Group dynamics, intimacy between strangers, and rehearsing for loss: A review and conversation between Autumn Joi Knight and Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney
Author’s note: I began working on this interview and writeup in the fall of 2024. By the new year, I had gathered all the information and data I needed to move forward. Unfortunately, my momentum was thwarted by a long and complicated accommodations battle with my graduate departments combined with some vastly time-consuming personal health struggles and exciting life changes. I am so thrilled to be returning to it with renewed time and energy and share this context mainly in order to explain why, although written in the present tense, this is being published many months after the actual performance concluded.
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Interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight has been producing staged, audience-engaged performances for over a decade. I know of her from performances like Sanity TV wherein she satirizes the talk show environment and invites audience members to participate as ‘guests,’ and YES + NO: A CULT, which involves testing audience member’s proclivities toward ‘joining in.’ When I saw she would be bringing a newer, three-part performance—Nothing #15:a bar, a bed, a bluff—to Portland as part of PICA’s 2024 TBA festival, I knew I had to go.
For a couple years leading up to this, questions of ‘work’ and ‘anti-work’ have become more and more central to my art and writing practices. I have been primarily gravitating toward projects which contend with the same, and with artists and writers who are engaging thoughtfully with the problems of late capitalism, the nuclear family, the office, and the disappearance of luxury time.
Autumn Knight is one such artist. Much of Knight’s work interrogates group dynamics, the value of time, and the implications of hierarchy in power dynamics, and so of course I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend her performance series—Nothing#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff—which specifically addresses notions around “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
How does society define productivity and value to suit capital? People are socialized to identify financial productivity as the only path to having personal and social value. We are considered hard and loyal workers only when we go above and beyond our contractual obligations in ways that seriously cramp our personal time and limit our ability to separate work from home. Time for ourselves and our families compress, while time for our employers exponentially expands. Late capitalism demands it.
Before seeing Knight’s Nothing #15 series at PICA, I had watched a recording of Sanity TV which, like Nothing #15, relies on audience participation. What stood out most was not the questions she asked or the ways she interacted with the audience, but the way that the experience seemed to operate outside of time. Time meandered slowly as Knight utilized long pauses and often lingered for a while on a single question or interaction. She allowed herself to follow whatever curious, improvisational thread appeared. Had I been told that the performance went on for hours, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I was struck by the way the performance invited me, the viewer, and apparently, the audience members, to take the pacing for granted and just exist ‘in the moment’ however long that moment might be.
I would eventually experience this firsthand when attending and participating in a bar.
There is so much to discover in the process of meandering—of simply allowing space for things to happen—and this came up very strongly again in both Nothing#15: a bar and Nothing#15: a bluff. Yes, a framework existed, but it was flexible. The scaffolding was silly putty rather than steel. I’m compelled by the idea of creating a life that allows for engaging with time in this way—one which allows it to stretch and compress based on mood and capacity at any given moment—an impulse strongly deterred by corporate America.
My relationship to productivity had already begun shifting, as had my definitions of precarity, security, and “free time,” and these lines of inquiry forced me to reckon with my own associations of professional success with personal value. What happens when one begins to untangle the two, I wondered?
It all falls apart, as it turns out.
When I saw that Nothing #15: a bar, a bed, a bluff would open at PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art) on September 19th, I was determined to find a way to participate, so I showed up right as things were getting started.
Upon checking in at the ticket counter for a bar, attendees are given a drink ticket and encouraged to start mingling in the large, open warehouse space-turned performance stage. The only things separating the ‘stage’ from the rest of the space is neon tube lighting lining its perimeter, a few sets of wooden chairs facing each other, and a wooden ‘bar’ suspended from the ceiling which would eventually be lowered down to encourage more mixing and mingling as the evening wore on.
PICA described the series as an “investigation into the Italian concept of ‘dolce far niente’” or ‘the sweetness of doing nothing,’” and in part one—Nothing #15:a bar—the “nothing” happens when strangers are paired off to share flirtatious acts of care in the middle of a room of spectators, while cameras circle, broadcasting their interactions on televisions placed strategically throughout the room—that is, the participants are unable to see themselves on-screen.
