Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Saturday, 1 January 2011
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Context Responsive Curating - Document
Leeds University, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
2010 Module Leader: Peter Lewis
Semester 2 February - March -April - May 2010
for
Professor Vanalyne Green, Chair of Fine Art
v.green@leeds.ac.uk
0113 343 7633
Tuesdays, 4.00 pm to 6.00 pm
G19
The module will help you thematise your own work as an artist and/or curator and to give you the intellectual repertoire needed to situate your work and ideas in the public sphere. There are two working assumption of this module: One, that traditional approaches to visual display are inadequate in the context of marginal, orphaned, ephemeral, and raw spaces; two: that we will pay particular attention to exhibitions in which the accumulation of individual art works or proposals is privileged over a trajectory of single careers, and, three: that critical writing about art and visual display is worthy of an artistic project. Students should complete the module with the necessary insight, skill and experience to engage with a range of spaces and to curate ideas, as well as objects. Students will write a catalogue essay, or a piece of creative writing as a text for catalogue as well.
Assignments: you will have weekly brief explications. These texts are a place for you to rehearse your thoughts about the readings, lectures, and class exercises.
On-line web address: http://organisationofdirt.blogspot.com
This URL is accessible
Week 1: In and Around Curating
Synoptic overview of connoisseurship and the history of visual display, particularly as it obtains to the phenomenon of recent curatorial incursions in to fine art, globalisation, the biennialisation of art, and curating concepts.
What forms of knowledge are representative of the group of participants?
Read: readings listed on-line:
Quick overview of important bits here ("Towards a Situationist International")
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm#Toward%20a%20Situationist%20International
and here ("Theory of the Derive")
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
Second Life:
Assignment: text explication due, next class. Bring copies for everyone.
Week 2: Where Theory Meets Practice. 29, January, 07
Turn in text explications and discuss readings. Bring copies for everyone.
Interventions in and subversions of curation and visual display
The Situationist International: A Users Guide. Ford, Simon
In the spirit of Fluxus. Armstrong and Rothfuss, Catalogue (1993)
The benefits of public art: the polemics of permanent art in public places Sara Selwood., (1995).
Messhall: http://www.messhall.org/
Synagogue project: http://www.goethe.de/ges/rel/thm/en32969.htm
Further reading:
Public art - the new agenda. Valerie Holman. Ed. (1993)
Decadent: Public Art: Contentious Term & Contested Practice . David Harding. (1997)
Art in public: what, why and how . Susan Jones., (1992).
Situationist International Anthology. Kenn Knabb, (1981)
Sociopolitical Activism in Art. Wochenklausur. (2001)
Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner, Zone Books; ISBN: 1890951285; (June 15, 2002)
Messhall: http://www.messhall.org/
Synagogue project: http://www.goethe.de/ges/rel/thm/en32969.htm
First text explication due
Week 3: Art as Life, Life as Art
Histories and practices about the creation of situations and engagement with an audience.
The Revolution of Everyday life. Vaneigem, Raoul. (1998)
The Fluxus Reader. Friedman, Ken.
Art in Everyday Life. Montano, Linda. Station Hill Press. 1981
Further reading:
Society of the Spectacle. Debord, Guy.
Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Allan Kaprow, (2003)
Practicum: exploiting existing on-line services to create web design templates.
Assignment: On-line catalogue essay and bibliography
Week 4: Matter Out of Place
Assignment: second text explication
Deploying theories about the impure to negotiate alternative curatorial practices.
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Douglas, Mary. Routledge, 2002
Deconstruction, A Reader Macquillan, Martin (Ed.).
Simulations. Baudrillard, Jean. (1983)
Theory of The Avant-Garde, Peter Burger, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984
Further Readiing:
The Order of Things. Foucault, Michel.
October, No 79 (Special on Situationist International), Winter 1993
The Curator’s Egg. Schbert, K. (2000)
Assignment due: outline catalogue essay with bibliography
Week 5: Substance to Surface I
Assignment: web addresses for visual display of provisional objects
Turn in outline catalogue essay with bibliography
Practicum: Students bring in their chosen objects or images and agree on an initial arrangement in the space. Documentation of objects and spacial relationships. This documentation, along with the results of the tasks from weeks one through three, will form the initial content of the web exhibition which will go live in week six. Presentation and discussion about the mechanics of setting up and running an art show, (i.e., press, documentation, fund raising, placing and hanging work, lighting, invitations, mailing lists, signage and so on). Step-by-step information sheets will be distributed at the end of the session. The students will then be divided into groups specific to the tasks in hand and tasks will be delegated. These will include areas such as design, website maintenance, collating press contacts and mailing list, sourcing sponsorship, etc.
Theoretical context: Foucauldian theory and the study of museums.
AN Newsletter (Listings)
Arts Council Guidelines for writing Press Release
Catalogue: Situation Leeds Festival (2005)
Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11. Enwezor, Okwui. Cantz Editions (February 2003)
Beyond Recognition, Representation, Power and Culture, Craig Owens, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford,1992.
Further reading:
Black Dogs, Vitrine and Situation Leeds press releases.
Press coverage from Black Dogs and members (in Yorkshire Evening Post, Leeds Guide etc) and features on “Situation Leeds Festival” in national publications.
Catalogues: Vitrine (2005-2006)
Second text explication due
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Week 6: Reading Week
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Week 7: Substance to Surface II
Practicum: Writing press releases and the role of the catalogue in an audience’s understanding of an exhibition. Press release as literary genre. At the end of week six students will have an understanding of the importance of text in relation to art practice.
Theoretical context: Social histories of object making and display, gendering space.
Turn in web addresses for visual display of provisional objects
Sexuality & Space. Ed., Beatriz, Colomina. Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1996.
The Return of The Real, Hal Foster, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England, 1996.
Week 8: In the Viewers’ Shoes
Practicum: In week six the writing produced so far will go on-line to form part of the exhibition-in-progress/ lab. Reviewing what has been written and how it relates to the objects and the space. Will it be interesting and coherent to an audience? Is it consistent in its outlook? At this point the option will be made available to swap the original objects that form the content of the exhibition for more suitable material. With the experience and knowledge gained so far what would the ideal objects be and what is the brief for submissions?
Theoretical context: Narrativity and visual display
Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence. Ed. Brooks, Bruce and Wojtowicz, Robert. Princeton Arch. 2001
Straight Corridor Hollywood Cinema. Bordwell, David. 1998
SEMESTER BREAK
Week 9: Editing Appearances
Practicum: Objects brought in and situated within the space. This arrangement will constitute the final appearance of the show and will be arrived at through group discussion and consideration.
Theoretical context: The School of Project Art
Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Grosz, Elizabeth, Eisenman, Peter. The MIT Press. 2001.
Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser Fraser, Andrea.. ed. by Alexander Alberro. MIT press, 2005.
Week 10: Setting Up
Practicum: Installation of the show begins. Creating information sheets and signage, finalising any sponsorship, ensuring that e-mailouts and invitations are completed and are ready to go out as reminders. Web maintenance team to ensure that the web exhibition is fully up-to-date and operational. On-site team to ensure that everything is fully prepared and to iron out last-minute details.
Theoretical context: Catalogue essay assignments that deploy readings to contextualize theory within arts administration.
