The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art 1443856983, 9781443856980

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The Permanence of the Transient

The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art

Edited by

Camila Maroja, Caroline Menezes and Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri

The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art Edited by Camila Maroja, Caroline Menezes and Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Camila Maroja, Caroline Menezes, Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri and contributors Authors are exclusively responsible for the opinions and statements in their articles. All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5698-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5698-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Images ........................................................................................... vii Preface ........................................................................................................ x Introduction .............................................................................................. xv Approaching Precariousness in Art Camila Maroja Part I: Dematerialization/Materialization Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Photogenic Art: Precarious Participation and Documentation Cristina Albu Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 17 Embracing Uncertainty Through Digital Mediation of Art and Culture Florian Wiencek Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 30 For a Concept of Immaterial Indestructibility Matthew Bowman Part II: Cultural Politics Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 44 How to Animate Images or: On the Production of Precarious Labour Friederike Sigler Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 57 Ecological Precariousness and the Fragility of Art and Life in the East European Neo-Avant-Garde Maja and Reuben Fowkes Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 70 Against (Porno)Precarity Andrés David Montenegro Rosero

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Part III: Precariousness in Latin America: Some Studies Chapter Seven........................................................................................... 82 Precarious Matters: Conceptualism and Materiality in Chile and Argentina Sophie Halart Chapter Eight ............................................................................................ 96 Happenings to Anti-Happenings: The Avant-Garde and Obsolescence in 1960s Argentina Elize Mazadiego Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 106 Words in Mira Schendel’s Artwork: Contradiction Between Permanent and Transient Ana Mannarino Part IV: Precariousness in Art: Artists’ Narratives Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 116 Precariousness as a Conceptual Basis for the Understanding of Art as Uninterrupted Primacy of Play Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 126 A Word is a Word is a Word? Gerard Choy Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 135 Off Balance Nicholas Pope with Kevin Mount Notes on the Authors .............................................................................. 148 Images’ Credits ....................................................................................... 152

LIST OF IMAGES Black and White Figures Fig. 1: Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. Fig. 2: Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. Fig. 3: Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. Fig. 4: Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. Fig. 5: Petr Štembera, Sleeping on a Tree, 1975. Fig. 6: Rudolf Sikora, The Earth Must not Become a Dead Planet, 1972 (Detail). Fig. 7: Group TOK, Transparent Bins, 1972. Fig. 8: Šempas Family, 1977. Fig. 9: Tetlock-Choy, Translate #2, 2009. Fig. 10: Tetlock-Choy, Translate #3, 2009. Fig. 11: Tetlock-Choy, Violin in Alum 6. Excerpt of page 121, 2009. Fig. 12: Photograph of 1900.9.6.1971, 1971. Fig. 13: Langly-Dome Enterprises sandwich board photographs, 1972. Fig. 14: Nicholas Pope, Special Vessels, 1973. Fig. 15: Installation view of Special Vessels exhibition stand, 1973. Fig. 16: Nicholas Pope, Stacked Clay, 1976. Fig. 17: Nicholas Pope with Anne and Ovidiu Serban in Romanni de Sus, Romania, 1975. Fig. 18: Election rally at Piata Revolutiei, Bucuresti, R.S. Romania, 1975. Fig. 19: Nicholas Pope, Two Stacks, 1976. Fig. 20: Nicholas Pope, Three Stone Slabs, 1978. Fig. 21: Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Anrolfini, 1978. Fig. 22: Nicholas Pope, carvers and others at Mbawala, Ruvuma Valley, Tanzania, 1982. Fig. 23: Nicholas Pope, African Woods, 1982. Fig. 24: Nicholas Pope, Model for an Unknown Landscape No.1, 1984. Fig. 25: Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope with Holes, 1985. Fig. 26: Nicholas Pope, Myself in Difficulty, 1986. Fig. 27: Nicholas Pope, The Vicar, 1997. Fig. 28: Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope Spiked and Holed, 1987. Fig. 29: Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope Melting, 1991. Fig. 30: Nicholas Pope, Black and White Spotted, 1992.

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Fig. 31: Nicholas Pope, Ten Commandment Pots, 1992. Fig. 32: Nicholas Pope, Small Ten Commandments in Flight, 1992. Fig. 33: Nicholas Pope, Dead Mum Surrounded By Her Sons, 2009. Fig. 34: Nicholas Pope, Vrouwe Justitia, 1998. Fig. 35: Nicholas Pope, I Am Sad Today, Very, Very Sad (Prototype Female Urinal), 2001. Fig. 36: Nicholas Pope, Suicide Woolie, 2003. Fig. 37: Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope Lit from Within, 2009.

Coloured Plates Plate 1: Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003. Plate 2: Olafur Eliasson, Take your time, 2008. Plate 3: Olafur Eliasson, Take your time, 2008. Plate 4: Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004. Plate 5: Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004. Plate 6: Exhibition installation view, Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs. Central photo: Robert W. Off, Polly Off at Glen Laurel, Fox Chapel, PA, 1948. Plate 7: Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. Plate 8: Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. Plate 9: Lydia Galego, Embolsado (Bagged In), 1993. Plate 10: Roser Bru, Las Frustraciones de Mariana (Mariana’s Frustrations), 1976. Plate 11: Lydia Galego, Bicho Canasto II (Caterpillar II), 1987. Plate 12: Roser Bru, Edelmira Azocar, Animita, 1977. Plate 13: Mira Schendel, Untitled, from the series Toquinhos (Little Stubs), 1972. Plate 14: Mira Schendel, Objetos Gráficos (Graphic Objects), 1967–1968. Plate 15: Mira Schendel, Untitled, from the series Monotipia (Monotypes), 1965. Plate 16: [+zero], Visit: corporal delirium, 2008. Plate 17: [+zero], Visit: corporal delirium, 2008. Plate 18: Gerard Choy, Violin in the White, 2008. Plate 19: Gerard Choy, Violin in Alum 6, 2009. Plate 20: Nicholas Pope, Oak Wood Column, 1973. Plate 21: Nicholas Pope, Odd Elms, 1981. Plate 22: Nicholas Pope, Yoo Hoo Too, 1981. Plate 23: Nicholas Pope, Norman, Virginia and Other Members of the Congregation, 1986.

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Plate 24: Nicholas Pope, The Apostles Speaking in Tongues Lit by Their Own Lamps, 1993–96. Plate 25: Nicholas Pope, Motorway Service Station of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues, 2003. Plate 26: Nicholas Pope, Liar Liar, 2007–09. Plate 27: Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope knitted, shrunk and hung, 2012.

PREFACE This book is the result of academic collaborations concerning the same question: how to approach the notion of precariousness in art, its meanings and outcomes? Precariousness is a concept that overarches a wide range of theoretical sources from which art has been created, established, and studied, being thus vital to promote a greater debate on the term in visual arts. Particularly since, due to the intrinsic nature of the term precariousness in itself, the span of its meanings is variable and difficult to grasp. Therefore, as editors, we aim through this publication to open the term to a consistent critical reflection on the variety of ways it underlines contemporary art. This publication originated at the 39th Association of Art Historians Conference, in Reading, UK, in April 2013. Under the topic “The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art”, a two-day academic session was organized in which participated most of this book’s collaborators. The discussion initiated at the conference has developed further, and other researchers have joined the publication project, giving special prominence to artists’ narratives and theories. The essays here, while focusing on art, broaden the discussion to other areas such as political studies, sociology, and philosophy. This interdisciplinary scope reveals the phenomenon of art as a unifying force for diverse fields of knowledge. Moreover, studies on art increasingly align themselves with the complex systemic thinking that guides contemporary discussions in many academic areas as well as everyday life. The book has been organized into four parts in which similar perspectives on precariousness converge. Each part should not be understood in isolation as its several interrelated debates compose the core of this publication. The introductory essay operates as an overview of the questions that will be examined more extensively in the essays—initiating a debate on how precariousness can work in the visual arts during the 20th and 21st centuries. The notion of precariousness first unfolds as defined by its physical or intangible attributes. Named “Dematerialization/Materialization”, Part One places precariousness in everyday life in the digital era and considers new media art and spectatorship. This session questions the issues of collecting, documenting, displaying, and preserving art nowadays. Cristina

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Albu shows that, paradoxically, the “immateriality” and fragility of this collective data is key both to its proliferation and its dispersion. Through the use of digital photographs and videos the spectators’ behavioural responses to large-scale sculptures, installations, performances, and new media environments can be understood as a means for the inclusion of their subjectivity into the artworks. Albu examines a series of reflective and responsive artworks that act as a magnetic core attracting the viewers to take part in the construction of their meanings using digital technologies. In this digital domain the role of the viewers as well as of the art professionals, and institutions involves change. The digital capture of the participative gesture in an exhibition also implies its mutability. Thus, Part One includes the debate around mediation between art and public through digital apparatus in the realm of cultural institutions. Regarding this topic, Florian Wiencek puts forward these questions: How can the unpredictability of digital media enrich the reception of art? And how can cultural institutions benefit from this on-going and interchangeable relationship with the public? Wiencek’s questions relate to some challenges faced by cultural institutions in the 21st century, including ones that have arisen from the emergence of a participatory culture in our current information society. As the author discusses in detail in his essay, this participatory emphasis brings several new layers of precariousness to cultural institutions. From the elusive aspects of digital media art practice, reception, and institutionalisation, we shift to Matthew Bowman’s essay, which uses fictitious examples from blockbuster movies to compel us to notice the less fragile forms of precariousness in art. Starting with the description of a couple of iconoclastic movie scenes, Bowman suggests the indestructibility of digital media. Along this path the reader realizes that some established notions of dematerialization, widely affirmed in the history of art during the 20th century, could point to other directions. Part Two, titled “Cultural Politics”, concerns the precariousness present in current socio-political, ecological, and economical situations. A complex picture of precarious labour can be taken on observing the bond between the art object, its contextual meaning and its representation through images. Analysing the artwork by Harun Farocki presented at documenta X, Friederike Sigler examines the new form of labour that emerged from the ambivalence between materiality and invisibility in the last decades. Her perspective embraces a micro and macro analysis in which Farocki’s artwork functions as a metonymy of documenta’s curatorial project. In the text by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, economical

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and socio-political conditions, art perception, and art making are interwoven into their study of the Eastern European neo-avant-garde emphasizing ecological precarity. By relating environmental awareness to an art that has become known mostly for its direct political implications, they widen the political concept to include other dimensions explored by artists in the region, such as community building and collective creation. Expanding precariousness into areas considered taboo in the academic field—namely the manoeuvres of the resilient art market—Andrés David Montenegro Rosero critically discusses how the term was decontextualised and utilized as a style. The lack of fair economic and social conditions in “underdeveloped” countries has ended up being considered a distinguishing factor for art production that is then explored as a stylistic attribute. Thus, with the boom of marginal areas in the art market, the precarity that has affected socioeconomic realities is lent to other contexts, aiming the specific trade of art goods. Part Three is dedicated to studies in Latin America, a region in which the notion of precariousness is a constant feature in art history. “Precariousness in Latin America: Some Studies” situates the discussion of precariousness regionally. Sophie Halart brings back the issue of dematerialization, scrutinizing the theories that associate political gesture to Conceptualismo in Chile and Argentina. According to Halart, strict definitions given a posteriori and mainly linked to the socio-historical context revised by post-colonial lenses can eclipse the significance of other important practices, which captured and dealt with the same precarious conditions but in different fashions. Halart calls attention to artists whose artworks are constituted by instigations similar to the ones related to Conceptual trends, but whose artistic manifestations result in different visual outcomes. Focusing on Argentina, Elize Mazadiego examines a lively period of artistic experimentation, investigating the rapid growth and development of Happenings into transient and destructive actions. The author argues that the impact of these artistic ephemeral events was indeed permanent and left an urge for constant innovation and transformation in the Argentine artistic scene. Understanding language as being the core substance of precariousness leads to the comprehension that all artistic experiments are processes in perpetual mutation and never completed. This is the approach given by Ana Mannarino when contemplating the production of Mira Schendel, a Swiss-born artist who worked and lived in Brazil. Part of Schendel’s oeuvre incorporates written language and Mannarino demonstrates that the subtle, fragile, and transient qualities of Schendel’s graphic manipulations derive from the profound understanding that the artist had of precarious

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structures of language—influenced by her close contact with the Brazilian Concrete poets. The final session is dedicated to artists’ voices. Still taking into consideration the notion that language is a precarious index of the external world. “Precariousness in Art: Artists’ Narratives” exposes the experiences, aims and investigations of three distinct artists: Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri, Gerard Choy, and Nicholas Pope. Poltronieri continues the discussion about language as a precarious modus-operandi through which the world is perceived. He delivers a philosophical discussion about the primacy of play and its inextricable connection to art, exploring the “games” carried out by his art group, [+zero], employing media art, technology and performance. Choy further develops the debate regarding the volatile substance that composes communication via language. Using fiction, images, and theory, the artist delves into language’s precarious aspect to highlight the fragile relationship between word and meaning. The artist makes visible the provisional truth that surrounds each phrase in a particular cultural context. The leitmotif of his creations are the words themselves, their representation and a sort of “translatability”. Playing with these elements, he presents the “translatability” not only of verbal codes but also of sounds, material and images. Closing the fourth part, Pope generously tells us his life-history, giving a first-hand testimony of a life dedicated to art wrought with precariousness. Since he was an art student he has challenged the limit of precarious shapes when creating his sculptures. Thus, precariousness has become embedded in his approach. Later on, a dramatic shift in his personal trajectory expanded the manner in which precariousness became present in his art and life. His essay, written with Kevin Mount, reminds us of the fundamental role that biography can play in art. Bringing together multiple aspects in which precariousness can feature in contemporary art, this book aims to be a compendium in which the readers will find evidence that the notion of precariousness is deeply embedded in the issues of making, thinking, and perceiving art. Finally, we would like to thank everyone who helped with this publication, especially Alexandra Dodson, Luciana Dumphreys, Erin Hanas, Serena Qiu, and Mariola V. Alvarez for their attentive and most useful suggestions during the editing process of this manuscript. We are also deeply indebted to Amanda Millar from Cambridge Scholars Publishers for her dedication to this project. Further thanks go to those who graciously granted permission for the reproduction of images. Lastly, we would like to acknowledge Duke University, the University of the Arts

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London, and the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, institutions that generously supported us and facilitated our academic session at the 2013 AAH Conference. We also wish to express our gratitude to our families and friends who have encouraged us to complete this endeavour. Camila Maroja, Caroline Menezes, and Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri

INTRODUCTION APPROACHING PRECARIOUSNESS IN ART CAMILA MAROJA In the visual arts, precariousness per se does not constitute an art movement, school, or style. Nor does it define a particular art historical period or a general state of aesthetics. Rather, the concept implies a condition: a transient, uncertain, state that can stay in contrast to established or stable ones. Ironically, precariousness’s precarity, and its resulting ambiguity, makes clearly articulating the term a difficult task. Yet, even operating beyond traditional categories of art history, artists and critics have consistently associated precariousness with various art discourses.1 During the 20th and 21st centuries, the term has been related to several artistic events that are now part of established art history: Marcel Duchamp’s famous anti-retinal art, epitomised by his readymades; the ephemeral Dadaist soirées, which incorporated change in their production process and appeared meaningless; Neoconcrete artworks that depended 1

I will focus here on the 20th and 21st centuries, a temporal frame that has known an unprecedented amount of instability. Conversely, Theodor Adorno famously started his Aesthetic Theory (1984, [1970]) by highlighting the precarity of any current definition of art: “It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in its relationship to the whole, nor even the right to art to exist.” However, precariousness can also be associated with the arts of other time periods; two examples include the late 17th century Baroque’s taste for the transitory and the grotesque, and the 19th century romantic obsession with the fragment and ruins. Outside the artistic domain, during neoliberal times, the term is profusely associated with the total lack of protection and rights in work relations, and the rise of immaterial labour. But even in political discourses and social science research, precariousness’s significance has become highly polysemic. For instance, after debates on post-Fordism denounced increasingly precarious work conditions under new labour regimes, a sense of precarity also entered the ecological sphere, by means both of radical climate changes and nuclear danger, as life conditions on earth appeared to be increasingly tenuous.

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on the viewer’s active engagement, theorised by poet Ferreira Gullar in “Teoria do não-objeto” (“Theory of the Non-Object”, 1958); Gustav Metzger’s experiments with “acid action painting” as well as his radical “Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto” (1959); critic Germano Celant’s coinage of the term “Arte Povera” (1967) in reference to a young generation of artists whose contingent pieces explored changing physical states; Robert Smithson’s fascination with the concept of entropy, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system, which was materialised in his earthworks; Artur Barrio’s pieces made of perishable materials, like his Trouxas Ensanguentadas (Bloody Bundles, 1969), which attempted to resist the commodification and institutionalisation of art; VALIE EXPORT’s feminist performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1968), which unsettled conventions of presentation and documentation, as the “documentary” photographs that featured the artist wielding a machine gun were taken a year after the actual performance in 1969; and Nam June Paik’s Electronic Fairy (1989), a historic new media work, whose now obsolete display may alter the way that present-day viewers perceive the artwork. Although incomplete, this list supports two considerations: first, that in the last century precariousness has been primarily associated with experimental art production, operating as a way to defy or subvert traditional views of art; second, that rather than being solely restricted to the artwork’s material fragility, the term can operate on several juxtaposing levels. Instigated by this belief that precariousness can be loosely present in an artwork’s diverse features—form, material, method of production, medium, presentation, reception, documentation, narration, collection, and conservation—this introductory essay constitutes a rather broad discussion of the term “precariousness” in the field of the visual arts during the late 20th and 21st centuries.2 Precariousness can operate as a theme, a concept, 2

Recently, curator Nicolas Bourriaud proposed “precariousness” as a determinant feature for contemporary art in his book The Radicant (2009). In a smaller article in the magazine Open, responding to Jacques Rancière’s critique, Bourriaud reviewed and further explained the concept of precariousness, concentrating on its ethical and political aspects. He explains: “A precarious regime of aesthetics is developing, based on speed, intermittence, blurring and fragility. Today, we need to reconsider culture (and ethics) on the basis of a positive idea of the transitory, instead of holding on to the opposition between the ephemeral and the durable and seeing the latter as the touchstone of true art and the former as a sign of barbarism. […] In this new configuration, the physical duration of the artwork is dissociated from its duration as information and its conceptual and/or material precariousness is associated with new ethical and aesthetic values that establish a new approach to culture and art.” He then proposes three main patterns in precarious aesthetics:

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a condition, a context, and a process in contemporary art production. By examining some of the ways that precariousness permeates artworks as well as art history, I hope to provide an overview of the issues surrounding precariousness that are more thoroughly examined in the following essays. I start by arguing that the concept has played a central role in subverting the Modernist credence of the autonomous art object. Precariousness in modern and contemporary art often acquires a positive value, despite its negative semantic context in common usage.3 I will also consider how precariousness can be present in the context of both institutional and socio-political contemporary art production, spurring debates about the legitimation and diffusion of marginal artists, artworks, and art histories. Finally, I call attention to the term’s potency in providing spectators with “transcoding, flickering, and blurring”. He associates these characteristics, present in the work of artists like Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, to the world we live in, which is explained via Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity”. His view of the political dimension of the artwork being present in its capacity to create new forms and not in its content touches on philosopher Paolo Virno’s proposal, expressed in an interview published in the same magazine. Although I agree that there is a political potential in mobilising “precariousness” in the arts, I don’t believe that we can define contemporary art via precariousness. Moreover, it is always dangerous (and paradoxical) to create a structural model out of concepts such as “precariousness” or “formlessness”, especially when this model is applied indistinctively to “contemporary art” at large. See Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2009); Nicolas Bourriaud, “Precarious Constructions: Answers to Jacques Rancière on Art and Politics”, in Open, no. 17 (A Precarious Existence) (2009): 32-35. Available at: http://www.skor.nl/_files/ Files/OPEN17_P20-37%283%29.pdf. See also Paolo Virno’s interview: Sonja Lavaert and Pascal Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art: An Interview with Paolo Virno”, in Open, no. 17 (A Precarious Existence) (2009): 72-85. Available at: http://www.skor.nl/_files/Files/OPEN17_P72-85%281%29.pdf. 3 Although precariousness is etymologically linked to the sacred, sharing in Latin the same root with the verb “to pray”, the term normally signifies frail and/or ephemeral conditions. With the questioning of the Enlightenment’s ideals and master narratives, it has assumed a positive valence not only in the visual arts, but also in the humanities and social sciences—as have other concepts like “opacity”, advocated by Caribbean intellectual Édouard Glissant. In the article “A Snapshop of Precariousness”, while discussing the feminisation of labour and precarity in Italy, the authors highlight the positive flexibility and criticism that the term enables: “Insofar as the concept of precarity belongs to semantically negative areas (instability, transience, fragility) it is at the same time also connected with the idea of re-questioning, of becoming, of the future, of possibility, concepts which together contribute to creating the idea of a nomadic subject without fixed roots.” Cf. Manuela Galetto et alli, “A Snapshop of Precariousness: Voices, Perspectives, Dialogues”, Feminist Review, no. 87, Italian Feminisms (2007): 106.

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an ambiguous territory in which regulated and standardised behaviour is not a given, leaving the public free to develop alternative actions. The ephemeral nature implied in the term precariousness supposes a tense relationship within the tradition of fine art. Conventionally, a work of art is defined as an object that displays a high degree of dexterity in the handling of its medium, a condition that normally excludes precarity. Opposing this and other artistic traditions, precarity presupposes that the object’s status as art cannot be established by the fact that it shows appropriate formal and/or technical characteristics. The term also defies the assumption that the work of art is something “made to last”, to be stored in museums as part of society’s cultural heritage. Therefore, precariousness can be collated not only to the avant-garde’s love for the transitory, the elusive, and the ephemeral, but also to its assault on academic training and the European aesthetic tradition. Likewise, precariousness is associated with the so-called “crisis of the object” in the 1960s.4 This period saw an explosion of new artistic practices— Happenings, Performance, Installation, Environmental Art, Body Art, Conceptual Art, Mail Art, and Video Art, among others—that either crossed the borders of recognised media or cross-pollinated art with media that had not previously been understood as art forms. As a direct result, artists came up with different terms to identify their art production, like Gullar’s “non-object” cited above, Donald Judd’s definition of “specific object” (“Specific Objects”, 1964) in reference to minimalist works, or Dick Higgins’s artwork Intermedial Object #1 (1966), which introduced the term “intermedia” in an attempt to characterise Fluxus work. It was clear that by the second half of the last century traditional art categories could not encompass the new methods of art production. This opening up of the definition of art introduced the idea of the art piece as a process or a task rather than as a finished object for contemplation. For instance, in Yoko Ono’s Beat Piece (1963) participants read on a small piece of paper: “Listen to a heart beat”. As part of the artist’s event score series, the 4

In an essay on Conceptual Art, art historian Charles Harrison suggested that the “crisis of the object” was in reality a crisis in the critical relation between “art” and “language”: “a crisis brought by the collapse of those protocols that had previously served to keep the two apart. […] [T]he making of art and the making of theory might had to be seen as indistinguishable.” Although Harrison is obviously referring to his experience with the group Art & Language, his comment reminds us that there was a blending among different media even before the 1960s. It also illustrates another characteristic of the period: the increasing number of artists who included art criticism and theorisation within their responsibilities. Cf. Charles Harrison, “Conceptual Art”, in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell Publising, 2002), 319.

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artwork focused on a simple and yet intimate action—calling attention to the potentiality and fragility inherent in every living body. The notion of the artwork as a process resulted in an increasing number of participatory experiments—e.g. objects to be manipulated, scores to be performed, installation spaces to be actively explored, and/or digital images to be downloaded and manipulated—that have re-shaped the concept of reception in contemporary art. Comparable to the fraught relationship between language and intentionality that is permeated with precariousness, this reception enables both readings and misreadings, accepts instability and rejects definitive interpretations. In the 1990s, when participatory art started to receive consistent attention from US and European curators and critics,5 these artworks were perceived as a tool to engender art communities by imbricating human relations with social context. Therefore, the contingency of these artworks adapted the avantgarde project of inserting art into daily life, and operated as a critique to exclusive and isolated art. Viewed from this angle, precariousness in art can constitute a critical means for confronting Modernism’s formalist legacy, epitomised in the Anglo-American art world by the writing of the US art critic Clement Greenberg.6 Certainly, precariousness’s recent philosophical, conceptual, and formal acclaim can be correlated to a crisis of certitude that became preeminent in the humanities in the late 20th century. By the 1990s, the most popular methods of critical inquiry—including post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, and feminism and gender studies—had in common the inclusion of some kind of revision and critique of hegemonic ideologies within their intellectual projects. In such a scenario, art history became increasingly interdisciplinary, dismissing traditional stylistic and iconographic focuses as well as the emphasis on the visual. As a direct 5 I am thinking here not only of Bourriaud’s “relational art” focus, but also of Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s project Do it started in 1994, in addition to Claire Bishop’s attempt to systematise the history of participatory events with the publication of an anthology of primary sources, Participation (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). These readings propose spotlighting ethical and political concerns, and privileging art that can be understood as social practice—though sometimes without sufficiently questioning who constitutes the public in contact with these practices. When showcased within an institutional space, the incorporation of participatory artworks should function as a powerful institutional critique, forcing art institutions to review their display parameters; this, unfortunately, is not always the case. 6 For a critical contextualisation and revision of Clement Greenberg’s texts and legacy, see Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

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consequence, precariousness, viewed as another challenge to the institutional authority associated with Eurocentric Modernity, gained new popularity. Precariousness thus became a current concept in the art world, even without the same succès de scandale of terms like “dematerialisation” in the 1970s, “postmodernism” in the 1980s, or “informel” in the 1990s,7 each of which represented a different critique of the Modernist artwork. In the 2000s, the success of the term was rekindled in academia and activist circles vis-à-vis debates on the neoliberal order and the rise of immaterial labour and the global precariat.8 Precariousness’s currency in the visual arts is also associated with the advent of new media art,9 which, similar to media like performance, is dynamic, customisable, and time-based. If understood as an art form that uses the inherent possibilities of the digital and that is produced, stored, and presented in a digital format, new media is inseparable from the rapidly transforming field of digital technologies. Here, issues of obsolescence and preservation become key. Being associated with an 7

The critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler coined the term “dematerialization” in their 1968 article “The Dematerialization of Art”, in reference to art that “emphasises the thinking process almost exclusively” and “may result in the object becoming wholly obsolete”. Grosso modo, the so-called “postmodern turn” in the arts reacted against the decay of an institutionalised and elitist Modernism and the “failure” of the avant-garde project. As such, critics challenged the opposition of high and low culture and attacked concepts like “originality”. Georges Bataille’s concept of “the formless” (1929) was popularised by the show L’Informe: Mode d’Emploi (Formless: A User’s Guide) curated by Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois (Centres George Pompidou, 1996) in which the concept intended to operate as a critique and subversion of Modernism’s precepts. Needless to say, all these concepts touch on the notion of precariousness in the subversions of the status of the contemplative art object as defined in High Modernism. 8 The magazine Open dedicated the 2009 issue, entitled A Precarious Existence. Vulnerability in the Public Domain, to discussing the term in relation to aesthetics, the visual arts, and the creative industry. 9 The book Precarious Visualities uses the notion of precariousness to analyze new directions in media like photography, film, video, and performance. Here, the term relates to the advent of what art historian Christine Ross names the “bodily turn” in visual studies. For Ross, the presence of the body complicates the perceptual experience of the spectator in contemporary art and visual culture, as it addresses “the agency, yet finiteness and fallibility, of vision, together with its interrelatedness with other senses.” Cf. Christine Ross, “Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture”, in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux, and Christine Ross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 7-8.

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industry that is constantly updating itself, new media art has become a precarious territory, difficult to define. Theoretician and curator Christine Paul elucidates: “A definition of new media art, although the focus of many discussions in physical and virtual space, is an elusive goal, since the technological and conceptual territory occupied by this art form is constantly being refigured.”10 Moreover, as her comment infers in its mention of virtual space, new media art also creates different modes of display. Able to inhabit spaces other than the museum and the gallery, it prompts new approaches to art collection and display. As such, art in the digital era instigates new institutional models in the art world, impacting the way that cultural institutions, curators, artists, and art educators operate. Precariousness then enters the institutional sphere: artists and curators become mediators or facilitators for an audience that collaborates and interacts with the pieces—continuing the emphasis on the artwork as an “open-work”, to use Umberto Eco’s famous term, originally highlighted in 1960s experimental production. Furthermore, the accessibility of cyberspace and of the new infrastructures of production welcome underground art activity, which subverts the language of the society of the spectacle towards its own ends—as in the work of The Yes Men who, through official spoof websites and passing as corporations’ spokesmen, insert fake news in the media in order to create social awareness of real problems—evoking the Argentinean experiment Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar, 1966), which also employed mass media as a political tool. Precariousness can also be present in the institutional art space as an index of the deficiency or the lack of an artistic apparatus. The paucity of spaces to discuss, study, produce, display, and commercialise art in areas far away from consolidated art centres has direct consequences in the assiduity and dissemination of its local production. It is also a great contributor to artistic diaspora and nomadism. Undeniably, artists and art professionals who decide to stay in their local areas may find creative solutions to overcome the precariousness of their institutional field—by organising artist-run spaces, exhibitions, and communities, for example. Departing from the established art centres and its canonical rules, these independent organisations potentially introduce other criteria into the art world—especially since these marginal spaces sometimes do not conform to (or are not interested in) the rules and narratives instituted by canonical art history. However, if marginality relative to major art networks may 10

Christiane Paul, “Introduction”, in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. Curatorial Models for Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3.

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indeed foster new artistic parameters, institutional precarity hinders artistic legitimisation and dissemination. As cultural theorist Mieke Bal has noted, the museum is a discourse, a structure that via collecting and exhibiting creates and propagates an art narrative.11 Consequently, without local institutional support, marginal production runs either the risk of becoming invisible and inoperative in constructing new artistic parameters, or of being incorporated uncritically into hegemonic art narratives. The problem is geopolitical and has direct consequences in the writing of the history of art, which only recently with the emergence of so-called “global art” has consistently incorporated artists from geographical areas other than the US and Europe. Institutional precarity is generally associated with turbulent political and socio-economic contexts: areas under totalitarian or unstable regimes as well as regions stricken with poverty. Contextual instability affects not only the local production but also the criticism and historiography of such production, which is generally read through the lens of its socio-political context—which happened for Latin American Conceptualismo as well as for Eastern European neo-avant-garde art. In conflict zones, the consequences may not only thwart the contemporary art scene, but also put at risk the region’s cultural legacy—as in the case of the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. During such traumatic events, the fragility of the artwork and of human life become perilously intertwined. Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev pinpointed this shared fragile condition, asking: “How does their violated materiality come to matter, and how does the example of their loss and damage help us to react to a sense of the precariousness of life, the loss and damage to a flow of persons projected onto, and projected from, those artworks?”12 Her question brings to mind the work of Hannah Arendt and other theorists who interrogate the human condition, trying to find common ethics in the turbulent world that we inhabit together.13 11 See Mieke Bal, “The Discourse of the Museum”, in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 201-218. 12 Precarity here not only spurs ethical questions, but also debates about conservation and reconstruction; a satisfactory solution to this traumatic episode seems far from realized. Cf. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “On the Destruction of Art – or Conflict on Art, or Trauma and the Art of Healing”, in 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts n. 40 (Kassel/Ostfildern-Ruit: documenta 13/Hatje Cants, 2012), 8. 13 Spurred by the work of intellectuals like Arendt, Jeremy Rifkin, and Judith Butler to analyse the ethics of our time, the exhibition Human Condition. Empathy and Emancipation in Precarious Times (Kunsthaus Gras, 2010) debated the zeitgeist of our century, which “has an almost paranoid character and in any case

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Artist Hélio Oiticica famously employed materials as diverse as sand, plastic, television sets, cheap plywood, and live parrots in his environmental piece Tropicália (1967). Materiality here operated metonymically and metaphorically as an index of precariousness. By mixing “poor materials” and technological appliances, nature and culture, the artist exposed the transitory space that Brazil (and he as a “third world artist” living under a dictatorship) occupied. The artwork gave visual form to the historical belief that two Brazils coexisted: one that is urban, avantgarde, and modernised; the other, rural, kitschy, and primitive—without any attempts to resolve this contradiction into an artificial final synthesis.14 By being deeply inserted in its local context and culture, the precariousness that can be viewed and experienced by walking through the environmental piece ultimately reminded the participants that art is indeed a social act. Though enacting adversity—materialising the artist’s motto “on adversity we thrive”15—the artwork had the political potential to create personal and social awareness. What is more, Tropicália created an ambiguous arena in which contradictions coexisted. While performing the embodied experience of walking through Tropicália, participants could find personal answers to the contradictions expresses existential fear”. It showcased the artwork of Lidia Abdul, Marcel Dzama, Maria Lassnig, Mark Manders, Renzo Martens, Kris Martin, Adrian Paci, and Susan Philipsz. The goal was to express how “the complexity of [the] current situation that foregrounds precariousness and fragility of global systems of economy and political order calls for a more profound reflection upon contemporary mechanisms of social movements, structures of labour, distribution of power and the ethics of judgment.” The show thus understood that some artworks embody or denounce socio-economic unpredictability, political adversity, and existential precariousness. However, the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Martin’s sculpture Mandi VIII (2006), based on the Hellenic piece Laocoön and His Sons, was more an evocation of the Romantic sublime and a fascination with the apocalyptical than a space for a critical consideration of human and ecological fragility. Cf. Universalmuseum Joanneum, Human Condition. Empathy and Emancipation in Precarious Times, (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010). 14 For an extensive analysis of Tropicália, see Celso Favaretto, “Oiticica and the music of Tropicália”, in Arte contemporânea brasileira: um e/entre outro/s, v. 4 of XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), 152155. 15 The motto, “Da adversidade vivemos” was formulated in the text “Esquema geral da nova objetividade” (“General scheme of the new objectivity”, 1967). Proposing that adversity was a common condition in Third World countries, Oiticica suggests “adversity” as the starting point for any Brazilian artist and for a shared “Third World” identity.

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the piece proposed or simply accept irresolution.16 Thus, when refusing to deliver easy or prefabricated solutions, artworks can provide spectators with a critical space in which to affectively exercise freedom through small gestures. Therefore, precariousness in art can be organised politically to prevent categorical resolutions, hold the future in abeyance, and create an arena in which the spectators can perform actions and critically reflect. Yet, when strictly summoned for formal reasons, precariousness runs the risk of becoming a fetishized commodity for the art market, thereby losing its political potentiality. This formalist danger seems to be exacerbated as the underground production during the 1960s and selected production from marginal places have been amply institutionalised and successfully commercialised. After all, as the examples discussed in this essay show, precarious artworks are already part of canonical art history—a discipline that is, of course, a precarious construction in itself.

16

My view here departs from Bourriaud since I don’t believe that the political is an inherent quality of precariousness, which, in representing a fundamental instability, is ingrained structurally in contemporary artworks. Especially since this allencompassing quality weakens the term, blunting its critical potential. Instead, I claim that there are several ways that precariousness can be present in artworks and art history, an argument to which I believe that the essays in this book testify.

PART I DEMATERIALIZATION/MATERIALIZATION

CHAPTER ONE PHOTOGENIC ART: PRECARIOUS PARTICIPATION AND DOCUMENTATION CRISTINA ALBU As preparations were in full sway for President George Bush’s visit to England in November, 2003, a group of protesters temporarily took over the space of Olafur Eliasson’s installation The weather project, which simulated the image of the Sun rising or setting in a reflective abyss on the ceiling of the Turbine Hall (Tate Modern). By twisting and turning their bodies on the floor, participants formed the message “BUSH GO HOME” to express their dissatisfaction with the American president’s foreign policy (Plate 1). Almost as rapidly as it got projected into the mirror ceiling, the image surfaced in the news and the blogosphere. The intervention was organized by a group of anti-war artist protesters accompanied by photographers who ensured that this ephemeral gesture would be turned into an iconic representation. Onlookers are said to have spontaneously joined the group and enhanced the urgency of the message by forming the word “NOW” out of their bodies. It was also rumoured that the artist himself might have been present at the scene. The photograph later appeared in art magazines and was published under the “democracy” entry in Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia.1 While this image of social engagement has become historicized, countless other individual and collective performative gestures staged in the context of The weather project will remain outside the canonical representation of the installation even though they constitute significant evidence of its participatory qualities. Many of them are still widely available via Flickr or blogs, but numerous others have disappeared since online sources sometimes have a short-lived existence in the public eye. 1 Anna Engberg-Pedersen, ed., Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia (Köln: Taschen, 2008), 114.

