This is about the twentieth time that I have returned to walking in a circular pattern in dialogue with the minimum turning circle of the vehicle. Undertaken in different locations, circumstances, and times of day, this ritual again reveals the micro-ecology of a momentarily poised situation.
Mick: Rock formations bulge from the Mojave Desert floor. A shading fabric canopy has been laced between rocks, creating a cooling micro-canyon into which seven bodies linger, lying, reading. The ethereal white fabric shifts in the swirling breeze. (The register of these sails and ropes and knots affirm my embodied sense of equivalence between desert and body of water. Surely I am not hallucinating … ) White pages from a range of books are held in hands and rest on arms and chests. A medley of reading short passages aloud from these books at hand has emerged, randomly shifting from person to person, yielding curious juxtapositions and an awareness of relations between rocks, between pages, between bodies, between voices, ideas, and sensations. I retrieve an unread book from my bag, flick its pages for the first time and within seconds am reading aloud a passage hitherto unknown to me:
How to read the recurrence of challenges within our general theory of performance? Is this some kind of trick or ruse? Shuttling between theory and practice, between generalization and specifications, our trajectory is marked by chance associations, idiosyncratic passages that connect disparate sites by reciting and displacing a singular performance-challenge. Such chances and idiosyncrasies are key to the process of metamodelization. ‘There must be a trick to the train of thought, a recursive formula’, writes mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, commenting on the nature of associative thought.22
A man is standing atop the roof of a scribbled-on vehicle, with a book in hand. He reads aloud to those who surround:
The make of the desert. The sea of sand. Mountainous ranges on desert – Plains, valleys, and mesas – Effects of drought – the rains – Harshness of desert – a gaunt land – conditions of life – incessant strife-elemental warfare – desert vegetation – protruding edges …23
The woman is seated under the shading canopy suspended from the vehicle. She picks up a thread and reads on:
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.24
I am orbiting the vehicle around and around, carrying a jerrycan of water that is pathetically cracked, leaking this valuable liquid that leaves a circling trace on the absorbent ground. I near the canopy, I near a pause in the others' narration, I near again now to find myself stepping into another circle:
Cultural theorist Raymond Williams claims that culture is ordinary, in that it is both traditional and creative.26 In spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre’s terms, it is in this ordinariness that the contradictions of the everyday are also held and broken (sublated) in regard to tradition and creativity.27 So through the doing of the everyday we sublate the apparent contradictions – make and break them through the practice of the everyday – through a doing that can also be imagined and reimagined as a making in every encounter.
Of being in but not of the world:
In using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it. As such, it has the capacity to communicate on two levels – to participants and to spectators – the paradoxes that are repressed in everyday discourse, and to elicit perverse, disturbing and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew. But to reach the second level requires a mediating third term – an object, image, story, film, even a spectacle – that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imaginary. – Claire Bishop28
We might subsequently think of John Dewey, who in his chapter ‘The Act of Expression’ writes, ‘what has been said locates, even if it does not solve, the vexed problem of the relation of aesthetic or fine art to other modes of production also called art.’29
In any offering to re-present creative practice as research, how far do we redistribute (social) practice as categories: the performative, the political, the pedagogical, the research, or, as Bishop’s mediating third term, the artefactual ‘work’ of art as distinguishable from the processually ongoing? And how then does one return to be presently resituating practices in a diversity of situations, to the re-creation of everyday practices, to re-search creative practice?
Through journeying the four-thousand-mile loop from Tucson in daily cycles of movement and stillness; via a summer equinox annually framed by the Sun Tunnels of Nancy Holt; in reiterating historical precedents; through a burgeoning milieu of speech, gestures, references, and actions of shuttling individual artists; through this heightened returning back through and anew, a social ecology of practising know-how is iteratively built, self-affirming in practice. Values emerge and are contested in the resituating returns to practices, prompting one to renegotiate awareness of unconscious patterns and the calls and threats of both familiar and unfamiliar territories.
He told me his book was called the Book of Sand because neither sand nor this [book] has a beginning or an end. – Jorge Luis Borges30
Tracing, embodying, iterating again and anew, circling and being encircled: conditioning … co-creating … situating … the movements of playful shuttling.
The collective shuttling orbit – temporarily displaced from other human circling – slowly cultivates both the interior journeys of individuals and a sense of a collected grouping as one body of interconnected beings. Daily practices enacted in twos and threes, revolving through places both confined and more elastic, construct this one body of several human beings, vulnerable to the distancing, departure, and replacement of its parts. Our practice, dancing around objects and elements carried with us, slowly, through dust, dirt, salt, and sand, becomes increasingly blurred with the environs around us. Encountering, engaging, confronting, colliding with a litany of other-than-human bodies and forces, this othered collective body is interrupted, disrupted, and destabilised in its orbiting. These others – creatures, natural forces, and social, political, industrial, and military organisms – reroute the collective body, presenting a daily resituated challenge to consider anew the rhythms and patterns of practices, entangled with unfamiliar environs, other-than-human lives and larger networks.
