(a-)musing

Real Elastic

2011-11-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

Essay commissioned for 'Life with Edits; the thin line between documentary and fiction', Shane Harrington and Gimena Blanco (eds), Art in the Making, 2011

The term documentary was coined in 1926, by the Scottish documentary maker John Grierson, to describe a non-fiction film.[1] This may or may not be true.

Documentary has always had an intimate relationship with fiction. Robert Flaherty, one of the pioneers of the documentary genre, presented Man of Aran (1934) as an accurate record of life on the Aran Islands, yet many of the scenes were staged to show the islanders engaged in practices that had already died out. Fictional elements such as the staging or re-staging of scenes for the camera, or the re-ordering of scenes during editing, have long been common practices within documentary making, justified by the need to create a coherent, spatio-temporal logic for the viewer. Fidelity to the observed, as in Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963), where a static camera frames a close-up of a man sleeping for eight hours without edits, takes the idea of the documentary as a transparent window onto the world, and exposes it as a fiction.

The critique of the image and the shattering of its authorial voice in the second half of the 20^th C ushered in a post-documentary era. With truth claims discredited, and the idea of neutral observation radically undermined, and with ‘the real’ laid bare as a shifting construct, the status of the documentary vis-à-vis fiction became unclear. Certain technical means and conventions - the use of real-life footage, self-reference, interviews to camera, eyewitness accounts, graphics, onscreen titles – continued, for a time, to mark out the territory of the documentary, but it seems less relevant now to speak of a line between fiction and documentary than to speak of a hybrid space which marks their intersection.

Most of us are recording and exhibiting our lives in various ways, stepping in and out of a stream of performativity that runs through contemporary culture. In spite of the fact that our realities have multiplied, hybridised, been virtualised and commodified, our lives remain actual, material and generative. We are, by and large, still concerned with what can be said to exist, which may explain why documentary as a category continues to survive. Liberated from the demands of authenticity, the documentary can be understood as a particular ‘interplay of operations’[2] in which there is still some kind of engagement with a concrete, lived experience of the world. In this it shares an affinity with contemporary art practice, especially those strands that concern themselves with the ways in which existence is negotiated relative to particular (local) conditions.

IKEA - Aran Lobster Pots (2011) is a recent work by Gareth Kennedy which is at once spatial, material and relational. It involves what Kennedy describes as a ‘staged encounter between material cultures’[3]. Using items purchased in IKEA, two lobster pots – one traditional and one modern – are fashioned by the artist and by local Caoladoirí (basket weavers) on the smallest of the Aran Islands. These are then taken to sea by island fishermen and used to catch lobsters. The unfolding story is recorded on Super 8 film in a manner that directly references the Hands series of documentaries on traditional Irish crafts, from the 1970’s and ‘80’s[4], and the resulting silent film is presented in a back-projection structure, designed as a flatpack and made from materials and in a style similar to those of IKEA products.

This is one in a series of works that Kennedy calls ‘folk fictions’[5]. Working with a number of fictions and temporal disjunctions, Kennedy winds memory, tradition, consumption and displacement into a complex construction that is both actual and fictional. Incorporating local knowledge and forms into the destruction and construction of functional objects, these ‘folk fictions’ also serve to challenge ethnographic or anthropological readings. Kennedy’s presentation of the work back to the world using an outmoded film technology responds directly to a set of fictional or semi-fictional representations in which the Aran Islands (or the rural West) always function as a kind of edge (of civilisation, modernity or humanity) yet his use of the documentary form grounds the work in a concrete relation to the material world.

Another recent work by Irish artists which adopts this hybrid mode is Post-Fordlândia (2011), a collaborative body of work by Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley that consists of four filmed works, shown as cinematic installations/projections[6]. Set in Fordlândia and Belterra, two rubber plantation towns constructed in the Amazonian rainforest in the 1920’s and 30’s, the work is a consideration of Henry Ford’s attempts to export his own model of capitalism to the wider world, seen, as the title suggests, from a Post-Fordist perspective. These plantations were more than just production sites – they were to be a piece of America in the Brazilian rainforest. All workers, including local workers, had to live in American-style houses, and to attend American festivities on weekends, such as poetry readings, square-dancing, and English-language sing-alongs. Only American style food was available on-site and alcohol was prohibited. Each worker had to wear a badge displaying their personal number and they were forced to conform to American working hours (9 – 5) contrary to local practices of working before sunrise and after sunset to avoid the mid-day heat[7].

Discontent amongst the workers led to a riot in Fordlândia in 1930, when local labourers declared that they would no longer tolerate the conditions. The town was finally abandoned in 1933 after it was discovered that the land was unsuitable for rubber trees. Belterra was slightly more successful, and although it never produced enough rubber to be viable, it remains inhabited to this day. These two towns are described by the artists as a ghost and its living image, a theme that informs the body of work.

Combining various cinematic techniques and approaches, the films sit somewhere between documents and visual narratives. Post-Fordlândia, the longest film, is the most consciously poetic, using subjective camera work and a semi-mythological voice-over to suggest the presence of a journeying yet spectral protagonist, who moves first through the air, then through forest and finally around the abandoned ruins of Fordlândia. This approach and treatment is deliberately contrasted in the film An Act of Reclaiming, a shorter piece without dialogue that focuses on Ducca, the son of a former rubber tapper who lives alone on the edge of the plantation, and salvages objects and materials from the ruins to make into household implements and farm tools. What we know of Ducca is gleaned as much from writings that accompany the exhibition as from the film itself, but it is clear that his relationship to the ruins is productive, rather than nostalgic.

As a body of work, Post-Fordlândia invokes the multiple temporalities identified by post-colonial theory as latencies within the modernist paradigm, and hints at their part in the downfall of this colonialist project. Perhaps inevitably for a work that contrasts the ruins of a failed monument with the lushness of the surrounding jungle, it incorporates a number of Romantic tropes – the aesthetics of decay, the struggle of the lone survivor, the sublime nature of the Amazonian forest. However, the title of the work offsets this Romanticism against the context of Capitalism’s current precarious moment.

The aesthetic experience, in the modern sense, is both pre-theoretical and closely aligned with thought, and of the many aesthetic works occupying this proposed hybrid space between documentary and fiction, the most interesting for me are those that play on tensions between what can be seen, what can be thought and what can be done. They do not limit themselves to ‘the actual’ or ‘the fictional’ because they are not primarily concerned with representations as such, but with questions of agency and a capacity to act in the world. The events or situations on which they focus may be real or fabricated, simulated or not, but this seems beside the point. These works move beyond the duality of documentary/fiction, staging an elastic real in which things could, or might yet, turn out differently.

Fiona Woods
October 2011

[1] Grierson is reported by Delsey Deacon to have used the word for the first time in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana for the New York Sun. ‘Films as Foreign Offices: transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and early thirties’ in Ann Curthoys (ed.), Connected worlds: history in transnational perspective, 2006, Anu Press, Canberra, p151

[2] This term is used by Jacques Rancière in his discussion of the image particularly in relation to “what we call art”, but it seems appropriate in this instance to apply it also to the documentary form. Jacques Rancière , The Future of the Image, Gregory Elliot (trans.), Verso, London, 2007, p6

[3] Gareth Kennedy from his website, http://www.gkennedy.info/indexhibitv070e/index.php?/projects/ikea---aran-lobster-pots/ (accessed October 2011)

[4] HANDS, by David and Sally Shaw-Smith was a series of thirty-seven documentaries on Irish crafts, made for RTE. http://www.irelandstraditionalcrafts.com/index.html (accessed October 2011)

[5] Gareth Kennedy, op. cit.

[6] First shown at the Galway Arts Centre, July 2011 http://www.galwayartscentre.ie/events/view-event/168.html

[7]Alan Bellows, ‘The Ruins of Fordlandia’, (2006) http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ruins-of-fordlandia/ (accessed October 2011)

Some practices of in-between

2011-06-29T11:51:00.001-07:00

Essay first published in Trans Local Act, published by AAA, Paris. Available on www.rhyzom.net

On 1^st April 2010, the British Army launched a Defence Cultural Specialist Unit which deploys military specialists in Afghan culture and language to advise commanders on the ground in Afghanistan.

‘The specialists will help build a picture of Helmandi society for commanders in Task Force Helmand and battlegroups across the province to help them identify and understand issues relating to the local cultural, political, economic, social and historical environment to help commanders make better and more informed decisions. . . . . Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Operations) Air Vice-Marshal Andy Pulford said that a focus on cultural issues is essential to success in Afghanistan. He said: "Cultural awareness has been a weakness in the past. The unit is essential to equipping the military with a better understanding and appreciation of the region, its people and how to do business there."’[1]

I was involved in a research trip to a long-term art project[2] in Ballykinler, Co. Down, Northern Ireland which included a guided tour of the British Army base which dominates the village. Whilst there we were treated to a formal presentation by a Lt.Col. of the 2^nd Battalion Rifles. He spoke in broad terms about the deployment of the battalion in Afghanistan, and the extent to which they engage with ‘the human terrain'. His account of their work engaging with complex local cultures in order to operate, (similar to that outlined in extract above), bore a striking resemblance to the contemporary discourse of socially engaged art and architectural practice. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. While the methods, tools and forms of knowledge inherited from ‘community arts’ were developed to support culturally marginalised people in their demands for cultural democracy, knowledge can be adapted for any purpose. That those tools are now being used by military strategists seeking tactical advantage in a situation of occupation is only to be expected. Every cultural production has the capacity to double as a Trojan Horse.

Global relations are largely based on the flows of capital, backed by military force as required. Hardt and Negri call this ‘Empire’, “a system of power so deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure”.[3] By operating beyond any detectable horizon, this system of power leaves virtually no outside from which an alternative might be constructed[4]. The example of the British Army above demonstrates how even ‘alternatives’ can be co-opted and put to use by hegemonic forces for coercive purposes. Under these circumstances, how is the relentless march of Capital to be non-violently or creatively opposed?

In seeking change which is not just a subversion or negation of what already exists, Brian Massumi points to the need to engage ‘with the unfounded and unmediated in-between of becoming’.[5] The idea of in-between as a condition under which properties of resistance can emerge is one that I want to consider, particularly how a ‘resistant in-between’ constitutes and is constituted by a number of architectural and art-related practices operating at the current moment[6]. These practices are not defined in relation to any central point or ideology – they are themselves immanent experiments, with their own theoretical positions. They are not empty experimental forms, but incorporate skilful approaches to living and when viewed in combination they seem to describe a pragmatics of transformation.

Art’s privileged position within the symbolic order has long been used (and abused) to lend enhanced visibility to all kinds of social and political processes. The status of art demands a distinction between art and the real which secures the symbolic and exchange value of art, but at the cost of reducing its political effectiveness. This segregation of art from the real has a limited value for current practices engaging with the in-between as a site of production: they reject such binaries, shifting between action and representation without anxiety, generating use value or symbolic value as needed. These practices construct situations, events and images in response to selected local conditions, producing or mobilising spaces in-between where people can identify, and sometimes act upon, points of possible transformation in their own lived realities. They share an orientation towards a social which is part of a complex system of relations that includes the non-human – the virtual, the spatial, the biological, the agricultural, the technological, the terrestrial, the animal etc.

This is Not a Trojan Horse[7] is a recent work by Futurefarmers, a group of artists and designers who have been working together since 1995. The work takes the form of a large, human-powered, wooden horse, designed with architect Lode Vranken and built at Pollinaria (an organic farm and artist residency programme in Italy). On a ten-day tour through the region of Abruzzo in Italy, this nomadic architectural form became “a physical space with moving edges . . .a vehicle for social and material exchange at a pivotal moment in this region.”[8] En route, it collected “traces of rural practices; seeds, tools and products to enliven the imaginations of farmers through discourse, artistic production and to parade their truths to power.”[9] The project specifically alludes to the in-between as a place of connection between people and places, not presupposing any existing community but creating space for new forms of social interaction. By drawing on ‘the network’ rather than ‘the community’ as a model, This is Not a Trojan Horse avoids stereotypical accounts of rural as fixed places of tradition and stability, emphasising creative, knowledge-based practices of working land and producing food.

The work moves beyond an increasingly common tendency towards romantic documentation of ‘the rural’ through its sub-title – “Incarnating Nomadic Resistance Against Biopolitics (the discourse of traditional power)”. Biopolitics is largely associated with human life, although Nicole Shukin argues that human social life cannot be ‘abstracted from the non-human lives of others (the domain of zoopolitics)’.[10] While this is contentious, it is clear that biopolitical conditions extend beyond the human, and that by calling upon this discourse, the work of Futurefamers introduces a non-anthropocentric dimension into their considerations of environmental realities. The three registers of ecology – environment, social system and human subjectivity – which Felix Guattari articulated[11] are not separable in practice.

Futurefarmers is a hybrid network, drawing people together from a number of fields and disciplines in the construction of spaces and events which respond to the local conditions of a given context or situation. Its productions are collective assemblages that work towards the creation of commonality and/or commons. In opposition to current economic and political structures, which render the natural world and all of its inhabitants as resources from which profit can be extracted, practices that engage with the in-between operate contrary to forms of enclosure. In some cases this involves documenting and understanding mechanisms of enclosure, in others it is about developing counter-strategies, carrying out or documenting contrary actions. It can be a way of modelling or producing commons, or opening a space for discussions of what is common, including whether or not the commons is restricted to humans. The in-between is what is not (yet) owned, or what can still be made common.

A creative and intellectual commons movement is already well developed: the concept of information sharing and open source predates computer technology, and its principles extend well beyond the free software movement. There is talk of an ‘emerging commons paradigm’,[12] manifesting as local resistance to the politics of water, to the corporatisation of natural resources, to the enclosure of public space, the privatisation of the internet etc. However, anti-commons is a powerful force. The internationally influential US Patent system, which issues 3,500 patents a week, generally favours the rights of property over those of common interest, with little non-patentee input into policy or decisions[13]. In the 1980’s, when the patenting of biological matter was legalised in the US, the huge economic potential of biodiversity and related traditional knowledge led to rampant bio-prospecting (or biopiracy as it’s known to its opponents), with patents on living matter extending to thousands. The simple act of seed-saving is now a potential criminal act in many parts of the world. Even for those who are not interested in biodiversity, these developments shed light on the knowledge economy as a mechanism of enclosure. Anti-commons exposes Capital at its most voracious.

HURL (Home University Roscommon Leitrim) is “Ireland’s newest university”, formed in 2009 in rural north-west Ireland by a multidisciplinary group of individuals committed to the ‘exchange of soft knowledge’[14]. HURL does not commodify knowledge, but seeks to facilitate its transfer from person to person, placing an equal value on abstract knowledge and know-how. The model of education proposed by HURL identifies every private or public space as a potential place of dynamic knowledge exchange. This transmedial practice operates both inside and outside the space of art, using forms of assembly that are real and virtual.

HURL invites others to create their own version of Home University, working towards the establishment of a Home University network. By acting in common with others, this and other practices in-between find ways of generating and sharing knowledge, ideas and productions across time and space, involving fluid sets of actors and incorporating lived and sensed experiences. They engage with issues, sites and groups of people that are ‘local’, but they operate within a trans-local condition so that there is no fixing of place or community identity but an opening up to displacement. Arising from the productive tension of local / global, displacement allows new narratives and thought forms to be assembled from previously limiting binaries such as local/global, rural/urban, tradition/innovation, knowledge/imagination, human/ non-human etc.

The Herbologies/Foraging Networks recently emerged from the Baltic region, initially from Finland and the Kurzeme region of Latvia. Composed of a transnational group of practitioners, operating across multiple platforms, it explores the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants through events and workshops, placing that information within the context of online networks, open information-sharing and biological technologies.

“Herbologies refers to the different ways of knowing about plants and their extracts (as well as sometimes fungus and bee products), as wild and cultivated food, medicine and related crafts. Foraging Networks raises awareness of organised behaviours and practices in gathering wild food, potential networked actions in micro to macro ecosystems or socio-political levels. The slash in the project name indicates the uneasily-reduced connection between cultural knowledge, social practice and extended resources in these subjects. Combining with the fields of social/visual arts, craft, cultural heritage, media, network cultures and technology, the programme has directed attention to the different ways of sharing knowledge, especially within the Baltic Sea region and between different generations. Furthermore, it has also been initiated from the position of ‘not-knowing’, and being an immigrant to a landscape and environmental habitat.”[15]

Situating knowledge of the edible qualities and useful properties of wild plants within a cultural commons, along with aesthetically inclined ways of knowing, or know-how; “how to gather, how to prepare, how to use, reflections on use and how such knowledge is learned”,[16] Herbologies/ Foraging Networks responds to a developing interest in sustainable food production, and forges a trans-generational link between traditional knowledge and innovation that can be reproduced in multiple localities.

Practices engaging with the in-between as a site of production, including many not mentioned in this text, might be described as forms of action-research in the way that they combine deceptively simple actions with multifaceted inquiries into the working of things. They are collective productions; they are neighbourhood events. They are assemblages of human, non-human, material and immaterial forms; they are art and farming projects. They are hybrid networks of culture, nature, science, discourse and technology; they are communal gardens and discussion groups.

Forms of attention lie at the heart of aesthetics, and these practices employ the embodied inquiry of aesthetics to consider both what is, and what is emerging. In so far as they place an emphasis on skilful living, as opposed to competitive advantage, they function as nodes for the emergence of possible change.

Fiona Woods, 2010

[1] British Army website, http://www.army.mod.uk/news/20420.aspx accessed August 2010

[2] The artist Anne-Marie Dillon has spent a number of years working with micro-communities of interest in the village of Ballykinler which owes its existence to, but has a complicated relationship with, the local British Arrmy base.

[3] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, New York: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp 210 – 211

[4] This is of course debatable, particularly in relation to the question of whether the challenge to ‘Western Capitalism’ posed by Islamic Fundamentalism constitutes an ‘outside’ or only an inversion.

[5] Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p 31

[6] The reference to practices located ‘in-between’ first came to my attention in relation to the work of aaa in ‘How to make a community as well as the space for it’ by Doina Petrescu in Space Shuttle, eds. Peter Mutschler and Ruth Morrow, Belfast, 2007. Also available on http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=60, accessed August 2010

[7] Futurefarmers, This is Not a Trojan Horse htttp://www.futurefarmers.com/thisisnotatrojanhorse/about.html accessed August 2010

[8] http://www.futurefarmers.com/thisisnotatrojanhorse/about.html

[9] http://www.futurefarmers.com/thisisnotatrojanhorse/about.html

[10] Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering life in biopolitical times, University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p 9

[11] Felix Guattari, Les Trois écologies, partial translation by Chris Turner, 1989, Paris: Galilee: full translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: The Athlone Press, 2000

[12] On the Commons website - ‘About the Commons’ http://onthecommons.org/about-commons , accessed August 2010

[13] For further details see The Public Patent Foundation website http://www.pubpat.org/About.htm , accessed August 2010

[14] Home University of Roscommon and Leitrim website, http://hurllearning.wordpress.com/ accessed August 2010

[15] Andrew Gryf Patterson, ‘Introduction in English’, Herbologies/Foraging Networks website http://herbologies-foraging.net/about/introduction-english accessed August 2010

[16] Gryf Patterson, Introduction, http: /he

In Search of the Public

2011-06-03T01:04:00.001-07:00

In search of the Public
Edited version of keynote address to “CONNECT; Public Galleries engaging with communities”, Annual General Meeting of the Public Galleries Association of Victoria (PGAV), Swan Hill Regional Arts Gallery, VIC, AUS, May 16^th 2011.

The English critic and theorist Claire Bishop, has spoken about the domain of art as a 'complex knot of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement and the conventions of social interaction'[1] and it is this complex knot of concerns that forms the basis of my address.
My practice as an artist and curator and someone who thinks and writes about art, has largely been shaped by the absence of a public gallery where I live and in many of the places where I choose to work. Furthermore, I have some ambivalence towards the gallery as a cordoned-off space for culture – I recognise the value of that space, but I don’t necessarily want to work within it. So as a result, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the space of art, and about the paradoxes and contradictions that come into being when that space is opened in an unexpected place, and attempts to encounter a public, or even to call a public into being[2].
Stepping outside of the institutional site of art and into the lifeworld as an arena of practice, involves stepping into the realm of social aesthetics, a somewhat vexed topic. The term ‘social aesthetics’ internalises a basic contradiction – in contemporary society the aesthetic is used to suggest a free zone of experience, buffered from instrumentalised relations, while the social is always structured around forms of power relations. Social aesthetics seems to claim or suggest the possibility of a liminal space between the two, although this is debatable and much debated. My intention is to consider these contradictions and paradoxes in relation to my own practice with its inherent claims, and to try to bring those out as questions that we might collectively consider.
What I am often aiming for in my work is to generate modest spaces that exist as a sphere of possibility, within which some things can be individually or collectively considered or questioned or produced. I spent quite a few years struggling to find the language to describe my practice in a concise manner, and finally, a few years ago, I came across the term socio-spatial practice. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but crucially for me it captures my interest in the social and the spatial nature of the sites and contexts that I work with, and the way that these are constantly producing or being produced by the other, so talking about my work involves shifting from discussions of the social into the spatial and back again.
The object of art comes into being only in the event of its reception, so art has always been relational. The establishment of Relational Aesthetics as a formal category in the 1990’s emphasized the status of the artwork as a co-production between the artist and the audience, or the people-formerly known as the audience. Speaking as an artist, the idea of the artwork as a co-production between myself and others generates a really interesting territory, in which the work of art becomes an event in time, an assemblage of things, ideas and places, of forms of agency, both human and non-human. The idea of assemblage opens up the possibility of new ontologies, new modes of being-in-the-world, far more interesting to me and more expansive than the fixed relations of subjects and objects. This recent work, Common?[3], is an ongoing series that I have been working on over the last few years in response to the possibilities opened up by unlikely forms of assemblage. Common? consists of a set of photographic images that stage an absurd convergence between humans and the material or non-human world. The works are concerned with constructions of space, time and a capacity to act, relative to what might be called environmental questions. The discourse of environmentalism, which often appeals to Nature as a container for a hierarchy of beings ranging from bacteria at the bottom to humans at the top is one that I find limited and uninteresting. So, in these works, and actually in my life in general, I am trying to think through a post-humanist position and to pay attention to other forms of agency, such as vital materialism for example.

Common? (3), series of 3 photographic works, 2010

Art for me is never outside of politics, because even the most apolitical art is always already embroiled in a politics of production, distribution, and reception, and much as I like the idea of co-production, it does not remove the fact that there are unequal power relations in the very designation of artists and non-artists. With that in mind, I made Common? to be shown in the public domain, using an existing visual economy for its distribution – the works have been shown on bicycle shelters, bus shelters, as a series of posters distributed through my personal and professional networks around the world, as a series of billboard images, etc. The distribution of the work outside the institutional site of art is a way for me to think through the social relations involved in viewing and experiencing artworks. By addressing an unknown and unpredictable viewer, who encounters the work in their everyday movements, I am aiming for a situation in which that viewer is not pre-positioned as a spectator of one kind or another – they can range from observers to consumers, to passengers, to people who are interested in art, to disinterested bystanders, to opponents, to users, to participants, and so on. This kind of public is a fluid formation, made up of individual subjectivities in motion which I personally find more interesting than the idea of an audience.
Art practices that are oriented towards the social have generated a whole swamp of terminologies - socially engaged art practice, participatory practice, collaborative practice, community-oriented practice, relational practice, dialogical practice and so on, with each term staking out a slightly different political position. In addition to this confusion, terms like public, audience and community are often used inter-changeably in spite of being quite different, and when all of these are combined it produces a jumble of ideas about the kinds of social relations that are being engendered.
This conference has a stated aim of exploring new approaches to engaging with communities. Community is a word that entered the discourse of arts practice in the late 1960’s through the Community Arts movement. At that time it was used to construct an alternative to the consumerist model of art’s reception, more associated with the term audience. Community Arts chose to address itself to groups of people who were understood to have unifying interests or needs that were geographical or socio-economic or identity-based, and the arts practices oriented towards such communities were aligned with a belief that art could contribute to social change. A community in this sense was a group of people who were capable of seeking and taking control of their own situation: as such it was a term of empowerment, part of an activist discourse.
In recent years I would argue that this has changed. The term Community has become more generic and abstract, not necessarily linked to activist agendas, or aligned with the interests of disenfranchised or marginalised groups of people. There is a danger of reductionism in the use of this term, particularly when it is used to suggest consensus where none exists. Just because people belong to the same ethnic grouping, or occupy the same geographical area doesn't mean that they are a community. Community is something that is practised, not something that exists by default and I think that as arts and cultural practitioners we are in a good position to promote this active and complex account of community.
Public seems to refer to something like a social totality, or something shared and accessible, generally suggesting a benign condition. However, like the word Community, I prefer to think of Public as less noun and more verb. I believe that the concept becomes more interesting when it is understood as something performed, consciously or otherwise, rather than an external given. From that performative idea of public emerges a sense of public as a force, akin to electricity. Like electricity, public as a force can be directed but not grasped, it is obvious when it manifests, but unpredictable and even potentially injurious at times. What the media sometimes does with the force of public is a good example of that. The title of my presentation, In Search of the Public, reflects a Utopian desire to access that force of public as an agent of change, a desire that surfaces in a lot of the work that I do.
There are a lot of tensions and contradictions in all of this and to elaborate on those, I am going to talk to you about some works that I have been involved in. The first of these is Silvermines; a psychogeography[4]. This work takes the form of a long-term engagement between myself and the village of Silvermines, Co. Tipperary that began in 2007 and is nearing completion. The unfolding of the work over such an extended period, contrary to the accelerated time that characterizes our contemporary condition, gave me and the people I was working with a chance to really consider what we were doing, and to let the work evolve in unexpected ways.
This village of approx. 450 people has been a centre of mining for hundreds of years: the last working mine was abandoned by its Canadian owners in 1992 – its status is officially that of an orphaned mine, as no remedial works were carried out at all once mining ceased. The village was left with massive environmental problems, all of the water courses and neighbouring soils are full of lead and heavy metals, there is all kinds of toxic waste in the surrounding area. In contrast to this devastation, the local population set out to make beautiful open public spaces around the village, and yet in spite of this, and uniquely for a quaint Irish village, Silvermines has practically no tourism industry; just one pub, one B&B, one small shop. It does have a little agriculture, but effectively the village is a satellite to neighbouring urban centres.
The project Silvermines; a psychogeography has used art processes and forms of cultural production such as workshops, events, public discussions and meetings, publications, cultural evenings and a website to consider the social construction of space in this unusual, post-industrial rural context. The work began with a temporary project called The Imaginary Museum, which came about in response to the desire of the people of Silvermines for a museum to present their heritage, to provide local employment and to act as a basis for developing a tourism industry. However, due to the massive environmental issues to be addressed, a museum is unlikely to be developed in the near future. Because the mineworks are surrounded by tailings and spoil heaps that contain traces of arsenic, cobalt and lead, even the simple act of constructing a footpath is very technical and expensive, requiring that the surface be covered with a protective material and so on.
The temporary museum was a way to talk about the desire for a museum, to imagine who might contribute to such an archive and what kinds of things might be considered relevant and valid. My policy was to accept, catalogue and present all and any materials brought to the museum, by any member of the public, no matter their age, allegiance or motivation. The collection built up over a period of 3 months and these are some images showing how that developed.
What Silvermines; a psychogeography has done slowly, over time, is to bring together the multiple perspectives of the local people who live in this place, which they love and are very passionate about, and my perspective as an outsider with an interest in a critique of space and the social relations that shape its construction. About a year and half into the project, following a long and detailed consultation process, holding meetings, walks and public displays of materials we agreed that a satisfactory outcome for all of us would be a walking route around the village and former mineworks. This became known as Walking Silvermines, and it is composed of signs at a number of key locations and a series of texts gathered together in the form of a guidebook. The signs would function as a kind of open-air museum, constructed from the materials and information which had been shared through the initial museum project, but they would also serve to explore and at times subvert the ways in which the idea of ‘heritage’ is used to package places and pasts for tourist consumption.
An important aspect of the signs was to exceed the purely local, to make links between this place and other places, between this history and other histories. I wanted to reflect the cosmopolitan history of Silvermines, but also the global nature of our economy and how the extraction of resources - metals, minerals, agricultural produce - is linked into a wider set of circumstances and histories. I was very upfront about this strategy, which demanded a certain amount of explanation and debate throughout the process.
While some signs or locations had to be changed or abandoned because of local sensitivities, one particular sign, which makes reference to the role of the Korean War in the economy of Silvermines, was never questioned by any of the local people. I must confess that this surprised me. I thought it might be perceived as too political or not touristy enough. However, this sign became a sticking point with the Local Authority, when one individual officer claimed that the text below apportioned blame for the war.

