PARSE journal issue 3 by anders wennerström

03 Issue Kaja Marczewska, Janez Janša, Annette Arlander, David Blamey, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, Barbara Neves Alves, Bruce Brubaker, Ioana Cristina Popovici, Barbara Bolt

Repetitions and Reneges

issue editors Darla Crispin, Anders Hultqvist, Cecilia Lagerström

Platform for Artistic Research Sweden PARSE Journal Issue #3 Repetitions and Reneges Summer 2016

PARSE Journal

Issue Editorial Team

Working Group

Publisher

Darla Crispin

Erling Björgvinsson

University of Gothenburg

Anders Hultqvist

Kanchan Burathoki

ISSN 2002-0511

Cecilia Lagerström

Ingrid Elam Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

Online edition

Editor-in-chief

Andrea Phillips

www.parsejournal.com/journal

Mick Wilson

Front cover image Advisory Board

Project Manager

Shiman Kateryna, Copying Olexander

Simon Critchley

Mina Dennert

Murashko’s “Portrait of Olga Nesterova”,

Darla Crispin

National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv

Vinca Kruk

Copy Edit

Bruno Latour

Valerie Pihet Henk Slager

Photograph courtesy of Anatoly Polishim

Layout

Gothenburg, the artists, photographers

Anders Wennerström, Spiro

and authors.

Print Billes tryckeri

Table of contents

Introduction Darla Crispin, Anders Hultqvist, Cecilia Lagerström

Relocations: The Idiot as Figure of Miscommunication Barbara Neves Alves

The Iterative Turn Kaja Marczewska

Over and Over and Over… : Performing Scripted Music

Collaterality and Art

Bruce Brubaker

Janez Janša

Repeat, Revisit, Recreate – Two Times Year of the Horse

Two Churches and a Hat: The National Bucharest Theatre or the Mythology of Post-War Romanian Architecture.

Annette Arlander

Ioana Cristina Popovici

Echo Chamber

Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?

David Blamey

Barbara Bolt

Feminine Destruction and Masculine Protagonism: Notes on Gender, Iterability, and the Canon Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

PARSE Journal

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Darla Crispin

Anders Hultqvist

Cecilia Lagerström

Darla Crispin is Director of the Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research (NordART) at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH), Oslo. A Canadian pianist and scholar with a Concert Recital Diploma from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, and a PhD in Historical Musicology from King’s College, London, Darla specialises in musical modernity, and especially in the music of the Second Viennese School. Her most recent work examines this repertoire through the prism of artistic research in music, a process which has been reinforced through her work as a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (2008-2013). She is sought after for her experience in the developing field of artistic research, currently serving on the International Advisory Board of PARSE (Gothenburg) and as a regular advisor for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. Crispin’s publications include a new book co-edited with Bob Gilmore, Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology (Leuven, 2014); a collaborative volume with Kathleen Coessens and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto (Leuven, 2009); and numerous book chapters and articles. She is currently working on a book entitled The Solo Piano Works of the Second Viennese School: Performance, Ethics and Understanding (Boydell & Brewer).

Anders Hultqvist is a composer, sound artist and Professor of Composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Besides writing for different orchestral, chamber music, electro-acoustic and sound art settings, he has since 2005 been involved in different artistic research projects concerning musical interpretation and sound in city spaces. The research projects “Transmission, Urban experiments in sound art and sonic space” and “Into noise” were operated by the research group USIT—The Urban Sound Institute. He is currently involved in the artistic research project “At the conceptual limits of composition: A shrinking emptiness – meaning, chaos and entropy”, which explores certain topics concerning the creation of meaning in musical and literary composition. Examples of publications relating to earlier research projects are Sound and Other Spaces (with C. Dyrssen, S. Mossenmark and P. Sjösten: Bo Ejeby Förlag, 2014) and Musikens frihet och begränsning. 16 variationer på ett tema (ed. Magnus Haglund, Daidalos, 2012). Two of Hultqvist’s more recent chamber music works include Entropic Pleasures (2015), composed for Ensemble Mimitabu, and Disembodied (2012), written for KammarensembleN. For more details see http:// andershultqvist.com.

Cecilia Lagerström is a director, researcher and Professor in Dramatic Performance at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Cecilia has a background in laboratory theatre and performance studies (PhD 2003). She has been directing performance work in theatres and other venues for many years, and several artistic research and development projects in academic contexts. Since 2005 Cecilia has been active in the development of artistic research in the field of the theatre in Sweden, and she is the representative for research in the dramatic arts at the Academy. She is also regularly commissioned as a lecturer, opponent, committee member and adviser in artistic research contexts in different Nordic countries. As an artist Cecilia is an active member of the artist- run space Konstepidemin (The epidemic of art) in Gothenburg, where she is involved in international work and has her working studio. Cecilia’s art and research work deal with sitespecific performance, physical performance training, performative writing and walking as art. During 2013-2016 she is conducting the project GångART.

PARSE Journal

his collection of articles takes

demand for the present moment? To encounter a familiar

as its unifying theme the opposed but

pattern or figure is also, for many artists, a way to create a

reciprocal artistic operations of repetition

confrontation between oneself and the pre-existing material

and renege; each of the contributors deals

on the one hand, with that which is not the same, with new

in some way or other with how one, or

meaning, on the other.

both, of these principles functions in the area of artistic practice with which they

Bruce Brubaker’s article presents the performing artist’s

are concerned. While, there may arguably

processes of grappling with this confrontation. Recalling, in the

be differences between the durational and the non-durational

manner of presentation, the writing experiments of John Cage,

arts in the way repetition and rebuttal are treated, the essays

Brubaker leads the reader through the reiterative processes

assembled here suggest that such differences are less signifi-

that beset performers of composed (as opposed to improvised)

cant than might be imagined. At the same time, the inclusion

music. Repetition is at the core; not only of the processes

in this collection of texts that discuss both the repetitive and

of learning and presentation, but also of the compositional

the idiopathic aspects of performance reminds us of the

material itself. In the cycle of presentation and re-presentation,

importance of interpretation, in addition to creation, along the

the paradox is the demand for novelty: the exceptional

spectrum of artistic activity.

experience. Existing neither in the printed score nor in the repetitive performance processes of concert-giving, this quality

Repetition is in fact an obvious prerequisite in many art forms,

lies at the border between repetition and renege without, in

and especially so in the performing arts. In these, it may even

this case, disrupting the boundary between the two.

be considered a basic requirement for the creation of a piece as well as its performance; the concert or performance is

Irrespective of the medium in which it is employed, the

carved out by being rehearsed, or repeated, over time, and it

dialectic between repeating and reneging can manifest

is presented for an audience time and again, night after night.

itself in art at a wide variety of levels: it may be a principle

And each time it must be recreated.

that drives the unfolding processes of an individual work; it may fuel an artist’s creative or performative appetite as they

This specific condition of repetition may also be what

progress from one work to the next; or it may characterise

constitutes the art form’s “problem” or dilemma. How can the

an entire artistic genre in terms of its relationship with the

performer recreate the pre-determined pattern “as if it were for

audience among which it is disseminated.

the first time”, with new clarity and poignancy? What happens in the meeting between repetition—which represents a familiar

At times of extreme polarisation between artist and audience,

past—and a new situation, an event—with its inevitable

repetition and renege may be wielded combatively, pulling

INTRODUCTION

and pushing expectation in a way that deliberately destabi-

concept of iterability, used by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl in her

lises the relationship between producer and receiver. In his

essay documenting her experiences directing August Strind-

pamphlet of aphoristic “Le coq et l’arlequin: notes autour de la

berg’s Miss Julie and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. In the

musique” (1918), Jean Cocteau proclaimed that:

performance of canonised works, patterns of iterability usually become evident and questions on authenticity rise to the

En effet le public aime à reconnaitre. Il déteste qu’on

surface.

le dérange. La surprise le choque. Le pire sort d’une œuvre c’est qu’on ne lui reproche rien—qu’on n’oblige

This leads us to broader questions about reproduction and

pas son auteur à une attitude d’opposition. [Indeed

documentation. In contemporary discourses of artistic research

the public likes to recognize. It hates to be disturbed.

such issues are constantly in the foreground. The possibilities

Surprise shocks it. The worst fate a work can suffer is

to document “live” art and performance have been variously

not to attract any kind of reproach—for its author not to

questioned, challenged and developed. Still, we see in these

be obliged to take up an attitude of opposition.]

debates variations of scholar Peggy Phelan’s claim from the

1990s that performance, in an ontological sense, is nonAt other times and in other contexts, an artist may use the

productive and only lives in the present. There is a strong

balancing of repetition and reneging as part of his or her

conviction that performance can never be saved, recorded

own creative self-stimulus. For example, the composer Witold

or documented as it then becomes something other and the

Lutosławski described his approach to successive works as

performance “becomes itself through disappearance”.3 On the

one of creating a series of “once-only conventions”.2 For the

other hand, documentations are continually being realised and

duration of each work, a set of rules would apply, generating

new formats developed by performing artists and researchers,

coherence—and, as part of this, elements of repetition – within

as well as ideas that documentation itself has a performative

the frame of the work in question. But before commencing the

character. To document a performance produces an event as

next work, these rules would be renounced and a new set

a performance, to refer to scholar Philip Auslander,4 which can

generated, ensuring that the challenges of each successive

in turn generate new artistic results.

work remained finitely fresh and sui generis in key respects, however much a certain stylistic continuity remained an

In Annette Arlander’s report on her work with recreating and

inevitable component of his output.

revisiting the same site and thereby her earlier project, Animal Years and Year of the Horse, her way of repeatedly docu-

The sense in which individual artworks are simultaneously

menting the landscape (and in some sense the act of viewing

unique to themselves and symptomatic of themes that echo

the landscape) also constitutes a mode of artistic expression

across works, and even authors, is encapsulated in the

and a tool for artistic research. Her way of creating slowness

PARSE Journal

and working with the temporality of the images suggests less

artists changed their names to “Janez Janša”, the name of the

anthropocentric and more ecological approaches to creating

Prime Minister of Slovenia at the time. Jansa shows in his article

art, where the environment rather than the individual artist is

how the repetition and proliferation of the name Janez Janša

given primary agency. Perhaps repetition, as a method in itself,

created something he calls “collaterality”, or collateral effects,

can liberate and better expose variations in explored materials

and how the name-change triggered reactions in various

as well as different ways of seeing and defining the artistic

contexts. By doing the same—repeating a name—separate

subject.

providers produced difference. In this way, borders between art and cultural contexts were, in many respects, dissolved

The last decade’s strong interest in re-enactments in various

and the art project opened up to a wider social and political

artistic fields may reflect an increased commitment to historical

arena.

processes, but also to the development of a systematic methodology of repetition. Re-enactments give the prerequisite for a

Iterating concepts and objects in this way works as a means

re-contextualisation of what is repeated, enriching the explo-

to push forward the process of exploration to reach towards

ration of contemporary issues through the use of recurrent

something we didn’t know that we didn’t know: it becomes

structures.

a strategy for “affirming misunderstanding” as opposed to what Barbara Alves—drawing upon Isabelle Stengers—terms

In this sense, repetition may be a way of looking more

“faithful communication”. Setting in motion iterations that can

closely at “something”, as well as expanding the perception

produce more indeterminate and more interesting outcomes by

of this “something”; however, it can also work as a means of

using a chaotic strategy, and where the outcome is therefore

distancing or estranging. Removing something from its specific

the product of dissipative structures, is a key feature of this

context (or even enlarging that context to include non-specific

process of affirming misunderstanding.

perspectives) implies a de-contextualisation and/or a re-contextualisation. It may cause us to pause and to consider a familiar

The trope of iteration can be seen as a metaphor for the

phenomenon or object with new eyes, as well as breaking

construction of memory. For Ioana Popovici, the re-iteration of

automatic patterns and everyday monotony (which could be

memories is done differently within a professional community

compared to Bertold Brecht’s famous notion of the Verfrem-

than how this process takes place within the public at large:

dungseffekt [estrangement effect]).

“Professional recollection is prone to imparting memories through mentorship, making individual repositories of architec-

The artist and director Janez Janša, who has been heavily

tural recollection heavily dependent on general professional

engaged in actions of re-enactment in his artistic practice,

consensus on value, reinforced through reiteration.”

discusses the kinds of resonance that were created when three

INTRODUCTION

But we can also look at repetition as a way of seeing what

attitudes to originality alter as technologies develop.”

the preceding repetitions were not able to realise. As Kaja Marczewska writes, echoing Derrida, repetition may be a

The kinds of performative practices exemplified in this

manifestation of “a desire to re-appropriate the text actively

collection of articles create an effect; they do something in

through mastery, to show the text what it ‘does not know’. […]

the world and accentuate the performative force that art can

Hence, everything that follows can be read as the working out

embody. The growing confusion in the arts regarding the use

of the logic that ties repetition to alterity.”

of notions of “performance” and “performativity”, not least in the performing arts, is addressed and clarified in Barbara

Many artists iterate their practice and, in turn, re-iterate the

Bolt’s concluding essay on performativity and the issue of a

practice of iteration—repetitions of iteration across many

performative research paradigm. Bolt underlines—drawing

registers—and thereby generate embodied knowledge

on Judith Butler—that performativity involves repetition rather

processes. But these processes can, of course, become stale if

than singularity. Artists actually always work—and deal—with

not monitored in an active way. The question is always: when

conventions and stylistic patterns that recur. But as she points

does iteration become artistically productive and when is it just

out: repetition is never repetition of the same—it is repetition

doing something once again; on what level of originality is the

of difference. It is in the act of repetition and re-iteration that

repetition worked out?

disruptions can take place, and something “new” may emerge. As Bolt claims “This is the ‘stuff’ of research”.

Perhaps the level of relative concealment of the artistic “material” at hand is what alters according to different historical settings, and from one artist/composer to another. Appropriation, citation and even theft have always been active ways of working for all types of artists. One could say that if the artist conceals her techniques and influences she is considered more original, maybe even more “authentic”, but if she repeats the “historical” material as the “material” of the artefact at hand, she might be considered as eclectic or a plagiarist. As Kaja Marczewska points out in her article, citing Walter Benjamin, “in the age of post-mechanical reproduction the work of art becomes ‘designed for reproducibility’ rather than for the aura of its manifest singularity. This is not to say that a propensity for originality is abandoned […] rather, the

1. Cocteau, Jean. Le Coq et l’Arlequin. Paris: Stock. 2009. p. 71. 2. As discussed, for example, in Nicholas Reyland. Notes on the Construction of Lutosławski’s conception of Musical Plot. Witold Lutosławski Studies. 2008. p. 12. 3. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. 1993. p. 146. 4. Auslander, Philip. The Performativity of Performance Documentation. In Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Amelia Jones and Adrian Heatfield (eds.). Bristol/Chicago: Intellect/The University of Chicago Press. 2012.

PARSE Journal

The Iterative Turn

Abstract

Kaja Marczewska

This paper investigates the implications of what I see as the increasingly prominent propensity to copy as a creative practice in contemporary culture. While debates about plagiarism, copyright infringement, and the state of copyright inform my argument, the focus here is on broader issues. My discussion is formulated as an attempt at defining a cultural condition that triggers novel attitudes to creativity in order to explore the possibilities of re-conceptualisation of copying as a creative category. By doing so, this project strives to interrogate the restrictions and inadequacies of the dominant categories of originality, creativity, and authorship to propose the notion of iteration as a possible alternative. Drawing on the example of recent creative projects by child-star cum performance artist Shia LaBeouf, practices of copying are represented here as a necessary condition of the contemporary culture and a manifestation of a shift in aesthetics, here defined as the Iterative Turn. In its attempt to think about the contemporary, the paper posits a framework for looking beyond the established paradigms of creativity.

Kaja Marczewska is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture/Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her research interests span avant-garde and experimental literature and art,Â hybrid creative-critical forms and innovative forms of criticism, digital aesthetics,Â as well as intersections of the humanities, technology, and law. She has published work on questions of unoriginality, creativity in the digital context, google surveillance and creative practice,Â and ideas of the curatorial as a creative paradigm.

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it, “first there were modernists, then there were post-modernists, now there are plagiarists.”1 Although hyperbolic in his attempt at defining changing attitudes towards creativity as they emerge in their respective cultural moments, in this statement Home points to a distinctive aesthetic shift, one, I suggest, of increasing prominence today. There is a sense here that plagiarism is an aesthetic category that has a clearly defined history: Home’s plagiarism emerges as historically contingent and following on from modernism and postmodernism. But if plagiarism can be seen as a natural successor to modern and postmodern thought and practice, then, by implication, both modernism and postmodernism have to be understood as conditioned upon codification of practices related to plagiarism, if not plagiarism itself. What Home seems to imply, then, is that clear affinities can be drawn between dominant models of cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and an ongoing creative commitment to acts of copying. From modernist allusion, through postmodern parody and pastiche, to contemporary practices discussed in this article, evoked in Home’s trajectory is a sense of a characteristic increase in significance of copying for creativity that reaches a characteristic tipping point today. s Stewart Home puts

Examples of this move towards creative copying in both high and popular contemporary culture abound and include Kenneth Goldsmith’s wider uncreative project; Vanessa Place’s retweeted Gone with the Wind and her retyped legal briefs, reconceptualised as poetry, alongside a range of similar publications proliferating among the conceptual writing community; Richard Prince and Roger Koons’s ongoing commitment to appropriation art; the prominence of sampling practices in music; or a controversial debut novel by Helene Hegemann, published in 2010 in Germany to high critical acclaim, but comprising significant amounts of plagiarised material. Today, everyone from Baldessari

to Banksy dabbles in similar forms of copying as an expression of creative practice. Whether discussed as plagiarist gestures, manifestations of remix or appropriation cultures, or what I describe here as an expression of the contemporary Iterative Turn, the intensifying notoriety of creative practices reliant on the possibilities of reusing pre-published content posits challenges with respect to categories in which to consider them. At the time when on the one hand the availability and accessibility of information is far greater than ever before, and developments in information technologies encourage a culture of communal creativity and free appropriation, increased efforts are also being put into place to introduce often controversial means of control of what has varyingly been described as a democracy and an anarchy (recent examples of Stop Online Piracy Act [SOPA] in the US and attempts at an international ratification of Anti-Counterfighting Trade Agreement [ACTA] are a case in point). The mounting tensions between the propagators of the creative remix culture and the defenders of traditional copyright law generate contrasting rhetoric of tradition versus innovation, stability versus change, and print versus digital culture. My discussion here is an attempt at exploring this cultural framework as a trigger for what I consider an important shift in aesthetics. As I argue, creating by means of appropriation, borrowing, plagiarism—creating by iterative means—finds its particular moment in contemporary culture and emerges not as a transgressive practice but rather as a characteristic attitude towards creativity. My interests here reside not in instances of plagiarism or copyright infringement per se, but rather in the cultural condition that triggers the proliferation of acts of copying, a condition that affords their re-conceptualisation as creative, aesthetic categories. Recent controversies surrounding Shia LaBeouf ’s attempts at film-making and performance art are a useful starting point for thinking about issues of creativity and originality as they impinge on the contemporary art scene. In December 2013,

Kaja Marczewska

LaBeouf, a child-star turned performance artist, posted online his short film HowardCantour.com, which had debuted at the Cannes 2012 festival to high critical acclaim. Its availability online caused a considerable controversy after significant similarities were exposed between LaBeouf ’s film and Daniel Clowes’s comic, Justin M. Damiano (2007). The script, many of the visuals, as well as dialogues of LaBeouf ’s film all proved to be appropriations of Clowes’s, incorporated into HowardCantour.com without acknowledgement. On 8 January 2014 LaBeouf tweeted a storyboard for his next short, Daniel Boring. “It’s like Fassbinder meets half-baked Nabokov on Gilligan Island” LaBeouf declared.2 The storyboard was, again, a copy of a comic series and a graphic novel David Boring (2000), also by Daniel Clowes,3 and the statement a quotation of Clowes’s description of David.4 LaBeouf circulated his Daniel accompanied by a “cease and desist” letter from Clowes’s attorney, addressing the issue of both copied works and calling LaBeouf to undertake “all appropriate and necessary steps to redress his wrongs.”5 While LaBeouf complied with the cease and desist note— the relevant tweets were deleted, HowardCantour.com taken down—his subsequent amends turned into a statement on the ambiguous status of the relationship between copies and originals in contemporary culture. His public, social-media driven apology for an act dismissed by the media as transgressive and infringing took the form of a complete appropriation stunt. None of the tweeted statements were LaBeouf ’s own; instead his apology for plagiarism was also plagiarised and included an eclectic mix of unacknowledged quotations from, among others, a hip hop megastar, Kanye West, the notorious Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, and Yahoo! website comments section.6 LaBeouf ’s explanation of the nature of his art in an interview for Bleeding Cool was also a compilation of repurposed material: statements by Marcel Duchamp, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lawrence Lessig, Gregory Betts, and Steve Jobs, among others. It is easy to dismiss LaBeouf ’s transgressions as yet another manifestation of the contemporary celebrity art culture (Joaquin’s Phoenix’s I’m still Here, James Franco’s various artistic endeavours), the role of the social-media information machine, “generational aversion to ‘giving credit’” 7 fostered by habits of sharing information online, and related popular culture consumerism. Charges of tastelessness, immorality,

1. Home, Stewart. Plagiarism: Art as Commodity and Strategies for its Negotiation. London: Aporia Press. 1987. back cover. 2. LaBeouf, Shia. Twitter post. 2014-01-08. @thecampaignbook. The post has now been deleted. 3. Interestingly, appropriation is a persistent and characteristic feature of Clowes’s work as well. As Daniel Nicolás Ferreiro points out, “Clowes’s works have continually revealed echoes from films, paintings or literature, blended with different forms of popular culture”. See Daniel Nicolás Ferreiro. Relational Genres, Gapped Narratives, and Metafictional Devices in Daniel Clowes’s David Boring. In Relational Design in Literature and the Arts: Page and Stage, Canvas and Screen. Rui Carvalho Homem (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2012. p. 185. David Boring is the prime example, built around references to superhero comic books, and Star Trek in particular, here reworked as The Yellow Streak. Clowes’s response to LaBeouf ’s appropriations does not, however, acknowledge Clowes’s interest in aesthetics of appropriation as a creative practice. 4. See Clowes, Daniel. The Velvet Gloves are off: A Boring Interview with Ghost World’s Daniel Clowes. Interview by Matt Silvie. The Comics Journal. no. 233. 2001. p. 66. 5. Michael J. Kump to Brian G. Wolf. 2015-01-07. Circulated as a Twitter post. 2014.01.08. https://twitter.com/thecampaignbook/status/420931894935834624/photo/1, and https:// twitter.com/thecampaignbook/status/420931951462477824/ photo/1 (Accessed 2016-04-08). 6. LaBeouf ’s approach to writing his apologies was first identified by a Twitter user. See Molly Horan. Shia LaBeouf ’s Plagiarism Controversy. Know Your Meme. http://knowyourmeme. com/memes/events/shia-labeoufs-plagiarism-controversy (Accessed 2014-10-10). 7. Cowen, Trace William. Shia on the Moon: The Necessary Dissection of Howard Cantour. Glide Magazine. 2014-12-20. http://www.glidemagazine.com/hiddentrack/shia-on-themoon-the-necessary-dissection-of-howard-cantour/ (Accessed 2014-10-10).

PARSE Journal

and bad art aside, LaBeouf ’s act is nevertheless interesting as a characteristic manifestation of what I see as a persistent contemporary tendency to create by means of copying occurring at an unprecedented level in both high and popular culture, in mainstream and avant-garde circles alike. It is indicative of a very characteristic thinking about current means of engaging pre-published content as an aesthetic project, unique to the contemporary moment. LaBeouf ’s methods resonate, I suggest, with echoes of Ted Berrigan’s interview with John Cage (1967),8 a text entirely composed by Berrigan from a compilation of statements by Warhol and Burroughs, among others, but attributing everything to Cage. As such, Berrigan’s take on appropriation is manifested not only in the act of recycling textual material itself, but, perhaps even more importantly, in the selection of sources, all pointing to a carefully constructed statement on the creative possibility of the copy. Berrigan’s act should not be seen as a manifestation of plagiarism. It foregrounds an aesthetic engagement with the dynamic of repetition so characteristic of Warhol’s silk screens and Burroughs’ cut outs, evoked in Berrigan’s text, and the broader attitude it exemplifies. There is a sense of an appropriation of not just the source, but of a particular attitude to creativity that is repeated when the words of Andy Warhol are being flagrantly repurposed. LaBeouf ’s plagiarism, I suggest, should be considered in similar terms; as an iteration of a certain persistent attitude to copying as a creative act that finds its manifestation in related forms of creative production, a trajectory illustrative of contemporary models of creativity. Understood as such, the propensity to repeat today should be seen as a complete aesthetic project expressed in individual works which rely on iterative means as well as on a manner in which previous appropriation gestures are evoked. LaBeouf ’s preoccupation with Duchamp and Goldsmith, and Goldsmith’s commitment to engaging with Warhol’s oeuvre both exemplify this trajectory. What LaBeouf repeats is not simply a specific source text, but the method of appropriation

itself. His contemporary iterative project surfaces as an acknowledgement of the singularity of the current cultural moment defined by a drive towards acts of re-appropriation of appropriation gestures, of repetition of repetition, to arrive at a novel, current aesthetic mode. Like Berrigan’s, then, LaBeouf ’s sources are significant and an expression of his commitment to copying as a contemporary avant-garde gesture. Echoing Duchamp immediately foregrounds LaBeouf ’s interest in the ready-made. His recurring references to Lessig and Goldsmith inscribe HowardCantour.com, Daniel Boring, and LaBeouf ’s apologies into the contemporary framework of debates about creativity, authorship, and copyright. While drawing from Lessig can be seen as a justification of LaBeouf ’s acts in legal terms, an interest in Goldsmith’s work offers a creative and critical point of reference. Promoting ideas of free culture and creative commons, and of “an updated notion of genius [that centres] around one’s mastery of information”,9 both Lessig and Goldsmith respectively move away from thinking about models of cultural production in proprietary terms and towards paradigms of creativity—“uncreativity”, to borrow Kenneth Goldsmith’s term—based on a culture of collecting, organising, curating and sharing content. For Goldsmith, in the contemporary context, practices such as LaBeouf ’s assume a creative quality and are a manifestation of characteristic habits of textual production and dissemination; “it is not plagiarism in the digital age—it’s repurposing”,10 argues Goldsmith. “It is not plagiarism in the digital age—it’s repurposing”11, suggests LaBeouf, without acknowledgement. This approach, LaBeouf argues, contributes to his ongoing creative project as an expression of “metamodernist performance art”.12 His two artist’s manifestos, positioning his work as meta-modernist and intentionally uncreative, are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, composed by means of copying, repurposing Luke Turner’s meta-modernism

Kaja Marczewska

manifesto, passed off as LaBeouf ’s,13 and excerpts of Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing 14 respectively. His recent “Twitter as Art” statement is a mash-up, bringing together a selection of performance art manifestos by Marilyn Arsem, Scott Wichmann and Marina Abramvić, as well as passages copied verbatim from Painters Painting, a 1973 documentary. “All art is either plagarisum [sic] or revolution”,15 LaBeouf suggests, (mis)quoting Paul Gauguin. However, the notion of plagiarism today, as acts such as LaBeouf ’s seem to imply, requires a radical re-conceptualisation. Where instances of creative expression are concerned, “all rights and remedies [might be] reserved”16 under the rule of copyright law, as the “cease and desist” notice concludes, but LaBeouf ’s stunt seems to imply that in the contemporary context their reach, enforceability and applicability prove limited. LaBeouf ’s case is a reminder that the idea of culture as property is not an unquestionable absolute. Rather, as Jonathan Lethem contends, it is “an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.”17 When paradigms of information production and dissemination change with the rise to prominence of novel media platforms, so does thinking about authorship and creativity, a trajectory true both in the context of the now familiar, historical, “old” technologies and as a manifestation of the contemporary new media cultural transformations. Projects such as LaBeouf ’s contribute to a collective attempt at renegotiating the standards that are otherwise taken for granted. Although removed as a result of the copyright controversy, HowardCantour.com and LaBeouf ’s tweets remain accessible online. This widespread preservation and availability of the material officially deleted posits significant questions about the nature of the copy in the digital environment. The dynamic of production and dissemination of content online is foregrounded here not as a space of the original creation but of the inevitable copy, of its persistent proliferation, not only independent but, importantly, irrespective of the status of the original. The original as a centre and source of meaning, in the context, becomes only an illusory centre. This logic of the digital copy finds its manifestation in LaBeouf ’s complete act. LaBeouf got away with plagiarism, until he did not, his transgression identified by a Twitter user almost immediately after the release of HowardCantour.com online. If, as Warhol (appropriating McLuhan) puts it, art is what you can get away

8. Berrigan, Ted. An Interview with John Cage. Electronic Poetry Center. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berrigan/cage. html (Accessed 2014-09-10). 9. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. 2011. p. 1. 10. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Twitter post, 2014-01-2. https:// twitter.com/kg_ubu/status/418787567354785792 (Accessed 2016-04-08). 11. LaBeouf, Shia. Authorship is Censorship—Bleeding Cool in Conversation with Shia LaBeouf. Interview by Rich Johnson. Bleeding Cool. 2014-01-02. http://www.bleedingcool. com/2014/01/authorship-is-censorship-bleeding-cool-inconversation-with-shia-labeouf/ (Accessed 2014-09-01). 12. LaBeouf, Shia. Twitter as Art. Tweeted by LaBeouf in January 2014 (@thecampaignbook), the manifesto has since been taken down but is widely available online. See, for example: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/shialabeouf-bizarre-behavior-performance-art-article-1.1587660 (Accessed 2016-04-06). 13. LaBeouf ’s name was temporarily included in the by-line of Luke Turner’s Metamodernist Manifesto. It is preserved on Turner’s website: http://luketurner.com/labeouf-ronkko-turner/metamodernist-manifesto/ (Accessed 2016-04-06). Turner’s manifesto, now in its original format, can be viewed here: http://www.metamodernism.org/ (Accessed 2016-04-06). 14. LaBeouf, Shia. #stopcreating. The New Inquiry. 2014.01.20. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/stopcreating/(Accessed 2014-01-10). 15. LaBeouf, Twitter as Art. 16. Kump to Wolf. 17. Lethem, Jonathan. The Ecstasy of Influence. In The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. London: Jonathan Cape. 2012. p. 101.

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with, then LaBeouf ’s performance is an example of how not to do art. But, perhaps, getting away with plagiarism is not the point here. Perhaps plagiarism in not an appropriate term to describe LaBeouf ’s act. His uncreative practice acquires an altogether different status if viewed as a clear manifestation of the influence of the contemporary digital, networked culture on the practices of information dissemination and artistic expression, on the status of the copy. As Goldsmith puts it, “plagiarizing well is hard to do”.18 Plagiarising in the social-media driven culture proves an impossible feat. In this context, questions that need to be raised in relation to plagiarism shift away from ethics and towards aesthetics of borrowing pre-published content. The change in attitude might be a result of increasing availability of all published content online and of simple, widely accessible tools that make plagiarism detection possible. If a “trial by Google”19 enables any online user to detect LaBeouf ’s plagiarism only a few hours after his work or a statement are released online, then the motivations behind acts of copying must, inevitably, change. In the context of ubiquitous digital media, plagiarism as an attempt at passing someone else’s ideas as one’s own ceases to be achievable. It is this sense of an impossibility of a copy that provokes a proliferation of copies, but generated as an expression of transgressive creative gestures achieved though inherently uncreative acts. Plagiarism seen as such is not antithetical to creativity, but rather, as Lethem argues, a necessary condition of all writing and creativity, and organically connected to it.20 There is a certain sense that LaBeouf ’s complete work of plagiarism came together as an afterthought, an attempt at reframing an unambiguous instance of plagiarism as a carefully constructed performance to avoid the consequences of copyright infringement. LaBeouf, by choosing Goldsmith, Duchamp or Abramović as his sources, makes a stand about the status of his copy as an avant-garde project. His self-fashioning as an experimental performance artist is a conscious choice to shift

attention away from the illegality to the aesthetics of the act. But this is exactly why LaBeouf ’s case serves as a useful example here. It points to the urgency and ubiquity of the debates and to the dynamic of the environment that generates them. That LaBeouf has an extensive knowledge of the history of appropriation art is a possibility; that HowardCantour. com, released two years before the plagiarism controversy started, had been created to incite the uncreative performance that followed is likely. But there is also a chance that it is the exigency of the current debates about open sourcing, file sharing, copyright in the digital age, the ubiquity of the debates about information dissemination and circulation online, and the ease of accessing materials about them that collectively enabled a construction of LaBeouf ’s defence that was only one Google search away, collated as a publicity rather than an artist’s statement. And while the approach might raise questions about the creative qualities of LaBeouf ’s art, the controversy touches at the core of the contemporary cultural condition that drives the aesthetic developments discussed in this article. Acts of plagiarising an artist’s statement, a performance piece, plagiarising apologies for plagiarism, although dismissed in LaBeouf ’s case as instances of copyright infringement and plagiarism by law and media respectively, should be seen, I argue, as neither. Rather, LaBeouf ’s tenacious copying should be considered a manifestation of a condition of iteration as an emergent aesthetic attitude. Practices of copying today should be considered a necessary condition of the current cultural moment. While notions of plagiarism, copyright infringement, and iteration all imply that forms of authorship are defined in relation to a shared preoccupation with means of creative production informed by acts of copying, the base assumptions about the essence of creativity and originality differ significantly where the first two concepts and iteration are concerned. Both plagiarism and copyright infringement favour originality of creation, where originality is synonymous with,

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simply, not copying. Iteration, on the other hand, recognises the creative potential of copying. Iteration, as I define it here, represents a tendency to repeat available material as a creative gesture; as an extension rather than a synonym of copying and appropriating. While copyright infringement and plagiarism are preoccupied with questions of whether copying has occurred, copying is always already implied in iteration. This approach is inherent in my use of the term, itself an appropriation of Derrida’s concept of iterability. According to Derrida, the word “iter” means “again”. The logic of iterability is the logic of repetition. But iterability also inheres change. As Derrida explains, the term “iter” most likely derives from “itra”, or “other” in Sanskrit. Hence, “everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity.”21 Repetition is that which, for Derrida, alters. The principle of iterability assumes alterity as a condition of otherness, difference or change. Iterability implies a repetition, but a repetition with a différance rather than a repetition of the same. Thinking about creative practice as iterative necessitates a completely new set of questions, which, I argue, define contemporary attitudes to creativity and the cultural moment that breeds them. I describe that moment as the Iterative Turn. LaBeouf ’s project evokes this new iterative attitude. In line with the dominant logic, LaBeouf ’s acts are a case of a “clear copyright infringement and a misappropriation of Daniel Clowes’s work.”22 Dismissed as a “blatant copy”, and a manifestation of “improper and outlandish conduct”, the derivative

nature of LaBeouf ’s “foolishness” fails to comply with the copyright paradigms of authorship and originality. Similar thinking pervades popular understanding of what it means to create, echoed in the media debates about LaBeouf ’s plagiarism. While often considered a manifestation of an unlawful practice, plagiarism is not a legal term. Unlike copyright infringement, plagiarism is an ethical category. Although inherently transgressive, acts of plagiarism do not, in all instances, constitute copyright infringement. As Laurie Stearns explains, in some ways the concept of plagiarism is broader than infringement, in that it can include copying of ideas, or of expression not protected by copyright, that would not constitute infringement […] fundamental to both plagiarism and copyright infringement is wrongful copying from a preexisiting work. But the form, the amount, and the sources of the copying prohibited as copyright infringement are different from those of the copying condemned as plagiarism.23 But, as it is often the case, the logic and the media rhetoric of plagiarism surrounding LaBeouf ’s performance mirror the legal understanding of copyright infringement. There is a sense that plagiarism is synonymous with a failure of a creative process. Plagiarism, as Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy put it, “is perceived as a problem […]: ‘using someone else’s words without telling whose they are or where you got them’; ‘stealing other people’s ideas or words.’”24 Plagiarism, then, is considered synonymous with theft and the under-

18. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Interview by Trace William Cowen. Nailed. 2014-01-08. http://www.nailedmagazine. com/interview/interviewwith-kenneth-goldsmithby-trace-william-cowen/ (Accessed 2014-08-18). 19. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. London: Hamish Hamilton. 2010. p. 38. 20. Lethem, Jonathan. I’m suggesting [originality] is an overrated virtue. Interview by Harvey Blume. The Boston Globe. 2007.03.04. http://www.boston.com/ news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/03/04/qa_jonathan_lethem/?page=full (Accessed 2013-02-24). 21. Derrida, Jacques. Signature Event Context. In Limited, Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Gerald Graff (ed.). Evanson, Il: Northwestern University Press. 1988). p. 7. 22. Kump to Wolf. 23. Stearns, Laurie. Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law. In Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy (eds.). New York: State University of New York Press. 1999. p. 9. 24. Buranen, Lise, and Roy, Alice M. Introduction to Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Lise Buranen and Alice M. Roy (eds.). New York: State University of New York Press. 1999. pp. xv-xvi.

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25. Randall, Marilyn. Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2001. p. 61. 26. Halbert, Deborah. Poaching and Plagiarising: Property, Plagiarism, and Feminist Futures. In Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. p. 111. 27. Boon, Marcus. In Praise of Copying. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2010. p. 101. 28. Siegert, Bernard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulation of the Real. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 2015. p. 2.

standing of the notion derives, Marilyn Randall explains, from the Latin origins of the term, plagium meaning “to kidnap a person”, used only with reference to children, servants or slaves, people who could be considered in proprietary terms.25 The same logic translates into paradigms of creative production as soon as creative outputs are considered property, as defined by Intellectual Property law. “Once it becomes possible to think of literary work as property”, Deborah Halbert suggests, “it becomes possible to ‘steal’ that property.”26 There is a sense here that a copy is almost a taboo. However, my argument stems from an assumption that as technologies and economies of writing change, so does the inherent understanding of authorship and the dominant attitudes towards both creativity and plagiarism. We find ourselves now at a transitional cultural stage—at the Iterative Turn—characterised by the propensity to copy as an expression of creative practice. Perhaps, this contemporary persistence of acts of copying, of which LaBeouf ’s performance is only one example, should be seen as a shift, to borrow from Marcus Boon, “in relation to the forces that constitute that taboo”.27 If copying emerges as an increasingly prominent avenue of creative expression, then perhaps the base assumptions of creativity need to shift accordingly. The critical and creative move towards the Iterative Turn I propose here offers one possible way of thinking about creativity in response to these assumptions. Today, the context that triggers iterative thinking is digital. As Lev Manovich suggests, it is technology, more than

any critical impulse that should be seen as a driving force behind developments in modern paradigms of creativity. But it is easy to give into techno-deterministic reductionism while focusing on technological progress alone. My thinking about the logic of iterative creative practices is influenced by but not limited to the digital environment. I am interested in the critical potential of technological change and technology’s ability to destabilise the familiar cultural codes and consider the contemporary digital culture as a contextual framework, a cultural technique in Bernard Siegert’s terms, that exerts significant impact on the dynamic of creative practices both online and offline. Following Siegert, I see new technologies as a characteristic “condition of representation”, 28 a system of reference for paradigms of contemporary creativity. This is to say that the iterative attitude is not limited to digital practices, but it emerges in response to the impact of digital culture on cultural production broadly conceived. Hence, it is the backlash of the Internet copy-paste culture of ubiquitous sharing rather than that culture itself that forms the context for the Iterative Turn, emerging under the condition of postproduction and not as a straightforward expression of mechanism of digital culture. Developed by Nicolas Bourriaud, the notion of “postproduction” is useful here as a critical framework for conceptualising the state of contemporary creativity. While contemporary digital technologies heavily inform the dynamic of the postproduction culture, the technology is only one aspect of this much more comprehensive cultural ecology and of the processes that inform the contemporary aesthetic shift towards iteration. For

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Bourriaud, postproduction epitomises the contemporary, and offers a means of presenting “an analysis of today’s art in relation to social changes, whether technological, economic, or sociological.”29 He sees contemporary culture as defined by a characteristic sense of excess which manifests itself through excessive information production, dissemination and manipulation characteristic for the contemporary digital culture. This understanding of the contemporary condition serves as a means of distinguishing between the contemporary and postmodern moments, the latter characterised by extreme consumerism of hypercapitalism that triggered appropriation art as it developed in the 1970s. This characteristic trajectory exemplifies the changing nature of appropriation, with the aesthetic transformation driven by a move away from the overload of things to information overload as a defining features of creativity today. The contemporary remix culture that Bourriaud poses as a pre-condition of the postproduction moment inherently subsumes self-conscious acts of appropriation as the dominant creative mode of today. “It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material”, Bourriaud writes, “but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, […] objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality […] and even creation […] are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape.”30 The negotiation of consumption-production dynamic implied in Bourriaud’s statement lies at the core of his postproduction thinking. His postproduction Web is an environment synonymous with what Christopher Schmidt describes as a “waste media

capitalism”,31 an environment characterised by an abundance of language as an object of widespread, constant consumption and production online. However, the features of material consumed and produced online alter the nature of this capitalism. In the digital context, technologies come to be defined in terms of processes of reproduction rather than production. Within a culture of information consumerism, governed by what Goldsmith defines as “re-gestures”,32 i.e. re-blogging, re-tweeting, the nature of information circulation and processing presupposes a “scrambling of boundaries of consumption and production”.33 This is a culture that, as Bourriaud stresses, “denies the binary opposition between the proposal of the transmitter and the participation of the receiver [...] the producer is only a transmitter for the following producer.”34 As such, any act of consumption simultaneously turns into an act of production, eradicating, to turn to Bourriaud again, “the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work.”35 What transpires, then, is a notion of creativity that turns copying into a creative paradigm. But copying in the postproduction environment assumes a hyperbolised structure of reproduction; “everything digital is a copy”,36 Carolyn Guertin contends. Driven by models of digital re-creation, postproduction is characterised by proliferation of copies of copies, copies without originals.37 Mark Poster points to a similar feature of digital information production. For Poster, an act of digital mediation can only produce reproductions, not copies of originals but rather copies as simulacra,

29. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art reprogrammes the World. Trans. Jeannie Herman. New York, NY: Lukas and Sternberg. 2002. p. 8. 30. Bourriaud, p. 7. 31. Schmidt, Christopher. The Waste Management Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith. SubStance 37. February 2008. p. 37. 32. Goldsmith, Kenneth. The Bounce and the Roll. Harriet: a poetry blog. 2011-04-16. http://www. poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-bounceand-the-roll/ (Accessed 2013-02-10). 33. Bourriaud, p. 19. 34. Ibid., p. 40. 35. Ibid., p. 13. 36. Guertin, Carolyn. Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art. London: Continuum, 2012. p. 21. 37. Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. p. 9.

