Domestic Displays

I recently visited Redfern for the first time in several months and clocked the sharp gentrification evidenced by a quick influx of small bars and delicious coffee. Now a place just slightly cheaper to live than Surry Hills, it would be fair to say that perhaps the artistic community are partly the perpetrators of such gentrification, and as the rent rises, may soon to be of victims of it.  Nevertheless, HOUSE WORK – a curatorial project by Diana Smith, confirmed Redfern is currently crawling with artists.

For the project artist and curator Diana Smith invited her peers that live within walking distance of each other to open up their homes for one afternoon to the public. I left home expecting to visit several loungeroom cum- galleries, perhaps with sculptures on dining tables and some video art on the television. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter something more integrated with the daily workings of domestic life.

I began at Nick Coyle, Alice Gage and James Harneys sharehouse, greeted by the hungover flatmates who encouraged us to play 1970s boardgames. Naturally witty, Nick powered us through wheel of fortune while Jimmy made guacamole in the kitchen. We could have easily stayed for the afternoon, competing against whoever walked in the door, but were determined to visit every abode before sundown.

At first I thought Dara Gill had hired performers to undertake ‘tasks’ around his place, but quickly realised the situation when we were offered rubber gloves. Strangely compelled, I became focused on cleaning the windows while others scrubbed mould on their hands and knees. Surprisingly the house was filled with satisfied grins, leaving Dara with a whole vegetable garden and his DVD collection both alphabetised and genre-specific by the end of the day.

Perhaps less welcoming were Julia Holderness and Henry Kember who had skyped into their lounge room from a bed in a symmetrical flat down the hall. As they sipped tea and read Sunday Life we desperately tried to gain their attention, firstly by poking around their kitchen , and finally by grabbing watermelon from the fridge, and enjoying a slice. This left the invigilator a little on edge, who had clearly been briefed to allow participatory activity until things got stolen. He let us have one slice before wrapping the tropical fruit in glad wrap and asking us to think about how we would feel if strangers simply grabbed things out of our fridge. On later enquiry it was confirmed the artists were happy to see their almost slimy melon get eaten.

Keg De Souza offered us a couple of things from her fridge – home brewed beers and freshly baked cakes. Her boyfriend wasn’t around but he had recreated his sound installation which used cassettes tapes attached to balloons to make noise. This made it the most gallery-esque home and I think I would have preferred some of Lucas Abelas eccentric stories over a beer.

Our last stop was an appropriate finale. Shane Haseman, Ella Barclay and Rosealee Pearson had stayed up all night – the evidence was on the kitchen table. Upstairs we witnessed all flatmates in deep subconscious after popping sleeping pills, and in between spying their book collections, we eerily watched them breathing deeply. A sound recording of them drunk the night before confimed they weren’t acting, the snores were real, and after taking a couple of photos, we left feeling like creeps.

HOUSE WORK cleverly played with the intersection between routine, art and daily life, generating a sense of play without any frightening theatrical participation or a plonking of works made for gallery contexts. It was localised tourism on the most micro scale – made for those who take pleasure in checking out other peoples shopping trolleys and in investigating bathroom cabinets. With it also came a great sense of neighbourliness, a coming together of like-minded strangers walking around the street nodding at each other, eating, scrubbing and chatting, making for a satisfying way to spend a sunny afternoon. HOUSE WORK also showcased one element of a suburb at a time of flux, making me wonder if those share-houses will still be inhabited by artists in a few years time.

Lara Thoms

HOUSE WORK curated by Diana Smith for Perfromance Spaces WALK program Sat 10 December 2011. Photos by Alex Wisser.

Tiny Stadiums call out

CALL FOR LIVE ART WEEKEND SUBMISSIONS

Groundwork and PACT invite applications from emerging artists for inclusion in the Tiny Stadiums Live Art Weekend. The Live Art Weekend will be presented on June 2-3, 2012, in Erskineville village and surrounds.

Download the application form and more information HERE.

Application deadline: Monday 13th Feb, 5pm. Late applications will not be considered.

Email your application to assistant@pact.net.au with “Live Art Weekend Submission” and “your name” in the subject line.

Curatorial Criteria
Groundwork are seeking applications for bold, immersive and site-specific works by emerging artists that respond to the concepts centre and margins. Artists working across the disciplines of performance, dance, new media, sound and visual arts are encouraged to apply.

Experimental, interdisciplinary and community engaged works will be prioritised, as will projects that critically consider their location or context and shift how the community access public space. Artists living outside of Sydney as well as local artists are encouraged to apply.

Some questions that you may wish to engage with in your application are:

Does the work consider or respond to the histories and geographies of the local area?
How does the artist want to involve the local community?
Does the work take risks artistically?
Is it achievable logistically?

Occupy This Zizek!

Occupy This Zizek! My new Potts Point Apartment!

The following text was recorded by Agatha Gothe -Snape, in conversation with me, Sarah Rodigari, about the Field Theory Zizek Excursion, held in my new Potts Point apartment on October 15^th 2011.

There is a lot to be said about Zizek and Live Art.

Actually, I don’t even want to talk about Live Art.

No, don’t write that down.

So… the topic, Zizek.

Um, the Zizek Excursion was an opportunity for peers and friends and thinkers to get together and talk about the relationship between psychoanalysis and performance. We all know this is a broad church.

In true psychoanalytical form, this excursion happened the same night at Occupy Sydney commenced in Martin Place Sydney.

So, the next thing is, what’s the next thing.

I have no idea what happened.

We ate socca.

I invited ALL THE PARTICIPANTS to reflect on their experience of the night.

What follows are their account.

Dear Koji, Nina, Brain and Jess,

There were over twenty RSVPs for the Zizek excursion on Saturday October 15, more people than could be accommodated. This date also marked the first day of Occupy Sydney and on the evening it was you dears (oh and Tessa for a brief stint) who tore yourselves away from such a momentous occasion and came to my place, where as relative strangers we shared food together and watched a documentary about Zizek.

Thank you all for coming.

I am writing to ask if you might like to write a brief response about your experience of the Zizek excursion? I have been thinking about Zizek a lot.  I have been thinking about his acknowledgement that he is a performance of himself, resting somewhere between truth and fiction, and that he is aware that his idiosyncratic honesty in acknowledging this is also a performance and a parody of himself. I often find myself lost between truth and fiction, are these separable? I have also been thinking about his writing methodology and how he tricks himself into writing, first by saying I am just getting ideas down on the page and then after bashing out these ideas he says to himself, I only have to edit now. This again seems like a relationship between truth and fiction, in which Zizek is both clairvoyant and storyteller.

Will you be the clairvoyants and storytellers of this Field Theory Excursion?

Cheers

Sarah

 Brian Fuata’s response

I came down from Newcastle to attend both Occupy Sydney and the Zizek screening.  I was excited to see how big the protest might be after the NY and London versions. The film I hadn’t seen yet also excited me.  I wanted the experience of the film to be imbued by the reality of the protest.  I was reminded of a story about Guillermo Gomez Pena and La Pocha Nostra holding a workshop somewhere in Mexico, I think it was Oaxaca, where there was civil unrest directly outside the building they were in.  The story goes, that apparently Pena had no choice but to take the workshop outside.  Workshop participant and protester became interchangeable.  I never thought that anything like that would happen on this day, but there was some myth rub off that entertained my mind, and it did colour how I saw the protest and film screening as a double bill.

I had been attracted by the spectacle of protests over the years, the performances of protestors, police, horses and passer-bys and media, and although very familiar with this performance trajectory, the documentation of NY and London had me excited in the way I see a Best of album; a Greatest Hits.

I’m reminded of Le Tigre’s song Cry for Everything Bad that’s Ever Happened.  How late-nineties-Newtown-queer of me!  I mention that with a genuine blush.

I arrived at the occupation at 5pm and bumped into a friend Sumu who also introduced me to two friends of his.  Sumu and I spoke about the last time we saw each other, which was at a performance of mine at Tin Sheds Gallery and after that, talk of possibly joining him in the birthday celebrations of the nightclub Good God.  I decided to stay in that night.  He went.

Our conversation at the protest continued.  I had asked him how the nightclub was for him.  He said it was a strange night.  Our talk moved on.  I remember then, him, his friends and I laughing over small talk.  I think I said something funny about protest drum circles, can’t remember if Sumu’s friends were part of this conversation.

I remarked on how small the crowd was.  I saw a few familiar faces from previous protests I attended over the last ten years.

I was disappointed.  The occupation was a bad performance in its typicality.  It seemed out of place, no direction, and no design.  A pale imitation of what I had seen in the media and not because of the lack of fervour in the protestors and organizers, but of its innocuous Australian middle class context.  The general feeling of the masses is a good one, this good feeling was reflected in what seemed like an air of irrelevance of this Martin Place organization.  I lasted about 15minutes then walked aimlessly around town to kill time before Zizek.

I got a text from Nina.  Nina was at the protest.  I was at McDonalds for the free Internet, which I mention not to be ironic or cynical towards the protest.  I have faith and believe the cause, it was a genuine coincidence.

