Roddy Hunter
THE CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM
AS/AND
THE PLACE OF DISSOCIATION IN ACTION ART

'where things hurry away from their names' (1) Octavio Paz

I would not explain action art any more than I would explain other (visual) art forms. As it would seem of limited value to reiterate definitions of installation art, sculpture and painting continually, so it is the same with action art. It may be accurate, though, that many action artists have become so, amongst other reasons, in Opposition to seemingly fixed and axiomatic frameworks of assumption in other art forms. The enduring avowal of a 'suspension of disbelief' in theatre and the equally outmoded premise of mimesis in 'representational' painting are examples of this, to lesser or greater extents. Action art, I hope, does not carry any meaning axiomatic with its form. It troubles me, therefore and for example, when I hear the view that action art is somehow more intrinsically 'authentic' or 'real' than other visual art practices. Though this tendency manifests itself frequently in action art, such apparency does not render 'authenticity' to the practice exclusively. Installation art, for example, is an obvious aggregation in which action art and other forms such as assemblage chiefly figure. Action art itself is an aggregation of different forms and so, we may assume given this influence, installation art may conduct equally pertinent investigations into encounter. It is unhelpful to enforce a sectarian divide between action art and other visual art forms based on the premise of there being a single 'real'. I find it ironic that these claims of 'authenticity' are often made in favour, and usually in defence', of action art.

Put simply, I would only want to explain action art in broadly formal terms and in relation to my own practice. In my case, then, I would describe it as the act(ion) partially regarded from the perspective of visual art'. There are common features in any characterisation of action art and visual art more broadly. One constant in both is this element of aggregation, which concurs with a simultaneous detournement of framing and classification. This constitutes a challenge to normative taxonomy. Kristine Stiles writes: Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing that he could erase. In Erased De Kooning (1953), Rauschenberg left only the material signifiers to establish the context of art, the work's title, Rauschenberg's signature, and the object's physical support, the frame.(2)
Erased De Kooning and other works such as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (a urinal installed in a gallery and signed 'R.Mutt'), deliver the important manifesto and polemic of detournement to subsequent artists and public. These works reveal explicitly those aspects of framing, recognition and identification embedded in visual art practice that lead me to be sceptical of any axiomatic relation between action art and an imag(in)ing of a pre-sophisticated reality. It is rather the case that action artists, and those like Rauschenberg and Duchamp who originated a performative dynamic in other forms, are those who have encountered philosophy as an important method of enquiry in art. This of course is no axiom, however: it is instead paradigmatic and this is an important difference.

I actualised two works during la àccion su y huel!a: Relief From Memory (IV) and Down-Goings (Homage To Zarathustra). Of the material, and thus apparent, signifiers of these works, one may conclude that mine's, in particular, is an art of dissociation, or even dissolution. That it is an art that dissents against the forced interrelation of particular objects and conditions with particular functions. lf so, it does as an art that questions, without doubt, any notion of inevitability in that forced interrelation. An art that betrays its influence to Duchamp and Rauschenberg in preferring objects and conditions to be cleaved, even temporarily, from their apparent function and thus, usually, their names. It would be philosophically inaccurate and unhelpful, however, to romanticise, and thus undo, the phenomenological potential of these objects and conditions by solely blaming the 'naming', or taxonomic, process. This approach lacks rigour, as it perceives taxonomy as an omnipotent, inflexible and thus wholly inevitable force. While phenomenological discourse can be evasive to taxonomy, it can still be usefully termed 'phenomenological discourse'. Ergo any condition or object ascribed a name subsequently resists romantic considerations of itself as truly and historically 'unnameable'. The successful occurrence of a taxonomic act disproves any evasion of re-presentation. Recognising this only assists, than hinders, any liberation of objects and conditions from taxonomic influences. Acknowledging the historical, temporal matrix of an object, condition or function aids in its undoing. To believe otherwise would be to agree with Sol Lewitts claim that 'once something is done, it cannot be undone' (3).

