Performance and fiction
Fiction is the bedrock of theatrical performance and literature, an othering of time and place within the everyday space-time of reality, assuming a difference between ‘the logic of fact and the logic of fiction’(Rancière 2004, p. 35). The structural possibilities of fiction enable the public to experience different kinds of power system. Aesthetic and everyday events, as with historic events, test the transformative ability of fiction to impact reality. The event presents fiction with the possibility of becoming reality. This research project tests the dimensions of fiction within the production of artistic interventions in the seemingly real public space of the city.
The Performance
The historic meeting described above would have seemed an unlikely scenario, had it not been for the real life event that worldwide audiences witnessed with open mouths. If it been a movie, it would surely have been preceded by the familiar disclaimer[i] “The events depicted in this movie are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental” (Davis 1988, p. 457). The real-life meeting in the first week of June 2018 was the culmination of mounting speculation and plot twists. United States President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un finally came face to face in the 5-star resort hotel on the holiday fun-park island of Sentosa off the coast of Singapore[ii] to discuss nuclear disarmament; making history through the first meeting between the leaders of these two nations. As an event informed by truths and untruths, this public performance that straddles a work of fiction and a reality-forming event, presents a complex perspective on the relationship between truth and event, reality and fiction.
From a performance design perspective – in which this event can be analysed as designed performance – the spatial mise-en-scène was notably egalitarian, human in scale as compared the spectacular displays of state frequently presented by the North Korean communist government, and modest in scope compared to the US president’s domestic public addresses. The unmistakable signifiers of stately power – the obligatory red carpet, a meticulous line of flags, the formal symmetry of the presentational space – are subdued in scale and materiality. Rather, the leaders’ faces are centre stage on worldwide media screens, commentators focus on reading subtle signals that the eyes, mouth, hands and body gestures give away; interpreting narratives of dominance and staged camaraderie (Tom McCarthy 2018).
The months leading to this event had been characterised by a rhetoric more befitting pro-wrestling than politics. Donald Trump’s diminutive name-calling of the North Korean leader as ‘Rocket Man’ were met by Kim Jong-un’s ‘dotard’ (Stevens 2018) in escalating personal attacks of macho antagonism. President Trump, whose previous career as a reality television star and sometime guest on televised pro-wrestling (Pearson 2017), is a confident proponent of personal bravado and sensational bite-sized media statements, from “grab them by the pussy” to “you’re fired”. This was punctuated by Trump’s presentation of a short video to Mr Kim, a kitchy utopian promo-clip in the style of movie trailer, featuring both men in lead roles with the US challenging North Korea to ‘show vision and leadership… or not’. This propaganda film, presented to the media in lieu of any coherent policy documents, mixes male heroism with inspirational slogans appealing to popularity and affirmation while advocating “a moment to remake history” (Hains 2018). Peacemaking is a strategy that holds each actor to their defined role, upholding a power relationship, the video presents a paternal US position, bending a knee to advise the North Korean leader to “do the right thing”.
The complex combination of media presence, security, location, live commentary, ceremony and closed door meetings, provided a text-book example of ‘performance’ advocated by theorist Jon McKenzie who establishes the triadic aspects of ‘cultural, organizational and technological’ (McKenzie 2002, p. 153). The human image is amplified globally through technical means (digital media infrastructures) via an organisational performance (the state visit as an operation that commonly takes upwards of a year to plan is pulled together in just a few weeks) and cultural performance (enacted through gesture and language, but also framed by spatial signifiers and the built environment).
The conscious construction of this performance is not lost on the lead characters either. In one of the many media snippets capturing peripheral moments around the meeting, Kim Jong-un is overheard making an of-the-cuff statement to Trump (through his translator) that ‘there are many people who will think of this as a scene from a fantasy, a science-fiction movie' (''A scene from a sci-fi movie': what Kim told Trump about their meeting - video' 2018). The relationship to fiction is vital in maintaining a symbolic order through which new possibilities may arise. American cultural critic and philosopher Steven Shaviro addresses the relationship between science-fiction and reality as ‘emotional and situational, rather than rational and universalizing’ (Shaviro 2016, p. 9), perhaps Kim’s observation is therefore acknowledging the power of fiction to form a complicit moment of shared suspension of disbelief.
Fiction
The peacemaking performance is intentionally informed by structures of fiction in order to affect reality. The public space of global media is complicit with this structural fictional dimension, incorporating a diverse audience to participate in an otherwise diplomatically vague meeting. At the end of the talks a document is signed, but it is neither specific nor politically binding. The narrative is constructed with symbols of the imagination – West vs East, reconciliation of adversaries, the reckoning of opposing forces in a fantastical landscape - inserted into a real-life setting.
The Latin root of fiction, fictio suggests ‘a fashioning or feigning’, which develops in the 15th century into ficcioun ‘that which is invented’. However today it commonly means ‘imaginary events and people’ and is generally associated with language and symbols (literature, film, imagery). The way fiction is referred to has shifted from a dual relationship with truth to a more nuanced understanding. Jacques Rancière puts this down to its becoming an ‘arrangement of signs’ rather than a ‘sequence of actions’. The authority of aesthetics in the romantic age effectively blurred the lines of distinction between ‘the logic of facts and the logic of fiction’ (Rancière 2004, p. 35). While this has significant influence on the construction of literature and by turn history, since the narrator is considered more of a participant in the telling of history rather than a definitive authority, it also enables fiction to enter the realm of images and actions. Fiction infiltrates and informs the domain of politics and art alike through this new ‘arrangement of signs and images’ and ultimately between ‘what is done and what can be done’ (Rancière 2004, p. 39) and thereby how it performs and is performative.
