Category: Writing

Posts which have some amount of my own writing included.

CREATIVE JOURNAL—Mujeres Creando—Art and Political Activism

In Lab last week I was quite negative about the Bolivian feminist performance/action group Mujeres Creando1, mainly with respect to their relevance and effectiveness, but also with their translatability to the present state of affairs in Europe and particularly Britain.

This reaction was sparked by an anecdote about their presence at a conference last year where they performed and talked about their work. Apparently their presentation was greeted with a degree of scepticism by the audience as to it’s effectiveness when taken out of the Bolivian (or South American) context. The way the response was described, the audience were put off by the group’s less than academic style (given the context within which they were presenting), and the methods proposed as being those which Britain had seen from activist groups in the 80’s and 90’s and which had proved to have had little effect on politics and society in general.

After this we watched a video of one of Mujeres Creando’s performances in Bolivia. It took place in a public square, with a woman throwing pots of red paint (possibly blood) over the floor while haranguing the assembled crowd. Another member of the group, gaudily dressed as a caricature of someone from the upper-middle-classes (I think). The performance leads to the involvement of the police, performing a predictably heavy-handed eviction and arrest of the troupe. Much struggling and screaming ensues.

And here lies a problem with all works, it depends for it’s immediate effectiveness—it’s affectiveness?—on some knowledge of the context on the part of the viewer. Speaking personally, for this work I have only the vaguest idea about the background in Bolivia, about the treatment of female and/or gay members of their society. So my first contact with the piece lacks the necessary information for me to make anything of it (and given that I do not speak Spanish, I cannot gather anything from the dialogue), and I am hence only able to interpret formal aspects of the show, and relate what I am seeing to similar events I am aware of.

Is this a surmountable problem? In the context of the performance itself, is it a problem in the first place? The Performance only loses it’s context—it’s meaning—through the recording, so when performed I assume the piece works for it’s audience, and only by being mediated does it fail (at least on that front).

So what can be done to regain that context, if that’s all that’s necessary to make the piece work? At a very basic level, the video would need to include a lot of extra information to situate to performance within the social and political milieu, and this information would need to be tailored to a certain extent to the particular audience viewing the piece.

So what can be said about the reaction of the English audience to their work? Many will have no direct knowledge of experience of the situation in Bolivia, thus losing any possibility of an empathetic reaction. The performers at the conference may be able to engender an affective reaction through their engagement with the issues and ability to communicate with their audience.

So is this particular (lack of) reaction just apathy or a reasonable suspicion of this type of activism? Has performance of this type lost it’s effectiveness in Britain?

And what about it’s status as art? Is that relevant anymore? Does being classed as art neuter the work’s political aspirations? Again, does ‘art’ give the work some caché in Bolivia that is lacking in Britain? Have the British become inured to art? Is art not the place to make any kind of statement, if you want that statement to be taken seriously? Has the avant-garde tradition of épater le bourgeois been emasculated?

It’s very difficult for me to relate to what is undoubtedly a very serious situation in Bolivia. Using performance art to address it leaves me with conflicting emotions – on the one hand I can see that in it’s place it could have been effective; on the other I am repelled by the methods that seem to me to be embarrassingly ineffective. But of course, I am only thinking of them in relation to myself, one person’s reaction. Just because I do not react well, does not prevent the work from being effective with other people. I feel bad for being so negative now. I was being very limited in my thinking. I should ask myself what I would do in this situation.

  1. Mujeres Creando

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BOOKS—About books and potentiality

My partner asked me about my obsession with books tonight, and perhaps it bears some explanation.

Books, for me, are not just about their content, their words and the knowledge that can be gained form those words.

They are much more about their potential.

I love buying books. But I am well aware that I may never read all of them – I expect it would be impossible to do so. However, to see them all together makes me feel encouraged, I could possibly read them all. I am genuinely interested in the author’s works, otherwise I would not buy the books, but it’s enough perhaps to own the book, not to actually read it.

