axial talks

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embodying principle

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I have given a number of performative talks about the axial principle*, particularly how it manifests in creating axial stones*—the sculptural art of the precarious, balancing discovered stones with no external aids (no glue) or any deliberate change in the stones, carrying them to their most precarious point possible as the liminal state of greatest intensity. I regard the same principle as occurring at the heart of any art that I practice, and in varying degrees it is embodied in talking about the principle. (I think it happens naturally in a lot of conscious talking, and for that reason I have included my impromptu video of

David Antin talking on Kathy Acker (NYU, 2002)

on my Vimeo site. David, like Joseph Beuys and John Cage, created an art form of the public talk. Perhaps unique to David’s creation is its degree of embodying an intentional poetics in a purely oral medium [which he transcribes and then publishes in a textual/print medium] to the extent that he calls them poems.) I do not regard my talking as poems but I do see them as roughly consistent with the principle they describe, and therefore performative. One instance, not included here, in a Rotterdam performance festival (Words Live 3, May 9th, 2009), is an intentional art piece as talk, the Axial Lecture on Lecture.

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Below is Axial Lecture on Self-Orientation, my performance April 30, 2010 at Barnard College, created for AG3: The Third International Arakawa & Gins Architecture & Philosophy Conference, around the works and writings of the visionary architects Arakawa and Gins. Performance includes text/music/video. PowerPoint text animation by Susan Quasha.
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The talk below was in the context of the 10th annual conference of PINC (People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity) in Zeist, The Netherlands, on May 12th, 2009, where 16 selected speakers in various fields address some 500 people for about 20 minutes each. Introduction by PINC founder and director, Peter van Lindonk. See pinc.nl for other videos and information.

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