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?
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
SEMINAR NOTES 1-3 : WEBSITES
Seminar notes – 1-3
Preparatory notes for students
We will be looking at websites, and online mailing services to gather information and particular examples of press releases; the kinds of projects that are currently distributed and advertised not only online but through various channels, such as invitation cards, and social networks/ communities. www.e-artnow.org and www.e-flux.com will be examined to gauge the currency and rhetoric of an art project as an enterprise. We will consider the alternative, critical and transgressive models discussed in 1 and 2 sessions against these commercial evidences of the industrialisation and scale of market operations. The seminar will also consider the exhibition space as info-centre, or archive and platform for debate Discussion will be encouraged in preparation of text explications / presentations in the following week.
student group at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in collaboration with Leeds Metropolitan University internet project and transmitted events
Points to consider for catalogue essays and proposal of projects
1. The work of Guy Debord and George Maciunas represent attitudes that define Situationism and Fluxus. Where do these intersect, and where do they differ?
2. The movement from Lettrism to Situationism occurs in the mid 1950s. What might be determined as originary motives in each movement, and how did these manifest themselves as a politics of the aesthetic?
3. The origin of Situationsim is complex, drawing on many historical models into effective contemporary conditions. What can be nominated as key moments and what events can be exemplified as representing the period of activity?
4. What are the inheritances of the work of John Cage and the work of Black Mountain College in 1950s/60s?
5. Can trajectories be drawn from the early modern period, Dada, Schwitters’ Merz, through Fluxus and Situationsim to the present? If so, how do they form the antagonist debates of the contemporary museum and the domestic space?
6. How does public manifestation and event in the contemporary field differ from sanctioned ‘public art’? What arguments can be upheld in regard to independent curating and the ‘group’ as an alternative exhibition form, operating without state funding? How does state funding enter the ‘independent’ artists and curator into the framework of the art market?
7. Has Situationism been influential on the way a museum structures its public programmes? In what ways?
8. What are the ‘new agendas’ of public art and are the criteria of commissions at odds with the intervention of control spaces that marked the Fluxus and Situationist ideology?
9. What examples of groups of artists can be described that move Fluxus into the present as initiatives? What differentiates the ‘artist-run space’ from dealer led galleries and the ideology of the ‘white cube’ ? Can the ‘White Cube’ absorb the artists-run space? Give examples.
10. The binary relation ‘art/life’ might define the work of artists and their institutions’ interface with the public as a change from a studio base and the ‘artists’ as sole owner of her work. The experimental space comes into play. Entertainment triangulates this relationship and motivates art and media culture. What ramifications of this third aspect now mark an end to the avant-garde model?
11. Simon Ford has written that Situationism ostensibly marked an end, rather than a beginning. Do you agree with this?
12. Are ‘art fairs’ and ‘biennales’ representative of the new projects that derive from Flux/Situation? Do the institutions of art destroy the fabric of intent of independent work if inclusive in the market? What is marginalised in this process?
13. What relationship does ‘punk’ have, if any, to the Situationist International?
14. The dematerialisation of the art – object, as argued by Lucy Leopard, has some resonance with the thinking that accompanies 1960s and 1970s projects by diverse artists, as also providing a rationale that links Fluxus to conceptual art and what is considered also now academic. What post conceptual strategies can be nominated and offer examples as curatorial ones?
15. Magazines provide articles and create archives of a kind of documentation not offered by the exclusivity of the catalogue essay. In the 70's and 80's, very little had been published on public art. Few, if any books, and no magazines were devoted to it. Herve Bechy, "Les Dossiers de l'Art Public" magazine continues now as a web site www.art-public.com. What can be gathered as public art, if much of the work of performance that it entails, disappears? What remits do museums and public art institutions, like Art Angel Trust offer, and what do they disguise? www.davidharding.net/publicart/
16. Can an archive be considered as a work of art? From Duchamp to Maciunas and beyond the archive stands in as art, and rests between hermetic and communicative, or commemorative tendencies. Can some examples be offered and compared?
17. How does a public archive work?
18. What can protect artists from being coopted into the power hegemony of art and the institution, as Foucault has written of ‘micro-politics’ in diffusion of central agencies. How does the work of philosophers, like Alain Badiou, condition the work of artists ?
19. What kind of cinematic works may be assigned to Situationism and Fluxus?
20. The proposal, as an architecture that counters the ‘plan’ [ Cedric Proice] may be a conceptual realisation. What does Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ do to architecture that allies it with Situationsim, and how does art/architecture unfold as public space and event?
Preparatory notes for students
We will be looking at websites, and online mailing services to gather information and particular examples of press releases; the kinds of projects that are currently distributed and advertised not only online but through various channels, such as invitation cards, and social networks/ communities. www.e-artnow.org and www.e-flux.com will be examined to gauge the currency and rhetoric of an art project as an enterprise. We will consider the alternative, critical and transgressive models discussed in 1 and 2 sessions against these commercial evidences of the industrialisation and scale of market operations. The seminar will also consider the exhibition space as info-centre, or archive and platform for debate Discussion will be encouraged in preparation of text explications / presentations in the following week.
student group at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in collaboration with Leeds Metropolitan University internet project and transmitted events
Points to consider for catalogue essays and proposal of projects
1. The work of Guy Debord and George Maciunas represent attitudes that define Situationism and Fluxus. Where do these intersect, and where do they differ?
2. The movement from Lettrism to Situationism occurs in the mid 1950s. What might be determined as originary motives in each movement, and how did these manifest themselves as a politics of the aesthetic?
3. The origin of Situationsim is complex, drawing on many historical models into effective contemporary conditions. What can be nominated as key moments and what events can be exemplified as representing the period of activity?
4. What are the inheritances of the work of John Cage and the work of Black Mountain College in 1950s/60s?
5. Can trajectories be drawn from the early modern period, Dada, Schwitters’ Merz, through Fluxus and Situationsim to the present? If so, how do they form the antagonist debates of the contemporary museum and the domestic space?
6. How does public manifestation and event in the contemporary field differ from sanctioned ‘public art’? What arguments can be upheld in regard to independent curating and the ‘group’ as an alternative exhibition form, operating without state funding? How does state funding enter the ‘independent’ artists and curator into the framework of the art market?
7. Has Situationism been influential on the way a museum structures its public programmes? In what ways?
8. What are the ‘new agendas’ of public art and are the criteria of commissions at odds with the intervention of control spaces that marked the Fluxus and Situationist ideology?
9. What examples of groups of artists can be described that move Fluxus into the present as initiatives? What differentiates the ‘artist-run space’ from dealer led galleries and the ideology of the ‘white cube’ ? Can the ‘White Cube’ absorb the artists-run space? Give examples.
10. The binary relation ‘art/life’ might define the work of artists and their institutions’ interface with the public as a change from a studio base and the ‘artists’ as sole owner of her work. The experimental space comes into play. Entertainment triangulates this relationship and motivates art and media culture. What ramifications of this third aspect now mark an end to the avant-garde model?
11. Simon Ford has written that Situationism ostensibly marked an end, rather than a beginning. Do you agree with this?
12. Are ‘art fairs’ and ‘biennales’ representative of the new projects that derive from Flux/Situation? Do the institutions of art destroy the fabric of intent of independent work if inclusive in the market? What is marginalised in this process?
13. What relationship does ‘punk’ have, if any, to the Situationist International?
14. The dematerialisation of the art – object, as argued by Lucy Leopard, has some resonance with the thinking that accompanies 1960s and 1970s projects by diverse artists, as also providing a rationale that links Fluxus to conceptual art and what is considered also now academic. What post conceptual strategies can be nominated and offer examples as curatorial ones?
15. Magazines provide articles and create archives of a kind of documentation not offered by the exclusivity of the catalogue essay. In the 70's and 80's, very little had been published on public art. Few, if any books, and no magazines were devoted to it. Herve Bechy, "Les Dossiers de l'Art Public" magazine continues now as a web site www.art-public.com. What can be gathered as public art, if much of the work of performance that it entails, disappears? What remits do museums and public art institutions, like Art Angel Trust offer, and what do they disguise? www.davidharding.net/publicart/
16. Can an archive be considered as a work of art? From Duchamp to Maciunas and beyond the archive stands in as art, and rests between hermetic and communicative, or commemorative tendencies. Can some examples be offered and compared?
17. How does a public archive work?
18. What can protect artists from being coopted into the power hegemony of art and the institution, as Foucault has written of ‘micro-politics’ in diffusion of central agencies. How does the work of philosophers, like Alain Badiou, condition the work of artists ?
19. What kind of cinematic works may be assigned to Situationism and Fluxus?
20. The proposal, as an architecture that counters the ‘plan’ [ Cedric Proice] may be a conceptual realisation. What does Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ do to architecture that allies it with Situationsim, and how does art/architecture unfold as public space and event?
seminar 1 - notes for Students
Notes for students
Context Responsive Curating: The organisation of dirt
Seminar 1 Redux and the organisation of dirt
www.reduxprojects.org.uk
www.slashseconds.org
www.isolartcenter.org/
www.orchard47.org/
www.alandunn67.co.uk/revolutionmp3.html
www.themetropolitancomplex.com/index.php?id=redux
www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/001/articles/jpolak/index.php
http://www.iraqpavilion.com/
This seminar presented a broad look at the work of an alternative space [with a focus on Redux Projects, London] with some examples of particular experimental approaches to curating that were developed over a period of three years at the space at Commercial Street. Examples included installed works by artists Giorgio Sadotti, Bob and Roberta Smith [within the group show ‘Sir Eel’] and the curator Paul O’Neill.
Dinner Party was originally held at Cubitt Street Gallery in 1996. The reconstruction at Redux hosted works by Giorgio Sadotti, and Elizabeth Wright and musicians from Los Angeles. ®edux re-presented the event with different guests and performance, in a setting whereby the guests were part of the performance. The unnerving quality of these power brokers in an alternative ‘dirty’ space, set the agenda for subsequent events, and a radical approach to how exhibitions are set in terms of art world etiquettes of behaviour.
Guests included Penelope Curtis, Director, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds [Director Tate Britain ] Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Art Gallery;.formally Chief Curator, Tate Modern, Kier McGuiness, Chairman, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Patrons of New Art, Tate Gallery, David Batchelor, Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, Annie Ratti, Director, Antonio Ratti Foundation, Como.
It referred this work in a trajectory from earlier avant-garde models from Dada, such as Kurt Schwitters 1933 ‘Merzbau’ and Marcel Duchamp’s 1942 ‘Mile Of String’. The website was used as a way of showing how a series might be hosted in one space, and how those events could be documented with the tools of writing and photography; how the website itself performed as a simple navigational tool to represent events, to collect archive material in a complementary relation to the material presentation of work. How the design in turn reflects the non-institutional manner of these presentations. [Compare a museum website which is corporate with an independent curatorial project such as Redux or the Metropolitan Complex] Various curatorial ‘conceptual’ approaches may remove curating from a museological method of scholarship, yet, by their innovatory orientation and unorthodox construction and focus, influence a museum’s assumptions of what and how to absorb changes in aesthetics and contemporary art’s agendas. These conceptual strategies were introduced, for example inviting artists to respond to a ‘collection’ [in Sir Eel, specifically, to the curators collection of suits], which were reassembled in the context of the exhibition of a ‘mile of string’. The string both referenced and reconstructed the Andre Breton exhibition, and provided a display structure for works by artists.
In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to play ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings. Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String 1942, New York
Redux, as a title, was explained as a ‘return to health’ to what has been arguably overlooked in a period, if assuming that the market has recently clouded the work of avant garde historical models and their relevance to contemporary modes of address. It rests in a matrix of like-minded operations internationally. The programme eschewed solo exhibitions in favour of thematically, conceptually, and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represented a commitment to historically based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment was reflected in the parallel activity of a New York project, also a three-year enterprise without commercial aspirations. Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser-known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices mirrored Redux. Various contrasted but unified practices were nominated to introduce a common undertaking of re-addressing the contemporary situation: the work of Orchard Gallery, New York; Sarah Pierce’s The Metropolitan Complex; Jeffrey Vallance’s Clown Museum, at Ron Lee’s World of Clowns; historically, Mies van der Rohe’s New Museum in Berlin, where the difficulty of the space presented challenges to installing works and with Alexander Dorner’s pivotal work in Hanover Museum, of establishing laboratory spaces, that followed the work of artists’ groups in the pre-war era.
[Dorner joined the State Museum (Landesmuseum) in Hannover as a curator in 1923, rising to director in 1925 (one of the youngest in Germany). As such, he was responsible for many smaller museums in the Hannover area. His appointment coincided with Walter Gropius' foundation of the Bauhaus a short distance away in Weimar. Dorner was one of the early and great leaders of avant-garde art collecting in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s concentrating in Constructivist art for the collection focusing on Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo, Kazimir Malevich, and El Lissitzky. With the collaboration of Lazlo Moholy Nagy, Dorner built a special room to display this art, the "Abstract Cabinet," designed for the viewer's perspective, including film projection and sound. Dorner taught as an assistant professor at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, beginning in 1928 (through 1936), contributing to the journal Museum der Gegenwart (The Museum of Today) from 1930 to 1933. As a director, Dorner juxtaposed art with other objects of different periods in his installations, a new method for art museums. His progressivist art policies put him in direct opposition with the Nazi party, who assumed power in Germany in 1933. Dorner led the fight against the Nazi "Entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) exhibition of modern art in 1936].
The references were intended to contextualise the experimental approaches of Redux. The works presented show how groups can author exhibitions, and how their performance [which included DJ, night club counter culture, punk, ‘live’ art, hosting other curators, using public spaces, such as bowling alleys, shops] could attest to the continuation of these earlier practices. There was a point to be made concerning the difference between these attitudes to performance and the work of the emerging 1960s ‘white cube’ dealer / market ideology of a neutral space cut off from reality, where the work might be vetted by a certain theatricality and transcendental ether, or where the ‘dirty’ aspect of the everyday, domestic ‘interference’ with perception of an autonomous art object. It was discussed that there was also a difference marked out in how the market has also interfered with purist notions of artistic practice, and how globalisation, the biennale and the art fair have colluded to change the manner of art’s social agendas, and how we view the institution of art. Questions of democratisation arise. Can the institution be reformulated by alternative strategies? How does the absorption of strategies by museums differ now from say Alexander Dorner’s museum experiments? What has happened to the avant garde as a form of resistance? Is the free market, more money, more collectors, a good or bad indicator of this democratic change? What happened to the Situationist International? What are its inheritances, and what differences might be recorded through an enquiry in the social milieu in which it was embedded?
We also looked at an online curatorial project, www.slashseconds.org, a website that operates by inviting such questions, and collating contributions to form an issue three times a year. Each issue is ‘themed’, but written as an open invitation to consider personal, tangential, approaches to an ambiguous subject, connoted without determining answers; these might wander from an academic analysis, and support more idiosyncratic and discursive approaches. The work of Alan Dunn was selected as an interesting online project within seconds, itself a website, concerning ‘revolution’. Jenny Polak’s designs for an alien protection [refugee] also gave an idea of the range of social/ urban space interventions that are being developed as alternative architectures and art forms. We looked briefly at Isola Art Center, Milan, and the key work of Bert Thies that maintains a strong political agenda to the urban regeneration of vernacular spaces, and their insipient destruction of Milan communities. How does art function in terms of a socio-political platform? How has Isola been absorbed by, say, a fallacious ‘relational aesthetics’ and, by its recuperation, neutralised? Is a radical form, through the organisation of dirt, or alternative and resistant activity always to be exploited by hegemonic structures in the art world?
