grant kester "galatea’s gaze: ethics, spectacle, and participation"

18 19

A minor art-world contretemps erupted in Los Angeles in November of 2011 when performance artist Marina Abramovi organized a set of events (An Artists Life Manifesto) in conjunction with MOCAs annual gala fundraiser.2 This typically celebrity-ridden affair has, in the past, featured Lady Gaga playing a piano painted by Damien Hirst and wearing a hat designed by Frank Gehry, so the bar for excess was set pretty high. As part of her staging for the fundraiser, Abramovi required the well-heeled guests to don white lab coats. She also paid a number of artists, dancers, and actors to sit on rotating turntables under the dining tables, their heads poking through holes that allowed them to stare meaningfully (and in silence) at the invited donors. She paid some other female participants to reenact an older performance of hers, which involved lying naked under a skeleton. This may sound pretty much par for the course for performance art (I especially like the image of gala guest Will Ferrell in his white lab coat, listening politely while Abramovi intoned, An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls). However, the event elicited a strong critical reaction from a list of art-world luminaries, led by famed choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. In a letter to MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch, she expressed her

Galateas Gaze: Ethics, Spectacle, and ParticipationGrant Kester

You feel sorry for us because were being stared at? But were staring at you.

Jesse Aran Holcomb, participant in Marina Abramovis An Artists Life Manifesto, 20111

If youre the viewer, how come I can see you watching me? Is it you?

Lyrics from My Barbarians Transparency, 2009

20 21

concern that the individual actors, artists, and dancers involved in the production were being used by Abramovi and would be subjected to possible public humiliation and bodily injury from the three-hour endurance test at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors. As she continued:

Their cheerful voluntarism says something about the pervasive desperation and cynicism of the art world such that young people must become abject table ornaments and clichd living symbols of mortality in order to assume a novitiate role in the temple of art. This grotesque spectacle promises to be truly embarrassing. I and the undersigned wish to express our dismay that an institution that we have supported can stoop to such degrading methods of fund raising.3

Part of the problem, I suspect, was that the entire performance, with donors paying $2,500 per plate to stare at young peoples disembodied heads, exposed the normally more circumspect interdependence between art and wealth with a bit too much gusto. Abramovi appeared to have some anatomical or medical metaphor in mind for the event (from the lab coats to the life-sized cake in the shape of her body that was cut up and served as dessert), so the performance as a whole certainly suggested a level of violence or exploitation in the artists relationship to the world. To further complicate matters, some of the actors, dancers, and artists on whose behalf Rainers outrage was expressed responded quite critically, professing that they were happy and even privileged to be involved (Exploitation? No. Where I come from, its considered an honor to work for a great artist; Marina gave us all permission to create our own performance space around usit was a gift.).4 As humiliation and objectification goes, this is pretty small beer compared to a typical Santiago Sierra performance. No one was tattooed, asked to dye their hair, or paid in heroin. Nonetheless, this incident reveals a great deal about the complex issues that emerge as museums begin to commission participatory art projects. More specifically

it suggests a central tension between the act of seeing and the experience of being seen, between agency and instrumentalization, and between specular and participatory aesthetic encounters. It points as well to the tension between ethics and aesthetics in the analysis of contemporary art. These issues have come to the fore in recent art criticism because of the dramatic expansion of various forms of participatory, engaged, and collaborative art practice over the past two decades. Ive written elsewhere about this shift in terms of a renegotiation of aesthetic autonomy, as artists begin to redefine the conventional relationship between a viewer and a discrete work of art, as well as the relationship between artistic production and other cultural forms and practices (from urbanism to environmental science and from architecture to activism).5 It was largely in response to this new trajectory that MOCA launched the Engagement Party series in 2008. Engagement Party, which ran until 2012, featured projects by emerging Southern Californiabased artists working collectively and collaboratively. Of course California was particularly fertile ground for participatory art practice long before the current art world vogue. Two factors, in particular, need to be emphasized here. The first is the influence of feminism, beginning with Judy Chicagos Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College in 1970 (which later moved to California Institute of the Arts [CalArts], where Chicago was joined by Miriam Schapiro) and the subsequent formation of Womanhouse and the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles. Key figures included Sheila de Bretteville, Mira Schor, Arlene Raven, and Faith Wilding. Already by the late 1960s there was an interest in collaborative and dialogical forms of knowledge production in the feminist community, centered on the practice of consciousness raising. Consciousness raising evolved from informal meetings and conversations among women as they compared their lived experience within a patriarchal culture. Through these exchanges, many women came to realize that seemingly individual and isolated encounters with domestic violence, limitations on professional and educational advancement,

