A Portrait of the Artist: Performance Art

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        In The Poetics of Space (1957), Gaston Bachelard writes, “For the phenomenologist, the image is there, the word speaks; the word of the poet speaks to him. There is no need to have lived through the poet’s sufferings to seize the felicity of speech offered by the poet—a felicity that dominates tragedy itself. Sublimation in poetry towers above the psychology of the mundanely unhappy soul. It is a fact that poetry possesses a felicity of its own, however great the tragedy it may be called upon to illustrate.”

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        Bachelard insists on the ability of poetic language to transform life experiences into artistic experience as tragedy and felicity. This echoes Aristotle’s praise of dramatic arts in Poetics (335 BC), where experiencing drama leads to sublimation and catharsis, achievable only through poetic language. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, in Questions of Perception (1994), emphasizes the importance of this metaphoric language, stating, “In Catharsis, recognition of Being’s presence in the events of everyday life does not rely on ordinary language (prose). The language of drama is a poetic language, the language of metaphor.” Pérez-Gómez views this dramatic universe as closely related to architecture. For example, Daedalus, whose name is tied to the legendary labyrinth, is the archaic figure of the ancient Greek architect. Best known for his craftsmanship, representative of art and technique to create wonder, in Homer’s The Iliad, he is the founder of a dance, ritual theatrical stage, and architecture.

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        Inspired by Bachelard’s quote and drawing on Daedalus’ techniques and craft, A Portrait of the Artist is a dance and ritual stage exploring how photos (prose) of my everyday life can be transformed into poetic language, metaphor, abstraction, or pattern. I see my body, dance, and music as my material to create a theatrical space of architecture for poetic human imagination.