| Subject: art,death,and illusion |
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stalebreath
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Date Posted: 17:39:41 05/01/03 Thu
Author Host/IP: elcamino.elcamino.cc.ca.us/198.188.6.246
If an artist prepares his death while creating his art work, - if work, material, artist, art-director, performer and the medium of performance coincide, then the artist gives a piece of his life to the illusion of art. Usually, a performance
begins and ends like a theatre-piece within a chosen frame of space and time. This frame is only conceptual, because the performance-figure will continue living after his performance has ended. This condition will alter completely if the
figure of the performance has committed suicide within his performance. This is a transition from normal life to the "life" of a performance, during which the figure is an imagined person. But when this figure commits suicide, as the case
might be, the end of the performance will join illusion and reality. The artist will be dead. In this extreme case, his art work would look as real as possible. Only in the memory of the public the art work would stay alive. The
performance was its birth, while the figure and the artist together are dead. The artist's death is proof for the reality of his art work. This extreme case shows the autonomy of the artist, who wants to decide about life and death as his last
creative act as an art-director of his own. It is as if he does not want to leave his death to his Great Creator, but to his art alone.
When the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader in 1976 announced on a postcard his solitary performance "Search of the Miraculous", that he would be sailing from Florida to Amsterdam in 1976 in a Dinghy, nobody tried to keep him off his
dangerous and absurd plan. And nobody saw him again. It might have been suicide or just an accident, perhaps not even planned but a challenge. It was, of course, his last work. There was no doubt about his intention expressed by his
invitation card, because Bas Jan Ader never was afraid to avoid the most dangerous kind of performances. In 1970, for instance, he dropped from the roof of a small house in Los Angeles, which was filmed on a 16 mm film ("Val 1, Los
Angeles"). With this remarkable action he wanted to treat his body as material for a sculpture and show the effect of gravity. It was a kind of body art. There is no doubt that his sailing-trip was meant as a conceptual art work, which
brought its author to vanish, but, of course, the work would continue to exist as made by the author. Such paradoxities are typical for this sort of art works. Nevertheless an attempt to search for Ader at sea was started - without any
result. If he would have been found, one would have taken away the completion of the "miraculous", which he seemed to have longed for. Dying for your art work - this Sigmund Freud did not mention, when he formulated his theory of
the urge for death (Todestrieb).
On the one hand, the performance of Bas Jan Ader followed the tradition of the concept art, in which the artist makes a plan for his proposed action in a quite distant way. On the other hand, he operated in the romantic line. In some
paintings of Caspar David Friedrich a ship is a typical symbol for the vanishing life. A lonely little sailingboat emerges in the mist on Friedrichs painting of 1807 called "Beach in the Mist". In the so-called century of sensibility and the
German literary movement of the "Sturm und Drang" the death of a genius was one of the most discussed figures of art work such as, first of all, Goethe's "Werther". Bas Jan Ader would lean on this esthetic tradition of the farewell, the
sadness and the departure to the "horizon of death". But we have to realize the differences: In the time of historical romanticism at 1800, illusion and reality did never coincide. While the romantic heritage still exists in our time, the
illusion was brought into reality, where it seems to have given up its character. That has important effects. In the melancholy of the art lover about the vanishing author of the art work, real pity and real abjection are mixed. By bringing
illusion and reality together, as it was the very aim of the avangardists of the 20th century, art could be made real, irreversible and not repeatable. The death of the artist within his art work is the most extreme case of an avantgarde-art
work.
Already Antonin Artaud, the author of the passionate manifesto "Le thtre de la cruaut" (The theatre of cruelity of 1947), argued that fiction on stage was just a lie. On the 25th of May in 1924 he wrote his editor Jacques Rivire:
"Why lies, why do you want to bring some-thing on a literary level, which is the cry of life itself, why to give something, which consists of the unvanishing substance of the soul, as the wailing about reality, to the fiction of a novel?".
