TOP TEN TIPS FOR LIVE ART*

1. When we talk about ‘Live Art’ the noun – we should really be talking about ‘live art’ as in the verb ‘to live’. We need to shift from being objects to becoming subjects and all that this entails. Moving from the ‘named’ to the ‘one who names’, moving from the anxious detached breath to the fluid and dynamic actuality of breathing.

2. “All art starts from groups”. Alan Moore tells us that Collectivity is the basis for all artistic production, because it stems from the social relations that make the soil all artists are rooted in. Sometimes when flowers are grown in this soil they are cut and arranged in large vases and placed in the sterile world of the art gallery as objects to be understood by the passive idiotic consumer. (Moore, A “General Introduction to Collectivity” Journal of Aesthetics & Protest” University of Chicago

3. Artists should not be concerned with making flowers as much as the soil. They “should not make objects they should make changes, opportunities, realizations, understandings”. (Moore: 2)

4. Keep it real – acting will only get you so far in this industry. In this world of trickery, the real trick is to hold onto yourself and your means of creation. You should be careful you don’t sell these or allow these means to be taken from you.

5. We live in the era of the ipod, the iphone, the iheart…these individualistic mantras are infiltrating you at the rate of several hundred kilobytes per second. DIY is now a clothing label you can purchase online. It’s an underground music event sponsored by Smirnoff. It’s a silent centrelink government contract. You will need to use all your creative power to resist this colonization of the brain.

6. LIVE ART OR LEAVE ART. Get out of art before it turns you into a mantle piece, a brooch on the lapel of the ministry of the art.

7. When you make art, start with your heart – stop craning your neck to the altar listening to the elites of the world and aspiring to be more like them. They will only make you say things that don’t make sense. And it will make you self-destruct, and you will drag everyone with you, inevitably. All things being connected.

8. Don’t be fooled into thinking you are ever completely on your own – the separation between you and someone else is a fiction pedaled by Big brother and his estranged siblings. Along with all the other unbelievable fictions sold back to you as the ‘real thing’ or the ‘next best thing’.

9. Don’t forget your cellular material relies on a molecular process called differentiation – Through the inexorable and never satisfied hunger of consumption, society’s skins are hosting global tumors of undifferentiated cell growth. Remember while we are submerged in constant occasion for replication, life will always find ways to deviate, resist, and combat.

10. We live in an era where the spectacle is triumphing. But it can never maintain the separation between art and life for too long. It is time for the artist to dissolve back into life. And to reclaim the opportunity for intervention and change. Tomorrow you may be surrounded. But today you will surround. And infiltrate the city.

* These tips are inspired by John Jordan and his Seven Live Art Tips published in the The Live Art Almanac. Check it out John Jordan's words here.

Rebecca Conroy is an interdisciplinary performance maker, writer/researcher and curator, working across the areas of community culture development, devised performance and practice-based research. Rebecca is based in Sydney, Australia.