“NOTHING#15: a bar” by Autumn Knight, 2024. Media: Ryan-Ashley A. Maloney
Knight approaches my group and asks if anybody wants to participate. My arm shoots up and she leads me over to one of the chairs. I was the ‘guest’ and a ‘host’ joined me momentarily—someone I’ve never met before who calls themselves Soap. Knight circulates from couple to couple providing lubrication during moments of stagnation, stopping once to give Soap tips on how to make me laugh. She explained that the goal is to make me lean in and maintain eye contact.
The container of the ‘performance’ allows me to lean fully into this flirtation without any fear of blurred boundaries that might bleed over into real life.
Knight hands Soap a clementine and directs them to slowly peel it in front of me and then to feed it to me, one wet wedge at a time. I delight in the attention and accept the feeding while my date (now husband) observes from the sidelines. After about 15 minutes, Knight tells us we’re free, and the date comes to an end. Much like actual host bars which originated in and continue to gain popularity in Japan, we peel away and go back to not knowing each other.
Nothing #15:a bed, which opened on October 10, asks the questions: What does it mean to rehearse for loss? What would you do differently if you knew a loved one’s death was looming? How do you prepare for goodbye—either inevitable or impending?
This performance was inspired by the struggle artist Félix González-Torres faced in contending with his partner’s prognosis and impending death, and this context puts a fine point on the idea of rehearsal. What does one do when they know that death is coming? How does one continue moving about their day as usual—waking, eating, working … sleeping?
“NOTHING#15: a bed” by Autumn Knight, 2024. Courtesy of PICA. Photos: Malique Pye
Guests are directed to stand along a back wall. The lighting is low, there is a neon glow, and the air is filled with fog. A performer—Justine Chambers—sensuously circles the space on roller skates. Her movements are both urgent and resolved, and speak to a tension between living in the present, honoring the past, and making room for the future. At times, Chambers melts into her turns—almost a collapse—and at others, she cuts corners quickly as if racing toward an invisible finish line. There’s a graceful resignation in her slaloming—in the ways her arms hang loose and limp, in the ways her skates barely lift from the floor—an energy that gestures to a weary spirit; a heavy load. The bed is situated at the other end of the room, barely visible, and, as is so common to Knight’s performance work, there is no telling how long the skating will go on for.
After a few minutes, Chambers retires to the bed and, Autumn Knight—her only appearance of the evening—leads the audience toward the other corner of the room. We comply.
Once seated, we watch Chambers slowly remove her skates and socks. The music—an eerie combination of hip hop samples and relaxing, esoteric tones that roll over us like soft waves—pulses, and the moody neon lighting follows.
Chambers alternates between circling the bed as if separated by a force field, and climbing on top of and rubbing their whole body against it. The shape of a body is visible beneath a white comforter and, occasionally, it moves. Chambers dances around the bed. Her movements are jagged and potent and, at times, Justine mounts the bed. She scurries across it like a spider, crawls through the gaps in the headboard, slides to the floor, and glides across it as if still on skates. Occasionally, she sits on a corner and humps it, urgent as a feral animal in heat, and smells the spot after as if to ask, “Am I still here?” Desire and denial are palpable.
The performance climaxes when Chambers releases the grief, the burden, the body. She allows it to sink into a hole beneath the surface of the bed, and the bedding follows. The body, then the sheets, then Chambers herself sinks into the hole and disappears from view. Is this sinking down a metaphor for the parts of ourselves we lose when a loved one disappears from our lives? Or the parts that are lost during long periods of care? Is it meant to draw a correlation between the conditions of the sick and the heartsick? Grief is, after all, consuming. It will pull you under, swallow you whole, and spit you out a little smaller and lighter and thinner than before. A little less sturdy.
I left asking myself, “What did I just see, and when can I see it again?”
Finally, the last performance in the series, Nothing #15:a bluff, opened November 7th and, like the other two performances, ran for three nights in a row. I was able to make it the first two nights.
