September 29th, 2009
On Friday Valentina and I attended the performance “Individual Utopias” by Bosnian artist Lala Rascic & Vuneny at Galerie Zero. The performance is a retelling of an experience the artist had a couple of years ago when she was invited by the Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti to participate in a project with mental health patients in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a accompanied by an edition of 500 artist books with the script for the story as well as drawings of the cast of characters involved. The story is a funny account of the missteps and miscommunications between artists, arts organizations, social organizations, and the beneficiaries of social projects. Rascic highlights, through various voice impersonations, sound effects and clean sound design by Vuneny, the absurdity of the situation and vis-à-vis offers an institutional critique of the naivete of artist social projects. In her story everyone is uninformed, unable to communicate, and looking after their own interests only. Throughout, Rascic is at a distance, not aligning herself with the artists or with the locals, seemingly the only objective observer able to note the ridiculousness of the situation. It was a funny story, as those stories tend to be, and Rascic is a good storyteller. It was the kind of story you can imagine began over drinks at a bar, impersonating and laughing at the situation and then the idea occurred to make it into a performance. I have an interest in storytelling as a mode of performance and documentation, however in this case I wished the story would have remained a story told in the bar over drinks. As a performance it offered nothing further toward an analysis of the situation, it gave no new meaning or an opening for meaning, there was no room for side effects. The act of telling the story and the meaning contained in the story were synonomous. It was the kind of performance that you enjoy but wonder how or what this does to further a dialogue. Cesare Pietroiusti when discussing modes of documentation speaks about the potential for side effects, “Maybe we can imagine a situation where a message, working on a symbolic level (so, conceptually, on a different level than a direct ‘real time’ experience), does not determine only the fixity of a specific meaning, but also ’side’ meanings.”
There was a moment in Rascic’s story when she told of the complete breakdown of the project. According to her account the director of the project is complaining to Pietroiusti about the failure, the artists are not connecting with the mentally ill, the hospital director is hijacking the materials, and “art” has not transformed the lives of the patients. At which point Pietroiusti states that this is an experiment, that there is no way it is supposed to turn out, but rather that the situation itself for him is the project. He is conducting research, and the process as it unfolds informs his research. While this quotation may have been meant to place Pietroiusti also in the absurdity of the situation, it functioned as a nice reflection on the role and goals of the artist in social practice. Pietroiusti understands very well that the intention or even implimentation of an art project into a social context does not translate into social transformation. His goals are often to see what happens in the encounter between art and social realities, his research is to see what the potential of art is in such situations.
At work a couple of days prior to the performance, Laura, the other art teacher asked me about my practice. I told her of some of the participatory projects that I was involved with Cali, Colombia and in Bologna, Italy. She asked me about responsibility; she told me of having attended a talk by an artist who had done a workshop with immigrant children. The artist showed pictures of himself interacting with the children and also some of the drawings that the kids had made. Some of the drawings represented scenes of domestic abuse and she was appalled that the artist casually displayed these very personal drawings and did not address how he dealt with this. When she asked whether he had a strategy, support system, or training to deal with these things, he said that he did not. What was my position on this Laura wanted to know. I answered first that having an institutional support system (as we do in a school) does not necessarily offer any kind of better support, it just takes the responsibility off of us. I recounted a time when I was teaching in the Bronx and a students assumed my confidence to confide to me that she was abused by her father. I had to inform her that legally I have to report this to the school psychologist and beyond that there is nothing that I can offer. In this situation I was completely rendered paralyzed, whether I was able to deal with it or not. I was put in a place as a teacher where students could grow confident and safe in my presence but that when anything at all private came up I was no longer an autonomous acting agent. In the Bronx case I knew that the school psychologist would completely neglect or botch the entire issue, but that she was the one in the legal place to respond.
As an artist working in a social practice I state very clearly my area of research and the framework of each individual project; this is no different from an artist working in any other media. By being clear I am able to explore with specificity and intention my interests while allowing for new discoveries and unexpected outcomes. My interest is not solely to work with people, and what comes out comes out. I am specifically interested in the potential to imagine alternative realities and relationships. Each of my projects in some way addresses this specifically and the as people are participating in the project they are participating within a tightly defined frame. There is always a potential for unexpected outcomes, especially when working with people. However, since I have defined for myself what my area of research is, I also know what my capacities are, and how to deal with the unexpected within my framework. Like Pietroiusti, I view the process of people coming into encounter with art as research, and the potential “failure” as equally valuable as some pre-ordained idea of what success may be. In the mode of representation that a project assumes after its completion it is important that it act in a way reciprocal to the way a project unfolded. Allowing for meaning to be generated instead of illustrated, and that in this phase of the project there is still potential for new meaning and side effects.
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