Come and wave to your friends as the real becomes imagined! by Michelangelo Corsaro

COME AND WAVE

TO YOUR FRIENDS

AS THE REAL

BECOMES IMAGINED! â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Potential Scenarios for the Party as an Exhibition

Michelangelo Corsaro

UniversitĂ IUAV di Venezia FacoltĂ di Design e Arti Corso di laurea specialistica in Progettazione e Produzione delle Arti Visive A.A. 2010/2011 Relatore: Cesare Pietroiusti Correlatrice: Filipa Ramos Laureando: Michelangelo Corsaro

COME AND WAVE

TO YOUR FRIENDS

AS THE REAL

BECOMES IMAGINED! — Potential Scenarios for the Party as an Exhibition

Index

Introduction .....................................................................................

p. 6

COME AND WAVE TO YOUR FRIENDS AS THE REAL BECOMES IMAGINED! ............................................ p. 16 Conclusions .................................................................................... p. 82 Visual index ..................................................................................... p. 86

Introduction

One year is passed since I started question myself about the possibility, the relevance, and the need for curating encounters, oral exchange, and social situations. As a curator I decided to undertake this research following the realization of some projects I did during the last year. Within the system of production and circulation of ideas, encounter needs to be acknowledged as a proper language and thus to be developed along with other artistic practices. My main interest has been focused on building a structure of references in order to define, as a curator, my activity in producing moments of encounter, making situations happen, carving out a conceptual frame for oral exchange. Whenever, during the last two years, I’ve been developing personal projects, I’ve always tended to avoid the format of the exhibition. Although I wanted to fulfill the role of the curator, I didn’t want to make exhibitions. Each time I found myself face to face with practical purposes I always slipped in different territories. It was as if the display of an artwork, deprived of all the discourse that contributed to its creation, was way too little to give. Constantly submerged in the lively and outgoing environment where art is created, I became concerned in realizing, nourishing, and presenting the real activity that goes on beyond the white cube. Rather than gathering and displaying works related to a discourse I was interested in, I thought it could be way more interesting to bring the discourse itself among a group of people in order to raise their interest. In doing it I’ve always tried to stick to the function, methodology and practice of a curator.

—

What follows is therefore the account of the path I’ve been following in the attempt to make clear some of the issues and the blind spots that I’ve encountered during my activity. It is not supposed to be an historical account of the practice of encounter and conversation within contemporary art. The compiling of such an academic report has never been my goal. Instead the practical activities I wanted to undertake required me to develop my own set of references. It meant to confront myself with the work of some artists and curators in order to make clear if such a specific curatorial practice is necessary and how to achieve it. My research began with a critical analysis of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s activity. I faced the necessity of doing it when I asked myself “what does it mean to curate conversations?” The study of Obrist’s Interview Project and his Marathon Series gave me the opportunity to deal with the issue of oral exchange. The work of some conceptual artists from the end of the 1960’s inspired some questions about the use of oral communication within his practice. Especially Ian Wilson and Lee Lozano served as touchstone to understand the status of oral communication when it comes to its commodification (Interview Project) or its spectacularization (Marathon Series). In this context Guy Debord acted as a dialectic reference to topics I couldn’t treat or include here. A project by Nico Dockx, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Anton Vidokle, New York Conversations, was taken into account to measure the potential of a moment of encounter as an occasion to collectively produce and present new ideas. Especially in relation to the idea of spectatorship within the so-called participative practices, its analysis was meant to make clear the different roles of production and consumption in cultural production. Clémentine Deliss’ activity for Metronome Press gave me the occasion to illustrate an alternative curatorial paradigm to approach practices dealing with relations among people. Her initiatives set the role of the curator aside from the public display. Both the Metronome issues discussed below (No. 3, No.7) as well as the establishment of the Office for First Intentions deploy the potential of the intimacy of the encounter in the privacy of a behind-closed-doors event. The analysis of the brief career of Joshua Compston closes the

research. His activity within Factual Nonsense, although rarely acknowledged, achieved in consolidating and propelling the london art scene during the first 1990’s through and encounter-based curatorial practice. With his exhibitions, designed as street parties, he provided a paradigm that, even if never fully developed, opens the possibility to conceive the party as an exhibition.

— A last clarification is needed. It regards two main themes I decided not to treat in this research. The first of them is Relational Aesthetics. Although many of the topics I took into account are actually consistent with the subject, I decided not to discuss it for several reasons. First of all, my aim was to line up a set of references in order to achieve a better understanding of some themes I’m interested in. Although the quest for a curatorial practice of encounters could heavily draw inspiration from Relational Art, I don’t think that it is necessarily the only source. In this case, to gather all the references I discussed here under the label of Relational would have been just too simple and, especially in two cases, at least inaccurate. Joshua Compston, although his activity could be compared to relational practices, came out in a totally different context. Although he worked with artists such as Ceryth Wyn Evans and Liam Gillick, no doubt that his visual and written language, as well as the artists he was surrounded with, belong to a different frame. Clémentine Deliss as well, for the peculiar relationship she has with the broad public, couldn’t be placed as well within the area of Relational Aesthetics. Her initiatives, often set aside from a wide audience, rather seem to negate the possibility of relations with a generic spectator, withdrawing in the enclosure of a behind-closed-doors intimacy. This specific choice clashes with the way some relational artworks deal with their audience. Whether it is a meal prepared by Tiravanija or a load of candies by Félix Gonzáles-Torres, or a piece of furniture by Andrea Zittel, relational art is always addressed to a generic audience. Even if it partially involves the audience in the realization of works, the identity of the spectator is not important at all. In other words, the spectator contributes to activate and create the works but he cannot participate to the definition of its content, its message, and its meaning. To say it with Claire Bishop, “how do we measure or compare these

relationships? The quality of the relationships in ‘relational aesthetics’ are never examined or called into question. When Bourriaud argues that ‘encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them,’ I sense that this question is (for him) unnecessary; all relations that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good.”1 Such initiatives discussed below as Tempolabor and Office for First Intentions, rather than speaking to a disposable spectator, choose to involve individually each participant through the intimacy of a private encounter.

The second main theme which I didn’t mention in this dissertation is the one of the art school. Even if deeply related to what I’ve been discussing here, I thought that the this subject deserves an independent and a more accurate analysis than the one I could do here. Nevertheless the school is the place for encounter, discussion and ideas’ circulation par excellence. Since some artists and curators developed the design of the school with an approach that might be interesting to consider, some experiences from the last ten years worth at least mentioning here. The first of the them is the project for Manifesta 6, in 2006. Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel, curators of the event, planned it “to take the form of a temporary art school, the Manifesta 6 School, comprised of three departments revolving around diverse cultural issues and debates, and each proposing a different structural model for art education.”2 Due to frictions between the curators and the Municipality of Nicosia regarding the establishment of the school in the occupied part of the city, Manifesta 6 was cancelled. In addition to the letter published via e-flux by the curators,3 on the Manifesta website it’s been a published a collection of texts by the curators and other participants including Anton Vidokle, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys.4 Following the failure of Manifesta 6, in 2006 Anton Vidokle, together with other artists and curators,5 launched unitednationsplaza. Conceived 1 Bishop 2004, p. 65. 2 e-flux archive, June 7th, 2006. The e-flux archive can be consulted at e-flux.com/archive (as found on March 21st 2012). 3 Ibidem. 4 Notes for an Art School 2006. Available for download from the Manifesta website manifesta. org (as found on March 21st 2012). Particularly interesting for what discussed here is the list of experimental schools compiled by Anton Vidokle (Anton Vidokle, Exhibition as School in a Divided City, p. 6, in Notes for an Art School 2006.) 5 “unitednationsplaza is organized by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with Liam Gillick, Boris Groys,

along with the tradition of free universities, “unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school.”6 The project, started in Berlin, in 2008 moved also to in Mexico DF7 and to the New Museum in New York8. The project involved many artists and curators such as Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Maria Lind, Raqs Media Collective, Martha Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija. Another project that deserves to be mentioned here is the Future Academy. Founded in 2002 by Clémentine Deliss in Edinburgh, Future Academy set aside from the official school system working as an independent platform to experiment new research methodologies. Although consistently supported by the Edinburgh College of Art, the academy didn’t provide any official diploma. The academy, structured as an itinerant institution, “has operated through a series of collaborative structures and experimental events that to date have taken place in London; Edinburgh; Glasgow; Dakar; Delhi; Bangalore; Mumbai; Portland, Oregon; Ljubljana; Patras; Tokyo; Nagoya, Yamaguchi, Melbourne; and Kassel.”9 The last project I’d like to mention here is the Protoacademy. Founded in Edinburgh by Charles Esche, it has been running from 1998 to 2002. The academy, created along with the idea of tabula rasa, acted as a center for discussion and experimental education in parallel with Edinburgh established institutions. “Whoever came to the table was a member of the protoacademy, whether it was a teacher or a student or somebody from the outside. They demonstrated their qualifications to be part of the group by the information, the intelligence, the ideas, the questions, or the confrontation they brought to that table.”10 For what concerns the theme of the art school, including accounts regarding both unitednationsplaza, Future Academy, and protoacademy, it is more extensively discussed in the book Art School. (Propositions for the 21st Century). Through the contributions of many authors, including Daniel Birnbaum, Clémentine Deliss, Boris Groys, Charles Esche, Liam Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nikolaus Hirsch, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Tirdad Zolghadr.” e-Flux archive, October 20th, 2006. 6 Ibidem. 7 e-Flux archive, January 3rd, 2008. 8 e-Flux archive, January 28th, 2008. 9 Clémentine Deliss, Roaming, Prelusive, Permeable: Future Academy, in Art School 2009, pp. 117-140: 119. 10 Charles Esche, Include Me Out: Preparing Artists to Undo the Art World, in Art School 2009, pp. 101-112: 109.

Gillick, Anton Vidokle, the book provide an exhaustive overview of this topic which, although complementary to the main theme of this research, didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find here a detailed coverage.

COME AND WAVE

TO YOUR FRIENDS

AS THE REAL

BECOMES IMAGINED!