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Large-scale sculptures, installations and new media environments that generate reflective feedback encapsulate within their sphere spectators’ behavioural responses and are highly photogenic. They set on display collaborative and competitive gestures as viewers-turned-participants attempt to set their ephemeral imprint onto the fluctuating visual and social system framed by the artworks. Precarious empathetic ties emerge between art spectators as they contemplate each other’s participatory responses and take pictures of performative acts to immortalize their temporary belonging to an affective community. Art historian Caroline Jones has noted the proliferation of artworks that call for viewers’ collaborative involvement. She maintains that we are witnessing the rise of a “server/user” mode of art production and reception that relies on the exponential growth of information within dynamic networks of image consumers and producers.2 Art museums have been alert to these transformations in art production and reception fostered by the widespread use of Web 2.0 technology that permits users both to gain access to information and to create and share new content. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has created a discussion board on Flickr to find out why people feel the urge to take pictures of artworks.3 The web postings reveal a wide range of motivations, including: museum visitors’ desire to create evidence of their presence in the proximity of unique artworks, their compelling need to compensate for their inability to collect actual art objects, their wish to consolidate memories of artworks, their eagerness to capture other visitors’ reactions to artworks, and, last but not least, their creative inclination to staging performative gestures in the proximity of art objects. In what follows, I will examine a series of reflective and responsive artworks that remain somewhat incomplete in the absence of viewers and generate a strong participatory interest in staging photo-ops with the purpose of capturing a unique aesthetic experience or performative gesture. While acknowledging their inherent variability I will elucidate their contingence upon such factors as the dynamics of visiting groups, the shifting sites of display, or the plethora of photographs documenting and expanding their content. I argue that the instability of these art practices reflects the conditions of “liquid modernity” enunciated by Zygmunt Bauman.4 According to him, contemporary societies are increasingly 2 Caroline Jones, “The Server/User Mode”, Artforum 46, no. 2 (October 2007): 316-325. 3 “Flickr: Discussing – Why do people take pictures of works of art?” Available at: www.flickr.com/groups/themomaproject/discuss/72157600239853229. 4 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

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Chapter One

fragmentary because of the transient relations established between individuals loosely affiliated via mutable social networks. Photographs of participatory responses to artworks often bring to the surface the fragility of interpersonal ties developed between viewers congregating around them. Images produced by exhibition visitors frequently diverge from the codes of visual representation utilized by art institutions for documenting participatory works.5 Far from suggesting an objective or generic illustration of the artwork, many of them highlight its transformation in relation to changing audience groups and capture short-lived performative gestures enacted within its space. At first glance, any attempt at discussing photography in conjunction with notions of precariousness may seem doomed to failure. Photography has traditionally been acknowledged as a medium that condenses fleeting moments in still representations, thus offering seemingly permanent (yet fragmentary) evidence of experience. However, upon being confronted with an excessive range of images of an artwork that calls for participatory engagement, one realizes that the hard proof of the photographic reproduction of an artwork becomes unstable and tenuous. Moreover, digital photography and montage further destabilize the notion of a fixed picture that can offer enduring visual evidence. In discussing the methodological challenges faced by researchers of participatory art, Claire Bishop explains that photographs “rarely provide more than fragmentary evidence, and convey nothing of the affective dynamic that propels artists to make these projects and people to participate in them.”6 While I share 5

Installation shots included in exhibition catalogues typically display only the components of the work in the absence of viewers. In the 1960s and 1970s, images of spectators would very rarely be included in photographs of installations or environments. At present, some art museums specifically stage spectatorial experiences for the purpose of constructing photographic evidence of art reception. Recently, New York Times photographer Fred R. Conrad took snapshots of MoMA staff members individually posing in front of paintings in the Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition (October 3, 2010 – April 25, 2011). The photographs were suggestive of an absorbing and highly private aesthetic experience. They accompanied Roberta Smith’s review of the exhibition “With A Jury of their Peers” (September 30, 2010). The editors of New York Times published an online addendum to the review, explaining that the staged photographs were taken at the suggestion of MoMA officials and are in violation of the newspaper’s ethical standards. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/arts/design/01abex.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx= 1380586009-8qWfLzRXCDVT017ZHAryhA. 6 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 5.

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Bishop’s cautious attitude,7 I contend that photographs of installations and new media artworks that call for spectatorial engagement either through reflections, shadows or manipulable images/sounds can in fact help us acquire a deeper understanding of the interpersonal dimension of art reception.

Precarious affective collectivities in photogenic installation art Olafur Eliasson has often capitalized on the versatility of mirror-like surfaces in order to challenge viewers to reconsider their sense of selfhood and re-connect with their surroundings. First displayed at PS1 MoMA in 2008 and subsequently exhibited in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2011, his installation Take your time encourages viewers to slow down their perception and contemplate their shifting ties to others. The work consists of a circular mirror placed at an oblique angle against the gallery ceiling. Activated by an engine, the mirror revolves slowly, making a very subtle rhythmic sound. It is made up of adjoining reflective strips whose edges can be fairly easily observed in situ. The generic installation shot (Plate 2) presents the artwork in isolation from viewers, perfectly inscribed within the pristine gallery space. The object appears unitary, showing no evidence of being constructed out of multiple foil strips. Far from conveying a sense of the destabilizing effect of the work or indicating the perplexing experience of having one’s reflections submerged in a large field of endlessly fragmented body images, the photograph presumably offers solely a denotative representation of the work, “a message without a code”, as Roland Barthes suggested in his analysis of image rhetoric.8 Yet, the invisible institutional code encapsulated in the generic installation shot becomes conspicuous as participants’ countless photographs of visual and performative interaction with Take your time surface online in spite of the PS1 policy forbidding visitors’ photography on its premises. In discussing 7 Claire Bishop’s observation concerning the documentary inadequacy of photographs applies to a more restrictive category of participatory works that does not include installation art and new media. She considers such art practices “interactive” rather than participatory since social relations do not represent their primary medium. I consider this divide somewhat artificial since large-scale object-based works and environments do not entail only binary feedback. They frequently catalyse the formation of affective ties between multiple viewers concomitantly interacting with the works and staging performative acts. 8 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 34.

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Chapter One

the institutional bias against bodily presence on the exhibition site, Brian O’Doherty explained that the typical installation shot is meant to enhance the permanence of the art object and the ideal dimension of the gallery space: “Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there—one of the major services provided for art by its old antagonist, photography.”9 Participants’ photographs of Take your time have the opposite effect—they showcase the signs of bodily presence and the fleeting collectivities of viewers exposed to each other’s gaze as they lie on the gallery floor, playfully engaging with the reflective field (Plate 3). On his website, artist Olafur Eliasson presents the generic installation shot along with a wider range of photographs that showcase participatory responses in order to emphasize the affective impact of the work. Flickr images of Take your time show visitors creating abstract shapes out of their bodies, mimicking each other’s movements, or getting closer to their friends as they try to conceal the boundaries between their individual mirror images.10 These signs of non-verbal communication reveal the affective attunement catalysed by Eliasson’s installation, which prompts participants not only to see themselves seeing, but also to become engaged in interpersonal exchanges that indicate our complex and fortuitous negotiation of identity in relation to increasingly temporary collectivities. In some of these photographs, it is hard to tell who is the participant taking the picture. Frequently, the camera is not oriented solely towards the image producer, but purposefully includes within its frame the image of multiple others. The photographs testify to the precarious relations formed between oneself and familiar strangers. Voyeuristic impulses counterbalance narcissistic tendencies, but neither of these desires is satisfactorily fulfilled given the mutability of reflections. Moreover, the rotating disk of Take your time constantly defers the viewer’s identification with the mirror image, thus impeding the collapse of identification into identity. Judith Butler defines “precariousness” in terms of the sense of human vulnerability experienced by oneself in the face-to-face encounter with the “Other”. Building upon Levinas’s theory of alterity, Butler explains the fragile ethical dimension of interpersonal relations: “To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of

9 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 15. 10 An online gallery of Take your time photographs taken by visitors is available via Flickr. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35565475@N06/galleries/72157633098846594/.

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life itself.”11 Numerous Flickr images shared by Take your time participants communicate their momentary ties with other viewers’ equally vulnerable existence. The mirror disk constitutes a responsive interface, catalysing fleeting affective relations between people sharing the same physical and virtual space. Participants tend to create photographic series in such settings rather than produce a single snapshot that encapsulates their experience. Their heightened sense of physical presence and duration is conveyed by the compelling need to alter the photographic compositions through performativity and capture behavioural variability instead of a unique picture immortalizing the salient qualities of a permanent art object. By taking their time to take photographs in the installation, participants seek to consolidate these ties by projecting them into a less precarious temporal dimension—the time of the photograph that can be revisited by its producer, as well as discovered by other Flickr users.

Elusive images and interpersonal exchanges in responsive environments Photographs enable art participants to chart cognitive processes and contemplate the outcomes of performative experiments within responsive environments. The interactive potential of new media is often fairly elusive and participants can figure out the effects they can produce only after testing out multiple possibilities or spending a significant amount of time observing how their participatory input is encapsulated into a larger collection of responses to the work. Scott Snibbe invites viewers of Deep Walls (2002) to perform in front of a projection screen including video recordings of other participants’ silhouettes interacting with the same work. The past and the present are conjoined and individuality is masked since all participants are represented by their shadows. Only their performative gestures can distinguish them from others once their image becomes part of the network of visual recordings. The installation replicates the mechanisms of surveillance systems, but it also subverts them to a certain extent since the visual information is constantly erased, being visible only for a short span of time. Participants have their photos taken as they choreograph their shadows in order to leave behind a somewhat distinctive bodily trace within the visual system of anonymous silhouettes. As they go away, their image momentarily becomes part of a collectivity of strangers who may have never encountered each other. 11 Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London, New York: Verso, 2004), 134.

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Chapter One

While interacting with Snibbe’s responsive interfaces, participants take pictures of themselves mimicking the act of jumping into the space of the projection screen or orchestrating collaborative performative acts to undermine the impression of individual isolation.12 Their acts are suggestive of the “cloakroom” or “carnival community” described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who highlights the ethereal human bonds formed between individuals who entertain the illusion of having participated in a communal activity.13 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s responsive environments often prompt similar ethereal social ties. Yet, many of them also create a heightened sense of social interdependence. Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan project (2005) staged in public spaces in England and Japan invited passers-by to activate videos of performers. As their shadows projected onto different areas of the pavement, they revealed pre-recorded portraits of individuals who made desperate attempts to communicate with them visually. Passersby often became part of spontaneous congregations collectively watching the video projections. They took pictures of themselves as they tried to engage in dialogue with the mute performers, vainly expecting them to react to their presence in real time.14 Both Snibbe and Lozano-Hemmer cherish the notion that their works stage unexpected encounters and even collaborations between audience members. They create mutable systems that can be repeatedly transformed through the input of participants. Their precariousness subsists in the uncertainty of the visual formations and the interdependence between viewers’ acts.15 Participants’ pictures of the works often disclose improvisational gestures and simulated attempts at blurring the boundaries between representation and embodied presence. Lozano-Hemmer asserts that responsive artworks are successful “if the behaviours and relationships that emerge from participation manage to surprise the artist/designer … in other words, the outcomes have not been pre-

12 An online gallery of photographs of viewer interaction with Deep Walls and other responsive environments by Scott Snibbe is available via Flickr. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35565475@N06/galleries/72157636070327193/. 13 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 200. 14 An online gallery of photographs of viewer interaction with Under Scan is available via Flickr. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35565475@N06/galleries/72157636070998374/. 15 The OED definition of the word “precarious” includes the notion of dependence: “Precarious, from the Latin precarious, obtained by entreaty, depending on the favor of another”.

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programmed.”16 As artists relinquish authorial control to a greater extent, participants come up with inventive ways of appropriating the space of responsive environments and staging distinctive performative acts.

The aura of aesthetic contingency Installation artworks and new media environments undermine the notion of absolute autonomy of the artwork and spectator. Instead of being lost as a result of photography, the aura is perpetuated as participants aim to create singular events for the camera lens that capture their encounter with the work. Hence, “the cult value” and “the exhibition value” no longer occupy antagonistic poles as in Walter Benjamin’s theory concerning the effects of mechanical reproduction.17 Spectators-turnedparticipants devise their own rituals within the designated space of the artwork while envisioning a public audience that surpasses the group of viewers present in the proximity of the artwork. In recent decades, the concept of the aura has undergone reinterpretation in the context of contemporary art practices, which have become increasingly time-oriented and participatory. It is currently associated with the singularity of the spectator/participant’s experience in relation to a variable artwork that calls for heightened perceptual engagement or for convivial social exchanges. New media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen maintains that the aura originates in the “singular actualization of data in embodied experience”18 and relational art theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that “the aura of the artworks has shifted towards the public.”19 A similar argument is embraced by Boris Groys in his analysis of the politics of installation art. According to him, this medium “offers to the fluid, circulating multitudes […] an aura of the here and now.”20 Groys believes that installation art perpetuates and strengthens the aura of the artwork by extending its purview to the space in which it is displayed. The contingent relation between the site and the installation components is complicated by 16 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s response to debates on curating digital art at New Media Curating Archives. Available at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/web admin?A2=ind01&L=new-media-curating&F=&S=&P=311796. 17 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 224. 18 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3. 19 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 58. 20 Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation Art”, e-flux 2 (January 2009). Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-installation/.

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Chapter One

the presence of large numbers of spectators who enhance the variability of the aesthetic encounter through their interpersonal exchanges and quasiperformative acts. Photo taking often constitutes a means of temporarily colonizing the space of an artwork in order to co-produce and mediate an “authentic” aesthetic experience. As the space of the art object becomes open-ended in installation art, the habitual and the incidental that Benjamin associated with the perception of architecture21 permeate the encounter with art. In the context of works incorporating mirrors, video or shadow projections, photography becomes a means of slowing down perception and appropriating the space of the artwork in order to stage a moment of aesthetic absorption even in the midst of a whole group of viewers concomitantly interacting with the work. Flickr images of exhibition visitors’ participatory acts maintain the aura of the artwork instead of undermining it. They reveal the increasing variability of contemporary artworks’ content without diminishing the viewers’ desire to be in their presence.

The endlessly mutable photogenic icon Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2004) is probably one of the most photographed contemporary artworks (Plate 4).22 Its ovoid stainless steel shape constitutes a biomorphic screen for viewers eager to have their body images projected onto its distorting reflective surface. Despite its status as a landmark of Chicago, Cloud Gate tends to undermine the feeling of selfassuredness usually granted by encounters with iconic artworks. Spectators’ enchantment with the immediate recognition of its bulging silver shape gradually gives way to misapprehension as they step below the sculpture’s low arch called “omphalos.” Photographs can hardly capture the disorienting bodily experience of viewers faced with the warped space of this concave shape (Plate 5). The reflective arch projects participants’ mirror images into a shimmering abyss that disrupts their usual sense of proportions and distance. Many of them start taking pictures of this perplexing swirl of endlessly repetitive reflections as they are negotiating their bodily presence in relation to crowds of onlookers.23 21

Benjamin, Illuminations, 240. There are 87.130 results for a Flickr search for the words “cloud gate”. 23 An online gallery of photographs of viewer interaction with Cloud Gate is available via Flickr. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35565475@N06/galleries/72157633142259064/. 22

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For Cloud Gate visitors, photography is also a means of anchoring oneself into the unfamiliar space and time of the arch. The identity of the photographer dissolves into thin air as the camera lens is directed towards the pinnacle of the archway where the viewing subject becomes a mere dot, almost undifferentiated from the remaining onlookers. In this context, participants become engaged in precarious processes of identification as they adopt indexical and performative gestures in order to single out their presence. They temporarily alter the flow of images, but lack the capacity of controlling the entire field of reflective projections. These destabilizing modes of perceptual engagement epitomize the “precarious visualities” of contemporary art eloquently defined by art historian Christine Ross in terms of the perturbation of close identification with visual representation, the disjunction between sight and other bodily sensations, and the public exposure of otherwise deeply personal experiences.24 Flickr images of Kapoor’s sculpture show friends holding hands, gesticulating, pointing to each other’s image or forming circles and stars out of their bodies. Precarious empathetic connections are also established between strangers watching each other’s reflections in the stainless steel surface of Cloud Gate. Photography enhances performativity and catalyses non-verbal relations between people who remain anonymous to each other although they share an intimate collective experience that exposes the intricacy and hazardousness of contemporary social ties. Despite the feeling of togetherness inspired by the Flickr images, the act of taking photographs of a public sculpture can also trigger divisions. Some viewers want to establish temporary ownership over the public space of the work in order to create a visual representation of themselves free from the interference of other onlookers. As I was by myself taking pictures of Cloud Gate, a group of people asked me to step out of the omphalos space so that they could capture only their mirror images. The visual representation of belongingness conveyed by many Flickr pictures is often staged as a result of enforced exclusion. Hence, the photographs can easily frame images of solidarity with others that substitute control for unpredictability and enforce social boundaries. In her seminal study on the role of photographic documentation in installation art, Monica McTighe argues “photographs both solve and create problems when we are trying to

24

Christine Ross, “Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture”, in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux, and Christine Ross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 7-8.

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Chapter One

understand the past”.25 She explains that even though they are supplements of the artwork they have a direct impact upon its perception, particularly in the case of works that have a more ephemeral condition. Although McTighe does not address the topic of photographs specifically produced for the purpose of sharing via social media, her astute examination of transformations in photographic documentation highlights the inevitable complications that result from the focus on precarious processes, as well as from the multiplication of documentation sources and historical narratives. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate fuels the desire for freezing transitory images and creating unique, unrepeatable circumstances through one’s interaction with its interface and others. Through kinetic engagement, participants enhance the aura of the sculpture and transfer some of its absorbing power to their photographs. Ultimately, the aura in Benjamin’s view depends on the tension between the viewer’s simultaneous proximity and distance from the object of aesthetic experience. It is worth remembering that according to him natural objects can also be endowed with an aura when contemplated from afar.26 Flickr photographs of reflective installations such as Cloud Gate bring both natural and historical objects into focus. They reveal a past experience that cannot be fully replicated since the image of the object/experience is contingent upon variable factors that cannot be reified. The aura of photographs of Cloud Gate also derives from the index of human presence encapsulated in the installation, which restores to the photograph the ritualistic value attributed by Benjamin to early photographs recording the fleeting qualities of individual appearance. The presence of the viewer in the midst of a much larger audience gazing upon Cloud Gate confers to the photograph a mysterious quality. Despite its enticing potential, any attempt at solidifying one’s precarious ties to all the other co-participants seeing themselves in the sculpture’s screen is evidently futile. Yet, the aura of the art object subsists not only at the level of the participatory experience. The photographic evidence itself acquires a certain aura, especially since its circulation may be restricted to a group of friends using social media. Moreover, its online presence may be precarious since it is subjected to conditions of visibility and temporality imposed by networks that may escape individual user control. Boris Groys

25

Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces. Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art (Hannover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth University Press, 2012), 10. 26 Benjamin, Illuminations, 233.

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calls social media images “weak signs with low visibility”27 because they are often seen only by a small number of people who have limited time to contemplate them. Praising their democratic potential, Groys concludes that they expose the pronounced blurring of boundaries between art producers and spectators. Paradoxically, these so-called “weak images” of art participants’ physical presence and performative gestures contribute to strengthening the aura of the artworks by showcasing their powerful impact. Works with reflective surfaces and responsive environments invite even more to this mode of photographic engagement. Participants complete the images of these installations through their bodily presence while conveying their endless plasticity.

Art museums’ contentious love affair with visitors’ photographs In recent years, museums of art have increasingly taken advantage of these so-called “weak images” produced by social media users in order to strengthen their status quo as highly accessible institutions that catalyse creativity and social interaction. While such strategies are meant to underscore the democratic quality of museums, they often end up exposing the way they regulate participation and reserve the right to restrict or selectively display the content produced by visitors in response to artworks in their collections. In 2009 The Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a photography contest called It’s Time We Met that invited visitors to capture the highlights of their museum experience. Viewers were encouraged to take photos of themselves and objects in the permanent collection and upload them to a Flickr page administered by the Met.28 Out of approximately one thousand submissions, a total of seven images were selected for the museum’s advertising campaign and displayed in conjunction with the museum logo and slogan. Most of the selected entries focused on visitors’ simulation of facial expressions and gestures represented by artworks: a couple re-enacting Rodin’s Eternal Spring sculpture, a long-haired girl gaping in awe next to a raffia bodysuit with an open mouth in the Oceanic Galleries, a man sticking out his tongue in a rebellious attitude while facing a griffin head that previously embellished the rim of an ancient Greek cauldron. The selected photographs suggest 27 Boris Groys, “The Weak Universalism”, e-flux 15 (April 2010). Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-weak-universalism/. 28 The images submitted by participants to the It’s Time We Met contest/advertising campaign are available on Flickr. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/metmuseum/discuss/72157612982178407/.

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that visitors appear to acquire a more profound understanding of the works through a heightened embodied experience of their shape or image. They underscore the fact that they are only a weak substitute for the direct encounter with the actual art object, which catalyses powerful gestures and surprising reactions. In order to consolidate the impression that the photographs cannot be equated with the works, the captions identify only the location of the objects in the museum collection, the time at which the photograph was taken, and the name of the producer of the Flickr image. In a similar attempt at boosting audience participation while maintaining and even expanding the aura of art objects in the permanent collection through visitors’ photographs, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh launched the event Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs (2013). Visitors were invited to create visual responses to 13 photographs in the museum collection that were displayed both in the museum and online. Submissions could be made via a website administered by the institution. The museum reserved the right to choose the pictures that best entered into dialogue with the photographs. The display of visitors’ pictures frequently changed to enable the presentation of as broad a range of images as possible out of the submissions. The selected images were printed in a significantly smaller format than that of the “original” photograph that inspired them. They were disposed around the art object forming a seemingly diffuse visual information cloud (Plate 6). Generally, visitors’ photographs are welcomed in the museum framework as long as their aura remains highly precarious and their singularity derives from the original artwork, which catalyses creative impulses. After having integrated within their framework institutional critique and installation art, museums are now increasingly dedicated to promoting viewers’ participatory engagement in response to the relational turn in contemporary art practices. Many of them aim to be seen as spaces of conviviality and creativity even though they continue to regulate visitors’ behaviour quite closely. They often end up providing instructions for interaction in order to inform viewers when and to what extent spontaneous responses are encouraged. Photography provides one of the least intrusive modes of engagement, especially in the context of installation and new media art that defy visual representation through their mutable coordinates or the complex sensorial experience they trigger. Hence, it represents one of the strategic tools in museums’ attempt at broadening audiences and providing evidence of their creative impact. In addition to featuring works that call for participatory responses, museums focus on mediating social interaction between viewers, hence providing a substitute for the declining face-to-face social exchanges in contemporary

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societies. In her survey of art museum education programs geared towards participation, Nina Simon conceptualizes several levels of art engagement starting from that of individual observation of the art object and culminating with interactions between viewers who exchange views on the art object or transform its content through collaborative or competitive behaviour. Praising the function of institutional guidelines and rules in stimulating interpersonal exchanges over aesthetic content, Simon enthusiastically invites museum professionals to consider objects in their collection that stimulate dialogue between viewers who have not previously met: “Imagine looking at an object not for its artistic or historical significance but for its ability to spark conversation”.29 Yet, a significant number of the social relations established between strangers in museums are not based on verbal interaction. Instead, they imply visual or empathetic relations that are highly inconspicuous. These ties transpire at the level of photographs focused on capturing other people’s experience as they relate to art objects or environments that heighten interpersonal awareness through their large scale, reflective qualities, open-ended content, or the ambiguous perceptual effects they generate. Under these circumstances, photo taking often compensates for an inability to connect with others in a more direct manner and constitutes a means of questioning both the coordinates of the artwork and the fixed parameters of one’s identity. Instead of offering reassurance, these pictures instil doubt and register the precariousness of personal experience, whose limits and ambiguities are fully unveiled as the photographic frame is unable to encapsulate the shifting dynamics of the participatory audience. The overflow of photographs of artworks and their audience poses new challenges for contemporary art historians. Authorial intent is repeatedly supplemented and sometimes even undermined by the multiple meanings inherent in participants’ performative acts as they strive to obtain a representation of a unique transitory experience. While it can be argued that art participants’ drive for creating photographic images of themselves in the context of artworks may be yet another symptom of their state of captivity in the society of the spectacle, this practice is also evocative of a critical attempt at constantly shifting the boundaries of visual representation by taking charge of its unavoidable mediation. In contrast with the generic conventions of cinematic spectatorship reminiscent of the Platonic myth of the cave, many installations and new media environments enable participants to incur changes to the artwork through their bodily movements rather than imprison them in a collective state of immersion in 29 Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010), 127.

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what is happening on a different plane. By taking photographs of participatory responses, visitors of these artworks embrace a precarious condition situated between absorption and interaction, self-contemplation and self-estrangement, control and vulnerability. Ultimately, these images reify the aura of the artwork, confirming its perpetuating power even in the age of mechanical reproduction.

CHAPTER TWO EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY THROUGH DIGITAL MEDIATION OF ART AND CULTURE FLORIAN WIENCEK Cultural institutions in the 21st century are challenged by the digital practices of the information society and participatory culture. These practices result in several layers of precariousness for cultural institutions, which will be discussed in this essay: departing from novel practices of digital communication and mediation, which build up the ecology in which digital heritage takes place, over the digitisation of cultural heritage objects, to the transformation of cultural learning and institutional meaning making through participatory practices. The example of the multimedia guide of the exhibition Eat, Pray, Weave: Ancient Peruvian Art from the Permanent Collection (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 201213) will illustrate the convergence of digital practices and mediation of art in a museum setting. I will argue that cultural institutions will benefit from opening up and embracing the uncertainty of participatory and digital media practices, amongst others through added value for their content as well as the strengthening of their position as places for informal and lifelong learning in the digital age.

Digital Practices of the Information Society and Participatory Culture As a first step it needs to be examined how contemporary digital media practices differ from the one-to-many communication of mass media, which also resembles the traditional communication model of a master narrative within a museum. With the move to an information society along with the advent of digital media, our society centred on creating, distributing, using, integrating, and manipulating information. Indeed, information has become ubiquitous and is available in abundance. Likewise, with the shift to a participatory culture in tandem with the

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process of “cultural convergence”,1 we see a move from consumers of content towards prosumers.2 This new type of user not only consumes but also produces content within the services and applications available to him or her. Moreover, prosumers share the content with others on social media platforms such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Twitter. We also see a rise of recombinant aesthetics such as remix,3 where users “appropriate cultural artefacts for their own derivative works and discussions”.4 Personalisation thus becomes key. Users want to be in charge of their experience, want to appropriate services, data, and content for their own needs. Eric Gordon—a visual arts scholar researching the effects of games and social media on urban life and democratic processes—refers to this phenomenon as the “digital possessive” in which “practices of networked media encourage (…) the possession of thoughts, actions, and memories in personal folders, accounts, and devices”.5 The participatory culture is about your personal points of views as well as the collection and (re-) appropriation of the point of views of others into a new cultural expression. The definition of participatory culture by media theorist Henry Jenkins strengthens collaborative as well as social aspects of communication, knowledge, and meaning generation in which “users work together on the basis of equality to create meaning and compile knowledge”.6 This is also reflected in what he, Erin Reilly, Laurel J. Felt, and Vanessa Vartabedian call the “4 C’s of participation”: connect, circulate, create, and collaborate.7 Additionally, new media scholar Ganaele Langlois argues that [o]nline participatory media platforms offer an exemplar of the new conditions of the production and circulation of meaning beyond the human 1

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, London: New York University Press, 2006). 2 See Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. From Production to Produsage (New York, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). 3 See Eduardo Navas, “Remix Defined”, Remix Theory, 2012. Available at: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3. 4 Nina Simon, “The Participatory Museum”, 2010, chap. 1. Available at: http://www.participatorymuseum.org/read/. 5 Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator. American Concept-Cities from Kodak to Google (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 175. 6 Martijn de Waal, “From Media Landscape to Media Ecology. The Cultural Implications of Web 2.0”, Open no. 13 (2007): 22. 7 Erin Reilly et al., “Shall We Play?”, 2012. Available at: http://www. annenberglab.com/sites/default/files/uploads/Shall_We_PLAY_final_small.pdf.

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level: they offer rich environments where user input is constantly augmented, ranked, classified and linked with other types of content.8

All of these mechanisms of interlinking, ranking, augmentation, retrieval as well as the way we can actually interact with media, produce, edit, and enhance digital objects are determined by the functionality of software and its interfaces.9 They are based on algorithmic processing of cultural data available in the digital ecosystem either as natively digital objects or in digitised form. Media scholar William Uricchio10 argues that software and algorithms change our relation to the world as we perceive it, experience it, interpret it, and constitute what we perceive as subjective “truth”. This is also true for the filtering mechanisms on the Web, which predetermine the points of views we are confronted with, the information available to us to construct our own opinion and perspective, to understand a topic. Thus, the “algorithmic turn”11 establishes software as a new non-human actor in the mediation process.

Digitisation of Cultural Heritage as Process of De-/Re-Materialisation The move towards digital media and digital communication affects cultural heritage as well. According to the art historians Nina Zschocke and Gabriele Blome, and research artist Monika Fleischmann, digital cultural heritage in the area of IT-research entails the digital storage, collection, and preservation of information about cultural objects. This encompasses amongst others the digitisation of archives, the digital reproduction or reconstruction of cultural objects, the preservation of digital data as well as the networking of information or knowledge.12 Thus what are the consequences of digitisation for cultural objects, artistic projects, as well as their meaning and preservation? 8

Ganaele Langlois, “Meaning, Semiotechnologies and Participatory Media”, Culture Machine 12 (2011): 1. Available at: http://culturemachine.net/index.php/ cm/article/view/437/467. 9 Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (New York, London, New Dehli, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013). 10 William Uricchio, “The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image”, Visual Studies 26, no. 1 (2011): 25–35. 11 Ibid. 12 See Nina Zschocke, Gabriele Blome, and Monika Fleischmann, “Cultural Heritage. Kunstvermittlung mit Digitalen Medien”, Netzspannung.org, 2004. Available at: http://netzspannung.org/media-art/topics/cultural-heritage/?lang=en.

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The process of digitisation brings cultural objects into the digital ecosystem to make them accessible and processable. Digitisation can be viewed as a process of translation: the translation of an artistic project or a cultural artefact into digital data and metadata—in short information— about the project. Digitisation is a form of documentation, which especially for ephemeral, time-, process-, or experience-based projects can be described as the embodiment of memory of the project until its rerealization, according to art historian Jean-Marc Poinsot. It captures a specific state of an object or process in time. The result is a digital creative object in its own right. Because of its digital nature, cultural data can go beyond a mere reproduction or documentation. Depending on the software environment it can allow new insights through new ways of interaction with and re-contextualisation of the material in comparison to physical exhibited items. Philosopher Jos de Mul summarises this shift away from Walter Benjamin’s exhibition or cult value towards interaction under the term “manipulation value”.13 Digital imaging technologies as well as algorithmic analysis, such as “Cultural Analytics”14 by media theorist Lev Manovich can allow observations beyond human perception. The point of view of a machine is hereby used as a novel entry point for human analysis. The findings using these digital methodologies as well as the (creative) processes and experiences that methods such as digital reconstruction afford, can lead to new research questions.15 But there are also several caveats, which come with digital cultural heritage. The process of digitisation in the sense of remediation, as defined by new media scholars Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin,16 constitutes a dematerialization of cultural objects into data and information and, at the same time, a re-materialisation into digital materiality. The latter acknowledges that digital media does not only consist of “immaterial” data, but also of physical media for transmitting storing and presenting the data. Machine-readable data needs to be translated into a humanperceivable form and thus be “re-materialised”. This results in the 13

Jos de Mul, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination”, in Digital Material. Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, ed. Marianne van den Boomen et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 95–106. Available at: http://mtschaefer.net/media/uploads/docs/Digital-Material.PDF. 14 See Lev Manovich, “Software Studies: Cultural Analytics”, June 2013. Available at: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html. 15 See Jonathan Shaw, “The Humanities, Digitized”, Harvard Magazine, 2012. Available at: http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/05/the-humanities-digitized#article -images. 16 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation – Understanding New Media (Cambridge Mass., London, England: MIT Press, 1999).

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precarious situation that in digital cultural heritage we translate ephemeral cultural objects and projects into equally fragile data, of which the longevity is still in question. The reason for the fragility is that storage media as well as the hardware that allows us to read them become obsolete, as does software to interpret specific data formats and the hardware to run it.17 Also, the digitisation process comes with potential loss of information—such as spatial or temporal components, interactivity, potential as well as actual user-experience or information about the material—which need to be added in form of meta-data. Furthermore, the context of these digital cultural objects is constantly in flux, especially if they are available online or part of an evolving database as “living environment”.18 A database stores (and preserves) a selection of data about artistic projects and culture, orders them, adds metadata, and makes it accessible and retrievable. In that case, context is defined as relations of information or the interlinking of documents or data nodes. This is specifically true for data in networked environments. As new media arts scholar and curator Christiane Paul describes using the Internet as an example: [t]he Internet is a network where a different context is always only one click away, and everyone is engaged in a continuous process of (re)contextualizing. Linking to and commenting on other websites creates information filters, portals, and new contexts.19

Mediation of Art and Culture The changes in the media ecologies challenge established structures of meaning-making in cultural institutions as well as mediation and gallery education. Especially younger museum audiences increasingly demand to not only be presented with cultural objects and readymade information, but also to be able to participate in the meaning making process, interact with the items, and be able to manipulate and reuse data about the objects. Moreover, the public want to have a choice in “what, when, where, and how” to learn, communicate, and access information. The NMC Horizon

17

See, for example, Jeff Rothenberg, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information”, 1999. Available at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/ensuring.pdf. 18 See Christiane Paul, “Context and Archive. Presenting and Preserving Net-Based Art”, in Netpioneers 1.0 – Contextualising Early Net-Based Art, ed. Dieter Daniels and Gunther Reisinger (Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 101–120. 19 Ibid., 103.

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Report 2013,20 a yearly report on the impact of emerging technologies on education, identifies a rise of informal learning outside the classroom using devices that are always connected to the Web. As a result, educators are transformed into mentors as well as guides through the vast amount of available information. In the following, I will introduce several informal learning approaches for art and culture and their relation to digital media practices. One example is Anna Cutler’s concept of “Cultural (Creative) Learning”, which emphasizes experience as mode for learning from, with, and about art: “[C]ultural learning in this instance, means learning that takes place beyond the classroom and lecture theatre; within a cultural setting, and that takes cultural product as its subject matter for direct engagement”.21 A similarly broad approach is the term “Mediation of Art and Culture”, a translation of the German concept of “Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung”, which includes diverse activities in order to provide an interface for engagement with art and culture in different social and institutional contexts. Following the definition by Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried Pauleit,22 scholars in the field of cultural education, these activities encompass a range from artistic approaches, such as performances in everyday situations, over exhibitions and gallery education, to cultural education and cultural marketing. Cutler identifies a move towards hands-on learning approaches, personalisation of learning programmes, co-learning or “shared learning that is guided in response to the needs of the users and shaped in collaboration with them”.23 In the German concept of “Critical Mediation of Art” (Kritische Kunstvermittlung)24 as well as in the Anglophone “Gallery Education”,25 20

L. Johnson et al., NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition (Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium, 2013). Available at: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/ 2013-horizon-report-HE.pdf. 21 Cutler, “What Is to Be Done – Sandra? Learning with Young People in Cultural Institutions of the 21st Century”, 61. 22 See Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried Pauleit, “Einleitung”, in Kunst-MuseumKontexte. Perspektiven der Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung, ed. Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried Pauleit (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2006), 11–21. 23 Ibid. 24 See, for example, Carmen Mörsch, “Allianzen zum Verlernen von Privilegien: Plädoyer für eine Zusammenarbeit zwischen kritischer Kunstvermittlung und Kunstinstitutionen der Kritik”, in Medien Kunst Vermitteln, ed. Nanna Lüth and Sabine Himmelsbach (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2011), 19–31. 25 See, for example, Felicity Allen, “Situating Gallery Education”, Tate Encounters [E]dition 2, 2008. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/major projects/tate-encounters/edition-2/tateencounters2_felicity_allen.pdf.

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the critical engagement with artistic projects and cultural objects is central, as are active interactions with the very culture and society, with topics represented by the exhibited items or with institutional and socio-political powers. The main goal of the critical mediation of art is the production of new knowledge together with the visitor, instead of merely reproducing existing knowledge. Therefore, his or her own interpretation should be fostered in the mediation process.26Another important concept tackling the current challenges and fostering engagement with artistic projects is the “Participatory Museum” by Nina Simon, a “museum visionary”.27 She emphasises the importance of the museum as social space, as a space for social experience, and as a facilitator for meaningful interaction with the artistic projects as well as with other visitors. Thus, the artistic projects or cultural artefacts should be facilitators for meaningful conversations amongst museum visitors. They should promote creative expressions, shared learning, and co-creative work.28 Art historian and curator of interpretive media Peter Samis and his collaborator Mimi Michaelson also argue that participation allows to integrate the visitor’s voice and their points of view into an exhibition or cultural institution as well as into the meaning making process, in addition to make visitors “feel at stake of what they see”.29 All these concepts embrace multiple points of view, which according to Fiona Cameron, a museum studies scholar, is inherent in postmodernist philosophy. According to it, there is no one fixed truth but “rather, particular interpretations of phenomena are individually and socially determined”.30 Moreover, these multiple concepts also embody the fact that the perceived meaning of a cultural object is not fixed or completely inherent in the item, but rather is constructed and negotiated between the visitor and the object at the moment of the encounter. In other words, meaning is dependent on the space that is opened between the viewer and the displayed object and is influenced by personal, socio26 Mörsch, “Allianzen Zum Verlernen von Privilegien: Plädoyer Für Eine Zusammenarbeit Zwischen Kritischer Kunstvermittlung Und Kunstinstitutionen Der Kritik”. 27 Simon, “The Participatory Museum”. 28 Ibid., chap. 1. 29 Peter Samis and Mimi Michaelson, “Meaning-Making in Nine Acts”, Exhibitionist no. Spring ’13 (2013): 54–59. Available at: http://nameaam.org/uploads/downloadables/EXH.spr_13/12 EXH_SP13_Meaning Making in Nine Acts_Samis_Michaelson.pdf. 30 Fiona Cameron, “Digital Futures I: Museum Collections, Digital Technologies, and the Cultural Construction of Knowledge”, Curator 46, no. 3 (2003): 325–340. Available at: doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.2003.tb00098.x.