The online magasine functions as a ‘work’ or provides the laboratory in assembly of discursive formations [Foucault], or as a cinematic bricollage, of many visual and literary components and visual devices, to make each issue extensive in its range of arguments. It does not perform as ‘net art’ which invades the telephonic space of the Internet by using tactics of simulation, but does offer a platform for a global constituency as a network.
Another project was identified, where practical concerns were described, and to show how the curator often works with outside agencies, whose other agendas form a difficult and sometimes antagonistic situation. The social interface, working, for example, in poor urban areas will undoubtedly reveal these difficulties to the artists and publics alike. The Birmingham project ‘Under a New Sky’ presented works by Dan Graham and Yona Friedman, Goshka Macuga, Runa Islam, witth Iranian artists Reza Aramesh and Nooshin Farhid, and Iraqi Al Fadhil, within an Asian inner city space, with immediate consequences, forcing a question of the reactive conditions in which it occurred.
Practicum
Of the many kinds of output available for consideration as a practical project that brought together students in fine art, museum studies and art history, it would be necessary to discuss how a group would be able in a short time scale, produce an exhibition, in the terms of the remit which interrogates alternative practice and curatorial form. It was argued that the assessment therefore needed to be adjusted in the case of a large mixed group, whereby an arena or umbrella concept should be agreed upon. The seminar used some of its time preparing ground for such an umbrella, so that understanding the required outputs would also come together to coincide a curated outcome. Since the group is 44 members, the website it was felt could provide this, but it needed to be discussed as to how and when the assessments took place and whether fine artists worked more on works and historians on texts et cetera.
Additional reading / references
1 Jeffrey Vallance
http://bombsite.com/issues/56/articles/1960
Re The Clown Museum at Ron Lee’s World of Clowns
Jeffrey Vallance Interview excerpt:
JV Yeah, but they weren’t your official nice clown things, they were a little bit perverted. I was taking clowns to a place where the clown museum would never normally want to go. Every five minutes, busloads of tourists pulled up, they’d all get out, and were totally primed to have a clown experience. And they’d walk in and see the regular show, and then they’d see our clown artwork. But it didn’t stop them for a second. They didn’t look at it and say, “Whoa. This clown is too weird…” They expected to see clowns and so every clown they saw made total sense. If you’d taken the clown show and put it in a gallery, then they might have gone in and been upset, because they wouldn’t be expecting a clown experience, they’d be expecting art. But in the clown museum it seemed perfect. As far as they knew, the paintings were always there.
2 The Orchard Gallery
Gallery Hours: Thurs–Sun 1 to 6
contact@orchard47.org
Rhea Anastas
Moyra Davey
Andrea Fraser
Nicolás Guagnini
Gareth James
Christian Philipp Müller
Jeff Preiss
R.H. Quaytman
Karin Schneider
Jason Simon
John Yancy, Jr.
Anonymous
Past Exhibitions:
Spring Wound
From One O to the Other
11 Sessions
Cookie Cutter
Calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones
Image Coming Soon
Form of a waterfall. Sadie Benning
detourism
On The Collective For Living Cinema
Jef Geys
I Like You and You Like Me
Sylvia Rivera Law Project Art Opening
Around the Corner: Zoe Leonard, Petra Wunderlich, Christian Philipp Müller
Nicolás Guagnini: The Middle Class Goes to Heaven (2005–06)
Dan Graham: Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986–2005)
Reality/Play
Vera
Heard Not Seen
Having Been Described In Words
Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters
Small Works For Big Change
Michael Asher, film screening
Stephan Pascher, Lucky Chairs
Martin Beck
September 11. 1973.
Part Three, "Last Minute"
Polish Socialist Conceptualism of the 70s
Part Two
Part One
Orchard was a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side. The gallery was run by twelve partners of a for-profit limited liability corporation founded for the project. The partners include artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators, with several combining these activities in their practices. The partners of Orchard have been associated variously with New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, 90s non-yBa practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America. The partners do not have a univocal position in terms of their working methods or views on art. Instead, Orchard's cooperative framework was intended to put the diversity of its members' practices into discursive motion. The resulting exhibition program reflected these dialogs and the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of the positions taken within them. Orchard's program largely eschewed solo exhibitions in favor of thematically, conceptually and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represented a commitment to historically-based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment was reflected in Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices. Since opening in May 2005, Orchard has restaged or produced unrealized projects by Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner. Orchard has also presented historical works by Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Juan Downey, Hans Haacke, Roberto Jacoby, Adrian Piper, Anthony McCall and Martha Rosler, as well as new works by Merlin Carpenter, Nicolás Guagnini, Jutta Koether,Josiah McElheny, Lucy McKenzie, Blake Rayne, Stephan Pascher, Jeff Preiss, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, and Jason Simon, among others. Orchard was a three-year project which was completed on May 25, 2008.
3 Merzbau
Kurt Schwitters is best known for his collages and assemblages and for his association with the dada art movement in the 1920's and thirties. But his most important work is less well known. Starting in the 1920's and continuing until he fled Germany in 1936 he constructed an enormously ambitious work of art in his Hannover home. The Hannover Merzbau was a vast architectural construction. There is no doubt that he was influenced by the constructivist concept of the total environment where the architecture, furniture, art etc of a room are integrated to create the total arrangement and structure of the space. In 1921 his friend the constructivist artist Erich Buchholz had transformed the interior of his Berlin apartment in this fashion. Schwitters undoubtedly saw, and was influenced by this. However he went a little further. Ernst Schwitters, his son, has said that it started with his father's interest in the relationship between the pictures he hung on the walls and the sculptures on the floor. He started by tying strings to emphasis these interactions. These in turn became wires then were replaced by wooden structures, which, in turn, were joined with plaster. The merzbau grew and grew, eventually filling several rooms on various floors of the house. As the construction grew grottos and caves appeared in its internal space, each of which had their own independent life. These grottos were often very personal and almost fetishist, with many being devoted to his friends. These are mentioned in many contemporary accounts as he often stole his friend’s belongings to fill these.
Context Responsive Curating: The organisation of dirt
Seminar 1 Redux and the organisation of dirt
www.reduxprojects.org.uk
www.slashseconds.org
www.isolartcenter.org/
www.orchard47.org/
www.alandunn67.co.uk/revolutionmp3.html
www.themetropolitancomplex.com/index.php?id=redux
www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/001/articles/jpolak/index.php
http://www.iraqpavilion.com/
This seminar presented a broad look at the work of an alternative space [with a focus on Redux Projects, London] with some examples of particular experimental approaches to curating that were developed over a period of three years at the space at Commercial Street. Examples included installed works by artists Giorgio Sadotti, Bob and Roberta Smith [within the group show ‘Sir Eel’] and the curator Paul O’Neill.
Dinner Party was originally held at Cubitt Street Gallery in 1996. The reconstruction at Redux hosted works by Giorgio Sadotti, and Elizabeth Wright and musicians from Los Angeles. ®edux re-presented the event with different guests and performance, in a setting whereby the guests were part of the performance. The unnerving quality of these power brokers in an alternative ‘dirty’ space, set the agenda for subsequent events, and a radical approach to how exhibitions are set in terms of art world etiquettes of behaviour.
Guests included Penelope Curtis, Director, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds [Director Tate Britain ] Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Art Gallery;.formally Chief Curator, Tate Modern, Kier McGuiness, Chairman, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Patrons of New Art, Tate Gallery, David Batchelor, Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, Annie Ratti, Director, Antonio Ratti Foundation, Como.
It referred this work in a trajectory from earlier avant-garde models from Dada, such as Kurt Schwitters 1933 ‘Merzbau’ and Marcel Duchamp’s 1942 ‘Mile Of String’. The website was used as a way of showing how a series might be hosted in one space, and how those events could be documented with the tools of writing and photography; how the website itself performed as a simple navigational tool to represent events, to collect archive material in a complementary relation to the material presentation of work. How the design in turn reflects the non-institutional manner of these presentations. [Compare a museum website which is corporate with an independent curatorial project such as Redux or the Metropolitan Complex] Various curatorial ‘conceptual’ approaches may remove curating from a museological method of scholarship, yet, by their innovatory orientation and unorthodox construction and focus, influence a museum’s assumptions of what and how to absorb changes in aesthetics and contemporary art’s agendas. These conceptual strategies were introduced, for example inviting artists to respond to a ‘collection’ [in Sir Eel, specifically, to the curators collection of suits], which were reassembled in the context of the exhibition of a ‘mile of string’. The string both referenced and reconstructed the Andre Breton exhibition, and provided a display structure for works by artists.
In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to play ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings. Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String 1942, New York
Redux, as a title, was explained as a ‘return to health’ to what has been arguably overlooked in a period, if assuming that the market has recently clouded the work of avant garde historical models and their relevance to contemporary modes of address. It rests in a matrix of like-minded operations internationally. The programme eschewed solo exhibitions in favour of thematically, conceptually, and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represented a commitment to historically based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment was reflected in the parallel activity of a New York project, also a three-year enterprise without commercial aspirations. Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser-known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices mirrored Redux. Various contrasted but unified practices were nominated to introduce a common undertaking of re-addressing the contemporary situation: the work of Orchard Gallery, New York; Sarah Pierce’s The Metropolitan Complex; Jeffrey Vallance’s Clown Museum, at Ron Lee’s World of Clowns; historically, Mies van der Rohe’s New Museum in Berlin, where the difficulty of the space presented challenges to installing works and with Alexander Dorner’s pivotal work in Hanover Museum, of establishing laboratory spaces, that followed the work of artists’ groups in the pre-war era.
[Dorner joined the State Museum (Landesmuseum) in Hannover as a curator in 1923, rising to director in 1925 (one of the youngest in Germany). As such, he was responsible for many smaller museums in the Hannover area. His appointment coincided with Walter Gropius' foundation of the Bauhaus a short distance away in Weimar. Dorner was one of the early and great leaders of avant-garde art collecting in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s concentrating in Constructivist art for the collection focusing on Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo, Kazimir Malevich, and El Lissitzky. With the collaboration of Lazlo Moholy Nagy, Dorner built a special room to display this art, the "Abstract Cabinet," designed for the viewer's perspective, including film projection and sound. Dorner taught as an assistant professor at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, beginning in 1928 (through 1936), contributing to the journal Museum der Gegenwart (The Museum of Today) from 1930 to 1933. As a director, Dorner juxtaposed art with other objects of different periods in his installations, a new method for art museums. His progressivist art policies put him in direct opposition with the Nazi party, who assumed power in Germany in 1933. Dorner led the fight against the Nazi "Entartete Kunst" (degenerate art) exhibition of modern art in 1936].
The references were intended to contextualise the experimental approaches of Redux. The works presented show how groups can author exhibitions, and how their performance [which included DJ, night club counter culture, punk, ‘live’ art, hosting other curators, using public spaces, such as bowling alleys, shops] could attest to the continuation of these earlier practices. There was a point to be made concerning the difference between these attitudes to performance and the work of the emerging 1960s ‘white cube’ dealer / market ideology of a neutral space cut off from reality, where the work might be vetted by a certain theatricality and transcendental ether, or where the ‘dirty’ aspect of the everyday, domestic ‘interference’ with perception of an autonomous art object. It was discussed that there was also a difference marked out in how the market has also interfered with purist notions of artistic practice, and how globalisation, the biennale and the art fair have colluded to change the manner of art’s social agendas, and how we view the institution of art. Questions of democratisation arise. Can the institution be reformulated by alternative strategies? How does the absorption of strategies by museums differ now from say Alexander Dorner’s museum experiments? What has happened to the avant garde as a form of resistance? Is the free market, more money, more collectors, a good or bad indicator of this democratic change? What happened to the Situationist International? What are its inheritances, and what differences might be recorded through an enquiry in the social milieu in which it was embedded?
We also looked at an online curatorial project, www.slashseconds.org, a website that operates by inviting such questions, and collating contributions to form an issue three times a year. Each issue is ‘themed’, but written as an open invitation to consider personal, tangential, approaches to an ambiguous subject, connoted without determining answers; these might wander from an academic analysis, and support more idiosyncratic and discursive approaches. The work of Alan Dunn was selected as an interesting online project within seconds, itself a website, concerning ‘revolution’. Jenny Polak’s designs for an alien protection [refugee] also gave an idea of the range of social/ urban space interventions that are being developed as alternative architectures and art forms. We looked briefly at Isola Art Center, Milan, and the key work of Bert Thies that maintains a strong political agenda to the urban regeneration of vernacular spaces, and their insipient destruction of Milan communities. How does art function in terms of a socio-political platform? How has Isola been absorbed by, say, a fallacious ‘relational aesthetics’ and, by its recuperation, neutralised? Is a radical form, through the organisation of dirt, or alternative and resistant activity always to be exploited by hegemonic structures in the art world?
The online magasine functions as a ‘work’ or provides the laboratory in assembly of discursive formations [Foucault], or as a cinematic bricollage, of many visual and literary components and visual devices, to make each issue extensive in its range of arguments. It does not perform as ‘net art’ which invades the telephonic space of the Internet by using tactics of simulation, but does offer a platform for a global constituency as a network.
Another project was identified, where practical concerns were described, and to show how the curator often works with outside agencies, whose other agendas form a difficult and sometimes antagonistic situation. The social interface, working, for example, in poor urban areas will undoubtedly reveal these difficulties to the artists and publics alike. The Birmingham project ‘Under a New Sky’ presented works by Dan Graham and Yona Friedman, Goshka Macuga, Runa Islam, witth Iranian artists Reza Aramesh and Nooshin Farhid, and Iraqi Al Fadhil, within an Asian inner city space, with immediate consequences, forcing a question of the reactive conditions in which it occurred.
Practicum
Of the many kinds of output available for consideration as a practical project that brought together students in fine art, museum studies and art history, it would be necessary to discuss how a group would be able in a short time scale, produce an exhibition, in the terms of the remit which interrogates alternative practice and curatorial form. It was argued that the assessment therefore needed to be adjusted in the case of a large mixed group, whereby an arena or umbrella concept should be agreed upon. The seminar used some of its time preparing ground for such an umbrella, so that understanding the required outputs would also come together to coincide a curated outcome. Since the group is 44 members, the website it was felt could provide this, but it needed to be discussed as to how and when the assessments took place and whether fine artists worked more on works and historians on texts et cetera.
Additional reading / references
1 Jeffrey Vallance
http://bombsite.com/issues/56/articles/1960
Re The Clown Museum at Ron Lee’s World of Clowns
Jeffrey Vallance Interview excerpt:
JV Yeah, but they weren’t your official nice clown things, they were a little bit perverted. I was taking clowns to a place where the clown museum would never normally want to go. Every five minutes, busloads of tourists pulled up, they’d all get out, and were totally primed to have a clown experience. And they’d walk in and see the regular show, and then they’d see our clown artwork. But it didn’t stop them for a second. They didn’t look at it and say, “Whoa. This clown is too weird…” They expected to see clowns and so every clown they saw made total sense. If you’d taken the clown show and put it in a gallery, then they might have gone in and been upset, because they wouldn’t be expecting a clown experience, they’d be expecting art. But in the clown museum it seemed perfect. As far as they knew, the paintings were always there.
