ANDREW MARCUS, DISAPPEARANCE

(1958- )

The Disappearance of Andrew Marcus is an unusual case.

He had embraced the identity, when he was 19 and in New York, of an artist; in particular, that of a painter.

He thought he had something important to contribute; and devoted his life to the pursuit of beauty and truth, thinking these were objects that, most assuredly, could be obtained. The year was 1977.

In 1983, he chose to step inside the frame, become the object, and selected another identity, if still that of an artist; a dancer/choreographer.

He studied (with) all the masters, but did not become one.

With the increasing financialization of the City and related starvation of the arts economy, he, in 20004, misguidedly sought refuge in graduate school, earning an MFA in Dance and Performance.

In 2010, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the failure of his attempts to escape the laws of capital resulting in the loss of his home, community and professional standing, he founded ANDREW MARCUS DISAPPEARANCE.

DISAPPEARANCE was the conceptual frame he felt could contain his sense of loss and unbelonging; and provide the ground of all future experiments in the arts.

DISAPPEARANCE is an examination of the nature of the frame. Although initiated through his curiosity about how art objects, regardless of medium, are contained and separated from ordinary reality, his interest in the limits by which frames are defined, inevitably implied questions of the psyche, the social and the political in an expanded field.

In 2013 he opened the SCHOOL OF DISAPPEARANCE | Somatic Experiments And Trainings, to teach his methods in movement technique and dance composition to dancers, dance companies and organizations academic and otherwise; and to continue his anatomically centered somatics practice while also developing an approach to the phenomena of subjectivity in work with individual clients.

In a subtle shift of emphasis in 2020, he moved all his practices under the heading of the SCHOOL and changed the subtitle to Encounters In The Being of Phenomena. This more closely reflected the importance of his studies in phenomenology, ontology and psychoanalysis.

By midyear 2024, after admitting abject failure in his cherished pursuits, he abandoned all pretense of being any one at all. Any prestige that would attend the claim to a legitimate identity was, likewise, abandoned.

Fortunately, having stumbled upon the psychoanalytic theory and practice of J. Lacan (1901-1981), he moved toward acceptance of his lack as structural, and his fate as a split subject, sealed.

Against all sense, a last possibility nonetheless emerged. While the painful awareness of separation that marks the lived experience of the human, at least in his case, remained problematic as cause, in the depth of the night, out of darkness and silence, came words, giving voice to desire:

A movement arose, on a path of longing after impossibility, an apparent opening to the death of the subject; or, love.