RODDY HUNTER Frank Claris licit. Thus performance art presents a
constancy of change, especially in terms of
its capacity to re-figure interrelations of, and
within, contexts. Whether these contexts originate and find
their generation through imperative or
circumstance and indeed whether these relate, in
turn, to custom or practice, the means of
performance art remain a negotiation of
contingent actualities and a contention with
apparent dualities. this introduction to a lecture,
as yet unwritten and undelivered, seeks to
amplify such key concerns of performance
art methodology, and at market that we
had sought to avoid. My words were edited
out. Lyon in 1980 was probably no worse
than anywhere else, 'enterprise culture' is international,
but it was a portent of the next
ten years. I hope, in the 90s, that live
art will find itself again. MANIFESTO TOWARD PERFORMANCE(S) OF INDEFINITE DURATION X. Fully realizing that any art " manifesto " can only stink of the same bitter irony it seeks to oppose, we nevertheless declare without hesitation [...] the founding of a " movement ",..... (Hakim Bey Immediatism,AK Press,Edinburgh & San Francisco,1994) The particular " movement ", or " action, being proposed today differs from previous proclamations of the avant-garde in that, like Hakim Bey’s Immediatist project, it does not need to realise itself through or because of its suppression (cf. Situationist International). This is because this manifesto is a statement of personal intent to pursue the realisation of PERFORMANCE(S) OF INDEFINITE DURATION. Art has, for too long, operated as a formal ‘response’ to the world. The articulation of such ‘responses’(others are also regularly made on behalf of religion, ideology and extrapolated consciousness) is in spite of the actuality that the world does not ask anything of us. In this eventuality art is limited to posturing when, at its best, art can realise series of irresolutions as marvellons uncoverings! The realisation of Performance Art, more specifically, is also and at once a realisation of the difference between uncovering and understanding (or translating). As such in the realisation of Performance, there is no thing to understand, or put an other way, it becomes impossible not to unterstand everything. When art is lived, so living is art; and when living is art, so art is lived. Thus, now, to prevent art remaining an arbiter of separation, it has become necessary for me to propose the realisation of PERFORMANCE(S) OF INDEFINITE DURATION. In this eventuality, the mediations engulfing and invading the live action, rendering art separate and meaning controlled, are themselves made vulnerable and untrustworthy when art is of an indefinite duration. In and for performance, the human and the artist are so
simultaneous in their existence that not even a silent phasing of separate bodily fluids
and electrical impulses may be detected. The inaudibility of the collision and
collusion of these actualities is the sound of a departure from our interior milieu of
conventional and accredited knowledge. Nomadity: artists talk about performance art Introduction: The editors of Art Without Boundaries 1950 - 1970 (being Gerald Woods, Phillip Thompson & John Williams) observed in this work that „Unfiltered reality is a pre-occupation of many artists.“ 1. In introducing myself and my work to you, I would say that this observation made in 1972 is relatively accurate of my work today which began in earnest in 1989 with my first performances in Scotland, my place of origin. Since, and throughout, the past nine years, however, my work in, mainly durational or continuous, performance and installation art has led me to become equally preoccupied with unfiltered art as much as unfiltered life. I have learnt from both my own work and from the work of other artists I have had the privelige to see and meet not only throughout Europe but also here in North America, that there can be no difference between unfiltered life and unfiltered art in the specific but ever-expanding sphere of art and life that is performance. This has been made evident to me through my experiencing of the multiplicity of activities which constitute the practice of, certainly, the contemporary performance artist. ln the realm of what is recognised to be art, these activities include devising and presenting performances in a wide range of contexts; writing texts for and of performance; initiating, maintaining and evolving correspondence and dialogue with artists irrespective and in spite of national boundaries; founding and supporting archives documenting the situation of art at this moment in its history and disseminating such information through artist-run publications, initiatives and centres. In short the contemporary artist, in being rightly wary of the mechanisms of separation, marginalisation and control works simultaneously across means and media both of art and of living to refute the paranoia exetered by monolithic institutions of cultural and political control. The performance artist is particularly aware of this because he or she lives with his or her art at all times and is, as his or her own person, marginalised whenever their work is. As such, the performance artist may recognisea separateness of what is recognised as art and what is not,but will always realise through the actuation of his or her own life and corporeality that there can be no such distinction. As such, my own practice of life and art has become more and more like this and has been formed through the experience of the performing, travelling, meeting and researching which has come to constitute my art and now my life. In order to reflect the activities which constitute my work and the inter-relations to which my work is happily obliged, I would like to take the opportunity of this evening’s presentation to deliver a lecture concerning the states of being an artist a human and a nomad which will be simultaneously accompanied by video documentation of performances I have presented previously in Transylvania, Budapest, Quebec, Toronto and Helsinki. In doing so, I will be talking about my work in terms of my the concerns, motivations and inter-relations which constitute my art. This is the most appropriate means of artiuculating my work through the medium of the lecture. In the absence of a technique of performance, which makes it impossible for me to talk only of performance, I will present images and words simultaneously. I will look forward to discussing any metters arising afterwards. The lecture is entitled: Leaving a milieu of interiority: the artist becomes human becomes nomad „I suggest we look first to Southern Siberia, in the second