Eventually I had to start from somewhere. And among all the starting points I laid out on my desk, a paragraph by contemporary art curator Clémentine Deliss, was the only one I couldn’t escape from. It’s like an elusive lover in a libertine novel, a bizarre experiment in a scientific research, a puzzling murder in a detective story: hard to deal with and not dismissible as well. To me these words represent the trigger that start the research for the personal curatorial practice that I want to develop. Since the result is still unpredictable, the curiosity that they arouse is both the thrust and the fil rouge of the research itself. I had to start from here because it’s where some essential questions raise, questions that I can’t ignore if considering curatorial practices based upon catalyzing intimate situations. Ce que nous abordons avec ce dialogue est pour moi une dimension essentielle de l’architecture de la rencontre. La rencontre est un phénomène personnel et intime. Elle s’extrapole d’elle-même comme une contagion socialisante, si les êtres intéressés lui donnent l’espace nécessaire. Une fois démarrée, toutes le modulation possible s’y introduisent, de la méfiance jusqu’au moment affectif le plus innocent, se multipliant pour, au besoin, rester opaque. Et l’art dans tout cela? Tu disais que l’acte de la rencontre est en soi un signe potentiel de l’art. Je ne suis pas entièrement d’accord. Il y a maintenant au moins cinq ans que l’on propose des ‘situations’ comme génératrices d’un moment d’art. Joshua Compston,

l’animateur de ces moments dans le contexte londonien l’avait bien compris. Ses initiative (A Fête Worse Than Death, The Hanging Picnic), conçues à partir du folklore anglais et de la rencontre forain, avaient une valeur de mise-en-scène sociale et comme résultat la consolidation de la soi-disante scène britannique artistique jusqu’à la spéculation immobilière du quartier de Hoxton dans l’est de Londres. Sa mort en 1996 signifia pour moi la jonction conceptuelle entre le vécu et la mémoire. L’édition que j’ai fais pour Fama & Fortune s’intitula “Ecran Mémoire I” et depuis lors, je m’engage à comprendre cette nécessité de traduction, de passer de l’éphémère au continu et de l’entamer par la route la plus libertine. Metronome en est le résultat.11

Can conceptual junction between live experience and memory be possible? To what extent is it needed? What does it mean to translate, to switch from the ephemeral to the continuous? And how do situational practices relate to that who we usually consider the spectator? What’s, thus, the place for situations? What are their immanent parts? What is their contingent matter?

I can understand quite well what Clémentine Deliss meant when she proposed situations as moments for generating art. It’s about involving individuals in a never-ending process where a full set of conditions put their whole self at stake. And of course it’s about taking an active part in it. It’s about prompting a very concrete output - the situation - to come out through the most elusive medium: intimacy. And though the result it’s among all the most ephemeral, its continuity in time is granted by the consequences the situation is able produce for the ones who took part in it. What I am looking for is a curatorial methodology, as the required tools fully belong to curatorial practices: working it out by selecting, highlighting, putting one thing next to the other, provoking reactions between elements, building a structure, a context, a path, and setting the whole thing up. Now, in the precise moment in which this methodology starts dealing with the medium of intimacy and encounter, the curatorial becomes a fertile and interesting matter to work on. What I am after is a specific curatorial attitude able to re-design the curator as 11 Clémentine Deliss & Samon Takahashi, Le Bâtard: Metronome+Elastica, in The Bastard 2001, pp. 130-148: 143-144. As it is easy to understand from the structure of the whole text, the quoted sentence is to be ascribed to Clémentine Deliss.

a catalyst of a situation and this actually means the necessity to develop new practices after a new set of references.

— The Wunderkammer were rooms whose walls were covered with wooden shelves, closets and cabinets, stuffed with every kind of objects, from rare plants and animals to bizarre artifacts coming from all over the world, artworks, archeological finds, and all sorts of curiosities. Started in the Middle Ages, they became a quite popular phenomena during the XVI and XVII centuries, when learned and rich men started to gather, store and display such collections. And in setting up, managing and arranging their museums of wonders they rose as curators of such places. Plunging into this initial and traditional curatorial paradigm discloses a cunning device that immediately attracted my attention for being able to transform the relation between visitors of a museum and objects on display. I am going back to 1651, when the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher founded the Museum Kircherianum, a collection of antiquities and wonders located in the Collegio Romano, in the heart of the baroque Rome. Among stuffed animals, fine arts pieces by Dosso Dossi or Guido Reni and Egyptian relics, the collection displayed an apparently living statue that Kircher used to call “the Delphic Oracle”. Actually the sculpture was able to speak and to move its eyes and he used this device to speak with the visitors who came to see his museum. Kircher invented a speaking tube, a long cochleate pipe projected to amplify and channel the sound of human voice, and had one of these tubes installed in his museum in order to connect the Delphic Oracle statue to his bedroom. Through this device, the “curator” himself was able to address visitors by their name, and engage in a conversation with them through the marble mouth of an ancient roman bust.12 At that time wunderkammers were not mere display devices, and to consider those places just as spaces where objects were collected, stored, and displayed would mean to have just a partial understanding of their function. They were in fact also a place specifically designed for 12

Findlen 1994, p. 107.

conversation and knowledge exchange. As claimed by Daniel Georg Morhof, a scholar familiar with Kircher’s museum and contemporary with him, “Museums and Colleges [...] used to be established so that the increase of mutual learning occurs from the conversation of scholars.”13 The conversation was actually part of a process that included the display of unique objects, as well as the moment for solitary studies. An account of such experience was written by a visitor of the collection of Federico Cesi, an Italian scholar and scientist who lived between the 16th and the 17th centuries: I stayed there almost two hours talking, and he showed me many of his curious things […] Yet another time when I went there to bring him a manuscript, I again stayed awhile to talk with great enthusiasm. Certainly I want to have the opportunity to go there often, because, other than what I learn by conversing with a person as knowledgeable as he is, I always leave with a miraculous desire to study these sciences in particular.14

The collection of curiosities and wonders found their place in studios or wunderkammer, places specifically designed to be private, and the display of those object was just a prelusive moment to a conversation among learned men. Even though the modern concept of museum became popular in Europe during the 18th century, since the Reinassance in these cabinets of curiosities rose what we may consider as a curatorial practice in fact deeply connected with an active engagement of the spectator. In fact we could say that no actual spectator was involved in the visit of the collection, just people with whom to share one’s knowledge over a private conversation.

— Within contemporary curatorial practice, the research for a speaking 13 “Musea et Collegia, de quibus superiore capite egimus, eam ob causam institui solent, ut ex conversatione eruditorum mutua res literaria augmentum capiat.” Morhof 1747, p. 151. 14 “Si stette almeno due ore a discorrere e mi mostrò molte cose curiose ch’egli ha […] e l’altra volta che ci andai a portargliela scritta a mano, vi era stato similmente un gran pezzo a discorrere con grandissimo mio gusto: e certo ho desiderio di aver occasione spesso d’esser con lui, perché oltre a quello ch’io imparo a discorrere con una persona che tanto sa, mi parto sempre con un desiderio mirabile di studiare, ed in particolare di queste scienze.” letter by Giovanni Bardi to Galileo Galilei, 2nd July 1614, in Galilei 1851, p. 324. Transl. Findlen 1994, p. 100.

statue could take many different forms. The more we consider a social encounter as a complex matter, the more it is likely to establish itself as a lively working environment. The structure of social situations acts as if peopled with contingent elements - the mood of a conversation, the time of the day, the furniture, food, drinks, drugs, hours of sleep, changes of weather, the last book one has read, etc. Each of them is an event that exists according to the different interactions that it may create with whoever relates to it. The process of tying and untying of relations thus creates a social experience that finds its continuity in the consequences that it produces. To work within such an environment means to recognize the potential significance of each element that composes it, and to be consistent with its richness. Whereas a situation of sociality becomes a prelusive moment to a creative process, its openness allows to evolve unexpected possibilities. A specific practice supposed to deal with this dimension, far from being defined, should find its starting point in a catalytic action. To act as a catalyst means to create the conditions for reactions between elements to happen, to increase their rate, and to improve their effect. It is about creating and highlighting a process. It is precisely through this activity that a process emerges, the process that lies behind the silent opacity that seems to shroud some beautiful artworks. It is because any object of art once lived (only later it was delivered to the upsettingly white silence of alarm systems) that thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no curatorial activity that can be called contemporary than that which is able to deal with the muscular spasm of a living being that cannot be captured alive. Curating as handling a living machine. A glorious funeral will be arranged by the ones who still remain in its death, but thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no presence, no truth, no cheerfulness aside from a glorious life. To the extent that curating is about how art goes public, if talking about contemporary art, I would add that any curatorial practice is about how art comes alive. How it is possible to hand over this ever-changing process to a public without betraying its living essence? How it is possible to keep it alive in a form, which allows to transmit and diffuse it?

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The word traitor comes from the Latin verb tradere the primary meaning of which, among others, is to hand over. The traitor was indeed the

one who handed over his allies to their enemies. The verb could also mean to sell - and in fact one could have done it for money. Moreover the Latin word traditor used to indicate the ones who handed over Holy Scriptures to authorities during anti-Christian persecutions but, curiously enough, it also meant master, that is, the one who transmitted such Scriptures. In fact from the same Latin verb it also comes the word tradition and actually tradere could also mean to transmit hence, also to recount. Last but not least, it also means to yield, from the action of handing over one’s own weapons as a sign of surrender. If talking about mediation this Latin word becomes a revealing reference point to keep in mind. It especially does if considering how, from the primary meaning of this word, that is, to hand over, it generated many different meanings. Indeed the gesture of handing something could easily be related to curatorial practice. The curator is the one who is in charge to hand something to a public. Whether we’re talking about an exhibition, a book, a performance, or an interview, the curator will be responsible for the task of handing it to a public. For his role of mediator, the curator actually hands over art to spectators, institutions, collectors. The notion of the curator as a mediator can take now many different faces. He or she can become a betrayer, a salesman, a keeper of The Archive responsible for its perpetuation, a translator, a raconteur, a surrendered, or all these at once. What is to be done of a curatorial practice based on curating, constructing and delivering intimate situations? How to shape the mediator’s role of the curator? How to interpret the practice of handing over?

— Hans Ulrich Obrist has become a key figure in the contemporary art scene of the last twenty years due to several collaborations with many international institutions (PS1, Portikus, CAPC, etc.), biennials (Manifesta, Biennale di Venezia, Lyon Biennal, etc.) as well as for the curatorship of largely renown exhibitions such as Il Tempo del Postino or Utopia Station. In fact he seems to have achieved everything a curator could get. Besides from his intense activity as exhibition-maker, which he undertook since the early 1990s, and from the curatorship at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at Serpentine

Gallery, London, he is especially renewed for the Interview Project. During his whole career he went from door to door interviewing artists, curators, philosophers, architects, musicians, writers, designers, and other relevant figures of the contemporary cultural scene. Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another, he managed to collect thousands of hours of interviews. Most of them are published in books such as: Interviews vol. I, Interviews vol. II, A Brief History of Curating. In addition, he published a twenty-six-volume collection entitled The Conversation Series for which he met artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Dan Graham, and Cerith Wyn Evans. Perfectly fitting for the role of mediator, he re-enacted those intimate conversation that took place in XVII centuryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wunderkammer and handed them to a broader public. His archive of conversations, taped and translated into the written format, grew year after year to the impressive proportions it has today. The intimacy of the situation that can occur when two learned men meet over an art-oriented conversation, has been recorded and handed to the public through an almost endless series of books packaged in a elegant edition. The archive of interviews collected by Hans Ulrich Obrist gained a very large importance over the contemporary art scene. First of all due to the sophisticated selection of interviewed people and their relevance in our culture. On the other hand due to the huge dimension this archive grew to. For this reasons it slowly became a research tool often essential in contemporary art knowledge. Last but not least, during these last years, the model of the interview became a more and more widespread format within contemporary art writing. What Hans Ulrich Obrist has done is something monumental: a huge monument built in heavy granite stone to stand against time for the days to come.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; At the end of the 1960s some artists started to orient their researches around the possible uses of the verbal. In 1968 a conceptual artist, Ian Wilson, conceived a work that was meant to have a verbal realization. Time consisted in telling people that the artist was interested in the idea of time. The work actually took place each time he referred to his interest about time. But as Ian Wilson declared, his research was not about time: it was about the verbal.

