THE BRIDGE

Change Of View: The Viewpoints Bridge

Crossing from Montana into the future and over the river of everything.

News of a Difference

The Art of Difference

I encountered this concept in my study of seeking to experience finer and finer levels of reality, and to record and interact with this information, developing your senses and interacting with what you perceive.

This is a mental and physical practice that develops your senses and strengthens interaction with the surfaces of reality. This practice is a traditional tool for artists and scientists. In the Viewpoints work this conceptual frame is given a centrality that is radically non-traditional.

The Viewpoints use of News of a Difference, or the art of difference, encourages the artist to remain focused on perception as a source for creativity itself, rather than using observation simply as a refining tool.

Deconstruction

The process investigating a subject by separating the components of its structure.

In the act of deconstruction the whole remains intact as a possibility. When you deconstruct something the parts become known on their own terms. The Six Viewpoints deconstruct theater by shifting concentration from the whole to the particular, like splitting the atom. I have come to call this process particalizing theater or The Six Viewpoints as Particle Theater.

The motivation of deconstruction is "you don't know but you will try to find out". Construction means you know but you need to find the way to get there. The contrast between these two perspectives has a radical influence on both process and out come. On the one hand a person might start to build a house knowing already what a house is, on the other hand a person might start by taking the structure of houses apart. In the second instance the result has a much greater change to initiate innovation.

The Horizontal

A non-hierarchical positioning of the materials and their languages.

I stumbled onto The Horizontal while trying to describe how deconstruction caused a release of hierarchy. I took six paper cups and stacked them one on top of the other. These became the six languages in a hierarchical order. I then pulled them apart to show the effect of deconstruction. I set them down on the floor side by side to demonstrate that the release of hierarchy caused the languages to assume a position of equality. I looked at the cups and saw the horizontal position. There was one of my characteristic long pauses as thoughts slowly gathered themselves in my mind. As I looked at the cups I saw the formation of a conceptual frame taking place. I realized that I had come across a short hand way of demonstrating how postmodernism is related to The Six Viewpoints and how the whole theory actually works in practical application.

The Horizontal is a way of physically and conceptually presenting the shift hierarchy to no hierarchy. The Horizontal expresses the conditions that give rise to and support fluidity of experience and structure.

Postmodernism

It is necessary to understand Postmodernism to see The Six Viewpoints in their entirety.

Postmodern philosophy precedes, passes through and extends beyond The Six Viewpoints. Its principals are represented in the framework of News of a Difference, Deconstruction and The Horizontal although they function on a much larger scale. Locating the smaller and more physically accessible Viewpoints within postmodernism links The Viewpoints to the social, intellectual, political and scientific environment of our times.

All art has philosophical references. Being conscious of philosophy strengthens art and art imbued with this consciousness strengthens philosophy. When artists are aware of their philosophical context their work is stronger, clearer, more successful in communicating to the audience. Art with a clear philosophy is more likely to remain valuable of generations. I think that interest in The Viewpoints is due to the fact that they are physically and conceptually link to postmodernism.

Classicism: Investigation of nature seeking the grand hierarchical principals

Modernism: the investigation of nature seeking the nature of human beings.

Postmodernism: the investigation of nature through researching its particles

Reification

The process of making a thing out of an experience. Bring experience into a language and language into a system.

To reify something one puts a label on it and places it in a category. The un-reified is an experience that remains in the realm of pure experience. Artists, scientists, inventors, educators and anyone wanting to keep moving must find their own paths between the reified and the non-reified worlds. In order to create the one must enter the un-reified world and bring back a new experience then labeling it so the rest can enjoy and share in the new experience.

This conceptual frame is the heart of The Six Viewpoints. It lays out the very reason we make art. It also explicitly defines the relationship of thinking, writing and researching to the act of creativity. This is an extremely delicate and at the same time powerful concept.

It is difficult to get outside the circle of definitions that bind our world. Labels are powerful things. People go to war because of them. Conflicts between religious definitions, national boundaries, race and class distinction are some of the profoundly treacherous members of the world of labels. Labels are dangerous. They are also necessary to our survival and sanity

The Piano

A metaphor for the relationship between the audience and the artist from The Six Viewpoints perspective.

Applying the concepts of reification, redefining meaning and making language automatically brings the presence of the audience into focus.

