performance writing

Exploring how to straddle and blur the boundaries between art, activism, philosophy, poetry, and anthropology, amongst other (un)disciplines, Huge Sillytoe is in a continual process of considering how to combine action and performance with reflection and writing. In this vein Huge is engaged in ongoing experiments with performance writing or writing as a performance in itself, turning the traditionally private, solitary act of academic text inscription into a public, sometimes participatory intervention. For three months during 2019, Huge Sillytoe held an office hours residency at Grace Exhibition Space in New York City. The following excerpt from their PhD thesis summarizes their performance writing practice during this period:

         “I set up a desk in the street-facing window of the old pizza shop turned gallery, surrounded by my central research questions written on cardboard in English and Spanish, and worked at my computer in rotating costumes and masks. Passersby at different moments encountered a spoon, a frog, a clown, or a fully suited man with underpants on his head, amongst numerous other unidentified creatures, working studiously. Thus many sections of this text, composed to meet the meticulous professional standards of a PhD thesis, were written with a pair of underpants on my head in a shop window. The text of a sign attached to my computer read “Why? Why not? Por qué? Por qué no?” descending into illegible nonsense script. One pedestrian, putting a note in the cookie jar I provided for comments and questions wrote: “This seems like some kind of protest”. I thus attempted to transform the condensation of exaggeratedly transgressive performance into a relatively normative academic text into a further opportunity for counter-normative intervention in public space. Here I hope to blur the boundary between creating and writing about absurd performance whilst querying through action the political motivations and import of both.”

Photos: Luisa Alarcón