This Is Television

Judy Radul's show This Is Television is on view till the 19th of October at the daadgalerie in Berlin. The exhibition encompasses a 16 mm film, video stills and a set-up of monitors and cameras for which I compiled a video programme that contains artistic reflections on the medium as well as direct interventions in broadcast or cable television. The pacing of these videos is used to manipulate a local television feed through the intermediary of two live cameras.

Artists/directors range from Willem de Ridder and Wim T. Schippers to Sean Snyder, from General Idea to Harun Farocki, from Gregg Bordowitz to Alexander Kluge, from Christoph Schlingensief to Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf.

Time Is the Place

Starting in Germany, History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image is now available— for instance from amazon.de, but also from real bookstores that aren't data-guzzling kraken, such as pro qm. 

The rest of the world is to follow very soon.

History in Motion contains 312 action-packed pages, with 82 illustrations in glorious black and white. Very reasonably priced at € 19, so you won't have to sell an organ to buy a copy.

 

New Left Review: Performance After Television

Issue no. 80 of New Left Review (March/April 2013) contains my article "Performance Art After Television," which is part of chapter 3 of History in Motion. In general, that book would hardly have come into being without NLR's receptiveness and support, even when faced with half-baked work-in-progress. The "art" bit was added to my original title "Performance After Television" so as to give a slightly clearer sense of the subject; after all, this is not an art journal. The essay shares the pages of this issue with, for instance, contributions on the Arab uprisings and the Nobel Prize for Literature—not to mention the Decline of the West.

The article is online here, but it's behind a paywall.

Image: Eran Schaerf's 2002 installation version of his Listener's Voice Project.

www.newleftreview.org

Getting there

This isn't the final cover; the subtitle has changed in the meantime. We're in the proofing stage right now. Getting there one comma at a time. Design by Surface.

History in Motion

The holidays were taken up largely by the effort to get my book History in Motion ready to go into the design phase. History in Motion, which is to be published by Sternberg this spring, is an investigation into the temporalization of history in a media-saturated society, in which "historical events" penetrate daily life in real time. Specifically, I analyse ways in which time-based art (film, video, performance) continuously re-models and modulates the representation and the production of history within this temporal economy. The first chapter of this book analyzes the migration of moving images (film, video) to the exhibition space in the context of various notions of the “liberation of time,” whereas chapter two discusses its dark reverse: the manipulation of the dialectic of shock and suspense in film, TV, and the Internet. The third chapter continues the analysis of television with a focus on the medium’s role in establishing a regime of “general performance,” and chapter four in turn develops this by tracing the growing importance of play in work since the 1960s. Chapter five takes up the notion of performance again in relation to that of the event, as well as that of the act, to discuss possibilities for aesthetic action. Finally, chapter six considers the ongoing event that is the new “unnatural history” in an age of global warming and genetic engineering. 

The notions used—such as suspense or the event—are exploited for their potential to problematize disciplinary boundaries and entrenched methodologies. I do not propose an abstract negation of my own discipline, art history, but this is an art history that has undergone transformation through confrontations with philosophy, cultural theory, and film and media studies—a dialogue that in turn constitutes interventions in these disciplinary formations. Artists (or, in more general terms, cultural practitioners) discussed range from Harun Farocki to Eran Schaerf, from Guy Debord to Louise Lawler, from Robert Jasper Grootveld to Hito Steyerl, from Hitchcock to Wendelien van Oldenborgh.

One of the most fun parts of making such a book is making a montage of images that illustrates but also complements and sometimes even heckles one's text. There can be motifs running through image sequence that are hardly addressed in the text, and at times there are odd little resonances that can take on the qualities of a private joke. In the coming weeks we'll see just how many illustrations we can include in the book. I'm not even sure yet if both images I post here (a photo of Neuschwanstein from Guy Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni and George Maciunas's version of George Brecht's No Smoking event score) will make the cut. Even if they do, they will they will certainly not sit side by side. Still, since somebody pointed out that one could just as well read the the text of the Brecht/Maciunas piece as "NO EMO KING" it is hard for me not to think of these two disparate images in conjunction with each other.

Ongoing

Dutch academia is in the process of being transformed into an edu-factory in which research has to suit the ideological agenda of the government or private and corporate sponsors, and either try to squeeze their research interests into whatever mega-programme is on offer or simply allow their agenda to be determine by those programmes. 

