An End-Of-Day Matinee

GABRIELA RICCARDI considers ahas that render art in the world around us. One example: APPLAUSE ENCOURAGED, a naturalistic immersion - slash - performance piece that asks us to re-listen to the rhythms of the wild.

The piece surfaces in How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell’s treatise on resisting what’s termed the attention economy. To her, we need to reclaim our attention from the forces of technocratic capitalism; that reclamation can be found in place-making, and especially placemaking in nature. So it’s no surprise that Odell, an artist based in the Bay Area, cites a number of Californian pieces in her work.

It’s here that she invokes Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, an art piece perched upon a clifftop in San Diego. On the evening of the performance, attendees arrived to a red-rope stanchion and an arrangement of folding chairs lined up like an orchestral floor for eight. After being directed to their seats, the audience sat for forty-five minutes to watch the sun set. When the last of the light dropped below the horizon, they applauded. That was the performance; this was the show.

Encountering the piece, one can begin to imagine a radical reorientation of what in the world we might call a creative work. Perhaps the extraordinary can be found in the rhythmic and the routine. Perhaps nature itself is a work worth recognizing.

The piece offers a magic to be discovered in mere observation. Once roused to attention, you can’t help but find art in counting the petals on a front-yard flower or contemplating the azure of the sky. You’ll find it in plucking a leaf from your path and inspecting it, really inspecting it, tracing the rivets and rivulets of its veins. You’ll find it in the flicker of a flame or the drift of a stilled sea. Creative works are embedded, Applause Encouraged suggests, in the circadian cycles of living. Attune your ear to their humming, and you may be stirred to the sounds of a show.