I arrived again at Martin Place, and Nina was with Sumu and one of his friends.  I stood quiet while watching and listening to Nina and Sumu speak to each other.  Witnessed them laugh.  Saw some cute boys; the sky darkening.  I nodded in agreeance to the things said.  Nina spoke of calling Sarah to bring the screening to the occupation.  I felt uncomfortable that the screening at Sarah’s house was a sanctioned stage and to bring the film outside would disrupt a specialised space of conversation.  A conversation separate from the crassness of mass hysteria; this isn’t Mexico and we were not activists.

So the film then happens.  The food was delicious.  It wasn’t as many people as I thought.  I was surprised to find Koji there.  We sat down and watched the film.

Zizek himself, on film is a great guy.  He is believable and entrancing and incredibly funny.

“Vegetarians are degenerates who will turn into monkeys”.

Encore! Encore!

Koji Ryui’s response

Dear Sarah,

My apology for such a delayed response. I am sure this would apply to everybody and so it would sound very lame but amongst all the end of the year / semester commitments, I was not able to find time to respond to your request any earlier. I myself felt like being a hopeless student who do not get his act together till the very end with all the over due assignments. I hope my absence did not come across too offensive to you.

Now my memory of the excursion in terms of the content of the film is also quite hazy and I can no longer remember what was from then and what was from the other times, although my memory of the actual evening is quite sweet and clear. Unlike the other participants there, I would imagine that I was  ‘the new face’ to the group taking up on the random invitation I received through my newly created Facebook account. Despite my attendance being rather ‘experimental’, you guys were very generous with the hospitality and made me feel welcomed throughout the evening. The meal was delicious and I thoroughly enjoyed your company and our conversations there.

I believe Zizek was quite a mediator raising valid enough points for us to engage with and simultaneously kept us entertained and amused both with his presence and his intellectual gymnastics – some totally articulate and some a little tricky to understand. Here, I am in two minds about the tendency of ideology and politics being an entertainment. I enjoy them this way probably in a similar way to say enjoying the aesthetic of the protests. However, another part of me really would like to embrace possibly naive, utopian and perhaps very daggy yet sincere attitude which reminds me of Zizek’s quote discussing the Slovenian band Leibach (which is also appropriate to the aesthetic of the protests) that i overheard somewhere

..cynicism as today’s prevailing mode of ideology means that it is the positive condition of the functioning of the system that its own ideology must by its own subject not be taken seriously. An ideal subject today is the one who has ironic distance towards the system, etc., etc. And the reverse of this is that the only way, I would even say, to be really subversive is not to develop critical potentials, or ironic distance, but precisely to take the system more seriously than it takes itself seriously.

Anyway, regardless of which angle we managed to engage from (and it probably would have been an oscillation between the two, sincere and cynical, for many of us), Zizek & dinner felt very special and intimate where several people who all had different days coincided to share the same experience. Thanks again for hosing the evening, and i hope there’ll be more of these in the future.

PS: I agree that Zizek rests between truth and fiction with his words. And his experimental writing methodology (which I wonder if it is a bit like him playing exquisite corpse with his own words but being super rational at the same time) does indeed make him clairvoyant alike. Sort of like Carlos Castaneda back in the day, what amuses me is not only what he says or whether if that is true or false, but how much it resonates. (I wonder then, the discussion of Simulacra and Simulation is valid here at all.) Controversial thoughts of philosophical geniuses often become a well accepted mentality of the future generations decades later. I look forward to the day when everyone thinks like Zizek. If that ever happens that would be very entertaining.

Kind regards

Koji

Jess Olivieri’s response

It was a little while now that Sarah and I sat at her kitchen table wondering if we had over catered, convincing ourselves that we could happily eat the tomato and spinach stew for the rest of the week and perhaps the week after. When people finally did arrive it was with great anticipation that I sat on the floor to watch Zizek in all his idiosyncratic glory.

This is where my memory gets hazy, I know, the important bit, but it was a lot to take in and the challenge of conveying the ideas of this man seemed to be lost on me among the biopic elements of this documentary. It made me wonder if it really was Zizek’s ideas that I was excited by, or him as his constructed public persona. Really how interested am I in communism as being the answer to capitalism, or in his constant use of sex as a metaphor for, well everything.

It seemed appropriate that we were watching this documentary on the eve of Occupy Sydney, Zizek has a mainstream appeal that the Occupy world wide protests seemed to also receive and in Occupy New York Zizek aligned himself with the values and aesthetic of Occupy as he gave a rousing speech to the gathered crowds.

As our late guests arrived straight from Occupy Sydney our night had begun with a discussion on the aesthetics of leftist protest, and the need for the crust punks to rethink their presentation to the world, is the dirty green hair stereotype really the road to getting people on side?

Perhaps this is where Zizek could be an answer to the great problem of capitalism, in his acknowledgement of the importance of the separation of private and public persona, in what one might say is as an open armed embrace of the performance of the self, perhaps some might even be so bold to say he is the new king of Live Art. If there where more enigmatic round bellied sweaty people tugging at their over sized t-shirts spraying spital as they use sex to dissect the evils of capitalism, maybe then more people might listen.

Nina Stuhldreher’s response

 A large microphone in a Bauhaus Paradise or What can a former rebel do?

 Žižek! The sound of this word, pronounced harshly but with a little Slavojesque lisp, was perfectly repeated by the lighting of a TV-camera lamp – zz zzt – that later on that night targeted me and a fellow protester at Martin Place. It was October 15, the day when the wave of the Occupy movement hit Sydney. After an exciting media reunion with my former hero thanks to Field Theory, my way home dropped me into field research again. I don´t know if the image ever hit the internet. The gaze of the cameraman, anachronistically exposed by the lamp, is still in my mind. Commodified memories.

Commodified Communism! Is the key thought I recollect from my discourse-tourist trip to Sydney. I haven’t seen so much flowery beauty in a long time: everything seemed to spring and bloom. Even artworks criticizing colonialism, kwila wood frames bought in an op shop, or the notion of “communism” itself that all of a sudden burst with a glamorized blaze of color.

“White tiles were recently still in, which means most likely already out now. Cardboard is, post-Hirschhorn low-tech craft, very retro in the German-speaking world, but ok in London as the pictorial that breaks up slick video installations. The MDF-look is totally retro pre-millennium game-theory aesthetics, but pale pine plates are fully trendy. In the 90s paintbox silver was the hip opposite of gold leaf, but currently light gray and flat yellow get on fantastically in the rhombus business”, I declined it like a verb in my head.

It seems that the introduction of a certain book had come to my mind, “Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus” (“Postmodernist Left-Nietzscheanism”), published in 2004 during “times of political disappointment”, as the cover blurb states. It asks whether post-modernity was born out of Deleuze and Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, and examines the way they re-evaluated Nietzsche’s overman and neo-religious ideas – the price of which being allegedly a contradictory aesthetization of the political. To illustrate the insufferableness of this development’s touchdown in the meatspace, the book quotes a scene from Marco Giordana’s film “To Love the Damned” (1980) where a former rebel returns home from exile, “torn between leftist terrorism and yuppie culture”, and finally puts a pistol in his mouth after spelling out “a new version of post-leftist political correctness”. Marx – I really don’t know how that happens – Marx lands on the right. Boom!

With a glamorous roar Zizek also landed in the mediatized matrix of the social arena again. Back home at my place, the guru of “Enjoy your Symptom!” had finally appeared next to my computer as a spitting image of himself, as a little psychological drill instructor, wildly gesticulating, calling out “Why hesitate!? What do you fear!?” My milieu had perceived him disappearing into a discourse-niche, a socialist-pensioner with an enthusiasm for Lenin bordering on a hobby-horse. But now he was back. With the help of this year’s revolutionary sex-appeal, beamed right into the lounge room of Field Theory, next to hip rubber trees, fantastic silver beet hot-pots and the most beautiful, meditative Bauhaus aesthetics. And with a traction beam connected to the giant white space ship at Circular Quay, the rhombus-layer-shaped Bastille, where one cannot be sure if – when the “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” takes place – the mighty concrete is supposed to stop those ideas from getting out or rather to protect them against the outside. If the igloo tents at Occupy-Sydney hadn’t been real but 2D, it would have been easy to collage a small Sydney Opera House from them.

The night was warm and I noticed how little I knew. Lacking a sleeping bag kept me from having an overnight share of world history. Perception-drunk I staggered home, passing through a street named after an unhappy gay dandy. Rather famous as a minister of war for a former Occupy Australia movement, he had lost his reputation starring in the role of murder in the accusatory poem THE MASK OF ANARCHY. Written in 1819 in respond to the Peterloo Massacre by Percy Shelly, another young rebel torn between beauty & the fight for freedom, it is believed to be the first modern statement of the principle of non-violent resistance. Mahatma Gandhi is known to have referred to it. And the Occupy movement recently referred to Mahatma, by making Pepperspraying Cop attack him in a cynical photoshop meme.

“Do Australian artists dream of rotating Pyramids?” I had shortly before asked in my performance. Only a short time later it was the activists of Occupy [Venice] Biennale who discovered the similarity between tents and triangles.

I sank into the white-white sheets of my fancy hotel bed and dreamed of a morning swim in the square roof-top swimming pool.

