"I am Albert Grass."
This quotation, for me, was the most important thing Beloff said about her work during this lecture. Before she revealed Grass' true identity was in fact equal to her own, Beloff was only just creating representations of a historic happening and well-known philosophies. Once she revealed the extent to her control over the "happening," Beloff's concept was demonstrated to me. Her work seeks to find the point at which actuality ends and theater begins. Through her residence within Albert Grass, who was an actual person, and control over his persona, Beloff successfully balanced on the tight rope separating reality and artifice. This fact was enhanced by the reveal at the end of the lecture, after feeding the audience "history" for over an hour.
3 Words
1) Philosophical
2) Embodied
3) Form follows function
About Beloff
An interesting thing I learned about Beloff that I didn't know prior to the lecture was the extent to which she "lives" through her work. I had read a few of the descriptions on her website of certain pieces and was aware of how much research she does into the concepts she references. However, only at the end of the lecture did she reveal how fully she is embodied in the work. The research she does into the concepts becomes evidence that functions as a continuity cloak within her work, preventing the viewer from questioning era, or any other facts. Even the type of media she uses becomes part of the research. Interestingly enough, Beloff does not even have to state one way or another where the research ends and the art begins because it is so seamless.
Answers to Questions
1) The first question I recorded before the lecture involved the role of the viewer in Beloff's work. As evidenced through the last piece she showed at the lecture, the viewer's function is to be drawn into an extremely seamless pseudo-fabrication and contemplate the referenced stories. She mentioned the conflicting viewpoints the Coney Island viewers had about the Freudian piece there last year, and made clear this work was meant to welcome open discussion of those stories it told. For a more academic viewing audience, I think, Beloff's work is meant to involve the viewer in the final "act" of the "performance": the reveal of the artifice. This final act is as much a part of the work as any existing portion, because it proves the functionality of the whole performance as an artistic tool used to inform the concept.
2) The second question I wrote before the lecture referenced the film medium in which Beloff often works, and particularly, the relevance of a time-based medium to the discussion of the "real" and the "imagined." Beloff answered this question in the beginning of the lecture when she discussed motion-picture analysis of 19th Century psych patients. The attempts to document patient's hysterical episodes was what interested Beloff in that it marked to her "the beginnings of cinema and narrative film." In this, she examines the line between a scientific hysterical moment, and acting, and the "relationships between scientific document and spectacle." Time-based media, especially the earliest forms used, is important because the idea of the "snapshot" was not yet conceivable, proving the existence of some amount of theatrics. Beloff used such media and performances to "show the concepts the way they would have been if cinema had started much earlier."
Compelling Piece
The most compelling piece Beloff lectured about was definitely DREAMLAND: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle 1926-1972. The piece started off interesting based on extensive research connecting Coney Island to Freudian philosophy, and ended with a fully embodied work of art, whose performative nature is completely inter-related with the conceptual backbone. The line between actual and imagined is truly debatable in this piece.
Book based on the imagination of "Albert Grass"
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