Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia

Vol. 5, No 1 | 2016 Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Special Issue "Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity"

Editorial

Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity. Ruy Blanes, Alex Flynn, Maïté Maskens and Jonas Tinius

Articles

Rehearsing Detachment: Refugee Theatre and Dialectical Fiction Jonas Tinius

The Instant Composers Pool: Music Notation and the Mediation of Improvising Agency Floris Schuiling

Subjectivity and the Obliteration of Meaning: Contemporary Art, Activism, Social Movement Politics Alex Flynn

How to Begin, Again. Relational Embodiment in Time Arts & Anthropology Anne-Sophie Reichert

Approaching Utopia Pragmatically: Artistic Spaces and Community-Making in Post- Earthquake L’Aquila Jan-Jonathan Bock

Artistic Labour: Seeking a Utopian Dimension Neylan Bağcıoğlu

Microtopia in Counterpoint: Relational Aesthetics and the Echo Project Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier

Antropocefa: un kit para las colaboraciones experimentales en la práctica etnográfica Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella

Afterword

Afterword. After Utopias. Roger Sansi

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Ruy Blanes, Alex Flynn, Maïté Maskens and Jonas Tinius (dir.) Special Issue "Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity"

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Special Issue "Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity"

Editorial

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Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity.

Ruy Blanes, Alex Flynn, Maïté Maskens and Jonas Tinius

Rationale and context

1 The editors began discussing this special issue in 2014 through a serendipitous encounter. Ruy and Maïté were interested in the possibility of promoting an anthropology of utopia, and simultaneously an anthropology as utopia. Alex and Jonas, working on anthropological approaches to contemporary artistic practices, were seeking to develop the theorising potential of relational art. The immanent space of connection was, precisely, the concept of “micro-utopia”. In our discussions, several questions, problems, and challenges emerged about the relevance of micro-utopias for an anthropology of art in particular, but also for an anthropological agenda concerned with core themes of the disciplines, among them agency, creativity, and relationality.

2 As editors based in three different continents, we have selected a range of texts that are situated in starkly different fields. We have therefore been faced with challenges of anthropological comparison: how to synthesise distributed anthropological and local expertise? This special issue proposes to render plastic key artistic theories and concepts that help to situate and compare different field sites, with the aim of rethinking core anthropological theory, while also striving to respect the specificities of the contexts and distinct vocabularies of the case studies discussed. In this introduction, we propose a preliminary cartography of the concept of micro-utopias in art practice and anthropological theory of art. We are, however, wary of sidelining art practice and theory as a sub-discipline or niche area of anthropological inquiry. Instead, we show how micro-utopias - as one example of an ethnographic concept - can feed back into anthropological theory itself and inform some key concepts that have been central to the discipline since its various inceptions.

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3 From an anthropological point of view, framing art as a social experience would be sufficient justification for a disciplinary heuristic construction. The anthropology (or rather, anthropologies) of art that we propose goes much further. It entails engaging with art historical and art theoretical themes and concepts, especially if we acknowledge the reflexivity and professional expertise characteristic of the milieus of contemporary art. In this manner, we propose a synthetic way of approaching art, namely as itself a highly reflexive field premised on expertise that can contribute productively to anthropological thinking and practice. This is, we wish to stress, distinct from acknowledging that one is like the other. Instead we suggest that they are “on speaking terms”, as suggested by Schneider (2015: 23) following Clifford (1988: 126), and therefore capable of productive dialogue.

4 As such, this is an interdisciplinary special issue that recognises the specificity of contemporary art practitioners as professionals who produce knowledge and engage with such expertise. Our account therefore presents a perspective regarding certain forms and milieus of artistic production, those characterised by reflection and theorising capacities, links to universities, politics, or markets, and an interest in the contemporary - be it through forms of production that are laboratory- or experiment- based or through a link to our present times. On one level, this anthropological perspective on art therefore takes art into its modern chapter, and beyond, in an attempt to update anthropology on what has happened in art practice and theory since the mid-twentieth century (see Svašek 2007). On another level, we also wish to stimulate a discussion with the strong current of anthropological thinking on art that stresses the “making”, “crafting”, or “experience” of art at the expense of its historicising and theorising potential and interest (see Ingold 2015).

5 Contemporary anthropologies of art cannot just theorise for their informants. As anthropologists in this field, we are faced with highly reflexive expert interlocutors who put forward their own theoretical agenda, often on similar, if not conflicting, epistemological terrain. Rather than seeing this as a problem or a conflict, we regard such encounters of intellectual observation and theoretical reflexivity as a productive challenge to illuminate the status quo and to anticipate the future of anthropological scholarship (see Boyer 2001, 2008; and Tinius, this issue). Inasmuch as we show how anthropology can both “learn about” the value of artistic concepts from its practitioners and thus “learn from it, and so as to reflect upon and enlarge our own understanding and judgement” (Laidlaw 2014: 214), our project sees links to that of the anthropology of ethics and gender, which developed as a dialogue with theorising agents whose practices are not just alternatives to, but alternatives for us.

6 We also take inspiration from Roger Sansi’s recent contribution to the relationship between anthropology, art, and the gift (2014), to recognise that the study of aesthetics and art theory today no longer has much in common with the “the Western art cult of aesthetics as an ideology” (Gell 1999). Theoretical developments within specific artistic circles and worlds - from one of which we borrow the key term of this special issue - have critiqued this cult repeatedly, and rigorously. The notion that “art is a modern form of religion and aesthetics its theology, just as museums are its temples and artists its priests” (Sansi 2015: 67) has been challenged in many ways by artists as much as by art critics, ranging from Adorno’s notion of “negative aesthetics” to Duchamp and the Situationist movement, or contemporary forms of institutional critique and laboratory paradigms (see Macdonald and Basu 2007).

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7 As suggested earlier, in addition to updating anthropology to the self-critical and theoretically reflexive milieus of contemporary artistic practice (even beyond taking on “a decidedly modern approach to art”, Sansi 2008: 203), we also wish to indicate how the conceptual developments in these fields can return to anthropology. One only need think of terms such as “mana”, “hau”, and “potlatch” to observe how local and specific lexicons of knowledge have made lasting impacts on the anthropological endeavour, far beyond the ethnographic contexts in which they were elaborated (see Graeber and da Col 2011). In this sense, our contention is that certain artistic concepts put forward synthetic analytic propositions that can throw light on key anthropological theories. This does not gloss over the inevitable differences between anthropology and art: anthropological and artistic theory may be on “speaking terms”, but as knowledge practices they are still embedded within an “uneven hermeneutic field” (Schneider 2013) and the contributions to this special issue reflect on and explore this. We proceed not by positing similarity, but by exploring productive analogies (see Geertz 1980); and we look to art as a way to reflect back on anthropological theory and practice.

8 As a point of departure for this conversation, we chose the curatorial proposition of “micro-utopias” and instances of relational art as an example of a canonised but provocative concept from the artistic field that prompts three principal questions of relevance to this issue and the wider intervention we propose. First, how do artists engage with art theory and therefore how do their negotiations become part of and constitute art as a dynamic theoretical field? Second, how can micro-utopias (as an example of such artistic theorisation) become an analytic beyond what might be considered part of art worlds? And third, how can such dynamic theorisations feed back into anthropological concepts and practice? The framework of this special issue, and the contributions we have assembled, respond to and engage with this concept by throwing light on anthropological thinking about subjectivity, the negotiation of meaning, post-democracy, citizenship and the state, self-cultivation, exchange, and methodology.

Anthropology, utopias, and micro-utopias

9 The first major challenge of this special issue is thus to expand upon the complicated distinction between the idea of utopia and the concept of micro-utopia, as proposed by the curator and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Relational Aesthetics (2002 [1998]).1 As we know, the idea of utopia has a long history in Western philosophical thought, predominantly as a concept of political theory, literature, and praxis towards discussions on governance, communal living, and well-being. This conceptual genealogy famously began with Thomas More's Utopia (1516), a debate of political philosophy concerning an “ideal society” (the fictional island of Utopia, located in the “New World”) and its political organisation, which is currently seeing a range of recontextualisations in art and anthropology due to its 500th anniversary, including the Somerset House 'Utopia2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility' series of events in London. More's book thus explicitly inaugurated a field of thought that included a fictional and representational recourse in order to convey an argument towards the possibility of a “new”, “different”, “alternative” form of commonwealth.

10 However, and perhaps more implicitly, it also advanced a specific literary “genre”: that of writing about politics and society using a “proto-ethnographic” style that combines

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observation and reflexivity, through the words of Hythloday, the narrator who describes the society (see Claeys 2010; Maskens and Blanes 2016). From this perspective, utopia became more than philosophical conceptualisation; it became a method of speculation and part of an artistic range of “technology of the imagination” (Holbraad et al. 2009).

11 Most evident among 19th century intellectuals, philosophers, and artists, utopia moved beyond the realm of political philosophy to inform practices of artistic creation and creative epistemologies. Dating from its first use in his unfinished Bildungsroman titled Heinrich von Ofterdingen by the influential Romantic author Novalis, the symbol of the blue flower (blaue Blume) has found its way into the writings, for example, of E.T.A. Hofmann, Goethe, or even Walter Benjamin, for whom it represented a quasi- unattainable desire or hope: a utopian feeling or place. Since the 19th century, we have also witnessed for instance the emergence of a utopian literary genre, of architecture and urban design, music, and aesthetic theory. Within this framework, the “art” of utopia is also and simultaneously methodology, heuristics, and politics. Charles Renouvier, the 19th century libertarian philosopher, aptly exemplified this with his theory of “uchronia” (1876), a formulation towards thinking about history not as it happened, but as it did not happen and as it could have happened. This formulation, although produced at the Bureau de la Critique Philosophique in Paris, provoked a particular form of literary imagination: the possibility of alternative temporalities and the speculation of different realities. To be more precise, this is the literary backbone of what would be known in the twentieth century as the genres of Science-Fiction and dystopian fiction, populated by oeuvres such as Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy (1888), H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), or George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 (1949).

12 We can also find similar appearances of utopian imagination in the realm of music theory and production, such as Ernst Bloch's musical philosophy. In The Spirit of Utopia (2000 [1923]), for example, he famously discussed the utopian imagination as central to the act of musical creation (see also Korstvedt 2010; Zabel 1990): How do we hear ourselves at first? As an endless singing-to-oneself, and in the dance. Both are still nameless. They have no life in themselves, and no one personally gave them form. Where one encounters them, they possess the appeal of every originary beginning. (2000 [1923]: 34-35)

13 In his cryptic depiction of the "history of music", Bloch makes use of an understanding of utopia as a “drive” that binds imagination and creation. What these various examples illustrate is how utopia, as a political concept, exceeds the realm of political theory, and has become, over the course of the 19th and 20th century, part of realms beyond the political imagination. Modernism, and its relation with modernity (Jameson 2005; Bronner 2012), is a case in point.

14 Nicolas Bourriaud, a central figure for this introduction and issue, arrives at the concept of utopia very explicitly through a Bourdieusian notion of power and agency (2002 [1998]: 26) and without reference to the above-mentioned genealogies. Stemming from his curatorial work with certain artists of the 1990s, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes the concept of “everyday micro-utopias” (ibid: 31) to conceptualise certain distinct features of art practices, which he describes as collective, relational, and contextualized endeavours, focusing on the concrete inter-relations among artists and audience members (see, in this respect Roger Sansi's Afterword to this issue). These social interstices, he argues, have become the focus of “relational art”, whose principles

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of participation and relationality have indeed since become some of the most prevalent notions to describe contemporary art. Bourriaud, in his dual role of art critic and theoretician, surveyed late twentieth century artistic practices and the growing body of socially-based art work to advance a theory of art that takes as its model “the flexible processes governing ordinary life” (2002 [1998]: 47). In his programmatic work on the subject of what he calls “relational aesthetics”, he elaborates various definitions of art practices that are inherently relational, because they pose a perspective on art that is “taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context” (ibid: 14).

15 Bourriaud's proposal did not emerge from a vacuum; he reacted explicitly against mainstream interpretations of art that either framed it as a product of an individual imagination or within wider macro-temporal movements and trends (e.g. baroque, neoclassical, etc.). As others before him, his work took place in a “tradition” of French social thought (from Fourier, to André Breton and the Situationist International) reacting against abstract utopianism by proponing concrete actualization of the utopian impulse into everyday life but also against an aleatory frontier between art and the everyday (see Gardiner 1995). He also understands relational art as a critique of the objectification of social relations, which he attests to the late twentieth century; artworks that focus on the creation of concrete instances of intersubjective and social encounters, in his view, arguably provoke a glimpse into a democratic, “micro-utopian” space. Inspired by philosopher Félix Guattari's ideas of micropolitics and politics of proximity, as well as by the Marxian notion of social interstice, Bourriaud framed relational aesthetics as a process of creation that takes the creation of social encounters into the sphere of the otherwise private encounter with art-objects in an art gallery of museum.2 Art is thus a social means and end, and is not confined to artists themselves, or the objects they produce. Bourriaud's concern was therefore one that could allow for a critical understanding of art practice within a situated, historically, and politically informed context. Moreover, from this perspective, relational art becomes legible as a “social environment”. Within this framework, micro-utopias appear as (artistic, political) statements that result from the "neighbourhood interactions" of our everyday lives, from the ability to imagine and create in the local sphere, responding to concrete political questions of the present. Bourriaud is thus interested in utopia as a “device” to move away from the abstract and locate the concrete, political component of the micro-dimension of social life, the structures and flows of power and production that conform our everyday lives: This is what I call utopias of proximity, those apparently anonymous operations that relate to elements of everyday life, but which clearly and forcefully reveal the power relations, the relations of production. (La Chance 2002: 43; our translation)

16 Bourriaud's notion of utopias of proximity thus reveals an interesting anthropological concern with the concrete, the material and the everyday. This micro-realm is thus one of emergence and concretisation of utopias, which are located in a space of concrétude, instead of a commonsensical space of an unreal ideal. From this perspective, Bourriaud appears close to what other researchers of utopia have defined as "real utopias" (Wright 2009), "everyday utopias" (Cooper 2014), or even "nowtopias" (Carlsson & Manning 2010). So, instead of thinking in terms of imagined Shangri-las, Vallhallas, or Waldens, Bourriaud points, through Guattari's microscopic, molecular (1977) angle, towards the community and neighbourhood as spaces where utopias can be actualised (2002: 31). However, Bourriaud seems less interested in defining the space of utopian

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relationality as a prefiguration, but instead, as an interstice, a transience into a context of creation and poïesis (2002: 70). Thus, utopia becomes fundamentally an expression of practical politics, as we will discuss further below.

17 Bourriaud's microcosmic utopia also unearths the problem of the “art” of events and their role in social life. Whereas art is oftentimes framed in terms of concretising moments (events, performances, artefacts, objects), thinking through interstitial relationality pushes us into rethinking their role within the process of creativity. Thus, if the contributions included in this special issue initially refer to “productions” - theatre plays, film-making, musical shows, exhibits -, they also go beyond the analysis of such productions “in their own terms”, depicting the sociality of artistic interaction, thus contributing to an emerging anthropology of creation and creativity that goes beyond art (Pandian 2015).

18 Bourriaud's concepts of micro-utopias and relational aesthetics are “good theories”. But they are good not because of the correctness of their content (obviously subject to debate), but in the sense proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his The Savage Mind (1962). They are good to think with, because of the reactions, reflections, and critique that they spurred, not only in art theory (see e.g. Bishop 2004), but across disciplines. In this special issue, we pick up on the emerging debate concerning relational aesthetics within anthropology (Sansi 2014; Flynn 2015), focusing on the notion of micro-utopias as a case in point. We challenged anthropologists working on art and creativity to see how they would react to Bourriaud's concept in the framework of their own ongoing ethnographic studies, inherently relational in their essence (Maskens and Blanes 2016). Such an endeavour, in any case, requires further reflection on what is understood by “relational art” within the wider spectrum of contemporary art practice.

Cartographies of relational art

19 The concept of the micro-utopia as elaborated by Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics is embedded within specific art historical understandings of participatory art practice. An important starting point is Hal Foster’s understanding of “the artist as ethnographer” (1996) - later popularised as “the ethnographic turn” in contemporary art (see Siegenthaler 2013). Through its emphasis on subjectivities and communities beyond institutional spaces, Foster’s theoretical approach has been located as an important precursor, but also analytic, of what has variously been termed social, relational, participatory, community, or activist art (Foster 1996). Tom Finkelpearl (2014) foregrounds a different perspective on the genealogy of the participatory, highlighting the political processes that engendered mass mobilisation around civil rights and feminism, and the connections therein to aesthetic realisations and instantiations of these struggles. Grant Kester echoes Finkelpearl’s emphasis on extra-institutional collectives seeking change, arguing that the collaborative practices often associated with participatory art have “performed a defensive function” (2011: 4) against a hostile and reactionary art establishment since the 1960s. Citing Situationist International as an example, Kester suggests that such groups built on the collective traditions of the interwar years, as enacted by the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, a connection that Sansi elaborates in his recent book on anthropology, art, and the gift (2015). Claire Bishop focuses similarly on interventions that proposed political reconfiguration, although she widens her focus to include actions and programmes that were directly or

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indirectly associated with the state. In Artificial Hells (2012), Bishop’s analysis centres on three particular moments in the European avant-garde: Italian Futurism; post-1917 Russia; and André Breton’s Paris Dada (2012: 41). For her edited collection Participation (2012), however, the cover pointedly displays an image of “Baba Antropofágica” a work by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. This connection to Brazil’s Neo-concrete movement is important to the trajectory of participatory art, as artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark’s body of practice has created a longstanding interest in how the spectator as agent can engage with art objects. Clark’s series of Bichos, created in the early 1960s, places a particular responsibility on the viewer of an art object to become an interactive agent, destabilising the porous boundaries that are the subject of this collection. However, perhaps one of the most interesting analyses of the “social turn” in contemporary art has been put forward by Shannon Jackson, in her insistence that such works have a “fundamental interest in the nature of sociality” (2011: 2). Jackson’s reading encourages us to analyse such “post-optical” object making through the lens of performance: art thus becomes “a site of group coordination in space and over time” (ibid: 3).

20 In this very brief cartography, what becomes clear is an art historical preoccupation with classification and in some senses, appropriation, of what can, and what cannot be considered as an art object worthy of consideration. Such categorisations are freighted with judgments: “community art” has long been relegated beneath other practices, almost to the level of “artisanal” practice, a long way distant from “conceptual” works which can be legitimately made part of museum's collections. Such categories and valorisations are not our focus in this special issue, and as Alex Flynn’s discussion of Liberate Tate’s The Gift makes clear, the extent to which inclusion in a canonical art historical tradition is welcome, or indeed, sought, by practitioners of participatory art is debatable (see Flynn, this issue).

21 In his entry on “Participatory Art” for the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2014), Tom Finkelpearl argues for a broad three-way division: relational, activist, and antagonistic. He proposes that although there are important differences between, respectively, the artist Rikrit Tiravanija cooking Pad Thai in an art gallery Untitled (Free) (1992), instances of citizens taking the initiative to create an architectonic intervention in their neighbourhood, and Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people (1999), what links these works is the idea that what is at stake is the possibility of intersubjectivity and the instantiation of relations. While Finkelpearl’s categorisation is extremely helpful, what is important in any anthropological analysis of such diverse art objects and practitioners, (as opposed to art historical categories) are questions that relate to sociality: for example, notions of instantiation; axes of verticality and horizontality; political intention; and/or modes of practice/work. Here we propose three heuristic categories premised on dimensions of conceptualisation and realisation, each producing different kinds of relations and meanings, that foreground how participatory art experiments can differ, irrespective of their art historical status.

22 The first dimension includes works that can be thought of as characterising Bourriaud’s paradigm of relational aesthetics or equally the more “antagonistic” practices described by Claire Bishop. These projects are conceived of by an individual but rely on the presence of a group of people to activate the work. Liam Gillick’s oft-quoted comment on his practice makes this clear:

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My work is like the light in the fridge. It only works when there are people to open the fridge door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else – stuff in a room. (Gillick 2000: 16)

23 Note the emphasis here on Gillick’s possessive pronoun “my”. The work remains his, despite the fact that without the activation of other people it is just “stuff in a room”. This question of authorship is important as it foregrounds an obvious tension between dimensions of creativity: the work is conceptualised individually, but activated collectively. Notwithstanding, the credit, percentages, and other facets of authorship remain with the artist-conceiver.

24 A second dimension can be drawn precisely from the idea of the act of conceptualisation. While Gillick puts forward a work that is “his”, contractually, intellectually, and emotionally, much participatory art is developed through networks and collaborations with curators, collaborators, and artist-peers. The notion of a “pure” individual creation, a persistent and most recently Romantic ideology, puts forward creativity as the “solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value - most emblematically in the field of art - by highly exceptional and gifted individuals” (Wilf 2014: 398). This concept, which became a founding stone of Western art institutions is now largely disregarded in the anthropological literature. However, as a discourse, it persists in contemporary art criticism and curatorial practice: the apocryphal account of Charles V kneeling to receive Titian’s brush at the artist’s atelier is well mobilised by Grant Kester in his examination of this paradigm, highlighting the celebrity and aura that has embedded itself in understandings of artistic practice and creation (2011: 3). As such, we do not wish to suggest here that art projects can be conceived of entirely “individually” as in the first dimension, but the inclusion of multiple actors into processes of conceptualisation is a question of degree and foregrounds the notion of a distributed creativity, mobilised at the stage of planning of the work (see Schuiling and Tinius, this issue). In this second dimension, these projects, may or may not have activist connotations, but through discussion groups, seminars, lectures, and instances of the autonomous university that characterises active contemporary art scenes, an idea may be developed, shared, commented on and revised, before being realised, again by an individual, depending on the activation of a collective.

25 The third dimension extends this idea of distributed creativity to its logical extent: the inclusion of the collective. In this understanding a work is conceptualised, but also realised collectively by the same people. In this manner, the dynamics of the activation of the work are embedded in how the work has been created, resulting in a hierarchy of decision making that may be more horizontal and open to diversity than the first two dimensions. Although this model may be identified with “community art” projects, it can also be localized in the work of artists or projects with more openly activist intentions, like Artúr van Balen, who was invited to work in collaboration with activist groups during the general strike in Barcelona in 2012. In groups of collective decision- making, thinking through what might represent an apt symbol of protest eventually resulted in a huge inflatable cobblestone. In the street protests that followed this object played on the interstice between interactivity, public sculpture and an aestheticised politics, being activated by the same collective (and others) who had participated in its conceptualisation and construction. In this manner, a horizontal framework of decision-making emerges and the consequences for the relations and meanings that are produced from such a process provides a pathway to a more anthropological analysis.

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This brief cartography serves merely to contextualise the specific placing of relational, or participatory art theory that underlines the contributions to this volume. In the following articles, the tensions surrounding hierarchy, creation and the creator/ activator will become clearer, and we hope that this may lead to further work on this topic.

What kinds of relations?

26 In his programmatic book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud defines “relational (art)” as: A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 113)

27 The attested focus of these art practices and their theoretical conceptualisation, from which we draw the core notion of this special issue, is explicitly human-focused, leaving aside and deliberately going beyond a vision of art as object or material. One of the obvious questions that could be levelled against Bourriaud’s understanding of relations, thus, is that it neglects the complex composition of relationality and distributed agency (see Gell 1998). As Marilyn Strathern has pointed out in a variety of contexts (1995; 1996), relations and networks are composed of a variety of objects, people, and ideas, many of which have differentiated agencies. As she writes, in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s suggestion of sociology as the “tracing of associations” (2005: 5): A network is an apt image for describing the way one can link or enumerate disparate entities without making assumptions about level or hierarchy. Points in a narrative can be of any material or form, and network seems a neutral phrase for interconnectedness. (Strathern 1996: 522)

28 The human (body), for her, counts as one such “‘network’ of materials … for it gives off diverse signals, revealing skill, charisma and pathology” (ibid: 520). Different from Actor-Network Theory, however, she is interested in noting that relations are not just endlessly and effortlessly created; they are mediated, hierarchically ordered, and even severed, or “cut”. Indeed, as with the term network, the notion of a relation also “seems a neutral phrase for interconnectedness” (ibidem, p. 522).

29 If relations are not only composite and hierarchical, but also mediated and subject to different orders of control, then surely the question that should be posed to relational artworks is: what kind of relations are created in such an aesthetics? What kind of relations and subjectivities are facilitated or inhibited in specific “micro-utopian” encounters? In his article on the cultivation of fictional characters in refugee theatre, Jonas Tinius raises a number of similar challenges with relational aesthetics, demanding that we subject it to an ethnographic interrogation. As anthropologists, he argues, we are trained to observe and qualify the complex nature of relationality and the constitution of subjectivity, and it is in the experimental settings of rehearsals and other creative social processes that we can observe, challenge, and revise theories of relationality through art. He also connects the conversation on “relationality” with an emerging anthropological discussion on detachment, distance, and reflection - concepts that have long been central to understanding artistic creation (see Adell 2016; Candea et al. 2015).

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30 For Bourriaud, relational art practices are a reaction against a specific change in the way (western) society organises relations in the late twentieth century. “These days”, he writes, “the social bond has turned into a standardised artefact” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 9). In Western capitalist society today, Bourriaud claims, “human relations are no longer ‘directly experienced’” (ibid.). Therefore, “the most burning issue” for contemporary artists would have to be whether “it is still possible to generate relationships with the world” (ibid.). Driven by scepticism about the experience of intersubjective relations and the arguable commoditisation of subjectivity - an argument that is inspired explicitly by his aforementioned relation to the philosophy of Guattari - Bourriaud “observes” that “artistic praxis appears these days to be a rich loam for social experiments” that work towards creating “hands-on utopias” (2002 [1998]: 9). This relates to observations made in other fields of art history and theory, such as Shannon Jackson’s insistence on the interest in “the nature of sociality” (2011: 2) discussed in the previous section. What renders Bourriaud’s observations both problematic and intriguing is that he redirects art back to fundamental questions beyond art. Artistic practice, in a move not coincidentally echoing Situationist and Fluxus, focuses on realms that are beyond itself, which try to move the scope of art beyond its definitional realm, to dissolve the boundaries framed for it within institutional and disciplinary settings.

31 It will strike most readers as paradox that an artistic movement or paradigm that emerged within particularly powerful western institutional traditions - defined by a particularly powerful western institutional figurehead and critic - should have as its focus the dissolution of such frames. The critic who has most aptly captured this problematic side of relational aesthetics is CUNY professor of art history Claire Bishop. She questioned the supposedly “democratic concern that informs [relational art]” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 57), arguing that the “temporary collective form that it produces” (ibid: p. 61) is not a sphere of “sphere association” (ibid.), but one of hierarchy and power. She noted that when we look at so-called relational, social, or participatory art today, it is not enough simply to posit the production of relations or encounters; we ought to ask what kinds of relations they engender. Who is the subject or agent? Who the recipient or pawn played in an institutional context? What forms of participatory oppression, scripted social cohesion, or “artificial hells” may it provoke (Bishop 2012; Cook and Kothari 2001)?

The problem of creativity

32 As an art critic, Bourriaud is, we believe, ultimately interested in a theory of creativity that addresses the process of artistic creation and production. Within this framework, his invocation of the concept of utopia into micro-utopias responds not only to a concern with politics, but also with a dimension of imagination, fabric, and production. From this perspective, relational aesthetics has important theoretical implications for classical anthropological fields of enquiry such as personhood, agency, and relationality. As suggested above, Bourriaud’s concern with proximity and micropolitics not only embeds artistic processes into the social, but also shifts the locus of creativity into the social process.

33 From this particular perspective, Bourriaud’s theory speaks to Alfred Gell’s theories of art (1998) insofar as they conceptualise art objects as embedded in a nexus of social

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relations. However, here there is a lesser concern with the material objects and artefacts per se, which may be an outcome of artistic agency, but instead, as discussed in the previous section, with the people and the effects of the relationships they build in collective contexts. From this perspective, Gell’s theory of creativity refers to art and art making, but in performative terms, as actions and productions that affect and change the agents involved (through virtuous technique and abduction) rather than just replicating and encoding it through symbolic propositions. Art and art objects are thus seen on par with the persons that create and appreciate them, from creators and prototypes to basically “everywhere” (1998: 35), and thus constitute undetachable processes. And precisely, such forms and materialities emerge and incorporate agency from the creativity of social life, that which can be observed in the micro-politics of the everyday.

34 Here, we are tempted to see such socialized creativity as what Ingold and Hallam (2008) described as “improvisation”, the generative, relational, transitory and productive way in which “people (...) work it out as they go along” (2008: 1). From their perspective, social life is embedded with “improvisational creativity”, by which imagination and performance become a conjunction towards our perception of life as constantly “in the making”. While we find it easy to agree with this proposition that envelopes life with dynamics and transformation, and we embrace the co-participatory character of improvisation, we are also interested in art forms and expressions as intentional productions of voluntary association and creations of proximity. Here, universes of meaning become historical, contextual, oftentimes genealogical. This is the case, for instance, of the Dutch improvising musical collective known as Instant Composers Pool, discussed by Floris Schuiling (this issue), which was founded in the mid-1960s very explicitly as a “counter-culture”. It is also the case of art-making initiatives designed as forms of community-making in post-disaster L’Aquila in Italy, described in this issue by Jan-Jonathan Bock.

35 In sum, we are interested in a middle ground between conceptions of art and creativity as commodified, impersonal productions, and, on the other hand as pure, unintentional improvisations. Bourriaud’s micro-utopia offers this possibility, precisely because it also allows us to incorporate the utopian element of art as a “process”, and simultaneously locate it within historical and political contexts. In this respect, Richard Howells (2015) suggested, following Ernst Bloch, that our expectations and prospects of “better worlds yet to come” (2015: 1) are embedded not in political tracts, but in art, literature and popular culture (see also Jameson 2005) and as such in actualised, albeit fictional, realities. Howells notes in addition that the location of the “wishful” in our everyday lives appears not so much in artistic genre, representation or figuration, but instead in “design”, in the process of the materialisation of imagination.

The problem of political agency

36 As stated above, Bourriaud's elaboration of micro-utopias incorporates an explicit understanding of art practices as agentive political, both in terms of their materiality and potential: How is it possible to transform the world from scratch and rebuild a society which would be totally different? I think that is totally impossible and what artists are trying to do now is to create micro-utopias, neighborhood utopias, like talking to

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your neighbor, just what’s happening when you shake hands with somebody. This is all super political when you think about it. That’s micro-politics.3

37 Anthropologists of art and performance have long identified this political configuration. Turner and Schechner's theories of performance were informed by notions of social drama, implying the recognition of the rituality, spectacle and audience factors of artistic creativity, to the extent of a speculation around the idea of the “anthropology” of performance - not as a disciplinary approach to performance, but understanding performance in itself as a form of “anthropology” (see Turner 1987), a poetics or poïesis that is inevitably enveloped in history and politics. This is the case debated by one of the contributors to this volume, Sophie Reichert, in her discussion of the performative production of “archives” in Chicago. From this perspective, we can think of Guy Debord’s Situationist manifestos as a case in point in what concerns ideas of “intervention” and “protest” as part of the economy of the art world. More recently, we have the interesting case described by Alexei Yurchak (2008) on the “inevitability” of politicized art, in his discussion of the “politics of indistinction” in late Soviet Russia.

38 However, to claim that art is politics is not much more than stating the obvious. What is more interesting is to enquire in what terms this is so. Jonas Tinius’ contribution to this issue addresses this critique through an ethnographic case study on the cultivation of a detached subjectivity in refugee theatre rehearsals. He does so by recourse to one of the major critiques raised against Bourriaud's theory from art historian Claire Bishop (2004), who noted the absence of plurality and antagonistic politics in her discussion of relational aesthetics. Bishop argued that these art practices do not produce democratic relations but instead build on mechanisms of exclusion that don’t address the antagonism and inequality in the process of art production pertinent to “the divided and incomplete subject of today” (2004: 79). Furthermore, one cannot propose a political approach without qualifying in what terms this politics is played out. In other words, a micro-approach requires an invitation to the concrete, and Alex Flynn’s analysis of contemporary art interventions takes up the Bourriaud - Bishop debate, arguing how Bishop’s “concrete”, or rather, “antagonism” might itself limit plurality (this volume). Roger Sansi has also addressed this debate in his book Art, Anthropology and the Gift (2014), albeit from a different perspective, in criticizing Bourriaud’s insertion of utopia “within” art - thus removing its political agency, in contradiction with the micro-utopian project in itself - and advocating the indistinction of art and life (2014: 157). To demonstrate this, Sansi incorporates the problem of “crisis” as it emerged within the European Union project, once the utopian space of “collective experimentation” (Latour 2011) but now, as Sansi proposes, a scenery of movements and processes that unfold “prototypes” (Corsín 2013), new ways of imagining and acting upon the world.

39 Our point, however, is not just of rendering the politics of art, but also the art of politics, understood sensu lato, in our micro-political everydays. This is precisely what Davina Cooper explores in her book Everyday Utopias: “networks and spaces that perform regular daily life” (2014: 2). This performance is artistic inasmuch as it “opens up” possibilities for new social configurations, new expectations and temporalities, new materialities. As with Sansi's and Bourriaud's proposals, it is the experiment that opens the space for transformative politics, oriented towards more egalitarian, liberated, free, democratic lifestyles. This is the work of art and the work of utopia.

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Contributions and structure of the special issue

40 In his article “Rehearsing Detachment”, the anthropologist Jonas Tinius takes us into the rehearsal processes for a critical interactive and site-specific refugee theatre project in the postindustrial German Ruhr Valley. His contribution responds to Nicolas Bourriaud’s account of the poetic function of relational art, which according to relational aesthetics “consists in re-forming worlds of subjectivization” (2002 [1998]: 104). Tinius challenges and complements this account by providing an ethnographic description of what he terms “dialectical fiction”. This notion describes actors’ cultivation of detachment and reappropriation of subjectivity during theatre rehearsals by building up fictional characters. By inviting refugee actors to introduce abstract and fictitious characters into their reflections on acting and cultivation of an acting conduct, the project he discusses aspired to what its director called theatre’s “impossible political utopia”: a situation in which refugees are not framed as “authentic” vulnerable victims “acting themselves”, but as creative agents capable of playfully negotiating their political subjectivities in a collectively reflected context of social creativity.

41 The trained musicologist Floris Schuiling, who conducted fieldwork on musical creation, offers a critical take on relational aesthetics from the perspective of “relational musicology”. Discussing the emergence of this relatively new field at the intersection between musicology and ethnomusicology, Schuiling argues that it shares fundamental concerns with relational aesthetics, first and foremost the question: how do artistic and musical practices shape social relations? His article elaborates the role of “utopia” in music theory and scholarship, submitting the notion of creativity and improvisation to a critique of Bourriaud’s concept of micro-utopia. Schuiling’s intervention is based on an ethnographic research project on the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra, an improvising collective based in Amsterdam that has built a global reputation as one of the most innovative groups in improvised music. In his analysis, he raises questions about the extent to which music as a social practice, the institutions and social organisation of art music, and the hierarchies and forms of interaction present in particular musical practices dominated the activities of both composers and improvising musicians, attending to the role of hierarchy and authority in supposedly “free” creative settings.

42 Alex Flynn’s article analyses the notion that social movement politics and contemporary art interventions increasingly traverse a porous boundary, be it in terms of practices, relations, or institutions. The chapter highlights remarkable resonances between the paradigm of relational aesthetics and the ethnography of prefigurative and antiauthoritarian direct action politics, before moving to initiate a dialogue with politically engaged artistic experiments in São Paulo. The chapter argues that an analysis that foregrounds ephemerality, the “absolute centrality of diversity”, and different forms of dissonance, allows us to grasp how subjectivity is elaborated and meaning created in the increasingly shared micro-utopias of social mobilisation and contemporary art.

43 Anne-Sophie Reichert focuses ethnographically on a performance art group (Every house has a door, from Chicago) to incorporate a further element of discussion in what concerns relational art: its diachronicity, and the place of memory, archive and temporality in the recognition of (radical) political potential in performance. Using the

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body as locus, she suggests that relationality, while exceeding self-contained individuality, can also exert normativity and therefore political statement through “encounter-based collaboration” - echoing Anna Tsing's recent monograph (2015). Her conclusion is that we need to understand the conditions and protocols through which collaborative worlds emerge.

44 Jan-Jonathan Bock illustrates this conundrum in his analysis of artistic creation in post- disaster contexts. He focuses specifically on the region of L'Aquila, devastated by a massive earthquake in 2009, describing how art became part of the “cultural work” devised for the recovery of local inhabitants. If on the one hand, there was a political movement towards the use of communitarian artistic projects to deal with individual and collective distress, on the other, the kinds of artistic engagements that took place actually produced new forms of experience that focused more on ideas of enduring relationships and collective recovery, beyond the “obvious” ritualised, event-based production. This becomes an interesting utopian alternative to the mainstream, enjoyment-based cultural production that characterises contemporary art.

45 Neylan Bağcıoğlu takes this last point as a central problem in her article: the self- referential and provocative nature of stances of struggle against industrial or industrialized art. This is the case of Ahmet Öğüt's intervention “Intern VIP Lounge”, held in the Dubai Art Fair in 2013, which she discusses in detail. Her goal is to investigate the very utopian problem of artistic labour, and how it may, or may not, be conceived as an expression or manifestation of utopian worldview, either through ideologies of community, egalitarianism, and solidarity.