Week 11: Launch and Public Delivery
Seminar 5 - preparation
Week 7 presents the 5th Seminar in the module ' Context Responsive Curating'. This session will endeavour to begin a period of production in the areas of exhibition, website and blog, after completion of the first four contextual studies of the area of alternative practices, especially Situationism, Fluxus, Abject Art, and their curatorial adderss in contemporary manifestations.
These introductions to contemporary curating [outside the museum and mainstream] have adjusted the institution of exhibition in considerations of process. Session 5 [ week 7] is therefore a practical workshop to realising some of these processes, and their attributive practices, from the current position of interrogation of inheritances of avant-garde works.
The text explication, as requested in the last seminar, session 4, [week 5], will be handed in as part of formative assessment. It was also requested from each participant to set up and maintain a blog. Each student will present work in progress. The blog is like a draft or sketchbook and may contain research material in consideration of an essay [a catalogue or theoretical piece of writing]. The writing can take the form of a study of particular work[s] or articulate an artist position, in the form of a statement or as artists' writing. We will look at these to find certain themes that can be further developed.
A workshop will commence with the idea of the proposal for an exhibition. This might take a form of drawing / hand writing / collage - all manner of drawings and texts can be considered: from diagrams, notations, cartoons, collage, photo-montage, scribbles, manifestos, instructions for other works, theoretical proposals, notes, explications. These will be made in the session either from previous research material or from pure invention. Drawings may be shared in their authorship.
At the end of the session the proposals, made on paper, will be printed during the week to b/w A1 poster size to assemble as an exhibition to be mounted on the walls around teh space the following week 8, session 6. From this position, further discussion will be platformed around the exhibition, and its subsequent plural forms, such as designing display mechanisms, and introducing video, sound, and performance as supplements to an event. We will discuss the dates for such an event and launch of website.
These introductions to contemporary curating [outside the museum and mainstream] have adjusted the institution of exhibition in considerations of process. Session 5 [ week 7] is therefore a practical workshop to realising some of these processes, and their attributive practices, from the current position of interrogation of inheritances of avant-garde works.
The text explication, as requested in the last seminar, session 4, [week 5], will be handed in as part of formative assessment. It was also requested from each participant to set up and maintain a blog. Each student will present work in progress. The blog is like a draft or sketchbook and may contain research material in consideration of an essay [a catalogue or theoretical piece of writing]. The writing can take the form of a study of particular work[s] or articulate an artist position, in the form of a statement or as artists' writing. We will look at these to find certain themes that can be further developed.
A workshop will commence with the idea of the proposal for an exhibition. This might take a form of drawing / hand writing / collage - all manner of drawings and texts can be considered: from diagrams, notations, cartoons, collage, photo-montage, scribbles, manifestos, instructions for other works, theoretical proposals, notes, explications. These will be made in the session either from previous research material or from pure invention. Drawings may be shared in their authorship.
At the end of the session the proposals, made on paper, will be printed during the week to b/w A1 poster size to assemble as an exhibition to be mounted on the walls around teh space the following week 8, session 6. From this position, further discussion will be platformed around the exhibition, and its subsequent plural forms, such as designing display mechanisms, and introducing video, sound, and performance as supplements to an event. We will discuss the dates for such an event and launch of website.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
SEMINAR 4 - notes
Student notes 4
Preparatory notes and image bank from references to names of artists and authors from 4
The class commenced with an introduction that attempted to give an overview of the subject of taboo, danger, and the organisation of dirt. Abject Art, and its relation to the immolation and death of the avant-garde - was to be the ‘research’ subject under investigation as had been discussed the previous week. Research itself is placed under a kind of investigation. Joe Zane
A definition of terms. – Introduction with reference to books by Alain Badiou, ‘The Century’; and ‘Polemics’ Julia Kristeva, ‘The Power of Horror’ and the catalogue Abject Art curated in 1993 at Whitney Museum of American Art Paul McCarthy still from video Rebecca Guberman, Blood Work 1997
Mike Kelley, photograph from The Poltergeist, ectoplasm series
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v82/ai_15490868/
(Vanessa Beecroft, VB61 Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, performance, 2007. Image: Vanessa Beecroft. Courtesy of Galleria Massimo Minini & Galleria Lia Rumma).
At the Whitney Museum of American Art [concerning Darfur massacre]
Although this image is Wojnarowicz, its predecessor is Bunuel and Dali’s surrealist film ‘Chien Andalou’ 1929, which articulated in visual sequence an attack on the ‘Eye’ as sovereign sense.
David Wojnarowicz seems to refer here to the abattoir, arguably, in Blood of the Beasts, by Georges Franju, another fringe ‘surrealist’ film that marks and then crosses the border of the representable, between realism and the body, as a destroyed site, coinciding visual pleasure, with repulsion. Cinema, as a collective fascination, is drawn from the luminescence of the screen. The defence mechanism of keeping the certainty of a sphere of human reality is fearful - of collapsing into its ‘bad’ objects, and the threat of disappearing from experience. Crossing the experiencing border of consciousness, what defines and maintains subject from object, is therefore potent, to be forever lost. Here in Franju’s film the deliberate psychological impasse between identities of body / world, and male / female, is brought to the fore so as to test the limits of realism, from the state of abjection.
“Blood of the Beasts: Franju's Gendered Worlds
“Georges Franju's 1949 short Blood of the Beasts, a film usually noted for its grisly documentary footage of Paris' slaughterhouses, sets up from the start a dialectic between two worlds, the strictly masculine world of the abattoirs and the world of the surrounding slums, a sphere that the film links to femininity, which adds additional tension to what would otherwise be a static exposé of the horrific butchering practices at the Vaugiraud Slaughterhouse. This dialectic is established not simply in terms of the settings, the exterior world against the claustrophobic hothouse of the abattoirs, but through the film's use of two narrators, one male and one female, who take two distinct approaches and through the introduction of two differing visual conceptions [...] The feminine presence returns for two more sequences, once in a brief interlude and once at the film's conclusion, but both times it is depicted as something entirely separate from the masculine interior world. The dialectic between the film's two worlds is only approached directly (though ultimately left unresolved) in one extraordinary sequence that explicitly juxtaposes the interior and exterior spheres. In the middle of a documentary sequence, Georges Hubert informs us that "Henri Fournel can split an ox while the clock strikes noon." We see Fournel, his blade poised at the top of the ox hanging from the ceiling, while he puffs away on a cigarette. Suddenly the narration stops and the ambient noise is eliminated from the soundtrack, replaced by the sole sound of a tolling bell. Franju then cuts to an exterior shot of a public clock, before returning to Fournel. Then, while waiting for the twelve bells to chime, Franju returns us to the exterior, introducing a montage of scenes from the surrounding neighborhood, many exact quotes from the film's first sequence. Finally, the camera returns to Fournel who finishes cutting the ox and the masculine narration and ambient noises resume. By deliberately intercutting images from the exterior world, images we have already been taught to accept as feminine, with the explicitly masculine act of cutting an ox, Franju brings the tension between the two worlds to the film's forefront. That this manoeuvre fails to resolve this tension (the rest of the film reasserts the two clearly delineated spheres) makes it no less important a gesture at confronting the two gendered conceptions with each other and letting their inherent tensions play out.” Andrew Schenker at http://aschenker.blogspot.com/2007/08/blood-of-beasts-franjus-gendered-worlds.html
Excerpt from interview with Mike Kelley / Robert Storr [Art in America, 1994] on the iconography of the ‘wound’, gives an indication of complex symbolisations of the body and how Kelley keeps the material from its ideology. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v82/ai_15490868/pg_7/?tag=content;col1
RS: There's one piece where you have a Christ in Deposition and there's some text underneath that talks about the unity of mind, body and spirit. Then it says, "I devour you like a drink and food." On the one hand that sentence in context invokes the Host; on the other hand, it suggests a childlike devouring of the body of the parent,
MK: That work is called The Little Side Cave. It's taken directly from a Renaissance painting of the wound in Christ's side. I found this quotation from an 18th-century crackpot Christian cult in Europe whose sole focus was Christ's wounds. They fetishized them until they had all these various shrines dedicated to each of his wounds, and there they would have sort of Tantric sex orgies. Within this cult, the Christian symbolism was desublimated so that the fixation on the holes was made really clear. I was really interested in how cults that go to certain extremes sometimes go right back to the root meanings of things. But then I wanted to keep the mythic level, so when I used the Christ figure, I was describing the position of a naive youngster or someone who can't tell whether it's Jesus or Santa Claus or Lincoln because the signifiers are all the same--the long hair, the beard. They know it s a good, important, mythic father figure, but that don't know which one.