As far as I’m concerned, time is just a vast illusion, it’s just a neverending illusion without any possible understanding of it. I don’t really use it in this sense, though. I use it just as a word that has suitable characteristics, but one of the facts is that it is a word, and that it is so nebulous, such an enigma, that you can’t pin anything on it; it’s so vague, it’s not even there. The word, when said, is like a sound: it vanishes in its moment of execution, the sound vanishes, just like time. But this is really what I’m trying to do. The same principles carry over to oral communication, and I’m not involved with time now, I’m involved with oral communication...15

After Time, Ian Wilson began to use oral communication as a medium for his works. The artist started to do a series of conversation pieces that could take place in the gallery space and outside it. At the beginning he organized his conversation by appointment, and afterwards he started to write on the invitation cards the time when the conversation would take place. He would have been in the gallery available for discussions with visitors. The conversations were usually led by Ian Wilson using a Socratic method - which was meant to provoke questions and answers by the participants - and it seems that usually they dealt with complicated philosophical questions. For Ian Wilson talking about art was the simplest and easiest answer to the question that many artists are asked: “What kind of art do you do?” His conversations were both the form and the content of the answer. Probably for this reason, at least during the first years, Ian Wilson didn’t want to record or transcribe his conversations: his interest in oral communication had to find its expression through oral communication itself. I try all the time to keep things at a primary state and present subjects as directly as possible. If you have the subject of, say, oral communication, it can’t be written because you can’t write an orally communicated thing. Obviously you apply the medium that presents the idea as directly as possible, and you end up with yourself saying it - oral communication - just directly. The animation of the situation is not destroyed.16 15 16

Lippard 1997, p. 83. Ibidem, pp. 83-84.

Ian Wilson went along with a trend, very popular among conceptual artists, which sought for a de-materialization of the artwork.17 An indeed his practice was utterly event-based and it completely relied on the impermanence of oral communication. Moreover, due to the dialogic form of his conversations, he sought for an active engagement of the spectators, who were supposed to participate, intervene, and take part to the event.

— An article by the anthropologist, linguist, social scientist, cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson18 can propose a relevant difference that might exist between oral and written communication. His research about communication among pre-verbal mammalians may be quite helpful in this respect. The way animals are able to communicate is in fact useful to understand the way we do communicate. And it is so especially insofar as Bateson manages to show how communication among mammals is primarily about relationships. It seems in fact that mammals use to communicate specific meanings by highlighting their relations between each other. Bateson offers the example of a cat telling somebody to give her some food. “She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying ‘Milk!’ Rather, she is saying something like ‘Ma-ma!’ [...] The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants.”19 According to Bateson, communication among humans is different just for being “specific about something other than relationship”,20 that is, to say, about milk. But this doesn’t 17 “The difference between conceptual art and poetry, literature, and philosophy is that conceptual art takes the principles of visual abstraction, founded in the visual arts, and applies them to language. When it does that a nonvisual abstraction occurs. [...] Nonvisual abstraction is difficult to grasp because we continue to look for something. [...] Nonvisual abstraction is difficult to appreciate because it deals with the most difficult objective to comprehend. It endeavors to inspire a consciousness of being which is formless. Nonvisual abstraction is at the heart of conceptual art. Nonvisual abstraxction is formless.” Ian Wilson, Conceptual art, in Conceptual Art 2000. Bateson 1966. 18 19 Bateson 1966, p. 571. 20

Ibidem.

mean that communication about relationship ceases to exist. As mammals, we are familiar with, though largely unconscious of, the habit of communicating about our relationships. Like other terrestrial mammals, we do most of our communicating on this subject by means of kinesic and paralinguistic signals, such as bodily movements, involuntary tensions of voluntary muscles, changes of facial expression, hesitations, shifts in tempo of speech or movement, overtones of the voice, and irregularities of respiration.21

As Bateson stated, all those elements contribute to communicate a message, which anyway may be different or complementary to pronounced words. Although not contained in them, this message exists and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s actually transmitted trough oral communication. In this respect a conversation is produced by many different elements and words perform just one of the possible functions of oral communication. A written word is therefore way more different from a spoken one insofar as we are concerned with that part of communication that relates to patterns and contingencies of relationship among people and of the context theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re acting in. 28

Going back to Hans Ulrich Obrist and his Interview Project, the relation between his huge archive of interviews and oral communication becomes now a more complex subject. Even though they originally took place in a verbal form, it is through the written word that they were handed to the broader public. Every interview, although achieved verbally, doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t belong to oral communication. How could it be? From the first moment one tries to transcribe a spoken speech he will notice how it is actually impossible to write down the exact words that were pronounced. The speech has to be shrunk, slightly adjusted, grammar needs to be corrected. Spoken words cannot actually be transcribed. And even if it was possible: would that be equal to what was orally communicated? The paralinguistic signals mentioned by Bateson would be absent from the transcription. Relationship between people and with the context would be skipped as well. The place where the interview took place, what happened before and hat happened later, the people who maybe silently assisted; all these elements, 21

Ibidem, p. 573.

this series of contingencies, are left aside by the transcription. In fact contingent elements don’t find any transcription. But how to be sure about the necessary functions of oral communication? To me, it seems that Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interviews are not so much related to oral communication as we may think. Even though deeply connected with it, his methodology seems to be way more effective as a writing practice than as a oral one. Oral communication may be the way his interviews are realized, but when we come to the way they are handed over things turn out to be quite different.

— From 2005 Obrist started to conceive the interview as a starting point to develop an event-based practice. From the first experience realized in Stuttgard, he started the Marathon Series, a yearly event that takes place in the Serpentine Gallery. From 2006 to 2011 the Serpentine Marathon became a relevant appointment in the London art agenda, and in some occasion it was also exported internationally. For his Marathons, Obrist gathers dozens of highly renewed guest in order to deliver conversations, performance, and lectures. The concept of the marathon was for the first time conceived in Stuttgart, for a theater festival, Theater der Welt, in 2005. It was a 24-hour event during which Obrist interviewed twenty-four artists and intellectuals from the Stuttgard cultural scene. In 2006 he moved the format to the Serpentine Gallery and namely in a temporary pavilion, designed by Rem Koolhas, just outside the gallery. The event was co-presented with Rem Koolhas and it was divided in two parts. The first one was in July and was scheduled to go on overnight from 6pm to 6pm of next day. The second one took place over two days during next October. It was indeed planned to take place, as all the following ones, during the Frieze Art Fair week. Among its participants it included Zygmunt Bauman, Brian Eno, Gilbert and George, Zaha Hadid, Damien Hirst, Doris Lessing, and Juergen Teller. As stated by the organizers “The Interview Marathons treat the past as a toolbox with which to make an almost archaeological slice of the present, [...] they are also intended as ongoing research that can lead to exhibitions, projects, publications and all manner of

future collaborations.”22 In 2007 the event was repeated in the Olafur Eliasson’s pavilion. This time it was called Experiment Marathon and it was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Olafur Eliasson.23 Unlike the last one, this wasn’t scheduled to go on overnight but it stopped on Saturday night at 11pm to start again the day after at 10am. Moreover, if in 2006 admission was free, this time there was a ticket to pay, available on the door on a first-come-first-served basis. 2008 was the year of the Manifesto Marathon, hosted by the pavilion commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and designed by Frank Gehry. The marathon listed, as usual, an impressive series of renowned figures. From this edition on the format of the marathon remains more or less unchanged: the event was planned over two days,24 on a weekend, during the Frieze Art Fair; this time tickets could be bought in advance. The Manifesto Marathon was followed by the Poetry Marathon, which took place, in the 2009 pavilion, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. In 2009 Obrist also curated, together with Rem Koolhas, the Shenzen Marathon, for the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture.25 The Serpentine’s marathon for 2010 was conceived around the idea of map. Unlike the previous ones, the Map Marathon took place apart from the Serpentine’s building. In fact it was hosted by the Royal Geographical Society, just outside Kensington Gardens, five minutes walking from the gallery. In 2010, in occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the first marathon, Obrist also curated the Marathon Marathon in Athens, around “the concept of superhuman endeavor, in the seemingly impossible but historically real feat of the Battle of Marathon.”26 The last marathon, for now, was the 2011 Garden Marathon. Since I attended the event, this time I can speak about a direct live experience of it. Notes about Garden Marathon, Serpentine Gallery, London, October 15th-16th 2011 Just outside the Serpentine Gallery, a white half-rounded 22 e-Flux archive, July 25th, 2006 (as found on March 21st 2012). 23 The Experiment Marathon was remade, with some guest from the Serpentine edition, as part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival in 2008. e-flux archive, April 29th, 2008 (as found on March 21st 2012). 24 The Experiment Marathon still was presented as a 24-hour event. 25 e-flux archive, December 18th, 2009 (as found on March 21st 2012). 26 e-flux archive, October 21st, 2010 (as found on March 21st 2012).

temporary structure was the place where the marathon took place. This year it didn’t take place in the 2011 pavilion, designed by Peter Zumthor, but in this white structure specifically built for the marathon. All around it there was a metal railing with an entrance for the guests on the back, and an entrance on the front for the public. Bouncers were guarding the entrance, checking bracelets which marked visitors who paid the ticket. The main theme of the marathon, as already said, is the garden. And in fact it took place inside the Kensington Garden, all around the audience, outside the pavilion. In front of the entrance there was a christmas tree by Hans Peter Feldman. Inside, a few hundreds chairs, a stage, a projector, a screen, microphones, cameras. There were some plants too, probably to recall the main subject of the event. The super-polite Hans Ulrich Obrist, with the help of a bunch of assistants, presented the series of talks, lectures, performances, conversations. People announced by Obrist got on and off the stage one after the other, accompanied by audience’s applauses. Lectures lasted around twenty minutes, which is the perfect length to say something without becoming boring, and to make the long list of guest fit the schedule. And in fact the marathon had a very fast and pressing tempo, broken, here and there, by a five-minutes coffee break. Pablo León De La Barra was particularly affected by the fast timing. A few minutes after he begun his lecture - which, by the way, was outstandingly rich - he noticed he couldn’t fit the twenty minutes limit. So, for fear not to be able to finish his talk on time, he started sweating and speaking faster and faster. Outside the white-bubble-pavilion time seems to flow slower. People lie on the grass relaxing, having a coffee or eating their lunch in the precious autumn sun. A group of young people lied there, outside the pavilion for the whole day. Around them they displayed a couple of notices in search of tickets:

