Jacob Wren, Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

 

My performance work has been a search for authenticity, but I don’t think authenticity is something that exist. A work of art cannot be authentic, it can only feel authentic for certain people at certain times. Which is to say that, for me, authenticity is a feeling and about what we feel. In much the same way one might feel sad or feel joy, one can feel something to be authentic. It is a word that suggests engagement and connection. If you feel that Beyoncé is authentic and I don’t, this simply means that for you Beyoncé is authentic and for me less so. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about Beyoncé. However, what works of art we feel to be authentic can also tell us a great deal about how we see things, what we value, and can at times also potentially change how we see and feel about the world that surrounds us.

I’m behind on everything, but finally working my way through writer and “maker of eccentric performances” Jacob Wren’s Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2018), composed as a combination of criticism, first-person reportage and archive, surrounding the first two decades of his participation in PME-ART, the collaborative interdisciplinary collective he helped found in Montreal. Moving from storytelling, lingering doubt, alternate voices and blistering self-critique, he writes of a growing disillusionment after a decade of working in Toronto, prompting him to head into Montreal, and starting the beginnings of a sequence of connections, collaborations, conversations and conflicts that opened up a wealth of writing, performance and possibility for both him and his work. “I have always been interested in what it means to stand in front of a room full of people, often strangers, who are watching you, and to do so with as little armouring as possible, not hiding the fact that the situation is potentially unnerving or even nerve-racking, being as vulnerable as possible without turning vulnerability into any kind of drama or crutch. I often say that I personally find performing to be humiliating, and do my best, while performing, not to conceal this aspect of my experience. I often wonder why I have spent the past thirty years of my life obsessively working on this particular question and practice. Perhaps it is only because it is a kind of impossible undertaking, always leaving me artistically destabilized and therefore always leaving me wanting more.”

If you aren’t aware of Jacob Wren, he’s the author of a mound of award-winning novels and plays, including Unrehearsed Beauty (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1998), Families are Formed Through Copulation (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2005), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (Pedlar Press, 2010), Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and a Globe and Mail best book of 2014; Book*hug Press, 2014); Rich and Poor (finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a Globe and Mail best book of 2016; Book*hug Press, 2016) and the new novel, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*hug Press, 2024), out any minute now. There’s something really fascinating in how Wren composed this recollection, offering his take on certain situations, collaborations and performances, as well as allowing a number of his collaborators their own opportunities to offer their own perspectives, after reading through an early draft of the manuscript. Working from within the very idea of collaboration, Wren doesn’t wish his to be the only perspective, certainly. If you don’t know where else to begin with the work of Jacob Wren, this might be the perfect point.

I have been making performances and literature for almost thirty years and, despite or perhaps because of my incessant doubts, I apparently have not quit. I constantly wonder what keeps me going. In one sense I feel that when you’re an artist the only way to keep going is to believe you have no choice. Believing one has no choice is also a form of privilege.