Viscous Sensus Communis

(Working title)

"...not only is the worker on the other side of the international division of labor still subaltern, but we do not even know why anyone could be in solidarity with her. It is solidarity as such that has become subaltern today, because there is no language in which it can be audibly articulated." Hito Steyerl, The Subalterns' Present, 2007.

The much lauded shift from genius to every (wo)man, god given birthright to deskilled, reskilled, and proud has necessarily meant that within the parameters of the art establishment, the banner of art has been handed to literally Everyone. Everyone doesn’t quite know this yet, however, nor does Everyone particularly want to stand under it. So in the last 20 years or so, we as artists have been collaborating, cajoling and confusing Everyone into art spaces, and asking if it’s possible for them to just hold the banner for five minutes while we pop to the loo.

Performance artists of the late 60’s and 70’s who presented their own bloody, masturbating bodies in peril, also initially carved out an authentic space of refusal of the market. But this also paved the way for the commodifiable spectacle of the event. The use of performers by high profile artists such as Tino Seghal, Vanessa Beecroft, and Jeremy Deller, whether documented or not, whether hyper-stylized or not, all have in common that they select certain sections of society, transform them into performers, and then ask them to be themselves, or let’s say, regulated approximations of themselves, stereotypes of themselves. So the perception of authenticity once placed on the artist’s body is replaced onto the social group. A trajectory which is completely understandable, which – if I’m not being too cynical – broadly mirrors economic and labour trends, and which has at it’s heart an elevation of the social.

While this alleviates the artist from the charge of a bodily-authentic suffering for the sake of their own art, I would posit that the contemporary practice of using other people in performance art reinstated an entirely questionable belief in authenticity, and pushed the notion of an artist’s discomfort from a corporeal level to a socio-ethical level. But there should be a creeping sense of distrust here, if we sense an underlying assumption that the community is a space of implicit virtue, when in fact the social space, is - as far as I can tell - mucky, grubby and full of awkward exchange scenarios. In placing themself in a directorial role, the artist’s defence of their use of other people as art is won or lost by the quality of that art. As an overt example, we could take the infamous bad boy of outsourced performance, Santiago Sierra. Vilified and vindicated respectively for, on the one hand, abusing minimum wage labourers and on the other hand, exposing a corrupt economic system; he takes the moral fall by acting out the profit-seeking employer. ‘But audience!’ He seems to be saying ‘I do this all for you’ – pillorising himself by inhabiting an economic inequality, grimly spreading it out in front of us. At the same time there’s not much regret in his work; more the baleful stare and defensive shrug of: ‘I didn’t invent the system’. So even if the artist themself bears no heavy burden, their role as employer injects a certain anguish in the audience’s reception, discomfort at the reduction of using a person’s outward appearance, their nationality or their social status.

There is a current trend amongst young left-wingers, to act against ‘Looksim’. However ridiculous it may sound, the accusation of lookism is thrown at people who initially feel attracted to others on the basis of their appearance. A reworking of the old ‘book-by-it’s-cover’ moral judgement, the aim is really to address the politics of attraction - although cynics would probably reword it as ‘more sex for ugly people’. Although both the claim and the act of reducing attraction purely to the visual is completely absurd somehow, when I first heard about it, it reminded me of the unease at the violence of performance that pulls the same trick.

And then, we have other Tiravanija-esque performances that provide platforms for audience involvement (e.g.; Liam Gillick, Superflex, and Artur Zmijewski’s Berlin Biennale) where the notion of a collective experience, or communality, is proposed. In these practices, we see the spect-actor emerge, and a reflex of building and incorporating social networks into the art work. The Berlin Biennale fanned the fire of artists distrustful mutterings and grumbles about the call for participation in a high profile exhibition, where their work is subsumed into a political discourse that they have no control over, and retrospectively grouped as a political movement, headed by the creator-curator. But the perversity then, (aside from some artist collectives) is that no matter how much or little autonomy is given to the performers, the social is still being reorganised under the auspices of individualism, although it’s an individualism that flirts as if it were collectivism. And even though an ethical value system as criteria for quality of art, after Bourriaud, is now heavily criticized, I’m trying to work through the following proposition. Although these relational aesthetic practices aim to give voice to a community, they do so within a hegemony which, although it is addressed in a kind of self-reflexive criticism which always gets a round of applause, is not unpicked with scientific rigour.

Although my art practice so far has not been about communality per se, this is probably about the right moment to bluntly point out that it has been a regular tick-box of the above discontents i.e.: uncomfortable sociality, audience as bystander-performer, coy co-opting. In the performance Die Scheiß-Ideologie Deiner Nation (2010), I took on the role of an over-excitable toilet attendant, waiting around in the lavatory of the gallery. When a visitor came to use the toilet, I would give a short lecture, based on a Žižek quote, about the differences between toilets in England, France and Germany. An intimate performance for only one (possibly desperate) person, I expounded on a cultural ideology of shit before leaving the visitor alone to do their business. The performance was given a monetary value by the tip that visitors left on a flowery plate.