Tickets? Will pay cash $ TICKETS? £££

—

It is interesting now to note how the concept of Obrist’s marathons was for the first time tested and developed in a theater festival. The whole event is in fact a theatrical event. A threshold is established by the presence of the stage. And with the stage it comes the audience. It divides the environment in two distinct spaces: the one for who’s allowed to speak and the one for who has the opportunity to listen. It is not an architectonic space anymore: don’t matter dimensions, materials, nor its functionality. Space is identified, scanned, and defined by the roles that it designates for the ones who are inhabiting it. And to set an event within and around the separation between the stage and the audience is not a neutral choice at all. It makes what will happen on the stage an object of contemplation, an insulated event the spectator is not allowed to touch nor to interact with. The curator performs his role of mediator by handing the content of the event. Spectators, on their side, pay their money and their time to receive the content of this event as it is set up. But it’s necessary to understand what exactly is handed to a spectator who attends a conversation between, to say, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Brian Eno. For the interview, in the very moment it is realized as a live public event, cannot take place than in one only format: the spectacle. The entire life of societies in which modern production conditions prevail announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The images which detached themselves from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of life can no longer be reestablished.27

Debord 1970, ch. I, ¶ 1-2.

Spectacle is in fact the structure that lies below the such events as Obrist’s marathons. A conversation between an international renown curator and famous intellectuals actually is an auratic situation one might want to experience. And to the extent that it relates to those intimate conversations that took place in wunderkammers, it could be such an event that deserves to be represented. As a moment in which knowledge is produced it wants to be shared insofar as this knowledge needs to be public. The curator is here in charge to hand over this content to an audience. A conversation is then staged and displayed which means that it takes place through a mediation device. It won’t be possible to grasp it by direct experience but spectators will approach a representations of a reality they’re not part of. For this reason what happens on the stage is for the audience a content which remains out of reach. The artist is flaunted on the stage and his presence becomes an object of desire. The interviewer is now a representative of the audience body. He will speak for them and will ask the questions everybody in the room would always wanted to ask - if they could. Spectators will not take part in the conversation, they will just assist. And they will identify themselves with an experience that is performed by somebody else. The construction of situations begins on the other side of the modern collapse of the idea of the theater. It is easy to see to what extent the very principle of the theater — nonintervention — is attached to the alienation of the old world. [...] The situation is thus made to be lived by its constructors. The role of the “public,” if not passive at least a walk-on, must ever diminish, while the share of those who cannot be called actors but, in a new meaning of the term, “livers,” will increase.28

— In the same moment Ian Wilson brought on his researches, another conceptual artist, Lee Lozano, came out with a work that involved oral communication as well. In 1969 she started Dialogue Piece. The instruction for this piece are very simple: 28 Guy Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency (1957), in Debord 2002, pp. 29-50: 47.

CALL (OR WRITE/SPEAK TO) PEOPLE FOR THE SPECIFIC PURPOSE OF INVITING THEM TO YR LOFT FOR A DIALOGUE. IN PROCESS FOR THE REST OF ‘LIFE’. [printed in the notebook’s margin] NOTE: DEFINITION OF ‘DIALOGUE’ REMAINS OPEN. VERBALL GIVES SOME INDICATION.29

Lee Lozano undertook a long series of conversation of which she carefully take note. Almost all of them took place in her apartment and anyway, unlike Ian Wilson, she never brought her practice an institutional art space. This project indeed came out from very different premises than Wilson’s. As Lee Lozano wrote on her notebook: “THE PURPOSE OF THIS PIECE IS TO HAVE A DIALOGUE WITH AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE, NOT TO MAKE A PIECE.”30 And in fact, if Ian Wilson led ponderous conversations on very complicated philosophical matters, Lee Lozano used to invite friends for intimate and relaxed dialogues, often accompanied by drugs and alcohol. On 21st of April, date of beginning of the piece, she started to call people inviting them at her place for a conversation. In the following days she called Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, Jasper Johns and Larry Poons. Finally Robert Morris returns her call and they arrange a meeting for the 17th of May, the first of a long series. 38

Moose [Robert Morris] visits, then we go to his crib, turn on and have a great dialogue, that is, a long intense talk without too much tension during which we exchange many ideas.31

As we see from the note she took, the dialogue went on over a very intimate and cozy atmosphere. The dialogue with Robert Morris was followed by many others with various people mostly from the art world. But not only: Lee Lozano also met Hugo, the cat of her neighbours,32 and a group of eighteen children33 as well as any other visitor who 29 Lozano 1998, p. 13. The book is available for download at antinomianpress.org (as found on March 21st 2012). 30

Ibidem.

31 Ibidem. 32 “Start dialogue with Hugo the Cat, who will live here for a while while his owners (neighbors Bill & Charlotte Sayler) are out of town. He mauls my arm as a start but the dialogue progress- es slightly to a good fighting dialogue. One wkend is all I can take with Hugo.” Ibidem, p. 16. 33 “Finally a group dialogue, Gary Bower brings kids from Arts Resources Center of Whitney Mus. for a terrific experience for me. About 18 kids. Talk mostly to a boy* who’s going back to his farm in Mich.,

visited her just for the purpose of having a conversation. She indeed took note of any dialogue she had; she took note of the ones organized specifically for the piece, but she also included in it the “spontaneous” ones that she just happened to have.34 Actually Lee Lozano tried to got in contact with Ian Wilson too, but the result of their conversation showed the distance between their approaches. Ian Wilson returns call. After a very unpleasant conversation he refuses to visit. I suggest taking a walk, he refuses and can’t wait to get off phone. The conversation yielded an enormous amount of information, in spite of his being adamant about not believing in ‘passing information’, and some of his questions forced me to think more about what I am doing. He put his ideas into art mag jargon: ‘Are you setting up an environment?’ He said something about the first ‘conversation’ we had (abt a yr ago , at Longview, thru Lucy’s suggesting that he talk to me), that it made him vomit, or something we talked about concerning art mags which I don’t recall. I must now decide what to ‘do’. Note: Mention inviting an animal to I.W. during this call.35

Apart from being both concerned with the verbal, Lee Lozano and Ian Wilson actually were very far from each other. While Ian Wilson’s conversations were arranged in a gallery space and conceived as proper pieces, Lee Lozano just used a piece as an occasion to make visible a process already going on. One of the first notes she took about her piece was indeed: “SO FAR THE PEOPLE CALLED ARE THOSE WITH WHOM A DIALOGUE HAS ALREADY BEEN STARTED IN THE ‘PAST’, A DIALOGUE WHICH MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO ‘PURSUE’.”36 To set her dialogues outside official art space or institutions comes as a choice consistent with the idea of doing a piece made up with live experience. What follows is the creation of a parallel art system that goes on beyond the galleries’ wall. And indeed many relevant names from the New York art scene of those days were listed among invited people. Set up in a private context and withdrawn from public display, Dialogue Piece’s said he’s the only one who’s not staying in N.Y.C. of his group. Said mine of all their symposiums so far was most ‘disorderly’, the least ‘strict’. *Bill Goers.” Ibidem, pp. 18-19. 34 “Larry Stafford who is in bldg to visit Ray Siemanowski knocks on my door & we have spontaneous dialogue, much abt gallery & dealer pitfalls.” Ibidem, p. 15. 35 Ibidem, p. 14. 36 Ibidem, p. 13.

existence seems to be granted just because it was accurately noted down on Lee Lozano’s notebook. Otherwise it would have melted with her own life. Here conversations don’t take place in a theatrical form at all. There’s no stage nor they took place in a theatrical context. Conversations move from an institutional context to a private one and each dialogue doesn’t have any predetermined starting point nor it has any desired or pursued aim. This openness loosen the situation allowing many different results. Each of these situations was open to every kind of diversion, influenced and driven by all kind of contingencies that may have occurred. This fertile uncertainty could lead to stupid situation e.g. Richard Serra has an attack because he’s too stoned37 - as well as to relevant outcomes. On 30th of May 1969, Lee Lozano wrote on her notebook: “Dan Graham & I have important dialogue in that definite changes were immediately effected because of it.”38 Dialogues that took place within her piece seem here to be a research tool effective on a broader extent than the dialogue itself. Lee Lozano’s Dialogue Piece is way further from the theatrical format of Obrist’s marathons. Although the concept of her work remains very different from Obrist’s one, the comparison between these two types of situation highlights a major difference. Trough this difference a significative switch occurs. It is the switch from the spectacle to the situation as pointed out by Guy Debord. The concept of an audience who attends to a public talk move into that of a participant who contributes to create his own situation. There are no distinctions between passive and active participants, no fixed roles. Communication slows down for there’s no schedule and involved people starts to wander with no directions, drifted away by the movement of contingencies.

