ARC Muses: February 2012

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Occupy as Form: Photo Recap

On February 10, 2012, the Arts Research Center hosted Occupy as Form: A Working Session, an event which explored questions of "formal" concepts related to Occupation, reflecting on the movement's significance, techniques, and future. We would like to thank all participants for their thoughtful contributions to a stimulating discussion. A photo album of the day is now posted on the Arts Research Center Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ArtsResearchCenter).

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Michelle Dizon

Coinciding with the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is hosting the offsite working session "Making Time at Human Resources" on February 22, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by artist, filmmaker, and scholar Michelle Dizon.

I've been thinking and teaching a lot lately on the question of what is critique. Basing my understanding of critique on Foucault has been helpful in resituating the discursive frame of critique, exploding what it is that we do as teacher who lead group critiques, as well as opening the question of criticality for students in a way that understands critique as a practice rather than an object.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Aandrea Stang

Since 2008 I have been working with a team of colleagues at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) to design and organize the museum’s performative/social practice program, Engagement Party. Engagement Party’s statement is below:

Engagement Party offers Southern California–based artist collectives and collaborators an opportunity to make new artworks, interacting with and exploring MOCA and its resources in unexpected ways. Invited to work on site for three months, the artists may employ any medium, discipline, or strategy to create performances, workshops, screenings, lectures, or any other activity emerging from the group’s particular focus. Through Engagement Party, MOCA challenges the conventions of the museum as a collecting institution by providing a platform for artist collectives who create socially based works. Consistent with MOCA’s mission statement, Engagement Party aims to identify and support the most significant and challenging art of its time.

Over the program’s three and a half year life we have worked with twelve amazing mostly artists collectives from (again) mostly Southern California. During the three months they work on site, they are asked to create three discrete event-based art works. As the museum’s oversight committee begins to think about Engagement Party’s next phase and contemplate what the program could ideally be, we have been asking a lot of questions about social practice at MOCA and at large. Many of the questions have been specific to the museum but we have also tried to think on a broader scale.

Some of the questions in no particular order:

· How do institutions provide artists with adequate support while balancing their other programmatic offerings? How to best realize these projects when the museum does not have systems for the messiness of work that includes both artists and audience?

· Do the artists working with the institution feel well supported and how can we best work with them to their best advantage?

· Have the artists working within the museum made the work they wanted to make? Is a museum the right space for social practice?

· How has MOCA refined its notion of social practice to move beyond the larger event-based works to consider artists working in other aspects of the genre?

· How does a museum-based social practice program remain relevant?

Monday, February 20, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Carol Stakenas

LACE has been a crucial participant in Los Angeles artistic production for over three decades. One can argue that LACE’s existence emerged directly from the creative intensity generated in Los Angeles in the 1970’s. More specifically, performance art was a driving force behind the emergence of Los Angeles’s alternative spaces, including LACE. At the same time, performance-based activities provided a central platform for three new forms of contemporary practice to emerge: performance art, video art and public practices.

Most recently, our exhibition and performance series, Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1070-1983 focused on the disparate elements of the vibrant Southern California contemporary scene. In what ways did these wildly diverse practices unify and stratify Los Angeles’ art scene and its perception of itself? The impact of this abundance of action informed the studio practices of many artists as it provided an outlet for “out of the box” behavior. We intentionally invited artists from different generations including Cherie Gaulke, Jerri Allyn, Suzanne Lacy, James Luna and Ulysses Jenkins who were all active in Los Angeles in the 70s. The other commissioned artists: Heather Cassils, Liz Glynn, Ellina Kevorkian, OJO, Denise Uyehara and Dorian Wood brought mid-career and emerging artists into the mix. This selection did generate a desired fractionation and blending of form and content. At the same the, the group underscored a fundamental awareness and commitment by each artist to context and her/his desire to stop focusing on history long enough to be present now.

“I’d like to be sure that Kaprow’s intentions and ideas surrounding the work are not lost in attempts to replicate a historical moment.” (Steve Roden)

In 2008, LACE invited artist Steve Roden to develop a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s seminal Happening –18 Happenings in 6 Parts. He assembled a creative team, which included Rae Shao-Lan Blum, Simone Forti, Michael Ned Holte, Steve Irvin, and Flora Wiegmann among others. This new vision of the work was based on Kaprow’s original notes and writings and grounded in the artists’ intensive research at the Getty Research Institute in Kaprow’s archive. At the same time, the team made bold decisions on how to create the work in a contemporaneous setting that generated a productive dialogue with the Kaprow Estate, which ultimately led to the Estate’s endorsement of the process and performance.

While the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative punctuated LACE’s historical position in performance art, our long-term commitment to performance continues, thanks to these artists and many others, including Dino Dinco and Brian Getnick, who both served as guest curators recently.

It is with this in mind that I look forward to our conversation – to continue to grapple with the challenges (economics, politics, entertainment expectations, boundaries of form) performance art provides for its practitioners and for the organizations that are committed to making space for these creative practices.