“The Korean War was one of the most destructive of the 20th century. Perhaps as many as 4 million Koreans died throughout the peninsula, two-thirds of them civilians. Whilst destroying Korea, the war boosted the economies of countries such as Japan and the US through increased production of supplies and armaments. The demand for metals and minerals rose substantially during this period. This meant that the reprocessing of ore previously discarded at Ballygowan became economically viable. The Waelz plant was constructed for this purpose; it was in production for just over two years, July 1950 - October 1952.”

I disagreed that any blame was apportioned by this text, which is composed of well-known facts about the war, all of which are in the public domain, and I refused to bow to what I saw as unreasonable censorship coming from outside the project. This has made it difficult to secure a minor agreement that we need from the Local Authority in order to access funding from another statutory body to complete the project. So after a stand-off of 10 months, we received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland in the shape of a Project Award to develop an alternative project in the form of a website with audio clips, a guidebook and an App for SmartPhone, all of which are due for completion in July 2011.
The guidebook will be available as a free download from the website, and I have proposed that anyone in the village or surrounding area will be able to set up a point for the sale of the guidebook in their house or business. In exchange for an agreement not to alter the book in any way, they will receive a Walking Silvermines sticker to put in their window, so a person wanting to purchase a guidebook can knock on their door and buy it at a price to be decided in negotiations between them and they get to keep the profit. My hope is that this will encourage discussion and exchange between locals and visitors, and will also create a very tiny local economy, something that the local people really want.
The guidebook will also have another function, cataloguing our encounters with the controlling mechanisms that shape interventions in public space – statutory, regulatory, licensing, insurance-based. This will take the form of specific pages within the guidebook which I call interruptions, consisting of the seemingly bland, bureaucratic, and innocuous forms and documents that are generated by attempts to act or intervene in the public domain.
I would like to zoom out from the local and consider the question of translocality, which is very important in this kind of practice. In order to do this I’m going to draw on the Actor-Network theory of the French Sociologist and Anthropologist Bruno Latour.
Latour uses two contrasting forms, networks and spheres, to describe the complexity of our contemporary globalised condition. Spheres are useful for describing the complex and fragile conditions of local ecosystems, while networks are good at describing unexpected and long-distance connections starting from local points. By themselves networks have no substance, and spheres have no extension, but together they create a functional system[5].
Rural places and cultures have often been characterised as spheres, lacking the animating force of networks, but anyone who has looked at how rural places and cultures operate can see that these are systems involving exchange between localities. People whose practices are situated in relation to rural contexts, such as myself, have had to build strong international networks with others who share our interest, and these translocal networks are growing in strength and visibility. Agricultur.eu[6] is a loose affiliation of practitioners from a number of European countries who share an interest in rural places as sites for cultural practice. This organisation was launched in October last, with members in six European countries. At the moment the website functions primarily as a window onto our various practices, with some co-productions taking place between individual member organisations.
This example on the screen is a recent event hosted by one of the members, Grizedale Arts[7], based in the Lake District of the UK. This is a cheese making workshop run by the Spanish artist and agroecologist Fernando Garcia Dory, who is a founder member of Campo Adentro[8], another partner in the Agri-Culture network.
The Wedding of Art and Agriculture was an event hosted by Kultivator[9], a Swedish partner in the network, who operate an organic farm which also operates as a kind of laboratory for art experiments. They were asked to organise a conference on art and agriculture, but they rejected the model of conference and adopted the wedding of art and agriculture as an alternative format. Just below the apparently naïve surface of this event is a questioning of the models that we use to come together and talk about art. It included lots of typical art activities such as meetings around tables, screenings of artist films, art workshops, combined with the actions that happen on farms – clearing out barns, killing and cooking of chickens and other farm produce, distilling vodka – and the kinds of forms that are typical of weddings - a banquet of amazing food that brought together invited arts guests and neighbours from the surrounding area, lots of children and a dance band. Using Wedding rather than Conference as the format was a way to subvert hierarchies and preconceived notions of collective production through dialogue, and was also a way of opening out such a discussion beyond a closed-circuit of experts to include a non-art public.
Rhyzom[10] is another European network that adds dynamism to local cultural productions by bringing them into dialogue with one another. The stated aim of Rhyzom is “to map emerging cultural productions related to local contexts, through an interdisciplinary network which constitutes a cultural collaborative platform for reciprocal empowerment and trans-local dissemination.” The Rhyzom network has a very strong theoretical aspect, and includes architects, cultural geographers, curators, artists and academics drawn from France, Turkey, the UK, Ireland, Germany and Spain. Over a period of about 18 months, with funding from the European Union, we visited one another’s projects, staged various local events with groups or communities in the areas in which we work and held a lot of discussions and debates about the kinds of questions that I am addressing in this presentation. We just published a book called TransLocal Act, which is available as a free PDF download from the Rhyzom website[11].
Both of these are quite complex entities with a good web presence - I’m not trying to give a full account of them here, but to highlight the significance of translocality. Each individual element or sphere to use Latour’s analogy, is animated by the network, yet the network can only be generated between these complex spheres. The translocal process of exchange and dialogue that results from the combinations of networks and spheres facilitates the emergence of new ideas and forms of practice.

To conclude, I want to return to question of the gallery. When I described the gallery earlier as a cordoned off space for culture, I was being simplistic and a bit provocative. In reality, every public gallery is part of an institution, and cultural institutions at their best are what Sean O’ Reilly at Leitrim Sculpture Centre has described as ‘complex communication structures’,[12] so a public gallery is of course far more than a space of display, it includes a range of other communicational activities.

What matters in communication—understanding, relationality and transference – depends upon the presence of a substantial entity at both ends of the exchange. What I hope that I have argued in this presentation, is that cultural institutions including public galleries, have a critical role to play in ensuring that the complex ecosystem or sphere represented by the term community, is capable of transferring knowledge into the institution and not only the other way around. In this way, the engagement of Public Galleries with Communities can contribute to a global movement to cultivate forms of local agency and to decentralise both the production and the distribution of Culture.

Fiona Woods, 2011

[1] Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006, p 179 – 185.

[2] Dave Beech ‘Don’t Look Now! Art after the Viewer and beyond Participation’ in Searching for art’s New Publics, ed Jeni Walwin, Intellect Press 2010.

[3] Common? http://www.fionawoods.net/com.htm

[4] www.walkingsilvermines.net

[5] Bruno Latour, ‘Some Experiments in Art and Politics’, e-flux journal #23, 03/11. http://e-flux.com/journal/view/217

[6] Agri-Culture Network www.agri-cultur.eu

[7] Grizedale Arts www.grizedale.org

[8] Campo Adentro http://www.campoadentro.es/en

[9] Kultivator www.kultivator.org

[10] Rhyzom www.rhyzom.org

[11] TransLocalAct, 2011, Nishat Awan, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu (eds.) may be downloaded here http://www.rhyzom.net/2011/02/02/translocalact.pdf

[12] personal communication from Sean O’ Reilly, April 2011

Embracing the Bogman

2010-08-12T08:52:00.001-07:00

Review of 'Bog', an exhibition by Trudi van der Elsen, The Courthouse Studios and Gallery, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, April 2010

In Ireland ‘bogman’ is a pejorative term used specifically in relation to rural people, conjuring up a sense of someone who is ‘too close’ to the land. It implies an inferior level of civilisation, a lack of culture. As a term of abuse, it captures the attempts of the ‘modern’ world to distance itself from the pre-industrial world, and the resulting tension of the human as product of both nature and culture.

From a post-modern vantage point, we can see the ‘triumph’ of culture over nature as a hollow victory. The values inherent in the Modernist rejection of nature blinded us to the consequences of our actions, which are just now becoming visible. All accepted notions about progress and value demand an urgent reworking: art has an important role to play in this, primarily by challenging us to review all clichés about what constitutes nature and/or culture and to reconsider the false dichotomy between the two.

Bog by Trudi van der Elsen is a body of work that locates itself in this uncertain place, in this questioning of the division of nature and culture. It draws largely on a series of performative works carried out by the artist along a geological line of boglands from Belgium to the Netherlands to Denmark, and is presented to us as a series of iconographic photo-images together with some paintings and a sculptural installation. It depicts a kind of descent into the supposed underworld of nature, where all is inverted and the bogman is revealed as master of a complex, symbolic realm.

The performative aspect of Bog began with a work entitled The Fall (1991), a series of six B/W photographs tracing the fall of a woman into the dense murky waters of a bog pool. Each image reads as a frozen moment, charged with the motion that must inevitably follow. At the time of making these works van der Elsen was conscious of the mythic undertones rippling through them, so it is no accident that Fall is the starting point for what reads initially as a ‘descent into nature’. No single mythic tradition is evoked here, but the multiple strands and traditions that have woven their way into Western European consciousness – Judaeo-Christian, Ancient Greek, Nordic, and pagan.

Yet it is undoubtedly the shamanic tradition, and the female shamanic tradition in particular, that is most to the fore here. The artist-shaman (who, since Joseph Beuys, lurks always at the edges of contemporary art) becomes a proxy, enduring trials beyond the capacity of most people, to bring back a message from the other side of experience. In Bog the journeying figure morphs from female to male, from dark to light, from innocent to malevolent. Her props and costumes are heavy, traditional, and unflattering, and more than once the work evokes the shadow world of medieval fairytales in all their puzzling and sometimes gruesome detail.

The overall effect is of a series of film-stills, intensely iconic images that are both remarkably still and trembling with the weight of multiple readings. The presence of a traditional rike of turf in the centre of the gallery space has an important grounding effect, drawing the charge of the images without neutralising them. The work seems to capture a shift from thinking about nature as something out there, on the other side of a car window or television screen, to an understanding that what is happening around us is also what is happening to us, for good and for bad.

The poster for the exhibition showed one of the works in which the artist is lying almost face down in the bog, smeared with mud. A woman working in the local print shop where the posters were produced said that she thought the image was degrading to women. Outside of the safer context of the gallery the work was rawer, more threatening, less easily read and consumed.

The performative works from Bog have a tremendous power that derives from the artist’s evident willingness to place herself outside the limits of her own control. Whether the wildness of that experience is overly tamed once inside the white cube gallery space is a question that remains for me, and one that I would be interested to see the artist explore this further.

Strange, if the world was in a different colour

2010-07-19T09:55:00.001-07:00

Catalogue essay for the exhibition Strange, the rooms we have all lived in by Fiona O’ Dwyer, The Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, September 14th – October 12th 2009. Curated by Fiona Woods for Clare Arts Office.

In déjà vu, a recollection of the present moment coincides with the present itself, creating a disjuncture in the flow of memory and time. In 1894, French philosopher Henri Bergson described a non-chronological form of time, in which past and present co-exist and are always already in the act of becoming-future or becoming-past.

These matters go right to the heart of Fiona O’ Dwyer’s work, Strange, the rooms we have all lived in. In a play between duration, movement and form the artist pursues a strategy of repetition and endless return. At the centre of the work she has placed a set of moments and object-images; these have been turned over and over, picked apart, troubled and worried by the artist, subjected to a variety of processes and practices, staged and re-staged as a series of events.

The work is permeated by the spectre of a film I Was Happy Here (1966), a straightforward piece of narrative cinema - the heroine, a young woman, leaves Co. Clare for London and marries, but is not happy. After some years, she returns to Co. Clare but finds that she no longer belongs, that the former happiness she imagined eludes her.

O’ Dwyer was drawn to the film initially because, unusually for the time, it was shot entirely on location and had a specific impact on the local area. It brought employment, excitement, magic, glamour and left behind places rendered exotic through their re-framing as ‘locations’ in addition to props and paraphernalia that found their way into people’s homes and sheds.

Research led O’ Dwyer to an original wooden ‘set’ that had been used in the film. Relocated to her own garden, this set became a ‘strange room’, full of narrative and cinematic resonances that called up aspects of the artist’s own autobiography. Her response was performative – she began to insert herself retrospectively into the film, albeit a version of the film that had never existed, constructing new props from her own collection of family objects. The resulting works superimpose layers of time, fiction, history and personal memory.

What comes through Strange, the rooms we have all lived in is the artist’s tireless pursuit of something both imagined and unimaginable. She wonders if the world was a different colour in 1966. She has pored over photographs from the time, isolating small sections in which patches of colour seem to vibrate on a different wavelength, projecting the results onto objects, sites, buildings. These movement-images she has described as being “full of air” but they are also penetrated by the world, by the textures and materials of the walls they temporarily animate.

Her working and reworking of the image blurs boundaries between memory and matter, between fiction and reality, between this place and all places. O’ Dwyer’s method of working does not fix the image but destabilises it, opening it up to flux, to shifting relations of visibility. Moments become form and forms dissolve into moments; neither space nor time is privileged in this fluid continuity of the real.

Fiona Woods
July 2009

http://fionaodwyer.com/

Ilya Kabakov and the shadows of modernism

2009-04-10T04:10:00.000-07:00

First published in ARTEFACT, Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians, Winter 2008

This essay explores the work of Ilya Kabakov through a consideration of an alternative to the binary opposition of modern- and post-modernism, suggesting that his work occupies a more hybrid place, what Bruno Latour calls ‘the amodern’[1]. The assertion of post-modernism in Western culture marked a conceptual break that made it possible to assess modernism as a cultural construct based on specific conditions. For the purpose of this essay my reading of modernism will emphasize two of its aspects in particular. The first derives from modernism’s exaggerated sense of rupture with the past, in which the present moment developed a singular, forward motion; the reconfiguration of modernism has made visible a complex relationship between modernity, tradition and nostalgia. Drawing upon the theories of Latour, Svetlana Boym, Jacques Rancière, Susan Stanford-Friedman and others, I propose that the work of Kabakov represents a counter-modern sensibility aligned to a non-linear temporality.

The second aspect that I emphasize relates to modernist aesthetics, or more accurately what I call its shadow-aesthetics. I use this term to refer to that which is nominally excluded from the realm of the aesthetic – for example garbage, kitsch, the amateur, the fetish - but remains necessary in order for the aesthetic to differentiate itself from everything else. Drawing upon Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s identification of a counter-narrative running through modernism (as demonstrated in the exhibition L’Informe; Mode d’Emploi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1998) I will demonstrate how the seemingly marginal, disruptive and contradictory aspects of shadow-aesthetics, which, as I argue here were integral to the modernist dynamic, operate in the work of Kabakov.

Kabakov’s work can be understood as having two distinct phases; one as a self-proclaimed Soviet artist (which lasted until approximately 1993/4) and one as a post-Soviet artist. Each phase is contained within the other and they share many aspects in common. Nonetheless, the nature of public space in the Western world has gradually overtaken Kabakov’s experience of a space dominated by totalitarianism and this has impacted on the character of his works. From 1989 he began to work in partnership with his wife Emilia Kabakov who, by the late 1990’s, was very much a co-author of the works; where appropriate I will make reference to the work of the Kabakovs.

Kabakov was an official artist under the Soviet regime. Until his emigration to the West in 1988 he worked as a children’s illustrator whilst developing an underground practice as a member of NOMA. Also known as ‘The Moscow Conceptualists’ this was a group of unofficial artists who met regularly and secretly in one another’s apartments. They were united not by any single style or particular philosophy but in their covert attempts to exert agency in the face of a stifling, collective will. Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, has described NOMA as more of a subculture than an artistic school, a kind of underground Soviet pop-art whose real resistance to official Soviet culture was posed in a continuation of the modernist tradition of art-making as lifestyle, invoking a semi-autonomous sphere of cultural existence.[2] Modernism had been repressed in the Soviet Union since the 1930’s, its early critical and utopian potentials, which had long since been challenged in the West, remaining current for many Soviet artists prior to perestroika.

As an official artist Kabakov was completely subject to the will of the Soviet state and lived with the possibility of severe consequences arising from his underground practice. As an individual he was traumatized by collective living and he said ‘by the fact that my mother and I never had a corner to ourselves’.[3]

The communal apartment is not just a social misfortune and catastrophe that must be done away with, it is the normal state of the communality of the Russian psyche. It's the same for a person living in a Russian communal apartment. . . . He's charred, burned from all sides in this social, communal body, and he dreams about being alone in his own small corner with his own constructs of a personal utopia. He dreams not only of a social project where we will all be happy, but he also dreams of having his own individual project where he will build something for himself.[4]

Ilya Kabakov, The Toilet, 1992. Stone, cement, wood, paint construction, men’s room, women’s room, household objects, furniture, Overall h. approx. 450 cm, w. 417cm, l. 1100cm. Installation, Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany. Image courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

The Toilet, 1992, part of Documenta IX, was Kabakov’s first ‘total’ installation in the West. Located behind the main building of the exhibition, the work consisted of an exact replica of a provincial Soviet toilet, which had been turned into a two-room apartment, complete with table, glass cabinet, bookshelves, a sofa, uncleared dishes, children’s toys, casually discarded garments, paintings, a clock, a radio. All of these were placed around or alongside the open toilet stalls, cohabiting peacefully with them.

A definitive account of this work has been given by Boym.[5] She discusses various possible readings of the work, ranging from psychoanalytic (Kabakov’s mother was, for a time, forced to inhabit a laundry-room housed in a former toilet, to be near her son while he studied in Moscow) to socio-historical (the changing quality of public and private toilets in Russia during and since perestroika) to avant-garde (an appeal to scatological sensationalism as employed by Marcel Duchamp, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Mario Metz etc.) to archaeological (fragments of a crumbling Soviet civilization) and so on.

She says:
Kabakov's toilet does not offer us the conventional satisfaction of a single narrative, but leaves us at a loss in a maze of narrative potentials and tactile evocations. What makes it obscene is its excessive humanness and humor. . . . The toilet is embarrassing, not shocking. It does not contain the excrement of the artist, but his emotion. . . . The black hole of the toilet might be equally mystical, but its power lies on the border between art and life.[6]

She describes his work as also engaging with the ‘drama of captured, or constipated, time’ describing a ‘temporal and narrative excess . . . that makes it new and nostalgic at the same time.’[7] Embarrassment, gaps, estrangement and empathy – these are part of what she terms the ironic nostalgia that pervades many of Kabakov’s works.

Irony plays a complex role in Kabakov’s work. There are narrative tensions that are more accurately captured in the uneasy duality of allegory, which can be described as a story with two meanings, one symbolic, one literal. Largely discredited in the modernist period, allegory according to Stephen Melville ‘ . . . . as it (re)appears for us now, appears as a belated rewriting of “irony.”’[8] He linked it to the concept of the tableau which includes an acknowledgment of the presence of a spectator.[9] Many of Kabakov’s installations, from the earliest The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, (1980-81) to some of the most recent such as In the Closet (2000) read as tableaux, from which the actors have inexplicably vanished, unambiguously anticipating the presence of a spectator, foregrounding both disbelief and its suspension.

The suspension of disbelief that takes place when reading a novel has been a reference for Kabakov in the development of the ‘Total Installation’[10], the form of work for which he is best known. The term captures very accurately the complete control he exercises over every last detail of his installation environments, generating an all-encompassing atmosphere that allows the visitor to become completely absorbed in the ‘fiction’ of the work, no matter how bizarre or unfamiliar the premise.

Many of the earlier installations are peopled with a cast of semi-fictional characters, and have a strong textual element, consisting of multiple written texts or spoken recordings, often contradictory. This corresponds to Kabakov’s assertion that more than any visual art, it is Russian literature that he sees as his primary inspiration.

Along with his Soviet contemporaries, Kabakov operated within a twilight zone with regard to Modernism, which is often described as a response to the conditions of modernity. For Jacques Rancière modernity itself is ‘an incoherent label’ which seeks to trace ‘a simple line of transition or rupture between the old and the new’.[11] ‘The idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities.’[12]

Similarly Bruno Latour, author of We Have Never Been Modern argued that

(Modernism’s) dream of emancipation has always been counteracted by an opposite movement of attachment. Because it was turned so thoroughly toward the past with which it wanted to break, it has run blindly through history, producing in its wake very strange hybrids, mixing up all periods, confusing all sorts of epochs.[13]

Latour’s complex argument suggests that the modernist version of time is not one that we have to accept. ’The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it were really abolishing the past behind it.’[14] The deconstruction of modernism revealed a complex operation of temporalities in which tradition is actually the invention of modernity, always constructed retroactively. The need of Modernists to demonstrate a total break and even to suppress continuities with the past, was part of their allegiance to individual autonomy and rationalism. Tradition, nostalgia, fetishism – these things would bind the individual to a moment other than the present and thus prevent him or her from functioning in a completely rational way.

Boym has coined the term ‘off-modern’, describing off-modern art as existing between the poles of modernist and anti-modernist, exploring hybrids of past and present that mediate between modernism and post-modernism. Amongst those whom she lists in the off-modern category are Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Benjamin, Milan Kundera and of course Kabakov. Locating his work in this category of the off-modern means that, for Boym, Kabakov’s works play with an idea of being out of time, locked out of both future and past, occupying a more hybrid temporality. They involve complex co-dependencies between tradition, modernity and nostalgia that always seek to transcend rational explanations, yet are meant to be read neither symbolically nor ‘in the quotation marks of post-modernism’.

My installations are oriented toward the viewer as well, but a viewer who is standing before a broken vase and thinking, "This vase existed, and now it is no more. Why did it break? Was it a good vase?" There is uncertainty and a melancholic question to which there is no answer. [15]

Boym’s thesis sees reflective nostalgia as constructing from fragments of memory a narrative that is ironic, fragmentary and inconclusive, in which the past is ‘a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development’[16] not anti- but counter-modern.
The counter-modern appears again in Formless; A User’s Guide (L’Informe; Mode d’Emploi ),a publication and exhibition (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1998). Curators Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss set out a number of postulates and exclusions central to the modernist narrative, and then set about cataloguing practices within modernism that diverged from these normative principles.

The postulates they put forward were as follows. Firstly, that the visual arts address themselves uniquely to the sense of sight, leading directly to the second postulate, namely that the temporal is denied by the effect of works revealing themselves to the eye of the viewer all at once. The third inherent claim of modernist art lies in the verticality of the viewer; the subject is addressed as an ‘erect being’ which separates the viewer from his or her body. Finally, a modernist work must be ‘bounded’ so that any apparent disorder is contained.

Drawing on the anarchic writings of Georges Bataille and the counter-surrealist Documents group, Bois and Krauss took the de-structuring, anti-architectural, unforming operations described by Bataille as Informe and employed these as a curatorial strategy to ‘redeal modernism’s cards’ as Bois described it;

. . . . to see to it that the unity of modernism, as constituted through the opposition of formalism and iconology, will be fissured from within and that certain works will no longer be read as they were before.[17]

In opposition to the ‘foundational myths’ of modernism outlined above, they proposed four operations; base materialism, pulse, horizontality and entropy and used these to generate alternative readings of art practice in the twentieth century based on the work of those very artists who are at the heart of standard accounts of modernism. The exploration of this contrary narrative has a rupturing effect on any unified account of modernism, allowing Bois to describe the latter as an ‘interpretive grid’.[18] This is a valuable metaphor because the architecture of the grid exists only by virtue of spaces that are not-grid; spaces that are ambiguous and flowing in contrast to the grid’s structural formality. The ‘non-spaces’ of modernism suggested by this metaphorical not-grid present a means of considering all that which did not sit comfortably within the modernist programme.

