Anoche (2012) two-channel video, 7min.

Quodlibet (Bellas Artes)

Exhibition at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

April 21- June14, 2012

opening April 20th, 7pm

http://www.palacio.bellasartes.gob.mx/index.php/cartelera/mpba

Quodlibet (Bellas Artes) takes on the history of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico’s foremost exhibition and performing arts center. Opened in 1934 after decades of construction and reflecting a variety of styles as a result of the hiatus created by the Mexican Revolution, the Palacio is a site charged with a complex past, having serving as stage for the most prominent figures of Mexican art as well as internationally. Helguera’s exhibition, a result of extensive research of Bellas Artes archives, includes the incorporation of objects from the theater’s little known and yet vast warehouses of Opera, Dance and Theater, housing objects from decades of past productions.

Ida de forma ( 2012). From the series "Album Histórico". acrylic and digital printing on canvas, 36"x52"

Incorporating musical composition formats, scriptwriting, and narrative pedagogical approaches into the gallery space, the exhibition consists in  a deliberately tendentious selection of several known and obscure anecdotes of this site and has made a narrative patchwork of them through the works in the show.  The term quodlibet, which refers to a musical composition that takes form with various melodies, refers to the idea that the construction of a nation’s cultural identity is dependent of physical stages where to enact it, and this process, always complex and prone to accidents, is made as much through canonization of artists and  works as through misunderstandings, misenterpretations and omissions, thus building a selective history that before we know it, becomes official. Quodlibet functions as an exercise in composition, mixing elements from official and personal histories, as an interpretive project that uses this building not only as a container but as performer of its own history.

Video still from "Anoche" (2012), two channel video, 7min.

Desarrollado como proyecto específico para el Palacio de Bellas Artes, Quodlibet reflexiona sobre la forma en que la identidad artística de una nación se va proyectando en espacios físicos, eventos, y obras artísticas concretas.  El proyecto parte de la historia del Palacio de Bellas Artes y de su peculiar significado para la historia cultural de México. Este recinto ha sido, por espacio de ocho décadas, un contenedor y escenario monumental de un sinfín de eventos, exposiciones, espectáculos y episodios a veces exhaustivamente documentados y en otras ocasiones totalmente perdidos o solo existentes como breves  pies de nota o historia oral. La exposición hace una selección deliberadamente tendenciosa  tanto de los capítulos conocidos como de las anécdotas mínimas del Palacio para efectuar un engranaje narrativo a través de instalaciones, video, pintura y obra en papel.

still from "Anoche" (2012), two-channel video installation, 7min.

En su investigación, Helguera ha hecho uso de los archivos existentes del Palacio así como de los objetos procedentes de las bodegas de las compañías de danza, teatro y ópera, todos ellos cargados de la historia de los espectáculos de donde proceden.   Quodlibet (término que se refiere a una composición musical que se compone de muchas melodías conocidas) alude al hecho de que, en palabras del artista, “la identidad cultural de una nación requiere de  escenarios físicos para irse construyendo, y este proceso, siempre accidentado y complejo, está constituido tanto de canonizaciones de artistas y obras como de malentendidos de lectura de nuestra historia, que incluyen el rescatar y eliminar fragmentos, rehaciendo cada vez el pasado con nuestra memoria selectiva.”  La presente muestra funciona tanto como un ejercicio de composición que mezcla elementos provenientes de la historia oficial y personal, sino como proyecto interpretativo, utilizando a este edificio mismo no solo como contenedor de historia sino como instrumento narrativo.

Education for Socially Engaged Art is the first “Materials and Techniques” book for the emerging field of social practice. Written with a pragmatic, hands-on approach for university-level readers and those interested in real-life application of the theories and ideas around socially engaged art. The book, emphasizing the use of pedagogical strategies to address issues around social practice, addresses topics such as documentation, community engagement, dialogue and conversation, amongst many others.

The book was published by Jorge Pinto Books in 2011 and can be acquired online.

An interview on the subject can be found here:

http://www.artpractical.com/feature/interview_with_pablo_helguera/

–

“For too long Social Practice has been the notoriously flimsy flipside of market-based contemporary art: a world of hand-wringing practitioners easily satisfied with the feeling of ‘doing good’ in a community, and unaware that their quasi-activist, anti-formalist positions in fact have a long artistic heritage and can be critically dissected using the tools of art and theatre history. Helguera’s spunky primer promises to offer a much-needed critical compass for those adrift in the expanded social field.” -

—Claire Bishop, Professor of Contemporary Art and Exhibition History, CUNY, and author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

“This is an extremely timely and thoughtful reference book. Drawn from empirical and extensive experience and research, it provides a curriculum and framework for thinking about the complexity of socially engaged practices. Locating the methodologies of this work in between disciplines, Helguera draws on histories of performance, pedagogy, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, community and public practices. Rather than propose a system he exposes the temporalities necessary to make these situations possible and resonant. This is a tool that will allow us to consider the difficulties of making socially engaged art and move closer to finding a language through which we can represent and discuss its impact.”

—Sally Tallant, Artistic Director, Liverpool Biennial

“Helguera has produced a highly readable book that absolutely needs to be in the back pocket of anyone interested in teaching or learning about socially engaged art”

—Tom Finkelpearl, Director of the Queens Museum, New York, and author of Dialogues in Public Art

Excerpt

[From the chapter 1., DEFINITIONS]

BETWEEN DISCIPLINES

The term “social practice” obscures the discipline from which socially engaged art has emerged (i.e., art). In this way it denotes the critical detachment from other forms of art-making (primarily centered and built on the personality of the artist) that is inherent to socially engaged art, which, almost by definition, is dependent of the involvement of others besides the instigator of the artwork. It also thus raises the question of whether such activity belongs to the field of art at all. This is an important query; art students attracted to this form of art-making often find themselves wondering whether it would be more useful to abandon art altogether and instead become professional community organizers, activists, politicians, ethnographers, or sociologists. Indeed, in addition to sitting uncomfortably between and across these disciplines and downplaying the role of the individual artist, socially engaged art is specifically at odds with the capitalist market infrastructure of the art world: it does not fit well in the traditional collecting practices of contemporary art, and the prevailing cult of the individual artist is problematic for those whose goal is to work with others, generally in collaborative projects with democratic ideals. Many artists look for ways to renounce not only object-making but authorship altogether, in the kind of “stealth” art practice that philosopher Stephen Wright argues for, in which the artist is a secret agent in the real world, with an artistic agenda.[2]

Yet the uncomfortable position of socially engaged art, identified as art yet located between more conventional art forms and the related disciplines of sociology, politics, and the like, is exactly the position it should inhabit. The practice’s direct links to and conflicts with both art and sociology must be overtly declared and the tension addressed, but not resolved. Socially engaged artists can and should challenge the art market in attempts to redefine the notion of authorship, but to do so they must accept and affirm their existence in the realm of art, as artists.  And the artist as social practitioner must also make peace with the common accusation that he or she is not an artist but an “amateur” anthropologist, sociologist, etc. Socially engaged art functions by attaching itself to subjects and problems that normally belong to other disciplines, moving them temporarily into a space of ambiguity. It is this temporary snatching away of subjects into the realm of art-making that brings new insights to a particular problem or condition and in turn makes it visible to other disciplines. For this reason, I believe that the best term for this kind of practice is what I have thus far been using as a generic descriptor —that is, “socially engaged art” (or SEA), a term that emerged in the mid-1970s, as it unambiguously acknowledges a connection to the practice of art.[3]

SYMBOLIC AND ACTUAL PRACTICE

To understand SEA, an important distinction must be made between two types of art practice: symbolic and actual. As I will show, SEA is an actual, not symbolic, practice.

A few examples:

Let’s say an artist or group of artists creates an “artist-run school,” proposing a radical new approach to teaching. The project is presented as an art project but also as a functioning school (a relevant example, given the recent emergence of similar projects). The “school,” however, in its course offerings, resembles a regular, if slightly unorthodox, city college. In content and format, the courses are not different in structure from most continuing education courses. Furthermore, the readings and course load encourage self-selectivity by virtue of the avenues through which it is promoted and by offering a sampling that is typical of a specific art world readership, to the point that the students taking the courses are not average adults but rather art students or art-world insiders. It is arguable, therefore, whether the project constitutes a radical approach to education; nor does it risk opening itself up to a public beyond the small sphere of the converted.

An artist organizes a political rally about a local issue. The project, which is supported by a local arts center in a medium-size city, fails to attract many local residents; only a couple dozen people show up, most of whom work at the arts center. The event is documented on video and presented as part of an exhibition. In truth, the artist can claim to have organized a rally?

These are two examples of works that are politically or socially motivated but act through the representation of ideas or issues. These are works that are designed to address social or political issues only in an allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic level (for example, a painting about social issues is not very different than a public art project that claims to offer a social experience but only does so in a symbolic way such as the ones just described above). The work does not control a social situation in an instrumental and strategic way in order to achieve a specific end.

This distinction is partially based on Jurgen Habermas’s work The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In it Habermas argues that social action (an act constructed by the relations between individuals) is more than a mere manipulation of circumstances by an individual to obtain a desired goal (that is, more than just the use of strategic and instrumental reason. He instead favors what he describes as communicative action, a type of social action geared to communication and understanding between individuals that can have a lasting effect on the spheres of politics and culture as a true emancipatory force.

Most artists who produce socially engaged works are interested in creating a kind of collective art that impacts the public sphere in a deep and  meaningful way, not in creating a representation—like a theatrical play—of a social issue. Certainly many SEA projects are in tune with the goals of deliberative democracy and discourse ethics, and most believe that art of any kind can’t avoid taking a position in current political and social affairs. (The counter-argument is that art is largely a symbolic practice, and as such the impact it has on a society can’t be measured directly; but then again, such hypothetical art, as symbolic, would not be considered socially engaged but rather would fall into the other familiar categories, such as installation, video, etc.) It is true that much SEA is composed of simple gestures and actions that may be perceived as symbolic. For example, Paul Ramirez-Jonas’s work Key to the City (2010) revolved around a symbolic act—giving a person a key as a symbol of the city. Yet although Ramirez-Jonas’s contains a symbolic act, it is not symbolic practice but rather communicative action (or “actual” practice)—that is, the symbolic act is part of a meaningful conceptual gesture. [4]

The difference between symbolic and actual practice is not hierarchical; rather, its importance lies in allowing a certain distinction to be made: it would be important, for example, to understand and identify the difference between a project in which I establish a health campaign for children in a war-torn country and a project in which I imagine a health campaign and fabricate documentation of it in Photoshop. Such a fabrication might result in a fascinating work, but it would be a symbolic action, relying on literary and public relations mechanisms to attain verisimilitude and credibility.

To summarize: social interaction occupies a central and inextricable part of any socially engaged artwork. SEA is a hybrid, multi-disciplinary activity that exists somewhere between art and non-art, and its state may be permanently unresolved. SEA depends on actual—not imagined or hypothetical—social action.

[2]. See “Por un arte clandestino,” the author’s conversation with Stephen Wright in 2006,  http://pablohelguera.net/2006/04/por-un-arte-clandestino-conversacion-con-stephen-wright-2006/. Wright later wrote a text based on this exchange, http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/153624936_2.html.

[3]. From this point forward I will use this term to refer to the type of artwork that is the subject of this book.

[4] Paul Ramirez Jonas’ project, produced by Creative Time, took place in New York City in the Summer of 2010.

Ælia Media’s project site

Ælia Media is a participatory art project for Bologna by Pablo Helguera for the First International Award for Participatory Art. Consisting of a nomadic cultural journalism institute and broadcast center in Bologna, and an alternative arts multimedia channel online, the project functions in two capacities:

• A training ground for active and aspiring cultural producers
• A temporary broadcast program in a variety of media (video, print, radio, web) with a focus on engagement through live participation and online social networks.

The project was launched as a alternative arts journalism school in May of 2011 in Villa delle Rose, Bologna, and the radio station Ælia Media was launched at Piazza Puntoni on October 15, 2011, the same day of a massive protest in Rome and of global protests against economic greed.

At a time in Italy where media is dominated primarily by right wing interests, Ælia Media responds to an important tradition of alternative radio in Bologna, connected to the student movement of 1977.  The live transmisssions are done in collaboration with the three main remaining alternative radio stations in Bologna, Radio Cittá Fujiko, Radio Cittá del Capo and Raio Kairós.

The team of producers of Ælia Media

Ælia Media’s mission is:

• To provide a physical, nomadic, and virtual space where dialogue around culture, and the analysis of social and political issues can be debated;
• To raise the visibility of the contemporary arts in Bologna;
• To support curators, artists, performers, and other experimental artists in showcasing their works;
• To give an opportunity to emerging artists, art producers, and individuals new to the field to test out their ideas to a larger audience;
• To provide concrete skills for media production to those interested in
• showcasing their work;

• To develop programming that may activate a dialogue between the art community and social activists and remain as an archive documenting the cultural life of the city;
• To offer possibilities to the local community to continue this project as a sustainable initiative.
• To present its creative process with absolute transparency, to gain the confidence and support of the Bolognese community, while at the same time instigating reflection and response through provocative programming.

Workshop with Miran Mohar from the Slovenian collective IRWIN, Villa delle Rose, Bologna, October 2011

Project Narrative

introduction

Political and Social Background

The Emilia Romagna region has a long and significant history of social activism, grassroots and progressive thinking.  Ever since the the 19th Century, the Emiliano-Romagnoli have shown a strong commitment in creating support systems for the disadvantaged, which many times have crossed political lines (ranging from the Societá di Mutuo Soccorso in the 1880s[1] and other centers run by Catholic charities to today’s social centers for the elderly in Bologna[2]).

Similarly, as a region that holds the oldest university in the world,  the area has shown equal awareness and progressive thinking in the field of education, most notably through the creation of the Reggio Emilia approach, a revolutionary early education practice started in 1945. The Reggio system emphasizes creativity, the empowerment of the individual in their own education, and a decentralized decision-making process that is greatly mediated through creativity and conviviality in a visually stimulating environment.

The historical inclination of the region toward collectivism and equality manifested after World War II when the city of Bologna became the leading center for the Italian left, a role which continues to this day and has given Bologna the nickname “La Rossa” (the red one).

Bologna also played a central role in the history of Italian communism. According to writer Edmondo Berselli, the kind of communism of the Bolognese is an orthodox version, “a practical thing, impregnated with work and the construction of peace”[3] which emphasizes pragmatic solutions and which came from the “conviction of the professional bourgeoisie that […]the bourgeois and the communist worlds needed to find a modus vivendi. It is not so difficult.[4]”

Bologna’s role as a center for the left as well as a university town led to it becoming the main center for the student protests in Italy in 1977, “a strange movement by strange students” which revolved around working class concerns[5].

The student movement led the birth of the independent radio and independent media movement. Stations like Radio Popolare, Radio Cittá Futura, and Radio Onda Rossa emerged during this period. Of these, the most influential was Radio Alice, an independent/guerrilla radio station initiated in 1976, one of the first and most prominent platforms of communication for the young left and inspired the emergence of other similar networks in Italy.  The cultural/artistic faction of the student left, known as the “indiani metropolitani” (metropolitan indians), sought to take on a critique of mass media with a kind of theatrical, satirical and creative approach, with a energy and imagination that has been linked to the Situationists and the Futurists. One of the famous slogans of this group was “La Fantasia Distruggera’ il potere ed una risata vi seppelira” (“fantasy will destroy power and a laughter will bury you”).[6] The collectively written mission of Radio Alice was to “propose to give voice to delirium, to the irrational, to the everyday, to the infinitely subjective, to the extemporaneous, to the paradoxical.[7]” The role of irony in the new left movements of 1977 is seen as critical since it marked a break with the ‘68 generation and the humorless political class holding power in Italy at the time.[8]

This emergence of independent critical and satirical spirit in the Emiliana region is not an isolated event: the region has a rich tradition of satirical journalism since the 1920s with magazines such as Corriere Emiliano, Bertoldo, and Candido (this last one a monarchist publication although also satirical, in which the famous writer Giovanino Guareschi contributed to the form).  The practice continues to this day with the writings of journalists like Michele Serra.

The radicalization of the left through the student movement came to a head with the brief overtaking of the city of Bologna by student groups during three days in 1977 and the response by the socialist government itself,  which resulted in the death of a student, Francesco Lorusso. The same day, police arrived to Radio Alice and shot down its operations definitely.

The events of that year remain deeply engrained in the minds of the Bolognese.  After the violence and social tensions of the 1977 student movement, the city would be shaken again shortly thereafter with the terrorist attack on the Bologna train station in 1980 by neo-fascist groups. This event remains a painful and traumatic chapter in the history of the city. The fact that the clock of the Bologna station was intentionally left marking the hour in which the terrorist act occurred becomes a powerful symbol of how the city has difficulty moving on from those events.[9] While it is hard to accurately assess the cultural impact of these incidents, it is generally seen as a turning point in the history of the city.  A local artist remarked, in one of the interviews I conducted, “Bologna died in 1980”[10].