46 Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier’s chapter reframes the notion of the micro-utopia by presenting and analysing a virtual space through which artists are brought together and relations are elaborated. Through a series of video clips, in which musicians who have never met or worked together before collaborate, the chapter highlights the bearing of a virtual, distanced, and spatial reading of the relational aesthetic paradigm. In discussing the nature of these distant relations provoked by an anthropologist during the production of a project that aims to create points of connections between communities, the chapter also puts forward an innovative methodological proposition that is significant for the wider discipline.

47 Finally, the contribution by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado offers a “hands on approach” of relational practices, by taking the ethnographic endeavour in itself as a space of experimentation and collaboration. Using abundant irony and humour, Estalella and Sánchez Criado produce an ethnographic object named "Antropocefa", a kit that promises to solve the anthropologist's anxieties and moments of social participatory awkwardness in the course of his or her research. We are not given a price for this panacea, but we are given the opportunity to see, through such devices and productions, the artistic and relational dimensions of ethnographic work.

48 Together, these pieces enable a field of reflection within anthropology that we hope can be continued in subsequent occasions: the anthropology of art and creativity and the anthropology of utopias.

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NOTES

1. Throughout the texts of this issue, as well as in the several references we discuss, the reader may see reference to either “micro-utopias” or “microtopias”. In the English translation (2002) of Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Esthétique Relationelle (originally published in 1998), the chosen translation is “micro-utopias” - unlike in subsequent discussions by Bishop (2004) and Flynn (2015), for instance. In this special issue we choose to acknowledge both formulas as equally valid. 2. It should be noted that his intervention is still firmly located in a rather uncritical take on institutional authority - a position that has been critiqued elaborately by Néstor García Canclini (2014). 3. In http://www.stretcher.org/features/nicolas_bourriaud_and_karen_moss/. Retrieved 27 January 2016.

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AUTHORS

RUY BLANES University of Bergen [email protected]

ALEX FLYNN University of Durham [email protected]

MAÏTÉ MASKENS Université Libre de Bruxelles [email protected]

JONAS TINIUS University of Cambridge [email protected]

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Special Issue "Micro-utopias: anthropological perspectives on art, relationality, and creativity"

Articles

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Rehearsing Detachment: Refugee Theatre and Dialectical Fiction

Jonas Tinius

EDITOR'S NOTE

Date received: 2015-05-31 Date accepted: 2015-10-04

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article greatly benefitted from lively discussions before, during, and after the conference panel “Micro-utopias: exploring connections in anthropology, relationality and creativity” at SIEF2015 in Zagreb, Croatia. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article whose comments provided stimulating feedback.

Introduction: subjectivities and impossible utopias

1 Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in the post-industrial German Ruhr valley, this article provides an account of a theatre project in a former refugee camp in Mülheim. The artists who organised this project proposed to bring theatre to the attention of local authorities, who were at the time dealing with acute problems of accommodating and integrating refugees into the municipal community. Some of the core questions raised by this project were: how can theatre respond to vulnerable and traumatised subjects? What kinds of subjectivities is it able to restore; which new ones can it engender?

2 In a conversation with the project director Adem Köstereli, he remarked that the “impossible political utopia of refugee theatre” would be a situation in which the refugee was not marked off from other subjects of the state; where refugees were not

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confined to a single legal identity and reduced to a merely ‘tolerated’ precarious and bare life (in a publication, he explicitly referred to Agamben’s Homo Sacer 1998 [1995]). Adem insisted that the aspiration of the project was political and utopian; not because it shows just ‘how things really are’, but because it has the capacity to point to the non- existent and imagined, the eu-topia. The impossible political utopia of the project thus referred to a non-existent but desired situation in which actors would not be identified solely by recourse to the political category of the refugee. This utopian situation functioned as a central telos that affected its rehearsal process. Yet, it also described a political aim of the project that concerned its eventual audiences, since it sought to evoke a scenario in which it would be unclear if the actors were refugees, if their stories were real or fictitious.

3 Instead of merely documenting and re-creating the experience of refugees in the eerie post-industrial refugee camp that the project took as its performance venue, participants transformed the site itself into a place for the rehearsal of imagination where actors trained to merge their 'real' stories and imagined roles. In doing so, this project responded to and criticised a prominent political aesthetic of contemporary documentary theatre, which emphasises the authenticity of refugee actors ‘playing themselves’ (see Heinicke et al. 2015; Long 2015; Nikitin et al. 2014; Stegemann 2015). This critique raises a key question for anthropological studies of political art: what in our analyses of art projects with vulnerable actors can be gained from examining fiction and detachment, rather than identification and authenticity?

4 Rehearsals were the primary space and means to elaborate this relation of actors to their selves and thus form the central ethnographic prism through which I explore this subject. By focussing on the process rather than the impact of this theatre project, I wish to highlight subject-formation and intersubjective encounters as creative and also as laborious processes. Theatre with refugees, taught and experienced primarily through its rehearsals, became a type of method of learning, reflecting, and relating to others. For this reason I stress the working methodology in this article as the principal activity through which artists and participants repeatedly probed self-reflection and self-articulation in the context of a social, interactive realm. The work of the rehearsals can therefore be considered an artistic form of work on the self and on others in a social, interactive space with an ambiguous therapeutic telos. Working towards the “impossible political utopia of refugee theatre” through the rehearsing and training of what I term ‘dialectical fiction’, this project raised certain productive problems with the theme of this special issue. Can performance constitute “an effort involving the individual and collective reformation of lost subjectivity” and if so, how? (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 103). What is the relation between the ‘real world’ and an ‘imagined other world’ in the production of artistic encounters? How can artistic processes that focus on social encounters sustainably affect subject-formation if they remain confined to the temporary realm of artistic exhibitions or performances? What is the quality of the relations and the subjectivities that emerge in “micro-utopian” encounters?

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Micro-utopias, antagonism and political subjectivity

Micro-utopias

5 In the late 1990s, the French curator and art historian Nicolas Bourriaud elaborated a conceptual paradigm to understand new practices of political art that emerged in that decade. It appealed to anthropologists, and instigated an ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary arts practice, by producing ‘participatory’, ‘site-specific’, and ‘research- based’ artworks that dealt with the question of ‘everyday sociality’. He termed this new form of art ‘relational aesthetics’. In his programmatic book Relational Aesthetics, he defines ‘relational (art)’ as: A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 113)

6 Relational art practices have come about as a specific reaction to a fundamental societal change in the way intersubjective relations are organised in the late twentieth century. “These days”, he writes, “the social bond has turned into a standardised artefact” (ibid., p. 9). In Western capitalist society today, Bourriaud argues, “human relations are no longer ‘directly experienced’” (ibid.). For contemporary artists, he argues, “the most burning issue” therefore is whether “it is still possible to generate relationships with the world” (ibid.). Although it could be argued that this question has been fundamental to artistic practices and representation for decades, if not centuries (see Alloa 2015), Bourriaud proposes that contemporary political performance practices focus on a specific quality of intersubjectivity: “artistic praxis appears these days to be a rich loam for social experiments” that work towards creating “hands-on utopias” (2002 [1998]: 9).

7 These kinds of “everyday micro-utopias” (ibid., p. 31) facilitated by relational art practices are very different from previous artistic ideas of utopias, he argues, especially from the avant-garde experiments of the 1960s and their fights for imaginations of a different society. “Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world” (ibid., p. 13). The utopias developed by political artists today, Bourriaud suggests, are no longer about grand revolutions in the world, but about a small-scale and pragmatic “learning to inhabit the world in a better way” (ibid.). Put differently, “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist” (ibid., my emphasis). Therefore, the “substrate” of this new art “is formed by intersubjectivity” (ibid., p. 15). Intersubjectivity, in his view, is not merely a means to an end. “Being-together”, “the ‘encounter’ between beholder and picture”, or quite simply the “collective elaboration of meaning” are the actual focus and telos of relational art practices today (ibid.). The productions of his most famous exemplary relational artists consist in cooking meals for gallery-visitors (pad thai series by Rikrit Tiravanija, 1990) or other forms of critical human interaction (250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people by Santiago Sierra, 1999). Relational art, he writes, “is a state of encounter” (ibid., p. 18). And since the contemporary relational artist “embarks upon a dialogue” through the form of their artwork – the form being the kind of encounter created through art – the aim of relational art today “resides in the invention of relations” (ibid., p. 22). I engage this paradigm here because it provides an crucial backdrop to the participatory, research-based, and site-specific arts practices employed by Adem and

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his team to raise ethnographically challenging questions about the relational qualities of refugee theatre. Additionally, relational art raises key anthropological questions about the relations between art, ethnography, and sociality (see GDAT 2010: ‘The task of anthropology is to invent relations’, Venkatesan 2012). The critical reception of relational aesthetics brought to the fore significant challenges to artistic practices aimed at social encounters, which are relevant to my subsequent analysis.

Antagonism and political subjectivity

8 As with the praxis of relational aesthetics itself, Bourriaud frequently switches between descriptive observation and questionable normative evaluation. Thus, while “TV and literature” are seen to “refer each individual person to his or her space of private consumption” and “theatre and cinema” supposedly “bring small groups together before specific unmistakable images”, relational art practices are seen to be different because they “tighten the space of relations” (ibid., pp. 15-16). When he speaks of each particular artwork as a “proposal to live in a shared world” (ibid., p. 22), he therefore has particular artworks in mind, such as those produced by his protégé Rikrit Tiravanija, or Braco Dimitrijevic, Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster, and Felix Gonzalez- Torres, to name but a few. Those artists propose as artworks “moments of sociability” and “objects producing sociability” (ibid., p. 33).

9 Bourriaud’s observations are political insofar as they concern the definition of a relational context in advance – “so as to extract production principles from it” (ibid.). Relational art practices are not just disengaged gatherings entirely devoid of critical reflection. According to Bourriaud, one of the principal propositions of relational art is that “[t]he first question we should ask ourselves when looking at a work of art is: - Does it give me a chance to exist in front of it, or, on the contrary, does it deny me as a subject, refusing to consider the Other in its structure?” (ibid., p. 57).

10 Bourriaud here raises a fundamental political question about relational art, namely the extent to which it produces or inhibits the recognition of subjectivity. This is important since participatory art forms can also produce very powerful forms of semantic oppression, faux social cohesion where one should engage in critical dialogue, or even “artificial hells” (see Bishop 2012; Cook and Kothari 2001). What strikes Bourriaud in the work of relational artists, however, is “first and foremost, the democratic concern that informs it” (Bourriaud 2002: 57). He refers here to the supposedly transparent interactive possibilities enabled through relational art, “the temporary collective form that it produces” (ibid., p. 61). This effect, for him, is produced through social transparency and choice: “The aura of contemporary art is a free association” (ibid.).

11 The outline for a new art paradigm proposed in Relational Aesthetics has been subjected to numerous critiques from practitioners and scholars, most notably by Claire Bishop, CUNY Professor of Art History. She noted that the artistic practices described by Bourriaud insufficiently address “the divided and incomplete subject of today” (2004: 79), pointing out that when Bourriaud speaks of relational artists, he refers to educated and stable subjects. Given his explicit attention to fractured subjectivity and the commoditisation of relations, this overarching criticism initially appears redundant. She therefore suggests that when we look at political art today, we ought to consider the kinds of relations they engender. Who is the subject or actor, and what kinds of encounters are produced through art today? If for contemporary artists “it seems more

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pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows” (ibid., p. 45), then how can the relations we cultivate through theatre meaningfully continue beyond a performance into the future? If large-scale social revolutions are a relic of modernist avant-gardes, then what political aspirations are implied in the cultivation of relations in art today?

12 In addition, Bishop rightly points out that the “laboratory paradigm” promoted through hosting relational aesthetics by curators “including Maria Lind, Hans Ulbrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud” encourages temporary projects and the precarious working modalities it entails (ibid., p. 52). As she puts it, “project-based works-in-progress and artists-in-residence begin to dovetail with an ‘experience economy’, the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experiences” (ibid., see also Pine and Gilmore 1999). Bourriaud addresses these criticisms levelled against relational aesthetics with regard to their confinement to galleries and museums (Bourriaud 2002: 81). Nonetheless, Bishop is correct in problematising the institutional background structures within which relational aesthetics operates and which Bourriaud acknowledges only in a conveniently haphazard way (see ibidem, p. 109). “As Hal Foster warned in the mid-1990s, ‘the institution may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the spectacle, it collects the cultural capital, and the director- curator becomes the star’ ” (Foster 1996: 198 cited in Bishop 2004: 53).

13 In the most recent addition to anthropological scholarship on relational aesthetics, Roger Sansi (2015) has brought to attention that such a deliberate framing of artistic interventions questions the potency of their political aspirations. He asks whether art in institutional spaces does not render impossible “the aesthetic utopia to abolish the distinction between art and life, representation and practice, inside and outside?” (ibid., p. 157, see also Bürger 1984 [1974]). Two fundamental questions arise from this critique: If large-scale social revolutions are a relic of modernist avant-gardes, how does the production of subjectivity move beyond the immediate artistic encounter into sustained reflexive sociality? And secondly, if it is still possible to create meaningful micro-utopian encounters of intersubjective collectivity but only in artistic encounters, “are they still political projects?” (Sansi 2015: 157)

Dialectical fiction and rehearsed relations to the self

14 The following ethnographic account analyses the cultivation of detachment and fiction in refugee theatre. In doing so, it addresses a central shortcoming of relational aesthetics with the aim of adding a richer ethnographic understanding of reflexivity and subjectivity in participatory art. Further, this critique addresses patronage and support for a new generation of directors concerned with ‘applied theatre’ with marginal communities at the Theater, but it also shows how theatre that might be regarded as aimed purely at pedagogic or therapeutic ends contains a deeper concern for the cultivation of political reflexivity through art.

15 My principal contention with Bourriaud’s characterisation of political participatory art today is that it appears besides the point to posit its capacity to be “re-forming worlds of subjectivization” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 104) without asking whose subjectivities are reformed, or what worlds of subjectivisation are being construed in the process? On the one hand, this is a call for more detailed analyses of concrete artistic practices. On the

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other hand, my discontent is born of the observation that ‘thick’ relations are not the inevitable result of any artistic encounter. Relations can also be foreclosed, severed, or thinned out by intersubjective encounters as Marilyn Strathern variously showed to be the case in descriptions of social life (1996: 517). In order to understand the nature of the relations facilitated by artistic practices, I therefore appeal to more nuanced observations of relational formation through art. Who or what is capable of initiating relationality? Who or what is the subject of such relational sociality? This raises an important issue, rightly noted by Claire Bishop when she criticises Bourriaud for not paying sufficient attention to the kinds of relations and subjectivity addressed by relational art. She writes: The tasks facing us today are to analyze how contemporary art addresses the viewer and to assess the quality of the audience relations it produces: the subject position that any work presupposes and the democratic notions it upholds, and how these are manifested in our experience of the work. (2004: 78)

16 One possible and promising perspective that may shed light on relations and subjectivity is what I introduce in the following as the dialectical process of rehearsals and the engagement with the fictitious. By observing months-long rehearsal processes, I was able to note how refugee participants in Adem’s project trained to detach themselves from their personal and often traumatised or stigmatised identities by creating fragments of characters different from themselves. This process of first looking at oneself and treating oneself as a fictional ‘other’ in order, subsequently, to reappropriate a playfully amended version of oneself is part of a complex theatrical method I refer to as “dialectical fiction”.

17 My usage of the term ‘dialectical’ is inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical vocabulary. Most explicitly outlined in his “Short Organon” (2014 [1948]), Brecht drew on Marxist dialectical materialism to develop his version of epic theatre. According to this political philosophy, dialectics serves as a method for explaining social and historical change through economic contradictions and political conflicts. One of its prime sources, Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history, “codifies the spatial and temporal tensions [of interiority and exteriority] by interpreting human history as a process of ‘becoming’ or ‘actualization’ from within to without, from Spirit (Geist) into form … unfolding an inner logic of purpose into ever-more-complex forms of organic realization (System)” (Boyer 2005: 11).

18 The concept of dialectics appealed to Brecht due to its insistence on unpredictability, instability, and the prospect of change (see Barnett 2015: 22). Yet it also appealed to him as a view of human subjectivity that is in constant engagement with the social and political world. In Brecht’s theatrical practice, “dialectics is concerned with unpicking things that appear to be fixed, from the ways society is organised to the ways people think about themselves” (ibid., p. 24). It is crucial (albeit not necessarily intuitive) to understand that for Brecht this way of thinking about society and personal identity development through theatre “is able to make dialectics enjoyable” (“Short Organon”, 2014 [1948]: §45). Brecht does not understand enjoyment as simple entertainment; rather, “enjoyable dialectics” describes a form of playful education through theatre that does not offer ready-made answers, but stimulates reflexivity and subject- formation. In his discussion on the matter, Barnett offers the example of The Good Person of Szechwan (1943) in which the central character Shen-Te comes to the realisation that “the society in which she lives is configured in such a way that it stifles goodness” (2015: 25). How can she be good if she is exploited for precisely this trait?

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Brecht here offers no solution, but rather thinks of enjoyable dialectics as a “new kind of entertainment” (“Short Organon”, 2014 [1948]: §23) that functions as a “method of thinking” about questions rather than providing answers (Barnett 2015: 26). Dialectical theatre, then, can be thought of as a form of reflexivity on actors and their roles – and the audience as recipient of such dramatised processes of dialectical thinking.

19 Beyond acknowledging this obvious legacy of the term, I wish to propose a more contemporary reading of dialectics in theatre that takes inspiration from the notion of dédoublement, literally “doubling”, which describes the relation of actors to their roles and that which they enact. As performance scholar Tracy C. Davis elaborates, dédoublement is a useful term for thinking about the specific characteristics of theatrical situations, or what she terms as “theatricality” (2003: 148). From her citation of the Oxford English Dictionary, we learn that theatricality was once defined as “[a] spectator’s dédoublement resulting from a sympathetic breach (active dissociation, alienation, self- reflexivity) effecting a critical stance toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to the theatre” (ibid., p. 145). In a first sense, it thus literally describes “a way of uncoupling presence and representation” (Nield 2014: 553); although it could also be argued that it is a deliberate relating of presence and representation to one another. Antonin Artaud for example wrote of the double as a form of “never completed specter” and “spectral effigy” of the actor (1958 [1938]: 134). In his essay Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers (“On the Anthropology of the Actor”), the German philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner writes: “One human embodies another. Nowhere else is this being shown to us [other than in theatre]. Poetry and fine arts embody ‘indirectly’ and ‘in distance’, in words, colours, and form, not through humans themselves” (1982 [1948]: 146).

20 Sophie Nield develops Tracy Davis’ concept of theatricality and the double further to describe situations as theatrical when persons “appear both as themselves and as what they represent” (2014: 553). For Nield, one could think here of a judge, “who is of course a judge all the time, but nevertheless will ‘appear’ in his or her formal role in costume” (ibid.). Crucially, this change of perspective invites a particular approach to social situations or artistic encounters: “The point becomes to look less at what is being referred to, in terms of message, but to examine how reference is being made: what is the quality, shape, texture, hidden intent or form of the representation itself?” (ibid.). What renders a situation or space “theatrical”, then, is when they are such “in which the gaze (or its possibility) is embedded” (ibid.). A situation in which this double-nature of theatre is rehearsed is a situation in which reality and fiction do not necessarily blur, but one in which they are deliberately related to each. This doublement can become a strategy of intervention or subversion comparable to the Situationist practice of détournement (see Sansi 2015: 31). Such situations are pejoratively described as “theatrical”, but we can also think of self-referentiality and doublement as “generative of political potential” (Schmidt 2010: 55). Explicit self-reference and self-reflection can also be thought of as an aspect of a transformative and educative theatrical method. Wolfgang Iser has described the fictitious (or fictive, to use his term) as “an operational mode of consciousness that makes inroads into existing versions of the world” (1993 [1991]: xiv). The fictive is an act of boundary-crossing which “simultaneously disrupts and doubles the referential world” (ibid., p. xv). As such, “fictionalized doubling … defies essentialization” (ibid.).

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21 My intention with introducing dialectics, doublement, and fiction into an analysis of “dialectical fiction” during theatrical rehearsals is to shed light on the ways in which the act of making oneself a reference to one’s own performance – beyond being an aesthetic activity – is also a political and an ethical practice. It is a political practice, because it allows for the creation of alternative visions of whichever stigmatised role is being enacted, i.e. what constitutes a refugee, a queer, or a disabled actor. It is an ethical practice because it invites the acting subject to engage in a process of deliberative self-cultivation.

The impossible political utopia: against documentary realism

22 In late 2013, I was conducting a long-term ethnographic study of a public theatre institution in the German Ruhr valley, the Theater an der Ruhr, when someone introduced me to a young theatre director, Adem Köstereli. Adem had been working at this theatre for over a decade and had been socialised into the aesthetic of the institution – an aesthetic that regards collaborative artistic self-cultivation as political engagement (see Tinius 2015a). I first met Adem when he was invited to a roundtable in the city’s library, organised by the municipal Green Party. They had asked him to speak about his engagement with refugees’ experiences in asylum camps in the Ruhr valley. Although Adem had a close rapport with the municipal leader of the party, who invited him to the roundtable, he was not happy with the event. He felt that he was not given sufficient time to speak about the intricacies of the project, the research he had conducted on the experiences of camp-like housing structures, about the long-term rehearsal processes, or the importance of the institutional ties with the Theater an der Ruhr, which served as patron for his projects on refugees. He was disappointed that the event did not address the complexity of artistic engagement with refugees, but instead seemed primarily to serve the party’s electoral campaign. He remarked that the refugees he worked with were mentioned merely as a category, positively discriminated and reified: The people I work with are academics, musicians, therapists, writers – and actors, but of course also just people without sensational skills, just like you or me. But they are not just ‘asylum seekers’. In the media, local politics, and even in documentary art, they are often only reduced to this reified category. This is realism gone wrong. (Personal communication, January 2015)

23 From that day onwards, I began accompanying Adem and his work with refugees, since I was struck by his trust and confidence in the transformative political potential of art and his scepticism towards what he called the “problem of authenticity and realism” in both local politics and contemporary art. He told me that he was in the second year of a trilogy that used theatre and site-specific art installations to challenge the homogeneous and negative image of refugees in the city’s civic and political public perception, but also to question the idea that there were and had to be “real refugees” who could tell the affected and well-intentioned audiences about “their real and authentic tragedies”. “As artists, we are almost committed to showing that things can also be different – the Bilder we create must show the ambivalence and complexity of human life and suffering, not lock it down in explicated scenarios”, he said.

24 Adem invited me along to several meetings in the run-up to the project’s launch. These included discussions with the CEO and artistic directors of the Theater an der Ruhr on how to present the project to potential patrons and publics as well as meetings with the

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local city councillor in charge of cultural affairs. What was intriguing for me was that Adem and the Theater an der Ruhr CEO soon decided that my perspective on the refugee trilogy should somehow feature in the project, too. They knew that I had been accompanying the Theater and its rehearsals for a long time and thus suggested that I could become involved, not as an artist but as an anthropologist. My initial concerns about becoming too involved in the project were countered by them: “No, no”, they insisted, “it is precisely your presence as anthropologist that will make this interesting – your observation and critical distance to what we do will underline our commitment to reflexivity.” Eventually, the two even decided to include a reference to me in the application, as “accompanying anthropologist”. I did not object, since it was a rather apt description of what I was doing, I felt, and since I anticipated that this would yield interesting insight into the exchange and collaboration of artistic and anthropological expertise on this project (see Tinius 2015b). The project was eventually funded by the city of Mülheim and the Arts in Intercultural Dialogue scheme of the state of North Rhine- Westphalia.

25 On a later occasion, shortly before the project was about to begin, the Theater CEO and Adem had invited cultural correspondents from several local newspapers and regional radio stations to announce the project. Most journalists found the project’s aims of creating a more nuanced and subtle artistic representation of refugees laudable. Adem had suggested a particular weekly column format to the reporters that would not portray the refugee participants of the project as tragic stories of loss, victimhood, and suffering – although these are undoubtedly significant aspects of their narrative. Instead, he wanted to base these columns on their dreams, aspirations, and creative hopes for a good life. One local journalist kindly agreed to host this column in their newspaper, suggesting that I should write these reports on the basis of my research and interviews with the project – a collaboration that led to a series of well-received alternative forms of research output that were also helpful for the project. One journalist, and it should be noted that he was an exception on the occasion, thought this idea was pointless: “The only stories people want to read about refugees are about blood, tears, and misery.” This phrase stuck in Adem’s head and he would bring it up on numerous occasions during my fieldwork with him, repulsed by its normative and scandalising assumptions about refugees and motivated to correct this view. On one occasion – we were in his local shisha-café where we regularly met to discuss the project, frequently with the refugees participating in his project – he remarked: The impossible political utopia of my artistic endeavours would be if nobody recognised whether my theatre plays are with refugees or professionals. Once the audience realises that it’s about the relations of actors to themselves, that it’s about the work of artistic reflection, my work is completed. Art is not about facts, it brings fiction into our understanding of reality. (Personal communication, December 2013)

26 A young refugee actor, whom I will call Marvin, was with us that evening. He had been working with Adem for over three years and clearly agreed with what Adem said. He nodded and sipped a bit of his tea before adding: I have now worked with you for a long time, Adem. I have been threatened with deportation a few times, but I have always been able return to what we trained and learned with you: that I can always imagine myself anew and otherwise.

27 Adem and Marvin were both convinced that their artistic practices were not political because they represented reality, but because they created a new reference for who one

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could be as a refugees. Perceiving the self, as Carlo Severi once put it, is an act of projecting an image of oneself (2003: 80). The theatrical rehearsals Marvin had accompanied – with forced interludes during which he was threatened with deportation – taught him the conduct and cognitive ‘tools’ for projecting new kinds of images of oneself, for imagining not just himself, but also his peers anew. In Bourriaud’s words, one might say that the rehearsals provided him with means to produce new “relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects” (2002 [1998]: 107).

Fig. 1: Marvin (standing) during rehearsals for the trilogy’s third part in 2015; © Franziska Götzen.

Dialectical Fiction I: Space and context

28 In the glossary appended to Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud defines what he calls “context” as follows: In situ art is a form of artistic activity that encompasses the space in which it is on view. This consideration by the artist of the exhibition venue consisted, yesterday, in exploring its spatial and architectural configurations. A second possibility, prevalent in the art of the 1990s, consists in an investigation of the general context of the exhibition: its institutional structure, the socio-economic features encompassing it, and the people involved. (2002 [1998]: 109–110)

29 Adem’s theatre and art project focussed on the subjective experiences of refugees, but it took as its starting point the context and location of the site-specific performance venue. As he wrote in the project’s official proposal, “the name of our project – Ruhrorter – refers both to a location and an idea”. In one sense, Ruhrorter is the name of the street on which the abandoned refugee camp was located, but literally translated from the German it also means ‘pertaining to places along the Ruhr’. For Adem and the other artists involved in the project, this second meaning introduced a metaphorical dimension to the project’s location; the location became a symbolic image for a range of other meanings. The site they transformed into a temporary performance and

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installation venue was not merely one place where refugees had been housed by the city of Mülheim (and some sections of which currently also serve as rehearsal space for the Theater an der Ruhr) – it referred to the many places along the Ruhr to which refugees are distributed upon arriving in the region. This implied sense of multiple contexts, spatial dispersal, social uprootedness, and fragmentation inspired Adem to name the project after the street and building: Ruhrorter. The place thus became a real reference point anchored architecturally and spatially, but it became at the same time a sign for the experience of being a refugee in the Ruhr valley. The German term they used to describe this reality/signification play was Sinnbild, literally ‘meaning-image’. The name as well as the site incorporated reality and imagination; it constituted a spatial doublement.

Fig. 2: The building on the Ruhrorter street; © Jonas Tinius.

30 With help from stage designers at the Theater an der Ruhr, Adem and his friends rented out and prepared two floors of the Ruhrorter building, amounting to more than a thousand square metres of dusty, abandoned, empty space. The two floors they had selected, the second and the top floor, became important sites for the project. The second floor was structured along a hallway with about thirty rooms to its right and left of equal size (about 25m2). Each room had once been given to an asylum-seeking family when the building was still a refugee camp in the 1990s. Upon exploring the space with Adem, we discovered many signs of this former usage. Each door, the floor, the walls, and even the windows bore the marks of former inhabitants. Jokes, names, insults, and poems were scratched into wooden doors and scribbled onto concrete walls.

31 While Adem focused on rehearsals for his theatre play on the top floor of the building, one of the artists involved in the project created a participatory walk-through installation in these rooms, which they aptly named Palimpsest. The installation Palimpsest comprised multiple possible pathways to explore the institutional history, the people involved in it, and the socio-political background of the building – they created, in other words, “trajectories between signs” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 113).

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Several rooms were dedicated to a newspaper archive that traced the former ownership and media coverage of the building, while other rooms had hidden loudspeakers with interviews conducted with former facility managers, therapists, and inhabitants that replayed on a loop. One room (see Fig. 2) also included excerpts from my field notes and diaries that offer insight into the rehearsal processes. This resulted from our discussions on how the “expertise and knowledge” (CEO Theater an der Ruhr) I had produced could be made visible to the audiences visiting the project.

32 When the project premiered in May 2014, this installation was made accessible after each theatre performance. Audience members would walk down from the top floor, where drinks and food were served in one of the larger rooms of the installation, all the while able to explore the rooms on their own. Each person was invited to find their own way through the rooms; there was no necessary path or guidance. Actors from the project joined in for conversations that often lasted until late in the night, and the project directors made sure to invite journalists, politicians, former inhabitants, and other people that had been associated with the building and its history to facilitate an engagement with the spatial context of refugee experiences.

Fig. 3: One of the archive rooms in preparation; © Jonas Tinius.

33 The focus of the installation resided in the social relations “implied” in the building and its “social context, rather than an independent and private space” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 113). The exhibition was not merely an echo or a representation of past experiences of refugees in this building. It was, instead, an active engagement and a collective reimagination of it. Through sounds, images, and conversations – but first and foremost by way of co-presence and intersubjective encounters between audience members, former inhabitants, and current refugees – the installation facilitated a creative engagement with the project’s spatial and institutional context. The Ruhrorter building became both a real historical background and a projection screen for new meanings of spatial experience as a refugee. The refugee participants of the project and

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the audience members became co-producers of relationships with the spatial context they temporarily populated. The artwork was thus located and emerged at the junction of different imaginations of such a space that oscillated between historical facts and present experience. In other words, the installation gave “the viewer a chance to complement” the “model of sociability” proposed by it (ibid., p. 109). It permitted the audience “to enter into dialogue” (ibid.). It is this spatial oscillation that I describe as the first plane of “dialectical fiction” facilitated by the Ruhrorter project and context, because it posed direct questions to viewers and participants alike. What kinds of social experiences do the space and the installation provoke? How do they disrupt existing and create new experiences with a space once marked-off for refugees?

Dialectical Fiction II: Actors/characters

34 One day during the first month of the project in early 2014, the Ruhrorter group (Adem, a collaborator and friend of his, as well as six refugee participants) spent a long day together in the Ruhrorter building to get to know each other better. After a walk through the golf course and horse racing track situated right next to the industrial harbour and the former asylum camp – a juxtaposition that is characteristic of the crass social contrasts of the post-industrial Ruhr valley today – we went upstairs to begin the rehearsal. Adem addressed the participants: We have known each other for a little while already, but I would like to begin our rehearsals with an exercise that is not about us as a group or about the outside world, but about the relations you have to yourselves. I would like you all to imagine you are writing a story to someone far away, to someone who lives on an island where nobody knows who you are. Tell them your story, or a story that you have wanted to tell someone, but have so far not been able to articulate. (Fieldnotes, January 2014)

35 Adem hastened to add: “We are not telling each other stories that we don’t want to tell. This is not an exercise in exhibiting yourself to the others. Rather, it’s about getting some things off your shoulders that you’ve been wanting to tell. You don’t even have to tell your story in German: choose your language”. Marvin, the Roma participant from former Yugoslavia, remarked: “I find it good that we’re in this house on the Ruhrorterstraße. It already tells us stories about us.”

36 The participants dispersed around the room, sat down in a corner, or on the stairs leading up to the podium. Each participant began to write, some more slowly and hesitantly, others with assistance from more literate friends. One participant did not write at all and soon I noticed that he cried silently. I prodded Adem, and he immediately walked over to the young Macedonian man, telling me to come with him. The three of us sat down with another Macedonian project participant who translated our conversation. Res, as I will call him, told us that he wanted to write about how his father and uncle died on their escape from Macedonia: “I didn’t know at first if I could write about it, since I thought it would take me all day. I wanted to try, but I failed – it was too intense.” Adem patted him on the shoulder, saying: Res, you have learned a very important lesson that I am trying to teach you all through rehearsals: identification is dangerous, fiction is our tool. During rehearsals, we are learning how to use this tool to be able to deal with the traumatic experiences all of you have had.

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37 Shortly afterwards, Adem called the group together. Res and some others gathered a few chairs we had brought up to the fourth-floor makeshift stage. Adem told the group that the texts they had written – in Farsi, Turkish, French, Arabic and several other languages – were not going to be read out. “This is not the point”, he said, “let me explain…”: You are all going to take your text, and imagine you are that other person you have written to. As someone else, you are now reading your letter. Imagine you are not yourself, but a fictional character in a far-away place. Don’t tell me who this person is, or where you imagine this to be – that’s entirely up to you.

38 One participant raised his hand to get attention, shrugging his shoulders visibly to show he had not understood the exercise. In response, Marvin, the Roma boy who had been working with Adem for several years, said first to him, in Serbo-Croatian, then in German to the rest of the group: “If you imagine someone else reading your story, you can distance yourself from yourself. The question is: how do you abstract something that is so deeply personal without becoming too emotionally vulnerable – like just happened to Res.” Marvin looked over to him and Res nodded. Marvin continued in German: “Once we have imagined our story as someone else’s, we can then reappropriate that story as if it were not our own.” Adem, the project director, listened patiently, waiting to comment in German, then in English for the Iranian and Egyptian participants: Yes, exactly Marvin. This process of abstraction and reappropriation is at the heart of theatre, and therefore of our rehearsals. We need to introduce the fictitious into the real, otherwise we make ourselves vulnerable. This ‘real’, or your ‘authenticity’ is also how the authorities and media subdue you: they tell you that you are only your refugee self. But you are so many others. In the rehearsals we co-create a space and a praxis that help us reformulate who we are. That’s when we are able to act upon ourselves as subjects. That’s what I want you to learn. I am just facilitating this process, but it extends far beyond the stage.

39 Res was the first to get up and to try writing his story anew. The Iranian participant sat on his chair for a moment longer, pensive, before he too got up and walked through the room, eventually leaning on a column and reading his story to himself, slowly, in Farsi. Marvin, too, took his sheet of paper and, in exaggerated gestures, walked through the room, reading out the letter in Serbo-Croatian. Adem saw that I was taking notes. I told him I wrote about this process of learning to distance oneself from one’s own stories. “It’s interesting how you are slowly teaching them to introduce a new character into their own story”, I said to him. “Yes”, he responded, “and this is only the first step in a long process. You will see, this takes months, years – even some professional actors never understand this.”

40 Half an hour later, Adem added another level of intensity to this exercise by asking everybody to come closer together. As they stood just a few feet away from each other with sheets of paper in their hands, Adem asked each participant to read out their texts, loudly and at the same time, then silently, almost inaudibly. This cacophony of different stories, he told the group later, was supposed to estrange them even further from relating to the stories as something personal, allowing for a greater distance between story and self, imagined addressee and author, character and actor.

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Rehearsals and self-subjection

41 The scene described above constituted one of several hundred other such instances of training to reflect on the self that I witnessed during my fieldwork. Over the course of eight months, Adem introduced a plethora of different practices, methods, and exercises that involved the group and the individual actor in such methods of reflection and estrangement. These exercises were not aimed at producing a particular script for the eventual performance, but at inviting the actors to develop an attitude, a conduct, a relation to their selves and subjectivities – and in turn a form of respect for the other participants present and involved in this process. This slow training cultivated each actor’s body and mind as a subject in the double sense of the term: as an active agent in creating a relationship to the self, and as a passive subject subjected to this reflection. The reflection, although often characterised by Adem as a relational practice that can take place with any participants, not just refugees, had a strong therapeutic dimension. In the many conversations I conducted with participants, they noted the way in which it facilitated the articulation of alternative subjective possibilities to experience stress, trauma, but also to express new ideas, aspirations, and to find self-confidence.

