Alexandre Singh Artist Lecture Questions/Response

1. Many of your works require the viewer to spend long hours listening or reading. Seeing as how short some peoples' attention spans are, how do you deal with this desire for immediacy? Do you take it into consideration, and can your overall message be summed up in a short time?

2. With your diversity in mediums, what kind of artist would you consider yourself? Your lectures seem highly intellectual and quite long. Are you more of a teacher than an artist and how does your choice of audience effect/reinforce this?

I really enjoyed Singh's lecture/performance. It was unlike any of the others I've seen this year. I was engaged the entire time. Before the lecture, I couldn't really find much on his work. I was anxious to see what it was all about. Although the other work he showed at the end seemed interesting, the live performace, "An Edifice of Association" was just amazing. I loved the fact that there were two projectors and he paced back and forth manually changing the slides. It could have easily been done in Powerpoint, or another similar program, but it showed the two contrasting sides of thinking and association. Singh is a very good public speaker. He kept the audience's interest and interjected humor and sarcasm into parts of the performance. He also mentioned that each show is somewhat customized depending on the location. I thought this was interesting and very smart to make each performance better touch the audience. Lastly, the ending was perfect. All of a sudden, he exclaimed "The End" and cut the power to the projectors, leaving the audience in darkness. It was as if I had awoken from a dream and tried to piece back what had just happened. 

Three Words

Performance

Imaginative

Teaching

His work is so unique, I am really unsure how to categorize it, or which words best describe his style. I like that he isn't limiting himself to one way of presenting his work. My second question is a bit unimportant. I don't really believe that he is too concerned with being a certain kind of artist. He is just doing what he does, and using whichever medium will best convey the message. To answer the first, question, I believe he just engages the audience with his ability to speak. The lecture, for me, went by very quickly. It ended so abruptly, I wanted more. I liked his quote, “Writing is a form of magic.” He definitely shows this to be true in his performance. My favorite quote, though, was “Everything is understandable. Art doesn’t need to be mystified.” He explained that no matter how long it takes, or how many words, things can be explained. I thought this was especially inspiring and important seeing as how some of his art is very lengthy. “The Mark of the Third Stripe” is based off of a 1000 page book. I thought that was incredible.