EX SITU
A Methodology
Local
PLACE is reclaimed from market stalls and viewing rooms to a living context that yields to those who occupy it, rather than the reverse. Place offers up its wares for play and invention, and reveals idiosyncrasies bound to a specific and inimitable present. Place again embodies change and the singularity of a moment. Place is the opening of the Feast, in the momentary light of Monet’s cathedrals.
Warped and Revamped
Pages ripped from the Situationist Internationale, unusual situations are plied to confront the murder of the present by the romance of the past and the hanging promises of the future — times that never existed except for commercial and political manipulations that keep the public in a culturally moribund state of reminiscence and waiting. Situations disrupt the social isolationism of the entertainment industry, an industry that monopolizes the private imagination and all public discourse. Situations repair the imbecilization of the young and the old.
Most of all, at any scale, from small detournements to large quasi demonstrations, situations are concocted to generate the source material for a
response — what we call experience, and the soul-rubbing invigoration of trying to understand it all.
Rough and Immediate
A work too polished often becomes too conventional. Just as often, a work too polished becomes work. We return to the concept of play. Responses are produced quickly. Out of the experience of situations and place (ex situ), reactions emerge in the form of artistic rendering — the great fury of trying to process the absurdity of occupying a moment, a body, a place, a planet through all modes of discourse, testimonials, and intellect. And that’s it, in the space of a night or a week, the tiniest and most complete microcosm of the entire human condition: events, and their ensuing processes of comprehension. Local and situational, they are visceral, rather than vicarious. Lived, instead of watched remotely.
Grand
See above. We seek more. If the postmodern era undid the novelty and creative liberation of modernism, the Human Feast seeks to undo the postmodern era. If tanning under the pastiche of radiating entertainment, where everything lies on the same arc of short-lived insignificance, and the only protection against a culture-wide, full-scale nervous breakdown lies in emotional detachment and a rehearsed state of irony, then the Human Feast seeks to restore the significance of everything, the grandeur of it all, Blake’s eternity in a grain of sand. It’s all there — given a good stir and rattling.
Proscriptions
No direct photography, no direct video. Not only have optical lenses and processor chips become commonplace interfaces with places and events, they have supplanted experience with widely used presets and automatic aesthetics. Notable exceptions are vintage film cameras that greatly render the subject into subjective translations, such as from early Pentax and Holga cameras.
Nothing sold, nothing monetized; fame is the end of all movements, pseudonyms are advised.
All beauty is incidental.
Place, Situations, Renderings
We have capitulated to others all of these. We take them back. We set the table. We feast on whatever happens there.
