A lot of ‘stuff’ could be referred to when asking the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘ It would be easy to become snowed under by such stuff and, in the hope of capturing its diversity, anxiously produce a list of keywords, names, descriptions of materials, processes, works and affects. I could then attempt to find a logic that might point to how all those things are caught in the net of such a category. Should this trail take the historical route? … but then where should I decide to start?… with the Greeks? Or do I go as far back as some of the oldest known ‘sculptural’ archeological artefacts such as the ‘venus figurines? ‘ These however pre-date our category, concept and understanding of ‘art’, as well as of subject, object and space, all of which are also historically shaped notions. And these inevitably frame any questioning around ‘what is sculpture? ‘ Asking what sculpture might be involves therefore many different intersecting histories. As well as an art history made up of periods, movements, artists and styles, we may need to include the cultural and anthropological histories of monuments and commemoration, of architectures and statuary, histories of votive rituals, totems, religious fetishes and decorative or symbolic architectural embellishments. Are all these relating to the same thing or, when approached through the lens of one of these histories, does the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘ itself show a plasticity and keep shifting its form and meaning? Matter, materials – the stuff that art gets made out of – also have histories, those of functions and effects, histories that lead us to question how we think about the role and phenomenology of things, leading to fundamental questions such as ‘what is matter… ? ‘ Art as sculpture is a practice in dialogue with these histories.

Highly significant for sculpture whether taking place as structures, objects or spaces are the tensions and polemics of how cultures, societies and individuals approach the practice of ‘giving form to …’ of creating objects to draw attention to a material presentation or ‘stand for’ or ‘in place of’ something or someone. These show themselves through different strategies of representation ranging from celebratory forms of construction to oppositional practices of iconoclastic destruction to spaces that reflect prohibitions against idol-making through providing a place for nonrepresentation.

The question of sculpture also demands that we think about the ‘object-nature’ of art, its physicality, its materiality, its spatiality, its tactility. These questions in turn pose the further question of how sculpture is in relation with our embodied and temporal sense of being. It is therefore also the history of affect and the phenomenology of how we, as thinking-bodies, experience the concrete material world. Sculptures can also be determinately different from this, showing a mute material refusal of psychological readings or projections. Sculpture often poses questions itself in terms of how it may sit in the context of everyday functional things, which we more usually differentiate (in often contested ways) as design, craft or architecture. And many sculptures now play self-reflexively with these discourses and disciplines through the recent sculptural history of the ‘ready-made’. Further, we might also, in response to the material strangeness of sculptural practice, ask ‘what is the role of non-object making, of de-materialising and performative practices within sculpture? ‘ Thinking about these questions often operates by using the strategy of binary distinctions and relations, such as those between matter-form and form-function and form-content. Often it is through the very staging of these tensions that ‘sculpture’ takes place.

Therefore the simple clear elegance of the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘ may unfortunately need to be rephrased here into the more awkward form of ‘what task does art set for the materials we encounter, when we encounter them as something transformable into something else, yet without a clearly designated functionality determining its final form? ‘ Sculpture, as well as transforming materials into ‘art’, is also often required to perform other functions – its art ‘work’. At times this may require it to represent, to depict, to affect, to evoke, to commemorate, to monumentalize, to decorate, or to physically stop us in our tracks and make us think or be amazed or surprised. If it is the kind of sculpture that is so effective that it physically stops us in our tracks, then what happens when that happens? Does sculpture demand that we look, or touch, or ‘don’t touch’? Are we required to imaginatively or literally activate it, participate as spectator from the ‘outside’ or become a necessary component material or participant ‘within’ the work?

The sculptor Eva Rothschild puts it like this, ‘the question of its materiality should lead to a kind of intense looking where a sort of exchange takes place. Rather than a sort of passive looking, there is a sense of search, as sense of […] demand from the eye in terms of what the sculpture might give it. ¹ This approach might at first seem to emphasize the visuality of sculptural objects, but for all its fascinating visualities, a defining feature of sculpture is that it is never fully reducible to an image or verbal description (even though many sculptors may use image and text as components). Regardless of how high the quality of a particular documentation image or descriptive text is, it is always necessarily inadequate when it comes to those aspects of sculpture that by their sculptural nature can evidently not be presented through image and text as such. What is not reducible to an image is perhaps therefore what is most ‘sculptural’ about it, what is untranslatable. Just think of the experiential tactile impact of materials, structures and volumes and their affective qualities, such as hardness, roughness, smoothness, shininess, hollowness, transparency, solidness, spikyness, furriness, smelliness, disappearing-over-time-ness, stickiness, delicacy and all the almost infinite nuanced physicality of materials and forms that I can merely evoke here, but cannot hand to you to touch and feel. I could show images that depict these but these would not communicate their visceral impact as a sculptural experience.

A crucial example for sculptural effect is that of scale. In order for something to appear huge or tiny the sculptural effect requires a shared space where a direct physical relation between our body encounters the other physical elements. Phenomenologically, sculpture is therefore a very different way of engaging with artwork than that which we experience through an image. Sculpture’s way of using materials engages us by being able to affect our embodied situation through its situatedness, through the capacity to walk around it, experience it from different angles and sometimes in different spaces. (This can include different, complex and perhaps contradictory sculptural sensations we may encounter from, for example, tactile, plastic, free-standing ‘presences’ to the staging of immaterial, ungraspable ‘absences’). Like a body or an architecture, one of the potentials for sculptural objects is to create an inside and an outside. Boundaries are formed which create new spaces, volumes, and interventions in already existing spaces. These new spaces can be created by a sculptural intervention or sculptures can dynamically reactivate previously existing places.

Some sculptures appear as singular objects that aim for a decontextualised autonomy, their aspiration to be as if impossibly selfcontained, ie. a ‘pure-object-in-itself’. Others are made up of many different objects, forming component parts of a wider whole or constellation points in a series operating as a network of encounters. Some ‘sculptures’ are not even physical objects per se but the staging of interactions between materials and forces, or a showing by means of something else. Some move in the direction of merging with architecture and some in the direction of commodity and some seem to hardly exist except as a set of instructions related to the idea of what it might be.

When we engage with such phenomena as art-objects we are necessarily then led also to focus on how these relate to their support structures and frameworks. These are never separable aspects whether literal, conceptual or metaphorical and can be fascinating structures themselves. They include quasi-sculptural objects and spaces such as plinths or podiums, display cases, plazas, museums, galleries, public sites, private rooms, gardens, sides of motorways, boxes, mantelpieces, pockets, etc. Each space that waits or allows for sculptures to take place also reflects the changing histories of our relations to objects; for example, the courtyard of IMMA, once used for military rituals, displays and parades, now operates as an iconic open architectural setting, waiting for its next sculptural moment. The Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda is a ‘decommissioned’ chapel, repurposed and designed using a secularised white cube aesthetic with emptied alcoves and altar as part of its display area. The ‘Fourth Plinth’ project in London’s Trafalgar Square keeps active a public space for temporary sculpture, setting these in direct dialogue with a different culture of permanent commemorative monumentality.

In taking on this task I requested permission not to rely on any images of specific artworks in this text, in preference for images of some spaces that might host sculpture. My justification for this ‘cop-out’, as well as the (as mentioned) inadequacy of representation through image of the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘ is that I am wary that any images I might have chosen would necessarily give a false sense of being exemplary. They might act as if ‘explaining, demonstrating or illustrating, ‘ as if pointing out the answer to the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘… but of course in another way, each different work has a sculptural reality and particularity that, when encountered, is exactly an answer because each keeps open the tension between a work’s singular particularity and its participation in the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘ This is not because the category ‘sculpture’ is now so huge that it indicates a meaningless relativity, but rather each work adds to the discourse on sculpture rather than closing it down.

If we look then at the development of the objects, things or materials that have been variously considered ‘sculpture’ throughout the history of art, then we might say that, since modernity, our understanding of any firm category defining art, appears to follow the trajectory indicated by Karl Marx’s famous quote, that ‘all that is solid melts into air. ‘² If that is so, then what does asking the question ‘what is sculpture? ‘ mean for us, now? To keep asking that question means that we still want to know something about what it means to name some things as ‘sculpture, ‘ in differentiation from other things that are not-sculpture. To respond to an artwork from the IMMA collection, we can ask what makes Michael Craig Martin’s work On the Table (1970) more than just 4 buckets of water, a tabletop and some rope? That is, what makes On the Table accurately described as both 4 buckets of water, a tabletop and some rope and not 4 buckets of water, a tabletop and some rope? What makes a work of art more than the sum of, and not reducible to, the materials that go into its making and yet is only those materials? What transforms those materials, processes or activities into sculptural art? In these peculiar ways sculptural objects appear to mimic en-soul-ed or animated things, have a fetish-like quality ; yet, rather than being inspired by a force of agency, by a power to act autonomously, these objects are activated by a set of relations between environment, materials, spaces, makers, skills, techniques and these, gathered together, work as a place of interaction called ‘sculpture’. In turn, when sculpture is set in place, it activates the specific area it occupies, as a set of relations, affects and discourses, like a concrete hyperlink. 4 buckets of water, a tabletop and some rope, hanging from a ceiling, become enlivened when On the Table is put into place. We could say it sets into action an example of the effect of the joie de vivre of ‘what is sculpture? ‘

So, the term sculpture as we find it in a dictionary definition, is evidently no longer very evocative of what sculpture is. As a word ‘sculpture’ originally indicated a specific practice of carving or cutting and is now a loan word that gets applied to a wide variety of techniques and practices. It is interesting to note that ‘sculpture’ etymologically included the art of carving figures in relief and also the art of intaglio.³ This suggests that it may always have indicated a hybridity between object and form that emphasises the sense of materiality in any technique or technology, since intaglio is a form of printmaking that uses techniques of incision/cutting into a surface to make an image. Therefore the term sculpture perhaps focuses us on a sense of the material aspect of all artwork including those that operate predominantly through imagery. Every image has an object and material form for instance, where the image ‘takes place’ on a surface or through a screen with light effects, etc. This is why we can talk of both the ‘sculptural’ aspects of something that is not a physical sculpture as such and practices that are now forms of ‘expanded sculpture’ and installations which may not quite be limited to the experience of literally tactile objects as such, as may happen through screen-based or virtual technologies.

I propose therefore that it may be interesting to consider ‘sculpture’ to be something akin to a Theseus’ ship. Theseus’ ship is the famous philosophical thought experiment proposed by the Greek historian and biographer, Plutarch (c. AD 46 – AD 120). It poses the enigmatic question ‘if all the material components of the object are replaced over time, is it still the same thing? ‘ It was added to by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), to provide what we could appropriately call here ‘the curator’s or conservationist’s angle’. He asked what if all the worn bits of the ship were collected as they were being discarded and reconstructed according to the original design? You would then have two ships. Then the question becomes ‘which would be the Theseus’ ship? ‘ The paradox opens out the classical question of identity and difference as an oscillation between materiality and essence and leads us to the enigmas of the affects of presence, change, time and continuity.

If we think of sculpture as a Theseus’ ship, we might think of it currently as having sailed through a kind of modernity that reflects Marx’s description of ‘the solid melting into air’. Yet, after a focus privileging conceptualism, there is now currently a trend reengaging art with the question and nature of the ‘object’ and new ways of thinking materiality. Therefore, the story of sculpture seems like one where all that is solid melts into air … and then condenses and reforms into different stuff, objects or plasticities and presumably these will then evaporate again and reform again. An example of a work that uses sculptural means to pose these kinds of questions for sculpture is Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2), (2005), by Simon Starling, where a functioning shed on the banks of the Rhine was disassembled, with parts constructed into a boat that transported the other parts and all were then reassembled as a shed-sculpture in the Kunstmuseum, Basel.

Our story of sculpture has therefore been intertwined with the history and tensions that appear between the brute fact of the materiality of an object and the question of how function might determine its form and the apparent immateriality of the ideas informing what an object is or may be. These places of fascinating tension, when thought about, may best help answer why 4 buckets of water, a tabletop and some rope is also not 4 buckets of water, a tabletop and some rope but a sculpture known as On the Table, by Michael Craig Martin – one answer among many other answers, within IMMA’s collection, to the question what is sculpture?

1. Tate Shots: Eva Rothschild, 24 July 2014, available at: www. tate. org. uk/contextcomment/video/tateshots-eva-rothschild
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
3. Robert K. Barnhart, Ed. , Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, The H. W. Wilson Company, p. 974.

In an interview conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2005, Leonora Carrington was asked for her definition of Surrealism. Her answer continues the impish evasiveness she demonstrated throughout the interview and seems, initially at least, to refuse a definition. She said: ‘ I would define it as an approach to reality that we do not understand yet. ‘ Despite first impressions, the artist comes close here to capturing the essence of the Surrealist movement. What Carrington’s definition suggests is that Surrealism’s interest in unconscious fantasy as revealed through desire, was not as a means to escape reality, but instead a strategy through which to fundamentally alter reality, thus inferring Surrealism’s fusion of art and radical politics, typical of the revolutionary avant-garde in the inter-war period. ¹

This contrasts with a general, popular understanding of Surrealism, which tends towards broad definitions of the term as encompassing anything marvellous, strange or fantastic; often demonstrating a very narrow understanding of Surrealist art, with a focus on painting (particularly that of key figures such as Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst), rather than engaging with the diverse activities of the Surrealists that encompassed visual art, literature and politics. The tendency to focus on a small part of the Surrealist movement as representing the whole, diminishes the vibrancy of the Surrealist movement, by not properly describing the range of its activities and interests, or the heterogeneity of the artists who embraced Surrealism, with varying degrees of commitment. This text addresses some of these issues, but will focus on French Surrealism, using select examples. A particular emphasis will be placed on the writer André Breton, the central figure and organising force behind the movement.

Breton worked as a medical orderly during WWI, where he was struck by his encounters with patients suffering from shell-shock. This experience reinforced his interest in psychoanalysis, one of the key discourses that informed Surrealism. While Surrealism was strongly influenced by the models of the unconscious mind and the discussions of psychological states and dreams – both in terms of function and content– in the work of figures such as Sigmund Freud, it was not a slavish transcription of these ideas into a cultural context. Surrealism tended to place a very different value on psychoanalytic principles, theories and methods. For example, whereas, for Freud, automatism was simply a diagnostic tool, for the Surrealists it formed a central route to the unconscious. Similarly, where Freud argued that the primitive urges and desires of the unconscious (the Id) needed to be checked and ‘civilised’ by the conscious (the ego) and the conscience (the superego), the Surrealists advocated freedom from all constraint and taboo. As Alyce Mahon argues: ‘Freud’s understanding of sexuality and eroticism informed the Surrealists’ understanding of Eros, the life force, as a philosophical concept concerned with the profound human drive towards creativity and social fulfillment. Eros is also inevitably bound to its counterpart, Thanatos, the destructive death drive, and to society and its repressive codes of behaviour. At the same time, the Surrealists broke with Freud’s insistence on the need to control Eros and instead claimed that it should be deliberately unleashed for subversive, political ends. ‘²

Breton was also strongly influenced by his involvement with Dadaism, and many other artists associated with Surrealism such as Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier links to various Dada groups. The Dada interest in the ludic (the playful and spontaneous) and in chance and irrationality, particularly as a means to counteract or refuse the norms of bourgeois society, was adopted in Surrealism, although Breton argued that Surrealism was less nihilistic than Dada. In a text ‘Leave Everything’ published in Littérature, the first of many Surrealist journals, he signaled his distance from the earlier avant-garde movement, as well as from bourgeois life and values:

Leave Everything Leave Dada Leave your wife, leave your mistress Leave your hopes and fears Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere Leave the substance for the shadow Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future Take to the highways.³

A couple of years later, in 1924, Breton formulated his ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’, a statement of intent which is often seen as marking the beginning of a formal Surrealist movement. Breton’s manifesto emphasised the technique of automatism as central to Surrealist practice: ‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. ‘⁴

The text, Les Champs Magnetique (the Magnetic Fields) 1919, also published in Littérature, was by André Breton and Philippe Souppault, who claimed to have created the text through a sort of automatic free association without conscious mediation (although the texts were subsequently ‘tidied up’ through the addition of punctuation for example). Automatism in visual production was achieved through a number of techniques, such as the game ‘Exquisite Corpse’, which again created an unconscious free association, and through various painting techniques such as decalcomania, frottage and grattage. Despite these techniques, there were disputing views within the Surrealist group, as to whether visual art could be properly automatic.

