Watch this space…. Live Art in the UK…

Recently Madeleine Hodge visited Lois Keadon at the offices of the Live Art Development Agency to find out what is going on in the UK live art scene.

The cultural landscape in London has shifted in the past two years, in the wake of the appointment of a conservative government and in the following slew of heavy cuts to art funding, live artists are seeking new strategies for survival. Having returned to the UK wanting to get a better sense of this radically altered landscape I went to LADA (the source) to hear the tale, first hand, about the history of the form in the UK and how live art has changed.

Lois Keadon explains that the Agency was set up in 1999. With the support of the Arts Council it was formed as a response to the programming that had begun during her time as director of the performance program at the ICA. It is an art movement that came to currency during the social hardships and politically charged years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Artist’s were making work that made visible the opposition to the cultural and social politics of the day. “It really came out of the work of a lot of radical artists from the states” says Keadon. In this time artists put their bodies and the political, social and cultural implications of the body at the centre their work. The political movements around Aids and Gay rights initiated by groups such as Act Up, with their “Silence is death” call to arms made this a highly charged time in which to be making work. American Artists, such as Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, addressed the political body, a body of flesh, blood, sweat and semen. These works implicated the audience and made political engagement implicit in the social relations of the work. Keadon says that these artists were loudly rejecting the social and cultural politics of the time and that she was actively supporting work by artists that were making work about gender, race, religion and identity.

Following this, Keadon explains, with the advent of a new “socially inclusive” labour party and with the guidance of the Agency, live art in England experienced something of a golden age. Companies that started in the 80’s and early 90’s with nothing, surviving on dole payments and working out of garages were now receiving yearly funding that allowed them to take bigger risks. Artists that were marginalised were taken into institutions, they were given serious research positions, there was work in the education departments of major gallery’s, critical writing and academia developed responses to the work that meant this deliberately ephemeral art form had a sort of permanence and new levels of encounter. “We are looking at the end of all that now,” she says.

Along side these developments for live artists England witnessed new sort of visual art projects that borrowed from live arts challenging relationship to the audience yet without the political agency that live art would afford. Lois Keadon describes these projects as “Happy Clappy,” and she singles out one artist in particular, “Stand up Anthony Gormley”. In Keadon’s eyes Anthony Gormley’s 2009 Trafalgar square project One and the other signalled the death of interesting participatory practices. By inviting people of Britain on to a plinth for 100 hours of “real people” time, Gormley’s project highlighted the flaccidity and lack of criticality of participatory practices. His project “allowed” people to have time in the spotlight (on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square) without any particular framework.  Keadon says that works like these remind us that involving people is not necessarily participation. She talks about the way in which these practices mimic rather than challenge the politics of contemporary capitalism. The rise in participatory practices has occurred with out the necessary reflection on what participation is for and why artists are using these strategies, We talk about how this sort of participation with its emphasis on engagement for engagements sake is not so different from David Cameron’s big society, where the illusion of a participatory society is played out in a large scale.  Keadon makes the distinction that involving people doesn’t necessarily mean they are participating, “people think they are involved and actually they are being duped, it becomes a way of silencing people.” (and in the case of Gormley’s project of mocking them). She talks about a site specific performance she saw on a beach in Wales, in the 80’s. The performers kick sand in the audience’s direction and to the surprise of the performers the audience kick back. “Well what exactly were they expecting?” asks Keadon.

She says that with participatory art, artists have moved from the social body to the political body, into the collective body that we inhabit. She sees the creative response to the work of Culture beyond oil and Occupy London and artists that are addressing issues of climate change and capitalism are part of the next wave of live art practices.  She says that she is still concerned that we make time to challenge issues such as race, gender, disability and identity as we still have more work to do, the agency is currently working on a series to address each of these areas of practice that will occur over the next few years. She says artists and small independently run spaces around London (such as LUPA and  [performance space]) are experiencing a new sort of popularity without the support of the major institutions.  The performance matters program, “trashing performance,” addressed a lot of questions about the future of the form, with artists working outside institutions and outside performance. With artists exploring they way in which the internet and new technologies are allowing for new kinds of connection, distribution and promotion of live art projects, and there is an audience as each week live art events are sold out across London.

However she also recognises that without the institutional support of places such as the TATE and the ICA the fate of long-term practices for artists is uncertain.  Artists have long had to struggle with their desire to challenge a system while also developing strategies for survival within it and she is not sure what will happen, or where this younger generation of artists will go next.

The future, as always, is invisible.

The effect of the expansion of this art form from UK and North America into other countries and social political areas, can only serve to further the cause. Live art has had a series of iterations in different parts of the world and the way in which it moves, mutates and changes depending on the location seems particularly suited to the “liveness” of the form. Lois says that in particular artists in Britain are very connected to Australian artists, with ongoing dialogue in both directions. She says that almost each week an Australian artist will visit the office of the agency, they have coined a phrase “this weeks’ Australian”’. I guess this week that would be me.

Lois Keadon is a great person to talk to, she is very engaging and as she talks she repeatedly gets up and goes to the bookshelves as each point in the conversation is punctuated by references to publications the agency has produced and artists she admires. These are artists with whose names I am familiar, and whose names I have heard frequently over the last ten years, she refers to Joshua Sofaer, French Motteshead and Franko B among others. She speaks about their work and the community that exists around the agency as one that is generous and open and engaged with ethical encounter. But it does make me wonder about the next generation of artists that the agency might support, I ask about this about what is next and about where these younger artists might progress and she says … “watch this space….”

Madeleine is an artist, writer and researcher living in London, she has most recently been working in Spain with Banana Asylum to provoke new discourse between artists and the world through anthropological practices. She is a former Panther, founding member of field theory and she promises to write more for LALA in her role as foreign corespondent.

Links

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/

http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/

http://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/

http://www.performancespace.org/

https://www.facebook.com/LUPA.E2?sk=info

(Funny youtube clip from Mayor Boris Johnsons introduction to a One and the other.)

Yes, but is it Art? A molecular journey through the nexus of Live Art and Social Practice.

‘All art forms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.’ Bertolt Brecht

‘We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants everyone to be equal. We want to be different.’ Gilbert and George[i]

In trying to plot the movements of an emerging and shifting genealogy of live art and social practice in Australia, I find myself thinking through molecular biology. Perhaps it is the emergent state, as it crosses several divides simultaneously, or the process of osmosis by which it occurs, that invokes the cellular metaphor.[ii] I am also recalling Baz Kershaw, a UK performance theorist and socially engaged performance-maker, whose investigations into the efficacy of radical performance resulted in him ‘straddling the cusp’ – the space betwixt and between modernist narratives and the promises of postmodernity.

My intention is that by thinking through cellular properties and mitosis (cell division), we may intercept a possible point in the unraveling of these messy overlapping threads of the ‘live’ and the ‘social’, which tells us something more instructive about ‘art’ genealogies and genetic codes for the future. And hopefully through that, demonstrate how the emergence of Live Art and Social Practice is being mutually shaped and re-constituted by the emergence of the ‘creative industries’.

Live Art and Social Practice in Australia appear as the bastard children of mutated genealogies from the 60s & 70s that ran screaming from the gallery and the proscenium arch. Some ran a million miles, whilst others screamed from within the gallery space, and still others ran screaming, only to return to the stage after a successful run on the streets working with ‘the public’. A few managed to straddle multiple spaces, and engage in a kind of site specific screaming.

To varying degrees these practices have been described as performance art, socially engaged practice, radical cultural interventions, conceptual art, hybrid performance, happening art, relational aesthetics, social sculptures, littoral art, performance-installation, “New-Genre” Public Art, dialogic art, site-specific art, practice-based research, and public performance, and participatory art. If we really want to stretch the ancestral line, we could include the politically motivated art periods that engineered such forms as agit-prop, epic theatre, radical people’s theatre, workers’ theatre, political theatre, community theatre, activist art, street theatre, participatory site-based performance, and cross cultural collaboration.

It is not the intention, nor the inclination of this essay to write an inventory of what constitutes Live Art or Social Practice. That seems to me a very dull assignment. It is however pertinent to my investigation that we acknowledge the differing places from whence we arrive at these terms in order to discover what discourses are being put to work in their service.

So, thinking through mitosis to meiosis we can divide the genesis into two camps:  Are you a theatre/contemporary performance/performance-maker person? Or are you a visual arts/interdisciplinary/performance art person? Perhaps more crudely: did your ancestors descend from a white cube or did your ancestors hail from a black box? (Yes, it is more than just a matter of black and white.)

However, divisions are also useful. They enable critical distance, as they express difference through spatialised time. Sometimes for the purposes of knowing where we stand, we enlist the utility of divisions to crystalize where we begin and end, to separate out right from wrong, to recognize our outsides from our insides, and to recognize our enemy from our friend. These divisions are never permanent, nor do they pre-exist us, and we are forever destined to rupture these membranes in a hopeful bid to transcend.

Just as cells divide, the necessity of which recreates life, a rapid replication of cells dividing also marches us in a dance of death towards the malignant tumor. Cancerous cells divide in a furious drive towards self-annihilation, negating their function by over-function. This surplus of cells, having no place to be integrated into the organism, is like a hijacked plane diverted from its mission, left to kamikaze with over-production.

And sometimes, just as our immune systems misrecognize a Trojan virus for a helpful antibody, the recognition of divisions can also work happily in the service of a dominant ideology, whose purpose it is to sell fast cars as a substitute for happiness.