Meanwhile, there are fortunately some alternative and less market-Stalinist contexts in which scholarship and theory can survive — as forms of praxis that engage with those structures that attempt to make them obsolete.

If I Can't Dance has published an update on our project on Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture, which includes the introduction to (the rough draft of) my essay and an impression of the Amsterdam "screening" of A Picture by Anik Fournier. We are working on a publication, which will  contain my essay, a few shorter texts on specific aspects of the piece, and documentation.  

The Autonomy Project — an informal, under-funded and highly stimulating initiative by a number of art schools, art history departments and the Van Abbemuseum — is also continuing. The autonomy issue of Open contains a number of texts based on last year's Autonomy Symposium, and the recently published issue of the Autonomy Newspaper, which can be downloaded for free here, also reflects (on) this symposium. As usual with the Autonomy Newspaper, there are a number of contributions by students. We're now working on a reader with historical and recent source texts, to be published by Afterall. The Autonomy Project has also has an impact on into my upcoming book History in Motion.

Open no. 23: Autonomy

Issue no. 23 of Open is dedicated to autonomy in and between aesthetics and politics. As member of the Autonomy Project, I guest-edited this issue alongside editor in chief Jorinde Seijdel. The issue contains essays—some of them based on talks given at the Autonomy Symposium at the Van Abbemuseum by authors including Joost de Bloois, John Byrne, Andrea Fraser, Peter Osborne, Gerald Raunig, Hito Steyerl and myself, as well as an interview with Franco "Bifo" Berardi by Willem van Weelden and a dialogue between Jacques Rancière and Thomas Hirschhorn. As always, there are a few blemishes, including the inevitable tiny-but-irritating editorial oversights. People were using up their energy reserves, and it shows. I suppose, given the issue's subject, these glitches can be said to posses a certain recursivity.

The same might be said for the issue's horrendous full title, "Autonomy: New Forms of Freedom and Independence in Art and Culture," was in fact imposed by the publisher, as was the questionable cover image. Still, as a rich collection of texts that think through the complex history as well as the potential of the notion of autonomy, this is a good penultimate issue for Open, at turns rigorous and imaginative, and occasionally both at the same time. My own essay, "Autonomy After the Fact," problematizes the relation between aesthetic and political conceptions of autonomy, and discusses Harold Rosenberg's notion of the act as well as Institutional critique and the "performative turn" made by its more recent manifestations, and recent forms of collective action in and beyond art. The essay is also part of my History in Motion project; the book is being readied for publication this autumn.

There will be one more issue in the current form, after which Open will be (as Brian Holmes put it) closed and hopefully reopened. SKOR, the foundation that co-published the journal with NAi publishers, will soon cease to exist as a result of the Dutch funding cuts, and the editor is busy trying to ensure some sort of restart. The new Open will probably be an online platform first and foremost, which would at least mean that the text can be accessed by a potentially wider readership than the  old Open, which suffered from a minimal and shambolic distribution. My essay from the autonomy issue is online here. (Note that the caption on p. 98 incorrectly gives 1952 as the publication year of these images; it is in fact 1960.) The print edition is available at amazon, and even at select bookstores! 

The Autonomy Project has also published a series of "Autonomy Newspapers," mostly written by students; issue no. 3 is online and can be downloaded here. 


Image: A black box, in homage of Hito Steyerl's essay in Open 23.

Coming Soon

On the 12th of June, a new version of Louise Lawler's 1979 work A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture will be presented in Amsterdam, as part of a "Performance in Residence" project I'm doing with the curatorial platform If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. The Stedelijk Museum is also a partner in organizing the Amsterdam version of A Movie.

From the If I Can't Dance site: "Performance in Residence ‘hosts’ a performance-related (body of) work for a substantial period of time, allowing a researcher to engage in an in-depth inquiry. A public presentation marks the start of the research, and the conclusions are presented at the end of the period in the form of an essay, exhibition, performance or other. With this programme, If I Can’t Dance aims to research performances as case studies and proposes to connect archival research to practice."

A small initiative such as If I Cant Dance's "Performance in Residence" research initiative is much appreciated at a moment when Dutch universities are actively demolishing pockets of research and reflection that had not yet been brought into line with the prevailing ideological-economical imperatives; it doesn't matter what you do and if it makes any sense at all, as long as it somehow pretends to stimulate "the creative industries."