Automatic methods were often collaborative and demonstrate the importance of the group within Surrealism. Surrealism involved artists and writers coming together to create work collectively and individually, in an atmosphere charged by debate and frequent passionate disputes. Something of this atmosphere is suggested by Max Ernst’s painting, Au Rendez-Vous des Amis (At the Meeting of Friends), 1922. In its prominent placing of Louis Aragon and Breton at the centre of two separate groups of Surrealists, Ernst’s image seems to prefigure the dispute between the two, essentially due to Aragon’s increasing commitment to, and Breton’s growing disenchantment with, the PCF (the French Communist Party). Breton’s dominance as ‘leader’ of the group, made for a fluid situation, with several figures leaving Surrealism to set up their own rival groups. Chief among these marginal figures was Georges Bataille, often described as ‘Surrealism’s enemy from within’, the editor of the influential journal, Documents. Bataille differed from Breton in terms of a less utopian, more strongly materialist approach to the unconscious, expressed through his concept of ‘la bassesse’, base material.

In Surrealism and Painting, produced first as a pamphlet in 1928 and then published in the journal, La Revolution Surréaliste, Breton argued more strongly for a Surrealist painting that would refer to ‘a purely interior model’, conceived not just in terms of automatism, but in terms of a new conception of ‘oneiric description’, where dream narratives were communicated in a highly polished, finished, almost illustrative manner. While Surrealism and Painting focussed on the work of Picasso (then working in what could be described as a Surrealist vein), Breton’s model of Surrealist painting was soon centred around the work of Salvador Dalí.

Dalí’s The Spectre of Sex Appeal, 1934, is typical of the type of dream illustration that formed this branch of Surrealist painting, and also clearly demonstrates an interest in psychoanalytic models in its representation of a desire for the mother that is simultaneously erotic and repulsive. The work is typical of Dalí’s method of ‘critical paranoia’, where the artist made use of double imagery to illustrate how the individual experiences reality in a manner that is more indicative of their repressed desires, than a confirmation of objective reality. According to Dalí: ‘…the paranoiac activity always makes use of materials that are controllable and recognisable … Paranoia makes use of the external world in order to set off his obsessive idea, with the disturbing characteristic of verifying the reality of this idea for others. ‘⁵

Hal Foster’s influential text on Surrealism, Compulsive Beauty, 1993, reads Surrealist art in terms of Freud’s ideas of the uncanny as being primarily motivated by a death drive that is more powerful than the pleasure principle. In Foster’s view, the eroticism of Surrealist art is always tinged with violence and death. Hans Bellmer’s Les Jeux de la Poupee, 1934-1949, involves a series of photographs of an elaborate, jointed doll, made by the artist and subject to his manipulations and distortions, in a manner that creates an unsettling eroticism. Freud’s text The Uncanny, 1919, had named the doll or mannequin and the double as figures that strongly represent the uncanny. For Freud, the repetitions associated with the uncanny are associated with the inevitable movement of life towards death, and it’s notable that Bellmer repeats forms, even within single images, as in one of his most disturbing manifestations of the doll, where instead of a body she is given a double set of legs.

The violent dismantling and distortions of the female form, in Bellmer, and in the images of Man Ray among others, have meant that Surrealism has been read as an aesthetic that privileges a heterosexual male gaze under which woman is simply an ‘object of desire’. Surrealist art frequently presented the body of woman as offering a route to the unconscious through desire (or l’amour fou, mad love, and ‘convulsive beauty’ as their ideas of eros were often expressed). Female artists within Surrealism, such as Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, tended to be viewed as models and muses as well as artists, conforming to the ideals of femme-enfant (child-woman) or femme-sorcière (sorceress). However, Surrealist images often complicated fixed ideas of gender, as in Man Ray’s Anatomies of 1929, where he photographed Miller’s chin and neck in a manner that renders them strongly phallic in appearance, or in the Surrealist fascination with transvestitism, as in Marcel Duchamp’s adoption of the feminine persona of Rrose Selavy (eros, c’est la vie, eros, that’s life).

While Max Ernst’s Meeting of Friends suggests a strongly male environment, Surrealism was attractive to a number of female artists, who saw it as a field through which they could explore their own sexual and gendered identities. Natalya Lusty has argued that these women occupied a particular position in relation to Surrealism, where they were both participants and observers: ‘… their work at particular moments is informed through the twin modes of active participation and detached observation, establishing a dynamic of complicity and resistance, homage and critique in relation to many of the central tenets of Bretonian Surrealism. ‘⁶

Lee Miller’s t, 1940, can be seen not simply as a documentary image of a classical sculpture, damaged in the London Blitz, but as an example of the artist taking control of her image, conflating the many images Man Ray took of her, suggestive of a fragmented classical torso, with her political reportage of WWII. Meret Oppenheim’s works, such as Luncheon in Fur, 1936, and Cannibal Feast, 1959, are strongly suggestive of a female sexuality, conflated with consumption, where passivity is not necessarily a powerless position, but instead one that is actively chosen for gratification and pleasure.

These works also provide a cogent example of Surrealism’s experimentation with non-traditional media, and demonstrate the limitations of a narrow focus on Surrealist painting. Oppenheim’s Luncheon in Fur is a particularly well known example of the ‘Surrealist Object’, where everyday items are brought together or transformed, to create a sense of the uncanny or the marvellous. Her Cannibal Feast was produced for the 1959 Surrealist Exhibition, with the theme of Eros. To get a full sense of the radical nature of Surrealism, we need to imaginatively move beyond the often poor quality images that record such ephemeral works, to consider the intensely experiential nature of these events. Many Surrealist actions and performances acquired their own mythology and legend, such as Dalí’s infamous speech for the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in London, in 1936, which he famously delivered wearing a diving suit, causing him to collapse from the heat and lack of air.

Rosalind Krauss has argued for photography as the most important medium for Surrealism. In L’Amour Fou: Surrealism and Photography, 1986, she argues that Surrealist images undermine photography’s iconic and indexical nature (where the world is recorded as an image that demonstrates a necessary connection to reality). Instead Surrealism tended to present photographs as indeterminate symbols that operate in a manner akin to language (the staged repetitions of Bellmer’s Poupee provide just one example of this). Surrealist use of photography was varied, ranging from techniques undermining its connection to reality (Man Rays ‘solarizations’ or Raoul Ubac’s ‘brûlages’), to chance images of the marvellous (such as Brassaï’s photographs of Paris at night).

Surrealism operated above all through language, through the pages of the various Surrealist journals (Littérature, La Revolution Surréaliste, Surréalisme au Service de la Revolution, Varietés, Documents, and the London Bulletin, to name just a few of the most prominent), and through pamphlets and flyers distributed on the streets, often with strongly didactic political messages such as their collective statement of 1925 ‘Open the Prisons. Disband the Army’. The group also produced more measured statements of their political views, as in the text jointly produced by Breton, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, published in the Communist Publication, Partisan Review, in 1938, which argued that art is necessarily revolutionary when free from political control.

In an elaborate protest against the Colonial Exhibition, held in Paris in 1931, the Surrealists, together with the PCF (the French Communist Party) and the AIL (the Anti-Imperialist League), organised an alternative exhibition ‘The Truth about the Colonies’. The Surrealist display for the exhibition featured ethnographic objects (mostly taken from André Breton’s extensive collection), alongside a text derived from Karl Marx: ‘a people who oppress others cannot possibly be free’.⁷

Against this display, the Surrealists had a vitrine exhibiting ‘European fetishes’, which contained three figures: a tacky figurine reminiscent of a ‘Hottentot Venus’; an elaborate collection box for French Foreign Missions, featuring an African child holding a begging bowl with the word ‘merci’ printed on it; and finally, a Catholic crusade figure of the virgin and child. David Bate has argued that this display involved an inversion of the Christian values of faith, hope and charity.⁸

As such, the Surrealist contribution to ‘The Truth about the Colonies’ took a strong stance against what they saw as the hypocritical humanism of Western colonialism, especially as represented by religious missionaries. Photographs of the exhibition were reproduced in Surréalisme au Service de la Revolution in December 1931, reinforced by a tract in the form of an imperative instruction: ‘Don’t Visit the Colonial Exhibition’, where they argued: ‘The dogma of French territorial integrity, so piously advanced in moral justification of the massacres we perpetuate, is a semantic fraud; it binds no one to the fact that not one week goes by without someone being killed in the colonies. ‘⁹

The Surrealist response to the Colonial Exhibition, involved a typical reversal of hegemonic values, with the supposedly civilised and rational European society exposed as barbaric against the ‘primitive’ irrationality and magic of the non-West. The ethnographic objects from Breton’s collection were used to present an alternative to Western bourgeois culture. By privileging the non-West over the West, the dream over reality, the chance and the marvellous over the rational and routine, the Surrealist hope was to alter existing reality through a fusion of image and text, art and politics.

1. See Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1984.
2. Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros: 1938-1968, 2005, p. 15.
3. Breton, in Matheson, ed. , The Sources of Surrealism, 2006, p. 243.
4. Breton, in Harrison and Wood, eds. , Art in Theory: 1900-2000, 2003, p. 452.
5. Salvador Dalí in Finkelstein, ed. , The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 1998, p. 233.
6. Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 2007, p. 2.
7. The Surrealists ascribed the quotation to Marx in the exhibition ; however, it actually comes from Engels, rather than Marx’s Speech on Poland of 1847.
8. David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, 2004, p. 223.
9. Ibid, p. 221.

What is Photography?

From its beginnings, photography has been marked by its versatility. The camera has been employed for personal use in family snapshots; official use to create visual records (examples include passports, medical records and mugshots); commercial use in advertising images; and creative use in art photography, to list just a few examples. Photography has also engaged in constant technological innovations, leading to enormous differences in the physical character of the image; from daguerreotypes to images printed from a negative, from plate glass to film and from analogue to digital. Given this diversity, the photograph has always been difficult to define and contain. The apparently basic question ‘What is Photography?’ provokes complex responses that need to consider the diverse roles and characteristics of the photograph.

In 1922, in a letter to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Marcel Duchamp declared: ‘You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.’¹ Today the camera seems more firmly embedded in visual culture than ever; every mundane event or passing sight instantly captured and shared in an age of ‘smartphones’ and social networking sites. The ubiquity of the photographic image has perhaps created an oppressive presence in everyday life. The colonisation of every aspect of life by photography is not a recent development; however the invention of photography in the late 1830s quickly led to a dramatic increase in the production and circulation of images.²

Photography has been seen as a documentary tool, allowing for realistic depictions of the world, and as a creative practice, now a central medium within the fine arts. The interchange between these opposing views of the medium – factual and imaginative, everyday life and ‘high’ culture – has created a rich field of image production.

Photography and Modernity

Roland Barthes pointed out that photography in its earliest years depicted remarkable things, but over time things became remarkable simply because they were photographed.³ The development of a medium that allowed for a quick and accurate reproduction of the world meant the creation, for the first time in history, of a visual record of all aspects of life. Photographs offer a visual knowledge of the world outside direct experience. This knowledge is abstracted and second-hand, but it nonetheless creates a strong sense of recognition.⁴Visual representations became increasingly important in the dissemination of knowledge; the endless reproducibility of the photograph made it a central feature of modern, spectacular, consumer society.

Photography did not simply represent modern life, it became one of the conditions associated with modernity. Advancements in technology, especially those related to transport and communications, gave a sense of life lived at greater speed accross shorter distances. Photography allows for quick, accurate recording of things and its placing of distant objects, places and people, directly in front of the viewer, had the apparent effect of abolishing both time and distance.

Photography inserted itself into discourses, such as tourism, criminology and medicine, often becoming a tool through which institutional power was exercised.⁵ The photographing of people and places did not always make the distant and strange seem familiar; photography, especially in its institutional use, frequently asserted difference.

John Lamprey, active in the 1870s, sought a standardised means to depict the human body for his anthropological research. He photographed the nude figure, in full-length front and side profiles, against a gridded backdrop. His methods gave the illusion of a neutral, disinterested, scientific discourse, allowing him to compare differences between races. However, Lamprey’s work didn’t just record difference, it also constructed it. His project was ‘steeped in colonial ideology and illicit desire’ and served as a visual representation of western power over the ‘other’.⁶

Image of Reality

Early accounts of photography often displayed a clear sense of wonder at a process that showed a miraculous ability to record the world. Walter Benjamin cited the response of German author, Max Dauthendey, to early portraiture:

We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyone affected by the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotypes.⁷

Despite such accounts, the photograph’s distance from reality can be seen from its distortions of time and space; its two-dimensionality; its selection and omission of objects through the framing of the camera’s lens; the frequent absence of colour; and its stillness. However, despite these features, photography has been seen to have a necessary link with reality.

This connection to reality is often cited as the reason certain photographs generate a charged or emotional response from viewers. The photograph has been described as indexical, a sign carrying a trace of the real, because of the way analogue photography records a physical trace of the light as it falls on actual objects. Dennis Oppenheim’s work from 1970, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, is an illustration of photography’s indexical properties; a photograph of the artist as a photograph. In the work, Oppenheim turned his torso into a light-sensitive plate, sunbathing with a book on his chest, and recording the result in a pair of ‘before and after’ photographs. It’s a compelling demonstration of the way traditional photographic methods both depict the objects that appear before the camera, and contain physical residues of them.

Photography was also considered to offer a truthful depiction of the world because it avoided the personal, subjective expression of media such as painting. In contrast, the camera was seen to offer an objective means of recording subjects that documented rather than interpreted. Photographic documents aspired to a ‘straight’ photographic style – direct and unmediated – that described ‘facts’ in a neutral, scientific way. John Lamprey’s work demonstrates that claims to scientific objectivity were often spurious. Our experience of images is never entirely free of interpretation, and the meanings we ascribe to photographs are strongly influenced by the context in which we encounter them. Photographs are rarely presented in isolation; even personal snapshots are often experienced in the context of the ‘family album’. The supposed truth and objectivity of photography is as much a symptom of institutional authority, as a characteristic of its physical properties.

One way in which the meaning of the photograph is fixed and made clear is through the use of the caption. Walter Benjamin described the caption as an imperative directive to photographic meaning that created signposts for the viewer.⁸ Another paired set of images, Incident, 1993 and Border Incident, 1994, by the Irish artist Willie Doherty, demonstrates the way our understanding of photographs is informed by the context in which they are viewed and how language supplements the image in the form of title and/or caption. Both images are large, detailed, close-ups of burntout cars abandoned in the landscape. The straight on camera angle in the photographs adds to the sense that we are being presented with a factual description. Both works are given a political charge because of the use of the words ‘border’ and ‘incident’ in the titles, immediately evoking the violence of Northern Ireland’s recent past and suggesting that we are looking at the aftermath of conflict. However, one of the two images depicts a car that has simply been illegally dumped. Typically for Doherty’s work the signposts offered by the titles misdirect rather than guide.

When digital processes first became widespread in the 1990s, they were seen by many to mark the end of any claims to photographic ‘truth’. Rather than carry a physical memory of light falling on objects, digital images are reconstructions using binary code, and can therefore be seen as further removed from reality. As we have seen, viewing photographs as a slice of the ‘real’ has always been problematic, no matter what form they take.

