Because the object is strange

“An experimental method in music means listening: first of all, all the time, before, during, after. Because the object is strange, courage lies in going on to define its humanity and beauty, in seeking reassurance not by pursuing the kilometric path, the white pebbles of measurement, but because we have used our taste, made a choice. Because also, for years, we have had the honesty to reject found objects if they are ugly or poisonous. Because we will go to the lengths of burning our furniture if at last we find a varnish that is purer and above all more durable.”

(page 169)

Pierre Schaeffer. In Search of a Concrete Music. Trans. Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley: U of C P, 2012.

Found while browsing the stacks of the Belzer Library, SFU, Vancouver.

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.

How to perceive rhythm synaesthetically

“[Einar Schleef’s production] Mothers demonstrated how to perceive rhythm synaesthetically, that is, not just through sight and sound but through our bodily senses as a whole. The energies released from the rhythmic movements and speech circulated between actors and spectators created a reciprocal release and intensification of energy. These energies then collided and resulted in the “struggle” between chorus and audience. The flow of energy could also harmonize and generate short moments of communal unity, albeit individuals could choose to distance themselves. The flow of energy was unpredictable. It depended as much on the actors’ ability to mobilize energy at any given point during the performance as on every single audience member’s level of responsiveness and their ability to physically experience the energy. Among other factors, the proportion of responsive and resistant spectators played an important role in this context. The audience fueled the feedback loop and thus the course of the performance through their particular attitude and experience. The audience physically experienced and absorbed the energy emitted by the actors and transferred it back to them.”

(page 58-59)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

These indistinct transformations and explosive fusions

“All three examples are situated in different political and aesthetic contexts. Yet they all have one notable feature in common: they negotiate processes of democritization and redefine relationships between members of a community. Each in their own way, they effected the implementation of civil rights, the elimination of, in some cases, latent discrimination, and the distribution of power among all participants. This ambition can only be successful if some surrender their power and privileges so that others may be empowered. Role reversal thus can be understood as an interplay of disempowerment and empowerment which applies to both artists and spectators. The artists relinquish their powerful positions as the performance’s sole creators; they agree to share — to varying degrees, of course — their authorship and authority with the audience. However, that requires a prior empowerment of the actors and disempowerment of the audience: the artists force new behaviour patterns onto the audience, often plunge them into crisis, thus denying the spectators the position of distanced, uninvolved observers.

In the above-mentioned examples, role reversal highlighted the peculiarities of performance, making the latter a useful model for drawing up an aesthetics of the performative. The reversal of roles revealed that the performance’s aesthetic process is set in motion by a self-generating and ever-changing autopoietic feedback loop. Self-generation requires the participation of everyone, yet without any single participant being able to plan, control, or produce it alone. It thus becomes difficult to speak of producers and recipients. Rather, the performance brings forth the spectators and actors. Through their actions and behaviour, the actors and spectators constitute elements of the feedback loop, which in turn generates the performance itself. Therefore, the performance ultimately cannot be “understood.” It is still possible to ascribe meanings to specific elements, sequences, and processes — for example to interpret role reversal as establishing symmetrical relationships between co-subjects. The perfomance as such, however, cannot be understood as expressing pre-existing meanings or intentions. The elusiveness of the performance is not due to an independent existence principally out of the reach of actors and spectators, as would be the case with the divine and the sacred. Rather, it aims at the involvement of all participants, in order to create a reciprocal relationship of influence. The feedback loop thus identifies transformation as a fundamental category of an aesthetics of the performative.

The term elusiveness also disputes the notion that a performance can be planned. For this reason, the concept of staging, or mise en scène, must be clearly distinguished from that of performance. The term staging comprises a concept and a plan, devised by one or more artists and evolving through the rehearsals process (as another, slightly different, feedback loop). This overarching concept of staging can indeed give a sense of the effects of any given element. Yet even if this plan is minutely adhered to in every single performance, each one will still differ from the next. Each so-called repetition deviates from the previous one – as was shown by the “magnifying glass” of role reversal — not only as a result of the shifting conditions and humors of the actors but also due to the autopoietic feedback loop. The latter is responsible for making every performance unique and unrepeatable.

By way of summary: the realms of art, social life, and politics cannot be clinically separated in performance. An aesthetics of the performative, founded in performance, must therefore develop concepts and categories that grasp these indistinct transformations and explosive fusions.”

(page 50-51)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Subject and object could no longer be clearly defined and distinguished

“The alternatives offered to the concerned spectators forced them into the roles of actors — even if they remained sitting in their place they would be responsible for ending the performance. The audience’s traditional role — to remain seated and observe the actions on stage without actively participating — was no longer an option. Subject and object could no longer be clearly defined and distinguished. It became unclear who was exercising pressure and violence on whom here. Was it the performer, forcing the spectators to become actors? Or was it the spectator who stopped the performance by refusing to become an actor, thus upholding traditional role divisions regardless of the performers and their artistic intents? Each participant claimed a subject position for themselves that simultaneously objectified the other. In the case of [Richard Schechner’s Performance Group production] Commune, lengthy negotiations between performers and spectators followed, only enhancing the dilemma resulting from the production’s rules.”

(page 42)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

The creation and collapse of communities, proximity and distance

“The staging strategies or game instructions devised for such experiments consistently play with three closely related processes: first, the role reversal of actors and spectators; second, the creation of a community between them; and third, the creation of various modes of mutual, physical contact that help explore the interplay between proximity and distance, public and private, or visual and tactile contact. Despite the large diversity of these strategies (within a production, in the productions of one director, in the productions of various directors), they all have one feature in common: they do not — if at all — simply depict role reversal, the creation and collapse of communities, proximity and distance. Instead, they actually create instances of these processes. The spectators do not merely witness these situations; as participants in the performances they are made to physically experience them.”

(page 40)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

The playful nature of the experiment and the experimental nature of play

“Contingency became a central aspect of performance with the performative turn of the 1960s. The pivotal role of the audience was not only acknowledged as a pre-condition for performance but explicitly evoked as such. The feedback loop as a self-referential, autopoietic system enabling a fundamentally open, unpredictable process emerged as the defining principle of theatrical work. A shift in focus occurred from potentially controlling the system to inducing the specific modes of autopoiesis. Given this shift, it needs to be investigated how actors and spectators influence each other in performance; what the underlying conditions of this interaction might be; what factors determine the feedback loop’s course and outcome; and whether this process is primarily social rather than aesthetic in nature.

Performances since the 1960s have not only addressed these issues; they have increasingly been constructed as experiments that seek to offer answers. Today, performance is no longer seen as the mysterious locus for an inexplicable encounter between actors and spectators. Rather, performance provides the opportunity to explore the specific function, condition, and course of this interaction. The job of the director lies in developing relevant staging strategies which can establish appropriate conditions for this experiment. These preconditions aim at making the functioning of the feedback loop visible by foregrounding certain factors and variables, whilst minimising, if not fully eliminating, others.

Yet, evaluating the outcome of these theatrical experiments proves difficult. The processes of negotiation vary, at times significantly, in each individual performance of a given production, making it impossible to draw even approximate conclusions from them. It cannot be clearly established whether a performance actually constitutes an experiment testing the autopoietic system or a play with its diverse variables and parameters. In either case, the playful nature of the experiment and the experimental nature of play reinforce each other.”

(page 39-40)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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.