Glossary

- Cardboard: I am mainly referring to the „Bataille Monument“ that artist Thomas Hirschhorn installed at documenta11 in Kassel (2002). For pictures see http://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/community-subjects.html – This article reviewing European ‚community art’ projects also features interesting quotes by Zizek and the Dutch urban theory group BAVO on the role of identity politics and art activism in multinational capitalism.

- Postmodernist Left-Nietzscheanism: Jan Rehmann’s main points from this book can also be found in his English essay „Towards a deconstruction of postmodernist Neo-Nietzscheanism“ at http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/view/176/200.

- Rotating Pyramids: A scene from my performance „Nootropics“ shown as part of the „Islands“ series, initiated by Brian Fuata fort he „Rules of Play“ exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, September 2011. http://playingrules.tumblr.com/Islands (3rd picture from top)

Nina Stuhldreher

Translation: Anita Fricek

Image of Zizek Excursion taken from Nina’s Facebook Album, Oddities from an Evacuated Artist

Image of Occupy Sydney taken from Nina’s Facebook Album, Oddities from an Evacuated Artist

November Rain, Shane Haseman’s Lecture on Live Art

On November 5^th 2011, Field Theory invited Shane Haseman to give a lecture on Live Art from his perspective, the discipline of painting. Shane is a recent Doctor of Philosophy. He wrote his paper on something like the Situationist and Marxism but we’re not 100% on the details, he’s an elusive man. Prior to this evening Shane confessed on numerous occasions that he knew NOTHING about Live Art, which is why we considered him the perfect candidate to talk about the slippery devil that it is.

20 of us gathered in my tiny apartment, it doesn’t really matter who was there but I’ll paint you a little picture for vibes sake. There was a mix of good looking performers, painters and musicians. All were from various genres and peer groups, some knew each other but most were meeting for the fist time.

Someone once told me that the success of an event can only truly be measured by its celebrity status. I’m note sure if such a statement can be applied to this occasion and the nature of its sub genre content but…UK artist, Joshua Sofaer (THE LIVE ARTIST) was in attendance…  And actually, the whole of Field Theory were also there.  Field Theory had just finished their first day of Durational Lattes where each of them drunk an average of 4 coffees throughout the day as they met and discussed Live Art with other cultural leaders. So… by this stage they were an uncomfortable combination of strung out and totally pumped up, making little if any sense when attempts at conversation were made. This latter display of behaviour could be paralleled with the attendance of a coked up rock band like say, Guns and Roses at an LA house party in early 90s. So upon reflection and in light of the above mentioned celebrity statement, this excursion was a total success!

After some milling and chatting, and some awkward quinoa risotto (which clearly would not have been made available to guests at an 90s LA house party), Shane commenced his “Lecture”. For the record, especially in this LIVE ART and SOCIAL PRACTICE BLOG, Shane’s lecture ebbed more on the lecture side and less on the lecture as performance side. He made it very clear to me that lecture cannot be casual and is inherently formal in its presentation.  There is a copy of this lecture attached for your own musings. Make no mistake, this text is no joke.

Thanks Shane, thanks all who attended.

LIVE ART LECTURE – FIELD THEORY EXCURSION by Shane Haseman

A couple months ago Sarah asked me if I would give a lecture on Live Art. By ‘Live Art’ I assumed she meant some form of aesthetic experience that took place in time – that was, in other words, live and experienced immediately.  Live Art, I assumed, must have something to do with art as event, with an experience that is ephemeral and open to contingencies. It must forgo representation and pursue instead the directly lived, engaging those increasingly fashionable tropes of contemporary art that involve ‘interaction’ and ‘participation’. Basically, live art must involve an experience of being there. “Do you mean relational aesthetics,” I asked Sarah? Sarah explained that they were not the same thing, though, interestingly, her own thoughtful description of Live Art did confer on the genre the definition just provided.

I agreed to give the lecture, and in the interim have found that one of things that best defines and characterizes Live Art at this point in time is a general lack of consensus around what defines and characterizes Live Art. Its big issue is the issue of its classification. What is Live Art historically? What is it contemporaneously? Does it still exist? Did it exist? What are its aims? Is it art? Is it theatre? Is it dance? Is it their respective meeting place?  Who is the author of a Live Art event? Can such an event have an author? If there is and if it does who is it for anyway? The community? The artist? Meta questions, Meta problems, but are they false problems? I began to wonder whether this ambiguity and definitional heterogeneity was just the expression of an age where art has irrevocably left representation and entered into the multiple coordinates of the real and the everyday. I began to suspect that Live Art is simply the expression, in other words, of art in the age of pluralism where anything goes, and, as such, becomes as difficult to classify as that polymorphous thing called life.

I am actually referring here to Danto’s thesis about the end of art, or what is really the end of art history. Bear with me as I move through Danto’s scintillating discussion of the end of art and its resultant pluralism. I will return to what this might all mean for Live Art shortly.

In an audaciously generalizing move, Danto reduces art history to four linear phases – the prehistoric, the imitative, modernism, and our current pluralism. The prehistoric isn’t of much use to us, as it exists before history, or more exactly, before the story of art and the role history assigns to art comes into being. It’s pre-historic, which is to say it is before history. (As an aside, the prehistoric might be the only Live Art the world has ever really known, as art was then inseparable from ritual, and we can assume wasn’t made with any thought of its being re-presented, but let’s forget that). Where things get interesting is in the 14th century, which begins for Danto a narrative concerned with imitation and representation that moves through to the late 19th century. This second phase of art involves a period of progress that involved “doing better than ones predecessors at what those predecessors themselves sought to do, namely, capture reality on a painted or drawn surface”. The overriding goal of Western art and the many periods these 600 years ushered in was optical fidelity. Mimesis is the goal of this period, the accomplishment in paint of a perceptual verisimilitude. Reality, or at least the perfect illusion of reality – that was the goal.

Naturally, the next phase, that of Modernism, began in 1880. Modernist movements were no longer concerned with mimesis, with representational fidelity. In this new phase of the image, reality was depicted in impressions, often in surreal, subjective, and unrealistic manner. Paradoxically, this depiction was more real than the reality we find depicted in the imitative period, as the major concern became the essence of painting or the essence of the image – the material of paint itself, the shape, surface and pigment. A self-reflexive attitude to the fact that painting is an illusion of reality also prevails here. In this phase there exists the beginning of awareness that what makes something a work of art is not entirely reliant on its appearance. Still, like the imitative period that preceded modernism, the stakes of art are still wrapped up in the issue of representation and image making generally. Art is still – especially the Greenbergian Modernism Danto is referring to – something separate or autonomous from life or the real. It is still concerned, albeit in a different way, with aesthetic purity.

Danto, pretending that Duchamp never happened for some reason, then deploys Warhol and his Brillo boxes. This ushers in the final stage of art, or at least of art history. What this work reveals is that now the status of an artwork is not something that can be deduced from the visual properties of the art object itself. If something can be an artwork that is perceptually indistinguishable from another object that is not considered a work of art (Brillo boxes, say) then the visual character of the object cannot be the determining issue.  The incredible realization here is that anything whatsoever can be a work of art. Anything can count as art, regardless of its appearances. This is a big deal. By this reading art has gone as far as it can toward what Hegel would call self-knowledge, and has left its historical role or narrative. The 700-year metanarratives of art as a means of representing reality, of engaging in a world of appearances or aesthetic experience separate from life is closed, has now ended. Art enters a post-historical period where anything goes, where anything is art, where art is imbedded in the everyday, ungoverned by art historical imperatives. Cue art’s postmodernism – by the way, we still live in a postmodern society, as capitalism is still the governing political economy – where no movement or style is more legitimate or authentic than another.

The wash up is essentially a post-historical period of art that Danto celebrates as radically plural – a space where art has become philosophy, where it has become inseparable from reality, where we understand that anything can be an artwork unburdened by aesthetic judgment. Indeed, where various historical art periods and styles can exist together, none with a greater claim to significance.  This is, in other words, art after metanarratives – an anti-hierarchical fruit salad of post art ‘art’. Soup cans, monochromes, empty spaces, clowns, performance, cooking: it is all art. For Danto this age, which he argues may not be art as we have known it historically, “inaugurates the greatest era of freedom art has ever known.”

We might touch on problems in Danto’s reading later, but for now we should ask what does this have to do with Live Art?  Lots, I think.  Live Art is an example par excellence of two central tendencies within Danto’s post-historical period: (1) it imbues all life with aesthetic significance, it renders artistic and creative expression inseparable from life, and lessens the significance of appearances or representation in favor of ideas and actions; And (2) it embodies a pluralism in style while also evoking a diversity of historical eras, rendering them interchangeable within its umbrella category of ‘Live Art’. For example, Live Art as a term came into existence in the UK in the mid-eighties. Nevertheless, in keeping with the anti-historicism of art’s pluralism, it is actually a category that can be assigned both retrospectively and contemporaneously to a diversity of performance art and creative expression – whether in the eighties, now, or in decades and centuries previously. Look at the dizzinging wealth of artists now placed under the anti-hierarchical umbrella term of Live Art: Beuys’ social sculpture, Stelarc’s post human experiments on the body, the baroque logic of the happening, the Zen-minimalist logic of the Fluxus mono-structural event, the Situationist decidedly Marxist rejection of art for the construction of situations, the Feminist ‘schlock art’ of Dej Fabick, Gordon Matta-Clark’s intersection in architectural spaces, Paul McCarthy’s abject and grotesque performances, or contemporary works as diverse as Brown Councils fusing of Theatre and Art and…… continue with examples…….