In yet an earlier performance, Destiny / Density (2009), a flatly explanatory text written on the gallery’s window led the eye through the frame to the street beyond. Taking ‘fate’ into my own hands, a situation which could have been perceived as destiny was turned into planned performance as the artist - myself - was run over every 10 minutes or so by a maroon-coloured car. After the initial shock factor turned to laughter, viewers began to rate the hits - a ‘bad’ hit being where the artist was only touched lightly, a ‘good’ one was full, hard body contact with the car. The dull thud of matter that accompanied the irrevocable act was, therefore, both slapstick and deadly serious, acting as an inverse measure of the viewer's empathy.

More recently (2012) the installation and participatory performance: Market Research - Because no body is predictable, was the result of a residency exploring implicit and explicit notions of success as an artist. The performance took the form of a market research focus group. Focus groups can be conducted to evaluate the reception of an advert, say, or gather reactions to a new product. In this case, the focus was on 'the art product', a gold painted hand on a base, set in the middle of a shiny black table. A hand in a resting pose. A hand that inadvertently twitched from time to time, being, as it was, attached to an arm, and the arm to the artist's body, which was currently cramped under the table. The focus group leader welcomed gallery visitors into the room, five at a time, as if they were volunteer participants. She informed them that as she was a third party, all of their comments would be taken in confidence, and nothing they could say would hurt her feelings. She then began to ask questions about the art product - What thoughts or feelings it evoked, what era participants thought it belonged to and if they could have it in their house, where they would place it. There was a moment of recognition - a split second for some as they first entered the room, for others slightly longer - but this was less the unveiling of a trick, more a sleight of hand performed by the eye. The questions posed went from the specific to the general, from the art product (in it's form of pretence, or supposed naivité) through to the personality of the artist and then on to the archetypal, optimal character of an artist as the session progressed. At the end of the session, she thanked the participants, and asked them to leave via a different door to which they had come in. The room itself was part of a larger installation. Embedded in one wall was a one-way mirrored glass, on the other side, viewers could watch the session taking place. It was via this darkened antechamber that participants exited the installation, a doubling of experience, taking part and viewing. As viewers looked through the glass, they saw the focus group as it unfolded and heard the answers given by the participants. On the back wall, directly across from the window was a huge picture, printed on advertising flex. The vivid image showed a joyous group, arranged in a circle (the artists/curators who took part in the residency) in the garden of the gallery. Staged, but not entirely - elements of humour, and the unplanned connected each member of the group to another, via golden props. Exiting this antechamber completed a circular trajectory and a passage from action to observation.

As an aside which will probably leak into this whole research: my experience of living in Germany was a honing exercise of the struggle between sensibilities: The English fetish for guilt and shame coupled with a out-dated set of social moral values; the post ‘68 German renunciation of the guilt-complex, combined with a pragmatic positioning of the individual within society. I’ve tried to put that as succinctly as I can to sketch out a kind of swamp of discomfort which, it strikes me, disgustingly belches and bubbles underneath this research, and perhaps underneath performance or human resources organisation as art, that claims other actors. Or perhaps considered another way, this disgusting belching is precisely it. There is no wrong-doing, it is part of the social fabric itself, an embarrassment that the economic tries to eradicate - the uncomfortable feeling of not ever knowing whether the exchange you proposed is worth enough / worthy enough. The social being the media with which the artist works, there is no an admission of guilt necessary, but a raising of the question of a guilty social awareness: How is it possible to do the right thing with other people?

So turning toward sociology in my research practice was about trying to provide a system for dealing with people, on the one hand, but on the other hand to explore how a scientific method could perhaps provide the framework for making performance. The suspicion that this kind of borrowing between disciplines could richen as much as it dumbs down is fertile ground for my art practice. I see that falling in the crack between art and sociology holds potentiality for fine art research, and at a hopeful best, for sociological research too.

Firstly, I’ll just run through the steps I’ve taken up to this point. Initially, I wanted to use a method of sociology called Grounded Theory, developed by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss through their research ‘Awareness of Dying’ in 1965. I’ll outline the methodology of grounded theory in relation to how I understand it could relate to a performance art research practice in future texts, but loosely speaking, GT researchers collect qualitative data without an initial hypothesis. They then analyse this data through a system of coding, which becomes progressively abstracted, from which they then form a hypothesis. Research into how to employ this methodology, however, is pretty painstaking. It’s not that I think that I, as an artist-researcher, would produce a body of research which GT sociologists would credit as valid. That’s been clear to me from the beginning. Yet, there is somehow no point in conducting the research at all if I do it with only a crude understanding of the method, when the whole point is to analyse how, if at all, GT could be used to generate performance. Using this methodology, I will visit a company in Germany and conduct interviews, however I will screw with an innate understanding of language by not doing the research in my mother tongue.

Stefano Harney, former sociologist and Chair of Strategy, Culture and Society at Queen Mary’s Business school, London provided the impetus for looking into a Marxist sociological method named Co-research (Kritische Untersuchung). Co-research can be traced back to Karl Marx’s A Workers’ Inquiry, published in La Revue Socialiste in 1880. The Inquiry comprised of 100 questions, appealing to workers to return their answers. The questions were absolutely biased on the side of the worker, and they aimed to prompt the worker to think critically about, and articulate, their work situation. Co-research, then is a politically engaged, participatory research practice that, rather than simply observing, collects data in order to find out what real working conditions are, to actively change conditions for the worker. Harney's work at Queen Mary's, and his text entitled: The University and the Undercommons, written with Fred Moten, will flesh out a co-research agenda in my thesis. As I begin the thesis, this particular body of research is nearly complete.