Grant Kestor Galateas Gaze

IberiaPerezHighlight



22

and normative standards of beauty or sexuality were, in fact, widely shared and part of a much broader system of gender-based oppression. By coming together in solidarity, they discovered the political roots of these personal experiences and were able to envision new, collective forms of resistance. The reciprocal, non-hierarchical process of consciousness raising suggested a kind of auto-pedagogy that would have significant implications for subsequent art practices. It suggested as well a continuity with avant-garde models of aesthetic experience in which critical insight into the operations of political power is rooted in a form of subjective self-exploration, and in which the intuition of a transcendent sensus communis is replaced by the intuition of a previously unrecognized system of domination. A second important factor in the emergence of collaborative and participatory art in California can be found in the influence of Allan Kaprow. Kaprow left New York for the West Coast in the late 1960s, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and CalArts before coming to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 1974, where he taught for the remainder of his career. In an evolution that has been widely remarked, Kaprow began to move beyond what he viewed as the impasse of Abstract Expressionism (he studied with Hans Hoffman in New York) towards interactive forms of performance, under the influence of John Cage and others. As he explained in a 1988 interview:

There are two directions in which the legacy [of Abstract Expressionism] could go. One is to continue into and develop an action kind of painting, which was what he [Pollock] was doing, and the other was to take advantage of the action itself, implicit as a kind of dance ritual. Instead of making ritualistic actions, which might be one direction someone could take, I was proposing the hop right into real life, that one could step right out of the canvas, which in his case, he did while painting them.6

Abstract Expressionism conveyed a double movement in the artists relationship to the viewer. On the one hand it entailed a movement away from the viewer (and a familiar world of signifiers), privileging instead the artists expressive action as the primary locus of meaning. Here the finished work is the residue of an originary creative performance, which the viewer can only imbibe secondhand. On the other hand, in liberating expression from the restraints of formal training and expertise, it offered an implicit invitation to open that same opportunity for performative freedom to the viewer-as-participant. If, for Pollock, the action of making a painting was as important as the painting itself, then Kaprow wanted to invite the viewer into the studio and hand him a brush. It was necessary for Kaprow to come west to fully develop the pedagogical implications of these new insights. CalArts and UCSD were especially important centers for the development of participatory and performance-based art practice, due to Kaprows influence as well as the presence of collaborative teams such as Helen and Newton Harrison and David and Eleanor Antin at UCSD. The participatory projects of Suzanne Lacy are emblematic of the rich cross-fertilization of feminist and performance art that began during the 1970s and 80s in California (Lacy entered the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State in 1970 and studied with Kaprow when that program later moved to CalArts). A related mix of conceptualism, performance, and activism can be seen in the work of figures such as Fred Lonidier, Allan Sekula, and Martha Rosler (all of whom earned MFAs at UCSD); the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, active in San Diego and Tijuana (founding members included Isaac Artenstein, David Avalos, Sara-Jo Berman, Jude Eberhart, Guillermo Gomez-Pea [another CalArts graduate], Victor Ochoa, and Michael Schnorr); and, a bit later, the collaborative work of Avalos, Louis Hock, and Liz Sisco. Key figures in Los Angeles also included Judith F. Baca and the members of ASCO (which included Diane Gamboa, Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Daniel J. Martinez, and Patssi Valdez, among others). High Performance, the leading performance-art journal in the country, was also published



