This event demands not only a series of repetitions across years, but insinuates by including the date included, that a huge and elastic group has repeated this event year after year. Events repeat on a more fundamental level as well allowing performers to produce “events” (in quotation marks) because it is a different structure now: I am following — following instructions; I am mimicking as a form of event-making. I did not invent the constraints in 1966, but I am acting it out now as if quoting the events of, say, Dick Higgins, Ken Friedman, Yoko Ono, or others. Peter Frank’s definition of seven different types of events already identifies internal structures, but the issues of signature, and time, of events gets little if any attention. The structure of repetition relates to the geographic distance (as opposed to the immediacy and presence) and musicality (of works waiting to be performed by others). Still, these issues do not completely express the inherent “event-ness” (in quotation marks) of the event structure. It does not exist as an original that one can recover like art historians recover the Mona Lisa, or even trace its provenance. Events become events as “events,” and that has significant implications for the meaning, signature, and social function.
Continue reading A Feeling Event: Boredom, Regret, Lack of Poetic Value?