CURS 2007-2008
MÀSTER IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS PRACTICE & DISSEMINATION (MACAPD)
Reader and Bibliography BOKANA KUNST
Girona, 1-4 Abril de 2008
Fundació UdG: Innovació i Formació Plaça Jordi de Sant Jordi, 1 17001 Girona Tel. 972 210 299 A/e: [email protected] www.fundacioudg.org
Queda prohibida la reproducció, total o parcial, sense autorització prèvia per part de la Fundació, de la documentació inclosa en aquest dossier. Embodied Context: On Dramaturgy in Contemporary Dance and Performance
Boyana Kunst
If we say that art is a public act, we say also that it is never isolated from signification. Artists today work inside the dense network of historical, social, artistic and political contexts. At the same time these contexts are not only discursive, but also sensorial and embodied. Such multiple nature of the context is also one of the reasons why dramaturgy in dance has such a slippery position; it seems namely that it is very hard to grab it and say exactly what is it about. »I know what I'm doing, but I don't know how to name it«, Andre Lepecki once told to belgian producer Bruno Verbegt. »You are a dramaturg« he answers him. In my lectures I will be disclosing the role and position of the dramaturgy with theoretical and practical examples. We will be focused especially on the problem of the context and dissemination, which changed a lot in the last decades. What is especially interesting is also to observe the discoursive and embodied layers of dramaturgical discourse and their role in the process of performance making. We will be especially interested in approaches which are understanding working processes also as a way to produce knowledge about artistic processes and working together – we are learning through the work itself. In my lectures i will present many practical examples. The lectures will also offer a possibility to participants to reflect on their actual practical work.
Becoming Room, Becoming Mac
New Artistic Identities in the Transnational Brussels Dance Community
By Eleanor Bauer
A preliminary version of this text was first given as a lecture within B-Chronicles: A discursive event around mobilities and subjectivities in the dance community presented by Sarma and Damaged Goods in the Performatik series at Kaaistudios, in Brussels on the 13th of January 2007.
1. On Perspective
I was initially invited onto Sarma’s B-Chronicles team in the Spring of 2006 as an artist, in order to create and perform something on the issue of community within the current situation of transnational mobility in the performing arts, centered around the crossroads or focal point of Brussels. Given the vastness and diversity of this community and its flows, it was immediately evident to me that my own limited perspective would certainly not suffice to illuminate such a reality. To go about investing in this issue with any sincerity, I would have to dive into it head first and invite a shattering of all my assumptions or projections. Interview research with members and participants of the "Brussels dance community" was designed by the B-Chronicles team in collaboration with sociologist Delphine Hesters as a part of the project. The interviews were to serve as a resource for the creation of written, performed, and interactive presentations by the contributors to the B-Chronicles events and webpage. So I opted to conduct the interviews myself, choosing as research for my own artistic output the direct immersion of my perspective within a multiplicity of others.
Mobility is a concretely formative part of our reality, and the issue of transnational movement is a huge set of circumstances that determines the performance of our lives. Its personal effects are so prevalent in my daily life, especially once I turn my attention towards them as I have done in the last seven months of working on this project that it is no longer possible to separate between the issue and my life or the issue and its effects, much less to distinguish cause and effect within the complex relationships of economic, artistic, political, personal, institutional and physical circumstances that constitute the forces in the life of a performing artist today. To determine why we move where we move as often as we move, and decipher which instability provides for which behavioral pattern is so inter-circumstantial and subjective that an attempt to explain from a birds-eye view what is actually going on involves more cross-referencing than an advanced game of Sudoku.
Interviewing 50 people – including myself before and after the other 49 – was therefore an attempt to magnify the individual and personal trajectories that illustrate such circumstances. Doing so I involved myself deeper within a topic that did not initially stir me into action to create a piece, observing as it became more and more apparent and relevant in my surroundings, less and less escapable, more of a "real" issue. What began as a hypothetical issue, a potential frame to place on my surroundings, encounters, and experiences, became my reality.
Now, when I look at my calendar and it appears more as a list of cities and countries than anything else, I am aware of becoming that which I was not critical of before, and might not have questioned. When 90 percent of my contact with friends and loved ones is online instead of in the flesh, I am aware of the chasm between social and professional needs that grows within such mobility. When 80 percent of my friends are in the performing arts field or are also professional relations, I am aware of the conflation between the social and professional spheres that takes place in this field. When I pay rent and receive my mail in an apartment that I will only spend at total of two non-consecutive months in in 2007, and when I only spend ten days a year in the city I call home; when the only place I have voting power (however fictional it may be) and pay taxes (however poorly they are spent) is a 24-hour commute away, and when I have people in three different cities asking me when I am coming home; when I have my own toothbrush in three other cities; when I have to carry with me four different contracts and four Certificates of Coverage from the US Social Security Administration written out for four different countries every time I board a plane, just in case they question my purpose of travel (lucky for me I am an Anglo-Saxon female with a US passport so they usually never do); when I have all my photo albums on the internet instead of in books; when I own more suitcases than pieces of furniture; when I spend more money each year on travel expenses than rent; when I choose one book over another at the airport bookstore because it is lighter and smaller; when I catch myself speaking more idiomatic international English than proper English; when I get emails from fellow danceWEB alumni trying to coordinate residencies together, seeking further international exchange for the sake of international exchange; when all of my closest collaborators live in different places; when my entire artistic career feels like it is on hold when my laptop is in the repair center, making me realize that the new requirement for an artist's autonomy and productivity is no longer A Room of One's Own as Virginia Woolf would have it, but a Mac of one's own -- a port for interconnection rather than a space for solitude; when I have more "presence" artistically and socially in the places I am not than in the places I am; when I get more email announcements from colleagues about sublets than I do about upcoming performances; when I have more possibilities to apply for residency than I do to apply for subsidy; when the same list of experiences compares to most of my interviewees, colleagues, and acquaintances, and when I come from rehearsal in Berlin to Brussels for one day in order to participate in a discursive event on an internationally disseminated artistic community and sleep for one night on my roommate's floor while a subletter working for the EU sleeps in my bed, I realize I don't have to invent a performative answer to these issues – my life has become itself a performance of them.
Let's be clear that this is not a barrage of complaints, and that I do recognize the amount of privilege that is also inherent in the above portrait. But as much as I do not wish to incriminate the structures that contribute to this lifestyle, neither do I think it appropriate to romanticize the artist as a nomad and to attribute all of her or his movements on the planet to her or his roaming adventurous gypsy spirit. To place a closed and/or unidirectional causality between the institutions and the artists when it comes to their mobility would be foolish and unnecessarily polemic. Simply put: institutions are localized, dance studios and most offices are fixed places, and people are not. People are moveable. So is money, of course, but we seem to have found it easier to traffic people across borders than subsidies.
So we travel very far to make work inside of empty rooms that are not so different from the empty rooms in the city we just left behind: maybe a grey Marley floor instead of a black one, maybe it has a ballet barre, and if we're lucky it has windows. But how does all that is outside that window change what is made? Or does it only manifest itself in our personal lives? How is one connected to the world while in the room of one's own? If one puts the Mac of one's own inside the room of one's own, one becomes virtually connected way outside the window, but what about just outside the window? Do we care where we work or not? Can we think critically about the relevance of our presence in one place or another? Shall we challenge ourselves to include what is outside the window? Can we take hold of the international network and use it to our advantage instead of running around the globe chasing after the money and space? Is it our obligation to move ourselves around all the time, as living breathing art objects or cultural ambassadors and messengers? Can we challenge the institutions to move more money than people every now and then?
Finally, as we are all workaholics in this field, the people will work where they can, and that means that as it is we go where there is space and money. Or do we? Is it space and money that attracts dancers to Brussels? If it were just space and money that we needed, we would all live in Essen year-round. But we do not. Then why do so many dance professionals choose to live in Brussels (even if for only half of the year)?
2. "Brussels Dance Community?”
Only one out of fifty interviewees said that he moved to Brussels because he loved the city itself, (though he also already had a job secured before moving). So dance professionals are attracted to Brussels primarily for professional and artistic reasons. Interviewees’ particular reasons within the professional/artistic scope are very much based on the times that they came. Ten years ago the contemporary dance community was hardly more than the contemporary dance companies themselves, and was still an emerging sub-sector of the Brussels theater scene which outnumbered but gave place for its dance-appendage. The cases of those moving to Brussels for a job with a dance company are much rarer now, while the cases of those coming without a plan and living on a prayer has increased exponentially. Perhaps there is something of a do-it-yourself energy and mind-frame of possibility that lingers in the smoggy Brussels air after the self-made successes of the older, more known companies of Rosas and Ultima Vez. In addition to the hype created by these companies, we have P.A.R.T.S., which acts as a magnet not only for those who are accepted, but often those who are not – moving to Brussels anyway, taking workshops with the same teachers at the various studios in Brussels which have also increased in number and size. Contemporary dance in Brussels grew quickly from nothing and gained a place on the map quite rapidly, and as we all know, fast successes leave a wake of vulnerability, a period of adjustment, wherein questions of sustainability arise. The money and space in Brussels have never been here before the artists, it has been a history of demand and supply – where the artists' demands are met by requests to the powers that be and by the presence of the artists applying pressure upon the ministries and funding bodies. But it seems the demands cannot be met as fast as the "dance community" grows. And this is when the community becomes a competitive one, and issues of who should get the space and money come to the foreground.
If the space and money are not pulling the artists, but the artists are pulling the space and money, what is pulling the artists? There is another kind of immaterial currency – discursive, artistic, social, educational, inter-relational activity that produces a cultural climate of productivity, but also of competition, and support, and... and... and... Is this the activity that creates the image of what we are calling the "Brussels dance community"? And is it that image, that activity, that "community" that attracts the monthly influx of foreign newcomers increasing steadily for the last ten years? What kind of a community exists now, as a result of such a history? Do people still come to Brussels because they know about Rosas and Ultima Vez and think that those companies generate as much opportunity as they symbolize? Is the "community" merely the after-effect of other more pragmatic concerns? In relationship to current mobilities, what is the nature of this fluctuating conglomeration of 500 plus (that's an unofficial estimate) dancers moving through and within Brussels each day?
To begin to answer these questions, the first problem we encounter of course is limits: with every fifty people you would include, there are fifty more attached to them that you ought also to consider. In order to set limits to the interviewee group, we defined the "Brussels dance community" first as anyone living in Brussels who works on the creation and presentation of dance performances. This includes choreographers, performers, technicians, dramaturges, presenters, critics and administrators, but there is also a huge population that supports and surrounds these working strata of the community, and those are the hundreds of dancers who don't appear onstage, can't afford to fill the theaters but do anyway, fill workshops, classes, and auditions, may or may not be here legally, may or may not stay, may or may not find work performing, but are in Brussels for one reason: to dance. We can call this a less visible stratum, but visibility is not objective, for the question becomes, visible to whom? They are visible to each other, visible in auditions, and can be overall more visible than many programmers or managers. It is not unlikely that the "unemployed community" and the "dramaturge community" within the "dance community" are completely invisible to each other. Many frames of comparison and lines of division pop up quickly that tell us loud and clear: just because we all share an interest in dance and live in the same city does not make us a community.
One interviewee said to me that the interest in the Brussels dance community is an outsider's fascination, an image of togetherness and like-mindedness that from the inside disintegrates completely. Other interviewees said that there is no such thing – that community does not exist in the Brussels dance field. Again others describe it as a multiplicity of subjective spheres in which each is the center of their own community. Others see it as a network of interconnected milieus, joined by specific points of interest ranging from personal to practical to artistic, and might consider the initial delineation of "Brussels dance community" as "those living in Brussels and working in dance," – or working at a bar and living here for dance as it may be – as purely demographic, and to call that a community means no more than to say "the immigrant community" or "the bio-shoppers community" or "the science community". Though each of these mentioned communities might find occasional solidarity behind a given issue, once you include discipline or profession, as in the case of "the science community," or in our case, of "the dance community", you cite a binding condition, a strong common interest that overlaps several spheres and can host sub-communities driven by sub- categories of other common interests. Within the Brussels dance community, one can name sub-communities brought together by theoretical discourse, communities brought together by practical information (keeping one another informed about opportunities, auditions, and classes), communities brought together by social ties, and miniature and temporary or lasting communities formed around projects, to name a few. What is consistent in all of these communities is an exchange of something that keeps it together: information, thoughts, collaboration, material and ideological support. It is in currencies and communication that networks are tied together and communities are formed. In this sense community is not a static thing that exists as such, but a performative entity, a thing that requires a set of actions to come into being.
One major form of currency in this map is recognition – I will borrow from Rudi Laermans now in saying that "recognition is the symbolic capital of the art world". After all, we don't do it for the money, right? And as performers engaged in an interactive medium of collaboration and presenting ourselves in front of others, we don't just do it for the personal and private satisfaction either. In addition to the necessary recognition of our audiences, the recognition of our peers is a currency generated specifically within the "dance community" that creates motivation to continue working, influences how the work is made, and determines in a very socially oriented way who makes it and who doesn't. Whether we like it or not, we need to be recognized to survive in doing what we do.
The interesting twist is in the value placed on recognition within the body of interviewees. Though some cited their own auto-recognition as the most important and others did cite a good review or positive reception from an unknown public as valuable forms of recognition, when asked what form of recognition they most value, a majority of interviewees answered: the recognition of their immediate peers and collaborators. Which means more than just the recognition of your name or your face (though that level of recognition is also an important symbolic capital at times in one's career). Recognition from your closest peers is about being recognized accurately, or fully, to be seen in the way you intended to present yourself, to recognize your intention in their reception. People like to feel understood. So what do we actually need from a wider community? If we say recognition is the main currency of an artistic community, and the most valued type of recognition does not breach outside of the project participants, does this not challenge the existence of a wider "community"? If so, much to the pleasure of those who are agitated to discuss such a thing. Some artists are specifically turned-off by a discussion of the "dance community" because it connotes everything besides the work itself: the competition, the who-knows-who, the vying for recognition. And those who see community as a distraction from the work are often those with a distaste for "networking" because it implies a philistine and opportunistic approach to one's contemporaries. Let's entertain this perspective and erase for a moment the wider community, and rather regard it as something like a cohabitation and interrelation of sub- communities.
What is consistent in these sub-communities is instability: the immediately close are the most important but who comprises the immediately close is usually shifting all the time. Within the frame of dance, hardly anybody, including the most seemingly stable and supported companies and institutions, know what projects they will do more than two years in advance, as based on funding intervals. If a large company receives four year subsidies, they will know at least a financial part of their reality and the scale and quantity of productions that will be expected of them for four years, but the personnel of course can change, and they do. Most choreographers rank in around two years maximum of planning ahead, and freelance performers can hardly plan one year ahead, as they are the last to know if/when/where the pay, the rehearsals, the residency, or the performances will take place. So if we say that a sub-community forms around a project, and a project is cancelled because it did not receive funding, or the personnel changes for each project within the same company, that is a very fragile notion of community. Not to mention the non-working stratum: though marked by a general effort to help each other stay informed, the tie that binds members of the "unemployed community" is their mutual interest in not belonging to that stratum any longer, and members of this stratum literally disappear from it: when employed, they no longer appear in classes, workshops, and auditions, and when fed up, they quit or move to another city. So what kinds of community or communities are there at all?
3. Dance: The Old New Community Field
To discuss the "dance community" is to conflate the professional/artistic realm and the social realm. Herein lies the difference between field and community. Community is a paradigm within society and social relations, activated or performed on a social, personal, inter- relational level, and dance is the profession it does or does not form through, the idiom it does or does not exchange as currency in order to build further ties, the common interest around which a community can be activated, the field from which it does or does not grow. So when we say "dance community" we ask about the social within the professional or artistic. How are social affinities built as based on artistic affinities, and vice versa? Here we must invite a third term – that of culture, which effects the formation of communities as common identity.