Popcorn and drinks are being served in the lobby while the room is being prepared and, once we’re allowed in, we all wander to a small, solitary arena in the vast warehouse space. The actual bar from a bar hangs suspended from the ceiling, as does a massive cluster of microphones hanging from retracting cords. Seats are positioned snugly around the bar, and a few more sit around the periphery.
“NOTHING#15: a bar” by Autumn Knight, 2024. Media: Ryan-Ashley A. Maloney
Autumn Knight stands in the middle of the bar silently while we all sit on the outside, also quietly. The premise is unclear. Soon, though, Knight begins initiating conversation with randomly selected audience members and for at least an hour, she calls on everything she knows about performance and group dynamics to get the audience to generously engage, but the audience is not having it. Their answers are curt and one dimensional. Even an art professor who’s brought a gaggle of art students with her all but refuses Autumn’s bids for connection.
On night two, the crowd is ready, eager, and kind. Even in moments when it seems Knight may have jumped to a conclusion or pricked a little too hard, we see the scab of relationship forming in the wake of the most uncomfortable interactions.
Knight asks one audience member about the book they have in front of them, hoping, I imagine that the answer isn’t the same as the night before when someone said they brought a book to the performance just in case they got bored. In this case, it was an anthology featuring trans voices. A book which makes them happy, they said, and confident, and proud, and which they re-read again and again to continue feeling those feelings.
They tell Knight that she’s the most beautiful person they’ve ever seen and that they’re so happy to be in the room and so grateful for her work.
Autumn stops. Her breath catches. She tears up and then she wipes the tears away. They hug. And we collectively sniffle. I think about what’s lost when we choose not to be vulnerable.
In the following conversation, Autumn Knight and I talk about her performance origin story, the challenge of being present, and interrogate whether host bar work is actually a kind of sex work. Spoiler: she said no, it’s not.
R.A. Maloney / What originally drew you toward performance over other disciplines? What keeps you in it? Were you already into performance before attending HSPVA (High School for the Performing and Visual Arts), or did it develop during your schooling?
Autumn Joi Knight / I was involved in theatre, performance, and visual art in educational environments all throughout my formative years, then concentrated on theatre in my high school and undergraduate studies. I stay connected to and stay in performance because it’s my art foundation—it’s the thing I know best, and I love it and trust its endless possibilities.
R.A.M. / What’s your favorite thing about doing performance art? How about performance art that involves audience participation?
A.J.K. / My favorite thing about performance is its liveness. Its ephemerality. The preciousness of the shared lived moment. The endless possibilities of the form. The bending and playing with time, architecture, site, and materials.
R.A.M. / What’s your process like for determining how you iterate performances for different audiences in different places?
A.J.K. / I don’t have a particular process for different locations. But I do prepare by doing a small bit of research on the place, cultural beliefs, local politics etc. But its most important to read the room and let the dynamics emerge in the present.
R.A.M. / Performance art requires you to be very social—social with your team, with the venue/organization staff, and also with, ultimately, the audience. How do you maintain a sense of autonomy and maintain personal boundaries through it all? How do you take care of yourself?
A.J.K. / I try to be as open as possible to what each person on the team can offer. And work with that. If they’d like to work together to go beyond their own expectations, I’m willing to go there. I take care of myself by understanding the role and function of institutions and remembering my understanding of group dynamics and how they emerge depending on who has authority in the room.
R.A.M. / Dolce far niente—this idea you are engaging with in Nothing#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff—makes me wonder what the pandemic was like for you. Did you participate in the sort of collective turnoff that happened in the beginning? How did this period impact your relationship to productivity, if at all? I know you were still productive during this period because of the work you created for The Kitchen and I’m curious about what your relationship to output was like during that time.
A.J.K. / I found myself doing quite a few online talks and performances during the pandemic. I didn’t seek productivity actively during this time, but I did embrace the invitations and moments to connect and bring what I could offer in that overly distanced and frightening time.
R.A.M. / Your work often contends with power dynamics. What do you hope to accomplish?
A.J.K. / I hope that people start to question and/or acknowledge the power they have and think about how they wield it.
