Karin Bolender

Interesting intraspecies art. 

Karin Bolender

 "The Gut Sounds Lullaby installation frames layered sites where gut-sounds phenomena fold in with questions of presence and invisibility in forms of intraspecies being-together. Odd to think that gut sounds are something we seldom attend to, even as their presence signals life and cessation equates to death. Living gut sounds surprise us with their immediacy, bubbling up bigger questions of bodies’ unknowns, along with the ways we manufacture ontologies through the boundaries we draw between inside/outside, human/animal, and self /other. Gut Sounds Lullaby seeks to blur some of these boundaries, pressing our ears to their seams to listen for what hums on the other side. We will invite listeners into the presence of an intricate and intimate auditory mesh, where real-time equine gut sounds are wired into and amplified by the layered resonances of improvisational electronic music/sound collage and an invisible but present human fetus, who we presume will be listening on the other end of the intraspecies transmission wires."

Sound and Scape

 For some new proposed work- I need to create a soundtrack for performance- I'm interested in repetitious sounds created by the body- heart beat, breathe, stomach sounds, joins, sneeze, yawn, hum, sing, tongue click, snore, sniff, kiss, hands clapping, cough, laugh, hiccup, whistle, sigh, whisper, shout, snap fingers, tap feet, etc. 

Most specifically sounds that are uncontrolled. 

Some influences: 

William Basinski influences all the compositions I make at this point. Disintegration Loops specifically. 

Or phasing found sounds- Steve Reich "Come out"

Henri Chopin- La Digestion

Swallowed Microphone amplifying the sounds of the gut. 

Rust: What the hell is it doing..

 I've been using rust for a while in my work, not knowing the chemistry exactly behind or history. I've picked up a book called "Rust: the Longest War"by Jonathan Waldman . It's a narrative based history of rust/corrosion. Ferrum corrumpitur- " latin for Spoiled Iron. One section discusses how the Romans understood rust as being "metaphysically, that the benevolence of nature had inflicted the penalty of rust to limit the power of iron, thus making nothing in the world more mortal than that which is hostile to mortality." Pliny the Elder. 

When iron and copper are placed together- the copper will cause the iron to rust. I'm thinking about how I might use this in my work- maybe intentionally weaving copper and iron wire together to see how the rust process works- it also causes a small electrical current- not enough to power anything but it could be an interesting aspect of the work. 

The copper will slowly "eat" away at the iron- preserving the copper but destroying the iron. I'm not sure metaphorically what this means yet but it is curious. It's the opposite of a symbiotic relationship and stands in contradiction to 'chasing symbiosis' which I often find artist and designers looking for in their work. 

What Came Before-

 Artwork/Artists that use objects in performance:

Morris "Site"

Nick Cave Soundsuits

Pina Bausch

Chris Burden Big Wheel

Tanya Aguiñiga

Joseph Beuys

Speed and Time.

Hijikata performed by Day Matsuoka

Bruce Nauman- space as limits

Body as Object

Yvonne Rainer

Performance Craft

Indira Allegra

Blend of Objects, ideas of craft, and dance

Deborah Valoma

Body as tool in performance

Janine Antoni

Play and objects

Performance/Dance and Objects

 I'm trying to work out- my approach to performance and I've found an interesting intersection of Minimalism and Dance- 

Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance Author(s): Virginia Spivey

This article in the "Dance Research Journal" outlines a connection between Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer. The idea of Minimal Sculpture's connection to Dance. 

"She relied instead on interruption and repetition, devices she had used before, to break the flow of

the piece. As Rainer explained, "both factors were to produce a 'chunky' continuity,

repetition making the eye jump back and forth in time and possibly establishing more strongly the differences in the movement material... Interruption would also function

to disrupt the continuity and prevent prolonged involvement with any one image."

Viewers were thus denied the power of the extended gaze and forcedt o focus attention on other components of the dance, such as the interaction between body and object, or the body's movement itself. 

Morris linked his use of objects to determine dance sequences to his methodology in making sculpture:

“Finding ways to get the body moving--and having this movement be generated by the manipulation of objects so that the resultant movement became the dance was the challenge... pace the comparable a priori methods involved in construction to generate my sculptural objects of the early 1960s. This new structural armature opened up the making for me on both fronts-i.e., a kind of automation that foreclosed the expression involved in the toe (dance),or adding a 'expression' pointing little more on the left (sculpture) offered a new freedom. “

Thus, for Morris, objects used as props helped him solve the problem of intentionality in artistic-decision making. Accordingly, he believed the process of art-making no longer to be a conscious individual undertaking the interaction between artist and materials could yield a final product without any visible trace of the artist's presence.