A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture at The Movies, Haarlemmerdijk 161-163, 12 June, 7 PM. There will be a discussion following the piece, with contributions by Andrea Fraser and myself, among others.

Image: Poster for the 1983 version of A Movie.

Afterall: Wendelien van Oldenborgh

The Spring 2012 edition of Afterall (no. 29) contains articles on Wendelien van Oldenborgh by Emily Pethick and by me. My essay focuses on her three slide pieces Après la reprise, la prise (2009), Pertinho de Alphaville (2010) and Supposing I love you. And you also love me (2011).

The text is online in its entirety here.

Performance and Action

One year ago, in January 2011, Paul Chan and I edited an issue of e-flux journal on the rise of right-wing populisms. In the absence of immediately successful counter-strategies, this was conceived as a first stock-taking in the form of a series of "reports." The issue's Dylanesque title, "Idiot Wind," was taken by some as a symptom of ill-advised leftist arrogance, as a sign that we foolishly underestimate the intelligence of populist strategies and the need to learn from them. One would have thought that most contributions made it perfectly clear that the desperate logic of right-wing populism will ultimately have disastrous effects even for most of those who at the moment think they stand to gain (and perhaps actually stand to gain, for the time being) from its rise. Of course Geert Wilders and Sarah Palin are smart; they cleverly boost the idiot wind.

In some ways, the outlook is now less bleak, as the second half of 2011 has seen a wave of new protest movements in a number of countries. The December issue of e-flux journal was made under the impact of Occupy Wall Street, and contained brilliant contributions by Bifo Berardi and Hito Steyerl, among others; the current (January) issue continues the analysis of the ongoing social and political upheavals as well as the economical, cultural and technological factors that shape them. It features my essay "General Performance." This text, part of my History in Motion book project, discusses both artistic performance and today's performative economy, which is undergoing a profound crisis at the moment. From the text:

"The term 'performance' is slippery even within relatively well-defined contexts. In today’s economy, it not only refers to the productivity of one’s labor but also to one’s actual, quasi-theatrical self-presentation, one’s self-performance in an economy where work has become more dependent on immaterial factors. As an artist or writer or curator, you perform when you do your job, but your job also includes giving talks, going to openings, being in the right place at the right time. Transcending the limits of the specific domain of performance art, then, is what I would call general performance as the basis of the new labor. The emergence of new forms of performance in art in the 1960s was itself a factor in the emergence of this contemporary form of labor, which is, after all, connected to a culturalization of the economy."

Later on in this essay, I examine how new forms of activism emerge within the performative regime of contemporary capitalism, exploring and exploding the contradictions of contemporary labour. That these collective acts can generate an emancipatory political narrative strong enough to challenge the relentless mythmaking on the other end of the political spectrum remains questionable, but at least there are now partially positive as well as negative examples to scrutinize and learn from.

Performance, Live or Dead

The Fall 2011 edition of the venerable Art Journal (vol. 70, no. 3) contains a round table on performance, registration and reenactment edited by Amelia Jones: "Performance, Live or Dead." This is not the transcription of an actual round table session, but rather a series of short texts by various practitioners of art and theory. In my contribution, "Performing Time" (pp. 41-44), I look back on my 2005 exhibition Life, One More: forms of reenactment in contemporary art, and discuss my shift towards greater interest in the ways in which performances (reenacted or not) function within the current "economy of time." This strand of thought is developed further in the article "General Performance" and in my upcoming book History in Motion. 

Together with Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones also edited the anthology Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (published by Intellect Ltd in London; distributed in the US through University of Chicago Press), which will be released in February 2012. The selection of texts looks excellent, and in contrast to some other anthologies out there, the editors strove to present texts in their entirety, which to my mind greatly increases an anthology's use value. However, this does mean that this (massive) volume comes with a hefty price tag. Included is an essay of mine that was part of Secret Publicity: "Progressive Striptease: Performance Ideology Past and Present". Overall I'm still quite happy with this text, which was published in Secret Publicity, though I erred by turning Kristine Stiles into some sort of ideological bogeyman on the basis of a few remarks.