Anyway, my point is that Live Art’s heterogeneity of styles and performance modes is perhaps a symptom of art histories end, of a period of creative expression that comes after art history’s big story, after its aesthetic value judgments. The definitional issues and ambiguities around Live Art touched on earlier may simply be the expression of a generalised pluralism in contemporary art, and the difficulty of categorizing art in a still postmodern society where art has transcended its history. Live Art may be a particularly good example of art’s post-history; of the moment art makes its final step into life.

Perhaps the big issue for live art – and contemporary art generally – is not how to define or label it, but what it exactly means to enter into such a paradox where we are making art after art history. What is at stake in a period of art production where life has become entirely aestheticised, where non-art and art are indistinguishable, where diverse strategies and histories of art (or theatre, performance, and dance) are leveled across the same surface? Moreover, what is live art contemporary with? And beyond that, how might we critique it rather than simply define it?

Many of us might view art’s becoming life as good thing, as a natural thing, and the pluralism of contemporary art as the dynamic expression of our contemporaneity. Not Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, art’s aestheticisation of reality, its movement away from representation into life, has had the unforeseen consequence of rendering art banal. In losing its desire for illusions, art has become all too contemporary. Too contemporary with the everyday that makes up lived experience in global capitalism. Art is just like everything else – it is advertising, it is the flow of capital, and (more importantly in the context of Live Art) it is inseparable from the obscenity of a hyperreal world where seduction is out and an insistence on disclosure and transparency is in. ‘Anarchist-Christian’ Paul Virilio is also circumspect of arts integration into life and its wager with the live. For Virilio, the major fetish of contemporary power and its information age is an insistence on experiencing real time exchanges, on live-ness, on the here and now. Our contemporary experience of the everyday is increasing worked over by techno-scientific discoveries that demand interactivity, immediacy, ubiquity, real time; all of which, he argues, deprives us the agency of real contemplation essential to rational action. As a possibly strong expression of art’s entering into life, of art’s contemporaneity, is it possible that live art is all too contemporary with this logic also – participating in a fetish or dramaturgy of real time, transparency, ubiquity, and even the obscene that has washed away art’s ability to create truly symbolic spaces. Further, we might wonder whether it is actually a great thing that Live Art ‘defies interpretation’? Is this just an expression, as Zizek would put it, of the contemporary conservative liberal’s celebration of relativism, which arises from a fear of risking failure and censure by attempting to speak a truth or making a value judgment?  And finally, is it possible that the plethora of historical artistic and performative styles retrospectively labeled as Live Art serves only to do damage to the specificity of history, thus rendering same the minute and beautiful differences of art and performance history?

These potential criticisms are offered polemically (in the mildest sense of the term, and in accordance with the critical position Sarah asked me to assume this evening). Or else I will flatter myself and say that they are offered in the spirit of the dialectic, a spirit that negates in order to regenerate. Art, no less than politics, should never become a discourse of exceptionalism. It should never be outside critique, especially self-critique.

Live Art is an especially fertile ground to instigate this critique, as it seems to overtly encapsulate the characteristics of contemporary art generally; especially this art’s unrestrained pluralism that is the happy off-shoot of its post-historical status where the traditional separation of art and life have ended. Either that, or Live Art is the spitting image of the era that has given birth to it, and therefore just as incapable of transcending itself or allocating significance and value to its aims.

Live Art Almanac, Volume 3 – Call Out

The Live Art Development Agency has put a call out for writing related to live art or radical performance practices for their Live Art Almanac Volume 3. Deadline is January 31, 2012 – get yer skates on..

See below;

We are seeking recommendations for material to include in The Live Art Almanac Volume 3. What articles or reviews have you read, what new stories have you spotted, what emails did you receive or forward to a friend, what blogs have you visited, what texts crossed your path? Did they engage you, provoke you, amuse you, or make you rethink Live Art and radical performance? If it caught your eye and had something interesting to say then we want to know about it.

We welcome all kinds of submissions for The Live Art Almanac Volume 3 – from more traditional forms such as journal essays, newspaper reviews, transcribed interviews, symposium papers, public lectures or book chapters, to digital forms such as blog entries, Facebook pages and Twitter conversations, to even less conventional forms of “publishing” such as emails, diary entries, and letters. The submission must be engaging, provocative, and thoughtful writing on and around the contemporary cultural landscape in which Live Art practice sits and must shed light on the various debates and ideas in circulation within that landscape.

For more information please download a copy of the call out PDF here;
Live Art Almanac Call Vol 3

Hobart gets Touchy Feely

Thinking of going to MONA FOMA in January? Well you might also like to catch Touchy Feely.

Touchy Feely will be five days from January 25 to 29 packed full of artist-led talks, workshops, performances and presentations held at Inflight ARI, Hobart, Tasmania. Curated by Amy Spiers and Pip Stafford, it will bring together a number of interstate and Tasmanian artists – including Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sally Rees, Paula Silva, Judith Abell, Jason James and Elizabeth Woods – to discuss central issues facing socially engaged, participatory and relational artists today.

Why Hobart?

In recent years Hobart has been the base for a series of intriguing and exciting projects of a relational, socially engaged and live art nature. Recent examples include David Cross’ Iteration:Again and Paula Silva’s “artist-run” CWA branch. For this reason, it seems timely and appropriate to gather together artists in Hobart who are interested in participation and social engagement to meet and exchange ideas, express misgivings about our field and engage in hearty and passionate debate.

Why the theme?

Touchy Feely is organised around a central question: Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental? As the instigator of this project, I raise this question because “sentimental” and “comfortable” have been pejorative terms used to challenge art I have made, as well as work by artists I like. I have begun to take these criticisms seriously.

Indeed, in recent decades there has been a “social turn” in contemporary art, here in Australia and internationally. This turn is characterised by art projects that emphasise participation, dialogue and community engagement to activate the public. It has given rise to an optimistic notion that art can be marshaled to tackle wider social issues and create emancipatory social relations. These practices take a variety of forms, some more politically overt than others, however what they all have in common is that they are artistic attempts to offer new social models of being and living together.

In an effort to re-­humanise and re-­connect a society atomized and alienated by capitalism, increasingly artists are adopting socially ameliorative strategies. But has this resulted in a sentimental and friendly artistic impulse, that is at the expense of complexity and criticality?

In response to these concerns Touchy Feely will seek to address the following questions:

• Should the “skill set” of art be instrumentalised to make a better world?
• Is there a role for hope, compassion and optimism in art, without having to take an evangelical or moralistic position?
• In our current situation, is it actually politically irresponsible to creatively express despair, unease and tension?
• Is contemporary art marked by a facile cynicism, heartlessness and nihilism?
• Or is relational and socially engaged art in Australia too sentimental, ethical and uncritical?

If you can’t make it to Hobart, you can still follow the discussions on our blog: touchyfeelyhobart.tumblr.com. We will regularly post updates and videos of talks during the event.

If you’d like more information or wish to contribute something remotely send an email to amyspiers@gmail.com.

Amy Spiers

Pashing and Growing Old.

I spoke with Daniel Santangeli after seeing his theatre show Room 328 at the Melbourne Fringe, as I was particularly interested in the participatory nature of the work. Although this was the first time we met, we ended up having a good yarn about River Phoenix and pashing audience members.

LT:  Lets get this out of the way, what do you think of the term live art?

D.S…Pretentious isn’t the word but it is over academic and very exclusive…

LT: Interesting, I get exclusive, only tiny amount of people know of that term., it comes from the UK after a push for body art in the 90s, but here In Australia I think we are trying to use it as a term for practice that sits in between artforms, it may have a liveness to it but could also be a site specific installation that is not very performative…. No one wants to set limits  for what it is and it isn’t. But I think this work is often criticised as not being academic enough…or serious enough… just very playful, so it is interesting you say academic.

D.S: Well in Brisbane, it feels academic

L.T: You have the exist crew down there?

D.S: Yep, it was interesting… I went to the festival and some works missed the mark with the audience, they mostly just ignored them… I think what you say in terms of playful interaction is good, it’s what it has to be.

L.T: So…how did you come to make the kind of work you make?

D.S: Well I went through that thing we all go through which is …theatre is so boring. A little angsty moment….. then you go off and make something that brakes every single rule you can think of. I came across a book called ‘The Mind and the Cave’. It’s about what made humans go into the caves and start doing cave painting… This author is saying we needed to make art because we needed to begin to manipulate our own reality at that time in our existence where we didn’t really know what the difference between what  a dream and real life was…. Crawling into the cave meant we could take symbols and actually manipulate and have a sense of control over them, we were able to make our reality malleable. This is present in room 328, (Dans most recent show) a sense of coming into a space of signs and symbols getting thrown at the audience, and they can grapple with them in any way that they want.  The interactivity also came about by accident, because we were given a gallery instead of a theatre space. So suddenly the audience were walking around.

L.T: How did this expand to a work like DJ While You Sleep?

D.S: In DJ While You Sleep the audience came in and slept overnight and DJs played a 60 beats a minute set throughout the night- it was about recognising sleep as a state of consciousness and making art for it. So it’s that consciousness thing again.