42 I use the term “dialectical fiction” to refer to the aims and means of this project, that is, its aesthetic and method. First, the project aimed to estrange viewers and participants from their usual reading of the performance venue by offering imaginary narratives of the space through fictitious memories of the refugee actors, and through encounters in the performance venue. It therefore imbricated the real historical with a fictitious locus. The space was both real location and fictitious scene. Second, not just the space, but also the bodies and characters of the actors were implied in a process of dialectical fiction. They were double in the sense that each participant rehearsed him- or herself as both real and otherwise, as imagined character and real refugee actor. It was never revealed whether the actors were playing themselves or enacting other people’s experiences, refugees or non-refugees, living or dead, real or imagined people. Thus, each person on stage was implicated in a double performative gesture: both by enacting a fictitious person and by executing authentic corporeal movements that reflect on this fiction. This aesthetic form I term “dialectical fiction” was conceived by Adem and the other informants directing the project as a political critique, since it offered a corrective to realist documentary theatre; a corrective that regarded the participating refugees not as somehow “locked” in their “real” refugee character, unable to abstract from it, but as actors capable of imagining themselves as other and otherwise.

43 The rehearsal’s aesthetic practice and its associated political critique were based on months of intense training, which, I argue, added an ethical dimension to the project. Rehearsals in the site implied months-long commitments to a particular modus and locus of theatrical practice – a process that required intense self-reflection and awareness of the institutional space and personal experiences. Since the aim of the project was to facilitate imagination, rather than curtail it through a focus on realism, each actor was constantly asked to be aware of the double-nature of their performance, too. Adem introduced what initially appeared contradictory to me, namely a strict “discipline of reflection”, asking the participants again and again not to slip into “private” gestures and actions. By this he referred to the potential emotional danger of associating oneself too strongly with the characters on stage – a form known in its extreme as “method acting”.1

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44 Instead, actors trained to abstract the personal acting self from the fictitious character on stage, thus constantly engaging in a process of relating to themselves and others and reflecting on how they did so – a practice that Alex Flynn and I have analysed elsewhere as “relational reflexivity” (2015: 5). This reflection on the detachment of self from character became an ethical practice for participants, a praxis that some (more than others) took on as personal projects beyond the theatre stage. It consisted of a form of relationality that functioned through detachment and reflection – aspects of social life that are arguably overlooked in the social theory canon (see Candea et al. 2015; Strathern 1995). This dissociative and yet self-relational process of self-subjection and subjectivisation (see Foucault 1990 [1984]) constituted the telos of the rehearsal: for actors to internalise the self-disciplined reflection on the dialectical fiction of their stage presence. Dialectical fiction, then, describes the initiated oscillation between “praxis (the act of self-transformation) and poiesis (the necessary, servile action aimed at producing and transforming)” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 103). Since this process was not a form of individual therapy, but took place in a context of continual interaction with others, multiple relations were effectively “tightened” through the practice of dialectical fiction. Detachment, subjectivity, and relational sociality are not contradictory; they complement and enrich each other.

Conclusion: double subjects and relational reflexivity

45 The aim of this article has been to provide an account of a participatory and site- specific art and theatre project that responds to what they perceive to be a crucial challenge for political theatre today, namely whether “it is still possible to generate relationships with the world” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 9). For Bourriaud, relational aesthetics is a form of artistic practice that takes the generation of relationships between artists and spectators as both subject matter and means of art production. I hope to have complemented his claims by referring to a second kind of relationship, namely that between artists and themselves. By proposing theatrical rehearsals as a locus and modus for the production of both intra- and intersubjective reflection as well as the subjection of the self to a reflected interrogation, I hope to have indicated a productive gap in the treatment of relational aesthetics: the very question of what constitutes relationality and subjectivity.

46 The practice of dialectical fiction describes the recognition of the double-nature of subjectivity and relationality in theatre. This double nature refers to the introduction of fiction or a fictitious other into processes of art production that extend beyond theatre. The double, or doublement, then, is a reflexive process on relationality. But rather than introducing this reflexivity exclusively on the level of relations to others, it highlights relations of subjects to themselves. This imagination of the self as potential other, or the process of “dialectical fiction” and “relational reflexivity”, I argue, defined the main trajectory and telos of the Ruhrorter refugee theatre and art installation project. As stated before, reflexivity and subsequent detachment from a single notion of identity are not individual and chaotic but collective and disciplined processes.

47 The “impossible political utopia” aspired to by the project director therefore characterises as much a collective telos as it describes a very personal, intrasubjective aim. Dialectical fiction is fundamentally concerned with the development of a creative

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autonomy through “active dissociation, alienation, self-reflexivity” (Davis 2003: 145). Many informants described detaching themselves from the stigmatising and minimal category of the refugee by introducing fiction and self-creation as a therapeutic practice. This practice and the rehearsals were by no means “democratic processes”, in Bourriaud’s terminology. They were shot through with self-discipline and self- subjection. However, the discipline cultivated during rehearsals aimed at greater creative autonomy of each participant and shed light on what it might mean to speak of political participatory art as “re-forming worlds of subjectivization” (Bourriaud 2002 [1998]: 104). The rehearsal process of the refugee trilogy ultimately aimed not at greater individuality or detachment from others; it emphasised the oscillation between self-reflection and engagement with others, self-care and care for others.

48 By introducing this minute and ethnographic scale into the discussion of relational artistic practices and micro-utopias, I hope to have challenged and complemented Bourriaud’s narrative on relational art and utopian political visions in art. His account of relational artistic practices and their political aspirations for “learning to inhabit the world in a better way” (ibid., p. 13) provides a rich vocabulary for analysing performative practices in and beyond the art world – but it equally requires more nuanced accounts of what, who, and how we relate in art to form and reform subjectivity of such learning processes. If relational aesthetics – and by my extension, participatory political theatre with refugees at the Theater an der Ruhr – is about the creation of relations and the formation of a reflexive subjectivity, then ultimately it is also about the cultivation of the subjects enacting and severing these relations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998 [1995]. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Alloa, Emmanuel. 2015. Penser l’image II. Anthropologies du visual. Paris: presses du réel.

Artaud, Antonin. 1958 [1938]. Theatre and its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

Barnett, David. 2015. Brecht in Practice. Theatre, Theory and Performance. London: Bloomsbury.

Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall): 51-79.

——. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London/New York: Verso.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002 [1998]. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: les presses du réel.

Boyer, Dominic. 2005. Spirit and system: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brecht, Bertolt. 2014 [1948]. “Short Organon for the Theatre.” Pp. 229-255 in Brecht on Theatre, edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kohn. 3rd Edition. London: Bloomsbury.

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Bürger, Peter. 1984 [1974]. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Candea, Matei, Joanna Cook, Catherine Trundle, and Thomas Yarrow. Eds. 2015. Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cook, Bill and Uma Kothari. 2001. Participation. The New Tyranny? London/New York: Zed Books.

Davis, Tracy C. 2003. “Theatricality and Civil Society.” Pp. 127-155 in Theatricality, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flynn, Alex and Jonas Tinius. 2015. “Reflecting on political performance: Introducing critical perspectives.” Pp. 1-28 in Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance, edited by Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foster, Hal. 1996. “The Artist as Ethnographer” in The Return of the Real. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1990 [1984]. The History of Sexuality. The Use of Pleasure. Vol. II. New York: Vintage Books (Random House).

Innes, Christopher and Maria Shevtsova. 2013. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Iser, Wolfgang. 1993 [1991]. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Long, Nick. 2015. “For a verbatim ethnography.” Pp. 305-333 in Anthropology, Theatre, and Development. The Transformative Potential of Performance, edited by Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nield, Sophie. 2014. “ ‘Speeches that draw tears’: Theatricality, commemoration and social history.” Social History. 39 (4): 547-556.

Nikitin, Boris, Carena Schlewitt and Tobias Brenk. Eds. 2014. Dokument, Fälschung, Wirklichkeit. Materialband zum zeitgenössischen Dokumentartheater. Bielefeld: transcript.

Pine II, B. Joseph and James J. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Plessner, Helmuth. 1982 [1948]. “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers.” Pp. 146–163 in: Mit Anderen Augen: Aspekte einer Philosophischen Anthropologie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Sansi, Roger. 2015. Art, Anthropology and the Gift. London: Bloomsbury.

Schmidt, Theron. 2010. “ ‘We say sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality.” Law Text Culture. 14 (1): 55-78.

Severi, Carlo. 2003. “Warburg anthropologue ou le déchiffrement d’une utopie. De la biologie des images à l’anthropologie de la mémoire.” L’homme. 165: 77-128.

Stegemann, Bernd. 2015. Lob des Realismus. Berlin: Theater der Zeit.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1995. The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale. Cambridge: Prickly Pear.

——. 1996. ‘Cutting the Network’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (3): 517–535.

Tinius, Jonas. 2015a. “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Engagement: Self-Cultivation as the Politics of Engaged Theatre.” Pp.171-202 in: Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance, edited by Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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——. 2015b. “Der Theaterberater.” Interview by Elena Philipp. Tanzraumberlin-Magazin. November/December 2015: 14–15.

Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2012. ‘The task of anthropology is to invent relations: The 2010 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory’ (Special Issue). Critique of Anthropology 32 (1): 43–86.

NOTES

1. In method acting, actors use a set of emotional, psychological, and bodily techniques to recreate themselves in the light of the characters they enact. For a good overview, see Innes and Shevtsova (2013: 62ff).

ABSTRACTS

This article responds to Nicolas Bourriaud’s account of the poetic function of relational art, which for him “consists in re-forming worlds of subjectivization” (2002 [1998]: 104). I challenge and complement his account of how such reforming takes place in relational art by providing an ethnographic description of what I term ‘dialectical fiction’. This notion describes actors’ cultivation of detachment and reappropriation of subjectivity during theatre rehearsals by building up fictional characters. The ethnographic source for this analysis is a long-term study of the rehearsal processes for a site-specific and participatory refugee theatre and art project in an abandoned post-industrial refugee camp in the German Ruhr valley. By inviting refugee actors to introduce abstract and fictitious characters into their reflections on acting and cultivation of an acting conduct, this project aspired to what its director called theatre’s “impossible political utopia”: a situation in which refugees are not framed as vulnerable victims “acting themselves”, but as creative agents capable of playfully negotiating their political subjectivities.

INDEX

Keywords: anthropology, diversity, Germany, relational art, refugees, theatre

AUTHOR

JONAS TINIUS University of Cambridge, United Kingdom [email protected]

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The Instant Composers Pool: Music Notation and the Mediation of Improvising Agency

Floris Schuiling

EDITOR'S NOTE

Date received: 2015-05-31 Date accepted: 2015-12-02

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This research was part of a doctoral project conducted as a member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, at the music faculty of the University of Cambridge. The project was made possible through support from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Cambridge Home and EU Scholarship Scheme and Corpus Christi College, and aided by grants from the Music & Letters Trust, the Society for Music Analysis and the William Barclay Squire Fund. For further results from this project, see Schuiling (2015).

1 Just as relational aesthetics in recent years has come to signify a convergence of art history and theory with the anthropology of art, so has the recently emerged “relational musicology” reflected on and advocated an interdisciplinary encounter between musicology and ethnomusicology (Born 2010, Cook 2012). Despite different genealogies, these two encounters raise much the same questions: how can we understand artistic and musical practices as shaping social relations? How have previous academic definitions of art and music prevented such understanding? How does the entanglement of such microscopic practices in wider social and historical processes compromise or amplify their political efficacy? Despite such similarities, and notwithstanding a proclaimed openness about their respective subject matter, these

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two interdisciplines have shown little mutual engagement (Born, Lewis and Straw (forthcoming) engages with relational art from a musicological perspective). However, they seem to have much to offer each other. For one, the relational aesthetics and the anthropology of art have a much closer engagement with recent anthropological theory than ethnomusicology (Kingsbury 1997, Beginho 2008). In particular, the influence of material culture, as exemplified in the work of Alfred Gell (1998) and its lasting influence on this field, opens up interesting new perspectives when applied to music. Conversely, relational musicology, with its background in ethnomusicology, can draw on a long tradition in this field to study music as a form of social interaction, since for many ethnomusicologists a theory of music is implicitly a theory of social practice.

2 In this article I present some results from an ethnographic research project on the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra, an improvisation collective based in Amsterdam that has built a global reputation as one of the most innovative groups in improvised music, and performs regularly around the world.1 It was founded as the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) in 1967 by pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg, clarinettist and saxophonist Willem Breuker, and drummer Han Bennink. Influenced by free jazz, contemporary art music, experimental music and the performances of Fluxus and Happenings, the group developed not only a diverse and distinctive sound, but also a particular musical practice that integrated compositional and improvisatory aspects. This performance practice was developed against a backdrop of an emerging counter- culture. Their musical practice and the concept of “instant composition” was an attempt to democratise musical performance by musicians who did not believe in “freedom” in improvisation, yet were critical of the traditional hierarchy between composer and performer.

3 The field of musicology, with its roots as a philological discipline uncovering and editing the music of the past, has proceeded from an ontological assumption that music exists as “works”, i.e. ideal Platonic objects represented by musical notation (Cook 2001, 2014). The practice of the ICP, which uses a variety of musical notations in the improvisatory process, constitutes a wholly different ontology of music as it imagines a radically different relation between notation and the resulting sound.2 Their notations function as mediators of the social and creative agency of the ICP’s musicians. As such they also require a reconsideration of improvisation.

4 Musical improvisation has been one of the fields in which the creativity of performers and the idea of music as a relational practice have received the most attention. However, improvisation has mostly been described in opposition to the use of notations, and this has often been connected to utopian claims of collectivity. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, for instance, write that improvisational practices have generally shown “concepts of alternative community formation, social activism, rehistoricization of minority cultures, and critical modes of resistance and dialogue” (2004: 2). More recently, and with the increased attention to improvised music in music scholarship, such claims have started to be criticised, as such descriptions of improvised music are inherently bound up with the status of improvisation as the “Other” to the Western, written tradition of art music (Nooshin 2003, Prouty 2006). Such criticisms call for a greater empirical attention to a diversity of musical practices and to the ways in which particular social relations are enacted in each of them (Cook 2007, Labaree 2013, Stanbridge 2008). As Claire Bishop asks of Bourriaud, if we accept

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that art produces social relations, then we must ask “what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?” (Bishop 2004: 65)

5 In what follows I will first describe some of the background to relational musicology: this will familiarise some readers with the issues at hand, serve to introduce the role of notation in the distinction between musicology and ethnomusicology, and help describe my view of the theme of “microtopias” (Bourriaud 2002: 31), especially as it relates to the purpose of ethnography. After a brief sketch of the history and musical approach of the ICP Orchestra, I will present some more detailed examples from my fieldwork to describe the function of notations in their practice. To conclude, I will draw out some of the themes of my discussion that relate most directly to the concerns of relational aesthetics.

Ethnomusicology and Relational Musicology

6 Conventional ways of distinguishing ethnomusicology from musicology either focus on the subject matter—“world musics” rather than western art music—or on the main method of study—ethnographic rather than historical. Gary Tomlinson (2012) argues that a distinction between the two fields can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, about a century before the respective academic disciplines were formally founded. With the rise of Kantian aesthetics, in which the formal properties of art rather than its content were argued to be “truly aesthetic”, instrumental music rose greatly in esteem. Tomlinson notes that before, song was the primary category of music, considered a basic aspect of human expression, common to people around the world. The aesthetics of Kant paved the way for the idea that music, as opposed to song, exemplified the historical progress of European culture. Contemporaneous music histories in addition defined the music-historical development of a culture in terms of the precision of its notation system (and indeed related the superiority of European culture to the development of the alphabet).

7 These developments not only distinguished the historical study of the development of western music from the ethnographic study of historically static non-western music cultures, but also led to a very particular music ontology, in which music was not considered first and foremost as a practical activity, at once creative, social, political, sensory, material and emotional, but as a structure of “organised tones”, an ideal and transcendent object (rather than a process) as represented by the score. In his 1885 founding programme for the academic study of music, Guido Adler writes that: In the final and highest instance, however, the history of music looks at artistic creations as such, in their mutual concatenation and their reciprocal influence, without special consideration given to the life and effect of individual artists who have participated in this steady development. (Mugglestone 1981: 7)

8 The history of music was thus defined as being propelled purely by forces “internal” to the music, leading to what Nicholas Cook has called a history of “composition, or even of compositional innovation” (2014: 3). This also has consequences for performance. With music existing as an ideal object, performance becomes curiously accidental to music’s existence. Performers are caught up in a paradigm of “reproduction”, which Cook describes as “the idea that performance means bringing out something that is already there in the score, composed into it and just waiting to be released by the performer” (2007: 338). In this paradigm, the demand to play “just the notes” or to stick

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to the composer’s intentions is not just an ethical obligation but an ontological necessity.

9 The ethnographic study of music was scarcely represented in Adler’s programme. The historical study of music, he argued, should be complemented by a “systematic” musicology, which consisted of music-theoretical, philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological questions, and of something he called “comparative musicology”, the ethnographic study and comparison of musical systems in different cultures. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that this field, now called ethnomusicology (Kunst 1955), started to explicitly engage with anthropological theory. The work of Alan Merriam was particularly important for this shift, with his definitions of ethnomusicology changing in the course of the 1960s and 1970s from “the study of music in culture” to “the study of music as culture”, and finally stating that “music is culture and what musicians do is society” (cited in Myers 1993: 7).

10 I am briefly discussing this disciplinary history to highlight an important point for my discussion below: that the concept of music as an academic subject associates it foremost with writing rather than performance, to such an extent that any considerations of social context, cultural meaning, or even the interactions between performing musicians were considered to be strictly “extramusical”. It is this odd ontological arrangement that lies at the basis of the distinction between musicology and ethnomusicology, and which gives a very particular significance to the supposed and often constructed opposition between the aesthetic and the social which is a familiar and central problem to anthropologists of art. It is also this ontology that gave rise to the idea that to concentrate on specifically musical issues would not be compatible with a serious engagement with anthropological theory, and vice versa (Kingsbury 1997, Beginho 2008).

11 Much of this has been addressed in the past 25 years. During the 1990s, musicologists increasingly started to address music’s entanglement with social and political issues, as well as the ideological baggage that had prevented this earlier, and ethnomusicology was swept up in the more general reflexive turn in anthropology that problematized the notion of “culture” and the nature of ethnography and fieldwork. In both fields, one outcome of these developments was a shift in emphasis towards the concept of performance, to avoid either a work-based approach or a totalising concept of culture, and to foreground the forms of social and creative interaction that were now increasingly seen to be essential to music’s existence.

12 This led Nicholas Cook to argue, somewhat optimistically, that “we are all (ethno)musicologists now” (2008). Noting the increasing overlap between the two fields, he argues for a consideration of how conceptions of race and ethnicity, self and other, and insider and outsider have fundamentally shaped disciplinary programmes. He generalised this idea with his advocacy of a “relational musicology” (2012), an approach that considers musical, personal, cultural and genre identities to be relationally constructed. The “situated encounter” — between musicians, cultures and musical practices, but also between for instance ethnographer and informant — becomes a site that is historically, ideologically and socioeconomically conditioned, but that also allows for a negotiation and perhaps a variation of these conditions, an exercise of agency. The reference to Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics here is intentional, since the idea that music creates social relationships, and its correlative deconstruction of the distinction between the aesthetic and the social, is crucial to this

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relational musicological project. In Cook’s words, a relational musicology sees music as “not just a metaphor but a metonym of social interaction” (2012: 196).

13 Georgina Born, in her formulation of a relational musicology (2010), suggests that the rapprochement between musicology and ethnomusicology should be informed by a larger engagement with social and anthropological theory, as this development has been largely informed by a wish to attend to the social nature of music. She proposes to conceive of music as an assemblage of multiple mediations (more on this below), in order to attend to the constant work that has to be done for music to even exist, and thus to the social relations that sustain and make up musical practice.3 In addition to the relationality proposed by Cook, she suggests a comparative approach to the social, technological, temporal and ontological aspects of music, four topics that may provide particular connections to anthropological thought and may help to generate disciplinary innovation. Ontology is particularly important in such interdisciplinary engagement, as it raises not only the question “what music is”, but also “what counts as music to be studied” (208-9). In other words, it can not only help to redefine what musicologists study, but also how they study it, and the values and prejudices inherent in such methodologies.

14 Both Cook and Born’s versions of relational musicology attend to the way in which musical ontology is wound up with social practice. This is no less true of the ontology that lay at the basis of musicology. Lydia Goehr (2007) has shown how this “work- based” ontology, which conceives of music in terms of discrete ideal objects represented in writing, came about not only because of the aesthetic changes described by Tomlinson, but also changes in musical practice and the socio-economic position of composers in Europe. In the scholarship on improvised music, this relation between ontology and practice has been much more explicit. Ingrid Monson, in an ethnographic work on the practice and theory of jazz musicians, argues that “Rather than being conceived as foundational or separable from context, structure is taken to have as one of its central functions the construction of social context” (1996: 186).

15 Two conclusions can be drawn from this entanglement of ontology and practice. First, that music’s existence “between process and product” (Cook 2001) can be a useful object of study to those critical of the focus of material culture on finished and stable objects (Ingold 2011). The second has to do with the purpose of ethnography. Bourriaud’s concept of the microtopia has some affinities with Cook’s “situated encounter”, a place that does not project an entirely new world, but one that creates an interstitial opportunity for agency. Roger Sansi argues that art and ethnography share this utopian element, as they present “a reduced model of a possible world, a research process that proposes to imagine the social in different terms” (Sansi 2015: 157). The purpose of my research project has been to take the concept of “Instant Composition” as a way of scrutinising how the concepts of composition and improvisation have shaped musicological thinking about musical performance as a social process. I will do so below by drawing on statements by the ICP’s musicians themselves, but especially on my own observations of their performances and rehearsals and reflections on what their practice may tell us about the role of notation as an object of creative and social interaction.4 Relational musicology is committed to such a dynamic unsettling of categories and the reciprocal movement it creates between such empirical work and the methodological assumptions of music scholarship. In other words, Sansi’s emphasis on the utopianism inherent in both ethnographic fieldwork and artistic practices,

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namely their commitment to imagining different ways of being, has both an ontological and an ethical component.

The Instant Composers Pool

16 In the early 1960s, when Mengelberg and Bennink started playing together as part of a successful jazz quartet, Mengelberg was a student at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where he would major in music theory. He was one of five students of composer Kees van Baaren—the others being Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Peter Schat and Jan van Vlijmen—who would become some of the most famous composers of post- war Dutch music, not only because of their musical achievements, but also because of the notoriety they gained from their political activism. In his detailed history of Dutch avant-garde music in the 1960s, Robert Adlington describes how these composers not only encountered experimental music and performance art, which were radically different from anything they had been taught, but partly because of such encounters were also made to consider their social relevance in the face of the emerging counterculture (2013: 23-24).

17 Through the organisation of demonstrations, debates and the foundation of various institutions, they raised questions about the social organisation of musical life in the Netherlands, including the hierarchies and division of labour inherent in musical practice as well as questions concerning the wider infrastructure of music: pedagogy, programming, funding policies, and so on. In addition, they asked themselves to what extent their own musical practices could not only be organised in such a way as to reflect their political ideals,, but might themselves also have a positive political effect beyond the sphere of performance—in other words: could avant-garde music be a positive political force in society?

18 Although these developments have usually been described in histories of Dutch composed music, there was a considerable degree of overlap with contemporary jazz and free improvisation (Rusch 2011), where similar questions were being raised about pedagogy, funding and the hierarchies and social conventions of musical practice. The ICP was initially founded partly as an interest group, in order to create better opportunities for improvising musicians. In an interview with the French Jazz Magazine in 1974 Mengelberg stated: “All music is political, our improvised music is political, it is the continuation of our thought, of our political actions” (Unknown Author 1974: 20). In 1977, he was more explicit about this: I have been working on a democratisation of music itself for years, it is essential. […] Delegating decisions to performing musicians is an aspect of it. Such delegation is only a weak form. In the Instant Composers Pool the distinction between composer, musician and conductor has virtually disappeared. (Koopmans 1977: 208)

19 If such remarks seem to indicate a vision of musical performance as a microtopia, it must be emphasised that such questions of social relevance met with much disagreement among Dutch musicians and composers, and the ICP was no exception. Of the three founders, Bennink has never voiced any explicit political commitment, whether in the context of his music or otherwise. Breuker and Mengelberg were more outspoken, but Breuker eventually left the ICP in 1973 partly because of disagreement with Mengelberg about the purpose of democratisation in music. Mengelberg himself frequently disagreed with the other Van Baaren students: “I thought it was a

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nauseating period. […] Overstated expectations, hysterical enthusiasm, gauchisme, without much depth” (De By and De Beer 1988: 5).

20 In addition, even though Mengelberg saw the improvised music of the ICP as a “continuation of our political thought”, his view on improvisation was by no means utopian, but aware of the necessary limitations inherent in any form of musical practice. This marks a contrast with the emphasis on “freedom” that was so prominent in the American “Free Jazz” of the 1960s, where breaking the conventional rules of rhythm and harmony was symbolic for the struggle against institutionalised racism in the United States (Anderson 2007). In the 1960s Mengelberg commented: “Such rebelling for its own sake is trivial, it gives you nothing substantial to deal with. You just end up with new forms of discipline” (Vuijsje and Witkamp 1966: 225). In the 1990s he implied that he actually found such music oddly restricting: “They made it into a religion instantly. It had to have power, and whenever it sounded similar to something else it must have been thought of in advance, it had to be spontaneous, etc. I had no use for such slogans. “Free” music was a plague” (Andriessen 1996: 19).

21 This is one meaning of “instant composition”: the acknowledgement of the rules and discipline inherent to improvisation, and also the valorisation of improvisation as a musical practice by emphasising that it involved much the same kind of aesthetic and structural musical considerations as composition. Mengelberg has always maintained that he did not see any difference between composition and improvisation in principle, only in terms of procedure: I think the two matters are barely any different. The processes of consideration of musical activities run parallel to each other. Only the procedure is different: in improvised music you collect an amount of baggage which you can employ on the spot, while as a composer you have to be much more elaborate about it. You sit at a desk and use your baggage to fill a page with music notation, with suggestions of what is to be played by a group of musicians to which you do not necessarily belong to yourself. (Andriessen 1996: 22)

22 This attitude also meant a greater acceptance of familiar musical material than in other improvising groups, where, as I quoted Mengelberg above, anything that sounded similar to something else was suspected of having been prepared in advance. As Adlington writes, in the practice of the ICP, “musical freedom included the choice of departing from the notion of ‘free’, as it was fast solidifying in the practice of fellow avant-garde improvisers” (2013: 119).

23 The duo performances of Mengelberg and Bennink, recordings of which make up most of the ICP’s catalogue during the 1970s and which became notorious in the Netherlands because of the musicians’ particular stage behaviour, exemplify this point. Their music drew from a large variety of sound worlds, including free jazz and earlier forms of jazz such as swing and bop, but also including tangos, can-cans, classical dance forms, German “Schlager”, hymnals and Wagnerian harmonic explorations, all combined in long improvised pastiches. Moreover, the two musicians were playing in opposition to each other as much as (or even more than) collaborating, by ignoring or even intentionally sabotaging whatever the other was doing. Much of the time, it seemed that they were hardly interacting at all. Bennink tended to play very loud and fast, using everything around him that could make a sound, while Mengelberg slowly explored harmonic and contrapuntal structures on his piano. If there were any interaction, it would be primarily antagonistic—they would tease each other, deliberately missing entries set up by the other, playing right through what the other is

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doing, and joining in with something when the other had already stopped. This form of interaction involved a large sense of theatricality, as Bennink would empty a bag of drum sticks over his kit or knock over his cymbals to make a loud crash while Mengelberg would be dryly waiting to be audible again.

24 Adlington, although noting the reluctance of the ICP’s founders to identify their music too strongly with any political movement, compares this form of musical interaction in the ICP’s early performances to a particular strand of individualist anarchism. He discusses the subversive, antagonistic and headstrong behaviour of the musicians and opposes this to the much more conventional emphasis on collectivity in other free improvising groups (both in the USA and in Europe), where integration into a collective production and merged group identity was the aim (Adlington 2013: 127). He compares this to the anarchist ideas of Max Stirner, whose individualist form of anarchism envisaged a “war of all against all” in which collaboration would only be a temporary truce, a “union of egoists” (Adlington 2013: 126-8).

25 This form of interaction was cultivated also when Mengelberg, toward the end of the 1970s, started putting together a steady group of musicians, which in the course of the 1980s led to the establishment of the “ICP Orchestra”, with which most of the creative output of the ICP has since been associated. Both trombone player Wolter Wierbos and alto saxophonist Michael Moore, who have been part of the group since the early 1980s, confirmed this in our interviews: Wierbos: The way of working in the ICP is derived from Han and Misha. They’ve been working together for so long… or rather against each other, like in a boxing match. […] That has nothing to do with freedom, it’s about egos, competing and showing off. The louder Han would play, the softer Misha would become. And Han wouldn’t hear him, and he would become purple and when he stopped you would hear Misha, playing very softly. That was fantastic! (21 December 2011) Moore: I really appreciate Misha, when he does choose people for his band, he doesn’t just choose people that have a similar aesthetic. […] Misha, he liked to create tension in any way possible, and in the beginning a lot of it was… putting people together that perhaps shouldn’t be together, you know! Seeing what would happen! You know, people that really wouldn’t like each other he would put together. (23 December 2011)

26 In order for the iconoclastic interaction of the Bennink-Mengelberg duo to work in a group of around ten musicians, Mengelberg started to compose a large repertoire of compositions. Although he had always written music for the ICP, he now started to do so on a large scale, and the group would have rehearsals every week to become familiar with this material. This repertoire includes a diversity of styles and uses various forms of notation, including regular staff notation, the chord changes of common jazz practice, graphic scores and other indeterminate notation systems like mobile forms. Before each set, a set list is made from a small selection of this repertoire as well as specified groups of musicians who do brief free improvisations together, and the ideal is to play a whole set without any pauses, improvising transitions between items on the set list, suddenly lapsing into a free improvisation in the middle of a composition, or interrupting one piece with another.

27 This liberal use of notated music in their improvised performances points to a second meaning of “instant composition”. Mengelberg had been part of the Fluxus movement in the early 1960s, at the time that Fluxus artist Tomas Schmit was creating a series of

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“instant poems”, jars filled with scraps of papers, letters, or even ash and ink, to be “shaken well before reading”, creating a collage of found poetry (Wien, Lukatsch and Vollmer, no date). Similarly, the musicians of the ICP create an improvised collage of their repertoire, using the notations as “found objects”, as Moore put it (23 December 2011). This practice means that the scores in the ICP’s repertoire function as significant sources of creativity for the performers. Rather than establishing uniformity and reaffirming the control of a composer as in the discourse and practice of the “work- concept”, the pieces in the ICP contribute to the heterogeneity of creative possibilities open to the performers.

28 The first meaning of instant composition—which is not exclusive to the ICP, or even to European improvisation—entails an understanding of improvisation that subverts its status as an “Other” to Western, rational and text-based art music by countering its associations with the primitive and the irrational (such an argument is central to Berliner 1994). This point is now more widely accepted, and it is perhaps no longer as necessary to argue for it as it was in the 1960s. The second meaning, which I will discuss in more detail below, suggests a potentially more radical opportunity of reconsidering the function and use of musical notation in ways other than the Platonic, composer- centred manner of the work-concept. It is in this sense that I will discuss the ICP’s practice as a “microtopia”, in terms of the possibilities for imagining different ways of being. The ICP’s repertoire and its use present an opportunity to reconsider ontological assumptions about text and performance, and the way in which such assumptions guide ideas about art as a form of social interaction.

Instant Composition

29 The ICP’s repertoire forms what Alfred Gell (1998) calls a “distributed object”, and what Lucy Suchman (2005) calls an “affiliative object”. It is distributed not only in the sense that it consists of various pieces, but these pieces themselves are spread out over various copies, versions, and instrumentations, or split into various parts. The musicians all have big folders with these notations, some of which contain their own markings and scribblings. During my fieldwork I collected my own folder, which at around 100 separate pieces is about half the size of the folders carried by any of the ICP’s musicians. These folders are not meticulously kept archives; on the contrary, it often happens that the group wants to play a piece and somebody does not have (or cannot find) their copy or part—which would be an opportunity for me to make a copy. During my fieldwork it happened frequently that a musician (some of which have been in the group since the early 1980s) would dig up a piece that they had not played for decades. Some instructions would no longer be clear, and such arrangements usually had outdated instrumentations.

30 It is because of this distribution and multiplicity that such pieces also become affiliative objects, “fraught with significance for the relations that they materialize” (Suchman 2005: 379). They become objects of social interaction as the musicians figure out how to interpret certain markings that may have been made in the context of particular performances in the 1980s, or how to divide the various parts among the current line- up. Some of the musicians may make the effort of writing a new arrangement of an old piece, which because of the addition of a new introduction or coda, or new suggestions for improvisation also creates new possibilities of playing such an old piece together.

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One of the most frequent forms of collaboration on the ICP’s repertoire is the making of set-lists. These are always made briefly before the set—the list for the first set may be made over dinner at the earliest, but the second set is always made during the 20- minute interval and so requires musicians to quickly find their scores, copy any missing parts or determine if they can play something by heart.

31 These set lists used to be made by Mengelberg. Tenor saxophonist Ab Baars describes them: A few minutes before the concert he’ll take a pen and a slip of paper, puts together some groups of people that will improvise, and around that he’ll construct the programme, of the pieces that we play. And I’ve noticed he’ll always take into account the keys the pieces are written in, their atmosphere. Making such a programme is also composing, in a sense. Those set lists are always gratifying, and you can do a lot with them. (Dekker 2005)

32 As Mengelberg’s health began to deteriorate because of old age, the musicians have increasingly taken over the making of set lists. A set list will include a selection of pieces, possibly names of musicians who may take a solo in a particular piece, and groups of people that will improvise together freely. Making a set list gives some insight into how the musicians’ relationships to these objects become negotiations of social relationships, as they are opportunities for musicians to exercise their personal tastes for swinging and symphonic arrangements of Duke Ellington pieces, anarchic improvisation games or sparse atonal chamber pieces. Moreover, they can decide who can take a solo in a piece either because they think the piece fits their playing style or precisely because it will form a challenge for them. In outlining such soloists and improvising groups it is an unwritten rule that everyone gets an equal chance to play.

33 The role of the repertoire in the social interaction between the ICP’s musicians is not restricted to such collaborations around performances, but also permeates their socio- musical interaction on stage. From a musical point of view, their notations participate in the creation of musical structure in performance. From a more ethnomusicological or anthropological point of view, this means that the notations mediate the social and creative agency of the musicians during performance. As I described above, the work- based musicological paradigm of reproduction almost turns performance into an accidental property of music, and the agency of performers in the creation of music has therefore long been neglected. Conversely, discourse on improvised music has long emphasised the agency of performers in the musical process, and has perhaps at times overemphasised improvisation as a form of spontaneous and immediate creation in opposition to performers who simply “follow a score” (Cook 2007). Both discourses are deeply shaped by distinctions between literacy and orality, and both take a negative view on notation—in the sense that the score is perceived as a site of negation of agency.

34 The practice of the ICP, in which notated pieces are used precisely to create new opportunities for improvisation, offers an alternative. The iconoclasm of the Mengelberg-Bennink duo and the ICP Orchestra is similar to the kind of iconoclasm that Latour associates with Actor-Network Theory, in which iconoclasts … do not believe it possible nor necessary to get rid of images. What they fight is freeze-framing, that is, extracting an image out of the flow, and becoming fascinated by it, as if it were sufficient, as if all movement had stopped. What they are after is not a world free of images, purified of all the obstacles, rid of all mediators, but on the contrary, a world filled with active images, moving mediators. (Latour 2002: 26)

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35 A particularly good example of this is a set of compositions that the ICP’s musicians call “viruses”. Viruses are very short pieces, for instance a melody of a few bars, a repeating riff, or a small graphic score, that can be initiated by any musician at any point, and so they usually do not feature on a set list. They are called “viruses” because they can spread by “contamination” (other musicians take over the virus) and so overtake whatever is happening at that point; either another piece or a group improvisation, or it may be “contained” and then it is no longer a threat.

36 The use of these viruses is a good example of how compositions in the ICP do not determine the actions of the musicians, but may be used precisely to subvert what other musicians are doing, who then have to adapt to what is happening in the group. The metaphor of the virus, to the extent that it connotes something that sits on the boundary of what can be considered a living organism, and which is dependent on a host organism for replication, can also be taken as an indication of the agency of these pieces. They infect the behaviour of the musicians, and do not participate in the musical interaction as a musician would, but rather they have an impact on a more systemic level. This actually makes them effective tools for musicians to change the musical situation rapidly: if a musician wants to go in a new direction while playing a particular piece, they can of course do so by simply playing something else (and this happens frequently in the practice of the ICP). But these viruses, however minimal some of them may be, lay down more of a “ground” for interaction with which other musicians can collaborate, or from which they may in turn diverge.