Hannah Arendt defines culture as the relationship between society and its objects: Culture is neither society nor art, nor religion, nor entertainment nor sports for that matter, but the nature of the relation of one to the other, of society to its objects. Culture is the attitude in operation when society and its “enlarged mentality” (Kant, Critique of Judgement) or common sense (suggested in French as “good sense” or le bon sens) confronts the images, products, and events of that society. If culture is that which forms between society and its products (including art), and community is that which forms between members of society, then we see that culture and community are of a similar nature, potential fields of activity completely determined by how they are enacted, and whose centripetal force is agreement.
Culture influences community in alliances formed over similar cultural attitudes. The arts thrive on intercultural interest (which is a cultural attitude in itself) so we may not all share cultural history, but like everyone else, we gravitate towards those with whom we feel common in our attitudes towards cultural objects. Human beings seek social interaction with those who share an appreciation for the same books, music, art, games, foods, beliefs, ideas – cultural alliances are a determining factor of how sub-communities divide themselves. Commonality creates community, and the activities of communication, exchange, and the sharing of interests within a community confirm and solidify its existence. This is where the conductors of "common sense" come into play. Curators are granted the power of judgment to determine what is presented to society and to the field, and in discourse, where the critics are granted the authority, common attitudes towards those pre-selected objects are formed. This is not to say that we agree on the things we are presented with, on the contrary we rarely ever do, but the theoreticians, critics and dramaturges, those with discursive authority, curate the references, lexicon, and frames of analysis that circulate as tools for production and reception. All those at work in the "cultural sector" participate in the formation of the relationship between society and its product(ion)s. As performers, as people onstage, we inherently produce an attitude in relationship to the society that watches us. Performance is a product of society that opens the movement of cultural attitudes in the opposite direction, from the product towards society. Because our artistic media are human beings, we have a particular handle on the between-space of culture: our art is social.
Dance and performance are not only social in their presentation, but in creation as well. When collaboration and interaction are the basic premises of creation, we are working constantly in a cross-influence between social and professional, i.e. the community and the field, where the two planes merge into one. There are of course, as always, exceptions, as in working with written scores and other such processes that attempt to remove this social aspect from the artistic process, but in general, to work in our artistic medium requires a great deal of social skill, so to utter such a conflation as "dance community" is perhaps not such a crime, and to investigate what is sociologically specific about community in this field is not arbitrary. But furthermore, to think what we can do with this massive amount of "people power" that convenes in performance unlike in any other media is to engage a notion of community towards productive aims rather than avoiding community as all that which is besides the artwork.
I realize that I do not propose something new here: critical thinkers and makers in the performance field have turned their attention towards the modes of art-production as an engagement of politics within their artistic praxes since the 1960's. Over the years, a recurrent proposal to harnessing this people power potential is collectivity. Several artists interested in consciously engaging the social and collaborative nature of performance- making rather than taking it for granted have subsumed individual identity and authorship into a uninomic (and sometimes utopic) whole at one time or another. But as we know, this approach is difficult to sustain given the monetary and symbolic economies of our field that more readily invest in hierarchical structures and unavoidably attach recognition to individuals. Furthermore, with less and less sustained structural support in general and more short-term project support, the combination of an economy that wants star-figures and contains less long-term contracts is a double-blow to the collective. With no boss, no contract and often unpredictable income, the maintenance of a collective requires the strong and persistent commitment of each participant who has to fight the currents of the freelance market pulling them into the undertow of the massive, individualistic, globe-trotting dance labor force. Therefore, even if not geographically tied, the collective proposes an obsolete idea of community – that of a relatively localized and isolated group of intimates. It is important to finally define here these two basic versions of the term "community", even if it's obvious: the old-fashioned and the contemporary. An old-fashioned definition of community connotes physical presence and cohabitation, the sharing of practical survival needs, vital support and care, and stems from the ways of life established by an agricultural society, therefore confining community geographically and materially. A contemporary definition takes into consideration newer forms of communication and exchange towards increased mobility, and stems from a post-industrial society where both the individual workers and the businesses themselves have multiple specializations and extreme flexibility. Hence, communities today are built often on physical absence and virtual presence, communicating through mobile phones, Skype conferences, chat rooms, blogs, the digital exchange of texts, images, and files. Working with such a contemporary reality, there are also now a number of individual artists as well as located institutions taking interest in how these platforms of communication can become a deliberate part of their working processes. Today's artistic collective no longer lives in the same house, but on the same open-source web page.
While other professions in this contemporary model can leave the physical farther behind, the dancer cannot. We may be affective laborers, but we are intensely material. The performing artist today inhabits and maneuvers within a perfect hybrid between the old- fashioned and contemporary definitions, the analogue and digital representations of community. For as dancers we have to be physically present in order to create and perform (with the exceptions of a few, let's say "conceptually oriented" examples) and on the other hand, the international scope of professional networks we move within reflects the breadth and distance facilitated by and inherent in the contemporary definition of community. So what we in the performing arts grapple with is a combination between "a room of one's own" and "a Mac of one's own"; our actual work in the studio is equally vital to our profession as are our networking capacities, particularly on an international level, hailing multi-city co- productions and residencies (and still working below minimum wage) in order to gather sufficient resources to realize even mid-sized projects.
4. Becoming Room, Becoming Mac, and What Now
In order to make use of such international networks, one must be self-sufficient and everywhere at once. The individual performing artist is becoming both the Mac and the room at once: inseparable from his or her computer, the laptop has become an extension of his or her brain and body, always attached at the fingertips and the primary portal of professional and social connection, while the body becomes his or her only home, the only consistent place of dwelling and continual return, the high importance of which affirms it as the only room of one's own.
The performing artist him/herself is a resource, a located node of activity and hub for information that processes and produces within the interstices of culture and community. In a neo-collective or post-collective model, the artists that remain pro community engagement must maintain very individual-oriented strength and productivity while remaining connected to the world and to each other, each highly differentiated while in constant collaboration with a larger network of other creative, productive, individuals that support and engage in each other's interests. This description is ambitious considering what it requires in terms of time and energy, and generosity of course, as we are not payed for keeping in touch even when our work depends on it.
In order to realize the potential and vitality of this community/field complex, we have to stay generous with our ideas and resources. Why? Because we are dealing with culture, a between space, and we must tend to its activation and cultivation if we have any concern for its condition. And of course because, especially in our field where resources are limited, no "we" will get very far by hoarding them. So are we a "we" or aren't we? When asked "what do you do for free for which you should be paid?", the list of replies from any given interviewee was often impressively long and involved giving one's expertise, time, thought, and energy to another's artistic and professional projects without asking anything in return. Which is 100% legitimate evidence of community, the new/old/social/professional kind. The challenge I pose to that community is to take by the horns this do-it-ourselves and ask-what-we-need spirit that is responsible for the existence of contemporary dance in Brussels, and work to define and pursue the concrete demands of an increasingly fluid and flexible community.
And in case you are wondering, "Why Mac?". No this is not a sponsored advertisement, but an evident reality: when asked what was their most expensive purchase in the last year, the majority of interviewees answered: a new Mac. The runner up? Airplane tickets.
Eleanor Bauer is a choreographer, performer, and writer. In addition to performing her solos ELEANOR! and Dig My Aura, she is working on a new group project entitled At Large. She is currently performing with David Zambrano in Soul Project, Mette Ingvartsen in Why We Love Action, and for Trisha Brown in Primary Accumulations and Floor of the Forest at Documenta 12. Her writing has appeared in publications by Nadine (The Making Of The Making Of), P.A.R.T.S. (Documenting 10 Years of Contemporary Dance Education), www.i-theatron.net and in the Movement Research Performance Journal (New York), for which she is a contributing editor.
On protocols, collaboration and language
Bojana Kunst
1. Event
The final preparation meeting for the joint issue of Performance Research , Maska and Frakcija took place in March 2005 in Vienna during the conference Inventur (in Tanz und Performance) , in one of the cafés in Museumsquartier, where in the late afternoon they served only cold Frankfurt sausages and dried up toasts. The conference in Tanzquartier ran under a rather frenzied rhythm, which went hand in hand with its ambitious goal to embrace and reflect on the state of contemporary performance over the past ten years and thereby confront the main protagonists from both the West and the East of Europe. Nevertheless, we, the editors and co-editors of the mentioned magazines, had no other alternative but to take some time off and skip on the analysis of the state of affairs for a brief hour. The arrangements for this joint issue have been dragging already for a long time and it was high time to finally work out some details. The meeting was easy-going yet at the same time tense. It was marked with numerous problems, which have arisen upon our intention to publish a joint issue. The nature of these problems was not of the content, as the theme has already been delineated and agreed upon for quite some time. It was the problems of a more logistic nature that were arising one after the other: how to distribute and design the magazine, how to publish three magazines in one, what will be its layout, whether we should publish three issues or only one, and alike… Although at first glance it seemed that we were dealing with problems of a “more formal nature”, this was not the case. Namely, we did not understand form as something of secondary consideration; this would, in fact, be rather ironic bearing in mind the title of the joint issue: On Form / Yet to Come . One of the essential problems, which this meeting was to solve, was precisely the layout of the magazine, in other words, how to enact the formula of three magazines in a single one without breaking down the specific contexts of each of the participating magazines and at the same time ensure that the important context of this particular issue – that which joins us – would not be lost. Ric Alshopp, the editor of Performance Research, had to, on one hand, take into consideration the context, which pertains to the magazine due to its economy of academic status and the globally oriented publisher, and thus argue for minimal changes in the layout and format of the magazine. While on the other, Emil Hrvatin and Goran Sergej Pristaš (the editors of Maska and Frakcija) tried to bring into the layout an air of contingency of the contradictory material practice, which positions the two magazines in the space between theory and practice of art, and at the same time marks them with a virtual position in the space in-between the local and the global.
2. On the protocols of collaboration
The evoking of this memory has no intention to mythologize a particular history of collaboration and to make a grand theme out of its invisible ordinariness (namely, networking and collaborations are today’s most common economy). My aim is to disclose some interesting aspects of collaboration. Namely, what kind of networks does today’s production of critical thinking of art confront, in what kind of economic, territorial and political connections it is bound and, consequently, what kind of networks does it produce itself. The economy of the magazine’s layout is not as innocent as it may seem at first sight. It speaks about the importance of these issues when we think about the production of critical language, thinking and reflection, which nowadays takes place in strict co-dependence upon economic, cultural and geopolitical procedures and protocols of a publication: it co-creates them, resists them, and at the same time adjusts them. The problems of this meeting, which seemed to be of a “formal nature”, were precisely that – but only if we understand form as an entirely central issue: namely, in form the deeply political problem of the protocols of collaboration is disclosed. Now, how to constitute the joint magazine as a platform, where the common will be understood not as another consensual articulation of the contemporary economy of collaboration, in which some have no other way but to communicate with others in the connected totality, but as a formative act, which transforms the materiality of thought itself and opens it up for new possibilities of connections?
From today’s distance, I can say that our meeting was devoted to the formation of a protocol of the joint issue. The formation of the protocol is not to be understood as a marginal problem, for it no longer avails only for the description of a consensual procedure of agreeing upon the procedures of performance, where the procedure with the same meaning for all parties involved is formed content-wise by way of negotiation. Etymologically, the word protocol refers to a fly-leaf, which was pasted to the beginning of the document, while throughout the history it also designates an introduction text, which epitomizes key points of the diplomatic agreement. Protocol also delineates bodily behaviour within the networks of social and diplomatic etiquette, which is rigidly discursively and consensually defined: what is in question then is a certain kind of behaviour within linguistic conventions, where the body is rigorously submitted to language. In his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralisation Alexander R. Galloway brings to attention another important characteristic of contemporary notion of protocol, which differs from its historical meaning: “However, with the advent of digital computing, the term has taken on a slightly different meaning. Now, protocols refer specifically to standards governing the implementation of specific technologies. Like their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols establish the essential points necessary to enact an agreed-upon standard of action. (…) Yet instead of governing social or political practices as did their diplomatic predecessors, computer protocols govern how specific technologies are agreed to, adopted, implemented and ultimately used by the people around the world. What was once a question of consideration and sense is now a question of logics and physics.” 1 Contemporary digital and network protocols are thus strictly formal and without content. They are no longer something to be negotiated among discursive contexts and linguistic subjects, but are proving to be an issue of technical, logical and physical functionality. In his book Galloway mentions a simple example of speed limits in city districts. In one district the citizens work out an agreement and adopt strict laws for those breaking the speed limit law. They set up traffic signs and reinforce the radar control. In the other district the citizens reach a decision to set up speed bumps, placed on the road, in order to limit the speed of driving through the district. Now, which of the two solutions is protological? For Galloway the protological solution is the setting up of speed bumps, for what is in question is a physical system of organisation, which “materially forces the driver to slow down (…) with bumps the driver wants to drive more slowly. With bumps it
1 Alexander R. Galloway: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralisation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2004, p. 7. becomes a virtue to drive more slowly.” 2 We could say that the first solution is of the language and has immediate effect on the thought (where the presence of the police ensures forced behaviour, resulting from a linguistic and lawful consensus), while the second solution directly affects the body: protocol, says Galloway, “always operates at the level of desire, at the level of ‘what we want’”. 3
If we apply this nowadays rather common protological solution to wider forms of contemporary networking and collaboration, we may find out that these kind of physical, technical and contentless protocols directly influence our flexible and mobile bodies, and mould our desires for collaborations. Instead of linguistic interpretation, negotiation and ideological detection of consensuality procedures, we are thus confronted with a (no longer obsessive but an urgent) desire of incessant participation in numerous multilayered technical, economic and business procedures. These procedures and their empty form resist interpretation, while at the same time they also present themselves as universal and total. And precisely because of this I believe that the very ways of participation – especially in the area of production of language, discourse and critical thinking (as, for example, I understand collaboration among publications, formation of educational and artistic platforms, formation of critical networks as well as numerous personal connections) – should be reflected upon closely with these inert and contentless practices, with which we enact and practise collaborations today. Willing or unwilling, today each networking and collaboration takes place through this kind of contentless protocols, while the question, whether we know how to, are able to and want to use them, nevertheless, remains open.
What was so clearly unveiled at that afternoon meeting in Vienna was thus the fact that today every act of connecting and collaborating has to give consideration to this technical and contentless structure of contemporary capital, global and economic connections, business and technical structures, which are decentralized and have immediate effect on our bodies. Our discussion on “one magazine in three” or “three magazines in a single one” has been intriguing because it did not take place at the level of a consensual negotiation about the concept of the joint issue (the mirror
2 Ibidem., p. 241. 3 Ibidem., p. 241. image being the layout itself), as well as because it was not concerned neither with negotiations about the language or the content between us and them or with the network of representations of different opinions and a proportional positioning of the solutions of the content. Instead, we were to face the strictly formal questions of the economy of the publication, the protocol of its dissemination, as well as the employment and the efficiency of the protocol itself (of the successful management and performance of the common). Precisely the formal emptiness of successful performance of the protocol itself (paradoxically corresponding to the abstract cover of the joint issue), which has to, both technically and performance-wise, connect the comparable and incomparable concepts of the content and economies of the publications without attaching importance to the proportionality of the content, may disclose the possible ways to think protocols of collaboration today. These protocols mark an even so multilayered and particular linguistic and discursive production with their abstract form of collaboration. Namely, geopolitical, cultural and social characteristics are formed through these contentless technical procedures, which at the same time present themselves as total, multiple and universal.
