Encyclopedia of Media Objects final presentation

Personal Research - culmination of objects + encyclopedia + media

Since we’re no longer restricted to the prescribed classical methods of connection, we’re open to an extraordinary leap in connection, which is just a matter of defining connective space. - W.Forsythe.

Subject-Verb-Object Actor-Spectator

On the book Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories, and particularly a text by Jeroen Fabius - Con forts fleuve, politics of perception in the work of Boris Charmatz, a point on the relation between communication and perceiver, although in the theatre context, seems to relate the same way in overall modes of performance, including dance:

"In dealing with politics, theatre cannot compete with the directness or speed with the means of communication of mass society. But, at the same time what characterizes communication in contemporary society is the loss of the communicative. A spectator can no longer assess the value of what is presented; everything is reduced to information; the gap between experience of an event and perception of the event is so big, that there is no way to assess what really is determining one's experience. " "Theatre can respond to this only with a politics of perception, which would at the same time be called an aesthetic of responsibility (r response-ability). Intead f the deceptively comforting reality of here and there, inside and outside, it can move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and make visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception - Hans-Thies Lehmann"

Time//Duration + Space

Labanotation uses abstract symbols to define the:

- Direction and level of the movement

- Part of the body doing the movement

- Duration of the movement

- Dynamic quality of the movement

Territory - spatial and temporal - is always “existential territory“. It has as much a territorry that enables movement as something that keeps everything in its place, it is movement itself.” Reading / Feeling - If I Can’t Dance

Action Painters of “inception, duration, direction,” right down to the “concentration and relaxation of the will.”

---

http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/introduction/

. "limitless potential of ideas to take form as actions and in the constant questioning of what constitutes art and artistic practice as they turn to the live, the immediate, the immersive, and the participatory for the realization of their work"

. See Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” in Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 17–119. Schimmel, the curator of the exhibition that this volume accompanied, used the term “performative object” throughout his essay to refer to objects produced in or for performances, which ultimately came to be seen not only as traces or relics but also as artworks in their own right.

. “constructed situations”

. As Shannon Jackson writes in her essay in this volume: “The hazy understanding of the term [performativity] arguably contributes to its ubiquity, as ‘performative’ becomes a catchall in an art and performance scene that has undergone incredible expansion…. It seems to provide an umbrella to cluster recent cross-disciplinary work in time, in space, with bodies, in relational encounters—even if the term does this work without saying anything particularly precise.” Jackson identifies this phenomenon as the intermedial use of the performative vocabulary. In an essay titled “Performativity and Its Addressee,” Jackson, a scholar specializing in rhetoric and contemporary visual and performance art and theory, provides us with an important and necessary grounding in the topic of performativity through the position and role of the receiver (i.e., the audience, beholder, visitor, interlocutor, participant, spectator). She explores the frames and stakes of both the intermedial and reality-making contexts of performative practice while clustering her reflections around selected artworks and thinkers from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She argues for a precise and varied vocabulary for the wide variety of expanded, cross-media practices that we now encounter regularly in museums, on stages, and in the streets. Her focus ultimately is on three different historical moments that are framed by “performative” vocabularies: the “action turn,” the “Minimalist turn,” and the “relational turn,” each one a performative speech act with its own felicities and blind spots.

. What the notion of the performative brings into perspective is the contingent and elusive realm of impact and effect that art brings about both situationally—that is, in a given spatial and discursive context—and relationally, that is, in relation to a viewer or a public. It recognizes the productive, reality-producing dimension of artworks and brings them into the discourse. Consequently we can ask: What kind of situation does an artwork produce? How does it situate its viewers? What kind of values, conventions, ideologies, and meanings are inscribed into this situation?

. Minimal Art during the 1960s: suggested a situational focus in the visual arts through the way in which they introduced a consciousness of the space and the bodily situatedness of the viewer.