The field of photojournalism is most vulnerable to doubts about photography’s relationship to reality. For many the most important role of the camera has been its ability to ‘bear witness’ to the major events of history. Photojournalism certainly seems less prestigious today than in its heyday from the 1930s to the 1960s, when magazines such as Life and Vu were dedicated to the narration of current events through the picture story. However, the decline in photojournalism has less to do with doubts about photographic truth, than with the emergence of new media and forums for the circulation of news images. Many of the images of the recent ‘Arab Spring’ revolts were taken by protestors and ordinary citizens, who then circulated the images on the Internet. Such developments offer the possibility of more democratic documentary practices. In the past the figure of the photojournalist or documentary photographer suggested a heroic figure (by virtue of both skill and bravery) who occupied a superior position relative to his/her subjects, often presented as passive victims of events.⁹ Digital technologies seem to offer the possibility that such victims of circumstance can achieve agency through recording their own trauma.

Outside these debates, in our everyday experience of visual culture, we continue to invest in the belief that photography presents a reliable and truthful account of the world. We expect images of products displayed by online stores to relate to the items for sale, and tend to believe in the image more than the textual description. The item for sale on e-bay, without an accompanying photograph, is assumed to be in dreadful condition, no matter how enthusiastically its virtues are listed by the seller.

Image not Reality

While some have prized photography for its ability to document and record the world, others have been drawn to the creative possibilities offered by the camera. Photography was initially positioned as a creative practice through emulating existing fine art media. The earliest photographs depicted genres established in painting: the still-life, the nude and the landscape. From the 1850s a style of photography known as ‘pictorialism’ emerged. The pictorialists recreated the type of sentimental, narrative subject found in nineteenth-century art, often producing very elaborate, multi-figural scenes through using techniques like combination printing. Pictorialist imagery tended to employ soft focus and made the surface of the photograph appear expressive and individual, by scratching into or drawing on negatives.

In the early twentieth century, with the emergence of avant-garde groups such as Dada, Soviet-Constructivism and Surrealism, there was a radical change in approaches to photography as art. These groups were drawn to photography’s modernity and, rather than relating it to painting, they sought a new aesthetic based on the operations of the camera. Avantgarde photography tended to employ a sharp focus and often depicted modern subjects, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch’s images of industrially produced commodities or László Moholy-Nagy’s images of the Eiffel Tower.

Aleksandr Rodchenko felt that photography allowed artists to move away from the ‘old point of view’ which he associated with bourgeois ‘belly button shots’ and argued that the camera enabled less conventional views of the world, such as views from above and below (bird’s eye and worm’s eye viewpoints), extreme close-ups and cropping.¹⁰ Photography was also seen as an exciting extension to natural vision, recording sights unavailable to the human eye. Microphotography using powerful magnifying lenses, the use of series of cameras to capture motion and X-rays, all extended natural vision, creating what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘the optical unconcious’.¹¹ While avant-garde photographers were interested in photography’s connection to reality, they were also concerned to dismantle and subvert the reality of the photograph. Techniques such as photomontage, photograms, doubling and solarisation emphasised the photograph’s status as a made image and its distance from the real.

Some art photographers, particularly those associated with Aperture magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, produced a type of modernist pictorialism; moody black and white images that abstracted their subjects and emphasised the expressive qualities of the camera. David Campany has argued that this approach was concerned to separate photography from everyday, vernacular snapshots. This is why they chose to use black and white rather than colour; produced images that were expressive rather than descriptive; and often used unusual angles or framing to create abstract effects.¹²

In contrast, other art photographers engaged in a ‘documentary style’, often focusing on urban life in street photography.¹³ John Szarkowski’s influential catalogue, The Photographer’s Eye, was centred around these practices by artists who were united by an interest in the vernacular snapshot, using its tropes to give their artfully composed images a careless, everyday quality. As with earlier avant-garde ideas, this approach to photography attempted a codification of the medium, based on qualities inherent to the camera. Szarkowski argued that one of the central features of the camera is the way it causes us to see the world as an image (the thing itself), framed, isolated and ultimately separated from the world by the act of photographing (the frame). The resulting image is separated from the flow of time, and causes an attentive form of viewing, often focusing on compelling details.¹⁴

Artists from the 1960s began to move away from seeing the photograph as art, and were instead drawn to its everyday documentation of the mundane. In this they were strongly influenced by conceptual art, in particular its mistrust of the expressive aesthetic of modernist art, engaging instead in an art of intellectual enquiry. Conceptual artists employed photographs as blank, neutral documents, but soon this became an influential aesthetic within art photography, most famously represented by the exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, held in the Eastman House Museum of Photography, New York in 1975.¹⁵

This approach to the image continues to be influential in contemporary art, however, apparently neutral documentation of the everyday spaces of life can often be deceptive. Thomas Demand’s practice involves photographing seemingly blank and overlooked environments, such as offices, stairwells and bathrooms; spaces Marc Augé referred to as ‘non-places’.¹⁶ Demand’s photographs are in fact elaborate hand made creations, sculptural models of space, created in paper by the artist and then photographed. Demand’s work brings together two opposing tendencies in the use of photographs by contemporary artists: the documentation of the everyday, and the creation of elaborate scenarios for the camera.

While art might engage with the everyday, documentary character of photography in one way, in another it avoids losing the unique, special character of art. Most artists using photographs tend to produce images in single or limited editions, denying the reproducibility offered by photographic technologies. Walter Benjamin famously argued that photography diminished the ‘aura’ of art, but that it also offered the possibility of more democratic forms of art.¹⁷ The economic imperatives of art production prevent the widespread adoption of these ideas, but some artists have used photographic practices to reach a wider public audience. A good example is Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy, which was shown as a series of posters on the London Underground, for one month in 1998.

The End of Photography?

Despite our exposure to ever increasing amounts of photographic images, it could be argued that we notice them less and less. Where once photography was seen as representing modernity and speed, it is now often characterised by its slowness and stillness, more marked today as the moving image becomes increasingly accessible. Roland Barthes argued that the frozen quality of the photograph has the effect of suggesting a past moment, but that our belief in its reality makes that moment permanently present.¹⁸ Photographs create a powerful nostalgia, evoking the past in the present.

Digital practices mean that photography has become more disembodied, often exchanged from computer to computer without ever taking physical form. But certain photographs are still noticed, embodied, displayed and examined. The best example of this is the family photograph, which often becomes a substitute for absent loved ones, and is sometimes touched and caressed as if it had a type of personhood.¹⁹

However, we are attentive to such images, not because of their physical properties, but because of their subject. Barthes argued that the photograph acts as a ‘transparent envelope’, which we look through in order to engage with its content.²⁰ This unassuming quality has allowed photography to adopt new forms and to insert itself into a wide variety of contexts. The invisibility of photography does not mark the end of the medium, the invisibility of photography is its power.

© Fiona Loughnane, 2011

 

What is this thing called Performance?

‘How was your performance today?’ I could be asking a teacher, a driver, a stockbroker or a lover. ‘Performance’ is a recurrent term within today’s general lexicon, yet practitioners and theorists in the field of Performance Studies disagree as to what constitutes this nebulous art form. In the context of the contemporary art world it allows us to suggest a practice full of paradoxes, wilfully refusing to be fenced in.

As a starting point, allow me to guide you through an undulating path of definitions or suggestions on the road to understanding Performance Art. I will not be directing you towards a signpost marked ‘Performance Art’ because there is no such thing. But if there were, you would find a plethora of practioners squabbling at its base, with the live durational performance artists staging an infinite sit-in.

Performance — a broad church

Performance is an ‘essentially contested concept’.¹ Practitioners and theorists occupy this space of disagreement, allowing the field to unfold and incorporate a multitude of practices. Amelia Jones explains that “Body art and performance art have been defined as constitutive of postmodernism because of their fundamental subversion of modernism’s assumption that fixed meanings are determinable through the formal structure of the work alone.² Performance Art cannot be described simply in terms of a particular structure or work. All forms and media are at the artist’s disposal. Santiago Sierra’s work Veterans of the Wars of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq facing the corner, 2011 at the Manchester Gallery of Art simply installed a performer in a bare room for seven hours a day over nine days. Pauline Cummins and Louise Walsh collaborated on their 1992 Sounding the Depths video, photographic and sound installation, projecting mouths onto each other’s bodies; proclaiming bodily ownership amid this turbulent period of lack of control over Irish women’s bodies.

Indeed, Performance Art cannot be said to stem from any one particular discipline: theatre, dance or the visual arts. London’s Live Art Development Agency describe Live Art as ‘a gene pool of artists, whose work is rooted in a broad church of disciplines, they have crossed each other’s paths, blurred each other’s edges and, in the process, opened up new creative forms.³ With practices from different art forms performing (excuse the pun), Performance Art is, then, interdisciplinary, collapsing the boundaries between disciplines. This essay, however, focuses on performance .in the visual arts, a practice ubiquitous in the contemporary art world.

Body — Site — Audience — Time

Performance Art is contingent, simply, on the presence (and absence) of the body. The body, site, audience and time are its four pillars, with corporeal action the central axis. Artists turned to the physical body and brought an ‘aliveness’, a temporality and instability to artworks. Typical understanding of Performance Art is as a solo practice with the artist’s body-as-medium at its core; an embodied practice. But the practice may also incorporate other bodies: performers and audience members. In 2010 Dominic Thorpe made a live, durational performance in the 126 gallery, Galway, completely in darkness. Redress State, Questions Imagined gave the audience small torches to illuminate the darkened performance site as they wished, engaging the viewer in an auditory, sense experience. Thorpe’s removal of one of our senses refocused our experience of his work into a physical, embodied one.

It is the action of the body, the authenticity of an activity, that frames it as Performance Art. RoseLee Goldberg describes the context thus: ‘… the live presence of the artist, and the focus on the artist’s body, became central to notions of ‘the real’, and a yardstick for installation and video art.⁴

Performance Art, from its beginnings, occurred in both alternative and formal locations. Site is a potent element in the framing of the work. A work of live performance on the street will have a distinct reading to one viewed in a gallery context. Indeed a performative video or photograph shot on the street has a different interpretation to one shot in a studio. This essay is littered with examples of live performance works with the site listed as a significant element to the manifestation of the works.

Time, or what is called duration in Performance Art, is a critical element. Performance Art is a time-based practice. Durational work — generally anything over three hours — is a particular strand of practice and inevitably brings with it elements of endurance. Endurance comes in different forms; from the grande endurance or masochistic performance⁵ to the petite endurance, occurring in performances that explore everyday life.⁶

What kind of activity?

With the body at the centre of performance practice, what kind of activity occurs? The influential Performance Studies scholar and theatre director Richard Schechner describes performance as ‘an ephemeral event which shares characteristics with a nexus of activities including play, game, sport, and ritual.⁷Consider the following artworks:

Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971. Burden walked into F Space gallery, California and had himself shot in the arm.

Marina Abramovic /ULAY, Rest Energy, 1980, ROSC ’80, Dublin. A bow and arrow is held taut by the performers’ body weight, the arrow pointed directly at Abramovic’s heart. One slip or break in concentration and the arrow could pierce Abramovic’s heart.

Franko B, I Miss You!, 2002, Tate Modern. Franko walked up and down a catwalk, bleeding from the veins in each arm, painting the canvas-covered floor with his blood.

Works such as these are often thought of when considering Performance Art; sensational and risky, they challenge the very integrity of the corporeal body, and are emblematic of grande endurance works. Performance practice, even from the 1960s and ’70s, also includes works focusing more on participation and transforming everyday actions:

Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970. A photographic work in two parts. Oppenheim lies on the beach, firstly with a book over his chest and latterly without the book, displaying evidence of sunburn with the shadow of the absent book.

Joseph Beuys, Bureau for Direct Democracy, 1972. A live performance. Over the 100 days of Documenta 5, Beuys invited the audience to engage in conversation with him on democracy and politics.

Pipilotti Rist, Ever is Over All, 1997. A performance to video. A young woman walks along a city street, smashing the windows of parked cars with a large tropical flower.

Performance Art — the Performing Arts

The Performing Arts refers to theatre, dance, opera and the circus. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner made a key distinction between Performance Art and the Performing Arts when he declared Performance Art as: ‘making, not faking’.⁸ Put simply, the artist is actually shot in the arm, car windows are really smashed, skin is truly sunburned. These are not illusions but actual bodily experiences. In http://www.imma.ie/en/page_212496.htm#008the 1970s, Performance Art stood in direct opposition to theatre. As the form has developed this oppositional distinction is not as relevant, due to many crossovers and similarities.

Is the Performance Artist acting?

Performance occupies an in-between place. The performance artist is not ‘acting’ in the traditional theatrical sense. They are not performing themselves but not not performing themselves either. The performance frame is contingent and temporary, holding the performer in a liminal, provisional and suspended place. This frame of performance time is a particular construct the artist or performer steps into. Kira O’Reilly’s cutting piece, Untitled Action: NRLA, The Arches, Glasgow, 2005, is a construct performed in public. While in action it may relate to forms of self-harm, made public and placed in the Live Performance frame, it offers the viewer an empathetic human-to-human encounter. Precisely because O’Reilly performs live, inhabiting the same place and time as the audience, and is the artist/maker constructing the action, the work becomes an intersubjective experience.⁹ Josette Feral illucidates: ‘… ‘performance’ attempts not to tell (like theatre) but rather to provoke synaesthetic relationships’.¹⁰

A short and rocky road into the history of performance

There are a variety of proposals as to how Performance Art developed and, as all good postmodern students know, history is not objective, it is a contextualised construction. From the perspective of a practitioner in the field of performance from the visual arts, allow me to sketch the relatively brief history of Performance Art.

RoseLee Goldberg’s book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, dates the beginning of Performance Art very precisely to 20 February 1909: the day the first Futurist Manifesto was published in Le Figaro newspaper. She charts her theory on the development of the art form up through Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism and Bauhaus and cites the significant influence of the Black Mountain College in the US as foundational, referring to John Cage in music, Merce Cunningham in dance and Allan Kaprow’s Happenings. Looking to parallels in Europe, she cites the practices of Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys as important — artists we identify more immediately as belonging to the visual arts. Goldberg’s arc of Performance Art encompasses the different disciplines of theatre, dance, visual art and music into the family of Performance Art. Goldberg explains that ‘… by its very nature performance defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists. Any strict definition would immediately negate the possibility of performance itself.¹¹

Another historical perspective from close to the emblematic era is Performance by Artists, edited by A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale and also published in 1979. In her Introduction, Gale opens by making two clear distinctions in practice between Canada/US and Europe. She cites European practice as ‘more theoretical, more intellectualised — if only because of the apparent rejection of those qualities of narration and entertainment [as seen in Canadian and US works]… [European practice employs] tableaux vivants… [and is]… a form of extended sculpture.¹²

Looking at this from the globalised world of the twenty-first century, it is informative to note that in the days before the multifarious biennials and blockbuster exhibitions criss-crossing the world there was a proposal suggesting two clear branches of practice. Gale cites a foundational figure in each location: Vito Acconci in Canada/US and Joseph Beuys in Europe.

Thomas McEvilley, in a less historically-focused trajectory, suggests three fountains of interest as noteworthy in the development of Performance Art practice:

 

1. Performance emerges from the history of theatre and begins as a counterpoint to realism.
2. Performance emerges from the history of painting and gains its force and focus after Jackson Pollock’s ‘action painting’.
3. Performance represents a return to investigations of the body most fully explored by shamans, yogis and practitioners of alternative healing arts.¹³

 

McEvilley’s reference to painting as a springboard for Performance Art resonates in Harold Rosenberg’s watershed 1952 essay, ‘The American Action Painters’, illustrating a turn in practice; ‘… what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event […] The image would be the result of this encounter.¹⁴Performance artworks are events that have at their core a living, breathing body presented in an art frame.

Hans Namuth’s 1950 documentary film of Jackson Pollock at work is also influential, aligning the medium of film with an artist’s action. Performative practice is extant in the contemporary art world. At a cursory glance we can cite Matthew Barney’s mammoth Cremaster series and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, with the artist taking on different guises, staging (or performing) images of feminine stereotypes.

Looking at this trajectory it is interesting to note that even from its emblematic period, performance practice was not contingent on the presence of a live audience. Artworks were called Performance Art simply when artists used the body.

