Reading and Foto: Open Letter to artists.Sara Wookey
http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/open-letter-to-artists/
QUOTES:
“I wanna a voice, loud and clear”
” Artists of all disciplines deserve fair and equal treatment and can organize if we care enough to put the effort into it”
We all do have a voice that potentially can be clear and loud. What defines the way that this voice comes out and how is used? At my opinion, it is not only a matter of the artist’s world. It is something that concerns each individual and the way that copes with exploitation, violence of rights, discrimination, submission to power. And this clear and loud voice is related to the sense of responsability.
SUMMARY of the article.
Event: Marina Abramović. Annual gala of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (2011)
The artist Sara Wookey writes an open letter in order to explain the reasons for which she refused to parteciapte as performance, even if she was selected for the role and express her opposition against the labor exploitation. The main reasons of her actions are:
- to add my voice *(“I wanna a voice, loud and clear”)
- to clarify my identity
- to prompt a shift of thinking
- to support my overriding interest in organizing and forming a union that secures labor standards and fair wages.
She states that the conditions of the work were problematic, exploitative, and potentially abusive. Specifically:
- I was expected to lie naked and speechless on a slowly rotating table.
- I was expected to ignore any potential physical or verbal harassment while performing
- I was expected to commit to fifteen hours of rehearsal time
- I was to be paid $150.
- During the audition, there was no mention of safeguards, signs, or signals for performers in distress.
- no official or even unofficial standard practice measures for working conditions, compensation, and benefits for artists and performers.
” I refuse to be a silent artist”
“I want to suggest another mode of thinking: When we, as artists, accept or reject work, when we participate in the making of a work, even (or perhaps especially) when it is not our own, we contribute to the establishment of standards and precedents for our cohort and all who will come after us.”
“I am grateful to Rainer for utilizing her position” ( Follows an article regarding Rainer’s reaction ) http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/750038/yvonne-rainer-denounces-marina-abramovics-planned-moca-gala-performance-as-grotesque
ABOUT THE COMMENTS:
- The most of the people that reply in the blog are feeling to be rappresented by Sara’s voice.Mainly one sided comments.
- Interesting the opposition of Doran Georg: “
“Despite your claim that your agenda is ethical rather than artistic criticism, you use the performance practice of silence and duration as the metaphor for enduring an ethically and economically dubious situation.”
“I am concerned about the conditions for all artists, “live art” is too easily wrapped up with exploitation because historically it has been misunderstood, and often explicitly engages with power in its practice.!
- and of the partecipant on teh event SC Fallou:
” I feel a certain righteous tone belies the rightful perspectives in your post, a tone which invalidates each artist’s will and choices involved in this event”
“The pool of power, money and resources represented under that tent that night, and the systems which the event symbolized are indeed the issues which need to be addressed, not a single artist’s choices nor the tip-of-the-iceberg banal (albeit interesting-weird in this case) gala format itself.”
http://iamled.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/artists-exploiting-artists/
“Ms Abramovic is so wedded to her original vision that she – and by extension, the Museum director and curators — doesn’t see the egregious associations for the performers, who, though willing, will be exploited nonetheless. Their desperate voluntarism says something about the generally exploitative conditions of the art world such that people are willing to become decorative table ornaments installed by a celebrity artist in the hopes of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves” Y. Rainer.
Is it about performer’s exploitation or about Abramovic?
What about Santiego Sierra?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naoYNgnDUl8
What about Vanessa Beecroft?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkVFm0pvPmA
Reading and Notes: Grindon; surrealism,dada and the refusal of work
Reading and Notes:Bourdieu.The rules of art
QUOTES
1. “I am the wound, and yet the knife!
The smack and yet the cheek that takes it!
The limb, and yet the wheel that breaks it,
The torturer and he who is flayed!” Baudelaire
2.
