response to artificial hells

Will wrote this great piece at Urban Times. 

I wrote something in the comments but it's maybe useful to keep here too.

Hi Will, I really like this! I think the question regarding "actual hellish experiences" is by the audience member is, while slightly obtuse, a valid one deserving more examination.
While the asker might have been challenging discourse being fixed on the trials of production in favour of the the awakening or disruptive "experience" Dada, perhaps the question is more how do we find ourselves exterior to the process or armature of art itself, with all of its over-coding, and do we want that and is it possible?
The other night I heard a first hand description of Teddy Cruz's Political Equator event (http://www.politicalequator.org/) from 2011. A conference that would examine the divide of the global north and south whilst literally transgressing the San Diego/Tijuana border. Due to the government controls of this crossing, including siren-blaring police escort of their bus as they entered the Mexican town, the delegates found that the local population they had hoped to consult had vanished. In the words of the delegate, the border was “elastic”. It was hard not to question whether this organised transgression avoided being a spectacle and for all its good intentions the results have more than a flavour of the Victorian about them. If the border crossing what to be a transgression (it was deliberately made on foot away from official checkpoints) why was authorisation sought and can we expect it to function in any other manner? Even made completely illegally, would this cross have been able to escape the whiff of privilege seeking the (inaccessible?) touch of the material side? In researching the Political Equator project I was not much surprised to find that the Mexican state of Hilalgo tourists could pay for an “Illegal Border Crossing Experience”, completely with blank-firing “border police” (http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/travel/04HeadsUp.html).
I wonder if context, and within that specifically knowledge of the situation, means that even through the trauma of Action Hero's work the best (?) we can hope for is a brief drowning out of that knowledge? This is itself to the yoga breathing exercising that you use whilst in the work, different only perhaps in tone and the level of control). If we know something is “not”, can we ever touch it or do we always prep ourselves for the encounter somehow? Does the knowledge of an “art context”, including the incredibly complex coding of experiential and demonstrative work ever escape us? As such a Theatre of Cruelty is so familiar to us now, how can we hope to do more than kid ourselves? I wonder if we were jaded 9 years ago when Rod Dickinson staged his Waco re-enactment, as shown is this review (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/sep/18/theatre1). But then again, this was around the millennium when sort of post-virtual-reality obsession with living a prescribed experience seemed to hit fever pitch in culture.
I'd argue that art can't leave art. Steve Power's robotic Waterboarding Thrill Ride from a a few years back (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt9yXlT6cLQ) is perhaps the most honest approach to the subject I can think of precisely because it remembers that the anticipatory promise is as real as it ever gets.
Its interesting that the quote that titles the project is from Breton when you consider his famous break with Georges Bataille, which the latter often being positioned as the Materialist opposition to the former's Phenomenology-infused Idealism. While Melvin Moti's fiction shows more than a small reference to Bataille's Acephale with its collective death-pact, I wonder what a Bataillian onto-politically minded and outwardlooking approach to that beyond performance would look like? I suspect that it would not look like anything precisely because it would need to be exterior to the meta-context of such organised cultural frameworks. More a Fantomas-like fantasy of inflicting such trauma on the public without providing them any rationalising framework. Not the Guantanamo “image” inherent in the hood and restraints but something far more horrifically and incomprehensible, a blow to the face in the dark.

local and global/ part 1

Lee has started writing his blog again.

There is an interesting post up there at the moment which touches on, amongst other things, the distinction between the local and the global.

This is a duality that I have found interesting for a long time. Really it's  a series of dualities.

I think first about the individual and the group. The political split that assigns primacy to the respective halves of that equation could be argued as being "first politics", and it is something that has troubled me for as long as I can remember. A while ago I was at a conference on Deleuze and the simple distinction was made (quoted?) that the right starts with the self and radiates out, while the left starts with the out and narrows down to the self. From here we can smoothly move to Identity Politics, the power games inherent in both (remember Adam Curtis's Century of The Self and the pivot point of Anti-Psychiatry and the distrust this provokes in other groups). Now we can think about how collective responsibility is frequently imposed from without that collective (See all instances of Communism realised as State Capitalism or secular feudalism) and the basic contradiction that Materialism is itself an Ideal.