24 25

in Los Angeles between 1978 and 1995. Today a generation of younger artists have emerged in the region, influenced both by this rich history (in some cases working directly with the leading figures, many of whom still teach in area art schools) as well as by the broader development of relational and participatory art practices. It is, by and large, this generation that is represented in Engagement Party. For Engagement Party, each group was given three months to develop programming for MOCA, to be presented on the first Thursday of each of three months. The participating groups were selected by Think Tank, a committee of MOCA staffincluding representatives from the education, development, and registration departments along with a sales associate, a grants manager, a curatorial assistant, a publications editor, a web manager, and an exhibition technician. This reconfiguration of conventional museum hierarchies (giving sales associates and installation techs responsibility for curatorial decisions) suggests that Engagement Party was intended to open up the museum itself to some internal critique. This was especially evident in My Barbarians project, which used the concept of transparency as a guiding theme to explore the constitution of the museum through interviews, performances, and live readings, including frank discussions of MOCAs recent financial crisis and its impact on museum staff. Other projects challenged the institutional closure of the museum in a more whimsical manner. Knifeandfork allowed participants to race radio-controlled cars through the galleries and created a miniature golf course that ran through the museum and its exterior spaces. Neighborhood Public Radio brought one hundred guitarists onto the MOCA campus to play loosely orchestrated compositions inside the galleries and around the courtyard, and Slanguage staged dub and break-dancing performances in the courtyard. Several collectives used sections of Grand Avenue in front of MOCA as a stage. Elements of music, theater, dance, installation, and performance collided in choreographer Ryan Heffingtons goth-versus-punk dance-off Heavy Metal Parking Lot, Lucky Dragons Live Sprawl, and OJOs Flesh Car Crash. As these examples suggest, many of the groups involved in

Engagement Party sought to bring forms of popular culture (from break dancing to video games to amateur science) into some dialogue with the more constrained ambit of the museum. In place of the seriousness typically associated with high art there was a deliberate attempt by many of the collectives to evoke playfulness and absurdity, and to make audiences coparticipants in the general subversion of order (of science, the decorum of the museum, etc.). Throughout, Engagement Party sought to raise questions about the boundaries between art, the art museum, and the broader culture. This is, of course, a venerable strategy. The history of modernism is replete with examples of artists seeking to disturb or unsettle the aesthetic equipoise of the academy with the chaotic energies of the street. This generally works through a process of isometric resistance, in which the ostensibly hidebound institution (the salon, the gallery, the museum) is subjected to an unexpected assault or provocation from without. What makes Engagement Party different is the fact that the museum solicited its own disturbance. This suggests the significant changes that have occurred over the past three decades, as museums have sought to assimilate and reproduce the capacity for self-reflexive criticality that has come to be seen as the unique province of art. This accounts as well for the carefully modulated relationship between Engagement Party and MOCAs institutional core. Like the Abramovi project cited above, two of the Engagement Party performances were staged in conjunction with larger events designed to celebrate MOCA as an institution (a thirtieth-anniversary party and a members-only night) and targeted in part at donors and museum members. As a result, the Engagement Party actions on those nights were effectively made complicit with the broader mission of venerating the institution. Certainly it is no surprise that a museum would seek to cultivate donors, and any opening in a gallery does the same thing, with paintings and sculptures serving as the genteel backdrop for canaps and wine. The difference here lies in the particular congruence between the playful energies of the performances and the institutional self-interest of the museum. This


26 27

suggests certain limits on the ability of institutions to accept the broader implications of participatory work as an autonomous creative practice, but it is also fair to say that these events still marked a significant concession of institutional interest and authority. To return, finally, to the questions with which this essay began, how do we evaluate these new, participatory practices as art? What criteria are appropriate? We might begin with a simple process of structural differentiation, based on the varying ways in which this work organizes the physical and cognitive experience of participants. The first mode of practice would include projects in which the performance is presented to a viewer who witnesses but doesnt directly intervene in a manner that would alter the composition of the work (for example, watching break dancing or the goth-versus-punk dance-off). The conventional form of presentation in this case would make use of a physical stage, or simply the normative associations of a stage as marking a physical and psychological barrier between audience and performer. In these cases the performers are there to be looked at while the audience remains either physically static before the stage space and/or understands its role as one of observing an externally performed act. Here a psychological difference between performer and viewer is often reinforced through a spatial division or frame in which the performer occupies a discrete space of performance (Grand Avenue, an elevated stage, etc.). The second mode would involve immersive performances in which the physical segregation of the stage is broken down, and both viewer and performer are free to wander around and past each other (as in Lucky Dragons Live Sprawl project). The space of performance here is no longer so clearly divided and frontal (one faces a stage but occupies a space). In this case the work can trigger a more improvisational and interlocutory relationship between performer and viewer (although the norms of certain genres, like music, tend to enforce a stage presence even around a wandering performer and can discourage direct, spontaneous interaction). The third mode of practice involves a conscious delegation of (potentially expressive) action to the individual previously

