How the Work Works
How the Work Works
(I have been told that if you are going to do something bad it should be really, really bad – so bad that it is obvious to everyone that it is your intention to be bad – to fail, to be a flop. For this reason I would like to claim what you are about to read as a formal flop. I say formal in reference to the form of an academicintellectual-reflection-paper-analyses-thesis-critical-essay of my artistic work in relation to the topics of: form vs. content, separation vs. combination and the white cube vs. the black box. This paragraph, being a reflection of the reflection and written at the end of the process, offers a fun house hologram of the work itself, which in the end I have decided flopped as an academic piece but hope succeeds as a work of art. Therefore, I formally credit this reflection to Alan Smithee, the film director and sometimes playwright that has claimed so many flops, and I dedicate it to Mario Garcia Torres who introduced me to Alan and suggested flopping as a viable political stance in his name.
July 23, Vienna – August 19, 2016, Arlesheim
Dear Elise Lammer and Judith Welter,
I only dare to address you personally in an academic essay because it is, after all, only art and not yet history (art referring to anything that goes and history referring to art history, or the academic practice of writing about, reflecting on and analyzing art). The purpose of this letter is to demonstrate that I have, through my studies, reflected on my artistic practice within the context of current issues and thereby improved myself intellectually. I do this because I have been told that in order to graduate with a master’s in fine arts, I must present a reflection on my process as well as an artistic work. For my reflection I am presenting two things: an installation titled How the Work Works and it’s analysis.
The installation will be exhibited in two parts, one in each of the two venues of the graduation exhibit Every Contact Leaves it’s Trace. In the first venue, at Kaskadenkondensator, there will be a performance reading of this paper on a small screen. In the second space, the Kunsthalle Basel, another small screen will be placed in an upper corner of one of the large rooms. In the opposite corner there will be a set of headsets and binoculars through which observers may look at the screen and hear what is happening.
The reflection of this piece is what you are about to read. I hope that it is the only academic-intellectual-reflection-paper-analysesthesis-critical-essay of my artistic work that I will ever have to write and that you will ever have to read! It’s not that I think reflecting is bad, it’s just that I would prefer to leave it to the experts so that I can focus on doing what I hope I am good at – creating art. You see, all this academic business of being clever and working with concepts in the middle of my artistic process cuts me off form the muse! Call me romantic, but I prefer to talk philosophy and get intellectually stimulated through the in breath and let the work come out on its own as the exhale. Too much conceptualizing makes me artistically hyperventilate and create dry, boring stupid art.
Not long ago I had fantasized about presenting a piece of paper with the words I quit on it for my graduation piece. I was frustrated by the experience of an art system that often abstracts and sclerotizes the creative process and then documents it within white walled crypts. As this was not a very novel critique and I knew it was just an adolescent threat, I quickly abandoned it. Somehow I had to find a way to quit without quitting and How the Work Works is my response. It is an attempt to refuse to abstract the creative process while still creating work that functions within the dispositive of the museum or gallery space. It is an attempt to “play the game” without losing my soul.
One month ago (one month before the exhibit) I had a plan for what I wanted to show. It was a very hyperventilated, dry, boring and stupid idea in which I thought I could exhibit the creative
process of my art. I thought I could put my poetic, theatrical, social, alchemical imagination on display in the Kunsthalle or at Kaskadenkondensator. Thank god life intervened and landed me in Vienna for the summer where I learned that the dispositive of the museum (and often even that of the off space) is very different from the dispositive of my imagination! (I suppose dispositive is an old idea to you, but it is a new word for me and I am trying to use it every chance I get). This is because I met a lot of intelligent fun people in Vienna who filled my head with clever theories and ideas. And as I have never been one to learn from books and prefer to get my information through oral history, this has been a very formative experience for me. (Yes I know I have digressed into story telling, but that too can be a form of analysis). Let me explain now in the perhaps more intelligent and informed language of my new friends:
How the work works is a phrase I learned from Goran Sergej Pristaš, a dramaturge from the university of Zagreb working within the field of visual art. I met Sergej in Vienna at the ImPuls Tanz art x dance workshop and research project series, curated by Tino Segahl, Louise Höjer and Rio Rutzinger.
