My brain cannot divide any of these notes. I'm sorry this is so long. DO NOT FEEL OBLIGATED TO READ IT FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. I need to work out a better system for including the notes I take directly on the reading for easier reference to their more sussed out versions on this blog.
Then...I can't quite put my finger on the common thread between the readings (haven't gotten to Ranciere and Barthes yet) but I know that it's more complex than that art is experience and that art delineates some kind of version of reality - those things seem obvious to me by making performance art. I feel like there's something more complex going on here about maybe the fluidity of the function of art, its affect on culture and vice versa.
Questions that I have after reading de Certeau, Fraser and Kaprow include
-who do we make art for?
-is an art object an autonomous object of its own reality or is it a representational object? and how do we know this?
-does photography create or capture reality?
-who should pay for art? should art be paid for?
-how much does art actually reflect culture and how much does art just reflect the culture of art?
-what is the system for valuation and validation of art? does it change?
-can performance art reveal some truths or am I just wacky off my ass?
and...AND!...I'm gonna get super good editing these blogs. This one HUGE and it's just a compilation of my notes on various aspects of the essays.
HERE GOES...
So I’ve been reading Plato’s
Republic and trying to get a handle on what Socrates believes is 1) the ideal society and 2) the shape and function of art in that society. It’s good to know that these are the questions thinkers have been asking themselves for…well, a while now…
To begin, I’m not sure if I know how I detect and perceive art, or what exactly forms my opinions on it. I don’t totally trust my senses, which creates some paradoxes in the ways I assign value to artwork. What’s more frustrating is that the more I try to rationalize art, the greater the schism grows between how I consume art and make art.
I found
Michel de Certeau’s
The Practice of Everyday Life “Making Do”: Uses and Tactics to provide a comforting message: the function of art changes, as does the culture in which the art is made. The distinction of work and leisure is becoming blurry – people don’t just work at work anymore, and sometimes they work at a job they actually enjoy. In Socrates’ opinion, this sort self-serving, non-specialized way of moving about a social system will inevitably result in total chaos. De Certeau’s answer to Socrates is that we’re much more interested now not in what people are doing, but why. Upon closer examination, we see that the “why” is as fluid as the “what.”
To discover the why we turn to actions that define their own contexts as they are performed; we employ
strategies and
tactics. This is my breakdown (lots of shit going here):
A strategy is a manipulation of power relationships that can be located as soon as a subject can be isolated. Isolation involves first to distinguish its own place (to define itself in relation to Others).
Some things resulting from isolation:
1. establishing sustainability by being independent of variable circumstances
2. defining territory from which to observe and measure the Other, in order to predict future movements and thus integrate the Other and its behavior in one’s own system
3. you are made into being by the knowledge of the power you have to designate your own space (is this right?). You have to have the power to have the knowledge.
-drawbacks of having location:
1. as a power grows, it is more noticeable and is less capable of deceit
-places:
1. actual property
2. theoretical discourses
3. systems of distributing power and forces
Not about time, but about space. Bets on place.
Pins hope of resistance to time on establishment of place
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A tactic is a calculated action without a location. You don’t need a space for a tactic. A tactic is a maneuver on the Other’s turf. A strategy is on your turf. With a tactic, you don’t have the opportunity to view the whole of your enemy. A tactic takes advantage of opportunities, it doesn’t create them. It’s mobile, but can’t carry anything. A tactic is an art of the weak.
-trickery is possible for the weak
A tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer.
-a tactic is resourceful, makes use of bricolage.
-tactic uses and redefines resources at the same time
Summary:
Tactic: absence of power
Strategy: postulation of power
Making the worse argument seem the better: making the outline which is the starting point for persistent, subtle, tireless intellectual creativity that is ready for every opportunity it can find within the larger structure, playing not by the rules of that larger structure in regard to rights and property.
-when an element subverts its native structure by playing by its own rules but still inside of the larger structure.
Validated by timing. Bets on time.
Utilization of time which offers opportunity and power play.
Andrea Fraser seems pretty discontent with the way our cultural system is presently perpetuating art practice and confused about how the artist is expected to sustain herself while making relevant work. The whole system of cultural production and valuation is caught in a circular downward spiral…but it’s actually pretty difficult to understand a cultural phenomena if you’re right in the middle of it. In order to gain some perspectives, we’d have to put some strategies and tactics to work…or make some art that confuses the fuck out of us. As evidenced by
services in Fraser’s
How to Provide an Artistic Service An Introduction, art is a culture in and of itself, with freedoms and responsibilities, limitations, resources and dialectics all of its own.
Strictly speaking about the economies of art culture…
A demand that a work meets is conditioned by the struggles that make the field of cultural production what it is. As far as the interests in the demands are concerned, the demand itself is perpetually displaced following struggles within the field. The demands are generated by competition among and between art collectors, museum visitors, artists and institutions.