2 The Orchard Gallery
Gallery Hours: Thurs–Sun 1 to 6
contact@orchard47.org
Rhea Anastas
Moyra Davey
Andrea Fraser
Nicolás Guagnini
Gareth James
Christian Philipp Müller
Jeff Preiss
R.H. Quaytman
Karin Schneider
Jason Simon
John Yancy, Jr.
Anonymous
Past Exhibitions:
Spring Wound
From One O to the Other
11 Sessions
Cookie Cutter
Calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones
Image Coming Soon
Form of a waterfall. Sadie Benning
detourism
On The Collective For Living Cinema
Jef Geys
I Like You and You Like Me
Sylvia Rivera Law Project Art Opening
Around the Corner: Zoe Leonard, Petra Wunderlich, Christian Philipp Müller
Nicolás Guagnini: The Middle Class Goes to Heaven (2005–06)
Dan Graham: Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986–2005)
Reality/Play
Vera
Heard Not Seen
Having Been Described In Words
Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters
Small Works For Big Change
Michael Asher, film screening
Stephan Pascher, Lucky Chairs
Martin Beck
September 11. 1973.
Part Three, "Last Minute"
Polish Socialist Conceptualism of the 70s
Part Two
Part One
Orchard was a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side. The gallery was run by twelve partners of a for-profit limited liability corporation founded for the project. The partners include artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators, with several combining these activities in their practices. The partners of Orchard have been associated variously with New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, 90s non-yBa practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America. The partners do not have a univocal position in terms of their working methods or views on art. Instead, Orchard's cooperative framework was intended to put the diversity of its members' practices into discursive motion. The resulting exhibition program reflected these dialogs and the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of the positions taken within them. Orchard's program largely eschewed solo exhibitions in favor of thematically, conceptually and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represented a commitment to historically-based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment was reflected in Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices. Since opening in May 2005, Orchard has restaged or produced unrealized projects by Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner. Orchard has also presented historical works by Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Juan Downey, Hans Haacke, Roberto Jacoby, Adrian Piper, Anthony McCall and Martha Rosler, as well as new works by Merlin Carpenter, Nicolás Guagnini, Jutta Koether,Josiah McElheny, Lucy McKenzie, Blake Rayne, Stephan Pascher, Jeff Preiss, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, and Jason Simon, among others. Orchard was a three-year project which was completed on May 25, 2008.
3 Merzbau
Kurt Schwitters is best known for his collages and assemblages and for his association with the dada art movement in the 1920's and thirties. But his most important work is less well known. Starting in the 1920's and continuing until he fled Germany in 1936 he constructed an enormously ambitious work of art in his Hannover home. The Hannover Merzbau was a vast architectural construction. There is no doubt that he was influenced by the constructivist concept of the total environment where the architecture, furniture, art etc of a room are integrated to create the total arrangement and structure of the space. In 1921 his friend the constructivist artist Erich Buchholz had transformed the interior of his Berlin apartment in this fashion. Schwitters undoubtedly saw, and was influenced by this. However he went a little further. Ernst Schwitters, his son, has said that it started with his father's interest in the relationship between the pictures he hung on the walls and the sculptures on the floor. He started by tying strings to emphasis these interactions. These in turn became wires then were replaced by wooden structures, which, in turn, were joined with plaster. The merzbau grew and grew, eventually filling several rooms on various floors of the house. As the construction grew grottos and caves appeared in its internal space, each of which had their own independent life. These grottos were often very personal and almost fetishist, with many being devoted to his friends. These are mentioned in many contemporary accounts as he often stole his friend’s belongings to fill these.
student notes seminar 2
Notes for students
Context Responsive Curating: The organisation of dirt
http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HypmW4Yd7SY
http://www.strano.net/town/music/fluxus.htm#Registrazioni%20sonore%20di%20happening%20Fluxus
http://www.strano.net/town/music/fluxus.htm#Registrazioni%20sonore%20di%20happening%20Fluxus
http://imaginepeace.com/archives/3966
http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/constant.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/leckey_hardcore.html
http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index2.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
http://www.ben-vautier.com/
http://www.ubu.com/film/debord_spectacle.html
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/fluxus_box/Fluxus-Anthology-30th_01_George_Maciunas.mp3
http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/dhiggins-childshistory.html
http://www.ubu.com/
http://www.bopsecrets.org/
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/
http://www.wearebad.net/
http://savagemessiahzine.com/
http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/Lettrist/Lettrist.htm
http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html
http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml
http://www.ubu.com/film/brecht.html
Seminar 2 Fluxus, Situationism and its discontents (notes paraphrased from talk)
This seminar presented a brief and albeit personal account of Fluxus and Situationism and looked at certain other related formations of art movements before and beyond, and their combined significance to contemporary debates. Commencing with John Cage’s 4’33” [please refer to recordings of performance on youtube] the seminar aimed to alert to a different kind of evolving aesthetic, also linked to certain Eastern ideas of composition, and beauty, [Zen], [wabi sabi]. At first presenting some publications available [there are many] to show that these movements, producing a kind of art and politics incommensurable at first glance in fact share many salient features of practice in their time, their homological relation effecting a new generation of conceptual artists, and parallel social activism. The inquiry would need a lot of time to fully contextualise these distinct occurrences in the history of modern movements. There were similar kinds of articulations [The Manifesto form, lists of instructions, impromptu actions, poetic slogans, public interventions, anti -cinema films, provocation texts, underground publications, a general disordering of social behaviour, detournement cartoons, the practice of the everyday, [from Dada’s iconoclast polemic] and an applied nomadic principle to urban space – the radical act of ‘detour’ of movement that derived from the idea of the ‘flaneur’ [Baudelaire’s characterisation of modern life and its sensibility, of getting lost in the crowd. The importance of establishing an architectural critique, in the earlier work of Lettrism [established in 1942 by Isadore Isou and also involving Guy Debord] was amplified by the architect Constant, [see New Babylon] and complemented by the method of ‘detournement’ by the painter Asger Jorn who attacked traditional painting by painting over them. These advances on the perceived corruption of Surrealism’s anti-establishment original provocations to rational organisation of life, of ‘unreason’, were accompanied by both groups’ dismissal of an art for its own sake, critical of the ‘aristocratic’ institution, ‘belle ecriture’ still in concord with the avant garde principle and battle cry ‘epater le bourgeois!’ even if Debord writes of the bourgeois as being an origin of revolution against hegemony and privilege. In Debord it is political theory that takes first place concerning the spectacularisation of the society, to be re-inscribed in the 2nd international as a general politics of the image, which must include an attack on the market of commerce ‘art’ and celebrity culture. Debord’s films were key to this understanding as a breaking up of values invisibly distributed as ‘spectacle’. The 1st International is characterised by the importance placed on art and politics, as mutual platforms, yet acknowledging that two directions might not co-incide, yet whose agreements forged politics and aesthetics, might also be claimed as resulting in the successes, and failures of the May 68 protests and riots of Paris. The rise of a subsequent reaction in attitude - the New Philosophy, the Mediology of Debray, to the ideas of Debord, and in turn Deleuze and Foucault and many others, were targeted to the restitution of conservative politics / governance; a return, as Alain Badiou terms it a ‘second restoration’ to an ideology of late ‘capital’ which virtually killed the spirit of the republican city, forever changed. Capital itself absorbs its antagonism and becomes stronger. The same could also be said of the state policing of USA since the concurrent student insurgencies, the campus 60s riots, and the Black Power movement of Malcolm X; in Germany the Baader Meinhof RAF arrests, which culminated in their conspired deaths in prison cells. Joseph Beuys performed in Documenta 1972 ‘ “Durer, I walk here personally with Baader and Meinhof through Documenta’. This piece bridged, and made complicit many national prejudices to the universal movement, although Beuys is himself attacked for advancing a ‘mythology’ of the collective, and ‘Urgrund’, by Benjamin Buchloch and others, as is Debord accused of naïve young Hegelianism.
Gerhard Richter’s paintings commemorated the ‘suicides’ as a collective shame ten years after. These events were echoed in the criticisms of Adorno and Frankfurt School’s analysis of the oppressive state culture industry, totalitarianism and those vested interests of industries allied to governments; in Italy, the Red Brigade brought these ‘mutualities’ to an end, after the arrests in Bologna in 77, and the Fiat strikes’ cultural revolt against work. Fluxus and Situationsim mobilised the ‘passion of the real’ in student movements, which perhaps naively allied intellectuals and workers solidarity in post Marxist activisim. In collective street interventions against ‘control space’, by applying a subject’s ‘psycho-geography’ both Fluxus and Situationism released pleasurable and impassioned expressions.
Fluxus Shock Theatre and the Event.
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at
Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images
In George Maciunas’ Fluxus it was staged in a benign form, a playful revolution, a carnivalesque [Bahktin] up-turning of codes of behaviour and a gentle attack on the status of the immobile museum [as an eccentric ‘box’ of paraphernalia] –works were made by the group deriving from Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum – a comedy of objects, disclosing an empty box of tricks [anti-archives] without interest in interpretation. In Debord, the ‘fun’ is translated as seeking a pleasure or desire against governmental will and authority. The term ‘situation’ originates from existential thought. One makes one’s own unique situations, dismantling the logic of Marxist scientific historicism regarding the proletariat. The ‘situation’ of haptic space and its deformation the affects stable structures of power from a point of contact with existential being or ‘becoming’, has some origin in Cage’s introduction of non western thought as practiced in art / music.
The seminar used a slide presentation to look at a more personal involvement with urban space, fluxus inspired projects such as performing outside the Musee D’Art Moderne in Paris, after the ‘alternative’ art survey of London spaces ‘Live/Life’ [a ‘drinking sculpture’ called ‘Itch God’ with pictures of a referential work of auto-destructive art by Gustav Metzger [using hot irons to burn mdf wood]. We looked at the work of Catalyst Arts Belfast as an example of an independent space and presented slides of a performative installation by Peter Lewis and Runa Islam with Peter Fillingham and Gustav Metzger [a reconstruction of a hypothetical auto-destructive work] at Catalyst arts. Transmission Gallery was also cited as of importance in the history of alternative practice, as an artist-run space. There were pictures from Redux [Reza Aramesh presented Arab men on plinths serving wine] , more suit cut-ups, Simon Ford’s take on 80s pop stars with situationist slogans, and another dinner party. The bar was integral. When entering the space the bar announces the event – which takes place in a large open space, an unexpected arena that lies beyond it.
BOWLING ALLEY performance with Makiko Nagaya 2010-02-13
Statement about my "metadramas"
by Dick Higgins
One of the main genres of Fluxus pieces of the 1960s is and was "events." These were first done before Fluxus, and came to be conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings, which were new at the time-that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art. Events differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract. I did them, George Brecht did them, and others of the Fluxus artists did them also though, for the most part, somewhat later than 1958 when George, I, AI Hansen and others studied with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York, a story which has been told, more or less, to death.
However, events made their point and the genre became well defined over the years, through Fluxus concerts and individual performances and works by, quite literally, hundreds of artists. In the sixties, when purely formal explorations seemed essential to sweep away the overly personal baggage of the 1960s, this was a positive thing. However, in the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so consciously as now. I call them "metadramas" because they must be dramatic in order to satisfy the criterion, and, the "meta-" part suggests that they are "next to" or "about" what they relate to-that is, some are dramas about the drama, while others simply don't pretend to be dramas but do point in that direction. I wrote about sixty of them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong, though not vice versa.
Barrytown, New York
18 September, 1985
examples of actions / scripted
the artist
a metadrama
artist: "i'm hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two ounces of honor."
artist: "i'm still hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two more ounces of honor."
buddhism
a metadrama
buddhist monk: "peace!"
sound of gunfire.
couic!
a metadrama
enters in a suit of medieval armor.
trips.
falls.
erotic
a metadrama
she giggles then sighs.
she giggles then sighs.
ad lib a couple of minutes.
flexible lumbar
a metadrama
nude, profile to audince.
demonstrates flexible lumbars.
two minutes.
words: optional
follow the leader
a metadrama
two people nude and smiling one leads other follows.
after a while follower no longer follows leader does not change roles.
they look at each other.
leader does something follower does something different.
follower does something
leader does that thing.
leader follows the other away.
Reference 2
Adrian Searle on FluxusSnapshots of a revolution
Fluxus was a daring movement that spread art anarchy around the globe.
Can its spirit really be captured in an exhibition?
By Adrian Searle, The Guardian.
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at
Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images
In the gloom of the Baltic gallery, there are things preserved under
glass: odds and ends in an upturned beret; a cabinet whose opened
drawers are filled with stones; a plastic American breakfast (plastic
fried eggs, plastic bacon); phials of liquid; stacks of money. I peer at
a chromed tooth-brush, at bars of wooden soap, at a pair of spectacles
with spikes that poke the wearer in the eyes, at trays of carefully
sorted animal droppings.
All these little boxes – the spoof games, the surreal gags, the
manifestos, the political placards and unplayable musical scores – are
the sad reliquary of a dream. The dream was fluxus, a revolutionary
movement that, during the 1960s and 70s, encompassed Europe, America,
Japan and beyond. It hovered between art and anti-art, neo-dada and
nouveau realism; it embraced artists, composers, poets, philosophers,
amateurs, cranks, enthusiasts and passersby. Yoko Ono filmed a parade of
naked bottoms. A man festooned in string did things to a violin, as a
free piece of street theatre. Pianos were ritually abused. Pavements
were scrubbed and “mystery boxes” filled with rubbish – both as art and
as a way of getting rid of garbage.
For a while, fluxus was everywhere. There were festivals no one
attended, performances no one saw, promises of money that never came,
revolutions that never happened. When Ono and John Lennon held their
bed-ins, that was the nearest fluxus got to worldwide fame. The
photographs and films, the anecdotes and stories that record these
perplexing events cannot do them justice. Fluxus never went down well
either with the public or with collectors. For the former, it was
baffling, regarded at best as yet one more joke at their expense – those
crazy artists, at it again. Never mind that fluxus work rarely cost
anything to make, and not much more to buy, and its single laudable
aesthetic premise was to avoid wasting resources. The problem for most
art collectors was that fluxus was too cheap and too ephemeral. Take Ben
Vautier’s God, an empty wine bottle. “If God is everywhere, he is also
in this bottle,” Vautier claimed, in an accompanying note. Not even the
Vatican could argue with that.
Fluxus was resolutely against skill, artiness, expression, form and
pomposity. Fluxus was a mystery probably even to some of those who
espoused its restless ideals. Paradox was at the heart of the movement -
just as it is at the heart of The Dream of Fluxus, an exhibition at the
Baltic in Gateshead. It is also the title of a biography of George
Maciunas, the architect, graphic designer, amateur art historian and
photographer who founded the movement, if movement it was.
The exhibition and accompanying book by its curator, Thomas Kellein,
somehow fail in their tasks. Both fluxus and Maciunas slip away from us
the more we look and read. Fluxus itself is ill-represented by its
objects, and needs a living context, while Maciunas and his
complications burst the seams of Kellein’s book. A second show, of work
by Ono, has also just opened at Baltic.
Maciunas was fascinating, talented, and by all accounts a nightmare.
Like André Breton, godfather of the surrealist movement, Maciunas would
invite artists, composers and even philosophers to take part in
activities. He would charm them, boss them around for years, then
perform summary excommunications, banishing those who displeased him.
Other artists, such as Joseph Beuys, would claim fluxus as their own.