These non-spaces were exploited by the avant-garde in the creation of the anti-aesthetic, a complex operation in which the non-aesthetic is re-contextualised and given a new existence within an aesthetic frame of reference. In Kabakov’s work objects/ ideas are also re-contextualised, but this is never part of an anti-aesthetic stance, because his aims are otherwise; his work is always located within a framework of affects arising from human actions and relations. Speaking of the “Total Installation” he described its conceptual goal as ‘a sacralization of banal space’[19]. While recent works seem to focus more on the sacral, the installations from the 1970’s and 1980’s were saturated with the banal.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of garbage which features repeatedly in earlier works, sometimes overtly and sometimes in the form of the broken-down or dysfunctional. In conversation with Boris Groys, Kabakov has spoken of the importance of garbage in his work; ‘it is like a swamp in which both art and philosophy are submerged’.[20] Garbage, according to Groys, ‘forms the great Other of our culture’ a kind of shadow twin to the art object in that they are ‘equally useless, non-functional, superfluous things, peripheral to the universal traffic in commodities.’ That which ends up in the museum could equally end up in a dump, rendering garbage ‘as the final, fantastic, universal context of all art’.[21]

Ilya Kabakov, detail from ‘Drawings for installation, The Red Wagon’, 1991. Ink, watercolour, coloured pencil on paper. 29.5 x 42cm. Image courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

In The Red Wagon first installed in the Kunsthalle, Dussledorf, 1991, the spectator was presented with an exhibition within an exhibition, where mediocre socialist realist paintings adorned the exterior of a stationary train-wagon. At one end was a series of wooden platforms culminating in a ladder ascending pointlessly or optimistically to arrive at a no place in empty space; the front door to the wagon was locked. At the other end was a pile of garbage, outside, on the ground, in front of the back door through which Soviet-style music was blaring, mixed with tango music. Inside there was a dark space and a painting, a panorama of a future Soviet paradise, lit up from below. There was a bench where people could sit in front of the painting and listen.

Speaking of this installation, Kabakov described how viewers were often reluctant to leave. ‘Everyone understood that there is nothing more beautiful than the past. There was no irony, no derision: people rose reluctantly and sluggishly and walked out, so overwhelmed with emotion that they were unsteady on their feet.’[22] Visitors would exit through the back door again and pick their way through the rubbish on the ground.

Ilya Kabakov, Carrying out the Slop Pail, 1980. Enamel on masonite, 150 x 210 cm. Collection Kunstmuseum, Basel. Image courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Carrying out the Slop Pail, 1980, probably the best known from a series of white paintings, also makes reference to garbage. It takes the form of an apparent schedule for a fictional apartment block, a rota for residents to take out the garbage over a five year period. Against the bureaucratic weight of this schedule is contrasted a small splash of colour in the form of the garbage pail and its contents. It seems to stand for all that is formless, spontaneous, anarchic – the word ‘refuse’ seems particularly appropriate – what is ephemeral and excluded.

White is much more than a colour in the work of Kabakov; he uses it repeatedly in different ways, drawing upon its ambiguity and multiple associations to suggest complex and often contradictory realities. White can suggest purity, Divine Light, emptiness, absence, the clinic, the laboratory. Kasimir Malevich employed white as the embodiment of the ideas of Russian Suprematism; - ‘ . . . white suprematism is on the way to white non-objective nature, to white excitations, white consciousness, and white purity as the highest stage of every condition, of repose as of motion’[23] Kabakov employs dirty white to suggest the tarnishing of such modernist transcendentalism, or uses fields of white to represent the possibility of escape as in his early work, the Albums, (1970 – 75), where characters float upwards into white emptiness; collaborative works by the Kabakovs increasingly employ pure white and/or white light interchangeably (Palace of Projects (1997) House of Dreams, (2005) Manas, (2007)) to explore utopian ideas of hope and possibility.

Boym describes the work of Kabakov as exploring ‘. . . the sideroads of modernity, the aspirations of the little men and amateur artists and the ruins of modern utopias.’[24]

At the beginning of the century the visionaries were easily able to break with the past because all of their hopes were located in the future; they believed that a new era had begun and that they were part of it. Our generation, the generation of unofficial artists, did not have any future, because all of us were convinced that Soviet power would last for 10,000 years, that nothing would ever change. . . . . Therefore, each of us oriented his art not to the future but to the varied spaces of the past or of the existing Soviet environment.[25]

As this quote from Kabakov illustrates, the ‘achievement’ of utopia represents an irresolvable contradiction, what Ernst Bloch called ‘the melancholy of fulfilment’.[26] Utopia, once realised, would be subject to infinite repetition, posing an end-point of history and the negation of the future, a secular eternity without change - ‘the boredom of Utopia”.[27]

This inherent contradiction binds the idea of utopia firmly to its dystopian shadow - a dark twinning that is at the core of all of the Kabakovs’ work. Such is the case in The House of Dreams (Serpentine Gallery, London, 2005/06) in which visitors to the installation are lulled into a false sense of security through the installation’s promise of a restful space in which to dream.

For their exhibition at the Serpentine, the Kabakovs designed a new installation responding to the tranquility of the Gallery's setting within Kensington Gardens. In The House of Dreams, they transformed the Gallery by creating a series of distinct meditative spaces, encouraging visitors to enter into a world of fantasy and daydreams. The installation was a place for rest and quiet contemplation.[28]

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The House of Dreams, 2005. Installation and mixed media. Serpentine Gallery, London. Image courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

After donning white plastic shoe covers, visitors were allowed to enter the installation where they were initially dazzled by intense whiteness; walls, floors, billowing white curtains surrounding an outer circle of cubicles containing white beds, white light, bright windows. Unlike earlier installations, there was a minimum of text or instructions. The visitor wandered freely, accepting the invitation to recline and dream, or not. The outer ring of cubicles surrounded a domed, central rotunda which had four structures built against its inside wall, each containing a chamber the size of a small walk-in cupboard. These darkened chambers also contained beds, but here the walls were lit with colorful moving images of child-like cutouts; animals and fish, people on horseback. Each chamber had steps leading up its side to further beds on platforms; these were roped off and inaccessible, raising vaguely disturbing questions about their purpose, invoking the relationship between sleep and death.

The description of the installation from the Serpentine Gallery website is very much in contrast to comments that Kabakov himself has made about the nature of his installations;

The fact of the matter is that I do not plan for any installation to be smooth and naturalistic; rather, it is meant to be an entry into repressive, communal zones. . . . . Generally, we're touching on a very important subject here: the subject of freedom, and of the coercion of the viewer in the installation space. In normal conditions, viewers forget about their bodies, which helps create the aesthetic effect. But what if they have to push their way past something or someone, as part of the author's artistic agenda? [29]

This is borne out by the experience of many visitors to the installation. The first impression of an oasis of restfulness gradually gave way to feelings of uncertainty and confusion about the kind of social behavior that might be appropriate in this conflation of public and private space. To enter a cubicle in which a stranger was lying on the narrow, white, slab-like bed, resting or dreaming, produced awkward sensations of voyeurism and intrusion. What kind of House was this – sanctuary, sanatorium, asylum, mortuary?

Like many of Kabakov’s works, The House of Dreams was both oppressive and humane; it seemed to capture an affection for the frailty of the individual and to recognise the individual’s need to temporarily escape from or transcend immediate circumstances. At the same time it suggested a controlled utopia that contained at every moment the possibility of becoming its opposite.

This theme continues in The Center of Cosmic Energy (Tufts University, USA, 2007) and Manas (Venice Biennale, 2007). Here, the Kabakovs have created works in which an awkward juxtaposition of the credible and incredible leave the visitor in some confusion about how the work is to be received or understood, generating a certain friction in its play of narcissism and idealism, naïvete and a knowing appropriation of pop culture.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Manas, 2007. Installation and mixed media. Aresnale, 52nd International Exhibition, Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Each work is related to a larger project, The Utopian City and Museum of Dreams, planned for an abandoned industrial complex in Essen, Germany. This ‘city’ will be complete with technology for detecting and receiving ‘cosmic energy’. The Center of Cosmic Energy is one aspect of the plan for this Utopian City which was realized at Tufts University by invitation. It took place over a number of levels, incorporating an archaeological ‘dig’ that revealed an ancient ‘cosmic energy reservoir’, authoritative ‘academic’ and ‘scientific’ accounts of cosmic energy and a museum-type exhibit of other sacred sites such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Sudan, Uluru, Angkor Wat etc.

Manas establishes a precedent for The Utopian City, with its intricate scale models of a ‘former’ utopian city in northern Tibet. It consists of a series of mountain observatories circling a crater, designed to collect cosmic energy, special dreams, and views of alien civilizations. One short text by the Kabakovs accompanies the work;

The model of utopian city of Manas represents a reconstruction of a city that existed at one time in Northern Tibet. This city existed on two levels; on the level of the banal, everyday life that is occurring on the earth; and on the level of contact with a loftier world, primarily with the cosmos. This contact arose when the inhabitants of the city had ascended to the peaks of the 8 mountains that formed a ring surrounding the city. There were various objects located on each of these peaks, and inside of these objects one could receive cosmic energy, one could interact with extra-terrestrial civilizations, wind up in gardens of paradise . . .
In the center of the city there was a deep circular cavity resembling the crater of an extinct volcano. But the unique thing about this place was not just these 8 mountains and the crater, but the fact that there was an exact identical city that was clearly discernible during certain days of the year only this one hovered in the sky. Hence the ‘earthly’ Manas was an exact copy of the ‘heavenly’ Manas.[30]

This is a long way from Kabakov’s first work for the Venice Biennale, Red Pavilion, 1993, in which the fenced-off pavilion of the Russian Federation was filled with abandoned scaffolding and empty paint cans while a small, brightly painted hut located at the back of the pavilion played loud, Soviet-style music. The evident parody of the first work cannot be assumed to be present in Manas. There is absurdity but not the easy comfort of irony. The Kabakovs are, once again, engaging with material that is excluded from the realm of the aesthetic – alienology, altered states of consciousness and theories of mind expansion, mysticism and otherworld longings. Like garbage, this seems to represent a disavowed Other of ‘serious’ culture. ‘Becoming receptive to cosmic energy’ can be read as an appeal to the visitor to suspend disbelief and surrender to the power of imagination, but it is suggestive also of other ideas, for example Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’[31] or Theodor Adorno’s ‘nonidentity thinking’[32], ideas that introduce into the standard subject/object mode of relation a third position, a field; not a spatial register but an active constituent of all exchanges, all communications, all processes.

This essay has put forward the idea that running right through modernism, as well as around and underneath it, were alternative forms of knowing that rejected or exceeded the architecture of thought within which modernism had been framed. These alternatives fell largely within the shadows and non-spaces of modernism, excluded from its formal configuration; the operation of inclusion /exclusion is such that the two are irrevocably bound together. This is evidenced by the way in which revolutionary avant-garde projects such as Dada and Surrealism employed shadow-aesthetics at critical, oppositional moments indicating the extent to which they were integral to the dynamics of modernism.

The fissuring of the modernist edifice was inevitable, given that modernism was ‘a condition of tension, instability and, ultimately, irresolution’[33] as described by Elizabeth Mansfield. Susan Stanford- Friedman’s account of ‘multiple modernisms’ reflects a reconfiguration of the geohistory of modernism which has made possible the recognition of “alternative, alterior, heterogeneous, hybrid and polycentric modernities”[34] contradicting both the temporal break asserted by post-modernism and the modernist idea of a progressive, linear time. This has generated the need for a more rhizomatic account of multiple, overlapping modernisms, which challenge the myth of a pure modernist form.

In his use of allegory, multiple temporalities and shadow-aesthetics (such as garbage, kitsch, excess, the drab, the amateur etc.) Kabakov aligns himself with a post-modern sensibility, shunning the rigid absolutes that he perceived in the work of Malevich and the revolutionary Russian avant-garde, rejecting also the pure forms and transcendent individual aesthetic such as one might encounter in Mondrian. Despite this, I propose that his work, individually and in partnership with Emilia, evades easy classification under a simple opposition of modern and post-modern. There is a direct engagement with hopefulness, a lack of cynical detachment and, in spite of the preponderance of texts in his work, a belief in the possibility of a place beyond speech that defy a clean break with everything modernist. His work occupies a more hybrid place, between borders, out of time, where critical, oppositional residues of modernism have not yet ceased to resonate.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov for kind permission to reproduce images of their work.

My thanks also to Dr. Francis Halsall and Tim Stott of the Department of Visual Culture at N.C.A.D. Dublin, for their contributions to my thinking around this topic.

ENDNOTES

[1] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Mass. 1993
[2] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York, 2001, 311
[3] Ilya Kabakov, quoted in Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 316

[4] Ilya Kabakov, in Robert Storr, ‘An Interview with Ilya Kabakov’, Art in America, January, 1995

[5] Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 313 – 320

[6] Svetlana Boym, ‘Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias’ Artmargins, 1999, http://www.artmargins.com/content/feature/boym2.html (accessed March 2008)

[7] Boym, ‘The Soviet Toilet’

[8] Stephen Melville, ‘Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism’ October, Vol. 19, Winter, 1981

[9] Melville, ‘Reemergence of Allegory’, 60

[10] Ilya Kabakov, Uber die ‘Totale’ Installation; On the ‘Total’ Installation Bonn, 1995, 342

[11] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, transl. Gabriel Rockhill, London, 2004, 24

[12] Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 26
[13] Bruno Latour, ‘Welcome to an Idea?’ http://www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/presse_art/GB-07%20DOMUS%2007-04.html (accessed January ’08)
[14] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 68

[15] Kabakov, in Storr, ‘Interview’

[16] Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 55

[17] Yve-Alain Bois, ‘The Use Value of Formless’, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss eds. Formless; a User’s guide, New York, 1987, 21
[18] Bois, in Bois and Krauss Formless, 31
[19] Kabakov, On the ‘Total’ Installation, 342

[20] Boris Groys and Ilya Kabakov, ‘A conversation about Garbage’, Ilya Kabakov, The Garbage Man, Oslo, 1996

[21] Boris Groys, ‘The Movable Cave, or Kabakov’s Self-memorials’, Boris Groys, David A. Ross, Iwona Blazwick Ilya Kabakov, London, 1998, 49 – 53

[22] Ilya Kabakov in conversation with Margarita Tupitsyn and Victor Tupitsyn ‘About Installation’, transcribed, edited, and updated in 1997, translated from Russian by Cathy Young. Art Journal, Vol. 58, 1999

[23] Kasimir Malevich "Suprematism," in John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1988, p. 145 (originally published 1976).

[24] Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 311

[25] Kabakov, in Storr, ‘Interview’

[26] Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (1918) trans. Anthony Nassar as The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford, 2000

[27] Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Durham, 1987, 92

[28] http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2005/10/ilya_and_emilia_kabakovthe_hou.html accessed July 2008

[29] Kabakov in conversation, ‘About Installation’, 1999

[30] Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, ‘”Manas” (Utopian City)’, Venice Biennale, 2007.

[31] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imaginiation: Four Essays, Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London, 1981 (written in 1930’s)
[32] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Translated by E.B. Ashton, 1973 (Published in German in 1966)

[33] Elizabeth Mansfield, ‘Art History and Modernism’, Elizabeth Mansfield, ed. Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, New York, 2002, 13

[34] R. Radhakrishnan, “Derivative Discourses and the Problem of Signification,” The European Legacy 7, no. 6 (2002), 790, 788 quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Project Muse, Volume 13, Number 3, September, 2006, 425-443

Rethinking the Animal

2009-03-14T13:38:00.001-07:00

This article was commissioned for the Visual Artsists Newsheet, March/April 2009

“I am at two with nature” Woody Allen 1

History, it seems, is shaped by humans, never by animals. As ‘history’ and ‘animal’ are human constructs, does the animal’s conspicuous absence from history have any real significance? Humans act; the animal is generally regarded as a mere accessory to human actions, not credited with agency, mere “passive, unthinking presences in the active and thoughtful lives of humans”.2

Recent modes of thought and analysis, including post-colonial studies, have taught us to pay regard to those excluded from conventional historical narratives. In the light of such discourse we have now a more complex understanding of the way in which beings at either end of a power relationship construct and are constructed by one another. The Native, the Slave, the Woman, the Lunatic – all of these terms have been exposed as manifestations of specific power relations and reworked to reveal hidden histories. So, what of the Animal?

A place to begin might be with the branch of thought often described broadly as Continental Philosophy. Amongst other things, it has attempted to “reverse the metaphysical and normative priority granted to human beings over animals”3. Many philosophers – Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Agamben – have variously considered questions of human-animal distinctions, sketching out a post-humanist perspective that potentially subverts traditional binaries of human/animal, subject/object, mind/matter etc.

Agamben in particular has argued that the distinction between humanity and animality within the human being has made it possible to bestialise entire groups of people, leading to their exclusion from the ethico-political realm. Examples would include the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay or the grim corralling of the Traveller community in Ireland. Agamben argues for the suspension of the distinction altogether.4

A post-humanist perspective has been informing art practice since the mid-1960’s, as evidenced by the introduction into the work of art of actual, as opposed to represented animals – Untitled (12 Horses), 1969, in which Jannis Kounellis stabled live horses in a gallery space; Newton and Helen Meyer-Harrison’s Fish Farm of 1971 which proposed to publicly electrocute fish for consumption purposes; Hans Haacke’s Ten Turtles Set Free, 1971; Joseph Beuys I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974, a two-week cohabitation of artist and coyote in a gallery space; Eduardo Kac’s GFP Bunny, 2000, comprising a fluorescent green rabbit commissioned from a Paris laboratory, etc.

Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny, 2000, transgenic artwork. Alba, the fluorescent rabbit.
Courtesey of the artist

These works offer a questioning of the intellectual consumption of animals through visual representation, so pervasive in our culture. They are also part of a shift between the kind of visual mastery associated with a primarily optical mode of visuality, concerned with representations, appearances, signs, language and knowledge, and a more haptic visuality (sometimes described as embodied viewing) that explores a fluid, uncontrolled experience of seeing in which the other senses are also implicated.

It turns out then that there is a lot at stake in the human/animal divide, strikingly described by Ron Broglio as an ‘ontological apartheid’.5 Much thought has been expended on whether the difference between human and non-human animals is one of kind – an absolute difference in which animals are soulless machines (industrial farming and slaughter practices come to mind), or one of degree, a biological continuum in which all beings are equal, with the difference lying merely in humans’ symbolic / linguistic mode of being opposed to animals’ non-symbolic / non-linguistic existence.

There is no doubt that nonhuman animals are central to the lives of humans; animal-as-food (up to 50 million animals a year are killed for food), animal-as-pet, animal-as-sport/prey, animal-as-experiment, animal-as-entertainment and so on. But all of this takes on a new shape in the current climate; at least seven out of ten biologists believe we are witnessing a human-generated, mass extinction event on a scale never seen before.6 The human, it seems, is in the process of wiping out the other animals. In addition to other considerations then, we need to grapple with the terrible if preposterous idea of a post-animal world. What would it mean, and what it would mean culturally, to live in such a world?

The Animal Gaze: Contemporary Art and Animal/Human Studies, (20 – 21 Nov 2008), a two day symposium and exhibition (18 Nov – 13 Dec 2008) held at London Metropolitan University7, set out to consider some of these questions, bringing together thinkers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines – philosophy, geography, zoosemiology, phenomenology, history and art. A broad spectrum of attitudes towards animals and the animal (the two are not the same) was also evident. These ranged from a discourse of animal rights, to academic critiques of Cartesian models of the animal, to animal phenomenology, to ideas of a human/animal/cybernetic continuum and more.

The presentations in the two-day symposium were rich and diverse, impossible to cover in a report like this; I will present some of the questions that arose and focus on some of the artworks presented.

In his presentation The Death of the Animal, Giovanni Aloi discussed a surprisingly large number of artists who have engaged in the killing of animals for the purpose of their work.8 All the works were compelling and disturbing, in particular Don’t Trust Me, 2008, by the artist Adel Abdessemed, a video work that portrays six animals—sheep, horse, ox, pig, goat and fawn—being struck and killed by a hammer. The artist statement claimed that the work was an allusion to the uncontrolled expansion of China as a world power, founded on brutality and violence towards its own population. The gallery press release focused on whether the killings represented “slaughter or sacrifice? What are their social, cultural, moral and political
implications?”9 To my mind this is either a failure of rhetoric or a failure of representation because the real subject of the work is evidently a cruel and gratuitous killing of large mammals for aesthetic purposes.

Adel Abdessemed, Don’t Trust Me, 2007, 6 videos on monitors, 2 sec each (loop), color, sound,
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Are all actions justifiable under a banner of art? This was a predominant theme of symposium discussions, ranging from animal welfare advocacy to Matthew Poole’s contrary stance (after Richard Rorty) that ethics complicate and obfuscate mechanisms of thought, so that the evacuation of ethics and truth from thought and action opens up the possibility of a greater negotiation of justice based on empathy.

Other interesting questions concerned the individuated animal vs animal species, the idealised animal manipulated through breeding practices, the animal as pest, with no place in ‘our’ world; the condition of human vs animal skin which demarcates a separation of human and non-human forms of life; the question of animal aesthetics and the related possibility of mapping a “myriadic ecology”10 encompassing multiple species in virtual space.

The exhibition attempted to show “stances outside anthropocentrism, deconstructions of species taxonomy, constructions of the idea of difference and documentation of the consequences of indifference.”11 It brought together work by 40 international artists, largely, though not exclusively, lens-based work including video and stills documentation of a number of performance works.

Ladybirds by Miranda Whall12 was shown on a small monitor in a room full of video works; it stood out from much of the other work in the room in spite of (or possibly on account of) its deceptively delicate construction. The work is an animation of watercolour paintings in which a woman masturbates with the aid of a colourful device, surmounted by one or more songbirds singing declaratively. The work features seven different figure/bird assemblages, the whole lasting approximately four minutes.

Miranda Whall, Ladybirds, 2007, still from animation
Courtesy of the artist

The fusing of ornithographic and pornographic modes of viewing generated interesting tensions, resulting in a decidedly haptic space. Whall’s work plays with all kinds of classifications and, in the context of an interrogation of ‘the animal’, transgresses various human/animal boundaries, requiring the viewer to shift back and forth between ideas of nature and culture.

Birdsong has a particular place in the cultural and phenomenological life of humans, and featured in a number of the works exhibited or discussed. Marcus Coates, an artist whose work occupies a zone of indeterminacy between the human and the animal, showed Dawn Chorus, 2006, during his presentation to the symposium.

Marcus Coates, Dawn Chorus, 2007, stills from video
Courtesy of the artist

This work was developed from an audio recording of birdsong made on the edge of a forest. Each individual call was digitally slowed up to 16 times and given to a member of a local choir to sing. 17 people were filmed performing their ‘song’, sitting or lying in nondescript interiors – office spaces, waiting rooms, a car-park, kitchens, bedrooms etc. The resulting video was speeded up, generating a near-perfect auditory resemblance to the original bird-call. It had the added effect of intensifying the animality of the human bodies; breathing became visibly rapid, eye and hand movements darting. Each human body became fragile and vulnerable, its gestures almost bird-like.

Coates’ work is infused with a humour that short-circuits representational clichés of the human/animal relationship. He plays with anthropo- and zoomorphism, staging impersonations that are as much about impersonating the human as they are about impersonating the animal.

Is it possible to exceed the subject/object dichotomy, or does a screen of subjectivity stand forever between ‘us’ and the actuality of real, non-human animals? As a practice that stages representations, art is of course aligned with human subjectivity, yet many artists are employing art as a proposed contact zone between species. At its best, this work explores the failure of the animal ‘object’ to go fully into the ‘animal’ concept, leaving a residue akin to what Adorno called non-identity13. This presents an unmapped anti-territory where axes of binary thinking provide no useful reference.

[1] Quoted in Woody Allen: clown prince of American humor, Bill Adler and Jeffrey Feinman. 1975, New York: Pinnacle Books.
2 Erica Fudge, ‘The History of the Animal’, http://www.h-net.org/~animal/ruminations_fudge.html
3 Matthew Calarco, ‘Animals in Continental Philosophy‘, http://www.h-net.org/~animal/ruminations_calarco.html
4 Georgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Meridian, 2002
5 Ron Broglio, ‘Making Space for Animal Dwelling’, (a) fly, Snaebjornsdottir/ Wilson 2006
6 Claim made in a survey carried out in 1998 by the American Museum of Natural History, quoted in the Press Release, The Animal Gaze, Unit 2 Gallery, London, 2008
7 ‘The Animal Gaze: Contemporary Art and Animal/ Human Studies’ Symposium – Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design, LMU, November 20 – 21 2008. The symposium was accompanied by an exhibition held at the Unit 2 Gallery, London Metropolitan University, November 18 – December 13 2008. Abstracts are available on http://www.animalgaze.org/
8 This paper also took the form of an article in Issue 5 of Antennae, ed. Aloi http://www.antennae.org.uk/
9 San Francisco Art Institute, ‘Don’t Trust Me’ Press Release, March, 2008, curated by Hou Hanru
10 Mathew Fuller, ‘Art for Animals’, Animal Gaze symposium.
11 Rosemarie McGoldrick, Animal Gaze curatorial statement http://www.animalgaze.org/11.html
12 http://www.mirandawhall.com/
13 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973 (Published in German in 1966)

REVIEW Scéal Eile by Valerie Driscoll

2009-01-24T09:02:00.000-08:00

This review is carried on the CIRCA website, please click here

The Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, Co. Clare (January 4th – 24th 2009)

As an object, the Kitchen Dresser is somewhat conflicted. With its open shelves above and closeted section below, it attests to an impulse of both display and concealment, lending itself to a variety of psychological readings. As an image it conjures up the domestic and the rural, its visual qualities banal and iconic in equal measure.

Scéal Eile, a solo exhibition by Valerie Driscoll, stages a kind of psychodrama that draws on, but also subverts, a tradition of theatrical representations of ‘Ireland West’ from Playboy of the Western World to more recent works such as The Beauty Queen of Leenane. She employs the aformentioned kitchen dresser not only for its capacity to metaphorically conflate the domestic with the public, but also for its fusion of decorative and functional modes, a fusion that is central to an understanding of rural aesthetics.