L.T: How did it go down?

D.S: Really good, people slept, so I can say “people slept through my show”. Sleeping…It’s a private thing… so  within this big public event it is interesting,  kind of a bit like skinny dipping?

L.T: How did you find the audience participation went in room 328?

D.S: You don’t have to do a lot, just make an offer, people can go wild with it. The discovery we had was that audience are 90% of the show. The shows that worked the least well were probably when the performers thought their performance was amazing, but the audience was not so involved.

L.T: What processes do you use to to develop these participatory elements?

D.S: What we did was get test audiences, but never enough…it is so hard through so much guess work. We had a rule which was don’t do anything unless you have permission from the audience member to do it… which we upheld strictly like “Can I pick you up” or  “Would you like a shot of tequila”.. but then we learnt how to play with it. At the end Skye (A performer) tries to make out with an audience member.  And then we considered permission was if you charm your way into a situation… through body language…. Getting into their bubble, and that is kind of a permission in itself.

L.T: Is it?

D.S: If you are going to let them get this close to your face then you are kind of saying go all the way… With kissing audience members they would always say no if we asked, but if it happened it really worked out… 

L.T: Does he do it to males and females?

D.S He is meant to, but it is mainly females, only one has pushed him away. It’s a whole journey of giving lot of little yesses, not like walking into a café and doing it.

L.T Ha, yes I guess I am familiar with pashing audience member in these performative environments.

D.S: How did you go?

L.T: It was a choice… they are asked twice if they wanted to, it was up to them how they wanted to take it, it could be quite intimate or ‘fake’ and theatrical… people seem to get lost in the journey and let down their guard and give themselves permission to perform. We constantly ask ourselves these questions around agency, invasiveness and permissions as ours involves touching people blindfolded by video screens who are essentially disempowered. So I think it is about being honest- always giving people the option to leave. I was always unsure of the correct way to feel provocative whilst being safe and respectful. But you always get a range of responses from complete commitment and transformation to disengagment, so you can’t expect a singular response, that is the first mistake you could make.

D.S: What is the line of being too confronting?

L.T: I think that is where testing is so important, for us it is also on your own thresholds, the line we personally wouldn’t like to be crossed. And as we are different people (a five person collaboration) the medium of those responses, so look at it in your own shoes.  Also getting feedback from a test audience who are not just your friends who are always your own age and who think similarly to you.

D.S: ‘Our own personal line we wouldn’t want to be crossed’, that is good.

L.T: It’s funny because sometimes I find artists to be the most dull audience- they try to read to much into it rather than recognise it as experiential.

Do you collaborate with people who aren’t actors?

Yes visual artists like Eric Bridgeman.

I love Eric, he is amazing, and quite wild.

He worked on a past show, he was onstage the whole time, moving projectors around and doing his own thing. Yes, its funny visual arts and the theatre world are aiming in the same direction but…can totally hate each other. There is the idea that the ghost of theatre is somewhere there along the line…. there is the expectation you will be ‘good’  – which is why we do the physical theatre stuff at the end of the show, the audience are bringing the ghost with them, so we say – here you go, have it.

How to you prepare, as the director,  do you make alot of decisions before or does it all come out in the development?

It all comes out in development. It’s a lot of tasks, like go out and get six things… or what are six things River Phoenix would have said before he dies.

I love River Phoenix.

Me too!

I had a huge crush on him when I was 12. So where do you think the initial ideas from Room 328 came from?

Lots of different places, but I think a fear of growing old, I had a 21 yr old crisis…. Also at the time my dad was quite sick so I think it was that fear of growing old. What happened to Dad is there again my new work, because he died from cancer and this new work is about the natural world and how we are terrified by it and long for it at the same time and it is essentially the natural world that took my fathers life.

Interesting…My mother died  of cancer when I was that age too, it certainly gives you this new perspective,  while it can give you this a uncertaintiy of what you are doing with your own life, it gives you a much broader sense of what is important and what is and isn’t worth getting stressed out about… when it comes down to it what we are doing is just art?

I totally agree, I mean I still get stressed out, but you realise that its not that important really.

How old are you ?

25 so not very old

Yeah, don’t worry about growing old!

yeah!

So whats next?

Working on a kickstart project for Next Wave, finding some funding, working with established artist Brian Lucas and moving to Melbourne!

Excellent.

www.danielsantangeli.com

400 Coffees

To wrap up the durational latte project, field theory invited guests into their ‘office’ at performance space to see some data visualisation and watch some youtube clips. This was the introductory speech:

I know you’ve been waiting for this party for a long time so we wont keep you long.

Thank-you Kadigal people of the Eora nation, we pay our respects to their elders past and present.

We are Field Theory. We’re a collective of individual artists (WAVING) and guest drivers Boyd Burgher and Jess Olivieri . As Field Theory we are also cultural leaders. We received a iniaitive from the Australia Council with Performance Space, to investigate “Live Art” in Australia.

This week we have had 33 meetings with other leaders across different sectors such as law, visual arts, the environment, community groups, councils, festivals, major arts institutions, television and radio.

-At each meeting we have – introduced ourselves, had a coffee, sometimes a double-shot, gave some examples of the different types of projects that “ Live Art” can be, and then discussed the commonalities of these with what they do, its interest if any, what the future of it might be and what we could possibly do for them.  Some people made contributions to our office- highlights include this miniature version of the chair Jason sat on with Ralph Myers and these hand clapper maracas from SBS. Woo woo.

Around you are the exact dimensions of the offices of the people we have met, an tape based data visualization that not only shows the breadth of our leadership exercise but the startling fact that height in the corporate ladder does actually relate to office size. The colour of the tape also indicates how long it took to get the meeting which corresponds to the colours on the meeting spreadsheet.

If we just bring your attention to the spiders web pre and post coffee here- its an accurate representation of what we have built over the past week- the tangential network of conversations, the possibility for other artists to now talk to these people- and a few dead ends. This is important and exciting because frankly no-one goes to meetings anymore without asking for something. We did not pitch or fundraise, we chatted.

SO WHAT IS LIVE ART?

We have avoided this discussion, and tried to define it by example- a durational marathon, a tour of weeds, a one on one spoon.

People have said to us in turn:

Live Art it is a fruit salad.

It is the opening of the Olympics, which was terrible. It is the future of contemporary arts practice.

It is the re-appropriation of existing meme’s or structures such as the marathon, the corporate meeting, the tour. It is part of the social fabric of the everyday, of history and so essentially banal and unable to achieve the sublime.

It is metaphorically a wedding, an awkward, intense merging of two communities of strangers, with poor production values and under-rehearsed leaders. It is the fetishisation of failure. It is so, so important to a community because it allows them to participate.

It is a term funding bodies have invented to discuss art they don’t have a box for. It is a term artists have invented as a cultural strategy to respond to funding bodies desires for something hot and new. It is, from the perspective of funding bodies, nothing new and Sydney has been doing it better than Melbourne for 30 years. It is the only way to get 18-35 year olds to a Museum. It is a useful art category for people to use when something is not dance. It is the sector with no name.

It is has already generated its own cliché’s, its own cringe towards the language it uses, descriptors overused to the point of losing their original meaning- duration, agency, sharing, loveliness, exchange, relationality, social engagement- and therefore it is already dead and we should go back to making work for people sitting down.

It is nonsense. Nonsense as defined by Aldous Huxley as an assertion of humanities spiritual freedom in spite of the oppression of circumstance.

In having to be continuously defined, re-worked, explained it is enigmatic, prescient and important precisely because of the amount of conversation it can create.

And finally it is Zumba. The hybrid merging of two communities into a new form with the unintended result of making white people look incredibly stupid.

Thankyou for coming. The two meeting teams are now going to walk those of you who wish to through the offices and give you a bit more detail about the meetings and let you ask questions or just mingle with drinks.

Thank-you to Daniel Brine, Jeff Khan, Georgie Meagher and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Campbelltown Arts Centre SiteLab Minto 2011

This October saw the second year of SiteLab, an offsite research and development laboratory conceived by Campbelltown Art Centre’s Live Curator, Rosie Dennis. Over the period of three weeks, from 10-28 October, 11 artists were given keys to their own shop in Minto Mall, which apart from a small handful of businesses, is pretty much abandoned.

Throughout the three weeks artist were allowed to do whatever they liked, within reason of course, but this reason seemed far more reasonable than many off site council projects. It was here in Minto where artists skated freely through the mall, spray painted indoors, laid down hip hop tracks with explicit lyrics, bravely entered boarded up houses and hosted rave parties (all be it from the hours of 4-6pm). It was truly an experimental playground.

Some say the mall was transformed into its own microcosmic arts centre, perhaps like a small Roppongi Hills in Tokyo (but without the crumbling Minto Mall being a testament to a new concept in urban planning, without its abundance of wealth and without the 200 shops) but with its own gallery exhibiting local work, it was truly a space unto itself. For me, as one of the artist fortunate enough to be involved, it was more than that. I couldn’t help but think that this was a shining example of social practice not by the artists involved in the residency (although most were pretty good) but by the arts centre that has invested many years into this local area and through its’ staff, in this case Rosie Dennis, who has managed to create an empowering dialogue about contemporary art with Minto residents, one that involves them.