Another significant, if perhaps not comparable event that altered the liberal Bolognese’s perception of themselves as a progressive city was the historical electoral loss of the left to a non-communist candidate in June 1999 (The Italian Communist party dissolved in 1991 and its leader, Achille Ochetto, transformed his party into a progressive left wing party declaring that the era of Eurocommunism was over).

The success of the center-right in the liberal bastion of Italy was a particularly painful symbol that underscores the political direction that Italy has taken since the mandate of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi.

According to Fausto Anderlini, sociologist and director of the Metropolitan Research Center of Bologna, the return of the right to the city and the re-establishment of the influence of the church manifested in subtle ways, such as the repositioning of the statue of St. Petronio in-between the two towers of Bologna, the very urban axis of the city.  “The symbolism of this repositioning was not lost amongst Bolognans”.[11] Curator Mili Romano has further remarked: “the statue of St. Petronio, positioned at the end of the commercially-developed Via Rizzoli appears to be giving his blessing to the new shopping culture of the city.”[12]

The previously mentioned events in Bologna and the Emilia Romagna region have punctuated what is regarded as a process of gradual weakening of the left in Italy. The reconfiguration of social and economic factors in Europe over the last twenty years have presented a challenge for the left as it tries to adapt its platform to the new realities of the country. An example, in cities like Bologna, is the increased immigration from North Africa and the Middle East, one of the highest in Europe. While the left has vacillated to adopt a strong position on the issue, the right has instead taken this phenomenon as an opportunity to criminalize these groups (even if most immigrants earnestly seek to become lawful and productive members of Italian society) and blame them for the economic and social instability of the country, producing anti-immigration laws which further isolate and ostracize them.[13]

From my various conversations, interviews, and research it is clear that there is currently a soul-searching moment amongst the Bolognese left, of trying to understand the current state of affairs, trying to find new models to reinvigorate progressive thinking in the region and make the ideals of the left appealing again to the new demographic of voters in the region.

To aggravate matters, quoting Anderlini again, “The left self-destructed under its own self-satire”: that is, the left has further fragmented itself by oddly turning its criticism mainly onto itself and using its own satiric tradition to self-immolate in public.

Somehow, that old orthodox and pragmatic version of communism described by Berselli no longer appears viable in a country with such unpredictable future; instead, individualism, neoliberalism and separatism have emerged and taken control with the full support of the central government and the media.

The art scene

The art world in Bologna appears to represent a microcosm of the larger social and political identity issues that are currently at play in the region.

Bologna has a history of alternative art spaces which served as room for experimentation and dialogue amongst contemporary artists, as well as venues for emerging artists in the Bologna art schools. The proliferation of some of these spaces in the early 90s is closely linked to the clandestine occupation or squatting of unused buildings. Such was the origins of organizations such as TPO (Teatro Polivalente Occupato) and Link.

According to Link’s founder, Silvia Fanti, Link functioned as an organization “where we didn’t make a distinction between producers and audience.”[14] The constituents of this space often presented new artworks or films, collaborated and attended a variety of activities that ranged from exhibitions to screenings, discussions and other programs.

Toward the beginning of the following decade, however, these spaces underwent a transition that caused them to either close or become even more established and abandoning their original alternative or experimental edge (Link continues to exist although under a different group of producers and mainly functioning as a music club). The transition may have had to do with the changing situation with squats in Bologna (which became less viable) and the moving on of the original founders of these spaces. However, in contrast to what usually happens in other cities with a fluid art scene, these alternative spaces were not replaced by other projects or venues.

Today, the situation of alternative spaces in Bologna is dire. In my research to find spaces for the production and presentation of contemporary and alternative art forms, most of my interlocutors were hard-pressed. The Neon Campobase Gallery, where I presented a collaborative performance during my stay in Bologna and which is considered by most as the most enduring and well-known of alternative galleries, has informally announced that it will close in February of 2011.  In group discussions and one to one conversations I held with various performance artists and theater groups, there is a consensus that there are far too few venues and opportunities to present their work in the city, which results in many giving up their production or moving to another city to continue working.

Most importantly and also from my conversations with local producers I got the sense that, aside from the reduced options of exhibition or performance venues, there are no clear replacements to the alternative venues of the 90s where the exchange and discussion about art took place; no drop-in spaces that currently facilitate a conversation or dialogue about common issues.

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 90s proposed the notion that all communities need a “third place” (a location that is an alternative to work or home) in order to thrive. Third places are usually the local pub, the café or other social space where people who think alike gather to have unstructured interactions. The art community in Bologna has lost its third places, and with the exception of a handful of locations where a few book presentations happen (such Bar La Linea) there does not appear to be a permanent place that would allow for social interaction.

Some artists I spoke to, such as Sissi (Daniela Olivieri) and others, are based in Bologna but don’t see the city as a place where they should invest their energies or even exhibit their work.  Those who produce valuable work in Bologna, such as Elisa del Prete, who directs the artist residency Nosadella Due, feel that their work is precarious and feel isolated in their efforts.

Opportunities

In the previous section I have outlined what, to the best of my abilities and with the limited knowledge that my personal interactions and research about Bologna have afforded me, I consider significant issues and challenges facing the region. I now would like to highlight what I perceive as the opportunities and potentialities in proposing a participatory project in the city.

Bologna continues to be a comparatively rich city with some of the most attractive urban landscapes amongst major cities in Italy. The fact that the city is not overwhelmed by the tourist economy (such as it happens to Rome, Venice or Florence) allows for its local life to breathe a more independent air and not be subjected to the outside visitor.  The university continues to attract a vast student population, which brings a variety of skills and interests. While venues are lacking, there are many artists and cultural producers willing and interested to be a part of something larger.

The generation who participated in the student demonstrations of 1977 are still present and wish to share their experiences, as shown by the publications that have emerged chronicling these years. This generation has also been responsible for jumpstarting other means of autonomous communication, most notably with the appearance in 2002 of TV Orfeo, and the network it created, Telestreet.  Founded with the idea to use the redundant frequencies that large broadcasters do not use in their transmission, TV Orfeo became an independent/pirate form of television with a short field of transmission (around 200 meters usually) but with the ability to bring together small communities.

This kind of TV production, although humble, could be seen as a spontaneous citizen response to the current overtaking of the media by the Italian Government (given that the head of state is also the owner of most of the entire country’s telecommunications).

The pioneering efforts of a few individuals, such as the project Cuore di Pietra and others by curator Mili Romano, have shown that there is great potential for public art in Bologna, both in piazzas and in the periphery of the city. Romano’s projects have reached out to disenfranchised communities through collaborative and pedagogical approaches.

Another hopeful experience during my stay in Bologna was with the interaction of the members of La Pillola, a group of young professionals of diverse disciplines seeking to redefine the working environment. Through this redefinition, La Pillola also explores new ways of collaborating and becoming cultural producers. The pro-active, pragmatic and constructive approach of this organization marks an exciting mode of working for a new generation.

Finally, in my visit to the schools of Reggio-Emilia, I found a story that stood in stark contrast to the one in Bologna. The school system of the Reggio schools is proliferating, nourishing an ethnically diverse student body, and nonprofit organizations like Re Mida, which takes recycling as a creative medium promoting green practices and sustainability, has helped Reggio become one of the leading cities of Italy in recycling.

In my present proposal I submit the view that the philosophy behind the Reggio Emilia approach, the collective pragmatism that has characterized the region, the satirical angle of its journalism, and the socially-engaged activism and participatory nature of its independent radio and television

can all be drawn upon to create an expanded critical platform of cultural production that would again create a space where, as Fanti mentioned, there is no distinction between the audience and the producer.

Ælia  Media

[ a new idiom] requires spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation  in order to appropriate  the ’story’ and make it their own story.  An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators.

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

Don’t hate the media— be the media

Jello Biafra

Summary

Ælia Media consists in the creation of a nomadic cultural journalism institute and broadcast center, as an alternative arts multimedia channel. The project would function in two capacities: one, as a training ground for currently active and aspiring cultural producers, and second, as a temporary broadcast program in a variety of media (video, radio, print, and web) with a primary emphasis on user-generated content (consumer-generated media) using live participation methods as well as online social networks.  The webpage of Aelia Media will function as a multi-media news center where program streaming will be available and ongoing debates will take place.

The project will derive its strategies from processes of learning, self-organization, and media production that have local roots but with a contemporary emphasis and outlook. The “Aelia Media Corporation” will try to be a cabinet of curiosities of cultural journalism, searching for the extraordinary in the ordinary, rediscovering the wealth of cultural production in Bologna, and juxtaposing opinions on specific issues, tying them with larger issues internationally.

The presentation and broadcasting of the programs will be conducted from a specially designed kiosk to be placed in a public plaza in Bologna with substantial presence of student population. The idea behind this kiosk is to 1. Provide visibility of the project in the city; 2. Establish a location in the form of a “third place”. In addition, the kiosk would occasionally “travel” to other locations in the city to reach other communities or to bring attention to particular issues in the city.

Rationale

The public program as location. The art community in Bologna currently lacks a space where to discuss and debate. In the words of sociologist Ray Oldenburg, it lacks a “third place” — that is, a social surrounding where more informal exchanges can take place. In previous years, the art organizations mentioned before apparently served this purpose, but today it is hard to find a location that would fulfill this purpose. While this project will provide an opportunity for artists groups to present and discuss their projects, Ælia Media would not seek to become a physical alternative space where art is physically exhibited — as the prospect to administer and program such location would supersede the possibilities of this grant and would be more of a curatorial task. However, Ælia Media would function as a temporary third place by virtue of its presence in plazas and the regularity of its programming. Bologna already has plenty of bars and cafes — desirable hangouts for artists and non-artists alike. What is missing is a focus of conversation, which can be achieved by this project, which would position its temporary kiosk amongst spaces that already have the café or bar infrastructure[16].

Art community involvement. After my various interactions with local curators and artists, I concluded that the idea of bringing an artist from outside to present a public art project in Bologna with substantial (and official) government support and public funds, has the potential to further alienate the local art community, who (rightly or wrongly) may see an investment of resources passing them by instead of being invested in them.  I thus want to propose a project that, while remaining open to participation to a general audience, would make an effort to involve the local art community as key players.  These local producers are, in my view, the ones who can provide the true content of the project by sharing their interests, showcasing their projects in descriptive formats, and reaching out to the larger public, some of which in turn may have a chance to participate.

In terms of the benefit for the art community, I believe that providing art agents with the means and tools of communication can allow them to spread their ideas and initiatives more effectively, while at the same time offering them a community environment to exchange ideas. The project at the same time will rely on those artists who have links to the region and already have production experience to conduct workshops as part of the program (one such organization is Alterazioni Video).

Narration and Translation. Content for this project will emerge from a series of workshops and debates on the cultural history of Bologna and the current issues faced today locally and also internationally.  Participants will be asked to learn to “translate” the issues of the past into the present and learn narrative strategies to address them.

Multi-tiered participatory structure. Much art that proclaims itself as participatory proposes models of exchange that are little more than small alterations to the rituals of the traditional passive viewer in an art exhibition. Such models may include attending a meeting or a class, joining  a workshop, contributing a small object toward an installation, etc.  While some of these approaches may be appropriate for their respective contexts, I believe that every art project with social integrity must at the very least show some awareness about the difference between “symbolic” or “token” participation versus deeper engagement. Moreover, I believe that an art project should also admit the reality that the large range of public that may be exposed to it will also display an equal range of desires to engage, as well as the possibility that an enticed viewer that interacts at a symbolic level and feels rewarded by the experience may want to engage further at a deeper level. For this reason, in order to become truly functional in a public realm, a participatory process in my view should ideally strive to be such that the participant is rewarded by the level of engagement (in time and effort) that he/she is willing to invest in the exchange. A breakdown of the levels of participation is provided in the action plan.

Content of the programs. Programming may include a) description and discussion of current and future art projects in the city; b) debates on cultural policy; c) general discussions on contemporary art; d) discussions about the role of the media; d) interviews and guest interlocutors from the local art scene in Bologna; e) news and other curiosity items.

Media and the cultural moment. This initiative emerges as a response to a social and cultural need in the city, but also as a statement about the state of media in Italy. Television in Italy responds to conservative and commercial interests to an extreme, even amongst the general standards of mass media in the developed world. While small, this intends to be a small gesture toward criticality and autonomy, seeking to draw from the legacy of independent media while also trying to bring it to the next generation of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.)

Sustainability. This proposal is conceived with the objective to create a sustainable platform that could be undertaken by members of this art community – or other local Bologna residents with similar interests. While not a central condition for the success of the project, I believe that a key objective must be to ensure that collective participation can translate into ownership, or, equally valid, the realization that a similar project could emerge in response to this one. While the kiosk may not be preserved, other elements such as the website/blog may have a chance to continue its life after the end of the project.

Documentation. The project will place special emphasis on the gathering, editing and organizing of the material that will result from the experience (transcripts, videos, transmissions, sound recordings, performance scripts, etc) both with the objective to give longevity and visibility to the project but also to create a resource for younger artists about what was produced.

Physical structure

The goal of the physical kiosk is to exist as a transparent “cabinet of curiosities” where passersby can see “news in the making” in the fashion of street-level newsrooms that are made available for people to view their real-time broadcasts. The kiosk would be conceived as a collapsible structure made out of transparent material for viewing (such as plastic windows used for greenhouse structures).

The structure of the kiosk is inspired in cabinets of curiosities located in the Museo di Palazzo Poggi of the University of Bologna, which display the original collection of Ulysse Aldrovandi, the founder of Natural History. The structure simulates, to a degree, the various towers of the city (which historically were created to establish status) and most importantly would make a direct reference to the political subtext of the movements of the monument of St. Petronio.  If in a city like Bologna the moving of a monument is a political gesture, then the sensible answer is to create a project that behaves as well as a nomadic monument — to free expression.

In sum, while the proposal is to secure a piazza (preferably Piazza Verdi) as the “base” for this kiosk, the idea of it being relatively easy to transport is both logistical and political — the kiosk could travel to other locations in the city to reach other “participants”, and to draw attention to significant historical locations in the city.

AELIA LAELIA CRISPIS

The name of the proposed project makes a reference to a famous cryptic epigraph that has been known for four centuries as “the stone of Bologna” or “the enigma of Bologna”.  The stone that bears this name, despite its historical notoriety, is located in a seldom-visited gallery in the Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna, often hidden by a projection screen used for lectures. Although it is regarded amongst scholars as a “famous” stone, the piece and its history are barely known amongst the general public.

The tombstone reads as follows:

D.               M.

AELIA LAELIA CRISPIS

nec vir nec mulier nec androgyna

nec puella nec iuvenis nec anus

nec casta nec meretrix nec pudica

sed omnia

sublata

neque fame neque ferro neque veleno

sed omnibus

nec coelo nec aquis nec terris

sed ubique iacet

LUCIUS AGATHO PRISCUS

nec maritus nec amator nec necessarius

neque moerens neque gaudiens neque flens

hanc

nec molem nec pyramidem nec sepulchrum

sed omnia

scit et nescit cui posuerit

The text in English would translate approximately thus:

For the Manes[17]

Aelia Lelia Crispis

Not a man, nor a woman, nor hermaphrodite

Nor girl nor young nor old

Nor caste, nor a prostitute, nor modest

But all of the above,

Killed

Not by hunger not by the sword nor by poison

But by all of the above;

Not in air, not in sea, nor in land,

But everywhere she lays

Lucio Agatone Prisco

Not husband, nor lover nor relative

Not sad nor happy nor mourning

This

Not stone, nor pyramid, nor tomb

But all of the above

Knows and doesn’t know to whom is dedicated.

This epigraph was first made reference to in 1567 by a senator named Achille Volta. Volta reportedly had the ancient inscription redone in a more contemporary marble stone, which is the version that survives today. We know this information because the stone is accompanied by a smaller inscription that describes this fact (what could be described today as the first interpretive exhibition label).

In addition, the various accounts about this stone in the XVIth century add three more verses that did not make it into the extant stone inscription:

hoc est sepulchrum intus cadaver non habens

hoc est cadaver sepulchrum extra non habens

sed cadaver idem est sepulchrum sibi

This is a tomb without a corpse,

This is a corpse which is not contained by a tomb;

but the corpse and the tomb are one and the same.