So distance and division is a methodology and a practice that is capable of generating both tyranny and emancipation. It is precisely in the straddling of division that live art and social practice resonates most significantly, both in its mode of operating (its interdisciplinarity) and in its delivery of service (engagement with audience, and relationship with space). But as others have shown – Beradi, Holmes, Negri, Harvey, Lazarato among others – this very slipperiness and straddling is also characteristic of the flexibility and permeability demanded by ‘capital’ in its bid to colonise new terrains for exploitation. This has some serious ramifications for how we do ‘business’ and how these practices become complicit with capital’s agenda.

Neoliberalism and its modus operandi behaves very much like the cancerous cell; it invades the host by mimicking its cellular properties, pretending to be what it isn’t, and then replicating without differentiation. (Think astro-turfing and strategic advertising campaigns). Eventually a malignant tumor will destroy the functioning of the organ, its rogue cells having conquered an otherwise humble process of inter-cellular collaboration.

In this example, the capitalist machinery confuses the inside and the outside, reinforcing the oft remarked post modern cry “there is no longer an outside”. Neoliberalism thrives in this confused environment by providing the optimum conditions for knee jerk reactionaries to reinscribe the same miserable divisions over and over again, unknowingly helping them spread the cancer, collaborating in their own death. Neoliberalism’s specialty is in blurring the distinctions between friend and foe, aping the host’s cellular properties in order to gain entry and propagate new divisions, based on the old divisions.

Neoliberalism is at its finest when it manipulates the emotion of the human brain, coopting the drive for mutual cohabitation, invading it to produce an artificial divide between what is public and what is private, between what is common and what is commodified. Between what you have and what you don’t have. Capitalism, as Marx’s thesis proves, alienates people from their labour, it separates their thought from their action. As Paulo Freire wrote so eloquently about, and as Guy Debord waxed lyrically: capitalism is the expression of the ultimate spectacle in which we are all passive consumers.

But like the slipperiness of the shifting divide between inside and outside, just as the membrane of a cell participates in mitosis, the same properties can be reversed and used against the intended affect. Like an immunized baby exposed to a virus, the body adapts and learns to identify the outside and the inside. By bringing attention to the fact, by framing the foreign experience through a heightened exposure, we allow our body time to distance itself, and in doing so, equip our body to know where it stands.

Bertolt Brecht’s methodology was an intervention into the domesticating affect of a realist drama, which sought to diminish the distance between character and actor. Brecht opposed the predominant Stanislavski technique whose acting methodology was analogous to an invasion by the character of the host actor’s body, contriving a psychological confabulation that one was the other. Brecht sought to undo this process and draw focus on the separation between character and mise en scene, between actor and constructed situations. The ‘verfremdungseffekt’, a defamiliarisation technique also known as the Alienation effect, was a reverse engineering of the collapse of the person into the character, in order to demystify and identify what was possible to change or be changed. Crudely counterpoised to Stanislavski, Brecht travelled through the body and expanded outwards to view the constructed social situation and identify structural flaws in the environment that conditioned ‘man’ to behave and make certain choices.

Brecht devised an epic theatre model, which sought to remind the audience that it was watching a play; that it was a representation of reality, and not reality itself. Leaving outside problems with such assumed simple dichotomies between reality and not-reality, the point worth noting is that Brecht drew attention to the parameters of the form, and in this sense kept the human senses alert to pretense or false division.

Taking my lead from Brecht, any useful discussion about the porous membrane dividing Live Art and Social Practice is best focused on the contours of spatial praxis and the agency of the spectator ­– or “spect-actor” if you prefer to use Augusto Boal’s definition, which I do.

The “spect-actor” is the dual occupation of the spectator who in the act of spectating can also take action.[iii] She becomes an actor, whilst remaining simultaneously an audience member. This enables her to see her self in the act of seeing – a radical act which Boal attributes to the transformative powers of the ‘aesthetic space’. The ‘aesthetic space’ is created out of the complicity between the actor and spectator, and is transformative because it contains properties that dichotomise time and space. This effect simply means that the spectator and actor simultaneously occupy the real time of the theatre auditorium, and the imagined space of the scene created before them. This renders the aesthetic space a safe place to practice transgressions in a ‘rehearsal for revolution’, which prepares the spect-actor to intervene and make changes to her real life situation. This was essentially Boal’s quest for a real theatre that diminished the separation between actor and spectator, thus intervening in a real world drama that constantly placed the oppressed actor in the role of passive spectator.

With any discussion of Boal, you venture into ‘theatrical’ terrain demarcated by a particular set of discourses. Performance, hailing from the stage, has a specific understanding of the relationship between the performer and the audience which is principally shaped by the necessity for complicity between the actor and spectator. As we approach the nexus of Live Art and Social Practice, our genealogical boundaries really come into play.

From the perspective of the white cube, the audience or viewer of the work is located in a different aesthetic space, which precludes their intervention. As the artist placed her body in the service of ‘an act of art’, the aesthetic space expanded and contemporary art experienced what is referred to as a ‘performative turn’. Then as the artist contemplated her escape from the white cube gallery it shifted into a ‘social turn’. Now, as site specificity unhinges the site from the practice, it appears to be experiencing a ‘contextual turn’, as biennales commission the artist to activate a site in the service of local participation, usually from an existing catalogue of work supplied by the artist to the curator. (Miwon, MIT, 2002: 37)

As artists step outside of both the cube and the black box, they enter the ‘public space’ to seek out ‘engagement’. Here we arrive at the nexus of Live Art and Social Practice, as the position of engagement shifts along a continuum of audience/spectator/viewer/participant contained within a porous membrane of site specificity.

As this writing exercise is concerned with imitating cellular properties, I am going to throw up another dichotomy between Live Art as a UK tradition and Social Practice as a US tradition. This is purely to see the interplay between what is being circulated and talked about in order to identify points of intersection.[iv]

Social Practice is a term more widely used in the United States. You can easily trace the growth of this movement of ideologies around spaces that are more likely to be artist led, and located beyond the white cube gallery space. They are also, and in greater number, focused on dialogical practices aimed at opening up discursive terrain, often in proximity to organised political or social movements. Examples of this in Chicago are: Incubate, Mess Hall, Temporary Services, and in New York: Not an Alternative, 16 Beaver, and Institute for Applied Aesthetics, to name but a few.

It is also useful to look to higher education facilities for the reproduction of genealogies. At the Californian School of Arts, their MFA provides for a major in Social Practice, which it describes as thus:

Social practices incorporates art strategies as diverse as urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, “new genre” public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, interactive media, service dispersals, and street performance. The field focuses on topics such as aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, persona, media strategies, and social activism, issues that are central to artworks and projects that cross into public and social spheres. These varied forms of public strategy are linked critically through theories of relational art, social formation, pluralism, and democracy. Artists working within these modalities either choose to co-create their work with a specific audience or propose critical interventions within existing social systems that inspire debate or catalyze social exchange.[v]

In Australia, we are yet to name a singular modality and seem more comfortable relating to a messier litany of terms such as socially engaged art, relational aesthetics, participatory art, dialogical art, littoral art, cultural interventionist, or the lazy tag of ‘artist activist’. Related to this is the absence of any distinct movement of radical ideologies around artist led spaces in Australia that would seek to provide points of friction with institutional agendas, but which regardless still permeate the spectrum of thinking amongst artists and their modalities of art making.

Some recent examples of Social Practice in Australia could include: boat people.org’s large scale interventions questioning race, pvi’s site based excursions into terrorist training camps, Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic, Squatspace’s tour of beauty through the suburb of Redfern, or any number of the walk projects commissioned by Performance Space in the first half of this year. These shared characteristics orbit around an interrogation of the subject through spatial dimensions and a critical engagement of the spectator as audience participant.

But some of these examples could also sit appropriately under a banner of ‘Live Art’, where site, intimacy and exchange are also shared as a fundamental characteristic of the practice.

As you know from visiting this website, Performance Space in collaboration with Field Theory and Lala were awarded a cultural leadership grant to further develop Live Art as a practice and a discourse in Australia. It is a fortunate twist that Daniel Brine having worked at the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in the UK for a period of 8 years finds himself back in Australia as the Director of Performance Space, at an interesting point in the emergence of both Live Art, and the creative industries.

Like the creative industries, Live Art is an industry tag designed to properly categorise the form so it can compete with resources and guarantee future productivity. In the UK, Live Art has been around since the mid to late 80’s. Centres like Arnolfini, and the Inbetween Time Festival, and the National Live Art Review, have been major catalysts and incubators for Live Art practice. In Australia, Performance Space has been nurturing the way forward, particularly through its strong collegial ties with UK contemporary performance, presenting Live Works, the first Live Art festival in Australia in 2008 and again in 2010. With the support of the Australia Council it has also established investigation into practice through the P4 pilot program in 2010.

In 2009 the Melbourne Fringe under the direction of Emily Sexton inaugurated the category of Live Art. I participated in its key event TOYS (Take Off Your Skin) directed by Dario Vacirca in collaboration with the Kuronoz cloning project. Described as an elaboration, this event assembled over 100 clones of Japanese dance artist Yasuko Kurono, and dispersed them in choreographic fashion throughout the street of Melbourne’s CBD.  The choreography of replication, of sameness produced, acknowledged the potential for affiliation and mimic whilst remaining simultaneously governed by the widely erratic differentiation of bodies in time and space. In its expression of sameness it illuminated the differences. It was ‘doing both’ and in doing so, did something entirely different and unique.