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cultural, and (physical) reception contexts.31 Briefly, mediation is about the “in-between”: the encounter between art, culture, and the audience. It is about interfaces and how they allow us to interact with artistic and cultural projects. The described practices of cultural learning are not necessarily digital in nature, but show similarities to digital practices and are influenced by them. This is especially true for contemporary, participatory practices of mediation of art, which go beyond the classical triad of one-way communication methods such as labels, guided tours, and lectures. One parallel is the information flow between users and institutions. Simon as well as Kasra Seirafi and André Seirafi, the developers of the mobile guiding solution “Fluxguide”,32 point out that the information flow between users and institutions in participatory practices is different from the traditional museological master narrative. The museological conventional discourse is similar to the one-to-many communication of mass media—criticised by media ecologist Robert K. Logan for its lack of cognitive development at the audience when used for learning.33 In contrast, participatory practices as well as digital communication rather employ the dialogic principle of digital media, especially the Web 2.0 paradigm, which allows a two-way communication between the parties. Having museum exhibitions as a paradigm, Simon states in relation to traditional exhibits that [d]esigners focus on making the content consistent and high quality, so that every visitor, regardless of her background or interests, receives a reliably good experience. In contrast, in participatory projects, the institution supports multi-directional content experiences. The institution serves as a “platform” that connects different users who act as content creators, distributors, consumers, critics, and collaborators.34

This notion of a “platform” is another key idea of digital media and Web 2.0, a term coined by technology publisher Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly defined the Web as platform, meaning that the World Wide Web provides an 31

See e.g. John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2013). 32 André Seirafi and Kasra Seirafi, “Fluxguide: Mobile Computing, Social Web & Participation @ the Museum”, Fluxguide.com, 2011. Available at: http://www. fluxguide.com/uploads/4/2/3/3/4233655/paperforummedientechnik2011_fluxguide _red.pdf. 33 See Robert K. Logan, Understanding New Media – Extending Marshall McLuhan (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). 34 Simon, “The Participatory Museum”, chap. 1.

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environment, a technical basis for different services or applications, or a basic mode of operation. Looking at mediation of art as a collaborative approach to storytelling, Aaron Koblin’s notion of digital storytelling becomes interesting. Relating to the platform-concept, the digital media artist defines digital storytelling as setting up a framework, constraints, and parameters for stories to emerge. Once this scenario is set, people can contribute in the creation of something bigger than the sum of its parts.35 For a cultural institution this means that the organization provides an open framework as a basis for diverse possible experiences, which are dependent on the visitors’ interaction. The result is an inconsistent or unstable experience that is not fully controlled by the institution.

Example: Multimedia Guide for the Exhibition Eat, Pray, Weave After describing different principles of digital communication practices as well as approaches of mediation of art and culture, I will discuss an example of their convergence. Therefore the multimedia guide I developed for the exhibition Eat, Pray, Weave: Ancient Peruvian Art from the Permanent Collection (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, US, September 15, 2012 to January 13, 2013),36 will illustrate an approach of digital mediation of art, which integrates digital media and communication into an exhibition setting and into the meaning making process. The exhibition’s concept of Eat, Pray, Weave highlighted artefacts from the rich Pre-Columbian collection of the Nasher Museum, focusing on works from the South American Andes, more precisely the region that represents present-day Peru. The examples of the textile, ceramic, and metal arts on show exemplified the sophisticated material culture of the lesser known civilizations such as Paracas, Nasca, Moche, Chimú, and Chancay pre-dating or coinciding with the well-known Inca Empire (1100–1532). The exhibition revolved around five thematic sections, titled “body adornments”, “death”, “food and animals”, “textiles”, and “literacy”. 35

Aaron Koblin, “Data Driven Stories”, Future of StoryTelling 2012 on YouTube, 2012. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1WKX4ux_bI. 36 The exhibition would not have been possible without the hard work of many colleagues. Herewith I want to acknowledge and thank the whole exhibition team for their great collaboration on the project and for leading it to a success: the curators Alexandra Dodson, Katherine Jentleson, Camila Maroja, and Laura Moure Cecchini as well as the team from Nasher Museum—especially Marianne Wardle, Molly Boarati, Juline Chevalier, and Brad Johnson.

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There were two primary goals for constructing a mobile exhibition guide. First, to digitally enhance the on-site experience by relating networked information to the items on display as well as by bringing together physical items with digital objects. Secondly, to create an environment where the visitor is integrated into the knowledge production about the objects. These aims were deeply rooted in the exhibition’s curatorial concept as well as in the nature of the collection itself. The Pre-Columbian cultures were mainly oral cultures. To gather knowledge about them we can tap on the writings and illustrations of the Spaniards, who dominated the region and gave us a European view and therewith an outsider-account on these cultures. Complementing these biased narratives, there are very few indigenous accounts from an insider perspective. Noteworthy among these, is the 1615-16 illustrated book by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala—a member of Inca nobility born shortly after the Spanish arrival, who mastered both Spanish and his native language and started to document his native culture. Therefore, our main sources to study these civilisations are the remains of the material culture: ruins and objects, oftentimes found in tombs, can give us hints on how these cultures lived. According to Western traditional beliefs these are mute witnesses of history. Material culture thus needs translation or interpretation, be it from a person or from technology, in order to reveal their individual story as well as the potential collective history they represent.37 Moreover, as it was already pointed out, each object does not only tell one story, but its narrative depends simultaneously on the individual point of view, the background and mindset of the beholder, and the reception context. The exhibition thus invited the public to be a part of the meaning-making process and to collect multiple points of view on the objects. This approach fostered the viewers’ own interpretation and mental involvement with the presented cultures and objects. Moreover, it also promoted theoretical questions about cultural heritage—spurring conversations on several levels. But, most importantly, the show wanted to avoid a master narrative based on the sparse available evidence. In order to accomplish these aims, I worked with Fluxguide38 to construct a mobile guide to Eat, Pray, Weave. This system on a conceptual level transfers Web 2.0 paradigms into the physical and cultural space of the museum and offers the visitor a participative and personalised access to the show. The system allowed the users to consume curated content in 37

See, for example, Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 38 www.fluxguide.com.

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their own pace, and therefore functioned as educational tool. The possibility to access the informational content of the gallery and additional material beyond the gallery space allowed not only to enhance the gallery experience, but also to use the material available online both for preparation and for the visit wrap-up. This content can also be transferred into new (locative) contexts, continuing to exist after the end of the show. The additional material included thematic texts. For example, texts instructing about textile production, which described the production methods used for items on display in addition to further information on the cultures that produced the items. Furthermore, the viewers could access rich image material, which contextualised the objects on display. These encompassed detailed images of the objects in order to highlight details and to lead the public’s gaze in an interplay between digital and physical display, as well as visuals showing specific objects in use, historic sites, and diagrammatic explanation of production methods, such as slip paint. More than just adding new content, visuals enabled to bring in a critical perspective and to foster visual learning. As one example the visitors were able to visually compare different colonial points of view (that tend to project European mores into depictions of indigenous cultures) with a native Peruvian point of view. Therefore, using Fluxguide, the exhibition digitally juxtaposed three exemplary motifs in illustrations of colonial authors, whose books were also on display inside the gallery, to depictions from Guamán Poma’s book El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), available in digitised form in a database of the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark.39 Furthermore, Fluxguide permitted viewers to leave comments related to the entry of exhibition items in the system, and therewith became a tool for co-creative knowledge generation. Through the possibility to “like” and respond to these comments, the system ideally allows visitors to get into a synchronous or asynchronous conversation with the institution as well as with other people inside and outside of the exhibition space. Fluxguide thus allows visitors not only to comment on the objects displayed but also to discuss more general questions on the exhibition such as: What can we learn from the collection? What do these artefacts mean to us today? What does remain from a culture? What can these objects tell us about their culture of origin? Additionally, the public was invited to engage in a debate about our cultural heritage today, connecting the discourse about ancient cultures with thoughts about what might remain from our contemporary culture. Therefore, vis-à-vis the Fluxguide system, 39 See Digital Research Center of the Royal Library, “The Guamán Poma Website”, 2013. Available at: http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/ frontpage.htm.

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the exhibition team formulated challenges for the visitors as a stimulus to respond to. Moreover, the availability of the online guide offered the potential to bring together a global audience with different cultural backgrounds—including people from the same area of origin of the artefacts—thus enriching the discussion by adding their points of view. Grouping a diverse audience allows the participants to learn together as well as from each other through dialogue.

Summary As I have shown in this essay, the process of digital cultural heritage and different forms of digital mediation of art and culture reveals several layers of precariousness for cultural institutions. The first layer is the ephemerality of digital data—the basis for digital mediation—as a result of digitisation process and digital materiality. Even though cultural institutions and scholars try to preserve transient cultural artefacts or artistic projects in order or make them accessible for cultural learning, there is no guarantee that the digital objects are permanent or lasting. On the other hand, the digital objects allow users at this moment in time to interact differently with the cultural object. Through this interaction, experience, and manipulation of the digitised cultural objects, as well as through computational methods enabled by the processability of digital data, he or she is able to gain new insights. Therefore, maybe it is more useful to look at the value of digital data not so much in terms of longterm preservation but in terms of temporary experience through interaction and manipulation. With regard to enhancing the museum experience, open institutions are needed, which allow digitally mediated content in relation to the exhibited items inside the gallery space. This adds an additional experiential dimension to the direct experience of the cultural items and artistic projects on display. The second layer of precariousness in digital cultural heritage is related to content, which is unstable, as in digital communication it is constantly evolving. Precariousness is also due to the multitude of meanings, the multiplicity of points of view that come into play when opening up the meaning making process to the visitors and users, as well as to non-human agents. This process of opening knowledge generation to the general public takes a good deal of trust from the institutions. They have to let go of their role as gatekeepers as well as their interpretive power over the objects to non-expert visitors and trust the self-regulatory abilities in terms of quality control and reputation systems of the Web 2.0. Especially in Europe, many institutions still fear a loss of content-quality through

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opening up the meaning making process and through the assumed association of third-party content with them, which would be automatically validated through their role as trusted sources. But therewith they miss out on the added value that an open discussion of meaning and points of view could add to their content, besides a heightened visibility and increased contextualisation. Moreover, it is important to embrace the dialogic nature of knowledge generation, which beyond establishing a framework requires communicative effort from the institution and opening up the data-sources for creative re-use beyond the museum walls. Lastly, the precariousness for institutions with regard to participatory practices lies in the loss of control over the experience of the public. In contrast to traditional educational efforts, where the institution is working towards a specific pedagogic outcome and provides a “one-size-fits-all” solution to reach this goal, informal learning and participatory environments need a change in design practice, in which the institution designs the framework for the participation to happen, leaving the outcome open to be determined by the visitors. In such a scenario, the visitor, and not the museum, is in charge of his/her own experience. He or she decides on when and where to pull specific information; on interacting and engaging with items on display as well as with other visitors or the institution; or on not to engage at all. In other words, the institution designs a scenario, an open process that enables interaction, communication, and mediated or unmediated engagement with cultural objects. The scenario needs to provide incentives and added value for the visitor and the institution alike. Moreover, the interaction and participation should come naturally during the exhibition experience instead of being forced upon participants. Similarly, the design should provide activityoptions for the different participative roles a visitor can take: from the creator, critic or collector to the joiner, spectator or inactive.40 For cultural institutions as places for life-long learning, the growing trend towards informal learning and the increasing use of digital media for learning offers huge possibilities to strengthen their position as well as to widen their scope and audience. But therefore institutions need to open up, embrace the uncertainty of participatory practices, digital media and networked learning, and employ these tools to their strength for cultural learning. It is worth it.

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See Forrester Research, “What’s The Social Techographics Profile Of Your Customers?”, 2009. Available at: http://empowered.forrester.com/tool_consumer. html.

CHAPTER THREE FOR A CONCEPT OF IMMATERIAL INDESTRUCTIBILITY MATTHEW BOWMAN I One particular scene of Batman (1989), directed by Tim Burton, presents The Joker—the archenemy of the eponymous hero—causing havoc in Gotham City Art Museum. Vicki Vale, a talented photographer, is at the museum for a dinner date with the billionaire Bruce Wayne. Wayne (Batman, of course) has made no such arrangement and the villain, played on this occasion by Jack Nicholson, has orchestrated a fiendish trap to draw out our hero. But rather than simply capture Vale, he preludes the trap by taking the opportunity to vandalize the museum’s rather impressive collection of paintings and sculptures. Without mercy, and to the beat of Prince’s music playing on a ghetto-blaster, The Joker and his gang of goons lob brightly-coloured paint at pictures by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas, while sculptures are knocked-over or redecorated. A marble bust has its hair repainted green and its lips bright red: the distinctive colours of The Joker. Only one painting, Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954) is permitted to survive the onslaught unscathed. Something more or less similar happens in another movie, Tom Twyker’s The International (2009). Interpol agent Louis Salinger has tracked a top assassin to the prestigious Guggenheim in New York unaware that this assassin has been marked for death by the company he serves. A crack team of men arrives, equipped with automatic weapons, and an intense gun battle breaks out in the Guggenheim. Forced by the circumstances to momentarily work together, Salinger and the assassin engage in a reckless pitch battle that sees rapid hails of bullets fly across from one side of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic corkscrew spiral to the other. Bullet holes violently puncture the pristine modernist white walls. For the most part, the artworks remain unspoiled—not because the bullets

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fortuitously miss the artworks but rather because the works on display are mostly video projections upon the walls. Even if the projectors themselves are shot, there is no guarantee that the artwork is destroyed insofar as it is presumably connected to an unseen DVD player or computer. The exception to this non-destruction is a large piece which, hanging down the centre of the corkscrew, is comprised of numerous monitors in the manner of some kind of hi-tech mixed-media chandelier. Salinger shoots at it as a means of ensuring his escape; the destruction he rages upon it is as if agitated compensation for the artworks that survived the gunfire. At face value, especially in regard to the first film clip mentioned, we are presented with incidences in which the so-called “civilizing rituals” that comprise the museum break down. Subverting one of the main functions of the museum, namely the protection of cultural artifacts from time and overuse, the characters wreck mayhem and destroy examples of the displayed collection. The scenes we are confronted with are, to be sure, fictional and perhaps merely enjoyable Hollywood fare, but for all that they are not beyond the realms of plausibility. As art historian Dario Gamboni’s classic study, The Destruction of Art, reminds us, artworks have long been victim to instances of wanton vandalism and sociallymotivated iconoclasm.1 There are numerous cases evincing destruction in the museum or gallery that could be referenced here—from Pierre Pinoncelli’s notorious attacks on the reproductions of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to the more recent slashing of Andres Serrano’s controversial Piss Christ (1987). Both of these are deliberate attempts to do harm, however, we should not exclude accidental situations resulting in damage to the artwork. The parental dictum of “look with your eyes, not with yours hands” seeks, of course, to forestall such unhappy accidents within the gallery space. Following a similar trajectory, the Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art online project served as an archive forensically documenting the unfortunate fates of various 20th century artworks according to the categories of “Attacked”, “Destroyed”, “Discarded”, “Ephemeral”, “Erased”, “Missing”, “Rejected”, “Stolen”, “Transient” and “Unrealized”.2 Not all of these categories are directly germane to my immediate concerns, nor do I wish to explicate them in this present essay, but it is worth noting their overall tenor towards the destruction of art. There has, though, been a countervailing tendency that takes as its leitmotif destruction in art and is exemplified, for example, by the auto-destructive 1

Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 2 Sadly, although appropriately, the Tate’s Gallery of Lost Art has since been erased, although traces of it remain here: http://galleryoflostart.com/.

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works of Gustav Metzger (who, of course, organized the Destruction in Art Symposium, DIAS, of 1966) or Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960). These works actively hunt for their own death—preferring, maybe, the afterlife—or take destruction as their theme. Whether in or of, however, destruction appears an immanent condition of art as such rather than some external potentiality; what destruction in art acknowledges and highlights, for its own part, is that inherent destructibility—an acknowledgment that is often displaced by the emphasis upon timeless values and by the artworks that have survived the ravages of history. By the same token, the museum is the protective environment that sustains the artwork over extended periods, thereby indicating the fragility of their existence, their innate liableness to destruction. All in all, then, the central point is that artworks are, perhaps seemingly almost by definition rather than merely contingently, precarious. And yet, the second of the two films that I began this paper with, The International, conveys another possibility—albeit one that is unintended within the film and rather speculative on my own part—that emerges when set against Batman or, more generally and more pertinently, placed in relation to destructibility of/in art as such. It’s this speculative thought that I wish to broach in this paper. Simply put, the key contrast here amid these two films is between the predominant immateriality of the artworks that survive the shoot-out in The International versus the materiality of the paintings and sculptures damaged in Batman inasmuch as in the case of the former that survival is dependent upon immateriality and in the latter the destruction intrinsically stems from materiality. Generally speaking, the works shown in The International are video-based: photons organized by specific data configurations translated into immaterial images projected onto a wall. Whilst the wall and projector represents the material components of this set-up, these are largely extraneous to the artwork itself. Neither the bullets that puncture the wall nor any that might irrevocably damage the projector would constitute destruction wrought upon the artwork, which consists of an immaterial, virtual image. And in a similar fashion, the quotidian television monitors that comprise another artwork that are destroyed by gunfire does not indicate the destruction of the artwork tout court; the television monitors relays rather than contains information, and, being mass produced, are relatively easily replaceable. Presumably, the best chance of destroying such works rests upon destroying the component that holds the data itself—namely, the hard drive, USB, or compact disc. But even here destruction is not certain: data is reproducible and can be shared amongst numerous sources, and so

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destruction would surely require the elimination of all those sources. Could such art, then, be considered indestructible?

II The question raised is, as already admitted, speculative in form and might be regarded as a playful thought experiment. Nonetheless, it seems to me that this scene from The International can help us to reconsider well-established concepts within contemporary art history, especially when it comes to under-explored and hence under-discussed avenues in the critical-history of art practices and post-object movements since the 1960s. For example, if The International suggests that each artwork’s survival amid a hail of bullets stems from the immateriality of that artwork (i.e., the conceptually significant aspects of the artwork are to be found within its light-based projection of images rather than the technical supports that necessarily enable the projection of the image in particularized circumstances), then we might cast doubt on what could be termed the conventional aesthetic or historical attitude in which immateriality correlates—or, to state the matter more strongly, equates—with ephemerality or its cognates such as “precariousness” and “transience.” In other words, there appears to be a potential intersection between the immaterial and the indestructible that is not commonly noted within arthistorical discourses. Discussions around immateriality in relation to artistic practice largely take as their focal points Conceptualism and post-Conceptual Art strategies from the 1960s onwards. The key textual source here, of course, is curator Lucy Lippard’s influential 1973 anthology Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972, which extends from her earlier essay, “The Dematerialization of Art”, co-written with John Chandler and published in February 1968.3 Although her central term, “dematerialization”, is never—at least to my mind— sufficiently laid out in a theoretical manner and was thoroughly rejected from a philosophical standpoint by the artist-writer Mel Bochner, Lippard’s remarks upon dematerialization in Conceptual art nonetheless remains a useful place to proceed from even if one should not over-identify it with the notion of immateriality as such.4 3

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Bochner’s critical review was published in Artforum, v. 11, no. 10, June 1973, 7475. It is reprinted in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems and Rest Rooms: Writings and

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To a certain degree, “dematerialization” was a relational term that made sense insofar as the art it categorized was in contrast to the mediumspecific works answerable to art critic’s Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernism, on the one hand, and to the literalist or objecthoodness of Minimalism, on the other.5 That is to say, both tendencies—whether comprehended as an opposition or as significantly convergent—were the aesthetic ground upon which Conceptualism turned against, although Conceptualism was historically and intellectually more proximate to Minimalism than Colour Field painting. As Lippard writes, in place of the focus upon objects as the artwork, in Conceptualism “the idea was paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized’” and this was evident in mediums such as “video, performance, photography, narrative, text [and] actions”.6 The contention that the medium was secondary to the idea can, of course, be found in multiple regions of the field of Conceptual art and intersected with the rejection of art as commodity item. Again, in Lippard’s own words: “The artists who are trying to do non-object art are introducing a drastic solution to the problems of artists being bought and sold so easily, along with their art. (…) The people who buy a work of art they can’t hang up or have in their garden are less interested in possession. They are patrons rather than collectors.”7 In stating the material was secondary, however, Lippard doesn’t seek riddance of materiality as such; rather, from her list of examples of Conceptual mediums, it’s notable that each medium is, in principle, reproducible. The photograph issues from a negative, the text could be reprinted, and the performance is often theoretically repeatable—as long as each reiteration tries to copy the original or previous reproduction fairly closely, then it’s uncertain that any minimal differences would be of significant consequence. While these serve as instances of dematerialization, Lippard is also well aware of artworks that push the process of dematerialization all the way towards its logical conclusion: immateriality. Examples abound here, too, but we could mention Yves Klein’s (in)famous Le Vide (1961), currently installed in Krefeld, in which

Interviews, 1965 – 2007, foreword by Yve-Alain Bois (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: MIT Press, 2008). 5 For a strong account of Minimalism’s “objecthood”, see: Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 6 Lippard, Six Years, xi. 7 Ibid., xiv.

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an empty space was set aside in order to become a void.8 Interestingly for our purposes, the integrity of that void is not ruined when visitors are occasionally permitted access to the room. Her focus upon the immaterial, then, very much operates to create a space for an oppositional practice that interrogates and even refuses the patronage system of the art market as well as capitalism more generally—matters that were of especially great concerns for artists at the tail end of the 1960s. Here we might push this almost utopian thought further: could it be imagined that the link between immateriality and indestructibility could lead to artistic practices safe from the encroachment of the market? That immaterial art’s indestructible qualities are not simply an indestructibility against vandals, but against capitalism, too? Could immateriality be political? To think in these terms is admittedly somewhat utopian and Lippard’s contention had already been problematized prior to the publication of Six Years. Of particular importance here is Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959-62) in which he sold—in exchange for gold— various immaterial spaces above the Seine. To demonstrate the buyer’s permanent ownership over a particular immaterial zone, the buyer would receive a certificate signed by Klein. The transformation of common immaterial space into purchased commodity evinces a near-alchemical process, as the function of gold in the exchange suggests. However, in order to complete the transaction, and thus own part of the sky, the buyer was contractually obliged to destroy the certificate. While Lippard saw immateriality, the shift towards post-objects artistic practices, as an “escape attempt” from the increasingly dominant post-war consumer culture, Klein suggests that even the immaterial can now become available for commodity exchange. In discussing all this, there is a coincidence—at once theoretical and historical—that we cannot avoid. While Lippard initially comprehended dematerialization as a means for challenging the art market, and the way it commodifies both artwork and the artist’s career, writers such as Alexander Alberro point to how conceptualism became enmeshed in what it nonetheless sought to avoid and counter.9 In the same year that Lippard’s anthology was published, sociologist Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society which served as a prognostic analysis of economic, 8

For a useful discussion, see Denys Riout, “Exaspérations 1958”, in Voids: A Retrospective, ed. Mathieu Copeland with John Armleder, Laurent le Bon, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot, and Philippe Pirotte (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2009). 9 See Alexander Alberro, ed., Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: MIT Press, 2003).

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labour, and socio-economic transformations within advanced capitalist nation states, with America being his core example.10 Bell forecasted that the half-century from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s would witness an unprecedented structural change, with developed countries shifting towards post-industrial labour models as becoming central to their economies. In principle, this means that rather than supporting the country economically through agriculture or industry (which constitute the primary and secondary forms of labour, historically), the economy would be dominated by the tertiary sector, which is typified by service provision. Bell writes: “if we group services as personal (retail stores, laundries, garages, beauty shops); business (banking and finance, real estate, insurance); transportation, communication, and utilities; and health, education, research, and government; then it is the growth of the last category which is decisive for post-industrial society”.11 Unifying these areas is their deemphasizing of materiality; money is not invested in the production of consumable objects, but instead in fleeting intersubjective exchanges and experiences. While Bell’s writings have somewhat, it seems, fallen out of fashion as a reference point—perhaps largely because his social forecasting almost naturalized the post-industrial as an evolutionary step within Western economies—the sense that the beginning of the 1970s reflect a significant transformation is to be found in more critical thinkers. For instance, Marxist theorist David Harvey points to 1973 as the approximate moment in which the economy partly placed the socio-industrial regime of Fordism to one side and entered a new era of flexible accumulation that saw, for instance, the intensification of finance capitalism and ultimately the deregulatory “Big Bang” of 1986 which was linked with “a highly integrated global system co-ordinated through instantaneous telecommunications”. In consequence, Harvey notes that “while industrial, merchant, and landed capital [has] become so integrated into financial operations and structures that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where commercial and industrial interests begin and strictly financial interests end”.12 The burgeoning field of studies examining post-Fordism has largely picked up on these issues within the contemporary socio-political context. Within the context of this book, post-Fordism, which is typified in part by precarious employment (short-term contracts, for example, and part-time 10 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1999 [1973]). 11 Ibid., 15. 12 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 161.

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work) and immaterial labour, is especially relevant to the discussion. Constraints of space preclude a full analysis here, but it’s worth mentioning that the emergence of post-Fordism connects with the rise of computer-based technologies and what sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello see as a crisis in capitalism after the May 1968 riots.13 Significantly, they view the transition into post-Fordism as bringing artistic critique—defined by notions of individuality, creativity and radicalism—into managerial practices. Along these lines, art becomes the model for a “new spirit” of capitalism, and Conceptualism entwines with the new immaterial forms of commodity production. To suggest that immaterial art forms conjoin with a potential indestructibility, then, shouldn’t be taken as a utopian claim. On the contrary, this conjunction may also negatively propose that the commodification of immateriality under post-Fordist capitalism exhibits a desire, and perhaps even a strategy, for attaining its own indestructibility. In other words, if the economic shift towards immateriality was a step taken in order to rescue and preserve capitalism, then the links between immateriality and indestructibility may hinder any attempts to formulate a genuinely egalitarian society. The critical question, then, becomes how to produce immaterial art forms that retain a degree of oppositionality rather than reflect the new spirit of capitalism.

III For the moment, this question may have to remain unanswered, but in drawing towards an end I wish to consider two artists who have implicitly addressed some of the themes of this paper, such as the link between conceptual art’s dematerialization and the dematerialization of labour in contemporary post-Fordist society. But if immateriality has become one of the key aspects of value creation today, meaning that conceptual art is going to struggle to escape from the structural logic of the market, then I’m interested in how in the works there is an impure immateriality that arguably seeks to redeem the critical potentiality of materiality. The work of Irish artist John Gerrard is very interesting in the complex relationships it draws between the immaterial and the material. At first glance, we are presented with computer animations, often but not always projected on a large scale. Some of these works depict isolated agri-industrial units, mostly devoid of people, which are animated in real time throughout the 13 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso, 2005 [1999]).

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exhibition. Works such as Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas) (2008) and Lufkin (Near Hugo, Colorado) (2009) are real-time simulations of existing agri-industrial architecture that intersect the natural world and machines. Gerrard’s Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez/Richfield, Kansas) (2008) was his first computer animation to feature a human character. In this case, the solitary figure of Angelo Martinez paints a single square of his barn with an oil stick; this activity takes the entire time from dusk to dawn. As an ongoing real-time computer simulation, covering the whole barn will take thirty-eight years in total. While computer animation evokes the leisurely fun of contemporary games consoles, its origins actually derive from real-time simulation software used by the army as part of its training operations. Here, immaterial virtual experiences are intended as preparation for concrete real experiences, which is to say, the virtual precedes the actual, and the immaterial is in advance of the material. Along these lines, it’s also worth mentioning—admittedly rather vaguely—a project Gerrard is presently working on in Norway for the Kistefos Museet. The work is due to be in a former hydro-powered paper mill and would consist of a real-time simulation piece that would itself be powered by the adjacent river. Gerrard’s piece, however, will not simply be a simulation but also be designed so that it automatically continuously produces “information” that would take the form of immaterial bytes of memory. The river, in effect, would be producing immaterial information that would accumulate and eventually fill hard drive space in a manner analogous to its former role in producing realms of paper. Once the hard drive is filled with information, it would be removed from the computer simulation and another put in its place. As the exhibition progresses, it is expected that filled hard drives would also permanently occupy the pavilion alongside the computer animation, thereby demonstrating how the materiality of the river becomes the immateriality of computerized information which, in turn, is reliant upon the material support of hard drives. I would like to consider one more work very briefly in order to cogitate how the immaterial sphere created by technology potentially enables an indestructible, temporally endless artwork. The work in question is titled Permanent Vacation (2008) by North-American artist Cory Arcangel. Arcangel’s practice has been based around using and modifying computer programs that are occasionally given open access status. His Photoshopbased works, such as Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=1098 x=1749.9, mouse up y=0 x=4160 (2008), use the popular program’s functions to generate abstract compositions; with each composition he

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publishes online the details of how that composition was created so that other people with Photoshop can reproduce that very image. Permanent Vacation utilizes two computers which are set so that their email accounts are on “out of office” mode; one account emails the other, thereby automatically initiating that second account to reply with an “out of office” message—this is received by the first account which replies with its own “out of office” message, thus triggering another message, and so on and so forth. As with the other examples, the immateriality constituted by the virtual space exists in relative disjunction to the computers and suggests that physically destroying them wouldn’t be enough to destroy the work as such. Indeed, one might well imagine that the email accounts would continue ping-ponging auto-responses to one another, thereby prolonging their pattern of failed communication, in the absence of any actual hardware. The concluding examples of Gerrard and Arcangel evince, to my mind, something resembling a dialectic between materiality and the immaterial, which, to paraphrase Mel Bochner, no virtuality or immateriality exists without a sustaining material support. Without denying the necessity of those material or technical supports, their significance is somewhat secondary to the immaterial realms they enable to be shown when it comes to the question of indestructibility. Indeed, it’s unclear how we might determine if destruction had been carried out even if, say, The Joker had popped over and highly visibly daubed bright-green all over the monitor. Since the advent of Conceptualism during the 1960s, it has become commonplace to link dematerialization with the ephemeral. This correlation isn’t wrong in general, arguably, but hopefully I have done enough to suggest that ephemerality and precariousness are the logical outcomes of the artwork’s materiality. The immaterial proposes as a potentiality the indestructible.

IV As a paper given at the 39th Association of Art Historians conference, it was content to rest with the notion that seeing immateriality as being linked with the indestructible rather than the ephemeral offered a worthwhile shift in our art-historical narratives of conceptual art and its aftermath. And yet, the political implications of proposing disturbing interconnections between immateriality, indestructibility, and post-Fordist economies ultimately continued to haunt the ongoing reflection that accompanied the expansion of the original paper into a chapter. Could one, after all, redeem the counter-market strategies that conceptual artists once

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hoped to instantiate through moving beyond materiality and medium specificity? Or was conceptualism, and the artistic practices it developed, condemned to appear as mirror images of the regime of immaterial flexible accumulation that grew in the wake of 1973? Returning to the objecthood of artworks—even under the banner of Object-Orientated Ontology, associated with philosopher Graham Harman—seems insufficient here as it appears from this viewpoint, perhaps, as simply as a retreat to the historical moment when the relationship between the objectness of artworks and their commodity character became too difficult to parse. Meanwhile, hoping that immaterial art can subvert an immaterial capitalism through the resources and dynamics common to both may smack too much of optimism. Neither objecthood nor immateriality, it seems, provide significant solutions to the problem. Perhaps, though, posing the issue as an opposition between materiality and immateriality is the incorrect theoretical step to take. Indeed, the examples of Gerrard and Arcangel indicated there was a crucial dialectic between materiality and immateriality that has uncertain consequences for the question of indestructibility. This dialectic, although important, was almost an afterthought in the original paper in that respect, noted, but not worked through. The untimely death of American artist Allan Sekula led me to looking back at the catalogue for Fish Story, his major work of photo-documentary critical realism that was carried out as a long-term project from 1989 to 1995. Rereading his essay “Dismal Science” after a gap of a few years, I was struck by the following fundamental contention: My argument here runs against the commonly held views that the computer and telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of the maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace”, and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces. I am often struck by the ignorance of intellectuals in this respect: the selfcongratulating conceptual aggrandizement of “information” frequently is accompanied by peculiar erroneous beliefs: among these is the widely held quasi-anthropomorphic notion that most of the world’s cargo travels as people do, by air. This is an instance of the blinkered narcissism of the information specialist: a “materialism” that goes no farther than “the body”. In the imagination, e-mail and airmail come to bracket the totality of global movement, with the airplane taking care of everything that is heavy. Thus the proliferation of air-courier companies and mail-order catalogues serving the professional, domestic, and leisure of the

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managerial and intellectual classes does nothing to bring consciousness down to earth, or to turn it in the direction of the sea, the forgotten space.14

Sekula is worth quoting at length here insofar as he points to the continuing necessity of materiality within capitalism—the slow-moving ship carrying physical commodities or resources within its heavilywrought containers from one geographical location to another—as well as the potential misprision that may stem from the identification between cognitive worker and post-Fordism. With the growing interest in immateriality within the economy, one wonders if the cognitariat has displaced the old proletariat as the revolutionary subject of history.15 Yet the key thing here is Sekula’s reminder of the presence of materiality within an informational economy, which we may emphasize as a dialectic. For, if the new spirit of capitalism has sought its indestructibility within the immaterialized economy, then it might be prudent to hold onto the dialectic of immateriality and materiality: the immaterial possesses vestiges of utopian possibility while the material may serve as a grounding principle that points to the limits and potential corruptions of immateriality. Through their conceptual interdependency we might situate a thoroughgoing political analysis within the field of art.

14 Allan Sekula, “Dismal Science, part 1”, in Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 50. 15 The concept of the “cognitariat” refers to the section of labour force defined by forms of work in which intellectual activity is paramount rather than manual labour. In that sense, the notion of the cognitariat is associated with the category of “white collar work”—typically, the office worker. Yet, the categories are not wholly identical: the concept of the cognitariat updates that of the white collar worker through its relation to changes in Information Technology, the spread of intellectual labour beyond the office into other spheres, and the increasingly precariousness of such work.

PART II CULTURAL POLITICS

CHAPTER FOUR HOW TO ANIMATE IMAGES OR: ON THE PRODUCTION OF PRECARIOUS LABOUR FRIEDERIKE SIGLER New images The first image in Harun Farocki’s film Still Life (1997) is a close up of Pieter Aertsen’s painting Market Woman with Vegetable Stall from 1567, in the galleries of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. (Plate 7) In the centre of this 16th century Flemish canvas one can spot a female character surrounded by fruits and vegetables.1 A voice-over comments: “This is a precursor of the still life. People and animals are visible in the painting, but mainly it’s taken up by inanimate objects.” Then the camera zooms into the painting, focusing on a variety of vegetables: These pickles, grapes, melons—historians have looked at them and construed the painting as evidence of what foods were available in the Netherlands of the 16th century (…). What is involved when inanimate objects become the focus of a painting? Does it have to do with the objects themselves in a first reading at least?

Thereupon, the camera switches from the scenery of the museum and the artefacts to a photo studio, in which photographers and their staff are arranging and re-arranging a bank note briefly before taking a picture (Fig. 1).

The author would like to thank Nicole De Brabandere, Isabelle Lindermann, and Mara Millack; as well as Harun Farocki and Matthias Rajmann for enabling the photographs in this publication. 1 All quotes in German are translated by the author, except the quotes from Still Life, which derive from a condensed English version of the film.

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Fig. 1

“Does it have to do with the objects themselves in a first reading at least?” Regarding the relation between the objects and their image, the continuous parallel montage in Still Life contrasts categories such as painting and photography, document and artwork, materiality and representation and thereby fundamentally questions the significance of images in present times. As a result, one is tempted to continue to deconstruct the image further: what is left of the image, for instance, after the medium of photography has already been declared “dead” many times?2 What status does the image have in its current economic context? And what position do we occupy when working on images, in light of the new paradigm of the service economy?3 Questions like these were at the core of documenta X in 1997, taking place in Kassel, Germany, for which Still Life was one of seven specially-commissioned films.4 Exhibition 2

Cf. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 119 et seq. 3 The service economy emerged in the 1970s, mainly in Western nations and is characterized by the replacement of the industrial production by the provision of service. 4 Volker Pantenburg, Film als Theorie. Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und JeanLuc Godard (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006), 107.

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entitled Retroperspective, organized by chief-curator Catherine David, sought to explore the relation between art, politics and economics in times of globalisation. Positioning itself against a Eurocentric standpoint in these three fields, the exhibition aimed to respond to the new era of “hot wars”5 that started to emerge after 1989. The term refers to “a complex network of exchanges in which American hegemony is relativized by the European Union and the rising power of East Asia, while the future remains uncertain for the former USSR, China, and most of the Arab, Muslim, and African countries”.6 As global relations change, the image takes on new significance. Over the course of major technical developments such as digitalisation and live broadcasting, in addition to the economic shift from industrial production to a service economy, the image has become stronger than ever as a political weapon in constructing Otherness. Most commonly, the discourses about image surrounding these changes focus either on the way that these constructions are made or on their sociopolitical effects. In his film, Still Life, Farocki demonstrates that this focus hides the mechanisms that turn labour, especially precarious forms of labour, invisible. I contend in this paper that the artist uncovers mechanisms at work in the production of labour relations by deconstructing the image to the logic of its production. Further, he discloses how the images themselves in times of the service economy produce new forms of precarious labour. My paper explores Still Life’s strategy to make labour visible in relation to the concept of cultural politics displayed by documenta X, particularly in regard to the exhibition’s perspective on labour in globalised times. Against the background of the show and its aim to respond to the great social issues of our time, I ultimately interrogate how labour is (re-) presented on documenta X.

