Happy new year!
This week the dial on my collaborationometer was ping ping pinging when I discovered the following invitation in my inbox:
Lou Mallozzi “Outpost”
Perched on the 4th floor mezzanine of the MCA, I’ll be zeroing in on visitors to the museum through a telescope and describing them in detail over loudspeakers placed outside the 2nd floor exhibition space. Presented for the “Interactions” series in conjunction with the MCA’s current exhibition “Without You I am Nothing: Art and Its Audience,” this performance turns surveillance inside-out: spectators become spectacle, the audience becomes subject and object.
Sadly, I can’t travel to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Arts to experience the performance (it’s annoying how the instantaneousness of the internet fools you into forgetting that the world remains as massive as ever), but I am intrigued by the stealth-like nature of this collaboration between artist and audience.
Lou Mallozzi is a sound artist who “dismembers and reconstitutes sound, language, gesture, and image in various media.” He is also a prolific collaborator. (http://loumallozzi.blogspot.com) I replied to Lou’s message about his forthcoming performance, explaining my own interest in collaboration. In discussing the work, I was really struck by his assertion that: “Part of the reason to do it is to see what the responses will be and to put myself on the spot to respond in some significant way.” This idea of “putting yourself on the spot” is exactly what makes collaboration both exciting and frightening. I am curious to know how Lou will modify his actions in response to audience “participation” and am particularly keen to learn how the power dynamic between artist and audience will play out, since it will occur in the pressurised situation of a live performance.
Where does control lie and how does it shift? Maintaining some sense of it within a collaboration is paramount, but it must not be at the expense of your collaborator’s sense of control. It’s a difficult balance, made harder by the fact that it has to be re-learned every time you embark on a new collaboration. This will be the case for Lou, as although the premise of his performance is the same each night, the audience is not… anyway, this is to be continued, as Lou has promised to feedback on how it all goes, so I’ll be discussing this again shortly.