Fiction within literature from a post-modern reading reflects plurality, through what literary theorist Lubomir Doležel labels ‘possible worlds’ theory (Doležel 2010, p. 29). Rather than opposing the fictional realm with the real world (thereby asserting a one-world view point), possible worlds theory responds to the subjectivity and participation of the reader to suggest multiple possibilities. In the realm of art, fiction also enables the link between what is and what can be done. Artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude famously wrapped the German Reichstag building in Berlin entirely in silver cloth in 1995. At the dawn of the new Europe, with the Berlin wall only coming down 6 years earlier, this enormous performance installation was a significant artistic, social and political event. Having negotiated for over 25 years with various governments, the artists were finally able to get permission from the German bureaucracy by agreeing to stringent demands. The fiction-that-became-reality of wrapping the building like a gift, helped hail in a new era for a reunited Germany, overcoming division and political opposition.
Even within the rational sphere of science a plural understanding of the universe frequently depends on the structures of fiction to negotiate the gap between ‘what is done and what can be done.’ Until recently the Higgs Boson particle lay in the realm of fiction as an explanation for an as yet unobserved reality of the forces of nature. The immense effort and resource that went into proving its existence using the CERN Large Hadron Collider – the largest machine in the world that took decades and thousands of scientists, technicians and engineers to build – was testament to the persuasive power that fiction was able to rouse in governments, intellectual scientific communities and the general public.
In both these scientific and artistic examples, performance enables fiction to be transformed into fact, the event effectively heralds a new truth. In order for fiction to affect reality, it must still be determined in relation to truth. Can truth therefore be responsive to fiction yet still uphold factual meaning?
Truth and the event
Hermeneutics philosopher John D. Caputo discusses the historical dimensions of truth in his book, aptly named Truth (Caputo 2013). From a European historical perspective, a holistic truth derived from the authority of God (religion) is progressively replaced by reason (truth), through modernity beginning in the Renaissance and developed through the Age of Enlightenment. Truth in pre-modernity could have been understood as a pursuit rather than a goal, whereas post-Enlightenment truth becomes discernible through observable behaviour (chiefly science) and clearly distinguished between what is and what is not. This separation of body from mind, knowledge from feeling, is how modernity rationally negotiated the world, effectively replacing the authority of God with the authority of scientific reasoning.
From a post-modern perspective however, truth is a more slippery fish, since truth is progressively subjected to a shifting lens of time and cultural perspectives. A prime example is how Isaac Newton’s scientific truth of physics is rewritten 200 years later by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which in turn is overwritten in the mid twentieth century by quantum mechanics. The truth, based on a perspective of time and place, is given context and interpretation rather than being an absolute in itself. Caputo refers to the crowd-sourced online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, as a good example of postmodern truth since it is in a constant state of flux, responding to debate and new evidence as it comes to hand.
In this context the event becomes a key marker for truth. Events and truth have a special relationship with one another. Either truth is upheld by an event, or our understanding of the truth alters to make sense of the event. A significant historical event, such as the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers in New York 2001, for example, re-wrote the truth of the United States’ role as an impartial diplomatic peace-maker.
The event shattered the commonly held belief that the US was beyond reproach. The attacks were disastrously real but they were structured by fictional representations that long preceded the event. In Welcome to the desert of the real!: five essays on September 11 and related dates, philosopher Slavoj Zižek suggests that the imaginative thought not only precedes reality, but ushers it in to existence, since the image (via media spectatorship) is the cultural assimilation of reality. In what Zižek calls the ‘twisted logic of dreams’ he reads the destruction of the twin towers as an image that ‘the image entered and shattered our reality’ (Zizek 2002, p. 16).
Whether the historic peace-brokering of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un’s meeting is constructed simply as an image, or whether it was a genuine attempt at diplomacy, both scenarios depend on the event to interpret an evolving complex truth. How then can we look towards artistic interventions in the city as affecting reality and, through fiction, relating truth to the event?
Affecting reality
If fiction is, as Rancière claims, the ‘material arrangement of signs and images’ (Rancière 2004, p. 38), then the political and the aesthetic are surely inter-related as the author suggests. The historic event impacts reality in a material and symbolic way, but to what extent does the aesthetic or everyday event affect reality and can we claim the same relationship to truth through the terms of fiction arranging signs and images?
Fiction is neither impartial or neutral since it has been created by someone’s imagination. Therefore fiction can be said to be strategic in that it assumes a position that cannot be refuted, since it is not claiming to be factual. In the example of the Hollywood movie disclaimer that introduced this essay, such declarations are legally motivated since they remove the responsibility of accurately representing real people. The disclaimer serves power by creating its own value system, in a similar way art adopts fiction as an independent and critical position to power systems. The art intervention is tactical in the way it negotiates hegemonic power, but the use of fiction in Rancière’s definition is its own system, therefore necessarily strategic. French philosopher Michel de Certeau makes an important distinction between strategy and tactic in The Practice of Everyday Life, whereby strategy is a self-defining position of power, while tactics are working within the confines of those systems (de Certeau 1988, pp. 35 - 37).
German theatre maker Christof Schlingensief used fiction as an independent power system in his 2000 performance Please Love Austria! in the very public sphere of downtown Vienna, amplified through online broadcast and documented in the feature film Foreigners Out! (Jestrovic 2008, p. 163). Foreign asylum seekers were housed in a temporary shipping container compound erected in a prominent public space, they were introduced to the public via media-style reality television format game show whereby each of the potential immigrants would vie for the privilege to the right of residency in Austria. Each day public opinion demanded one asylum seeker to leave the compound (and presumably return to their country of origin). The event caused huge public debate, protest and condemnation. On the one hand Schlingensief maintained that the asylum seekers were real, but there was considerable doubt as to whether this was factually true. The symbolic language and format of reality-style television was a clear acknowledgement that the performance was structured as a fiction but the representative theatricality was never confirmed. This framework of the television show enabled a strategic position of power since it allowed Schlingenseif to make up his own rules as the performance continued in a series of performance tactics, such as addressing the public via megaphone from a politically ambiguous position, and inviting public debate in the very presence of the asylum seekers. After several days the certainty of fiction slowly eroded from the performance and scandal erupted in the public sphere online and offline. The fiction of a tv show ensured the public could openly participate through otherwise highly xenophobic behaviour, exposing a reality-producing cultural division between supporters and opponents to this crass display of human exploitation. The fictional framework prevented the performance from inevitably descending (quite brilliantly and deliberately) into a racist confrontation.
