Beatriz RinaldiMA Art and Media Practice 2009-2010University of WestminsterThinking Practices

Participatory art in retrospective

This text is a reflection on institutional forms of presenting retrospective participatory art. By looking at exhibitions and critiques, I attempt to discuss the representation of a body of work that, at the edge of art, challenges the conventions of artwork display.

Clark and Oiticica

“A history of irritated material”1 is a current exhibition on “art's relation to politics, alienation and the archive”2. Presenting “problem-oriented artistic practices”, which are at the edge of art, the curator Lars Bang Larsen proposes the archive as a means to transmit/translate knowledge into the present. More important, the archive lends itself to tactical uses, since each viewer/user makes his/her own way (and interpretation) through it.

Practices that are problem-oriented also receive other names such as socially-engaged art, process-based approach and dialogical art. Grant Kester (2005) offers a good overview on such practices, and his concise description of the changes in the perceived function of art through history is particularly useful for this discussion. In response to eighteenth-century art, which served decorative and pedagogical purposes in court and in church, the Modernist avant-garde artwork was meant to produce shock and provoke the museum audience out of complacency. From the late twentieth century on, socially-engaged art projects are based on a contrasting notion of art: the object and its contemplation are no longer the aim. Instead, art is seen as a practice, a cumulative and durational process of exchange and creation of meaning.

One of the works at Raven Row exhibition is the video archive produced by Suely Rolnik, titled “Lygia Clark, from object to event”. Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica started as neoconcretist artists, doing paintings and sculptures, and in the 1960s began to create art in the terms discussed by Kester3. Clark and Oiticica had a strong artistic connection throughout their lives and to understand one's work implies a certain knowledge of the other's. Their shared objective was to create propositions of liberation of the body, conditioned by repression4.

Suely Rolnik, a Brazilian critic and psychoanalyst, was a long-time collaborator of Lygia Clark. Her project was born out of gratitude to her friend and of a desire to reach younger generations of artists who feel the resonance of Clark's work, but only access it through the memory of the representations, “not through the memory of the power of artistic creation and what that kind

1 25 February to 2 May 2010, Raven Row gallery, London.2 Exhibition catalogue3 Although Kester does not use the term “participatory art”, I consider his concept of dialogical art, derived from

Bakhtin, suitable to these artists' proposal of an art that only exists in its vivência [Portuguese word that means lived experience], in an open relation between the artist and the participant that has no fixed positions.

4 Guy Brett's text, Lygia Clark: the borderline between art life, is a thorough introduction to Clark's work and its development, from constructivist to participatory propositions, written a year before her death. Brett is an English art critic who met Oiticica and Clark in the 1960s and became involved with their work ever since; he helped organise the famous Oiticica's “Whitechapel experience” in 1969. The letters Brett exchanged with the two artists are crucial for an understanding of their work, and his texts will be used in this discussion.

of action opened up around it”5.

“(...) that doesn't mean that we have to redo Lygia Clark. Her devices belong to her time; on the other hand, what remains very valid today is the question that the inheritance of their poetic power allows us to ask: how is the political power inherent in artistic action - its power to establish possibles - to be reactivated today?”6

Her contribution to keep the memory of Clark's work alive resulted in 65 filmed interviews, in France and in Brazil, with people who lived and worked with the artist in different contexts. The intention was to tell the story through the bodies that lived it.

From Lygia Clark's Walking (1963) onwards, she aimed at provoking an opening in the sensory capacity of the receiver. That was the moment when the work changed from object to event, writes Rolnik7. But Clark soon realized that her proposition had the “side effect” of bringing up the traumas, subjective barriers that needed to be crossed for the work to be experienced in its full potential. Structuring the Self (1976) was a response to that need. The individual sessions with participants (which Clark called clients) introduced the use of “relational objects”, which had the function of mediators of the experience, but held no expressivity or prior meaning in their own. The work had an open therapeutic dimension and explored the power of objects to heal8. The aim of these sessions was to treat the traumas, the repressed ghosts, “to vomit the phantasmatic”9.

Despite the therapeutic dimension of the work, Clark has never “left art for therapy”, as many have interpreted it. Rolnik claims that in Brazil the artist was regarded as the “great dame” of neoconcretist movement, but her work after that was seen with contempt and pity10. She was isolated from both the art world and the psychiatric world, and that started to change ten years after her death.

