Tag Archives: performance

WOF notes

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\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

Participation is a practice based activity, a performative action, an unfolding of experience, an open work, an exchange. Participation accents the embodied nature of encounter, be it with words, ideas, images or forms, accenting the powerful resonances that may come about through contact and connection.

Engagement is central and time mediates the activity. Shared articulations of different conceptions of being in the world, different perspectives, different voices bring a conceptual site of dwelling: Thorsten’s support brought a physical site of dwelling.

Contributions could be considered speculatively through dialogue and exchange. Informal approaches supported equality, a non-hierarchical space.

The event brought a physical and psychological space of creativity, where participants were able to engage in different ways, with different persons, different concepts: the event highlighted the challenges of managing the more subtle modalities of thought and action.

That which may be captured may be explored. Art-making as an expressive practice occupies an uneasy territory between speculative and empiricist practices.

To reach beneath the obvious, one must be at ease and open to possibility.

Pluralistic approaches supported mobility between the particular and the general. Different frameworks marked out different territories as separate and significant, mirroring back to audiences and augmenting existing perspectives. The event brought different ways of seeing and experiencing, thinking and untangling.

Attunement to different perspectives can be exhausting and needs time and training to balance the needs of body, mind and spirit.

Ornament and gesture are intrinsically linked through the action of doing and being in the world.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

Ornament and gesture may be explored as operative elements of art–making: that which at first may appear random, unreadable, unfathomable or nonsensical may build over time to inhabit new spaces of creativity and assert agency of the individual. Ornament as gesture: a gesture towards a manner of capture through which a telling is made possible.

Attunement to different perspectives may be explored through a commitment to artistic process. Metaphorically walking the territory, exploring marginal areas, resisting the banalisation of the everyday through artistic practices.

To reach beneath the obvious, one must be at ease and open to possibility. Ideas of the pause creates an interruption in the continuous flow of the everyday. Practices of mindfulness may support letting something into its own presencing, resisting conceptions of complete knowledge towards examing interstices, exploring liminal spaces at the meeting point of a number of ideas. Challenge the authority view: the pause supports narratives to emerge that are particular to the person.

That which may be captured may be explored. The person comes to know her–/himself through encounters with the other. Observing, looking, noticing, speaking and listening are forms of performative action. Sites of encounter where multiple resonances, multiple intensities may be explored are crucial. Discernment, trust, presentness, ‘anti–numbness’ strategies, developmental methods, speculative actions may be explored.

The event brought a physical and psychological space of creativity. An existential space, in which body and mind may take up their residence in the world. A space for in the moment action, improvisation, elaboration, a testing ground for new ideas, movement from inertia to possibility.

Contributions could be considered speculatively. Brings opportunity to critically review processes and methods to consider the ways in which various stages of artistic action and reflection may work together productively.

Engagement is central and time mediates the activity. Commitment to process is an essential aspect of developmental activity: time may be mediated by artistic means, in the moment encounter, embodied experience. Different rhythms support different conditions. Change may be both temporal and temporary.

Participation is a practice based activity. Without action there is inertia. Participatory action may take many forms from speaking and listening, to simply being there. Action and reflection are part of artistic practice.

RECALL

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\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Which key-notes would you like to share with all of us?

It is quite simple to fold past events into the present, but to fold present events into the future and to forget anticipated futures effectively is a difficult task, particularly if there are distinct anticipated futures. The “coming” offers an adequate conceptual space in which such active forgetting of anticipated futures can be achieved through the passage of time.

In addition to stomping and melting as forms of setting and virtuality the expansion-form describes the affective and effective forces of spatial contamination.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/What is the relevance of WOF in your work? How do its aspects reflect in your current projects and how could you imagine integrating the questions WOF raised in future projects?

Thanks to all of you for making the WOF! You may have realized that I have not participated in the building of a model. The reason is that the WOF itself is my model including the question of its making. The WOF is an artistic research project that among other aspects examines spaces of freedom for art’s involvement in academic research contexts. This question is relevant for an ethical redefinition of the artwork and art practice in a globalized market-driven art world dominated by a consumer-friendly curatorial system of transnational large-scale exhibitions. Claiming that the art worlds of the 1970s were just romantic ineffective refuges would mean to disregard their capacity of transforming socio-political issues into artistic material exhibiting real difference. Today, contrarily, the art world seems materialized as consumable material representing the world’s capitalist infrastructure.

Philosophically speaking we could say, for example, that art is the exhibition of the potential of not not being. The wonder of art resides in the sensation of the freedom that it could have been radically otherwise – and that it is not. While everything exhibits itself as it is and thus cannot be otherwise, art exhibits itself as its impossibility of being otherwise and thus constantly reemerges as it is: and makes us wonder. There is an intrinsic connectedness between art and the world in which it is embedded: within the immanence of gesture. But at the same time art’s gestures can only be connected to aims outside the wonder of art. While the gesture of walking leads to a position, the gesture of art leads nowhere, to atopy, to a-position (just) so to speak.

Thus, the WOF is constitutive for my dissertation wall sandwich – The Architectural in Art Practice from Destruction to Non-Construction. The cave and the ‘studiolo’ (an Italian Renaissance intellectual translation of the eremitic cave or the monastic cell into a hybrid architectural typology of a bourgeoise “study” room) are exemplary spaces of the architectural as non-construction: a hole in the ground and virtual space. The cavities left by the footprints of “ornament” and “gesture” as well as the virtual molds of melting or expanding models constituted an experimental framework of non-constructive art practice.

The focal shift in the art world (and beyond) from architecture to the urban and the global (and beyond) finds an institutional parallel in the Swiss context from art & architecture (Kunst & Bau) to art in public spheres (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum). The WOF together with the concept of non-construction point beyond public space towards a virtual artistic infrastructure.