Orange Dogs and Memory Responses: Creativity in Spectating and Remembering

A spectator sees a Laurie Anderson performance. All she remembers is an orange dog. There is no orange dog. Anderson decides to start documenting her work, in order to avoid orange dogs turning up here and there. But I feel the opposite way. I am provoked to pursue that orange dog to consider memory as the scene where we honour, play out and hold open the ethically freighted invitation extended by (some) performances, to contribute and to exceed the performance in our own imagination.

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In this chapter I define, contextualise and evaluate memory response as a creative-critical tool and experiment with it thinking about Cildo Meireles' Through (2008), resulting in Icebreaker (2014).