Charles de Agustin

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Mission Drift follows a nonprofit art gallery worker who tries to stay afloat when a horny sadomasochistic philanthropist infiltrates the organization.

Video, sound, text. Seminar room, bullet points. Narrator, gestures, QR code. Distance from white guilt, malaise. Scales of death, datedness. Zoom out, in, out (as nobody is pure, the contradictions in striving toward an ethics of practice are insurmountable). Big drop. Scream.

A liberal philanthropist yearns for his next fling with radical politics.

A supernatural road trip in the Scottish village of Foyers, the American hamlet of Grovers Mill, and reading breaks in an Amsterdam film library. Difficulties between loving your work, working at loving, making a living. Language piles up, crashes down, and maybe becomes something else.

Part essay, part diary, part panic attack. A narrator attempts to attribute the gentrification of New Brunswick, New Jersey since the 1970s to the longtime stature of Johnson & Johnson’s world headquarters in the American city, but is possessed by the past civic-corporate figures in question through the urban space.

In Charles Prigmore’s Swamp, I take on the titular character of Charles Prigmore: an emerging interdisciplinary artist who recently moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey to connect with his roots and start a new art gallery. Following in the footsteps of the late-1600s Prigmore colonizers, Charles Prigmore proudly furthers problems of gentrification in his city and cultural appropriation in general. Appropriation also exists on the level of the performance script itself, as I lifted the majority of its contents directly from interviews (e.g. Jordan Wolfson, Jill Medvedow), local news articles (early as 1854), essays (Danto’s “The Artworld”), song lyrics and more, sometimes in full-paragraph chunks. The work uses the traditional podium/audience/projection lecture setup as a starting point, but quickly emerges as a work of theater dependent upon a wide range of edited/live media, including videos, websites and computer interfaces.

Interior Shot is composed of the artist’s recent surgery footage and breathing exam audio, alongside poetry on grief, work, luck, and time.