Maciunas would take against individuals for no good reason – composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen was one – and damn by association those who had
anything to do with them. All this was wearying.
One fluxus artist said that Maciunas “walked a tightrope extended
between the two poles of avant garde anti-art and mass entertainment”.
One might say the same of much art today. Interestingly, the show opens
with shelf upon shelf of all the medications Maciunas used in one year,
all his light bulbs, all the fruit juice he drank.
Inert and under glass, fluxus appears as dead matter in this exhibition.
Yet – as one peers at its museological corpse, the remains of so many
empty gestures – the spirit of fluxus, its playfulness, zest and
anarchy, fitfully reasserts itself, if only by association. Here’s a
scrunched-up piece of paper that makes us think of a work by Martin
Creed. There’s a musical score that takes us back to John Cage and Kurt
Schwitters. Here are placards, protesting the Vietnam war, just as
apposite as arguments against American and British activities in Iraq.
All the objects in the show have stories to tell, or demand to be played
with. One wants to get up and play Joe Lones’s adapted Flux Harpsichord
and his mechanical bells, or Takako Saito’s Sound Chess Set for John
Cage. But you can’t. I’d stay away from the Flux Toilet and the Human
Flux Trap, inoffensive though they probably are. It’s hard to tell. You
can’t actually reach out and touch anything, and almost nothing is
explained. The Flux Mystery Boxes remain mysterious, the adapted musical
instruments unplayed. All the life’s been sucked out of everything. It’s
a shame.
Richard Long’s walks, Gilbert and George posing as living sculptures,
Sarah Lucas’s early work and a million other small gestures, actions and
ephemeral objects can trace their origins back to fluxus. It was a
conduit through which ideas and personalities flowed, and still flow
today. Fluxus inevitably failed, and came to be seen as old hat. It was
partly a problem of packaging – though Maciunas was a very good graphic
designer, for whom no detail was too small to be worried over. Fluxus’s
aim to eliminate music, theatre, poetry, fiction and all the rest of the
fine arts combined was doomed. Only the mass entertainment industry
might achieve such a thing.
If anything and everything could be art, and everyone was an artist, the
whole system would collapse, fluxus thought had it. If only things were
so simple. There were even complaints from hardcore fluxus artists that
people with too strong a personality left too much of a trace of
themselves in their work. These are the aesthetics of the Khmer Rouge.
A contemporary exhibition ‘Unmonumental’ represents a kind of influence on a young generation’s [ through punk] absorption of Situation and Fluxus. Curated by Robert Storr at the New Museum, New York this year. It seems to present an antagonism or critique to the market driven ‘spectacularisation’ of art by reducing scale and industrialised ‘perfection’ in material hand-made or poorly constructed emphemera, bricollage et cetera.. Although made of trash elements, these ‘works of art’ are in fact ostensibly confirmation of their own redundant avant -gardist ideals. The works gladly betray their origins by a double bind, of the ‘new’ as obsolescence, and therefore lay victim to use as commodity/ status signs ready for the auction house.
The origin of Fluxus resides in 1961 influenced directly by John Cage, whose New York based school in 1958 Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Jackson McClough attended. Anti-art statements of Vladimir Mayakowsky, the vaudeville of Spike Jones, Futurist theatre and their manifestos, and Duchamp, and Paris Dada events. Ben Vautier made theatre ‘shock pieces’ where the audience is challenged in expectations. Maciunas describes many pieces of transgressing the ‘4th wall’, which originated in the ideas of Brecht and Paris Dada.
We can identify the various performative work of Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, with Allan Kaprow’s first happening [‘concerted action’ 1952 at Black Mountain college with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham] informally swapped ideas with also Japanese ‘Gutai’ group in 1957. The magazine ‘Fluxus’ was published later in 1961. In 1962 a whole series of concerts and events were staged in Europe, linking the ‘nouvelle realiste’ also of Nice such as Armann. . The destruction of the piano was memorable – the newspapers called the Fluxus people ‘cultural bolsheviks’...
The second part of the seminar attempted to articulate the group’s ideas about how to construct its own ‘situation’. It was suggested that the assessment was designed with text as its main weight, and a gallery show seemed an impossible outcome given the size of the group. Other suggestions and criticisms began to democratise the group’s discussion with conflicting opinions – it became necessary to confront the problems by offering an adaption through negotiation to the draft syllabus [since the group was being taught by another it was felt appropriate to change certain conditions to make it work]. The solution was to make a three part assessment with outcome in keeping with the brief of a website [who was to design this site?] that would act as a project linking all teh individual responses. [something like slashseconds does as a curated work comprising a lot of different material. How a group of this size works together remains a problem.
Some solutions were offered. If everyone in the group provide firstly a proposal [this could be a fantastic or pragmatic or a theoretical one] depending on the subject and the author / artists’ orientation.] Art historians could provide texts as everyone – which could also be made into films / readings / performances. The catalogue essay seems academic in regard from fluxus and situationist viewpoint. Mobile phone videos would be perhaps uploaded to website of readings....there should be a group decision made as to how free the options are in presenting material.
The website could be templated upon /seconds which would then offer the group the chance to launch it, and to produce an exhibition at a later time from its contents.
text as placard
text as situation
text as spoken word
text as video
An info center could be hosted in the seminar room – or a 3rd International...fluxus version –
Performance artists could be invited to stage work within an info-center environment.
Deadlines: to be clarified in 3rd session.
Context Responsive Curating: The organisation of dirt
http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HypmW4Yd7SY
http://www.strano.net/town/music/fluxus.htm#Registrazioni%20sonore%20di%20happening%20Fluxus
http://www.strano.net/town/music/fluxus.htm#Registrazioni%20sonore%20di%20happening%20Fluxus
http://imaginepeace.com/archives/3966
http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/constant.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/leckey_hardcore.html
http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index2.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
http://www.ben-vautier.com/
http://www.ubu.com/film/debord_spectacle.html
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/fluxus_box/Fluxus-Anthology-30th_01_George_Maciunas.mp3
http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/dhiggins-childshistory.html
http://www.ubu.com/
http://www.bopsecrets.org/
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/
http://www.wearebad.net/
http://savagemessiahzine.com/
http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/Lettrist/Lettrist.htm
http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html
http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml
http://www.ubu.com/film/brecht.html
Seminar 2 Fluxus, Situationism and its discontents (notes paraphrased from talk)
This seminar presented a brief and albeit personal account of Fluxus and Situationism and looked at certain other related formations of art movements before and beyond, and their combined significance to contemporary debates. Commencing with John Cage’s 4’33” [please refer to recordings of performance on youtube] the seminar aimed to alert to a different kind of evolving aesthetic, also linked to certain Eastern ideas of composition, and beauty, [Zen], [wabi sabi]. At first presenting some publications available [there are many] to show that these movements, producing a kind of art and politics incommensurable at first glance in fact share many salient features of practice in their time, their homological relation effecting a new generation of conceptual artists, and parallel social activism. The inquiry would need a lot of time to fully contextualise these distinct occurrences in the history of modern movements. There were similar kinds of articulations [The Manifesto form, lists of instructions, impromptu actions, poetic slogans, public interventions, anti -cinema films, provocation texts, underground publications, a general disordering of social behaviour, detournement cartoons, the practice of the everyday, [from Dada’s iconoclast polemic] and an applied nomadic principle to urban space – the radical act of ‘detour’ of movement that derived from the idea of the ‘flaneur’ [Baudelaire’s characterisation of modern life and its sensibility, of getting lost in the crowd. The importance of establishing an architectural critique, in the earlier work of Lettrism [established in 1942 by Isadore Isou and also involving Guy Debord] was amplified by the architect Constant, [see New Babylon] and complemented by the method of ‘detournement’ by the painter Asger Jorn who attacked traditional painting by painting over them. These advances on the perceived corruption of Surrealism’s anti-establishment original provocations to rational organisation of life, of ‘unreason’, were accompanied by both groups’ dismissal of an art for its own sake, critical of the ‘aristocratic’ institution, ‘belle ecriture’ still in concord with the avant garde principle and battle cry ‘epater le bourgeois!’ even if Debord writes of the bourgeois as being an origin of revolution against hegemony and privilege. In Debord it is political theory that takes first place concerning the spectacularisation of the society, to be re-inscribed in the 2nd international as a general politics of the image, which must include an attack on the market of commerce ‘art’ and celebrity culture. Debord’s films were key to this understanding as a breaking up of values invisibly distributed as ‘spectacle’. The 1st International is characterised by the importance placed on art and politics, as mutual platforms, yet acknowledging that two directions might not co-incide, yet whose agreements forged politics and aesthetics, might also be claimed as resulting in the successes, and failures of the May 68 protests and riots of Paris. The rise of a subsequent reaction in attitude - the New Philosophy, the Mediology of Debray, to the ideas of Debord, and in turn Deleuze and Foucault and many others, were targeted to the restitution of conservative politics / governance; a return, as Alain Badiou terms it a ‘second restoration’ to an ideology of late ‘capital’ which virtually killed the spirit of the republican city, forever changed. Capital itself absorbs its antagonism and becomes stronger. The same could also be said of the state policing of USA since the concurrent student insurgencies, the campus 60s riots, and the Black Power movement of Malcolm X; in Germany the Baader Meinhof RAF arrests, which culminated in their conspired deaths in prison cells. Joseph Beuys performed in Documenta 1972 ‘ “Durer, I walk here personally with Baader and Meinhof through Documenta’. This piece bridged, and made complicit many national prejudices to the universal movement, although Beuys is himself attacked for advancing a ‘mythology’ of the collective, and ‘Urgrund’, by Benjamin Buchloch and others, as is Debord accused of naïve young Hegelianism.
Gerhard Richter’s paintings commemorated the ‘suicides’ as a collective shame ten years after. These events were echoed in the criticisms of Adorno and Frankfurt School’s analysis of the oppressive state culture industry, totalitarianism and those vested interests of industries allied to governments; in Italy, the Red Brigade brought these ‘mutualities’ to an end, after the arrests in Bologna in 77, and the Fiat strikes’ cultural revolt against work. Fluxus and Situationsim mobilised the ‘passion of the real’ in student movements, which perhaps naively allied intellectuals and workers solidarity in post Marxist activisim. In collective street interventions against ‘control space’, by applying a subject’s ‘psycho-geography’ both Fluxus and Situationism released pleasurable and impassioned expressions.
Fluxus Shock Theatre and the Event.
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at
Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images
In George Maciunas’ Fluxus it was staged in a benign form, a playful revolution, a carnivalesque [Bahktin] up-turning of codes of behaviour and a gentle attack on the status of the immobile museum [as an eccentric ‘box’ of paraphernalia] –works were made by the group deriving from Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum – a comedy of objects, disclosing an empty box of tricks [anti-archives] without interest in interpretation. In Debord, the ‘fun’ is translated as seeking a pleasure or desire against governmental will and authority. The term ‘situation’ originates from existential thought. One makes one’s own unique situations, dismantling the logic of Marxist scientific historicism regarding the proletariat. The ‘situation’ of haptic space and its deformation the affects stable structures of power from a point of contact with existential being or ‘becoming’, has some origin in Cage’s introduction of non western thought as practiced in art / music.
The seminar used a slide presentation to look at a more personal involvement with urban space, fluxus inspired projects such as performing outside the Musee D’Art Moderne in Paris, after the ‘alternative’ art survey of London spaces ‘Live/Life’ [a ‘drinking sculpture’ called ‘Itch God’ with pictures of a referential work of auto-destructive art by Gustav Metzger [using hot irons to burn mdf wood]. We looked at the work of Catalyst Arts Belfast as an example of an independent space and presented slides of a performative installation by Peter Lewis and Runa Islam with Peter Fillingham and Gustav Metzger [a reconstruction of a hypothetical auto-destructive work] at Catalyst arts. Transmission Gallery was also cited as of importance in the history of alternative practice, as an artist-run space. There were pictures from Redux [Reza Aramesh presented Arab men on plinths serving wine] , more suit cut-ups, Simon Ford’s take on 80s pop stars with situationist slogans, and another dinner party. The bar was integral. When entering the space the bar announces the event – which takes place in a large open space, an unexpected arena that lies beyond it.
BOWLING ALLEY performance with Makiko Nagaya 2010-02-13
Statement about my "metadramas"
by Dick Higgins
One of the main genres of Fluxus pieces of the 1960s is and was "events." These were first done before Fluxus, and came to be conceptually framed as a sort of cognate of happenings, which were new at the time-that is, intermedial, free-form pieces which lay conceptually among the bounds of music, theater and visual art. Events differed from happenings in that they were always as compressed as possible, minimal statements that would provide a mental or emotional impact. But, of course, they were highly abstract. I did them, George Brecht did them, and others of the Fluxus artists did them also though, for the most part, somewhat later than 1958 when George, I, AI Hansen and others studied with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York, a story which has been told, more or less, to death.
However, events made their point and the genre became well defined over the years, through Fluxus concerts and individual performances and works by, quite literally, hundreds of artists. In the sixties, when purely formal explorations seemed essential to sweep away the overly personal baggage of the 1960s, this was a positive thing. However, in the 1980s, when personal expression has been minimized, and when art performances, the heirs in some respect of happenings, often celebrate boredom and almost always deal essentially with technical and formal concerns, it seems more desirable to do pieces which are mainly minimal emotional statements or narrative ones, complete with characterizations in most cases. I had done a few such pieces previously, but not so consciously as now. I call them "metadramas" because they must be dramatic in order to satisfy the criterion, and, the "meta-" part suggests that they are "next to" or "about" what they relate to-that is, some are dramas about the drama, while others simply don't pretend to be dramas but do point in that direction. I wrote about sixty of them in the summer of 1985, destroyed most of them, and then noticed that they seemed to define a genre to which the earlier events belong, though not vice versa.
Barrytown, New York
18 September, 1985
examples of actions / scripted
the artist
a metadrama
artist: "i'm hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two ounces of honor."
artist: "i'm still hungry."
someone else: "here are twenty two more ounces of honor."
buddhism
a metadrama
buddhist monk: "peace!"
sound of gunfire.
couic!
a metadrama
enters in a suit of medieval armor.
trips.
falls.
erotic
a metadrama
she giggles then sighs.
she giggles then sighs.
ad lib a couple of minutes.
flexible lumbar
a metadrama
nude, profile to audince.
demonstrates flexible lumbars.
two minutes.
words: optional
follow the leader
a metadrama
two people nude and smiling one leads other follows.
after a while follower no longer follows leader does not change roles.
they look at each other.
leader does something follower does something different.
follower does something
leader does that thing.
leader follows the other away.
Reference 2
Adrian Searle on FluxusSnapshots of a revolution
Fluxus was a daring movement that spread art anarchy around the globe.
Can its spirit really be captured in an exhibition?
By Adrian Searle, The Guardian.
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965
Bandaged Orchestra during the Fluxus Festival arranged by Yoko Ono at
Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965. Photograph: Getty Images
In the gloom of the Baltic gallery, there are things preserved under
glass: odds and ends in an upturned beret; a cabinet whose opened
drawers are filled with stones; a plastic American breakfast (plastic
fried eggs, plastic bacon); phials of liquid; stacks of money. I peer at
a chromed tooth-brush, at bars of wooden soap, at a pair of spectacles
with spikes that poke the wearer in the eyes, at trays of carefully
sorted animal droppings.
