Katherine Guinness on Denys Blacker
Picture of the concept of synchronicity by CG Jung with English text substituted for original French (Wikimedia Commons)
During a variety of times and places, artist Denys Blacker was in conversation with Martine Viale. The talk, which for me was a Sunday afternoon, kicked off with the grounding (but also spreading, dispersing, connecting) practice that each presentation for the Out of Site Flow Symposium had thus far, in which we shared our times, our zones, which way the light was or was not shining into our small square space-screens for all to see. All falling along different places on the spacetime continuum, brought together by a common cause, but perhaps not to land at the same ends or energies. This was fitting for Blacker’s thoughts on the Vincular mind (vincular alluding to connectivity, linking, basing around) and her work with all-women performance groups including Ocells al Cap (Birds in the Head). Viale stated that “As women, we’re still fighting to find a place.” And Blacker responded that those places, “don’t exclude men, it just happens that we [women] work very well together…you need an assurance of trust.” She explained that with that assurance of trust, a safe space and community, there can always be more risk taking, via more listening. She compared it to improvisation: “if someone has a louder voice, it hurts the dynamic.” Or perhaps a dinner party where someone takes center stage. (Laughingly, she put to words what we were most likely all silently envisioning: that stage-taker is hardly ever a woman.) Following up on this, Carron Little reported that the symposium participants had been about 95% women. Let the community of synchronicity commence!
Born in the UK, having lived in Catalonia Spain for the past 25 years, Blacker is an artist, curator, organizer, facilitator, researcher, and teacher. Beginning as a sculptor, her work revolves around the ideas of “intuition and improvisation in performance.” According to Blacker’s website, these themes are heavily invested in “the way we intercommunicate and how we develop our individual and communal capacity for adaptability and contingency…. Her investigation has led her to explore the boundaries between subject and object and between self and other, to reveal how we might communicate in ways that go beyond the cognitive senses, including the possibilities of telepathy and precognition.” (1.)
For Blacker, the move from sculpture to performance was linked with these concerns; of energies, of embodying the connectivity she was so interested in (and also through a process of embodying the sculptures she was already creating, wanting to be inside of them, putting her energies into them through fasting, practicing tai chi, etc.) Finally, a teacher asked her why she just wasn’t doing it – why she was drawing instead of embodying. And so she moved from three dimensions (drawing) to three dimensions (sculpture) to the fourth dimension of action, performance, energy, movement, “and hopefully”, she laughs “the seventh dimension!”
Speaking of taking up space, speaking at the dinner table, improvising loudly, Blacker feels a push and pull about creating objects in the world. Viale interjected that within Blacker’s practice, “the sculpture has never actually gone away.” “The sculpture is kind of an annoying habit…” Blacker responds. It’s at odds with the non-materialist practice she strives for while still producing objects; the pull of production vs. ceasing to fill the world with more things, things, things. Thus, the focus is always on mediating ideas, even though sculpture is a productive way to interact with ideas through action. She explains, “usefulness is at the essence of performance art, it has to be useful, but it doesn’t have to be logical.”
While performance art has less materiality in a concrete sense, the issue of audience quickly arose. Blacker elaborated on how, when she started working in a public space, the audience was fairly frightening. This directly informed much of her communal, non-hierarchical practice. By asking the audience to interact, by forcing them to make the work as a way of working through this fear, communal action could be achieved. This then moved further, to discovering how to make the work by making the audience make the work without even realizing it; this was the opening into her work with telepathy.
Whenever I’ve read about collaborative art making practices, the term “alpha-artist” inevitably rears its alliterative head. I dislike it a great deal, for all the same reasons I dislike the term “alpha” in general – its linking to ideals of masculinity, of dominance, ownership. It was a direct beam of sunshine into my (to be fair, camera shut off black) shared zoom square during the talk when Blacker stated “the idea of the ‘alpha artist’…that word for me is immediately off putting.” Instead, she focuses on consent and collaboration without those old systems. Explaining that during one FEM residency, with the house full of women, the idea of the public became “weird.” The group didn’t want to separate themselves hierarchically, to be the orthopedic message carriers, moving out of that singular space to an audience divided. Blacker said the authenticity within their shared room felt as though it couldn’t expand outside of it, so how were they to “offer or give permission to participate without telling them what to do?”
The answer, of course, was not to use words, not tell anyone anything, to become telepathic.
Some early inklings of vincular linking, or telepathy (or at the very least, the flows of the world flowing in the world): when moving from sculpture to performance, Blacker’s early work dealt with burial and clay (she had always enjoyed burying herself, and showed us pictures of her, with her siblings, all buried in sand as children at the shore). She first worked with the repetition of burying herself in clay and climbing out again and again until too exhausted to continue. Soon after, in another performance, she painted herself as a volcano (red), and as she was erupting from the energy-filled clay, a volcano erupted in Armero, creating mud flows which buried the entire town. The news was filled with images of a young girl buried in mud, her dead grandmother at her feet, and soon she too died. Blacker related, “obviously my performance didn’t cause the volcano to erupt, but did the volcano cause me to respond?” She began to look at all the possible ideas around reception – those beyond one’s own cognition – divination, oracles, anything broaching or accessing information you shouldn’t be able to access –interlinking, flowing, the search for the Northwest passage in which literal boatloads of men go beyond what is known. “Where do I begin and where do you end?” (As a child Blacker would play a game where she imagined being in the body of someone else in the room, trying to see out of their eyes, trying to be them – it produced a deep melancholy for her.)