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38. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text. In Cybertext Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1999. p. 89. 39. Lévy, Pierre. quoted in Ryan, p. 90. 40. Derrida. p. 7. 41. Bourriaud, p. 8. 42. Ibid., p. 93. 43. Fitterman, Robert, and Place, Vanessa. Notes on Conceptualism. New York, NY: Ugly Duckling Press, 2009. p. 32. 44. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (ed.). London: Pimlico, 1999. p. 219.

i.e. copies that have no originals. A characteristic propensity for the fake is implied in this understanding of the virtual culture and, as Marie-Laure Ryan points out, the term “virtual” itself encompasses two distinct concepts: “the largely negative idea of a fake, illusionary, non-existent, and the overwhelmingly positive idea of the potential, which connotes productivity, openness, and diversity.”38 As Ryan explains (quoting Pierre Lévy), “the virtual is not at all the opposite of the real. It is, on the contrary, a powerful productive mode of being, a mode that gives free rein to creative process.”39 Hence, the derogative culture of copying turns into what could be described as an aesthetics of plagiarism, a different kind of creativity, distinct from what we traditionally understand by the term, flaunting the convention and speculating about the potential of the fluidity and the openness of the source. Here, the new text remains at the same time a deconstructed, displaced old text in a new context, linking, to repeat after Derrida, repetition to alterity.40 In such a cultural frame, iteration becomes a cornerstone of creativity. This preoccupation with creative possibilities implicit in acts of reusing material is, of course, as Bourriaud himself admits, “nothing new”.41 The affinities of the postmodern and postproduction practices are significant. The task of the early twenty-first century is in the end, as Bourriaud stresses, “not to start from zero or find oneself encumbered by the store-house of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.”42 As such, the contemporary digital impulse brings forward new concerns; similar forms, similar approaches to uncreative

practice, already explored at different stages of the twentieth century, arise in the culture of postproduction through an engagement with and in response to the new digital hegemony, to address a different range of questions, distinct from the preoccupations of the postmodern predecessors. Today, Fitterman and Place argue, “production (industrial age) [becomes] replaced by simulation (information age).”43 The trajectory precludes a particular relationship between technology and creativity where advancements in reproduction technologies inevitably result in association of creativity with acts of copying. As modes of information, (re)production and dissemination become more advanced and necessary technologies more accessible, notions of creativity and copying gradually converge to eventually emerge as interchangeable terms. As Benjamin predicted, in the age of post-mechanical reproduction the work of art becomes “designed for reproducibility”44 rather than for the aura of its manifest singularity. This is not to say that a propensity for originality is abandoned when increasingly more advanced technologies emerge; rather, the attitudes to originality alter as technologies develop. Similarly to Bourriaud’s, my reading of contemporary reproduction strategies in their current technological moment is an attempt at identifying a broader cultural tendency that emerges under a unique, contemporary cultural condition, an attitude that I see manifested in the emergence of the Iterative Turn. As Bourriaud explains, “today certain elements and principles are reemerging as themes and are suddenly at the forefront, to the point of constituting the ‘engine’

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of new aesthetic practice.”45 The same sense of contemporary culture that relies on iterative gestures evoked in Home’s trajectory manifests itself clearly in Bourriaud’s postproduction thinking. The aesthetic paradigms of both Home’s plagiarist culture and Bourriaud’s postproduction condition presuppose a dominance of inherently derivative practices, relying on repurposing and recycling of the abundance of available material proliferating and constantly generated online, a dynamic that influences habits of cultural production and consumption also outside of the immediate confines of the Web and strictly technology-oriented contexts. This is a key assumption, indicative of a particular thinking about technology that informs the dynamic of the Iterative Turn. If contemporary reading and writing habits develop as a result of the ubiquity of digital environments that transform and influence our behaviours also outside of the digital sphere, then acts of creativity today can be conceived of as a manifestation of the Heideggerian “essence of technology” and not of the technology itself. This is a distinction which informs Heidegger’s inquiry in “The Question Concerning Technology”—not a question of technology per se, but of what Heidegger refers to as Wesen, the essence of technology: “by no means anything technological.”46 “Technology”, Heidegger explains, “is not equivalent to the essence of technology […] the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is.”47 In line with Heidegger’s thinking, it is the changing understanding of the very conception of technology, of what technology is, rather than simply of the

changes in the apparatus of technology that should be seen as a trigger for a shift in aesthetic attitudes in their respective cultural moments. As Žižek puts it, the “essence of technology” does not designate a complex network of machines and activities; rather it is a manifestation of a particular attitude towards reality; “technology”, Žižek comments, “is the way reality discloses itself to us in contemporary times.”48 Today, then, we operate by means of a Heideggerian essence of technology, which, as a dominant attitude, “structures the way we relate to reality”.49 The problem for Heidegger is not the existence of technology—or its manifestation in a variety of forms it assumes—but rather a propensity for and orientation towards technology and technological thinking, a certain technological imagination that finds its manifestations in an aesthetic project. The framework within which contemporary iterative practices are best considered, I suggest, should be based on this concept of technology as an essence rather than simply viewed as a response to changes in technology themselves. Of course, the technological developments and thinking about technology that Heidegger posits are inherently interdependent. It is impossible to speak of the essence of technology without considering technology in instrumental terms, while any manifestation of technological progress is contingent on the conceptualisation of the essence of technology: because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in

45. Bourriaud, p. 9. 46. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York, NY: Garland Publishing. 1977. p. 4. 47. Heidegger, p. 3. 48. Žižek, Slavoy. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin Books. 2014. p. 31. 49. Žižek, p. 31.

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a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.50 “Such a realm”, Heidegger suggests, “is art”.51 In order to think about creativity in the contemporary postproduction moment, a model of technological thinking is required that goes beyond the restricted definitions of technology viewed in purely instrumental terms. The notion of the essence of technology invites a broader, more adaptable and comprehensive approach to conceptualising the nature and role of technology today. Technology as essence cannot be defined as a specific machine or a tool, but rather should be seen as a more general concept of making, inclusive of processes of artistic production. As Heidegger puts it, if we speak of the “essence of a house” and the “essence of a state,” we do not mean a generic type; rather we mean the ways in which house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay—the way in which they “essence” [Wesen].52 If we speak of an essence of digital technology, it is not the specific applications, devices, or Internet browsers that we address—not the platform which LaBeouf might have used to create his works—but a broader attitude towards the ways in which we engage with the means of information production and dissemination in an environment in which all of these technologies influence creative practices. This is a trajectory that has its roots in what can be described as Heidegger’s taxonomy of technology. Heidegger draws a distinction between modern technology and its traditional equivalent. While, for Heidegger, the modern technology restricts the definition of the technological to that which is purely instrumental, the traditional technology, or technē, typically encompasses manifestations of skill, art, or craft. Technē is a category used to denote both the creative and the instrumental practice; it is, Heidegger writes, “the name not only for the

activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to […] poiēsis; it is something poietic.”53 It is in the affinities between technē and technology that the nature of the essence of technology resides. Technē is both technology and poiēsis, technē as a cultural technique perhaps, where technology assumes a sense of a method of the arts, turning itself into an aesthetic tool. It is a matter of a certain orientation towards technology as a wide-ranging cultural attitude. It involves an extensive engagement with processes of making and producing and is not a manifestation of a singular machine or tool. What is of particular significance to my argument here is the possibility afforded by thinking about technology as essence to explore the dynamic of alterity, subversion, and change, implicit in the logic of the Iterative Turn. Technē, unlike modern technology, is inherently non-instrumental; the essence of technology is a matter of constant change. As Heidegger argues, the world is set in place (gestellt), and the modern technology as a tool and a means to an end, is what Heidegger describes as an Enframing (Gestell). While Enframing is characterised by an attempt at regulating, securing, using technology as a means of setting in place, the emphasis of technē is on engaging with technology in non-instrumental terms, on unsecuring and unsettling the familiar categories and paradigms. The use of technology that informs contemporary aesthetic practice should be seen as the essence of technē rather than of technology per se. The engagement with technology that informs iterative creative practices can be considered as a response to an ever-increasing technological move towards Enframing, a response to an effort to regulate the arts, to secure the technē in purely instrumental terms. The aesthetic premise of iterative creative acts stems from, I suggest, the possibilities of thinking about technology and creativity as technē, where creative process emerges as a result of unsecuring and unsettling the familiar, dominant categories. While Heidegger sees Enframing as the essence

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of modern technology, I suggest that turning towards technē, with allowances for digital thinking, offers a more accurate framework for the contemporary context. As such, the creative thinking at the contemporary postproduction moment should be seen as governed by the essence of technology (Wessen) rather than by its Enframing (Gestell). In this approach, any act of digital reproducibility, assumes an aesthetic rather than instrumental function. It becomes an end in itself, governed by its own logic of iteration rather than by the rules of techno-deterministic pragmatism. The iterative aesthetic, with its subversive take on mechanisms of technology, becomes a space where the possibilities of technē as a universal creative paradigm are recognised and realised. Such understanding of the essence of technology as a flexible and fluid category, as a cultural state that is coming to presence,54 is inscribed into my notion of the Iterative Turn. Thinking about the contemporary change in technology emerging in the postproduction moment as “a turn” allows for an acknowledgement of a certain sense of continuity in conceptualising practices of appropriation in the variety of their historical guises, always informed by the essence of technology, and changing as a result of shifting conceptions of technology in their respective cultural moments. A turn does not imply a break away from the older models of technology or creative practice—Home’s plagiarism, for example, develops from rather than rejects the postmodern and modernist projects— but as an unsettling process that has generative qualities at the same time, as a Heideggerian “turning”. Heidegger speaks of a turning as that which comes to pass within Enframing. As Heidegger writes, “if a change in Being—i.e., now, in the coming to presence of Enframing—comes to pass, than this in no way means that technology […] will be done away with.”55 A change in the coming to presence of a new aesthetic paradigm in no way means that earlier creative models will be done away with. Rather, the coming to presence of a new conception of technology is characteristically driven by what Heidegger describes as the “change of its destining”.56 The change, as a turn, or turning, manifests itself “out of the arrival of another destining”.57 A change in the Enframing, in the technological apparatus, a development of new technological possibilities, i.e. the ubiquity of the digital tools and methods, results in a turning not just in the technology itself, but in the essence of technology, in its conception and the attitudes towards an

50. Heidegger, p. 35. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p. 30. 53. Ibid., p. 13. 54. In his translation of “The Question Concerning Technology” William Lovitt renders the noun Wesen as both “essence” and “coming to presence”, with the latter translation of particular prominence in Heidegger’s essay “The Turning”. See Martin Heidegger. The Turning. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York, NY, and London: Garland Publishing. 1977. p. 35, n. 1. 55. Heidegger, The Turning, p. 38. 56. Ibid., p. 39. 57. Ibid.

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altered technological reality that emerge as a result. In the turning, “everything is reversed”, but nevertheless it is “not a change of standpoint”.58 Rather, it is a change conceived of as a turning point59 that allows for a shift in established paradigms in response to the change in the conception of technology. The turning, then, emerges from a pattern of discontinuities with what comes before it—appropriating in postproduction moment differs from the related modernist and postmodern acts— but the conception of technology and the related aesthetic that emerge as a result of the turning are interpretable from within and through a relationship to earlier projects and concerns.

work, but rather the revealing of the making as remaking. Conceptualised as such, contemporary uncreative works should not be considered instances of plagiarism or copyright infringement but are better described as iterative acts and an expression of the contemporary Iterative Turn. Iteration as it manifests itself at the postproduction moment can be seen as an expression of what Bourriaud describes as a “configuration of knowledge, which is characterised by the invention of paths through culture.”63 Here Heideggerian thinking and Bourriaud’s project converge to form a notion of an Iterative Turn that is indicative of shifting aesthetic attitudes and emergent means of conceptualising them.

Hence, what is manifested in the contemporary postproduction turn towards digital technology and iteration is a transformation in the attitudes towards forms of knowing (and technē, as Heidegger explained, is linked with the word epistēmē—“both words are names for knowing in the widest sense”).60 “Such knowing”, Heidegger suggests, “provides an opening up. As an opening up it is revealing”,61 indicative of epistemologies of contemporary aesthetics, revealing shifting paradigms of creative thinking and alternative approaches to originality that emerge at the backdrop of such a conceptual framework. For Heidegger, technology is a way of revealing (das Entreben) of that which it brings forth, i.e. letting a thing disclose itself rather than simply producing or manufacturing an object in purely instrumental terms. ‘”What is instrumental in technē”, Heidegger writes, “does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing that technē is bringing forth.”62 Creative acts such as LaBeouf ’s, overtly reliant on repurposed material, are a manifestation of such an assumption, openly disclosing themselves, their methods and sources to draw attention to their distinctive aesthetics, to alternative models of thinking about creativity today. It is not the manipulation of sources, making by means of remaking, that is at the core of iterative creative

Understood as such, the notion of iteration serves as a broad and flexible concept akin to, or perhaps itself a manifestation of, the Heideggerian essence, an essence of making by means of transgressing the familiar notions of authorship and creativity that turns into a creative act, one that is revealing of the paradigms of creativity constructed by iterative means. Hence, iteration should be considered as a category particularly relevant to describing the dynamic of technological and aesthetic turns, where a change, a shift in tools, practices, and attitudes, involves both a move away from the earlier paradigms and a repetition of the earlier paradigms at the same time.64 Hence, each turn, regardless of the cultural condition that defines it, is always an iterative process, repeating and altering earlier aesthetic models and systems of thought in a chain of constant change of charged differences. The contemporary turn should be seen, I suggest, as iterative in such a broad sense. It should be understood as evocative of the modernist and postmodernist commitment to repetition associated with a certain propensity for technological change as an aesthetic dominant. At the same time, this current Iterative Turn is a turn towards iteration as a creative method and form that defines the cultural and aesthetic dynamics today. As a response to the postproduction condition, iteration, or the essence of

Kaja Marczewska

iteration, perhaps—a general attitude towards re-appropriating earlier paradigms of aesthetic thinking for a cultural moment—translates into specific forms of expression that assume repetition as a model of creativity. Here the principles of an iterative turn in general, and of a turn towards iteration triggered by the current cultural moment converge at the Iterative Turn. In Heideggerian terms, the contemporary Iterative Turn combines an essence of iteration and an Enframing of iteration at the same time, or, as Derrida would have it, an example of iteration in general—a condition of iterability—and a singular iteration in itself. Seen as such, iteration should be considered both a method of creative practice and a historical category of aesthetics. The contemporary turn emerges as a result of a conflation of the two models, always intertwined in the contemporary iterative thinking, where the condition of iterability as an attitude to creative practice, finds its momentum and a manifestation in related iterative forms. Seen as such, iterability turns into a law of not only repetition itself but of postproduction creativity more broadly. While the possibility of a repetition of a particular creative form or mode of expression is always a probability, it is the specific context of the postproduction moment that creates a condition for the Iterative Turn to manifest itself most explicitly. That is to say, iteration as a creative paradigm reveals itself in the mode of revealing that is most suited to it. At the Iterative Turn, the function of reproduction technologies is not simply a matter of technological reproducibility as a means to an end, but rather an end in itself. At the Iterative Turn, an act appropriating already authored content turns into an expression of iterative thinking. Today, it is not simply an aestheticisation of technology or technologisation of aesthetics that are at stake. The ubiquity of contemporary digitalisation means that distinctions between the technological in the instrumental sense and the digital aesthetics are increasingly impossible to draw, with digital technology assuming a role of all-encompassing digital culture. It is in such a context that the Iterative Turn emerges, a moment in which both technology and aesthetics are at a turning point, turning away

58. Heidegger, Martin. Letter on Humanism. In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Trans. F.A Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray. D.F. Krell (ed.). London: Routledge. 1993. pp. 231-232. 59. My description of change as a turning point is a reference to Heidegger’s statement in his letter to William J. Richardson which, in the German original, reads: “Das Denken der Kehre ist eine Wendung in meinem Denken.” The notion of “die Kehre” mentioned here has been varyingly translated as ‘a turn,’ ‘a turning,’ or ‘a reversal,’ and the statement itself has been translated with references to a ‘turning point’ and ‘change.’” William J. Richardson translates the statement as: “The thinking of the reversal is a change in my thought.” Reprinted as Preface to Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. William J. Richardson. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 2003. p. xviii. In contrast, Emad Parvis’s translation reads: “The thinking of the turning is a turning point in my thinking.” In On the Way to Heidegger’s Contribution to Philosophy. Emad Parvis. Maddison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 2007. p. 111. See note 41, p. 214 on Parvis’s comment on his translation. 60. Heidegger, The Question, p. 5. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., p. 6. 63. Bourriaud, p. 19. 64. The same iterative logic is implied in my conflation of Heidegger and Derrida’s terms and the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida’s thought. Derrida’s could be described as an iteration of Heidegger’s philosophy, as its altered repetition. This association with Heidegger is one that Derrida makes explicit himself. See Jacques Derrida. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. 1981. pp. 52-54. Derrida’s wider philosophical project is, in fact, an iterative one. It is governed by what Spivak describes as “the notion of the joyful yet laborious strategy of rewriting the old language […] Derrida acknowledges that the desire of deconstruction may itself become a desire to reappropriate the text actively through mastery, to show the text what it ‘does not know’.” See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translator’s Preface to Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD, and London: The John Hopkins University Press. 1997. pp. xx, lxxvii. Derrida’s work is within and without the work of Heidegger, and his other predecessors more broadly; it repeats it by means of alterity, it reverses it without rejecting it, offering a framework particularly useful for thinking about the Iterative Turn and my attempt to question the familiar terms of creativity, originality, and authorship.

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65. I refer here to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura”. The aura is an aesthetic category, a way of describing particular qualities of art that Benjamin saw waning in modernity as a result of increasing mechanisation of society. The aura of a work connotes its singularity and qualities such as authority, authenticity, and originality grounded explicitly in the Romantic understanding of creativity. As Benjamin argues, the aura disappears in the modern age, as a result of the possibilities of reproducibility that proliferate. Benjamin associates the notion of originality with an artwork’s unique presence in space and time and argues that a reproduced piece loses the quality of originality exactly because it is always removed from the auratic original, because in reproduction the origin is always absent, and so the work loses the quality of originality, authenticity, and authority. Benjamin writes: “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” Benjamin, p. 214. 66. This statement is a reference to Heidegger’s notions of danger and saving power. Heidegger understands modern technology as danger, danger to man, danger to Being, technology in its instrumental sense, as Enframing, “endangers the relationship to the essence of truth”. See Heidegger, The Question, p. 33. Enframing, Heidegger explains, “banishes man into that kind of revealing that is ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiēsis, lets what presences come forth into appearance.” (p. 27) But, for Heidegger, the danger always harbours the possibility of transformation, of a turn, there is a possibility of liberation in every danger. Heidegger writes: “where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense. But where danger is, grows/The saving power also.” (p. 28) In line with Heidegger’s argument, acts of copying emerge as antithetical to paradigms of creativity and as inherently creative acts at the same time. Copying assumes creative qualities exactly because it is dismissed as “danger”, by law, by publishing standards, by prevailing notions of creativity and authorship.

from earlier paradigms without rejecting them, and turning into one another as technē. Here, the process of digital reproduction loses its instrumental, purely functional associations, to assume its own all-pervasive iterative logic. This is not to say the Iterative Turn permits or favours plagiarism and copyright infringement. It does not offer a context for a defence or indictment of either, or of projects such as LaBeouf ’s. Instead, it draws attention to the changing conditions of cultural production, where questions of the aura65 are no longer a creative concern. The iterative project offers means of reconceptualising attitudes towards technology and, as a result, transforms the “danger” that acts of copying typically pose to creativity into a form of liberation from it, a “saving power”,66 transforming plagiarism into iteration, copying into a paradigm of creativity itself.

Collaterality and Art 1

Abstract

Janez Janša

The article explores the relation between a name and its repetition, focusing on the name as ready-made and the name change of three Slovenian artists who changed their names into Janez Janša, two-time prime minister of Slovenia. In the humanist tradition a human being is considered unique and namegiving is an act of branding that uniqueness. In as much as every human being is unique, the name given to them needs to contain that uniqueness. As we know, the conventions of naming are in many cultures much more about repeating rather than innovating. Reproduced and repeated names (of an elderly member of the family) are not there only to extend a family line, but they are there to name a life as a reproduction of a society. The repetition of the name Janez Janša creates collateral effects, because the name refers to more than a single person. As soon as you call a person with the name “Janez Janša”, you cannot but set in motion a series of other effects that name conjures. The institutions involved in a name change cannot but be linked to the collateral effects of that name change. Collaterality becomes a concept that creates social ties among areas in societies that are not connected as such.

Janez Janša is contemporary artist who, together with two other Slovenian artists, in 2007 changed his name into that of the conservative, two-time prime-minister of Slovenia. Prior to and after this radical artistic gesture, Janša has been working as a theatre director and performer of interdisciplinary works that focus on the relation between art and the social and political context surrounding it, reflecting on the responsibility of performers as well as spectators. Many of his works deal with the very status of performance in neoliberal societies. For Janez Janša artistic practice, theoretical reflection and political involvement are not separated. He is also the director of Maska, a non-profit organisation in publishing, production and education, based in Ljubljana, and has edited several books on contemporary dance and theatre. He is author of the book on early works by Jan Fabre (La discipline du chaos, le chaos de la discipline, 1994). Currently he is a fellow at the international research centre Interweaving Performance Culture at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

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Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša. Signature Event Context, Berlin, 2008. Performance (screenshot, detail). Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana . www.aksioma.org

Name and Repetition In the video installation Namesake (1999) by Gary Hill, we see the artist repeating his name in an endless loop: Two color video images are projected on opposite walls. On one a face is saying the name “Gary;” on the other the back of the head appears. (...) Over and over again, the artist simply repeats his name, not particularly fast or drawn out and slow. There is no attempt to try and say it particularly differently or with any noticeable theatricality. Rather the focus is to get inside the word as if one could discover identity—where the name might become the person over time. With each articulation the word turns, shifts, and cuts a new “image.” There seems to be an equal chance of the opposite

occurring—complete alienation as the name “Gary” morphs like any other word, mutating into pure sound in the very mouth of the one it belongs to.2 In the description of the video posted on the artist’s website, the author is focused on the sound of the name pronounced. The name is not heard by the one to whom it has been addressed to again and again, the artist’s namesake, his double, the projection of himself. As much as there is no dynamics in the way of calling, there is no particular body movement that would demonstrate an effect of listening to the name. The name becomes an alien to both bearers. However, the author tries to state that the name turns into nothing more than a sound: the unsuccessful calling of the artist himself can produce a variety of affects and interpretations in a spectator.

Janez Janša

Let us look at the video from another perspective. What if the name is repeated not in order to be heard by the namesake, but to be set as a name by the speaker, by the actual bearer of the name? Doesn’t a (proper) name become the (proper) name by its mere repetition? Despite cultural differences in the convention of naming, the very act of naming contains at least two facets. A given name is always trying to fit a child, to identify the most with an infant that is yet out of language (in-fans—Latin—one that doesn’t speak), to accommodate a new being in a name that contains and projects something that is yet to come. A given name is a nest in which a new human being lands and it becomes their primary land. In the humanist tradition a human being is considered unique and the name giving is an act of branding that uniqueness. In as much as every human being is unique, the name given to them needs to contain uniqueness. Given names are names that are branded onto us, they can hurt or they can make us feel comfortable, they will connect and perform for us and in the performance of a name the repetition will have a crucial role. It is only through the repetition that a name becomes the name and when Gary Hill calls himself “Gary” again and again he is establishing his name as the name. He accommodates himself in the name given to him. He fine-tunes his name. But, as we know, the conventions of naming in many cultures are much more into repeating rather than innovating. Beside the obvious repetition of surnames that prolong the life of a family, given names are often given after someone (grandparents, for example, or persons important for the parents, the name givers), as a re-production of a naming convention. Reproduced and repeated names (of elderly members of the family) are not there only to prolong a life of the family, but they are also there to name a life as reproduction of a society.3

A Name: More or Less than a Name? In the short documentary by Boris Bezić Janez Janša: the Project (2008) Viktor Bernik, an artist and a friend of one of the three artists who changed their names into Janez Janša,4 describes the act of addressing his friend in the following terms: “Ever since Žiga changed his name to Janez it is pretty necessary to not just say ‘hello’ but ‘hello Janez’ instead.” In his description

1. The article is part of larger research on the performativity of name that author develops as a fellow at the International Research Center, “Interweaving Performance Culture” at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2015-16). 2. URL: http://garyhill.com/work/namesake.html (Accessed 2016-04-06) 3. According to the Icelandic naming policy, one can give to a child only a name that is listed in the Personal Names Register. As of the end of 2012, the Personal Names Register (Icelandic: Mannanafnaskrá) contained 1,712 male names and 1,853 female names. The BBC reported that “A 15-year-old Icelandic girl has won the right to use the name given her by her mother, after a court battle against the authorities. Blaer Bjarkardottir will now be able to use her first name, which means ‘light breeze’, officially. Icelandic authorities had objected, saying it was not a proper feminine name. Until now, Blaer Bjarkardottir had been identified simply as ‘Girl’ in communications with officials.” URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/worldeurope-21280101 (Accessed 2016-04-06). Iceland is not the only country with strict naming regulations. The same goes for Denmark, where the list contains 7,000 pre-approved names and out of 1,100 applications for new names on a yearly basis, some 15-20 per cent are rejected. 4. In the summer 2007, three artists living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Davide Grassi, and Žiga Kariž, changed their names to “Janez Janša”, the name of the Prime Minister of Slovenia at the time and the leader of the SDS (Slovenian Democratic Party). 5. “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundredand-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their consciences’.” Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. 2001. p. 174. While interpellation always hit the right target without naming it, in collaterality there is always something that remains aside.

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6. Dolar, Mladen. What’s in a Name? Ljubljana: Aksioma. 2014. p. 17. 7. At the time the three artists changed their names, there were already 11 peoples with the same name in Slovenia. Only Janez Janša, the Prime Minister of Slovenia at the time, was a public person. Interestingly enough, his legal name is Ivan Janša and the name “Janez Janša” is his nickname. Retroactively we can say that even the politician uses his name as a ready-made. 8. URL: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/ duchamp.php (Accessed 2016-02-01). 9. Adj. late 14c., “accompanying,” also “descended from the same stock,” from Old French collateral (13c.), from Medieval Latin collateralis “accompanying,” literally “side by side,” from Latin com- “together” (see com-) + lateralis “of the side,” from latus “a side” (see oblate (n.)). Literal sense of “parallel, along the side of ” attested in English from mid-15c. Related: Collaterally. n. 16c., “colleague, associate,” from collateral (adj.). Meaning “thing given as security” is from 1832, American English, from phrase collateral security (1720).

Bernik points that the name “Janez” is not there to identify a person addressed, but instead to underline the new name that his friend gave himself. Bernik tells us that addressing of his friend contains a certain performative dimension with which the name that is pronounced functions as more than a name. There is something in addition to what the name “Janez Janša” contains and that’s why it is not enough to call your newly-named friend with just “hello”.5 That “something” in addition to the pronounced name is the collateral effect of the name change, and it is the reason why you cannot call your friend without naming him. Whenever you pronounce his name, something else is pronounced, something that makes that name more than just a proper name. Saying the name “Janez Janša” hits not only one target (one person), but sets a series of collateral effects in motion that effect/ affect not only the bearers of the name. When you address Žiga with the name “Janez”, you do not only acknowledge his new name, you do not only indicate a person that holds that name, but you also acknowledge the act of a name change. You perform his name change by saying his name. Mladen Dolar explains that once we have four (public) people with the same name, none of them can exist only in one’s own name. Talking about the name change of the three artists he claims: The project comes with a twist, though: if one cannot turn the name into the perfect replica of the thing, one can make the perfect replica of the name itself, the name can be cloned, so even if the name is an imperfect image, its

tenuous and tenacious connection with the bearer is such that it clones the bearer. The one and only Janez Janša is, by the mere cunning of the name, multiplied by three more Janšas with the threat of becoming indistinguishable.6 The repetition of the name Janez Janša creates collateral effects because the name refers to more than a person. We will have a closer look at the concept of collaterality, but for the moment let us point at a crucial dimension of the concept of collaterality, and that is unavoidability. As soon as you call a person by the name “Janez Janša” you cannot avoid evoking a series of other effects that the name engenders.

Ready-made and Collateral Effects of the Name Change The name “Janez Janša” is repeated in the very act of name-changing. It is the name that already existed and it is the name that is charged with a strong meanings in the political life of Slovenia.7 The name “Janez Janša” is a ready-made, an object that acquired another meanings by being transferred into another context. Let us have a closer look at the name being a ready-made. What distinguishes the classical Duchampian ready-made from the name as ready-made are two main features. First, an object from everyday life that has been transferred to a gallery has no effect on other objects that existent outside the artistic context. The same

Janez Janša

goes for those destroyed and disappeared and for those that are yet to be fabricated. There is no disambiguation needed between a urinal that is installed in a bathroom from another one installed in another bathroom. Also, there is no need to disambiguate Duchamp’s Fountain from other urinals. Urinals are not affected by the one that became one of the most significant art objects in the twentieth century art (that has itself seventeen replicas commissioned by Duchamp).8 If I use a urinal I can do it without thinking about scrutinising an art work. When it comes to the name as ready-made the situation is rather the opposite: a name that has been transposed into another reality calls for immediate disambiguation. Janez Janša cannot be just “Janez Janša”. A name as a “rigid designator” needs a cluster of descriptions to be able to operate as the indicator of a person we are talking about. Even if the supposed clusters of descriptions are not pronounced, they are always at work in making a name the proper name. Janša, Janša and Janša titled their exhibition in Graz (Steirischer Herbst, 2008) Name Readymade. The

Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša PB0241858 (Passport), Ljubljana, 2007 Booklet, spread 17.5 x 12.5 cm Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

objects exhibited consisted of personal documents issued by authorities (state, political party and banks) in order to claim identification, membership or other civil status of the individual. The objects presented in the gallery acquired the status of art objects by the procedure of their naming (done by the artists), by their inclusion in an art context (acted out by the gallery, curator, festival) as well as by legal expertise that claimed the objects are artefacts (enacted by a court assessor for visual art). The status of art object was added to the initial status the object had, and that was not interrupted. They also became the ready-mades. Here we come to the second difference between the classical ready-made and the objects that were exhibited at the Name Readymade exhibition. It would be unlikely that once a ready-made would leave its place in everyday reality and become an art object, it would turn back into everyday life once the exhibition would be over. Or the other way round: the object that is turned into a ready-made mostly loses its function from everyday reality. Even if someone would piss into the Fountain, that would not turn the art object into a urinal (which is anyhow deprived of the infra-

Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša PB0241891 (Passport), Ljubljana, 2007 Booklet, spread 17.5 x 12.5 cm Courtesy: Daniel Aschwanden

Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša PB0243172 (Passport), Ljubljana, 2007 Booklet, spread 17.5 x 12.5 cm Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

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structure needed to be able to function as a urinal). In a certain way, a urinal turned into a ready-made becomes an illusion of an urinal. The opposite goes for the exhibited official documents: even if a spectator’s gaze tries to turn them into mere documents (a document of an action, a leftover of an action that took place somewhere else), they insist on their everyday existence. The personal documents exhibited by Janša, Janša and Janša did not remain in the art context, once the exhibition was over. They turned back to everyday life, continuing their own pre- and post- ready-made life. The individuals to whom the documents were issued were vitally interested to get them back into their everyday life in order to be able to continue performing their civil status. For our discussion on collaterality it is crucial to point out two aspects of the documents: on the one hand they were produced as collateral effects of the name change—an individual is obliged to ask for new documents once some of their data have been changed; on the other hand, the institutions that issue the documents are obliged to issue them. It is part of their routine to produce new documents. It is unavoidable for both parties to have new documents produced.

Collateral Before paying closer attention to the way institutions reacted to the name changing, let us briefly look at the concept of collaterality. The word “collateral” comes from medieval Latin collateralis, from col-, “together with” + lateralis (from latus, later-, “side”) and is otherwise mainly used as a synonym for “parallel” or “additional” in certain expressions (“collateral veins” run parallel to each other and “collateral security” means additional security to the main obligation in a contract).9 The concept is widely known via its negative meaning, coming from military jargon—“collateral

damage”. In 1961 the term was introduced into US military doctrine via an article written by T.C. Schelling entitled “Dispersal, Deterrence, And Damage”. The USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide states that broadly defined, collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces. (...) Determining collateral damage constraints is a command responsibility. If national command or theater authorities do not predetermine constraint levels for collateral damage, a corps or higher commander will normally be responsible for doing so.10 In 1999 the German word for collateral damage— “Kollateralschaden”—was declared “unword” of the year.11 The argumentation was that “collateral damage” is a military term referring to the incidental destruction of civilian property and non-combatant casualties. It points out euphemistic dimension of a word underlying its rhetorical and ideological function. There is no doubt that unintended civilian casualties were given their name in military doctrine as a consequence of the public pressure on acknowledging innocent victims of war operations. However, from the discourse on collateral damage that has been developed in the last 50 years, it is clear that despite all the advancements in military technology, collateral damage is always an unavoidable part of military operations. There is no war operation that can avoid collateral damage. As much as we try to put them aside, as much as we try literally not to collateralise12 the victims, they are unavoidable.13 The naming is not going to safe their lives. The term “collateral” was introduced in finance in the late 1980s, most widely as “collateralized debt obligations” (CDO). In simple terms, a CDO can be

Janez Janša

understood as a security for a loan to be paid or as “a promise to pay investors in a prescribed sequence”. The market for CDOs has been hugely developed and CDOs became one of the main instruments in financialisation.14 What makes the concept “collateral” relevant for us (I will continue to use the popular version of the term “collateral” instead of that of the CDO) is the fact that it is impossible to take out any loan today without having a collateral as security. Collateral is something put aside, but it is only because of that “something” that the main operation (taking out a loan) can take place. There is no “thing” without a collateral. The fact that something that operates as a periphery, as something alongside the main operation, became of such structural importance that it turned the economy of collateral into a business that in the mid-2000s generated billions of profit.15 The economy is developed on a simple basis: since collateral became so important, additional collaterals that would stand as a back-up for the first collateral were introduced. From here on, the highway to bad infinity of endless collateralisation was open. In both military and financial contexts the term collateral appears as something unavoidable, as something that sits alongside, but without it an operation itself cannot take place.

Name Change and Collaterality The name change of Janša, Janša and Janša triggered reactions in various contexts. Identification documents of Janša, Janša and Janša have been exhibited several times and, as we pointed out above, have thus acquired the status of works of art. But the artists had virtually nothing to do with their creation as such. Simply due to the routine nature of their functioning, institutions produced numerous objects the artists subsequently put in an art context and thus prompted the question of the artistic status of those objects. Those works were created as side effects, as a collateral consequence of the change of names. In this process, the actions of the artists are nothing special, for every citizen needs to change their personal documents if a change in their personal data occurs. What is particular here is the functioning of the institutions, which unknowingly produced, and still produce artworks, simply by performing their usual activities. Institutions produce works of art without intention and without doing anything outside their purview. The artworks are a side effect, collateral of a new situation in which all agents behave as if nothing has changed.

10. URL: http://fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afpam14-210/part20. htm#page180 (Accessed 2016-02-01). 11. The unword of the year (German: Unwort des Jahres) is an annual publication that names a German word or word group that is considered to be the year’s most offensive new or recently popularised term. Between 1991 and 1993, the unword was announced by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, alongside the Word of the Year. In 1994, the task was taken over by Goethe University Frankfurt. 12. The word “collateral” comes from medieval Latin collateralis, from col-, “together with” + lateralis (from latus, later-, “side” ) and is otherwise mainly used as a synonym for “parallel” or “additional” in certain expressions (“collateral veins” run parallel to each other and “collateral security” means additional security to the main obligation in a contract). [Adj. late 14c., “accompanying,” also “descended from the same stock”” from Old French collateral (13c.), from Medieval Latin collateralis “accompanying,” literally “side by side,” from Latin com- “together” (see com-) + lateralis “of the side,” from latus “a side” (see oblate (n.)). Literal sense of “parallel, along the side of ” attested in English from mid-15c. Related: Collaterally. n. 16c., “colleague, associate,” from collateral (adj.). Meaning “thing given as security” is from 1832, American English, from phrase collateral security (1720).] 13. Zygmunt Bauman uses the concept of collateral damage in relation to catastrophes, pointing out how social inequalities turn certain part of the population into collateral casualties: “Casualties are dubbed ‘collateral’ in so far as they are dismissed as not important enough to justify the costs of their prevention, or simply ‘unexpected’ because the planners did not consider them worthy of inclusion among the objects of preparatory reconnoitring. For selection among the candidates for collateral damage, the progressively criminalized poor are therefore ‘naturals’—branded permanently, as they tend to be, with the double stigma of non-importance and unworthiness.” Bauman, Zygmunt. Collateral Damage. Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2011, p. 8. 14. “Financialization describes an economic system or process that attempts to reduce all value that is exchanged (whether tangible or intangible, future or present promises, etc.) into a financial instrument. The intent of financialization is to be able to reduce any work product or service to an exchangeable financial instrument, like currency, and thus make it easier for people to trade these financial instruments.” URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization (Accessed 2016-02-06). 15. “When the financial crisis peaked in 2008 crippling the banking sector, banks found themselves with a trillion dollars tied up in now worthless assets. Of this, around half, that’s $500 billion, was tied up in CDOs. With many banks sitting on huge losses, the interbank lending market dried up, as no bank wanted to lend to another bank that was potentially going bust. CitiGroup lost $34 billion on mortgage CDOs, Merrill Lynch lost $26 billion. The insurer AIG was crippled due to selling $500 billion worth of Credit Default Swaps to in effect insure against defaults on CDOs, and payments of which it could not meet.” https://sites.google.com/site/sparemoments/my-articles/cdos---their-role-in-the-financial-crisis (Accessed 2016-04-25).

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16. Osebnosti - Veliki slovenski biografski leksikon, Mladinska knjiga, Ljubljana, 2008. 17. Tončka Stanonik, the editor of the Osebnosti - Veliki slovenski biografski leksikon in an email to Janez Janša, 30 April 2008. 18. Pojmovnik slovenske umetnosti po letu 1945. Pojmi, gibanja, skupine, težnje, ALUO and Študentska založba, Ljubljana, 2009. 19. URL: http://www. pojmovnik.si/people/hrvatin_emil/, URL: http:// www.pojmovnik.si/people/ grassi_davide/, and URL: http://www.pojmovnik.si/ people/kariz_ziga/ (Accessed 2016-01-27). 20. As long as we are not talking about “Janez Janša”, the only entry that has no year of birth, no year of death. Despite the fact that Janez Janša changed his name to Žiga Kariž in 2008, he didn’t die. Janša stays immortal and Kariž dead!

Institutional Resistance Let us have a closer look at the way some institutions reacted on the name change. The contributors and editors of the Who is who in Slovenia publication16 claimed that the former names of the artists should be used in the entries in their lexicon, instead of new ones. According to them, the names “Žiga Kariž”, “Davide Grassi” and “Emil Hrvatin” are more known than the new ones. They stated that the lexicon functions as a net of references in which each name gets linked with other names in the lexicon, and if they would replace artists’ former names with new ones they would need to do that all the way. I send you the entries. I don’t know how to understand this complication. Don’t you think that it would be correct that at least I would know whom am I talking to? I have to deal with 13,000 entries and I am supposed to be busy with only 3 of them. It’s not fair. I have no time to explain what are the consequences of that change.17 The artists insisted on editors doing their encyclopaedic job correctly and using the data that corresponds to their legal status. At the end the editors published entries with the names “Janez Janša”, “Janez Janša” and “Janez Janša”. Behind the story there might be the same problem the editors of Wikipedia had. As soon as there were three new people with the same name in addition to the existing one of Janez Janša, disambiguation was needed. The editing policy has changed slightly over the course of nine years, however, the name of the politician was always the first one on the list.

Another lexicographic publication18 solved the problem of naming by splitting artists into different persons. On the web page www.pojmovnik.si, among other information on artists there is also a year of birth and a year of death (in the case an artist is deceased). Next to the name “Žiga Kariž” it is written “born 1973, died 2007”, next to “Davide Grassi” “born 1970, died 2007”, next to “Emil Hrvatin” “born 1964, died 2007”.19 Although this could be considered as a pure mistake (in the book version the same people with their old names are still “alive”) or shortcoming of a web database, the editors basically “murdered” names and in doing so they opened an interesting debate about the names of artists as their identity, as their brand—as an artist you are not a person, you are just your name. A name is detached from a person, a name lives its own life, it can live longer, but also shorter than the person who bears it.20 In both cases the institutions were resisting to accept new names, and the new legal status of three individuals. By doing that, they actually undermined their institutional position. The arguments used were the arguments of power. Another exclusion policy the artists encountered several times was at airports. It happened that the computer system that deals with booking of flights left only one person with the name Janez Janša on a list of passengers, although at least another one if not two of them had booked their flights and bought tickets. Although all the examples speak about the power of institutions through their resistance to accept more than one person with the name Janez Janša, they actually extend the field of institutional legitimacy. They have to decide on

Janez Janša

Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša. Monument to the National Contemporary Art (Golden Triglav). Gilded sculpture, 115 x 123 x 45 cm. Steirischer Herbst, Forum Stadtpark, Graz, 2008. Photo: Peter Rauch. Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana. www.aksioma.org

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21. Dežulović, Boris. Rat i mir, Zagreb: VBZ. 2012. pp. 61-63. Originally published as Ali je Janez Janša kreten? In Dnevnikov Objektiv, 2017-09-01. Translated from Slovenian by Polona Petek. 22. On 13 November 2012 all the news broadcast on Radio Student in Ljubljana was signed by Janez Janša. The journalist of the commercial station POP TV became inspired by Janša’s exhibition Life [in Progress] and made a performance of washing the Slovenian flag at one of the main squares in downtown Ljubljana. The performance was staged for later broadcasting that took place on 28 September 2010.

something that is not part of their institutional agenda. In the cases described, they did not use the power of argument but the argument of power.