— In 2006 Hans Ulrich Obrist, together with Markus Miessen, co-founded the Brutally Early Club (BEC),39 a club for early birds who use to gather around 6:30 am in a coffee shop. The club is conceived as a XXI 37 “Serra comes over a little high on beer & no food. Just into a dialogue with him ( we’ve been smoking Saret’s hash) when he gets an attack (too stoned), falls off chair to floor with a crash, has “convulsions” & passes out. later he feels sick, lies down on bed until Saret comes over.” Ibidem, p. 15. 38 39

Ibidem. brutallyearlyclub.org (as found on March 21st 2012).

century salon where artists, architects, scientists can meet for an early morning conversation. BEC, started in London and then moved also to Berlin, New York and Paris, was founded due to the necessity of a platform where people could meet within a modern busy way of life. When everybody has a busy schedule and it becomes very difficult to improvise a meeting with a few people, a Starbuck’s coffee shop at 6:30 in the morning could become the perfect set for a meeting over an easy conversation. And it doesn’t even need to be planned weeks and weeks in advance. ‘HEC/BEC is a salon for our times.’ ‘HEC starts at 3am, grey-zone between the end of one day and the start of the next. BEC start at 6.30am, just before the new waking day begins.’ ‘HEC/BEC takes place in a central, public an easily accessible location … Perambulation is good for conversation.’ ‘HEC/BEC is about conversation.’ ‘HEC/BEC is polyphonic. Several conversations may occur at once. There is no moderator neither pre-advanced themes.’ ‘HEC/BEC believes there must be a time and a place where conversation is not measured by the cultural, commercial or institutional value of the output. HEC/BEC therefore does not permit audiences, recordings or transcripts. HEC/BEC however does like notes and doodles during sessions.’ ‘HEC/BEC has introduced the word “ever” as its customary greeting and farewell.’40

The concept of a XXI century salon somehow recalls the openness of Lee Lozano’s dialogues. BEC discards any theatrical feature and move towards the form of a live experience. Despite the interviews and the marathons, here the conversation hasn’t any determined track to follow nor fixed roles of participants. Each of them affect the situation and in his turn is affected by it. Moreover the practice of encounter is brought back to its primary meaning for the gathering of people has no further aims than to take place in itself. For these reasons here a major difference occurs. When spectators blurs into constructors of the situation, what does the curator become? He’s not a mediator anymore 40 Manifesto Marathon, 19th October 2008. serpentinegallery.org/2008/06/park_nights_manifesto_ marathon_2.html (as found on March 21st 2012).

for there’s no audience to mediate for; also the content to be mediated disappear for it is directly brought and experienced by participants. The scheme of a curator that hands a content to an audience here’s not valid anymore. The curator is not in charge of mediating a content, instead he’s the proposer of a practice. Namely he’s in charge for creating a frame, for setting up a context, for organizing a meeting and for triggering reactions. His role is much more related to a process of catalysis than to mediation. And from this point of view the practice of encounter becomes a medium in itself. Ce que le spectacle a pris à la réalité, il faut le lui reprendre. Les expropriateurs spectaculaires doivent être à leur tour expropriés. Le monde est déjà filmé. Il s’agit maintenant de le transformer.41

—

In 2008 A Prior Magazine invited Nico Dockx, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Anton Vidokle as editors in charge to realize a new issue. The three artists proposed a shift in the format of the magazine: for all the previous issues it used to be a paper journal that the invited artist/editor could treat as an exhibition site. Dockx, Tiravanija and Vidockle, along with their artistic practice, decided that the invited contributors of the magazine were not supposed to write an essay or an article. Instead, they were invited for a meeting, divided in six sessions, that took place from the 26th to the 28th of June 2008, in a Chinatown storefront on Essex Street, in New York. Further two sessions took place on 10th and 11th of October, in Brussels. Invited guests included Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Lawrence Weiner, Raqs Media Collective and Maria Lind, “plus other known and unknown contributors from a free-floating public.”42 Tiravanija - who presented himself as a cook43 - provided food for the participants. The magazine’s issue was created “on the spot, in person and with a public.”44 The on-paper publication consists of the transcripts 41 The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, 88 min., France, 1973. 42 From New York Conversations, by Anton Vidokle, 16mm film transfer to DV, sound, 1h06m, e-flux films, 2010. 43 44

Ibidem. Ibidem.

of The New York Conversations. The event was open to the public and mostly improvised: no topics were defined for the discussion, editors moderated only when needed, and conversation freely flew, as usually conversations do, in many direction. With no fixed spatiality, no schedules, no rules. During a free conversation an energy constantly pushes the original conditions toward the unexpected that is, to say, a new outcome that didn’t exist before. The result was produced by the unpredictable interactions occurring between contingencies and the free will of participants. Participants were just invited to follow a bunch of simple rules borrowed by early modern art of conversation: Participants and visitors are advised to respect the following rules *: - It is necessary to listen to others if one wants to have their attention - Above all things and upon all occasions, avoid speaking of yourself - Being over confident and peremptory does very much unfit men for conversation - Avoid too excessive pedantic or technical speech (like direct interrogation, the use of imperatives and short answers such as ‘Yes’ and above all ‘No’) - Adapt your conversation to the people you are conversing with - Honourable people must never use a low word in their speech - Subjects to avoid for men: ‘hunting, hawking and the War of the Netherlands; for women: fashionable clothes and housewifery. In general avoid talking about one’s children, telling one’s dreams or boasting of one’s nobility or riches. - It is a great fault to be too fond of keeping silent - don’t talk when you eat, it makes people think you are not enjoying the food - It is better to be a men of few words than a ciarlatore - No one speaks to the king during his public meals unless he addresses him first And of course: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent45

After the publication of the A Prior issue, in 2009 Anton Vidokle realized a film as a documentation of the event. New York Conversations is a 45 “* see Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation in Early Modern Europe, 1993” e-flux archive, June 19th, 2008 (as found on March 21st 2012).

16mm film shot during the event. The film, as a complementary addition to the sessions, is both an attempt to represent the atmosphere of the event and an account of discussed topics. Along with black and white images of the situation, the cooking session, the streets of the Lower East Side in New York, fragments of speech appear written on the screen, building a new narrative flow of the conversation.

The sessions organized for New York Conversations highlight an interesting contact point between two different concepts of structured situations. On one hand they could be conceived as means of production of a further result that will be sold, staged or displayed. This is the way Obrist’s interviews work. Both in written form and performed live, they’re based on the idea of gathering information from the interviewed in order to hand them to a public. A separation between actor and spectator is produced. On the other hand - and this might also be the case of BEC - the situation is created with no other aims than to take place. Participants are in charge to create and to experience it as well. In this case the separation between actors or spectators falls apart leaving the scene peopled just with “livers”, as Debord defined them.46 During the sessions of the New York Conversations this double side of the situation came out with the idea of not editing the sessions into a printed issue of A Prior. If a printed magazine wasn’t produced, the issue would have consisted just of the conversation itself as it was going on. Monika Szewczyk: [...] What if there comes no text after this? What if we are already writing the text? Has the text already been written? Or is the text in the future? Dieter Roelstraete: ...and who wants to re-read what he said? Monika Szewczyk: Yes, really, do we really want to re-read this again and edit it? I am curious. Martha Rosler: Who is we? Monika Szewczyk: All of us. When we first met up, it was a serious possibility that there would be no text after this. There was even a question that the magazine might never materialize. What if this is the materialization of the magazine? A Prior 18, here you are!47 46 47

See note 28. APM#18 2009, p. 123.

The idea of not producing a printed issue of the magazine would have shifted the event from the concept of a displayed situation toward a lived one. However a paper issue was realized and New York Conversations resulted in a two-headed project. The one head was created and experienced by its participants. The other one, the public representation of the project, exists for the advantage of those who didn’t shared the time and space of the event - for those who wasn’t present the paper issue of A Prior and the film by Anton Vidokle are produced. Their function is to extend the existence of the situation over its own boundaries in time and space. The heading image chosen for the e-flux announcement48 of the film’s release is a still image from the film with a sentence pronounced by Lawrence Weiner during the sessions: Every time you make a work and make it public, put it in the world, it’s supposed to change the world in such a way that your previous conception of the way the world was isn’t supposed to be the same. [...] I don’t get this long conversations, when we are actually supposed to be making art, trying to change things.49

Lawrence Weiner’s background may be slightly different than many other participants’ one. The point he stresses here is essential though. The choice of the Weiner’s statement for the e-flux announcement, even if ironically, raises a question that shouldn’t be underestimated. “How is such an event able to affect people?” From the moment that a paper issue of the magazine was published and a film was made, the text produced during the sessions and the ideas that it contains become public. Thus anybody can read it and make of it whatever he prefers. Ideas circulate. This is of course one of the possible way to produce a difference. To release a magazine issue, a film or the recoding of a conversation actually introduce in the world something that didn’t exist before, producing a difference. However it produces a difference between, so to speak, the actors and the spectators. Between those who sell a commodity good and those who buy it. Between those who speak and those who listen. Between those who produce ideas and those who consume them. Between those who conceive and own the 48 49

e-flux archive, June 3rd, 2010 (as found on March 21st 2012). APM#18 2009, pp. 152-153.

conceptual means of production, and those who are allowed to borrow them. Between those those who are named and those who remain anonymous. (In the printed issue of A Prior, as well as in the film by Anton Vidokle, some of the contribution remains anonymous. While speeches made by invited guests are identified by their own name, contributions made by the so-called “free-floating public” are labeled as “from the audience:” This actually created a difference in the modality of participation.) Anyway Lawrence Weiner’s statement reflect one specific point of view. The idea of making a work, putting it in the world and making it public is not the only possibility to conceive modes for public action. To act within a cultural scene first of all means to produce an effect on that environment. The idea according to which it means to produce or to be part of something that will be preserved for the future generations is a naive and complacent concept of cultural engagement. Whether it is an object in the vitrines of a museum, a documentation of ephemeral artworks or an archive of witnesses. A little story is worth mentioning here. It was told by Francesco Pedraglio during the presentation of a project called The Time Machine.50 50

A wise man decides to walk all around the world to meet other wise men to ask them a simple question: “Could you tell me something, part of your knowledge, that really deserves to be passed on?” Since he was really concerned about passing on something to other people, he decided to undertake this mission. Obviously all the answers he got, traveling from one wise man to the other, were quite disappointing. No matter how many he people he met, he couldn’t find the right answer to his question. Until he got in front of the Sphinx and its thousand-year wisdom. “Sphinx,” he said “tell me something that really deserves to be passed on to the human kind” The Sphinx, which didn’t say a word for thousands years, finally opened its mouth and said: “Well, don’t expect too much” 50 “The time machine, is a project selected and edited by Francesco Pedraglio from open submission that asks us to forget about archives and embrace the confusion of the present, in order to consciously experiment with all our imaginable histories and expected futures.” From the press release of the event. Commissioned by Francesco Pedraglio, Book Works, January 17th 2012.

One possible perspective is to consider New York Conversations as a series of texts produced within a specific situation and then delivered to a broader audience. But next to the idea of making a work, putting it in the world and making it public there’s another possibility. New York Conversations can be also considered as the experimentation of a practice aimed at prompting an attitude. In other words, instead of handing a series of texts through a publication, we could recognize in the live act of provoking those reflections the main goal of the project.

— Being live indicates an existence in the moment: an endurance that takes place both in time and, strangely, also out of time. This is liveness’ wonderful contradiction: how it gestures to occasions that can never be fully known, disrupting the recorded and disfiguring all the representational apparatuses that would appear to order our present cultural conditions. Being live signals movements without endings, gestures without acting, and perhaps most important of all it produces an ethos that cannot find solace in any complacent morality.51

— The New York Conversations project obviously was not the first attempt to produce a publication through the construction of a social situation. An intimate encounter has often been the starting point of Clémentine Deliss’ curatorial practice. “I firmly believe that different curators support different phases in the production of a work. Some curators are good when a work is finished. I’m at my best when a work is just starting.”52

Clémentine Deliss is a curator, publisher and researcher based in Frankfurt. She gained a PhD in in philosophy (on eroticism and exoticism in French anthropology of the 1920s). Besides some 51 Andrew Quick, in Live Culture 2003, p. 43. 52 Clémentine Deliss in The museum laboratory as transducer. A conversation with Thomas Bayrle, in Object Atlas 2012.

exhibitions she realized in at the beginning of the 1990s53 and the directorship of africa95,54 in 1996 she conceived Metronome, an itinerant writers’ and artists’ organ, and published, until 2007, all the twelve issues. She has been guest professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (19992000) and director of Future Academy at the Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Edinburgh. From 2010 she has been the director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt.