With the impact of the desert’s environmental conditions, which disconcerts human and other-than-human ecologies, comes the friction of worn consensus, sitting tense with dissensus. Although one body, it is not always social. Of course, environment and situation unsettle social relationships: the thinness of high-altitude air at Moab and the seemingly interminable, bone-shaking dirt tracks along many remote trajectories are equally part of the ultimately sublime and intense encounters with Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels. At Joshua Tree the group is betwixt and between a planned and highly anticipated two-day rest and an escape to the border with Mexico. But the conditions and situation are defeating, cracks opening up for the fear of the other – not just the other-than-human critters, the swarming Africanised Bees, but also strangers outside our collective.
Amid the agonism of pluralism within this collective temporary assemblage, we navigate and negotiate a dialogue on our onward and outward performative action – artists as pilgrims, not tourists – and distinguish between ethics, ethic, and the ethical in how we limit or take responsibility through our interventions towards the boundaries and borders – literal and moral – of our respective practices. In the spirit of Lévinas,31 to see the other face-to-face, we suggest that we should have more faith in our position, that to truly reflect on the politics of this we should seek openly to meet strangeness.
A white Chevy Express van is the centre of gravity for a temporary collection of individuals. The vehicle’s surfaces are transformed and perform as a message board, shopping list, collective diary, sketch pad, group schedule, and public broadcast medium. A mass-produced emblem of American industry, a materialised image of progress, a sibling to all other vehicles of human-carrying spatial conquest: a kind of space shuttle. Using a simple manual tool, erasable black lines are marked on its white and glass surfaces. Such a slight, a détournement of consumer respect toward shiny material culture, raises uncertainty, suspicion of non-conformity, and relegation to the cultural fringe.
This shuttle orbits an anticlockwise loop of sites; at its outermost edges are the Native American ruins of Chaco Culture to the east, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake to the north, the California coast to the west, and the US–Mexico border fence to the south.18 ‘What happened to your van?’ asks the US border patrol officer through the window of his four-wheel-drive vehicle, inquiring about the drawings, doodles, and notations accumulated across the surface of the Chevy van. He has pulled up alongside in Calexico to determine just what these people are doing in this strangely marked vehicle. Why are they stopping beside the vast concrete canal inscribed on the landscape of this desert/border region? The canal wends its way freely in and out of Mexico, feeding and watering the growing urbanisation and agribusiness operating on the US side of this desert landscape. Shuttle on. Another patrol stops the van. Why is this van driving along the dirt track parallel to the US–Mexico border? Why on this sand track that border guards patrol and grade each day, dragging a rake of chained tyres in an effort to recast this portion of the earth’s surface as a tabula rasa to reveal transgressive human actions to their eyes – any so-deemed illegal border crossing activity that transpires upon it.
Situating multiplies the entanglements with the more than human. The conditions of co-creating persistently return to the social actors as opportunities for situating multiple orbits of performance: performance for self, performance for the other, performance for and with one another, being subject to the performance of non-human and elemental forces, performing in dialogue with the performance of other forces. The initiating and affirming impulses of this co-creating mobile laboratory, and the platforms affording it, continue to emerge iteratively through a reflexive praxis of conditioning and situating that always exceeds the capacities to be captured through a written account.
Experiential performance sometimes resists, exceeds, and overwhelms the constraints and strictures of writing. It is the task of rhetorical critics to seek out the sites of tension, displacement, and contradiction between the Being There of performed experience and the Being Here of written texts. This rhetorical self-reflexivity has helped politicize ethnography. – Dwight Conquergood19
The mobile condition affords durational and momentary encounters with new sites for situating the emerging iterative practices: sites rich in material to be cited, folding back upon and informing individual and collective patterns and participation, actions, and observation. The sites and situations themselves, irrespective of citational relations, afford certain actions and derail or detour other intended actions, shifting out of intentional patterns to generate as yet (un)anticipated events. James Clifford observed, ‘participant observation obliges its practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intellectual level, the vicissitudes of translation.’20 Iterating in ever new sites and situations has this mobile social organism elaborate subtle shifts in individual and collective patterns. Relations to citations of past artistic and performance practices that once inhabited the same sites are layered back on to the presently occupied sites with reiterations and new creative iterations.
Allan [Kaprow] taught us the history and practice of what he termed ‘lifelike art’. […] art making was a function of a reflective life, not a skill set. – Suzanne Lacy21
A collection of artists situated: enmeshed with a mobile travelling site and daily mobile practices; citing diverse historical precedents, diverse disciplines’ theories and cultural frameworks; traversing an unfolding sequence of sites and experiences of circumstances culturally inscribed and contingently coincidental.
Conditions of orbiting resituate, challenge, stretch, and confront individual creative, conceptual, and physical sensibilities and sensitivities.
