tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33650148061888059812024-02-07T20:17:57.504-08:00Peter's Flux de ParolePeter's Flux de Parole is a blog devoted to the personal professional interests of art historian Peter van der Meijden: avant-garde art from the early 20th century until the present and especially Fluxus.Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-47084200026108041952017-08-24T01:20:00.000-07:002017-08-24T01:20:34.816-07:00THE ART LIBRARY'S 60th ANNIVERSARY<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poster by Henry Heerup, 1957.</td></tr>
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No new entries on this blog since September 2016. High time to explain why.<br />
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Part of the time I did not spend blogging was used helping to organise the 60th anniversary of the Art Library in Copenhagen. The Art Library was founded in 1957 by Knud Pedersen (1925-2014) as one of the first, if not the first, art rental in Europe, and also a very special one. I can think of no other art rental can claim to be embedded in a consistent project to rethink art mediation in all its aspects; a project that has the qualities of an artwork in its innovativeness. <br />
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The Art Library originated from an earlier project, The Picture of the City, initiated by Pedersen in 1952. From the late 1940s onwards, Pedersen had been speculating about the uses of art. One of the things he asked himself was, why art had to be hidden away when all other commodities were right out there, meeting people face to face as they went about their daily lives. He compared museums and exhibitons to hotdog stands on every street corner that made sure that people were confronted with sausages wherever they went. Why not treat art in the same manner? He ended up erecting easels all across Denmark where he displayed a representative cross-section of contemporary Danish art. City councils signed a contract with him, and he made sure that the paintings were rotated every so often.<br />
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From 1955 onwards, individuals could subscribe to The Picture of the City as well. The Art Library was the logical next step. After all, the customers could not choose which painting they got. When Pedersen in 1957 managed to get permission to rent the empty Nikolaj Church in central Copenhagen, he could put all his paintings on display, so that people could pick the one they liked best. Rental fees were modest, at 3,85 kroner, the price of a packet of cigarettes, for three weeks. Whatever the market value of the painting, the rental fee was always the same. Once again, art was removed from public space, but this was more than compensated for by the fees, which made sure that it could enter homes where art had up until then only been available in the shape of reproductions.<br />
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In 1962, visual artist Arthur Køpcke introduced Pedersen to Fluxus and its programme of framing everyday actions as art. Fluxus became a lifelong source of inspiration which had Pedersen experimenting with countless new ways of mediating art: art in jukeboxes (1963), art on the back of lorries (1965), art on the Art Libary's answerphone (1967-) and so on. Around 1970s he also started to formulate proposals for "experimental libraries" as more conceptual frameworks around art. There was a Singing Library, where one could order a song over the telephone; an Instant Library, consisting of all the objects in the area, on loan under normal library conditions; a Money Library, where one could borrow the money the book was worth, provided one handed it back in three weeks later; et cetera. Pedersens last big project, from the 2000s, was the development of an online platform that made it possible to rent out time-based art (video and performance) in the same way that the Art Library rented out paintings.<br />
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Given the Art Library's long history of thought-provoking, innovative ways of mediating art, the party committee, of which I was proud to be a member, thought it would be fitting to celebrate its 60th anniversary by questioning the conventions surrounding anniversaries, especially the obligatory speech. Who is allowed to speak? Which content is appropriate? Which form? We decided that in the case of the Art Library, the artists and the borrowers had the best claim to the right to speak, so we invited all of them to send in a contribution to a speech, in a medium of their own choice. These are the building blocks that all the elements of the celebration are based on. We will be presenting them in the shape of a book , an actor will read them out on the streets surrounding Nikolaj Church, they will be on display as an exhibition and three artists will use them as raw material for performances and video works.<br />
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Quite an event, so if you are in the area, do try to come. I am sure you won't regret it. Here is the programme:<br />
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<b>SPEECH on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Art Library</b><br />Saturday 26 August, Kunsthal Nikolaj, Nikolaj Plads 10, Copenhagen, 2-6 PM<br />
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2.00 PM - Doors open.<br />2.30 PM - Welcome, book launch and performance of the SPEECH by actor Poul Storm<br />3.00 PM - SPEECH #1: claus ejner, "Something About the Future, a Nine Seconds Scream and How to Unachieve That a Dotted Line Is a Dotted Line. A 5 Minute Speech for Knud Pedersen".<br />
3.30 PM - SPEECH # 2: Kristian Schrøder, "Homo Ludens At Work".<br />
4.00 PM - Ulla Hvejsel, "Thinking With Your Ass. A Quizz About the Stupidity We Subscribe To, Based on Artistic Speeches in Connection With the Art Library's 60th Anniversary".<br />
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Continuously from 2 to 6 PM:<br />
- Exhibition of paintings 1957-2017 from the Art Library's catalogue.<br />- Exhibition of contributions to the SPEECH.<br />- Reading of the SPEECH in the area surrounding Nikolaj Church by actor Poul Storm.<br />
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Many thanks to the Danish Art Foundation and the Copenhagen City Council for their suppoort.Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07081706221627574008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-50423800426293860642016-09-21T13:03:00.003-07:002016-09-21T13:03:54.716-07:00TALK ART FLAT!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Keep Art Flat! </i>opened last Thursday. A flurry of activity, and there it was: nearly 250 works by 95 artists, presented for your enjoyment at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen until 6 November 2016. For every visitor there is a free catalogue with articles by John Held, Vittore Baroni, Chuck Welch and myself. And because we know that the audience won't be satisfied even with that, there is <i>Talk Art Flat! </i>on 28 September. Two hours of discussion about Mail Art and politics, from 17 until 19 at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Don't miss it!Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07081706221627574008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-84288329392245867272016-09-11T13:31:00.003-07:002016-09-11T13:47:19.632-07:00SANDIE, HER ARMPIT AND ME<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It is often said about the art of Thomas Hirschhorn that it engages people because it is based on fan culture. Hirschhorn’s monuments and other installations, the argument goes, do not speak to the visitor in the “professional” language of art, but in the more informal language of genuine personal excitement. Ray Johnson, so often credited with the “invention” of Mail Art, also had a thing about fan culture. The Shelley Duvall Fan Club is perhaps the best known of his fan clubs, but he also initiated a Paloma Picasso Fan Club, a Jean Dubuffet Fan Club, a Marcel Duchamp Fan Club, and a Blue Eyes Fan Club, the latter with a Japanese section called the Brue Eyes Fan Crub. Is there some sort of point here? A link between 1960s/70s Mail Art and 1990s “relational” art?<br />
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There is certainly a link between Mail Art and ‘zine culture. Mail Art and home-produced fanzines use the same means to a similar effect, and the ‘zine and tape circuit regularly made use of the same infrastructure as Mail Art did. There may also be a link at the level of con- or intent: Johnson often employed the symbol of a potato masher, identifying himself as a “masher”, someone who comes too close – a stalker, in today’s vocabulary.<br />
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But it is important also to note that Mail Art had no style of its own. The visual similarity with fanzines is likely to be due at least in part to the fact that they use the same means (photocopy, offset) and are produced at home by a single person. Moreover, the similarity between the fanzine “feel” and the “feel” of a Johnson work cannot support a claim about Mail Art as a whole. Johnson’s work has always had a tendency to come too close. Much Mail Art produced by others comes close because it arrives at someone’s private home, but it rarely comes too close.<br />
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Look at Cees Francke. His work on the theme of Sandie Shaw seems upon first glance closely related to Johnson’s Fan Clubs. The difference, however, is that Francke’s work comes too close to the person of the artist as well. There is fan culture in his Sandie Shaw-worship, but there is obsessiveness of a different type as well. It’s not just Sandie Shaw who’s in focus, it’s armpits as well. Sweaty armpits. Immaculate armpits. Sandie’s Third Armpit.<br />
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Neither Johnson’s “club” atmosphere nor Hirschhorn’s homemade look suffice to explain Francke’s project. Not even the two combined are enough to capture its full breadth. Mail Art is about “us” and about Doing It Yourself, but it is also about the “me” of the sender and the receiver and all the ways in which the work manages to capture the one and engage the other. One of Francke’s stamps reads “Sandie Shaw Internal Apparitions”. Mail Art is about being “inside” and about doing a lot with minimal means, but in Francke’s case, “internal” also refers to the sender’s and the receiver’s innermost feelings and “apparition” to the images they give rise to.<br />
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Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07081706221627574008noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-50364290227090857302016-08-28T13:44:00.000-07:002016-08-28T13:44:42.818-07:00ARCHIVING MAIL ART WITH DAVID ZACK<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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”These stories are either true or else told as if they were true by reputable artists such as those the article is about”. There is something strangely tautological to this comment, attached by David Zack to a photocopy of an article of his called “Teaching of Art, Art of Teaching” in <i>Art in America</i> (December 1971), although it is hard to pinpoint what, exactly, the tautology consists of. Either the stories are true, or “reputable” artists have told them as if they were true. But where, exactly, does one find proof for the fact that the artists are reputable? In an article. Written by Zack.<br />
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The approach is not unlike the one chosen by Zack in his landmark “Authentik and Historikal Discourse on the Phenomenon of Mail Art”, also in<i> Art in America</i>, the January/February 1973 issue. The article begins with an account of Nut Art, which Zack writes was “definitely invented in 1967 by Roy De Forest and myself”. “Definitely invented”: the author feels it necessary to underline the truth of the statement. The article is full of reports on the reports of others. “Soon after Clayton moved to California from South Dakota I began to receive (…) letters reporting the exploits of a friend named George Gladstone, a local madman (…) who planted the highways with critters cut from dead inner tubes and alarming neckless heads”, for example. Zack reports on letters reporting on barely believable incidents and activities – and if he does not do that, he reports on barely believable exchanges that took place via the mail. The factual report and the outrageous scheme, the document and the forgery mix in a manner that makes it very hard to tell what is what and how the reader can be sure that it is all true. In insisting on the truth of his reports, or reports of reports, Zack manages to cast doubt on their truthfulness.<br />
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Another example of Zack’s tightrope act on the border between document and fiction: his <i>Twenty-One Correspondence Palimpsests</i> are letters – Mail Art works – by others, annotated by Zack. He advertised them to his contacts in the name of the Correspondent Art Services Foundation, secretary David Zack. The CASF, he wrote, was a non-profit organization dedicated to “research on communication arts and related services”. The Correspondence Palimpsests were available as originals, sealed in polyethylene and framed, and as Xerox copies – not a fixed number of copies but between seven and 49 of them. On one letter he wrote: “This is a letter from Jim Haining, one of the most powerful friends of anyone in mail art. (…) Jim Haining’s mail is a fountain of interest - - - for one thing he was the first to show me what Mircofiche looks like (…) and for another he introduced to me the concept of the work of art shared among friends as if it were a puzzle “. So: Zack adds background information on the writer – rather random bits of information – to a letter sent to himself and asks his network what to do with it. There is a document, there is information about its provenance, but there is no purpose, at least, not yet. It is up to the recipient to decide what to do with it. Zack brushes the archive, but passes it by because he does not imply any particular way of using the material.<br />
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True stories, letters that were really sent and research material that is not tied to any particular topic or goal. Zack manifested himself as an archivist of the phantasmagorical. His records and files are deceptive, even hallucinogenic. In a strange way he demonstrated the problems inherent in all Mail Art archives: the material stands as a witness to an exchange, but although it is has a physical reality and can be seen as an unchanging witness of an exchange that once took place, it does not really capture the exchange. It always goes beyond fact. It speaks to you as document and work at the same time.<br />
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When will we learn to stop making a difference between the art collection and the archive?<br />
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Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-13278732452122565012016-08-17T04:29:00.001-07:002016-08-28T13:54:02.363-07:00LOMHOLT FORMULAR PRESS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In which type of art do you look for a key to a work in the works of others? That’s right, in Mail Art. Mail Art, like no other art form, is designed to invite other artists to respond, and the responses tend to be superb guides to the potential of the work that provokes them.<br />