. In 1971 Robert Morris said, “I want to provide a situation where people can become more aware of themselves and their own experience rather than more aware of some version of my experience.” The artwork is no longer seen as representing a mental, internal space or consciousness. Instead it forms part of an external space—which it shares with its viewer—in which meaning is produced in relation to a given situational reality. Internal relations of form and content retreat behind the object’s impact on this situation, an impact that throws viewers back on themselves, in a space and a situation.

.The investigation of perception and phenomenological experience—even the exploration of art as an inquiry into the nature of thought and experience—became the core of his interventions. Robert Irwin’s shift from the discrete object to the staging of experiences determined by the conditions of their site led him to work in very different contexts. He started integrating experiential relationships into the architectural environment, but he also designed gardens and took on landscape projects.

. Although for artists like Andre, Irwin, and Graham the visual remains an important factor in art, their works dismiss a reflexive spectator-object relationship, in which meaning is determined only by the optical exchange across the visual field, in favor of a felt and lived experience of corporeality, a haptic or tactile phenomenology of the body as it encounters the physical world. These changes, which were induced by Minimalist aesthetics and its phenomenological model of experience, which conceptual art later replaced with a semiotic model of experience, led to a paradigmatic reconception of both the notion of the object and the idea of the viewing subject that became essential to a generation of artists working in the 1990s.

.artists such as Carsten Höller propose a notion of reflection that is inseparably bound to a lived, felt, and situated dimension of experience. They address a subject for whom looking is as much the body as the eyes, a subject whose body engages in an active encounter with the physical world.

. Krauss quotes Thomas Krens, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a key protagonist in this change, who specifically referred to Minimal Art in explaining these developments: “It is Minimalism that has reshaped the way we … look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.” Krens understood that conventional museum architecture was unable to provide the kind of experience that these Minimal objects required. The sculptures prompted him to opt for new design paradigms, preparing and anticipating new spatial concepts that took their cue from warehouses and factories and presentation formats that were geared toward comprehensive monographic shows.

. The experience evoked by the Minimal Art object is oriented toward an individual who constitutes himself or herself in the act of perception and hence only temporarily, from one moment to the next. This aesthetic experience, in its radical contingency and its dependence on the conditions of the space and its respective situation, creates a specific kind of subjective experience but not one that can (or intends to) anchor the individual in the coordinates of history. This experience of the self is one that neither is nor can be historically underpinned.

. "Walter Benjamin, in his concepts of corporeal space (Leibraum) and visual space (Bildraum)"

. Yet while in Minimal Art the experience is that of a body standing indeterminately outside of power, sexuality, and history, James Coleman, in contrast, gives experience a historical-materialist contour. He introduces a dimension of experience that does not exclude meaning, language, critique, and history but gives these categories a concrete form as a necessary basis for all experience. The subject is presented in a sociogeopolitical context and at the same time is enacted on the uncontrolled level of affect and physicality. The body is therefore conceived as material, as a bearer of meaning and, simultaneously, as a psychophysiological being.

. What these works by Coleman and Sehgal exemplify is the difference between artworks that produce an experience (which basically any artwork does) and artworks that shape experiences. With these works, experiences had with the work become an integral part of the work. The meaning of these works manifests itself in an experience. And thus both works also point to ways in which experiences can be charged with signification. Coleman does this through a dialectical approach to experiences, which are produced and shaped and at the same time reflected in their historical, cultural, social, and medial origin. Referring to Foucault’s concept of “archaeology,” in a radically discontinuous way he constructs links between subjective experience and specific historical events, relating in turn to media and general cultural phenomena in the history of modernity. Sehgal works with experiences that are generated by and within an aesthetically shaped, social, and intersubjective situation. If games, according Schulze, constitute an important realm in which work on the self takes place, Sehgal inserts the visitor, in his or her communicative actions, into a game that radicalizes and challenges the “old” game of the museum as a place for the formation and self-formation of the individual.

