Across the Art/Life Divide

Patrick Martin

Description

Martin Patrick explores the ways in which contemporary artists across media continue to reinvent art that straddles both public and private spheres. Examining the impact of various art movements on notions of performance, authorship, and identity, Across the Art/Life Divide argues that the most defining feature of contemporary art is the ongoing interest of artists in the problematic relationship between art and life. Looking at underexamined forms, such as stand-up comedy and sketch shows, alongside more traditional artistic media, he situates the work of a wide range of contemporary artists to ask: To what extent are artists presenting themselves? And does the portrayal of the “self” in art necessarily constitute authenticity? By dissecting the meta-conditions and contexts surrounding the production of art, Across the Art/Life Divide examines how ordinary, everyday life is transformed into art.

Chapter 1 - Art and How to Live It: Artists Performing Themselves (and Others)

 

Chapter 2 - Unfinished Filliou: On the Fluxus Ethos, Origins of Rational Aesthetics, and the Potential for a Non-Movement in Art

 

Chapter 3 - Autobiographical Voices and Entangled Identities: On Monologues and Memoirs; Comedians, Celebrity, and Camouflage

 

Chapter 4 - Reenactments, Remixing, and Restaging the Contemporary

 

Chapter 5 - Social Practices and the Shifting Discourse: On Collaborative Strategies and "Curating the Social"

 

Chapter 6 - Emergent Notions of Subjectivity and Authorship: How Might We Occupy the Present?

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Musique
• Musique
• Photographie
• Photographie
• Histoire des arts visuels
• MUSIC
• History of art
• Multiple signal classification
• General officer
• Photography
• Art
• General
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208555
• Langue: English