Works performed to camera in the artist’s studio include: Bruce Nauman, Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966-67, in front of an invited audience; Gilbert & George, The Singing Sculpture, 1970, at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London, and sometimes in front of an unintentional audience; Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance, 1981-1982. Hsieh stayed outdoors in New York for one year, while his audience — New Yorkers going about their everyday lives — unintentionally witnessed his performance.¹⁵

Performance Art — live or mediated presentation?

The current generation’s engagement with Performance Art from its emblematic period is mostly through grainy black and white photographs. These images themselves become iconic references to influential works, and are unavoidably dislocated from the context of their live presentation. They live bound up in the mythology of the event. It is the re-presentation of these ephemeral events that excites; the absent made present, the disappeared reappearing in the form of photography, video and stories.

Alanna O’Kelly made her 1995 live performance Omós in St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin. In the darkly-lit twelfth-century chapel, O’Kelly’s feet and calves were illuminated as she ran on the spot. The hairs on her legs stood out, the sound of her breath audibly taxed. I did not witness this live performance and have only seen fleeting video documentation of it, but it lives in the annals of Performance Art folklore. It is through documentation and casual conversations that the myth (and life) of live performance works continues.

The ‘evidence’ of such artworks are available to us through representations of the event: photographs, posters, sometimes videos, and always stories, testimony and mythology. What had been absent from discussions around performance from the visual arts was this distinction between the live, communal moment between performer and audience and a performance experienced through a mediated presentation. That was until Peggy Phelan’s ontological proclamation of performance’s contingency on the live experience: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present’.¹⁶

Phelan’s seminal essay focuses on the ‘manically charged’ present of a live performance. This ‘presentness’ of both performer and spectator calls for, in Phelan’s terms, the active participation of the audience in the liminal space of live performance. The audience become interpreters or co-creators when experiencing live performance; the emancipated spectator that philosopher Jacques Rancière writes of.

This spotlight on the relationship between the live performer and live audience refocused discussion about Performance Art to its liveness and its relational bond with the audience. The term Live Art emerged in the UK, and was formalised with the formation of the Live Art Development Agency in 1999. Live Art centres on the temporality and ephemerality of Performance Art in its widest sense.

Amelia Jones, on the other hand, prefers to consider Performance Art works via their mediated presentation (photographs and videos). She opts to refer to the works as Body Art rather than Performance Art and claims the viewer can also have this performative relationship with an image from a performance work.¹⁷(Here we are challenged by the multiple contemporary uses of the term ‘performance’. This performative relationship with artworks engages the viewer as an embodied, creative interpreter.) The mediated document, Jones claims, is equally as valid as the live performance and indeed is more neutralised and set apart, allowing the viewer to consider it outside of the manically charged present of live performance.

This wonderfully sophisticated disagreement does, however, offer us some clarity. With Phelan’s declaration of the ‘presentness’ of Performance Art and the emergence of the term Live Art on the one hand, and Jones’ subsequent hypothesis and focus on mediated works/documentation — Body Art — we may glimpse the possibility of a distinction in modes of presentation, all of which come under the umbrella term Performance Art.

Live Performance Art: Live presentation in front of an audience, corporeal acivity made public: Performance Art/Live Art
and
Performative Work:
A mediated presentation, made privately to the camera or re-presentation of a Live Performance: Performance Art/Body Art.

Performance Art and the Death of the Object

Ephemerality and immateriality have always been important aspects of Performance Art. For some practitioners in the 1960s and ’70s this immateriality was a form of protest directly against the art market. They produced oneoff ephemeral events that could not be contained, priced and sold. In the contemporary era of service industries and commodified events, this political stance against the art market is especially complicated.

Tino Sehgal’s performance works are hinged purely on live encounters. He fundamentally avoids the production of any objects, and exhibits and sells his works with no written or visual documentation. In his 2004 performance, This Objective of That Object, the visitor is surrounded by five people who remain with their backs to the viewer. The five chant, ‘The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion’; when the visitor does not respond they slowly sink to the ground. If the visitor engages with them they begin a discussion. Sehgal’s works have been collected by a number of significant institutions around the world, including the Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.¹⁸ On the sale of his work, the artist stipulates that there are no written instructions, no written receipt and no images. Sehgal’s practice has been read as the full stop in the death of the object: ‘Body Art should be seen as an extension of, not substitute for, conceptual art’.¹⁹

But can we have it all?

Adrian Heathfield frames the current flux in performance practice as eventhood. ‘Eventhood allows spectators to live for a while in the paradox of two impossible desires: to be present in the moment, to savour it, and to save the moment, to still and preserve its power long after it has gone.²⁰ There are, of course, no rules: performance artists may make ephemeral events and produce images, videos or objects around those events, or structure their work to live purely in the moment of its live performance. Heathfield’s distinction suggests that the detritus and documentation of live action functions as a relic of an event passed into memory but, as Jones asserts, these subsequent performative artworks hold their own potency independent of the live moment.

The Audience

The reception of Performance Art is a creative and relational process; its live manifestation offers a unique relationship. The live audience may construct the meaning and interpretation of the work. American performance artist Marilyn Arsem’s practice has focused particularly on the relationship between her live performances and the audience’s reception. Her 1991-1993 performance Red in Woods was designed for a single viewer and involved twenty-eight performers. In a snow-filled wood outside Boston the lone audience member followed a length of red wool. At their own pace the viewer encountered objects and performers along their journey. ‘Each person’s understanding of the performance was unique, coloured by her or his own concerns, undiluted by anyone else’s perspective.’²¹ Live performance lives in the experiential, a process made public, an encounter inviting the viewer to engage, bringing their own personal meaning to the work.

An exciting and potent part of live performance is the mythology that develops around a one-off temporal event; the creative reverberations that come from the audience. Art writing plays an important role, from the formal essays and reviews to the social media forums such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter, where the audience’s transformative experience is communicated.

Irish Performance Art

Live performance from the visual arts in Ireland is currently a vibrant practice, grounded in responding with the physical body and psychological self. There are many theories on how and why this kind of practice has developed, with suggestions that such evolution is closely connected to the Troubles, amid which artists felt conventional forms of art making failed to express the experiences happening outside the door of the studio.²²

The significance of Alastair MacLennan within Irish practice cannot be underestimated: a teacher in Belfast from the mid ’70s, MacLennan asks his audience to witness and co-inhabit the visceral territories he explores. In 1988 MacLennan made a seminal work, The Burn, in the shell of the building adjoining the old Project Arts Centre in Dublin. In an eight hour non-stop actuation (MacLennan’s term for his performance installations), he moved slowly around the burned-out shell of the building amid rubble and specifically placed objects, including pigs’ heads and burned-out flags, electrifying the sitespecific installation with the human body.

Another important point of reference is Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland’s performative stance in response to the political situation in Ireland. In 1972, O’Doherty changed his name to Patrick Ireland in a ritual performance, again at the Project Arts Centre, in protest against the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry. He vowed to sign all of his subsequent artworks as Patrick Ireland. In 2008 O’Doherty buried Patrick Ireland in a Live Performance in the grounds of IMMA in recognition of the progress of the peace process.

Samuel Beckett’s late plays, Not I, That Time and Breath, ‘exist somewhere between installation and poetry, their strict aesthetic bringing the meditative rhythms of visual art into performance.’²³ His works are essential pivots for performance practitioners globally, but clearly have special significance for Irish artists.

And Currently

Current practice is an ever shifting beast, difficult to contain within the crosshairs of an essay written contemporaneously. Nevertheless, Performance Art currently stands at a particular moment of evolution. As collections around the world attempt to reflect and collect performance works, there has been some significant examination into methods of extending, capturing and archiving the ephemerality of performance works both in theory and in practice.

TRACE: Displaced was performed live at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow in 2008. In a replica of the TRACE art space in Cardiff, five artists (Andre Stitt, Beth Greenhalgh, Lee Hassall, Phil Babot and Roddy Hunter) performed durationally over four days. On a table outside the installation, Heike Roms made a live documentation of the live performance using Post-it notes, polaroids and typed sheets of paper. At one point she noted one of the performers making an action in the centre of the installation — the site, she noted, in the gallery in Cardiff that Northern Irish artist Brian Connolly had buried his time capsule during his 2002 live performance Initiate. Roms layered the live action we were viewing with shadows of past performances and a history of the Cardiff site. Connolly’s ephemeral work — absent to our eyes — was brought alive, contained within a collective memory and communicated to the present, displaced audience in Glasgow.

Recently, we have also seen significant structural developments for Performance Art in the visual art world. In 2009 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York appointed their first Curator-in-Chief for Performance Art, and the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester cleared its permanent collection and installed fourteen durational performances for a three-week exhibition.²⁴ 2010 saw the first retrospective of a performance artist: Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present at MoMA.

Galleries and museums are currently opening their doors to live Performance Art, either ‘eventing’ an exhibition or making exhibitions centred on Live Performances. This development opens the white cube to a messy unpredictability. Live performance is often a chaotic beast, with the collision of the fluctuating unknowns of action, site, time and audience. Part of the excitement of anything witnessed live is this tantalising unknown; each iteration of a live performance is unique and unrepeatable.

Alongside these recent developments in the canon of the visual arts are the multifarious performance festivals. In many countries around the world significant festivals of Performance Art show a wide range of Live Performances over concentrated periods of time. The National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, set up in 1979, is one of the longest running festivals of Live Art in the world, showing a variety of Performance Art practices. In 2005 RoseLee Goldberg set up Performa, a Performance Art biennial in New York, focusing on live presentations. In 2001 IMMA hosted the performance event Marking the Territory. Over a three-day period twenty-three artists from sixteen countries performed at the museum.

Live Performance can happen anywhere, at any time, for any duration. Bbeyond, the Northern Irish performance collective, perform regularly on the streets of Northern Ireland — often unannounced but sometimes framed within an arts festival — making dynamic interventions in public spaces, outside galleries or cultural institutions. Abramovic, on the other hand, performed live in the cathedral of contemporary art, MoMA, New York in 2010 for three months.

Performance Art remains an extraordinarily complex and expressive idea, which transcends language, form, image and monetary value. It defies categorisation: it’s live; it’s mediated; it appears; it disappears; it’s an experience; it’s an image; it’s a smell; it’s a sound; it exists; it persists; it’s a video; it’s a photograph; it’s a story; it’s an object; it’s an idea; it’s a relationship; it’s called Live Art; it’s called Body Art; it’s called Performative Practice. It is Performance Art, asking ‘us what it means to be here, now’.²⁵

© Amanda Coogan, 2011

 

One of the dilemmas of public art has been the difficulty in offering any clear or shared definition. We might say simply that it is art that happens outside of the gallery or museum, but implicit in this definition is the assumption that public art exists outside the mainstream of contemporary arts practice, or at least is secondary to what goes on in the main spaces and, as such, it has lacked a certain credibility as a fine art discipline. The lack of a clear definition is perhaps one of the greatest obstacles for public art and yet, as Cameron Cartier points out “a clear definition is elusive because public art is simply difficult to define”.¹ Part of what makes public art practice so difficult to define is that it encompasses a vast umbrella of practices and forms: from permanent sculptures to temporary artworks; political activism; socially-engaged practices; monuments; memorials; community-based projects; off-site museum and gallery programmes; earthworks and land art; site-specific work; street furniture, urban design, and architectural decoration have all been classified under public art. Some argue that categorising public art is misleading – public art is just art. Certainly we see more and more how the distinction between an artist’s studio practice and one that is publically motivated (i.e. political, social, situational, or relational) has blurred and there is considerable fluidity in how an artist’s work resonates within the gallery, art fair, biennial and public project contexts. (Think, for example, of Martin Creed’s Work No. 850, 2008, with athletes timed to run as fast as they can, one at a time through the Duveen Hall, Tate Britain; or Francis Alÿs’ When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002 – a performative work in Lima Peru, involving 500 volunteers who with shovels moved a sand dune a few inches – land art for the landless.)

What we consider today as public art has been around since the beginnings of art – the Paleolithic cave paintings, such as those at Lascaux, France (no longer accessible to the public) or the frescoes and religious art from the medieval era that spoke to a ‘community of interest’ about hell, salvation and the divinity of God; or the tradition of monuments and memorials increasingly evident in cities and towns since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries amplifying battle and death and noble heroes. Yet the term Public Art is relatively new. It was coined in the late 1960s in the USA and UK and associated with government Per Cent for Art programmes (introduced in Ireland in 1987), which provide funds for a public artwork linked to capital development – urban regeneration, new roads, social housing, public buildings – and until the last decade involved the commissioning of mostly permanent, site-specific sculpture. Around the same time – the late 1960s and ’70s – vangardist artists in the USA, such as Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Christo, Mary Miss, Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria and Bruce Nauman, consciously broke from the constraints of the gallery and began producing interventions into the landscape and architecture. The art they made – termed invariably site-specific, earthworks, land art or environmental art – was inseparable from their (non-art) surroundings, creating a very different kind of viewing experience. Walter de Maria’s Lightening Field, 1977, for example, is conceived to be experienced over an extended period of time and involves an overnight stay at the remote site in Western New Mexico. Art historian Rosalind Krauss, keen to map this rupture with high modernism’s formalism, recognised the need for a new terminology for sculpture that had moved off the pedestal, into the gallery and out into the environment, titling her influential essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. In this essay she draws on the Klein technique to articulate new boundaries of aesthetics that move towards the limits of postmodernism’s formlessness.² This ‘loosening out’ of art’s limits has, since the 1970s, generated new categories of (public) art that operate within ever expanding and interdisciplinary fields.

Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, constructed in 1970, is perhaps the best known of these land works and has taken on a mythic status due to its disappearance a few years after it was built, submerging under high level lake water, only to re-emerge in the droughts of 2004. It is a massive spiral earthwork at Rozel Point in Utah, USA, that curves its way out into the lake; a great swirl of basalt and soil that redefines the landscape it inhabits with its juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebirth, rot and permanence. It was, writes Lynne Cooke, curator of the Dia Art Foundation, New York, “the sense of ruined and abandoned hopes that interested [Smithson]”.³ He was concerned with ‘entropy’ or energy drain (the reverse of evolution) and saw the future, like Vladimir Nabokov, as obsolete in reserve. Jane Rendell suggests that the distance (and remoteness) we have from many of these earthworks today, such as Spiral Jetty, allows them to resonate in more speculative ways and they take on a sort of heroic quality or site of pilgrimage, as suggested in Tacita Dean’s journey to find the jetty recorded in her 1997 work Trying to find the Spiral Jetty.⁴ The British artist Robert Long’s strategies for art made by walking in the landscape operate in a similar vein of remoteness and pilgrimage, going out into the ‘middle of nowhere’. His works are concerned with the relationship between time, distance, geography and measurement, and so walking as a form has enabled him to explore these ideas, while simultaneously extending the boundaries of sculpture – walking becomes art. (Walking is a practice, which other artists such as Francis Alÿs use, but for Alÿs it is principally the city that is his site, studio and readymade.) Questions of monumentality and transience are present in Long’s work: stones are used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of huge, anonymous sculptures in remote landscapes and his walks are exhibited afterwards in galleries through maps, photographs, texts and floor sculptures. Long’s work in IMMA’s collection, Kilkenny Landscape Circle, 1991, is a stone circle, an artwork that we might feel resembles the ancient field monuments. Long writes, “I consider my landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making ‘monuments’ or conversely, of ‘leaving only footprints'”.⁵

Questions of permanence and ephemerality are major themes in public art, and histories and memories find expression in the built environment – but whose history and whose memories are recorded and can the monument always maintain its original meaning and purpose? “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” writes Austrian historian Robert Musil.⁶ How many, for example, would instantly recognise the four angels at the foot of John Henry Foley’s Daniel O’Connell Monument, 1882, at the riverside of Dublin’s O’Connell Street, as representing the four provinces of Ireland? While historic, artistic and literary figures, and famous dead pop stars, sports people and popular local heroes find their way onto our streets and squares, to sit alongside the dead heroes and triumphal arches and public sculptures, they usually take on traditional – generic and heroic – aspects of monumentality. But many contemporary artists have found other ways of remembering, both using and subverting the monument as a means in which to readdress everyday and political issues or to disrupt a sense of familiarity, as Rachel Whiteread achieved in her 1993 work House, by casting in concrete a soon-to-be-demolished house in East London, turning inside space out. And, John Byrne’s Misneach (Courage), 2010, situated in Ballymun, Dublin – an equestrian statue of a girl on a horse – which shows how an everyday person (a young local girl) can be as much a hero as the celebrated public figure.