Co-research somehow hits a nerve of contemporary art practice. Instead of using a methodology which is struggling with the objective/subjective observer/participant on a theoretical level, why not activate the political dimension of these dialectics? Which brings us back to my original question. Is performance, whose media IS the social, so disconnected from the social at the level of idea generation, as to be irrelevant? Or is this simply the neurotic hang-up of the solipsism of contemporary art?

Which leads me back to the impetus for trying to use these two sociological methods. My particular art practice has loosely focused, for the past 10 years, on what it means to work. An explicit example of this is Creaming-off (2012). Another recent instance that continues this enquiry was PRAXISpractice, a video performance from 2012. This is a short film which shows the artist wandering around the Dutch DIY store PRAXIS, trying to help customers. She is dressed in a similar yet badly remade PRAXIS uniform, and quite obviously doesn’t know the store well. She offers small, quite crap magic tricks to employees, which they either laugh at or ignore. The final interaction with a customer sees the customer understanding the mistake in reading the artist’s clothing as that of an employee, and refusing assistance with the comment: ‘If you’re not from this shop, I don’t think so’. The activity or intended usefulness of the ersatz employee in the video is somewhat of a rupture in the social contract of the shopper/worker, it adds free labour that is neither asked for nor needed. Instead of an: 'I'd rather not', the video posits an: 'I'd rather!', as the character performs having a choice, and choosing to help out in PRAXIS.

My earlier performances were generated from, well, if not an individual creativity, then certainly from a singular perspective. Investing in sociology might, then, be a personal way of creating a research discipline, limiting the amount of flailing around; or it could be trying to address an accusation of superficiality which I’ve thrown at my own performance practice. Right now, I’m not sure if this superficiality comes from what could be termed the speed of a joke, which raises interest and attention with a sort of intellectual and bodily kick, before dissipating rapidly - a bit like the monosodiumglutimate effect of a Chinese meal. Or whether it comes from a practice which, when you weigh it up, looks increasingly self serving. So the decision to use these particular methods of sociology comes from an idealistic vision that performance can change its methodology to include multiple, real voices. And that employing an outside system could inform performance art research, and not side step the problematic of the artist as mystical social saviour in contrast to the artist as user of the public, but as a means of acknowledging the performance artist’s position in the social, and I really mean within the social, at the same time as being the creator/author.

This preamble is intended as background to the thesis proposal. The thesis itself will continue on from the research I have already done into these two sociological methodologies, but it also aims to address the outright questions and semi-intuitive hints which have cropped up during the research process. The thesis starts out with a continuous, all pervasive concern: To what degree is it possible or viable to creatively re-appropriate a performance surplus in the workplace? How does Bourdieu's habitus relate to this re-appropriation? I mean by this, how does a certain symbolic choice reaffirm the actor's position in a socio-symbolic order? I would then further explore the link between this, and the cruel optimism written about by Lauren Berlant. If I'm relating this back to my art practice, we could look at PRAXISpractice, where the character in the DIY store performs having a choice, where in reality, the choice could be phrased as either to work or not to work. Also Creaming Off, which in the beginning I had thought of as a reaction to the theoretical struggle between business and art rhetorics (after Boltanski and Chiapello) but which now perhaps becomes an illustrated epitome of habitus when seen through Bourdieu. Reading Nietzsche's: Kritische Studienausgabe through Geoffrey Waite's: A Short Political Philology of Visceral Reason (A Red Mouse's Long Tail); I would then like to look at surplus, not as a by-product of capitalism, but as a sacrificial cause. Are there any freeing possibilities for work and art in fronting up to this metalepsis? I would also (through Waite and Berlant) like to look again at the specific examples of activism given in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, with particular attention to the cunning, political potential of the body as active resistance to oppression. Kevin Kennedy's freshly released doctoral study on the economics of Battaile would also serve as a guide. How does Bourdieu's critique of Levi-Strauss' gift economy add to our understanding of relational aesthetics and performance art? I.e.; not the structuralist model that Levi-Strauss proposed, whereby a gift receives a counter gift, but the precondition for gifting to operate in the social realm being that the exchange must be both deferred and different. How could problematizing language within a sociological study further our understanding of the relevance and potentials for such methodologies? I would also draw here on Spivak's claim that in trying to 'let subjects speak for themselves', experts perform a self-congratulatory act of ventrilloquism. With this in mind, is there any way that a sensus communis can be spoken about? Lastly, I would like to think through Brian Massumi's writing on affect in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation to ask if it points to an undoing of grounded theory, on the grounds of both it's reliance on the Saussurian linguistic model, and freezing -thereby discounting -movement, or if there is a way we can rethink GT via Massumi to open up possibilities for change and the body as agent of that change.