____________Rules of the dialogue game_____________
- Start with a question (applicable only to the first one).
- Follow with a short dissertation related to the object of discussion.
- Close it up formulating a new question to your colleague.
To fulfill this task is important not to think over the words extremely too much, just somehow articulate yourself around the subject, not being too sure about what you are stating. Exposing yourself vulnerable as well, as process rather than product.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
sarah vanhee / aimar pérez galí
feburary 2009
“re-thinking performance, re-considering production: a dialogue”
How can we re-activate the art production as a condition for political action?
Aimar:
Reading the Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno, he poses that art fulfils itself without working towards an object that remains and that needs of an audience to witness the event. Art produces non-product products. These principles are what makes art enter the sphere of the political (action), and differentiates itself from other labor production such as making cars.
Have we moved away of those principles, away of the political action, to just enter the sphere of labor production with a capitalistic goal?
Sarah:
For now, I just consider the performing arts, regarding to your question, since their production structures are different than the ones in visual arts where merchantability is even much more an issue, as well as the movement against it:
The goal is not so much capitalistic I think, although of course embedded in a neo-liberal society so for sure inspired by it – maybe one of the precise problems is rather that there is no goal anymore, besides of the realization of the work. Especially in the Low Countries, where our working means and funding structures are so well elaborated – but therefore also enclosing, it seems that generally spoken “making a good/successful” piece is the thing to be reached, only after comes: which political movement does this work imply/ which politics do I present?
If the goals would really only be capitalistic, there would only be Broadway musical.
But this brings us to another question: is the audience, interested in performing arts, an audience of art-lovers or of “spectacle”- lovers (ref. Guy Debord), and for whom do we produce our work (if we already think about a “who”)?
Aimar:
Don’t you think the production nowadays is somehow very orgasmic oriented? I mean, it has a goal (to realize the artwork) but the process towards that goal is not so important, what is important is whether it becomes successful or not, like an orgasm. (I do not understand sex this way, but I am not so orgasmic oriented, after all).
And considering the bourgeois situation we live in the so-called Low Countries with such a developed subsidy system what happens is that the art production is extremely institutionalized and therefore impossible to accept other radical/subversive alternatives.
I do not know what the audience is interested on, there is so much audience in just one city (plus I’m not so fan of labeling people), but for sure it seems that the so-called conceptual field is becoming extremely endogamic, somehow being us (conceptual artists) our only audience. That is why is so important to re-think performance and consider accessibility as a key word.
But yet, are we really conceptual artists? Or is this already an old-fashioned label?
Sarah:
I do not consider myself as a conceptual artist and I also don’t only work in capitals for elite-audiences. For instance now I’m both working in Amsterdam on a project about (oh god, I always hate this “about”- since if it would be so clearly “about” something- what would be the use of making it still, things are so much more complex than just an “about”) about collectivity and relating it to “the society of the spectacle”, yes, because I think “politically” that is what I have to make now in that context. But on the other hand I’m working in the small city where I’m born in Belgium with 40 teenagers on a piece about fear, because I think politically that is what I have to make there. Conceptual for me is referring to the fact that I work from a strong concept in the beginning, and not so much from a text/content/format. Let’s say that I start form a discourse. I’m very grateful the institutions are there (and you must be also somehow- why did you move from Spain to the cold countries by the way?) but they should not become the goal- we should not forget they are there to make our work possible – and not that our work is possible only through them.
How can we create the work we want to create in the context where we want to develop and show it- within the time that we need for it (and this “time-pressure” for me is often bigger and more absurd than the “success-pressure”)? And should we after all find it legitimate/normal that we can also earn our living with that?
Aimar:
First of all, to make it clear, I didn’t move to Amsterdam because its subsidy system (I was 18 years old and definitely not aware of it); I moved because education quality. And yes, I am grateful to the institutionalized structure that these countries offer, but yet, as you say, we should not forget that there is many other possible ways to produce ones work. Just take a look at New York, Berlin, even Barcelona (to mention just a few); and also let’s observe how other fields (specially music) is being produced. I think we can learn a lot from other fields.
But getting back to your question, I believe it is very interesting to be able to produce our work within the desired context, with the desired time and perform it to the desired audience. But hey, let’s don’t forget either that a constraint on these desires can be extremely creative. Unexpectedness is something I truly defend.
And yes, it is legitimate and normal to earn our living with that. Let’s don’t fall on the trap! Margaret Thatcher said: Why giving money to aristst if they will do it anyway?
Thanks Margaret, you’re right! BUT if that is the case, why giving money to museums, national theaters, concertgebows, and other institutions if not to support culture?
Sarah:
I will try to take this game serious and understand your last question not as a rhetorical one. The institutions you mention have a lot to do with cultural “patrimonium”: settled companies or artists that already have shown they “served the society” by strengthening its culture. No surprise that for instance in Belgium there is a call again for more “repertoire- theatre”, and the classic directors/writers. Still, quite some money is also going to emerging (to not have to use the horrible word “young”) artists who explore new formats and contribute to the evolution of the art scene. Real important things though, often only get valued after their time, since they signalize turning points one only realizes after and are often disruptive. They are not only disruptive towards their artistic context, but equally towards the society in which they are born. In a lot of work I see in the performing arts, I miss this alertness for what is going on in the world, a sensitivity and curiosity for its time frame. Is it because of the well -equipped structures that we sense this endogamy you mentioned before? Or is it also the audience and the art critics who should look further than their taste? What creates for you a satisfying (on different levels) performance experience?
Aimar:
First of all I want to excuse myself for the cynic tone I might use sometimes which I start to think is just a way to express my frustration at the moment. Said that:
Yes Sarah, indeed. I agree on your point, although I could question it to a certain level. But I would like to focus more on your second question, whether art critics (which I completely right now de-authorized them of their power of deciding upon the audience) and audience should look further than their taste or not. I believe we, as artists (and even more emergent artist) have the responsibility to educate our audience. And I love this aspect of creating, where the pedagogy is always already there. We should develop strategies to teach with (and learn, which goes together) the audience.
I find this aspect of my artistic practice extremely relevant and important. I am currently working on defining performative strategies where I can offer tools to the audience to create accessibility to these new art forms, sometimes related to dance, theater, performance, experiments, etc., in order to avoid frustration from both the artists and the audience. But that is the approach I am developing at the moment, where I find my motivation and fascination, and I do not try to impose this approach to all art practices now a days. Hmmm… and now I don’t know how to formulate a question on that. But I love playing games and therefore I need to follow the rules!
Ok. Is it the artist’s responsibility to re-formulate alternative strategies to make art accessible again? Well, yes. Ok. But is it accessibility a key word to re-think performance?
Sarah:
Wow. This is an extremely difficult one. The kind of question that would make me stutter in a conversation since I have too much ambivalent thoughts about it. Because: “responsibility” and “accessibility” are words that make me shiver a bit since they seem to derive from a vertical relationship between the one who knows and the one who does not know, the one who has the power and the one who is the victim. At the same time I am personally quite socially engaged and I do see that artists might have an awareness for ruling components in time and space that their audience sometimes do not have, and I think that this kind of awareness, alertness and curiosity are for an artist indispensable. So I would like to almost think about (performing) arts as a possible catalyst, a generator. Still I think the artist falls in a trap when he already know what the exact goal is/ what he would like the outcome to be. I like to think about “responsibility” as “the ability to respond”, and ideally, it is this ability that is addressed of the viewer. And this is not only the task of the artist, I think. It’s part of a bigger problem which are for me the current general educational systems where, what is taught and how it is taught, is just not up to date with the developments in our media, technology, sciences, mobility, lifestyles,…
I do think it is part of the role of the artist (even historically) to be critical towards what a society offers to the human being in terms of how can it reach self-fulfillment (on various levels) , still always relating to a community of “others”.
You seem to combine in fact a “cynic” tone together with a good dose of idealism, is that right? So then, I wonder, just to give you very bluntly an open forum for the cynicism: what are the things you hate nowadays in the (performing arts) world? And what do you want to change? It is still a game…Let’s put on the masks now and make a dance!
Aimar:
Yes!! Finally, I declare: Let’s celebrate! With masks or without, we don’t need to hide behind anything.
I guess my cynicism is not a temporal state but somehow related to my being, or emotional construction, and as well being idealistic, even romantic. I like that, and I defend romanticism, utopia, happiness, dreams and expressionism. (Just to offer myself slightly vulnerable).
Let’s go step by step. About the responsibility and the accessibility, I do not pose them here horizontally, but I rather consider them a dialogue between both the artist and the spectator. Both are responsible and should be accessible. It is part of the contract.
And, going to big words now. Yes, the educational system it is not updated, or it’s been outdated because its attempt to update. I explain myself: we forgot the power of dialogue (power understood as a verb and not as a noun). Paolo Freire had it very clear, and Rancière too. They believed on the potential of intelligence inherent in all people, no matter class, sex, color, etc. Departing from this horizontal idea of pedagogy we can start up a whole new system, without power relations, without hierarchies, without stupid and useless knowledge to be memorized, etc.
But, relating this to art production, I consider art that which offers the possibility to think otherwise. This is the pedagogical responsibility and response – ability in art. And this is what is mostly lacking in the field now, and to a wider extent, in our society.
Should we start a revolution then? How do we start?
Sarah:
We are still dancing. We have put the masks on the back of our head so people don’t only look to our front bodies. Your mask is the one if the romantic idealist and mine is neutral white with a little purple flower on the side. I would not defend romanticism, utopia, happiness, dreams and expressionism – I actually don’t trust them, I think they are the extremists of our thinking and they hide something else behind them. But still, we are dancing together. I would say: transparency, media-critique, imagination, emancipation, creativity and consciousness. But I have to answer your question since I’m a serious player. To start a revolution (still have to consider my participation in it but anyway), we should know what we revolt against, since people mostly revolt against. Let’s start from the positive point: information sources are more and more open to everyone, thanks to the net – and everyone (at least in the west) can add to the evolving pool of knowledge if he/she wants. Various tools to (re)create your own world and self-image are available to anybody- at least if we look at our continent. But does this make us freer or more captured? Or is it less antagonist? Have a look at this Ted-speaker on “the paradox of choice.” I do think this ‘paradox of choice’ is what a lot of people in western society are getting confronted with now. I think a real (r) evolution would be to acknowledge and even embrace the complexity of postmodern society and promote an open, critical self intelligent mind and a body that does not fear – instead of bringing old “gods’ back in.
Wasn’t also Nietsche’s God a dancing one by the way? So how do we do that?
Aimar:
I must honestly say that this man (Barry Schwartz) got on my nerves.
It is not about the amount of choices –there will be always lots of choices, but it is about being conscious of the choice you’re making, and that brings us to emancipation. It is also a matter of taking all this choice making as a game, and the goal of the game is to play, not to win. That is important!
About the revolution, I like this question: against what do we want to revolt? And to say, against the system, I find a too teenage answer. Therefore I suggest offering constructive alternatives, rather than a revolution. To construct alternatives on the basis of emancipation, (self)critique, freedom, creativity and happiness. Alternatives that offer tools to participate and collaborate playfully in this game called art.
