open

Texts

In tracing the thinking around socially engaged, participatory art, there are a number of texts that are not only relevant but crucial, and yet, are often ignored. A bibliography appears at the end of OPEN, but here are some excerpts that serve to lay a ground and/or to which we are responding as we write.

Death

"Were the author truly dead, it would be impossible to differentiate between participatory and nonparticipatory, because this can only occur through the celebrated surrender of authorship by the artist. The general delight surrounding the idea of the death of the author should not belie the fact that the author must always preordain this demise. One might also claim that the enactment of this self-abdication, this dissolution of the self into the masses, grants the author the possibility of controlling the audience--whereby the viewer forfeits his secure external position, his aesthetic distance from the artwork, and thus becomes not just a participant but also an integral part of the artwork. In this way participatory art can be understood not only as a reduction, but also as an extension, of authorial power." Boris Groys (Frieling, 23)

The Temporary Autonomous Zone

"And--the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control. And here we should introduce the concept of psychotopology (and -topography) as an alternative "science" to that of the State's surveying and mapmaking and "psychic imperialism." Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot "control" its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features. We are looking for "spaces" (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones--and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs [Temporary Autonomous Zones]. ...

(Bey, n.p. from section "The Psychotopolgy of Everyday Life")

The TAZ as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of anarchist society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration (see Appendix C). Here we might also invoke Fourier and his concept of the senses as the basis of social becoming--"touch-rut" and "gastrosophy," and his paean to the neglected implications of smell and taste.

The ancient concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lie outside the scope of "profane time," the measuring-rod of the State and of History. These holidays literally occupied gaps in the calendar--intercalary intervals. By the Middle Ages, nearly a third of the year was given over to holidays. Perhaps the riots against calendar reform had less to do with the "eleven lost days" than with a sense that imperial science was conspiring to close up these gaps in the calendar where the people's freedoms had accumulated--a coup d'etat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival.

Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in the midst of armed struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia which has slipped loose (or been forced to vanish) from its intercalary interval and is now at liberty to pop up anywhere or when. Freed of time and place, it nevertheless possesses a nose for the ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci; the science of psychotopology indicates "flows of forces" and "spots of power" (to borrow occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ spatio-temporally, or at least help to define its relation to moment and locale.

The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.)--and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. "Fight for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!"

Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style "tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics--we should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.

The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss-- in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form--or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlatch culture.) Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelTAZ

Fucking Hippies

"And then they took their shirts off and burned the whole thing down." —Bizigo, "Burning Man and the Re-Emergence of Social Practice," Stump Press Ltd 2007, Seattle.

Social Sculpture

"To Beuys...his idea of 'social sculpture,' consisting of lengthy discussions with large gatherings of people in various contexts, was a means primarily to extend the definition of art beyond specialist activity. Carried out by artists, 'social sculpture' would mobilize every individual's latent creativity, ultimately moulding the society of the future. The Free University, an international, multi-disciplinary network set up by Beuys in conjunction with artists, economists, psychologists, etc., is based on the same premises." (Goldberg, 96)

More Beuys

Economics is not only a money-making principle. It can be a way of production to fulfill the demands of people all over the world. Capital is humankind’s ability in work, not just money. True economics equals the creativity of people. Joseph Beuys

It is from art that all work ensues.

Thinking in the free individual is a recurrence of the evolutionary principle in existence since the beginning of time. Human being himself becomes creator of the world and experiences how he can continue creation.

One has to set in motion a much more inward, deep-seated machinery, which creates this warmth, this evolutionary warmth, which enables us to become beings capable of carrying evolution forward

…we have to take a more careful interest in the store of things with which we live, and in the midst of which we live…

A true experience of things means: giving life meaning, quite simply noticing how important life is, that you are alive, and not overlooking the fact that life may be sad, may be a burden and might not amount to much; let’s say, getting rid of all these forms of despondency to which people are often subject, by making something new of oneself. And in making something new of oneself one is obviously enabling something new to happen with regard to other human beings too. But if you just do this by and for yourself, you’ll see that there’s no warmth process involved. If you bring about something in yourself it only becomes a warmth process once you involve others, and hear from other people about what they do. But this is [still] not necessarily have to be a ‘warmth work’. No, this is not a must. Rather one has to let others have the complete freedom to express what they draw out of themselves. […if only men were granted absolute liberty, and were compelled to obey no one, they would then voluntarily associate themselves in the common interest, As Bill Sees It] …I can’t say:.. I see things differently, I will simply ignore your existence and draw a clear dividing line. Absolutely not. Instead I have to enter right into the midst of this, for only here do you have a perfect warmth issue, only then do things start to be interesting. The rest is only preparatory work. That’s the field of social sculpture as a new ‘machine’, one could say – as an energy carrier.