“Manifestation Culturelle” and the economy of signs The tenth documenta holds a paradigmatic position in the history of the exhibition that started in 1955, as it marks a change in the curatorial program of the exhibition. Historically, the focus had been mainly on European and North American art. David’s documenta, however, aimed to respond to growing global inequalities in the era of “hot wars”, and, most generally, to stay in tune with the emerging field of global art, which attempts to engage with art production worldwide. For 100 days the 5

Günter Grass quoted in Catherine David, “Introduction”, in documenta X: Short Guide, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997), 8. 6 Ibid.

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exhibition sought to explore “a critical view on history”, lamenting that due to “the age of globalization and … the sometimes violent social, economic, and cultural transformations it entails, contemporary artistic practices … [are] often condemned for their supposed meaninglessness”.7 Despite this condemnation, David suggests that contemporary art is “in fact a vital source of imaginary and symbolic representations whose diversity is irreducible to the near total economic domination of the real”.8 This is the case of “critical art which does not fall into a pre-cut academic mould or let itself be summed up in a facile label”,9 documenta X emphasised links between art, politics, and economics. It was an attempt to “propose an enlarged, expansive, and recentralized view of art history and the art world, through which ‘the extreme heterogeneity of contemporary aesthetic practices and mediums—matched by a plurality of contemporary exhibition spaces—would be used to ‘provide a multiplicity’ representing shifts and redefinitions that have ‘become manifest with the process of globalisation’.”10 The accompanying publication, entitled Politics – Poetics, replaced the conventional exhibition catalogue: instead of sharing biographical information about the artists or images of their work, it assembled theoretical texts on subjects that revolved around art, politics and globalisation.11 In its status as a “Manifestation culturelle” the publication is, according to David, a significant foundation for many artists working on the subjects that documenta X addressed and a “political context for the interpretation of artists’ work at the end of the 20th century”.12 Positions from Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Serge Daney to Saskia Sassen are divided into chapters titled as “globalisation”, “civilisation”, and “neo-colonialism”, among other categories to which the participating artists are associated. Farocki and artists such as Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau are grouped under the chapter “Information”.13 The chapter combines text fragments by intellectuals like Paul Virilio and Serge Daney as well as pictures. These include film stills from Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution 7

David, “Introduction”, 7. Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Paul O’Neill quoted in David, “Introduction”, 11-12. Originally published in Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 66-67. 11 See Catherine David and Jean-Francois Chevreir, ed., Politics – Poetics: documenta X—The Book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997). 12 See “Prologue”, in Politics – Poetics, 24. 13 See “Information”, in Politics – Poetics, 556-601. 8

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(1992) and the iconic photograph of the Chinese army infiltrating the Tiananmen Square in Peking, shortly before the 1989 massacre. Statements relating to political events from 1989 are also exhibited in the catalogue and include “1991 Gulf War” or “In the Multiethnic State of Yugoslavia a Civil War Begins”.14 All these fragments that contribute to the collage in the chapter “Information” revolve around the significance and, particularly, the consequences of images in and around times of war. It becomes apparent that, here, the term “image” undergoes a significant expansion that not only includes the material version (as, for example, the photographic image), but also bears “more generally on everything on the world that can be perceived as an image”.15 The essays on “Information” emphasize that this seems particularly true for the status of the technical image in relation to this broader definition. This relation is outlined in a text excerpt from Paul Virilio’s “Polar Inertia”, in which he brings up the 1989 student turmoils in Peking, making demands on a live broadcast to show the situation on the Tiananmen Square to the rest of China. This undertaking becomes impossible when Chinese television networks report that the army would shoot at any bearer of a film or photo camera.16 Likewise, the Gulf War in 1991 holds a paradigmatic position, being the first war to be broadcast live on television. However, at the same time, it brings up a crisis since the US government censured or staged most of the images to secure popular support from home by creating a “threatening” image of the Arab world.17 Whereas pictures were prohibited at Tiananmen Square, the surplus of pictures from the Gulf War was unreliable. Serge Daney’s text “Before and After the Image”,18 which closes the following chapter on “(Neo-) Colonialism”, refers to this issue and laments the problematic overflow of pictures. Due to the possibility of taking pictures everywhere and all the time and then broadcasting them live on television, there was no more distinction between what is worthy of being photographed and what isn’t. Daney pessimistically concludes: “A surveillance camera doesn’t complain if it hasn’t recorded any event.”19 To grasp the impact of the technical apparatus of picture-taking in the contemporary setting, Daney makes a paradigmatic distinction between 14

See Ibid., 594-595. Jean-François Chevrier and Catherine David, “The Actuality of the Image, between Fine Arts and the Media”, in documenta documents 2 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997), 40. 16 “Information”, 597. 17 Ibid. 18 Serge Daney, “Before and After the Image”, in Politics – Poetics, 610-620. 19 Ibid., 618. 15

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“the image” and “the visual”.20 The latter is understood as “seeing what you’re supposed to read”,21 and as “the verification that something functions”,22 while the former, the “image”, “still holds out against an experience of vision and of the ‘visual’.”23 Therefore, the visual is an aesthetic structure geared to deliver certain information, whereas the image bears a resistance towards the becoming-of-information. The visual’s logic is not only used in the commercial sector but also might be appropriated by it. Again, it is Daney who draws parallels between his paradigmatic distinction of the image and the visual, and the image format of advertisements.24 He claims that within advertisement images “the message is not only aesthetic, it is also semiologic, indeed ‘semiurgic’.”25 He understands the “semiurgic” as “the omnipotence of the sign—like ‘demiurgic’—at the moment when it [the image] has lost all aura and [has] become a productive force”.26 Thus, the construction of the image is exclusively aligned to its interpretation. It only matters as a sign, wherefore Daney speaks of an “economy of signs”.27 Farocki is therefore associated with discourses that claim that the political use of images makes recourse to a visual language that is reduced to its information. As a point of opposition, the image itself “becomes a sort of obtuse resistance or touching memory in a universe of pure directional signs”.28 Is the distinction between the image and the visual also apparent for Farocki? And how is the “economy of signs” related to the conditions of working on images?

Images/information: On modern still lifes Farocki’s Still Life emphasises the production of images by means of two seemingly different types of images: the still life genre and the photograph. Both are examined in two different sceneries and states of 20

Ibid., 610. Ibid. 22 Ibid., 614. 23 Ibid., 610. 24 This article by Serge Daney, “Baby Seeking Bathwater”, was published in an accompanying publication to Politics – Poetics, the above-mentioned documenta documents 2. 25 Daney, “Baby Seeking Bathwater”, 24. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Daney, “Les fantasmes de l’info”, in Devant la recrudenscence des vols de sacs à main (Lyon: Aléas, 1991). Republished in documenta documents 2, cover. 21

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production. Still life paintings are filmed in museums, whereas commercial images are recorded by the camera while they are being created in photo studios all around the world. Despite the different scenarios, the film explores a parallel between these two types of images: the relation between things and their image. This investigation is introduced by the voice-over in the opening of the film, quoted in the start of this essay. While the camera focuses on Pieter Aertsen’s painting (Plate 8), the voice-over introduces different scientific approaches to the genre of still life, by pinpointing its status as a “historical document” within, for instance, history or archaeology. According to these approaches still life paintings are considered to provide more “evidence” than other genres such as “historical painting”. This is due to its technical precision, partially enabled by the use of mechanical aids such as the camera obscura, in addition to its focus on inanimate things rather than on human figures. Therefore, still lifes have been used for scientific studies on eating and trading habits of Flemish culture in the 16th and 17th centuries.29 The voice-over explains that while mimetically still life objects refer directly to their potential references, from an iconological perspective they are allegories representing often-religious motifs. The implicit reference to a divine order is affirmed in the particularity of the still life’s composition and the perfect ripeness of the fruits depicted. By listing the multiple possible significances that the still life genre is able to embrace, the film points to the gap between the image and the impact of its reception. Significance is produced both in the reception of the work and in the purpose of its utilisation as a message. Therefore, one can even state that Farocki’s film points to a gap between the image and its significance, which raises questions concerning the way in which values are produced in the act of representation itself.30 Similar questions become equally but differently valid in the setting of the photo studios. In contrast to the still lifes and the focus on image meaning, in the photo studios the focus is on the “making of”. In them, one can witness the meticulous rearranging of a glass of beer, a clock, a piece of cheese, and a bank note (Fig. 2). In this still life-in-the-making photographers coordinate their assistants, insisting that they turn or shift the objects minimally in order to achieve the perfect picture. A beer glass hovers in the air with a perfect crown of foam, a wristwatch is draped over a white background, blocks of cheese are artistically stacked on a plate, and a bank note crisply ironed. The voice-over is silent during these moments of concentration; the viewer 29 30

Cf. Pantenburg, Film als Theorie, 108-109. Ibid., 112.

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can overhear only background discussions and instructions to the photo team.

Fig. 2

Whereas the objects in the paintings refer to something divine, the objects in the photo studios are arranged to become something that will refer to something divine. This essential difference becomes apparent in Still Life, as the female voice-over and her theoretical discourse are replaced by the careful treatment of the objects. The treatment is comparable to a “religious ritual”, in which objects are “laid out like onto an altar”, as if getting prepared for the “redemptive” act of being photographed via “liturgical ritual procedures”.31 Similar to the iconological treatment of the fruits and vegetables in the still lifes, the objects do not seem to be mere things anymore, but to Fig. 3

31

Ibid., 123.

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have magical powers and—what is even more remarkable—to develop a life of their own. They seem to have abandoned their status of being inanimate objects to become animated, “quasi-objects”32 in terms of Bruno Latour, or “transcendent”33, as in the way Karl Marx describes the sudden activity of the commodity. This reference to Marx is apt given that the voice-over introduces the term “fetish” in relation to the way that the still life’s objects are arranged and presented. The term “fetish” was first used in the Netherlands by sailors during the 17th century, the height of the still life production, to describe African cults that treated certain things as if they were divine. More than two hundred years later, Marx similarly applied the term to the treatment of things. The voice-over concludes: “The word fetish has returned and can now haunt any object.” In Marx’s terms, the fetish describes the potential of the commodity. According to him, the relationships between things-turned-commodities resemble the “social”34 and therefore seem to carry subjective manners. Surprised by their power, Marx suggests: “In order, therefore, to find an analogy … [between the things and their ‘mysterious’ interactivity], we must have recourse to the mistenveloped regions of the religious world.”35 Accordingly, both the things in the still lifes and the things in the photo studios can become animate under certain conditions. As divine allegories or as commodities, things can turn into a mode in which their status as objects needs to be Fig. 4 called into question. However, because in Farocki’s Still Life the emphasis is not only on the things themselves, but rather on the images of things, one must ask what

32

Cf. Bruno Latour, Wir sind nie modern gewesen. Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995), 18 et seq. 33 Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909), 82. 34 Ibid., 82-83. 35 Ibid., 83.

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exactly are the animated things and what exactly are the commodities: things themselves or the images of things? (Figs. 3 and 4) Over the course of the economical change that took place in the 1970s from industrial production to service economy, the state of the commodity underwent massive changes. In the post-industrial era machines have mostly overtaken industrial production. Moreover, the industrial production status of generating surplus value is replaced by the growing service sector, so that the economical value of the immaterial version of the commodity overtakes that of actual material goods. Production gets transferred from the factory to consumer relations, comprising communication and information services. The new labour, the so-called “immaterial labour”, therefore mainly “produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity”.36 New professions arise and, at the same time, “classical forms” like “audio-visual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth”37 are in great demand. Particularly the “creative industries”38 become role models for the new concept of labour due to their flexible and autonomous forms. Against this shift’s background and among the general tendencies of dematerialisation that come along with it, the image receives a new importance. As made patent in the photo studios’ scenes in Still Life: it is particularly the relation to the object that changes, as the image becomes the object of examination itself. Although one can never capture the picture that is about to be taken, it seems that the final photograph is pre-existent in the meticulous procedure of arranging the objects for the final composition.39 Accordingly, one can conclude that the image not only becomes the object of examination, but as it is fetishised, it replaces the object as the new commodity—it is the image that bears the information and is hence necessary for the production of surplus value in the service economy. Or, according to Daney, it is rather the visual that bears the information and becomes the fetish. In the context of a service economy, the commercial image is designed to condense and deliver information that can be interpreted right away. Daney concludes: “It’s never very difficult

36

Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”, in Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1996), 132. 37 Ibid., 136. 38 For further information see the e-flux journal publication; Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, and Brian Kuan Wood, ed., Are you working too much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and Labor of Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009). 39 Cf. Pantenburg, Film als Theorie, 119.

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to interpret that which has been fabricated precisely for interpretation”.40 Still Life emphasises this economic shift by showing that it is no longer things, but the visual, that gets a life of its own. The visual as the sign becomes animated, as manifested in advertising politics: “In a world exchanging before your very eyes the old realist picture of mass production for a brand-new landscape or more personalized simulacra, advertising has played its vital role, which consisted in ‘liberating’ the productivity of the sign.”41

The missing image or: How to make labour invisible Farocki’s strategy to deconstruct the image to its most fundamental logic in times of the service economy, an era when most aspects of life are mediated by visual media, reveals its increasing significance. What is peculiar about Still Life is its interest both in the image and in the conditions of its production, assuming that the contributing forms of labour are inherent in each category. However, documenta X does not manage to account for the interconnectedness between an image and the labour relationships involved in its production. Although the curatorial focus of the exhibition was on great social contemporary issues, the subject of labour does not get directly addressed, despite being an issue that belongs undoubtedly to the main concerns of the 20th and 21st century. Even if not directly addressed in the curatorial program or in its publications, the issue of labour is present throughout both. It is, for example, a recurring motif in the work of artists like Jean-Luc Godard or Hans Haacke, whose pieces were included in the section entitled “Historical Positions”. Since the current labour paradigm cannot be reduced to a cohesive form, it cannot be shown as an aesthetic mode of representation. Rather, labour is a phenomenon that infiltrates all forms of production and social interactions, or even life in general. It thus becomes a biopolitical force that turns itself into the precondition for becoming a subject. Accordingly, labour is implicitly present in most of the discourses on documenta X that deal with social, economical and political issues. Additionally, Farocki’s film affirms that the current issue of the image is necessarily an issue of labour. Yet, at the same time, he reveals that coping with images brings the displacement of labour with it. The distinctiveness of Still Life is its strategic ability to imitate the image act as a production of economic value and reveal, within this “reproduction”, the 40 41

Daney, “Baby Seeking Bathwater”, 24. Ibid.

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decreased value of the material objects being represented. Similar to the speech act, the image act implies the ability of images to initiate actions. According to art historian Horst Bredekamp, the image has the potential to create relations with the spectator, wherein it takes on an active role.42 Thereby, the image can have effects on feeling, thinking and taking action.43 The ambition to “make images speak” or to concede to them the opportunity to “speak” parallels the inanimate activity of the advertisement images that are highlighted in Still Life. Under these premises one can state that the labour in the photo studios becomes the preparation of the image act. Over the course of the image act, the performative positing, the image receives a form and becomes a commodity. Following a classical interpretation of Marx, labour becomes invisible in the becoming-of-form that is the becoming-of-a-commodity. He famously states: “Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure.”44 Embodied in the commodity, the labour that went into producing it is invisible. Conversely, the emphasis in Still Life is not on the image act, but on the preparation of the image. It is on the moment before the becoming-of-form and, therefore, before the becoming-of-representation. Thus, it is an attempt to expose the image as a process that turns labour invisible. Still Life is not only about the work on the image that can be witnessed in the photo studios. It is also about work on things. Since the growth of the service sector, the labour of material production has been replaced by machines—but only within industrialised countries. In the majority of cases, material production is outsourced to newly industrialising or developing nations. There, the work is mostly done manually, often under inhuman conditions and according to questionable juridical regulations. Accordingly, the so-called “new” economic paradigm not only creates precarious labour conditions in industrialised nations but also intensifies the physically precarious conditions of industrial production in the emerging and developing nations. Farocki can then be said to use a double strategy that reveals the process and the circumstances of how the work on the images is turned invisible and, at the same time, how the work on the things is turned into the very invisible. The double strategy to expose both paradigms of labour, the service economy and the outsourced manual 42

Cf. Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 52. 43 Ibid. 44 Marx, Capital, 45.

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industrial production, points out that the current labour paradigm is a measure for global inequalities and simultaneously reproduces them. In particular, Farocki brings to light that the work on the new service commodity, namely the image as information, creates an emerging gap between things and the process involved in the work on things. The more production becomes immaterial, the more material production loses importance. Whereas manual industrial production remains primarily associated with emerging and developing nations, the service economy is imposed by the developed Western world. As a result, one can conclude that the current labour paradigm increases global inequalities in its striving for immaterial production. It reproduces the Eurocentric thinking that is addressed in documenta X as well as (neo-) colonial patterns. Consequently, the immaterialisation of production can only function on the grounds of precarious labour that produces material commodities on “the other” side of the world. Image making and especially the making of advertisement images in the service economy is thereby necessarily related to the precarious conditions of labour wherein the “visual” commodities to be pictured are produced. From this perspective the current labour model is reproduced in documenta X: it is present as a phenomenon that accompanies the paradigm change in the economy, but turns itself and the precariousness it produces invisible. However, positions like those held by Harun Farocki’s Still Life manage to undermine the politics of the invisible. Moreover, they demonstrate that Serge Daney’s conclusion—“the sine qua non of the image is alterity”—,45 the proposition that the image produces “the Other”, needs to be upgraded so that it can move beyond an analysis of the image per se to an analysis of the relationships involved in image production itself. As Still Life reminds us, it is not the image but the production of images in the service economy that creates and, at the same time, turns precarious labour invisible.

45

Daney, “Before and After the Image”, 610.

CHAPTER FIVE ECOLOGICAL PRECARIOUSNESS AND THE FRAGILITY OF ART AND LIFE IN THE EAST EUROPEAN NEO-AVANT-GARDE MAJA AND REUBEN FOWKES The art production of the East European neo-avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s frequently involved short lived interventions that left little immediate impression on the official art world and only rarely spread beyond the close circles of the cultural opposition, made up of between a dozen and a few hundred like-minded individuals, to reach a wider public. Breaking through to significant international recognition as expressed through art criticism, art history, museum collections, and major exhibitions also remained an unattainable goal for most East European artists during the communist period. However, in hindsight and from the perspective of a more globally-oriented art history, the achievements of the East European neo-avant-garde appear anything but transient. Today the limited supply of period artworks and precious documentation of artistic activities are fought over by private and public collectors, while there has been a surge in archival research into the art historical lacunae that their practice inhabits. A process of the recreation and “museumisation” of neo-avant-garde performances and actions is under way, encouraged by the current commodification of art created under the market-free conditions of real existing socialism, leading also to more intense interest in establishing the authorship of artworks created at the time in a spirit of easy-going collaboration. The tables are now well and truly turned on the official and semi-official artists of the communist era, whose materially more permanent works are now faced with critical oblivion and have been dislodged from their positions in local art histories by the resurgent neo-avant-garde. The latter has been adept in turning the disadvantages faced by non-official artists during the communist system into a bankable myth of heroic origins.

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The life experience of the East European neo-avant-garde generation also offers an alternate historical perspective on the notion of precariousness. The lives and working conditions of East European artists were, as we will see, precarious in many ways, from the direct effects of political interference on the level of both artistic censorship and personal repression, to the denial of exhibiting opportunities and restrictions on travel, effectively excluding them from participation in the international art world. At the same time, the social meaning of precarity was only revealed to them with the fall of communism and East Europe’s crash course in neo-liberal capitalism. The harsher climate of a market based economy that lacked a social safety net and had no a priori, ideological, need for art in fact ended up undermining the social and economic status of artists. The fragility of artistic lifestyles under socialism was therefore of a different order to that experienced in more recent years by artists in Eastern Europe. Although the notion of precariousness is still primarily understood in relation to the economic, social, and psychological insecurity facing individuals living in the conditions of post-Fordist global capitalism, there have been efforts to explore the overlaps and common ground between ecological theory and the critique of immaterial labour.1 While it certainly applies to humans, precariousness is also an accurate descriptor of the situation facing the natural environment as a whole in an era of global warming, ecological degradation, and mass species extinction. Sensitivity to the fragility of the natural balance also dates to the period at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s that saw the emergence of the neoavant-garde, and it is this specific sense of ecological precariousness, with particular contemporary relevance, which is discussed through the work of neo-avant-garde East European artists. The revolutions of 1968, which had generation-changing ramifications on both sides of the Iron Curtain, led many in the East to abandon hope for the viability of a left critique of communism,2 or the prospect of socialism with a human face, while in the West there were also articulations of a

1

For instance, see “Symposium on Art, Post-Fordism and Eco-critique held at Central European University in 2010”. Available at: http://www.translocal.org/ sustainability/indexsus5.html. 2 See Maja and Reuben Fowkes, “New Left East: Socialism as (if) it really existed”, in Loophole to Happiness, ed. Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Budapest: translocal.org, 2011).

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parallel rejection of Marxist dogma.3 Although both in Eastern Europe and in the West raising your voice about the state of the planet was immediately regarded as “soft politics”, as art critic Lucy Lippard put it recently, compared to the assumed primacy of human rights, gender equality, and anti-war campaigns, it is nevertheless a territory of special relevance in thinking about precariousness at that insurgent social moment.4 For Murray Bookchin, the founder of social ecology, it was not the immiseration of the Proletariat that would lead to revolutionary change, but rather the impoverishment and over-exploitation of the planet, as he expressed it in an open letter of 1969 entitled “Listen Marxist!”. He went on to warn of “a catastrophic breakdown of the systems that maintains the stability of the planet”, highlighting the danger to life posed by “a society gone mad in its need to grow—replacing the organic by the inorganic, soil by concrete, forest by barren earth, and the diversity of life-forms by simplified ecosystems”.5 The systemic changes of human activity on the planet that Bookchin described were for the first time globally felt and articulated around 1968 and culminated in the first UN summit on Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. This was the period of the formation of ecology as an academic field, which was, for example, in the Croatian cultural weekly Telegram described as “interdisciplinary, wide and all encompassing”, as a “politics as well as way of thinking, at the same time a natural and social discipline”.6 There was a sense of urgency about the need to do something about the state of the environment, at a time when the catastrophic proportions of pollution and exploitation of the planet were first realised, while ecology as a new discipline, from the outset conceived as uniquely “subversive”, was at the forefront of concern for cultural workers as well as scientists. The subtle interrelations between perceived impoverishment of the planet and the precarious existence of the neo-avant-garde artists under state socialism created a delicate art historical territory, which is only now being revealed. 3

See, for example, pamphlet “Listen Marxist!” written by Murray Bookchin in 1969. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1969/listen-marxist. htm. 4 Lucy R. Lippard, “Beyond Beauty Strip”, in Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, ed. Max Andrews (London: RSA, 2006), 14. 5 Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 20. 6 Vladimir Matek, “Pravo na opstank” [Right to survival] Telegram (Zagreb) (29 December 1972): 18.

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During the 1970s, Czech performance artist Petr Štembera developed a distinctive approach to the natural environment and questioned the human position in it. In his performances he regularly included the surrounding elements such as earth, stones, wood and living plants, and often performed together with animals, including insects, birds, fish and a hamster, placing his body in the wider context of human existence in the environment. The starting point for his practice was his trip to Paris in 1968, when he had no money and went ten days without eating. Later Štembera stated: “When you have nothing to eat, you become aware of your existence”, explaining that it took him several years to process that experience, and then he became aware of the potential of using the body as the most direct artistic form of expression.7 In the years 1973 and 1974, Štembera engaged in some extreme endurance tests of the body, reflecting on the experience of hunger from his Paris days. The information about these activities was mostly conveyed in the form of written reports, for example: “11-14 June 1973: four days without eating/ first day without drinking; 1-4 January 1974 and 10-13 March 1974: four days and three nights without sleep; 10-23 August 1974: fourteen days without eating”.8 Abstinence from food, drink and sleep is related to asceticism, which in its original meaning implies discipline, physical control and endurance, and is connected with the experience of pain, while a further level of asceticism could be reached through selfimposed isolation. In that sense, Štembera spent time in the countryside living off the products he found there, as was documented in the photograph series Eating Seeds during Some Days of Asceticism from 1973. To be able to undertake such actions, Štembera made use of the practice of Yoga and the teachings of Zen Buddhism.9 Štembera referred to Fig. 5

7

-LQGĜLFK&KDOXSHFNêNa hranicíh XPČQt [On the borders of art] (Prague: Prostor $UNêĜ  8 Karel Srp, .DUHO0LOHU3HWUâWHPEHUD-DQ0OþRFK-1980 (Prague: Gallery of the City of Prague, 1997), 5. 9 6HH/XGYtN+ODYDþHN³9]SRPtQNDQDDNþQLXPČQL/HW´>5HPHPEHULQJWKH action art of the 1970s] 9êWYDUQpXPČQL (Prague) 3 (1991): 66.

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these ascetic exercises in which he would not eat or sleep for days as “examples of an attitude to life, rather than purely artistic pieces”.10 The artist also talked about the “concentration camp called the Czechoslovak Socialist (better: Soviet) Republic”,11 giving a political and existential context that arguably provides a too convenient and mono-causal explanation for his chosen path of self-imposed suffering. However, his actions and performances should not be reduced purely to his political situation, but instead examined in light of his theoretically infused attitude to the natural world, at a time when ecological ideas and a sense of environmental crisis spun the globe for the first time. This is evident from his performances such as Grafting, which took place in April 1975 when the artist decided to implant a shrub of a fruit tree under his skin, in order to demonstrate his unity with nature. In the artist’s words, he wanted to “make contact with the plant, to put it in [his] body, to be together with it as long as possible.”12 Shortly after Grafting, the artist realised a piece which he described as “after three days and nights without sleep I spent the fourth night in a tree” (Fig. 5), while in another related work, Štembera dug a hole near the roots of a tree with his own hands, a spot where he would “occasionally spent the night”.13 It is remarkable that in all three performances the artist explored the problem of human belonging to the natural environment, using his body as the main means to both communicate with the environment and to receive impulses from it by exposing it to extreme conditions. These performances reveal Štembera’s non-instrumental and non-programmatic approach to the natural world. As an avid promoter of contemporary Czech art in an international context, Štembera initiated correspondence and collaborations with artists, curators and gallerists around the world and also hosted foreign artists in Prague, while using his “worldwide contacts” to arrange exhibitions for KLPVHOIDQGKLVIULHQGVDEURDG+LVFROOHDJXH-DQ0OþRFKZKRUHFROlects this period, reveals how this functioned in practice: “We put a few photographs, along with some texts, into envelopes and took them to the post office. They might have been censored, but they were delivered everywhere in the world. We had exhibitions in France, Germany, Japan,

10

3HWUâWHPEHUD³8PČQtD3ĜLURGi´>$UWDQGQDWXUH@8QSXEOLVKHG Suzanne Neuburger and Hedwig Saxenhuber, Kurze Karrieren (Short Careers) (Vienna: MUMOK, 2004), 103. 12 Kristine Stiles, “Inside/Outside: Balancing Between a Dusthole and Eternity”, in Body and the East: From 1960s to the Present, ed. Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1998), 24. 13 Štembera in Srp, .DUHO0LOHU3HWUâWHPEHUD-DQ0OþRFK-1980, 37. 11

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wherever we liked, at the strangest possible events”.14 Štembera’s ultimate decision to give up art in 1980 can be understood as a consequence of the paradoxical situation in which Czech artists operated: where they could participate in the international art world only in absentia, having virtually no audience at home apart from a closed circle of insiders. Štembera himself only once in 1978 obtained permission to visit the West Coast of America, thanks to the invitation of artist Chris Burden. In Czechoslovakia life changed significantly during the period of normalization, which was a long and gradual process of a “return to order” DV GLVVLGHQW SKLORVRSKHU 0LODQ âLPHþND GHVFULEHG LW WKDW KDG WR EH restored after the public movements and protests led to an “outbreak of disorder” that culminated in Prague Spring of 1968.15 He offered a poetic description of the events of the 1960s: At that time my country was like a planet which, as a result of a strange combination of circumstances, had slipped out of its orbit and was flying on its own course in the uncertain hope that it might find another orbit nearer the sun. Within the fixed European planetary system this undertaking was quite risky from the very outset, [therefore] they decided that my country was a threat to the order of the universe since it might lead to other planets one day escaping from their orbits.16

The cosmic metaphor was a popular analogy in Slovakia during the normalization era as well and many artists were attracted to it, as “cosmic space became a means of escape from the ever-disturbing social situation”.17 Over the course of time, the differentiation between the artists in the Czech part of the state, who moved inwards into private spaces and focused on the body, and their Slovak colleagues, who focussed on an explosion into outer space, solidified into an art historical commonplace. There is one little known work by Slovak artist Rudolf Sikora entitled Czechoslovakia 1969, in which the artist divided an elongated vertical sheet into four zones. The lowest zone one is an aerial photograph of a mass of people, with obvious allusions to the mass movement of the Prague Spring, a transitional zone leads to a daytime sky and, finally an image of shining stars. Over these sections rises a cut-out of the 14 Inteview ZLWK-DQ0OþRFKLQ.OLPRYDReplaced, author’s edition (Brno, 2006), 24. 15 0LODQâLPHþNDThe Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia (London: Verso, 1984), 14. 16 Ibid. 17 $XUHO +UDEXãLFNê ³5XGROI 6LNRUD – Activist and Observer”, in Rudolf Sikora: Against Myself (Prague: National Gallery, 2006), 41.

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borderlines of Czechoslovakia, which in the lowest part remains invisible over the multitude of people, but in the next section the contours are filled with brown, the colour of land. Gradually the colours change as the country ascends, turning at one point into deep red, the symbolism of which in 1969 is clear. The country then turns into a night sky filled with constellations as it is elevated into the universe. Through these dislocations of his country it is possible to perceive the artist’s questioning of belonging, of national identity, and political reality. Interestingly, in 1968, like Štembera, Sikora also happened to be in France. However, his experience abroad was marked not by hunger, but by paintings of abstract topographies as personal recollection of the places he visited when travel was free and unrestricted. Only once restrictions on travel were imposed during normalisation and the artists were forced to be bound to their locality, did they start actively to question the meaning of national identity and borders. This work also provides the link for Sikora’s ecological practice, the focus of which moved from concern with the precarious situation of his country towards the impoverishment of the planet as a whole that he explored in a series of works from the early 1970s. Sikora, who had only one show in an art gallery in Bratislava after graduating from the Academy in 1969 and had to wait till the end of communism to be able to exhibit in an art institution in his home town, tried to overcome these restrictions. He organised the first Open Studio, an unofficial art exhibition event at his home in 1970, and also facilitated private meetings between artists and environmental activists, who faced an equally challenging situation. His triptych Cuts through Civilisation (1972) consists of a crosssection of the Earth, containing geological layers of the planet’s crust and atmospheric layers above, while in its central part, a succession of images show the progress of human society, where one can perceive the change from intact nature to modern civilisation symbolised by the “unnatural” functionalist style of architecture. While the metaphor of architecture contains elements of dwelling, of being at home and ultimately of belonging, the artist used examples which could stand for both socialist panel housing as well as Western modernist estates, pointing to his conviction that environmental crisis was a phenomenon that went beyond cold war divisions. As Sikora insisted, “the devastation knows no borders”.18 Such a global approach to the history of civilisation on Earth is also visible in The Earth Must Not Become a Dead Planet (1972), where markers of geological time and atmospheric zones are combined with episodes from the history of human intervention on the planet, from the 18

Ibid., 42.

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megalithic structures of Stonehenge to the spectre of nuclear destruction. (Fig. 6)

Fig. 6

Sikora’s practice was directly informed by the groundbreaking 1972 study Limits to Growth, which addressed the problem of the unstable ecological balance of the earth with only a limited amount of resources left.19 At the time in Czechoslovakia, environmental literature was accessible to a very limited number of specialists and even in the environmental movement there were few people who knew about the Club of Rome. Limits to Growth was therefore taken in Slovakia as precious information only available to the initiated, and no criticism was made of this controversial study. By contrast, in Yugoslavia reports from the Stockholm Conference were immediately published, along with discussion of the pros and cons of Limits to Growth and its findings, including the fundamental problem of 19 Donella H. Meadows, ed., Limits to Growth: a Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (London: Earth Island, 1972).

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its Western bias. The slight difference in political path of Tito’s “unaligned” Yugoslavia is exemplified not only in relative openness to ecological discourse, but also in the more blurred zone of official and unofficial artistic production. For instance, Croatian Group TOK realised in 1972 a series of public art works during an officially organised Zagreb Salon, an annual exhibition, which in the early seventies also had a section for representation of young art under the heading “Proposal”. The group TOK described their understanding of urban space as reducible to “the dichotomy outer/inner, open/closed as well as public/intimate.”20 While Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere was defined in relation to the private, which in bourgeois society was “no longer confined to the authorities but was considered by subjects as one that was properly theirs”,21 under socialism, where privacy was a contested notion, the concept of “intimacy” had much more appeal. Although the authorities kept constant control over public squares, for most of the time these were neglected and uncared for spaces, which prompted TOK to highlight the problem by turning the alienated space into more intimate zone for public use. One such action involved the symbolic cleaning of several square meters of the pavement on the main square in Zagreb in order to demonstrate the problem of the treatment of public space as a space of “no one’s interest”. The artists found proof of this neglect in “dirt on the pavements, streets, squares and parks” of the city, which pointed to an “unsustainable situation of street pollution”.22 In this action the pavement was first swept than washed with brushes by the artists on their knees as if “they were cleaning their own apartment”. Another aspect of the same problem was addressed in the work that consisted of transparent rubbish bins that were installed at several locations in the city centre during the Zagreb Salon exhibition. The artists also produced a postcard with an image of smoke billowing from a factory chimney, with the text “Greetings from Zagreb” printed on it. (Fig. 7) Playing with Marshall McLuhan’s credo “medium is the message” by using the postcards and standardised text on it, they subverted the image, which usually portrays the city in its best and most iconic views, to disclose its air pollution.

20

'DYRU /RQþDULü ³2NROLã L NRPXQLNacija,” [Environment and communication] Telegram (Zagreb) (21 January 1973): 18. 21 Jürgen Habermas, The Transformation of Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (London: Polity Press, 1992), 16. 22 Grupa TOK, “Grad kao totalno zbivanje” [City as total happening] Telegram (Zagreb) (2 June 1972): 17.

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Fig. 7

In another action, which also took place during the Salon, TOK staged demonstrations by marching through the streets of Zagreb holding canvases with abstract signs, such as dots and black and white lines, causing confusion amongst passers-by and parodying the role of art at the same time. The procession through the streets of Zagreb also implied a conscious comment on the political protests that had taken place during 1971. Led by the supporters of the Croatian Spring, these political manifestations had been expressing demands for greater national independence, till its harsh repression by Tito later that year. TOK’s reenactment of demonstrations with abstract posters was a comment on the polluted political atmosphere at the time. TOK’s public projects reveal the artists’ understanding of the context of the city space in which they intervened as both complex and layered with social and political meanings, while they also expressed concern for the looming environmental crisis. TOK’s engagement with so directly socially-engaged questions presented Croatian art historians, who generally nourished a warm affection for modernist art, with a rather difficult task in evaluating their work. In the catalogue New Artistic Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978 their works were described as “primarily transmitting a social message, rather than artistic one” and

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recognised as “close to the contemporary forms of ecological art”.23 This gives a clear picture of socialist art history in non-aligned Yugoslavia: although the art scene embraced innovative artistic approaches and would deal with the institutional critique of conceptual art, their theoreticians were not prepared for artistic practice that reached out of the discipline’s confines and dealt with the social, political, and ecological reality itself. By contrast, Group OHO from Slovenia was credited by art critics with being the “most interesting and most important neo-avant-garde movement in Slovenia in the 1960s”,24 a status which the group also enjoyed in Yugoslav contemporary art at the time, receiving much critical acclaim for their exhibitions, happenings and publications in artistic centres across the country. Art historian Ješa Denegri’s assertion that “the spread of conceptual art in Ljubljana, Zagreb and Novi Sad was conditioned by the trace left by OHO exhibitions among the young artists” verifies the importance of the group in adopting new artistic trends.25 Interest in OHO was not limited to Yugoslavia alone; the group participated, for example, in the conceptual art exhibition Information at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970.26 One of OHO’s signature works was Triglav, when the three artists stood in the park in the centre of Ljubljana covered in black fabric in a pose that resembled the highest mountain peak of Slovenia. They took down the preeminent national symbol of Slovenia from its elevated place to the midst of everyday reality by inverting the always snowy-white mountain top into a black silhouette. The action, which took place on 30 December 1968, had an additional factor of subversion, namely the artists’ heads representing the nation’s hallowed mountain peaks were all unshaven, with long hair, demonstrating their counter-cultural orientation.27Around 1970, OHO group artists became increasingly interested in cosmic laws and human existence on earth and wanted to achieve harmony between self and cosmos, which they investigated through notions such as cycles in energy flows, constellations of universe, 23

'DYRU0DWLþHYLü³=DJUHE&LUFOH´LQNew Artistic Practice in Yugoslavia, 19661978 (Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), 25. 24 Igor Zabel, “A Short History of OHO”, OHO Retrospective, ed. Igor Španjol (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 2007), 105. 25 Ješa Denegri, “Primjeri konceputalne umjetnosti u Jugoslaviji”, [Examples of conceptual art in Yugoslavia] äLYRW umjetnosti (Zagreb) 15-16 (1971): 151. Authors’ translation. 26 Knyaston McShine, Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 98102. 27 6HH0LãNRâXYDNRYLüThe Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group (Ljubljana: Zavod P.A.R.A.2S.I.T.E, 2010).