In 1998, Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona held a retrospective exhibition that showed an ensemble of Clark's works together for the first time. This retrospective contributed to the international recognition of her work11. The exhibition, however, depressed Rolnik because it displayed the objects and made re-enactments of Clark's propositions, which transformed the audience in spectators instead of participants.

The problem of displaying objects is that they were designed to be used as mediators during sessions, not as aesthetic objects for contemplation. Even if the relational objects were to be touched by a contemporary audience, they require an intimacy sphere that a museum cannot offer. As a material trace of interpersonal practices, they do not hold enough power to invoke memories of what happened.

“Oiticica's work is intended to be a machine that works”

The UK-based American artist Susan Hiller wrote two articles on retrospective exhibitions of Hélio Oiticica's work. Fifteen years apart, the texts are an incisive critique of the placement of his work inside an institution and its conventional ways of display.

5 Rolnik & Larsen, Afterall 2007.6 Ibid.7 Exhibition catalogue.8 These were precarious and improvised, made of everyday material like plastic bags, rocks, gloves, mattresses, etc.9 Video exhibited at Raven Row gallery; Rolnik interviewed by Yve-Alain Bois (2006) and Guy Brett (2002).10 Ibid.11 Since then, there are every year 30 exhibitions around the world that include Clark's works, says Rolnik at her video

interview

Exhibitions usually show documentation, described by Hiller12 as “sedimentary remains”, “fossilised carapaces”, “relics of a dead past”, “quiescent, decorative and ineffectual”. The objects created by Oiticica, like the Parangolés capes, are (like the relational objects) vehicles for an experience, “raw ingredients, insufficient evidence of magic”13 that lack bodies to animate it. Those garments are presented overlooking the fact that they should be used, and how they should be used.

“The bodies of other people were to become their own instruments of a secular revelation, to which not just eyes and cognitive brains, but tactile, auditory and olfactory sensations contributed. The intended effect was metamorphosis or mutation, the cumulative result an emancipation of the participants from aspects of their socio-cultural and personal conditioning”14

For Hiller, such powerful transformation apparently can no longer happen without the artist's presence. That poses a question of whether the museum presentation of inert and untouchable objects is merely pointing to the inevitable – one is looking at dead remains.

But in 1992 she seemed open to a possibility:

If correctly used, his real work could be understood as a form of realism, in which a realisation of the abysmal and transient nature of the human being is accurately communicated between one body and another body by using these precisely-designed physical tokens. Oiticica's art is intended to be a machine that works. In this sense, the potential functional efficacy of his work is an hypothesis of abiding relevance, testable here and now (...)”15

In 2007, invited to talk at Tate Modern during Oiticica's retrospective exhibition16, she reaches the same conclusion; it is impossible to retrieve the meaning of the work or experience it through display or re-enactment, or more radically, there is no place for such work in the museum.

Susan Hiller tries to analyse why she feels incapable of reviewing her position. As an anthropologist, she observes that we transmit history though preserved objects, as starting points for narratives. Oiticica was an artist concerned with self-archiving, but the placement of these files inside an institution represents an adaptation of the artist's intention. The radicality of his proposals and even his own history, which could help inform the understanding of the work – Oiticica was a homosexual and a drug user, notes Hiller, and that is not mentioned in the exhibition17 – are tidied and revised to be coherent with the mainstream values of the institution, digested and delivered as “official history”. “All that survives is the happy ending – the rebel is forgiven, the prodigal son is embraced”18.

Hiller repeats the same conclusion written before:

Posthumous exhibitions of Oiticica's work in the form of artefacts and texts can never replace the personal, charismatic element that is essential for understanding

12 Kokoli, 2008.13 Ibid., p. 4514 Ibid., pp.45-46.15 Ibid., p. 46. Emphasis by this author.16 a short and, until 2008, unpublished participation.17 How much do biographical facts help audiences understand the work? Stating that an artist was a homosexual and a

drug user can be tricky, considering these are still taboo subjects in Brazilian society. But putting in perspective his journey and artistic proposals of body liberation (a Brazilian artist in exile fleeing from the military dictatorship), I agree with Hiller that it contributes to an understanding of Oiticica and his context.