R.A.M. / How has your work impacted your life? What sacrifices have you made to continue producing at such a phenomenal clip? Seeing your list of accomplishments, it’s clear that you’re incredibly productive and prolific. It makes me wonder about your relationship to productivity and rest, especially considering the work you’ve been performing recently.
A.J.K. / I’m still in it. I don’t know yet what has been sacrificed. I will say that I feel very energized and nourished by all the amazing people I get to work with on each project. I am very excited to return to working with people—it’s an honor that people want to work with me again—and I don’t discount that or take it for granted. Or I try not to.
I am working constantly on rest.
R.A.M. / When you were conceiving of the Nothing#15 series, did you know from the beginning that you would be creating a three-part series or were you originally thinking about the individual performance pieces as separate projects?
A.J.K. / When approached about the commission by Performance Space New York, I decided to present a trilogy of performances. In part, I wanted to work around one of the usual presentations of performance work, which is building and developing a single project over a year (or more), then presenting two or three performances over a weekend.
I also wanted to use the time and resources offered by the institution to work on several ideas at once. I chose and developed three different works, but arranged them in an order that would make sense as a series and would address certain conceptual concerns as each work unfolded over the course of three weekends.
R.A.M. / Do you sort of start with a big idea and reverse-engineer it, or with a kernel and build up? Or something totally different?
A.J.K. / I’ve had the idea for a bar for over a decade. The idea came from a news article I read, and while I applied for various exhibition and performance opportunities over the years, it never got any traction. I took the freedom of the commission process as an invitation to bring this idea to fruition—to try it. Of course, the idea changed as I started to think about the mechanics, materials, site-responsivity, location, potential audience demographics, and structure. I didn’t quite reverse-engineer it, but I did have to examine what about this project spoke to me, overlapped with my practice, etc. These concerns were partly about what it takes to produce and manage connectivity and intimacy among strangers. Research is critical to my work, as I’m sure it is to most artists today, and performing the work is also a form of research.
a bed is an iteration of a piece I’ve presented before as video and performance. Re-staging a work allows you to look deeper, especially when you place new bodies and incorporate new relationships into the work. In addition to reimagining this work over several in-depth conversations with the performer/artist Justine Chambers, I also came to this PICA production with more goals and ideas as a choreographer, building a movement vocabulary that exposed more of my conceptual questions.
R.A.M. / When you decided to create a bar, was your intention to produce a social experiment that challenged strangers’ willingness to be intimate with one another? To elicit curiosity around the origins of host bars? Something else? In the ArtForum piece from 2023, you mentioned wanting to create a ‘buffet of attention’—I love that visual and definitely felt that to be true as a participant. What about the host bars in Japan were so captivating to you?
A.J.K. / a bar was in some ways an exploration in how to be a host—how to construct a space where people enjoyed themselves and were curious about the environment and the other people there. It was also an exploration into how one might host or orchestrate, direct, and inform intimacy between others.
R.A.M. / Regarding host bars, stories have surfaced around some of the pitfalls and consequences of host bars. Does that interest you?
A.J.K. / Yes, it interests me—both the history of this phenomenon and how it develops. I even have a google alert for “host bars.”
R.A.M. / Do you view host bar hosts as sex workers?
A.J.K. / No.
R.A.M. / I’m curious how you came to that. Like, is this kind of care work a kind of sex work?
A.J.K. / I don’t think it’s sex work because I think that even in the original conception of host bars as I understand them, that is the thing that’s off the table, which allows for the depth of this other work to happen. Because that is not the end goal. Creating space for talking is a certain kind of care, and it’s fulfilling. When somebody wants a service that’s sexual, they’ll probably seek that out in a different kind of space. It’s a different offering, so I don’t think of the hosts as sex workers in that way. But it is a type of attention work—attention work to produce a type of pleasure, to produce a type of intimacy and focus.
R.A.M. / That makes a lot of sense. Did you say it was about ten years ago when you first encountered host bars? What was going on at the time in your life that facilitated your interest in this phenomenon and wanting to do work around it?