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symmetry, time and space, as conveyed in the wisdom of ancient worldviews, Eastern religions and Western esoteric traditions. Their outings to the countryside in 1970 were mostly focused on explorations of the relationships within their own collective through a process of “schooling”. Slovenian art historian Igor Zabel explains the concept of schooling as “re-disciplining the liberated body” through meditation practices and rituals in order to “re-harmonise with the universe”.28 When they went on a schooling outing they worked together throughout the day, and all their activity was part of the ritual including eating, breathing and walking. One such schooling ritual included forming a line by holding sticks and then walking behind each other with their eyes closed, with only the first person able to see and having the responsibility of leading the others through the environment. The aim of such an activity which put emphasis on shared trust between the members was to experience OHO as a collective body. Such collective explorations led them to experiments in communal living. (Fig. 8) On 11 April 1971 they founded a rural commune in the village of Šempas, when the members of OHO group with their families and some friends moved to an abandoned farm in Vipava Valley. Their change of lifestyle involved farming land that had not been cultivated for years and turning a derelict house into a liveable space. They were vegetarians who grew their food, using tools that they made themselves, collecting herbs, and making natural remedies. A journalist from Zagreb, who visited the commune, described their kitchen as furnished with a table made of rough wooden planks, with handcrafted pottery plates and earthware dishes, and added that the group lived with no electricity, using candles produced from the wax of their own beehives. Moreover, they had no radio, did not read newspapers, and used no money, only sometimes exchanging goods with local farmers. Asked about their worldview, 3RJDþQLN WDONHG DERXW D ³UHWXUQ WR QDWXUH DQG WKH OLJKW WKURXJK ZKLFK nature speaks”, while “man is polluting and reducing the light from which he lives”.29 As a gesture of the acceptance of precariousness, moving to a rural commune entailed a deliberate withdrawal from the institutions and structures of modern life as well as the conscious acceptance of a simpler standard of living, in order to get away from the destructive and oppressive social system and to be able to live more free and sustainable lives. 28

Zabel, “A Short History of OHO”, 127. 6DOLK=YL]GLü³3REMHJOLRGFLYLOL]DFLMH´>(VFDSHIURPFLYLOL]DWLRQ@9HþHUQML/LVW (Zagreb) (20-21 April 1974). Authors’ translation. 29

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Fig. 8

While the level of awareness of ecological discourse varied between individual countries and art scenes in Eastern Europe, in a striking number of cases a deeply felt concern with the fragility of the ecological balance can be observed in the work of neo-avant-garde artists from the region. For some, the natural environment represented the bigger picture, over and beyond the restrictions of life under dictatorship and a glaring critique of the socialist everyday, while for others the environment was a setting in which to explore human identity and interspecies dialogue, revealing essential truths that exceeded the distortions of political ideology. Ecology was also corrosive of the artificial boundaries between cultures and states imposed by the system of Cold War geopolitical divisions, a reference point that enabled artists to engage with international currents of progressive thought that, at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, echoed the spirit of the hippie counter-culture and were attuned to a new awareness of environmentalism. The specific conditions in which art under socialism was created, prompted more nature-sensitive East European neo-avant-garde artists to spin a thread of empathy with the precariousness of the planet.

CHAPTER SIX AGAINST (PORNO)PRECARITY ANDRÉS DAVID MONTENEGRO ROSERO On Pornomiseria In the late 1970s the Colombian filmmakers Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo produced the text “¿Qué es la porno-miseria?” (“What is pornomisery?”). In it, the authors launched a critique of certain films made in Latin America that, in their opinion, exploited poverty and misery for commercial gains. The short text is worth quoting in its entirety: WHAT IS PORNO-MISERY? Independent filmmaking in Colombia had two origins. One that tried to interpret or analyse reality, and another that discovered within that reality cultural and anthropological elements in order to transform it. At the beginning of the 70s, with the creation of the law to support filmmaking, appeared a certain type of documentary that superficially appropriated the achievements and methodologies of independent cinema to the point of deformation. In this way, poverty became a shocking theme and a product easily sold, especially abroad, where it served as the counterpoint to the opulence of consumption. If misery had served independent filmmaking as an element for analysis and denunciation, the merchandise rush converted it into an escape valve of the same system that created it. This lust for profit did not allow for the existence of a method that discovered new premises for the analysis of poverty but, on the contrary, created demagogical schemes becoming a genre that we could call miserabilist or porno-misery. These deformations were leading Colombian film-making down a dangerous road insofar as misery was being presented as just another spectacle where the spectator could wash away his bad conscience, be moved and calm down. We made Agarrando Pueblo as a kind of antidote or Maiakovskian bath to open people’s eyes to the exploitation behind

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miserabilista filmmaking that converts the human being into an object, into an instrument of a discourse that does not belong to its own condition.1

Mayolo and Ospina’s text demanded a kind of filmmaking that rejected the economical exploitation of social problems and the superficial representation of socioeconomic realities. More importantly, Mayolo and Ospina were reacting against a miserabilist industry which, as critic and curator Michéle Faguet argues, thrived in “the spectacular, fetishistic and, above all, consumable character of the images that passively attested to the degree of estrangement that existed among divided social classes in Colombia (and throughout Latin America)”.2 It is important to say that Mayolo and Ospina were referring to a particular trend within Colombian filmmaking of the time. Whereas in the rest of Latin America the model of Third Cinema (such as Tomás Gutiérrez’s Memorias del Subdesarrollo [1968] or Glauber Rocha’s Maranhão 66 [1966]) dictated the content and structure of a militant filmmaking practice, in Colombia (and perhaps due to the lack of an established film industry) emerged what was called “cine de sobreprecio” (“surcharge film”), which was geared towards the production of commercial gains. This kind of filmmaking was sponsored by the Colombian state and supported by officially sanctioned laws, such as the increase of prices (sobreprecio) for movie tickets.3 These measures hoped to finance the production of Colombian films and therefore contribute to the consolidation of a national industry. However, as Faguet argues, Given the still very precarious nature of anything that resembled an infrastructure (film schools, laboratories, etc.) necessary for such an industry to develop, this dramatic increase in numbers suggests flagrant opportunism more than sincere enthusiasm, because for the first time in Colombian history it was possible not only to recuperate the money invested in a film, but to actually turn a profit. As one critic commented, “In the light of these economic circumstances, many sets of indifferent eyes opened, hands that had never so much as touched a film canister 1

Unpublished. Originally written in Spanish. Available at: http://asaltovisual.blogs pot.co.uk/2013/04/que-es-la-pornomiseria-por-luis-ospina.html. All translations from Spanish are by the author unless otherwise noted. 2 Michèle Faguet, “Pornomiseria: Or How Not to Make a Documentary Film”, Afterall, no. 21 (2009). Available at: http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.21/ pornomiseria.or.how.not.make.documentary.film. 3 The Ley del Sobreprecio (surcharge law) was sanctioned on September 6, 1972. Luis Alberto Álvarez, “El cine en la última década del siglo XX: imágenes colombianas”, in Colombia hoy: Perspectivas hacia el siglo XXI, ed. Jorge Orlando Melo (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1995), 360-362.

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Within this miserabilist trend, the critic Alberto Aguirre described two main tendencies that pervaded many productions of the time. According to Faguet’s interpretation, one of these produced “picturesque films that resembled moving postcards and which pandered to excruciatingly trite nationalism”.5 The other, termed by Mayolo and Ospina as “pseudodenunciation”,6 as described by Faguet, used (often) previously recorded footage of subjects—ranging from poor families to street children, prostitutes, drug addicts or the mentally ill— hastily put together with an authoritative voice-over informing the Colombian movie-going public (anxious for the short to end so that the feature film could begin) about the social mechanisms that had precipitated such grave social ills. In the absence of an in-depth analysis or attempt to explain these situations in other than formulaic terms, ‘surcharge film’ was guilty of the worst kind of exploitation, one that justified its ambiguous intentions in a distorted and vulgar version of the call for cinematic realism famously articulated by Glauber Rocha in his 1965 text “Eztétyka da fome” (“Aesthetic of Hunger”).7

This kind of quasi-documentary practice, according to Aguirre, morbidly discussed and displayed “poverty in order to provoke commiseration in a gesture similar to that which moves the bourgeoisie to pursue charitable acts.”8 Suggesting a perverse jouissance in the consumption of images of poverty, Mayolo and Ospina even argued that miserabilismo, or porno-miseria, relied on the viewer’s sadomasochistic pleasure for images of pain and poverty that they sought to fulfil. Consciously representing social illnesses with and for the gaze of an outsider, voyeuristic, perspective, porno-miseria exploited the tension between documentary and fiction by providing self-exoticised, reductive representations that matched certain geopolitical expectations. As Mayolo argued:

4

Ibid. Ibid. 6 Carlos Mayolo and Marta Rodríguez, “El De$precion del $obreprecio”, Ojo al cine, no. 2 (1975). 7 Faguet, “Pornomiseria”. 8 Alberto Aguirre cited in Faguet, “Pornomiseria”. Originally in Alberto Aguirre, “II Festival de Cine Colombiano: Radiografía veraz de un cine embrionario y pobre”, Cuadro, no. 3 (1977). 5

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Latin America had become the best place for poverty. Obviously the cinema of this era … was unable to hide it, nor could it refuse to recognise it. Poverty became the theme. Everyone began grabbing a camera to film the defects, the deformations, the diseases and scars of an unequal and impoverished Latin America … They descended on the poor with their cameras, believing that with the simple act of filming, they were making a document about reality.9

A “Generation of Inclemency” In the catalogue for the exhibition La Era de la Discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en Mexico 1968-1997, Mexican curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina described the artistic situation in Mexico during the nineties as a “no-place where the emerging artistic culture … built its foundations left art subject to a process of exposure, or weathering, that we might call ‘inclemency’”.10 According to Medina, the lack of consolidated artistic institutions allowed several artistic practices at the time to live in a permanent state of productive uncertainty. Devoid of an art market or an official circuit that modelled the production and circulation for artworks, for Medina, many artists in Mexico in the nineties, “actually benefited from the lack of certainty regarding the who, what, where and how of art, and from doubts about how it might be inserted in the context of a new cultural geography”.11 Acting without specific models to copy or expectations to fulfil, a particular kind of Mexican art in the nineties thrived in improvisation and contingency; what Medina calls a “rejection of art as a normative practice involving equally normative ‘objects’.”12 The generation of the nineties developed a tentative and fragile artistic practice that sought to transpose its inclement condition to the political arena and suspend belief in certainties, finalities, and conclusions. Here, I’m thinking of a general trend in Mexican art but also, specifically, about works by Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra, Gabriel Orozco or Abraham Cruzvillegas. It is important to mention that this sense of inclemency in which the arts thrived was also a more generalised feeling. In many ways, the 9

Mayolo cited in Faguet, “Pornomiseria: Or How Not to Make a Documentary Film”. Originally in Carlos Mayolo, La vida de mi cine y mi televisión (Bogotá: Villegas Editores, 2008). 10 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “The Critical State of Inclemency”, in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997, ed. Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina (Madrid: Turner, 2007): 382. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

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generation of the nineties was framed and conditioned by the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake and the consequences it had for both the material fabric of the city and the socioeconomic landscape of the country. The earthquake not only destroyed buildings and other important urban infrastructures—not to mention its death toll—, but it also left many of Mexico City’s inhabitants homeless; it crippled the city’s economy growth and contributed to further polarisation between rich and poor.13 At the same time, the generation of the nineties was also conditioned by the economic debacle triggered by the Salinas administration. Crowned by the launching of the NAFTA agreement in 1994, and the almost immediate crisis of el peso that it prompted—the Tequila Effect—, the dramatic economic decline of the Salinas administration also determined the conditions of possibility for this generation. This is to say that the context that sustained the emergence of the aforementioned artistic practices in Mexico could, also, be described as inclement insofar as it was a volatile, vulnerable, fragile, unstable political, cultural and socioeconomic moment. In other words: precarious.

Enter Precarity Precarity, as a word, does not exist. It is a neologism associated with a particular Marxist account of post-Fordism. As the Sydney based cultural critics Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter note, in its most general understanding it comprises a theoretical corpus that seeks to address the “prevalence of contingent, flexible or precarious employment in contemporary societies”.14 According to them, precarity as a concept “was an attempt to identify or imagine precarious, contingent or flexible workers as a new kind of political subject, replete with their own forms of collective organisation and modes of expression”.15 In other words, precarity sought to theorise the conditions of many workers characterised by non-fixed contracts; unstable jobs and wages, free-lancers, adjuncts, hackers, immigrants, creative workers, multitudes, janitors, domestic and factory workers. Conflating several distinct and decidedly geopolitically specific contexts, struggles and resistances, precarity—in the last 10 13

Vania Macías, “Alternative Spaces in the 1990s”, in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997, ed. Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina (Madrid: Turner, 2007): 372-373. 14 Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept: New Forms of Connection, Subjectivation and Organization”, Open, no. 17 (A Precarious Existence) (2009): 49. 15 Ibid.

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years—has become an empty sign that can refer to multiple, albeit contradictory and irreconcilable, realities. Precarity, as Neilson and Rossiter note, can mean: the creative worker or activist in Europe, the migrant’s experience of labour and life, the CEO undergoing an existential crisis over repayments on a third holiday home, the policymaker’s or academic’s affiliation with a discursive meme, the finance market whose fluctuation are shaped by undulating forces, etcetera. Played out over diverse and at times overlapping institutional fields, the sign and experience of precarity is multiplied across competing regimes of value: surplus value of intellectual property rights, cultural and social values of individual and group identities, legal and governmental values of border control, and so forth.16

Precarity has become a term that has been applied over bodies, objects, economic situations and social realities, that can be described as contingent, volatile, threatened, fragile, ephemeral, temporary. Highlighting a commonality, that such referents have a precarious quality, precarity can often obscure, if not blatantly disregard, the intricacies and specificities of the elements that it seeks to describe. Clearly, and as Neilson and Rossiter dramatically point out, the precarity of a CEO who cannot afford a third house is not the same precarity as that of a free-lance journalist who cannot make ends meet. In turn, this precarity is also different than the condition of an undocumented migrant being paid “under the table”. As much as these situations have certain affinities, to assign the word precarity to them erases the internal differences that characterise and determine such conditions. Perhaps similar to a psychiatric case of displacement, the category of precarity seems to be a projection of the socioeconomic and ontological instability of certain groups of intellectuals and social commentators to socioeconomic conditions that resemble their unstable position. It seems to me that more often than not, commentators equate the condition of intellectual/creative labour with the condition of the displaced migrant or the unstable economic subject of the global south. Levelling both experiences, precarity as a concept does more as a mechanism to cleanse the conscience of the economically unstable intellectual/creative labourer by creating a sense of solidarity, of being in the same boat—so to speak—, with the global precariat. This reductive (mis)identification, while striving to create a collective political subject, erases the individuality, the specific histories, of its varied subjectivities. 16

Neilson and Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept”, 58.

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(Porno)Precarity At this stage, the reader might be asking what does precarity have to do with the Mexican generation of the nineties and, moreover, with the third edition of Pinta London, the Latin American Art Fair, held in London in 2012. The first point of connection was a lecture given by art historian Robin Adéle Greeley at the University of Essex in November 2011. Entitled “The Logic of Disorder: the Sculptural Materialism of Abraham Cruzvillegas”, Greeley’s talk examined the work of the contemporary Mexican artist by focusing on the relationship between his sculptural practice and the “self-building” architecture of the squatter settlements on the edge of Mexico City where he grew up. Making a simile between the spontaneous and improvised architecture of economically marginalised sites and the fragility and contingency of Cruzvillegas’ sculptures, Greeley’s talk emphasised the formal and material instability of both slums in Mexico City and Cruzvillegas’ assemblages. Importantly, she underscored the precarity of the sculptural objects: how each structure was carefully dependent on the arrangement of its constituent parts, how the distribution of the weight of the objects determined the shape and solidity of the construction, how the works were not glued but propped and assembled, how they were fragile, contingent, ephemeral, on the verge of collapse. Precarity, for Greeley, was definitively sited on the artistic object, on the sculptures. Contrary to what Medina theorised as inclemency, Greeley’s precarity was not located in the conditions of possibility that pervaded the making of both houses and objects (Medina’s overall sense of inclemency), but on the sculptures themselves. Perhaps more problematically, Greely’s talk suggested a perverse interpretation of the generation of the nineties that valued the ephemerality of their artistic products over the radical questioning of Medina’s “what, where and when of art.” Greeley’s interpretation, I argue, reduced the “Generation of Inclemency” to a “School of Precarity” based on formal, medium-specific concerns rather than socioeconomic, historical, and political conditions. If Medina brought to light the hesitancy, ephemerality and event-driven nature of the generation of the nineties, Greeley’s position effectively returned their artistic practices to the museum, disavowing the sociopolitical frictions implied by such a move. The second point of connection was the Project Rooms section curated by Pablo León de la Barra for the third version of Pinta London. For the 2012 edition, the fair, originally created to “showcase the best modern and contemporary art from Latin America”, included for the first time galleries and artists from Spain and Portugal. In the fair’s catalogue, the Board of

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Directors justified such a move as “the natural consequence of a gaze that has consistently endorsed the rereading of the history of Latin American art, and broadened its perspective on the basis of the geopolitical and cultural relationship between the Old and the New World”.17 Focusing its attention in the “unique moment of encounter between both continents”, the fair encouraged a trans-Atlantic and trans-Historic understanding of Latin America vis-à-vis Portugal and Spain and vice versa. As the Board noted, the fair hoped to “focus the gaze on the dialogue between art that emerged on both shores” and “update the perception of contemporary creation in this vast territory, thus promoting the reunification of a market that has common roots”.18 By presenting artists from both “Latin America” and “Portugal and Spain”, Pinta London implied that a discussion about Latin America that excludes considering its relationship with the “Old World” is incomplete. Although in the catalogue there was no mention of the socioeconomic and political histories of any of the Latin American countries included or of the Iberian Peninsula, the Project Rooms section of the fair suggested certain affinities between those contexts. In what follows, I will discuss how in the Project Rooms at Pinta London, the exhibition reduced and conflated Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula under the umbrella of precarity as a formal and aesthetic category, literally putting their poverty for sale. The fair followed the standard of many other contemporary art fairs as it presented a vast sequence of booths of different size one after the other. There was no discernible geographic or thematic arrangement that determined the location of the galleries. At the end of one of the corridors, and strategically located right next to the VIP area (a series of couches cordoned off from the general public), started the more intentionally curated Project Rooms section of the fair. During the opening guided tour of the event, de la Barra led a group of patrons through several booths. Upon our arrival to the Project Rooms section, he focused on Nuno Sousa Viera’s work. The Portuguese artist, according to both curator and artist himself, created Two Together (2011) for example, out of objects that he had found in his studio and that he re-used, re-shaped and re-cycled in order to create a sculptural object with multiple forms. For another piece, dating from 2009 and displayed as well at the fair, the artist had refurbished and re-deployed several window frames, also found objects in his studio, that were delicately hung from the gallery wall. These contraptions were not only precarious in their materials—perished, recovered, rusted window-frames—but were also structurally fragile. 17 18

Pinta London, The Official PINTA Catalogue (2012) (London: PINTA, 2012): 7. Ibid.

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As the tour progressed, de la Barra stopped at another booth to highlight Johanna Unzueta’s work. The Chilean artist presented a series of carefully constructed industrial objects made out of coloured felt and thread. Imitating industrial appliances and home fixtures, such as sinks, faucets or pipes, the works conveyed a sense of realism through unrealistic materials. Delicate, fragile, contingent yet, paradoxically, solid and functional (the gauges in the sculptures could actually be moved) for de la Barra, Unzueta’s installations, along with Sousa Viera’s sculptures participated in an aesthetics of precarity insofar as they thrived on material fragility and contingency. During one of the most striking points of the tour, de la Barra told patrons that, because of the recent raising indexes of poverty in both Spain and Portugal, one could further justify the inclusion of Iberian artists into the fair. Precarity, economic scarcity, poverty, in this way, became the common thread that united such different geopolitical contexts. Moreover, he affirmed that precarity was also manifest in the very materials of the works themselves. In the case of Sousa Viera’s work, both curator and artist intentionally highlighted that the materials used in his works had been objects he had previously discarded and were laying around his studio. Arguing that the economic conditions of Portugal not forced but strongly pushed him to use “poor”, “inexpensive” materials, both de la Barra and Sousa Viera made a formal and aesthetic analogy between the “poor” situation in Portugal and the “poor” materials used by the artist. Precarity, just like in Greeley’s model, rested on the objects themselves— their materiality, duplicity, contingency and mobility—not in the process that created them. Similarly, and in terms of Unzueta’s installation, de la Barra argued that it posited an aesthetics of precarity based on the use of fragile processes of construction that defy gravity—albeit temporarily— along with “poor”, “perishable” materials (such as felt and thread). Precarity, again, displaced from a state of being to a quality of things.

The Redistribution of the Exotic As a formal characteristic of artistic objects, the discourse of precarity pervaded the art fair. During one of the guided visits given by the curator to a select group of patrons and supporters of Tate, (i.e., possible buyers) de la Barra spoke of the re-emergence of the group of European countries undergoing dramatic economic downturns (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain), which became known in public discourse by the acronym PIGS. Branded as such during the nineties and re-popularised after the 2009 financial crisis, this denomination grouped together the geographic and

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economic periphery of continental Europe. De la Barra argued that given the new economic conditions of the PIGS the notion of precarity—as usually used to describe Latin America—could readily be applied to the current context creating new bridges between the Old and New continents. This, in my opinion, prompted a redistribution of the exotic—Rancièreian pun intended—where the poverty, inclement misery and a generic economic downturn of Latin America were used to legitimise Pinta’s geographic expansion and, at the same time, introduce a select group of European artists to patrons interested in art from Latin America. As such, the Project Rooms extended the logic of pornomisery, or pornoprecarity, to the PIGS obscuring the contextual nuances that clearly differentiate the Latin American and PIGS scenarios, and ignoring the complex colonial past that binds the regions. In other words, the Project Rooms at Pinta London 2012 extended the market umbrella of Latin American art to select, economically marginalised areas of Europe.

PART III PRECARIOUSNESS IN LATIN AMERICA: SOME STUDIES

CHAPTER SEVEN PRECARIOUS MATTERS: CONCEPTUALISM AND MATERIALITY IN CHILE AND ARGENTINA SOPHIE HALART In 2003, the Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo organised the exhibition The Structure of Survival at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale. Including a strong contingent of Latin American artists, the show aimed at exploring “a constellation of themes related to the effects of political, economic and social crises in the developing world (…) [and] the ways in which artists and architects have reacted and react to this set of conditions”.1 Through the examination of informal modes of production and organisation in visual arts, Basualdo took the image of the shantytown as both a breeding ground and a visual strategy for artists living and working through moments of crisis in emerging countries. Writing about the show, the art historian Anna Dezeuze voiced her concern that the whole curatorial line danced dangerously between two postures: granting visibility to certain under-documented forms of artistic production while, at the same time, glamourising them to the point of turning precariousness into an exotic label, a “slum chic”2 aimed at foreign consumption. The question of the double-edgedness of precariousness as a keyword to define the artistic production of “peripheral” art scenes is also the

The author would like to thank the editors for their thorough feedbacks on this paper. Many thanks to the artists and their families for enabling the use of photographs as well as to Professor Claudia Campaña and to Soledad García for providing photographic reproductions of the works by Roser Bru. 1 Carlos Basualdo, “The Structure of Survival”, Universes in Universes. Available at: http://universes-in-universe.de/car/venezia/bien50/survival/e-press.htm. 2 Anna Dezeuze, “Thriving on Adversity: the Art of Precariousness”, Mute, (5th September 2006). Available at: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/thriving -adversity-art-precariousness.

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subject of this paper as it examines the different levels at which the concept has spanned in recent Latin American art. More specifically, it considers how the new language articulated by Argentine and Chilean artists in the 1970s and 1980s context of social inequality and military repression has been historicised as a rejection of the “valuable” nature of art to the benefit of political critique and how these readings have contributed to overshadow the production of artists whose approach to precariousness differ from the avant-gardist norm. As artists increasingly turned away from object-based production, embracing the constructivist motto of art as pure communicative energy, or adopted a post-structural framework to make use of the body as a refractory sign in the dominant flux of official discourse, their works were interpreted within scholarly research as precarious forms of “Ideological Conceptualism”, an involvement of art in politics that would, in certain accounts, turn into the dissolution of art into the realm of militant political practice. While Conceptualism represents a necessary and valid framework to make sense of the art of this epoch, it also, the first part of this article argues, defines the historical period under study as profoundly grounded in an ideatic view of art that excludes more embodied modes of creation. The second part of this paper examines the artistic production of the artists Lydia Galego (Argentina) and Roser Bru (Chile) whose work with the body, particularly the female body, operates a return to the artwork’s materiality seemingly at odds with the dominant conceptualist language. In their work, the body turns from conceptual given to a fragile zone of shifting surfaces on the perpetual brink of collapse. As such, I argue that their works—mostly produced during the years of the Dirty War and the Pinochet dictatorship and in their recent aftermath—operate a return to political embodiment and thus, articulate a precariousness whose grounding in the work’s materiality contributes to put in crisis the conceptualist effort to unify artistic practices into a restrictive account of the period.

Conceptualism(s): Accounting for Latin American art Beginning in the 1990s, exhibitions like Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century that took place at Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in 1992 or Global Conceptualisms: Points of Origins, 1950s1980s organised by the Queens Museum of Art in 1999 strived to grant a higher international visibility to artistic production hailing from Latin America. The two exhibitions shared very little in terms of curatorial line and actual content: while the MoMA show drew a chronological account

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of Latin American modernisms, placing emphasis on pictorial and sculptural media, Global Conceptualisms placed Latin America as one of the creative hubs of a transnational conceptual language through which the artist, endorsing the role of “preacher/provocateur”3 actively participated in the building of a utopian project. Nevertheless, both shows met in their effort to reveal Latin American art as an unjustly understudied field in the traditional corpus of Art History. These events also marked the start of a widely disseminated literature on the making of a specifically Latin American type of Conceptualism. The Uruguayan artist and writer Luis Camnitzer who participated in the making of Global Conceptualisms and the curator Mari Carmen Ramírez whose essay “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America” appeared in the MoMA exhibition catalogue, drew the outlines of a set of artistic practices whose profound political awareness during the critical decades of the 1960s1980s led to a radical rethinking of art in terms of both production and reception. In her essay “Tactics for Thriving in the Face of Adversity”, Ramírez defined Conceptualism as “the second major twentieth-century shift in the understanding and production of art”.4 The author further developed what this shift entailed: By cancelling the status and preciousness of the autonomous art object inherited from the Renaissance, and transferring artistic practice from aesthetics to the more elastic realm of linguistics, Conceptualism paved the way for radically new art forms. For this reason, Conceptualism cannot be seen as a style or movement. It is, rather, a strategy of antidiscourses whose evasive tactics call into question both the fetishization of art and the systems of art’s production and distribution in late capitalist society.5

While insisting on the fact that Conceptualism did not restrict itself to one manifestation in particular and could actually be present in both immaterial and object-based art, Ramírez emphasised the “cultural” or “ideatic” drive of these works. Camnitzer and his co-curators of the Global Conceptualisms show went further, defining this artistic turn as a defining moment during which artists broke “decisively from the historical 3 Luis Camnitzer and Rachel Weiss, On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 24. 4 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity. Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980”, in Inverted Utopias. Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 425. 5 Ibid.

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dependence of art on physical form and its visual apperception”.6 To these writers, this shift in practices echoed a double political call for action, operating on both a domestic and a transnational/postcolonial level. Drawing a link between the emergence of Conceptualism in countries such as Chile and Argentina and the rise to power of military dictatorships, Ramírez and Camnitzer argue that this turn, in its Latin American specificities, articulated a model of resistance against oppressive regimes and allowed artists a platform from which to rethink their own role in society: from the solipsistic creator identified with US and Western European artistic status to “active intervener in political and ideological structures”.7 Turning signs on their heads, revealing the manipulative nature of official discourses, resisting the disciplining of civilians bodies by opposing it with signs refractory to rational thinking, all constituted subversive strategies that fit with their reading of Conceptualism. A case in point of these budding ideas may be found in the experiments carried out on the Buenos Aires avant-garde scene of the late 1960s where artists like Oscar Masotta and Roberto Jacoby developed the term desmaterialización (dematerialization) as a strategy of emancipation from the constraints of form and a new plastic language able to engage in political critiques.8 Influenced by the writings of the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, these artists increasingly focused on the forms in which messages were being conveyed by power and mass media in order to deconstruct them through a double process of imitation and parody. Guiding the rise of what would come to be called El Grupo de los Artes de los Medios Masivos (The Group of Mass Media Art) was Lissitzky’s belief that “lazy masses of material are replaced by liberated energy”.9 In the spirit of McLuhan who was then widely read among the porteña avant-garde, as the body of the artwork dematerialized, the medium indeed became the message and thus, the discourse to be manipulated and perverted, operating toward a complete exhaustion of meaning. To these artists, the question of the involvement of art in politics 6

Jane Farver, Luis Camnitzer, and Rachel Weiss, Foreword to Global Conceptualisms: Points of Origins, 1950s-1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), viii. 7 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America”, in Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, ed. Waldo Rasmussen (New York: MoMA, 1993), 157. 8 The genesis of the term “dematerialization” remains a sensitive topic in Argentina. Jacoby and Masotta claim precedence in their use of the term which, they feel, was unduly recuperated by the North American critic Lucy Lippard. 9 Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 187.

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had become obsolete: what remained to define was the extent to which art was ready to merge with politics.10 Resorting to a precariousness of means and a rejection of the aesthetic approach to art and the art object, Argentine artists of the 1960s paved the way for the articulation of a truly efficient form of art, one that, as Camnitzer would put it, “reduced the loss of information”11 and allowed for the creation of a widely diffused political critique which would culminate in the 1968 celebrated episode of Tucumán Arde.12 Similarly, in Chile, the rise of an avant-garde scene known as Escena de Avanzada after the 1973 military coup was also interpreted by writers like Ramírez in terms of a conceptualist turn. Quoting the Chilean art critic Nelly Richard, Ramírez justified the change of artistic language as an attempt “to seek alternative ways to recover the meaning of that history, which had been replaced by the Grand History of the Victors”.13 In this spirit, the art collective CADA developed a series of public interventions and performances in the streets of Santiago that expressed a rejection of traditional artistic media.14 For the Avanzada, to continue resorting to traditional media and figurative styles, particularly painting, betrayed a guilty misunderstanding of the type of authoritarianism deployed by the 10 As Roberto Jacoby would put it himself, “[t]he old age conflict between art and politics (‘Art should reflect reality’. ‘All art is political.’ ‘Art is not political.’, etc.), which has never quite been overcome by merely introducing political ‘contents’ into art, perhaps could be superseded by the artistic use of a medium as political as mass communication”. Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 273. 11 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 33. 12 Tucumán Arde was a collective multidisciplinary project highly critical of the government’s austerity measures in the Argentine province of Tucumán. The artists’ project led to an exhibition in Rosario and Buenos Aires. The Buenos Aires show was censored by the police. For more on Tucumán Arde, see Giunta, AvantGarde, Internationalism and Politics. 13 Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits”, 158. 14 In their action entitled Para No Morir de Hambre en el Arte (To Not Starve in Art, 1979), CADA (that stands for Colectivo Acciones De Arte) organised a series of happenings which consisted in distributing powder milk to the inhabitants of a slum in Santiago, making a public statement in front of the UN building, publishing an announcement in the weekly magazine Hoy, exhibiting both milk and named publication in the front window of an art gallery in central Santiago, and asking exiled Chilean artists (among others Cecilia Vicuña and Eugenio Téllez) to perform artistic gestures with milk that would function as an extension of the Santiago-centralised series of actions. The use of milk suggested the creation of clots—physical and symbolic—slowly forming in the veins of a Chilean autocratic society.

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Junta (the military government). Art had to be re-injected in the midst of life and even merge with daily reality in order to recover a political relevance and help denounce present abuses and articulate alternatives for the future.15 To this effect, Richard found in the linguistic and structuralist theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes an explanatory framework to the group’s actions. For Richard, cultural criticism and art were practices mobilised “to suspend the sentence that condemns signs to remaining static or routine” and instead to create “disturbances in the semiotic organization of messages that produce and reproduce institutional consent”.16 The experiments of the Argentine and Chilean avant-gardes that operated in a climate of political repression therefore fared well with the criteria outlined by the advocates of Latin American Conceptualism. Moreover, both scenes illustrated cogently another aspect of Conceptualism, namely its anti/postcolonial struggle for autonomy from the art centres that were Paris and New York. By breaking away from objectual art and positing their practices firmly in the realm of politics, Latin American artists rejected both the European dominance of the pictorial medium as well as the “tautological or self-reflexive”17 nature of North American conceptual art. Grounding her thinking as heir to the Spanish art critic Simón Marchan Fiz’ notion of Ideological Conceptualism, Ramírez read these practices as specific to peripheral art scenes. As such, the exhaustion of meaning and the interruption of signs established by Argentine and Chilean artists also functioned as a gesture of defiance against the dominant currency of European and North American art trends and movements. Camnitzer would appeal to a similar kind of rebellion when he wrote: “[i]t may well be that the established means in art will prove unsuited for the building of a new culture. Perhaps the mere act of taking a paintbrush in one’s hand—no matter how one uses it—

15

As CADA would explain, “[o]ur aim is to dissolve art through everyday creativity. We do not want any opposition between art and life. The future we desire is life itself, the creation of a different society is a great work of art”. Cf. Camnitzer, Didactics of Liberation, 89. This claim, quite characteristic of CADA during these years, helps reveal the collective’s hope for a complete fusion of art and life and may partly explain why the Avanzada was subsequently accused of attempting to impose a hegemonic view of art and the avant-garde on the Chilean scene. 16 Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 (Melbourne: Experimental Art Foundation for Art & Text, 1986), 1-2. 17 Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits”, 156.

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condemns one to producing colonial art”.18 With Conceptualism on the other hand, artists finally had a specifically national—or regional—style to call their own and one that allowed for the plastic expression of precariousness as not only a daily reality but also a tool to resist dominant modes of governance, be they political, economic or cultural. The contribution of Camnitzer and Ramírez’ writings to the international recognition of Latin American art ought not to be underestimated. Nevertheless, many questions should also be—and have been—raised as to the “flattening” effect that such a broad categorisation has performed on local particularities. As the Peruvian curator Miguel Lopez rightly puts it, this kind of “assertion, though somewhat provocative, traces a particularly narrow and dichotomous path of analysis, indebted to essentialist nuances that fail to establish a genuine antagonism”.19 Moreover, scholars like Zanna Gilbert have also been right to underline that the effort to enhance the political aspect of Latin American Conceptualism has tended to undermine the ways in which North American conceptual art also devised forms of resistance and intervention in the public realm through, for instance, their involvement in the anti-Vietnam war movement.20 While this paper shares these views, it also wishes to expand the scope of negative consequences that the dominance of the conceptualist currency in retrospective accounts of Latin American art appears to lead to. Indeed, if Conceptualism may, in certain aspects, appear over-inclusive, it does not only flatten out regional 18

Dawn Ades, “History and Identity”, in Art in Latin America. The Modern Era, 1820-1980, ed. Dawn Ades (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the South Bank Centre, 1989), 285. 19 Miguel A. López, “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?”, Afterall 23 (Spring 2010). Available at: http://www.afterall.org/ journal/issue.23/how.do.we.know.what.latin.american.conceptualism.looks.likemig uela.lopez#cite42.42. The art critic Gabriel Peluffo Linari says something similar when, addressing the Spanish release of Camnitzer’s book Didacticas de Liberación, he warns about the risk of turning Conceptualism “into a kind of super-category (a meta-style) that simplifies and homologates a variety of language operations, aesthetic formulations, and information strategies”. Gabriel Peluffo Linari, “Salpicón and Compota”, ArtNexus 79 (December 2010-February 2011). Available at: http://www.artnexus.com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=22456. 20 The other point of criticism defended by Gilbert in her article refers to Conceptualism’s tendency to resort to a kind of neoprimitivism, casting once again the image of Latin America “as a melancholic, violent and politically unstable region, the perfect ‘other’ of the supposedly stable and democratic West”. See Zanna Gilbert, “Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption”, Re:bus 4 (Autumn/Winter 2009): 14.

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differences but also leaves out gendered specificities. Moreover, I would argue that the restrictiveness of a Conceptualism of art that conflates the ideatic aspects of art with its political valence fails to account for the subversive force lying in the materiality of artworks also produced at that time. Bearing this in mind, I now turn to the works of two artists who have remained marginal figures in the narratives weaved around Chilean and Argentine art. My contention is that the resistance to the application of conceptualist criteria in the formal properties of their work, opens the way for a crack, an opening through which materiality and gender, two utterly precarious elements mostly absent from Latin American Conceptualism, resurface and lead the way toward a radical reconsideration of the linear narratives made about Latin American art from the 1960s to 1980s.

