‘Observing art: on performance, prisms, and reflexivity’ (Third Get-Together of the Independent Performing Arts Industry 2015 Berlin) (original) (raw)

Moving Bodies: An Anthropological Approach to Performance Art (Contents and Introduction)

Constantly resisting time and space, performance is an art that historically spotlights the artist within a certain spatial and temporal frame (the here-and-now), in relation to an audience and a specific political, social and cultural context. By allowing the artist to be its first spectator and searching for a simultaneous exchange between performer and spectator, performance art proposes conditions of socialisation that challenge normative structures of power and spectatorship. Starting from an understanding of the artists as researchers working perceptually, reflexively and also qualitatively, this thesis explores the field of performance art and focuses on their relation to the artwork as intimate, subjective, and transformative. The core of my ethnographic fieldwork was developed between October and December 2014 within the frame of two international festivals based in Northern Italy (Turin and Venice) dedicated to the practice of performance art — torinoPERFORMANCEART and the Venice International Performance Art Week. A highly ethnographic, reflexive and subjective approach is combined with a diversified theoretical frame of reference. Phenomenology and embodiment as points of philosophical departure provide the necessary threshold to overcome the dualistic Cartesian subject widely questioned in performance art: a holistic approach to performance as a series of dialogical, relational, and transformative processes thus allows for deeper investigation on its practice and alternative understandings of its documentation. Contemporary art theories further expand the discussion of performance and tackle some of its critical points and enduring ambivalences. Intending to make a contribution to the already existing efforts of those anthropologists working at the crossroads between art and anthropology, as well as to welcome fruitful dialogues with the artists it engages, the attempt is to trespass fixed positions and binary pathways of thought by exploring the potentials of experience, its continuities and transformations that creatively involve and intersect ethnographies and artistic researches.

Participatory Art and Participant Observation: Exploring Social Relationships through Interdisciplinary Practices

2015

This paper concerns participative practices that draw from both art and anthropology. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, it presents creative overlaps and possible exchanges between the respective knowledge fields. The particular setting is an intervention in a suburban London shopping centre that was part of an exploration of migration and diasporic existence. The event was organised by the author in collaboration with an artist and a refugee centre who have a background in the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka. It investigated Tamil relationships with the British environment, and challenged the lack of Tamil visibility. While this kind of interdisciplinary methods provide inviting challenges, the researcher often has to adapt to institutional claims of particular expertise at the stage of research disseminating. However, this paper suggests that maintained interactions between two disciplines, which both are directed towards qualitative social encounters and their performative eff...

‘The constant critique of the state can end up colluding with intensively conservative neoliberal models’. Shannon Jackson on art, politics and labour.

Documenta: Tijdschrift voor theater, 2016

The fourth edition of the Brussels festival Performatik (2015) opened with a panel discussion between Shannon Jackson (professor theatre, dance and performance studies at UC-Berkeley) and Hendrik Folkerts (curator Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). The specific interaction between the performing arts and visual art was at the very heart of this so-called “Brussels biennial of performance art”, an initiative of the renowned Kaaitheater in association with a dozen cultural organizations such as Beursschouwburg, Bozar, Passa Porta & WIELS, to name but a few. All artists invited playfully explored and revised the codes, conventions and expectations of the world of performance and visual art. Choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, for instance, undertook the challenge to rethink her own dance work in Work/Travail/Arbeid, a choreographic exhibition in WIELS. Visual artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx made a reverse move. Drawing from her vast archive, she created a four-hour ‘all-round show’ entitled "THAT's IT!" (+3 FREE minutes). Formally speaking, the resulting artworks did not belong exclusively to either artistic domain. Karel Vanhaesebrouck and Nele Wynants took this opportunity to engage in a conversation with Shannon Jackson about her recent book Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. In this volume Jackson offers an interdisciplinary approach to the recent return to socially engaged art in both contemporary performance and visual art. Social art practice is often collaborative and involves people as the medium of the work. At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book tackles some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making.