All these little boxes – the spoof games, the surreal gags, the
manifestos, the political placards and unplayable musical scores – are
the sad reliquary of a dream. The dream was fluxus, a revolutionary
movement that, during the 1960s and 70s, encompassed Europe, America,
Japan and beyond. It hovered between art and anti-art, neo-dada and
nouveau realism; it embraced artists, composers, poets, philosophers,
amateurs, cranks, enthusiasts and passersby. Yoko Ono filmed a parade of
naked bottoms. A man festooned in string did things to a violin, as a
free piece of street theatre. Pianos were ritually abused. Pavements
were scrubbed and “mystery boxes” filled with rubbish – both as art and
as a way of getting rid of garbage.
For a while, fluxus was everywhere. There were festivals no one
attended, performances no one saw, promises of money that never came,
revolutions that never happened. When Ono and John Lennon held their
bed-ins, that was the nearest fluxus got to worldwide fame. The
photographs and films, the anecdotes and stories that record these
perplexing events cannot do them justice. Fluxus never went down well
either with the public or with collectors. For the former, it was
baffling, regarded at best as yet one more joke at their expense – those
crazy artists, at it again. Never mind that fluxus work rarely cost
anything to make, and not much more to buy, and its single laudable
aesthetic premise was to avoid wasting resources. The problem for most
art collectors was that fluxus was too cheap and too ephemeral. Take Ben
Vautier’s God, an empty wine bottle. “If God is everywhere, he is also
in this bottle,” Vautier claimed, in an accompanying note. Not even the
Vatican could argue with that.
Fluxus was resolutely against skill, artiness, expression, form and
pomposity. Fluxus was a mystery probably even to some of those who
espoused its restless ideals. Paradox was at the heart of the movement -
just as it is at the heart of The Dream of Fluxus, an exhibition at the
Baltic in Gateshead. It is also the title of a biography of George
Maciunas, the architect, graphic designer, amateur art historian and
photographer who founded the movement, if movement it was.
The exhibition and accompanying book by its curator, Thomas Kellein,
somehow fail in their tasks. Both fluxus and Maciunas slip away from us
the more we look and read. Fluxus itself is ill-represented by its
objects, and needs a living context, while Maciunas and his
complications burst the seams of Kellein’s book. A second show, of work
by Ono, has also just opened at Baltic.
Maciunas was fascinating, talented, and by all accounts a nightmare.
Like André Breton, godfather of the surrealist movement, Maciunas would
invite artists, composers and even philosophers to take part in
activities. He would charm them, boss them around for years, then
perform summary excommunications, banishing those who displeased him.
Other artists, such as Joseph Beuys, would claim fluxus as their own.
Maciunas would take against individuals for no good reason – composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen was one – and damn by association those who had
anything to do with them. All this was wearying.
One fluxus artist said that Maciunas “walked a tightrope extended
between the two poles of avant garde anti-art and mass entertainment”.
One might say the same of much art today. Interestingly, the show opens
with shelf upon shelf of all the medications Maciunas used in one year,
all his light bulbs, all the fruit juice he drank.
Inert and under glass, fluxus appears as dead matter in this exhibition.
Yet – as one peers at its museological corpse, the remains of so many
empty gestures – the spirit of fluxus, its playfulness, zest and
anarchy, fitfully reasserts itself, if only by association. Here’s a
scrunched-up piece of paper that makes us think of a work by Martin
Creed. There’s a musical score that takes us back to John Cage and Kurt
Schwitters. Here are placards, protesting the Vietnam war, just as
apposite as arguments against American and British activities in Iraq.
All the objects in the show have stories to tell, or demand to be played
with. One wants to get up and play Joe Lones’s adapted Flux Harpsichord
and his mechanical bells, or Takako Saito’s Sound Chess Set for John
Cage. But you can’t. I’d stay away from the Flux Toilet and the Human
Flux Trap, inoffensive though they probably are. It’s hard to tell. You
can’t actually reach out and touch anything, and almost nothing is
explained. The Flux Mystery Boxes remain mysterious, the adapted musical
instruments unplayed. All the life’s been sucked out of everything. It’s
a shame.
Richard Long’s walks, Gilbert and George posing as living sculptures,
Sarah Lucas’s early work and a million other small gestures, actions and
ephemeral objects can trace their origins back to fluxus. It was a
conduit through which ideas and personalities flowed, and still flow
today. Fluxus inevitably failed, and came to be seen as old hat. It was
partly a problem of packaging – though Maciunas was a very good graphic
designer, for whom no detail was too small to be worried over. Fluxus’s
aim to eliminate music, theatre, poetry, fiction and all the rest of the
fine arts combined was doomed. Only the mass entertainment industry
might achieve such a thing.
If anything and everything could be art, and everyone was an artist, the
whole system would collapse, fluxus thought had it. If only things were
so simple. There were even complaints from hardcore fluxus artists that
people with too strong a personality left too much of a trace of
themselves in their work. These are the aesthetics of the Khmer Rouge.
A contemporary exhibition ‘Unmonumental’ represents a kind of influence on a young generation’s [ through punk] absorption of Situation and Fluxus. Curated by Robert Storr at the New Museum, New York this year. It seems to present an antagonism or critique to the market driven ‘spectacularisation’ of art by reducing scale and industrialised ‘perfection’ in material hand-made or poorly constructed emphemera, bricollage et cetera.. Although made of trash elements, these ‘works of art’ are in fact ostensibly confirmation of their own redundant avant -gardist ideals. The works gladly betray their origins by a double bind, of the ‘new’ as obsolescence, and therefore lay victim to use as commodity/ status signs ready for the auction house.
The origin of Fluxus resides in 1961 influenced directly by John Cage, whose New York based school in 1958 Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Jackson McClough attended. Anti-art statements of Vladimir Mayakowsky, the vaudeville of Spike Jones, Futurist theatre and their manifestos, and Duchamp, and Paris Dada events. Ben Vautier made theatre ‘shock pieces’ where the audience is challenged in expectations. Maciunas describes many pieces of transgressing the ‘4th wall’, which originated in the ideas of Brecht and Paris Dada.
We can identify the various performative work of Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, with Allan Kaprow’s first happening [‘concerted action’ 1952 at Black Mountain college with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham] informally swapped ideas with also Japanese ‘Gutai’ group in 1957. The magazine ‘Fluxus’ was published later in 1961. In 1962 a whole series of concerts and events were staged in Europe, linking the ‘nouvelle realiste’ also of Nice such as Armann. . The destruction of the piano was memorable – the newspapers called the Fluxus people ‘cultural bolsheviks’...
The second part of the seminar attempted to articulate the group’s ideas about how to construct its own ‘situation’. It was suggested that the assessment was designed with text as its main weight, and a gallery show seemed an impossible outcome given the size of the group. Other suggestions and criticisms began to democratise the group’s discussion with conflicting opinions – it became necessary to confront the problems by offering an adaption through negotiation to the draft syllabus [since the group was being taught by another it was felt appropriate to change certain conditions to make it work]. The solution was to make a three part assessment with outcome in keeping with the brief of a website [who was to design this site?] that would act as a project linking all teh individual responses. [something like slashseconds does as a curated work comprising a lot of different material. How a group of this size works together remains a problem.
Some solutions were offered. If everyone in the group provide firstly a proposal [this could be a fantastic or pragmatic or a theoretical one] depending on the subject and the author / artists’ orientation.] Art historians could provide texts as everyone – which could also be made into films / readings / performances. The catalogue essay seems academic in regard from fluxus and situationist viewpoint. Mobile phone videos would be perhaps uploaded to website of readings....there should be a group decision made as to how free the options are in presenting material.
The website could be templated upon /seconds which would then offer the group the chance to launch it, and to produce an exhibition at a later time from its contents.
text as placard
text as situation
text as spoken word
text as video
An info center could be hosted in the seminar room – or a 3rd International...fluxus version –
Performance artists could be invited to stage work within an info-center environment.
Deadlines: to be clarified in 3rd session.
seminar 3 - notes
Student notes
Session 3: Pragmatics – Real and Virtual Effects
Session 4: preparatory notes for discussion
Examining the necessity for a pragmatics that aligns the theoretical and historical with practical knowledge and concerns, (the ‘know-how’ with the ‘know-what’), in view of structuring a curatorial project that has both real and virtual outcomes, or where the effectiveness is fused between notions of real/virtual. What are these ‘practical’ outcomes and how do they interrelate the theoretical or hypothetical subject of the project? Provision of both written texts and physical artworks, address themselves both to networks and to a specific time / spatial location. How do these break down into individual processes and the forming (making) of unique objects and transmissions that are not mutually exclusive? Language marks the collaboration of the group: the assembly of material, as an event. Heterogeneous materials and voices. The ‘micro-museum’ or an-archive of disassembled parts, cohere or coalesce as a platform, make a boon of their disorganised material, which falls together in free-forms without homogenizing efficaciousness. The event ‘sublates’ the material and the voice together, either / or: art forms, words, spoken words, documents, collected things, simultaneously re-arranged within the electronic realm, the networked website live. These parameters would define perhaps some questions regarding process and saturation, the virtualisation and sublime object of the market, ‘ideology’ both from an academic position of detachment and as at the same time entering, immersed, in the subliminal actuality / ideology of contemporary-social milieu.
“A much more interesting notion, crucial to understanding what goes on today is the opposite – not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual. That is to say ‘reality’ by this I mean ‘efficacity’ – effectiveness – real effects generated by something that does not yet fully exist, that is not yet fully actual...” Slavoj Zizek, The Reality of the Virtual [youtube/excerpt]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5b_Q_KOGqE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiTum8eQ51E&feature=related
On Philosophy: Adorno, Marxism and Hegel by Zizek, how would our epoch appear to the philosophy of the perspective of the idea? What is really what is new, through the lens of the old. ‘One should begin from the beginning again’. Not nostalgia for the far-off other place, the dream of a utopia but what is pragmatic, critical? The overcoming of capitalism with or without a human face.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw
Topics discussed
The introduction began with a distribution of the notes from the first two sessions with references, paraphrasing the topics that were delivered in the form of lectures/ projected visual presentations / documentation. A suggested reading [with online addresses of websites] referred the group to Fluxus and Situationist works and writings / magazines et cetera. Essay titles were also provided as examples of topics that might structure an essay suggesting critical arguments and comparisons, descriptions, and historical analysis developed from personal study and attendance weekly at the presentations and discussions. Essays could be responses to different kinds of questions, in relation to the material that the course has considered.
The group discussed matters of time scales for assessment, and how the essay, the proposal for a project, and related visual material could be presented within the time frame of the module, and how these outcomes were to be integrated. It was decided that the text explication of 300-400 words would be handed in week 7 after reading week 6.
There was a provisional agreement that the final draft of the essay would be ready for the launch of the website, week 11, in early May, which would co-incide with an event in the space itself. The text would have to be ready a week before the launch to upload by the designers (to be decided). The exact dates for the launch of the website and event could be discussed next session. Press releases and mailing would be prepared and distributed a week before.
Week 9 would be a provisional date for the catalogue outline of 2000 words. This should also co-incide with the proposal for an individual project. The space would be transformed into an info-centre and a ‘fluxus’ table would present numerous texts and images, objects, boxes, and other collected material. Certain presentations were discussed – for example ‘manifestos’, press releases, texts, collages, cartoons, drawings, photographs, audio-visuals, that would be accumulated from a study of the practices and theories under investigation in the seminars – fluxus, situation, conceptual art, internet downloads, books, magazines, posters all constitute a ‘praxis’ whereby theory and practice fall together in arbitrary or chance encounters upon a table. It was also to inquire whether the group has access to printing larger scale work / posters for the walls.
Posters could be scanned from pdfs.
Videos would be projected, or on monitors. Audio works could be played on CD.
The groups, in three disciplines of fine art, art history and museum studies, would therefore be able to choose how to present their work, as written, drawn, photo- scanned, and moving image, that they felt represented their positions. It could be illustrated text, diagram, or manifesto [echoing the kind of presentation at the event].
A diagram was provided that explained the outcome structure of essay/website/event. The essay and the launch of website were outcomes of a skeletal structure like a backbone, the course pathway itself. Blog and proposal informed both outcomes on either side. The movement to / from blog to essay, and to /from proposal, was also to link to the final event and launch of website.
Web Presentation – website launch of www.slashseconds 7– monitors [Event Gallery 2007] presented material from the individual submissions in random play.
The website would be designed as a simple structure that allowed for each 44 individuals to upload proposal, visual documentation and essay. These can be designed idiosyncratically. The website differs from the blog in that it is a unified group entity that can be accessed publicly. The blog is the rehearsal of ideas, private, informal and to be used as a note and sketchbook. Each participant should set up a blog. This blog would be maintained as note / sketchbook/ reference log, writing ideas and developing them. Access to be enabled by providing address to the group.
We went on to return to some theoretical issues after questions. We looked for examples at www.slashseconds.org, the introductory editorials of issue 11, and issue 8. For examples of how practice is to be manifest, if a proposal is invited. We also looked at the relation between curating and archives. The proposal could be introduced through diverse quotations that connoted ideas, or inspired responses. An invitation could be staged as a series of references that form tangents around an idea or hypothesis. These could be at first not normally considered related in any sense other than poetically. However there is a tension in the non-relation, between poetry and pragmatics that Georges Bataille noted in his work ‘The Impossible’.
An Impossible Pragmatics
Pragmatics is an awareness of the necessary conditionality of collaborations and groups. Proposals and rehearsals of this collaborative group anticipate a shared event [that might never arrive]. The course itself is a ‘work’ of rehearsals and hypothetical [poetic/pragmatic] proposals. concerning ‘curating’.
Questions concerning a paradox about proposals were expressed– if a proposal can be hypothetical and in itself is ‘complete’ without necessity to any concrete manifestation, and completion or ‘realisation’ - why include the practical aspect of a budget and schedule for such an impossible hypothesis? The engineering of an impossible architecture for example like Constant’s New Babylon and other ‘mega-structural’ works are impossible: yet these sci-fi techtonic fantasies are meticulously drawn on blueprint. Conceived In the 60s [Archigram, Superstudio etc] the cities they imagine might yet result in a breakthrough. [Although the sublime architectural non-plans of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace are certainly not achieved in Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre]. How does the utopian dream here get reconfigured, if not as a failed enterprise of modernist functionalism?
Poetry and Pragma – The Abject, Transgression
Perhaps it is not strictly to be impossible, the purely hypothetical? Franz Kafka’s novel [‘Metamorphosis’] whose giant insect appears ordinary is ‘at home’. This is the practical aspect of the impossible, the abject subject, transformed, uncannily into the usual surroundings of his apartment. The apartment remains the same, yet is now transgressed, and impenetrable. Gregor is excluded from his own habitus. Kafka’s engineering of the story of the abjection of Gregor demands a solid and believable world for the transmission of the uncanny. Here pragmatics operates to fuel a certain desire, the taboo, death, perverse sexuality - or abjectness – that is also a death-drive, that Baudrillard will develop later in media criticism as the symptom of mass culture.
“ Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death – precisely the perspective of poetry, and in the opposite direction, that of science and the real world of utility. We the useful, the real, have serious character. We are never without our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us, indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being god is stronger than every right. That impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights.” Georges Bataille
Curating is set here in questions asked as to what and how is a work self-determining. Some terms in the process were explained.