In the series of photographs titled A few things around my father’s kitchen, the photographic frame encloses just one small section of shelving that turns the display impulse on its head. This is no romantic, well-crafted country dresser, sporting the best delft, but a homemade, rough-hewn version, soiled and grimy. Each compartment houses a collection of items – tin foil, mustard, sugar, knives, a sieve, a tin opener, a bar of soap. Many of the objects hang from randomly placed hooks; a smoke alarm balances precariously on a nail. The relentlessly shallow space of the shelf forces the image to operate within a single plane, claustrophobic, inescapably domestic.

A few things around my father's kitchen, C-type print, 2006 - 2008
Courtesy of the artist

The paradox of the photograph as an index of presence now absent, is carefully considered and delicately employed. The anachronous dresser, with its motley collection of objects, becomes a locus for Driscoll’s attempt to come to terms with the life and recent death of her father. What follows something so emotionally incomprehensible is an extended moment of stasis, in which objects - these trousers, those glasses, this blanket - become both hyper-real and unreal; present and inert, they point to the abrupt suspension of a trajectory of motion along which they had just now been propelled. The anachronism of the dresser, rather than being incidental, is revealed as central to the work’s exploration of time as a set of continuously present moments which may be compressed or extended, disjointed, occasionally even doubled. If nostalgia is a longing for the familiar, what comes through these images is a mute longing in the face of a familiar rendered ‘unhomey’ (rather than uncanny) by the temporal dislocation that attends the death of a parent. It corresponds to the photographic image’s freezing of the continuum of the world, its capture of a moment of time producing “an illogical injunction of the here and the formerly“[1].

As much as the photograph is an image it is also an object, both a thing-in-itself and a trace of some other thing to which it remains causally connected. This interplay of object and image is crucial to the tension of the exhibition, generated through a spare and minimal arrangement of photographic and sculptural works. The photograph’s complex relation to the object is amplified by the rude presence in the gallery space of actual domestic objects; an unplugged radiator on wheels, over which a folded blanket is hung; an ugly, wooden shelf supporting a row of bottles, affixed high up the wall; a closed, wooden box on the floor. The fourth of these, a mound of reading glasses, 90 in all, was placed on the floor of the gallery, photographed from four directions and removed. The resulting photographs are pinned directly to the nearest wall.

Untitled, sculpture, 2008
Courtesy of the artist

By transferring items from the sphere of the commonplace to the space of aesthetic discourse, the artist invokes the anti-aesthetic of the readymade in which the ordinary or overlooked is recast as a weighty signifier of what is not, what cannot be, present. The repeated shift in the work between presence and absence also hints at a slippage between what can be seen and what can only be guessed at. The exposure of what is private hints at intimacy, but the revelation is partial, unsatisfying, implying much that is unspoken.

In addition to its exploration of presence and absence, public and private, the work uses a strategy of sequencing. The viewer is presented with three ‘sets’ of photographs in which duration is an important element. Irish mothers know the hardship . . . and the hope is a diptych of larger than life photographs, so nearly identical that it is difficult to spot the difference. A pair of jeans is pegged to a clothesline in an overcast and lush green garden. They read from left to right, the second image distinguished from the first by a few drips gathered at the lower edge of the garment. Time has passed - it could be a second or an eternity. This is true also of A few things around my father’s kitchen. A close reading of the sequence, numbered 1 – 7, reveals that objects have been rearranged, some appearing in more than one frame. Whether this rearrangement has taken place over a brief or an extended period cannot be known.

Irish mothers know the hardship . . . and the hope, C-type prints, 2008
Courtesy of the artist

The scrutiny of these banal but highly charged objects in succession might be understood as a leaning towards narrative, but the striking object/image tension animating the work adds a layer of complication. In so far as the objects scrutinised both are and are symbolic of ‘the real’, the work can be read less as narrative and more as allegory (properly understood as a story with two meanings, one literal and one symbolic); an allegory of the real. In this reading, the artist’s decision to include the titles of some works as texts, applied physically to the wall, can be understood as a form of ‘captioning’, a play on the relations of image and text. For this viewer, however, the ‘captions’ were overly directive, with a trace of sentimentality that had been rigorously avoided in the construction of the works themselves. Given that this is the artist’s first solo exhibition, the single off-note can be excused as a possible lack of confidence in the capacity of the work to function as its own text; in any event, it barely disturbs the restrained and delicate orchestration of the assembled works.

In a metropolitan gallery, say in London where the artist now lives, this exhibition might have a slight aura of the exotic. In the context of The Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon, the work presents a reality so closely aligned with the reality just beyond the gallery doors, that its very ordinariness and familiarity has proved both attractive and repellent to gallery goers. Much credit is due to the staff of the Courthouse Gallery for their inclination to engage gallery goers in discussions about the work, something which sets this small arts centre apart from many others and may account for the diverse audience that it continually draws through its doors.

Scéal Eile is a measured and thoughtful collection of works, located at an intersection of the conditions of time and those of space. It succeeds in disturbing the border between object and image, eliciting a suitably fraught tension, and it almost entirely avoids a tendency to romanticise that which remains of that which has passed.

January 2009

[1] Roland Barthes, “Rhetorique de l’Image” in Communications, 4, 1964 p47

Where Art Grows Greener?

2008-12-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

A talk given at PS2 project space, Belfast, December 17th 2008

When PS2 issued the invitation to me to launch the Ground Up publication in Belfast, I was delighted to be able to do that; in particular now that the publication is out there in the world, in combination with the documentary, it has taken on the function of telling the story of Ground Up, which frees me up to talk about it in a different way. I am less interested in describing a bounded project and more in examining a collective research process that continues to unfold. I see it as part of an ongoing dynamic of interacting ideas and practices.

To begin I will sketch out the conceptual framework within which GU was operating and then attempt to look critically at that framework, in particular to examine how the original questions and terminologies associated with the project have shifted and evolved.

Ground Up was an experimental programme of contemporary art in the rural, public realm that took place between 2003 – 2007. It involved 22 artists over three strands, staged a series of public events, generated two publications and 11 temporary public artworks. It had a strong artist-led ethos and laid emphasis on research; art in public was understood as both a process of research and a mode of dialoguing between artists, rural communities and the wider cultural discourse. It was not set up as a participative project, but with a faith in art as a way of thinking about and examining the world. The emphasis on the temporary was very deliberate, this was a way of opening up spaces which could then close over again, emphasizing becoming over being, proposing performative rather than fixed identities.

Artists participating in GU were paid to engage in a relatively short, collective research process. This was seen as a way of examining received values about rural contexts and culture, and of building networks amongst geographically dispersed artists. Some artists were subsequently commissioned to carry out temporary public works, which themselves involved research stages of various lengths, some quite extensive.

Various modes of enquiry were used by the artists participating in the project – there were discursive practices involving public talks; textual material circulated locally and through the local newspapers; there were artistic interventions at public events; artists learned skills that would be perceived as traditional rural skills; there was individual research carried out by artists working on their own and with mentors that they had identified, and there was a publication circulated with the local newspaper which curated contributions from multiple disciplines such as economics, botany and agriculture as well as artistic responses. This final publication is also seen as a continuation of the research process in that it contains specially commissioned essays which are hopefully somewhat provocative.

I am going to list the objectives that I set out for the project at the beginning.

To facilitate a new type of engagement between public art practice and rural contexts, generating debate and discussion amongst practitioners and the rural constituency that will inform the engagement and the resulting artworks.
To create opportunities for artists to make interesting, challenging artworks where they live, independent of the gallery system.
To create opportunities for contemporary artists in rural areas to overcome their professional isolation, inspire and inform one another, interact with national/ international practitioners and address the need to acquire new skills.
To research ways in which contemporary art can be relevant and accessible to rural audiences without compromising the art.

This is the brief that was given to the research teams in the first two strands of the project;

“Working collaboratively or as related individuals, develop proposals for a work or series of works which pertain to rural environments and communities. These works should be viewable in a variety of rural locations and should seek to engage rural communities in some way.”

It is some 5 and a half years since I wrote these; inevitably many of the terms that I used uncritically at the outset have since become problematised for me. What I am going to do for the remainder of my presentation is unpick some of the terms with a view to opening these up to critique and perhaps some expansion.

A new type of engagement
In making art of any kind there is an intention to engage an audience, art only exists in the reception of it. When I spoke of ‘a new type of engagement’ I was drawing on the whole relational aesthetic and the idea of a two-way reception, a kind of Bakhtian dialogism. What I find myself questioning at this point is the extent to which the very idea of engagement when applied to art in the public realm has become almost synonymous with participation and occasionally the terms are collapsed into one another. Participation as a term can be used very uncritically – for one thing, participation needs an object, one has to participate in something – but as the term is increasingly used without specifying any object a reification takes place where participation becomes an end in itself. There is a second layer to this; in some quarters there are signs of this developing into a kind of orthodoxy that occludes other equally political aspects of art. Jacques Ranciere has been very useful in opening this up – he talks about art’s capacity to reframe what he calls the distribution of the sensible and its role in making visible processes of all kinds, social and otherwise. The viewing of art is not a passive activity – people are not stupid, they are quite capable of making readings of work even where they have not previously been exposed to contemporary art.

Accessible
The accessibility of art seems essentially like a good idea, up to a point where it starts to look reductive. The aesthetic message is supposed to be eccentric, not immediately clear, demanding an interpretive effort that leads to a kind of productive ambiguity. Good art has multiple levels of meaning and possible readings, so questions relating to the explication of public art are tricky at best, and often underestimate an audience. Soccer has jargon, it has codes, and some understanding of those is required in order to derive enjoyment from it, but it is not accused of being inaccessible for that reason. There are links to be made between the experience of aesthetics and the experience of gaming with regard to the question of accessibility.

Public art
It’s fair to say that there has been a seismic shift in thinking about art in public in Ireland in the last 10 years. There now exists a great deal of art that is called or understood to be public art, though I sometimes find myself asking what exactly that means. I don’t want to get side-tracked into some kind of impossible attempt at defining public art. The public art website being developed by the Arts Council (http://www.publicart.ie/ ) is certainly going to be a forum for that discussion and I look forward to it.

The term public suggests something held in common, but as the idea of a public sphere has been replaced by an understanding of multiple public spheres coexisting, overlapping, maybe even competing with one another, it becomes more accurate to speak of publics than public. As the singularity of ‘public’ fragments into multiple publics, questions arise to do with scales of proximity and spectacle, the function and social use of art, the temporalities of artworks, and so on, many of which are being addressed through discussion fora all over the country.

There are just two points that I want to make about art in public. As the social uses and values of art are foregrounded, it might be a good time to talk about questions of aesthetics in relation to public art. For a long time aesthetics was an unfashionable word, with its implications of art for art’s sake and its advocacy of distance from the life praxis, but I think that a review of the philosophy of aesthetics is underway and there could be some interesting applications of that debate to the practice of art in public.

The second point I am going to make is drawn from an essay by Doina Petrescu in the Space Shuttle book that PS2 produced, titled ‘How to Make a Community as well as the Space for it’ and I am going to quote Doina quoting Jorge Ribalta from his essay titled ‘Mediation and Construction of Publics’

The public is constructed in open, unpredictable ways in the very process of the production of discourse and through its different means and modes of circulation. Therefore, the public is not simply there, waiting passively for the arrival of cultural commodities; it is constituted within the process itself of being called. The public is a provisional construction in permanent mobility. [i]

Community
This ties in to my critique of the next term, community - a term that’s almost impossible not to use in the area of engaged public art practice but it is very problematic. A bit like participation, it can be used in a way that suggests community is something that exists rather than something that is continually performed. I think everyone who works in this field is wary of the tokenistic use of the term in supposed consultation processes and policies that actually mask an absence of democratic politics; but even moving beyond that I think there can still be a kind of lazy use of the term, specifically where there is a kind of consensus agenda and in that process an antagonistic politics of difference might be suppressed.

Rural contexts
One critic (need to identify and cite) has gone so far as to say that there are no non-urban areas in the world– even the rainforests are just resource stores for the urban. Those of us who are practising outside of the metropolitan centres know that there is something else out there, something other or alterior (I use that post-colonial term deliberately to refer to something that exists at the very margins of a dominant discourse). But while urban is widely agreed as a term, describing the non-urban is very difficult. Rural is not a term that people will agree to, non-metropolitan doesn’t work for everyone – so in the absence of agreement about terms it becomes very difficult to refute the kind of claim made by the critic as quoted or to discuss and critique this area of practice.

The difficulty is more than semiotic, it points to political divergence about the nature of space and place. In response I have found myself reverting to a discourse of spatialisation, a study of the practices – discursive, cultural and institutional - by which place and place-related identities are constructed. In this I have been influenced by a paper given by Rob Shields at the 'Putting Region in its Place' Conference, University of Alberta, in October 2007. The title of the paper was A Sense of Place and Region. Shields gives a comprehensive account of the geopolitics of Regions and Centres, and argues that there is nothing natural or essential about the identities of place or region, but that place must be continually reproduced through practices. What I find useful about this is that there is less need to define a place as this or that, rural or urban, it provides tools for looking critically at the practices, both strategic or state-sanctioned and tactical or unofficial, that designate somewhere as a place-for-this or a place-for-that, appropriate for certain social activities and behaviors but not for others. This opens up a means also of examining the role of art and public art in that process - visual representations, literature and folk tales, urban myths are all aspects of the spatialisation of a site or region.

There is nothing new about this obviously; the theories of Lefebvre are inherent in much public art practice anyway, but their deliberate application outside of the urban context has been minimal, which leaves these practices open to critiques that are primarily and maybe simplistically participative in their bias.

A 'critical regionalism' which recognizes and celebrates place and region while attending to the operations of power and the spatial and historical exclusions and xenophobias which accompany hegemonic spatialisations could make a useful contribution to a renewed sense of place. [ii]

I am far less interested in conclusions than I am in an ongoing process of critical enquiry. What I have presented here is nebulous and inconclusive, but deliberately so; given the particularly interesting collection of minds that PS2 drew together for this event, it seems to me that there is an opportunity to do something quite interesting through this discussion, so I offer the formlessness of my thought on this occasion for that purpose.

[i] Jorge Ribalta, ‘Mediation and Construction of Publics: The MACBA Experience’, www.republicart.net/disc/institution/ribalta01_en.htm quoted in Doina Petrescu, ‘How to Make a Community as well as the Space for it’, Space Shuttle, Six Projects of Urban Creativity and Social Interaction, Belfast, PS2, 2007.
[ii] R. Shields, A Sense of Place and Region, Notes for a Talk, Putting Region in its Place Conference, University of Alberta, October 2007.

Of every place, a centre

2008-09-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

(Catalogue essay for 'Switch' an artistic intervention into the town of Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. See website www.switchspace.org for more details)

Switch is both verb and noun. It can be understood as an exchange or a shift, the act of changing one thing or position for another. Equally it indicates a device that links separate paths, connecting and disconnecting established circuits.

The public realm is a complex place, composed of closed and open spaces, vertical and horizontal surfaces; it is defined by an invisible architecture of regulations, laws and customs, socially acceptable behaviors, norms and taboos; it is governed by a multiplicity of signs and symbols. In the act of traversing such a place we each read the signs, adopt an attitude, select an approach, navigate a route.

The more familiar the place, the less likely we are to think about those choices that we make, operating on a kind of auto-pilot, experiencing ourselves as separate from all that is around us; the ‘subject’ self distinct from the ‘object’ environment through which we pass. While this binary distinction of ‘subject’ self and ‘object’ environment is useful for our survival, it also impoverishes us. We ‘forget’ our continuity with all of existence, ‘forget’ that we are composed of the very same materials that we see around us. We ‘forget’ that what happens around us is also what happens to us. What does it take to switch from forgetting to remembering? What kind of switch can disconnect the circuits of dull habit, trip us from one circuit to another?

In its capacity to surprise and confound us, to confuse and perplex us, art can be one such switch. It can flip our perceptions of where we are, so that where we are is no longer where we were.

Switch then, this very moment. It’s Nenagh, it’s October; the light is fading from the skies, the heat is seeping from the land. There is culture and commerce, there is bustle and night-life. Shops open, shops close, people congregate and disperse, economies rise and fall. Daily life has its rhythms and routines, its dramas and dreams deferred.

Into this moment comes something unexpected, something unlikely; six artworks inserted into places where they should not be. Their purpose is not to distract or entertain us; they do not promise to answer any questions or confirm any positions - instead, they stop us in our tracks, ask of us that we reconsider where it is that we think we are. Artworks are things, but they are not only things. Sometimes, they are conduits for the forces that pass constantly around and through us.
Most of us long for those moments when the world fills us up, when our self becomes continuous with our environment, making of every place a centre. North Tipperary Arts Office embraced Switch, this artist-led initiative, so that people going about their business in Nenagh on a dark autumn evening might find themselves, unexpectedly, at the very centre of a world; they might find themselves present, continuous, remembered.

The End of Nature?

2008-08-03T12:48:00.000-07:00

(essay from Ground Up; re-considering contemporary art practice in the rural context, ed. Fiona Woods, Clare County Council Arts Office, 2008)

The End of Nature?
Critical art practice and the ‘new rural’.

“The conventional notion of the rural as a 'marginal' or minor cultural discourse needs to be challenged, re-positioning the rural as a new intellectual site and critical impulse from which to construct a different cultural discourse about social, economic and environmental change in the context of sustainability.” Ian Hunter, Littoral Arts Trust

Ground Up was an experimental programme of contemporary art in the rural, public realm that took place between 2003 – 2007, involved 22 artists, generated two publications, a series of public events and 11 temporary public artworks. The geographical context for the work was rural Co. Clare. Located in the west of Ireland, this is still primarily an agricultural region, in which all of the fault lines developing as a result of the impacts of globalisation and industrialisation on agriculture are evident. It also has to contend with the legacy of the picturesque, which continues to inform thinking about and regulation of the region.

Within the discourse of contemporary visual culture the rural context is relatively invisible or largely viewed as a cultural void, an absence. Ground Up set out to challenge that discourse, proposing the rural as a distinct type of public sphere, and exploring how contemporary art practice might relate to the full, cultural complexity therein. Art in public was understood as both a both a process of research and a mode of dialoguing between artists, rural communities and the wider cultural discourse. The project was not an attempt to ghetto-ise the rural. What sets this context apart from its urban counterpart is that an active engagement with nature is integral to the social, economic and cultural matrix.

‘Nature’ is a conceptual structure that allows us to categorise and understand particular phenomena that we experience. We live in a moment when our experience of the phenomena to which the term refers, is itself almost entirely mediated through additional layers of cultural construction. The effects of human activity on the ecology of the planet are so transformative that the binary opposition of nature and culture may be obsolete; whether ‘nature’ as we understand it even exists anymore seems to be a question worth asking.
This can be seen very clearly in rural Ireland, and other parts of rural Europe, which have for some time been experiencing a shift from site of production to site of consumption. For a long time, rural communities were not ‘good’ consumers. They tended to make do with what was available, to adapt objects and materials for new uses, to operate and co-operate on a local scale. As farmers were encouraged to rely on agro-chemical products, the process of transforming rural communities into markets was begun. The change from agri-culture to agri-business was a move from subsistence and diversity towards industrialisation and monoculture based on oil and petroleum. Today the systematic ending of farming and food production creates a new rural, where the nature of space is shifting from the concrete to the abstract. Rural contexts are recreated as sites of (primarily) economic activity through the construction of categories like ‘tourism service providers’ ‘land managers’ ‘development hubs’ and so on. The new rural is a place of leisure or a place of development, no longer the source of our capacity to feed ourselves, to exercise control over what we eat.
The model of consumption that we know as the Oil Paradigm reaches so far into all of our lives that searches for alternatives can be characterised as regressive or anti-modern. And yet the ultimate expression of that paradigm, the patenting of material fundamental to the existence of life, is a privatisation of public space to such a degree that creative autonomy and freedom of thought seem certain to be amongst the casualties[1]. On that basis alone, the search for new conceptual structures within which to discuss alternative social, cultural and economic models is a valid area of art practice.

The research process of Ground Up was envisaged as a means of strengthening local artist networks and was intended to have as much weight as the outcomes. The first strand, Ground Up was made up of six artists; a discursive mode of enquiry was employed in the research stage, with the artists meeting regularly and conducting discussions in public with additional, invited speakers. This strand also resulted in a publication, 22,000 of which were circulated with the local newspaper.

The five artists in the second strand, In, Under, Over, Out chose a more collaborative route, submerging their individual artistic practices into collective projects and taking these to local agricultural fairs. They visited the artist group Ointment in Wales and worked with two mentors, Jon Bewley of Locus+ and Alan Phelan (who contributes an essay to this publication) on the development of their final proposal(s).

The third strand, Rural Vernacular, operated differently; while the invited artists (drawn from Ireland, Hungary, Switzerland, Russia and the UK) worked independently of one another, they each worked with a local artist as their assistant, providing the artist with important local information but also exposing local artists to the ideas and thinking of international practitioners. An on-site symposium took place at the site of the commissioned works to coincide with the conference Shifting Ground; New Perspectives on Art and Rural Culture in October 2006; this provided an opportunity to explore from a critical and theoretical perspective, some issues that the works had both identified and generated.

The unfolding of Ground Up over a period of five years has allowed ideas and thoughts about nature, culture and art in rural contexts, many of those contradictory, to develop through artistic practice. In keeping with this process, David Smith and Oran Day of Atelier approached the design of the publication very much as commissioned artists. From the outset their approach to the project focused on the idea of book-as-artwork, reflected in their brilliant and innovative final design. In addition, they engaged carefully with the work of each of the 16 artists, visually interpreting their ideas whilst maintaining a faithfulness to the individual character of each project. In that respect, and in many others, this publication is the final strand of Ground Up, both a document of the project and a further development of some ideas that it set in motion.

Fiona Woods

[1] For further information on the impact of corporate law on freedom of expression see http://www.illegal-art.org/ ; also ‘Disciplining the Avant Garde; the United States vs The Critical Art Ensemble’ in an article by Sholette, G. CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland (pp. 50-59), Summer 2005 issue also available at http://gregorysholette.com/essays/docs/02_disciplining.pdf

The non-metropolitan; a site of resistance

2008-06-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

“Half of the world’s population now lives in cities.” This is a statistic with which most people are familiar and is reflected in the growth of ‘urbanism’ within cultural studies. The methods by which cultural discourse is generated – through art journals, art colleges, curatorial practices, discursive events, funding agendas etc. – present the urban as the site where cultural innovation and resistance is most likely to occur.

Of course, there remains another half of the world’s population - people who don’t live in cities but in non-metropolitan contexts. In contrast to the discourse of urbanism, theirs is a marginal discourse, discontinuous and non-elite, often characterised as non-progressive, traditionalist, backward looking.

This essay will attempt to present a mobilisation of public space which is not urban, but nonetheless represents a reconfiguration of what Jacques Ranciere calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ – that is, what can be seen, what can be thought and what can be talked about. I will endeavour to show that this space is as much a site of potential resistance as urban space, that here too cracks and slippages can be located wherein to consider and counteract hegemonic strategies.

In our present world, all contexts, urban and non-metropolitan are subject to a quintessential colonial strategy, the Oil Paradigm. This is an employment of superior technology and institutional mechanisms to impose one set of cultural, social and economic values on another for the purpose of extracting wealth to benefit an elite – but these days we call it corporatisation. Similar in many respects to what Hardt and Negri term Empire, it is a web of values centred on consumption, which prioritises the economic over the social, encourages the separation of production and consumption, preferably by a great distance, and imposes a ‘progressive’ temporality.

Public space is actually a spatio-temporal matrix, but while the spatial is much discussed the temporal is rarely held up to scrutiny. We inherited from the project of modernity an understanding of time as singular, forward-moving, always breaking with the past; this is what it means to be modern, and it is the basis of Capitalist time. The lens of unidirectional temporality creates a model of history as linear, generating some of the great, almost unquestionable modern myths such as ‘economic growth’ and ‘progress’. Following this model ideas, events, things become easily outdated which renders them obsolete, irrelevant.

Post-colonial studies have thrown up a different understanding of time in which multiple modernities exist and overlap in different places at different times. Subaltern studies in particular, with its emphasis on non-elite histories, has made evident the way in which non-elite social and cultural formations are occluded rather than erased or superseded by dominant social narratives, and how they persist in that occlusion.

When I use the term ‘non-metropolitan context’ I am not necessarily referring to a physical place but to that which lies outside of the dominant, metropolitan discourse and which can be described as alterior. Viewed through this other lens, the social and cultural forms characteristic of non-metropolitan contexts are contemporaneous with the modern, but displaced to the margins. This is significant because the great cliché surrounding the non-metropolitan is that it belongs somehow to the past, that it is irrelevant, reactionary, traditionalist, incapable of generating anything radical or resistant.

Climate change and peak oil require that we shift all modes of understanding and practices to adopt new, sustainable forms of living and being in the world, with an emphasis on the local and the translocal. Fluid City is a proposal by an Irish architect, Dominic Stevens for a vibrant, intensive linear settlement along the banks of the Shannon-Erne waterway in the West/ North-west of Ireland which has about 800km of usable shoreline. The flood-plains or callows as they are known are intended for use as farm land, worked sensitively with local systems of ecology; the houses are designed to rise and fall as the rivers swell and flood. A moving city can appear overnight; this is an ephemeral, adaptable resource – the city travels to the people instead of the other way around. So, the bank, post office and shop might come twice or three times a week, the cinema and bookshop could come once a week, while the National Gallery could come once or twice a year. In line with many of the houses that Stevens designs, these are intended to be built relatively cheaply, avoiding the need for huge mortgages. They are also designed so that they could be built by communities using the meitheal system of shared and bartered labour; community building is employed as a social and economic strategy. The population density would be in the region of 400 people per kilometer of shoreline, so it’s an intensive rather than exclusive use of land.