Lewitts claim could not be palindromic ('once something is undone, it cannot be done') and as such privileges a perspective of agency in which the human/object relationship is always divisible and unequal. It also assumes a wholly linear version of the passing of time. Time-based art, like post-quantum physics4, does not accept this divisibility as axiomatic. Michael Holquist: the laws of gravitation, electricity and magnetism, nuclear interaction, the laws of beta-decay - they are all indifferent to time, insofar as they are in themselves processes that remain the same, even if the order in which they occur is reversed. And yet, if a glass of water falls off a table, none of us expects the drops to reconstitute themselves, the shattered shards to fly together into their previous shape, or the whole complex then to jump off the floor back onto the table.(5)
The human love for semantics, adherence to linear thought processes and never-ceasing hunger for explanations and definitions outside the context of application are all useless in the challenge to dominant discourses of taxonomy. My actions in Santiago de Compostela staked their very pertinence upon challenging Lewitt's claim. In fact, my work is obliged to comment explicitly upon the normative objects, conditions and discourses of art as expressed by Lewitt's claim. In considering the taxonomic process, the artist is obliged to explore the inherently taxonomic conditions brought to bear, currently, by art itself. I subscribe to the view that each work of art renders comment upon art discourse, to a greater or lesser degree, and that art discourse not only represents but also often constitutes a paradigm of taxonomy.

Indeed, my actions during Ia àccion su y huella aspired to forcing another interrelation to temper the potential of art as a solely taxonomic force. The interrelation I wished to force was of the discourses of art and phenomenology, these chiefly being discourses of aggregation and indivisibility respectively. This intention may seem at first as inadvisable and inappropriate as the taxonomic process I oppose. Yet, there is also a clear challenge here: to allow aggregation (art) and indivisibility (phenomenology) proximity where there is customary duality. For art, aggregation is the given 'real in actuality and such aggregation, as a constant, becomes as indivisible as phenomenological discourse. It requires an integrated praxis of methodology and outcome. John Richardson writes usefully in this regard, "phenomenology is in its formal aspect the holding of something up for view, so that it can show itself to us."6 That formal aspect of phenomenology equates well to action art, though again this is paradigmatic rather than axiomatic. Erased De Kooning, while not strictly an action artwork, is a paradigm instance of this phenomenological formalism. This work depends on Rauschenberg's act of 'holding up something for view and on the pivotal role this plays in the overall matrix of Erased De Kooning.

Moreover, there is a very curious consequence of this work in that De Kooning received a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in 1989, the same year that his wife Elaine died of lung cancer. Alzheimers disease is described by the Alzheimer's Association as "a progressive, neurodegenerative disease characterised by loss of function and death of nerve cells in several areas of the brain, leading to loss of mental functions such as memory and learning.'(7) They also add, 'Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia." Debate has subsequently raged within the art world as to the relative value of De Koonings paintings post-diagnosis. This prompted me, perhaps sub-consciously, to focus upon memory as a fruitful interstice between art and phenomenology, which would permit revelation of their extant, non-linear proximity. The act of holding up something for view' in my works in Santiago de Compostela was that of recalling memory whilst 'discussing' it through the work. As phenomenology requires self-manifestation solely on the terms of that phenomenon's ontology, so explaining it necessarily entails representation on other terms. Such explanation renders the phenomenon plucked from its own ontological context suspended and gazed upon by the taxonomic eyes of human reasoning. Thus, divisibility is re-instated, undermining the phenomenological potential of art. To counter this, I intended to challenge linear memory, through attempting to erase all apparent traces borne by the installation of my actions. I succeeded in this right up until the last day of Relief From Memory (IV). I need not have been so concerned; of course, the Museum subsequently removed all traces of others and mines work. This catalogue is now all that is left of these traces.