Making Time at Human Resources: Alexandro Segade

The 5 Principles of the PoLAAT

February 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment

Central to the PoLAAT is a performance lab in which participants are trained in the tactics and techniques of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. Classes are comprised of exercises designed to educate the participants in the five principles: 1) Estrangement, 2) Indistinction, 3) Suspension of Beliefs, 4) Mandate to Participate and 5) Inspirational Critique. Songs based on these principles are taught to the group. What follows are notes on these five principles, using examples from the Living Theatre and antiteater to illustrate:

1. Estrangement
The performer acts out the distance between themselves and what they are doing. An adaptation of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, often translated as the Alienation Effect, Estrangement also incorporates elements of camp, which uses an ironic displacement or disidentification to critique the action represented. The audience, it is hoped, will be similarly engaged in an active critique of the performance and the questions it poses. Estrangement is evident in the antiteater’s use of the Alienation Effect as a performance of an ‘attitude, not a character.’

2. Indistinction
Contradictory formal and institutional distinctions are set in oppositional motion. The performer does two things at once, such as singing a love song and paying taxes. The play itself refuses to be a play and becomes a caucus, the narrative explodes with extraneous plot points and goes hyper-narrative or the signifiers of pop music are short-circuited by art-historical classification, etc. Theater as process is exemplified by the practices of antiteater. Plays were made into films and television series; films were adapted as plays, with cast members serving as both administration and crew for these various productions. This blurring of disciplines, forms and roles provides a model of production in which all participants are expected to invest their talents in a group effort that may fail, but do so spectacularly and with political commitment to democracy intact. Implicit here is a willful disregard of audience expectation, not to mention taste.

3. Suspension of Beliefs
A truism of theater is that it requires the suspension of disbelief, but in the PoLAAT model ideological and aesthetic assumptions are questioned. The performer must consider all options. With so many contradictory political positions represented by the attitudes (not characters) onstage, the effect of their technique is the suspension of beliefs, when the actors and audience find their ideological and aesthetic concerns caught in a field of contemplation. This principle is exemplified by the Living Theatre’s attempt to levitate a person in the performance of their play Frankenstein (1965).

4. Mandate to Participate
Audience and performer are the same thing. All is rehearsal and rehearsal is all in a reconfiguration of event as process. The theater is made into an open system, disrupting the hierarchical structure of the stage, where the actor is speaker and public is listener. Structures for the inclusion of participation must be made clear; chaos can be managed. The audience becomes the cast and the cast gets naked with the Living Theatre. Democracy is alive again.

5. Inspirational Critique
When the structure of institutional thought is ruptured, an inspirational critique is the result: a moment in which, for a brief second, all is questioned, allowing for an understanding of the situation that opens itself up to new possibilities.

Making Time at Human Resources: Ryan Kelly

My collaborative practice with Brennan Gerard has centered around the production of live performances informed by dance and engaged in a dialogue with the histories and legacies of Minimalism. In recent work we have interrogated the couple as the hegemonic formation of intimacy. We approached this problem through a programmatic score-based performance that produced, over the course of it, new representations of intimacy determined by the logic of the system and not by our individual desires or authorial urges. I think that the medium of dance is well-suited to these inquiries into gender, relationality and intimacy. In dance, the body and its gestural language are primary. The affective exchange--its promise and impossibility--between dancer and spectator is the site for working out questions of relationally and the problems of seeing.

This remaking of the performance space as the site for the production of new models of exchange and relationality has recently led us to consider the potential for the distribution of works--an area generally kept outside the frame of what the work is--to be made meaningful. Again, performance, in its dual character of repeatability and uniqueness, seems well-suited to this question of distribution's potential for meaning-making. A live work will never achieve the standardization or repeatability of Minimalist sculpture, for instance. A performance is always a re-iteration of itself, a new manifestation. How can we as artists exploit this characteristic of performance to further a project driving toward the production of new models for relationally? How is the re-creation of a dance work for the circumstance of distribution different than the refabrication of a Judd box? Rosalind Krauss has argued in depth the extent to which Minimalism's once-radical notion of refabrication opened up the entire project of Minimalism to exploitation by an increasingly creative market. What does this legacy teach us as dancers?

Making Time at Human Resources: Suzanne Lacy

TWO WORKS I'm thinking about:

1) Otis Public Practice at CAA: Radical pedagogy and educational critique are key concepts in current debates on artistic public practices. Pedagogical models are explored, re-imagined, and deployed by art practitioners in highly diverse projects comprising laboratories, discursive platforms, temporary schools, participatory workshops, and libraries. Artists are revaluing the collective knowledge and agency of communities through processed-based works that mix the aesthetic with the social and political. In the west lobby atrium of the Los Angeles Convention Center, Otis Public Practice MFA students occupy a prototypical classroom where changing and spontaneous groupings of students and faculty “perform” discussions on politics, relational and public practices, and the experience of learning. A changing series of presentations and discussions will be open to casual and immersive participation over three days.