Collaterality in the Media With their change of name, the artists opened up a space for action for other agents in the public realm, among which the media and journalists reacted most forcefully. In some political media, journalists simply took advantage of the fact that there are more people called Janez Janša appearing in public and they developed their journalistic activities accordingly. The media and the artists established mutual collateral operations without ever forming a pact with each other. The artists’ act opened up a new space for the journalists to perform media activities, whereas the media— with their usual routine of following public cultural events—opened up a new space for the artists, which was far outside the usual cultural context. a. Mutual Collaterality Some artistic gesture can trigger gestures in other subsystems of society. What is important here is that the collateral effects were not intended by the act itself, but are the consequences of a potential new space, opened up by an artistic gesture. Take the example of Boris Dežulović column entitled “Is Janez Janša an Idiot?” in which the author, who signed the article with the pseudonym Ivo Sanader (the name of the Prime Minister of Croatia at the time), claims that there would be no newspaper that would dare publish an article under this own name. Now, since we have three

artists with the name Janez Janša that becomes possible: This can be done because it is perfectly legitimate to call artists—but not politicians—idiots and to call their work idiocy. Artists are harmless beings who do not have powerful lawyers. Unlike politicians, they do everything publicly and they offer their work to be judged by the public, despite the fact that their mandate is strictly personal and their responsibility is only to themselves. Politicians, on the other hand, have our mandate and they are accountable to us; and yet, no politician has ever publicly presented their work. There are no annual festivals or exhibitions in which politicians would display their achievements of the past year.21 Dežulović uses the insertion of the name “Janez Janša” in the public sphere to show the potential of criticism and media strategies that the media themselves can use without being threatened by possible being sued. Name changing created the potential for a vast range of media strategies.22 Just four months before parliamentary elections, in May 2008, an article in the daily Dnevnik mentioned that in the town where the Prime Minister Janša would appear on elections list, one of the artists with the name Janez Janša would appear as the candidate of the Social Democrats. In September 2008 political weekly MAG wanted to publish an interview with the politician Janša as one in the series of interviews with presidents of political parties. Janša refused and the three artists Janša, Janša and Janša were invited to give an interview instead of the politician. The interview was conducted

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in written form and it was pretty obvious that the intention of MAG was to use artists as a parody of a politician. The artists accepted to give an interview and instead of replying to the questions by the newspaper, they wrote a completely new interview and sent it just before the deadline expired, so that the journal could not make any substantial changes. We can say that in all of these cases there was a kind of mutual collaterality: artists opened up media spaces for their strategies while the media opened up a space to the artists to perform their artistic operations. The media used artists to criticise the politician Janša and the artists had their work presented far beyond the usual cultural context, and in that way extended the very field of art. In that sense mutual collaterality created new spaces for activities in a wider public space: in the cultural, media and political field. Mutual collaterality raises the question of the notion of collateral in a military, medical and economical context, too. Mostly, collaterality is understood one way: there is a military operation, which as a consequence creates civilian casualties (called “collateral damage”). Potential civilian casualties have no instruments to stop an operation that would make them potential victims. The same goes for the collateral effects of medication: the pharmaceutical industry is generated by collateral effects, since curing a disease can cause another malfunction of a body. Then there is finance in which every loan has to be backed up with a collateral, which generates the backing up with another collateral and so on and so fort. b. Complicity Mutual collaterality in the media raises an old question of the role of the media in society. The media create and co-create reality on which they report and reflect. The space of manipulation is immense. What is different in the case of the Sanader-Janša article is the fact that the author introduced a new type of journalism, which is satirical on the one hand, while on the other it is creative journalism, which continues

at the point where artists open up possibilities for another kind of critical journalism. The journalist and the newspaper embraced the gesture of the artists and continued operating in their own field alongside the space opened up by the name-changing gesture. In that sense journalists became the collateral accomplice of the artists: artists and journalists never met, the artists and the media never defined any kind of cooperation, and yet they created conditions for both of their activities to acquire another dimension. Of course, this kind of situation is much more complex and creates mutual collaterality only under conditions in which there is no misuse or abuse of the other side. The artists and the media are closely connected only if they are radically separated, if they are collateral, if they are together by operating independently in different fields. Journalist Jela Krečič wrote extensively on the position of journalist as an accomplice: The Janez Janša media phenomenon reveals the nature of the Janez Janša art phenomenon by parasitically infiltrating the media; the media is the space of artistic performance, that is, the space of the project by the three artists, and they cannot be severed from the artistic creation of the Janez Janša project. The project also reveals the nature of the functioning of the media, which never reports on reality as such, rather, they construct such a reality by reporting about it and by choosing a way of reporting about it. The media, which co-creates the art project, induces a certain split in the journalist who is duty bound to report about the project, and in the process of reporting about the three Janez Janšas, the journalist understands—at least, instinctively—that s/he is not merely a recorder of a neutral event but that s/he is also dealing with an event that constantly evokes a series of meanings (and their interconnections) that cannot be done away with, regardless of how precisely or dispassionately the journalist treats the event. By inadvertently producing a whole series of meanings or several coexistent semantic fields, the reporting about the Janez Janšas often creates confusion

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23. Krečič, Jela. The Janez Janša Media Phenomenon. In NAME Readymade. Ljubljana & Berlin: Moderna galerija & Revolver. 2008. pp. 175-195 24. Lukan, Blaž. The Janez Janša Project. In NAME Readymade. p. 23. Last but not least, in the media debate between Janša, Janša, Janša and the Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports at the time Žiga Turk, the Minister ended his second response with the following words: “With the answer I end my participation in your promotion and I am thankful for your understanding.” Politična samovolja ne sme vplivati na izvajanje kulturnih programov. In Delo, 8 March 2013, p. 24. 25. As of early 2016, the Museum still hadn’t obtained the official permit to buy the identity cards of the artists for their collection. 26. See Ziemer, Gesa. Neue Form von Kollektivität: Das Projekt NAME readymade von Janez Janša. In Komplizenschaft. Neue Perspektiven auf Kollektivität. Bielefeld. transcript Verlag. 2013, pp 152-156. 27. Orel, Barbara. Naming as a Playing Practice and Political Strategy. In Playing Culture: Conventions and Extensions of Performance. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. 2014. pp. 126-127

and appears comical. Even though— or, perhaps, precisely because—the journalist as a professional remains faithful to the rules of reporting and commenting, s/he cannot shake the feeling that s/he participates in the creation of the Janez Janša media phenomenon and, by extension, the Janez Janša art project.23 It is by doing the same that the journalist produces a difference. The same goes for the artists. Blaž Lukan wrote that nothing basically changed in the work of Janša, Janša and Janša: they continued doing the same professional activity as before their name-changing. To paraphrase Krečič, the artist as a professional remains faithful to the art making, and as such find accomplices in other fields. Furthermore, we note that the artists achieve this effect in an almost passive manner, for the plan carries itself out by itself, by producing new meanings solely by appearing spontaneously in the media, with no additional special or planned activities. Since the name change, all three artists have been doing what they have always done, in the same way, and there is no evidence to the contrary; meanwhile their new names, in connection with their actions, produce new meanings. The following is important when considering this conclusion: if we ask ourselves how The Janez Janša Project is functioning or where its author is to be situated, we note that it is not to be found in any of the planned activities of the three artists (a plan or a concept can only be detected in their simultaneous decision to change their names into Janez Janša), but rather

in the media attention following their actions.24

From Institutional Critique to Institutional Complicity Let us have a closer look at the relationship between the artists and cultural institutions. There has been long and well advanced artistic practice of the critique of institutions and we are not going to enter a debate about reach and complexity. Janša, Janša and Janša perform a different model of the relationship between the artist and institution— a relationship called institutionalised complicity. The artists invite cultural institutions to be their “partner in crime”, to join them in breaking through into broader social, political and economic contexts and collaborate with them on projects that cannot be realised within the field of art. The cultural institution thus appears as an accomplice and positions itself into a broader social context and by extension questions its social role. In 2011 the Museum of Modern Art (MG) in Ljubljana wanted to include the three identity cards of Janša, Janša and Janša in their permanent collection. The double status of those objects (being official and valid identification documents and art objects at the same time) made the museum approach the administrative arena (the Ministry of Interior Affairs, the issuer of the IDs) for a permission for acquisition of the objects. Although underlining and attaching the documentation that demonstrates the artistic status of the objects,

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the authorities on both local and state level claimed that those are valid documents (only) and should not have any other function that the one prescribed by the law. The Museum continued correspondence, asking the Ministry of Culture to intervene in the situation by treating the objects as artworks and not just as identification documents.25 This is an example that gives another dimension to the relation between artists and public cultural institutions. The position of an institution here is not a position of a producer, presenter or protector of an artist. The intention of the public cultural institution (the museum) to include official documents in their collection gives them no other option than to perform the role of supreme authority in the field of culture towards public institutions in other fields. Only as such can they raise a question of real weight and position of art and culture in a wider social and political context. It is a structural position of an institution to make it behave like an institution, as a subject of authority in the field of culture. The cultural institution interacts with other public and state institutions as an institution of knowledge and expertise and not as an institution of state power. Therefore, the state institutions can also enter into dialogue as institutions of knowledge and not as institutions of power. That puts the question of a double state of identity card on the same level as questions about the relation between constitutionally proclaimed rights (including rights of free artistic expression, as well as the rights of free movement within and outside the country) and legislation, which puts forward constraints and limits.

The Inclusiveness of Collaterality Let us conclude our brief journey with the concept of collaterality by looking at the social potential of the concept. Gesa Ziemer pointed out that the gesture of name-changing unconsciously involved a wide range of people: those working in state administration offices, in factories that produce personal

documents, in the media, in political parties, in the cultural field...26 Barbara Orel goes even further, interpreting the impossibility of “staying out” of a name-changed situation, turning the reality affected into a kind of omni-theatrical event: A theatrical event usually takes place in a single location and in a precisely defined time. The JJJ project, however, started in 2007, the moment the three artists acquired the politician’s name and will continue as long as they bear it. The players are not only the artists, but anyone who uses their names. At the same time, the role of audience is also acquired by the three artists as they observe others who use their names. Thus the question of who are the performers and the audience remains open. The borders between playing and not playing, intentional and unintentional playing, productive and unproductive playing are blurred as ordinary daily activity becomes extraordinary and the fictitious is infused in the real.27 What matters here is the fact that those who became included stayed exactly in the same position as they were before. Inclusion did not changed the state of a person or an institution included. Inclusiveness happened as a collateral effect and original positions were maintained—they are included by keeping their positions. Collaterality is a concept that could operate here only by crossing borders of art and cultural contexts and placing art in a wider social and political context. Moreover, collaterality is a mode of operating that coinvolves different social and political contexts without them necessarily being connected. In that sense society itself appears as multi-layered and multi-connected. Distinct from a networked society, in which some kind of totalising dimension guides relationships between people, collaterality is a concept which shows that we are always already in relation although we don’t need to be connected.

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Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša. Waiting for JJ (Riga International Airport), Riga, 2007. Digital photography. Photo: Janez Janša. Courtesy: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana. www.aksioma.org

All images in this article can be used for educational, advocacy and/or promotional use. http://gallery.me.com/hglendinning 102591. Any use of the images should be properly credited. Should you wish to publish the images extensively in a web format or any form of print publication, please contact aksioma@aksioma.org for formal permission.

Repeat, Revisit, Recreate—Two Times Year of the Horse

Abstract

Annette Arlander

The popularity of various re-makes, re-constructions and re-enactments has been much discussed in recent years. In traditional performance art, however, repetition is mostly shunned. The fascination with returning to classical performance art pieces could be understood in terms of nostalgia for the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon, the radical gestures of which we can only rehearse with a historical interest for want of any real innovation or critical force in the current situation. But what about revisiting one’s own work? Is that not the ultimate evidence of total stagnation, even stultification of what might have remained of a critical impetus? This paper does not discuss the topic of re-performance in principle, but approaches the issue from a personal perspective related to a specific artistic research project, recreating Year of the Horse (2003) twelve years later, by performing Year of the Horse—Calendar 1-2 (2015). By revisiting blog posts documenting the project this text tries to shed light on the process of repetition, to demonstrate the multi-directional and dispersed character an artistic research process can assume, and to find possible threads to follow in the future. Thus repeating and revisiting are strategies and methods for both this study and the work discussed.

Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. At present she is Visiting Professor at Stockholm University of the Arts. Educated as a theatre director (1981), with an MA from Helsinki University and a DA from Theatre Academy, Helsinki (1999), she was Professor of Performance Art and Theory 2001-2013, creating the MA programme in Live Art and Performance Studies, the first Head of the Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke) 20072009, and Professor of Artistic Research 2015-2016 at the Theatre Academy Helsinki. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-asresearch, site-specificity and the environment. Her artwork involves performing landscape by means of video or recorded voice, moving between performance art, video and environmental art. For publications see https://annettearlander.com.

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1. Jones, Amelia, and Heathfield, Adrian (eds.). Perform, Repeat, Record— Live Art in History. London: Intellect. 2012. 2. Arsem, Marilyn. Manifesto - THIS Is Performance Art. Infraction, Venice 2011. http://infractionvenice.org/ this-is-performance-art.html (Accessed 2011-06-24). 3. Marina Abramović. Seven Easy Pieces. 9-15 November 2005. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum http:// pastexhibitions.guggenheim. org/abramovic/ (Accessed 2016-04-08). 4. Marina Abramović. The Artist is Present. 14 March-31 May 31 2010. http:// www.moma.org/calendar/ exhibitions/964?locale=en (Accessed 2016-04-08). 5. Lewis, Ruth-Elois. (Re) Staging In Performance Work—Marina Abramović, Gina Pane And Valie Export. Behind the Curtain. 8 August 2013. 6. Arlander, Annette. Performing Landscape for Years. Performance Research 19. no. 3 2014. pp. 27-31. 7. Borggreen, Gunhild, and Gade, Rune. Introduction: The Archive in Performance Studies. In Performing Archives / Archives of Performance. Gunhild Norggreen and Rune Gade (eds.). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 2013. pp. 9-10.

he popularity of various forms of re-makes,

re-constructions and re-enactments has been much discussed in recent years, for instance in the anthology Perform, Repeat, Record—Live Art in History.1 In traditional performance art, however, repetition is mostly shunned.2 The recent fascination with returning to classical performance art pieces could be understood in terms of a nostalgia for the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon, the radical gestures of which we can only rehearse with a historical interest, for want of any real innovation or critical force in the current situation. But what about revisiting one’s own work? Is that not the ultimate evidence of total stagnation, even stultification of what might have remained of a critical impetus? Recreations like for example Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces,3 or the performances of her iconic works from 1970s by younger artists in her exhibition The Artist is Present4 can be defended as attempts at transmitting experiential knowledge of important works otherwise lost to a younger generation; as a way to promote the understanding of performance art among a larger public; or dismissed as purely commercial or canonising gestures. Some feminist critics contend, however, that the practice of re-staging performance works is crucial in engaging with issues surrounding the politics of representation, since “retracing reputes the notion of masculine genius locked into a linear structure of constant innovation, progression and advancement” and “questions what has been omitted from the dominant canon of modernist discourse”.5 This paper is not discussing the topic of recreation or re-performance in principle, but approaches the issue from a personal and practical perspective related to a specific artistic research project. The aim is to describe repetition in the context of recreating a previous work by revisiting the same site in order to document changes taking place in the landscape, that is, the experience of recreating the first work in the series Animal Years called Year of the Horse (2003) and performing Year of the Horse—Calendar 1-2 (2015) as an epilogue to the series. The whole project is briefly described in another context.6 By revisiting blog posts documenting the last part of the project, the text will follow the structure of a research diary, a calendar, resembling the way in which the artwork was produced. Returning to these notes I hope to shed light on the process of repetition, to demonstrate the multidirectional and dispersed character that an artistic research process can assume, and to find possible threads to follow in the future. Thus repeating and revisiting are strategies and methods both for the work discussed and for this study. Before focusing on my example, a few words about different approaches to repetition and re-creation in performance.

8. Ibid, pp. 13-15.

Repetition, Recreation and Performance In the introduction to their anthology Performing Archives / Archives of Performance Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade note how these two seemingly contrasting concepts are increasingly blurred: “New ways of understanding archives, history, and memory emerge and address theories of enactment and intervention, while concepts

Annette Arlander

of performance constantly proliferate and enable a critical focus on archival residue.” 7 Starting with Richard Schechners’ understanding of performances as actions, Marvin Carlson’s observation that performance as a metaphor has moved scholarly focus from the “what” to the “how” of culture, and Jon McKenzies’ claim that performance is today not only an analytical tool but also a disciplinary instrument (“perform, or else”), they rehearse the debate concerning the ontology of performance with regards to documentation. Since Peggy Phelan’s well-known claim in 1993 that performance’s only life is in the present, and performance’s being becomes itself through disappearance, various responses have criticised and complicated this ontology, including Philip Auslander, who deconstructs the opposition between live and mediated forms, and Rebecca Schneider, who maintains that archives disappear as well, while performances do remain and form bodily techniques of remembering.8 Following Diana Taylor, who, in her influential discussion of the archive and the repertory, politicises the idea of considering performances as ephemeral, they note the need to “take seriously the repertoire of embodied practices as an important system of knowing and transmitting knowledge.”9 Another aspect they refer to is the increasing popularity of practice as a methodology: “Parts of performance studies known as PaR (Performance as Research) use creative practice as a methodological approach in its own right, and thus emphasize a mutual response between doing and knowing in the scholarly process.”10 In passing they mention that “[r]evisiting a performance is also relevant for artists who may wish to reflect on their own performance in order to evaluate and sharpen key issues, or consult other artists’ works for consumption, inspiration, or collaboration”,11 an observation relevant for the concerns of this text. For them “there is not only a close relationship between research and performance—since many scholars are practising artists themselves, and many artists engage in critical theorising about the way in which they do or perform—but also because the distinct categories of artwork and research can no longer be upheld.”12 As scholars they stress “[i]n-depth knowledge of what is conceived as the ‘original’ performance” as “a pre-requisite for reenactments, whether in battle reenactments as part of Living History, or in artistic reenactments of one’s own or others’ performance artworks of the past.”13 Reconstructing, or rather recreating a historical work based on remaining sketches, descriptions and fragments can be a way to better understand the work, and to investigate one’s artistic legacy, although it will necessarily result in an interpretation, as we realised when creating a reconstruction of the futurist opera Victory over the Sun in Helsinki in 1988.14 In the case at hand knowledge of the “original” was of less importance, since there was no attempt at exact reconstruction, while revisiting the same site was crucial. In music and theatre the idea of re-enactment or recreation is perhaps of less importance, since the work is supposed to live on in the script. In art forms less reliant on notation, like dance and live art, re-enactments are often legitimised with archival aims or outreach; how else to keep the works alive and share them with new generations? With canonical works questions of “fidelity” to the original can become a

9. Taylor, quoted in Borggreen and Gade, p. 15. 10. Borggreen and Gade, p. 12. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Arlander, Annette, and Koskenniemi, Pieta. Is yesterday’s avant garde today’s avant garde too? Why a futurist reconstruction? News from the Finnish Theatre. 1989.

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15. Friedman, Ken. Fluxus Workbook. Oslo: El Djarida. 1990. p. 5. 16. Ibid. 17. Lepecki, André. Not as Before, But Simply: Again. In Perform, Repeat, Record— Live Art in History. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (eds.). Bristol / Chicago, IL: Intellect. 2012. p. 152. 18. Widrich, Mechtild. Can Photographs Make it So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’S Genital Panic Since 1969. In Jones and Heathfield, pp. 98-100. 19. Arsem. 20. Howell, Anthony. Analysis of Performance Art. A guide to its theory and practice. OPA (Overseas Publishers Association). London and New York, NY: Routledge 1999. p. 31.

concern. In general, scores are open structures for interpretation, as are theatre plays or musical compositions. For instance, regarding Fluxus event scores, which anyone can perform from the notation, “[t]he artist gives birth to the piece, but the interpreter gives it its voice.”15 The distinction between a musical and a painterly sensibility in understanding events can be useful in understanding recreations as well: Performance art is signature art: the creator does it, and without the artist, the work is no longer itself. Only Beuys can have done a Beuys performance. The same is generally true of happenings: only Vostell can have done a Vostell happening. And of those Fluxus artists like Knizak or Higgins who created happenings as well as events, their event scores are open to all, but their happenings were essentially restricted to creation under their personal guidance.16 Thus performance art is painterly rather than musical; it cannot be re-interpreted and performed in the same way as musical works or theatre plays. Many happenings, however, share the problems of transmitting a form through a script with traditional forms of choreography, as Andre Lepecki has pointed out in describing his redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 happenings in 6 parts.17 With performance art the question can arise as to what actually is re-enacted—the description of an event, the photograph of it, or perhaps a rumour, as in the case of Marina Abramović re-performing Valie Export’s Genital Panic as part of her Seven Easy Pieces.18 The text “Manifesto—THIS Is Performance Art” written by Marilyn Arsem in January 2011, in conjunction with Infr’Action Venezia, is an example of the critical attitude towards re-enactments among many “old-school” performance artists. The text is “conceived for a time when performance art’s true and intrinsic qualities are being confused by notions of live art and re-enactment, and is drowning in the unclear matter of its opposite: the staged, the theatrical, the spectacle.” The main headings are strong claims: performance art is now, performance art is real, performance art requires risk, performance art is not an investment object, performance art is ephemeral. There is a clear statement concerning re-enactments: “Re-enactment of historical work is theater, not performance art.” Moreover, all archiving of past performances is questioned: “The record of performance art resides in the bodies of the artist and the witnesses.”19 This manifesto is written by an artist respected by the international performance art community, which probably shares many of its views. As a contrasting example, Anthony Howell, one of the forerunners of British Live Art, considers repetition as a key term in his theory of performance art; repetition is one of the primaries of action, together with stillness and inconsistency. Mimicry is for him one form of repetition, often related to representational theatre, while copying is another, which not only mimics, but also multiplies the original. Representation is a conscious repetition; representational theatre is a theatre of the conscious mind, while performance art is an art of the unconscious, Howell maintains, referring to Gilles Deleuze, who considers repetition to be the unconscious of representation.

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There is “an inverse relation between repetition and consciousness, repetition and remembering, repetition and recognition.”20 Freud assumed that we repeat because we repress, and later suggested the death instinct was connected with repetition, as a psychic equivalent to gravity.21 According to Howell, repetition is associated with obsession, which is “a method for salvaging comfort in a painful situation”, 22 although “[r]epetition may seem to annul the progress of time by constantly returning us to the scene of some previous experience, as if one trod water in the river of life.”23 Life is maintained by repetitions, like the heartbeat, the breath, sleeping, eating, walking and so on. Moreover, “repetition can confer value by maintaining that some particular act is noble enough to merit being repeated.”24 This is relevant in the context of re-creations as well. These two examples (Arsem and Howell) exemplify the variety of approaches among artists. Other proponents of Live Art would probably stress other aspects, like live interaction with audience members in participatory works. The purpose of this text is not to rehearse the ever-more sophisticated arguments for or against re-enactments or the radical potential of performance art. It is nevertheless important to remember that the relationship to repetition differs in performance art, Live Art and theatre. When speaking of repetition with regards to theatre we can distinguish between the use of repetition in the creation of work and in the distribution of it. In standard stage performances repetition is used in rehearsal to develop and “fix” the performance. And repetition is used for distribution when the performance is repeated for new audiences each night. A third dimension involves repetition as a compositional tool, like in much choreographic work and contemporary performance, and in the example case of performances for camera I will describe in what follows.

1. Year of the Horse-start-2002-a. (video still)

2. Year of the Horse-start-2002-b. (video still)

21. Ibid, p. 37. 22. Ibid, p. 30. 23. Ibid, p. 36. 24. Ibid, p. 37.

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3. Year of the Horse-start2014-a. (video still)

4. Year of the Horse-start2014-b. (video still)

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Two Times Year of the Horse In the year 2002 I decided to document changes in the environment by visiting the same place on Harakka Island, in Helsinki, performing for camera approximately once a week for an entire year, which resulted in the video Year of the Horse (2003) [see images 1 and 2]. This led to a series of works called Animal Years (2003-2014), twelve one-year projects based on the Chinese calendar performed and videoed on the same island.25 To accentuate the idea of cyclical return I decided to revisit the place where I began again in 2014, this time only once a month. Thus I sat on the same rock, with the same scarf, albeit in front of a new camera and with new image proportions, once a month to create Year of the Horseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Calendar 1-2 (2015) [see images 3 and 4]. I also wrote blog notes after each session. Even without this last revisit, Animal Years consists of sheer repetition if formulated as a score: Take the same scarf and return to the same site. Place the camera in the same spot and choose the same framing. Perform the same action in front of the camera. Repeat this procedure once a week for a year. Repeat the same procedure the following year in another place on the island. Choose another scarf, another spot for the camera, another action or gesture to repeat. The repetition seems obvious on many levels; the place, the scarf, the position, the action, the framing, all stay the same. In this case repetition was not used in the creation process to develop and fix a performance, or to find the right version. Instead of discarding previous versions, as in a theatre or dance rehearsal, I repeated the action in order to record many versions of it. Every variation resembled the previous ones, and they were all used in the final work. In this case the use of repetition could be called generative, since repetition generated material, which was compiled more or less â&#x20AC;&#x153;automaticallyâ&#x20AC;?, using all the versions in the order they had been created. The performance was not repeated for new audiences, only for the camera, and only the video work is shown to the public. Repetition is an aesthetic principle of the work, a crucial gesture, what the viewer actually sees. Variations were produced around the basic structure of a few initial choices, with repetition as the main compositional strategy. Roughly: one artistic choice a year was repeated again and again. With repetition as an aesthetic strategy we can ask: what is repeated and what is changing? What stays almost the same, and what is constantly shifting? The attention of the viewer can be focused on the repeated action and the small shifts in it. Or, alternatively, on that which is changing, like the surrounding landscape. In this case variations were produced by the weather, light, wind, vegetation, birds, passers-by or other unforeseen occurrences. The main variations, like the time of year and time of day, as well as some weather patterns, are created by planetary movements. There is variation in the repetition from year to year, and within each one-year project. Most years I

25. I have discussed the project for instance in Arlander. Performing Landscape for Years. pp. 27-31.

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26. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and foreword Brian Massumi. London and New York, NY: Continuum. 2004 [1980]. pp. 342-86 (1837: Of the Refrain). 27. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis—an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sydney: Power Publication. 1995. p. 26. 28. I have discussed the work in Tuulikaide—Eräänlainen alku / Wind Rail—Sort of a Beginning. Ruukku— Studies in Artistic Research. no. 1. 2013. http://www. researchcatalogue.net/ view/42484/42634/53 (Accessed 2016-04-12).

have chosen two or more actions to repeat and more than one place to return to. The camera position, too, tends to shift, despite my efforts to keep it constant. Animal Years is all about repetition. Perhaps we could call it a refrain, even an existential refrain.26 “The symptom through its own repetitiveness functions as an existential refrain.”27 Discussing that would be another story.

Recreating an Image after Twelve Years In 2014, during the process of returning to the same place where I performed in 2002, I made blog notes after each session, once a month. In these notes I often begin by describing my experience and then refer to books read or conferences visited, or other details that fed into the research process. Some of them proved relevant and led to further study. In the following I quote only the initial descriptions from each note. The first blog post, however, where I describe my starting point is quoted in full. When I first took an interest in recording the changes taking place in the landscape by returning regularly to the same place and placing my video camera on a tripod in the same spot, attempting to keep the same framing and entering the image to the same position I worked for a few weeks, sometimes twice a day. To focus on the seasonal changes rather than changes in light and weather, and thus more specifically on time, I decided to record one full year, approximately once a week. And I chose the easiest place possible, the stairs on the slope towards southwest just outside my studio on Harakka Island, off Helsinki. And to have some tension in the image, I chose two positions, one very close to the camera, hiding half of the view with my shoulder, and another further away in the landscape, sitting on a rounded boulder next to the path. This was actually an exaggeration of the two different versions in a work called Windrail II,28 where I explored the difference between guiding the viewers gaze into the landscape or posing as the central figure embedded in the landscape. In this exaggerated version the human figure is literally blocking the view in the first version, and so small as to be hardly discernible in the second. This was more than twelve years ago, in 2002. To return to the same place after twelve years would certainly be more dramatic were I not walking on that same path almost on a weekly basis. To try to recreate a version of the first year of weekly repetitions as a monthly calendar is actually a way of softening the shock of coming to the end of this project, which has occupied me fairly regularly for twelve years. It is also a way of closing the cycle, as it were. So one day in brilliant sunshine, I decided the moment was right for creating the February image and start the remake. I remember the first image of the Year of the Horse, with the sun sending two dazzling swords to hit the snowy ground. By the time I stood in front of the camera twelve years later the sky was cloudy with a soft pinkish hue although there were several hours to go before sunset. My camera was different, too. Originally I used simple DV and a 4:3 image, while I now worked with HD and a 9:16 image. The dark blue scarf was the same, and so was

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the rock I was sitting on. The only notable difference in the landscape was the small windmill, fastened with wires to the ground, and I deliberately framed the image to include a part of it, to show some change. I remember being very unhappy about the framing of the original image later in the first year, since the rail of the wooden stairs is visible in a monitor, although the camera screen would not show it. So this time I was careful to leave the horizon low, to be on the safe side.29 The day I started my recreation, Helsingin Sanomat, the main local newspaper, used the trope of showing an old photo with a contemporary picture of the same place, to commemorate the bombing of Helsinki on 6 February in 1944. Compared to such dramatic demonstrations of time passing, my documentation of changes in the landscape is modest. Tapio Heikkilä has developed a technique for visual monitoring of cultural landscapes, which could be useful for further developing this practice. He recommends, for instance, choosing some of the vantage points in advance on a map, photographing the landscape in four directions, adding other viewpoints if needed, returning to take photos from exactly the same spots and directions in predetermined years, and using a camera at 200-250 cm level with a tilt of 5 degrees downwards,30 which resembles the height I used by accident in these first and last images, due to the hill.

Re-creation and Repetition in March My attempt at re-creating “Year of the Horse” (2002) on Harakka Island in 2014, albeit once a month rather than once a week, was almost stranded before it started due to unlucky circumstances. During my first session, in the first days of February, snow covered the island and most of the sea as well. The winter was exceptionally short, and the ice soon turned unreliable to walk on or impossible to row through. In mid March when the sea was finally open for boats, I was away travelling. In order to continue the “calendar” I finally made it to the island at the end of March. The jump between the first two images is thus almost two months rather than one month. There was no more snow in sight, only a few remains by the rocks on the northern shore. The first sounds of birds filled the air and the sun felt warm, like spring.31 Kirsten Pullen discusses the many re-creations of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies on YouTube, viewed by millions, and suggests that performance studies scholars should not only use YouTube for examples in teaching, as consumers, but to participate as producers too.32 Re-creation is a kind of repetition relevant for artistic research, as Mark Fleishman notes in “The Difference of Performance as Research”.33 For him performance-as-research is a process of creative evolution. It is not progressivist, building towards a finality; nor is it mechanistic in the sense that it knows what it is searching for before it begins searching. It begins with energy... that is then channelled, durationally, through

29. Posted 2014-02-07. http://annettearlander. com/2014/02/07/recreatingan-image-after-twelveyears/ (Accessed 2016-0412). 30. Heikkilä, Tapio. Visuaalinen maisemaseuranta. Kulttuurimaiseman muutosten valokuvadokumentointi [Visual Monitoring of Finnish Landscapes]. Helsinki: Kustannus Oy. Musta Taide. Taideteollisen Korkeakoulun Julkaisusarja A 76. 2007. pp. 152-153. 31. Posted 2014-03-31. http://annettearlander. com/2014/03/31/march/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 32. Pullen, Kirsten. If Ya liked it Then You Shoulda Made a Video Beyoncé Knowles. YouTube and the public sphere of images. Performance Research 16. no. 2. 2011. pp. 145-153. I remember reluctantly participating in her “Psingle Ladies” at PSi #16, and that is not the version that attracted the millions. Obviously there are re-creations and re-creations. 33. Fleishman, Mark. The Difference of Performance as Research. Theatre Research International 37. no. 1. March 2012. pp. 28-37.

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34. Ibid., p. 34. 35. Posted 2014-04-15. http://annettearlander. com/2014/04/15/intraacting-with-geese-grassand-wind/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 36. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway— Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007.

repetition, in variable and indeterminable directions... It expresses itself through a repeated, though flexible and open-ended, process of ontogenesis.34 Fleishman suggests that repetition is a way of slowing down in order to see the differences, in order to feel and live the intervals between the stable points of action. I completely agree; in creating a performance it is as if repeating things is the only way to become aware of what actually takes place. But what about revisiting old works, old places, old strategies for performing landscape? What is the difference, and is there a difference that matters? These questions haunted me at the start of the project, although I soon abandoned them as unproductive. Working with repetition can take many forms.

37. Ibid, p. 234. 38. Ibid, p. 235. 39. Ibid. 40. Arlander, Annette. From interaction to intra-action in performing landscape. In New feminist materialism: engendering an ethic-ontoepistemological methodology. Beatriz Revelles Benavente, Ana M. Ramos González, Krizia Nardini, (eds.). Artnodes. no. 14. 2014. pp. 26-34. http://journals.uoc. edu/index.php/artnodes/ article/download/n14revelles-gonzalez-nardini/ n14-full-node-en (Accessed 2016-03-31).

Intra-acting with Geese and Grass in April A short visit to a windy Harakka Island for the April session revealed a familiar landscape. The surroundings looked almost the same as at the end of March, with one audible difference; the birds had arrived. Not only were the seagulls sitting in pairs on the cliffs, screaming every now and then of the sheer joy of spring, but two geese couples were strutting on the slopes of the old fortifications, trying to find something green to eat among the dry grass of last year. When more of them have arrived and started nesting, standing on the path on the hill is like a dangerous adventure; the birds will be fiercely protecting their territories from intruders, and humans make no exceptions.35 During that time I was struggling with Karen Barad’s important book Meeting the Universe Halfway,36 trying to understand what agential realism might mean in practice. Building further on the explorations of Foucault and Butler, Barad insists that the forces at work in the materialisation of bodies are not only social and the materialised bodies are not all human. “According to agential realism, causality is neither a matter of strict determinism nor one of free will” she writes, “intra-actions iteratively reconfigure what is possible and what is impossible—possibilities do not sit still.”37 Barad explains: “The world’s effervescence, its exuberant creativeness can never be contained or suspended. Agency never ends; it can never ‘run out’. The notion of intra-action reformulates the traditional notions of causality and agency in an ongoing reconfiguring of both the real and the possible.”38 Barad emphasises that agency is a matter of intra-acting, an enactment rather than something somebody or something has. “Particular possibilities for (intra-) acting exist at every moment” and they “entail an ethical obligation to intra-act responsively in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering.”39 Her notion of intraaction, instead of interaction, which assumes that the entities interacting pre-exist the interaction, is fascinating; intra-action suggests that bodies or agents or subjects are created through intra-actions.

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Later that year I wrote an article on intra-action40 trying to understand the concept in relation to another work in the same series, Year of the Snake. The notion of intraaction changes our understanding of our relationship to the environment. Bodies are not simply situated or located in particular environments; rather, environments and bodies are intra-actively co-constituted. “Bodies (‘human’, ‘environmental’ or otherwise) are integral ‘parts’ of, or dynamic reconfigurings of, what is”.41 The relationship between “bodies” and “environment” becomes obvious when working with video imagery. The idea of intra-action as constitutive is easier to understand, because the elements in the image are produced by the intra-action of “measuring agencies” like the camera, the tripod, the framing of the image, and “objects” like the cliff, the sea, the tree, the stub, the swing and the performer.

Exposition of Artistic Research in May When the sun suddenly appeared after several rainy days I rushed out on the slope above the fortifications to record the May session of the remake of the Year of the Horse. I reacted as if the subtle green of the small birches on the cliffs would immediately turn into ordinary foliage consequent to the light. The wind from southwest was freezing cold, so no risk.42 In “Integrating the Exposition into Music-Composition Research” Hans Roels presents the idea of the open sketch as an exposition form and a research tool, which could be transposed to other art forms as well. Roels emphasises the unfinished character of the sketch, which is deliberately created to investigate a research topic and is performed and discussed by an invited critical audience. It differs from a finished complex composition by being focused on a specific problem and perhaps allowing some emotional distance as well.43 I immediately associated my blog posts with open sketches as expositions. Perhaps one would expect a research exposition to be more planned, more focused and analytical than monthly blog notes, which seem like field notes, observations, material to be analysed later. If we understand the word exposition literally, however, I was indeed exposing my artistic practice and research in the making; the investigation of the effects of a time-lapse of twelve years was presented as open sketches made public.

Practicing Embodied Cognition in June Standing on the hill in front of the camera and walking down to sit on the rock below the slope, during the session in June, made me aware of the small windmill again. It is the only feature in the environment that has visibly changed since I sat on the same rock once a week for a year twelve years ago. At that time I was interested in recording the seasonal changes in the environment during one year. Now my focus is on changes that have taken place during these years in between.44

41. Barad, p. 170. 42. Posted 2014-05-11. http://annettearlander. com/2014/05/11/expositionof-artistic-research-in-may/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 43. Roels, Hans. Integrating the Exposition into MusicComposition Research. In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia. Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff (eds.). Leiden: Leiden University Press. 2014. pp. 153-164. 44. Based on a note posted 2014-06-21. http://annettearlander.com/category/ year-of-the-horse-remake/ (Accessed 2016-04-12).

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45. Keane, Jondi. Æffect: Initiating Heuristic Life. In Carnal Knowledge—Towards a “New materialism” through the Arts. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds.). New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. 2013. pp. 41-62. 46. Ibid., p. 61. 47. Ibid., p. 60. 48. Posted 2014-07-14. http://annettearlander. com/2014/07/14/returningto-the-rock-in-july/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 49. See http://psi-artisticresearch-working-group. blogspot.fi (Accessed 2016-04-12). 50. See http://www.avarkki.fi/en/works/year-ofthe-horse-sitting-on-a-rock/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 51. See http://www.av-arkki. fi/en/works/sitting-on-arock-rock-with- text/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 52. The blog post Istun kivellä sateessa [Sitting on a rock in rain] is written in Finnish http://annettearlander.com/2014/06/23/ istun-kivella-sateessa/ (Accessed 2016-04-12).

The environment could be understood as an example of the excluded middle, as discussed by Jondi Keane in “Æffect: Initiating Heuristic Life”.45 According to Keane a new materialism must be built on the subtle difference initiated by embodied reality sensitive to affects and prompted by atmospheric intricateness. His notion Æffect is “a relational/corelational tool devised to help one learn how to negotiate the material processes of self-organisation.”46 Practising embodied cognition, or distributing the mind throughout the body and into the environment, means “first, the recognition of the role of the environment in the co-selection of the organism-person-surround”, that is, “cognition as perception and action”, and “second the role of abstract relationships in the coordination of the organism-person-surround”, that is, “cognition as attention, emphasis, and the production of value-based distinctions”.47 The role of the environment, the organism-person-surround, was evident while sitting on the rock among small birches bending in the wind and geese walking around followed by their young when I was performing for camera in 2014. Rather than observing and reflecting I was engaging in actions in order to perceive, focusing my attention on some parts of the environment, putting more emphasis and value on some aspects, intent on noticing changes since my last visit. The camera, however, does not make the same distinctions but registers the familiar and the surprising with the same intensity. By using its automatic functions for choice of light balance and focus an impersonal approach and some constancy is maintained. Moreover, the agency of the technology and the environmental conditions it reacts to are acknowledged.

Returning to the Rock in July Revisiting the same rock on Harakka Island as a kind of re-enactment, felt like a relaxed return home after a trip to Shanghai in China. /--/ Sitting on the same rock on the island again, knowing that the second half of the year is still in front of me, feels both strange and familiar at the same time, like engaging with the remains of some ancient practice that does not really belong to me or my concerns at the moment any more. On the other hand I have not invented any significantly different approaches to performing landscape, not yet.48 During the conference Performance Studies International #20 at the Shanghai Theatre Academy I showed images of the first part of these re-visits together with the original video in a performance-presentation called “Revisiting the Year of the Horse” as part of the “Porous Studio Avant-Gardening” organised by the Artistic Research Working Group.49 Besides the original video Year of the Horse50 from 2003 I showed Sitting on a Rock (Rock with Text),51 made the following spring in the same place, and a new work performed in Koivumäki (Birch Hill) during a day and night at midsummer 2014, Sitting on a Rock in Rain.52 I tried to write a new version of the text “Sitting on a Rock” from 2002, without much success, although the attempt at using an existing text as a template, re-creating it and adding new observations according to circumstances was useful as a tool and would merit a separate discussion.