The meaning these public artworks will have for a particular public and how the public experiences the work becomes a central concern of the artist. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982, in Washington, is the opposite of the traditional overpowering monument – authoritarian, vertical, phallic. It succeeds, as Tom Finkelpearl suggests, in being both abstract and personal – it does not include an image of the dead, but instead names them (naming has been used in many other memorials since, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt begun in California in 1987 and which still continues today, now the biggest community arts project in the world). The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is anti-monumental, anti-heroic, intimate. It includes the viewer as participant in the work in a very physical way. It is, says Lin, made for a “one-to-one experience”.⁷ Conversely, Christo and Jeanne- Claude’s ‘Wrappings’, such as Running Fence, California, 1973, or Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, Australia, 1969, (made with the aid of 130 workers who devoted 17,000 work hours) might also be considered as monuments. The ‘Wrappings’ offer new ways of seeing the familiar, but only for a short time (like an event), giving them an almost legendary character. Visually impressive and monumental in ambition, scale and execution they perform as spectacles. Nearly five million people saw the Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, in 1995. But most of us will only know the works through photographs and recorded documents. Similarly, Dorothy Cross’ Ghost Ship, 1999 – a NISSAN/IMMA award – operated like a public spectacle, but not in a way that ‘overwhelmed’ the public, it was more subtle, poetic. Conceived as a homage to the lightships around the coast of Ireland, which were being decommissioned in favour of automation, Cross’ decommissioned lightship (a found object), was painted in phosphorous paint and with a UV light timed to fade and glow; the obsolete vessel made visible at night in repetitive sequences of appearance and disappearance. Moored off Scotsman’s Bay, Dun Laoghaire for three weeks, it demonstrated, like Christo’s ‘Wrappings’, how the impact of temporary public artworks can powerfully resonate long after the work is complete.

The focus on everyday life, ‘ordinary people’ and ordinary things and the influences of popular culture on ‘high art’ originating in historical avant-garde strategies to bring art and life closer, are all evident in the work of German artist Stephan Balkenhol. Large Head, 1991, is an everyman (an individual). It sits on a simple table – carved, craggy and cracked. Ordinary rather than idealised, and anonymous rather than heroic, his works represent the familiar strangers that occupy our everyday lives.

Julian Opie’s life-size walking figures (Sara, Jack, Julian and Suzanne), displayed on the central mall of O’Connell Street, Dublin, walking in the direction of the Hugh Lane Gallery, and mounted on LED screens, use sophisticated computer technology to represent real people as simple outline reductions. They were commissioned by the Hugh Lane Gallery who have successfully used O’Connell Street as a very public platform to connect people to the gallery by using public art that is both immediate (accessible) and ‘sophisticated’. Barry Flanagan’s exhibition of giant bronze hares, for example, was also displayed here. These public works displayed as exhibitions, which are generally for several months, build impact over time, but unlike permanent works seem somehow less threatening for the public and give greater scope for risk taking and experimentation. The successful ‘Fourth Plinth’ in London makes a space amongst the monuments of Trafalgar Square for temporary public artworks by high profile artists that capture a large audience and include the people’s voice as part of the selection process, through comments on a website. The range of work seen and experienced here is considerable – think, for example, of Mark Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, 2004, a sublime work in white marble of the disabled artist when she was eight months pregnant, or of Antony Gormley’s One and Other, 2009, a participatory democratic work that gave 2,400 people the chance to spend an hour alone on the Trafalgar Square plinth (many used the occasion to hold up banners supporting charities or protesting).

II If defining Public Art is testing, it might nonetheless be helpful to suggest a few things central to the way a public artwork is likely to be considered today. Firstly, the majority of public artworks result from a public commission often requiring a competitive process, long-term planning, consultation and approval (that said, increasingly public art projects are artist-led, or involve a direct invitation by public art agencies that promote more avant-gardist approaches, such as Artangel, UK or Creative Time, USA). Secondly, there is an emphasis on the public and audience and the relationship the artwork will have with, and for, the people for whom it is made. Thirdly, the situation – to create artworks in ‘real’ or virtual places (outside of designated art spaces) – makes context a vital element in how the artwork is conceived, created, located, understood and even authored. It is within this triangulation of the artist, the situation (context, place, site, and commissioning body), and public (audience, participant, collaborators, people) that the public artwork gets made, and we might add negotiated, diluted, compromised, and received.

The tendencies for many commissioned artworks, such as those funded under the Per Cent for Art scheme has been to promote the ‘usefulness’ of art – be that to fill the ‘social bond’, create visual coherence of a city or transform the image of a public body. How successful art can be in performing these functions is wide open to debate. An advocacy of the non-contentious and the universal benefits of the art commissioned for the general public or promoting coherency of the public sphere, has resulted in the blandness of many public artworks we see in towns, along motorways and in front of corporate buildings. The emphasis on socially-engaged processes and participatory practices is widely embraced as a means of broadening access to the arts through greater social inclusiveness. However, as Claire Bishop points out, governments often compensate for social exclusion through socially inclusive strategies, meanwhile the structural inequalities of society remain uninterrogated.⁸

How the public will receive the artwork that they might feel is ‘foisted’ upon them is indeterminable. Still Falling, 1991, a work in IMMA’s collection by Antony Gormley, whose figurative sculpture is generally made from casts of his own body, attempts to treat the body not as an object but as a place. Gormley has made some of the best known public artworks and has been invited as a high-profile artist to make work in many cities across the world and also at remote sites – on top of skyscrapers, in the sea and on mountain ranges. His most famous work is the iconic Angel of the North, 1995, which won the hearts of local people only after the replica Alan Shearer shirt was thrown over it by a Newcastle supporter. But not all his works have received the same positive response. For example, his three cruciform cast iron men made for Derry City were attacked and graffittied. Malcolm Miles, writing about this commission, asks how can the metaphor Gormley set up, “to put his body between the two sides to create a poultice to draw the poison from the wounds of Derry”, carry the burden of these referenced histories?⁹

It was Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, 1981, which arguably presented the single most divisive moment in the history of public art. Commissioned for Federal Plaza, New York, the giant Corten steel sculpture was conceived to work in “opposition to the context” – Serra was not “interested in art as an affirmation or complicity” and disdained the need for art to please its audience.¹⁰ The sculpture drew a negative response from the workers, fuelled, many have said, by two judges which eventually led to a court case and the removal of Tilted Arc. What the art world saw as “a great avant-garde masterpiece” was, for the people who worked beside it, “enormous and threatening”.¹¹ Tilted Arc is a fascinating case study, with the ripple effect of asking how a public artwork is to (or should) engage its public?

The critique of ‘heavy metal’ public sculptures and the removal of Tilted Arc marked, as Miwon Kwon comments, the transition to more discursive models of public art – the shift in which ‘site’ is displaced by notions of ‘audience’, a particular social ‘issue’ and most commonly a ‘community’ and dialogue, becomes a central ingredient in the work.¹² Suzanne Lacy termed this New Genre Public Art, in 1995, where she distinguished a new form of public art practice that is not about the object but is based on the relationship between the space and the audience. She was influenced by Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, which focused on ideas, gestures and processes (labelled conceptual art). Lawrence Weiner’s Water & Sand + Sticks and Stones, 1991, at the entrance to IMMA, is a conceptual work that sees language as sculpture, where an ambiguity lies between the artwork as gesture and the statement describing the gesture.

The desire for a more compassionate identity and deeper engagement with people also found expression in the writing of Grant Kester, whose dialogical aesthetic draws on the philosophies of Jürgen Habermas and Jean- François Lyotard, to present a very different image of the artist, “one defined in terms of open-ness, of listening and a willingness to accept dependence and intersubjective vulnerability”.¹³ Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, written in 1998, drew attention to contemporary arts practice that took its point of departure from the whole of human relations and their social contexts. Such highly influential texts encourage more socially conscious approaches to arts practice, where artists work closely with people or in collaboration with people, often embedding themselves within the context where they work. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Touch Sanitation, 1978-1993, is an early example of New Genre Public Art where, through a self-initiated residency in the New York sanitation department, she began her work by shaking hands with the 8,500 sanitation workers – from street sweepers to managers. The handshake was the start of the ‘getting to know’ and, with each gesture she would express her thanks for “keeping New York City alive”. Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, 1994 – a major self-initiated project involving considerable negotiation in the renovation of a row of vernacular shotgun houses to transform them into homes for single mothers as well as project spaces for African American artists (of whom he was one) – came from the artist’s desire “not only to put the work in the community, but also to become part of the community”.¹⁴ What’s the Story Collective – an ongoing project set up in 2008, led by artist Fiona Whelan – builds a dialogical practice based on a set of horizontal working relationships with the young people of Rialto Youth Project, Dublin. Investigating power relationships, the project built on the gathering and sharing of personal stories through different forms, including intimate readings with invited audiences. The main focus has been on the young people’s sense of powerlessness with the Gardaí, who have in turn been included in the process, which is to inform a ground-breaking new training scheme for the Gardaí, based on the content of findings. The art made is primarily performative, where the subject is about real people living in real situations. The level of personal commitment given by such artists to these particular situations stems from a desire to make a difference (to offer the promise of a better world) and their practices, politically motivated, often offer new aesthetic forms that represent a counter-argument to more bureaucratic programmes of social inclusion. Nevertheless, a challenge for much socially-engaged public art practice is how to critique and evaluate it as art. The emphasis on empathy and ethics places less value on the aesthetic and political impact, crucial, as Claire Bishop argues, to critically discussing and analysing the work as art. She seeks “shock, discomfort, or frustration – along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt or sheer pleasure, as crucial to a work’s aesthetic and political impact.”¹⁵ Bishop cites Jeremy Dellar’s Battle of Orgreave, 2002, as an exemplary work that deals with an industrial dispute (the 1984 miner’s strike), but in a way that mixes the political narrative with eccentric middle class weekend leisure (the historical re-enactment societies). For Bishop, Dellar’s work dismantled any form of sentimentality of class unity and suggests that “the whole event could be understood as contemporary history painting, one in which representation is collapsed with real-time re-enactment”. Seamus Nolan’s Hotel Ballymun, 2007, commissioned by the forward-thinking Breaking Ground Per Cent for Art Programme 2002-2010, presents a particularly special and distinctive project. Nolan organised the process around a collaborative relationship with local people helping him to design and build a fantasy space, through salvaging and reimaging objects, furniture and items from the flats, to create a real hotel, on top of a soon-to-be-demolished tower block. The hotel was a functioning micro-society with bedrooms, a gallery, music venue, conference centre and garden. The surreal and utopian experience (people could stay the night) became a springboard, as Mark Garry writes, for contentious opinions that “slipped into negative clichés about the practice of socially-engaged art in working class areas”.¹⁶ But in this way, this extraordinary work offered what Garry suggests, “a mechanism to question the position contemporary art holds within the capitalist model, encouraging a possible rethinking of the possible social function of art”.¹⁷

The influence of spatial theory, such as the writings of Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space), Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) and Doreen Massey, who argue for a more nuanced and complex understanding of place as unfixed, contested and multiple, is reflected also in the writings of Simon Sheikh, who speaks of the fragmentation of the public sphere, which we do not enter into equally as a common shared space. And just as there is no unified public sphere, there is, he argues, no idealised or generalised public. The meaning of a public artwork will shift in relation to space, contexts and publics (an individual spectator brings his unique experiences – inclusive of age, class, gender, background – to the particular situation or art experience). Such a shift in understanding, according to Sheikh, suggests a different notion of communicative possibilities and methods for the artwork, that take their point of departure from different fields or disciplines, or a specific rather than general public, or a particular context or site.¹⁸

On the Irish public art website – publicart.ie – there are numerous examples that demonstrate the many directions (and forms) that public art is taking in Ireland and internationally. The possibilities within this relatively young movement to present unique opportunities to explore the multifold realities of the contemporary world, surely must make this a credible fine art discipline?

© Cliodhna Shaffrey, 2011

 

IMMA invited Niamh Ann Kelly, lecturer in Critical Theory, Department of Art, Design and Printing, in the Dublin Institute of Technology, to write an essay titled Here and Now: Art, Trickery, Installation which provides an overview of Installation Art. Kelly’s essay includes examples of artists and artworks, some of which are included in IMMA’s Collection or have been featured in IMMA’s Temporary Exhibitions.

Introduction

Ideas of installation art span a number of art practices and are variously registered in a range of approaches to the histories and theories of art. Sometimes permanent in structure, usually ephemeral, installation art prioritises, as the term suggests, the mode by which art is installed as a crucial facet in a work’s reflexive identity. This emphasis is typically achieved by ensuring, first and foremost, that the viewer is not a passive spectator but an active agent in how the work (re)defines place. This open-ended proviso of installation art acknowledges that reading, in the widest sense such as an encounter with art, is where knowledge is located. This concept finds a voice in the words of installation veteran Ilya Kabakov, who has remarked upon installation as a genre of art that takes note of a “shift from object knowledge to subject experience”.¹ The functioning of installation art thus depends upon the presence of the viewer daily transformed, willingly or unsuspectingly, into necessary participants in the life of an artwork at a particular location.

From this premise and in the light of contemporary alertness to cultural relativities through constantly changing notions of community, to compile a definitive history of installation art is a possibly impossible project. Claire Bishop acknowledges the cultural limits of her study on Western installation art, while Erika Suderburg comments that installation art is a solely Western art-historical construct.² The disparity of these disclaimers serves a clear reminder that writing on art is always about points of view. Similarly, to claim an authoritative set of characteristics as central to all installation art would be a clumsily conventional and unproductive task. Instead I will focus on what can be identified as repeated themes and motives behind some exigent, influential and inspiring samples of installation art, in the hope that drawing attention to these topical aspects might contribute to general understanding and engagement with the persuasive power of this genre to make art experiential and immersive.

Locating the Viewer

A recess in an interior wall of a room appears to have a full vase of flowers, and a nearby window seems surrounded by a billowing curtain. On closer inspection, the sense of depth, texture, light and even life, is revealed as an illusion: a flat wall meticulously painted to provide the eye with the impression of features not actually there. Trompe l’oeil is a manipulative mode of image making and produces a vision, which can only be realised by the artist through a considered awareness of the viewer: understanding how they see and where they stand.³The resulting theatrical potential of painting can function as a metaphor for the wider trickery of art: to manipulate and undermine easy distinctions between experiences of life and of art, and between perceptions of reality and of representation.

Trompe l’oeil is evident in imaging practices from as early as classical painting and is arguably present in any attempts at depicting perspective, but is most readily identified with the Baroque period. As in trompe l’oeil, two of the core tasks typically undertaken by installation art revolve around how space is experienced and the activity of the viewer in a changeable contract between illusion and presence. This dual interest is echoed in the work of Jorge Pardo. In his exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010, and in particular by his rendition through photo-wallpaper of interiors belonging to rooms elsewhere, Pardo plays on the viewer’s sense of here and now, by insistently presenting an illusionary representation of elsewhere, at another time. A sequence of superimposed images along the museum’s exhibition corridor re-envisioned the space as a reference to his there-and-then, inviting the viewer into his personal history as an artist. In 4166 Sea View Lane, 1998, Pardo fully decommissioned the gap between everyday life and art: a house in Los Angeles was built as both an artwork and his place of residence.⁴

Arising from the observation that installation art prioritises viewer engagement, a useful point of differentiation between taking account of art as object and art as installation might be considered as part of a growing and determined insistence of artistic control over commissioning and curatorial power. Installation works by Ann Hamilton have progressively pioneered immersive experiences in which the duration of viewer engagement is vital. Often site and context-specific in her work, she also produces installations that are equally object-driven, such as Filament II, 1996. In this work, an organza curtain on a circular rail is mechanically programmed to spin, and to experience it the viewer must enter it. In theory, such an artwork can be described as a filledspace type of installation, as opposed to a location-specific work, to borrow Mark Rosenthal’s explanation: it be packaged and remade elsewhere, if a little differently.⁵ Nonetheless, as with all her work the role of the viewer is an active one, necessary for the work to make sense.

