Thinking of going to MONA FOMA in January? Well you might also like to catch Touchy Feely.
Touchy Feely will be five days from January 25 to 29 packed full of artist-led talks, workshops, performances and presentations held at Inflight ARI, Hobart, Tasmania. Curated by Amy Spiers and Pip Stafford, it will bring together a number of interstate and Tasmanian artists – including Lara Thoms, Liz Dunn, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sally Rees, Paula Silva, Judith Abell, Jason James and Elizabeth Woods – to discuss central issues facing socially engaged, participatory and relational artists today.
Why Hobart?
In recent years Hobart has been the base for a series of intriguing and exciting projects of a relational, socially engaged and live art nature. Recent examples include David Cross’ Iteration:Again and Paula Silva’s “artist-run” CWA branch. For this reason, it seems timely and appropriate to gather together artists in Hobart who are interested in participation and social engagement to meet and exchange ideas, express misgivings about our field and engage in hearty and passionate debate.
Why the theme?
Touchy Feely is organised around a central question: Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental? As the instigator of this project, I raise this question because “sentimental” and “comfortable” have been pejorative terms used to challenge art I have made, as well as work by artists I like. I have begun to take these criticisms seriously.
Indeed, in recent decades there has been a “social turn” in contemporary art, here in Australia and internationally. This turn is characterised by art projects that emphasise participation, dialogue and community engagement to activate the public. It has given rise to an optimistic notion that art can be marshaled to tackle wider social issues and create emancipatory social relations. These practices take a variety of forms, some more politically overt than others, however what they all have in common is that they are artistic attempts to offer new social models of being and living together.
In an effort to re-humanise and re-connect a society atomized and alienated by capitalism, increasingly artists are adopting socially ameliorative strategies. But has this resulted in a sentimental and friendly artistic impulse, that is at the expense of complexity and criticality?
In response to these concerns Touchy Feely will seek to address the following questions:
Should the “skill set” of art be instrumentalised to make a better world?
Is there a role for hope, compassion and optimism in art, without having to take an evangelical or moralistic position?
In our current situation, is it actually politically irresponsible to creatively express despair, unease and tension?
Is contemporary art marked by a facile cynicism, heartlessness and nihilism?
Or is relational and socially engaged art in Australia too sentimental, ethical and uncritical?
If you can’t make it to Hobart, you can still follow the discussions on our blog: touchyfeelyhobart.tumblr.com. We will regularly post updates and videos of talks during the event.
If you’d like more information or wish to contribute something remotely send an email to amyspiers@gmail.com.
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 18th, 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.
At the recent LIVEWORKS at Performance Space, I interviewed Roarawar Feartata (Benjamin Cittadini and Craig Peade) from Melbourne, who were there developing a work I Luv Amanda Crowe 4 eva.
Here is a very small portion of that interview, covering a number of previous works that happened in Dandenong and Frankston, which are outer suburbs of Melbourne;
MC – Tell me about the works you did in the suburbs?
BC – In Dandenong , it was almost a year spent out there doing things
MC – Just off your own bat?
BC – No we got some money I was doing a masters…
MC – At VU (Victoria University, Melbourne)?
BC – No at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in Public Art funnily enough but I already had…
MC – What’s that course like?
CP – Shite
BC – I didn’t even realise public art was visual art
CP – It’s ‘art in public spaces’
BC – Basically just design and architecture and visual artists who want to make money, they do art in public spaces, you know giant sculpture things, but I was amazed there was no performance art. I couldn’t believe it but um but I was going to do this stuff in Dandenong, anyway I started doing stuff out there, We had done stuff in Frankston before that and we started using ‘surveying processes’ on the street – we had a complaints table , we just took complaints, well Craig did in Frankston on his own.
MC – Were they good complaints?
CP – Well you get good um
MC – Did people think it was part of the council?
CP – Some people did yeah, and then you get conspiratorial nutjobs you don’t know what their past is, who are absolutely paranoid , what was that guy? That guy was South American? We didn’t know what his relationship with government agencies was, he had a problem with everything, you know the cosmology of the universe….
MC- hahahaha
CP – It’s a beautiful moment it starts getting…
BC – The point of engagement for the complaints is that we are taking complaints, they are like “whats this for?” you go – “nothing, we are just taking complaints do you have a complaint?” And then the decision gets made (in their mind) do I want to or not? And the majority of the time they are like ‘fuck it, I’m happy, any opportunity I get!’