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Watching the Birches Suffer in August After a long period of warm, dry weather the birches on the cliffs on Harakka Island… have been completely yellow, like in autumn, since there is very little soil on the cliffs and no water without rain. But today, after the rainfall last night I expected them to look invigorated. Because of the brisk wind, however, most of the dry leaves had fallen, so the landscape looked even more autumnal, despite some fresh greenery here and there.53 Since my last visit I had participated in the World Congress of the IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) at Warwick University in the UK, with the theme “Theatre and Stratification”..54 At the meeting of the Performance as Research Working Group, originally started by Baz Kershaw and Jacqueline Martin in 2006, I focused on a work from the previous year of the snake (2013) and Michael Marder’s ideas on plant thinking.55 In a paper called “Performing with Plants—Challenges to Traditional Hierarchies?”,56 I discussed how we normally take the plants that support our activities for granted. And the rocks, like the rock I was repeatedly sitting on during 2002 and 2014, and which I did not grant any agency before reading Jane Bennett and her idea of thing-power.57 Without the big rounded rock on the path on Harakka Island I would probably have chosen another place to sit on and another spot to place my camera tripod on. In the timescale of the rock the twelve years that have passed since I performed with it the last time are merely an instant.

Indian Summer and Immaterial Land in September Beautiful warm summer days in the middle of September are rare in Finland, and what we call “Indian summer” always feels like extreme luxury. Very, very soon the dark, damp, stormy autumn is upon us. I went to revisit the slope and the rock I used to visit weekly in the year of the horse in 2002, and now visit once a month this year, and was surprised by the view. After a few days of rain the moss was light green on the cliffs, and all the yellow leaves of the birches were gone, so the few remaining green ones almost reminded me of spring. And it was warm! 58 “Immaterial land” by Brian Martin59 is written from the point of view of the indigenous population in Australia and their view of art in contrast to western notions. The central notion is “country” or land, which makes the text harder to comprehend. A more sensitive relationship to the earth, the soil and the environment is necessary, but talk about land and belonging inevitably associates to “Blut und Boden” ideology in European ears. The idea of an artwork as a map, a ritual aid and the materialisation of memory is fascinating, however, as is refusing the binary between the material and the immaterial or spiritual. The aboriginal works I have seen were huge shimmering colour fields, while the works Martin describes are ornamental images of fish. The concept is beautiful, though: you catch a fish, respect it, eat it and then paint a representation of it and bring it back to life that way—a perfect form of

53. Posted 2014-08-12. http://annettearlander. com/2014/08/12/watchingthe-birches-suffer-in-august/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 54. See http://iftr2014warwick.org (Accessed 2016-04-12). 55. Marder, Michael. PlantThinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2013. 56. In a workshop organised together with Stefanie Bauerochse and Juan Manuel Aldape Munoz we invited people to swing from an old oak (me), to climb that oak and read some lines of Shakespeare (Stefanie) and walk into the art centre and watch a small performance with one of the volunteers (Juan). The book of abstracts, including these ones, can be found online. (http:// iftr2014warwick.org/conference/book-of-abstracts/) 57. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. 2010. 58. Posted 2014-0-17. http://annettearlander. com/2014/09/17/indiansummer-and-immaterialland-in-august/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 59. Martin, Brian. Immaterial Land. In Carnal Knowledge 2013, Carnal Knowledge—Towards a “New materialism” through the Arts. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds.). New York: I.B. Tauris 2013. pp 185-204.

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60. See http://www.avarkki.fi/en/works/year-ofthe-horse-sitting-on-a-rock/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 61. Posted 2014-10-11. http://annettearlander. com/2014/10/11/appropriation-and-invocation-in-october/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 62. Verwoert, Jan. Apropos Appropriation: Why steeling images today feels different. Art and Research 1. no. 2. summer 2007. http://www. artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/ verwoert.html (Accessed 2015-09-01). 63. Ibid. 64. See http://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Der_- Moench_am_ Meer_(C_D_Friedrich).jpg (Accessed 2016-04-12). 65. See http://www.avarkki.- fi/en/works/year-ofthe-goat-harakka-shore-1-3/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 66. See http://www.av-arkki.- fi/en/works/three-shores/ (Accessed 2016-04-12).

ritualised repetition. My repeated visits to the rock were also turned into representations, albeit without such ritual significance. Perhaps recreating Year of the Horse was a ritual exercise to keep up the practice, while looking for another place, another landscape, a different environment.

Appropriation and Invocation in October Revisiting the rock on the western shore of Harakka Island once again made me think of the materiality of this kind of reworking, remaking, returning, and replaying of what was before. Although the rock, the wooden stairs, my scarf are the same as twelve years ago, I have a hard time making the connection. I do not remember what I experienced in October 2002, rather, I have only some vague images in my mind of the video thus created, Year of the Horse—Sitting on a Rock,60 which I saw recently. Probably the same goes for many memories, we do not remember the events but only our retelling of them.61 In “Apropos Appropriation: Why steeling images today feels different”,62 referred to by Barbara Bolt at the conference “New Materialist Methodologies—Gender, Politics and the Digital” in Barcelona, Jan Verwoert discusses appropriation and invocation comparing postmodern practices of appropriation in the 1980s with appropriation today. Referring to Derrida he contends that invoking images involves dealing with ghosts, as well as the ceremonies of invoking them. He describes the move away from interest in the arbitrariness of the sign to the performativity of language, how things are done with words, how language through injunction and interpellation enforces meaning, like a spell cast upon a person. When you call up a spectre it will not be content with being analysed, it will have to be negotiated.63 Invoking the spectre of German romantic painting, as in re-creating Der Mönch am Meer64 by Caspar David Friedrich on various shores, resulted in Year of the Goat—Harakka Shore 1-365 and Three Shores66 and evoked a whole legacy of ghosts, interpretations and recreations to negotiate. But Year of the Horse had no conscious model or precursor. In recreating it I did not appropriate my previous work, but perhaps I invoked it. We could ask, why call up exactly these ghosts? Why sit on the rock again? Perhaps I should have considered what ghosts would be worth calling forth, what spectres could be summoned for help? Acknowledging the performativity of all artistic practices, we could ask: what spells should we use right now? What should we really repeat? These questions must remain rhetorical; I have not yet discovered an answer. One of the beauties of using repetition as a tool, however, is that it can carry you through moments of doubt.

Production of Space in November On returning to a damp and chilly Helsinki from the rainy but considerably warmer city of Porto I inevitably thought about the influence landscape and the environment

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in general has on our moods. After discussing various approaches to artistic research during a small well-organised and fairly informal event called “Conversations on Artistic Research” at the department of fine arts of the University of Porto, where I gave one of the keynotes with the title On Doing Research, it seemed almost an anticlimax to resume my modest project on Harakka Island.67 The classic work by Henri Lefevre, The Production of Space68, from the 1970s is on the reading list of most people interested in space, and his tripartite division of space into lived, conceived and perceived space, or his distinctions “spatial practice”, “representation of space”, and “representational space” are still relevant. His witty criticism of the proponents of the linguistic turn of the time and his ironical comments directed at orthodox Marxists are entertaining today, but most of his ideas on the production of space still make sense: how has the particular space of Harakka Island been produced, and how is it continually reproduced by the social practices of various user groups, including my practice of performing landscape?69 The lived space on the island is transformed into the conceived and perceived space of a video work, a representational space, which is based on, and to some extent influences, the prevalent cultural conceptions of space. The notion of production, rather than the levels of representation, seems related to the performativity of space.

Between Storms in December Last night some of the rainfall came down as wet snow, but nothing of it remained in the afternoon when I went down to the shore to empty my boat from water. The ground was as dark and gloomy as before, only more wet. To my surprise the wind was blowing from west-northwest in such an angle that there were no big waves between the mainland and the island. Thus I quickly decided to return and bring my things and to row across to record the December session of the Year of the Horse now, and thus to have it done well before Christmas. /--/ I was energized by my dread for the strong wind, though. On the way to the island it was pushing me, but on the way back I really had to work hard against it. And nothing keeps you awake better than a kick of adrenaline.70 Many performance artists work with risk, experimenting with pain or hinting at terror. Some, like Marilyn Arsem, say that without risk there is no performance art. My performances for camera do not involve any real risk, or even imagined dread, although they repeat the same actions as if forced by an obsession or trauma. Their forte is not in duration, like for instance the work of Linda Montano,71 but in repetition. Autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides, a dialogue with Jacques Derrida72 recommended by Rustom Bharucha, during his lecture on his book Terror and Performance,73 reminds us that even a peaceful activity like revisiting a site could become risky, if there are disagreements concerning who is entitled to use the land. “Terra”, territory and terror go together.

67. Posted 2014-11-09. http://annettearlander. com/2014/11/09/productionof-space-in-november/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 68. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1991 [1974]. 69. For a discussion of what I mean by the term, see Arlander. Performing Landscape, pp.7-21. 70. Posted 201-12-13. http://annettearlander. com/2014/12/13/betweenstorms-in-december/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 71. Linda Montano repeated her Seven Years of Living Art for another seven years. http://www.lindamontano. com/14-years-of-living-art/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 72. Borradori, Giovanna. Autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides, a dialogue with Jacques Derrida. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2003. pp. 85-136. http://is.muni.cz/el/1423/ podzim2013/SOC571E/um/ Bor- radori_A_Dialogue_ with_Jacques_Derrida.pdf (Accessed 2016-04-12). 73. See http://www.teak.fi/ general/Uploads_- files/Bharucha_lecture.pdf (Accessed 2016-04-12).

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74. Posted 2015-01-19. http://annettearlander. com/2015/01/19/through-thethick-skin-of-the-sea-in-january/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 75. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film—Intercultural Cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. 2000. 76. Cubitt, Sean, and Monani, Salma (eds.). Ecocinema Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. 2013 77. See http://www.av-arkki. fi/en/works/year-of-thehorse-sitting-on-a-rock/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 78. See http://www.av-arkki. fi/en/works/year-of-thehorse-calendar-1-2/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 79. Previews of both versions are available on the web: the first version http://www. av-arkki.fi/en/works/yearof-the-horse-sitting-on-arock/ and the second version http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/ works/year-of-the-horsecalendar-1-2/ 80. Macdonald, Scott. The Ecocinema Experience. In Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Sean Cubitt and Salma Monani (eds.). New York, NY, and London: Routledge. 2013 [2004]. pp. 19-20.

Through the Thick Skin of the Sea in January The sea was open when I came over to the island, but since there was no wind it felt like it could be freezing any moment. There was no thin layer of ice on the surface yet, but near the shores there was a sort of porous jelly that could turn into ice floes any minute. For a good ice to form it was not cold enough, though. I got a ride across to the island and went to perform, to stand and sit in front of the camera with my dark blue scarf on the hill towards the west for the last time. This remake of my weekly performance during the year of the horse 2002, done once a month in 2014, ends here. /--/ When I look at the small DV tape cover on my table, I can read the dates I have visited the hill and the rock below it: 6 February, 30 March, 12 April, 11 May, 2 June, 14 July, 12 August, 17 September, 11 October, 9 November and 14 December 2014. And now, today, on 19 January 2015.74 The Skin of the Film by Laura U. Marks,75 the only work related to video or film, besides, Theory & Practice,76 I read during the year, introduces the notion of haptic visuality, relevant to these works. Marks discusses intercultural cinema in a postcolonial context, and focuses on films describing diasporic experiences, including specific audiences touched by the actual “skin of the film”. Many of the film-makers she introduces work with the blurring of vision in order to evade objectifying visuality and to evoke other senses in an effort to articulate what cannot be remembered. Despite the discrepancy in the context, this resonates with my idea of repetition; returning to the same place, showing the same thing over and over again, trying to grasp what exactly is happening in the landscape. Perhaps that is something to focus on even more in the future: to look closer, to forget the view and to direct attention to the details, the more or less living things that together comprise the landscape.

Returning to the Beginning The purpose of returning to the same site was not only to recreate the first version twelve years later, but also to be able to juxtapose the two works, Year of the Horse 77 (2003) and Year of the Horse—Calendar 1-278 (2015). Looking at the two versions provided a surprise; the same actions on the same site performed for a camera placed in the same spot produced two rather different works. This was due to several changes: 1) from DV quality to HDV quality, 2) from a 4:3 video format into a 16:9 film format, 3) from approximately one image per week (64 images) into an image once a month (12 images). The environment had changed surprisingly little, while developments in video technology have been remarkable. The main difference between the two works is the rhythm. The second version, a two-channel installation (11 min. 10 sec.), was edited to almost the same length as the first, a single channel video with two parts (12 min. 28 sec.)79 In the first work the year is thus repeated twice, and the image duration is 6 seconds. In the second work the image duration is more than 60 seconds, which changes the character of the work completely. Moreover, one image

Annette Arlander

per month rather than one per week accentuates seasonal changes rather than shifts in weather and light conditions. Additionally, in the second version the scarf often covers more than half the image, so the camera automatically focuses on the textile, leaving the landscape blurry. Slowness and static images of long duration—which characterise the second version— are considered the hallmarks of an ecological approach to film. Scott MacDonald, for instance, defines certain films as eco-cinema primarily because they provide within the film an experience of nature that functions as a model for patience and mindfulness, characteristics of awareness that are decisive for an appreciation of and a commitment to the natural environment; they offer an alternative to conventional modes of watching media, thus helping to foster a more sensitive relationship to the environment.80 Paradoxically the second version could thus be considered more “radical” than the first version, in terms of the values of eco-cinema. Perhaps it is misleading to think of the second version as a re-creation, and the first version as an “original” to be recreated. The repetition is more like a return to the beginning in order to create an ending to the cyclical process. Year of the Horse— Calendar 1-2 performed in 2014 was not only a re-creation of the Year of the Horse from 2002, but the result of repeating the same task in order to end Animal Years. The second version points to the cyclical structure of the series and indicates a third level of repetition. As the year begins and ends in January, this series, following the twelveyear cycle of the Chinese calendar (which traditionally begins with the year of the rat), begins and ends with the year of the horse. On a more general level, revisiting these notes and works did serve as a reminder that the task for artistic research is not necessarily to find out something that already exists out there, waiting to be discovered, but to construct or cut out a space for the divergent agents to intra-actively create the matter at hand, or simply, to focus attention on that which matters, in this case the landscape. Websites Annette Arlander: Performing Landscape http://annettearlander.com http://psi-artistic-research-working-group.blogspot.fi http://iftr2014warwick.org http://newmaterialistconference.wordpress.com. Video works http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-horse-calendar-1-2/ http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-horse-sitting-on-a-rock/ http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/sitting-on-a-rock-rock-with-text/ http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-goat-harakka-shore-1-3/ http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/three-shores/

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David Blamey David Blamey (b. London, 1961) is a London-based artist and proprietor of the independent publishing imprint Open Editions. His work encompasses several activities, including teaching, publishing and exhibiting, which overlap to form a multidimensional practice that defies easy categorisation. To this end, his work is positioned consciously within a range of public situations, both inside and beyond the art gallery. He recently released and edited the book Specialism (2016) and a record Rural (2015), while The Wire described his O.K. sound project for My Dance the Skull’s Voice Studies series as “something quite strange, creepy and good”.

David Blamey

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David Blamey

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David Blamey

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David Blamey

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David Blamey

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David Blamey

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The respective photographers and artists reserve the rights to the images published from pages 61-72 in this issue. They may not be reproduced and distributed without permission of the photographers. Page 61. Maud Taber-Thomas. Photograph by Xueli Zheng. www.maudtaber-thomas.com Page 62. Paula Billups, Copying at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 2004. Photograph by Scott Billups. http://paulabillupsart.blogspot. se/2013/08/the-mud-in-middle.html Page 63. Amy Mann painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, USA. Photograph courtesy of Amy Mann. www.amyilenemann. blogspot.se Page 64. Copying Monet (West Wing), National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, USA. Photograph by Robin Taylor. www.flickr.com/ photos/robinelaine/

Page 65. The Old Master, Louvre Photograph by Scott Watton. www.flickr.com/photos/nuzululand/ Page 66. Art Student at Hermitage. Photograph courtesy of Why Art? www.whyart.pl Page 67. Artist copying a painting at the Louvre museum in Paris, France. Photograph by Iain Masterton. www.iainmasterton.com/index Page 68. Copying the Old Masters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph by James Stave. www.flickr.com/photos/56923898@N02/ Page 69 –  Top. Artist copying old master oil painting in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.  Photograph by Alex Segre. www.flickr.com/photos/ alexsegre/ Page 69 –  Bottom. Leo Neufeld, Copying Rembrandt. Photograph courtesy of Leo Neufeld. www.leoneufeld.com

Page 70. Ng Woo Lam, Copying master painting (Frans Hals) at the Metropolitan Museum.  Photograph courtesy of Ng Woo Lam. www.woonartworks.blogspot.se Page 71. Copy Cat Photograph by Shari Littman. www.flickr.com/photos/sharilyx/ Page 72. Artist copying The Wine Harvest by Francisco de Goya in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Photograph by Alex Segre. www.flickr.com/ photos/alexsegre/

Feminine Destruction and Masculine Protagonism: Notes on Gender, Iterability, and the Canon Abstract

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

This article reflects on my experiences directing Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 2014, and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie at Scenkonst Sörmland, one of Sweden’s regional theatres, in 2012. Both productions were part of a larger (ongoing) research project concerning gender, performance and canonical works. Exploring critical gender perspectives and norm-creativity in performance practice, I have been investigating the possibility of developing at once an acting technique and an overarching performance aesthetic grappling with questions of performativity and iterability. In this, my main concern has been structures or patterns of iterability in the performance of canonised works, as well as notions of authenticity—particularly what is deemed acceptable or believable when it comes to character portrayal, gender(ed) performance, and mise en scène. In these reflections, the question of subjectivity and gender as connected to dramaturgy and what I call protagonism surfaces in particular ways, casting light on some of the problems I faced and with which I grappled in my directorial work. As such, my original notes on these two research and production processes have been reframed as a reflection on dramaturgy, and on the coerciveness of gendered and aesthetic ideals.

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl is PARSE professor of performative arts at the Academy of Music and Drama, Gothenburg University, and also a freelance director. She works at the intersection of critical theory and performance practice, with research interests in feminist performance, cultural and psychoanalytic theory, and interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts. She has held appointments as a researcher and teacher at Stockholm University of the Arts, Lund University, California College of the Arts, and the University of California, Berkeley. Between 2010 and 2015 she was a member of the Swedish Research Council’s Committee for Artistic Research. Kristina has a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Indeed, every deep experience wants repetition, return, insatiably, to the end of all things. Walter Benjamin1 It is always necessary for a woman to die for the play to begin. Hélène Cixous2

Prologue As I sat down to reflect on my process of directing Henry Purcell’s baroque opera Dido and Aeneas (1689) and August Strindberg’s chamber play Miss Julie (1888), I became aware of certain points of connection between these two works, authored two centuries apart and separated by context, geography and genre, which I had not noticed while I was working on each production (in 2012 and 2014, respectively). Beyond the dramatic structure of the individual work, I began to discern a correlation pertaining to protagonist status, point of view, and ultimately the stakes of subjectivity in the relationship between plot and character development. I had planned to write a text describing my attempted incorporation of theories on iterability and (gender) performativity (primarily those of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler) into my mise en scène. Because notions of repetition and iterability in particular ways become central to the performance (history) of canonical works, I have chosen to approach the practice of “staging the canon” through critical discourses on repetition, iteration and citationality. This has had effects on my understanding of the notion of a canonical work, and it has also informed my way of working with the embodied performance and enactment of character and plot, including the actors’ technique. However, as I considered the two works as well as their rehearsal and production processes together, a sense of recognition brought me instead to think about a different point of iteration and citation, having to do with the seeming inevitability of the death of the woman. This standard trope of nearly every classical play or

opera stages a tension between the two directions or tendencies in which repetition and citation tend to operate—either to confirm, stabilise and re-iterate, or to point to the instability and flexibility of signs and signification. The action staging and signifying the death of the woman can be carried out, that is to say performed, in many different ways, settings, and situations, and for various reasons. However, does its signification really change? It is the “thing” to which theatrical performance always returns, “insatiably”, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s word. Peggy Phelan has suggested that theatre and performance not only enact disappearance, but also “respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death.”3 However, the rehearsal of this particular loss, the destruction of the woman as embodied symbol of femininity, seemed to me to fill a slightly different function. I could not separate it from the matter of dramaturgy, nor from the question of subjectivity as it is theorised but also enacted on stage. In what follows I try to consider these varying and various takes on performance, iterability, and gender, by reflecting on my own dramaturgical (rather than hands-on directorial) experience through a framework of critical theory.

One As is well known, both Dido and Aeneas and Miss Julie pivot on the (self-)destruction of the female protagonist. Dido and Aeneas climaxes in Dido’s lament, one of the most beloved and canonised arias in the history of opera, in which Queen Dido mournfully prepares to die at her own hand. In

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

Miss Julie, considered one of the most significant works of Western theatrical modernism, the ending builds seemingly relentlessly towards the suicide of Miss Julie. The last line of the drama, a stage direction, describes Julie exiting the stage resolutely, razor in hand. Both protagonists, according to their own dramaturgical logic, “have” to take their lives because, against better judgment and each in their separate context and narrative arc, they have fallen in love with, and given themselves to, a man for various reasons deemed inappropriate for a woman of their position. Additionally—and perhaps worse—they have both given themselves to a man who also betrays them, and for whom a joint existence with the female protagonist in question was never the goal. In both cases, upon closer inspection one realises that these women are after all perhaps not the protagonists of their own stories. In fact, their stories, as presented in these canonical works, ultimately position them as object/counterpart to another subject, another protagonist, namely the men who betray them, in whose life narratives they are but an episode. These two works, which appear to be “about” the women for whom they are titled, really take as their point of identification the men for whom the conquering—and discarding—of these women is intrinsically bound up in their self-realisation. In this, they function not only as individual men, but also as symbols of a notion of ideal masculinity, as “hero” of the plot at hand. Although the age of baroque opera differs from that of literary and dramatic naturalism in many other regards, this ideal appears remarkably consistent.

Both male characters have a moment in the plot to expunge themselves; their destiny was never to become the husband of a woman they seduced out of wedlock. They are both driven by a conviction that they are destined for greater, more remote things, to obtain which they will need to travel. This is not to say that Aeneas and Jean, the characters in question, enjoy fulfilling their protagonist trajectories; on the contrary, they are tormented, anguished and at times regretful as to the seemingly inevitable turn of events in which they are participating catalysts. They do, however, fulfill this trajectory despite their apparent empathy with their female counterpart/adversary. And, significantly, their empathy, which they are given time and space in the plot to develop before encouraging or allowing the female character to come to the realisation that it will be impossible for her to go on living (abandoned, unhappily in love, having forsaken her social position and her values etc.) strengthens the audience’s sympathy with the men—not the women—as point of identification, or identificatory ideal. Suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly), the death of the female protagonist seems not only acceptable but even desirable, necessary for the narrative and the dramaturgy to “work”. Certain smaller yet significant details pertaining to the dramaturgies of Dido and Aeneas and Miss Julie also seem to support this insight: in both works, the female protagonist makes her entry and utters her first line only after being introduced to the audience via another character. Additionally, the final lines of both works are spoken or sung by characters other than the presumed protagonist. She is neither the first nor

1. Walter Benjamin quoted in Rainer Nägele. Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. p. 61. 2. Cixous, Hélène. Aller à la mer.Trans. Barbara Kerslake. Modern Drama 24. no. 4. 1984. p. 546. 3. Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York, NY: Routledge. 1997. p. 3.

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4. Derrida, Jacques. Limited, Inc. Gerald Graff (ed). Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1988. p.9. 5. Derrida, p. 12. 6. Derrida, p. 9. 7. Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. p. 37. 8. Enquist, Per Olov. Strindberg. Ett liv; Tribadernas natt; Målet mot Fröken Julie. Stockholm: Norstedts. 2012. p. 395. 9. Enquist, p. 419. 10. Price, Curtis. Dido and Aeneas in Context. In Purcell: Dido and Aeneas: An Opera. Curtis Price (ed). London: W.W. Norton & Company. 1986. pp. 3-8. 11. Harris, Ellen T. Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1987. p. 148.

the last thing we see. Or rather—as directorial choices rather than textual/ dramaturgical structures determine what audiences actually see on stage—in the drama, for the audience, she is neither the first nor the last point of attention. Technically, dramaturgically, it isn’t obvious that she should be considered the protagonist. Her “own” drama works against her. This more or less covert transferral of protagonist status, what I am tempted to call masculine protagonism—in which a female character, despite being indicated as the drama’s point of identification (for example through the work’s title), is positioned as antagonist/counterpart to (or something that “happens to”) a male character—I want to argue constitutes one form of iterative pattern among the classical tragedies of the stage.

Two In its most basic definition, iterability indicates the capacity to be repeated in different contexts. Derrida’s neologism, intended to problematise claims to authenticity and singularity in signification, points to the many potentialities and the multiple contextualities in which a given sign (or an utterance) may take on meaning, signify, have bearing. That a sign be repeatable and its signification transformed in the process of repetition and recontextualisation, Derrida argues, is no abnormality or exception to the way that language works (moreover, he suggests that these “traits” are generalisable to all systems of signification, even to notions of experience, being and presence).4 On the contrary, the iterabil-

ity of the sign (and with it the variation on the possibilities of meaning) is constitutive of the sign’s ability to signify— what shapes the notion of normality. For, Derrida asks rhetorically, “What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way?”5 When dealing with the Western theatrical and operatic canon as performance tradition, I have found the process of repetition, citation, iteration to pull in a near-opposite direction; through repetitive enactment and affirmation, signification risks becoming overdetermined, nearly petrified. Certain tropes occur repeatedly in the composition and dramaturgy of the work; additionally, approaching a canonical work as a director means facing tradition, expectation, anticipation, even desire. The “timeless” quality of canonical works is often invoked as justification for including them in the repertoire—that is to say the notion that there is an original meaning to a work, which can speak to its audience across time, location and setting, and to which creative practitioners are expected in various ways to be faithful. The faithful audiences of these works—or so widely held assumptions suggest—come to the theatre to have their expectations and desires fulfilled, not challenged. Iteration thus risks becoming reification. At the same time, the challenge—and the fascination— for creative practitioners often resides precisely in the potential new meanings that canonised works, scenes, phrases can acquire/inspire when they are uttered and performed in changing contexts— that is to say, when the known and anticipated encounters a new framework,

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

or a new way of looking. In opera it sometimes seems as though both these tendencies are working at once: the directorial concept should challenge and recontextualise the thematics and/or spatial/scenic dimensions of a work, while the vocal and musical performances should reproduce, in as much detail as possible, a centuries-old ideal. As a director and researcher I have found inspiration in the challenge to stage encounters between these two patterns. If the traits that Derrida discerns in writing can be generalised to include all experience, then obviously they can also be said to characterise the canon. Its “essential iterability” may as well be described by way of the anti-essentialist construct “repetition/alterity.”6 This “flexible essentialism” (a term I borrow from Shannon Jackson, who uses it to describe how theatricality and performance can often be found on both sides of an essentialist/antiessentialist divide7) allows one to assume a sense of permanence, stability, unity, self-identity required to make recognition and repetition possible. Meanwhile, closer consideration will inevitably reveal patterns of alterity. Above all, one quickly comes to the realisation that although a work like, say, Miss Julie, which is the most frequently and internationally staged play in Strindberg’s body of work, carries with it a series of expectations and demands related to its canonical status, it is hard to come up with an “original” performance or interpretation that would have given rise to these specific notions of authenticity. Certainly not its inaugural production, scandalous yet seen by few and largely undocumented. Further, as Per Olov Enquist shows, Strindberg’s authorial intentions with Miss Julie may seem obvious but upon closer inspection are difficult to discern. The famous Preface, composed after completion of the script, appears to rationalise Strindberg’s choices pertaining to dramatic form as well as plot, character composition, and style. However, the text of the play follows no such logic, Enquist writes, but can be interpreted “in any which way”.8 Addi-

tionally, the seduction of the young Julie, which is supposedly what necessitates her suicide, is barely hinted at in the Danish translation that preceded the Swedish publication of the play in 1888.9 Even in the Swedish edition, the central acts—sexual encounter and suicide—are merely intimated, never actually confirmed. Similarly, the origins of Purcell’s canonical opera are uncertain. No complete score exists, and moreover, baroque scores were notated so as to be open to a certain amount of interpretation and embellishment by singers and musicians. The libretto is adapted from Book IV of Virgil’s The Aeneid, and thus itself part of an iterative structure dating back to the Punic Wars. The context of the inaugural performance, given in the non-professional context of a school and performed “By Young Gentlewomen”, is indicated on the cover of a libretto presumably distributed to the audience at the premiere and preserved today in a single copy, but information is incomplete, and the opera appears not to have garnered much critical attention or appreciation at the time.10 Productions of the opera were scarce until the late nineteenth century, when its modern performance history can be said to begin.11 The process of excavation related to my own and others’ attempts to grasp the canonical framework of these two works is the subject of a separate essay. However, it seems safe to say that what definitive meanings these works appear to harbour arise out of the very process of repetition, citation, re-enactment to which they have been subjected in the course of their canonisation. Despite the claim to a standard or rule (the most basic definition of the term “canon”), even superficial scrutiny reveals alterity, absence, fragmentation and contradiction in place of any essential notions of authenticity, origin, or even singularity of meaning or interpretation. Tellingly, despite this knowledge as a director I worried constantly that I was either betraying the work or failing to live up to its standards.

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12. Derrida, pp. 14-19. 13. Derrida, p. 18. 14. Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40. no. 4. 1988. pp 519-531. 15. Butler. p. 519. 16. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ”Sex”. New York, NY: Routledge. 1993. pp. 12-15, 15.

Three Derrida’s notion of iterability, introduced as part of a critique against the seemingly essentialist usage of context and intentionality in J.L. Austin’s theory on performative utterances, is in some ways from the outset bound up in theatricality. Taking issue with Austin’s separation of the authentic, ordinary, normal uses of language from the inauthentic and “parasitic” forms associated with poetry and theatrical performance, Derrida instead suggests that so-called ordinary uses of language presuppose a form of citationality of the kind that Austin excludes from consideration.12 The success of a performative utterance, Derrida writes, depends on its conformity with an “iterative model”, which, while it doesn’t by necessity include theatrical performance, doesn’t exclude it either. Likewise this iterative model takes into account the intention(s) of the uttering subject as well as the context of utterance, but simultaneously allows for the possibility that intentionality (and with it a sense of authenticity) “will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance.”13 While it is no impassioned defence of theatricality or the actor’s speech act, Derrida’s argument does however posit that words spoken from a stage or in a heightened/poetic context, rather than be considered false, inauthentic, or parasitic, should be seen to have the transformative potential that Austin accords to performative utterances. However, one thing Derrida does not account for—but which follows, inevitably, from his larger argument—is that the potential performativity of theatrical performance hardly

limits itself to the verbal expression of the characters, or even the actors. The event of a theatrical performance and the work undertaken by actors as part of such performances consist of verbal as well as non-verbal utterances on several levels, including gesture, gaze and physical/ spatial relationality. Some of these may not be wholly intentional. The bodily aspect is taken up by Judith Butler in her early essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, in which she argues for a performative understanding of gendered subjectivity and for an iterative model of bodily utterances, subject to interpretation and transformation.14 Following Derrida (although in this context it is to John Searle and not Derrida that she refers) she demonstrates how bodily utterances—“a stylized repetition of acts” 15 that in different ways signify or express gender (including those deemed natural or authentic)— constitute citations within a larger iterative structure. Butler’s early work on performativity likewise entails a critique of intentionality, which is sharpened in later writing; in response to misconceptions of her argument in Gender Trouble, in Bodies That Matter she clarifies that the acts to which she refers are not singular, performed by a pre-existing/choosing subject, and they are not primarily theatrical, but rather identificatory processes which “enable the formation of a subject”.16 Working with canonised texts and characters, I have attempted to explore a category of bodily utterances that I would perhaps call “social” so as to differentiate them from the volitional and singular acts conventionally associated with

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

theatricality and theatrical performance (“acting”). These include (the actors’) bodily habits that express and confirm conventions of gender, but also the kinds of coded gestures and patterns of behaviour that convey relational systems of power. Examples might include the choice or reflex to direct one’s gaze toward or away from the other character while they speak, the quality of listening as expressed through stance and direction of attention, the space and focus that an actor takes up through bodily pose, and, for example, the distance between the actor’s feet and knees while standing or sitting— things which, while they might not be explicit or fully intentional statements, still aid the audience in their interpretive process. In my mind it would be erroneous to assume that only those verbal, gestural and bodily utterances that the actor produces intentionally and by volition would constitute meaningmaking or signification for an audience or spectator regarding gender, sexuality or other aspects of identification and experience. Rather, a critical performance practice problematises the enactment of gender onstage; if verbal language and utterance can be said to have a generative or transformative effect, likewise theatrical performance inevitably goes beyond a mere reflexive function to suggest possibilities for signification. As such, the performative function of theatrical performance lies not in the fact that it performs, but in its iterative and embodied enactment of utterances, which, in context and relation to a widely construed audience/public, participates (by generating, confirming, challenging) in the normative processes and systems we experience as social life. Very rarely would the performative utterance in a theatrical performance be located within the fictitious world of the play, or in a character’s lines or even a soliloquy (although, following Derrida, I’ll allow that it could happen); rather it is within the complex interaction of performer and spectator, where a performance is somehow perceived by the spectator as believable and in some sense generative, perhaps “authentic”, that it has the possibility of being deemed “successful”.

In this sense, every (hetero-)normative and cisconforming performance of gender, as undertaken by an actor in character, is explicitly and felicitously performative by Austinian standards. This is because the stakes of signification, or of the perception of authenticity and believability, lie in the actor’s performance not of “character” but in the performance of gender. The character operates within the realm of the theatrical “as if ”, or what is commonly termed the audience’s suspension of disbelief; its gender, in this setting, instead operates in terms of authenticity, believability, and on the basis of self-identity. This is something that is so taken for granted that most audiences hardly reflect on the many assumptions that are made about the (fictional) character based on (“real”) gender conformity. Were contemporary productions of Dido and Julie cross-cast (i.e. with non-confirmity regarding the gender of the character and the performer, which most likely was the case with Dido and Aeneas’s inaugural performance), that choice would affect nearly all levels of interpretation and would itself be considered a re-framing of the work, hardly included in the suspension of disbelief (the way that, for example, the obviously inauthentic suicide acts of both Julie and Dido are). This view of gendered subjectivity and performance has critical bearing for character enactment if we position canonical characters in relation to iterability and patterns of repetition and signification. Miss Julie and Queen Dido are subject to the same flexible essentialism as the larger concept of the canon; they are the object of much desire and projection, from within the drama, in the audience encounter, and in their canonical legacy—identification less so. Their suicidal acts are so bound up in the realisation of the drama and anticipation of cathartic release that considerable amounts of energy and desire are invested into this moment as an expression of their character—would they really “be” Dido or Julie if they did not self-destruct? The death of the woman tends to be positioned or justified as an outcome or effect of the plot; however, as Cixous suggests, perhaps it is rather to be considered a

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17. Rokem, Freddie. Strindberg’s Secret Codes. Norwich: Norvik Press. 2004. p. 24. 18. Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV. Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud. London: The Hogarth Press. 1957. pp. 243-258. 19. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. Ways of Not Seeing: (En) gendered Optics in Benjamin, Beaudelaire, and Freud. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning. David Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. p. 399. 20. Virgilius. Aeneiden. Trans. Ingvar Björkeson. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. 1988/2012. p. 82.

prerequisite for the performance, for theatre itself, to work. During the rehearsal process with actors it is my objective to complicate and problematise the iterative patterns of character (re-)enactment. This pertains in particular to gendered relations as expressions of power and subjectivity, and it operates on the level of dramaturgy as well as in corporeal (re-)presentation. If Julie, as Strindberg explicitly states, was raised as a boy, why would her body language betray no resistance to or difficulty with conventions of femininity? Similarly, if Dido is a skilled political ruler and strategic thinker, why is her character so often presented as altogether driven by emotion? Furthermore, why would the perceived value and self-esteem of two principal characters, who each in their own way have been raised to assume leadership and who on several occasions have shown exceptional independence given their social circumstances (rejecting previous suitors, among other things), rely so heavily on the commitment and approval of these men? I pose these questions not to reject any such interpretation of character, but to point to the tacit agreements that seem to render Dido and Julie comprehensible and recognisable as characters. It has been pointed out that Julie is a character created by and under a male gaze.17 Is it possible, within the repetitive process of theatrical performance, to enact a form of resistance to that gaze, or at least make the gaze visible, palpable, to the audience? Can the drama enact its plot and character trajectory while simultaneously questioning its own premises? It would entail inviting the audience to develop a double perspective

on the space and event of the dramatic action, by creating multiple simultaneous points of view. Interestingly, this is what Strindberg strives to do with his aesthetic in Miss Julie (at least if we are to believe his Preface); however, as a spectator I have rarely, if ever, felt encouraged to view performances of the play that way. Moreover, this approach to character and dramaturgy also means interrogating (hetero-) normative gender ideals (for the drama, for the ensemble, for the audience). For despite numerous examples of characters acting and desiring otherwise, and of playwrights and librettists suggesting otherwise, works in the canon tend to be construed around the flexibly essentialist drama of heterosexuality and heteronormativity. This drama stages the fictional coherence of genders as well as normative desires and ideals. And in this drama, masculine identificatory ideals often turn out to be more cherished and consequently more fragile than their feminine counterpart. As a possible effect of this fragility, which needs to be counteracted and compensated for, both Jean and Aeneas are often projected as essentially stable and selfidentificatory characters—as experiencing conflict and inner turmoil due to events in the plot, certainly, but rarely as constitutively fraught or contradictory figures. Perhaps this is in part because they are destined by their creators to survive and prosper. An analogy to the dramaturgy of grief as developed in Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” comes to mind:18 for the male character/protagonist it is necessary that the object of loss lie outside of himself. He may grieve his loss but that loss must, precisely, be and

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

function as an object; his mourning (construed as a process of gradual detachment) must be successful if he is to “move on” the way it is written into his character that he will. For this to work, a complete identification becomes necessary between the female character and loss. She must be the lost object; she always (already) is. Julie and Dido will both fulfil their character arc through suicide, and they must find themselves on this teleological path from the outset of the onstage action. A penchant towards instability and destruction is therefore in some way inscribed into the character. This constitutive flaw leaves the character—and the actor—with less to uphold and defend, and paradoxically that entails less danger, less fragility. (Also, we don’t mind viewing women as victims or sites of loss. It doesn’t hurt or arouse empathy the way a loss of masculine status, or masculine destruction, would. Because we don’t put ourselves in her place. On the contrary, I argue, her loss, meaning the loss of her, enables our cathartic release.) If Jean and Aeneas were represented as less stable, more dependent on the approval of the women, more capricious, less self-composed, more willing to please, would they still be recognisable as Jean, as Aeneas, within the larger dramaturgy that necessitates a certain form of character development? How would this affect their position of subjectivity? In order to explore this question, together with the actors playing Aeneas and Jean in their respective processes, I sought ways for them to fail to live up to the notion of ideal masculinity guiding the character. In both productions I used as a point of reference the following thought by Alys Eve Weinbaum: “the objectification of woman in the male field of vision has often served as the ground for securing coherent masculinity. (…) I modify this formulation and suggest that masculinity is a construct best characterised not so much by control, mastery or prowess, as by the momentary loss of all three.”19 Enacting masculinity as (momentary) loss of control and mastery means moving into largely unchartered territory where conventions of theatrical and operatic

performance are concerned; the ambition was to emulate convention while simultaneously undermining the sense of coherence upon which it relies. Aeneas, in our reading (which is supported by passages from The Aeneid), becomes uncomfortable with the heroism projected onto him on account of his participation in and survival of the Trojan War. Like the young soldiers that Freud encountered and observed during and after World War I, he is haunted through dreams and visions by the traumatic memories of his experiences. In his approach to Dido he is cautious, hesitant, and when he leaves Carthage it is not only in pursuit of the (Roman) empire he is destined to found, but also in flight from the impending invasion of Carthage by their neighbour, Iarbas. Aeneas cannot force himself to face another war. At the same time, he cannot reconcile with the emasculated image projected onto him by rumours in Carthage and beyond; as mere husband of Queen Dido (a “woman’s slave” in Ingvar Björkeson’s Swedish translation 20) he has relinquished his role as leader and manly ideal. His inner conflict, caused by his desire and inability to emulate an ideal, which he simultaneously finds coercive and even oppressive, thus becomes a strongly motivating factor for his betrayal of Dido.

Four In many senses, psychologically and materially, it is illogical for Dido and Julie as characters to view suicide as the only option. In both rehearsal processes, we struggled to motivate this determination to die. In both cases, I felt resistance toward acquiescing to what I perceived as coercive dramaturgies, and I wondered to what degree I could stage this resistance as part of the mise en scène. A strong motivation was to allow the female characters to re-emerge as protagonists of sorts, or, if not that, then at least as subjects—while simultaneously recognising and admitting their objectification within the work and its dramaturgy.

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21. Butler. Bodies That Matter. p. 15. 22. Strindberg, August. Miss Julie. In Selected Plays, Volume I. Ann-Charlotte Gavel Adams and Anna Westerståhl (eds.). Trans. Evert Sprinchorn. Stenport MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2012. p. 220. 23. Strindberg, p. 275.