3. Between performing and the virtual
The reflection on the protocols may also help us to think the changes, which took place in the area of collaboration between different theoretic and artistic platforms during the past decade. It is particularly interesting to analyse them from the perspective of magazines, such as, for example, Maska, Frakcija or Teorija koja hoda (Walking Theory). 4 This perspective is of great interest because we are dealing with the publications from the so called former postsocialist, Eastern Europe, namely, with the geopolitical territory, which has always been overloaded with content and presents itself as rather difficult to be thought in connection with the abstract and contentless protocols of collaboration. 5 In other words, during the past decade the
4 Maska is a magazine for contemporary performing arts and is published in Ljubljana (edited by Emil Hrvatin). Frakcija is published in Zagreb (edited by Goran Sergej Pristaš). Both magazines are bilingual editions. THK is published in Belgrade (edited by Ana Vujanovi č). 5 To be precise, we are speaking of the publications, which emerged in the area of ex- Yugoslavia, which is also not a mere coincidence. Namely, Yugoslavia was a sort of a unique phenomenon in the political as well as in the cultural sense, and managed to, until its tragic dissolution, manoeuvre successfully between the socialist rigidity and the Western hedonism, which is known for its rather developed practices of modernist art. More on the history of these publications platforms, which the mentioned magazines develop, may reveal a story about the cultural-political contexts of collaboration, full of interesting shifts and contradictions. For example, both Maska and Frakcija are in the beginning of the nineties constituted not only as platforms for a particular generation of artists, who were developing new concepts of theatre and dance art, but also as generators of visibility and recognizability of artistic practice both in the local and global context. At the same time they both bring into the local cultural space new theoretical approaches and try to expand the field of thinking about the articulations of contemporary art with translations of texts, with guest lecturers as well as with translations of individual important books. With their internationalization both magazines autonomously enter the European cultural space as magazines, which wish to open new and critical platforms of thinking about art. Internationalization is not a mere result of the necessity to affirm the local practice in the international context but presents an important part of the economy of the publication, a characteristic of new protocols, which the publications have to face if they wish to open up new spaces for critical discourses. Thus, in the internationalization of the mentioned magazines, particularly of Maska and Frakcija , we may detect a pressing need for the change in the comprehension of a critical platform of thinking art. This need left behind the problematic recognition of the other, the postmodernistic cultural openness and multicultural industry, marking the first half of the nineties of the 20 th century, and is connected with the need for the articulation of the material practice of art and thinking as well as with the possibility for opening new spaces of reflection and art.
During the first half of the nineties the mentioned platforms had to, first of all, face a critical reflection on certain invisible artistic histories of the 20 th century, which were invisible both in the local (national) as well as in the international context. They developed models of thinking, which are critical toward the linear understanding of the history of modernism, marked with aesthetic and emancipatory progress and distinguishing between the visible and the invisible practices of both art and theory. At the same time, their reflection on the performing of the other and the critical reflection on multicultural approaches tackled a certain prior topographic definition
and their contexts, see: Bojana Kunst: Performing the Critical Writing, which will be published in the compendium Contesting Performance Research, ed. Jon McKenzie and Heike Rooms. Herein, I refer to only a few excerpts from this longer text. and denomination, which Boris Groys describes as ‘Eastern European always comes from Eastern Europe, it is always seen as information on the state of the society of its origin.’ Activity of this kind intentionally differs from those processes, which in the majority of cases marked the postsocialist and transition related cultural processes in the countries of the Eastern Europe and which Aleš Erjavec described in the compendium Postmodernism and the Post-socialist Condition as follows: “with the transition out of post-socialism and toward capitalism, the majority of the artists...were forced to adapt to the emergent world of capitalist aspirations in their own countries or be marginalised. In this respect the position of these artists was, of course, not much different from that of other intellectuals of the period or of ordinary people who were also forced to reinvent their lives.” 6 The general characteristic of this kind of reinvention was that in the circumstances of the transition artists supposedly favour the globalized cultural artefacts over the subversive and politically provocative art. We can here only mention the outright absurd title of the festival in Rotterdam in 2005, which presented young artists from the countries newly associated to the European Union under the name “Paradise Regained?”, to understand how the vertical story of transition and reinvention prevails when thinking about the territory of Eastern Europe. In transition we are supposedly abandoning our own history (the history, where capitalism was still not yet present) and are finally opening or not opening to contemporaneity: the process of transition is in the service of making us all the same in the contemporary global paradise of redistribution and connections. This prior topographic/political representability (where one is always performed in the role of the other) by no means allowed for the abstract emptiness of the protocols of collaboration. Quite the contrary. In accordance with the procedures of deconstruction it was necessary to disclose denominations, look up the names, and constitute a critical language of ideological and multicultural operations, which delineated the visibility of art and defined the procedures of an increasingly developing culture industry.
These critical platforms of thinking and writing also faced certain other processes in the end of the nineties, which mark our common contemporaneity despite different temporalities. We can speak about a unique paradox of normalisation, which is a part
6 Aleš Erjavec (ed): Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, Politicized Art Under Late Socialism , Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 29. of a general problem, which contemporary Western societies are coming to grips with. 7 Precisely the necessity of how to reflect on the processes, which these changes brought about in the material practice of art, is, in my view, deeply inscribed in the constitution of platforms of collaboration of these magazines as well as in their development of critical and art audience. “Despite the prevailing mythologies that continue to link the experience of art to individual reflection, we do look at art, inhabit the spaces of art in various forms of collectivity and in the process we produce new forms of mutuality, of relations between viewers and spaces rather between viewers and objects. Beyond the shared categories of class, or taste or political or sexual orientations another form of ‘WE’ is produced.” 8 The platforms of thinking, writing and creating, which developed around the mentioned magazines, wish to open up the possibilities for collaboration. But possibilities are neither understood as possibilities for reinvention or multicultural sympathetic recognition, neither as a process of transformation or conformity to the global art and culture market. Rather, we are dealing with an opening of new spaces of art and reflection, which are at once inside and outside, with a possibility of different initiatives of thinking and creating of events. “The act of discursive self-legitimisation is not the act of a solution to go beyond boundaries but to legitimate the outside as a strategy both of appearance and disappearance. The act of going and the act of staying.” 9
Instead of the deconstruction of linguistic and ideological operations and the disclosure of the difference, the employment of contemporary protocols of collaboration allows therefore for the possibility of creating networks, or better, virtual spaces in-between. It is these virtual spaces in-between, which enable the different practices to be articulated at once both inside and outside. They are disclosed as potential events of new publics, new ways and activities in art. In these spaces in- between it is not only the continual negotiation between national experience, community interests, cultural values and particular histories which can be detected. In-between spaces are also inter-territorial spaces, in which connections among
7 The book of essays on contemporary Nordic art, developing amid the highly democratic environment, thus also opens up a paradoxical problem with its very title: We Are All Normal and We Want our Freedom. See: Katja Sander and Simon Sheikh, We Are All Normal and We Want our Freedom: A Collection of Contemporary Nordic Artists Writing, Black Dog Publishing, London 2001. 8 Irrit Rogoff: “Collectivites, Mutualities, Participations”, http://mode05.org/blog/node/145 9 Sergej Goran Pristaš: Why do we produce ourselves, promote ourselves, distribute ourselves and explain ourselves? Why are we ‘as well’ around?, Maska, volume XX, no. 92-93, summer 2005, p. 8 many different cultural, historical and artistic experiences are at work. These spaces are thus also the spaces of many parallel temporalities, which can nevertheless efficiently sustain together precisely because of the employment of formal protocols. One of the basic problems is thus the way how to think connections and networking among different initiatives of artistic practice as the affirmative process of creating a different public (which can be designated as a virtual space in-between). In this process collaboration is not a result of adjustment and appropriation of models of success on the global cultural market. It is the result of the articulation of different energies, permanent activities and a creation of events, which are, however, not necessarily events of our common and only one temporality. What is in question thus is the enactment of the platforms of actualization, the affirmation of different modes of activity, where art is in the centre of social, cultural and political processes.
How this enactment takes place can be described more concretely by a certain notion, which Ana Vujanovi č, the editor of the Belgrade magazine THK ( Walking Theory ), used for Maska’s activities, and which can also be employed for the description of collaboration and creation of the community. Vujanovi č described Maska’s activities as a sort of hacking of the virtual, whereat she understands hacking as the opening up of closed zones, with an intention to transform their procedures or protocols, and the virtual as the unrealized potentiality of the real. 10 With this notion the author wants to draw attention to the inevitable contingency of this kind of practice and to the multiplicity of its strategies, which position the publication in the unstable processes of continual rearticulating and detecting, in the continual entering and withdrawing from performing different material practices. Paradoxically, it is precisely such instability that allows for “the opening of the current state of affairs to its potentialities”. 11 I think this is not only a proper description for Maska, but for any other publication which would like to deal with the critical material practice of thinking. The virtual space in-between is created with the perpetual multiplication of the relation between the actual and the virtual within each of the stated contexts and their potentialities. Any platform of knowledge has to open up the
10 Vujanovi č, A. 2006. Maskino hekiranje virtualnega. (In : Kunst, B. & Pogorevc, P. Sodobne scenske umetnosti , Ljubljana: Maska. The book will be published in October. 11 Vujanovi č, A. 2006. Maskino hekiranje virtualnega. (In : Kunst, B. & Pogorevc, P. Sodobne scenske umetnosti , Ljubljana: Maska. The book will be published in October. potentiality for the unrealised thought of the real exactly with its skilled use of protocols.
4. On the ways how to work together
Our thinking about the modes of collaboration, networking, and the collective ways for opening the space for the material practices of thinking thus necessarily faces the very dilemma, which contemporary protocols and multiple connections of our contemporaneity suggest. Namely, the question, remaining for the concluding part of this essay, is how is the criticality of the virtual space in-between articulated, where criticality itself can be briefly described also as the ability of traversing between inside and outside. Could this also be the way of resistance to a rather hopeless standpoint on the emptiness of contemporary protocols of collaboration, which undermine the critical possibilities of activity precisely through universality and totality of contemporary economic, business, and technical protocols? Namely, it seems that contemporary protocols open up the possibilities for an increasingly universal emptiness of the global language of collaboration, closely connected with economic market procedures as well as with subjectivity, which in safety inhabits the networks of decentralized control. This perspective can also help us to understand the disappointed acknowledgment of the normalization of subjectivity, which we are supposedly facing on the break of the 20 th century, and which can be augmented with the problematic status of theory in relation to the actualization of materiality. This very process of normalization, which takes place, at least in the West, under the maxim of universal economic, political and democratic success, in the past years at the same time marginalizes the critical processes of the public, the ways of different thinking and activity, while it enacts the relation toward the other as a legitimate empty protocol of tolerance. It also influences the conception of artistic subjectivity itself, where, as Susan Buck-Morrs states, “the artistic freedom exists in proportion with the artistic irrelevance.” 12 In other words, it seems that artistic and creative powers are today isolated from the social effect and self-realisation by their normalisation.
12 Susan Buck-Morrs: Thinking Past Terror, Verso, 2003, p. 69. Jouissance of the private and arbitrariness of everyday life seem to be in the centre of post-capitalist production. The normalisation of artistic subjectivity is disclosing the exhaustion of subversive and transgressive modes, which became an intrinsic part of contemporary commodification. At the same time we can detect the problem with the commodified jouissance of the private, which unfortunately lost the revolting potential in the commodified jouissance of global happiness. Today, when we all are users of this kind of protocols, less and less opportunities for traditional oppositional activity, which is proving to be an entirely disenchanted political way of the 20 th century, is not the only problem. Rather, the tender spot is the fact that it is difficult to develop a passion for the real and affirmative act within contemporary protocols, or, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou writes: 20 th century closes with a theme about “security, the impossible subjective novelty and the comfort of repetition”. 13 Perhaps, this is the very reason why protocol collapses (like viruses, disturbances) are feared so greatly in the globally connected world, while, on the other hand, many projects (emerging from the field of media art and performance) indicate the potentiality of this kind of participation in protocols, which may open up different formal possibilities. The real question at stake is, namely, not how to find the way out anymore but how to tackle the overall normalisation with different protocols of disobedience and intensification.
This issue is the reason for Galloway’s statement that protocols ‘may present a possibility’. They may do so precisely with their formal emptiness, with a way, in which they directly influence the body. The very emptiness of protocol opens the ways for the disclosure of possibilities for different social practices, which at once enact new possibilities of coexistence precisely by way of participating in multilayered networks, where we work against networks with new networks. In other words, protocol is a practical formal procedure, through which different social practices can be developed. These are no longer grounded in linguistic conditioning and the isolated clash of concepts, aesthetics and ideologies, but in division, networking, and transitions between the actual and the virtual, in the intensification of intensities and actual connections. As far as protocols are concerned, it is true that we still live in a certain golden age, which is, with the privatization of technology, communication,
13 Alain Badiou, 20. stoletje, Analecta, Ljubljana 2005, p. 88. networks and the internet, indeed quickly approaching its end. Nevertheless, the experience of the nineties of the 20 th century points to the possibilities of how to resist the contentless danger of protocol and how to use it as a possibility. Protocols can be used as a possibility only if they are not violently filled with content (this kind of moralism in relation to technology and the global procedures of collaboration, which have to be given back their language, is often encountered in art as well as in theory). First of all, it is necessary to know how to use them. Then, it is necessary to know how to develop together with them the forms of collaboration, which would resist interpretation, content and prior formed discourse, and would instead offer the possibilities for multiple cognitive processes, the virtual opening of possibilities for a practically sensate world of flexibility and for a material practice of dissemination. Protocol can thus still be understood as that process, through which a different form of the common act, of a social and thinking practice can be articulated. To return to that afternoon meeting in Vienna, which served as a starting point for the present essay: our conversation ended up in the centre of the debate about political contexts of collaboration in the very moment, when we confronted the different economies of the publications, their possibilities for dissemination and the effect of their layout. Today, it is impossible to think any joint project, which would want to enact something in common, without re-thinking the potentiality of the employed protocol itself. This very employment may open other possibilities in our contemporary practically sensate world of mobility, communication and constitution of a common language, which is being incessantly rearticulated through the enactment of different social and material practices of thinking and art.
In the introduction to the joint issue On Form / Yet to Come Ric Alshopp, the editor of Performance Research, described the connection between the two parts of the title of the joint issue. His description also reveals another important connection between the protocols of collaboration and the possibility, which they open up. I cite a longer excerpt from his text: “Yet the question of form – of how, where, with and for whom performance takes place, becomes visible or manifests itself as a point of resistance or a moment of slippage or connectivity – seems to be as immediate and pressing as ever. The association of the term “form” itself however has shifted. Form and its relation to time – to the yet to come – its relationship to politics, to space, to cultural environment is perhaps no longer to be used in its more conventional association with the imposition of fixed organisational frameworks on the materials and contexts of performance, but in an active processes of formation, the sets of relational processes that reflect the intensities, differences, transformations and translations that constitute the work of performance. Such a view of form is of course exemplified widely in the practice across the field of contemporary performance and informed by a relational view of performance as a shared moment of becoming, an event within an always wider and more complex set of associated processes and contexts that make connections (in terms of performance) between texts, histories, political economies and psychodynamics.” 14
In my opinion, the cited excerpt is interesting as it accurately describes the field, within which the practice of thinking and writing of Performance Research developed during the past decade and which positioned the magazine to a hybrid place between academic discourse, art practice and thinking of the material processes of art. We are dealing with an expanded notion of the event of performance, which enabled the magazine to constitute a wide reflection on different contexts of art. At the same time this very expanded notion of performance presents an important point in common of the encounter of different articulations of critical thinking over the past ten years, and, as a matter of fact, delineates the relations and collaborations of publications. Namely, performance finds itself in the centre of connections and articulations of various contexts of art, history and society, also its political, scientific and technological characteristics. And this very conception also becomes an important part of understanding locality and internationalization. In other words, we cannot think performance without examining the comprehension of its space, the context of its emergence, temporality and its visibility in the local and global context. In my view, the publication, dealing with an expanded notion of performance, is thus not to be understood as a mere academic or theoretic representative of art, or as a disseminator of information across the global market of culture industry, but as a unique material practice of thinking and writing, as one of the generators of networks and a user of the protocols of collaboration, which opens up and inhabits the space of particular practices of art and contemporary thinking.
14 Ric Alshopp, On Form / Yet To Come . Performance Research, volume 10, no. 2, June 2005, p. 1.
The expanded notion of the performing event is thus not merely a question of the content, through which different initiatives would aesthetically recognize and encounter one another. What it concerns as well is the understanding of form, actualization of the language of art, formation of a discourse on art practices themselves, and the conflicting ways of how to think the practice of art itself. The above cited excerpt mentions two important traits of contemporary performance, which I find crucial for these processes. They are, at the same time, also characteristic of the protocols of collaboration: “active process of formation ” and “shared moment of becoming ”. In this kind of comprehension of performance and in the thought about it a certain intriguing relation is at work, which can be described as a relation between form and temporality, as a way, in which the very form can be understood as a potentiality of thinking the real and, at the same time, as a way, how the event emerges, becomes and constitutes itself precisely through this formal multiplicity. In the event form has an immediate effect on the body, form is a protocol of the performance, which places us, together with our desire, in the ways how art could have been: it opens up different perceptual processes, intensities of the bodies, audibility of language and energies, the power of speech and gesture, where language once again opens up to imagination and potentiality.
