Between Authority and Pretense

Abstract

Humor calls into question collectively held truths, whether real or imagined, emergent or engrained. Through costume and studied speech, the performance artist as pundit makes permissible a self to which we may otherwise be afraid of confessing. The lens of the camera acknowledges that, “…visualities are the great legitimizers ”. In layering, the projected image stands in as a post-modernist canvas mediating between performer and audience, spectator and spectacle, transmitting and transmuting signal. Through the presence of the screen, the audience is given visual reminder of the distance between self and other, encoded in space and time.