Through low to high desert, to salt flats and deciduous forest biomes; from 125 feet below to 7500 feet above sea level; through drought and monsoon seasons; from 5º to 47º Celsius (42º–116º Fahrenheit); through constructed networks of irrigation canals, military training camps, industrial cattle feedlots, and solar farms. Orbiting gives rise to reflection upon our actions and practices in this range of sites and situations, giving new relevance to some while prohibiting others.
From the first movement of Shuttle through the desert landscapes of the United States of America, with their cinematic vistas, one enters a heavily technological, military, and industrial playground. All around appear seemingly infinite public tracks of asphalt, swathes of land excised by the US government, virtual terra incognita. Further surrounded by massive movements of industrial farming are the occasional reminders of First Nation presence. Soaring above are ranging drones and Black Hawks, and, hiding behind one mountain, a squadron of Stealth Bombers. Perhaps the simplest but most dangerous technology to be encountered is the border – a sheer wall. It forms an extension of the primordial instinct of the boundary and the power of the imagination.
One becomes enmeshed in the ecology of desert landscapes; movements are made both as performance practices and as practical displacements and spark entanglements with campsite hosts, park rangers, and border patrols. Passage through this desert setting stirs curiosity, not just from border patrols. Consensus and dissensus do not just appear in our midst, they are made manifest through our doings and relations; they are made without necessarily being designed; they are situational, a process or form of adaptation.
Beth: How can I practise and develop new modes of practising a discipline founded upon foundations, stability, and endurance, through practices of destabilising, shuttling, mobilising, co-creating, resituating? How should we value the play, the creative discovery brought on by unpredictability, the performance of making, over the thing that is made?
A scientist’s story drew parallels between our performative journey through the desert and those of the scientists on the Mars lander and rover missions, rehearsing in the most desolate places – in Arizona, Utah, and Nevada – the actions in the environments they anticipated encountering on Mars. Costumes, props, rehearsing the actions, practicing the roles to be played and the responses to unanticipated conditions – rehearsing the performance was what they did most of the time.
The Greeks attributed the origin of geometry to the Egyptians who, they claimed, had devised it in order to annually reestablish agricultural property lines erased by the regular flooding of the Nile. […]
It’s an old habit, geometry in the desert, whether it shows up in Navajo rugs and Hopi sand paintings, or Australian petroglyphs and Persian rugs. When the landscape is so bare before us that we cannot ignore the fact that most of the universe around us is empty, we invent systems in order to hold it in our minds so we don’t, either literally or psychologically, lose ourselves in the void. – William L. Fox25
Akin to the reinscribing of lines after the flood, we freshly inscribe our tenuous collective within ever new sites and ecosystems. In the rocky formations of Devil’s Garden in Moab we scatter at the first opportunity, connecting with the traces of thousands of years of prior walkers, journeyers, dreamers, and artists. The well-situated rock I claim as my night camp must have served as a bed for millennia before tonight. Eons separating then and now enfold into a thickened ‘long now’.
One day and two thousand feet higher, against the night winds blowing east off the salt flats, the tailwinds of a revolving orb, we cling together behind a make shift wall. Under a canopy rigged between rocks, we construct, articulate, and perform our collective, our common humanness, entangled with the very present other-than-human forces who co-choreograph and render specific each site and segment of our shuttling.
James: Conditioning and co-creating are also elemental and situational; we are emplaced in the relational environs of vibrant matter. When we first embarked on Shuttle from Tucson, we were hosted for a public presentation by a local art studio. As a public exchange, one of the gifts we each received was a set of seashells – to remind us that we were driving through an ancient seabed and the different scales of our spatio-temporal journey.
As a mobile desert performance, Shuttle held many agonistic moments of ‘material vitalism’, both social and environmental, that demanded adaptation. In the desert, I needed tougher shorts and took to modifying two pairs of my jeans. I cut them below the knees and retained the lower part to wear as a set. This provided flexibility and ventilation around my knees, while also still protecting my skin from the sun and dust (like cowboy chaps). These shorts I named ‘desert trouts’ (trouser-shorts), in homage to the ancient seabed we were situated in and to the fish in the river on our croft back in my native desert, Fásach. I was also embodying a performance of the improviser, the joker.
‘Situating’ the entanglements of social relations and incomplete encounters of Shuttle.
In Joshua Tree National Park, I woke up late, at nine a.m. This was late for Shuttle. We were very tired and looking forward to a two-night stopover to experience this environment, this place.
When I awoke there was an enormous buzzing; so-called Africanised Bees were bouncing around my tent. Although an amplified noise in the tent, I had already slept through the camp invasion as our crew had attempted to breakfast. The camp was more than a desert now: deserted and disconcerting, disappointing. As I braved this new world, I struggled to feel free. A bee stung me, right where the space in my Desert Trouts revealed my flesh. Sometimes the conditions and situation produce a dissensus of co-creation where our adaptation is to move on and away.
