DOWNLOADS (IN PDF FORMAT):
Section by section (click on individual names above right)
the theoretical part (which is pretty funny) entitled "MetaFormances: The Hermeneutics of Play in Language/Art/Life" (click here)
the whole thing (click here)
CONTEXTUAL OVERVIEW
MetaFormances is a correspondence-based social sculpture that took place between 2005 and 2007. The performances culminated as a book and an exhibition and formed my Master's Thesis for my Master's of Science in MIT's Visual Arts Program (readers: Ute Meta Bauer & Francisco Ricardo). Curiously, the day after I turned in my thesis and closed the final exhibition, the FBI tracked me down - someone had reported that I was involved in a mail fraud ring with my mailman. The two agents tracking my case (who were disappointingly dowdy) had reviewed my thesis and interrogated me with questions about with whom I was mailing letters, how many times I visited my mailbox per week, etc. As a compulsive letterwriter obsessed with the mail and a habitual collaborator, I seemed to be a prime suspect. However, to my disappointment, they abandoned my case - they said they weren't taking my thesis project as a threat to the country.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Miming the protocol of business form letters, the letters request their recipient to perform absurd, erotic, and illicit behavior in order to transform the letter into something else. As I see it, the recipients' correspondence signals their readiness to play, to accept their role in the transubstantiation of the letter, to believe in the metaphysical force of the delicate printed word, their complicity in extending a joke.
Each letter was mailed via overnight express courier along with a disposable 35 mm. camera and self-addressed, self-stamped envelope. The project engaged a motley crew of 32 characters – a mailman, a confettiologist, a Dutch man, a computation origami expert (and his dad), a porn artist, a pinata factory, a psychoanalyst, etc. I knew about half of the recipients; the others I found after extensive searches for recipients who I thought would “play along.”
It was impossible to get responses from all the recipients. I got a lot of rejections. Most of those who responded did so after I pestered them with polite reminder emails and phone calls that followed proper business protocol. I used my best phone voice and invoked my most illustrious epistolary skills as I could possibly muster, deployed my ten years' training as an administrator and grant-writer. A few of the recipients responded of their own accord. It seemed to me that they did so because they felt that I had somehow incised their day-to-day life. Some explicitly told me this is how they felt. Several of the letters I wrote returned to me without warning, a year or two after I had mailed them off.
The process of letter-writing unfolded organically according to some logic that I processually discovered. During this working process, I needed to have some way of understanding the rules of the epistolary exchange, so I wrote them down exactly as they presented themselves to me. Most of the time, the logic governing the letters (the choice of the recipient, the request I suggested, the approach, etc.) made themselves clear to me through revelatory moments in which I imagined myself to be an ecstatic sociopath or thoroughly repressed Victorian pervert. It's the recognition of this double consciousness that I believe is contained here in the book's essay.
I don't consider myself a religious person but somehow these letters invoke a sense of religiosity. To me, the letters are meditations on life, death, and alterity; the letters utilize myth and symbolism to suggest transcendence, abjection, violence, communion, reincarnation, faith, etc.
ABOUT THAT PART OF THE BOOK ENTITLED "The Hermeneutics of Play in Language/Art/Life"
By foregrounding the corporal presence of their author (myself) and the intimate nature of letter writing, the letters broach normative workplace etiquette. Instead, the cover letters invoke exploration into the fetishistic aspects of epistolary correspondence and the historicity of a bourgeois scriptural economy, Methodologically, MetaFormances weaves together three voices (first personal narrative, academic criticism, business letter-writing protocol) and draws from a variety of 20th century theorists (Kristeva, Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Zizek, Bataille, Foucault, Somner).
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