Joan Simon points out that there is a “dynamic relation between the experiential and the picturesque” in Hamilton’s installations.⁶ Hamilton exerts a concerted control over the presentation of Filament II, for example, by maintaining the centrality of the viewer’s spatial immersion in the work, where a purely object-based piece might be (re)positioned more arbitrarily. In this reckoning, in installation art practices the artist’s awareness of the extent to which a viewer activates the work supersedes the managerial influences of the commissioner and/or curator. This power struggle has taken the form of an art that, in an out-right manner, proliferates space beyond the conventional art object, and therefore directly implicates the viewer and importantly, their experience, immersive or otherwise, as part of the work. Vanessa Hirsch identified in her discussion on Marcel Duchamp’s Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris, 1938, that the work: “bursts the spatial restrictions of a work of art”.⁷ This bursting forth, in all directions, is a symbolic tearing down of previously proffered boundaries of art – media specificity, discipline alignment, site of production, place of presentation and social function.

Pushing the Boundaries of Art

Installation art is repeatedly distinguished as a genre of the late-twentieth century by a notable upsurge in artists’ stated interests in the potential for social change fostered by an emphasis on the experiential outcome of art, as epitomised in the rhetoric of Joseph Beuys among others.⁸ As a distinctive method of making art, installation art at this time challenged the reduction of art to an economic chip, tool of cultural discrimination or mechanism for social exclusion. Debates around art’s relationship to reality, in particular everyday socio-economic reality, lie at the heart of the preliminary indications of installation art as distinctive intentional genre, apparent in diverse collective and individual works.⁹ In 1961 a clearly intended installation-style work presented a smart critique of the values associated with material culture broadly. Claes Oldenburg’s The Store was a collection of typical saleable objects rendered in papier-mâché, such as a dress and decorative ornaments. Displayed in a rented store-front in the lower East Side of New York City, the artwork was a conflation of artefacts represented in a manner that denied their function within a viable commercial site. Oldenburg thus simultaneously queried the purpose of shopping and of art in a witty swipe at where and how cultural value is played out through social mores of consumption.

The Store also marked the displacement of studio that occurs in installation practice as the work is definitively constructed at the location of its presentation, in Julie Reiss’ words “the site is the studio”.¹⁰ Taking a sincere if belated cue from Oldenburg, forty years later, Michael Landy took all his material possessions and placed them on a specially constructed conveyor belt in a disused department store in London. In the space he bagged and tagged the items and created an inventory with various categories, before everything was destroyed. Break Down lasted for two weeks, by which time all his material belongings were destroyed. A self-conscious search for identity through a thoroughly destructive act, Break Down also constituted a determined disregard for the rift between studio and display, and negated the separation of performance from installation.

Rosenthal has described installation as an “elastic medium that compromised, even democratised, the sphere of art”: presumably Landy’s choice of venue and actions were indicative of an agenda to democratise art by enacting a refutation of personal identity on the high street.¹¹ Landy’s work, however, demanded witnesses and in this, as Reiss has suggested in general, the prominence given to the viewer’s experience makes installation art resistant to conventional methods of historicisation. The subversion of the spaces and practices of everyday life presented in the installation work of Oldenburg and Landy institute a defiant attitude towards necessarily chronicling either art or society in the terms received by their respective generations.

Disregarding the limitations of defining artworks in terms of objects, media or discipline is conspicuous in the light and environment works of artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Olafur Eliasson. The systematic laboratory style explorations of visual and psychological perception by Turrell and Irwin highlight another shift in studio practice towards an experimental model in which intermittent presentations of installations in the form of exhibitions are simply expression, or even research, points in ongoing processes of art making. Eliasson’s works distill or reconstitute natural phenomena into galleries, institutional environments and constructed exhibition sites to ultimately confront the capricious divide between outdoors and indoors, and so question the lived relationship between natural orders and contemporary culture. Friedrich Meschede claims that the outcomes of Eliasson’s practice “render visible our fascination with the elements”.¹²

Springing from a sustained and ongoing dialogical practice, Eliasson’s art installations vary from subtle interventions to truly spectacular manipulations of environments. The Weather Project at Tate Modern, 2003, exemplifies the latter: the creation of an artificial sun, complete with ambient golden haze in the Turbine Hall. In other of Eliasson’s work, olfactory and aural senses as well as visual and spatial perceptions are called upon in fuller explorations of the synaesthetic potential of art. As constructions of spaces that intervene at various sites to refocus personal and shared senses of location, installation art, through committed boundary-breaking, highlights how temporal experiences call attention to the precariousness of systems of representation.

Performativity and the Theatre of Representation

Michael Fried’s now famous essay on ‘Art and Objecthood’, 1967, pinned a demarcation between autonomous art, which Fried argued could trigger absorption, and objects in context, that became, in his terms, art in the presence of the viewer through a reliance on theatricality.¹³ Intended as a criticism of minimalist sculpture, the debate that Fried’s text has come to represent has polarised theorisations on art practices of the late modern period. Nonetheless, the revolution of how notions and devices of theatrical staging have become, widely, integrated into subsequent art practices, and especially into installation (and obviously performance) art, remains of great significance in how artists have challenged the field of representation, more generally. Angelika Nollert has commented: “Art, like theatre, opens up spaces where illustrations can become happenings – ones which thrive on the awareness of their simulation”.¹⁴

Kabakov, who works in collaboration with his wife Emilia, has even developed a subgenre of installation art in his theatre installation works. Throughout his practice, Kabakov eschews the possibility of complacency on the relationship between individuals and their environment, by focusing on the interaction between social conditioning and realms of imagination. The Children’s Hospital, 1998, made for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, draws on the history of the museum site as a hospital and is combined with an interest in using fantastical elements to promote health – such as small mechanical theatres to provide entertainment for hospitalised children.¹⁵ The life-size scale of the hospital rooms clearly positions the viewer as the subject of the work and reorients the viewer’s consciousness of the unnervingly trans-cultural codes of institutional spaces.

The staging of collective culture is also a driving concern in some works by Fred Wilson and Mark Dion. Their works, respectively, query the legitimacy of methods of cultural and historical representation and the basis of our enthrallment to codes of display in determining, as Flora Kaplan succinctly phrased it, “the making of ourselves”.¹⁶ In the spaces of installation art, Wilson and Dion have systematically subverted systems that most readily make and perpetuate notions of otherness as the blinding base on which the formation of selves occurs, time and time again. Wilson eloquently noted the importance of location for his work at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Speak to me as I am, which included a range of materials to illuminate and interrogate the framed position of Africans in Venetian art history. Wilson also commissioned a Senegalese vendor to sell handbags at the entrance to the main exhibition area in a deft gesture depicting multicultural Venice. The bags were designed by Wilson but were mistaken by the local police for illegal designer knock-offs. Dion in his alternative archeology in Tate Thames Dig, 1999, for example, reinvents systems of value enlisting professional help across disciplines to present incidental throwaway culture as notice-worthy artefactual finds.¹⁷

For artists such as the Kabakovs, Wilson and Dion, a viewer’s activated present-ness, being there, is key to the raison d’être of their works, which implies that installation art is in no small part a matter of spectacle, albeit a spectacle fashioned by blurred delineations between concepts of document and simulation. Comparisons are often evoked between installation art and cinema and theatre, but the comparisons are limited. In a cinema, as de Oliveira points out, the screen divides audiences from the form (though perhaps less so with three-dimensional effects).¹⁸ Also, in a theatre, audiences are usually a silent, seated and still mass, separated from the stage and actors. Installation art activates the spectacle, thus extending the theatrical stage of culture into subjective experiences. The viewer is on location and an essential element of the scene in an engagement that confounds expectations of art as a purely representative practice. De Oliveira phrased it: the artist and viewer are together in a discursive environment.¹⁹ In other words, the experiential outcome of physically being in the work fosters a sense of dislocation from both everyday life and art, disavowing segregated concepts of reality and systems of representation.

Some historians, like Reiss, contend that installation art began as an alternative practice of cultural discourse that has migrated from its origins on the margins of mainstream culture to the very centre of institutional practice.²⁰ It can equally be interpreted that, far from sitting pretty in the seat of cultural power, installation art in museums or as part of large-scale commissioned projects can function to effectively perplex politics of representation at play in such traditional set-ups. Jacques Rancière’s hypothesis of artistic practices as ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility”, seems to iterate the transformative potential of art on concepts of public domain and dominion.²¹ Installation art, then, as method of space reclamation, can re-territorialise culture from either margins or centres of commissioning authority, by virtue of an insistence on the viewer as indispensable to the work.

The practice of the Situationist International from 1957, set the scene for a discussion on psycho-geography and highlighted the importance of considering the urban public sphere as a living, changeable, subjective, as well as shared, space.²² Many public art projects – both temporary and monumental installation works – extend these concerns, where the site of art becomes a cue to reconsider the past in the present day. Installation art is viewed, but it is also heard, smelled and touched, enlisting the viewer in an active engagement that reflects the lack of closure, even interpretative restlessness, proposed by the Situationists. Bishop writes that art installation is a co-joined experience of activating viewers and decentering them as subjects. In a visual sense, she evokes this decentering in terms of a history of pictorial perspective, but one that is insinuated into the identity politics of fragmentation within postmodern theory: “[…] installation art’s multiple perspectives are seen to subvert the Renaissance perspective model because they deny the viewer any one ideal place from which to survey the work”.²³

Through his work in urban spaces, Thomas Hirschhorn has elaborated on a desire to generate art as a place for social interaction, where communication is open-ended. At Documenta 11, 2002, in Kassel, Germany, Hirschhorn developed a layered project that included a makeshift port-a-cabin library and cafe thematically dedicated to the philosopher Georges Bataille.²⁴ Situated in a suburban area away from the main exhibition venues, and primarily focused on engaging the local community, Hirschhorn’s work pointedly prioritises the role of viewer-participant as the purpose of the materiality of the work: a library or cafe is only communally recognised as such if it is utilised. Nollert’s description of ‘performative installation’ as a social space applies here: the performativity of the participants is reliant on the presence of the work, but is not entirely controlled by it.²⁵ The performativity aspect that attends installation art implies a counterpoint to predetermined representative processes, and renders the practice of installation art one of constant transition and art installations guaranteed uncertain outcomes.

Towards a Conclusion

When Marcel Duchamp attempted to place his ‘readymades’ in a gallery in 1917, he in effect stated that critiques of institutions of representation are a necessary part of art.²⁶ A urinal was deemed a fountain in the eventual transition from plumbing outlet to gallery plinth and so questions were raised: What is everyday life? What is art? Who decides these questions?²⁷ The advent of installation art harnessed these questions into: What is real? What is representation? As a result, many terms have been applied to installation art – category, event, environment, intervention, site, space, medium, assemblage, ensemble, simulation, construction. This indicates that comprehending the guises of art forms is much more complex than a historical litany of media practices can explicate. The distinctions of art genres is critically linked to shifts in social, economic, geographical and virtual contexts of how and where art is read, experienced and historicised through collections, exhibitions and documentation.

In an age defined by paradigms of mobility when potential to journey seems evermore widely available, artists are increasingly nomadic and virtual travel re-characterises the geography of social networks, the desire for physical spaces where contemplative, confrontational and participatory spectatorship can occur is peculiarly constant. Recognising, temporarily, installation art as a genre – with its inherent demand upon the viewer to get involved, here and now – crystallises the continued importance of the sublime contradiction of art as a persistent form, and site, of expression and communication. Potentially an interruption of everyday life, art can also be integral to daily living: manifesting in installation art as an active mode of cultural challenge and ideological confirmation.

© Niamh Ann Kelly, 2011

 

IMMA invited Brian Hand, artist, writer and lecturer, to respond to this subject. In his essay, A struggle at the roots of the mind: service and solidarity in dialogical, relational and collaborative perspectives in art, Hand focuses on three aspects of Participatory Arts: Dialogical Art, Relational Aesthetics and Collaborative/ Collective Art Projects, as a means of exploring some of the key issues which inform and shape contemporary Participatory Arts practice.

Raymond Williams in his definition of community offers the dialectic of solidarity and service (working with people or voluntary work sometimes paid), and sees this dialectic on a philosophical level as operating between idealism and sentimentality.¹ For Williams solidarity equals positive change whereas service equals the paternalistic status quo.² In this short essay I will explore how this dialectic between service and solidarity in relation to concepts and practices surrounding art forms that have prioritised an active social dimension has been conceptualised in recent art theory. A socially engaged or community based art practice is a current theme in discussions around contemporary art. This subject is very broad so to lessen the confusion I will look at just three distinct participatory approaches: dialogical art, relational aesthetics and collaborative/collective art projects.

In the past 50 years, community based visual arts have emerged within working class and marginal communities both here and elsewhere and are now a well established set of practices aligned with the broad principles of community development. While participatory arts in general are recognised as an important tool in a bigger scheme of grass roots social empowerment, a weakness in state supported community based arts activities, besides inadequate funding, has often been the top down approach of sponsoring agencies/institutions. In this familiar scenario artists are parachuted in and out and little attention is given to long term engagement. In our age of consumer orientated individualism, community, as Homi Bhabha reminds us, is something you develop out of.³Community can imply a herd like conformity, a suppression of difference, or simply the ideal of individual freedom. The Arts Council has dropped the once popular term ‘community arts’ for the more neutral and arms length term ‘participatory arts’.

Community, Bhabha outlines, is synonymous with the territory of the minority and the discourses of community are themselves ‘minority’ discourses incommensurable with the discourse of civil society.⁴ Community, he argues is the antagonist supplement of modernity. It becomes the border problem of the diasporic, the migrant, and the refugee. Community in this sense almost has an atavistic resonance because it predates capitalism and modern society and leads a “subterranean, potentially subversive life within [civil society] because it refuses to go away”.⁵ In this sense invoking community is at once to locate a togetherness and paradoxically an estrangement from or antagonism to the notion of a frame or limit to what constitutes a community. As Grant Kester argues:

The community comes into existence […] as a result of a complex process of political self-definition. This process often unfolds against the back drop of collective modes of oppression (racism, sexism, class oppression, etc.) but also within a set of shared cultural and discursive traditions. It takes place against the grain of a dominant culture that sustains itself by recording systematic forms of inequality (based on race, class, gender, and sexuality) as a product of individual failure or nonconformity.⁶

There is, to follow Bhabha, Nancy and Pontbriand, a contemporary value in the concept of community because it somehow evades the grasp of the bundle of discourses which describe it and remains opaque to itself.⁷ As Douglas observes:

In ‘community’ the personal relations of men and women appear in a special light. They form part of the ongoing process which is only partly organised in the wider social ‘structure’. Whereas ‘structure’ is differentiated and channels authority through the system, in the context of ‘community’, roles are ambiguous, lacking hierarchy, disorganised. ‘Community’ in this sense has positive values associated with it; good fellowship, spontaneity, warm contact … Laughter and jokes, since they attack classification and hierarchy, are obviously apt symbols for expressing community in this sense of unhierarchised, undifferentiated social relations.⁸

Indeed, while the definition of community resists empirical study and interpretation there is something similar in the resistance to profit in the community artwork which, because of multiple authorship/ownership, remains unexchangeable and therefore economically unviable within the traditional art market and auction houses.