Extrait

This edition first published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
This edition first published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: Michael Eckhardt
Design: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Gelitin, Blind Sculpture (2010). Photo © Paula Court.
Courtesy of the artists and Greene Naftali, New York.
Indexer: Róisín Nic Cóil
Production editor: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-854-8
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-855-5
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-856-2
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE:
Art and How to Live It: Artists Performing Themselves (and Others)
CHAPTER TWO:
Unfinished Filliou: On the Fluxus Ethos, Origins of Relational Aesthetics, and the Potential for a Non-Movement in Art
CHAPTER THREE:
Autobiographical Voices and Entangled Identities: On Monologues and Memoirs; Comedians, Celebrity, and Camouflage
CHAPTER FOUR:
Intervals, Moments, and Events: Performative Tactics and the Reinvention of Public Space
CHAPTER FIVE:
Reenactments, Remixing, and Restaging the Contemporary
CHAPTER SIX:
Social Practices and the Shifting Discourse: On Collaborative Strategies and “Curating the Social”
CHAPTER SEVEN:
Emergent Notions of Subjectivity and Authorship: How Might We Occupy the Present?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)
—ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, 1959 1
Contemporary artists are not out to supplant recent art with a better kind; they wonder what art might be. Art and life are not simply commingled; the identity of each is uncertain.
—ALLAN KAPROW, 1966 2
Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art argues that the most central defining feature of contemporary visual art and culture is the intensive and sustained interest shown by artists to the problematic and vexing relationship between art and life. In so doing, many artists have adopted and created more incorporative theories and new forms of practice, eroding the notion of a distinct border between the two realms. Artists have repeatedly challenged the notion that art must be a wholly unified, separate entity, and are consistently shifting their concentrated efforts towards creative methods that emphasize mutability, flux, and chance.
I drew my early inspiration from so many artworks and statements by artists, such as the ones cited by Rauschenberg and Kaprow. This project addresses the question of how and why so many vitally significant yet stylistically different artists of the contemporary period have sought to link and merge the disparate entities of art and life in a concerted fashion within their particular theories and practices. Moreover, it attempts to record how the history of “blurring boundaries” has led to increasingly diversified models for artistic practice. The artists examined here have moved between art and life concerns with the desire to keep those parameters flexible, never as rigid demarcations.
Across the Art/Life Divide proceeds more thematically than chronologically, with the intention of selectively investigating relevant examples of contemporary cultural production. The book can be viewed as a series of interrelated essays, although written in the hope that they will reinforce and support one another when read together. I came to research and write this book through my long-standing interest in performance art, conceptualism and interdisciplinary modes of art-making in which artists have so often annexed aspects of their daily life into their practice, questioning the separation between “art” and “life” as discrete, circumscribed areas of existence.
And while so many artists draw upon, are inspired by, and variously use their life experiences to nurture their practice, many artists wish to close the studio door, so to speak, keeping certain boundaries in place, neither transgressed nor muddled. Although it was initially my primary interest to discuss art/life practices of the mid-to-late twentieth century, it has instead become my intention here to explore the heritage and residual effects of those notions on various trajectories of contemporary practice: performance and live art; public art and interventions; relational aesthetics; and autobiographical narratives. I became equally intrigued by how notions of blurred, indistinct categories have radically altered and reworked some existing assumptions concerning the roles of authorship and subjectivity, along with aspects of socially engaged art practices.
While the phrase “art and life” might indeed sound overly ambitious, perhaps even vague, or a historical box to be ticked, in Across the Art/Life Divide I explore a wide, lateral profusion of approaches – albeit selectively chosen – that might be reconsidered and unpacked in light of my initial premise. To perform, reenact, represent, and otherwise engage with lived existence in the context of art is a long-standing emphasis of practices that have now moved further into the forefront of both arts research and public awareness.
For this reason, the scope of critical investigation in Across the Art/Life Divide extends into a variety of fields of cultural production, including popular entertainment, art interventions, experimental writing, criticism and theory, performance art, and emergent media practices. If this short introduction is meant to sum up the book’s approach, it is to some extent bound to fail, just as the examples discussed are arguably slippery and not readily categorized, but could conceivably provide some informative cues for readers and their own ongoing engagement with the world, whether easily decipherable as art or life. Bluntly stated, life interferes with art. The impulses to make certain gestures in art are not exactly the same as those that lead us to make certain decisions in daily life. Rauschenberg’s claim to neither make life nor art, but work somehow in the interstices that are thereby opened up, in the so-called “gap between art and life”, becomes not only a rhetorical device, but a still cogent and relevant explication of the predicament of the contemporary artist.
The artist David Hammons once remarked:
I think the worst thing about galleries is, for instance, that there’s an exhibition opening from 8–10 PM. The worst thing in the world is to say, “Well, I’m going to see this exhibition.” The work should instead be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it, it shouldn’t be at the gallery. Because when you get there you’re already prepared, your eyes are ready, your glands, your whole body is ready to receive this art. By that time, you’ve probably seen more art getting to the spot than you do when you get there. That’s why I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else. 3
Hammons thus asserts the significance of the experiential factor in approaching the artwork. How might art compete with being taken unawares, shocked or disrupted by something seen on the street, or at least removed from the gallery context? Often this has occurred through the concerted efforts of artists to transport aspects of daily life into the gallery or, conversely, to move art out into the public sphere (both strategies we will encounter again and again within Across the Art/Life Divide) .
With any work of written analysis and scholarship on contemporary art and visual culture, the expectation of the reader might be for the author to arrive at some clear conclusions, and to state from the outset the intentions of the written work itself. This is where I encounter considerable difficulty: just as artworks continue to challenge, so the writer must contend with both their specific aspects and broader assumptions. I consider this series of comments to be simply that: a performative trajectory that has its own problematic aspects, is both responsive to the artworks and notions chosen, and takes its own particular, idiosyncratic path in configuring such responses.
In a prescient proclamation written in the mid-1960s by Allan Kaprow, he states:
I am convinced that the only human “virtue” is the continuous rebirth of the Self. And this is what a new art is. We today are not damned (as we have all been told); we are simply bored to death. If we seek salvation, it is still Baudelaire’s ennui that we wish to be saved from. To be born not simply again, but again and again, is now our loftiest social obligation. As an artist, it means living in constant spiritual awe and inner disequilibrium. (This is perhaps the only real state of harmony; all the rest is undreaming sleep.) It means casting our values (our habits) over the edge of great heights, smiling as we hear them clatter to pieces down below like so much crockery – because now we must get up and invent something again. 4
Such a near-constant discarding, embracing and recycling of potential selves has become much more widely manifest in recent contemporary art practice, and this will be returned to often in the themes treated throughout Across the Art/Life Divide . The notions Kaprow raises here are still relevant and challenging today, particularly the rebirth of artistic identities and the simultane