Precarious Materialities: Lydia Galego and Roser Bru The Argentinean artist Lydia Galego has been making sculpture since the 1960s. Her work Embolsado (Bagged In, 1993) (Plate 9) is a discomforting piece and its very display, perched upon a plinth, requires the audience to spin around it in concentric circles, growing increasingly uncomfortable. The sculpture represents a vaguely anthropomorphic form entirely contained in a large sewn-up sack of textile. As the top of the face barely peers out of this enclosure, the only trace of life emanating from the sculpture lies in the figure’s staring eyes and in the sharp angles framing the head on both sides suggesting two hands and conveying to the structure a dynamic sense of resistance. This forced enclosing movement is contained in the manufacturing process itself as Galego wraps a sculpted Styrofoam block into layers of textile that adhere to the original support with glue, sewing and the application of a matte coat of varnish, providing to the outer layer the appearance of a dried, solidified hide. Galego’s sculpture perspires a profound awareness of its own material condition. The artist’s wrapping, tightening and/or caressing gesture is somehow marked into the finished object and contributes to conceal the industrial origin of the underlying Styrofoam. At a time when Argentine avant-garde artists rejected the very idea of material production in their artworks, insisting rather on the codification of meanings surrounding them, Galego seems to proceed in the exact opposite way: hiding the processed aspect of her work under a veneer of artefact—a manual quality conveyed by the texture, form and palette of her sculpture. Chilean painter Roser Bru’s portraits of women evoke a similar sense of suffocation but whereas Galego’s figure appears to be slowly captured by an excess of materiality, in Bru’s painting, it is the woman’s body that

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seems to lose sense of its own proportions and swell to the point of exploding the borders of the frame. Moreover, in many of Bru’s female figures, the gaze is absent, cut off by the upper part of the canvas. What the painter leaves her spectator with therefore is the pictorial spectacle of a swollen, dilated body, which in the very midst of its overwhelming materiality, is denied by the artist through a large X cancelling out the lower part of the canvas as in Las Frustraciones de Mariana, (Mariana’s Frustrations, 1976) (Plate 10). The underlying conservatism of the military regimes in place in Chile and Argentina during 1970s and 1980s found its most retrograde expression in their conception of women. The stakes of providing a tight definition of femininity lied in the military regimes’ ambition to turn women into the symbols of the Nation. As la Patria (the Nation) became one of the keywords of post-coup rhetoric, this return to the unadulterated values of the country was intertwined with an idea of gender based upon a reactivation of the traditional family model of marianismo that advocated a dominance of men over the public realm.21 As women became stuck in rigid casts of femininity, the imposition of fixed gender led to a sense of trapped embodiment, a pervasive aspect of both Bru and Galego’s works. Entitling many of her portraits of female figures Mujeres Clausuradas (Closed-off Women), Roser Bru explains: “my concern is for closed-off women because there is no such thing as a closed-off man”.22 This concern is prominent in her series of mutilated caryatide-women such as Mujeres que Aguantan (Women who Endure, 1988), where female bodies collapse under the weight of responsibility placed upon their heads, forcing them into immobility. Moreover, the recurrent duplication and mutilation of her female shapes contribute to a heightened sense of discomfort, pain and 21

In Chile, the control over women’s bodies took place both concretely—through budget restrictions on the distribution of free contraception and a decree banning miniskirts from public office—and symbolically—as the military government came to announce in their 1974 Declaración de Principios that “it is in the family that woman finds the greatness of her mission and it is family that turns woman into the Nation’s [La Patria] spiritual rock”. Cf. Pía Rajevic, El libro abierto del Amor y el Sexo en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Planeta, 2000). Similarly, in the Argentine Generals’ dictatorship, women became synonymous of order, discipline and nationalism. For performance scholar Diana Taylor, the “Dirty War represents an extreme example of the double mechanism of imagining and imposing national/gender identity”. Cf. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 93. 22 Claudia Campaña, El arte de la cita. Velasquez en la obra de Bru y Cienfuegos (Santiago de Chile: Museo de Bellas Artes de Santiago, 2008), 56.

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complete helplessness. The slow petrification of women’s bodies within a social cast is an equally prevalent motif in Lydia Galego’s work. Her work Bicho Canasto (Caterpillar, 1987) (Plate 11) in particular insists on the slow suffocation of women under layers of expectations. The house that the bicho, an insect endemic to the Argentine pampas, weaves around itself here becomes a poisonous aegis, a social skin slowly smothering the female figure within herself. At the same time, in mimicking the tightening grip that the military dictatorships held upon women, these artworks also exacerbate the violent gesture up to a point where the distortion of the human shape reaches an unrealistic degree. There is something almost tragic-comic in the demeanour of Galego’s Bicho Canasto as the process of layering appears to know no bounds. Emphasising the Juntas’ ambition to overburden the female body with symbolic meanings ultimately turns into a parody that deflates official gestures. In the Chilean Avanzada, women artists like Diamela Eltit (who was a member of CADA) also elaborated performances that dealt with the problematic treatment of femininity by the patriarchal military government. Her art action Zona de Dolor (Zone of Pain, 1980) for instance, took place in a brothel and recorded Eltit cutting her forearms and legs while reading aloud from her novel Lumpérica.23 Mobilising an aesthetic of shock-value, the artist used self-harm to highjack the sacrosanct image of the female body defended by the military dictatorship. While the mix of blood and water used by Eltit to wash away the pavement in front of the brothel, as well as the coloratura of her voice piercing through the silence of the room, referred to a physical break-down and leakage, the performance was interpreted by Richard—and, through her, incorporated in the conceptualist canon—as a sort of anti-discourse meant “to expose the suppression of meaning or the positions of power in official discourse”.24 While they share similar concerns with Eltit’s performance, Bru and Galego resist the tendency to interpret their works’ reference to the body as a refractory sign. Indeed, by shaping female forms whose contours seem on the perpetual edge of collapse, the two artists turn the body into a formless mass, a precarious and shifting matter upon which no discourse seems to stick. In Galego’s Embolsado, the figure’s human form is denied by the very wrapping into the bag of textile, functioning as an excess of derma that deflates the form and locks the figure within through a slow process of suffocation. Meanwhile, in Bru’s representation of female 23

The English and French translations of the novel kept the Spanish title that would loosely translate as “Lumpen Woman”. 24 Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions, 72.

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bodies, matter verges on liquefaction, a fleshy overflow precariously standing on the edge between presence and absence. The collapse of forms in these artists’ work, its prevalent formlessness therefore function as a visual strategy of survival developed by the female body in it attempts to escape the normative categorisation promoted by the military government and patriarchal society. Whereas the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s resorted to a precariousness of means (eliminating the object) and meaning (proposing a reading of artistic resistance in terms of signs and countersigns), Galego and Bru produce an overabundance of matter, but it is a damaged and suffering matter that they confront us with. Moreover, by denying to the viewer the solace of a form to hold on to, their works operate a stripping of the sensorium itself, an experience of precarious visuality that the art historian Christine Ross would define as “an unsettling of vision that occurs at the viewer-image interface, a quality addressed to the viewer that troubles the full visual access to the image (and beyond, to the reality to which it refers)”.25 Assessing a return of materiality as a resistance against both government oppression of the female body and the hegemonic lens of Conceptualism is far from unproblematic though. For in all their work’s physical persistence, Bru and Galego also have to question the relevance of their practices at a time when bodies did not only undergo strict social codifications but were also subjected to abduction, torture and disappearance.26 Here lies another reason of the conceptualist avantgarde’s rejection of materiality for, indeed, how could material art forms such as painting and sculpture truly express the aporia of political disappearance? Even more so, how would a figurative type of representation be able to account for the absence of corpses and the hole that disappearances created in the social fabric of each country? In Argentina, the return to figurative painting undertaken by avant-garde artists such as Luis Felipe Noé during the years of the Dirty War has constituted a real issue for art historians who (when they have not ignored 25 Christine Ross, “Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture”, in Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux, and Christine Ross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 20. 26 During the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships, the “disappearance” of political opponents became a common practice both at a domestic and a regional level as the intelligence services of the military governments of the Southern Cone collaborated through the implementation of the “Plan Condor”. For more on this, see John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents (New York and London: The New Press, 2004).

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it completely) have tended to interpret it as a traumatic and traumatised expression which, paired with a certain degree of self-censorship, constituted pictorial gestures that rejected and denied the reality of the time.27 Is there a way to consider the work of Bru and Galego as anything else than “ciphers of regression” as Benjamin Buchloh, suggested in another context?28 Could the materiality in their work express anything but a denial of the political reality? I would contend that it is paradoxically in the (self-destructive) use they make of a figurative materiality expressed through traditional media such as painting and sculpture that these artists’ subversive strength appears most visible and raises questions regarding the process of repression and disappearance. In her portrait of the desaparecida Edelmira Azocar (Plate 12), Roser Bru resorts to a pictorial gesture in which the evanescent palette and the blurred brush lines suggest not only a disappearing or disappeared body but also a disappearance of painting itself. Indeed, in her resort to the medium, Bru seems to scalp her own canvas off its pigments, attacking the very materiality of her work as if the self-mutilatory performativity of her gesture stood as the only way for her to address the unconceivable experience of political disappearance. As the facial traits of Edelmira blur and blend, the painting seems to lose form, erasing itself in the very gesture through which it claims to assess its existence. Similarly, in Galego, the monstrous materiality that engulfs women within appears to have succeeded as, in her later works, Galego’s bichos turn into abstracts rolls from which all traces of anthropomorphism have disappeared, as if digested and evacuated. Moreover, the textured and pigmented appeal of her earlier sculptures—these material aspects which used to provide an embodied sense of fleshiness to her work, give way to a much more polished and processed appearance. The spell is broken, Galego seems to suggest and as the—however impeded—recognisable humanity of her early works recesses, these works sound as the admission of defeat: the defeat of sculpture in addressing, through its materiality, the political anguish of the time and women’s impeded sense of embodiment. 27

I am thinking here of an article and a catalogue essay, both explaining artists’ return to painting and figuration during the years of the Argentine Dirty War as the result of a political and psychological trauma. See Andrea Giunta, “Pintura en los ‘70: inventario y realidad”, V Jornadas de Teoría e Historia de las Arte. Arte y Poder (Buenos Aires: Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Artes, 1993), 215264; and Maria Teresa Constantin, Cuerpo y Materia. Arte Argentino entre 1976 y 1985 (Buenos Aires: Fundación Osde, 2006). 28 Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression”, October 16 (Spring 1981): 39-68.

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However, it is in this very admission of defeat that both Bru and Galego’s approach to materiality seems to take on its greatest relevance. Indeed, as disappearance injects uncertainty and a constant climate of doubt in the public field, Galego and Bru resort to a (non-) representation of both the body of their figures and the body of their works which constantly seem to hover between two states: lack and excess, solid and liquid, presence and absence. Political disappearance corresponds to an impossible and monstrous attempt at making matter disappear, at conveying the false story of bodies that abruptly move from a state of presence to one of irremediable and unexplained absence. In their persistence in mistreating the materiality of their artworks, Galego and Bru set about showing how such a process can only be achieved through violence. Similarly, the persistence of their work in all its damaged and residual gravity—of flesh and bone—functions as an antidote to the lies about disappearance conveyed by the military’s official discourses.

Conclusion The story of high Modernism as well as the place Conceptualism in a Latin American context has come to occupy within it, has been generally perceived from a gender-indifferent point of view. Although a number of Chilean artists and theorists like Richard were concerned with the question of feminism, the incorporation of their works—or even, absorption— within a wider framework of Latin American Conceptualism has erased such legacy. Questioning the subversive form of a precarious materiality has allowed me to rethink the place occupied by gender in the work of Bru and Galego as the embodied core of a critique against patriarchal constructs, both in the political and in the artistic worlds. However, as I have argued, the return of materiality in Galego and Bru’s work is coterminous with the admission of its own impossibility to account for political terror, and the representation of these female bodies as precarious givens and surfaces of slippage also shows how the work’s materiality builds the way toward a critique of the kind of linear readings that historiography creates in its effort to shape linear narrative. In this sense, the critique underlying these works targets Modernist and high Modernist understandings of materiality alike. Clement Greenberg advocated the creation of a flat painting.29 Meanwhile, Marcel Duchamp called for “a 29

By “flat painting”, Greenberg refers to the visual experience of painting as it renounces three-dimensional illusion. To Greenberg, this purely optical, flat experience of painting characterises the epitome of Modernism. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, in Modern Art and Modernism. A Critical

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completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art”.30 In their work, Bru and Galego undo both Greenberg’s approval of a pure opticality and Duchamp’s proto-conceptual rejection of materiality by offering what writer Mira Schorr would call a “wet” painting, an art of depth, of “visciousness”, of “goo”31 where ground and figure become embodied and the fleshy fluidity of artistic matter stops being seen as a regression into an essentialised view of the feminine. Ultimately, the dents that Galego and Bru make in hegemonic discourses on Latin American Conceptualism also ought to be seen as cutting into a fossilised view of painting or sculpture: a plotting against medium and discourse alike. In this sense, their locked-up, mummified women undo their forms from within to wound historiography, breaking apart the casts placed upon them by linear and narrative views of art. This understanding of Galego and Bru’s works proceeds to reveal the gaping wounds, the cracks that a precarious materiality opposes to the categorising discourse of Conceptualism. The wound that opens is also an intersubjectivity, an encounter between interiority and exteriority. The wound “does not kill but it soils”,32 writes Georges Bataille, an author also involved in the undoing of master narratives. By soiling, the wound in Bru and Galego’s figures sips in and corrodes the smooth surface of linear discourses about Latin American contemporary art and helps one see how, precariousness, far from being a monosemantic term, continuously draws the outlines of forgotten (art) histories.

Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (London: The Open University, 1982), 5-10. 30 Mira Schorr, Wet. On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 149. 31 Ibid. 32 Georges Bataille, “Documents 1”, in Georges Bataille. Vision of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

CHAPTER EIGHT HAPPENINGS TO ANTI-HAPPENINGS: THE AVANT-GARDE AND OBSOLESCENCE IN 1960S ARGENTINA ELIZE MAZADIEGO In 1967, at the height of Argentina’s experiment in avant-garde art practices, art critic and intellectual Oscar Masotta reflects on the recurring problematic of defining the avant-garde in his lecture “After Pop, We Dematerialize”. He states, Although it is difficult, I will not attempt that definition here. More than offering definitions, my intention now is to give some account of events and complete the account with a few indications and some reflections. I will say that an avant-garde work must have at least these four properties …1

Among these four criteria is the need for an artwork to understand itself within an art historical discourse and genealogy, to alternately open up a new range of aesthetic possibilities, and to radically “negate something”. More specifically, Masotta understood the orchestrated ephemeral events historically coined by US artist Allan Kaprow as Happenings as both an extension from painting and traditional theatre in its resemblance to and departure from these traditional art forms. On the basis of these criteria, the then-popular participatory events named Happenings seemingly constituted a manifestation of the avantgarde until presented with its antithesis known as the “anti-Happening” or, more appropriately, “media art”. Masotta’s argument is that this emerging artistic activity is Argentina’s avant-garde art as it inverts the structure of the Happening to produce a new genre of work made of information. Masotta explains, 1

Oscar Masotta, Conciencia y Estructura (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010), 281-2. Author’s translation.

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The “material” (“immaterial”, “invisible”) with which informational works of this type are made is none other than the processes, the results, the facts, and/or the phenomena of information set off by the mass information media.2

Media being radio, television, newspapers, and magazines operated as a catalyst by which the work’s material—its communication—is generated, and hence a type of dematerialization of the artwork. Masotta’s use of the term “dematerialization” extends from artist El Lissitzky’s understanding of the encroaching effect new media technologies like the telephone and radio had on material forms of communication such as books and letters.3 I foreground Masotta’s intervention because it demonstrates the coincidence of two preoccupations: the need to define what is avant-garde art in 1967 Argentina and that the avant-garde is a dissolution of the material art object into immaterial or more radical ephemeral forms of art. My argument here is to reframe Argentina’s brief but vibrant exploration of the avant-garde within an entirely different construct, rooted in precariousness and progressive obsolescence. These new terms stem from a reading of artists’ avant-garde works which alternately express a state of obsolescence in their materiality, and more so in their effort to be part of a perpetual artistic reinvention and renewal. As such, the question of what constituted the “new” within Argentina’s art at this particular historical moment can be identified as obsolescence as much as it can be considered internationalism, rather than any particular style or genre. The question of what is avant-garde in 1960s Argentina begins with the country’s reorientation towards change set off by the disposal of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955. Of course, the specifics of change vary across social, political, and cultural fields, but the momentum towards progressive change was the underlining emphasis, setting Argentina on an identifiably different course than Perón had. Based on the discourse that emerged from the field of art and culture during this transitional period, Perón’s government was uniformly represented as a provincial and populist dictatorship that stifled growth on all fronts, especially in arts and literature.4 One such example is the magazine Sur supported by writer and intellectual Victoria Ocampo. From the start of the magazine in the 1920s, the writers and editors imagined its publication as a bridge between 2

Ibid., 283. El Lissitzky, “The Future of the Book”, New Left Review 1.41 (1967): 39-44. 4 Cf. Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentina Art in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 3

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Argentina and Europe. However, they felt their cultural connections abroad constrict under Perón. So, with the end of Perón’s era, editors published the issue 237 titled “Por la reconstrucción nacional”, translated in English as “For National Reconstruction.” Much like the artists and intellectuals within the visuals arts, the literary magazine asserted a return to free creative production and international engagement, which would subsequently generate a new and superior art form in Argentina.5 These ideals took shape in a series of initiatives that established art historian and critic Jorge Romero Brest as the new director of Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), which led to exhibitions of local artists abroad and international artists in Argentina. The first example is in 1957 with the exhibition Arte moderno en Brasil (Modern Art in Brazil) at the revitalised MNBA. To follow was the plan to build the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMbA) with the director Rafael Squirru and in 1958 the foundation of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella.6 These new conditions were just a small series of efforts within a larger system that set its sights toward a new generation of art within Argentina. The question of what was “new” within art was rather ambiguous or yet undefined, leaving the term open for numerous interpretations. In looking back at this historical period, art historian Andrea Giunta rightly unites the energy towards Arte Nuevo, or New Art, under an international orientation and modernisation within a complex network of cultural producers. In her seminal work Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics, Giunta posits the term “internationalism” to describe the artistic project in 1960s Argentina. Her claim is that in 1964 Buenos Aires was nearly the international artistic centre it aimed to be as its cultural producers successfully imported trends from the US and Europe while exporting its newest art forms. This two-way exchange rerouted the country’s artistic development, which led to it becoming part of a global 5

John King recognizes “freedom and good literature” as key terms in Sur’s projection of a post-Perón Argentina. See “Towards a Reading of the Argentine Literary Magazine Sur”, Latin American Research Review, 16.2 (1981): 57-78. For the terms “novelty youth and internationalism”, see Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics, 59. 6 Guido Di Tella founded the Instituto Di Tella on the 10th anniversary of his father’s death, Torcuato Di Tella, the founder of the successful manufacturing company Siam Di Tella. The Institute was initially started as a program in independent research within the arts and social sciences, but any actual programming didn’t begin until 1960 when the Institute organized itself in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and produced its first exhibit. See John King, El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta (Buenos Aires: Asunto Impreso Ediciones, 2007).

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experiment in avant-garde artistic forms and practices, particularly in terms of general notions about the eventual dematerialization of the object, the blending of art and life, Neo-Dada tendencies or the advent of Conceptual Art.7 Art historians’ prevailing conceptions of this period continue to construct it in terms of avant-garde, international, novelty, rupture, transformation, political, or proto-Conceptual, and often from the perspective of institutional networks. Between large historical narratives and more focused interrogations into different parts and players of the period, the discourse remains within a particular set of conditions. Aside from a constant outmoding of practices from Arte Informal (Informal Art) to Happenings, the precarious condition of works highlights Latin America’s avant-gardes more interesting problems and challenges. Arte Nuevo is an ambiguous term that emerged in the late 1950s to describe art that dialogically opposed traditional forms of art, which was still largely figurative painting and to some extent geometric abstraction. Without any clear expression of what new form Arte Nuevo was, art within these terms was quite simply a category of difference from and against current practices and trends. The Asociación de Arte Nuevo (New Art Association) produced a quasi-manifesto in support of non-figurative art as the newest and latest artistic expression of form and reality, and thus representative of Argentina’s exploration in Arte Nuevo.8 Among these artists was Kenneth Kemble who exhibited Tregua (Truce, 1957), a collage oil painting blended with cut burlap and cloth on canvas, in the exhibition. The curators perceived the muted brown and greyish colours mixed with a material other than oil as an unfortunate turn towards a vulgar aesthetic. Yet, art critic Hugo Parpagnoli responded to the edition of the Asociación de Arte Nuevo’s salon with a certain curiosity in the Informalist works by Kemble. Kemble’s collages of discarded trash, continued in a nonfigurative fashion, but already signalled non-figurative art in specific 7 All of these terms have been applied to Argentina’s artistic trends in the 1960s. See, for example, Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin America: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Arte No Es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, ed. Deborah Cullen (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2007); Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972, ed. Lucy Lippard (Berkeley: University of California, 1997); and Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a Tucumán Arde (Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Cielo por Asalto, 2000). 8 The association was initiated by art writers and artists Aldo Pellegrini and Carmelo Arden-Quin and composed a large group of non-figurative artists. See Sofia Althabe and Julián Althabe, “Presentación”, 4º Salón Arte Nuevo (Buenos Aires: Galería Van Riel, 1958).

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formal terms. As the title of the article “Arte Nuevo y el movimiento Informalista” (“New Art and the Informal Movement”, 1959) states, Arte Nuevo and Arte Informal were beginning to be one and the same.9 Among Argentina’s critics Arte Nuevo was synonymous with artistic experimentation and the latest forms it produced. For artists such as Kenneth Kemble, Arte Nuevo was also a measure of radically different art practices that were represented in “real”, everyday materials incorporated into his canvases. For Kemble, his objects such as rags, tree bark, and burlaps retained their original signification and thus offered a “representation of the real”. Additionally, Kemble understood Arte Informal to be a viable progression or rather transformation of painting into new mediums. Without any clear intention to do so, Kemble, whose work echoed Dadaist sensibilities, ultimately provoked the virtual dissolution of painting towards a new materiality and object making, ushering in Argentina’s exploration of neo-avant-garde practices. Thus, Arte Nuevo led the way into an avant-garde art in Argentina that by definition pushed the boundaries of the latest trend. As such, Arte Nuevo began to operate as a term that needed to be fulfilled or realised, rather than a descriptive device or construct. Giunta similarly notes, For Argentine institutions, the priority was to produce an artistic avantgarde and to become involved in the international scene and to do so they had to present an art that was different from what was already being offered as part of the repertoires of the main cultural centres—an art that was cutting edge … the project was not vey well defined when the time came to deciding which images should present it. It meant offering all that could be considered new and, preferably, produced by young artists. The ideas was that, out of all the forms that emerges from this climate of experimentation and adventure that had taken hold among artists of Buenos Aires, there was something key and original and different from what was being created in the traditional art centres.10

In its first manifestation with Arte Informal, Arte Nuevo was an investigation and incitement that met its evitable end once the style appeared to be fully integrated in the local art scene and thus no longer new. But, in addition to its faded novelty, more artists working under the term produced muted versions of the once rough matter and gestural vitality, while producing unconvincing imitations of European Informalist artists. Seemingly new within the context of Argentina, Kemble 9

Hugo Parpagnoli, “Arte Nuevo y movimiento informalista”, La Prensa, December 1, 1959. 10 Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics, 13.

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understood Arte Informal as a sign that Argentina was on the right path towards its own art, but it wouldn’t be with this trend. By 1960 Kemble says, We also seem to be working in a contemporary idiom for the first time … but we still have a long way to travel nevertheless … we still follow the latest trends much too faithfully … The next few years will tell whether we are capable of shrugging off these influences and creating an art of our own.11

Under these conditions, Arte Informal never fully reached its potential as it swiftly navigated towards a newer expression in “Arte Destructivo” (Destructive Art). Again, an initiative of Kemble, artists Enrique Barilari, Jorge López Anaya, Jorge Roiger, Antonio Seguí, Silvia Torrás, and Luis Alberto Wells organised an exhibition under the same name at Galería Lirolay in 1961. The exhibit was composed of found objects, such as an umbrella, a flag, coffins, and wax dolls that were subsequently distorted or destroyed, while a soundtrack played fragments of a lecture by critic Jorge Romero Brest, readings of Aristotle’s Poetics, a theatre script by Pablo Picasso, and music performed by the exhibiting artists. According to Kemble, the show was an experimental art practice that foregrounded the “destructive tendency of man … into a completely non-offensive artistic experience”.12 Noting the possible references one could make to Dada and Neo-Dada’s use of the readymade, Kemble admits to an art historical precedent situated in the first avant-garde practices of the early 20th century and his French contemporaries in the Nouveau Réalisme. Art critic Aldo Pellegrini’s contribution to the catalogue interpreted the exhibition as a creative act of destruction rooted in a natural order of change, a quality of ephemerality and a means by which to generate change, transformation and “make something new”.13 Foundational within this framework is a principle of precariousness and obsolescence. 11

Kemble Smith, “Does This Mean Local Art Is Catching Up?”, Buenos Aires Herald, November 14, 1960. 12 Kenneth Kemble, “Arte destructivo”, in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art f the 1960s: Writing from the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 30. Originally published in Arte destructivo: Barilari, Kemble, López Anaya, Roiger, Seguí, Torrás, Wells (Buenos Aires: Galería Lirolay, 1961). 13 Aldo Pellegrini, “Fundamentos de una estética de la destrucción”, in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art f the 1960s: Writing from the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 32-6. This essay was also originally published in Arte destructivo.

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Materials were being recognised for their ephemeral properties, while the artistic process or act was one that produced inevitable change towards a new beginning. This formulation resonates in Marta Minujín’s work La destrucción (The Destruction) in 1962. Minujín was living in Paris on a fellowship to study painting from late 1962 until mid-1963. In her second visit to France, she became well acquainted with Nouveaux Réalistes artists Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle among others in the avant-garde such as Jean-Jacques Lebel. Minujín organised her final work before returning to Buenos Aires as a Happening of the literal destruction of her pieces in the street L’Impasse Ronsin. Artists were invited to participate in the sequence of destructive actions, beginning with a so-called executioner axing works into pieces, followed by letting loose a number of rabbits and birds, and lastly spraying gasoline over the artworks and setting them on fire.14 Within the context of France’s Neo-Dada experiments and with the company of fellow Argentine artist Alberto Greco, Minujín was developing her practice in very similar terms to Kemble’s Arte Destructivo. Her sculptures made of found mattresses echoes an overall interest in readymade objects, but her first destruction of them as a Happening alternately acts as a closure to her previous practice and initiates a new art that is the ephemeral event. In the 2010 retrospective of Minujín’s work at the Museo de Arte de Latinoamerica in Buenos Aires (MALBA), curator Victoria Noorthoorn situates La destrucción in the swelling discourse stemming from France’s Nouveau Réalisme, Germany’s early Fluxus, and Argentina’s Destructive artists about an art of negation. Scholar Daniel Quiles posits her Happening as an oppositional practice to her early work in sculpture, by literally destroying it.15 By extension, I question the possibility that Minujín ceases her practice for a new one: the Happening. This new form, however an oppositional gesture or anti-model, resonates with an impulse for a “new art”. Once in Buenos Aires, Minujín would make once more her mattresses in two works, Eróticos en technicolor (Erotic Works in Technicolor, 1964) and ¡Revuèlquese y viva! (Roll Around and Live!, 1964), but her concentration turned to orchestrating Happenings, making her sculptures 14

Marta Minujín, Obras 1959-89 (Buenos Aires: MALBA, 2010). Pierre Restany, Georges Maciunas, and Aldo Pellegrini quoted by Victoria Noorthoorn in Marta Minujín. See also Daniel Quiles, “Burn out my Potentiality: Destruction and Collectivity in Greco and Minujín”, in Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Contemporary Argentine Artists, 1960-2007 (New York: Americas Society, 2007), 69-80. 15

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all but obsolete. As much as I want to emphasise the oppositional force that is taken up by artists like Kemble and Minujín, there are qualities in these works that suggest a current of continuity. Much like Kaprow’s Happenings had elements reminiscent of Neo-Dada’s use of everyday objects, Minujín’s Happenings similarly tended to manifest events within transient environments made of everyday objects. Her first formal, by which I mean institutional, Happening in Argentina was constructed as a fragmented perception of Buenos Aires through a series of interconnected installations. The point of La Menesunda (The Challenge, 1965), however, is that these sort of “living assemblages” could be argued as an extension of her found mattresses, particularly as we consider her works in the framework of Pop Art. But as part of the rapid succession of experiments, and hence incessant new art forms, is the equally dramatic effect of obsolescence on the art of this period. Minujín’s Happenings in the 1960s offer several avenues of investigation into the development of the genre within Argentina, such as its relationship to US artist Kaprow, or its place within a global expression of Pop Art, to only name a few. Within the framework of this paper, Minujín’s events, beginning with La Menesunda and later taking new shape in her more mediated works like Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity, 1966) and Minucode (1968) are evidence of the popularisation of the Happening in Argentina’s artistic trends, to the extent that art critic Jorge Romero Brest was forced to reckon with them. Brest’s initial hesitancy to subscribe to Argentina’s wave of Happenings stemmed from his steadfast belief in modern art’s formalist paradigm, which he had to forgo if he was to engage in Argentina’s more pressing concern for new and original forms of art.16 In Brest’s introduction to the 1964 exhibition catalogue New Art from Argentina Minujín, with Dalila Puzzovio and Rubén Santanonín, represented “the leaders in freeing and unblocking the creative forces in our country, essential for the formation of a national artistic style”.17 Indeed, Minujín unleashed a creative energy that transcended the local art scene by saturating mass media outlets. Her spatial, temporal and sensorial experiences seemed to be dominating the category of Argentina’s Arte Nuevo with diverse audiences involved in celebrating this new art form. More specifically the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella’s Centro de Artes Visuales (Centre for Visual Arts), known as CAV, was actively involved in hosting Minujín’s Happenings, in conjunction with conferences and annual awards given to national and international artists of the avant-garde. 16 17

See Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics. New Art from Argentina (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1964).

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Within this general climate, seemingly settled into Happenings, eclectic intellectual Oscar Masotta organised two conferences on Pop Art in 1965 and his first production of Happenings a year later, both at the Instituto Di Tella. These incidents developed into book publications, which include Masotta’s writings on the two topics. In it, he commented on Minujín’s El Batacazo (The Long Shot, 1965) as “above all an ‘antipainting’ and an ‘anti-sculpture’” while remaining to be an object, however immediate and transient. In these terms, the development of an avant-garde art was predicated on the dissolution of artistic conventions. As Masotta ventured into making his own Happenings for the public, his interest immediately yielded a closure on the practice. While this may suggest a premature end to Happenings, Masotta can only see his experiment as a necessary transition towards another, more veritable avant-garde art. In his restaging of three Happenings by Michael Kirby, Carolee Schneemann, and Claes Oldenburg, the combined work titled Sobre Happenings (About Happenings, 1966) was an attempt to translate an albeit fragmented history of Happenings through the works themselves. On the one hand, Masotta’s didactic approach initiated a critical rethinking of Happenings as one that can be reconstructed vis-à-vis its material remnants, and thus already an historical artefact. On the other hand, he was giving a glimpse into Happenings’ ultimate reinvention into mediated events. In his words, Our happening would be a mediator, like a language of absent events, already nonexistent, in the past. The events, the facts inside of our Happening, would not just be facts, they would be signs. Put another way, we were excited once again that the idea of an artistic activity put onto the “media” and not into things, information about events and not the events themselves.18

In so doing, Masotta was anticipating his own thesis on the dematerialization of objects and thus prompting Happenings’ ruin or end. Throughout his essay, Masotta questioned “the novelty of the genre” by directly noting that Happenings were dead or out-dated. Having exhausted all originality, the Happening was already in 1966 relegated to an art historical narrative and subject to the past, rather than representing an art of the present. This alone justified the need for reinvention, which Masotta facilitated in his two works El helicóptero (The Helicopter, 1966) and El mensaje fantasma (The Ghost Message, 1967).

18

Oscar Masotta, Happenings (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Alvarez, 1967).

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The details of these works can be quickly summarised as staged events familiar to a Happening in their setting, script, and participation of the viewer. But rather than existing on just these terms, the work relied on a process of communication in order to complete the event. Already designated as anti-Happenings by Masotta, they were purposefully illustrative of Happening’s “logical consequence”: their end and media art’s beginnings. A seemingly quick succession of forms is pronounced in the making of Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar, 1966). Also known as the anti-Happening, this piece was a myth about a Happening that effectively never took place, but which was leaked to the press as real. According to its artists, the result of the work was an imaginary event constructed by its mediation. Recalling Masotta’s essay “After Pop: We Dematerialize” the everyday material objects Argentine artists once explored and incorporated into their works formally dissolved into processes of information and communication. Aside from the ostensible immaterial condition of media art, Masotta’s quest for an avant-garde art can be identified as a symptom of Argentina’s impulse towards perpetual novelty and transformation. The ambiguous concept Arte Nuevo caused a flurry of activity that sought to explore new forms and practices. The nebulous definition of the term created an opportunity, an expansive void that could be occupied by anything or everything. In all their attempts to fill that space, Argentine artists developed a series of experiments that were quickly made obsolete in a frenetic temporality. The result can be identified as a progressive maturing of the avantgarde or a cursory formulation of the term, developing into a series of fads than any legitimate avant-garde art. As I argue in my doctoral thesis,19 novelty in this context generated a so-called negation of earlier forms that suggests an interesting hybridisation of practices. But artists, mostly, were compelled to distinguish their work in opposition of established practices, eclipsing the continuity in their work. By all art historical accounts, the period arrived at an inevitable political radicalisation with the work Tucumán Arde (Tucumán is Burning, 1968) and fostered Latin American Conceptualism. My framing of the period in terms of precarity and obsolescence however, highlights some general issues and challenges scholars face in attempting to historicise and periodize 1960s art from Argentina. 19

Cf. Elize Mazadiego, “Dematerialization in the Argentine Context: Pop, Happenings and Media Art in 1960s Argentina.” (Forthcoming doctoral thesis, University of California, San Diego).

CHAPTER NINE WORDS IN MIRA SCHENDEL’S ARTWORK: CONTRADICTION BETWEEN PERMANENT AND TRANSIENT ANA MANNARINO The work of Mira Schendel (1919-1988) is marked by an intense experimentalism, evident in the variety of forms assumed by her artistic output over her career. A single coherent line of thinking traverses her oeuvre: an untiring investigation of the same questions, which includes the void and the emergence of form, the creative gesture, and the indetermination somewhere between the creation and the consolidation of symbols. Despite these recurrent motifs, the artist’s variety of paths and lines of research allows her work to be explored in diverse ways. Here, I focus on those artworks that involve words, writing and verbal language, without failing to recognize this offshoot as part of a totality—one of the many manifestations pursued by the artist in her inquiries, notable precisely for their processual nature. Schendel’s artworks were produced in large series, many of which explore the word in graphic space. Fragments of phrases or words, very often just letters and scripts, are associated with space, transparency and light. The word thereby plays a crucial role in the development of the artist’s inquiries. In this paper, I examine the theme of precariousness in Mira Schendel’s work, above all in her manipulation of words. I argue that the precarious and the transient are a central aspect of her poetics. Indeed, her choice of fragile, transparent materials is a recurring feature in artworks that attempt

This article was written thanks to a pre-doctoral research grant from the PDSECAPES, from September 2012 to June 2013, and to the support of PPGAV-UFRJ. The author would also like to thank David Rodgers for helping to translate this article into English as well as Ada Schendel for graciously enabling the publication of images in this book.

