ART F-ALL

“Hierarchies of participation are being reconfigured and traditional authorial claims are under stress, new articulations of spectator/performer reciprocity can no longer be disregarded.”

The venerable ART-ALL academic mailing list is nowadays mostly a silent void. And Darkness and Decay and fifty thousand pointless conference papers about art hold illimitable dominion over all. Very rarely a small, absurd item still scuttles across ART-ALL’s dead face, like this recent call for participation associated with the University of Glasgow and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, specifically two entities that in all seriousness call themselves respectively the “Performance and the Body Working Group” and the “Performance and New Technologies Working Group”. “Working groups”, as if they’re engaged in vital research or something, as if the fate of the world hangs upon their deliberations.

Behold the sheer bollocks that these people write:

Title: Embodied Engagement: Participatory And Immersive Performance
The Performance and the Body and Performance and New Technologies Working Groups are joining forces this year to explore different bodily, aesthetic, political, ethical and economical aspects of participation in the current performance milieu. In a performance context where hierarchies of participation are being reconfigured and traditional authorial claims are under stress, new articulations of spectator/performer reciprocity can no longer be disregarded. Focusing on audience experience, we intend to examine possibilities of participant (spectators and performers) agency and empowerment within different modes of performance transaction.

HEY, STOP DISREGARDING THE NEW ARTICULATIONS OF SPECTATOR/PERFORMER RECIPROCITY, OK? Does this Scrabble board of a paragraph really mean to suggest that it’s in any way a new thing for live art and performances to involve or incorporate the audience as something other than passive spectators? If so, they’re talking absolute crap. And if they don’t mean to suggest this, then I’m still pretty sure they’re talking absolute crap. If you’re focusing on audience experience, don’t you think you should be able to express yourself to that audience in plain English?

According to Adrian Heathfield, contemporary performance has shifted aesthetically from ‘the optic to the haptic, from the distant to the immersive, from the static relation to the interactive’. The dialogue between the two Working Groups aims to explore the productive tensions between bodies and technologies in the development of this shift. The contested term ‘immersive’ is a rich, under-theorized concept which pulls in and works across distinct constituencies of performance. It calls upon diverse technologies to create its performance environments and promote active bodily engagement. Immersion both as an artistic intention and a perceived process is identified with concepts of viscerality, authenticity and immediacy. Yet the question remains as to how effective immersion can be in engaging audiences mentally, emotionally and corporeally.

You know Adrian Heathfield. Of course you do. He’s, er… the man who said contemporary performance has shifted from the optic to the haptic. Which is a shame, really, because I’d much rather see a performance than have to wait in a long queue to feel the performer. I’d like somebody to explain to me how one engages an audience corporeally; does this just mean grabbing or groping them? Having a fight with them? Because I’m also available to perform in shows like this.

What utter balls.

Anyway, let’s wish both of these working groups the best of luck in their research. Millions of lives depend upon it.

IMAGINARY ARTISTS I: LEBOWSKI

“My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal, which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina. Yes, they don’t like hearing it and find it difficult to say, whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his ‘Johnson’.” Maude Lebowski

You don’t need me to tell you that the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski is a classic; just ask the internet. It’s also remarkable for having two painfully accurate satires of contemporary artists in it. The art talk and Julianne Moore’s mid-Atlantic Sylvia Plath drawl, geometric hair and snotty attitude are all perfectly observed, and hilarious. In fact there’s three painfully accurate satires of contemporary artists if you count The Dude’s landlord Marty and his almost entirely unattended vanity premiere of a self-devised interpretative dance/performance art piece to Mussorgsky in a “nude” bodystocking and plastic vines. I’m sure many of us art lovers have been to those shows and regretted it.

OWNING THE IMMATERIAL

Yves Klein issues a receipt for the Immaterial to Dino Buzzati, and releasing Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility into the Seine. Paris, 1962.

Yves Klein (1928-1962, previously) offered a limited “edition” of ten “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” to collectors in exchange for specified weights of gold. A receipt was issued for every one, stating the weight of gold handed over. The receipt was burned and then half the gold was irretrievably thrown away so there could be no question of the buyer owning any physical object or residue, apart from their memory of the action. Note that although he doesn’t spell it out, the assumption must be that Klein shrewdly kept the other half of the gold. Even a mystical conceptual artist has to eat. Observe also the bow tie that seems to have been de rigeur for Continental artists circa 1960. All images here are from the Yves Klein Archives.

“GALLIZIO PRODUCES PAINTING BY THE METER”

Pinot Gallizio cutting and selling a scroll of industrial paintings by the meter. Inauguration of ‘Industrille Malerei’ show at Van de Loo Gallery, Munich, April 1959.

Giuseppe (Pinot) Gallizio (1904-1964) worked for most of his life as a pharmacist in Turin. Like many people (including me) who come late or by an otherwise circuitous route to the art world, many of its practices and assumptions struck him as utterly absurd; even more so as he began to participate in them. Gallizio was a founding member of the International Situationists (society of the spectacle masking the degrading effects of capitalism, Guy Debord, the 1968 French uprisings, détournement, dérives, etc: it’s far too large a subject to cover in a single blog post…) and in his art works he tried to cultivate a sense of play and creativity in the face of the capitalist imperative to recuperate, neutralise, and monetise even something as indefinable as art.

One of his projects was industrial paintings, abstract works on scrolls that were designed to be sold and cut on the spot like any other commodity, such as the original blank canvas it was painted on.  The paintings themselves aren’t actually very good or interesting, but that isn’t the point of them. He was making fun of the idea of art as a unique object or a finite resource; judging by the photos on the left, he was having a lot of fun doing it too. What a suave gent. I have to admit that on a few occasions I’ve rocked this bushy moustache and bow tie look at art openings. There’s a post on Yves Klein coming up soon; he favoured similar outfits as well and he also always looks like he’s having a great time in all the photos of him I’ve seen. I’m definitely going to apply myself to perfecting the late 50s/early 60s Continental look now. Like Klein, Gallizio was ahead of his time with his thinking on capitalism, commodification and intellectual property in the art world and in Western society in general.

TANKS BUT NO THANKS

It may surprise some of you to learn that I don’t go out looking for things to annoy me. Since I actually work in the arts and a lot of both my employment and (frankly, sadly) my socialising takes place in galleries and arts organisations, some of the bad work I see is all up in my face whether I actively seek it or not. I would still prefer to like things than not like things. As somebody who works in performance and video I’m particularly invested and interested in– and therefore conflicted about– Tate Modern’s Tanks, which opened a few months ago to provide spaces more suitable than the existing galleries for the presentation of live, ephemeral, performance and interactive art. It took me a while, but I finally got there just before their first programme of work comes to an end, along with Tino Seghal’s long-form live work in the Turbine Hall.

The Tanks are post-industrial, almost science fictional spaces. I wish any architect had recently designed a new, built-from-scratch gallery space in Britain that was anywhere near this inspiring, unique and full of character. The immediate unflattering comparison I’d make is to the dysfunctional Firstsite in Colchester, with its meagre selection of badly planned, sterile, poky spaces that in fact seem inimical to the showing of any and all forms of art, despite it being a purpose built new art gallery. Certainly I never saw anything at Firstsite yet that was flattered by the space rather than having to battle its quirks.

Secondly, I like the fact that the upper echelons of certain parts of the art world are finally waking up to what artists are doing and what they’re interested in now. Thanks for noticing that some of the most interesting, relevant artists around at the moment and in the recent past are once again not (or not just) working with flat objects you can sell and/or nail to a wall.