37 The idea of the “virus”, however, is not restricted to this set of pieces. Over time, the group has developed inventive ways of radically reinterpreting aspects of their scores, not only varying the tempo, playing lines from other musicians, playing lines backwards, suddenly changing from minor to major, but also reinterpreting clefs, rests and the letters in titles as “graphic scores”. As tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius pointed out to me, the viruses exemplify this more general way of working in the group: Some have a name, and then we have decided to keep it and use it more often. But this principle is always there—it’s always possible for everything to suddenly go in a different direction. Viruses can be composed by Misha, or spontaneously invented on the spot. They can grow from misunderstandings. […] It can also be something very banal, pointing at the score and saying “let’s play this backwards”. Or pointing at a sign for repeating a bar and reading it as a graphic score—beep, booyee bap—or even a title, or a word as a graphic score, or the rhythm of a word or a phrase. (21 February 2012)

38 This is partly what Michael Moore referred to as taking these pieces as “found objects”, and it is indeed a practice that depends on seeing these texts as material objects rather than representations of abstract structures. The practice Delius describes always takes place among a part of the orchestra, never the whole group: for instance between two or three musicians standing next to each other, between the group of brass or string musicians. It often hinges on traversing the line between (to use Peirce’s semiotic terms) symbolic and iconic signification. A downward arrow, originally intended to mean “once you have played this, you can skip forward to here”, can be reinterpreted as a graphic score and be played as a downward glissando. A note or melodic line that has been scratched out can become “play some chaotic noise”. The swirling and wriggling shape of a G-clef symbol can be reinterpreted as a swirling and wriggling melodic line. Such playful reinterpretations—which Delius calls “a little banal” but, it seems to me, actually depend on a kind of virtuosic co-responsiveness that is seen more

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often amongst improvising musicians, and perhaps amongst expert collaborators more generally—can be used like viruses, to create chaos or to suddenly go in a different direction. Conversely, they may be used to spur on a soloist by creating a background, or they may be contribute a particular texture to an improvising group or in an improvised transition from one piece to the next. Crucially, it shows one of the ways in which the musicians improvise precisely by playing something that has been written down.

39 Delius further explained how this altered the role of their notations compared to the more traditional use and discourse of the relation between notation and performance: Many people say that improvisation can be too chaotic and then there is the “guiding hand” of the composer or a piece to bring some sense of structure, but I think it’s the other way around. The purpose of the written material is to disrupt a “nice flow” of improvisation. It can create more anarchy than improvisation sometimes. […] The compositions play their own part. (31 January 2013)

40 What Delius points out is that instead of determining the musical process, the compositions in their repertoire can be used to take things in new directions and explore unforeseen musical possibilities. This is an explicit and direct counterargument against the work-concept as employed traditionally in musicology. This work-concept may be seen as an extreme version of what Tim Ingold has called the “hylomorphism” that guides much thinking about creativity: the idea that creative work is about applying a preconceived model or plan rather than realising that such structures emerge in the course of such creative work (Ingold 2011: 210-219).

41 Lucy Suchman made a similar claim in her work on human-machine interaction, in which she tries to formulate an alternative to the view that “treats a plan as a sequence of actions designed to accomplish some preconceived end” (Suchman 1987: 28). The problem with this view is that it neglects the necessary improvisation inherent in action, and the fact that plans, taken as representations of action, are created in the course of this improvisatory activity, in order to make sense of it (51). Like Ingold, she argues that “the organization of situated action is an emergent property of moment- by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environment of their actions” (179). For my purposes, she makes an important next step however, by arguing that plans (in her case instructions to novice users of complex machines) can be understood as “resources for action” (185 ff.). As representations, they are themselves artefacts that form part of the environment to which an actor responds (2005, 389), and they may be used to reflect on earlier actions or precisely to open up new possibilities. As Delius put it, speaking of Mengelberg’s arrangements of Duke Ellington: “When Misha arranges such a piece […] there are built-in moments from which… where it’s not about erasing the composition but about improvisationally shaping the material” (31 January, 2013).

42 The indexicality of signification, its context-dependence, is crucial to the role of notation in such an improvisatory practice. It suggests that the meaning of the written sign is not contained in the score, “waiting to be released by the performer” as Cook put it, but emerges in the course of performance. Indexicality is central to Gell’s account of creativity and distributed objects, as it is through such relations of indexicality that artworks are entangled in networks of agency. Born’s relational musicology draws significantly on Gell’s work, and notes ways in which music might contribute to Gell’s theories as set out in Art and Agency. Music, Born argues, requires an

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account of mediation that is largely missing from Gell’s theories. “Music favours associations between musicians and instruments, composers and scores, listeners and sound systems, music programmers and digital code—that is, between subjects and objects” (Born 2013: 138). It is this “plural and distributed material being” that music presents to us that “indicate[s] the necessity of conceiving of the musical object as a constellation of mediations” and of “its meaning, and of musical experience, across these plural mediations” (138-9). However, to fully account for all the material actors that may be part of such networks, Gell’s notions of abduction and the protentions and retentions between particular objects are not sufficient. This requires attention to mediation, in order to see how objects are “device[s] of generating relations, or in other words of generating agents, not just of tracing them back” (Sansi 2015: 55).

43 As an illustration of how notation is involved in such networks of mediation, and not just in binary relations between score and performer or text and performance, I will briefly discuss the notion of instrumentation. The “voice” of a musician, as developed through the skill of playing an instrument, is a good example of the mediation of agency more generally. In addition, an instrument usually implies a particular “role” for a musician in an ensemble, for a combination of historical reasons and reasons of material construction. For instance, drummers, bass players and pianists in jazz are expected to be very well attuned to each other since they, as the “rhythm section”, provide the rhythmic and harmonic foundation for the rest of the group. Similarly, the division in the ICP Orchestra of a brass section on the right of the stage and a string section on the left may be understood to signify the encounter between jazz and classical music that is enacted in their practice.

44 The score constructs relations between musicians by specifying groups of musicians to interact closely with each other, and by imagining, assuming or inventing particular playing styles for them. I already described how the negotiation of obsolete instrumentation forms part of the social interaction between the ICP’s musicians. The mediating role of instruments in the agency of notations may be seen in an example from the ICP’s rehearsal of new material. In trumpeter Thomas Heberer’s “Coming up for Air”, Heberer included a section where the musicians could play a call and response figure at will, but it was his intention that they do this while the rhythm section would continue to provide a rhythmic basis. During the first rehearsal of this piece, he interrupted everyone and the following exchange occurred between him and bass player Ernst Glerum: Heberer: There is a confusion that has to do with the way I wrote it. For the rhythm section in the D part, it’s continuous. It’s like a no chord situation, but you continue with the walking bass, so… those little crosses are just backgrounds if you want. Glerum: I can’t play background (?). Heberer: Oh y—you could, if you wanted to but eh-it would be…for somewhere where the rhythm section has to function… Glerum: No, no, sure, I’ll play notes. I just wanted to… […] Heberer: Let me rephrase that Ernst, if you feel like doing it, that is perfectly fine, but that was not the original idea, so I think from that perspective, it would be slightly… it would be a slightly different thing. Glerum: No worries man, sure. (30 August 2012)

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45 It is an interesting exchange because it illustrates some of the tensions between the egalitarian impulse of improvisation and the authorship and authority that are inherent to bringing a new piece to rehearsal and explaining how to play it to the group, which explains Heberer’s apologetic tone. However, what I wish to focus on is that the confusion stems partly from Heberer’s assumption in writing the score that the rhythm section would continue to provide a ground for the rest to improvise with the call and response patterns, and Glerum’s expectation that this would be an opportunity for him to stop providing this ground and join in with the improvisation. Of course, as Heberer says, Glerum can in fact choose to join in with the call and response patterns, “that is perfectly fine”, but because of the bass player’s role of providing a foundation in a jazz piece like “Coming up for Air”, this does have direct consequences for the way that the other musicians interact with each other.

46 Alto saxophonist Michael Moore wrote another piece, “Oz”, of which the introduction consisted of downward melodic lines plucked by the string instruments. Notes were suggested, but the musicians could pick their own tempo and were not expected to play their lines together, creating an open, pointillistic texture. Because of this openness, not only in the sound quality but in the way that the musicians are able to pick their own way of playing the suggested notes, this introduction is very suitable for the kind of transitions that the ICP frequently makes. In an improvisation (by the string players or others) the strings can simply start playing these downward lines, which because of the light texture they create does not impose too much on what is happening at that moment but still allows others to accommodate to making this segue.

47 Again, there is the matter of authorship and authority here, which Moore nicely negotiated by creating this open texture for the introduction. The string players can start the piece on their own accord; nobody needs to count them in or give them a cue. Indeed, they do not need to start playing together but can just join in one by one. During the first rehearsal, after Moore had explained his piece and the musicians had briefly rehearsed the various sections, the group played the whole piece once for the first time. There was no need for Moore to tell them when to start; in fact he was still having a chat with Baars sitting next to him while the string players started their downward lines. In this way, the score mediates Moore’s agency as an author as the musicians can engage with the written music on their own account without Moore having to tell them what to do.

48 The style of this introduction is more reminiscent of contemporary chamber music, which is another key part of the ICP’s sound world besides jazz. This is actually suited particularly to the string players (Mary Oliver, Tristan Honsinger and Ernst Glerum), who all have a classical conservatory education, and Oliver and Glerum have actually had careers playing contemporary composed music. A more significant way in which the instrumentation of this introduction mediates the interaction in the group is that it allows the string players to initiate a transition very effectively. Strings are softer than brass and reed instruments, and the string players regularly told me that when a piece or improvisation gets particularly loud, they can find it difficult to contribute something to the music. The strings also initiate viruses less frequently, because they simply do not have the volume to be audible in some situations. “Oz” thus gives them an effective way to take the music in a sudden new direction because the plucked downward lines are so clearly recognisable that it will be instantly clear to everyone that they are starting a transition to “Oz”. If a string musician would otherwise start

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plucking a downward melody, this would not have so much impact. The piece thus creates new possibilities for the string musicians to influence the socio-musical interaction on stage.

Conclusion

49 Those familiar with the debates surrounding relational aesthetics will have recognised many similar themes: questions of art as process or product, the politics of the process of making, of authority and participation and the question of collectivity and antagonism. To conclude, I will briefly draw out some issues regarding the politics of participation in the ICP more explicitly. Compatible with Adlington’s portrayal of the ICP’s similarities to individualist anarchism, significant emphasis was placed on individual responsibility in the discourse of the musicians during our interviews. In many of their statements, the way they phrased this responsibility made it unclear whether this was an aesthetic or ethical responsibility, suggesting that these two largely overlap for the ICP’s musicians. As Ab Baars indicates, referring to the early beginnings of the ICP Orchestra, when Mengelberg was trying to create a particular way of working in the group, this individual responsibility was always tied to an awareness of one’s role in a collective effort: Misha wanted us to do our own thing, but he corrected us often, and he was really trying to go in a new direction, where we would steer the material as a group, not as an individual, but that everyone had a compositional mind-set. Everyone could introduce something new, but with conviction, and taking responsibility for what he or she did. (4 January 2012)

50 As noted above, the “collectivity” in the ICP is by no means a conformist or egalitarian one, but one that emphatically advocates agonism and discord. It is for this aspect that the emphasis on individual responsibility is particularly relevant. Heberer indicates that the two—agonism and responsibility—necessarily go together: There is a lot of freedom, as long as you’re willing to defend your position. If you throw something into the pool, or change the direction, you have to find a way to make it work or when it doesn’t find a way to deal with the failure. (20 February 2012)

51 Rather than a particularly demanding or competitive form of individualism, the possibility of failure is accepted as an inherent part of this way of working, as Heberer told me later: This band is also about tolerating failure. […] I think the quality sometimes actually lies in the weaknesses and it going terribly wrong and then figuring out how you deal with them, and that in itself can be a quality that one can enjoy, or say it is terrible rubbish but it’s not… the rubbish is as important as the really fantastic beautiful Michael Moore solos. That is as valid as the fuck-up of the day. There’s no hierarchy in this regard. That is something maybe not specifically ICP, but certainly a specific of the band. (15 July 2013)

52 The question of antagonism and collectivity is a central one in the debate between Bourriaud and Claire Bishop. Where Bourriaud advocates art practices that create possibilities for interaction and collaboration, Bishop argues that these may only serve to acknowledge the exclusionary political structures in which such artistic practices find themselves, and on which they may to some degree depend. Bishop in turn advocates artworks that antagonise and question the whole premise of identity, harmony and collaboration being a condition for democracy. In the case of the ICP, it

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seems that these two positions are not mutually exclusive: the antagonism that characterises their practice is clearly dependent on a pre-established agreement on a way of working. One may see this as a refutation of Bishop’s point: once the disruption of the premise becomes the premise, there is no stepping outside of the authority of the artist.

53 The issue is particularly relevant in relation to Mengelberg’s status as the leader of the group, which may seem to run counter to the improvisatory intentions that underlie a practice such as the ICP’s—even the anarchism that Adlington perceives in their practice only accepts leadership on a temporary basis. (It is worth repeating that none of the musicians has ever explicitly stated that the group is anarchist in any serious sense, but Adlington’s analysis is apt and serves to illuminate some aspects of their practice). Even if the musicians play subversive, anarchic performances, there seems to be a certain parochialism in the fact that they do so because this practice was developed under the leadership of Mengelberg—indeed all of the musicians would probably say that, especially now that Mengelberg has stopped performing, the performance practice and aesthetic of the ICP is partly in his spirit.5

54 These are valid points, and rather than to argue against them I would shift the view somewhat to the question of skill. Mengelberg is quite right in saying that there is no practice of improvisation without discipline. To play music, particularly to improvise, is impossible without the development of some practical skill—or perhaps without skill developing in the process. Similarly, although the Orchestra frequently plays with guest musicians, there is a sense in which this repertoire must be acquired before a musician can fully participate in their way of working. In this regard we encounter a major difference between musical avant-gardes, particularly experimental and improvisatory ones, and artistic avant-gardes in the twentieth century. Sansi notes that many artistic avant-gardes since Duchamp and Dada have questioned the importance of skill and have in different ways celebrated the amateur. The relational and participatory art practices described by Bourriaud and to a lesser degree by Bishop also usually involve some form of audience participation.

55 Music has a rather different history in this.6 In his description of how the ICP democratises performance, Mengelberg tellingly speaks of erasing the distinctions between composer, musician and conductor, but not between performer and audience. The same is true of other forms of improvised music: although they almost without exception draw attention to music as a form of social interaction, very few involve audience participation, and many are very exclusive in the sense that they demand a high skill level from performers. The musicians in the ICP are all highly virtuosic performers, and in this sense it is quite an exclusive group. In the course of the 1970s, other groups that had sought to democratise through the participation of unskilled musicians, for instance workshop orchestras teaching improvised music, were finding it increasingly difficult to combine their democratic ethos with a desire for musical quality (Bouman 1978). Mengelberg never had such problems because he always set high demands for performers.

56 Although this can be exclusionary to some extent, it also makes the ICP’s practice possible. Their repertoire, though it has to be learned in order to participate fully, is at the same time precisely what makes possible their particular form of interaction, including its possibilities for antagonism and disruption. The ICP could similarly not function with amateurs, not only because some reading skill is necessary but also

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because the ability to make such quick transitions and to adapt to each other or subvert each other in innovative ways requires virtuosity. The ICP’s repertoire stands out as not only making the premises of musical interaction amongst musicians explicit, but also for allowing them to engage with it on their own terms. In the sense that the ICP actually acknowledge and address their own forms of exclusion, their politics are closer to Bishop’s than to Bourriaud’s.

57 Sociologist Pascal Gielen (2013) argues that the idea that creativity is synonymous with improvisation, where artists are expected to constantly adapt to new environments, fits the neoliberal agenda and its sizing down of the arts budget to encourage the “entrepreneurship” of artists remarkably well. The challenge set by Gielen is to create institutions that provide a point of reference, a place for learning and the development of creative skills and knowledge, while they remain sensitive to the power dynamics, the forms of exclusion and privilege that they may enact in establishing such institutions and in the work that is needed to maintain them. The ICP’s repertoire, as something that provides a secure basis for the performance practice of its musicians, and yet allows people to engage in agonistic forms of improvisatory interaction, to step away from this repertoire or radically interpret its function, seems a good example of this as it not only imagines a particular model for social and creative behaviour, but also maintains a realism concerning its own limitations.

58 I have described how this repertoire mediates the socio-musical interaction in the ICP’s performances. This practice requires a rethinking of the ontology of text, performance and improvisation, and of the way in which we associate these categories with particular forms of social interaction. This imaginative aspect of ethnography, the unsettling of received disciplinary epistemologies and ontologies, is part of what makes fieldwork so valuable as a method. Bishop argues that the “positivist social sciences” are less suited to deal with participatory art than political philosophy (2012: 7), as such practices always involve an imaginative symbolic modality. If we accept that fieldwork is a microtopic imaginative practice rather than a purely positivist one, then such situated encounters may precisely be the most fruitful source of disciplinary innovation.

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NOTES

1. The Orchestra members during my fieldwork were Misha Mengelberg (piano), Han Bennink (drums), Ernst Glerum (double bass), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Mary Oliver (violin/viola), Wolter Wierbos (trombone), Tobias Delius (tenor saxophone/clarinet), Ab Baars (tenor saxophone/ clarinet), Michael Moore (alto saxophone/clarinet), Thomas Heberer (trumpet/cornet). In addition, pianist and organist Guus Janssen frequently performed with the group. 2. Although I am aware of the interest in ontology in contemporary anthropological theory, and will relate ethnography and ontology later in the text, my interest in ontology initially arose because of developments in musicology. Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (2007 [1992]) argued that the work-based ontology of music was a historically emergent, culturally specific regulative ideal rather than a natural category. The targets of her criticism were not primarily musicologists (whose work-based methodologies she did include in her critique) but philosophers, who saw the question ‘what is a musical work’ as being particularly interesting for analytic philosophy, as it implies an ideal object that is nonetheless created at a specific point in time and knows various instantiations in performance that are different to each other as much as to its notation. Such questions were usually answered by logical stipulations about the relation of notation to particular performances. Goehr’s argument was enthusiastically received by musicologists who, as I explain later in the text, were seeking alternatives to their work-based paradigm. In one of the key texts on this development, Philip Bohlman (1999) called for a pluralisation of musical ontologies—which, he is careful to point out, do not map on to musical ‘cultures’ but may exist at both a local and a global level. Bohlman suggests two axes, one between product and process and one between embeddedness and adumbration, on which ontologies may be mapped. Surveying a number of musical ontologies, Bohlman shows how different concepts of music inform notions of ownership, agency, community, number, language, time, nature, science, the divine, and so on. His fourfold systematisation calls to mind the work of Philippe Descola in Beyond Nature and Culture (2013), while his emphasis on their enactment in practice seems closer to that of Annemarie Mol in The Body Multiple (2002). 3. Note the similarity to Howard Becker’s (1982) approach to “Art Worlds”, and to Latour’s (2005) emphasis that the social is in constant formation. Cook (2012) and Born (2005) both draw on Latour’s work, and so will I below. However, it should be noted that there are many similarities in

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what follows to Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (2006) work on the open-endedness of works of art and particularly Becker and Faulkner’s (2009) work on repertoire, both of which have been influential on the wider project of which I present part of my results here. 4. Over the course of two years, I attended most of the group’s performances and rehearsals during this period. This meant brief periods of fieldwork of at most three weeks of regular performances—this corresponds to some degree to the way in which the musicians themselves interact with each other as a group given that some of them live outside the Netherlands (i.e. New York, Berlin) and only meet up with the others to do a series of performances. In addition to this fieldwork, I conducted various interviews with the musicians, using both semi-structured interview techniques and stimulated recall methods using video and audio material of performances and rehearsals recorded in the course of the fieldwork. I did not participate in their music (though this is standard practice in traditional ethnomusicological research) because, as I explain further on, the Orchestra is an established group and not just anyone can join in—my own skills as a musician would also not have been sufficient. Despite this, the musicians did express their feeling that I had become something of a part of their group later on in my fieldwork, a feeling I had come to share. Other than this, I have no official affiliation with the ICP. 5. I alluded earlier to Mengelberg’s deteriorating health. He stopped performing altogether shortly after my fieldwork had formally ended. 6. It may be thought that the work of John Cage and other experimentalists achieved such a deskilling of the artist, and although there were indeed some attempts to create music for amateur performers in this vein, Cage himself—despite some of his statements to the contrary— could actually be very particular about what he wanted from performers and how his pieces should be interpreted (Piekut 2011: 140-176).

ABSTRACTS

This article relates the recent development of a “relational musicology” to debates about participatory art and relational aesthetics. I present results from an ethnographic study of the Dutch improvising music collective the Instant Composers Pool, founded in 1967 and still performing. With a background in jazz, experimental music and performance art, this group developed an improvisatory musical practice in which musical notations are freely used. These pieces mediate the social and creative agency of the musicians in the group. As such, they provide a case for reconsidering the nature of musical notation, and the distinction between composition and improvisation, which have been foundational for the academic study of music, and constitutive for a distinction between the aesthetic and the social. I employ the concept of “microtopia” to describe not only the way in which artistic practices subvert such conventional categories, but also to account for the value of ethnographic fieldwork to take such practices as inspiration for disciplinary innovation.

INDEX

Keywords: improvisation, music notation, relational musicology, mediation, ontology, creativity

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AUTHOR

FLORIS SCHUILING Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Institute for Cultural Enquiry, Faculty of the Humanities, Institute for Cultural Enquiry [email protected]

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Subjectivity and the Obliteration of Meaning: Contemporary Art, Activism, Social Movement Politics

Alex Flynn

EDITOR'S NOTE

Date received: 2015-10-29 Date accepted: 2016-02-11

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article has been supported by funding from the British Academy and Durham University’s International Office. I would like to thank my co-editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and constructive feedback in revising this article.

Introduction

1 Movements such as Occupy and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) have placed relational art practices at the heart of calls for change. Equally, artists such as Tania Bruguera and Ai Weiwei have put forward an aestheticised political agenda, mobilising institutional spaces to articulate activist concerns. Nestor García Canclini argues that “art is the place of imminence – the place where we catch sight of things that are just at the point of occurring” (2015: xiii). But if we accept that there is an on- going revision of the cartographies of art history and activism, and the dissolution of attendant categories of practice, what implications might this have for what is “just about to occur”? What ramifications might we consider for subjects such as the

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construction of subjectivity if art with activist connotations is to be taken seriously as an analytical category? Is it the case that analysis situated from the very interstices of overlapping terrains can lead to a productive theoretical contribution?

2 In this article, I take as an initial premise the idea that social movement actions and contemporary art interventions increasingly traverse a porous boundary, be it in terms of practices, relations, or institutions. Premised on Nicolas Bourriaud’s seminal reading of 1990s art, I contend that the theory of “relational aesthetics” (2002) offers a synthetic platform from which we can understand how artistic interventions with activist connotations are increasingly moving away from the utopian and prescriptive, and thus echoing the “subjective turn” (Razsa 2015) of social movement politics more widely. Based on fieldwork with contemporary artists and social movement actors in Brazil, the article highlights that while there is an on going collapse of categories between contemporary art interventions and social movement actions, these diverse political art experiments are not all equivalent: some may open spaces for encounters between different subjectivities, while others may delimit the potential of such encounters, rendering the elaboration of meaning less open a process. Relational aesthetics here offers important criteria with which to differentiate such projects and in this manner productive points of comparison emerge regarding how subjectivity is elaborated and meaning created, and in what temporal framework.

3 I begin by discussing the influence of social movement theory on artistic practice before tracing this influence to the “subjective turn” in social movement politics. In connecting these fields, I draw attention to the subjective turn’s perspective on the utopian and its focus on both subjectivity and participatory decision-making. I then elaborate the theoretical framework of this article, placing relational aesthetics in conversation with an ethnography of radical politics, foregrounding the importance of actors’ subjectivity as opposed to the setting in which such subjectivities are supposedly created. This theoretical framework encompasses a discussion on dissonance and I highlight how both the MST and the contemporary art world in São Paulo engage with identity politics, before moving to the article’s principal ethnography — the contemporary art intervention, Jardim de Passagem. The contrasting intentions of these examples demonstrate how for both social movements and politicised art experiments the elaboration of meaning is keenly contested, a discussion I expand through an analysis of Claire Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics and her counter proposal, “relational antagonism”. I conclude by suggesting that if art really is the locus of imminence it is to the open-ended and subjective rather than the identitarian that we should turn our attentions.

Definitions

4 Before moving to the first section of this article, I would like to offer working definitions of key terms. Meaning here is understood in everyday terms as what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated. However, the elaboration of meaning, which is central to this article, refers to the process by which subjective interpretations of phenomena are contested by multiple persons. In a 1957 lecture, Marcel Duchamp argued that:

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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. (Lebel 1959: 77)

5 In the interventions that this article analyses, a similar, multiple, and contested elaboration of meaning takes place, pertaining to such notions as free speech, democracy, agrarian reform, public space, or citizenship. The possibility of an obliteration of meaning arises as these processes may be variously left more open or closed to the subjective interpretation of their participants. My intention here is not to build specifically on a post structuralist understanding of meaning: Barthes refuted the “unity” or “totality” of a text, in preference for a fragmentary intertextuality, thus denying stable categories and unitary meaning. But in the examples I put forward, obliteration has more to do with the means and possibility of articulating one’s subjectivity, as opposed to a Derridean obliteration of “oppositions” or even the idea that writing in and of itself is the moment of any given author’s “obliteration”.

6 Duchamp termed this vector the “art coefficient”: the difference between “the intention and its realization” on the part of the artist regarding any proposition. This coefficient, as an “arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed” (ibid: 77) may be low or high, and in this variance, it represents the extent to which the person proposing an intervention has control over the meaning that can be imparted, a key point that I wish to examine in this article. In this sense, the obliteration of meaning is more fully the idea of the removal of the possibility to elaborate your own meaning from within a relational process: a series of closed gestures in which the fundamental condition for intersubjectivity, the participation of multiple subjects, is no longer fulfilled.

7 Meaning in this sense is elaborated by multiple subjects, each with his/her own subjectivity. This focus on subjectivity characterises research on the “subjective turn”, an analytical approach that Maple Razsa has initiated. In this article, I seek to provide ethnographic evidence of the importance of such an approach, building on the work of such scholars as Jeff Juris and Marianne Maeckelbergh, but focusing less on organisational activities, in favour of an analysis that foregrounds the role of individual subjects in contemporary artistic/activist interventions. A clear understanding of subjectivity is central therefore to this article.

8 In a philosophical sense, subjectivity, through perception, experience and apprehension of phenomena, is constituent of consciousness. As the possession of conscious experiences is a precondition for a subject, subjectivity not only defines what it is to be an individual, but also shapes his/her actions on objects beyond that immediate conscious space, as these experiences and/or phenomena have a direct bearing as to how that individual perceives subjective reality. Anthropological research on subjectivity has ranged from questions of diasporic identity (Brodwin 2003), violence and gender (Das 2008), the Palestinian Intifada (Jean-Klein 2000), but also how subjectivity can be thought of as a semiotic construct (Leone 2013). And it is connected to this idea of subjectivisation through semiotics that Félix Guattari’s theory of subjectivity provides the principal intellectual grounding of this article. Transforming Lacan’s conception of subjectivity as decentred and incomplete, and specifically expanding the Lacanian notion of “partial object”, Guattari puts forward the following definition:

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The ensemble of conditions which render possible the emergence of individual and/or collective instances as self-referential existential Territories, adjacent, or in a delimiting relation, to an alterity that is itself subjective. (1995: 9)

9 Subjectivity for Guattari, as Simon O’Sullivan states, is therefore “collective and specifically relational” (2012: 258 my emphasis). And what is particularly pertinent about Guattari is his foregrounding of art (an ethico-aesthetic instance) in the process of subjectivisation: According to Bakhtin, in this movement the ‘consumer’ in some way becomes co- creator; the aesthetic form only achieving this result through the device of an isolating or separating function of such a kind that the expressive material becomes formally creative. (Guattari 1995: 14)

10 Guattari here echoes Duchamp’s “art coefficient” and in this manner brings together the two key concepts of this article into a cohesive intellectual paradigm.

Contemporary art interventions

11 The Occupy movement’s impact on the contemporary art world is just one instance of a growing preoccupation with what has variously been termed social, participatory, or activist art. The coalescence of Occupy Wall Street inspired the contemporary art journal “October” to dedicate an entire issue to a discussion of the movement’s politics, and Occupy’s practice echoes so much of the recent curatorial lexicon that a new journal, FIELD, has been established specifically to focus on “socially engaged art criticism”. In his introductory text, editor Grant Kester writes that FIELD was created in response to “the remarkable proliferation of contemporary socially engaged art over the past fifteen years” (2015: 1) and one of the most important epistemic sites for this type of knowledge production has been the contemporary art biennale. Ever more participatory and focused on research processes as opposed to the “art object”, the biennale has become a privileged space of encounters from which to explore the emancipatory potential of art. Panos Kompatsiaris (2014: 80) writes of this desire to link art to urgent realities: The third Athens Biennale wishes to “transform the biennale into a sit-in and a gathering of collectives, political organizations and citizens involved in the transformation of society, an invitation to create a political moment rather than stage a political spectacle”. In turn, the curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale, Artur Zmijewski, calls the invited artists to “identify their political positions” and describe what they are doing as artists “also in pure political terms”. The 12th Istanbul Biennale seeks to “explore the relationship between art and politics, focusing on works that are both formally innovative and politically outspoken”, while the 2012 Manifesta edition focuses “on aesthetic responses to the worldwide ‘economic restructuring’ of the productive system in the early 21st century”.

12 This activist stance stems from a wider resistance to perceived hegemonic neoliberalisms that recurs throughout the political ecology of the contemporary art world. The award of art prizes offers an important indication of the direction of travel in this sense: influential institutions such as the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) for example have directed resources and prestige to politicised interventions through annual awards. Since 2012, ECF award laureates have included the Teatro Valle Occupato, Teodor Celakoski, and Charles Esche. Of the Teatro Valle and Celakoski, jury member and current director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, stated, “it is precisely the precarious conditions felt by countries hardest hit by the financial crisis that Teodor

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Celakoski and the collectives he works with and Teatro Valle Occupato are trying to address and to overcome”, while Esche was praised for his promotion of a “conversation that imagines how individual citizens can live and enact a future society together”. The ECF has praised their laureates specifically for the way in which they “show us how collective forms of action can tangibly influence a wider civil sphere” and their award for 2016 further reflects this approach: Athens Biennale has re-imagined the model of the biennale as a space for cultural debate and grassroots organising in contemporary Greece. It has reinvented the art biennale as a structure that enables new forms of solidarity between local and international cultural communities and wider civic engagement.1

13 The implicit and explicit lexicons of “collective forms of action” and “grassroots organising” are deeply reminiscent of social movement terrain and these porous boundaries have been analysed among others by Néstor García Canclini (2015). In his analysis García Canclini highlights how art practice is increasingly expanding into sectors of urban development, design and tourism industries. Pointedly, Canclini argues that art is “even being asked to take the place once filled by politics by providing collective spaces to deal with intercultural relations” (2015: xi). As such, for García Canclini: “Art processes are epistemological places where art and society, aesthetics and sociology, rethink their ways of making and knowing” (2015: 162).2

Artivism

14 The collapse of boundaries signified by the proliferation of social, participatory, or activist art has thus instigated not only new knowledge categories, but also an art historical container in which to place them. Broadly termed as “artivism” (Sandoval and Latorre 2007, Asante 2009), it is important to consider that despite such categorisation, the varied political art experiments that sit within a unitary classificatory system are not all equivalent: depending on the criteria by which they are assessed, some may offer possibilities for encounters between different subjectivities, while others may seek to delimit such intersubjectivity, promoting the transference of a message as opposed to the creation of dialogue.

15 Liberate Tate have mobilised such an artivist discourse in questioning the Tate’s sponsorship by British Petroleum (BP). Their protests, which enter into dialogue with existing aesthetic regimes and are art works in and of themselves, point not only to the tensions inherent to such artivist practice, but also to how such interventions have prompted questions of institutional critique. In 2012, as part of the performance “The Gift”, a wind turbine blade was submitted to the Tate under the rubric of a “gift to the nation”, a gift which the Tate’s curatorial board ultimately rejected.3 However, as Mel Evans notes, although the Tate rejected the art object, “performance documentation of ‘The Gift’ is held in Tate’s archive” (2015: 163), thus emphasising the interstitial position of groups like Liberate Tate and artivism more widely. It is unclear whether being included in the archive, as opposed to the permanent collection, is a slight, or a victory; an example of appropriation, or an instance of functioning institutional critique. But the actions of groups like Liberate Tate that position themselves between a social movement and an artistic collective, call into question how institutions react to this type of artistic practice and production.4

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16 Artivism in this sense seems relatively marginal, but one need only think of recent high profile exhibitions by artists such as Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy (2015) or Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin's Whisper series to understand how aesthetic projects with activist connotations extrapolate at the very core of some of the art world’s most conservative institutions. When Jen Harvie can write texts for the Royal Academy declaring that such work “can provide catalyst for change”, it is clear that activist vocabulary, and even practices, are beginning to bleed into previously discrete worlds, worlds that include high value cultural and financial capital.5 Such engagements can be freighted with ethical implications. Commenting on Ai Weiwei posing as a dead refugee child to recreate an iconic photo, art critic Karen Archey declared: “If we were to ascribe a set of ethics to art engaging activism, I would suggest number one: Do not accept capital gain from restaging images of dead refugee toddlers”.6

The subjective turn in social movement politics

17 The pervasiveness of such an activist art is intrinsically connected to the spaces, discourses, and social media channels in which a new type of social movement discourse has been articulated. Since the Genoa G8 Summit protest, the collective momentum generated by a wave of social movements such as the alterglobalisation movement, Brazil’s Landless Worker’s movement (MST), Occupy, the Zapatistas, and the Indignados, has infused theory, practice, and scholarship of social mobilisation with fresh vigour. The actors who participate in these movements seek to change how politics is conducted, but more importantly, generate new ways as to how meaning itself can be created, and it is precisely here, recalling García Canclini’s emphasis on how art processes rethink ways of making and knowing, that this article seeks to build an analysis. Building on the school of new social movement theory elaborated by Alan Touraine (1988) and Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), scholars such as Marianne Maeckelbergh (2009), Jeff Juris (2008), Maple Razsa (2015) and Arturo Escobar (2014) have analysed how this process of envisioning and realising new worlds occurs. In particular, Maeckelbergh has detailed how participatory decision making practices can offer the beginnings of an emerging democratic alternative by placing the diversity of people’s subjectivities at the heart of decision making practices. Razsa equally portrays how alterglobalisation actors seek alternative worlds by shunning utopian ends and centralised authority in favour of forms of direct democracy that enact a prefigurative politics. In both analyses, subjectivity emerges as a key site of conflict and creativity as activists independently “seize the means of producing themselves as subjects” (Razsa 2015: 12).

18 The theory that underpins what Razsa identifies as a “subjective turn” is in stark contrast to previous approaches to social movement politics, traditionally articulated within sociological scholarship, that sought to explain how and why large groups of people came together to “mobilise”. Whether “collective behaviour” (Park 1967), “mob mentality” (Arendt 1951), “rational choice” (Olson 1965) or Marxist studies focusing on class, analyses of collective action have long been premised on functionalist readings that overlook ethnographic realities of context, individuality, and location. A focus on subjectivity allows us to unpack concepts such as “frame alignment” (Snow et al. 1986), or “organisational structure” (Kriesi 1996) and focus on the nuanced ways in which mobilisations are conceived, enacted, and performed. Such a perspective reveals the

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ephemeral, and highly site-specific nature of how people protest and this shift from a generic terrain of mass-mobilised dissent to what Tilly (2008) terms “ensembles” of small-scale performance, offers a framework in which productive comparisons with activist art installations can be made.

Relational aesthetics as criteria

19 In my own research on social movements, I have analysed the political performance of the MST, termed as mística by members of the movement, from a perspective which foregrounds the private reflective worlds of its participants, as opposed to the organisational structure in which such practices are embedded (Flynn 2015). Central to my analysis has been the theory of relational aesthetics. Put forward by the art historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, the relational aesthetic paradigm argues that art has “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (2002: 14). In this manner, artworks, or, in the case of the MST, performances of mística, are capable of producing “micro-utopias”, temporary communities of intersubjective encounters in which people can “invent democratic relations with our neighbours” (ibid: 45) from within a space that allows for a full range of diverse subjectivities. Relational aesthetics thus foregrounds the notion that “viewers” of art works are in fact active “participants”, invited by a wider collective to elaborate tropes of meaning: a work of art in this sense becomes a “social form”, political in implication and emancipatory in effect.

20 Unlike other readings of mística, which depart from a more organisational point of view, highlighting for example the form’s emancipatory (Issa 2007), pedagogic (Hammond 2014, Tarlau 2013), or community building potential (Wolford 2003), the framework of relational aesthetics makes possible a reading of mística as a site through which members of the MST can articulate diverse political subjectivities, and importantly, create meaning that may be divergent from any given performances’ intended “pedagogic” message (Flynn 2013, 2015). In an analysis that seeks to demonstrate mística’s potential to allow members to “seize the means of producing themselves as subjects”, I argue that there is a nuanced and deliberately ambivalent discrepancy between creating a reflexive and artistic gesture towards an audience (a performance of landlessness) and articulating one’s own transformation through this gesture (a performative act), a discrepancy which highlights the marked ethico-aesthetic dimensions to mística: members take stock of where they are, and imagine possible futures that may differ from the MST’s wider vision.