I doubt, Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you are able to look at fiction and reality at the same time. To stand at a distance and to look at the art work from an esthetic point of view - and at the same time to take, what you see, as pure
reality, seems to me impossible. If we look to a theatre-piece or a film, we can feel pity with the protagonists as much as we enjoy the esthetic values of the art work. But in the case of art and real life, our perception has to switch from
the esthetic point of view two real feelings for the suffering human being. An example as the so-called "cube of Necker", which Josef Albers designed in the fifties, might proof my point. You will never see the cubes from both sides at
the same time. You have to switch the image in your consciousness. I will come back to this point later.
If we now turn away from the image of Ader's dinghy to the fact of the really dying artist in his work we are dealing with a whole range of traditional sources. I will only touch upon a few of them. The tradition of the self-portrait is
perhaps the most important source for this performances, also the "allgorie relle", which shows the emblem in real circumstances. Another is the ready made, which according to the protagonist of the Fluxus-movement Georges
Maciunas was not invented for things only, but also for gestures, human attitudes and real actions. The history of performances in general belongs to this range of traditions, from the futurists to the Actionists in Vienna, who maltreated
their body. In the basso continuo of this art you still realize the art of metamorphoses, the process art and - generally spoken - "Bad Art", which one constantly discusses from new perspectives. One of the first writers who commented
ugliness in art was the German Classicist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was not at all able to hold up the big stream of ugliness in art, always again sucking away classical beauty and harmony. In this context of bad art the item of the
dying artist belongs to the sublime and the exploration of taboos . Last but not least you might remember the rich tradition of martyrdom shown in art. The contemporary term "Victim Art" - as recently heard in New York, which means
to present the dying artist in his art work - is rooted in this tradition. The question arises, whether such performances follow the same development and how they are accepted by the viewers and how they should be perceived.
In the beginning of the art of the avant-garde the joining of performance art and real dying did not take place in its last consequence. When Kazimir Malewitch died on the 15th of May in 1935 in his flat in St.Petersburg, he lay in bed
and his coffin stood upright next to it. Painted on it by Malewitch himself were the symbolic signs of suprematism: the black square and the black circle. Malewitch died under his suprematistic icon: the painting called "black square",
which was hanging on the wall. This art and the artist were then brought to the house of the INCHUK, where his pupils made a sort of stage-set of them. Again the main art works of Malewitch played their role in this setting as if they
guarantee eternity, while the artist died. The funeral itself did not alter this concept. His painting "Black Square" was put on the bonnet, while the black limousine drove the coffin to the graveyard. Obviously, his work should replace the
artist.
In some other cases the dramaturgical set of two art works can be similar but the meaning of it can be completely different. The Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken made a film of himself during his fatal illness in 1990. He could
be seen lying in a fourposted bed like a duke and talking as a wise man at the end of his life. Another case is the American artist Bob Flanagan, who suffered from Cystic Fibrosis, and who exhibited himself in 1994 in a so-called hospital
room installed in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Van der Elsken's bed and that of Bob Flanagan seemed to be "the world's a stage" (as Shakespeare would say). But both works should perceived differently. It was not
the only work Flanagan made out of his situation. After Flanagan's death the filmer Kirby Dick and Flanagan's wife, Sheree Rose, put together all the filmed images of Flanagan's extreme performances, which in 1996/7 resulted in the
film entitled "Sick". But while van der Elsken wanted to show his dying process in odd beauty and as a metamorphosis of wisdom and completion, and while the viewer, being no participant in this, was sad about it, but somehow even
glad,- Flanagan directed himself to the viewer, as the title of his work "Visiting Hours" made clear. He intended a social act of communication with the visitor, hoping that fascination and sensation would change into a sort of human act
of interest. A green plastic chair next to his high hospital-bed was offered to the visitor. Viewing altered into visiting. The indirectly light behind the ill person's head gave him a holy aura. In a real hospital you probably would not notice
this, but in the tradition of art every detail of a set gets a double meaning.
From Malewitch to Flanagan one can speak of a sixty years period of this trend of an art, in which the subject of the dying artist brings together fiction and reality. His or her death forms the absolute end of the art work. Another way
of ending this sort of art when the attempt of suicide is interrupted. There are famous examples of it. One is Stanley Brouwn, who in 1965 was standing in a corner of a room in the Gallery Patio in Neuisenburg. He pulled a long
transparent bag over his head, sat down and stayed calm for a while, as if nothing was wrong. He looked like an object in a show-case. After a while he began breathing faster and faster in need of fresh air. Suddenly he pulled the bag from
his head - just in time. Nobody in the audience helped him. Were the people expecting a bad end and therefore did not move or were they shocked? Or were they so sure nothing serious would happen and the artist would not go too far?
