Does postgraduate study make for better art?

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At the ACUADS conference a few weeks back, the final panel discussion tackled this question:

“What impact are higher degree research programs having on emerging trends and themes in contemporary art?”

There were some interesting responses from the panel which included Tony Bond, Rebecca Coates, Chris McAuliffe, and Kate Daw. But nobody seemed to answer the question in the very literal way I wanted it answered. So I threw a more specific and perhaps reductive question to the panel:

“Do artists who complete PhDs produce better art than they did before?”

(M’colleague Maria Miranda has gone on an interesting excursion with this question at her blog, over here.)

After much humming and harring, the panel produced no real consensus – but if anything, the answer did seem to be tending towards the negative: “No – PhDs in creative practice do not lead to discernably better artists, nor the production of better artworks”. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but really I was a bit shocked (I feel naive even writing that here). So, at the risk of cementing my position as a naive utopianist, here’s my opening gambit:

Surely one of the fundamental reasons for the existence of creative practice based PhDs should be that they result in better artworks. Surely? If not, then what’s the point?
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‘Socially Engaged Artists’ are people who…

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‘Socially engaged artists’ are  people who get to count as artists be virtue of their usual or self-defining artwork-making role within the artworld.

They then make use of this status (exploit it, if you like) by messing about in the real world outside the artworld, making things and doing things that they want people who normally would never go into an art gallery to look at and think about in the best sort of open-minded way in which people who do go into art galleries look at and think about things.

…that is to say, as sites of potential illumination (the acquisition of new memes) in any of the domains of human concern: moral, political, economical, scientific, legal, charitable, religious, and whatever. Even aesthetic illumination if there is such a thing (whatever, if anything, an aesthetic illumination may amount to that beats seratonin stimulators).

-Donald Brook, email to Lucas Ihlein, 14 September 2013.

Reconciling Values

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Recently I posted these brief thoughts on the issue of Transfield’s sponsorship of the Sydney Biennale, over at the Open Engagement blog: http://openengagement.info/home/archives/5200. The blog post is part of a series that OE is hosting, where 100 questions are posed, broadly addressing ethics and aesthetics around socially engaged art practice. The series is co-ordinated by Gemma Rose Turnbull, Ariana Jacob, and Jen Delos Reyes.
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Personal Narrative in the Digital Age

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Yesterday I participated in an online discussion with Anna Poletti, as part of the 2014 Digital Writers Festival.

Our discussion panel was entitled “Personal Narrative in the Digital Age”, and was archived on Youtube. You can watch it here or here.

We spoke about autobiography and its relationship to blogging and micro-blogging platforms. One of the interesting ideas coming from Anna’s work is that autobiography doesn’t need to be “written” or even “narrative” – it can be constructed unintentionally via a fragmentary collage of phatic publishing events (like “pokes” in facebook, or the curated uploading of bio-images and other professional data).

We also talked about the current craving for “authenticity” and coherence, which may be the flipside of this more fragmented kind of identity formation process.

I enjoyed the online discussion format – and I hope that more conferences can be run this way in the future – definitely less travel per unit of discourse!

My work with re-enactment…

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Precursors:

I’ve been working on re-enactments in one way or another since about 1996, when I did a performance work called Cornflakes in Perth. It was, in some way, about the daily re-enactment of getting out of bed and eating breakfast.

Another early work, The Peg#24 Pieces (1996), in collaboration with Mick Hender, explored the relationship between performative action and score.

Fluxus and Happenings:

In 2002, I conducted (sort of in the way a conductor conducts an orchestra) a re-enactment of Albert M Fine’s Fluxorchestra for 24 Performers. It was part of a project called Bilateral, where I lived in the gallery of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide for the duration of the exhibition.

The Fluxorchestra was a classic Fluxus event which had a wonderful series of scores (one for each participant) that could be followed, and drew in many members of the local arts community for a celebration of the absurd. I’d very much like to do it again sometime.

In 2009, I worked with Nick Keys and Astrid L’Orange to re-enact Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull – a Furniture Comedy for Hans Hoffman – a happening/environment from 1963. This was part of There Goes the Neighbourhood, at Performance Space.

Our version of Push and Pull was documented heavily as a blog.
The great thing about this was that the documentation from our re-enactment goes back to the Allan Kaprow estate, where it becomes part of the ongoing narrative about this work.

Expanded Cinema:

Via Fluxus, I became fascinated with Expanded Cinema, which is a performative branch of experimental film culture from the 1960s. There are significant crossovers between Fluxus, performance art and Expanded Cinema – VALIE EXPORT and Carolee Scheeman being two examples.

Working collaboratively with SMIC (Sydney Moving Image Coalition), and in particular with Louise Curham, I embarked on a series of experiments with re-enacting key works of Expanded Cinema from the past. These early attempts (2003-5) were pretty rough but they set us on our path. Our later works were very research intensive.

Here’s some info about our re-enactment work with SMIC (which we later renamed Teaching and Learning Cinema).

Our two most significant Expanded Cinema re-enactments to date are:

Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975) (re-enacted in 2007)(about which I wrote a chapter for Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield’s book Perform Repeat Record.

and

Guy Sherwin’s Man with Mirror (1976) (re-enacted in 2009-onwards).

In May 2013, Louise Curham and I went to London to begin work with Malcolm Le Grice on re-enacting a work of his from 1971, Horror Film 1. This re-enactment will continue to be developed during 2014.

