Roddy Hunter
SCORE/TEXT FOR LECTURE/ACTION:
'Introduction to 'The currency of the artists' network': a lecture as yet unwritten and undellvered'
8. Performance Konferenz, IG Farbenhaus, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, May 1999

[Background note: Juergen Fritz invited me to present a lecture and a performance separately at the 8. Performance Konferenz. Ultimately, however, logistics of venues and time within the programme eventually dictated only one possibility: that I should combine the two events in one. Before this realisation I had devised a site-related durational performance in an out-house in the complex surrounding the building. A central aspect of this site, and of my intended performance, lay in the manoeuvrability of large floor-slabs which had become loosened over time, allowing the performer to excavate and thus undo the linearity of the out-houses function and architecture. I requested permission to bring one of these slabs to the main venue to use in my subsequent lecture/action. The other materials I used in the lecture/action, and which were all present in front of the audience throughout, were as follows: One green blackboard. One laundry trolley with a sack attached to the inside of the frame Two lines two metre long white tape stuck to the floor and arranged as a 45-degree angle with a glass of milk on each line. One overhead projector showing an acetate assemblage of two anatomical drawings superimposed upon a plan cartography of the world by mortality rate. One table upon which were both a lap-top Computer with the text of the lecture and a catalogue of Viennese Aktionist texts and images. Other objects used in the performance included a length of red ribbon and a small piece of metal piping. Morgan OHara, an artist whose synchronous drawings of motion are known as live transmissions, sat opposite me at this table at the beginning of the lecture/action. She proceeded to parallel my actions with her own and produced two extraordinary drawings during the work.]

1. [action] Write 'doli incapax' (1) on blackboard.
2. [action] Drop glass of milk on slab
3. [read text]

A necessary note on the Symposium as context and methodology
The entirety of this presentation, in actuality and by necessity, can only serve as an introduction to a lecture as yet unwritten and undelivered, which I might in future entitle The currency of the artists' network'. This introduction will hopefully contribute to the cause of meeting: of a dialogue that generates significatory, yet not necessarily epistemic, acts. These acts originate neither primarily nor conclusively through conventionally conditional matrices that attend to the dyad of 'object' and 'subject' (the primacy of which coupling is a misconception). It is unlikely then that the process of generating these acts will find modal communication as a corollary. However symposia and conferences might attempt to accommodate non-conclusive means of transmission2, they always remain cast as intermediaries'. They are mechanisms of mediation that channel currents of analysis between bases so as to elevate their importance in aspiring toward an interdisciplinarity of practice through the unlikely means of specialising evaluation. This act of aspiring, of seeking out, implies, however the impossibility of an interdisciplinarity without the agreement of the symposium. This impossibility reminds me of the slogan of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, 'only those who attempt the impossible will achieve the absurd'. Notwithstanding the absurdity of approaching the relation of theory to practice through consistently theoretical means, performance is frequently 'taken as read to be at least either a subject, object (but rarely the medium) of debate at such events. This usage of performance, and it is a usage, also occurs notwithstanding performance's indubitable offering of itself as a viable methodology of simultaneous research and practice. It does. Performance art methodology as a non-linear matrix, does not seek exchange (though it is likely to maintain that which Mikhail Bakhtin characterised as 'answerability'3), rather it practices mataxis4. Performance art methodology is then both theorem and method. As such it engages seamlessly with bases both spoken and unspoken, both visible and invisible, both implicit and explicit. 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 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 these essential concerns of performance art methodology, and as such its presentation should not solely occupy an ancillary or verificatory role. Each performance reveals an epistemological deficit and this introduction hopes to keep with this in revealing the scale of what is not known to us. I ask you, furthermore, to rely on the innate Intuition that human agency is not always a catalyst in all processes.

Performance art methodology remains almost wholly in negotiation with the conventional methodology of the symposium, almost to a point of irony.

4.[action] Kneel with head bowed, facing audience (cf. Maoist 'PeopIes' Tribunal). Shake head backwards and forward, gradually becoming faster and more pronounced, until uncontrolled sounds emit from the body and through the mouth.
5. [read text]

Extant views on performance art in the context of network
The editors of Art Without Boundaries 1950-1970 (being Gerald Woods, Phillip Thompson & John Williams)observed in this work that "[u]nfiltered reality is a preoccupation of many artists"(5). In introducing both my work and myself, I would say that this observation made in 1972 is relatively accurate of my practice today which began in earnest in 1989 with my first performances in Glasgow, Scotland, my place of origin. Since, and throughout, the past ten years, however, my work in performance and Installation art has led me to become equally pre-occupied with unfiltered (or immediate) art as much as unfiltered life. It is my primary contention that there can be no difference between unfiltered life and unfiltered art in the specific but boundless sphere of art and life that is the interregional6 performance art network.

