Nothing To See Here: Performing the Emperor s New Clothes

Transcription

1 Nothing To See Here: Performing the Emperor s New Clothes Exploring the value of hidden intention and unaware viewers in public performance, with reference to my work Surveillance Can Only See My Body. Before I begin, a little context. Surveillance Can Only See My Body is the beginning of a body of work undertaken during my Experimental Studio Residency at Vane in Newcastle upon Tyne. While I am referring to it as a body of work here, it functioned more like a programme for production during this time, with the central thematic question being whether a radical hidden intention is in any way a subversive act, where there is no outward visible manifestation of that intention. If a tree falls in public and no one notices, has it made a cultural impact? The Conspiracy Recently a story went around the Internet concerning an image purporting to be of an art opening in which the artist claimed to have made art that was invisible. This image spread as a joke on the inpicture viewers; there was no art! They have been tricked into looking at blank walls, the final consequences of The Conspiracy of Art, a conspiracy that fools the knowledgeable, while the unand under-informed seem, in this instance only, to be the more contextually aware. A contemporary instance of the emperor s new clothes. While this image in itself turned out to be a hoax by radio parodists Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring, an act that hopefully led to some (rather unlikely) examining of whom in- and outside the art-world

2 context is really the more gullible, it raised for me another question about invisibility in art that may be more productive than these gullibility questions. This link came through a chiming of the phrase emperor s new clothes with the other times I have encountered it in relation to an artwork. For my sometimes day-job (because of capitalism and that), I recently worked as an invigilator at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, a large public art gallery based in the England s North East. BALTIC s audience in general differed for the kind of audience I have encountered while working at COB and Banner Repeater in London, smaller, specialist galleries, in that there was a much higher proportion of non-artworld visitor, even visitors who would inform me they don t like modern art (sic). I don t like lots of contemporary art either, I m not disputing that outright, that s fine, particularly as you re paying for it though taxes. The link for me here is this idea of the emperor s new clothes. After the most common complaint, that a piece of work isn t art, next on the list would be the comment it s the emperor s new clothes, describing a situation where BATLIC had fallen for a trick of context and collusion, with no central content to hang all this on. Maybe at the centre of this comment can be a discussion about visibility, as with the original emperor. That the BALTIC visitor can see something that I cannot. Being free of artworld discourse they can see the work itself, unobscured by the context someone like me may approach the work with, and see that there is nothing really there. At the heart of this may be boring Death of the Author stuff. But the BALTIC visitors and the notional visitors in the hoax gallery image both go further than this; the emperor had no clothes, there is no art on the wall, it isn t art. This is more than saying that I read the art differently to you. It is actually disputing its materiality, its existence. Kissinger s Nobel Prize Much of my recent performance work has been focused on impersonation in a public setting, such as pretending to be Michael Green, ex-alter ego of Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps MP, online or impersonating a plain clothes police offer in a public space. These impersonations bare some relationship to satire in their use of exaggeration. But while satire relies of these exaggerations being registered, these performances have, for the most part, been experienced by the target audience in a way in which they may have been unaware of. How this happened in the PCPO performances is clear; I walked past the notional audience, with no discernable marking feature of pretending to be a policeman, of committing a crime. The moment passed. This unaware viewership is even clearer in the online Michael Green work. Much of this performance took place over Twitter, with me tweeting verbatim quotes from Michael Green s found

3 promotional material under his name. While the Shapps/Green story had some impact in the United Kingdom, the international nature of Twitter meant that many more people encountered my Tweets as Michael and took them at face value, engaging with the inane online marketing-speak that I was playing with. A re-tweet is clear evidence of an engagement; the text has been read, processed and shared. When writing my Grants for the Arts report, am I to count this engagement as an engagement with the work, even where it is obvious from context that the viewer has not taken the Tweet for art at all, but was rather engaging with the literal online marketing message? BATLIC counts every person that enters the building and gallery spaces. This body count is then returned to Arts Council England and other funders and stakeholders as evidence of BATLIC s cultural impact. This count includes people who felt no meaningful engagement with the art, and yes, even those that disputed its very existence. While quantifying engagement for funding purposes is not an especially productive way to investigate performance meanings, I hope my point here is clear; registering the existence of an artwork can be as much at stake as contesting or coconstructing its meaning in the Barthesian tradition. Nothing To See Here At Vane I was looking to interrogate this process of unaware and unregistered art viewing more directly. Taking on the notion of something seen not being art, for Surveillance Can Only See My Body I tasked myself with attempting the opposite; performing something unseen (not there) that is art. And further, trying to perform invisibility, remaining unseen, and yet still to have some kind of worthwhile cultural impact beyond documentation. As we saw recently with controversies of attribution in relation to Marina Abramovic s attempts to perform nothing 1, such questions around nothingness are both well trodden and still at stake. But performing the new clothes is not about doing nothing, nor making nothingness visible or material. Rather here I am proposing performing hidden intention as a series of positive decisions that maintain covertness while knowing that you are doing something other. This might be closer to the Hayward Gallery s group show of unseeable art Invisible (2012), though the work in this show relied primarily on frame-based traces, testimony and titles while performance-based questions about a real-time, unaware audience, and cultural impact at this point, were largely unaddressed. 1

