CO-LAB 2

Last Saturday I found myself counting seconds during a performance afternoon at Overgaden in Copenhagen. For nearly three hours. Here is why.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

THE MUSEUM IS CLOSED

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.

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.

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.

“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…?”

See also Knud Pedersen Day, my somewhat offbeat attempt at an obituary for an extremely offbeat man. 

BLACK MARKET INTERNATIONAL: PURE PERFORMANCE

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?

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 here - 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.

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.

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 Untitled Event 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 here). 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.

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.

KULSTOF 15: MEMORY AND REFLECTION

Elvira Santamaria
Torres, Shadow Self-
Portrait, 2015. Photo
© Peter Lind.

 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.

On day one, I watched Elvira Santamaria Torres (Mexico) perform her Shadow Self-Portrait. 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?

Myriam Laplante, The Pheno-
menology of Doubt, 2015
Photo © Peter Lind.  

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 The Phenomenology of Doubt 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.

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.

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.

To be continued.

KULSTOF 15

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.

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.

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 Kunst der Begegnung, an art of encounter.

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.

WAS BEUYS A FEMINIST?

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: was Beuys a feminist?

My own answer was brief and purely factual: his Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum 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:

“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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

BEUYS HOLOGRAPHIC

Offset poster for US lecture-series Energy
Plan for the Western Man (1974)  by
Joseph Beuys, organised by Ronald
Feldman Gallery, New York. Courtesy
Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.