For now, I think it is more useful to think about the definition of Live Art from LADA’s definition as a ‘strategy’ rather than an artform. Perhaps this resonates more strongly for a practice where the divisions between performer and spectator are themselves the work, and where the multiple overlapping and messy divisions that constitute ‘site’ or space, are genetically predetermined to evade capture by the intentions of a neatly determined category. However as the global political economy continues its shift towards the immaterial, the terrain for Live Art and Social Practice will be required to move forward and coalesce into a discreet artform. And one most likely that conforms to the economic imperatives of the National Cultural Policy, currently under discussion by the Federal Government, and strongly shaped by the increasing hegemony of the Creative Industries.

The Creative Industries, like the term Live Art, has largely emerged through the imperatives of a market economy, seeking articulation of the productive capacities of knowledge-based, experiential markets, and immaterial labour for generating value. But unlike the Creative Industries, Live Art was prompted by a genuine desire to generate a space which brought together a number of practices, whose ‘work’ is expressed as a series of constructed relations, typically related through spatial concerns, and which do not sit comfortably under one singular funding category. Creative Industries however is symptomatic of a global march by capital in the search for new values to be exploited in its rampage towards the creation of wealth.

The context for the emergence of these three terms — ‘Social Practice’, ‘Live Art’ and ‘Creative Industries’ — is characterized by the amplification of late capitalism’s bio-political machinery expressed through the financialisation of every aspect of life, including our future/s, and the increasing privatization of the commons. We see this in the privatization of water, airspace, and in the patenting of thousands year old indigenous knowledge forms, such as medicinal plants, by multinational pharmaceutical companies. It is important to situate the emergence of these new productive areas in a context where the ‘dominant economic paradigm has shifted from the production of material goods to the production of life itself’ (Hardt & Negri, 2005: 283) and where the mechanisms for doing so increasingly rely on a blurring of the boundaries between work and life.

We see this also in the incessant creep of public private partnerships into areas that were once the responsibilities of democratically elected governments. What kickbacks are being promised in the delivery of services now partially owned by a corporate body? What happens to the delivery of these services when a private interest commands a greater return on their investment? Now that creativity is lauded as a key driver of the economy, who is reaping the benefits of this newly created wealth? How is this wealth being distributed and reinvested back into the industry mainframe, if at all?

We are living in the era symptomatic of a growing enclosure of the commons through an expanding network of privatizing arteries transporting cancerous cells to other parts of the political body, in order to halt differentiation, by encouraging rapid mass replication of the same cell with guaranteed predictable behaviours. A ceaseless and senseless division that eventually kills the host. Transactions, trading and exchanges now occur across a porous membrane, unlocking the gate for some to enter and determine the distribution of surplus value, while locking the gate for others whose surplus value is extracted and alienated from them in order to be distributed by those in power. Accompanying this is the proliferation of displaced people, trapped in refugee processing camps, whilst capital soars around the globe at a dizzying pace, unfettered.

This is the context into which biennales the world over insinuate themselves. Live Art and Social Practice may have inherited the radicality of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic formula, but just like creeping ivy, it can also manifest as poison. It appears to represent both an expansion of creativity or else an increase in the number of practices to be amalgamated or subsumed under an industry banner called ‘Creative Industries’ ­– making what is particular to a specific art practice, generic and general to an economic paradigm. This loss of distinction is characteristic of cancer as rogue cells keep dividing, at a rapid pace, without differentiation.

Live Art and Social Practices share a common genetic framework that pulls them in the direction of replication or differentiation; from rupturing the code to produce difference and opposition, to the replicated homogenisation of predetermined functions in the service of a system’s logic. Rupture or breach also creates distance – these positions are equally necessary and productive as they are equally destructive and terrifying. By understanding the capacity of these movements to rupture neoliberalism’s code, as well as its tendency for expanding the terrain for commodification, we will be better equipped to navigate our way through the nexus.

We straddle the divide as it occurs because it is no longer possible to remain tethered to the rigid and inadequate dichotomies of art versus life, private versus public, inside versus outside, as the cognitive and sensational apparatus of the physical and metaphysical reconstitutes and reshapes each other.

So does Social Practice and Live Art attempt to un-stitch the separation between performer and audience and bring participants and art itself back into the fold by reframing ordinary activities as art? Or by doing so, does the social practice reify the separation; confusing what truly is the outside, and subsuming it into the work? Do we need to know there is an edge, an outer limit, or a point of difference, from which to anchor our subjectivity? Or is it sufficient to simply intuit what we are seeing, opening ourselves up to the confused experience, with no guarantee about what it is?  When something plays the edge, and art plays life playing art, should we not worry about whether it is concealing a virus in the host cell, a dark cancerous neoliberal lining inside the work?

As lived and embodied practices, I am buoyed by the transformative tactics of Live Art and Social Practice to disrupt and reconfigure the location of critical culture’s apparatus. In doing so it necessitates the articulation for new ways of understanding the significance of producing culture. But I am suspicious when this repositioning of the viewer and the practice folds deeper into the materiality of life, by making the creative “perform” in the service of the economy. Particularly as it does in ways that would confuse and make complicit our creative instruments in order to service a political economy whose mode of operating is based on a senseless aggressive march to increase productivity, at whatever cost.

The infection rate of corporatization into the cellular fabric of our everyday lives is everywhere, and growing with increasing speed. Straddling as a resistance tactic makes Live Art and Social Practice urgent and relevant to the conditions for intervening in a constant and senseless replication of homogenous cellular mass. Straddling eventually forces us to choose. When we are ready. The world is ready now.

I Love Lying

I love lying. I do it a lot in my work. I tell white lies, grey lies and a few fluorescent lies. This is both a confession and a justification for my duplicitous nature.

During a recent forum around participatory art the group discussion veered into the contentious territory of ethics. Good old-fashioned cheating, lying and manipulating, or if you prefer the more fashionable euphemisms: agency, invitation and exchange. These vices and virtues don’t really match up but in terms of what I am about to discuss they do begin to relate. Having spent years honing a set of ethical standards for working in live situations, at its core a pledge that if I seek to ‘move’ someone they are able to ‘move’ me too, I was somewhat taken aback to be accused in the forum of being dishonest with the public. Did my willing vulnerability not justify the convoluted game play of my artistic endeavours?  Either way it got me thinking.

If we accept as a given the small conceit most artists harbour of noble intent there’s still no getting round the fact that messing with people in public is very messy. Few would disagree that audience participation within a traditional theatre context marks the bottom of the abusive art power scale. Nobody likes being bullied into acting against their will or better judgement, but as we move up the scale towards more subtle forms of coercion like bribery or false representation do we feel equally uncomfortable?

Let me describe the infringement in question: My colleague, Torie Nimmervoll, and I are Prismatic Auditors. We are also of course, artists who have fabricated an otherwise non-existent ‘job’ and by extension a type of business. This business involves a set of rituals and processes loosely based around a playful social survey. The term audit has been hijacked with all its connotations of certainty and officiality to play off against the deeply subjective experience of colour. We are Prismatic Auditors when we engage in those processes, just like one is a teacher when one teaches and a cleaner when one cleans.

In order to audit a community we need the members of that community to take part. This involves an intense period of explanation, reassurance and gentle persuasion prior to the audit period. It is where we negotiate the play-space of the work and establish the nature of our future interactions with the participants. During this entry phase Torie and I believe that we must be “only what we are doing”, meaning that when potential participants look at us funny and say “Are you guys serious, why are you doing this?” and “what are the results of the audit for?” we do not respond by saying we are artists doing a project where we pretend to be auditors to try and get you to do what we want because we are convinced of the greater good of our cultural agendas. We answer by explaining what the audit is and does. It is a genuine data and narrative gathering exercise that relates personal choice to collective representation. All aspects of the audit process are open for the participant to influence, respond to, and improvise with. Except the meta/artistic explanation of why the Prismatic Auditors exist.

Does this make us liars and ethical infringers?  I believe not, for these reasons.

There is play and there is fiction but there is no falsehood. We are not seeking a specific set of data nor do we draw conclusions from the results beyond their source context. The data is fed back to the participants throughout the process and there is no candid camera or content to be manipulated at a later date. The language and aesthetics of the project are an obvious parody of corporate efficiency but the deadpan tone of the work is not intended as mockery. It is more a device to soften the dryness of the process. If anybody is made to feel ridiculous, it is us.

The Prismatic Audit is a system for playing with the construction and function of meaning within different social environments. The fact that someone is yellow for three days and green for two then purple for five could mean nothing and everything. Our function and the way in which we are perceived within each community must be negotiable and uncertain. It has to be both a genuine statistically accurate process as well as a complete absurdity. Yes our participants need to ‘play along’ and it is always their choice to do so. But we are not asking for their involvement as an act or special case art project that is granted its eccentricities and safely distanced, but as a functioning if somewhat strange addition to the mundanities of daily routine. Only by existing, or at the very least attempting to exist alongside the ‘normal’ is the audit able to be both satire and celebration.

Our lie if you wish to call it that is a necessary one.

Perhaps the perception of this issue is more about where one places the frame of a work and how that frame is perceived. Live art often establishes unusual zones of play and artists chose public situations because of their inherent uncertainty – they are good spaces for developing and maintaining a necessary doubt around what exactly the work is, why it is there and who might become involved. This can at times leave people floundering for the frame but we must be careful that in our attempt to make ethically sound work we do not end up with comfortable subversion and sanctioned satire. Are full disclosures and statements of intent really necessary or are we just scared of not being nice?

If you are a punter in the community where the Prismatic Audit is about to take place and you need things to be clear, certain and understood then perhaps you aren’t someone we can work with. The entry process offers up a set of very considered, and we believe fairly obvious indicators in the form of objects, language, and approach that define the play zone. Engineering a specific type of engagement does create exclusivity within the work, but it also avoids the need to constantly cart around the cumbersome baggage of why a project is art, let alone artistically worthy. Torie and I are not interested in trying to dupe and manipulate a general public we are interested in activating a committed one.

