RYAN T. DUNN

The DIADEM Interview

Collector and DIADEM contributor Michael Cavendish (“DD”) interviewed artist Ryan T. Dunn (“RTD”) on April 14, 2014.

DD: In a preview of a billed appearance you did at Chicago’s Enemy in 2012, the copy said simply Ryan T. Dunn “wiggles his tongue, babbles, and sounds like babies hung from tongs.” Isn’t that like an art reviewer saying “Claude Monet takes horsehair glued to a stick and pokes it into pots of emulsified color grease and then daubs it onto cloth?” Did the fact that you were doing performance art on a club stage escape the promoter, or did you have to tell them it was an experimental sound show in order to get on with the music acts?

RTD: It should be well noted that Enemy was a sound art and improvised music venue, which often ventured into adventurous and aggressive new media. If you will, it was always a performance art venue which primarily concerned itself with sound.

Enemy was ultimately mainly the project of Jason Soliday (though it had other contributors during its seven-year run), who is himself a sound artist engaged in noise and media performance. I was involved in running Enemy for its last two years, from 2010 until 2012, and Tritriangle occupies the very same space.

That being said, no. It was well understood that the audience might experience something which went outside their expectations, and if there’s a stage in our space, it’s extremely subdued (a protective layer of stained black plywood over the flooring). That particular show was rather music oriented to accommodate the visiting musicians from Vienna and NY. The work of Joseph Kramer is similar to mine in its performative nature, and we’ve collaborated on sound/media performances as Duplicates.

Ben Boye is a member of the rapidly ascending group Health & Beauty, and functioned as the hinge between the straight musical work of Le Cowboy and the more conceptually concerned works of myself and Joseph.

In general I’ve proudly attempted and managed to come off as strange within a world of strange media, and I have often chose to describe this part of my practice as performance in the context of music. The project I presented at that show has since been defined under the moniker Maoϴ which recently had its first release by the netlabel Pan Y Rosas.

As an artist I am very invested in primary forms and have often, unsolicited, been described as a philosopher (which may be an even better way of describing me than artist). So, when describing my work I tend to lean toward essentialism. I think the description betrays more than a mere description of my method, and in fact doesn’t really describe my tools at all, but it is a bit of a jest, and there’s a fundamental investment in nonsense with Maoϴ.

Maoϴ involves language boiled down to its sonic constituent parts, used in asemantic fashion. Its primary interface is a device I built based on a device used in speech therapy, a palate controller—used to convert touch against the roof of the mouth into digital control signals, which are then applied as gestural controls to abstracted sound manipulation conventions.

The whole process seems absurd to me, and so I’ve been pushing the result to mirror this conflict between meaning and nonsense.

DD: And what’s the protocol, and the lingo of an appearance for you or by you? When you do a public performance, are you calling it, on the inside, a gig, like a musician or an actor would, or are you calling it, again, to yourself, a piece, a performance art piece?

RTD: Somewhere under everything, I think of everything as performance. It’s an unavoidable philosophical conclusion. I suppose I code-switch like everyone. Things can be referred to differently in different contexts and within different cultures.

DD: There is this really ripe question hanging around in the aftermath of Jay Z. and Marina Ambramovic filming a music video for the single Picasso Baby at the MoMA. Is performance as a medium under indictment right now?

RTD: Marina is great at pushing the buttons of the performance establishment, if there is one. And ‘performance’ as a medium, like any other, deserves indictment.

I am pretty dissatisfied with what is generally considered ‘performance art’ right now. Somehow the current moment has forgotten the past century’s developments and intellectual intrigues.

It’s almost as if, in the aftermath of the conceptual mishandling and blunder of ‘relational aesthetics’, performance art has returned to an unfortunate concern with fancy and avant garde theater. Instead of continuing on the path of manifesting, performance has returned to representing, and because of our inundation with documents of all kinds, performances are geared toward them almost entirely, while almost entirely failing to confront this.

I had the wonderful opportunity to sit with Marina during the first public day of The Artist Is Present during her MoMA retrospective. It was a clear indictment of the role of the document and the intangible reality of the material of performance, which is not purely the body, not purely the artifact, but the experience in all its multiplicitous forms.