Metronome is a peculiar publication first of all for the way it was conceived and distributed. The publication, designed as an “artist to artist” organ, wasn’t conceived to be distributed to a wide public. Each of the contributors used to receive many copies so that they could distribute them within their personal network. Further copies were distributed by mail or sold through the website. Clémentine uses to carry the books with her distributing them to the people she works with. Thus the publication could hit the specific target reader it was produced for. If Metronome’s issues were sold through public libraries all over the world and all the copies were gone as it was released, right now Metronome couldn’t continue to achieve the task it was created for. Metronome’s structure reflects quite well the structure of Clémentine Deliss’ curatorial practice: “I decided that as a curator I could limit my field and say that I would be an ‘artist to artist’ curator and not an ‘artist to public’ curator on a broader scale.”55 This idea of the “artist to artist” curator is essential to understand how the fourth issue of Metronome was realized. The first three issues (No.0, No.1, No.2) were produced in Dakar, London and Berlin, and listed, among their contributors, Joshua Compston, Paul Virilio, Tracey Emin, Carl Freedman, Gary Hume, Issa Samb, Carsten Nicolai and Slavoj Zizek. The third issue was produced in Basel. Invited by the director of Basel Kunsthalle, Clémentine Deliss decided not to organize a big international show. Instead she put together a list of many different people, as it could be for the previous issues of Metronome, for a private event behind closed doors. Among 53 Lotte or the Transformation of the Object (Steirischer Herbst, Graz 1990, Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, 1991), Exotic Europeans (National Touring Exhibitions, Hayward Gallery, London), Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Whitechapel Gallery, 1995; Konsthalle Malmo 1996). 54 From 1992 to 1995. 55 Deliss 2002. The text can be found online at worldofart.org/english/0001/tekst_clementine_ang. htm (as found on 10th March 2012).

the thirty-nine participants Tempolabor listed Charles Esche, Olaf Nicolai, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Tobias Rehberger. The event, instead of being projected for wide public, was aimed at affecting the participators on a deeper professional level. So Metronome No.3 was named Tempolabor. A libertine laboratory? Libertinage threaded a path toward the exploration of a different intellectual attitude in order “to take into account various factors, such as the speed of communication across boundaries, the value of personal experience and the need for physical displacement.”56 Thus Metronome could act as a research facility rather than just a mouthpiece of invited participants. The traditional structure of a publication here is restyled into a more complex device. Creative forces and procedures divert from the vector that points from cultural producers towards the public. Relations between all the participants tangle up, during the four-day private enclosure, over multiple registers. As an all-encompassing creative methodology is developed through libertine social procedures, the structure of the laboratory is allowed to involve several layers: the linguistic one, as well as the visual, the verbal, the social, the tactile, the erotic ones.57 The sessions took place in the Kaskadenkondensator, an independent art space in Basel.58 The place was carefully suited to host the meeting in a comfortable atmosphere. It was equipped with “sofas, two-seater in brocade, six-seaters in black leather; [...] a table so large you can just shake a hand opposite; covered in blank newspaper, changed everyday; a bar filled with drinks, coffee; music plays from a small walkman; two microphones picking up sound from the table and sofas; the walls lined with all forms of documentation, newspapers cuttings, quotations from guests, the Marquis de Sade, Crébillon fils, Edouard Glissant, a ‘jungle’ [...] of images and information from Los Angeles, Chicago, Dakar, Edinburgh, Bombay, Sarajevo, Skopje, Geneva, Zurich and Basel.”59 The discussion didn’t have any planned direction. Although Clémentine could act as a moderator - and partly did it every participant was asked to write something that could become an input for the conversation to start. The discussion could then freely 56 Clémentine Deliss, Editorial, in Tempolabor 1998, p. 10. 57 “This research - in its early form - gave me a clue on how to structure the Tempolabor, an introduce, if possible, a certain philosophical eroticism into the sessions, encouraging the guests to work with raw and unfinished ideas rather than rely on existing problematics.” Ibidem. 58 Ibidem, p. 12. 59 Tempolabor, act I, scene 1, in Tempolabor 1998, p. 124.

flow wherever it happened to go. During the four-day laboratory the conversation touched many topics: from personal projects to art institutions, from political to philosophical matters; it included slide and video screening; people took notes and drew. The situation wasn’t limited to scheduled time and space. It continued in different moments and places, during lunches, dinners, drinking or dancing. Eventually, after the Tempolabor laboratory, sixteen hours of audio material from the taped session were left. The issue of Metronome that was produced included these recordings transcribed in a peculiar form. Clémentine Deliss was concerned with editing it “in such a way that it would not betray the system that we had been operating within”60. So she decided to adopt the form of the drama. The discussion that took place during the laboratory was cut and transcribed in five acts - each one divided in scenes; the guests were listed as the cast; non-linguistic events described by stage directions. In other words, you have an edited version of what was said, but in addition you have all the movements and all the asides, the whole play being divided into acts and scenes. As you progress through the different scenarios, you begin to understand what the issues might be, couched in a different form of expression. [...] It is so difficult to put across what happens when more than a few people meet and do something. All these were indices that came through in a very soft and modest manner, and I think that the modesty element was very important.61

As well as New York conversations, Tempolabor is a two-headed project too. The choice to translate the sessions into a theatrical format reflects the double nature of the project. Conceived as a live event, it also took the form of a printed publication - the public face of a private event. Here the choice of shaping the discussion into a script acquire a relevant meaning. Tempolabor was projected to be a research moment, a platform designed for meeting, discussion and confrontation among professionals. When asked about why she decided to do it this way, Clémentine replied: “Because I didn’t want to do an exhibition.” And indeed, despite a conventional exhibition, Tempolabor achieved the 60 61

Deliss 2002. Ibidem.

ambition to trigger an active response to the work of invited guests. When it comes to the point of being translated into a printed issue of Metronome, the choice of translating it into a theatrical format becomes a meaningful step. Whereas one cannot translate the richness of a live situation, it’s always possible to highlight the lack that comes from translating it into a fixed shape. The script can do it, for it is the form of a mutilated writing. Its form, although fixed, always fail to its own completion. A script is the way written words ask to be staged. In its written form, the script always points out what it lacks - contingencies of mise-en-scène, movement, management of time, consciousness of space, one or several voices, presence of the body. Insofar as it exist as an incomplete work, its form express the urge to be performed live. Despite the New York Conversations’ transcript, which is uncut and minimally edited,62 Tempolabor has been transcribed as a libertine dramaturgy where stage directions act as patches on the void that the script leaves all around the spoken dialogue. Between the lines of a script, what has been later formalized into a fiction plot, still clings to what it used to be: a live event in a quest for the design of a less reassuring ethos. A few years after Tempolabor, Metronome No.7 was produced. It was called The Bastard and it was centered around Magnetic Speech seminars that took place in Oslo, Bergen, Malmö, Copenhagen and Edinburgh. Organized as an itinerant seminar, it travelled around Scandinavia involving students from several art academies. The name came from a discussion that took place in Dakar, where “la parole magnétique” or “magnetic speech” was mentioned: “an act of speech that is irretrievable, that fires out of a person’s mouth and clings to another person like a magnet, with a seductive pull of energy sucking one closer as soon as one enters its field.”63 The seminars wanted to inquire about intimacy, verbal seduction and communication across language barriers. The object of the investigation gave the chance to bring on the research on an intimate and convivial level. This also required the environment to be made comfortable with sofas, easy chairs and a coffee table. The cosy atmosphere breaks in - again - as part of the language used to organize the seminar. Intimacy emerges as 62 Anders Kreuger, Els Roelandts, Monika Szewczyk, Whereof One Cannot Speak, in APM#18 2009, p. 7. 63 Clémentine Deliss, Magnetic Speech, in The Bastard 2001, p. 14.

the research field while speech procedures are decentered in order to conjure the object of the investigation. By concentrating on conversational interaction and on live speech in the moment of its enunciation, all the misunderstandings within translation, rhetorical devices, and indeterminacies of interpretation came together to provide the choreography of our debate - the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’.64

The issue of Metronome No.7 is composed by an audio CD with the sound pieces produced during the seminars and the 248-pages book with some text from the CD and other intervention by invited contributors. Among them: Luca Frei, William Furlong, Liam Gillick;, Bjarne Melgaard, Samon Takahashi.

—

What comes out from the methodology developed for the realization of Metronome is a curatorial practice aimed at enhancing the intimacy of relationships. In search for a more radical curatorial approach, it leads to the abandonment of some structures, widely diffused in contemporary art practice, which we may define as “democratic”. First of all Metronome wasn’t meant to provide an interpretation or explanation of artist’s work. Its aim wasn’t in fact to foster or spread the understanding of involved artists among an undifferentiated public. Metronome was rather conceived as a node for a new network to grow. Due to this reason its distribution travelled on a peculiar channel. Since it wasn’t available in bookshops for anyone who wanted to buy it, distribution used to go along with the network the organ itself was able to build, in order to hit with a higher precision the target it was designed for. There were no pretentions in doing Metronome of providing a regular journal or magazine, and therefore no editorial board to bolster recognition and induce democratic negotiations, and no commercial distribution. I was not interested in explaining things, where the contributors came from, what had they been doing, what type of art it was and all of these pedagogical systems and I did not have to 64

Ibidem.

negotiate anything with anybody other than the contributor.65

Although designed as a platform for discussion, Metronome wasn’t supposed to be an inclusive one. This becomes even more important when it resulted in a practice for encounter. The Tempolabor laboratory, although produced by Basel Kunsthalle, a public institution, mostly took place behind closed doors.66 Here conversational and social practices aren’t supposed to be adopted in order to involve an undistinguished “everybody”.67 Instead, intimacy allows the one who are actually participating to fully take part to the situation. No divisions between participants are introduced. And this namely means not only that everyone who is participating has an equal role in defining the content of the event; each participant has in fact to be allowed also to shape the event for what concerns the frame it takes place in. In other words, intimacy here act as a concept for which participants abandon the role of “disposable spectator” to acquire a full autonomous identity. La communication n’est pas de tout comprendre mais de comprendre ce que l’autre e ce qu’on est en rapport avec l’autre68

For a social situation to be effective, encounter between people must take into account relationship not only as a generic frame for a discourse to take place. Social relationship are instead to be meant as a specific context where the practice of encounter is developed in all its complexity.