There are many interesting challenges to hegemonic strategies in this proposal. First of all, Stevens is thinking outside the model of Roads Culture that has come to dominate Ireland over the last 15 years. Since the Roman Empire roads have been a primary means of broadcasting colonial power; In Ireland today new roads are one of the primary means by , which ‘mortgage culture’ is broadcast. Mortgage culture is an extremely efficient means of population control; people with very high mortgages to pay can easily be frightened into voting for things that favour ‘economic growth’ if they vote at all; they are less likely to have time or energy to protest about social issues. In addition, the values of the Oil Paradigm that I described earlier are achieved through a progressive de-localising of the economy and the culture, so people no longer cultivate food or eat local produce, fewer people work locally, the majority of people don't shop locally and so on and it becomes very self-perpetuating so that people come to depend increasingly upon roads and the kinds of economics that go along with them. Fluid City addresses many of these issues.

Returning to a discussion of space for the moment, the internet has given us cause to reconsider where we locate and how we understand public space, but in a way that is very compatible with a metropolitan discourse. The Potato Perspective, a work presented on the web by Danish artist Asa Sonjasdotter, engages another kind of space which could be said to lie beyond the dominant cultural discourse.

The artist embarked on the project after spending time at the Navdanya centre, an organisation in Northern India that resists corporate control and exploitation of seed stock, by collecting, developing and sharing local varieties of rice, wheat and beans. On return to Denmark the artist wanted to transfer the experience to the Scandinavian cultural and environmental context and somewhat innocently selected the potato as a comparable staple within the Scandinavian diet. She collected some old species of potato and began to cultivate those, but in the process encountered the complex world of European Seed Law.

When countries join the European Union, they must produce a National Varieties List; commercial producers then have an opportunity to register a variety for legal distribution, for which they pay a substantial annual fee. They can also apply for a Plant Breeders Rights or PBR certificate if they can show some minor modification to the variety, for which they can then claim royalties. Unregistered varieties cannot be grown commercially and where a registered PBR certificate holder ceases to maintain a variety it can lead to that variety being de-listed which then renders it illegal.

As such, within the context of the European Union the potato becomes a kind of public site where the intricate relationship between food regulation and privatisation is made apparent. This is much more than an agricultural issue; when regulatory powers enter into alliance with commercial interests it inevitably impacts on questions of autonomy and freedom. The appropriation of seed-stock and the like for private, economic gain is a matter of common political and cultural import.

The corporatisation of food production is undoubtedly a primary outcome and probably one of the primary motivations of agricultural regulation; I don’t think there is anyone who would contest that the WTO and GATT represent the interests of big business over small, indigenous farmers. The impact of this has also been felt in Ireland which has seen the systematic ending of farming and food production; in that process the nature of rural space has shifted from the concrete to the abstract, from a site of production to a site of consumption, from a place of self-sufficiency to a place of amenity provision.

In my own practice I am often trying to discern the ways in which rural space is ordered and controlled and to locate occluded or counter-hegemonic practices and thinking. The character of non-metropolitan space is quite different to that of urban space –topographically space tends to be more apparently open and horizontal but subject to an invisible architecture of regulation governing land-use; rural audiences or publics are more dispersed but often less transitory so encounters tend to be quite different; temporality is not linear and progressive as I described earlier but tends to include the past in a more real and concrete way; engagement with nature is integral to the social, economic and cultural matrix and then of course there are areas which are neither urban nor rural.

Silvermines: Becoming Utopia is a work in progress; it is the second stage of a project that I undertook last year as visual artist-in-residence for North Tipperary. I deliberately adopted an aesthetic framework borrowed from the Situationist International and called the first stage of the project Imagining Silvermines; a psychogeography. Drawing on situationist practices I made a decision to work with whatever was presented to me; I also wanted a clear and definite aesthetic framework for the project to avoid becoming overly identified with the language of social engagement, which is vulnerable to instrumentalisation as the management of public art practice in Ireland and in the UK in increasingly institutionalised and placed in the service of state interests.

Silvermines is an area of ecological disaster; seven centuries of mining have left the watercourses and the land impregnated with heavy metals. It is also a beautiful place with an incredibly interesting and complex history. Using the Space Shuttle I entered into an agreed exchange with the people of the village; I provided a space and a display service arranging whatever material people brought to form the ‘collection’ of a temporary museum, in response to a passion for local history that I encountered all over Tipperary but particularly in Silvermines. In return they afforded me an opportunity to enquire into the narrative constructions and practices that were used by different groupings within that community to make sense of their place, including nostalgia, racing and burning out cars, graffiti, farming practices, a kind of epic poem tradition peculiar to the area, and also an unpicking of the construction of local history.

In response to that first encounter stage and with the intention of extending the notion of psychogeography that informed it I am developing a publication for distribution back into the community that befriended me and vice versa; the intention is to reflect the ‘tactics’ employed by different groups of people to make sense of this place. The publication is also an attempt to place the project in critical relation to itself, to subvert conventions of ‘reading’ and include the participant-reader in the act of meaning making. To that end the publication will include a number of movable elements and sections, a number of board games designed around the realities of the place, a fictional ‘I’ve Been to Silvermines’ tourist merchandising line based on the legacy of mining for a much-desired but presently absent tourist industry, and a selection of material and maps gathered or generated through the project that may be real or fictional. The completion of the project is currently funding-dependant.

With all of the references that I have made to margins and the marginal, it’s probably appropriate to conclude with a work that considers a form of space which is literally marginal and beyond the mainstream. BorderXing is a work by the artist Heath Bunting that has been carried out on and off over a number of years. He makes unauthorised crossings of borders between European countries in various locations, including forests, rivers, mountains and tunnels; he painstakingly documents the routes and makes a detailed record of all his movements. These are available in the BorderXing Guide which is only available by making a direct application to the artist.

Since the 1980’s border art has developed as a genre that addresses international power relations, recognising that borders are not lines but symbolically charged zones of relation. I read Bunting’s work as an attempt to re-subjectivise these spaces in response to the way that liberty is increasingly sacrificed in favour of security. It’s also a Situationist project par excellence! The slide show from the project can be viewed by clicking here.

To conclude, the point is not to place the urban in opposition to the rural or the metropolitan to the non-metropolitan. There is much to be resisted in the face of “. . . a system of power so deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure”.[1]

In order to locate the cracks and vacancies where such resistances might be practiced, all existing discourses including the metropolitan and the non-metropolitan need to be deconstructed for signs of hegemony. In urging a re-examination of that which lies beyond the dominant metropolitan discourse I do not advocate a ‘return’, to the past, to purity, to the formerly glorious or to anything else; what I urge is a ‘stepping outside of’ so that new forms, new hybrids, new discourses can be elaborated.

Text based on a talk given by Fiona Woods at PS2, Belfast, June 2nd 2008 on the occasion of the launch of URBAN/ACT a publication conceived by Constatin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, and Nolwenn Marchand.

[1] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire Harvard University Press, 2000 pp 210 - 211

To live as if we were free

2008-06-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

“Collaboration is the answer, but what is the question?”[1]

Thomas Moore’s ‘Utopia’ of 1516 was an ironic play on the Greek Eu-topia (happy-place) in contrast to the no-place of Ou-topia. In spite of the irony, utopianism has come to be associated with the search for a state of social (or other) perfection.

In Five Faces of Modernity Matei Calinescu described the emergence of utopianism as “perhaps the single most important event in the modern intellectual history of the West”[2] because of its obsession with the idea and myth of Revolution. Closely linked with heresy, it arises from a radical impatience with the imperfection of the world as it is.

No longer associated with the spatial, utopia has acquired a more layered, temporal significance; its ‘no place’ is now an other place (properly translated as heterotopia) or other time; a ‘now’ derived from an alternative course of history, or an “aesthetic anticipation of the future”[3], which places utopian imagination at the heart of the historical avant-garde project.

The possible ‘achievement’ of utopia, however, represents an irresolvable contradiction, what Ernst Bloch called "the melancholy of fulfilment"[4]. Utopia, once realised, would be subject to infinite repetition. This would pose an end-point of history and the negation of the future, a secular eternity without change - "the boredom of Utopia”[5].

Utopia could only ever manifest then as anti-utopia, its intended perfection twisted and distorted by its own inherent contradiction. This mirrors a fundamental paradox at the heart of art practices that seek to align themselves with radical, social change; if, as Joseph Beuys said, everyone is an artist then who will clean the toilets?

There can be artists only as long as there are non-artists. Liberation and equality for all can only be achieved if privilege is surrendered by those who have it. While privilege is largely measured according to surplus wealth, educational and/or cultural surplus can substitute for spending power. What Walter Benjamin calls the ‘counterfeit wealth of creative personality’[6] represents a surplus that is the basis of artistic privilege - anyone who claims to be an artist (or, by extension, who claims a role in the philosophy and critique of art) is dependent on the existence of others whose lack of surplus prevents them from claiming creative autonomy themselves.

In The Author as Producer Benjamin argues that all poets (and artists by extension) place themselves in the service of class interests, whether or not they acknowledge it. Is it possible for people to claim the privilege of art and credibly advocate dissent or practice any real form of cultural resistance, if the logical outcome of such dissent is not the end of privilege itself?

In our society, class seems less relevant now than a global scale of privilege that is represented as the natural order of things. In this order, the underprivileged, whose lack of advantage is apparent to everyone, are characterised in some way as deficient and therefore responsible for their own situation. The over-privileged are symbolised, but at the same time concealed, by the running narrative of excess that we know as the cult of celebrity.

In this order art is both a condition and a product of privilege. Some artists have tried to subvert this order by submerging the privilege of their artistic identity via a relational aesthetic, jettisoning questions of aesthetic value in favour of the ethics of socially engaged practice. This approach has every intention of making an anti-hierarchical and therefore political statement, rejecting market values of art and refusing to participate in Biennale Culture. It operates on the principle of consensus with its chosen participants.

Consensus, however, may not necessarily be a good thing. For Jacques Rancière consensus is a means by which the possibility of confronting the established framework of perception, thought and action with the ‘inadmissible’ (a process that he calls dissensus) is prevented, and with it, the conditions for the emergence of practices of emancipation.

Those who have no part in the established order need to create a locus of dispute to acquire the status of political subjects; through their actions they can reconfigure the aesthetic coordinates of the dominant order.[7] Collaborative art practices that maintain but do not foreground the artist’s position of privilege disguise the fundamental inequality at the root of art’s making and reception; equally, practices that aim to create a locus of ethical and harmonious relations may conceal that which must be repressed to sustain the semblance of harmony. Such practices are vulnerable to instrumentalisation by the forces of hegemony because they enact scenarios of community rather than generating it.

Intended aesthetico-political gestures may obscure the process by which politics (in Rancière’s terms) can emerge. As the horizon has shifted beyond the political to the corporate, the question of whether gestures of artistic resistance and dissent are ‘politically’ empty – futile at best – seems pressing. Hardt and Negri describe as Empire a regime of global relations based on the accelerating flows of capital, a non-place which yet has no outside from which an alternative might be constructed. Empire represents;

“. . . a system of power so deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure”[8]

As a result, they argue, the ‘natural impulse’ to resist and dissent, “to be against. . . . .must be against in every place.” [9] Resistance must occupy the cracks and vacancies in the edifice of the State, creating ‘alterotopias’ to quote the architect and activist Constantin Petcou.[10] Art has long seen itself as the generator of such alternative places, a temporary autonomous zone as described by Hakim Bey[11] where the ‘natural impulse’ to resist finds unfettered expression, forming the basis of art’s supposed political agency.

This is a pivotal point. The political crisis that faces us is a crisis of freedom. The credibility of representative politics has more or less completely collapsed and it is not clear to what extent general political agency exists, in art or anywhere else. Power, as Guy Debord described in The Society of the Spectacle, shrouds itself; it generates an “uninterrupted discourse about itself”[12] which he calls the spectacle, also to be understood as a social relation among people that is mediated by images.

This may account, to some extent, for the resurgence of interest in the politics of aesthetics and the question of aesthetic autonomy which had been largely discredited during and after Modernism. The spectacle is very similar to what Rancière terms the aesthetic coordinates of the dominant order, by means of which the distribution of the sensible is orchestrated. In a desperate search for political agency, the enclave suggested by a “Republic of Art” presents an attractive option, from which attempts to expose the spectacle may prove politically effective on a small scale. If power has aesthetic coordinates then who better to locate those than the artists?

Plato’s ‘Politeia’ is translated as The Republic, although the word ‘republic’ originates from the Latin term res publica, meaning "public thing" or "public matter". Politeia has a more complex, layered meaning; in general it refers to the political organization of a group, but is also described as rule by the many, neither wealthy nor poor ('freemen'), in the interests of the whole community (not just 'freemen'). The principles of governance in Ancient Greece operated on the basis of this split in society, between those who were free to devote their time to questions of rule and politics, and those who were absolutely enslaved. Some were able to experience total freedom because others were totally enslaved.

Slavery is characterised by some or all of the following; people forced to work through mental or physical threat or through the ‘bond’ of an unpayable debt; people owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse; people who are dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property'; people who are physically constrained or have restrictions placed on their freedom of movement.

An estimated 27 million men, women and children in the world are enslaved today; this slavery is fundamental to the operations of global capital or Empire. It is a world-wide phenomenon, always carried out under the guise of other names and practices. For instance, the H2B program, created to allow thousands of ‘guest-workers’ to work for US companies after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, is creating slave-like conditions across the Gulf Coast. Daniel Castellanos, organizer with the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity has said;

"I am a guest-worker and I know the realities of the H2B visa. We are brought here on false promises. Our members report being sold, being kidnapped, being told they are owned. Meanwhile survivors of Katrina and Rita are still shut out of work two years later. The federal government is allowing this. They’ve traded the old slaves for new slaves".[13]

The work of Santiago Sierra grapples with questions of liberty and enslavement, and does so relative to the privileged realm of art. Rather than collapsing the distance between the artist and those with whom he engages, he exaggerates that distance, placing himself in a position of power. His more sensational works overtly exploit non-privileged people paying them ‘as little as possible’[14] to carry out demanding yet meaningless tasks, or to allow themselves to be subjected to a kind of physical branding (tattoos, hair colouring or shaving).

Although Sierra’s work is identified with the forms described by Bouriaud in Relational Aesthetics, many of his works can be understood as drawing on the institutional critique of Minimalism (Removal of a Museum’s Glass Windows (Belgium 2004); Illumination of the Space between Two Planes (Contemporary Art Center of Malaga, 2006); House in Mud (Germany, 2005); Wall Enclosing a Space (Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennial, 2004)). This is a 21st C critique that understands the institution of art as reticulated within the capitalist network of relations, so that even works such as 9 forms of 100 X 100 X 600 cm each constructed to be supported perpendicular to a wall ( Deitch Projects, New York, 2002), in which oblong forms in a gallery are supported by people paid to do so, makes visible the concealed, menial labour upon which the institution of art, along with other manifestations of privilege, depend, but which has been pushed to the margins (in Western cultural terms) by the logic of late capitalism.

Sierra’s work generates unease amongst the liberal, art-going, middle-classes, familiar with a previous social critique that required them to reflect upon conditions of inequality. This, argue Pil and Galia Kollectiv is because his work exceeds representation;

". . . his work functions directly by setting him up as a free man in the Greek sense, his freedom contingent on the lack of freedom in those he is subjecting to work. Instead of illustrating conditions of work, he could be said to be illustrating those of . . total liberty . . . . . demonstrating that it is not enough to negate one’s own will, but that true creative freedom requires the subjugation of the wills of others. As viewers, we do not experience a gap between the work we are seeing and that which has been hidden away, the real work that has disappeared from our cultural landscape. What we experience is the artist’s liberation: we are citizens like him, free to talk about freedom. The workers themselves become commodities, fetishised stand-ins for the spectre of manual labour."[15]

Slavery is one aspect of global working conditions; the precarization of labour is another. Artistic work has changed as well, from “manufacture to ‘experience’ economies”.[16] Sierra positions his work so that it is both a product and a generator of these conditions, rather than a model of alternatives. This makes it difficult, and beside the point, to assess his work on ethical grounds. For Sierra, art is "a narrow margin through which one can convey blame."[17]

Some of us experience relative degrees of freedom because others experience relative degrees of enslavement. As long as our freedom depends on the non-freedom of others, then what we experience as freedom is contingent – as long as there are slaves in the world none of us is free.

“Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfill its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy.”[18]

There is no way to know if ‘resistance’ through art is actually or only nominally resistant; WJT Mitchell has asserted that ultimately the avant-garde represented nothing more than the research and development arm of the culture industry.[19]

“The aesthetic is, according to Rancière, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, characterized precisely by that tension between faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come.”[20]

The promise of a better world to come. For the time being, art may have to continue to function as an ironic Utopia, an imaginary outside, a no-place where those of us with access to the privilege continue to ‘live as if we were free’[21]

Fiona Woods
May 2008

[1] Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dialogues, Volume I
[2] Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University Press, Durham 1987 pp 63
[3] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, transl. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum 2004 pp. 22
[4] Ernst Bloch The Spirit of Utopia 1918
[5] Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity op cit. pp. 92
[6] Walter Benjamin, 1934 The Author as Producer, reproduced in Cutural Resistance Reader ed. Stephen Duncombe Verso 2002 pp 68 - 81
[7] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, op. cit pp. 24
[8] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire op. cit. pp 210 - 211
[9] Ibid. pp 211
[10] Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu ‘Acting Space’, URBAN/ACT published under Creative Commons by aaa, Paris, 2008
[11] Hakim Bey TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, New York, Autonomedia, 1985, pp. 97 – 102
[12] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle,
[13] http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2007/08/modern-day-slavery-on-gulf-coast.asp
[14] Santiago Sierra, quoted in Martin Herbert, ‘Material Witness’ Artforum, September 2004
[15] Pil and Galia Kollectiv, ‘The Spectre of Manual Labour’, http://www.kollectiv.co.uk/
[16] Ibid.
[17] Santiago Sierra, quoted in Martin Herbert, ‘Material Witness’ op. cit

[18] Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, Emplotments of Autonomy and Heternonomy
[19] WJT Mitchell, Art in the Public Sphere
[20] Bishop, Claire, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents 2005
[21] Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), from Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York : Harcourt Brace Hovanovich, 1978

To reveal the nature of angels

2008-06-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

(Script for a monologue/dialogue for one/two characters, a mule and a ventriloquist's dummy)
Watch the film by clicking here
________________________________________________

What is this place?

It’s a grey area.

The void of the situation.

It can’t be a void.

Why not?

We are here. There isn’t anything in a void, by definition.

Virtual particles exist in a vacuum

What?

Never mind. (pause) How can you be sure that we really are here?

I have sensations, I experience affects.

They could be part of the illusion.

If I experience it as real, then who is to say that I am having an illusion?

Suit yourself. I’m just making conversation. (Long pause).

I thought we had some kind of task, something to consider.

Yes.

So, what is it?

"It is our task to consider the limits of the self, the boundary between self and Other."

Why would we do that?

Maybe we have some anxieties about our condition.

I don’t.

I think you should.

Why should I?

You’re not even fully animal or human. (pause) What are you anyway, some kind of horse?

I’m a mule.

A mule, oh. And that doesn’t make you anxious?

You’re just a thing.

I don’t go for that hierarchy of being over non-being. We are all things at some level.

I’m not a thing!

(pause). What about your bones, what is a bone if not a thing?

That’s ridiculous; you can’t just extract one aspect from an entire matrix of being and label it ‘a thing’.

Your bones are the only part of you that endure; long after you are gone your bones will remain as things. So if they are not things now, at what point do they become things?

Bones may ultimately be “things”, but while they are part of a living organism they are animate, they reproduce aspects of themselves so that makes them more than mere things.

Reproduction is just one mode of generation.

Name another.

Crystallisation, wave-forms, coagulation of forces, solitons, magnetism.

Those are not living processes.

You take such a life-centric view.

I favour the obscurity of things.

That subject/object mode blinds you to the vitality of the material world.

What would you know of vitality . . . you are not even a natural thing, you are just an artifact.

I am an assemblage of organic and inorganic matter-energy in various modes, just as you are.

What about consciousness; it’s not possible to reduce consciousness to matter.

I think that’s a bit of a fetish. Consciousness is just one form of vital energy; it isn’t so rarefied as you being-types like to think. The line between animate and inanimate is permeable not fixed.

Isn’t that just a notion? Doesn’t experience tell you otherwise?

Experience is whatever has been filtered through your limited sensory apparatus.

I also have animal instincts. What do you have?

I have an affinity with nonbeing; I understand what it is to shift or vibrate between different states of being.

(Long pause). How long do you think that we will be here?

I think we are beyond time.

That’s just because you don’t have a pulse.

What is it that you have against things?

Beings are beings and things are things; assemblage is a false notion.

You favour segregation then?

I don’t think hybridity is the way to go – it’s not natural.

That seems strange coming from you . . . . . . What do you mean by natural?

I mean that which has evolved organically.

What about fundamental forces?

What about them?

You can’t deny that they exist; there is no nature without the action of forces.

Isn’t this just a kind of chicken and egg thing?

The organic and the inorganic are part of a continuum, it’s undeniable. (long pause).

Can we talk about something else.

(Pause) What shall we talk about?

Are we agents or just patients?

What?

Do we have any agency? Do we produce any effects of our own?

You want autonomy now?

I want to know that I am free to produce my own effects.

Technically, I am just an index of someone else’s agency.

If we don’t produce effects of our own then we are just part of a mechanistic universe.

I don’t see how you can really know if you produce effects.

(pause) Am I really talking to you?

(pause) I think you are just talking to yourself.

Hybrid (notes towards an essay)

2008-06-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

The essay, says Adorno, is itself a hybrid form.[i] According to Vincent Casaregola the development of printing in sixteenth century Europe altered the consciousness of Western European culture, generating new forms of discourse, oral and written, often evolving from or combining earlier forms as a new “textual consciousness” emerged. This reflected a much earlier change, when, as he says;

“ . . . . .the noetics of traditional oral culture and the new patterns of literacy interacted and gradually achieved a balance that was reflected in the dialogue form. The dialogue was an expression of the interiorized balance between orality and literacy that came into existence in chirographic cultures.”[ii]

The dialogue, as a form, existed as a result of the interaction between textuality and orality in the ancient world, balanced between the “systematic realm of the written word and the behavioural realm of speech.”[iii] This hybridity gave to dialogue a capacity to represent compositional connections between both speech and writing. “It can represent the texts and an evolving and unfinished process, a blending of action and suspended action, of movement and stasis.”[iv]

Dialogue, through the literal conversation of its participants, foregrounds a polyphonic discourse. With the advent of print culture, the balance between orality and literacy was relocated; print culture fostered an introspective discourse. The dialogue no longer expressed this balance and was gradually superseded by the development of a new form of expression, the essay, which constructed itself from the internal dialogue of the essayist. In spite of its apparent interiority, Casaregola argues that the essay, like the dialogue, reflects a high degree of oral residue; its presentation of mental processes with their “unfinalized and multi-voice qualities“[v] marks the essay as a new hybrid form of discourse which is dialogic and thus the central inheritor of the dialogue tradition (the novel retaining a primarily narrative form).

According to Bakhtin, it is the utterance rather than the sentence that is the basic unit of language,[vi] making of language an event rather than a series of signs, something dynamic that happens within a context of interactive personalities and processes. A third revolution in the relationship of orality and literacy (following the invention of writing and the invention of printing) derives from the invention of broadcast media, and a fourth, the arrival of the internet. The impact of these new media on forms such as dialogue or essay is both hugely significant and beyond the scope of this essay. What is clear is that the transmission of discourse is now both more and less obviously mediated. Bakhtin’s dialogism suggests that there are no neutral channels of communication, that all ‘transmissions’ – from everyday speech to scripted, televised oration- are subject to interference or feedback of one kind or another which alters both the nature of the communication and that which is being communicated.

This corresponds in one way to Adorno’s idea that things never fully go into our concepts of them; they leave a residue, what he called ‘nonidentity’. A task of nonidentity thinking would be to expose the inadequacy of concepts, to render visible the nonidentity dispersed around them. Both ideas – interference in the channels of communication and nonidentity - introduce into the traditional subject/object divide a third position, a field. This is not a spatial register through which things move, but an active constituent of all exchanges, all communications, all processes, all ‘assemblages’ in the Deleuzian sense of that term.

My emphasis thus far on the essay/dialogue as hybrids of the “systematic realm of the written word and the behavioural realm of speech”[vii] corresponds to my own experience as an artist engaging with concepts that are articulated both through language (thought-forms) and through other modes that exceed the perceptual frames established by language (art-forms in my case). A reconfiguration of the forms through which thought can be articulated impacts upon the nature of thought itself, as outlined relative to the shift from dialogue to essay.

Hardt and Negri argue that Empire[viii], the quintessential colonial power, has no outside and that to resist must be to resist in every place rather than pinning utopian hopes on enclaves of autonomy. In so far as the self is culturally and socially produced, and society inhabits the individual, even the possibility of an inner enclave of autonomy seems like a hopeless ideal. However, if it is possible to take control of the means of production of one’s own thought then it might be possible to generate resistance outside of the terms of that which is being resisted.

The alterior discourse of the subaltern lies outside of, or beyond, the institutionalized discourse of a dominant power. It is marginal and discontinuous, which is both a cause and an effect of the denial of its legitimacy by hegemonic forces. Marginality and discontinuity can, of course, be politically opportune. The hybrid, of its nature, is marginal or liminal because it operates across boundaries; in nature, hybrids are discontinuous because they do not generally reproduce. In choosing to focus on this area, I am stating that my interest lies beyond simple dualities but also beyond a specifically human ontology. The separation between human and non-human, between people and things, between people and animals, between culture and nature is a thought-form composed partly of what Jane Bennett calls “the mediating screens of subjectivity, cultural formations and perceptual biases”.[ix] In the notion of a third position (albeit the non-position of a field) I see a potential site of resistance.

