Directions for a cloud-crowd is a performance with artists Anne Walsh, Jim Melchert, and Michael Swaine. Beginning with the assertion that life is divided between things given and things taken the artists give and take instructions throughout this performance prompting further actions and interactions from one another. These actions create a chain of connections between people and ideas, illuminating the cloud-crowd of consequences. Throughout the performance, the audience will both bear witness to these actions and be an unwilling participant in the event. The performance reflects upon the history of instruction-based art, a major strategy used by conceptual artists such as Sol Lewitt, Allan Kaprow, and Yoko Ono.
Organized by Michael Swaine, Assistant Professor, 3D4M, Directions for a cloud-crowd is a re-staging and variation of three performances created for San Francisco’s Southern Exposure in 2015.
Anne Walsh produces works in video, performance, audio, photography, and text. For the better part of a decade she has been producing visual and literary adaptions of The Hearing Trumpet a visionary text by the late Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Walsh has had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Martina}{Johnston, Berkeley. Her works and performances have been shown at Artists Space, New York; Royal College of Art, London; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Walsh is Associate Professor in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches new genres, video, and creative writing.
Jim Melchert received his undergraduate degree in art history at Princeton, as well as degrees in painting at the University of Chicago and ceramics at the University of California, Berkeley. He directed the Visual Art Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and served as the Director of the American Academy in Rome, 1984–88. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museums of Modern Art, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany.
Adair Rounthwaite is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on ephemeral art forms, specifically audience participation and performance art. Her first book, Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in spring 2017.