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In 1978, British Mail Artist Pauline Smith wrote, in one of her beautiful Letraset compositions, “I’m afraid I don’t know what this is all about” on a work called <i>A Length</i> by Niels Lomholt, or Lomholt Formular Press, as he used to call himself. German artist albrecht d. added: “I can’t speak Danish” and “It’s a surprise for me to read that Pauline Smith has the same problem”. Surely it could not have come as a surprise to him that Smith did not speak Danish?<br />
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Lomholt Formular Press published formulae, documents that have all the trappings of the bureaucratic form but function in the exact opposite way. Rather than making information comparable and quantifiable, they are tailored to generate an ever-expanding cloud of responses that radiate from the formula outwards. There are all the usual boxes and dotted lines, but instead of easily answerable questions they are headed by phrases such as “Are you satisfied with not being able to move any part of your body but your feet?”, “The duration of the action … measurement as experienced” and “Describe the point between run and walk”. Surely language is not the only problem, or even the biggest one.<br />
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American Mail Artist Irene Dogmatic wrote, “To tell you the truth, I have trouble participating in your projects quite often, (1) because they seem extremely self-contained to begin with (i.e. the idea seems inherent in the forms you send, almost as if they can stand without additions by anyone) and (2) quite often your ideas are over my head”. And Davi Det Hompson, also from the US: “It’s difficult for me to find a place to enter into your formula. Yes, there are plenty of empty boxes and dotted lines, yet, you seem to have already filled the important ones”. These artists have difficulty filling out the forms because to them, they already seem to contain everything that is necessary. The boxes and dotted lines make it clear that a response is asked for, but the general setup – and, to venture a guess, the images and words added by Lomholt himself – indicates that all the necessary ingredients are not there.<br />
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Smith’s and albrecht d.’s response does something else. It is critical, but it engages with the work as well. Smith sculpts her words around the words and images that are already present on the page, drawing attention to the form as a visual composition. Albrecht d. responds to the bureaucratic overtones, adding comments such as “Formular paranoia” and “Lomholt shows the crazy world today”. Both respond in the spirit of their own work. Smith’s Mail Art works are immediately recognisable by the beautifully balanced Letraset and collage compositions, and albrecht d.’s work, both in visual art and in Mail Art, thematises the violence and paranoia of everyday reality. Both artists responded on the basis of their own practice.<br />
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On the template of <i>A Length</i>, Lomholt wrote a numbered list of what a formula is to him: a process, a practical example of the irrational development of an action or an idea, a way of asking questions, a world that has not materialised yet, a series of material layers, a chance of watching the private as it develops itself, a starting point for change, a mirror, a list of other things and a poem. One thing is to hear him say it, another is to see his contacts enact it. To watch artists such as Smith and albrecht d. as they try to come to grips with the form, as they develop the work in the process, as they respond to the questions posed explicitly and implicitly, as they help to materialise the work, as they mirror themselves in the form and are mirrored by it – as they interact with it as a work of art in their own artwork.<br />
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Self-contained? Over your head? Impossible to penetrate? All you have to do is look at the way others have come to grips with it.<br />
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Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-82644677735399897702016-08-15T04:44:00.002-07:002016-08-28T13:45:00.470-07:00WAIT AND SEE / WATCH WHILE YOU WAIT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On 17 February 1979, Mail artists Niels Lomholt, David Zack and Horacio Zabala met in Falling, Denmark. It was uncommon for Mail artists to meet. One of the hallmarks of Mail Art is that it made it possible to work together with people you had never met and were unlikely to meet. When Swiss Mail artist Hans-Rudi Fricker in 1986 tried to institutionalise Mail Art meetings by proposing “Tourism” as the next step after “Mailism”, his collaborator Günther Ruch designed a stamp saying “Tourism in Mail Art Remains Tourism and Not Mail Art”. But the meeting in Falling was a meeting of friends. Lomholt, Zack and Zabala set special store by their postal exchanges. <br />
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From 15 September, works by all three artists will be on display at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen as part of the exhibition <i>Keep Art Flat: Mail Art and the Political Seventies</i>. If anything, the event will show how different they were. Lomholt operated under the name of Lomholt Formular Press. His formulae use the trappings of the bureaucratic form – dotted lines, boxes, figures – to invite his correspondents to think differently about the world surrounding them. Zack is best known as the author of the first “manifesto” of Mail Art to appear in a mainstream art magazine, "An Authentik and Historikal Discourse on the Phenomenon of Mail Art" in the January/February 1973 issue of Art in America. Less a manifesto than a rambling account of his own personal experience of mailing art, it is typical of his contribution to the network: long texts full of verbal acrobatics and obscure references to people he knew and situations he had experienced. Zabala emigrated from his native Argentina to Europe in 1976. At the time, Argentina was in the grip of the "Dirty War", waged by the military regime against political dissidents, so it is not entirely surprising that the project that was to keep him occupied until 1981 was called <i>Today, Art is a Prison</i>.<br />
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The strength of Mail Art was that it could accommodate people who worked with the bureaucratic form, the hallucinogenic narrative and the “socio-imaginary test” (as Zabala called his project); that it could bring together people from Europe, the US and South America; that it did not require them to agree upon anything. The 1970s may have been dominated by the Cold War, but Mail Art was not about taking sides. It made it possible to express one’s views, certainly - but it did not force people to subscribe to a specific agenda. There are no absolute judgements in Mail Art. It is not about what you do, but how you do it. Criteria are generated on the inside, not imposed from the outside.<br />
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Fluxus artist Dick Higgins had a stamp that read “No Anticipation Allowed”. Stamped on an envelope, it translates as “wait and see”. My programme for the coming month is “Anticipation Required”: watch while you wait. I have always been fascinated by Mail Art's inclusiveness and diversity and drawn towards its typewriter-and-newspaper-cutout aesthetics. I have been writing about it since 2008 and have spent the past many months together with Mail artist Niels Lomholt and art historian Lene Aagaard Denhart, preparing <i>Keep Art Flat</i>. In this blog, I will now roll out the red carpet for the exhibition, presenting the reader with related works and thoughts, an artist or a work per entry. In anticipation.Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-63587882314763158552016-05-02T13:30:00.000-07:002016-08-17T04:32:52.390-07:00CO-LAB 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKs2LVT1WCnuw2Obkb73xcAf9e4OpaVPOtFklC2vbb8_BRckoiwoFfQaopMv-7Jum1rLEN6VQjs1ExnmTmaqCy53bdfTHLvIAx_M12OKY2RiFx4F4kzZyJScOgEXloDd5OWKU292PertKK/s1600/Peter+Ato.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKs2LVT1WCnuw2Obkb73xcAf9e4OpaVPOtFklC2vbb8_BRckoiwoFfQaopMv-7Jum1rLEN6VQjs1ExnmTmaqCy53bdfTHLvIAx_M12OKY2RiFx4F4kzZyJScOgEXloDd5OWKU292PertKK/s200/Peter+Ato.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
Last Saturday I found myself counting seconds during a performance afternoon at Overgaden in Copenhagen. For nearly three hours. Here is why.<br />
<br />
Sometime last year I volunteered to be part of Co-Lab 2, a project curated by Portuguese artist Marcio Carvalho. The idea is to create one month long collaborations between non-Western artists and representatives of the Western institutional world.I participated as a representative of Copenhagen University and got to collaborate with Kenyan artist Atò Malinda throughout the month of April. The event at Overgaden was the final presentation of our efforts.<br />
<br />
When we first met, we had nothing. All we knew was that she is interested in the way African artefacts are treated by Western museums and that I teach gallery studies. The most obvious way forward seemed to be to visit a museum. We chose the National Museum of Denmark, which has the largest public collection of African artefacts in Copenhagen. Although our backgrounds are completely different, at least we could meet around the same object.<br />
<br />
We ended up spending several days at the museum, having long discussions about the objects on display and the way they are made to represent African culture(s). The question of culture (singular) and cultures (plural) is important, because one of the first things that struck us is that in most displays, the objects were used to represent the entire continent, or at least large swathes of it. Another thing we kept returning to was that the African displays are predominantly brown – the brown of pottery, baskets and wood, wood, wood. Nothing stands out. And then there was the importance of text: the way objects appeared empty whenever there was no text, the way words immediately started to seep into the object whenever there was text.<br />
<br />
So we ended up talking about representations; Atò about the objects and the people they are made to represent and myself about the displays and the way they address the visitor. To the casual listener it may have sounded as if she was the wronged party and I was the insensitive apologist of the system that maintains the wrongs, but it did not feel like that. We were both bitter and we both had fun - so much fun, in fact, that we decided to treat the discussions themselves as our joint performance.<br />
<br />
How to represent a discussion on representations? How to represent a discussion that is understood as a performance? After all, large part of such a discussion consists of all the things each of us brought with us, and an equally large part consists of the thoughts each of us had afterwards. In short, the words that are actually spoken only make up a tiny part of the discussion, and even they cannot be correctly understood out of context and/or without the participants in the discussion being present to account for them.<br />
<br />
We arrived at two answers that more or less respond to our respective positions. Atò conducted a painting workshop during which the visitors were invited to paint empty boxes brown – the exact shade of brown that they already had been painted with once. She would squeeze the paint onto the brush herself, without leaving the visitor a choice, and afterwards she would place the boxes on a table as if she was installing a museum display.<br />
<br />
I myself, meanwhile, had recorded all that we had discussed during our last visit and had worked out how many seconds we both had spoken. The numbers were read out in real time, stopwatch in hand: “Atò 4 seconds… Peter 5 seconds… Ató three seconds”, et cetera. All that was objective about the conversation was represented, all that was subjective – the actual content – was edited out. The result was a long, slow pattern in time that functioned in the exact opposite way from the original discussion. Short exchanges became interesting, longer arguments dull. And while the discussion had served to make us understand the other better, we appeared as opposites during the presentation: Atò hospitable and service-minded, me self-absorbed and unapproachable.<br />
<br />
But there were links, too. Next to me, I showed a picture of the room that the particular part of our discussion that I was presenting had been about, accompanied by as many “facts” as I had been able to collect. Atò referred to the discussion we had in that particular room in the way she addressed the visitors and the way she displayed the painted boxes. Despite our different ways of presenting ourselves, we were still speaking of the same thing – not the object as such, but the discussion, understood as an immaterial object.<br />
<br />
Afterwards, we – not only Atò and me, but also the other participants, Nigerian artist Odun Orimolade, Cameroonian artist Christian Etongo and their respective collaborators, Mette Garfield and Jessie Kleemann –spoke about the effect of such collaborations with the audience. What do they achieve? Maybe our presentation had been blank and uncommunicative, but our explanation seemed to strike a chord. The brown boxes and the empty seconds, the empty offer of participation and the uncommunicative patterning of time – they resulted in a good deal of discussion.<br />
<br />
Someone asked why we had not made our discussions public. We could have – but then we would only have been discussing representations, not representing a discussion. We would have been turning what presented itself to the eye into words, but we would have lost the experience of doing so. A result is all fine and well, but what it is it without the experience of arriving at it?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-61211154051133684972015-12-11T13:28:00.001-08:002015-12-11T13:53:37.447-08:00THE MUSEUM IS CLOSED<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">On 9
December 2015, Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen opened an exhibition about Knud
Pedersen. The exhibition, curated by Johanne Løgstrup, is not exactly your standard gallery show: it only exists of videotaped interviews
with people who knew Pedersen and a list of projects on one wall that visitors
can refer to while listening to them. I participated by giving an interview and collecting the
material for the list. After all, I've known him since 2000 or 2001 and written about him in my Ph.D. and various other publications.</span><br />
<br />
For the
invitation, Nikolaj Kunsthal chose an image of Pedersen’s Copenhagen Museum of
Modern Art. That is to say, the photograph does not actually show the museum,
but the Danish National Bank, designed by Arne Jacobsen and built between 1965
and 1978. When the Copenhagen Museum of Modern Art opened in 1967, it found
shelter in a small space in the basement of Nikolaj Church, where Pedersen had
his Art Library, but later it became a conceptual museum. No building, no
staff, no nothing – according to Pedersen the ideal venue for conceptual art.
