>The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

>Tuesday, February 07
7pm, room DMS 235

>iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck (introduced by Trebor Scholz)
In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course, and after any
socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and early 1960s.

>About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck: BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with Benjamin
Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships, including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.

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1st part of conference: what 50' & 60's performance and conceptual art brought up

intermedia - happening, performance, fluxus 50's/60's

modern art: a version of vanguard practice (common definition)
art historians have 2 definitions of avant-guarde:
1/ teleological progression towards abstraction (breaking away from representation); formal vanguard practice: art making = autonomous from the social practice. questions: what tools? what is line? what is color? how do we see image?
 through self-criticism; Mondrian = thinking of paintings as not correlates of abstract thought but a kind of abstract thought. still referential: addressing something outside of itself (examples: the curve: in nature/organic world; physiological perception; shape of the frame: 18th-century conventions). precision of painting + highly specialized activity + elite/high brow art
end of this movement: NY late 40's + 50's --> expressionist abstraction: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko... focus on the end point of the narrative.

2/ the Marcel Duchamp tradition; moves away from painting; 1917: in NY, part of a group that want to democratize the arts (you pay a fee = they show the art, whatever it is). Duchamp wants to demonstrate how much conventional art is. "the urinal" (signed by his persona name MUTT). cares about:
- it is not made by the artist's hand: a multiple.
- it's a functional object
--> contrary to the main esthetic theories: art is not supposed to be functional/usable. So: controversy. the piece didn't appear in the exhibition, apparently.
Connection with the famous gallerist Alfred Stiegieltz (photographer), who was very active in the modern art scene. He doesn't like the artwork but accepts to recognizes it as art contractually if Duchamp pays the fee. The piece is being photographed, staged in a modernist context (a painting in the background)
--> what's important: it IS art because it is displayed/staged as art. demonstration: the definition of art doesn't depend on skills, inspiration, bla bla, but on its contextual and discursive location (discursive because it takes its meaning from our conversation), + on strategy = they operate once (strategic intervention in discursive space)
--> + engaged position: how does the art goes in the world, what are the relationships between the art world and the social world.

[T.SCHOLZ:
there is a set of ideas/discourse that can influence the development of technological tools; invention driven by concepts]

J.Pollock: understands vision itself, not space (and not nature). personal freedom "i am in my painting", "i am nature". transcendent abstract expression. but this is a language that is perishable (problem of subjectivity).
but beyond the modernist critique dominant discourse (transcendence & abstraction),  there is a strong materiality in the process (junk on the floor, gravity...), there is a motion, and there is a space in action. so artists started to like the idea of 3-dimensionnal, real scale space, everyday material:
---> Allen Kaprow

"Experimentalism"
A. Kaprow + George Brecht + Robert Watts = frustrated with dominant discourse, studio ideology, art market
"Project in Multiple dimension", strongly influenced by Duchamp; experimental art laboratory designed to work with new materials, new techniques, no investigation into the final product, no planning of the outcome: model based on science.
in music: Noise
in painting & sculptures: with material that belong to industry and waste
dance: based on everyday/action movements
--> collective appropriation of what's out there and art starting to address/contaminate the artistic agents.
--> new model about experimentation.

new strategies:
- multiples, seriality, iterability
- event (temporal),
- environments (multi-media; visual and spatial for instance; disrupting the sensorial, etc.)
- objects of everyday life
you can touch the art, change it, interact with it
--> communication and language (the way we use language)

[SCHOLZ: distributedness // new communication systems like the Internet]

thinking about performance
cf. the "score" by G. Brecht Word Event, Exit. unreadable? what do we do with the symbols on the page? you can do this piece in whatever way you want. doing the piece = thinking about it, interpreting it, acting it. the piece is made out of ordinary language, in an imperative language: it gives an order, though very open to interpretation
--> the notion of communication is radically destabilized. the piece remains the same while its performance is unique, every one is different.
--> notion of indeterminacy: language itself is ambiguous at core

"opening" of the work of art: the performer has to make some choices, and the user too (has to think...)

[SCHOLZ: that's when the new media theorists come into play; they take into account these notions : interactivity, collaboration, participatory design...]

discursive object ("urinal"); social conventions
--> this has been pushed forward by these conceptual people. notion of engagement is primordial" artwork doesn't have to be an object, it can be a process. art is about communication. what is it communicating?
language is also a picture. relationship between image and text.
taking artwork out of the realm of the unique, taking it into the realm of the everyday life. accessibility, directness, sillyness (in failure as well). you have to approach life as an artist.

[SCHOLZ: Lev Manovich: that's his stance.
process of trying something out. works as transition, experiments; exhibition by Peter Weibel; center ZKM in Hamburg]

A. Kaprow;
set of instructions; taking the task, and executing it ; everyone participates, together and autonomously at the same time (collaboration)
[SCHOLZ: cultural software]

we don't want audience at all, we only want participants. how do you establish connection between people?

John Cage:
4 minutes 33 seconds: a musical piece about 'silence' (we are surrounded by everyday sound): visual performance + Cage stages the way he traps the audience (signals the silent movement, activated the public in order to get their attention on the sound around)

moments of knowledge develop and change forever how we think about the world (cf. scientific revolutions: Structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)
conceptual art is art of demonstration; tries to change way you conceive art (and social practice, to some extent)

you can transport an object/a theme/a media from one arena to another arena // digitality, trans-mediality


[SCHOLZ:
the artist is a context provider: sets up a space were performance can happen
people are producing and consuming at the same // participatory art]



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2nd part of the conference: problems with Bourriaud's relational esthetics



problems that have come out from Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. her goal : to provide a counterpoint to this.
construction of social situations/space: one of hottest commodities (how does it become that?)

Bourriaud (1998) = the liveliest factor has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts
--> artists: heavy weights on the international market:
P. Huygue, M. Cattelan...
the sphere of inter-human relations: their common criterion
artwork = social interstice.
vanguardist responds to mass-communication
1st question = materiality of these works


Bourriaud's task: assemble like-minded artists and works + to give them a pedigree + proving that issues were radically contemporary
--> useful conceptual frame but needs interrogating (weakness)
---> dismissal of 60's art practices that might tell us about contemporary practices

take his terms and re-map them

relational aesthetics = reactivation of the audience; starting point: Duchamp in 1917 (Urinal; "all in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution"

first "open work" (Eco). Cage 4'33'' (1952: 1st performance)


 (loose) typology of participation
 1/ Novitz : degrees of appreciation; participation = immersion = being in a place and moving through it; any physical engagement; broad generality
--> Duchamp: the work is completed in the engaged spectator
--> thinking about something (engagement)
---> cf. Rauschenberg & white paintings

  2/ more active sense = extension of engagement
new media art. undetermined outcome; some degree of conscious participation.
--> doing something (navigation)
museum education project (paratactical); cf. Hans Haacke (MoMA poll)
projects = post-readymade work, self-conscious of their engagement within their institution.

  3/ more precise & active notion = conscious decision-making, activity that shapes the work
--> doing and thinking about something ("oriented orientation" ECO}
work iterable, no 2 performances will be the same (Fluxus)

the open work can exist within several discipline (inter-...)
for U.Eco, open work = "unfinished", artist is concerned with their potential development
component of a kit
performer as autonomous decision-maker
incomplete knowledge of a system as structural principle
--> completion of instructions + interpretative activity made internal
--> production of a "field of relations", as et of possibilities = "works in movement"

conceptual and strategical priorities that re-appear in Bourriaud

but open work is not the same as participation art
only require participation as a specific cognitive action = structural necessity; iterability also.

Cage's 4'33'' removed expression from performance; silence as a written construction; confirms the textuality of music. active kind of listening; renunciation of interpretative closure.  
encoded the passivity of the audience confronted with lack of performance, the player with the lack of score, etc. some considered it as a wake up call
A. Kaprow: see the tension to contingency; "instrumental piece". "now that everything is available, what do you do?"

between contemplation and utilization (Eco)

Cage's students: Fluxus' generation
main clusters: material, immersive, funky, fundamentally social

Happenings: proto-performance projects involving multiple individuals & collage esthetics. increasingly participatory in it strong meaning.
behaviouristic aspects. depersonalizing process.
not acted or performed, but done (no illumining characters/discplaced identity) --> "collaboration without objects"
participation: in the piece (not in the documentation: photographing, filming the scene conditions/disrupts the happening)


Fluxus: participating/everyday/collectivity art activity (anti-preciousness or anti-unique, anti-professionalism)
artist : not an vocation/profession; you should not call yourself an artist
cheap entertainment and popular forms, gathering of multiple skills
(not like happenings which requires an artist-organizer)
flirted with collective-authorship; international network; distribution

both practices: a paratactical critique of the cultural production done within space gallery

engagement with behaviour and process; systems disappear in favor of failure (Gere); problems of reception

Bourriaud; interactive, user-friendly, on-going, multiple authorship works + address social relations

2 artists representative of relational/spcial programing background:

Rikrit Tiravanija: became famous by cooking meals and serving them in galleries (to art people talking about art stuff)
Hugo Boss price: "the air between the chain link fence and the broken bicycle" (with an antenna that references to Duchamp's readymade cycle wheel)
realtional idea: you can build a pirate broadcast; in the space of free-speech, the airwaves are owned by legal codes that prevents you from airing what/where you want
failure: the museum would let it broadcast (only narrowcast)

Carlsten Holler, "Solander greenhouse" with solander lily (pheromones/sexual's smell emitters). behavioral stimuli + disorientation by stroboscopes

Claire Bishop: the "open manner" of these works closes up differences:
--> neo-liberal programs: illusion of choice & social connectivity

Bourriaud evades a number of key-concpet that the 60's arose (relation to gallery, to interpretation, invitation to boredom or failure or disagreement)

Bishop points out to an antagonist model to the "being together is wonderful" stance. there is a possibility of disagreement, conflict, danger.

cf. new media discourse's enthusiasm (connectivity is fabulous, etc.)

the 60's asked: how fully do you engage with the work? question of inhabiting oneself (what is self?).