millennium B.C., the far-eastern point of paleolithic civilisation. The tribes were
beginning to settle down into societies based on a productive economy, ...[and by] the
middle of the second millennium,...people were apparently ensconced, once and maybe for
all, in comfort and prosperity - but it was just at that moment that several tribes
dropped out and turned nomad. Which meant extensive movement rather than
sedentary business, dispersion among nature rather than huddling round social edifices, an
adventure in space rather than the security of codes. Unfortunately for me, the preceding words are not my own. They were, in fact, written by the Scottish writer Kenneth White in 1992 in a work he entitled „The Nomadist Manifesto“. My thinking in using the introduction to White’s manifesto as my introduction to this lecture is because of the author’s precision in delineating, with great accuracy, the initial conditions which lead to the human becoming nomad. For this, I am indebted to him, and propose to further research and practice in this area through proposing a new manifesto formulated in the course of this lecture, which I will deliver as its conclusion. As I said, White provides us with a delineation of the process of the
human becoming (or in his words turning) nomad. As a human being, an artist and,
increasingly, a nomad, I wish to provide an overview of the three-way relationship
existing between these states of being. In doing this, I will come to the conclusion
that mediations exist between the artist, the human and the nomad: and, further, that this
mediation consists of the interiorisation and/or exteriorisation of the human being.
The artist, we will discover, operates, certainly initially, within a milieu of
interiority 3., the nomad one of exteriority while the human being,
having the capacity to be both nomad and artist, may simultaneously exist in both milieus.
What I am calling interiorisation and exteriorisation may previously have been articulated as territorialisation and deterritorialisation. While these latter terms may, in their pertaining to the phenomemon of land, provide a greater sense of physicality, the terms interior and exterior seem to reveal a greater polarity and, consequently, suggest the scale of the mediation which dictates who is in and who is out and the desirability to be one of the former rather than one of the latter. This oppositional strategy is pursued relentlessly by those forces to whom ‘conventional’ knowledge (as opposed to ‘non-ordinary’ or ‘peripheral’ knowledge) is essential for the continuance of a cohesive society, pliable and vulnerable to the marketing of desire. I think we know the nature of the forces to which I am referring. The volume of acceptance for these forms by willing subjects moreover, lends a certain weight to the thought that what can be territorialised may be de-territorialized and vice versa, but the strictly human terms involved in being exteriorised seems more likely to be a juncture from return is not only an impossibility, but also undesirable. The existence and pursuance of the strategy of exteriorisation is attested to by White. His choice of words to describe this („but it was just at that moment that several tribes dropped out and turned nomad.“) implies a definitive sense of collective departure equal in cale to any Diaspora since. These humans dropped out. Erwin R. Strauss elaborates on the extent volition plays in such an exodus in his book How To Start Your Own Country, 4. in which he profiles a means of „dropping out“ as „going Vonu“: a process whereby one resists the coercion of the State through becoming invisible to it. Incidentally, while Bob Black wrote of Strauss’ work, „Is it absurd to consider How To Start Your Own Country ? It’s been done before: we’re living in one.“ and that this continues to be a cautionary warning of the flimsy nature of libertarian-anarchist counter-ideology, his subsequent dismissal of the overall practice of becoming „ invisible to coercers“ as „the stuff of romance“ is philosophically myopic 5. and fails to consider the capacity of art to achieve precisely this aim. I will return to this later when I will discuss the pursuit of invisibility as a central feature of my own performance work. For the moment, however, as we have learnt of the „turning nomad“ of several Siberian tribes in the second millennium BC, we must also turn our attention to those who opted for White calls „ sedentary business“ and „the security of codes“ and more specificlly, whether all those who opted to remain did this. Although the law of probabilities (which like all laws is largely arbitrary) would, for what its worth, presume that some of these nomads were artists: it is just as likely to presume that as many artists opted for the milieu of interiority of the new industrialised epoch. Additionally, even if some of these nomads were artists, this seems to be of little importance. The process of exteriorisation (I have just thought another better-used word to articulate this would be „marginalisation“) has defined their transformation from humans into nomads. In order to achieve such an escape artists must first aspire to the status of human, before making this second transition. This is not to say that all non-artist humans are more advanced than artist-humans in exercising their conciousness, rather artists should realise now the initial follhowever well-meaning, in their opting to remain behind. In saying this, the absence of a theory of art generated by the earliest experiences of art, renders it difficult to criticise the early artists who remained within the convential social order. They were not to know that the theory of art would eventually be used to mediate, neutralise, rationalise and thus control their work. The theory of art, proposed initially in earnest by the Greeks, located art in a relationship to life which could not be anything more than mimetic and thus limited its capacity for dissent. Even now, as Susan Sontag has pointed out, „when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory remains.