I have been talking to Stuart Tait, of among other things, AAS Group, since Spring this year. These discussions has mainly focused on other related dualities, like that of the the artist and the audience, or the teacher and the student. What makes AAS a unique entity in my personal experience is a sincere and thorough approach to the flat plane of the collective. In a time where farcical and utterly insincere terms like "social engaged practice"(1), the still-born buzzword that never-was "Relational Aesthetics" and all variations on "collaboration" and "participation" are everywhere (2), it is refreshing to see a practice that is continually recalibrating itself in relation to its environment, including the allowing for the impact that it has on this environment. An so on and so on.

The point I would like to make about AAS is that it is significantly less formed, less formalised, less Idealised and more fluid, amorphous and molecular.

This is a collective that has no agenda other than to respond to situations. It makes no priority for presented situations which contain an audience (though it does sometimes perform in these situations) and can equally operate with only the four most constant parts present or with an expanded AAS with further additional parts.

The individual/collective and the local/global are both false distinctions, as Lee puts it here

"Decision making needs to ignore artificial borders and boundaries and simply treat humanity as an individual and a collective of individuals at the same time. "

Bruno Latour has talked about the false local/global distinction extensively.

"Is a railroad local or global? Neither. it is local at all points, since you always find sleepers and railroad workers, and you have stations and automatic ticket machines scattered along the way. Yet it is global, since it takes you form Madrid to Berlin or form Brest to Vladivostok. However it is not universal enough to take you just anywhere. However, it is not universal enough to take you just anywhere. it is impossible to reach the little Auvergnat village of Malpy by train, or the little Staffordshire village of Market Drayton. There are continuous paths that lead form the local to the global, the the circumstantial to the universal, from the contingent to the necessary, only so long as the branch lines are paid for."
Latour - We Have Never Been Modern - Harvard - 1993

There is no real duality in Latour model. Networks, which for Latour everything is a part of are always a monsterous mixture of the local and the global, of the immanent and the transcendental. The local of Cardiff is threaded to the global of Biennales, they can't be separated.

So the issue here for me is how can, for example, art, negotiate this singularity? The first point would be that there is no isolated entity called "art".

Much of the defined art discourse and art practice focuses on a sphere that it positions directly in front of itself. That is to say, an agreed territory of what art is about. A week or so ago I had an interesting conversation with Adam Sutherland of Grizedale (3) on how to move art from the position it has occupied for the past 200 or so years, namely the segregated self-fascination best demonstrated by the Romantic era, and redefine it as a thing of use which is connected to all other things.

My position on this has been pretty stable for the past few years; art rarely engages with anything in any manner other than appropriation and (Capitalist) detournement. The Grizedale stance is that art has been about itself. I would argue that this is not even the case. Some art is explicitly about it's own production, and much if not most, is built upon knowledge of and delicate deviations from it's own (historical/theoretical) narrative (4) this is true. However art rarely, if ever, engages with its material self. This is why I say that it is concerned with a sphere just in front of it, because the real practicalities of networking, form filling, strategic compromise, the great unspoken of artist's labour value, of fees, of careers, is left off the table.

Grizedale and Marcus Coate's current exhibition at The Jerwood Space in Borough is an exception. 

At times, these domestic issues of art reality do surface within work, but in my experience these mostly retain the distancing effect of performance, frequently through irony. It is like a partial, Kippenburgerian disclose.

1. As though any practice is not "socially engaged". As though "socially engaged" was categorically superior to an other that is not. As though "socially engaged" means anything than a patronising late-90s style aesthetic of usefulness. As though "socially engaged" means anything other than prepared and equipped to exploit the most vulnerable and extract the state resources allocated to them.  

2. These terms, and the practices which drift between them frequently share an approach to the collective which is comparable to State Capitalism. The artist or artist group or curator engineers a situation for "participants" to engage, frequently with each other in an imitation of a flat structure.  The artist, as shepherd may stay outside of this structure, or may involve themselves within group. In either case the outcome of the project is always subservient to the fact that it was orchestrated. The collective is never more than the material resource of the lead artist.

3. Grizedale is a fairly unique example of an institution that has managed to create a situation in which art discourse and production can engage with things outside of itself in a manner other than domination and recoding. Grizedale's operations are simultaneously amorphous and practical.