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discussion

Tony Conrad: art as a framing institution. Dada?
J.R: resurgence of the question of utopia through a major change for Bourriaud: utopia is old avant-guard, relational esthetics is a series of micro-utopias.
post war problem : difficulty to hold a notion of yourself as totality on which you can totally account. "what is a person" is no longer an obvious question. 60's happenings were also said to be boring, dangerous, creepy, etc. not all about pleasure and simplicity. experience of fracture, fragmentation... pushing the sense of self and physicality to the extremes. a complexity that vanishes in the social relation contemporary works. debate about necessary differences.

someone: user-friendly in Bourriaud's vocabulary?
relational esthetics: not disruptive, environment like, simple to use, "convivial" (french term - i think), design-like, sophisticate.
fluxus: not made by professional, even if easy to use (do it yourself?)

someone else: question of how art can deal with services is a question that is concerning
Claire Bishop works in that territory: projects that take some of the strategies, but more edgy (Thomas Hirshhorn), about social differences. T. Hirshhorn: i am an artist, i am not interested in social stuff, i believe in art autonomy... but his work testifies of the contrary. it put things in places where they're not supposed to be.
Bishop: antagonistic democracy = participating democracy is at his best the creation of a dialogue that doesn't demand homogenization.
the problem is the artworld, because ht artworld is talking to itself.

T.Scholz: check out Brian Holmes about that problem

J.R.: if you want work in that category, you have to give something up, maybe the art world itself.

C. Bishop:  in the last Art forum about pieces that deal with the social. in October (see JSTOR)

someone again: in what way do you see technologies that expand (culture of virtual performance). how performance paradigm change throughout these periods? are we moving towards works that are all open all the time?

J.R.: photography and documentation conduct the apprehension of works of art (Susan Sontag: we see sunsets because photographs provided them to us)
performance = we must notice - always - institutionalization. but there is a re-thinking of these works : re-doing of "easy pieces", performances of the 60s (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys...) by new artists.
How can you re-do? To what extent? we can only experience the difference of a re-do. technical problems + conceptual problems. context of copying and replication. to what degree is one when one is performing a piece about self. early performances: producing (or attempting to produce) a sense of self-awareness.  

this re-do problem is also a question raised in new media contexts.

T. Conrad: problem of self after post-war. Cage's 4'33": consuming temporal, + tackling the subjectivity of the bourgeois cultivated audience of the 50's (necessity to meditate, to be attentive. Cage's piece: an iteration of nothing else than itself. Cage failed to point out the duration (the pianist performer did the gesture, but it wasn't on the score). late-bourgois investigation of self/internality.
Bourriaud does address the reversing of direction (social sphere/platforms).
what one might expect from an art discourse? is there any space left for a critique from within (not from the outside like the situationists - ??)
[i am not sure i understood what the point was]

J.R.: art history is s avery tendencious 20th century's subject. tradition of separation of spheres of human activities (esthetics, opposed to blah blah). today: crossover between the applied arts and the high arts. maybe we are entering a moment when that separation of spheres is not possible/thinkible anymore.

T. Conrad: to re-do makes much more sense today, not when people's focus on time was linked to their conception of social identity.

J.R.: the concept of the boring (as good to arts); to me boring has to do with time & duration

someone: it is difficult to put ourselves in the place of audience of Cage's 4'33", when it was new, when he was demonstrating that everything was worth as sound.

J.R.: yeah, it's a paradigmatic moment; it opens up possibilities

T. Conrad: if there is no differentiation, there is no meaning; if everything is music, the function of composer is dismantled. it both disables everything, but it destroys also everything.  

someone else: difference between creating and listening to music. context-cultural provider...

T. Conrad: i am sort of saying: go for it!

T. Scholz: Cage provided the frame; like for social software tools: i am providing the context; the user-producer creates a piece

T. Conrad: there is no way to announce the piece

(talking about the instructions of Cage's silence piece)
(plus other considerations that i missed)

T.Scholz: you care for intention, i care for functions out in the world

J.R.: Thomas Hirshhorn: he's a really good manager; lots of intention, but thinks also about applications. it's not clear that the users of the work are not naturalized to the work (turkish immigrants are becoming part of the work); which produces an uncomfortable feeling (which is good)
at the same time, he's turning that residence into spectacle
it has the potential for producing

T.Conrad: i agree with you Trebor when you say that a piece in a museum is corrupt, but 99% of the works are corrupted. the way that culture industry works...
artists pay graduate students for doing the work according to a sketch the artist did // Renaissance 'collaborative' works
curator = reallocates the artists to being the ??
there is a coherent power play, or
are you interested? you're on the curatorial side

J.R.: i'm too opinionated to be curatorial . some people say that curators have taken a large part of the creation process. shifting of understanding of functions (in Europe mostly). Restani literally invented the "new realism" (french pop art) as a curator. find a concept and assemble all the part that makes the concept viable (french are good at that) = "impresario" figures.
generation of young curators who took advantage of space being made available. space + concept = works. that's "student work". students! get a move on! move to france and get some state funding!
even artists take on this producer role (P. Huygues, Gillick -?)

T.Scholz: in New Media too, it is strongly the case: event organizing comes with artistic projects...

J.R.: Young British Artists were curated (and replaced every 5 years) by this huge advertisement campaign.

T.Scholz: the "Land Foundation" in Thailand: supposed to be a utopian community; actually: no electricity, internet, tv, and the artists kids who came there went away in 2 weeks.
--> social event: but about WHAT?

someone: what about in China where they still have that industry-based society?

J.R. China: very local discourse that approaches and appropriate what they consider as radical practices in the West

T.Scholz: there is no such need to translate and distribute new theories from China to the rest of the world

J.R.: art market is blossoming in China, but mostly with chinese art.

someone (a chinese person): actually chinese contemporary art heavily depend on Western market and art channels. i learnt more about that here than in China. translation difficulty: if you want to create a global art product, what language do you choose to use?

T.Conrad: art is more object-oriented (painting, sculpture) within an industrial society?

same someone: not really; modern identity of chinese art has kind of lost its spirit that chinese traditional art and crafts were (used as functional objects, decorational, etc.). it has been objectified, forgetting its contextual history. communication art is not fully developed. in the 60's: art served politics; the personal, subjective speeches have been broken. it's highly staged what has been exported outside China

T.Scholz: check that catalogue: "Global Conceptualism"

someone, about services in art:
linguistic capabilities; things come in and you are able to adapt & to process them

J.R. : part of the skill set is managing as well.

T.Scholz: Mackenzie Wark: you can only sleep in the middle (not on top) (?????)

















































>The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

>Tuesday, February 07
7pm, room DMS 235

>iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck (introduced by Trebor Scholz)
In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course, and after any
socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and early 1960s.

>About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck: BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with Benjamin
Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships, including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.

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1st part of conference: what 50' & 60's performance and conceptual art brought up

intermedia - happening, performance, fluxus 50's/60's

modern art: a version of vanguard practice (common definition)
art historians have 2 definitions of avant-guarde:
1/ teleological progression towards abstraction (breaking away from representation); formal vanguard practice: art making = autonomous from the social practice. questions: what tools? what is line? what is color? how do we see image?
 through self-criticism; Mondrian = thinking of paintings as not correlates of abstract thought but a kind of abstract thought. still referential: addressing something outside of itself (examples: the curve: in nature/organic world; physiological perception; shape of the frame: 18th-century conventions). precision of painting + highly specialized activity + elite/high brow art
end of this movement: NY late 40's + 50's --> expressionist abstraction: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko... focus on the end point of the narrative.

2/ the Marcel Duchamp tradition; moves away from painting; 1917: in NY, part of a group that want to democratize the arts (you pay a fee = they show the art, whatever it is). Duchamp wants to demonstrate how much conventional art is. "the urinal" (signed by his persona name MUTT). cares about:
- it is not made by the artist's hand: a multiple.
- it's a functional object
--> contrary to the main esthetic theories: art is not supposed to be functional/usable. So: controversy. the piece didn't appear in the exhibition, apparently.
Connection with the famous gallerist Alfred Stiegieltz (photographer), who was very active in the modern art scene. He doesn't like the artwork but accepts to recognizes it as art contractually if Duchamp pays the fee. The piece is being photographed, staged in a modernist context (a painting in the background)
--> what's important: it IS art because it is displayed/staged as art. demonstration: the definition of art doesn't depend on skills, inspiration, bla bla, but on its contextual and discursive location (discursive because it takes its meaning from our conversation), + on strategy = they operate once (strategic intervention in discursive space)
--> + engaged position: how does the art goes in the world, what are the relationships between the art world and the social world.

[T.SCHOLZ:
there is a set of ideas/discourse that can influence the development of technological tools; invention driven by concepts]

J.Pollock: understands vision itself, not space (and not nature). personal freedom "i am in my painting", "i am nature". transcendent abstract expression. but this is a language that is perishable (problem of subjectivity).
but beyond the modernist critique dominant discourse (transcendence & abstraction),  there is a strong materiality in the process (junk on the floor, gravity...), there is a motion, and there is a space in action. so artists started to like the idea of 3-dimensionnal, real scale space, everyday material:
---> Allen Kaprow

"Experimentalism"
A. Kaprow + George Brecht + Robert Watts = frustrated with dominant discourse, studio ideology, art market
"Project in Multiple dimension", strongly influenced by Duchamp; experimental art laboratory designed to work with new materials, new techniques, no investigation into the final product, no planning of the outcome: model based on science.
in music: Noise
in painting & sculptures: with material that belong to industry and waste
dance: based on everyday/action movements
--> collective appropriation of what's out there and art starting to address/contaminate the artistic agents.
--> new model about experimentation.

new strategies:
- multiples, seriality, iterability
- event (temporal),
- environments (multi-media; visual and spatial for instance; disrupting the sensorial, etc.)
- objects of everyday life
you can touch the art, change it, interact with it
--> communication and language (the way we use language)

[SCHOLZ: distributedness // new communication systems like the Internet]

thinking about performance
cf. the "score" by G. Brecht Word Event, Exit. unreadable? what do we do with the symbols on the page? you can do this piece in whatever way you want. doing the piece = thinking about it, interpreting it, acting it. the piece is made out of ordinary language, in an imperative language: it gives an order, though very open to interpretation
--> the notion of communication is radically destabilized. the piece remains the same while its performance is unique, every one is different.
--> notion of indeterminacy: language itself is ambiguous at core

"opening" of the work of art: the performer has to make some choices, and the user too (has to think...)