“ 6. Additionally, it took until the earlier part of this century and the formation in Europe of an avant-garde that the the theory of art as mimesis was challenged at all. By this time, the synonimity of art and mimesis led Richard Hulsenbeck to state that „The Dadaist considers it necessary to come out against art because he has seen through its fraud as a moral safety valve“ and also that „regarded from a serious point of view [artl is a large-scale swindle“. 7. Since, and because of, this attack, and others like it, we can now separate art from theory, actuality from mediation, and thus can conceive of an art which operates on the exterior of social convention and thus outside of the realms of conventional knowledge. In order to do this however, and thus to follow the nomads, the artist must realise his or her inter-relation with the world beyond the closed-value systems of convention, for that world, that realm of experience is far more enduring and offers far greater possibilities than are present in any milieu of interiority. In an interview I conducted with artist Alastair MacLennan in 1996, he reflected on the current conventions of knowledge, experience and art by saying „ One branch of what is currently called post-modernism will (perhaps) be seen in time as temporaty fatigue of the collective human mind and all its workings. Some features are trite, sad and self-indulgent - certainly not what to base one’s life on. [... ] what is currently on political, social and cultural offer is hardly viable for the evolving species we presume ourselves to be.“ 8. This is not to say that, in leaving the milieu of interioirity and its false choices and turning nomad, we are necessarily going vonu. On the contrary, because Performance art (as being distinct, in this instance, from other art forms) has an unlimited capacity to be ‘lived’, and furthermore, as ‘lived art’ is at all times a perpetually onceoccurring entity, its perspective does not recognise a difference between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. By its act, moreover, it stresses simultaneity and an indistinguishable proximlty of performances of art and those of human activity. Lived art, then, in the course of its execution may refute strategies of separation and fragmentation. Germano Celant suggested that the artist should live art " in order to live the marvelous organization of living things", among which „he discovers also himself, his body, his memory, his gestures...... It is at this crucial point, insists Celant, that "He abolishes his role as being an artist“. 9. While this may or may not be the case, Celant’s position does presume an essential dichotomy between an artist ‘being’ and a human ‘being’. Wherever there is dichotomy, however, there is also proximity; and while an artist may choose to abolish his or her role as an artist in order to live, an artist may only choose to abolish his or her role as a human as a suicide. When art is lived, so living is art and when living is art, so art is lived. Suicide is a symptom of remaining within the milieu of interiority, resisting all exteriority until it is too late and one finds oneself marginalised. Dissent is the blood-flow and life-force of the marginal. Yet while such tenacity is admirable it also reflects a limited choice, a mediated horizon which presents itself as completely in or out, slave or utopian, interior or exterior, martyrdom or fulfilment. Suicude can result from the realisation that one may already be dead. The choices are wider however. The artist, for example, has choices in realising his or her being as a human. One means is to attest to the terrifying reality of a life of freedom away from „the security of codes“, a life on the exterior of conventional knowledge, through becoming nomad; a life no longer in opposition to one’s self and one’s milieu. The other is to attest to the same urgency of one’s sense of the primeval by taking one’s own life. In this sense the experience is one of via negativa (that one can only prove existence through defining what it is not) and one whose attraction is in its otherness. Yet, otherness is here, among us, in any and every perception of any and all matter. The existence of the post-suicide may or may not be an existence of unfilitered otherness and unmediated matter. We do not know. We only know what suicide is not. We rarely contemplate, in actuality and without sentimentality, what not being a suicide could be. I propose that the nomad-human lives in this way and that , is a way to which all artists should aspire. lt is truly difficult to say whether in becoming nomad, the artist is realising his human being in entirety or whether it is the human realising his artist-being completely. In and for performance, the human and the artist are so simultaneous in their existence that not even a silent phasing of separate bodily fluids and electrical impulses can be detected. The inaudibility of the collision and collusion of these energies in conjunction is the sound of becoming nomad. The existence of the nomad could be best articulated, within our conventional knowledge, as a non-ideological utopia. Ideology denounces possibilities as its mediated intellectual programme seeks disciples whose passion for dissent justifies other programmes of (counter-ideologies). Domination of one’s self through devotion to non-holistic intellectual and social programmes maintains in the balance of ideologies and the democracies of dissent. There is no need