. I have people enacting my work and they can become much more than just a solid material can. … I create situations which use the capacities of these people, and make them increasingly more complex.” For Sehgal, the molding and modeling of his corporeal material in this first category is a meditation on animate form rather than subjectivity, which is a key concern in other works. // Each of these pieces amply reveals Sehgal’s acuity in distilling the spoken word, natural and choreographed movement, game strategies, institutional behavior, and social norms in a single piece.

. choreography as “symbol[s] of an action process, about to be commenced or already completed.”.

---

1.Tino Sehgal at Tate Modern : https://vimeo.com/54314537

"Tino Sehgal’s This objective of that object is based on a formal structure that involves and engages the visitor in a communicative, intersubjective experience. As with all of Sehgal’s works, This objective of that object is enacted by different people during the entire opening hours of an exhibition. The viewer enters an empty exhibition space and is slowly encircled by five people walking backward one after the other toward the visitor from hidden corners, stopping at a distance of about three to four meters in a circular formation. They all have their backs to the visitor and breathe heavily in a synchronous rhythm. What is at first a barely audible murmur turns into a phrase delivered in unison and repeated insistently: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” The louder this sentence is spoken, the more emphatic it sounds, like a demand, with increasingly long pauses between each utterance. The stratification that Sehgal constructs with this work is a strange mix between conversation and sculpture or a social situation and its aesthetics. The visitors are crucial and constitutive to the work—without their comments the main part could not take place. If no comment is made, the work does not go beyond the unvarying prologue. The artwork needs to become an object of reflection, just as the visitors have to become the object of the conversation that they witness; it is as if the work of art were holding up a mirror to the observer. In this way artwork and reception are in an infinite feedback loop, with a fragile and constantly negotiated power relation between the players and the visitors that, to a certain extent, is directed by Sehgal’s dramaturgy and mise-en-scène. The fact that the players face the wall is crucial, as it allows the visitors to perceive this formation as something constructed and aesthetic. This spatial configuration creates a kind of equilibrium between those enacting and those visiting. The players know what is to be done, and the visitors can identify the players. Since the players always face the walls and do not have a complete overview of the changing situation, they cannot be aware of things like nonverbal communication between visitors. “It’s something between ballet and chess,” one visitor commented, and indeed the work functions like a spatial and formal game that the visitors try to understand and also to control. “The visitors are trying to play a game on us,” one player said, as a number of visitors drove her into a corner in an attempt to see her face, thereby altering the spatial configuration of the work. "

2. Michael Clark company: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/michael-clark-company-tate-modern-london-2295429.html

3. Anne Theresa: A Choreographer's Score - Cesena - Excerpt : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nob9Avyi3W4 ("movement and sound is suspended"- STOP)

and Fase: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1129

and Laban cube + floor patters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkfhae2sgbM

4. Vito Acconti: http://aaaaarg.org/ref/8efb6f1c80463fb968a1861c216555e6

5. Tanzquartier Wien - scores: http://aaaaarg.org/ref/71ea1bb7d0e0e35f9e2258b4a82ee9dd

6. Chance/Indeterminancy in Cunningham's method: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merce_Cunningham#Chance_operations

and Solo Suite in Space and Time 1953: http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/54/

and the hexagram technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching#Structure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagram_%28I_Ching%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagram

7. Pina Bausch: https://www.google.nl/search?q=pina-bausch+ropes&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=lrFZVYTTI8voUrOogcgM&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1144&bih=751

8. Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece): http://prod-images.exhibit-e.com/www_skny_com/TH_2012_07_Sleek0.pdf

9. A catalogue of steps: http://ddpaa.org/artist/dd-dorvillier/

10. Thinking with the body: Mind and movement in the work of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance: http://wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/thinking-with-the-body/?video=4

11. William Forsythe | choreographic object: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59QRpcLgPOQ

12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U6gCS7QYXA

13 Arrangement by Joe Moran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7zuTFmr5m8

14 Meredith Monk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUfPmc_8E6c / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsefAgYbdX8

