Laurel Nakadate is an artist who began making videos and photography with strangers after randomly meeting a man in a Home Depot parking lot and being interested in his life. She suggested they make a video together and she began exploring the unknown by creating relationships with strangers. In the article she says:
It was just one of those moments where I had no idea what I was saying,” she remembered. “I really wanted to push myself. And I think I was in this place where I was so afraid to fail that I thought, ‘Well, I just have to take fear out of this. Fear’s not an element, and I don’t have to follow any social codes, so what can happen? Anything can happen.’
The other article that reminded me of Benjamin is about Brock Enright, a Columbia MFA grad who has created a company that creates "reality adventures" for clients. He and his team script stories and events to occur in people's lives that blur the boundaries between fact, fiction, script, spontaneity, etc. The enterprise reminds me of the movie "The Game."
The article likens Enright's adventures to a kind of relational aesthetics. Enright's response is that “A lot of artists say, ‘If just one person sees my work, it’s worth it,’ ... “But I literally make works that only one person will ever experience.” Read it here. Just know that I'm watching you.
These are both interesting, though Enright's theatrical gaming strikes me mostly as professionalized LARPing, and its position in an art context as much about attracting clientele who can afford it as anything else.
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