2) Three Weeks In January: End Rape in Los Angeles was a contemporary exploration of Lacy’s 1977 performance, Three Weeks in May (1977), created for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time and produced by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. In partnership with Los Angeles student and arts groups, political organizations and civic institutions, Lacy recreated key aspects of the original work but focused on where Los Angeles is now, forty years into the anti-rape movement, and included new organizing strategies including social media. I Know Someone, Do You? #RapeEndsHere was a twitter campaign launched at the beginning of the project.

At the center of this expansive and durational performance, a Los Angeles Rape Map was installed in front of the Los Angeles Police Department and marked daily with the prior day’s rape reports. The form and structure of the performance consisted of activism, education, media, city politics and art, and featured approximately 50 private and public events. As with the original work, art was the platform to organize a series of presentations that collectively brought renewed focus to the effort to end rape. The project concluded with two performances directed by Lacy: Storying Rape, an exploration of solutions at the top of City Hall communicated through social media, and Call to Action/Candlelight Vigil, a rally-as-performance that dedicated the “assets” of the entire project to a year-long international campaign, Billion Women Rising.

In this video short, Myths of Rape, an original 1977 performance by Leslie Labowitz, was recreated by artists Elana Mann and Audrey Chan.

Making Time at Human Resources: Malik Gaines

Visual art and performance are in a classic bad relationship. Art stays for the sex, the good times, the feeling of being alive. But art will belittle performance in public, will call it late at night but won’t let it stay over, doesn’t really believe what performance does is valuable. Art’s esteemed family only barely tolerates the relationship. Performance stays with its more powerful partner for the money, for the stature, the trips to Europe, for feeling like it belongs to something, for fear of having to go back to that old senile boyfriend, the Theater. How else can it support itself? But performance never feels like it really belongs in art’s world. It’s always using the wrong fork at dinner. Performance is always acting out, marginalizing itself, relishing the freedom of that marginal position, then wondering why it can’t get any respect in art’s world. These dynamics can be traced back to each partner’s childhood.

Art was born among aristocrats, but went to school with merchants who made it big. They value value. Their wealth is derived from a displacement of value onto objects. These objects are sometimes useful, like tools, machines, and slaves; but those are meant to be handled by the servants. Art’s family is hierarchical, those on the top surround themselves with beauty. Beauty is not material, like so many tools, but ideal. One may not touch an ideal. As this family grew increasingly rational and scientific, an empirical interest in observation met an emphasis on visuality to bolster art’s importance. Art has always been very good-looking, and has long served as a site of contemplation for its many admirers. As such, folks tend to project what they want onto it.

Performance is older than it looks, much older than the infantilized position imagined by art. It grew up in a religious milieu, but eventually found its secular purposes. In either context, it was always trying to do something, make something happen. In an increasingly alienated and imagistic world, performance found that it could foreground its own body as the instrument of ideal relations, a material iteration of ideological constraints. This act is ambivalent: it can mystify or deconstruct; it can promote heroism or criticality. The body and its cultural trappings are so thoroughly marked, so easily recognized, that performance can sometimes feel over-determined to those who encounter it.

During a political rough patch, both were radicalized. Art started dating outside its class. Performance dared to leave home. They met in an avant-garde café. The rest is history: or Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present …

Making Time at Human Resources: Brennan Gerard

The past five years have witnessed the explosion of dance in an art context. Major exhibitions exploring the relationship of dance and the visual arts have been mounted at the Museum of Modern Art (2010), Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2011), Hayward Gallery (2011), and the Centre Pompidou (2012), while choreographers have been the subject of solo shows as well as articles and monographs in visual art publications. Contemporary artists increasingly incorporate dance, dancers, and choreography in their practices (witness the 2010 and upcoming editions of the Whitney Biennial), and prominent art historians have directed their criticism and scholarship to include dance. Such examples evidence an expanding institutional interest and investment in producing, historicizing, and collecting dance-based work. This phenomenon is not simply, or not only, one of appropriation by the art world of an external, or adjacent, discourse. As much as dance may appear to be a new object of fascination in art, dancers and choreographers have also been moved to present and insert their work in museums, galleries, and art schools.

What are the stakes of this dance/art interface? What is the potential for loss and gain? What are the historical precedents for this current phenomenon? How might dance transform art institutions and collections from within, and how will the art "world" transform the dance "community?"

Collaborating since 2003, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly approach art as a series of experiments to work through questions of spectatorship, desire, and the formation of political consciousness. Recent projects—combining performance, choreography, text, sound, and video—are often site-specific and reflect their shared interest in the legacy and politics of Minimalism and post-modern dance filtered through social and psychological structures.

Gerard and Kelly recently completed the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010), where they received the Van Lier Fellowship, and are currently pursuing MFAs in the Interdisciplinary Studio program at the University of California, Los Angeles (2013). Gerard received a BA from Yale University (2001), and Kelly was a dancer with New York City Ballet, receiving a BA from Fordham University (2008). Their collaborative work has been shown in New York at Danspace Project, Art in General, Park Avenue Armory, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process, The Kitchen, Volta Art Fair, and Whitney Museum of American as well as at Greenwich Music Festival (Greenwich, CT), Jacob’s Pillow (Beckett, MA), Mount Tremper Arts (Phoenecia, NY), Renaissance Society (Chicago), and University Art Gallery at University of California, Irvine, among other prestigious institutions. Their work has been shown internationally at Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa (Lisbon), Maastricht Toneelstad Festival (Netherlands), and Studio 303 (Montréal).

