john roberts

Lauren Larkin

i am unsure whether or not i think she is legit or a complete idiot. i think some of her ideas are worthwhile, like the global blog, while others are rather trite- getting dressed in new york city. i would like to know what you guys think about it too.

Phillip Glass on Seseme Street

Fuck yes Also, a lego reenactment of Phillip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach: Just for some context, this opera lasted 4 and a half hours.

RE: Schechner

I like Susanne K. Langer's quote about re-enactment as expression rather than experience. Also, I like how Schechner goes on to describe the state of modern performance art, enabled by technology to present very little space-time distance between art and action. "A considerable amount of postmodern art does not offer viewers objects or actions for consideration," he writes. This seems to ripple out in a variety of interpretations of "doing" or doing as "not doing", ie YouTube webcam blogs or Cage's four and a half minutes of silence. It makes me think about the line of doing and not doing during a performance, how we worry if we are performing too much or not enough to be believable or get our point home. All of the divergent means and ends lead to a really malleable medium. I think during our first showcase we played with this line pretty readily, drawing out would-be daily rituals (dinner table, shower, ice cream) into performative elements based on a mixture of context and performance.

For Friday

Since we never agreed on an assignment for Friday, I was hoping that people would post suggestions. My idea was to organize a performance around "a completely original" behavior. The discussion would be about what components of the performance were original, what parts were were examples of "restored behavior", and why the assignment was impossible.

JOSEPH BEUYS

Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist who worked in a variety of mediums, including innumerable drawings, sculptures, installations, and performances. Born in the German town of Krefeld in 1921, but soon transferred to the industrial town of Kleve (which Beuys was adamant about being native to), Beuys’s childhood was spent largely in this region. An aspect of Beuys’s upbringing, his involvement with the Hitler Youth, is often brought against him; however, it should be noted that at the time of his adolescence in Germany such involvement was absolutely mandatory. Given this military background, Beuys was training as an aircraft operator in 1941 when he decided to take leave. During this time he attended lectures in biology, philosophy, botany and geography. It is also said that it was during this time that he first considered working full-time as an artist. As his work, particularly his large body of drawings, would later come to reflect, Beuys “seems to be investigating a possible underlying geometry to [his] natural forms” (Jeffreys, p. 561). This fascination with underlying concepts to structure at every level may well stem from Beuys’s early interest in the natural sciences. In 1942, Beuys was stationed in Crimea as a member of various bomber units. On March 16th, 1944, Beuys’s JU87 bomber plane crashed on the Crimean front. The pilot was killed, but Beuys was found by a German search commando and brought to a military hospital where he stayed from March 17th to April 7th. Beuys’s recollection and embellishment of the incidents notoriously included a rescue of his unconscious body by Tartar tribesmen. Beuys quite avidly describes the Tartar’s language and actions, claiming to have been wrapped in fat and felt to retain body warmth and fed milk and cheese. The story has served as a powerful myth as to the origins and nature of Beuys’s artistic intent and explorations. Beuys is a seminal figure in the history of performance art due to the all-encompassing nature of his “artist-persona”. Beuys attended every lecture, opening and public dialogue in virtually the same garb, year after year: a workmanlike button-up shirt, slacks, leather shoes and his infamous rimmed sun hat. In fact, his outfit was directly related to the image he intended to convey through his public speakings, exhibitions and writings. Arising out of his fascination with the materials alluded to by the plane crash myth, Beuys sought to portray himself as an everyman; clearly within the confines of the natural world and owing not to posessions but to the implications of the materials contained therein. This consciously applied aesthetic, coupled with Beuys’s willingness to beguile, created a far-reaching persona that came to define Beuys and recognition of his work and rhetoric. Beuys tended to mythicize and obscure his past with historical data both plausible and implausible, references to interactions with famed people that never occured, and highly embellished accounts of real events, such as the plane crash myth. This circular method of obfuscation and personification has led to a widespread labelling of Beuys’s explanations, manifesti and intentions as sheer rhetoric. Viewed from the lense of his Utopian ideals, Beuys’s outspoken approach to matters ecology, sociology and more become interconnected in their all-encompassing theories. “Everyone is an artist,” Beuys has famously said. Such rejections of the hierchical institution of art-making and culture at large become apparent in Beuys’s actions, such as when he famously abolished all entry requirements for the Düsseldorf class he was professor of at the time. These public displays of personal politics eventually caused Beuys to be dismissed from his post in 1972. This perception of Beuys’s catalogue as mired in Beuys’s own personal symbolism has led to a tendency by critics and scholars, especially Americans, to try and wrest the potential and control of the works away from the artist’s rhetoric. These discussions of the work tend to focus on the materials represented therein, and the wider processes and discursive elements present. That meanings may be sifted through to arrive at conclusions about Beuys’s body of work is a productive take on the common criticism that Beuys has tried to control his art through “dubious esoteric or symbolic codings” (interpreted from an essay by Buchloch that dissects and attacks Beuys’s work and intentions). Several overarching themes in Beuys’s work recur in a variety of manifestations. One is the “radical ecology” Beuys proposed as a solution to the capitalist outcome of the “complicity between the power of money and the power of the state” (Adams quoting Beuys, 26). Adams deserves that “radical” ecology is concerned not only with ecological systems within the natural order, but also all levels of human interaction. Beuys studied and expanded upon the idea that art can tackle the Western philosophies and attitudes formed fundamentally as “individual modes of thinking and self-imaging” (Adams, 26). This universal approach to art as a supreme equalizer came to further reflect Beuys’s earlier comment that “each man is an artist”. This did not mean every man is a painter, Beuys later clarified, but that his observation was meant to explain “it is man aided by no god, as in the mystery of Golgotha. It is man himself who must accomplish the resurrection” (Michaud quoting Beuys, 36). Along with this leveled socio-ecological standing for all men, Beuys also stressed the importance of action and theory in every individual’s life. The artist-molded future Beuys sought to achieve could only be reached if man deployed this “resurrective force” in an effort to transform the social body. Beuys often tried to reach his own people, speaking of the “task that the Germans have to accomplish in this world” or the “duty of the German people” (Michaud, 38). Beuys critiqued Marcel Duchamp’s silence, that which Duchamp had contented himself with in lieu of developing a theory on the basis of the work he achieved. Beuys saw Duchamp’s contribution -- the establishment that it is transferral of the object from one place to another that makes it into art -- as empty without the simple and logical follow-up that, in turn, every man is an artist. Beuys sought to convey time and time again that artist’s works without meaning are “objects with no consequences”, and that art must seek to reflect a meaning “so that it later becomes a practical idea within society” (Michaud, 39). Beuys tried to be an acolyte of change in every facet of society he could. As a performer, he built himself into a healer, teacher and practicioner, he who could overcome societal ills with the prescription of self-worth, validating that you who is observing is, also, an artist. With his drawings, sculptures and installations he sought to represent the radical ideals of his personal ecology, readily evident in such vast undertakings as his widespread tree-planting installation across Kassel, 7000 Oaks. In all of his speakings and writings, Beuys stressed the importance of the spoken word over the plastic, of real communication over simulation. This universal connectivity, a theory of recognition and abolishment of doubt, lies central to Beuys’s philosophy and contribution to art and the world at large.