This is a fairly clear description of our general work with re-enacting Expanded Cinema.

Daily life in a Cagean frame:

My 2005-6 twin projects, Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham, were for me an “evolved re-enactment” of John Cage’s 4’33”. In the methodology underlying these projects, I took Cage’s 4’33” as a format or template, and shifted it to my own time and place. While Cage’s piece tends to be performed in a concert hall, and lasts only four minutes and thirty three seconds, my projects took his template into a neighbourhood social sphere, extended the duration to 2 months of my own daily life, and registered the chance occurrences through blogging. (To be clear: at the time, this Cagean connection was not foregrounded publically as the reason for the work’s existence, but was rather an unspoken skeleton shaping my daily practice).

Intergenerational Revisitations:

In 2011, I began working with Ian Milliss, a veteran Aussie conceptual artist, on a re-enactment of his Yeomans Project from 1975-6. It is in some ways more of an enactment, in that the original work never came to pass back in the 1970s. This intergenerational contact (Milliss, as well as Guy Sherwin, Anthony McCall, etc) is an ongoing part of my practice.

Discussions around re-enactment and performance:

In 2012, I convened a panel discussion with Christopher Hewitt and Andrea Saemann, on re-enacting performance art at University of Wollongong. It was part of a symposium called Expanded Documentary.

Lucas Ihlein – Philosophy of Teaching

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The following text was written up for two reasons. First, I was invited to be an external “Artist-Teacher” for Carrie Ramig, an MFA student from Vermont College of Art in USA. The college required me to submit a “philosophy of teaching” statement. (A what?)

And second, I’ve been enrolled in a “University Learning and Teaching” (ULT) subject at University of Wollongong – theory and activities to help improve my teaching practices at tertiary level. This ULT subject also required me to write up a rudimentary “Statement of my Conception of Teaching”.

I’ve tried to put it as clearly as possible – and it doesn’t have much in the way of contemporary educational theory. You could look at this as “where I was at before I read a whole lot about tertiary classroom education and spoiled my innocence” …
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Albert M. Fine’s PIECE FOR FLUXORCHESTRA

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AM FINE FLUXORCHESTRA

This tiny image is all I could dredge up on the web for this wonderful Fluxus performance. It looks like the score used to be available at Printed Matter, but not anymore.

I conducted an enactment of this piece in 2002 at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide (precisely, at the Mercury Cinema) – a few notes on the larger project within which the event was conducted are here. For this enactment, I re-typed all of Fine’s scores and customised them a bit for the local context, and I also added in a few extra performers.

Here’s how the piece works:

There’s an individual score, typed up on an individual card for each performer, and each performer is in the dark about what the others are going to do. From memory, there are 24 performers.

Each score has a series of numbers running down the page, 1 to 15. These represent minutes. Thus the piece goes for 15 minutes. Each performer has to watch the clock and carry out the relevant instruction as each minute ticks around. If a number has nothing written next to it, the performer does nothing.

When I conducted the work, I inserted it as a ‘secret’ piece in the middle of an evening of film screenings called “Film” films? Fine! at the Mercury Cinema in Adelaide. The films shown were Buster Keaton’s Film and Gustav Deutsch’s Film Ist.

There were more than 24 people in the audience. Those who were not performers in the Fluxorchestra had no idea about what was going to happen.

The event was the aggregate of all the things that took place within that fifteen minutes.

It was pretty impossible to document. A video was shot – it’s mainly useful for the audio recording however, as the cinema was quite dark.

Here’s a re-typing of the score for the first performer:

AM FINE: PIECE FOR FLUXORCHESTRA. FLUXPERFORMER NO.1

1.
2. Clap loudly at indeterminate intervals for short lengths of time
3. Yell: “Damn this boredom”, get up and walk out.
4.
5.
6.
7. Re-enter and sit somewhere else, eating a bag of potatochips loudly, sharing them with your neighbors. When the bag is empty, inflate and
8. explode it with a bang if possible.
9. Chat with your neighbors, interrup it suddenly without warning and yell: “What do you think this is – Ben Vautier and Total Art?” then
10. resume your conversation
11. Continue conversation or remain quiet. Burp.
12. Get up and walk out. Come right back in and announce: “I’m as much
13. it as anything.” Sit in original seat.
14. Take a balloon from pocket and inflate it until it bursts.
15. Walk out.

“Experimental Art” is a Tautology

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In the process of putting together a grant application on behalf of the Big Fag Press, I’ve been thinking a little about the notion of experimentation in art. This has been prompted by a new category of funding, called “Experimental Art Grants“:

These grants support artists, groups and organisations investigating experimental arts.

It is an open grant category for any stage of your experimental arts activity that meets the selection criteria.

Some examples of what you might apply for include investigating new emerging and experimental arts processes in a creative arts lab or through workshops; initiating innovative creative collaborations and partnerships; or creating and/or presenting new and experimental art work.

To keep this program as open as possible, Inter-Arts will consider any proposal from artists proposing to explore emerging or experimental arts.

Two questions:

  1. what the hell is “experimental art”?
  2. are there any examples of art which are not experimental?

…if the answer to question 2 is NO, then what is the need for this grant category?
If all art is inherently experimental, then surely the existing categories of art funding would already adequately support the experimental.

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