[SCHOLZ: that's when the new media theorists come into play; they take into account these notions : interactivity, collaboration, participatory design...]

discursive object ("urinal"); social conventions
--> this has been pushed forward by these conceptual people. notion of engagement is primordial" artwork doesn't have to be an object, it can be a process. art is about communication. what is it communicating?
language is also a picture. relationship between image and text.
taking artwork out of the realm of the unique, taking it into the realm of the everyday life. accessibility, directness, sillyness (in failure as well). you have to approach life as an artist.

[SCHOLZ: Lev Manovich: that's his stance.
process of trying something out. works as transition, experiments; exhibition by Peter Weibel; center ZKM in Hamburg]

A. Kaprow;
set of instructions; taking the task, and executing it ; everyone participates, together and autonomously at the same time (collaboration)
[SCHOLZ: cultural software]

we don't want audience at all, we only want participants. how do you establish connection between people?

John Cage:
4 minutes 33 seconds: a musical piece about 'silence' (we are surrounded by everyday sound): visual performance + Cage stages the way he traps the audience (signals the silent movement, activated the public in order to get their attention on the sound around)

moments of knowledge develop and change forever how we think about the world (cf. scientific revolutions: Structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)
conceptual art is art of demonstration; tries to change way you conceive art (and social practice, to some extent)

you can transport an object/a theme/a media from one arena to another arena // digitality, trans-mediality


[SCHOLZ:
the artist is a context provider: sets up a space were performance can happen
people are producing and consuming at the same // participatory art]



~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

2nd part of the conference: problems with Bourriaud's relational esthetics



problems that have come out from Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. her goal : to provide a counterpoint to this.
construction of social situations/space: one of hottest commodities (how does it become that?)

Bourriaud (1998) = the liveliest factor has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts
--> artists: heavy weights on the international market:
P. Huygue, M. Cattelan...
the sphere of inter-human relations: their common criterion
artwork = social interstice.
vanguardist responds to mass-communication
1st question = materiality of these works


Bourriaud's task: assemble like-minded artists and works + to give them a pedigree + proving that issues were radically contemporary
--> useful conceptual frame but needs interrogating (weakness)
---> dismissal of 60's art practices that might tell us about contemporary practices

take his terms and re-map them

relational aesthetics = reactivation of the audience; starting point: Duchamp in 1917 (Urinal; "all in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution"

first "open work" (Eco). Cage 4'33'' (1952: 1st performance)


 (loose) typology of participation
 1/ Novitz : degrees of appreciation; participation = immersion = being in a place and moving through it; any physical engagement; broad generality
--> Duchamp: the work is completed in the engaged spectator
--> thinking about something (engagement)
---> cf. Rauschenberg & white paintings

  2/ more active sense = extension of engagement
new media art. undetermined outcome; some degree of conscious participation.
--> doing something (navigation)
museum education project (paratactical); cf. Hans Haacke (MoMA poll)
projects = post-readymade work, self-conscious of their engagement within their institution.

  3/ more precise & active notion = conscious decision-making, activity that shapes the work
--> doing and thinking about something ("oriented orientation" ECO}
work iterable, no 2 performances will be the same (Fluxus)

the open work can exist within several discipline (inter-...)
for U.Eco, open work = "unfinished", artist is concerned with their potential development
component of a kit
performer as autonomous decision-maker
incomplete knowledge of a system as structural principle
--> completion of instructions + interpretative activity made internal
--> production of a "field of relations", as et of possibilities = "works in movement"

conceptual and strategical priorities that re-appear in Bourriaud

but open work is not the same as participation art
only require participation as a specific cognitive action = structural necessity; iterability also.

Cage's 4'33'' removed expression from performance; silence as a written construction; confirms the textuality of music. active kind of listening; renunciation of interpretative closure.  
encoded the passivity of the audience confronted with lack of performance, the player with the lack of score, etc. some considered it as a wake up call
A. Kaprow: see the tension to contingency; "instrumental piece". "now that everything is available, what do you do?"

between contemplation and utilization (Eco)

Cage's students: Fluxus' generation
main clusters: material, immersive, funky, fundamentally social

Happenings: proto-performance projects involving multiple individuals & collage esthetics. increasingly participatory in it strong meaning.
behaviouristic aspects. depersonalizing process.
not acted or performed, but done (no illumining characters/discplaced identity) --> "collaboration without objects"
participation: in the piece (not in the documentation: photographing, filming the scene conditions/disrupts the happening)


Fluxus: participating/everyday/collectivity art activity (anti-preciousness or anti-unique, anti-professionalism)
artist : not an vocation/profession; you should not call yourself an artist
cheap entertainment and popular forms, gathering of multiple skills
(not like happenings which requires an artist-organizer)
flirted with collective-authorship; international network; distribution

both practices: a paratactical critique of the cultural production done within space gallery

engagement with behaviour and process; systems disappear in favor of failure (Gere); problems of reception

Bourriaud; interactive, user-friendly, on-going, multiple authorship works + address social relations

2 artists representative of relational/spcial programing background:

Rikrit Tiravanija: became famous by cooking meals and serving them in galleries (to art people talking about art stuff)
Hugo Boss price: "the air between the chain link fence and the broken bicycle" (with an antenna that references to Duchamp's readymade cycle wheel)
realtional idea: you can build a pirate broadcast; in the space of free-speech, the airwaves are owned by legal codes that prevents you from airing what/where you want
failure: the museum would let it broadcast (only narrowcast)

Carlsten Holler, "Solander greenhouse" with solander lily (pheromones/sexual's smell emitters). behavioral stimuli + disorientation by stroboscopes

Claire Bishop: the "open manner" of these works closes up differences:
--> neo-liberal programs: illusion of choice & social connectivity

Bourriaud evades a number of key-concpet that the 60's arose (relation to gallery, to interpretation, invitation to boredom or failure or disagreement)

Bishop points out to an antagonist model to the "being together is wonderful" stance. there is a possibility of disagreement, conflict, danger.

cf. new media discourse's enthusiasm (connectivity is fabulous, etc.)

the 60's asked: how fully do you engage with the work? question of inhabiting oneself (what is self?).

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discussion

Tony Conrad: art as a framing institution. Dada?
J.R: resurgence of the question of utopia through a major change for Bourriaud: utopia is old avant-guard, relational esthetics is a series of micro-utopias.
post war problem : difficulty to hold a notion of yourself as totality on which you can totally account. "what is a person" is no longer an obvious question. 60's happenings were also said to be boring, dangerous, creepy, etc. not all about pleasure and simplicity. experience of fracture, fragmentation... pushing the sense of self and physicality to the extremes. a complexity that vanishes in the social relation contemporary works. debate about necessary differences.

someone: user-friendly in Bourriaud's vocabulary?
relational esthetics: not disruptive, environment like, simple to use, "convivial" (french term - i think), design-like, sophisticate.
fluxus: not made by professional, even if easy to use (do it yourself?)

someone else: question of how art can deal with services is a question that is concerning
Claire Bishop works in that territory: projects that take some of the strategies, but more edgy (Thomas Hirshhorn), about social differences. T. Hirshhorn: i am an artist, i am not interested in social stuff, i believe in art autonomy... but his work testifies of the contrary. it put things in places where they're not supposed to be.
Bishop: antagonistic democracy = participating democracy is at his best the creation of a dialogue that doesn't demand homogenization.
the problem is the artworld, because ht artworld is talking to itself.

T.Scholz: check out Brian Holmes about that problem

J.R.: if you want work in that category, you have to give something up, maybe the art world itself.

C. Bishop:  in the last Art forum about pieces that deal with the social. in October (see JSTOR)

someone again: in what way do you see technologies that expand (culture of virtual performance). how performance paradigm change throughout these periods? are we moving towards works that are all open all the time?

J.R.: photography and documentation conduct the apprehension of works of art (Susan Sontag: we see sunsets because photographs provided them to us)
performance = we must notice - always - institutionalization. but there is a re-thinking of these works : re-doing of "easy pieces", performances of the 60s (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys...) by new artists.
How can you re-do? To what extent? we can only experience the difference of a re-do. technical problems + conceptual problems. context of copying and replication. to what degree is one when one is performing a piece about self. early performances: producing (or attempting to produce) a sense of self-awareness.  

this re-do problem is also a question raised in new media contexts.

T. Conrad: problem of self after post-war. Cage's 4'33": consuming temporal, + tackling the subjectivity of the bourgeois cultivated audience of the 50's (necessity to meditate, to be attentive. Cage's piece: an iteration of nothing else than itself. Cage failed to point out the duration (the pianist performer did the gesture, but it wasn't on the score). late-bourgois investigation of self/internality.
Bourriaud does address the reversing of direction (social sphere/platforms).
what one might expect from an art discourse? is there any space left for a critique from within (not from the outside like the situationists - ??)
[i am not sure i understood what the point was]

J.R.: art history is s avery tendencious 20th century's subject. tradition of separation of spheres of human activities (esthetics, opposed to blah blah). today: crossover between the applied arts and the high arts. maybe we are entering a moment when that separation of spheres is not possible/thinkible anymore.

T. Conrad: to re-do makes much more sense today, not when people's focus on time was linked to their conception of social identity.

J.R.: the concept of the boring (as good to arts); to me boring has to do with time & duration

someone: it is difficult to put ourselves in the place of audience of Cage's 4'33", when it was new, when he was demonstrating that everything was worth as sound.

J.R.: yeah, it's a paradigmatic moment; it opens up possibilities

T. Conrad: if there is no differentiation, there is no meaning; if everything is music, the function of composer is dismantled. it both disables everything, but it destroys also everything.  

someone else: difference between creating and listening to music. context-cultural provider...

T. Conrad: i am sort of saying: go for it!

T. Scholz: Cage provided the frame; like for social software tools: i am providing the context; the user-producer creates a piece

T. Conrad: there is no way to announce the piece

(talking about the instructions of Cage's silence piece)
(plus other considerations that i missed)

T.Scholz: you care for intention, i care for functions out in the world

J.R.: Thomas Hirshhorn: he's a really good manager; lots of intention, but thinks also about applications. it's not clear that the users of the work are not naturalized to the work (turkish immigrants are becoming part of the work); which produces an uncomfortable feeling (which is good)
at the same time, he's turning that residence into spectacle
it has the potential for producing

T.Conrad: i agree with you Trebor when you say that a piece in a museum is corrupt, but 99% of the works are corrupted. the way that culture industry works...
artists pay graduate students for doing the work according to a sketch the artist did // Renaissance 'collaborative' works
curator = reallocates the artists to being the ??
there is a coherent power play, or
are you interested? you're on the curatorial side

J.R.: i'm too opinionated to be curatorial . some people say that curators have taken a large part of the creation process. shifting of understanding of functions (in Europe mostly). Restani literally invented the "new realism" (french pop art) as a curator. find a concept and assemble all the part that makes the concept viable (french are good at that) = "impresario" figures.
generation of young curators who took advantage of space being made available. space + concept = works. that's "student work". students! get a move on! move to france and get some state funding!
even artists take on this producer role (P. Huygues, Gillick -?)

