Constance DeJong on Exploring and Performing Narrative

Artforum's Lauren O’Neill-Butler spoke with writer, performer, and artist Constance DeJong about her conceptions of narrative, "'the movement of thought' across the mind," and her new works in Let me consider it from here, a four-artist show on intimacy at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, currently on view. An excerpt:

. . . [W]hen I read, during a performance, it’s because within the narrative there’s a moment of text: a letter, a paragraph from a book, or something like that—something that is, within the narrative, a written text. When I perform, there’s a distinction between the read language and the spoken language. That difference is important to me. For instance, I performed one of the texts during the opening of the show in Chicago. That one features a character that has a bunch of friends near their bed on the floor—i.e., books. During an insomniac moment, after a bad dream, the character remembers a quote from Elizabeth Bisland’s Dreams and Their Mysteries, written in 1896, and through the character I read this text:

. . . night after night, with calm incuriousness we open the door onto that ghostly underworld, and hold insane revels with fantastic spectres, weep burning tears for empty griefs, babble with foolish laughter at witless jests, stain our souls with useless crime, or fly with freezing blood from the grasp of an unnamed dread; and with morning, saunter serenely back from these wild adventures into the warm precincts of the cheerful day, unmoved, unstartled, and forgetting.

 

I have an ongoing interest in dreaming, unlike most of today’s neuroscientists. It’s a topic that’s been pushed off to the side in the US, though there are a bunch of events related to it. You can go to a dream fair in Las Vegas, and somebody will tell you what it all means. Since Freud, it’s as if we’ve drawn a line in the sand, and we’ve not progressed, and that baffles me because, of course, if we’re fortunate we sleep and dream every day, for a considerable portion of our twenty-four, diurnal cycle.

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