I start to question a bit this very game we are playing. Is it just a representation of the dialogue as a pedagogical/creative method or are we actually generating alternatives by writing this dialogue? Are we being serious and putting ourselves on stake or just playing with words? Is this good or bad or we don’t care about the moralistic judgment? Am I in crisis?
Oh my God, tell Nietsche to take me out dancing!
Written for the occasion of revolution//re-volition, a conference organized by Bâtard Festival at Paf. ____________________________________________________________________________________________
maria mavridou / aimar pérez galí
march 2009
What is it?
Aimar:
We’ve been talking for some days about this urge we are feeling of the need of a move, the feeling of being somehow stuck, the questioning of our profession, this very life we are living, the way we are contributing during our stay in planet Earth (as PJ Harvey says), the field of dance in Holland, the spring that seems to never arrive to Amsterdam, the difficulty to adopt as a gay couple, the institutionalization of our field, the thought to move somewhere more south, the taste of coffee… What is it that makes us feel like this?
I am right now writing this while traveling on a train to Leipzig to perform, one day and come back to Amsterdam. It is a sunny day. Perhaps irrelevant information but shows the nature of our profession.
There is a thought that keeps on popping up into my thoughts every time I get stuck with this question: mountains. I’m not sure if it is because the nature of the country where I am based is just completely flat, or because I have an inner wish to move to the country side, where maybe things are more relevant.
And suddenly, my colleague, sitting next to me points out to the landscape: “Look”, he says, “there is a mountain!”. Amazing. But we are already in Germany.
What is the meaning of this mountain?
Maria:
A hip of stuff collected… experiences, memories, conclusions, thoughts for past-time, words to connect to others…is there anything meaningful about each separate thing?
Or is it just the fact they collect into hips…with bottoms and tips… and they gradually grow and melt together to appear as one (mountain of stuff).
Those stuff stick together…they were separate once, do you remember? Well, now they are one thing; A stable one, actually; A structure that cannot be lifted and cannot go unnoticed. You see it yourself. Look! There is a mountain!
Does anybody try to see what this mountain is made of to find its meaning?
No, it’s a mountain. It is one thing and its meaning is this. It is indeed a mountain.
Mountains are there to be mountains; Heavy, stable, unmovable. Mountains are there so that you can go to them- they will not come to you- they are there to be climbed-in case you have some time to kill on rather useless recreational activities…
They are there to be looked at and to be admired for the fact that they are not flat at all and therefore not at all easy to stroll. They are there indeed to give you an illusion of having a perspective into the life underneath the mountain.
Mountains are there to make the life underneath the mountain the main point.
Like somebody said. You need some end points to define what the main point is.
So they are also some kind of border. You can see till there and then your vision is in danger of hitting a surface that is tending towards the vertical axis. Doooiinnnngg!
Actually those borders are not easy to change…Back to the mountain image, you can better acknowledge that it exists and try to live with it. You can for instance, take a curve around. Or make a tunnel to pass under and through, or climb over or even fly over.
Anyway… As long as you stay in that main reference spot (the same flat land) you always have the same mountains around you. You always need to re-acknowledge the same borders. As time goes by you know your way around or over or right through- you deal with them, cause they are actually always there.
Now in a flat land, where mountains are nowhere to be seen with a naked eye, there is the illusion of an eternal walk. Mountains are something you know about, because of your knowledge, but they somehow remain virtual. You kind of forget they exist.
And sometimes, in order not to forget you create your own imaginary mountain on the flat land. Your own subjective mountain that belongs only to you and you and you and not to anybody else, but its there, because you desperately need it.
Oh, this is so sad…Sometimes the imaginary mountains are harder to climb or to make a hole and pass through… Imagine, blindly pointing a drill in the air for a might be somebody’s mountain- or ever worse; your own mountain that you actually forgot where you put last time.
Funny… sometimes it really feels real… like there are really mountains in between people.
How can you make tunnels through mountains that can’t be seen?
Aimar:
What a beautiful and poetic reflection you just made, somehow sad, but real nevertheless.
So often I see myself constructing this mountains on this flat surface. They are not real, and I know, but yet I have the need to build them. Sometimes here, sometimes there. I have the urge for a rugged surface, a wrinkled skin, where I can see and feel live.
I wonder what sort of tool we could need to make tunnels in these sort of mountains. How to drill the virtual seems to be a good question. And therefore, maybe it needs of a virtual tool as well. I think: philosophy, art, literature, dialogues, something that is thought producing. But then again, maybe that is just being in the same realm.
To make a tunnel it needs something with more force, somehow aggressive, a punch!
And I keep on thinking: why would I need a tunnel in this virtual mountain I have just made? A tunnel is made only to avoid the rugged surface, therefore to flatten my existence. No! I do not want tunnels, I do not want to make it easier, comfortable.
But to answer your question:
Would art be a good tool to tunnel mountains?
Maria:
ok, back to earth…hello hello! you can’t imagine how many different paths I took to bring myself to respond to you and still, no sign of light.
This is probably how the walking on the rugged surface till your skin gets wrinkled feels like…
But in this dialogue i need to find the shortest path to get to the next question.
That’s more like the tunnel right through it, i guess, and not the way up and down and around the mountain, wondering and admiring the view, contemplating on top of a stone, getting your skin burned from the sun, and all what you can imagine… but what I make now is not really a tunnel…it is a short path, but more like a next stop to the next busch.
one step at a time…
If we leave aside the mountains and the tunnels for a moment...
Do you see art as a tool?
Aimar:
Well, maybe first then we should agree on what a tool is, and what’s its function. Art maybe is not itself a tool, but it is something useful, sometimes because it is useless even, and its uselessness makes us think about our very existence.
I guess art is not a tool, but contains tools that are useful to survive in this life. Art helps to open up views that were blocked or maybe did not exist up till now in our understanding of life.
So, actually, maybe it is a tool, like a wine-opener, that opens up other possibilities. Because I like to understand Art (or art) as an opener, not as a tool that pins something down, closes it, makes it impermeable and narrow, gives it a name and possesses it.
Don’t you think so?
Maria:
What I think now is that I really like this sentence “its uselessness makes us think about our very existence.” That’s the definition that stands closest to my heart.
I also like this one: “Art helps to open up views that were blocked or maybe did not exist up till now in our understanding of life.”
But then I think, a tool already implies a use. Opening or closing down is done for a reason that’s in front of you. A wine-opener is there so that you can smell and taste the wine that is inside the bottle- a new taste that you ‘ve never had before. A drill is there to make a hole so that you can see what’s behind the wall- a view that you never experienced before.
And yes, I do believe that art causes a change, but not through a direct path, like a wine opener or a drill does…hmm…
How about something totally stupid? Art is like an itch under your arse. A slightly uncomfortable situation, which you can as well learn to ignore by simply calling it an irrelevant itch…For sure there is no obvious reason why this itch there, but well, IT IS THERE, and it makes you shift your position on your chair. But, those slight shifts are not yet the thing; they could become something, or remain irrelevant for very long time…
For a noticeable change, a new viewpoint through the wall, we still need, I think, the real tools, which are not maybe purely artistic… Which are the real tools, remains a question still…
At a party on sunday night, when we were drunk and we were laughing with what I was about to respond to you, a common friend told me to ask you: “Don’t you think art is like aimorroides?”, so that you could tell me that “art is like scavis” … but right now i think that this is not what I should ask.
Don’t you think it’s rather irrelevant?
Aimar:
Art might be irrelevant, but its irrelavance makes us think our very existence. I guess you will love that one too!
Actually, I would never say art is like scavis, because, even though I agree on art being like an itch, scavis are always nasty, you can’t have pleasure with scavis, and you do have pleasure sometimes with art.
But it’s funny how this conversation is going towards art, when it started about life. I actually, right now, do not care much about what art is, should be, or have been.
I’m going through a process of taking lots of distance to my practice and lately I am enjoying it. This distance makes me understand much more what I want to do and how, and makes me question what is being done and how.
I start to think a lot about the 60’s, the hippie times, when love and happinness seemed to be what really mattered.
Don’t you think it is rather relevant?
Maria:
Hello, love!
You find me quite disappointed today, betrayed and hopeless. I have been feeling secretly desperate for the last days.
This is not the point. This is rather irrelevant.
I expect life to be about love and happiness…and trust and respect. Basic human respect, that is. Meaning that I will not keep on stepping on you to climb up. I will greet you back when you greet me… I will greet you before you greet me because I actually know you
-you are my neighbor- not because you might be useful to me one day. I will write your name for the work you did, because you are responsible for it and I will not “accidently” forget it because nobody knows you anyway.
I am bitter today. For my own obscure reasons. That’s irrelevant.
Basic human respect…I will answer your question or I will a least let you know that I am not willing to answer. I will not ignore the fact that you exist.
I will recognize your presence here. That’s relevant for me. A rather basic and simple thing.
But here I am seeing myself as a naive romantic wanker, happily masturbating in a world that’s not there.
But, yes, I think it’s relevant. Still.
And I am sorry for being so self-centered.
And I am sorry for all the times I acted without respect towards other people.
How is life these days?
Aimar:
Maria, my love. Your anger doesn’t seem to be irrelevant, but actually very very relevant. I could somehow imagine where your complains come from, and it makes me angry as well. It is COMPLETELY relevant to give value to love, happiness, respect and trust. Oh Please!!! Yes, it is!
But this world seem to have different values, or maybe some of the inhabitants that seem to think they are more important than others…. Hmmm, I wonder!
But you know, actually I think always in these situations: well, if that’s the way they want to do it, fine. It is not the way I want to do it and therefor I will not support it. I know that the way I am doing it is with respect and love and care, and maybe my name won’t be famous, but at least it won’t be famous either for being an asshole!
I guess we should be honest to ourselves as much as we can, and promote values that are missing and underestimated nowadays.
Life is getting better, since the sun seems to be on our side! I am getting back the motivation to work and do things. Even if it’s in a small scale, just backing a cake for my boyfriend, or going to swim to feel better. I could complain over and over on an endless flow, but I am deciding that it is better for my mental health to stay true to myself, think global but act very local, and be happy.
Shall we call it a day?
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nicola vincenzoni / aimar pérez galí
march 2009 – still under construction
Must the show go on?
Nicola:
It depends. Not every show is worth to see. Sometimes you honestly don’t need it, and it’s such a pleasure to turn it off, to say “shut up”, to shift your look and stop to attend. Or to throw your shoe against the showman/woman – whoever he/she is, your neighbor, your friend, the actor on the stage, your president.
Anyway, by doing so, can you really stop the show? When you close your eyes, push the off-button, run away from theaters, are you really out of the show? Or maybe you’re now performing as well, even for a very limited audience: yourself.
