Yip is an arts practice executed in the material practice of publishing.
It begins with my experience of lots of world travel via contemporary dance.
A experience which underlined the seriousness of the observation that Web 2.0 has established within us a mode of being constantly together yet apart.
We are all in each other’s inboxes all the time.
I am interested in understanding how such a reality (one of confusing, long-distance, tech-enabled matrices of intimacy) can be experienced without moral judgement. \
I am not interested in a return to any romantic past of “hard books only!” Lol
I am interested in prompting changes in perception which would allow us to understand how the world we live in—and the specific, digitally-networked technologies that support social media, drop shipping, and POD publishing—is as luscious and capable of helping us to care for one another as any romanticized notion of the past.
And there is the word that perhaps pins Yip to the wind most sincerely: CARE.
All of Yip’s work is performative. Importantly, it seeks to be performative in the literal tradition of theater and avoids (impossible) being understood via the overused notion of performativity inherited from Austin.
Theater, so as to be understood in as participating in the long project of Tragic poetry and it’s enactment as a tool of grieving, together which extends back to ye old Greeks. “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” AC
Because philosophy and poetry, those waring horses, begin in failure. Philosophy cast out of the city, poetry as a response to war.
Yip is an effort to understand the grief that has been the bedrock of the capital W West, and to posit that publishing—through it’s contemporary capacity to move seamlessly between the seemingly material and immaterial—offers a unique space in which to gather and offer each other touch, (care), in spite of not sharing a room, or maybe even a century.
Touch being the primary form of care.
How to touch? Lol
Very. Quickly. I content that the debate which marked modern art criticism in the middle 20th with regards to the autonomy of the art object, and whether or not am artists intention can be called upon when interpreting the Meaning of the art object, is/was tacitly a debate over the proper domain of the art object: the secular or the scared.
I actually don’t want to dwell here. Maybe it is enough to start with a slogan I’ve come to in the past couple of years: Art is politically insignificant but religiously profound, which renders it politically significant.
Very. Quickly. …….. . . . . . . .