The Piano represents the metaphor of the audience as an instrument that is played by the artist. This audience/piano is exceptional because it is made of the same materials as theater itself. The Audience is able to read all six languages and understand them in any way the artist might wish to use them. Success in playing this audience/piano instrument is based on how well you know the materials they are made of and how well you have master playing with them. This conceptual frame is a meditation on how art works and the degree to which an audience can follow, reify, un-reify and re-reify. This conceptual frame has vast implications in the scope of art and what the artist believes can be made.

There are actors who intrinsically understand The Piano and actors who don't. There are directors who intrinsically understand The Piano and directors who don't.

The Matrix

The Six Viewpoints materials at work in their most complex form

For years I had been seeking a way to describe how the six materials interact with each other. I thought of superimposing them using transparencies a job that proved impossible because of their intangible nature. Then I tried to draw them in a grid but the complexity was so great that the grid, as it extended into a cube became so dense that any clarity was lost. The problem stayed unsolved, as many of the concepts on this bridge, for years. Then a wonderful thing happened. The movie, "Matrix" came out and I found the word I was seeking. A fan now among many I teach parts of The Viewpoints using the Matrix story and its images.

The Viewpoints Matrix deals with the materials in their most complex and complete form. Each of the materials has sub-properties of the other languages. This may seem terribly technical but in practice, as an acting technique, it makes a very subtle form of action as the materials form matrixes with each other. Matrix level Viewpoints work is achieved by being able to change focus from on material to another without changing the action one is taking.

This makes it possible to change how you are interacting with the languages and other actors in any direction you choose at any moment. These choices create variations in the paths the interaction.

Doing the Unnecessary

Discovering the nature of anima

This conceptual frame is one of the most beautiful, funny and exciting discoveries Of the Six Viewpoints and is an essential element of The Bridge. It startles actors and audiences into a state of alertness fulfilling one of the essential objectives of theater, that of bring life onto the stage. It is the frame of the unlikely and unexpected. It could also be thought of as extending the statement John Cage once made, "you can have art, all you have to do is change your mind", by also suggesting that you can have art all you have to do is change what is you expect.

The Unnecessary is based on breaking the habitual use of our senses to fulfill ordinary tasks such as: walking, speaking, reaching, exiting, entering, taking our coat off, sitting down. When these actions exist in the necessary we produce them through minimal and efficient co-ordinations of our movements, spatial judgment, timing and appropriate shapes in our bodies. This well planed out achievement leaves out much of our attention to what we are actually doing. This cause our senses to be only half alive half asleep in these actions, the coat, the chair and the body are not fully present.

Waking up happens instantly when we step off this ordinary routine and try to take our coat off by lifting the bottom hem over our head, then sit on the chair back horse style and read a book turned over from its cover rather than its pages. In these unnecessary activities the body, senses and objectives leap into alertness because they do not know the routine. The body and the mind are put in a state of high awareness and therefore function with thrilling accuracy stretching performance into extraordinary performance. It is an extension of the act of reifying, it un-reifies customary actions to create the situation that a new reification will happen.

The Original Anarchist

One who performs right action without the guidance of rules

This is the final frame of The Bridge. With this discovery the entire work forms a circle that returns to the origins of the project and the girl growing up in such a wild and spacious and physical land.

An Original Anarchist is formed through becoming intimately knowledgeable of the basic element ; feeling and speaking with space; knowing form within your own body; knowing how to work with time; understanding the delicacy and power of logic and being versed in the dialogue of emotions.

April 2002 I initiated series of conversations with a professor of Avant Guard Theater, Branislav Jakovljevic after years of prompting by my students at NYU. These were our first meetings. On our second meeting I decided to tell him about Doing the Unnecessary to see if he could understand what I was doing and what he might think of it. My motivation was that I did not truly understand what The Unnecessary had to do with The Six Viewpoints. I had resorted to teaching The Unnecessary because I was exhausted teaching The Matrix to students in six-week sessions, the material is too in-depth for this length of class, teaching it was making me hysterical.

Not only did Branislav seem to fully understand this concept he said that he had been reading about it for the past six months. I was astonished since I thought that I had invented the unnecessary. It seems he has done his doctoral thesis in part on this subject.