New Page — MARC LAFIA

Participation
marc lafia
(read through Lygia Clarke, Claire Bishop, Relational Aesthetics, Precariousness, Hal Foster, Giorgio Agamben, and Brian Holmes)

1.
If we look at the proliferation of collaborative art practices today, it seems that many no longer have the oppositional and anti-authoritarian punch they had in the late 1960s and 1970s – when radical theatre, community arts and critical pedagogy emerged in opposition to dominant modes of social control. Today participation is used by business as a tool for improving efficiency and workforce morale; it is all pervasive in the mass-media in the form of reality television; and it is a privileged medium for government funding agencies seeking to create the impression of social inclusion. Collaborative practices need to take this knot of conventions on board if they are to have critical bite.

It would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a superegoic injunction to "love thy neighbor," but from the position of "do not give up on your desire." In other words, pursue your unconscious desire, as far as you can.
https://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php

2.
So what are we looking for?
'Rethinking the conventions of participation, which are today somewhat orthodox.'

3.
Looking for what's rotting:
The inner disgust, appetite
We have only to look at the new French extremity in cinema, the new brutalism (Briallet, etc..)
Excess (Artaud, Grotowski, Beck, Bataille…)

4.
Perhaps experimental living situations that will help us understand our place in the world

5.
An outbreak of mass surrealism

6.
Genuine participation of citizens in the processes of political will-formation
Within the "confusion" of ruling elites and the "violence" of global capital and the neoliberal battle cry "There is no such thing as society.'

6a.
To examine Authenticity, individuality, difference, and rebellion

7
To get close to our bodies, perceptions and senses to dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of the body

8.
"To think about the body energized is to think about discarded body practices in the West. It is to think about how body-energetics is a concept radically refigured with the constitution of modernity and Enlightenment to become something exclusively physical. There are no spiritual, immanent, or transcendental energies allowed to operate within the discourse of subjectivity in modernity. There are only physical energies - which are the relentless subject of policies, regulations, medicine, and war.
http://www.in-transit.de/2004/content/en/productions/lab.html

9.
To revisit Lygia Clarke
'They consist of nothing else but the use by others, according to certain rules determined by the artist, of various easily replicated props - such as a pebble and a plastic bag filled with one's own warm breath and tied with a rubber band. (This becomes a "proposition" only when one places the pebble on the corner of the inflated bag, letting it sink in a bit, and maintains the precarious equilibrium by gently holding the bag with both hands: The slightest pressure makes the pebble pop up and down, like a fisherman's bob
ArtForum, Jan, 1999 by Yve-Alain Bois

9a
Clark, by contrast, defined the concept of endless space as a succession of paradoxical relationships to be directly experienced in the body. Her propositions acknowledged the coexistence of opposites within the same space: internal and external, subjective and objective, metaphorical and literal, male and female. For Clark, the radical new space of the Möbius strip called for new forms of production and communication impossible to explore within traditional artistic categories and practices.
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

10.
To really look and be with others
"In some way we come to exist in the moment of being addressed," Judith Butler writes, "and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails." In "Precarious Life" (2004), her brief essay on Emmanuel Levinas, Butler explores the notion of "the face," which the French philosopher poses as the very image of "the extreme precariousness of the other." "To respond to the face, to understand its meaning," Butler argues, "means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself."
https://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_48/ai_n56388185/?tag=content;col1
Precarious: Hal Foster on the art of the decade
ArtForum, Dec, 2009 by Hal Foster

11.
1 came to the term precarious via Thomas Hirschhorn, and many of his projects, such as Musee Precaire Albinet, staged in the Aubervilliers banlieue of Paris in 2004, are very much to the point here; his sometime collaborator the French poet Manuel Joseph has also used the term, in a short text on la precarite "as a political and aesthetic apparatus." (8) Yet what I want to underscore in the word is already present in the OED: "Precarious: from the Latin precarius, obtained by entreaty, depending on the favor of another, hence uncertain, precarious, from precem, prayer." This implies that this state of insecurity is not natural but constructed--a political condition produced by a power on whose favor we depend and which we can only petition. To act out the precarious, then, is not only to evoke its perilous and privative effects but also to intimate how and why they are produced--and thus to implicate the authority that imposes this antisocial contract of "revocable tolerance" (as Joseph puts it). The note of entreaty is largely lost in the English word, yet it is strong in the installations I mentioned above. (9) Sometimes it is mournful (as in Gober and Chan), sometimes desperate (as in Kessler, Wallinger, and Genzken), but in all instances this importunate quality implies that the entreaty carries the force of accusation as well--an attesting to the violence done to basic principles of human responsibility.
from
https://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_48/ai_n56388185/?tag=content;col1
Precarious: Hal Foster on the art of the decade
ArtForum, Dec, 2009 by Hal Foster

7.
“It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows”
(RA, p. 45). This DIY, microtopian ethos is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of relational aesthetics.

7a.
But moving beyond the 'scenarios' of relational aesthetics we call for a participation that is performed for its rewards and perhaps even more so its deceptions and delusions its hidden agendas, its covert political subtexts.

8.
Some argue this is not enough
As art
As critique
As being
As being engaged
As becoming

9.
We want a body unbecoming
Art like a building:
Work of art as a (un-designed) system.
Art like a society:
Art describes a social context like a (designed) system.
We want an unbecoming. A collective vomiting. An emphasize of the fluidity of life.

10.
How do you make something that is woven into the practice of daily life—not just something on a screen that you click through and then forget? Something that is more than information, content? The issue is one of substance, agency, and form.