T.Scholz: in New Media too, it is strongly the case: event organizing comes with artistic projects...

J.R.: Young British Artists were curated (and replaced every 5 years) by this huge advertisement campaign.

T.Scholz: the "Land Foundation" in Thailand: supposed to be a utopian community; actually: no electricity, internet, tv, and the artists kids who came there went away in 2 weeks.
--> social event: but about WHAT?

someone: what about in China where they still have that industry-based society?

J.R. China: very local discourse that approaches and appropriate what they consider as radical practices in the West

T.Scholz: there is no such need to translate and distribute new theories from China to the rest of the world

J.R.: art market is blossoming in China, but mostly with chinese art.

someone (a chinese person): actually chinese contemporary art heavily depend on Western market and art channels. i learnt more about that here than in China. translation difficulty: if you want to create a global art product, what language do you choose to use?

T.Conrad: art is more object-oriented (painting, sculpture) within an industrial society?

same someone: not really; modern identity of chinese art has kind of lost its spirit that chinese traditional art and crafts were (used as functional objects, decorational, etc.). it has been objectified, forgetting its contextual history. communication art is not fully developed. in the 60's: art served politics; the personal, subjective speeches have been broken. it's highly staged what has been exported outside China

T.Scholz: check that catalogue: "Global Conceptualism"

someone, about services in art:
linguistic capabilities; things come in and you are able to adapt & to process them

J.R. : part of the skill set is managing as well.

T.Scholz: Mackenzie Wark: you can only sleep in the middle (not on top) (?????)

















































>The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

>Tuesday, February 07
7pm, room DMS 235

>iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck (introduced by Trebor Scholz)
In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course, and after any
socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and early 1960s.

>About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck: BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with Benjamin
Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships, including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.

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1st part of conference: what 50' & 60's performance and conceptual art brought up

intermedia - happening, performance, fluxus 50's/60's

modern art: a version of vanguard practice (common definition)
art historians have 2 definitions of avant-guarde:
1/ teleological progression towards abstraction (breaking away from representation); formal vanguard practice: art making = autonomous from the social practice. questions: what tools? what is line? what is color? how do we see image?
 through self-criticism; Mondrian = thinking of paintings as not correlates of abstract thought but a kind of abstract thought. still referential: addressing something outside of itself (examples: the curve: in nature/organic world; physiological perception; shape of the frame: 18th-century conventions). precision of painting + highly specialized activity + elite/high brow art
end of this movement: NY late 40's + 50's --> expressionist abstraction: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko... focus on the end point of the narrative.

2/ the Marcel Duchamp tradition; moves away from painting; 1917: in NY, part of a group that want to democratize the arts (you pay a fee = they show the art, whatever it is). Duchamp wants to demonstrate how much conventional art is. "the urinal" (signed by his persona name MUTT). cares about:
- it is not made by the artist's hand: a multiple.
- it's a functional object
--> contrary to the main esthetic theories: art is not supposed to be functional/usable. So: controversy. the piece didn't appear in the exhibition, apparently.
Connection with the famous gallerist Alfred Stiegieltz (photographer), who was very active in the modern art scene. He doesn't like the artwork but accepts to recognizes it as art contractually if Duchamp pays the fee. The piece is being photographed, staged in a modernist context (a painting in the background)
--> what's important: it IS art because it is displayed/staged as art. demonstration: the definition of art doesn't depend on skills, inspiration, bla bla, but on its contextual and discursive location (discursive because it takes its meaning from our conversation), + on strategy = they operate once (strategic intervention in discursive space)
--> + engaged position: how does the art goes in the world, what are the relationships between the art world and the social world.

[T.SCHOLZ:
there is a set of ideas/discourse that can influence the development of technological tools; invention driven by concepts]

J.Pollock: understands vision itself, not space (and not nature). personal freedom "i am in my painting", "i am nature". transcendent abstract expression. but this is a language that is perishable (problem of subjectivity).
but beyond the modernist critique dominant discourse (transcendence & abstraction),  there is a strong materiality in the process (junk on the floor, gravity...), there is a motion, and there is a space in action. so artists started to like the idea of 3-dimensionnal, real scale space, everyday material:
---> Allen Kaprow

"Experimentalism"
A. Kaprow + George Brecht + Robert Watts = frustrated with dominant discourse, studio ideology, art market
"Project in Multiple dimension", strongly influenced by Duchamp; experimental art laboratory designed to work with new materials, new techniques, no investigation into the final product, no planning of the outcome: model based on science.
in music: Noise
in painting & sculptures: with material that belong to industry and waste
dance: based on everyday/action movements
--> collective appropriation of what's out there and art starting to address/contaminate the artistic agents.
--> new model about experimentation.

new strategies:
- multiples, seriality, iterability
- event (temporal),
- environments (multi-media; visual and spatial for instance; disrupting the sensorial, etc.)
- objects of everyday life
you can touch the art, change it, interact with it
--> communication and language (the way we use language)

[SCHOLZ: distributedness // new communication systems like the Internet]

thinking about performance
cf. the "score" by G. Brecht Word Event, Exit. unreadable? what do we do with the symbols on the page? you can do this piece in whatever way you want. doing the piece = thinking about it, interpreting it, acting it. the piece is made out of ordinary language, in an imperative language: it gives an order, though very open to interpretation
--> the notion of communication is radically destabilized. the piece remains the same while its performance is unique, every one is different.
--> notion of indeterminacy: language itself is ambiguous at core

"opening" of the work of art: the performer has to make some choices, and the user too (has to think...)

[SCHOLZ: that's when the new media theorists come into play; they take into account these notions : interactivity, collaboration, participatory design...]

discursive object ("urinal"); social conventions
--> this has been pushed forward by these conceptual people. notion of engagement is primordial" artwork doesn't have to be an object, it can be a process. art is about communication. what is it communicating?
language is also a picture. relationship between image and text.
taking artwork out of the realm of the unique, taking it into the realm of the everyday life. accessibility, directness, sillyness (in failure as well). you have to approach life as an artist.

[SCHOLZ: Lev Manovich: that's his stance.
process of trying something out. works as transition, experiments; exhibition by Peter Weibel; center ZKM in Hamburg]

A. Kaprow;
set of instructions; taking the task, and executing it ; everyone participates, together and autonomously at the same time (collaboration)
[SCHOLZ: cultural software]

we don't want audience at all, we only want participants. how do you establish connection between people?

John Cage:
4 minutes 33 seconds: a musical piece about 'silence' (we are surrounded by everyday sound): visual performance + Cage stages the way he traps the audience (signals the silent movement, activated the public in order to get their attention on the sound around)

moments of knowledge develop and change forever how we think about the world (cf. scientific revolutions: Structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)
conceptual art is art of demonstration; tries to change way you conceive art (and social practice, to some extent)

you can transport an object/a theme/a media from one arena to another arena // digitality, trans-mediality


[SCHOLZ:
the artist is a context provider: sets up a space were performance can happen
people are producing and consuming at the same // participatory art]



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2nd part of the conference: problems with Bourriaud's relational esthetics



problems that have come out from Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. her goal : to provide a counterpoint to this.
construction of social situations/space: one of hottest commodities (how does it become that?)

Bourriaud (1998) = the liveliest factor has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts
--> artists: heavy weights on the international market:
P. Huygue, M. Cattelan...
the sphere of inter-human relations: their common criterion
artwork = social interstice.
vanguardist responds to mass-communication
1st question = materiality of these works


Bourriaud's task: assemble like-minded artists and works + to give them a pedigree + proving that issues were radically contemporary
--> useful conceptual frame but needs interrogating (weakness)
---> dismissal of 60's art practices that might tell us about contemporary practices

take his terms and re-map them

relational aesthetics = reactivation of the audience; starting point: Duchamp in 1917 (Urinal; "all in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution"

first "open work" (Eco). Cage 4'33'' (1952: 1st performance)


 (loose) typology of participation
 1/ Novitz : degrees of appreciation; participation = immersion = being in a place and moving through it; any physical engagement; broad generality
--> Duchamp: the work is completed in the engaged spectator
--> thinking about something (engagement)
---> cf. Rauschenberg & white paintings

  2/ more active sense = extension of engagement
new media art. undetermined outcome; some degree of conscious participation.
--> doing something (navigation)
museum education project (paratactical); cf. Hans Haacke (MoMA poll)
projects = post-readymade work, self-conscious of their engagement within their institution.

  3/ more precise & active notion = conscious decision-making, activity that shapes the work
--> doing and thinking about something ("oriented orientation" ECO}
work iterable, no 2 performances will be the same (Fluxus)

the open work can exist within several discipline (inter-...)
for U.Eco, open work = "unfinished", artist is concerned with their potential development
component of a kit
performer as autonomous decision-maker
incomplete knowledge of a system as structural principle
--> completion of instructions + interpretative activity made internal
--> production of a "field of relations", as et of possibilities = "works in movement"

conceptual and strategical priorities that re-appear in Bourriaud

but open work is not the same as participation art
only require participation as a specific cognitive action = structural necessity; iterability also.

