A brief note on last nights performance of Washing with Witt

June first marked the official kickoff to Elsewhere's Artist Conversation Series, an 18 week series of artist talks, performances, screenings, etc.  Sarah Witt gave her live performance to a crowd of about 25 people which was comfortably enjoying the event.  It was quite a success I thought, the whole evening.  The work became a fantastic exploration of failure, a design or opportunity to fail based around the artistic engagement with a technical process.  In some sense the work explored the two sides of praxis/practice, the technical and scientific engagement with knowledge and human capacity versus the artistic presence and exploration of such ideas in and of themselves outside the production possibilities of human capacity.  Of course ask and you shall receive, and while flying was never accomplished, failure was in an electromagnetic melt down that caused digitized quirks in the video screening when the camera was placed too close to the tv.  I found myself at the center of the mess, not sure whether to keep showing the video or cut it off, and after a desperate back stage plea I cut off the video and entered Witt, flustered and pissed off, angry, humiliated, saddened.  I forget what exactly she said to the audience but it was heartfelt and hysterical.  The audience laughed with her as she expressed her humiliation and pain, anger, and frustration at the inability to show her work.  Backstage she cursed and was mortified, trapped in the Aqwherium tent fuddling with a costume change that was necessitated by the sudden technical failure.  After fielding a few questions about the work  the situation was being worked out and the video was shown, making the whole thing look like an intended piece.

We were discussing that night what it is to set oneself up for the opportunity of failure and Sarah's relation with the space and the multiple personalities that she was exploring.  One of the thoughts that I came to during the discussion was the notion of the immensity of visual information and possible knowledge that is immediately present in the space.  The overwhelming nature of information and possibilities as they present themselves to artists is daunting for sure, and the process of acclimation, of overcoming that which one intends with the experience as it arises and provides itself for artistic insight offers an opportunity to look beside oneself at their own production and process tasks and see how it is that they make decisions.  Choice shares a stage at all times with failure.  As we limit whatever it is we have to chose from the act of determination directs the flow of ideas away from multiple possibles as they arrange themselves outside the realm of distinction.  Collection then becomes a primary objective, the opening up and presenting to oneself multiple possibles.  One question from the audience was to what extent the flying character and the Witt character were related, and Sarah said plainly that they were not, that she had grown fascinated over her time here with multiple choices and options and had the desire to merge and present even though they sprang from different sources.  This conjunction was admirable and thorough, conjoining concepts and approaches, multiple characters and evidences for art making, object collecting, etc.   

Failure exposes an end outside of design, an end that is unexpected or unintended, a collapse of hypothesis, a disproof.  The failure of the performance, the moment in which the work collapsed brought a sudden and unexpected end, a sharing of another character, that is, Sarah herself, but within a context that when revealed through the successful showing made the unintended interruption appear to be part of the show.  We met three characters and not just two as one supposed, and so instead the technical failure forced an artistic opening up, a true disclosure that was necessary to complete the circular structure.  The girl "sarah" freaking out in the video about her own silliness was made public in the costume of Washing with Witt in relation to a failure of the overall performance.    In the end all worked out and my suggestion for Sarah's next impossible feat was to pursue x-ray vision. 
Perhaps this performance will expose the nothingness and truth beneath her skin, as that which is at all moments a character of her self, and an identity that makes up the audience upon which she feeds.

--thank you Sarah.