And since the museum had no actual physical existence, Pedersen thought, it
might as well be the National Bank.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But it
would be wrong to say that the Museum had no existence whatsoever. Not only did
the Museum sponsor many art events, it also existed as a patent. Pedersen took
out a patent on the name and used it – more or less successfully – to file
lawsuits against other museums who tried to adopt names that resembled that of
the Museum. That the new museum in the suburb of Ishøj that the Municipality of
Copenhagen opened in 1994 is called Arken, and not the Copenhagen Museum of
Modern Art, for example, is due to Pedersen. If it did not have a physical existence, the
Museum at least had a legal one, and that is almost as solid in Western society
as we know it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">“The Museum
is Closed” is the title of the exhibition at Nikolaj Kunsthal. The museum is
closed, but the exhibition is open. The Copenhagen Museum of Modern Art only
exists as a concept, but it can act in the world thanks to its legal status
nevertheless. Is it accidental that Pedersen chose the National Bank as the
place to incarnate his Museum? After all, money has the same un/real character,
not really there but available for use nevertheless. Maybe there is more to
Pedersen’s choice than just a “why not…?”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">See also <a href="http://petersfluxdeparole.blogspot.dk/2015/02/knud-pedersen-day_24.html">Knud Pedersen Day</a>, my somewhat offbeat attempt at an obituary for an extremely offbeat man. </span></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-62701958430691638212015-11-21T13:26:00.000-08:002015-12-11T13:34:29.434-08:00BLACK MARKET INTERNATIONAL: PURE PERFORMANCE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Boris Nieslony is kicking a stone around, Jürgen Fritz is walking around with a balaclava on his head, dragging a piece of piping and Elvira Santamaria Torres is striking matches. Lee Wen is sitting on a chair, wearing a sleeping mask, Alastair MacLennan is carrying a plastic sheet around and Roi Vaara is folding and unfolding a folding ruler. Myriam Laplante is dressed as Santa Claus, Elvira Santamaria Torres is filling plastic bags with helium and Jürgen Fritz is hammering two long beams together by means of shorter ones. What does it all mean?<br />
<br />
All of the actions took place during a six-hour performance by Black Market International, the international performance collective that visited Aalborg last weekend. As I wrote in my last blog entry - see <a href="http://petersfluxdeparole.blogspot.dk/2015/11/kulstof-15-memory-and-reflection.html">here</a> - I was there to engage the audience in conversation about the event. Since the performance took place in the entrance hall of a community centre containing a theatre, a cinema, a fitness centre, a pizzeria and lots more, this was not an easy task: a large percentage of the spectators just happened to be passing. The taciturn nature of the local population didn’t help either: “So what do you think of the performance?” [a couple of minutes’ silence] “I don’t know.” “But what do you think they’re doing?” [another couple of minutes’ silence] “It’s a bit weird.” End of conversation.<br />
<br />
But then, this was a very special kind of performance. Black Market International (BMI) perform together, but without agreeing on roles or a plot beforehand. All you see is a number of performance artists, all of them with their own style and background, who meet up, who start out by doing their own thing but who sometimes come together, drift apart, come together again, et cetera. Because that was what’s happening. In amidst all of the chaos the performance area suddenly divided itself into two, one area where people did things and one where people built things. Or suddenly two of the performers were doing something with numbers. Or four of them were slowly moving along in a kind of conga line, swaying from side to side.<br />
<br />
In this kind of performance – and there isn't really anyone else who does it quite like this – what you have to look for is not a story or a structure, but the dynamics, the ebb and flow of the action. The famous <i>Untitled Event </i>at Black Mountain College in 1952 springs to mind. Here, Cage himself read a text on music and Zen, Robert Rauschenberg played with a gramophone, David Tudor played a prepared piano, Charles Olson and Mary Richards read poetry, Merce Cunningham and other dancers moved through the room – all independent actions, performed in such a way that the audience could never take it all in. However, the event was organized by Cage by means of time slots allotted to the players and the seats were arranged to ensure that every spectator got a different view (see <a href="http://black-mountain-research.com/2015/07/06/untitled-event/">here</a>). There was no story, but there was a scheme. The BMI performance, on the other hand, was entirely unplanned and unorchestrated. All there was, was the action unfolding in time.<br />
<br />
BMI serves performance art the way the textbooks want it to be. This is really performance taking place in its own time, performance that it is impossible to document, performance that takes place in the spectator’s here and now. What it certainly is not, is just a bunch of people fooling around. While it may strike the casual passer-by as strange, perhaps even alien, no-one was tempted to see it as pure nonsense. It was obvious to everyone that the actions were performed with sincerity and with a lot of experience to back it up. It is not hard to see why BMI has continued existing for 30 years and why the individual artists take part in it for such a long time: this exercise in leaving all your plans and routines behind leads to the purest, barest performance art imaginable. Whether you like it or not, this is a fascinating experience.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-79898622533145926032015-11-18T00:17:00.000-08:002015-11-19T05:57:42.516-08:00KULSTOF 15: MEMORY AND REFLECTION<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDISXBdx8d-Ee8BI34bStBRjy0mhQzgVvjloh8qFoy0fDH0egQ_6_-Tx5maq9jVdFOfEo7IHejrF9TLTdKdd2YodfcnjEUQUYQlH04xQRHBRPlz0I8q0flqbNuozZ8Ep9Op6Iz2dTSHBRh/s1600/Santamaria+Torres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDISXBdx8d-Ee8BI34bStBRjy0mhQzgVvjloh8qFoy0fDH0egQ_6_-Tx5maq9jVdFOfEo7IHejrF9TLTdKdd2YodfcnjEUQUYQlH04xQRHBRPlz0I8q0flqbNuozZ8Ep9Op6Iz2dTSHBRh/s1600/Santamaria+Torres.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elvira Santamaria<br />
Torres, <i>Shadow Self-<br />Portrait</i>, 2015. Photo <br />
© Peter Lind.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Last weekend, I manned the “samtalekøkken” (“conversation kitchen”) during the Kulstof 15 festival in Aalborg, Denmark. My job was to engage visitors in conversation about the performances they had just seen. This gave me a lot of time to talk about them and to reflect on them. Here are some of my thoughts.<br />
<br />
On day one, I watched Elvira Santamaria Torres (Mexico) perform her <i>Shadow Self-Portrait</i>. Torres started by bending over, shaking her hair out and sticking her hand out through it in gestures indicating basic emotions, from supplication to anger. Then she started striking matches, faster and faster, counting each one of them like the years of a life. Finally, she blackened a sheet of glass that she held up in front of her face with soot and traced a stylized face in it with her finger. Was this the shadow self-portrait from the title? Or were the other scenes shadow self-portaits as well?<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFFcFVNnix75lXbbBrSpCP9mbLP-WSbkfDA951sEyeUpKE9o9QmRtqMsH1bLHR5R3qOkeZSTCguncYwQtLT-MlklXXYrz6uUAa12984DlmFpb6LvQ2_WC5959i9mKL0-HEEvmIclJjPJ-2/s1600/Laplante.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFFcFVNnix75lXbbBrSpCP9mbLP-WSbkfDA951sEyeUpKE9o9QmRtqMsH1bLHR5R3qOkeZSTCguncYwQtLT-MlklXXYrz6uUAa12984DlmFpb6LvQ2_WC5959i9mKL0-HEEvmIclJjPJ-2/s1600/Laplante.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Myriam Laplante, <i>The Pheno-<br />menology of Doubt</i>, 2015<br />
Photo © Peter Lind. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If Torres’s performance demanded a willingness on the part of the audience to wait for the imagery to unfold, Myriam Laplante (Canada/Italy) captured the viewer’s attention straight away. Her performance <i>The Phenomenology of Doubt</i> started with her writing words on a black wall with a horribly squeaky piece of chalk attached to a piece of string on a nail. “Doubt”, she wrote along the perimeter of an imaginary circle, and “universe”, and “art”. She filled the space in between with other words to create a circular sentence: “doubt in the post-material universe of contemporary performance art through the study of the phenomenology of…” and so on and so on. Then she performed two conjuring tricks: first she put a vase of flowers on her head and danced, finally leaving the vase hanging in the air, and then she lay down on thin air and floated out of the room. Except that she didn’t: you could see the figure in black that held the vase, just as you could see the black table on wheels that she lay on during her exit. It was all a trick. Doubt.<br />
<br />
Both performances make demands to the viewer. The first one expects him/her to stay and piece the scenes together, the second one expects him/her to go over the action once again in his/her head in order to work out how the notions of “doubt”, “the universe” and “art” fit in. Intense viewing combined with reflection along the way vs. relaxed viewing followed by reflection. Retroactive reflection in both cases: reconstructing the performance again and again in your head as new layers are added to it, reconstructing it afterwards on the basis of the words supplied by it after the performance has lifted its spell. If performance really is characterized by the fact that it only happens once, like performance theorists used to claim, it is the spectator’s time, not the run-time of the actual performance. If it only happens once, it happens in a strange, broken kind of time that encompasses memory and reflection as much as it does actual experience.<br />
<div>
<br />
Did the audience comment on this? Not really. Some merely answered "I don't know" when I asked them what they thought of the performances. Some of the less taciturn ones confessed to being frustrated about the lack of narrative in the performances. But among the most talkative ones I did notice a tendency to want to confirm their readings with the artist or, if s/he didn't happen to be around, with me. It may for a long time have been an item of faith among performance theorists that a performance happens in its own time, but it was equally common to point out that performance happens in the viewer's space. I am tempted to conclude that that space, just like performance time, is strange and broken. That these viewers wanted to ask the artist means that they were aware of the latter's presence as a human being, but it also means that they saw him/her as the key to the work in the Modernist sense. A direct line between the artist and the viewer, yes, but one with a big kink in the middle.<br />
<br />
To be continued.</div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-59677509452345399682015-10-29T03:27:00.003-07:002015-11-18T00:27:01.349-08:00KULSTOF 15<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This year, the performance collective Black Market International celebrates its 30th anniversary. It does so, amongst other places, at the Kulstof 15 festival in Aalborg, Denmark.<br />
<br />
Black Market International was founded as the Market project in Poznan, Poland, in 1985. After a number of changes in the composition of the group, it adopted the name Black Market International. The group's present regular members are Jürgen Fritz (Germany), Norbert Klassen (Switzerland, died 2011), Miriam Laplante (Canada/Italy), Alastair MacLennan (UK), Helge Meyer (Germany), Boris Nieslony (Germany), Jacques Maria van Poppel (Holland), Elvira Santamaria (Mexico), Marco Teubner (Germany), Julie Andree T. (Canada), Roi Vaara (Finland) and Lee Wen (Singapore). All of them, with the exception of Julie Andree T and the deceased Klassen, will be present in Aalborg.<br />
<br />
The group's aim is not to create collective performances that can be understood as a single coherent whole, but to achieve a kind of simultaneity in which each participant provides input that will somehow enter into the whole, even if it is not explicitly picked up by the others. Like any black market, open and free exchange is central, resulting in a <i>Kunst der Begegnung</i>, an art of encounter.<br />