A Performative Turn
The way an artwork can affect reality is the subject of ongoing philosophical discussion. Art theory has often sought to chart the relationship between the word or symbol and a real-world consequence, through the concept of ‘performativity’. While this has also been adopted in performance theory, it frequently becomes confused with behaving in a performance-like manner. Performativity was initially proposed by British philosopher J L Austin in his 1955 Harvard lecture “How to Do Things with Words”. He claimed that some language – as ‘speech acts’ – was able to produce an effect beyond description, therefore producing reality, through actions (doing) and therefore consequences. For example, the words ‘I do’, pronounced in a marriage ceremony, act performatively to produce an active reality according to Austin (Austin 1975, p. 6).
While the dimensions of performativity have since been expanded by a wide variety of philosophical thinkers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jürgen Habermas to name a few), it is gender specialist Judith Butler’s work on performance and gender that relates everyday bodily acts to performative consequences; where normative ‘reality’ is achieved iteratively and through repetition. Butler describes ‘a reiteration of a norm or a set of norms’ (Butler 2011, p. 12)as essentially a struggle of power since a norm rejects everything that sits outside the norm. In a later study, Notes toward a performative theory of assembly, Butler takes the politics of performativity one step further to the enactment of mass demonstration. Power relations are maintained or challenged through iterative and repeated acts of who constitutes “the people” and who does not (Butler 2015, p. 164). The performative act in Butler’s thinking is not a singular act of performance but a constantly iterated act.
Meanwhile visual art theorist Dorotea von Hantelmann suggests a different interpretation of performativity, suggesting that the concept simply shifts the consideration from what an artwork represents to what it does, in which case all artwork ‘has a reality-producing dimension’. A contemporary wave of interest in performativity, von Hantelmann claims, stems from ‘an experiential turn’ (Von Hantelmann 2014), in which a post-production society seeking non-material relationships (i.e. experiences) with artworks as opposed to ownership of them. The experience is not simply an immersive environment: it is an active engagement structured upon imagined and real people and places.
Tino Sehgal’s artwork This objective of that object, performed at London’s ICA gallery in 2004 is a good example of this. The gallery visitors are met by a small group of performers who at first encircle the viewer, whispering “the object of this work is to become the object of a discussion”. Unless there is some reaction or response to the statement, the performers as ‘interpreters’ melt lifelessly to the floor and there is no further interaction. However, if the visitor responds in some way, the performers spark into life with movement and discussion.
In Sehgal’s work the performative reaction is employed as a strategy, retaining a position of power through the carefully structured framework of the experience. Could this framework therefore be considered a complicit fiction within which the public are invited to participate? The parameters of the event xxx? an invitation to an alternative, imagined reality (similar to the peace ceremony, the gift-wrapped building, or the reality-tv show), using symbolic markers to structure a mutually inhabited space.
In performance as with language, work that creates action as a consequence of its own utterance, or expression, initiates a power system through which the public are able to participate or engage. Fiction is a universal human trait, enabling collective, autonomous power systems to affect reality.
Austin, JL 1975, How to do things with words, Oxford university press.
Butler, J 2011, Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex, routledge.
—— 2015, Notes toward a performative theory of assembly, Harvard University Press.
Davis, NZ 1988, '“Any resemblance to persons living or dead”: film and the challenge of authenticity', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 269-283.
de Certeau, M 1988, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press.
Doležel, L 2010, Possible worlds of fiction and history: the postmodern stage, JHU Press.
Hains, T 2018, President Trump's Video Message To Kim Jong Un: "A New Peaceful World Can Begin Today", viewed 1 July 2018 2018, <https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/12/president_trumps_video_message_to_kim_jong_un_a_new_peaceful_world_can_begin_today.html>.
Jestrovic, S 2008, 'Performing like an asylum seeker: paradoxes of hyper-authenticity', Research in Drama Education, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 159-170.
McKenzie, J 2002, Perform or else: From discipline to performance, Routledge.
Pearson, J 2017, 'Smackdown! Trump seen ripping tactics straight from pro wrestling hype', The Washington Times, 3 July 2017, p. online edition, viewed 2 July 2018, <https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/3/donald-trump-insults-tactics-borrowed-wwe-pro-wres/>.
Rancière, J 2004, 'The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (trans. Gabriel Rockhill)', London: Continuum.
, ''A scene from a sci-fi movie': what Kim told Trump about their meeting - video' 2018, The Guardian Online, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2018/jun/12/a-scene-from-a-sci-fi-movie-what-kim-told-trump-about-their-meeting-video>.
Shaviro, S 2016, Discognition, Watkins Media Limited.
Stevens, M 2018, 'Trump and Kim Jong-un, and the Names They’ve Called Each Other', The New York Times, 9 March 2018, viewed 2 July 2018, <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/world/asia/trump-kim-jong-un.html>.
Tom McCarthy, MWaKL 2018, 'Trump-Kim summit: world scrambles to decipher 'denuclearisation' deal – as it happened', The Guardian, 10 July 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/12/trump-kim-summit-meeting-singapore-us-president-north-korea-kim-jong-un->.
