Jennie Guy

Live Stock Reading

On Friday February 26th I presented a short musing on the potentially inspiring but simultaneously isolating act of reading and art-making during the Live Stock performance series, a part of Louise Ward’s exhibition Nightlight at the Market Studios in Dublin.

My reading – from Boris Groy’s text Art Power – was accompanied by a previously recorded video diary excerpt of a reading of the same text, presenting a reflexive perspective on reading and self as audience.

Download an audio recording of the Livestock reading from my daily video diary.

The reasons I give for recording myself are as follows:

I began recording myself as a means of engaging with difficult texts. The first time I did this was when reading We – Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations by Irit Rogoff. I read it out loud into the mic of my MP3 player and then took the text on a long walk with me. Listening to it read out in my own voice was strange but helpful. Vocally appropriating the text and then listening to it allowed an engagement with Rogoff’s ideas that had been evading me.

The second reason I give for increasingly recording myself with a mic or a video camera is because conceiving or researching projects is often done solo. Solitude is a beautiful thing. Sometimes solitude slips into loneliness; therefore I decided to become my own audience, my own sounding board. By keeping the self who seeks knowledge companion by including my creative self leads me onto my third reason.

Many of my projects focus on temporary, ephemeral output, as they are primarily event-based. There is another part of me that yearns to output more tangible, concrete pieces of work. By creating these video diaries I am creating small concrete output. I think that my sentiments somehow mirror the experience of breathing in today’s contemporary art environment.

My fourth reason for recording myself is based on my interest in themes of reiteration, duplicity and the self-reflexive which is why I chose to read alongside myself as part of an experimental reading process for the Livestock Readings in the Market Studios. I think I wanted to widen my audience of one (myself) and allow a different audience to witness this obsessive self who likes to read, record, re-read, re-play.

The choice of text which I included as part of the reading is at once arbitrary and specific. I happened to be reading it the week I was invited to take part in Livestock. I selected an excerpt from the second chapter of Boris Groy’s book Art Power entitled On the New. Groy’s writing highlights issues of the avant-garde and its often minimal audience, reflecting themes of solitude and loneliness in the artist’s experience within the contemporary art world.

Video still; Livestock reading at Market Studios.

Video still; Livestock reading for daily video diary.

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