<br />
At Kulstof 15, the group will encounter a selection of performance artists from the region, namely, Sophie Dupont (Denmark), Nanna Lysholt Hansen (Denmark), Line Skywalker Karlström (Sweden), Olof Olsson (Denmark/Sweden) and Jessie Kleemann (Greenland). Throughout the festival, there will be a Samtalekøkken ("conversation kitchen") during which theatre director Christine Fentz, performance artists Ellen Friis and Henrik Vestergaard Friis and myself will provide running commentary and keep a public dialogue going.Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-381916951047094012015-10-26T07:30:00.002-07:002015-10-27T01:53:49.837-07:00WAS BEUYS A FEMINIST?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My last
blog entry dealt with an unexpected question that was asked during the Artist
Rooms session on Beuys at Tate Modern on 18 September. Here is another one: <i>was Beuys a feminist?</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My own
answer was brief and purely factual: his <i>Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum</i>
went in for equal rights for men and women. A blackboard that was used at Documenta
V in 1972, where Beuys’s contribution consisted of the presence of the Office
throughout the entire 100 days the exhibition lasted, said: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><i>“Our
suggestion: Equal Rights for men and women! 20 years of party politics have not
managed to realise this basic right: the recognition of domestic work as labor
(career); to legally place this career on an equal level with others and to
legitimate it through salary. Homemakers [sic] salaries! Women and men! If you
would like to support our work toward the citizens’ demand to secure a true
equal rights [sic] for women, then please sign this list. True freedom for
women”. </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">At face
value, unconditional basic income does nothing to secure equal rights for
women. It only makes it easier for women (and for men to force women) to stay
at home and do the chores. I will return to the question of true equal rights
and true freedom further down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">First, I
want to paraphrase what another participant, the collector Anthony D’Offay, had
to say about the matter. D'Offay, a former art dealer who knew Beuys personally, pointed
out that the latter distinguished between a male and a female “principle”, that
he counted intuition among the characteristics of the female principle and that
he had great respect for women’s intuition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">One might
add that he also tended to represent the male principle by means of hard iron
and the female principle by means of soft copper. Beuys’ entire universe consisted of opposites, with the energy that animates it circulating permanently
between them. In his view, no pole should dominate. If one particular pole appeared to be fixed, it should be liquefied by means of the
other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In terms of
sex and gender, such views no longer hold up. To take but one obvious
reference, Judith Butler has argued convincingly that being female is not the same
as being a woman. Gender roles are established and perpetuated performatively. From this perspective, any female principle set within a bipolar system is suspect. Respect for women’s intuition is all fine and
well, but within a bipolar system built up around a male and a female principle it will only serve to perpetuate conventional
gender roles. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Several
arguments could be made against this. One of them is historical: the first wave
of feminist artists, roughly contemporary with Beuys’s formative period during
the 1960s and early 1970s, was concerned with visibility. In order to achieve
equality between the sexes, it was felt that traditionally “female” activities,
materials and tasks ought to be made visible and to be recognised as equally
important as “male” ones. In this respect, Beuys is first and foremost a product of
his time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">More
importantly, however, Beuys’s ideas about the circulation of energy extended
to the field of economics. If he mentions labour, salary and domestic work in
one sentence, it is because his Energy Plan distinguishes between “production
capital” and “consumption capital”. Every citizen, he said, ought to receive consumption
capital in order to satisfy his/her needs. After a particular need had been
satisfied, the money, having lost its value, would be returned to a central bank
and be issued again as consumption capital. Everybody has needs, so everybody
deserves his/her portion of consumption capital, no matter what they do.
Payment for domestic labour follows logically from this scheme.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So was
Beuys a feminist? I would say not. He wasn’t one in the modern sense of the
word because he thought in terms of bipolar opposites and he wasn’t one in his own time
because he thought in terms of flows. He isn’t one now because he is not radical enough
and he wasn’t one back then because he was too radical. So please don’t get me
wrong: if I say that he wasn’t a feminist I don’t mean to say that he was a
male chauvinist, heterosexist pig. I mean to say that a concept like “feminism”
would have been secondary in his scheme of things. Whether he was right to give
it that position is another question.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-2754619978313069732015-10-09T02:20:00.001-07:002015-10-13T22:56:58.383-07:00BEUYS HOLOGRAPHIC<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp8wnDC0yd8z91IeptdcCCj6V95bjg5ADdT6YVkOLAaNBKuPCazCgasReSrSgspekoqOwGKd1j0Q1T6IJ8jAJlL9sjxPpPdjgr9j_8l920LFdu5Rums5hISmoAHOdCMoXwrhZg9Cqn5R6M/s1600/Beuys+1974.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp8wnDC0yd8z91IeptdcCCj6V95bjg5ADdT6YVkOLAaNBKuPCazCgasReSrSgspekoqOwGKd1j0Q1T6IJ8jAJlL9sjxPpPdjgr9j_8l920LFdu5Rums5hISmoAHOdCMoXwrhZg9Cqn5R6M/s320/Beuys+1974.jpg" width="217" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Offset poster for US lecture-series <i>Energy <br />Plan for the Western Man</i> (1974) by <br />
Joseph Beuys, organised by Ronald <br />
Feldman Gallery, New York. Courtesy <br />
<a href="http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/home_frame.html">Ronald Feldman Gallery</a>, New York</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
During the Artist Rooms session on Beuys at Tate Modern on 18 September (see my previous blog post) one of the participants asked about the importance of Beuys in the digital age. Frankly, the question had me flummoxed. I had noticed that we were constantly linking Beuys to earlier artists and was thinking about his role today, but the word “digital” threw me.<br />
<br />
The first thought that struck me was that the ontology of his work is completely different from that of a digital(ised) work. A digital work exists in as many copies as there are people who are viewing it at the same time and it is constantly renewed onscreen. Beuys, on the other hand, made unique works, often using unique objects. While it is true that he also created over 500 multiples – something which we also discussed – these often draw upon the material properties of the objects and materials used, so even his non-unique works depend for their functioning upon the handling of one particular copy. When you put his work online, you lose a whole range of meanings.<br />
<br />
In response to the question about the digital age, one of the organisers suggested that Beuys, with his love of discussions and his didacticism, would certainly have embraced the social media and the internet as a worldwide communicative platform. Given the broad range of media he worked in and his willingness to try his hand at new media such as performance and installation art, I have no doubt that he is right. However, it is speculative as well: “What would Beuys have done if he had been alive today?” The question about his relevance in the digital age certainly implies a question about the present, but I don’t think it means having to imagine the artist’s live presence in the present. As I understand it, it is about his work as we have it today and the way in which it employs media.<br />
<br />
My own answer was a quote by Beuys from a Public Dialogue at the New School in New York on 11 January 1974. Beuys was there to explain his Theory of Sculpture – the idea of social sculpture – and the very first question was: “Have you ever thought of using holography as a medium?”. This got a laugh from the audience, but Beuys was unfazed. After having asked some additional questions, he said: “This science [holography] could have similar interests to my interests, to look for the whole, if you say ‘holo’ from the Greek ‘holos’, meaning the whole”. Did he counter humour with humour? Possibly – but the way kept referring to holography throughout the rest of the dialogue has a bearing on the question about the digital as well.<br />
<br />
Back to the New School. After the initial discussion of holography petered out, people in the audience started complaining about the lack of seats and the noise. People were queuing up outside, but because of fire regulations it was not allowed to sit in the aisles, and people talking in the back rows prevented others from hearing what was being said. Addressing one of the disgruntled visitors, Beuys said: “But first you have to ask yourself whether your intervention is productive for the whole. What you did just now [complaining that a discussion could not be truly public if there weren’t enough seats] was a kind of critique, yes. And I’m saying, is critique the only method to find a solution for the questions we all have in the society?”. Beuys clearly does not think that critique alone is enough to create solutions. What it takes is people taking responsibility for the holos, the whole; people making contributions that are “productive” for the whole.<br />
<br />
After a lot more heckling and wrangling, holography came up a third time, now in connection with Beuys’ aesthetics. Asked how he would describe his new aesthetic, Beuys answered: “I describe it radically: I say aesthetics = human being. That is a radical formula. I set the idea of aesthetics directly in the context of human existence, and then I have the whole problem in the hand, then I have not a special problem, I have a ‘holography’”. To Beuys, holography was more than a medium but less than simply everything. It was more than just a way of writing things and less than everything that can be written. It was “human existence and all the problems it entails”, more specifically human existence as a matter of aesthetics, of sensory and emotional values.<br />
<br />
This relates directly to Beuys’s doubts about criticism as a useful way of finding solutions. His arguments throughout the Dialogue suggest that he prefers responsibility to critique, productivity to reactivity, the sensual and emotional to the analytical. In focus is not a particular understanding, but a way of being in the world. Being in the world certainly means something different in the digital era, but I doubt whether the digital as a medium would have any impact on the way Beuys wanted his work to be understood. Holography was brought up as a specific medium, but Beuys turned it into one aspect of human existence. Extrapolating from there, the digital, which is also a means, becomes something we all know from experience, something to take responsibility for, part of a “problem” – a more positive way of saying it would be “condition” – that we are a part of and that we can solve – change – by taking responsibility.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-4921934242270532592015-09-24T06:58:00.002-07:002015-09-24T06:58:45.201-07:00HOMOGEN: THE BEUYS RESERVOIR<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last Friday, curator Keith Hartley of the Scottish National Gallery and I discussed Joseph Beuys at Tate Modern. In my introduction, I spoke about the countless ways in which meaning is produced in Beuys’s work. Meaning is a real problem in Beuys’s oeuvre, as it is generated across an incredibly wide range, all the way from private experiential knowledge to universalizing political theory.<br />
<br />
