RAY LANGENBACH
THE PERFORMATIVE INDOCTRINATION MODEL PIM THAILAND

First presented at the Perforritatice Art, Culture and Pedagogy Symposium at Penn State University in November'96, The Performative Indoctrination Model generated considerable controversy.

 

Excerpts from PIM were subsequently presented at Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, December 1996, and in the complete lecture/perlonnance has been presented at the Nevada Museum of Art, Arizona State University and Bard-Simon's Rock College. Video documentation was shown at Artspace, Sydney, Austratia in 1997 and a live version is scheduled for 1998. Video Documentation of PIM is available through the address/fax/email above.

PIM falls into that category of performance that has grown out of the merging of cultural theory and performance art. In a nutshell, PIM theorizes the performative through the performance of theory.

Appropriating the work of Southeast Asian ideologues and artists*, along with historical footage documenting American interventions abroad, the Performative Indoctrination Model lays out a theory of propaganda and indoctrination. The theory is then applied to contemporary American foreign diplomacy and art practice. PIM offers a portrait of performance art as an integral part of the totalized" internal and external propaganda project of the United States.

The presentation is in the form of a 45 to 60 minute monologue (depending on audience interaction) with video projection and audio complement. Whenever possible, PlM is adapted to the specific dynamics of the political/cultural milieu and language where it is presented.

*especially Lee Weng Choy and Lan Gen Bah

The end of performance art.

Janet Pillai, Malaysian Theatre Director about PIM-

See also: New Criteria Who shot Guy Debord ? in New Criteria - a Pictorial Supplement, Ray Langenbach, Suzann Victor, Ng Siew Kuan & Jason Lim

......When capital accumulates to a great enough degree, it becomes an image and it is this image that the French artist, Guy Debord, calls the `spectacle'. Meaning lives not within any image but in the charged space between viewer and image, where the viewer has become mere image as well. The simple act of seeing becomes an act of selfconsumption or what Langenbach calls `panoptic cannibalism'. Because this charged space contains veils of information imposed by an alienating capitalist economy culture, one can only arrive at `true meaning' (if there is such a thing) through a strategy of acknowledging the alienation in the work of art.

The focus of Suzann Victor's art is the body. Her work concerns the shift between gender and body politics, and challenges perceptions of power relations in the art world and society as a whole. Victor's work for New Criteria will feature a series of stools or highback chairs, which will carry images of genitalia and gynaecological views of an infant's head at various stages of birth. Spurred by the women´s movement and western art-historical traditions, Victor's work has elements of indecorous patterning and allegorises household domesticity. It is building on a groundwork for a more feminised art and more vigorous questioning of contemporary attitudes towards the different roles within life´s rituals.

For Jason Lim and Ng Siew Kuan, clay is a medium to scrutinise, analyse and redefine the physical form and inner values of their art. Their point of view recalls the work of the environmental-artists of the early 70's which maintained that any meaningful creative activity should put both the artists and the audience/participants in touch with nature in special ways. This first-time collaboration between Ng and Lim at The Substation is an engaging `sculptural event'. With the entire inner end of the gallery covered with a mixtureof clay and grog, the artists and audience are invited to fashion container/vessels which are to be housed on shelves, placed midway in the gallery also serve as a screen demarcate the activit" /working space from the passive space in the other

half of the gallery. At this side, Lim and Ng will arrange and manipulate polaroid photographs of the actual interaction that will take place throughout the duration of the installation......

Contact Ray Langenbach: xray@mailhost.net