21 One might suggest at this point that in terms of the form’s focus on “producing subjects”, there is little difference between my analysis and that of previous, more classically Marxist readings. However, the emphasis that Bourriaud places on the temporality of the micro-utopia is significant. The spaces of community that relational art works can generate are transient and as such point to a key provocation as regards social mobilisation. The age of the New Man, future oriented manifestos, and calls for a better world all ready to be walked into and lived in is well and truly over. These days utopia is being lived on a subjective, everyday basis, in the real time of concrete and intentionally fragmentary experiments. The artwork is presented as a social interstice within which these experiments and these new ‘life possibilities’ appear

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to be possible. It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows. (2002: 45)

22 The lack of conviction in utopian solutions that characterises relational aesthetics is mirrored in the politics that underpin the subjective turn in social movements more widely. Razsa points to how although alterglobalisation actors seek alternative worlds, unlike previous movements, they shun utopian ends and centralised authority in favour of forms of direct democracy to enact a prefigurative politics. A further point in common between the two platforms is the temporal aspect: artistic interventions made by social movements can be read as spaces of micro-utopia as they are necessarily interventions into volatile situations. However, if meaning really is the central concern of projects characterised by relational aesthetics and interventions proposed within the “subjective turn”, then it is necessary to ask how such processes are contested, and if how do we understand the inevitable dissonance that is created?

Understandings of dissonance

23 In his discussion of the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bourriaud notes how already in the early 1990s Gonzalez-Torres was articulating a paradigm for a more nuanced practice regarding the interstices between politics and aesthetics. For Gonzalez-Torres, himself heavily involved in the gay rights movement, the manner in which he created his work hinged on a certain openness of interpretation, an interstitial space through which people could create their own meaning. Bourriaud calls attention to Gonzalez-Torres’ comment on his work “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990: Two clocks side by side are more of a threat to power than the image of two guys giving each other a blowjob, because [systems of power] cannot use me as a rallying point in [their] struggle to obliterate meaning. (2002: 56)

24 Gonzalez-Torres articulates a type of art with activist connotations that leaves subjectivity in the hands of the beholder rather than furnishing slogans and prêt-à- porter calls for change. This hints towards a type of political articulation that does not prompt responses that “obliterate meaning” but rather invites dialogue without recourse to sloganeering. For Gonzalez -Torres, positioning two clocks side by side is a celebration of gay union, but the aesthetic juxtaposition does not allow people to take “offense” at a more “explicit” image. In this way, a spectator who might describe him/ herself as “morally conservative” is neither afforded an easy way out of contemplating gay sex, nor a faux sense of moral outrage with which to dismiss wider issues connected to the LGBTI platform.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

25 The paradigm advocated by Gonzalez-Torres’ aesthetic decisions clearly resonates with how social movements characterised by the subjective turn have moved beyond identity politics to recognise difference in their members and integrate that difference as a key part in their calls for change. For Gonzalez-Torres, being gay represented “not so much a proprietary discursive theme, than a universally accessible emotional dimension” (Bourriaud 2002: 50) and this dimension is not mobilised to reinforce membership of a certain community: quite to the contrary, the celebration of his partner’s life and their union becomes a “life model that could be shared by all, and identified with by everyone” (Ibid.).

26 The inclusive tone inherent to the work of Gonzalez-Torres echoes a social movement politics premised on the “absolute centrality of diversity” (Maeckelbergh 2009: 20). For Maeckelbergh, identity politics was an important phase of social mobilisation, but activists became trapped by the need for political unity and a homogenous identity, resulting in fixed and predetermined subjectivities: It is no longer identity politics because some shared identity is not the basis upon which alterglobalisation actors are demanding recognition. Rather than insisting that the movement should not focus on the WTO because it is not the quickest means of achieving women’s liberation, the fight against the WTO is carried out while incorporating an awareness of the power hierarchies that exclude women, not only from the WTO, but also from the movement. (Ibid.)

27 Not requiring all movement actors to fit a predetermined identity naturally leads to dissonance and Maeckelbergh highlights how important these dimensions of conflict are in the horizontal elaboration of subjectivity. For these movement actors, “consensus” has come to be rejected through its associations with compromise and unanimity, deeply problematising Rawlsian ideas of an “enduring unity”. However, the notion that it is an individual’s prerogative to express dissonance in whichever way

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she/he chooses is incorrect. In an analysis of how conflict manifests itself, Maeckelbergh points to two separate dimensions of conflict, constructive and adversarial: Diversity leads to conflict, it is true, but adversarial conflict is not caused by this flow of diversity, instead it arises when these flows are blocked. Conflict can be productive if it is given space for expression. Nurturing the constructive power and limiting the adversarial power of conflict requires continuous work. (2009: 137)

28 As I seek to make clear, there is a diversity of contemporary art interventions and these varied political art experiments are not all equivalent: some open spaces for encounters between different subjectivities, while others close off such encounters.

29 Within the contemporary art world, just as within social movements, politicised interventions with aesthetic dimensions mobilise a range of approaches, from the identitarian, and its attendant consequence, the flattening of subjectivity, to experiments that are more open to reflexivity and individual subjective interpretation. In São Paulo it is common to hear groups of artists who consider themselves “political” demanding a more radical and confrontational relationship between aesthetics and politics. Tied to the phrase, “uma nova geração de artistas jovens” – a new generation of young artists, this identitarian politics can presuppose a manner of how “politics” should be defined, leaving other artists uncomfortable. One artist commented to me that “if we are to go along with his line of thinking, then I think my next work will have to be an installation consisting solely of guns”, while another practitioner drily remarked over a coffee, “If we’re really going to change everything, then what are we supposed to do, take up arms?” This identitarian discourse evokes a scheme of politics very much distant from the practices of participatory democracy and ideals of prefigurative politics. It perhaps hints that there is a disconnect between a new type of social movement politics premised on diversity and resultant artistic interventions, and more traditional “politicised art”, as put forward by contemporary art practitioners, operating within more traditional spheres.7

30 These factions within the São Paulo contemporary art scene follow in a long tradition: attempts to block “flows” of diversity are not a recent phenomenon. As Duchamp’s concept of the art coefficient makes clear, the form of an artwork is of singular importance in the transmission of its content. Form is indivisible from the “unexpressed but intended” that will be shared with the spectator, or participant. This connection helps to explain the emphasis with which Marxist organisations have long sought to create and maintain a unitary artistic style, seeking to limit diversity and a supposed fragmentation of the struggle. The Italian Communist Party post World War II is a typical example. Seeking to homogenise artistic activity and anchor it in social realism, a form that would facilitate a clearer message, artists including Pietro Consagra and the editor Elio Vittorini who insisted on “stylistic diversity and individual expression” (Dossin 2015: 23) were excluded from the party. Further decisions on form were delegated to a “cultural commission” in charge of “verifying the conformity of cultural and artistic production” (ibid.).

31 What is important to highlight is that the practice of attempting to contain dissonance occurs in both contemporary art interventions and social movements. With regards to the MST, I have argued elsewhere that culture sector leaders emphasise mística’s power to create moments of collective unity rather than its potential to engender powerful dimensions of ethical self-cultivation (Flynn 2013). One reason for this tendency is that

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mística is a key locus for the formation of the sem terra (landless) identity, and while members are free to interpret a performance in the manner of their choosing, there is much less possibility to be able to create performances that differ from a standard repertoire. In this way, I describe how Tais, a member of the MST, was prevented from putting forward her own subjective interpretation of mística. Choosing to rethink a typical mística performance, she attempted to articulate the concept of landlessness through a belly dance. After MST leaders considered her proposal, it was decided that she could not perform the dance and her performance was censored on the basis that it was considered too vulgar. Soon after this censure, Tais left the movement and the blocking of these “flows” of diversity that Tais experienced is not a unique example in my engagement with the MST. Cristina Chaves (2000) also documents examples of members being expelled from a march to Brasilia. But if dissonance need not necessarily result in obliteration, how might conflict be articulated in a more productive manner? Can contemporary art interventions, diverse as they are, even move social movement theory forward in this respect?

Jardim de passagem

32 A question that opens heated political debate in São Paulo is public space. In a city where segregation, violence and aggressive zoning are uncontrolled processes that capture symbolic as well as spatial terrain (Caldeira 2001), interventions that propose a reuse or rethinking of how the city should be accessed and experienced are highly politicised.8 Such is the polemical nature attached to questions of access to space, that even placing furniture in a public square becomes a gesture laden with political intent.9

33 It is in this context that I participated in Teresa Siewerdt’s intervention, Jardim de Passagem. Siewerdt explores the relationship between one’s body and the body of others, and the approximation of that body with wider landscapes. For Jardim de Passagem, 26 performers waited at different bus stops along a specific route, all carrying large plants of different varieties, and waiting for a specific pre-indicated bus. I was the third person to board, and when I did, I sat down unobtrusively towards the back of the long, articulated vehicle. The other two performers were equally as inconspicuous, and fellow passengers didn’t seem to find our presence, carrying plants, in any way out of the ordinary. Gradually however, as the bus kept on stopping, and another person carrying a large plant with foliage or exotic blooms came aboard, the murmurs and laughter began to grow. As the journey continued, there were so many people carrying plants and flowers, that the bus began to resemble a form of mobile garden centre, with hanging baskets suspended on hand rails and the entire bus corridor disappearing behind thick green shrubbery.

34 Passenger reactions were mixed. The man seated next to me ignored the whole intervention, and by the manner he pushed past me to disembark, seemed perhaps quite annoyed. Another man, due to the sheer amount of plants filling up the space, grew irritated as the foliage from a hanging basket repeatedly poked him in the face. Other passengers, having been initially curious, laughed and smiled once they understood that it was an intervention, and asked what we were doing, saying that the flowers were beautiful. As more and more performers got on board, the atmosphere became ever more light-hearted, and a sense of community sprang up, not just between the 26 performers, most of whom had not previously met each other, but also between

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the performers and fellow passengers with whom we conversed freely. This nascent sense of community was playful and unexpected, given that we had been directed to not specifically open conversation, but clearly not everyone wanted to participate: the bus journey was in the early afternoon and there were people who just wanted to get home, or listen to music through headphones.

35 As we neared the bus terminal where the intervention was to end, people begin to ready themselves to disembark. In front of me, I watched as one of the performers chatted with a fellow passenger. We had been directed to offer our plants as a gift to passengers at the end of the journey and the performer in front of me, having struck up a conversation, now offered her plant as a gift. [1] Would you like to take care of it [the plant]? [2] I would! I would… Thank you, thank you! It’s so beautiful…

36 The woman who accepted the plant was in tears as they hugged and at this point of emotional connection, there was a sense of the tangibility of the community that had been created as a result of 26 plants and a bus ride from one terminal to another. As we all got off the bus, passengers and other people passing through the terminal accepted the plants that we, the performers, were giving away. After the intervention had ended and the bus had left, all that remained was the busy terminal, into which people carrying plants were rapidly disappearing as we, the 26 performers, left for a public/ private space, the Praça Victor Civita10 to discuss how we felt the intervention had gone. Shortly after this discussion we all went our separate ways.

37 Jardim de Passagem is perhaps best characterised by its ephemerality. In all, five hours passed between the performers coming together, acquiring a plant and then separating again and very little survives of the intervention. What contrasts with this lack of materiality is the feeling of community that manifested itself in a space that passengers themselves commented was one where conversations rarely occur. The intervention did not try to perpetuate this sense of community: as quickly as relations had been created, they were then left to disperse, without any attempt to engage people beyond that experience. In this manner, no names were written down, or messages exchanged to prolong the state of encounter; the sum of what occurred is video footage that has been compressed into a five minute film,11 and a defunct WhatsApp group that the performers used to communicate logistical details. The intervention did not speak to any particular political debate or articulate itself to any kind of slogan. There was no sense that performers were advocating a particular cause, and yet fellow passengers were curious to know what was happening and why. Some passengers said as everyone was getting off that it was nice to speak to someone on public transport; that it was a pleasant change to have a conversation in what was usually such a depersonalised space. Passengers also said they liked the flowers, that São Paulo was a “grey” city and the intervention had made it more colourful.

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Jardim de Passagem. Photograph by the author.

38 When I spoke to Siewerdt, some days after the intervention, she shared that she had been apprehensive about how the experiment would unfold. Siewerdt has carried out the intervention twice before, but both times in smaller cities in the interior of São Paulo where as she put it, “people are more likely to chat on a bus”. It was her fear that in São Paulo, a busier, and more segregated city, the intervention would not engender forms of exchange or conviviality. From what I observed on the bus, this apprehension was partly realised. There were passengers who resented their commute being interrupted, just as there were passengers who gave no response to the intervention, preferring to remain in their own space. Equally there was a degree of irritation discernible amongst some passengers at what could be considered the “mess”, or “inappropriateness” of the situation that was created. But it was the very diversity of passenger reactions that was striking. Some passengers were annoyed, some passengers laughed, interacted and shared jokes, and at least one woman was moved to tears. These ephemeral relations were created as a result of nothing more than carrying a plant and it was precisely the possibility of these relations, as Siewerdt stressed, which had facilitated the open-ended nature of the intervention. For her, the meanings of the intervention rested with the passengers who disembarked, and it was not her role to impose an a priori sense of what the performance was “about”. In this open-ended manner, through a series of deliberately aestheticised intentions, Siewerdt’s intervention touched on questions of community, public/private space, and the ephemerality of gestures and relations. In donating the plant at the end of the bus’ route, the intervention also pointed to the idea of the gift, and the relations that an object could make possible within the framework of an artistic exchange.

39 At a seminar I attended a few weeks after the event, there ensued a debate amongst contemporary art researchers as to the “point” of such an intervention. One art scholar asked me to specify what exactly the intervention had changed or brought about. It is

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my reading that such a question is to mistake the nature of such a project’s intention. Within a relational aesthetic paradigm, the liberation of forms of subjectivity takes places within a matrix of horizontality, as opposed to a vertical, authoritarian relationship between artist and audience. In Jardim de Passagem’s aesthetic proposition, the determination to not succumb to utilitarian precedents echoes the politics of Guattari in its rejection of a step-by-step transformation of society, with a series of tangible “goals”. No one on the bus was required to compromise their subjectivity to be part of a wider community, because as soon as that community had formed, it disappeared. In other words, the artwork’s very interstice contains its own dissolution as part of its proposition and any transformation that the intervention brings about is located entirely within the subjectivity of the people who participate.

Disconcerting situations

40 I have argued that Teresa Siewerdt’s intervention demonstrates how political art experiments can create ephemeral micro-utopias that are characterised by an absence of slogans and prescriptive understandings of community. In this space, people are free to elaborate their own subjectivity, and in this vein, create a particular and personal scheme of meaning. And it is pertaining to this idea of “community”, and to what extent that community is necessarily based on a shared or unified sense of meaning, that a discussion surrounding dissonance, and how it is articulated can be productive.

41 In the article “Antagonism and relational aesthetics” (2004) and more widely the book “Artificial Hells” (2012), Claire Bishop argues that Bourriaud places so much emphasis on the facilitation of intersubjective relations, that he entirely leaves aside the bigger question of what kinds of relations are being created, and by whom. In this manner, Bishop implicitly calls into question the emancipatory potential of such a platform, arguing that relational art, for all its claims to horizontality, can in fact end up being nothing more than another exclusive art world sphere, where the only relations permitted are “fundamentally harmonious” as they are “addressed to a community of viewing subjects with something in common” (2004: 68). The notion of a homogeneous audience articulating notions of “democracy” is problematic for Bishop who instead puts forward her theory of “relational antagonism”, premised on Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) discussion of agonism and subjectivity: A fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate - in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased. (Bishop 2004: 66)

42 Bishop argues that in much of the body of work that can be characterised by relational aesthetics, “the structure of the work circumscribes the outcome in advance” (2004: 68), despite these works’ claims to open-endedness or participation.

43 This particularly situated debate points to reflections on conflict that are of significance more widely for both social movement politics and artistic interventions with activist connotations. The extent to which Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics is justified is not the subject of this article, but such a consideration, necessarily brief, does highlight two key points: first, Bishop’s Lacanian emphasis on the concept of subjectivity as inherently fractured and decentred, and second, how these divergent subjectivities are to be articulated. To begin with, it is important to

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note that Bishop’s depiction of the “homogenous relations” produced in Bourriaud’s micro-utopia is at odds with Bourriaud’s own emphasis on how art can emancipate diverse forms of subjectivity. As Bourriaud states: “Subjectivity does not stem from any homogeneity. On the contrary, it develops itself by cuts, segmenting and dismembering the illusory units of psychic life” (2002: 94).

44 “Harmony” is therefore not the goal of the relational aesthetic paradigm. In Siewerdt’s intervention, despite the sense of “community” that was created on the bus, there was nothing homogenous about its membership. Bishop’s critique of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s performance, Untitled (Free), in which the artist served free curry from an ad hoc kitchen in an art gallery, is premised on the idea that only art “insiders” had access to the performance. This was clearly not the case for Jardim de Passagem. Indeed, the performance’s very positioning within a transitory public/private space conferred an accessibility, but also an implicit reflexivity on notions of what it is to have access to certain spaces. Further, Bourriaud argues that the micro-utopia should not only be ephemeral, but also critical: The subversive and critical function of contemporary art is now achieved in the invention of individual and collective vanishing lines, in those temporary and nomadic constructions whereby the artist models and disseminates disconcerting situations. (2002: 31, my emphasis)

45 The forceful articulation of dissonance is a central issue for Bishop and relational antagonism’s seeks to differentiate itself through not seeking to smooth contours of difference from groups which are brought together by a work of art. Bishop puts forward the example of Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People, in which the artist arranged six men in an art gallery in Havana, perceived to not belong to the “art world”, and tattooed a line across their backs, creating an art work of 250 cm length. Echoing the questionable ethics of Ai Weiwei’s recreation of a Syrian boy washed up on a beach, the work’s foreclosed gesture finds resonance in Bishop’s dismissive perspective on participatory art: “Destructive modes of participation might be more inclusive than those that purport to be democratically open” (2012: 49).

46 In this argument, Bishop contends that Sierra creates “dissonance” by “mobilising a tougher, more disruptive approach to ‘relations’” (2004: 77), generating friction and discomfort, and thereby ultimately facilitating relations that are more “democratic”.

47 Leaving aside the debate as to whether “antagonism” necessarily reflects Mouffe’s concept of agonistic pluralism (see Honig 1993, Adorno 1974, Connolly 1991), is it the case that the irritation, non-engagement, and lack of patience of passengers in Jardim de Passagem does not count as dissonance, merely because it is not articulated in such a forceful manner? I argue that the casual ill-feeling of the bus journey signals a gesture that is just as important in terms of poetic significance as tattooing a line across people’s backs, or the herding of crowds across the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.12 Indeed, the micro gestures of dissonance inherent to Jardim de Passagem, and the positioning of the intervention in such a public space, illustrate the subtle sense of détournement that is possible within a community which might superficially seem to display an “immanent togetherness”. In this manner, the nuanced gestures of dissonance expressed by Jardim de Passagem passengers stand in productive contrast to the sharply framed ethical “controversy” generated by the works of artists such as Santiago Sierra. As I have noted above, for Maeckelbergh dimensions of conflict are central to the horizontal elaboration of subjectivity: “consensus” has come to be

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rejected through its associations with compromise and unanimity. However, how such dimensions of dissonance are expressed has signal implications for the elaboration of meaning. If, as Maeckelbergh argues, adversarial conflict is not caused by diversity, but rather by the delimitation of this diversity, then it follows that conflict can be productive if it is given space for expression. Although Siewerdt’s intervention may seem outwardly harmonious, in fact it subtly engenders and indeed facilitates a type of dissonance which is constructive and not adversarial, in the very openness that it proposes for participants to offer a reaction. In aesthetic terms, this is realised through the fact that the intervention is less permanently scarring, recalling the example of Sierra, and more inherently disconcerting, in Bourriaud’s vocabulary. Getting aboard a bus, to be confronted with a swaying, verdant, urban garden on one’s way to work, offers a degree of the bizarre, which is only augmented by the continual growth of this green space, until it begins to encroach on one’s very own personal space. It is this deliberate strangeness of Siewerdt’s intervention, and its nonsensical juxtaposition of the subversive with objects as banal as pot plants and flowers, that creates a non- adversarial difference of opinion, offering a productive dissimilarity with the work of artists who Bishop cites as putting forward a relational antagonism.

48 Following Maeckelbergh therefore, in Sierra’s tattooing of “unelite” people in an “elite” space to create an “antagonistic” provocation premised on a priori assumptions of class, I see an adversarial statement that can only obliterate meaning, rather than facilitate it. By contrast, in an analysis of Jardim de Passagem, it seems important to consider the full range of dissonant gestures and not just those of “monumental”, easily documented, or even readily marketable interest: the shift from a frown to a smile, from non-engagement to an embrace through tears, represents a constructive conflict, signifiers of the multiplicity of subjectivity that underpins the possibilities of a more diverse society.

Conclusion

49 Whether pertaining to social movement politics or artistic interventions with activist connotations, meaning and how it is contested emerge as salient, pressing issues. The subjective turn in social movement politics and the relational aesthetics paradigm both call for diverse subjectivities to be placed at the core of how we envision new worlds. Yet, from within both contemporary art worlds and organised mass mobilisation, a discourse premised on identity politics, seeking to pre-determine and essentialise identities to better present a “coherent” platform continues to be articulated.

50 Despite the compelling resonance between relational aesthetics and direct action politics there are important differences between projects like Jardim de Passagem and activists’ political experiments. There are at least two productive vectors of differentiation in this sense, temporal, and more controversially, “pragmatic”. Jardim de Passagem proposes an ephemeral intervention, but it is unclear on which plane of temporality the artist seeks to provoke change. Is this change designed to reside exclusively in the moment of its happening, or are these gestures designed to provoke a longer term shift? This doubt could be put into contrast with two examples: First, Situationist International’s focus on the gift as a long term revolutionary strategy, articulated through the distribution of a magazine entitled Potlatch in order to subvert commodity exchange by transforming commodities into gifts (Martin 2012: 134); or

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second, the “Free Store” as described in Razsa’s ethnography of direct action politics (2015) where goods are given away in public rather than exchanged for cash as a way to prefigure different social relationships among urban dwellers that will exist beyond the moment of exchange. Does the ephemerality of Siewerdt’s intervention preclude it from the longer-term ambitions of these two examples? Do we accept indeed that ephemeral moments cannot articulate long-term change? As Bourriaud pointedly remarks, demonstration is charged with a temporal import in and of itself, and relations can constitute “a formal resolution which touches on eternity precisely because it is specific and temporary” (2002: 54, my emphasis). In this manner, while Jardim de Passagem may not have achieved anything “quantifiably long term”, I suggest that in artistic interventions with activist connotations, just as in social movement politics, subtle and ephemeral gestures of conflict may signify greater long-term import than the “radical” and destructive in bringing about lasting change.

51 However, in terms of what we can understand as a more “pragmatic” vector, there is a clear differentiation that needs to be made regarding the “production” of subjectivity. Among certain radical activists, seizing the means of subject-making is not an end in itself, but rather a means through which to produce subjects who are prepared to challenge the conditions of their exploitation and alienation in contemporary social orders. While this description could certainly be applied to the Landless Workers’ Movement, it could not be used to describe an intervention like Jardim de Passagem. With Jonas Tinius, I have argued that what exists in the micro-utopia, beyond dimensions of conviviality, is an ethico-aesthetic proposition for how to live your life with others: a call to horizontality and reflection, premised on the transitive ethic between the artist and a community of participants (Flynn and Tinius 2015). There is a non-negotiable difference between a process that is seeks to create meaning through reflection, and one that more actively seeks to impart meaning to a subject. If art really is the looking-glass to the future, then a focus on the germinal and open-ended is required: it is only in engaging with its poietic and horizontal matrix of sociality that we can discern what will happen next.

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Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 152-184.

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NOTES

1. All quoted ECF text available on the ECF website: http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/pma/, accessed 20 October 2015. 2. Canclini’s analysis of the expansion of art world beyond traditional spheres is occurring despite, or perhaps because of, its self-referential structures of power and decision-making. In this manner, cultural foundations give awards to biennales, biennales are curated by cultural foundation laureates, (Charles Esche, São Paulo 2014), and jury members offer pronouncements

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on social movements occupying biennale space: Chris Dercon on the Occupy movement at the 7th Berlin biennale: “there was not much to see” (Farrington 2013). 3. See the following for video and documentation: http://www.liberatetate.org.uk/ performances/the-gift/, accessed 21 October 2015. 4. Liberate Tate’s submission was not accepted by the Tate, but 2 years later many activist objects were displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s much praised exhibition “Disobedient Objects”, including Artúr van Balen’s inflatable cobblestone. 5. Jen Harvie’s article for the Royal Academy “Art and activism: can it change the world?”: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/ai-weiwei-can-art-change-the-world, accessed 21st October 2015. 6. For photo op, Ai Weiwei poses as dead refugee toddler from iconic image. By Karen Archey. Available at: http://conversations.e-flux.com/users/karenarchey/activity. 7. It should be noted here that artists in São Paulo are influenced by contemporary realities: events that I attended where these opinions were aired occurred shortly after millions of people in Brazil had taken to the streets either wearing red in support of the government, or yellow and green in a broadly conservative movement of protest and indignation. 8. An example of such segregation is the Brazilian shopping, or mall. Privatised spaces for leisure and consumption, they also project a certain class identity through the aestheticised use of building materials such as marble and stone, the presence of air conditioning, parking facilities, and the types of businesses that are tenants of the space. Clearly there is a hierarchy of shopping malls with some being more up-market, and others less so, but security is ubiquitous and complicated micro-readings of your embodied racial and social class positioning may determine whether you are allowed free access, whether you are subject to surveillance, or whether you will simply be denied entry. 9. The Largo da Batata movement aims to render usable a large public space after which the movement is named. After an expensive redevelopment, the space is entirely bereft of any shade, any seating, or any other features that might make it conducive to use. The protest movement puts on classes, parties, builds street furniture amongst other activities to try and highlight the lack of usable public space in São Paulo. See for more information: http://largodabatata.com.br/ a-batata-precisa-de-voce/. 10. The square was originally a site for the incineration of rubbish until 1989. The space was redeveloped through a partnership between the São Paulo city council and the Abril Group, a major publishing house and media conglomerate in Brazil. The square was eventually named after Victor Civita, one of the most powerful media barons in Latin America and the founder of Abril Group that oversees titles such as Veja, Men’s Health, and Playboy. See: http:// pracavictorcivita.org.br/conceito/linha-do-tempo/. 11. For video of the performance Jardim de Passagem see: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=PNT0f-4DAmc, accessed 21st October 2015. 12. The cover of Claire Bishop’s “Participatory Hells” depicts Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 at the Tate Modern. In this installation, visitors to the exhibition are subject to crowd control tactics, enforced by two mounted policemen.

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ABSTRACTS

In this article I analyse the notion that social movement politics and contemporary art interventions increasingly traverse a porous boundary, be it in terms of practices, relations, or institutions. Premised on Nicolas Bourriaud’s seminal reading of 1990s art, I contend that the theory of “relational aesthetics” (2002) offers a synthetic platform from which we can understand how artistic interventions with activist connotations are increasingly moving away from the utopian and prescriptive, and thus echoing the “subjective turn” of social movement politics more widely. Based on fieldwork with contemporary artists and social movement actors in Brazil, the chapter mobilises relational aesthetics as a criteria to differentiate various forms of contemporary art intervention. Through conversation with ethnographies of radical politics, I argue that an analysis that foregrounds ephemerality, the “absolute centrality of diversity”, and different forms of dissonance, allows us to productively theorise how subjectivity is elaborated and meaning created. If art really is the locus of “imminence”, then understanding how these processes are contested is to grasp how prefigurative politics can have consequences for the immediate future.

INDEX

Keywords: micro-utopia, subjectivity, relational aesthetics, contemporary art, activism, social movements

AUTHOR

ALEX FLYNN

Durham University, UK. Department of Anthropology [email protected]

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How to Begin, Again. Relational Embodiment in Time Arts & Anthropology

Anne-Sophie Reichert

EDITOR'S NOTE

Date received: 2015-06-01 Date accepted: 2016-01-18

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am deeply indebted to all members of Every house has a door for their hospitality, generosity and critical feedback on this project. Many thanks to Mary Jo Schnell, Chris Sullivan and Robert Metrick for taking time to answer my many questions. Comments from Judith Farquhar, Michael Rossi, participants of the Anthropology Graduate Student Conference “The (Troubled) Field” (NSSR, April 2014) and participants at the Knowledge/Value Workshop (University of Chicago, April 2014) all contributed to earlier versions of this article. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which substantially improved an earlier draft of this paper. One. 1990. Begin. Again. Can We? Begin Again. One.

1 Speaking deliberately, Selma Banich opens 9 Beginnings. It is January 24, 2014, 7.42 pm at the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry in Hyde Park, Chicago. The Chicago performance art group Every house has a door has just opened tonight’s run of their latest work 9 Beginnings: Bristol & Chicago. Engaging with the live art archives of the University of Bristol and Arnolfini in the UK, and the Randolph Street Gallery archives at The School

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of the Art Institute of Chicago, the project restages the beginnings of nine performances by nine different artists or companies in a new arrangement. 1

2 Every house’s reenactment questions the distinct quality of performance as the ephemeral live art experience par excellence: that which can never be re-presented; that in which you don’t play your role, you are your role (Schneider 2011: 125). Rebecca Schneider argues that the “immaterial labor of the performing body” (Schneider 2011: 131) cannot be replaced—it is a living ritual, the “singular spectacle of the body-in- action of the performance artist” (Gómez-Peña c.f. Schneider 2011: 131). Reenactment then, purposely troubles the alleged singularity of phenomenal experience, of the individual subject, and of original, authentic art. Instead, it sets out to highlight prevailing connections and establish new links between performances and performers. 2

3 In early 2014, I was allowed to accompany Every house has a door for a residency at the Gray Center in Chicago, a space for interdisciplinary arts-sciences collaborations at the University of Chicago. My aim was to explore whether the interaction of perception, affection, cognition and body movement could be understood in a way that does not have to presuppose an autonomous individual but conceptualises being as thoroughly social. Ethnographic fieldwork with performers, who are trained to be extremely aware of their bodies and to manipulate affective atmospheres, seemed like a promising start to such an investigation.

4 The study of body movement can be found at the origins of anthropological inquiry. E. E. Evans-Pritchard argued for dance as a concern for anthropological study (Evans- Pritchard 1928) and Marcel Mauss understood body movement and technique as socially acquired yet non-discursive elements of culture (Mauss 1934). Yet, since the influential collaboration of Victor Turner and Richard Schechner in the 1970s (Schechner 1985, Turner 1986), anthropology has looked at various art forms and music as important elements of culture but has paid comparatively little attention to performance art and dance. I would like to suggest that by coupling the recent anthropological interest in contemporary art (Ingold 2013, Schneider/Wright 2010 and 2013, Foster 1995) with anthropological research on the materiality of the body and embodiment, as well as with recent contributions on the relation of politics and aesthetics in performance studies, political theory and art history (Phelan 1993, Schneider 2011, Kompridis 2014, Ziarek 2012, Bourriaud 1998, Bishop 2004 and 2012), performance emerges as a social field that deserves ethnographic attention.3

5 This paper is divided into four sections. First, I introduce the performers of Every house has a door and their work 9 Beginnings, focusing on the process of reenacting and reimagining performance. Section two proposes three different kinds of relationalities between past and present in performance experience. I observe that collective relationality, which enables performance as a world, is transtemporal, embodied and affective. In section three, I interpret the political potential of Every house’s collective practice against the backdrop of relational aesthetics and draw out critical differences between embodied relationality in the practice of Every house, and relational aesthetics after Nicolas Bourriaud. I conclude by sketching how the kind of relational being-in- the-world that emerges from my ethnographic inquiry challenges an understanding of relational art as inherently democratic, yet allows for an understanding of form as normative.

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How to Begin

6 9 Beginnings started with an invitation to an archive. The University of Bristol and the contemporary arts space Arnolfini invited Lin Hixson, the director of Every house has a door, and Matthew Goulish, the dramaturge of Every house to engage with the Live Art Archives Bristol, the primary archive for contemporary performance art in the UK. Matthew and Lin took up the invitation and spent four weeks in the summer of 2012 in Bristol, digging through an abundant collection of videotaped performances. They selected nine videotaped performances, which were then staged in a performance in Bristol. In summer 2013, Lin and Matthew entered another archive: that of Randolph Street Gallery, a former progressive arts space in Chicago.4 Again, they selected nine performances on videotape that were put on stage in Chicago. When I met Lin and Matthew in January 2014 they wanted to bring these two sets of works together, weaving them into one single performance.

7 Why beginnings? As Hito Steyerl writes in a recent essay on the oeuvre of documentary filmmaker Harun Farocki: “The first sentence sets the scene. It is a building block for a world to emerge in between words, sounds, and images. A good beginning holds a problem in its most basic form. It looks effortless, but rarely is. A good beginning requires the precision and skill to say things simply. Like the crafts of making bricks, weapons, or files on hard drives, there is an art of creating beginnings” (Steyerl 2014). Watching hours of performances on video imagining their potential restaged, Lin and Matthew chose to focus on beginnings precisely because of their ability to hold a world that is still to unfold. Their new beginnings would figure as live archives: a performance re-presenting a former performance.

8 Every house’s endeavour is not a meticulous replication of the former works. The production of exact sameness is not desirable for the performers since it presupposes a kind of original body movement that can be copied one-to-one. But it is precisely this idea of original body movement that performers like Every house’s and performance theorists like Schneider continually question. To Schneider, “all bodily practice is, like language, always already composed in repetition and repetition is, paradoxically, both the vehicle for sameness and the vehicle for difference or change” (Schneider 2011: 10). Lin affirms that there is no authentic, the authentic is already multiple, made up—part of a tradition, piece of a repertoire. As much as Every house’s performance is composed through restoring a past performance, so was exactly that past performance concerned with connecting to other past events, actions, and themes (cf. Schneider 2011: 126-127).

9 The members of Every house think that they can only live up to what the archival sources demand if they warp them, enacting them in their own variation. Lin explains: “It was taking this material and turning it in such a way that we embodied it. Rather that, than trying to duplicate what we saw.” Turning begins with limitation. Performer Nik Wakefield characterises the compositional process of 9 Beginnings as one of subtraction rather than of production, of cutting away in order to reveal what matters. A first constraint was to solely work with beginnings. Another limit, and one that Lin and Matthew understand as central to reenactment, was to focus on the vital qualities of the videotaped performances; a process which Lin calls “capturing the forces”. A third restriction was practical possibility. In selecting the videos from the archives as well as in deciding how to exactly reenact certain scenes, it was often a matter of considering what was doable, given the performers, materials, and resources at hand in

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rehearsal. These practical decisions went hand-in-hand with detecting the emblematic elements of the former works. In one scene, Sebastián reenacts the beginning of Cavalcades in Learning, a performance created by Chris Sullivan and performed in 1989 at Randolph Street Gallery. In his version, Chris Sullivan set up a stage with loose floorboards, which caused him to dodder whenever he walked on it. In Every house’s reenactment, there are no loose floorboards, but Sebastián’s legs shake tremendously throughout the whole scene. Reenacting the emblematic means to find out what defines a situation instead of solely trying to copy it. Through impersonating the leg movement, “you have the unstable floor although you don’t really have it”.5 Every house understands these choices made in the production of the performance as a collective subjective process. As Selma comments: Different hosts bring different meaning and a different experience to the body of work. There are different versions or possibilities, or different trajectories that are equally important and equally authentic. [...] You don’t really know anyway what is the master tape and what are the copies.

10 Every house does not claim authoritative exclusivity to their iteration of the performances; to them, it is more important to investigate the practical possibilities for engaging with the archival materials. Doing so, they contribute to the ongoing discussion of how to archive performance while keeping it alive.

Collective Experience and Sticky Matter

11 The world which Every house inhabits is a complicated network of materials, bodies, places, and feelings. This section is concerned with the human relationalities, outlining three different modes that all take connectivity rather than individuality as their starting points. With Marilyn Strathern, I perceive “[b]odies [as] compris[ing] a field of relations” (Strathern 2009: 150), a plane on which that which we might perceive as single skin-bounded individuals are complexly interwoven. Understanding life as thoroughly social, I view humans as being continuously enmeshed in meaningful relations to each other, thus producing shared experiences and common worlds (cf. Haugeland 1982).

12 The first relation is that of Every house to the former performers and their original works which Every house restages. 6 This connection has to be established from the present into the past. Starting points are the videotapes from the archives in Bristol and Chicago, which mediate the performers access to the past performances. For Sebastián, a videotape can tell him more than a written script could because it provides a moving image of the performing body: Think[ing] of the video screen as a script is very interesting to me […] because it is a different way of reading text from a screen, because you are reading the whole situation, the body, the lighting, how it was taped. You try to capture what the situation is, the ambiance of the moment.

13 Video facilitates access to the past through recalling experience (cf. Ruby 2000: 54). Discerning the atmosphere of a moment past, a sensible connection to the former performers and works is established; something Schneider calls “the affective stain that passes between bodies and time” (Schneider 2011: 135). Lin recounts: Yeah, it’s fascinating because so much of that did come from the video but then that was only a starting point because once Sebastián and Selma started taking on that material, there was something that I trusted that had to do with the impulse of the

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initial piece. That somehow we were connected to it. I don’t know but that’s how I felt about it.