Were they just waiting for Brouwn's selfliberation and the true end of the performance? Outside of the aura and the authority of the art work certainly the police or an ambulance would have been called. But experience with modern art did
teach the people that there are different laws for different cultures and traditions on the basis of cultural agreement. There is the law of a liberty for the arts and the artists and the rule for a liberal perception which makes objecting against
them unwelcome. Since the work of John Cage these kinds of cultural agreements were tested regularly again and again. In doing so the conditions were the subjects of the works themselves and a special kind of reception of these
conditions was intended.
The Living Theatre of Julian Beck in New York is an example of this process. They first wanted to test the conditions of theatre itself, secondly they tried to dissolve the borders between fiction and reality and third they tried to make
the people responsible for the Vietnam War. Screeming in agony the street-performers lay directly at the pedestrian's feet, after they had been shot by an execution platoon. Who exactly lay dying on the street, nobody knew. Is this a
theatrical or real dying? And how would the passers-by react? Would they dare to give some help to the dying? Nobody did. Probably they could tell the difference between fiction and reality. Who knows: they did not express any emotion.
Their pity was invisible, absent perhaps or still bedded in their imagination - as always when you look at a tragedy which takes place on stage.
There are exceptions as always, because, without feelings of responsibility for the artist in danger shown by a member of the audience, Marina Abramovic and Jochen Gerz would not be alive. Although not intended to be saved,
Marina Abramovic was rescued in time. Lying in a pentagram of lines of burning sawdust, her intention was to melt together with her art work in that sign of perfection, which the pentagram is. Joseph Beuys, who saw this performance
in 1974 in the Cultural Student's Center in Belgrado, warned her emphatically because he immediately realized the danger of her not getting oxygen inmidst the flames. But Marina Abramovic wanted to explore the coinciding of her
personal physical border with the abstract border for the art work. "You have to see my work as abstract" she argued in 1975, "even the pain of death in art can be an abstract subject." Somebody pulled her out of the flames just in time.
The real work was not finished, visitors had to finish the work in their imagination. Most of them stayed passive witnesses. They did not realize that they were tested, too, in fact as co-performers or pityfull citizens. From 1993 on
Marina Abramovic called her performances "teaching situations". She questioned the metamorphosis of the visitor. "Can one arrive at another state of mind?", she asked. She hit the nail on the head of the utopian idea of the healing power
of art. In this idea a certain hermeneutica is intended.
James Lee Byars did a similar performance twenty years later in Gent in order to make his death ritual. While he lay down on the ground, he was dressed in a golden suit, stretching his limbs out in the form of a pentagram, the
symbol of eternity, as Marina did before. He, however, did not practise or challenge any dangerous strategy. In fact, he played a role,- the role he felt very close to because of his fatal illness from which he was suffering at that time.
While laying on the ground he scattered some diamonds around, acting like a shaman with his insignia, which you might call requisites in theatre, but sacra in mystery-plays. His silent performance carried the message of hope, that art
could concur death. Therefore the visitor did not feel an urge to help.
This was the opposite in a performance of Jochen Gerz, who just wanted to test the feelings of responsibility or potential of aggression of the viewer of his performance. In 1979 in Genve he remained invisible for the visitors of the
Centre d'Art Contemporain, where his performance took place. On two monitors, you could see the head and the neck of Gerz (taken by the camera from two different angles) and the noose of a rubber band around his neck. The rubber
band was stretched out from his neck through the room where he sat in, and through the wall to the room next door where the visitors could observe the monitors, and on through this room to an opposite wall where the band was fixed.