As far as we can tell, the human self exists. Awareness of the self as a distinct and separate object amongst other objects seems to be psychologically established by the age of two. Phenomenologically speaking, the self is seen to move in an external environment amongst other selves, human and non-human, and amongst objects that are not selves. While there is almost certainly an external environment that is constituted without reference to any self, what the human self experiences as its environment is based not only on percepts, but also on culturally constituted modes of apprehending which may vary considerably from culture to culture and through time.

For example, it was only in the seventeenth century that the concept of the world as ‘animate’ was superseded by a mechanistic understanding of the world as subject to the ‘laws of Nature’. Thirteenth century Paris was a renowned centre of learning in which rational theologians sought to bridge an unbridgeable gap and inquire into the non-human mind of angels (anthropomorphism is a fundamental sin, so they were always treading a very fine line).

Such binary oppositions as subject/object, real/imaginary, animate/inanimate are merely axes along which the experience of an entity relative to an environment can be positioned; such positions are not fixed but shift as cultural norms change and the collective and psychological ‘self’ adjusts to those changes. Even the linear metaphor of ‘an axis’ is misrepresentative of the field of choices that are available to human consciousness, although, as Jane Bennett has indicated, most choices within that field are occluded by culturally predetermined ‘screens’.

For reasons of psycho-social functioning the self is required to adjust to cultural norms, involving a denial of much within the experiential field. To refuse cultural norms has implications regarding social status, which impacts on the psychological orientation of the self.

This essay represents a first step towards the testing of an idea that while there may be no ‘outside’, there may yet be ways of constituting alterior behavioral environments which can deflect the normative functions of hegemonic, cultural strategies. Heidegger used the concept of Clearing to describe a place or means by which a thing or idea might be ‘unconcealed’; artworks, as he outlined in ‘The Origin of the work of Art’, can act as a kind of Clearing. Hybridity, adopted deliberately as a position of possible resistance, includes an opening up to that which is denied within the experiential field; an extended engagement with that field, which is also a kind of formlessness.

[The Ebola virus enters into a subject, breaks down the distinctions between the subject and itself, and finally produces something which is pure hybrid, just before the virus/subject assemblage dies. What useful purpose could such a model possibly serve? ]

[i] Theodor Adorno ‘The Essay as Form’
[ii] Vincent Casaregola 'Orality, Literacy, and Dialogue: Looking for
the Origins of the Essay' from Dennis L Weeks and Jane Hoogestrat, eds. Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong Associated University Presses 1998 62 - 92
[iii] ibid
[iv] ibid
[v] ibid
[vi] Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Essays, 61 – 102
[vii] Vincent Casaregola, op. cit.
[viii] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,
[ix] Jane Bennett, 'The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter' Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3, 347-372 (2004) SAGE Publications

Regarding the inadmissible; reflections on art, commodity and politics

2008-05-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

In the 1990’s a bounded cultural quarter was manufactured at Temple Bar in Dublin, incorporating maximum opportunities for monetary transactions. Standing inside Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, its shop-front window frames the congealed cultural value of the resulting aesthetic economy, full of retail outlets selling non-essential items – no butchers or pharmacies here. The same shop-front window functions as a kind of proscenium arch, staging the consumption of a cultural experience that is part of the gallery’s own aesthetic economy.

Today the gallery walls are densely lined with uniform canvases, four hundred and eighty A4 panels in grid formation. Each panel presents a single object – a bank statement, a board game, a playing card, a piece of sandpaper, a brochure, a glossy label – the flotsam and jetsam of consumer capitalism. The objects appear to be represented in a post-consumer phase, fragmented and marked by use in some cases, rendered obsolete or redundant by their removal from the circulation that normally animates commodities and associated detritus.

A first impression of the images reveals little about the process of their making; the accompanying literature says that these are oil paintings, the medium beloved of Venetian Renaissance painters for its capacity to render convincing illusions of materials and their textures. Each object has undergone a rigorous scrutiny by the artist, the seductive intensity of his gaze drawing you into the work.

The title of the exhibition is The Capital Paintings. Commodities, capital - this can only mean Marx. And so the story goes: once upon a time, the artist Colin Darke transcribed all three volumes of Marx’s seminal work Capital in miniscule handwriting onto a collection of objects – four hundred and eighty in total – each of which was then laminated between A4 sheets of plastic and hung together in a gallery. The work, also titled Capital, took the artist three years to complete.

What is represented in The Capital Paintings is the very same collection of objects as they looked before being inscribed with the text of Capital. These are not really paintings, we are told, but a single conceptual work that could only manifest as paintings, authored by an individual hand. The intensity of the artist’s engagement with each object introduces a fetishistic aspect whilst symbolically erasing his previous labour on the work Capital. This projection back in time arrives at a moment in the life of each object before it was reprocessed via the aesthetics of decontextualisation, and diverted into a new ‘regime of value’[1] as an element within an artwork, in which its existence as a product or commodity was revived, intensified and enhanced.

Commodities are not objects, but objects in motion. In The Capital Paintings the original objects are literally re-presented as though in stasis, their acute stillness calling attention to previous and future trajectories of motion, accentuating by inversion the velocities of exchange to which such products, first as mundane commodities and later as elements of a luxury commodity in the form of an artwork, might be subject.

In many ways, this stillness is similar to the experience of standing in a quiet, open space on a windless, sunny day; you have a momentary illusion of stillness, though the planet is actually hurtling through space at enormous speed, not to mention revolving at the rate of 500 miles an hour. So it is with The Capital Paintings; despite appearances, this art object is moving through the commodity context of the art world, set in motion by the artist himself.

Much is made of the artist’s labour in both of these works, through the symbolic erasure of labour between the first work and the second, and also through the mythology that has been constructed around both. In the panel discussion attendant upon this exhibition, which hosted a range of speakers including the artist himself, a suggestion was repeatedly made that the extreme tedium and frustration experienced by the artist over the four-year period that it took to make The Capital Paintings represented a kind of alienation for the artist from his labour. This is patent nonsense; the artist was at all times in control of his own situation, and was never alienated from the products of his labour which he was free to introduce into the sphere of commodity exchange or not.

The question that arises, that must arise in front of the work is what relationship it has to the process of commodity exchange – whether it is offering a critique of that exchange by foregrounding the process of commodification itself or simply participating in it, wearing a mantle of politics.

The overt, sincere-yet-ironic reference to Marxist thought in Capital and its invocation in The Capital Paintings implies the artist’s rejection or at least questioning of the sphere of commodity exchange within which the bulk of contemporary art practice and its reception is situated. The work itself, however, appears to be a ‘commodity by destination’. The entire collection of paintings is for sale as a single unit; the scale and asking price indicate that the intended purchaser is probably a cultural institution.

Not that there is anything wrong with this; artists have to sell their work and must also seek social distinction in order to increase the commodity potential of that work. Such social distinction is generally produced through discursive practices including reviews, panel discussions, articles, interviews as well as inclusion in institutional or corporate collections. Whether they like it or not, artists are producers of both cultural artifacts and commodities. Ever since Marcel Duchamp placed the urinal in the gallery, artists have been attempting to get around this, biting the hand that feeds them as much as possible, whilst retaining the privilege derived from the cultural surplus of being an artist.

The situation of The Capital Paintings in relation to the art market reflects very accurately on the situation of all contemporary artists who wish to critique or even dissent from the capitalist system of production and exchange, particularly as it pertains to art - it is practically impossible to operate outside of that system as it has no real outside. Artists are forced to adopt the strategy of trying to have it both ways.

It is problematic when this strategy is dressed in the garb of politics without really being political in any way. All artworks that deal with commodity reference Marx whether overtly, deliberately or otherwise. It doesn’t follow that they are successful critically or as political gestures, and I would contend that this is true of The Capital Paintings.

At its most basic, politics refers to “relations, assumptions and contests pertaining to power.”[2] A more dynamic and, in relation to contemporary art making and art criticism, potentially more useful account of politics is suggested in the work of Jacques Rancière. Politics, for Rancière, is an anarchic process of emancipation that only exists in intermittent acts by those who have no part in the established order. These intermittent acts create a locus of dispute, where this ‘part with no part’ confronts the established framework of perception, thought and action (what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’) with the ‘inadmissible’, an antagonistic process that he refers to as dissensus.[3]

The public sphere, for Rancière, is depoliticized; art that bases itself on consensus, like much of the regeneration-initiated public art and some of the relational aesthetic practices, actually mask an absence of politics proper, which can only emerge through antagonism. While Rancière places aesthetics at the core of politics, because of the role it plays in determining what can be seen, said and thought, that does not mean that all art is political in the antagonistic sense; it either operates within the aesthetic coordinates of the established order or confronts that order with the inadmissible, effecting a re-distribution of the sensible.

An artwork that addresses the issue of art and commodity in a way that succeeds in being political in Rancière’s terms, I propose, is Damian Hirst’s For the Love of God. While its equation of the fetishism of art and commodity may seem about as subtle as a brick, there is a transgression in the work that foregrounds something inadmissible.
The work was made, could only be made, for a specific register of commodity exchange involving fabulous wealth; the cost of its making is emphasised in every associated piece of publicity or press, usually as the headline. “The price tag is the art" commented art critic Nick Cohen scathingly, but I contend that the intensely public spectacle of exchange value set up by Hirst is intentional and complex, rather than just sensational.

The past and future trajectories of the objects/materials involved in the work and the politics of their motion (using politics in a general sense) show the work to be more layered than its glittering surface suggests. The original commodity exchange that underpins this work is already loaded with political meaning. The skull, from which the platinum cast was made, was that of a European male, aged around 35 who died sometime in the 19th C; it was bought by the artist in Mexico. Our conception of commodity exchange assumes a polarity between persons and things, although this differentiation is accurate neither in historical nor contemporary terms, given what we know of slavery and bonded labour. Including the original teeth from the skull brings this primary exchange, with its negation of those conceptual poles, directly into the final work.

The “8,601 VVS to flawless pavé-set diamonds, weighing a total of 1,106.18 carats”[4] were sourced ethically in line with UN resolutions, according to the gallery and to the jewelers Bentley & Skinner, who set the diamonds in the ‘biggest single undertaking by a jeweler since the Crown jewels'. Just what is signified by the word ethical here is really in question; the diamond trade is the epitome of the capitalist mode of production, with workers at one end literally descending into the hell of production for the purpose of producing objects that have no real use value but function as the perfect commodity (endlessly exchangeable with ever-increasing value). Platinum, though more useful, is not dissimilar from diamonds in this respect.

These levels of meaning are accessible to anyone used to reading art objects – they reference politics in many ways without necessarily being political in Rancière’s terms. Hirst’s political achievement lies in the actual, as opposed to ironic, collapsing of rigidly maintained distinctions - between aesthetic and kitsch, between art and commerce, between meaning and appearance, between value and price. This collapse constitutes a kind of unmasking that brings a number of inadmissible things to the fore, not least the extent to which art and greed rely equally on a scale of privilege which makes of other human beings mere base materials.

Hirst is an unlikely candidate to make a political artwork. His dumbed-down, tabloid style statements are almost certainly performative, but his embrace of the logic of capitalism and media-driven spectacle of BritArt does not appear to be critical. However, Hardt and Negri have argued that the logic of Empire (a word they use to describe the global regime of capitalism) dictates that the only form of real resistance is to push that logic to and beyond its limits.[5] In that respect, I contend, Hirst’s transgression is radical and politically sophisticated.

A comparison of artworks as diverse as The Capital Paintings and For the Love of God would be a useless and invalid exercise and it has not been my intention to do that. Rather, this is an attempt to consider the various relationships of art to politics, to reflect on what politics might mean in terms of art practice now, and to wonder how dissent can be practiced in the absence of any real sites of cultural resistance.

Fiona Woods
Feb 2008

[1] Arjun Appadurai Introduction: commodities and the politics of value from The Social Life of Things ed. Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge University Press, 1986 pp 4
[2] Arjun Appadurai Introduction: commodities and the politics of value op. cit. pp 57
[3] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, transl. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum 2004 pp. 22
[4] Press Release Damian Hirst: Beyond Belief White Cube Gallery, June 2007
[5] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire Harvard University Press, 2000

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun ed. The Social Life of Things Cambridge University Press, 1986
Rancière, Jacques The Politics of Aesthetics, transl. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum 2004o Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio Empire Harvard University Press, 2000
Press Release Damian Hirst: Beyond Belief White Cube Gallery, June 2007[referenced on www.whitecube.com February 2008]
Press Release Colin Darke: The Capital Paintings Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Jan 2008

Curator/artist

2008-04-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

Transcript of a talk given at "The role of the curator in the artist's career",

VAI event, Galway April 3rd 2009

In trying to prepare this presentation I had a lot of discarded beginnings which I put down to a certain ambivalence I feel about the role of the curator in these times that we live in. I thought I would start with this work by Turkish artist Halil Altindere from 2001.

It is not, I think, the rejection of the curator that it might at first seem, but a more complex expression of co-dependence and of an artist’s need to get the curator’s attention in order to progress their career. Halil Altindere is included in the 2005 list of interesting, emerging artists on PILOT, the self-described ‘International archive for artists and curators’ and this image is positioned at the top of a column of possible images to view. I don’t think that is an accident – I think this work continues to resonate because it captures a productive tension that exists between the artist and the curator.

I myself am a visual artist who has had work ‘curated’; I have also occupied a curatorial role relative to the work of other artists. About 3 years ago I began to describe myself as an artist and curator, but about two years ago I stopped doing that and switched to saying ‘a visual artist whose practice includes curating’. I did that because I realised that I needed to distinguish between the practice of curating in its contemporary form, which I see as an important tool for artists in reworking the contextualisation and presentation of art, and the increasingly privileged cultural status of individuals who carry the title of curator.

This discussion is about the ways in which curators can assist the development of an artist’s practice and career, and my invitation to speak here includes describing artist development aspects of projects in which I had a curatorial role, so I will get to that.

But I wouldn’t want to ignore the political dimension of this topic either. The concentration of creative agency in a person or persons who carry the title of “curator”, in its contemporary manifestation, is at the very least in need of constant appraisal. Currently, in projects that involve professional curators and artists, the curators will almost certainly be paid for their work but the artists will not necessarily. That has to raise some kind of question about the professional, economic and perhaps cultural value ascribed to these different roles at this time.

You can’t be an artist now without knowing that the production of artworks is only one aspect of the production of Art, and that other aspects – distribution, circulation at the level of media, critical reception, consumption via reproductions, commodification through the market –are ever present and increasingly important aspects of Art under Capital. The rise of the professional curator who packages and manages these other aspects can be beneficial to artists, as can their role in determining visibility - the life-blood of an artist’s career. Curating is a very broad spectrum of practices ranging from the curator-as-auteur, a kind of artistic director employing artworks as elements in the construction of his or her greater vision, to the curator as independent maverick who challenges the canon of art by drawing attention to its exclusions, prompting us to reimagine and rethink what we know about art.

In between these poles are other kinds of curatorial practices, including those that take place within the public sector, supported by public money. Richard Hylton has said that under those circumstances the notion of a curator being critical or autonomous is arguably as fantastical as it is implausible[i] so it’s within that context that I locate my own work with Ground Up which I devised for Clare Arts Office in 2003.

It was an experimental programme of contemporary art that involved 22 artists over three strands between 2003- 2007, staged a series of public events, generated two publications and 11 temporary public artworks. It was informed by my own experience of being a practicing visual artist in Clare, and I also consulted widely with visual artists when I first took up the position, so it had a strong artist-led ethos. It laid emphasis on research; art in public was understood as both a process of research and a mode of dialoguing between artists, rural communities and the wider cultural discourse. The focus on temporary public art was very deliberate, a way of opening up spaces which could then close over again, emphasizing becoming over being, proposing performative rather than fixed identities for artists and audiences in rural places.

From the beginning the project had an artist development remit which took place largely in the research stages. In the first two strands invited artists were paid to engage in a relatively short, collective research process, which had an inbuilt training and/or mentoring budget that the artists could spend as they chose.

The team-based research process was seen as a way of examining received values about rural contexts and culture, and of building networks amongst geographically dispersed artists. Some artists were subsequently commissioned to carry out temporary public works, which themselves involved research stages of various lengths, some quite extensive.

These were the aims of the project as stated at the outset;

o To facilitate a new type of engagement between public art practice and rural contexts, generating debate and discussion amongst practitioners and the rural constituency that will inform the engagement and the resulting artworks.
o To create opportunities for artists to make interesting, challenging artworks where they live, independent of the gallery system.
o To create opportunities for contemporary artists in rural areas to overcome their professional isolation, inspire and inform one another, interact with national/ international practitioners and address the need to acquire new skills.
o To research ways in which contemporary art can be relevant and accessible to rural audiences without compromising the art.

These aims were expanded, refined and developed by all of the artists who participated in the first two strands; by the time we got to the third strand, it needed something different. In particular I wanted the third strand to acquire an international dimension and to bring the artworld to Clare, because in spite of very good work, the first two strands had received almost no critical attention in Ireland. I felt that I needed to adopt a more directly curatorial role to package and manage that process as I described earlier, so I conducted research through the internet and by contacting organizations across Europe, America and Australia whose interests overlapped with mine. In the end I invited five internationally established artists, three of them based in Ireland and two from abroad, to carry out on-the-ground research resulting in temporary works.

In the first two strands, the teams of artists had been carefully selected to include established and emerging artists, with the idea that they all had something to gain from each other, and that did prove to be the case. In the third strand I invited 5 local artists to act as paid assistants to the commissioned artists, with the idea that an exchange would take place, although the level of involvement of the assistant in the process varied from work to work.

In parallel with the Ground Up process, I set out to create networks of contacts with other people across the world who shared an interest in the rural context as an alternative site for art practice, or who were exploring alternative models of art in the public sphere. I did very extensive internet searches and sent e-mails to people whose work interested me, telling them what I was trying to do, asking them to send me more information on their own work and I traveled to a couple of conferences and made connections with theorists, academics and practitioners.

Gradually through that process the Shifting Ground project was developed, which aimed to bring together theorists and practitioners who didn’t need to be convinced that this work was culturally and politically relevant. It led to a two-day conference in 2006 with Simon Sheikh and Suzanne Lacy amongst others, and one of the two days was spent traveling around Clare to see the works commissioned under the third strand of Ground Up. The Shifting Ground website operated as a resource for people interested in this area of practice and the contacts that I established during those researches are still listed there. Many of those contacts continue to develop - last October I was invited to visit an arts organization in rural Australia to further a project that began in e-mail discussions over the previous couple of years.

I am going to conclude by talking a little bit about where I am now in relation to all of this. I finished working for Clare Arts Office in September - I felt that I had done as much as I could within the confines of a local authority structure and I needed to step away from that institutional framework.

“The existing framework for cultural activity is always shifting around and it is up to the artist/ curator to recognise gaps in the existing cultural framework and to generate new conventions for operating, which in turn can be subverted further in a constantly shifting environment. Hutchinson describes these gaps in culture as “alternative space”, and he claims that “once the gap is filled, it becomes part of the existing framework for other artists/curators (i.e. institutionalised)… and the gaps change all the time and new gaps form”

This is a quote from Paul O’ Neill’s paper ‘Self-organisation as a way of being’ which is available on the Visual Artists Ireland website in the info-pool section.

Self-organisation is a vital tool for artists and curators who don’t buy into a hierarchical and centralised model of culture; it is integral to the multiplication of forms of artistic practice that include the discursive, the relational, the performative, the curatorial and so on. It is about looking for those gaps in the existing framework, as described in that quote by Paul O’ Neill, and trying to make something interesting happen there with whatever resources are available. Within this alternative model, curating can be a dialogic practice, a critical involvement with contemporary culture that is arrived at collectively by curators, artists and audiences working together.
[i] Richard Hylton, 'Thoughts on Curating', Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, ed Judith Rugg, Michèle Sedgwick, Intellect Books, 122

Proxemic

2008-04-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

This essay was written to accompany a board game of the same name; principles of the game are posted at the end of the essay.

What I find disturbing about pornography is not that the participants are de-humanised but that they are de-animalised. Although the bodies of the figures are fused in a compressed space, their faces exist elsewhere, in a realm of pure separation that Agamben sees as the present manifestation of fulfilled capitalism[i]. They are penetrated, not by one another, but by the spectacle.

The face has been beautifully described by Alfonso Lingis as a ‘surface covering the head’ a blank wall for the inscription of signs, following from and followed by the word, with its cohesive linearity of meaning[ii]. There is, in the face, a covering up of and a distancing from the animal, captured by the assignation of that single term ‘the Animal’ to account for all creatures that live beyond the edge of ‘the Human’.

“The animal – what a word!” says Derrida, considering this “heterogeneous multiplicity of the living” reduced to a single concept[iii]. And yet we must have the word in order to locate the animal within, the animal that can break through the surface of the face as Lingis has also described (I would argue that the staging of pornography works to erase this possibility). The animal within and the animal without have been sources of fascination for humans ever since the distinction between the two came into existence. Anthropomorphism/ zoomorphism are ancient and universal practices, one of the capacities of the human animal, often but not necessarily bound to anthropocentrism.

“Underneath the smooth word “anthropomorphism” are hidden a multitude of anthropoi, of kinds of humanity – in this case, of kinds of mind – as well as the multitude of morphoi, of shapes of understanding other minds”[iv]. The anthropoi, as Daston describes, is a slippery term, in a constant state of flux; contemporary pornography is one apparatus and effect of that process of slippage.

Animals are immune to the spectacle, although they may be absorbed into it (the question of animals in pornography is one I have yet to consider) and indeed are regularly employed by the machine of the spectacle to construct a kind of humanity that is increasingly alienated from the animal[v]. It is in part this apparent innocence of the animal, its impenetrability that makes it so fascinating to humans, so available for cultural projections of all kinds.

Fascination is the proper term to describe the human/animal relation, suggesting as it does a certain quality of attention-binding. The realm of the human is both bounded by and bound to other realms which “cannot be totally objectified”.[vi] The ‘abyssal gaze’ of the animal can be ignored but at what cost to the Animality of the human? What is the Human without the Animal?

Do animals have mental states? Do they have private experiences? Do they suffer? Do they language? Do animals have a face? Can they have a hand? Is the difference between us one of degree or one of kind?

These are questions that figure in philosophical considerations of the human/animal divide. To think at the limits of the human in order to multiply those limits is what Derrida is proposing to do, and it could be argued that thinking at the limits is the essence of philosophy, continually pushing out our understanding of ourselves and our relations to the world. And yet, while these exercises of the human faculty for thought are engaging and even entertaining, the question is do they matter at all? Isn't it too late already to rethink the human/animal relationship, when all animals are caught in a web of human actions, the consequences of which point to the end of animal life in great quantities?

Because this end seems decided in advance, the only thing to do may be to engage in a means without end, to joyously forget one’s goal[vii], to play at Human and Animal in a shifting zone of undecidability where, at a price, boundaries may be breached and uncrossable borders crossed.

[i] Georgio Agamben, ‘In praise of Profanation’, Profanations, pg 90
[ii] Alfonso Lingis, ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face’ Zoontologies, The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe, Minneapolis, 2003, p175
[iii] Jacques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am (More to Follow), 1977
[iv] Lorraine Daston ‘Intelligences – Angelic, Animal, Human’, Thinking with Animals, New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. L. Daston and G. Mitman, New York, 2005, p 51
[v] An account of this theory is given in Cheryce Kramer, ‘Digital Beast as Visual Esperanto, Getty Images and the Colonization of Sight’, Thinking with Animals, ed Daston and Mitman, pg 137 - 171
[vi] Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am,
[vii] Agamben, Profanations, pg 85

PRINCIPLES OF THE GAME (under development)

STRUCTURE

This is a game for two to four players. It contains the following;

A board (composed of six adjoining triangles); figures (4 humans, 4 animals, spare animals, stands for figures and counters representing baby animals); trees (20 with stands); circular discs (21 with spares); Instruction cards (16); Language cards (16); Sensation cards (16); Failure cards (16); Shadow cards (16); Creation cards (16); Contagion cards (16); weapons tokens (20); 1 numeric dice; 6 language dice; one timer.

Additional requirements; paper and pen (for score-keeping)

The board is made of six triangles of differing colours. Each colour represents a specific zone as follows;

White : Language
Red : Sensation
Black : Shadow
Grey : Liminal
Khaki (x2) : Wild

Every triangle should have at least one side touching the side of one other triangle; the khaki triangles should adjoin one another, and the grey triangle should adjoin at least one side of a khaki triangle and at least one side of another colour. Apart from these restrictions the triangles can be arranged in any formation.

The figures are composed of a human and animal twin. Each player has two figures, but players do not play their own animal – each plays the animal of another player instead.

The trees are available for use by the animals (ref. Principals and Mechanics).

The circular discs should be laid out (11 contagion, 10 creativity) text down, one on each of the full spots (not half-spots) in the Liminal zone (grey triangle).

The cards should be arranged into separate piles according to their type.

The weapons tokens should be arranged in a separate pile.

PRINCIPLES

Each player must decide whether their aim is to unite or to permanently separate their Human and Animal twins. Each player can have a different aim to the others, but their aim must be stated publicly from the start.

A player who wishes to permanently separate their Human and Animal twins will play the game largely in the Language zone, and can place their human figure on any full spot in that zone to begin the game. A player who wishes to unite their Human and Animal twins will play the game in the Sensation zone and can place their human figure on any full spot in that zone to begin.

Players must swap their Animal figures so that no player plays their own Animal. Each Animal figure can be placed on any full spot in the Wild zone to begin.

On each alternate turn the player will play their Human or allocated Animal figure. The aim of the Human figures will be to gain enough points through the playing of the game to acquire weapons to trap and either kill or fuse with their Animal twin (depending on their stated aim). Any player who succeeds in killing or fusing with their Animal twin is the winner. Any player whose Human figure is killed by an Animal is disqualified.

The aim of the Animal figures will be different. They will set out to gain territory (this they can do by breeding), to evolve adult Animals of their own kind (also achieved through breeding) and to construct their own environment (through the placing of trees) for maximum protection. They will seek to avoid capture at all costs.