Cage's 4'33'' removed expression from performance; silence as a written construction; confirms the textuality of music. active kind of listening; renunciation of interpretative closure.  
encoded the passivity of the audience confronted with lack of performance, the player with the lack of score, etc. some considered it as a wake up call
A. Kaprow: see the tension to contingency; "instrumental piece". "now that everything is available, what do you do?"

between contemplation and utilization (Eco)

Cage's students: Fluxus' generation
main clusters: material, immersive, funky, fundamentally social

Happenings: proto-performance projects involving multiple individuals & collage esthetics. increasingly participatory in it strong meaning.
behaviouristic aspects. depersonalizing process.
not acted or performed, but done (no illumining characters/discplaced identity) --> "collaboration without objects"
participation: in the piece (not in the documentation: photographing, filming the scene conditions/disrupts the happening)


Fluxus: participating/everyday/collectivity art activity (anti-preciousness or anti-unique, anti-professionalism)
artist : not an vocation/profession; you should not call yourself an artist
cheap entertainment and popular forms, gathering of multiple skills
(not like happenings which requires an artist-organizer)
flirted with collective-authorship; international network; distribution

both practices: a paratactical critique of the cultural production done within space gallery

engagement with behaviour and process; systems disappear in favor of failure (Gere); problems of reception

Bourriaud; interactive, user-friendly, on-going, multiple authorship works + address social relations

2 artists representative of relational/spcial programing background:

Rikrit Tiravanija: became famous by cooking meals and serving them in galleries (to art people talking about art stuff)
Hugo Boss price: "the air between the chain link fence and the broken bicycle" (with an antenna that references to Duchamp's readymade cycle wheel)
realtional idea: you can build a pirate broadcast; in the space of free-speech, the airwaves are owned by legal codes that prevents you from airing what/where you want
failure: the museum would let it broadcast (only narrowcast)

Carlsten Holler, "Solander greenhouse" with solander lily (pheromones/sexual's smell emitters). behavioral stimuli + disorientation by stroboscopes

Claire Bishop: the "open manner" of these works closes up differences:
--> neo-liberal programs: illusion of choice & social connectivity

Bourriaud evades a number of key-concpet that the 60's arose (relation to gallery, to interpretation, invitation to boredom or failure or disagreement)

Bishop points out to an antagonist model to the "being together is wonderful" stance. there is a possibility of disagreement, conflict, danger.

cf. new media discourse's enthusiasm (connectivity is fabulous, etc.)

the 60's asked: how fully do you engage with the work? question of inhabiting oneself (what is self?).

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discussion

Tony Conrad: art as a framing institution. Dada?
J.R: resurgence of the question of utopia through a major change for Bourriaud: utopia is old avant-guard, relational esthetics is a series of micro-utopias.
post war problem : difficulty to hold a notion of yourself as totality on which you can totally account. "what is a person" is no longer an obvious question. 60's happenings were also said to be boring, dangerous, creepy, etc. not all about pleasure and simplicity. experience of fracture, fragmentation... pushing the sense of self and physicality to the extremes. a complexity that vanishes in the social relation contemporary works. debate about necessary differences.

someone: user-friendly in Bourriaud's vocabulary?
relational esthetics: not disruptive, environment like, simple to use, "convivial" (french term - i think), design-like, sophisticate.
fluxus: not made by professional, even if easy to use (do it yourself?)

someone else: question of how art can deal with services is a question that is concerning
Claire Bishop works in that territory: projects that take some of the strategies, but more edgy (Thomas Hirshhorn), about social differences. T. Hirshhorn: i am an artist, i am not interested in social stuff, i believe in art autonomy... but his work testifies of the contrary. it put things in places where they're not supposed to be.
Bishop: antagonistic democracy = participating democracy is at his best the creation of a dialogue that doesn't demand homogenization.
the problem is the artworld, because ht artworld is talking to itself.

T.Scholz: check out Brian Holmes about that problem

J.R.: if you want work in that category, you have to give something up, maybe the art world itself.

C. Bishop:  in the last Art forum about pieces that deal with the social. in October (see JSTOR)

someone again: in what way do you see technologies that expand (culture of virtual performance). how performance paradigm change throughout these periods? are we moving towards works that are all open all the time?

J.R.: photography and documentation conduct the apprehension of works of art (Susan Sontag: we see sunsets because photographs provided them to us)
performance = we must notice - always - institutionalization. but there is a re-thinking of these works : re-doing of "easy pieces", performances of the 60s (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys...) by new artists.
How can you re-do? To what extent? we can only experience the difference of a re-do. technical problems + conceptual problems. context of copying and replication. to what degree is one when one is performing a piece about self. early performances: producing (or attempting to produce) a sense of self-awareness.  

this re-do problem is also a question raised in new media contexts.

T. Conrad: problem of self after post-war. Cage's 4'33": consuming temporal, + tackling the subjectivity of the bourgeois cultivated audience of the 50's (necessity to meditate, to be attentive. Cage's piece: an iteration of nothing else than itself. Cage failed to point out the duration (the pianist performer did the gesture, but it wasn't on the score). late-bourgois investigation of self/internality.
Bourriaud does address the reversing of direction (social sphere/platforms).
what one might expect from an art discourse? is there any space left for a critique from within (not from the outside like the situationists - ??)
[i am not sure i understood what the point was]

J.R.: art history is s avery tendencious 20th century's subject. tradition of separation of spheres of human activities (esthetics, opposed to blah blah). today: crossover between the applied arts and the high arts. maybe we are entering a moment when that separation of spheres is not possible/thinkible anymore.

T. Conrad: to re-do makes much more sense today, not when people's focus on time was linked to their conception of social identity.

J.R.: the concept of the boring (as good to arts); to me boring has to do with time & duration

someone: it is difficult to put ourselves in the place of audience of Cage's 4'33", when it was new, when he was demonstrating that everything was worth as sound.

J.R.: yeah, it's a paradigmatic moment; it opens up possibilities

T. Conrad: if there is no differentiation, there is no meaning; if everything is music, the function of composer is dismantled. it both disables everything, but it destroys also everything.  

someone else: difference between creating and listening to music. context-cultural provider...

T. Conrad: i am sort of saying: go for it!

T. Scholz: Cage provided the frame; like for social software tools: i am providing the context; the user-producer creates a piece

T. Conrad: there is no way to announce the piece

(talking about the instructions of Cage's silence piece)
(plus other considerations that i missed)

T.Scholz: you care for intention, i care for functions out in the world

J.R.: Thomas Hirshhorn: he's a really good manager; lots of intention, but thinks also about applications. it's not clear that the users of the work are not naturalized to the work (turkish immigrants are becoming part of the work); which produces an uncomfortable feeling (which is good)
at the same time, he's turning that residence into spectacle
it has the potential for producing

T.Conrad: i agree with you Trebor when you say that a piece in a museum is corrupt, but 99% of the works are corrupted. the way that culture industry works...
artists pay graduate students for doing the work according to a sketch the artist did // Renaissance 'collaborative' works
curator = reallocates the artists to being the ??
there is a coherent power play, or
are you interested? you're on the curatorial side

J.R.: i'm too opinionated to be curatorial . some people say that curators have taken a large part of the creation process. shifting of understanding of functions (in Europe mostly). Restani literally invented the "new realism" (french pop art) as a curator. find a concept and assemble all the part that makes the concept viable (french are good at that) = "impresario" figures.
generation of young curators who took advantage of space being made available. space + concept = works. that's "student work". students! get a move on! move to france and get some state funding!
even artists take on this producer role (P. Huygues, Gillick -?)

T.Scholz: in New Media too, it is strongly the case: event organizing comes with artistic projects...

J.R.: Young British Artists were curated (and replaced every 5 years) by this huge advertisement campaign.

T.Scholz: the "Land Foundation" in Thailand: supposed to be a utopian community; actually: no electricity, internet, tv, and the artists kids who came there went away in 2 weeks.
--> social event: but about WHAT?

someone: what about in China where they still have that industry-based society?

J.R. China: very local discourse that approaches and appropriate what they consider as radical practices in the West

T.Scholz: there is no such need to translate and distribute new theories from China to the rest of the world

J.R.: art market is blossoming in China, but mostly with chinese art.

someone (a chinese person): actually chinese contemporary art heavily depend on Western market and art channels. i learnt more about that here than in China. translation difficulty: if you want to create a global art product, what language do you choose to use?

T.Conrad: art is more object-oriented (painting, sculpture) within an industrial society?

same someone: not really; modern identity of chinese art has kind of lost its spirit that chinese traditional art and crafts were (used as functional objects, decorational, etc.). it has been objectified, forgetting its contextual history. communication art is not fully developed. in the 60's: art served politics; the personal, subjective speeches have been broken. it's highly staged what has been exported outside China

T.Scholz: check that catalogue: "Global Conceptualism"

someone, about services in art:
linguistic capabilities; things come in and you are able to adapt & to process them

J.R. : part of the skill set is managing as well.

T.Scholz: Mackenzie Wark: you can only sleep in the middle (not on top) (?????)
























>The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

>Tuesday, February 07
7pm, room DMS 235

>iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck (introduced by Trebor Scholz)
In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course, and after any
socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and early 1960s.

>About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck: BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with Benjamin
Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships, including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.

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1st part of conference: what 50' & 60's performance and conceptual art brought up

intermedia - happening, performance, fluxus 50's/60's

modern art: a version of vanguard practice (common definition)
art historians have 2 definitions of avant-guarde:
1/ teleological progression towards abstraction (breaking away from representation); formal vanguard practice: art making = autonomous from the social practice. questions: what tools? what is line? what is color? how do we see image?
 through self-criticism; Mondrian = thinking of paintings as not correlates of abstract thought but a kind of abstract thought. still referential: addressing something outside of itself (examples: the curve: in nature/organic world; physiological perception; shape of the frame: 18th-century conventions). precision of painting + highly specialized activity + elite/high brow art
end of this movement: NY late 40's + 50's --> expressionist abstraction: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko... focus on the end point of the narrative.

2/ the Marcel Duchamp tradition; moves away from painting; 1917: in NY, part of a group that want to democratize the arts (you pay a fee = they show the art, whatever it is). Duchamp wants to demonstrate how much conventional art is. "the urinal" (signed by his persona name MUTT). cares about:
- it is not made by the artist's hand: a multiple.
- it's a functional object
--> contrary to the main esthetic theories: art is not supposed to be functional/usable. So: controversy. the piece didn't appear in the exhibition, apparently.
Connection with the famous gallerist Alfred Stiegieltz (photographer), who was very active in the modern art scene. He doesn't like the artwork but accepts to recognizes it as art contractually if Duchamp pays the fee. The piece is being photographed, staged in a modernist context (a painting in the background)
--> what's important: it IS art because it is displayed/staged as art. demonstration: the definition of art doesn't depend on skills, inspiration, bla bla, but on its contextual and discursive location (discursive because it takes its meaning from our conversation), + on strategy = they operate once (strategic intervention in discursive space)
--> + engaged position: how does the art goes in the world, what are the relationships between the art world and the social world.