18 Ibid., p. 51.

what he was 'about'. (…) An exhibition can never reveal how his work worked, what happened when it did, and what it meant when it didn't. The remaining traces lack personality, the most essential element in art practice that emphasizes the provisional nature of art and the interactive, performative aspects of aesthetic experience. Without this, it is impossible to experience the effect intended by the artist – the promise of transforming ourselves in our ethical and social dimensions of art.19

This view does not concede a possibility of the work being “correctly used” in an exhibition. Without the presence of the artist (the charismatic personality that made the work “work”), is the possibility of living it forever lost? Is the work to be read as something belonging to the past, that present and future audiences can only experience through documentation?

A related issue, especially concerning Oiticica's case, is ownership and control of the work. Most of his texts, correspondence and artworks are owned by Projeto Hélio Oiticica, managed by his family, after his death in 1980. The tension between the family, the State, museums and curators over the display and even the interpretation of Oiticica's work are public20. The recent fire that burned the Oiticica house and damaged the archive was a trigger for these discussions to take place again21. How and where should the artist's legacy be kept and managed? What was the artist's intention, and does that matter now?

Structuring the Self: the individual and the public

Lygia Clark's Structuring the Self work only enters the public sphere as the report of a private process, notes critic Guy Brett, since there is no audience. Therefore such work, at the edge of art and therapy, cannot be understood as body art or performance. Since the nature of Clark's work was focused on individual experience, it could not act on mass scale, but her propositions had the potential of being models or “cells” of an “experimental exercise of freedom22. Oiticica develops the idea that Clark's “cellular” practice:

From person to person, this is an improvised corporal dialogue that can expand into a total chain creating something of an all encompassing biological entity or what I would call a crepractice [creation + practice]. The idea of creating such relations goes beyond that of a facile participation, such as in the manipulation of objects: there is the search for what could be described as a biological ritual, where interpersonal relations are enriched and establish a communication of growth at an open level. I say open level, because it does not relate to an object-based communication, of subject-object, but to an interpersonal practice that leads toward a truly open communication (…)23

The concept that changes happening at an individual scale may lead to a chain reaction is a powerful one. Since each participant is part of a larger social group, these ideas could resonate and reach others, hence the potential of growth and expansion.

Guy Brett observes that the photographs of Clark's sessions are fascinating and misleading, since they “make into a spectacle what is essentially interior, to be felt by the participants”24. When

19 Ibid., p. 52.20 The argument between Projeto Hélio Oiticica's director and the curator of the retrospective have been made public

and the publication of the catalogue raisonné is apparently on hold due to the disagreement. Lagnado, http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/2882,1.shl

21 Lagnado, http://pphp.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/3136,1.shl22 Brett 1987, p. 72.23 Bishop 2006, p. 115.24 Brett op. cit., p. 80.

watching the long interviews conducted by Rolnik, specifically the one with Brett when works are discussed in detail, the viewer may wonder why there are no images of the works themselves. The recording of an entire talk, with few edition cuts and a steady camera focus on the interviewee's face, for over one hour, is a test of the audience's attention25. However, this option could be seen as a strategy, suited to the purpose of showing the bodily memory of people involved with Clark's work. To engage with this archive is to dedicate time to watch the conversations develop, to make choices (which videos to watch), to revisit it – the tactical, individual uses the curator wanted to encourage at the gallery.

When talking about the parangolés capes, Oiticica says the experience of wearing it and the one of seeing other wear it are both relevant. There is a viewer, but who is dragged into the experience.

The parangolé wasn't something to put on a body just to be shown/ the experience of wearing it/ to the person who is watching the other putting it on/ or those who put things on at the same time are simultaneous experiences/ multi-experiences;/ the body is not a support for the work/ on the contrary, it is the total incorporation26

There is no separation between body and parangolé or between artist (creator of the capes), participant and spectator. It could be understood as the same model as Clark's work: a cellular, individual action which can resonate with others, also through vision.

