I wonder where all the manifestos are for listeners.

My favorite artwork is the time my friend asked me to go on a roadtrip with her to follow a cloud until it disappeared. It never happened. I wonder if she ever intended it to. But I think I can still remember us doing it. When I left town for grad school years later, the same friend hand wrote me a goodbye letter on a scroll designed to be read only once. I wish I had spent more time pausing over each and every word - enough time to let them seep into my bones - but I was too excited and touched at the gesture.

I suspect we are all searching, all the time. We seek what is true in different forms. But the search itself, or maybe more precisely, how we search, may be the truest true we know. Trues that are composted in other trues and shit and when we finally taste fruit, we sense it’s time to search again.

We are made more aware of the artist’s search as we are left with traces of her investigations. Fingerprints. If we could articulate each artist’s unique set of gestures within the larger gesture of searching, which I believe we can, we find, in her search, ourself, each other, our erotic knowings, our freedoms.

I used to think of the artist’s role as a flag runner. Maybe I still do. The first to sense that it’s time to shift. The sentient force of all forces to
Lead. The. Way.
But the artist’s flag is often an appropriately quiet one, so who is alerting the others to listen (search) for the flag? I wonder where all the manifestos are for listeners.

Artists give us a path to transgress the ontological either/or we were taught to become. Maggie Nelson points to a line of thinking by William James. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or feeling of cold. She adds, “We ought to, but we don’t - or at least, we don’t quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won’t need to stare as long.”

Artists search in ands, ifs, buts, and bys.

The Game of Moralisation.
Artists are not in the game of moralisation.
We ask questions and study our questions.
We listen (search) to others for their questions.
We plant questions in the earth and step away to let them grow and die.
We search in our bodies for questions,
our homes,
our wildness,
our skies,
our togetherness,
our fears,
our silences,

Questions, however, connote answers. So perhaps I need a more refined word for questions. Maybe I will start to call them sensings.

The Unknown and the Incomplete

Artists do not make knowledge, we are knowledge.

The artist’s completeness lies in the incomplete.
Her transformation is transforming.

While artworks (searches) may serve as temporary slivers of possibilities,
they hint at more.
The more is not temporary.
We need reminders,
every day,
of the more.

The more has nothing to do with time.

Artist Cauleen Smith says, “I am not making this because I know something, but I am making it because I don’t know something and want to learn what is possible.”

Deep listening, as described by Pauline Oliveros, is listening in every possible way to everything possible. Artists are weaving together volatile sounds of our imagination, of our bodies, of our grief and pain and pleasure - these sounds are then acutely tuned to the specific room they inhabit, whether that be internally or externally or often both.

Reality becomes a matter a fragments fragmenting into sounds not tones, which are heard contingently on the indexical weave and remind us through their possibility of the seemingly impossible, read not as the dissonant, the anti-tone, but experienced as the inaudible and the barely heard. Thus it demands a listening-out* for the minor, so we might hear and excavate from the slices of reality the less heard ones to produce different narratives.
Salome Voegelin

(searching)

Go through me to get to you.

In grad school, I presented work for a class of artists, all in various stages in their careers. I was given three hours to present new work and lead a conversation activated by the work. The critique in art school, when grounded in heart-centered boundaries, is an opportunity to have a dedicated group engage in the social elasticity of the work presented. The work isn’t just a noun here, but a verb. The work isn’t just mine, it’s ours. Where is this elasticity outside the walls of the art classroom? Where are the manifestos for the listeners?

In my work titled Listening Workshop, A performance,* I set up an experience to complicate the roles of performer and audience. Am I watching, or being watched? Who am I performing for? Am I listening more deeply to internal or external cues? The piece was intended to offer a safe space to navigate any complicated tensions inside our body, next to other bodies. To offer a gentle nudge towards deep listening as a way to take care of each other. In the critique that took place immediately following that experience, I noticed who was still unsettled by the experience and who was buzzing with excitement. Who gets to show up to unfamiliar situations without feeling the need to “read the room” as a means to know how to act? How might deeply listening (searching) for each other in those heightened transitions be an act of care?

The day after my critique, a dear friend and stunning movement artist, Melissa Word, coincidentally posted on her Instagram some of her fragmented phone-notes after working with a group of highschoolers in Atlanta.

permission to experiment and be different than the person who showed up yesterday
asking ourselves how to be better stewards of the group culture
toggle between cultivating more self-trust while practicing surrender to extender circumstances
we can practice different ways to be together. different ways to relate to ourselves with the group
generate discomfort as playful inoculation for our wildly destabilizing world