Hence it’s the effect of the book’s structure to create the space for potential. The physical make-up, the parts of the text – all treated as objects holding meaning beyond their meaning.

Each book is precious as an object, but—at a certain level—it is also equivalent and replaceable by every other book.

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EXHIBITION—Tino Sehgal—This Success—ICA, London

I missed the previous two installments of this, the final part of a trilogy of works by Tino Sehgal. The piece is called—at least for the day I went to see it—This Success (2007), but the next time I visit it may be called This Failure. I’m not sure what criteria are being used to judge whether it’s a success or a failure that particular day.

The piece takes place in the main room at the ICA, and when you enter you’re presented with various groups of children generally doing what children do, i.e. running around, playing, talking and shouting. Immediately you’re approached by a small group of children and one by one they announce:

Hello, my name is —, and I think this show is a success.

before returning to their games.

In addition to the children, there seemed to be a small group of adult supervisors plus some other people who may have been other visitors to the show, talking with the children.

We went through the room to the exit at the other end, and found that the upstairs galleries were all closed. A very helpful invigilator let us know that the room we’d just passed through was the full extent of the exhibition – he also gave us a potted summary of the history of the pieces which I’ll expand on here. I missed the previous works, so I’ve quoted others for accounts of the events.

In 2005 Tino presented This objective of that object (2004) – here’s an account from Art in America at the time:

When I entered the gallery, two other visitors were sitting near the entrance, and as the interpreters’ voices began to rise, one of them started to interject a question, at which point the actors excitedly exclaimed “we have a question, we have a question.” The visitor, who apparently knew “how to play,” asked, “what do you think of Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution?,” prompting an interpreter to knowingly (perhaps too knowingly) expound on the philosopher’s treatise, which somehow led to musings on music, and back to the group’s initial misunderstanding of “creative evolution” as “creative revolution.” At the end of one long digression, the group simultaneously leaned back on their heels, let out a whoop and bounced around the space, pogo-like, changing positions with each other. It was utterly silly. (Cash, 2005)

The next piece–This Progress—took place in 2006 and consisted of a series of conversations with progressively ageing ‘performers’, starting with a child and ending with a 70-year-old. The Independent newspaper judged the piece to be “. . . both condescending and emotionally directive and implies the superiority of the artist, while actually being cod philosophy. . . . lacking in real intellectual or metaphoric content . . .” (Hubbard, 2006)

My experience of the latest piece, the last in this ‘series’, proved to be underwhelming in comparison to these accounts of the earlier pieces. I’m not a great chatter, especially with children. The invigilator mentioned earlier encouraged us to interact a bit, but I didn’t feel comfortable trying to strike up a conversation with them.

However, beyond my own experience, it also has to be judged as a completion or resolution piece, given its place at the end of the series of three works produced for the ICA.

The long-term aspect of the series is particularly significant, I think, and leads to questions like: were the formats of all the pieces decided in advance? did the reactions to the previous pieces affect later works? if so, it would obviously be interesting to know how, as this would cast light on the nature and meaning of them as well as on Tino’s work process.

The works seems to draw on aspects of institutional critique in its reflexive posing of aspects of the reception of the work back onto the audience. What are we thinking as we look at art? What if the art just asks us the same questions back at us?

All artworks implicitly give us the tools with which to judge them. They position themselves in a space of meanings, in relation to all other objects or artworks that we know of, providing methods by which we make our meanings from them.

Tino’s work seems to work on a similar level to Joseph Kosuth’s definition works, where there is an attempt to investigate the structures society uses to present knowledge and create meanings. Tino’s work uses the medium of conversation to present his meanings, thus fitting into the more recent conception of a relational aesthetic (Bourriaud, 2002) but also as part of an attempt to problematise the transmission of meaning, and hence the nature of the author’s rôle, a subject that could be fruitfully explored in relation to the post-structuralist writings of Foucault and Barthes.

I’ll pursue this line of thought in an essay I’m writing for my course. This is due for completion on the 1 May 2007, so I should be able to post it here soon after.

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