Then I thought about devouring and love, the body and getting swallowed up. These various mythic images were all beautifully mixed up, like in spiritualist symbologies, which I really love because symbols like that get so overloaded that they break into this frenzy of meaning. I like that. That's my aesthetic. It's about using these things until they reach a crisis point.
What is ‘abject art’ in relation to the ‘sacred’ and to ‘dirt’? A film was screened by Jean Rouch made in 1937, the Gold Coast, Africa, [titled ‘Les Maitres Fous']. This work would influence and determine how ethnographic filmmakers were researching certain information previously not clearly available in the West. Research like Jean Rouch’s used 16mm cameras and sound recording equipment. In this film, convulsions, possessions, violence, blood sacrifice and collective experience are acted out and performed as both ‘gifts’ and cathartic exorcisms of the body, and as a process of social bonding and psychic healing in sacred rites that involve shedding inhibition, especially in the ‘flesh’. The apparatus of recording these events are tied to the new technology of portable cameras, yet are not themselves the symptomatic products of technology. This becomes an important route through reading avant-gardism in regard to the psychic breakdown offered by the perspectival disordering of static spatial coordinates- recorded with new technological apparatus the experience of movement is realised through 360 degrees, 16mm in the field, performs as a 'realist' representational practice, whereby Rouch himself declares later his antipathy to video recordings’ part in a radical transformation to the obscenity of the digital media culture in the attenuated cognition of such analogue experiences.
David Wojnarowicz
A anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss, that were also attached to concurrent ideas in philosophy and writing, by Georges Bataille, concerning the economics of excess, the ‘accursed share’’
Reference to Excess
The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste. Crucial to the formulation of the theory was Bataille's reflection upon the phenomenon of potlatch. It is influenced by Marcel Mauss's The Gift, as well as by Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.
Volume 1 introduces the theory and provides historical examples of the functioning of general economy: human sacrifice in Aztec society, the monastic institutions of Tibetan Lamaism, the Marshall Plan, and many others. Volumes 2 and 3 extend the argument to eroticism and sovereignty, respectively. The book was first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1949, but was re-edited in 1967. It is collected in volume seven of Bataille's complete works.
Also to note are the works of Marcel Mauss’ concept of Gift exchange, and of the avant-garde concepts that underlined Surrealism, particularly in Andre Breton’s work such as ‘Mad Love’ [‘Beauty must be convulsive!’} that are sympathetic to some degree with Freudian and Jungian analysis of dream experiences; the loss of the ego’s constructed narrative and its architectures of reality, to the fluid discharges [taboo, danger, repulsion, the visceral body, the rotting corpse] belonging to realms of the underworld / unconscious. [See James Hillman’s 1970s book ‘The Dream and the Underworld’ for a more open textual reading of dreams, as signifiers of the soul: detailed imagery in death and decay is what it is in the detail.]
"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist
only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. "
Charles Baudelaire
(1821-1867)
Les Paradis artificiels # Artificial Paradise: On Hashish and Wine as Means of Expanding Individuality (1860)
# The Flowers of Evil (1857) Still from Teiji and Cherel Ito's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, edited from Maya Deren's original footage 1977. Black-and-white 16mm film with sound.
© Courtesy LUX Jean Rouch
Rouch reveals an enormous gulf between power and subjugation through military and state imperialism, in the regimentation and regulation of colonial power over the freedom insinuated by incarnate [bodily] possession in these rituals. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley take elements from the fictions of the period, such as ‘Heidi’ to show the malaise at work in Western narratives of family, that connote the misery and psychotic ensemble of so called ‘hygienic’ drives of both the micro-family and state imperialism. ‘Grandfather’ [below] is seen extracting turds from his own offspring with the help of ‘Heidi’, his grandniece....
David Wojnarowicz and Kiki Smith – [an unsold work]
The dream could provide a subject with direct and violent experiences of a sexual, violent nature, ‘mad’, in abject ‘material’ that the rational ‘dayworld’ excluded as part of its regimental constitutive reality. The polemic of Surrealism resided in creating abject scenarios, and thereby made aggressive, disruptive claims on reality’s so called human ‘rights’ [as coded and implemented in religious/ethical/moral/ family/ community and State laws] that tore a hole in these hierarchical rules of social behaviour. Carnival [in the proper sense] allocates a temporary space of disorder and ritual [indulging in the plebeian pleasures of bodily sharing: blood, sex, dirt, and sacrifice], yet always returned the participant [even mores so to be ‘sedimented’ into the regime of reality] in confirming the hygienic codes of everyday reality and the structures of power and patriarchy that enable the continuity of the state [in the broad sense, through patriarchy, a domination, that seeks through ideology to marginalise all who are categorically ‘dirty’, to be denied access to the Symbolic Order –for example, of an unhygienic sub-human race, female gender, mad, ‘black’ Other, et cetera].
Jacques Lacan had written concerning the subject’s abjection from the Symbolic Order in ways that disorient a reader, to actively seek profound disorientation on the basis of a subject’s dislocation between ‘two deaths’, neither in this place or any other; through ambiguities and contradictions in speaking, the subject is aware of the other’s voice speaking always already in herself: to ask where does the subject originate, if language displacement ‘buries’ the process of subjectivisation and symbolisation? The halted process of infantile symbolisation – might be productive alienation, dissociated from reality. [See Melanie Klein’s work on infantile psychology]
What defines reality? Slavoj Zizek on ideology– precisely the fictions that support the symbolic order [reality, the appearance sustained by fictionalisation]. A section of film from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds vividly presented an effect of overwhelming the reality, sustaining fragility as a matter of etiquettes, when taboo desire [incest? Perhaps something more base to fear, to do with subject collapsing the object of its desire and vice versa] enters into the frame. The film’s commercial success speaks of a situation that Mike Kelley later addresses, to do with social formation and therefore belies the need for ‘art’ as such as autonomous and by implication ‘higher’ in its thinking.