The text, which seemingly refers to a dead loved one, is regarded as a riddle in the hermetic and emblematic tradition of XVIth century Bologna. Ever since that time, the stone of Bologna has remained as an object of curiosity and reflection by generations of erudites, writers and historians, including Bolognese naturalist Ulysse Aldrovandi and eminent foreign visitors such as Sir Walter Scott, Gèrard de Nerval and Carl Jung, all of which wrote about this stone and tried to decode its mystery. At different times the stone inscription has been interpreted as describing alchemy, music, abortion, the relationship between body and soul, time and shadow, love, all the things of the world— and the list goes on. [18]

**

The project of “Aelia Media” takes the enigma of the stone of Bologna as a symbolic departure point for a variety of reasons.  The spirit in which the riddle was created denotes ambiguity, playfulness, and knowledge — three qualities that have been historically characteristic of Bolognese culture, up to and including the countercultural left-wing movement of the 1970s. An analogy between the 1970s title “Radio Alice” and the proposed “Aelia Media” is also intended, but by reaching to the past for the female name (Aelia) and the medium to the present (the more comprehensive contemporary digital communications term, “Media”).   Furthermore, the phrase of the Proletarian Youth Circles movement, “a laughter that will bury you all”, is intended to also be given an extension through this tombstone that contains, ultimately, the implicit laughter of the riddle inventor.  The project seeks to trace a subtle line between the intellectual Bolognese spirit that created the famous riddle and the rebellious spirit of Radio Alice, which proposed, as previously mentioned, “to give voice to delirium, to the irrational, to the everyday, to the infinitely subjective, to the extemporaneous, to the paradoxical.”

The intention to link the counter-cultural movement of the 70s to the ancestral history of Bologna is more than an arbitrary decision: in the analysis of the legacy of the activist legacy of the recent past, I find it important to take a longer historical view of the social and political scope of a society, in order to gather a certain distance from the immediate past and thus resist its easy mythologizing.

Last but not least, the project intends, in a modest way, to offer yet one more reading of the stone, this time from the present time and from the current cultural moment in which it is being read. What this exact reading could yield will only be determined after the end of this project, if it in fact became a reality. My sense would be that, whatever the outcome, it may point toward the idea that Aelia Laelia Crispis may be the very city of Bologna in the current time, and the narrative of the epigraph may be found to express its myriad contradictions, and shed some light on what was it exactly that died in 1980 (as the art student said) how that death of the city lives within its inhabitants (in terms of the last line of the inscription “ the corpse and the tomb are one and the same”) and how a city that encompasses both vitality and stillness could hopefully draw from both to construct its new identity and its meaning.  And if it can be done, I believe, it has to be done with self-determination, proactive gestures, and a dose of irony. It is in a small way in which this project hopes to open the door toward these explorations.

[2] See “Aspects of the Cooperative Home Care for the Elderly in Bologna, Italy”(chapter 6) , in Lucille Rosengarten’s “Social work in Geriatric Home Care”,  Psychology Press, 2000

[3] Edmono Berselli, “Quel Gran Pezzo Dell’Emilia,” Mondadori, 2004, p. 18.

[4] Ibid. p. 19

[5] Diego Benecchi, ed. “Le Parole dei Luogi Bologna ‘77”,  Edizione Sigem, Modena, 2009

[6] It has been suggested that Umberto Eco’s attack to the critique of laughter, which is the central subject of the novel The Name of the Rose (1980), is a reference in support to this student slogan (Eco is professor at the University of Bologna).

[7] Benedecchi, Ibid, p. 37

[8] A key paper that analyses this phenomenon in depth is by Patrick Gun Cuninghame, “A Laughter that Will Bury You All”: Irony as Protest and Language as Struggle in the Italian 1977 Movement, IRSH 52 (Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis), 2007

[9] Margherita Bianchini, “Le 10:25 del 2 agosto 1980: quando il tempo si è fermato”, from “101 Storie su Bologna”, Newton Compton Editori, 2010

[10] Interview with artist Fedra Boscaro, September 2010.

[11] Conversation with Fausto Anderlini, September 2010

[12] Conversation with Mili Romano, September 2010

[13] See Peter Williams, “The World’s Worst Immigration Laws,” in Foreign Policy, April 29, 2010. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/29/the_world_s_worst_immigration_laws

[14] Interview with Silvia Fanti, September, 2010

[15] It should be noted that the project will be conducted in Italian with some partial translation into an English version on the blog for international visitors. I am proficient in reading and understanding Italian and have a middle proficiency in communication in that language.

[16] In a recent essay, I have argued for the notion that true alternativity in contemporary art today lies primarily not in the construction of a physical location, but in the use of time in the shape of the public program (Helguera, “The Public Program As an Alternative Space”, in “Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces”, Apexart, New York, 2010)

[17] D.M. stands for  “Dis Manibus”, which is a common Roman inscription referring to the Manes, deities that represented the souls of lost loved ones.

[18] A comprehensive collection of all the texts relating to the stone of Bologna can be found in the book “Aelia Laelia: Il mistero della Pietra di Bologna”, edited by Nicola Muschitiello, Società Editrice Il Mulino,  Bologna, 2000.

This blog documents the development of The Well-Tempered Exposition. The project consists in a methodical investigation on the formal components of the performance art practice.  The year-long project will be developed as a series of 48 scores which will be developed and performed in a series of public experimental workshops in various cities. Upon its completion, the final aim of The Well-Tempered Exposition is to exist as a collection of scores addressing the rhetoric, contrapuntal and compositional structure of performance art as we understand it today.

The WTE is structured around the existing forms in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (1722),  a collection of keyboard exercises composed in all 24 major and minor keys, originally intended as a pedagogical textbook “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.”  Today it is considered one of the foundational works of modern Western music.  The WTE project seeks to retain Bach’s original pedagogical intent while also “translating” the complex compositional formulas of Bach’s work into correlational forms such as verbal counterpoint, contextual harmony, movement,  and other elements.

The project is being developed over the course of a year senior residency at Location One in New York, where it will launch on September 21st, 2011 with a performance with Beatriz Helguera-Snow at the keyboard.

Sections of the project will be presented at Performa 2011, the RISD Museum, and the 9th Havana Biennial, amongst other venues in Brazil, Mexico, Italy, and elsewhere. The project is supported by a fellowship of the Franklin Furnace Archive.

August 24, 2011

Writing about a work-in-progress is a challenging, and somewhat frightening, task. Usually when we undertake a new experiment it is better do to so privately, in order to minimize the unsavory possibility of failing publicly. Yet in the case of this project I am happy to take that risk as this project is by and far a collective experiment  and one that can greatly benefit from collective input.

First, I will try to describe the project as succinctly as possible: The Well-Tempered Exposition is an attempt to “translate” the compositional structure of The Well-Tempered Clavier, one of J.S. Bach’s greatest works, into the realm of the performative visual arts. The questions around this proposal may likely be: why doing this, why now, why with Bach, and why this work?  Isn’t Bach already over-interpreted? Do we need yet one more experiment or analysis of an European composer in the practically infinite literature of his work, which has been analyzed from the standpoints ranging from statistical analysis and language to even alchemy and baseball?

The place alone of Bach and the WTC in the history of Western music may be enough to justify a year of study to it in any capacity. However, my motivation for focusing on Bach and on this work is specifically geared to inserting some melodic static to the current debates around what we understand as visual performance art. I don’t seek as much to illuminate Bach’s work (more than enough capable minds have done so already) but I certainly think that Bach can help us think a bit more seriously, and maybe critically, about performance art.  If Bach has served as an inspiration for cosmologists and philosophers, he may also do us some good.

I will characterize my motivations in three areas: one is related to debates around creativity and invention in composition. The second has to do with to what I will describe as ‘conceptual’ oratory, which is really about the understanding of the conceptual confines and DNA of performance art. And the third has to do with pedagogy.

1.

On the year when Bach died, in 1750, Baroque art had long past its heyday, even in music ( musical baroque came somewhat after the visual arts) yet he continued composing pretty much in the same way he did decades before. By the mid-Eighteenth century new forms of composition, such as the symphony, had emerged. In fact, Bach while revered in his time was not given the recognition that he is given today—it would take nearly 150 years for the musical world to fully appreciate the extent of his achievement.  The type of compositions that Bach produced were tied to a kind of writing that at the time were considered outmoded. “Modern” composers were critical of learned counterpoint and the next generation of composers did not favor the fugue (Mozart and Beethoven wrote a few, but they clearly were not into them). Furthermore, it may also be interesting to know for the non-Bach specialist that Bach himself did not introduce new musical forms. From the standpoint of the visual arts, this may appear a bit puzzling:  could we think of an artist  who would be considered the best of all times and still have not been an innovator of the form?

Bach belongs to a time where ideas of aesthetics were fairly removed from ours, right before a paradigm shift that comes with the Enlightenment under which a new kind of aesthetic is to emerge, in an articulation that primarily culminates with the work of Kant in his third critique (1790). In Kant’s version of aesthetics, the genius in art is about innovation or originality; in Bach’s time, art was about invention.

Today the terms ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ may sound like synonims to us, but in the 18^th century ‘invention’ meant something different. Inventio is a term that belongs to the classic art of rhetoric. It is considered the first part of a speech — the thing that will be said, or the content of the speech to be developed. In music, it would translate as a musical idea or a melody. Yet this ‘new’ musical idea would still conform to a set compositional structure. Its innovation lies in the development of the form, not in the transformation of the form.

Part of the answer as to why  Bach is considered so relevant despite not being an innovator of forms is that, actually, the development of the form, when taken to its ultimate consequences, can amount to innovation. This is the argument that, in his brilliant analysis of Bach’s compositional techniques, entitled “Bach and the Patterns of Invention” Laurence Dreyfuss makes, by saying that Bach’s ways of pushing within the formal constraints of the Baroque period constituted in itself not just a critical reimagining of the traditional musical ideas of the Baroque but a forced reference for any future musician. Thus Bach has the rare credit of being not just the culmination of an era, but as the beginning of another. In other words, Bach blurred the boundaries of form an content.

Performance art today, in my view, exists in a similar crossroads between form and content — a crossroads between deciding whether it is a formal discipline— ‘a genre’, that is, such as painting— and a conceptual sensibility that permeates every other kind of art. Under this logic, “performance art” is just a set of relatively connected conceptual actions that date roughly from the 60s til the present, while “performativity” encompasses every medium found in lots of modern and contemporary art. I personally am in favor of the interpretation that performance is, and should remain, a meta-genre. But if that is the case, how do we develop a useful criticality toward it? How can we know what it is if it can be anything? What prevents us from the “anything goes”, invertebrate gravitational force that produces so much mediocre performance art? My thought  is that the debate can be illuminated by conducting a reflection on composition that analyses the relationship creativity vs. invention as previously presented in Bach’s case.

2.

The second set of concerns is linked to the relationship that Bach had with the art of rhetoric, which I already introduced. In Bach’s time, there was an ongoing musical tradition that established direct links between the construction of a speech and the composition of a musical piece. This is easiest exemplified by the use of rhetorical terms in musical composition such as Inventio, expositio, elaboratio, executio, etc. In a fuge one inserts “voices” that intertwine between one another, as if one were constructing a conversation.  The ranges of regimentation of this idea varied throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century,  and were best articulated by Johann Mattheson, a contemporary of Bach who first made reference to his work in print. We will undoubtedly hear more about Mattheson in this project, not least because he was a fascinating figure but because his adamant interest in relating the structure of speech to music will prove useful.  Using rhetorical structures of the time is a common way through which several musicologists can map out and study Bach’s works.

I will argue here that, as much as performance art may be seen as the most open meta-genre as they come, it also has its own rhetorical devices like any other kind of art. Performance art does still function within the parameters and the narrative of conceptual art- that in itself is some kind of score. It is naïve to attempt to do performance works while ignoring the kind of performance practices of the 70s or 80s. So the acknowledgment of that history is already a concession toward the need of conceptual structure. So while we may not be able to speak about a formal rhetorics of performance art, we can certainly speak of some kind of conceptual rhetorics, or ‘conceptual oratory’ —that which is being said within a performative approach. It is important to note here that when I refer to rhetorics or oratory I do not mean to refer exclusively to acts of speech, or to voice-related performance: I refer to performance art as a set of activities (could be through movements, actions, experiences, etc) whose devices and conceptual/compositional mechanisms could theoretically be mapped in a similar way to the kind of music from the late Baroque period.

3.

Last but not least, The Well-Tempered Clavier is, in essence, a textbook.  Bach was no theorist nor was he even very strong as a writer (his extant writings us are almost exclusively business-oriented; his letters very brief and he didn’t leave a single written piece that discussed his aesthetic interests or intentions). However, he was a famous and successful teacher —exemplified most immediately by the fact that many of his own children went to become major composers in their own right (and surviving the shadow of a towering father like Bach must not have been an easy feat). Bach’s pedagogy  thus was not theoretical but almost entirely practical: his students learned by playing the compositions that he devised for them, such as the WTC.

As an educator and an artist, I have always pondered about the questions around how to teach performance art from a practical —not theoretical or art historical perspective, which is pretty much what we do today. Then in art school we all try and experiment with crazy performances (that was my experience as an art student), in varying degrees of mediocrity and occasional discoveries, until we graduated. I was always left, however, with the sense that my learning in those performance art classes was at best random and haphazard, and what I had learned was more out of luck than out of having followed any methodical exploration.   I would like to think that it is possible to teach the performance art practice without that same haphazardness. But knowing that not everyone may agree with me,  I would argue that in any case we would be well-served by at least discussing the existence of a practice-based performance art textbook— which the WTE attempts to do in a humble way.

Perhaps this entire project is prompted by a personal memory from art school. When I was a senior  BFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 90s,  I took a performance art class. There I met a number of colleagues with whom we developed a somewhat fanatical fascination with performance, and soon we had taken over the performance space of the school at which we would spend all-nighters preparing pieces that we would present the next morning to the class. One of our most admired colleagues was Eduardo Martínez-Almaral, a Cuban artist.  Eddie had come to Chicago via Miami, where he had been involved in theater and was trained as a light technician.  Eddie was obsessed with Bach, and his works always incorporated his music in some way.  (Sometime after art school Eddie shifted his interests and while continued to do some performance, he never went back to perform these pieces or to explore Bach). They usually were extremely long durational pieces —sometimes lasting four, five hours— during much of which the audience would remain inside the space in complete darkness and silence.  After some seemingly interminable time, a beautiful floating red square light would turn on in the middle of the space. Some time later, a partita would play for a few minutes. Then some more time, someone would perhaps walk slowly into the space. The entire event would often consist of combinations of very short movements, light projections, and of course the music of Bach. The pieces generated huge reverence in school.  It always seemed remarkable to me that a man who was an organist and choral teacher in a small town in Germany in the XVIIIth century could feel so contemporary and move so many people in a collective experience; but it all was due to the possibilities to translate this sensibility into a contemporary realm, as Eddie had done. The WTE is thus dedicated to Eddie and the brief magic that he created in that student performance space in Chicago.

In 1660, a mysterious sect of Dutch mystics arrived to an island in the New World with the objective to create a new society. Their governing principle revolved around the uninterrupted performance of a single dramatic work in seven tableaux vivants. Invoking alchemical imagery and hermetic thought, their goal was to arrive to a higher state of being by collectively embodying the symbolic representation of all of human and divine knowledge. Their experiment, which would last a century, would test the human boundaries of time, physical endurance, and the commitment of a society toward an idea.

Uryonstelaii is a project consisting of two complementary components: a book published by Jorge Pinto Books, New York,  and a one-time only series of performed prologue tours delivered by historical reenactors. The contents of the performed prologue are not included in the publication and are not meant to be reproduced beyond their single performance.

The project was presented as part of The Sixth Borough, an exhibition at Governors Island in the summer of 2010 curated by Manon Slome and Julian Navarro for No Longer Empty.

“All history threads between what was and what could have been; all art threads between what is and what could be. In Urÿonstelaii, Pablo Helguera tugs at these threads, unraveling, reweaving, embroidering. The result is a strange and at times poignant tapestry of the possible, the dreamt, the present, and the lost.”

D. Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan

“Like a ‘lamb in wolf’s clothing,’ Pablo Helguera uses the exoteric mechanisms of historical erudition to lure us to his magical island of the Ourobourians. But right about the time we lose our footing on the land’s slippery shores—when we begin to wonder if the artist has gleaned an esoteric tradition for more than just source material for his island’s symbols and nomenclature, when we start to navigate his land with the non-verbal hunches of the alchemists’ score, and call into question the artifices we employ to gather the world around us—we realize Helguera has really taken us on a journey to another land altogether, the most forbidden of places–the self.”

