Sal Randalph has done A Good Thing by wrangling Mr Randall Szott to do an interview. Randall until recently ran a great blog called Leisure Arts. All three of us (Sal, Randall and myself) share artistic and theoretical touchstones.

I met Sal for the first time when I was in New York back in November. She took me to a nice little organic place near her studio on the lower east side and I had a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. It was rather expensive and Sal only had a coffee. We spoke passionately (I fear I sometimes ranted) about the things we were excited about at the time: things you might expect like the legacy of conceptual art and Allan Kaprow and re-enactment; but also unexpected stuff, eg: Sal has become convinced of the importance of Donald Judd.

Amongst a million other activities, Sal periodically works on a project called “Free Money“, in which she, quite literally, gives money away to people. They sign up for an appointment and then they meet at a cafe and have a chat, but the first thing that happens is Sal gives them the cash. Then the conversation can go wherever it needs to or wants to. There is no need for the person to hang around, Sal is not “buying their time” or anything.

I should point out that our meeting in New York was not an instance of Free Money.

But it was a great meeting, we were excited penpals who finally connected in the flesh.

After we left I realised we had not “split the bill”. In fact, Sal had paid for most of it, even though her small coffee probably constituted a quarter of the total. I felt strange about this. I worried that Sal might think I was trying to get out of paying my fair share, having just heard of her tendency to give away cash. Like somehow we had played “Free Money” without any advance agreement on the idea.

Neither of us has not mentioned anything about it since, even though we have exchanged several friendly emails in the interim.

See the funny things money does to a man?

I just got back from overseas, and my friends ask “so what are you up to now that you’re back?” When I reply, “I’m working on a project about Bon Scott, you know, that guy from AC/DC”, there is generally a pause, and either a look of incredulity, or almost immediate raucous laughter. You see, I’m not really the kind of person who you’d think of as an enthusiast for these things. My interests tend to be a bit bookish. I have a tendency to over-intellectualise, which fits more with an interest in obscure corners of conceptual art history, than Aussie rock legends. So it’s all very amusing, isn’t it?

The next thing that happens is that, once my so-called friends have gotten over their ridiculing of my rock credentials, they inevitably launch into their own stories about AC/DC. Here’s one by Diego, who is describing a scene from a small town outside of Turin, in the north of Italy:

When was it? Oh damn, I was driving around, so I must have had a licence, so that makes me 18…so I suppose it must have been about 1988 then. I was driving around with all my friends, and someone had this tape, I can’t remember where it came from, did my sister give it to me? Anyway, we put it on and it was wow! You know [does air guitar and sings the riff "na, na na, na na....di-di-di-di-du-do"] and we were really into it but we had no idea who it was, we figured it must have been Rod Stewart or something. It wasn’t until a long time after that someone told me it was AC/DC. You know, we knew nothing about that stuff, but it were were really into that guitar bit.

The funny thing is, I’m not even convinced that the famous riff Diego sings while telling this story is an AC/DC song. But who knows? Certainly not me. There are so many famous guitar riffs. They’re like pithy quotes from Shakespeare: we all recognise them, but we can’t always remember where they came from.

Diego asks a few other questions which betray his enthusiastic but hazy grasp on AC/DC-ology:

“Wasn’t Bon the one who wore the funny hat?”
“No”, Keg says, “that was Angus, and it was a school uniform.”
Diego: “Oh, I thought they all had school uniforms”…

-but never mind that, he immediately picks up his air guitar and launches into song, in his Italo-Aussie accent: “ROCK-AND-ROLL-MAKES-NOISE-POLL-U-SHUNN!!”

Immediately I find myself correcting this in my own head. It should be “rock and roll AIN’T noise pollution!” (The meaning is quite specific, although Diego’s misreading is, I must admit, an interesting slip). (Read the full lyrics here.)

