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.