How are we something more than identikits reworked and reconstituted through information networks through apparatuses?

11.
By forming to critique and understand the self-becoming in the network but through the body.

12.
The body and its body politic, the politic, the apparati that shape the body.

13.
To live past and through the shaping of the formal and architectural processes of the global body and sense shaping.

14
To understand these limits
To accommodate these limits
To exceed this limits
To explode this limits

15.
To become the being-protagonist to some kind of understanding - of the story, of the software, of the this layering of network and control – and something more.

16.
To pay a considered attention to the agency of things and the material manifestation of our being not to be taken for granted, or simply smoothed over, or rendered interoperable via the flat surfaces of computer displays.

17.
To do so, to gather reflect, commune, take action, invent being is to resist, and interrogate, the demands of digital culture.

18.
This interest in the contingencies of a “relationship between”—rather than the object itself—is a hallmark of Gillick’s work and of his interest in collaborative practice as a whole. This idea of considering the work of art as a potential trigger for participation is hardly new—think of Happenings, Fluxus instructions, 1970s performance art, and Joseph Beuys’s declaration that “everyone is an artist.”
*Claire Bishop, antagonism and relational aesthetics

19.
"Working online I oftentimes feel disconnected from my body, Half-engaged in a stream of weightless graphics and information, it’s easy to lose track of the screen’s physical parameters—and your own, says Erin Shirreff, recounting the familiar experience of restlessly navigating virtual space.

20
Not participation but embodiment, being bodies, knowing being as such.

This entire experience into which art flows, the issue of liberty itself, of the expansion of the individual's consciousness, of the return to myth, the rediscovery of rhythm, dance, the body, the senses, which finally are what we have as weapons of direct, perceptual, participatory knowledge . . . is revolutionary in the total sense of behavior … Helio Oiticica
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

21.
Umberto Eco, 'The Open Work' – The Open Body
In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.

Eco regarded the work of art as a reflection of the conditions of our existence in a fragmented modern culture, while Bourriaud sees the work of art producing these conditions. The interactivity of relational art is therefore superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a “social form” capable of producing positive human relationships. As a consequence, the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect.
*Claire Bishop, antagonism and relational aesthetics

22
The principal virtue of this show lies in its understanding of the participatory dimension of Clark’s work. With this in mind, the curators (Manuel Borja-Villel, Nuria Enguita and Luciano Figueiredo) have made replicas of the jumpsuits, dust guards, masks, gloves and other utensils that Clark employed in order to combine sensorial exploration and therapy. The first floor of the Fundació Tápies was thus transformed into a laboratory of tactile, sensual experiments in which viewers could don masks and jumpsuits. Finally, it seems, Clark’s notion has been realised: that the festive, healing qualities of art overcome the importance of the artistic object, and that art serve the people.
https://www.frieze.com/issue/review/lygia_clark/

23.
Perhaps the work here is contemplation and being. And so to recover discover the body in us in others in bodies in space in the network. To rename agency to become agency.

24
Brazilian artists Lygia Clark (1920-1988) and Hélio Oiticica from different perspectives, they contributed to the development of an original vocabulary of interactivity. Clark, merging the body/mind duality, focused primarily on the subjective and psychological dimensions of sensorial experimentation, while Oiticica engaged in sensorial explorations involving social, cultural, architectural and environmental spaces.
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

25
Reality and artifice, structuring the event
On Jeremy Deller's "The Battle of Orgreave," which was a reenactment of a 1984 English miners' confrontation with police, complete with participation by a historical reenactment society...
"Their work joins a tradition of highly authored situations that fuse social reality with carefully calculated artifice," Bishop says of Deller and the others. Like Dadaism before them, they created "intersubjective relations (that) weren't an end in themselves but rather served to unfold a more complex knot of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement, and the conventions of social interaction."
https://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php

26.
Clark and Oiticica questioned representation in art by examining ideas inherited from modern avant-garde movements--Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Suprematism and Concrete Art--that broke with mimesis and assumptions of realism. In the late 1950s, they reframed modernist notions of universal aesthetics by translating them directly into life and the body. Weaving a web of relationships around the body's internal and external spaces, they relayed a Modern European geometric abstract tradition to Brazilian vernacular culture. This syncretic process fused two very different traditions--a Western aesthetic canon that privileges vision and metaphysical knowledge, and Afro-Indigenous oral traditions in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is profoundly concrete [3]. It must be noted that, in a true syncretic spirit, both traditions have always coexisted in Brazilian society at large, but it was not until Oiticica began working that this syncretism was methodically investigated in the visual arts.

Clark's and Oiticica's creations, as they changed the traditional role of the viewer and the status of the artistic object, confronting in the process the function of artistic institutions, redefined the identity of the artist and the idea of authorship. Emphasizing viewer participation and material precariousness, their works continue to resist being frozen in museum displays as relics of past actions. Their move from hard to soft and ephemeral materials clearly establishes a historical link to the current immaterial and software-based practices of electronic art.
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

26A.
It is primarily Boltanski and Chiapello's analytical division of the resistance movements of the sixties into the two strands of artistic and social critique that allows us to understand how the specific aesthetic dispositions and organizational structures of the flexible personality began to crystallize from the mid-1980s onward, to complete capitalism's recuperation of—and from—the democratic turmoil of the 1960s. https://www.16beavergroup.org/brian/

27.
An effective cultural critique
To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social relations and their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it points to the specific discourses, images and emotional attitudes that hide inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of consent, by flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it tolerates the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into practice because it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips with the complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough expressions of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe—those upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo depends.