Because my first meeting with Beuys as a scholar was in connection with my research on Fluxus, this is where I started. It ought to be easy to deal with Beuys and Fluxus. If you apply the strictest of criteria, Beuys only participated in one Fluxus festival, the <i>Festum Fluxorum Fluxus</i> at the art academy in Düsseldorf on 2-3 February 1963, and of the two pieces he presented there, he only considered one to be a “Fluxus” piece. So: one festival, one work. But what, then, about the exhibition <i>Joseph Beuys Fluxus</i> at the Haus Van der Grinten in Kranenburg in November 1963? If you go by the title, all the works on display there ought to be Fluxus works, but some of them predate Fluxus by several years. There is even one drawing, <i>Fluxus für Vierzehnjährige</i> ("Fluxus for Fourteen-year-olds"), that is dated 1948/9. And Beuys’s engagement with Fluxus extends way beyond the early 1960s as well: think, for example, of his and Ken Friedman’s multiple <i>Fluxus Zone West/Fluxus West</i> from 1971. In the case of Beuys, Fluxus is both a very narrow and a very broad concept.<br />
<br />
Laws – in this case the simple one-after-the other of time – seem to work differently with Beuys. The notion of the reservoir, which he unfolded in his <i>Infiltration-homogen für Konzertflügel</i> ("Infiltration-homogen for Concert Piano"), is a useful one to explain how. The <i>Infiltration-homogen</i>, an action performed at the art academy in Düsseldorf on 28 July 1966, revolved around a concert piano with a felt cover. The felt, Beuys has said, turned the piano into a “<i>Klangdepot</i>”, a sound reservoir. All the sounds that the piano can and will produce, are trapped inside the felt skin, without order, earlier and later sounds, real and potential sounds mixed together. The idea is echoed by the felt itself: the fibres it consists of are not woven, but matted. Felt is a homogeneous material. In Beuys’ work, felt is associated with isolation, warmth and absorption. Beuys draws on direct bodily knowledge about felt that we all have, which is one of the ways in which he communicated. But what is more important here is that each and every one of Beuys’ works, and indeed his oeuvre as a whole, can be seen <i>Depote</i>, reservoirs, felt-like in their structure.<br />
<br />
Within the single work, there are always numerous layers and kinds of meaning. In <i>Infiltration-homogen</i>, the experiential knowledge we all have of felt is combined with the conventional sign of the Red Cross, stitched on the side of the piano cover - for Beuys a sign of “emergency” - and a contemporary reference: the subtitle of the <i>Aktion </i>was <i>der grösste Komponist der Gegenwart ist das Contergankind</i>, “the greatest contemporary composer is the thalidomide child”. The drug thalidomide had been taken off the market only five years earlier because it caused serious deformities in unborn foetuses, especially deformed limbs. The crippled child echoes the isolated piano as a container that nothing can get out of. But despite the many things Beuys has said about his work, you cannot compile a Beuys dictionary. Every line you draw through the homogeneous mass of references – the reservoir – gives a particular reading, but you cannot say that any single reading is the correct one. And the same can be said of his dating. If he includes a drawing from 1948 in a Fluxus exhibition, it is to invite the visitor to think about Fluxus. To Beuys, Fluxus was a principle rather than a group of people or a type of work. Flux, later <i>Hauptstrom</i>/”main stream”: flowing.<br />
<br />
Beuys’ work was about setting in motion, about abolishing fixed categories. He is perhaps best known for the term “social sculpture” and the slogan “everyone is an artist”. Sculpture means changing things. A felt corner changes the right angles of a room. A thought can change society. It is not surprising that Beuys became politically active. The <i>Deutsche Studentenpartei</i> (German Student Party) was founded in his class at the Düsseldorf art academy in 1967. In 1970, he founded the <i>Organisation der Nichtwähler, Freie Volksabstimmung</i> (Organisation for Non-Voters and Free Referendum). Renamed the <i>Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung</i> (Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum), it was present at Documenta V in 1972, with Beuys discussing his works and politics with the audience for the full 100 days that the exhibition lasted. In 1977, at Documenta 6, he installed his <i>Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz</i> (“Honey Pump in the Workplace”), an image of ideas flowing through the social organism. An integral part was the presence of the <i>Freie internationale Universität</i> (Free International University), by means of 13 workshops on contemporary issues such as nuclear power, the effects of capitalism, et cetera.<br />
<br />
Beuys’ work and politics became increasingly inseparable – but they are miles apart as well. His theories, such as the <i>Energy Plan for the Western Man </i>from 1974, dealt with society and how to change it. His work, on the other hand, is recognizable as artwork, with a distinct style and an often unique character. It is also extremely puzzling. As a viewer, you’ll want an explanation, but the nature of the explanations, of the available keys, varies enormously, from knowledge that we all carry in our own bodies to abstract theories offered by Beuys. That, to my mind, is the greatest challenge Beuys’s work offers to the scholar and the viewer: to balance all of these explanations.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
- More Beuys to follow - </div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-37997456311249073502015-09-10T01:45:00.000-07:002015-09-14T13:02:56.731-07:00IMPORTANT SHIT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On Friday 11 September, during a seminar in connection with the annual Golden Days Festival (theme: "important shit"), I spoke about <i>Het Lieverdje </i>in Amsterdam as cultural heritage. As a sculpture, <i>Het Lieverdje </i>("The Street Urchin") is nothing special. Commissioned by the Committee for Activity in Amsterdam, it was created by sculptor Carel Kneulman and unveiled in 1960 as a symbol of the Amsterdam spirit, cheeky but lovable. If "anti-smoking magician" Robert Jasper Grootveld had not turned it into the symbol of "tomorrow's addicted consumer" in 1964, the expression "cultural heritage" would never have been used. Grootveld discovered that the sculpture had been funded by Hunter Cigarette Co. and organised a happening there every Friday at midnight. A crowd that grew larger with each week that went formed a magical circle around the statue in order to exorcise the spirit of consumerism, ritually coughing and chanting slogans.<br />
<br />
<i>Het Lieverdje</i> - quite accidentally - became the meeting point for a whole range of people with different agendas. There was Bart Huges, who drilled a Third Eye in his skull in order to get permanently high. There was Johnny van Doorn, or Johnny the Selfkicker, a poet who worked himself up in a trance, ranting and raving his poetry. There was Nicolaas Kroese, the eccentric restaurant owner who claimed to have discovered the Fifth Energy that made plants grow and who lent Grootveld a garage for use as a K-Temple (K stands for "kanker", cancer) until it burned down. There were literary figures such as the poet Simon Vinkenoog and the author Harry Mulisch, who immortalised <i>Het Lieverdje</i> and the crowd surrounding it in their writings. There was the photographer Cor Jaring, whose pictures ensured that everyone, both inside and outside Holland, knew what went on. And there was Roel van Duijn, the co-founder of Provo.<br />
<br />
As Van Duijn tells the story, he either found Grootveld's Gnot-sign drawn on the wall next to his door one day when he came home or a paper with the Gnot-sign written on it in the letter box. "Gnot", a word of Grootveld's invention, is a combination of the words "genot" ("indulgence") and "god" ("God"). The sign looks like an apple with a dot in it. It also stood for "Amsterdam Magic Center", Grootveld's campaign to turn the city into a place where everything was possible. Van Duijn had handed out leaflets announcing the publication of the magazine Provo at <i>Het Lieverdje</i>, and posting the sign was Grootveld's way of calling a meeting. Apparently he suggested to Van Duijn that Provo make use of ludic means, the very means that made it both notorious and effective in those serious times. The anarchist youth movement only existed from 1965 until 1967, but it turned the city upside down - and it adopted both <i>Het Lieverdje</i> and the Gnot-sign as its own signs.<br />
<br />
This year it is 50 years ago that Provo began to organise its happenings at <i>Het Lieverdje</i>. The event has been marked with a documentary, several exhibitions, a Provo tour organised by the Amsterdam Museum and lots of media coverage. When a gnot-sign was discovered on the Royal Palace in Dam square, the place where Provo demonstrated against the monarchy, Paul Spies, the (now ex-) director of the Amsterdam Museum immediately told the press that it ought to be recognised as cultural heritage. Meanwhile, he and ex-Provo Luud Schimmelpenninck placed a white bicycle underneath the sign, carrying a picture frame that picks it out against the background. All the stops on the Provo tour are marked with white bicycles as a reference to Provo's White Bicycle Plan, which Schimmelpenninck was the main architect of.<br />
<br />
It is not surprising that Spies wanted to activate the heritage machinery. The Palace is under renovation, and it is always when things are under threat that the notion of cultural heritage crops up. If the gnot-sign is recognised as cultural heritage, it will function the way cultural heritage usually does: a physical object is turned into the unique, authentic sign of an imagined community, in this case the spirit of Provo, as cheeky and lovable as the Amsterdam spirit as embodied in <i>Het Lieverdje</i>. The sculpture, meanwhile, fared differently. During the 1990s, he square where it stands, Spui, got a new pavement with an apple - the gnot-sign - picked out in differently coloured cobbles, but hardly anybody notices it. The owner of a bookshop on the square regularly has to point out to brick layers that they have put the cobbles back the wrong way. The sculpture, meanwhile, is still the focus of demonstrations, ludic or otherwise, that result in the same press photographs as 50 years ago. Especially student protests often take place near <i>Het Lieverdje</i>, as the rectorate of Amsterdam University resides in the nearby Maagdenhuis.<br />
<br />
I am tempted to see the tradition for civil unrest around <i>Het Lieverdje</i> as a kind of cultural heritage as well. Some will argue that only physical remains can be seen as heritage, as the word "heritage" suggests "inheritance", the possibility for things to be inherited by later generations. However, cultural heritage is intimately connected with identity; traditionally national identity, but in recent publications on the subject increasingly the heritage of smaller communities as well. Analyses of cultural heritage as a carrier of national identity tend to stress the fact that it creates communities by excluding others. When academics want to address the heritage of smaller communities or minorities, on the other hand, they tend to pull the Butler card, stressing the fact that the performative creation and perpetuation of national identities also leaves open the possibility for changing the status quo, for including the heritage of others. Ever since Grootveld and Provo, <i>Het Lieverdje </i>has been the focus of civic disobedience. Although the students who demonstrate there do not belong to the same community as the early happeners around Grootveld or Provo, they do represent the same spirit of anti-patriarchal, pro-democratic revolt. Het Spui and <i>Het Lieverdje</i>, I would argue, are the locus of the performance of that spirit and have been its locus for the past two-three generations. That, too, I would say, is a type of cultural heritage.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
More information on the <a href="http://goldendaysfestival.dk/event/hva%E2%80%99-m%C3%A6-kulturarven">Golden Days homepage</a>Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-40292911175860628292015-02-24T03:59:00.000-08:002015-02-24T03:59:03.589-08:00THE LOOK OF THE BOOK<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The other day I visited a seminar on socially engaged art in public space. Yet another one. But this one was different. After the presentations, a man stood up and introduced himself as a local politician. He wanted to know why he should hire an artist to deal with marginalized groups, and not a social worker. Why he should hire an artist to design a public convenience, and not an architect. The answer that he was given was that artists are less likely to be associated with authority and can therefore communicate more easily with the people concerned.<br />
