What is wrong with offering an experience that enfolds in real space, in real time? This was the question Bruce Nauman asked in the 2003 publication, ‘Theatres of Experience’. A document is just that... evidence. Performances, on the contrary, can heighten awareness of our often contradictory physical, psychological, social, emotional and perceptual states.

What is the problem with having to move physically round something?

Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor of 1969 did just that. It was about control. Passive spectators morph into active participants manipulated, never the less, in their movement by Nauman’s controlled space. He said, “I want to be a director of viewing experience.”

Nauman’s corridor lies somewhere between action and non-action, the viewer can only ever see part of the image and thus moves this way or that trying (futilely) to find a complete view. In the book Nauman is described as, “a controller of marionettes via cameras.” Rather like Brecht’s alienation effect, Nauman says, “a moment when one is shocked bodily into an awareness of... the uncanny... suddenly in the minds of reassuringly familiar forms a space opens up, lit by a strange light.”

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nationalgalleries.org/media_collection/6/AR00044.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/ar_home/4:6685/0/89096&usg=__gw1S-wxevnXT-o4RAEOOLQTGPzk=&h=703&w=540&sz=31&hl=en&start=6&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=1paBdWByJwQRlM:&tbnh=140&tbnw=108&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dbruce%2Bnauman,%2Bperformance%2Bcorridor%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1R2ACPW_enGB363%26tbs%3Disch:1

Bricolage? Accidental Collage?

Two exhibitions: Paulina Olowska at the Tramway, 2010 and Toby Patterson at the Fruitmarket, 2010; the chance pairing of images to make new worlds, the Chance pairing of two artists, totally unrelated, united by the medium of disparity. Is this chance? A subconscious reaction?

“It was not until the early 1960s, with the formation of the Italian movement Arte Povera, that bricolage took on a political aspect and it was used by artists to bypass the commercialism of the art world. Arte Povera artists constructed sculptures out of rubbish in an attempt to devalue the art object and assert the value of the ordinary and everyday.”

www.tate.org.uk

Now the word has a new significance, having been brought into information technological terminology since the 1995 book Life on Screen by Sherrie Turkle. Bricolage (or accidental collage) is having a renaissance! Olowska’s collages seemed visually a stark contrast to the accompanying Tramway exhibition – Make it New John by Duncan Campbell. This film, half artsy video-essay, half docudrama perhaps had more in common with Olowska’s accidental collages than I initially thought (or saw).

Toby Patterson’s exhibition too, Consensus and Collapse, layered itself around its audience, a web that you slowly and laboriously work your way round trying to separate one image from another. Standing in his Perspex maze gave the uncanny experience of being ejected into some kind of early nineties videogame. Perhaps the collage, the bricolage, the pairing of the seemingly disparate is the result of an information overload. It is now impossibly to trace a history, a vertical lineage. Links emerge through a communal incongruity instead.

It was recently suggested that I research the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor and his ‘Theatre of Death’ he established post WW2. I managed to locate his Wielopole/Wielople An Exercies in Theatre from the 50s with a very interesting introduction on his methods by GM Hyde. Kantor apparently, had an obsession with the subject of realism. There is a description of his paradoxical rootedness in Polish theatrical tradition - an intrinsic scepticism, sense of absurdity, ritual and fantasy, but also the rootlessness that came with his Dada influence, or ‘rooted in the void’. His ‘rootedness’ is not a sort of nostalgia, instead, “reminding us of the pastness of the past as much as of its presence.” Wielopole/Wielopole employs many disconcerting techniques – the doubling of actors, actors as mannequins, crossing representational space with real space. This is not an attempt to merge the past and the present but create a disjunction or void between them, a sense of loss. The Dada influence filters its way in through what Hyde calls, “the afterlife of junk, wreckage is another manifestation of death: things become themselves somewhere between the scrapheap and infinity.” Kantor started out officially as a painter although his methods always crossed the performative boundary. He placed his painting within the ‘art informal’ genre – expanding outwards with no divisions between creativity and work. Within Kantor’s sets props and costumes are not left to their own devices, not merely decoration but borderline functionalism and self-sufficiency. The actor must act as a mediator between reality and the unknown, unconscious.

The Science of Sleep

A beautifully contrived stupidity!

Exagerated Alienation

Book: Site Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn edited by Alex Coles, Black Dog Publishing Ltd 2000

James Meyer discusses in this book what he calls ‘motion in order’ – the new direction towards a mobile audience where travel becomes the fundamental common theme. A culture of itinerancy. He says that there are two types of nomadicy:

1. Lyrical nomadism – “Random and poetic interaction with objects and spaces of everyday life.”

2. Critical nomadism – “Locating travel itself within a historical and institutional framework.”

Lyrical nomadism is personalised. It involves the body’s circulation as a series of phenomenological encounters in real time. It is the material condition in which this occurs. He then goes on to discuss exaggerated alienation – an otherworldliness. He references Edward Said saying that the traveller projects onto the place of his destination perceived notions he has already heard or read. His view is mediated by preconceptions and representations. The traveller’s view of his own culture is equally mediated.

This idea of alienation/mediation between the body and a space is a direct result of a nomadic society where home, belonging, routed-ness etc are all obsolete concepts. The art world is reacting to this special flux accordingly.

Book: Joyous Machines (Artwork by Michael Landly and Jean Tinguely) Catalogue for exhibition at Tate Liverpool, October 2009-January 2010

Tate Shots: Michael Landly’s exhibition introduction: http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/joyousmachines/

Something can exist both as a celebration and subversion of its own terms of reference. Aesthetic appropriation can expand on the original ideas e.g. Jean Tinguely’s Modernist aesthetic.

‘META’ prefix (this can mean ‘with’ or ‘after’) therefore by adding this to his titles Tinguley was denying the original’s potential to be self-sufficient, for example his Meta-matics (drawing machines). Is there a power struggle between humanity and the mechanised world or has it merely translated into acceptance, apathy and passivity?

“When something is set out or pre-conditioned it is predictable, it denies the possibility of chance.”

-Tinguely’s work was a play between the utilitarian and the functionless. In his words, “concern for the implications of the machine on society.”

Tinguely designed his Homage to New York in 1960. It was a demonstration of time, movement and gesture, change inherent in life itself. It brought the meter into an ironic situation – a self-destructing machine (and the ultimate comment on a self-destructive consumer society). This was built from scrap metal and machine parts.

“His machines are not machines; they are auto-machines... This kind of art accepts changes, deconstruction, construction and chance, that rules anyway.”

K G Hulten 1960

Langly’s homage to Tinguely are appropriation into another era. In the theme of Tinguely’s work they accept the necessity of change, adaption and appropriation of ideas without denying where they come from (they are a celebration of their origins). They are a celebration of an era that no longer exists but has expanded in space. Drawing obviously plays an important role but is only one component of the overall picture.

Karla Black at Inverleith House Febuary 2010

I've been mulling over the idea of doing something with pastel lights since I saw a girl’s performance in Prague where she moved white foam boards in front of pastel lights to create this weird cushioned, pulsating space. I think the memory was triggered by the Karla Black exhibition I visited at Inverleith House a little while ago; the repulsively sticky, makeup colours in soft shades - like swimming in candyfloss! I'm bored of minimalist, monochrome text, on cheap photocopies taped to walls with masking tape. In Black's exhibition there was paint on the floor, foot prints in the plaster, mud, and crumpled paper. If I remember rightly the fun thing about art at school was the legitimate mess. Now the studios look like offices. As she said in one interview, “It’s hard enough to make something that’s any good, you may as well start with some sort of self-indulgence.”

http://artforum.com.cn/angle/2225