Is life itself a continuous surface where things happen, like events on a stage, or is the structure of consciousness that forces us to live in a continuous show? till the end…
Sometimes I need a break, my consciousness need it too, and in that moment often the show(business) starts. (Maybe the show – in its conventional meaning- is just something that tries to break the continuous show-structure of life, but can only imitate it).
Someone said “la vida es sueño”, others lived their life as a piece of art. I feel often that my life is like a show, performed every moment, staged by myself, and that I can’t quit. I feel like a low trained actor who scarcely knows the plot, and has to improvise. But can you really perform just for yourself, or maybe, in any case, even unconsciously, you believe in a form of audience ( real, ideal, idealized, intimate, collective, present, yet-to-come, inhuman…), and
Who is the audience?
Aimar:
Wow, who is the audience? Probably is just continuously shifting. I can be performer and audience at the same time, depending on the point of view of the observer, who will decide and will position himself. If I am the observer, I could say right now I am the performer, and you are the audience. But for a third one, could be that we are the performers and they are the audience. Again, it depends.
But I would say that the great position is when I am continuously shifting between audience and performer. It’s like being a leader or a follower. It’s great when you can be both, not always one nor the other. And then, as I always say in class, it’s very important to understand that you are a leader when there’s someone that follows you, and you are a follower when there’s someone to follow; but you’re not a leader if no one follows you. The same happens with being a performer or a spectator. Or not?
Are you still a performer if there is no audience? And, are you a spectator if there is no performer?
Nicola:
The first question: is what I ask to myself. I try to make some examples, a bit extreme maybe…A street-performer acting in a street-corner where, accidentally, everybody is lost in its own business and no-one is taking care of him: is he still performing? An actor performing inside a structure from which he can’t know if there is any person looking at him. Or enlarging the concept: a thief or someone who’s committing a crime, who acts carefully, exactly in order not to be seen. Doesn’t he have in mind an ideal audience, which could be identified in the judge or in the police officer? Isn’t he performing in the absence of the audience, but in relation to it? Or also my home in Roma, that’s a bit like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with three lines of windows facing one half of the apartment. You never know if someone is looking at you (that’s the reason why you decide to do whatever, and not to care if someone is looking). But you could also do something, with the hope that someone is attending at your performance. And I think that this idea could be generalized – always thinking the extremes- in our society obsessed with the idea of control. Could someone perform for the satellites? Or for the surveillance and closed-circuit cameras (as we generally did as kids)? Is there any human eye beyond the media-one? Or someone who believes in the energies, and who thinks that a performance leaves energy in the space that could be felt by someone eventually arriving later in that space. Or, more realistically, someone who records his performances (audio-video etc.) for a future, eventual audience…So maybe is the intention to address our performance to something/someone that makes it a performance, more than the real presence of an audience. We maybe should enlarge the “here and now” of the performance adding also a “there and then” that could be the reference of the performer…
(and I also would add the unconscious, saying that sometimes we do unconscious performances too…) I’m not saying the feedback of someone present is not important, I’m asking if it is essential to talk of performance, and I’m not sure it is…
The second question. Again, enlarging the idea of performance it becomes more problematic. What about the wonder of the nature? What about all those phenomenon that from ancient times were defined “shows” – like storms, eruptions, but also the simple cycle of natural life, spring etc.? The spectacle of nature is something that impressed mankind from the beginnings (Aristotle puts the “wonder” at the origin of philosophy), and then was stressed for instance by the romantics. Could we name the nature and the cosmic forces “performers”?
Or what about the technical processes that are everywhere around us, and that go on automatically? I don’t want to refer simply to the powerful charm of the washing-machine looping again and again (this is my personal passion)…but also the surrealistic movement thought that technique was art, and that machines were performers… this is today probably even more remarkable… So maybe we can be spectators also without a human, traditionally intended performer…
I don’t know, maybe I’m enlarging it too much…Can we say that performer is someone who believes he is, and that spectator is someone who feels he is attending something? Would that be too much?
What discriminate a performance from a non-performance?
Aimar:
Wow, that was a long dissertation around those two questions, but very interesting nevertheless.
You point out some interesting concepts, such as intention, which is fascinating and I guess it is the answer of those questions we were posing. Again, in class I say ‘intention cannot be injured’, because I find one of the most important principles when performing.
In that sense, I would not say a performer is some who believes he is, but someone who is intentionally doing so. And the same happens when being a spectator. I am not so fan of believes, but in this context I would prefer intention. I think this could answer your last question.
But, since you mentioned this idea of nature performing for us, I would like to refer to a friend’s performance called Telling Future (http://tellingfuture.blogspot.com), in which she collaborates with the weather framing a Nature action as a performance. Already this proposes many disruptions with the conventions of the so-called performance relations of who is audience, who is performing, who is making, and so on. And I love it because it offers me the possibility to think otherwise, to look at a moon eclipse as a performance with millions of spectators… how beautiful! And she made it happen, of course not the eclipse, but she framed it as such.
Could then still this ‘framed performances’ still enter the realm of the show?
Nicola:
Yes, they can!
I like this idea of the frame – probably because I have to do with photography – and I guess it really make performance and photography come closer. Like the photographer, who can both create the reality he wants to portrait (by arranging a set) or just point the attention to an existing-one, also the performer can do the same: he can give life to a self-transformation on the stage, or point the attention to a natural, social, technical (and more, more, more…) transformation that happens in the world. But probably we already are beyond the frame, which is the typical representation means of the modernity- Foucault, commenting Velazquez’s Las Meninas, explained in the beautiful and poetical introduction to Les mots et les chose exactly what the limits of the framed (modern) representation are. But yes, we can understand “frame” more in the sense of something giving visibility, than something establishing limits (although the first aspect can’t avoid completely the second).
I think this is a transformation investing the whole contemporary art, and maybe our questions sounds a bit old, since art declared that ‘everything can be art’. So I guess that we could ruthless state that everything can be performance, just keeping the intention ( I assume your criticism on beliefs) as essential point. And maybe also very popular ( and unwatchable trash) tv-programs like Big Brother aim to overcome the limits of conventional performance and the limits of framing, looking at a vanishing of all borders between show and reality… So, dear Aimar, I think we should take as granted that we live in a society that abundantly acknowledges performances… it could now be interesting to question how we react to this extraordinary exposition to performance, and I would like to start asking your very personal opinion on aesthetic, like inviting you to sketch a (personal) general theory of aesthetics answering to: -I’m intentionally shifting the topic of our dialogue, if you will let me 😉
When do you find a performance “good”?
Aimar:
Dear Nicola, thanks for that! I actually do not think you are shifting the topic, but the topic itself is evolving, navigating to –or through- our needs.
It is a great question, although I do not accept just ‘good’ as a feedback. To say ‘that was good’, to me it operates on the same level than to say ‘that was bad’. It just doesn’t propose much.
Said that, I find a performance “good” when it produces movement. I explain: when I engage as a spectator watching a performance, I want that the performance shakes me up, makes me reconsider my principles, produces movement of thought, makes me navigate from A to B,or to Y. As a spectator I want to engage, with all my self. Sometimes it creates just a physical affect, which is already enough, it surprises me unexpectedly and I react to it.
Actually, not so often I see ‘good’ performances. But it can be because I see many every month, so sometimes I decide not to go, otherwise it becomes a pure consumption.
So, dear Nicola, I would say that a ‘good’ performance is this which offers me the possibility to think otherwise, engages my self and is thought producing. Of course, that is a statement, but you asked for it!
And you? Under which criteria do you define ‘good’ when watching a performance?
Nicola:
I agree with you, I chose “good”(between commas) meaning that it is not self-sufficient, but exactly asking you to motivate it; and moreover “good”, latin “bonus”, is the core word of the moral reflection and philosophy. Vita bona – the good life; imperium bonus – the good government… and now the good performance.
Anyway, it’s a big question, and I thank you for turning it to me. I can easily feel when I like a show or a performance, but to motivate it clearly…is another matter! I asked you.. also because I wasn’t sure myself..
I also think, like you, that there are different orders of reasons that make us like or not a performance. When you say, for instance, “sometimes it creates just a physical affect”. What I find interesting is this connection between the materiality of the performance and the movement of thought. But how to define the particular movement of thought that we find “good” or beautiful? I mean, we always have movements of thought, also when we decide to move an arm, to turn the light off, or when we think of the most boring thing in the world.
Yes, it’s probably something that has to do with the power of revelation. But it shouldn’t be the revelation of a specific content. In that case, once we know it, its power would come to an end. I know I’m not clear – it’s fucking hard, actually- I think I don’t like a performance because it tells/shows me something new. The revelation I experience, which occurs each time in a very powerful way, is probably always the same. Maybe is the revelation of the revelation. The revelation of the connection between the materiality of the performance (the bodies, the voices, the sounds, the lights, the images, the objects and clothes, everything that strikes the senses) and a specific idea, or content, or thought, Is the revelation of the connection between material and spiritual, that become one thing, as we experience the goodness as a whole – in our sensible feelings as well as in our thoughts. Is like saying that when we experience something that we like, we are forced to be materially and spiritually present at the same time, or better, at the same tempo – and this is a condition that in ordinary life we often miss. In experiencing it, we overcome our usual scissions, and the revelation is the revelation of our unity.
Or maybe this is all extremely false, this is shit. Sometimes I feel we get pleasure from a performance, then we find it good, exactly because it shows us all our scissions. I think that it is good when it forces us to translate what we are attending. We translate it to ourself. The performance is saying us something that we can’t catch directly, is something that lays somewhere else, that relates to something else, that brings us- by sitting or standing, in a theatre or in the streets, or whatever – in a different place, or in a different time. In that moment, the Hamlet’s “question” is fake, because we are and we are not at the same time. We experience that the self is double, multiple, caught in a series of associations, relations, words, places, bodies, that we usually experience as a whole, but that are actually dislocated, disconnected.
I think anyway we find a performance good when it reveals something. Maybe we should come to the play in the play of Shakespeare’s plays. I think, but I don’t know, is just something that sprung now in my mind, that there we can find a structure of revelation, that could be the core of performance. Anyway you’re right, this revelation is for us necessarily engaging, has a transformative power. I guess this question is bigger than I expected, and it puts me in a state of confusion. But this state of confusion is also what I like in a performance, what I find “good”. This sense of crossing the subtle border between what we hold for known and what touches us as unknown. Why does that voice hit me so? Why could I fall in love for that figure? Why does that scene bring me in a very nostalgic mood? Why am I crying?
I notice that I examined only very self-related arguments.
Do you think that theatre, that is for its origin and for its nature a social practice, is living an individualistic turn?
Do you think that this sort of self-transformation or self-discover that we can experience by attending “good” performances could be intended also as political?
Aimar:
Fucking hell! First: have you ever thought about making a performance yourself? You just explained a really good concept to research that could unfold a large discourse on theater. This idea of the play in the play of Shakespeare’s play is, of course, very meta but very interesting to honestly talk about this very situation of the spectator in relation to the performance.
It is indeed very complex, but I think we have no other way than to approach completely humbly and honestly in relation to one self, subjectively related to one’s experience.
