WUK has become the 2018 home for a new series of works created by Saint Genet. Saint Genet creates new contemporary performance works through a process of presentation termed “Aesthetic Declarations”. These “Declarations” often take the form of installation, time-based or site specific performance events, experimental musical presentation, or illicit private actions. They serve to highlight different concepts and pivotal images that will recur over time as well as create a network for institutions, artists, and audience to communicate about difficult and ephemeral concepts that will eventually be presented in a wholly new “master work”. One that has been affected by the real and dramatic history begun inside these walls.
“Myth is content without fixed form, it is protean, re-appearing, and embodied at any point in history, in diverse and unexpected fashions.” -Alain Borer “A Lament For Joseph Beuys”
Aesthetic Declaration:
Offering, analytic scenario, or prelude. Event(s) that manifest, through action, image, installation, transgression, procession,and performance, blood, booze,and betrayal, the inciting incidents, conceptual narratives, and portraits through performance, that become the foundation for single vision large scale master works; that that utilize the tangible experience of creating “a continuous present”, to affect and change the outcome of the yet unknown final product. This process allows necessity and need of to affect both the piece being viewed and the pieces not yet made but alive in the future “perfect”.
Utilizing a methodology we have termed: “Dramaturgical Diagnostic Dialogues” (Conceptual Evidence and Dramaturgical Investigations of Poetic Form), these declarations are points of departure, signals through the flames, or dominos that are falling that leave a fractured history of performance events in their wake while creating the pathway for new and experimental works that have their own mythological history through performance.
Aesthetic Declarations allow meaning not to be encoded in images, instead meanings emerge in "now time" like a flash, dialectically in the form of a constellation re-presenting wish images, utopian desires, and uncovering layers of meaning in past experience. A combination of the sensory, sensuous experience of narrativity "that preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time" and dialectical images may together generate "understanding" and be transformative.
a modern history of the continuous present: SAINT GENET and MODERN MYTH MAKING
SAINT GENET’S new series “a modern history in a continuous present” takes the form of a Trilogy of Greek Tragedy. These 8 hour pieces or Portraits are transformation, transposition, and translation of the philosophical considerations surrounding questions of desire, transgression, betrayal, foreignness, destiny, and death. Each 8 hour performance finds its voice in the impossible madness of the human condition, the whispers of Agamemnon (Portrait I: Like Shapes in Dreams) or Antigone (Portrait II: Forever), of Jonestown and The Donner Party, of your shitty behavior toward people you are supposed to love, call to us...to all of us. As the title implies “a modern history in a continuous present” is a contradiction in terms, a paradox, which sets out to do nothing less then to create a symposium of the theater space, to create a stronghold for prolific activity and non-ideas, a place where thoughts and things are split...and far from controlled.