the non-visible worlds of art and performance praxis (delia and brainard carey)

8/17/2019 The Non-Visible Worlds of Art and Performance Praxis (Delia and Brainard Carey)

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THE NONVISIBLE WORLDS OF

ART AND PERFORMANCE

Praxis (Delia and Brainard Carey)

As artists we are concerned with the visible and non-visible worlds: we argue

they are so intertwined in daily life as well as art practice, that without thenon-visible world, the visible one would suffer. And beyond that, there is a world that can only be seen in dreams and hints of parallel realities that are mutuallyexclusive, so we can never see the other, like dreaming versus waking states. We wantto consider how different artists, seen through our own creative lens, contribute todifferent aspects of these worlds.

When artists work with what we call the non-visible world, it has several meanings,from the spiritual to the magically imagined object. Tere is also the mixing of thereal and the imaginary, such as a hand holding an imaginary apple, or reading a

book that has passages so visual you see them in your mind’s eye. In our everydaylife we mix the two on a regular basis: when we make a wish on our birthday cakefor something we cannot see or when we visualize our future achieving whicheverdream we might have. Tose are all in the realm of everyday imagination, where weregularly use what we cannot see.

We are two artists looking at the issue of invisibility or the non-visible, through thelens of our own artwork which is part performance and part idea-based, or to usethe antiquated term, “conceptual” in nature. As that term is overused these days, we

will define it here for the purposes of this article. Artists who consider themselvesconceptual are usually working with ideas as the primary focus of their work. If theideas are not just part of the work, but need to be understood and acknowledged inorder to experience the work, then the artists would be considered concept-based inour minds, and are conceptual artists. Tat definition is loose, though most readersof this journal will understand the parameters quickly. However, there are otherexamples that would fit this definition.

Mathematicians, for example, often work largely with ideas, and then those ideasare proven with formulas and equations. Occasionally the two mix in this wonder-ful example that seems to bring the imaginary into the real. In trigonometry andalso in the beginning of calculus, students are introduced to a wonderful concept


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and that it could actually be used. Briefly, it is the square root of negative one. Forexample, we all know how to determine the square root of a number like twenty-five. It is five. When we look for a square root, we are looking for a number that

when multiplied against itself gives us the original number. So the square root ofone is also one, because one times itself is one. However, there is an exception. Te

number, negative one, which is often shown like this:

1; which square root doesit have? Te problem is this—what is the square root of negative one? It is notnegative one, because negative one multiplied by itself gives us a positive numberone, since a negative times a negative is a positive. Tere is not a clear answer tothis matter. Yet mathematicians and scientists use the number negative one all thetime in calculations that are very real. So when you learn the answer, you are toldin math class that it is an imaginary number. Tat imaginary number has a symbol,and it is a lower case, cursive, letter “.” Te student must take it on faith initially,that an imaginary number times itself is negative one. A strange idea, a conceptualidea, that can be used in everyday calculations. Te square root of negative one isthe imaginary number.

In the art world, the equivalent might be Yoko Ono asking us to imagine peace. Itis at once a concept-based idea, and also a call to action that can have real results.

When Ono and Lennon made posters and billboards declaring “War Is Over” withthe phrase underneath it “If You Want It,” they are asking us all to imagine an endto war, and putting the onus on us to make it happen.

ino Sehgal has also used the concept to draw our attention to what we cannot see.

In a piece for the art publication , he created a work that did not exist by renumber-ing the pages. In the table of contents, if you were looking for his work, it wouldsay clearly, “ino Sehgal, page 165–184.” If you flipped to that page, you couldn’tfind it. You could find page 164, but the next one was 185. Even some readers werestumped, asking the editor what happened. Of course he replied that the renumber-ing of the pages was in fact the project itself. Te magazine then, had the very realand physical ability to capture pages that did not exist, to present something that

was not there. A very simple but elegant solution, don’t you think?

Last year, Sehgal had a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York wherethere was no art on any of the walls, just an empty museum in the round. Te workconsisted solely of performers directed by him to have loosely scripted conversations

with every visitor. For the viewer, they are only aware of the performers, so to speak,that approach and begin a conversation by asking you a question. As you walk tothe top of the museum, the conversations change with different actors talking toyou as loosely directed by ino Seghal (who is not present). He will not documenthis work with photos or allow them to be taken when he can prevent it. Tere arefew to no images of his art.

