My first attempt at performance art took place on October 17th, and I’m not quite sure how to think about it.

One thing that surprised (and disappointed) me was the lack of people around. The farmers’ market was a ghost of its summer self with only a few diehard vendors and nearly no customers. Victoria Park, nearby the market, where I set up, was void of human life… I suppose I shouldn’t have expected to have an audience on a cold autumn day in Regina. Stil, it was disappointing that I didn’t give out (via Jakob — this was his role) any of the 120 small slips of paper I’d printed with information about the climate action signs on one side, and this on the other:

I’ll have to consider projects/events I plan for the near future and how integral having live viewers, or participants, should be. I can’t really do much indoors these days either due to Covid19. I really have to think about how these facts of my reality (winter; Covid) will impact my work over the next few weeks.

If no one was there to really observe or experience this event in person, at least it was “put out there” via the media. A local radio station, Regina 980 CJME was out to interview me, and I while I didn’t hear myself on the radio, I was pleased to see that they also printed a summery of it. I’m pretty okay with how the reporter presented was I was doing.

Global TV also interviewed me, though again I didn’t get to see the interview when it happened on the 6pm and 10pm news that day. (I gather from friends that it was a decent interview). Like every other aspect of this new (for me) art practice, I need to think more about how to assess what I’m doing with the media. Do I consider it a good thing as far as my art work goes to get this type of attention? It has no real connection to the actual event itself — the immediacy the moment, the feeling it creates, is lost. I’ll have to ask Risa about this.

About the performance itself: it was hard. Physically hard. This was how I felt immediately after: tired and having trouble breathing.

I hadn’t really put much thought into what this performance would do to my body. As I read in the Marilyn Arsem’s “Some Thoughts on Teaching Performance Art in Five Parts,” after doing this work,

There are real consequences to every action in which one engages. Any action affects one both physically and psychologically. It is happening by and to one’s body, and its impact cannot be discounted simply because it is called art.

And in “This is Performance,” Arsem writes

Performance art requires risk.
The artists take physical risks using their bodies.
The artists take psychic risks as they confront their limits.

Physical risks: I had an asthma attack immediately after my seven minutes of jumping hurdles in -10 degrees. It was my first attach in over two decades, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind to bring the old (expired) Ventolin inhaler I keep at home for “just in case.” I had to rush home to take several puffs, and it took me three days before I was able to speak normally and a week before I wasn’t wheezing and hacking. Who would have thought that suddenly running in freezing temperatures without any warm-up would be such a shock to the lungs? Really! Also, in one particularly graceful hoist over a lawn sign, I snapped its metal stand, and in a subsequent effort to haul my 125 pounds over this object, I scraped my leg. That was no big deal; I didn’t even notice it until that evening. Still, these physical effects of the performance gave me a glimpse into just how unpredictable this type of work is.

Psychological risks: I’ll get to that in another blog post.

As far as getting feedback from viewers, there really isn’t a lot to report. My husband said that night as I wheezed and coughed, “Jakob saw, I saw, and God saw.” We’re devout atheists, so what he meant by the latter was really that I did something he considered a good thing to do. Period. Everyone else who’s said anything about this performance (feedback from friends after seeing my Facebook post or the radio/tv news about it) just said it was “amazing.” Of course, that’s what friends are for, right?

As an aside, I have received more feedback from the “happening” I organized for the previous weekend (the “house of cards” event). Naomi Hunter, leader of the Saskatchewan Green Party, told me that she felt rejuvenated for a week following the event. Florence Stratton, a well-know local activist, told me she felt great after participating too. A stranger who got in touch after reading the Leader Post article about what I was doing said, “your performance helps promote the environmental cause. Good job.”

Good job? I really don’t know. Overall, I’m feeling lost, and it’s hard to say if this is feeling is just a sign that I’m doing what Arsem says students of performance art must do (“I believe it is critical for artists to learn to assess the progress of their work, and challenge themselves to develop it further”), or if this type of work just isn’t me.

Photo credits: Esperanza Sanchez Espitia

I’ll end by quotoing from Arsem again (thanks for introducing me to her, Risa!):

Artists need to find ways to sustain their practice without becoming too reliant on validation by outside authority figures, who rarely have the same focus or agendas as the artist. The more clarity that one has about one’s goals, the clearer the avenues of options become.

This is what I really need the most: to have clarity about my goals.