I have been following the continuing, fluid declarations of Joseph and Donna McElroy of ElectricHands for about three years now. Their performances explore their imaginative reasonings, engaging with informed, multi-behavioural understanding to promote the idea that we (humanity) are the medium. They consciously refuse to stick to the traditional art protocols or to use materials or tools to justify the act of creating art itself. Most art attention is directed towards the object as art. They advocate that their embodied experience is art. What they create is a ‘gift economy’, not a product. Their recent collaboration is a collection of short streaming videos ranging in size from 274k to 1,185k.

In this recent assortment of work, various themes and ideas crop up that seem to be dealing with presence and non-presence. For instance, in ‘Ghosthands’, a video is presented of Joseph talking to the viewer, but you cannot hear his voice, whilst words are automatically typed out onto the web page saying, “as I type these words I’m typing them for you. These are my Ghost hands”. And then we shift an extra level in ‘I am not Donna’. Joseph is talking, but once more, you do not hear his voice. Instead, you hear Donna’s voice saying, “Hi, this is not Donna McElroy…This is my Shadow”. Yet the text appearing before your eyes read, “Hi, this is not Joseph McElroy…This is my Shadow”.

There are other works to see here, so the above does not define all the work, although I would like to mention that I also feel that there are traces and resonances of post-fluxus in many of the pieces, such as ‘Gum Joseph’. This new collection of work by Joseph and Donna McElroy features a successful exploration of defining unconsciousness as experience. It is a type of social psychology mixed with an intuitive way of using new media and the Internet.

Going back to the two pieces Ghosthands and I am not Donna, such play on out-of-sync, communicative language functions suggests a dysfunction that many people experience in their everyday lives. Unearthing an existential realisation that our languages, gestures and actions are not necessarily of our own. They are shared, whether we like it or not. We are subconsciously entwined, at many levels, with non-fixed narratives, and we might not even be aware of such shifts. These socially informed performed observations are a poetic subjectivity, trying to break away from a singular ‘themed’ (one-liner) narrative. These works somehow manage to touch and reach inside the psyche. Leaving one in a state of confusion yet simultaneously accepting that what we see and hear is true but also immeasurable.

An example to ponder on is the lucid image and moment in Milan Kundera’s novel ‘Immortality’. Goethe is in heaven, describing a dream to Hemingway. It involves a puppet theatre production of his Faust-
‘And then I suddenly glanced at the seats and saw that the theatre was empty. That puzzled me. Where was the audience? … I expected them out front, and instead, they were at the back of the stage, gazing at me with wide-open, inquisitive eyes. As soon as my glance met theirs, they began to applaud. And I realized that my Faust didn’t interest them at all and that the show they wished to see was not the puppets I was leading round the stage, but me myself! Not Faust but Goethe!’ (p. 93)

So, Joseph and Donna are the audience, and they have taken hold of the reigns, blurring the boundaries between art and life. Art is experience. It breathes.

Oct 2003