-Essentially, art making is the argument for itself. Artists think they’re struggling over culture, but in fact it is that they struggle that perpetuates a demand from collectors and museum visitors. It is their struggle that is in demand, and then becomes culture and then that culture is displaced by another struggle. This is the Circular Argument: see the story about the Indian chief whose evidence for stocking wood was his own actions of stocking wood.
The cynical debased version of this kind of analysis is that the artistic field is no different from any other market in luxury goods.
-The reason there is a demand for $500,000 cars is that $500,000 cars are being made and marketed. The only reason there is a demand for my work is that I’m making work. That’s sad. I thought I was making work about things that had already been demanded. I thought I was making work in the middle of the Venn diagram, but what I’m making is one side of the Venn diagram.
In regard to the function of museums:
You live in this state. In order to live here, we say you need to understand this culture that we say is legitimate. You have to agree with us and then you have to meet our standards of comprehension of what we just told you is legitimate.
What is it that we’re looking at if what’s in front of us isn’t associated with an accredited institution?
In an excerpt from Assemblages, Environments and Happenings Kaprow offers us some alternatives to gallery/museum work in which the individual's stakes aren't necessarily so high as in Fraser’s project work. Also, Kaprow’s methods of
performance/happenings allow us to investigate some of de Certeau’s strategies and tactics through application.
Conditions of Happenings
A. The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.
-Do I agree or disagree? For me performance art is non-representational but the stuff that happens isn’t in the name of life, it’s in the name of art and has its own set of rules. I don’t believe in general that people put on wings and rabbit fur gloves and put chairs up in the ceiling. Doing those things as actions are true and factual – I’m not trying to convince you that I am doing those things, I am actually doing them. They happen in real time. They don’t happen at a junction between art and life. They happen quite far over the boundary because life in general does not include the exploration of time and space as materials in art making, only art explores those areas.
B. Therefore, the source of themes, materials, actions, and the relationships between them are to be derived from any place or period except from the arts, their derivatives and their milieu.
-Dig it, I don’t like to be so definitive about my sources…in fact, it’s irrelevant since anything can become part of the art toolbox with a little intentionality. When you pull a raw chicken into art it becomes equivalent to paint.
C. The Performance of a happening should take place over several widely spaced, and sometimes moving and changing locales.
-Only if it has something to do with the content of the work. If you’re doing a piece about farting, was does it need to move? Why can’t you fart in the same place every time? Not saying the piece might change for the better if it were carried out in new places, but I think that moving for the sake of moving is just too arbitrary for me.
D. Time, which follows closely on space considerations, should be variable and discontinuous.
-Agree absolutely! Things should end when they need to and naturally. If that means the performance is exactly 13 seconds long because that length supports it’s gesture, then let it be. If a performance continues indefinitely until the performer is exhausted, then let it be. This is real time, this is not conceptual time.
-hmm…I keep saying “real time” which is like real life. I want to deal art concepts in real time. Why? What will this reveal to me? It’s not real things in real time, or art things in art time. It’s art things in real time. Time is my constant, maybe? Like how gallery is my constant? A ready-made is a real thing in art time. What do I hope to accomplish by doing this performances? Have I convinced myself really that I’m learning something about time and space as materials?
E. Happenings should be performed once only.
-Again, absolutely agree. EJ argues that this is irrelevant due to the fact that every time you redo the piece, something will invariable be different. But…why risk it? We’re dealing with real time here, so it would be defeatist to practice in a way that would allow us to preserve the essence of a work. Preserving the essence of a work in a way that makes it repeatable would make it timeless.
F. It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely.
Absolutely agree! The audience becomes part of the material of the performance. Everything is integrated. There is no stage; there is no old convention of a wall between the audience and the performance. If there are not people who are passive that make up part of a material, then that material is simply not necessary to the performance – it’s not that the performance goes unseen. Having a performance seen in a theater convention anyway!
I’m not interested in making work that’s a representation of the everyday experience. I’m interested in making work that confronts the everyday experience to reveal truths. The reason I make performance, which deals with time in space is that, as a tactic (see de Cereau on Uses and Tactics), I take advantage of opportunities that are not allowed to me through a static position.
Summary:
De Certeau says things change while you’re using them. The meaning and function of art changes as its made and as culture is reflecting upon it. As evidenced by Fraser’s project work, we’ve reached a point in our art making where we just aren’t so sure whom we’re making the work for anymore and who owns it in the end. Kaprow suggests writings on happenings that art that references itself and exists as a vehicle of the institution is falling by the wayside. Artists are taking on a responsibility to the real…how do we know what is real? All three essays deal with questions of the role of art in a society, and therefore, what is the role of the artist? How do we know what is art and what is reality? I don't believe that you can answer these questions with senses data and inductive reasoning - though direct experience with art consumption and making certainly doesn't hurt.