If the avant-garde wished to break up the hegemonic structure of social reality, why did it fail? Is it not that capitalist society precisely gears to incubate and foster rebellion and antagonism in order to prosper from it? Contemporary artists such as Merlin Carpenter, both act in protest and protection of bourgeois commissions. The very fabric of the avant-garde romance with revolution is sewn into the bourgeois’ taste and sold in the auction house for profit on another scale: surplus value and ‘absolute’ value.
Here is a section of press release provided by this Mayfair Gallery.
INTRINSIC VALUE
1 – 25 April 2009
The Opening: Tuesday, 31 March, 6 - 8pm
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce Merlin Carpenter’s Intrinsic Value as its forthcoming exhibition. This marks the fifth show in a series where the artist only produces the paintings in the midst of the show’s preview.
The Opening first took place in 2007 at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York and was followed by a show at Overduin & Kite in Los Angeles. The third The Opening, organised by Galerie Christian Nagel took place in a fashion store and a Mercedes Benz showroom in Berlin. In the latter show the artist painted the bare canvases
whilst reaching out of a moving car. Last year Carpenter also staged The Opening at Mitterrand+Sanz in Zurich.
Merlin Carpenter writes: “In the fifth of a series of shows called The Opening Merlin Carpenter will sign eleven blank canvases shortly before the opening. If the works are painted this will happen during the posh private view. Like Dalí signing hundreds of blank pieces of paper, or La Monte Young performing pieces before they
were composed, the empty canvases beg the question of what possible value these works have. The guarantee of the biography of the artist? The power of the gallery? Price-fixing or oligarchy? Energy stolen from the bohemians who decorate the room? Or something intrinsic to a work which evidently could be anything? A Matisse is still heralded by the auction houses as being of ‘intrinsic value’. For the contemporary art scene this
implies finding a source of value untouched by the recent speculative madness, whether it’s painting or critical authenticity. Meanwhile, with a gnawing sense of dread, capitalists are looking for a way to rebuild profits in the depression. Pay will have to go down and work hours increase for most people under the threat of starvation and Mad Max. Only Marx shows where value comes from (labour, surplus-value) and offers the
explanation for credit crises. Because of this, I wonder whether this time Marxism itself will be used to locate real value. Those cultural producers studying Marx, like Carpenter (me), could unwittingly provide fuel for further exploitation by explaining to government elites just how to reassert profitable conditions. Better to go on art strike, wander into your own show, outraged... ready to vandalise and destroy”.
Another artists working in a dualist capacity, or Janus-faced, to establishment and conservative power, an absolute value, is Joe Zane, also ‘critiquing’ schizophrenic/capitalist, as an irretrievable and undeniable situation, as if there is no alternative. Can one work inside the belly of the monster?
Joe Zane
.
Two examples were offered concerning how a hypothetical proposal although a pure proposal, yet might also insinuate its manufacture, by test of an impossibility, i.e. its enactment [and potential failure] would mark the work itself, as an axiom of the impossible. An axiom concerning the impossibility of speech acts: of the unheard, the excluded, the cancelled, the undecided, the abjected...etcetera
(Theresa Byrnes, Trace, performance, 2007. Image: Andrzej Liguz.) (Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Acts, 1963. Courtesy of the Artist)
Kafka’s Metamorphosis provided an instance of how the prosaic, bureaucratic, regulated world could provide the stage for the hypothetical, transformative, imaginary, and poetic, the ‘excess’ to disrupt function and production, the abject appears and destroys the ‘Heimlich’ of the sensible, without determinate cause. The ‘wandering excess’ of the avant-garde, having no cause / effect, no ‘genus’, having broken with classical form and logic, proves that if a transformation of properties occurs it is an instantiation of a new object.
PROPOSALS
The conditionality of a proposal was key to how the group could invent space by allying hypothetical ideas as proposed works within a world of utility and organisation, precisely the ‘organisation’ of ‘dirt’. A quotation fro Georges Bataille from his book ‘The Impossible’ articulated this contradictory tension between poetic conceit [death, violence, sex] and the motivation to logic, utility, and order, in overcoming the ‘right’ of truth.
Certain examples might offer a view of historical art works, from Jean Rouch to David Wojnarowicz that illustrated the shift from an avant-garde to a ‘post avant-garde’ perspective, bridged through abject works, which would address these questions of a transition. The reference to the work of avant-garde writer and artist David Wojnarowicz (who died as a result of AIDS in 1992), especially in Seven Miles a Second, the multiply-authored graphic novel of Wojnarowicz’s life, draws attention to manifold experiences of abjection: illness, including suffering, pain and anger–but significantly not excluding an investment in bodily pleasures. In Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, claims deriving from Jurgen Habermas, on the changes in 19th Century bourgeois art and consumption, to a 20th Century rejection of classical art, maintain that the avant-garde retained a romantic position on the body and upon direct experience. The internal conflict of the avant-garde produces its catastrophe, striving for an absolute aesthetic, yet facing defeat to the institution in its fierce opposition. The realignment of the institution never the less demands integration with artists' oppositions.
The avant-garde – Quoting Picabia [after Manet] – painting, which does not trust itself, is not painting
Questions to consider
1. What is a Proposal?
2. What is aesthetic autonomy?
3 What is Post-autonomy – abjection – relation? The Other in abject art - of the body –
4 Criticism of a myth of success: pseudo-avant-garde, Damien Hirst and the yBa - the sign of the avant-garde accommodated by the auction house
5 the emergence of photography, film and video as art practice
6 Conceptual art and social practice
Carolee Schneemann was a protégé of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose signature style of scratching film emulsion and choppy editing inspired Schneemann’s films like Fuses (1965) and Kitsch’s Last Meal (1973-76). But issues of the body and female subjectivity are always more central to Schneemann’s art than mere technical articulation, of formalist/ structuralist language. Schneemann became one of the first woman artists to articulate and eroticize her own body on film, while affirming the statement of feminist discourse: “the personal is political.” Writes Schneemann: Meat Joy is an erotic rite -- excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic -- shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the "sacred erotic." This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City.
Meat Joy: First performed May 29, 1964, Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris. Filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau. Editor: Bob Giorgio.
We referred also to the modern city that generated the historical conditions for avant-gardism and incubated extreme political ideologies that for example Vienna that ‘produced’ Freud, Marx, and Hitler at the turn of the 20th Century. The Austria/Hungarian Empire collapses after World War 1. The significance of this cultural moment also moved in the arts as avant-garde protest, promoting a symbolic life / violence of/to the body, emerging from catastrophe [violent social and political change]. Artists, Gustav Klimt, in decadence, Egon Schiele, in perversion, may be said to anticipate the Viennese School, and much later, Viennese Actionism, in the abject and visceral works of Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Arnulf Rainer, and most controversially, Otto Muhl, who sets his own utopian colony based on polygamous sexual ideology. In retrospect, given the superfluity of images of extreme sex and real violence in current media circulations, all these pseudo-radical anti ‘bourgeois’ gestures of revolt and repulsion seem suspect, as also symptomatic of failure to force change, characterised by a contemporary artist’s dramatic pretensions, like Vanessa Beecroft, staging in mimesis, the massacres at Darfur [see image above]
The question was asked about aesthetic vis-à-vis cultural change, revolution producing shifts in perception. Kristeva proposes a revolution of desire and politics, whereby there is redistribution, a disturbance, of the ‘sacred’ – “we are only free subjects in so far as we are strangers to ourselves.” [From an interview, published in Semiotexte] an either / or – suggesting that aesthetic change does not necessarily change perception on a generic scale, or social. The political / cultural interface itself would form the conditions for the emergence of works of art – such as Manet’s Olympia, or Jasper Johns’ Flag [1954-55] where certain historical and contemporary iconographies clash, or are placed into ‘abject’ relation with the Ideal form, the Classical eternal truths of art, or reveal ideology at work. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement) causing rupture with the established canon’s monological theory of perception of things and signs [e.g. flags] and abstractions, beliefs like Nation. Another question raised the issue of psychological interpretation on motives. Why would the artists who produced abject images and performances do that? A good example would be Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, re theorised by Rosalind Krauss from a feminist perspective, yet also pertaining to how cultural change is controlled by patriarchy. The psychology that produces the art is - or not – to be signalled as significant and important The artists as producer from a subjective expressive drive might also be viewed equally as an ideological construction. The established avant-garde interpretations about organic form, Native American ritual, the ‘surface’ plane, ‘action’, and the organic, ‘autonomy’ in nature and art [in painting], are disturbed by such analysis and no longer cohere. Key moments in cultural change would, for example, be in cognizance of the importance of political migrations, wars, [artists / refugees such as Arshile Gorky’s arriving in America, disturb homogeneity of the received social and cultural form and introduce new ideas about unity through skewing its internal relationship].