Gerard and Kelly are the founders of Moving Theater. Their writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, PAJ, and Box of Books, Vol. IV. More information and blog at www.gerardandkelly.com.

Making Time at Human Resources: Megan Hoetger

In a recent conversation with a performance scholar whom I respect deeply, the issue of re-performance, or as it is also often referred to re-enactment (the distinction between these two terms being another topic ripe for conversation), was brought up only to be quickly written off as kitsch and as a sign of a lack of any new platforms for performance production, signaling a sort of dead end in performance's political efficacy. I was troubled by the shutdown of conversation and what seemed like a full-scale dismissal of any work produced within the matrix of re-performance. This unease has left me thinking very much about the concept and my own conflicted position on it as a strategy of production.

While I understood this scholar’s position and have heard iterations of it across a spectrum, I find myself not able to so easily reconcile the issue. It is clear to me, as to many, that the Abramović model of re-performance, insisting on the creation of an “authentic experience,” is a farce, to draw phrase from Marx vis-à-vis Martha Rosler, speaking more to the phenomena of canonization, commodification, and celebrity. The evacuation of context in such deeply political work sanitizes it by means of aestheticization, willfully forgetting the lessons of the past—a slippery slope indeed. That being said, there are other forms of re-performance, which engage in the richness of past social, political and aesthetic contexts as a means of raising contemporary dialogues about such shifts in context and, by extension, a politic of engagement with past, a past whose ideological structures are embedded in the present. I am thinking here of two recent PST projects, Andrea Fraser’s Men on the Line, KPFK, 1972 and Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in January. Distinct in the format, scale, and historical material from which they were working (Fraser’s being a historical radio broadcast from a non-art context and Lacy’s being a contemporary iteration of her seminal 1977 Three Weeks in May), both re-performed a past event as a means to foreground the relevancy, and in fact urgency, of the topics raised and in the process of doing so created a moving experience.

It seems like I have come down on a side, so to speak, where the former is “bad” and the latter “good.” What risks are run in this prescriptive approach to re-performance? Is there not also significance in the failure of the Abramović model? Does not the still deeply-felt desire for an authentic experience of a distant past wrapped up in this model (alongside the desire for spectacle and entertainment) deserve discussion, particularly for the ways in which it is tied to the institutionalization of the field of performance art? Is it not important to address the issues raised in it precisely for their kitschiness? Is there not a way that thinking through all of re-performance’s manifestations, for better and worse, there is something to be learned of how we as writers, artists, and thinkers make sense of historical time-based work today and, moreover, how we make (as in construct) these performance histories?

Making Time at Human Resources: EJ Hill

Sometimes (most times), I act on irrational impulses. Several nights ago as I was driving home from my studio in Culver City to my apartment in Koreatown, I realized that I had never counted out loud to 1,000. As soon as the thought occurred, I began counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 . . . 246, 247, 248, 249 . . . I had parked my car somewhere between 487 and 518. It was then that I decided I would either continue counting until I reached 1,000 or until I lost count. I ended up losing count around 860-something. I got out of my car, locked the doors, and crossed the street into my apartment building. The action had come and gone with no one around to witness or document. The very act of counting is measuring time as it passes, examining moment by moment, the fleeting nature of all things earthly. Did I just make a new performance or am I simply losing my mind?

As a performer, my natural/conditioned inclination is to document everything—each and every temporary moment to ensure that there's evidence of an artistic gesture's occurrence. But where is the line drawn between the raw, impulsive, and unrehearsed actions performed for oneself and the deliberate efforts to make an "art thing" for an attentive audience? How thick is that line? And who (the individual? other artists? an art institution?) determines the exact position of that line? Is it even necessary to make these delineations?

If a performance artist falls in the forest and there's no one else around to witness or document it, is it still art?

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Tavia Nyong'o

I have been mulling the historical and political contexts and consequence of our present fixation with “participation” — as the art world calls it — or “participatory culture” as it is referred to in media and cultural studies. In a well-known essay, Claire Bishop teased out one key assumption: that between participation and democracy. Indeed, participatory democracy, a cherished value of the new left, has received renewed attention due to its presence within the Occupy movement. As just these examples of art-, media-, and decision-making suggest, ‘participation’ concatenates and potentially conflates a wide variety of discrepant theories and practices. It is a more or less unquestioned value that also seems on the way to becoming a dominant structure of feeling. In thinking through this state of affairs, I have been influenced by Jodi Dean’s critique of participation as what she calls a “neoliberal fantasy,” and would even pick up on her cue to connect participation to the genealogy of neoliberal governmentality. To do so would introduce a Foucauldian dimension to the analysis of participation, like governmentality, as “the conduct of conduct.” How do we mold ourselves into docile, useful bodies in the very process of acting out in concerted or networked agencies? For whom do these agencies accrue value (cultural, political, and monetary)?