—Lise Patt, founder  and director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles

Images from the “Prologue Tours” at Governors Island’s Fort Jay on October 2, 2010:

Excerpt from the beginning of the book:

In spring 1671, in Amsterdam, a mysterious book began to circulate among a small circle of intellectuals. Written in Latin and entitled Principia of the Live Image Method of the Ourobuorians, it provided a painstaking description of a single dramatic work consisting of seven elaborate tableaux vivants, one for each day of the week, to be performed in perpetuity on a remote island in the Americas. The instructional text, accompanied by obscure references and symbols, appeared to have been written for those already initiated into a society dedicated to the performance. It claimed that the continuous, collective presentation of the work would help participants attain transcendental knowledge that would lead “to the universal unveiling of the invisible threads that connect all the essences underneath every object.” The text’s millennial language and apparent fanaticism suggested that the author was a member of a northern European sect of Menonites or Pietists that, persecuted in its home country, had made its way to the Americas. And yet there was little, if any, mention of Christian rituals or beliefs.

Tableaux vivants had existed since the Middle Ages in presentations of liturgical dramas. In the Netherlands these were normally performed by groups specifically dedicated to this purpose, known as rederijkerskamers (“chambers of rhetoric”). These groups had emerged in the fifteenth century out of secular and spiritual brotherhoods in Flanders whose original mission had been to aid the clergy in the creation of religious processions and dramas.  Rederijkerskamers had a strict order of membership and a very specific hierarchy (with titles such as Prince, Emperor, Dean, and Fool) and developed their repertoire mostly to participate in contests known as landjuwelen (“country jewels”), where they would showcase their dramatic achievements. They were experts at creating “wagon plays” with biblical or historical subjects and elaborate triumphal arches, which often served as theatrical sets with a variety of entrances and performing spaces.

Principia of the Live Image Method of the Ourobuorians appeared to be the product of a rather esoteric rederijkerskamer, one that had moved from the Netherlands to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam or had recently formed there. It was not unusual for members of rederijkerskamers to form societies there—such was the case of the famous Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel, who fled religious persecution in Germany; they were merchants (such as Hendrik Laurenz Spieghel) and marine underwriters (Roemer Visscher). Some readers suggested that Principia was the product of a splinter group of Labadists, a protestant religious community founded by Pietist Jean de Labadie. De Labadie’s ideas had gained support in the Netherlands, and some groups emigrated to the New World in the 1670s to escape persecution.

The questions Principia introduced were deepened by the emergence of a second anonymous text a few years later, in 1673, titled Annals of the Chambers and Fortress of Urÿonstelaii (today usually referred to as Annals).  Annals appeared to have been written by the same hand as Principia, but it was a more detailed work and even more puzzling to scholars. At face value it was a compendium of the architectural structures on the island described in Principia, all apparently guarded behind a fort,  but it was soon determined that the descriptions might also function as metaphorical narrations of the ideology and history of the society that created them. Annals also provides clues to the text and name of the sacred performance introduced in Principia.

None of this brought anyone much closer to solving the enigma of Principia. It was by no means a traditional text even within rederijkerskamer literature. Rederijkerskamers generally presented religious and morality plays, usually dramatizations of stories from the Bible. In contrast, the elaborate descriptions of  tableaux in Principia had no recognizable connection to any religious writing; they were more closely connected with hermetic writing and the Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century, although the images in Principia were unorthodox interpretations of the alchemical and hermetic symbols of that tradition. The term “Ourobourian,” from the Greek noun ourobouros, refers to a circular symbol of a snake swallowing its own tail, in a representation of infinity that was very prominent among alchemists throughout Europe. But in Principia, although ourobouros retained that original meaning, its conjunction with the concept of the island made it a more expansive symbol.

So who were the Ourobourians? What had brought them to America with the singular mission of dedicating the life of their community to the representation of a single performance? And what was the purpose of the fort and the structures in that island, and those carefully constructed tableaux?

—

THE SYMPOSIUM was  a special hybrid project presented in conjunction with the international exhibition project PR04 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. PR04, a bi-annual contemporary art event in Puerto Rico, includes installations, interactive projects, and is an important forum of exchange and dialogue of conteporary art. This year the subject of PR04 is the Olympiad, and projects developed as part of it address, to some extent, the Greek tradition of the Olympics.

SYMPOSIUM  was a hybrid product between  a traditional symposium and an actual performance of Plato’s symposium, as an updated reenactment by various prominent writers, artists, and critics. The objective was to utilize both the more relaxed discussion format of the symposium in the tropical setting of the Caribbean, and to transpose the philosophical debates about love, passion and desire to current issues in contemporary art. Participants were asked to present the points of views of their “characters” following the format of this famous dialogue, and to enter into a debate with participation from the attending public.

The project followed the general spirit of PR04 in that it reclaimed the classical cultural tradition of Greece as in the Olympics, and seek to also revive the nourishing nature of the public dialogue, making it more a matter of both spiritual and physical enjoyment than a dry academic affair.

The Symposium is one of the foundational documents of Western culture and arguably the most profound analysis and celebration of love in the history of philosophy. It is also the most lavishly literary of Plato’s dialogues–a virtuoso prose performance in which the author, like a playful maestro, shows off an entire repertoire of characters, ideas, contrasting viewpoints, and iridescent styles. A symposium is literally a “drinking together”–in other words a drinking party. In Athens, in Plato’s day, symposia were strictly stag affairs. As a rule, they consisted of a fairly lavish, semi-formal banquet followed by ceremonial toasts and bouts of drinking.

Symposia were usually held in private homes in specially designed dining and party areas. The guests (from as few as 3 or 4 to as many as 12 or 20) reclined on couches arranged in a circle. An entire service of ornamental cups, bowls, plates, and vases were set out for the occasion. After dinner, amid hearty servings of wine, the guests would converse, engage in song contests, enjoy the professional entertainment, or, as in the case of The Symposium, compose speeches or deliver mock orations.

A preliminary rehearsal was conducted on June 4^th, 2004 at the University of Camaguez, and the  public final performance was presented at the Olympic village of Rincón the following day, with food and drink being served throughout the entire duration of the event.

T H E    S Y M P O S I U M

By Plato

Written 360 B.C.

Reinterpreted by Pablo Helguera
Persons in the dialogue:

Xandra Eden as ARISTOPHANES

Nelson Rivera as PHAEDRUS

Ryan Hill as PAUSANIAS

Hamza Walker as ERYXIMACHUS
Pablo Helguera as AGATHON

Christine Hill as ALCIBIADES
James Elkins as SOCRATES

–

PABLO HELGUERA (Agathon) (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual artist living and working in New York.

HAMZA WALKER (Eryximachus) is the director of Education of the Renaissance Society in Chicago.
NELSON RIVERA (Phaedrus) is an artist, theater director, writer and composer living in San Juan, Puerto Rico
RYAN HILL(Pausanias) is a visual and performance artist living in New York.

XANDRA EDEN (Pausanias) is associate curator of the Power Plant in Toronto.
JAMES ELKINS (Socrates) is an art historian and critic based in Dublin. He is the author of many works, including “The Object Strikes Back” and “What Painting Is”
CHRISTINE HILL (Alcibiades) is an artist based in Brooklyn. Her ongoing project, Volksboutique, was featured in Documenta IX and many other international exhibitions.

SYMPOSIUM

Symposium

First part

PR04 Olympic Village, Rincón, Puerto Rico

June 5, 2004

Pablo Helguera

Ladies and gentlemen:  two thousand, two hundred and thirty four years ago, a certain banquet amongst notable Greeks took place, and that’s what became known as the Symposium. I am here to present to you the Symposium by Plato. My name is Agathon in the Symposium. In the symposium Agathon gathers a group, and as in any symposium people drink, sing, dance, do speeches. In Plato’s Symposium, the guests decide to do speeches about love, and thus here, we will talk about love.

But one thing I would like that you do with me first is to have a toast.

(the audience toasts)

What each one of us here will do is to take a role front the original characters of the Symposium. As we go into the discussion, we would like you to be part of it, asking questions or interrupting.

In the symposium the discussion starts with Phaedrus, who tells us his theory of love.

Phaedrus

In my speech I thought about using Phaedrus’ own words, but at the same time bring in the words of a lot of poets, not from Greece but from later years – including my own. So I included these and brought them together with whatever Phaedrus is talking about.

My text is Spanish and English, some of it is translated.

Gran dios es el amor

Love is a great god

Todos mis pensamientos hablan de amor

No tiene el amor genealogia conocida ni se la invento por nadie pueblo o poeta

Su origen no lo se pues no lo tiene, mas se que todo origen de ella viene aunque es de noche

O soleil c’est le temps de la raison ardente

Amor fin doble corazon son la misma cosa tal como dice el sabio en su cancion

Y asi no puede ser uno sin el otro como el alma sin la razon

You must sit down, says love and taste my milk

So I did sit

How fair you are, how all rapturous love

Here is your figure stately as a palm tree and your breasts are like clusters of fruit

I say let me climb the palm tree and take hold of your branches

Qué lindos se ven tus pies con sandalias

tus caderas torneadas son collares obra artesana de orfebre

tu ombligo una copa redonda que rebosa vino aromado

tu vientre montoncito de trigo adornado de azucenas

tus pechos igual que dos crías mellizas de gacela

quedeme y olvideme del rostro recliné sobre el amado

ceso todo y quedeme dejando un cuidado entre las azucenas olvidado

de vos será.

Her image had passed to his soul forever.

And no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy

Her eyes had coal and her soul had —

To live to her to hold, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

To rage, to lust, to write, to commit, all these were product of the god of love

If you were to drop dead i would never stop loving you

Even though we could no longer screw

Solo a los amantes les viene de voluntar morir por otros

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence,

The most sublime act is to set another before you,

Solo el amor puede poner verguenza por lo feo

Respetuoso amor por lo bello, que sin amor y verguenza no hay manera

De que ni particular ni ciudad alguna lleven a cabo obras grandes y buenas

No picture is made to endure or to live with, but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura sin against nature

Todo cuanto existe digno es de entrar en la obra de arte, porque goza de la inmanente dignidad de la existencia

El arte no distingue cosas sucia o inferior, la distincion de la cosa sucia podra venir del estómago, la cosa inferior del cerebro, el corazon no tiene nada que ver en estas diferenciaciones. Un gran dolor, un inmenso placer hacen olvidar lo sucio y lo inferior, liberando todo en emocion.

Love is worth it

Tal vez nos casemos este anio, amor mio,

Y tengamos una casita,

Y tal vez se publique mi libro

O nos vayamos los dos al extranjero

Tal vez caiga Somoza, amor mio

and yet you know, hatred, even of meanness, contorts the features,

Anger, even against injustice, makes the voice hoarse

Oh we who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness

Could not be ourselves friendly

Y sin embargo sabiamos tambien que el odio contra la abadesa desfigura la cara

Tambien la ira contra la injusticia pone ronca la voz

Desgraciadamente nosotros que queríamos preparar el camino para la amabilidad

No pudimos ser amables.

Perdoname amor, si no te nombro,

Fuera de tu canción soy el asceta,

La muerte y yo dormimos conjuntamente

Cantarte a tí tan solo me despierta

Incapaz de acción politica, no denuncio a mi solitaria vocación de cultura

A mi empecinada busqueda ontológica

A los juegos de la imaginación en sus planos más vertiginosos

Pero todo esto  no mira ya en sí mismo y por sí mismo

No tienen ya nada que ver con el cómodo humanismo de los mandarines de occidente

Que lo mas gratuito que pueda yo escribir asomara siempre una voluntad de contacto con el presente histórico del hombre

Una participacion en su larga marcha a sí mismo como colectividad y humanidad

What thou lovest well is a true heritage

What thout lovest well shall not be taken from thee

Entonces todos los hombre de la tierra lo rodearon

Desvío el cadaver triste, emocionado, incorporose lentamente

Abrazó al primer hombre, y hechose a andar

Y en resumen tales son mis palabras

Que el amor es entre los dioses el más antiguo, el más venerable

El senor de los senores

Que en cuyas manos se encierra para los hombres vivos

Para los hombres toda posesión de virtud y bienaventuranza.

Pablo

As you have seen, Phaedrus has a very ideal notion of love- a poetic interpretation of love.  We can start to reflect what kinds of love we have.

Pausanias

One of the things that makes love ideal is to say that it is only one thing, and everything that isn’t that ideal is dishonorable. So what I am proposing is that there are two ideals of love: there is the older god of love, and there is one love whose nature is absorbed in ethereal desires: the common and the heavenly.

What is interesting in Pausanias is that he talks about the purpose of love.  What is animating this love?  Is it to not discriminate, to engage one’s lusts, one’s appetite, or is it more heavenly?  Is it more about the soul than the body?

The other idea is that love is goal oriented, [it has to have a noble goal] so for example the love would be not noble if you are only thinking about the orgasm, and not the spiritual side.

As I go through these ideas, what’s interesting to me is my reaction to them, because I wonder what’s going to make them relevant to my life, or what’s going to make it relevant to the time I am speaking in. I think it is interesting and sad that we don’t have a definition of what a soul is.

Pausanias also talks about rules for love, that there are rules for love, that there is good and bad love.

Agathon

What is bad love?

Pausanias

I don’t know…[however]  I’ve had a lot of bad love…

Alcibiades

Bad love could be publicly acknowledged [negative] sexual things like pedophilia. We [maybe also] are talking about masochistic love.

Pausanias

In psychology there is an idea that there is an unhealthy love for you.

Alcibiades

It could be a much more subtle evil, doesn’t have to be about drug abuse.

Pausanias

My experience is that even bad love brings wisdom. If I am going out with someone who is insane, then maybe it will make me a little less insane…

Eriximachus

I think the problem has to bring together bad and love. Part of the problem is that you can’t translate the term in a more subtle way, the way that  they are referring to love, as it refers to the state and citizens and being a good person so that “bad love” is still “love” all the same but its not in the sense of pederasty, bestiality, those things mentioned as value judgments as we do today,  such as adultery. Maybe [bad love] is more like ‘love that has to be conducted in secrecy”.

Pausanias

There are a lot of ideas here such as that love is more than about the body and beauty, and that once beauty its gone, the love is gone, and that a good love can endure the loss of beauty. What’s moving to me is this split that I see happens in contempoary culture, and that’s what makes more sense for me.

These speeches are not about love in how we relate [to each other], but on the idea of love and how we celebrate the spiritual love and how it is beneficial to society- because if one falls in love with someone who is good and you are trying to be good, there’s two people trying to be good, and this can only benefit society.

Alcibiades

This issue of honor and dishonor in the text speaks about on whether its honorable for you individually or whether if it is for the greater good. It talks about some sort of workmanship to love rather of love for its own sake, which is also interesting to go over the art context about whether we are actually contributing something in the greater sense.

Pausanias

I think this talks about the idea of working out love, this idea that love should be this manageable thing… What means to work on your love? It means to make your love an ideal that you can work towards. After that notion of the ideal becomes institutionalized, you’ve got a lot of underpaid workers there!  In art, seems to be same kind of thing, instead reverse: you can’t just love your art, you have to work at it

Agathon

So what does Pausanias says about relationships today?

Pausanias

That’s where [Pausanias’ speech] doesn’t work for me, because I think it is a mixture for me of both-  although I have to say in terms of , that the idea of healthy and unhealthy love seems to be something you see in a lot of talk shows, like Jerry Springer.  Is that about bad love or is it about good love? I can’t answer if it is good or bad, but what is interesting to me is that a good love is something that lasts over time, that once the beauty has faded, there is a deeper love that goes beyond the body.  That’s something that we talk about when we transfer it over to the state. Which is: Bill Clinton was the Daddy of America and suddenly became a national interest because how can he be a great leader of state if he can’t control his lower common self? This made American people very upset because they didn’t want to think about how perhaps this idea of a long term relationship would not work for everybody. So in this sense Lewinsky is perhaps an example of bad love, because of her interest in power, etc.

The other idea [ that I like] is that when you are truly in love you are of service to your partner. It could also be that because there is an understanding that their well-being is your well-being.

Erixymachus

I want to go back to the issues of ethics , good vs. bad love. I am deeply troubled by it, and in thinking of a structure of discussion, only once before have I been at a dinner when the topic of love came up in an informal setting and the idea of raising the dinner conversation to the level of theater. The conversation stopper of that evening, [which I will bring up] in the spirit of this of this symposium, was: could you sleep with an artist whose work you didn’t like?

At some point we had to agree whether we would have to say yes or no.  I would like to know by a show of hands, who would sleep with an artist whose work you didn’t like?

(some in the audience raise their hands)

Audience member:

How about sleeping with a curator whose work you didn’t like?

Socrates

Socrates’ favorite thing is to take notes on what everyone is saying that check off contradictions and things like that… but in relationship to this, I wonder the kind of thing Socrates might say is that you have to define “like”, because by definition you don’t like anyone’s work more than you like yours, because otherwise you would be doing that work.

Erixymachus

I would object to that idea, because if you were to reverse that question… I mean to say…if it is an artist whose work I like and I slept with him, then it’s the word “like” problematized?

Socrates

Socrates doesn’t know what the word “problematized” is.

