DISAPPEARANCE AS ART, IN THEORY

DISAPPEARANCE, is an evolving set of strategies by which the boundaries between artistic expression and ordinary life are first examined, and secondly, dissolved. These strategies are physical and aesthetic in character, and, wholly improvisational in method. 

DISAPPEARANCE removes the frame from that which is framed; and seeks to apply limits to the infinite and boundless.

Such frames, conceptual in nature, continually expand and contract according to shifting conditions of site and constituent living and non-living phenomena.  Because the frames applied tend toward the conceptual rather than the literal, Disappearance resists documentation, and is present only in the moment of recognition.

Methods:

We bracket conditioned modes of meeting situations as they appear, both internally and externally. This is a stripping away, or separation from, reflexive aspects of presentation. Following, or even simultaneously, there is a creative (re)construction, toward encounters with what is. This process is called embedment: It is a progressive transparency, a disappearance, within the situation.

This radical in-ness positions us as open to possibilities beyond the limits typically associated with the situations in which we present. Such availability, even surrender, opens the conditioned limit of the ego/self and holds the possibility of transformation of the situation in question.

The quality of the movement we refer to above as surrender, far from indicating passivity, is rather a movement of agency; the necessity that arises in the undefended encounter with truths as processes of inquiry, as distinguished from, say, fixed aspirational objects.

In religious contexts, states of being such movements imply are often associated with the term grace. Acts of disappearance unfold amid the radical transformation of a situation (event); with physical, psychological, aesthetic, spiritual, and political implications.

Disappearance cultivates listening capacity (or, receptivity across the sensory-perceptual field), to phenomena, perceived as originating internally, externally or both (or neither). The practice facilitates somatic integration, clarification of creative impulse/desire and relational expression, or in Disappearance terms, necessity, toward actions in worlds.

Disappearance, in its commitment to the felt sense of being in relation to void (or, being toward death) offers a bridge, in Lacanian terms, between the symbolic and the real; in other words, a point of access to body, beyond its purely social construction; a bridge between body and organism, and containment within the trans-subjective field.

The implication herein: The movement we are speaking of, were it to be accomplished, leads to the end of separation of the liver from the lived, or, the death of the subject.

PRACTICES

Practices include dance and performance, painting, still photography and video, and site specific installations, and writing.

Each area of practice demonstrates movement toward open ended potentialities formally delimited by the materials specific to that practice; they do not seek resolution that can be quantified in any absolute sense.

Where there is resolution into an actual thing, it is as a registration of a moment as it appears on a continuum, contextualized by the entire life span of the work.