Von Hantelmann, D 2014, 'The experiential turn', Living Collections Catalogue, vol. 1, no. 1.
Zizek, S 2002, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, London Verso.
[i] In an historic court case, Princess Irina Alexandrovna Youssoupoff successfully sued MetroGoldwynMayer for libel in 1934 for the way she was represented in the film Rasputin and the Empress. Since then it has become standard practice for films to add a “fictitious” disclaimer.
[ii] Santosa is an island resort in Singapore, previously a British military base and a prisoner of war camp. In 1972 the island was reconstructed as a popular tourist resort, currently receiving twenty million visitors per year. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentosa - Accessed 12 July 2018)
1. EXT. DAY - THE WHITE VERANDAH OF AN ISLAND RESORT HOTEL, SOMEWHERE NEAR THE EQUATOR
A wall of 12 alternating national flags of the USA and North Korea flank the tropical gardens of the Capella Hotel. A red carpet links two colonial arcades through which two dark suited politicians appear,
the President of the United States, and the Supreme Leader of North Korea. They move toward each other, holding their right hand out in a sign of mutual respect and friendship. The President of the United States places a reassuring hand on the elbow of the Supreme Leader of North Korea while performing his extended signature handshake.
While shaking hands, a few words are exchanged, mostly inaudible over the flutter of cameras assembled by international media.
KIM
(Inaudible)
Nice to meet you Mr President.
TRUMP
(Inaudible) … … .
They turn to stand side by side facing and acknowledging the fleet of photographers.
TRUMP
(To the media)
Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Turning once again to Kim Jong-un)
Fantastic. I think we can get a drink.
President Trump turns to Leader Kim once again and speaks to him (inaudibly), taking charge he gestures the way out. Kim turns to lead the way followed by Trump and his unacknowledged translator.
Strategies as imagined worlds
Retold through fanfiction, each of these strategies is imagined as an object. Based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this discussion is an abstraction of what fiction might look like as a city of objects, supporting and challenging power systems. An object (real or imagined) suggests a spatial way of thinking, analogic as opposed to logic. These can provide a genesis for performance, or a way to critique and develop an existing performance structure.
The two lead protagonists (Marco Polo and Kublai Khan) are prime archetypes for this fiction, their ideologies ‘other’ in both desire and contempt, and their mutual privileges flatter each other. Any similarity to Donald Trump and Kim Jung-Un are purely coincidental. The tale told by Calvino’s (fictional) Polo is fantastical beyond Khan’s dream, but he’s not buying it as reality, he keeps trying to get Khan to confess what city he’s really talking about.
The next part of this exposition turns to my own performance work as a tool for viewing the strategic power of fiction. Looking at various fields of knowledge I have hand picked strategies of fiction that are frequently adopted as power systems. This is not a conclusive or finite list but an inclusive categorisation of the many dimensions that fiction may inhabit. In the spirit of Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, I propose a family of Strategies Towards a General Theory of Fiction, each with potential to enact, maintain or challenge power relationships.
• Fiction as possible worlds - proposes multiple realities from incomplete or open-ended information.
• Fiction as value creation - encompassing the many forms of value, from commodity to spirituality and everything between.
• Fiction as transposition - substituting the qualities or meaning of a place, an object or a person, onto another.
• Fiction as resistance - presumes some form of opposition or oppression that one must resist.
• Fiction as mythology - confronting human and supernatural forces of chaos, typically through allegory.
• Fiction as empathy - to draw the witness into an emotional understanding of another.
• Fiction as residue - marking an absence of something or someone with the manifestation of something new or left behind.
• Fiction as parody - over-identification or exaggeration forcing new meaning to emerge.
Tactical Performances
The third part of this exposition presents tactics of performance that reveal or test fictional strategies. Performances are at different stages of development, each is characterised by location, context, collaboration and form.
Click on each strategy to see an expanded description (on separate page)
click on the image below to see the screenplay of the conversation between Trump & Kim, as recalled by their faithful translators
Breeding Monsters (Planning 2019)
Location - Berlin, DE & Brussels BE
Context - ongoing etudes
Collaboration - Joshua Rutter (collaborator and co-performer)
Form - Choreographic and sound intervention
Materials - Found spaces,
Strategy - Fiction as Residue
Description
The urban environment is full of spaces that either change function with a shifting social or economic fortunes, or that fail to be useful through negligence, misfortune or disaster. These space are often referred to as uncanny, since they are both familiar and unknown. Breeding Monsters uncovers the mask of the uncanny by giving a clear form and presence in the guise of a monster. Collecting field recordings from the human and the non-human world, and through choreographic interventions together with materials of mass production (plastic, construction debris, logistics boxing), the monstrous is evoked literally, inhabiting the space with as the fictional residue of absence. The monsters embody and inhabit the spaces, filling the void that created them. The second part of the performance relocates the fictional monster into highly visible commonplace spaces, (street corners, malls, carparks, gardens) inverting the relationship between context and presence.
Working across two cities, (where we are currently living) the collaboration makes use of familiar and unfamiliar environments, giving instructions of choreographic operations to one another in turn, then rehousing the monster in a different context. Structured as a set of studies, drawing on our 6 year common studio practice, this project mixes symbolic meaning with shared cultural references.
Discussion
The monstrous is frequently associated with disaster, both in literature and in folk-lore, which philosophers Jane and Lewis Gordon consider as ‘creatures of admonition’ (Gordon & Gordon 2015). When something does terribly wrong, the residue of that memory becomes monstrous, both in a psychological sense but also in the material environment. Environmental disasters such as radioactive poisoning in Fukushima and Chernobyl, or the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, all produce monstrous residue materially and psychically. As liberal democratic cities move industry out from the population centres, monstrous spaces that housed enormous machines are repurposed, with art interventions frequently used for their transformative power to discharge or recharge spaces of their residue.