Texts on aspects of performance seem to come with more than the usual share of contentious exchanges — perhaps because performance attracts the attention of several academic disciplines, including art history and, of course, performance studies. Territorial battles often inform writings. This is also apparent from the reception of Life, Once More. In the catalogue essay, I attempted to think with and through a certain critical tradition that problematized the traditional theater and its perceived separation of actors and audience, comparing the “activation” of audience members in historical pageants and in the modern war reenactments that emerged in the early 1960s to the art events and happenings that emerged in the same period, analysing both as (compromised) attempts to rethink and reform performance in a period in which Debord’s “society of the spectacle” was itself undergoing a performative turn. The traditional association of “spectacle” with “passive viewing”, then, became less tenable than before, as did that of performance with liveness and uniqueness and the identification of recordings as weak derivatives of the “orginal.”

Today I would define and qualify my use of terms such “theater” and “spectacle” much more, but to suggest that my essay aligns theater as such with “slavish imitation”, as Rebecca Schneider does in Performing Remains, her bid to become the go-to reenctment scholar (we all need goals in life, I suppose), is to miss the point in a rather spectacular manner. On the basis of my characterization of Jackson Pollock's fear that, in performing for Hans Namuth’s camera, his creative act had “degenerated” into mere play-acting, Schneider proceeds to pathologize me and my supposedly deep-held aversion to the theatre. It seems that performing the part of somebody's bogeyman is part of the game.

Sloth Time

Things will be a bit slow during the first half of 2011, though some publications (most of them having been underway for some time) will see the light of day. Aside from teaching one class this semester, I'm trying to keep my time free for my next book, History in Motion. Like the sloth, that unfairly named and unjustly maligned animal, the book writer needs to exist in a different temporality, a duration without obligations and deadlines, or at least as few as possible - making slow progress that often seems futile to foreign eyes.

History in Motion deals with the impact of time-based media (film, video and television, live performance) on the representation and the production of history. The book will contain the following chapters, most of them radically reworked and expanded articles: 1. "Transforming Time," 2. "Suspense and Shock," 3. "Playtimes," 4. "Performance After Television," 5. "Art After the Event," 6. "Unnatural History."

Meanwhile, I'm engaged in invisible work on the Autonomy Project, which moves on apace with a second summer school and a large public conference in the fall, from 7 till 9 October at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. For more information on the Autonomy Project, see http://platformmodernekunst.blogspot.com/. For the fall semester, Eric de Bruyn and I are also developing a joint academic seminar (both at VU University and at the University of Leiden) on film screenings (or film séances,to use our terminology) from the 1920s to the present, which will hopefully be accompanied by a series of public events, and possibly a small exhibition. The project reflects my growing interest in forging connections between different types of intellectual and educational activity: teaching, writing, curating, and the research they all involve.

Additionally, and connected to this "séance" project, I'll be participating in the "Performance in Residence" programme of the curatorial platform If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. For this programme, a researcher investigates one historical performance during a period of six months, and presents the piece and the research in public. My turn will start in September. Hopefully I'll be able to emerge from sloth time by that point.

Image: Barbara Visser with Veronica Ditting, Slothism (poster), 2008.

New Left Review no 66: Playtimes

Issue no. 66 of the New Left Review (November/December 2010)contains my essay "Playtimes" (pp. 125/140). The text grew out of a talk I gave in a seminar on games and play organized by Eric de Bruyn in Groningen, and like many recent texts it is part the work on my book-in-progress History in Motion, on the representation and production of history through moving images in film, video, and performance.

"Playtimes" discusses various moments in history of the theory of play - of play as something opposed to modern capitalist society, as an activity more at home in the distant past or in a possible future. From Schiller to Kaprow and from Huizinga to Debord, play was seen as an anachronistic presence in modernity.

This essay analyses various forms that such theorizing took, from early Romantic-Idealist utopias and their collapse in the later phases of the French Revolution and during the Restoration to Huizinga´s conservative pessimism and neo-avant-garde´s attempts, in the 1950s and 1960s, to unleash a revolution of play unhindered by rules - of play freed from any basis in conventional games.

By now, play seems to have caught up with the present, or vice versa; post-Fordist capitalism seems to have made a "ludic tun" echoing that of the 1960s neo-avant-garde. But if the modern theory of play is itself something of an anachronism in the age of game studies, this text argues that it may be a productive one.

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2873

Image: Rod Dickinson´s version of Debord´s Game of War, made for Class Wargames.

Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy

As one artist told me recently, the Van Abbemuseum is the only Dutch museum that one would even consider criticizing seriously - as an ambitious enterprise worthy of an immanent critique that rather than merely external criticism. In the near future the Van abbe will hopefully get company from the Stedelijk Museum, after years of utter malaise. One symptom of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Dutch museums for 20th- and 21-century art is their chronic inability to develop projects that involve significant and innovative art-historical research and/or a theoretical component. I certainly don't see anything comparable here to a historical investigation such as the MUMOK's Changing Channels, and in a different way the project To the Arts, Citizens! organized by Serralves in Porto (the exhibition opens on 21 November) likewise offers a stark contrast to Dutch business as usual.

There is a historical section with various documents, but this exhibition is mainly a survey of work by youngish contemporary artists (and collectives) focusing "on some of the intersections between art and politics − understood as action, representation or reference − as manifested in our time." The list of artists (which includes Bureau d'Etudes, Chto Delat, Zachary Formwalt, Nicoline van Harskamp and Gert Jan Kocken) looks promising, though it remains to be seen if the project can escape the usual problems of the museification of the political. The point of departure seems somewhat generic - and the title To the Art, Citizens! does not strike one as the best possible choice. However, I am looking forward to the two-part accompanying publication; one volume will be the catalogue while the other contains essays commissioned for the occasion from Peio Aguirre, Federico Ferrari, Brian Holmes, Roberto Merrill, Hito Steyerl and myself.

The authors were contacted well in advance, which suggests an awareness that these things take time - an awareness that is rather rare in my neck of woods. I haven't yet read the other texts yet, but the montage looks like it might be a productive one, and conducive to thinking about and beyond the limits of such museum projects. My text, "Acting on the Omnipresent Frontiers of Autonomy," investigates the use value of the notion of autonomy in these interesting times.

http://www.serralves.pt/actividades/detalhes.php?id=1758/

Image: overgrown rafts by Robert Jasper Grootveld moored next to the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Grey Room no. 41: Transforming Time

Issue no. 41 of Grey Room (Fall 2010) contains my article "Transforming Time," which is based in part on my earlier essay "Liberating Time" in the Art of Projection book. This, whose antecedents reach back much further than the Art of Projection essay "Liberating Time" from the Art of Projection essay, is now a more or less finished part of my History in Motion book project. Other chapters will deal with the dialectic of suspense and shock, with the ideology of play, with television and performance, with unnatural history, and (finally) with revolution and the event.

Transforming Time constitutes a specific take on the rise of film and video art in the last few decades. The focus is on art that I call "cinematic," which is to say that it exists in relation to the history and conventions of the cinema, regardless of whether the artwork in question uses actual film as its material substrate or, for example, video.

Against the background of theoretical analyses of the regimentation of time under capitalism by thinkers such as Debord and Negri (the latter is also interviewed in this issue of Grey Room) Transforming Time explores ways in which various works of cinematic art intervene in the dominant temporal regime, constituting momentary transformations and possibly liberations of time. Artists/directors discussed in the text include Godard, Joseph Cornell, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Stan Douglas,and Günther Förg; the final section focusses on Harun Farocki, Allan Sekula and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, all with works that constitute cinematic reflections on the factory.

The full text can be accessed here: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00009

Image: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Après la reprise, la prise, 2009.

Texte zur Kunst no. 79: Life at Work

I served as co-editor for the September issue of Texte zur Kunst, "Life at Work." This is André Rottmann's final issue as editor. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with André these past few years, and he seems to have dealt with the strain of processing my last-minute edits of translations and rewrites of edits remarkably well. Freed of his editorial burden, André will now be able to focus on his PhD thesis and other writing projects. Luckily, his final effort at Texte zur Kunst is a strong, coherent and stimulating collection of contributions by some of the most interesting authors and artists working in the US and Europe today (and by me). To conjure with some imaginary statistics: I'd say that whereas the abstraction issue, my previous stint as guest editor, was 75 % successful, this time around we're nearing the 95 % mark.

