FridgeFest
CONCEPT

EXPLORATION

Creating identity and exploring the art/artist/audience relationship.

Which comes first?
Artist--Writer--Performer
ArtObject--Word—Action

Why create pseudonyms: Think of everything we write/make/perform as proposals to others. The story or concept “belongs” to the part of the group that wishes to proceed with it. They could re-propose the story in a new configuration.


CHALLENGE

Each of us is asked to turn inside out the usual methods codified within our specific art form for the creation and presentation of our work. This is the most significant challenge that this project presents.

ART OBJECTS
The art objects should seem at certain time and place almost subservient to the text and performance as stage props. But in the longer process by which the project outlives the performance (Philly Sept 02, 2005 and again elsewhere), along with the cataloguing for auction, will elevate the art objects into High Art. In this process the art object is served by the writer/performer in a fashion similar to that of an art dealer(s). We designate FridgeFest (Cult 12, DIVA DIVAN) as the gallery for twelve NAME ARTISTS. The (originating anonymous) artists and their art objects mimic the contracts that already exist within the market; i.e., something like a 50-50 per cent split with gallery owner middleman.

TEXTS
Texts should seem at certain times and place almost subservient to the art object. Criticism is one avenue for art to find its audience, especially the historical audience. Critics are hired to write the catalogues for gallery or museum shows. In this and many other ways these texts serve as the PR branch of the art object (or performance) soliciting an audience. DIVA DIVAN has additionally "commissioned" 12 texts for performance with the idea this will help sell all the "furnishings" in the Spirit Wind gallery showroom on September 02 in Philadelphia and subsequent auctions or performances. The dramaturgy for writing these texts is radically different than writing a play or even writing for an ensemble performance. Both the collective nature of writing and the need to fully integrate that writing into the whole as well as to the specific art object/performance necessitate an alternative notion to authorship.

In order to protect both the (originating anonymous) author as well as the project itself from being hijacked, writers, performers, and artists will offer their texts and ideas to the project under the Copyleft Attitude and the Free Art License. (document below)

Chuck Mee and Richard Foreman create some their scripts under a variation of the Copyright restrictions of this Free Art License, but for the most part this is new as it is applied to writing for theatre or performance.

As principle creators of the critical, promotional, and performance texts, the writers are also considered as stakeholders in any product or production. Details as to their stake in any particular art object (the 50/50 % gallery split) or box office percentage can be work out mainly with the performer(s) and particular producer.

PERFORMANCES
Performances should seem at certain times and place almost subservient to the promotion or veneration of the art object. Further the performances will need most specifics of the FridgeFest environment and the particular art objects (props) in order to be successful.

The full documentation, archiving, and cataloguing of the individual art objects and the project would likely include some recording of the performance to complete it. These recordings along with the rehearsal preparation and live performances make the performers stakeholders in any product or production. Details as to their stake in any particular art object (the 50/50 % gallery split) or box office percentage can be work out mainly with the writers(s) and particular producer. In addition performers should have the right to first refusal to subsequent "FridgeFest' performances of their product.

Copyleft Attitude : the Free Art license
Free Art license
[ Copyleft Attitude ]
version 1.2

Preamble:

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MISE EN SCENE

FridgeHenge/Diva Divan

Fridge: white box that artificially preserves things (museum)
Henge: a prehistoric circular area with standing stone or wooden pillars, possibly used for rituals.

12 refrigerators in a configuration (circle?) surrounding a divan. A desert or polar landscape surrounding, or perhaps enclosed within the vitrine, the white cube of the gallery.

The diva is that fleshy thing that moves between the divan and the fridge, foraging. The diva posing under "the gaze." Who or what or where is the gaze?

The entire space is a refrigerator. There are gigantic open soup cans, slowly rotting bags of spinach, the occasional pristine egg... The stage lights go off and on intermittently. The audience is famished. A diva must be sacrificed to their insasiable appetites. Does she go in noble calm to meet her fate? Is she forced shrieking to the top of the volcano? Does she go on to serve the Vanity, or the Compassionate Love Seat? Does she empathize with the audience's hunger? Does she just love a good recipe?