And then it dawns on me that after only a couple of days into my career as a fan (which consists, thus far, of the paltry reading of the first half of Bon Scott’s biography, and listening to one single album), it’s already started: I’m becoming an AC/DC nerd. Mothers of Australia, lock up your daughters. I’m about to bore them to tears.

Have spent last few days reading the biography by Clinton Walker. Only up to page 105, ie the whole period before Bon joins AC/DC.

After no luck in local bookshops, finally found the biography at the Newtown Public Library. Immediately adjacent to the music biography section is the magazine section. On top of the pile of dishevelled mags was Rolling Stone, May 2007, Issue 665. On page 38 there should have been an article about Bon Scott (entitled “was he really as bad as they say?” or some such), but when I turned to page 38 the whole piece had been torn out.

I spoke to Katie, who is curating a small display of Bon Scott’s letters, which will go into an exhibition at Fremantle Art Centre in May. She said a lot of letters were sent by Bon to his ex-wife, and ex-girlfriends, while he was on tour. These could make interesting reading, but she has to track them down. Some of them were sold to a private collector in Melbourne…maybe some are installed in a bar on Flinders Street. Katie has trawled through the biography herself and constructed a rough timeline of Bon’s life. Tomorrow, we’ll go together to meet Clinton Walker, the author. He’s written a bunch of titles about Aussie rock and music/cultural history.

My first impressions of the book: very readable - it makes a compelling story. The main tension which drives the tale is Bon’s anti-establishment attitude - the desire to not be trapped into the conventional habits of everyday life: job, house, wife, kids. Early on in the book, Walker hints at how problematic this attitude would be for Bon later - when the craving for “home” made him a very lonely man on AC/DC’s relentless touring circuit.

The other thing that amused me about Bon’s early music career was the tension between integrity and popularity. It seems, according to Walker, that he had an authentic “voice” (both for singing and for writing lyrics), but that the Australian music scene was unreceptive to this voice. But Bon was not against what looked like “selling out” in order to get attention and gain airplay. One of his early bands, the Valentines, completely remade their image a few times, transforming themselves from bad boys to bubblegum rockers (with matching uniforms) and back.

The provinciality of the Australian music scene in the late 1960s is quite fascinating, as was the “radio ban” Walker mentions, where major labels were banned from Australian radio stations for a year or so. These “social history of music” chapters are great - they show the restrictive artistic milieu in which Bon was emerging - it seems bizarre that he was bumping around the scene with saccharin singers Johnny Farnham (at one time Bon’s next door neighbour) and Johnny Young. I’m looking forward to finding out more on that.

After the library I went up to the record shop to blow some of my hard earned cash on acca dacca. They had about 5 Bon Scott era CDs, I picked the earliest one I could find, TNT. It’s a pretty famous album I guess, with the tracks “It’s a Long Way to The Top (If you wanna rock and roll)” and “TNT”.

At the bus stop in Enmore I bumped into Vanessa. She came over for tea and we listened to the album together. My immediate observation was that it was catchy: damn catchy. Something about those guitar riffs struck a note in my belly. This is not something that can be easily explained.

I also noticed that the lyrics on the album are often about the following: the process of becoming a rock and roll star; what life’s like in a rock band; “how hard we rock”; etc etc.

Me to Vanessa: “I know nothing about the 1970s Aussie rock music scene, but there is definitely something in common with the conceptual art that came out about the same time. Both seem very self-referential”.

I’d like to find more connections between the two. It seems impossible that the pared back films of Anthony McCall and the pared back riffs and lyrics of AC/DC, occuring at precisely the same time, could have happened in hermetic bubbles, entirely unconnected to each other…

I have been commissioned by the Fremantle Arts Centre to write a blog about all of this. I’ll be travelling to WA in February for the statue unveiling and concert, and again in April/May when there will be further festivities and an exhibition by visual artists responding to Bon’s life and work. My mission, hazy as it is right now, is to interact with “the fans”, whoever they might be.