Now, going to your last question: I am not sure if it is intended as political, but what I am sure is that it has all the potential to be political. A performance should be, in some way, political. Some more explicitly than others, but if a “good” performance produces some sort of change, then it is already political.
Of course, then I think of this big shows like ‘The beauty and the beast (on ice)’, or Sesame Street the Musical, and so on, and actually this ones just operate to idiotize the audience, just like football, or the roman pane et circus– keep them busy so they don’t think –just the opposite of what a performance should do. But again, they are also performances, they have all the ingredients, and so do have football.
It is tricky.
If I think when I make my own stuff, I actually do have an awareness of what I am offering to the audience, its pedagogical content, if it’s subversive, or if it shakes the established conventions, etc. Of course it is not on my hands to decide the effect that will do on the spectator (as you said, we are double, multiple, caught in a series of associations, experiences, etc. and that makes experience subjectively each performance).
Oh, and very important, to be political it is not to show awareness of the situation of the world, just to be clear. I hate when I see performances where they bombard me with lots of images of Iraq. That is not political!
So, as you see, it is very hard to actually come up with a clear answer to this question. But for sure it’s being a political question, since it’s producing lots of questioning to my practice and the way I think. Actually it is very interesting because many times we give things for granted, or we do not question anymore some basic principles of our practice, but it’s great to stop for a second and re-think them.
I’ll try to make you re-consider your practice now by asking two questions:
Is philosophy political?
Are you politically aware when you shoot pictures?
Nicola:
(maybe Sesame street has an intrinsic political meaning, i wish it has, it has to have it, yessss!!)
I think, like you do, that the political side of the performance is not necessarily in the content – but I wouldn’t say, a-priori, that a performance showing images of iraki war isn’t political – though generally these performances are very superficial and try to take advantage from sensible themes, it really depends on the use of this material they do. I think, in a deep meaning, that you should have awareness of your present to act politically. You should have awareness of your present also to create a performance that develops changes in the sensibility of the audience. I understand what you say, that the equation political content= political meaning is false. But I wouldn’t say that we have to take the equation political content= no political meaning for universally true.
Philosophy is political when it unfolds a social use. I understand this in large range of practices. For instance, is political a philosophical lecture or class. Is political a philosophical book or essay or article published and available in the public sphere. No matter what the content is, it is already political the aim of transmitting, discussing, or contesting a knowledge or a system of knowledge. Foucault -his name returns often in this dialogue- expressed clearly the view that each knowledge corresponds to a power, and is therefore political. So philosophy, is strictly linked to the power, also the institutions that develop, produce and spread philosophy are centers of power, and have a political life.
But there is also another reason for philosophy to be political, one more concerned with the individual life, that I experienced directly. Apart from attending to my philosophy studies at the university, the social-political consequences of this kind of studies are also in other. Philosophy also illuminated lots of aspects of my personal life, and it shaped my life and, more importantly, my relationships in a new way. By transforming myself and my relations, I did through philosophy a political job (and I’m doing it right now, in this dialogue with You, that maybe also others will read). For instance I saw something new in the familiar relationships, or the importance of the reciprocal dependency in strong ties. Political is here used not in an institutional meaning, but assuming, as the feminist movement revealed in the late 60’s, that “personal life is political”. Meaning that the essential range of ties that constitute the self (family, love, friendship, and, decisively, sex) can’t be considered as a personal and intimate sphere with no social importance – and consequently shouldn’t be hidden behind the curtain of “my own business” or “privacy”- because it is rather the core of an enlarged conception of politics.
With my photographs is different. Since now I kept them mostly away from the public use – with just a couple of exceptions. They are a personal research that scarcely involves other people, and they still don’t have a political meaning. Esthetics is already politics, because it puts in question the common and shared opinion of what is beautiful and what is worth to see, or feel. But my photography -that I do with a personal esthetics – is still hidden in my personal archive, and it will unfold a political meaning only when I will finally choose to put it in the arena of the publicity.
But, just to be clear, I don’t think the massive exposition of the self that we can observe in the old and the new media – and mostly in the social networks like Facebook etc.- has a political awareness. I agree with Zygmunt Bauman, that in his new book (Consuming life) see it as a market of identities where the subjectivity becomes a fetish. These relations are not political because they don’t have any kind of commitment, they don’t put the self in a real dialectic with the other, but rather respond to a consumerist attitude that understand the relation as a narcissist confirmation of the self. -But of course it is important to study and observe the massive diffusion of social networking, and to ask what kind of political consequence it could entail.-
About the politics of the relations – for instance philosophy helps you to put in question the ordinary hierarchy and roles that structure each relation (parents-son; teacher-student; governor-governated, lover-beloved etc.).
Do you think that it is important, in a performance, to try to modify the ordinary relation between public and performer? Is that something maybe too much linked to the work of the avant-gards of the 60’s and the 70’s, or could it still be powerful today? Have you ever tried it in your personal experience as performer?
Aimar:
One of my goals in the pedagogic research project I have been developing in the last two years was to establish situations where this traditional hierarchy of teacher-student was inverted to a horizontal structure of (as Paulo Freire would say) teacher/student – student/teacher. Looking for this dialogue of one learning from the other and one teaching the other, always already at the same time.
It is about the emancipation that we were talking at some point of this dialogue.
In a way, I am lately thinking that it could be an idea to re-think what was proposed during the 60’s and 70’s and actualized it nowadays. Not to be cool and trendy, but because at that time the values where very different than the ones in our time. Of course, the situation was another one, but we could try to make a parallelism and think which principles could be adapted to current society, and culture.
Actually, I don’t think a performance should try to modify the relation between performer and spectator, but might do so. There will be always a difference between one and the other, since one is initiating the event, but with the relation it catalyses it.
I personally do not like to actively participate as a spectator in a performance, but I love when I can participate from my position of spectator, which is not a passive one.
And maybe that is what happens in the 60’s and 70’s, with places like the Judson Church in NYC, or the Living Theater, performance artists like Marina Abramoviç and Ulay, and many others. The spectator was not conceived as a passive entity, which is how it is conceived now in the mainstream (and not so mainstream) theater.
How do you position yourself as a spectator? Is there a specific thing in a performance that activates you in your position?
Nicola:
You know, most of the time, attending to a show or to a performance, I don’t have the impression I position myself anyway. Much more I’m positioned by it. I always try not to be passive, and to let something happen. Sometimes I’m kept apart, out of the Brecht’s “fourth wall”, sometimes I’m invited by the structure of the performance and involved in it.
But my participation, with feelings and intelligence, like in any kind of encounter, depends on me and on the other. The performance, with all its tools, try to call me, and I try to answer, with all my tools. I feel that the encounter is successful, and that I was active in it, when the performance enlightens some aspects of my feelings and intelligence. This sounds very vague, but when it happens it has – what i called above – a specific power of pleasure and revelation. It is like a common production: the performance produces something in the space-time, and this produces something in me, hopefully something that is not part of my normal experience of space-time and opens a door in my awareness. If I fall asleep – literally or metaphorically- , it could be my fault – too tired, too enclosed in myself and in the stream of my ordinary thoughts- or could be the performance’s fault – too tired, too enclosed in itself and in the incommunicability of its thoughts. But also, too worried about pleasing me, too worried about being good, too worried about making everything clear – these could be reasons why the performance doesn’t call me and activates my participation. It is exactly like a person who tries to catch our attention and imagination but uses the wrong tools: we don’t listen to him, or, worse, we avoid him.
As you see, it seems like we’re entering in the sphere or very personal and individual experiences and opinions. But we don’t want to say: I like it just because I like it, just because I like it.
How to explain what happens between us and a performance, without using the simple language of likes and dislikes. There always is an opacity of desire and pleasure, that makes it difficult for us to argue our esthetic opinions. How to explain, for instance, why we do fall in love with one person, and not with another? Every rational and clear explanation won’t get the point, leaving us somehow wordless in relation to our primary drives.
I would like to refer to the work of Roland Barthes on photography, La chambre claire. In this amazing essay Barthes tries to find a general theory to explain the fact that he likes some photographs and not others (in the book he shows us the images he likes, and the whole writing is a successful compromise between very individual commentaries and theoretical thought). He discerns two aspects that always work together in our esthetic approach to an image: studium and punctum. The studium is what, in reading an image, appears as clear, as responding the photographer’s intention to tell something or to represent something. It’s the way the photograph organizes its story-telling essential feature. It is the point of view chosen, the subject, the historical and particular moment, all the informations that are selected to be transmitted with the image. And it essentially activates our capacity to read and individuate all this informations. But in the photograph there’s also a punctum, something that exceeds all this, and strikes us immediately, it is like an arrow thrown by the image to the hearth of our sensibility. Not every photograph has a punctum for us, and it is almost impossible to give general examples of it – for this reason Barthes reproduces in the book the photographs that for him have a punctum, to show it case by case. The punctum exceeds the intention of the photographer and the capacity of conceptualization of the photograph’s reader. And it is linked to the specificity of the photographic (film) medium, the fact that a photograph is the result of the light projected by an object to a sensible film, the fact that a photograph is the light-trace left by an actual being or reality. The punctum has a feature of actual existence.
I guess the punctum in a performance has to do with the fact that something produces in the space-time, that there’s is an actual consume, and it expresses the uniqueness of the moment. That is the uniqueness of each moment.
When does the punctum start to work in a performance? Yesterday I was by a Trisha Brown show, the third piece was one of the seventies, Glacial decoy. I guess the punctum started as I heard the footsteps of the female-dancers, I realized there wasn’t any music leading their movements, just the sequence of the black&white Robert Rauschenberg’s photographs sliding on the background in a row, appearing and disappearing, like the two dancers on the extreme side of the stage, who, following the movements of the others, were entering and exiting off the wings, appearing and disappearing, like the quality of the white fabric of their floating and light costumes, that let the forms of their bodies appear and disappear. I had the strong intuition that all that, together with the quality of their movements, that were very rooted in the ordinary human expressivity but at the same time fading into an elementary natural agitation, conveyed the sense of a humanity constantly exceeding the borders of the forms that seek to structure its existence, a humanity always beyond the borders it gives to itself, a humanity that needs frames, but finds its sense beyond them. Like the photographs of Rauschenberg, they were beautiful not in their singularity, but because originating a sequence in which their position always slid, and it brought them out of themselves. Like each part of a choreography, each single movement, in its originating from the movement before and its sliding to the movement after. The punctum for me started with the sound of the footsteps, but what the result of all this material elements. The punctum is also linked to the conviction that the dancers weren’t representing this state, they were giving life to it, consuming it. And my presence was also totally consumed by all that was happening on stage. The performance didn’t position me in any particularly way, it used its tools to call me, and I heard it.
I ask you something ambitious, if you feel like doing it. I don’t have the Barthes’ book here with me, and I tried to use its tools – studium and punctum – just with the help of my memory. If you have already read it, would you like to take it in your hands again, or if not would you like to find it and read it, and then write for me a description of something that is for you a punctum?
