It's Thursday, Feb 12 - I can't believe the seminar is finally happening! I have wanted to see a seminar like this at UCR since I first saw the syllabus that Ron created for the course he taught at UCLA a few years back.  I still think that was one of the most well thought out, and totally rigirous explorations of performance I've ever seen.  

This is, of course, different.  A quasi-open seminar, a free class for artists and a few fellow travellers - run out of the basement of a local coffee house but on the UC's dime. The funding for this project comes largely from the University of California's Humanities Research Institute, which has a fairly new program supporting efforts to program events generated by humanist scholarship - but to do this programing off campus, in collaboration with non academic organizations.  This was perfect for my interest in very unruly art & performance - and for what art can do outside of the official spaces of art & education.  I can't shed that institutional stuff entirely here, but I'm really happy to do something in spaces that people in Riverside associate with the social, rather than with work or school.

And, I'm excited about exploring what a seminar is when it isn't taken by students! Meaning - no grades, no fees, not much by way of red tape (at least from the seminar participants' end!).  Ron knows this experience better than I do - he's taught artists workshops of varying sorts for a while -  most recently Praxis Mojave (I think that's what they called it) with Julie Tolentino - a performance "boot camp" in the desert, in the middle of August.  By all accounts it was an intense and transformative experience.  Heather Cassils & Zachary Drucker - who were a part of that workshop - will perform on Saturday 2/21 with Ron and Julie.

Anyway - not much to report today - except that wading through the library's collection of feminist performance video was oodles of fun.  I can't wait to show Linda Montano's insane "Primal Scenes" and her moving "Mitchell's Death" in the seminar this weekend.  Montano is a provocative and moving artist - see this interview about the piece she did with Tehching Hseih (in which they lived tied together by rope for a year).  There is a good overview of her performance videos on Video Data Bank.

Funny how, in 2009, checking out a half dozen tapes will make you feel like you are handling ancient materials.