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“Love,
Labor, and the Proliferation of Small Worlds: Getting pink
in Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon”
Jaclyn
Pryor
Performance as Public Practice Program
University
of Texas-Austin
Pink:
a (love) courier service was a month-long,
site-specific, community-engaged, interactive performance
event, commissioned by First Night Austin and underwritten
by the Still Water Foundation.
Operated out of an empty storefront in the rapidly
gentrifying commercial district just west of the downtown,
and by a queer collective of visual artists, performing
artists, cyclists, activists, and poets, pink
became a city-wide performance
experiment in saturation, communication, collective action,
and contagion, made manifest through mediated acts of love.
For the month leading up
to New Year’s Eve 2006-7, the storefront space was
converted into a love factory, and people throughout
Austin, as well as local passersby, visited pink
to write and send pink love notes to friends, lovers,
co-workers, and strangers.
A team of uniformed love factory workers scrolled
and bottled each note, attached a hand-stitched tag with
the first initial of the first name of its recipient, and
sorted the bottles by zip code, while another team of
costumed messengers—traveling by pinked-out bicycles—biked
the bottled love notes to people’s homes and workplaces
throughout the city.
Those who received love were encouraged to pass it
on by visiting the pink love factory, writing a love note,
and sending it on to those they love; 2007 bottles were
sent and received in the month of December, and the event
culminated in a community parade and bicycle carnival in
downtown Austin, as part of First Night Austin.
In
this presentation, I situate myself as a queer artist and
scholar interested in the ways in which performance
happenings and events can mobilize formations of affective
communities. Specifically,
I ask questions about what love might have to do with
labor, what labor with love, and what both together might
have to do with performative interruptions of flow (flows
of time, flows of space, flows of bodies, flows of capital,
flows of material objects, flows of affect).
Using pink as an ethnographic case study, I am
interested, too, in uncovering how performance happenings
and events not only interrupt normative flows of everyday
life, but also work as a site for, what Lauren Berlant has
called, “public feelings” to be made manifest, and as
a mechanism for the proliferation of small worlds—built
upon notions of radical humanism, love, hope, labor, and
queer collective action.
About
Jaclyn Pryor
Jaclyn
Pryor
is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar based in
Austin, Texas. Her
most recent project, pink:
a (love) courier service, commissioned by First Night
Aistom was nominated as “Best Independent Project” of
the year by the Austin Critics Table 2006-2007. In 2006, Pryor created BREAD,
also commissioned by First Night, winner of the First
Night International Creative Programming Award.
Other current projects include floodlines
(2004-2010),
recipient of the W.H. Deacon Crane Award at the Austin
Critics Table 2005-2006. Jaclyn received her B.A. summa cum laude from Washington
University in St. Louis and her M.A. in Performance as
Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin, where
she is currently a candidate for a Ph.D.
She has published essays, articles, and reviews
about progressive pedagogy, feminist criticism, and queer
performance, and she is currently co-editing, with Jill
Dolan, a book about lesbian performance artist Peggy Shaw.
Her dissertation is about the role of art-making in
the formation of queer community.
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