If you don’t feel like, or don’t feel inspired by it – I would assume it as totally fair- I would ask you what exactly, the last time you saw a performance you liked, activated you as spectator?
Aimar:
My dear, thanks for all this information I didn’t know. I will definitely go to the library and get this book. Barthes is one of my favorite authors!
And you know, I finished reading your words and I had to think for a while, to think of a performance that I liked and I got activated as spectator, where I could find this punctum you mention. I couldn’t come up with any. Then later, during the night, talking with my boyfriend, we started a discussion on education and the need to re-think the whole educational system, because its lack of including the body in its curriculum (the discussion went on till passed midnight), but out of this discussion, suddenly I understood the punctum and a performance came up into my mind.
I went to see a couple of friends, great dancers, who did some sort of composed improvisation with a musician. They are exceptional movers. They presented the work in the former film academy that is now a squat cultural center. I went to see my friends, but somehow a bit afraid to see just beautiful movers improvising. I was greatly surprised when I suddenly found myself enjoying the performance so much, just because it was not engaging me intellectually but on a different level, maybe more kinesthetically. It offered me a lot of space to navigate in and out, to enjoy the beauty of two virtuosic bodies moving, with a music landscape, and appreciating the gap that I could (or not) fill in, as I wished. It gave me lots of freedom and satisfaction in such and immediate and estrange way that long time I did not feel that way in a performance. It is not so easy to explain why it activated me as a spectator, but I guess is this punctum you talk about.
Indeed, I felt I was in a very luxurious position, enjoying the uniqueness of it all. Being able to understand the proposal, to understand the movement quality, and somehow transcend all this and position myself beyond that, in an abstract place where I felt happy. Yes, I felt very happy while watching it and afterwards. How great!
Now I might get lost in my thoughts, but I will try to formulate them in such a way that you can follow me. Let me think how I organize them and make this parable understandable.
Yesterday I saw on Youtube a TED conference by Sir Ken Robinson who was exposing the need to re-formulate the educational system, which now kills the creativity of the kid and it is only oriented towards the training of the brain, the intellect, forgetting about the body that carries that intellect. The talk is quiet interesting (besides the overuse of silly jokes to catch the attention of the audience). This led me to think about dance and performance, and how nowadays it seems to be also this way. I explain: many makers make performances using the body but with a need to offer and intellectual satisfaction. We could call them conceptual makers, or even post-conceptual. So, even if our main instrument is our body and its movement, we try to fulfill and intellectual need. Whereas, in post-modern makers (for instance), it seemed that they were making dances to offer a kinesthetic satisfaction, which would go beyond the understanding, beyond the brain, and maybe, leaving a happy feeling, unknown but happy.
It might seem simplistic, it is not my intention, and please excuse me if I don’t explain myself very well. It’s the first time I am organizing this thought and it is not yet clear in me.
So, do I make sense? Does this trigger anything to you? Does this relate to the piece you saw by Trisha Brown –Glacial Decoy? (if I’m not mistaken… which, by the way, I have danced when learning her repertory!)
Nicola:
Thanks for the reconstruction of your feelings by the performance of your friends, it’s very interesting.
“I felt I was in a very luxurious position, enjoying the uniqueness of it all. Being able to understand the proposal, to understand the movement quality, and somehow transcend all this and position myself beyond that, in an abstract place where I felt happy.”
I like this passage, really. I guess I understand what you say. But I would ask you to inquire if the happiness you felt is not depending on your understanding. I have the impression you’re saying that you’re happiness was stronger and deeper than your intellectual capacity to understand the performance. I think it’s true, happiness is probably stronger than everything. But is it actually really possible to separate it from the condition of its emergence? Maybe you were happy because of your understanding, and the happiness allowed you to “transcend” and forget the work of your intellect. I guess that pleasure (or happiness) improves and stakes with the intelligence. Esthetics is about this. Esthetics is the education of senses, the aim is to get pleasure from their use. Senses are immediate, but to get more pleasure, to have a sophisticated and aware form of happiness, you need to educate them. That means: a hard intellectual work. I guess this is exactly the point, or the moment, when the studium meets the punctum. To get the punctum, the emotional sensitivity, you have to know the studium, to have gone through it. Refine the sensibility is one of the goal of every kind of study. After you have spent hard hours reading a book, trying a movement, playing with words, fighting with an instrument, your able to see, feel, express, understand very small differences that you wouldn’t consider if you were uneducated. And this is a source of happiness, and joy, and pleasure.
You say something very similar to what Wittgenstein once said about philosophy.
“6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”
This is proposition 6.54 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. You throw philosophy away from yourself, after you have used it. You throw intellectual engagement away, once that you know how to enjoy a performance. But before you can do this liberating act of throwing the ladder away, it is worth to climb up all the steps. Could you really have enjoyed in that extent the movements of your friends, if you hadn’t all the experience and intellectual awareness and sensibility you’ve worked hard to reach?
This could be seen in 2 ways that, I think, are interesting.
The first: this is an intellectual attempt to affirm that there’s no real pleasure nor real emotion outside of culture. The very roots of this view are that drives –who are the basis of pleasure – are always determined by culture, also when we try to consider them completely natural. This is a very complicated point, that relates to the work of Freud, that I don’t know enough well to resume in few words here. Also Judith Butler referred to this point in her research, when she seeks to demonstrate that even aspects of life that are doubtless considered natural – like sex and gender – are cultural constructions . But without entering in deep dissertation you can consider that human forms of pleasure are deeply connected with cultural elaboration in constant development. Is for instance your sexual pleasure immediate? Are your sexual fantasies determined by your specific cultural backgrounds and from the cultural environment of your age? Can you find sexual pleasure in certain circumstances because of an intellectual involvement, or because of an intellectual stimulating condition? I refer to sexual pleasure because it is considered one of the most instinctual and immediate, but I guess it is also part of a cultural collective and individual elaboration and improvement- what about all the specific sexual preferences that proliferate for instance among the gay people? (Like bears, leather, dominant, racial etc.) Aren’t they the sign of a strong intellectual and cultural participation in the expression of our primary pleasures and desires? Then, to come back to our point, could you get happiness from the performance without the intellectual awareness? Or, are you maybe so educated and aware that you know when you can “transcend” or throw your intellectual commitment away?
The second: Why do we need all this effort and study if the final goal is just to enjoy immediate pleasure? Isn’t it better never to climb up the ladder rather than throw it away after? Clearly the metaphor shows that you start from a ground-level, and you stop just when you are at the top. But the question is, where is the top? How to recognize it? Wittgenstein himself changed his mind, the Tractatus is his most absolute work. The so called “second Wittgenstein” would probably adjust this metaphor.
I take lightly the (huge) responsibility of doing it in his place… I would say that is better not to throw the ladder away, but to have an intermittent relation with it – sometimes step down and forget it, and then maybe try to climb one more step up, then take a rest and have a look at the things from that station, and then maybe go further. And maybe this ladder is not linear and vertical. I see it more like in an Escher’s drawing, a sort of labyrinth, a spiral movement maybe..
Is this maybe a post-modern perversion of a purely metaphysical image?…
Alexander Kojeve read Hegel’s work trying to see in it that there is no immediacy in desire, that human desire, from the first cry of the new-born, is always desire of desire, desire of another desire, desire of the attention of another human being.
How to separate intellectual needs from bodily expression? Is dancing something just committed to body? Isn’t it responding also to intellectual needs? The need to move in a certain more or less encoded way, is it a pure bodily need? Can you enjoy the show of it just with bodily means?
Last Saturday I went to an acupuncturist. After the treatment, the doctor – who’s also a chiropractor – adjusted with two blows my vertebra in the neck and in the back. I had to laugh suddenly and with heart. He told me it is normal, when the body releases old accumulated tension, we have to laugh. Was it just a bodily happiness? Maybe. So maybe a pure bodily happiness exist. ??
After two hours of conversation the acupuncturist looked at my tongue. “You didn’t tell me everything”, he said, “you didn’t tell me you have a broken heart”. Was it a purely bodily statement? Is there then a purely bodily happiness? ??
……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
(To the true understanding of this answer, it is essential, once you’ve read it, to forget it, to throw it away. Just then you can, eventually, find happiness)
Can you please explain me why, once I start to write, I never get to be short and poetic? – This is not the real question –
Real question is:
Does it exist, a process of education that is not repressive?
Aimar:
Yo! Not bad at all… that was truly interesting. But I see how you try to fool me pretending to be short by changing the size of the font!
I’ll get to the real question you ask me, and leave the rest of your dissertation as inspiring and thought-producing but I will try to focus on the last question.
A process of education that is not repressive. Probably, to educate means to place some limitations for the knowledge to expand, grow; to enable constraints to open up potential. With these limitations / constraints we have to find ways to develop ourselves in that specific context.
We can not pretend that we could educate (a child, for instance) on total freedom. Even Mowgly, in the total freedom of the jungle, finds some limitations imposed by the context, the animals, his needs, etc.
When I think of education, I think of offering frames to make emancipated subjects, so they can think on their own and find the right tools to reach the knowledge they miss so they can get access to it. By offering a frame I am (probably) limiting other possibilities, but I do need a frame to start with. Is a frame repressive? I do not think we should put it on these terms. But, of course, most of institutionalized education it is repressive because it needs to fulfill some goals agreed upon by the government following a certain criteria.
Education should not restrict or repress, but should open up potential, motivate, inspire.
To use Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the ladder, in education it is important to climb this ladder and throw it away (although it is never completely thrown, because we have memory and the steps climbed stay in our (unconscious) experience or self). A friend of mine posed it in different words: she says it is important (in life in general, which is a long-time education) to anchor once in a while, to arrive, to understand what has happened, in order to depart again.
Using my nautical terminology, I would transform this ladder into a navigation and myself into a boat. It is very important to navigate, but also to get to the harbour once in a while, to rest, think, reflect, and then is very important as well to depart again, to gain more knowledge, more experience, to practice what I’ve learned so far and find out other ways to do it. To stay at the harbour all the time is not so exciting, but we think is a safe place. A visual artist said: We’ll be save while everything keeps on moving.
Going back to the repressive eduaction. There is no perfect (oficial) eduaction. Education is so personal that there is no institution that could fulfill everybodies desires and needs. But just now I had to think of the Summer Universities at PAF – Performing Arts Forum (www.pa-f.net) in France. A place to share knowledge based on self-education, being both teacher and student at the same time. But this requires a huge amount of responsibility.
Would self-education be a non-repressive education?
Nicola:
La mala educacion…en la pelicula you see very clearly this point, that you get: education is creation, positive act of giving form and shapes, and at the same time, repression, choice of one point of view and limitation of the others, supremacy of one image of the world on all others. The frame is a limitation, but at the same time it makes possible to isolate and see one image. In german das Bild is image, and die Bildung is education. In the movie the camera focuses very often on the eyes of the characters: the eyes of the priest, for instance, full of desire for his “pupil”- at the end almost blinded and hidden behind sunglasses-; the eyes of the director, who tries to see in the actor the character he’s looking for, and helps him to get to appear like him -the transexual. Because education, mala o buena, originally, is also a relation of desire, the desire of transmitting what you see to another pair of eyes (to do cinema is exactly this kind of act of love, Almodovar has often reflected on that).