An Animal will rarely kill a Human, and can only do so under very specific circumstances (see Mechanics).

Animals are anarchic and will have occasion to change and invent rules. While Humans must respect the borders between zones, and can only cross under certain circumstances, Animals will be able to cross more freely between zones (see Mechanics).

Human figures will occasionally receive an instruction to pass into the Liminal zone to retrieve a Creativity token. This they will do by landing on one of the circular discs placed on the spots in the Liminal zone. They will not know until they land on the disc whether they have picked a Creativity or a Contagion token – whichever they have picked, they will draw a corresponding card which will give them instructions. Contagion cards are not to the advantage of the Human figures in the game.

Animals can retrieve tokens under certain circumstances (see Mechanics). In the event that they retrieve a Creativity token, they can acquire certain skills that will aid their goals; Contagion tokens may be more advantageous to Animal than to Human figures.

Human figures will occasionally be instructed to draw Failure cards, which will impact negatively on their aims. Some Failure cards will instruct the Human figure to relocate to the Shadow zone. The Human figure will then be forced to play in the Shadow zone until released (see Mechanics).

An Animal can choose to forego their turn in favour of having a Human figure of their choice draw a Failure card.

Animals will breed through the playing of the game. Each baby animal that they succeed in acquiring will take the form of a counter which they can place on a spot in the Wild zone or on unoccupied spots in the Liminal zone. As this spot becomes unusable for the other players it represents a form of territorialisation. When a certain number of baby animals have been acquired, the Animal will be able to trade them in for an adult.

An Animal player who has more than one adult becomes very formidable and difficult to trap. Other players will actively try to prevent this from happening, by capturing the babies of another Animal (see Mechanics).

Under certain circumstances, Animal figures will be able to acquire trees, which they will place on a full spot in the Liminal zone. Trees will greatly increase the Animal’s capacity to evade capture and to escape from threats posed by other Animals.

All figures will move differently, depending on their location or ontology.

MECHANICS

1. General

Animals will not use dice but can make a single move from any red spot to any other red spot within the zone that they are in, or any zone that has a border with the zone that they are in, as long as that spot is not already occupied and is at least one spot away from the closest occupied spot.

Humans in the Language zone will move by throwing the six language dice and turning over the timer. In that one minute they will make the longest word that they can and will be able to move the number of spots corresponding to letters used, along the visible lines between spots only. If the player cannot make a word they cannot move.

Humans in the Sensation zone will move by throwing numeric dice and will move along the visible lines between spots; each dot on the dice corresponds to one spot on the board.

Each Human will aim to land on a spot marked with an X (red or white makes no difference to the Human figures) where they can draw an Instruction Card. They must land on an X spot with an exact count; they can change directions for each turn, but not within a single turn. Upon drawing an Instruction Card, they will receive further directions. These they will carry out within that same turn, until they have carried out their instructions or exhausted their options.

The instructions that the Human figures receive will facilitate or frustrate their attempts to gain points. Some instructions may result in the loss of points.

On occasion the Human figures will be instructed to retrieve a Creativity token. To do this, they must travel into the Liminal zone and must land on a token by an exact number of moves – they cannot land on any spot that is occupied by another figure, nor can they land on any spot that is not more than one spot away from an Animal. They turn the token over and draw a Creativity card or a Contagion card according to the text on the reverse of the token. They will follow the instructions on this card, and on their next turn will retrace their path to the zone from which they started, using whichever dice they are allocated.

When a Human figure has gained XY number of points, they will be entitled to purchase weapons (in the form of Weapons tokens). Upon completion of this transaction they will be free to set off into the Wild zone, to attempt to trap their Animal twin. Humans must go through the Liminal zone in order to pass into the Wild zone. They cannot approach the Wild zone through any other route.

When and what was Modernism?

2008-04-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

Once Upon a Time there was Modernism.

Like Cinderella, it seems to exist in many versions, written and rewritten by various authors and ascribed multiple origins. The multifarious accounts of its conception indicate the difficulty of ascribing a ‘when’ to Modernism. The very notion of ‘when’ suggests something continuous and coherent, something that can be located in time; as such, this consideration of Modernism must begin with a ‘what’.

The assertion of ‘Post-Modernism’ marks a temporal and conceptual break that makes it possible to assess Modernism “as a cultural construct based on specific conditions”. [1] This opens up the possibility of new readings of Modernism, which can rewrite and challenge the official or academic version; equally it creates the possibility of a re-contextualisation that may be reductive and instrumental.

Over the last three decades, as Hal Foster outlines in Design and Crime,[2] the history of art has been expanded to include visual culture. He describes this shift as being governed by social imperatives and anthropological assumptions. He says;
“in our extended period of theoretical ambivalences and political impasses, anthropology remains the compromise discourse of choice.”

Coming as I do from outside the discipline of art history, my leaning is towards the contextual bias of an anthropological discourse. As a result my research is focused less on a vertical, developmental version of Modernism, than a horizontal reading that takes account of its marginal, disruptive and contradictory aspects.

An internet search under the word Modernism throws up a variety of descriptions;
A grave error;
A self-conscious rejection of tradition;
A succession of art movements;
A radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities;
A concern with form;
An elitist aesthetic;
A style;
An ideology;
A philosophy;
A historical theory;
A Utopian project;
A democratisation of culture;
An enterprise;
An institution.

Evidently Modernism is nebulous and all-encompassing; it reverberates in many areas of human thought – art, religion, psychology, politics, history, science, mathematics, literature, architecture, music, philosophy – whilst perversely being open to interpretations that are diametrically opposed.

In her essay, Art History and Modernism, Elizabeth Mansfield says;
“Modernism . . . is a condition of tension, instability and, ultimately, irresolution.”[3]
The critical potential inherent in modernity as an oppositional project surfaced and was repressed a number of times during the modernist period. Modernism’s dependence on irresolution, as described by Mansfield, resulted in fracture-lines, non-spaces and internal contradictions. Critical, oppositional residues of Modernism, if they exist, might be located at such points of tension; this is where I intend to focus my attention.

Terms; a short history

Whatever else can be said about Modernism, it is and was largely a Western cultural phenomenon, a product of (or reaction to) capitalist economics, masculine and (generally white) -colonialist in its approach to the ‘Other’, bourgeois in its class structure and ‘modern’ in its orientation.

Modern, of course, is a relative term, used to refer generically to the contemporaneous. While Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and Cézanne are variously credited with making the first truly ‘modern’ paintings, the 15th C writer Cennino Cennini, in his book Il Libro dell'Arte (translated as "The Craftsman's Handbook"), described the work of Giotto as making painting "modern"[4] while Giorgio Vasari refers to the art of his own period, 16th-century Italy, as "modern."[5].
Modernity, modernist and modernisation must be understood as specifically 18th /19th C terms distinct from 'modern'. Modernisation is associated with technological progress; modernity and modernism are often described as responses to the conditions of modernisation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau may have been the first to use the word modernist in 1769 ("Correspondance à M. D.", 15 Jan.)[6] but it is Immanuel Kant who is credited with laying the philosophical groundwork for Modernism, leading Clement Greenberg to call him ‘the first modernist’.

Greenberg is referring to Kant’s philosophical method, based on the Enlightenment order of distinct and autonomous disciplines, which used logic to establish the limits of logic; this philosophical imperative of self-critique was the basis of a self-criticism “from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized”[7] that Greenberg saw as essential to Modernism. In his Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant formulated his paradoxical concept of “art’s purposiveness without a purpose” which proposed art as fundamentally disinterested, an a priori condition for art to function as an autonomous activity.

In addition, Kant placed the active, rational, human subject at the centre of the cognitive and moral world. The freedom to use one’s reason freely in all matters, he argued, would give rational agency to all humans who could act according to a universal moral law. Although Kant himself favoured the stability and consistency offered by a benign and enlightened monarch -
” . . .a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent.”[8]
- the emphasis he placed on the rational, autonomous subject and the degree of individual autonomy implied by his thesis that morality is rooted in human freedom had an obvious political affect that contributed to the complex political and cultural conditions in Europe during and after the French Revolution (1789).

As part of the democratisation of culture that followed that bourgeois revolution, the first public museum, the present-day Louvre, was opened in 1793 (the same year that its first director, Jacques Louis David, painted ‘The Death of Marat’ described by Elizabeth Mansfield as the first manifestation of modernist art). Known originally as the "Muséum central des Arts" and consisting of work confiscated from the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church, this public institution did much to establish the principle of culture as an egalitarian domaine.

The museum of art was to become central to the development of the modernist aesthetic. The practice of classifying material for the purposes of display according to principles of chronology, style, geography or any other principle, created a situation where a material object could be elevated to art status, allowing its original ‘function’ to be disregarded in favour of its aesthetic qualities – what Walter Benjamin called the historical transition from cult-value to exhibition-value. This elevation created a condition of separateness from the praxis of life that was essential for the establishment of the autonomy of art, autonomy serving as a foundational concept for Modernism in the mid-19th c.

The museum of art also contributed significantly to the establishment of the institution of art, in parallel with the establishment of the École des Beaux Arts and the developing discipline of art history; that institution’s claim to cultural authority was something against which advocates of autonomy reacted at various points throughout the modernist period, beginning perhaps with the Salon des Refusées and concluding with Minimalism and Land Art.

With the autonomous, individual subject established as the fundamental unit of bourgeois society and the principle of the accumulation of capital firmly established as the basis of social relations, the extreme rupture in temporality generated by the industrialisation of production meant that all the conditions of modernity, as we generally understand it, were in place by the early 19th C. (The complex question of temporality and modernity is something I will return to).

Charles Baudelaire is credited with giving a contemporaneous, cultural meaning to the word modernity;
” Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is eternal and the immutable. “[9]
In his book Five Faces of Modernity, Matei Calinescu states that in the first half of the 19th C, modernity split into two distinct and conflicting forms. The first was the modernity of scientific and technological progress, imbued with the values of the middle classes; the second an aesthetic concept with anti-bourgeois tendencies that began in Romanticism and led to the avant-gardes.
Initially, Buadelaire used the term modernity synonymously with romantic; after1858 his use of the term included a new dimension of separation between the ‘presentness’ of the present moment and any previous moment. The artist, therefore, could not look to the art of the past but was reliant fully upon his or her own imagination to give expression to modernity.
For Baudelaire “. . . .”modern” was a privileged semantic space, a locus where opposites coincided.”[10] In the same chapter, Calinescu describes Modernism as follows;
“a conscious commitment to modernity, whose normative character is thus openly recognised”[11]
Susan Buck-Morss, though not attempting to define Modernism, presents another view;
“Modernism expresses Utopian longing by anticipating the reconciliation of social function and aesthetic form”[12]

The question of a definition for Modernism raises perhaps the most problematic aspect; its inclusions and exclusions. If we take conscious commitment to modernity as the defining characteristic of Modernism then how is this conscious commitment to be assessed and by whom? Raymond Williams, in his essay When Was Modernism?, questions why it is that Joyce and Proust can be accepted into the modernist canon on the basis of their ‘radical questioning of the processes of representation’ while “Gogol, Flaubert . . . Dickens . . . the great realists . . . (who) devised and organised a whole vocabulary . . . with which to grasp the unprecedented social forms of the industrial city”[13] remain excluded. Williams sees this as ideological, determined by ‘the machinery of selective tradition’. He seems to argue that the function of this selectivity is to appropriate ‘radical disconnection’ for the purposes of the market.

Realism and its modes of representation surfaces again in Jacques Rancière’s treatise on aesthetics and modernity. He identifies novelistic realism as the inaugural moment of modernity, because it represented;
“the reversal of the hierarchies of representation (the primacy of the narrative over the descriptive or the hierarchy of subject matter) and the adoption of a fragmented or proximate mode of focalization.”[14]

For Rancière, modernity is ‘an incoherent label’ which seeks to trace “a simple line of transition or rupture between the old and the new”.[15] He sees the change that took place as happening earlier in the form of a shift from a ‘representative regime of the arts’ to an ‘aesthetic regime of the arts’ (which, he says, was first of all a new regime for relating to the past).

The point about these differing positions relates not to any question of a starting point for modernity and Modernism (David, romanticism, Baudelaire, realism, Manet etc.) but rather to the multiplicity of perspectives that we encounter in relation to these two terms. I see no reason to attempt a synthesis of these complex and contradictory accounts; rather than pursue this, I would like to consider some of the tensions of Modernism beginning with a look at the question of time.

Temporalities.

As outlined above, what we understand generally as Modernism was framed largely within a Kantian architecture of thought and in relation to a specific temporality in which the present moment is severed from the past and develops a singular forward motion.

However, the relationship of Modernism to the past and to tradition is more complex than this. Even Baudelaire, with his stated desire to ‘represent the present’ remained ambivalent towards modernity, clinging to certain romantic, pastoral, aristocratic ideals that he saw as uncorrupted by the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie.

Rancière has this to say regarding Modernism and temporality;
“The idea of modernity would like there to be only one meaning and direction in history, whereas the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities.”[16]

Svetlana Boym, in her book The Future of Nostalgia, uses the term ‘off-modern’ to describe artists and thinkers for whom these heterogeneous temporalities are of relevance. She describes off-modern art as existing between the poles of modernist and anti-modernist, exploring hybrids of past and present that mediate between Modernism and Post-Modernism. Amongst those whom she lists in the off-modern category are Stravinsky, Nabokov, Walter Benjamin, Milan Kundera and Ilya Kabakov. Of this last, she describes his work as exploring “. . . the sideroads of modernity, the aspirations of the little men and amateur artists and the ruins of modern utopias.”[17]

Working in Soviet Russia in the 1970’s /80’s, Kabakov and his peers were operating within a kind of twilight zone with regard to Modernism, which had been repressed since the 1930’s. (Boris Groys challenges this account, arguing that the principle of ‘art into life’ championed by the Constructivists and others active within the early avant-garde of revolutionary Russia, was not eclipsed but inherited by Social Realists.)[18] The NOMA movement in which Kabakov participated was not so much an artistic school as a subculture, a kind of underground Soviet pop-art that blended amateur crafts, references to the avant-garde and social realism, drab Soviet trivia and popular kitsch. The resistance that NOMA posed to official Soviet culture was really in a continuation of the modernist tradition of art-making as lifestyle, invoking a semi-autonomous sphere of cultural existence.

The installations Kabakov made in the years immediately following his exile to the west reconstructed fragments of Soviet life. Works like Toilets (1992) and We Live Here (1995) are meant to be read neither symbolically nor in the quotation marks of post-modernism – they play more with an idea of being out of time, locked out of both future and past.

Moments of modernity are characterised by these ‘Janus-faced’ forwards and backwards looks; tradition, as Hal Foster points out in his essay Five Archives of Modern Art[19], is never given but always constructed retroactively. There is a complex co-dependency between modernity and tradition which reveals itself in some of the darker moments of 20th C history but also in some of its more ‘progressive’ moments.

“(Modernism’s) dream of emancipation has always been counteracted by an opposite movement of attachment. Because it was turned so thoroughly toward the past with which it wanted to break, it has run blindly through history, producing in its wake very strange hybrids, mixing up all periods, confusing all sorts of epochs”[20]

This quote is from Bruno Latour, author of We Were Never Modern. While his thesis that we were never modern is not unproblematic, it does offer an interesting challenge to the fixity of Modernism and its supposed relationship to ‘the future’. The quote above sounds remarkably similar in many ways to Walter Benjamin’s catastrophic account of Klee’s The Angel of History, who is blown backwards into the future and must watch the events of history piling up as wreckage upon wreckage. Benjamin did not reject tradition outright; he urged that its fragments be rescued from a dependence on ritual and put to use for the present purposes of politics. He even celebrated the Surrealists as “the first to perceive the revolutionary energies in the ‘outmoded’”.[21]

This is not unlike Boym’s ‘reflective nostalgia’ which, in contrast to ‘restorative nostalgia’, does not seek to restore or reanimate the past. Reflective nostalgia values fragments of memory but ‘remains aware of the gap between identity and resemblance’, so rather than seek to reconstruct from them any coherent manifestations of the past, they construct a narrative that is ironic, fragmentary and inconclusive. The nostalgia of reflection sees the past as;

“a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development.”[22]

This notion of an alternative course of history has something in common with temporal Utopianism. They share a dissatisfaction with the imperfection of the world as it is and belief in an alternative time (now or in the future) where things might turn out differently, could be other than they are. The capacity to imagine change in this way is romantic and links directly to a modern ideal of human freedom, or autonomy; it is also central to the idea of the avant-garde.

Fetish and kitsch.

The question of aesthetic autonomy is now, as it was throughout the modernist period, a highly contested and intensely political issue, inextricably linked to the history and idea of the avant-garde.

The term avant-garde, derived from military strategies, was first used in a cultural context in the mid 16th C by Etienne Pasquier, who gave it a largely metaphorical function in his account of the development of French poetry. By the mid-19th C it was being used self-consciously to express the idea that “artists constitute the “vanguard” in the moral history of mankind”[23], a belief that Calinescu traces to the romantic and messianic traditions.

The self-assigned role of the avant-garde ranged from the pursuit of formal and technical innovation to “an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society”[24] as Peter Bürger states in his essay Theory of the Avant-Garde.

Art in bourgeois society, he outlines, is removed from the means-ends activity that characterises the life praxis of the bourgeois citizen; with Aestheticism, the separation of art from the life praxis of the bourgeoisie becomes the content of art and the statement of its autonomy.
The tension that characterises the relationship between Modernism and the avant-garde oscillates between this aesthetics of autonomy and an anti-aesthetic stance that sees the claim to autonomy as hierarchical and privileging of an elite.

Hal Foster points out that autonomy is a diacritical term, defined in relation to its opposite, subjection. This subjection was sometimes figured historically in terms of fetishism, such as Charles de Brasses’s 1760 definition of it as “an infantile cult” that traps its worshippers in a “perpetual childhood”. This is reminiscent of Kant’s dictate that man must free himself from immaturity through an autonomous form of rationality.

Foster further emphasises the oppositional linking of fetishism to autonomy;
“. . .the orderly austerity of the Kantian art work is opposed to the sensuous seduction of the fetish, the disembodied disinterest of the Kantian viewer to the embodied desire of the fetish worshipper, the sublimation of Kantian object and subject alike to the perversion of fetish and fetishist alike.”[25]

Fetish is a term with a complex etymology – it was originally used by European traders to designate those things which African people exempted from trade, largely because of their cult value. This led to connotations of superstitious vulgarity, locating fetish objects initially in the same category of non-art that included kitsch.

Kitsch was named by Greenberg as the natural enemy of the avant-garde. [26] It is used generally to imply aesthetic inadequacy; Calinescu writes about kitsch as deception and self-deception - “an aesthetic form of lying”[27]. The term and concept is essentially modern, made possible by the processes of industrial production, but operating as a kind of shadow-aesthetic.
Fetish and kitsch then can be read as inverse forms of autonomy and aesthetic, the former acquiring complex new meanings through psychoanalysis, the latter lending itself to an increased parodying of bourgeois taste that peaked during and after WWI.

“We have no taste but distaste”[28] declared Pierre Naville, editor of La Revolution surréaliste in1925.

The anti-aesthetics of fetish and kitsch found a natural home in Surrealism. Like Dada, Surrealism had roots in the traumatic distortion of places and people produced by WWI. Both sought consciously to disrupt the hypocrisy of bourgeois values and morality, Dada in an overt attack on the normative rules of aesthetics, Surrealism by invoking the uncanny and indexing psychic and sexual taboos.

Stylistically schizophrenic, the diverse axes of Surrealism seem to pivot on the possibility of forbidden or excluded elements rupturing the surface of reality. The work of art becomes a site where the act of libidinal repression upon which cultural production is founded (according to Freud) can be desublimated. This strategy involves bringing to the fore some of the conflicting impulses within the aesthetic object and transgressing the distance between subject and (aesthetic) object, as in Man Ray’s Gift of 1921 or Meret Oppenheim’s My Nurse of 1936.
Many of the works of Surrealism sit uneasily with Modernism. There is an excess, a lack of formal or structural purity to the later works of Max Ernst, Dali, de Chirico and to some extent Magritte that might be described as baroque.

The discourse of rupture and excess that manifested via kitsch and fetish in Surrealism (and in the counter-Surrealist Documents group) have resurfaced in contemporary art practice, along with strategic invocations of aesthetic autonomy.

Although it has been unfashionable for some time, aesthetic autonomy may be the most enduring legacy of Modernism.

“The aesthetic is, according to Rancière, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, characterized precisely by that tension between faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come.”[29]

The non-spaces of Modernism

By concentrating on some of the places where the logic of Modernism is strained, my intention is to highlight its non-spaces. These spaces allow Yve-Alain Bois to describe Modernism as an ‘interpretive grid’[30] (a particularly apt description given the extent to which the grid functioned as a modernist motif). This is a valuable metaphor because the architecture of the grid exists only by virtue of the spaces that are not-grid; spaces that are ambiguous and flowing in contrast to the grid’s structural formality. It is this opening out that makes room for the de-structuring, anti-architectural, unforming operations described by Georges Bataille as Informe and applied by Bois and Rosalind Krauss as a curatorial strategy in the exhibition L’Informe; Mode d’Emploi (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1998). Of this strategy Bois said;
“Our project is to redeal modernism’s cards . . . . to see to it that the unity of modernism, as constituted through the opposition of formalism and iconology, will be fissured from within and that certain works will no longer be read as they were before.”[31]

Bois and Krauss set out a number of postulates and exclusions central to the modernist narrative, and then set about cataloguing practices within Modernism that diverged from these normative principles, some of which were executed by artists considered to be firmly within the canon of Modernism.

The postulates they put forward are as follows; firstly, that the visual arts address themselves uniquely to the sense of sight, leading directly to the second postulate, namely that the temporal is denied by the effect of works revealing themselves to the eye of the viewer all at once. The third inherent claim of modernist art lies in the verticality of the viewer; the subject is addressed as an ‘erect being’ which separates the viewer from their body. Finally, a modernist work must be ‘bounded’ so that any apparent disorder is contained.

In opposition to these ‘foundational myths’ of Modernism they proposed four operations; base materialism, pulse, horizontality and entropy.

Base materialism, they proposed, relates to matter which resists all attempts at ‘metaphorical displacement’ in line with Bataille’s use of the word scatology – “the science of what is wholly other” - and describes work that cannot be accommodated within Modernism’s discourse, including works by Burri, Rauschenberg, Fautrier, and Picasso.

Pulse or pulsation ‘attacks the modernist exclusion of temporality from the visual field’[32] and speaks to the corporality of the viewing subject. Duchamp’s work featured in this category, as did works by Giacometti, Tanguely, Serra, Morris, Man Ray and Bellmer.

Horizontality as an operation contradicts the very feature that distinguishes humans from animals, namely their erect state. It makes reference to the ‘biological mouth-anus axis’[33], and opposes the visual with the carnal space occupied by our bodies. This category included works by Duchamp, Pollock and Hesse.

Entropy, the meaning of which is ‘constant and irreversible degradation of energy in every system, leading to a continually increasing state of disorder and non-differentiation within matter’[34] speaks of rot and waste and has been of interest to artists in one way or another for a long time. As a means of exploring an alternative narrative within Modernism, Bois and Krauss identify works by Matta-Clark, Oldenburg, Serra, Dubuffet, Duchamp, Ruscha, Arp and of course Smithson, for whom entropy was a motto.

I have elaborated on the rationale of the exhibition ‘L’Informe . . . ‘ to support a view of the modernist narrative as partial, and to indicate that alternative readings of art practice in the 20th C, based on the very same artists who feature in the standard accounts of Modernism, can produce entirely different lines of thought.

Conclusion

It is usual to consider Modernism primarily in terms of philosophy, art/ architecture and politics, which is largely what I have done here, though William Everdell has argued that Modernism began with Richard Dedekind's division of the real number line in 1872 and Boltzmann's statistical thermodynamics in 1874.[35] Any account of Modernism, on this scale or any other perhaps, can only be partial.

As a result, throughout this essay I have used Modernism as shorthand for a concept that is completely nebulous or comprehensible, something that happened or didn’t happen, something that exists primarily as an ideology or narrative yet can be clearly identified in certain objects, actions and institutions. I think that this reflects the contradictory nature of Modernism itself.
Rancière’s description of Modernism as an incoherent label strikes me as accurate; in seeking a way of understanding Modernism that is neither reductive nor closed to interpretation, that takes account of the disparate practices and beliefs sitting cheek by jowl in historical accounts of it, I have highlighted a few concepts that seem useful: Modernism as a cultural construct (Foster); Modernism as a condition of tension, instability and irresolution (Mansfield); Modernism as an interpretive grid or master narrative (Bois); Modernism as a battle-site between different modes of modernity (Calinescu).

Calinescu’s modes were informed by different mythologies. The bourgeois myth of human power to reshape and reform the world for the better, aided by science, technology and experimentation, was irreparably damaged by the trenches of WWI and shattered completely by the fact of the extermination camps of Europe. The aesthetic myth of art’s autonomy reached a logical zenith in the work of the American Abstract Expressionists, but this proved to be a conceptual dead-end.

Running right through Modernism, as well as around and underneath it, were other myths, other forms of knowing that rejected this binary of modernities and exceeded Kant’s architecture of thought. They can be found in the work of artists like Marcel Duchamp, Claude Cahun, Max Ernst, the Situationist Internationale; in the anarchic writings of Georges Bataille, the ‘pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, the absurdism of Camus; in the ‘literature of silence’[36] identified by Ihab Hassan as present in the work of de Sade, Kafka, Hemingway, Beckett and others; in the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and in the entire range of practices documented by Bois and Krauss in L’Informe; Mode d’Emploi. The ‘otherness’ of these practices and attitudes have survived into Post-Modernism, suggesting that some of what is termed ‘post’ modern is a continuation of that which remained unresolved in Modernism.

