10.22.09 kulturnatib

Nothing new

Many artists, I included for sure, have this overarching pride – half a step, really, to hubris – that what they do, their art, is something new, that it is something that has never been done before.

To them, and myself, it is always a good and humbling reminder to heed the ancient voice of the prophet of the Song of Solomon; There is nothing new under the sun.

When preparing, in the summer of 2008, for a performance art piece -- a performative action, as I have now learned to call these pieces -- involving alphabet noodles I thought this was a first. For myself, certainly, and quite possibility for the whole of Art as well.

But last weekend, this bubble was burst.

I was involved in a performance art event with nine other artists, six of them coming from Montreal. I arrived early at the house where the event was to take place. After depositing the materials or instruments for my performance in the home office that for the evening was turned into the coat room that soon accommodated more than just coats, I entered the living room to find other artists in the thick of preparations for their own performance.

This is not unusual. Often much of what gets used for a performance can only be brought together just before they are used, sometimes even, brought together only as they are being used, especially when the bringing together is crucial to the performative action.

I arrived at the point of their preparation when they had what I immediately recognized to be alphabet noodles scattered on the low living room table. The very same ones that I had used for my performance last year, the remainder of which we continue to eat as a kind of emergency, fast cooking meal, not because this is really part of our emergency preparations – it is now -- but simply because I had bought way more boxes than I needed.

I got introduced to the one artist I had not met before of this trio and to the fact that for that evening they were a trio. They have their own individual art practices but they are also together on a research project into performance art. In the course of this research they have decided to jointly develop collective actions, including that evening's, as part of their methodology.

I asked about the alphabet noodles, adding that I also had a performance last year involving those noodles and proceeding with a brief summary of what that performance was. In response, one of them, Anne Bérubé, then produced or wielded the bubble-bursting pin.

The use of those noodles were apparently one of her contributions to their entire performance piece that on the surface looked like disparate events but a closer reading revealed the connecting or organizing threads of play and communication.

The noodles came into play towards the end of the performance. They were organized into words contained in small resealable plastic microbags and distributed to the audience who by this time had been almost completely absorbed into the performance becoming unwitting though quite willing performers themselves.

She had been using alphabet noodles for some fifteen years now, she said, but not, so far, in the same way that you did, she added.

Bubbles don't burst halfway. But, like phantom limbs, bubbles can reappear like they did that evening when during my piece titled, 'A Musical Tribute To Housework,' I played Bach's Air in G on the classical guitar while seated in the bathtub with the water running.