We are using the whole lexicon of sight: frame, image, eyes; the metaphor of seeing for knowing.
The frames work like in a series of chinese boxes, I guess, from the larger to the smaller, from the most generic to the most particular.
“When did I meet my first Chinese?
[…] As near as I can figure, it was 1959 or 1960. Whichever, whatever, what’s the difference? Precisely nothing. […]
Okay, I’m sure it was the year Johansson and Patterson fought for the world heavyweight title. Which means, all I have to do is go search through the sport section in old copies of The Year in News. That would settle everything.
In the morning, I’m off on my bike to the local library. Next to the main entrance, for who knows what reason, there’s a tiny henhouse, in which five chickens are enjoying what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch. It’s a bright, clear day, so before going inside I sit down on the pavement next to the chickens and light up a cigarette. I watch the chickens peeking at their feed-box busily. Frenetically, in fact, so that they look like one of those old newsreel with to few frames per second.
After my cigarette, something’s changed in me. Again, who knows why? But for what it’s worth, the new me – five chickens and a smoke away from what I was – now poses myself two questions:
First, Who could possibly have any interest in the exact date when I meet my first Chinese?
And second, What exactly is there to be gained by spreading out those Year in News on a sunny reference-room desk?
Good questions. I smoke another cigarette, then get back onto my bike and bid farewell to fowl and file copies. If birds in flight go unburdened by names, let my memories be free of dates.”
Haruki Murakami, A slow boat to China, in The elephant vanishes
Is this the description of the liberation from a generic frame? A frame that, almost unconsciously, gives relevance to certain information rather than others..
Education is also imitation, reproduction of existing rules, or characters, or habits. Confirmation of the existent through repetition. Education should be discovery of the Difference, but the difference is much more difficult to be taught.
The deepest repression is the limitation of the possibilities. You never see it, the repression has already happened, and casts a rest out of the frame, and off your sight.
In her newest book, Frames of war, published last month, Judith Butler asks how can we recognize the existence of something that exceeds the limits of our frames, – cause we only recognize what is within the frame of recognizability- and she finds an answer I still don’t exactly know, since I haven’t finished the book yet…
Anyway, coming to the concept of self-education…I don’t like it!
I understand it is intended to stress a process of education issued outside the institutional styles and goals. But it blanks out exactly the most important aspect of any education: it is a relational process and happens only in the relation of different people. I know it is a question of terms, but when it goes on definition, terms are the question..
I would better say shared-education, education-circuit, group-education or much better I would pick up the concept of “edu-action” that you – maybe unwittingly 🙂 – suggest at the end of your last answer…
In Italian we call self-education “auto-formazione” – and I guess in French you also have the prefix “auto” – solitary, automatic, non-incarnated: that’s what the self, or auto, suggests, at lest to me.
No, I guess since education is necessarily a work of l-imitations and exclusions (repression), is important to know clearly who are the actors in the play, what are their roles and the relations among them: self-education tends to neutralize this whole field of conflicts. Also the german, french and american college education systems require to be in part teacher and student – I don’t know about the dutch. ( I’m interested to know better what happens by a session of study at PAF; is there anyone leading the group? No, probably there would be some kind of procedural agreement… maybe, very far from the total freedom, the self-education would probably be organized as a procedural democracy). Of course it is a very different experience than the traditional and fixed master/pupil relation.
We can see the master/pupil relation as hierarchical, tyrannical, and the self-education as an emancipated democratic one. That’s true, I guess.
But what if we also try to look at education as an act of love? As in Almodovar movie, or as it was conceived in ancient Greece, with all the controverted implications, even sexual ones, of the case. The concepts of repression, emancipation, procedure would acquire a new meaning in this, maybe provocative, perspective. How can we deal with education as an act of love? Who are the subjects entitled to do that? (just parents? or teachers?) Which rules or authorities can decide the legitimacy of an act of love? It’s a whole range of questions that our democratic societies still find very difficult to answer.
Moreover, as important as the practices of education, also the topics and the frames should be put in question. That means that every education that seeks not to be repressive should be a critical theory. Critics in the positive meaning of going back to and finally see the frame, its contingent formation that tends to become absolute, to deconstruct the consolidated principles of education and knowledge. Is there a positive gain in such a deconstructive journey towards the roots of culture? For Butler the important thing is to make the frame extendable. Once you get to see it, and you find out what is included in it and what stays out of any comprehension, the job is to enlarge the limits of the frame so that it contains also what before was not recognized. It is a never-ending, never final job. It’s a continuos fight against repression and its limitation of possibilities. How do you get to do that? Giving voice and sight to what stays out of recognition, but, nevertheless, exists.
So, i guess, non-repressive education is the one that, with its estranged eyes, looks at the darkest corners of the world.
You, as a dance teacher, do you ever consider your job as an act of love?
Aimar:
If love is a never ending feedback of caring for each other, of learning and teaching, of giving and taking, of creating desire (maybe somehow a desire machine), of encouraging each other to go and discover in the darkest corners of the world, I do consider teaching an act of love.
I am right now busy with the idea of love, of declaring love, of giving love. And teaching is a great frame to practice love.
Teaching is very exciting, somehow unpredictable, but always rewarding in one way or another.
Loving is very exciting, somehow unpredictable, but always rewarding in one way or another.
But reading your question again, the word that is somehow making more noise in this sentence is job. Funny enough, I still don’t consider my profession as a job. I know I get paid for what I do, but yet I do not consider myself as having a job. Maybe because the nature of this profession, because I don’t have a steady schedule, a routine, a place a go every morning. Might be as well because of the fact that I think of it as a learning process, as part of my development, a place to share and practice ideas, and not a place to give them.
Few weeks ago I was teaching in Maribor (Slovenia) and one of the dancers that was taking the workshop came to me and told me that what stroke her the most during the workshop was the passion and fascination I have (in this case I guess towards dance) and the way this is transferred to the students in the room. It was the first time someone told such words and I had to think of it. I never thought I had such fascinations and passions towards things but maybe is this what makes me understand my profession not as a job but as a ‘must do’ in live because I believe in it. Somehow an act of love, and act of declaring love, which must be done in live because you believe in it.
Teaching is a beautiful act. I should not be taken for granted neither underestimates it.
Have you ever taught?
Nicola:
No I haven’t. I mean, never professionally. I taught my mom how to use Skype. I taught Francesca how to burn dvd. I taught Chiara how to sing with all of your voice. And I taught Sergio the concept of “revenant” by Derrida.
You know, in my family teaching is some kind of tradition. My abuelo was a philosophy teacher, my abuela a greek teacher, my uncle is a philosophy teacher, my other uncle a law teacher…Sometimes I think I’ll be good in this job, and that it would also be an interesting one. Sometimes instead I think…No, it’s not for me. “ta da da, da da’…but not for me…altough I can’t dismiss, the memory of her kiss, I think she’s not for me…da da diba dadadibadibaa”.
-I’m quoting Chet Baker’s song-
____________________________________________________________________________________________
mi otro trabajo // aimar pérez galí
enero 2011
___________________Normas del juego del diálogo___________________
- Empieza con una pregunta (aplicable sólo al primero)
- Sigue con una disertación relacionada con el objeto de discusión
- Ciérralo formulando una nueva pregunta a tu compañero/a
Para realizar estas tareas es importante no pensar mucho sobre las palabras que se utilizan, simplemente articúlate sobre el tema en cuestión, sin ser demasiado serio sobre lo que estás exponiendo. Muéstrate vulnerable, como proceso en lugar de producto.
___________diálogo____________
¿Qué es Mi Otro Trabajo?
MOT:
Mi Otro Trabajo es un logo performance que intenta dar visibilidad a los medios por los cuales muchos artistas producen su trabajo actualmente.
Viene a ser como un gesto político sin más pretensión que ofrecer una “alternativa” constructiva dentro de las políticas de producción artística.
Obviamente no consigue nada a un nivel pragmático, es decir, Mi Otro Trabajo no es una empresa con alguien detrás que dispone de un presupuesto para producir artistas. En este sentido MOT no es una productora. Pero a un nivel especulativo o filosófico, conceptual, sí que es una productora, pero quien hay detrás de ella es cada artista individual. Digamos que es una manera de compartir una situación, en este caso de precariedad.
¿Has visto el logo en algún sitio?
Aimar:
Lo he visto en algunos artistas que presentan su trabajo en el Antic Teatre de Barcelona, y bueno, yo mismo lo he utilizado y ha aparecido en el programa de mano del festival LP’09 por ejemplo. Pero es verdad que aún no ha conseguido mucha visibilidad, aunque la lista de artistas no es nada corta. Quizás la gente lo pide pero otra cosa es que se atreva a publicarlo.
Como usuario del logo se me generan algunas preguntas. Quizás empiezo por la más simple.
¿De donde sale la idea de hacer este logo?
MOT:
Pues estaba con mi pareja en un bar charlando de lo mal que nos iba con el proyecto que queríamos hacer, todas las negativas que estábamos recibiendo y la imposibilidad que producía esta situación para desarrollar trabajo. Nos veíamos en la posición de producir nuestros proyectos con el dinero que ganábamos trabajando para otros, y si alguna institución nos daba un poco de dinero siempre aparecía el logo de dicha institución como productores de la obra, cuando quizás el 85% del presupuesto lo habías puesto tu.
Otra cuestión que se planteaba era que muchas veces generabas un proyecto en el cuál no cobrabas literalmente, pero habías dedicado unas cuantas horas a desarrollarlo. Estas horas nadie las consideraba como horas que se debían cobrar, porque al fin y al cabo “los artistas lo hacen porque quieren”.
De esta inconformidad y de, como dice mi madre, el derecho a pataleta nació la idea de escribir cada vez que se daba esta situación y te pedían la frase Producido por, seguirla con Mi Otro Trabajo. De esta manera el mismo logo explicaba la situación de precariedad en la que se había generado el trabajo.
¿Me sigues?
Aimar:
Sí, sí, claro. Realmente estás describiendo una situación muy generalizada entre los artistas que conozco. Incluso hablando con artistas que pensaba que están muy bien producidos, y con muchas instituciones y logos detrás, me comentan que para el proyecto X ellos no han cobrado nada, pero se sienten contentos que el resto del equipo haya tenido un sueldo.
Lo que me gusta del logo es que sea como una marca. El hecho de que tenga un formato, que se personaliza para cada artista, lo formaliza de alguna manera.
¿Me explico?