After all, people can only express themselves in ways that have material forms. Of course this is already there in language. But if this model, which doesn’t have to be at all grand – everything today is far too grand – if this tangible expression is there, then one can see better where it has come from and whether the matrix of forces that constellates it, let’s say, is really the optimum one. And one can discuss this forever. And this process is culture; this is what it’s all about. It really is not culture if something is just asserted, or made into an ideology, enthroned…

You see, we all still live in a culture that says: there are artists and there are non-artists. This becomes something inhuman, giving rise to the concept of alienation between people. No, every person continually performs material processes. He continually creates interrelationships. Even when he gives, when he defers to another, or the way he behaves in a crowd, there are always, let’s say, form processes at work. Dancers, after all, do nothing other than move, on their feet. And people on a crowded street are basically dancers too. So the moment you become conscious of this, you are involved in this problem. I want to get away from this: from the way the issue of form is laid on artists, or on art in the traditional sense. I want to get things to the stage where people experience themselves as continually involved in this question; and then, as they keep experiencing and creating these material processes, that they basically also experience that social sculpture is a necessity. And that it is necessary to take things in that they normally don’t perceive. …our social organism exists like a living being… Through these activities, undertaken consciously, one can school oneself to perceive this; to perceive the sickness of the social organism as a living being, to perceive its movements – to see what has been formed – in other words, to compare the contemporary shape and form of the social organism with its archetype. This is a sculptural concept, which you arrive at only by practising all this first. Then you perceive sculptural things that are not perceptible with a normal instrument of perception.

...it is so hard for people to draw up a list of criteria, or express them, ...relating to the question: How should human society be structured; what form should it take now? Because they have no sense or perception of the archetype, that is, of the healthy condition of a social organism as it evolves.

... That alone would be ecology if we could grasp this ecological question at its root… Ecology goes further, reaches further, and relates to the social organism’s capacity for life, for this is a living being that we cannot today perceive with our ordinary senses, without practice...

Yes, the very phrase ‘He is the creator of himself and his surroundings’ expresses the fact that the human being creates the world. It is not presumptuous to say this, because this is what is required of human beings. There have been times when a great deal was given to human beings, by leaders and spiritual mediators; when the collective ethos was dominant, and there were, of course, precepts and rules connected with this, which had to be strictly adhered to. This all had a purpose once upon a time. But because we have emancipated ourselves from this..; we can achieve it through our own powers that we have actually acquired during the course of evolution. And because we can do this, it is also required of us.

…our concept of work. …the concept of art must replace the degenerate concept of capital. Art is really tangible capital, and people need to become aware of this. Money and capital cannot be an economic value, capital is human dignity and creativity. And so, in keeping with this, we need to develop a concept of money that allows creativity, or art, so to speak, to be capital. Art is capital. This is not some pipe dream; it is a reality. In other words, capital is what art is. Capital is human capacity and what flows from it. So there are only two organs involved here, or two polar relationships: creativity and human intention, from which a product arises. These are the real economic values, nothing else…. There is only human capacity and what flows from it. And this can continually be discussed and explored in an ongoing dialogue between people, and lead to endless productivity that builds up and rebuilds the world; that under certain circumstances builds up a whole new cosmos and does not destroy it.

Joseph Beuys, What is Art?

"Forging Polyphonic Interlacings Between the Individual and the Social"

The suggestive power of the theory of information has contributed to masking the importance of the enunciative dimensions of communication. It leads us to forget that a message must be received, and not just transmitted, in order to have meaning. Information cannot be reduced to its objective manifestations; it is, essentially, the production of subjectivity, the becoming- consistent [prise de consistence] of incorporeal universes. These last aspects cannot be reduced to an analysis in terms of improbability and calculated on the basis of binary choices. The truth of information refers to an existential event occurring in those who receive it. Its register is not that of the exactitude of facts, but that of the significance of a problem, of the consistency of a universe of values. The current crisis of the media and the opening up of a post- media era are the symptoms of a much more profound crisis.

What I want to emphasize is the fundamentally pluralist, multi-centered, and heterogeneous character of contemporary subjectivity, in spite of the homogenization it is subjected to by the mass media. In this respect, an individual is already a "collective" of heterogeneous components. A subjective phenomenon refers to personal territories - the body, the self - but also, at the same time, to collective territories - the family, the community, the ethnic group. And to what must be added all the procedures for subjectivation embodied in speech, writing, computing, and technological machines.

In pre-capitalist societies, initiation into the things of life and the mysteries of the world were transmitted through relations of family, peer-group, of clan, guild, ritual, etc. This type of direct exchange between individuals has tended to become rare. Subjectivity is forged through multiple mediations, whereas individuals has tended to become rare. Subjectivity is forged through multiple mediations, whereas individual relations between generations, sexes, and proximal groups have weakened. For example, the role of grandparents as an intergenerational memory support for children has very often disappeared. The child develops in a context shadowed by television, computer games, telecommunications, comic strips. ... A new machinic solitude is being born, which is certainly not without merit, but which deserves to be continually reworked such that it can accord with renewed forms of sociality. Rather that relations of opposition, it is a matter of forging polyphonic interlacings between the individual and the social. Thus, a subjective music remains to be thereby composed...

