Sisyphus and the Myth of the New World
33:06
Performed in Sayulita, Mexico
Video Edition (1 of 4)
$4000
Entire Installation
$13000
Video, Bat, Suitecase, Rocks, Police Report, Audio
contact xxavierismyname@gmail.com to purchase


Performance Description:
On Miami Beach at 4PM the artist arrives dressed with a suitcase. The migrant worker in black skin rolls along, his tools packed inside the vessel
for building. An architecture exists and in these places, the invisible or often forgotten remnant exists in the skin. A breadth to access something,
somewhere, on the grounds of the shared.

Sisyphus and the Myth of the New World is many things. In its action, a combination of the destructive and fruiting bodies wrapped in play, the elevating
of the often violent hand of man into sport, a place hallowed in memory and financed the world over as a kind of right. In theory, the spaces built by the
other at the point of departure, the beaches of the world sold and resold by capitalism for leisure, loss in personhood, the global body, prostituted. In
the sound of metal on stone, hammers breaking rocks, the sound of progress. Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus in three languages plays from the suitcase
containing stones and a baseball bat.

Over roughly 30 minutes, Xxavier Edward Carter, hits rocks with an aluminium baseball bat into the ocean until the bat breaks. This reimagining of the Myth
of Sisyphus sees the rock as a world object you can hold in your hand, one to be projected into space, making the ground that it travels along. The
eventual breaking of the bat is the descent and the continuation, the body now ready to begin again. That we must imagine Sisyphus as happy, that with every
rock the idea of the struggle leading and ending, from our past, our bodies, the plane that we exist on to find the heights of our climb. This performance
is made possible through funding from the Foundation For Contemporary Art as part of Satellite Art Show by Performance is Alive.


In Conversation

its funny, you know? youve seen my pervious interaction with the police and i always see it coming ( i told the documentarian that the police would probably
come) this time i underestimated the response. the vision i have of miaminis g string bikinis and speedos, i thought at least there would be some wiggle
in the nudity part but thats where the hardest threats came from. it was treated like i was endangering children very strongly which was surprising. the
city of miami beach rejected the performance in the first place on the grounds of the rocks but i shooed that being a problem away to make the
performance. i told the organizer of the festival about this issue that untitled who would have hosted the performance had and she wasnt too concerned about
it. i even got through to the officers the point of the performance and they understood. they also wanted me to understand that it was them letting me
go rather than me not being a criminal at the moment, ha. the aftermath has been worse than i thought. i feel charged in a way that i cant shake off.
with the jesus performance the police let me finish the performance and in this instance i wasnt able to and i had to keep seeing the officers around the
rest of the week which was paranoia inducing. i go back to mexico on wednesday. i think the performance still highlighted a key point in my revisioning of
the myth. that i stood out as an exception to what could have been is the structure of the performance. sisyphus exposes power dynamics in an actionable
way. the telling of the gods secrets, the punishment, the choice of happiness in the struggle, death, revolutionary suicide, and labor are tangled in the
push of something bigger than you. the individual rocks may not be bigger than me but they are eash a step on the path and the path itself. like camus
said a face that toils so close to stone becomes stone itself. the boulder is also part hill and breaking the bat at the end of the performance the
descent. those are just a few thoughts.