It was Summernats hot (A Canberrian Hot Rod show that is so charged with massive engines, chrome, metal and babes that it is said to raise the temperature every January from stinking hot to super stinking hot) in Minto, it was bustling, there were jiving conversations; people got it.  They got that you were an artist, that you weren’t quite sure what you were doing but you thought it was ‘going to be great, deeply profound and very funny’…they got it…they recognised this creative melancholic cry and offered to help. Locals were talking, they knew about us, they knew about art, in fact many were artist themselves, some even drew portraits of those in residence.

This years SiteLab Artist were: Roslyn Oades and Bilal Reda, Lee Wilson and Matthew Prest, Simone O’Brien and Joey Ruigrok, The Suitecase Royale, Justene Williams, Fadia Abooud, Alwin Reamillo, Sarah Rodigari

What follows is a series of photos  from the each of the artist shops in week two of the laboratory.

Thanks Minto

1. The Suitecase Royalreopen the cafe for coffee and conversations with the locals.

2. Justene Williams converts her shop into a seriously action packed artist studio

3.Simone O’Brien and Joey Ruigrok create big ideas invite people into their cubby to imagine future possibilities

4.Lee Wilson and Matthew Prest: Minto Rave, day 1

5.Roslyn Oades and Bilal Reda: Hello, Goodbye and Happy Birthday collecting stories and photos from groups of elder and young people.

6. Fadia Abooud sharing old found photos and taking new ones at the kodak shop.

7. Alwin Reamillo: The Jose Rizal Op (shop)tical Carillo

 8. Sarah Rodigari: U_ROYGBIV_ME, Santa for an hour

Sarah Rodigari.

BANANAS IN THE LIBRARY

Placing artists in residence within ‘industry’ is often criticised for being too short term to allow the time for artists and employees to form rich relationships or to collaborate.  Artists can feel ostracised in a new environment where employees have not been properly briefed and may be resent having to perform extra artistic ‘duties’. Artists can often walk away with a project that is exhibited elsewhere, without impacting on the workplace in a lasting way.

Perhaps avoiding some of these dilemmas are Banana Asylum, a collaboration between Madeleine Hodge (artist) and Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi (Anthropologist) who are working on a nine month project in a library in Penaranda de Bracamonte, Spain. The project was commissioned as part of a ‘slow innovation’ project from Conexiones Improbables, who match artists and social scientists with organisations or companies that request research or help with the application of a new way of thinking or imagining. I asked Maddy to talk about the processes in her project as she enters the half way point and prepares for a upcoming workshop in Melbourne.

-Lara Thoms

Maddy Hodge: Banana Asylum began as a conversation, between two friends, an artist and an anthropologist. We began by discussing the diverging and mirroring practices between our two fields. In our conversations we realised we wanted to define the territory between these disciplines and find ways that we might make something together and explore the territory where one thing becomes the other… making something more than we might on our own.

Through our conversations we realised that the points of intersection in process are varied, each of us taking similar routes and ending in different places.  We also realised that the relationship between these fields is not new, artists and anthropologists have been playing with the territory between research and practice, fact and fiction for a long time and recent works exploring documentary realities, ethnographies, participation, practice as research, and the possibility for “real” encounter all of boarder this relationship between art and anthropology.

We are making a project about the future at the Fundacion German Sanchez Ruiperez which is a library, a gallery, a music school, a theatre and centre for “cultural spreading”. The fundacion was set up 20 years ago to encourage a love of reading and books across Spain. Banana Asylum applied to be matched to the library and we were chosen to work with the staff to make a project that imagines what the future might be like for the fundacion, for the libraries and their public spaces.

On the first week it really struck us that the expectation of the workplaces was for the artists to create relationships beyond the existing reach of the organisation, the artists were seen to be a sort of connective material between what is known and what is not known. In a way these relationships and connections are imagined by  the workplaces to be “a little like magic”.  Artists within this context are valued for the work they do outside the production of cultural artefacts and are instead valued for their collaborative insight, perspective and judgement.

We have been working on this project for 5 months now through both creative intervention and anthropological research. The project is asking how will the increasing use of the internet, cloud culture, google library, online films, plays and music change the centre? Can the centre evolve to be a porous, hybrid place, existing both in the real physical space of Penaranda de Bracamonte and online? What is a library with no books on its shelves, a theatre with no actors on the stage and a gallery with no artworks on the walls? How might conversations, dialogue, sharing of knowledge and co-creation of interdisciplinary artistic experiences take the place of the more traditional uses for the library, theatre and gallery? And importantly for us, how can we make this possible?

The works developed so far include a human library- where library users could come and ‘borrow’ a staff member for a 5 min discussion on topics as varied as metaphysics, ping pong and the most recent ikea catalogue. Staff and users have also been keeping ‘cloud diaries’, documenting how they see the potential merging of information and physical spaces, and building dioramas, diagrams and walks describing future visions of a cultural centre. The support of the director of the centre, Javier Valbuena has allowed staff members the space for creative thinking and us the confidence to impact on the workplace. The twin processes of art and anthropology allows us the luxury of time, an essential part of the project is that it is seen as valuable to watch observe and wait,  a fundamental difference to the traditional relationship between artists and business. We have time to make innovation possible, meaningful and necessary to the life of the organisation.

As part of the research we are constantly opening up the process to the staff, the town, the users and the non users, the project progresses through a series of workshops, open forums and discussions, in Spanish (with a translator). As part of this process and as a part of the connexions improbable process we are opening up the process to discussion with other artists, thinkers, researchers and sociologists. We are hosting an open lab in Melbourne that will be broadcast to the Library in Penaranda. The Open Lab will take place in Melbourne at Arts House on the 9^th December and will focus on the place of the library in bridging practice and research between disciplines.  We would like to invite you to respond to this project by asking questions, interrogating, and documenting… we hope to see you there…

OPEN LAB: Cultural Centres for the Future – The Library

Banana Asylum will present ‘In the Clouds’, a working project, with Madeleine and Leili and the team from the Foundation in Spain connecting via Skype (in English). With Melbourne Artists Lara Thoms, Ross Coulter and  Robert Heather Senior Curator from the State Library of Victoria.

Artistic and documentary interventions will be provided by field theory www.fieldtheory.com.au

When: 9th December 2011, 3pm – 9pm

Where: Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne 3051

Register for the workshop by sending an e-mail to: bananaasylum@gmail.com

www.artshouse.com.au

Latte with Judith Bowtell and Kim Spinks

WHO: Judith Bowtell, Kim Spinks
ROLE: Arts NSW
OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: 5.6 x 8m

Judith and Kim met Jason and Lara in a large boardroom and immediately commented that their shirts functioned as costumes. They also offered them tea and scones.

They discussed existing models of presenting and facilitating Live Art and process based community projects and Kim offered the example of Minto Live as an alternative to the usual festival approach. She was concerned that we avoid returning to a “plonk art” model and believed that Western Sydney, particularly Campbeltown and Blacktown had pioneered a socially responsive method that had produced ‘Live Art’ successfully for many years. Kim also spoke at length on the issue of artists objectifying their projects enough to be able to pitch them at specific funding partners – she gave the example of finding the ‘health’ angle in community dance projects. She often saw her role as adjusting her language to speak multiple beaurocratic dialects. A skill that was becoming increasingly important as  governing agencies were now approaching arts bodies to broker problems and issues using artistic strategies.

There was speculation as to whether Melbourne lagged a little behind Sydney in this regard.

Both Judith and Kim expressed a strong sense of “trust the sector” and had great faith in the work currently being produced in Sydney. Allowing institutions to develop their own programs and tailor funding directly to artists and specific objectives was, they believed better than shifting to a direct project based government support structure.

Latte with Podium Innovative events.

Who: Julia Marr and Mellissa Aquire

Role: event manager and events co-ordinator.

Office Measurements: 3x3m

Jason and Lara met Julia and Melissa at ‘the Barn’ in Leichardt. They were slightly perplexed that they were not pitching to perform at one of their events. They asked: “So the purpose of this is pure art for art sake?”

The office was playing the Coldplay parachutes album.

“Podium like to create high profile events for companies, which are more than just good food and music, they like to take inspiration from culture, art and design and translate that into a corporate environment.”

Lara asked them to describe a particularly exciting event they had created, imagining detailed themed decorations and catering, but “nothing sprang to mind”. Julia and Melissa said it takes a lot of work to get corporates to trust new ideas.

Latte with Erik Jensen

Who: Eric Jensen

Role: Journalist Sydney Morning Herald

Office Measurements: Small cafe.

Lara and Jason met Eric in a Darlinghurst café to chat about the medias role in the arts. Eric does not think we have a culture of great arts criticism in this country and acknowledged it can be both difficult an easy to get press for this kind of work. As audiences and seasons can be so limited, it can be tricky to get coverage for things that not many people can see. This work might make into on the front page of a tabloid for being ‘waste of tax-payers money’ or in the news section for its ‘weirdness’.

Eric was writing a biography of Adam Cullen and is a fan of Stuart Ringholts work. He thought Stuarts naked tours of ACCA were an example of ‘live art’ and Jason said he had heard that people had never looked so hard at the art in order to avoid looking at each others naked bodies.

