In ... performance, the human and the artist are so simultaneous in their existence that not even a silent phasing of separate bodily fluids and electrical impulses may be detected.     ~Roddy Hunter (February 1998)

FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Scottish artist Roddy Hunter in Statement of Matter: Performance(s) of Indefinite Duration.

Hunter's performance will begin at noon on Wednesday, June 2, 1999 and continue into sometime the following day. Evidence of the performance will be on view through to midnight on Thursday, June 3, 1999.

Through his work, Hunter investigates and creates charged, complex environments. Using simple materials, he moves through and acts upon a space, mapping out territories and time periods, tracing and erasing interrelationships among himself, his audience, and whatever objects are present. For this performance, his primary materials will be an empty white room, two video monitors with live feeds, a large sack of flour and a roll of white gaffer tape.

Statement of Matter: Performance(s) of Indefinite Duration is one of a series of projects bearing the same title. In a manifesto for these works, Hunter writes:

Art has, for too long, operated as a formal 'response' to the world.... The realisation of Performance Art ... is ... a realisation of the difference between uncovering and understanding (or translating).... [T]here is no thing to understand, or put an other way, it becomes impossible not to understand everything. When art is lived, so living is art; and when living is art, so art is lived.

Statement about Statement of Matter

This performance is one of an ongoing series of inherently interdisciplinary negotiations of anterior spaces, places and actions. This anteriority does not imply, however, that these exist in the past, that they are lost to us. Rather, these states of matter and being remain 'before' conceptions and perceptions of causal thinking and doing in linear time frames. As such we are in their midst and by uncovering them we realise participation in a new milieu where previously rigid forms are no longer assured.

In our climate of syntactical formalism, I propose that the actuation of installation, through its precise location of action as the site of both the perception and conception of the aesthetic matrix, provides a necessary undoing of any preexisting equation whereby language solely equals thought.

~Roddy Hunter, Some notes and sources toward a realisation of installation, 1999