Part of my interest in exploring theories of performativity and iterability as a basis for performance practice lies in the question of what is at stake in the emergence of the subject in a social as well as theatrical context. Re-interpretations of canonical works and potentially heteronormative-misogynist scenarios easily construct subject-object relationships in which subjectivity appears desirably coherent, stable and self-same, invested with agency and self-determination, and diametrically opposed to positions of objectivity. (In other words, what theories of deconstruction and performativity critique.) It may be tempting in these scenarios to reverse the situation and the subject-object relationship; however, such inversals do not alter the binary status quo, and above all they do not interrogate the category of the subject. As Butler shows, becoming subject (“subjectivation”) entails being subjected, a process of identification with regulatory norms and ideals; “these identifications”, she writes, “precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject.” And while the subject may “have” agency, it is “as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power and not a relation of external opposition to power.”21 Relating this notion to dramatic character (allowing myself to invoke the fictional world as a site for performative enactment without problematising this move), it is obvious that neither Aeneas nor Dido, neither Jean nor Julie, could appear as subjects in an autonomous sense, but that they need to be portrayed as subject to the regulatory norms and ideals that govern their emergence as characters. As such, the dramaturgies in question

are equally coercive when it comes to the male characters; however, their position is privileged in terms of the dramatic universe and vis-à-vis the audience. One strategy I used to “re-privilege” the position and point of view of the women was to refunction and reshape the dramaturgical arc of each work, through a method of framing. Creating a circular dramaturgy in lieu of the linear, teleological narrative arc (and in the case of Dido, even a circular performance space enveloped by 360-degree video projections) I hoped to indicate the repetitive act of staging the canon (indeed, the repetitive act of theatrical performance) and as well the reiterations of becoming subjected and situated as Dido, as Julie. I created for each production a version of a preface/overture set in the present here and now of the onstage/audience encounter. The opera, of course, has an overture, which became the site and occasion for a return to the past, from the vantage point of the present. For Miss Julie, we created a musical and filmic overture, introducing the events to come. Thus, when my version of Dido and Aeneas starts, Dido is already dead. Aeneas and Belinda (Dido’s aide and confidante) are on stage to greet the audience, and in the course of the musical overture proceed to reconstruct, literally and physically, the setting for the events that constitute the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas. In a slight change of order, the first musical number as listed in Purcell’s score, in which Belinda energetically encourages Dido to “Shake the cloud from off your brow” is replaced by the second, Dido’s more melancholy response, ”Ah! Belinda, I am pressed with torment”; in this way

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

the opening scene is dedicated to Dido’s perspective, which also has the effect of bringing Belinda from the present world of the overture into the past, to relive the memory of Dido. The overture to Miss Julie is a film, accompanied by live music. When it ends, the screen, which doubles as stage curtain, is lifted to reveal Julie standing alone on stage with an excerpt of Strindberg’s Preface projected onto her body and the surrounding on-stage space. Holding her razor, she gazes at the audience and proceeds to read the excerpt out loud, using Strindberg’s voice to describe her character and postulate the scientifically proven inferiority of women to men. Only after this opening does Jean burst on to the scene with his famous opening line, “What a night! Miss Julie is wild again! She is absolutely wild!”22 As Jean and Kristin (the third character, who unfortunately barely gets a mention in this essay) act out the first scene of the play, in which they describe Julie as capricious, unsuitably sexually adventurous, beautiful yet unhappy, Julie remains onstage, semi-hidden in a corner, observing her servants as they shape the audience’s image of her, and gazing intermittently at the audience. On her cue to start speaking, she simply enters the scene. In this manner, the audience is encouraged to develop a double perspective on the events at hand, as the gaze relates to the onstage action in a manner that is at once direct (with the audience positioned “inside” the drama) and externalised (approaching the premises of the play and watching the unfolding scene from Julie’s perspective). Similarly, for the ending, in a modification of the closing scene that Strindberg imagines, Jean delivers his closing line—“It’s horrible! But there’s no other way for it to end”23—to the audience rather than to Julie, thus providing meta-commentary not only on the plot but also on the iteration of this ending throughout the past century. The direction of his delivery also underscores Jeans own perceived helplessness before the events of the play. However, instead of Julie walking offstage to complete her

action, Jean exits clutching Julie’s father’s boots (which he has spent the play polishing), although it remains untold whether this is to return to the Count’s service or don the boots and depart, leaving the oppressive social milieu of the mansion behind. Julie remains onstage, alone in the spot where she stood at the play’s opening, razor in hand and gazing once again at the audience, as if to ask: is there really no other way for it to end? This open-ended closing scene seemed possible (and plausible) in Miss Julie precisely because Strindberg situates the suicidal act offstage and technically after the end of the play, thus casting doubt about whether it really does happen—or whether in fact it needs to happen for the play to conclude. With Dido, death cannot be avoided as the opera cannot dispense with Dido’s lament (in which Dido relieves those around her of responsibility for her fate), and this aria concludes with her dying. The closing scene in Dido and Aeneas consists of a chorus in turn lamenting the death of the queen. In order to problematise Dido’s ultimately beautiful, gentle and cathartic disappearance, we inserted a short passage spoken by Aeneas into the final chorus. This passage paraphrases an excerpt from Book VI of The Aeneid, which recounts how Aeneas, having descended into the lower world of Dis to search for his father, encounters the spectre of Dido. He begs her forgiveness, but she turns away and refuses to speak to him. In our staging, upon completion of Aeneas’s words, in the final musical sequence, Dido rises from the bed in which she has lain dead, and walks very slowly across the stage, away from Aeneas (and Belinda) and into the offstage shadows. Aeneas and Belinda are left in the onstage positions they had at the opening, with Dido gone as she was when the performance began. The intimation is that Aeneas and Belinda could attempt a repeated excavation of the tragedy of Dido, but that it seemingly inevitably would end the same way. Thus, although Aeneas utters the closing phrases of the drama, followed by one last chorus

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24. Halliwell, Stephen. The Poetics of Aristotle: Translation and Commentary. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 1987. pp. 45-48.

sung by Belinda, the final (open-ended) action is yet performed by Dido. She refuses, albeit silently, cathartic release either to her audience or to him.

Five Is there really no other way for it to end? Or, to speak with Cixous, is there no other way for it to begin? I can offer no definitive answers or redemptive solutions. I offer only this, my measure of resistance. Julie won’t go. Dido won’t forgive. And neither end will be over her dead body.

Epilogue I traced the pattern of male protagonism to the classical tragedies upon which Western drama is founded, as I considered the relationship and exchange between Antigone and Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone (441 BCE), Medea and Jason in Euripides’ Medea (431 BCE), and also Phaedra and Theseus in Seneca’s Phaedra (54 CE). The position of the men fits the Aristotelean ideal of a high-ranking character whose downfall is caused by an error in judgement (in turn caused by hubris); this cannot be equally said for the women. Granted, they too make errors in judgement, and they are also of high social status. However, Aristotle’s recommendation regarding character is that the audience be able to identify with the protagonist’s position and trajectory; the “terror and pity” that the drama should elicit in the audience relies on a combination of admiration and identification, brought about by the fact that the character is good yet relatable, and also constituted

mainly through the necessary and the probable.24 The character flaw exhibited by the men has to do precisely with an error in judgement that is relatable and probable—underestimating a rebellious young girl, marrying a foreign woman (a reading which positions Medea as a xenophobic play), trusting a deceitful wife. They do not knowingly break the law, commit infanticide, or harbour— and act upon—incestuous desires (as do the women). Secondly, it is with the men that the audience remains at the end of the drama, these men who endure great loss and towards whom we feel empathy while we simultaneously experience a desire to distance ourselves ever so slightly, at least from their fates. Thinking, as Aristotle would have it: lesson learnt, I’m glad it’s not me. The women of the plays’ titles instead vanish from the scene. Antigone and Phaedra, like Julie and Dido, commit suicide. Medea, as an exception, exits on a chariot drawn by dragons. However, this is rendered possible and logically probable through a case of the Deus ex machina, of which Aristotle disapproves. There is nothing to learn from these women. And while neither Miss Julie nor Dido and Aeneas aspire to Aristotelean dramaturgy (although Strindberg’s construction of plot, character and thought indicates a preoccupation with, and desire to challenge, such dramatic principles), this reflection, as well as this dramaturgical construct, remain for me a frame of reference for interpreting the lack of subjectivity and protagonism granted the female characters.

Relocations: The Idiot as a Figure of Miscommunication

Abstract

Barbara Neves Alves

I investigate a productive sense of repetition by looking at miscommunications emerging through relocations. Departing from the field of communication design, I engage with Isabelle Stengers’ conceptual framework of the idiot to explore how miscommunication produces modes of indeterminacy that generate new readings of the designer, contexts and publics of communication. In the first part of the text, I note how communication design is largely shaped by practices aiming to “faithfully communicate”. In observing work by artist Dina Danish I explore how miscommunication raises performative and material dimensions, which disturb the idea of faithfulness in communication. In deepening the political potential of miscommunication, I propose to explore through the conceptual character of the idiot how modes of indeterminacy may impact communication design. In the second part, I analyse the participatory process of relocating a village in Alentejo, Portugal, due to the construction of a dam. I explore a sense of repetition around equivalents between the old and new village during the process of relocation. Relocating sets out unaccounted connections that produce modes of indeterminacy. These allow modes of encounter surrounding the miscommunications emerging between the early projection phase to be traced, and the reality of relocation and its impact on the local community and its ecosystem. This political dimension to miscommunication calls on an eco-political positioning of communication design that may allow new publics to emerge.

Barbara Neves Alves is an Amsterdam-based communication designer and researcher, currently in her final year as PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research investigates communication design and publics, exploring possibilities to design “political scenes”. Miscommunication is proposed as a key concept to explore politically and socially engaged design practices. Beyond her research, Barbara has maintained regular activity as a lecturer in higher education and works as a communication designer, specialising in type and media. More recently she has been engaged in developing practice-based research into community-based, participatory processes that explore performative and material dimensions of communication design.

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And it happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so…” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it. Isabelle Stengers1

Introduction: Exploring Miscommunication

of models of communication accounting for our democratic lives.6

In Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices,2 Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers presents the term “faithful communication” as a counter to “affirming misunderstanding”.3 Affirming misunderstandings within a practice questions the value of “good communication” in creating a “good definition” of a common world.4 In this sense, it challenges modalities of the political, construed upon establishing a common ground and based on an agreement around an equality of terms. In political terms, faithful communication implies communication design is working upon consensual 5 framings of the public, and reinforcing and reproducing these consensual understandings of the public, by, predominantly, framing communication as a space of rational, discursive, dialogical interchange. This communicational space of exchange resting upon common terms, is the foundation

What I am looking to explore in this paper are practical possibilities for the design of communication to remain not solely a practice shaping consensus, but rather entertain the possibility of assuming modes of being public and political that are not known in advance, where communication moves from a normative exercise aiming at consensus, to trouble assumptions regarding faithful communication with different propositions of what a communicative arena might be. In Molloy Re-translated to French,7 Egyptian artist Dina Danish presents a re-translation of Molloy “in collaboration with its author Samuel Beckett.”8 Molloy was written and published in French in 1951 and translated to English in 1955. The fact that Danish attempts to re-translate the English version back to its original French version points to a non-

Molloy Re-translated to French, 2008. Photo by Dina Danish.

Barbara Neves Alves

sensical repetition, which Danish stresses further by working with the materiality of Molloy as book. Danish evidences the acts of replacement and transport inherent to word translation, with Danish collecting each of the single letters in the English original needed to assemble words in the French re-translation. “To re-translate the first page in French, 124 pages of the English version were needed.”9 In this way, the French version is, materially, the English version, allowing through translation a return to its original. Danish establishes a physical connection between signs and object, but an open one regarding referents. The performativity of re-translating Molloy produces a suspension of the text’s meanings, disclosing language’s material and iconic dimensions. In this way, miscommunication is potentially happening in-between other layers of meaning, and not only on the layer of language. In Molloy, it seems the nonsense of a translation travelling back to an absent original form, amplifies both Beckett’s words, the performativity of translation, and the role of representation in communication, adding layers to the book as a communicational object. In the act of repeating, different layers intertwine, which may potentially reshuffle the grounds of established interpretative frames. In The Sis, These S10 Danish explores translation by reflecting on the process of learning a foreign language, considering her position in-between languages. Danish playfully engages with grammar, interpretations and translations in an attempt to connect her Arabic, Spanish and German. She invites us to account for words in different modalities, by emptying them, de-contextualising them, by breaking the rules that bond them together and searching for reasoning beyond grammar or meaning. The repetitions, translations, hesitations Danish creates become nonsensical in proposing “foreigner” not only as language but as her language. “Foreigner” resists the limits of “correct” translations, becoming a language of permanent interference to the formalities of language. In this sense, it is a language of miscommunication, as Danish makes tacit a performative dimension of language, affecting us as readers to play with our own use of language in the nonsensical process of learning “foreigner”. The repetitions in the work of Danish show the potential in exploring communication design beyond faithful communication. Her use of repetition raises questions, such as, what is

1. Stengers, Isabelle. The Cosmopolitical Proposal. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. p. 996. 2. Ibid., p. 189. 3. “And the practical certainty of misunderstanding is something an ecology of practice has to affirm without nostalgia for what would be faithful communication”. Ibid., p. 189. Stengers. p. 995. 4. Stengers. p. 995. 5. A prevailing metaphor for this consensual view of the public within representative democracy is of an image of a body constituted of many bodies, an illustration of a public equally represented within modes of government. However, as Jacques Rancière points out, this notion of a public rendered equally participant before the idea of a general law blurs what is private and what is public. But then, the private sphere is determined by the same political structure that recognises the public. The association of the private sphere with the individual, the body, is used as an abstraction to legitimate—by opposition to—that which is universal. And, as the universal is considered the realm of citizenship, what is private becomes excluded from the sphere of citizenship. See Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy [La Haine de la démocratie]. Translated by Steve Corcoran. London. New York, NY: Verso. 2009. 6. A notion of the bourgeois public sphere is proposed by Habermas as a “society engaged in critical public debate” in which “the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) [Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit]. Translated by Thomas Burger with assistance of Frederik Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1991. p. 52 and p. 27. 7. Danish, Dina. Molloy Re-Translated to French. http://dinadanish.com/translation.html (Accessed 2016-04-08). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Danish, Dina. The Sis, These S. San Francisco, CA: The Walgreen’s Eye Press. 2008.

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the point of undoing translation? Or, of making translation confusing and paradoxical? The dissolution of sense leads to an impasse that dislocates our attention towards the performativity and materiality of the acts of replacement, of erasing, of transport, as unforeseen practices of translation. This nonsensical aspects of Danish’s work seem to invoke Stengers’ idea of the idiot as a producer of impasses to “good communication” that interrupt the general understandings of a situation or problem as framed by faithful communication.

The Idiot as Figure of Miscommunication In the examples above Danish explores repetition through translating, de-contextualising, and moving, to paralyse what would be expected correspondences and shape the possibility of other connections, which allow for different inhabitations of communication. The act of repeating creates a productive sense of interference, which allows other dimensions of communication to emerge. In “A Cosmopolitical Proposal”,11 Isabelle Stengers proposes the figure of the Idiot as a conceptual character capable of creating a state of suspension, of indeterminacy, by interrupting general understandings of a situation or problem. Stengers12 proposes Bartleby, a character developed by Herman Melville, as an example of the possibilities that the figure of “the Idiot” can offer in a sort of ecological questioning of an environment, forging new political questions. In Melville’s short story, Bartleby is a clerk who embodies the ultimate form of resistance because he lives his environment in a way that defies being understood by all those surrounding him. As his superior continually tries to approach him to negotiate a working relationship, Bartleby offers nothing other than a “I would prefer not to”—in a sense a soft answer, but one that resists faithful communication and seems to paralyse any “normal” relationship of address, opening an empty space

around him. This is the space that Stengers proposes as a state of indeterminacy. Bartleby’s state of refusal is not exactly a negation—that would be a claim— and the indeterminacy is not exactly a neutral state—that would not be a force. The refusal is a resistance. Like in a process of casting, a negative is taken from a positive, as the first step is to adhere to the surface of what exists and alternate it. Danish’s work points to a space of potential idiocy within communication design, where communication oriented towards achieving agreement and consensus is interrupted with impasses to what should be “good communication”, emerging from the nonsensical aspect of her projects. Deleuze’s definition of nonsense in The Logic of Sense13 is affirmed through contrast: rather than a name whose sense is described by other names— that is, by synonyms—nonsense is when a name says its own sense. According to Helen Palmer in Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense,14 given “Deleuze’s theory of univocity, the formula does not differ from its permutations.”15 Accordingly, only nonsense itself can be named as an example of nonsense. The simultaneous openness and entropy of the concept makes nonsense produce a paradoxical indeterminacy: “the removal of the delineation between sense and nonsense means that […] there is absolute openness, but there is also nowhere left to go.”16 Stengers is drawn to the character of the idiot, from the ancient Greek and borrowing from Deleuze’s idea of “conceptual characters”. For the ancient Greeks, the idiot was someone estranged from Greek language, a relation made apparent in the etymology of Idiom, a “semi-private language”.17 Deleuze indicates the idiot’s effect of “slowing down”, “that we don’t consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know”.18 Following Stenger’s appropriation of Deleuze’s “idiot”, one could further argue that Deleuze’s definition of “nonsense” indicates a para-

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doxical state, which provokes an indeterminacy of senses. The openness of indeterminacy is significant in looking at miscommunication within design processes. Firstly, because it draws in matters of positioning and affect, which contemplate an ecological understanding of a design process,19 that considers our attachment 20 within this positioning and involves a “thinking with”, a being implicated with what will happen within the realm of a practice. This bond is important because it takes a personal commitment to allow indeterminacy to provoke political questions. Choosing to think and act from indeterminacy means allowing the nonsense brought by the idiot to resonate within a design process. Secondly, indeterminacy calls on a performative quality, which enables miscommunication to become a link to the assembling of diverse perspectives, even if incapable of interlocution. In this sense, miscommunication surpasses the level of what might be or not be equally understood, and moves an understanding of communication to the level of materialities, and affect. Finally, within this affective experiencing of indeterminacy, of an impasse, of what is provoking the “slowing down” Stengers refers to, there is an inhabiting of a situation, while lacking keys to interpret, or unlock it, and this demands a remapping, that is, a political transformation. The idiot for Stengers is potentially more generative of indeterminacy than a Deleuzian register and gives rise to plurality, and to a multivocal set of registers that complicate encounters, because the Stengerian idiot nuances

the idea of the political not only as a site of challenge per se, but rather created through mutual, but different forms of incomprehension, that might even consider those deliberately or accidentally confusing a situation. The idiot as a figure of miscommunication is shaping connections, which suspend what would be assumed as logical correspondences, and allow other layers, other connections, to surface. In this sense, indeterminacy renders miscommunication visible, suspending faithful communication and transporting exchanges from the domain of the representative to a concrete practical dimension, constituted by materialities and affecting other modes of participation that are not shaped around representation, but rather a “lived” dimension of communication. In this sense, Danish’s threading of nonsensical connections remains far from the political potential of the idiot as figure of miscommunication, due to its circumscribing to a literary universe, which remains thoroughly authorial and unchallenged in terms of how the idiot might resound within the setting of her work. I consider Danish a good example of nonsense, and there is a part of the idiot that concerns producing nonsense, but what interests me is the political sense of the idiot in producing what Stengers proposes as modes of indeterminacy. This is what I wish to analyse further in looking at communication within the participated process of relocating Luz, a village in the south of Portugal, due to the construction of a dam. Communication here is part of an ongoing effort in arriving at agreements

11. Stengers. 12. Ibid. p. 996. 13. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense [Logique du sens]. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1990. 14. Palmer, Helen. Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense. London, New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. 2014. 15. Ibid. p. 11. 16. Ibid. p. 11. 17. Stengers. p. 994. 18. Ibid. pp. 994-995. 19. Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices. 20. de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig. Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things. Social Studies of Science 41. no. 1. 2011.

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regarding the plan of relocating a village, as a participatory process shaped the relocation. In-between the imagined, the projected, the discussed and the “reality” of a new village materialising, communication goes through diverse stages and moves from abstract notions of that what might be affected by a relocation, to the conversations surrounding the concrete questions and problems emerging from the actual relocating.

A Practice in Indeterminacy: Relocating Luz a legend tells that the holy virgin appeared to a shepherd at the top of an oak tree asking the people to build a temple in her honour at the same place of her apparition. However, the people decided to save the tree and build the temple elsewhere. During its construction, what was built one day appeared destroyed on the other, with all the construction tools reappearing under the oak tree. After several attempts, the temple was built in the place of the apparition—the oak tree—and the saints’ will was satisfied. —Carlos Dias21 The legend above is at the origin of a small village named Luz (Light) in the Alentejo region, in the south of Portugal. The village was named after Our Lady of Light, the saint appearing above the oak tree determining its location. In a twist of fate, after such importance was invested in its location, Luz was relocated in 2003, due to the construction of the Alqueva dam.22 Here I will look into how this process of relocation was projected, planned and implemented, considering the participation process involving different layers of political players affected by this relocation, as well as how the design of communication changed during the various planning phases, as the relationship between the local community and the project of relocation modified. After the decision to construct the dam and the

flooding of Luz, the question of how to relocate its residents23 resulted in the decision to re-build another village two kilometres along, which added to its original name—Luz—the word Nova (new): Nova Luz. In attempting to replicate the original village, but also to improve it, the processes of replicating and improving triggered a permanent dispute and debate with efforts in negotiating representations of Luz by the diverse actors involved in the relocation. In this way, the process of relocating Luz opened a space of miscommunication in negotiating the in-betweens to multiple referents and expectations. As a sort of translation of Luz, Nova Luz is a village in which “every facet is the result of a design decision,” which in itself comes out of a participatory process, drawing in the ambivalence of multiple perspectives: “a discussion with people living inside it”.24 The project of the Alqueva dam assumed the status of a myth in the region, as it was first discussed in the late 1950s and left in “still waters” by several governments since then. There was distrust in the project being implemented up to the final stages of construction—“[…] you’d better finish it yourself! Because they will do it in a month of Sundays!”25 The gigantic scale of the project, its high cost and the numerous stakeholders involved provoked disruptions within all phases of the project, from planning to implementation, with the inhabitants of Luz accustomed to interpreting these disturbances as a sign the project would remain unimplemented. Thus, inhabitants of Luz were committing to participating in a process that would irreversibly change their lives, while remaining in the expectation that the project would actually never go ahead. When, finally, a whole ecosystem was transported—the dead included—the replicated village became haunted by the original; a museum was created to preserve the memory of the submerged village and generate a sense of continuity; and, as a village was submerged and a new one born, tourism was fostered in the shadow of the ghost of the invisible village. If one considers not only

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the human actors involved in the re-location, but also the impact on the non-human—the irreversible transformation of the landscape, the wildlife, the immaterial flow of economic activity, and how a local culture is affected by its living “musealisation”—it becomes apparent how the process of relocation is a valuable example through which to analyse miscommunication, particularly considering that during the years the process of relocation took place there was a constant concern with the consultation and participation of the inhabitants of Luz. As the process unfolded, communication unravelled the complexity of relocating with many miscommunications emerging around the impasses created between a general understanding of what the project would be, and the specificities of the territory and its modes of life. Between different modalities of communication, implying distinct representative universes, but also different layers of materialities and affects to the landscape, to the social and economical structures in the process of being relocated. I analyse these in more detail, working mainly from a set of documentaries registering the process, as well as drawing from a set of papers, of which I would like to underline the contribution of ethnographer Clara Saraiva, who followed the process of relocation integrating a team responsible for creating a museum dedicated to Luz.

The Story of Luz: Inhabiting a Participatory Process In an early phase of planning, one of the initial hypotheses offered to the inhabitants of Luz, was of keeping the village in place by constructing dykes. However, in the driest region of Portugal people were afraid of being surrounded by such a large amount of water. The inhabitants of Luz were then offered a choice between receiving a financial compensation and relocating the village. They opted to relocate the village, agreeing that the compensation would follow a juridical figure known as “like for like”.26 This decision was first made by a group of men of Luz in 1981, and later by the whole village in 1996: “we always wanted house for house and land for land”.27 The relocation of the village under this system of equivalence set out the expectation that the process of relocation would constitute a process of repetition, in the sense that the set of conditions and relations existing in Luz would be translated to

21. Legend of the foundation of Village of Luz. In Carlos Dias. Demolição Da Aldeia Da Luz Começou Ontem. Público. 2003. (Translation/adaptation from Portuguese by the author.) 22. The Alqueva Dam is the biggest in Europe with an area of 250 km 2 at its maximum quota of 152m. The general objectives of this gigantic structure were altered through successive readjustments: the construction of a water reservoir important in fighting the severe draught and secure the provision of water to populations; a progressive alteration of the specialisation of agriculture in the south of the country, which gains 110,000 hectares of water for irrigation; the production of hydroelectric energy; the fight against physical and populational desertification through an increment on the regional job market and stimulation of agriculture, industry and tourism. In Clara Saraiva. Aldeia Da Luz: Entre Dois Solstícios, a Etnografia Das Continuidades E Mudanças [The Dam of Alqueva and the Village of Luz: Between Two Solsticies—The Etnography of its Continuities and Changes] Etnográfica VII, no. 1. 2003. pp. 105-106. 23. Luz in 2001 had 363 residents in 185 plots with homes, outbuildings and gardens. Ibid. p. 106. (Translated from Portuguese by author). 24. Mário Moura to The Ressabiator. 2013-08-26. http://ressabiator.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/uma-discussao-com-gentea-viver-la-dentro/#more-11652. 25. One man addressing another man who is going to visit the construction place of Nova Luz. In Muriel Jacquerod and Eduardo Saraiva Pereira. Between Two Villages (Entre Deux Villags / Entre Duas Terras). Switzerland / Portugal. 2003. 26. Saraiva. Aldeia Da Luz. p. 107. 27. Wateau, Fabienne. Barragem E Participação Pública Em Alqueva. Um Exemplo Português De Concertação? In Auga E Sustentabilidade. Enfoques Para Unha Nova Política De Augas. T.S. Cuesta and X.X. Neira (eds.) Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2008.

Village of Nova Luz in Alentejo, Portugal. Photograph by Miguel Manso for Jornal Público. © Jornal Público.

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another location. In this sense, the term of equivalence marks a defining moment in which miscommunication became inscribed in the whole participation process. In resuming the Alqueva project after the end of dictatorship, the choice was to include the inhabitants of Luz in the decision-making process.28 However, the shaping of this process of participation went through different stages and many transformations. The project set out by creating a committee of residents, which met regularly with architects. But, at a certain point, this dialogue became impossible, and, from there on the company EDIA, 29 responsible for the Alqueva Dam project, became responsible for discussing matters with the population, such as the area of houses, annexes and gardens, materials for floors and walls and the possibility of adding modifications to projects.30 Since 1995, meetings were set up with EDIA at the village centre with the intent of explaining the process to the inhabitants of Luz. The decision was made to call residents to these meetings according to identical social conditions, asking them to choose the floor of their future house, the colour of doors and windows, the general configuration of the house. Residents participated in these meetings trying to understand the plans of the architects and the arguments of the people of EDIA, in order to approve their new houses. The technicians of EDIA tried to explain to these groups of residents what would become an equivalent to each house, as well as why residents were part of a particular group. Questions of value surfaced during these meetings, but also of what must be identical in old and new houses for them to be considered equivalent to “home”. For many, the discussion centred upon the expectations of an equivalent house being a unique and individual one, assuming similar characteristics to the ones they called home. The idea of equivalence was nuanced within the actual planning of the new village. The project

team devised an initial set of 25 typologies of houses, projected as an equivalent to the range of houses existing in Luz; each with a different set of materials and finishes. In the outlines of these typologies, in making them public and discussing these in detail, inhabitants of Luz were confronted with the replications of economical and social differences. Inequalities were highlighted within the project through details such as the size of windows or the quality of floors. As inequality became tacit, it affected social relations, creating envy and unrest; even people who considered themselves happy with their new house, noted “they were left off worse than their neighbours”.31 The very idea of groups of houses being merged into one typology was difficult to accept when many houses were constructed with money saved from years of migration, precisely looking to differentiate them from others. Conflicts emerging from these meetings led to limiting contact to two intermediaries as representatives of the village: the current and the former village council presidents..32 Finally, EDIA chose to select a small group of technicians as contact with the population. Several documentaries register moments of tension in the contrast between different discourses, for example, with inhabitants signing the approval to the construction of their houses without a full understanding of the architectural plans or mock-ups constructed.33 Many miscommunications only became manifest over time, as people, in visiting the construction site, came to terms with what they had signed off to during the planning phase of the project. Often discussions were layered with feelings of resentment, of injustice, of resignation. The participatory processes of consulting with the inhabitants of Luz took place over several years, without the population believing the project would come to a conclusion. It was only with the relocation of the cemetery that inhabitants faced the reality of relocating.34 The inhabitants of Luz were assertive in that they “would not abandon their little souls” and “the dead should move before the living.”35 Care

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was put in planning the relocation of the cemetery, trying to articulate the will of residents with the practicalities of such transition; every household was individually consulted and residents accepted to name a representative to be present at each exhumation. The relocation of the cemetery is considered by ethnographer Clara Saraiva, who followed the process of relocating Luz closely, “the most difficult moment in terms of the violence of privacy which touched the heart of the sacred relation of people with the dead”, 36 a process where, again, meaningful miscommunications surfaced.

28. This resolution was based on learning from the process of submerging the village of Vilarinho das Furnas in the north of Portugal, in 1972.

The decision was made to create an exact replica of the old cemetery, but different understandings of what a replica entails became apparent. Maria Chilrito, an inhabitant of Luz, in a talk with EDIA technicians expressed her discomfort with the exhumation of the body of her daughter: “because you know that ground is the sacred ground that destroyed her little body”37—for Chilrito moving the cemetery involved moving the ground itself. It was not a matter of exhuming bodies, but of the holiness of the location (the sacred grounds of the Saint of Luz) and of the holy earth of which the body of her child had become part. In order to facilitate the process of reburial, inhabitants of Luz were asked to light candles in the old cemetery as a gesture of farewell and again in the new so souls could find their way.38 Saraiva notes that the sense of continuity in the repetition of these gestures helped mitigate the pain.39

30. Saraiva. p. 121.

Finally, inhabitants moved into their new houses in several phases. The process of moving was based on a swapping of keys, in order to assure people did not return. This was a moment of great sadness as residents left houses, spaces, plants, trees, that had been in their families for generations; the houses were left clean and tidy—cared for. After moving to Nova Luz, residents returned to the old of village on a daily basis: “we are going to have coffee at the village.”40 Over time shops, cafés, the post office, and school were relocated to the new village and people came to terms with the move. In several documentaries one sees the population observing the rising of the waters of the dam, as the landscape of their whole life changes, the river of their picnics and festivities disappears, the trees and pastures make place for a large lake: “cognitive maps and memories of landscape completely changed: ‘now I don’t know how to orient myself; I search for things that

29. “Empresa de Desenvolvimento e Infraestruturas do Alqueva, S.A. was set up in 1995. It is a public limited company with an exclusively public share capital and belongs to the state corporate sector. Its mission is to design, execute, build and operate the Alqueva Multi-purpose Undertaking (EFMA), thereby contributing to the economic and social development of its area of intervention […]” In S.A. EDIA Empresa de Desenvolvimento e Infra-estrutura do Alqueva. About Us—Edia. http://www.edia.pt/en/about-us/edia/146. (Accessed 2016-04-08).

31. Ibid. p. 118. 32. Wateau. 33. This became apparent when the village was constructed and inhabitants started to visualise their new houses, as for example when a group of inhabitants visit the construction site as one of them vents: “I gave permission to build exactly the same house. When we saw the plan we couldn’t tell it was going to be like this!’ In Jacquerod and Pereira. 34. Saraiva. p. 110. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Jacquerod and Pereira. 38.Saraiva. p. 110. 39. Ibid. pp. 110-111. 40. Ibid. p. 120.

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are already under water and that before we knew so well!’”41 But, in moving to their new houses there was also a sense of renovation in buying new furniture and lamps, and elderly couples enjoyed making jokes: “now, with the move these are all bridal houses.”42 During the participation process, from the period of planning, to construction and finally relocation, communication with the population created numerous miscommunications that surfaced between those planning Nova Luz, and those affected by it. For those living in Luz, the relocation touched upon the sacred grounds of their loved ones; on decorative tiles that were proud representatives to years of migration; toilets and sanitation constructed with sacrifice; houses that were built by ancestors and shaped during generations, by marriage, death, births; the envy of observing a neighbour with bigger windows; the sadness of abandoning vegetable gardens cultivated for over 40 years. Again, people were caught between a sense of pride of the sacrifice43 they were making for their country, and a lack of privacy in being on display, under the attention of the media and a rising amount of tourists. Miscommunication becomes tangible at moments in which relocating suspends the language of project and planning. In looking at communication, one perceives moments of impasse in which the idea of an agreement is only reached because one side is capitulating, sulking, lamenting, or withdrawing. With impasses in communication, tensions, perceived in silences, in gestures, disrupt faithful communication.

Miscommunication and Modes of Indeterminacy: Between Life and Project Architects, urban planners and designers set themselves the task of not only attempting to preserve an original, but also to improve it. This task was shared between the expectations of a

variety of stakeholders, including the inhabitants of Luz, but also several instances of central and local government, EDIA, the semi-private company responsible for the project with financial support from the EU. As discussed above, many miscommunications permeated the participation process of projecting Nova Luz, and as the village materialised and people relocated different senses of relocating came forward; I transcribe different vocalisations collected from several documentaries: This is not a replica An EDIA Technician speaks with new inhabitants about their pantry space: “Because these [houses] aren’t replicas. It was decided to compensate in kind. The house is to compensate for the one you lost. Regardless of whether this or that wall is in the same place […] If we did that, we’d have to tear down the things that are here but aren’t the same as in your old homes. These aren’t replicas.”44 An equivalent In Duas Terras we follow the explanation of a technician to inhabitants of Luz gathered to select the floors of their future houses: “as you must understand when we are going to build a house that is equivalent to the ones you have here we are going to attribute better materials but compatible with the level of the house relatively to others that already have better finishes. So it is natural that you say ‘we like this one better’ […] but, all has to be a little balanced, you see? So, in the same way, that, for example, instead of we building the houses, we paid for you to build them, there are houses that are worth more and others less, right?”45 It can’t be a copy In Luz Submersa46 we watch an inhabitant of Luz visiting the construction site of his new house, pointing to structural details that differ from the initial project. He complains he will not be able to inhabit the house in the same way.

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But then he stops to remark that, in fact, the house could never be the same, because even if it was a copy, it wouldn’t be identical: his house in Luz was built by his grandfather and maintained with his own hands. In another example an elderly couple, in attempting to explain their feelings regarding the new house, describe their old house as an extension of their marriage:47 “my husband built up the walls to our marriage”,48 starting only with outer walls and soil floor, to over decades build necessary inner walls as the family grew. In the first part of this paper I presented the concept of nonsense, to substantiate the paradoxical quality of indeterminacy. There is no possibility of agreement around the value of a concept, no possibility of equivalence. The signification of relocating holds similar modes of entropy and openness. In this case, what is significant is that the indeterminacy surrounding the meaning of relocating and the values of equivalence, copy, house, home, landscape—to name a few—is emerging in the inhabiting of Nova Luz. The practical grounds of the concrete materialisation of the new village make tacit impasses already felt during the participated process manifest. Between projection and practice, different modes of locating communication within a political discussion emerged. During the projected phase, in designing participation around representations of what could become the new village; during the implementation of the project, in communication moving to the dimension of the practical,

surrounding the concrete rather than the represented and allowing another affective dimension to emerge in communication. In the new village becoming concrete the most significant dispute seems to have arisen between the rural modes of living existing at Luz and the urban conception of living guiding the architects projecting the village: “the problem is that the village was projected by architects who think more the urban world.”49 This is well illustrated in documentaries showing the reaction of the inhabitants to Nova Luz, with recurrent complaints regarding the larger scale of the village and its windy central square without shadow, no land allocated for vegetable gardens and pastures, the lack of conditions to slaughter a pig, small chimneys without space to smoke meat, or—an important detail in a village where siting on a doorstep is significant to social life—the lack of doorsteps. There is a sequence in Duas Terras, which is illustrative of how conversations seemed to occur within two different worlds, remaining invisible to each other: as an old man, in search of a doorstep, enquires with the constructor “no doorstep made of stone?” and receives a perplexed reply: “Doorstep? Stone? Your door is v-424 and it’s not supposed to have one… [moving to the kitchen] here you have a g-70, a canopy and sink.”50 We observe an impasse in communication arising from distinct modes of being affected by the absence of a doorstep. The old man cannot understand that a house does not have a doorstep; the contractor is reading a plan that clearly does not include a doorstep. In the documentary, the old man turns his back and resigns himself to the impossibility of communicating.

41. Ibid. p. 125. 42. Ibid. p. 117. 43. In the documentary My Village Doesn’t Live Here Anymore we hear the priest during a procession in the village: “know like Christ how to accept our own suffering. He accepted suffering for our sake, that through his sacrifice we could be happier. And likewise our suffering must be borne for the sake of our fellow brothers and sisters in Portugal, through a dam that might bring them more happiness. That this sacrifice might be accepted in this hour of goodbye.” 44. Technician talking to new inhabitants about their pantry space. In Catarina Mourão. My Village Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (a Minha Aldeia Já Não Mora Aqui). 2006. 45. Jacquerod and Pereira. 46. Matos Silva, Fernando. Luz Submersa. 2001. 47. In Portuguese, the verb “to marry” (casar) is closely affiliated with the act of occupying a “house” (casa). 48. Jacquerod and Pereira. 49. Salema, Aldeia Da Luz Já Tem Museu. Público 2003. 50. Ibid.

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51. Saraiva. Aldeia Da Luz. p. 121. 52. Mourão. 53. Saraiva. Aldeia Da Luz. p.122. 54. Representative of EDIA. In Ramon Rodriguez. Aldeia Da Luz, Uma Terra Submersa Pelas Águas. 2003. 55. de Azevedo Antunes, Manuel , Coutinho Duarte, Lucinda, and Reino, João Pedro. Barragens Em Portugal: De Vilarinho Da Furna À Aldeia Da Luz, Com Passagem Pelo Douro Internacional (paper presented at the Comunicação ao IV Congresso Ibérico sobra Gestão e Planificação da Água. Tortosa. 8-12 December 2004. p. 17. 56. Mourão. 57. Clara Saraiva, the ethnographer involved in the creation of the museum in Salema. 58. Saraiva, Clara. Um Museu Debaixo De Água: O Caso Da Luz [A museum under water: the case of the village of Luz]. etnográfica 11, no. 2. 2007. p. 445. 59. Ibid. p. 457. 60. Ibid. p. 459. 61. Ibid. p. 460. 62. Salema.

Like in the example given by Stengers of Bartleby, the idiocy of this moment suspends “good communication”, creating an impasse materialised in silence. A silence loaded with a sense of miscommunication between two different views on the doorstep. These different senses do not allow for an exchange, because they refer to two different worlds existing around relocation: between a way of living that includes sitting on the sidewalk as part of a social dynamics of Luz, and, the contractor following a plan to finish a construction site. These are two modes of being part of a situation that defy the terms of faithful communication and present a challenge in terms of how communication design devises participation. Miscommunication between life and project is evidenced as each designed element is disputed by its inhabitation: It is a rural mode of living where people are deeply connected with the rituals of the pig slaughter, smokehouses, making wine, preparing olives which make up a great part of peoples’ modes of living and that the architect team neglected. Not even one shed remained the same less than a year after moving and decorative elements such as tiles, columns and arches were added to houses, reflecting a need to appropriate a space and personalise it, a space that you want different than your neighbours.51 Or, in an attempt to recover social ties between neighbours, another recurrent change observed is shortening, or altering the white walls limiting each property, in order to gain a view of the

surrounding landscape,52 but also to be able to chat with neighbours,53 as it used to be in the old village. It becomes clear that the participatory process failed to account for the project from different perspectives. The dominant view was that of the architects, planners and technicians, ignoring miscommunications, which were not discursive, but manifest as modes of indeterminacy, which mobilise other dimensions to communication.