Conclusion
The understanding of performance, which brought Performance Research close to the thinking of material processes of art (of the ways how art could have been) and positioned it in the hybrid place between different articulations of thinking performance, can be interestingly connected with the understanding of protocol as a question of form. Consequently, this may also open up the vision of the future of the publication as such. Performance Research constituted its hybrid language of speaking about art with a certain specific gesture, which distinguishes the magazine from other academic publications. This gesture can be described as a turn from language to writing, which directly unfolded the individual practices of performance, and therefore also enabled that certain points of collaboration with other publications were constituted. Writing is thus that common thread in the magazine Performance Research, which connects reflection and material practice of art. Through it theory is consciously revealed as a protocol of writing, which is not merely an ideological, aesthetic, or evaluative one, but presents a cognitive, sensate, corporeal and processual approaching to certain events as well as their inhabitation. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the magazine linked a number of its issues to writing (On Fluxus, On Documents, On Page, On Memory, etc...), which thematized the protocols of notation, scores, records, documentary writing on the unstable memory and event, protocols of publications and pages, cognitive processes of remembrance and perception. The very turn from language to writing often enabled the writers to enter the theory of performance not only with language but also with the body. Here, we are not dealing with an expressive body but with a moving, pursuing and detecting body of writing, or, to put it differently, with a body of writing, which does not adapt to the prior assumptions of the already formed discipline but, like the event of art, constitutes itself and emerges in time. At the same time, this kind of writing does not lose its theoretic rigorousness, for it forms a protocol of thinking and a way to think art precisely with the process of writing. It unveils and thinks its own procedure. Writing flattens the language and shifts it into a sensate and cognitive sensorial field, which offers to language a possibility of articulating and thinking art events. The important references from the history of 20 th century are those art practices, which unfolded the instability and the eventness of an art object through performing and the disclosure of own protocols, like, e.g., performance art, happenings, events, as well as the eventness of the performance as such, which is constituted as a fragile relation between the formative and the temporal. A shift toward writing can thus be interpreted as the disclosure of the protocols of enactment of a certain art event as well as of the modes of its thought (how an event thinks itself). At the same time, it also reveals more general protocols of the production of knowledge, which concern both art and theory.
This kind of disclosure of protocols is not interesting from the standpoint of the institutional critique of art, which today seems to be rather exhausted due to the appropriation of critical procedures by the global culture industry and commercialization. It becomes intriguing only when we practise and think it at some other level, at the level of the constitution of protocols of the common, of becoming and articulating possibilities. That is to say, we think it at the level of creating events and collectivity, at the level, where performance is understood as a network of many contexts and connections, parallel temporalities and formal multiplicities, as a process of actualization. This kind of understanding undoubtedly presents a special challenge to theory, which is here also disclosed as the actualization of a material practice and a mode of its own writing. Art no longer possesses the traditional utopian and emancipatory role of transforming life, the role, which is today so successfully adopted by contemporary commodification in all its creative procedures. Notwithstanding, we can still understand it as an open process of the articulation of the possible, which can reveal the ways how to be together. It has become a general truism that we live in the time when the potentiality of nature is performed and privatized in advance. At the same time aesthetic cognitive competences of intensities, energies and events are in the centre of contemporary commodification and economy of entertainment. Critical thought thus needs to re-discover the way to articulate the potentiality of processes and ways of life, which may bring about the change in the ontological place of art itself. It is necessary to examine both the poesis as well as the praxis of art. For this reason I conclude this essay with two questions, which I would like to leave open – similar to that openness of the future, which, as Derrida states, cannot be future, if it is not at once understood as “monstrous arrivant”. First, can we think artistic practice as a potentiality, as an intensification of intensities of imagination, forgotten languages and parallel temporalities? Second, can we think the practice of theory as a cognitive operation of corporeal energies and events, as potentialities of thought and persistence of desire?
Collaboration Florian Schneider
If one principle could be seen to inform the opaque surface of what in the 1990s was called a "new economy" -- the shifts and changes, the dynamics and blockades, the emergencies and habit formations taking place within the realm of immaterial production -- it would certainly be: "Work together".
Facing the challenges of digital technologies, global communications, and networking environments, as well as the inherant ignorance of traditional systems towards these, 'working together' has emerged as an unsystematic mode of collective learning processes.
Slowly and almost unnoticeably, a new word came into vogue. At first sight it might seem the least significant common denominator for describing new modes of working together, yet "collaboration" has become one of the leading terms of an emergent contemporary political sensibility.
Often collapsed into the most utilitarian understanding, 'collaboration' is far more than acting together, as it extends towards a network of interconnected approaches and efforts. Literally meaning working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavor, the term is nowadays widely used to describe new forms of labour relations within the realm of immaterial production in various fields; yet despite its significant presence there is very little research and theoretical reflection on it. This might be due to a wide range of partly contradictory factors that are interestingly intertwined.
As a pejorative term, collaboration stands for willingly assisting an enemy of one's country, especially an occupying force or malevolent power. It means working together with an agency with which one is not immediately connected. Most prominently, "collaboration" became the slogan of the French Vichy regime after the meeting of Hitler and Marshall Petain in Lontoire-sur-le-Loir in October 1940. In a radio speech Petain officially enlisted the French population to "collaborate" with the German occupiers, while the French resistance movement later branded those who cooperated with the German forces as "collaborators".
Despite these negative origins, the term collaboration is mostly used today as a synonym for cooperation. Dictionary definitions and vernacular uses are generally more or less equivalent; but etymologically, historically and politically it seems to make more sense to elaborate on the actual differences between various coexisting layers of meaning.
Is it in principle, possible to make a relevant distinction between cooperation and collaboration and to what end? If so, what characterizes the constellations, social assemblages and relationships in which people collaborate? And last but not least: Does this have any impact for the current debate on education?
What follows are seven notes and propositions in which I try do adress these questions in a very preliminary, eclectic and sketchy way.
1. In pedagogical discourse, both cooperation and collaboration are relatively new terms. They emerged in the 1970s in the context of "joint learning activities" and "project-based learning", which were supposed to break with an authoritarian teacher-centred style of guiding the thinking of the student.
What might be defined as "educational teamwork" corresponds to an idea promoted at the same time by management theory; that is, in a teamwork environment, people are supposed to understand and believe that thinking, planning, decisions and actions are better when done in cooperation.
At the beginning of the last century and well ahead of his time, Andrew Carnegie, steel-tycoon and founder of Carnegie Technical Schools, said: "Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision, the ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results."
To this day, this famous quote has probably featured prominently in a myriad powerpoint presentations by human resource managers across the globe, but its central argument only became a reality in the early 1980s, when the crisis in the car manufacturing industries triggered the first large scale proliferation of the concept of teamwork in the realm of industrial production.
Factories that had hitherto been characterized by a highly specialized division of labour usually coupled with a strong self-organization of the workers in trade unions were turned upside down: teamwork started being considered as a prerequisite for breaking the power of the unions, dropping labour costs and moving towards so- called 'lean' production, which was seen at the time as a response to global competition and the success of Japanese exports to the US and Europe in particular. In late industrial capitalism the notion of teamwork represented the subjugation of workers' subjectivity to an omnipresent and individualized control regime. The concept of group replaced the classical one of "foremanship" as the disciplining force. Rather than through repression, cost efficiency was increased by means of peer- pressure and the collective identification of relatively small groups of multi-skilled co- workers.
The model of teamwork soon spread across different industries and branches, yet without any great success. Meanwhile, various research studies showed that teams often make the wrong decisions, especially when the task involves solving rather complex problems. Teamwork frequently fails for the simple fact that internalized modes of cooperation are characterized by "hoarding" or stockpiling, quite the opposite of knowledge sharing: in the pursuit of a career, relevant information must be hidden from others. Joining forces in a group or team also increases the likelihood of failure rather than success; awkward group dynamics, unforeseeable external pressures and bad management practices are responsible for the rest.
This overall failure is even more staggering if we consider that rapid technological development and the availability of global intellectual resources were supposed to have increased the pressure on individuals to exchange knowledge within and between groups. Yet as knowledge became the main productive force, neither the free wheeling and well-meaning strategies of anti-authoritarianism nor the brutal force of coercing cooperation seemed capable of establishing any new dimensions of the dynamics of 'working together'.
2. Increasing evidence shows that 'working together' actually occurs in rather unpredictable and unexpected ways. Rather than through the exertion of the alleged generosity of a group made up of individuals in the pursuit of solidarity, it often works as a brusque and even ungenerous practice, where individuals rely on one another the more they chase their own interests, their mutual dependence arising through the pursuit of their own agendas. Exchange then becomes an effect of necessity rather than one of mutuality, identification or desire.
This entails an initial level of differentiation between cooperation and collaboration: in contrast to cooperation, collaboration is driven by complex realities rather than romantic notions of common grounds or commonality. It is an ambivalent process constituted by a set of paradoxical relationships between co-producers who affect one another.
In "Le Maître ignorant", published in 1983, Jacques Rancière indicates that ignorance is the first virtue of the master or teacher. He gives the example of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French revolutionary, professor of French literature at the University of Louvain in Belgium from 1815. Jacotot taught French to his Dutch-speaking students in the absence of a shared language, through what appears to be an entirely collaborative method: without setting up a common agenda, identifying a common ground or communicating through a shared set of tools, he "placed himself in his students' hands and told them, through an interpreter, to read half of the book with the aid of the translation, to repeat constantly what they had learned, to quickly read the other half and then to write in French what they thought about it." This "teaching without transmitting knowledge", as Rancière defines it, seemed to be incredibly successful, because it granted a level of autonomy to the students who acquired their own knowledge as they deemed useful and independently from their teacher. Rancière's example is particularly enlightening in the context of collaboration and its relation to notions of hierarchy which so much of collaborative disoiurse deems to have vanquished. It exposes the hypocrisy of the supposed anti-authoritarianism that essentially underlies many notions of cooperation. This misconception might be seen as the practice of liberally weakening the position of power, yet ignoring the inherent paradox of doing so, so that in an infinite line of regression power reappears even stronger than before. The more it tries to explain, mediate, communicate or teach, the more it reaffirms the distance, inequality and dependency of those who lack knowledge on those who seem to possess it. The same applies to cooperation and teamwork: a presumption of equality actually extends both discrimination and exploitation while seemingly providing continuous evidence in support of such an illusion, as if there were no radically different modes of working together.
3. The work of Jacotot's students can be seen as a form of collaboration with their teacher that flattens the hierarchies and does away with the teacher-student relationship altogether, without romanticising it. Through collaboration hierarchies are neither criticised nor morally disapproved of and hypocritically discarded. This way of working together is capable of ignoring the ignorance of the ignorant and of pauperizing the poverty of the pauper precisely because collaborators are neither questioning obvious authority nor pretending to be equal. Instead they have worked out a system not of exchange but of flow in which these positions are avoided altogether.
Collaborations are the black holes of knowledge regimes. They willingly produce nothingness, opulence and ill-behaviour. And it is their very vacuity which is their strength. Unlike cooperation, collaboration does not take place for sentimental reasons, for philanthropical impulses or for the sake of efficiency; it arises out of pure self interest. Collaborations could reveal the amazing potential whereby an ignorant, poor or otherwise property-less person can enable another ignorant, poor or otherwise property-less person to know what he or she did not know and to access what he or she did not access. It does not entail the transmission of something from those who have to those who do not , but rather the setting in motion of a chain of unforseen accesses.
Shifting the focus away from its components and outcomes, collaboration is a performative and transformative process: the sudden need to cross the familiar boundaries of one's own experiences, skills and intellectual resources to enter nameless and foreign territories where abilities that had been considered "individual" marvellously merge with those of others. In this sequence, outcomes and processes follow an inverse relation as do the relations of power. For what comes about is not the 'granting' of access but a recognition across the board of those involved in the process, that it is the unexpected multiplicity and uncertain location of the points of access that is at stake in the exchange.
4. Translating the concept of collaboration back to the context of education also points to a reverse-engineering of the teacher's role. Etymologically, in Greek and Latin "pedagogue" or "educator" means "drawing out" or "pulling out" and refers to an ancient Greek practice: a family slave called "pedagogue" used to walk the child from the private house to a place of learning. Rather than the teacher, who was supposed to have and transmit knowledge, the pedagogue was the person who accompanied the student to the place where the teacher imparted it.
This rather spatial notion of bringing somebody across a specific border evokes striking associations with human trafficking. The escape agent or "coyote" - as it is named at the US-Mexican border - supports undocumented border crossers who want to make it from one nation state to another without the demanded paperwork. Permanently on the move, only temporarily employed, nameless, anonymous and constantly changing faces and sides, the coyote is, in an ironic way, the perfect role- model for both education and collaboration. As a metaphor it serves the purpose of destabalising the idea of 'knowledge in movement' away from its always assumed progressive direction. Instead it allows for a certain degree of illegitimacy inherent in all forms of collaboration and distinguishes it from the always perfectly sanctioned and legitimate nature of cooperation. By extracting a principle of mobility and perceiving the lack of legitimacy as enabling as opposed to criminally inhuman and disabling, the 'coyote' who may or may not be motivated by self gain without ideological committment, produces a possibility whose parameters cannot be gaged. The "coyote's" motivations remain unclear or, shall we say, do not matter at all. The "coyote" is the postmodern service provider par excellence. The fact that there is no trust whatsoever between those engaging in the transcation, does not actually play any part in the unfolding of its play. Here , we might say, conceptual insecurity overrides the financial aspects of the collaboration and triggers a redundancy of affects and perceptions, feelings and reactions. Those who do not need the coyote's support hunt and demonize it; those who rely on the coyote's secret knowledge and skills appreciate it all the more. The extreme polarities of these responses instantiate the range of the collaborative field and the impossibility of navigating it through moralising vectors.
Ultimately, collaboration with a coyote generates pure potential: ranging from the dream of a better life to the reality of pure living labour power ready to be over- exploited in the informal labour market. If it wasn't for its totally deregulated character, this practice would bear similar results to that of traditional educational systems; we might say that in this exchange nothing can be claimed for material existence, let alone possession, but neverthelss something very precious and entirely precarious comes into being; pure imagination, yet potentially powerful beyond measure.
5. Against the background of postmodern control society, collaboration is about secretly exchanging knowledge independently of borders. It stands for the attempt to regain autonomy and get hold of immaterial resources in a knowledge-driven economy. It no longer matters who has knowledge and who owns the resources; what matters is access: not a generously granted accessibility but a direct, immediate and instant access, often gained illegally or illegitimately.
While cooperation involves identifiable individuals within and between organizations, collaboration expresses a differentiated relationship made up of heterogeneous elements that are defined as singularities. As such they are not identifiable or subject to easy categories of identity, but defined out of an emergent relation between themselves. As such collaboration is extra-ordinary in so far as it produces a discontinuity and marks a point of unpredictability, however deterministic. Its unpredicatbility takes the form of not being able to entirely categorise the components of the collaborative process, even when its general aim or drive may be steering it in a particular direction.
Rationality has here been replaced by a kind of relationality that constantly decomposes and recomposes information in order to make temporary use of unexpected dynamics and contingencies: from stock market speculation to the development of network protocols, from the production of new forms of aesthetics in art and culture to a generation of political activism with global aspirations.
People meet and work together under circumstances where their efficiency, performance and labour power cannot be singled out and individually measured; everyone's work points to someone else's. Making and maintaining connections seems more important than trying to capture and store ideas. One's own production is very peculiar yet it is generated and often multiplied in networks composed of countless distinct dependencies and constituted by the power to affect and be affected. At no point in the process can this be arrested and ascertained, for it gains its power by not having explicit points of entry or exit as a normative work scenario might.