The ‘dispositif’ [Foucault] is the conditional / contingent set of relations of materials and voiced and unvoiced discourses that enable the rehearsal of an event, constituted from many discursive formations and disciplines. These are in states of flux and are precisely contextual, processing, changing, becoming. The poetic device, the dispositif, is itself gauged to operate as a bracket to interrogate structures of meaning. The reception of meaning is therefore opened up to the process of deconstruction of ‘accepted’ cultural matter and histories that have produced an influential collective, a body of works, preoccupied in the modern period with the development of novel, complex and heterogeneous spatial and temporal forms, in art, architecture, design and technology. The modernist drive is characterised by a ‘passion for the real’, in the direct action of its avant-gardes. What ‘is’ the avant-garde in the ‘obsolete’ present, now symptomatic of ‘real time’ cognition, that it no longer has any affectivity? The work of Alain Badiou, specifically ‘The Century’ was forwarded as a brilliant analysis of avant-garde movements and manifestations of the 20th Century in relation to a rejection of history and ideology, reformed in the criticality of the montage as a break from the past, a ‘present’ tense that motivates the ascension of the ‘new’, as an artificial construct and egalitarian wish fulfilled. Autonomy of the art work is thereby rejected in favour of action or manifestation, aesthetics is left behind, and what must be maintained is an opposition, an aggressivity, to social hegemony, through the montage process that strips back the ‘doxa’ or the ideological representations and narratives that collude as the disguises of so called reality and its ‘ideal’ - Realism.
A horizontal movement is identified by Hal Foster in ‘The Return of the Real’ of a new entropic, fetishist, kind of art, as signifying the ‘post-autonomous’ space. The immolation and petrifaction of the polemical / provocative force of the avant-garde occurs at a moment of a self-contradiction regarding post-autonomy; its ‘containment’ as an institutional archive, or its adoption as simulated ‘sign’ of the new. [Baudrillard].
The aesthetisation of ‘the passion for the real’ forces out strategies of institutional critique, affirming the hiatus. The institution has no ‘outside’. Museums are utilised as political tools, or present a new kind of transparency – an ideological architecture that performs within the Post-Fordist economy, where oppositions of old are dissolved, and where the situationist ‘street’ does no longer exist. The dogmatisms of a new ‘freedom’ in the Museum’s dematerialised function, poses problems for Multitude, as a resistance to control. Technology enters and supersedes all practice. The Post-Fordist worker must recognise the conditions of this change and of a crisis period of post modernity, which Baudrillard makes a claim for as mourning the end. The after-world is sited, as a non-place- an illusion, which constitutes the inversion of the real of the modern’s passion, yet is also the absolute potential of freeing from the past, from both the vortex of ‘new’ and ‘obsolete’. Merz produces a horizontality spreading everywhere rather than a self-contained object.
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/003/articles/plewis/index.php
THE POMPIDOU CENTRE PARIS
Reference: The Pompidou Centre: or the hidden kernel of dematerialisation
Author: Proto, Francesco
Source: The Journal of Architecture, Volume 10, Number 5, Number 5/November 2005 , pp. 573-589(17)
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Already in the mid-1960s, with the first warnings of juvenile arraignments, an open critique of the naive enthusiasm with which the former generation had absorbed the myth of technology and communication came to the fore. So that Archigram members themselves, in proposing a cardboard megastructure for the ARCHIGRAM VII special issue (‘everybody's got their own mega-structure, do it yourself' they wrote), kept an ironic distance from the modernistic belief in the linear evolution of society (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, the dramatic decrease in the utopian mainstream that had characterised the ‘Year of Megastructures', as Banham called it (1963), succeeded in producing an unrepeatable architectural gesture for the celebration of individual freedom and social equality. As one of the best-known contemporary icons, the Pompidou Centre was also responsible for turning the modernistic interest in functionality into the de-materialised aspects of urban fetishism. The hyper-objectification of its form and the consequent ‘transparency' of its content led in fact to a new type of architectural fruition: that in which the ideological perception of the building exceeded the real possibilities suggested by its hyper-flexibility. Thus, the Pompidou also inaugurated a new era for the dogmatic myth of self-empowerment by means of self-learning (auto-didacticism) and mass jouissance.
Reference 2.
How did the student revolution of May 1968 influence the French art world? What were the repercussions of the activists’ social criticism on museum practice and artistic display? How was contemporary art informed by these critiques, and how did French cultural policy respond to the new artistic imperatives that emerged in the decade that followed the protests? These are the questions examined in Rebecca J. DeRoo’s, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968.[...] DeRoo continues her investigation of the institutionalization of the spirit of ’68 with a chapter on the creation of the Pompidou center in 1977. This new museum--“transparent, open, flexible, crowded, user-friendly”--appears at first glance to engage directly with the criticisms that activists launched at “museum-cemeteries.” Its architecture, café, shops, audio guides, media center and--not least of all--location in a former working class neighborhood can all be seen as creating a more democratic and accessible art institution through an incorporation of the everyday into the museum experience. Following Baudrillard and other critics, DeRoo argues, however, that the view of the everyday that the Pompidou center actually embodied was one centered on “popular entertainment, mass media and commodity culture” (p. 168)--a “supermarket of culture” in which the public was relegated to the role of passive consumers.
The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 describes the broader impact and legacy of 1968 in French art and culture. It investigates the cultural policy of a decade –the evolution of French cultural policy from Malraux to the 1990s, and contextualizes this evolution in the major theoretical debates of the period. DeRoo’s examination of the institutionalization of May ’68 critiques in the creation of the Pompidou centre; her reassessment of the significance of Christian Boltanski’s and Annette Messager’s work, as well as the misinterpretation of this work by French curators adjusting to the post-68 cultural climate; and her broader investigation of the politics of artistic display in the second half of the twentieth century make
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-vi-the-beaubourg-effect-implosion-and-deterrence/
http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm
www.brianmassumi.com/textes/REALER%20THAN%20REAL.rtf
IMPOSSIBLE TOURISM / ARCHITECTURE
On the city tourism in Beirut and the Middle East -Tony Chakar
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/001/articles/14_tchakar/index.php
On Cedric Price and Peripheral Architectures
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/003/articles/ffergusonplewis/index.php
Reference 3: Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - VI. The Beaubourg Effect : Implosion and Deterrence
The Beaubourg effect, the Beaubourg machine, the Beaubourg thing - how to give it a name? Enigma of this carcass of flux and signs, of networks and circuits - the final impulse to translate a structure that no longer has a name, the structure of social relations given over to superficial ventilation (animation, self-management, information, media) and to an irreversibly deep implosion. Monument to the games of mass simulation, the Pompidou Center functions as an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it - a bit like the black monolith in 2001: insane convection of all the contents that came there to be materialized, to be absorbed, and to be annihilated. All around, the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone - remodelling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design - but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory - a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.[...] This space of deterrence, articulated on the ideology of visibility, of transparency, of polyvalency, of consensus and contact, and sanctioned by the blackmail to security, is today, virtually, that of all social relations. All of social discourse is there, and on this level as well as on that of the treatment of culture, Beaubourg flagrantly contradicts its explicit objectives, a nice monument to our modernity. It is nice to think that the idea did not come to some revolutionary spirit, but to the logicians of the established order, deprived of all critical intelligence, and thus closer to the truth, capable, in their obstinacy, of putting in place a machine that is fundamentally uncontrollable, that in its very success escapes them, and that is the most exact reflection, even in its contradictions, of the current state of things.
Certainly, all the cultural contents of Beaubourg are anachronistic, because only an empty interior could correspond to this architectural envelope. The general impression being that everything here has come out of a coma, that everything wants to be animation and is only reanimation, and that this is good because culture is dead, a condition that Beaubourg admirably retraces, but in a dishonest fashion, whereas one should have triumphantly accepted this death and erected a monument or an anti-monument equivalent to the phallic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. Monument to total disconnection, to hyperreality and to the implosion of culture-achieved today for us in the effect of transistorized circuits always threatened by a gigantic short circuit. Beaubourg is already an imperial compression - figure of a culture already crushed by its own weight - like moving automobiles suddenly frozen in a geometric solid. Like the cars of Caesar, survivors of an ideal accident, no longer external, but internal to the metallic and mechanical structure, and which would have produced tons of cubic scrap iron, where the chaos of tubes, levers, frames, of metal and human flesh inside is tailored to the geometric size of the smallest possible space - thus the culture of Beaubourg is ground, twisted, cut up, and pressed into its smallest simple elements - a bundle of defunct transmissions and metabolisms, frozen like a science-fiction mecanoid. But instead of breaking and compressing all culture here in this carcass that in any case has the appearance of a compression, instead of that, one exhibits Caesar there. One exhibits Dubuffet and the counterculture, whose inverse simulation acts as a referential for the defunct culture. In this carcass that could have served as a mausoleum to the useless operationality of signs, one reexhibits Tinguely's ephemeral and autodestructive machines under the sign of the eternity of culture. Thus one neutralizes everything together: Tinguely is embalmed in the museal institution, Beaubourg falls back on its supposed artistic contents.
Fortunately, this whole simulacrum of cultural values is annihilated in advance by the external architecture. Because this architecture, with its networks of tubes and the look it has of being an expo or world's fair building, with its (calculated?) fragility deterring any traditional mentality or monumentality, overtly proclaims that our time will never again be that of duration, that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling, that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids. Our only culture in the end is that of hydrocarbons, that of refining, cracking, breaking cultural molecules and of their recombination into synthesized products. This, the Beaubourg Museum wishes to conceal, but the Beaubourg cadaver proclaims. And this is what underlies the beauty of the cadaver and the failure of the interior spaces. In any case, the very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. Nothing can be done about it. Too bad for the masses, too bad for Beaubourg.
What should, then, have been placed in Beaubourg?
Nothing. The void that would have signified the disappearance of any culture of meaning and aesthetic sentiment. But this is still too romantic and destructive, this void would still have had value as a masterpiece of anticulture....
One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a monument of cultural deterrence. Within a museal scenario that only serves to keep up the humanist fiction of culture, it is a veritable fashioning of the death of culture that takes place, and it is a veritable cultural mourning for which the masses are joyously gathered.
And they throw themselves at it. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture which they have been denied for centuries, but because they have for the first time the opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the end, they have always detested. The misunderstanding is therefore complete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cultural mystification of the masses. The masses, themselves, rush there to enjoy this execution, this dismemberment, this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated, including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. The masses rush toward Beaubourg as they rush toward disaster sites, with the same irresistible elan. Better: they are the disaster of Beaubourg. Their number, their stampede, their fascination, their itch to see everything is objectively a deadly and catastrophic behavior for the whole undertaking. Not only does their weight put the building in danger, but their adhesion, their curiosity annihilates the very contents of this culture of animation. This rush can no longer be measured against what was proposed as the cultural objective, it is its radical negation, in both its excess and success. It is thus the masses who assume the role of catastrophic agent in this structure of catastrophe, it is the masses themselves who put an end to mass culture.
The Real of the Virtual, not the Virtual of the Real = no way back
The archive, aided by the virtual/entropic sphere of the internet, is infinite in accumulations of data, residues of ‘facts’, and pollutions of knowledge. The simulacrum is the real, for Jean Baudrillard, and again positive for Brian Massumi. The impurity of language begs for a new kind of ‘critical’ space of the internet. Where there is no distance, no outside, there is what Edward Said names ‘the space of invention’. The self-fashioning this implies is also the kernal of an idea of curating. .
However, if we consider the theoretical work of Paolo Virno, or of Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, in Italy, concerning the ‘Multitude’ there is an argument for a continued passion of the ‘real’, which is to be indifferent, yet powerful, to the status quo and the period of a second restoration. It might utilise subliminal strategies, net wars, simulations of simulations, in the virtual key, since dissolving all sense of origin and originality, and copyright, i.e. ownership and privilege. Dates that mark a kind of equivalent transition are 1977 [the completion of the Pompidou Centre in Paris] [see Charles Harrison’s critique of the Pompidou on Open University, and references below]; and the Fiat factory strikes in Bologna that year, when resistance collapsed with the emergence of armed terrorism [The Red Brigade, Baader Meinhof, The PLO]. [See Franco Beradi [Radio Alice, Bologna]. It is a case that the self-determination of artists echoes in symbolic ways the kind of resistance model of terrorism.
Seminar 4 Preparatory Notes for Students
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/mmcgowan/index.php
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/hhatry/index.php
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/tionlee5/index.php
ABJECT SPACES
Was the vertical trajectory of the avant-garde, against Realism, not contradicted equally, by the internal contradiction of an anti-aesthetic, which recognises and aims to the power of the museum, the exhibition, and the scandal of entering some ‘dirt’ or life into its hallowed halls, only to be accommodated by it? The contemporary situation as Zizek has pointed out, requires precisely that dirt stands in as truth, once occupied by the sacred icon, beholden in the hallowed space, if not the ‘holy relic’ what? The earliest ritual- museums, cathedrals, the empty signifier, in Christology, the empty sepulchre that Hegel identifies as the inherited condition, of art’s failure to immanence. Death. Void. Shit. However, the ‘scandal’ of the rotten is at the same time without any of scandal’s redemption value, it is just rotten. If the rotten is to be forcibly confronted as its own subject, as the truth of the subject...abject art must take residence in this non-place, where the threshold cannot be passed without significant horror of non-being. In contemporary critical theory, abjection is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as women, people of colour, prostitutes, convicts, poor people, disabled people, and queer or LGBT people. In this context, the concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. Neither this nor that. To live excluded from both the social sphere and from oneself. Between two deaths. This term is used in the works of Julia Kristeva. Often, the term space of abjection is also used, referring to a space that abjected things or beings inhabit. William Apess used the term in the early 1800s in "An Indian's Looking-Glass For The White Man" to describe the plight of the Native Americans.
According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. We encounter other beings daily, and more often than not they are alive. To confront a corpse of one that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same state, our own mortality. This repulsion from death, excrement, and rot constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic order. [On the Abject, Black Sun, Julia Kristeva]
[Some references from wikipedia] The roots of Abject art go back a long way. Painters express a fascination for blood long before the Renaissance but it wasn't until the Dada movement that the fascination with transgression and taboo made it possible for Abject Art, as a movement, to exist. It owes a considerable debt to Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty.” Well before the Abject Art movement was given a name by the Whitney Museum, New York in 1993, the movement towards Abject Art had long been in existence.
It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese Actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's idea of a gesamtkunstwerk led to his setting up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater which involved the use of animal carcasses and blood shed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas Mekas where he organised a series of performances which greatly influenced the radical New York art scene.
Other members of the Viennese Actionists, Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade, which had a powerful influence on later Abject Art from the 1980s and 1990s. Rudolf Schwarzkogler who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1969 is better known for his photos dealing with the Abject. The growth of extreme performance art coincided with the radicalisation of politics in the late 1960s.
In the late 1960s Performance Art took off in New York. For a short period, Carolee Schneeman made performances that led to her inclusion in the 1993 show at the Whitney Museum of Abject Art. In the early 1970s Mary Kelly caused a scandal in 1976 when she exhibited dirty nappies at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This was followed by the concentration on the abject which is implicit in punk rock and, in particular, the performances of Genesis P. Orridge and GG Allin which involved spit, piss, blood, semen and shit.
In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee and Kira O' Reilly.
In the late 1990s, the abject became an important theme of radical Chinese performance artists Zhu Yu and Yang Zhichao.
The abject also began to influence the work of a number of mainstream artists including Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Paul McCarthy, Gilbert and George, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Jake and Dinos Chapman who were all included in the 1993 Whitney show.
