Beckett Walk IV – plastic bender
performance in search of traces of 'impropre lumps'
* from the 'scrap-book' *
«Beckett Walk ...» is series of works with performances, interventions, videos and installations.
«Beckett Walk» in the title refers to many things: to a man of letters and his still current texts - Samuel Beckett -, to a work that belongs to the canon of art history - Bruce Nauman's video work «Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) 1968» - to the latent risk of losing balance, of losing face, to landscape and our relationship to nature and our relationship as a whole to life in all its stratifications.
initial situation
The title also contains the word 'bender': I slip into an alter ego, I am an avatar. The face is completely covered by a fleece hood jacket; the zipper also closes the hood at the front. In this sense I do what the word (gender) bender promises: not only do I 'bend' and 'inflect' the gender attribution, but I am going out on a limb in this gathering of people who have come to the performance. Although I have an idea what my material is, where I want to be spatially involved, I cannot know how the people who gather in this situation will relate to my vocal, physical-textual approaches.
process of performance
I feel my way along the corridor on the second floor in Gleis 70, touching the walls with my hands and other parts of my body, crossing the corridor from one wall to the other. I let throaty to humming, hissing and breathing sounds develop, depending on the steps and vocal impulses the touch leads me to. I approach the 'circle' of the gathered people, open the hooded jacket and hand over single 'plastiglomerate' stones, which I take out of the pockets of the fleece jacket, to those present. I place them in their hands and murmur that they are very precious, a rare new stone. In the true sense of the word, it is a matter of optical-physical cleaning, in which questions resonate: What emotions, what motives are involved when we encounter plastic pieces. How do we come into contact with it? What does plastic do to us? What is natural? What is artificial? What is true? What is fake? What is valuable, what is worthless? What is waste? What does capitalism burn, and does something burn capitalism?
A new type of stone lies on the shores of Shetland and elsewhere. I first found this stone on the shores of Shetland in 2016. Others have found it before in other places. The artist Aimee Labourne, Shetland, informed me about the name "plastiglomerate". This rock plays the main role in the performance and is at the same time an open research that is not yet finished.
The performance «BECKETT WALK IV» is based on experiences I made in Shetland during excursions and researches on the shores of the islands. While exploring Shetland, I found plastiglomerates on the shores and learned for the first time what this 'new' rock is about. Shetland consists of over a hundred islands and has many kilometres of coastline. Exposed to wind, weather and the currents of the North Sea, the ecological crisis here becomes radically clear when, for example, plastic pieces, which are washed to the islands in large quantities by the ocean currents, accumulate.
The legacies of human civilisation in the oceans have created a new type of rock. 'Plastiglomerates' is what geologists* call the formations made of parts of molten plastic, lava, sand, coral and shell parts, whereby the plastic components often still show traces of the previous life of human tools such as toothbrushes, cords etc. «Plastiglomerate indexically unites man with the currents of water, with the decomposition of stone and sand and fossils into oil over thousands of years; with the rapid subtraction of this oil into fuel; and with the refining of this fuel into polycarbonates, into plastic, into garbage.»* What physical materiality is formed in the face of these inauthentic lumps?
* Quote from e-flux journal #78, december 2016, Kirsty Robertson, Plastiglomerate; downloaded October 2019, translated into German.
over-text for the works shown in the context of the exhibition
applies to all three parts that were shown and took place in the exhibition 'Selbstklumpungen':
* performance
«BECKETT WALK IV - plastic bender»
Performance in search of traces of improper agglutinations.
Many thanks to Ingrid Käse for her support with the face painting.
* display-installation with plastiglomerates
«What does captialism burn? What burns capitalism?»
Display with with improper lumps
The performance and the display-installation go together and complement each other: I used the shelf to put down the plastic agglomerates, which in as part of the performance I was carrying in my pocket.
* kinetic image
«L'animoteur 12 - bender»
1 photo on Hahnemühle Baryta, mounted on stadur plate, 37 x 50 cm
suspension and drive for image rotation: gear motor with friction wheel
«Post-cyborg, what counts as biological kind troubles previous
categories of organism. The machinic and the textual are internal to
theorganic and vice versa in irreversible ways.»*1
«The
permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, and the inevitable
comic and tragic mistakes in that quest, commands me respect, whether
the other is animal or human or indeed inanimate.»*2
*1 Quote from Donna Haraway, «The Companion Species
Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness», Pricly Paradigm
Press, The University of Chigaco Press, 2003, Seventh Printing March
2020, p. 15
*2 ibid., p. 35