<br />
On the face of it, this is a sympathetic argument. It is certainly one that is often used in texts on socially engaged art. It features prominently in Grant Kester’s classic <i>Conversation Pieces</i> (2004), where WochenKlausur’s project <i>Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women</i> (1994) is singled out as an example of artists breaking a bureaucratic deadlock. Local politicians and bureaucrats in Zurich were unable to find a solution to problems relating to drug-addicted prostitutes, so WochenKlausur took them out on the Lake of Zurich on a boat and got them to talk together. On facing pages, Kester reproduces images of the boat and the boardinghouse that resulted from the intervention. In the context of the argument, the boat comes to symbolize the role of the artists as free agents and the boardinghouse the solution.<br />
<br />
But sympathetic though it may be, an argument like this is unlikely to satisfy a politician or bureaucrat: it implicitly turns him or her into the one who has the real problem. The drug-addicted women may lead a rotten life, but the authorities that are supposed to have the power to do something about it are unable to use it to good effect. The artist, on the other hand, is portrayed as someone who is able to do something and therefore gets the hero’s role. Unfortunately, I was unable to speak to the local politician after the seminar, but I would not be at all surprised if he left with a feeling of finding himself amongst strangers.<br />
<br />
As an art historian, I am quite naturally drawn to arguments such as the ones fielded by Claire Bishop in <i>Artificial Hells </i>(2012), based on the idea of antagonism. Of course Kester had very little previous art historical literature to draw on while Bishop could base her argument on an analysis of Kester’s, but the difference is telling. While Kester focuses on the type of communication used by socially engaged artists in their interaction with society, Bishop focuses on debates within the art world as well. Her argument is centered on art world concerns – object quality, artistic intention, questions of reception – and distinguishes between a primary audience, consisting of the people who are directly involved in the project, and a secondary one, consisting of anybody who is interested in the work but who has not been involved. Again speaking as an art historian, something that happened amongst strangers is returned to my world. Lovely.<br />
<br />
Bishop does not reproduce Kester’s two illustrations of WochenKlausur’s project, but she does reproduce two of his other illustrations, not next to each other on facing pages, but underneath each other on a single one. Kester separates them with two text pages, but Bishop brings them together in what we can understand from the text on the facing page is an opposition – not necessarily one between the works, but between the ways they are read by Kester. The works are Rachel Whiteread’s <i>House </i>(1993-4) and Loraine Leeson/The Art of Change’s <i>West Meets East</i> (1992). Kester contrasts the former’s object-based approach with the latter’s dialogue-based one, but not in a simple opposition: associating Whiteread with the avant-garde tradition of disruption and Leeson with a dialogical approach beyond and outside the avant-garde as a well-known art historical form, he also claims that art historical arguments are naturally biased against dialogical practices. The avant-garde is “ours”, dialogue is “theirs”. Directly confronting the two works on one page enables Bishop to reabsorb them, and Kester’s argument, into the art discourse. As she points out, both works have form and both elicit affective responses. Even if Whiteread conceived her work in the studio and Leeson allowed it to crystallize in dialogue, the result is a form. And even if in Whiteread’s case the debate raged after the audience was confronted with the work while Leeson’s practice puts a premium on the debates taking place before the work is served for the general public, there is still a public.<br />
<br />
Kester’s argument distinguishes between hierarchical and hierarchy-free communication, the one geared towards results and the other towards mutual understanding. His two photographs of WochenKlausur’s intervention function almost as a Derridean exergue, an introduction that inscribes the argument on the text before it is unfolded: the rocking boat of hierarchy-free communication vs. the solid foundations of the boardinghouse as a result of hierarchical communication after mutual understanding was reached. But so do the images in Bishop’s book, identical to the ones reproduced by Kester. In her case, the implication is that the same thing may be read differently, thus introducing her approach as based on the arguments employed by others, be they artists or theorists.<br />
Bishop notes, quite rightly, that the success of socially engaged art is never measured by means of comparisons with non-art projects that attempt something similar. Nevertheless, such an evaluation was demanded by the politician at the seminar. The documentation of two phases of a single art project, as in Kester, or the documentation of the final form of two different projects, as in Bishop, cannot supply it, as both are premised on the Look of the Book.<br />
<br />
Significantly, one of the items that featured prominently during the seminar was a book that is in the process of being produced about the work of the artist who answered the politician. Pages containing text and illustrations. I agree with Bishop that it is important to see socially engaged art as art, produced by an artist and consumed by an audience. I agree with Kester that socially engaged art implies non-art processes and subjects. But both make their arguments by means of the Look of the Book, and I agree with the politician that art projects in this particular field are consumed by others than the art world and should therefore be accountable outside as well as in. Other juxtapositions are called for: not just the opposition between object and dialogue or the similarity between the object-based and the dialogue-based as art, but also the oppositions and similarities resulting from the project’s identity as something to be decided upon by a city council, to be administrated by a bureaucracy and to be lived with by ordinary citizens, quite apart from art world concerns. For the sake of dialogue <i>and </i>antagonism, the politician should have been up there giving his view of the project, not in the audience asking a question. His agendas, minutes and reports should have been up there, next to the book.<br />
<div>
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Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-33959094474715167622015-02-24T03:49:00.001-08:002015-02-24T03:50:18.292-08:00ONLY ONE CASPARI<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Writing about Knud Pedersen reminded me of another obituary I wrote but never published. Since the man in question made a profound and lasting impression on me, just like Pedersen did, I thought I'd publish it here, now. On the left is a picture of the man, and below is the text:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
This is a blog entry about Carlheinz ”Arthus” Caspari. I only met him once, but he made a big impression on me. And now he has passed away. Several years ago, actually. I was never particularly good at keeping in touch and he was never particularly good at answering e-mails. But it is a great shame that the world now has to manage without its Caspari.<br />
<br />
It is not easy to write about him. Towards the end of our only meeting, at his home just outside Hamburg, he showed me some pickle jars. They contained parts of his archives, or rather, the papers he accumulated during the course of his life. He sold them, but under a condition: if the buyer opened a jar, he/she had to memorise the documents it contained, destroy them and pass on their contents in an oral form. It is a form of archiving that is inimical to the archive, but also one that suits the man extremely well. So if one wants to write about Caspari, and if one wants to do so in a way that respects his views, it has to be done in a non-archival way.Therefore, I will not use any source material. I will not even mention his birth and death dates, because that would make it possible to pin him down on a timeline, safely caught between two points. The only clue I will give is that Caspari was old enough to have fought on the Eastern front during World War II. Otherwise, I will just write down the first things I remember about him; put some entirely personal and subjective accounts into the circulation that he valued so highly.<br />
<br />
The first thing I remember is what he told me about being a German in Paris, just after World War II. Caspari lived in the French zone of occupation. He trained as a theatre director, and because he was on friendly terms with the local French military commander, he obtained a visa that enabled him to study French contemporary theater. When he arrived in Paris, he found that his visa and his letters of recommendation gave him access to the theatres, but no more than that. The actors, who were often of Jewish descent, refused to speak to him or even shake his hand, so he ended up just sitting and watching them rehearse.<br />
<br />
Another thing I remember is that he was the inventor of the Eastern as a film genre. Working for German television, he came up with the idea of making a series about the Russian conquest of Siberia, as a response to the long-established genre of the Western. What struck me about this idea was that it put him at odds with both sides of the East/West conflict. It identified both the Soviet Union and the US as expansionist powers, imperialist in their very roots. As in Paris, it left him standing all on his own, although his time not as a German amongst the enemies of Germany, but as an original thinker in a world that chooses sides.<br />
<br />
A third thing I remember is what he told me about his collaboration with the Dutch artist Constant. They met when Constant was working on New Babylon, an urban environment designed for the man of the future, Homo Ludens, Man the Player. Caspari argued that New Babylon only could function after a profound revolution in our way of thinking, and he decided to define and pave the way for that way of thinking. He called it “Labyr”, part laboratory, part labyrinth, part labour and part something else entirely. Once again he was on his own, not because he ignored history or the logic of the present, not even because he chose the future, but because he placed himself outside the logic of modern Western time altogether. There is no connection between time as we see it, as a regular, measurable, linear form of progression, and Labyristic time.<br />
<br />
Now I would like to stress that these are just things that struck me. Personal thoughts that cannot be read as verifiable, logical conclusions. This is how I will remember him: as geographically and temporarily at odds with the rest of the world, a person the like of which we will not see again in a hurry.<br />
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Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-17984612259373814242015-02-24T03:30:00.000-08:002015-02-24T03:30:32.602-08:00KNUD PEDERSEN DAY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am unable to generate ideas like Knud Pedersen’s. It was only him who could do that. But if I was to give it a try, I would propose to commemorate his death on 18 December last year with a Knud Pedersen Day. He often spoke about the time he had been invited to give six lectures on Fluxus at the Department of Literature at Aarhus University in 1982. Instead of droning on from the safety of a lectern, he asked the students to start, develop and end a project. Knud Pedersen Day, as I imagine it, has to start, develop and end just like that. As Pedersen himself wrote, not about a day but about a chair: “it is exactly by not specifying it that it gets attention”. The idea with Knud Pedersen Day is to give special attention to a day by not specifying it. Actually, it would be better if it was not called Knud Pedersen Day.<br />
<br />
