An Exhibition of Contemporary Art, a Conference and a Series of Parallel Actions

Terra Mediterranea: In Action An exhibition of contemporary art, a conference and a series of parallel actions

FOR AN EXTENDED ACTIONISM International Conference

Within the framework of Pafos 2017, European Capital of Culture, and the Terra Mediterranea: In Action project, the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation organizes the international conference For An Extended Actionism based on a concept by Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre.

Saturday, 23 September 2017, NiMAC

Free admission

Τhe conference will be in English

To paint, to photograph… is to act. Sometimes, the distinguishing features of actions, such as intentionality, agency, control, and their individuation, are also touched upon in the process.

When Duchamp states that his Large Glass is definitively unfinished, he wades into the individuation of action in a recurring manner and not simply in relation to a specific material. He was already an Actionist.

We propose to take over this term once again,1 to describe both the interventions characterizing actions and those that modify their very characteristics. Examples of Actionism as hereby defined can be found throughout the history of the 20th century. As early as the 1910s, Malevich described his White on White as pure action.

This Actionism extends beyond the movement labelled Viennese Actionism, beyond taxonomies of action in art: art action, happenings, performances. It no longer refers to conventional iconographies such as dismembered corpses.

1 Use of this term is not restricted to the field of Art. It can also be found in sociology first with Max Weber and in the cognitive sciences. What are the implications of this Extended Actionism, of this emphasis on interventions concerned with the characteristics of action, whether we practice them, observe them, or question them? How might we approach works that inquire into action itself, within history, law, economy, and even art criticism?

Let us better pinpoint certain issues arising from this Actionism. It is curled up in the origins of the neo-liberal economy.2 Should one necessarily leave others to take action? Might Actionism also have a role to play in reconsidering and producing direct modes of action? From this perspective of the philosophy of action in the 1950s-1980s, what can we expect, on an operative level?

The use of such concepts within artistic practice is not self-evident, especially as most remain to this day controversial. Yet might we not employ them in order to challenge established characterizations and perhaps open up new possibilities for practice?

And yet, a number of these concepts have been applied –and challenged 3– in other areas of artistic activity, as for example in the series Blind Time Drawings (Drawing with Davidson) by Robert Morris as raw material.4

Could we revive this type of exercise? Could the Actionism of cognitive pragmatism be of use to us, such as in the proposition: perception is action?5

We will address such an extension of Actionism, at the crossroads of diverse fields. It follows on from the conference The Action of Art, organized by ARP-ALBA at the Sursock Museum in Beirut in 2016.6

2 See Ludwig VON MISES, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Yale University Press, 1949, 1998, 2010. 3 Jean-Michel ROY, Triangulating Morris Intention? Davidson on Morris Quoting Davidson, ENS Éditions, 2015. 4 Jean-Pierre CRIQUI (Author), Donald DAVIDSON (Author), Robert MORRIS (Artist). Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings, Paperback, 2005. 5 “Actionism is the thesis that perception is the activity of exploring the environment making use of knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies.” In Alva NOË, Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception and the Fragility of Presence, Thomas METZINGER, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany and Jennifer M. WINDT, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. 6 https://sursock.museum/content/international-conference-laction-dart-action-art Programme

14:30 Welcome: Dr. Yiannis Toumazis

14:40 Paola Yacoub, Michel Lasserre: Extended Actionism, operative questions. Extended Actionism raises a set of operative issues. Taking artistic action into consideration, characterizing it and intervening on its characteristics involves unexpected consequences. We will draw on some anecdotes from the Viennese Actionism, even if we come back to few preconceived ideas. It seems that this artistic movement indicates below activism, a political space that is still poorly identified.

15:20 Daniel Blanga Gubbay: Action, Opacity, Deactivation. Some years ago artist Jason Dodge took the decision to no longer date his works, preventing catalogues and exhibitions to add a date after his new works. In relation to this image, this lecture opens a reflection on the (false) dichotomy between action and production in artistic creation. By disclosing –with Marina Garcés– a reflection on the idea of engagement, it sheds a light on the limits of the operative ontology of Western-political philosophy, and it eventually discusses the possibility of the opacity of the action and its temporality, and the use of the concept of désœuvrement, as a shift from the action to the deactivation.

16:00 Bana Bashour: Moral Judges and Moral Agents. In the literature on moral psychology, people often assume that making a moral judgment and behaving in a moral way go hand in hand. In this paper, I wish to tease those two apart: I would like to argue that the skills involved in being a good moral judge are different from those involved in being a good moral agent. While being good at one makes it more likely that you may be good at the other, it is by no means necessary or sufficient. Once the kinds of skills required are spelled out, it will be clear why that is the case. For making this argument I will be relying on philosophical texts as well as relevant empirical studies (specifically on skill acquisition).