understood as a viewer. In Engagement Party this would include the distribution of wooden flutes by Lucky Dragons or the Hand of God reenactment and miniature golf course created by Knifeandfork. Although the level of autonomous action can be more or less constrained and mechanical (simply operating a video game or blowing into a flute versus something more textured and extensive), this marks a further movement away from the segregation of a stage presentation. A fourth category would involve projects in which the dissolution of the frame and the expansion of the parame-ters of action and interaction are carried even further. This level of collaboration did occur in some Engagement Party projects, for example in My Barbarians consultations with museum staff and in the formation of Think Tank itself (in which non-curatorial staff was allowed to act like curators). Participatory practices of this nature are much more difficult for institutions like museums and galleries to exhibit as dis-crete works. The time scale of such projects (which can unfold over a period of years) simply isnt commensurate with the conventional mechanisms that museums use to commission and present art. I assume no implicit hierarchy in outlining these modes of practice, and its clear that any given proj-ect can operate in more than one mode either simultaneously or over time. As I have suggested elsewhere, participatory approaches to art making challenge many of the cognitive assumptions associated with the thingness of the artwork, understood as an object, image, or organized space that is conceptualized and prepared beforehand, and then set in place before the viewer. While this thing may well be consti-tuted in such a way that it anticipates a hypothetical viewers responses, the interaction of actual viewers has no recipro-cal transformative effect on its formal or physical properties. In some cases a physical space (or an apparatus within that space) may be able to register a viewers actions, but here I would in-troduce a further distinction between a physically responsive space (for example, one that allows the viewer to modify the space in some way or trigger a mechanical response) and the reciprocal attunement that occurs in participatory projects involving performative human interaction.









28 29

In the history of modernist art the viewers relationship to the work-as-thing is based on a dynamic in which the physical artwork stands in place of another human subject (a surrogate Other). It provides a virtualized inter-subjective encounter in which viewers can enact, and challenge, certain (habitual) cognitive patterns triggered by the work of art. These experiences are virtual, and aesthetic, precisely because the interlocutor is an object rather than a sentient being. Thus they provide a kind of cognitive training, which can be applied to our subsequent interactions with real spaces and people. In the case of participatory art practice the locus of meaning is displaced from the viewers experience of an object that stands in for an absent Other to interactions with a living human presence that is vulnerable to the participants actions and emotional responses. Rather than a singular consciousness confronting a non-sentient object, we find a series of conscious subjects in dialogue and resistance, accommodation and confrontation. It is in this plural relationality that aesthetic experience is produced in participatory work. This analysis does not imply a simple opposition between object (or image) and action, or between passive viewers and active participants. Many if not most participatory projects employ physical objects, forms, or designed spaces as a matrix of interaction and experience. And inter-subjective exchange is very much conditioned by a set of representational protocols. What Im trying to capture here is the unique nature of projects in which each participants actions or behavior are perceived and felt in real time by another coparticipant. Here, representational experience is always paired with, and complicated by, a consciousness of the effect of ones actions, and on the reciprocal deformation of the limits and boundaries of self, in a way that is quite distinct from the experience produced by paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations. I would suggest that this is one reason why the experience of artistic subjectivity or authorship is often openly engaged in participatory practice as a point of investigation (via various notions of de-skilling or amateur knowledge or production, collaboration, etc.). The goal, in general, is not to simply collapse the subject position of the