To make a day special by not specifying it is a logical impossibility. Pedersen liked impossible projects. To give just one example, he applied for the job of General Secretary of NATO in 2008, together with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen: Fogh could be the secretary and Pedersen the general. He knew beforehand that the answer would be “no” and treated the rejection as a kind of trophy. On the other hand, he also happily allowed himself to be surprised when one of his projects became a reality anyway. In 2013, he proposed to let a pupil at Aalborg Cathedral School scratch his or her initials into a wall where others had done the same thing from 1540 until 1848. He seemed a bit disappointed when he got permission, but he accepted it. If you start a project, you have to live with the result, whether you expected it or not.<br />
<br />
The impossible is one thing, but there is something else about the history of the Fluxus lectures at Aarhus that says a great deal about Pedersen. By setting others an assignment instead of accepting one himself, he appropriated a university’s core business. He did not respond to the invitation as much as to the institution that did the inviting. Throughout his entire life, Pedersen has worked with (infra)structures. He was not interested in what it was that was being communicated, but how it was communicated. It is tempting to think that this preoccupation with infrastructures already motivated his resistance activities as a member of the Churchill Club during World War II, which were directed against the infrastructures that supported the occupation. It certainly motivated his work within the arts. The first time he manifested himself on the Copenhagen art scene was with <i>Byens Billede</i>, the Picture of the City, a wood-and-steel easel for the display of a single work of art in public space. In 1958, he opened <i>Kunstbiblioteket</i>, the Art Library, where people could borrow a work of art for the price of a packet of cigarettes a week. Neither project, nor other ones such as <i>Faxe kører med kunst</i> ("Faxe Drives with Art) from 1965, during which works of art were driven through the country on the back of brewery lorries, were intended to promote a specific type of art. It was all about the way it was distributed; about infrastructures.<br />
<br />
For Knud Pedersen Day to be a project in the spirit of Pedersen, then, it is not enough for the day to remain unspecified, the project as such has to have an infrastructural bias as well. Preferably, it should engage with the mechanisms that make a day special at all. It is not accidental that French historian Pierre Nora also includes significant dates in his famous and often-used definition of Places of Memory. It is not a question of days or dates, but about the way in which fixed entities - a red number on a calendar - become the locus of memory. A recurring Knud Pedersen Day would be a temporal monument. For the project to be in the spirit of Pedersen, however, it should not <i>be </i>a monument, but ask how a day can become one. Another impossibility, because the word monument implies a thing, a result, while the question is open-ended, without a result.<br />
<br />
I think, in order to commemorate Pedersen in a suitable way, that I should cast the proposal to designate a Knud Pedersen Day in the form of an assignment: elaborate a proposal to celebrate Knud Pedersen Day in such a way that a) what is celebrated remains unspecified, yet recognizable as the thing that is celebrated and b) what is commemorated is not fixed, yet recognizable as a process of fixation. I do not know how one could possibly do these things, so the form of the assignment is a welcome way out. But it is also appropriate because Pedersen’s projects are not about what things are, but about how they are done. Pedersen was the only person who could generate ideas like Pedersen's. He is sorely missed.Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-79124923207103087712013-08-08T00:37:00.001-07:002013-08-08T00:39:30.634-07:00THE HAMMER WITHOUT AN EXPLANATION<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-kYjkapxqRvit_-xSMAEB6YfIQNXoYQB-gZw6Ug4OZTp1lK4RLoDaiYLssFRjv_Eu6yB4RJ2-yG6dTeZVm2vhG9ceqfCmI8PLf6LyIrfr7BVoCNjc8D_KeX_h97yxpuU-BwG4AeLDKjeW/s1600/hammer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-kYjkapxqRvit_-xSMAEB6YfIQNXoYQB-gZw6Ug4OZTp1lK4RLoDaiYLssFRjv_Eu6yB4RJ2-yG6dTeZVm2vhG9ceqfCmI8PLf6LyIrfr7BVoCNjc8D_KeX_h97yxpuU-BwG4AeLDKjeW/s200/hammer.jpg" width="200" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Recently,
the owner of gallery 44 Møen on the Danish island of Møn, René Block, has
bought the farmhouse next door to house composer Henning Christiansen’s
archive. The first exhibition to be held there, curated by the Los
Angeles-based curator and visual artist Chiara Giovando, is called “The Hammer Without a Master”. This is
not a review of the show. This blog entry only deals with the title.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Hammer that
is referred to can be no other than composer Pierre Boulez’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Marteau sans maître</i>, a serialist work
written in 1953-1954 and revised in 1955. There is at least one good historical
reason to choose this particular work as a point of reference, because in 1959-60,
a handful of members of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Det unge
tonekunstnerselskab</i> (The Young Musicians’ Association, DUT), amongst them
Henning Christiansen, ran a study group devoted to “avant-garde” compositions
such as Boulez’. Other composers under scrutiny were Anton Webern (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sechs Bagatellen</i> op. 9, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fünf geistlige Lieder</i> op. 17, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Konzert für 9 Instrumenten</i> op. 24 and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Variationen für Klavier</i> op. 27),
Karlheinz Stockhausen (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kontrapunkte</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Klavierstück I-IV</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Klavierstück XI</i>) and Olivier Messiaen (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mode des valeurs et des intensités</i>). The
study group is a bit of a local myth in Denmark , because it marks the
beginning of an intensive involvement with the musical avant-garde on the part
of a group of young composers, amongst them Per Nørgaard, Ib Nørholm and Pelle
Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, who had a decisive influence on the Danish new music
scene since the early 1960s.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As a
visitor, you would like to know that sort of thing.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The study
group never found the key to the Boulez piece, by the way. Not entirely. It was
Lev Koblyakov who in 1977 described the methods behind the work for the first
time. </span><span lang="DE" style="mso-ansi-language: DE;">He did so in an article
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zeitschrift für Musiktheorie</i>. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But then, although Boulez stringently
applied his serialist methods in overall terms, he is known to change
individual notes on the basis of sound or harmony, so no blame attaches.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In any
case, the Hammer Without a Master can be said to have been an important early
influence on Christiansen. There are certainly plenty of hammers in his work;
for example in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">188 Hammerschläge
gegen Kriegsaffen</i>, op. 195 (1988). I witnessed a performance of the piece
some two years ago, and on that occasion, the aforementioned Pelle
Gudmundsen-Holmgreen went up to the interpreter, visual artist Bjørn Nørgaard,
to complain that that sort of noise gives you tinnitus and that it is immoral
to expose an audience to it. Christiansen also produced several graphic works
by the same title. The hammer prints they bear remind one of some of Danish
artist Poul Gernes’ graphic works from the early 1960s in which he subjected print
plates to hammer blows and suchlike. Halfway through the sixties, Christiansen
teamed up with Gernes and the other members of the so-called Ex-School, the
Experimental School of Painting, so it is possible to make a connection there;
but I like to think that Boulez played a role as well, at least in the
background. In any case there are hammers everywhere in Christiansen’s work,
both in his compositions, in his graphic work and amongst the (sonic) objects
he made.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Methodically,
serialism made its mark on Christiansen’s work as well, although less visibly.
I do not mean serialism as a compositional technique, but something much less
tangible. Christiansen had a weak spot, or perhaps one should say a talent, for
systems, and some of the works he is best known for make extensive use of
exactly such systems. The composers he studied the Hammer Without a Master
with, for example, still remember his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perceptive
Constructions I</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">II</i>, op. 27
and 28 as a revolutionary piece of music. These pieces combine a systemic
approach to music with the idea of the graphic score so as to create, quite
literally, sonic blocks that alternate and/or overlap in time. On paper, they
take the shape of blocks or columns of sound, divided by empty spaces. This has
the effect of making the works extremely transparent and understandable; quite
the opposite of Boulez’ piece, but with a similar stringency as his point of
departure.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So: the
Hammer is in many ways a useful key to Christiansen’s archive, but it requires
an explanation. And the exhibition is not even devoted to the archive, but to
ten artists’ responses to the archive. The artists are Leif Elggren, Andreas
Führer, Jacob Kirkegaard, Claus Haxholm & TR Kirstein, Johannes Lund,
Gordon Monohan, Vagn E. Olsson, Marja-Leena Sillanpää, Society for the
Disorderly Speaker and Tori Wrånes. The title is a key to the archive, but so
is the curator’s choice of these ten artists and the artists’ response to the
archive. Just as much as it is a collection of objects, the exhibition is a rhizomatic
maze of translations and responses; translations of texts that remain
unspecified and responses to statements that remain unsaid. It might just be
the art historian in me that feels an insuppressible need to explain the title
and thus to add words to the exhibition, but really there are words everywhere.
Unsaid, unheard, but present nevertheless.</span></span>Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-62609750964706780892012-12-15T01:47:00.003-08:002012-12-15T01:50:38.587-08:00AND HERE IT IS: THE CATALOGUE!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDShI11v-aycOarPARIzTyV_AY7coBwT8qcj6NHVjgwlCmC3W_FY1aka9JuLLa8pBtsp63a_BaQNx9NRlMkBF4D2YzwuPZPE7Ha8XIsieIjRutaL5QQ6NdzXhnXQKu8oCJSdwW92OsebZX/s1600/Fluxuskatalog.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br /></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDShI11v-aycOarPARIzTyV_AY7coBwT8qcj6NHVjgwlCmC3W_FY1aka9JuLLa8pBtsp63a_BaQNx9NRlMkBF4D2YzwuPZPE7Ha8XIsieIjRutaL5QQ6NdzXhnXQKu8oCJSdwW92OsebZX/s1600/Fluxuskatalog.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDShI11v-aycOarPARIzTyV_AY7coBwT8qcj6NHVjgwlCmC3W_FY1aka9JuLLa8pBtsp63a_BaQNx9NRlMkBF4D2YzwuPZPE7Ha8XIsieIjRutaL5QQ6NdzXhnXQKu8oCJSdwW92OsebZX/s200/Fluxuskatalog.JPG" width="133" /></a>And here it is: the Lunatic catalogue. Few have it, many want it. A solid brick of a book, yet flexible and fluxable. A luxury edition, bound with the same string that is used to hang up the cards in the exhibition. In a matter of minutes, you can take the string out, rearrange the pages after your own wishes and bind the book again. And that is only the shape of it. The contents are even better. 1,4 kilogrammes of, in Emmett Williams's phrase, Fluxus facts and fictions. Lots of new information, enough detail to satisfy even the most devoted Fluxus nerd. Get it while it is hot!Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-26763232865368914692012-11-22T23:18:00.001-08:002012-11-22T23:19:33.679-08:0050 YEARS OF FLUXUS: KEEP ON DISAGREEING<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I once met
an artist who put his entire archive in pickle jars and sold it on the
condition that if the buyer decided to open them, he or she would destroy the
documents, memorise their contents and pass them on orally. During the last two
years, while I was busy collecting eye witness statements for the Lunatic
exhibition, it struck me that with Fluxus, the opposite is the case. There
turned out to be a surprisingly large number of people still around in Denmark
who had witnessed Fluxus events and had a large stock of Fluxus anecdotes they passed
around to their friends or acquaintances, but that had never been written down.