Dialogical Art

Dialogical art or aesthetics is an umbrella term borrowed from Bakhtin and Freire by Kester. Kester’s work tries to give legitimacy and a sound theoretical grounding to the alternative practices of community arts, recognising them as new forms of cultural production. To paraphrase Kester’s nuanced arguments: dialogical art aims to “replace the ‘banking’ style of art in which the artist deposits an expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer, with a process of dialogue and collaboration”.⁹ Community based participatory art is a process led, rather than a product led, dialogical encounter and participating entails sharing a desire to unveil or discover the power structures of reality with a view to creatively imagining a contestatory and oppositional platform where radical and plural democracy might take root. According to Kester, and borrowing from arguments by Walter Benjamin, art is not a fixed category/entity or thing, except that it reflects the values and interests of the dominant class. For a host of art movements, especially avant garde ones, their relationship with the dominant order is channelled through a dialectical and often contradictory relationship where a specific and important discursive system constructs art as a repository for values actively suppressed within the dominant culture. “There is nothing inherent in a given work of art that allows it to play this role; rather, particular formal arrangements take on meaning only in relationship to specific cultural moments, institutional frames, and preceding art works”.¹⁰

So while the challenge art poses to fixed categorical systems and instrumentalising modes of thought is important, it is not necessarily simply located in the artwork itself as a discreet, bounded, formally innovative object. Rather Kester argues that the tendency to locate this principle of indeterminacy solely in the physical condition or form of the work of art prevents us from grasping an important act of performative, collaborative art practice. “An alternative approach would require us to locate the moment of indeterminateness, of open-ended and liberatory possibility, not in the perpetually changing form of the artwork qua object, but in the very process of communication and solidarity that the artwork catalyzes”.¹¹ To uncouple the material form from social practice is not as straightforward as Kester makes out because both are overlayed and imbricated thoroughly in the history of Modernism.

For Kester, dialogical art is an approach that separates itself from both the traditional non-communicative, mute and hermetic abstract modernist art (Rothko, Pollock, Newman) and the more strident innovative heterogeneous forms of shock based avant garde work (such as the Futurists, Surrealists and Dada movements or the more recent examples of work such as Christoph Schlingensief’s public art project Foreigners Out!) designed to jolt the hapless alienated viewer into a new awareness. Kester argues that both anti-discursive traditions hold in common a suspicion about shared community values and that ‘art for the people’ suggests an assault on artistic freedom, individualism or even worse raises the spectre of fascism and Stalinism.¹² While such fears are grounded in history, in many peaceful and settled democracies not under immediate threats from extreme ideology, the tradition of anti-discursivity, isolation and negation still resonates in mainstream aesthetic practices.

Dialogical art, or conversational art as Bhabha termed it, foregrounds the encounter and interpretation of the co-producers of the art work and as such is against the traditional scenario where a given object or artifact produced by an individual artist is offered to the viewer. Some examples for Kester of solidarity orientated dialogical art include some of the work of WochenKlausur, Suzanne Lacey, Hope Sandrow, Ne Pas Plier, Ultra Red, Maurice O’Connell and the ROUTES project in Belfast in 2002. Examples of work closer to the service or paternalistic end of the spectrum for Kester, include some of the work of Alfredo Jaar, Fred Wilson, and Dawn Dedeaux.

For Kester there are just too many examples of institutional led community based work by well known and established artists that reinforce the neo Victorian view of a given ‘disadvantaged’ “community or constituency as an instrumentalised and fictively monolithic entity to be ‘serviced’ by the visiting artist”.¹³ As Sholette has observed, “the avant garde promise to drag art out of the museums and into life is today remarkably visible in all the wrong places. Museums and foundations now claim to nurture art as social activism”.¹⁴

Relational Aesthetics

The criticism that participatory projects in the art world can be toothless is clearly present in the critique of relational aesthetics by Bishop, Foster, and more recently Martin.¹⁵ Relational aesthetics is a term coined by French curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud and relates to a diverse body of work made by artists in the 1990s, such as Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez- Torres, Vanessa Beecroft and Philippe Parreno, that foregrounds interactivity, conviviality and relationality as the subject of its artistic practice. This social rather than socialist turn is seen as a direct response from the privileged art world to the increasingly regimented and technologically administered society. Again like the theory of dialogical art there is little emphasis in relational aesthetics on the art object as such and what the artist “produces, first and foremost, is relations between people and the world by way of aesthetic objects”.¹⁶ There is a further similarity in that relational aesthetics rejects the non-communicative strategies of autonomous abstract art that avoided content like the plague. Bourriaud’s argument is provocative and interesting in that it sees art from a Marxist perspective as an apparatus for reproducing the all encompassing hegemonic capitalist ideology, but due to the complexity of the cultural sphere in the age of information there are slips and gaps within the reproduction of the dominant ideology that can be exploited by certain artists as creative heteronomous interstices. Hence while acknowledging on the one hand institutionally supported contemporary art’s complete immersion in capitalist relations and submission to capitalist imperatives, Bourriaud believes that relational art can, within this system:

create free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed on us.¹⁷

It is a French tradition to invest in art as a strategically resistant activity and Sartre viewed the primary aim of art to challenge the established interests within society, so Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics sets itself in opposition to the culture of commodified individualism. As Liam Gillick claims: his object based work is only activated by an encounter with an audience. “My work is like the light in the fridge, it only works when there are people there to open the door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else stuff in a room”.¹⁸ This is a common perception of the experience of theatre, where the audience gathers and forms a body for the duration of the performed event. The limits of this interactive empowerment of an audience community can be seen in the marketable success of the individual signature of the international artists associated with relational aesthetics. As Adorno observed about the underlying use value of the exhibition, “the words museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. They testify to the neutralisation of culture”.¹⁹ Yet while Bourriaud celebrates the role of the artist as a service provider he does caution:

Of course, one fears that these artists may have transformed themselves under the pressure of the market into a kind of merchandising of relations and experience. The question we might raise today is, connecting people, creating interactive, communicative experience: What for? What does the new kind of contact produce? If you forget the “what for?” I’m afraid you’re left with simple Nokia art – producing interpersonal relations for their own sake and never addressing their political aspects.²⁰

Our current era is characterised as the era of the service led consumer economy and many artists are now earning a modest income from the payment of fees from cultural institutions for participating in exhibitions and other activities including institution led participatory arts programmes like those at IMMA or indeed temporary public art programmes funded by percent for the arts schemes. As Sholette observes:

cultural tourism and community-based art practice must be thought of as a local consequence of the move towards a privatized and global economy […] the remnants of public, civic culture aim to make art appear useful to the voting population as a form of social service and tourism.²¹

Collaborative/Collective Art Projects

Solidarity implies a different kind of economic relationship, something more reciprocal and committed than financially dependent. Collaborative groups are the final approach that I wish to consider in this discussion on participation and the work they make “can raise complex questions about participation among artists – not just issues of process (Group Material and Tim Rollins + K.O.S. operated by sometimes tortuously arrived-at consensus), but also of credit and ownership”.²² Celebrated art groups of more than two members in the past 100 years include the Omega workshop, The Russian Constructivists, Berlin Dada, the Situationists, Gutai, CoBrA, Fluxus, Art & Language, the Guerilla Girls, the Black Audio Film Collective, Act Up, Gran Fury, RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Paper Tiger and Temporary Services. With the exception of the writings of Sholette, Gablik and edited publications by Thompson and Sholette and Sholette and Stimson, contemporary work made by collaborative groups has often failed to merit serious critical attention.²³ Having co-founded and worked with the collaborative groups Blue Funk, The Fire Department and 147, as well as participating with the collective RepoHistory, I can speak from experience that there are multiple challenges in group art making and art activism. Art collectives are risky as sharing does not come easily to visual artists and the tacit knowledge of one’s practice can be difficult to communicate. Group formation is interesting in terms of how a shared political position can motivate action and organise a group to tackle an issue. A transitive relationship is implied in making collaborative work and becoming engaged in the wider social and political arena. Conversely the lack of artists’ groups signals a lack of problematic issues within the cultural/communal sphere or is it a sign of a more widespread inertness where we have become what Agamben sees as “the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history?”²⁴

Joining or forming a collaborative art group or collective may impoverish you, but it is paradoxically good for one’s individual identity and at least your life expectancy. As our society dismantles most of the traditional groups like the nuclear family for example and replaces them with consumer orientated lifestyles, collective identity can re-value individual participation and self worth. As Habermas has argued “a person can constitute an inner centre only to the extent that he or she can find self expression in communicatively generated interpersonal relations”.²⁵ In this sense, the agency to express solidarity or opposition with the other, is significantly different to the relentless mass organisation of our lives into stratified data banks, market segments, audiences, biometrics, google accounts and biological samples, what Deleuze calls the administered forms of collective control.

Judging work, be it dialogical, relational or collaborative on a scale from solidarity to service asks of the reader to reflect on the social dimension of participation and the material dimension of social practice from aesthetic/political perspectives. The future that is mapped out in phrases like the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘virtual communities’ and ‘cultural industries’ is a future that threatens solidarity through corporate control. I hope artists, students, and audiences at IMMA remain alive to dealing with these complex forces and engage with what Williams generously believed art could be: a struggle at the roots of mind to figure out an embodied sense of creative engagement with self-composition and social composition.²⁶

© Brian Hand, 2011

 

IMMA invited Maeve Connolly to write an essay on New Media Art, entitled Art and (New) Media, Through the Lens of the IMMA Collection, which focuses on artists and artworks in IMMA’s Collection as a means of describing and contextualising this complex and contested area of Contemporary Art practice.

The term ‘New Media Art’ is frequently applied to artworks, or art practices, involving media not traditionally or conventionally associated with the Fine Arts. Paintings, drawings and sculptures are routinely (although sometimes erroneously) regarded as original and unique works of art authored by a single individual, but the emergence of photography, film, video, audio and other technologies enabling reproduction through mechanical or digital means, radically alters the relationship between art and originality.¹ This is one of the reasons why artists associated with the historical Avant-Garde, seeking to radicalise the relationship between art and society, often rejected painting or sculpture in favour of photography or cinema. Inevitably, however, media that are initially perceived by the art world as ‘new’ (such as video in the 1960s) soon become familiar and even conventional.

Artists have also been drawn towards non-traditional media because they are specifically interested in exploring the (rapidly changing) relationship between media, technology and society. These concerns were often evident in the work of artists associated with the Kinetic Art and Fluxus movements during the 1960s, such as Nam June Paik, whose installations and sculptures involving audiovisual technologies explore and contest the power of the mass media.²More recently, it is possible to trace a continuation of this critical tradition in the work of a younger generation of artists working with even newer media, from locative technologies, like GPS systems, to gaming software, bio-technologies and beyond.

Pictorialism and Performance

While many contemporary art practitioners reject media-based classifications altogether, categories such as ‘Lens-Based Media’ can be valuable, emphasising the parallels and tensions between art practice and a much wider history and culture of media use and production. Thinking about lens-based practice opens up points of connection between a contemporary artwork and such diverse cultural forms as a television news broadcast, a holiday snapshot taken with a mobile phone, or even a seventeenth-century painting in which the illusion of perspective was produced with the aid of optical technologies.

Several works in the IMMA Collection that might be classified as ‘New Media Art’ allude directly or indirectly to histories of technologically mediated representation, asserting connections as well as differences between new and older media. So, for example, Caroline McCarthy’s two-channel video work Greetings, 1996, calls to mind a history of landscape representation that extends from painting to tourist postcards and amateur video, while also drawing upon a performative tradition in artists’ film that is deeply indebted to silent cinema. The artist composes a picturesque image of the Irish countryside, complete with drifting clouds and rolling hills, before suddenly jumping up into the frame to temporarily include herself in this ideal landscape.

Michael Snow’s 60-minute single channel video Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids), 2002, also exploits established traditions of pictorial and dramatic representation. A highly significant figure for theorists of film in the 1970s, Snow directs his camera at the billowing curtains of a window opening out from his workshop onto the landscape of Newfoundland. The window suggests a frame though which (in narrative cinema) the camera might be expected to move, or even a proscenium arch within which (in theatre) some action might take place. Yet, Snow’s camera remains resolutely fixed and the viewer is left only with the fluctuations of the curtain as it moves in the breeze.

Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) derives much of its appeal from its status as an unaltered document of a natural phenomenon occurring at a particular time and place. But for many artists in the 1960s and ’70s, the medium of video was most interesting for its capacity to blur the boundaries between event and document. Videotape, unlike film, could be played back, viewed and if necessary re-recorded immediately. Monitors could also be used within the context of a video work or performance to display a live or delayed image ‘feed’, enabling various forms of real-time interaction between artist, on-screen image and audience. In the single channel video Now, 1973, for example, Lynda Benglis moves between the roles of performer, operator and director, appearing to kiss a monitor that displays her own image, while continually repeating the phrases ‘Now?’, ‘Do you wish to direct me?’, and ‘Start the camera’.

Aura, Materiality and Analogue Technologies

Just as Benglis uses repetition to highlight the specificity of video time, others have emphasised the distinctive characteristics and properties of photography and film. Taking the reproducibility of the photographic image as a starting point, Craigie Horsfield makes only a single print, rather than an edition, and destroys his original negative. But even though this action results in a unique artwork, with the same claims to originality as a painting, the title of each work strongly asserts the specificity of the photographic process. Each title records where and when the photograph was ‘taken’ – or rather the exposure of the negative to light – as well as a second date referring to the production of the print.

Clare Langan is also interested in the interplay between painting and newer media. In films such as Forty Below, 1999, she combines dramatic shooting locations and hand-painted filters (attached to the lens of a 16mm Bolex film camera, which is wound by hand) in order to create exotic, otherworldly images. But although she is clearly drawn to the materiality of film, Langan seems to favour the expediency of newer image display technologies, because she exhibits her work on DVD. In contrast, Tacita Dean shoots and exhibits her moving image work primarily on film, often relying on mechanical looping devices for continuous projection and sometimes using optical sound so that the audio is encoded directly onto the celluloid. There is also frequently a relationship between the themes explored in her work and her attraction to 16mm film, a medium widely thought to be anachronistic, even obsolete.

There are parallels here with James Coleman‘s use of 35mm slide projection, a medium once associated with advertising, corporate communications and domestic photography. He has produced a number of ‘projected image’ installations involving slides, including Background, 1991-94, Lapsus Exposure, 1992-94, and I N I T I A L S, 1993-94. All three feature highly constructed still images, synchronised with soundtracks that incorporate voiceover narration. Coleman’s images and scripts are richly evocative and a vast array of historical and contemporary sources are referenced either directly or indirectly, but he generally withholds contextualising information, with the result that critics often excavate earlier works in search of meaning.

Collaboration, Appropriation, and the Politics of Representation

Other artists have embraced technologies and economies of digital media production and consumption, as well as more collaborative modes of practice. Carlos Amorales‘ two-channel installation Dark Mirror, 2004-2005, incorporates animation by André Pahl and an original score and piano performance by José María Serralde. Significantly, the animation is derived from a ‘liquid archive’ – an open and expanding collection of digital images assembled by Amorales’ studio, which is apparently available for use by others. A comparable example of collaboration can be found in Philippe Parreno‘s digital video Anywhere Out of The World, 2000, featuring a character entitled Annlee originated by a commercial animation company, co-purchased with the artist Pierre Huyghe and then made available to several other artists in accordance with the principles of ‘copyleft’.

This project can be situated in relation to a much earlier tradition of appropriation, in which artists borrowed and repurposed images from popular media. Dara Birnbaum was one of a number of artists to work with mass produced images of women’s bodies during the 1970s. Her single-channel video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978/9, is composed entirely of edited and looped special effects sequences from the Wonder Woman TV series, in which ‘Diana Prince’ is transformed in an explosion of light and sound into her tightly-costumed, crime-fighting alter-ego.