Documentation and the body are vehicles for the experience of everyone involved, whether immediately or distanced. They are undeniable in their influence but also undeniably vehicles of removal as much as vehicles of connection. The body and the artifact are just as inherently a part of the experience of painting or sculpture as they are performance, so why are they the focus in what should be a philosophical framing, not a medium specific format?

As such, being at The Artist is Present was very different from the generally consumed product. The space was a clearly defined arena begging to be breached (and it was), surrounded by cameras, and lit with huge film lighting rigs. The experience was of being on display, being produced for external consumption, all while having (potentially only the semblance of) an intimate moment with Marina.

The immediacy of publication and the investment of the project in social media (combined with Marina’s high profile) created rather innovative and playful responses, which were only possible with the level of (perhaps momentary) celebrity Marina achieved with TAiP.

The video with Jay Z is a brilliant extension of TAiP—extending her engagement with reperformance (Seven Easy Pieces, and all the represented performances in her retrospective), and tying it into not only music, but also the nature of celebrity as the most public act of endurance.

Jay Z may not be a fascinating critical artist, but his work has an immediately broad-reaching effect in a way that Marina’s probably does not.

The juxtaposition of her mirroring, equalizing format with his position as celebrity and the introduction to the Picasso Baby video, which recognizes music and sound performance as a portable, context aware manifestation of performance sets the stage pretty well.

I briefly spoke to Marina one on one in 2006 after a talk she gave in Portland, OR. We touched on sound art and noise and she conveyed her observation that noise was a great platform for performance, which could not have pleased me more. As a young artist just beginning to explore sound in earnest, it was exactly what I was thinking, and a great encouragement.

There is no reason our consideration of ‘performance’ should be limited to artists who choose to demarcate themselves within an institutional and academic consideration of the term.

Performance happens everywhere. I see it as fundamentally disappointing that the work of Cage and Kaprow did not take hold and that we have become fundamentally more conservative, rather than more liberal and innovative in the framing of action and art.

DD: Because when Branford Marsalis took his saxophone and left the world of making studious jazz albums to tour with Sting on The Dream of the Blue Turtles, people in jazz were like, ‘You’re done. Just go all the way and link up with Yanni and Kenny G. Make music for wedding buffets.’ His own brother felt that way. It seems that performance, broadly understood, has always been at risk for being confused with theater, and since YouTube, for being confused with video recorded improv, or worse, canned sketch comedy. But have we moved from at-risk to actual confusion, and is a rescue operation needed?

RTD: Performance isn’t just at risk for being confused with theater, it’s at risk for being theater, or any other genre for that matter.

Performance has unfortunately seemed to return to representation rather than manifestation. The stage is a canvas on which an idea is presented for us to examine.

When the experience of the audience isn’t being considered as an integral strata in the life of an artistic output, we’re only attempting to represent to our audience rather than manifesting something in or through them.

Performance at its best implicates the audience as a critical node in the realization of unpredictable but guideable events.

DD: In your recurring performance Instinct Control, I use the performance of it you did in St. Louis a few years ago, you stand holding a metal box contraption that emits noises pumped out to a loudspeaker, you kind of stand in a posture that Keith Richards would use, you can be seen kind of hammering the side of the contraption with your fingers, like a guitarist would, and the bystanders who are watching you, some of them are doing these headbanging motions. A skeptic is going to take that in and say, ‘this guy is a rocker, and, but, he’s just rocking using the noise, not the signal.’ So, what is Instinct Control?

RTD: Instinct Control is most definitely a performance in the context of music. It follows the same sentiment Jay Z expresses about music being a performance in serially differing, yet similar contexts, though instead of playing nicely with music as a format, it’s attempting to push against it.

The name evolved from a way of thinking about sound production and reception—a way of divorcing oneself from desirable outcomes and responses. It’s a statement about open engagement with things as they are, cleared of a veil of expectation, and of course, using tropes as foils plays nicely into this—thus performance in the context of music. The instrument I’m playing in that video is an unmodified, tape-less reel-to-reel.