I am not interested in wielding Foucault with a broad brush to paint all forms of participation an equal color of grey. But I am invested in a more patient and philosophical investigation into what it is we are doing when we tell ourselves we are participating. And I am equally interested in contemplating the Bartlebyan gesture. Is it still possible, in the era of participation, to “prefer not to”?

Making Time at Human Resources: Judith Rodenbeck

Several issues emerged from my work on Allan Kaprow and happenings and have been taking up headroom for some time now.

1) “Strips of behavior” and the repertoire and how these two concepts do or don’t map onto advanced art practice.

2) Deskilling and its self-conscious institutionalizing as “resistant” practice.

3) Institutional critique as necessary decoy.

4) The fetishizing of collective and/or participatory practice v. the problematics of solo work.
While these topics can’t satisfactorily be compressed into a keyword, all circulate around several common nodal points, one of which is the nominally shared territory of certain advanced art practices and performance art. At play in many such works is a complex of claims about deskilling, performative language and framing, and a desired though possibly utopian sociability -- I think, for instance, of the curious quietism in claims for the performative efficacy and communicative openness of Tino Sehgal’s work, or the highly stylized embrace of pathos in Sharon Hayes’s various embodied reanimations of speech acts. I’ve been interested in the ways the varied jargons deployed to frame or explicate these kinds of projects both open up new lines of thought (or reopen old ones) and close down or repress other avenues.

Art history has concentrated on what performance people call the archive, but we also have our various repertoires though we don’t think of them this way. Might hybrid practices help shed light, understood in terms of their relation to repertoire, on issues in non-performance-art?.

Making Time at Human Resources: Nizan Shaked

Out of the six exhibitions my students curated since I began heading the Museum and Curatorial Studies program at Cal State Long Beach, two have taken the issue of exhibiting performance as their primary concern. In 2008 Un-figuring the Body (lead by Megan Hoetger) investigated the posthumous representation of performance-related objects in the gallery space, tackling the problem of how to represent the (intensely) physical work of performance after the event took place, and the theoretical implication of how the human body becomes “figured” in representation. Currently on view, Split Moment (lead by Mary Coyne) examines the relation of time-based work with two-dimensional forms of representation, by thinking about the latter as a form of “writing” in the Derridian sense.

These professional exhibitions were curated by the students for our accredited University Art Museum (UAM), and in both cases they were met with varying degrees of antagonism to the display and/or the programming. The first exhibition provoked the resistance of the institution itself, which questioned the “museum quality” status of Johanna Went’s performance costumes, and the merit of Dawn Kasper’s series of performances. (Went’s contribution is now acknowledged in various Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, and Kasper is gearing up to be part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial.) With Split Moment the criticism came from the museum’s “general public.” While both graduate and undergraduate students responded enthusiastically to a recital by dancer/choreographer Flora Weigmann, members of the community complained that it had not been sufficiently contextualized in for them to understand what they were seeing.

It seems that my students and I have made several assumptions when curating the programing. Since Flora’s piece Wondering was on display, we expected that the audience will organically enjoy the live event and extrapolate its meaning from the discussion of her video piece addressed in the exhibition brochure. Both the video and the live event were a tribute to modernist choreographer Mary Wigman. It was only after watching the event that I could articulate how the movements themselves held a tension between a modernist aesthetic and a postmodern distance captivating me in my inability to distinguish between the two.

However, even now I feel insecure in my ability to discuss the meaning or significance of this dance. I am wanting for criteria and do not even have the means to assess whether my observations are insightful or obvious. False confidence is not an option here. In fact, I think it’s the first problem to be weeded if we are to formulate a concrete and meaningful critical tool. I therefore see the question of criteria as central and think it should be approached comparatively.

But here we face another problem. On the one hand, most critics/historians I read (indeed, with bias) evaluate performance in relation to the canon of art-discourse that is deeply connected to formalism, either directly, or because their argument has been formulated through the art-historical dialogue with this powerful position. Even the varying schools of politically engaged criticism are ultimately debating formalism, whether they admit it or not, and the strong influence of this methodology continues to shun inter-disciplinary discussion. On the other hand, the dialogue with formalism is the last straw connecting us to a meaningful history—the last frontier against the onslaught of spectacular populism that has seized the imagination of museum personnel, funding agencies, and of course private philanthropy, consequently lowering the bar in our institutions of display to an unacceptable common denominator.

Making Time at Human Resources: Jennifer Doyle

1) My work was never organized by a commitment to a disciplinary framework. I can talk at length about disciplinary formations, however. Like - what cultural studies enables for literary scholars - the disinterest many literary scholars have in a reified notion of "the literary," our sense of happiness in jettisoning the canon, our glee in the discovery that unloading that dead discursive weight didn't require abandoning our fondness for the formal, the textual. We swapped literature for text somewhere in the mid 1980s. I tend to approach visual "stuff" with the same freedom - the same fondness for text.

