THE PERFORMANCE SPACES OF IRMA OPTIMIST

I first performed as Irma Optimist in the Museum of Contemporary art in Tampere in June 1991. Since then, I have applied theoretical, mathematical approaches to my artistic activities. Mathematical chaos, which formed the basis when preparing the works, means unexpected order and periodic variation within spaces of a certain system – of a performance, for instance.
I also used female optimist humor in my works. Dynamics of language games and events became the nonlinear spatiality of my works. In my performances Body Omega (1998), Hysteresis (1998) and Private Pythagoras (1999), I focused on starting and maintaining a spatial event.
As a spatial process, the performance Private Pythagoras also connected with the esoteric Pythagorean mathematical thought. The thematic of the work is best described as a structure of differences within fragmentary topology. It is realized within a net of geometrical subsets. The most important elements of the work were a triangle-shaped fishnet pinned inside the performance space and my computer program Pythagorean tree. On those elements, the specific physical and imaginary questions of the performance were exposed.

My bodily mathematics

First, I changed my studio to Studio Là-bas→. After that, Là-bas→ also started to develop into a living structure for performance art and other forms of experimental art and culture. In the first ever event at Studio Là-bas→ in August 2000, my video of Private Pythagoras saw its premiere.
That crystallized the connection between my previous work and the events of the new millennium. That experimental art needed a bodily-mathematical space for its transformation was to be important to those events.
Là-bas→ has changed the ideal space of Euclidian geometry into jagged forms described by contemporary mathematics. Euclidian analysis does not penetrate the essence of irregular forms that have been found from mathematical space through fractal dimensions.
To imagination, a fractal shows a way to perceive infinity. Paradoxes, such as infinite length within a finite area, or irregularities, such as infinite surface area of objects with zero volume, have created a nonlinear experimental space also for some of my performance commentaries, which I have presented in the context of art history, for instance related to the views about vacuum and space held by Kazimir Malevich, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck.

My performances also deal with inner similarities of forms and the organized structure of a hidden form. Gottfried Leibniz already imagined a drop of water containing a whole seething universe.

In performance works, dynamical events install themselves as traces of themselves. My bodily mathematics is a complex combination of sexual and gender dynamics, structures of female and male, personal autobiography, cultural border crossing, communal ruptures and overturns.

I am interested in the way Edmund Husserl has posed his question about the original essence of geometry. My interest arose from a point of view presented by Jacques Derrida in his introduction to a French translation of Husserl’s works. How do language and writing act as conditions of probability for ideal objects?
Shapes, which we call geometrical, have evolved as ideas in human thought, not in nature itself. My problem and task has been to link the forms of thought with the sensual world in my works.
Phenomenological thinking of space and spatiality, which includes, for instance, kinesthetic phenomena and their variations, is also something Edmund Husserl has given me. Other representatives of the phenomenological-existential tradition, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, have likewise provided important ground and starting points for my work.


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