We're excited to be included in this year's
Emergency Index 2, an anthology documenting performance art in 2012. Here's the entry for our Walmart Entanglements:
And here's the simple text (the un-EI-edited version anyway):
Wal-Mart
Entanglements— part of our ongoing series of Entanglements— entanglement
borrowed loosely from the concept of quantum entanglement— spooky action at a
distance— here action = language— entanglement as semi-closed, verbal, coupled
system
we
did three one-hour sessions in which we trapped ourselves simultaneously in
Wal-Marts (one in ATL, one in OKC)— before each session parameters were for
interactions between us and between the person and his Wal-Mart— during the
session we communicated by phone, email and text— e.g., each person sent the
other an email that named the department the sender was in, a color and a
direction (e.g., turn right), and contained additional verbal material for the
receiver to use (e.g., “I'm such thumb glitter/ That leather the/ Center at
trim music/ Or people at apparel”)— each also made calls to the other which
interrupted the other’s activity and provided him additional material to react
to and use— not all session parameters were symmetrical, e.g., in the second
session, we agreed that Selvidge would record audio monologues and Sanders
would compose written pieces, neither of which was to be shared with the other
in real time—
what
we want through entanglement is a system of composition that is sited,
improvisatory, and transindividual— one that displaces the still
all-too-prevalent mode of poetry by the lone, inspired individual, instead
using a mode that is quasi-determined (focused) but also complex enough to
embrace real-time (a rejection of the algorithmic asceticism of much conceptual
poetry)—
some
properties of entanglement discovered them: (1) entanglement as a nonlinear,
dynamic feedback loop: not simply dialog or dialectic— (2) entanglement as
knotting— connection but also constriction— blockages by sensory
overload—miscommunication (dropped calls, mishearing)— (3) entanglement as
interpolation, refiguring— here a literalized “allegory” (allo = other) + (agora =
marketplace), an alternative to the verbal behavior encouraged by the site— (4)
entanglement between process and product— a verbal analog to Smithson’s
site-nonsite: sited composition (Wal-Mart doesn’t stock poetry so you have to
bring poetry’s “low ghost” to Wal-Mart) and extraction to non-site (remnants of
“Wal-Mart language” reassembled and recontextualized)— (5) entanglement as
intimacy by distance— not the arm’s length intimacy of consumer exchange that
Wal-Mart wants (that conceals the knots of other social relations)— a 90°
tilt, an exchange in part produced by the problematics described above
to
modify Hejinian’s exhortation: “entangle
with the occasion”