14 While Lin expresses this connection as already existent in the form of a feeling, the performers have to work hard for establishing a felt relation. They search beyond the videotapes for ways to establish links: online research, books, and archival materials about the former performers and their artistic contexts were more conventional ways of becoming familiar with the works, but there was also a great part of imaginary investigation at play. Reenacting the performance of Chris Sullivan, Sebastián tried to understand the relation between Chris Sullivan, the actual person, and the version that Chris created of himself to address the audience in his performance. Sebastián’s goal was to craft a version of himself that was like the version that Chris created of himself in his performance. Sebastián did not try to copy Chris’s performance but rather Chris’s relation to his performing self. In order to relate to the earlier performances and their performers in a meaningful way and thus bring their force into the present, this force has to be understood bodily, it has to be taken into movement. For the performer Selma, this process goes beyond cognitive understanding: You think about it when you watch the video, when you research it. You think about how it was for Simone Forti [a former performer]. What did she think when she was doing it? You can prepare yourself in a way but then you have to let go of all of that and just see what the practice of doing brings. […] I still think when I move but I think differently. I think from the experience of now, and not from what should, what did I read about her or how it was then.

15 Understanding the past performances and their performers functions for Every house through recognising their absence and as much as their presence. While affirming the boundary between past and present through acknowledging an “original” and its author, which will be reenacted, the same act troubles this boundary. The contingency unsettles the differentiation of past and present; cross-temporal relationalities determine the understanding of time within the performance. In this case, replication and repetition do not threaten the original but might function as vehicles for temporal exchanges and negotiations (c.f. Schneider 2011: 30-31). For Sebastián, 9 Beginnings aims precisely at questioning the originality and singularity of events, whose stringing together establishes linear progressing time. The original and Every house’s reenactment can equally be viewed as two separate works, or as one work that is being extended through time: It’s as if all of these beginnings are like a piece of gum and we are grabbing the gum and we are pulling it. It is still the same piece of gum but now we pull it, maybe we twist it here and so in a way it’s different, we are elongating the work in a way but by doing that we are also changing its shape. Yet it’s always still connected to that first part.

16 When a performance event is stretched like gum, beginnings and ends appear only as possible, somewhat arbitrary time markers rather than as determinate events. Interesting here is that the performance exceeds its genre’s temporal mode, the present, altering an event of the past in an unexpected manner.7

17 Echoing James Gibson (1979), the philosopher Alva Noë conceptualises performance experience as a small-scale environment, in which that what “we encounter is the meaningful world of our possible action […] not the physical world” (Noë 2013: 126).8 A performance attunes us to our “perceptual being-in-the-world”, it makes us aware that our environment is one “whose meaning is always specified relative to us” (Noë 2013:

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126). According to Noë, a performance teaches us that we dynamically “enact our environments thanks to our skillful engagement with them” (Noë 2013: 126). In the context of Every house’s work, Noë’s account implies that establishing a world through performance depends on recognising and extending meaningful relations to the past works and their performers, as well as the establishment of meaningful relations in the present. Understanding these relations as a practice, Every house enables a contingent performance world which, as Lin frames it, is made up of “connective tissue” (Hixson 2013: 4).

18 In this practice, the past is more agentive than one might think. On the cold and snowy nights of Every house’s performance showings in January 2014, three of the performers who had created and performed work at Randolph Street Gallery between 1989 and 1998 that was now reenacted by Every house came to the Gray Center. Their impressions of the performances are truly fascinating. The reenactments by Every house functioned for all of them as a sensible entry into the past, (re)invoking excitement, fear, sadness, delight and inspiration. At the time, Mary Jo Schnell was the curator of Randolph Street Gallery and often gave improvised pre-show announcements. In 9 Beginnings, Matthew reenacts one of her pre-show announcements, providing an insight into the thriving and progressive performance arts scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Chicago. After the show, Mary Jo’s eyes glowed as she put her first impressions into words: “It’s wonderful that Lin and Matt pulled the material out. It would only sit in a stupid box and be dusty if you didn’t do that. You liberate the material from its fate, you give it new direction, and you bring it back!” Mary Jo tells us stories from the days of Randolph Street Gallery: how this evening reminds her of the creative and politically radical forces of that time and evokes the desire to create performance again.

19 Another guest, Robert Metrick, tells me that he was immensely curious to see how Every house would engage with the performance O Klahoma! or The Farmer in the Astral Plains, which he came up with and had performed by a number of performers, one of them Matthew of Every house, at Randolph Street Gallery in 1998. What fascinates Robert is how the reenactment makes unthought-of encounters possible—retrospectively and in the present—through overlapping kinds of formerly separated works: How the different events sort of materialised and disappeared—it was kind of ghostly. […] Moments that could have never happened in the past—now things come together that didn’t come together in the past. That was kind of otherworldly. I had no idea who the others were, that were simultaneously with me performing [in Every house’s reenactment]. I mean, I had never met them or seen their work. So there was this collaboration that [had ]never [happened before]—Lin and Matthew selected those materials and molded Jennifer [Monson], Yvonne [Meier] and me in collaboration.9

20 By bringing these different works into one conversation, the members of Every house problematise their established singularity. They mould the boundaries of different events and entities, building on existing and establishing new links between different moments in time. In my conversations with Mary Jo and Robert it became apparent that when the members of Every house expands and alters their works, this radically changes their relation to them. This might be the “kind of ghostly” effect that Robert described earlier: the past experiences of Mary Jo and Robert adopt a different present than they would have envisioned possible, partly independent from them, yet never fully defamiliarised. It feels like Every house’s work and their own work at the same time, like kin yet like stranger.

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21 A second set of relations is that of Every house’s members. Although all performers prepare by themselves for the usually short phase of collective practice with the whole ensemble, it is through collective research and rehearsal that bodily inquiry into the past is practiced together. Here, reenactment is an ongoing appropriation, shared by trying out things together. Through enacting the archival sources collectively, the performers bring into being a live archive that is distinct in its dynamic quality. The possibility for enabling this mode of representing the formerly archived works arises through the act of working and embodying as a collective. None of the individual members of Every house could create the performance experience on their own; all performers are needed at the same time and place, engaging in and sharing the practice of performing.

22 Working with Every house, there was an unusual openness, respect and care. Empathy did not fall victim to intense concentration. During the rehearsal period, the members of Every house spun a world of their own; entering their studio space felt like leaving the everyday. The collectivity they created exerts a special affective force; a force that is plural and not multiple, being more than the sum of their individual agencies. This collective force emerges through their being together in the world, hence creating a meaningful world that comes with its own respective atmosphere. Sebastián calls the energy that animates this atmosphere “richness”, materialising out of the relations with the others. Annalaura speaks of that what is shared as “sticky matter”, the matter of feeling: “To some extent, you find it is shared. Sometimes, as if by magic, you find that everybody in the room may respond to the same thing. That’s the moment of intensity. The moment when the atmosphere intensifies.” For both Annalaura and Sebastián, it seems that the collective force of Every house arises through creating and sharing feelings and meaning. The delight of shared force is what drives the practice of performing: it is what makes everybody work extremely hard, yet never grimly determined. The formation and circulation of this force is essential for creating a performance that will be affective, that will move and touch the audience. As a matter of feeling, it is both directed and temporary. It is directed towards each other among the performers and once entering the actual performance it might resonate with the audience as well. Yet it is ephemeral: In order to enable and feel it, the performers have to achieve a heightened presence in the moment—they have to be fully devoted to the performance practice; they are the performance. While the creation of shared force depends tremendously on actually being together in one place at a specific time, the encounters with the original performances and their performers have shown already that collectivity might also be experienced transtemporally. In particular the work with the performances from Randolph Street Gallery led Every house to inquire into the communal spirit and practices of the venue at that time: their community outreach initiatives, their non-profit strategies, and their fight for radical art and political change.

23 Collective embodied inquiry and the production of collective affective worlds question a phenomenological account of an experiencing self that is bound to an individualised “experience-collecting […] body proper” (Farquhar/Lock 2007: 2).10 In order to grasp the quality of the performer’s collective embodiment and the affective forces it generates, neither a purely phenomenological perspective, which implicitly presupposes a given individual body-self, nor a structuralist perspective, which understands the human body as a historically contingent product of semiotic, cultural,

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and social order, suffices on its own. The structuralist account would not provide sufficient insight into novel individually differing embodied experience of actual material practices and falls short in explaining how the entanglement of perception, emotion, cognition and bodily movement comes about in detail, e.g. in proprioception or kinaesthetics. A purely phenomenological perspective misses out on the productive relationality and interdependence of the performers and might obscure how a specific socio-cultural and historical context shapes their being-in-the-world. What might be more appropriate, then, is a less oppositional treatment of the respective positions. The research, rehearsal and performance of Every house is a collective practice which arises in a specific context and location and configures responsive bodies in meaningful ways, thereby producing and at the same time relying on experientially grounded, sensing, feeling and moving bodies.

24 Reenactment as enactment in Every house’s work is embodiment in the literal sense. The performers attempt to connect to history by engaging in it bodily, animating the past through and in their own experience. In this process, perception, body movement, emotion and cognition are complexly linked, not just in individual bodies but also in between the performers, who move in relational configurations, share thoughts and feelings, and experience the plural force which arises from their mutual work. Collective embodiment denotes this process of collectively taking-into-the-body and producing a shared meaningful world, a practice that requires individual as well as supra-individual intertwined engagement of perception, emotion and cognition.

25 There is a third set of relations, that between Every house and its audience. One type is seating. The members of Every house passionately discussed how to organise the seating. Their conversations about chairs, risers, and lines of vision became a daily ritual, taking up good amounts of time in feedback rounds and lunch break conversations. The main issue was that the space where they would show the performance did not have a preconfigured and installed seating concept. Before the first actual showing of the performance, the group set up wooden risers which they specifically built for the shows in the Gray Center—a place in which they would only stage the performance three times. On the night of the premiere I understood for the first time why the seating of the audience mattered so much. While I tended to perceive performers and audience as two separated groups in one place but with different jobs, I now understood that the situation at hand was different: performers and audience contribute collectively to the performance experience. The performance is not solely a transmission of a theme from the stage to the audience but it is a shared experience for which both spatially separated sides are responsible. The performers devote so much time to the conscious and self-reflexive construction of the performance venue because they aim at creating a realm in which a palpably collective experience can materialise. In order for the audience to become enmeshed in this performance experience, it is important that they can see properly. Lin reflects: I think that we found that it’s really important that people can see. It’s important to me. So that’s always been an issue to me that people can see. Cause I am seeing it in this certain way I want everybody else to see it. My god, if they can't see Sebastian's legs it’s a whole other thing. It’s this precision thing. […] There is something about the idea of a seated audience; someone is seated and just watching. [But] that’s not a passive position! It’s an active position, a very active position. That people immediately think that if you are seated, if you are not moving around, that puts the spectator in a passive position. I felt like that it’s really important that people

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are taken care of and are comfortable so that they can go into this state where they can actively be involved and be in the performance […].

26 Although the performers can prepare the performance space, they cannot control the performance experience. The atmosphere of each night’s show depends to a great extent on the different audiences and their interaction with the performance. Involving the audience actively, the collective disclosing of the past expands beyond the members of Every house in the actual live performance. Every house embraces the fact that a specific performance only exists in the moment of the event, in the now. Performance is a shared experience for performers and spectators alike. In the performance, performers and audience form a collective, which enables the performance together. Attuning themselves to their surroundings via sense perception and proprioception, relating to the fellow spectators and the performers, the involvement of the audience is not just a simple absorption of the experience, followed by a form of conceptual understanding. On the contrary, most of the times it is quite difficult to “understand” performance art, to make sense of it. Actively engaging in performance is not just understanding it within the space of reasons; it involves seeing, hearing, sometimes tasting or touching the performance, feeling bodily and emotional resonances. Through the affective involvement in the event, a community of performers and audience forms. Sticky matter is what draws and holds it together. In this sense, its uniting forces are affective and material, felt and sensed.

Relational Aesthetics and Politics

27 To recapitulate: the above-explicated relationalities which form the backbone of Every house’s performance art exhibit three main characteristics. First, relations are transtemporal, for example, when Every house extends the videotaped performances into the present or when Robert Metrick’s understanding of his own performance changes once he sees it back on stage performed by Every house. Second, relations are bodily and material—they can be sensed, felt and moved. One example for this is the collective embodied inquiry into the past that Every house undertakes. Relations are practiced in tangible environments, involving props and tools to configure space and atmosphere. Third, relations produce and hold a shared affective force that has been expressed as felt delight, intensity, ghostly energy or sticky matter. All of these three characteristics contribute toward generating Every house’s world. Due to their sensible and affective nature, these relations offer an entry into the very same world they engender.

28 At this point, it might be worthwhile to bring in one more approach to relationality for comparison. I would like to think the social relationships that undergird Every house’s work in line with what has been termed relational aesthetics after Nicolas Bourriaud (Bourriaud [1997] 2002). Drawing out where Bourriaud’s and my ideas for relationality overlap and where they diverge, I intend to further hone a framework of relationality as generative of beings and worlds, and as possibly reluctant to capitalist exploitation. Yet, I suggest that when investigating this latter emancipatory characteristic, the relation of form and content has to be treated with care.

29 Echoing Bourriaud in an abridged manner, art is relational if it expands the possibilities and the space for intersubjective relations beyond established systems of interaction that are bound up with the capitalist market system. The idea of a microtopia denotes

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exactly such a place and moment of interaction—an “arena of exchange” (Bourriaud 2002: 7) that aims at divesting itself from the commodification of social relations in the everyday and the art world. Instead, a microtopia is understood as a space in which collectivity functions as a constitutive element of art practice. Artistic inquiry does not solely envision a kind of utopic future anymore; it now practices utopia in enclosed and temporary microtopias in the present.

30 A first difference between Bourriaud’s and the relational approach, which I develop out of my engagement with Every house, exists with respect to the kind of art under consideration. Where Bourriaud is concerned with fine art, Every house create performance art. Bourriaud focuses on artworks; the artist-audience collaboration is the explicit aim of the artwork. Performance, on the other hand, is more an art practice than a piece of art; it is an action not a thing—hence its ephemerality. While interaction with the audience is crucial to Every house’s practice, it is not the single end to the performance. Every house deliberately preconfigures the performance environment beforehand in order to create a space that facilitates the maximum possibility for the audience to interact with the performers. However, this kind of hospitality can also be understood as delimiting the space of possible actions for the audience.11 In fact, Every house coordinates how all relations which converge in their project manifest. While the audience might become immersed in the performance, they are not directly involved in defining and shaping the performance. For this, Every house would have to facilitate the audience’s direct engagement in decision-making processes, presumably, even before an audience has formed, in the process of rehearsal. Yet in this case, such modes of engagement are not in Every house’s interest. An additional difference between Bourriaud and Every house can be found in their treatment of time: Bourriaud’s relational art places heavy emphasis on the present as the exclusive temporal mode in which direct democratic relationality can evolve. One does not get to know much about whether relational art’s radical potential can survive in memory or can be cultivated as future possibility. In contrast, Every house’s practices are comprised of and stored in collective relations that span from past to present—and back.

31 Nevertheless, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and the relational embodiment that I understand to guide Every house’s practice share a belief in the political possibilities that collectivities enable. Yet, the understanding of how a collective comes into being and takes on meaning might differ.

32 For Bourriaud, relational art is “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (Bourriaud 2002: 5). One problem with this notion of relational art is that its use can be inflationary: all art that evolves around social interaction may practically be understood as relational in the way Bourriaud imagines it. Every house’s work, for example, can be encompassed under Bourriaud’s definition. Following Bourriaud would not solely mean that a given arts practice is collective, but that its collectivity can provide and practice new, better and potentially anti-capitalist models to inhabit the world. In this respect, the exclusive focus on relationality and its radical democratic potential might divert from further critical expressions and functions of the practice under investigation.. In the case of 9 Beginnings for example, it would be difficult to address Every house’s methodological investigation concerning the archiving and representing of live art.

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33 Relational aesthetics appear not to specify exactly how relationality functions in detail. It does not spell out sufficiently that social norms are what, among others, constitute and govern human behaviour and interaction. A central criterion for relational art after Bourriaud is that the artwork allows “me to enter into dialogue” (Bourriaud 2002: 109). Yet, entering a dialogue successfully depends on knowing and playing “the rules of the game”. If I do not know the rules under which the dialogue operates, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to enter it. Especially in the art world, which has a reputation for being extremely difficult to access due to its minute codes and rules, entering into a dialogue with an artwork will not only depend on the normative space of an artwork but will also depend on its context and the social rules that govern it.12

34 The art historian Claire Bishop criticises relational aesthetics for understanding humans as whole subjectivities (Bishop 2004: 79), which then practice, seemingly with little difficulty, inter-subjectivity. In other words, the bottom category of relational aesthetics remains the Enlightenment trope of a free and rational single-body individual. This understanding is contrary to the one I have proposed earlier, namely, one, in which relations are constitutive for the formation of a kind of human that we experience as individual.13 I define Every house’s practice as relational because I understand it to exhibit a mode of being-in-the-world that is thoroughly social and thus precedes individual personhood. While Bourriaud strives for having relationality at center, the base constituents of his approach remain single skin-bounded individuals. Collectivity comes in a second step; a phase of active production, and this is the work of art. Bourriaud’s reliance on individuals leads to experience as, ultimately, a matter of single subjects in a collective situation: “I see and I perceive. I comment, and I evolve in a unique space and time” (Bourriaud 2002: 6). Whether an artwork is relational or not is therefore only visible from a non-relational, individual standpoint. To this end, I propose that it might be productive to extend Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, coupling it with an understanding of relationality which does not presuppose individual subjectivity as the base unit of a collective situation. Bourriaud himself appears to be inclined to such an understanding when he writes: “So the essence of humankind is purely trans-individual, made up of bonds that link individuals together in social forms which are invariably historical.” (Bourriaud 2002: 7). Yet, in his following analyses of several artworks, Bourriaud regresses to characterising individual agency more so than relational forces. And, Bourriaud falls short on providing a comprehensive explanation for the inherent normativity of relationality.

35 Relational aesthetics offer possibilities for progressive politics on the basis of simplifying the complex relations of aesthetic and normative judgment. Put in other words, the possible relations of form and content are reduced to one fitting configuration: the right form of an artwork provides the right kind of political utterance. While these relations cannot be discussed in depth here, I will begin to clarify how their uncritical treatment becomes problematic if one is to render relational art fruitful for anthropological inquiry. In relational artworks as described by Bourriaud, relationality appears to be the form of the art practice and its subject matter at the same time. This conflation of form and content allows Bourriaud simultaneously “to equate aesthetic judgment with an ethicopolitical judgment of the relationships produced by a work of art” (Bishop 2004: 65). It does so because the form of the artwork, relationality, is inevitably understood as inherently normative, in this

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example, as providing critique and alternative to commodified art and relationships within capitalist life. It does so in contradistinction to a traditional understanding of form as an aesthetic category; of aesthetic judgment as formal judgment. Accordingly, the fact that meaning is elaborated collectively in microtopias renders them automatically politically good or democratic, without specifying their intentions (Bishop 2004: 54). Therefore, Bishop has raised the question how to evaluate of the normativity, in her words, the “quality”, of the form microtopia: When Bourriaud argues that ‘encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them,’ I sense that this question is (for him) unnecessary; all relations that permit “dialogue” are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good. But what does “democracy” really mean in this context? If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why? (Bishop 2004: 65).14

36 Bishop highlights here the point raised earlier: Relationships are governed by norms. She adds two critical issues: relationships are constituted by a specific set of people and to a certain end. Without delving further into the known debate between Bourriaud and Bishop, I would like to make a preliminary suggestion of what anthropology could contribute to this conversation. If anthropology were to engage relational aesthetics, its biggest strength would be that it has a long tradition of analysing social structure and practice, focusing on norms, codes, rules and their reappropriation. Anthropology pays attention to socio-economic and historical contexts, investigating people, places, relations and processes as situated concrete phenomena. Anthropologists might thus be in a privileged position when developing research designs that speak directly to Bishop’s most crucial questions: How do we assess or compare relationalities like Every house’s? How do we examine the norms that govern the relationships and how do we differentiate such an examination analytically from the goal towards which a collective works?

37 Yet, if anthropological research is guided by questions like Bishop’s, asking for whom, and why which kinds of relations are produced, it remains in a mode of assessing relationality on an individual level. This restriction limits the scope that anthropological inquiry can take. Unlike Bishop, anthropology holds the possibility to develop concepts that emerge from empirical observation and embrace an understanding of human relationality as preceding individuality, thus effectively transcending the mode of individual experience and appraisal.

38 The anthropologist Roger Sansi has recently provided an anthropological exploration that draws on relational aesthetics. In his research on the collaborative art project Colony at MoMA PS 1 in 2013, Sansi asks, almost exactly in vein with Bishop: “Which protocols do the new collective experiments require?” (Sansi 2014: 156)? In the way it is posed, Sansi’s question avoids asking for a cause-and-effect chain that begins with and loops back to individual agency. He instead proposes to think of a collective as a situated experiment that abides to protocols. Although Sansi is sceptical of the emancipatory potential of the art world for society as a whole he relies on Bourriaud’s concept of microtopias. Therefore, he ultimately runs into the same problem as Bourriaud when he couples relationality with normativity a priori—without giving an explanation for why relationality as an organising principle is already politically desirable in its own right. The collective experiments that Sansi investigates inside and outside of the art world appear to be progressive and democratic primarily on the basis that they are organised in a relational form. This organisational form can then be

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infiltrated by other normative agendas, for example, that of the state or that of the market economy. While Sansi does explicate that a collective project can, and does increasingly, comprise several conflicting objectives (Sansi 2014:160), he does not sufficiently explain why the kind of relationality he lays out is, on its own terms, i.e. before it is hijacked by other objectives, ethically or politically desirable. Why is relationality as form already good, even democratic? Why do the organisational structure and the political expression of a collective experiment line up so neatly for both, Bourriaud and Sansi?

How to Begin, Again

39 If we were to presuppose relationality as constitutive of human life worlds, artistic and everyday, and this is what I have been arguing for after analysing Every house’s relationalities throughout this paper, the political potential of a collective praxis can be discerned on two levels: in its form and in its content. I suggest that it is critical to not conflate these two levels too hastily. Of course, form and content are complexly linked. A specific form, for example, always indicates the origin of the respective content in a given practice. Yet, that does not mean that form and content are the same. If we were to equate the form with the goal toward which a collective works, any group that holds together on the base of embodied and affective relationality would be politically good or desirable. Every house’s relational embodiment, the practice of taking archival sources collectively into bodies and reconnecting with other performers and performances through time is an extraordinary achievement of human collaboration. However, I do not think that this act of collaboration automatically holds a kind of radical political potential beyond the transtemporal affective relationalities that it makes felt for the performers and the audience. These relationalities can, obviously, provide a kind of lived empathetic collaboration that appears to be quite rare in a time in which an understanding of humans as atomistic alienated individuals dominates. Yet, we would still have to explain how, and to what end exactly, such a felt collaboration is politically or ethically desirable.

40 To conclude, I would like to offer one possible explanation for how relational form, and, consequently, a kind of relational aesthetics that does not presuppose self-contained individuality can be understood as exerting normative, and thus potentially politically desirable, force. The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has recently proposed an answer as to why exactly relationality can be averse to capitalism; an argument that all authors discussed so far herein have not yet provided. Admittedly, Tsing’s context is not the art world; but the life world and exchange routes of matsutake mushrooms. What Tsing calls “contaminated diversity” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015: 33) are entangled and conflicting forms of identities and histories of landscapes and people that, in her story, evolve around the worlds of the matsutake mushroom. This contaminated diversity, so Tsing, is primarily relational: “[It] has no self-contained units; its units are encounter-based collaborations. Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, of functionality, to any “one” involved. […] Without algorithms based on self- containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake. That takes time, and too much time, perhaps, for those who dream of grasping the world in an equation” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015: 33-34).

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41 Echoing Tsing’s argument for the purposes of understanding the political potential of relationality in the context of performance art and anthropology proposed here, it becomes apparent that the collective embodiment that I have observed in the small- scale environment of Every house’s performance is, in its primarily relational being, something else than the sum of whole subjectivities, or, autonomous individuals. On the contrary, the experience of individually perceiving and feeling beings emerges through collective practice, through making and encountering a specific world of possible action.

42 If a collective, artistic or everyday, is more than a sum of individualised and thus scalable units, if it is, in Tsing’s words, an “encounter-based collaboration” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015:33), its translation into capitalist assets appears to prove difficult because capitalism runs best on reliable definitive elements. Performance studies scholars like Schneider have long argued that the ephemerality of time arts is precisely what positions it in opposition to commodified art works that can be hung on walls. It is the non-scalable and always evolving form of relational arts practices which render it reluctant to commodification and possibly recalcitrant to capitalism.

43 If Anthropology is to engage further with questions of relational encounter, a first step could be to observe under what conditions and protocols collaborative worlds emerge and dissolve. The question of how forms of relationality are bound up with the politics they propose solicits further attention.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Banes, Sally. 1998. Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” In: OCTOBER, no. 110, pp. 51–79.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.

Buckland, Theresa Jill. 2010. “Shifting perspectives on dance ethnography.” In: The Routledge dance studies reader. 2d ed. Edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 335–343. London: Routledge.

Carr, C. 1993. On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Csordas, Thomas (ed.). 1994. Embodiment and experience: the existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Davida, Dena, ed. 2011. Fields in motion: Ethnography in the worlds of dance. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1928. The dance. Africa 1, 446–462.

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Farquhar, Judith & Lock, Margaret. 2007. “Introduction.” In: Beyond the Body Proper. Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, edited by Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

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Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Lock, Margaret & Farquhar, Judith (eds.). 2007. Beyond the Body Proper. Reading the Anthropology of Material Life, edited by Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Mascia-Lees, Frances E (ed.). 2011. A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment. West-Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Noë, Alva. 2013. “Making Worlds Available.” In: Knowledge in Motion. Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance, edited by Sabine Gehm et al. Bielefeld: Transcript, 121-127.

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NOTES

1. Performance and performance art are wide-ranging and contested fields. Using terms like performance art, performance artists and performers in this paper, I refer specifically to contemporary performance art in Western, mostly US-American and European, artistic contexts, which can broadly be understood as a postmodern answer and critique to the formal and stylistic conventions of more classical forms of theatre. Performance arts’ origins are often traced to Dada and Futurism in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as to the thriving experimental arts scene in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. For an overview about the history and conceptual understandings of performance art see Auslander (1992), Carr (1993), Goldberg (1998), Banes (1998), Jones/Heathfield (2012). 2. Throughout this paper, experience is not understood as foregoing conceptual abstraction, representation, or discourse, since this would presuppose a kind of authentic substance in which such experience could unfold (cf. Scott 1992). Post-essentialist thought after Foucault often runs the danger of loosing the grip on objects and subjects, which are not solely discursive but equally material, moving, and alive, and which matter precisely with respect to these characteristics. While operating within the realm of “experience” always involves the danger of reaffirming a metaphysics of substance (Povinelli 2014), the category experience nevertheless has two advantages here. First, it is the term with which the performers operate and use to designate their work themselves: their job is to produce meaningful and affective performance experience. Second, it makes it possible, at least momentarily, to fathom and discuss phenomena, which I deem central in the production process of meaning: corporeality, sense perception, body movement, and affective, or emotional relationality. 3. For a recent anthropological engagement with the political potential of performance see Flynn/Tinius (2015), for an overview of the anthropology of performance see Korom (2013), for dance ethnographies see Davida (2011), Buckland (2010), and Royce (2002). 4. Randolph Street Gallery hosted visual art exhibitions, performances, as well as dance performances, and was engaged in community outreach from 1979-1998. Its archive is currently in storage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 5. All following direct speech citations are, if not stated differently, quoted from individual interviews which I conducted personally with Selma Banich, Sebastián Calderón, Annalaura Alifuoco, Nik Wakefield, Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish between January and June 2014 in Chicago. 6. I use the word original with care and a certain reservation since I do not think that the issue of ownership of a performance can be discerned easily. Although the performers whose work got

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reenacted in 9 Beginnings created the performances, they do not own them. Instead of creating entirely new material they drew on accounts of different authors themselves. Their innovation was to assemble the already existent aspects differently. Richard Schechner and Rebecca Schneider have both problematised the issue of non-original body movement. (Schechner 1985, Schneider 2011). 7. Yet, this statement might become controversial in light of the example of Sebastián’s use of the videotapes, where the past informs the presence solely via a representation (video-recorded performance) and not through an immediate human-to-human relation. 8. Gibson has been critiqued for conceptualising environment as an inanimate canvas on which the behaver-perceiver acts. Ingold claims that Gibson understands environment as prior to the assignation of value and meaning by a perceiving subject, thus reaffirming an inanimate world, “furnished with objects” (Ingold 2011: 78). While this critique is justified, neither Noë, the performers, nor I perceive environment as such inanimate canvas. Rather, environment is understood as emerging through the process of building meaningful relations and thus bringing a world into being. 9. In this part of the performance, two beginnings of former performances, O Klahoma! or The Farmer in the Astral Plains by Robert Metrick (1998) and All Fall Down by Jennifer Monson and Yvonne Meier (1991) are reenacted at the same time, woven into each other. 10. Embodiment is a controversial concept. In using the term, I deliberately avoid referring to one specific theoretical definition. I do so precisely because my inquiry is inductive, trying to attend to one “actual form[s] of lived embodiment in the fields of practice” (Lock/Farquhar 2007: 11) rather than measuring it against a general concept of embodiment. In so doing I account for the circumstance that what might be perceived as a general concept of embodiment emerges precisely through exploring and assembling such specific practices of attending and inquiring. Contra the idea of Quinean representationalism (Quine 1951), I argue that an abstract definition of embodiment always emerges in a specific practice and cannot be dissected from the respective practice without losing explanatory value (c.f. Rouse 2007). While I therefore fall short on a comprehensive definition of the term embodiment, three ideas are nevertheless decisive for my approach to, and use of, the term (cf. Scheper-Hughes/Lock1987). First, the idea of embodiment opposes the binary opposition of Cartesian dualism and reaffirms the human being as grounded in material physicality. Second, following phenomenological theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, embodiment is understood as lived experience in the presence; as a sensing, perceiving, feeling, and thinking human being in and co-constituting time and space. Third, the experiential quality of being as outlined in phenomenological approaches does not have to stand solely in contrast to accounts which perceive the human body and embodiment as historically, socially, and culturally contingent formations. On the contrary, I understand the body and embodiment as locations in which biological and cultural or social perspectives collide in fruitful and productive rather than merely oppositional modes. For selected approaches to embodiment see Mascia-Lees (2011), Lock/Farquhar (2007), Csordas (1994) and Gallagher (2005). 11. This intervention does not have to be understood as restriction. For Claire Bishop, the clear demarcation of context and selection of participants reflects “precisely the act of exclusion that is disavowed by relational art’s preference for open-endedness“ (Bishop 2004: 72). Yet, following Mouffe and Laclau to whom Bishop refers for her argument, clear demarcation is central to the constitution of a visible and tangible context which can hence perpetuate productive antagonisms, the substance of radical democracy. 12. On the contrary, Bourriaud believes that artistic practice might be “a space partly protected from the uniformity of behavioral patterns“ (Bourriaud 1998: 3). 13. This argument bears rough similarity with a more nuanced criticism that Claire Bishop raises when she writes that „[…] the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically

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democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole […]” (Bishop 2004: 67, emphasis mine). 14. Bourriaud has been critical of the idea of relationality for the sake of relationality itself: “The question we might raise today is, connecting people, creating interactive, communicative experience: What for? What does the new kind of contact produce? If you forget the “what for?” I’m afraid you’re left with simple Nokia art—producing interpersonal relations for their own sake and never addressing their political aspects“ Bourriaud, quoted in Bishop 2004: 68). However, as Bishop shows, several of his examples of relational art appear to fall short on responding to the “what for” question sufficiently.

ABSTRACTS

This paper proceeds from ethnographic fieldwork with the Chicago-based performance art group Every house has a door. I analyse the performer’s aim to engage with the past in a sensuous and embodied manner and I discuss the practice of cross-temporal collective relationality, which challenges notions of embodiment as being limited to an individual “body proper” (Farquhar/ Lock 2007). While forms of relationality are central to artistic research and performance, I remain critical of their immediate political potential. I explicate this argument by discussing Every house’s practice with respect to contributions in relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 1997, Bishop 2004). Emerging out of my critical engagement with Bourriaud, I propose an understanding of relationality which is neither built on individual personhood nor immediately politically desirable. Instead, and emerging from fieldwork with Every house, I suggest that embodied relationality can be understood as foregoing individual experience. While this kind of relationality can be emancipatory, its normativity has to be explained with care.

INDEX

Keywords: embodiment, performance art, relational aesthetics, archive, form

AUTHOR

ANNE-SOPHIE REICHERT University of Chicago, Illinois, USA. Department of Anthropology. [email protected]

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Approaching Utopia Pragmatically: Artistic Spaces and Community- Making in Post-Earthquake L’Aquila

Jan-Jonathan Bock

EDITOR'S NOTE

Date received: 2015-05-31 Date accepted: 2015-10-30

L’Aquila after the earthquake

1 When an earthquake devastated the central Italian city of L’Aquila on 6th April 2009, the metropolitan Italian and international media coverage focussed on the suffering of the survivors and the loss of architectural heritage. Founded by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, in the thirteenth century, L’Aquila had been a showpiece of stunning baroque and renaissance architecture. It boasted a grand historic centre, characterised by large condominiums arranged around picturesque squares, dotted with fountains, benches, and flowerbeds. Imposing churches and colourful palaces marked every angle of the centro storico – the historic city centre – the pivot of social and cultural community life. Some mediaeval churches had survived a previous earthquake in the eighteenth century, which razed large parts of the city; they stood as reminders of central Italy’s exposure to seismic dangers.

2 Tucked away in a remote Apennine mountain valley, L’Aquila was an inconspicuous place. The earthquake brought the city – with a population of 70,000 people – to global fame. With 309 casualties, hundreds of injured survivors, and thousands of destroyed or damaged buildings, the then Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, declared a state of emergency for L’Aquila and the Abruzzo region. The Civil Protection Agency evacuated almost all residents to one of 170 hastily erected tent camps or to temporarily

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requisitioned hotel resorts on the Adriatic Coast (Alexander 2010). Tens of thousands of Aquilani lost access to their city. A complete ban on entering the historic centre was imposed, enforced by Italian soldiers, to the dismay of former residents. A lively, atmospheric university town – with numerous bars, clubs, churches, theatres, university faculties, and scenic squares – transformed into what the survivors began to call a città fantasma, a ghost city.

3 But in early 2010, almost one year after the quake, local discontent with the recovery trajectory erupted in a display of local pride and activism. In an act of civil disobedience, thousands of survivors tore down security fences barricading the historic centre. Fighting their way past soldiers and policemen, thus risking prosecution, displaced residents brought their own wheelbarrows to cart away tons of debris still piling up in squares and streets. They exposed government inaction, despite previous promises for swift and thorough commitment to recovery.1

4 The “wheelbarrow people”, as this movement became known, showed what many survivors thought of Berlusconi’s approach to recovery. Instead of focussing its efforts on the reconstruction of heritage and architecture in the historic centres of L’Aquila and of surrounding towns and villages, the Italian government constructed nineteen permanent resettlement sites on greenfield areas in L’Aquila’s rural periphery, called Progetto CASE, as well as dozens of semi-permanent resettlement sites of wooden huts, called Progetto MAP. Isolated and remote from familiar, functional urban spaces, Aquilani quickly lamented that the resettlement sites prolonged the initial catastrophe through ongoing displacement, rather than alleviating feelings of despair and uncertainty (Erbani 2010). The decision to spend over one billion Euros on the 185 prefabricated housing blocks, which rest on anti-seismic pillars and accommodate around 16,000 people, has been widely criticised: EU institutions (which funded the constructions) denounced the waste of public money, accusing the authorities of ignoring corruption, while survivors deplore forced displacement and solitude, resulting from a lack of urban planning attentive to local needs (Ciccozzi 2011; European Court of Auditors 2013). When, or whether, the displaced survivors will be able to return to their abandoned historic homes remains uncertain.

5 Nonetheless, the recovery effort was initially praised by the international media, which even dubbed it Berlusconi’s rise “from zero to hero” (Popham 2009). Pundits applauded the Prime Minister for relocating Italy’s G8 summit of world leaders from a Sardinian island to the devastated city, purportedly to bring attention to L’Aquila’s plight (BBC 2009). Survivors protested against the waste of financial resources, denouncing what they considered a bombastic spectacle among ruins that wilfully reduced their suffering to a dramatic backdrop, allowing Berlusconi to present himself as a generous saviour alleviating local suffering (The Huffington Post 2009).

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Progetto CASE peripheral resettlement site. Photograph by the author.

6 In 2012 and 2013, over three years after the earthquake, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in L’Aquila, tracing the social and cultural repercussions of the disaster by analysing how a natural catastrophe was transforming into individual and collective crisis experiences. The state of the historic centre was discouraging. While the rehousing sites had been completed within months, in the summer and autumn of 2009, no attention had been paid to the restoration and reconstruction of houses and monuments in historic centres across the affected area. Following an enthusiastic interlude, led by the “wheelbarrow people”, inaction had resumed: Aquilani themselves had been able to clear the streets, but they then had to reckon with the need for coordinated government planning to guarantee restoration and reconstruction, which they found missing. Grassroots initiatives could not be successful without official schemes and generous funding.