Other American models.
Roland Barthes writes of Cy Twombly: ‘ These gestures which aim to establish matter as fact are all associated with making something dirty...fact is more purely defined if it is not clean. The truth of things is best read in refuse.’
Robert Rauschenberg’s objects and collages move from this ‘gesture’ to a language of abject materiality, found in refuse and what has been used up...newspapers, cardboard, badly printed material from media.
Alan Kaprow writes on ‘Impurity’ ‘ a second-hand state, a mongrel at best, physically: therefore tainted, morally and metaphorically impossible by definition.
Georges Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ redefines pathos into bathos, the lowest point of experience.
Carole Schneeman reclaims the body in an exuberant sensory celebration of the flesh. The critical currency of ‘abject art’ weighed towards the male: Vito Acconci [masturbation in the gallery] Oppenheim [burning skin] which neglected and abjected female 'jouissance', in artists' concerns, as Hannah Wilke, Lynda Benglis and later Cindy Sherman, whose desirous look is filled with dread and disease. These ‘mannequins’ return the gaze as grotesque and assert their independence as objects of abject status.
Others such as David Hammons, Jimmie Durham, use low material in signifying strategies, to posit the Other, from racial and colonial stereotyping. these still are to be labelled as connoisseurships.
see http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/PHL20070517_4217/15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.askart.com/AskART/H/david_hammons/david_hammons.aspx&h=400&w=314&sz=18&tbnid=YUk9NZv-5GIi4M:&tbnh=254&tbnw=199&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDavid%2BHammons&hl=en&usg=__il4DcnzEeRDfT6i6kokOdDKRoLY=&ei=75SOS5jjKs-TjAevvaWiCw&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=3&ct=image&ved=0CAoQ9QEwAg
The fraught situation of ‘making and doing’ work is made more complex by what Habermas and Burger identify as the implosion of the avant-garde as a critical means to affirm – taking a step further, to implicate the body into the collection of ‘inorganic’ art objects. The bourgeois accommodate everything in both privileging their authority and enjoying criticism of it. Effect rests upon cause, in the world, yet ‘reality’ is precisely of the domain of the virtual, without cause / effect. Zizek refers to the psyche, in affirming the Real of the Virtual, not the Virtual of the Real, which leaves the body floating in bits, as leftovers of its real.
Preparatory notes and image bank from references to names of artists and authors from 4
The class commenced with an introduction that attempted to give an overview of the subject of taboo, danger, and the organisation of dirt. Abject Art, and its relation to the immolation and death of the avant-garde - was to be the ‘research’ subject under investigation as had been discussed the previous week. Research itself is placed under a kind of investigation. Joe Zane
A definition of terms. – Introduction with reference to books by Alain Badiou, ‘The Century’; and ‘Polemics’ Julia Kristeva, ‘The Power of Horror’ and the catalogue Abject Art curated in 1993 at Whitney Museum of American Art Paul McCarthy still from video Rebecca Guberman, Blood Work 1997
Mike Kelley, photograph from The Poltergeist, ectoplasm series
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v82/ai_15490868/
(Vanessa Beecroft, VB61 Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, performance, 2007. Image: Vanessa Beecroft. Courtesy of Galleria Massimo Minini & Galleria Lia Rumma).
At the Whitney Museum of American Art [concerning Darfur massacre]
Although this image is Wojnarowicz, its predecessor is Bunuel and Dali’s surrealist film ‘Chien Andalou’ 1929, which articulated in visual sequence an attack on the ‘Eye’ as sovereign sense.
David Wojnarowicz seems to refer here to the abattoir, arguably, in Blood of the Beasts, by Georges Franju, another fringe ‘surrealist’ film that marks and then crosses the border of the representable, between realism and the body, as a destroyed site, coinciding visual pleasure, with repulsion. Cinema, as a collective fascination, is drawn from the luminescence of the screen. The defence mechanism of keeping the certainty of a sphere of human reality is fearful - of collapsing into its ‘bad’ objects, and the threat of disappearing from experience. Crossing the experiencing border of consciousness, what defines and maintains subject from object, is therefore potent, to be forever lost. Here in Franju’s film the deliberate psychological impasse between identities of body / world, and male / female, is brought to the fore so as to test the limits of realism, from the state of abjection.
“Blood of the Beasts: Franju's Gendered Worlds
“Georges Franju's 1949 short Blood of the Beasts, a film usually noted for its grisly documentary footage of Paris' slaughterhouses, sets up from the start a dialectic between two worlds, the strictly masculine world of the abattoirs and the world of the surrounding slums, a sphere that the film links to femininity, which adds additional tension to what would otherwise be a static exposé of the horrific butchering practices at the Vaugiraud Slaughterhouse. This dialectic is established not simply in terms of the settings, the exterior world against the claustrophobic hothouse of the abattoirs, but through the film's use of two narrators, one male and one female, who take two distinct approaches and through the introduction of two differing visual conceptions [...] The feminine presence returns for two more sequences, once in a brief interlude and once at the film's conclusion, but both times it is depicted as something entirely separate from the masculine interior world. The dialectic between the film's two worlds is only approached directly (though ultimately left unresolved) in one extraordinary sequence that explicitly juxtaposes the interior and exterior spheres. In the middle of a documentary sequence, Georges Hubert informs us that "Henri Fournel can split an ox while the clock strikes noon." We see Fournel, his blade poised at the top of the ox hanging from the ceiling, while he puffs away on a cigarette. Suddenly the narration stops and the ambient noise is eliminated from the soundtrack, replaced by the sole sound of a tolling bell. Franju then cuts to an exterior shot of a public clock, before returning to Fournel. Then, while waiting for the twelve bells to chime, Franju returns us to the exterior, introducing a montage of scenes from the surrounding neighborhood, many exact quotes from the film's first sequence. Finally, the camera returns to Fournel who finishes cutting the ox and the masculine narration and ambient noises resume. By deliberately intercutting images from the exterior world, images we have already been taught to accept as feminine, with the explicitly masculine act of cutting an ox, Franju brings the tension between the two worlds to the film's forefront. That this manoeuvre fails to resolve this tension (the rest of the film reasserts the two clearly delineated spheres) makes it no less important a gesture at confronting the two gendered conceptions with each other and letting their inherent tensions play out.” Andrew Schenker at http://aschenker.blogspot.com/2007/08/blood-of-beasts-franjus-gendered-worlds.html
Excerpt from interview with Mike Kelley / Robert Storr [Art in America, 1994] on the iconography of the ‘wound’, gives an indication of complex symbolisations of the body and how Kelley keeps the material from its ideology. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v82/ai_15490868/pg_7/?tag=content;col1
RS: There's one piece where you have a Christ in Deposition and there's some text underneath that talks about the unity of mind, body and spirit. Then it says, "I devour you like a drink and food." On the one hand that sentence in context invokes the Host; on the other hand, it suggests a childlike devouring of the body of the parent,
MK: That work is called The Little Side Cave. It's taken directly from a Renaissance painting of the wound in Christ's side. I found this quotation from an 18th-century crackpot Christian cult in Europe whose sole focus was Christ's wounds. They fetishized them until they had all these various shrines dedicated to each of his wounds, and there they would have sort of Tantric sex orgies. Within this cult, the Christian symbolism was desublimated so that the fixation on the holes was made really clear. I was really interested in how cults that go to certain extremes sometimes go right back to the root meanings of things. But then I wanted to keep the mythic level, so when I used the Christ figure, I was describing the position of a naive youngster or someone who can't tell whether it's Jesus or Santa Claus or Lincoln because the signifiers are all the same--the long hair, the beard. They know it s a good, important, mythic father figure, but that don't know which one.