It’s plugged into the wall. Anyone who knows anything about circuit bending would tell you not to do this.

I’m bringing sound from the device just by touching its raw circuitry, just as designed and hand assembled by people who likely assumed it would only ever be used for the recording and playback of sounds external to itself. I like to (problematically) claim I’m activating the voice of this isolated and unheard object, the product of a technological and industrial society that left it in the dust without exploring its full potential–-a rock icon of planned obsolescence. I’m tapping into pan-psychic-ism and reflections/inversions of agency between the instrument and the musician.

Rocking out is what’s expected of such a sound with such an audience. The device and moniker have seen different treatments, different tonalities, and totally different strategies. Perhaps in that era of Instinct Control, the reel-to-reel is like Ziggy and I’m just Bowie pulling the strings in the background, playing at a stage show in which the audience has an unbelievable encounter with what is unwittingly just a hazy mirror of an aspect of themselves.

DD: In another performance in your archive, Domestic Violence — Cherries and Pennies, you are sitting on a small tricycle, holding an electric teakettle and remonstrating with another artist, who stands, and argues back, you then both solve your argument by wrestling on the floor of what is revealed to be a kitchen littered with cherries—the fruit. Toward the end of the piece you both appear to unite, raising arms and cheering for the “tea” that is brewing and, with the kettle whistle, may now be served. But then this moment of, I don’t know, unity or perhaps healing, is then dashed when you drop to the floor and sort of spasm and roll around in the cherry fruit. When you plan a performance like this, how much of it is scripted, how much improvised, and are the big apparent shifts in the emotional tone, which are obviously some kind of focal point, how do you draw those out?

RTD: Domestic Violence was a project born of a very real and specific set of contexts. At the time myself and Rob Daly were living together in a big house with three to four other people in Portland, OR. The communal living experience was shared amongst most people we knew, and this also formed the basis for most of the venues at which we both played noise shows. The absurdity of conflicts between people living in large houses together was apparent daily, and I wanted to see it play out in parallel to the creative output with which we surrounded ourselves.

I’m fascinated by naïve presentation, and the confluence of these two contexts and their indistinguishable course was ripe.

Unlike most music, DV was presented cold, to activate the liminal space and invoke an initial confusion as to the sincerity of the conflict. In the fashion of improvised music, DV involved a set collection of ‘equipment’, in this case, sonically active household and everyday objects, and a loose notion of the course of the improvisation—actions and reactions, absurdly drawn assumptions and dramatic threads.

We tried to include surprises for each other as well, so we’d be forced out of our own expectations as well. And every performance ended with emotional resolution, and cleaning up our mess…that’s a part no one really considers exciting, or part of ‘the performance’, but it always happened, and I always thought of it as integral. At the end of Cherries and Pennies, I just felt compelled to overact the emotional distress of the overblown dispute, that and I really wanted those white clothes to be properly ruined.

DD: You are an artist in Chicago. What is that like? Is any part of your practice of Chicago, or is that something you leave for the local audience to fuzzle over?

RTD: I’m always creating in some way in response to context. So, I imagine Chicago has influenced me but I’m not sure I properly know how its influence manifests, yet. It’s not as weird here as it was out west. It’s also more professionally oriented.

Has my work gained in those elements? Probably. But I don’t tend to think out so broadly as to address my city. It’s too complicated a frame to really comment on entirely.

My work has tended to exist here within the past few years, however, so that’s a definite consideration and it effects the reception and the likely audience. I’m performing for and in Chicago. Code-switching.

DD: The experimental art space you founded and direct is Chicago’s TriTriangle. What got you started as a new century gallerist and curator? Is it a live-in, a live-above? What’s that life like?

RTD: It’s a live-in. It’s the most natural way for art and life to coexist. Domestic Violence stemmed from that coexistence.

Portland has house shows, Chicago has apartment galleries. The differences play themselves out through the architecture and the city planning, the history and the cultural and class inheritance.

I prefer to be in and around the material of my practice rather than dividing my life into artificially imposed categories. That’s a fundamental expression of my artistic philosophy.

