Andrea Geyer, Spiral Lands, Chapter 2

In the previous post, I’d mentioned Andrea Geyer’s talk/performance at Parson’s Democracy in the Age of Branding show, and now I’d like to actually talk about it.

I came in blind, or rather: dumb. I knew this was going to be a presentation, but had no idea it was a “presentation.” A performance. So, the first things I thought as I sat listening to Andrea Geyer speak about post colonialism and first nation’s people (American Indians) were:

1) I feel like I am back at the University of the South Pacific.
2) How brave of her to be willing to express herself so naively.

But, then, the creeping rot of face value began, as I realized, “oh, yeh, this is art, where naive self-expression is usually ironic.” In this case, it would be more appropriate to say it was the object, as in, the thing.

And the questions bore this out. No-one talked about the content of her presentation, but instead focused on the goals of her performance, the distinctions between her and her character.

I, as it has been pointed out, can be stubbornly anti-contemporary, and I am genuinely interested in naive questions of post colonial responsibility and experience, so I decided to focus on the content itself.

Andrea Geyer had mentioned something about “responsibility not relativism.” I asked her to clarify, and was delighted to learn that that was one line she had written herself, and not quoted. I will definitely talk with her more on that subject, because as an admitted relativist, I’d love to figure out how responsibility could surpass that. What I’ve got to guide me now are Trinh Minh Ha and Konai Thaman, but here are some other good clips from Andrea Geyer’s presentation/ performance.

• Ethnographic Realism
• Reality as a dialogue with symbol systems that can block reality
• Penetrating the Other’s life vs. being penetrated by it
• We are searching for something Other than ourselves
• The same ground the extends into the Pueblo is underneath our feet in this building in Manhattan

And a few thoughts that sprung in my head during the talk:

• Character as Crutch
• Where does self hate go?
• Knowing that rather than knowing how (via Douglas Paulson/ Naomi Wolf- End of America)