— From this point of view the choice to arrange an event behind closed 65 Deliss 2002. 66 Although mainly conceived as a private event, within Tempolabor two public moments were actually scheduled. “We had to be a little bit careful; we could not bring all these people over to Basel and really lock them up in a room! I mean, there was an audience that had to be satisfied, and so we made a sandwich of two public moments either side of the private meetings, at the beginning and at the end. But during the three days when we were alone, we were really alone.” Ibidem. 67 Whose speech is represented, in New York Conversations, by the definition of “From the audience:”. See p. 50. 68 Clémentine Deliss & Samon Takahashi, Le Bâtard: Metronome+Elastica, in The Bastard 2001, p. 132. As it is easy to understand from the structure of the whole text, the quoted sentence is to be ascribed to Samon Takahashi.

doors acquire a different value. Far from being meant as a limitation of its circulation among a broader public, it appears as a solution to trigger the intimacy that is needed to embrace the moment of encounter in all its registers. This step is quite essential when considering the potential of the curatorial when a work is just starting instead than when it’s finished.69 Beyond the publication of Metronome issues, since 2006 Metronome Press started the activity of the Office For First Intentions (OFI). OFI was Based in Belleville, in Paris, and it was conceived “on the model of a halfway house or maison de passe”.70 Its aim was to act as a junction between the moment of production and the one of display. Its structure was meant to support the development of new works aside both from the privacy of the studio or the office and from the public of a museum or a cinema. This setting allowed the discussion and the sharing of ongoing researches or projects among a group of professionals in order to encourage multiple and different perspectives to emerge from the participants. According to the different situations, different guests could be invited to participate next to a fixed group of participants: “The members involved in these sessions are Clémentine Deliss, Thomas Boutoux and the sociologist and writer, Boris Gobille. However, this membership can expand in order to achieve the necessary conditions for the analysis of a specific first intention.”71 Sessions took place behind closed doors and were open only by invitation or recommendation.

— Unlike the other mentioned project curated by Clémentine Deliss, OFI wasn’t supposed to be followed by the release of any public material. The only way its sessions could produce any effect or interest among the public was by the consequence that the debate could produce on the work that was discussed. In other words OFI created the conditions for a private conversation to affect the creation of an artwork before it went public. From this point of view the curator withdraw from a public dimension to join a different function. His role of mediator is abandoned in order to focus his energy on the creation of favourable conditions for 69 70 71

See note 52. metronomepress.com/ofi.html (as found on March 21st 2012)

Ibidem.

artworks to be created. And if on one hand the intimacy of a situation has a crucial importance on this task, on the other there’s no need for the situation itself to go public at all. For the curator is here in charge of fostering and managing a prelusive moment. As with prelude or prelusion, prelusive denotes the object or experience that triggers a principal event, action, or performance. Often associated with composition and structure, the prelusive phase is the instance of anticipatory and transformative thinking that can lead to the early shaping of ideas and the subsequent creation of a new body of work.72

Whereas the curator steps aside from a public working environment, he can enjoy the shelter of a prelusive moment. The indeterminacy of an ever-open-ended practice traces a path towards the freedom of a situation that can evolve into infinite possibilities - the freedom to become everything; to disappear into nothing; to wallow into an unheard heresy; to establish unheeded orthodoxies; to be wrong; to not feel guilty; to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor. Intimacy, as an act of freedom that leads to the unknown, enables to question one’s own established knowledge. An action that takes place within the intimacy of this kind of prelude acquire an utterly different meaning. In this context the action of the curator takes the form of a catalysis insofar as it creates the condition for things to happen (creating of a network, enriching the conceptual frame, shifting viewpoints, providing protection necessary to experiment, producing a narrative for research, supporting, fostering, and strengthening ideas). Despite a traditional curatorial practice, which provide a conceptual and practical arrangement for what is already accomplished, such a curatorial approach achieves its task through the irregular, non-methodic, haphazard aspects of the research process.

— Born in 1970, Joshua Compston became a preeminent figure that acted as a catalyst within the East London art scene during the first half of the 1990s. In 1991, before graduating at the Courtauld Institute, he 72

Deliss 2011, p. 10.

worked on the project of a Courtauld Loan Collection with the purpose of exhibiting contemporary artworks in the seminar rooms of the school. Although the project was opposed by the institute, he managed to arrange a show which included artworks by his friends Gilbert and George together with the then-up-coming artists Ian Davenport, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and Fiona Rae.73 The press release of the event explained the reason for the necessity of such a show: This evening’s private viewing of the first Courtauld Loan Collection is primarily the result of a horror vacua experienced more than a year ago when faced with seminar rooms of such bareness, that the eye and mind revolted [...] I therefore decided, by hook or by crook, to find some contemporary art to destroy all vestiges of such nudity, and by this act restore to its rightful position art in everyday surroundings.74

The next exhibition Joshua Compston Curated was Abstraction from Domestic Suburb Scene (Sin), which he realized in 1992. It gathered work from london art students or recent graduate “who make work that is directly engendered by, or metaphorically linked through allusion to, the domestic/Kitsch capitalist reality of the last thirty years.”75 Together with artworks he displayed commercial objects that he distinguished from artworks by a fluorescent label with the slogan “NOT ART NOT APPROPRIATION”.76 As soon as he graduated, in 1992 Joshua Compston started Factual Nonsense (FN) at 44a Charlotte Road, in Shoreditch, London. Conceived and structured not only as a commercial gallery, FN lined up many of the artists that hung around the then burgeoning East End art scene. The list is very long and includes: Adam Chodzko, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Angus Fairhurst, Tracy Emin, Leigh Bowery, Cerith Wyn Evans, Liam Gillick, Blast Theory, Iain Forsyth, Renato Niemis. Among huge financial difficulties, FN continued its activities for the four years that go from 1992 to 1995. Joshua Compston, who leaded his life in absolute poverty, “lived illegally in the office section of the gallery, at night mounting a ladder to sleep on a rug bed concealed on top of his picture 73 74 75 76

Cooper 2000, p. 219. From the Courtauld Loan Exhibition invitation card. In ibidem, p. 31. From the private view broadsheet. In ibidem, p. 45. Ibidem, p. 45, 47.

store, with neither showering nor cooking facilities.”77 The task that FN was supposed to achieve could be partly made clear by the business plan that Compston presented to his potential sponsors. Factual Nonsense’s operators and associates are confident it can achieve the following: 1 To be a forum for all elements disenchanted with the laxity and ennui of current thinking. 2 To act as a platform for musical experimentation, theatrical expression, and as a site for the promotion of manifestos, poetry, and other forms of literature through public readings. 3 To act as a commissioning body for a number of significant bodies of work which will address themselves to an audience way beyond the usual gallery-goer.78

In March 1996 Joshua Compston died, at the age of 25, of an ether overdose. After his death FN finished its existence.

— Saturnalia was an ancient festival celebrated by ancient romans. Described by the roman poet Catullus as “the best of days”,79 it was held in honour of Saturn, the god who ruled the world during the Golden Age, when mankind enjoyed without labor the fruits of the earth in a state of social egalitarianism. This holiday used to reenact this mythical moment suspending all forms of work and social distinctions. Schools were closed, no justice was administered and, after a religious ritual, a public banquet was followed. Strongly characterized by role reversals and behavioral license, Saturnalia used to be the moment when slaves were considered as free men, could dine together with their masters or being served by them. During Saturnalia both slaves and freedmen use to wear the pilleus, a conical felt cap that used to distinguish freedman. Slaves were also allowed to have outrageous behaviours towards their master without any fear for potential punishments. Saturnalia in fact marked the time for free speech, described by the poet Horace as 77 78 79

Ibidem, p. 78. Joshua Compston, The Business Plan foe Factual Nonsense, in ibidem, p. 99. “Saturnalibus, optimo dierum!” Catullus, 14.15.

“December liberty”.80 Whereas the myth of the Golden Age can make its return on Earth, it does it just for a limited time. Saturnalia used to last a few days (from December 17th to 23rd) for this December liberty was supposed to cease shortly after it appeared. Social reversals could be tolerated, sure, but just as a temporary phenomenon. The celebration, which could also slide into an orgiastic party, was in fact the moment when to adopt behaviours that wouldn’t have been accepted in everyday life. Insofar as it revoked prohibitions imposed by the social order, the celebration used to allow the emergence of buried drives silently dwelling on social existence. More than a claim for the establishment of a permanent freedom, people used to take a few days off to test and design the practice of freedom within a social encounter. Far from being an actual attempt to change social relationships, Saturnalia used to express a drive, which comes from within society, towards the dissolution of its own social rules.

—

A large and consistent part of FN’s activity was the organization of public events that took place in the street of the Shoreditch area in London. On the 31st July 1993 Joshua Compston organized “the first ever Shoreditch street festival/fête/party/trade fair, normally and naturally known as A Fête Worse Than Death”81 The event didn’t need a very complex structure or organization: dozens of stalls were placed around the crossing of Charlotte Road with Rivington Street and rented for a symbolic price to artist friends. People provided music, food and entertainment while the corner’s pubs, the Bricklayer’s Arms and the Barley Mow, granted an all-day opening. A Fête Worse Than Death started at 2pm and finished at late night. Far from the exclusive atmosphere of West End art gatherings, for one day the streets around FN’s gallery offered a cheerful sight. Tracey Emin played the palmist, telling the future from passersby’s hands; Gavin Turk set up the Bash A Rat game where he gave people the chance to hit a rat made of old socks while it slid through a pipe; Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst hung around dressed as a pair of clowns hiring out their spin-painting - and for 50 pence they showed their striped cocks and dotted balls 80 81

“age libertate Decembri” Horace, Satires 2.7.4. Joshua Compston, Programme of A Fête Worse Than Death, in Cooper 2000, p. 75.

