I was born at the birth of a new millennium. This means absolutely nothing unless you decide it does. I have decided that somehow everyone I have grown up with is decidedly different from the people that everyone else on earth grew up around for all of human history.  That is all I care to share about my personal history. I am attempting to remove myself from my art. So that it can be your art too. So that you can look upon it and know your personal history and so that you can know the collective personal histories of everyone else who has looked upon it. I do not wish to be god. I wish to see us become god. 

 

I wrote this immediately after hearing this prompt. I do not know if this is writing for a character, a manifesto, or a cult. But it sure is interesting. To me at least. 

 

I am a hyper modernist. I am a hopeless romantic. I hate the Idea of living in New York. I love the idea of Suffering in New York. I love being from Texas. But I grew up in dallas. I know good writing is good thinking. But I can only write while talking under my breath, which isn't writing or thinking. Because talking isn't really thinking in your head but in your tongue and throat. I was raised to hate God because I was raised in the church. I never didn't know I was queer. but there was for sure a time before sex, but I cant recall that time now. I will never be able to spell theater, aecestics, or conciseness correctly but i can spell mississippi. I will never read a book on Bob Dylan. Please hold me to that. I have no idea how to talk about myself without sounding disgusting. I would like to see someone on stage counting for two hours. Because when they are counting I know what is coming next, that is liberating. I sure hope one of those numbers will be surprising though.When I “do theater” I feel most like I have existed for a very long time. For perhaps the longest time of all. Well, things have fallen apart again. After all, if I was told history would repeat itself, why did I learn it in the first place?

 

 

I, as an artist, is everything

 

This is not what most would want to hear from a student who has the word "playWRITING" attached to them. I FEEL that more has changed about my artistic outlook this semester than at any other time in my life. (not sure if this is true or just my POV) I noticed this while revisiting my first Personal Statement at the beginning of this class. First semester, I was far too attached to old ideas. But UT broke me, or broke me in. I work at the fine arts library now and I am longer a BFA actor. This has inundated me with literature and art of all the highest orders and from all the loftiest places. But words are failing me. Writing solid prose and lyrical poetry is either too intimidating a practice, or I just find them boring now. Bob Dylan and Shakespeare will become boring. My generation is  born at the advent of a new millenium. The human mind has changed more and faster in the last century than all the time between WWII and Christ’s death. New languages must be made to communicate effectively. New crafts must be formed to accommodate this new human. Tribalism must be reevaluated and culture most be defined. New art must remind us that the soul is the center of a pharmacological bio scape (the body). 

 

MAY 1, 2022 11:32 PM CAPITAL METRO BLUE LINE SOMEWHERE ON LAVACA 

 

There is a veteran aprox 60 under some influence either mental or chemical or life 

 

“YOU, you young thing, YES you. You keep this place hip. ATX is dying dude. Its all dying this country dying. WE ROME and you know what Rome gotta do, ITs gotta fall. But when it falls, the coolest shit happens” 

 

LATER THAT NIGHT - LOWER GAUD  APPROX 2 am- UBER POOL RECODING HEARD ABOVE:

A driver heard aliens speaking through his Uber app 
this is a small snippet of a 10 minute conversation. 
He says, Its some sort of new language 

 
Joan Didion (RIP) after seeing a child on acid:

 “It is the first time I had dealt, directly and flatly, with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.” 

Things have fallen apart, I have no idea where the center is, let alone what forces should be called upon to hold it there. BUT IT'S GODDAMN EXITING.  

 

Robert Wilson, Dadaism, Minimalists like Donald Judd, these are the forces that are providing hope. And for now I call that hope FORMALISM and VISUALISM. 

So here I am, I want to radically move forward and make art that crafts the future of humanity. Yet, I am confined by the same linear epistemological and poetic thinking that has plagued, or rather held up, society for a millenium. 

Here are a few things I do know:

-The ancient Greeks didn't believe in creative geniuses. No person could be attributed responsibility for their work because they never acted alone; they thought that an artist was a person who could hear the gods whispering in their ear. 

-Theater is not the summation of all the other arts, it is the mother of all arts. Therefor its philosophy should be broad and  should be GOD. 

-Ascetics are not the private domain of Humans. There are many unexplainable traits that birds and other wildlife have that are not accounted for by Darwin or any modern biological theory 

-This extends to the “art world''. Mozart would be really lame if he was writing today. Good thing he wasn't. The artist only has value if they are coevolving with their audience. 

-folklore contains two meaningful traits: 

1. Narrative. Regardless of convention, the audience must     see one event before another event.

 2. Necessity. These stories are told because they have to be told. they are painful, cutting, and honest. you don't do that unless you have too. In the southern tradition folklore is sometimes the only space for marginalized communities to thrive.

-fossil fuels are no longer the basis of our economy and are slowly being replaced by Pharamacopornographic mechanisms that reveal more about the soul than they do the body. 

-complete monocultrism and multiculturalism are the same system. 

-something will kill me eventually

 

Robert Wilson:

Watching Einstein on the Beach is the reason I am still a theater major right now. His commitment to crafting a visual lang paired with his ability to harness linear time is inspirational beyond belief. I wrote a play entitled “Chekhov's Gun” starting with a storyboard and character drawing. I  took this one step further by formatting the document in an innovative way. The left column is the action directions and descriptions. The right is the dialogue. I further give indications to the reader, director, and actors by playing with all aspects of the formatting and design of the script. The characters are wild, the set costumes and lights, the visual langue, is of equal importance to the literary one. 

 

These word plays trace their roots back to early Dadaist absurdism, but I would argue they go back even further to the advent of language itself. One of Wilson’s productions: A Letter To Queen Victoria takes its title and much of its dialogue from a 150 year old letter in english that is almost incomprehensible in today's vernacular. Wilson is attempting to recon with how we connect to our history and to our present linguistics if that is the case. 

  
link to the project: https://docs.google.com/document/d/108MqTI5nOb6gVKfVVceJrs4ExRn80WbSLZZWErvdOL8/edit?usp=sharing

Norman Bel Geddes: 

I have been working to digitize the Ransom Center's collection of his paper all semester. I just completed  a large website containing a series of essays reckoning with this question: why did the “man who designed the future” and the “father of the industrial design trade” spend the first half of his career directing and designing classical theater. He was a futurist obsessed artist who placed the human form at the center of his work. This is a north star. I have constructed the site to attempt to let the audience make its own conclusions about the arc and scope of his work. The documentation commentary and contest run next to each other in heavy volume. 

 

I have been experimenting with this process oriented style of work. I want fast paced tableaus. I want sharp stark transitions and confusion. I want to help the audience tap into a psychological realm before a linguistic one. This practice penetrated my stage work in PCP this semester with our final project.

here is the link:
 https://gegilker.wixsite.com/my-site-1