They are not clearly separable things

“We encounter in this tactile exploration a great deal of ambiguity between sensory feeling and mental feelings. This is not just because it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the two of them, but because they are not clearly separable things. They constantly condition and influence one another to such a degree that it simply becomes an academic abstraction to contemplate the nature of one without the other. I ‘feel’ things, and I simultaneously have ‘feelings’ about them, and very often we find ourselves reduced to the question of the chicken and the egg when we try to determine which one causes the specific qualities of the other. Our very language is riddled with these ambiguities, and in fact we don’t really have a way of talking about much of our experience without the metaphors we use to express them. An object, a touch, and a mental feeling can all be ‘light’ or ‘heavy’, ‘hard’ or ‘soft.’ An attitude can be just as tense and unyielding as a muscle. A nagging symptom can be like ‘a millstone around my neck,’ and mental anxiety can flesh itself out as a ‘heavy heart,’ or ‘cold feet,’ or a stomach that is ‘tied up in knots.’

These are not merely poetic ways of expressing ourselves. They spring as often from attempts to be as precise as possible about the actual quality of our experiences as they do from attempts to dress those experiences up aesthetically. They point not to a fuzziness in our discernments and our descriptions, but to a certain fuzziness in reality that is created by the many levels of mutual interpenetration between ‘feeling’ and ‘feelings,’ between sensation and response, attitude and behaviour, mind and matter.”

(page xxvii)

Deane Juhan. Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2003.

From my own library – ordered online after reading an excerpt as part of a teacher training in a somatic practice.

Art as a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world, needing continually to be performed and tested in every specific context

“Rather than addressing this by collapsing art and ethics together, the task today is to produce a viable international alignment of leftist political movements and a reassertion of art’s inventive forms of negation as valuable in their own right. We need to recognise art as a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world, whose negativity may lend support towards a political project (without bearing the sole responsibility for devising and implementing it), and – more radically – we need to support the progressive transformation of existing institutions through the transversal encroachment of ideas whose boldness is related to (and at times greater than) that of artistic imagination.

In using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it. As such, it has the capacity to communicate on two levels – to participants and to spectators – the paradoxes that are repressed in everyday discourse, and to elicit perverse, disturbing and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew. But to reach the second level requires a mediating third term – an object, image, story, film, even a spectacle – that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imaginary. Participatory art is not a privileged political medium, nor a ready-made solution to a society of the spectacle, but is as uncertain and precarious as democracy itself; neither are legitimated in advance but need continually to be performed and tested in every specific context.”

(page 284)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

Art and the social are not to be reconciled, but sustained in continual tension

“This new proximity between spectacle and participation underlines the necessity of sustaining a tension between artistic and social critiques. The most striking projects that constitute the history of participatory art unseat all of the polarities on which this discourse is founded (individual/collective, author/spectator, active/passive, real life/art) but not with the goal of collapsing them. In so doing, they hold the artistic and social critiques in tension. Guattari’s paradigm of transversality offers one such way of thinking through these artistic operations: he leaves art as a category in its place, but insists upon its constant flight into and across other disciplines, putting both art and the social into question, even while simultaneously reaffirming art as a universe of value. Rancière offers another: the aesthetic regime is constitutively contradictory, shuttling between autonomy and heteronomy (‘the aesthetic experience is effective inasmuch as it is the experience of that and‘). He argues that in art, theatre and education alike, there needs to be a mediating object that stands between the idea of the artist and the feeling and interpretation of the spectator: “This spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but which prevents any kind of “equal” or “undistorted” transmission. It is a mediation between them, and that mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of intellectual emancipation. […] The same thing that links them must also separate them.’ In different ways, these philosophers offer alternative frameworks for thinking the artistic and the social simultaneously; for both, art and the social are not to be reconciled, but sustained in continual tension.”

(page 277-278)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

Only ever ambiguously ‘real’

“Theatre can only ever be ambiguously ‘real’ – even when it tries to escape deceptive appearance and draws close to the real. It permeates all representation with the uncertainty of whether something is represented; every act with the uncertainty of whether it was one; every thesis, every position, every work, every meaning with a wavering and potential cancellation. Perhaps theatre can never know whether it really ‘does’ something, whether it effects something and on top of it, means something.”

(page 179-180)

Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. Oxford: Routledge, 2008.

An ambiguous territory between ‘art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art’

“At present, the discursive criteria of participatory and socially engaged art is drawn from a tacit analogy between anti-capitalism and the Christian ‘good soul’; it is an ethical reasoning that fails to accommodate the aesthetic or to understand it as an autonomous realm of experience. In this perspective, there is no space for perversity, paradox and negation, operations as crucial to aesthesis as dissensus is to the political. Reframing the ethical imperatives of participatory art through a Lacanian lens might allow us to expand our repertoire of ways to attend to participatory art and its negotiation of the social. Instead of extracting art from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic to relocate it in praxis, the better examples of participatory art occupy an ambiguous territory between ‘art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art’. This has implications for the politics of spectatorship: that Rancière’s ‘metapolitics’ of art is not a party politics is both a gift and a limitation, leaving us with the urgency of examining each artistic practice within its own singular historical context and the political valencies of its era.”

(page 39-40)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

To leave art is to escape nothing

“Experimental artists always deny art within the circle of art, submitting their alternative actions for acceptance as the preferable form of what they have rejected. Even if they occasionally refuse the accreditation when it is given, they do so to prolong the experimental atmosphere, since the experiment could not be performed elsewhere without losing its identity and the issues it proposes to tackle. This acceptance as art, no matter how late it comes, is in my view the goal. The temporary ambiguity of experimental action is appropriate, for to leave art is to escape from nothing; what is suppressed emerges in disguise. A residue of esthetics and masterpieces lies on the inside of our eyelids as semiconscious recall. The task is to build up sufficient psychological pressure to release from the transformation of this material the energy of art without its earmarks.

Put differently, if any action of an artist meant as a renunciation of art can itself be considered art, then in those circumstances nonart is impossible.”

(page 76)

From Allan Kaprow’s “Experimental Art” from 1966, reprinted in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.

Bought secondhand at Pulpfiction Books on Main St, Spring 2012.