MOT:
Esta era la idea. Muy a menudo ves en los programas de mano a artistas que estan producidos por TYLO (por ejemplo, me lo acabo de inventar). Y yo siempre me pregunto: ¿Y qué coño es TYLO?, pero la cosa es que le da un punto de seriedad al proyecto. Piensas: joder, tiene a una productora detrás, qué suerte! Aunque de verdad sea el artista mismo, que se inventa otro nombre para autoproducirse y darle más seriedad al asunto.
De aquí sale la idea de formalizarlo y hacer un logo que todo artista pueda adquirir y compartir. Que sea un movimiento global.
¿Te imaginas que Mi Otro Trabajo fuera el logo más utilizado en las artes escénicas? ¿Como el de Coca-Cola o el de Copy-right?
Aimar:
Bueno, quizás es un poco pretencioso pensar así, pero la verdad es que molaría mogollón. A parte, si todos los artistas que tuvieran el logo colaboraran dando visibilidad a los presupuestos podríamos decir que MOT sería la productora con el presupuesto más alto del mundo.
¡Sería maravilloso!
¿Cuánto dinero lleva invertido Mi Otro Trabajo?
MOT: Por ahora, la suma sube a 83.980€. Que yo diría que no está nada mal… y si añadiéramos los presupuestos de los artistas que aún no nos lo han enviado creo que la cifra sería aún más sorprendente.
Lo interesante de todo esto es que este dinero, en verdad, no existe. Es pura especulación, una ilusión. Este dinero, al haber sido invertido por Mi Otro Trabajo, en general para cubrir gastos de los sueldos de los propios artistas por el tiempo invertido en los proyectos, es un dinero que nunca ha sido transferido a sus cuentas, es simplemente un valor que se le da al trabajo hecho. Creo que es muy importante darle un valor a este tiempo invertido por el artista por el trabajo hecho, ya sea de investigación o creación.
Margaret Thatcher lo dijo muy claro en una frase un tanto desafortunada: “Por qué dar dinero a los artistas si lo harán de todos modos?”. Bien, con este logo aceptamos que los artistas lo hacemos de todos modos, pero si esta es la situación entonces le daremos visibilidad, le pondremos un valor, aunque sea por el puro derecho a pataleta.
¿Qué crees que podríamos hacer para que la gente se interesara más en el logo?
Aimar:
Creo que el interés está, se puede ver en la lista de artistas y proyectos que ya tienen el logo. Obviamente, si el objetivo es ser un movimiento global y ser la mayor productora del mundo, compitiendo con Hollywood, aún hay mucho por conseguir. Pero me gusta que sea un trabajo un tanto lento e invisible, que vaya haciendo una huella poco a poco.
El hecho de que también exista en inglés es ya un paso para la globalización. Quizás si se pudiera hacer el blog en otras lenguas… no sé, francés, sueco… quizás se tendría que ver en qué países hay más precariedad y lanzarlo ahí.
Y por supuesto creo que ayudaría si se hiciese el vídeo en inglés. Lo del vídeo es muy didáctico y clarificador, a mi me ayudó mucho a decidirme.
Te lanzo otra pregunta:
¿De dónde sale la idea de personalizar el logo utilizando el icono de copyright?
MOT:
¡Me gusta que me hagas esta pregunta!
Teníamos que encontrar una manera de personalizar el logo, de poder decir “este dinero lo he puesto yo, sale de mi bolsillo”. Como todo logo tiene su icono de copyright o trademark u otro similar, pensamos que se podía abusar de ese idea para personalizar así el logo. Así que en lugar de tener la c o el TM en el circulito encima de la marca, ahí pondríamos las iniciales del artista, proyecto o colectivo que lo solicitaba.
Y como con Photoshop se pueden hacer maravillas pues era la manera más fácil y cómoda para personalizar los logos y, así también, subvertir todas las políticas de copyright.
¿Mola, no?
Aimar:
Sí, bueno… mola mogollón! Pero lo que no he visto mucho en la lista de artistas que han solicitado el logo es colectivos, festivales, organizaciones, etc… Aunque supongo que es un logo que funciona más para artistas independientes, o pongamos que poco dependientes de las instituciones.
¿Hay colectivos interesados en el logo?
MOT:
Sí, sí, claro, por supuesto. De hecho, por poner un par de ejemplos, tanto TEATRON (una libre comunidad escénica virtual) o Bâtard (un festival de Bruselas) lo tienen; otra cosa es que lo pongan en su listado de apoyos y subvenciones. Eso ya demuestra el interés que un colectivo, organización o festival puede tener hacia este tipo de iniciativa, o lo que es lo mismo, que incluso un festival puede hacerse sin tener realmente el presupuesto real o el apoyo institucional necesario. Otros festivales se han interesado en tenerlo e incluso apoyan la idea pero no pueden tenerlo porque entrarían en conflicto con las instituciones, lo cuál demuestra lo “peligrosa” que puede llegar a ser una arma así, un logo que entra en el terreno de lo político. El hecho de poner el logo de Mi Otro Trabajo al lado de otras instituciones gubernamentales puede desencadenar una problemática a la hora de justificar presupuestos que muchos festivales no pueden, o no quieren, tomar tal riesgo. Y es totalmente entendible y respetable, puesto que este logo aparece desde una posición en la que no hay nada a perder.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Aimar Arriola / Aimar Pérez Galí
Junio 2011
¿Son escribir y bailar la misma cosa? o ¿por qué escribir y bailar SON la misma cosa?
Aimar:
En cuanto a proceso de articulación se podrían encasillar dentro del mismo catálogo de acciones, pero de entrada, impulsivamente, te respondería: no.
Ambas acciones requieren de un ejercicio de organización y articulación puesto que son acciones que comunican, es decir, que exponen, producen; pero no podemos entenderlas de la misma manera puesto que el proceso mental por el que se organizan es muy diferente. Escribir y bailar juegan con códigos diferentes, y por supuesto se pueden influenciar el uno del otro, e incluso a veces el cruce entre ellos genera cosas maravillosas.
Pensando en la pregunta se me vienen reflexiones que me hacen dudar de mi respuesta impulsiva. Obviamente, ser la misma cosa tiene que especificarse un poco más para poder responder acertadamente, pero a mi ya me gusta esta incertidumbre en la pregunta, es lo que me hace ir más allá del sí o el no.
Así pues, buscando parecidos entre escribir y bailar, pensaba en que ambas acciones estructuran el espacio-tiempo, juegan con este concepto, le dan otras connotaciones, proponen nuevas experiencias.
Pero ahora que estoy escribiendo este diálogo, fragmentado de por sí en el espacio y el tiempo, no me considero que esté bailando. Poéticamente, o de manera cursi, podría decir que mis pensamientos están bailando en mi cabeza, pero esto no es otra cosa que pensar. Y bailar es pensar.
Pero ¿Pensar es bailar?
Aimar:
Puede ser… aunque yo no bailo, o bailo poco. ¿Me debería preocupar? Decía Deleuze (creo que era él) que uno no puede pensar si no está en un dominio que excede sus fuerzas, es decir, en cierto estado de fragilidad, de vulnerabilidad. A menudo pienso en que bailar, la exposición pública de un cuerpo que se mueve (perdón por la simplicidad de la definición), es también someterse a un estado extremo de vulnerabilidad: la de la “publicación de uno mismo”, en el sentido de hacer un cuerpo público –y no me refiero al hecho de estar sobre un escenario y llevar más o menos ropa–. Intuyo que algo de todo eso estamos haciendo aquí. Aunque pensar, es decir, la generación y asociación de ideas (disculpas aquí también por lo prosaico de la definición), no necesariamente conlleva su ‘publicación’ (uno no siempre hace público sus pensamientos, se los puede guardar para sí mismo), por eso arriba sugería que bailar y escribir tienen tanto en común (más que lo que pensar y bailar pueden tener). Últimamente me he estado interesando mucho por escritura relacionada con la danza (gracias por señalarme en su día la existencia de la forma ‘textual’ del script coreográfico), y también por escritos de bailarines y coreógrafos. Hay algo en la forma escritural de alguien que baila –las notas de un coreógrafo, por ejemplo– que me interesa, del mismo modo que casi siempre –y esto es una generalidad– me interesa la escritura de un artista que trabaja desde/a través de su cuerpo (aquí pienso en Itziar Okariz). Pienso que este interés tiene que ver con la consciencia sobre la relación cuerpo-escritura de aquel que tiene en su cuerpo su herramienta, con saber que la escritura es en última instancia una prótesis corporal, una extensión técnica del propio cuerpo, y con intuir que un buen escritor no escribe desde “el pensamiento” –en todo caso, pensará escribiendo–, sino que la escritura ha de estar conectada con la textualidad del cuerpo…. Pero volviendo al inicio de mi respuesta, ¿debería preocuparme y bailar más?
Aimar:
Hombre, igual te diría: deja de preocuparte y si te apetece bailar, baila!
Hay esta tradición de pensamiento que pone al teórico como un cerebro pensante cuyo cuerpo es usado para transportar este cerebro a los eventos que le requieren. Muchas veces esta tradición es errónea, aunque muchas otras no; lo veo a menudo en el lounge de cualquier festival, donde la gente se congrega para tomar algo y hablar más distendidamente y los bailarines (en su tradición) se ponen a bailar desenfrenadamente (cosa que me incomoda) y los teóricos hacen un intento torpe de activar su cuerpo físico y mantenerlo al ritmo de la música (lo cual me parece adorable).
Siempre he intentado mantener un ejercicio tanto físico como mental equilibrado, para no acabar como el tenista, con el brazo derecho hiperdesarrollado y el izquierda hiperatrofiado. Así pues, ponte un poco de Beyoncé y menea el cuerpo!
Volviendo a tu reflexión, hay algo de lo que has dicho que me ha interesado mucho puesto que se relaciona con el último trabajo que he desarrollado. Se trata de la vulnerabilidad del cuerpo público. Investigando sobre el concepto de declaración llegamos a la conclusión, o a un cierto anclaje de pensamiento, que declarar algo es exponerte vulnerable en tanto que te estás lanzando a un vacío incierto que se definirá en el momento en el que el otro reciba la declaración. Entendiéndolo así, el bailarín, saliendo a escena, se está declarando, se está haciendo público, se expone vulnerable. Y supongo que el escribir tiene algo de esto también. Ambas acciones entran en el terreno de lo público, de lo vulnerable, de la declaración o lanzamiento.
Pero, ¿no crees que esta posición, aún siendo de extrema vulnerabilidad, es un acto de empoderamiento?