If thinly disguised manipulation is really what we do I hope it is not felt as crude coercion, rather clever orchestration. The works of participatory art that I admire are those that encompass and shift me whilst making me feel like I was the one doing it all along. There are no explanations of context and intent, I just have the sensation that I have taken part in something unusual that resonates with meaning. As the British poet and satirist Samuel Butler said: The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

POST SCRIPT

Writing this confessional defence has prompted me to consider the idea of a small corner of webspace – perhaps LALA, where artists might submit their accounts of ethical doubt or transgression. A project went to far, somebody made you feel a bit dirty, why not get it off your chest, let the community suggest penance and forgive your sins.

All liars welcome.

Jason Maling

Who Needs Live Art. An ongoing rant.

Preface.

Barry Laing delivered the article below live in an abbreviated form during a recent public forum called “Who Needs Live Art”. The forum was hosted by Field Theory and took place in the Supper Room at Arts House on August 31st. It grew out of what appears to be a growing desire amongst ‘cross discipline’ Melbourne artists to gather and critically discuss contemporary practice. The title and the function of the forum was intended both as a provocation and a genuine question. Who are we, what do we need and what form should a gathering of this kind take?

The event was attended by approximately 40 people and included a participatory development showing of Strange Passions by Triage as well as Barry Laing’s presentation and much robust discussion. It is hoped that the connections and energy generated by the forum will evolve into an ongoing process.

Jason Maling.

Who Needs Live Art?

from Notes Towards a Collective Rant offered as a spoken provocation by Barry Laing at Field Theory’s Excursion #2, 31st August 2011, Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne.

Tonight’s event is titled Who Needs Live Art? On the LALA website, it is also promoted as an ‘Excursion’. To ‘excur’ might habitually mean to wander, digress, run off and escape from bounds. To participate in an excursion might be to linger upon a deviation from a clear and definite path. I intend to wander in order to stay ‘live’ and the performance maker in me suspects that any ‘clear and definite path’ is anyway always and already provisional, and so I’m not sure yet what I might be deviating from. I have no intention of running off – unless you try to hurt me. Really. And so I’m left with an attempt to ‘escape from bounds’…

Who needs Live Art? Escape Artists.

This question ‘Who Needs Live Art?’ troubled me initially. Not sure why. ‘Cause I thought ‘I get it’, the thrust of it. Maybe it’s because it ‘gets me’, catches me, frames me, binds me up. Maybe because it is not mine. I wanted to squirm out of it.

In a piece called ‘A Conversation: What is it? What is it for?’[i], the philosopher Gilles Deleuze says:

Questions are invented, like anything else. If you aren’t allowed to invent your own questions, from never mind where, if people ‘pose’ them to you, you haven’t much to say. […] Objections are even worse. Objections never contributed anything. It’s the same when I am asked a general question. The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it. Many people think that it is only by going back over the question that it is possible to get out of it. But getting out never happens like that…

For example, borrowing from Deleuze, and transposing ‘Live Art’ for ‘philosophy’: ‘What is the position with Live Art? Is it really ‘live’? Isn’t it mediated and mediating like everything else?’ Deleuze says this is “very trying”.

So, OK, if ‘getting out of it’ doesn’t happen like that, how does it happen? Because I like to think of myself as a bit of a contrarian, I’m going to try and escape from bounds, to get out of it, by ‘answering’ the question anyway, but while I’m doing that verbally, I’ll be thinking of another question (which I’ll return to later) and so my ‘answers’ won’t really be answers, but playful and serious offerings of things at stake in a conversation about Live Art.

So who needs Live Art? Escape Artists.

There are plenty of ‘takes’ or emphases possible in the question Who Needs Live Art?:
Who needs ‘Live Art’?
Who needs Live Art? (who is here, even, who is the process for [ie. this Salon], why?)
Who needs (to call it) ‘Live Art’?

So, Live Art, names, definitions, categories – I’ll let you wander between the possible meanings above, I’m going to keep moving …

Who Needs Live Art/names, definitions and categories – who needs ‘em?

Conscientious Objectors and No-one. We’ve heard from my good friend Deleuze on ‘questions’ and ‘objections’ … the thing is to get out of it … questions, categories…of others, left with nothing to say …So, the thing is to invent one’s own categories and questions, from wherever.  Is Live Art a ‘wherever’? Is it our ‘own’? Or does it constitute other people’s questions and objections in the form of art (and there’s plenty in this notion here …in understanding, perhaps, what Live Art was/is in part – the contrariness of refusing other people’s categories and questions)? If it is, or if it does, who needs it? Either way, Conscientious Objectors. Following Deleuze then, that’s No-one, apparently (‘cause objection never contributed anything). And yet the dilemma of ‘inventing one’s own questions from wherever’ remains. Who Needs Live Art? Conscientious Objectors and No-one.

Live Art/Names, definitions, categories … who needs ‘em?

Name Callers (and Their Enemies), that’s who.

I’ve been thinking about the proposition: a dramaturgy, any dramaturgy, imagines its audience/spectators/witnesses/participants (and even, here these four words imagine different dramaturgies and beg the question). Think of ‘dramaturgy’ as all that which concerns the ‘world’, circumstance or situation of an artwork, event, performance or Live Art work.

An Email Exchange on the SCUDD[ii] List (The Standing Conference of University Drama Departments – UK):

“What Knowledge is Here?”
23 March – 24 March, 2009
Simon Piasecki (S.Piasecki@LEEDSMET.AC.UK)

What Knowledge is Here?

At dawn on Saturday 28th March, Simon Piasecki will drag Robert Wilsmore down all 199 steps from Whitby Abbey, in their first collaborative performance for a decade. This action will be documented by Peter Morton and Richard Molony.

Insomniacs and curious bystanders are welcome.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and say – that’s VERY ‘LIVE ART’!

McDowell, Wallace (W.B.McDowell@WARWICK.AC.UK)

Well, whoop-dee-do, for fuck’s sake. Will the dragee be taken head or feet first? Doubtless the next edition of ‘An introduction to Performance head injuries’ will provide the answer.

Dr Wallace McDowell
Theatre Studies
University of Warwick

Simon Piasecki (S.Piasecki@LEEDSMET.AC.UK)

I’m sorry Dr Wallace we’ll write a little play about it afterwards with
lots of witty, offensive language for you to enjoy. For future reference,
please note I have a private email address as well.

Best wishes,
Simon Piasecki.
Course Leader BA Hons Art, Event, Performance
Senior Lecturer in Performance Practice
Leeds Metropolitan University

Indeed, ‘What Knowledge is Here?’ Clearly Dr Wallace is neither an insomniac nor curious bystander. Likewise, he is perhaps not imagined as audience/spectator/witness/participant by Piasecki and Wilsmore.  And so, we could also say, a dramaturgy imagines its enemies, its Other/s, it oppositions.

In case you thought name callers and their enemies only ‘went hard’ in the Academy, consider this from the current edition of Realtime[iii]:

Oscar Redding and Jonathan Auf der Heide are adamant. The only social value of their work is as a useful corrective. “As far as mainstream content goes” Redding says, “it seems that there’s a lot of thought given to presenting material which isn’t offensive. But I’d rather stab myself in the cock with a sharp fork than sit through another play by Joanna Murray-Smith or Tony McNamara”.

Ouch. A couple of names called as ‘useful correctives’ there! Friends? Enemies? Is Oscar ‘Live Art?’ A ‘hater’? Or is he just not particularly fond of theatre?

At least where cock-stabbing is concerned, performance artist, poet and super-masochist Bob Flannagan got there before him, notoriously driving a nail through his penis into a block of wood – as performance.

Ouch. “Why would you do that?!” I can still hear the cringey, whiney exclamations of students of mine perhaps habitually more familiar and comfortable with Murray-Smith’s work than with Bob’s or Redding’s. (Why is that?)

But what was Flanagan doing and why would you do that? Was it called ‘Live Art’ then? Did he need it?

Read his answer to these questions with his performance poem staged as the answer to a question, called ‘Why?’[iv]

Live Art/names, definitions, categories … who needs ‘em? Name Callers and Their Enemies and People who Don’t Mind their Questions Answered with a Question.

Live Art. Who needs it?

Resistance Fighters. James Hillman and I (we’re like that) have argued that in the context of theatre and performance, wherever there is resistance, there is ‘body’ – as in a good red wine. Mmtwuh!  A ‘something’ to push against, resistance, body: within theatre and performance and between ‘Theatre’ and other forms in order that ‘Not-Theatre’ might be given a name. Live Art, anyone? Guillermo Gomez Pena resists in his ‘In Defence of Performance Art’[v]. Not quite Live Art, is it? Or is it? But an art nevertheless full of body, politics, contrary forms and a resistant ‘dramaturgy’ as ‘world view’. I commend to you a terrible piece of ‘Theatre’ and an exemplary piece of ‘Performance Art’ – Gomez Pena’s and Coco Fusco’s Couple in the Cage. Who resists? Who resists what? How? With Performance Art? ‘So yesterday’! With Live Art?  With ‘new’ dramaturgies eg., of the body, of the audience/spectator/witness, of participation, of the everyday, of the amateur (as opposed to the brittle righteousness and self-satisfaction of ‘the professional’ – shit, sorry …am I name calling?!), of place, site, participation, and of the event? Is Live Art the ‘body’ born of these ‘new’ dramaturgies? Born of resistance? Is it the conceptual ‘head’, now, of a series of resistances? Who needs it? Resistance Fighters. Are we?