What brings him into the discussion of the non-visible is also how he handlesmoney and the sale of his works. In the Guggenheim Museum solo show, one of


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the Guggenheim Museum. He is in a field of his own when it comes to how hehas managed to sell his performance work and not documentation, of which thereis none of course.

Marina Abramović and many other well-known performance artists from the ’70s

and ’80s who have huge reputations in the art world cannot earn a living from theirdocumentation, and have little else for sale, but ino Sehgal does. When a workof his is sold, the exchange of money is very specific. Tere is no receipt, there areno cash or checks accepted, only a wire transfer of the money from the collector’saccount to his. Tere is also a verbal exchange between Sehgal and the collector sothat the owner of the work can understand how to produce the performance whenit is shown.

We confirmed that method of purchase and learned this when we saw a show of hisat a gallery in New York. We asked the director of the gallery about purchasing one

of Sehgal’s works. We were told that the work we were seeing was in an edition often at $10,000 each, and in order to buy it, we had to wire money to an account.It is a brilliant idea to make a sale this way, because the buyer is bewildered!

In 2008 the Museum of Modern Art acquired his work “Te Kiss” for $70,000.MoMA said it was one of the most difficult purchases they had ever made. Tere

was a handshake and an oral agreement. A group of MoMA employees had tomemorize the instructions. But in the end, it was a compromise, as MoMA did geta receipt by e-mail for the purchase and it was permitted to let MoMA write down

the instructions by ino Sehgal for “Te Kiss.” Since that purchase, his work hasincreased in value, and is rumored to be selling in the six-figure range now.

Money represents something that is based on faith. We believe that these pieces ofpaper with numbers on them will continue to be recognized as valuable everywhere.But will they? When Sehgal addresses the sale and the exchange of money so directlyin his transactions with museums and collectors, he also engages the non-visiblefaith and belief we have in money, and in our memories. It is about trust and alsothe unspoken and unseen profit motive for everyone involved.

We are Praxis, and in our work, we have always thought about what we call thenon-visible worlds. When we opened up the doors of our East Village storefronton 10th Street, we offered several services. You could have a foot washing, a hug,or a band-aid for a non-visible wound. Te bandage was one of the most popularservices that we gave out. We would ask people what they wanted the band-aidfor, and someone might say, a headache. We would put the bandage on their headand kiss it, the way a mother would. A headache is indeed invisible, but very real.Te bandage was also real, but what the kiss implied was not. When a motherkisses a wound, it is as though it will heal it somehow. It can make us feel better

right away. Why is that? It is almost like that kiss contained a magical or at leastnon-visible element that went beneath the surface to do the work that the bandage


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Image courtesy of the artists.


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could not. We all accept that kiss with pleasure and most of us can probably attestto its visceral power.

As we gave out bandages for the non-visible wound, we also encountered differentlevels of a desired effect. One woman asked for a bandage on her womb because

she was having a difficult time getting pregnant. Another wanted one on her brokenheart. In these cases, the wound was clearly real but could be mended in a way that was very unreal. Te first woman might have a child, and the second might find loveagain. We were not therapists by any stretch of the imagination, but participantsused the wide spectrum of the worlds we cannot see to alleviate their own internalstruggles. As artists who work with concepts of this kind, we were intrigued by thethoughts and wishes of the many participants in this project.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, as artists, we are currently collaborating on anon-visible project with James Franco, who is an artist and an actor. Let us explain.

We are working on something that takes you inside the world you cannot see, a stepforward in the direction of a world that can never be physically constructed. Webegin by looking at buildings that were never built, but planned. One such buildingis the Guggenheim in lower Manhattan that Frank Gehry proposed, but the building

was never completed. Tere are countless museums like this one all over the world.Tey are ideas, as well as plans and models, but the buildings were never started.

We decided to give tours of these buildings by using the land where it was originallyproposed (when available) or a spot nearby to re-imagine it. It worked in much the

same way as an educational tour through a museum would work. A docent guidesthe tour group that begins in the imaginary lobby of the museum. Ten the guidebegins the talk, explaining this museum was never built, but that on this day it iscoming alive with the help of all those present. As the tour begins, and the groupis guided into a make-believe elevator, there is a pause as the top floor is reached.

While waiting for the doors to open, the history of the building is described. Tetop floor is reached, and the group shuffles along with directions from the docent.

