WAIT AND SEE / WATCH WHILE YOU WAIT

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.

From 15 September, works by all three artists will be on display at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen as part of the exhibition Keep Art Flat: Mail Art and the Political Seventies. 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 Today, Art is a Prison.

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.

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 Keep Art Flat. 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.

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.