"The Without Response"
Verbal 3, Call & Response
The Kitchen NYC 2000

Experimental Art is at its conception "restless art". Notions that
cannot be "fixed". Work that falls apart and within that "falling apart"
there is something of a reference or a "carrier" that at best and most
successful exposes us as discontinuous beings. Restless works cause a
jarring in perception but not in exclusivity in the popular codified
sense most nearly associated with the word "provocative" e.g., the
"Sensation" show and what I would consider the conceptual equivalent to
surface ornamentation relegated to a definitive value-sign or otherwise
"shock". I mean here by route of "jarring" and "restless" to reference a
sudden interruption and possible subsequent or married understanding on
behalf of the viewer /participant that prompts a stark "reckoning" of
most nearly what Emmanuel Levinas communicates as "the without response"
the call for which there can and will never be a definitive response or
even a non-response. With this stated one can meditate on the convoluted
route of my above statements and see that "Experimental Art" betrays
itself under the capitalist system and under this system it will always
turn inward onto itself, crushed beneath the obstinate weight of the
"more profitable future" for institutions of career fixated individuals
or at best individuals seduced and ensnared by the glamour of an
autonomous spectacle that contributes toward the harnessing the "new"
and shaping it into a dependable, "quality" product.

Last night I witnessed and participated in "Verbal 3: Call & Response"
at The Kitchen. The event was comprised of a group of artists who use
utilize the net for some or most of their work. Call & Response was a
mini-series of numerous live performative artist interpretations of the
concept "Call & Response" originated by way of people and machines
networking and communicating through data protocols.

There were moments of silence. There were moments involving monotony of
repetition. There were moments of boredom. A key organizer was
distressed some pieces went on too long. A representative and
director(?) of The Kitchen did not seemed pleased and hinted toward a
lack of success on behalf of the artists to successfully append their
approaches to a vehicle more friendly to performance and a live
audience. Someone asked if specifically two of the artists intended to
"destroy the audience". A participating artist said it was Dada in
spirit, without any of the underlying or discernable political tenants.

Against the better wishes of an administrator, an organizer, a mixed bag
of audience responses from bedazzled to comatose and a few somewhat
overly aggressive critiques from another artists present… Experimental
art staged a brief, very "real" and quite non-glamorous interruption, an
exposure in NYC 2000. At the end of the night a Kitchen staff member
asked me to invite her to more "stuff like this" because she is tired of
"seeing the formalized offerings that pass through this place". I went
home happy and thinking just maybe tonight some of us might have done
John Cage real proud.