artist, but rather to problematize sovereign agency in one of its most conventional forms. This is also the reason why ethical concerns so often emerge in critical discussions of participatory practice (Rainers criticism of Abramovi, for example, or anxiety over a so-called ethical turn in recent criticism). These concerns mark a recognition of a concrete change in the material conditions of art practice (the engagement with social relationships, no longer virtualized through objects and images). At the same time, the form in which these concerns are expressed (the belief that spurious ethical criteria are somehow replacing legitimately aesthetic criteria in the analysis of participatory practice) involves a fundamental misrecognition. The aesthetic has, of course, always carried an explicitly ethical meaning. What is changing now is the specific relationship between ethics and aesthetics in this work. This shift is evident in the conflicting interpretations of Abramovis Artists Life Manifesto. Rainer complained that the participants were exploited by being required to sit (in an awkward and demeaning position) beneath the tables, subject to the objectifying gaze of privileged donors. In addition to the physical discomfort and risk of unwanted physical contact, they acted out a literal image of subordination. But the performers themselves, in many cases, did not feel exploited. Thus, an interpretation of this work that focuses primarily on the image of a perceived exploitation and overlooks the conscious agency of the participants remains incomplete. Rainer ascribes this incongruity to the plight of young artists and performers in thrall to the pervasive desperation and cynicism of the art world. But that interpretation risks another kind of disavowal, of the intentions of the participants themselves. As participatory practices continue to grow, both inside the museum and beyond, the need for a more nuanced understanding of the complex issues raised by this work at the intersection of the ethical and the aesthetic will only become more pressing.












30 31

Notes

1Quoted in Jori Finkel, Abramovis Silent Heads Speak Out, Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2011.

The worst thing that I heard about, said one of the heads, yoga instructor/actress Jesse Aran Holcomb, was someone lining up a little salt near a performers face

so it looked like he was snorting a line. She found the accusations of exploitation perplexing. Its not so bad to sit on the flooras a yogi I do that all the time, Holcomb said.

You feel sorry for us because were being stared at? But were staring at you. Marina gave us all permission to create our own performance space around us it was a gift.

2Marina Abramovi stated, I am trying to make the gala different. People have to invest their own participation. It is a great way to introduce my manifesto. An artist should say what he believes in and share his moral code with his audience and new generations of artists. Quoted in Erica Wrightson,

An Interview with Marina Abramovi, moca.org, January 5, 2012.

3In an open letter to MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch, Yvonne Rainer wrote:

After observing a rehearsal, I am writing to protest the entertainment about to be provided by Marina Abramovi at the upcoming donor gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art where a number of young peoples live heads will be rotating as decorative centerpieces at diners tables and othersall womenwill be required to lie perfectly still in the nude for over three hours under fake skeletons, also as centerpieces surrounded by diners. [] At the rehearsal the fifty headsall young, beautiful, and mostly whiteturning and bobbing out of holes as their bodies crouched beneath the otherwise empty tables, appeared touching and somewhat comic, but when I tried to envision 800 inebriated diners surrounding them, I had another impression. I myself have never been averse to occasional epatering

of the bourgeoisie. However, I cant help feeling that subjecting her performers to possible public humiliation and bodily injury from the three-hour endurance test at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors is yet another example of the museums callousness and greed and Ms. Abramovis obliviousness to differences in context and some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others. Rainer, Letter to Jeffrey Deitch and MOCA Regarding Annual Gala, November 12, 2011, available on artforum.com, http://artforum.com/archive/id=29378.

4Another participant, actress Megan Rose, said the experience was

monumental for her in large part because of one guest at her table, the collector and MOCA trustee Blake Byrne. We actually locked eyes for 35 minutes straight and had this nonverbal conversation that was really meaningful. It was incredible: he was staring at me while Deborah Harry was performing, I felt so honored. Finkel, Abramovis Silent Heads Speak Out. Sara Wookey, a performer who auditioned for Abramovis event but then turned it down, released a public statement detailing her concerns that the performers were underpaid and that there were no safeguards or protections for performers in distress. Posted on Chtodelat News blog, November 11, 2011, http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/the-1-marina-abramovic-jeffrey-deitch/.

5See my The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

6Allan Kaprow, An Interview with Allan Kaprow, videotaped interview by John Held Jr. at the Dallas Public Library Cable Access Studio in 1988 as part of a Kaprow symposium at the University of Texas, Arlington, transcript available at http://www.mailartist.com/johnheldjr/InterviewWithAlanKaprow.html.

Grant Kestor

Finishing SchoolKnifeandfork

OJOSlanguage

My BarbarianLucky Dragons

Ryan Heffington and the Eastsiders

League of Imaginary Scientists

Neighborhood Public Radio

Los Angeles Urban Rangers

Liz GlynnCamLab

grant kester "galatea’s gaze: ethics, spectacle, and participation"

Documents