MC – To have a complaint
BC – To have a complaint
MC- It’s a very Australian thing
BC – But then you also – it frees it , and then you might actually learn something but that’s something we did with our surveying as well , the design of surveys – fairly passive questions you do a lot of research about the place, what the issues are there , you try and ask the next question that never gets asked on the survey, you know or you try and jump ahead and use the whole survey process…
Cp – It’s a totally open process…
MC – For the purpose of being there, for ‘opening a space for people to…’
BC – Purpose of engagement – whats this for? , just for us and you to talk and you do a survey and you create this space once or twice over a few days and you start creating your own thing and people get used to your traffic…
CP – even enjoy it,
BC – Then you set up a complaints table and they come back for more , you use these things, you know because we were working for the council and we made it quite clear we are not going to give you anything but still in the back of their mind they (the council) are thinking – oh we might just get something because we don’t know what the public think, we ask them a million surveys a year and we still don’t know what they think.
So you sift through the mountain of material and you can find questions like How often do you think about God? cos we had gone to a there was a interfaith meeting in Dandenong, there are a lot of cultures in Dandenong we went along it was quite tense we were quite struck about this thing so we only gave them a few choices on the survey
[polldaddy poll=4350720]
One person answered OFTEN almost every single other person unflinching, almost deriding looking at us going ALL THE TIME
You know by the end of the day right we are losers for one you know because in my mind there were four choices but there was never going to be four there was only ever really one choice ALL THE TIME – everyone around you was thinking and talking about God
MC- That’s amazing
BC – Pass that on to council and go ‘you want to know you want to provide for something, here you go – GOD!’
CP – Transcendental hub
BC – Yeah its not a transport hub the community needs it’s a Transcendental hub for fucks sake
MC – hahahaha
BC – Let’s think big here lets stop fucking around
CP – What was the other question? Tying into that about If you could be in anywhere now you could be in Dandenong, somewhere else (another city) or Heaven and the majority of ppl wanted to be in heaven. I found that deeply disturbing because that meant, kind of, dead.
MC – Hahahahhaa
CP – Not to say that was about Dandenong it was just about
MC – I would rather be dead than in Dandenong
CP – I want to be in heaven
BC – That was my moment, from that we took our point of departure ok well lets work from this point that everyone thinks about God all the time, thats where we went with our next thing. We did a book of prayer. I just put suggestion boxes in the library with little dockets saying write a prayer down, donate a prayer we are going to make a book, do it anonymously , I didn’t really know or think what was going to happen, but they were prayer machines! stuffing the box with very few jokes most of them were…
MC – From all faiths?
BC – Yeah of course some of them disturbingly honest which is what you were going to get – luckily they were anonymous.
MC – So you made a prayer book,
BC – Yes and we got them made and gave them away for free, put stacks of them in the library so people could take them with photos I had been taking everytime I went out there.
Dandenong was being flattened and rebuilt. Sorry – ‘renewed’. So I was trying to document all the shit that was there. Trying to give the council a picture of what Dandenong is – it may not be the kind of picture you want to see or have projected, but it is compelling as any other.
We also created a performance intervention where we wanted to do our own ritualised act of the place that had given us this opportunity and also just provoke it a bit putting ritual fair and square on the street even if it wasn’t a specific ritual it was alluding to something other – so we walked on our knees from Dandenong station to the plaza we had bells we were doing some things prostrating ourselves in order to show that the body creates space not just architecture all these things that are part of what which is what doing performance is all about, body creates space, you can lie down anywhere and it does that…
MC – What was the response?
BC – Well it was amazing, it wasn’t lots of people flocking to us but you had these few engagements where people were going what are you doing? So enthralled by it but wanting it to be for a specific faith “if this was Christian, I would call all of my friends now” that’s what one guy said which I was almost tempted to go “okay”
MC – hehehe
CP – Then there was also you know “what are you fucking doing? My dog shits on that footpath” because we were on our knees and had been for an hour and they were cut up and shredded…
BC – And also there were some boys on BMX’s who rode up and said “hey what are you doing”, “oh you know doing this stuff” and we had been going for an hour and we were on our knees and they were all torn and stuff and we were carrying bells and everything and they went “ok cool, see you later” and that was sweet, I love that! Just take it in, let it go, let it be what it is…
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