Who else …?

Academics, Pedagogues, Grant Applicants and Funding Bodies. In other words, Art Industrialists and Knowledge Brokers (and yet aren’t industry, commerce and academic institutions precisely some of what the resistance is all about/forged in opposition to? Wait a minute. Aren’t they our friends? Don’t we make Culture together? Hang on. Are these our questions?).

Yet it’s not all about or even simply a question of ‘oppositions’, but of politics, in the foundational sense of the ‘polis’, and the problem of a polis reduced to the contestations and negotiations, questions and answers and objections, no less, of people otherwise unilaterally grouped together who don’t seem to like each other much. It is a question of how to be here, now, on our own terms, speaking and stuttering and offending and fucking up in our own languages – not those of dead artists or anyone else (except the dead philosopher Deleuze and the dead artist Flanagan, ‘cause they’re my friends). Who’s the ‘us’? Who’s the ‘who’? People. Here. Now. This loner and that family …me and you …us and them …all of the others. In all of this, who needs the name, the definition, the category of Live Art? Do Art Industrialists? – that people might be processed (oh dear, again?), returned to economy, capital and industry that ostensibly also produces ‘Culture’, all the while concealing the means of production. Do Institutionalized Knowledge Brokers need the name, the categories, the definitions of Live Art that, under the guise of ‘new and original contributions to knowledge’ in captial R- Research cultures, the mechanisms of returning dollars to Universities as investment in Research can be enacted as economies of scale? And who needs these guys? Perhaps Live Artists as Grant Applicants and Live Artists as Artist-Researchers need them and the identifier ‘Live Art’ for the same purposes? Hmmm … Excellent! K-ching, k-ching! (Call me cynical. I prefer skeptical.)

Live Art. Who needs it?

I think I mentioned Loners and Family-makers. Have you noticed there’s a lot of solo artists doing Live Art? Very suspect. Loners. Not team players. Then again, groups and collaborations abound. Who’s in the family and who’s not? Gary Winters of Lone Twin, clad inappropriately in an army surplus poncho and hiking shoes, various paraphernalia including a Norwegian hunting horn and a clipboard slung around his neck, spends much of one performance with vertical rows of lights one foot away, sweating profusely, performing a rain dance that looks like dog-paddle standing up. “This is what I do to feel a part of things”, he says. Waddya reckon, a bit whiffy? In or out? What about Tacquacore, hardcore Muslim Punk artists and their fans born of an original fiction in a novel? ‘Family’ mismatch? Mike Parr sewing his lips together in solidarity with asylum seekers. Resistant Live Art political activist? Or just a wanker? I received another SCUDD email this morning, like an exorcet into the hull of my email inbox – a press release for Daniel Ploeger’s Electrode 2011 – in which Ploeger fakes the orgasm of an anonymous subject while an anal probe connected to a muscle sensor registers the activity of Ploeger’s sphincter muscle. The performance installation forms part of Ploeger’s Doctoral research project. A dirty cousin or just a very strange man, likeable, but strange? What of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s claim that the events of 9/11 were “the greatest work of art for the entire cosmos”[vi]. 9/11 as ‘Live Art’ at the limits? Live Art, who needs it? Those having 10 Year Anniversaries – lest we forget. Is Stockhausen in? The Terrorists? Who’s in the family? Yoko Ono and her scissors? Marina Abramovic and her knives and guns? Franko B with his catheter plugs in arms for release of blood using his own body to excur, to escape from the bounds of the body? The lonely, solitary, always moving Claire Blundell Jones introducing tumbleweed into British landscapes with a leaf blower? Gob Squad? Francis Alys? Robert Long? Mother and family-maker Mierle Laderman Ukeles as self appointed Artist in Residence for the New York Sanitation Department? Before Ukeles, perhaps no-one had ever thought of the question ‘Do Sanitation Workers Need Live Art?’ It was her question, she answered it – with art, with performance, with political activism all imbricated, entangled together and continuing until this day…

Who needs Live Art? Loners and Family Makers.

Who Else?

Cheapskates and Amateurs. One reason Lone Twin use walking as their primary modus operandi in performance is because it’s cheap. Accessible. Anyone can do it. It’s free. Sarah Rodigari, walking from Melbourne to Sydney in her faux epic Strategies for Leaving and Arriving Home, understands. Anyone know Rodigari…? You see, cheapskate. Despite the extremely arduous nature of these artists’ work, none of them train. Gregg Whelan (Lone Twin) likes a good lie down when he’s not working and Rodigari once scolded me while working on a creative development for a show with “Training’s for pussies!” How unprofessional!

And then there’s Liars and Dissemblers. Live Art has acquired a reputation somehow of being more ‘authentic’ than theatre and other forms of spectacle. But anyone who has paid any attention at all to the extended family and various lineages knows, perhaps uncomfortably, that Live Art and live artists are just as adept in the art of lying as their estranged illusionist ‘others’, the ones they call names, their imagined enemies. I’m going to lean on Alan Read here[vii], dissembler that he is, ‘cause then he’ll appear to provide an ‘answer’, I get to wiggle out of it and look good by association – I’m such a schmoozer – or bad, depending on your own ‘take’ and objections (remember, they’ll never contribute anything). Read points out that “‘live’ has ‘lie’ within it” and that there’s no greater veracity in Live Art’s claims to ‘truth’ and authenticity than other forms of cultural banditry that deceive in their very capacity to construe the already fabricated world of ‘live culture’ as the (real) ‘true world’. When Live Art claims the title of authenticity, is it more deadly than the dead art it seeks to usurp? Why claim the title when ‘the true’, under this regime, might for all appearances attain little but the same status as ‘the dead’? What image do we have of ourselves that we speak so urgently of ‘truth’? Lying’s more fun, and anyway, argues Read, “the truth is the raison d’etre of the university, not the artist, and live artists in particular should feel no compunction to walk under this sign”. Friends? Enemies? Practice-as Research, anyone? Read turns to the notion of the human and “the promised” and the slippery proposition that “the lies of performance perjury performance” – and herein lies its ‘promise’. We love swearing/promising the truth (eg. in court, in the theatre, to a loved one), and have great pleasure in the pseudo secret knowledge that we will do no such thing, that ‘the ‘promise’ is always already broken, that through playing here at the interstice of truth and lies, we ‘perform promise’. The per of performance carries things through to temporary completion. A living art may convulse the deadly imaginal, political, ideological and aesthetic fields that dead artists inhabit and an alternative might just emerge: born of lies that take exception to the surface of too easily acquired truths; born of the promise of human potential and “impotential”, born even of human failures. Alan Read, Tim Etchells and Matthew Gouish (The Institute of Failure) and a plethora of others understand this major trope in Live Art and performance. What are the limits to action beyond the incumbent conventions of art and culture? What is there to discover in the relationship between “the ‘can’ of performance and the ‘cannot’ of the performer?”

Alan Read argues that what distinguishes Live Art is its exceptionality. He says, “Live Art is barely live and barely art” and is of the order, necessarily, of “exceptional acts in cultures that are constantly concealing their own conditions of production”. So, Live Art as resistant to cultures that “consume themselves” – ie., self-devouring cultures, deadening, deadly and finally dead. Read segues easily between ‘Live Art’ and ‘Performance’. Performance, he suggests, doesn’t “stand (in) for” anything else, unlike a long history of doing so by drama and theatre. It is simultaneous, commensurate with itself, here, and now, without “alibi”, no suspension of disbelief required. If it doesn’t ‘stand in for’ or point to an elsewhere, what does it do? What kind of doing is it capable of? What not? What kind of politics, asks Read (I’m squirming out of it – politics is so un-sexy), does Live Art do? He invokes and extends body discourse in suggesting that it is “auto-biographical” and “bio-political” – not ‘about’ ‘The Body’, but of the body-politic and simultaneously in exception to it. In cultural climates that would do away with exception, “the necessary conditions for Live Art to occur are the arrangement and rearrangement of resistances to conditions of dead art that would otherwise prevail”. Live Art needs Resistance Fighters. I think of a history of Live Art evolving in the UK in the shadow of Thatcher. Here, now, in the wake of the Howard years, what is the name we might give to a parallel evolution?

Who needs Live Art? I’m sick of this question. Should we otherwise say, with Read, ‘performance’? Performance enacted by Liars and Dissemblers and Those Who Make Promises.

Shit. I think my questions, and categories, and calling of names and objections are starting to leak, to signal what I would otherwise answer to the Salon question if I were to proceed sincerely, seriously … as if I was not implicated, as if I was not always and already caught up in this thing called ‘performance’ – if not Live Art – where the telling of lies in face of clear and present tyrannies may just be the means of getting at some possible and promising truths.

Who needs Live Art? Listmakers.

Escape Artists
Conscientious Objectors and No-one
Name Callers and Their Enemies
People who Don’t Mind their Questions Answered with a Question
Resistance Fighters
Art Industrialists
Institutionalized Knowledge Brokers
Live Artists as Grant Applicants
Live Artists as Artist-Researchers
Loners and Family-makers
Cheapskates and Amateurs
Liars and Dissemblers
Those Who Make Promises
Did I mention Listmakers

Now, my ‘secret’ unspeakable question (lest it become a question not of your own invention)?

‘How might we have a conversation and not a series of questions, answers and objections?’