This excess is essentially beyond measure; collaboration relates to the mathematical definition of singularity as the point where a function goes to infinity or is somehow ill- behaved. The concept of singularity distinguishes collaboration from cooperation and refers to an emerging notion of precariousness, a systemic instability. this in turn can be seen as the crisis associated with the shift and transition from cooperation to collaboration in modes of working together.
The nets of voluntariness, enthusiasm, creativity, immense pressure, ever increasing self-doubt and desperation are temporary and fluid; they take on multiple forms but always refer to a permanent state of insecurity and precariousness, the blue print for widespread forms of occupation and employment within society. They reveal the other side of immaterial labour, hidden in the rhetoric of 'working together'.
6. Today it is tremendously urgent to learn how to deal with such excess. This is not simply the realm of an exclusive minority of geeks, nerds, drop-outs and neurotic freelancers; it invests a rapidly growing global immaterial labour force that is confronted with the prospect of life-long learning witout the complimentary prospect of there ever having a teacher or a schoolbook in store, because knowledge emerges as useless as soon as it can be commodified and reproduced as such.
The crucial question is how a form of education to collaboration is possible that is not reduced ad absurdum to become the application of truism after truism. Certainly this would not mean the staging of a collaborative process within the classroom or other spaces of learning. This debate can take place at a meta-level or around the issue of "un-organizing" oneself in order to be aware and ready for the future challenges of collaborative working environments. It can takle place in the fragementation of the components of bodies of knowledge and their re-alignemnt with one another according to other principles. Or it can take place in the removing of pre-determined directions around the flows of knowledge.
Cooperation necessarily takes place in client-server architectures. It follows a metaphorical narrative structure, where the coherent assignment of each part and its relation to the others gets reproduced over and over again. The current educational system mirrors this structure and is therefore essentially incapable of responding to contemporary challenges, let alone future ones. Even worse, the more the system attempts to re-modernize itself, the more it sinks in the swamp of commodification, homogenization and hierarchization. Obviously the problem lies with the educational system's understanding of what contemporary imperatives are and its insistance that these must have an 'applicable' function. If a model of collaboration were to be applied to educational cultures , then it would have to accept an inabilty to predetermine outcomes even while sharing a set of aspirations or directives or being anchored in a set of recognised probelamtics.
7. Collaboration entails rhizomatic structures where knowledge grows exuberantly and proliferates in unforeseeable ways. In contrast to cooperation, which always implies an organic model and a transcendent function, collaboration is a strictly immanent and wild praxis. Every collaborative activity begins and ends within the framework of the collaboration. It has no external goal and cannot be decreed; it is strict intransitivity, it takes place, so to speak, for its own sake.
Collaborations are voracious. Once they are set into motion they can rapidly beset and affect entire modes of production. "Free" or "open source" software development is probably the most prominent example for the transformative power of collaboration to "un-define" the relationships between authors and producers on one side and users and consumers on the other side. It imposes a paradigm that treats every user as a potential collaborator who could effectively join the development of the code regardless of their actual interests and capacities. Participation becomes virtual: It is enough that one could contribute a patch or file an issue, one does not necessarily have to do it in order to enjoy the dynamics, the efficacy and the essential openess of a collaboration.
In the last instance, the democratic or egalitarian ambition has migrated into the realm of virtuality: Open source developer groups usually do not follow the patterns and rules of representative democracy, the radical notion of equality reveals in the general condition that everyone has instant and unrestricted access to the entire set of resources that form a development. The result is as simple as it is convincing: Those who disagree may "fork" and start their own development branch without loosing access to the means of production.
On the internet, distributed non-hierarchical information architectures are characterized as "peer-to-peer" (P2P) networks. They emerged in the 1990s and triggered a revolution of the conventional distribution model. These networks were first designed to exchange immaterial resources such as computing time or bandwidth, mainly in scientific academic contexts. Their aim was to overcome technological limits, incapacities and shortages by combining the existing free resources.
Since the late 1990s the same network architecture has been used to exchange relevant content: music and movies were distributed amongst ordinary personal computers that worked as both downstream and upstream nodes in mushrooming networks.
The enormous success of these projects, from "Napster" to "BitTorrent" - currently estimated to account for nearly half of the total of internet traffic - enabled people who do not know each other and probably prefer to not know each other to actually "share" their hard drives. In fact, their anonymous relationships are based on the irony of sharing, even in a strictly mathematical sense: due to lossless and cost free digital copying the object of desire is indeed multiplied rather than divided.
In the last instance collaborations are driven by the desire to create difference and refuse the absolutistic power of organization. Collaboration entails overcoming scarcity and inequality and struggling for the freedom to produce. It carries an immense social potential, as it is a form of realisation and experience of the unlimited creativity of a multiplicity of all productive practices.
The possibility of relating these notions of collaboration to contemporary education and pedagogy, have less to do with emulating their operating modes and more to do with their ability to inspire a realignment of the relations in the field. Not limited to the seeming good intentions and democratising impulses of the 'working together' dimension of collaboration, in education this might mean rethinking both the direction and flow of its activities. For example the shifting of the focus of attention away from the exclusive direction of instructor to instructed, or shifting the directions of the exchanges that take place towards a circulation that values everything that is already within it. It might also mean thinking education's outcomes away from previously established criteria and towards the ability to constantly affect and restructure its own field.
Learning by making
Bojana Cvejić
(Contemporary Choreography in Europe: When did theory give way to self- organization?)
It would be too easy to dismiss “education” as yet another topic like an event to arise in contemporary dance and performance in Europe, even if the event of “education” does confirm again the curatorial logic of exhausting and replacing one promise of the critical and inventive with another. “Education” has been recently featured by all major dance centers in Europe, in conferences, artists’ laboratories, research initiatives, festivals and national dance programmes. To demonstrate how “education” and its declinations like “learning”, “learning by doing” etc. follow up the chain of topics such as “research” and “laboratory”, “collectivity” and “collaboration” neither deserves an interpretative effort.
A rather evident fact for a choreographer, theoretician, critic or programmer is that the infrastructures supporting contemporary dance in Europe in the 1990s developed so rapidly thanks to assimilating critical discourses into self-reflexive institutional routine. The venues for dance in the 1990s established themselves with the understanding that if they were going to promote choreography then they should emancipate it from the modern dance definitions, produce authors who problematize authorship, and instigate research and collaborative frames of production even if such orientation mainly results in a new aesthetic (the “look”) of research and small- scale work. In absorbing poststructuralist and art theory in order to “catch” up with visual art and cinema’s contemporaneity and reflect its proper discipline theoretically, the field of choreography and dance in Europe developed sometimes oblique ways of forming and operating discourses. How concepts like “research” or “knowledge production” became overdetermined before they were defined and how they gained power in diffusing performance practices cannot be traced back to autonomous territories of criticism, curatorial practice, artists’ self-reflexive discourse or academic dance scholarship. With authors moving in between these discursive sites, occupying more than one role at a time and shifting between the positions of critic, theoretician, dramaturg and, occasionally, also performer –the discourses in dance and performance emerged “soft and round” out of complicity. The discourses in European contemporary dance are thus still produced out of the “meshworks” of criticism, dramaturgy, theory and curatorship, where none of these registers struggle for a paradigm, an epistemological framework or even a name. When a name appears, like “conceptual dance”, it is rejected as a misnomer: both the choreographer and the programmer are wary of any terminology that can raise polemical acts against history in favor of dance’s obsession with contemporaneity. A denomination of a current dance practice is undesirable because it can only reiterate the protocols of exhaustion and reaction whereby dance refuses historicity in order to entertain the prestige of contemporaneity that society assigns to it. This is why bringing up “conceptual dance” does not open but forecloses any discussion with the question: and what comes after “conceptual dance”?
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I would like to address two problems concerning the states of theory and knowledge in the practices of choreography developing from mid-1990s until now:
1. How did it occur that critical theory became a tool-machine that propelled choreography to distinguish a knowledge specifically different from modern dance in the mid-1990s and why only then? How does choreography’s affection for critical theory relate to the development of poststructuralism and the theories (biopolitical, new media) ensuing from it? How to account for “deconstruction” becoming almost a commonplace word, a technical term on the lips of programmers as well as technicians? Why did contemporary dance schools include “theory” as one of the subjects in their curricula (not specified as dance or performance theory but in a rather open under-determination of the “space reserved for thinking”)? Does this show that the education in contemporary dance only now adopts the renaissance model of Academy, of inducting art candidates into philosophy apart from technical instruction, or a prestigious dance school like P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels recommends theory to dancers because it recognizes its methodological impact on contemporary dance in Europe? 2. After and beyond the pragmatic alliance of critical theory and choreographic practice, which has been so far polemically argued for and against under “conceptual dance”, there is a new practice turning away from the critical examination of concepts and protocols in theater in a direction towards researching conditions, methods and tools and thereby possibly reinventing the modes of production, presentation and status of work in performance and choreography. Such a practice is primarily concerned in orchestrating larger-scale platforms or contexts of producing through sharing knowledge about working methodology and theoretical discourse beyond authorship/ownership, considerations of audience reception, and negotiation with the requirements of a programmed performance. To what extent and for whom does this work practice conflate with a practice of learning? How much does it reflect and is conditioned by the freelance lifestyle and flexible subjectivity as contemporary forms of life and work that performance artists in Western Europe endorse?
The second (new) model of the artistic as learning practice cannot be elaborated - how and why it emerges now - without being situated first against the problem of the role theory had in establishing the practices of choreography in the 1990s. The reason why dance became a new avenue for theory in the 1990s – after theory had completed its expansion into visual arts and theater from the 1960s on by way of performance art – is dance’s historical resistance to theory as a language practice. Dance is kept “under age” not only by its proponents - dance practitioners - but even more by the philosophers’ fascination with the body and movement as the presence of absence. Alain Badiou voiced most clearly this envious projection of Romanticist residues of the ineffable, volatile, and incomprehensible, ruminating on Nietzsche’s and Paul Valéry’s statements about dance: dance is poetry that doesn’t need to write itself, movement is a metaphor of thought. A philosopher’s opinion on dance could be put aside as yet another philosophical co-optation of an art as a visual metaphor for philosophical concepts or interests if the philosophical authority didn’t legitimize the doxa in which the largest part of the dance field is invested: dance’s victimhood of ephemerality. The doxa centralizes itself on the reinvention of the bodily movement in self-expression, which is ascribed to dance not only by the theater programmes and audiences but it’s also the principle upon which dance education is based by and large. The antagonism between theory or language and dance and its supposed “presentism” (obsession with presence), subsumed under the most oft-invoked binary of “conceptual”/ “experiential”, is instituted and reinforced by the separation between physical training and study of theory. With few exceptions, training is practiced in the show-copy protocol where the choreographer or dancer-as-teacher essentializes her method by passing her knowledge as dance/movement experience to be re- embodied the same again.
Alongside this pedagogical practice, the common sense about the works of dance and choreography – and by common sense I mean, here, the residues of past intellectualizations which make up the beliefs about normality – prohibits them for interpretation. A choreographer may allow her work to be only reconstructed, and many choreographers did reserve their author’s rights to ban reconstruction by claiming that the working process (the “creation”) is carried on through the bodies of performers and is indispensable for the authenticity of performance. So if the pedagogy of a show-copy masterclass is entrenched in the traditional and high- modernist notions of craftsmanship, then it is further economically stimulated in a system of supermarket workshopping : dancers are expected to constantly “upgrade” their body technique (and the notion and politic that such body technique supposes) towards the ideal of readiness for global dance diversity.
However, there is a new technology of the dancer’s self, a new care of the body already in practice now, entirely dissociated from the premises of mastery and authenticity. I will illustrate it from an example of the choreographers I have worked with. Instead of pondering whether to take a ballet or modern dance class or any of the established bodypractices as a general warm-up before the rehearsal, some choreographers think they should rethink their training more specifically. Each project develops its own technical procedures and the body specializes accordingly. Another approach to physical technique in currency now stems from the question: what kind of body practice should one set up from the concept and work method one is elaborating in parallel so that such a body practice may positively interfere and transform a habitual methodology. So, rethinking the body training anew runs along two lines: either dancers have become pragmatic and opportunistic to fully accept that their body intelligence is relative to and instrumental for particular purposes, or they invest in searching for means without ends in order to prevent themselves from consolidating the knowledge or the “mindset” in which they’re going to make a performance. In both cases, they give up the trust in the organic wholesome curriculum training diet.
The constructivist approach towards a more specific but plural body practice described above, wouldn’t be possible without critical theory’s incursion into choreography in the 1990s. Until the 1990s, one could go away with speaking about dance performances by asking what kind of object of dance a performance produces; by defining, first, style with a formalist concern with the body as the instrument for a certain technique and, second, subject matter by way of metaphoric representation. In the 1990s, another approach settled in: not what kind of object a dance performance is, but what kind of concept of dance it proposes. Concepts of dance sourced other – not specially, autonomously or intrinsically belonging to dance – domains of knowledge, theoretical discourses and cultural practices: semiotics, historicity, speech act theory, poststructuralist theories of text and death of the author, concepts from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, cinema techniques, opera, pop, digital art, sports etc.
Baptized as ''conceptualist'', the new methodologies only adopted the speech-act tactic of proposition: ''This is choreography''. The formal effects these rather heterogeneous constructivist methods had on the dance apply to the critique of the apparatus of theater and its spectatorship. They resulted in a new regime of representation, which underlies the tautological character of the convention within the performative. The knowledge of the performance is more than twice ''checked'' in the intention communicated to the spectator as an intention meant for her recognition. Similarly to what Frederic Jameson called the ''language police'' in poststructuralism, the performance is interrogating the spectator in her role: it's looking back at her, asking her to reflect upon her history, her taste, her capacity to perceive, the frames of references she should mobilize in order to be able to read the performance.
Now, the conceptualist reorientation coincides with the last encroachment of (critical+poststructuralist) theory in the arts that began in the 1960s. After visual arts, theater, cinema and music, dance is probably the last discipline to undergo the march of theory through the humanities which contributed to the foundation of the arts as theoretical disciplines. Recently, the process of the expansion of theory has been critically re-examined by some of its key theoreticians, like Jameson and Terry Eagleton . Jameson describes this process in figures of war and domination and imperialism because he regards theory as of course yet another super-structural development of late capitalism. As the acknowledgement of dance being a language practice came considerably late in the dance institution, so could the moment when theory began to supplant philosophy - as it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts can’t exist independently of their linguistic expression– be re-enacted in choreography in the 1990s. If, as Jameson points out, the logic of theory’s Empire is appropriation by translation into or for this or that disciplinary area, then, he remarks, it is interesting that modernism lent its dynamic and telos to theory in the postmodern age; in other words the dynamic of theory has been the pursuit of the new and, if not a belief in progress, then at least a confidence that there always will be something new to replace the various older theories that have been absorbed into and domesticated by the canon. This is how theory - coming to terms with materialist language—involves something like a language police, a search and destroy mission targeting the inevitable ideological implications of discursive practices. In the case of choreography and dance, the language police disguised in the self-referential speech-act which interrogates the spectators in their role and discloses theater in its apparatus (dispositif).
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It is clear that theory can no longer play the role of providing a poststructuralist text- model of performance for the simple reason that textuality not just as a structural or poststructuralist regime of signification, but in a broader sense - a mindset with which concepts for applications for subsidy, programme notes and reviews are written, in which artists also present and produce themselves - aims for a critique by interpretation, or by a proposition which critically rereads, reinterprets, poses itself against the essentialist heritage. It says, it utters this is, this could be choreography as a contingent statement. It seems that the 1990s meant for the choreography and performance practices a period of the belated modernist logic, of the insistence on self-determination by declaration whereby the work issued a sum of judgments”: historical, aesthetical, intertextual, interdiscursive, and culturally implicated in a speech act. Poststructuralism and contemporary art theory were instrumental in conceiving of dance as an open concept, and the evidence that their mission is accomplished are the niche-markets, specialized target audiences, special contexts in which these practices are presented, and often marginalized and tolerated.