It was through exciting afternoon discussions with Sergej and Georg Schöllhammer, a writer, editor and curator from Vienna, that I first encountered historical and current ideas about practice at the intersection between theater, cinematic art, dance, performance and visual art. These discussions focused not only on the transfer of methodologies between disciplines but also on the possibility of transformative translations from the institutions of one art form to another – mostly from the theater to the museum or the black box, to the white cube, and rarely the other way
around. The reason for this I learned during sessions with Louise and Tino in which we learned Tino’s basic movement techniques and philosophy - the museum has become more politically relevant than the theater.
(Now I realize that I am at risk of being perceived as dropping names merely for the sake of dropping names. But this is not really the case – although I must confess to doing it at least partly for the sake of playing the game of building social capital within the art world’s cult of the personality. This is, after all, a cult that valorizes the individual artist and curator god through his or her branding isn’t it? This is exactly one of the things that made me want to create the I quit piece in the first place. The art system is stinky. Now here I am creating my own stink! – But back to the real case… I am responsibly giving credit for my new ideas to individuals by name as a way of quoting my sources. If I haven’t read any books, what else can I do? I suppose oral culture also requires supportive evidence and intellectual copyright.)
Okay, so Tino believes the museum has become more politically relevant than the theater and therefore has chosen the art world over the dance world, wishing to be where the relevance is and hoping to change it from within. But I must quietly wonder, while fully realizing that it might open a debate on the meaning of both politics and relevance, if YouTube might be more relevant than either of them. I wonder how much actual social-political capital artists or dancers like Tino have on YouTube? But that is another a digression, so let’s make this easy and stick to the competition between the theater and the museum and to a simple assumption that relevance refers to having attention and access to influence
(mostly through power and money). With this in mind I suppose I must begrudgingly accept the museum as winner.
I say begrudgingly because it has also come to my attention during this hot and passionate summer of analytical love, that the difference between the black box of the theater and the white cube of the museum or gallery, is that the black box combines and the white cube separates (Sergej’s theory based on experiments done with dual spaces in Zagreb). And, although I am in general a lover of cubes because I love the classic symmetry of platonic solids, I must admit that boxes have more potential – their architecture can, for example, also incorporate golden rectangles and not jut squares (Dawn’s theory based on the art of the fool)! So finally, if I could be the one to chose one over the other in this day of having gone way too far with the cold separation of materialistic scientific thinking (that is what allowed us to create the atom bomb after all!) I would choose combination. Therefore I am a little disappointed that the abstraction of white has won out over, dare I say, the passion of black. Spend a month with dancers or stage performers in comparison to visual artists and you will know immediately what I mean.
So how did I end up in the white cube - in the visual arts? I have been asking myself this question a lot lately because I am actually just a poet. To be honest the first reason is that I fell in love with a visual artist and I wanted to impress him; the second reason is that I wanted to learn how to speak German; the third reason must have something to do with destiny and I suppose the fourth is that I have a nose for sniffing out the relevant places and a desire to be there. So here I am. And by deciding not to quit I have decided to stay and accept this stinky clan as my own and make the best of it.
It’s a little like deciding that like it or not, I am a part of humanity and must take some responsibility for that.
(If you are still reading this I would like to give you a prize for your patience and endurance. Please do not judge me too harshly as I do not claim to be an academic or an intellect and I am only doing this under duress in order to prove to be just intelligent enough to graduate. Although I must admit that it is a little fun now that I’ve gotten over the shame of not having read any books to quote and have decided that it is an art piece and not an essay. And assuming that you are still reading this, your attention alone makes me feel very relevant!)
But what does all this have to do with “How the Work Works” which is what I’m supposed to be reflecting on? Now I will finally tell you… It is a commentary on the tension between combination and separation (I am an alchemist at heart!). to begin with I wish to say that I don’t actually expect many people to watch my reading of this paper at Kaskadenkondensator. The point is simply that it is there for those who care, so that I can be accused of being didactic by those who like didactics, and of being conceptual by those that love to be conceptual. I will purposely not reflect much more on this because that would be just a reflection of a reflection (of a reflection?), which I have already done in the first paragraph and now find a little redundant. It is also a game-playing tactic that leaves something for the experts to talk about!