The fridges will be salvaged from the street on bulk trash days after the city has recovered the Freon.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dos/html/recycfc.html

There will be different kinds....freezer top, freezer bottom, maybe a side by side but they all will be white, inside and out. No off-whites because we will also paint them all the same Arctic White with visible brush strokes.

None will be "working" so in most ways they are no longer even fridges. Although what is the essence of a fridge? Years ago a friend of mine from India told me that the "new rich" there sometimes bought refrigerators without knowing their function. So they would have these brand new refrigerators in their homes packed with clothing or other things.

The plain white canvas from where we begin is still the FridgeHenge. It would be nice if we had an empty lot where the FridgeHenge always was. Not just a place from where we begin, but also the place to where we return. After the opening, after the premiere, after the cataloguing, auction, and sale....after the Deluge. We return to FridgeHenge. The faceless white stones.

That said, to bring one of these large faceless white stones into some domestic function, such as a TV console, fish tank, indoor marijuana garden, or even a refrigerator is possible but will face all the technical hurdles of "beginning from scratch."

MEDITATIONS ON MISE EN SCENE

Theatre is descendant of rituals once performed at site specific sacred grounds like Stonehenge,

Art objects are descendant of talismans and other sacred objects.
(Nothing really sacred about a couch or a fridge. Likewise theater and art. All seems pretty tame and domestic now. The dog was domesticated long ago. So dogs really can't go wild anymore. The best they can do is go feral. How does theatre and art go feral? Shed its domestication and show its teeth. Refusing the museum in the same manner as a wild animal would refuse the zoo or breeding for slaughter.)

Refrigerator: Food source? Or messy place? Needs to be cleaned. Images of mom's & friends' clean & properly stocked fridges popping up each time you open up the fridge door. Can a refrigerator be a reminder of what we're not?

The sofa or divan is more conscious [than a bed]. Like a pedestal. Maybe I think this due to the photos on the cultsofa site. But also I think of the living room, a place where people present themselves to one another.

The refridgerator is so strange. Casket and breast. A symbol of our moden lives, at least those of us who are wealthy enough to own or have access to one. Frozen food is so dead, think of a piece of lettuce which has been frozen and thawed. I believe the cell walls burst when food is frozen.

The refrigerator is the comforter/the nourisher, the great mom after mom. The replacement mother. She takes over when mom has other plans. everything is very messy on the bottom, where the food is not completely stopped from decomposing, only stalled --all the i miss you mommy, where are you, connect to something...but the top -- the freezer --is where we can compartmentalize and get it back together. freeze your emotions. [the piece I am working on now is bleeding in here.]

Standing naked in the light of the open fridge at night, the question is always the same. "What do I want? Why am I here?"

In past fridge shows, cashing in on the kitsch phenomenon, each artist had created their line of "fridge magnets" to sell. The magnets were fun mostly because no one would actually buy one. But people would inspect these art magnets intently. Never being able to quite answer the question they all posed, "Why?" Why stick a magnet on the door of your fridge? Why stick a painting on your wall?

Eva had made casts of nipples of some of her friends. The clay male and female nipples were all pink and red. They were heavy and needed a strong magnet to adhere them to a fridge door. When Eva's fridge magnets actually started to sell, I think it may have confused her some." Maybe I should raise the price?"

I could imagine the Cult 12 Nipple Collection of fridge magnets becoming a hot item. Better than an autograph. And of course the Cult 12 should have busts to immortalize them. Egghead busts, nipple busts. The Cult 12 is destined to Fame's Piazza.

I want a world where celebrities give their fingerprint instead of their autograph. Nothing safer, more secure, more democratic than a celebrity. I write here the words "Bin Laden" and they don't get underlined as a mistake by spell check in Word. At first I'm confused. Is Bin Laden so safe secure and democratically elected Evil to have already entered the lexicon? But then I realize both Bin and Laden are words in their own right, commoners. The poet H.D. hung with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. She held the notion that words were like vessels that could be cracked open, myrrh like resins releasing their imaginative aromas. Common bins laden with inventive power.

