Before COVID-19 hit, I was commissioned by the University of Kentucky to make work for an exhibition (presciently) called “Home As Situation.” Faced with the inability to travel to Lexington or perform live, I instead assembled a dispersed body or “jury” of twelve individual artists and offered them each $100 ($1200 constituted my artist fee) in exchange for a “statement of truth” in the form of a brief text and video. After receiving the texts and video, I attempted to substantiate each artist’s judgements of truth in brief private/at-home performances that resulted in material remains (e.g. sculptural objects/wall works). As of January 2021 I have yet to get these sculptures back to all of my twelve collaborators, but expect to deliver and mail them over time; some of them involve jam and dead flowers and so are pretty deteriorated already. Each video pair, however (the invited artist’s statement with my substantiation/materialization), is uploaded to YouTube and all twelve can be viewed: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh50UcmPAYJWH89WVNBG64sMSH2ugRacp (will this link+site or this book last longer?) These videos include the twelve artist’s original videos, their text, and then documentation of my brief responsive performances involving jam, cast sugar, fire, a dried mushroom, scissors, a diner chair, marigolds, and other materials. My responsive performances were done indoors and outside in the garden and on the sidewalk at MARSH in St. Louis and documented with assistance from Kaia Gilje.

In the context of “Home As Situation,” this performance process frames self-jurisdiction and social substantiation as temporary, disintegrative homeboundings or home bases and acts of truth-evaluation as homing devices. Challenging binary conceptions of public vs. private spheres, active vs. mental processes, and economic vs. ideological notions of value, individual/intellectual property, justice, and material conditions, the process operates through social, conceptual, and financial contracts. Demanding that artists intentionally materialize “truths,” is both idealistic and absurd, while attempts to understand, interpret, and materialize truths are earnest and interpersonal, enacted between friends, colleagues, and comrades. While cultural actors (artists) especially tend to disbelieve the idea of any universal or non-relative “truth,” art is also often claimed to be “more true than true” in spiritual or affective ways. As a theatrical and idealistic third option, this performance process proposes that feelings of being at home in this world (more valuable than money) may be partially generated by others attempting to substantiate one’s personal, emotional, and political truths.