As the large but manageable group of people follows the docent, the talk begins bydescribing the work of art on the wall that they have been led to. In this case, all the

works of art in this museum were designed and built by Praxis, ourselves and anycollaborator, in this case James Franco. As the first description begins, the audienceis told that this was one of the first collaborative paintings by Praxis and it measureda petite eight by eight inches. It is oil on linen, mounted on board and framed in

wood taken from the mulberry tree that was growing in William Shakespeare’s backyard in Stratford-upon-Avon. Tat mulberry tree was cut down by David Garrickin the year 1769. He made several snuff boxes from the wood of the mulberry andthree elegant picture frames for portraits of Shakespeare that were commissionedshortly thereafter.

Te idea of Garrick was to celebrate Shakespeare and create souvenirs as a remem-b f h f d f d h h d


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used. It came up for auction in 1999, and Praxis bought it and used it for the workyou see in front of you. Te painting itself is a subtle layering of shades of green,a lime green that when layered and covered with a thick coat of resin that is closerto the color of hunter green, which is similar to the green color worn by hunters inthe nineteenth century and probably the color of Peter Pan’s outfit as well as Robin

Hood’s hat. Tis color was chosen by the artists to represent jealousy and envy. Itis monochromatic, and impenetrable in the visual sense and also physically. If youtook a screwdriver and try to damage this work of art, the board would prevent youfrom puncturing it, much like the nature of the emotion represented. Tis work istitled, A Night to Remember , after the book about the itanic disaster. It is currentlyowned by James Wintner and is on loan for this exhibit.

Te tour continues and becomes more grand and fantastic. Tere are huge sculpturesmade of human hair, and gigantic LED displays that are so bright the audience must

wear invisible, solar-shaded glasses. Tere are performances, edible works, installa-tions, and films. All are described in vivid detail, as is their history, and provenance,ending with a mention of the current owner. Ownership is a large part of this par-ticular show because it is the bridge between the visible and non-visible worlds. Inthe example of the work listed above that is owned by James Wintner, his faith inthe object and its description change what is intangible to something real, tangible,and with the ability to be loaned and even resold to another party. Money is at onceabstract in what it is and what it represents and also concrete in terms of validatingart in the world of investors. When a work of art is sold at a major auction house,it establishes value for the artist in the marketplace. Te beginning of that process is

the first sale of the art through a gallery or the artist’s studio. All of the non-visible works in the museum have been sold and are on loan for the purpose of the tour.In this case the imaginary and the non-visible world enter into a different reality

when objects are purchased. Like paper money itself, it is a question of faith in whatit represents, and if that faith is shared by another person, we are not only creatingvalue, but something real is born out of what was a make-believe world.

Te artist Kenneth Aronson is best known for the Website hell.com, which wasone of the most elegant and abstract sites the Internet has ever known. It began as

a portal to a world of what was once called “Net art” and evolved into somethingquite abstract. Tere was nothing for sale, no one to contact, and no site map. It wasalso a domain that by its name, without any promotion, had thousands of visitorsevery day. Te idea of the owner was to create a parallel Web, an alternative, sincehe saw the Internet as a vast commercial wasteland, a place teeming with ads foreverything, everywhere you look. He wanted to make an alternative to that com-mercial space. Visitors would go to the page at hell.com, but the key to enteringthe site was not visible. Te user experience is that you would go to the site andsee a screen that was largely black with no tabs or buttons to press. Curiosity wasthe guiding factor and as you clicked around in the dark, a word or a flash of light

might pop up, leading you to explore more. You weren’t able to really navigate thesite in any narrative way; it felt like a closed door, which it was to many people.


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were going or what you were doing there. Unlike every other website, the navigationof this one was a mystery.

Te founder was doing something that was complex and extremely sophisticatedas well as ground breaking. o create a site that was entirely non-commercial, he

brought together visionaries, coders, and artists from all over the world. It was a newtype of community that was enthused because of the possibilities which most people who saw the site never knew about. Te content and goals of the site were invisible,but the ability to wander, unknowing, was possible. If you did know somethingabout the way Websites were designed, then there was a door in. If you looked atthe code that generated the site, you could read things that were not actually onthe webpage, but only in code form. Most Internet users still don’t know how toright click a page to download its html code. One of those things hidden in thecode was how to get on a guest list. Tat guest list grew, and it was up to 450,000people at one point, but hell.com could not survive indefinitely because there waslittle to no funding, and the domain was eventually sold.