A couple of years ago, I gave a paper about friendship and generosity in Warhol's Blue Movie. "Where is aesthetic judgment in your work?" asked a member of the audience. This asked by a well-known art historian, an "A-list" figure whose work is quite sophisticated.

Nowhere, I answered. I might have even laughed at the question, which was somewhat tactless on my part. I did honestly think she must have been joking.

There is no room for aesthetic judgment in my work. It may be fine for others, but it is not a productive line of inquiry for me, and in fact my practice rejects aesthetic judgment: at no moment does my argument center on whether or not something is "art." Or if something is good, or bad - as "art."

I am very much interested in what happens when one doesn't worry about that.

It's a willful form of innocence - of course I'm aware that most of the official art world cares deeply about Art qua Art. But, as a critic, when something is presented to me as art, I take it as art. The declaration "this is art" is, for me, a rhetorical move - valuable for its context, for its aim, and its effectiveness. It is not a categorical observation of a stable truth or value. I don't want the job of arbitrating that.

So, socially engaged and process-oriented performance doesn't pose any trouble for me. If someone says its art, its art. Maybe it's sloppy. Maybe it's boring and doesn't seem to go anywhere. Maybe it looks like something else, which it perhaps is. Resolving the question "is it art" won't help me write about it. The question may, in fact, lure me into a critical dead end. Who wants to be stuck in that cul-de-sac writing about how the art is all about what art isn't. I mean, I get close to that - but the way out is usually by remembering how art helps me write about friendship, intimacy, being in a body, class violence, shame, love.

Perhaps my a-disciplinarity is just a lower-middle-class reaction formation to art world snobbery and institutional elitism. Actually, screw the "perhaps" there - of course my work is that. I want people to enjoy reading my work, and for them to feel like a wider world of art is available to them. So, art is a category of expansion for me.

2) None of the performance artists I work with are good at having a career - they are survivalists. Many of the artists I know have other jobs. James Luna and Ron Athey, for example.

It's not even a question of living wages. It's a question of no invitation at all. My work has been centered on people in that zone for a while now. If I could contribute anything to performance artists besides money, it'd be spaces in which people could talk about how they survive and support their work under the most precarious of circumstances.

3) I'm not sure about that skill question: The forms of wisdom emerging from hard core performance, example, do suggest a skill set - just not one recognized by (for instance) traditional theater or dance. So, I don't see a de-skilling so much as a shift and expansion in how we understand skill. But given all that I've written above, I would say that.

I do want to say that if all we look at is art by people who are between 22-30, well - who has had the time to develop skill? Most of what we see there is talent. I love spending time with older artists, because they have wisdom. I guess I prefer wisdom to skill as a term for describing expertise? But perhaps that's a specific term naming performance's skill set?

4) I recently hosted four seminars staging conversations about feminist politics and performance: This was inspired partly by the "catering wars," as I like to call the controversy regarding Rainer's (quite valid) critique of Marina Abramovic's work for MOCA's fund-raising gala.

I was motivated by the sense that there is a lot of performance art in Los Angeles, but not much by way of conversation about performance - especially conversation accessible to artists and supporters. So, I thought, why not have an open-ended conversation outside academic and institutional space, with an agenda set by whoever shows up and speaks? I know I want to hear what artists have to say. And I want to hear what other teachers and writers have to say. And it's nice to be able to talk with rather than at each other.

The thing about the MOCA affair is that it generated a lot of talk - and a lot of the people talking were younger artists - out of excellent art schools - and it seemed like they were struggling to understand Rainer's critique. They seemed not used to public interventions like this - which is very unusual for an arts scene, no? Something about the overwhelming dominance of LA's art scene by art schools seems to mean that people don't argue with each other, really. The participants in the show were furious that Rainer said they were (at best) suffering from a false consciousness - but it is her right to say so. It's her right to call out the culture of the gala fundraiser for its parasitic relationship to performance culture.

The frisson of shaming people with their own wealth is very museum-friendly. Rich people like to soak in that shame - it's a spa treatment for their conscience.

These galas are always ridiculous: Why can't rich people just write a check? Why does a museum have to raise the money to entertain them, so as to get more money in order to entertain them?

Those who think that making rich people uncomfortable is itself a meaningful political intervention are missing the big picture: that discomfort has been the engine of High Art since Manet's Olympia first stared out at a crowd of people who recognized her as Victorine Meurent.

There is something truly obscene about making the shame of the rich into a consumable experience. At a moment when kids have no libraries, no arts education, when their schools are falling apart and they don't have books or desks, when a public universities degree costs $60,000, when professors can't afford to send their own kids to the colleges they work at, and when students ask for more they are being bludgeoned and arrested - at this moment, who cares about how rich people feel?

That gala event was a performance art version of that awful movie Crash.