Gordon, JA & Gordon, LR 2015, Of divine warning: Disaster in a modern age, Routledge.
The Abyss is a place no compass will find, yet remains close by. It marks a defeated turn from one ideology in betrayal of another. It consumes the hearts of those who live in absence. The more hearts that live in absense, the bigger the Abyss becomes.
To stand at the edge of the Abyss is to confront your own fears, to inhabit everything that distorts a rational view of yourself. Many believe that terrifying monsters live at the bottom, where no light can escape and all sound is an augmented roar.
Once you have seen the Abyss, you carry its residue as a reminder of what may lie ahead if rational sense is lost. The monsters are a consequence of losing all sense of self. Fiction knows no better ally in fear than the abyss.
ARS concepts (May 2017)
Location - rue de Flandres, Brussels, Belgium
Context - as part of a workshop on public performance led by Antonio Pensotti (AG)
Collaborators - Mahshid Dastgheib (IR/FR), Zoe Ni Riordain (IRL)
Form - installation performance
Materials - paper, powerpoint video, objects bought from local community market day
Strategy - fiction as parody
Description
ARS concepts is a parody on authenticity as commodity, particularly within ‘hipster’ culture, which rejects objects of mass production in favour of a return to the hand made. ARS concepts (a cynical acronym for its three fictional entrepreneurial developers Ashilen, Raquelle, Stephane), turn an emptied café shop window into a specialist repurposed collectables store. In recognition of iconic rue de Flandres in central Brussels, which boasts an array of new or repurposed artisanal-styled products from hand-knitted woollen clothing to rare second-hand vinyl, ARS Concepts takes repurposing to an absurd extreme. All items are literally bought from local residents of the street during a community flea-market (coincidentally a few days before the performance) then repackaged as ARS-Authentic and revalued for sale online and offline.
A low-tech parody of hi-tech marketing uses an automated conveyer belt, similar to a sushi train, with each product simultaneously described for authenticity on a computer screen. The descriptions are exaggerated claims that included local celebrities, heart-wrenching love stories, tragedies, tenuous connections and bizarre claims.
“Picture frame from the bathroom of Fleur-Marie, a talented painter who never realised her dreams. €110”
“Miniature Trees. Gift from a drug dealer to his client for years of loyalty €94”
The objects use white-space aesthetics to fetishize the objects and create value, in an attempt to create an elite experience. The ten minute performance plays several times as a loop, using amiable sound and light to enhance the aesthetic haze. Objects bought for a euro or two were revalued at up to 300 Euros. No sales were made.
Discussion
ARS concepts acknowledges how current fashion-cultures value authenticity. ‘Hipster’ culture is a recent social phenomena, which sociologist Bjørn Schiermer associates to a ‘redemptive gesture toward the objects of the recent past and its predilection for irony’ (Schiermer 2014, P. 167). The performance also recognises how the arts are frequently instrumental in urban transformation, or gentrification, as identified by urban planners and sociologists such as Ali Cheshmehzangi within the development and (re)organisation of space (Cheshmehzangi 2016). Within a globalized network economy, the ARS Concept (ironically close to ARSE - as in “what a load of arse”) preaches acting locally as a valued commodity, yet actively employs outsourcing and globalized marketing strategies - as exemplified by the online trans-national trading. The aesthetic is also highly reflective of the ‘experience economy’ as originally stated in financial terms by economists Pine & Gilmore (1995), and discussed to some degree within the performing arts sphere by performance theorist Claire Bishop (Bishop 2012) in terms of its exchange to labour value. However, it is the visual arts theorist Dorotea von Hantelmann who begins to articulate this new ‘experiential turn’ as a relationship between a remote access to material production and subjective experience. If ‘Western societies are on their way to a postindustrial social order, this development [the experiential turn] is mirrored in art’s shift from the object towards the dimensions of subjective and intersubjective experience.’(Von Hantelmann 2014)
Schiermer, B. (2014). "Late-modern hipsters: New tendencies in popular culture." Acta Sociologica 57(2): 167-181.
Cheshmehzangi, A. (2016). "Temporary and temporality: Public realm regeneration through temporary events." Journal of Urban Regeneration & Renewal 10(1): 58-72.
Pine, I. I. B. J. and J. H. Gilmore (1998). "WELCOME TO THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY." Harvard Business Review 76(4): 97-105.
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books.
Harvie, J. (2013). Fair Play-Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Springer.
McKenzie, J. (2008). "Global feeling." Performance Design: 113-128.
Von Hantelmann, D 2014, 'The Experiential Turn', Living Collections Catalogue, viewed 10 June 2018, <http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/>.
The Ladder is as useful as it is difficult to climb.
The ladder needs two surfaces to function, the ground (as status quo), and a horizontal surface (as an irregularity that cannot comply), without either the ladder will fall. A good climber is supported by the status quo, stabilised by many-handed presumptions.
In parody the ladder is only ever as stable as these two surfaces, one uncertain assumption and the climber looses footing. Either the climber falls and must find a way back up, or the ladder must move to a more stable surface elsewhere. A climber on a wobbly ladder won't stay long hanging on for dear life, the public don’t want to witness desperation, it’s cruel and unseemly. Better to fall in a bloody heap than flail around in uncertainty.
The ladder is not comfortable place to rest, it's only a way up or down, anything in between is fleeting.
