Notes from December 1

Note on Notes:

These are rough and provisional traces of a discussion - they are almost all questions, the evidance of thinking out loud.

Please join us on January 5th for a continuation of the discussion on Ranciere's Emancipated Spectator, and the start of a discussion of Dave Hickeys "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty"

Thinking out loud – December 1st, 2009

Articles

"Relational Form" by Nicolas Bourriaud >> "The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents"  by Claire Bishop >> "The Emancipated Spectator" by Jacques Ranciere

We had questions around relationship with audience.  Bourriaud’s article provides the foundation, Bishop article provides a critique, and then – since both those articles are so practice-oriented and we wanted something more theoretical – the Ranciere article speaks to why we might want to work this way and consider these ideas.

FLASHES: (from Friere)

• Relation to Marxist theory – difficulty and confusion of collectivity in this era Question of working in commercial theatre: how do you create art with meaning, if you have to sell it?
• Passivity of spectatorship as being problematic
• Bourriaud asserts the importance of evaluating within social and political context
• Shift in purpose of theatre: Are we making things to teach?  To provoke?  To engage? To mollify?
• Bishop says “this is about post-communism” and artists that are looking for a form of artistic revolt when revolution no longer seems possible; an attempt to resist commodification.
• Different shared experience when viewing performance and visual art :: you can talk to someone in the present about your experience while viewing a painting, which you are not able to do in a performance.

There was then a wide ranging discussion that we’ll attempt to summarize with categories of Ethics/Politics, Aesthetics/Form  and Audience. These categories are so interrelated that it’s difficult to pick and dangerous to forget the interplay , but hopefully useful to tracking thoughts. We were jumping like crazy, which was a good thing.

AUDIENCE:

• what happens to collectivity when an audience is diverse? Are relational pursuits there to grapple with this unpredictability, because we can’t rely on anticipated experience? 
• What can you assume about an audience’s collective experience? Maybe nothing – maybe you have to provide them with everything they need in the space and in the piece itself?   Imperative for work to contain all of the information required in order to engage with the work?
• People making the work actually become the audience in a very specific way.  When you’re doing the work, the community becomes the most immediate audience.  Denying authorship (“don’t worry about getting my inside jokes, make up your own”) as a way of dissolving audience/performer boundary.
• Relational work as creating a world you inhabit, rather than a world you watch.

FORM/AESTHETICS:

• Is there a difference in purpose between visual and performing arts – how does possibility of ownership of visual art object affect its role, compared to un-own-able performance?
• What does RA do to the notion of craft – is that scary?
• Discussion of the table set-up as being “crafted” but not to be “observed” – intentionally loose.  Common idea that craft is “best if not even noticeable” – value is in what it facilitates, not in the thing itself.
• Consultative and dialogic art necessitates shift in our understanding of what art is, away from visual/sensory.
• Modernist goal: to blur lines between life and art.
• Can art fall out of function, if life becomes too much like art or vice versa. 
• Is Youtube making the practice of art-making as a specialized profession redundant?  Idea of art making itself redundant is also in Emancipated Spectator. 
• At the unachievable limit of what relational could be (utopian ideal) would there be no audience and no author?
• Is it not ancient, that art was a function of life (women sitting around weaving) and we are oddballs who have created this elite “away from people” kind of art?
• Is Bishop saying: there is a difference being an artist that is mostly like a social worker, and one who enagages with a conflict but does it through their artistic choices?
• Where does aesthetics go when you are developing relational work?  What are we allowed to evaluate?  The process (maybe there becomes a “virtuosity of ethics”, a question of “how good a collaborator you are”)?  The resulting object?
• There is still an artistic object – an aesthetic manifestation of the relations, so even if you aren’t evaluating relation, you are evaluating product; still responsible aesthetically for time and space as an artist.   So if you are still shaping/manipulating time and space, where does the ethics come in?
• Is it about the making of it being collaborative?  If the structure is in place where someone is still in control, if it is still being imposed by an authorial voice, can it be?
• Art-making as a “game” in Bourraiud.   Is art really a game between all people and all periods, or is it a game between all ARTISTS and all periods?
• Is there a useful difference between creativity (finding expression) and critical creation (public money, public stage)? 
• Comparison with sporting events (rules become a container in which you can recognize the situation, be it war, basketball game, a party).

• “Sometimes I want the aesthetic”.  Question of aesthetics of naturalism.  Being "human" in the performance space (specific aesthetic way of being).
• Problematic word: technique … what is it good for?

• Do you express the same contemporary ideas differently in a different disciplines?  specific work (in dance you are responding to dance history, what power has been in dance, etc … whereas in relational art one responds to visual art lineage?  Or maybe not)
• Having separate “pure dance brain” based on “is it beautiful?” like a platonic ideal (aspiring to them), whereas relational aesthetics is talking about it in relation to something (engaging with those ideals but grappling with them)?
• If we could think about artists marrying the dance and relational practices, confusing notions of spectatorship:
• Forsythe (deconstructs ballet, process is very time-specific; he hates what is being done to his pieces out of the time and place that they were conceived in) – relational in the process, but crafted with trained dancers for an audience
• Continentale in Montreal last summer (“guerilla dance”)
• iPod dance parties – act of dance used
• Ame Henderson and Kaleb Robertson’s Noise Complaints where people were attempting to learn choreography 
• Huge practice of dance in public space.

• Ballet and modern share an aesthetic (dance involves a notion of body in space) even if they have different takes on that aesthetic.  Relational work as breaking from this aesthetic entirely and moving beyond it so that dance can be about the quality of a relationship, atmosphere, or experience … not about what it actually looks like, but rather the experience of “looking” at it or participating in it.

Definition of aesthetics?

POLITICS/ETHICS

• Brecht’s quote “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” – authorial claim of hammer wielder doesn’t work anymore in relational work.
• How do you un-structure the power dynamic in art (and society)?  Notion of democracy is that everyone’s voice has a place, and yet we give up that voice in a voting system (not possible in practice what is possible in theory). 
• Making manifest power, bringing into the visible something; never completely dismisses its history. 
• Question: How are relational works proposed to communities?  In diverse ways, and with an attempt to make it part of the process (it is part of the work of the artist to figure this out).  What are the ethics of this kind of work work? 
• Using exploitation to make the point (Santiago Sierra).
• There are ethical requirements in the academic world, but there’s no ethics “overseer” in the art world – how do we deal with this? 
• Is it important to be explicit to be clear about the rules? 
• Rules that are arbitrary make you overly authoritarian.  Do you need to create rules that work towards an end that you understand?
• Some kind of contract is made, so there is room for criticality.

•  KG’s Elapse I+II  (link under performances) - Proposal was impossible; people take agency within “game” that you set up for them, and play depending on their willingness  - the pleasure of installing rules is that people like to break them (idea of having rules generating a kind of freedom).

• What parameters do we use to evaluate relational work.  Is the critic extinguished – and does that even matter?  Shift of focus from product to process in community arts?  Goal is the process, not the artifact.  Difference between “community enhancing” art practices, and art done with community.  Critiquing relationship with community, versus artifact.

• Radical (for some) statement in Ranciere is that “spectatorship is bad”, capitalist, part of an oppressive regime.