Vision has often been regarded as an inferior (in)action, in light of Guy Debord's critique of the spectacle; Jacques Rancière (2004) has a different reading which is suitable for understanding such propositions. Discussing theatre and its audience, the philosopher asks: “Why identify 'looking' with 'passivity' if not by the presupposition that looking means looking at the image or the appearance, that it means being separated from the reality which always is behind the image?”27 This structure of perceived oppositions – hearing/looking means not speaking/acting – is what the author names partition of the sensible, “allegories of inequality”. And he proposes another possibility:

Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realize that looking also is an action which confirms or modifies that distribution, and that 'interpreting the world' is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it. The spectator is active, as the student or the scientist: he observes, he selects, compares, interprets.28

Oiticica and Clark's propositions were concerned with overcoming the perceived fixed notions of artist/creator and spectator/consumer. Rancière's idea of an emancipated community, made of storytellers and translators (active interpreters of other's propositions), is a dream these artists would share.

Tiravanija and the fictional account

An alternative example of a participatory art retrospective is “Tomorrow is Another Fine Day”, on the work of Thai-Argentinian artist Rikrit Tiravanija. 29

25 Especially if we consider that contemporary audiences are used to fast-paced and fragmented film editions.26 Cardoso, 1979.27 Rancière, 2004. 28 Ibid.29 Museum Boijmans vanBeuningen in Rotterdam, 2004. In Bishop, op. cit.

A tour guide leads people around the museum, which only exhibits replicas of architectural spaces where the artist's practice has taken place30, such as his apartment. The guide shows the spaces and gives a talk, based on a script guide. The narrative about the actions that happened includes sensorial descriptions (“we can smell the scent of a steaming pot of jasmine rice”, “sunlight pours in from an October afternoon”). At the end, after going from room to room with the audience, the guide concludes:

Thank you for joining us, for walking through with us and giving your attention to this 'retrospective'. You may have wondered all this time why we are not in the presence of the work itself and are instead just given a story about or descriptions ofthe work or event. Tiravanija and the curators believed that this is one of the possible ways this body of work could be represented. There is no object, no picture, no moment, no space and even perhaps no time, but in this void of representation we hope you have heard and have imagined a picture of your own, a memory of your own, and that in the end it was an experience of its own making...31

An exhibition that avoids representation and is experienced mainly through an oral narrative may sound too “fictional”, especially without the presence of a curatorial text and photographic evidence (our criteria of objectivity). The replicas of architectural spaces help people physically enter the narrative, while the voice (or voices) evoke the past experiences. Such imaginative approach is an interesting model to bring the past to our experience.

“The storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.”32

This text is in itself a testimony of the difficulty of approaching past participatory art work. Through weaving many voices, I hoped to create some sense of what has been. There is no privileged starting point, and certainly no end point. Looking at descriptions, photographs, accounts is as good and as insufficient to form a more thorough understanding, but focusing on the body and on reception of these practices is essential. As art historians, as artists, as contemporary audience, it is an effort, that requires empathy and listening, a willing to give credit to what participants have to say. That may mean trusting oral narratives, more than objects or documentation, to carry this story forward.

Bibliography

Benjamin, W., 1936. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. Available at slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf [Accessed March 31st, 2010].

Bishop, C. ed., 2006. Participation. London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press.

Brett, G., 1987. Lygia Clark: the borderline between art life. Third Text, Autumn, vol.1, pp. 65-94.

Hélio Oiticica. 1979. [Film] Directed by Ivan Cardoso. Brasil.

30 Apparently this was just one of three narratives at the retrospective; Dan Fox gives a brief description of two recorded voices being played in the museum at http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/welcome_to_the_real_world

31 Bishop op. cit, p. 153.32 Walter Benjamin, 1936.

Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyEH58BhxAA [Accessed March 31st, 2010].

Kester, G., 2005. Conversation pieces: the role of dialogue in socially-engaged art. In Z. Kocur & S. Leung eds., Theory in contemporary art since 1985. Blackwell.

Kokoli, A. ed., 2008. The provisional texture of reality. Zurich/Dijon: Ringier & Les presses de réel.

Lagnado, L., 2007. O “além da arte” de Hélio Oiticica. Trópico [online] Available at http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropico/html/textos/2882,1.shl [Accessed March 31st, 2010].

Rancière, J., 2004. The emancipated spectator. Available at http://theather.kein.org . [Accessed March 31st, 2010].

Rolnik, S. & Larsen, L.B., 2007. On Lygia Clark's Structuring the Self. Afterall [online], Spring/Summer, 15. Available at http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.15/lygia.clarks.structuring.self [Accessed March 31st, 2010].