Performance

Gradually, and with no small struggle against this realization, I came to see that oral propaganda is at best but a means of shaking people from their lethargy: it leaves no lasting impression is a live sound collage made from two lectures in the Vera List Center’s archive. It is part of a cycle of public readings in which Katz works with archival feminist, leftist, and other radical texts through collective reading. A team of diverse voices and bodies speaks the original words in their own meter, accent, and inflection, forming a conversation and healthy dissonance with the source. Occasionally, the original author is present to discuss the root of their idea and its dissolution into the collective body.

For this intervention, which was performed as a part of a commission for The Vera List Center 20th Anniversary Conference, Katz works with the December 2004 panel Seeing Double: Exile Artists Interpret Their Homelands—specifically Walid Raad’s participation—and artist Mel Chin’s lecture Whitehouse to the Safehouse, one of the Art & Science Transdisciplinary Lectures presented by Parsons and the VLC in 2010.

Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, first published in 1910 by Mother Earth Publishing Association.