When required to articulate my interest in memory as an interstice between subjectivity and objectivity in my lecture at la àccion su y huella, I read the following text by Alexander Trocchi whilst simultaneously attempting to recall personal memory. I have reproduced the text in full here, perhaps as a 'score' for an action by the present reader. Read this aloud while recalling personal memory simultaneously. The experience points to the difficulty and performativity of reading with an awareness of phenomenology. This morning, the first thing after I got out of bed, I looked in the mirror. It is of chromium plated steel and I always carry it with me. It is unbreakable. My beard has grown imperceptibly during the night and now my cheeks and chin were covered with a short stubble. My eyes were less bloodshot than they had been during the previous fortnight. I must have slept weIl. I looked at my image for a few moments and I could see nothing strange about it. It was the same nose and the same mouth, and the little scar above and thrusting down into my left eyebrow was no more obvious than it had been the day before. Nothing out of place and yet everything was, because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance, the same break in continuity which I have always felt to exist between acts which I committed yesterday and my present consciousness of them.
But there is no problem.
I don't ask whether I am the I' who looked at the image or the image which was seen, the man who acted or the man who thought about the act. For I know now that it is the structure of language itself which is treacherous. The problem comes into being as soon as I begin to use the word. There is no contradiction in things, only in the word I' which is arbitrary and which contains within it its own inadequacy and its own contradiction.(8)

The fulfilment of this score requires non-linear thought processes. Furthermore, as Robert Filliou remarked that art is what makes life more interesting than art (9), so we can thin k of an indivisibility of phenomenology and art, of 'the thing done to' and 'the thing doing'. Attempts at dismantling this integration are common, however. My work does not explicitly debate where the distinction is drawn: it is not about that. My work pursues a phenomenological approach rather, meaning that it implicitly draws this debate into my practice rather than having my practice drawn into it. I am interested in artists like Robert Filliou, Esther Ferrer(10), Julie Bacon and Roland Miller'(11), amongst others, whose work not only suggests, but actualises the act of allowing objects and conditions to manifest themselves on their own terms.

I have since realised through reflection and further reading (12) that Relief From Memory (IV) and Down-Goings (Homage To Zarathustra) also rendered certain delusional behaviours expressly. This is unsurprising given my interest in the neurodegenerative condition of Alzheimer's disease and the prevalent imagistic allusions to amputation evidenced particularly in Relief From Memory (IV). These behaviours are normally of greater interest to an audience of neurologists or psychoanalysts than to those who observed these works in the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporänea. Of course, I am not to know if the audience in fact numbered any neurologists or psychoanalysts amongst them. Yet, in any case, I felt that a similar type of spectatorship emerged, that is to say one borne of curiosity into the sometime uncanniness of encounter. The audience for art seems to expect an artwork to allow a general navigation of our collective sensibility through a microcosmic real, without risking implications for the macrocosm. Alastair MacLennan highlighted this process, in an interview I conducted with him, saying "mind scrambles to give matter meaning, to control it through knowledge', to identify it."(13) Action art, in its tendency to present encounters on a representational ratio of 1:1, clearly and properly threatens that model of engagement. The Museum, on the other hand, encourages artists and viewers to clamber for the traces of actions now past; now seemingly immaterial and no longer apparent. This is the case no matter how linear or non-linear the passage of time has been since these acts found their execution.

The Vitrine and the Catalogue, their affects and effects are prime means of the Museums taxonomic drive. The inherently taxonomic influence of the Vitrine and the Catalogue demonstrates this choice aptly. As part of the 1994 exhibition, Worlds in a Box, the following description accompanied Ay-O's Tactile Box, in the exhibition catalogue:

4. Ay-O Tactile box 1963 cardboard box stamped with hole in top 31 x 31 x 31.5cm The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit Ay-O b. 1931