Nobody besides the artist and the organizers knew, that Gerz was sitting next door. As soon as one visitor pulled the stretched rubber band, they all could realize what happened on the monitor: The band around Gerz'neck would be pulled
tighter and tighter limiting his proper breathing. The game meant pain for the victim. The public went on playing, until someone understood that the strangled victim was sitting next door and - just in time - cut the rubber band. In the
few reports about this test, nothing is said about some visitors who might perhaps have refused to pull the rubber band or even have protested. A similar thing happened in the famous research-project of the American behaviorist Stanley
Milgram. In his book "Obedience to Authority. An Experimental View" he describes the willingness of the test-persons to be aggressive and even to murder, if they believe their cooperation would serve science. In this research-project the
so-called victim was sitting next door, unseen, but heard because of his immediate cries as soon as the test-person pushed the button indicating increasing electric power, to which the so-called victim was assumingly connected. The
test-person did not know, of course, that this connection was a fake. Her she had to believe that he would cause the victim's death. He just did what the scientist ordered. Only ten percent of the test-persons protested to switch the last and
lethal button. The others did not want to act against the authority of scientific research.
Did Jochen Gerz get the same result? Were his visitors ready to bring the game to a fatal end, because they believed in the authority of an art work? Were they right in understanding the title of this performance "Purple Cross for
Absence Now", that the artist's face was crossed by the rubber band and that he just wanted to be crossed? Does not the tradition of participation of the viewer in art urge to the opinion that participants have the right to act in a way the art
work is asking for? That they should take the opportunity to be creative within the rules the art work offers? And does not the tradition of "art as a game - the game as art" force the public to behave within the frame of the rules,
innocently and unconsciously? And is not the promise of freedom, which this tradition of art as a game offers to the participant and which the art of avant-garde constantly has presented, responsible for the fact that the visitor of the
performance of Gerz should take his liberty to pull as hard as he wanted to? Milgram answered indirectly to this dilemma:" Very often, it is not the character of a man, which determines his action, but the character of a situation, in which
he behaves." It is the last sentence of Milgram's book. There seems to be no guilt. Who should judge the visitor? The seduction within the rules of the art work is great, even if you may bring the artist's life to end. And - by the way, the
viewer saw only the monitors and did not know that there was a close TV-circuit. Rules, which can be driven too far, - beauty in opposition to morality, liberty as unfreedom, game to murder -, also this work of Gerz we may define as a
"teaching situation". Sensitivity, responsibility and consciousness were tested. Gerz scratched the surface and the dishonesty of the human, social and cultural virtues were exposed.
The hermeneutica of the involvement of the viewer through art starts with Aristotle, of course, with his theory of catharsis, and went on to Edmund Burke's thoughts about the Sublime and Schiller's theory about the "Trauerspiel" up
to Gernot Boehme's contemporary lectures about "Involvement" at the Technical Highschool in Darmstadt. But none of them mentioned the involvement of a viewer when the artist really dies within the rules of his art work. Can you
describe the involvement, as Marina Abramovic tried to do, when she saw a performance of Ben d'Armagnac in 1978? Dressed in black, Ben was laying on the white terrace of the Brooklyn Museum in New York, while a hard jet of water
constantly splashed down on his heart. His chest went up and down quickly, while his heavy breathing could be heard from loudspeakers. Sometimes his arms moved a little bit, as Marina wrote later. Suddenly nothing happened anymore,
nothing moved, no noise...The witnesses gazed at the rigid corpse - until Ben jumped up and went away. In front of the viewers a drama did take place. The artist had had his purification ritual set into a dualistic black and white and a
struggle of warmth against the cold. The performance ended with the hero, who concurred the cold, so it seemed. And one should not tell in this context, perhaps, that Ben d'Armagnac really died some weeks later by drowning in one of
Amsterdam's canals, because that was not meant as an art work. When taking in consideration the feelings of the viewers of this water-jet-performance one might quote Friedrich Nietzsche's term of "a sudden moment of emotion", in
which notions of space and time for the present and the future vanish and a feeling of horror takes over. According to the philosopher, in this sudden moment you will feel the essence of life as during the feast of Dionysos. But Nietzsche
never was a witness of art in which the subject of fiction and that of reality were congruent.