In the midst of this state of affairs, a shaft of meaning must be discovered, that cuts through my impatience for the other to adopt my point of view, and through the lack of good will in the attempt to bend the other to my desired. Not only must I accept this adversity, I must love it for its own sake: I must seek it out, communicate with it, delve into it, increase it. It will get me out of my narcissism, my bureaucratic blindness, and will restore for me a sense of finitude that all the infantilizing subjectivity of the mass media attempts to conceal. Ecosophic democracy would not give itself up to the facility for consensual agreement: it will invest itself in a dissensual metamodelization. With it, responsibility emerges from the self in order to pass to the other. (Guattari)

Relational Art

"Relational art...arises from an observation of the present and from a line of thinking about the fate of artistic activity. Its basic claim--the sphere of human relations as artwork venue--has no prior example in art history, eve if it appears, after the fact, as the obvious backdrop of all aesthetic praxis, and as a modernist theme to cap all modernist themes. Suffice it merely to re-read the lecture given by Marcel Duchamp in 1954, titled "The Creative Process," to become quite sure that interactivity is anything but a new idea...Novelty is elsewhere. It resides in the fact that this generation of artists considers inter-subjectivity and interaction neither as fashionable theoretical gadgets, not as additives (alibis) of a traditional artistic practice. It takes them as a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief, as the main informers of their activity. The space where their works are displayed is altogether the space of interaction, the space of openness that ushers in all dialogue.... What they produce are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences trying to rid themselves of the straitjacket of the ideology of mass communications, in a way, of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out. It is nevertheless quite clear that the age of the New Man, future-oriented manifestos, and calls for a better world all ready to be walked into and lived in is well and truly over. These days, utopia is being lived on a subjective, everyday basis, in the real time of concrete and intentionally fragmentary experiments." (Bourriaud, 44-45)

Bourriaud defines relational art as “an art taking as its theoretical hori- zon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”7 While relational art projects often engage (in order to deconstruct) specific social systems, this is not to imply that these artists operate strictly within the limits of empirical reality. On the contrary, a great many of them, particularly Sophie Calle and Pierre Huyghe, construct and deploy elaborate fictions, and often overlay “real” social systems with those of the artist’s devising. The result can be a blurring of reality and fiction, or the creation of a kind of parallel universe that serves to heighten the audience’s awareness of the contingency of real- ity. Like an elaboration of Morris’ “public mode” and “extended situations,” these projects mimic systems of social relations, and situate the audience squarely within their systems.

http://www.janushead.org/11-2/Cooper.pdf

Ballade in Favor of Those Called Decadents and Symbolists

In all this Paris some few,
We live on pride not costly.
Smitten though we are with booze
Fresh water’s what we like to drink mostly
While breaking our crust a bit toasty.
Let the others eat well and have wine,
And beauty that is never beastly!
We are writers superfine.

Phoebe, when cats turn gray-blue,
Streamlines with a horn’s-end harshly
Our bodies fed on glory’s stew,
Hell drools over, watching largely,
And Phoebus shoots arrows at us archly.
At night we’re cradled by dreams lying
In beds of peach-pits made unposhly.
We are writers superfine.

Many a wit has taken to
The signboard of the Delver hotly
And Lemerre covers each bet on cue,
More than one still makes haste hardily
And tries to enter the breach untardily,
But Vanier at the end of the line
Is the only one who fishes properly.
We are writers superfine.

Envoy
Even though our purse goes mothly,
Princes, we laugh, sweet and divine.
Whatever they say or preach ungodly,
We are writers superfine.

-- Paul Verlaine

On Leaving Art Behind

"All the time, though, my sensibility pointed toward and yearned for an imaginative Elsewhere. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the narrowness of art as a formulation of the imagination. This will sound preposterous to many people, I’m aware, given that art offers and represents extraordinary behavioral freedoms, but in “making art” I found an ultimately enslaving formulation. How so? In art, you can do, yes, anything you want so long as you’re willing to have it end up as art. That isn’t real imaginative freedom, in my view. Inquisitiveness of mind will carry you past art, and apparently I love inquisitiveness of mind more than I love art." (Robbins, n.p. from section "Post-Art")

"Once, the task of the artist was to make good art; now it is to avoid making art of any kind." (Kaprow, 81)

"The arts, at least up to the present, have been poor lessons, except possibly to artists and their tiny publics. Only these vested interests have ever made any high claims for the arts. The rest of us couldn't care less." (Kaprow 99)

"Artists of the world, drop out! You have nothing to lose but your professions!" (Kaprow 109)

First of all...

First of all, we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate actions.

Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new ones, means which are more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and customs, but which must be applied in interrelation with all revolutionary changes.

Guy Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations

All your life will ever be

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.

Pink Floyd