Then I thought about devouring and love, the body and getting swallowed up. These various mythic images were all beautifully mixed up, like in spiritualist symbologies, which I really love because symbols like that get so overloaded that they break into this frenzy of meaning. I like that. That's my aesthetic. It's about using these things until they reach a crisis point.
What is ‘abject art’ in relation to the ‘sacred’ and to ‘dirt’? A film was screened by Jean Rouch made in 1937, the Gold Coast, Africa, [titled ‘Les Maitres Fous']. This work would influence and determine how ethnographic filmmakers were researching certain information previously not clearly available in the West. Research like Jean Rouch’s used 16mm cameras and sound recording equipment. In this film, convulsions, possessions, violence, blood sacrifice and collective experience are acted out and performed as both ‘gifts’ and cathartic exorcisms of the body, and as a process of social bonding and psychic healing in sacred rites that involve shedding inhibition, especially in the ‘flesh’. The apparatus of recording these events are tied to the new technology of portable cameras, yet are not themselves the symptomatic products of technology. This becomes an important route through reading avant-gardism in regard to the psychic breakdown offered by the perspectival disordering of static spatial coordinates- recorded with new technological apparatus the experience of movement is realised through 360 degrees, 16mm in the field, performs as a 'realist' representational practice, whereby Rouch himself declares later his antipathy to video recordings’ part in a radical transformation to the obscenity of the digital media culture in the attenuated cognition of such analogue experiences.
David Wojnarowicz
A anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss, that were also attached to concurrent ideas in philosophy and writing, by Georges Bataille, concerning the economics of excess, the ‘accursed share’’
Reference to Excess
The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste. Crucial to the formulation of the theory was Bataille's reflection upon the phenomenon of potlatch. It is influenced by Marcel Mauss's The Gift, as well as by Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.
Volume 1 introduces the theory and provides historical examples of the functioning of general economy: human sacrifice in Aztec society, the monastic institutions of Tibetan Lamaism, the Marshall Plan, and many others. Volumes 2 and 3 extend the argument to eroticism and sovereignty, respectively. The book was first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1949, but was re-edited in 1967. It is collected in volume seven of Bataille's complete works.
Also to note are the works of Marcel Mauss’ concept of Gift exchange, and of the avant-garde concepts that underlined Surrealism, particularly in Andre Breton’s work such as ‘Mad Love’ [‘Beauty must be convulsive!’} that are sympathetic to some degree with Freudian and Jungian analysis of dream experiences; the loss of the ego’s constructed narrative and its architectures of reality, to the fluid discharges [taboo, danger, repulsion, the visceral body, the rotting corpse] belonging to realms of the underworld / unconscious. [See James Hillman’s 1970s book ‘The Dream and the Underworld’ for a more open textual reading of dreams, as signifiers of the soul: detailed imagery in death and decay is what it is in the detail.]
"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist
only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. "
Charles Baudelaire
(1821-1867)
Les Paradis artificiels # Artificial Paradise: On Hashish and Wine as Means of Expanding Individuality (1860)
# The Flowers of Evil (1857) Still from Teiji and Cherel Ito's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, edited from Maya Deren's original footage 1977. Black-and-white 16mm film with sound.
© Courtesy LUX Jean Rouch
Rouch reveals an enormous gulf between power and subjugation through military and state imperialism, in the regimentation and regulation of colonial power over the freedom insinuated by incarnate [bodily] possession in these rituals. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley take elements from the fictions of the period, such as ‘Heidi’ to show the malaise at work in Western narratives of family, that connote the misery and psychotic ensemble of so called ‘hygienic’ drives of both the micro-family and state imperialism. ‘Grandfather’ [below] is seen extracting turds from his own offspring with the help of ‘Heidi’, his grandniece....
David Wojnarowicz and Kiki Smith – [an unsold work]
The dream could provide a subject with direct and violent experiences of a sexual, violent nature, ‘mad’, in abject ‘material’ that the rational ‘dayworld’ excluded as part of its regimental constitutive reality. The polemic of Surrealism resided in creating abject scenarios, and thereby made aggressive, disruptive claims on reality’s so called human ‘rights’ [as coded and implemented in religious/ethical/moral/ family/ community and State laws] that tore a hole in these hierarchical rules of social behaviour. Carnival [in the proper sense] allocates a temporary space of disorder and ritual [indulging in the plebeian pleasures of bodily sharing: blood, sex, dirt, and sacrifice], yet always returned the participant [even mores so to be ‘sedimented’ into the regime of reality] in confirming the hygienic codes of everyday reality and the structures of power and patriarchy that enable the continuity of the state [in the broad sense, through patriarchy, a domination, that seeks through ideology to marginalise all who are categorically ‘dirty’, to be denied access to the Symbolic Order –for example, of an unhygienic sub-human race, female gender, mad, ‘black’ Other, et cetera].
Jacques Lacan had written concerning the subject’s abjection from the Symbolic Order in ways that disorient a reader, to actively seek profound disorientation on the basis of a subject’s dislocation between ‘two deaths’, neither in this place or any other; through ambiguities and contradictions in speaking, the subject is aware of the other’s voice speaking always already in herself: to ask where does the subject originate, if language displacement ‘buries’ the process of subjectivisation and symbolisation? The halted process of infantile symbolisation – might be productive alienation, dissociated from reality. [See Melanie Klein’s work on infantile psychology]
What defines reality? Slavoj Zizek on ideology– precisely the fictions that support the symbolic order [reality, the appearance sustained by fictionalisation]. A section of film from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds vividly presented an effect of overwhelming the reality, sustaining fragility as a matter of etiquettes, when taboo desire [incest? Perhaps something more base to fear, to do with subject collapsing the object of its desire and vice versa] enters into the frame. The film’s commercial success speaks of a situation that Mike Kelley later addresses, to do with social formation and therefore belies the need for ‘art’ as such as autonomous and by implication ‘higher’ in its thinking.