© Barry Laing 2011 geeuphorsey@hotmail.com

It’s not easy to sell friendship: On participation and audience engagement

Some months ago LALA asked me to write down my impressions on the League Of Resonance – an ambitious live art project that occurred in Melbourne from December 2010 to April 2011. As I’m a slow writer and pedantic academic, it’s taken me a little time to settle on my response. Currently I’m writing a thesis on participation in art, so I thought it might be useful to discuss the project by relating it back to a concern I have with participatory, site-specific artworks.

Particularly I want to discuss a frustration with the lack of engagement that projects such as League of Resonance receive from audiences beyond the usual throngs of art-goers, a frustration that I know other live and participatory artists share. Despite good intentions to attract participants from the wider public, often the best efforts by artists fail.

It seems that the particular skill set of a participatory artist requires charming, cajoling, arm-twisting and coercing “ordinary” people to get involved in your project, but is this the best way to engage people in your art?

A commission

Live artists Sarah Rodigari, Jess Oliveri and Jason Maling were in residence at the intersection of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets, Melbourne from December 2010 to April 2011. Commissioned by Melbourne City Council, the artists were asked to creatively respond to the area as it was considered to have a “bad vibe”. Or to put it in City Council speak:

“The intention of the project is to appoint artists as an alternative method for Council to engage with the city night experience and explore diverse experiences and views. The artistic outcomes aim to provide a counterpoint to late night culture, and is designed to activate the space with positivity, romance and humour and to create a softer alternative to an area that is quickly gaining a reputation for the inverse.”

Sarah, Jason and Jess’s “softer alternative” manifested in the project the League of Resonance, a series of gentle and playful interventions that aimed to directly and meaningfully engage with the space and the people that move through it. As one League participant describes in her blog, “Jason and Jess explained how the project aimed to take seriously the idea of an area having a ‘bad vibe’ and their desire to investigate all the components of this area’s vibe.” With an upbeat and whimsical sensibility, the League’s website explains how they aimed to uncover “the intangible and barely perceptible” and tune into, collect and combine “the resonance of individuals: their stories, perceptions and rituals”.

One tactic they employed to encourage people to do this was to take them out on dates, a convivial strategy to collect the stories and experiences embedded in the space. Participants were sourced via word of mouth, their website and a one-page publication the League produced and distributed at the intersection, available in three editions, called This Is Townend. Up until March 18^th, anyone who had even a passing connection with the intersection were welcome to get friendly with the League. In Edition 2 of This is Townend they wrote:

“If you live, work, or pass through this area please contact us. We would like to meet you, listen to your thoughts and opinions about this place. We’ll take you out for a coffee, lunch or dinner. We’ll go for a walk, and share stories about this area. The League of Resonance is just a good old-fashioned way of trying to make friends in this crazy city.”

My date

In late February, I went on a date with the League. Although I had only the most minor association with the site -  I have caught the number 19 tram home to Brunswick and eaten a hot dog at Walker’s Donuts on occasion – Sarah Rodigari had asked me to come along as her friend and a fellow artist interested in site-specific and participatory practices.

We met one evening outside Flinders Street Station, by two of the city’s last remaining black and white chemical processing photo booths. Smelling like piss and traffic, this site also conveniently faced right on to the intersection of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets. In addition to Sarah, my date companions were Sarah’s video camera-wielding assistant, Emma Williamson, and Melbourne-based video artist, Salote Tawale. Sarah explained that it was the usual habit of the League to have singular encounters, but as Salote, Sarah and myself were already pals, she had seized the opportunity to have a “double date”.

Our date began with a choice: where to eat? Dinner would be paid for by the League, but on the condition that Salote and I limited our eating options to the immediate area surrounding the intersection, leaving us with an unappealing list of fast food outlets. We chose Pepperoni’s because, as Sarah sagely suggested, it was one of the few places where you could also get a beer.

Pepperoni’s is a place where the city’s late night drinkers go to buy slices of greasy pizza before heading home. It’s not a place you usually eat at sober. As Salote and I tucked into our eating “experiences” among some depressive, unhealthy-looking diners – Salote described our meals as something out of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – Sarah explained the rest of the night’s activities.

Pulling out an impressive display of League of Resonance-branded stationery, we were told that following our dinner we could go for a stroll around the block. During our walk we were asked to tell Sarah any associations or points of interest we may have with the space, and she would note them down on an A5 map of the area.

As mentioned, however, my experience of the area was limited and so my contributions to Sarah’s map were scant. Indeed, Salote too had little to offer beyond tales of late night pizza devouring and running for trams and trains at the intersection. So it was left up to Sarah and Jess (who joined us after our meal) to play the role of tour guides and regale us with tidbits of information they had gleaned from their research and encounters with people at the intersection.

A walk down a stretch of Elizabeth Street revealed to us an overlooked 1950s mural of clinking glasses towering above the 7-Eleven and the smallest shop in Australia – a watch repair stall where customers placed orders via a window that opened onto the street. Down alleyways off Flinders Lane we were offered the chance to go fossicking for kosher bakery treats in Glick’s dumpster bins and shown a line of chewing gum that one of the suited professionals had begun during his smoko breaks. Sarah invited us to add to the line with a piece of gum she had given us after dinner.

Walking back towards our starting point, Sarah shined a dolphin torch to help us spot rats that scurried in the open by Flinders Street Station and pointed out the glamorous Rendezvous Hotel that seemed out of place in a street with rodents and Dreams Gentleman’s Club. Opposite we were shown some underground public toilets that had been concreted over to deter a gay beat that allegedly once existed there.

After a pleasant walk around the block we found ourselves back at the photo booths. Despite contributing very little to Sarah and Jess’s research, Salote and I had still earned ourselves the chance to become members of the League of Resonance. Membership, it was explained, involved receiving our very own League membership card that detailed our personal connection to the intersection on the back. At a later date, we could attend a Swap Meet to meet other League members, collect the whole set of membership cards and exchange stories about the intersection.

Accepting the invitation, Salote and I were both asked to participate in a kind of initiation process. Firstly we listened to Jess sing a song from the Victorian Railway Institute – a men’s club with Masonic overtones who had gathered in halls above Flinders Street Station in the early 1900s – which, I supposed, was an example of a “resonance” they had found at the site. Next, we had our picture taken in the photo booth, to be printed on our membership card. Finally, we were asked to hum a tune into a voice recorder. It was explained that any tune was appropriate, so long as it was associated with what we felt was the resonance of the intersection.

This last request seemed baffling and nebulous, but taking inspiration from a nearby patch of graffiti that depicted a dinosaur with a speech bubble that said “So Lonely,” I obediently hummed the chorus of The Police’s song of the same name and had my photo taken.

It’s not easy to sell friendship

At an intersection that is characterised by a busy tram terminus and train station, a “Barnes Dance” pedestrian crossing, adult bookshops and fast food outlets, the League responded to their City of Melbourne brief by attempting to slow down the impersonal rush of human foot traffic and urging people to look, listen and engage more attentively with their surroundings. They highlighted the overlooked and made conscious our unexamined habits and routines in the area.

However, I couldn’t help feeling my date was an experience that was akin to window shopping. I wasn’t given any genuine or thought-provoking engagement with the “vibe” of the place or the people that move through it, beyond a superficial viewing of points of interest. I imagined Salote and I were like tourists who only had other tourists, Sarah and Jess, to show us around. We all lacked the insight of locals, a personal perspective outside of our experience from people who had a sustained knowledge of the space.

Please don’t get me wrong, I think the project was laudable. It opened up the space for non-object, process-based, site-specific practices to be supported as legitimate public art activities by city councils. I appreciate that it was a brave and exciting experiment that emerged and developed over time. Although there were tensions and uneasy compromises between council desires and artistic control (see Lucas Ihlein’s essay) the City of Melbourne Art and Participation program and the League of Resonance artistic team should be commended for attempting such a project.

As Lucas points out: “The working methods which underlie a project like this are not widely understood. This is hardly surprising – the artists of the League employ a set of processes which are still relatively novel additions to the toolbox of contemporary art.” As socially-engaged and participatory art of this type is arguably new and experimental, it is difficult to find an adequate criteria for measuring its success.

However, I want to begin a discussion about the League’s chosen strategy – making friends and going on dates – by observing a couple of crucial things. Firstly, the League of Resonance was a response to an agenda in the City of Melbourne’s commission, which as Lucas suggests, sought to instrumentalise art as a tool for social change at the intersection. The effect of this was, in part, to predetermine the tone of the project and prevent the League artists from enjoying complete creative autonomy. It’s likely the Council objectives that directed the project “to activate the space with positivity, romance and humour,” also obliged the League to employ a feel-good and ameliorative methodology.

Yet, is it possible that the League’s friendly and participatory model actually had the effect of excluding people? Observing the 70 members the League accrued over three months, it’s worth noting that a large proportion have been sourced from the League artists’ friends, family and interested members of the arts community. Which makes me wonder: what vibes were collected, whose resonance recorded? Is it only those who had the inclination to participate?

Connecting beyond that which we know

From my chats with Sarah, I got the impression that the League of Resonance did not have heaps of success in sourcing dates on the intersection. This might come as a surprise to LALA readers: I mean, who would turn down a free meal and the chance to chin wag with Sarah, Jess and Jason?

Talking to Sarah about the project, she described the experience of trying to involve people on the intersection as a harrowing cold-calling task that was as challenging as a Mormon’s attempt to peddle God to passers-by. In a revealing statement she claimed: “It’s not easy to sell friendship.”