Brody and Paetau, from their series, Chinese Paintings 2008
Other important artists working with abjection include New York photographers, Joel Peter Witkin, whose book Love and Redemption is made up entirely of photos of corpses and body parts, and Andres Serrano whose piece entitled Piss Christ caused a scandal in 1989 when it received $15,000 dollars of public funding.
Abjection in other works
According to Barbara Creed in Horror and the Monstrous Feminine a male's relationship with the mother and other females is complicated by the use of the feminine in horror and science fiction as we are forced to confront it as horrific and abject. Through an analysis of the film Alien (1979) and the female roles and representations, Creed explains how females are often related to the object of horror, be they as the object of horror or the object of the actual horrors' desire/hatred. The conclusion is that through monstrous representations of the female or the Mother, the audience is drawn into viewing them as abject rather than subject or object. The aliens themselves from the film in question are often described as having phallus-like appendages in the shape of their head and tongue, while maintaining an almost female form. Their interaction with the human crew takes on very abject roles as one crew member, a male, is forcibly impregnated (clearly as a product of rape) with an alien that eventually rips itself from the male 'womb' in a horrific scene of blood and gore. The process of a male being impregnated through the mouth with a creature that gestates -- in a being that has no womb -- and rips itself free in a shower of blood is one way in which this film abjectifies female roles.
Abjection is also a major theme of the 1949 work The Thief's Journal (Journal du Voleur) by French author Jean Genet. As a criminal outcast from society, during a fictionalised account of his wanderings through Europe in the 1930s, he claims to actively seek abjections as an existentialist form of 'sainthood.'
100 Wheelchairs – Thaniel Lee
Merz event– wall, Royal College of Art 2009– Redux archive, flyers, posters, photographs, texts, press releases, video
Theorizing the avant-garde
Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity with limited success. One of the most useful and respected analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon remains the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli's 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry and music to show that vanguardists may be seen as sharing certain ideals or values which are manifested in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopted, vanguard culture being shown to be a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism.
Other authors have attempted to both clarify and extend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work."
Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, while older critics like Bürger continue to view the postwar neo-avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like Clement Greenberg view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions
Avant-garde and mainstream society
Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg, Germany.
The concept of avant-garde refers exclusively to marginalised artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch As the essay’s title suggests, Clement Greenberg conclusively showed not only that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to ‘high’ or ‘mainstream culture’, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture that has been produced by industrialization. Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism – they are all now substantial industries – and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch: they were phoney, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from advanced or vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. It was a matter of style without substance. In this sense Greenberg was at pains to distance true avant-garde creativity from the market-driven fashion change and superficial stylistic innovation that are sometimes used to claim privileged status for these manufactured forms of the new consumer culture.
A similar view was likewise argued by assorted members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception (1944), and also Walter Benjamin in his highly influential The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). [9] Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture; members of the Frankfurt School coined the term mass culture to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged Culture industry (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, the electronic media). They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.
Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, "avant-garde" has been appropriated and misapplied by various sectors of the culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema. It is now common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning. Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern age, when the former modernist ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.
Nevertheless the most incisive critique of the vanguardism against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s.[10] Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called 'avant-garde ghosts' to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, ‘a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it.’
Essay suggestions
Looking at the relationship between the avant-garde, the abject, where can a line be drawn that locates their critical / categorical dimensions and topographies? What gains, what losses to the will to freedom?
What is left of ’68? Is the inheritance of avant-gardism now forced underground? Is there a disagreement with the market economy in current practices that have accepted the institutional programming of artists into the culture industry?
How do archives work with material that is ‘left-over’ from performances, things, bits and pieces that were never intended as aesthetic objects? Give examples.
What does the dispositif mean, if we consider the range of installation art projects in Taschen book’ surveys of ART NOW?
Is Jean Baudrillard correct to say in Simulations that there is no power to combat, only a virtual threat? What does he mean by the 'end of dialectical evolution’?
Session 3: Pragmatics – Real and Virtual Effects
Session 4: preparatory notes for discussion
Examining the necessity for a pragmatics that aligns the theoretical and historical with practical knowledge and concerns, (the ‘know-how’ with the ‘know-what’), in view of structuring a curatorial project that has both real and virtual outcomes, or where the effectiveness is fused between notions of real/virtual. What are these ‘practical’ outcomes and how do they interrelate the theoretical or hypothetical subject of the project? Provision of both written texts and physical artworks, address themselves both to networks and to a specific time / spatial location. How do these break down into individual processes and the forming (making) of unique objects and transmissions that are not mutually exclusive? Language marks the collaboration of the group: the assembly of material, as an event. Heterogeneous materials and voices. The ‘micro-museum’ or an-archive of disassembled parts, cohere or coalesce as a platform, make a boon of their disorganised material, which falls together in free-forms without homogenizing efficaciousness. The event ‘sublates’ the material and the voice together, either / or: art forms, words, spoken words, documents, collected things, simultaneously re-arranged within the electronic realm, the networked website live. These parameters would define perhaps some questions regarding process and saturation, the virtualisation and sublime object of the market, ‘ideology’ both from an academic position of detachment and as at the same time entering, immersed, in the subliminal actuality / ideology of contemporary-social milieu.
“A much more interesting notion, crucial to understanding what goes on today is the opposite – not virtual reality but the reality of the virtual. That is to say ‘reality’ by this I mean ‘efficacity’ – effectiveness – real effects generated by something that does not yet fully exist, that is not yet fully actual...” Slavoj Zizek, The Reality of the Virtual [youtube/excerpt]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5b_Q_KOGqE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiTum8eQ51E&feature=related
On Philosophy: Adorno, Marxism and Hegel by Zizek, how would our epoch appear to the philosophy of the perspective of the idea? What is really what is new, through the lens of the old. ‘One should begin from the beginning again’. Not nostalgia for the far-off other place, the dream of a utopia but what is pragmatic, critical? The overcoming of capitalism with or without a human face.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw
Topics discussed
The introduction began with a distribution of the notes from the first two sessions with references, paraphrasing the topics that were delivered in the form of lectures/ projected visual presentations / documentation. A suggested reading [with online addresses of websites] referred the group to Fluxus and Situationist works and writings / magazines et cetera. Essay titles were also provided as examples of topics that might structure an essay suggesting critical arguments and comparisons, descriptions, and historical analysis developed from personal study and attendance weekly at the presentations and discussions. Essays could be responses to different kinds of questions, in relation to the material that the course has considered.
The group discussed matters of time scales for assessment, and how the essay, the proposal for a project, and related visual material could be presented within the time frame of the module, and how these outcomes were to be integrated. It was decided that the text explication of 300-400 words would be handed in week 7 after reading week 6.
There was a provisional agreement that the final draft of the essay would be ready for the launch of the website, week 11, in early May, which would co-incide with an event in the space itself. The text would have to be ready a week before the launch to upload by the designers (to be decided). The exact dates for the launch of the website and event could be discussed next session. Press releases and mailing would be prepared and distributed a week before.
Week 9 would be a provisional date for the catalogue outline of 2000 words. This should also co-incide with the proposal for an individual project. The space would be transformed into an info-centre and a ‘fluxus’ table would present numerous texts and images, objects, boxes, and other collected material. Certain presentations were discussed – for example ‘manifestos’, press releases, texts, collages, cartoons, drawings, photographs, audio-visuals, that would be accumulated from a study of the practices and theories under investigation in the seminars – fluxus, situation, conceptual art, internet downloads, books, magazines, posters all constitute a ‘praxis’ whereby theory and practice fall together in arbitrary or chance encounters upon a table. It was also to inquire whether the group has access to printing larger scale work / posters for the walls.
Posters could be scanned from pdfs.
Videos would be projected, or on monitors. Audio works could be played on CD.
The groups, in three disciplines of fine art, art history and museum studies, would therefore be able to choose how to present their work, as written, drawn, photo- scanned, and moving image, that they felt represented their positions. It could be illustrated text, diagram, or manifesto [echoing the kind of presentation at the event].
A diagram was provided that explained the outcome structure of essay/website/event. The essay and the launch of website were outcomes of a skeletal structure like a backbone, the course pathway itself. Blog and proposal informed both outcomes on either side. The movement to / from blog to essay, and to /from proposal, was also to link to the final event and launch of website.
Web Presentation – website launch of www.slashseconds 7– monitors [Event Gallery 2007] presented material from the individual submissions in random play.
The website would be designed as a simple structure that allowed for each 44 individuals to upload proposal, visual documentation and essay. These can be designed idiosyncratically. The website differs from the blog in that it is a unified group entity that can be accessed publicly. The blog is the rehearsal of ideas, private, informal and to be used as a note and sketchbook. Each participant should set up a blog. This blog would be maintained as note / sketchbook/ reference log, writing ideas and developing them. Access to be enabled by providing address to the group.
We went on to return to some theoretical issues after questions. We looked for examples at www.slashseconds.org, the introductory editorials of issue 11, and issue 8. For examples of how practice is to be manifest, if a proposal is invited. We also looked at the relation between curating and archives. The proposal could be introduced through diverse quotations that connoted ideas, or inspired responses. An invitation could be staged as a series of references that form tangents around an idea or hypothesis. These could be at first not normally considered related in any sense other than poetically. However there is a tension in the non-relation, between poetry and pragmatics that Georges Bataille noted in his work ‘The Impossible’.
An Impossible Pragmatics
Pragmatics is an awareness of the necessary conditionality of collaborations and groups. Proposals and rehearsals of this collaborative group anticipate a shared event [that might never arrive]. The course itself is a ‘work’ of rehearsals and hypothetical [poetic/pragmatic] proposals. concerning ‘curating’.
Questions concerning a paradox about proposals were expressed– if a proposal can be hypothetical and in itself is ‘complete’ without necessity to any concrete manifestation, and completion or ‘realisation’ - why include the practical aspect of a budget and schedule for such an impossible hypothesis? The engineering of an impossible architecture for example like Constant’s New Babylon and other ‘mega-structural’ works are impossible: yet these sci-fi techtonic fantasies are meticulously drawn on blueprint. Conceived In the 60s [Archigram, Superstudio etc] the cities they imagine might yet result in a breakthrough. [Although the sublime architectural non-plans of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace are certainly not achieved in Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre]. How does the utopian dream here get reconfigured, if not as a failed enterprise of modernist functionalism?
Poetry and Pragma – The Abject, Transgression
Perhaps it is not strictly to be impossible, the purely hypothetical? Franz Kafka’s novel [‘Metamorphosis’] whose giant insect appears ordinary is ‘at home’. This is the practical aspect of the impossible, the abject subject, transformed, uncannily into the usual surroundings of his apartment. The apartment remains the same, yet is now transgressed, and impenetrable. Gregor is excluded from his own habitus. Kafka’s engineering of the story of the abjection of Gregor demands a solid and believable world for the transmission of the uncanny. Here pragmatics operates to fuel a certain desire, the taboo, death, perverse sexuality - or abjectness – that is also a death-drive, that Baudrillard will develop later in media criticism as the symptom of mass culture.
“ Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death – precisely the perspective of poetry, and in the opposite direction, that of science and the real world of utility. We the useful, the real, have serious character. We are never without our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us, indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being god is stronger than every right. That impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights.” Georges Bataille
Curating is set here in questions asked as to what and how is a work self-determining. Some terms in the process were explained.
The ‘dispositif’ [Foucault] is the conditional / contingent set of relations of materials and voiced and unvoiced discourses that enable the rehearsal of an event, constituted from many discursive formations and disciplines. These are in states of flux and are precisely contextual, processing, changing, becoming. The poetic device, the dispositif, is itself gauged to operate as a bracket to interrogate structures of meaning. The reception of meaning is therefore opened up to the process of deconstruction of ‘accepted’ cultural matter and histories that have produced an influential collective, a body of works, preoccupied in the modern period with the development of novel, complex and heterogeneous spatial and temporal forms, in art, architecture, design and technology. The modernist drive is characterised by a ‘passion for the real’, in the direct action of its avant-gardes. What ‘is’ the avant-garde in the ‘obsolete’ present, now symptomatic of ‘real time’ cognition, that it no longer has any affectivity? The work of Alain Badiou, specifically ‘The Century’ was forwarded as a brilliant analysis of avant-garde movements and manifestations of the 20th Century in relation to a rejection of history and ideology, reformed in the criticality of the montage as a break from the past, a ‘present’ tense that motivates the ascension of the ‘new’, as an artificial construct and egalitarian wish fulfilled. Autonomy of the art work is thereby rejected in favour of action or manifestation, aesthetics is left behind, and what must be maintained is an opposition, an aggressivity, to social hegemony, through the montage process that strips back the ‘doxa’ or the ideological representations and narratives that collude as the disguises of so called reality and its ‘ideal’ - Realism.
A horizontal movement is identified by Hal Foster in ‘The Return of the Real’ of a new entropic, fetishist, kind of art, as signifying the ‘post-autonomous’ space. The immolation and petrifaction of the polemical / provocative force of the avant-garde occurs at a moment of a self-contradiction regarding post-autonomy; its ‘containment’ as an institutional archive, or its adoption as simulated ‘sign’ of the new. [Baudrillard].
The aesthetisation of ‘the passion for the real’ forces out strategies of institutional critique, affirming the hiatus. The institution has no ‘outside’. Museums are utilised as political tools, or present a new kind of transparency – an ideological architecture that performs within the Post-Fordist economy, where oppositions of old are dissolved, and where the situationist ‘street’ does no longer exist. The dogmatisms of a new ‘freedom’ in the Museum’s dematerialised function, poses problems for Multitude, as a resistance to control. Technology enters and supersedes all practice. The Post-Fordist worker must recognise the conditions of this change and of a crisis period of post modernity, which Baudrillard makes a claim for as mourning the end. The after-world is sited, as a non-place- an illusion, which constitutes the inversion of the real of the modern’s passion, yet is also the absolute potential of freeing from the past, from both the vortex of ‘new’ and ‘obsolete’. Merz produces a horizontality spreading everywhere rather than a self-contained object.
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/003/articles/plewis/index.php
THE POMPIDOU CENTRE PARIS
Reference: The Pompidou Centre: or the hidden kernel of dematerialisation
Author: Proto, Francesco
Source: The Journal of Architecture, Volume 10, Number 5, Number 5/November 2005 , pp. 573-589(17)
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Already in the mid-1960s, with the first warnings of juvenile arraignments, an open critique of the naive enthusiasm with which the former generation had absorbed the myth of technology and communication came to the fore. So that Archigram members themselves, in proposing a cardboard megastructure for the ARCHIGRAM VII special issue (‘everybody's got their own mega-structure, do it yourself' they wrote), kept an ironic distance from the modernistic belief in the linear evolution of society (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, the dramatic decrease in the utopian mainstream that had characterised the ‘Year of Megastructures', as Banham called it (1963), succeeded in producing an unrepeatable architectural gesture for the celebration of individual freedom and social equality. As one of the best-known contemporary icons, the Pompidou Centre was also responsible for turning the modernistic interest in functionality into the de-materialised aspects of urban fetishism. The hyper-objectification of its form and the consequent ‘transparency' of its content led in fact to a new type of architectural fruition: that in which the ideological perception of the building exceeded the real possibilities suggested by its hyper-flexibility. Thus, the Pompidou also inaugurated a new era for the dogmatic myth of self-empowerment by means of self-learning (auto-didacticism) and mass jouissance.
Reference 2.