If the avant-garde wished to break up the hegemonic structure of social reality, why did it fail? Is it not that capitalist society precisely gears to incubate and foster rebellion and antagonism in order to prosper from it? Contemporary artists such as Merlin Carpenter, both act in protest and protection of bourgeois commissions. The very fabric of the avant-garde romance with revolution is sewn into the bourgeois’ taste and sold in the auction house for profit on another scale: surplus value and ‘absolute’ value.
Here is a section of press release provided by this Mayfair Gallery.
INTRINSIC VALUE
1 – 25 April 2009
The Opening: Tuesday, 31 March, 6 - 8pm
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce Merlin Carpenter’s Intrinsic Value as its forthcoming exhibition. This marks the fifth show in a series where the artist only produces the paintings in the midst of the show’s preview.
The Opening first took place in 2007 at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York and was followed by a show at Overduin & Kite in Los Angeles. The third The Opening, organised by Galerie Christian Nagel took place in a fashion store and a Mercedes Benz showroom in Berlin. In the latter show the artist painted the bare canvases
whilst reaching out of a moving car. Last year Carpenter also staged The Opening at Mitterrand+Sanz in Zurich.
Merlin Carpenter writes: “In the fifth of a series of shows called The Opening Merlin Carpenter will sign eleven blank canvases shortly before the opening. If the works are painted this will happen during the posh private view. Like Dalí signing hundreds of blank pieces of paper, or La Monte Young performing pieces before they
were composed, the empty canvases beg the question of what possible value these works have. The guarantee of the biography of the artist? The power of the gallery? Price-fixing or oligarchy? Energy stolen from the bohemians who decorate the room? Or something intrinsic to a work which evidently could be anything? A Matisse is still heralded by the auction houses as being of ‘intrinsic value’. For the contemporary art scene this
implies finding a source of value untouched by the recent speculative madness, whether it’s painting or critical authenticity. Meanwhile, with a gnawing sense of dread, capitalists are looking for a way to rebuild profits in the depression. Pay will have to go down and work hours increase for most people under the threat of starvation and Mad Max. Only Marx shows where value comes from (labour, surplus-value) and offers the
explanation for credit crises. Because of this, I wonder whether this time Marxism itself will be used to locate real value. Those cultural producers studying Marx, like Carpenter (me), could unwittingly provide fuel for further exploitation by explaining to government elites just how to reassert profitable conditions. Better to go on art strike, wander into your own show, outraged... ready to vandalise and destroy”.
Another artists working in a dualist capacity, or Janus-faced, to establishment and conservative power, an absolute value, is Joe Zane, also ‘critiquing’ schizophrenic/capitalist, as an irretrievable and undeniable situation, as if there is no alternative. Can one work inside the belly of the monster?
Joe Zane
.
Two examples were offered concerning how a hypothetical proposal although a pure proposal, yet might also insinuate its manufacture, by test of an impossibility, i.e. its enactment [and potential failure] would mark the work itself, as an axiom of the impossible. An axiom concerning the impossibility of speech acts: of the unheard, the excluded, the cancelled, the undecided, the abjected...etcetera
(Theresa Byrnes, Trace, performance, 2007. Image: Andrzej Liguz.) (Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Acts, 1963. Courtesy of the Artist)
Kafka’s Metamorphosis provided an instance of how the prosaic, bureaucratic, regulated world could provide the stage for the hypothetical, transformative, imaginary, and poetic, the ‘excess’ to disrupt function and production, the abject appears and destroys the ‘Heimlich’ of the sensible, without determinate cause. The ‘wandering excess’ of the avant-garde, having no cause / effect, no ‘genus’, having broken with classical form and logic, proves that if a transformation of properties occurs it is an instantiation of a new object.
PROPOSALS
The conditionality of a proposal was key to how the group could invent space by allying hypothetical ideas as proposed works within a world of utility and organisation, precisely the ‘organisation’ of ‘dirt’. A quotation fro Georges Bataille from his book ‘The Impossible’ articulated this contradictory tension between poetic conceit [death, violence, sex] and the motivation to logic, utility, and order, in overcoming the ‘right’ of truth.
Certain examples might offer a view of historical art works, from Jean Rouch to David Wojnarowicz that illustrated the shift from an avant-garde to a ‘post avant-garde’ perspective, bridged through abject works, which would address these questions of a transition. The reference to the work of avant-garde writer and artist David Wojnarowicz (who died as a result of AIDS in 1992), especially in Seven Miles a Second, the multiply-authored graphic novel of Wojnarowicz’s life, draws attention to manifold experiences of abjection: illness, including suffering, pain and anger–but significantly not excluding an investment in bodily pleasures. In Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, claims deriving from Jurgen Habermas, on the changes in 19th Century bourgeois art and consumption, to a 20th Century rejection of classical art, maintain that the avant-garde retained a romantic position on the body and upon direct experience. The internal conflict of the avant-garde produces its catastrophe, striving for an absolute aesthetic, yet facing defeat to the institution in its fierce opposition. The realignment of the institution never the less demands integration with artists' oppositions.
The avant-garde – Quoting Picabia [after Manet] – painting, which does not trust itself, is not painting
Questions to consider
1. What is a Proposal?
2. What is aesthetic autonomy?
3 What is Post-autonomy – abjection – relation? The Other in abject art - of the body –
4 Criticism of a myth of success: pseudo-avant-garde, Damien Hirst and the yBa - the sign of the avant-garde accommodated by the auction house
5 the emergence of photography, film and video as art practice
6 Conceptual art and social practice
Carolee Schneemann was a protégé of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose signature style of scratching film emulsion and choppy editing inspired Schneemann’s films like Fuses (1965) and Kitsch’s Last Meal (1973-76). But issues of the body and female subjectivity are always more central to Schneemann’s art than mere technical articulation, of formalist/ structuralist language. Schneemann became one of the first woman artists to articulate and eroticize her own body on film, while affirming the statement of feminist discourse: “the personal is political.” Writes Schneemann: Meat Joy is an erotic rite -- excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic -- shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the "sacred erotic." This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City.
Meat Joy: First performed May 29, 1964, Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris. Filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau. Editor: Bob Giorgio.