Ay-O studied in the Fine arts Division of Tokyo Educational University. He moved to New York in 1958. He met George Maciunas in 1961 and by the end of 1962 was taking part in many Fluxus 'Happenings. The numerous tactile and finger boxes Ay-O conceived are all variations of a single concept: by sticking your finger through a hole you entered an unknown tactile universe. This idea was further extended in the Fluxus Collective work Fluxlabyrinth shown at the 26th Berlin Arts festival in 1976. Ay-O made Tactile Entrance: people were meant to thrust themselves through the entrance consisting of a foam mattress bent into a U-shape. Sexual readings of these works are probably intended. Since 1970 Ay-O has divided his time between Japan and New York.(14)

A photograph, taken by Brad Iverson, of three such tactile boxes accompanied this unaccredited writing. The taxonomic tone of the writing is alarming in setting side-by-side information both seemingly important and trivial to the degree that the reader may be disinclined to discern one from the other. The further emasculation of this Tactile Box becomes apparent when one realises, of course, that was presented to its curious audience within another box: a glass exhibition case. Ben Vautier's Total art matchbox, which declaims "USE THESE MATCHES TO DESTORY ALL ART - MUSEUMS ART LIBRARY'S -[...]" was contained in the same way. This delineated its capacity as solely reflexive and located it very firmly within art and museological discourse. The Vitrine is peculiarly uncanny as a phenomenon but wholly congruent with its surroundings in the Museum. Its uncanniness arises from its possessing both three-dimensional form yet the appearance of transparency. In this way the viewer, for whom its design renders clear divisibility with the object, loses their "usual insertion (or 'at-homeness') within the system of assignments.(15) Its simultaneous congruence within the context of the Museum reveals the super-structure itself as inherently uncanny (or 'unhomely).

The Museum's uncanniness thrives an mediations that testify to the divisibility of viewer and artwork. It seems of limited value, then, to enter a specificity of debate within its pervasive economies. These debates circulate and constantly rebound within the narrowest parameters and overstated importance of false consciousness. Value systems always justify their own value, impervious to others. The Museum is no exception to this; it over-privileges its own importance in relation to 'the question' of action art. As such, I disagree with the line Robert Ayers drew in the sand of museological debate in relation to The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles' Out of Actions: Between Performance and The Object, 1949-1979 ("an exhibition that ostensibly takes as its material the static traces that three decades of Performance Art has left behind"(16): The more troubling issue for me is around the things that are not genuine relics at all: the recreated relics, if you like. Yoko Ono's Painting to Hammer a Nail was originally made in 1961 but that wasnt the one I hammered my nail into last week (thus alarming a security guard, who asked in horror, 'Excuse me, sir, are you the artist?' before I pointed out the instructions on the label); and Raphael Montanez Ortiz' Piano Destruction Concert is represented in the catalogue by a photograph that was taken in 1966, but imitated in the exhibition itself as a demotished piano which 1 stood and watched him destroy an the afternoon before the show opened. (17)

Surely, this secondary classification of relics into genuine and recreated is something of a critical blind alley. It is a discernment that abstracts material (nails, pianos, hammers) from any possible becoming irrespective of the framing it has been given by the artist. In any case, it denies the consideration of Ono's piece, for example, as a score. Ayers defeats his own reasoning in demonstrating the obvious necessity of anyone hammering a nail into Ono's work. This action fulfils the conditions the artist has delineated. In fact, in still provoking a response from a museum security guard so, the piece still grounds articulate and pertinent discourses surrounding originality and ossification in relation to the art object. What would trouble me is that the Museum has still to catch up with the polemic Ono issued through this work in 1961.

The Museum's death-drive in colonising and fetishising the indexical traces of action art can breed, as I noted earlier, an amateur neurology and psychoanalysis. The living body of the artist as material in the artwork further prompts this uncanniness further. There is, in any case, an often rehearsed sense of the uncanny that describes an imponderable sense of space and time wherein the limits of One's Body-Ego (in this case primarily the artist's) finds comparison with an Other's. In Santiago de Compostela, One experiences this most clearly when visiting the city's Cathedral and encountering proximity with the remains of St. James the Apostle through glass, of course. The 'vitrination' of St. James' remains is uncanny insofar as its compels a compounding proximity of mortality and immortality, the mundane and the celestial. Action art can also, at times, achieve this proximity, whether within or without the Museum. Not only is there a sense anywhere of uncanniness in encountering bodies aware their own self-reflexivity, so there can also be a similar sense in the displacement of linear time frames. It seems of little semantic coincidence then that Freud's naming of this condition 'unheimlich' or unhomely' corresponds closely to the fact that action art cannot be specifically housed anywhere. This again reveals the Museum's over-privileging in relation to action art. The uncanniness of action art rivals that of the Museum.