For the moment, the evidence I will initially offer in support of my contention is the maintenance of the contemporary, specifically performance, artist's practice constituted, as it is, by a multiplicity of activities axiomatically interwoven with the ideal of non-commerciality. Clive Robertson has crucially pointed out that, "[t]here are many confusions as to the differences between alternative networking and networking as practiced by professionals who work for institutions "(7). He continues, "these confusions have been largely precipitated by "the inverted critiques of 'statism in the arts' - not as a call for creative or political independence, but as an imagined 'freedom' that could be supplied in a working relationship with the marketplace (8) Roland Miller similarly highlights the significance of rendering the virtues of non-commerciality axiomatic with network in his 1989 essay 'The 8Os - A Decade We Could Have Done Without':

When the [...] catalogue - "Five Years' Performance Art in Lyon 1979-83" was compiled, I wrote a piece for it expressing [...] that the ideals of non-commerciality, directness and integrity were being displaced by the very vices of the art 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 (9)

Moreover, this need for, and simultaneous existence of, a non-commercial interregional network aimed at undoing the 'imperviousness of the worlds of life and culture' (cf. Bakhtin) was already evident in the 1960s. George Brecht and Robert Filliou, for example, opened a curio store, "an international center of permanent creation ‚"in the village of Vilefranche-sur-mer on the French Riviera."(10) Kristine Stiles continues: They aimed to sell all kinds of eccentric artworks, convinced that only by becoming a "subversive nuisance" could they "make possible the eventual transition between socialism and communism, and finally, communism and anarchism." (11)

Stiles identifies this episode as consistent with a broader survey of Brecht's life and work. She concludes that Brecht "was concerned with charting a new "history of mind" that would provide a "new synthesis. . .that can be nourishing for all of us".(12)

Clive Robertson is most likely correct in his observation that "[t]he notion of an artists network as a social and experimental if not economic alternative to the commercial and public gallery System reached its 'utopian peak' at the end of the 70's (13) Evidence is emerging now, however, that the work of artists such as Brecht, Filliou, Miller and their contemporaries has sufficiently inspired successive generations of artists. These also attest that 'as artists we will keep in touch by mail; will, when money allows, travel, and each of us no matter what town, city, or country we live in will create a modest centre of activity."(14)

6.[action] Go toward audience and borrow Warpechowski's cane (15). Take red ribbon and cane, put both in sack, climb in sack, tie cane around neck with ribbon (unseen to audience), begin shaking body inside sack causing trolley to move until it collides with stone, remove sack from trolley.
7. [read text]

The nomad/network dyad undoes the artist/suicide dyad
Germano Celant'16 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 "[h]e abolishes his role as being an artist"'17. 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. While an artist may choose to abolish his or her role as an artist in order to live, the same artist may only choose to abolish his or her role as a human as a suicide.

Suicide, and more certainly attempted suicide, may be a symptom of remaining within the milieu of interiority, resisting all exteriority until it is too late and one finds oneself marginalised. Dissent has become the blood-flow and, ironically, life-force of the marginal. The dissenter-artist may wish to testify to this as means of presenting us with and reminding us of a central schism of objectivity and subjectivity. Yet, while such tenacity may be 'admirable' in some senses, it also reflects a limited choice, an overly mediated horizon strictly marshalled by dualities of 'in' or 'out', 'slave' or 'utopian', 'interior' or 'exterior', 'martyrdom' or 'fulfilment'. In itself, suicide (as opposed to attempted suicide in this instance) may 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' and more importantly becoming as a human. One choice is to attest to the terrifying reality of an existence of freedom, away from the security of codes (18). An existence on the exterior of conventional knowledge, through becoming nomad; an existence 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 and/or experience of the post-suicide (let alone that of the individual at the moment of committing that act) may or may not constitute unfiltered otherness and unmediated matter. We do not know. (19) 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 exists in this way and that it is a way to which all artists should aspire. it is truly difficult to say whether in becoming nomad, the artist is realising his/her human being in entirety or the human is realising his/her artist-being completely. In and for performance art, the human and the artist become so simultaneous in their existence that not even a phasing of separated 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 finds its most effective articulation, within our conventionally conditioned knowledge, as a utopia beyond ideology. Ideology denounces possibilities. A mediated intellectual programme even mediates the credibility of intellect. It seeks disciples whose passion for dissent justifies other programmes of (counter-) ideology. Domination of ones self through devotion to sectarian intellectual and social programmes maintains the balance of ideologies necessary to neo-liberal democracies of dissent. There is no need for us to ask permission to realise our existence as nomads: the volition of the artist is evident during performance and is not a cause of enigmatic obscurity. Any such obscurity apparently emerging from the performance is caused by the mediation, not the matter, of this volition. If one feels that one does not understand' the performance, then one may also not 'understand' one's self and the relation of this Self to an Other. Moreover, in choosing to translate life to ourselves in a one-at-a-time fashion (20) we prove that we are always foreigners, even to ourselves, rather than nomads.

