THERE IS SOMETHING VERY REASSURING—;for someone whose attention, unless riveted by something truly compelling, tends to wander—about being told by her interviewee, “I pride myself on my short attention span.” Chances are, though, Dawn Kasper’s span of attention, however brief, is a whole lot more intense than yours or mine. As anyone who has followed Kasper’s work—from its earliest manifestations in UCLA’s New Genres program, to the video of her performance “Music for Hoarders,” currently on view at the Pasadena Armory, to her upcoming Whitney Biennial performance—knows, Kasper does not shy away from the “big questions”: love, death, good, evil, intention, object relationships, the possibility of communion with the material world, personal transcendence. The distinction is that Kasper’s responses to these questions are performed within a framework of radical contingency. While carefully prepared and accompanied by props, her performances are “open-ended” in almost every sense, with many variables in play. There is always the possibility that something may go wrong, or at least turn into something that was not quite what the artist envisioned. Kasper is the sort of artist that relishes and seizes upon those possibilities.

After an exhausting month of work in the lead-up to her departure for New York, Kasper stole some time away from her intense preparations for the upcoming Whitney performance to talk about what had led her there.

Kasper’s antecedents are numerous: Chris Burden, to be sure; but also Kurt Schwitters, the Fluxus group, Allen Kaprow, Vito Acconci, Howard Fried, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, the late Mike Kelley and others.

I mentioned that my first encounter with her work had been a performance at the Circus Gallery in which Kasper rather spectacularly “died.”

“It’s still very much a part of my practice. But I’ve acquired knowledge in my quest since I began that [“Death”] series at UCLA that’s afforded me some fundamental insights.”

She describes learning of a friend’s suicide as “an out of body experience—it turned me inside out,” yet also as a “gift.” (“I can only move forward because I’m alive.”) A friend recommended Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. “That book has a huge impact on my thinking right now…the unspoken language of grief and loss.” There is also the fascination of a kind of taboo knowledge. “It’s like staring at the sun—the greatest light, but dangerous, too.”

The notion of taboo or proscribed perceptions and apprehensions also play into Kasper’s fascination with the “look” of death and the psychological and interior spaces light can’t penetrate. During one of our first pre-interview exchanges, Kasper rhapsodized over the Weegee survey at MOCA. James Welling first introduced her to Weegee’s sensational crime-scene and forensic work while Kasper was studying photography at UCLA. But Kasper’s fascination with the nexus between “look,” act and fact goes back much farther—to her undergraduate studies at Virginia Commonweatlth University and even earlier. Growing up near Washington, D.C., the Hirshhorn Museum, along with its Smithsonian neighbors, was like a “church” to her, and from her teenage years forward she was exposed to important contemporary and 20th-century art that would influence her direction, including, significantly, that of George Segal, Ron Mueck, Chuck Close, and Pipilotti Rist.

Although her concentration at VCU was sculpture, Kasper had already made the conceptual leap into performance. “Gilbert and George’s “Singing Sculpture” had a huge impact on me. It blew my mind—that I could utilize my physical presence and expose it as a sculpture, that I could utilize my body as a tool.”

In one sense, Kasper had already quite literally embodied her own “singing sculpture,” as the front person in a high school punk band that played the D.C. area. She was already, as she puts it later in our conversation, “testing the limits of spectacle.” She dabbled in performance at VCU and was encouraged to apply to graduate school; but was skeptical about the connection between what she had seen of digitized and abstract documentation of artists like Burden and Acconci and the energy and immediacy of what she wanted to realize in her own work.

“I fear commitment [in general]; and so I feared calling myself a performance artist. I went to UCLA with the hope of developing a more concrete way of furthering my practice. I wanted to know fundamentally what I had inside me, and how I could convey it and nurture it. What did it need?”

Star-struck by Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins and Paul McCarthy, her initial entrée into the process was via the tools of documentation, auditing courses with both Welling and Allen Ruppersberg. “I started out by understanding what I could do technically [in photography and video], and I still use those tools to this day.” She worked with both Burden and McCarthy while at UCLA, and later invited Jason Rhoades and Pipilotti Rist to be on her graduation committee. “Some of the best advice I came away with was from Jason Rhoades: ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing. Just stay consistent.'”

Watching a performance like “Music for Hoarders,” it is easy to see the affinities between Kasper and the creator of “Black Pussy Soirées” and “Swedish Erotica and Fiero Parts.” I asked her about the sense of meter and duration in her performances—the staccato rhythms and almost abrupt finality of some, versus the more discursive, extended quality of others. Is there an implicit narrative on one level or another to some of her performances? “I hope with respect to the audience that there is a narrative, or some form of threading. The narrative could be my life or the narrative could be my art, depending upon the day. The [Allan] Kaprow take is that the fundamental narrative lies on the border of art and life. That’s my narrative—the blurring of it.”

I asked Kasper if her more extended “big question” performances could be compared to the discursive essays of a Montaigne, or if the “rhythm” of some of those performances owed something to a quasi-Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis line if philosophical inquiry. “I have a kind of structure that starts with the fundamental understanding of a middle- school science paper. My father is a physicist, and I grew up around these sorts of systems and structures and graphics. You have this thesis or hypothesis, and conduct experiments to prove or disprove it. In “Repeater,” I performed an action or experiment that would illustrate my findings on inertia and anger. And the results were very electric and very dangerous, and the end result was a car accident. But there was so much more happening in that piece. It became the catalyst to the performance I’m preparing right now for the Whitney. That fundamental structure has been my fail-safe.

“I’m by no means versed or considering [these questions] academically. I pride myself on longing to see answers. To want to see what I look like dead—it’s so vain—I’ll never see it. Who’s to say that anything I say makes any kind of sense to anyone?

“We only know what we know. Who am I to walk into a room and say, ‘This is who I am?’ I utilize my physical presence and expose it as a sculpture, but I like the idea of suspension of disbelief. I can’t not be who I am, but I like to question, ‘How am I not myself?’ I’m also the art. I’m painting myself into corners, and it gets scary and vulnerable.”

For Kasper, the big questions, not unlike most of the props in her performances, are the stuff of everyday life. “This is my route, my philosophical experiment. There are going to be variables that aren’t going to work. But I’m open and able to think on my feet and reach, to pick up on it or not.”

ForYourArt has invited Dawn Kasper to create a 24-hour durational performance event for Around the Clock: 24 Hour Donut City (April 20-21) to coincide with the screening of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film, The Clock, atLACMA. If you would like to take part, please come by ForYourArt at 6020 Wilshire Blvd. sometime between 10am and 5pm the week of March 4th-7th.