(laughs)

Erixymachus

If you saw it and you like the work, the idea of a virtuous person who you admire and you like the work and turns you on?

Pausanias

A great artist is not necessarily a virtuous person. I think there are certain kinds of artists out there who don’t think of themselves first, but there are great artists whose social, human part is not working that well…

Aristophanes

Also I want to say that in relation to the idea of sleeping with someone whose work you don’t like-  you can see it in two ways: first as taking advantage of them by having a love of the flesh while you have a distaste for whatever they are trying to express through their work; or you can look at it as being very generous because maybe there are other things about their personality – the way they look, etc-  that actually you  are willing to overlook, and are willing to love somebody despite their imperfections.

Pausanias

This brings interesting questions, because if art is the only thing that is important to you, then what is your artwork about? Then, concerning this idea of tying philosophy to judgement,  on whether something is good or bad… I am not the kind of person that believes in that kind of philosophy.  I like to be confused, because when I am confused I am free, and there are not these kinds of categories, there are no categories that have to be broken all the time. There are a lot of things that I am thinking in terms of that duality.

Agathon

Perhaps what you mean is that you don’t want to be ruled by permanent paradigms, but you don’t want either to be confused all the time?

Socrates

Nobody in this dialogue says that they are confused, but in any case if anyone would say that, it would be Socrates himself…

Pausanias

The arguments presented in this Platonic dialogue are made in a way to support Socrates’ final comment, who solves the “problem” by breaking it down by categories. And [back to the realm of art] when you look at the art of the 60s and 70s, you can see that there are these artists who are trying to do that [deconstructing the essence of art]. Then look at the marketplace, where [art is objectified and] objects are bought and sold. Because there is money there, perhaps that’s bad love. And good love is when art can be experienced with no way to be bought and sold. So, what is the role of the market in this discussion? Maybe you should tell everyone about Andrea Fraser.

Agathon

Andrea Fraser is an artist who is very involved with institutional critique. Most recently she did a piece that consisted in having sex with the collector- as part of the piece.

Alcibiades

A word that we haven’t used in discussed honorable and dishonorable is ‘whoring” its not only marketplace, it’s about dirtiness… Andrea Fraser is asking “who owns who” in this experiment. Are they in power? Is someone more or less dignified for taking money for their work?

Audience member:

There is a difference between selling and selling out. She’s doing what she is doing in her own terms and she has created a context in which to do it; what she’s done is to maintain control of the context.

Socrates

A lot of this is apart from the dialogue, but I am thinking what Socrates would say about this whole discussion about corruption…and he might say that money is not good nor bad- that stuff we are talking about in here is not in the dialogue, but one of the reasons it is not, aside from that its not related to art, is that it would be considered utilitarian, completely detachable, so it wouldn’t even matter what ends you were looking with your art.

(…)

For the sake of this conversation you can say that [the relationship between art and money] there is hypocrisy here, but is this hypocrisy relevant?

(…)

I don’t think Socrates would have been interested in any of this, so the question is what has happened in the 2000 years prior to this dialogue? Somehow we have figured that there is some sort of connection between these things, and we all sort of believe it but can’t really say how, and especially not in terms of this dialogue.

[We turn into ERYXIMACHUS speech]

Eryximachus

[quoting from Eryximachus’ speech from the Symposium]:

…but one has to deal with the effect upon human beings of rhythm and harmony by a process  known as composition or the right use of melodies and verse forms in what is called education difficult as it occur,  which demand skillful artists we come back to the old notion that is the love felt by virtuous men which should be gratified and preserved, with the objective of making those virtuous who are as yet less so. This is the noble, the heavenly love, which is associated with the heavenly muse, Urania; but there is also a vulgar or common love associated with Polyhimnia, and anyone who employs this must exercise great caution in its choice of people upon whom to employ.

Love is in the air.

[Eryximachus puts on the radio and starts changing stations. The audience listens to various songs of love in different styles: salsa, bolero, religious songs, rap, Paulina Rubio, etc]

Its such a dirty old shame when you gotta take the blame for a love song, because the best love song is written with a broken heart. Now the tears in my eyes are ever blinding;  the future that lies before me I cannot see.  Although tomorrow I know the sun is rising lighting up the world but not for me.

Example B (little Kim)

I know a dude, his name is Jimmy

Used to run up imme

Night time, pissy drunk, off the hainy grainy

I didn’t mind it when he fucked me from behind

It felt fine

Specially we used to grind it

He was a trip when I sucked his dick

He used to pass me brick, credit cards and shit

Something to sleep, I took the keys to the jeep

Tell em I’ll be back

Don’t fuck some other cats

Flirting, getting numbers, in the Summer

Ho hop raw top you know mans drop

Then theres homy Jimmy hes screamy gimme

Lean in my back busting nuts in all in me

After 10 times we fucked

I think I bust twice

It was nice

Kept my neck full of ice

Put me in chanels, kept me on ice

Cold sucking his dick rocking the mike

There was something about this dude I couldn’t stand

Something that could have made his ass, really

Something I want, but I never was pushy

The motherfucker just never ate my pussy.

I don’t want dick tonight. Eat my pussy, right?

Oh oh oh

Li’l Kim  L’il Kim

Bring it to me now

I know it dude

Push a cue

On Flatbush and Avenue U

Had a weak spot

Used to pump african black

Used to seal his bags

So his work was woodn cap

I used to see him in the tunnel

With fuckers at dawn

Whispered in my ear

You wanna get this fuck on

I dug him

So I fucked ‘im

He wasn’t nut

He wanted me to suck im

But I didn’t

I aint from

Sex was Wack

I jumped on his dick

Brought his ass to sleep

He called next week

Asking why I didn’t meet him

I thought your ass was still sleeping

He laughed

Told me he bought it pack

Could he come over right could he come over right fast

And fuck my pretty ass

I’ll pass nigger

I think we’re stretched

If sex was record sales

You would be double plat

The only way you are seein’ me

Is if you are eating me

Downtown taste my love

Like forest brown

Try to impress me

With your five g-stones

I can be ten g’s nigger

If you leave me alone,

Screaming

The moral of the story is this,

You ain’t licking this

You ain’t sticking this

And I’ve got witnesses

Ask any nigger I’ve been with

They ain’t eat shit

Til they stick their toungue in this.

I aint with that front shit

I got my own bends

I got my own ends

Immediate friends

Me and my girls rock worlds

Some big niggers fuck for car keys

And double digit figures

Good dick I cherish

I could be blunt

I treat it like its precious

I ain t gonna front

For lectic niggers that front that they really

Suck my pussy

Till they kill me.

You feel me?

Example C: James Brown

Ha! I don’t care

About your past

I just want a love to last deep

I don’t care darlin about your faults

I just want to satisfy your pulse.

[inhales helium]

When you kiss me

When you miss me

Hold my hand

Make you understand

…

In a cold sweat

Ho ho ho

I don’t care about the wants

I just want HA to tell you about the do’s and don’ts

I don’t care about the way you treat me darling

I just want you to understand me, darlin’

[inhales helium]

When you kiss me

And you miss me

Hold me tight

Makes everything all right

Put it put it

Where is at now

Miss io miss io

Let me have it.

That owes its thanks to Eryximachus, Little Kim, James Brown, John Corbett, Terry Kapsalis, John Cage’s speech. Thank you.

Symposium- Second part

Aristophanes

I will present something related to Aristophanes’s myth- the classic story that usually starts like a tagline of a film, something along the lines of “they were all alone in the world until they found each other” this is and old story, and everybody knows it, it’s the one about the search for the soul mate – so-called your other half but the belief that the romantic relationship between two people form some type of fullness is suspect these days. In the age of internet dating the intellectual part, the very basis of romantic love, concept that the personal fulfillment, the love for another, is often considered to be an embarrassing illusion, and the illusion that two form one is started by Aristophanes in Plato’s symposium. He proposes the idea that originally there were three sexes: a man, a woman, and a man-woman, and these humans had four arms and four legs; they had two legs looking the opposite ways, they walked upward but they often rolled over and over again on their hands and feet very very quickly, that way over large territories, and they were very powerful and strong, and actually threatened the gods. So Zeus decided to cut them into two, and when he divided they were very much saddened and clung to each other, so Apollo decided that he would rearrange their sexual parts in the direction of their faces so that when they embraced each other they would be able to have sex with each other and get some satisfaction from their embrace, and that would be true also of all the female and male humans. So that is how the idea of “looking for the other half”, and it has survived for thousands of years, and also has rationalized the idea of family and other needs in one person. So our notion of love, I think partially the idea of financial independence of women, along with advances in science, that make it possible for women to be artificially inseminated and have a child of their own, and even the idea that we can clone ourselves, and make another human out of one, so we are creating independence in countries that are technologically advanced and affluent. But love is still such an intense fascination … we seem inundated with the topic. I can’t think of any other topic, there are so many ruminations on the idea of love and manifestations and symbols of love in mass media, on the internet sites like love live, friendster and other offer many opportunities to hook up with individuals and the reality shows where people try to get the perfect match, and even the music industry, which since its earliest beginnings has been relying on the love song, sexual lyrics, of such explicitness that they verge on the comical- so we all seem desperate for a little amore but all these forms (television, internet, music industry) are really commodifying the idea of love, its not really about love at all, but about selling the idea of love. Were are in a society that emphasizes the self, and self preservation, and internet relationships tend to tell great risk- I think there is a certain disillusionment with love as this perfect oneness, that has to do with the internet – the idea of socializing from the isolation of the computer screen also we are living in a time when its increasingly open culture and part of this isolation could be that people are confused about what people’s sexual preferences are, and it is hard where to stand, or how to go about courtship, and there is still a very high divorce rate, that shows us how fragile relationship are, and  that relationships cause a lot of emotional stress. I got a very sad talk! So this is the side that is shown in mass culture, mass media, but at the same time there is another thing going on- last summer I did studio visits with many studio artist and many were doing work that dealt with the subject of intimacy and desire, and love- although they would never say that this was what the work was dealing with. Also I think that some people, at least in Toronto,  sort of expressed it through a camaraderie and openness that was very inspiring and there is this day, August 14^th, the great blackout, when the whole city of Toronto, and new York, and many cities we experienced this very peaceful night that brought strangers together, this wonderful feeling in the air that you know its there, but you just need the time to experience it an enjoy it. And so I organized this exhibition showing this young artists entitled “the republic of love”  and I  basically wanted to give the audience an opportunity not only to see the work but also to reflect upon what the conceptions of love were in that context versus popular media. I won’t describe what was in the show, but I think it is something that is important, this idea of self-realization through love is perhaps not seen as something as a possiblity and I think love — where I grew up most people were encouraged, said you have to happen this yourself before you can see it happen it to someone else. Anyway that’s my stance on the subject of love and want to propose that if they misbehaved  and perhaps that’s whats happened to us now instead of looking for another half we could be looking for three other quarters– that’s why there is interest in non-monogamous relationships and also growing population of people that define themselves as bi-sexual, searching experiences in more than one person.

Pausanias

Brings the idea of gender and asexual gender, and trasgender. This idea of self-definition instead of being defined by gender they are defined by themselves. Its almost a way to take these two halves and making them whole again but in a new way, people reinventing categories in order to have a greater sense of themselves. Maybe it is three fourths that are together. How can a marriage survive that?

Eryximachus

I think what makes it sound fresh from the gender perspective contemporary parlance of contemporary gender politics that gender has this essentialist notion relates to identity is gender is something like means to an end I think. Wholeness is the issue, not gender.  When you think about gender it’s a charged issue, but I think the issue of love in a broader, holistic sense, love and socialization, love and its relationship to medicine, as the foundation of other things, as opposed to “now we can’t talk about love unless we talk about the institution of marriage”, the issue of marriage does not even come into this conversation.

Aristophanes

The idea of romantic love and marriage is very new- with the rise of the bourgeoisie, that is something that we are supposed to seek out, a mate that you are in love with and get married to, instead of an arranged marriage or marry for money or for family reasons.

Eryximachus

But when we use the idea of modern love, what time does that entail? Renaissance or..?

Socrates

There is a book by Dennis Cuchebrand [ sp?] called “love in the Western world” its all about the origins of modern romantic love that is rooted in the Trobadours in the XIIth century, and so brings up things like Tristan and Isolde and other romantic periods, that would like be an anti-Platonic reading: marriage, love, fall, separation…

Pausanias

One of the things that interests me about Aristophanes story is that it’s not a Hollywood plot, – a man and a woman getting together- it’s about all these different kinds of ways that these relationships can happen. But aside from that, I think its not about finding wholeness, but about getting rid of loneliness. I mean, when I read that all I thought was the desire to completely not feel alone in the world, and the desire to unify with someone else was didn’t matter who it was, just finding that other half

Socrates

This question would be an out of character in the dialogue, but why would you say that none of the characters in the dialogue talk about loneliness?

Eryximachus

I think that the tone Aristophanes’ story, which is quite fantastic and somehow has a sort of “are you serious” quality, eliminates a certain human set of motivations- such as loneliness. The tale has something of an Eastern influence…

Aristophanes

I just want to mention that homosexuality in Plato’s time is very common and accepted, and also that Aristophanes claims that the union between the male beast divided into two is the purest type of love, which I think is largely due to the fact that is a very male-dominated society, and also that the perfect union man-man, they are longing to be with each other but they cannot say why is it that they need to be with each other and that is why Aristophanes makes this story up.

Socrates

Just want to mention that in the literature on the Symposium people make a lot of that,  and they make it into this whole story of the enigma of the story of love, that one passage, which is a very brief passage- becomes the whole —– that Aristophanes is really aiming at, that he loves to talk about but you don’t know why, that’s another kind of romantic projection, of romantic love back into the past .

Agathon

Here is where Agathon has to weigh in- as he comes after Aristophanes in this speech- and he is into is to understand what this whole idea of wholeness is about, and he questions Aristophanes in what the is forgetting about this kind of higher power which is God, and the love to God is what is truly important.

So what I thought would do would be to first explain what Agathon says, and then how this translates into the notion of how art, which is a product of love, (according to Agathon) how art makes us whole.

He says first: love is blessedest of gods, he also is the youngest, because he did not exist in the early years, when the gods were at war.

The things that were done before love were done out of necessity only unlike other things in humankind. So love is young and dwells in soft places, in hearts and souls.

Love is all flexibility and grace, and like any natural thing, it cannot do or suffer wrong.

Men and women serve the god of love out of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where there is love there is justice. However, love is the ruler of desires, and love can conquer war… etc.” and he goes on and on. But I will try to break it down a little bit and tell you what he would actually say about art:

Love is the fairest and blessedest and the best of gods, it is also the youngest, because the love was not invented out of not necessity, like other things in humankind.

Art is also invented out love, not out of necessity; There is something youthful about making art; Art does not become important for being useful

Love is always young and dwells in soft places, like the hearts and souls of people.

Art that only exists in people’s brains is not real art; art that you don’t feel something for is not real art.

Love is all flexibility and grace, and like any natural thing, it cannot do or suffer wrong.

If art is the product of love, and if love is all flexibility and grace, then there is nothing such as bad art. Meaning, Art is only what it is,  because it could not be either good or bard, so it should not be treated as something wrong.

Men and women serve the god of love out of their own free will, and where there is love there is obedience, and where there is love there is justice.

Art is a disinterested activity- which makes me think that political art or commercial art don’t really exist or are not real art.

However, love is the ruler of desires, and love can conquer war.

Art can help us do things that can help us would improve the world. And Art can defeat politicians

Love is the author of poetry and generates poetry in others

Art generates art in others

Love is the core of creation, as we are all the product of an act of love,

Art is the core of its own creation, because we create art once we see art and learn the language of art;

Love makes humans to be of one mind at a banquet

Art is a language that we all share and make us a universal community;

Love fills us with affection and empties us out of disaffection

We recognize each other through this language, and can fall in love with each other;

The pilot, helper, defender, saviour of men, in whose footsteps every man follows is love.

Which I think in equal portion it can be that

Art can take us to safe places where we can better deal with this world,

Art is a savior of our tormented minds,

Art, as a product of love, can make us grow,

Making Art is a different way of making love,

The best art we have made in our lives contains all our love,

We love art because it makes us strong,

Because it makes us richer, because if makes us better than who we are,

Even if everything ends, if the world disappears, if we have to live in wholes

We can thing about things and think about them as art,

The limits of art is only the limit of our imagination and it does keep us, if not necessarily young, it does keep me alive.

I want to make a toast to our love, for art.