[T.SCHOLZ:
there is a set of ideas/discourse that can influence the development of technological tools; invention driven by concepts]

J.Pollock: understands vision itself, not space (and not nature). personal freedom "i am in my painting", "i am nature". transcendent abstract expression. but this is a language that is perishable (problem of subjectivity).
but beyond the modernist critique dominant discourse (transcendence & abstraction),  there is a strong materiality in the process (junk on the floor, gravity...), there is a motion, and there is a space in action. so artists started to like the idea of 3-dimensionnal, real scale space, everyday material:
---> Allen Kaprow

"Experimentalism"
A. Kaprow + George Brecht + Robert Watts = frustrated with dominant discourse, studio ideology, art market
"Project in Multiple dimension", strongly influenced by Duchamp; experimental art laboratory designed to work with new materials, new techniques, no investigation into the final product, no planning of the outcome: model based on science.
in music: Noise
in painting & sculptures: with material that belong to industry and waste
dance: based on everyday/action movements
--> collective appropriation of what's out there and art starting to address/contaminate the artistic agents.
--> new model about experimentation.

new strategies:
- multiples, seriality, iterability
- event (temporal),
- environments (multi-media; visual and spatial for instance; disrupting the sensorial, etc.)
- objects of everyday life
you can touch the art, change it, interact with it
--> communication and language (the way we use language)

[SCHOLZ: distributedness // new communication systems like the Internet]

thinking about performance
cf. the "score" by G. Brecht Word Event, Exit. unreadable? what do we do with the symbols on the page? you can do this piece in whatever way you want. doing the piece = thinking about it, interpreting it, acting it. the piece is made out of ordinary language, in an imperative language: it gives an order, though very open to interpretation
--> the notion of communication is radically destabilized. the piece remains the same while its performance is unique, every one is different.
--> notion of indeterminacy: language itself is ambiguous at core

"opening" of the work of art: the performer has to make some choices, and the user too (has to think...)

[SCHOLZ: that's when the new media theorists come into play; they take into account these notions : interactivity, collaboration, participatory design...]

discursive object ("urinal"); social conventions
--> this has been pushed forward by these conceptual people. notion of engagement is primordial" artwork doesn't have to be an object, it can be a process. art is about communication. what is it communicating?
language is also a picture. relationship between image and text.
taking artwork out of the realm of the unique, taking it into the realm of the everyday life. accessibility, directness, sillyness (in failure as well). you have to approach life as an artist.

[SCHOLZ: Lev Manovich: that's his stance.
process of trying something out. works as transition, experiments; exhibition by Peter Weibel; center ZKM in Hamburg]

A. Kaprow;
set of instructions; taking the task, and executing it ; everyone participates, together and autonomously at the same time (collaboration)
[SCHOLZ: cultural software]

we don't want audience at all, we only want participants. how do you establish connection between people?

John Cage:
4 minutes 33 seconds: a musical piece about 'silence' (we are surrounded by everyday sound): visual performance + Cage stages the way he traps the audience (signals the silent movement, activated the public in order to get their attention on the sound around)

moments of knowledge develop and change forever how we think about the world (cf. scientific revolutions: Structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)
conceptual art is art of demonstration; tries to change way you conceive art (and social practice, to some extent)

you can transport an object/a theme/a media from one arena to another arena // digitality, trans-mediality


[SCHOLZ:
the artist is a context provider: sets up a space were performance can happen
people are producing and consuming at the same // participatory art]



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2nd part of the conference: problems with Bourriaud's relational esthetics



problems that have come out from Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. her goal : to provide a counterpoint to this.
construction of social situations/space: one of hottest commodities (how does it become that?)

Bourriaud (1998) = the liveliest factor has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts
--> artists: heavy weights on the international market:
P. Huygue, M. Cattelan...
the sphere of inter-human relations: their common criterion
artwork = social interstice.
vanguardist responds to mass-communication
1st question = materiality of these works


Bourriaud's task: assemble like-minded artists and works + to give them a pedigree + proving that issues were radically contemporary
--> useful conceptual frame but needs interrogating (weakness)
---> dismissal of 60's art practices that might tell us about contemporary practices

take his terms and re-map them

relational aesthetics = reactivation of the audience; starting point: Duchamp in 1917 (Urinal; "all in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution"

first "open work" (Eco). Cage 4'33'' (1952: 1st performance)


 (loose) typology of participation
 1/ Novitz : degrees of appreciation; participation = immersion = being in a place and moving through it; any physical engagement; broad generality
--> Duchamp: the work is completed in the engaged spectator
--> thinking about something (engagement)
---> cf. Rauschenberg & white paintings

  2/ more active sense = extension of engagement
new media art. undetermined outcome; some degree of conscious participation.
--> doing something (navigation)
museum education project (paratactical); cf. Hans Haacke (MoMA poll)
projects = post-readymade work, self-conscious of their engagement within their institution.

  3/ more precise & active notion = conscious decision-making, activity that shapes the work
--> doing and thinking about something ("oriented orientation" ECO}
work iterable, no 2 performances will be the same (Fluxus)

the open work can exist within several discipline (inter-...)
for U.Eco, open work = "unfinished", artist is concerned with their potential development
component of a kit
performer as autonomous decision-maker
incomplete knowledge of a system as structural principle
--> completion of instructions + interpretative activity made internal
--> production of a "field of relations", as et of possibilities = "works in movement"

conceptual and strategical priorities that re-appear in Bourriaud

but open work is not the same as participation art
only require participation as a specific cognitive action = structural necessity; iterability also.

Cage's 4'33'' removed expression from performance; silence as a written construction; confirms the textuality of music. active kind of listening; renunciation of interpretative closure. 
encoded the passivity of the audience confronted with lack of performance, the player with the lack of score, etc. some considered it as a wake up call
A. Kaprow: see the tension to contingency; "instrumental piece". "now that everything is available, what do you do?"

between contemplation and utilization (Eco)

Cage's students: Fluxus' generation
main clusters: material, immersive, funky, fundamentally social

Happenings: proto-performance projects involving multiple individuals & collage esthetics. increasingly participatory in it strong meaning.
behaviouristic aspects. depersonalizing process.
not acted or performed, but done (no illumining characters/discplaced identity) --> "collaboration without objects"
participation: in the piece (not in the documentation: photographing, filming the scene conditions/disrupts the happening)


Fluxus: participating/everyday/collectivity art activity (anti-preciousness or anti-unique, anti-professionalism)
artist : not an vocation/profession; you should not call yourself an artist
cheap entertainment and popular forms, gathering of multiple skills
(not like happenings which requires an artist-organizer)
flirted with collective-authorship; international network; distribution

both practices: a paratactical critique of the cultural production done within space gallery

engagement with behaviour and process; systems disappear in favor of failure (Gere); problems of reception

Bourriaud; interactive, user-friendly, on-going, multiple authorship works + address social relations

2 artists representative of relational/spcial programing background:

Rikrit Tiravanija: became famous by cooking meals and serving them in galleries (to art people talking about art stuff)
Hugo Boss price: "the air between the chain link fence and the broken bicycle" (with an antenna that references to Duchamp's readymade cycle wheel)
realtional idea: you can build a pirate broadcast; in the space of free-speech, the airwaves are owned by legal codes that prevents you from airing what/where you want
failure: the museum would let it broadcast (only narrowcast)

Carlsten Holler, "Solander greenhouse" with solander lily (pheromones/sexual's smell emitters). behavioral stimuli + disorientation by stroboscopes

Claire Bishop: the "open manner" of these works closes up differences:
--> neo-liberal programs: illusion of choice & social connectivity

Bourriaud evades a number of key-concpet that the 60's arose (relation to gallery, to interpretation, invitation to boredom or failure or disagreement)

Bishop points out to an antagonist model to the "being together is wonderful" stance. there is a possibility of disagreement, conflict, danger.

cf. new media discourse's enthusiasm (connectivity is fabulous, etc.)

the 60's asked: how fully do you engage with the work? question of inhabiting oneself (what is self?).

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discussion

Tony Conrad: art as a framing institution. Dada?
J.R: resurgence of the question of utopia through a major change for Bourriaud: utopia is old avant-guard, relational esthetics is a series of micro-utopias.
post war problem : difficulty to hold a notion of yourself as totality on which you can totally account. "what is a person" is no longer an obvious question. 60's happenings were also said to be boring, dangerous, creepy, etc. not all about pleasure and simplicity. experience of fracture, fragmentation... pushing the sense of self and physicality to the extremes. a complexity that vanishes in the social relation contemporary works. debate about necessary differences.

someone: user-friendly in Bourriaud's vocabulary?
relational esthetics: not disruptive, environment like, simple to use, "convivial" (french term - i think), design-like, sophisticate.
fluxus: not made by professional, even if easy to use (do it yourself?)

someone else: question of how art can deal with services is a question that is concerning
Claire Bishop works in that territory: projects that take some of the strategies, but more edgy (Thomas Hirshhorn), about social differences. T. Hirshhorn: i am an artist, i am not interested in social stuff, i believe in art autonomy... but his work testifies of the contrary. it put things in places where they're not supposed to be.
Bishop: antagonistic democracy = participating democracy is at his best the creation of a dialogue that doesn't demand homogenization.
the problem is the artworld, because ht artworld is talking to itself.

T.Scholz: check out Brian Holmes about that problem

J.R.: if you want work in that category, you have to give something up, maybe the art world itself.

C. Bishop:  in the last Art forum about pieces that deal with the social. in October (see JSTOR)

someone again: in what way do you see technologies that expand (culture of virtual performance). how performance paradigm change throughout these periods? are we moving towards works that are all open all the time?

J.R.: photography and documentation conduct the apprehension of works of art (Susan Sontag: we see sunsets because photographs provided them to us)
performance = we must notice - always - institutionalization. but there is a re-thinking of these works : re-doing of "easy pieces", performances of the 60s (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys...) by new artists.
How can you re-do? To what extent? we can only experience the difference of a re-do. technical problems + conceptual problems. context of copying and replication. to what degree is one when one is performing a piece about self. early performances: producing (or attempting to produce) a sense of self-awareness. 

this re-do problem is also a question raised in new media contexts.