In modern and contemporary aesthetics, the relationship between art and life is as crucial as it is problematical; this issue seeks to re-examine this unavoidable pairing, with a focus on performance art and post-Fordist immaterial labor. It contains essays by Eric de Bruyn, Sabeth Buchmann, Paul Chan, Branden Joseph, Rachel Haidu, and well as my own text "Acting in the Age of Performance" and a conversation between Hito Steyerl and myself on objecthood and subjectivity. My own essay, "Acts in the Age of Virtuoso Performance" (German version pp. 36-53, English version pp. 124-132), starts with Allan Kaprow's notion of the artist "changing jobs" in order to become a beach bum or a politician; I relate Kaprow's idea to Harold Rosenberg's writings on the act and his concern that the act was absorbed and neutralized by events. This is the background for a discussion of the contemporary regime of performance:

"We live in a culture of performance, and this 'performance' is as ambiguous as Rosenberg’s “acting”, standing both for one’s quasi-dramatic self-performance and for one’s economic achievement—and increasingly, the former is essential to the latter. If the act of old was, in theory, its own norm, contemporary performance constantly tries to meet external targets. To act is to move beyond one’s previous identity and position, whereas to perform is to 'get with the programme,' to be in the event, to readjust and recalibrate. To act is to step beyond the now; to perform is to extend the now, to prolong the present. But this need not be a static opposition. What is a failed performance if not an act, whether intentional or not?

"Using the term 'virtuosity' to refer to “the special capabilities of a performing artist”, Paolo Virno stresses that virtuosity is 'An activity without an end product: the performance of a pianist or of a dancer does not leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, capable of continuing after the performance has ended.' On some basic level, all of us are virtuosos, even if we are clumsy virtuoso; speaking is the most basic act of virtuosity. Of course, the term is traditionally associated with great opera singers or musicians; but while artistic and intellectual labor long were exceptions within developing industrial capitalism, Virno notes that 'Virtuosity becomes labor for the masses with the onset of the culture industry. It is here that the virtuoso begins to punch a time card.' Time cards, of course, have become an anachronism; the screenwriter working for one of the classic Hollywood studios in the 1930s or 40s had to subject to this temporal regime, but the contemporary freelance writer is on duty all the time.

"In a number of interconnected and overlapping texts, Jan Verwoert has reflected on the problematic position of the act in a society marked by the pressure to perform: 'Where do the barricades stand today, anyway? We are the avant-garde, but we are also the job slaves. We serve the customers who consume the communication and sociability that we produce. We work in the kitchens and call centres of the newly opened restaurants and companies of the prospectively burgeoning new urban centres of the service society. To offer our services we are willing to travel. Being mobile is part of our performance. So we travel, we go west to work, we go north to work, we are all around, we fix the minds, houses and cars of those who stay in their offices […] What would it mean to put up resistance against a social order in which performativity has become a growing demand, if not the norm? What would it mean to resist the need to perform? Is ‘resistance’ even a concept that would be useful to evoke in this context?' What Verwoert proposes is basically the development of strategies for turning performances back into acts, for making the leap from the implementation of an economic imperative to forms of action – that may in fact take the form of choosing not to act. While this could certainly be the nucleus for an ethic of performance, individual ethics need to be placed in a constellation that would ultimately delineate a political-aesthetical project.

"Jérôme Bel’s choreography Cédric Andrieux (2009) is part of Bel’s series on individual dancers, who tell the audience about their lives and dance extracts from various pieces. Cédric Andrieux danced for Merce Cunningham for years; when he dances extract from pieces by Cunningham and others, there is no music; his breath is clearly audible, stressing the intense labor required for performing Cunningham’s choreography – which, as Andrieux emphasizes, regularly push dancers to and beyond the limits of their possibilities. Practice with Cunningham was a 'slow and laborious process'; the nearly impossible things Cunningham demanded resulted in a feeling of humiliation, as Andrieux cannot keep torso in a strictly horizontal position; when balancing on one leg, he makes little jumps so as to not loose balance. During daily practice, Cunningham had the dancers do the same exercises every morning. Noting that it was a Cagean 'zen thing' for Cunningham, a way of emphasizing that every moment is unique and that there is in fact no such thing as repetition, Andrieux adds that 'For me, mostly it’s totally depressing.” The performance is not, however, some kind of debunking exercise. Andrieux notes that Cunningham never remarked on mistakes, stressing that “it’s when movement starts to be awkward that it becomes interesting.' Still, the dancer mentions his relief upon leaving Cunningham and shedding the dreaded 'unitard' outfit. He wore more comfortable clothes and experienced less physical pain dancing for Trisha Brown or Jérôme Bel—with the latter, 'We are people before we are dancers.' Repeating Cunningham’s repetitions, Andrieux examines himself as a quasi-subject and quasi-object, as body in perpetual training.