Observation, Performance and Revolution: Exploring “The Political” in Visual Art and Anthropology

Visual Anthropology, 2013

Following up on Marcus's seminal article on cinema and ethnography [1995] and weaving together anthropology, film theory and the analysis of four films-from the ethnographic, commercial, art and documentary genres-I argue that cinema can open a democratic and egalitarian space of observation of and interaction with ''the other'' and that anthropologists should approach their subjects in ways similar to some other filmmakers. But unlike Marcus, who considers films as metaphors of ethnography and advocates a posture of modernist distance, I look for juxtapositions between film and anthropology and, extending the Surrealist notion of ''the double'' across the fields of politics and aesthetics, I argue for a humanist anthropology, one that celebrates the dual nature of humans and cinema. MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths' College, London. His work focuses on politico-economic anthropology and film, especially on ideas of participation, labor, class and activism. He has done extensive fieldwork and several film projects in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

‘To See and Be Seen’: Ethnographic Notes on Cultural Work in Contemporary Art

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014

A key term in discussions on the nature of cultural work is the concept of ‘autonomy’, or ‘relative autonomy’, according to which cultural workers are capable of realizing themselves in the processes of work. This article wishes to problematize this idea by examining the quotidian reality of cultural workers in the field of contemporary art in Greece during the current economic crisis. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on how the positive characteristics of cultural work are inscribed in workers’ experiences through their participation in ReMap, a contemporary art event that takes places biannually in Athens and is tightly interwoven with processes of gentrification. I argue that relative autonomy is neither a given nor a state where the cultural worker linearly progresses. Within the context of the larger cultural and economic implications of neoliberalism and its crisis, it is rather an ideal they are striving for, often through highly alienating conditions, in a field dominated by competition, voluntarism, low salaries, precarity and absence of collective bargaining.

Across, Against, and Beside: the (pre)positions of art practices in the social realm

How do artists think through, incorporate and perform politics in their work? Internationally, activist and socially engaged artists approach this question by positioning their practices within localities and contexts in an effort to understand mutual influence of art and society at large. For the purpose of this paper, I will look into two theories that suggest different forms of agencies. The first is the idea of transversal concatenation, which is argued by the Austrian theorist Gerald Raunig in his 2007 book "Art and Revolution"; the second is the recuperation of the artistic avant-garde project, which the Canadian independent scholar Marc James Léger contends is integral to unifying a left that is fractured by difference politics. The analysis of the two serves as a starting point for my own interest in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's challenge to think "beside", through which I intend to proffer an understanding of socially engaged art through a queer and feminist lens that foregrounds the entanglement of body/brain/world (Blackman, 2012, p.1). This brings me to an analysis of failure and orientation that demonstrates the queerly productive negativity of activist forms of art practice.

Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film

Studies in European Cinema, 2019

Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies (2009) is a video installation (screened as a 20-channel piece at galleries across Europe and as a single-screen film at London’s Tate Modern) that brings together 20 different public assemblies – ranging from funerals to marches, protests and celebrations. The film provides a microcosm of contemporary European nationalism, exemplified in the convening of citizens in public spaces. This article analyses Democracies in order to unpack its technical approach to the bodies and spaces it documents. This involves two key points of departure. First, a phenomenological reconsideration of the observational documentary mode, which simultaneously critiques one of the foremost forms of representing reality and reignites its potential. Zmijewski’s observationalism is freshly engaged through the use of counter-intuitive framing devices and highly evocative proximity to the body throughout, encouraging the consideration of the aesthetics of assembly in contemporary Europe. Second, I turn to the site of exhibition, questioning the historical tendency to locate radical art in the museum. I situate Democracies in debates around ‘socially engaged art’, arguing that its form of engagement is one not of healing the ‘social bond’, but of immanent critique, holding to account institutional complicity as much as the producers and spectators that partake in textual meaning.