T. Conrad: problem of self after post-war. Cage's 4'33": consuming temporal, + tackling the subjectivity of the bourgeois cultivated audience of the 50's (necessity to meditate, to be attentive. Cage's piece: an iteration of nothing else than itself. Cage failed to point out the duration (the pianist performer did the gesture, but it wasn't on the score). late-bourgois investigation of self/internality.
Bourriaud does address the reversing of direction (social sphere/platforms).
what one might expect from an art discourse? is there any space left for a critique from within (not from the outside like the situationists - ??)
[i am not sure i understood what the point was]

J.R.: art history is s avery tendencious 20th century's subject. tradition of separation of spheres of human activities (esthetics, opposed to blah blah). today: crossover between the applied arts and the high arts. maybe we are entering a moment when that separation of spheres is not possible/thinkible anymore.

T. Conrad: to re-do makes much more sense today, not when people's focus on time was linked to their conception of social identity.

J.R.: the concept of the boring (as good to arts); to me boring has to do with time & duration

someone: it is difficult to put ourselves in the place of audience of Cage's 4'33", when it was new, when he was demonstrating that everything was worth as sound.

J.R.: yeah, it's a paradigmatic moment; it opens up possibilities

T. Conrad: if there is no differentiation, there is no meaning; if everything is music, the function of composer is dismantled. it both disables everything, but it destroys also everything. 

someone else: difference between creating and listening to music. context-cultural provider...

T. Conrad: i am sort of saying: go for it!

T. Scholz: Cage provided the frame; like for social software tools: i am providing the context; the user-producer creates a piece

T. Conrad: there is no way to announce the piece

(talking about the instructions of Cage's silence piece)
(plus other considerations that i missed)

T.Scholz: you care for intention, i care for functions out in the world

J.R.: Thomas Hirshhorn: he's a really good manager; lots of intention, but thinks also about applications. it's not clear that the users of the work are not naturalized to the work (turkish immigrants are becoming part of the work); which produces an uncomfortable feeling (which is good)
at the same time, he's turning that residence into spectacle
it has the potential for producing

T.Conrad: i agree with you Trebor when you say that a piece in a museum is corrupt, but 99% of the works are corrupted. the way that culture industry works...
artists pay graduate students for doing the work according to a sketch the artist did // Renaissance 'collaborative' works
curator = reallocates the artists to being the ??
there is a coherent power play, or
are you interested? you're on the curatorial side

J.R.: i'm too opinionated to be curatorial . some people say that curators have taken a large part of the creation process. shifting of understanding of functions (in Europe mostly). Restani literally invented the "new realism" (french pop art) as a curator. find a concept and assemble all the part that makes the concept viable (french are good at that) = "impresario" figures.
generation of young curators who took advantage of space being made available. space + concept = works. that's "student work". students! get a move on! move to france and get some state funding!
even artists take on this producer role (P. Huygues, Gillick -?)

T.Scholz: in New Media too, it is strongly the case: event organizing comes with artistic projects...

J.R.: Young British Artists were curated (and replaced every 5 years) by this huge advertisement campaign.

T.Scholz: the "Land Foundation" in Thailand: supposed to be a utopian community; actually: no electricity, internet, tv, and the artists kids who came there went away in 2 weeks.
--> social event: but about WHAT?

someone: what about in China where they still have that industry-based society?

J.R. China: very local discourse that approaches and appropriate what they consider as radical practices in the West

T.Scholz: there is no such need to translate and distribute new theories from China to the rest of the world

J.R.: art market is blossoming in China, but mostly with chinese art.

someone (a chinese person): actually chinese contemporary art heavily depend on Western market and art channels. i learnt more about that here than in China. translation difficulty: if you want to create a global art product, what language do you choose to use?

T.Conrad: art is more object-oriented (painting, sculpture) within an industrial society?

same someone: not really; modern identity of chinese art has kind of lost its spirit that chinese traditional art and crafts were (used as functional objects, decorational, etc.). it has been objectified, forgetting its contextual history. communication art is not fully developed. in the 60's: art served politics; the personal, subjective speeches have been broken. it's highly staged what has been exported outside China

T.Scholz: check that catalogue: "Global Conceptualism"

someone, about services in art:
linguistic capabilities; things come in and you are able to adapt & to process them

J.R. : part of the skill set is managing as well.

T.Scholz: Mackenzie Wark: you can only sleep in the middle (not on top) (?????)


















>The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence

>Tuesday, February 07
7pm, room DMS 235

>iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck (introduced by Trebor Scholz)
In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course, and after any
socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and early 1960s.

>About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck: BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with Benjamin
Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships, including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.

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1st part of conference: what 50' & 60's performance and conceptual art brought up

intermedia - happening, performance, fluxus 50's/60's

modern art: a version of vanguard practice (common definition)
art historians have 2 definitions of avant-guarde:
1/ teleological progression towards abstraction (breaking away from representation); formal vanguard practice: art making = autonomous from the social practice. questions: what tools? what is line? what is color? how do we see image?
 through self-criticism; Mondrian = thinking of paintings as not correlates of abstract thought but a kind of abstract thought. still referential: addressing something outside of itself (examples: the curve: in nature/organic world; physiological perception; shape of the frame: 18th-century conventions). precision of painting + highly specialized activity + elite/high brow art
end of this movement: NY late 40's + 50's --> expressionist abstraction: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko... focus on the end point of the narrative.

2/ the Marcel Duchamp tradition; moves away from painting; 1917: in NY, part of a group that want to democratize the arts (you pay a fee = they show the art, whatever it is). Duchamp wants to demonstrate how much conventional art is. "the urinal" (signed by his persona name MUTT). cares about:
- it is not made by the artist's hand: a multiple.
- it's a functional object
--> contrary to the main esthetic theories: art is not supposed to be functional/usable. So: controversy. the piece didn't appear in the exhibition, apparently.
Connection with the famous gallerist Alfred Stiegieltz (photographer), who was very active in the modern art scene. He doesn't like the artwork but accepts to recognizes it as art contractually if Duchamp pays the fee. The piece is being photographed, staged in a modernist context (a painting in the background)
--> what's important: it IS art because it is displayed/staged as art. demonstration: the definition of art doesn't depend on skills, inspiration, bla bla, but on its contextual and discursive location (discursive because it takes its meaning from our conversation), + on strategy = they operate once (strategic intervention in discursive space)
--> + engaged position: how does the art goes in the world, what are the relationships between the art world and the social world.

[T.SCHOLZ:
there is a set of ideas/discourse that can influence the development of technological tools; invention driven by concepts]

J.Pollock: understands vision itself, not space (and not nature). personal freedom "i am in my painting", "i am nature". transcendent abstract expression. but this is a language that is perishable (problem of subjectivity).
but beyond the modernist critique dominant discourse (transcendence & abstraction),  there is a strong materiality in the process (junk on the floor, gravity...), there is a motion, and there is a space in action. so artists started to like the idea of 3-dimensionnal, real scale space, everyday material:
---> Allen Kaprow

"Experimentalism"
A. Kaprow + George Brecht + Robert Watts = frustrated with dominant discourse, studio ideology, art market
"Project in Multiple dimension", strongly influenced by Duchamp; experimental art laboratory designed to work with new materials, new techniques, no investigation into the final product, no planning of the outcome: model based on science.
in music: Noise
in painting & sculptures: with material that belong to industry and waste
dance: based on everyday/action movements
--> collective appropriation of what's out there and art starting to address/contaminate the artistic agents.
--> new model about experimentation.

new strategies:
- multiples, seriality, iterability
- event (temporal),
- environments (multi-media; visual and spatial for instance; disrupting the sensorial, etc.)
- objects of everyday life
you can touch the art, change it, interact with it
--> communication and language (the way we use language)

[SCHOLZ: distributedness // new communication systems like the Internet]

thinking about performance
cf. the "score" by G. Brecht Word Event, Exit. unreadable? what do we do with the symbols on the page? you can do this piece in whatever way you want. doing the piece = thinking about it, interpreting it, acting it. the piece is made out of ordinary language, in an imperative language: it gives an order, though very open to interpretation
--> the notion of communication is radically destabilized. the piece remains the same while its performance is unique, every one is different.
--> notion of indeterminacy: language itself is ambiguous at core

"opening" of the work of art: the performer has to make some choices, and the user too (has to think...)

[SCHOLZ: that's when the new media theorists come into play; they take into account these notions : interactivity, collaboration, participatory design...]

discursive object ("urinal"); social conventions
--> this has been pushed forward by these conceptual people. notion of engagement is primordial" artwork doesn't have to be an object, it can be a process. art is about communication. what is it communicating?
language is also a picture. relationship between image and text.
taking artwork out of the realm of the unique, taking it into the realm of the everyday life. accessibility, directness, sillyness (in failure as well). you have to approach life as an artist.

[SCHOLZ: Lev Manovich: that's his stance.
process of trying something out. works as transition, experiments; exhibition by Peter Weibel; center ZKM in Hamburg]

A. Kaprow;
set of instructions; taking the task, and executing it ; everyone participates, together and autonomously at the same time (collaboration)
[SCHOLZ: cultural software]

we don't want audience at all, we only want participants. how do you establish connection between people?

John Cage:
4 minutes 33 seconds: a musical piece about 'silence' (we are surrounded by everyday sound): visual performance + Cage stages the way he traps the audience (signals the silent movement, activated the public in order to get their attention on the sound around)

moments of knowledge develop and change forever how we think about the world (cf. scientific revolutions: Structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)
conceptual art is art of demonstration; tries to change way you conceive art (and social practice, to some extent)

you can transport an object/a theme/a media from one arena to another arena // digitality, trans-mediality


[SCHOLZ:
the artist is a context provider: sets up a space were performance can happen
people are producing and consuming at the same // participatory art]



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2nd part of the conference: problems with Bourriaud's relational esthetics



problems that have come out from Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. her goal : to provide a counterpoint to this.
construction of social situations/space: one of hottest commodities (how does it become that?)