I’ve been asked to do this project based on my previous blogging projects, Bilateral Kellerberrin, and The Sham. In those projects, I spent an extended period of time blogging about a small country town in WA, and my own home suburb in Sydney. In this new project, I will need to get my head around a different kind of “site” - no longer geographically specific, but a site which revolves around a community of people who are dispersed throughout the world, and who hold in common their enthusiasm for Bon Scott.

I have to disclose from the beginning: I am not a fan. I certainly don’t dislike the music of AC/DC, but it’s just never crossed my horizon in any significant way, and I’ve never gone out of my way to listen to it. The earlier work of Bon Scott, before he joined AC/DC - well, I know nothing about it at all. So the Bon Scott Blog will certainly be, at least at the beginning, my autobiographical account of “coming to know Bon Scott”. I hope that some of the fans will take me under their wing and show me the “Tao of Bon”.

My first task is to get to Fremantle for the concert and statue unveiling on the 24th of February. I’m looking for an ardent fan as a travelling companion to drive with me across the nullabor from Sydney to Perth. The candidate would need to have a working car with a good stereo, and maybe some camping gear. I will pay for the petrol. Please contact me at shortleftleg[at]yahoo[dot]com to register your interest. (I guess we’d need to leave at least 5 days in advance…)

Coming soon: the new Bon Scott Blog…

–

*but I can’t remember where I heard this rumour. Searching around the net, looking at the enthusiastic sites maintained by fanclubs, I haven’t seen anything critical of the idea yet. Maybe I just dreamed it.

Artists are to blame: Simon Barney

In early March 2001 an Artist-Run Initiate Forum was held at the Tin Shed Gallery in Sydney. Simon Barney’s article ‘Artists are to blame’ would, perhaps, have artists rethinking the concepts of the artist-run gallery.

Artist run galleries come and go with a regularity that somehow suggests activity, even liveliness. And there’s much to be admired in these endeavours - the unpaid directors, the light and responsive structures, an engaging social scene, the acceptance of risk.

There was a forum about these places during ARI week in early March 2001. (Artist-run initiatives - a phrase that might be supposed to indicate a distinct identity but is inescapably bureaucratic.) There was a consensus that artist run galleries were an important, but threatened, part of the local art scene.

Who was at fault here? Was it the big bad property developers taking away our cute little ’spaces’? Or intransigent councils, ungrateful for the opportunity to spend money subsidising local artists? Or funding bodies that persist with arcane guidelines that fail to match the innovative changes artists are making?

Well, err, actually none of the above. The fault lies entirely with the artists. We persist with a once radical model that is more often than not a poor man’s version of a commercial or institutional gallery.

The scene that Saturday at the Tin Sheds Gallery was not so much depressing as lamentable. The room was set up with a lectern, a ‘top’ table, a mike and rows of chairs. Peering in the door you might have wondered ‘what is this?’ A downmarket shareholders meeting? Nuh, way too respectful. It needed a red-faced retiree, angrily waving a placard and berating the directors for their spiel, their spin, their fudging way with words and their lousy results. Maybe it was some kind of TV program. Oprah? Geraldo? Jerry Springer? There was a kind of compere (Ben Genocchio from The Australian) deciding who’d speak and for how long. But nuh, on TV they take the mike through the audience, they don’t get stuck with a two metre mike cord, forcing their ‘guests’ to shout across the studio. No, unfortunately it resembled nothing so much as a ‘forum’ about ‘Artist Run Initiatives’

Those of you who still retain a wistful image of artists as radical, disrespectful and obsessed with change need to go take a powder. Same if you imagine artists’ activities are co-operative, un-hierarchical and open to un-expected possibilities. Call me a hippie but why weren’t the chairs in a circle, why wasn’t the mike in the centre? It probably hadn’t been given much thought but the top table model helps to ‘keep it tasteful’, to prevent anything uncomfortable like dissent. It suited the presentation of a hardworking idealistic and supportive community of artists put on display by a concerned government body. But if the intentions were good why were the results so oppressive?