"Cédric Andrieux examines the labor behind and in the dance; it is performative treatise on the aesthetico-political economy. Bel no longer looks for life elsewhere, à la Kaprow; he locates it in the practice at hand. Nor does he engage in an ultimately empty celebration of the artistic act as free and therefore universal, as a mythical substitute for political action, à la Rosenberg; instead, he examines artistic acts as being universal precisely in so far as they are concrete examples of contemporary labor. To be sure, to the extent that such a practice becomes hardened fact, becomes a defined oeuvre, it also needs to be negated – with precision, with attention to its specific successes and failures. To this end, it needs to be put in a provisional montage with other performances – performances that may or may not be art, but that together form a constellation of acts that evince various admixtures of forethought and improvisation, of refusal and over-acting, of planning and breakdown."

http://www.textezurkunst.de/

Edit: a PDF of my essay has been posted here.

Images: Jérôme Bel, Cédric Andrieux, 2009.

Chronovision

Until June 6, the MUMOK in Vienna is showing Changing Channels, an exhibition (curated by Matthias Michalka) that investigates the different ways in which artists have used and reflected on television, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The catalogue contains essays by Manuela Ammer, Tom Holert, Christian Höller, David Joselit, Pamela Lee, Matthias Michalka and myself. My text is called "Chronovision", and it investigates television as a time machine.

"Television is video, video is television; they are part of the same technological dispositif. What is a video artist if not a television producer without a station at his disposal? The formal characteristics of much video art are hardly compatible with the dominant regime in TV programming, video art has developed its own modes of distribution, mostly based on tapes or DVDs sold in limited editions. However, television remained an object of fascination for artists—both abject other and ideal to be aspired to. If, as Martha Rosler has argued, video art was accompanied by myths revolving around its resistance to corporate TV, with an artist like Nam June Paik functioning as a mythical hero who '[freed] video from the domination of corporate TV,' and who 'has done all the bad and disrespectful things to television that the art world’s collective imaginary might wish to do,' it is equally true that there is a history of attempted rapprochements between video art and television that reads like an extended tragicomedy. In the collective imaginary of the video art world, television was both bad and good object, a tainted ideal to be rescued from its fallen state.

"In the 1970s, René Berger distinguished between macro TV (broadcast television), meso TV (local cable), and micro TV (video); at most, some artists managed to infiltrate and utilize the meso level of local cable TV, whose democratic potential was never fully realized. Some managed to establish a foothold in public television; Paik worked with American PBS affiliates such as WNET and WGBH, and Gerry Schum produced some programs for German television. However, in a symptomatic move Shum eventually retreated from macro to micro distribution, moving from the Fernsehgalerei Gerry Schum to the videogalerie schum. Even Warhol struggled for years to get his work on television, finally getting his own MTV show in the 1980s, in a format that hardly lived up to the promise of some of Warhol’s unbroadcast 1970s television projects. But whether it took place on a micro, meso, or macro scale, video art at its best pushed the logic of television to a point where the medium’s potential and its failings, its complexity and its contradictions are illuminated.

"In this text, the writing of history is not conceived as the amassing of positive facts, but rather as the tracing of failed acts, unrealized potentials, missed encounters—the reconstruction of what never took on the positive solidity of an unavoidable historical fact. This essay deals with some episodes in the hesitant history that is the dialogue between (video) art and television, and it does so precisely by focusing on the time-based nature of video and television. Television is the first medium that presented a potentially uninterrupted flow of images into people’s homes (and other places), penetrating daily life much more thoroughly than film had done. Television has often been analysed primarily as a spatial network, or in terms of a dialectic of network and object (the TV set as commodity), and when the temporality of television is theorized, the focus is often on real time and liveness—or on the ideology of liveness. This was already a crucial factor in Rudolf Arnheim’s 1935 essay on the new medium, in which he argued that TV can give us a feeling 'for what happens simultaneously in different places. For the first time in the history of mans striving for understanding, simultaneity can be experienced as such, not merely translated into a succession in time. Our slow bodies and near-sighted eyes no longer hamper us. We come to recognize the place where we are located as one among many: we become more modest, less egocentric.' Here, the focus is on the simultaneity that live transmission creates between different places, and the temporal dimension of this live connection is hardly considered; liveness and the resultant simultaneity are spatialized."

http://www.mumok.at

End of year roundup: book reviews, book in progress

Reviews of Idols of the Market have recently been published in Metropolis M, Open, and Texte zur Kunst. Meanwhile, aside from a grant application for a big project, I’m working on another book called, tentatively, History in Motion. This quotation from a film by Harun Farocki gives an idea of its point of departure: “Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and to stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on, and have to think: if film is possible then history, too, is possible.”