Smokers’ Ground (etudes 2018)
Location - TBC (performance score)
Context - Public smoking spaces (festival proposal)
Collaboration - Joshua Rutter (NZ/DE)
Form - Choreographic Intervention
Materials - Inflatable objects, chairs, ash trays
Strategy - Fiction as resistance
Description
Smokers’ Ground is a spatial intervention exploring the exclusionary status of designated smoker’s space. Inflatable structures of varying scale and ambiguity are used as fetishist furniture, which simultaneously become temporary boundaries between smoking and non-smoking social spaces. The objects use an aesthetics of inclusion and tactile participation, to enact the overtly divisive function of excluding smokers from public space. The proposed choreographic intervention uses the context of an arts festival social space (an habitually liberal social grouping), where an open-air bar and restaurant incorporate provocative ways to exercise exclusion. Daily interventions evolve the space toward and away from the boundaries, resolving and testing the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within a morally segregated group.
Drawing on relatively new legislation (in the last 10 years) that segregates space disproportionately between smokers and non-smokers, access to space is closely linked to morality and the hierarchy of legality. Smokers’ Ground uses the familiar environment of social smoking divisions to reflect on moral rigidity, the legality of exclusion on ethical grounds, and the appropriation of space from the social minority. The intervention plans to distort and reverse the appropriation of space over time (2 weeks), giving unjustified privilege to the morally indefensible smokers, provoking discussion and encouraging acts of subversion.
Discussion
Smokers’ Ground tests the principles of public space under the artificial pressures of a temporary space. Geographer Peter Marcuse offers five principles described as - equity in distribution of resources, accessibility, non-exclusionary access, aesthetic quality, and environmental sustainability (Marcuse 2003), each of which is actively violated over the course of intervention. The tools of division, large tactile inflatable plastic objects, are frequently associated with the architecture of democratic subversion. Avant-garde American architectural group Ant Farm’s self-published manual Inflatocookbook in (Ant Farm 1971) used various permutations of this throughout their work from 1970s to the early 2000s. Cheaply constructed inflatables have been used by contemporary artists such as Artúr van Balen in Tools for Action, where objects of resistance are democratically sourced and manipulated as a practical tool for activism serve as a means to resolve tense and potentially violent moments (Malzacher 2014, P.15).
These alternative, temporary architectures are essentially a reaction to permanence, one in which German cultural philosopher Peter Sloterdijk reminds us that ‘architecture is inherently a form of totalitarianism… because it is concerned with immersion, that is, with the production of an environment into which its inhabitants submerge, body and all (Sloterdijk 2011).’
Farm, A. (1971). Inflatocookbook. Sausalito, CA: Rip Off Press.
Malzacher, F. (2014). Truth is Concrete. A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics, Sternberg Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (2011). "Architecture As an Art of Immersion (2006)(translated by A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul)." Interstices: Journal of Architecture
A defiant hand appears in the strangest of places, inflated by the breath of the people. Extended sideways it may be a greeting, but held upright it is a demand to stop.
The inflated glove needs the breath of many to hold it at attention. If the breath goes weak, the glove falls and can easily be overcome. Governments and institutions are on the lookout for large over-inflated objects, finding complex ways to puncture them, but the simple glove is not always easily identified. It can also be small and personal, wedged into cracks, standing alone from the crowd, or en masse to form a crowd. The greatest affront to power may be tiny breaths too small to extinguish, that together can form a thundering wave.
A glove need not be one-size-fits-all, the strangest hands need the strangest gloves.
Extra Ordinary Folk April 2018
Location - War Memorial, New Lynn Shopping Mall, Auckland
Context - Public Performance
Collaboration - Fieldwork Collective - Choreographer - Claire O’Neil, Producer - Sarah-Louise Collins, DJ - Kristian Larsen, Performers - Solomon Holly-Massey, Rose Tapsell, Aloalii Tapu, Tallulah Holly-Massey, Claire O’Neil, Stephen Bain
Form - Choreographic Performance
Materials - Plastic chairs, plastic storage boxes, plastic table
Strategy - Fiction as possible worlds
Description
This choreographic group-performance transposes fields of everyday movement onto public space in order to reveal social dynamics. A transitional space in West Auckland links a large suburban mall to a public transport hub, and is occupied by a war memorial that uses the language and scale of civic architecture (standardised materials - bricks, multi-functional, classical proportions) to increase accessibility and add aesthetic qualities. This spatially charged location was negotiated by the local community arts board as the site for a choreography with 7 dancers. In order to further clutter the space we brought a number of mass-produced consumer items sourced from nearby hardware stores; a table, storage boxes, folding chairs, a plastic pot-plant, in order to signify the domestic domain within the civic.
The improvisation structure was developed by choreographer Claire O’Neil in the dance studio, using a vocabulary of daily movements from domestic and vocational settings. Each performer inhabited a ‘habitus’, a term derived from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu bringing together social, physical and economic spheres (Bourdieu 1977), eventually encroaching on each other’s space and individualising the public architecture. The objects helped externalise the interference between individuals, and allowed a larger more porous sphere of influence on the performance. Masking tape on the ground was laid out during the performance and used to help define individual fields, to segregate some behaviours from others, and to undermine the civic authority of the public architecture (including the war memorial).
A pre-learned folk dance, created by the group and incorporating domestic chores, expressions of care and self-preservation, was used structurally to bring the performance into a unison crescendo, and also invited the public in to participate. Live and pre-recorded music was used to influence the choreography and add a manipulation of time. The performance was around 30 mins duration and repeated twice at the same location.
Discussion
Extra Ordinary Folk was a choreographic response to a deconstruction of social dynamics, using the definitions derived by Pierre Bourdieu throughout his career. A ‘habitus’ was individually interpreted by each performer, bringing together ‘social fields’ of practice or play, and relational ‘capital’, which may be economic, cultural, social or symbolic (Bourdieu, 1989). The public, who were simultaneously passing through the performers' social field, could be said to embody their own habitus. This was acknowledged by the performers through playful and affecting exchanges. External elements such as the architecture and the weather, were also acknowledged through the use of the objects, constantly disrupting and re-negotiating the space. Public space in this case, was a location for private expression, creating collective social dynamics.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge university press.