Though both are inevitably uncanny, action art differs from the Museum in not resisting engagement with its immediate context and environment. In fact, it often presents itself without the material, and conceptual, signifiers of the Gallery and Museum because it tends to present encounters which do not reproduce themselves elsewhere. Action art frequently finds itself on this other side of the threshold of reproduction, amongst the ruins of abandoned and overlooked architecture of contemporary culture. I recently met a young lndonesian artist, lwan Wijono, whose practice of action art emerged, I believe, from his participation in anti-Suharto demonstrations in Jakarta. He recently sent an e-mail, to other action artists, asking the question 'what is Fluxus?' (18) Art histories such as that of Fluxus (a pivotal, but loose, voluntary alliance of recognised mid-twentieth century avant-garde artists) had not concretely influenced his work. And yet, at certain times, Fluxus counted amongst its number artists whose practices were situated within particular contexts of specific communities, cultural constituencies and/or social discourses. Given this, and the explicitly utopian drive' of early Fluxus activity (when its 'founder George Maciunas was closer to Henry Flynt), it is important for Wijono to be able to ask this question. It is equally important for others to understand the context that has shaped his art.

My interest and belief in action art as ultimately homeless' concurs with my fascination with the nomad as being one who does not move. I have written many times of this phenomenon elsewhere. For new readers of my work I will extrapolate this view thus. Both Toynbee and Deleuze & Guattari challenge the customary view of the nomad. They Observe (19)‚ in broad terms, that the nomad tribe, having the ability to domesticate animals, did not share with the agrarian state a need to extend its borders in pursuit of more land. By contrast, the nomad would adapt to the inhospitability of their environment by seasonally rotating their activities within different areas of their plateau. This would thus only result in the crossing of a border when agrarians would newly declare one within the nomads' territory. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert advance, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge (20) (Deleuze & Guattari)

I am inclined to parallel this challenge of nomadism with the dynamic model of action art. This is particularly pertinent given Santiago de Compostela's magnetic effect on pilgrims. Continually walking barefoot in a circle on the highly reflective marble floor of the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea was the pivotal action in Relief From Memory (IV). In Down-Goings (Homage To Zarathustra), I repeatedly rolled up and down a small set of stairs, my pockets shedding nails all the while, in one of the Museums galleries. These works aggregated existing forms and methods of art practice to reach a distinctive and particular outcome. Each work stimulated a simultaneously curious, distressing and liberating actuality: an exculpation of the human from memory. They additionally, however, attempted to overcome considerations of objective reality and subjective response. In fact, this is essential to stimulating a dissociation of human and memory. The significance of an act becomes revalued in the course of its unfolding before the viewer and the artist. Aggregations of forms were individuated, rendered indivisible Repetition and symmetry provided disconcerting means of composition, and rendered historical, contextual, political, cultural and personal sediment. Each situation engendered by each work constituted an inter-relative spatialtemporal mesh permeable to the affects of duration, reflection and recognition. The works aimed to allow a familiarity with phenomenological actualities.