I have cited elsewhere Wittgensteins assertion that 'the problem of philosophy lies not in its complexity but in our knotted understanding 21. I would now further purport that 'understanding' itself 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. I would go so far as to say that even the 'world of perceptions' exists irrespective of our understanding or otherwise. Yet, we feel that our existence requires an understanding of the world. It is at this point we may mistake the mass and sphere of existence and interrelation for our own milieu of interiority, and we do this to attempt a contingent definition of the form of formlessness. Ideology is one such response, religion another, extrapolated (false) consciousness another still. Art is also a response, though at its least reflexive art may, as Celant advocated earlier, realise irresolutions as uncoverings. Performance art, in negotiating such contingent actualities, may force the realisation that 'uncovering' and 'translating' are wholly different. In this eventuality, there is nothing to 'understand' in performance, art, or put another way, it is impossible not to understand everything. Viewing is one of many largely unquantifiable means of participating (or being implicated) in a performance and such participation may afford one a glimpse of the human as nomad. This may account for the 'shock of art, the reason for apparent incomprehension stemming from conventional knowledge. David Perez delineated such a context when he wrote of a performance of Esther Ferrer: While the artist carefully places a large glass on her head, we try to find the hidden mechanism by which the object was chosen. Entering that secret dynamic, we try compulsively to discover the raison d'être which, in the language of logic and the syntax of reason, could justify - even in a crude and clumsy manner - what is in truth always unjustifiable: the presence of some things that, despite acquiring life through our presence, are fully independent of it (22)

The inappropriateness of currently dominant philosophies and ideologies to our world is apparent in the shortcomings of how these articulate and define themselves in relation to what they are not. In voluntarily leaving the milieu of interiority (a neo-liberal hierarchical structure dependent upon causality and linearity) and becoming nomad in a milieu of anteriority (a rhizomorphic non-linear network), the artist-human welcomes otherness and realises interrelations with that previously regarded "exterior" to his 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 inaudible moment of total conjunction, they both realise that the only totality can be that 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 that lives off the frustration of realising that one may already be dead. In offering existence through surrogacy, the commodity is thus the currency of the milieu of interiority.

The very prospect of No-Thing creates perpetual flux and prompts doubt (which ironically has hitherto been considered, in Lacanian terms, as a defence against 'the real'(23)) in our reliance upon synthetic Systems and ideals for living/dying. If it were or could possibly be an object, then No-Thing would be the proverbial spanner in the works. The slightest glimpse of it within our milieu of interiority instils a discontent with neo-liberal civilisation. This discontent has manifested itself previously in the activities of the Unabomber, the Luddite revolution in England, and the mass dropping out at Jonestown and Waco. This is not to say that the forces of conventional knowledge are not happy to have martyrs who have died by their own dissent. The only concern within this milieu is to ensure when dissenters die that another takes his or her place. The fostering of confinable dissent allows the mechanisms of separation and control to operate more smoothly. The individual is identifiable solely 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 can thus confound expectations of him/herself.

The nomad, likewise, does not owe his or her existence to mobility. The nomad realises that the exteriority featured in every milieu as an intimidation of its inhabitants is an empty threat. A threat as empty as the national borders which attempt inclusion and exclusion, (and in the opinion of Otto Muehl are "the enlarged backyard fences of the possession-fixated small-family man"24). The nomad thus instinctually realises that there is nowhere to go. While these national borders derive their authority from echoing 'natural' borders, an irony lies in the actuality that they are also as temporary as the ebb and flow of the sea on the beach of an island state. Thus mobility does not make one a nomad (25)

8.[action] Stand in front of audience, begin to gradually shake fingers on right hand, then follow with the wrist and then the whole arm.
9. [action] Stand slab up on its side facing the audience. Kneel in front and strike it repeatedly with metal piping until exhausted.