Socrates

That was really interesting, because I did something very similar to that, but also different, because what you did was to take the word “love” and substituted it with “art”; what I did was to go through the dialogue and substituted the word “love” with “love of art”; its an important kind of difference, because what you were doing was changing the subject, in a sense  – which is not to say you didn’t get truths out of that- whereas my notion was if every time they say “love” they “say love of art” then you know they are taking the subset as an example, seeing if the doctrine applies, so this is what I was toying with. And I got this idea from that book on painting by Derrida, in which he says at the beginning that the subject is the shape of the desire for truth, in what it pertains to painting; and so there would be other shapes for the desire of truth. So in this case there would be love and there would be shapes of love when it pertains of art- it would be like a special case.  But, while this has been going on, Socrates has been making a list of all the things that would have baffled him, and then things that he would have disagreed with.

Among the things that would have baffled him would have been what Ryan (Pausanias) said about the embrace of ambiguity- because the shape of his dialogues for the classicists that study that- is that they (called aporiatic dialogues) lead to a state where the person arguing with Socrates is reduced to a baffling idiot, the aporia is the person who has no idea what they are claiming anymore and this happens a couple of times in this dialogue, like in this bit where Socrates questions Agathon. Then there is a thing called “elenchus, or elenctic dialogues” when you demonstrate, through this immeasurable series of horrifying annoying questions, that the person actually holds the opposite to what they were claiming minutes before. So the reason why I think what we have been doing would have baffled Socrates,  is that I think we don’t have anything against that, if any of us could actually sum up that kind of rhetoric we would be happy to have someone say “okay, I have no idea what I am saying”, but then we would enjoy that, so that ambiguity is, as the art historian  —- would say, a use of power for us- a lot of contemporary art is based on trying to find ambiguity- we love the kind of darkness and obscurity and the difficulty- but in these dialogues that would truly baffle Socrates, because if we ever reach the point in our conversations where we would know what to do, Socrates would say: “okay, now what? Let’s not be there anymore”.

Pausanias

I think that these dialogues are about trying to created order. But I would say now that people are more interested in embracing chaos. That may be the difference – now what is interesting to me is to look back and see how order was important to these people, and now I start to see how there may be a need in our culture for search for some kind of a balance…

Agathon

Well, in a way that was the origin of this whole discussion. Usually the discussions that take place nowadays feel so unstructured that I really wanted to know what would happen if you really try to follow some sort of structure.

Socrates

There are a couple of books that have come out on beauty and the search for clarity and balance, so this is in the air…

Pausanias

Just to add, in our political time, which is so conservative, this interest in balance is in fashion. As soon as you got this isolated point of view, and you are out doing stuff in the world… you have to allow chaos…

Socrates

I think that is completely true and some of these people who are writing stuff about beauty and truth, they are seriously conservative and old-fashioned.

You would ask yourself on whether there is any artist who wants to make something that is not ambiguous. At the Art Institute in Chicago we have these Koreans who are educated in a very conservative art setting, and they really don’t like ambiguity. One of my students brought a picture of a fish, a happy fish with smiley face and eyelashes, and said that it was a self-portrait. I said that couldn’t be because no one is that happy, and she said ‘I am’.

The next thing that would have baffled Socrates, was [the notion] that values are essential. This comes up a number of times. Communities believe that an artwork of like Rembrandt is good because many believe so- this would be what we would call “re-response criticism” in other words, that Moby Dick can mean anything if your class decides what it means.  That is really different from these dialogues, where goodness is beauty, inherently, is not because the majority voted for it, but because these are eternal facts.

The third thing I think that would baffle Socrates would be called “pscyhologisms”, which is is values or judgements of psychological origin or best explained through psychology, for example self-esteem, destructive relationships, relating, and loneliness particularly.

Then in terms of “love of art”, that it has a moral character or a virtue, like a moral purpose. Second that “love of art” entails moderation or temperance, which is an idea that is completely out since the Renaissance, basically- noboby is trying to moderate anything- nobody is trying to de decorous and balanced. Also, love for art is “tough, and shriveled, and homeless,” which sounds too much like the [romantic struggling] artist idea. There is also this thing about immortality, that “love of art” “wants reproduction, or immortality in birth and beauty”, “love of art neither comes to be nor passes away”, “love of art is not anywhere in any other thing, but itself, by itself, with itself”- that is the moment in which Plato supposedly enters the dialogue. I think there is a huge gulf there between our attitudes and Socrates’ attitudes. First of all, we don’t believe in that we are making stuff for the ages in the sense that Michaelangelo was, and then there’s this whole thing about creativity here, which is close to old clichés of creativity and depends on the equation of art and beauty so it’s a real pre-modernist idea- you could hold to it, but you would have to be someone like Odd Nerdrum in order to believe anything like that. Then there’s this question that love of art that love of art could really be known through the kind of discussions that we are holding, and here I think the misunderstanding would be mutual: because to Plato, there would be way too many digressions, we are not sticking to the point, we just like to chat – “chat” is not a Greek word, I guess-  and the incomprehension would be mutual- there is a lot of great literature about how awful person Socrates was, there’s great stuff that Nietzsche’s written about how he was the “disease” that was produced by the decadence of the Greek society, that he was the gadfly, famously, but mostly, that he was this annoying person, which was a source of truth but also of breaking the illusion- so there would be  a mutual mistrust: Plato would mistrust our dialogue as much as we distrust his. There is a fair amount of scholarship about how this is not really philosophy, and not really a dialogue, and not really a narrative, but a mixture of all rest of them,  the way that it comes on the fourth, fifth, sixth hand, that someone remembers that he told someone else then told it wrong so he retells to him again, and this exercise makes a lot of people these days ask why it had this form, why there are speeches that didn’t have the final truth- so that problems we have with that would be reciprocated- there would be problems if we tried to insert this conversation there.

Erixymachus

Would it be perhaps that the theatrical form helped to make a clearer story and really convey the point more strongly?

Socrates

One kind of answer is that back then they only had a limited set of categories for the kinds of dialogues, and all that was in what we now call poetry, but they conceptualized them in different ways,  but the other kind of answer is that the truths that happen in the dialogue are the kind of truths that pertain to concepts that are so widely held in life that they are entangled with many other concepts- that is why its so easy for Socrates to set these trip wires for everybody, because you can’t have consistent set of beliefs unless they are fenced off, so the point therefore of having a dialogue like the Symposium, which is not just a doctrine, but which actually takes the people through the steps of humiliation, by Socrates’ hand- the point is that because these things have so far-reaching connections, therefore every reader has to rediscover in the answers of the hapless people what their answers would be, so it has to be enacted.  But then there’s still an enigma which I still don’t see anyone giving an answer to- which is when Plato starts speaking in his voice, which is what happens when the simply writes his doctrine- then how does Plato want people to think about that in relation to what he wrote before, because how come there is other kind of truth that doesn’t require that kind of dialogue?

In terms of what we would agree on, is that the love of art has to do with seduction. This whole rhetorical business of the dialogue is about seduction, and that becomes obvious at the end, when Alcibiades comes to Socrates and says “all what you say has no truth or content, all you wanted to do is to seduce me”. That is a way of twisting the whole thing, so I thought point of contact is that artworks are about seduction. There’s all kinds of parallels between the language of talking about liking art and the language of love, and the rhetoric of seduction and the way of speaking in studios. Sometimes when students are fiddling in their studios, getting them ready for the critique, it’s a lot like being in front of the mirror, with makeup and things like that, although its not you who wants to do the seducing but it’s the work. This infamous word, “interesting” , its like a post-modern stand-in for whatever statements that are not being made; but for this context it’s also infuriating because it shows that the seduction is not going well!

The second one has to do with Aristophanes’ doctrine of doubles and all that. But the idea of ‘complement’ is similar to a word used by Derrida uses, which is “simplelong” which is the thing that matches you from you which you were divided before history began, which you don’t necessarily recognize but which you need,  so I am not continuing your critique but I think you can really use this, because if for love you substitute “love of art” then the doctrine is really nice, because then it would mean that art is the simplelong, it is the thing that complements you, but you can’t ever reattach yourself to it, ever.

Aristophanes

There is also this nonverbal way, where it gives but it remains a mystery.

Agathon

In fact art is in a better position, as it can always remain mysterious, whereas love normally fails to be mysterious forever.

Socrates

There is a passage from Daniel Halpern, who teaches at MIT, who says about this idea that Eros (love) “springs from a sense of lack or limitation, it pursues a fullness of being that forever moves in and in the course of that continuous struggle establishes a tenuous whole on existence or presence”.  Which is something that sounds reasonable to me?

Then there is this thing where, in this infamous passage, there is a lot written about how this dialogue anticipates Judeo-Christian, Christian love (agape) but apparently both Saint Agustine and Jerome both say that the Symposium contains a lot of Judeo-Christian values, and apparently there was a lot of backlash against that, and now people are returning to this idea that there is genuinely an expansion of the idea of love past the limits of the Greek language, and this special kind of love, which is similar to the Christian idea of love. One example is Kierkegaard, who asks “what is “love thy neighbor?”” and the answer is “he who I love as my neighbor is not the object defining love but the nature of love that defines the object”. And St. Augustine in the “City of God” there is a passage where he is talking about different kinds of love and says “there is a love which is itself to be loved, there is a love which is not to be loved, and there is the “agape”, the human virtue which is the right order, free… unimposed of human love by human love itself”. That’s the expand of Christian “agape”. So in a sense this love for art would be this whole consuming kind of thing; we wouldn’t be able to theorize it in the rest of the dialogue.

Then there is this notion that you could use the Symposium to prove that art is interpretation, and it would go this way: Diotima treats “interpretation” itself as an erotic enterprise; Diotima tells Socrates that Eros serves as “an interpreter between gods and men, filling and bridging the gap between beings who otherwise would never meet”, and so the whole art of love and also the prophetic interpretation depends on Eros, so interpretation itself (or, in this case, the love of art itself) would be  a form of interpretation.

Another that love of art could be understood as an obligation. That would be from a notion that Derrida has that art is an unasked-for gift, that when you walk into a gallery and you see something it’s a gift to see it but you didn’t ask for it; the gift is on a form that you didn’t quite anticipate, as the experience is unique and surprising, so it instills in you this sense of obligation that you have to return, but because it is an artwork, you can’t return it, there is nothing to give back. Then Derrida goes into all different kinds of ways in which people try to return it: by becoming curators, or becoming art historians and try to tell the “truth” of it, or becoming conservators and trying to physically change it…

Agathon

Why would that be seen as a return of a gift, as opposed to the claiming of ownership of it?

Socrates

Because it can’t; because it is a gift of truth, because you return the truth; but in the wider sense of “gift” there is no really giving back.

So what strikes me about that is that after a lifetime of looking at art you’ve got a very complex sense of unfulfilled obligations…

And the last thing: it struck me that talking about how we love art as we are doing here, has maybe in a way of hiding from actually loving art; this occurred to me because I am reading this book by George Perec, his biography entitled “W”, where every other chapter is about this childhood, and there is a chapter of a story that he wrote when he was thirteen or fourteen about a mythical island off Tierra del Fuego, where everybody plays a sport, and then what happens as you read about the island in excruciating detail, things start go to terribly wrong, judgment is arbitrary, and women are kept sequestered until the age of fourteen, so it is a story of a place that tried to keep the world at bay but that fantasy keeps getting more and more horrific; so it occurs to me that there’s a way of arguing that the whole dialogue – and our discussion- is a way to keep at bay what is going on in art, and there are ways to support this by looking at the text. Halpern says “to fix one’s case on a literary object (and I would substitute here with “art”) which is to say in the prospect of someone else’s neurotic activity is a perversion of direct desire”; which is to say that the Symposium is fundamentally perverse, because it is about someone else’s desire, and what you should do is to stop the conversation and just love the art.

Alcibiades

Alcibiades comes all the way in the end, drunk. I am not drunk, but I will summarize a bit about Alcibiades’ position that I align myself with… he is overwhelmed and obsessively in love with Socrates, and is completely unafraid to embarrass himself,  ready to speak the truth. And Socrates has basically summed up Symposium. From the position of Alcibiades, we talk about replacing love with art, and the question of sleeping with someone whose work you didn’t like, from his perspective the point is the experience, that its all about the position- Alcibiades has this interesting, introverted perception created by being inebriated and open, in a way he is talking about it all is an issue of perception. And I think that in that case, being able to grasp what the real situation is depends on how one sees it. And definitely within my own practice, once we are acting one role out, I don’t want to be pretending to be something, but I want to be “something”. I think Alcibiades’ idolatry of Socrates is mythological. The position that I identify with is having a completely uncynical, possibly naïve, yet completely genuine belief that one is doing is large and effectual and that is the core of  what one wants. There is a book entitled “Against Love” by Laura Kipnis, and it is polemic because she speaks intentionally against love, it’s about being confronted against love. Her ostensible argument is that Western American, monogamous love, is a completely archaic form- in other words, what she is arguing, is that monogamy is dead, and we should accept it, and society will favor a long-term monogamous relationship over a happy one. But what her argument ends ups being – and she goes into a really long list  and diatribe of things you can’t do with monogamy-  its actually creating your own circumstances. And this is what Alcibiades does- he decides what he wants and goes for it. And in art too, there is so much art history that asks are you a techno artist, a conceptualists, neo conceptualists, all these fake point of application – and I think the underlying thing that you have to be cognescent of is that it is “my life” and that you have to construct it yourself. And love, like art, is one’s own construct. I am talking about a  life-long investment that becomes one’s own legacy that we leave behind.

*****

[streaming audio files]

The Art World Home Companion, Smack Mellon, July 17 2010:

The Art World Home Companion, Introduction:

The Art World Home Companion, The Estheticist:

[full video documentation below]

The Art World Home Companion is a radio program originally conceived for  Condensations of the Social, an exhibition at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, curated by Sara Reisman in June-July of 2010. The project pays tribute to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, adapting the concept for the contemporary art community. The “Estheticist” segment of the  program invites public participation and offers a counseling and answering of art-related questions from listeners, in the spirit of Randy Cohen’s New York Times column “the Ethicist”.

A live program was presented at Smack Mellon on July 17, 2010 with the participation of Ryan Hill and Larry Krone.

Pablo Helguera and Larry Krone performing "Art Basel", AWHC, 07/15/10, Smack Mellon

Introduction:

The Art World Home Companion is the great variety show and radio podcast desired and expected by all and produced by none — until now. For those of you who feel lonely amidst the social choreographies of the art world, whose anxieties about professional issues generate unanswered questions that they are afraid to ask, who cant detach from Facebook and are a bit nostalgic of the time when you actually got to see and talk to people in person, but feel awkward at openings, for those for whom the art world remains inscrutable, who cannot understand why it is the way it is— who feel that our social rituals are slightly absurd and contradictory, our theorizing incomprehensible, our ethical behavior suspicious, our professional acting opportunistic, and yet you still ache for being part of it —this program is your friend, your companion and your Saturday morning sunshine.

Now that nothing is radical anymore but we are still stressed about it being so, the era of folk conceptualism has begun and it must be celebrated. Well aware of this,  The Art World Home Companion will reach the artist studios in Brooklyn and the Amish households in Pennsylvania, the pristine galleries of Chelsea and the prairie chicken farms of Mississippi, the grave hallways of Bard and the harmonious mountains of Appalachia. Uniquely American in its folksy spirit and humor, its relentless optimism, its shameless commercialism and its confessional talk show nature, The Art World Home Companion is the Car Guys for art students and confused art school graduates, Dr. Phil for artists and independent curators, the Oprah of the art historians, the Jim Cramer for collectors and dealers, and the Larry King of all of us who care about art but have a hard time not becoming cynical about the art world.  Each program will include special guests, American folk music, art recipes, site-specific travel tips from the Atlas of Art Commonplaces, strange manifestos, and the centrally important program The (Esth)ethicist, to whom listeners can write with their burning professional questions. The art world has now a friend, a shoulder to cry on, a companion finally not to compete against or sleep with for convenience but just someone to laugh with, to love, learn and share our eccentricities, fears and desires as members of our little town which is the Art World.

Radio drama: "Otto's Self-Board Meeting"

Full video of the July 17, 2010 program at Smack Mellon:

Part I: introduction and worst exhibition titles competition

Part II: Radio drama: Otto’s Self-Board Meeting

Part III: Larry Krone

Part IV: The Estheticist

Part V: The Estheticist 2nd part

Part VI: Over the Hamptons and Art Basel

Part VII: Art World Trivia and The Dan Flavin Awards

Part VIII: Documenta (final)

El proyecto de la conferencia combinatoria consistió en la presentación de 16 ponencias que conceptualmente y formalmente se integran gradualmente dentro de una sola, a manera de una fuga a 16 voces en cuatro tiempos. El evento duró aproximadamente media hora con cuatro breves pausas.  La jornada comenzó con 16 conferencistas haciendo presentaciones simultáneas en secciones distintas del museo de una duración de 8 minutos.  En la segunda ronda, los conferencistas se unen en pares, realizando 16 ponencias que integraron los temas que trataron en la primera ronda, pero manteniendo la misma duración de 8 minutos. En la tercera ronda los ponentes se unieron en grupos de cuatro, realizando una ponencia de la misma extensión que integró los cuatro temas anteriores, resultando en una ronda de ocho ponencias. En la cuarta ronda el grupos de dieciseis ponentes realizaron una ponencia colectiva, uniendo como antes todos los temas tratados. En cada fase, la integración de conceptos fue total.