But as for the Malevich part of the piece in the corner in the Kunsthalle (I hope the reference and the symbolism is obvious), that I can talk about. Or rather at least I can talk about what is inside it, which is my artistic piece because what really matters is
the content of what is within the frame. I am sick of concept art and of deconstructing mediums. Blah blah blah boring… I want to create content. I am a poet, lover, a bad philosopher, a fool, a dancer! I want to dwell in the creative process and muck about in the imagination. I want tell stories, make history, play, have fun, smile, be joyful, beautiful, didactic, romantic, dangerous, stupid, old… all the things I’m not supposed to do in the white cube. So I have created a nice little box (that I hope suits the dispositive of the museum) that is all about concept and form! Inside that box I will place the CONTENT, which the visitors can decide if they are interested in or not. My hope is that those who are interested in the form will be happy with the screen and the binoculars (don’t forget the binoculars, they are the best part!). Why not, formal lovers and conceptual people should be aloud to have their fun too (and children – children should be aloud to have fun in the museum as well). The binoculars will let them (the formal people not the children) know that they are indeed very far away and separated from the content. This is good because the visual artist that I fell in love with (and for whom I converted to the Visualartism religion) told me that Maurice Blanchot said something like: “In order to get close to something you have to get distance”, meaning something like, the other can only approach as other if he at the same time is distancing himself. (Now you have a little insight into my love life). So by distancing the formal and concept lovers I am actually allowing them to be intimate. It is their decision how intimate they wish to get because they can choose to actually enter the content by going through the binoculars and through the screen to join me in it.
Yes this is actually true! During the opening, which is when there might actually be people there to see how the work works, there
will be a live streamed broadcast of the creative process on the screen in the upper corner. So when the people look through the binoculars they will see me playing with all my friends in the imagination (but also in a real coffee shop walking distance away). They will be invited to come and join us. And this is not just any play. It is a poetry reading, a duration performance, a live action role-play, a game, an interdisciplinary dialog, a scripted improvisation, a record release and a one cut movie that will later be shown on the same screen throughout the exhibition. Although after the opening visitors won’t be able to join the live performance, they may call me on my cell phone if they want to meet for coffee.
If I look outside this content in order to consider the form, I could say that it is a content trying to create it’s own form – a form that is not yet known but is emerging, one that wants to resurrect the muses and sing a new song in order to quit without quitting. It is a content that is experimenting with, and wildly flailing about in itself, while still finding a way to play with and love the abstraction and separation of visualartism. And this, I believe, is very on time, because it seems (thank god) that everyone is trying to do it. I would never have thought this up on my own (here comes the giving credit where credit is due part again), I heard it from Thomas Oberender and Hans-Ulrich Obrist one night at a slumber party workshop at the Leopold Museum. Thomas was interested in creating a festival of formats for performance and Hans-Obrist said that people only remember the things that create new formats. So I guess it’s not about deconstructing the old formats anymore but creating new ones, which sounds much more fun. And although I’m still more interested in the content, I am willing to play with
the form for the sake of relevance. So in the end I’m trying to create a game that allows me to do both.
Now having hinted at the contend and its experimenting with form, it is tempting to describe and analyze the content itself because this business of abstraction is growing on me. And I suppose that if I am not the one doing it in the future, it might not be quiet so boring. But in the end, which is now, I will not talk about the content because it shall speak for itself. It is the real thing to be experienced - as love, Art, stupidity and bravery, as an experimental adventure in creativity, a mystery to be solved and a secret to be shared. It is so that I will always
REMEMBER WHY.
Sincerely yours, Dawn Nilo
References
I would like to reference all of the people I have ever met all of the experiences I have ever had my fellow students and teachers at the Basel Art Academy and a few specifically referred to sources in relation to my summer in Vienna at the ImPulsTanz visual arts X dance workshop and research project series, curated by Tino Sehgal, Louise Höjer and Rio Rutsinger, Vienna 2016:
Goran Sergej Pristas and Georg Schöllhammer ,‘The Obstacle’. Louise Höjer, ‘Tino Repetory’ Mario Garcia Torres and Maria Francesca Scaroni ‘This is How we Kill time’. Thomas Oberender and Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Formats’. Tino Sehgal , ‘Contemporary Dance Class’.
Edited, read and submitted on August 20, 2016 Art Institute, University of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Art Northwest Switzerland