Bourdieu, P. (1989). "Social space and symbolic power." Sociological theory 7(1): 14-25.
The Infinite Bundle of Sticks can be found anywhere, but recognition isn't always easy. To come across a single stick is good fortune, while finding a small bundle of sticks may have many uses. A larger bundle may become a burden without some idea of what to do with them, but an infinite bundle of sticks will have every possible permutation and potential. What can you do with something that has no beginning and no end?
An opportunist will sell them off a few at time, a fool will take one for safe keeping and forget the rest. A poet however, will leave them in a bundle and climb inside. There he will find the infinite doorways to worlds never imagined.
Infinite bundles of sticks are a doorway to possible worlds. They can be found anywhere if those searching are looking for it, in a forest, a desert, a drowned city, a prison cell, in the sleeve of a shirt.
Reverse Dollar Exchange (Planned Nov 2018)
Location - various locations, Auckland City
Context - conceived as part of the Ministry of Kindness
Collaboration - solo
Form - social structure
Materials - welcome booth, display cabinet or vitrine
Strategy - fiction as Empathy
Description
The Reverse Dollar Exchange is a commodity exchange for one dollar, the simplest unit of finance and standard measure of value. The Reverse Dollar Exchange is a temporary booth, using the language of commerce, where the public are invited to exchange anything at all for $1. No restrictions are placed on what may be exchanged, it may be a physical object, a service, an action, or an intangible concept, the booth will give one dollar to each person for absolutely anything. Some documentation is taken, either with an image, the written word or an object, and this is displayed in a makeshift vitrine (placed inside standardised zip-lock plastic bags). On a surface level the booth produces a graphic representation of the use-value of one dollar, with comparative difference between socio-economic locations within the city. Supporting this reading however, is a playful manipulation of the terms of economic exchange, provoking the public to situate themselves relative to the power dynamics of financial trade.
The Reverse Dollar Exchange will begin as one part of a three day event planned for the end of 2018 in Auckland, called The Ministry of Kindness. This fictional ministry parodies government agencies to present empathy as a meaningful strategy for fulfilment, riffing on the language of economic development used by neoliberal government agencies. Inspired by a radio interview with the incoming Prime Minister Jacinda Adern in October 2017, the Labour-coalition leader declared that the she wanted the government ‘to bring kindness back’[i].
Discussion
The Reverse Dollar Exchange inverts the power relationship of financial exchange, where use-value or exchange-value are relative to labour (over time). There are three expected responses to these exchanges between the payer (myself) and the payee (the public).
1 - The public is left to guess what the desire of the payer might be, what they choose to give as exchange is essentially guessing their desires.
2 - The payee considers what one dollar might be worth to themselves, including the worth of labour in the face-to-face exchange, or an altruistic desire for the artist to get a good bargain, or be seen as a generous person.
3 - The artist is seen as a naive sucker, who will part with $1 in exchange for something of no value to the payee, proving to be a justified exploitation.
Just as every candle that ever existed confirms the existence of someone who lit it, the candle burns to light another face. It is the fiction of empathy that illuminates our own existence. On every birthday cake, every window sill, in every hand raised to the doorway, at every graveside or staircase. Every candle is a reminder that you are not alone. The flame of the candle burns for someone, or else it cannot burn at all. It is another human being wanting to be seen.
Every lit candle must also die out, and so we feel a stab of pain for every human who will live only to die. Empathy takes shelter in such futility, and so we look for the flame in every window and door we pass.
Baby, where are the fine things you promised me?
2010 - 2018
Location - various locations, throughout Aotearoa: New Zealand
Context - independent street interventions & Arts festivals
Collaboration - solo
Form - performance Installation
Materials - wooden cottage 1:8 scale, artificial grass, domestic objects
Strategy - fiction as Mythology
Description
Baby, where are the fine things you promised me? is a mobile performance structure, inside of which the artists lives his normal domestic routines for the course of a day, situated in unlikely urban environments. The model of a Victorian cottage fictionalises a true history (a model of the artist's previously rented home), and allows the public to interact via the ground level windows to the occupant, sharing daily domestic conversation, drinking tea, or sharing music. Placed in busy urban spaces where domestic architecture is largely absent, the little house becomes a beacon symbol of home that elicits public involvement and spontaneous response. Written or drawn notes, either passed through the windows or posted anonymously into the letterbox, play an important role in proximity, allowing different levels of engagement and allowing some distance within a very intimate setting.
The Victorian colonial cottage is historically significant in post-colonial Aotearoa:New Zealand. Many thousands of these houses were built during the late 19th and early 20th century migration of European populations. The individually owned houses typically sat on a quarter acre block of land, and represented the new-world values of egalitarian ownership of resources and affordable domestic lifestyles. In the competitive economic environment of the 21st century these values are no longer accessible to many, leaving the symbol of a lost promise.
Discussion
Literary critic Susan Stewart refers to the miniature as it ‘represents closure, interiority, the domestic’ (1984, P.70), comparatively turning the public into giants. In order to speak with the artist, the public had to lie down on the ground, an act of performance in itself since it changes the relationship to the street and to the public, a dramatic inversion of hierarchies.
The symbolic home, domestic ritual and intimacy, are forced by miniaturisation to find new meaning in the public realm of the city street, just as the political dimension of inequality is played out by transient populations and poverty stricken people sleeping in the sheltered entranceways to luxury stores. The gigantic human inside the miniature house is a distortion that physically moves the public onto the ground, onto all fours, touching the domestic promise made by previous generations and not passed on.
Stewart, S. (1984). On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, Duke University Press.