Miscommunication and Modes of Indeterminacy: Between Original and Copy From the start the idea was to demolish the old village of Luz before submerging it, in order to protect the quality of the water, but also so there would be “no affective relation with the past or disgust for the situation of today[…]”54 This stressing of disappearance seems perceptive of the potential of miscommunication. The interest in erasing traces beyond a practical need reveals a desire to flatten the timeline of events, eliminating what could constitute an obstacle to an evaluation of the process as effective. The images of a bulldozer destroying the church constructed in honour of Nossa Senhora da Luz (Our Lady of Light) are powerful and moving. They feel, at least to me, as another layer of invasion that somehow makes explicit, underlines, what Antunes, Duarte and Reino conclude in “Barragens in Portugal”:

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“in terms of memories there will be a permanent recurring to another space that is a non-place as a primordial reference, thus there will always be a place for comparison ‘what we had there and don’t here, what we saw there and here don’t’.”55 It seems the attempt was that in demolishing, in destroying the original Luz, this non-place would cease to exist. This feeling resonates within the initial sentences of the documentary My Village Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in which the voice of a child speaks, while “we drive through” the old village “[…] Everything changed all at once, so it would seem as if nothing changed at all.”56 EDIA’s decision to eliminate the physical existence of Luz contrasts with the planning of a museum of the original village, the Museu da Luz. During the years of planning and implementation of the dam, a team was working on documenting the process and collecting material for the museum. The museum was projected as a memory deposit and catalyser to help the population adapt to the new village: “This museum is an exorcism.”57 In terms of its architecture, it was projected to disappear into the landscape between the new church and cemetery: “Thought as an element of the landscape and not as construction […] perpetuating a relation with two fundamental elements: the original earth, and water, agent of transformation.”58 Luz’s live musealisation entailed observing ethnographers “looking for old things for the museum”,59 and changed people’s sense of value and heritage. The affective ties to the past changed, reshaping a sense of identity. Objects that were symbols of the hardships of the region’s rural life—and that people looked to forget—suddenly became valuable: “if they want them for the museum they must be valuable.”60 Progressively, as Saraiva observes, these objects became a symbol of social and cultural status and ornament houses and gardens in Nova Luz,61 extending the act of memorialising beyond the symbolical borders of the Museum and affecting Nova Luz with cultural changes resulting from

the process of preserving the memory of Luz. This aspect is important because the museum became an amplifier of relocation: in preserving the memory of the submerged village it also initiates a process of “mise en abyme” of documenting, in which everything holds the memory of the relocation, generating in itself a profound impact on Luz. Georgina Sardinha, an inhabitant of Luz seems to defy the place of the museum as capturing the old village, by denying its sense of heritage: there is nothing there that does not exist in the village. Almost denying the changes taking place. The ongoing process of inhabiting Nova Luz, with Luz as reference, is a process of living values of heritage, of documentation and identity where potentially many productive forms of miscommunication may generate modes of indeterminacy between the original and its new equivalent. Georgina Sardinha lives in the central square, she says she is not going to the museum inauguration: “I am a friend of seeing things, but all there is in the village passes through here.” She is sitting in the sun working on her “crochet”, which she undoes at night to save thread, “my children like everything bought”.62

Final Remarks In this paper I explored the idea of repetition as a way of creating moments where processes of communication accommodate a more idiotic and nonsensical approach to what it means to believe in faithful communication. While in Dina Danish’s Molloy repetition opened up a nonsensical process of miscommunicating translation and language, the relocation of Luz was layered by a texture of miscommunications underlying an apparently functional process. The potential of miscommunication was augmented by the assumption that the original village would be replicated. In this way, the relocation process produced numerous para-

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doxical encounters, which I found to be evocative of Stengers’ figure of the Idiot, a figure interrupting the ideas of good communication surrounding the participatory process of planning, by drawing on affected and practical modes of experiencing relocation. If Danish’s Molloy invoked a nonsensical side of the Idiot, relocating Luz shows the political potential of indeterminacy in opening communication to different senses, emerging issues and new publics. Here, moments of impasse demand an engagement with a situation, that moves communication to not only contemplate the discursive, but also its material and performative qualities that raise questions about participatory processes. Many of the miscommunicating instances in Luz happened because of how each party involved was understanding the process of relocation as repetition and replica: in the earth that enveloped the bodies in the cemetery, in the immaterial routes gradually submerged leaving people disoriented, in dislocating objects from homes into the museum. But also in spaces of meaning, such as in the idea of equivalence as a cornerstone to the process of relocation; in the contrast between the language spoken at the meetings between technicians and residents; or in architects designing with an urban view that overlooked aspects of rural life. And many miscommunications not mentioned here, such as, for example, ecologists for whom relocating implied moving thousands of trees that were to be cut down. The exercise of relocating—moving senses, people, artifacts—revealed miscommunications that raise important questions to designing communication. Questions arising from not ignoring what is intuited as a fissure within the development of projects, acknowledging the silence, the hesitations, the awkward moments, which communication designers tend to dismiss, or equalise, to accomplish faithful communication. These questions entail dealing with idiocy in communication and imply a multitude of exchanges, agendas, affects and materialisations that should not be flattened and equalised to an abstract

level of rational, consensual modes of exchange. In this sense, the publics envisioned in processes of faithful communication are in fact layered, personal and complex rather than uniform and anonymous. Transporting into communication the demand for a positioning challenges representativity and opens new dimensions to “making sense”. Thus, instead of assuming, as designers, there is a perfect version of “good communication” we may rely on modes of indeterminacy and demand a positioned and affective involvement that allows for a political redrawing of the publics of communication. For communication design to work with these productive forms of miscommunication it must be open to a sense of discovery, of trial and error, of learning by doing, through the very inhabitation of a practice that is not always formulated in discursive terms and that, as the Idiot shows, can involve moments of impasse and indeterminacy. Miscommunications challenge the idea of faithfulness, to become polyphonic and no longer concerning solely a reciprocity of consensual exchanges.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Foundation for Science and Technology in Portugal for the grant that supported my research; my supervisor Jennifer Gabrys for her valuable comments; the anonymous reviewers whose comments have contributed to this paper; and finally Pedro Manuel for his feedback and support. NB: the original texts in Portuguese were translated into English by the author.

Over and Over and Over…: Performing Scripted Music

Abstract

Bruce Brubaker

A musician considers the significance and implications of repetition in the performance of western classical music. Varying practices used by musicians are described and contextualised with a series of accounts of performances of Philip Glass’s repetitive, minimalist piano piece Metamorphosis 2. The evolving concept of repetition is explored in relation to mechanical sound recording and mass production.

Artist, writer, and pianist Bruce Brubaker has premiered music by John Cage, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly and Mark-Anthony Turnage. He has performed at Tanglewood, the Hollywood Bowl, the International Piano Festival at La Roque d’Anthéron, New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Finland’s Kuhmo Festival. Recent recordings include piano music by Glass, Alvin Curran, William Duckworth, Meredith Monk, and Nico Muhly. A long-time faculty member at New York’s Juilliard School, Bruce Brubaker now chairs the piano department at New England Conservatory in Boston. His essay “Time is Time” appears in Unfolding Time: Studies in Temporality in Twentieth Century Music (2009). He co-edited Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (2000).

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Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers. Heraclitus1

First of August 2015. I am just outside the Cloister at the medieval Abbey of Silvacane in La Roque d’Anthéron, France. I’m about to begin a solo piano recital by playing Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2. I’ve performed this piece many times. I expect to be able to play the music well, yet usual pre-concert anxiety and exhilaration are affecting me. I’m not a drug addict. Yet, many times each year I get a fix, strong stimulants flow through my body. I give concerts. And almost always, through fear, public performance brings me to heightened consciousness. Adrenaline makes me intensely aware, and perhaps more able to play well. Accounts here, of my performances of American minimalist composer Philip Glass’s solo piano piece Metamorphosis 2, regard specific performances that occurred at the times and places mentioned. With words, I might evoke the regularly repetitive yet never-thesame task of the performer of scripted music—each repetition continuing a line made from more and more loops, more and more passes through preexisting musical text. Metamorphosis 2 contains multiple literal repetitions of material, concentrating the opposition/balance of sameness and variety present in the performer’s repeating of any music. As hand and fingers find increasingly efficient ways through a piece of music, the performer may also find artistic insight. Though not necessarily sought, analytic awareness may arise through the process of repetition, and in the laboratory of the concert. A piece of scripted music—conventionally notated western classical music—is greatly variable in playing. Even played by the same solo pianist over and over and over, a piece of music will emerge differently at each instance, each iteration. Each piano has particular tuning, timbre, and sustaining capabilities. In terms of conventional piano playing,

pitch adjustment remains outside the player’s control. What varies noticeably from performance to performance are phrase organisation, inflection, tone, tonal balances, and matters regarding time, rhythmic proportions, the nature, speed and pacing of beat. The acoustics of the concert space will affect the way sounds sustain and how they are perceived by the audience and the performer, and this will affect the performer’s work. The physical responsiveness of a particular piano will strongly influence the actions/ reactions of the pianist, and the seemingly unchosen nuances that occur in performance. In my opinion, the specific audience present at a concert can affect the music that is made. Music is a group activity. The collective scrutiny of many listening ears alters the musical and artistic awareness of each person— including the performer. The word commonly used in the French language to signify practising a musical instrument is “repetition”. Rehearsal coaches in opera houses are called “répétiteurs”. Surely the understood sense of this language is that in repetition change arises, improvement or progress. It is not exact or literal repetition. “Re-peat” is based on the Latin word “petere”, and so, “to seek” again. From the time of Walter Benjamin’s analysis or earlier, the understanding of artistic repetition changed.2 In the postmodern, industrialised world—a world of mass production—a repeated product or recording is clone-like. The presence of near-exact copies is a pervasive feature of present-day manufacturing and life experience. The nature of repeating a performance, and the desire to do so, may have been very different in the pre-industrial world. Twenty-eighth of July 2015. I’m sitting in the Green Room on the eighth floor of Broadcasting House in London. In about 15 minutes, I’m going to play Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2 on the BBC programme In Tune, a daily live show on Radio 3. I’ve already tried the piano in the studio, a Hamburg Steinway C, and chatted a bit with the

Bruce Brubaker

interviewer. After my playing, we will talk on the air. I’ve been asked if I will read a question that’s part of a UKwide competition. The winner receives tickets to a BBC Proms concert. Repetition can give an appearance of order. Musicians are accustomed to repetition. Even music that isn’t especially repetitive is subject to considerable repeating in a musician’s life. One month, as an adolescent pianist, I began each day’s practising by playing through “cold” (without warming up) Chopin’s “Black Key” Etude, opus 10, number 5. Replaying is our practice, a structuring of time, and, for the player, a structuring of life. In making a repertory, musicians strike a balance between repeating material and exploring new material. Some pianists play a huge number of pieces. Others delve into a few. How many times, and in how many ways, did the celebrated pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski perform the “Moonlight” Sonata? Or rock music icon Mick Jagger sing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”? Repetition is a form of change. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt3

In 1966, pianist Glenn Gould described the change he believed was occurring in the musical performer’s work. After producing a repeatable sound recording,4 a musician need not perform the same music over and over and over: Conceivably, for the rest of his life he will never again take up or come in contact with that particular work. In the course of a lifetime spent in the

recording studio he will necessarily encounter a wider range of repertoire than could possibly be his lot in the concert hall… It permits him to encounter a particular piece of music and to analyze and dissect it in a most thorough way, to make it a vital part of his life for a relatively brief period, and then to pass on to some other challenge and to the satisfaction of some other curiosity. Such a work will no longer confront him with a daily challenge. His analysis of the composition will not become distorted by overexposure, and his performance top-heavy with interpretive “niceties” intended to woo the upper balcony, as is almost inevitably the case with the overplayed piece of concert repertoire.5

1. “ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.” This is repeated by Plato. The reference comes down to us in many forms and with embellishments. It appeals to me that such an idea, apparently a parable of change, can be repeated so frequently and in so many ways.

Thirtieth of May 2015, Wuhan, China. I’ve been backstage at the new Qintai Concert Hall for a couple of hours. Coming back here from the hotel this afternoon, traffic was much heavier than traffic this morning. Tonight’s concert includes a number of musicians from the festival that I’ve been part of this week. I am going to play a single piece: Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2. In my playing of the piece, two passages that used to seem technically graceless are much easier to play now.

3. Eno, Brian, and Schmidt, Peter. Oblique Strategies. 1975. http://www.rtqe.net/ ObliqueStrategies/Ed1.html (Accessed 2015-09-05).

In recent years, I have given many performances of repetitive piano music by Philip Glass. In the playing of phrases or whole sections of repeated material— material that is notated without variation—I welcome some changes of emphasis or rhythmic inflection in the performance. It’s a delicate, even precarious balance. Wilful changes are

2. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936)]. Translated by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Hannah Arendt (ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1968. https://www. marxists.org/reference/ subject/philosophy/works/ ge/benjamin.htm (Accessed 2015-09-07).

4. Mechanical sound recording existed well before recordings were made that could be played back. Already in the 1850s and 1860s, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made sound recordings with the “phonoautograph.” See the work of the First Sounds research group: http://www. firstsounds.org/research/ scott.php (Accessed 201601-24). 5. Gould, Glenn. The Prospects of Recording. Reprinted from High Fidelity 16. no. 4. 1966. In The Glenn Gould Reader. Tim Page (ed.). Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys. 1984. pp. 335-336.

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6. Freud, Sigmund. Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung (1912). In Gesammelte Werke—Chronologisch geordnet 8. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. 1999. p. 376. 7. Tristano, Francesco. Red Bull Academy Lecture: Francesco Tristano [Video]. http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/ lectures/francesco-tristano (Accessed 2015.09.07). 8. Quoted in Lahr, John. The Sphinx Next Door: Julianne Moore and her imagination. The New Yorker. 21 September 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/thesphinx-next-door-profiles-john-lahr (Accessed 2015-09-16). 9. “Il y a à tout moment une infinité de perceptions en nous, mais sans aperception et sans réflexion, c’est-à-dire des changements dans l’âme même dont nous ne nous aperçevons pas, parce que ces impressions sont ou trop petites et en trop grand nombre ou trop unies, en sorte qu’elles n’ont rien d’assez distinguant à part, mais jointes à d’autres, elles ne laissent pas de faire leur effet…” Translation by the author. In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement human. Paris: Flammarion. 1921. pp. 9-29. https://fr.wikisource.org/ wiki/Nouveaux_Essais_sur_l’entendement_humain/Avantpropos (Accessed 2015-09-07). 10. Stearns, David Patrick. Van Cliburn and his fraught generation. Condemned to Music (blog). Arts Journal. 2013.02.28. http://www.artsjournal.com/condemned/2013/02/van-cliburn-and-his-fraught-generation/ (Accessed 2015-09-07). 11. Quoted in Beigel, Greta. Finally, a Return Engagement: Pianist Van Cliburn is hitting the concert trail… Los Angeles Times. 3 July 1994. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-07-03/entertainment/ca-11419_1_van-cliburn (Accessed 2015-09-06).

garish, too noticeable. Yet, small irregularities of the human hand and mind lead to a changeable musical surface that offers differing and desirable musical experience, in comparison, for example, to precisely unvaried automatic rendering by a machine. I may discern the differences as they happen in my playing, rather than trying consciously to make differences occur. Tone, rhythm, inflection, use of the piano’s pedals—are in a relationship so interdependent that I imagine my mental state as what Sigmund Freud describes as “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit”,6 often translated in English as “evenly divided attention”. Freud suggests this is the ideal mental state for the psychiatric analyst. In the parlance of mechanical player-pianos, “hand-played” described a piano roll that was derived from a real-time human performance. After initial punching, the roll could be retouched. (A long roll of paper punched with patterns of small holes causes keys on the player-piano to play, as the paper passes across a “tracker bar”.) Alternatively, an entire roll could be prepared by directly punching holes, measuring physical distances on paper to make rhythm—no piano playing required. Beginning in the 1940s, composer Conlon Nancarrow took the rhythmic possibilities of piano-roll punching to mathematically complex, superhuman extremes in his studies for player-piano. In today’s electronic music, especially in dance music, repeating patterns, or loops, generated by a computer may be extremely regular and regularly repetitive, down to the level of milliseconds or frames. The boundary-defying musician Francesco Tristano has described his preference for playing repeated loop-like material live on the piano,7 hand-played, while many computer programs that produce musical rhythms include possibilities for mimicking the irregularities of human playing. Today, “music” signifies recorded music. Live music is not the norm; the adjective “live” has become necessary. We are arriving at a new understanding of recording (already reached in some pop music). Recently, I participated in a recording session of a chamber music piece that I never played continuously from beginning to end. Yet, sufficient material was captured to assemble an intimate, improvisatory, and ephemeral-seeming performance. Perhaps, such a process is like film-making. Film actors do not perform a script from start to finish. The American actor Julianne Moore said:

Bruce Brubaker

I really know my lines. I really think about what I’m gonna do. Sometimes people think that means I’ve already played the part in my head. That’s not true. I know the parameters. Then, when the camera goes on, I’m ready to have an experience. I don’t want it to happen in my living room. I want it to happen on camera.8 My goal in practising for this recording had little to do with preparing a coherent beginning-to-end reading of the entire piece. My interest was in achieving spontaneous, vivid line-readings through one- or two-minute sections of the piece—“correct”, but generally played with more uncertainty and more risk of failure than I would tolerate in a concert. In post-production, attention can be paid to coherence and overall continuity. After a “take” in a recording session, I often find it desirable to continue recording again right away. The chance of achieving very similar rhythmic treatment and phrase shaping that can match well with earlier takes seems to diminish as minutes elapse. Today, classical performers, in their live playing, seem ever more easily able to repeat musical material with great sameness of detail and expressive nuance. Is this an outcome of the use, or existence of sound recording? Is the generally increasing instrumental proficiency of classical performers an outcome of the prevalence of recorded sound? Fourth of April 2008. I’m backstage at the Harris Theater in Chicago. Tonight, I’m playing in a gala performance with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Alejandro Cerrudo has choreographed a piece that utilises recordings of piano pieces including my recording of Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2. For tonight’s performance, I will play the music “live”. In our first rehearsal, the dancers were surprised. My playing didn’t correspond exactly to my commercial recording of Metamorphosis 2, the precise rhythmic nuances of which they had absorbed in their limbs. Hearing

a few phrases from the recording, I recognised the playing as mine, but barely. In earlier times, the presence of human musicians was required in order for music to be heard. Now, pervasively, we have playback of recorded music. My chamber music coach, the violist Paul Doktor said, “Never twice the same!” It was a Middle-European mantra of chamber-music playing. Consider legions of musicians playing the same texts over and over and over—but never in exactly the same way. The repeated playing of a sound recording yields a more precisely repeated sonic result. At every moment there is an infinity of perceptions in us, that we do not reflect upon or notice, these are alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because these impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they do not distinguish themselves individually, But when they are combined with others they do nevertheless have their effect… Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz9

Classical performers have differing views of repeated performance. The pianist Van Cliburn maintained that after arriving at a satisfying interpretation of a particular piece of music he did not want to change it.10 He intended to achieve the same reading in every subsequent performance. Cliburn said: “If I learn something, it’s not to play for this week or that week, but forever.”11 Alastair Macaulay describes something quite different from Cliburnian Platonism. Macaulay recounts his impressions of watching on film the evolving performance of Janet Baker as she sang the role of Vitellia in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito: The revelation of repeated viewings was to discover how, each season, Ms. Baker’s musical and physical manner changed… In 1974, when the production was new, Ms. Baker was possessed

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12. Macaulay, Alastair. Janet Baker’s Voice, a Singular Instrument, Lingers Like No Other. New York Times. 13 August 2015. p. C1. http://www.nytimes. com/2015/08/13/arts/music/ janet-bakers-voice-a-singular-instrument-lingers-likeno-other.html (Accessed 2015-08-31). 13. My work with Nico Muhly eventually led to Haydnseek, a collaborative project in which my live performances of piano sonatas by Franz Joseph Haydn were overlaid, contextualised, and sometimes drowned out by new electronically-synthesised sounds. 14. In a non-conventional reading, I made Bruce Brubaker’s Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The piece is a piano quartet fashioned from my favorite simultaneities taken, in order, from the last movement of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. 15. In Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer [Film]. Robert Hilferty (dir.). 2009. https://youtu.be/sf_Zfpq3gqk (Accessed 2015-9-4). 16. Ferneyhough, Brian. Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice (1978). In Collected Writings. James Boros and Richard Toop (eds.). Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995. pp. 7-13.

of many kinds of stillness. In Act I, the way she listened balefully to Sesto… was deadly; in Act II, the way she stood still for “Non più di fiori,” singing it in blanched, resigned tones (virtually monochrome), was supremely poignant. Yet, in 1975, Ms. Baker drenched that same aria in a wide palette of colors while seeming racked by her own vocalism. I can’t forget how, apparently now incapable of stillness, she kept clutching her hands together and transferring weight from foot to foot — as if possessed by the need to transmit this new range of nuance. In 1976, she had changed again. Then she seemed in full physical control, but played the role — that aria, above all — with a marvelously heroic supply of period gestures, weighted and forceful, evoking Racine tragedy...12 Twenty-third of October 2001. I am in my dressing room at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. The first music I’m playing tonight will be Metamorphosis 2 by Philip Glass. I am curator of, and principal performer in the annual Irene Diamond concert, honouring one of the Juilliard School’s important benefactors. It is my first concert since the World Trade Center attacks. Some parts of the event, like the dinner that precedes the Diamond Concert, were more subdued than usual, in keeping with New York City’s collective sombre mood. The concert includes first performances of chamber pieces by Nico Muhly and Kati Agocs that I commissioned for this event.13

Was Glenn Gould right? Do multiple performances of a scripted piece by a player lead to “overexposure” and a performance “top-heavy with interpretive ‘niceties’ ”? Often-played pieces may wander from denotative reading of the text. But the function of a musical text may not be simple representation. When I started working on Morton Feldman’s duo For Christian Wolff, I aimed to learn the notated rhythms accurately. The published score is a reproduction of Feldman’s hand-written musical text. Some things puzzled me. There are measures that don’t add up to the expected number of beats—mistakes? In other measures, the flute part and the keyboard part are not rhythmically aligned visually. Perhaps, in performing For Christian Wolff, fastidious coordination of beat between flute and keyboard is not necessary? The classical music community tends to share the belief that pitches and rhythms written by a composer ought to be performed accurately. There are many views regarding the specificity and nature of that accuracy.14 In the playing of difficult new music, getting the pitches and rhythms “right” can be challenging or impossible to achieve. I imagine first performances of The Rite of Spring and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, indeed, every symphony by Beethoven. By today’s standards of accuracy, it seems likely that those performances were deeply flawed. As musicians struggled to bring coherence to a complex piece by Milton Babbitt, he quipped, “Life is short and my piece gets long”.15 Apparently the players could not go fast enough for the music fully to make sense. I first

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became aware of Debussy’s D’un cahier d’esquisses by listening to a recording of the music by pianist Walter Gieseking. Later, looking at the notation of the piece, I realised that Gieseking read a note in the penultimate measure as if it was written in treble clef; it’s a bass-clef note. I rather liked the “F” that Gieseking played, and in my ear it had primacy. Do the notes in a written composition represent what the listener will hear? Or does written music merely put the performer into a condition for making music? The composer Brian Ferneyhough writes: What can a specific notation, under favourable conditions, hope to achieve? Perhaps simply this: a dialogue with the composition of which it is a token such that [the] realm of non-equivalence separating the two (where, perhaps, the “work” might be said to be ultimately located?) be sounded out, articulating the inchoate, outlining the way from the conceptual to the experiential and back.16 And then, the effects of a notation (fixed in writing) change, as new generations of musicians read it (repeat it). The resulting music necessarily changes, and keeps changing. So it is in reading every sacred text. Even if the symbols remain the same, their signification (what they signify) does not remain the same. For much of my life as a classical music performer, I believed that a mistake-filled performance of a piece was not really the piece. A performance either was the music or it wasn’t. Now, I have a different belief. All the sounds that result from a written piece (a musical text) are the piece. All performances of that piece ever given add up to the identity of that music. Such a range of results represents a limit of all possible musics that might be made. In this way, a composition is never finished but always subject to further completion, repetition, understanding, reading, misreading, exploration, and mistake. Each repeating adds to the totality, re-centring it. And repeats, at least “hand-played”, cannot be identical.

During one month, Paula Robison and I gave four performances of For Christian Wolff, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Later, listening to the recordings that were made of each performance, it seemed to me that some of the most satisfying music-making occurred when we were not “together” in a conventional sense. We did or didn’t do what the notation represents. Eighteenth of October 2013. I am offstage at La MaMa in New York City, waiting for my cue to enter the stage and begin playing Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2. I’ve played this music many times. I’m fairly confident of being able to play it adequately, yet usual pre-performance anxiety and exhilaration are affecting me. I repeat this sensation of adrenalised awareness many times each year. In this show, I collaborate with the dancer/movement artist Maureen Fleming. Tonight is the official opening night of our twelveperformance run. Last night, I was here for the preview performance. This morning I had to be in Boston—so some quick travelling. I arrived back in New York at the theatre before 5 p.m. In this production, the recorded voice of Ruth Maleczech is heard. The text begins with the words: “What would be the point in remembering.” This text is repeated several times, with varying emphasis. It’s almost formulaic, as Maleczech lands on one word (“What…”) and then another (“point…”), then another (“…remembering”); the shifting implications are vivid. Many years ago, Ruth directed me in a show in Boston, in which I played music onstage. As I hear the recording of her voice repeating this text each night, I remember performing in Boston. The pianist and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski played Beethoven’s so-called “Moonlight” Sonata very many times. It was a feature of his public programmes for decades. I have speculated about how many times Paderewski might have performed the piece… (He can be seen and heard playing part

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17. In the United States, the French word “encore” is used to designate an added piece played at a concert after the announced or printed programme. In France and elsewhere in Europe, such an additional piece is termed a “bis”. Usually, in today’s practice, encores are not pieces already played in the concert. Sometimes, however, they are pieces already played in the concert… 18. Schoenberg, Arnold. Today’s Manner of Performing Classical Music. In Style and Idea: Selected writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Leonard Stein (ed.). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California, 1975. pp. 320-21. 19. Schoenberg, p. 323. 20. McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quentin. The Medium is the Massage. Jerome Agel (prod.). New York, NY: Bantam. 1967. p. 63. https://designopendata.files. wordpress.com/2014/05/themediumisthemassage_marshallmcluhan_quentinfiore. pdf (Accessed 2015-09-08). 21. McLuhan’s evocative term.

of it in the 1938 feature film Moonlight Sonata.) How many pianists have played this music? How many times has it been repeated? The Moonlight Sonata is in the 1936 French talking-picture Un grand amour de Beethoven, directed by Abel Gance, in Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant made in 2003, and in dozens of other films. At the present moment, right now, how many people are repeating the Moonlight? Twentieth of October 1998. I’ve just come offstage at Miller Theatre at Columbia University in New York. My programme finished with John Adams’s Phrygian Gates. Now I’m going to play an encore,17 Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2. Tonight’s performance is a collaboration between theatre director Ian Belton, lighting designer Ben Kato, and me. The show contains sound effects, voice-overs—a reimagined concert experience, we hope. It may be that the taste for, and value of repetition varies as place, time, or context alters. In a world without mechanical reproduction, before mass production, the steady hand of the craftsman repeating a design, making a chair or a fork, very consistently, over and over and over, was highly esteemed. In our world where exact reproductions are prevalent and inhuman, our sense of the value of human irregularity may intensify. Increasingly precise repetition of musical performance was facilitated by the strong, regular beat that became pervasive in the performance of classical music by the later twentieth century.

Over a period of more than a hundred years, ensemble players became better able to stay together. Conductors became adroit in beating very regularly. The rise of the symphony orchestra, with its increasingly intricate largescale repertory, brought great change. Orchestral players of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries primarily played opera; the playing of symphonies was rare. The basic musical experience of those earlier players and conductors was accompanying singers, accommodating the delivery of a sung text. Increasing beat-regularity was, I believe, the outcome or reflection of several musical and societal changes: mass production, the standardisation of time keeping, time zones, the metronome, sound recording, the ascent of conducting, full scores, the practice of rhythmic “subdividing” by performers, and even notions of an egalitarian society. There was widespread accommodation of old music to highly regular repetitive beat. Arnold Schoenberg’s 1948 article describes the great change that was occurring. He writes: Almost everywhere in Europe music is played in a stiff, inflexible metre—not in a tempo, i.e. according to a yardstick of freely measured quantities... A change of character, a strong contrast, will often require a modification of tempo. But the most important changes are necessary for the distribution of the phrases of which a segment is composed.18 Discussing a piece he aspired to conduct, Schoenberg writes, “It seemed to me as if the conductor has taken a wet sponge,

Bruce Brubaker

erasing all traces of problems by playing whole movements in one stiff, inflexible tempo.”19 So, classical music was remodelled, regularised, and made more regularly repeatable. Twenty-fourth of October 1996. I’m offstage at St. Mark’s in Greenwich Village in New York City. I’m about to play a piece by Philip Glass that I have just learned—Metamorphosis 2. This is part of a dance performance with dancer/choreographer Polly Motley. At each performance, I need to find the precise speed necessary for the dancers. After Duet, set to Metamorphosis 2, there is a longer piece, in which I will take phrases from Glass’s music as material for extemporising. The balance or opposition of variety and sameness is a dichotomy providing essential friction in a lot of art. Personal preference for variety or sameness may lead to preference for a stylistically varied concert programme, or the grouping together of similar pieces. It may explain why some performers learn many new pieces and others repeat only a few. And this preference may have to do with place and time. If linear thinking is no longer possible, as Marshall McLuhan assessed it, 20 perhaps sameness is more a virtue now? If linear thought and experience prevailed in the past, variety might have captured attention. If the allatonceness21 of today threatens to overwhelm, then sameness can compel.

I’m hearing another pianist’s YouTube recording of Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis 2. Though the familiarity of the music is striking, another aspect of the experience is how much I am surprised. I’m constantly comparing these recorded sounds that emanated from another performer to my mental store of what’s what. The new details are not revelatory or illuminating necessarily— nonetheless, the shock of the new joins with the familiarity of the repeat. Can it be denied that with our repetitive acts we measure our way towards death—one tennis match, one car ride, one meal, or one performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata at a time? With concerts, the public performer of scripted music ritualises such increments. For the musician, the playing of a particular piece may be associated with a particular period of time, or particular places. A piece of music may disappear from the player’s repertoire, or keep recurring over and over and over. I am planning to perform Metamorphosis 2 again on 29 January 2016, 30 January 2016, 31 January 2016, 1 February 2016, 3 February 2016…

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Two Churches and a Hat: The National Bucharest Theatre or the Mythology of Post-War Romanian Architecture Abstract

Ioana Cristina Popovici

The National Bucharest Theatre is in its third architectural reiteration. All three have been gestures of political and cultural appropriation, but also of selective erasure and reconfiguration of the past, dictated by desired shifts of identity in political as well as cultural and architectural discourse. In socialist Romania, reiterations in cultural production often illustrated the recalibration of the relationship matrix between the local socialist system, Moscow and the West, as well as between cultural milieus and the political, social and economic spheres. Built during the 1960s, a time of politically-sanctioned cultural openness, the theatre epitomised the obsessive focus of Romanian cultural production: that of national specificity. During the 1980s, at the height of Ceauşescu’s campaign to mould Bucharest to his aesthetic vision, the NBT was interred behind a neoclassical facade. Out of sight, but never out of mind, the NBT accrued a wealth of meanings and values, gradually becoming synonymous in architectural circles with resistance to mediocrity enforcing cultural policies. In time, the original NBT became a veritable architectural myth, whose 2014 disinterment cum updating generated a shocking disillusionment. Using elements of self-analysis, interviews with Romanian architects, and theories examining collective/collected memories, this paper investigates reiterative myth construction in post-war Romanian architecture. The characteristics of collective professional memory thus revealed underpin the formulation of contemporary professional identity, with significant, but troublingly undiagnosed effects on current practice. In a professional climate of silent erasure of the recent architectural past, it is vital to examine these mechanisms in order to better reconfigure contemporary praxis.

Ioana Cristina Popovici trained as an architect at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, and is currently a doctoral candidate at Plymouth University. Her research project investigates the evolution of architecture in socialist Romania as discursive interference between several fields—politics, architectural profession, economy, and socio-cultural practices. Broader research interests include architecture theory in totalitarian regimes, the urban development of modern Bucharest, industrial architecture, and intersections between architecture, philosophy, cultural theory and social sciences. Having taught at both universities, in Bucharest and Plymouth, she has developed teaching interests focused on the critical examination of architecture praxis—past, present, and future—in articulation with power, social, economic and cultural practices. From liminality, transgressive architecture, disaster-relief design, the architectural critique of neo-capitalism, to urbicide and housing homelessness, she supports her students in becoming critically aware of the complex network of factors impinging on contemporary architecture.

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1. Introduction: Memories of the Unseen The National Bucharest Theatre (NBT) is in its third architectural reiteration. All three have been gestures of political and cultural appropriation, but also of selective erasure and reconfiguration of the past, dictated by desired shifts of identity in political as well as cultural and architectural discourse, cast into built form. In socialist Romania, reiterations in cultural production often illustrated the recalibration of the relationship matrix between the local socialist system, Moscow and the West, as well as between cultural milieus and the political, social and economic spheres. Designed and built during the 1960s, a time of politically-sanctioned cultural openness, the original theatre epitomised the obsessive focus of Romanian cultural production: national specificity. During the 1980s—the height of Ceauşescu’s campaign to mould Bucharest to his aesthetic vision—the NBT was interred behind a neoclassic facade. Out of sight—but never out of mind—the original NBT accrued a wealth of meanings, values, and even post-factum memories, gradually becoming synonymous, for the architectural milieu, with resistance to mediocrity enforcing cultural policies. Each new generation of architects acquired, through the University apprenticeship system,1 memories of the unseen, augmenting the visually inaccessible reality of the NBT to the status of architectural myth. In 2010, works began to unearth 1. The Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism (IMUAU), in Bucharest—Romania’s oldest and most reputable architecture university, established in 1892. 2. Psychology studies suggest that memory is a constructive phenomenon. According to Lynn et al., an absence of memory is compensated for by imaginative construction, narratively pieced together from the various sources available, based on commonly accepted plausibility and, in the specific case of architecture, I would argue, commonly shared judgements of (aesthetic) value. See Steven Jay Lynn et al. Rendering the Implausible Plausible: Narrative, Construction, Suggestion, and Memory. In Believed-In Imaginings. The Narrative Construction of Reality, Joseph Timothy de Rivera, and Theodore R. Sarbin, (eds). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 1998. p. 133.

the theatre from its concrete sarcophagus. Two years later, the grand unveiling brought professional and personal expectations to a heartbreaking crash. Using elements of self-analysis, interviews with Romanian architects, and theories examining collective—and collected—memories, this paper investigates myth construction in post-war Romanian architecture, based on the case study of the NBT. The characteristics of collective professional memory thus revealed underpin the formulation of contemporary professional identity, with significant—but troublingly undiagnosed—effects on current architectural praxis. In a professional climate of silent erasure of the recent architectural past, it is vital to examine these mechanisms in order to better reconfigure contemporary praxis.

1. NBT, second iteration

3. Architecture theorist Mircea Lupu coined the term in 1977 to define a school of thought and practice, which emerged during the 1960s, and produced some of the most appreciated works of Romanian architecture up until the first half of the 1970s. Lyrical functionalism is, essentially, the balanced tension between functionalist rigour and rationality and a poetic, creative approach to the design of space. The latter employs spatial, sculptural and decorative archetypes from traditional Romanian architecture and arts. Architecture historians consider lyrical functionalism as the third modern re-imagining of “national” architecture after Ion Mincu’s Neo-Romanian style and the interbellum modernism practised by Horia Creangă, Marcel Iancu, Henriette Delavrancea etc. See Lupu, Mircea. Şcoli naţionale în arhitectură [National Schools of Architecture]. Bucharest: Editura Tehnică. 1977.

Ioana Cristina Popovici

I have never seen the original NBT: by the time I entered architecture education in 2003, it had long been secreted away. An ambiguously proportioned succession of arches at odds with the concrete stage tower, the stone-filigreed annexes, and the silhouette of neighbouring Hotel Intercontinental—this is how the theatre featured in my mental landscape of Universităţii Square. The original configuration, however, is far from absent from my recollection. I am well aware of the building’s initial message, of the meanings accrued during the later stages of Romanian communism, its collapse, and the first growing pains of Romanian democracy and capitalism. I have memories of its first iteration, and knowledge of the complex design and building processes, which coincided, from the point of view of cultural production, with the tipping point between Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s thaw and Ceauşescu’s gradually increasing authoritarianism— a shift outlined below from the point of view of architecture’s negotiations with power in the arena of national discourse.

of its heritage—solid anchors into the local geocultural context—and its attunement to contemporary architecture trends.3 Most importantly, perhaps, it stood for a synthesis between past and present, home and abroad—an individuality-preserving architecture of belonging. Over the years, it had become a locus of collective professional memory, an instance of creative, autonomous architectural discourse to aspire towards. Finally, it embodied the ability of the profession to check-mate political intervention and reinstate architectural discourse as the primary underpinning of architecture practice, to the detriment of political critique. All things considered, a rather heroic feat.

Fig. 2. The original NBT

Fig. 3. The unveiling

These are acquired memories2 pertaining to a professional identity transmitted through architectural education, focusing on crucial stages in the development of architectural discourse during communism. Curiously enough, architecture history courses had little impact on the seedlings of acquired architectural memory, as they dealt rather summarily with contemporary, post-World-War-II history. Rather, it was through in-studio conversations with design tutors that I discovered the true NBT, which stood for lyrical functionalism, a pivotal moment when Romanian architecture unveiled the breadth, depth and subtlety

grand unveiling and trying to discern, amidst the scaffolding, the features of a well-known—and much-loved—project. The shanty town of hastily thrown together annexes, masked by the misleading height of the blind arches, emerged first. Then, the broad, hovering overhang—a grave, subtly upturned concrete slab, reminiscent of the deep shadow of medieval church eaves and traditional abodes, of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel, and even of entrances to ancient rock temples. But the final removal of the scaffolding came as a huge shock: the building unveiled was not the one I remembered…

I carried this image-concept of the NBT into professional and academic practice, looking back with nostalgia and fondness upon spaces mentally assembled from the original project, photographs, and enthusiastic stories. From 2012, I tracked the progression of on-site works, anticipating the

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2. History in the (Re)Making Traversing most of the communist period, the NBT can indicate shifts in the articulation between political discourse, urban strategy and architectural agenda. Scholarship of communist Romanian architecture has fashioned a tentative chronology of architecture under the regime—a temporal geometry still under expansion with relevant anchoring points. For architecture theorist Ana Maria Zahariade, the chronology blends the logics of politics and architecture, and can be roughly segmented into: a post-war reconstruction period (up until the end of the 1940s); the “interlude of socialist realism” (until the mid-1950s); a stretch of cultural thaw and “relative re-synchronisation” with the Western architecture scene (until the early 1980s); and, finally, the decline of the mid- and late-1980s,4 during the totalitarian restrictions of the regime’s last decade.5 Although the design, construction and alteration of the NBT belong to the last two stages, the concept of a large-scale performance venue suited to Bucharest’s increasingly modernised city centre predates the communist takeover. Plans for the expansion of Universităţii Square spilled into socialist urban strategies, with interventions in Bucharest’s city centre remaining, grosso modo, in tune with the pre-war development direction.6 The Square had long been a place of privileged urban function, situated in the capital’s epicentre at the intersec4. Zahariade, Ana Maria. Arhitectura în proiectul comunist. România 1944-1989. [Architecture in the Communist Project. Romania 1944-1989]. Bucharest: Simetria. 2011. 5. To repay Romania’s external debt in the 1980s, Ceauseşcu channelled the vast majority of the country’s agricultural, industrial and consumer goods production into export, also introducing inhumane restrictions on food and basic amenities for the population, such as water, gas, heating and electricity. The standard of living plummeted to an unbearable degree towards the end of the decade, turning daily routine into a struggle for survival. 6. The work of Professor Nicolae Lascu on the topic of pre-war urbanism has also yielded some interesting insights into the continuity of urban design practice across the change in regime: in Bucharest, urban development followed the 1935 masterplan well into the 1960s, although a fictitious new plan for the city’s

tion of its North-South and East-West axes.7 Thus, it is a site of geographic as well as symbolic urban importance, potential recognised across the post-war change in political regime: the socialist planning agenda had it earmarked for an upscale in official (that is, political) status, to the detriment of the plurivalent cultural and commercial functions historically hosted by the square. The results of the 1956-1957 urbanism competition focusing on Universităţii Square yielded various architectural approaches, but one cohesive urban vision: the north-eastern section of the square would benefit from the juxtaposition of a dominant mass volume and a vertical accent, setting the precedent, at least in terms of layout, for future iterations.8 In his study of the Sacré Coeur basilica, David Harvey explains how the cross-purpose actions of antagonistic socio-political factions resulted in surprising unity: one site, one preferred architectural form to physically embody and visually enforce the urban domination of Paris.9 Similarly, the site genealogy of the NBT is marked by its potential for centralised control and symbolic dominance within the urban hierarchy. Architectural form, however, proved to be more volatile, suggesting—as will be explored below—changes in the regime’s agenda of visual representation.10 A brief sketch of the Romanian political landscape from the 1960s onwards will better contextualise the NBT’s architectural becoming. Through policies affecting both cultural production and architecture praxis, the figures of Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej and socialist development was often cited in specialist media. Likewise, the core of urban legislation relied heavily on interbellum precedents. See Nicolae Lascu. Legislaţie şi dezvoltare urbană. Bucureşti 1931-1952, PhD diss. Bucharest: Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture. 1997. 7. Universităţii Square is one of Bucharest’s main multi-functional urban nuclei, fashioned in the Haussmannian planning tradition during the modern development of the capital during the late-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Its pre-war configuration featured the country’s second modern university, administrative buildings, a monastery, a hospital, shops and restaurants, and even a circus. 8. Documented in Architectura R.P.R., Romania’s sole specialist publication during the communist regime, no. 1, 1957, pp. 3-17.

Ioana Cristina Popovici

Nicolae Ceauşescu11 had significant impact on the evolution of architecture throughout the period. Dej’s tenure as leader of the communist party between 1947 and 1965 was paradoxical: on the one hand, it initiated a political breakaway process from Moscow, affording Romania relative independence in devising economic, socio-cultural policies serving national, rather than USSR, interests.12 On the other, the hyper-centralised state forged by this nation-centric strategy also meant increased resistance to the de-stalinisation process initiated in the USSR by Khrushchev, which reformed the system in other satellite countries.13 For Katherine Verdery, the cornerstone of this manoeuvre

was national discourse, hegemonic throughout Romania’s history in both politics and cultural production,14 and often acting as the binding agent—or dialogue channel—between the two. The reintroduction of discourse on the nation did more than legitimise a Marxist-Leninist ideology with scant local adherence: it introduced a monolithic core of insular nationalism into the Romanian communist credo, displacing the Soviet discourse while facilitating the increasingly totalitarian streak of local communism.15 In architecture, this meant a dilution of the sudden, politically sanctioned resurgence of modernism

Fig. 4. Universităţii Square: plan and aerial views predating the NBT. Urbanism competition solution, 1956-1957]

9. Harvey, David. Monument and Myth. In The Urban Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. 1994. pp. 200-228. 10. In-field driven variation of architectural form did find areas more permissive of experiment and innovation—for instance, industry, tourism, and the privileged architecture designed for the nomenklatura. Unique, high-profile administrative or cultural building projects were also desired commissions, as they allowed the authors reprieve from economic restrictions and the strictures of typified production.

Romanian communism) was marked by a more relaxed, tolerant rapport between state and citizens, manifest in lessened censorship and increased freedom of thought and creativity, alongside accessibility to information and western cultural and consumer goods. 13. Such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Hungary. For more details on the different paths taken by these satellite states within the general framework of Eastern-European socialism, see Staniszkis, Jadwiga. The Ontology of Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1992.

11. Successive leaders of the Romanian communist party—and, therefore, of the state. Dej was in power from 1947 to his death in 1965, and was immediately succeeded by Ceauşescu, until 1989.

