Date of Award
5-11-2025
Date Published
June 2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Department of Art
Advisor(s)
Holly Greenburg
Second Advisor
Juan Juarez
Keywords
absurd;chaos;collaboration;humor;onion;vulnerability
Subject Categories
Arts and Humanities | Fine Arts
Abstract
The Idiot's Asylum: “What better place to do it than from my own grave?” is an essay that examines how vulnerability and collaboration operate as the throughlines of collective creativity. By utilizing live performance, large-scale installation, video, food, and humor, I explore how immersing my audience in a unique experience encourages them to bear witness to or physically engage in a social and vulnerable act of trust – especially within a state of uncertainty. I consider historical and cultural movements centered around radical play, humor, and participation such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Situationism, and feminist performance art to be foundational to my research. What does it mean to willingly engage in play inside an environment that is fallible, unpredictable, or chaotic? By entering a space that unravels conventional social order and invites confusion as a catalyst for creative collaboration, I seek to offer an earnest encounter—one where hierarchy dissolves and presence is shared freely among all who cross the threshold. What do these earnest encounters teach us about ourselves and our capacity to learn from and care for one another? Through my experiences as an artist and educator, along with personal grief and trauma, I have learned that survival is reciprocal, connected to radical acts of care and generosity, and inherently humorous. I recall a beautiful example of this through a saying from my great-grandmother: "There are no strangers at a dinner table." Simply meaning, if I am eating, you are eating—I am here so you can be too.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Stallings, Kara, "The Idiot's Asylum: What better place to do it than from my own grave?" (2025). Theses - ALL. 961.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/961