The Combinatory Conference consisted in the presentation of 16 lectures that both formally and conceptually start to merge with each other, forming a fugue of 16 voices in four movements. The project started with 16 lecturers making simultaneous presentations in different sections of the museum, each lecture lasting 8 minutes. In the second round, the lecturers gathered in pairs with the goal to merge the content of their original corresponding lectures, but maintaining their merged lecture at 8 minutes (the topic of the resulting, “merged” lecture would need to be different from the original two, but would also need to incorporate them both). In the third round the presenters gathered in groups of four, presenting a lecture of the same extension that merged the four preivous topics, resulting in a round of eight simultaneous lectures. In the fourth round, the 16 lecturers made a collective lecture, unifiying as before all the previous topics. in each of the phases the integration of ideas and subjects was total.

Este proyecto surge la necesidad de cuestionar los modos en que la información the transmite como conocimiento en la era digital.  Hoy en día, gracias al internet, la información nos es accesible libremente de forma casi infinita, generando el problema de la carencia de filtros o métodos organizativos para resignificar esta información a manera de conocimiento o reflexión.  De la misma manera, los procesos cognitivos de hoy en día funcionan a nivel de multi-canal, como resultado del deficit de atención que se genera por estar bombardeado constantemente por información de todo tipo. Como resultado de estos fenómenos, estamos acostumbrados a vivenciar el mundo como una yuxtaposición de incongruencias y aún así darle sentido a nuestra realidad. Este proyecto busca reestructurar el formato pedagógico de la conferencia utilizando los principios combinatorios de las fugas barrocas de Johann Sebastián Bach, transponiendo el lenguaje musical a un lenguaje verbal y realizando una estructuras compositiva equivalente a las obras escritas para múltiples voces.

The project emerges from the need to question the forms in which information is transmitted as knowledge in today’s digital age. Today, thanks to the web, information is freely accessible, creating the problem of lack of filters or organizational principles to resignify this information into useful knowledge or reflecting. At the same time, our cognitive rewiring has made us used to work in multi-channel formats, thus giving meaning to our reality this way. This project seeks to restructure the pedagogical format of the lecture using the combinatory preinciples of Bach’s fugues, trasposing the musical language to  verbal communication and seeking an equivalent compositional structure for multiple voices.

La conferencia se presentó en el Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) el 11 de abril del 2010, como parte de la exposición Jardín de Academus.Los participantes de la conferencia combinatoria fueron Pedro  Castillo, Dante  Barrios Avila, Pamela Zúñiga, Bernardo Sánchez, Emiliano Ortega, Marisol Maza, Elizabeth Frisas, Miriam Rodríguez, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, Gustavo Hernández, Maribel Escobar, Mercedes hinojosa, Violeta Solís Horcasitas y Andrea Santiago.

The lecture was presented at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) on April 11,  2010, as part of the exhibition Jardín de Academus. The participating lecturers were  Pedro  Castillo, Dante  Barrios Avila, Pamela Zúñiga, Bernardo Sánchez, Emiliano Ortega, Marisol Maza, Elizabeth Frisas, Miriam Rodríguez, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, Gustavo Hernández, Maribel Escobar, Mercedes hinojosa, Violeta Solís Horcasitas and  Andrea Santiago.

Formato de las conferencias / Lecture format:

1.1.

Lo importante es tambien lo de afuera (o sobre las envolturas de regalos)

Violeta Solís Horcasitas

1.2

Encuentros: Fuerzas y Cuerpos

Andrea Santiago Páramo

1.3 El Hombre como animal simbólico

Mercedes Hinojosa

1.4 Cuando las imágenes se multiplican: el arte en la era digital

Elizabet G. Frias

1.5 La natación como posibilidad para la expansion del cuerpo humano

Marisol Maza

1.6 El perfil del Asesino Serial: el arte de matar

Pamela Zúñiga

1.7 Aspectos importantes en la nutricion de la vida diaria

Dante Barrios Ávila

1.8 La ciudad perfecta

Gustavo E. Hernandez

1.9 Inventar el espacio del agradecimiento: los ex-votos en México

Maribel Escobar

1.10 Curaduría y gestión cultural (o las artes visuales en búsqueda de su libertad condicional)

Santiago espinosa de los monteros

1.11 Ciencia ficcion y conflicto: frontera y colonialismo

Emiliano Ortega

1.12 Au’jourd hui: el París de hoy y siempre

Pedro Castillo

1.13 El baño: obsolescencia planificada y la estetica del desperdicio

Yaoci pardo

1.14 Sinsentidos de una prohibicion arbitraria: legalizacion de la marihuana

Bernardo sanchez

1.15 El por qué somos pura memoria

Miriam Rodriguez

SEGUNDA RONDA

2.1

El asesino como devorador de nutrientes ajenos

Pamela Zúñiga

Dante Barrios

2.2

Paris Oculto:

Capital de la gran caca

Pedro Castillo

Yaoci Pardo

2.3

La memoria de la prohibicion

Bernardo Sanchez /Miriam Rodriguez

2.4

Gestión y Conflicto

Emiliano Ortega Rousset

Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros

2.5

Navegar el oceano digital:

La publicidad del cuerpo y la imagen

Elizabeth Frisas y

Marisol Maza

2.6

El cuerpo como envoltura

Violeta Solís Horcasitas

Andrea Santiago

2.7

La apropiacion simbólica del espacio

Mercedes Hinojosa

Maribel Escobar Varillas

Gustavo Emmanuel Hernández Peña

TERCERA RONDA

3.1

El asesino es la idea

Yaoci Pardo

Pedro  Castillo

Dante  Barrios Avila

Pamela Zúñiga

3.2

Gestión de la memoria múltiple:

Iconografía navegable

Bernardo Sánchez

Emiliano Ortega

Marisol Maza

Elizabeth Frisas

Miriam Rodríguez

Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros

3.3

El cuerpo como espacio simbólico

Gustavo Hernández

Maribel Escobar

Mercedes hinojosa

Violeta Solís Horcasitas

Andrea Santiago

4.1

Ficcionator: La multiple ficcionalizacion de la individualidad y sus consecuencias

(una conferencia combinatoria)

What in the World is a site-specific project  for the first edition of Philadelphia’s festival Philagrafika. The project is an “unauthorized biography” of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, an illustrious institution that has played a key role in the history of American Archaeology. The project consists in an installation at the Penn Museum recreating the TV set of What in the World, a series of documentaries, and a published book digging out little known stories around the museum’s remarkable curators and other unusual figures of its history, all of which played a key role in shaping the museum’s collections.

The project is inspired in a famous 1950s TV quiz show of the same title produced by the Penn Museum and conceived by its charismatic director Froelich Rainey. The program   would bring together a panel of experts to try to guess the origins of a series of mysterious artifacts in the museum’s collection. What in the World was a pioneering museum education project during the dawn of the telecommunications age. The current project includes the launching of a season’s worth of episodes, loosely formatted in the original television show’s structure.

The historical episodes examined as part of What in the World are the life stories of Maxwell Sommerville (1829-1924), professor at the University and collector of talismans and Buddhist items; Louis Shotridge (1882-1937), a Tlingit indian from Alaska who became a well known curator, ethnographer and controversial figure amongst his people;  John Henry Haynes (1849- 1910) a photographer turned archaeologist who became the unlikely leader of the first American expedition to the Middle East and  uncovered more than 20,000 cuneiform clay tablets in Nippur, loosing his mind in the process. Other stories include the mystery of the Julsrud collection, a group of clay figurines collected by the German businessman Waldemar Julsrud in Acámbaro, Guanajuato, Mexico during the 1940s and which include representations of dinosaurs, and the story behind the theft of a renowned crystal ball at the University Museum that once belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi, the last female monarch of China.

Figure from the Julsrud collection, Acámbaro

By creating an “ anecdotal archaeology” of sorts on this archaeology museum, the project addresses the social role of curators in museums and the skewed narratives that curatorial voices often project onto objects.

Exhibition opening:Thursday, January 28, 2010, 5-7pm

An event on February 28th, with the participation of Mark Dion, will include a live recreation of a What in the World program as well as the launch of the What in the World book, publishe by Jorge Pinto Books.

For more information:

http://www.penn.museum/press-releases/694-multi-disciplinary-artist-pablo-helguera-creates-what-in-the-world.html

http://www.philagrafika2010.org

WHAT IN THE WORLD / BOOK EXCERPTS

FRONTISPIECE

Throughout the twenty or so years I have worked in the education departments of art museums, I have gradually become interested the biographical anecdotes, oral histories and archived or nearly forgotten stories—most of which are seldom visible or communicated to the public—about the generations of collectors, directors, curators and educators whose vision and interests have shaped the nature and tone of their institutions as well as their collections. This book contains a small group of biographical divertimentos connected to a museum with a particularly remarkable trove of such stories.

Most museums have a mission of educating through object-centered study, firm in the nineteenth-century belief that an object is a microcosm of a culture or an artwork a window to the world of an artist. What this focus often underplays is the fact that there are usually very subjective reasons—philosophical, personal, political—for the presence of an object or artwork at a particular museum, reasons why it was chosen by a particular person to represent a particular culture or art movement (or conversely, why certain objects or artworks are absent or not deemed important enough for inclusion).

In other words, what is often missing when the story of an artifact is told is the history not of its maker but of those who brought it to the museum—the objects’ “curatorial parents”— as well as of those who gave philosophical life to the museum by creating the interpretive frameworks that envelop these objects. The histories of museums are best revealed not through the objects they contain but through the histories of the individuals that brought them there. The Hermitage Museum’s collection can’t be explained without Peter the Great in the same way that the histories of the Guggenheim, The Frick Collection or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum owe the peculiarities of their collections to their founders. But while founders usually leave their names at the door of the institution, the hand of its curators is more invisible, and most of them are forgotten after a generation or two.

Sometimes this alternative history is unexceptional or irrelevant, sometimes it is unsavory or even embarrassing, but it often is useful and even illuminating, shedding light on the prevailing ideas and values of the time the collection was created. Of all American cities, Philadelphia has perhaps the most illustrious history in the early era of museum making. Pierre Eugene du Simitiere opened his coin collection to the public under the name American Museum in 1782 in Philadelphia, and a few years later Charles Willson Peale opened the first natural history museum (also the first major museum institution) in the United States there. As one of the historically key centers for science in America Philadelphia has a history of strange collections. In 1858 Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter donated his collection of medical oddities to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, thus creating the still existing Mütter Museum.

It is against this historical background that the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology emerged in the late nineteenth century. In the words of historian Steven Conn, the University Museum was “amongst the first institutions in this country—and probably the most ambitious—to create a separate space, both physically and intellectually, for the display of human artifacts apart from collections of natural history or specimens. Proposed by the University provost [William Pepper] as early as 1889, the University Museum, when it moved from temporary quarters to its new home in 1899, tried to do what the Peabody [Museum of Natural History, Yale University,] and the Field [Museum, Chicago,] had not yet done—occupy the space between science and art.” Aside from its central place in the history of American culture, the University Museum is a unique example of how individuals connected to a museum can leave a significant mark on the institution. The unusual cast of characters that formed the museum and helped give it shape during its first half-century of life run the gamut of eccentricity, ambition, idealism and even melodrama.

Thus the University Museum is, I thought, an ideal candidate for such an examination of its personalities through its collection. Its galleries and its objects are a collection of two tales: the one of the ancient culture that the curators sought to tell, and the unintended story of themselves and their vision. That is the story that I find the most attractive, perhaps because having worked in museums for so many years I am too used to hear the behind the scenes curatorial stories that don’t usually become common knowledge.

In the same way in which museums have two stories, this book also is a doubly subjective biography of the University Museum. On the one hand, it is an attempt to show how the personal interests and obsessions of certain individuals influenced the life of the museum; on the other hand it is my own subjective focus on a selected group of people that, to me, represent interesting aspects of curating, collecting, exhibiting and interpreting that are common to most museums. Seen through the prism of time, the subjects of these stories may appear naïve, egotistical and messianic. It is important to remember that the social and historical context in which they lived was drastically different from ours, and their efforts and accomplishments should be considered in relation to the realities they faced. The lives discussed here are remarkable, and they are worth remembering in connection to the objects they helped bring into public view.

I. THROUGH THE DRY ICE CURTAIN

FROELICH RAINEY, a dashing man in his early forties with dark hair and square jaw, is visibly nervous, sitting on a desk-like podium with a globe to his left. To his right is a small stage with three chairs in which three scholarly-looking men are sitting. Over them, white Styrofoam balls hang from the ceiling, which, lit from the bottom, have the appearance of a crude solar system. The lights darken. A large gray, tanklike television camera is before him. The cameraman zooms in on Rainey’s face. A voice comes from the cabin: “ready, action.” A red light goes on in the studio, an “On Air” sign lights up, and Rainey announces: “Welcome to What in the World.”

It is a Tuesday night in April 1950. Rainey has recently become director of one of Philadelphia’s most illustrious institutions—the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The museum is only fifty years old, but it is considered to have one of the most important collections of archeological artifacts in the world. As director Rainey, follows the many charismatic figures who brought that collection together. It is time to prove himself, to bring the museum into the modern age.

Froelich Gladstone Rainey was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, in 1907, and raised on a cattle ranch in Montana. He first thought he would be a cowboy but soon developed an interest in writing. In his memoirs he wrote, “The idea of becoming an anthropologist had not occurred to me. I had it all figured out that I was the writer the world had been waiting for. So off I sailed to get the background to fulfill my destiny.” The nation’s economy was crashing in 1929 as Rainey boarded a commercial steamer in San Francisco. In his travels he had many interesting experiences: selling ten-gallon tins of kerosene along roadsides in the Philippines, spending a night in a Cairo jail for carrying a gun, being stranded penniless in Shanghai and supporting himself for a while as a gambler in Monte Carlo. Upon his return, Rainey did a distinguished academic career, obtaining a bachelors degree from the University of Chicago and doctorates in English from the American School in France and in anthropology from Yale, where he had studied West Indian Archaeology and worked at the Yale Peabody Museum as assistant curator between 1935 and 1937. In addition, the hyperactive Rainey became the first professor of anthropology at the university of Alaska between 1935 and 1942.

In 1944 Rainey joined the American Foreign Service and was assigned to the staff of the planned Allied Control Commission for Occupied Germany under Robert Daniel Murphy. He survived a brutal winter crossing of the North Atlantic, during which his convoy was savaged by storms and U-boat attacks, only to arrive in London as the first V-2 rocket bombs fell. After the war, Rainey would continue his relationship with the US government, commuting to Washington and working on the establishment of a branch of what would become the Central Intelligence Agency. But he wanted to go back to work in an academic environment.

It was in 1947 that the opportunity of leading a museum in Philadelphia presented itself. The museum had experienced a hiatus during the war, and with many vacant positions, an operation deficit and an interim director it desperately needed new energy and vision. Rainey, then forty years old, was recommended from various sides. He had an impressive resume: on top of his international experience, he had the academic credentials. The museum’s board of trustees selected him enthusiastically.

Rainey remained director for almost thirty years, until 1976, a pivotal period for the institution. Over the years he introduced new technologies for dating artifacts (some of which, including thermoluminescence dating, later came under attack), new exhibition techniques and even a “Brazilian coffee room” (a cafeteria) at the museum. Percy Madeira, who was president of the board when Rainey was hired, wrote in 1964, “Rainey seldom lets his imagination be inhibited by the practical difficulties inherent in a new idea”, adding later, “consequently, the Museum of today is very different from that of 1947.”

Rainey was a populist—“I have never been a dedicated scholar and disliked the label ‘intellectual,’” he wrote—and he was part of the first postwar generation of museum directors, which shared the belief that the education of the public is the civic role of the American museum. This democratized vision, plus an explosion of market-driven mass media, necessitated a change in the tone of museum scholarship.

In 1948 the director of education of the University Museum, Eleanor Moore, had the idea to produce educational programs about the museum for television. She asked Rainey to participate in one of the programs, and he had an epiphany. Rainey had witnessed the emergence of television in his youth, and he understood its language. He thought, why not invest in a TV program with good production values and bring the venerable collection of the University Museum into people’s homes? No one before had exploited the visual capacity of television to describe and introduce museum objects. With a team of producers Rainey conceived of a loosely organized game show that would bring a panel of archaeology experts and other noted personalities together to examine a variety of ancient objects and determine their origins and the characteristics of the cultures that created them. Rainey would moderate the series. One can only imagine how such an idea must have been met by the conservative wing of the museum—the older, set-in-their-ways curators and keepers of the various collections. But Rainey was relentless, and in 1950 the first series of programs was created.