When the revolutionary theme of the avant-garde ceased to be an aspect of Modernism it congealed, producing an ideology and orthodoxy. Modernism had to be deconstructed from a retrospective position in order to separate the ideology from the critical, oppositional potential that had been implicit and explicit, expressed and suppressed. That this critical reinvestigation is ongoing, more than 50 years later, suggests that, for all its contradictions, there is some challenge inherent in Modernism, something that might be worth rescuing from the petrifying forces of the Academy.

Fiona Woods
January 2008

[1] Foster, Hal, (ed). The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture Seattle: Bay Press 1983
[2] Foster, Hal Design and Crime: (And Other Diatribes) Verso Books London: New York 2002
[3] Mansfield, Elizabeth Art History and Modernism
[4] Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook: Il Libro dell'arte, trans. D. V. Thompson, Jr., New York, 1933.
[5] Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori Italiani, Florence, 1550, 2 vols. (Reprint Broude International Editions, New York, 1980). Expanded second edition published in Florence, 1568 (edition published in Opere di Giorgo Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence, 1879 (1906 edition reprinted in 1981).
[6] Rousseau, J.J. Correspondance à M. D., 15 Jan quoted in "Dictionnaire de la langue française", published from 1859 to 1872 Paul-Maximilien-Emile Littré Lexicographer and philosopher.
[7] Greenberg, Clement Modernist Painting first published Forum Lectures (Washington D.C.: Voice of America), 1960
[8] Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” Konigsberg, Prussia, 1784.
[9] Baudelaire, Charles The Painter of Modern Life (1858) from Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, Selected Essays Intro. and Trans. by Lois Boe Hylsop and Francis E. Hylsop (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964)
[10] Calinescu, Matei Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University Press, Durham 1987 pp 86
[11] Ibid pp 86
[12] Buck-Morss, Susan The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) MIT Press New ed. edition 1991
[13] Williams, Raymond, When Was Modernism? Lecture at the University of Bristol, 1987
[14] Rancière, Jacques The Politics of Aesthetics, transl. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum 2004 pp. 24
[15] Ibid. pp 24
[16] Ibid. pp 26
[17] Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, pp 311
[18] Groys, Boris, The Birth of Social Realism form the Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde, in Post-Impressionism to World War II, Lewer ed.
[19] Foster, Hal Design and Crimes,
[20] Latour, Bruno We Have Never Been Modern Catherine Porter, trans. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993
[21] Benjamin, Walter Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Intelligentsia (1929), from Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York : Harcourt Brace Hovanovich, 1978
[22] Boym, Svetlana, op. cit, 2001 pp 50
[23] Calinescu, Matei op. cit pp 102
[24] Bürger, Peter, from Theory of the Avant-Garde, in Post-Impressionism to World War II, Lewer ed.
[25] Foster, Hal from Design and Crime
[26] Greenberg, Clement The Avant-Garde and Kitsch 1939, in Post-Impressionism to World War II, Lewer ed.
[27] Calinescu, Matei, op. cit pp 227
[28] Naville, Pierre La Revolution surréaliste, Issue 3 1925.
[29] Bishop, Claire, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents 2005
[30] Bois, Yve-Alain The Use Value of Formless, from Formless; a User’s guide edited by Bois and Krauss (Zone Books, New York) 1987 p 21
[31] ibid, p 21,
[32] ibid, p 33
[33] Ibid p 31
[34] Ibid, p 34
[35] Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
[36] Hassan, Ihab The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature 1971

Bilbliography
Bois, Yve-Alain and Krauss, Rosalind (ed.) Formless; a User’s guide (Zone Books, New York) 1987
Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, 2001
Calinescu, Matei Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University Press, Durham 1987
Foster, Hal; Krauss, Rosalind; Bois, Yve-Alain; Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. Art Since 1900 Thames and Hudson, 2004
Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture Seattle: Bay Press 1983
Foster, Hal Design and Crime: (And Other Diatribes) London: New York Verso Books 2002
Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?” Konigsberg, Prussia, 1784.
Latour, Bruno We Have Never Been Modern Catherine Porter, trans. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993
Lewer, Debbie (ed.) Post-Impressionism to World War II,
Rancière, Jacques The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. Continuum 2004

Articles/essays
Bishop, Claire, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents 2005
Mansfield, Elizabeth Art History and Modernism
Williams, Raymond, When Was Modernism? Transcribed by Fred Inglis (Lecture at the University of Bristol) 1987

Quoted but not read;
Baudelaire, Charles The Painter of Modern Life (1858) from Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, Selected Essays Intro. and Trans. by Lois Boe Hylsop and Francis E. Hylsop (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964) quoted in Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity as above
Buck-Morss, Susan The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project ( Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) MIT Press New ed. edition 1991 quoted in Foster, Design and Crime as above
Benjamin, Walter “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Intelligentsia” (1929), from Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York : Harcourt Brace Hovanovich, 1978 quoted in Foster et. al Art Since 1900 as above

From websites
Hassan, Ihab The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature 1971[referenced on www.wikipedia.com December 2007]
Cennino, Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook: Il Libro dell'arte, trans. D. V. Thompson, Jr., New York, 1933.[referenced on http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/bibliography.html November 2007]
Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997[referenced on www.wikipedia.com December 2007]
Vasari, Giorgio, Le Vite de Eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori Italiani, Florence, 1550, 2 vols. (Reprint Broude International Editions, New York, 1980). Expanded second edition published in Florence, 1568 (edition published in Opere di Giorgo Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, Florence, 1879 (1906 edition reprinted in 1981).[referenced on http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/bibliography.html November 2007]
Vermeersch, Arthur, (Transcribed by Gerard Haffner) Catholic Encyclopedia: Modernism from The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X. Published 1911. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York. [Accessed on http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm November 2007]
Rousseau, J.J. Correspondance à M. D., 15 Jan quoted in "Dictionnaire de la langue française", published from 1859 to 1872 Paul-Maximilien-Emile Littré Lexicographer and philosopher. [referenced on http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10415a.htm November 2007]

Review of the work of Miroslaw Balka

2008-03-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

Tristes Tropiques
Irish Museum of Modern Art
14 Nov 2007 - 27 Jan 2008

An initial encounter with the works of Miroslaw Balka, given their apparent emphasis on materiality and spare treatment of form and space, locates the work visually in relation to a kind of formal minimalism.

A closer inspection of the work reveals that something entirely different is going on. Whilst traditional sculptural materials such as steel, concrete and wood feature prominently in the works, their formal, elemental qualities are first tempered by other materials such as glass, rubber, felt and linoleum introducing notions of fragility and use, and ultimately subverted by substances such as salt, fine ash, soap, hair, maggots and spurting water which draw our attention to processes of dissolution, corrosion, mutation and failure.

Another departure from any formalist consideration of this work occurs as a result of small, hypnotic movements incorporated into some works, for example the salt disks rotating slowly anti-clockwise located inside concrete chambers in the work 3 x (57 x 57 x 50) 2005, or the barely perceptible camera movement in the DVD projection The Wall, 2006; whilst initially arousing perplexity and curiosity, this soon gives way to a mounting sense of futility as the movements are destined to repeat indefinitely and begin to be dwarfed by the physical masses that surround or define them.

In truth, the works of Miroslaw Balka are encountered internally as much as they are observed, and cannot be read in isolation from the artist’s own autobiography or from the troubled history of his native Poland. The viewer of these works is quickly immersed in a world that speaks of traces; traces of bodies and of life; traces of human use and usage; traces of emotion and of violence; traces of processes and histories.

Human vulnerability is invoked repeatedly throughout the exhibition; the titles of the works often refer to the artist’s own body proportions; a specially constructed seat-and-speaker unit shelters and isolates the listener/viewer of the sound and projected work Wydawaloby Sie [It Would Seem], 2005; a bar of soap has been forced through and around the steel mesh of a window grille which rattles occasionally; viewers are invited to walk on and tip the balance of the work 400 x 250 x 30, 2003 which mimics a giant see-saw.

The dark humor and almost Surrealist rendering of memory and anxiety in When You Wet the Bed, 1987 is not particularly characteristic of other works in the exhibition; it leads, all the same, to a psychoanalytic reading which is subsequently brought to bear on other, less demonstrative pieces.

The work for example, first encountered in the space, is a DVD projection that leads into an arena of collective memory and guilt. It features a camera that seems to be trying to maintain a focus on a single point within the frame, a letter B which is reversed, upside down and fixed to a pane of glass. Snow whirls past; whether the camera operator is outside in the snow being buffeted by the wind, or inside the window suffering from camera-shake due to endurance is not clear. What does emerge, against a background of laughing voices, is a sign, largely eclipsed, that seems to read Bergen-Belsen.

Balka is explicit in his reference to Concentration Camps, as indexed by the inclusion at a certain point of Gitta Sereny’s book ‘Into that Darkness; From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder’ a psychological study of Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka. Even without these pointers, the materials of ash, soap, maggots and gas (as in the DVD projection BlueGasEyes, 2004 in which an image of a burning gas flame is projected vertically downwards onto two blocks of salt) carry specific connotations that are impossible to ignore.

So far this review describes the work in terms of its capacity to evoke and suggest a presence and absence. This sits comfortably with dominant accounts that emphasise the poetic and elegiac in Balka’s work. Such a version, however, is not prepared for the insistent, multiple references that the artist makes in this retrospective to a number of texts. The title of the retrospective Tristes Tropiques (The Endless Journey) refers to a work published by Claude Levi-Strauss in 1955, while a number of published works are presented within the body of the exhibition. These include The Naked Man, The Savage Mind and The Origin of Table Manners, an introduction to the science of mythology Volume 3 all by Claude Levi-Strauss; About the House; Lévi-Strauss and Beyond edited by Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones ; Into that Darkness; from mercy killing to mass murder by Gitta Sereny and the film Concerning Tristes Tropiques by J P Beaurenant, J Bodansky et P. Mengent.

This puzzling but emphatic insertion is hard to read. Balka is an artist of considerable subtlety whose repertoire does not tend to feature direct irony. An introductory text posted by the gallery states that Balka deliberately locates himself within a relatively small geographical area - he sources all materials within a 100K radius of Otwock near Warsaw, where his studio is located in what was formerly his childhood home. From this information it is possible to conclude that the artist is already excavating his own memories and history, so it seems unlikely that he finds it necessary to refer us to any anthropological reading of his own work.

It may be that one of the works made specifically for this show, Zoo/T, 2007, gives a clue to the apparent disjuncture. The work in question, located in the courtyard, is “a scaled-down version of a zoo built in 1943 in the grounds of the Treblinka concentration camp. With a dovecote in the roof and a space for foxes and other wild animals below, it was commissioned by the camp commandant for the amusement of his children and his fellow SS officers.”[1]

It is unnecessary to elaborate here on the twisted symbolism of a ‘zoo’ enclosure within an extermination camp, nor of a plan to house doves and foxes in a single structure. Levi-Strauss elaborated on the significance of the house, or rather, to quote from one of the publications presented in the exhibition, “the interrelation between buildings, people and ideas using ethnographic case studies to reveal some of the different ways in which houses come to stand for social groups and to represent the world around them”[2].

Perhaps in bringing the existence of the zoo to the attention of the audience, Balka feels a need to elaborate on the interrelations between this structure and its primary users. It’s impossible to do so without raising questions about what humanity might have existed in the perpetrators of Treblinka. While this is not a comfortable area of consideration, it is consistent with Balka’s refusal to avert his gaze from things we might prefer not to know or remember.

Balka is a complex artist who has become somewhat categorised under ‘subtle and poetic’. Perhaps with this exhibition he is reasserting his capacity to make work that cannot be so easily digested or assimilated.

Fiona Woods
November 2007

[1] IMMA website
[2] Introduction by Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones; About the House; Lévi-Strauss and Beyond edited by Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones

Conflicting Interests and Interesting Conflicts: curatorial strategies in the context of the rural

2008-02-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

The following is a transcript of a given by Fiona Woods on the occasion of the Shifting Ground seminar series for GMIT/Clare County Arts Office partnership project; March 13th 2006.

I would like to start by clearly defining the role Ioccupy this evening. I am a visual artist, and although my time is largely taken up at the moment with the work that I do for the Arts Office of Clare County Council, I view that work as an extension of my practice, otherwise I wouldn’t have much interest in doing it! I will make reference to work I have done in my capacity as Arts Coordinator for the North Clare region, but I am not representing the Arts Office here tonight, I am speaking as an independent visual artist.

To outline a framework for this presentation I am going to begin with a few general statements. Rather than get drawn into a debate about where urban ends and rural begins, I will use the word rural to refer to all areas that are not urban, suburban or periurban, leaving villages, cultivated land and wilderness areas. The urban cultural discourse is not the same as the rural cultural discourse where broader definitions of culture apply. The prevailing cultural discourse is quite metro-centric and it does not view rural culture as legitimate, but as naïve and inadequate. The rural context has its own aesthetic, separate from the visual qualities of the landscape; this aesthetic is informal, local, discontinuous and complex.

On many occasions I have heard artists and curators speak of the need to educate rural populations in the language and aesthetics of contemporary art, but I have rarely heard artistic practitioners speak of the need to educate themselves in the language and aesthetic of the rural context. In general, where contemporary artists have engaged with the rural using through the medium of public art, they have kept rural culture at arms length or treated the rural simply as an empty space within which to place art objects.

The topic I am going to address is ‘Curatorial Strategies in the context of the Rural’ focusing on Public Art practice. In Public Art the curatorial process is a complex one involving many agents, from commissioners or funders to host communities, artists, selectors and occasionally a person who actually carries the title of curator. Each agent, I will argue, introduces a layer of strategy into the process; in this case 'strategy' refers to the choices that determine the relationship between artwork and context.

I began to look critically at the type of Public Art happening in the rural realm in Ireland when I got involved in developing a proposal for a Per Cent for Art scheme arising from the development of the new Ennis- Limerick road. During my research into local lore, someone explained to me how the road had severed the community, literally preventing some of the older people from driving relatively short distances to see friends because they found the scale of the new road intimidating.

As I thought about this, I realised that as well as inflicting physical and psychological scarring on the land and community, these roads are new cultural places; they embody a set of cultural values that preference the global over the local. In rural areas we no longer eat food grown locally, fewer people work locally, the majority of us don't shop locally and so on. The roads culture is an expression of the Oil Paradigm, which promotes economic over social values and encourages the separation of production and consumption. The ultimate logic of this paradigm is that the principle of mutual assistance and reciprocity between neighbours, which has been so much a part of rural culture, will be supplanted by solely economic transactions. This is already happening.

The act of placing artworks within the cultural corridor that these roads both create and occupy generates a sort of Drive-By Art placed for the benefit of the motorist. I believe that the function of the artworks commissioned under the Per Cent for Art scheme and located on the side of the new roads is to validate this new cultural place; as such the commissioned artworks become part of the apparatus of the state.

This situation, in which one set of cultural values is accorded dominant status by virtue of being state-sponsored and is imposed upon another local and indigenous set of values is akin to cultural colonialism. I started to think about other ways that artists could engage publicly with and within the rural. When I took up the position as Regional Arts Coordinator for North Clare I set about trying to devise a project that would facilitate a different type of engagement. This project became known as Ground Up and I should point out is also state-funded, though not through the Per Cent for Art scheme. Later this year a book documenting all three strands of the Ground Up project will be published, so rather than discuss Ground Up here, I thought it would be interesting to focus on curatorial strategies that have been adopted elsewhere in relation to Public Art in rural contexts. I am going to present three projects and my intention is to look at the layers of strategy introduced into a project by each of the agents involved and to consider how those strategies manifest in relationship between the final artwork and the context.

Slides 3 – 35 Various images from Artscape Nordland

Artscape Nordland was the brainchild of one artist, Anne Katrine Dolven. Her idea was to turn an art periphery into an art centre. This would be achieved by commissioning an artwork from an international artist for each of the municipalities in the Norwegian county of Nordland; in this way, and I quote "Nordland and Norway would acquire an international art collection . . . founded on qualities inherent in the landscape". A collection of 33 permanent artworks by artists from 18 countries was assembled over a period from 1992-1998.

In the introductory essay to the publication documenting the project, Maaretta Jaukkuri, the primary curator of the project states "Artscape Nordland has come about in a dialogue with the landscape, a dialogue that is carried on in the encounter between the sculpture, the landscape surrounding it and the spectator. The sculpture set in the landscape creates a new place, one that we can visit, look at and reflect on."

This gives us two layers of strategy so far- the first, a stated intent to "acquire an international art collection . . . founded on qualities inherent in the landscape" and the second idea of art and spectator encountering the landscape, as cited by the curator. This overarching emphasis on landscape, which implies primarily the visual aspect of the rural, is firmly rooted in the Romantic tradition. Another layer of strategy comes into play through the process of each selected artist choosing a site and devising a work for that site. Potentially, 33 completely different approaches to the idea of 'qualities inherent in the landscape' could emerge; after all this was the 1990's when it was widely known that a large hole in the ozone layer was appearing right above this area. Surprisingly, the strategies employed are very limited; a large majority of the works rely heavily it seems, upon an experience of the sublime, with 12 out of the 33 works literally incorporating 'Enframing' devices. This device reinforces the separation between the idea of a 'spectator' and a 'scene'. I find this strategy very unsatisfying.

Slide 36 Anthony Gormley, Havmanen and Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea

This work by Anthony Gormely is titled Havmanen. I am showing it to you alongside the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, "Monk by the Sea" because to me they are almost the same; certainly they are dealing with the same idea of the sublime, a Romantic contrasting of the individual with the infinite.

Slides 37 – 39 Inghild Karlsen, After-Images

There are only 4 works, in my assessment, which engage strategically with the complexities of place. This work, titled After-Images by Inghild Karlsen from 1995 is the work I find most interesting in the collection. It borrows its form from the type of street lamp most commonly used in the area, while the lamp takes the shape of a woman's face. It gives a constant light, both in the endless days of the northern summer and during the winter darkness. There are two of these lamps. One is sited in the center of a park in the small town of Myre, while the second, identical light is located in the abandoned fishing community of Nyksund some 15 km away. In my opinion, this is a work of subtlety and complexity, which engages with locality and reflects upon the consequences of human activity for this beautiful, semi-wilderness area.

Slides 40 – 51 Various images, !Xoe Site-Specific [thanks to Dr. Mark Haywood ]

!Xoe Site Specific shares some common ground with Artscape Nordland. It took place in 1998, in the remote South African town of Nieu-Bathesda, located in the Sneeburg Mountains on the edge of a vast, arid wilderness called the great Karoo. Bringing art out from the centres such as Johannesburg and Capetown to this art periphery was at least part of the impetus for the project.

But that is pretty much where the similarities end. Nieu-Bathesda is a predominantly white, historically Afrikaaner village; in the best South African tradition, it has a satellite township, Pienaarsig, made up of a predominantly black population. Despite the fact that Apartheid had ended 3 years previously, and that the town council of Nieu-Bathesda had a black, female mayor, segregation was still the norm. The project was accepted and supported by the town council as a means of attracting tourists to the place and the mayor insisted that the township community should also benefit from the project.

The director of the project, Mark Wilby, established the Ibis art center in Nieu-Bathesda; his essay in the !Xoe publication states "if Ibis was to contribute anything - other than tourist-market material - it was not in denial of, or in spite of our geographic position, but as a result of it. And so it has seemed increasingly appropriate to deal with artwork that concerns itself with the inescapable realities of place."

The emphasis on 'place' as opposed to landscape or space is a key difference between the curatorial strategies of this and the previous project. Mark Haywood, who participated in this project as an artist and advisor, wrote an introductory essay called 'Art in its Place' in which he said ". . . site-specific art, which draws meaning from its location, is usually diminished if subsequently re-presented elsewhere. This interaction means the artist has to establish a relationship with the site, acknowledge what is already there and work with it. The resulting artwork must be visually, conceptually and physically strong enough to maintain that relationship."

There were 14 temporary works in this project; the range of strategies employed by the artists in response to their chosen sites is very broad, so I am going show you three works to try and give a flavour of that.

This work is by Strijdom van der Meerwe and is titled Fossicking. The artist took the term site-specific to mean that he needed to create an artwork that could only exist in Nieu-Bathesda. Having looked at various aspects of the site, he identified the fossil-rich riverbed, which had been declared a National Monument, as the source for this work. The names of 16 fossil-specimens were engraved on copper plates and re-buried 5 meters apart down the middle of Hudson Street's west end. They are constantly covered and uncovered by the dust and sand of the area.

Illusions of Permanence by Bonita Alice took place in the newly established football pitch of Pienaarsig. The artist has taken a floating sheet of corrugated iron as the central motif of the work, with its obvious reference to temporary and township settlements. The image is painted directly on the soccer pitch and is designed according to principles of anamorphic perspective. To view the image with the perspectives corrected it needs to be seen from a single point, so interestingly, this work also incorporates a framing device! But I would argue that in this instance, the usual implications of 'framing of the landscape' are actually turned on their head.
On the opening day of !Xoe two Pienaarsig soccer teams played a match on the painted field wearing jerseys bearing the central motif of the work. To quote the artist again, she says "Illusions of Permanence is a reminder that few of the things that have ever been regarded as enduring and indestructible have proven to be so."

Finally, this is one of two works in !Xoe by Mustafa Maluka and is titled Movement. It took place in an abandoned railway station 25 km from Nieu-Bathesda. The artist has painted the building with fragments of graffiti sampled from various places across the country; he speaks of different cultural frameworks colliding within the work. He makes reference in his statement to the Khoi-san people who lived in this region for millennia, and also says "The accumulation of marks leaves behind the illusion of activity and overwhelming busy-ness contrasted against the ancient, ageless emptiness of the immediate and distant landscapes."

I find in this work a visual reference to the rock paintings of the Khoi-san, of which there are supposedly 15,000 in South Africa. It suggests to me that artist is communicating an understanding of histories traversing and colliding within this landscape; a sense of ‘unempty’ emptiness.

Slides 52 – 60 Various images, Coniston Water Festival

Grizedale Arts is an organisation based in Grizedale Forest in the Lake District of Great Britain which supports the development of new context-specific work. It offers "resources and practical support as well as access to a vast range of cultures driven by the political, economic and emotional relationship to the place/environment". Grizedale is based in the heart of the Lake District, an area with an established reputation as the birthplace of British romanticism. In 2005, they planned a series of events under the title Cumbriana Proof to look at the role of tourism, culture and regeneration in the rural economy. They set about collaborating with local communities, local craftspeople and invited artists on a number of new and existing events. The main event was the Coniston Water Festival. This was originally a 19th Century Boat Dressing Pageant, which died out in 1998 through lack of voluntary support. Grizedale Arts worked with the villagers of Coniston to reinvent the Festival for a contemporary audience, using the best of the old events and adding new interest through artist's projects. The project also included a temporary radio station, village newspaper and a post-event conference to discuss the role of culture and tourism in the regeneration process.

The strategy adopted by Grizedale Arts was not unlike that adopted in the !Xoe project, where the stakeholders had separate but clearly-stated agendas; for the villagers of Coniston, the revival of the festival was both a celebration of local culture and a tourist event; for Grizedale Arts, it ties in very much with their investigations into the complex matrix of perspectives at work in this place, including the historical baggage of Romanticism. Their decision to work within the framework of an existing cultural event, rather than generating a new art event takes this project a step closer to real collaboration with the local community in my opinion, and strikes me as an effective way of circumventing the usual hierarchical formulation of cultural value, that places art high up and rural culture low down.

The strategies adopted by the artists in this project ranged from a survey of rave sites in the surrounding countryside to guided walks, talks and performances, floating artworks and more. I am going to show you the work of two projects which make it clear that this type of engagement does not represent a dumbing-down of artistic content.

Manzill World is the creation of Sirus Manzill, an alter-ego of the artist Charlie Tweed. The idea behind Manzill World is to work towards a new, safer future by removing all the animals and plants from the world and replacing them with artificial or hand-made versions. The slogan of Manzill World is ‘Let’s start again’.

Sirus travels from place to place by rubber dinghy, and when he arrives he sets up a tent and begins digging an underground world in which this safe new future can take place. For Coniston Water Festival he proposed “digging a new future for us all below Coniston Water lake - the plan above gives you an idea of the ideal that I am workin towards - which will lead us to a new safer future. I will also be making new animals for release around the lake and planting some safe plants.” He also proposed to boil all the water of Coniston Lake and remove all the plants and animals from it.

During the festival he broadcast a daily radio show live from the edge of the water and distributed information leaflets encouraging people to remove plants and creatures from their gardens and start again. He ran classes and demonstrations to show people how to make their own animals out of bits of household waste i.e. tins, cardboard, tea bags etc. and to release them around the lake. Sirus maintains a weblog during his projects; unfortunately I couldn’t track down any images of the handmade animals in the wild.

Thinking Space for the North is a long-term project by artists Dan Robinson and Bryan Davis in association with Grizedale Arts to re-imagine the future of a remote and unoccupied farmhouse at Low Parkamoor in relation to wider local, national and global contexts. During Consiton Water Festival the site ran as a field centre, looking at the possible future uses of the building, the surrounding landscape and its diverse user groups. Steiner, Ruskin, ecology, tourism, 1970's communes and land management ideas were all perceived as contributing to the dialogue. This illustration from the Coniston relates to a guided expedition to the farmhouse, incorporating a boat-ride and a walk, where the general public and invited guests could observe or join in renovation activities and get involved in discussions about possible future uses for the building. A website for this project is due online shortly.

The title of this presentation, Conflicting Interests & Interesting Conflicts came about in response to a comment from the floor at a previous seminar, where someone suggested that artists who want to work with rural communities should make it clear in advance that they are ’not a threat’. I disagree fundamentally with this idea. Art worth doing is always potentially threatening to the status quo because it will ask questions; questions are a precursor to change. The idea that art should be 'neutral' is a false one - no art is neutral, and this is particularly true of Public Art. I also disagree strongly with the idea that conflict must be avoided by artists. Conflicting interests are inherent in human society, and the rural is a heavily contested site where some of the most pressing global issues of our time are being played out. Public Art which addresses rather than avoids conflict will certainly provoke discussion and debate, some of it heated; but I believe it has the potential to open up a space where people can examine issues of conflict rather simply reacting to them.