About PST: It's great art history. I've loved getting to spend this much time thinking about art from this region. But the Getty's publicity material does the region a great disservice by suggesting that the region's art history begins with the galleries on La Cienega. That's just wrong - for example: it completely erases Mexican American art history. Jesse Lerner's show at the Long Beach Museum of Art offered a very good critique of that line. I wouldn't mention it, except that discourse about art and Los Angeles seems to always begin with a very powerful moment of remembering that which is forgotten, that itself "forgets" the region's colonial histories.

I want to note: PST picked 1981 as its end-date because that was the year of Reagan's innauguration.

His election is not nearly as periodizing a force vis a vis art history as is the AIDS crisis. The CDC recognized AIDS in 1982. The beginning of that decade did mark an "end" in American art history - and it's shameful that the organizers of PST chose that year without noting what it really signaled. But again, I would see it that way.

Making Time at Human Resources: Spatula&Barcode

Coinciding with the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is hosting the offsite working session "Making Time at Human Resources" on February 22, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by UW-Madison professors and collaborating artists, Spatula and Barcode.

We (Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson) are artists and scholars who make work independently and collaboratively.

In our joint projects, under the group name Spatula&Barcode, we are interested in conviviality, criticality, and geography. There is always food. We’ve staged bicycle tours, Skype conversations, dinners, and coffee dates in Canada, Croatia, Morocco, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Our individual projects explore identity, memory, trauma, and materiality. Peterson is doing work on torture and performance. Clark currently has a project installed in Wisconsin that brings together into one installation 113 art works that use bones thematically or materially. This Ossuary will grow between iterations and you are all invited to contribute to it.

We’re interested in discussing what it means to make a creative practice of collating/bundling/collecting/hosting/presenting/installing or devising with other artists’ (and non-artists’) creative work. How is this activity like and unlike curating? What are the important ethical questions that need to be addressed as this particular way of making work becomes more widespread? As hosts, to what extent do we give something to or take something from the participating artists? How do these projects create new hierarchies or reproduce existing ones—between hosts, participating artists, support staff, venues, volunteers, and audience members? Is it important that audience members are able to identify the creative roles of the “host” as artistic practice?

Lately, we are also preoccupied with generosity. Are Lewis Hyde’s 1979 reflections on gift economies still relevant? If not, what newer theories might replace them? Are the new relational projects more “generous” than conventional art making? To what extent is generosity structurally central to all artmaking? Are there meaningful differences in degrees of selfishness between the arts? What are the antecedents of contemporary relational projects, both in and out of an arts context?

We’re also interested in canonization. Which kinds of relational projects are getting a lot of attention and why? Which are rarely written about and why not? Are there unique concerns that arise when critical acclaim is given to art works that profess populism? Are works from or produced in certain parts of the world being given special attention? How should be think about privilege as artists from one part of the world create relational projects for communities in other parts of the world?

Finally, we’d be interested in discussing the similarities and differences between the kinds of activities that are being developed under the rubric of relational aesthetics and those events that have characterized the Occupy Movements (and last year’s protests in Madison Wisconsin). What do we privilege when we call the work art and what do we lose? What do we privilege when we call the work political action and what do we lose?.

Making Time at Human Resources: John Spiak

Most awareness of the arts focuses on the final product and the outcome of artistic process: objects, productions, performances, publications and presentations. Mostly, the outcomes are observation based, with audience/community invited to view the end result of creative process, not the development or actual creation of such work. When “creative outreach” programs are devised to address such issues, they are most often developed and are guided by an institution’s education department and programs. While participatory, the implemented programs are often hands-on projects for which a group of individuals visit an institution, are provided a set of instructions, and then create an object with predetermined parameters.

Many arts institutions in the United States have recently presented Social Practice projects under the guise of artistic practice, but in reality, the focus has tended more toward problem solving for the institution (e.g., way finding, filling void spaces of the institution, dealing with permanent collections, trying to engage a different and often younger audience). The programs most often occur within or upon the institution’s grounds – participation only accessible if one visits the actual institutional structure. Like the hands-on activities, these series are mostly delegated to the institutions’ public programs, education or marketing staff, not led through artist/curator vision.

How does an institution develop a new vision for Social Practice residencies focused on the belief that the key to success is complete honesty, trust and openness by the institution, curator and artist with all potential collaborators and participants. An institution that is open to flexibility and adjustment throughout a project/residency as envisioned by the artist, leaving the opportunity for new discoveries to develop – creating the possibilities for even greater, successful and mutually beneficial outcomes for artist, institution and collaborator. These rules should apply to any institution exhibition, program or project, but they are even more essential when working with community and artists through Social Practice residence. Without an honest approach, trust cannot be secured to build connections with diverse individuals through an artist’s vision.

One major factor in realizing new and innovative projects without pre-determined outcomes/exhibitions is seed money. Financial support is essential to foster and promote non-traditional approaches that are sometimes difficult to describe and quantify. While an institution should anticipates active numbers of participants with each residency, is it possible for an institution to be more interested in measuring the matrix of success, not by the numbers, but by the quality of the outcomes.

The kinds of results that often occur at the conclusion of a residency or Social Practice based project are not always easily measured, in the traditional sense. For example, attendance figures, tour numbers and budgets may not be the most appropriate measures of “success.” Unfortunately, these are the most common types of statistics that funders and agencies require in grant reports, usually due immediately upon completion of the project.