Art is a useful word, but it’s also extremely oppressive. I’d prefer we talk about how we manifest the greatest multitude of fascinating experiences. Great art does that. Great government does that. Great tax preparation can do that, and so can a great pothole.

I have to live somewhere, so it’s an opportune place to let people present their creative activities. That’s great for me in some ways because I don’t have to go far to expand my horizons. It’s limiting too, since a greater portion of my experiences can end up occupying a particular context.

DD: Tritriangle hosted a show of David De Boer works last year. You did not show anyone the paintings, but projected them as holograms onto walls and within empty frames. I love that idea. How well do you feel it came off, and did it give rise to a new concept, like the fragmentation of physical art into pure light, or something?

RTD: When Joseph Cruz brought David’s work to Tritriangle’s attention, I was really excited—not as technologically oriented as our usual fare, but activating the other side of mediation and performance that were along the road I was hoping to travel.

The show and method seemed to nicely follow my philosophy about the fundamental nature of ‘art’ as manifestations of experience. His works are so in keeping with this philosophy it was a perfect opportunity to extend his concept, invoke different ways in which we could de-resolve and distance the objects from their referents, and comment on the way we not only interact with artworks but conceive of them.

The works he was showing wouldn’t really be there despite anything we could do. The replicas function like a miniature Statue of Liberty or postcard of the Mona Lisa, with more intentional heft. They comment on the commodification of the object and the impossibility of commodifying the idea of the object.

Rendering them immaterial created the potential for the participating artists and attendees to interact and interfere with the representation of the works while ironically keeping them more closely guarded than seeing them in a gallery or museum setting.

DD: In your role as a gallery director and art show impresario, have your expectations collided with the reactions of the gallery-goers in any way? What have you learned about your art audience in Chicago?

RTD: I’m not sure we so much get gallery-goers at Tritriangle. I think our audience is mostly turned off by the default of the sterile and restrained approach to making that is generally associated with an ‘art gallery’, and I don’t generally like to call Tritriangle a gallery. It’s a space that presents experiences. I don’t like to release official documentation unless that’s an element of the work.

It’s not always possible. Experiences are hard to promote if they haven’t happened yet. The best work is going to surprise me and demand that I release my expectations and be willing to see something I wouldn’t have anticipated. Frankly, that doesn’t happen a lot anywhere.

It takes gumption to resist the urge to officially re-contextualize work that doesn’t have any business being re-contextualized.

Chicago is very traditional, even conservative. That makes it fertile.

DD: If you had your druthers, what would Tritriangle focus on presenting for the next two or three years? Are you going to get your druthers!?

RTD: Right! So, I would love to present works which are irreverent but clever. Punk is fun but it doesn’t make my mind turn. I want to encourage works by makers going out on a limb to do something they haven’t done before, and surprising themselves and their usual audience. I want to show works by artists breaking typical engagement with media and mediation. The relationship between media and performance is ripe and carries a load of relevance especially right now and that’s what Tritriangle is trying to provide a home for here.

There are tons of places open to music, or theater, or things that fall in-between. There have been ‘media art’ movements and spaces. There are few places which advocate for critical approaches to the confluence of making and existing in a world which involves mediated creative acts and experiences.

Tritriangle is ‘performative media,’ which specifically calls for works to exist that require not only space to be what they are, but all the mechanisms they may employ, and no more.

I’m hoping this is only the beginning, and for me to get my druthers I have to create a reliable venue for the works I want to show. That reputation and show history should get me my druthers, but it will be a building process, an organic process in which Tritriangle plays a role. If I’m way out on the periphery, Tritriangle won’t survive and druthers will not be had. If I’m successful at making a fertile space, I will, we will—eventually.

DD: Let me ask about your process of invention. Lately, do you find yourself conceiving things and kind of sketching them out on your smartphone or tablet, or do you have a kind of ‘inventing shed’ you physically go into to do your heavy creative lifting? With Tritriangle, do you have to sit at a desk?

RTD: I think I’m proud to say that my process is a kind of reactionary—context and a loose non sequitur mental state are when I do my best work.

That requires less isolation and more exposure to the sincere world. Opportunities are abound in existing social structures. Jokes are critical. I create and criticize formats and frames.