To reorient theory from interpretative and critical to experimental and inventive direction – this means to invest in searching for the conditions in which new theorizations, new practices, new forms of work and life can possibly emerge. The new would be the approach which comes out of not obliging oneself with the departure from the negative assumption that there is always already that which needs to be undone, the spectator or the theater apparatus, as this protocol has proven to be politically ineffective, a protocol which proceeds only by exhausting itself in the object of critique. The new would be the effort at transforming contexts of problematization and producing situations from the assumption that the capacity to act is larger than the pre-given institutional means to realize it; that the potentiality is really different from the possibility understood as opportunity in the institutional market.
Speaking to choreographers, dancers and performance makers of the generation between mid-20s and 40s now, one gets the sense that everybody wants to learn, as simple as it sounds: to learn rather than produce. The change in attitude from making to learning, and learning how to learn in order to make, perhaps comes from the realization of a larger frame that artists as workers share. What could be common about the frame is what Paolo Virno called the practice of an intellect in general: the faculty of language, the inclination to learn, memory, the ability to correlate, the inclination toward self-reflection. The fact that artists nowadays represent the type of worker in an immaterial economy of services and information, constantly producing outside of the (paid and recognized) labor-time, in a non-calculated productivity.
A number of initiatives have been started since 2004 bordering between production as a practice of making new performance work and education. It is too early to classify them under a new performance/choreographic paradigm or cultural practice of learning, production or research. One of the first of these initiatives sprung during the MODE05 open-source conference on education in choreography, dance and performance in Potsdam, 2005. “White Valley Grey Plain” became a project aiming for a platform-as-a-milieu for the artists, theoreticians and other practitioners in the field of performing arts interested in elaborating their activities in the frame of knowledge production where the economy of ownership and distribution in the artworld would be reversed. What crystallized from the consideration of the ethics of WVGP is that any such initiative entails some form of self-organization, where the workers conceive and organize the conditions of working themselves. It may vary from an initiative to start an informal institution like PAF (=PerformingArtsForum, a user-created, user-innovative model initiated and run by artists, theoreticians and practitioners themselves as a platform for everyone who wants to expand the possibilities and interests in his/her own working practice) to a more limited-term set- up of research which explores and functions itself according to the principles of open source. The latter I would like to elaborate in more detail since it most explicitly of all the initiatives puts forth the questions about the status of work with respect to learning process.
The research was conceived and organized by the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen at the workplace Nadine in Brussels, aiming for modes of production and performativity, alternative to the performance as a theater genre. In fact there were at least two lines of inquiry into: 1) mediatized bodies in cinema transposed onto live stage performance (stuntwomen and special effects - this line was called “Why We Love Action”) and 2) modes of production (strategy of an overproduction of by- products or small-scale achievements; questioning if changing working conditions may affect the frames of reception; deliberately focusing on several problems in order to work on parallel tracks and many directions and not towards solving a major problem; relocating one problem from one medium to another; allowing concepts to “emerge” out of the experience of a working practice etc.)
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The model of research Ingvartsen developed isn’t only valuable as an experimentation that may change her long-term strategy of producing performances in processes and contexts that dictate efficiency and representability. This initiative echoes a number of points to be drawn for potential developments in the field of performing arts. One concerns that knowledge about and in choreography entails a more complex and user-oriented recourse to theory that permanently redefines the relationship between the conceptual thought and the experienced, emergent cognition. Organizing conditions of working together and sharing knowledge where the boundaries of ownership/authorship are temporarily suspended and yet there is no collectivity to hinder a transformation process – might have effect on the frames of presentation in the formal institutions, and might open another investigation on the forms of participating in performance today. Autonomy – if the term can still be used without the load of modernist or libertarian ideologies - appears not from isolation or subversion, but from the force of experimentation that risks presentability or visibility.
For footnotes, please email [email protected]
Meeting Yvonne Rainer
One of the key figures of American postmodern dance speaks about her separation from and her re-entering the field of choreography, comments her recent work, gives her view on contemporary dance and talks about her encounters with European artists, who re-visited her avant-garde work of the 1960s and 1970s, and about her writings and her memoir. An interview by Helmut Ploebst . corpus: What motivated you to return on stage to make stage work and to perform again after thirty years of abstinence?
Rainer: Yes, I officially quit dance and choreography in 1975 and made seven feature-length films. Then several things conspired to bring me back to choreography. One was a benefit for the organization "Movement Research" at Judson Church. They invited me to recreate "Trio A With Flags" which was basically my seminal dance piece called "Trio A" that was part of the project "The Mind Is A Muscle" from 1965-68. And there was a flag version in 1970 at Judson Church. It was a huge flag show to protest the US-Cambodian invasion during the Vietnam war. Five of us performed "Trio A" nude with flags around our necks at the opening of the show. So to recreate this event, Clarinda MacLow would learn "Trio A", and I taught it to a group of 12 people. I got 12 flags and they performed it for this benefit for "Movement Research". Mikhail Baryshnikov was at that performance, and he already was thinking about asking me to make a new dance for his "White Oak Dance Project". So he subsequently commissioned a half-hour piece, which I called "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan," for his company of six people at that time. And this kind of got me re-interested in choreography. corpus: Weren't you interested in making films any more?
Rainer: It was getting too difficult to make films. It was becoming harder and harder to raise the money, and costs kept escalating. And then, in 2005, Dance Theater Workshop in New York was planning a program called "Sourcing Stravinsky". They invited some choreographers to do something around Stravinsky. I immediately thought of "Agon", the Balanchine-Stravinsky collaboration from 1957, which I had seen in the late 50s in New York with the original cast. It's always been one of my favorite Balanchine dances. I invited four women; one of them, Emily Coates, had danced with the White Oak Company and with the New York City Ballet, and we did what I call a "re-vision" of "Agon". We took most of the music and learned some of the steps - Emily Coates does it En pointe and the ither three in sneakers ... corpus: With a little help ...
Rainer: ... from HM, Henry Mancini, yes. corpus: But you continue working. There is a commission to work for RoseLee Goldberg this year?
Rainer: Yes, I'm doing a version of "Rite of Spring" for Documenta and for Tanz im August in Berlin. It's half done, and this summer I'll complete it. With the same four women who are dancing in "AG indexical, with a little help from H.M." which has also been performed in Vienna and Helsinki. corpus: You're moving in interesting ways - working as choreographer until the 70s, then shifting towards film - and then, around 2000, you went back - and forward - to choreography: in the USA but also in Europe. What is different for you now working in the field of dance?
Rainer: What brought me out of dance is wanting to work with narrative and the specifics of political and social issues. But my films were always about performers and performance. And the narrative there is framed literally to refer to performance. Sometimes it's ambiguous whether the characters are choreographers or video makers, but there is always some indication within the frame itself and within the narrative of people watching things they've made. So performance itself has never been far from my process, from my methods and strategies for making narratives. It's just that my emphasis in dance before film and after making films is on movement itself. My dances were never narratives. They are athletic, they are about dance history, but they are not narrative fictions in the way that my filmmaking is. So it wasn't that difficult to move from one to the other although of course the technicalities, the technology is totally different. History is a narrative, so dance history is my concern in making dances; it always was, but now I'm forging much more specifically into particular dances, like Balanchine, and historic moments of the avant-garde, like 1913 and 1957. Which also parallels my teaching. Since the early 90s I have taught, and it's a teaching based on avant-garde practice. Now I'm teaching full time on a permanent basis at the University of California. It's basically a performance workshop and laboratory. corpus: There is a saying by William Forsythe: "Choreography is organizing things in time." - With a reference to film and montage.
Rainer: Well, film is a time-based art. One way of thinking about that is, in my case, I took the floor, the deep space, and tilted it up for the screen basically dealing with a two-dimensional space which gives the illusion of three-dimensionality. And from the very beginning I was very conscious of the frame as being able to dissect the body. There is a lot that happens on the edge of the frame. And my latest video work ("After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid") which came out of working with Baryshnikov, is very much about the edge of the frame and bodies seen in fragments. It's very difficult to do that in actual space. It's a much more controlled way of focusing the attention of the spectator. And that's what appealed to me when I went into film. corpus: You decided to continue with videos which you're integrating in installation works.
Rainer: Yes. In this examination concerned with previous avant-gardes which I consider my work an extension of. I began to look at 1900 Vienna when the Austro- Hungarian empire was about to deconstruct. So I took the rehearsal footage from "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan". I had the rehearsals videotaped in anticipation that I would use this material for a video... corpus: ... this was Charles Atlas?
Rainer: Yes. And I took this material and combined it with printed texts about the role of art and politics at that time. A lot of this material came from the book "Fin de siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture" by Karl Schorske. That was interesting to do: to make the dancers stand not only for the avant-garde of that period. My own avant-garde practice is superimposed on that history. But also they literally stand in, I think, for the various historical personae, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie . The half-hour duration of the videotape is determined by the length of the accompanying music, "Verklärte Nacht" by Schönberg. There also are some clips in it from the performance itself at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in June 2000. "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" in itself was a montage, a pastiche of 15 years of choreographic work: rearranged, and added to. So my own history became a trunk that I could forage around in, digging out memories, photos, film clips. I was also very dependent on the memory of Pat Catterson, who is one of my performers. She studied with me 30 years ago and has a memory like a steel trap and has been invaluable in this process of my re-entry into dance. corpus: You started learning with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, then you were involved in the dynamics of Judson Dance Theater and the Grand Union. Now, after you've re-entered choreography, you take a step dealing with early avant-garde but in the frame of ballet, with Balanchine. Ballet is something you didn't work on at your beginnings but now you're going to do research in it?
Rainer: It's odd. My choreographic practice had much to do with challenge and opposition to ballet and previous modern dance, and now I come full circle in looking at Balanchine. Yet Agon is very unorthodox in relation to classical tradition - I mean, imagine: looking at your own feet while you are dancing, you know, that was unheard of in ballet. Not that such unorthodox challenges hadn't happened before: Nijinsky's Rite of Spring was an even earlier challenge to ballet tradition. So one sees these interventions in the classical tradition all along the way in 20th century choreography. It became interesting to me to combine my own postmodern material with steps from these boundary breaking ballets, and especially interesting that my postmodern dancers could do the steps in flat shoes while the classically trained ballerina would dance in classical style -- But there is another coming full circle: that is the work I did with Richard Move. For about five years Richard, who had studied modern dance and who is about 6 foot 5 tall, had a show in a funky little club on the West Side in Manhattan in which he impersonated in full regalia Martha Graham. He changed his voice, and played the Mistress of Ceremonies of a variety show, introducing modern dancers and interviewing them. He also used ex-Graham dancers on the tiny little stage to do his versions of the Graham classics. So he invited me - this also was around 2000 - and we scripted a dialogue in which he, as Graham, has a debate with me about my practice. Several years later I took this further and taught Martha Graham/Richard Move "Trio A", and Charlie Atlas edited a film portrait of me which includes my teaching "Trio A" to Graham/Move. It's very funny and it includes lines that Martha Graham herself had spoken to me around 1960. In fact Richard Move's whole thing is based on Graham's notebooks, but in our dialogue with each other I would have a fit trying to do the Graham floorwork and saying that I never had a turnout, and she - with great hauteur - would reply: "My dear Miss Rainer, when you accept yourself as a woman, you will have turnout." Which is what she actually said to me in 1959 when I studied with her. So, you know - everything comes around again. corpus: You've always been so political in your work; I would be surprised if there were no political dimension to this new phase of your work. But your strategy has changed, I suppose, dealing with and co-developing postmodernity in dance, as opposed to very explicitly dealing with political issues in your film work. Now there seems to be another approach compared with what your work was about in the 60s and 70s. Back then you employed subversive and very oppositional strategies. Now you move to strategies of irony, of erosion ...
Rainer: ... and quotation of myself, and of Balanchine, of Nijinsky, etcetera, yes! corpus: But is it still motivated by political resistance?
Rainer: Yeah, sure! For instance "AG indexical, with a little help from H.M.". Someone asked me at a talk I gave: "Is your dance work political in the way your films were?" And I said "No", but then a friend reminded me that to have four women do the dance of four men - as in the opening of "Agon" - I guess that's a political act. You also might say my "AG Indexical" is an analysis, a parody, and an homage all at the same time. corpus: In both works you put your finger on indexicality.
Rainer: The word is used a lot in art writing. It comes from semiology, referring to traces of an original. And so I think this would describe my current practice of using traces of Sacre, traces of Agon. If you're familiar with the constructions of the originals, then you'll recognize these traces. The newest project for Documenta 07 is called "RoS Indexical" ("Rite of Spring Indexical"). corpus: If you compare the choreographical developments during the 60s and 70s in the USA with what was proposed in Europe during the 90s by people like Xavier Le Roy, Jérôme Bel or, e.g., by the group Le Quatuor Albrecht Knust: what comes to your mind?
Rainer: I'm not very good at that, because I haven't kept that close watch on what has been happening since I left dance - especially in Europe. I know Xavier's work, though. He has come to New York, so I saw him performing there. And he and I did a kind of improvisatory performance in Berlin at Tanz im August several years ago. Further, I've seen one of Boris Charmatz' works, I've seen some of the big French groups. But I haven't seen Jérôme Bel's work. I'm more familiar with the work of my peers, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti and some younger people like Miguel Gutierrez. It's only recently that I started to attend dance concerts. Oh, and I also saw Alain Buffard's "Good Boys". All of this work seems much more organized, less fly-by-night, than a lot of Judson stuff, much of which was influenced by John Cage's notions of chance and randomness. corpus: But at the end of the 90s one couldn't find much any more in New York from the heritage of Judson Dance Theater.
Rainer: Yes, the scene has become very technical and production oriented. corpus: What happened to the body discourse which was so vivid in the 60s?
Rainer: I think it was diffused a bit and then disappeared in a return to high technique. The use of pedestrian movement, the idea that untrained people can dance, all that has been lost. I think the Judson influence is much more apparent in Europe, wouldn't you say? corpus: In a way, yes, but there is also a longing for virtuosity again. By the way, what is the connection like now between you and Europe? The first contact was made by the French group Le Quatuor Albrecht Knust. They asked if it would be possible to redo "Continuous Project - Altered Daily". How was that for you?
Rainer: My first contact with them was in Montpellier in the late 90s. I was amazed at how much they could reconstruct just from my notes in my first book. I sent them a lot of photos, and they had the book. When I arrived, I made some corrections. And in the performance itself I started to remember things, and I entered the performance and taught a fragment that I remembered. And then in Stockholm a couple of years later, there was a conference where I performed with them. Now it's even further removed from the original, because my memory fades. So I accept that it's a hybrid, or a copy of a copy, or something else. In Vienna, Pat Catterson was appalled because she has such vivid memories of the 1969 original. But I don't make that comparison. corpus: You did "Continuous Project - Altered Daily" in 1970 in a very specific context. Now it's more than 25 years later, and the context has changed. How do you feel about the revision of your work in the contexts of the present?
Rainer: The only dance of mine that I feel a very rigorous attachment to is "Trio A". One, because it was documented in film in 1978; two, because I remember it so well. So I would like it not to change. Both "Trio A" from "The Mind is a Muscle" and "Chair Pillow" from the original "Continuous Project - Altered Daily" have been labanotated. So they exist as very specific and precise documentations. But everything else is up for grabs. Call it a degeneration, a regeneration, a hybrid, whatever you want, I accept whatever comes out of the process of a particular group. Although the "Knusties" are the only ones who have attempted this. The descriptions of my early dances in that first book ... I can't decipher a lot of those notes any more. Students have come to me and asked if they can make dances from these notes - yes of course, use it as a score for something new!. I don't feel purist about these things. corpus: You use the word hybrid, a term which one can also find in the title of your installation. Hybridization of approaches, aesthetics, social conditions and strategies of thinking - would that be a word for your strategy in the development of your artworks? Rainer: Probably yes, everything I do now is somewhat hybrid, appropriated ... I mean, all these words apply to my process. corpucorpus:s:s:s: When you refer to your NO-manifesto from 1965, where you asked for a lot of clarification, do you think this need for clarification asks for hybridization after a while?
