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.

ELEA 9003

Olivetti Elea 9003 computer, 1959: designed by Ettore Sottsass Jr and engineered by Mario Tchou.

The Elea 9003 was a mainframe 6-bit computer, the first fully transistorised one that was commercially available. ELEA stands for ELaboratore Elettronico Aritmetico (Arithmetical Electronic Computer). About forty were made. Like most early computers it worked less than 50% of the time.

But the reason I’m posting it here is that fifty years on it actually looks more like an interesting piece of contemporary art rather than a  mere machine, especially with the way it’s been photographed here. What a lovely, baffling thing it is. I wish more artists looked at something apart from a very narrow spectrum of old art when they’re studying art or developing (supposedly) their own practice.

ONE DIMENSIONAL

From Berlin gallery Fruehsorge (who came to my attention thanks to complaints from other arts professionals about their, shall we say, relaxed attitude towards financial relations with artists* see footnote) comes this splendid slab of bullshit about their current exhibition of drawings by Matthias Beckmann. This is a verbatim cut and paste from the English version of their site, but I speak German as well so I can assure you this is a fair translation of a German write up that is also brimful of crap.

“Matthias Beckmann is a draftsman. He meets his counterpart as a discreet dialog partner who then turns into a silent observer in front of the motif. Beckmann looks for places and finds pictures right there. “The draftsman Beckmann, who finds what he wants to see in everything, has an anarchic wit that flashes up time and again …” There is never only one picture, there are always mostly larger series, so that his drawings expand and condense to a larger visual narrative. Thus a fundamental characteristic already of the individual sheet augments itself, for Beckmann’s drawings give the impression that for the draftsman “at least on paper … no thing as such is significant. It is only the attention it gets that lifts it out of the arbitrariness of “all sorts of things”.” Exactly this is one of the crucial preconditions for relativizing the documentary gestus of these drawings. Beckmann’s pencil lines are contours, lines which directly refer to an extra-pictorial object. Nevertheless he succeeds in liberating the drawing from a one-dimensional object reference and transforming what is seen into a solely pictorial reality. That is why one should never reduce his drawings to their mere depictive function, even though Matthias Beckmann certainly, and not least, is a drawing documentarist. But the big achievement of his drawings is an intensified sensitization of seeing. The viewer has to renew the way he sees the drawn objects and their spatial contexts, has to readjust his view of the world.”

NOTES:

“He meets his counterpart as a discreet partner…” It’s rare for an art text to accurately convey how blithely sordid, mercenary and pervy many artists are about exploiting other people to make their work, but this is a pretty good distillation of it. It almost sounds like a paraphrase from a disturbing Craigslist personal ad.

THE AXIS OF GOOD (STUFF)

The artists’ database Axis is twenty-one years old. One of their chosen top twenty-one Axis things from the past twenty-one years is a brief extract that was published there last year from my book Career Suicide, (you should buy it here) about the hypocrisy and general twattishness of comfortably salaried people at fully funded arts organisations or supposedly “commercial” galleries always expecting artists to work for no pay, with no resources and to no particular benefit for the artist… and worse still, taking it for granted that they will. Worst of all, many artists take it for granted as well and go along with this kind of nonsense. As I put it in the Axis headline: somebody always pays for “free” (and usually that somebody is you). Telltale Career Suicide logo at the bottom left, click there!

Axis (promptly) pays the people who write these things, incidentally, making them one of the few good ones. I haven’t read all twenty of the others yet, but those I have read so far are interesting and informative so I think they’re worth you checking them out.

Hey, I got through this whole thing without making my traditional joke about WWII, setting up puppet states in Italy and Manchuria, having meetings with Mussolini, etc… oh, wait.

http://www.axisweb21.org

HOW ABSTRACT ART ATTRACTS THE CHICKS

I’ve been reading neurologist V.S. Ramachandran’s interesting (and occasionally, slyly funny) book The Tell-Tale Brain. There are some unexpected and cogent explorations of art in it, including a great anecdote about the Nobel Prize-winning Dutch ornithologist/ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and his experiments in the 1950s with seagulls. Some of Tinbergen’s most groundbreaking work was on what he called supernormal stimuli. In short, living creatures have inherent, instinctive preferences for certain things that play an important part in their lives, especially their reproductive lives. Birds like eggs in their nests and birds like sitting on eggs because if they didn’t then there wouldn’t any more birds. But these instincts can also be thwarted because a bird also usually prefers a giant, artificial, gaudy egg with exaggerated markings to anything nature can create. Male butterflies want to mate with female butterflies, but they will often choose an unreal, perfect model of a female butterfly instead of its– by comparison, anyway– boring and imperfect real-life counterpart.

Tinbergen also found that female herring gulls have a red spot underneath their beaks, which is a target for gull chicks to peck at when they want to be fed. The chick pecks the red circle, opens its mouth, the mother regurgitates some food, and they repeat as necessary or until the supply of seagull vomit is exhausted. It turns out, though, that chicks are not terribly bothered if it’s their actual mother who feeds them. A head on a pole, or a disembodied beak, or a red dot on a stick will all provoke a chick to peck for food. Evolution and daily life both tend to favour quick reactions and ad hoc solutions; as Ramachandran mischievously puts it, in nature a chick is unlikely to ever encounter “a malicious ethologist waving around a fake beak” so it makes sense for the hardwired seagull rule to take a relative short cut like “if I’m a baby, then red dot=mother=food”.

My diagram of the herring gull experiment is better than Ramachandran’s. OBJECTIVE SCIENTIFIC FACT.

What’s really fascinating is Tinbergen’s discovery that if you put three red stripes on the end of a stick, the chick goes into a frenzy of pecking; this abstract supermother promises far more than any real biological mother can. It seems there’s an addendum to “red dot=mother=food”, some as yet inexpressible rule that’s being exploited by this amplification of what nature offers. Ramachandran:

“Imagine that seagulls had an art gallery. They would hang this long thin stick with three stripes on the wall. They would call it a Picasso, worship it, fetishize it, and pay millions of dollars for it, while all the time wondering why they are turned on by it so much, even though (and this is the key point) it doesn’t resemble anything in their world. I suggest this is exactly what human art connoisseurs are doing when they look at or purchase abstract works of art; they are behaving exactly like gull chicks. By trial and error, intuition or genius, human artists like Picasso or Henry Moore have discovered the equivalent of the seagull brain’s stick with three stripes.”

It should be noted that Ramachandran is just throwing this idea out as a plausible hypothesis, and he isn’t dissing or dismissing abstract art here. Neither am I. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen a theory of abstract art’s appeal that makes some kind of objective sense and isn’t smothered in academic artspeak claptrap to mask all the things we don’t know, and in many cases can’t know.

PS: Abstract Supermother is the name of my new band.