for us to ask permission to realise our life as nomads. The volition of the artist is evident in the performance and is not the cause of enigmatic obscurity. lf one feels that one does not understan,d the performance, then one does not understand ones self. Moreover, in choosing to translate life to ourselves we prove that we are always foreigners rather than nomads. While Wittgenstein asserted that „the problem of philosophy lies not in its complexity but in our knotted understanding“, I would further purport that all understanding is knotted. The world asks nothing of us, yet we continually formulate responses to it. The world does not require our understanding for it to exist, yet we feel that our existence requires an understanding of the world. lt is at this point we confuse the mass and sphere of existence with our own milieu of interiority. We do this in order to atempt a working definition of the form of formlessness. Ideology is one such response, religion another, extrapolated conciosness another still. Art is also a response, though at its best art realises irresolutions as marvelous uncoverings. Performance is a realisation that uncovering and questioning are different. Performance realises that it owns nothing just as nobody can own art. As such, in the performance there is nothing to understand, or put another way, it is impossible not to understand everything. In watching (or participating) during a performance one is afforded a glimpse of the human as nomad. This is the shock of art, the reason for the apparent incomprehension of conventional knowledge. The inappropriateness of currently dominant philosophies and ideologies to our world is apparent in the shortcomings of its articulation and definiton of itself in relation to what it is not. In voluntarily leaving the miheu of interiority and becoming nomad, the artist-human welcomes otherness and realises his or her interrelations with that which is exterior still to him or her self. In the polar case of the suicide, there is at least also a welcoming of otherness. It may be the only common feature of the suicide and the nomad that in the execution of their parallel existences, they constantly and simultaneously define themselves as both what they are and what they are not. Then, at the inaubile moment of total conjunction, they realise that there can only be a totality of No-Thing. In contrast, the conventional knowledge and base obsessions of dominant ideology fears otherness and the prospect of No-Thing. This is because the application of dominant systems of separation and codification occurs through the agency of the commodity, the parasitic object which lives off the frustration of realising that one may already be dead. The commodity is, as we know, the currency of the milieu of interiority. The very prospect of No-Thing creates perpetual flux and prompts doubt in our relianace upon synthetic systems and ideals for living. lf it were or could possibly be an object, then No-Thing would be the spanner in the works. The slightest glimpse of it within our interiority could instil the discontent with civilisation which has already prompted scenarios such as the activites of the Unabomber, the Luddite revolution in England, and the mass dropping out at jonestown and Waco. This is not to say that the f orces of conventional knowledge are not happy to have martyrs who have been killed by their own dissent. Their only concern when dissenters die is to ensure that another takes his or her place. The fostering of containable dissent allows the mechanisms of separation and control to operate more smoothly. The individual is identified in relation to the hierarchy of the interior. An artist who has become a nomad does so in recognition that individuals cannot be identified in this way. This artist does what is not expected of him or her. Likewise, the nomad does not owe his or her existence to mobility. Realising that the exterior features in every milieu only as threat which intimidates inhabitants into conforming and that this threat is empty as national borders which denote inclusion and exclusion are only like natural borders in that they are as temporary as the ebb and flow of the sea on the beach of an island state, the nomad realises that there is nowhere to go, as these boundaries are not so separate that they can crossed. I agree with Otto Mühl when he described national boundaries as „the enlarged backyard fences of the possession-fixated small-family man“ 10. Thus flying over the Atlantic, as I did to get here, does not make one a nomad. The transition is in fact easier than that as it requires nothing more than what we have. The nomad shares with us the of movement and this merely suggests a criteria for proving we are alive. The migrant, the emigre and the fugitive move from place to place for reasons of protection. As many of these are generically dissenters so many of these are also artists. Being so close to realising their nomadity. In this way, we are nomads already. Our belief, however, in the false freedom of interiority renders us an obstacle to our own becoming. Moreover, this century’s history of art and avant-garde shows that an artist can longer be defined on the grounds of whether or not what he or she creates is art. just as the nomad is not defined by movement, so the artist is not defined by his or her actions. This has been the case since Duchamp exhibited his urinal. lf we are indebted to the avant-garde for anything, this is it. The possibility of everyone becoming an artist is greatly enhanced by this situation. It is a liberation; a realisation that to make art is to be human. Yet still, we must go beyond the ambition of everyone an artist to realise a new aspiration: everyone a nomad! The conjunction of the artist and the human in performance holds this possibility. At this stage, the dynamics of Kollision and collusion reveal to us a great discovery: Art can neither be created or destroyed! 1. Woods, Gerald, Thompson, Phillip
& John Williams (ed.) - Art Roddy Hunter, |
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