14. Verdery, Katherine. National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1991. p. 303.

12. The last stretch of Dej’s regime (collectively remembered as a golden age of

15. Verdery, p. 66.

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operated by Khrushchev’s 1954 speech.16 The green light to resurrect modernist discourse in Romania— couched in terms of rationality—only came in 1958.17 The shift was managed by the profession with caution, which generated surprising conceptual and formal variation: projects designed in a socialist realist aesthetic were completed after decorative stripping down, while the new rationalist direction began reshaping cities across the country with speed and efficiency.18 Interestingly, experimental attempts to fuse the socialist ethos of collective living with modernist principles and certain parameters of local architecture were perhaps more successful after the death of socialist realism than during its enforcement of “national form for socialist content”.19 In this atmosphere of discursive plurivalence, architects could pursue national specificity—later to become a central professional desideratum considered by the time’s theorists as the catalyst of Romanian architecture’s originality and maturity20 —although this direction would only be generalised and enforced across the board during Ceauşescu. Coming to power in 1965, Ceauşescu strengthened Romania’s autonomy within the Eastern bloc and, to some extent, the more tolerant social and cultural climate created under Dej.21 But this apparent freedom would be short-lived, as Ceauşescu’s secure political position paved the way towards his own brand of increasingly authoritarian neo-Stalinism. During the 1970s and 1980s, the system’s archi16. Nikita Khrushchev’s speech on 7 December 1954 at the All-union Conference of Builders, Architects and Workers in the Building Materials Industry, delivered an oblique blow to the Stalinist political scaffolding through a scathing critique of socialist realism, while also redirecting Soviet architectural production towards rationalized design (of modernist filiation) and industrialised production. For an in-depth analysis of the speech and its consequences for architecture praxis, see Augustin Ioan. Un discurs funebru la căpătâiul realismului socialist [A funereal speech over a defunct socialist realism]. In Arhitectura (supra)realismului socialist [The architecture of socialist (sur)realism]. Bucharest: Paideia. 2012. pp. 184-218. 17. In a speech given at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Romanian Worker’s Party held in November 1958 by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. A temperate, cautious return to a subdued modernist aesthetic is discernible, however, as early as 1955-56, demonstrating the ability of the profession to sometimes

tectural directives were increasingly marked by retrograde arbitrariness, applying rudimentary urban regulations on a countrywide scale, and pursuing terra-formation and “large-scale social engineering” projects resulting in the extensive erasure of memory and local character. Nevertheless, as recent studies show, “the production of form retains some autonomy”, 22 even under the most draconian of measures, producing buildings—like the NBT— which embody political and professional vision. For a nationalised architecture system working, since 1952, solely for the state and according to the directives of planned economy, the pursuit of national specificity—a topic of genuine professional concern predating the change in regime, and recurrently rising to discursive pre-eminence throughout the communist period—represented an area of congruent interests and creative dialogue with power. By the mid-1980s, architecture of a national flair was required of mass, typified housing and privileged urban developments (civic centres, high-profile administrative or cultural buildings etc.), and had produced designs ranging from the most banal decorative pastiche to truly experimental forays into the modernist vernacular.23 The ideal of “national specificity” fluctuated significantly throughout the period, hinging on overall political vision and the regime’s need of representation, the idiosyncratic tastes of the members of project approval committees, and, not least, on the evolution induce discursive changes before their official political espousal. 18. This is likely due to progress in industrialised, prefabricated construction, as well as the economic boost experienced by Romania towards the end of the 1950s. The switch to “rationalist” architecture and planning also benefited, unlike socialist realism, from a very solid theoretical basis and the working experience of architects well-versed in modernist architecture. 19. The 1957-58 works of Tiberiu Niga (Căţelu cvartal) and Octav Doicescu (Băneasa housing estate) evidence this hybrid transition, documented in Arhitectura R.P.R. no. 2, 1957 and no. 6, 1959. For a detailed discussion, see Ioana Popovici. Architecture competitions—a space for political contention. Socialist Romania, 1950-1956. Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 38. no.1. pp. 24-38. 20. Lupu, p. 174.

Ioana Cristina Popovici

of the concept in the field, which integrated repeated attempts to connect to international architecture discourse. Still, it represented a powerful legitimising force, both professionally and politically. As Harvey notes, the manipulation of urban space represents a vital source of social power for the state and the holders of specialist knowledge.24 The reiterative practice of updating architectural specificity to suit modern circumstances—and (re)definitions of “the national”—resulted in urban landscapes inscribed with official narratives of national specificity. The destiny of the NBT officially began in 1962 via a competition for a new, large-scale theatre, recycling to some extent the brief of the 1946 competition for the National Opera (on the same site) with reiterative effect on the theatre layout proposals, which observed the late 1950s consensus on optimum scale and silhouette. If in 1946 the two joint winners were genuinely innovative, 25 the 1962 submissions cautiously toed the line of avant-garde expression. Aesthetically, there had been a prudent switch from

emphatic socialist realism to a modern expression reminiscent of the austerity of fascist Italian architecture (Stile Littorio); the concept of the theatre hall and its connection with the urban context, however, seemed to revert to a classical theatre scheme. Theorist Alexandru Iotzu noted the architectural prudence of the designs, vying to secure the official commission by adhering strictly to the brief.26 Anton and Margareta Dâmboianu’s solution—an elegant, almost ironic overlay of svelte arches with no immediately discernible functional or structural role, and a fairly minimal rectangular volume— was perhaps the most forward-thinking, readable as oblique satire of the meaningless architectural heroics of socialist realism. At the time, it garnered approval for updating theatre architecture to an inspiring, monumental, mass-friendly socialist grandeur. G. Filipeanu and L. Strulovici authored the second project illustrated below, preferring a clean and modern, but sedate aesthetic. Iotzu also remarks, perhaps rhetorically, on the odd lack of

Fig. 5. Competition entries Dâmboianu (left) and Filipeanu/Strulovici (right)

21. Comisia Prezidenţială Pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste Din România. Raport Final [The Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania. Final Report.]. Vladimir Tismăneanu et al. Bucharest. 2006. p. 33. 22. Zahariade, p. 135. 23. Vernacular modernism is a concept denoting various “modes of dialogical engagement with the natural and human environment”, seeking to enrich the modernist discourse through reconnections with the geo-cultural and social context. For details, see Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf (eds). Vernacular Modernism. Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2005. p. 11. It is however debatable whether these experiments were coincidental or actually influenced by the design direction stemming from the self-critical movement surrounding modernism in the 1960s

and 1970s, which Zahariade suggest was not very well known to Romanian architects. See Ana Maria Zahariade et al. Themes of Romanian Architecture in the 20th Century. Bucharest: Editura Institutului Cultural Român. 2003. p. 24. 24. Harvey. pp. 194-195. 25. An aluminium egg housing the foyer and auditorium, projected against the blank prism of the stage and annexes (Virgil Niţulescu), and a modernist merger of performance and public space through a raised platform sweeping over the boulevard (Nicolae Porumbescu). 26. Iotzu, Alexandru. Teatrul. Act de creaţie arhitecturală [The Theatre. Act of Architectural Creation]. Bucharest: Editura Tehnică. 1981. pp. 100-101.

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coverage of such a major competition in Arhitectura magazine.27 Given the depth of political involvement in such a representative project and the strictness of brief specifications, this absence is both understandable and expected. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arhitectura had once again begun reporting on the international architecture scene. With regular features on British, American, German, Italian, and even Brazilian architecture, 28 the magazine had undergone a volte-face from censorship to unsanctioned wishful thinking, circumventing the prefabricated dreariness of mass construction with updates on Western architectural discourse. Moreover, in

Fig. 6. Top – Study for a contemporary theatre concept—Ciulei/Bortnovski

the last 1962 issue, an avant-garde study on theatre architecture did make it into print: Liviu Ciulei and Paul Bortnovski’s “Study for a contemporary theatre concept”, 29 which Iotzu deemed innovative for theatre architecture, from thespian and theatrical requirements to a genuine reflection of the users’ socio-cultural need.30 The solution aimed for maximum adaptability, reshaping the stage and annexes into a streamlined machine whose ruled surface volume was derived from an intersection of visibility and audibility curves with the spatial requirements of cutting-edge stage engineering. In an almost traditional follow-up of architecture competitions in communist Romania, none

Fig. 7. Bottom – The NBT—original project perspective

Ioana Cristina Popovici

of the winning or participant projects secured the commission. The NBT was designed in 1963 by a team led by Horia Maicu and Romeo Belea, under the professional patronage of the Bucharest Design Institute (BDI).31 Another team of BDI architects, headed by Dinu Hariton and Gheorghe Nădrag, developed the NBT’s compositional counterweight, the 22- storey Hotel Intercontinental, inaugurated in 1971. Unlike the theatre, whose design, construction, appearance and urban presence prompted radical reconfiguration during the 1980s, the hotel’s modern, clean minimalist presence withstood the test of time, earthquakes and professional criticism.32 Partially finished by 1969, and functional by late 1973, the NBT was more revolutionary in terms of aesthetics than programme. Horia Maicu, Bucharest’s chief architect at the time, and Romeo Belea, unofficially credited with the conceptual and visual authorship of the project, prepared for their commission by touring contemporary theatre venues in Japan, the US and Germany.33 Paradoxically, after such an extensive documentary trip abroad, the theatre’s design was simultaneously a surprising regression to traditional theatre space, a welcomed— though tentative—attempt to participate in international architectural discussion (Kenzo Tange’s tradition-suffused, robust architecture was very much en vogue in Romania), and a long-awaited merger between modernism with brutalist nuances and vernacular Romanian architecture. The following

section examines how these threads combined into the theatre’s peculiar aesthetic.

27. Why Arhitectura did not advertise, nor cover such an important competition, remains subject to speculation. Images of the two ex-aequo prizes can be found in Iotzu. pp. 103-105.

32. Including the 7.2 Richter earthquake that hit Bucharest in 1977, causing nearly 1,500 deaths and damaging 35,000 buildings. See http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/1977_Vrancea_earthquake (Accessed 2015-08-03). 33. Maicu, Horia, and Belea, Romeo. Proiectul Teatrului Naţional din Bucureşti [The project of the Romanian National Theatre in Bucharest]. Arhitectura. no. 2, 1969. pp. 42-53.

28. For reference, see issue nos. 11-12, 1955 (Netherlands, Germany), no. 3, 1956 (Poland, US), nos. 4, 8, 11, 1956 (France, UK, US, Italy), no. 2, 1957 (Sweden), nos. 3, , 1963 (Brazil and Oscar Niemeyer), no. 3, 1964 (Richard Neutra) etc. 29. Ciulei, Liviu, and Bortnovski, Paul. Studiu pentru o rezolvare contemporană a teatrului [Study for a contemporary theatre design]. Arhitectura R.P.R. no. 5, 1962. pp. 41-46. 30. Iotzu. p. 101. 31. Romania’s most prominent State design institute, based in Bucharest but tasked with the development of projects throughout the country.

3. Reiterative Innovation: the National Bent of Romanian Architecture Although the NBT project was finalised in 1963, it eluded print until 1969, when Arhitectura devoted fourteen pages and the cover image to the theatre, after an unexpectedly lengthy but telling period of press obscurity. The reasons behind the commission attribution to Maicu (rather than the winners of the 1962 competition) remain unclear, but co-author Belea concedes the team was assembled by Maicu the very same year.34 The obscurity of commission attribution once again highlights the political importance of the project. As the future epicentre of the capital’s theatrical culture—but also a site of en masse cultural and ideological conditioning—the NBT’s appearance had to deliver a strong message of innate cultural belonging, even if that mean a radical departure from the previous aesthetic of public cultural investments. Nevertheless, the resulting project was conceived with the highest standards of professionalism and quality, later betrayed by a mise en oeuvre a couple of decades behind the design. At the time, the NBT was the first Romanian theatre to enjoy the benefits

34. According to a recent interview with Romeo Belea, published online by Arhitectura. Pamfil, Françoise. 2013. TNB 2012—Un edificiu-loc public [NBT 2012. A public place-building]. http://arhitectura-1906.ro/2013/02/tnb2012-un-edificiu-loc-public/ (Accessed 2014-10-03).

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of a sizable, central urban site adequate for the scale and complexity of the programme.35 Pre- and postdesign consultations with specialists from the US, Germany and Austria (Marcel Breuer, Ben Schlager, Walter Munruh, Newman and de Gaetano), contributed to shaping the project, and Belea even reported that, after completion, the theatre rose to international attention, with many architects travelling from abroad to study the originality, complexity and ingenuity of the functional and technical solutions.36 If for the public and theatre professionals the NBT’s image was congruent with the artistic and cultural acts performed within, for architects the building’s outer shell was far more significant. To track the evolution of the design, I will first build a sketch of the authors’ conceptual agenda with regards to the building’s exterior appearance, using the article penned in Arhitectura 2/1969, and recent interviews conducted with Romeo Belea by contemporary architecture publications since 2005, which fully reflect his position on the subject. Design intent will then be weighed up against the overarching economic and political strategies of the time. Similarly, the end result will be seen through the lens of the time’s limitations in construction practice and technological capabilities. For the authors, the theatre’s layout, capacity and technological endowment stemmed from extensive research into experimental, flexible theatre design, focused on the individual and collective experience of the performance and explorations of theatre-going as an act of cultural participation and social presence.37 35. The NBT was designed to contain three performance halls (the biggest designed for 920 spectators), annexes fitted with cutting edge technology, ample facilities and recreation spaces for actors and staff, as well as multiple foyers, exhibition and services areas. 36. See http://www.revistaconstructiilor.eu/index.php/2014/01/31/despreteatrul-national-i-l-caragiale-bucuresti-cu-prof-dr-arh-romeo-stefan-belea/ (Accessed 2014-10-03). 37. Maicu and Belea, pp. 43-46. 38. Ibid., p. 46.

But if these desiderata were contemporary and generally valid for modern theatre architecture, the outward appearance of the building had to do justice to the idea of a “national” theatre, the capital and country’s biggest, most awe-inspiring performance venue. Maicu and Belea’s article constantly stressed the contribution of carefully selected instances of traditional Romanian architecture (erudite and vernacular) informing the NBT’s design, drawing on “traditions deeply rooted into the culture and consciousness of us all, in the consciousness of a people for whom tradition was and always is a point of departure for the future.38 The theatre’s main facade and foyer lent themselves best to modern re-imagining, using a syntax and vocabulary generally ascribed to “essential” Romanian architecture. The result was a veranda at urban scale, a space of selective openness, visibility and sociability, bearing the specific supra-unitary wall/opening ratio attuned to the country’s climate,39 and—according to the time’s philosophy infused discourse—the imprint of spatial archetypes stemming from a specifically Romanian cultural matrix. The exterior walls were to be decorated with polychrome mosaics and frescos reminiscent of “the painted exterior walls of monuments in Northern Moldova”, known for their exceptional value.40 Perhaps the most significant references were to the silhouette of medieval churches, with swooping eaves echoed in the veranda/urban portico synthesis, and svelte towers suggested by the slightly angled stage tower. The merger between vernacular and erudite traditional 39. Ibid., p. 50. 40. That is, “shapes of an authentic and contemporary architectural expression, specific for our country and people through their spiritual link with the most valuable traditions of erudite and folk architecture”. Ibid., p. 53. For further references, see the works of Constantin Noica and Nicolae Iorga on Romanian culture and spirituality. 41. Ioan, Augustin. Modern Architecture and the Totalitarian Project. A Romanian Case Study. Bucharest: Institutul Cultural Român. 2009. P. 159. 42. An assemblage of archetypes sourced from architecture history. See Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. 1978.

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architecture elements is significant. During socialist realism, folk architecture had been the politically preferred source of architectural precedent due to the historical subjection of Romanian peasants, while erudite architecture had been associated with past oppression.41 Bringing the two together in a modern retelling of national specificity suggests, beyond a professional incentive to recover the breadth of traditional architecture repertoire, a political striving towards general cultural acceptance on multiple societal levels. The second reference pays homage to Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut, whose upturned concrete overhang the NBT was accused to have surreptitiously copied. With an aesthetic verging on

Fig. 8. Building plan and dynamic sketches of the NBT’s foyers and main stage

Fig. 10. Conceptual collage: Voroneţ monastery (top left), Ronchamp (bottom left), and I.L. Caragiale’s hat

brutalism, or, as Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter see it, bricolage,42 Le Corbusier’s chapel is a striking departure from the architect’s earlier, “international” modernism, suggesting a return to the meaningful, symbolic dimension of built form. While Ronchamp is—inside and out—an experimental exercise in pure tectonics and refined religious symbolism, the NBT’s reiteration of tradition is more of an overlay of updated vernacular imagery onto an otherwise functionalist building. Only the main facade and foyers follow the curvilinear, tectonic logic reminiscent of church verandas, with the collage most apparent in the foyer/amphitheatre connection and the section of the stage tower.

Fig. 9. NBT and Ronchamp: a comparison of conceptual cohesion

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The third visual reference of the theatre’s collage aesthetics is dubious in origin, and probably arose from the multitude of similes produced by the nonprofessional viewers’ reaction to the building: the curved, broad rim, topped with a squat, cylindrical volume housing services and annexes, bore resemblance to Ion Luca Caragiale’s late-nineteenthcentury hat.43 Ironically, the public’s humorous assessment predated professional critique in perceiving the NBT’s aesthetics as less of a synthesis between the two conceptual mainlines espoused by the design team (a modern reinterpretation of traditional architecture and an attempt to enter international dialogue exploring alternative, local expressions of modernism) and more of an imagery collage blending two churches and a hat. Undoubtedly, the most fascinating element of this design agenda is the dual claim to national representation and international connectivity. Since the late 1950s, Dej had launched socialist Romania on a gradually divergent political and economic orbit from Moscow, and by 1963, the effects of this policy had been considerable in terms of cultural

Fig. 11. Junzo Sakakura’s Hiraoka city hall (1964) and Kenzo Tange’s Olympic Stadium (1963-1964), examples of Japan’s modernised architectural tradition focused on essentialised spatial archetypes. Below, Romanian lyrical functionalism focused on sculpturality derived from folk art

openness to western influences and access to information. At this time, modernism of the functionalist derivation and the negative effects of post-war urban reconstruction had been under criticism from without (anthropology, phenomenology) and within the profession (Team X) for its accentuated loss of the symbolic dimension of the built environment. In this respect, the NBT project was perfectly in line with contemporary attempts to arrive at a “vernacular modernism”, an architecture at the same time shaped by the constant progress, improvement and modernisation for the greater social welfare that the regime drove forth, but also culture- and context-conscious. In Romania, however, this appeal to local contextuality was mostly initiated by political and professional circles, rather than arising from popular discontent with the alienating characteristics of post-war urbanism and architectural developments. Rather than opening a line of dialogue with intellectual circles, the Party’s reinstatement of “the national” was primarily meant to centralise power and build an impregnable, monolithic “Romanian-

43. Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), one of Romania’s greatest playwrights and literary figures. 44. My research has identified a triangulation between Arhitectura magazine, the staff of IMUAU and the Romanian Architect’s Union, due to a select handful of practitioners holding leadership and key roles in all three institutions at the same time, throughout their joint history. This privileged professional circle does secure a certain degree of discursive autonomy in relation to power, but it also increases the inertia of the architectural agenda and hermeticism of the field. For details, see Popovici, p. 26. 45. Ştefan, Dorin. Lungul drum al ambiguităţii către arhitectură [The long route of ambiguity towards architecture]. Arhitectura. nos. 1-2, 1982. pp. 68-71. 46. Ibid., pp. 70-71. 47. As Ceauşescu had limited spatial perception, projects under his personal tutelage had to be presented through painstakingly detailed models, sometimes rendered in situ at a 1:1 scale, with expensive materials. Design Institutes had modelling departments working round the clock to produce—weekly—vast quantities of exquisite models of ongoing, high-profile projects for the ruling couple to peruse and modify. See Viorica Iuga-Curea (ed.) Arhitecţi în timpul dictaturii [Architects during the dictatorship]. Bucharest: Simetria. 2005. pp. 176-177.

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ness” (based on difference and uniqueness), justifying divergence from Moscow-dictated policies and garnering significant support from the masses. Since pre-war interdisciplinary exchanges hinged on the national, the change was welcome, but masked a transition to national discourse barred from free cultural negotiation, and rehashed by the Party to serve political strategies. The countless committees deciding the fate of architecture projects were strict in weeding out attempts at national cultural production lacking clarity, ease of perception and immediate (literal) reference to elements of local tradition. This cookie-cutter national filter made cultural production exploring fluidity, ambiguity and different nuances within a territory’s cultural system exceedingly difficult. Reactions to the NBT were, at the time, subdued, due to Horia Maicu’s position within architecture’s locus of professional and institutional power.44 Interviews conducted with architects whose university education coincided with the NBT’s first iteration point at the reluctance of teaching staff to discuss the project, although their perception was indifferent verging on negative. One clear stance on the subject came nine years after the NBT’s inauguration, from architect and academic Dorin Ştefan: “the immense concrete eaves projected in front of the NBT’s massive walls are nonsensical, as they do not create that uncertainty between interior space and the exterior world”.45 This article on ambiguity in architecture featured in “Ideas in motion”, a marginal rubric which packed a considerable theoretical punch (often along divergent lines than mainstream Romanian architecture), running sporadically in Arhitectura between 1981 and 1989. Although the reference to the NBT is brief, Ştefan’s conclusion clearly delineated the deficiencies of Party-sanctioned (and profession-enabled) national architecture: simply collating or referencing traditional architecture syntax and vocabulary could never produce national specificity. Subtly implying that national specificity itself was a problematic concept, which in reality rang closer to the shared ontological interferences between many social groups inhabiting

the same territory, Ştefan argued that the archetypal spatial patterns ascribed to a certain geo-cultural space reside in the tensions, contradictions, ambiguities, and multitudes of marginal nuances of cultural creation.46 Even for projects successful in tailoring these complex patterns to modern requirements and sneaking them past architecture committees, the limitations of socialist construction led to poor execution with quickly degrading materials, cut corners and lack of finesse in detailing. The NBT met the same fate. Weather deterioration and neglect transformed a building already morose without the planned polychrome mosaics and frescos into a drab life-sized model, animated solely by the fast-paced life of theatrical performance. Moreover, the raised platform housing the theatre and Hotel Intercontinental was equally deserted and uninspiring, failing to become a stage of public interaction and socialising. As the next section will explore, the area did have a presence in public and individual memory, but for wholly different reasons than the architectural shape, which sought to do so much and achieved so little. By the time Ceauşescu had taken exception to the building’s divergent aesthetic, only the interior had been more or less completed, and the projecting eaves shadowed nothing but bare brickwork. After a fire damaged the main theatre venue in 1978, Ceauşescu seized the opportunity to have the offending imagery corrected according to his own tastes, and called for the design of façade variations. After many attempts, set-up in situ as 1:1 models,47 no version was approved, but the idea that it would be more cost-effective and feasible to neo-classicise the theatre via application of a false façade had taken root. The theatre functioned in its grim, bare concrete and morose brickwork appearance until 1983, when Cezar Lăzărescu, a powerhouse of modern Romanian architecture who had shaped most of Romania’s littoral resorts under Dej, was once again in the system’s good graces, and took responsibility for reimagining the theatre. According to professional consensus, Lăzărescu acted

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Fig. 12. The NBT at the end of the 1970s, and during interment

as no more than technical facilitator of Ceauşescu’s vision, and the repeated stress and disappointments of the project ultimately led to his death.48 After several attempts to give some sort of architectural coherence to the project, Lăzărescu folded in front of Ceauşescu’s vision, and executed a mock-façade consisting of two levels of arches wrapped around the original building, topped above overhang level with a third, disguising the stage tower. What does such a radical change in aesthetics signify for the NBT, and does it still qualify as a reiteration? Beyond Ceauşescu’s personal preferences in terms of architecture, the creative-destructive nature of the theatre’s interment—a gesture of spatial manipulation and inscription of a message of symbolic dominance through culture—lends strength to the initial meaning of the building. While useful in charting the negotiation between state and profession, appearances pale in comparison to the actual reiteration: an overt display of power, appropriating and redefining a central node in Bucharest’s urban hierarchy and cultural production. 4. From Memory to Myth: A Sketch of Architectural Mythology The study of memory is a complex field at the intersection of many disciplines: cultural theory,

sociology, psychology, neuro-science, philosophy etc. Investigating the case of the NBT as repository of professional memory—a peculiar kind of “museum” of architectural recollection and thought—is by no means an in-depth examination of professional memory. It does however lean on a set of interconnected theoretical arguments, adapted to reflect the peculiarities of memory construction in Romanian architecture. Debates on the nature and existence of collective memory are far from settled: it is both the process and the result of complex interferences between multiple sites, perspectives and voices.49 Some are the preferred domain of historical studies, tending to favour temporal unity and factual logic; Nora’s memory is a “polyreferential entity that can draw on a multiplicity of cultural myths that are appropriated for different ideological or political purposes”,50 with the focus of agency placed on top-down, elite, hierarchising forces. Some spring from the margins—the voices and experiences of disenfranchised communities, gradually brought to the forefront by anthropology and sociology. Collective memory produces material artefacts— from memorials and monuments to the simple artefacts of daily existence. “Museal sensibility” ties the first two with efforts to preserve our connection to the past, which paradoxically manage to sever this tenuous link.51 David Lowenthal’s remark on the almost spatial foreignness of the past and the

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present obsession to re-possess it through the manipulation of material artefacts highlights a twentiethcentury paradox, questioning the validity of collective memory reconstructing “ways of being and believing incommensurable with our own.” Conjured up in this manner, the past is “an artefact of the present”, stable, segregated, and frozen in one single aspect snatched out of the morass of its evolution.52 Collective memory is often co-opted (and produced) by political agendas, especially those centred on national identity—a concept constructed in the present based on contemporary imaginings of a cohesive and homogeneous past and people. In this instance, built artefacts of collective memory are “mnemonic devices”,53 indicative of power’s official interpretation of the past, rather than items of actual recollection. Individual memory and the shared memories of social groups find themselves in a disputed relationship with a collective memory prone to disregard their existence. James Young’s construct of “collected memory” bridges this gap, as “an aggregate collection of its members’ many, often competing memories,” acquiring significance in common memorial spaces.54 Thus, individual experiences are accounted for, with common denominators falling into patterns informing tradition and commonly shared values. Memory makers, memory users and historically established cultural traditions interact, in Wulf Kansteiner’s view, to create this repository of shared recollection and meanings.55 But how does this process of memory construction and reiteration of the past function for professional milieus 48. Lăzărescu, Ileana, and Gabrea, Georgeta. Vise în piatră. În memoria Prof. Dr. Arh. Cezar Lăzărescu [Dreams in stone. In memory Of Prof. Dr. Arch. Cezar Lăzărescu]. Bucharest: Capitel. 2003. pp. 13-14. 49. Green, Anna. Cultural History. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. p. 99. 50. Ibid., p. 102. 51. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York, NY: Routledge. 1995. p. 251. 52. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985. pp. XV-XVI.

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primarily defined, as was the case of architecture in communist Romania, by internal dynamics and negotiations with the political sphere? With the NBT serving as tracker, I will attempt a sketch of memory construction in architecture, and explore its postcommunist effects.56 Cross-generation oral histories from within and without the profession are vital in understanding this process, as they capture gradual shifts in meaning over time, as well as highlight the difference in the perception of architectural iterations by architects and other social milieus. Professor architect Constantin Enache remembers the ambiguity of opinion elicited by the NBT’s construction. Lacking a critical dimension, it indicated, nevertheless, a dissonance between design intent and professional reception, judging the theatre inconsistent with the desired “nationally specific modernity”, and unsettlingly similar to Ronchamp. Keenly felt, a need to synchronise with the Western architectural scene favoured aesthetic emulation over sustained discursive cross-pollination. Involved in the theatre’s second iteration under Ceauşescu, Enache witnessed Cezar Lăzărescu’s struggle to mediate between professional standards and the political dictum, pushing the new façade to logic-defying, neo-classicist monumentality. Ceauşescu’s gargantuan, resource-depleting urban projects led, he writes, to increasing animosity towards the system and built icons of power abuse, like the NBT. Then, “the façade which had disappeared became idealized, and transformed into a veritable myth”. For Enache, the unveiling of the old facade was enthu53. Green, pp. 104-105. 54. Young, James. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press. 1993. p. XI. 55. Kansteiner, Wulf. Finding meaning in memory. A methodological critique of collective memory studies. History and Theory. no. 41. 2002. p. 180. 56. I will use “collective memory” instead of “collected memories” to signify the top-down directionality of memory formation in architecture, based on judgements of value and perceptions formulated within the profession’s circle of power. The contention of this article is that professional recollection would be better served by relying on collected memories to inform current professional identity and practice.

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siastically received in intellectual circles because it represents “requital, a gesture of final separation from years of discretionarily-imposed bad taste”. In addition, he recognises the merit of younger generations, less traumatised by the communist experience, who question the benefits of this revival, especially weighed against the loss of many of their preferred sites of cultural and social interaction.57 Professor and theorist Ana Maria Zahariade subtly remarks on the ambivalence of cross-generational reactions following in the wake of the NBT’s restoration. I share your disappointment with the NBT. It’s a strange case of “restoration”, nullifying the chances of a possible international competition for a redefined national theatre... which, in all probability, wouldn’t have happened. Paradoxically, I am revolted and glad: glad that Cezar’s horrendous façade is gone, but not at all happy with what I see in its place—or rather, in both their places... There is no way out of this dilemma, she concludes, also noting the loss of the initial spirit of the project.58

For architects educated in the 1970s, the NBT urban ensemble—deserted and anodyne—is more present in memory than the insipid architectural presence of the theatre. Their tentatively emergent space in professional critique by university staff and students, A.V. and R.M. recall, was increasingly negative and controversial, especially with regards to the second iteration. Paradoxically, despite the negative reception, Lăzărescu’s design brought incipient critique to a close, likely due to the architect’s privileged professional position as IMUAU rector and more or less official architect of the system. “I remember much more vividly what the area was like before the theatre, with stores, services, a circus”, writes M.B., who recollects “a ground floor shop in an old building, with a continuous water-flow in the window display”, rather than the characterless theatre. M.P. and C.S. attribute this lack of public appeal to the NBT’s placement on a raised platform, too far removed from pedestrian and automotive traffic, a strategy that worked against initial design attempts to create a social and cultural open-air hub in the city centre. Moreover, they express frustration at the half-heartedly critical in-studio discussions on both design versions, and report preferring Le Corbusier’s chapel over 57. Enache, Constantin: Professor, Urbanism and Landscape Design Department, Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. Email communication. Emphasis mine. 2014-03-13. 58. Zahariade, Ana Maria: Professor, History & Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation Department, Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. Email communication. Emphasis mine. 2014-02-24. 59. A.V., R.M, M.B., M.P. and C.S.: architects whose recollections were shared in a group interview conducted on my behalf by M.P. 2014-03-01. 60. A.D.: journalist. Personal interview via email. 2014-02-23. 61. A.I.: ballet dancer (retired). Interview conducted by M.P. on my behalf, shared via email. 2014-03-01. 62. Enache, Maria: Senior Lecturer, Head of the Urbanism and Landscape Design Department, Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. Email communication. 2014-03-01. 63. Stroe, Miruna: Associate Lecturer, History & Theory of Architecture and Heritage Conservation Department, Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. Email communication. Emphasis mine. 2014-03-04.

Fig. 13. NBT—urban presence

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a poorly-executed local version failing to deliver a genuinely modern take on traditional architecture.59 Journalist A.D. remembers the hopeful excitement for a cultural awakening incited by the first NBT, divergent in meaning and appearance from typified mass construction. “It represented an unprecedented note of modernity... and an affirmation of the national spirit, a reflection of an ideology which, during those years, seemed to us a breath of fresh air”, signalling Romania’s maverick stance within the Eastern bloc. She associates the 1980s transformation of the building with Ceauşescu’s unexpectedly intense, destructive involvement: “a retelling of the legend of master builder Manole, with the role of wall-crumbling hazard featuring not chance or divinity, but a simple man.” For A.D., these irrational, unpredictable decisions foretold, “with wounds and scars deeply tattooed into the memory of us all, and each one of us individually, that these were just the first symptoms of the destructive madness of a man self-styled—what semantic irony—Romania’s ktitor.”60 A.I., a former ballet dancer, stresses the lack of emotional reaction prompted by the theatre among his social circle, and classifies it as a lacklustre “stage of architectural adventure” lacking

Fig. 14. Ceauşescu’s architectural playground

modernity, exacerbated in scale and monumentality by the second iteration. At present, he welcomes the return to the initial façade, since “it is now a multifunctional building, as well as a part of our cultural patrimony, comparable to other spiritual values.”61 After the NBT’s interment, time gradually operated a shift in architectural perception, identifiably starting with the 1980s student generation: rejecting the anodyne urban ensemble and unfamiliar with the initial building, they shaped their memories around the activities housed within. For Maria Enache, this was “a cultural refuge, where you could see spectacularly staged plays, open to parallel interpretations.” Her dislike of the second façade equals her disappointment in the lack of a public architecture competition apt to deliver better solutions preserving the plurivalent cultural nucleus affixed to the NBT: “that spirituality is now lost.”62 Over the early 1990s, the old NBT once again reconnected with the ethos behind the project, even entering university courses on Romanian architecture as an instance of lyrical functionalism, retrospectively certifying the project’s genuine aim towards national specificity. Miruna Stroe sees the NBT as “an architectural object representative of a certain period”, despite not being “the most original”. While the supplementary façade afforded scant aesthetic improvement, she does deplore the loss of cultural spaces, such as Enache’s Milk Bar and Motors, whose existence on the roof of the NBT was made possible by Lăzărescu’s intervention. “Tearing it down”, she writes, “seems to me a retrograde gesture”, and recent design choices of colour, detailing and furnishings “make it resemble a sad, provincial mall... a mere update of the initial image, lacking interrogation and interpretation.”63 As demonstrated by the oral histories above, professional recollection seems to differ significantly from public perception and the individual memories of members of other cultural circles not privy to the insights—or victim to the prejudices—prevalent in the architectural milieu. Claims to national

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symbolism embodied in the theatre’s first iteration and the brutal shift in aesthetics of the second had more impact in those circles, where collected memories coalesce without a filter of architectural value dependent on the profession’s self-perception and agenda. Moreover, the performativity of architectural objects has far more poignancy that their appearance. Thus, many intellectuals equate the NBT with the cultural freedom and diversity of its highly professional artistic repertoire. Through these accounts, the process of the NBT’s gradual transition from disputed project to architectural myth begins to emerge. First, the critically inarticulate dissonance between design agenda and resulting image was dispelled by the construction of the second façade, which, conflated with Ceauşescu’s abuse of power, transformed the first iteration of the NBT into an idealised instance of professional agency from a more culturally permissive age. Subsequently, the fervid cultural diversity fostered by the theatre displaced both architectural iterations from public and professional recollection, until the recovery of the original design ethos restored the NBT as a key moment in Romanian architecture. This shift highlights traits of professional collective memory, which, unheeded, underpin the formulation of contemporary professional identity, affecting current architectural praxis. Professional recollection is prone to imparting memories through mentorship, making individual repositories of architectural recollection heavily dependent on general professional consensus on value, reinforced through reiteration. According to Garry Stevens, the field of architecture suffers from endemic self-deception about its own elitism and contribution, through architectural production, to inequitable, class-based social stratification.64 Education plays a vital role in this distorted selfperception, as it propagates, through institutional practices and master-pupil chains, hierarchies of value focused on the perpetuation of symbolic capital. The elitist internal structuring of archi-

tecture is thus masked by the pursuit of “pure discourse”, which also derails social engagement into aesthetic pursuits, and neutralises architecture as a political actor.65 However, professional recollection also comprises an undeniable element of criticality: knowledge of the design process, of the context and meanings behind each architectural gesture, allows critical thought to seep into the act of remembering. In this light, the personal memories brought together into collected memory are edited from a professional point of view, although this acuity seems somewhat diminished in the collective formulation of professional memory. Interestingly, the type of architecture deemed valuable enough to be actively remembered is distilled and hierarchized in the profession’s locus of power, whose interpretation is then irradiated throughout the field and internalised by younger generations with little critical resistance. Whether this is due to the strong creative identification between memory makers and memory users or the educational dynamics of the Beaux Arts model, is beside the scope of this paper. What should be noted, however, especially in conjunction with the previous section’s mapping of the links between power and architecture in the arena of national discourse, is that architectural value tends to equate, in this case, perceived professional agency and social influence (narrowly self-defined in relation to power), regardless of the actual social impact of these key moments of architectural evolution. Moreover, the value-dependent chronology thus shaped enables the selective reiteration of the past, pushing certain moments to the forefront of professional recollection, while others linger on the edges of obscurity.66 Coupled with the post-1989 reluctance to explore the recent past, this selective professional recollection creates a tacit mythology of idealised professional agency—enabled through the reiterative practices of education—to be restored in the present, which diverts much of contemporary discursive concerns and energy from issues of actual social concern.67

Ioana Cristina Popovici

5. From Myth to Museum: NBT 3.0 During the late-1990s and early-2000s, Romanian architecture was falling out of love with capitalist freedom. The strictures of the free market, even before the economic crisis, had supplanted one authoritarian vision with a myriad of financebacked others, equally impervious to professional argument or desire for a synchronisation with the international architecture scene transcending mere aesthetics. This reignited the search for “an architecture of our own”, specific and recognisable. In the age of global connectivity, cultural contextuality preventing local erasure was the new “national”. The NBT thus ascended from historical significance to architectural mythology, embodying originality, difference, and subversive professional victory over political and economic hardship—an ethos hardly generated by the theatre’s first iteration. But when the old NBT finally emerged from the scaffolding, it became evident that its allure stemmed from an

idealised framework of imagery, meaning, values and memories acquired through education, projected onto a visually inaccessible object, whose reality could not contradict it. With this final exposure of both disappointing past reality and the mechanisms which had mythologised an object of architectural and historical relevance, the NBT became a selective reiteration of the past, fashioned today in the name of wider professional recollection. Present-day “museification” dispels the dense patchwork of meanings constructed around the objects it seeks to update into contemporaneity. It bluntly reveals images, which, veiled from sight for extensive periods of time, lent themselves to the development of mental landscapes suffused in meanings transgressing professional generation boundaries. As a museum of and to memory, the current NBT nullifies myth, reduces meaning, and erases a significant aspect of recent architectural history: the alterations, destruction and transformations operated on architectural objects divergent, with or without intent, from the rapidly shifting aesthetic requirements of political institutions and personalities. Perhaps most alarmingly, it destroys long-standing social and cultural practices formed on the fringes of institutionalised culture. Like limpets on the empty hull of the NBT, galleries, independent studios, live music and theatre clubs 64. Stevens, Garry. The Favored Circle. The Social Foundations of Architectural Distinction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2002. pp. 86-87. 65. Ibid., pp. 215-223, p. 96. 66. For instance, Ion Mincu’s Neo-Romanian style and 1920s modernism are remembered vividly and with great attachment, although their actual architectural production was far less extensive in volume and social scope than the standardised, prefabricated architecture of housing estates built during the communist era. Despite making up the majority of urban housing—a shaping experience for urban dwellers throughout the country—it tends to fall into wilful forgetting, garnering less theoretical discussion or research, and hardly featuring in contemporary attempts to reconnect with the architectural past. 67. Architect Ion Mircea Enescu reflects on signals the profession’s penchant for national discourse, monopolising the discussion to the detriment of other relevant issues. See Ion Mircea Enescu. Arhitect sub comunism [Architect under communism]. Bucharest: Paideia. 2006. pp. 416-417.

Fig. 15. NBT 3.0

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thrived until recently behind Lăzărescu’s arches. These interstitial spaces, incubating art, thought, meanings and relationships, were infinitely more valuable for Bucharest’s cultural scene than the illconceived taxidermy of the NBT’s revival. Yael Zerubavel highlights the alarming frequency with which formerly insignificant places and events are hijacked into legitimising present readings and rewritings of the past meant to support strategies for the future.68 This phenomenon not only undergirds the construction of professional collective memory, but is also incredibly detrimental to a contemporary Romanian architecture looking for firm footing in the present. Reclaiming the NBT resuscitates a past rhetoric of specificity and originality brimming with nationalist zeal, but desperately struggling to fit into the bigger picture of international architecture. A lifeless re-staging of past meanings feebly updated through consumerist definitions of “multi-functionality” and “public space” nullifies the benefits of awakening to the reality behind the myth. If the removal of Lăzărescu’s façade brought so many illusory claims to the alleged originality, quality and specificity of this particular instance of Romanian architecture crashing down, the theatre’s third iteration is a missed opportunity to renounce the pursuit of a chimera: an architecture which is valuable, original and international because it is specifically, recognisably Romanian.

Fig. 16. NBT—quo vadis?

Moreover, the NBT’s revival is a deplorable erasure of the multiplicity of voices coalescing into professional recollection, of the multi-layered complexity of recent lived history, materially embodied in a single building. Both instances of communist architecture—the curiously western-looking attempt to channel “the national” during Dej, and Ceauşescu’s idiosyncratically neo-classic appropriation of the theatre—should have been preserved. Lăzărescu’s facade could have been open in sections, left to mask the old volume in others, opening up a layer of interstitial space—of questioning, debate and interpretation, of remembering both theatres, the times and conditions leading to their construction, and the shift between them—something rarely illustrated in built form. This space could foster non-institutionalised cultural colonisation—by the public, artists, clubs, and/or small creativity- and trade-driven enterprises. Then, architectural reiteration can become multiple-voiced, meaningful on a social group and individual level, and conducive to necessary shifts in discursive direction attuned to current conditions. And I can only hope that, should there be a NBT 4.0, it will strive for an architecture which is radical because it is different, inclusive, un-regimentable, and socially relevant.

68. Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of the Israeli National Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1995.

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Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?

Abstract

Barbara Bolt

What is performativity and what would be the characteristics of a performative research paradigm? Is it enough to say that the performance/production is an event/act/production that becomes the thing done and experienced by an audience? This essay focuses on artistic research in order to argue that a performative research paradigm needs to be understood in terms of the performative force of the research, its capacity to effect “movement” in thought, word and deed in the individual and social sensorium. These movements enable a reconfiguration of conventions from within rather from outside of convention. It proposes that what is at stake is the possibility that a performative paradigm offers a new perspective on research not just in the artistic field, but also in the social sciences, the humanities and in the sciences, where the reduction of “raw life” to “data” cannot encapsulate the performative effects of much primary research.