He felt ‘live art’ was fundamentally based around engagement and asked if we have the same levels of engagement with audiences as overseas might. He thought the feverish reactions to gameshows in the USA was an example of audience excitement around engagement, and that thanks to our comfortable social security situation in Australia, that “comfort can deaden emotions”.

Together they discussed that the idea that mimicking and appropriating the everyday may function better without the label of art.

Latte with Hugo Moline

Who: Hugo Moline

Role: Architect

Office Measurements: Thai cafe.

Hugo Moline is a good guy. Jason and Lara met him over laska to discuss ideas of ‘social engagement’ in architecture, urban planning and contemporary art.

Hugo is interested in getting people involved in making cities, making decisions and shifting the way we consider urban space. He gave a great example of a marketplace in Thailand that needed to come together to talk about a redevelopment, but personal disputes between stallholders got in the way. A team of young Thai architects encouraged a local teenage songwriter to make a video clip of all the stallholders lip-syncing one of his songs. The screening of the clip brought everyone together and allowed to a dialogue to begin.

Too often Hugo hears developers saying ‘people don’t know what they want’. He likes to see architects approach things sideways, to be adaptable through community involvement. He sees the strategies contemporary artists use as great for opening such dialogues and potentially very useful to architects. Hugo cited projects by Bababa International and an initiative by Bek Conroy to negotiate with Sydney’s gentrification (space rangers) as exciting examples of artists rethinking urban environments.

Latte with Simon Mordant and Rachel Kent

Who: Simon Mordant and Rachel Kent

Role: Chair and Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art.

Office Dimensions: 3.6x5m

Lara and Jason were a bit terrified about this meeting.  Simon Mordant is such a high powered business man, would he really want to spend time to chatting to such pseudo leaders? However, upon meeting in the foyer, Simon immediately complimented their ‘fantastic’ shirts’ and told them he loved their cheeky letter.

Rachel and Simon were both excited by this kind of practice, evidenced by the success of this years off- site Primavera exhibtion and the very interesting c3 West project. They are now thinking about continuing to exhibit off site. With the current renovations there will also be more space for performative and participatory practice, and they will begin this by partnering with Performance Space next year. Rachel feels very ready ‘to take it on’ and think about art in unexpected spaces within the gallery, on the skin of the museum, off-site and virtually. She sees visual art as encompassing so much, “from dance to psychology to phenology.”

Rachel said that the gallery shows the full stop. She would love to present “the whole sentence”, by conveying artists processes and research. They both liked the term live art and said it was up to artsits to define their own terms.

Jason made the mistake of calling the gallery a box, to which Simon said “We musn’t think of ourselves as a box, there is so much going on outside.”

Both believed that administration could be art and were curious about Field Theory’s methods. When asked what makes a good leader, Simon said “Don’t be shy – approach it all with enthusiasm and passion, like you are”.

Latte with Lisa Havilah

Name: Lisa Havilah
Role: CEO Carriageworks
Office Size: 5 x 8m

We met Lisa in the meeting room at Carriageworks.
She thinks that Live Art is starting to move into other areas – things like David Young with Chamber Made Opera doing opera in a loungeroom.
Carriageworks fits in with the rest of Sydney by being a place for contemporary artworks – hosting festivals like the Sydney biennale and the Sydney festival.
In terms of their own program they are going to work with the context of Carriageworks – its location and its scale. In terms of location – it is in Redfern and the Aboriginal community is key to its history and identity. It is a nationally recognised place for indigenous people, Carriageworks wants to connect with a history of Aboriginal practice, of aboriginal politics and the history of Black Theatre which the tent embassy came out of.

They will also make new works which reference this history. 

Carriageworks will also work with the scale of the building – so work that takes on the scale of the building and then work that is a counterpoint to the scale – ephemera.

In addition to these foci Carriageworks will also engage with the Asia Pacific area, producing culturally diverse or cross cultural work with ideas of exchange.

“Live Art is the reason that we were able to bring more audiences”
Rosie Dennis came in as the live art curator and deepened the level of engagement.
It is incredibly resource heavy to keep the engagement going like with her project Minto:Live at Campbelltown Arts Centre (where she was previously Artistic Director)
Audiences weren’t engaging with art in Campbelltown they were engaging with an idea or a point in time, something that reflects them.

Latte with Damian McDermott

WHO: Damian McDermott
ROLE: Senior Producer SBS and Stvdio Channel 132
OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: 3.20 x 2.10m
North Shore offices of SBS surrounded by light industrial – a real mix of clientele in the cafe, hi-vis workwear mixing it with suits.
Damian, in solidarity with our fourth coffee of the day, had a short macchiato  - this meant the majority of the time was spent being very animated with each other, yelling even.
Damian works at SBS TV who also run the cable channel Stvdio, which is a 24 hour art channel showing both internationally bought in content and shorter local content.
He wants the station to be seen as the tv ‘place to go’ to for arts in Australia.
“Live art – its a very broad term isn’t it!”
At the moment he is shooting artist profiles of Australia Council ‘Artstart’ grant recipients and Synapse (Science and Arts) projects
He also was doing festival based stuff “festival tv” which meant broadcasting a show every night of the festival
“If the work is unique and has longevity we can play it”
Are you beholden to ratings? “We are, but the short stuff doesn’t really apply” (The longer overseas stuff are programs like Andre Rieu)

Latte with Grace Archibald

WHO: Grace Archibald

ROLE: Communications and programming, British Council

OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: 3m x 3m

Grace had just begun in her role and was filling in for Amber who was away sick so her understanding of the Council’s history was fairly limited but she spoke about encouraging cultural relations. Grace is also a director of First Draft gallery so is familiar with this kind of work.

We discussed examples of recent work  through the experimental curators program she had seen that might fit under the live art banner and mentioned projects by ‘I Can Draw You a Picture’ and ‘Southless’. She also brought up the example of a UK artist who does a one on one work where he bathes an audience member.

Lara queried if administration could be art she replied “I think It can facilitate it but I don’t think it can be it” “but if you guys weren’t wearing your colored shirts you would be Mormons.”

Latte with Sam Sweedman

Who: Sam Sweedman
Role: Festival Program manager, New Mardi Gras
Office Measurements: 6m x 3m
Mardi Gras do really public events, that include a lot of co-producing with arts organisations – STC, Carriageworks, Performance Space, PACT, ATYP etc and will do so again next year.
They are setting up a youth program, they work in a development way with young people to make work for Fair Day, which is one of the major Mardi Gras events.
Their community likes public spectacle, next year they are really at the stage where they can push more arts practice.
Sam is looking for more contact with interested artists.

Latte with Denise King and Gabrielle Eade

Who: Denise King and Gabrielle Eade
Role: Acting Senior Contracts Officer Visual Arts Team and Manager Performing Arts – Arts NSW
What is live art?
“I don’t really understand it that well, maybe like Tess De Quincy – spectacle, free access to everyone, performance. Makes a bridge between art and the real world. It challenges assumptions.”
ARTS NSW don’t have artform panels, all artforms are assessed together. “It is a very human thing to categorise and put things in boxes.”
“New audiences are looking for cross fertilisation – new media has had a huge effect on this”
“Has anyone talked to audiences about what live art is about and what they think it is – what they are seeing?”
Good question.

Latte With Elizabeth Rogers

WHO: Elizabeth Rogers
ROLE: CEO, Regional Arts NSW
OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: 3m x 4m
In the pouring rain we went to the wrong building, but finally found it, an office overlooking the water on the wharf.
“I have no idea what live art is unless it has to do with Dance, Theatre or art in the streets”
When we showed her a work by Bababa International she said “for what purpose is that for?”
We think that is a valuable question – what is the purpose of some of this work?
Regional Arts NSW jurisdiction lies outside Newcastle, Sydney and Woollongong (Campbelltown Arts Centre is not within that boundary) It is an organising body as the funding and direction for the arts is driven by the local councils. It is the only Regional Arts body that operates in this devolved way.
There is great demand for Arts content in the regions – for example Armidale has the biggest collection of modern art and impressionism outside of the major cities in Australia.
She believes that the sort of practices we were talking about or work that happens ‘outside’ would mainly happen in a festival context.
Regional Theatres are starting to produce their own work.
The main things that regional audiences want is a) art for arts sake (Galleries and travelling Opera works are very big) and b) to tell their own local stories.
One set of cultural leaders are young city mums who have married farmers and moved to the country. An example of this would be “A Day in the Life of Denny” (Deniliquin). The organisers handed out cameras to everyone and asked them to take photos over the period of a day midnight to midnight, they put the photos online (http://dayinthelifeofdeni.blogspot.com/) and produced large scale posters for sticking up around the town, which degraded over time.
This was great for the town as there is a lot of depression, suicide, alcoholism and deaths from car accidents.