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to eternalize the transience of time, gesture, action and thought. An example is the series entitled Droguinhas (Little Nothings, 1965-1966). From the viewpoint that interests us here—her experimentations with words and verbal language—we can highlight a precariousness in the interferences generated by the spatial distribution of the words. These artworks allow an indeterminate and open reading, enabled by the rupture with linearity and the surface organization of words and letters. Moreover, they expose the work to the surrounding space, which subjects the words to fluctuations in luminosity, to the play of shadows, to the qualities of the materials used and to the viewpoint of a mobile spectator-reader who moves around in the same space in which the artworks are placed. Precariousness also appears in relation to other aspects of the word and verbal language, which are still related to spatial transience but on another level. This concerns the impossibility of stabilizing meaning in verbal language, the indetermination of the signified and the fragility of the sign: aspects that emerge in the succession of experiments undertaken by the artist. We can connect this artistic production to the confluence of the fields of art and poetry seen in Brazil since the 1950s with the Concretist movement. Though not part of the movement, Mira Schendel was a friend and interlocutor of the poet Haroldo de Campos, one of the movement’s leading poets and theorists. Yet Schendel’s work followed a very particular path, in which words, letters and graphic traces acquire form by adhering to the material of the support—extremely fine and translucent rice paper, transparent Plexiglas, for instance—and by experimenting with the form of the letter, using the artist’s gestures and calligraphy, in addition to readymade industrial letters such as Letterset and typewriter faces. The words also merge into space. The recurrent use of translucent and transparent materials subject the works to their surroundings and to the play of light. The artworks cast shadows that interact with the whole environment, incorporating the transience of the light and forming an unstable totality subject to momentary variations. Hence the boundaries of the works are blurred: letters and words sometimes seem to fluctuate, becoming immersed in the environment. The work thus creates a tension: the words are materialized by forms, luminosity and texture, but in a materiality that is both tenuous and subtle. Typical examples are the artworks from the series Objetos Gráficos (Graphic Objects, 1967-1968), made on paper, as well as the series Toquinhos (Little Stubs, 1970-1972) (Plate 13), made on acrylic. In the installation Ondas Paradas de Probabilidade (Still Waves of Probability, 1969), this immersion of the artwork in the environment is taken to an extreme. Made from nylon fibres dangling from the ceiling,

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this work only becomes perceptible with the variation in light as the viewer moves through the exhibition space. The text is still present, although, in this case, exceptionally, the artist opted to display the text independently of the installation, dispensing with the experiments with materials and light encountered in her other artworks. The support sometimes takes the form of suspended panels (Plate 14), linking the reading experience intimately with the body movement of the reader who wanders through the environment, circling the artwork. As the spectator moves between different viewpoints, the shadows and reflections also vary, interfering with the whole in a distinct way each time. The work can be seen and read (activities that are here indissociable) both from the side from which it was made by the artist and from the reverse. The ambient is immersed in letters and inscriptions. As a result the experience of reading and verbal language are thrown into question. The artwork suggests another relation between reading and viewing, word and drawing, form and verbal language, revealing its relation with the body, and its condition as a visual and simultaneously legible phenomenon. Legible, however, in the way in which words and letters assume a body from which the meaning cannot be dissociated or reproduced beyond the direct and always singular experience of the artwork. In Schendel’s artworks each text is a unique situation. In the case of the Monotipias (Monotypes, 1964-1967) (Plate 15) the text is the trace of a gesture, a fleeting movement of the artist. A gesture that is part of the glimmer of an idea or thought that is also material, and that only becomes complete with the drawing, in the process of becoming visible. These are physical marks of a passing instant that the artist wishes to last in time. Subject to the environment and its interferences, her work makes evident, in a very singular way, the fact that every reading, despite the text, is also a unique experience never to be repeated. Consequently, transience appears in Schendel’s work in two complementary ways: in the fleeting moment that the artist looks to retain, but without it losing the force of the transient; and in the moment of reading, since the text is presented in a non-linear, fragmented form, subject to the variations of the environment and the reader’s infinite possibilities of choice. The suspension of syntax, the fragmentation of the text (and even of the word) as well as its adherence to a spatial arrangement, leave the reading open so that it is remade each time. Reading is always an act centred on the reader, rather than on the writer or artist, and therefore takes place in a different way each time. There are two poles to the operation of writing-reading a text, and the second one—reading—is always open, always redone. Mallarmé’s Un

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coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1897), a poem in which the visual dimension has a determining role, provided a pioneering exploration of the possibilities of a form of reading open to multiple paths. In the words of Augusto de Campos, this poem marks “the extreme point of awareness of the crisis taking place in verse and language”.1 In response to Mallarmé’s poem, poets Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos’ critical texts and poetic works in the 1950s pointed in new directions that were explored by Brazilian Concrete and Neoconcrete poetry as well as by various visual artists who, inspired by the possibilities of exploring the visual dimension of the word, incorporated it into their works. Concrete poetry in Brazil belonged to a wider international literary and critical movement that took part in a re-vision, to use Augusto de Campos’s term, of Un coup de dés. This re-vision flourished in poetry, exploring the visual dimension of words and its implications for language renewal. It also flourished in the visual arts, and Mira Schendel is among those artists who ventured along this path. In an article entitled “Mallarmé: o poeta em greve” (“Mallarmé: The Poet on Strike”, 1972), Augusto de Campos makes a comment that evokes the field to be explored, not only in poetry itself but also in the arts more generally, by referring to the material support of the word: Mallarmé opens or sets ajar a whole new era for poetry, signaling its advent with unprecedented structural criteria and suggesting the surpassing of the book itself as an instrumental support of the poem.2

Many visual artists in Brazil would later interrogate the book as a support for the word. Investigations were (and still are) made into the word and its relations to the support, from the experimentation with the traditional book form to other experiments in which the book becomes almost unrecognizable, with nothing more than a few remnants left whether in the format or in the sequential structure. Mira Schendel investigated the book form in several artworks known as Cadernos (Notebooks, 1971). Thus, this questioning of the book as a support opened up the possibility for artists like Mira Schendel to explore words. She explored its implications in space, extrapolating the manipulable dimensions of the book, rupturing its totality and linearity in open sequences of multiple works that privilege spatial relations. 1

Augusto de Campos, “Mallarmé, o poeta em greve”, in Mallarmé, ed. Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991), 25. All quotes originally in Portuguese are translated by the author. 2 Augusto de Campos, “Mallarmé, o poeta em greve”, 27.

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These spatial relations are developed around the idea of structure. Similar to experimenting with the support for the word, as suggested and exploded by Concrete poetry, the idea of structure—initially developed in the theoretical and artistic work of the Concrete poets—was also a starting point for Schendel’s experimentation. In the article “Poesia, estrutura”3 (“Poetry, Structure”, 1955), Augusto de Campos calls attention to the idea of structure, the notion that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, suggesting a relational system in poetry. The word is seen to have no value by itself, but only within a structural relation with the whole. This happens not only from the semantic point of view, but also from the spatial arrangement of the poem on the page, differences in the size and weight of the letters, and the surrounding blank spaces: in sum, its visuality. Augusto de Campos contrasts the idea of structure with the idea of linear and additive organization. In some of her works, Mira Schendel takes this experiment to its limit. The role performed by the blank areas as well as the different calligraphies break the linearity of reading, allowing room for the reader’s subjective temporality. Various critics, such as Sonia Salzstein, Guy Brett and Rodrigo Naves,4 have recognized the importance of these blank spaces and the void in Schendel’s work, where the form of the drawings and letters seems to emerge structurally from within the blank spaces rather than over them. According to Mallarmé himself in the foreword to Un coup de dés,5 the blank spaces in the poem were demanded by versification, as surrounding silence. In Mira Schendel’s works, the blankness of the sheet of the paper, the empty space, assumes an even more striking importance. Structured in relation to letters and words fragments, which frequently remain incomplete, these spaces are more than a pause or counterpoint that, in the case of the poem, allow the word or suggested image to reverberate. We pass from silence to the muteness of the fragments in a circular movement that increases the dimension of the empty space, the force of its silence. Visuality acquires an even greater importance. The textures, the materiality of the support, the light, the transparencies, the form of the letter, everything combines with the word and is indissociable from it—placing 3

Augusto de Campos, “Poesia, estrutura”, in Mallarmé, ed. Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991). 4 See the articles: Sonia Salzstein,“In the Void of the World”; Guy Brett, “Actively the Void”, and Rodrigo Naves, “From Behind”, all of which are included in No vazio do mundo, ed. Sonia Salzstein (São Paulo: Marca D’Água, 1996). 5 Stéphane Mallarmé, Preface to “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”, in L’œuvre de Mallarmé: Un coup de dés, ed. Robert Greer Cohn (Paris: Librarie les Lettres, 1951).

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us in an unexpected position in relation to verbal language. Here we are faced by the absence, or virtual absence, of meaning. However, language is still present, even if suspended, as if caught by surprise in midoperation, in a process that ruptures the familiar unity of the sign—a sign that points somewhere only to return to itself. Form, matter, and light impose themselves, but the works are not limited to them, inviting us to engage in the act of reading. Verbal language is stretched, explored on the boundary with drawings and graphic traces. Her work allows one of its often forgotten dimensions to appear, a zone where marks and words blur, in a moment prior to that in which articulated thought takes shape. According to the artist herself, one of her main concerns was “with capturing the transfer of the instant living experience, full of empirical vigour, onto the symbol imbued with memorability and relative eternity.”6 Her objective, therefore, is to retain this transfer, from lived experience to articulate language, in an attempt to conserve what is intrinsically transient. She looks to make the fleeting instant endure in time without deterring its force and intensity inherent to the proximity with lived experience. Hence her work is motivated by a search founded on a contradiction: a contradiction between the transient and permanent, which is also a contradiction between lived time and past time, presence and absence. The impossibility of resolving this contradiction is manifested in her stubborn and profuse artistic production, which multiplies in series that sometimes number as many as two thousand pieces, as in the case of the Monotypes series. A stubbornness and profusion that also allow glimpses of a certain anguish, expressed in her correspondence, letters and diaries.7 Her interest in this contradiction—transient and permanent, lived time and past time, presence and absence—led the artist to an investigation, a reflective production, situated in the field of the visual arts rather than in textual production in the strict sense. It integrates, however, a very particular tradition within the visual arts, which I have attempted to reconstruct in the first part of this paper, and that involves investigations into the visuality of written language based on a specific and local interpretation of Mallarmé’s work made by Brazilian Concrete poetry as part of a wider international movement. This tradition flourished not only in the country’s poetic output but also in its visual arts. Mira Schendel 6

Excerpt from a typewritten text by Mira Schendel, unsigned and undated, found among the artist’s records. Published in Salzstein, No vazio do mundo, 257. 7 For a more detailed study of Mira Schendel’s writings, correspondence and philosophical concerns, see: Geraldo Souza Dias, Mira Schendel: do espiritual à corporeidade (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2009).

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focuses her work precisely on the production of signs. However, classic conceptions of the sign (here I evoke the thinking of Jacques Derrida, especially in Of Grammatology)8 are directly related to logocentric thought and the metaphysical conception of phonetic writing. Thus, according to these classical conceptions, the sign is subjected to speech and taken as exterior and secondary in relation to the logos, being and presence. Mira Schendel, in her works, searches to achieve presence in the ambit of writing rather than speech, to which presence is traditionally related. She does so in the realm of a spatial, visual, non-linear writing, which demonstrates a dissatisfaction and distrust in relation to speech and verbal language in general. Although her dissatisfaction with language leads to these visual and graphic experiments, there is no final response or solution in them. On the contrary, the contradictions persist and intensify. In the absence of speech and structured discourse, in the investigation of the symbol proposed by the artist—in the world, in space, with body and form, subject to light and the environment, to the situation of the spectator-reader and his or her movements—as a lived experience of the sign in formation, the work does not escape from the movement of signification which, as Derrida argues, depends on the fact that: each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element.9

The signifier of the signifier describes the movement of language—a movement without origin in which the sign represents the present in its absence, always deviating, always delaying the encounter with the thing itself. What I mean is that, despite Schendel’s efforts, her work itself also remains a type of representation, a reference to a moment that is no longer present—a present that continues to escape in the very movement of signification. Her aim is to locate in the symbol, in the word, the starting point that motivates the operations of language and thought itself, prior to the consolidation of any sign. She seeks to interrupt the constant references inherent to the sign and arrive at the point of origin, the absolute instant, in 8

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Original French edition dates from 1967. 9 Jacques Derrida, “Différance”, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 13. Original French edition dates from 1972.

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which relations, differences and references begin. She wants, therefore, to enter the play of the symbol’s operation, capturing its essence. Her work looks to recuperate presence through writing, registering the present moment and making it always present, without turning it into a trace. Before the muteness and silence of her artworks, we are faced by a question. Can we think of the subject’s presence-to-self prior to speech? Prior to writing or, more generally, to the sign? In other words, Can we think of a consciousness prior to the sign and beyond it, a conscience that is exterior to the sign’s movement and constant references? Is there any being outside of language? Schendel’s work both raises and seeks to answer these interrogations. Her artworks betray a dissatisfied unease, which looks for a response in the production of signs. She does not seek this answer in the inner intuitive silence, admitting the certainty of its existence prior to the sign and writing, but in the material production of forms and writings. This search, though, allows us to glimpse the precariousness of the word and meaning, the precariousness of the sign and the relations of signification, of this absolute instant to which they refer, an instant that would hypothetically contain the “instant living experience”. Here, precariousness is found in words that never form, in phrases that are never completed, inviting a circular, inconclusive reading. Most of her works, though filled with letters and words, never achieve any articulate sense. Yet, this should not lead us to a merely formal approximation, since the invitation to reading, in her artworks, continues to be made, in a circular movement in which beginning and ending remain indeterminate. We are faced then with the void of meaning, with the uneasy and perturbing movement of the sign’s referentiality, which instead of referring to another sign, or referring to present being, refers to itself. Therefore, instead of interrupting the movement of language and arriving at the “instant living experience”, her work substitutes this linear movement, of delays and referrals, always pointing elsewhere, for a circular movement. By breaking with the sign’s unity and proposing new situations when giving this sign a body (various bodies in fact) through a ceaseless experimentation, searching each time for a unique situation on the boundary between sign and thing, Schendel’s work would seem to match Mallarmé’s own evaluation of what his experimentation in Un coup de dés would end up producing: “rien ou presque un art”—“nothing or almost an art”.10 10

Mallarmé, “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”, 488. Augusto de Campos in his article “Mallarmé, o poeta em greve” quotes this same sentence in reference to Concrete poetry in Brazil.

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Most of Schendel’s artwork involves this incessant search. Additionally, the series reveal a processual dynamic that goes beyond the fixity of the physical piece. By seeking to make the instant traverse time, she multiplies it, transforming time into a series of traces, hints of an action or gesture that we relive through the experience of the work. We are not presented with finished results, but with a succession of attempts that look to become complete in their configuration as a whole. She aims to capture totality in the sum of the differences, but this totality is never attained: it is reinvented each time during the process and thus is never complete. The book’s totality with beginning, middle, and end has been undone. Rather than elucidating the contradiction in which her artwork is grounded, Mira Schendel’s poetics exacerbate it, allowing us to relive the artist’s experience of the impossibility of retaining the instant, the word, the sign.

PART IV PRECARIOUSNESS IN ART: ARTISTS’ NARRATIVES

CHAPTER TEN PRECARIOUSNESS AS A CONCEPTUAL BASIS FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF ART AS UNINTERRUPTED PRIMACY OF PLAY FABRIZIO AUGUSTO POLTRONIERI The condition of being precarious is something that has accompanied mankind since its civilizational consciousness was ferociously seized, although we know that said condition may have been the most fought against throughout human history, mainly during the period that follows the Enlightenment, also known as Modernity, when we experienced an era that sought to eliminate ambiguities typically found in precarious structures via the abstract discourse of reason. However, my objective here is not to deal specifically with the heritage left by Modernity but rather with the ascension, in our time, of thought structures that find in precariousness their own conceptual mobility, since it seems superfluous to talk about permanence in a period marked by ephemerality. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize that there cannot be any type of order where there are not at least some traces of generality, since this is one indispensable ingredient of reality and the complete lack of regularity is simply a nullity. A complete chaos is absolutely nothing. Therefore, to affirm that a period is based conceptually on precarious structures is to say that, at our civilizational stage, the certainties of modernity were abandoned in favour of thought modes that are more complex and dialogical. Consequently, I will deal with precariousness as something philosophically close to the concept of liberty. Liberty is found where the conditions that favour the emergence and concreteness of individual will exist. In the artistic field this liberty should be in communion with at least one other instance: The artwork, which will be dealt with as being precarious play and, consequentially, liberating par excellence. Individual liberty is united with the floating signs found in the art to form a free,

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detached and groundless being, whose meaning is precarious and in constant mutation given the ample exchange of signs between the subjectivity of the artwork and the subjectivity of the observer or the artist that, in the object, installs a space for exchange. I want, with these assertions, to underpin the consideration that precariousness in art is a manifestation of something found within mankind’s being and is instinctively present within the rules that produce language and meaning. In order to comprehend the emergence of what was said we need to realise that the condition of being precarious is present within two philosophical strands—nominalism and realism—that disputed the supremacy for truth in the Middle Ages which, in turn, was the period that gave rise to Modernity. The feeling that we have always lived under the sign of precariousness is evident in both the nominalist Franciscan and the realistic Dominican thoughts and, thus, within the ideological systems involved in the acts that created the world, in the case of nominalism, and in the acts that mediated it, in the case of realism, but with large conceptual differences between both systems that would, inevitably, conduct the way Western civilization developed. Let us take as a starting point the question: “What does it mean to say that ‘two things are similar’?” Similitude is, simultaneously, identity and non-identity, as in the logical assertion that “two sparrows are similar because they can be separated from other birds. They are identical because both are sparrows and not identical because they are two”. What does the identity and non-identity of these sparrows mean? Such a proposition indicates that our cognitive and perceptive processes are, at their core, contaminated by doubt. These are questions that were hidden by technical models during many different periods of history, which then peaked under Modernity via the ascension of an Enlightenment ideal that sought a Cartesian truth. It should be noted that the search for a Cartesian truth was imbued by a principle that surges from an unshakable faith in the certainty about everything. The question has, thereby, religious contours similar to the very division between Franciscans and Dominicans. Given the attempt to hide the precarious for such a long period, it is well worth noting that currently, especially in the aesthetic domain, to ask about what is real has become meaningless, once experimentation and exploration are more important than reaching supposedly truthful conclusions. What would have happened to Cartesian modernity then? The terrain that I propose to scrutinise is gritty for I begin from the edge of perception and production of meaning towards the core of understanding contemporary art as a manifestation of ancient doubts, through the

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hermeneutic theory of play developed by the German philosopher HansGeorg Gadamer (1900-2002). I begin this quest by analysing the nominalist thought that won its dispute with realism in the Middle Ages, giving birth to a modern society that believes in the power of conventional language as being superior to the power of natural indexes. Returning to the question of birds from the Franciscan viewpoint, two sparrows are called two sparrows because convention says so. The similitude between the two does not lie with the sparrows themselves but instead with the observer. The nominalist agreed to call them sparrows so it could give order to the world at will. From this perspective universals are only names given to things. Yet, names themselves are not real, being instead only a conventional abbreviation that substitutes real things. Reason, within this logic, becomes purely a manipulation of words and in that sense Wittgenstein is completely right when affirming that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”1 Here we find Modernity’s birthplace, since reason cannot save—only faith can—and man is endowed with reason, it was staked that at the end of the day it would be more interesting to focus on reason instead of faith, and that fact, therefore, changed our gaze from faith and its universals towards the domination of nature. The choice that originated Modernity was the one that elected Reason as a guide, burying deep that which could not be explained by conceptual abstractions and that which could not be thought of as truth. This choice held up through the creation of increasingly abstract layers, in which the upper layers attempted to either explain the reason for the creation of the lower layers or, simply, denied them outright. The modern nominalist plan, in short, occurred by denying doubt and here I am treating the act of doubting as being correlated to the acceptance of a theory of meaning that takes precariousness into account as an essential creative force. Precariousness is present at the core of language that, in turn, cannot account for why things are what they are. Our understanding of the world is consequentially precarious by definition, as we are condemned to use language as a means of mediation and representation of the phenomena that surround us. For the Dominicans, on the other hand, two sparrows are sparrows because both share the same form, the same idea, the same universal, but they are also two because at a concrete level both are manifested as two different material beings. Two sparrows are, for Realism, generically 1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, in Major Works (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 82.

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identical but are not specifically identical. In this sense, despite being divine, Reason is less than Faith, for Faith exists twofold, with two truths: The truth of Faith and the truth of Reason, being that the first should submit to the second. Using a rather existentialist phrasing we could say that the immediate experience corresponds to faith, while the experience projected by abstract models is the product of reason. The immediate experience is superior to the facsimile one and, in this regard, the Dominicans are existentialists. For Realism the universals are prior to individuals: The universal enables the emergence of particularity, determining it. The question that really matters in this discussion of Nominalism versus Realism lies in the differentiation between a concept that seeks to design the world from models created by reason and another that seeks a previous reality that we cannot see or reach, and it depends on faith for its presence to be effective. In more conceptual terms, Realism relies on the premises that “the universals are fully real things” and that “the universals exist before things.” Nominalism, rather differently, intends that “the universals are only names”, “the universals exist after things” and that “the universals are just the breath behind a voice”. This reality projected by Nominalism is still very much present. Its heritage of extreme rationality still surround us, being alive not only in the advances of science in all its areas but also, among others, in the legacy of representational techniques present in the sphere of art. However, despite these advances, the price paid was too high and can be seen in our current incapacity when dealing with phenomena that are outside our control as is, ultimately, always the case. We live in a projection that aimed to control, Cartesian like, all aspects of cosmic functioning but that failed at each one of its attempts. A paradoxical situation because, at first sight, nominalism seems to allow a dialogue with precariousness that, in fact, does not take place. This is one of the main reasons that allowed for the emptying of modernity’s project and its gradual substitution by mediating models, which, in turn, allow a more accurate treatment of reality and take into account the context of phenomena presented to us. We can observe that, within the central discussions in all areas of knowledge, there is a return to a complete dialogue with the precarious, for that allows a treatment of reality in a more accurate way and not solely an idealised one. These dialogues have been occurring in a variety of ways and I should highlight, for example, the one occurring in complexity studies and in game theory. Realism, in this sense, is shown as a possible construction of precarious structures through language. Still, these structures do not pretend to be truthful. Now a continuous construction

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process of significance, a play between language and reality, has replaced the truth. Language shifts from being truth holder to assume a more complex role, where it remains a mediating conventional symbolic element but not a final one. The formative signs of language are not set into solid models anymore but rather the opposite: Signs now carry out their realistic design or, in other words, signs are now found within other signs, forming an infinite constructive chain of meanings where only some of the numerous facets of signs are chosen during the construction of discourse. To retrace the path no longer guarantees a verbatim reconstruction of destinations already reached. Therefore, the issue in vogue today is: The modernity project having been surpassed, what is left to consider and experience in a world without certainties, where the brutalities of actual facts are shown at every moment? How can dealing with reality prevent a groundless and consequentially meaningless existence? The answer seems to lie in the need for a constant reconstruction of the meanings given to objects. Specifically regarding art, this constant reconstruction is an index of precariousness closely related to the principle of liberty that amalgamates in a simple entity the artwork, the artist and whoever contemplates the artistic phenomenon. These three instances fluctuate over the impermanence of incomplete and precarious meanings. The freedom to seek new precarious meanings is an act of faith and not reason; a hermeneutic theory—of signification—that can bring interesting horizons to the landscape with which we were left. Hence, I should adopt a hermeneutical position that deals with art and play as cultural correlated forms since play, when related to the experience of art, is not something external to it but rather the opposite, it is at the centre of the production and fruition of artworks, both activities constituted as only one, since making and observing are confounded within the play. There is no space for partitions. To see the world as a collection of plays from the point of view of the player is to see the world aesthetically. Even better: It does not suffice to simply observe the world; it is necessary to experiment with the precarious structure revealed by language. The play is independent from the behaviour, the animus or even the subjectivity of the player. This is how one can identify the independent character of play and, consequentially, of art. The play is not conditioned by those who play or by a specific player. Existing by itself, its autonomy exempts the necessity of a player. Players only ensure the representation of a higher instance that is the play itself. In order to clarify this question I should emphasise that a pure movement devoid of objective and target

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forms the character of the play, established in the form of an eternal return, a magical ritual, where there is no law of causality based on cause and effect. Its existence and conservation does not require a fixed subject. “The play is the occurrence of the movement as such.”2 Schiller designates play as “everything that is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent, and yet imposes neither outward nor inward necessity”,3 defining beauty as a mere play between sensitive impulses, identified as “life”—all material beings and all immediate presence to the senses—and a informal impulse, that is synthesized as “form”, comprehending all formal possibilities of the object and its relation with thought. The ludic could be termed as “living form”, designating all the qualities related to beauty created and observed by us. Play, in this context, should be comprehended as a state of mankind, where it is shown analogously to liberty, relating itself to this unimpeded form and, therefore, ludic and precarious. This state of pure freedom renders mankind complete, master of its own sensitive and formal qualities. The ludic process of playing with beauty amplifies our field of view and that, in itself, is the only real play: “Man is only serious with the agreeable, the good, the perfect; but with beauty he plays”.4 We should note that, for Schiller, the word “perfect” is subordinated to the word “serious”. Beauty does not service what is utilitarian or necessary but sympathises with what exists by itself and that alone is enough, not being necessary to anything or dependent on anything. In the playing field, beauty should be the only guide for: “Man shall only play with beauty, and he shall play only with beauty. For, to declare it once and for all, man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing.”5 If the player’s guideline is beauty, then play is the foundation that sustains human culture and finds in art its biggest, freest, most indefinite and precarious form of expression, praxis and contemplation, serving as model for all formalized and materialized constructions of language and thought. In the form of superfluous movements produced by children and animals when playing, the play is also identified as an essential condition for life in its biological sense, when primal instincts have been sated. The ludic activity of play is performed by the pleasure it provides, being by 2

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 156. 3 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 78. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 80.

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itself an uncontrollable exercise. The play with beauty, for Schiller, is a spiritual affirmation, bringing forth liberty in its most elevated form. The attainment of the play with beauty, for the author, is given by its contemplation, since it presupposes detachment from matter, so one can realize that it is also a form of spirit and that, in turn, allows a free signifying exchange between sensitive form and matter, sentiment and intelligence, meeting finally at their shared origin. It is through contemplation that we realise the other’s presence. In this sense, the personality of the player no longer exercises its will on things and instead it dialogues with them. In the play there is a principle of communication, an exchange of shared codes. To contemplate is the first step towards playing with beauty, which in turn is liberating. At the same time that mankind is liberated from the world by this process, mankind is also reflected in the world, given the fact that a contemplative state is a reflective one. The play with beauty frees because it leads mankind into a reflective state, uniting the sensitive and the intellectual in detriment of pure reason. When mankind only feels, it is automatically dominated by the immensity of nature; when it sees itself reflected it becomes a legislator of nature and free of its brutal impositions. When mankind plays nature itself also becomes a player for it attributes form to something unformed. Beauty shines as a result of this play for it is the result of an ethos that does not allow the degeneration of the natural state. Pretty much the opposite: The player cannot impose something evil onto nature because it is reflected in nature. To destroy it is to destroy itself, is to destroy the play. The play, as something that revolves around itself, is free of any tension, is free of any sort of friction with something internal or external to it, “it happens, as it were, by itself.6” From the player’s point of view the lack of tension in its play with beauty is translated as pure relief, relaxing from the constant need to mediate conflicts between objects that constantly collide. The separation between the subject and the artwork through contemplation causes the first to be left behind, there being nothing that says or imposes on itself what must be done. According to Gadamer, “the structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence”.7 The play with beauty, as a liberating experience in that it allows those who contemplate to become authors of what is contemplated, resulting in a never-ending circle, is also always precarious and does not aim for an end 6 7

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 105. Ibid.

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but rather to a continuity of its very unstable condition. In this play there is no division between those who produce or observe, there are only players: “The work of art is not an object that stands over against a subject for itself. Instead the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it”.8 We should note the changes that occur to the player once it is faced with the experience provided by the play. The real subject of this relation is not the player but the play. It is the play that prompts the verb, the transformative element. Despite also being changed, the artwork is what remains in the relation, constituting an enormous repository that reflects the history of the play. Although there is a connection between the artwork and subjectivity, it is indispensable to remark that the “play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play”.9 Since nothing lingers over beauty and art, as both surpass reality through mere appearance, the play with beauty is free. Appearance is not a simulacrum or consequence of anything, it does not answer to something external to it because it is not illusion, neither does it wish to substitute what already is. The play with beauty may seem frivolous and unnecessary since life, in its biological sense, does not seem to need beauty for its conservation. However mankind is immersed in culture, in an insatiable cultivating process. It is in mankind’s own essence not to simply accept an unfamiliar natural reality. It is the play with beauty, with its apparent superficiality, frailty and precariousness that bridges mankind and nature, allowing it, via culture, to test reality and release mankind from it. From the play a new being is born, essentially free and unconstrained to manipulate things, giving them new non-established meanings. This player comprehends that the impulse inherited in the play is an activity that forms the subject and, in this way, the world, since the world is submitted to the animus of mankind and is transformed in appearance, a freeing play. To be a player is to be a cultivator or, yet, a kind of alchemist, that transform the properties of matter through form. Despite having this uninterested aspect, essential for its liberty, in order to realise the play the player himself must be serious about the activity. Gadamer, pointing to what a player needs to enter this play says that “what is merely play is not serious […] more important, play itself contains its own, even sacred, seriousness.”10 In order to play arts’ play, one must play seriously. Those who are not serious players are not players themselves, since the “play 8

Ibid., 103. Ibid. 10 Ibid., 102. 9

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fulfils its purpose only if the player loses himself in play”.11 The play, with its independent nature, remains present even when it is ignored or, specifically, when it is not taken seriously: When there are no players playing. Even in those recondite places, where an arbitrary division between rationality and sensitivity attempts to hide the ludic and the precarious from human existence, the play is present: “Play—indeed, play proper—also exists when the thematic horizon is not limited by any beingfor-itself of subjectivity, and where there are no subjects who are behaving ‘playfully’”.12 Finally, I wish to empirically demonstrate the concepts exposed here through a play denominated Visit: corporal delirium13 (Plates 16 and 17) from the group of computational art known as [+zero],14 of which I am a founder member. The [+zero] plays with the elements here exposed, such as the precarious and free ones, in search of an artistic principle that includes contemplation as a fundamental element of its play. [+zero] artworks are propositional structures that unchain ludic acts. The group began in 2007 and is still going on today, continuing the proposition of discussing the empirical and philosophical fundamentals used in the spiralling and labyrinth processes of recombination found in contemporary audio-visual experiences, mediated by computational apparatuses. [+zero]’s artistic propositions do not intend to resolve problem Y or work with question X, but only to explore the characteristics that allow the precariousness found in contemporary apparatus to be played with. The apparatus are not machines. Machines, historically, condition man to work, due to organizing the space to make it work around them, as in a production line, where workers are all positioned in function of the machines. As for the apparatus, they are extensions of the human body, being around the body, rather than rearranging the body to make it work for them. The machines work, the apparatus allows the play. The man who uses apparatuses has freed himself from work in order to choose and decide, the play being pure intellectual doing. We live, with increasing intensity, a cultural reality based on apparatuses. Thus, the basic play of computer art proposed by [+zero] is marked by a primordial tension between what is already ideologically programmed at the core of the computer apparatus and in the disorder to be introduced by

11

Ibid. Ibid., 103. 13 Cf. http://www.maiszero.org/blog/?page_id=1505. 14 Cf. http://www.maiszero.org. 12

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the perspective of artistic practice based on chance and precariousness, that permeates the construction of meaning in this game playing. The game Visit: corporal delirium is a performance made up of six performers wearing clothes prepared with wearable computational apparatuses. These embedded computational apparatuses render the performers free players, as they are not previously instructed in any other form. Discursive precariousness is their actual guideline. Experiencing truthfully an unfounded act, whose meaning is still up for grabs, the performers fulfil their own will amidst a play against the computational apparatuses orbiting their bodies. The act of playing with their clothing is also an act of fruition for the performers, who occupy with their bodies and clothes a variety of spaces such as lifts and waiting rooms. The use of this kind of space is part of the play and reveals, clearly, the inefficiency of symbolic convention against a real precarious structure, driven by the play, since it has the power to re-signify pre-established codes via its ephemeral character. The public is included within the play by unexpected processes which catalyse phenomena generated by the precarious mode of the artistic proposition and, from this dialogue, they are faced with a situation in which there is no sense in dividing—Cartesian like—artwork, observer, performer and artist. Thus, the playful character which is present at the centre of contemporary art reveals the precariousness of all signifying phenomenon, opening space for a dialogue with the real through the random, disperse and unpredictable movements that are moved by the faith that truth is always constructed via proceeding ever more complex procedures of mediation.

CHAPTER ELEVEN A WORD IS A WORD IS A WORD? GERARD CHOY I Diego Velaquez’s 1656 Las Meninas is celebrated for its naturalism. Hailed as an “extraordinarily real presence of the painted world,”1 Las Meninas is often described as a snapshot depiction of a painter at work in his studio and in the midst of the subjects of his painting. Of the nine persons depicted in Las Meninas, the Infanta Margarita2–– lit brightest by the light from the window on her left and closest to the centre of the vertical axis––is clearly not the focus of the painting. The perspective lines do not focus on her. In fact there is no evidence of a single converging perspective. The mirror, at the back of the ample studio, does not reflect the back of the scene we are witnessing, that is the foreground of the painting. It does not show the back of the artist or any of the nine subjects depicted, or even reveal the front of the commandinglysized canvas which spans the entire left column of the painting. In fact the mirror tells of a different space in which two other subjects are depicted— the King and Queen of Spain, Felipe IV and María de Austria. What is important to note is that Velaquez’s Las Meninas was considered to prefigure photographic imaging, nature seen in a painting and therefore true to life.3 Or is it? Rather if it is not, what is it? And where can we find the information? Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault argues that Velaquez’s Las Meninas was a representation of representation. 1

Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas”, Representations, no. 1 (1983): 31. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/3043758. 2 Museo Nacional del Prado. Available at: http://www.museodelprado.es/en/thecollection/online-gallery/on-line-gallery/obra/the-family-of-felipe-iv-or-lasmeninas/. 3 Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation”, 31.

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As cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall quoting Foucault asserts, what is represented in Las Meninas is not about reflecting or imitating reality. Las Meninas is as much concerned with what is invisible and unrepresented as it is with what is visible and represented. It is the unrepresented subject the nine represented subjects are responding to that gives the painting its authoritative “complex inter-play between presence (what you see, the visible) and absence (what you cannot see)”. In short Hall, quoting Foucault, concludes that representation works as much through what is not shown, as through what is.4 Hall goes on to say that meaning is produced through interpretation of codes. The challenge then is to negotiate the different codes used in different social and cultural contexts as well as any changes inherent in any conditions. Hall continues to state that the interpretation of codes is then translated into sounds, text, images, and gestures, languages that produce meanings. In the exchange of meanings, we have communication.5 We live in a world that has been and will continue to be increasingly hyper-connected and interdependent. As well, we are presently not only having to consider the prospect of a turn in global relationship, but also the reality of an increasingly and overwhelmingly complex tangle of social, economic, and ecological global experiences. Oftentimes, these experiences demand responses that, at best, can “only be a partial, provisional and indefinite affair, with uncertain and indeterminate outcomes”.6 In such a state of being, cultural theorist Ien Ang demands that: we need to do more than articulate how things are “complex and contradictory”. What we should also aspire to, as part of our research endeavour, is explore what kinds of simplifications need to be developed in order to cope, deal with, or navigate the concrete complex realities we are confronted with.7

However, Ien Ang continues, it has been observed that while each solution may serve to resolve a particular situation, the solution itself does 4

Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation”, in Representations: Cultural Presentations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997), 56-62. 5 Ibid., 19. 6 Ien Ang, “Navigating complexity: From cultural critique to cultural intelligence”, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25:6 (2011): 779-794. Available at: doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2011.617873. 7 Ibid., 785.

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not solve its own consequences, creating further need for solution. Thus an open and contingent approach to resolving problems works better than applying a predetermined formula. Ien Ang offers cultural intelligence as a possible approach. Cultural intelligence was first proposed by human management specialists and scholars P. Christopher Earley and Soon Ang in 2003 as a strategy to address knowledge and understanding from a cultural perspective by adapting to the particular context of the culture.8 However, as Ien Ang argues, differences cannot be limited to cultural Otherness but, by locating itself within the specificity of a context, one could facilitate the “untangling and unscrambling [of] the complexity generated by the irreducible, wildly heterogeneous, co-existing differences circulating in the world”. Ien Ang advocates using cultural intelligence, which instead of considering cultural differences, works from within the situation to engage with the complex insights to a particular problem within the situation. As well, she cautions that “[e]xactly what this means in concrete terms obviously depends on the empirical particularities on the ground, …”.9 I am with Ien Ang. Perhaps it would be more beneficial to take the perspective that, because situations are forever changing and developing, any solutions are in reality negotiations used to navigate a particular condition. Such negotiated solutions are also useful in moving oneself further along. However, it is also important to acknowledge that such negotiations are limited. Thus, rather than trying to map or even resolve an ever-changing and dynamic situation, one could instead, put in place open and multiple possibilities. Such possibilities can then shift as required, contrapuntally at times, counterpoint to itself when appropriate. More importantly, whether the move is similar, parallel, oblique or contrary, it is always in concert with the entire situation.

8

P. Christopher Earley and Soon Ang, Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions Across Cultures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4. 9 Ang, “Navigating complexity”, 791.

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II: 5 Stories will bent down to grace the adder that affected a band backing barring the ashen bill and the broken spell that largely spans the rising and great expectations of an impending intercourse the chop belies the agreement

Will, Grace and Bill Will bent down to Grace (the adder that affected a band backing). Barring the ashen Bill and the broken spell that largely spans the rising and great expectations of an impending intercourse, the chop belies the agreement.

Fixing a broken support with ash and spells Will bent down to grace the adder that affected a band backing–– barring the ashen bill and the broken spell that largely spans the rising and great expectations of an impending intercourse––the chop belies the agreement.

The snake with stripes and a beak Will bent down to grace the adder, that affected a band backing. Barring the ashen bill, and the broken spell that largely spans the rising, and great expectations of an impending intercourse, the chop belies the agreement.

Group support … will bent down to grace the adder that affected a band backing. Barring the ashen Bill and the broken spell that largely spans the rising, and great expectations of an impending intercourse, the chop belies the agreement.

First Nations and Negotiations Will bent down to grace the adder (that affected a band backing). Barring the ashen bill and the broken spell––that largely spans the rising and great expectations of an impending intercourse––the chop belies the agreement.