Bourriaud (1998) = the liveliest factor has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts
--> artists: heavy weights on the international market:
P. Huygue, M. Cattelan...
the sphere of inter-human relations: their common criterion
artwork = social interstice.
vanguardist responds to mass-communication
1st question = materiality of these works


Bourriaud's task: assemble like-minded artists and works + to give them a pedigree + proving that issues were radically contemporary
--> useful conceptual frame but needs interrogating (weakness)
---> dismissal of 60's art practices that might tell us about contemporary practices

take his terms and re-map them

relational aesthetics = reactivation of the audience; starting point: Duchamp in 1917 (Urinal; "all in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution"

first "open work" (Eco). Cage 4'33'' (1952: 1st performance)


 (loose) typology of participation
 1/ Novitz : degrees of appreciation; participation = immersion = being in a place and moving through it; any physical engagement; broad generality
--> Duchamp: the work is completed in the engaged spectator
--> thinking about something (engagement)
---> cf. Rauschenberg & white paintings

  2/ more active sense = extension of engagement
new media art. undetermined outcome; some degree of conscious participation.
--> doing something (navigation)
museum education project (paratactical); cf. Hans Haacke (MoMA poll)
projects = post-readymade work, self-conscious of their engagement within their institution.

  3/ more precise & active notion = conscious decision-making, activity that shapes the work
--> doing and thinking about something ("oriented orientation" ECO}
work iterable, no 2 performances will be the same (Fluxus)

the open work can exist within several discipline (inter-...)
for U.Eco, open work = "unfinished", artist is concerned with their potential development
component of a kit
performer as autonomous decision-maker
incomplete knowledge of a system as structural principle
--> completion of instructions + interpretative activity made internal
--> production of a "field of relations", as et of possibilities = "works in movement"

conceptual and strategical priorities that re-appear in Bourriaud

but open work is not the same as participation art
only require participation as a specific cognitive action = structural necessity; iterability also.

Cage's 4'33'' removed expression from performance; silence as a written construction; confirms the textuality of music. active kind of listening; renunciation of interpretative closure. 
encoded the passivity of the audience confronted with lack of performance, the player with the lack of score, etc. some considered it as a wake up call
A. Kaprow: see the tension to contingency; "instrumental piece". "now that everything is available, what do you do?"

between contemplation and utilization (Eco)

Cage's students: Fluxus' generation
main clusters: material, immersive, funky, fundamentally social

Happenings: proto-performance projects involving multiple individuals & collage esthetics. increasingly participatory in it strong meaning.
behaviouristic aspects. depersonalizing process.
not acted or performed, but done (no illumining characters/discplaced identity) --> "collaboration without objects"
participation: in the piece (not in the documentation: photographing, filming the scene conditions/disrupts the happening)


Fluxus: participating/everyday/collectivity art activity (anti-preciousness or anti-unique, anti-professionalism)
artist : not an vocation/profession; you should not call yourself an artist
cheap entertainment and popular forms, gathering of multiple skills
(not like happenings which requires an artist-organizer)
flirted with collective-authorship; international network; distribution

both practices: a paratactical critique of the cultural production done within space gallery

engagement with behaviour and process; systems disappear in favor of failure (Gere); problems of reception

Bourriaud; interactive, user-friendly, on-going, multiple authorship works + address social relations

2 artists representative of relational/spcial programing background:

Rikrit Tiravanija: became famous by cooking meals and serving them in galleries (to art people talking about art stuff)
Hugo Boss price: "the air between the chain link fence and the broken bicycle" (with an antenna that references to Duchamp's readymade cycle wheel)
realtional idea: you can build a pirate broadcast; in the space of free-speech, the airwaves are owned by legal codes that prevents you from airing what/where you want
failure: the museum would let it broadcast (only narrowcast)

Carlsten Holler, "Solander greenhouse" with solander lily (pheromones/sexual's smell emitters). behavioral stimuli + disorientation by stroboscopes

Claire Bishop: the "open manner" of these works closes up differences:
--> neo-liberal programs: illusion of choice & social connectivity

Bourriaud evades a number of key-concpet that the 60's arose (relation to gallery, to interpretation, invitation to boredom or failure or disagreement)

Bishop points out to an antagonist model to the "being together is wonderful" stance. there is a possibility of disagreement, conflict, danger.

cf. new media discourse's enthusiasm (connectivity is fabulous, etc.)

the 60's asked: how fully do you engage with the work? question of inhabiting oneself (what is self?).

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discussion

Tony Conrad: art as a framing institution. Dada?
J.R: resurgence of the question of utopia through a major change for Bourriaud: utopia is old avant-guard, relational esthetics is a series of micro-utopias.
post war problem : difficulty to hold a notion of yourself as totality on which you can totally account. "what is a person" is no longer an obvious question. 60's happenings were also said to be boring, dangerous, creepy, etc. not all about pleasure and simplicity. experience of fracture, fragmentation... pushing the sense of self and physicality to the extremes. a complexity that vanishes in the social relation contemporary works. debate about necessary differences.

someone: user-friendly in Bourriaud's vocabulary?
relational esthetics: not disruptive, environment like, simple to use, "convivial" (french term - i think), design-like, sophisticate.
fluxus: not made by professional, even if easy to use (do it yourself?)

someone else: question of how art can deal with services is a question that is concerning
Claire Bishop works in that territory: projects that take some of the strategies, but more edgy (Thomas Hirshhorn), about social differences. T. Hirshhorn: i am an artist, i am not interested in social stuff, i believe in art autonomy... but his work testifies of the contrary. it put things in places where they're not supposed to be.
Bishop: antagonistic democracy = participating democracy is at his best the creation of a dialogue that doesn't demand homogenization.
the problem is the artworld, because ht artworld is talking to itself.

T.Scholz: check out Brian Holmes about that problem

J.R.: if you want work in that category, you have to give something up, maybe the art world itself.

C. Bishop:  in the last Art forum about pieces that deal with the social. in October (see JSTOR)

someone again: in what way do you see technologies that expand (culture of virtual performance). how performance paradigm change throughout these periods? are we moving towards works that are all open all the time?

J.R.: photography and documentation conduct the apprehension of works of art (Susan Sontag: we see sunsets because photographs provided them to us)
performance = we must notice - always - institutionalization. but there is a re-thinking of these works : re-doing of "easy pieces", performances of the 60s (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys...) by new artists.
How can you re-do? To what extent? we can only experience the difference of a re-do. technical problems + conceptual problems. context of copying and replication. to what degree is one when one is performing a piece about self. early performances: producing (or attempting to produce) a sense of self-awareness. 

this re-do problem is also a question raised in new media contexts.

T. Conrad: problem of self after post-war. Cage's 4'33": consuming temporal, + tackling the subjectivity of the bourgeois cultivated audience of the 50's (necessity to meditate, to be attentive. Cage's piece: an iteration of nothing else than itself. Cage failed to point out the duration (the pianist performer did the gesture, but it wasn't on the score). late-bourgois investigation of self/internality.
Bourriaud does address the reversing of direction (social sphere/platforms).
what one might expect from an art discourse? is there any space left for a critique from within (not from the outside like the situationists - ??)
[i am not sure i understood what the point was]

J.R.: art history is s avery tendencious 20th century's subject. tradition of separation of spheres of human activities (esthetics, opposed to blah blah). today: crossover between the applied arts and the high arts. maybe we are entering a moment when that separation of spheres is not possible/thinkible anymore.

T. Conrad: to re-do makes much more sense today, not when people's focus on time was linked to their conception of social identity.

J.R.: the concept of the boring (as good to arts); to me boring has to do with time & duration

someone: it is difficult to put ourselves in the place of audience of Cage's 4'33", when it was new, when he was demonstrating that everything was worth as sound.

J.R.: yeah, it's a paradigmatic moment; it opens up possibilities

T. Conrad: if there is no differentiation, there is no meaning; if everything is music, the function of composer is dismantled. it both disables everything, but it destroys also everything. 

someone else: difference between creating and listening to music. context-cultural provider...

T. Conrad: i am sort of saying: go for it!

T. Scholz: Cage provided the frame; like for social software tools: i am providing the context; the user-producer creates a piece

T. Conrad: there is no way to announce the piece

(talking about the instructions of Cage's silence piece)
(plus other considerations that i missed)

T.Scholz: you care for intention, i care for functions out in the world

J.R.: Thomas Hirshhorn: he's a really good manager; lots of intention, but thinks also about applications. it's not clear that the users of the work are not naturalized to the work (turkish immigrants are becoming part of the work); which produces an uncomfortable feeling (which is good)
at the same time, he's turning that residence into spectacle
it has the potential for producing

T.Conrad: i agree with you Trebor when you say that a piece in a museum is corrupt, but 99% of the works are corrupted. the way that culture industry works...
artists pay graduate students for doing the work according to a sketch the artist did // Renaissance 'collaborative' works
curator = reallocates the artists to being the ??
there is a coherent power play, or
are you interested? you're on the curatorial side

J.R.: i'm too opinionated to be curatorial . some people say that curators have taken a large part of the creation process. shifting of understanding of functions (in Europe mostly). Restani literally invented the "new realism" (french pop art) as a curator. find a concept and assemble all the part that makes the concept viable (french are good at that) = "impresario" figures.
generation of young curators who took advantage of space being made available. space + concept = works. that's "student work". students! get a move on! move to france and get some state funding!
even artists take on this producer role (P. Huygues, Gillick -?)

T.Scholz: in New Media too, it is strongly the case: event organizing comes with artistic projects...

J.R.: Young British Artists were curated (and replaced every 5 years) by this huge advertisement campaign.

T.Scholz: the "Land Foundation" in Thailand: supposed to be a utopian community; actually: no electricity, internet, tv, and the artists kids who came there went away in 2 weeks.
--> social event: but about WHAT?

someone: what about in China where they still have that industry-based society?

J.R. China: very local discourse that approaches and appropriate what they consider as radical practices in the West

T.Scholz: there is no such need to translate and distribute new theories from China to the rest of the world

J.R.: art market is blossoming in China, but mostly with chinese art.

someone (a chinese person): actually chinese contemporary art heavily depend on Western market and art channels. i learnt more about that here than in China. translation difficulty: if you want to create a global art product, what language do you choose to use?

T.Conrad: art is more object-oriented (painting, sculpture) within an industrial society?

same someone: not really; modern identity of chinese art has kind of lost its spirit that chinese traditional art and crafts were (used as functional objects, decorational, etc.). it has been objectified, forgetting its contextual history. communication art is not fully developed. in the 60's: art served politics; the personal, subjective speeches have been broken. it's highly staged what has been exported outside China

T.Scholz: check that catalogue: "Global Conceptualism"

someone, about services in art:
linguistic capabilities; things come in and you are able to adapt & to process them

J.R. : part of the skill set is managing as well.

T.Scholz: Mackenzie Wark: you can only sleep in the middle (not on top) (?????)