4 Hidden intention practices proposed in this way may then begin to approach ideas like Pfaller s interpassivity, and particularly Zizek s often quoted reading of ideology, irony and capitalism, If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth [This] cynical distance is just one way - one of many ways - to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. 2 Any performance operating at the level of radical hidden intention may be enacting this very problem. By allowing an agent space to think as Other, capitalist ideology hides the inherent antiradicalness it maintains, so long as the agent continues to act outwardly (and hence literally, materially) in a capitalist way. Performing the new clothes can seen as exactly this outward act, a process of infiltration that ends at the infiltration, offering no programme past this stage. Counting Babies As Surveillance Can Only See My Body progressed I initiated a series of informal collaborations with artists, tasked at looking at the topics addressed above. Interviewing Constance Humphies 3, a performance artist with a history of performing unseen performances in public spaces, she proposed unseen performance as a personal endeavor, with cultural impact maybe coming as a 2 Zizek, S, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, London (1989) P.30 3 Audio of the interview can be heard here: farid- week- 6- if- a- tree- falls- in- newcastle/

5 result later. While this was useful in considering the range of uses for unseen performance, it did not in itself offer a way out of the still doing them problem I am addressing here. A more productive line of inquiry emerged out of a sequence of interactions with Lily Mellor, an interventionist artist based in Newcastle, and a fellow BATLIC FoH worker. When we discussed the topics above, she began to focus on the questions about quantifying engagement, and particularly the art-institution practice of counting all bodies in the building as having engaged with the work. This led us to experiment with the potential of devising and enacting performances that disrupted these systems of counting engagement, and hijacked the quantification tools as a cultural impact witness to our otherwise covert performance. This work was called Counting Babies (2015), in homage to the babies counted as having engaged with work at BATLIC39. These performances involved us each, while on shift at BATLIC, triggering the automated door counters a specified number of times, adding fictional visitors to the gallery s audience count for that day, that year and the overall total. Performing on-shift built in a need for covertness; it was not part of our job to be performing. We performed with visitors in the room, but did all we could to make it look like no performance was taking place, a neat reflection of the kind of performativity that takes place whenever labour for another is performed, though maybe at this point remaining in Zizek s stage of ironical still-doing. But the triggering of the visitor counters ensured a true cultural impact, maybe one deeper than most registered performance work. Adding to BALTIC s visitor count in this way, if done on a more industrial scale, would affect the institution s public funding streams.

6 Machines of Loving Grace These performances with Mellor were on reflection somewhat pithy, answering the problem set too well and leaving no real room to generate additional meaning from them. But they may still be useful in terms of proposing a programme for further investigation, picking out elements of the performance and developing them into modes of production that can be elaborated on. In Counting Babies we have the unseen performance, like others discussed earlier in the text, nothing new here. But using the found surveillance machine to quantify a cultural output, performing to the dumb eye of a machine that cannot read intention or subtlety may be more useful as an area to pursue, for a number of reasons. Firstly looking at performance at the level of this essay, these quantified performances (taking cues from quantified-self culture) posit automated documentation as a viewer in itself, a reading of technology and performance that may become increasingly common as digital and online culture becomes ever more entangled with contemporary art. Beyond these metaphysical proposals, quantified performance as I term it here may be a proposal for artistic good-practice. The hijacking of surveillance machines, even low-level and potentially benevolent ones like Mellor and I performed to, attempts to coopt their working in a way all public machines should be; they are ours to affect. Playing with (and to) them like this blunts their point and disrupts the hierarchical structure their placement marks out. And, of course, any performative interaction with such machines at once also proposes the opposite, offering a blueprint for avoidance. This demystifies and opens up a structure and system in a way a socially engaged and politicised art practice might aspire to do. Simon Farid is a visual artist interested in the relationship between administrative identity and the body it purports to codify and represent. Taking on the role of a hacker or trickster he looks to playfully intervene in the identity-generation process, operating as other people and enacting ways to counter emergent institutional identity confirmation mechanisms. A quick Google search will, of course, reveal where he lives, works, what he looks like and information about other people with whom he shares his name.