All Art is Political: Writings on Performative Art

By Sarah Lowndes

Since the 1990s, performative art has been increasingly accepted into the cultural mainstream, becoming a familiar and popular feature of art galleries and museums, as shown by the Tate Modern's recent 'Collecting the Performative' project. As art historian Roselee Goldberg notes, 'The term "performative", used to describe the unmediated engagement of viewer and performer in art, has also crossed over into architecture, semiotics, anthropology and gender studies. 'But what is performative art? What about its radical origins? How does it remain politically engaged? Writer, curator and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, Sarah Lowndes, takes us through the world of performative art, using five case studies spanning from the 1960s to the present day. A series of essays and conversations, All Art is Political explores the work of artist-musicians Mayo Thompson and Keith Rowe, Berlin-based artist Thea Djordjadze, Glasgowbased Turner Prize winner Richard Wright, American conceptual artist Susan Hiller and German-Swiss artist and writer Dieter Roth. What is a literature sausage? How do you transform reading coffee grinds into contemporary art? How do you incorporate live radio broadcasts into a musical performance? What does it mean to draw attention to the marks accidentally left behind by previous uses of the exhibition space? How do you bring out the latent brutality of Punch and Judy shows? For the answers to these questions and many more, indulge in the pages of All Art is Political. REVIEWS An interesting and insightful collection of thoughts about the urgency of vision, how audiences work together with artists to enact the bodily labour of seeing and understanding, and how politics and the performative can be embedded in the material presence of art. Dr FIONA BRADLEY, DIRECTOR, FRUITMARKET GALLERY In her observant close readings of artists' practices and interviews with artists, Sarah Lowndes shows how artists themselves have navigated this territory, giving attention to the question of politics from the perspective both of theory and of the artwork itself. MELISSA GRONLUND, EDITOR, AFTERALL

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910324028

Book preview

DR SARAH LOWNDES is a writer, curator and a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. She has contributed to publications including Frieze and Afterall as well as catalogues for international institutions. An expanded second edition of her book Social Sculpture: The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene was published by Luath Press in 2010. Her curatorial projects include Three Blows (2008), Votive (2009), Urlibido (2010), Dialogue of Hands (2012), Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow Since World War ii (2012) and The Glasgow Weekend: Art, Design and Music from Glasgow (2013). She is also the editor of the prose, poetry and art magazine The Burning Sand.

By the same author:

Social Sculpture, The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene, Luath Press, 2010

All Art is Political

Writings on Performative Art

SARAH LOWNDES

Luath Press Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2014

ISBN: 978-1-910021-42-2

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-910324-02-8

The publishers acknowledge the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume.

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Sarah Lowndes 2014

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 There is Only the Room: A Conversation with Mayo Thompson and Keith Rowe (2008)

CHAPTER 2 Tokens of Sense: The Work of Thea Djordjadze (2009)

CHAPTER 3 Learned by Heart: The Paintings of Richard Wright (2010)

CHAPTER 4 Artists at Work: Susan Hiller in Conversation with Sarah Lowndes (2011)

CHAPTER 5 Hole Punch: The Late Autobiographical Works of Dieter Roth (2012)

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

FIRST AND LAST: with love and thanks to Richard Wright, Violet Wright and Raymond Wright.

Thanks to the artists Keith Rowe, Mayo Thompson, Thea Djordjadze, Susan Hiller and Dieter Roth.

Thanks to Katie Nicoll, Melissa Gronlund, Kay Pallister and Fiona Bradley.

Thanks to all at Luath Press, especially Gavin MacDougall, Lydia Nowak, Tom Bee and Chris Kydd.

There is Only the Room: A Conversation with Mayo Thompson and Keith Rowe is previously unpublished. The conversation took place as part of Three Blows: all-sound acoustic performance weekend at St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh, 5–6 July 2008. The project was curated by Sarah Lowndes, produced by Katie Nicoll and funded by the Scottish Arts Council. Alasdair Roberts prepared the transcript of the conversation.

‘Tokens of Sense: The Work of Thea Djordjadze’ originally appeared in Afterall, Winter 2009.

‘Learned by Heart: The Paintings of Richard Wright’ originally appeared in Richard Wright (New York: Rizzoli, 2010).

‘Artists at work: Susan Hiller in Conversation with Sarah Lowndes’, originally appeared in Afterall Online, 3 February 2011.

‘Hole Punch: The Late Autobiographical Works of Dieter Roth’ originally appeared in Dieter Roth: Diaries, (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery / London: Yale University Press, 2012).