Latte with Daniel Brine

Who: Daniel Brine
Role: Performance Space AD
Office Measurements: 3 x 5m

What is live art in Australia?
“Its a very difficult question – I’ll tell you what i usually say – it represents a wide range of work that falls between cracks. The term has a specific relationship to the British scene. It becomes very complex in Australia when you think of other things such as social engagement and community art.”
He cited Ralph Myer’s quote in the National Cultural Policy document – ‘That future work would reflect the city it was made in.’
Everyone is being acknowledged – community arts, social practice and live art – the sense of live art being a term that fills the gaps between practices may be no longer useful. He doesn’t use the term and hasn’t in his job as Performance Space Director.
Other things to note – He doesn’t talk about a ‘live artist’ he talks about a live art practice or approach to someones work,
which artists may use for one particular work but not another.
Question – What is the role of arts organisations in Live Art – MCA, Performance Space, Belvoir etc
Answer – Engage with a range of practices.

Latte with Antonietta Morgillo and Lyn Wallis

WHO: Antonietta Morgillo and Lyn Wallis

In the breakout room of the Theatre Board office in the Australia Council building with back issues of the big issue on the table, banana flavoured milky ways being eaten to celebrate the live art craze currently sweeping Australia.
Antoinetta on the definition of Live Art – it is unpredictable and crazy, don’t know what is happening, engagement that happens, element of surprise, it is intense, I figure it out as I go along. It is in public space, (their definition of public space was broad – can be a theatre, meeting place, cafes, galleries – public space is just outside of the home. The audience is everybody.
Lynn – not unfamiliar with it – what she likes is that it bridges areas of contemporary practice. It is challenging, but successful. It is intellectual, but IT IS FUN!
Antonietta – Live Art applications to the Theatre Board speak about ‘what it is doing’ as opposed to script based projects which speak about the play.
They feel that Live Art leadership could be encapsulated by the work of pvi in Perth. Live art is a description not an art form or a field of practice. i.e when they talk about a project they may say “this work was a text based performance work or this work was kind of live art.”
Antoinetta is a killer table tennis player.
The Museum of Modern oddities is a good reference for a work that fits into the term Live Art.

Latte with Hugh Nichols

Who: Hugh Nichols
Role: City of Sydney, Cultural Development Officer
Office Measurements: 3m x 10m
“Live Art is a slightly confusing term, a rebranding of Performance Art with a more narrative/story telling element.
A less obnoxious form of performance art” Hugh thinks.
Hugh also said that the City of Sydney is not involved as a cultural producer and shouldn’t be.
“We are a funding body, we fund non-profits, very small individual grants, individuals can also apply under the auspice of a gallery”
Hugh believes that Live Art is a great way to broaden audiences (Applespiel and Bakesale and Eddie Sharp are all doing stuff in the Surry Hills Library which is controlled by City of Sydney), “The interactive nature is rewarding – that is my experience of it.
Live Art is a great way to push the community into action especially in the library”
Hugh has asked that if artists who want to use spaces in the City of Sydney especially the Library spaces to contact him.

Latte with Martijn Wilder

Who: Martijn Wilder
Role: Head of the law firm Baker and McKenzie’s Global Environmental Markets and Climate Change practice
Room Dimensions: 5m x 4m

Each room in the Baker and McKenzie offices was called a different city name. We were in Rome.
He had just came back from China and he thought our email sounded  interesting and thought “what the hell I’ll meet with them.”
In regards to his connection to the arts he has been on the Board of national trust and his kids are “into this kind of stuff.”
The law firm deals with global climate change practice gets climate change laws up and running. He is interested in how to get art to appeal to young people.
He was influential in getting a melting polar bear ice sculpture outside the town hall. The Sculpture melted over 12 days in what was a simple but beautiful representation of climate change.
Always looking for different ways to deliver the message of climate change – use the arts and creativity to get important information across.

Latte with Bel Macedone and students

WHO: Bel Macedone, Harriet and Hannah
ROLE: Drama Teacher and Students, Newtown Performing Arts High School
OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: Cafe

These drama students and their teacher were savvy to this kind of work thanks to youtube and studying the ‘street theatre’ elective in year 9 and 10.

Bel Macadone, a inter-disciplinary artist in her own right, shared a lot of current Australian work with her students and we were surprised to hear that groups such as Welfare State and Matt Cameron were studied as part of the syllabus.

The year tens once did a work with their teacher MR POK (the famous artist Teik Kim Pok), whose eating a spoonful of custard and jelly from the canteen acted as the signal for thirty students to perform a ‘die- in’ in the playground. Even though some of the other students stole their shoes, they remained frozen.

Year 11 Student Hannah loves “theatre that is fun and random” and believes this kind of work can bring people together that might not normally be interested in art. She sees STC subscribers as the same kind of people, seeing the same thing, and prefers the kind of work that tricks you into being an audience.

For example, if there is a political work in a theatre, people who disagree with the politics simply won’t buy tickets, but if they see it on the street their opinions may be transformed through watching the spectacle – a theatre can shield you.   Also this kind of work is good for young people “who never ever have any money”.

Bel sees this kind of work taught either really well or really badly and recognizes it requires more energy and commitment from teachers and students than teaching the Shakespeare unit. Recently they made a work based on the manifesto “offending your audience” which placed the audience on chairs onstage while the performers were in the seating bank.

Latte with Ann Reeves

WHO: Anne Reeves
ROLE: National Parks Australia
OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: 3.20 x 2.10m

Anne got straight to the point: “research has a purpose – so what is the purpose of this?” Hopefully she received an answer through the course of the meeting. She was very interested in messages and ways to convey them through traditional versus innovative forms such as social media. Anne said the field of communication was changing and there was an increasing need for creative  methods of communicating environmental issues to an urbanised society.  She liked the idea that artists mine science for poetry.

Her idea of the best bang for your buck was a groundswell grass roots approach.  She was concerned that if you sit at pokies everyday you obviously have a radically  different approach to a bush walker, and that there is a conscious need to relate to different sectors of the community. Together they talked of using social modes – Where is the meaningful exchange in Youtube? There is the risk of superficiality.  Jason and Lara talked about artists enjoying working site-specifically and with particular communities, for example Liz Dunn who is making a work researching birders between VIC and QLD.

Anne thought artists might transcend the heaviness that so many drastically urgent issues convey – to burden people with guilt was not healthy.

She spoke of the perception in Indigenous cultures that all life is part of a cycle and agreed that communal sharing with office workers, bushwalkers, nature and conservationist societies was an important step towards lessening the disconnection between urban dwellers and the natural environment.

Latte with Theresa Famularo

Latte with Sebastian Goldspink

WHO: Sebastian Goldspink
ROLE: Alaska Projects Director
OFFICE MEASUREMENTS: 5×4.9
Sebastian has a new art space deep inside a Kings Cross car park. He asked Lara and Jasons driver, Boyd Burger, who has a driving hat and a name tag, to buy them all coffee and Boyd politely obliged.

Sebastian is a big fan of this kind of work,  he recently bought a Bababa International work, which was a key to their studio, which means he is now contributing to their rent. The Kings cross carpark draws a lot of unexpected punters to visit his space Alaska which may be their only art experience for the whole year.

Sebastian sees defining this kind of work as a “double edged sword”. Sometimes it is not street art or live art, it is just art. The kind of live arts he hates is the Olympic opening ceremony.  He likened the difference between theatre and live art to the difference between cinema and video art. He has a personal collection of paintings and drawings that have been stuck up on the walls of a major contemporaty art gallery by cheeky patrons.

Lara enquired as to whether administration could be art. Seb responded by using the analogy of a director on a film set micro-managing his haircut.  Jason then asked if the film set could be an artwork itself. Lara desperately tried to hold back from asking about Drazic from heartbreak high, the Australian television show in which Sebastian (also an actor) played a computer nerd. Both artists had had 4 coffees by this stage.

As a gallery director, Seb drew a distinction between being “pro artists” and being “pro artist run iniatives”, as he saw economic imperatives in some spaces as an issue interfering with ultimate artistic goals.

Latte with Eva Rodriguez Riestra

WHO: Eva Rodriguez Riestra

Latte with Neva Grant

WHO: Neva Grant

ROLE: National Public Radio (USA), UTS Journalism lecturer

MEASUREMENTS: 6m x 5m

Neva understand Live Art as “art that you don’t expect to see, or that has more to do with where you encounter it”. She has just finished a radio documentary on intimate theatre which featured Sara-Jane Normans work.   Neva thinks that Diego Bonnetto’s work falls under a different category and gave some examples of NYC subway flash mobs where people don’t wear pants.

She thinks that it is a trap to think that the desire for intimacy is anything to do with digital connectivity, and that artists are and always have sought a direct connection and closer relationship to the feedback they receive from an audience. Lara spoke about Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ project Touch Sanitation where she shook hand with 8500 sanitation workers across NYC. Neva asked where the engagement was for audiences but agreed that a concept can live on through memory, word of mouth and documentation without needing an immediate ‘audience’.

Latte with Joshua Safaer

WHO: Joshua Safaer (What is live art?)
ROLE: Artist & Thinker in Residence, Performance Space
OFFICE MEASURMENTS: A small Park
Joshua met Field Theory  in a park on Wilson street near Performance Space because the nearby cafe was closed at 4pm. He knows little about ‘Live Art’ in Australia, and what he saw of the works we showed him, was that that the models of re-appropriation were very familiar – a marathon, a tour, a sewing workshop.  He was interested in the Australian term ‘come out’ to describe someone arriving from another country rather than to describe someone who had revealed their true sexuality.
He also liked the fact we called superannuation ‘super’.