Vincular; Blacker explained that the word is close to vinculum, the tissues that holds bones together, any connective band in the body uniting parts, another name for a ligament. Within mathematics, vinculum is a line, a phrase that replaces parentheses – a sweet little hat to an “x” or a “y” that shows grouping, connection. There is a usefulness to the tendon flow of muds and maths and minds, synchronicity, connectivity.
In one Birds in the Head performance, the breakdown of information, of who has what knowledge, who is asking, who is answering, who is moving (only if moved to move) and who is still, simply watching all came together through this exploration of telepathy. Performers packed suitcases with objects to use in ways they weren’t sure of yet, and then a participant wrote down a question that no one else could see, someone else was writing the actions they saw. All labor aspects singular and separated, broken down, yet still utterly collaborative and connected. Acausal and totally synchronous. What an effective way of breaking down the hierarchical/patriarchal scale in the name of the vincular mind. What does it mean to ask a question that remains silent? To answer a question that hasn’t been spoken? It’s akin to automatic writing, but it isn’t the subconscious or a spirit moving your hand, it’s an entire group of others, supporting, enacting, working together without judgement because how could they judge when they don’t know what they are acting towards? So freeing!
What is the opposite of hierarchy? Could it be telepathy? This was exactly one way of thinking through these performance groups, communicating without structures so commonly used in that way, to practice telepathy.
Those old systems of hierarchy, or patriarchy must be questioned: alpha artists, orthopedic art, elevating harm and risk above all other affects. The FEM residency had many conversations about this last point in particular –the thin line of control, self-control, and loosening control.
I was again enamored, had the sunshine power shined at my black-box when Blacker spoke about her, and the groups’ she worked with, frustration at the elevation of pain and risk above a much else in performance, that the necessary (or perceived as necessary) element of risk in performance is all-too-often short-cutted to physical risk. She divulged that “psychic can become psychotic.” She shared a story, prompted by a synchronous memory by Viale, of a performance in which she was responding to an unseen audience question. She was moved to pick up steel wool, which she cut herself on. As she began to bleed profusely, Blacker told the participant she had to stop because “I don’t do this to hurt myself.” “I don’t want to fight with anyone…I don’t do this to hurt myself.” These words are beyond essential, a late-capitalist feminist demand, a Marxist-materialist mantra that we should refuse to be forced to speak. Let us simply telepathically implant them in those who demand too much of our time, our bodies, our pain, our minds, our selves, our flows, our vinculum.
Takeaway questions and answers consisted of one participant discussing their own synchronistic collection of people moving to places, then finding out they have a history of relatives already living there, unbeknownst to them – they collected these stories – these synchronicities. I love the idea of collecting connections like you would collect coins. So much lighter and more enlightening.
Blacker was asked, how can we become more synchronous? “Watching, listening, asking,” she replied. Ask, “why don’t I like this” when viewing performance art, and realizing that you can walk out..when I like something, why do I like it?...observing small gestures.” She states we are an accumulation of small gestures; grand gestures are an allusion of the patriarchy.
“Where do you sense from when you’re improvising?” -another question. Blacker told us, fascinatingly, of new research about the neurons in one’s gut and heart, that the heart has a strong magnetic field, which makes it capable of bypassing the brain, thinking for itself! Because of these physiologically realities, we can think of how the body is an antenna, and some bodies are better antennas, better at sensing, at telepathy, at being an oracle, Blacker tells us. We are asked, in a manner akin to Blacker cracking the code of how to make relating one’s dreams a fascinating shared and embodied experience, “where do we sense from – and emit from?” Gut feelings. Heart-felt things.
Dimple B Shah asked (fittingly, in a moment of sweet synchronicity being the last question asked by the very first presenter of the symposium), “when performing in a public space, not all of those in the public are receptive to your action – they may not be sensitive to your action – how do you respond to that?” Blacker responded that, “it depends on to what degree there is discomfort [slight discomfort to fearing for your safety]. If I feared for my safety I would just leave, I don’t want to fight with anyone.” Embodying the opposite of orthopedics, she talked about giving that audience member the attention they sought – to ask them: “is there something you need?” Blacker went on, “I don’t believe in a hermetic performance art space… there is no ‘go away, you’re in my performance space.’ You’re both in the same space.”
We were left with great words of advice, that could be placed almost anywhere along Jung’s diagram, to be in contact with one’s intuition, to trust oneself. “Anywhere is ok – anything you want to do is good…something can break, and that breaking can be a break open and you learn something new – don’t get trapped in conceptual restrictions you’ve given yourself.”
#katherineguinness #denysblacker #flowsymposium
Denys Blacker, biography, http://denysblacker.com/biography/