Barbara Bolt is a practising artist and art theorist and is Associate Dean of Research at the Victorian College of the Arts, and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne. She has written extensively on artistic research and the ethical implications of art as research. Bolt is currently the lead researcher on an Office of Learning and Teaching project, “Developing new approaches to ethics and research integrity training through challenges posed by creative practice research.” She is author of Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (I.B. Tauris, 2004) and Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (I.B. Tauris, 2011). She has co-edited four volumes including Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research, London (I.B. Tauris, 2014), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts, London, (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, (I.B. Tauris, 2007). Her website is: http://www.barbbolt.com/

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Introduction Over the past decade or so the term “performativity” has come to pervade contemporary discussions around the visual and performing arts—the performative arts, performative arts practitioners, performative arts based research, performative strategies, performative pedagogy, performative sound design, ad infinitum—ushering in what has been termed the performative turn.1 While initially there tended to be a conflation of the terms performativity, performance and performance art in discourses around contemporary art and aesthetics, it could now be said that all art is ontologically performative. In her essay “The Experiential Turn”, published online as part of the Walker Art Center’s inaugural Living Collections Catalogue, 2 Dorothea von Hantelmann tells us, “(t)here is no performative artwork because there is no nonperformative artwork.”3 According to the terms of “the performative” it could thus be argued that even the most illusionistic of representational art as exemplified in trompe l’oeil painting is performative—the pictorial equivalent of speech act theory. Thus von Hantelmann argues that it “makes little sense to speak of a performative artwork because every artwork has a reality-producing dimension.”4 In “The Experiential Turn”, Von Hantelmann picks her way through the tautological theoretical terrain and the popular take up of the performative to argue its value in understanding the experiential turn in contemporary art, that is, contemporary art’s concern with creating a/effects on its viewers. She comments: A concern with an artwork’s effects on the viewer and with the situation in which it takes place has indeed become a dominant feature of contemporary art since the 1960s. Although I am aware that a new notion will cause new problems, I want to suggest the experiential turn as a term that might be more appropriate and useful to describe these ongoing tendencies in contemporary art.5

What does this slippage of the “performative” into “experiential” in contemporary art mean for art? More specifically for this essay, what does this mean for the emerging discipline of artistic research? How does one assess “experience” for example? Does it reduce art merely to a phenomenological investigation of art’s reception, or does the evaluation of such work in the research field collapse artistic research into ethnographic or auto-ethnographic research on the one hand or scientific measurement of responses and psychometric testing on the other hand? Or is there something else at stake? In this essay I return to J.L. Austin’s elaboration on the term performativity to evaluate its value for the arts as a theoretical and methodological tool for understanding the impact of artistic research in contrast to the way it has been popularly taken up across contemporary visual and performing arts. I address the following questions: What is performativity? And what would be the characteristics of a performative research paradigm? Is it enough to say that the performance/production is an event/ act/production that becomes the thing done and experienced by an audience? Are all performances/ productions performative? Against what criteria do we assess the success or failure of a performance/ production? Finally, can a performative model make valid “truth” claims that will be recognised by the broader research community? The essay argues that the performative needs to be understood in terms of the performative force of art, that is, its capacity to effect “movement” in thought, word and deed in the individual and social sensorium. These movements enable a reconfiguration of conventions from within rather than outside of convention. Seen in the context of other research paradigms—namely the qualitative and quantitative paradigms of research—I will argue that what is at stake are the possibilities that a performative paradigm offers a new perspective on research not just in the social sciences and humanities, but also in the sciences.

Barbara Bolt

A Performative Paradigm? In 2009, I published an essay entitled “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts” in Working Papers in Art and Design.6 This essay had developed in response to my experience in supervising creative arts MFAs and PhDs in artistic research in Australia, where an exhibition, recital, performance or other form of creative work constitutes the major component of the submission in conjunction with an exposition that provides a meta-discussion of the context, methodology and research findings of the research. In this model, the art is the research and the written exposition provides the discursive contextualisation for the research project.7 While art has its own eloquence that is non-reducible, through the form of the exposition the “art” becomes data for discussion. What has become apparent, however, is that artistic research or creative arts enquiry reveals new modes and methodologies that could be considered to constitute a new paradigm of research distinct from the dominant modes of qualitative and quantitative research that provide the default modes of research in the academy. This new paradigm of research could be deemed the “performative paradigm”, a mode of research characterised by a productive performativity where art is both productive in its own right as well as being data that could be analysed using qualitative and aesthetic modes. Making a claim for a “new” paradigm in research cannot go unremarked. In her introduction to Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research (2014), Estelle Barrett has drawn on Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm change, as elaborated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), to argue that with its new methodological approaches and modes of knowing, the creative arts can “lay claim to its status as a new paradigm or ‘successor science’.”8 In addition to the “subjective and situated approach of artistic research… the tacit and intuitive processes, the experiential and emergent nature of its methodologies and the intrinsically interdisciplinary

1. The term “the performative arts” has been adopted as a catch phrase used in common parlance to describe much contemporary visual and performing arts practice. It has tended to be used in relation to forms that involve some form of performance or draw on the tradition of performance art where art is evaluated in terms what it does rather than what it means or signifies. For some, such as the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival Society, “the ‘performative’ describes practices that originate from a visual or media arts background and involve the live presence of the artist.” For others, such as the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, University Gallery at Washington University in St. Louis, the “stress of the performative is on process, participant, event, execution, and expressive action.” Pol Dehert and Karel Vanhaesebrouck adopt the term “performative practice” and “performative actions” to encapsulate the idea of a “living experiment” in their article “From Wunderkammer to Szeemann and Back: The Artistic Research Exposition as Performative and Didactic Experience”. In The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in the Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. 2014. pp. 206-219. Qualitative researcher Kip Jones talks about the “performative” use of arts-based research in his article “A biographic researcher in pursuit of an aesthetic: The use of arts-based (re)representations in ‘performative’ dissemination of life stories”. See Kip Jones, “A biographic researcher in pursuit of an aesthetic: The use of arts-based (re)representations in ‘performative’ dissemination of life stories”. In Qualitative Sociology Review 2. no.1. April 2006. pp. 66-85. While the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, initiated an annual festival, ACTS —Festival for Performative Art, in 2011. This festival “presents ephemeral art forms taking place ‘here and now,’ and which in a humorous, critical or sensual way relates to the world, we live in”. 2. The Walker Art Center’s inaugural catalogue, Living Collections Catalogue, is devoted to the notion of performativity in contemporary art and performance. In her introduction to the catalogue, Elizabeth Carpenter noted that in “its attempt to come to terms with this topic… the most pressing question is that of how a collecting institution such as the Walker, with its vital and internationally renowned performing arts programs and commissions (including dance, music, and experimental theater), might go about transforming its acquisition strategies to include the collection of not only ‘performative objects’ but performance itself.” http://www.walkerart.org/collections/ publications/performativity/introduction/ (Accessed 2016-04-12). 3. Von Hantelmann, D. The Experiential Turn. Living Collections Catalogue. Walker Art Centre. 2014. http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/(Accessed 2015-10-01). 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. This paper is a reworking of the original essay that was published as “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?” (2009) in the series Working Papers in Art and Design. See https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0015/12417/WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pdf (Accessed 2016-04-08). 7. Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdoff ’s edited book The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in the Academy (2014) teases out some of the nuances and differences in the creative arts “exposition” in Europe and Australia. 8. Barrett, E. Introduction: Extending the Field: Invention, Application and Innovation in Creative Arts Enquiry. In Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research. E. Barrett and B. Bolt. (eds.). London: I.B. Tauris. 2014. p. 3.

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dimension of this mode of research that is derived from it material and social relationality.”9 Barrett also identified a number of other attributes that qualify creative arts research as a new paradigm. These include processes that allow: new objects of thought to emerge through cycles of making and reflection; a recognition of the generative potential of the ambiguity and the indeterminacy of the aesthetic object and the necessity for ongoing decoding, analysis and translation and, finally, the acknowledgement that instruments and objects of research are not passive, but emerge as co-producers in collaborative and, in the case of audiences, participatory approaches that may not be pre-determined at the outset of the research.10 Thus, while in the scientific quantitative paradigm the validity of research lies in repetition of the same, the performative paradigm operates according to repetition with difference. This is the generative potential of artistic research. In this essay I propose to revisit the stakes involved in this “new” discipline of research in order to think through whether the widespread adoption of the term “the performative arts” across the contemporary arts and performance has undermined or consolidated such a claim.

The Research Context Brad Haselman’s article “A Manifesto for Performative Research” (2006) anticipated the performative turn in artistic research. He proposed and argued for a performative research model for the creative arts, distinguishing it from qualitative and quantitative models that constitute the dominant research paradigms in traditional research. Drawing from his own field of theatre, Haseman agued that: when research findings are presented as performative utterances, there is a double articulation with practice that brings into being what, for want

of a better word, it names. The research process inaugurates movement and transformation. It is performative. It is not qualitative research: it is itself - a new paradigm of research with its own distinctive protocols, principles and validation procedures.11 Haseman points to the fact that while qualitative research methodologies such as reflective practice, action research, grounded theory and participantobservation have informed what was initially called practice-led research, this mode of artistic research can not merely be subsumed under the qualitative research framework. He suggests that the distinctive research strategies, interpretative methods and outcomes arising in and out of creative arts, which are drawn from the working methods and practices of artists and practitioners point us towards a new research paradigm. He termed this methodology “performative” research. A performative paradigm potentially offers the creative arts a radical new vision and a way of distinguishing its research from dominant knowledge models. Haseman’s work has been significant in boldly asserting a performative paradigm and claiming it for the creative arts. However, before we make claims for a performative model for the creative arts, there are a number of urgent tasks that need to be addressed. Firstly, there is a need to define the terms of a performative model in relation to the existing theories of performativity. Secondly, like the qualitative researchers before them, artistic researchers need to carefully mark out the territory of a performative paradigm and differentiate it from the established research orthodoxies by refining its protocols and procedures; defining its concepts, methodologies and interpretive methods and assessing whether a performative paradigm really can hold its own within the broader field of research.

Barbara Bolt

Defining the Terms: What is Performativity? What Does it Look Like? The term “performativity” was introduced to the world by J.L. Austin in a lecture series entitled “How to do things with words”, delivered as part of the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955. While his lectures were not well received at the time, their publication as How to do Things with Words (1962) incited interest among intellectuals across the humanities and social sciences. The central, most profound and enduring aspect of these lectures was Austin’s claim that certain speech utterances or productions don’t just describe or report the world, but actually have a force whereby they perform the action to which they refer. Austin’s example of the words “I do” uttered during the marriage ceremony or a judges proclamation “I sentence you to ten years in prison”, exemplify that the power of the speech act to have real effects in the world. Thus Austin observes: “In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it… the issuing of an utterance is the performance of an action.”12 He called these language acts performatives. While the creative arts, and in particular Theatre Studies and Performance Theory, have come to claim the term performativity as their own, its usage is not necessarily true to Austin’s elaboration of performativity. In Performance Studies for example, as James Loxley points out,

the term performativity is used as an adjective that “denotes the performance aspect of any object or practice under consideration”.13 He continues, pointing out the implications of this take on performativity: “To address culture as ‘performative’ would be simply to examine it as some kind or performance, without the specific implications that would follow on from an invocation of the line of thought first developed distinctively by Austin.”14

9. Barret, E. and Bolt, B. Practice as Research: Context, Method, Knowledge. London: I.B. Tauris. 2007. p. 7. 10. Barrett, E. Introduction: Extending the Field: Invention, Application and Innovation in Creative Arts Enquiry, p. 3. 11. Haseman, B. Tightrope Writing: Creative Writing Programs in the RQF Environment. In Text 2007. http:// www.textjournal.com.au/ april07/haseman.htm (Accessed 2016-04-08).

It is precisely this “take” that has led to the wholesale and, I would argue, uncritical adoption of the performativity by the visual and performing arts. If the proponents of artistic research (and I would consider myself to be among their number) are to successfully argue for a performative paradigm in artistic research, we will need to be far more rigorous than this usage would suggest.

12. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words, J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1975. p. 6.

In his early work on language, Austin distinguished performative utterances from constative utterances. The constative utterance is concerned to establish a correspondence between statements or utterances and the “facts” being described or modelled. The performative utterance, on the other hand, does not describe anything. It does things in the world. Performatives are never just reportage, but the utterance or production invokes a causal link between the utterance and things that happen in the world. In their capacity to be both actions and generate consequences, performative utterances enact real effects in the world.

14. Ibid.

Through the work of such people as John Searle,15 Jacques Derrida,16 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,17 Jürgen

13. Loxley points out that for Austin, performativity is an adjective and a noun. The words are actions in themselves and do something in the world (performatives). See J. Loxley. Performativity. London and New York, NY: Routledge. 2007. p. 140.

15. Searle, J.R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. London: Cambridge University Press. 1969. 16. Derrida, J. Sending: on representation. Trans. P. Caws and M.A. Caws. Social Research 49. no 2. 1982. pp. 294-326; Derrida, J. Différance. In A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. A. Easthope and K. McGowan (eds.). Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 1992. pp. 108-132; Derrida, J. Limited Inc. Trans. S. Weber. Evanston, IL: Chicago University Press. 1998. 17. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. London and New York, NY: Continuum. 2004 [1980].

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Habermas18 and, in particular, Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on performativity and gender,19 and subsequently its application across the visual and performing arts by Barbara Bolt, 20 Dorothea von Hantelmann, 21 Erica Fischer-Lichte, 22 Marsha Meskimmon 23 and others, Austin’s work on the performative speech act, has become part of the established vocabulary of academia and the influence has spread far beyond its linguistic foundations. The concept has come to infect the other disciplines, particularly the creative and performing arts, but also other disciplines such as ethnography and education. In the shift from a textual reading of cultural productions to a performative understanding, performativity has invited new ways of analysis, modes that focus on process, participation, events, expressive actions and experience. In Searle’s hands, Austin’s ideas become incorporated into a “general theory of the speech act”; through Derrida’s notion of différance, we come to understand the dynamics of the iterability; in Butler’s theorising, Austin’s frame of reference is expanded to demonstrate how performativity can include bodily acts as well as speech acts; Deleuze espouses the forceful, transformative and creative potential of the performative; and Von Hantelmann, as we have seen, focuses attention on the production of experience in contemporary art. While Deleuze’s transformative understanding of performativity remains fashionable in film theory and among visual artists, Butler’s theorisation of the performative act has inspired Performance Studies and Theatre Studies and has framed its theorisation of performativity. It is this understanding of performativity that retains the greatest currency in the performing arts and to a lesser extent the visual arts, while Von Hantelmann’s How To Do Things with Art (2010) has profoundly influenced the concept’s uptake in contemporary visual art and aesthetics. However, I would like to return us to Butler’s understanding of the theorisation of performativity as a way of thinking about the performativity and iterability in the creative arts, which can enable us

to move on from the modernist idea of the singular gesture of the heroic artist as genius, to a more nuanced understanding of creativity that underpins artistic research. Drawing on Performance Theory in her theorisation of gender performativity, Butler distinguishes between “performance” and “performativity”. She argues that performance presumes a subject while performativity contests the very notion of the subject. Thus while performance can be understood as a deliberate “act”—such as in a theatre production, performance art or painting by a subject or subjects—performativity must be understood as the iterative and citational practice that brings into being that which it names. In her claim that performativity is an iterative and citational practice, Butler is very clear that performativity involves repetition rather than singularity. Performativity is: “not a singular ‘act’, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.”24 While there might be “too perfect performances”, “bad performances”, “distorted performances”, “excessive performances”, “playful performances” and “inverted performances”, Butler, like Austin, argues that performativity is conventional and iterative. The notion of conventionality and iterability may not sit comfortably with our preconceptions of the originality of art or the singularity of the performance. Nor does it conform to the commonly held assumptions that the “shock of the new” ushers in the transformative power of the art. Butler’s elaboration that the notion of performativity as an iterative and citational practice at first glance may not adequately account for the singular “performative” acts, that come under Von Hantelmann’s banner of experiential art. However, Von Hantelmann’s focus is on the “experiential” aspect of the work—its reception rather than at the level of process and production. In this sense, Von Hantlemann’s gaze is somewhere else than Butler’s. It retains its focus

Barbara Bolt

on the singular unconventional act and in doing so negates the foundational assumptions that underpin Butler’s notion of performativity—iterability and convention. Von Hantelmann’s account is compelling in understanding a particular mode or model of contemporary practice. However, it does not help establish a performative paradigm that may be used to account for research in the creative arts. An “experiential turn” and a performative paradigm are two different, if related, beasts. It is clear that if a performative paradigm is viable it has to be able to do the work expected of a research paradigm, it has to be able to define its terms, refine its protocols and procedures and be able to withstand scrutiny. I would suggest that Austin’s performativity, filtered through the writings of Butler and Derrida may enable us to define our terms and begin setting out first principles. Here Butler’s account of performativity helps in this task. Butler’s theory of performativity relates to the formation of the subject. In Butler’s thesis, there is no subject who precedes the repetition. Rather, through performance, “I” come into being. She argues that “there is no performer prior to the performed, the performance is performative [and] the performance constitutes the appearance of a ‘subject’ as its effect.”25 While Butler’s work specifically addresses the way in which sex and gender are materialised in the everyday, I would suggest that there are some curious similarities between this materialisation and the way in which “art” becomes materialised.

It could be argued that there is no artist who precedes the repetitive practice of art (and it is repetitive). Through practice, the artist comes into being.26 Art practice is performative in that it enacts or produces “art” as an effect. “Artists” engage with, re-iterate and question the “norms” of “art” existing in the socio-cultural context at a particular historical juncture. Similarly, art practice conceals the conventions of which it is a repetition. The re-iteration that operates in an artist’s practice produces a “naturalized” effect, which we come to label as an artist’s style.27 Butler’s argument that the “process of materialization stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface”, 28 can be exemplified in an “artist’s style”. The disciplinary operations of “art business” encourage such repetition and re-iteration. It is to this sedimented or habitual style, that “art business” attributes value. The sedimentation or stabilisation that produces the effect of boundary, fixity and surface is a consequence of the habit-provoking mode of discourse. However, is that all that happens? What about originality and original knowledge? Isn’t this precisely what art and art-as-research purports to do, regardless of the so-called death of the avant-garde? Within the repetitive and reiterative behaviour, Butler figures that possibilities for disrupting the “habit” or the “norm” exist. Within the re-iteration, repetition or citation of the discursive law, “too perfect performances”, “bad performances”, “distorted performances”, “excessive performances”, “playful performances” and “inverted performances” create what she calls (de)constituting possibilities.29

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18. Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. II: Lifeworld and System. Trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon. 1987 [1981]. 19. Butler, J. Imitation and gender insubordination. In Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. D. Fuss (ed.). London: Routledge. 1991. pp. 13-31; Butler, J. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York, NY, and London: Routledge. 1993; Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd Edition, New York, NY, and London: Routledge. 1999. 20. Bolt, B. Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. 2004. 21. Von Hantelmann. How to do Things with Art; and Von Hantelmann. The Experiential Turn. 22. Fischer-Lichte, E. The Transformative Power of Performance. Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. London and New York, NY: Routledge. 2008. 23. Meskimmon, M. Walking with Judy Watson: Painting, Politics and Intercorporeality. In Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting. R. Betterton (ed.). London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. 2004. pp. 62-78. 24. Butler. Bodies that Matter, p. 12. 25. Butler. Imitation and gender insubordination, p. 2. 26. There are similarities here with Heidegger’s assertion that art creates the artist and the artwork. 27. Bolt, Art Beyond Representation, pp. 152-153. 28. Butler. Bodies that Matter, p. 9. 29. Ibid. p. 10.

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30. Bolt, B. The exegesis and the shock of the new. Text Special Issue Website Series. Number 3 April. Illuminating the Exegesis. 2004. http://www.griffith.edu.au/ school/art/text/speciss/issue3/content.htm (Accessed 2016-04-17). 31. Derrida. Sending on representation; Derrida. Limited Inc. 32. Derrida. Differénce, pp. 112-113. 33. Bolt, Art Beyond Representation.

Excessive and ironic performances and parodic re-iterations shift the ground of what is considered the “norm”. In political and artistic practices, these subversive performances have been employed strategically. The avant-garde, and more recently feminist, queer and postcolonial practices, have actively engaged in prying open the gaps and fissures produced through re-iteration, in an effort to disrupt and to get outside or beyond the “norm”. Avant-garde artistic practices, in particular, have made strategic use of the “too perfect”, “distorted”, “playful” and the “inverted” performances in an attempt to create the “new”. Elsewhere I have argued that self-conscious attempts at transgression do not in themselves create originary knowledge.30 I argued that the “shock of the new” is not the action of plunging audiences in crisis, but rather it is a particular form of understanding that is realised through practice—our dealings with ideas, tools and materials of production (including our bodies) in practice. I suggested that that originary knowledge or the new is revealed through handling, rather through conscious acts of transgression. Here my understanding of “handling” or handleability can be understood as iterative and citational practice that artists engage in their everyday artistic practice. Derrida tells us that the iteratibility— whether it is in performing language, performing gender or performing art—is the mechanism through which there is movement and transformation.31 He uses the term différance, to demonstrate that each iteration is a “constitutive, productive and originary causality”.

He continues: Différance is the “process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences”.32 When Butler talks about gender “trouble” she alludes precisely to the productive nature of iteration. Performative utterances are subject to trouble precisely because the repetition of a conventional behaviour does lead to bad performances, infelicitous performances and excessive performances. Repetition is never repetition of the same. It is always repetition of difference. In everyday life we don’t always welcome the misfires and bad performances. In the creative arts and artistic research, on the other had, it is these “misfires” that become the source of innovation and movement. This is the “stuff” of research. If, as I have argued the research process inaugurates movement and transformation through iterability, what are the forms of this transformation and how are they to be interpreted and evaluated in a realm of research? Thus far, my account of performativity provides an alternative account of how “the new” emerges through iterative practice, rather than through the singular act. We see this “pattern” in our own practices and those of our colleagues and students. It allows us to begin to recognise the conventions (context of theory, context of practice) and map the ruptures that shift practice. Further, it allows us to understand both art as an effect and also what art does in the world. This is all very well, but how does this model of research fit with the standards of proof demanded in the qualitative and quantitative domains of research?

Barbara Bolt

The Burden of Truth: Truth Claims It is around the questions of “truth” and “standards of proof ” that the creative arts need to set out the stakes involved in research and differentiate scienceas-research from the domain of knowledge that has assumed the name “artistic research”. Here the discipline has much work to do to stake out its claim. Like the social sciences and humanities before it, the development of artistic research has proceeded in the shadow of the research “model” par excellence, that is, science-as-research. Through its systematic procedures, methodological consistency and ongoing peer review, science lays claim to “objective truth”. The equation of objectiveness or objectivity with truth (through measurement and calculation) has become the hallmark of the tradition of science-as-research. Through its propositional form and its ability to establishing a correspondence between statements or modelling of the world and the world, science establishes true or false statements. Similarly, the social sciences and humanities produce descriptions that correspond to facts in the world. The creative arts, in contrast, are often criticised for the subjective and emergent quality of their research. Artistic often seems nebulous, unquantifiable and untestable: its procedures and methods emerge in and through the work rather than being prescribed in advance by the discipline. In the academic world at least, artistic research continues to be seen as lacking credibility because the methods cannot be replicated exactly, a principle central to scientific research. The lack of correspondence in findings between studies, the lack of replicability or innovation in artistic research is still not a goal that is valued by the sciences. Yet, following Butler, this lack of correspondence is precisely what is the originating force of the performative principle. However, it does not meet the “standards of objective truth” that enables science to make its truth claims. How then do we establish our truth claims against the “veracity” of science?

Austin’s early distinction between the constative and the performative is useful for thinking about how we might begin to distinguish a performative paradigm from the qualitative and quantitative paradigms and make an alternative “truth claim”. While constative utterances and statements establish a correspondence between the description or modelling of the world and something in the world, performative utterances productions do something in the world. Constative statements and descriptions are the propositional or discursive statements of qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative and qualitative research methodologies rely on constative statements or utterance to establish truth claims. Here truth is seen as correspondence. In other words: they are representationalist. Performativity offers an alternative model, one that is no longer grounded in the truth as correspondence, but sets up a different paradigm altogether. Here I propose to return to the foundational understanding of performativity. Firstly, we have established that the performative model of language is not based on the correspondence between a statement and the facts of the situation, but the utterance/production is actually already part of the facts. The performative act doesn’t describe something, but rather it does something in the world. This “something” has the power to transform the world. Secondly we have identified that the underlying principle of performativity is iterability, and a priori iterability is subject to the dynamics of différance. Thus good performances, bad performances, playful performances and the excessive performances are all generative of difference. Thought in terms of différance, performative research necessarily begins to bud and grow in a disorderly fashion. While operating against the backdrop of convention, re-iteration and citation produce repetition with difference, rather than repetition of the same. According to this principle, as I have argued elsewhere, even representation is mutable.33

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34. Rust, C., Mottram, J., and Till, J. A Research Review for the United Kingdom Arts & Humanities Research Council of Practice-Led Research in Art Design & Architecture. 2007. https:// archive.org/details/ReviewOf Practice-ledResearchInArtDesignArchitecture (Accessed 2015-10-01). 35. Heidegger, M. The Age of the World Picture. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. William Lovitt (trans.) New York; Harper and Row. 1977. pp. 115-54. 36. Haseman, B. Rupture and Recognition: Identifying the Performative Research Paradigm. In Practice as Research: Approaches to Arts Enquiry. E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds.). London and New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. 2007. p. 150. 37. It also points up the problem with the term exegesis. Drawing from the Greek exegeisthai, exegesis means an explanation or interpretation. 38. James Loxley’s monograph Performativity (2007), provides working definitions and explanations of the illocutionary and the perlocutionary dimensions of the speech act. See p. 168. 39. Haseman. Rupture and Recognition, p. 150. 40. Loxley, p. 169. 41. Fischer-Lichte, p. 17. 42. Ibid., p. 18.

While science methodology demands that experiments are replicable and only verifiable if replication produces the same, the performative principle demonstrates that iteration can never produce the same. This is the “novelty” that the UK review of Practice-led Research in Art, Design and Architecture found in its assessment that one of “the distinctive qualities of practice-led research is its propensity to disrupt the status quo and produce research that is novel both in its contribution to research and in its very nature.”34 However, the “discovery” of the fundamental condition of iterability strikes at the very heart of science-as-research’s “standards of proof ”. In scientific experimentation, binding adherence to standardised procedures constitutes the rigour of research and establishes the validity of its “truth” claims. Through the standardisation of procedure other researchers are able to replicate the study in order to validate results from research. However, Heidegger identifies the prescriptiveness of the scientific methodology as part of the problem with science-as-research.35 He argues that science-as-research is a testing of the unknown in terms of the already known; a confirmation or refutation in terms of a law already established. Through Butler and Derrida we have seen that originary knowledge emerges from the mutability that is inherent in iterability. Perhaps then, there is a “flaw” in the very procedures through which science-as-research aims to establish its truth claims. In science, as in art, we might suggest that the paradigmatic shifts have occurred through this mutability rather than repetition of the same.

A Performative Model of Research: Assessing Successes and Failure So far, I have set out to demonstrate that through citation iterability, rather than the original unique act of artistic genius, the performative paradigm can account for the novel nature of artistic production. However, for artistic research to establish the credibility of a performative paradigm, it must also establish criteria whereby it can interpret and validate its research within the broader research arena. In Haseman’s account, practice is performative in that it brings into being what it names. “The name performs itself and in the course of that performing becomes the thing done.”36 At its most basic level this could mean that a performance, an interactive digital work, an immersive environment or a novel would constitute the thing done. However, if we pay heed to Austin, we must acknowledge that some utterances and performances will be successful while others will fail. The problem in artistic research (and all research for that matter) is that there will be production in some form. How then, do we assess the success or failure of the performance? This returns us to Barad’s question: Are all performances performative? We have established that the performative act doesn’t describe something but rather it does something in the world. It may seem simplistic, but in the first instance we need to ascertain just what “it” (the research) has done. This takes the focus away from describing, explaining or interpretating a work into a new realm of understanding.37 What

Barbara Bolt

are the theoretical and pragmatic tools that we can bring to bear on this task? Here Austin’s tripartite categorisation of the speech act provides us with the basic concepts for commencing this task. In Austin’s later work, he gives up the binary distinction between constative and performative utterances in favour of the more complex notion of the speech act. In elucidating the speech act he identifies a triadic relation—the locutionary, illocutionary and the perlocutionary dimensions of the speech act. Whilst the locutionary dimension deals with semantic meaning, it is the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions that are of most interest to us here. Performativity is not first and foremost about meaning. It is about force and effect.

research? While quantitative research may seek a metric to measure the effect, it would find it difficult to deal with the fact that in artistic research there is “no object independent of its production or its creator”.41 Similarly qualitative research may seek to observe, describe and interpret these effects on an audience, but again this is difficult to achieve in artistic research, because, as Erica Fischer-Lichte points out, there is no distinction between the production, work and reception.42 I would argue that Austin’s notions of the illocutionary and the perlocutionary provide a focus to our interpretive task and a way of addressing the success or failure of our performative productions.

In Austin, explains James Loxley, “the illocutionary force of any utterance is the function it performs or the effect it achieves.”38 The words “I find you guilty” exemplify this illocutionary speech act. It is a performative utterance that has a force. “The name performs itself and in the course of that performing becomes the thing done.”39 From Haseman’s perspective, the production in itself can be seen to be performative. Thus from his optic, it could be argued that even the most illusionistic of representational art is performative. To return for a moment to the trompe l’oeil painting discussed earlier: can it really be seen as the pictorial equivalent of speech act theory? In many respects, the trompe l’oeil painting could be said to be a constative visual utterance rather than a perlocutionary utterance. Actions have effects, and it is the effect of the performative act that is encompassed in the perlocutionary utterance. The perlocutionary aspect of an utterance, explains Loxley, is any effect that the performative speech act “achieves on its hearers or readers that is a consequence of what is said.”40 The effects of the performative can be discursive, material consequences and/ or affective. The effect that is brought about by the words “guilty” is that the person found guilty may go to prison.

Re-assessing the Stakes and Reach of a Performative Paradigm

How then do we assess the effect in artistic

So far in this essay I have identified the current tendency in art to an oxymoronic use of the terms “performative art” and have argued that the singularity in the use of the term in contemporary art loses that repetitive and iterative character of performativity as defined by Butler. In order to evaluate whether the term still retains currency or value for artistic research, I have returned to foundational work of Austin and Butler to demonstrate how procedures within the creative arts, like science, are based around repetition and iterability. I have argued that while in the scientific paradigm assessment of the validity of research lies in replication of the same, in a performative paradigm this requirement does not have validity. A performative paradigm would operate according to repetition with difference. Through reference to Austin’s conceptualisation of the illocutionary and the perlocutionary, I have argued that the interpretive methods of a performative paradigm stakes its “truth claims” in force and effect as it relates to the particular performative event. This contrasts with science-as-research, which still holds dear the notion of an “objective

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43. Bolt. Art Beyond Representation; Bolt. 2004. 44. Latour, B. Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands. In Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6. 1986. pp. 3-4. 45. Ibid., p. 4. 46. Barrett, E. Introduction: Extending the Field, p. 3. 47. The question of “what gets left” out in the reporting of scientific research is instructive. In artistic research the methodology is often the “innovation” or new knowledge. Here the exposition often describes process, not as something to be replicated, as in science, but as novel and unique. However, as in artistic research, the scientist or the social scientist or the humanities scholar will assume different orientations during their research—from “being in it”—flush with the other co-producers in the research process, to a more distanced orientation where the researcher steps back to look for and try to find and understand the patterns in the data. In the “happening” phases of research we are in the realm of the illocutionary and perlocutionary. Only when the researcher steps back does the constative process of description begins.

Science-as-Research Art-as-research Constative: describes/models the world Methodology: repetition of the same Interpretation: truth as correspondence

Performative: does things in the world Methodology: repetition with difference Interpretation: “truth” as force and effect

Fig1. Science-as-Research and Art as Research

truth” and truth as correspondence. Thus at a simplistic level it could be said that science-as-research is a model that works according to Austin’s constative utterance. It describes or models the world, its methodology is replicative and the interpretation of “data” operates on the logic of truth as correspondence (Figure 1). Elsewhere I have drawn on Latour’s notion of “immutable mobiles” to demonstrate how the science as a research methodology has the propensity to reduce the world to data.43 Immutable mobiles can best be described as inscriptions or “mappings” distilled from “raw” data or “reality”. By inscriptions, Latour refers to the marks, signs, prints and diagrams made by humans. These inscriptions form into chains or cascades. The key character of these chains or cascades is an unchanging form that can be moved across vast distances and presented in other places in the absence of the things they refer to. Absent things are transmitted with optical consistency. To illustrate operation of the logic of immutable mobiles, Latour cites his experience as a scientist working in a laboratory. He gives the example of the transformation of rats and chemicals onto paper. In a laboratory situation, he argues, “anything and everything was transformed into inscriptions”.44 These inscriptions, he observes, are “combinable, superimposable and

could… be integrated as figures in the text or the articles people were writing.”45 This transformation of flesh into data is one of the hallmarks defining our contemporary lives. Yet, at the heart of science-as-research, as art-as-research is “raw life”. Here I wish to return to Barrett’s observations concerning the “performative” potential in artistic research, that is, the “recognition of the generative potential of the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the aesthetic object” and the acknowledgement that the instruments and subjects of the research are co-producers in this collaborative venture we call research.46 Can this “model” be applied across so-called qualitative and quantitative modes too? Is this an aspect of the research that tends to be leached out because of the need to reduce “bare life” to data through the inscription process of the exposition in these fields? While this question is outside the scope of this essay, it does raise questions about the performative aspects of other research methodologies.47 If, as I have argued, the aim of a performative paradigm is not to find correspondences but rather to recognise and “map” the ruptures and movements that are created by artistic research, then isn’t that the same as for science? Here the work of art is not just the artwork/ performance or event and science is not

Barbara Bolt

just the reduction of the world to data as immutable mobile. It is the effect of the work in the material, affective and discursive domains. The scientist has the problem that while they have a method, this method dislocates them from the rawness and nearness to “the thing” in itself. The problem for the artistic researcher is often recognising and mapping the transformations that have occurred, since artistic research is emergent and experiential, involving a subjective and situated approach that draws on tacit and intuitive processes that makes pattern-making difficult. Sometimes the transformations may seem to be so inchoate that it is impossible to recognise them, let alone map their effects. At other times the impact of the work of art may take time to “show itself ”, or the researcher may be too much in the process and finds it impossible to assess just what has been done. Austin and Butler provide us with some concepts that help us focus our interpretative efforts. Through tracing the complex and multi-dimensional relation between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary we may begin to map the forces and effects of particular “events” in relation to the events in themselves. Through this we may gain some apprehension of the effects produced by our performative productions. This may start to sound suspiciously like the term “impact” that is regularly touted as one of the key markers in assessing research outcomes. How might that play out?

Performativity and Artistic Research What does “impact” look like and does an attempt to map it diminish the power of art in itself? In the research context, questions of “impact” are often difficult to assess. How has the work shifted or extended practice? What new knowledge understandings are made possible by it? The impact of the work of art is revealed over time and there is no immediate or clear way of assessing it in a snapshot

view. However, as the first audience or viewer of the work, the artist-as-researcher has some responsibility for the “knowledge claims” that can be made for the work. How do we know what the work has done and how may we articulate this? The effects of the performative in art are multidimensional—they may be discursive, material consequences and/or affective. How then do we assess these effects? Our task is to find ways to map the movement in concepts, understandings, methodologies, material practice, affect and sensorial experience that arises in and through the research experience. This leads to a series of possible questions that a researcher may ask of the research: • How did the research shift material practice in the field? • What methodological shifts occurred through this process? • What was revealed through the work? What did it do? • What new concepts emerged through the research? • Do these new concepts shift understandings and practices in the field and/or in other discursive fields? • Does the work a/effect its audience aesthetically, kinaesthetically or affectively? • Does the work shift the way we perceive the world? These shifts or movements are not confined to, or unique to, artistic research, however, it is imperative that artistic research is able to argue its claim to new knowledge, or rather new ways of knowing. In setting out the different ways in which the work may be performative, I would like to return to Von Hantelmann’s concern with experience and her argument for the experiential turn in art. Certainly the experience of the audience is a central aspect of the performative power of art and this has been picked up and argued through the work of others,

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48. See Mechtild Widrich’s monograph, Performative Monuments: The Re-materialisation of Public Art, Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press. 2014. p. 8. 49. Ibid., p. 9. 50. Von Hantelmann differentiates the concept of the performative from that of the avant-gardes arguing that the avant-garde position sees itself as working from outside of society rather than being embedded with “convention”. Von Hantelmann. How to Do Things with Art, p. 179.

for example Widrich in her discussion of the mobilisation of spectators as performers in relation to performative monuments.48 However, Widrich also points to the fact that the performative is not merely an adjective of performance. Further she argues that art, whether it is performance art or a monument, is not always performative. This contradicts Von Hantelmann’s claim, cited earlier, that there is no nonperformative artwork. Widrich’s argument for the performative relates to the performative force of art, its capacity to “effect changes in social reality” through conventional gestures.49 This change or “movement” in thought, word and deed in the individual and social sensorium that is enabled through theories of performativity is central to understanding the transformative power of art. The transformative power or reconfiguration that occurs through art is something that Von Hantelmann recognised in How to Do Things with Art (2010). Here she argued (using the work of James Coleman, Daniel Buren and Tino Sehgal) that it is not just: a question of the phenomenological conditions of the exhibition space but also of art’s discursive framing. And it is not just about rendering visible, or exhibiting these discursive framings and conventions as in Institutional Critique, but about operating with them, i.e. recognizing the potential for construction and change that lies in their usage… The efficacy of these works stems from the constitutive power of conventions, which are taken up and then modified in their usage.50

Hence, it is the “too perfect performances”, “bad performances”, “distorted performances”, “excessive performances”, “playful performances” and “inverted performances” that reconfigure the conventions in art and hence effect the movement in word, thought and deed that we have come to identify as the performative. In her work on performativity, Von Hantelmann’s concern has been about art in itself. The concern of this paper has been about what happens when art becomes research. Here, one of the tasks of the artistic researcher is to articulate a meta-discussion around the effects of their artistic research. It is a truism to say that words are inadequate to the task of encapsulating the material fact and the experience of the work of art and one could argue that any the kind of mapping process is a distancing device that creates objective “data” and denies the embodied experience that is central to our encounters with art. This may be true, but it is not the task of an essay, research statement, artist’s statement, catalogue essay or dissertation to stand in for or describe the artwork. The artwork must stand eloquently in its own way and if it doesn’t it fails. However, through mapping what the research does, artistic researchers are able to demonstrate not only how art can be understood as research, but also how its inventions can be articulated. This will not deny the artwork its eloquence but enable us demonstrate and argue the impact of artistic research in the broader realm, and particularly in the academy where we now have seat at the table of research.

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Notice of Issue #4 TIMES (The Conference Issue) Autumn 2016

all disciplines. As well as the arts (visual art, design, per-

Editors: Dave Beech, Ingrid Elam, Anders Hultqvist, Andrea

sciences, law, medicine as well as from the professional

Phillips

formance, music, architecture, craft, etc.), we are particularly interested to learn from the social sciences, natural sphere. We welcome proposals for presentation nodes and are interested in all forms of presentation.

Contributors include Marc Boumeester; Simon Critchley; Sonja Dahl; Rodrigo Delso Gutiérrez; Gerhard Eckel; Somaya El-Sousi, Hanna Hallgren, and Jenny Tunedal; Bruno Latour; The Otolith Group; Edgar Schmitz and Vermeir & Heiremans; Claire Staunton and John Hill (Flat Time House); Andy Weir;

A detailed call for the conference, with deadlines for abstracts etc., will be circulated in November 2016. A

series of public workshops on Exclusion will be held in

Autumn 2016, to be announced shortly. Please contact parse@konst.gu.se with inquiries.

Valerie Pihet and Benedickte Zitouni.

About Peer-Review Save the Date EXCLUSION: 2nd Biennial PARSE Conference

PARSE Journal employs a peer review process that is designed

16-18 November 2017, Gothenburg, Sweden

of content, relevance and quality; and (ii) provide critical

in order to: (i) establish suitability for publication in terms feedback to enable contributors to finalise material for publica-

How does exclusion operate at a local, national and international level both within the arts, in education and within cultural production more generally? How does one get to imagine oneself as an artist of any discipline - in terms of

race, class and access to education? Within the arts, how can we improve access to learning and the formation of experience – and what can we model from other disci-

plines in this respect? What are the politics of access? Do strategies and infrastructures of inclusion simply replicate and reinforce individualised imaginaries within broadly

hierarchical social structures, particularly as artistic habits of production are increasingly exported as economised knowledge production to other parts of the world? Both within and far beyond the field of cultural production, people are excluded from territorial,

subjective, environmental and imaginative spaces, be

they national or virtual. The weight of the world, as Pierre Bourdieu would have it, is slighted against the vast

majority of people living upon it. What forms of research and which actions can be taken within the artistic and pedagogical environment that hold open spaces of contact and forms of rights?

The PARSE conference on exclusion welcomes individual and collective proposals on the theme of exclusion from

tion. Each contribution submitted to PARSE Journal is reviewed by at least three readers in the pre-publication process: a member of the editorial team for the particular issue number (the article editor); a member of the editorial board; and an external reader. The peer review process is based on an open review process (it is not double blind as normally employed in many of the natural sciences for example). The full list of reviewers will be identified via the PARSE website annually. In all cases reviewers and authors will be asked to disclose any possible conflict of interest. After approval for publication has been established through the peer review process, a finalised version of the contribution will be provided by the author(s) in correspondence with the article editor. We regret, that it is not possible for the editorial team to enter into dialogue or provide feedback for all submissions. Typically this is reserved for those submissions that have been identified as suitable for potential publication in the particular volume number. PARSE Journal accepts proposals for publication on a rolling basis and potential contributors are invited to consider the open calls for material published on the PARSE Journal website: www.parsejournal.com

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University of Gothenburg ISSN 2002-0511