7 Previously inhabited by over 22,000 Aquilani – many of them students at the city’s university – L’Aquila’s centro storico remained uninhabited at the time of my fieldwork. Large parts were still under control by the Italian army, to the frustration of many Aquilani, who voiced their anger over what they considered an “occupation” by outsiders.

8 In the centro storico, almost all houses and monuments had been buttressed and clad in steel scaffolding, as if frozen in time. The old town was a melancholic and harrowing place. The few accessible streets lay abandoned; the authorities had installed rat bait boxes in streets and squares; dust-covered shop windows still advertised the 2009 spring sale. At night, only a handful of streets were illuminated, and the local youth entered the sealed-off, dangerous areas to annoy soldiers, who unsuccessfully chased them around the narrow lanes that L’Aquila’s teenagers knew better than their pursuers.

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Scaffolding and steel frames stabilising buildings in L’Aquila’s historic centre. Photograph by the author.

9 A dozen of bar and shop owners had obtained temporary special permits to reopen their venues on the ground floor of buildings that had sustained little damage in accessible areas within the historic precincts. One such square, Piazza Regina Margherita, at one end of the city centre’s main street, the corso, exhibited remnants of pre-disaster urban life. A number of bars and restaurants had reopened in the vicinity. In the early evening, Aquilani flocked to this pocket of apparent normality for the traditional aperitivo. In the warmer summer months, the square filled up regularly. Students and residents struggled to fit into the few available venues. They relished the temporary return of an almost normal type of sociality amidst the architectural ruins of their home city and amidst the psychological ruins of uncertainty that plagued mundane, everyday existence.

10 Late at night, the centro storico regularly turned into a bizarre scene of drunkenness and debauchery, framed by architectural decay. The Piazza Regina Margherita, surrounded by semi-ruined buildings barely held together by steel-frame scaffolding and wire rope supports, brimmed with partygoers dancing in front of L’Aquila’s empty homes, now cold and damp from years of abandonment. Uninhabited, narrow lanes and scenic stone doorways, plunged into pitch-black darkness, became open-air urinals. With no residents to make a noise complaint, bar owners placed loudspeakers on the square, blasting the latest summer hits through the gloomy, historic streets, thronging with students frolicking and drinking until the early hours. After the earthquake, the government had suspended tuition fees at L’Aquila University, and teaching had already resumed in containers and large marquees by the autumn of 2009. Three years later, L’Aquila’s students were enjoying a strange kind of unchallenged hedonism as a new way of life in a post-disaster city that most Italians had forgotten as rapidly as it had appeared on the nation’s television screens in 2009.

11 Faced with the greatest economic downturn since 1945, successive Italian governments have not considered the reconstruction of a small student city a priority. Over the

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course of five years, between 2009 and 2014, the country had four different Prime Ministers. The political instability undermined local hopes for a better future. At the time of my fieldwork, survivors were still wondering how long their state of exception would last. They struggled to envision a future in which they could return to the city centre and remake a sense of normality. They desired the return of everyday social life in historic homes, monuments, and squares. While the reconstruction of the centro storico was a shared concern, I found that the displaced survivors also emphasised the need to remake the city’s social fabric (tessuto sociale). Local interpretations of what is necessary for recovery were not limited to the survivors’ traumatic inner worlds (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Feldman 1991) or to material reconstruction (James 2006; Yoneyama 1999), but emphasised the remaking of a sense of community, which, for Aquilani survivors, meant relating to one another by sharing disparate experiences of suffering and disaster, by producing spaces of exchange and sympathetic understanding.

Heap of debris left in L’Aquila’s historic centre, framed by decaying houses. Photograph by the author.

12 A range of cultural initiatives sought to provide occasions for survivors to come together, share memories of the past, and create mutual sympathies. Against the background of uncertainty, destruction, and social dispersion, such occasions were intended to provide utopian imaginations of a better future, marked by a new kind of normal sociality in a restored historic city. In their accounts, artists and creative Aquilani emphasised that they were motivated by a perceived “need” or “necessity” to recount stories publicly and to engage in creative production, so as to reconstitute fragmented relations between local people.

13 I suggest that numerous creative initiatives in post-disaster L’Aquila pursued utopian imaginations pragmatically, concerned with the production of necessary occasions for reflection, sociality, and sympathy. Creative Aquilani’s approaches to producing possible utopian worlds did not aim at large-scale social transformations, but rather at reconnecting survivors who had thus far sought primarily to overcome impacts from

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the disaster in their private lives: mourning, trauma, suffering, financial compensation, family life, and unemployment. Community existence had not been a major concern for dispersed Aquilani. Through cultural work, local artists sought to provide a particular utopian impulse, reconnecting disaster survivors that, with the disappearance of traditional urban spaces, struggled to relate to one another as a community of people with a shared fate, and not just as a network of disparate individuals.

Army vehicles and fences in L’Aquila’s historic centre. Photograph by the author.

14 Pragmatic approaches to the production of utopian forms in post-earthquake L’Aquila, shaped by artists and others involved in cultural work, connected the importance of storytelling with everyday sociality and with material urban spaces. Artists’ involvement revealed important ways in which utopian imaginations should feature as neglected aspects of cultural recovery. Importantly, L’Aquila’s artists described their initiatives as reactions to political decisions that had neglected local needs in the aftermath of destruction and displacement. They articulated Aquilani voices about the city’s future, juxtaposing local utopian imaginations with the government’s claim that rehousing survivors had constituted the major challenge, which the authorities had successfully managed.

Utopias, microtopias, heterotopias

15 In “Relational Aesthetics”, Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) suggests that contemporary art (beginning in the 1990s) has been predominantly concerned with the production of ephemeral relations among spectator-participants, thus creating what he calls micro- utopias, or microtopias. For Bourriaud, the centrality of momentary participation and interactivity in the works of artists such as Rirkit Tiravanija, Henry Bond, and Pierre Huyghe illustrates a change in artists’ aspirations, since art “is no longer seeking to represent utopias; rather, it is attempting to construct concrete spaces” (ibid.: 46). Such spaces, however, do not expand beyond their emplacement, often in galleries or other

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semi-public forums, thus surrendering the aspirations of previous artwork, namely, to represent utopia and to transform spectators.

16 Beginning with Thomas More’s famous book of the same name, published in 1516, the term “utopia” has captured the imaginations of those seeking to “organize the world according to a grand plan” (Parker 2002: 1). Future-directed utopian imaginations have usually taken one, or more, of three forms: the Garden of Eden and unspoilt romantic nature; the ideal city-state, democratic or communistic; or the paradisiacal land of plenty (Reedy 2002: 172). In his nineteenth-century utopian novel, “News from Nowhere”, William Morris developed an idyllic, peaceful, and humane counter vision to the unpleasant urban life of industrial Victorian England. His utopian future inverted the workplace-centred, exploitative, and often destructive – both of nature and of human health – everyday reality he knew. Utopianists dealt in grand transformative visions, to remake human life fundamentally. The ultimate objects of transformative work were human beings, for example, in utopian socialisms or in the new urbanisms of the twentieth century (Fishman 1988).

17 In the 1990s, however, after the colossal projects of National Socialism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism had brought tragedy and suffering, the notion of utopia as a large- scale, directed transformation of individuals became problematic (see Goodwin and Taylor 2009). This also had an effect on how artists engaged with utopias. Bourriaud’s theorising of contemporary art as microtopian should be seen in this light: instead of generating profound transformation, concrete and ephemeral social relationships emerge as the realistically desirable outcome of engagement with creative work.

18 Taking a cue from Louis Althusser, namely that art and culture are not mere reflections of society but shape it, Bourriaud both analyses and advocates relational aesthetics. He does not dismiss completely the utopian aspiration to shape social forms – and hence he does not surrender the term “utopia” –, but he limits its scope to the construction of momentary relations between strangers in concrete instances. Microtopias are short- lived moments that do not seek to change the future; their creators are content to instigate a limited social encounter. The utopian future has been replaced by a microtopian present. Artists no longer desire to transform the inner worlds of those who engage with their work, so as to create different kinds of persons, fit for a utopian future; they simply provide the enjoyable experience of spontaneous social connectedness.

19 In response, Claire Bishop (2004) has argued that Bourriaud pays too little attention to the specific character of such temporary, microtopian relationships: The quality of the relationships in “relational aesthetics” are never examined or called into question. When Bourriaud argues that “encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them,” I sense that this question is (for him) unnecessary; all relations that permit “dialogue” are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good. But what does “democracy” really mean in this context? If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why? (ibid.: 65, her emphasis)

20 Bishop redirects our attention to an important aspect: emergent relationships differ in depth, content, and participants. Bourriaud, Bishop claims, neglects these differences, and she urges us not simply to explore in what way a microtopian relation can be brought about, but also to distinguish between emergent relationalities. While Bishop identifies different kinds of relationships, she still agrees with Bourriaud’s description

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of their microtopian character: with a focus on the here and now, artists abandon earlier aims to envision better futures and to shape human aspirations.

21 Bourriaud and Bishop concur that enduring utopian imaginations have been replaced by concrete, short-lived microtopias, limited to the construction of particular pockets of social connectivity that do not extend beyond the present. The microtopian experiences they describe are intended to be momentary and pleasant, rather than disturbing and potentially transformative. This microtopian art facilitates uncommitted, post-modern, neoliberal consumption: with no strings attached, the participant-observer enjoys the pleasure of an uncomplicated encounter. Authenticity becomes irrelevant. Satisfaction rules. Only experience matters in the neoliberal economy, and so: indulge.2 (see Zizek 2009: 51ff.)

22 What I propose to explore, however, are art forms that challenge this distinction between the neoliberal, microtopian aspirations of contemporary creative industries, on the one hand, and the transformative aspirations from utopias of earlier creative work, seeking to create different persons and societies, on the other. I suggest that contemporary artists have not universally surrendered the desire to be utopian in the profound sense. Nonetheless, I argue that the prefix “micro” should be retained, but not to indicate the pleasure-orientated, neoliberal experience economy. Instead, it signals the limited objective of cultural work to transform a local reality or community life, instead of macro aspirations to change society, the nation, or the world.

23 I find the concept of everyday utopias, described by Davina Cooper (2014) useful to think through my observations in L’Aquila. Cooper’s everyday utopias are not artworks, but pockets of non-standard social practices in a world shaped by the ordinary, the controlled, and the predictable. After short ventures into the excitement of everyday utopias, people return to their routines. Cooper’s examples are public nudism, a transgender bathhouse, or Speaker’s Corner in London: enclosed spaces that allow practices that offer “glimpses of something else and other” (ibid.: 44), through novels forms of diversity, participation, and democracy.

24 Cooper calls her everyday utopias “promising spaces”, rooted in the present and connected with concrete circumstances, since “everyday utopias are neither temporal nor spatial islands. Their proximity to mainstream life is a defining feature of their existence, of what they are capable of achieving as well as the constraints under which they operate” (ibid.: 221f.). Her everyday utopias have enduring material presences – institutions or buildings – and thus contrast with the ephemeral presentism of Bourriaud’s and Bishop’s microtopias.

25 Cooper’s concept develops Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias: “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986: 24). Cemeteries, gardens, and hospitals, Foucault argues, constitute commonplace heterotopias: sites and spaces that force us to reflect upon our own lives, our position towards nature, and the experience of our own bodies. Through such reflections, we open up spaces for introspection, and thus also for development and change. Cooper’s everyday utopias constitute such spaces in which to reflect on the ordinary.

26 Nonetheless, Cooper suggests that her everyday utopias are also conservative. The prospects they might offer to shape a different kind of reality beyond the defined sites

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of engagement are neglected by those who establish and maintain those spaces: “everyday utopias assert the importance of maintaining and sustaining what is, rendering the pursuit of further change secondary to securing and protecting existing forms of innovative practice” (ibid.: 223, her emphasis). Albeit with a different focus from Bourriaud’s and Bishop’s inauthentic and present-orientated experience economy, Cooper also highlights the limited scope of everyday utopian possibilities. They are pockets of difference that strive to coexist with what engulfs and thus shapes them, not to transform.

27 What happens, however, when conserving what is does not suffice? When utopian imaginations are necessary to escape from a situation of despair and destitution? What happens, for example, when people struggle to remake a life in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event? Under those circumstances, preserving the status quo is not enough. I thus turn to an exploration of innovative cultural work – in my case, community theatre – to stress the importance of a neglected aspect that is central to understanding what motivates people to imagine and perform utopian possibilities: necessity and pragmatics.

28 The initiatives I document from L’Aquila make us rethink utopian impulses as not simply confined events. Instead, I show how utopian imaginations can be invoked pragmatically in reaction to violent changes, serving as anchors to stabilise new kinds of reality at times when certainty and communal life have been replaced with despair and isolation. The utopian impulse spills over from concrete sites of engagement. Art professionals viewed the utopian imaginations I discovered in creative performances as being vital for disaster recovery, enacted as recollections of a harmonious, purposeful pre-disaster past in shared urban spaces. Pragmatic approaches to utopia shape creative work in L’Aquila. Post-disaster cultural productions reveal how utopian possibilities can serve as roads to better, collective futures, and not simply as individualist micro forms that permit consumption of short-lived experiences, on the one hand, or as pockets of alternative practices that nonetheless preserve everyday reality, on the other.

Post-disaster transformations and recovery

29 As soon as I had arrived in L’Aquila in January 2012, I noticed the vibrant creative cultural and art scenes, despite the city’s tragic circumstances. Walls displayed posters advertising daily plays, readings, exhibitions, and book launches. Since most traditional cultural spaces in the historic centre remained inaccessible – damaged or destroyed –, performances were staged in makeshift container theatres, outdoors, or in other temporary constructions across postwar neighbourhoods, where the repair of less damaged housing blocks from the 1960s and 1970s was progressing faster. Cultural initiatives sought to achieve at least two objectives: providing substitute spaces to counter the disappearance of sites of pre-disaster social life in the historic centre, and reversing fragmentation and isolation among Aquilani dispersed across rehousing sites, hotels, and other forms of resettlement.

30 Contrary to positive accounts of post-disaster sociality, which emphasise solidarity and emergent community life amidst equalising circumstances in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe (Solnit 2010), I found that everyday life in L’Aquila at the time of my fieldwork was marked by tensions. Experiences of the emergency and of the relief

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operations had differed. While some Aquilani had suffered losses in the family, evacuated to faraway hotel resorts with their former homes destroyed, others had sustained little material loss and lived in government-administered tent camps near the ravaged city. The inhabitants of postwar neighbourhoods had begun returning in late 2009 already, whilst the residents of historic parts had been assigned apartments in peripheral resettlement sites.

31 Initially, the Berlusconi administration had generously distributed government hand- outs. Claims for repair work in postwar houses were processed fast. Informants reported that many Aquilani had unjustly used these funds to renovate their attics and bathrooms with state money, whilst others languished in uncertainty about the future of their devastated homes. At the time of my fieldwork, there were serious doubts about the government’s financial ability to reconstruct the historic centre, and displaced Aquilani resented those who lived outside badly damaged areas, purporting that they had been extravagantly and unjustly compensated. Rather than creating a collective disaster experience, the government’s favouring of resettlement over reconstruction and over long-term recovery divided Aquilani and intensified frustration and fragmentation.

32 In one public meeting with L’Aquila’s mayor, Massimo Cialente, about the utility bills for the resettlement sites, tensions found expression in envy and mutual accusations. In early 2013, the municipal authorities sent bills to the inhabitants of resettlement apartments, adding up the costs of the previous three years. However, instead of individually metred consumption, the administration had divided total consumption by the floor space of individual flats. Those who claimed to have been particularly frugal felt cheated and sought to confront the mayor.

33 In a large white marquee in one of the resettlement sites, brimming with outraged citizens, Cialente was facing a backlash for his administration’s decision to split the bill. Sitting on a plastic camping chair, he struggled to reason with his fellow Aquilani: “If you still lived in your old houses, you would have to pay the bills, too.” “Yes, we will, when we’re back”, an angry pensioner retorted. The mood was confrontational, although some Aquilani were calm and offered to pay their bills, but correct ones, and not based on floor space. Someone suggested using the revenue from resettlement block solar panels, but Cialente shook his head and explained that they are not public property; they belong to a private investor. “Criminals”, a young woman whispered to me. “Those who still live in hotels don’t have to pay anything!”, someone shouted, and a group supported him with applause. The atmosphere was heated and the audience divided.

34 Afterwards, my landlady shook her head at my account. She explained that the earthquake was producing divisions and envy: “actually, we have all been hit. We are all struggling with anxiety, uncertainty, and the lack of state support. It’s now becoming a war among the poor.”

35 A local writer captured the earthquake’s divisive legacy in the foreword to a collection of photographs from the emergency effort, published on the first anniversary of the disaster, in April 2010. He stated that divisions had surfaced soon after the earthquake, which left every survivor with a particular story of suffering, shaping personal struggles to remake a life: In those first hours of sunlight, it stared you in the face. Little was spoken. From your house, the epicentre of your earthquake, you walked further. Aftershocks

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continued. If you could do more than crying, you sought to understand how much of your life had remained in place. You stumbled around the historic centre, before they would close it forever, trying to comprehend. Just after the dust blanket had settled, and before the aid givers arrived: precisely the moment in which change felt imminent. In the following months, your house is a blue tent. The alternative is a room in some faraway hotel – too far to understand what’s happening in your city; and too far to understand what others are doing to what used to be yours. Control is slipping away. For a short moment, we were all the same. Today, the differences are beginning to weigh us down. Your friend irritates you when he returns from his hotel on the coast, with his clean shirts but completely ignorant of what others are deciding for him. But it unnerves him that he does not have a clue about the things that you know, dirty and tired as you may be, but informed. There were moments, in which you managed not to think about yourself; when you staggered along curved walls, your nose up, staring at cracks. When you hoped you could look at yourself and see a colourful uniform. It would have changed everything: you would have been a volunteer. Removed from the catastrophe, you would have come to L’Aquila to help, knowing that all was in order somewhere back home, hundreds of kilometres away. But no, you only see yourself wearing your own clothes, in your own skin. This is your earthquake. (Sebastiani 2010: 3)

Piazza D’Arti in L’Aquila’s periphery. Photography by Francesco Paolucci and Giuseppe Dania.

36 One year after the earthquake, the account illustrated the harrowing consequences of disaster: isolation, self-centredness, and growing resentment. Sebastiani coined the phrase “your earthquake”, to conceptualise destruction and terror that afflicted every Aquilano and every Aquilana predominantly individually. Those in tent camps envied other evacuees for their comfort in hotels, while survivors in holiday resorts begrudged camp residents for being closer to their home city, producing fragmentation and anger. Rather than seeing themselves as a community of survivors, Aquilani experienced envy, struggle, and solitude. Local artists sought to deploy the possibilities of creative work to counter these divisions.

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Cultural spaces

37 In response to dispersion and dislocaton, a number of local cultural initiatives founded the Piazza D'Arti in the vicinity of L'Aquila's postwar hospital, shortly after the city's devastation. The Piazza D’Arti turned a previously abandoned periphery into a temporary gravel square, squeezed between the undeveloped retention area of L’Aquila’s Aterno river and a major artery connecting suburbs with the centre. The Piazza was framed by a handful of makeshift, large-scale containers, containing two theatres, a library, a café, and a volunteer project for disabled people. Every week, cultural associations staged dance workshops, cabaret, plays, readings, and other events in the unattractive cubes. The events were much frequented, with cars clogging up nearby roads.

38 One of the organisers of the Piazza D’Arti project was Rafaelle, a well-known local actor. He was born and raised in Lombardy, before he moved to L’Aquila as a teenager, where his father found a factory job. He had studied theatre, spending a couple of years with a production company abroad. Ultimately, he had returned to L’Aquila. While many left the city after the disaster, Rafaelle explained to me that the earthquake had motivated him to stay in his home city, seeking to contribute to recovery processes: The Piazza D’Arti was a response to the earthquake. No doubt about it. There was a need for public spaces for the displaced population, which had been catapulted into this incredible situation, dispersed across hundreds of tent camps and hotels, with people living far away from each other. We needed a place for people to get together, to share memories and impressions. We needed a project to reconstruct the social fabric. The associations and groups that founded the Piazza D’Arti sought to bring together Aquilani through a project pursued by local activists, volunteers, artists, and others involved in the cultural sector. Culture is a key component of recovery in L’Aquila. We wanted to recreate what everyone had lost in the earthquake: la piazza. It is the place of local civic and social life, where people meet daily for a chat, to discuss politics, to have a coffee. In the piazza, people debate ideas and create new initiatives. In Italy, the piazza is the heart and soul of every village, town, and city. It is the only place for true encounters amongst citizens.

39 Rafaelle’s account illuminated what Aquilani identified as a particularly painful dimension of loss in the earthquake´s aftermath: the lack of shared spaces, in which survivors could act as local citizens, as members of a civic urban community. The Piazza D’Arti initiative provided a space for encounter. It created pockets of what had become otherwise unreachable forms of sociality, modelled by memories of the past, to counter realities of dispersion and dislocation.

40 Importantly, for Rafaelle, the initiative did not simply provide a temporally and spatially contained refuge, but sought to reconstruct the social fabric, permanently remaking an urban community. The fragmentation lamented above – leaving every Aquilano and every Aquilana stranded with his or her own earthquake – was the shared reality the Piazza D’Arti initiative wanted to reverse. Rafaelle and others conceptualised the cultural project as a necessary aspect of recovery. With the Piazza D’Arti projects, artists approached the modelling of a different, utopian future pragmatically. The Piazza’s unsightly metal containers showed this: their practical ugliness contrasted vividly with pre-disaster urban social life, framed by baroque churches, fountains, and renaissance palaces in the historic old town.

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41 The initiative fits Cooper’s (2014) description of an everyday utopia, or Foucault’s (1986) heterotopia: a site that is both like and unlike reality, thus offering a glimpse of a potential possible. However, rather than preserving the reality that exists around it, content to instigate reflection, Rafaelle desired the initiative to venture beyond its limited emplacement in particular cultural events. Maintaining the status quo was precisely not enough for the organisers. Instead, they sought to engender transformation by recreating pre-disaster sociality. The sense of being part of a civic community resurfaced as utopian imagination.

Makeshift container theatre in Piazza D’Arti. Photography by Francesco Paolucci and Giuseppe Dania.

One Thousand Days

42 On the eve of 6th April 2013, in commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the city’s destruction, the industrial-size theatre container on the Piazza D’Arti hosted a play called “Mille Giorni”, or “One Thousand Days”. The small theatre was filled to the last seat, even though the play had been performed in L’Aquila previously. With the city preparing to commemorate the destruction with a torch march, a public reading of the victims’ names, and a range of other events on 6th April, this performance of “Mille Giorni” was special.

43 The stage is sparsely decorated. There is only one actress, Gloria, a local artist, who plays Antonio, an Aquilano. The play starts just before the earthquake. Throughout the play, Gloria changes her clothes and tone of voice repeatedly, slipping into other roles to complement Antonio. She performs a range of diverse Aquilani experiences from the first three years, or one thousand days, of the earthquake’s aftermath.

44 In the initial scene, Antonio, wearing a long green coat, steps on a kitchen stool, with a noose ready to tie around the lamp, preparing to take his own life. Jobless and divorced, Antonio has given up. Suddenly, however, he is violently thrown to the floor, covered in dust. At 3.32am, the earthquake that kills 309 Aquilani, in an ironic twist of

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fate, also saves Antonio’s life. The following scenes trace Antonio as he stumbles around L’Aquila’s streets, struggling to keep his balance amidst aftershocks. The narrator explains his moves: The Civil Protection Agency arrives. They install themselves in our towns and villages. Our mayors are reduced to celebrating weddings. People push trolleys to the coaches that take them to the coast, guided by men and women in uniforms. They build the first tent camp. The city is evacuated. Antonio, like other Aquilani, tours L’Aquila’s shopping centres, hoping to find his city. The optician along the high street is now in one remote shopping mall. The place where he used to buy his jackets is in another one. The bar, where he had his coffee, moves next to a peripheral supermarket. L’Aquila has been fragmented into lots of shopping centres.

45 Antonio’s one thousand days are a tale of urban transformation and loss: the city that he used to inhabit routinely, knowing places as well as people, has disappeared. Shopping centres fail to compensate for the lack of cobbled streets, mediaeval churches, squares, and the cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 1997) of everyday life. Antonio speaks with evacuated Aquilani about their traumatic evacuations to hotel resorts. They disclose distressing experiences: having to share a room with one’s elderly parents; months of sleepless nights; surrendering privacy; and a sense of guilt for having left L’Aquila in its darkest hour.

46 Antonio then moves into a Progetto CASE resettlement apartment. He struggles with claim forms, documents, contracts. Post-disaster bureaucracy. Gloria changes into a red apron and becomes a young family mother. She despairs about her husband, from whom she had been separated before the Civil Protection Agency assigned them a family resettlement flat: Franco! Turn off the television. Go study in our bedroom. Alberto! What is this? The soup is overcooked! Jesus! Why have they forced me to live with you? We separated two years ago, and yet you’re still here, ruining my life. Now, what are we going to eat? Pizza again? Like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and before…

47 Back in his green coat, Antonio then walks into the empty city centre. He finds a small bar on the edge of the heart-shaped old town, surrounded by semi-ruined monuments, clad in rusty scaffolding. He drinks himself into a stupor. Antonio surrenders hope that his home city can return to normality. The narrator closes: This is the story of Antonio. Unemployed. Divorced. Dead. If the earthquake hadn’t saved him. Now, he has forgotten, like many others, but I haven’t forgotten. In my mind, I walk to the Piazza Duomo. The market with the fruit and vegetable stalls. There are chickens and pecorino cheese. Shoes, underwear, vests, socks, tights. “Ciao Alessia! Shall we have a coffee? What? At the Rocco stall? No, I’ll go there later. Too many people now.” Nurses, students, elderly ladies with their walking frames. I stroll underneath the nearby cloisters. At the next corner, I take a look at Grimaldi’s music shop. I bought my first LP here, “Imagine”, by John Lennon. Further along, I spot a photograph of the L’Aquila rugby team, proudly dressed in our colours: black, for sorrow after the 1703 earthquake, and green, for hope. I am in Piazza Palazzo. On a bench, a student revises for her biology exam. Piazza Dei Gesuiti. Colacchi’s shop window is full of books. The newsagent. The florist. Walking towards Piazza San Pietro, I pass the trattoria Da Lincosta. After the play in L’Aquila’s theatre, the actors will dine here together. It’s the evening. Music, laughter, voices. Thursday. Student night.

48 With those words, the stage fell dark. Many Aquilani were visibly moved, and the applause lasted for minutes. During the following reception, Aquilani discussed the play. “My brother-in-law was deported to a hotel, too, near Giulianova. He was

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depressed all the time. It was terrible”, a middle-aged Aquilana explained to a teenager. He nodded: “We had to change apartments a couple of times, too, but I met a girl in one of the places and we’re still together today.” The woman smiled broadly. On the eve of a day of painful commemoration, survivors used the opportunity to share recollections and experiences from the destruction with each other. Gloria’s story of Antonio and the play provided an opportunity to discuss and relate to one another, seeking to understand diverse experiences of destruction, displacement, bereavement, resettlement, and recovery.

Lots of people merged into one

49 Intrigued by the play, I asked Gloria to speak about the project. She invited me to a makeshift container theatre that she and her husband had erected adjacent to a tent camp for evacuees in the aftermath of the earthquake, in a small town outside L’Aquila’s municipal borders. Gloria explained that the Civil Protection Agency had done a lot for children – keeping them busy with games and other activities – but adolescents had been bored in the camps. With her background in acting, and with her husband’s experience as a teacher at L’Aquila’s Fine Arts Academy, they organised theatre workshops for displaced survivors. People need to tell their stories after a disaster, Gloria explained. This desire inspired “Mille Giorni”: Time had to pass, to gain distance from the earthquake. otherwise it wouldn’t have been a lucid account. Three years was the right time. The earthquake had been covered widely in the media, but many of us in the city felt that there hadn’t been an objective account of our experiences. Reporters said what they wanted to say, or rather, what others wanted them to say. It was propaganda, not information. By contrast, in the play, we focus on the human dimensions, which were ignored during the emergency operation. People were reduced to numbers. There was a need to give space to people’s voices, to reach the audience emotionally. Theatre is very powerful for this. We interviewed over thirty Aquilani, aged between twenty and seventy, about their memories and circumstances. We spoke with people who had losses in the family, and other who did not even have property damage. Some had been evacuated to the coast; others had stayed in tent camps. Some lived in the Progetto CASE resettlement sites; others had returned to their repaired homes. We had a range of different accounts, to bring out the diversity of experiences. I also found that people had an enormous desire to talk and to share: from the head of the fire fighters to local teenagers. But they didn’t simply want to talk as a therapeutic thing: they wanted to communicate their experiences to help others understand.

50 Gloria established two key aspirations for “Mille Giorni”: first, to provide information for outsiders, who had been misled by what she considered media propaganda; and second, to permit Aquilani to understand better how their fellow survivors had experienced the disaster and struggled with challenges. Gloria talked about a “need” (bisogno) to give space to authentic voices. Crucially, she emphasised that the people she interviewed had not sought psychological relief from sharing their stories, but instead desired communication to facilitate mutual understanding. For Gloria, people’s motivations to participate and to share their stories were social, rather than psychological. These real stories then formed the history of a fictional character and of his experiences, Antonio: We didn’t have any preconceptions when we collected people’s accounts. Obviously, being the actress and also a personal witness, my point of view does feature. But

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there are also many aspects I had never thought about. That is why I didn’t just want to talk about my own experiences. The play is a monologue; but it contains a range of stories, like a chorus. It is as if lots of people were merged into one.

51 In the fictional character of Antonio, the experiences of diverse Aquilani merge into a single account. Antonio personifies everybody’s and nobody’s earthquake, permitting a range of Aquilani to identify with him and to see the lives of others through him simultaneously.

52 We should recall that shortly after the earthquake, Aquilani began experiencing social fragmentation as a result of disparate experiences of catastrophe. Every survivor was stranded with his or her personal earthquake. Antonio unified such individual experiences as a dramatic persona. Interestingly, Gloria, an actress, chose a male character, Antonio, as the protagonist, as if to encompass gendered experiences. Gloria assumed different male and female roles, playing old and young Aquilani, throughout the play.

53 I suggest that as a particular example of creative work, “Mille Giorni” engaged with what Aquilani identified as growing individualisation, division, and misunderstanding: the war among the poor. Gloria’s performance sought to highlight the shared dimensions of post-earthquake histories. Enacting different stories as if they were a single person’s life course, Gloria sought new forms of communication among survivors. Her desire to bear witness to what had really happened was not only directed at other Italians, but also at fellow Aquilani, who discussed their past enthusiastically after the performance on the eve of the earthquake’s anniversary. I witnessed discussions and conversations following “Mille Giorni” on a number of occassions, both in L’Aquila and in Pescara, a coastal Abruzzo city to which many Aquilani had relocated after the earthquake.

54 For Gloria, “Mille Giorni” confronted a perception that individual disaster experiences were inexplicable to others. The play constructed a shared symbolic framework by arranging authentic accounts into what emerged as the collective history of a dispersed population. “Mille Giorni” provided something distinctive for L’Aquila’s survivors: an occasion to relate to each other, overcoming the divisive effects of catastrophe.

Culture and disaster

55 Utopian imaginations can take many shapes, since they are “intimately tied to the historical and social milieu in which they arise” (Grey and Garsten 2002: 10). They can be anarchist, embracing diversity, tolerance, and difference (Reedy 2002); they can be political, pursuing grassroots activism to counter global corporate culture (Fournier 2002); and they can even be managerial, striving to use technology and efficient management to create a better, controllable world (Law and Mol 2002). What connects them is an aspiration for the “good” life: and “[t]he good in this respect is something that must be imaginatively conceived” (Robbins 2013: 457). The need or necessity to imagine, and to pursue, a different reality in fragmented post-disaster L’Aquila, riven by envy and fights over access to financial compensation, shaped the particular approaches to utopian imaginations that I call pragmatic.

56 Artists and others in the creative sector pursued what Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius have described as political performance, that is, “metaperformative actions and performativity as action intended to incite transformation” (Flynn and Tinius 2015: 4).

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However, while Flynn and Tinius emphasise the individually transformative potential of such acts, which echoes the neoliberal experience economy of Bourriaud’s microtopic art, I have drawn attention to the enduring role of collectivity and of communal life in other utopian projects.

57 This article has focussed on the contribution of art professionals to the recovery trajectory of post-earthquake L’Aquila. Performing “Mille Giorni” in the Piazza D’Arti showed a utopian impulse. However, rather than limited to the space and the time of the theatrical performance, this aimed at changing life for L’Aquila’s survivors through the constitution of a discursive framework in which differences and envy could be replaced by sympathy and understanding. The scope: producing lasting relationships. Despite differences in tent camps or hotels, regarding experiences of displacement and destruction, survivors longed to tell their stories, struggled to maintain friendships, and desired a sense of community. Gloria stressed that this was precisely what she thought “culture” (cultura) could contribute to recovery: Some people think that a cultured person is someone with lots of books. I don’t consider that culture. For me, someone is cultured when he or she is perfectly integrated into the social world that surrounds him or her. Culture means being connected with your environment: developing deep knowledge of what happens around you. If an event can make you lose this connection, or at least fracture it, then cultural work can help you re-establish a close link.

58 Gloria’s interpretation of culture underlined her aspiration to produce social relations and to reconnect fragmented survivors with the social world around them, achieving better knowledge and what she described as integration. The Piazza D’Arti project recreated the piazza as the pivot of local sociality, enabling the kind of centro storico community life that had disappeared with the earthquake. Rafaelle identified cultural work as crucial for reconstituting the social fabric. Culture, sociality, and recovery intersected closely for him, as well as for Gloria.

59 Nicholas Long and Henrietta Moore have pointed out that human sociality does not simply require spatial co-presence. Instead, it depends on the “human capacity for virtuality, for endowing things of the imagination and the mind with meaning and significance” (2012: 20). In L’Aquila, too, the Piazza D’Arti was an important material space, but it had to be filled with cultural work that stimulated reflections on communal life. “Mille Giorni” was the kind of project that sought to remodel people’s imaginations: impelling survivors to understand others and their personal struggles with disaster-induced crises. I contend that this intention, expressed by Gloria, can expand our understanding of microtopian aspirations. Here, however, the term “micro” does not denote the kind of ephemeral pleasure of spontaneous and uncommitted connectivity, experienced as characteristic of late capitalism’s neoliberal consumption, which Bourriaud describes. Rather, the aspiration is micro-utopian because it seeks to transform only a local reality, community life, thus foregoing aspirations to change the world on a grand scale, according to future-orientated blueprints.

60 Cooper’s everyday utopias, or heterotopias, cannot quite capture the importance artists attached to culture in the aftermath of the earthquake. Preserving what is, while allowing pockets of difference, was not enough for Rafaelle or Gloria: the present had to be transcended in ways foreshadowed by the utopian imaginations that featured in theatrical performance as memories of a better past. The artist performed local, authentic narratives, seeking to create lasting community ties to counter the divisive

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effects of disaster, destruction, and displacement, which had dispersed an urban community into individual survivors, each of whom struggled with his or her particular disaster trajectory.

61 The approaches to utopian imaginations were pragmatic. Rafaelle and Gloria emphasised that the Piazza D’Arti initiative and “Mille Giorni” were responses to the earthquake, and both spoke about a “need” and a “necessity” to remake a sense of community life. Pragmatic approaches to utopia expose pockets of imagination and practice in which an urgent sense of absence necessitates reflections on better worlds, and on how they can be achieved.

62 In L’Aquila, furthermore, the direction of utopian imaginations was rooted in a nostalgically remembered past: both Rafaelle and Gloria considered the sense of civic community, something that had been lost through the earthquake. The disruptive event conditioned reflections on reconstruction and return. The utopian projects that emerged in cultural activities in post-earthquake L’Aquila were pragmatically constituted in response to something that had gone missing: they were reparative, seeking to remake relationships, foster understanding, and enable a sense of shared fate that would stretch beyond the performance event.

63 My examples from L’Aquila challenge Bourriaud’s claim that the utopian impulse has disappeared from contemporary creative industries. They show that not all art forms in late capitalism are simply orientated towards, as well as conditioned by, the experience economy. During times of distress, cultural work still offers possibilities to strive towards a real, different future, drawing inspiration from memories of a better past, which was – at least in recollection, which might be romantically enhanced – characterised by communal life and by dwelling in shared, historic, urban spaces.

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NOTES

1. The instigators even stood trial, but were eventually acquitted (Il Messaggero 2013). 2. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to highlight this point.

ABSTRACTS

The aftermath of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake was marked by social fragmentation and isolation in resettlement sites. Cultural work emerged as a central aspect of recovery initiatives, aimed at reconnecting dispersed survivors. This article explores how local artists envisioned their contribution to recovery from catastrophe, namely as the production and performance of utopian imaginations in particular spaces, seeking to connect divided Aquilani. Cultural initiatives approached the notion of utopia pragmatically: with historic neighbourhoods, in which sociality used to be produced, off-limits, dispersion and envy made the building of new shared spaces necessary. These spaces were often cultural. However, rather than envisioning cultural events as momentary, artists aspired to shape enduring relationships and recovery. Their work challenges approaches that depict the culture industry as conquered by late capitalism’s neoliberal, enjoyment-centred experience economy.