A.J.K. / I encountered an article stating that, in these particular host bars, the hosts were men and the customers were primarily women. I thought about what is required to create this very gendered pleasure … Although I don’t think there needed to be anything specifically gendered about the transactions, I considered that there was probably a methodology for catering to this particular demographic of patrons.
These host bar customers keep coming back and this is what makes it a business. They get hooked on the product—the product being ‘intimacy’ and the feeling of being desired—good, positive attention that makes you feel maybe sexy, maybe alive, maybe that you’re a good person. But I’m interested in what happens over the course of a night to sustain that. What’s the character work of the host? What is the script that obviously is manufactured but also has to be real enough …
R.A.M. / Yeah, it has to be responsive.
A.J.K. / Yes, responsive, and it’s not a play. It’s not a proper performance but it also is a performance. And then the customer is invited to perform as well. I was interested in the inbetween and I wanted to (know) uncover how to train a host to be a host.
As an audience member [in a bar], audiences are just coming in. They’re not going to know what to do. I wanted to think more about what I could tell a person to impact the intimacy they could provide for another. And how I could coach? How I could be of assistance.
Even the environment … what are all the things that keep a person locked in in a space with a person, and also with the entire space?
R.A.M. / I imagine the host always kind of starts out with a thing that they say to get a person rolling so that then they have material to work with. Like a kind of improv. It’s like the first thing I say when I answer one of my client’s calls. I say, “What’s on your mind today?” because now I know I have a few channels that might come up, and I then know what to do once I’m in one of those spaces.
One thing that I’m interested in with you and artists in general is … you mentioned a mentor—Dr. Mary McRae—I think everybody has something in them to create. I think that like in our most child, raw selves, that’s what we’re kind of designed to do. And then life fucks that up and stomps it out. And so, I’m really curious about maybe one or two pivotal moments where, whether it was you pulling something out of yourself or maybe a mentor pushing you where maybe you could have gone in a different direction but you didn’t. You stayed with being a creative person, manifesting, in that unknown, magical, vulnerable path to choose and you really gotta be sure that, this is like, the thing I have to do.
A.J.K. / I have been doing art my whole life, my whole educational life from when I was really small. And I went to schools for that. So there was never really a sense of I’m going to quit this. But I will say that there was a pivotal moment with my longtime mentor Dr. McRae while I was in graduate school.
I was in her ‘group dynamics’ course. She was the only black professor I had in graduate school and she taught us how to think about group dynamics from the perspective of a black woman in a position of authority. She taught us how power dynamics shift depending on who in the room has authority. The concept felt so alive and performative. The solo performer, in the center of the work, can weave these concepts together.
The authority figure in the performance setting is the performer—the person deciding the time boundary, deciding when the performance ends or begins, determining the scope, the range, the parameters of it all—really shaping it.
I would say that that was a very pivotal piece of information that I’m constantly aware of and still learning from. I feel like I’m still in study of the thing that I learned over ten years ago.
R.A.M. / Is there a method for how you pair participants during a bar?
A.J.K. / Nope. I explain the roles and ask potential participants which role they want. I ask whether they want to challenge themselves, or, if they know themselves fully in a certain way, if they would like to deepen that knowledge.
R.A.M. / One of the reasons I ask about sex work and would love to hear more about your thoughts on the role of the host, is because the prompts that were being used and the ways I was being opened up by the host felt very much like what I do on a regular basis in my role as a service provider. There was a feeling I had while participating in a bar of letting go and having to accept the feeling of being out of control, of being the one who’s being appealed to. Even though it’s not real, it’s real. Everything that’s happening in this moment is actually happening. You’re facilitating the experience, and yet I’m fully in the moment with the person I’ve just met.
As somebody who’s in a monogamous relationship, if I was doing this in a different setting, what I participated in for the sake of a bar would likely be viewed as cheating.
A.J.K. / Because of the depth of the connection or just the actions?
R.A.M. / I think both. I think the actions prompt a depth of connection because the level of intimacy is so, like … when I think of being fed, I think of foreplay. Foreplay or like a really intimate, private space, and … my partner was there watching all this happen, but because it was in this particular space, I felt completely free to fully engage with it. But if I was at a coffee shop flirting with somebody like this and my partner were to walk by, I’d feel like, yikes. I would feel caught.