Sarah explained that it was important for the League to involve people who would be meaningfully engaged and invested in the project. Although this makes sense when you require some time commitment to the artistic activities, perhaps this is a big ask in an area that has been singled out for its “bad vibe”? In a space like this there is no sense of pride in the surroundings, no desire for local connectedness. It’s a transitory point between more important destinations with little reason to linger, as is demonstrated by all the fast food that is available. As League Member no. 52, Rakesh, is quoted as saying on the back of his League card, “This is a place where people just get on with their jobs, you don’t really talk to each other here.”

I’d like to suggest then, that perhaps making friends and going on dates may not have been the best strategy to employ? To illuminate my point better I’d like to offer another example of a participatory project that struggled to attract a plurality and diversity of participants. Some years ago, I developed the project, Agents Of Proximity, for the 2008 Next Wave Festival with writer Victoria Stead. A localised, artist-run travel service based in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, Agents Of Proximity, like League Of Resonance aimed to explore urban space via the stories and experiences of the people who shared it. It was an exploration of the ways in which the rituals and mindsets associated with travel could be applied to the streets we walk down daily and the places that we think we know.

In the months leading up to the 2008 Next Wave Festival, the Agents of Proximity took people from Brunswick on travels within their own neighbourhood. These tours usually involved two participants at a time, where one person took the other to their personal sites of significance in Brunswick. We documented the encounters through a series of postcards and the production of our Brunswick Travel Guide, which we launched during Next Wave.

Our starting point was our curiosity for the area – which we both called home – and a desire to explore it in ways that moved outside the normal social circles and circuits of bars and cafes where we spent our time. We specifically wanted to engage with people and places who were not normally part of our Brunswick experience, and give agency to others to do the same. We tried to attract participants to the project through a number of ways, including beginning with people we already knew and spreading out via word of mouth, posters and flyers. However, at the end of the project Victoria and I both felt we had only marginal success in attracting participants. Victoria reflected on this in an essay that accompanied our Travel Guide:

“It’s uncertain to what extent we succeeded in what we set out to do. In trying to traverse the myriad subjective experiences of this place where we live, the experiment we initiated was an ambitious one, perhaps more so than we realised when we began. After months of tramping through our suburb searching for participants, we have not succeeded in moving as far beyond our own worlds as we had hoped to do. Negotiating points of disconnect, though, is an unavoidable part of navigating the plurality of shared space. Tensions and disjunctures are always present within such spaces, essential even …

One night, many months ago we got talking to two men at the RSL on Sydney Rd. We were putting up fliers on the lamp post near the balcony where they were standing with their beers. They wanted to know what we were doing and we started trying to explain. They were bemused, mildly intrigued, but ultimately had no interest in participating in our “wanky art shit”. They did, however, talk to us at length about their experiences of Brunswick over the span of several decades …

We would have loved to have initiated a tour led by those men, through the Brunswick they knew. But ultimately they had better things to do than indulge us in our artistic meanderings, and we couldn’t really blame them. If nothing else, the fact they didn’t participate is testament to the limitations of our own experience; our own capacity to connect beyond that which we know.”

We wanted to open up possibilities for individual people to re-view and recreate the spaces in which they move. It was a nice idea, but only for people who were interested in doing so – those people who were like-minded and interested in “wanky art shit”. As Victoria observed, the barriers to human connection run deeper than the lack of opportunities to connect: “They are cultural, social, linguistic, emotional, aesthetic. Some of them are imposed; others are created and maintained through choice.”

Documenting disconnect

Perhaps, if the success of projects such as League Of Resonance and Agents of Proximity is to be judged on the participation of an extensive number and range of people, it could be argued that more time, or perhaps by more effective cajoling, would produce a ‘better’ work. Spending extra time in the site talking with the people who live, work and play there, may allow the trust and interest of a diverse range of participants to be gained. It could be argued too, that a project’s design and methodology should be more attuned and relevant to the targeted site.

However, I think the more interesting point here is that as live artists (as well as funding bodies and arts organisations) we shouldn’t assume that an open call-out for participation automatically results in inclusiveness, openness or an equal representation of a site or community. Often these methodologies attract a certain type of person – a like-minded coterie of people who have a common interest in art and social engagement. The selection and creation of a group of participants necessarily involves an inability to connect and inadvertent exclusion. This is as much a part of a participatory work as its moments of surprising engagement.

The concern is that many participatory projects only structure into the work the experience of connecting. They document just those people who were comfortable and eager to participate – and then attempt to claim that these contributions are a sufficient representation of a “vibe” or area. But what does not rate a mention are the points of disconnect – which are, arguably, as (if not more) thought-provoking and unpredictable as the moments of engagement the work attempts to facilitate. Surely it is these dead ends and failed moments of connection that tell you a more complex and interesting story about a place?

The task of involving people in our work is a worthy one. Perhaps we just need to engage people with greater sophistication and thematise these problems in the work – allowing for disconnection, fragmentation, friction and lack of interest to have an impact on the outcome.

Amy Spiers.

We Are Working

In my own musings that happened after the project Visible City in Melbourne in 2010, I have begun to wonder about the role of culture in Australia. There is a pretty standard cliche that is spoken about how ‘in Europe the society values the arts more’. I have to say that I don’t know this per se as I have not spent enough time there to really get below the surface of this idea.

I have spent some time in Asia and quite recently as well. The thing that strikes me again and again about being in Taiwan or China or Indonesia is that ‘culture’ is not something that is separated from the ‘normal’ goings on of the people, it is embedded deep within the fabric of day to day life. Going to temple, or eating from a street hawker, giving offerings or a procession of large puppets down a street – all of these things just happen, there is no build up to it, there is no ‘beginning or ending’.

Whilst in discussion with theatre and festival maker Ian Pidd I realised that he has just completed a thesis on the same sort of ideas. In the thesis he discusses the role of performance in Javanese life especially in Jogyakarta where he has made works with Australian company Snuff Puppets.

Here he has kindly allowed me to reproduce part of his thesis;

Architecture and the Neighbours
Physically we worked within the compound at YBK, a sprawling village consisting of three Pandopos (marble or concrete based theatres, open on three sides with a large ornate roof held up by a series of columns that have the effect of dividing the performance space for the audience area), a recording studio, large kitchen and eating area, administration block and dormitory housing for 40 people.

This entire centre was taken over by the PPP (People’s Puppet Process) process. On any given creating/rehearsal day, one Pandopo was being used for rehearsal, one had a team of people building puppets, props and set pieces and the other housed YBK’s magnificent collection of Gamelan instruments and was used by the musicians to write and rehearse the music.

It is important to understand that the compound sits within a larger village within Yogyakarta. Like many arts centres in Indonesia the YBK centre is essentially public space. On any given day the paths and open areas of the compound are traversed by hundreds of local residents. To set the scene, this might include men walking to the mosque; an old woman walking up the hill and back each day to find bundles of leaves for a small herd of goats that are penned just behind the largest central Pandopo; mothers and grandmothers following young children around feeding them nasi ayam; small knots of men sitting, smoking, drinking sweet tea; people with mobile food stalls strolling by ringing bells to call their customers. On one occasion a man sets up his knife sharpening service by the side of the theatre; all aspects of the PPP creative process – from morning warm-up, devising exercises, rehearsal, choreographic sessions, puppet design, script meetings, coffee breaks, creative squabbles – take place in public and become part of a larger conversation within the community.

The informal, casual audience, on the whole, quietly observed our activity over the course of the day. At times, especially when we began to rehearse larger blocks of the work, having this audience gave the process something closer to an actual performance. One sensed the performer’s energy levels rise. On occasion I noticed this casual audience engage members of the team in discussions about particular aspects of the play. This interaction does not just take place at the YBK. On occasion when out having a late dinner at a food stall some distance away from the Centre someone asked if we were the Australians who are preparing the Ramayana up the road and the conversation that followed made it clear that there was some detail in our work that has sparked particular interest: how have we come to be working in Yogya? Why is there such a mix of students and adults? Even a quite specific question about the casting of a woman in the role of Hanuman. YBK’s neighbours are interested and involved in what is going on in the creation of this work. It’s a subtle involvement, but nonetheless, real.

What is notable is the ease with which this rolling collaboration takes place. In no time at all our Indonesian collaborators have struck up friendships within the larger village – sharing cigarettes, cuddling babies, admiring goats, visiting the local mosques (there are four or five within easy walking distance – the din of the speakers calling the faithful to prayers five times a day also amplifies the fact that we are embedded in the village.) In part, of course, this has come about because this village has had artists creating work within it for 40 years. However, much more importantly is the physical environment itself. The compound is set up in such a way as to encourage the flow of human traffic. The Pandopos are spaces from which it is impossible to exclude the outside world. Local residents would have to go out of their way not to participate in the creative process on some level. Even the local dogs add their appreciation to the rehearsal, barking especially loudly during the practicing of the fights.

As the days pass our casual collaborators come and go. They do not wait for scenes to finish; they approach the rehearsal Pandopo from every direction and when they do stay and watch, settle anywhere within a 280 degree radius of the space, choosing to sit up close (indeed on occasion even sitting on the edge of the marble stage itself). This public collaboration, and the way that it is physically enabled by the architecture of the buildings and the placement of the building within the village system, adds to the sense (of it being a) being a manifestation of the community, of it having no front or back, of it not having an “opening night,” of the lack of emphasis on beginning and endings. These elements, I should emphasise, do not lessen the power of the theatre, but rather enhance it, making the form more approachable, more part of every day, more physically present, less concerned with wishing to find its own special place in space and time.

For me this has dovetailed into some of my own thoughts about why it is I try to make work outside of traditional structures and in non traditional spaces.