Introduction

All Art is Political is a collection of five in-depth interviews and essays written over a five-year period (2008–2012), which address the work of six post-war artists noted for their performative, participatory and process-based practices. Collectively the activities of artists and musicians Mayo Thompson and Keith Rowe, Berlin-based artist Thea Djordjadze, Glasgow-based Turner Prize winner Richard Wright, American conceptual artist Susan Hiller and German-Swiss artist and writer Dieter Roth span the time period from 1960 to the present day, and the artists have lived and worked in locales as diverse as New York, London, Tbilisi, Berlin, Los Angeles, Glasgow and Reykjavik. Yet there are marked commonalities between their artistic practices: namely an emphasis on making work that challenges the status quo, both in existing art practice and in wider society.

Many of the art works covered in this book can be understood as self-conscious experiments with the form and the conventions of exhibition and performance. This work encourages the viewer to think in new ways, as the material form is often ‘secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or dematerialized’.¹ Several of the artists use mundane everyday materials such as rubber erasers, old postcards, coffee grinds or cigarette ends, but through their presentation these are transformed into something unfamiliar and challenging. This activity of presentation and interpretation lies, in the words of Nancy Fraser, ‘not in an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theatre for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling’.² This book revolves around self-expression, individual autonomy and considerations of specific cultures: yet every example of activity that is discussed, whether a musical composition, a sculpture or a film, is also considered as a political act.

The title of this collection, All Art is Political, refers to George Orwell’s insistence that ‘In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics. All issues are political issues’³ Orwell exhorted people to become more conscious of the way in which they used words, explaining, ‘the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is the process is reversible’.⁴ Culture, when understood in this way, can be a conscious means of expression rather than a technique for concealing or preventing thought: ‘an instrument which we shape for our own purposes’.⁵

The idea of art as a vehicle for effecting social critique first gained real traction in Europe and America during the late 1960s, when the Anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements forced the question of the political commitment of artists onto the agenda in a way not seen since the end of the Second World War. The emerging conceptual art movement reflected many of the ideas associated with the protest movement and counter-culture, as many artists attempted to make work that challenged the prevailing consumer culture and resisted the existing structure of the art market. The emphasis on the relationship between art and audience in much conceptual art was part of an attempt to reinstate the connection between individual and society, and between artistic activity and social reality. As the West Coast artist and curator Tom Marioni wrote, ‘It was an invisible decade; the work that was produced had low commercial value; relics, documents and photos of events, earthworks and installations – all works not made as ends in themselves. It was a vital era and the art world could hardly wait for it to pass’.⁶

The heightened political atmosphere of the late 1960s created a sense that it was socially irresponsible for art only to address matters relating to art, an idea which lay behind a special edition of Artforum in autumn of 1970 which asked leading American artists to express their feelings on the current political situation. Donald Judd’s response seemed typical of a prevailing mood of resistance. He wrote, ‘The citizen, individual person has his interests and rights. He or she’s not and shouldn’t be an economic, military or institutional entity’.⁷ The sculptures and writings of Judd and contemporaries such as Robert Smithson and Robert Morris hold significance for the artists whose work I will be discussing, particularly in terms of the way in which their work rejected the tenets of Greenbergian formalism, in addressing both the role of the spectator, and the relationships between sculpture, performance and time.

Robert Morris’s mandate for the development of sculpture ‘Notes on Sculpture: Part I and II’ (1966)⁸ and Michael Fried’s famous counter-attack ‘Art & Objecthood’ (1967), are so well-known they hardly need to be discussed in detail here, except to make the point that the qualities that Fried identified as so problematic in the work of Morris and Judd (site-

specificity, temporality, ‘theatricality’) are precisely those that have shaped what might be called the performative.

Fried wrote, in words that have come (ironically) to be viewed as a premonition of the future direction of art, ‘Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art what is to be had from the work is located strictly within it, the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’.⁹

Although there were various strands of performance practice during the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a shared consensus that performance was concerned with ‘presence, liveness, agency, embodiment, and event’.¹⁰ The ‘now-ness’

of performance art endowed it with an oppositional edge¹¹ that reflected the mood of a wider youth culture pre-occupied not with history and traditions, but with the here and now. Mayo Thompson remembered of his 1960s explorations into experimental music that, ‘We felt an impulse, we felt an imperative to novelty, to do something that had not been done and to things that weren’t normally being done […] This led to a certain relationship to those strategies, where you don’t want to do the things that other people are doing, in fact’.

As Peter Braunstein and