It also felt a little bit exposing to know that people who know me, especially in an academic setting, are now seeing me be intimate. Even though I do the work that I do, I don’t really talk about sex much, I’m not a very … I might even present myself as asexual, maybe. It’s just not how I put myself out there. So flirting in front of people like that felt, like, OMG, the people who are watching, are learning things about me.
A.J.K. / A couple questions … First, I’m interested in the role reversal and how that changed what you did in the encounter. Second, when you said ‘caught’ I’m curious about when and how quickly you let go of the feeling of being caught … and what, for you, held the boundary of I am in front of people and I am also very away from people at the same time. People are watching me do something but I’m kind of in a container.
R.A.M. / I’ll work my way backwards. I think I was able to view it as being in a container and there’s this protection of everyone knowing that this is part of a performance, and I, a guest, am reacting to facilitation. So I think that the facilitation aspect of it provides a sort of protective barrier by creating a dynamic where, technically, I’m not making choices. All the choices I’m making are happening within this container. Is this free will? I’m consenting to be part of the process, but it’s different … like, let’s say, it would be totally different if you weren’t facilitating and there was just a general overarching prompt of, like, pick somebody you don’t know, sit down with them, start interacting … that would feel much more vulnerable and I think I would have felt less free to just be juicy with it.
As far as the feeling of being caught, I definitely felt right in the beginning like I was … a little bit like, oh, my partner knows I do sex work, but he’s not part of that. He doesn’t witness it. But him witnessing this … does that now give him a picture of what I’m doing for work in a different way? The idea of being engaged in a flirtatious intimate conversation. But I think I just had to intellectualize it as, you know, when am I going to get this chance again? This is such an interesting experiment, and I want to do fully participate. I didn’t want to miss out on discovering what could happen by restricting myself and thinking too much about other people.
To your first question about role reversal … there are some people who I’ve been talking to for a year and half, and they call me three to four times a week and while sometimes it’s sexual, most of the time it feels more like care, like I’m the confidante they don’t have to worry about running into at the grocery store. There’s a huge protective barrier and even though they’re paying me, there is a real relationship happening and there is real care taking place. And the connection is real even if it’s existing in this very structured way with strong boundaries in place, and this is the only place this exists. Knowing that also allowed me, in the moment, to both think about the interaction as a real thing we’re experiencing right now that has meaning, but also allowed me to acknowledge the desire to be cared for. Having someone’s attention on me, even if it’s contrived, or transactional, this person is asking questions and doing things that genuinely make me feel seen and heard and cared for. And it doesn’t matter to me that they’re being told to do it. It doesn’t matter that this is not happening of their own volition because it feels good.
A.J.K. / That thing you said about it not mattering that they’re being told to do it—I’m wondering why it doesn’t matter in this context. I feel like a lot of people in a lot of contexts are like, “If you have to be told, I don’t want it …” That if it’s a thing that doesn’t just come sort of organically …. But the idea that the person is being told and for you that does not matter, or it stopped mattering at a certain point.
R.A.M. / I think it has to do somewhat with my background. Not with work but just in my personal life … there were times when I did feel like—both in familial and interpersonal relationships—if you don’t just know, then it’s not authentic and I don’t want it. But then I started learning about my own limitations in relationship and really appreciating relating to people who have really good communication and are adept at saying what they want and how they want it and when and why. I realized that’s a kind of care. You’re giving me the tools I need to be a good partner or a good friend or a good daughter.
I was really struggling with parental relationships at one point and I basically said to one of them, listen, if you have to put it in your calendar to send me a text message at 3pm at the last sunday of every month, that’s fine. I just want that message. Whatever you need to do to set yourself up to express something in my direction, that to me is … that’s an effort. It’s like, “OK, I’m not good at reaching out and you don’t come to mind but I know it’s important to you to be thought of, so I’m going to do this thing.”