In addition to the standard matrix measurements for such a residency program, can an institution also measure, validate and share the success of each Social Practice residency through the following supplementary and alternative methods: gathering of personal stories and testimonials (artist, institution, organizations, community); presenting at national conferences (American Association of Museums, Art/City, College Art Association, Open Engagement, Creative Time Summit); creating web and print based documentation (website, blog, catalogues); writing and publishing articles in national journals (Museum and Social Issues, Art Education, Journal of Art for Life); and direct sharing with colleagues at peer institutions.

Making Time at Human Resources: Simon Leung

I have been thinking about the time/frame bracket of "the performative" with the general proposition that it defies the usual spatial and temporal brackets that is put around "a piece"--be it a dance performance or am event, or a "work of art." Last fall, I posted a note on Facebook called "Protest is a Performative" which was spurred by the controversy that surrounded Rainer's letter of protest against the MOCA Gala as directed by Marina Abramovic. Here is an excerpt: Ultimately, this is the most interesting gap in the discussions for me: In the first-hand or rhetorical accounts (pro or con) I have read thus far, there has been no mention of how this "performance" might have been altered by the letter. I am speaking of the most basic hermeneutic principle--Heisenberg's insight that the act of observing alters whatever "reality" is being observed. Rainer had no delusion of being able to "change" anything at the gala, but she framed something for public attention, for the community of artists of which she is a member. I doubt the performers, the guests, Abramovic, MOCA, everyone discussing this, would have thought about this event the same way otherwise, certainly not to this scale. Protest is a performative. Did Abramovic change anything or emphasize anything differently because of the letter? For example, did it influence "the rules of conduct" which is so prescriptive of how the guests are to behave? [Question to performers: When did you learn of these rules for the guests? Did you learn of these rules at the beginning of your collaboration with Abramovic or were they made know to you after the letter made this a controversy? If before, when/how was this emphasized?] Another aspect I might want to ruminate on is the gusto (in your word, "guts") with which she "called out the censure and directly pointed her finger at its perpetrator" who "denied the possibility of male nudity at the event." I am in agreement with you on MOCA's phobic response to male nudity, but did Rainer's letter goad or encourage Abramovic in this "gutsy" display? Was this a tone she would have taken without the letter? Would she have made this remark at all without the letter? And what does Abramovic's compliance with MOCA's wishes say about the meaning of her work or how male nudity is exactly the point where she is willing to compromise her vision and censor her work? I don't know if these are answerable questions. I am not making any cause/effect claims or speculations, merely that I doubt we would be talking about, for example, issues of art worker's relationship to institutions in quite the same way without the performative gesture of protest. The moment of the performative did not begin or end with the gala event. Rainer's letter is what has expanded it. This is perhaps why some of us see the value of “the performative” beyond the categorical boundaries of “performance art.”

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Making Time at Human Resources: Shannon Jackson

In anticipation of our working dinner--Making Time at Human Resources--let me share a few questions that have been preoccupying me. This will be a bit disconnected--and should confirm for participants that your reflections don't have to be eloquent.

1) So my first question is a potential critique of my own habits of framing these discussions. I have been trying to create fora that allow people to reflect upon the continued "disciplinarity" of so-called "interdisciplinary" art, to come clean about the fact that people who proceed from different artistic sectors have different skills, institutional habits, barometers for engaging quality, and often a different sense of what the stakes are, where innovation lies, what looks mediocre or passé. At the same time as I think that it is important to work through some of these lingering mis-recognitions, I also realize that I am in danger of reifying the practices of each of those sectors in order to think more clearly about their assumptions and habits. How to create gatherings that expose these important differences and work through them--without over-simplifying the place from which everyone comes?

2) A second line of questioning goes toward ideas of economy and ecology, what kinds of DIY systems, temporary labor, institutional affiliations, commissions, documentation practices, teaching gigs, voice-over gigs, etc are sustaining art-making and the lives of artists? How are these systems similar but also different for artists in different fields (film, visual art, theatre, dance, community art, etc)? When does a method of compensation look standard to one artist but look cynical to another? How do these ecologies unsettle or reinforce notions of "individual" or "collaborative" artistic work? How are different people thinking about the mixed economies of public sector, private sector, and non-profit sector legacies as they imagine new systems?

3) A significant amount of conceptually oriented art-making and performance-making is skeptical about traditional artistic skills. How are people feeling about skill these days? Are some art skills more suspicious than others? Does de-skilling in one domain mean re-skilling in another? Can the suspicion of skill become just as cliché as its celebration?

4) Over the last few months, several sites have provided opportunities to ask these and other interesting questions--Performa's "interrogation" of "theatre", Marina A/Yvonne R, and PST's display of how West Coast artists contributed to experimental practice, even and sometimes especially when they didn't bother worrying about categories. I look forward to hearing more from those who have thought about these and other sites--and about questions that have been perplexing all of you the most.