“The producer of the value of the work of art is not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief which produces the
value of the work of art as a fetish by producing the belief in the creative power of the artist. Given that the work of art does not exist
as a symbolic object endowed with value unless it is known and .recognized”
Reading and Foto:BASIC INCOME BEYOND WAGE SLAVERY
BASIC INCOME BEYOND WAGE SLAVERY: IN SEARCH OF TRANSCENDING POLITICAL AESTHETICS.
Lasse Ekstrand and Monika Wallmon.
QUOTES:
- “If we understand art, we don´t need it!”
- Art is a social activity and everyone is contributor. Art is not to be “seen”: art is doing.” (J.Beuys)
I like this quote because through this statement Beuys challenges the artist´s role and provokes deep reflections about the importance (or not) of understanding the Art. What really means “I understand art”? How much important is to whome the art is delivered?
On the second quote Beuys focus on thte social and active aspect of art.
“Dear artist, I don´t know what you want to say with this art-piece. My mind cannot recompose the puzzle of your thoughts. I am wondering : Do I really need to understand what you are trying desperately to tell me?Do you want to tell me something?Is it so important?I speak to you, dear artist. Why did you choose this word, this action, this place, this color, this shape? I strive to find something concrete in your art-piece that will reflect a part of myself. What do y0u want from me, dear artist? what do you expect from me?…to react?…..to reflect?…..to empathize? ……to get upset?……..to be confused?….to feel frustrated?…. to wake up? to feel happy?…hmmm….I need to understand… But now I realize that I grow up too much..I am an adult. The child on the other side of the room just looks at your art-piece. ..just looks and feels and seems not to worry to understant what you want to say..this child seems already to know…”
SUMMARY NOTES
- This paper joins the argument for the payment of an unconditional Basic Income to all members of a post-industrial society. It aims to demonstrate how aesthetic philosophy , particularly as developed by the German artist J. Beuys, collaborates with the welfare theory, how important and urgent is the BI discourse.
- Learned helplessness , Social Art, Liberation: three dimensions related to the welfare theory
“Welfare theory”
- Man needs to work in order to produce and reproduce, but work is not per -se labour work, and it must not be.
- Ethic of labour and aesthetics of non- labour
- Theory of “free time”. Liberation of the individual. Creative growth. New ways of thinking an acting.
- Mans own the possiblity to discover his/her own capacities.
Aesthetics and Politics.
- The purpose of the art is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to want and custom, perfect the power to perceive. (Dewey)
- Lyotard: aethetics is the main mode of human Knowldedge.
Beuys.
- Suggests that social action is to be considered as art and art as social action.
- Social Sculpture: Interaction of individuals who start to built a sculpture with a creative and open mind. The do not lasting longer than necessary.
- action.
- The artist´s role.
- ” Art is not here to be understood”. “if we understand art, we don´t need it”. “I hate art!”
- Art is not to be “seen”: art is doing.
- Beuys aim: liberating the individual in realtion to himself and to an oppresive society based on wage slavery.
- Society: a great artistic whole. “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kuenstler”
Art of Liberation
- We can not wait ofr linerations.We have to liberate ourselves, our fate is in pur hands, it comes down to praxis.
- We become an agent of self-government.
- Kunst>Kapital. Human capital is the only capital in that society.
- Full citizenship: full partecipation for everybody in all spheres of social and political life and in the ways and standards of life thata re the predominant in society.
- Basic Income: in not only an economic reform; it is a political reform with far reaching, dynamic effects and it must be connected with the idea of an aesthetically motivated society.
Learned helplessness: thE result of being trained to be locked into a system tha can be the family, the community, the culturem the tradition, the profession or the welfare state. The person feels passive with respect to the system.
We must really want to live our own life and not one prescribed by our family, societym culture, profession or tradition.
Social Art
- Every individual has creativity potential.
- Like ritual, the play creates spatial seperation from the ordinary life.
- Schiller: Art is the result of the “play impulse”.
- Is in the play that the individual can create, be creative, and it is only through being creative that an individual can find the indentity in her/himself.
- Creativity is an attitude to the world of liberation and disobedience. Our acts ” piece of art ” is a vehement protest.