About

A friend, colleague and curatorial collaborator, Jamie McMurry, did a 365 piece between 2005 and 2006, called “365 performances,” that I responded to in a piece for “Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art.”  A week ago a friend, colleague and intellectual collaborator, Natasha Myers, asked me to join her and her collaborators in a group of 365 pieces beginning today, December 21st, 2008. (For Myers’ piece and links to the others go to “A Dance A Day.”)

In McMurry’s words: “In September 2005, I began a project in which I would engage in a performance action everyday for a year. I had the beginning and ending dates of the work tattooed onto my forearms to act as temporary documentation and as on-going reminders of this obligation. Unlike other artists who have made such works center around their lives in an effort to blur the line between existence and practice, I seek to more overtly show the merging of my life and my work.”

In Myers’ words: “beginning on the solistice, december 21, 2008, i will begin a new daily practice. i will craft one dance a day for 365 days. these will be tiny dances. spanning two minutes at the most. each dance will be an improvisational conversation with a scrap of text or a found object. i will document each dance with a simple line drawing that remembers a gesture in the dance, or the arc of movement that runs through the dance.”

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Thinking through practice.  Thinking through gesture.  My first thought was to use Natasha’s invitation to respond to Jamie’s piece — a sort of homage.  My second thought was of a piece I did as a resident at the Banff Center for the Arts’ “The Future of Idea Art” residency in 2007 (I wrote a statement a day for the duration of the residency and posted it outside my studio).  My third thought was about time: counting and accounting.

I am interested in thinking about, with, and through labour.  Those labours through which our daily practices are constituted; practices that articulate the worlds we live in, the worlds we inhabit and that inhabit us.  It is here, to this mode of attention, that I look in considering a feminist ethics of the social.  Nothing new, to be sure.  But as a daily practice, also never ending.  And so always new, too.

An action a day.