I can’t do that in a vacuum, and while I admire a lot of naïve artists, it’s not what I do, but I try to make my work accessible to any audience, by which I mean that it doesn’t require special access to get something from it.

The everyday taken to absurd degrees. I have big crushes on Andy Kaufman and the Church of the Subgenius. Tritriangle involves a lot of emailing, web management, and graphic work.

I end up on the computer or my phone a lot; it’s not ideal, but it is a necessary undercarriage.

I’m not always at a desk, but I am putting in a lot of screen time, which can be tedious.

DD: What other mediums do you fool about with? Do you take photographs, not snapshots, but photographs, or non-performative videos, with purpose?

RTD: A snapshot is a sub-genre of the photograph. I resist the impulse to create distinctions based solely on a perceived intellectual or skill class. The work either holds up to repeat viewing, discussion, or presentation or it doesn’t.

A snapshot might convey certain things that a ‘proper’ photograph doesn’t. The distinction is merely one of framing and visual diction.

Is the difference whether one is trained in using the tools? If so, I only take photographs and videos, not snapshots or home movies.

Is it based on the subject matter? I have a feeling this is just the tired ‘is it art’ question, rather than talking about what the work does.

That being said, I do just about everything to varying degrees. I have a pretty committed material practice to accompany things which outwardly appear to be more performative.

I have a pretty strong video practice, and I’ve done installation work.

I still write occasionally, and I’ve been toying with ideas for a ‘radio play’. There’s generally some unavoidable performative edge even in these works.

Oftentimes it exists in the relationship the works establish between themselves and the audience—impelling something to happen to/for the viewer, whether externally or internally.

DD: In 2012 the artist Christian Boltansky started a subscription service. He sold by subscription, about ten dollars a month, a daily video, you could almost call it a clip, usually 30 to 60 seconds, first person point of view, of just, you know, whatever he was walking around and looking at. He may still be at it, a new video every other day or so. The primary criticism of it is that the camera shakes a little too much, because he’s moving and hand-holding a smartphone, or something small. And so it occurs me to ask you, as a performance artist who employs video and as a gallerist, just how significant the question of craft, of baseline viewability, a piece of video art, or a captured performance on video, needs to have to be viable, either as an artwork for sale, or as something that an institution could display in an exhibit?

RTD: Craft is in service of the intended experience of the thing being made. The video shaking in this example either conveys something about the video that’s interesting, or it’s a liability. Sometimes the audience isn’t going to relate to those aspects, so be it.

Boltansky may be fascinated with what that shaking says and does. I’m constantly fed up with value judgments, and I generally want to be able to back up an opinion, not just declare taste. If I can see value in a decision (or lack thereof) that makes me think then I’m all for it. The beauty happens when I have to reconsider that which I thought I’d resolved for myself, not just reinforce what I already believe.

DD: Did you go to art school? What were your initial influences steering you into performance?

RTD: I had a pretty creatively isolated childhood. Some art education in grade school combined with a couple really influential grade school teachers gave me a lot of my push. I think I owe them more than I probably realize.

I was a smart kid with big aspirations and my family wasn’t attuned to art, really of any kind, but my dad loved new technology. Very introverted salt of the earth types.

We lived in the woods away from any other families surrounded by hobby animals, and I had to choose to go to a religious, single-sex high school to get out of our town.

I started writing (terrible) poetry that nonetheless earned me some respect and opportunities.

I was part of an inaugural class of teen writers in a program at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and read in front of the City Council and for two years at Bumbershoot before heading to college.

I didn’t realize it was a defined thing I could do at the time, but I was already coaxing my friends into creating actions and happenings.

Entering the iconoclastic Reed College, and finally feeling like I would be somewhere I felt I belonged, I thought I would major in Physics or Creative Writing. And, having early feelings about being restricted to medium, and realizing that I was interested in manifesting philosophy, I abandoned writing as my primary medium, turned on physics, and took on the broader investigation into ‘art’.

Reed’s art program was highly intellectualized and there was surprisingly little support for guerilla performance and new media, but I managed to follow my path with relatively little resistance, and make some work I’m still rather happy with to this day.

