or ActionParables as Allan Kaprow coined it
Alan Kaprow/Trading Dirt
"Stories can be used to obfuscate or inflate an item's value- as in the pitch of a used-car salesman- but Kaprow's telling of how meaningful the contents of his bucket were had to be trustworthy for a fair trade to take place. Since all fair trades are based on a mutual trust, "the ethics of friendliness" were key to this enactment. With the wink of an eye and a firm handshake, Kaprow's storytelling moved the trading forward, animating its social interactions and adding narrative value to the dirt from bucket to bucket. It became clear to Kaprow that storytelling was integral to the work's unfolding: he was telling stories of the trading as the trading was generating stories. Storytelling, in this sense, is not recollection after the fact, but the metaphorical expression of what one is doing as one is doing it." -trading dirt at moca
"You will understand from this, and see from the cover of the book, that these are shaggy dog stories, fluffed up with tall wagging tales. By 1990, when the shags are longest, Kaprow had produced a counterart formula of attentive routines that reads like a hyperrealism of the commonplace. You catch yourself looking around for decision, politics, drives, or desires, but what you find has only the necessary nonurgency of respiration. There's nothing scintillating or sublime here. Yet the paradox of these writings is that they covertly return the long-estranged auras of art, turning them inside out and smuggling them back in everyday routines--where, framed and floodlit with "attention," they radiate the quiet wonder of life." -John C. Welchman, review of The Blurring of Art and Life, in Artforum Summer 1994
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Why Sculpture
"I�ve started seeing the medium I am working in as story-making, or maybe even myth-making. But rather than simply tell the story, or act out the story as a performance, I want the story to be real. I want it to live as a story someone tells about this guy he met. If Ray�s story is about the object�s re-making, mine is about its undoing. Me and the thing. The thing and its purpose. Its purpose and its meaning. And how its meaning is undermined by its purpose. Maybe it�s all very meta and ironic, but it feels so damned earnest."