“Writing Movement Choreographing Thought to Justify Aesthetic Principles” – an article from the WM call
By: Pavle Heidler
The relationship between the artist, his or her work, the audience and the structure that makes the interaction possible is a relationship most often analyzed and characterized by academic vocabularies and methods. As all academic efforts, these are great and are in service of an invaluable goal. To deny that would mean to willingly loose any or all credentials.
Be that as it may, academic efforts are aesthetically challenging because academia’s purpose is to process information, to define terms, concepts and values according to which knowledge can be made and global understanding achieved. Its purpose justifies its use of a specific, stiff language that is extremely articulated and beautifully precise; it is also language that is difficult to approach and takes a substantial amount of effort to understand.
The use of such language can fall short of success at articulating an analysis of human experience, because the expression of its analytical method is biased towards a conservative value system. Namely, objectivity. Objectivity is one of the qualities that academia values most. Academia values objectivity because it believes objective to be “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts”, it believes it to be “not dependent of the mind for existence” – if objective is understood according to the definition provided by the Oxford Dictionary. Such values influence academia’s aesthetic expression, the described specificity of which affects the number of its potential costumers. Valuable information stays closed off from potential public because of aesthetic priority.
In other words, it is reasonable for a group of experts to maintain a language, a method, a style of their own – if that is what speeds up their exchange and their progress. However, such a language is unavailable to anyone on the outside of the specific environment. This prevents the content from being shared. Given the expert’s consistent lack of effort in making the content publically available – the public eventually looses its interest. By loosing interest, the public looses its understanding of the necessity for the expert to exist, which is a problem familiar to experts in the field of contemporary art.
to knowledge or not to knowledge
When contemporary art claimed its right to naming segments of what it produces by the word knowledge it was immediately met with the demand on how that knowledge is to be articulated, organized and presented in order to, in fact, be recognized as knowledge. This means that within artistic discourse objectivity gained immediate fame. Works of art that claimed to be valuable in themselves, and not to be an expression of the artist’s opinions or feelings, were awarded esteem in their respective milieus. As did works of art that were to be understood rather than felt or experienced. In terms of dance, concept was becoming the signifier of status, making artists the likes of Jerome Bêl and Tino Seghal.
To this day objective-driven works have a hard time being accessed by a broad public. They continue to appeal to and are consumed by a very specific audience, one already familiar with its ways. To give an example: the research done by the Audience Agency showed that only 4% of British population maintains an intimate relationship with the contemporary arts. The Audience Agency describes the 4% as culture confident: these people enjoy the challenge provided for by a difficult work of art, they enjoy exploration and the process of broadening their horizons. In comparison, about 67% stands for those that interact with contemporary art regularly (once a year). The rest of the population, if my memory serves me right, was described as without a regular relationship with contemporary art and without interest expressed towards consuming contemporary art.
And so, where there already was an audience-dividing opposition between a traditional preference and a contemporary one, the field of contemporary was now provoking even more division, this time between difficult art and other. Small fields of expertise are being nourished by few who understand their value, giving rise to speculations about importance of investing in developments of artistic fields.
to have a valuable experience
I see the repercussions of such behavior as dangerous because society at large is loosing its general interest in the arts. Think only of all the European states that have cut funding to the artistic sector in the last couple of years.
Is, then, enforcing an audience-dividing opposition between felt and understood art in the given context (no matter there being a specific knowledge making argumentation) the right thing to do? This opposition doesn’t only result in aesthetic disagreements that create sub-groups within an already small sector that has difficulty justifying its public-sourced funds. It also inspires competition which slows down the exchange necessary for the developments of the field in which the creation and articulation of knowledge is already a difficult process. The movement of knowledge is slowed down, too. Movement that is by default slow and sluggish; considering the amount of time it takes a discovery to become confirmed, accepted, institutionalized and passed on to new generations.
Competition is also created in terms of what is to be considered high quality art and who has the power to organize the relation between the value of such art and the funding necessary for its development. Much competition is seen between disagreed sub-groups over scarce resources.
Another challenge to note here: how is a public supposed to relate to and grow to trust a field that is in a constant state of flux? Especially if that state of flux is pitched as the field’s creative potential? How is a public to understand that the specific knowledge produced by a small sector, such as contemporary dance is, has a greater potential and purpose than satisfying its creators and serving an intimate plan?
what is it about?
Ever since objectivity started to penetrate the art field, more often than not, audiences that see my work afterwards approach me with the question: “What is it about?” While often confused by such a question, I learned that the most constructive response is also in the form of a question: “What did you see?”
Next, our conversation usually flowers around the subject of dance. Is the thing I presented dance? Should they see it as dance and if so, why do they feel confused and unsatisfied? Why isn’t it more dance than it is?
When I point to the fact that the question of naming what I do as dance is not a topic I spend much time debating, but that my interest lies in questioning how dance or movement making can be put to use to question the process of expression making – and how the answer to this question depends on who the performance is being perceived by and how… then I most often get to listen to a rich monologue which consists of extremely well articulated experiences that were inspired by the affect of the performance itself.
What I noticed is that: 1) the accounted experiences are often well situated within the realm the show intellectually claims to “be about”, and that 2) the actual effects of the relationship between the spectator and the work of art produces an impact that is stronger and more memorable than any later intellectual justification I myself could come up with in order to answer the “what is it about” question. Answering that question would also introduce another problem: it would re-claim the value of the work of art as its author’s right of definition. And it does: every time the author explains his or hers work. This makes the author superior to the actual effects of his work; in the same way the objective “aboutness” of the work is superior to any one subjective experience (as is often the case with conceptual art).
Is not the value of a successful exchange between a work of art and its consumer an exchange of knowledge in its own right? Is not the subjective experience of art as valuable even though its format and its vocabulary don’t match academic structures and objectivity criteria, which have become necessary for information to be acknowledged as knowledge? Is it not important to credit the experience of interaction with artistic product in terms of knowledge production, so that we might challenge and expand our understanding of valuable progress, rather than remain in a closed and “safe” environment?
power relations and the meaning of it all
Contemporary dance is, as a context for knowledge, an extremely valuable art form. Materialized by the body, and inherently abstract, it inspires us to time and again come back to it and make an attempt at interpreting its correct meaning and value. This correct meaning and value always escape us, maybe because the art form reminds us that the answer is not in the traditionally singular statement and interpretation. The interaction between a dance and its spectator is a sharing of the information by means of the subjective perception. The “problem” lies in the potential success of such exchange, one that would prove the incredible value of a subjective experience, which could deny the existence of a general truth, but also the lack of necessity for its existence.
Because what if caring about the subjective means a development that will never again allow for a general structure? What if that means we will only ever be able to converse in terms of specific methods and specific content? Would such a demanding change of paradigm be possible without there being other great paradigm changes, like changing priorities in production value or existing relation to time?
And most importantly: whose authority would account for the decision necessary to carry out such a change, supposing sufficient interest for change existed?