Rainer: The NO-manifesto is brought up over and over again. I wish it could be buried ... I came to it at the end of an essay about a particular work, "Parts of Some Sextets", which was a piece for ten people and twelve mattresses in 1965, I never meant for the manifesto to be prescriptive. Manifestos are meant to clear the air and challenge, and then their usefulness is over. I myself haven't abided by that manifesto, and I don't expect anyone else to, either. But it's always brought up, I don't know ... It's no longer useful - or maybe it is. Someone else should write a manifesto about what's going on now. corpus: A young Danish choreographer, Mette Ingvartsen, wrote a YES-manifesto about two years ago.
Rainer: O yeah? (laughs) That NO-manifesto I guess is the opposite of hybridity, which is very inclusive, and the manifesto was very exclusive. corpus: But that's what I meant before: when you go for clarification, you're liable to dissolve very quickly in hybridization.
Rainer: Of course there is a great need now for screaming out "No!" to things like genocide, or ethnic cleansing, and imperialism, and corruption. These moments in art history and cultural history pale beside the larger political issues. corpus: The American artist Sharon Hayes ...
Rainer: ... is re-enacting political protest from the past, right? corpus: In a talk in Vienna last year someone asked her: Why don't you refer to more recent political issues? And she answered: It is art, it's not protest. So this means that artists are politically informed but it does not make them political activists nowadays. Art might not be in the reference system of activism any more ...
Rainer: Why not, time is calling for it! In the Vietnam War in the States there was a lot of specific political art. corpus: In the 70s, the positions seemed to be clearer. Today everything appears to be very soft and hard to grasp.
Rainer: Yes, sometimes it seems the idea of art as political act has congealed ... Well, following the Iraq invasion people got disillusioned after millions of people all over the world had demonstrated against what turned out to be a fait accompli. It takes time to build an organization and excite people to get out in the streets. Now in the States perhaps political energy is building again to show that the Bush criminals are wanted out. Fear of terrorism has been used by politicians to intimidate people, and it's a very effective weapon by the right wing. In the 60s there were all kinds of new movements, gay liberation, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, they all came together. All these movements have kind of lost their impetus, although the need for them is just as urgent as it was in the 60's. Abortion rights are still in jeopardy in the States. In the early 80's I belonged to a group that took to the streets with big banners, went to Washington with "No more forced labor" on our banners. And there was the "People's Flag Show" at Judson Church to protest censorship; the Artworker's Coalition was very active during the Vietnam War. These were movements that had very specific aims and were very effective in their way, joined to the larger anti-war movement. It seems energies, as I said, are much more diffused now. corpus: And what happened with the body discourses?
Rainer: The work at Judson was the predecessor of so-called "body art", Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and this kind of minimal performative questioning of body ideals. My current work is doing something of the same thing. I'm again working with people of varying ages and technical abilities. The range is from the virtuosity of the ballerina to Sally Silvers, who has never had a ballet class in her life. But she manages to do the same things, and you see the difference in age, experience, and approach in terms of discipline and training. And yes, I'm very engaged in confronting the body ideals of current dance practice in relation to virtuosic technique. So that still applies, even though I don't make running dances or mattress dances, but three women lifting a ballerina is a statement about traditional dance practices both in modern dance and ballet. So I guess I'm still involved with the same things; it's just taking a different form than it did 30, 40 years ago. corpus: One important dimension of your work is your writing. You've been writing continuously for more than 40 years ...
Rainer: ... Yes, I have a memoir out now ... corpus: ... published by MIT Press in 2006. How did you approach the revision of your artistic and intellectual life in the project of an autobiography?
Rainer: The title is "Feelings Are Facts: a Life." It's a very intimate memoir, starting with before my birth, my parents etcetera. But it also contains very detailed description of coming to New York in the 50s, the art world I was exposed to, becoming a dancer, and then in the last chapter, in the epilogue, I talk a little bit about film making. There is one chapter called "Feelings Are Facts" which is about the transition from dance to film, and deals with the specificities of narrative and emotional life that drew me into film making. So it's all kinds of narratives about my life but also about the social surroundings that attended this particular life in New York. corpus: What can you say about the communication between the writing and the creation of artworks ...?
Rainer: On the one hand, writing was a way of clarifying for myself what I had just made, like the mattress dance with the NO manifesto at the end. Then when I started to make films, it was an essential part of the process in terms of scripts. More recently, writing even supplanted other kinds of art-making, like the year in which I did nothing but write poetry, which followed on the heels of my last film, "MURDER and murder." Then when I re-entered dance at the invitation of Baryshnikov in 2000, I stopped writing poetry. It seems to be one or the other, working with the body or writing. Right now it's about working with the body - and teaching. corpus: Why an autobiography?
Rainer: It came out of being invited by Steve Anker, who is the head of the Film Department at the California Institute of Arts and used to be director of the San Francisco Cinematheque. He was editing an anthology of essays by filmmakers who were affected by growing up in San Francisco. And I wrote this one chapter, that is I think is Chapter five in my memoir, about memories of cultural events I was exposed to in San Francisco before leaving for New York in 1956. I came from a family of anarchists and was very early privy to this intermix of poetry and painting and political life in San Francisco bohemia ... For instance I attended the first reading of "Howl" [by Allen Ginsberg] at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955. So after I wrote that essay - that anthology has not come out yet, they've been very slow to publish it - I thought, Oh, there's more here! I was at a place where I didn't know what I was going to do next. It was after working with Baryshnikov and his White Oak Dance Project, and I had some time, and so for the next two years I worked on this book, while doing various teaching gigs ... corpus: Do you have a wish, an aim for the future?
Rainer: Yes. That the imperial maneuvers of the present U.S. government be turned around by a more rational and democratic regime.
COBISS Co-operative Online Bibliographic system & services COBISS
BOJANA KUNST
Personal bibliography for the period
2000-2007
ARTICLES AND OTHER COMPONENT PARTS
1.01 Original Scientific Article
1. KUNST, Bojana. Kiborg i moje tijelo. Tre ća, 2001, letn. III, št. 1-2, str. 0347-0356. [COBISS.SI-ID 18331234 ] 2. KUNST, Bojana. Aesthetics of the body : between the organic and the technological. Hron. Aisthäet. , 2002, vol. 41B, str. 697-707. [COBISS.SI-ID 21838434 ] 3. KUNST, Bojana. "Quero partilhar-te-que me fazes?" Aterrado e imóvel: o corpo íntimo. V: MIRANDA, José A. Bragança de (ur.). Crítica das Ligações na Era da Técnica : ligações, links, liaisons . Lisboa: Tropismos, 2002, str. 243-256. [COBISS.SI-ID 512020094 ] 4. KUNST, Bojana. Strategije subjektivnosti v sodobnem performansu = Strategies of subjectivity in contemporary performance art. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2002, letn. XVII, št. 74-75, str. 10-14, 77-80. [COBISS.SI-ID 18333794 ] 5. KUNST, Bojana. Simptomi tehno tela. V: ŠUVAKOVI Ć, Miško (ur.). Nove (teorije) dramaturgije , (TkH, br. 3). Beograd: TkH-centar za teoriju i praksu izvo ñačkih umetnosti, 2002, str. 52-59. [COBISS.SI-ID 512019838 ] 6. KUNST, Bojana. Izvo ñenje drugog tela. V: ŠUVAKOVI Ć, Miško (ur.). Novi ples / nove teorije , (TkH, br. 4). Beograd: TkH-centar za teoriju i praksu izvo ñačkih umetnosti, 2002, str. 66-69. [COBISS.SI-ID 512020606 ] 7. KUNST, Bojana. Strateške subjektivnosti. V: ŠUVAKOVI Ć, Miško (ur.). Izvo ñenje izvedbe u izvo ñačkim umetnostima - 1 (straight) , (TkH, br. 5). Beograd: TkH-centar za teoriju i praksu izvo ñačkih umetnosti, 2003, str. 27-32. [COBISS.SI-ID 512033150 ] 8. KUNST, Bojana. Politika naklonjenosti in nelagodja = Politics of affection and uneasiness. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2003, letn. XVIII, št. 5-6 (82-83), str. 23-30. [COBISS.SI-ID 512017534 ] 9. KUNST, Bojana. Subversion and the dancing body : autonomy on display. Performance research , 2003, letn. 8, št. 2, str. 61-68. [COBISS.SI-ID 512017278 ] 10. KUNST, Bojana. Telo v sodobni umetnosti : performans in nevarne povezave. Teor. praksa , september/oktober 2003, letn. 40, št. 5, str. 821-836. [COBISS.SI-ID 22522717 ] 11. KUNST, Bojana. Beži čne veze : privla čnost, emocija, politika. V: ŠUVAKOVI Ć, Miško (ur.). Digitalni performans , (TkH, br. 7). Beograd: TkH-centar za teoriju i praksu izvo ñačkih umetnosti, 2004, str. 25-30. [COBISS.SI-ID 512046206 ] 12. KUNST, Bojana. Strategije samo-izvo ñenja : o sopstvu i savremenom performansu. V: ŠUVAKOVI Ć, Miško (ur.). Digitalni performans , (TkH, br. 7). Beograd: TkH-centar za teoriju i praksu izvo ñačkih umetnosti, 2004, str. 150-158, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512046718 ] 13. KUNST, Bojana. Performing the Truth : the Metamorphoses of Wayn Traub. Maska (Ljubl.) , zim.-pom. 2004, letn. 19, št. 1/2 = št. 84-85, str. 82-87, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 235093248 ] 14. KUNST, Bojana. Uprizarjanje resnice : metamorfoze Wayna Trauba = Performing the truth : the metamorphoses of Wayn Traub. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2004, letn. XIX, št. 84-85, str. 76- 87. [COBISS.SI-ID 512040318 ] 15. KUNST, Bojana. Liberation or control : disobedient connections in contemporary works. Leonardo (Oxf.) . [Print ed.], 2005, vol. 38, no. 5, str. 419-423. [COBISS.SI-ID 512052606 ] 16. KUNST, Bojana. Yet to come : discontents of the common history. Performance research , 2005, vol. 10, no. 2, str. 38-47. [COBISS.SI-ID 1840219 ]
1.02 Review Article
17. KUNST, Bojana. Energetska veza tijela i stroja : zadnja veza s prirodom, prva veza s umjetnim. Frakcija , 2001, št. 19, str. 63-69. [COBISS.SI-ID 18234466 ] 18. KUNST, Bojana. Med naravo in kulturo telesa : o moderni vidljivosti ženskega telesa. Delta (Ljubl.) , 2002, letn. 8, št. 3/4, str. 65-85. [COBISS.SI-ID 22116189 ] 19. KUNST, Bojana. On strategic interventions in performance art : self-representation of the body. Frakcija , 2003, št. 28/29, str. 46-58. [COBISS.SI-ID 512046974 ] 20. KUNST, Bojana. Strateško uprizarjanje = Strategic performing. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2003, letn. XVIII, št. 78-79, str.6-10, 78-81. [COBISS.SI-ID 512018046 ] 21. KUNST, Bojana. Samenwerken en ruimtelijkheid. Etcetera , 2005, št. 99, str. 48-53. [COBISS.SI-ID 512065662 ] 22. KUNST, Bojana. Neposlušne povezave : mikroutopija druga čne uporabe = Disobedient connections : microutopia of different use. Likov. besede , 2005, št. 71/72, str. 37-42, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 513468031 ] 23. KUNST, Bojana. Virtualni biopoliti čni parlament = Virtual biopolitical parlament. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2005, let. 20, št. 92-93, str. 32-41. [COBISS.SI-ID 512053886 ] 24. KUNST, Bojana. Sotrudni čestvo i prostranstvo. Hudožestvennyj žurnal , 2006, št. 1-2, str. 73-80, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512065150 ] 25. KUNST, Bojana. Sodelovanje in prostor = The collaboration and space. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2006, letn. 21, št. 101-102, str. 80-87, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 2000731 ]
1.04 Professional Article
26. KUNST, Bojana. Sitni ostanki narave : esej ob koncu tiso čletja - sedmi. Delo (Ljubl.) , 10. jan. 2000, leto 42, št. 7, str. 8, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 106279424 ] 27. KUNST, Bojana. Teknolojik ve Organik Arasinda : Beden Estetigi. Mimarlik kültürü dergisi , 2001, št. 8, str. 139-142. [COBISS.SI-ID 18347618 ] 28. KUNST, Bojana. Performing the other body. Bal canis , 2002, let. 2, št. 4, str. 75-76, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512020862 ] 29. KUNST, Bojana. Postavljeno vmes, dvoumno in sestavljeno: estetika telesa med organskim in tehnološkim. Čas. krit. znan. , 2002, letn. 30, št. 209/210, str. 255-264. [COBISS.SI-ID 123540224 ] 30. KUNST, Bojana. Telesna straža doline šentflorjanske. Gled. list, Opera balet , 2001/2002, str. [3-4]. [COBISS.SI-ID 220714496 ] 31. KUNST, Bojana. Plesni konceptualisti. Delo (Ljubl.) , 9. jun. 2003, leto 45, št. 131, str. 6. [COBISS.SI-ID 125863424 ] 32. KUNST, Bojana. De Politiek van Affectie en Onbehaaglijkheid. Het Monty plan , 2003, nov.-dec., str. [9-10], ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512042366 ] 33. KUNST, Bojana. V hladni ekonomiji sterilnega ugodja. Delo (Ljubl.) , 10. jul. 2004, leto 46, št. 159, str. 16-18. [COBISS.SI-ID 512044158 ] 34. KUNST, Bojana. Nevtralni teritorij doma : Anja Planiš ček & Apolonija Šušterši č : družinska hiša Gerbec, Domžale, Slovenija, 2002 = The neutral territory of home : Gerbec family house, Domžale, Slovenia, 2002. Oris (Zagreb) , 2004, letn. 6, št. 26, str. 127-130, graf. prikazi. [COBISS.SI-ID 26079493 ] 35. KUNST, Bojana. Politici ale afec Ńiunii i stînjenelii = Politics of affection and uneasiness. Idea (Cluj-Napoca) , 2005, 21, str. 120-127. [COBISS.SI-ID 512052862 ] 36. KUNST, Bojana. Virtuelni biopoliti čki parlament. TkH , 2005, br. 9, str. 37-42. [COBISS.SI-ID 512054142 ] 37. HRVATIN, Emil, KUNST, Bojana, MILOHNI Ć, Aldo, PRISTAŠ, Goran Sergej. East- Dance-Academy. Frakcija , 2006, št. 41, str. 62-71. [COBISS.SI-ID 554349 ] 38. KUNST, Bojana. East - Dance - Academy. Frakcija , 2006, no. 41, str. 67-71. [COBISS.SI-ID 512064126 ] 39. KUNST, Bojana. Marko Peljhan : intermedijski umetnik : za umetniški projekt MakroLab. Prešernov sklad , 2007, str. [15-18]. [COBISS.SI-ID 512063870 ]