Willie Doherty‘s work during the 1980s and ’90s is also informed by critiques of representation. But rather than appropriating material from specific sources, Doherty explores the recurrence of certain images and narratives across a range of media, from photo-journalism to film and television drama. Initially working with photography, Doherty produced a number of black and white diptychs that combined images of Derry city and its surroundings with ambiguous yet suggestive text. He gradually moved towards colour photography and away from the direct use of text on image, relying on titles (as in the case of Border Incident, 1994) to evoke associations, and developed video installations, including The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1995, that engage with locally specific media genres such as television advertisements for the Confidential Telephone line.³

Gerard Byrne also responds to hybrid media genres, such as the magazine ‘advertorial’ or the ’roundtable discussion’, which may borrow from reportage or documentary but are nonetheless highly constructed. In Why it’s time for Imperial, again, 1998-2002, Byrne creates a film script from the text of a conversation between Frank Sinatra and Lee Iacocca (chairman of Chrysler), originally published as an advertorial for the Chrysler Imperial car in National Geographic. The text, never designed to be used as a script, is full of awkward phrases and Byrne exaggerates this quality by staging it three times in different locations. Byrne’s multi-channel installation New Sexual Lifestyles, 2003, is also based upon a text derived from a US magazine – this time a roundtable discussion on sexuality published in Playboy in 1973. Again the shooting location is highly significant as Byrne restages the discussion with Irish actors in a modernist building in Co. Wicklow. Designed as a summer house for the wealthy art patron Basil Goulding, the building also serves as the subject of a series of photographs that form part of the work. These photographs are exhibited alongside the edited footage of the re-enactment, which is presented on multiple monitors (with headphones attached), a mode of display that suggests the mediatheque or media archive, rather than the cinema.

Memory in the museum

Even though new media artworks may directly reference or evoke aspects of popular media production and exhibition, artists generally aim to solicit modes of engagement that are specific to the spaces and sites of Contemporary Art.⁴So, for example, Willie Doherty might structure a video installation (such as Re-Run, 2002) so that the viewer must continually shift their attention between two opposing screens in order to ‘read’ the work. Similarly, seating is rarely provided for James Coleman’s projected image installations; instead, multiple speakers are arranged around the exhibition space to invite viewing and listening from different positions. These works demonstrate a sensitivity to the museum gallery as a space through which the viewer moves, but some artists have structured their installations around the notion of mobility in even more pronounced ways.

This is the case with Jaki Irvine‘s The Silver Bridge, 2003, an eight-screen video installation that explores the spatialisation of narrative, drawing some of its themes and images from Carmilla, 1872, a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. Widely regarded as a source of inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Carmilla is a tale of repressed desire involving two young women. Like much Gothic literature, The Silver Bridge explores the persistence of attachments to people and places, and derives much of its power from the use of atmospheric settings (including the Phoenix Park and the Natural History Museum) as locations. The architecture of IMMA provides a particularly appropriate exhibition context for this work, as the eight projections are dispersed across a series of small interconnected rooms alongside a corridor, enabling multiple pathways through the narrative.

James Coleman’s Strongbow, 1978/2000, is also concerned with storytelling, focusing on the fraught interplay between history, myth and media in Irish culture. One of the first important new media works acquired by IMMA, Strongbow was placed on public display for several years during the early 1990s. At that time the work consisted of a spot lit replica of a tomb-effigy found in Christ Church Cathedral, and once assumed to be that of the Norman knight Strongbow. The replica was displayed alongside a video, on a monitor, of two hands clapping continuously, with the sounds of the clapping gradually rising to a boom and then receding. One hand is green, the other red and the image is distorted so that the hands appear to blur, leaving traces across the screen.

The work was interpreted in its original form as a critique of television’s insistence on the ‘noise and confusion of the present [offering] no particular insight on the past nor resolution for the future’.⁵ In 2000, however, Coleman presented a radically altered version as part of the IMMA exhibition Shifting Ground: Selected Works of Irish Art, 1950-2000. Strongbow, 1978/2000, was no longer situated in a darkened space; instead the components were clearly visible and several new elements had been added. The residue of the plaster mould was evident on the resin cast of the effigy, and the video of the hands clapping was displayed on a widescreen ‘Sony Art Couture’ monitor. In addition, the packing boxes for several monitors were stacked against the wall, along with a scaffold tower and the residue of the installation process.

Given its subject matter, these revisions to the form of the work can be read as a response to the context of the exhibition Shifting Ground, which focused partly on history and identity. But Coleman’s action also raises broader questions about the interpretation of new media artworks. The first version of Strongbow was produced towards the end of the era of classical ‘TV’, just before the widespread availability of home video and the emergence of cable channels aimed at niche audiences. During the classical era of broadcasting, television (like radio) had contributed to processes of nation formation through its insistence upon a continuous, shared, sense of the ‘here and now’. But by 2000, the experience of television – and its relationship to the national context – had altered radically. Through the alterations to Strongbow, Coleman highlights the complexities and the contradictions that are integral to the production and exhibition of New Media Art, the meaning of which is at least partly structured by the continually shifting relationship between media, technology and society.

© Maeve Connolly, 2011

 

IMMA invited Mick Wilson, Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) to contribute an essay entitled What is Conceptual Art?, which considers the relevance of Conceptual Art both as an influential art movement during a particular period of time but also, more broadly, as a framework for creating and understanding art which remains relevant to Contemporary Art practice.

“Conceptual art is not about forms or materials, but about ideas and meanings. It cannot be defined in terms of any medium or style, but rather by the way it questions what art is. In particular, Conceptual art challenges the traditional status of the art object as unique, collectable and/or saleable. […] This art can take a variety of forms: everyday objects, photographs, maps, videos, charts and especially language itself. Often there will be a combination of such forms. […] Conceptual art has had a determining effect on the thinking of most artists.”¹ – Tony Godfrey, 1998

“I will refer to the kind of art which I am involved in as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. […] The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. […] Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. […] The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple.”² – Sol LeWitt, 1967

“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/ or “dematerialized.” […] This has not kept commentators over the years from calling virtually anything in unconventional mediums “Conceptual art.” […] There has been a lot of bickering about what Conceptual art is/was; who began it; who did what when with it; what its goals, philosophy, and politics were and might have been. I was there, but I don’t trust my memory. I don’t trust anyone else’s either. And I trust even less the authoritative overviews by those who were not there.”³ – Lucy Lippard, 1972

“Concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e.g. music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.”⁴ – Henry Flynt, 1961

“I chose to work with inert gas because there was not the constant presence of a small object or device that produced the art. Inert gas is a material that is imperceivable – it does not combine with any other element […] That is what gas does. When released, it returns to the atmosphere from where it came. It continues to expand forever in the atmosphere, constantly changing and it does all of this without anybody being able to see it.”⁵ – Robert Barry, 1969

Introduction

The quotations which begin this essay establish most of the key themes in discussing conceptual art: the priority given to ideas; the ambiguous role of actual objects and materials; the need to rethink the mechanisms of ‘display’ and distribution of art; the increasingly important role for language; and the tendency to trouble core definitions both of ‘art’ in general and of ‘conceptual art’ itself in particular. This repeated play with definitions – ‘What is the limit of what can be included under the heading “art”?’ ‘What is the most reduced and concise way in which a conceptual artwork can be “given” for the audience to “experience”?’ – makes answering the question ‘What is conceptual art?’ a little tricky, but also very worthwhile.

Perhaps the easiest way to introduce conceptual art is to consider some examples of work typically described as ‘conceptual’. Robert Rauschenberg sends a telegram to the Galerie Iris Clert which says: ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so’ as his contribution to an exhibition of portraits in the gallery, (1961).⁶ Stanley Brouwn asks passers-by in Amsterdam to show him the way to a particular spot in the city using pen and paper, (This way Brouwn, 1961).⁷John Baldessari instructs a sign painter to paint the following words on a canvas: ‘Study the composition of paintings. Ask yourself questions when standing in front of a well-composed picture. What format is used? What is the proportion of width to height?’, (Composing on a Canvas, 1966-8).⁸ Cildo Meireles screen-prints subversive messages onto Coca-Cola glass bottles and re-circulates these so that they are re-used for selling Coca-Cola (Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970).⁹ Joseph Kosuth exhibits a series of blackand- white photostats of dictionary definitions for words such as ‘meaning’ and ‘universal’, (Art as ideas as idea, 1966). Adrian Piper exhibits a short text saying: ‘The work originally intended for this space has been withdrawn. […] I submit its absence as evidence of the inability of art expression to have a meaningful existence under conditions other than those of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom,’ (1970).¹⁰

Less the medium, more the message

This term ‘conceptual art’ has become the most widely used name for works such as these, which form a broad spectrum of experimental artworks and practices that developed from the 1960s onwards. These new art practices no longer necessarily depend on the production of discrete one-off physical objects; nor necessarily use traditional media and techniques like picturemaking with paint or modelling with clay or casting with bronze or assembling with metal and wood; nor even demonstrate a specifically pronounced ‘visual’ or ‘hand made’ aspect. Typically, though not without important exceptions, art making prior to this development had been a matter of working directly within relatively familiar art forms and media – painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking – to produce discrete objects. Conceptual art can make use of these forms on occasion, but it no longer requires these forms in order to produce something that claims an audience’s attention as an artwork – the emphasis is generally not placed on a specific material artefact nor on hand-crafting or technical-making processes as such, nor even on the ‘expressive’ personality of the artist, but rather on a range of concerns that emphasise the role of ‘ideas’. However, such generalisations are really only rough approximations – in many ways the list of works provided above could be used as counterexamples: for example, Robert Barry’s work with inert gases is centrally based on a material process, the diffusion of the gases into the atmosphere; however, this process is not available to perception in the usual terms of art viewing. This play off between percept (what is given in the experience) and concept (what is proposed as organising the experience meaningfully) is a recurrent feature of much conceptual art which makes use of the ambiguous interplay of language, perceptual experience and the conceptual organisation of experience.

When was Conceptual Art?

Most commentators identify the period from 1966 to 1972 as the key phase of development: a period that concludes with the canonisation of conceptualism in the controversial international survey exhibition Documenta V in Germany organised by Harald Szeeman,¹¹ and the first publication of Lucy Lippard’s often cited book that maps conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, in the US.¹² However, this neat packaging of cultural practices in such crisply delimited movements and periods, with clear beginnings and endings, is always, to a greater or lesser degree, misleading, although such periodisations are sometimes useful in summarily introducing complex cultural historical material.

The key problem presented by mapping conceptual art is the degree to which it has come to reorient the entire field of modern art, so that producing an account of conceptual art opens up a whole range of unresolved issues that continue to vex participants in contemporary art debate.

A rough answer to the question

So as a first rough attempt at an answer to the question ‘What is conceptual art?’, we could propose something like: conceptual art, is the name for a broad tendency to shift the priorities for making, describing, thinking about, giving value to, and distributing works of art, toward questions of idea rather than technique. This is a tendency that is strongly evident since the 1960s. This is a shift from questions of craft process, material artefact, medium, tradition and virtuosity as primary, to questions of intention, meaning, idea and information as foremost in importance. This broad shift in emphasis is evident internationally in the work of artists from many countries including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Japan, Russia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States, from the 1960s onwards. While some have identified conceptual art primarily with New York and North America, and thus with an English-speaking cultural context, others have worked hard to overcome this bias by exploring the rich and culturally diverse examples of conceptualism globally.¹³

Problems with this answer

But one of the problems with this answer is that it seems to isolate conceptual art from a broader set of developments in post World-War II culture, such as pop art and minimalism, as well as wider developments in literature, poetry, theatre, performance and mass media. Part of the problem here is the way in which the academic discipline of art history, especially in its popularised form in glossy publications and television programmes, likes to talk of ‘styles’ and ‘movements’ and to anchor these notions by describing the visual appearance of, and techniques used in producing artefacts such as paintings and sculptures. Clearly, when artists begin to prioritise ideas and begin to use ideas from a wide range of sources – science, philosophy, sociology, literary theory, media and communications studies, cybernetics, ecological activism, and counter cultural politics for example – the old art historical conventions of ‘movements’ and ‘styles’ potentially become obstacles to establishing a broad and rich sense of a wide-ranging re-orientation of the global art system. (Of course another problem of academic art history can often be its preoccupation with being ‘correct’ and exact in its use of terms, which can lead to a lot of hair-splitting and angels dancing on the heads of pins, so let’s not lose too much sleep over our rough answer to the question ‘What is conceptual art?’)

One important dimension of conceptual art (which it is difficult to address in an answer like the one given above), is its relationship with counter-cultural tendencies and with various forms of international cultural politics such as feminism, the anti-war movements, and various forms of activism and dissent. A key work of the 1970s and critically important for the development of feminist cultural practice and debate is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, which is in part a reworking of conceptual art approaches to the exhibition as ‘system’ and a use of the archive as a medium of display (presenting images, diagrams, documents, artefacts in a systematic manner).¹⁴ The exhibition as ‘system’, refers to the use of cybernetics and systems thinking in various conceptual art projects and in the rethinking of the function and role of exhibition and display.¹⁵ This is not to say that all conceptual art manifested a countercultural tendency: this was not the case.¹⁶ This is to make a claim for the broadening effects of conceptual art in terms of themes and methods in art making which enabled (not caused) the emergence of new cultural practices and debates which foregrounded questions of identity, gender, and class.¹⁷

Conceptual art and the knowledge economy

Another dimension of conceptual art, which is not fully addressed in this definition, is the ambiguous and complex relationships between conceptual art and changes in the contemporary art market. Some commentators like Lippard emphasise conceptual art’s ‘dematerialisation’ of the art object and identify this with attempts to resist the commercial logic of the art market. Other commentators foreground the role of conceptual art in reshaping the dynamics of the art market and the nature of what can feasibly be bought and sold. Seth Siegelaub, a key New York gallerist and curator since the 1960s, has written: ‘The economic aspect of conceptual art is perhaps most interesting. From the moment when ownership of the work did not give its owner the great advantage of control of the work acquired, this art was implicated in turning back on the question of the value of its private appropriation. How can a collector possess an idea?’¹⁸ Of course this talk of a new economy of ideas has a familiar ring for contemporary ears, and indeed some writers have identified a connection between such 1960s radical art ideas and twenty-first-century notions of ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘cognitive capitalism.’

In the 1990s, French sociologists argued that there is a relationship between the kind of creative and imaginative idea-based work proclaimed by 1960s artists and activists as progressive and transformative for society, and the kinds of ‘flexible’ ‘creative’ ‘idea-generating’ and ‘immaterial labour’ proclaimed by more recent champions of information capitalism and ‘flexibilisation’ as economically progressive and transformative.¹⁹ This is a very controversial matter, suggesting as it does that in some way work that sought to be socially, politically and culturally progressive in the 1960s has become taken-over as economically instrumental thinking by a new form of capitalism that seeks to exploit ever more totally our creative and social being.²⁰ Others go right back to the 1960s and identify a connection between the new art ideas of conceptualism and the new marketing cultures of corporations. Alexander Alberro has argued that: ‘The infusion of corporate funds was a major element in the expansion of the art market during the mid-1960s. […] Many in corporate practice […] imagined new, innovative art as a symbolic ally in the pursuit of entrepreneurship.’²¹ This is just one way in which conceptual art continues as a live controversy for contemporary art practice and cultural debate.

Conceptual art now

For some commentators the rise of conceptual art has been nothing less than the betrayal of the visual arts by overly literary and anti-visual cultural practices.²² For other commentators conceptual art has generated the basis on which current practice proceeds and, for them, it has established the basic problems and themes with which artists must continue to work. Arguably, conceptual art continues to be the key background for a number of important debates in contemporary art: the role of the curator; the functions and limits of art institutions (galleries, museums, exhibitions); art as exemplary economy of the ‘dematerialised’; the meaning of ‘public’-ness in art; the appropriate role and limits of mediation, publicity and explication in contemporary art; the inclusions and exclusions that operate in the circuits of global culture; and the relationship between art practice and knowledge.

In the most simple and everyday terms conceptual art has given rise to a new criterion in judgements on art. Encountering a work of art, instead of the question ‘Is it beautiful?’ or ‘Is it moving?’ we now find ourselves more often than not, first asking ourselves, ‘Is it interesting?’

© Mich Wilson, 2011