My mindset around instructions and around how that feels very caring to me allowed me to be like, it feels good and I don’t care if you’re reading a prompt from a relationship book or doing what you’re told by a facilitator because you’re still doing it and I get to choose whether I receive that or not. And I’m going to receive it.
A.J.K. / There’s something about coming into proximity with this stranger—well, first, I definitely try to make sure the two people don’t know each other—the lack of prior history and expectations on the relationships, on the encounter. There are none. The idea that there is a certain set of things that this other person is supposed to be doing, should be doing, or, you know, something you’re not doing is kind of … expectations are a little out of the window.
R.A.M. / I completely agree. This person has never disappointed me before.
A.J.K. / Right.
R.A.M. / They’ve never gotten it wrong before. So I think that in the ways we tend to be more generous when we’re first meeting or dating somebody, like letting things go while everybody is figuring things out, figuring out what we’re doing here, what the expectations are. In friendship, too. Yeah, I think there’s just a lot more leeway and in this environment in particular… they’ve never disappointed me, they’ve never not shown up, and how are they going to find out what I like if they’re not referring to a list? Whether it’s a list in their head based on past experiences, or somebody prompting them.
A.J.K. / One thing I’m curious about is your experience of the camera and that element of the performance.
R.A.M. / Well, something that I found really interesting was, and I don’t know why I didn’t make this connection, but, for some reason, I did not notice the televisions at all in the space. I saw the cameras but didn’t notice the televisions until after I had finished my pairing and was then watching other people’s interactions on the screens. So when I saw the cameras, I thought it was documentation. I didn’t realize that it was livestreaming, and I wonder if, had I known, whether I might have actually been self-conscious of this sort of hyper projection of my flushed, flirty face. But I think that because … there were two camera people, right?
A.J.K. / Just one.
R.A.M. / It felt like there were two. That person was very good. I think the person was important, and obviously you made that choice for a reason, but that person was very good about just weaving through the space in a way … it almost felt like an undulation, very underwater … it felt very seamless, very embodied, and I didn’t really think about it too much.
It felt… like, I think maybe there was this double action of being seen in two ways at one time, and I think we’re ego-driven, all of us, in some way or another and it feels good, even though on one hand the spotlight makes me feel uncomfortable, it also feels good to be wanted—for someone to want me to be in focus for them.
And I think a lot about, especially as a woman, being invisible and pushed on, so much of the time that to be, to have this space created for me where I’m really totally in focus, there’s definitely an empowering feeling to that.
A.J.K. / This was important for the design of the space. Each time I’ve done the performance, we’ve designed the space so participants wouldn’t be able to see themselves while participating in the performance. It was a nice challenge at PICA to attempt to angle the screens out of view.
R.A.M. / I think that’s really smart. Just thinking about watching instagram reels for example and people—they know where the camera is, but they look at themselves—and it’s such a compulsion to watch yourself. Even during this Zoom call with you, I notice myself at times catching myself looking at myself! And why? I’m not talking to myself. I think it changes our behavior when we can see ourselves in action.
A.J.K. /Absolutely. Absolutely. The image quality for me is so lush. Shirley, the camera director or DP, moves very fluidly, so that the video has a sort of soft, fluid, smooth quality. I imagine that seeing oneself on the screen would make you want to start to behave in a particular way. People have a cinematic quality on their own. Humans are very beautiful! There’s a kind of sweetness, innocence, when people are just being. But there’s something when you see yourself—an awareness—that, while still sweet, these other anxieties slice through that presence. I was just curious about your experience of knowing that we could potentially see you at any moment on a bunch of screens.
R.A.M. / I think that because I was one of the first and nobody had been shown on the screens yet, I didn’t totally make the connection that …
A.J.K. / Right …
R.A.M. / …that was going to happen.
A.J.K. /Right … I did it three nights and, of course people later in the evening were watching for a while …
R.A.M. / Oh I watched …
A.J.K. / [chuckling]
R.A.M. / And one thing that I think was interesting about my own behavior was that I was more … I found myself watching the television instead of watching the interaction.
A.J.K. / That’s intentional as well.
R.A.M. / O.K.
A.J.K. / I tried to set up the seating so you could watch both if you wanted.