In a most provocative way, Chris Burden has caused not only the moment of shock but also one of involvement, when in 1971 he let himself be shot during his performance "Shoot". Fortunately the shooting man aimed on his arm
(due to an agreement before, which nobody else knew). Burden showed his wound to the public as if his body matter had just undergone a metamorphosis: as if his own body was a piece of sculpture. It seemed to be a quotation of a work
of Niki de St.Phalle who let her hidden tubes of paint in her painter's cloth be shot at in order to release the colours, or of Lucio Fontana's, who cut into the linen to sat real space free, or of Gnther Brus' who in 1964 assumingly cut his
body in two parts ("Selfmutilation-act").
Walter de Maria reversed the roles of viewers and artists: in his "suicide-box" the viewer could now make an end to his own life. To be involved in art means to die in it. To think of such a consequence was typical for the Cage-School
with which Walter de Maria was familiar. John Cage took the conditions of art as subject - as did Walter de Maria in his early works. His "suicide-box"" was both an environmental and a conceptual work at the same time. In the case of
the "Visiting Hours" of Bob Flanagan, the artist seems to be no longer interested in the research of conditions. One could define it as a dislocation art work because of the renewed presentation of a hospital room in a museum. But this
would not be the core of the question. Its purpose is the dialogue between the sick artist and his visitor in an hour of saying good-bye, in a moment of tenderness and understanding. No longer can Burden's work "Shoot" fascinate people
in the sense of asking for an abstract view on changing material. Flanagan's work seems to belong to another tradition, which Joseph Beuys in 1976 begun with his work: "Show your wound", in which two high stretches on wheels and
other objects were exhibited in an underpath. Men, dead or alive, was, although invisible, still present there. Artists such as Beuys and Flanagan dedicate their work to life. It is an anthropological sort of art, not only a conceptual or
body-art-like presentation. It is possible that Beuys inspired Flanagan.
At this point one has to ask again, as I doubted in the beginning of this lecture, how these extreme performances should be perceived. On the basis of two models of perception taken from mythology I want to try and formulate an
answer. I call these two models Parsifal's view and the view of Orpheus. The view of Narcissus into the mirror of the water-surface which caused his self-love, can not be transmitted to a viewer of these sort of performances and will
therefore not be discussed here.
Let us try to test Parsifal's view first. He is the pure fool, who's medieval legend was taken by Richard Wagner for his last opera called "Bhnenweihstck". The legend tells the old story how a person a person becomes a true human.
Parsifal should not only look to what happens around him, but learn to feel pity for other people and to take the consequences out of it for his action in the sense of a revelation. Well, Bob Flanagan asks the viewer to become his visitor
and to sit down next to him on his green chair. Shall the visitor just look at him or help him to overcome his illness? Friedrich Nietzsches argument that man can only carry the burden of his own tragic role in the mirror of fiction does
not apply here. Because the difference is: the viewer would have to reach his hand so to speak through the mirror of fiction to true life. The aim of avant-garde to let art vanish into life would again be believable because of Flanagan's
work seen form Parsifal's viewpoint.
If we test Orpheus' view for the same work, the situation will change completely. The singer from antiquity did not give life a chance, for he was told not to look back when taken his dead wife Eurydike out of the underworld. He did
look back and consequently lost her forever. Thanks to the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, who discovered in 1955 the importance of Orpheus' view for the perception of art in general, we can use this model today. Actually
Blanchot did not think of art works in which the artist is going to die. Orpheus' view means in the case of Flanagan's "Visiting hours", that if the visitor will stop looking at him from an esthetic and distant point of view and will not sit
down and speak to the artist, you would bring the artist to death by looking at him like to an art object. Orpheus, also an artist, extracted inspiration for his art by gazing to his wife and killed her in this paradoxical strategy. Bob
Flanagan demasked the attitude of the viewer. The orphean gaze gives the living body the status of art, before it dies. Who looks in this way, will take the responsibility for the art work and not for the human being.
Parsifal and Orpheus give examples of two sorts of view, which one can never have at the same time. Only by switching from one to the other while looking to the same art work, one can understand the ambiguities in full. The
viewer might discover the demon and the melancholy in himself by realizing the gap between life and art, human and esthetic questions.
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