An off-stage voice, which the panelists couldn’t hear but the audience could, introduced each one of the objects as it emerged on the screen through a curtain of dry-ice fog, accompanied by mysterious, exotic flute music. The panelists included celebrities and artists, along with curators of the University Museum (who weren’t necessarily at an advantage as many items were chosen from very diverse cultures and obscure areas of the museum’s holdings.) Viewers watched as they (usually) failed to pinpoint the exact period or culture to which the object belonged. Guests’ willingness risk such embarrassments speaks highly of their bravery and of Rainey’s persuasive powers.

The program was a huge success. In 1951 What in the World won a Peabody Award, the most coveted prize in television, for its “superb blending of the academic and the entertaining.” Soon the program was broadcast to eighty-nine stations in the CBS network. Rainey received lots of fan mail, much of which is in the archives of the University Museum. It appears that, remarkably, he personally answered every letter. “We are happy to know that you enjoy the program as much as we have fun making it,” he wrote. What in the World continued to be popular, cycling on and off the air for almost two decades. Eventually, though, its basic production values were eclipsed by big-budget shows, and the series was brought to a close. But Rainey and the museum were remembered for the program for decades, and the museum continued to convene What in the World revivals every now and then, as part of benefits or special events, until 1975.

+++

Sixty or so years after the first broadcast of What in the World, it is a hot summer in Philadelphia, in 2009. I cross a plaza full of falafel carts at Thirty-fourth and Spruce Streets and arrive for the first time at the University Museum. I am here to develop an art project for the museum, and the goal of this visit is to find some direction for my research.

Through a large gate is an open courtyard with a fountain and an agreeable group of trees. The architecture recalls the generation of Washington Irving, and Frederic Church’s Olanna—a fantasy combining a Moorish garden, a Romanesque church and an Italian palazzo. The architect was Wilson Eyre, Jr., who had taken a northern Italian Renaissance style as a departure point but had internationalized it, in keeping with much of the Victorian architecture of the time. The original project was incredibly ambitious: a group of buildings set in a nine-acre landscape, but construction stopped after thirty years, during the Great Depression. The engraving on the stone slab at the main entrance reads “Free Museum of Science and Art,” the original name of the museum, and is decorated with gatepost figures by Alexander Stirling Calder, the father of the famous twentieth-century American artist.

I walk through the museum’s Kress entrance, part of a modern expansion in 1971. Styled like many other museum spaces of the 1970s, the space is flanked by two giant totem poles. A remarkably well-postured man with earrings and a silver bracelet comes to courteously welcome me. His name is Bill Wierzbowski, the keeper of the American collection. Bill takes me through the museum for the first time. We go up and down stairs and up again, opening and closing doors. The museum is a maze of corridors, and some hallways are partially lit. There are a number of closed galleries and a few exhibits in the middle of repair. We pass sphinxes, Babylonian artifacts, African costumes, Greek vases. There is no air conditioning in most of the galleries, and surrounded by the dimly lit Mayan stelae and other artifacts in the midsummer heat, I feel as if I am in a tomb. As in most archaeology museums, some of the cases appear to have been unaltered since the 1960s. Their light greens and blues, the fonts in which the texts are set and the style of the mountings are all reminiscent of another era of museology. The cases are time capsules, not of the cultures they ostensibly contain and depict but of the curatorial vision of those cultures at the time they were designed. In that sense, the museum is a dual encyclopedia, of both the cultures it studies and how those cultures were perceived by our curatorial ancestors. In modern and contemporary art museums, that phenomenon is almost impossible to find: it would be like walking into The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to find galleries as they were originally installed by Hilla Rebay, or finding galleries at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, that remain untouched since the times of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

We walk into the archives, where Alex Pezzati, the museum’s archivist for thirty years, is waiting. The archive room of the University Museum has the feel of a grand nineteenth-century university library. Two levels of dark oak shelves contain hundreds of gray archival boxes documenting the more than three hundred expeditions that have been financed by the museum as well as the papers of many generations of museum workers. Alex’s desk sits on top of a platform at the end of the room, supporting an old computer and piles of files. I have been told that Alex, who is in his late thirties, fulfills the role of institutional memory for the museum, bearing insider knowledge of the near infinitude of stories hidden in the archives as well as the oral history that has been transmitted by generations of museum staff, many of whom are deceased.

I tell him that I am interested in the lives of interesting people who have passed through the museum. “Oh we have plenty of characters, that we definitely do,” he says, pointing at some of the portrait paintings on the walls of the large room. I don’t transcribe his remarks, but they go something like this: “That one over there is Sarah Yorke Stevenson, who became director. She really was a remarkable woman, a liberated woman from the Victorian era. She was, like, the first woman museum director ever. Well, I am not sure if ever, but she was considered the first in everything. I think she created the first museum studies program. That one over there was the provost who created the museum, William Pepper; they say he had an affair with Stevenson. That one over there is Maxwell Somerville—he definitely was a character. He would dress as a Buddhist to give tours, and then he collected engraved gems, a kind that no one was interested in, and created a whole department for it. Then there was Louis Shotridge, the Alaskan Indian, who became a curator here. He died under mysterious circumstances; they say there was foul play. And of course Hermann Hilprecht, the curator of Assyriology, who got into a famous fight with John Peters over the first expedition of the museum to Nippur. He was well connected, and when he got into a fight with the museum he left with the keys to the collection and took a bunch of stuff with him. There was Byron Gordon; they say his personality was as sharp as his moustache . . . ”

Alex goes through the stories quickly, and they are so complex and intertwined that it is hard for me to get a handle on any of them. I leave the museum extremely stimulated but also intimidated.

I spend that night with Helen Cunningham and Ted Newbold, two key Philadelphia philanthropists who have been involved with arts and culture in the city for many decades. When, during dinner, I mention my museum visit to Ted, he says, unprompted, “Oh yes, the University Museum. They used to have a TV program called What in the World. It was so fun to watch. Sometimes they would have competitions, and once I called in the answer and won! But then they had real archaeologists competing, and it was no fun anymore. Anyway, I don’t know why they ended it. Those were good years.”

++

The New York Times dismissed What in the World as promoting a “stamp collector” mentality—equating knowledge to the ability to identify a given artifact. But others, like Dessart, defended Rainey’s project, saying that all education has to start somewhere, and that if the audience reached by this means was one that would have never been reached otherwise, that technique has a value.

The range of reactions about the show then is similar to today’s ongoing debate in museum education concerning “edutainment”—whether entertainment is a useful vehicle for an educational experience, or if attempts to entertain obscure or obliterate educational value. The answer, I think, depends on an institution’s educational goals and what one means by “entertainment.” Although it is true that some may be entertained by reading Shakespeare or Cervantes, the more common assumption is that entertainment means adopting a vegetative state in front of a TV screen. In this sense, when entertainment is paired with education, the implication that knowledge can be obtained with no effort is a proposition that, to most of us, may sound like the educational equivalent to diet pills for weight loss without exercising: intellectual growth is rarely a purely leisurely process.

But this doesn’t mean, conversely, that learning should be a dry and clinical process. Today, the term “engagement” is more favored in museums. The term describes an alert state of mind of someone who actively interacts with a particular reality in a way that is enticing as well as intellectually stimulating.

What in the World was a detective game in which the solution to the mystery is the true story of the object. In the surviving episodes, the simple but clever process through which Rainey involved his audience is evident. The game show was the format through which Rainey educated viewers in a key aspect of archaeology: that we often come to artifacts in darkness, with no knowledge of the story behind them. Through his quiz, he also reinforced a key idea in museology: that objects carry narratives. By many accounts What in the World introduced American audiences to archeology and to the main cultures of the world and even inspired some to study it formally.

++

In my subsequent visits to the museum’s archives, I continued thinking about Rainey and his program, about his quest for opening the door of civilizations using a group of mysterious objects. Sitting in the middle of that large room I thought that some of these artifacts, put on the examination pedestal, could also tell the stories of those larger-than-life individuals, like Rainey, who had given life and purpose to the institution. And us today who are not archaeology specialists like those TV viewers, may yet be able to recognize the humanity in them; each object emerging from within the curtain of smoke, revealing the visions of those who are gone, those whose portraits hang on the walls of this museum but whose life stories lie underground like the objects they once uncovered.

As a kid in Mexico, one of the first books that I ever knew that addressed ancient cultures was Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars. In this museum I instead saw curators behind altars —curatorial biographies waiting to reemerge from within the collections of artifacts they once assembled, and who needed to be given the chance to speak again.

[Variations on an Audience was a work designed to be performed only once, in the context of the launch of the book Theatrum Anatomicum (and Other Performance Lectures) at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University on October 22, 2009, inaugurating the performance lecture series Edifying, curated by Beatrice Gross. The work is an experiment on what in sociolinguistic theory has been described as Audience Design and Style-Shifting, which involves the way in which speakers adjust their modes of speaking in relation to their audience.]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Audiences are endangered species.

They are slowly vanishing in this world showered with limelight, where 15 minutes of fame has now a cacophony of 24/7 programming.

We all speak at the same time, and no one listens. When everyone is an artist, no one can be in the audience. We only sit offstage because we are waiting for our turn in the lectern.

What we call audiences today, like the one here tonight, is nothing more than a collection of highly individualized minds. You all are authors, we all produce things: you take pictures, you write blogs, you all own creative real-state. You all here tonight are so different. How can me, or anyone, talk to you in a comprehensive manner so that you all can feel engaged?

Unfortunately, most people who lecture have failed to recognize this simple fact. They still speak to audiences as if they existed as one whole, as if this hypothetical and amorphous mass was a homogenous group of listeners, nor a heterogenous entity of speakers. They talk to this hypothetical audience as if they thought and felt exactly like them.

Let’s take, for instance, Slavoj Zizek.

Slavoj Zizek talks to everyone as if we all were Slavoj Zizek. A scholar assumes we all are scholars interested in long bibliographies and in the reference to that 1974 book where the footnote of the footnote clarifies what the footnote of the footnote of the 1973 version didn’t clarify.

Artists, when they are invited to speak, usually think that their audience wants the artist to act as if they didn’t care about them, but of course artists care, and their audiences- well, their audiences as usually are other artists who are respectful enough but what they really want is not to be an audience but to be the artist who is speaking.

So it is very painful for me to say this, but the truth is that in this post-post-modern world we all are confused about when to speak and when to listen. As a result of this, we are both unprofessional speakers and unprofessional audiences.

This spells slight doom, the temporary boredom we all have to live through every time we attend a lecture. We don’t even know why we do it. But it shouldn’t be that way.

Lectures could be like sex. They could be like the seduction of love, like the erotic dance or the magic act or the psychic séance or the hypnotic session. All it takes is for the speaker to find a way to talk to each one of the persons in the room as if it were a one-to-one conversation, an audience whisperer.

So by all means then let’s then do variations on an audience, or rather, on this non-audience. I will talk not to all of you, but to each of you. For this exercise I will assume that, amongst the group here there is at least one person of the following sort:

1. Theorists. That is public intellectuals, post-structuralist scholars, downtown east village, readers of October magazine.

2. Chelseaspeakers. Uber-professional art speakers, curators, consultants, critics.

3. Grant-writers and administrators working for non-profit organizations and the U.S. government and the Department of Education or School Board.

4. ‘Show-me-the-money’ speakers, no-nonsense, uncomplicated, like when we talk about art late at an afterparty after a few drinks.

Now that we have established the four audiences that I will be addressing, I will now repeat my introduction in audience 1 style:

The construct of the spectator as redefined today by

post-technological networks reunites a number of given implications that, upon close examination,

reveal society

– and its involutionary transformation-

as a product of a demystified late capitalist model without centers and reformulated contents.

The involution of cultural communication into a system of seemingly

original producers of knowledge as opposed to receivers creates a different

activity universe that contrasts with the deflection of speech, a seemingly anti-political task of horizontal results.

Where one searches for the hidden receiver finds itself the manifested materialization of parallel mimetic producers. It is the fabrication of the plot of the content,

the substance of normative principles of inclusion of concepts, that varies only in stylistic practices of scientific postmodernity,

usually not self-identified as such but actively embracing a regiment of exclusionary concept definitions

within a well-founded domain of references visible only to a reduced agents of the operation.

Audience 2 form:

The notion of audience has been redefined today by post-technological networks.

Cultural producers today produce works that critique western notions of collective spectatorship and propose new critical models.

Notions of performance are incorporated in this new critique, resulting in innovative explorations that operate in the realm of conceptual art in various formats.

The viewer becomes an active participant in the work, which explores notions of viewers becoming active participants.

The work becomes an active participant in the viewer, which is an exploration of notions of viewers.

These works are conceptual narratives that question a variety of concepts, including the way in which spectators receive information in a post-modern world. These practices thus become explorations of conceptual information of notions of participants that participate in notions of information of conceptual explorations.

In other words, in audience 3 form:

Audiences in our global world today face the challenges and the opportunities that come along with the emerging forms of expression.

In this multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary society there are multiple voices which reflect our diverse culture and that are important to support. In some cases, these voices will challenge the viewer to reflect on important issues we all face, but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of others and are representative of the diversity of original community voices that we all should strive to support. We only face as a society the challenge to expand our long-term partnerships and advisory support to those who have an important message to convey to their constituents, building enduring foundations for community partnerships with real solutions. By acting together, we can overcome the obstacles that for too long have prevented real change on the critical issues that audiences face in art and life, fulfilling the long objective of change , creativity and achievement for the generations to come.

Audience 4 form

I mean its like sometimes because you are online so much and you get to like get to do all this like blogs and photoshop and movies and stuff its like today everything is so easy to do so why do we need anyone else doing it but us, like today things maybe have become decadent or something when you really think about it its really amazing like everything can mean anything because anyone can do whatever. I mean like today the world and like, culture has become a place where we all talk about ourselves and then it like makes everything look the same because no one seems to be listening or something. I mean that’s cool, but it’s like if I am talking and you are talking and he is talking and then if we just talk in different ways that doesn’t mean we are saying different things if you know what I am saying. Its like that is how its done today when we just say what we have to say and we know why we say it and we know what you or are going to say so what’s the point of even saying it, but the point that there is no point is maybe the point.

And now, to merge these styles, we will arrive to patch together the choir of art world voices. You can call it an audience fugue.

The construct of the spectator as redefined today by post-technological networks reunites a number of given implications that, upon close examination, I mean its like sometimes because you are online so much and you get to like get to do all this like, audiences in our global world today face the challenges and the opportunities that come along with the emerging forms of expression. The notion of audience has been redefined today by post-technological networks – and its involutionary transformation- as a product of a demystified late capitalist model without centers and reformulated contents. The involution of cultural communication into a system of seemingly original producers of knowledge its like today everything is so easy to do so why do we need anyone else doing it but us, In this multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary society Cultural producers today produce works that critique western notions of collective spectatorship as opposed to receivers creates a different activity universe that contrasts with the deflection of speech, blogs and photoshop and movies and stuff, like there are multiple voices which reflect our diverse culture and that are important to support, today things maybe have become decadent or something when you really think about it its really amazing like a seemingly anti-political task of horizontal results. In some cases, these voices will challenge the viewer to reflect on important issues we all face, where one searches for the hidden receiver finds itself the manifested materialization of parallel mimetic producers but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of others and are representative of the diversity of original community voices that we all should strive to support, I mean everything can mean anything because anyone can do whatever. It is the fabrication of the plot of the content, I mean like today the world and like, the substance of normative principles of inclusion of concepts, that we only face as a society the challenge to expand our long-term partnerships and advisory support to those who have an important message to convey to their constituents, These works are conceptual narratives that question a variety of concepts, where we all talk about ourselves and then it like makes everything look the same because no one seems to be listening or something. By acting together, we can overcome the obstacles that for too long have prevented real change on the critical issues that audiences face in art and life, only in stylistic practices of scientific postmodernity, I mean that’s cool, but it’s like if I am talking and you are talking and he is talking and then if we just talk in different ways that doesn’t mean we are saying different things, like These practices thus become explorations of conceptual information of notions of participants, building enduring foundations for community partnerships with real solutions, usually not self-identified as such but actively embracing a regiment of exclusionary definitions that participate in notions of information of conceptual explorations, if you know what I am saying, including the way in which spectators receive information in a post-modern world, and we know why we say it and we know what you or are going to say so what’s the point of even saying it, within a well-founded domain of references visible only to a reduced agents of the operation, fulfilling the long objective of change , creativity and achievement for the generations to come, an exploration of notions of viewers, Its like that is how its done today when we just say what we have to say but the point that there is no point is maybe, like, the point.