July Highlight - “Vague Enough to be Interesting” (Patreon)

As anyone who has spent more than seconds on my instagram can tell you, I’m not exactly social-media savvy, and I don’t get top marks for marketing. Part of this is logistical (when your shows have 1 audience member at a time, you don’t need nearly as many audience members), and part of this is admittedly my disposition; as a newly-30-year-old always-90-year-old-man, I’m too crotchety for that particular grind.

I do, however, find joy in crafting the language of instructions and context for participants booking and preparing for my experiences*. I try to create a different “voice” for each project, but there are certainly some overlaps, and on the whole I seem to achieve a brand that my dear friend and collaborator Sarah Reynolds has dubbed, with devastating accuracy; 

“Vague enough to be interesting.”

This, for the record, is my favorite joke, and it is also a strategy I have embraced and doubled-down for with my newest project, Undersigned:

Undersigned is a psychological thriller for an audience of one.

Depending on your choices, it will last between 30-50 minutes. Your participation will involve an invocation, a blindfold, and a pointed discussion.

The topic of this discussion will vary based on your input, and may include but are not limited to Money, Power, Sex, Pleasure, Violence, Blood, Wild Conjecture, and the Occult. You are invited to entertain or dismiss any topic of discussion that arises, or may request in advance that a topic be off limits.

​While building and holding a sense of mystery and intrigue is a fun game to play, it’s not the reason I default to this “little to no context before starting” model. Experiences like Undersigned and The Telelibrary are heavily centered on the participant’s choices, and both functionally and aesthetically bend around the assumptions a participant makes; “whatever you think I said, that becomes what I meant.” Because of this, I try my best to create the minimum amount of expectation — just enough for you to be ready for the first 5 minutes. Since much of the value of the experience comes from how personal it can be, I want to be sure you get a chance to encounter the situation for yourself, to gradually discover it first-hand and form your own constantly shifting idea of “what is going on here.”

But even though creating the effect described above is the purpose of the tone of the language I use, when I review the history of my work so far, it is interesting to note that the language came first.  Indeed, many of the defining features of the aesthetic I am exploring right now emerge from a simple logistical problem: not going to jail.

While studying at University in the United Arab Emirates, I became interested in exploring public performance actions. Partly this was the result of learning about Happenings and the long tradition of Performance Art; equally if not more so, it was the result of going to a school of less than 300 people who all lived, ate, and studied in the same building. But this call to the outdoors was complicated by the realities of living in a city where "various forms of 'informality' or deviation from what would be considered normal or proper behavior are criminalized and actively persecuted [1]." The formal guidance from my instructors was to assume that soliciting participation would be a problem, but so long as people elected to approach me on their own accord, I would likely not have trouble**.

Cut to two years of projects in designated public*** spaces that always began with me holding a confusing sign over my head, in hopes that people would approach me—and two years of remaining surprised that they often did. In making these signs, I had to boil down what I was doing to an invitation so essential it covered every aspect of what I had in mind, but so inexplicable it required curious people to come over and initiate a conversation. What this meant was that my participants were almost exclusively outgoing, curious people. It also meant my participants often approached assuming I was doing something entirely different from what I had tried to convey. For my first piece, I brought various partners out to the Corniche and together we held up a sign saying “Ask Us Anything.” Passersby varyingly assumed we were running a quiz show, were claiming to be all-knowing, or were offering dating advice; an astonishingly high number of young men asked me to guess the color of their boxers. It was wild and strange and unlike anything I had ever experienced in the Emirates before, and I found myself in conversations with people from across the many demographics of the city, discussing the most sensitive of issues and utter nonsense in equal measure.

I did a number of these projects, gradually expanding the scope of the interactions while limiting the number of participants at a time. Once I graduated and moved to New York, I tried to explore a similar dynamic; dangling puzzling, confusing, and/or otherwise intriguing offers in public spaces for curious passersby. In doing so, I began to value two things more and more, and to center them in my work. One was audience input and control; I found that I didn’t particularly want to know “what happens next,” and was far more interested in creating space for a participant to say or do something that would surprise me, even within the boundaries of a set and limited “exchange.” The second thing I came to value was a kind of participant; curious people. To this day, when beleaguered producers ask me what my “target demographic” is, I respond “people who walk down the street past something odd and look twice”—which of course, isn’t a kind of person at all. Instead, it’s a mood, and while some of us may be more predisposed to it than others, I firmly believe all people can access this curiosity.

In my work, I’ve set out to explore different ways I can invite people to do so, and how to affirm and reward them when they do. This takes many little forms, but the biggest is invitations like the one above for Undersigned: asking you to leap into something unknown, and figure out what you’re doing after the fact. As Bill Watterson’s Calvin once said in Calvin & Hobbes:

~

*How frequently (if ever) participants actually read the things you write for them is another topic altogether…

[1]  ELSHESHTAWY, YASSER. “Informal Encounters: Mapping Abu Dhabi’s Urban Public Spaces.” Built Environment (1978-), vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 92–113. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23289773. Accessed 28 Jul. 2022.

** To be clear, this axiom doesn’t reflect a specific law in the Emirates, but rather an understanding of how to avoid them. The rules we follow in public space are a mix of what could be legally penalized, what we assume will be actually enforced, and where enforcement actually begins. A good example is parking in the city of Philadelphia: in Philly, locals often park places that seem to have clearly posted signs forbidding it. No one has ever explained to me how people know if they will or won’t get a ticket. As such, when I park, I’m following a law somewhere halfway between what is officially forbidden and what seems likely to be enforced.

*** This essay is in increasing danger of becoming about the politics of public space, which I happen to be deeply interested in—instead, I’ll simply say that if you want to look into the complicated intersections of public use and corporate management, you don’t need to leave the United States. Just look at Dilworth Park, in Philadelphia, or Bryant Park, in New York City, to manage a few. Or go to any space you think of as public as ask yourself some questions; “who’s in charge here? Who sets the rules? And who enforces them?”