There is a monument made from glass, a towering mythic monolith. In the midst of the city, sandwiched between stone columns and poured concrete, the glass monument is pitch black from the dirt of smoke and petrol fumes. Up close you can see the initials of tourists and lovers scratched into the dirt. On winter mornings the shade from the monument casts an icy shadow on the streets below, frequently causing accidents, and assuring it as unpopular with locals. Every now and then an ambitious politician or a well-meaning social group in a rash of civic pride will clean up the momument to give the city new life, but the grime of daily life always catches up. At the base of the monument is a miserable bunch of broken objects accumulated over time, the hands of a ceramic goddess, the cap of a camera lens, the missing page from a novel. Lost objects and forgotten histories end up here scratching at the base of the monument, adding to the disarray with forgotten purpose.
Margins & Boarderlines Jan 2018
Location - Pukeaha National War Memorial Park, Wellington, New Zealand
Context - choreographic Workshop
Collaboration - choreographer Kate McIntosh together with students of Choreolab 18, (Footnote Dance Company Summer School)
Form - performance experiment / Choreographic intervention
Materials - bodies in Space
Strategy - fiction as transposition
Description
A simple choreographic operation in public space. A group of performers follow each other walking in single file, following visual lines that border one space from another. The borders are either textural (the grass where it borders the concrete, where the stone turns to asphalt, where the shadow of the trees begin) or implied through the geography (a line of bollards or following the underground road). By moving in unison, the group reveal the many borders that coexist in this space, they also highlight the continuation of borders from the city that are pulled into this space. The perimeters of public space are revealed to be porous, subjective, continuous, extendible.
The newly finished Pukeahu Park in central Wellington, New Zealand, is a carefully designed public space allowing pedestrians multiple lines of transit as well as spaces that are contemplative or formal. Two war memorial structures (made almost 80 years apart) dissect the space, which is typically vulnerable to Wellington’s harsh windy weather.
Discussion
Considering aspects of Lefebvre’s Production of Space, where a critical analysis of urban space is also understood in the context of everyday life, choreographic operations attempt to embody spatial relationships (Lefebvre, 1991). In this performance experiment the periphery is considered in relation to the centre in a purely physical expression, however the political implications are also discussed, putting forward developments to the experiment to break the group into parts in order to counterpoint the relationships.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space, Oxford Blackwell.
The fiction of transposition is a Labyrinth.
Those that enter the Labyrinth do so with the purpose of getting lost, so maps and directions are useless. The present location in a Labyrinth is impossible to mark, since there is ultimately nowhere to arrive except back out of the Labyrinth. You begin to feel you've been here before, but since there is no way of knowing this place from the last, you may be reliving the past as the future. Once you surrender to being lost, purpose disintegrates and you begin to live this place as you remember somewhere else. You transpose every thought, every experience from your past life onto this one. That's why visitors to Labyrinthine cities often recognise people and places from their home. This is the purpose of the Labyrinth. Inside every hidden corner is the potential of someone you already met.
The Floating Theatre March 2017 (test season)
Location - viaduct Marina & Whau River, AUCKLAND
Context - advertised performance event, part of Fringe Festival
Collaboration - designed, directed & produced by Stephen Bain, Performers: Jeremy Randerson & Jenny McArthur, Music: Jeff Henderson, Costumes: Sarah-Jane Blake, Lights: Sean Curham, Construction: Showquip, Metalmen, Fabric Structures, Dramaturgy: John Downie
Form - theatrical performance
Materials - barge, steel frame structure with wooden interior and PVC outer skin
Strategy - fiction as value creation
Description
The Floating Theatre is a mobile structure that floats on a barge. Assembled from custom-made steel frame, wooden scaffolding planks and a white PVC skin, the fully functioning theatre seats 30 people. The theatre arrives during the day via the sea and stays moored up to a marina or jetty for the duration of its season. When the theatre is inhabited by the audience during a performance, the interior lighting throws shadows and light projection onto the white walls, exposing all the mechanisms of the theatrical performance and the audience themselves.
The performance is made specifically for the theatre, and was conceived around a theatrical device of trapdoors in the stage allowing the two performers to endlessly appear and disappear. The performance itself is loosely inspired by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, whereby a ‘magic theatre’ is the central metaphor for a psychological and spiritual crisis of its central protagonist. The performance in The Floating Theatre uses 19th century theatrical tropes to highlight the representation of illusion as a machine, exposing the mechanisms to the audience rather than obscuring them.
Discussion
The Floating Theatre floats on water as a dream-space, unable to be quantified or fully rationalised since it evades permanence. It is evocative of philosopher Michael Foucault’s ‘heterotopian’ space, that is ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible (Foucault 1986, P.6).’
Architect Aldo Rossi, whose floating theatre pavilion Teatro del Mondo in the 1979 Venice Biennale was a miniaturisation of the monumental Venitean architecture, later explored ideas of the ‘analogous city’, which ultimately ‘concerns the collective imagination... a synthesis of a series of values’ (as cited in Hays 2008, P.117).
Foucault, M. and J. Miskowiec (1986). "Of other spaces." diacritics 16(1): 22-27.
Hays, K. M. (2008). "The desire called architecture."
The final strategy of fiction is the square. Simply and dramatically equal on four sides, an open invitation to the recipient. The square has an outside and an inside, one side that gives value, and one side that takes value.
It is a frame for all potential exchanges, a place that remains concrete no matter what truth is told. The square can always be divided into more squares, evenly distributed and revalued. Exponential growth, like bacteria in a petri dish, or the golden ratio, endlessly add value until supply and demand grow intolerant of one another and then panic sets in.
Fiction as a square will always maintain a position, regardless how truthful it is, since value is its own truth.
Such is the magic power of the square.
