Tagged: Britta Johnson
Burning Questions for Burning Bushes
An oldie, but a goodie. Back in August 2013, Vis-a-Vis Society installed this question/answer machine at Smoke Farm’s Lo-Fi Festival. Photos by Britta Johnson. Some of the resulting poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Fall/Winter 2014, Vol 31, No 3 & 4, which were declared “funny” by The New York Review of Books.
Dr. Ink and Dr. Owning donned ghillie suits and proceeded to engage in dancing rituals in order to answer participants’ burning questions.
First, a participant inserts a question in the mailbox:
Then, after some processing through landscape ritual and song, one burning bush selects a question at random to dance, while the other bush records her interpretation, (without seeing the written question).
Burning Bush dances a Burning Question, participants study results in background
Then Q&A poems are hung out to dry
Vis-a-Vis Society’s NEW video poem an homage to Spaghetti Westerns and Sergio Leone
You can watch an excerpt of “The End” here.
The Vis-a-Vis Society teamed up with Britta Johnson and drove out to the desert last summer to shoot some Spaghetti Western, Sergio-Leone-esque choreography experiments, when the forest fires leaped over I-90, forcing us to re-route to Umtanum. We drove and drove, topped off the hot engine’s oil, until we found this remote site, strewn with bullet casings and shattered glass, just like T.S. Eliot described it in “The Wasteland,”
After discovering 1,000 ways to end, and recording the results in Dr. Owning’s dad’s home laboratory, Ms. Johnson edited an incredible 23-minute video piece of this investigation. It premiered at the final installation of NEPO 5K “Don’t Run” in our “Registration” piece. This instructional video demonstrated ways to end as participants registered by selecting a race bib printed with an ending phrase. Photos below by Megumi Shawna Arai and Makenzie Stone.
This young art walker loved the part where we fell down
Vis-a-Vis Society 