4. Here a complete career could be made out of examining why Art is perhaps the most conservative industry.  Cultural Hegemony does not even begin to cover it.

new drawings /// Updates

at http://www.ralphdorey.co.uk/

Landmark Seizures is available at X Marks the Bokship

State Science (2012)

http://bokship.org/
http://www.senderbrocken.co.uk

DOOM

Pot Healers (2012) Screening, The Armory, Pasadena

http://miascreen.com/

The Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103

Friday 26th October 2012

7pm

$5 (suggested donation)

 

 

Text for MIA screening.

Artist name.

Ralph Dorey

Video title.

Pot Healers

Length.

10'40”

Year produced.

2012

Statement about work.

An introductory note for the viewer to read quietly.

“I fell in love with a sentient beach ball while working (non union) in space. My hands are covered in mud and glue yet, despite all I had previously imagined at the kitchen table concerning this always approaching moment, I am sincerely ready. I wondered how far I might need to travel to be outside of the State, but things never work out like that. Anyway, I have now recognised that I misunderstood what “Permanent Revolution” meant and so have been labouring needlessly all this time after a multi-tenticular-snipe of my own cack-handed making. A dead hoarse run to nowhere. Still, I'll always have Bataille; at the extremes, there's freedom. So I bid you goodnight and an easy morning.”

Statement about artist.

I paint and write and keep to myself at the edge of town. My institutional studies ended four years ago and I have grown a beard ever since. Improvisation is the closest thing to immanence, sound is the closest thing to life. My last PhD proposal title was

“Applications of the unknowable: a praxis of instability through the non-human”.

I think about George Clinton every day, and Martin Heidegger every other. To this writer, an artist's politico-ethics are the most important variable. I currently apply the ideas and games of Debord and Deleuze to the empowerment and self-realisation of children at a Special School. My only regrets are that I heard Dennis Oppenheim speak only once and that I didn't do more to save him.

Ralph Dorey, 6th October 2012, Walthamstow.

An open question on art dualities and how they might be broken.

 

Below is a part of an email I wrote this morning, so it's an open question now.

I think there is something interesting in the blurred boundaries between what is marked as art and what is effectively the same thing but not marked as such. About a year or so ago I was really hooked on seeing the "art object" (even if that were an intangible thing) as least problematic when it was simply the by-product of a creative action that had another ends. So doing something with paint on canvas in order to understand something about space would result in something called art, or digging a trench in the earth to resolve a practical problem of drainage would also be called art. Whether it was good or bad art was another issue, neither wholly relativist nor objective. Some "works" having much more going on in them generally, a lot more movement and difference, but a subjective response still being vital.

I still hang onto some of this definition of art objects, but I've realised a bit more about how problematic it is in itself. There is a bit of the old heroic individualism in it, because it implies artists as people who just go an engage with the world and all we see are the relics of where they have been. I think this is a problem because it becomes primarily about that narrative, or the artist (images of an shirtless and ancient Picasso in his studio, self mythologising quotes becoming truisms). So the conflict I'm stuck on now is that on one hand I still don't want to present itself direct to an audience, but on the other I want the artist to be open for dialogue, and to make a statement on what they believe in and be prepared to discuss (and potentially defend or even alter) their position.

I think perhaps it is a pair of defence mechanisms that make it hard for us to have both. If we do something personal we try to avoid discussing it, and if we have to discuss something we try to avoid it being personal. The mode of modern art (and society?) also works very well to enforce a bifurcation between these two modes Artist/Critic Subjective/Objective Image/object feeling/thinking emotion/politic painter/sculptor. I don't think these distinctions exist in actuality any more than I think there is a split in the universe which divides me from everything else. However, there still remains the question for me of how to have art which we can think about in terms of the Deleuze & Guattari / Spinozan Plane of Immanence (everything as one overall ontological field, self included with degrees of intensity in different areas rather than hard edged idealised distinctions).

So not art for a rarefied generality of society and an Ideology, but equally not the rarefied narrative of an angry and emotional young white man who is somehow elevated above everyone else (which itself another Ideology)!

I think this does occur, work that avoids getting trapped in one of the two channels. I think some of it is a matter of perception but some of it is a matter of the work and the artist. I don't there there is a system for making more of this occur either but there might be situations that could encourage it and that's something I have been starting to think about, including perhaps the role collaboration strategies or “non-art agendas” might have to play in this.

This is a bit of a rant, but it would be great to know what you think about any of these ideas, where the gaps are or whether there is something else going on that I'm overlooking.

All the best

ralph