Aimar:
Hablando de vulnerabilidad y empoderamiento, no puedo evitar responderte sin hacer referencia a los sucesos de violencia institucional acontecidos estos últimos días en respuesta a las expresiones colectivas de hartazgo que vienen sucediéndose desde hace unas semanas, y en las que sé que has estado participando –y aquí entramos en un terreno estrictamente personal, pero a sabiendas de que lo personal es político; expresiones provocadas por la ya a duras penas soportable situación de disminución de las libertades, de creciente precarización de la vida y de injerencia del capital en todos los aspectos de la misma, en estrecha complicidad con el poder político. Veo todas esas imágenes de las concentraciones y manifestaciones e irremediablemente pienso en esa capacidad de empoderamiento de los cuerpos vulnerables en su encuentro mutuo de la que hablas… Yo este fin de semana he estado en Sevilla visitando a mi amigo Miguel Benlloch –histórico de la lucha antifranquista, iniciador del movimiento de liberación homosexual en el Estado Español y performer– quien hace poco me hablaba de cómo los acontecimientos de este último mes le han avivado los recuerdos de las luchas anti-Otan de los 80, y del enorme movimiento de base que se creó entonces, en el sentido de la transformación de la rabia en capacidad de acción y en formas de organización –de empoderamiento, vaya–, pero también del desencanto y sensación de derrota de después… Yo en circunstancias como las de estas últimas semanas pienso mucho en la pertinencia de lo que hago, en qué sentido tiene mi quehacer –bueno, mis quehaceres, tendría que decir–, y el único modo de darle cierto sentido y no caer en la desesperación o la impotencia es entendiendo la totalidad de la vida como una acción –esta idea de “la vida como acción” se la debo también a Miguel–, una acción en la que mi principal vehículo (mi arma) será mi cuerpo, no como organismo sino como esa entidad afectiva políticamente competente. Y así, el repertorio de actos de los que mi cuerpo es capaz –moverme, andar, escribir, manifestarme, bailar al son de la última de Beyoncé…– serán partes de una misma acción. Esto tiene algo que ver también con lo que comentabas antes sobre la necesidad de actuar en contra de la distinción teoría/práctica, que tiene que ver con la separación de los ámbitos de acción, con la regularización de lo que uno puede hacer y no, con la normativización de la vida en definitiva, pero para ello recurrías a la idea de “equilibrio”, que a mí siempre me ha resultado un tanto problemática, porque me suena a moderación, simetría y quietud. Como alguien que trabaja con el movimiento, ¿no crees en que la oscilación, el desequilibrio y el titubeo tienen un mayor potencial?
Aimar:
Ah! Gracias!
Efectivamente, ahora que lo leo de nuevo a mi también me chirría el término equilibrio (aunque quizás lo puse por mi subconsciente Libra). En algún otro diálogo reivindicaba lo borroso, puesto que provoca un esfuerzo e incita a la imaginación. En este caso, estoy totalmente de acuerdo en que la oscilación, el desequilibrio y el titubeo tiene un mayor potencial. Pero la belleza de la simetría me sigue fascinando!
Justamente ayer un amigo hizo un comentario en referencia a todo el movimiento 15M que tiene que ver con esta idea: aquello que no es definible es peligroso. Hay algo en el no posicionamiento, en lo indefinible, lo borroso, el desequilibrio que empodera en el momento en que es una decisión consciente.
Alguien me dijo una vez que dar un nombre es poseer. Es una frase que la he dudado muchas veces, pero ahora mismo viendo como los media estan apropiándose de ciertos términos usados por el movimiento me doy cuenta del poder que también da, en este caso en contra, el hecho de definir, dar un nombre.
Solo un inciso: justo antes de ayer, manifestándome delante del Parlament de Catalunya, pensé en la reflexión que haces. Y pensé que estar allí era un gesto vital, un acto de empoderamiento y de vulnerabilidad, una declaración (de amor, me atrevería a decir).
Y establecer un diálogo con alguien, en este caso contigo, también tiene algo de declaración, de vulnerabilidad, de ofrecerse al otro. De algún modo abres tu intimidad al otro, te propones sin saber cómo serás recibido, pero tienes que arriesgarte a lanzar tu pensamiento, y permitir que la respuesta cambie o modifique tu manera de pensar. Y aunque a veces me gustaría posicionarme en un pensamiento claro y definido a menudo lo que me apetece escribirte es toda la navegación que ocurre en mi proceso mental al leerte, que muchas veces es totalmente no lineal e incoherente.
¿Podríamos decir que dialogar es practicar intimidad?
Aimar:
Hay que ver las vueltas que hemos dado para llegar a esto de la intimidad… (o ¿quizás estábamos ya ahí desde un principio?) Te respondo con otro pequeño giro: habitualmente “intimidad” y “privacidad” se utilizan como términos parejos, pero para mí son cosas bien distintas. Las nociones de ‘privacidad’, ‘privado’ y ‘privar’ comparten una misma raíz, y en este sentido, tienen que ver con la compartimentación de lo público, con la delimitación de aquello que puede ser compartido, con la privación, en definitiva, con la negación de lo común. A mí la intimidad en cambio me traslada a ese espacio compartido que se genera entre dos o varias personas, al establecimiento de zonas de confianza –como nosotros aquí–, a las políticas de la amistad, así que visto así, te diría que sí, que el diálogo es un modo de intimidad.
Hay una proposición de Maurice Blanchot que tengo siempre muy presente en la que define la conversación –una tipología del diálogo– como esa forma de producción de discurso imposible de clausurar, un acto siempre compartido, que se fragmenta y se abre al otro en su exteriorización. Y son estas mismas ideas de apertura y fragmento las que me vienen a la cabeza, casi como imágenes, cuando en varias ocasiones a lo largo de esta conversación te refieres a la necesidad de “lanzarse”, de desprenderse de los pensamientos de uno para compartirlos con el otro (eso que a veces también llamas “declarar”).
Volviendo a lo de arriba, me gusta la expresión que utilizas de “practicar intimidad”, en el sentido de “ponerla en práctica”, de ejercitar la creación de esas zonas de lo común que tanto escasean, dando a entender que en el creciente terreno de privatización y compartimentación de todos los aspectos de la vida, es necesario ejercitar la creación de zonas de lo común autónomas. Así que sí, dialogar es precisamente eso, y una de las pocas cotas de libertad que nos quedan.
Cuando me escribiste invitándome a entablar este diálogo contigo también te referías a la intimidad en cuanto que estrategia y como forma. Siendo así, ¿cuántas “formas” de intimidad diferentes eres capaz de enumerar?
Aimar:
Creo que con esta propuesta de Blanchot entiendo más el porqué me gusta tanto el diálogo como forma de generar discurso. Como dices, o dice, es esta imposibilidad de clausurar el discurso lo que me fascina tanto, quizás porque de algún modo crea una cierta accesibilidad, que a veces no encuentro en ciertos textos más académicos, y quizás ahí está el asunto, quizás esos textos tienen algo más privado. No sé, esto es un apunte que se tendría que pensar un poco mejor, pero ahí lo dejo.
En cuanto a enumerar “formas” o maneras de practicar intimidad, se me ocurren unas cuantas y bastante variadas:
la consulta del médico; cocinar con alguien; un diálogo, por supuesto; una relación sexual; un chat; salir a escena; una manifestación; un grupo de lectura; ver una película en compañía; una comida familiar; una sesión de feedback; un skype; ir al mercado (aunque a menudo esto roza el cotilleo!); tocar y ser tocado; saludar a alguien; una operación quirúrgica; etc.
De hecho, el otro día en los vestuarios del gimnasio (un lugar donde, en general, se practica la individualidad) estaba cambiandome al lado de otro señor, y éste, al cabo de un rato, me dice “perdona, que no te he dicho buenos días”. Me descolocó totalmente, de algún modo penetró en mi burbuja individual y se abrió un lugar de intimidad, una zona común autónoma (como dices) y temporal (añadiría). Fue curioso como esa frase tan común abrió todo un espacio de reflexión sobre como participas en la sociedad. Igual ahora soy un poco simplista, pero de algún modo me creó una consciencia que perduró todo el día y desatascó una vía básica de comunicación.
Tu que te dedicas más a una reflexión teórica y/o académica, ¿qué opinas del apunte que he dicho al principio sobre lo privado del texto académico?
Aimar:
Eso que comentas de lo “privado” de ciertos textos apunta hacia una de las batallas clave de las últimas décadas: el poder de saber y la gestión del acceso a ese saber. Es decir, tiene que ver con una tradición de la producción del discurso que se ve a sí misma valedora y gestora de cierta verdad, la que supuestamente encierra todo “texto” –no sólo escritural, sino extensible a la idea de “obra” en sentido amplio. Se trata de un tipo de práctica basada en una concepción sustancialista, “cerrada”, de la obra, y en el uso de un lenguaje igual de privado, opaco por naturaleza, que le permite mantener al “otro” –a aquel que pudiera rebatir su verdad– a una prudencial distancia. El 99% de la crítica de arte, por poner un ejemplo, está aquejada de este mal, y no es otra cosa que el producto del uso “privado” que un sujeto concreto (el crítico) hace de una realidad (la obra de arte). Por poner otro ejemplo, casi todos los Programas y Departamentos de Educación de los museos se basan en esta misma “lógica gestora”, “mediadora”, de una supuesta verdad, de un supuesto saber contenido en la obra de arte que el espectador es incapaz de interpretar sin su mediación. Una gran parte del pensamiento desde los sesenta (desde la recuperación que se dio del formalismo hasta la llamada “estética de la recepción”) ha luchado para desarticular esta actitud paternalista y el subjetivismo característico del arte moderno, esa especie de encierre de la obra en sí misma, desmontando el mito de la privacidad y el autismo típico de las prácticas artísticas. Mucho se ha trabajado desde entonces por la necesidad de instaurar un “lenguaje público”, un hacer cuyas formas integren estructuralmente al receptor. La danza y las prácticas performativas han sido cruciales en todo esto. Esta forma de pensar alcanzaría su esencia, nuevamente, en el espacio de la conversación, pero también en la idea de juego. Las posibilidades del juego, como las de la conversación, son infinitas, y sus logros son siempre provisionales; jugar es siempre “jugar con”, implica participación, los que juegan son participantes y espectadores al mismo tiempo, como en la conversación. Por supuesto que en todo juego, así como en la conversación, hay una serie de “normas”, pero no necesariamente han de entenderse como reguladoras de la conducta, sino que también podemos verlas como espacios de lo común, ámbitos de acción que me afectan a mí y al otro por igual. Entonces, ¿podríamos definir el juego como otra forma de intimidad?
Aimar:
Por supuesto, querido Aimar. Y de hecho me parece extremadamente poético e inspirador pensar en el juego como una forma de intimidad, como esta práctica que nos catapulta a un presente compartido, a participar de esta intimidad con el “otro”.
Me gusta esto que dices de que los logros del juego, como de la conversación, son siempre provisionales, no buscan un anclaje definitivo sino más bien uno que permita avanzar.
De hecho, cuando me invento juegos, siempre pienso en las normas, no como reguladoras de conducta sino como condiciones para que ocurran cosas, creadoras de potencial, digamos. Y me parece muy importante entenderlas así, porque en cualquier momento se pueden modificar para mejorar las condiciones (Change the rules to improve the conditions – como diría un buen amigo mío).
Ahora pensando en este diálogo mismo, casi me atrevería a decir que has desvelado el misterio del juego.
Confieso: me inventé este juego para intimar con otra persona mediante la escritura (entre otras cosas).
dialogues & post-dialogues 