We referred also to the modern city that generated the historical conditions for avant-gardism and incubated extreme political ideologies that for example Vienna that ‘produced’ Freud, Marx, and Hitler at the turn of the 20th Century. The Austria/Hungarian Empire collapses after World War 1. The significance of this cultural moment also moved in the arts as avant-garde protest, promoting a symbolic life / violence of/to the body, emerging from catastrophe [violent social and political change]. Artists, Gustav Klimt, in decadence, Egon Schiele, in perversion, may be said to anticipate the Viennese School, and much later, Viennese Actionism, in the abject and visceral works of Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus, Arnulf Rainer, and most controversially, Otto Muhl, who sets his own utopian colony based on polygamous sexual ideology. In retrospect, given the superfluity of images of extreme sex and real violence in current media circulations, all these pseudo-radical anti ‘bourgeois’ gestures of revolt and repulsion seem suspect, as also symptomatic of failure to force change, characterised by a contemporary artist’s dramatic pretensions, like Vanessa Beecroft, staging in mimesis, the massacres at Darfur [see image above]
The question was asked about aesthetic vis-à-vis cultural change, revolution producing shifts in perception. Kristeva proposes a revolution of desire and politics, whereby there is redistribution, a disturbance, of the ‘sacred’ – “we are only free subjects in so far as we are strangers to ourselves.” [From an interview, published in Semiotexte] an either / or – suggesting that aesthetic change does not necessarily change perception on a generic scale, or social. The political / cultural interface itself would form the conditions for the emergence of works of art – such as Manet’s Olympia, or Jasper Johns’ Flag [1954-55] where certain historical and contemporary iconographies clash, or are placed into ‘abject’ relation with the Ideal form, the Classical eternal truths of art, or reveal ideology at work. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement) causing rupture with the established canon’s monological theory of perception of things and signs [e.g. flags] and abstractions, beliefs like Nation. Another question raised the issue of psychological interpretation on motives. Why would the artists who produced abject images and performances do that? A good example would be Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, re theorised by Rosalind Krauss from a feminist perspective, yet also pertaining to how cultural change is controlled by patriarchy. The psychology that produces the art is - or not – to be signalled as significant and important The artists as producer from a subjective expressive drive might also be viewed equally as an ideological construction. The established avant-garde interpretations about organic form, Native American ritual, the ‘surface’ plane, ‘action’, and the organic, ‘autonomy’ in nature and art [in painting], are disturbed by such analysis and no longer cohere. Key moments in cultural change would, for example, be in cognizance of the importance of political migrations, wars, [artists / refugees such as Arshile Gorky’s arriving in America, disturb homogeneity of the received social and cultural form and introduce new ideas about unity through skewing its internal relationship].
Other American models.
Roland Barthes writes of Cy Twombly: ‘ These gestures which aim to establish matter as fact are all associated with making something dirty...fact is more purely defined if it is not clean. The truth of things is best read in refuse.’
Robert Rauschenberg’s objects and collages move from this ‘gesture’ to a language of abject materiality, found in refuse and what has been used up...newspapers, cardboard, badly printed material from media.
Alan Kaprow writes on ‘Impurity’ ‘ a second-hand state, a mongrel at best, physically: therefore tainted, morally and metaphorically impossible by definition.
Georges Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ redefines pathos into bathos, the lowest point of experience.
Carole Schneeman reclaims the body in an exuberant sensory celebration of the flesh. The critical currency of ‘abject art’ weighed towards the male: Vito Acconci [masturbation in the gallery] Oppenheim [burning skin] which neglected and abjected female 'jouissance', in artists' concerns, as Hannah Wilke, Lynda Benglis and later Cindy Sherman, whose desirous look is filled with dread and disease. These ‘mannequins’ return the gaze as grotesque and assert their independence as objects of abject status.
Others such as David Hammons, Jimmie Durham, use low material in signifying strategies, to posit the Other, from racial and colonial stereotyping. these still are to be labelled as connoisseurships.
see http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/PHL20070517_4217/15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.askart.com/AskART/H/david_hammons/david_hammons.aspx&h=400&w=314&sz=18&tbnid=YUk9NZv-5GIi4M:&tbnh=254&tbnw=199&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDavid%2BHammons&hl=en&usg=__il4DcnzEeRDfT6i6kokOdDKRoLY=&ei=75SOS5jjKs-TjAevvaWiCw&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=3&ct=image&ved=0CAoQ9QEwAg
The fraught situation of ‘making and doing’ work is made more complex by what Habermas and Burger identify as the implosion of the avant-garde as a critical means to affirm – taking a step further, to implicate the body into the collection of ‘inorganic’ art objects. The bourgeois accommodate everything in both privileging their authority and enjoying criticism of it. Effect rests upon cause, in the world, yet ‘reality’ is precisely of the domain of the virtual, without cause / effect. Zizek refers to the psyche, in affirming the Real of the Virtual, not the Virtual of the Real, which leaves the body floating in bits, as leftovers of its real.
Seminars 1-4: essay titles - suggested fields
1. What artists can be nominated as categorically dealing with abject subjects? Provide examples and descriptions of specific works.
2. Can a trajectory be drawn from early modernism through the avant-garde to 'abject art'? Name works and their contexts.
3. By most accounts, collage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in the 20th Century. Discuss.
4. What relationship does the avant-garde have to the subjects of taboo, danger, and the impure?
Compare the work of avant-garde film makers with video artists of the contemporary period. What conclusions can be drawn about intentions: of methods, representations, and subjects.
5. Is there an argument for video as a preference to other media taken by artists dealing with abject material and the body? Give examples of practices.
6. Can there be considered a difference in regard to the visualisation of Spectacle, as theorised by Guy Debord, and one operating as 'haptic' theatre in the performances of Abject art? How does 'ritual' play a part in both categories.
7. Jean Baudrillard has written of simulation as 'the ecstacy of comminication': the sacrifical logic of consumption, gift and expenditure, potlatch, and the accursed portion. Once belonging to the realm of the 'sacred' what 'qualities' of the organic have changed in the process of desacrilisation? What is the simulacrum? What disappears?
8. What relation does abject art have to feminist discourse and practice? Name artists and define differences in their approach.
9. Alain Badiou writes in 'The Century' of the 'passion of the real? What does this mean, in relation to the historical work of avant-garde artists? How do the contingencies of the present affect practice?
10. Is there any conclusion to be drawn from the failures of the avant-garde and the rise of the art industry? How do contemporary artists work in the scene of the globalised market, and the field of electronic communication?
11. How does a museum programme events such as performance art? Give examples and describe the reasons for adaption to new conditions in presentations.
12. What did the Pompidou Centre [1977] change by its architectural monument, in terms of how a museum might function as part of a social fabric?
2. Can a trajectory be drawn from early modernism through the avant-garde to 'abject art'? Name works and their contexts.
3. By most accounts, collage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in the 20th Century. Discuss.
4. What relationship does the avant-garde have to the subjects of taboo, danger, and the impure?
Compare the work of avant-garde film makers with video artists of the contemporary period. What conclusions can be drawn about intentions: of methods, representations, and subjects.
5. Is there an argument for video as a preference to other media taken by artists dealing with abject material and the body? Give examples of practices.
6. Can there be considered a difference in regard to the visualisation of Spectacle, as theorised by Guy Debord, and one operating as 'haptic' theatre in the performances of Abject art? How does 'ritual' play a part in both categories.
7. Jean Baudrillard has written of simulation as 'the ecstacy of comminication': the sacrifical logic of consumption, gift and expenditure, potlatch, and the accursed portion. Once belonging to the realm of the 'sacred' what 'qualities' of the organic have changed in the process of desacrilisation? What is the simulacrum? What disappears?
8. What relation does abject art have to feminist discourse and practice? Name artists and define differences in their approach.
9. Alain Badiou writes in 'The Century' of the 'passion of the real? What does this mean, in relation to the historical work of avant-garde artists? How do the contingencies of the present affect practice?
10. Is there any conclusion to be drawn from the failures of the avant-garde and the rise of the art industry? How do contemporary artists work in the scene of the globalised market, and the field of electronic communication?
11. How does a museum programme events such as performance art? Give examples and describe the reasons for adaption to new conditions in presentations.
12. What did the Pompidou Centre [1977] change by its architectural monument, in terms of how a museum might function as part of a social fabric?
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