INDEX

Keywords: disaster, Italy, utopia, recovery, culture, community

AUTHOR

JAN-JONATHAN BOCK Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK [email protected]

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Artistic Labour: Seeking a Utopian Dimension

Neylan Bağcıoğlu

EDITOR'S NOTE

Date received: 2015-05-31 Date accepted: 2015-12-31

1 Created by Ahmet Öğüt, "Intern VIP Lounge" was an exclusive space for the unpaid interns working at the art fair and at the galleries in Dubai during the Art Dubai Fair in 2013. The lounge was a self-referential artwork parodying the disproportionate economic structures of the art world. By subverting the hierarchical structure of the art world, Öğüt was acting as a catalyst for change. As such, his call was among the "small reforms which make up great transformations" referred to by Félix Guattari (Guattari and Lotringer 2009: 153). Taking cues from Guattari and Roger Sansi, who both take Lévi-Strauss's idea of the artist's work as a "small-scale model" (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 23) in their discussions of "micro-utopias", I propose that art practice that directly (or concomitantly) serves a function—other than being art or about art— challenges its own ontological conditions in turn for pragmatic outcomes. Sansi posits that although they may still be "imprecise and unstable" or "subject to revision", such prototypes, experiments, small-scale models or "utopian projections" created by artists carry with them "the promise of a different future" (Sansi 2015: 157). As such, this article investigates the notion of artistic labour by elucidating how artists can create ethical social relations to perform "a new, possible world" by reinserting labour and advocacy into their practice. An examination of contemporary works that attempt to create micro-utopias by situating artistic labour at their core or by emphasising the power of networks and the "commons" to foster social integration will be juxtaposed with the discussion of a possible genealogy of such utopian artistic attempts from the late 1960s and 1970s. The historical trajectory will delineate the common denominators of artistic practices that proceed from utopian ideals such as anti-isolation, anti social

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division, anti self-reflexivity, process instead of object-based work, and investment in human value rather than materialistic value.

Ahmet Öğüt, "Intern VIP Lounge", Art Dubai, 2013. Courtesy of artist.

2 Another shared aspect of these microscopic attempts is that they operate on the level of individual groups. By challenging the logic of capitalist markets, which promote individualism, these art works seek to create communities (albeit temporally) and platforms for solidarity and resistance that can essentially be replicated. Case in point, Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" provided such a temporal platform for the art interns as a micro-community. Subverting the concept of an art fair lounge, Öğüt’s work offered an "exclusive" space that provided "a relaxed and entertaining ambience, [that also operated] as a knowledge exchange space, with a special programme of events, including meetings, presentations and film screenings".1 Essentially, Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" was a parody of that which has now become a sine qua non of art fairs: the lounge, where the quarter-million-pound-a-piece-paying art-lovers go to sip champagne while mingling with other members of the so-called art world. Although art-workers, which include unpaid gallery interns, artists' assistants, art handlers, transportation teams, insurers and other administrative staff are indispensable for the sustainability of the art world, they are conveniently kept outside the lounges, just as they are kept out of the museum galas, exhibition openings and auctions. David Graeber argues that: the art world has become largely an appendage to finance capital. This is not to say that it takes on the nature of finance capital (in many ways, in its forms, values, and practices, it is almost exactly the opposite) – but it is to say it follows it around, its galleries and studios clustering and proliferating around the fringes of the neighborhoods where financiers live and work in global cities everywhere, from New York and London to Basel and Miami (Graeber 2008).

3 Dubai is one such city that is central to the oil-rich Persian Gulf, which the art world has been pursuing with plans for overseas outposts of museums such as the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, Mathaf Museum in Doha or the DMOCA in Dubai. Yet, projects such as the Guggenheim and Louvre in Abu Dhabi which won't materialise for some time to come have raised issues regarding labour abuse in their construction sites, instigating protests worldwide. Such cultural investments have become the focus of scrutiny because they fail to abide by ethical labour conditions. This is not far off from the asymmetrical financial structures that Öğüt critiques with his "Intern VIP Lounge". Writing in ArtReview, J. J. Charlesworth referred to Öğüt’s

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lounge as a spoof of "the current anxiety over 'slave labour' in the cultural industries" (Charlesworth 2013), which questioned the hierarchical structures of the art world. Free coffee, a chocolate fountain, massages, a table tennis tournament and free mocktails were offered at the lounge. As these art fair interns are rarely paid, and have to spend entire days—usually in 12-hour shifts—they have no other option than to pay for things from their pockets.

4 Notwithstanding its seductive façade, the art market depends upon the unwaged labour force of the interns. While, for instance the white-collar work force of the financial market is welcomed at first instance with at least an entry-level salary, entry into the art market, to a great extent, is through several months (up to a year in many organisations) of unpaid internship positions. Interns are the bread and butter of the art world market. Marx stated that "capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power, which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits" (Marx 1867). Hence, in Marxist terms, interns are the "reserve army" of labour. In effect, the reserve army of interns allows the market to keep wages low, consequently increasing profits for owners. The fortunes of the wealthy grow at the expense of the wage-earners. This is the perfect reflection of the perpetual character of the neoliberal system (See David 2005). Accordingly, as the number of interns increase, the precariousness of their position and their torment of labour is intensified. Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" is a direct response to the plight of this "precarious generation" (Bourdieu 1999) of twenty to thirty-something people who have very low work security and irregular and often harsh working periods, which have detrimental impacts on their health and social life (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2006; Perrons 2002, 2007; Pratt, 2000). Gill and Pratt list the results of qualitative and ethnographic studies, which emphasise the common conditions and features of work for these people: "long hours and bulimic patterns of working", blending of work and play, "high levels of mobility', "informal work environments and distinctive forms of sociality", "profound experiences of insecurity and anxiety about finding work, earning enough money and keeping up in rapidly changing fields" (Gill and Pratt 2013: 33). The major problem with internships then, (as well as for part-time or freelance work) is how it benefits the employers in their profit making schemes by exonerating them from providing certain benefits and conditions that they provide to full-time employees.

5 Like art-workers (or cultural and creative workers according to Gill and Pratt 2008), and regardless of their meagre or non-existent wages, these art interns are "social workers" of what Negri refers to as the "factory without walls", in which labour is "deterritorialised, dispersed and decentralised" (Negri 1989: 79). Since, these art interns are made to work long hours, starting before the opening of the fair and staying long after it closes, they endure hours of solitary work. There is no trade-union for interns, nor is there a specific upside to interning at a fair since most of these interns are local, whereas the galleries they intermittently work for are not. Hence, by offering a space where these otherwise dispersed interns can socialise, Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" attacks the art world's factory without walls. By reversing the conventional understanding of the VIP lounge and recompensing the interns—ethically doing what the employers should have been doing—Öğüt is disrupting the art market system. Instead of rejecting the invitation from the art fair to produce a site-specific work—a

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route many artists might have taken as a form of remonstrance—Öğüt is acting as a catalyst for change by subverting the hierarchical structure of the art world, where interns generally inhabit the very bottom of the ladder. In other words, Öğüt’s work initiates "the release of a social potential for transformation, largely attributable to [the work's] affective dimensions and the opportunities for human contact and interaction" (Gill and Pratt 2013: 29). By creating an opportunity for socialising and networking, which is "less about 'schmoozing' the powerful than 'chilling' with friends, co-workers and people who share similar interests and enthusiasm" (Gill and Pratt 2013: 35) in the creative fields, Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" is also providing a platform for "compulsory sociality" (Gregg 2008), which as Melissa Gregg's research contends may be a vital element of survival, and not solely "tarrying of time" as referred to by some autonomist writing (Papadopoulos 2008).

6 While low-paid or unpaid, intermittent and irregular patterns of work—such as the work undertaken by the interns at the Art Dubai Fair—translates to precarious work, one might argue that these interns already come from middle class backgrounds, stellar educational achievements, and are thus by no means part of the precarious labour force. However, such an approach would be discriminative and elitist. Art interns are not precarious because their work is intermittent or irregular, but because they are exploited financially and socially within the art world. In a 2011 European Youth Forum research study on internship quality, one intern admits that, although one learns a lot, an unpaid internship "does not support the idea of social equality, as those who cannot afford to do an unpaid internship do not have the same job opportunities".2 Furthermore, the statistics from the same indicates that nearly half of all interns surveyed (49%) had not been paid at all.3 Furthermore, for 41% of those who were compensated, the remuneration level was inadequate to cover their daily expenses, and only 25% of the interns surveyed were able to "make ends meet" with the compensation, whereas the vast majority (65%) had to rely on financial assistance from their parents.4 In a similar vein, in their template letter directed to art institutions, the Precarious Workers' Brigade stated: […] we are concerned that by not paying people, only those who can afford to work for free will be able to benefit from your internship scheme. As internships are becoming more prevalent than graduate jobs, those who are unable to take up these unpaid "opportunities" are less likely to enter the sector. This seems unfair and exclusionary.5

7 Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" challenged the exclusionary structures of the art world by way of the insufficiently (or not at all) compensated interns. Otherwise confronted with "unfair and exclusionary" social and economic conditions, the "Intern VIP Lounge" was where their social status as interns gained them entry to a world of Very Important People. By subverting these exclusionary socio-economic conditions that define the art world, Öğüt created a "microtopia" in the Bourriaudian sense, and hence in pursuit of Félix Guattari's call for social change through "microscopic attempts at creating communities, setting up analytic groups among militants, organizing a day-care center at a university" (Guattari 1977: 29). Throughout the five days of the fair, exclusive screenings of "Dream Factory" by Aily Nash & Andrew Norman Wilson, "A New Product" by Harun Farocki, "Workers Leaving the Googleplex" by Andrew Norman Wilson, "People's passion, lifestyle beautiful wine, gigantic glass towers, all surrounded by water" by Neil Beloufa, "The Trainee" by Pilvi Takala, "Strategies" by Harm van den Dorpel, "De-employed" by Michael-Bell Smith, "Green Screen Refrigerator" by Mark

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Leckey, "Strike" by Hito Steyerl and "Fired" by Marianne Flotron were shown in addition to talks given by artists Basim Magdy, Pilvi Takala and Dina Danish as well as curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and Başak Şenova. In addition to reinforcing the Lounge's status as a microtopia—and not solely a space for socialisation—these events deemed it "a-place-to-be", and one where a person's status as a HNWI was inconsequential.

8 Öğüt’s subsequent "Day After Debt: A Call for Student Loan Relief" was a collective project dubbed as "a long-term counter-finance strategy"6 with artists Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Dan Perjovschi, Martha Rosler, Superflex and Krzysztof Wodiczko; art lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, and The Debt Collective, a student-debt cancelling initiative launched by Strike Debt's Rolling Jubilee. Located in the Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum in Michigan State University, the project was jointly commissioned by the Broad MSU and the Istanbul-based art organisation Protocinema. The sculptures included in "Day After Debt" functioned as public collection points for raising funds for Strike Debt, who would then buy back Student Loans. A letter of agreement was created by Öğüt in collaboration with the New York-based art lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento for the artists and potential future owners of the sculpture-based fundraising machines, who would be raising funds for the collective.7 As of December 2015, with just over 700,000 dollars, Strike Debt's Rolling Jubilee had abolished nearly 32 million dollars of student debt8, yet the vital importance of this initiative and Öğüt’s "Day After Debt" was the fact that they offered students a platform for solidarity, advocacy and resistance. This resistance is a Foucauldian one that functions micro-politically and operates on the level of individuals and groups, rather than seeking to change things in totality. Both of Öğüt’s projects are geared to creating micro-utopias that carry the potentiality to resurface, multiply and/or expand.

Ahmet Öğüt, "Anti-Debt Monolith", 2014. Courtesy of the artist and photographer Aaron Word.

9 This potentiality is a recurring aspect of Öğüt’s artistic practice. Perhaps the best example of this is the autonomous knowledge exchange platform called The Silent

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University (TSU), which was initiated by Öğüt, together with Synthia Griffin and Nora Razian from the Learning and Community Partnerships teams at the Tate in 2012.9 Established as a response to the "silencing process" faced by migrants, asylum seekers and refugees with academic and/or professional backgrounds who are unable to practice because of their status, TSU seeks "to challenge the idea of silence as a passive state, and explore its powerful potential through performance, writing, and group reflection".10 Now operating in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and Jordan, TSU offers these people an opportunity to become lecturers, academic consultants and research fellows again. With its motto "Towards A Transversal Pedagogy", TSU offers a variety of courses such as "Didactics for Learning New Languages", "Herodotus and The Civilisation of Medes" and "The History of Food Preparation through the Visual Arts", and as such presents a perfect example of what Guattari deems a successful microscopic attempt. In addition to lectures, TSU also organizes events and workshops such as the two-day, free-of-charge Anti-Bias Workshop, last April, which was in line with its objectives, which include: acting in solidarity with other collectives and refugee struggles around the world, "Acting knowledge without language and legal limitations" or "Adhocracy without bureaucracy".11

10 So far, TSU has fostered the making of alliances with nearly hundred groups and projects such as The Chickpea Sisters, Open Education Resources (OER) Movement, The Magdas Hotel—whose staff members are mostly refugees—and the Autonomous Center for and by Migrant Women among others. Instead of money or free voluntary service, the university utilises alternative currencies of exchange—made possible by the variety of its alliances and members—for the transnational reactivation of knowledge, and not just its dissemination. As opposed to the usual suspects of cultural sponsorship, which include BP, Deutsche Bank or BMW, TSU is self-supported, in addition to the support offered by the collaborating institutions such as the Delfina Foundation, Tensta Konsthall, Ringlokschuppen Ruhr and the University of Oxford among others. Essentially a self-organising and self-supporting network, TSU works as a catalyst for the social integration of displaced academics and professionals (an ever-increasing necessity in today's political climate) as well as those they reach out to. What "The Silent University" and "Day After Debt" share is their initial—and perhaps practical— alignment with institutions as "responsible actors" rather than mere "facilitators" (Lind 2005). Neither of these works are bound to a particular institution, hence they are not at risk of becoming (possibly neoliberal) ideological façades for the entertainment industry.

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"The Silent University", 2012 - onwards. Courtesy of The Silent University.

11 Another contemporary artist who recently created a work that follows similar micro- utopian ideals is Cevdet Erek. The Turkish artist's "Re-illumination" (2013) was conceived for the MAK exhibition, "Signs Taken in Wonder: Searching for Contemporary Istanbul".12 Erek created the site-specific installation by initiating a cleaning operation that involved the ceiling of the main exhibition hall. Erek realised that the ceiling had been covered with carpets years ago, accumulating heaps of dirt. The hall was similar to the one in Kunsthalle Basel with a skylight that illuminated the space. Erek felt that MAK could also benefit from natural daylight. He convinced the museum's management and the exhibition curators, Simon Rees and Bärbel Vischer to remove the carpets and eliminate any dirt. After the ceiling was cleaned, daylight could finally enter and illuminate the space. As a result, Erek titled the work "Re- illumination". The entry of daylight meant that the work was the day itself, and as such, it was an illuminated volume rather than an object. Molleton (100% cotton material woven from plain canvas) fabric was suspended from a temporary aluminium structure attached to the ceiling in order to absorb the sounds that would otherwise reverberate from the walls. During the course of the exhibition, Erek, who is also a professional musician (he is the drummer of Nekropsi, an experimental, progressive rock band founded in İstanbul in 1989) made three sound performances open to the public, which effectively allowed him to activate the space.

12 In essence, this site-specific work eliminated the need for additional artificial lighting in the space. Furthermore, it provided the visitors of the museum with "free" light, even after the end of this exhibition. Instead of placing a loudspeaker and guiding visitors towards an object (three-dimensional or auditory) or a direction (as in churches), the work was formed by the actual volume of the space along with the light that filled it, its internal glass wall and the movement of visitors. At the same time, the glass ceiling with all the elements that had been added over the years, such as air

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conditioning, light fixtures and speakers, created a stained-glass window of sorts. This stained-glass effect was emphasised by the natural light that was filtered through the ceiling. Since, this site-specific work was created for a group exhibition, it in turn became a common gathering area for visitors, as well as an area for recuperation (from all the art). Since "Re-illumination" was part of a group exhibition—and because it was situated in the middle of the museum (hence the other artworks)—it also served as an impromptu meeting space for visitors.

13 One of the four demands stated by the Precarious Workers Brigade is "shared ownership of space, ideas and resources", which they refer to as "the commons".13 By creating "commons", both Öğüt and Erek's works defy the capitalist market's logic that negates and/or eliminates integration. All three works by Öğüt and Erek's "Re- illumination" provide a shared ownership to the participants. The screenings and talks are for the interns, money collected in the sculpture-based fundraising machines benefit the students with debts, by way of the Debt Collective, the TSU lectures and workshops are open to all and do not belong to any particular institution, and finally "Re-illumination" benefits visitors to the MAK even long after the end of the exhibition for which the work was intended for. All of these works can be viewed as interventions per se. While the former three works intervene by making additions, the latter intervenes by means of subtraction. However what deems them utopian is the way that they question management and the status quo. Öğüt’s "Intern VIP Lounge" reverses the social hierarchical positions of an art fair. The so-called lowest rank of the intern is upgraded to the highest rank, namely the "Very Important Person". Öğüt takes over the role of fair organiser and thereby blurs the line between defined social roles both of his position as artist turned organiser and of the interns turned VIPs. Similarly, Erek is also shifting his position from artist to that of a manager. His "Re-illumination" has a social agenda at its core. First and foremost, he improves the condition of the "commons" - the main exhibition hall of MAK. He creates an area for recuperation and social engagement. In the meantime, he also reduces the museum's electricity bill, thereby rendering the museum space more sustainable. Even though "Re-illumination" is primarily a site-specific work made for a particular exhibition, it is not solely a space- based work but also a time-based work, as it will exist even after this exhibition is completed. Erek's intervention is both a reduction and a remediation. In contrast to additive and/or reflexive works, these types of interventions do not run as great a risk of being subsumed by the system of our consumer society. Moreover, Re-illumination" enables a shift in the value system for art, from material value to human value as the basis for human interaction. In essence, both Erek and Öğüt are taking over "work" that would ordinarily be part of the salaried employee's responsibility, therefore elevating it from what may seem labourious to meaningful and affective.

14 Taking his cues from Max Weber, Brian Holmes expounds on an ideal type, namely, the "flexible personality" that reveals "the intersection of social power with intimate moral dispositions and erotic drives" (Holmes 2002). Intrinsically the notion is an artistic revolt against authoritarianism and standardisation. This idea of flexibility also has an affinity to Michael Piore and Charles Sabel's idea of "flexible specialisation" in reference to the new production regime characterised by a strategy of permanent innovation to accommodate change (Piore and Sabel 1983: 261-263). Piore and Sabel's research is based on the production approaches of Northern Italian companies in the early 1980s which relied on small, independent units and spontaneous cooperation in response to the regulation crisis and recession of the earlier decade (Holmes 2002).

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Although this notion of flexibility when adopted en masse turns out to tolerate opportunism fostered by the neoliberal system, it also showed the imminent need for socio-cultural critique. Inherently, these flexible production strategies refuse systems of mass-production and co-optation. As Negri suggests, this revival of decentralised labour is based on the "refusal of work" rather than nostalgia for former types of work (Lazzarato, Moulier-Boutang, Negri and Santilli 1993: 46). However, it also indicates an unfulfilled need for the ethical dimension of work.

15 Art practice that directly (or concomitantly) serves a function—other than being art or about art—challenges its own ontological conditions in turn for pragmatic outcomes. What this article proposes is that when art practice goes beyond the interests of the art world (i.e. making art about art itself) in order to challenge ways of working and/or terms of labour it is in turn redefining art as something that can have tangible consequences, and hence a socio-political function. While artists have increasingly embraced labour at the core of their practice since the end of the nineteenth century, they have also strived to situate themselves at the core of life. Their investigation of the ambiguous relation between artistic labour and material labour has in turn reinserted an ethical dimension to work itself. By utilising their own artistic labour as a tool, these artists have essentially shown that there can be a common ground between artists and non-artists outside of the synthetic public of the neoliberal system. However, the situation is anything but triumphant. The predominantly classless strike workers, that Arendt describes as the "refuse of all classes", constitute the ambivalent and precarious artistic labour force of today. What has been denoted as the end of internationalism and hence the beginning of globalisation has shown that inequality is even more pronounced. In fact it is now disguised as multiplicity and/or hybridity (Stallabrass 2010; Zizek 1997). Not too long ago, with rhetoric similar to that of Rancière in "The Ignorant Schoolmaster", Jeffrey Kipnis, stated: We should never confuse the fact that cultural practices affect us, change us, stimulate us to think and see and hear and feel differently with the supposition that they teach us anything. Once something teaches you something, it thinks for you. This is a point that eludes even the promising young mess specialists and punk whippersnappers à la Obrist, who, for all of their bravado, continue obediently to inscribe their work in the service of the Big Idea. Rotton once said, 'I may not know much about music, but I know it ain't got nuffin' to do with chords?' Worth remembering. (Kipnis 2006: 97-98).

16 Thus, if there is a road to salvation, it is through artists working as what Jean-Jacques Lebel describes as "moral transgressors" who voice and contest what is repressed in society through artistic labour, since, as he posits, "there is no frontier between art and life".14 Art production is affective precisely because it is part of life and its crude reality. For decades now, artistic labour has been part of the production, distribution and consumption cycle. Yet, it increasingly has also become part of the valuation, accumulation and speculation cycle strengthening its ties with finance capital as Graeber proposes. What all of this suggests is that, artistic labour is powerful only when it transcends representation to configure and produce ethical social relations. Otherwise, art production cannot escape being subsumed and valorised by the system that it longingly and arduously reprimands.

17 Perhaps this is not at all a surprising scenario. During the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called "dematerialisation of art" was artists way of opposing the systematic commodification of art. According to Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, by eliminating the need for

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objects altogether, art practice became dematerialised (Lippard and Chandler 1968: 218). Increasingly opting for conceptual works, language as art, ephemeral performance pieces, happenings and/or live art, artists sought to avoid becoming entangled in the commodification of art works; essentially opposing the socio- economic system of the art world. While these tendencies during the 1960s and onwards were in fact motivated by a multitude of social and political reasons, they all shared an agenda of anti-commodification. This might have been a Utopian agenda, and indeed, it more or less failed, as the art world found ways of commodifying the uncommodifiable.

18 This radical rupture was also a reaction to the Greenbergian formalist Modernism. One, perhaps notably obvious, critique of such formalism was John Latham's 1965 conceptual work, "Still and Chew" for which he along with his students from Saint Martin's School of Art in London chewed (and spat out) Greenberg's book "Art and Culture", which he had borrowed from the school library. The chewed pages were then dissolved in acid. When Latham was called to return the book to the library, he returned the dissolved book in a labelled vial, and was subsequently sacked from his teaching post. Utopian and reactionary as this act was in 1965, the spit-riddled pages of Greenberg's book dissolved in acid, namely, "Still and Chew" is now part of the permanent collection of MoMA in New York. The work, now titled Art and Culture" (1966-69) was bought by the museum with funds endowed by the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, and includes a leather case containing the book, letters and labelled vials filled with powders and liquids. So much for anti-commodification…

19 While artists' attempts during the 1960s and 1970s to fight the commodification of art through the proliferation of conceptual and/or dematerialised art practice were ultimately unsuccessful (becoming co-opted within cycles of legitimisation just like institutional critique), these artists have nevertheless managed to challenge capitalism, as "a social system based on the imposition of work with the commodity form" (Cleaver 2000: 82). Albeit indirectly, these subversions have forced art institutions and the art market to reform themselves, and adopt new practices of display and distribution. On the other hand, taking his cues from Marcuse, Negri posits that to challenge capitalism is to refuse work, since "the refusal of work does not negate one nexus of capitalist society, one aspect of capital's process of production or reproduction. Rather with all its radicality, it negates the whole of capitalist society" (Negri 1979: 124). However, in terms of art practice, refusal of work tout court is not enough. For instance, Gustav Metzger who declared an "art strike" between 1977 and 1980, terminated his strike because his call was not adopted by or elicited the interest of others. During his "Years Without Art", Metzger "delved into academic research, partook of revolutionary activities, wrote treatises and continued to investigate artistic methods"15 according to Jeannie Rosenfeld. Essentially, what Metzger did was take a sabbatical to do what the majority of other artists were already doing to support their art practices.

20 A more resonant attempt with a wider reach than that of Metzger was the "New York Artists Strike Against War, Racism, Repression, and War" proposed by the Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) in 1970. Founded on 3 January 1969 in New York City, and active until Spring 1971, AWC was a loose group of nearly 300 artists, writers, curators and other members of the art community. The conception of the group was instigated when Takis (Vassilakis, a kinetic artist) removed his work from the "Machine" exhibition at MoMA,

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claiming a right of control for the exhibition of an artist's work regardless of that work's sale to another entity or institution. Julia Bryan-Wilson's "Art Workers: Radical Art Practice in the Vietnam War Era" offers an excellent account of the AWC, whose members called on "all museums, galleries, art schools, and institutions in New York to close in a general strike on this day, Friday, May 22, 1970, in response to objectionable policies made by the U.S. government following the atrocious events at Kent State".16 This call was in-line with the AWC's objective to re-align artists and other art community members with workers, and redefine art as labour. As Bryan-Wilson posits, this redefinition was "pivotal to the minimal art that preceded and informed the AWC, the process art that relied upon literally laboring bodies, the feminist politics that understood work as gendered, and the conceptual strategies that emerged through and from notions of art as work" (Bryan-Wilson 2009: 2-3). The AWC's goal was perhaps a utopian call, and as Bryan-Wilson's account demonstrates, a re-alignment of artists with workers was problematic. Though characteristically and structurally different from the AWC, the Artists Placement Group (APG) also attempted to redefine art practice—one that situated artists side-by-side with workers—during the 1960s and 1970s in Britain.

21 An artist is "someone who gains access through an art idiom to the omnipresent universe in a sense that is otherwise occluded" claimed John Latham, the late artist and co-founder of the Artists Placement Group (APG, 1966-1979) (Latham 1984). His definition was reminiscent of the Modernist notion of the solitary artist, a genius at work creating an autonomous object. However, Latham's definition actually was aimed at taking the role of the artist one step further, to someone that can affect social change through active engagement. Together with Barbara Steveni, Latham sought to follow upon a policy of placing artists in industrial establishments, such as factories, corporations and government organisations, in order to resituate the artist as an integral part of society. At the turn of the nineteenth century—an earlier period that marked a similar socio-political shift to that of the 1970s—William Morris had suggested that "the valorisation of individual artists and the sphere in which they work is a new and temporary phenomenon produced by the rise of capitalist social relations" (Esche and Bradley 2007: 12). Morris's dream for art was for it to be "a part of the daily life of all members of society, […] inseparable from the creation of an egalitarian social order" (Esche and Bradley 2007: 12). In fact, Morris's non-hierarchical and inclusive framework for art production and working through which he spearheaded the Arts and Crafts Movement were revisited during the late 1960s and 1970s, when artists in Britain became increasingly involved in projects geared towards social reconstruction. Be it in response to individualism fostered by the industrial revolution as in the late nineteenth century or to the object-based regime of art; the late 1960s paved the way for the post- studio art world of utopian participatory practices and contemporary "microscopic attempts".

22 As founders of the APG, Latham and Steveni invested in the "universal legitimacy of the creative capacities of the artist" (Corris 2012: 6). They proposed that "the future must involve a more integrated and comprehensive approach to political and social organisation in which the insight of artists could have a significant role".17 Over the course of 14 years, the APG made 20 artist placements in a range of industrial as well as governmental organisations such as Department of Health and Social Security, National Coal Board and the Scottish Office. By enabling artists to engage actively in non-art environments, the APG shifted the function of art towards "decision-making".18 On the

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other hand, the APG's agenda also involved the insertion of artists into completely foreign terrains, regardless of their particular skills. In fact, most of the selected artists did not possess the necessary practical skills to function within these industrial enterprises, except as consultants, which indubitably situated them closer to management rather than the shop floor. As such, the APG's attempts, much like similar attempts portrayed in Bryan-Wilson's "Art Workers" to politicise art labour and identify artists as labourers were on an ideological level rather than being founded on the labour process itself.

23 Nevertheless, the innovative structure proposed by the APG was concomitant with the ethos of the period and the idealist intentions of the artists working in Britain. As Michael Corris delineated in his article "The Un-artist", during the late 1960s and most of the 1970s, the art world witnessed a tendency for a vast portion of artists to "reclaim art as an instrument of social and cultural transformation [and align themselves with] a broad social base in positive opposition to the ideological content and social relations reproduced by 'official' culture" (Corris 2012: 7). The APG emerged at a time when discourse began to be considered as an art form, and aimed to pair artists with industrial enterprises, pushing artists out into society. Albeit with shortcomings and impracticalities, the APG's theoretical system paved the way for the consideration of social processes as art, especially because they were instigated by the presence of the artist. By actually entering the space of the labour force—a workspace they were not familiar with—the artists were voluntarily becoming deskilled. As such, they were demystifying their social standing as autonomous creators while maintaining their definitions as artists. After all, if anything, the APG's success was to provide the framework for a process through which artists could influence decision-making within organisations.

24 Marxist-turned-right-wing critic Peter Fuller commended the APG for succeeding in getting companies (e.g. Hille Furniture Company, British European Airways and the shipping company Ocean Fleets) to accept placement of artists who would, in essence, work against the profit motive. On the other hand, Fuller was highly critical of the members of the APG for their naïveté in believing that artists could sustain their independent and in a sense, disinterested standpoints. Fuller claimed that the open brief system proposed a disadvantage for the artist, as it mandated that the artist would promise not to harm the host organisation. In other words, the artists were not to find fault (Bishop 2012: 171). In effect, this brought an end to the group's operation as the APG, not because they failed to affect social change, but because they relied on state funding and governmental regulation to a great extent. For instance, between 1974-76, artist Ian Breakwell was given a placement by the Department of Health and Social Security to work at the high-security hospital in Rampton and the Broadmoor Special Hospital. With a crew of interdisciplinary experts, Breakwell prepared the "Broadmoor Community Study", a critique of the status quo at Broadmoor, delineating problem areas and offering possible solutions. Angered by the radical outlook of the report, the Broadmoor administration terminated the project and restricted the report under the Official Secrets Act even though it was never intended for public circulation. 19 In that sense, the Broadmoor project was unsuccessful in instigating any direct effect. However, Breakwell's documentation from Rampton was shown at several events, including Documenta 6 in Kassel and the APG's seminars at the Whitechapel Gallery in London during 1977-78. After one of these presentations, a Yorkshire Television documentary team working on a project about high-security mental hospitals

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approached Breakwell seeking further information. Following Breakwell's advice, the team went to Rampton, however they were denied entrance to the premises. In the end, the Yorkshire team exposed the situation, which resulted in a public outcry and a police investigation.20 Although Breakwell's artistic practice with regards to this particular placement failed to produce a direct experience, it was effective in setting a particular social relation in motion. Furthermore, the recent screening of Breakwell's experimental documentary, which he co-directed with Kevin Coyne, entitled "The Institution" (1978) at the Nottingham Contemporary shows that his critique is still valid, and even though his placement ceased before his proposed reforms were introduced, the impact of his forced exile were critical.

25 What set the APG apart from other existing public art institutions was its socialist aspiration. The APG was established by artists for the good of society and not the other way around. The APG's overarching agenda was to develop relationships between disparate social entities (i.e. artists and workers, artists and industry, artists and society) and make a dynamic contribution over a broad social context. Although the APG aimed to use artistic labour by inserting artists into organisations that relied on material and/or productive labour, its members strived to establish social relations that relied on an ethical dimension of work, and succeeded in most if not all placements. Post-1960s avant-garde artists' quest for collaboration with other disciplines (e.g. architects, engineers, scientists) brought artistic labour closer to material labour. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s objected to the division of labour and hierarchy in industry, just as they opposed social inequality. They demanded autonomy, self-management and room for creativity. Lazzarato suggests that it was actually capitalism which created the conditions for these needs: while the lines between workers, consumers and owners were gradually blurred, the public collapsed into the private (Lazzarato 2007; Holmes 2002). However, since the system of capitalism essentially relies on the expropriation of labour in order to create surplus value, more often than not, it lacks an ethical dimension. With this in mind, the APG strived to foster the conditions for harmonious and ethical labour. Its utopian ideal was to create, what in twenty-first century terms would be called the "commons". At its best, this would have been a common ground where artistic labour instigated horizontal social relations rather than solely creating objects or experiences.

26 Deeming an activity, a proposal and/or a process utopian tends to carry with it an inevitable negative connotation. The concept is understood to be unattainable, impossible, naïve or quixotic. However, it also comes with a level of expectancy, a form of wide-eyed optimism. Although Thomas More's "Utopia" (1516) marks a milestone, creative thinkers have been drawn to utopias since the time of Plato's "Republic" (around 380 BC). Centuries later, Adorno deemed that an absolute society and utopia was unattainable, unless it encompasses "the notion of an unfettered life freed from death" (Bloch, 1987, 10). Indeed, the understanding of utopia shifted throughout these eras, and the symptoms of each era manifested themselves in different ways artistically. For instance, Nicholas Poussin's "Et in Arcadia Ego" (1636-37), Louis- Sébastien Mercier's novel "The Year 2440" (1770) or "A Modern Utopia" (1905) by H.G. Wells all express desires or fears by depicting specific utopias that "resist being classified as either good or bad" (Carey 1999: xi). Up until the Industrial Revolution, thinkers, writers and artists had contemplated utopia in a passive and perhaps isolated manner, producing paintings, sculptures, poems and books. Theirs was an investigation rather than an attempt to conquer this seemingly unattainable goal. However, a shift

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took place—a shifting of gears, as it were—to relocate artistic practice amongst the people through active societal engagement. More often than not, so-called utopian attempts by artists have occurred in times of social unrest or in response to them. The Arts and Crafts movement was conceived as a remedy for the labourer who was pressured by malicious industry.21 Similarly, the late 1960s experimental art practices indicated a watershed moment in the trajectory of utopia which concurred with the rising anti-war protests, trade-union strikes, and civil rights movements. The decade marked a shift from the autonomous art object to post-studio practice that harboured a process-based approach that exalted agitation: inciting people to think and act, with or without a promise or a requisite for a concrete end. As Alberto López Cuenca asserts, "the exceptional character of art does not lie in the object or experience it produces but in the sort of social relations artistic practice can put into motion" (Cuenca 2012: 12). And since capitalism is a social relation of production in Marxist terms, art production appears to be an anomaly.

27 In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt—who sees the modern experience of labour as repetitive, tedious and alienating, thus, congruent to slavery—considers the artist as the only real worker that has survived in consumer society (Arendt 1958). Arendt posits that artistic labour is the only form of true work, which she defines as the ability to produce a totality without being reduced to slaves, namely, works that are completely useless to the capitalist system. This is of course a reverberation of the idea that art and art works are fundamentally non-utilitarian. Yet, as the contemporary works referred to in this article illustrate, the power of this logic has not been able to withstand the test of time. Ultimately, what is now referred to—and what is elucidated above—as artistic labour is the action that is elevated to what Holloway defines as "doing" as opposed to labour. What Arendt refers to as art's durability can be considered as its reluctance to enter the capitalist cycle of production-consumption-waste. However, artists are not homo fabers (Arendt 1958) or "doers" solely because they produce outside the world of the assembly line and away from the rows of cubicles inside skyscrapers. The salience of art works and artists is their future affective power, in contrast to that which is proffered by the capitalist and neo-liberal economies. Only with the benefit of hindsight can we truly comprehend the affective power of art works. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917) and Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" (1937) are the most celebrated examples of this (Clark 1994). While both works generated debate and were provocative at the time of their presentation, it is their resonance and further debates that they continue to instigate that deem them affective. Although "affect", like "precarity", is a loaded word, it is the only one that depicts the perennial but anomalous (within capitalism) power of art.

28 After all, while both artistic tendencies (contemporary and the 1970s) strive to mend and/or correct social problems, they still run the risk of being more powerful on a discursive level as opposed to bringing forth concrete changes or tangible outcomes. On that account, Sansi posits, "The aesthetic utopia contains a promise of liberation, a form of life that is not based on work but on play, social relations rather than the material production of commodities" (Sansi 2015: 157). Perhaps a promise of liberation is all that is needed or all that art practice can offer. Yet as is clear from the artistic attempts for creating micro-utopias referred to above—contemporary efforts more so than their precursors—the aim is to change society in the here and now. Although both based on small-scale endeavours, the microscopic attempts by contemporary artists emphasise the vitality of the "commons": these artists seek to create platforms,

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prefiguring what kind of a society they (and presumably we) want to live in—a society based on equality and social integration—and organising accordingly rather than adopting reformist strategies. Works like "Day after Debt", "Intern VIP Lounge" and "Re-Illumination", and platforms like "The Silent University" all go to show that microscopic attempts can in fact generate practical achievements, and restore our conviction in utopia. Be it micro or macro.

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