Permanent
August 15, 1995 at the Climate Theater. A collaboration with Ann Barth & Tim Daniel.
Ann is a talented artist and friend of mine from Beaver College who moved to San Francisco around the same time I did. She approached us with an invitation to collaborate on a performance for Ron Leeson’s Forecast series at the Climate Theater. The conceptual framework was to be a meditation on the word permanent.
After a few weeks, Tim delivered an eight minute soundtrack and I cut a video to it. But by the evening of the performance we still hadn’t an idea what Ann was planning to do. When our segment arrived, a stagehand placed a chair in the center of the stage, and the lights darkened. I rolled the video, prompting Ann to walk out. She headed directly for the chair and sat down, fixing her gaze upon the audience. She held that position until more than halfway through the video when the music is stopped by a voice shouting: “Stop!”
If you are contemplating permanent and need a word to express it, “stop” would be the utterance par excellence. Permanent is a stop: the stopping of change.
When this moment arrived, Ann jumped up, lifted the chair and smashed it while falling to the stage floor. For the next several seconds the theater was full of silence, darkness and stillness. The sound and image continued, and she remained frozen through the final minutes of the piece. Permanent showed two states of permanence with a dramatic act of impermanence separating them.
Permanent provided me with a rare opportunity to see the completion of one of my videos as part of a live performance looking out at it from the perspective of the audience. As a stand alone video it was screened many times over the next few years. I reworked the video each time to challenge the question of permanence.