Five years later, having proved to myself that I was still making art outside the encouragement of the ivory tower, I went to grad school at The Art Institute of Chicago and am apparently still inhabiting this city.

DD: Something about performance as a medium connotes a ‘you had to be there’ or ‘this just happened’ response. When you are designing a performance, is this kind of immediacy, this fleeting ephemerality, a key ingredient?

RTD: Some experiences aren’t possible to create for a pre- or post-informed audience. Some experiences are contemplative and studious, some we return to or take our time with, and some involve surprise and confusion. A particular character belongs to the ephemeral, ephemera, or the approximately permanent. I have an affinity for the ineffable, so I tend to prefer new experiences to familiar ones, memory to the index.

DD: What about proximity? In some of the recorded performances of yours, your audience or your engaged participants, are really close to you. They’re almost in the piece with you. That’s obviously a conscious choice by you. Is it also a limiting factor in some way?

RTD: I’ve increasingly tried to emphasize the audience’s inherent participation in the effect of art. There is no painting without someone to look at it. There is no rock icon without the fans.

I believe the real thing happens out in the world once there is shared experience and commiseration—making is a trigger for emergent behavior.

The role of the audience as an integral part of my work has almost always been a concern. Instinct Control’s Electric Communion involved using audience members to complete the circuit—literally playing the reel-to-reel by connecting them to the device and playing their faces with my hand.

Are You My Mother pieces have invited participation in the act of imitating, notably In the Passing Lane, when we imitated cars in River North, here in Chicago, running through the street with rumbling engines and honking horns.

In One Way and the Other, Three Blind Visioneers, CULTURRORISM: A Triptych, a white wall is divided by a gaffe tape forward slash, a seamless video loop of me attempting to communicate with a crosswalk sign by imitating it plays on a flat screen, and staged ‘gallery-goers’ discuss the video, misunderstand and mishear each other, and incorporate the language of gallery-goers. Meanwhile, outside the gallery, patrons attended twenty minute rotating noise shows in a stretch-Hummer, which drove around downtown for four hours, being videotaped and livestreamed into the gallery via a woefully inadequate stream.

After the opening night, the livestream and the video played but the piece was painfully empty, a ghost of the occurrence in full bloom.

Many earlier works depend on an audience to function at all—the context of live music is hard to activate without a crowd, videos and interactive media don’t become what they are until audience members interact or refuse to, or talk to each other after they’ve been exposed. So, “I owe everything to my fans.”

But sure, there are times when considering the need for contingency plans when there’s a live audience makes performance more difficult than making works which stand on their own.

Making things you believe are self-contained is easier than having to consider the ramifications of your piece and the multiplicity of perspectives and responses an audience might have. It means imagining possible future worlds and making plans for showing work which are more difficult than finding a courier, packing and shipping, writing up installation instructions.

In a Domestic Violence set which didn’t get documented, near the end of my time in Portland, the person’s house we were performing in didn’t tell one of their roommates about the performance, and she interrupted the piece asserting her dominance over her abode. Her dog was sniffing through broken plates and vegetables which littered the kitchen floor.

Attempting to continue the planned score, activating a washer on spin with cat recordings and a brick for thumping rotation only to have it turned off again, prematurely spraying champagne everywhere while Robert broke his own planted glasses and storming out; we had intended to ‘break up the band’ as Robert refused to participate in the staged argument, me doing everything I could to cause him apparent emotional anguish. Instead we broke with the house, leaving and finding it hilarious while wavering on whether we should clean up, the final indication that the conflict had been resolved.

Performances, especially when engaging with a feigned spontaneity, cannot be restarted; they inherently welcome the audience’s true spontaneity, and can benefit or be ruined by this involvement. A well-planned performance has these potentials in mind. Even a truly unbelievable interruption should be manageable by a skilled performer.

Sometimes it’s dangerous.

Sometimes it’s the best of all possible outcomes.

DD: Music goers will pay a ten dollar cover charge to see a band play late at a bar. Are you going to be the performance artist whom art goers will pay admission fees to see in a similar fashion? If you are, is your art going to have to change to become—somehow, someway—an entertainment as opposed to an engagement?