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The intent of the artwork Violin in Alum 6 is to initiate a series of processes, a passage of articulations of an unstrung, and hence unvoiced, violin into materials whose resonant qualities would variously reference an original voice that has never been heard. In 2007 I travelled to Hong Kong to search for my grandfather’s origins, failing which I looked for a music shop willing to search for and purchase an unfinished violin form, that is, one that was unstrung and (as yet) soundless, from Guangdong, South China. The form, a violin in the white, (Plate 18) was mailed to Singapore where my father, a violin repairer who apprenticed with his father, dismantled it before sending it on to me in Canada where I prepared it for casting in London. I cast the deconstructed violin in alum 6, an alloy of aluminium, magnesium, and silicon commonly used in manufacturing. The first translation occurs as a consequence of the process. I mean that by casting the violin form I translate its potential to articulate the language of music into a sculptural object relevant to a visual art discourse. The second is a material translation of a wooden violin form into an aluminium cast. Once cast, I took an image of the object (Plate 19) and executed a series of translations of that image using various digital software into text (Fig. 9). The text is used as the basis for various translations, which are sequentially titled, ranging from audio renditions and sound waves (Fig. 10) to music notations (Fig. 11). These music notations, totaling 753 pages, are collectively titled Violin in Alum 6. Other than the notations, Violin in Alum 6 does not have a prescribed pitch or sound. Its articulation is determined by the performer’s decisions regarding clef, tempo and time signature. It could be played in its entirety, all 753 pages or sections thereof; for any duration; by anyone and on any instrument. As such Violin in Alum 6 is a channel and open to multiple translations. Its future articulation is “not already wrapped up in its past, it is not part of an unfolding teleological narrative, whose end is known and given in its beginning”.10 It is, in any of the translations, a rendering of the passage of the unvoiced violin as well as a rendition that is present to the deliberation of its performer.

10

Stuart Hall, “Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life”, in Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, ed. Brian Meeks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2007), 279.

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Fig. 10

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Fig. 11

The violin is chosen for historical reasons. In the early 20th century China exported labour to make up for a shortage resulting from, amongst other global events, the end of slavery in the US. Today, at the dawn of the 21st century, China is the workshop of the world, with its 2008 exports a close second to Germany’s lead.11 It is the leading producer and exporter of violins. As one of the wide array of goods in the white that China manufactures and exports, the violin form thus resonates with the global labour movement of the previous century and the journeys my grandfather undertook when he left Guangdong for Hong Kong before settling in Singapore as well as my own migration from Singapore to Canada. 11

World Trade Organization. Available at: http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_ e/its2009_e/its09_toc_e.htm.

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The image of the cast translated into text generated 753 pages of music notations. Played through a digital midi file using a violin instrument setting, the sounds are not unpleasant, in fact in many places quite lyrical, if meandering. As in their appearance, the music notations function like a music composition. However Violin in Alum 6 is not intended to be a music composition. Perhaps it is a drawing, a rendering of an image as part of the process of translation. The passage of multiple translations appears to have thrown up a quandary. What are these not unpleasant sounds—sonic renderings of an image of a cast of a violin whose voice has never been heard? If so, do they mean anything, or represent the image? As an uncustomary representation of the image, how do we make sense of them? Where in the sonic renderings is the image that introduces the passage of translations? Is Violin in Alum 6 a hybrid, a drawing that looks and sounds like a music composition? The translations of Violin in Alum 6 manifest individual voices. Each sound is characteristic of its process. As well there is the matter of the voice of the cast violin. It is reasonable to assume that the unstrung violin in the white has a voice. We can only speculate how it might have sounded. However, what is the voice of the cast violin? Can we consider such casts as objects in their own right, each with its own voice rather than representing that of others? How many translations will it take before the cast comes into its own? Or will it always be the other of the unvoiced violin?

CHAPTER TWELVE OFF BALANCE NICHOLAS POPE1 WITH KEVIN MOUNT I will show how a quality of “precariousness”, represented physically, visually, intellectually or emotionally in varying proportions, has been an enduring element in my sculpture. In the beginning, I avoided showing anyone what I was doing. I might provide a date, a time, a location, a suggestion of materials and not much else. For instance, 9th June 1971, 1900 hrs, map reference, parish boundary, deciduous trees, weather—sunshine, 195ft above sea level, rope, nails, hammer, plastic tube, plank (Fig. 12). This tactic was academically quite precarious. How

Fig. 12

close to the edge of nothingness could I push the assessment of a sculpture student’s sculpture? Perhaps a business model had something to offer. I went down Regent Street, London, wearing mirrored sandwich boards (Fig. 13). My fliers explained: “Langly-Dome Fig. 13 Enterprises wish to present part of Regent Street to you this afternoon … Our sandwichman is demonstrating a small part of the ever-changing activity and the static surroundings for you.” Langly-Dome Enterprises was set up as a limited company by a college friend, Kevin Mount and myself. We made an appointment with the local 1

The author would like to Kevin Mount for assistance with the original text; Doro Globus and Daniel Griffiths at Ridinghouse, London, for facilitating this submission; and the various photographers for graciously allowing the reproduction of their images.

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bank manager. I asked him for a loan and told him that one business objective we were considering involved bankruptcy.

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

We were interested in the process from another academically precarious business angle. With Marcel Duchamp’s phial of Parisian air (Paris Air, 1919) for historical encouragement, we went into manufacturing. We ordered empty glass vessels from a surgical glassmaker, boxes from a boxmaker, had our business correspondence miniaturised and printed up, built a sales stand for the degree show assessments and hired a sales girl (Fig. 14). We urged her to wear thigh-length leather boots and not be backward in coming forward. We sold out of the edition and finished the day with an Arte Povera empty table (Fig. 15). I started to saw out a precarious emptiness. Oak Wood Column (1973, Plate 20) was made from a single length of oak reduced until the two heavy blocks at either end were connected by a thin wand. The blocks were just about in equilibrium but the upper one would nod in the wind or quake if touched. It is human scale. The saw marks are still visible. It seemed right to leave it alone as soon as the point of uncertainty had been reached. Why worry more? Why worry less? When I made Oak Wood Column I was back home, using the garden shed and Fig. 16 working with whatever materials that came to hand. I also found a job as a postman, which is a familiar kind of precariousness: no support system apart from mother and home. Stacked Clay (1976, Fig. 16) tested precariousness to precarious limits. I stacked rectangular slabs of leather-hard clay and propped the stack with

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a stick when it began to fall over. I stopped building at about the height of this man. The surface of the clay was smudged all over with my fingerprints, and as the stack dried and shrank, so the sticks went out of useful alignment. Instead of supporting it, they started to push the column over. It seemed to be conceptually quite neat; it was cheap and easy to make. In 1974 I went to Romania on a British Council scholarship to get closer to the folk carving that had inspired Constantin %UkQFX‫܈‬L 1LFRODH &HDX‫܈‬HVFX DQG KLV ZLIH, Elena, were still in their prime, and so I was introduced to political corruption, suspicion, coercion and oppression—but with some compensating privileges, including being allowed to eat in the university professors’ canteen. I was attached to the Institutul de Arte Plastice Nicolae Grigorescu but, in fact, I travelled widely in the rural countryside staying in remote villages for weeks at a time to learn from the local craft. I stayed in a village near Bistrita learning Fig. 17 how to carve wooden spoons with Anna Serban (Fig. 17). I remember looking towards Party Headquarters opposite the old Royal Palace in Piata Revolutiei during an election rally

Fig. 18

Fig. 19

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in May 1975 (Fig. 18). The Father of the Nation and the Pre-eminent Scientist—Mr and Mrs &HDX‫܈‬HVFX—were standing side by side on the balcony as he gave a speech. They must have been feeling indestructible, unaware of the moment of fate steadily creeping towards them. The citizens of Bucharest were bussed in from work and colleges, checked in and kittled with a water canon pointing inwards. I got away three hours later by showing my passport to the Securitate. That day the speech went on for five hours; durational performance art is not what it used to be. The balancing act of Two Stacks (1976, Fig. 19) is achieved not with clay but lead. Without the weight of the lead the two stone plinths beneath each stack would topple over. Add another sliver of lead and everything will fall. It was my first attempt to Fig. 20 arrange more than one vertical, expecting that some sort of charge would pass between them. Lead is almost as pliant and responsive as clay, and the curve of the lead stack emerged from the way the shears distorted the cut surface, so that the edges overlapped slightly, one on top of another. I translated that accumulating curve to the radius of the stones. I wanted people to hold their breath when they approached. The slabs of Three Stone Slabs (1978, Fig. 20) are like oversized paving slabs which have been carved and smoothed out of Forest of Dean stone. The surfaces are convex and undulating, as if they have grown upwards from slightly wider bases before being squared up by confident slices. I wanted them to look as if they were dancing through the space, but at the same time seem completely at home with the floor. Dancing and falling are almost the same thing, after all. Lose your balance and it is dance or fall.

Fig. 21

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Forest of Dean stone worked for me in a similar way to produce Mr and Mrs Arnolfini (1978, Fig. 21) for a group exhibition at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol. Artists were invited to start with something to do with the gallery, so I reworked Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434). I translated the electricity of the moment of touching, seen in the famous convex mirror, into these two “lifelike” undulating stones with hazy edges. There is perhaps a suggestion here of emotional vulnerability. I have come to regard it as the first of nine portraits of myself and my wife Janet, although, at the time, I was far too pleasantly distracted by the art world to consider that I might be making an autobiographical work. The other eight portraits are all called Mr and Mrs Pope plus something to suit our timely condition: … with Holes (1978); … Red (1985); … Spiked and Holed (1987); … Melting (1991); … in the Garden Surrounded By the Ten Commandments or Are They Clouds (1991); … seen as the motorway system real and imagined (2008); … Lit From Within (2009); … knitted, shrunk and hung (2012). Beyond the grave, 0U DQG 0UV &HDX‫܈‬HVFX PLJKW KDYH UHFRJQLVHG themselves. I used a chainsaw to make a crowd of humanoid lumps called Odd Elms (1981, Plate 21). They are slightly more than human scale and have a heavy physical presence. Pieces like this are usually made for big spaces where sheer mass creates a sort of cordon sanitaire and there is a contrast between the smoothness you imagine from a safe viewing distance and the roughness of the surface to be experienced at closer quarters. I was not really interested here in any precarious or fragile inner core, but the truth was that I was beginning to waiver. Yoo Hoo Too (1981, Plate 22) shows the other side of my dilemma. It was carved out of fragrant cypress and polished sexy smooth. After the weight of Odd Fig. 22 Elms here are poised propeller-like shapes, bursting with energy. You might think you see confidence, but actually it is going out of kilter. There was very little polished wood sculpture around at the time. It was a lonely, precarious decision to Fig. 23 make such a sensual sculpture. In

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retrospect, I think I had actually found something rather good by going against the fashionable grain; at the time, I felt I needed to strike out in a different direction. So off I went to Africa to meet the Makonde carvers of Southern Tanzania, I also spent time with the Mwbawala carvers (Fig. 22). The Makonde used to inhabit the Ruvuma valley but most had moved north to line the road between Dar es Salaam and the airport from where they sold carvings to tourists—but not the marvellous abstract forms that had traditionally described their beliefs and dreams. Even those Makonde Fig. 24 who stayed put in the Ruvuma Valley were making stuff to order for the tourist market: pornographic “trees of life” for Danish aid workers, “Madonnas and child” for German missionaries. As well as those deep insights, I got more than I was bargaining for from the Makonde, not just intellectual refreshment, but a trio of encephalitic viruses that soon changed pretty much everything about me, leading to the post-encephalitic Parkinsonism that affects me today. African Woods (1982, Fig. 23) is a small blackwood carvings made in Mwbawala using simple Makonde tools. It is reminiscent of Yoo Hoo Too but the work is more concentrated and confident—full of optimism, too. But on my last night in Dar es Salaam, I was already beginning to feel ill. At first I blamed a celebratory bottle of Mount Kilimanjaro rosé wine, but I went further downhill during a five-hour stop on the tarmac at Dubai. As soon I got back home, I was put on an isolation ward at Hereford hospital. By most definitions of precariousness I now hit a rich seam. The next five years were dominated by the search for diagnosis in the midst of a struggle to carry on working. No one could find any “pill cure”, and in 1987 I stopped altogether for four years. After that came a period of physical and emotional rehabilitation, I had to learn to use hands and brain pretty much from scratch and when I eventually returned to work it was with a completely different regimen. I made a small carved, painted and stained piece called Model for an Unknown Landscape No 1 (1985, Fig. 24) during the first five years of my illness. I could not have been more off balance emotionally and physically, and the thing itself is askew by any visual reckoning, but somehow, in relation to what I wanted to be making in the aftermath of the Makonde trip it hit the bullseye. I made a few more things that had a similar

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hovering quality, in between episodes when I was in bed for days at a time, comatose. I was financially on the edge, too. At one time an income of £30 per week with debts of £60,000 and rising. In Mr and Mrs Pope with Holes (Fig. 25), the holes having been gouged out in the frantic search for something. Around this time I was appointed artist in residence at Wolfson College, Oxford. Curiously enough, this sculpture looks quite solid. There we were, my wife Janet and I, ragged with holes, cocooned and genderless. Truth be told, I was on autopilot. I could not validate what I was making internally, or persuade the British art world that it was relevant, so I spun away back home to Much Marcle. Myself in Difficulty (1986, Fig 26) is carved in wood and painted and looks like an umbrella stand with some peculiar instruments Fig. 25 stuck inside it. It has no cohesive structure—like me, a basket case, less than life size, occasionally upright. I first met Graham Holley, the Vicar, when I was 13 and he was being offered the living at Much Marcle, where he remained into his retirement. He took a requiem mass in front of a congregation of two (myself included) when the Church of England allowed the ordination of women priests. Around this bad time I turned to Graham for advice about Fig. 26 Fig. 27 the different characteristics of Christ’s Apostles, and he became a great friend and supporter. He still taught at the village school and would walk there wearing his Canterbury Cap. My relationship with him and my representation of his religion The Vicar (1997, Fig. 27)—an empty cross of Lorraine on top; arms and legs sticking out of two central testicles; the serpent climbing up inside; lots of drilled

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holes—put me way out on a limb. Perhaps on the roadside between Dar es Salaam and the Julius Nyerere airport they might have understood the confusion. In Norman, Virginia and Other Members of the Congregation (1986, Plate 23), carved, hacked, and painted shiny bitumastic black are Norman the local cider maker and Virginia, wife of Anthony, an old Carthusian like me and other members of the congregation. Virginia is a typical “county lady” with strong riding thighs and a punk haircut to match her daughter’s. Virginia is actually a Catholic and went to church in Ledbury, so the village Anglicanism of the whole assemblage is misleading. Still, I was digging down into Much Marcle and its surroundings, showing little interest in the art world or what was “au courant”. I was on the road to somewhere else. In Mr and Mrs Pope Spiked and Holed (Fig. 28), I am the one on the right with the exploding skull, awful gaping holes for eyes and the back of my head blown off. On the other side of the spikes, Janet is the curvaceous one with all Fig. 28 Fig. 29 the protusions. We are on some sort of presentation platform, going up and down at the same time. It is a portrait of difficult times. Mr and Mrs Pope Melting (1991, Fig. 29) was made by using a hotair gun to bond and melt polystyrene and then sand casting it in aluminium. The two of us are conjoined at the feet but are recoiling from one another and dissolving from the inside out. I was trying to depict our sad and sorry selves dealing with something we did not understand; the underlying vertigo had very little to do with the precariousness which is Odd Elms or Three Stone Slabs. How secure they were. Black and White Spotted (1992, Fig. 30) is made out of dyed porcelain. It is deliciously fragile and about nothing at all. It has a lot in common with what I am dealing with now, which is why worry Fig. 30 about whether it is about anything or

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nothing. It just floats. So there is this paradox. For a satisfactory expression of the inner condition, spotted could not be better or more robust, but of itself it is as vulnerable as any of those earlier columns at tipping point. I have modelled the fired clay Ten Commandment Pots (1992, Fig. 31) by sticking my fingers up from inside the lid, once for each commandment. I was pretty much completely divorced from the Fig. 31 mainstream art world by now. I had been through rehab and I was still going to a brain injury group, but I was out the other side somehow. This might have been the first okay work. It is a fine point, but I was starting to understand the value of precarious thinking, and of being able to calculate precariously, out there on the edge of a contemporary landscape. These pots are hardly sculptural objects, but I knew what to make, and why and how to make it. I felt my sense of balance might be coming Fig. 32 back. I had wanted to make allegorical work ever since I was at Wolfson College and Small Ten Commandments in Flight (1992, Fig. 32) is the first of many attempts. It explores the lovely, absorbent surface of unglazed porcelain. In those days, if I tried to picture the Ten Commandments, it was as a blood-soaked rag circling in the sky ready to splat down on wrongdoers. It was a way of portraying all of those harsh scriptural injunctions warning us how to live our lives. These were the “loadsamoney” years, remember, when Tory Fig. 33 idealism was passing for a moral conviction.

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There were a lot of stories in circulation about artists and other people who had reformed in a big way after some kind of fall, moral reawakening or rehab programme. And it is true—I was another one who was looking for a new, more relevant way to live and to make my work. I wanted to try to make the abstraction and minimalism of the early years speak for lived emotional experience, rather as the Makonde people had once done, before their encounter with the Thatcherite free market. Had it not been for my illness, I suppose I might have gone on being an artist with a saleable reputation, feeding gallery spaces around the world. Which is not to say I was suddenly a new man of virtue stepping outside art prison at the millennium like Jonathan Aitken. Rather, it dawned on me during rehab that to do the art thing properly, I had to take on the whole precarious mess of my life—those clever early columns, the shock of Romania, the confusion of Africa, the roundedness of family life, all that sadness and distress. I mention it, partly, as an observation on the next sequence of work, which I think demonstrates that more awkward balance, when cool abstraction takes on the world of feeling. In my case it resulted in pieces like Dead Mum Surrounded By Her Sons (2006, Fig. 33), and Flat Pink Dead Dad with Green Sons (2010). Some of the subtext for that one you can read about in the newspaper archives of the time where the published headlines of The Admiral, his Lady and the Gardener take some beating for catchy sculptural titles. Thinking about these sticky intimacies, I wonder about the lives of some of my old colleagues, who have held together the aesthetic of the last thirty years, and who have kept their work psychologically much cleaner. It is easy to forget: religion and religious subjects hardly figured on any agenda, certainly not any mainstream arts agenda, in 1993 when I started making The Apostles Speaking in Tongues (1993-96, Plate 24), a group of terracotta figures. Back then it was all bankers, money and “wizz wiz”. The figures began with an idea about making the touch of the Holy Ghost as a finger of fire Appalachian style, but it fell flat almost as soon as I began. But then I made the apostle Philip with a Fig. 34 candle hole in the top of his head

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and began to imagine all twelve among their followers as lamps in a chapel. When the lamps were lit for the first time, I knew I had made something that was okay. It was self-contained and offline. I think the terracotta pieces echo the confident mass of Odd Elms but they are much more precarious physically. In fact they are dangerous and they were given a suitably frosty reception by health and safety at Tate Britain, London, when I showed them there in 1997. I cannot pretend that Vrouwe Justitia (1998, Fig. 34) is as precarious as it might look because, being Dutch, the Utrecht structural engineers insisted that the foundations of a 70 ton, 25-meter column should go down half way to Australia. It is bulletproof and probably bulldozer proof. Here the idea was to acknowledge the importance of justice as a pillar of society alongside the enormous difficulty of achieving it. Frail mortals; godlike ambition. So I worked on a mortally small scale. Thumb prints on the surface of the little model are visibly amplified a hundred times in the finished version you see here. By now I had moved on to another level of uncertainty where commissions such as Vroue Justitia punctuate and help to shape plans for bigger projects that are even less likely to be realised. For long periods my bigger thinking has been governed by three of them: The Oratory of Heavenly Space (1992), where the twelve apostles belong, Motorway Service Station of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues (1998, Plate 25) and The Recycling Plant (1991). I think of them as a triptych, unified, one foot in the deeply profane, one in the sacred. Motorway Service Station of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues belongs to a period when I was collaborating with the architect, Peter Vaughan of Broadway Malyan, on proposals for a motorway service station. It includes, for example, the Blood Room—those red balls top centre—and it harks back to my Regent Street sales pitch when I was holding a mirror cheerfully up to nature. In 1998 the spiel was on the similar lines of not seeking to impose art on the experience of motorway travellers but merely to adjust their ordinary experience of pulling over for a muffin or a piss. “I am sad today, very very sad” is the opening line of a left-handed diary I started on 1st December 1988 about a year after starting rehab and is the title of this prototype female urinal (I Am Sad Fig. 35 Today, Very, Very Sad [Prototype

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Female Urinal], 2001, Fig. 35). Female urinals come into the category of parts made with a bigger and much chancier project in mind. There is another obvious resonance here with Marcel Duchamp and even with those early Special Vessels (1973), but here the issue is more about the relationship between the roadside urinal and the chapel font. Around this time, I went to the Sphinx factory in Maastricht to find out about the latest in industrial porcelain and to meet the designer of the Lady P, one of the first ceramic female urinals to go into commercial production. The names of our village friends are written round the outside; on the inside, round the quintet of pissing bowls are the words from my diary. This was thirteen years after the actual sad day, it is a conceptually solid piece set on a precarious foundation. Suicide Woolie (2003, Fig. 36) in its original knitted and felted mohair form dates from the turn of the century. So despair gets into the formula here, although by the time I knitted it, I was safer from that impulse than I had been. A Fig. 36 year later death felt much closer when I collapsed with heart block and was waiting for the paramedics to arrive, and again later the same afternoon when the Sunday locum could not get the wire into the blood vessel to kickstart me by electricity. This is a rather cosy and comforting reminder of all such perilous moments. So I was getting myself wired up to last at about this time, and I made Mr and Mrs Pope Lit from Within (2009, Fig. 37). Thinking about it now, this is not so different from Mr and Mrs Pope with Holes except it is in reverse, white not black, and instead of orifices gouged in— now circular gobs of light shining out. More death in Dead Mum Surrounded By Her Sons, which is Fig. 37 fashioned out of wire and epoxy resin. My mother is the central floating silver grey form and we, her five sons, are the surrounding squawking ones. The black shape is mum’s bed or the carriage that will bear her to the heaven

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she believed in. The “swiggling” black base represents the two commandments she used to tell us she had never broken—no killing, no adultery. The radiating circles symbolise the pull of home. There were a few variations on this unfashionably intimate theme, including a Dead Dad with Sons in a Flap (2009) where Dad appears as a sort of spider trapping his sons who are flapping paddle shapes. Mum seems quite comfortable at her anchorage. She wanted the nunc dimitis spoken as we carried her out of the church to her waiting motorcycle hearse from where she was spirited away by a female despatch rider, just like herself. Liar Liar (2007-09, Plate 26) is quite lot of porcelain, standing almost adult height and bearing the memory of the early columns, the Odd Elms and the gathering of the apostles. By this point I would have got quite a few of the seven deadly sins and seven cardinal virtues covered. I made quite a jolly version of Gluttony (2007) for example, portraying it as a jelly with a fridge for its plinth. It flops if it gets too warm. And so, at last, to Mr and Mrs Pope knitted, shrunk and hung (Plate 27). We are each hung on a 10mm wide knotted mohair rope from a beam in the roof space of the studio. There is no vertical support or stick—we both hang dejectedly, or perhaps at ease, from the rope which is noosed as in hanged instead of hung. But definitely we are drooping or hanging rather than seeming to be held up. And content enough with that precarious result.

NOTES ON THE AUTHORS Cristina Albu is Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department of University of Missouri – Kansas City. She has published articles on art and technology projects, new media, and sculpture in such journals as Artnodes, Athanor and Kritikos. Her writings have also appeared in several exhibition catalogues and edited volumes, including Isaac Julien, ed. Eveline Bernasconi (Hatje Cantz, 2006) and Crossing Cultures, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne University Press, 2009). She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively called “Seeing Self, Observing Others: Mirror Affect in Contemporary Art”. Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri is an artist and researcher who holds a PhD in Semiotics with a thesis on the role of chance in computer art. Currently, his research efforts are engaged in understanding how post-historical codes can be used to produce knowledge. This research is being conducted at both the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the Gamification Lab at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany. His writings have been published in several books, of which the most recent is Von Begriff zum Bild: Medienkultur nach Vilém Flusser, ed. Michael Hanke and Steffi Winkler (Tectum Verlag Marburg, 2013). Matthew Bowman is an art historian, critic, and curator who teaches in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. He is the author of “The New Critical Historians of Art”, in The State of Art Criticism, ed. James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge, 2008) and “Rosalind Krauss”, in Fifty Key Writers on Photography, ed. Mark Durden (Routledge, 2013). He has two forthcoming essays: “Shapes of Time: Melancholia, Anachronism, and De-Distancing”, in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, ed. Amanda Boetzkes and Aron Vinegar (Ashgate Press, 2014) and “October’s Postmodernism”, in The Art Press in the Twentieth Century, ed. Barbara Pezzini (Ashgate Press, 2015). Gerard Choy is an artist. He works in a variety of media ranging from sculptures to sound installations. Born in Singapore, Choy became a permanent resident of Canada in 2000. He received a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and a MA in Transnational Arts from the University of the Arts London, UK where he is presently reading for a

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PhD. Choy has exhibited in Canada, the United States and United Kingdom and has received grants from the Canada Council of the Arts and Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture & Heritage. Andrés David Montenegro Rosero has recently completed his PhD thesis, entitled “Politics and Aesthetics of the Uncanny: Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra and Tania Bruguera”, at the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. His work focuses on contemporary art and psychoanalysis with a special emphasis on Latin America. Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Translocal Institute, Budapest – www.translocal.org) are art historians and curators whose interests in the field of art and ecology are manifest in their curated exhibitions, symposia and writings, exploring key ideas and practices around green curating, environmental art history, and the sustainability of contemporary art. Their work also focuses on the theory and aesthetics of East European art from the art production of the socialist era to contemporary artistic responses to the transformations brought by globalisation. Sophie Halart is an art historian with special interest in contemporary Latin American art. Sophie is currently completing a PhD in History of Art at University College London where her thesis investigates the question of embodied and gendered materiality in the work of Argentine and Chilean contemporary women artists. She contributed one paper to the Spanish language volume Ensayos sobre artes visuales: prácticas y discursos de los años 70 y 80 en Chile (LOM Ediciones, 2014) and is the co-editor of the forthcoming book “Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Latin America” (I.B. Tauris, 2015). Ana Mannarino is an art historian and researcher. She received her PhD in Art History from the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (PPGAV–UFRJ, Brazil) and participated in a year-long collaborative study program at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Her doctoral thesis, “Word in Brazilian Art: Mira Schendel and Waltercio Caldas”, focuses on the relationship between text and image in Brazilian contemporary art, especially in the work of these two artists. Her research also considers the connections between art and poetry in Brazil, Concrete and Neoconcrete art, and the production of artists’ books. Camila Maroja is an art historian and researcher, specialising in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on Latin America. She is completing her doctoral work in the department of Art, Art History &

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Visual Studies at Duke University. Her PhD thesis investigates how institutions, curators, and artists are displaying methods to construct something called “Latin American art”. Currently, she is working with artist Regina de Paula and curator Ivair Reinaldim in an exhibition and publication project based in Rio de Janeiro, which investigates affective conceptions of space. Elize Mazadiego is a researcher and critic in contemporary art, specialising in topics of knowledge production, historiography, ephemeral art practice, the archive, and transnationalism. She is currently completing her PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Her essays and interviews have been published internationally and she is a contributing writer to Frieze and ArtNexus Magazine. Caroline Menezes is an art writer who has been working for newspapers and cultural magazines in Latin America and the UK, such as Studio International, for which she has been part of the collaborator’s team since 2006. Her writings have also been included in books such as the 30XBienal–Transformations in Brazilian Art from the 1st to the 30th Edition, ed. Paulo Venancio Filho (Bienal São Paulo, 2013). She is currently concluding her PhD degree in Art Theory at the University of the Arts London. Nicholas Pope is an artist. Since 1974, he has travelled and exhibited worldwide. Examples of his work are in many public collections including the Tate Collection, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Rijksmuseum Kröller Müller, the Utusukushi-ga-hara Open Air Museum, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. After studying at Bath Academy of Art and the Instutul de Arte Plastice Nicolae Grigorescu in Bucuresti in 1974 – 1975, he acted as a visiting artist at art schools in the UK, Europe and Australia between 1974 – 1986. Since 1981 he has lived and worked in Herefordshire and London. Friederike Sigler studied art history, media studies and philosophy at Philipps-Universität Marburg and Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Since 2012, she has been a PhD researcher at the Graduate School “Materiality and Production” at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Her PhD thesis focuses on the relationship between art and labour in contemporary arts.

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Florian Wiencek specialises in digital media as well as in art and cultural mediation. As a PhD fellow in the Research Centre “Visual Communication and Expertise” at Jacobs University (Bremen, Germany), he wrote a thesis analysing current uses of digital media and digital data to mediate art and culture. Recently, he has held a visiting lecturer position in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University (Durham, US), served as Steering Committee Member of the Visual Communication and Expertise Research Centre, and as a research associate in the project Visual–Film–Discourse, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. He is also a web and a graphic designer.

IMAGES’ CREDITS “Photogenic Art: Precarious Participation and Documentation” by Cristina Albu Plate 1 Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003. Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminium, and scaffolding. Installation at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of Studio Olafur Eliasson. Plates 2 and 3 Olafur Eliasson, Take your time, 2008. Mirror foil, aluminium, steel, motor, control unit. Installation at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Centre, Long Island City, NY. Photo Plate 2: Studio Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of Studio Olafur Eliasson. Photo Plate 3: Carrie Sloan. Courtesy Adam Lisberg. Plates 4 and 5 Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2004. Stainless steel. Millenium Park, Chicago. Photo: Peter J. Schluz/Patrick Pyszka. Courtesy of the City of Chicago and Gladstone Gallery. Plate 6 Exhibition installation view, Oh Snap! Your Take on Our Photographs. Central photo: Robert W. Off, Polly Off at Glen Laurel, Fox Chapel, PA, 1948, silver-dye bleach print. Photo: Tom Little. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. “How to Animate Images or: On the Production of Precarious Labour” by Friederike Sigler Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4; Plates 7 and 8 Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997. 16mm film, 56 min. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

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“Ecological Precariousness and the Fragility of Art and Life in the East European Neo-Avant-Garde” by Maja and Reuben Fowkes Fig. 5 Petr Štembera, Sleeping on a Tree, 1975. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 6 Rudolf Sikora, The Earth Must not Become a Dead Planet, 1972 (Detail). Photo collage, canvas, 125.5 x 47 cm each. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 7 Group TOK, Transparent Bins, 1972. Sudac Collection. Courtesy of the Sudac Collection. Fig. 8 Šempas Family, 1977. Sudac Collection. Photo: Bojan Brecelj. Courtesy of the Sudac Collection. “Precarious Matters: Conceptualism and Materiality in Chile and Argentina” by Sophie Halart Plate 9 Lydia Galego, Embolsado (Bagged In), 1993. Mixed techniques, 103 x 85 x 55 cm. Photo: Lydia Galego. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 10 Roser Bru, Las Frustraciones de Mariana (Mariana’s Frustrations), 1976. Oil on canvas, 162 x 98 cm. MACBA, Barcelona, Spain. Photo: Claudia Campaña. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 11 Lydia Galego, Bicho Canasto II (Caterpillar II), 1987. Acrylic, 70 x 30 x 30 cm. Photo: Lydia Galego. Courtesy of the artist.

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Plate 12 Roser Bru, Edelmira Azocar, Animita, 1977. Oil on canvas. Photo: Soledad García. Courtesy of the artist. “Words in Mira Schendel’s Artwork: Contradiction Between Permanent and Transient” by Ana Mannarino Plate 13 Mira Schendel, Untitled, from the series Toquinhos (Little Stubs), 1972. Letterset and Plexiglas, 46 x 20.5 x 3 cm. Esther Faingold Collection, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of Ada Schendel. Plate 14 Mira Schendel, Objetos Gráficos (Graphic Objects), 1967–1968. Exhibition installation view: Mira Schendel. Art from Brazil in New York, The Drawing Center, New York, 1995. Courtesy of Ada Schendel. Plate 15 Mira Schendel, Untitled, from the series Monotipia (Monotypes), 1965. Oil on rice paper, 47 x 23 cm each. Marcela and Israel Furmanovich Collection, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of Ada Schendel. “Precariousness as a Conceptual Basis for the Understanding of Art as Uninterrupted Primacy of Play” by Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri Plates 16 and 17 [+zero], Visit: corporal delirium, 2008. Mixed techniques. Photo: Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri. Courtesy of [+zero]. “A Word is a Word is a Word?” by Gerard Choy Fig. 9 Tetlock-Choy, Translate #2, 2009. Variable. Photo: Gerard Choy. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 10 Tetlock-Choy, Translate #3, 2009. Variable. Photo: Gerard Choy. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 11 Tetlock-Choy, Violin in Alum 6. Excerpt of page 121, 2009. A4 paper sheet Photo: Gerard Choy. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 18 Gerard Choy, Violin in the White, 2008. Violin bought in a factory in Guangdong, China. Photo: Gerard Choy. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 19 Gerard Choy, Violin in Alum 6, 2009. Alum 6, ebony, maple, pear wood, steel and bronze strings. Full size. Photo: Gerard Choy. Courtesy of the artist. “Off Balance” by Nicholas Pope with Kevin Mount Fig. 12 Photograph of 1900.9.6.1971, 1971. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 13 Langly-Dome Enterprises sandwich board photographs, 1972. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 14 Nicholas Pope, Special Vessels, 1973. Paired glass vessels with corks with booklet of letters of production Langly-Dome Enterprises, edition of 50. Box size: 10 x 13 x 6 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 15 Installation view of Special Vessels exhibition stand, 1973. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 16 Nicholas Pope, Stacked Clay, 1976.

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Wet clay, sticks, height: 183 cm. Photo: Tony Stokes. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 17 Nicholas Pope with Anne and Ovidiu Serban in Romanni de Sus, Romania, 1975. Photo: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 18 Election rally at Piata Revolutiei, Bucuresti, R.S. Romania, 1975. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 19 Nicholas Pope, Two Stacks, 1976. Lead, bath stone, height: 96 cm. Photo credit: Jerry Hardman-Jones. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 20 Nicholas Pope, Three Stone Slabs, 1978. Forest of Dean stone, height: 125 cm (each). Photo: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 21 Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Anrolfini, 1978. Forest of Dean stone, height: 153 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 22 Nicholas Pope, carvers and others at Mbawala, Ruvuma Valley, Tanzania, 1982. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 23 Nicholas Pope, African Woods, 1982. Ebony wood, height: 26 cm. Photo: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 24 Nicholas Pope, Model for an Unknown Landscape No.1, 1984. Stained and painted wood, height: 115 cm. Photo: John Preece. Courtesy of the artist.

The Permanence of the Transient

Fig. 25 Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope with Holes, 1985. Painted wood, height: 75 cm. Photo: Fareez Ahmad. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 26 Nicholas Pope, Myself in Difficulty, 1986. Painted wood, height: 158 cm. Photo: Thijs Quispel. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 27 Nicholas Pope, The Vicar, 1997. Carved and painted wood, height: 280 cm. Photo: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 28 Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope Spiked and Holed, 1987. Painted wood, height: 225 cm. Photo: Thijs Quispel. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 29 Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope Melting, 1991. Cast aluminium, height: 146 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 30 Nicholas Pope, Black and White Spotted, 1992. Porcelain, height: 33 cm. Photo: Thijs Quispel. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 31 Nicholas Pope, Ten Commandment Pots, 1992. Terracotta, height: 25 cm (approx.). Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 32 Nicholas Pope, Small Ten Commandments in Flight, 1992. Porcelain, height: 42 cm. Photo: Thijs Quispel. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 33 Nicholas Pope, Dead Mum Surrounded By Her Sons, 2009.

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Epoxy resin, height: 88 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 34 Nicholas Pope, Vrouwe Justitia, 1998. Fibre concrete, dye, steel, height: 27 m. Installation view, Utrecht Court House Square, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Photo: Thijs Quispel. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 35 Nicholas Pope, I Am Sad Today, Very, Very Sad (Prototype Female Urinal), 2001 Glazed ceramic, 50 × 75 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 36 Nicholas Pope, Suicide Woolie, 2003. Felted mohair, height: 29 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 37 Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope Lit from Within, 2009. Porcelain, electric light, height: 166 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 20 Nicholas Pope, Oak Wood Column, 1973. Oak wood, height: 171 cm. Photo: Tony Stokes. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 21 Nicholas Pope, Odd Elms, 1981. Elm wood, 198 x 63 x 21 cm. Photo: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 22 Nicholas Pope, Yoo Hoo Too, 1981. Pine wood, height: 153 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist.

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Plate 23 Nicholas Pope, Norman, Virginia and Other Members of the Congregation, 1986. Painted wood, height: 198 cm. Photo credit: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 24 Nicholas Pope, The Apostles Speaking in Tongues Lit by Their Own Lamps, 1993–96. Terracotta, metal, oil, wick, flames, height: 300 cm (approx.). Installation view, Tate Britain, 1996–97. Photo: Marcella Leith. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 25 Nicholas Pope, Motorway Service Station of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues, 2003. Digital virtual image with Broadway Malyan. Photo: Broadway Malyan. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 26 Nicholas Pope, Liar Liar, 2007–09. 15 unglazed ceramic figures, height: 73 cm (approx.). Photo: Janet Pope. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 27 Nicholas Pope, Mr and Mrs Pope knitted, shrunk and hung, 2012. Felted mohair, height: 135 cm. Photo: FXP, London. Courtesy of the artist.