Durational Contemplation

Durational contemplation is a place-responsive artistic practice developed by the instructor over the last fourteen years. This course represents the first time it will be instructed in-depth. Durational contemplation, in name, refers to the contemporary genre of durational performance, or endurance art, in which an artist enacts a performance that sustains itself over hours, or even months. Some of the most well-known figures to develop the form, as it is popularly understood, include Serbian artist, Marina Abramovic, and Taiwanese artist, Tehching Hsieh. The latter’s body of work (almost exclusively) includes five year-long performances and a sixth thirteen-year performance, between 1978-2000, all of which necessitated the complete entanglement of Hsieh’s life and art based on simple yet severe and symbolically intense constraints.

Durational contemplation also implements itself through long passages of time and based on fundamental, poetic constraints, yet it re-situates aesthetic force work from the performing body to the whole human being thinking, relating, and making as a place-responsive encounter. Concentrated on the intense intersections of social contact, historical processes, and spatial proximity, durational contemplation necessitates the meticulous selection of a boundaried place, like a family apartment, a cemetery, or an urban square that uniquely implicates the artist, their genealogies, traditions, conditions, futures etc. In other words, durational contemplation is a performance of contested internal experience over time in an intentionally set site; an extended physical-intellectual devotion to a place of excessive meaning that subsumes the borders between performance, site, objects, artist, and relations. The artist collaborates with the site—its human and nonhuman, visible/audible/tangible and invisible/inaudible/intangible forces—over time to co-create with and in its spatial bounds. Such a scale of confrontation, in this context, constitutes what is meant by contemplation or contemplative work.

Over the quarter, students will experiment weekly with durational, place-specific, and contemplative artistic forms, respectively, at times in the classroom and other times in distinct locations across Whatcom County, like the militarized fence surrounding the BP Oil Refinery in Blaine or the Haggen Food and Pharmacy that overwrites an ethnically cleansed Lummi village site in Ferndale. We will examine and discuss related contemporary art projects, beginning with an introduction to the durational performance works and philosophy of Abramovic and Hsieh, yet moving swiftly into a survey of artworks we could call durational contemplations. By the fifth week, students will begin working on a durational contemplation, selecting a specific site, in Whatcom County or elsewhere, and working with/in it through the end of the quarter, producing a range of materials, documents, acts, and stories.