RTD: It happens, and people do pay to attend these things. Usually that formality is part of the context so it’s a built in financing method. It doesn’t necessarily mean the performance is acritical of the format, or intends to entertain.

I was in conversation with an acquaintance after an Instinct Control set at a bar (accompanying some experimental-ish rock bands), and she said (not realizing IC was my project) that she thought Instinct Control was the most interesting act of the night, but, “the sounds, not so much.”

I laughed and told her that IC was my performance and she seemed embarrassed. There’s really no accounting for taste. Some folks love the sounds I make with the reel-to-reel, some, understandably, can’t handle it.

If I’m interested in the aesthetic outcome I focus on that, but if the aesthetic character of the work is a byproduct, then it is what it is.

I’m open to the reality that there will always be different responses to work, and try to create focus where possible.

DD: In the 50’s of the last century, no one paid to come to Yves Klein’s house to watch him dip fashion models in blue paint and slide them around on high-cotton art paper. And that was a good show! There’s this long tradition of performances, of happenings, that are craved by the audience but not paid for, not directly. And yet, why should performance, alone, apart from the other mediums, not be monetized for the artist?

RTD: Because when you take money for something that is very consciously working with an audience’s experience as its fundamental material, inserting the representative value exchange into that context changes the outcome. Sometimes it’s appropriate and sometimes it isn’t.

DD: Let’s say you were to put Tritriangle and Chicago on hold for six months, and you go out and get a grant that pays for a three city tour of a Ryan T. Dunn exhibition. Let’s assume you’re at traditional venues. Art museums, university auditoriums, white cube galleries. What’s going into the show?

RTD: Making work for the context of a gallery is a very different kind of presentation than I usually engage. I suppose I would take advantage of such a situation to fill gallery spaces with works of mine that traditionally occupy those kinds of space—document and object based work which manifests itself outside the document—videos, image work, listening experiences, possibly even sculpture. They would most likely have invisible or ephemeral attributes which could come and go, change, or be open to interaction and manipulation.

There’s also a chance of shenanigans with absurd conversations expected in the evening, and almost certainly I would be coordinating events to accompany the shows, and be thinking of them as complete experiences rather than as a collection of discrete pieces.

DD: Can you be collected? How would someone go about collecting Ryan T. Dunn? How would someone who wants to work with you make their approach?

RTD: I’m pretty purposefully distanced from the making of high price tag commodifiable art. I’m much more interested in living communities and ideas, and take issue with the preference for tangible objects which can manifest corruptible value.

I like to make things that almost anyone can have if they want, and which generally aren’t possible to completely restrict to one person’s possession. I give most of my practice away in one way or another. I get cultural capital in return. I make works for contexts because it’s counterinstitutional, and it’s open to people of different economic and intellectual classes. I believe in open pedagogy.

I don’t make art because I love beautiful precious things. I make art because I love the entirety of existence, people, ideas, and the chaotic, unpredictable and endlessly surprising world we actually live in, and I just want to add content that might not otherwise exist (and invite you to do the same).

If someone wants to ‘collect’ me, I could see something like patronage on a larger scale, but on a smaller scale—buy CDRs and DVDs, buy tapes—these are things which are created for and exist in contexts that are open to at-will participation. Come to shows and tell other people you know that what I do is worth paying attention to. Give me access to new contexts!

Tino Seghal’s model for selling his performances is a pretty impressive conceptual feat, but it’s a work unto itself. If I were to adopt a similar model (or even blatantly mimic his), that would be an inherently performative act—a work unto itself, not just a means to an end. I think any collector who wanted to ‘collect’ my work would understand these issues, and we’d probably have to sit down and talk about it to make some kind of unique and rewarding game of it all. I’d want to know what they hope to gain—and what they hope to create through our joint fiscal enterprise.

Ryan T. Dunn is on the web at www.liscentric.com.

N.1. this text courtesy of DIADEM Art Papers by Cavendish Projects.

N.2. all text copyright the author and the artist.

N.3. Cavendish Projects is on Twitter and Medium @cavprojects