Again back to text as recipe. A list of ingredients. But then what? How to blend? How hot is the heat? But I'm not a good cook, so all that's too complicated. Give me only recipes for strange new elixirs. Something I just sprinkle yeast into and watch ferment. Something I can drink and get drunk on. Unlike those eggheaded showgirls, I dance in abandon with the spirits.

this web site fridges it; our thoughts, scribbles, objects. for a time anyway. freezes casts an image. are we casting image as we cast about for image. looking in the frozen box inside or outside the circle of twelve fridges. simple shaped totems of stone. wasn't that an original thought from nick. stonehenge - hedge it, place the bet on the future of the human race. the frozen zig zagged lightening that gaby imagines. how simple is the stonehenge image anyway when you look up close or from an angle or distance. if our thoughts were liquids that frieze and we could take them out later heat them up. ahh is that performance than. when we do a show. here we are in the cyber fridge frozen up in heated electrons (an old outdated term now, iconographic, also stonehenge.) heat is also a big blot of an image. something we feel.

how real is that.

divakramden wishing he was drunk


P.R. IDEAS

· Create sculpture from fridge condenser and freon tubes hooked into electric of street lamps.
· Create an ad within a block of ice that slowly melts and drips onto sidewalk and passerby.
· Create a logo and make a temporary tattoo of it that you keep strict tabs on and sell as the "ticket" that will get you into all FridgeFest events.

The PR and promotion for process-centered work is tricky. You often
need to name the wine before its time. So I would appreciate any and
all ideas on the public representation of this project as we proceed
toward and then through the date of September 2. We will want to
start referring the public to some web pages at our site
www.fridgefest.com as soon as friend Seth gets the folder and
permissions set up.

**************

Also I have another related idea to this. All the Cult 12 writers
came from the rat-list. (The rat-list, now defunct, was a list serve
of theater makers whose membership was accumulated at yearly
conferences and word of mouth over the course of 10 years.) We (Cult 12 writers) had decided to regenerate the rat-list in some new
configuration and mission. But we never did. I'd like to bring that
idea back onto the table in relationship to both where the project is
now and projections of where it will be in future incarnations.

As you know, around the country and the world there are numerous
theatre fringe festivals such as the Philly Fringe. Do a google
search for fringe festival and you'll get a sense of what's out
there. If our fridge fest project had an impossible grand ambition
it would be to have an art show/performance production of 12 fridges in constant tour of the world's fringe festivals.

What is a fringe festival? Who is the fringe artist? What is art
that attempts to deliberately develop or assume a place outside the
mainstream? Does such a place or condition or attitude as "the
fringe" even exist anymore? Or is the dominant culture able to
immediately co-opt on demand anything it desires from the fringe?

So I was thinking of "Fridge Fest" as some kind of aesthetic or ethic
of resistance, developing methods for the preservation of temporary
autonomous zones at the fringe.

Through much of its early history, the Rat Conference/rat-list tried
to claim such a position. I would like to migrate the rat-list with
its membership over to our FridgeFest site charged with a new
mandate, which will really just be an old rat mandate made new again.

This international audience/participants of 450 theatre workers will
help provide a context for pursuing a more extensive exploration of
our project.

Mostly I am checking to see if anybody has any strong feelings one
way or the other about bringing the rat-list into a relationship with
this project. If nobody objects I'll work towards doing that by
drafting a statement to the members about the reactivation.

********

There was a refrigerator at the java hut the Philly Divas met at the
other night. You know, pick a soda out of it and pay at counter.
This had Mabel Gravy suggest we should begin putting eggs in such
"public" places as PR gifts of FridgeFest.com. Altered eggs,
hardboiled or something so they don't cause trouble.

So here's an idea for PR kid in all of us.

http://www.fridgefest.com/cooler/kidsegghead.htm

Leave these grassy haired eggheads with the FridgeFest logo in select
theatre and gallery locations for lucky winners to find. When these
finders-keepers go to the FridgeFest.com and follow the egghead link
they'll see that they have won a big prize. Two for the price of
one!!! The Egghead Special!!! Count your chickens; they've
hatched!!!! Etc.