Which consequences did the rise of moving images (film and video) have for the representation and the production of history? If film was destined to “portray the past and to stage the present”, as Harun Farocki states, History in Motion wants to focus on the interconnection between these two activities—not only in relation to film, but also in relation to other time-based media, including live performance and its afterimages. If it was traditionally a fleeting presence, the stuff of elusive memories, in modernity the moving image became storable. How does this influence the relation between representation and event, between the time of the image and historical time, and between past history and the history-in-progress of a contested present?

The book’s analysis is mainly aimed at the past few decades, at the post-Fordist phase and its temporal specificities: flexibility, the erosion of the distinction between work and leisure, permanent media presence. However, the temporal transformations of society and culture associated with post-Fordism, dominated by the permanent presence of television and then the internet, but haunted by the afterlife of cinema, will be related back to earlier shifts, in particular to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism—the early years of film.

This probably gives a highly inadequate impression. Analog, concrete thinker that I am, I’m notoriously bad at giving a priori summaries of what work in progress will end up being like. Although I’ve already done a lot of groundwork with various articles—tagged "history in motion" on this blog—things crystallize, dissolve and coalesce during the (re)writing process, and if I knew beforehand what I would end up with, I couldn’t muster the energy to actually do it. Admittedly, this is something of a handicap in a society in which you rarely get credit on the basis of your history – only on the basis of meticulously drafted, carefully planned futures.

Image: Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986, installed at Witte de With in 1994.

A Few Quotations for the Holidays

When I was rereading Debord and Sanguinetti's 1972 Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time shortly after the meltdown of the Copenhagen climate conference, I came across some passages that simply demanded to be posted:

"The recent appearance in the spectacle of a flood of moralizing speeches and pledges of retail solutions to what governments and their mass media call pollution, seeks to hide, at the same time that it must reveal, this obvious fact: capitalism has finally delivered proof that it cannot develop productive forces any further. It is not however quantitatively, as many people thought it necessary to understand, that capitalism will have proved incapable of pursuing this development, but qualitatively."

"The society that has every technical means to modify the biological foundations of the whole of life on earth is also the society that, thanks to the same separate technical and scientific development, has every means of control and of mathematically incontrovertible forecasting to measure in advance exactly what the growth in alienated productive forces of class society can lead to - with dates, according to a best- or worst-case scenario - in terms of the catastrophic break-up of the human environment."

"Pollution and the proletariat are today the two concrete aspects of the critique of political economy."

Oh yes, and happy holidays.

Proletarian Acting

From September 15, Argos in Brussels will show the exhibition Actors & Extras: "The concept of the exhibition is based on the contrast between the actor and the extra. The dividing line between both is the difference between cognisance and ignorance, pre-eminence and insignificance. An actor represents a process of embodiment, vocality, and the ability to give direction to an activity. An extra is a voiceless figure in a background crowd: a body without embodiment. If the extra, in contrast, embodies anything at all, it is a conflict of location. The tension area between background action as abstract, modulative, and manipulatable human material on the one hand, and the consciously acting individual on the other, motives the exploration of social relations of power and the place of collectivity. Works that have the figure of the extra as their subject often have to be read as social and/or political allegories."

For the accompanying publication, I wrote an essay titled "Proletarian Acting." The starting point for this text is as follows:

"The focus in some recent art on the extra, who is called “the silent proletarian of the cinema” in Mark Lewis’s video The Pitch, thus has to be seen as one aspect of a wider questioning of film performance and an exploration of liminal states in performance. In the end, the interest in alternative modes of performance is aimed at transcending the dichotomy between the actor—especially the star—and the extra, and thus abandoning the category of the extra itself. Such a project clearly is of more than merely academic interest in an economy in which work is increasingly redefined in performative terms: rather than selling abstract labour-power, the worker is supposed to sell himself by enacting his or her subjectivity. No longer a classic proletarian, and certainly not silent, this self-performer is the actually existing form of avant-garde models of performance."

The text goes on to discuss a number of films and performances, including work by Allan Kaprow, Augusto Boal, Jeff Wall, and Dora Garcia, in the context of a discussion of the post-Fordist focus on play and self-performance.

http://www.argosarts.org
Image: Dora Garcia, Instant Narrative (2006/2007).