Performance is a big word.

I have been meaning to write about Monday's crit all week but the nessessities of paid work have kept me from the studio. 
It was a good crit I think, the general feeling being that the subject of the films I have been making, mainly themed around an idea of failure, is not a bad one. The main criticism was that the medium, film, was getting in the way of anything interesting coming out of this work and that live performance, rather than recorded, is the way to go.
This proposal scared me, performance felt like a big word and far removed from what I thought I was doing. Having let the notion settle I now see the obviousness of this observation. The interests I have in temporality are naturally addressed by performance. My concerns about what constitutes an artwork are also addressed. Once performed a performance is over, there are no 'post-production' issues. 
I think one of the things that scared me was the word performance and all it connotes. I'm not concerned with acting, I think that it is just a question of doing things in real time and having an audience... whatever shape they take.


Failure as a subject always seems to crop up with me. In that cyclical way that things do. Failure as a way forward... failure as inherent in creativity/the creative process. When failure is a subject how do you fail? Can failure be a goal? I am quite happy to succeed but I think failure is interesting. Often success is only sweet  when failure is overcome... It is also a matter of perspective, one mans failure is another's triumph...


The way forward from here is just to do things... and to see if they are success full.