ABSTRACT
Where to begin when speaking of the work of Coat Island? A company whose art practice is bent against the very idea of beginnings and endings, whose spare performance aesthetic seems at times so dense and complex that it trips up your tongue and ties it in knots. But I must say something, so why not start in the experience itself: extreme self-consciousness, physical discomfort, confusion, frustration, near boredom, vague recognition, déjà vu, fleeting identification, sudden epiphanies of meaning, an entranced or mesmerized state, a creeping accumulation of emotions, subterranean alteration. Perhaps you have felt one, or some, or all of these things while watching the work of Goat Island. You might have found these things “difficult,” against some other desired effect. Traditions of watching within live arenas may lead us to expect that such experiences should and will have been cut down or out. And when we find ourselves inside them, that voice in our heads—at once natural and deeply conditioned—tends to ask, “I have paid for this. Where is the pleasure? Where is its meaning, its utility?” Coat Island's work holds you inside the duration of these experiences, then asks you to return to them again and again. It asks you to suspend your viewing habits and stall that inner voice, to linger openly in its moments, which are difficult to evaluate, identify and know.… Each performance quietly requires you to phase-shift your perceptions, and move into a state of being with the work that is sensory, associative, contemplative and unresolved. This work is not without its pleasures.