1.06 Published Scientific Conference Contribution (invited lecture)
40. KUNST, Bojana. Discontents of resistance eart and politics in the time of independence. V: KELLY, Noel (ur.), FITZPATRICK, Michael. Art and politics : the imagination of opposition in Europe : Conference Papers, Dublin, April 29-30, 2004 . 1st ed. Dublin: R4; Ljubljana: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia, 2004, str. 38-43. [COBISS.SI-ID 512064638 ] 41. KUNST, Bojana. "We are not selling Hollywood" : the potentiality of the meeting. V: HOCHMUTH, Martina (ur.). It takes place when it doesn't : on dance and performance since 1989 . Frankfurt am Main: Revolver - Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, cop. 2006, str. 130-135. [COBISS.SI-ID 512064894 ]
1.07 Published Professional Conference Contribution (invited lecture)
42. KUNST, Bojana. Beži čne povezanosti : privla čnost, emocija, politika = Wirelles connections : attraction, emotion, politics. V: Touch me festival : sjecišta umjetnosti, tehnologije i znanosti: "Zloupotreba inteligencije" = intersections of technology, science and art: "Intelligence abuse" : 08 - 17.09.2005, stara tvornica Badel/old factorz Badel, Zagreb . Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut & Kontejner, 2005, str. 140-157. [COBISS.SI-ID 512055422 ]
1.12 Published Scientific Conference Contribution Abstract 43. KUNST, Bojana. Aesthetics of the body between organic and technological. V: Aesthetics on the threshold of the third Millennium : abstracts . Athens: [Michelis foundation & Hellenic society for aesthetics], 2000, str. 71. [COBISS.SI-ID 18340194 ] 44. KUNST, Bojana. Politics of affection and uneassines. V: Perform, state, interrogate : abstract . Singapur: Performance studies international conference, 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512044926 ] 45. KUNST, Bojana. Strategic jouissance : organisation of happiness and exhaustion. V: Umetnost in njene strategije: med estetiko in politiko : mednarodni kolokvij, Slovenski gledališki muzej, Ljubljana, 22. do 23.10.2004 : international colloquium, National Theatre Museum, Ljubljana, October 20-23 2004 . Ljubljana: Slovensko društvo za estetiko: = Slovenian Society of Aesthetics, 2004, str. 5-6. [COBISS.SI-ID 512047230 ]
1.16 Independent Scientific Component Part in a Monograph
46. KUNST, Bojana. The Digital Body : History of Body Visibility. V: CZEGLEDY, Nina (ur.). Digitized bodies - virtual spectacles . Budapest: Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art: = Ludwig Múzeum - Kortárs M ővészeti Múzeum, 2001, str. 13-28. [COBISS.SI-ID 18232418 ] 47. KUNST, Bojana. L´impossibile diventa possibile. V: MENICACCI, Armando (ur.), QUINZ, Emanuele (ur.). La Scena digitale : nuovi media per la danza . 1. ed. Venezia: Marsilio, 2001, str. 307-315. [COBISS.SI-ID 18252130 ] 48. KUNST, Bojana. Avtonomna telesa plesa. V: HRVATIN, Emil (ur.). Teorije sodobnega plesa , (Transformacije, št. 6). Ljubljana: Maska, 2001, str. 55-64. [COBISS.SI-ID 18231394 ] 49. KUNST, Bojana. Za tjaloto i negovata drugost. V: Homo ludens : spisanie za teat"r , (Spisanie za teat"r, 6/7). Sofija, 2003, str. 251-256. [COBISS.SI-ID 512033918 ] 50. KUNST, Bojana. Wireless connections : attraction, emotion, politics = Drahtlose verbindungen : attraktionen, emotionen, politik. V: KWASTEK, Katja (ur.). Ohne schnur : Kunst und drahtlose kommunikation = art and wireless communication . Bonn: Autoren, Künstler, VG Bild-Kunst: Cuxavener Kunstverein & Revolver, 2004, str. 126-145. [COBISS.SI-ID 512053630 ] 51. KUNST, Bojana. Microutopias of disobedient connections. V: KARABOGDAN, Gordan (ur.), KLOBU ČAR, Nikica (ur.). Enigma objekta : zbornik teorijskih tekstova : a collection of theoretical writings . Zagreb: [samozal.] G. Karabogdan, 2006, str. 51-59. [COBISS.SI-ID 512054654 ] 52. KUNST, Bojana. Težave s sodobnostjo. V: KUNST, Bojana (ur.), POGOREVC, Petra (ur.). Sodobne scenske umetnosti , (Zbirka Transformacije, knj. št. 20). Ljubljana: Maska, 2006, str. 39-57, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512062846 ] 53. KUNST, Bojana. Critical potentiality : on protocols and performance. V: HUBER, Jörg (ur.). Ästhetik der Kritik oder Verdeckte Ermittlung . Zürich: Voldemeer; Wien; New York: Springer, 2007, str. 159-165. [COBISS.SI-ID 512063358 ]
1.17 Independent Professional Component Part in a Monograph
54. KUNST, Bojana. Razprta potencialnost telesa. V: TRATNIK, Polona (ur.), ZUPAN ČIČ, Nika (ur.), ERJAVEC, Aleš, KAPUS, Sergej, VIGNJEVI Ć, Tomislav, MIKUŽ, Jure, ZDRAVI Č, Andrej, KUNST, Bojana, LUKAN, Blaž, HERGOLD, Katarina, STREHOVEC, Janez, ŠTROMAJER, Igor, GRASSI, Davide, KREFT, Lev, ŽENKO, Ernest, KRPAN, Jurij V., PIRMAN, Alenka. Prostori umetnosti : zbornik . Ljubljana: Društvo inovatorjev, 2002, str. 91-104. [COBISS.SI-ID 21837922 ] 55. KUNST, Bojana. En-Knap / deset let : med disciplino in svobodo. V: KUNST, Bojana (ur.). En-Knap : deset let . Ljubljana: En-Knap, 2003, str. 10-11. [COBISS.SI-ID 512021374 ] 56. KUNST, Bojana. The form of global happiness. V: Hopefully someone will carry out great vengeance on me : [gledališki list] . Oslo: Impure company, 2003, str. 19-21. [COBISS.SI-ID 512021886 ] 57. KUNST, Bojana. The organization of happiness and the exhausted body. V: Hopefully someone will carry out great vengeance on me : [gledališki list] . Oslo: Impure company, 2003, str.[24-28]. [COBISS.SI-ID 512034686 ] 58. KUNST, Bojana. Poslednji aristokrati duše. V: JAVORŠEK, Jan Jona (ur.), VIGNY, Alfred de. Chatterton , (Gledališki list SNG Drama, let. 83, št. 7). Ljubljana: Slovensko narodno gledališ če Drama, 2004, str. 6-8. [COBISS.SI-ID 512042622 ] 59. KUNST, Bojana. Virtual biopolitical parliament : Davide Grassi's DemoKino. V: Davide Grassi 02-04 : selected works . Ljubljana: Aksioma-Institute for contemporary arts, 2004, str. 3-8. [COBISS.SI-ID 512041598 ] 60. KUNST, Bojana. Nomadsko desetletje tveganega naseljevanja : slovenske sodobne scenske umetnosti 1995-2005. V: BADOVINAC, Zdenka, ŠPANJOL, Igor, ZABEL, Igor. Teritoriji, identitete mreže : slovenska umetnost 1995-2005 : [Moderna galerija, 9. avgust - 9. oktober 2005] : Slovene art 1995-2005 : [Museum of Modern art, Ljubljana, 9 August - 9 October 2005] . Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2005, str. 78-86, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512053118 ] 61. KUNST, Bojana. Virtual biopolitical parliament : David Grassi's DemoKino. V: IVKOVI Ć, Ivana (ur.), GRASSI, Davide (ur.). DemoKino : virtual biopolitical agora , (Transformacije series, book no. 19). Ljubljana: Maska: Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2006, str. 21-30. [COBISS.SI-ID 512054910 ]
1.20 Preface, Afterward
62. KUNST, Bojana. Kon čaj stavek, ... : spremna beseda v gledališkem listu. V: Projekt 3 . Izola: Museum, 2000, str. [4]. [COBISS.SI-ID 18339938 ] 63. KUNST, Bojana. Radikalni dramski u činki subjektivnosti : Amelija Jones in strategije interpretacije telesa. V: JONES, Amelia. Body art : uprizarjanje subjekta , (Knjižna zbirka Transformacije, št. 8), (Knjižna zbirka Koda). Ljubljana: Maska: Študentska založba, 2002, str. 401-420. [COBISS.SI-ID 512021118 ] 64. KUNST, Bojana. Uvod = Introduction : Teritoriji predstave = Performance territories. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2002, letn. XVII, št. 74-75, str. 5, 73. [COBISS.SI-ID 18333282 ] 65. KUNST, Bojana. Uvodnik = Editorial. Maska (Ljubl.) , 2003, letn. XVIII, št. 5-6 (82-83), str. [1]. [COBISS.SI-ID 512017790 ] 66. KUNST, Bojana, POGOREVC, Petra. Uvod. V: KUNST, Bojana (ur.), POGOREVC, Petra (ur.). Sodobne scenske umetnosti , (Zbirka Transformacije, knj. št. 20). Ljubljana: Maska, 2006, str. 7-13. [COBISS.SI-ID 512062590 ]
1.22 Interview
67. KUNST, Bojana. Kaj pisati, ko naletiš na dogodek, s katerim ne veš kaj po četi : pogovor z Bojano Kunst, soustvarjalko seminarja sodobnih scenskih umetnosti. Delo (Ljubl.) , 9. nov. 2001, leto 43, št. 258, str. 9, portret. [COBISS.SI-ID 115337216 ] 68. KUNST, Bojana. Živi tako, da se lahko postaviš v prazen prostor in spelješ povezave popolnoma druga če. Park (Novo mesto) , 12. maj 2004, letn. 7, št. 7, str. 12-13, portret. [COBISS.SI-ID 13431351 ] 69. KUNST, Bojana. Umetnost še lahko razkriva nevidno : pogovor z Bojano Kunst, filozofinjo. Delo (Ljubl.) , 17. jan. 2005, leto 47, št. 13, str. 9, portret. [COBISS.SI-ID 218014208 ] 70. BERNIK, Stane, ERJAVEC, Aleš, KUNST, Bojana, PODNAR, Gregor, STEPAN ČIČ, Lilijana, KOMELJ, Miklavž, P. K. (ur.), ŠUTEJ ADAMIČ, Jelka (ur.). Neovirano razkrivanje lokalnosti. Delo (Ljubl.) , 5. okt. 2005, leto 47, št. 231, str. 10. [COBISS.SI-ID 225281024 ] 71. KUKOVEC, Dunja, KUNST, Bojana, PODNAR, Gregor, PIŠKUR, Bojana, ŠPANJOL, Igor, ZRINSKI, Božidar, BADOVINAC, Zdenka. Ali je razstava povedala vse = Has the exhibition told evrrything? : okrogla miza. Likov. besede , 2005, št. 73/74, str. 10-19, ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 513761151 ]
1.23 Artistic Component Part
72. KUNST, Bojana. Follower from the south. Apokalipsa , 2002, [Št.] 53/54, str. 61-66. [COBISS.SI-ID 124950272 ]
1.25 Other Articles or Component Parts
73. KUNST, Bojana. Medeno leto, lepljivo od sre če : od petka do petka. Ve čer (Marib.) . [Tiskana izd.], 30.12.2006, str. [33]. [COBISS.SI-ID 512064382 ]
MONOGRAPHS AND OTHER COMPLETED WORKS
2.01 Scientific Monograph
74. KUNST, Bojana . Nevarne povezave : telo, filozofija in razmerje do umetnega , (Zbirka Transformacije, knj. št. 15). Ljubljana: Maska, 2004. 223 str., ilustr. ISBN 961-91078-7-X. [COBISS.SI-ID 215683072 ]
2.08 Doctoral Dissertation
75. KUNST, Bojana . Filozofija, estetika in umetnost med organskim in tehnološkim : estetika telesa in umetnost postmodernizma : doktorska disertacija . Ljubljana: [B. Kunst Štromajer], 2002. 285 f. [COBISS.SI-ID 117537280 ]
2.12 Final Research Report
76. KUNST, Bojana . Strategies of self-performing : Wayn Traub and the truth of the self . Antwerpen: Universitaire Instellling Antwerpen, Research centre Aisthesis, 2003. 1 mapa (45 f.). [COBISS.SI-ID 512023166 ]
2.19 Popular Film, Radio or Television Broadcast
77. ŠTROMAJER, Igor, KUNST, Bojana . Toyota : radijska igra , (Radio Maribor). Maribor: Radio, 2003. 1 CD (28 min, 35 sek), stereo. [COBISS.SI-ID 124250624 ]
PERFORMED WORKS (EVENTS)
3.10 Artistic Performance
78. KUNST, Bojana . Kon čaj stavek, ki sem ga za čel : dramaturgija video projekta . Izola, 2000. [COBISS.SI-ID 18337634 ] 79. KUNST, Bojana . Pohujšanje = Temptation : dramaturgija plesne predstave . Ljubljana, 2001. [COBISS.SI-ID 18337122 ] 80. KUNST, Bojana . Dvoboj : dramaturgija gledališke predstave . Ljubljana, 2002. [COBISS.SI-ID 18336354 ] 81. KUNST, Bojana . Hopefullly someone will carry out great vengeance on me : a piece of Hooman Sharifi : dramaturgija gledališke predstave . 2003. [COBISS.SI-ID 512035198 ] 82. KUNST, Bojana . Chatterton . Ljubljana, 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512039806 ]
3.14 Invited Lecture at Foreign University
83. KUNST, Bojana . Bodies / Ambients . Antwerpen, 2002. [COBISS.SI-ID 18348386 ] 84. KUNST, Bojana . Automats, cloks, spirits and other historical gadgets . Antwerpen, 2003. [COBISS.SI-ID 512022398 ]
3.15 Unpublished Conference Contribution
85. KUNST, Bojana . Comprehensible body: incomprehensible flesh . Zagreb, 2002. [COBISS.SI-ID 512022654 ] 86. KUNST, Bojana . Les stratégies du corps on mouvement . 2002. [COBISS.SI-ID 512022142 ] 87. KUNST, Bojana . Respect yes - but leave my territory untouched. On strategies ans resistances of dancing bodies . Wien, 2002. [COBISS.SI-ID 512022910 ] 88. KUNST, Bojana . Group Jouissance - Organisation of happiness and exaustion . Zagreb, 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512040062 ] 89. KUNST, Bojana . Politics of affection and uneasiness . Dublin, 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512042110 ] 90. KUNST, Bojana . Politics of affection and uneasiness . Singapore, 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512044414 ] 91. KUNST, Bojana . Umetnost in globalizacija . [Ljubljana], 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512047486 ] 92. KUNST, Bojana . Wireless relationships : attraction, emotion, politics . Cuxhaven, 2004. [COBISS.SI-ID 512041854 ]
SECONDARY AUTHORSHIP
Editor
93. KUNST, Bojana (ur.) . En-Knap : deset let . Ljubljana: En-Knap, 2003. 55 str., ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 123335168 ] 94. KUNST, Bojana (ur.) . Ples in politika = Dance and politics , (Maska, Letn. 18, št. 5-6 (82- 83)). Ljubljana: Maska - zavod za založništvo, kulturno in producentsko dejavnost, 2003. 104 str., ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 512018302 ] 95. KUNST, Bojana (ur.), POGOREVC, Petra (ur.) . Sodobne scenske umetnosti , (Zbirka Transformacije, knj. št. 20). Ljubljana: Maska, 2006. 388 str., ilustr. ISBN 961-6572-04-0. ISBN 978-961-6572-04-0. [COBISS.SI-ID 228569856 ] 96. Maska . Kunst, Bojan (member of editorial board 2003-). Ljubljana: Zveza kulturnih organizacij Slovenije, 1991-. ISSN 1318-0509. [COBISS.SI-ID 29472512 ]
Author of introduction
97. JONES, Amelia . Body art : uprizarjanje subjekta , (Knjižna zbirka Transformacije, št. 8), (Knjižna zbirka Koda). Ljubljana: Maska: Študentska založba, 2002. 420 str., ilustr. ISBN 961-90309-7-4. [COBISS.SI-ID 118068992 ]
Co-Supervisor for Undergraduate Theses
98. GRUDEN, Aleksandra Saška . Med-prostor telesa : performans kot umetniško delo - moja izkušnja performansa : diplomsko delo . Ljubljana: [Gruden Aleksandra], 2005. 22 str., ilustr. [COBISS.SI-ID 2139758 ]
Interviewee
99. PRAZNIK, Katja. Na šahovskem polju izobraževanja in umetnosti = on the chessboard of education and art : pogovor z Majo Delak, Bojano Kunst, Nino Meško, Sašo Nabergoj, Jožetom Baršijem, Sebastijanom Horvatom, Emilom Hrvatinom in Blažem Lukanom : a conversation with Maja Delak, Bojana Kunst, Nina Meško, Saša Nabergoj, Jože Barši, Sebastijan Horvat, Emil Hrvatin and Blaž Lukan. Maska (Ljubl.) , zima 2007, letn. 22, št. 1/2, str. 23-41. [COBISS.SI-ID 2107227 ]
Referee
100. BEUERMANN, Dimitrij . Sodobni ples : predmetni izpitni katalog za splošno maturo leta 2005 , (Predmetni izpitni katalog za splošno maturo). Ljubljana: Državni izpitni center, 2003. 37 str. [COBISS.SI-ID 512045694 ]
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