How did the student revolution of May 1968 influence the French art world? What were the repercussions of the activists’ social criticism on museum practice and artistic display? How was contemporary art informed by these critiques, and how did French cultural policy respond to the new artistic imperatives that emerged in the decade that followed the protests? These are the questions examined in Rebecca J. DeRoo’s, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968.[...] DeRoo continues her investigation of the institutionalization of the spirit of ’68 with a chapter on the creation of the Pompidou center in 1977. This new museum--“transparent, open, flexible, crowded, user-friendly”--appears at first glance to engage directly with the criticisms that activists launched at “museum-cemeteries.” Its architecture, café, shops, audio guides, media center and--not least of all--location in a former working class neighborhood can all be seen as creating a more democratic and accessible art institution through an incorporation of the everyday into the museum experience. Following Baudrillard and other critics, DeRoo argues, however, that the view of the everyday that the Pompidou center actually embodied was one centered on “popular entertainment, mass media and commodity culture” (p. 168)--a “supermarket of culture” in which the public was relegated to the role of passive consumers.
The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 describes the broader impact and legacy of 1968 in French art and culture. It investigates the cultural policy of a decade –the evolution of French cultural policy from Malraux to the 1990s, and contextualizes this evolution in the major theoretical debates of the period. DeRoo’s examination of the institutionalization of May ’68 critiques in the creation of the Pompidou centre; her reassessment of the significance of Christian Boltanski’s and Annette Messager’s work, as well as the misinterpretation of this work by French curators adjusting to the post-68 cultural climate; and her broader investigation of the politics of artistic display in the second half of the twentieth century make
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-vi-the-beaubourg-effect-implosion-and-deterrence/
http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm
www.brianmassumi.com/textes/REALER%20THAN%20REAL.rtf
IMPOSSIBLE TOURISM / ARCHITECTURE
On the city tourism in Beirut and the Middle East -Tony Chakar
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/001/articles/14_tchakar/index.php
On Cedric Price and Peripheral Architectures
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/003/articles/ffergusonplewis/index.php
Reference 3: Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - VI. The Beaubourg Effect : Implosion and Deterrence
The Beaubourg effect, the Beaubourg machine, the Beaubourg thing - how to give it a name? Enigma of this carcass of flux and signs, of networks and circuits - the final impulse to translate a structure that no longer has a name, the structure of social relations given over to superficial ventilation (animation, self-management, information, media) and to an irreversibly deep implosion. Monument to the games of mass simulation, the Pompidou Center functions as an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it - a bit like the black monolith in 2001: insane convection of all the contents that came there to be materialized, to be absorbed, and to be annihilated. All around, the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone - remodelling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design - but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory - a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.[...] This space of deterrence, articulated on the ideology of visibility, of transparency, of polyvalency, of consensus and contact, and sanctioned by the blackmail to security, is today, virtually, that of all social relations. All of social discourse is there, and on this level as well as on that of the treatment of culture, Beaubourg flagrantly contradicts its explicit objectives, a nice monument to our modernity. It is nice to think that the idea did not come to some revolutionary spirit, but to the logicians of the established order, deprived of all critical intelligence, and thus closer to the truth, capable, in their obstinacy, of putting in place a machine that is fundamentally uncontrollable, that in its very success escapes them, and that is the most exact reflection, even in its contradictions, of the current state of things.
Certainly, all the cultural contents of Beaubourg are anachronistic, because only an empty interior could correspond to this architectural envelope. The general impression being that everything here has come out of a coma, that everything wants to be animation and is only reanimation, and that this is good because culture is dead, a condition that Beaubourg admirably retraces, but in a dishonest fashion, whereas one should have triumphantly accepted this death and erected a monument or an anti-monument equivalent to the phallic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. Monument to total disconnection, to hyperreality and to the implosion of culture-achieved today for us in the effect of transistorized circuits always threatened by a gigantic short circuit. Beaubourg is already an imperial compression - figure of a culture already crushed by its own weight - like moving automobiles suddenly frozen in a geometric solid. Like the cars of Caesar, survivors of an ideal accident, no longer external, but internal to the metallic and mechanical structure, and which would have produced tons of cubic scrap iron, where the chaos of tubes, levers, frames, of metal and human flesh inside is tailored to the geometric size of the smallest possible space - thus the culture of Beaubourg is ground, twisted, cut up, and pressed into its smallest simple elements - a bundle of defunct transmissions and metabolisms, frozen like a science-fiction mecanoid. But instead of breaking and compressing all culture here in this carcass that in any case has the appearance of a compression, instead of that, one exhibits Caesar there. One exhibits Dubuffet and the counterculture, whose inverse simulation acts as a referential for the defunct culture. In this carcass that could have served as a mausoleum to the useless operationality of signs, one reexhibits Tinguely's ephemeral and autodestructive machines under the sign of the eternity of culture. Thus one neutralizes everything together: Tinguely is embalmed in the museal institution, Beaubourg falls back on its supposed artistic contents.
Fortunately, this whole simulacrum of cultural values is annihilated in advance by the external architecture. Because this architecture, with its networks of tubes and the look it has of being an expo or world's fair building, with its (calculated?) fragility deterring any traditional mentality or monumentality, overtly proclaims that our time will never again be that of duration, that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling, that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids. Our only culture in the end is that of hydrocarbons, that of refining, cracking, breaking cultural molecules and of their recombination into synthesized products. This, the Beaubourg Museum wishes to conceal, but the Beaubourg cadaver proclaims. And this is what underlies the beauty of the cadaver and the failure of the interior spaces. In any case, the very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. Nothing can be done about it. Too bad for the masses, too bad for Beaubourg.
What should, then, have been placed in Beaubourg?
Nothing. The void that would have signified the disappearance of any culture of meaning and aesthetic sentiment. But this is still too romantic and destructive, this void would still have had value as a masterpiece of anticulture....
One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a monument of cultural deterrence. Within a museal scenario that only serves to keep up the humanist fiction of culture, it is a veritable fashioning of the death of culture that takes place, and it is a veritable cultural mourning for which the masses are joyously gathered.
And they throw themselves at it. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture which they have been denied for centuries, but because they have for the first time the opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the end, they have always detested. The misunderstanding is therefore complete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cultural mystification of the masses. The masses, themselves, rush there to enjoy this execution, this dismemberment, this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated, including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. The masses rush toward Beaubourg as they rush toward disaster sites, with the same irresistible elan. Better: they are the disaster of Beaubourg. Their number, their stampede, their fascination, their itch to see everything is objectively a deadly and catastrophic behavior for the whole undertaking. Not only does their weight put the building in danger, but their adhesion, their curiosity annihilates the very contents of this culture of animation. This rush can no longer be measured against what was proposed as the cultural objective, it is its radical negation, in both its excess and success. It is thus the masses who assume the role of catastrophic agent in this structure of catastrophe, it is the masses themselves who put an end to mass culture.
The Real of the Virtual, not the Virtual of the Real = no way back
The archive, aided by the virtual/entropic sphere of the internet, is infinite in accumulations of data, residues of ‘facts’, and pollutions of knowledge. The simulacrum is the real, for Jean Baudrillard, and again positive for Brian Massumi. The impurity of language begs for a new kind of ‘critical’ space of the internet. Where there is no distance, no outside, there is what Edward Said names ‘the space of invention’. The self-fashioning this implies is also the kernal of an idea of curating. .
However, if we consider the theoretical work of Paolo Virno, or of Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, in Italy, concerning the ‘Multitude’ there is an argument for a continued passion of the ‘real’, which is to be indifferent, yet powerful, to the status quo and the period of a second restoration. It might utilise subliminal strategies, net wars, simulations of simulations, in the virtual key, since dissolving all sense of origin and originality, and copyright, i.e. ownership and privilege. Dates that mark a kind of equivalent transition are 1977 [the completion of the Pompidou Centre in Paris] [see Charles Harrison’s critique of the Pompidou on Open University, and references below]; and the Fiat factory strikes in Bologna that year, when resistance collapsed with the emergence of armed terrorism [The Red Brigade, Baader Meinhof, The PLO]. [See Franco Beradi [Radio Alice, Bologna]. It is a case that the self-determination of artists echoes in symbolic ways the kind of resistance model of terrorism.
Seminar 4 Preparatory Notes for Students
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/mmcgowan/index.php
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/hhatry/index.php
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/tionlee5/index.php
ABJECT SPACES
Was the vertical trajectory of the avant-garde, against Realism, not contradicted equally, by the internal contradiction of an anti-aesthetic, which recognises and aims to the power of the museum, the exhibition, and the scandal of entering some ‘dirt’ or life into its hallowed halls, only to be accommodated by it? The contemporary situation as Zizek has pointed out, requires precisely that dirt stands in as truth, once occupied by the sacred icon, beholden in the hallowed space, if not the ‘holy relic’ what? The earliest ritual- museums, cathedrals, the empty signifier, in Christology, the empty sepulchre that Hegel identifies as the inherited condition, of art’s failure to immanence. Death. Void. Shit. However, the ‘scandal’ of the rotten is at the same time without any of scandal’s redemption value, it is just rotten. If the rotten is to be forcibly confronted as its own subject, as the truth of the subject...abject art must take residence in this non-place, where the threshold cannot be passed without significant horror of non-being. In contemporary critical theory, abjection is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as women, people of colour, prostitutes, convicts, poor people, disabled people, and queer or LGBT people. In this context, the concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. Neither this nor that. To live excluded from both the social sphere and from oneself. Between two deaths. This term is used in the works of Julia Kristeva. Often, the term space of abjection is also used, referring to a space that abjected things or beings inhabit. William Apess used the term in the early 1800s in "An Indian's Looking-Glass For The White Man" to describe the plight of the Native Americans.
According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. We encounter other beings daily, and more often than not they are alive. To confront a corpse of one that we recognize as human, something that should be alive but isn't, is to confront the reality that we are capable of existing in the same state, our own mortality. This repulsion from death, excrement, and rot constitutes the subject as a living being in the symbolic order. [On the Abject, Black Sun, Julia Kristeva]
[Some references from wikipedia] The roots of Abject art go back a long way. Painters express a fascination for blood long before the Renaissance but it wasn't until the Dada movement that the fascination with transgression and taboo made it possible for Abject Art, as a movement, to exist. It owes a considerable debt to Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty.” Well before the Abject Art movement was given a name by the Whitney Museum, New York in 1993, the movement towards Abject Art had long been in existence.
It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese Actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's idea of a gesamtkunstwerk led to his setting up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater which involved the use of animal carcasses and blood shed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas Mekas where he organised a series of performances which greatly influenced the radical New York art scene.
Other members of the Viennese Actionists, Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade, which had a powerful influence on later Abject Art from the 1980s and 1990s. Rudolf Schwarzkogler who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1969 is better known for his photos dealing with the Abject. The growth of extreme performance art coincided with the radicalisation of politics in the late 1960s.
In the late 1960s Performance Art took off in New York. For a short period, Carolee Schneeman made performances that led to her inclusion in the 1993 show at the Whitney Museum of Abject Art. In the early 1970s Mary Kelly caused a scandal in 1976 when she exhibited dirty nappies at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This was followed by the concentration on the abject which is implicit in punk rock and, in particular, the performances of Genesis P. Orridge and GG Allin which involved spit, piss, blood, semen and shit.
In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee and Kira O' Reilly.
In the late 1990s, the abject became an important theme of radical Chinese performance artists Zhu Yu and Yang Zhichao.
The abject also began to influence the work of a number of mainstream artists including Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Paul McCarthy, Gilbert and George, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and Jake and Dinos Chapman who were all included in the 1993 Whitney show.
Brody and Paetau, from their series, Chinese Paintings 2008
Other important artists working with abjection include New York photographers, Joel Peter Witkin, whose book Love and Redemption is made up entirely of photos of corpses and body parts, and Andres Serrano whose piece entitled Piss Christ caused a scandal in 1989 when it received $15,000 dollars of public funding.
Abjection in other works
According to Barbara Creed in Horror and the Monstrous Feminine a male's relationship with the mother and other females is complicated by the use of the feminine in horror and science fiction as we are forced to confront it as horrific and abject. Through an analysis of the film Alien (1979) and the female roles and representations, Creed explains how females are often related to the object of horror, be they as the object of horror or the object of the actual horrors' desire/hatred. The conclusion is that through monstrous representations of the female or the Mother, the audience is drawn into viewing them as abject rather than subject or object. The aliens themselves from the film in question are often described as having phallus-like appendages in the shape of their head and tongue, while maintaining an almost female form. Their interaction with the human crew takes on very abject roles as one crew member, a male, is forcibly impregnated (clearly as a product of rape) with an alien that eventually rips itself from the male 'womb' in a horrific scene of blood and gore. The process of a male being impregnated through the mouth with a creature that gestates -- in a being that has no womb -- and rips itself free in a shower of blood is one way in which this film abjectifies female roles.
Abjection is also a major theme of the 1949 work The Thief's Journal (Journal du Voleur) by French author Jean Genet. As a criminal outcast from society, during a fictionalised account of his wanderings through Europe in the 1930s, he claims to actively seek abjections as an existentialist form of 'sainthood.'
100 Wheelchairs – Thaniel Lee
Merz event– wall, Royal College of Art 2009– Redux archive, flyers, posters, photographs, texts, press releases, video
Theorizing the avant-garde
Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity with limited success. One of the most useful and respected analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon remains the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli's 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry and music to show that vanguardists may be seen as sharing certain ideals or values which are manifested in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopted, vanguard culture being shown to be a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism.
Other authors have attempted to both clarify and extend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work."
Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, while older critics like Bürger continue to view the postwar neo-avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like Clement Greenberg view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions
Avant-garde and mainstream society
Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg, Germany.
The concept of avant-garde refers exclusively to marginalised artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch As the essay’s title suggests, Clement Greenberg conclusively showed not only that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to ‘high’ or ‘mainstream culture’, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture that has been produced by industrialization. Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism – they are all now substantial industries – and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch: they were phoney, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from advanced or vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. It was a matter of style without substance. In this sense Greenberg was at pains to distance true avant-garde creativity from the market-driven fashion change and superficial stylistic innovation that are sometimes used to claim privileged status for these manufactured forms of the new consumer culture.
A similar view was likewise argued by assorted members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception (1944), and also Walter Benjamin in his highly influential The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). [9] Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture; members of the Frankfurt School coined the term mass culture to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged Culture industry (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, the electronic media). They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.
Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, "avant-garde" has been appropriated and misapplied by various sectors of the culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema. It is now common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning. Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern age, when the former modernist ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.
Nevertheless the most incisive critique of the vanguardism against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s.[10] Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called 'avant-garde ghosts' to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, ‘a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it.’
Essay suggestions
Looking at the relationship between the avant-garde, the abject, where can a line be drawn that locates their critical / categorical dimensions and topographies? What gains, what losses to the will to freedom?
What is left of ’68? Is the inheritance of avant-gardism now forced underground? Is there a disagreement with the market economy in current practices that have accepted the institutional programming of artists into the culture industry?
How do archives work with material that is ‘left-over’ from performances, things, bits and pieces that were never intended as aesthetic objects? Give examples.
What does the dispositif mean, if we consider the range of installation art projects in Taschen book’ surveys of ART NOW?
Is Jean Baudrillard correct to say in Simulations that there is no power to combat, only a virtual threat? What does he mean by the 'end of dialectical evolution’?
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