16:40 Q&A

17:00 Break

17:30 Alice Dupas, Jean-Michel Roy: Extended Actionism and Action Theory: Mutual Enlightenment? As suggested by the organizers of the conference, artistic Actionism can be broadly defined as the view that makes art essentially an exploration of action, with the additional idea that this artistic exploration is itself fundamentally one specific kind of acting. Actionism so understood is a powerful trend in modern art that manifests itself from its early steps as well as under various guises in the course of its development. It is also a typical illustration of the epistemological ambition of modern art to participate to the elaboration of knowledge. As such, it naturally calls for a confrontation with action theory, and in particular with the significant transformations that action theory went through recently, both on the philosophical side and on the scientific side. To what extent do artistic Actionism and action theory bring forth converging views about what acting amounts to and wherein lies the specificity of artistic acting? And to what extent also can they fruitfully cooperate in their investigation of action, leading to what might be called a scientifically Extended Actionism as well as an artistically extended theory of action? The talk will take some steps into the examination of these two interrelated issues, focusing on the critical examination of recent interactions between artistic Actionism and action theory in the privileged area of dance.

18:10 Walter Benn Michaels: “When I raise my arm”: Action, Ιntentionality, Αutonomy. My title comes from Wittgenstein’s famous question: “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” Whether he meant the question to be answered or whether he meant to suggest that, as posed, it was misleading and should be refused is debatable but, in this presentation, I will treat refusal as the right way to go. I will argue that –with respect to art– an interest in action, properly understood, must be an interest in form, and I will argue further that the interest in form has significant and (at the current moment) controversial political entailments.

18:50 Q&A

19:10 End

List of Contributors

Bana Bashour Dr. Bana Bashour is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Philosophy. Her research interests are mainly in moral psychology, a sub-field that is at the intersection of philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. She earned her BA in Philosophy from AUB in 2000 and her PhD from CUNY in 2007, at which point she started working at AUB. Her publications include papers on normative epistemology, moral psychology and most recently an interdisciplinary work on the relation between naturalist ethics and contemporary economics (co- authored with Ramzi Mabsout), as well as a co-edited anthology with Hans Muller entitled Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications, published by Routledge.

Walter Benn Michaels Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of several books, including The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004), The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006) and, most recently, The Beauty of a Social Problem, which is about art (both photography and literature) and inequality in the first years of the 21st century. He is a member of the nonsite.org collective and some of his recent work on art, action and politics can be found on their website.

Daniel Blanga Gubbay Daniel Blanga Gubbay (1982) is Professor at the Académie royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels and a researcher in political philosophy of the arts. He collaborates with the Kunstenfestivaldesarts and is the initiator of Aleppo, a Brussels-based independent research space in art and political theory creating every season a free and temporary Imaginary School around a specific topic. He graduated in philosophy from Venice University of Architecture with Giorgio Agamben, and got a European Ph.D, jointly run by the University of Palermo, Valencia and Freie Unversität Berlin, working on the political use and evolution of the concept of the possible.

Alice Dupas Alice Dupas is a teacher, who has passed philosophy aggregation in 2014 as well as a Ph.D student in philosophy at the Lyon ENS. Her supervisor is Jean-Michel Roy and the subject of her doctoral dissertation is: A cognitive conception of art at the turn of the 20th century: from Analytic Aesthetics to Cognitive Aesthetics. She holds a Master’s degree in History of Philosophy. She teaches courses in Philosophy of Art and in Contemporary Philosophy of Art at the Lyon ENS and also in Epistemology and Cognitive Science at the Lyon 2 Faculty. She co-leads the Doctoral Research Laboratory: At the Interface between Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Lyon ENS.

Jean-Michel Roy Jean-Michel Roy is Professor of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon as well as a Research Affiliate of the Philosophy Department of the East Normal University of Shanghai. His work deals both with the origins of XXth Century philosophy and with the foundations of contemporary Cognitive Science. He participated in the first Beirut Symposium on Actionism and currently collaborates with Alice Dupas on a doctoral investigation into the cognitive approach to art.

Paola Yacoub, Michel Lasserre Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre, visual artists, have been collaborators since 2000. Their works have been exhibited at Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2000); the Venice Biennal (2003), Busan Biennal (2004) and Gwangju Biennal (2006) biennales; Plateau, Paris (2002); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2003); Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (2008). They have given lecture-performances at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006); Beirut Art Centre (2011); EHESS Paris (2012); Travelling Féministe, Paris (2013). They have been the recipients of several grants, including from DAAD, Berlin, in 2005. Their lectures have been collected in the monograph Beirut is a Magnificent City: Synoptic Pictures, published by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2003). Their first joint works focused on a critical interpretation of perceptions of territories in conflict zones. They are currently working on the notion of action, and restoring varied techniques of dramatization to the field of visual arts. Paola Yacoub is director of the Artistic Research Practices program at ALBA, Beirut.

NiMAC Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Associated with the Pierides Foundation 19, Palias Ilektrikis, 1016 Nicosia, T: +357 22797400, [email protected], www.nimac.org.cy