As Aronson, the artist who founded it, said, “Te name fits because it really is aboutthe unknown and the undefined, and the purpose of the project is not to defineitself.” Te artist who founded it continued to make work and his projects oftencontained elements of the non-visible of invisible world. On a Website he createdcalled nothinginthebox.com, he presents a concept in a very elegant and compel-ling way. He offers for sale nothing in a box. With a graphic of an open box, heclearly and deliberately leads the participant on a humorous and quick journey to a

PayPal donation button. Once you choose to donate, it is with the understandingthat you will receive nothing. Tat means you will not get a receipt, an empty box,or anything else, you will truly get nothing. Unlike some of the other examples inthis article, there is not even a document or evidence of your purchase except for thePayPal receipt. Te idea behind this is to satirize the commercialization of the Web,but also to question the idea of consumerism in general. By purchasing nothing,the buyer enters into an agreement that is in essence saying how much they preferto own nothing, or less of something else. Before this particular project, when you

went shopping, this was not one of your choices, and at the very least it raises the

question of what it is as well as the motivation for what you are actually buying when you purchase nothing in a box.

A more traditional example of nothing that can become something would be ghostsand anything associated with ghosts, like sounds, moving furniture, a cold chill, or acreepy feeling. Another example would be psychic readings and clairvoyant healers.In our work, we have used ghosts and what we call SCA (Sonic Clairvoyant Arteachings) scans. In these performances we do not guide people or sell work, butinstead we practice a form of working one-on-one with our audience, using ques-tions and our own sense of the type of person we are dealing with. Our intuition is

relied on as well as physical observation of body language to begin a dialogue aboutpsychological blocks and personal goals.


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We are talking about performance art, but there are times when we see daily perfor-mances that invoke the invisible in ways that are charming and innocent. When achild begins speaking or playing with an invisible friend, what exactly is happeningthere? Or when we see our ten-year old son playing with a Spider-Man figure andmaking sounds of combat combined with muffled conversations taking place with

invisible adversaries, what is really happening? Te use of imagination in a child isused to add to, or supply, additional information so that a game can take place. Ifa friend is not there, a secret friend or a make-believe friend can stand in for theone who is absent. Adults may continue this process when we talk to the dead, likein an Ingmar Bergman film where loved ones that have died are like friends stillin the room. We talk to the dead as if they were alive, and not because we believetheir ghosts are there, but because we are filling in the blanks. Tere is a void that

we must replace, a needed dialogue with a deceased mother for example, that canbe easily conjured in our mind, to comfort not only loss, but the simple need tohave someone to talk to, who understands.

alking to ghosts and imaginary friends is certainly performative, but it is the per-formance of life, which has also influenced art-making. Artists are using worlds thatexist within our own and though they may not be visible, they are real enough tobe exchanged for a price and owned, as well as used for the most intimate comforts.

As performance art grows into a new millennium, the preservation of the form maybe hinged on that very notion of giving tangible value to what is hard or impossibleto document and reproduce, and at times to what is not even visible. From the saleof ino Sehgal’s work, to the sale of our own work, we can see something that is

hopeful in the world of performance. It can be treated as other visual art forms thatare exchanged, bought, and sold. Tis is good news for the artist working in thismedium who often wonders what will become of performance, especially the formsof it that are so easily misunderstood and without saleable objects.

When we describe images as we are performing, we are conjuring, imagining. ounderstand this and everything else written here, you too are allowing in otherideas of what is real or not, and how it can affect us. All of this leads to the holygrail of non-visible adventures, which is the idea of a dual reality, a separate world.

In recent movies like Inception and Source Code , as well as Te Matrix , of course,there is a state that always looks like dreaming where alternate realities exist. Tatis an analogy that we can all understand; that dream state is to waking as reality isto alternate reality. Adding a science-fiction twist is always knowing that one realitycannot perceive the other as real, and there is always confusion about which oneis more real.

So what is the next separate reality that we cannot conceive of now? Is it spiritualin nature, or something like lucid dreaming? It may be here already and we don’trealize it, or at least not in this version of the waking state.


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With non-visible works, the audience and the artists become very close by followingthe same path, taking the same risk, in which both meet at the end of the workthough each has probably experienced different realities, so they also have that toshare in the visible world.

PRAXIS DELIA AND BRAINARD CAREY is an art collaborativefeatured in Te Whitney Biennial and PS1 Greater New York shows aswell as numerous other venues. Tey are a husband and wife team whohave written for Te Brooklyn Rail and have two books forthcoming nextyear, Hugs and Te History of Wishing . Tey are currently in the middle ofa tour of their Non-visible Museum of Art (MONA), which was launchedin 2011. http://twobodies.com/nonvisiblemuseum/


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the non-visible worlds of art and performance praxis (delia and brainard carey)

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