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		Immemorial (some project notes) Description Immemorial was a performance/installation at the DeYoung Museum on December 1, 1992. On the morning of December first I carried in and positioned the individual units of a 17’ x17’ x 1/8" steel parterre into the far end of the central courtyard of the Museum. The staff, invited guests and the public watched from the entrance way. After positioning the steel garden, I invited the audience to lie down in the front of the courtyard and allow me to trace the outline of their bodies with white chalk. The effect was a geometric steel garden in the background and a chaotic somewhat circular formation of chalked body tracings in the foreground. The piece remained on view for 3 days.

		The steel garden This element was recycled from an earlier installation done at U.C. Davis in 1986 called Il Danteum. For this piece, I created a garden for a (never to be built) monument that Mussolini’s architect designed in 1947. This piece of fascist architecture was to spacially symbolize Dante’s "Divine Comedy". The public could retrace the progress of the pilgrims to their final destination in the great hall of Paradise and the emblem of Mussolini merged with that of the "holy spirit". I used the pattern of an Italian 17th century parterre to make from steel a monumental garden for this imaginary building. It was raised slightly from the ground. Under the garden were speakers on which were played an audio recording that I created using, on one track, layers of men’s voices reciting from the "Inferno" and on another track a recording of a women talking to herself incomprehensibly.

		Die In The performance that created the circle of chalked body traces was patterned after the political trope used by ACT-UP and other activist groups known as a "Die-In". In an act of protest against governmental policies and social conditions that directly contributed to the deaths of men and women from AIDS, groups of demonstrators would lie in the middle of a designated space while other demonstrators traced their body outlines--usually in spray paint. The image of the body outline is appropriated (and subversively re-inscribed) from crime scene procedures used by the police. The Title The title of the piece comes from a term used by the philosopher Lyotard. It refers to that which can neither be remembered (represented to consciousness) nor forgotten (consigned to oblivion). It calls to us to speak of such an historical event such as the AIDS epidemic ( Lyotard himself uses the historical example of Auschwitz ) to remain as event rather than the object of history, so that its singularity is not lost in historical representation and that it does not become something that happened, among other things. It calls forth the task of not forgetting and for us to keep this event from sinking into oblivion as the silent object of history.* As Lyotard puts it in "Heidegger et ‘les Juifs’": "What really preoccupies us, whether historians or non-historians, is this ‘past’ which is not over, which doesn’t haunt the present in the sense that it is lacking, missing. It neither occupies the present as a solid reality nor haunts the present in the sense that it might indicate itself even as an absence, a specter. This ‘past’ is not an object of memory in the sense of something which may have been forgotten and must be remembered in the interest of ‘happy endings’ and good understanding. This ‘past’ is therefore not even there a as blank, an absence, terra incognita, but it is still there." *(re-phrased from Bill Reading’s "Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics") A Day Without Art (World AIDS Day) A Day Without Art was created as a way of bringing AIDS awareness to the art world. In its first manifestation museums and galleries were asked to close or darken rooms to remember artists who had died of AIDS and to bring awareness of how the global crisis of the AIDS epidemic had impacted the arts. By the next year many artists around the country started creating performances, exhibitions, events and unique works of art to address the issues of AIDS on this day. The silent memorials were turned into pro-active events.

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