(mindfully mocking Hirst’s paintings); Gary Hume cheered the crowd providing tequila slammers dressed up as a Mexican bandit. The day ended up with lots of people dancing in the streets, Joshua Compston triumphantly acclaimed by the crowd chanting “Long live Joshua!”82 The same attitude that animated FWTD was put in any of FN’s activities. So, in October 1993, Joshua Compston took over the management of a pub - the Barley Mow - and organized Factual Nonsense first ‘party’ conference, “A rolling rock of events designed, tailored, and all dried up (hardly!) to celebrate the paradigm of Factual Nonsense as real life.”83 The five-days event listed a series of situation to be joined: a drinking night with Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas; a pub quiz with Stuart Brisley and Helen Chadwick; a cocktail performance with Leigh Bowery, Angus Fairhurst, and Cerith Wyn Evans; an all-night dancing session in a tent erected just outside the pub.84 In response to the great success of the first edition, in the summer 1994 Joshua Compston organized the second FWTD. The format was reproduced, this time in a bigger scale, in a new location just a few hundred meters from the FN premises. Dozens of artists set up their stall-shows and performed all around and within Hoxton Square. For all the afternoon until after midnight the place was filled with the works by invited artists. As a journalist wrote on The Independent “The event provides a chance for over 50 of, as Compston puts it, ‘the arrived, the arriving, and the grotty obscure’, in the London art, performance and film world to put their own bizarre spin on the traditional English village fete.”85 The subheading chosen for FWTD ‘94, The Hybrid “Pop Culture” Extravaganza, couldn’t be more appropriate. In fact the festival listed all kinds of exhibit: performances by Gavin Turk and Cerith Wyn Evans; Renato Niemis’ works; a Blast Theory’s piece, Invisible Bullets; an Anarchy Hospital; Tracey Emin’s Rodent Roulette - where a volunteer sat on a swivel chair assigned hand-made prizes to participants; a première of Leigh Bowery’s band Minty. At the end of the day, FWTD ‘94 definitely affirmed itself as a huge success, although it was a 82 83 84 85

Ibidem, pp. 75-84. Joshua Compston, from the program of Factual Nonsense first ‘party’ conference, in Ibidem, p. 88. Ibidem, pp. 88-90. The Independent, Friday July 29th, 1994.

financial disaster, with over four thousand people who enjoyed the joyful atmosphere designed by Joshua Compston.86 As the summer 1995 approached FN started planning its next street party. The location, as for the previous FWTD ‘94, was Hoxton Square but this time Joshua Compston could boast the presence of a tv crew in charge to produce a documentary about the event for LWT (London Weekend Television). The event was named The Hanging Picnic and indeed the idea was to play with the semi-private practice of the picnic in the context of contemporary art. While participants could experiment the creative potential of the social practice of picnicking, the artists could exhibit their works which were hung on the railings that enclosed the square. “Under FN’s aegis a committee was formed to discuss the aesthetics of contemporary picnics and to select representative art critics, picture framers, museum directors, collectors, as well as relevant institutions such as the Arts Council and the Henry Moore Foundation, to join the jamboree.”87 The program for The Hanging Picnic enticed people to join such an event. COME AND WAVE TO YOUR FRIENDS AS THE REAL BECOMES IMAGINED! COME AND BE ON TV! FN: NO FUN WITHOUT YOU & FUN CAN SERIOUSLY MAKE YOU FN!88

The Hanging Picnic’s program listed, among exhibiting artists, Helen Chadwick, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Gary Hume, Renato Niemis. But the easygoing mood didn’t prevent even two local policemen on duty from carving out the space for their own participation: by tying no-entry tape between a streetlamp and the railing they created their artwork that they labeled Roped-Off Area. The ludic structure conceived for the event produced a mix between a communal exhibition and a curated picnic. Once the visitors penetrated the railings, which replaced the walls of the white cube, they could join the relaxed situation of a picnic with young artists, people from the neighborhood, art students, 86 87 88

Cooper 2000, pp. 123-134. Ibidem, p. 142.

From the program for The Hanging Picnic. Ibidem

p. 141.

as well as some of Britain’s biggest collectors.89

— Ridiculous denominations like curator, dealer, lover, critic, dustman fall away, there is only the Real.90

This statement, contained in a letter that Joshua Compston wrote to a friend at the beginning of his venture, makes clear the attitude which backed FN’s initiatives. It would be difficult to define Joshua Compston’s figure within one of the traditional roles of the art world. Often remembered as a gallerist or an impresario, he didn’t manage to provide FN the needed financial stability through the events he organized nor thanks to artworks dealing. Strongly rooted in the london art scene, in return, he actually established a center around which a big creative energy revolved. His friendship with many of the artists, who later became famous as YBA, allowed him to develop a solid network among a relevant milieu in 1990s British art. The parties FN organized during those three years resulted in an explosion of that private network in the streets of the Shoreditch area. More than giving to artists a context where to show or perform their works, these events acted as nourishment for a private situation to grow, expand, and debouch into the public dimension of the street. The enterprise to which Compston gave birth performed the role of a gathering point where ideas could raise, evolve, and circulate. The moment of encounter, which is the root of every artistic movement, gained within FN the function of an incubator for further activities. FN concentrated the energy that during avant-garde experimentations revolved around the café. Joshua Compston was quite familiar with that paradigm and indeed it was assumed as a model for the design of FN structure.91 Rather than dealing with artistic representation of reality, the gallery was supposed to be the place where a social reality took place. The concept of a street party acted in fact as an interface between private and public 89 Ibidem, pp. 140-146. 90 From Abstraction from Domestic Suburb Scene (Sin), private view broadsheet, August 13th, 1992, in Ibidem, p. 44.. 91 In the business plan for FN that Joshua Compston wrote in 1993 he stated: “All that it sells, promotes, manufactures or manages must observe the dictates of Modernist idioms; particularly as revealed and manifested between the years circa 1890 and 1940.” In ibidem, p. 24.

spheres. The choice to focus the last FN’s street party around the act of picnicking shows the intention to base a public event upon the private intimacy of encounter. The simple activity of hanging around with friends, deliberately mixed with the format of a street exhibition, determined the design of a practice that better than any exhibition could convey the radical atmosphere that animated the british art context. The experience of personal relationships within the art context was transferred into a social mise-en-scène, to use Clémentine Deliss’ expression, that transformed East London’s face. To consider the importance of Joshua Compston’s activity we need to acknowledge that at the beginning of the 1990s East London was a totally different area from what it is now. Predominantly a working class area, it didn’t use to be a popular destination for the contemporary art public. At the time, “the triangle of Great Eastern Street, Old Street and Shoreditch High Street still enclosed the remnants of its light-industrial past, with printers, plate-makers, button manufacturers and shoe wholesaler replacing the pre-war furniture trade. Many of the buildings were half-empty, planning consent for residential use being at that time difficult to obtain.”92 It was during the first half of the 1990s that some young artists begun to move towards the East End. The Shop by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas,93 and House by Rachel Whiteread94 (both from 1993) are - together with FN - just examples to measure how the area was slowly becoming a centre of interest for the artists of the new generation. Before the gentrification process and the property speculation that hit Shoreditch since 1996, the events that Joshua Compston organized brought the attention of a broad public over this upcoming neighborhood. If the art world used to concentrate over West London area, the great stir generated by these initiatives shifted a great attention towards the East End. The three FN’s street parties defined the identity of an emerging group of artists better than any big collective exhibition could do and, doing so, they consolidated the social fabric of that creative thrust and of the area of London where it came out from. The results achieved by Joshua Compston through FN’s activities contributes to the definition of a specific curatorial practice that approaches the moment of encounter, with a disarming honesty, 92 93 94

Ibidem, pp. 75-78. Located at 103, Bethnal Green Road, London, E2. Located at the corner between Grove Road, and Roman Road, London, E3.

in its very essence. Basically he didn’t do more than inviting his public to enjoy the same social context he dwelt in during his everyday life. Anyway, although as a curatorial practice it might appear rough and shapeless, it contributed to define a different standard insofar as it emerged as a curatorship of social experiences.

— One day, during my researches, I was reading Jeremy Cooper’s No fun without U - Joshua Compston biography - in the Tate Library’s reading room. The library was closing in thirty minutes and a man who was leaving the reading room came to me and asked me: «Are you writing about Joshua Compston?» We start talking and it comes out that the Guy, - Neil Biswas, filmmaker - was in the same school with him. After a few minutes talk in the Tate entrance hall, he leaves me saying: «People have fond memories of him.» Getting home later that night I pass through Shoreditch (Old Street, Shoreditch Church, Shoreditch High Street), the area of FN’s premises, thinking about the conversation I just had with Neil. For as we talked about the street parties organized by FN he told me: «At that time Hoxton was nothing!» Today the area between Shoreditch, Hoxton and Brick Lane is filled with people, bar, clubs, nightlife, lifestyle, lofts, organic food, drinks, drugs, hipsters, crappy design, fashionable designers, galleries, popup shopping mall, vintage clothing, art and shoes. Once pervaded by the energy of a new artistic venture, Shoreditch is now the place where a plastic fun can be bought for a few quid in a fancy post-industrial packaging. The story of FN and the curatorial practice conceived by Joshua Compston are an immanent part of the transformation that occurred to this place, from the nothingness mentioned by Neil to the living portion of city that I witness, as it flow below my eyes, from the upper floor of a double-decker bus.

Conclusions

The subheading I chose for this dissertation is the line that can lead me towards a conclusion of my research. Potential scenarios for the party as an exhibition is what I wanted to put together. If Joshua Compston’s exhibitions found their development through the form of street parties, it is a short way to get to the idea of party as an exhibition. An actual conclusion is not to be written, it’s rather to be done. If the party emerges as one of the most tolerant forms of social interaction, the best conclusion for this dissertation would be to prove it to be the most inclusive structure to shelter a creative process. In other words it means to conceive the party as a curated multifunctional device able to be: a trigger for knowledge production; a support for intimate oral exchange; the structure for a network based on physical displacement; a secret society; an experience machine; the foundation for living schools; the opportunity to experiment disjoined thought; a platform for the development of unimagined epiphanies of the artwork; a coloured vision; the appearance of a collective identity; the occasion for role reversals and behavioral license; a boredom slayer; a meeting of live bibliographies; a backstage for politics; an extravaganza of truth in many forms; a script for an exhibition; a blank check for a violent creative thrust; a bird’s-eye view over social means of production; the occasion for a surprising thought to rise; a spell for a better sight.

Visual Index

pp. 12-13 pp. 18-19 pp. 26-27 pp. 32-33 pp. 38-39 pp. 44-45 pp. 50-53 pp. 60-61 pp. 62-63 pp. 68-69 pp. 70-71 pp. 76-77

Programme for The Hanging Picnic, London, July 1994. Talking statue and speaking tube, from Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, 1650. Programme for Garden Marathon, Serpentine Gallery, London, October 15th-16th 2011 Film still from The Society of Spectacle, by Guy Debord, 1973. Film still from The Society of Spectacle, by Guy Debord, 1973. A Prior Magazine #18, 2009. Metronome No.3. Tempolabor. A libertine laboratory?, 1998. Joshua Compston, FWTD ‘93, London, July 1993. Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst, FWTD ‘93, London, July 1993. Leigh Bowery’s performance with his band Minty, FWTD ‘94, London, July 1994. The Hanging Picnic, London, July 1994. Clémentine Deliss and Joshua Compston during africa’95, London, November 1994. 85

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Acknowledgements: Cesare Pietroiusti; Filipa Ramos; ClĂŠmentine Deliss; Darren Coffield; Neil Biswas; Valerio Del Baglivo; Chiara Costantini.