I have been mulling the historical and political contexts and consequence of our present fixation with “participation” — as the art world calls it — or “participatory culture” as it is referred to in media and cultural studies. In a well-known essay, Claire Bishop teased out one key assumption: that between participation and democracy.
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Several issues emerged from my work on Allan Kaprow and happenings and have been taking up headroom for some time now.
1) “Strips of behavior” and the repertoire and how these two concepts do or don’t map onto advanced art practice.
2) Deskilling and its self-conscious institutionalizing as “resistant” practice.
3) Institutional critique as necessary decoy.
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Out of the six exhibitions my students curated since I began heading the Museum and Curatorial Studies program at Cal State Long Beach, two have taken the issue of exhibiting performance as their primary concern. In 2008 Un-figuring the Body (lead by Megan Hoetger) investigated the posthumous representation of performance-related objects in the gallery space, tackling the problem of how to represent the (intensely) physical work of performance after the event took place, and the theoretical implication of how the human body becomes “figured” in representation.
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My work was never organized by a commitment to a disciplinary framework. I can talk at length about disciplinary formations, however. Like – what cultural studies enables for literary scholars – the disinterest many literary scholars have in a reified notion of “the literary,” our sense of happiness in jettisoning the canon, our glee in the discovery that unloading that dead discursive weight didn’t require abandoning our fondness for the formal, the textual.
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We (Laurie Beth Clarkand Michael Peterson) are artists and scholars who make work independently and collaboratively.
In our joint projects, under the group name Spatula&Barcode, we are interested in conviviality, criticality, and geography. There is always food. We’ve staged bicycle tours, Skype conversations, dinners, and coffee dates in Canada, Croatia, Morocco, the Netherlands, and the United States.
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Most awareness of the arts focuses on the final product and the outcome of artistic process: objects, productions, performances, publications and presentations. Mostly, the outcomes are observation based, with audience/community invited to view the end result of creative process, not the development or actual creation of such work.
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I have been thinking about the time/frame bracket of “the performative” with the general proposition that it defies the usual spatial and temporal brackets that is put around “a piece”–be it a dance performance or am event, or a “work of art.” Last fall, I posted a note on Facebook called “Protest is a Performative” which was spurred by the controversy that surrounded Rainer’s letter of protest against the MOCA Gala as directed by Marina Abramovic.
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So my first question is a potential critique of my own habits of framing these discussions. I have been trying to create fora that allow people to reflect upon the continued “disciplinarity” of so-called “interdisciplinary” art, to come clean about the fact that people who proceed from different artistic sectors have different skills, institutional habits, barometers for engaging quality, and often a different sense of what the stakes are, where innovation lies, what looks mediocre or passé.
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