15 A film in three parts after Oskar Schlemmer's dances. Book and Choreography: Margarete Hasting, Franz Schömbs, Georg Verden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jErmplUpA (theatrical)

16 Einstein on the Beach (Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW1RHByHJ8g

17 Merce Cunningham Walkaround Time dance performance 1968: https://www.google.nl/search?q=Merce+Cunningham+Walkaround+Time+dance+performance+1968&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=jzZvVfpjwpqyAfHqgYAG&ved=0CDIQsAQ&biw=1559&bih=1018

18 Wall floor positions, Bruce Nauman: https://www.google.nl/search?q=wall+floor+positions+bruce+nauman&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=lvhuVduqH4qRsgGJ9IC4Ag&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1559&bih=1018

19 Trisha Brown: Structured Pieces, “between geometry and gesture,”. She ascribed gestures to letters, so that the resulting words could provide an entire phrase of movement. Similarly, her crisscrossing Xs and quartered boxes from that period were attempts to loosely imagine a body divided into primary units, in varying combinations of implied movement.Similarly, her crisscrossing Xs and quartered boxes from that period were attempts to loosely imagine a body divided into primary units, in varying combinations of implied movement (figs. 4–5). For most of the 1970s, her drawings primarily functioned as correlative exercises to the way she pictured movement within the body or between a given group of bodies—few of her drawings serve to delineate trajectories of the body through the space of the performance. Instead of thinking about her body from the inside or in the abstract, Brown could now look at it as an object, much as video allowed her to do. Brown made to herself along the way, directional arrows or maybe some text, as if the movements could somehow be recovered, unwound, played back. The drawings, we find, sit perched as temporal fulcrums, Janus-like hybrids looking both backward and forward, part clue, part instruction. (...) What Brown describes as “a traveling phrase” that unfurls itself in multiple directions. Trisha Brown, meanwhile, had come during the 1960s to understand the value of everyday gestures in dance, not as a radical redefinition of her discipline, but rather as a way to use the vernacular to challenge dance’s reification of virtuosity. In large part, however, Brown’s achievement lies not in the vernacularization of movement, but in her reorientation of its relationship to our bodies and, in turn, our relationship to the environment around us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, she instructed dancers to walk, run, and pause on the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art the following year (Walking on the Wall, 1971)

20. Fluxus, http://jacket2.org/commentary/alison-knowles-17-event-scores-where-they-happened

21. http://www.xavierleroy.com/index.php at MoMa: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1131

"Dancing it specifies its contact with the ground, which remains the fragile of its stay in world. There is no ground beneath the ground, because every reality is a kind of floating architecture stretched above the abyss of botyomlessness. Dance articulates this knowledge about this uncertainty bu recognizing the reality of the subject as unfolded reality. It implies and re.actualises the ontological vagueness of human existence. This is what its ease is based on: on the affirmation of the indifinite, which marks the absence of origin of the subjectc and the certainty that nothing is certain in relation to its future, which remains contingent and vague..." Marcus Steinweg on Dance.

---

1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Harmony

2. https://instantcomposition.wordpress.com/knowledge-base-i-i-c/knowledge-base-structures/

3. http://aaaaarg.org/ref/c5db06bbe72a5b829162f33a01feaa6d

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_graph_theory

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_path

6. http://aaaaarg.org/ref/b1fb9abdde28ed4cc92d7a4ef0e2c14c (on Lanban's)

7. Design at Large - David Kirsh, Thinking with your Body and Other Things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU6gSMLsCrg

The question concerning corporeity connects also with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on space (l'espace) and the primacy of the dimension of depth (la profondeur) as implied in the notion of being in the world (être au monde; to echo Heidegger's In-der-Welt-sein) and of one's own body (le corps propre).

M.M.Ponty - https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/73535007/Phenomenology+of+Perception.pdf

This book implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture. It is about the architecture of the imagination.

http://monoskop.org/images/1/18/Bachelard_Gaston_The_Poetics_of_Space_1994.pdf