That the apparent, that is material, evidence of the two works I actualised during la àccion su y huella may lead one to the conclusion that mine's is an art of dissociation, or even dissolution, comes as no surprise. The taxonomic influence of the Museum and the uncanniness of the Vitrine attempt to render art dysfunctional. Considerations of action art (like most time-based art schema) as 'functional exist only insofar as it resists normative taxonomic ratios that often relate context, and more specifically space, to an ascribed behaviour ('a system of assignments'.) I wished to propose an expanded conception of architecture that encountered and encompassed indivisibly the architectonics of acts committed in architectural space (in this instance, that of the Museum.) The complexity and indivisibility of the architectonic of the act lies in its impermanence, in the apparent correspondence of its apparently brief and always passing life-time with a resistance toward the verification of this life-time. Architecture is, however, as relatively impermanent as the passing of an act and just as 'useless' or 'useful' depending on its surrounding context. Walk around an area that previously provided a park or school and now provides housing for commuters to experience this displacement. Congruity becomes incongruity in line with the current and temporary imperatives of the apparent, that is material, built environment.

The immaterial, yet still built, environment, however, is always verifiable if one person still experiences it, empirically through memory. That this act of recollection has in itself its own complex architectonic and indivisibility of actuation and self-consciousness is an epistemological matter. Memory, ironically perhaps, has both difficulty and little interest in discerning frames of knowledge and experience, of objectivity and subjectivity. Its acts of recollection and any self-consciousness of these recollections are one in the same. The memory of architecture may, apparently, cease upon the extinction of the life-span of perceiving subject who houses it, but the architecture of memory, like action art, continues as a constant; always 'homeless', and thus apparently 'unheimlich' I had thought, in writing this text, that as the Museum had erased all material trace of the presence of my work and my self from its architecture, that perhaps the Relief From Memory series was complete. Not so, my next work will pursue similar methods and aspirations in a street action in Sheffield, England. This seems to me, quite obviously, to be the next step to take.

Thus, I explain my self and my work.
Roddy Hunter Dartington, January 2001

Notes
1 From Octavio Pazs Objects and Apparitions-for Joseph Cornell, cited in Stiles, Kristine and Selz, Peter (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art; A .Sourcebook of Artists Writings, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ot Califomia Press, 1996, p. 509
2 Kristine Stiles, Language and Concepts', in StiIes, Kristine and Selz, Peter (eds.), (1996), p. 804.
3 SoI Lewitt, On Walldrawings, cited in Müller, Grégoire, The New Avant-Garde; issues for the art of the seventies, London: Pall Mall Press, 1972, p. 46
4 Richard Feynam: "in all the laws of physics that we found so far there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future, cited in Michael Holquist's foreword to Bakhtin, MM., Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov & Michael Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov, University of Texas Press, 1993, p.xiii
5 Holquist, 1993, p. xiii - xiv
6 Richardson, John, Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique Of The Cartesian Project, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 56
7 http://www.alz.org/glossary.htm
8 Trocchi, Alexander, 'Young Adam', Paris: Olympia Press, 1957, p. 1
9 These were undeniably Filliou's word, by virtue of popular dissemination if nothing else. A good Filliou resource can be found at The Budapest Poipoidrom project: http://www.artpool.hu/ Fluxus/Filliou/default.htm
10 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. "(David Perez, 'In the frame of time... (while objects pass in silence and the tea kettle boils' in the catalogue Esther Ferrari, xlviii Bienale de Venecia, p.51
11 This is clear from Miller's 1999 performance Incorporating. See Miller, Roland, Incorporating, Sheffield: Live Art Press, 1999
12 Especially Oliver Sacks', A Lag To Stand On, New York: Harper Collins,1984
13 'Digging Deeper', interview with Alastair MacLennan in Transcript, Vol. 3 #1, Dundee, Scotland: Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, pp. 20-29.
14 WorIds in a Box, London: South Bank Centre, 1994: p.9
15 Richardson (1986), p. 136
16 Ayers, Robert, "Out of Actions", Art Monthly, London, Issue 214, March 1998: pp. 1-4
17 Ayers (1998)
18 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/performance_art_network/message/54
19 Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, abridged by D.C. Somerwell, New York: Oxford University Press, Vol.1, 1974 pp. 164-68.
20 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, Nomadology: The War Machine, tr. Brian Massumi, New York: Semiotext(e), 1986, p. 51.