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 birth-right 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 a communiality, 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.

This is probably about the right moment to bluntly point out that my practice so far has been a regular tick-box of the above discontents i.e.: uncomfortable sociality, audience as bystander-performer, coy co-opting. And as an aside which will probably leak into this whole research: I quite obviously haven’t learnt anything from living in Germany for four and a half years. Or, if I have, it has been a honing 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 (succinctness which is refutable) 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 not an admission of guilt, but a raising of the question of a guilty social awareness. Or, as Liesbeth Bik put it much better than I could: ‘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. I do have a suspicion though, that this kind of borrowing between disciplines richens as much as it dumbs down. So while falling in the crack between art and sociology might potentially be fine from an art research point of view, we could throw out a charge of dilletantism, and brave up to the fact that this research runs the risk of inhabiting neither of the two disciplines. Which I guess simply makes it crap research.

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. In addition to which, I’m kind of screwing with an innate understanding of language by not doing the research in my/the participants mother tongue.

In the meantime, I talked to Stefano Harney, who visited Piet Zwart earlier this year, and who is a former sociologist now Chair of Strategy, Culture and Society at Queen Mary’s Business school, London. Stefano suggested that I also look at a Marxist sociological method named Co-research (which I had heard of as 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.

Stefano’s advice 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 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. Performances were generated from, well, if not an individual creativity, then certainly from a singular perspective. It might also 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 an 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 Nietzche'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, 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? Is there a way we can rethink GT to open up possibilities for change and the body as agent of that change?

Alinsky, S. (1971) Rules for Radicals, A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, Random House

Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press

Massumi, B (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press

Nietzsche, F. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Munich: DTV, 1980)

Steyerl, H. (2007) The Subalterns' Present, accessed online: [1], June 2012 (This text is the preface to the German translation of G. Ch. Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? Postkolonialität und subalterne Artikulation, transl. by Alexander Joskowicz and Stefan Nowotny, Vienna: Turia + Kant 2007 (Es kommt darauf an, Vol. 6).)

Waite, G (2005) 'A Short Political Philology of Visceral Reason (A Red Mouse's Long Tail)' in Parralax, Vol.11, No.3, (pp.8-27)