Composers such as Ib Nørholm, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Per Nørgaard, Fuzzy
and Axel Borup Jørgensen were involved in the organization of Fluxus concerts, wrote
about them or simply witnessed them, not because they felt in any way connected
to Fluxus, but simply because they thought it was a phenomenon that deserved
attention.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Today, on
the 50<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> anniversary of the first official meeting between Fluxus
and Denmark, I would like to make a case for the importance of making sure that
these people’s memories – their tall stories and amusing anecdotes – can
continue to circulate. Effectively, what they have done is to keep Fluxus alive
for 50 years. I feel especially privileged to have had the possibility of
speaking to Axel Borup-Jørgensen, who was seriously ill and recently passed
away, aged 88. His memories of the first-ever Fluxus festival on Danish soil, a
six day event that was held at Nikolaj Church between 23 and 28 November 1962,
were unbelievably vivid and gave a very strong impression, not only of the
historical event, but also, and perhaps even more so, of the way such an event
can stay with a person for the rest of a lifetime. It is important that an
effort is made to ensure that these events, and especially the personal stories
about them, can continue to circulate even when the eyewitnesses to which they
attach themselves, are no longer with us.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">While
working on the Lunatic project, I have thought a lot about the difference between
research and scholarship. At its most basic, research must be the retrieval of
evidence, pure and simple. It is important work, but it is not scholarship. An
essential prerequisite for it, but nothing more. Scholarship presupposes a
contextualization of the material collected by means of research, a qualified
effort to make it speak. It is tempting to conclude that research without scholarship
is useless. However, precisely these stories, their living character, their
obvious subjectivity, can make me consider the merits of the opposite as well.
I could also be persuaded to say that the personal quirks these stories display
and their stubborn refusal to come together in a unified narrative have merits
entirely their own. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is important to
write them down, where they can join other types of evidence to create a
coherent account of the events in hand, but it is equally important that they
can circulate. Why? Because they do not draw the straight line of a scholarly
argument but indicate a vague field within which everyone can find a pattern
for themselves. They can promote living history.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Now I
should note straight away that they can only do so if all the available
accounts are granted the same status. As soon as a dominant account emerges,
the others will group themselves around it in difference or conformity. This
goes for the oral accounts of privileged individuals such as the performers and
artists involved, but also for apparently solid documents such as photographs
and film and audio recordings. Like oral accounts, the latter also contain
elements of selection and translation. This said, I would nevertheless like to
end this special 50<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> anniversary blog entry with a double call: for
everyone to continue to tell stories about Fluxus events and for people who
possess such stories to come forward and share them with all the rest of us.
Both are necessary if we are to preserve Fluxus as a living phenomenon and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>something to have a stake in. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-89181071044920413152012-11-12T01:20:00.001-08:002012-11-12T01:20:17.627-08:00NO COMMENT TO NOTHING
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The following
is an English translation of a short article of mine that appeared in the Danish
newspaper <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Politiken</i> on Saturday 10 November.
Currently, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Politiken</i> has a series on
the subject of “nothing”. Readers can contribute with comments or photographs
and have done so industriously. Of course my contribution takes Fluxus as its
point of departure. Here it is:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“It is
difficult, if not impossible, to imagine an exploration of the concept of
Nothing without Fluxus. Not only has Fluxus had intimate dealings with Nothing
during the 50 years of its existence, it even turns into Nothing itself as soon
as one tries to tie it down. The experts still do not agree on whether Fluxus
was a movement or a network. One thing we do know about it is that the name was
invented by George Maciunas, who between 1962 and his death in 1978 organised
many Fluxus concerts and published many Fluxus editions. However, history also
shows that Fluxus can manage just fine without him. Many of the artists
involved still create works in the no-man’s land between music, visual art,
poetry et cetera in a true Fluxus spirit. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In
connection with Fluxus, ”Nothing” should be understood in at least two ways, on
the one hand as a Zen-inspired, philosophical, meditative flirt with Nothing and
on the other as an art rebellion that would prefer to hurl Nothing into the
face of the audience. The difference between the two can be hard to spot.
French Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, for example, specialized in signing
everything and therefore signed Nothing as well. Philosophical or
anti-artistic? Even his own mother pointed out in connection with the signed
Nothing that Nothing does not exists. Vautier embraced this maternal correction
and wrote on a box containing Nothing: “This Box Contains Something” in a
manner that can be understood as both the one and the other. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Maciunas’ plan
to market Vautier’s box as a ”Flux Nothing Box” was never realised, but a
Fluxus multiple that comes close in spirit is Vautier’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flux Holes</i>. The holes, too, take one of the artist’s own objects as
their point of departure, in this case <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trou
portatif</i> (”portable hole”, 1964), a box with a handle and holes in the
sides. The Fluxus edition took the shape of small plastic boxes containing
objects with holes in, cards with holes in or photographs of objects with holes
in. The label showed bare ladies’ buttocks with the words “Fluxholes Gathered
by Ben Vautier” right where the hole is or etchings of an anal examination. Vautier:
“No comment. I just like holes, maybe because they have something to do with
non-art”.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Fluxus’
first visit to Denmark in November 1962, with a festival consisting of six
concerts, resulted in a scandal. Not because of the substance of the
performances, but because of a perceived lack of same. Robert Naur, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Politiken</i>’s music critic at the time,
wrote that Fluxus “wanted nothing, had nothing to contribute with and delivered
nothing except an insistent, slow display of absolute impotence”. How? Danish
author Uffe Harder highlighted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dansk
musiktidsskrift</i> (”Danish Music Magazine”) a piece that had been performed
during the fourth of the six concerts, Alison Knowles’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proposition</i>. What Knowles proposes is to “make a salad”, and that
is exactly what she did, persistently and for a long time. Harder left the
performance after twenty minutes, outraged by the implicit “demand to contemplate
this nothing”, as he wrote. The problem was not that there was nothing there,
but that he was forced to witness it. Vautier’s mother was right: Nothing does
not exist. There is always a poor soul there to experience it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In
connection with the same Nothing, Harder also criticised Fluxus’ ”drive towards
destruction, monotony and a point zero”. He did not understand Nothing to mean “no
thing”, but the absence of several very specific things: of art, of
development, of respect for the spectators’ busy lives. The Nothing that Harder
experienced during the Fluxus festival consisted of the absence of several
specific things he expected to experience, but in a provocative or thought-provoking
manner felt robbed of. Like Vautier’s objects, Fluxus’ performances of Nothing
were – and are – boxes that contain Something, namely the power to provoke and
frustrate. And like Vautier we ought to say “No comment” if we want to hang on
to Nothing, because as soon as we comment on it, Nothing changes into Certain
Things and their absence.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-13708994743623343542012-11-01T15:43:00.000-07:002012-11-01T15:43:02.359-07:00INVITATION<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3LGTIkDwalfUiZS1xotQ4Ewg5kwE1EBC-DAaIrsADRoe26k7LR_OkZw2nAB_Ekv3r6MN7DW9FQzhud1DZgis76ewtbuUhOz7E5sdgMO5pXTs3FgDjMUGaFcBpqQYUmDIUNyPikaVqWwXm/s1600/Fluxus+invitation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br /></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3LGTIkDwalfUiZS1xotQ4Ewg5kwE1EBC-DAaIrsADRoe26k7LR_OkZw2nAB_Ekv3r6MN7DW9FQzhud1DZgis76ewtbuUhOz7E5sdgMO5pXTs3FgDjMUGaFcBpqQYUmDIUNyPikaVqWwXm/s1600/Fluxus+invitation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3LGTIkDwalfUiZS1xotQ4Ewg5kwE1EBC-DAaIrsADRoe26k7LR_OkZw2nAB_Ekv3r6MN7DW9FQzhud1DZgis76ewtbuUhOz7E5sdgMO5pXTs3FgDjMUGaFcBpqQYUmDIUNyPikaVqWwXm/s200/Fluxus+invitation.jpg" width="140" /></a>And now things get serious. After all those months, no, years, our interactive digital Fluxus extravaganza comes to Copenhagen. The official opening takes place tomorrow at 5 pm at Kunsthallen Nikolaj. The title of the exhibition: "Die Irren sind los!... europæiske Fluxusfestivaler, 1962-1978". Everybody is welcome. The picture in the corner is the invitation, but none is needed to join in the festivities, which indeed I hope you, reader, will. If you cannot make it, the exhibition is on until 25 November, so there is still time to see it. As George Maciunas would have said: "Come one! Come all! Hurry! Hurry!"<br />Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-65566164307829167612012-10-31T02:29:00.004-07:002012-10-31T02:29:57.245-07:00TWO FLUXUS EVENINGS DURING THE WUNDERGRUND FESTIVAL<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<a href="http://bibzoomdk.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/wundergrund-forside.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" id="il_fi" src="http://bibzoomdk.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/wundergrund-forside.jpg" style="padding-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="190" /></a>Tonight and tomorrow night, 31 October and 1 November 2012, the Wundergrund festival in Copenhagen is devoted to Fluxus. Tonight, composer Rasmus Zwicki presents two works devoted to Henning Christiansen and sculptor Bjørn Nørgaard presents a performence in the spirit of the ones he used to do together with HC. Tomorrow, Wundergrund gives the floor to, first, Reinhold Friedl, AKA Horst Possling, and afterwards to a host of composers and musicians and the listeners themselves, who will get the possibility to try all sorts of Fluxus works themselves. The place of action is Byens Lys at Christiania and a ticket costs a mere 50 Danish crowns. For further information, see the festival homepage: <a href="http://wundergrund.dk/program/">http://wundergrund.dk/program/</a></div>
<br />Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3365014806188805981.post-91923912881465081162012-10-31T02:21:00.001-07:002012-10-31T02:21:31.691-07:00PETER ON FLUXUS IN DANISH<div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<a href="http://arkiv.radio24syv.dk/files/podcastimage-3973425.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="140" src="http://arkiv.radio24syv.dk/files/podcastimage-3973425.png" width="140" /></a>Yesterday, 30 October 2012, I participated in a panel discussion on Danish radio about the 50th anniversary of Fluxus and the two celebrations in Copenhagen in November this year, SNYK's Wundergrund festival and our own Lunatic archive at Kunsthallen Nikolaj. The panel discussion, with Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen of SNYK and composer Rasmus Zwicki, took place in the programme RomerRiget, hosted by Knud Romer. Here is a link, for those of you who speak Danish or enjoy hearing people speak as if they are permanently about to throw up: <a href="http://arkiv.radio24syv.dk/video/7244891/romerriget-uge-44-2012-1">http://arkiv.radio24syv.dk/video/7244891/romerriget-uge-44-2012-1</a>.</div>
<br />Peter van der Meijdenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164122339528811023noreply@blogger.com0