R.A.M. / And that felt very accessible to me! To see both at the same time but my eyes kept going to the television.
A.J.K. /Yeah! There’s a live cameraperson. You don’t know what they’re going to capture. Their camera’s really great. Also, there are other things to do in the room, but the hope was that the quality of the image would pique your interest and pull you back into that image as well. It was an option. Part of the buffet of visual options. It was one of the offerings.
R.A.M. / Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about documentation and reality and fiction and how, like, kind of everything and nothing is real. The angles and the moments a photographer and a videographer chooses to highlight—those are the things that people end up knowing about an event. And it’s like… just a part of a whole and it made me think about that. I’m just thinking about what we choose to show and wondering why anybody thinks the picture is complete. I’m thinking about social media specifically.
A.J.K. / Right. The cropping.
R.A.M. / Exactly! The cropping … With a bluff, what do you hope the audience will walk away feeling or thinking about?
A.J.K. / I hope the audience walks away from bluff feeling the possibility of their collective presence—what can emerge and entangle and align when we speak to each other and question our reality together. Presence—I want them to feel they were very present.
R.A.M. / Can you describe the particular sensation of being surrounded on all sides by expectant people? Do you feel excited? Nervous? Thrilled? Something else?
A.J.K. / Performing surrounded on all sides, or “in the round,” is common in my performances. The sensation is quite intimate, thrilling. Organizing proximity is an important strategy in my work. Bringing audiences closer, to see their eyes in the encounter, is crucial to the feedback loop, the conversation and building an understanding of who’s in the room.
R.A.M. / My experience as an audience member was vastly different between the first and second night of a bluff. I felt the audience was being more generous with their participation on the second night. How did your experience differ from night to night and what do you attribute that to?
A.J.K. / Each audience is a different configuration of histories, narratives, sensibilities, orientations to performance, etc. The material emerges from the audience and circulates among that audience based on a combination of these factors.
R.A.M. / You’re not afraid to challenge the audience—to push, prod, and prick. On the first night, even an art professor was resistant to answering questions about her class. Then, on the second night, a random audience member welcomed your interrogation about their re-reading of a fairly old literary journal which led, ultimately, to a moment of joyous and emotional connection. What is your experience in these moments? What is your goal? How often do the two intersect?
A.J.K. / My goal is not so direct. What I’m interested in is what’s in the room—who is in the room? What’s emergent? What could and possibly needs to be unearthed or created together in the moment? My experience in these moments is trying to be as present, to open a space for dialogue and possibility.
R.A.M. / How do you prepare for performances like this which require so much of you? In a bar, you were facilitating but not necessarily at the center of the experience but, in the case of a bluff, you’re literally in the spotlight. Does preparation look different for one versus the other?
A.J.K. / I try to think ahead a bit about where my moments of relief, rest, and respite might exist in the space of the performance. Where and how can I use the architecture, silence, reflection? Who can I enlist in the moment to collaborate on ushering forth the needs of the work?
R.A.M. / There was something about the enormity of the room that added a gravity to the experience. Was that intentional? Do you think the impact would be the same in a smaller space?
A.J.K. / I thought it was important to remove distraction or rather pointedly focus the visual world of this particular performance. Moving the performance to an intimate space in the center of the room allowed previous audiences to experience the space differently. The darkness surrounding the light is definitely an intentional metaphor employed for that moment. There’s an opportunity here to think about what can allow you to fade into the background.
As noted in her CV, Knight’s work aims to “… reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority. She scrutinizes institutional spaces that regulate African American subjects or that assert their absence, often putting black women at the center of the conversation to usurp the dynamics of a room with humor and with purpose.” Nothing #15:a bar, a bed, a bluff, embodied this and so much more, and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.
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Autumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles, The Walker Art Center. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Trellis Art Fund Grant.
Learn more about Autumn Knight here, follow her Instagram here and be sure to stay tuned for future projects and performances. Learn more about PICA—the Portland, Oregon organization that hosted Autumn’s recent Nothing#15:a bar, a bed, a bluff performance featured in this piece.
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