Notes:

1 "The rebuttable presumption of doli incapax applies to children in criminal proceedings of ten to thirteen years of age: children in this age range are presumed not to know the difference between right and wrong and, therefore, to be incapable of committing a crime because they lack the necessary criminal intent." Charlotte Walsh, 'Irrational Presumptions of Rationality and Comprehension', Web Journal of Current Legal Issue in association with Blackstone Press Ltd (http://webicIi.ncl.ac.uk/1998/issue3/walsh3. html). I have called upon this defence at the outset of many of my works.
2 I emphasised this word, verbally, in direct reference to Morgan O'Hara's participation in the work.
3 see Bakhtin, MM., Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. & tr. Vadim Liapunov, University of Texas Press, 1990.
4 Mataxis is characterised by Augusto Boal as the participation of one world in another": Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed, tr. Charles A. & Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, London:Pluto, 1979.
5 Woods, Gerald, Thompson, Phillip & Williams, John (eds.), Art Without Boundaries 1950- 19 70, London: Thames & Hudson, 1972, p.54.
6 favour the description interregional to 'international' when referring to performance art network.
7 Clive Robertson, "Performance Art in Canada 1970-80: Tracing some origins of need' in Richard, Alain-Martin and Robertson, Clive (eds.), Performance au/in Canada 1970 - 1990, Quebec and Toronto: éditions Intervention and Coach House Press, 1991, p. 10.
8 op.cit
9 Roland MilIer, The 80s - A Decade We Could Have Done Without' in The National Review of Live Art Tenth Anniversary Limited Edition catalogue, Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1990.
10 Kristine Stiles, 'Material Culture and Everyday Life' in Stiles, Kristine & Selz, Peter (ed.) Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkley & Los Angeles: University of Califomia Press, 1996, p.288.
11 op.cit.
12 op.cit.
13 Robertson, ibid., p.10.
14 op.cit.
15 Zbigniew Warpechowski agreed to participate in this way before the performance.
16 Germano Celant was, in the words of Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, "closely associated as propagandist and curator" of the Arte Povera movement that originated in Genoa, Italy in the late nineteen-sixties. Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul (eds.) Art in Theory 1900-1990, Oxford & Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996.
17 I have quoted Celant here from his essay written for the catalogue 'Arte Povera' of 1969, reprinted in full in Stiles, Kristine & Selz, Peter (ed.) (1996) pp. 662-666.
18 Clear instances of such choices can be found in Rattray, David, How I Became One of the Invisible, New York: Semiotext(e), 1992.
19 In 1960, the International Association for Suicide Prevention was founded and has so far organised no fewer than five international conferences. The last decade also saw the emergence in the U.S.A. of 'suicidology' as a specialist field of study in its own right, with its own professional association, The American Association of Suicidology, and its own journal, The Bulletin of Suicidology. Such a massive investment in suicide research might suggest that there must be a large amount of agreement about the most appropriate approaches to and theories of suicide. One does not have to look far into the literature, however, to discover that this is not the case, and it would be an optimist indeed who declared that man is on the point of understanding suicide." J. Maxwell Atkinson, 'Societal Reactions to Suicide: The Role of Coroners' Definitions' in Images of Deviance, ed. Stanley Cohen, Middlesex, Victoria, Ontario & Auckland: Pelican, 1971, p.165.
20 "There is [...] perhaps more than a mere analogy between central vision and conscious, one-at-a-tine thinking, and between peripheral vision and the rather mysterious process which enables us to regulate the incredible complexity of our bodies without thinking at all. It should be noted, further, that we call our bodies complex as a result of trying to understand them in terms of linear thought, of words and concepts." Watts, Alan W., The Way of Zen, Middlesex and Victoria: Pelican, 1970, p. 28.
21 Kenny, Anthony, Wittgenstein, London, New York, Victoria, Ontario & Auckland: Pelican, 1975, p.18.
22 David Perez, 'In the frame of time... (while objects pass in silence and the tea kettle boils' in the catalogue Esther Ferrer, xlviii Bienale de Venecia, p.5l. 1 read Perez' essay some months after my lecture/action in Frankfurt, but decided to include it in this revised version.
23 This has been cited in, amongst other places, Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performanae, London and New York, 1996, p. 1.
24 According to Kristine Stiles, Viennese Aktionist Otto MuehI "sought to redress the sources of destructive and aggressive pathology, which he located in sexual repression and values perpetrated in the concept of the "nuclear family." Kristine Stiles, 'Performance Art' in Stiles, Kristine & Selz, Peter (ed.) (1996) p. 688). Muehl's remark concerning national boundaries comes from his Commune Manifesto which can be found in the same source, p. 752.
25 Others have also made compelling articulations of the stationary, but not sedentary, nomad, which have greatly influenced my perspective here. See, in particular, Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, abridged by D.C. Somerwell, New York: Oxford University Press, Voll, pp. 164-68; and Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, Nomadology: Th. War Machine, tr. Brian Massumi, New York: Semiotext(e), 1986, p. 51.