Recently I was working with Liesel Zink,  an emerging choreographer in Brisbane who was rehearsing a work that will take place on the streets of Melbourne in 2012. While she was rehearsing I realised that at first the general public in the park looked and would point and comment to each other, but eventually they would stop looking and return to their conversation and sandwiches. Somehow she and her dancers had become a part of the fabric of the park. When someone came up to her and asked her what she was doing, she said ‘We are working’.

I like the simplicity of this. We are working.

As I said at a talk at Perc Tucker Gallery in Townsville recently;

The larger picture for me is that any sort of deviation from the norm, any sort of cultural, creative, ritual or curious practice in public space can help to change the way we see these places but more importantly that the general public can see that cultural practice is important, that it is interesting and that it is vital to who we are as people.

Martyn Coutts.

(Ian Pidd is a Theatre maker, Festival Director and creator of The Village.)

Dear Audience,

Dear theatre audience,
This is it. I am standing backstage. Between me and you is a door, slightly ajar. When I hear my name announced I will walk through this door, across the stage and into the spotlight. I will strut and I will pose (as best as I can). I will meet your gaze and make you complicit in this product of
fiction. 
I have just extinguished my final cigarette. I think I could have timed it a little better as there are still a couple of moments before I am introduced and I am without a ritual to regulate myself. It only takes a moment for my fears to be incensed as to how silly this is and how it could all go so horribly wrong. To comfort this fear I pace back and forth in a straight line and sing a song under my breath, The Advertʼs One Chord Wonders. Like the expression of a territorial assemblage observed by Deluze and Guitarri, I take shelter in these actions and orient myself with them. 
I wonder what we’ll play for you tonight.
Something heavy or something light.
Something to set your soul alight.
I wonder how we’ll answer when you say.
“We don’t like you – go away”
“Come back when you’ve learned to play”
I wonder what we’ll do when things go wrong.
When we look up and the audience has gone.
Will we feel a little bit obscure.
Think “we’re not needed here”
The song helps. But I have just have just heard my name and your applause. The circle which the song drew around me has now opened and exposed its fragile centre. Me. I am to go out there.
Where you are now. If this does go wrong and it comes down to a fight, my colleagues and I donʼt stand a chance. You out number us about thirty-to-one. Frank could probably hold his own for a bit. Natalie too. Sime and Dara though can hide under the cloaks of their dramaturgical and design roles and avoid implication. Their work is done. As was ours, until this moment. Now a new job begins: the opening up of that same circle that these theatre rituals assemble and bring you into
the work. For you are important to us. It is for you. All of it. 
This will not be virtuous or pedagogical. This is about opening up spaces. It will expose the fragile centre of this moment. Where territories, identities and narratives collide. It could fail miserably. It could be awkward. But wont it be exciting finding out? 
This is not an investigation of x, an exploration of y or a fucking with of z. It is not about a subject. It is the subject. It is a form and a structure first. It is an event. Do not look for its meaning. Look for its function. 
Let us let go of virtuosity, stability and our compulsive modernity and just be together. For who we really are. Players of a game where we can all take control. We will let you know the rules. But feel free to break them. There will be no winners or losers in this game. Just players. 
Here I go. This is it. 
See you out there. Not from the stage, but on the stage.
Much love, peace and understanding,
Malcolm. x

Malcolm Whittaker is a young man from Sydney who works as an interdisciplinary artist. He does this in solo
pursuits, as a member of performance group Team MESS and in other collaborations with artists and non- artists. He canʼt be sure why he does this. But it feels right. Most of the time. http://malcolmwhittaker.com
This Is It is a performed press-conference by Team MESS for a non-existent new film. It will be presented at at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in July and Arts House, Melbourne in August this year.
http:// teammess.com.au

Inbetweeness

lala asked Melbourne based (via New Zealand) artist Jason Maling to explain just what he meant by Inbetweeness in terms of his practice.

In-betweeness
I was talking about love the other day. It was with a stranger. We had veered into the territory via a discussion about cutting the fat.
We spoke about defrauding someone, about not giving over. Do we demand a sign of love before we surrender? Without a sign, do we remain calculated and reserved? She wanted to be carried beyond all calculation, to arrive somewhere having never considered the journey.
I thought about this conversation a lot afterwards and I believe it has something to do with art.
The conversation took place in a small office on the second floor of a convent. She was there because a friend had told her to come. She did not know who I was or what I did, but she was there anyway. I was there because she had asked me.
It sounds contrived and from my point of view it was. What isn’t contrived is why I needed it to be that way.
It has occurred to me lately that I am no longer prepared to give myself away. I want a little of the big C(ommitment) before I subject myself to the big A (rt).
At what point did I become so demanding?
As an undergraduate painting student in New Zealand I was indoctrinated with modernist mythology. The artist functioned on the periphery of society, sending cryptic dispatches from frontier towns of the imagination. The act of presentation was sacred and a resolute nonchalance to audience dialogue was the preferred pose.
I tried very hard to be a believer. We joked about taking our vows with a prideful zeal and submitting to a life of impoverished isolation. I did my time in the studio and began developing a finely distorted vision of my own self-importance. I had gallery shows with things that people looked at but increasingly I found myself hanging around watching how people engaged with the work.
I made notes but kept my distance.
Frustration at a lack of direct feedback was too articulate a description for my naiveté at the time but I can remember feeling severely contained by a model that others found endlessly liberating.
I flirted with performance, and I did feel a little bit closer. The thrill of the live moment made me feel special but my audience was still over there somewhere, boxed up, and named.
Back in the studio I began nullifying my self-importance with banal repetitive tasks and arbitrary reasoning. My days became exercises in accidental aesthetics and punitive process. Why couldn’t just ‘doing’ be enough?
My rules weren’t playful they were belligerent. I demanded meaning, as if by sheer persistence I could elevate private action to social commentary. It made complete sense to me that if people were going to ‘get’ what I was doing they had to do it too.
A lack of willing ‘players’ as I so benignly called them simply reinforced my perception of a culturally ingrained passivity. A privilege of presentation over process.
I rationalised the conceptual sadism of my ‘games’ through my own subjugation – “look I’m going through it just like you”. I wanted people to give over completely. Sure, I was functioning in the same system but there was mostly just using and not much listening.
A particular schizophrenia had begun to set in. On the one hand I wanted an elegance of composition born of sensitivity to the potential nuances and infinitely variable elements within a system. On the other I longed for complete immersive disregard.
The notion that a meaningful live exchange might be something a lot more subtle and complex took a while to filter through.
Attempting to position the work somewhere between theatre and the visual arts began to feel like an excruciating family function.
On one side were the visual artists, all post-situationist ideologues and 70s conceptualists. They were a sulky lot, totally prepared to get naked and dirty. They put on records nobody liked and stared down any objections. On the other side of the family were the theatre makers. This crew were charming but I was never sure what was for real especially when they were telling me stories about really real reality.
Gallery audiences frowned at humour, thought far to hard about everything and kept their distance. Theatre audiences expected a show, obsessed about the text and always needed to be told what to do.
I was trying too hard to please disinterested parents. So I moved out, indignant about replacing a viewing box with some sort of magic circle of free play.
Of course nothing smells more like art than the anonymous public anomaly, especially if it has matching uniforms.
The idea that we can have unmediated artistic encounters maybe a pretension but it is often our most incidental interactions that relate us directly to our world.
Finding oneself within a set of conditions that become artistically meaningful without a set of prior expectations or contextual associations can be disorientating. The sensation of having fallen into something can leave us feeling foolish and a little manipulated. But it is precisely this mental state that becomes the platform of exchange. The tricky thing is that the artist needs to fall in there too.
I was looking for a mutual space that was fluid, dynamic and responsive with a shared sense of vulnerability. It needed to be both presentation and process at the same time and it wasn’t necessary to be aware of ‘the work” or even consider it art.
It’s messy and complicated. It’s not you it’s me. Didn’t Saul Bellow say any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately?
It’s an in-between space. Somewhere we are happy to be lost.
Having spent years making claims for my practice in the margins of visual art and theatre funding categories. I now find myself in the curious position of arguing its Inter, Hybrid, Community, or New Media worthiness. In-betweeness has become a category and categories require definition, hence the evolution of terms like participation, agency, and interactivity. These words outline an interdependent relationship between the artist, the work and for want of a better term, the audience. But what if by trying desperately to acknowledge and define in-betweeness we are making it harder for it to exist? Like too much personal information on a dating website.
The nature of being in-between requires us to step away from the edges that define it as one thing or another. The fear is that we no longer know where we are yet that fear is vital for the development of new forms of artistic exchange.
I believe many of my contemporaries would argue that their work is determined by the conceptual necessities of generating this mysterious in-between space. They are tired of audience relationships that feel like one night stands. Forgive us if we have evolved some convoluted strategies for falling in love.
Gifts, games, tricks on trains, everybody hates audience participation yet we still love to play. Does creating an in-between space have something to do with how we enter it and negotiate a relationship rather than predetermining it with roles?
In the Japanese martial art of Aikido there is the notion of blending. The energy of an attack is not countered it is utilized. For an Aikido practitioner to successfully execute a technique they must receive a committed attack. An attack is the willing gift of energy that allows both practitioner and attacker to gain an understanding through mutual movement. If there is no energy given there can be no blending. If that energy is hesitant or doubtful the practitioner has nothing from which to generate the movement and the art becomes meaningless.
So yes I am demanding. Perhaps I need to be.
If I’m going to be in this space I need you here with me and if it’s going to matter it’s got to be true love.

Jason Maling is a Melbourne based artist currently engaged in a three year process as The Vorticist.
www.thevorticist.com