We’d been promised a discussion of internal and external models for artist run galleries. External models meant sources of funding. Nobody seemed to have given a moments thought to what ‘internal model’ might mean but boy could they talk about money. Maybe that’s why it seemed like a shareholders’ bash. Now, I don’t want to criticise the show put on by the artists on the panel as they weren’t really helped by the setup. Speakers were Alex Gawronsky, Sarah Goffman, Melissa Chiu (of Gallery 4a, which has arguably made a successful transition from an artist run to a funded gallery), Leah Donan, Ruark Lewis… . But the potted artist gallery memoir, which was largely what was on offer, at once charming, dreary, buoyant, self-deprecating and self aggrandising had already been told better in Elizabeth Pulie’s interviews, The Premise of the Premises’ available at the back of the room for five bucks. She talked to artists who ran or had run galleries. (Declaration of self-interest: I’m in it, talking about SOUTH and Briefcase.) It was the best thing to come out of ‘ArtPort - Artist-Run Initiatives Week’ organised by the Museums and Galleries Foundation of New South Wales. And you know what? She and Lisa Andrew did it with their own money.

So that was it. Discussion of internal models went little further than things like opening hours, submissions, how to avoid meetings, and who bought the beer. All of it of some use I guess to anyone thinking of starting an artists gallery - a bit like ‘here’s how I did it’. But none of it addressed the question of the value of all this - Are such places genuinely successful or persistently servile? Remember Le Corbousier’s complaint about Regent St. in London. The decorative facades along the street suggest a diversity of buildings but step inside and you find the same unvarying floorplan. It’s the same with artist galleries. Everyone striving on a low budget to look as much like a commercial gallery as possible, the only real difference being the less reliable sources of funds. It reminds me of the skin flick industry and its mimicry of Hollywood. Like Hollywood, porn has the revolving cast of bankable stars, do-anything young hopefuls, and shady dealmakers. Porn has the award nights, the nose jobs and boob jobs, the car crashes and suicides and the badly behaved divas. And every now and then somebody crosses over and appears in a Hollywood film, holding out the promise that it really can be a launch pad to real celebrity. On this day there seemed to be an acceptance, even a delight in the idea that artist galleries do well if they provide such a feeder system, an apprenticeship for the ‘real’ world of commercial galleries and funded institutions.

One or two people in the audience questioned this acceptance without response. This was partly a consequence of the dissipating effect of the compered format and partly that the self-congratulatory mood of the afternoon left little room for a critical discussion. Yet somebody complained that there were no ‘big’ names present. Why would there be when artist’s galleries only offer a poor imitation of the commercial world? Unless they do something that institutions and dealers can’t they’ll always be regarded condescendingly as the art world bargain basement. Given that artists will always go for the money and prestige there will always be feeder galleries where young artists can show how their work might look in a ‘real’ gallery. OK. But is that all? Does this encompass the possibilities for art, for its place in the culture, for what might constitute an art activity? Such activities might not be considered so marginal if artists weren’t complicit in undervaluing them, didn’t generally see ‘graduation’ to the next level of institution as a sign of success.

Instead of scrambling to keep afloat a style of gallery in which they are overmatched artists might better look to their own strengths, to the areas in which they do have an advantage. Endeavouring to perform with the professionalism to which institutions aspire generally results in a culture of dependence. One member of the audience made the point that in her experience (with a performance group), this diverts a group of artists from the more radical activities they may initially have envisaged.

The 20th century dilemma over what is art is readily answered in 2001. Art is history. Art is what’s in the history books. Art is what’s in the museums. This is the inescapable dialogue of contemporary art. Art is contemporary in the sense that its possible display in museums is contemporaneous with its making.

But in other areas of culture technology has dealt a blow to such top down determinations. So why in art does the equivalent of self-publishing and self-recording offer no challenge? The answer lies in artists’ fidelity to the existing models. Art is the last area for which the appeal to authority and a structure of exclusion is still the determinant of value. It isn’t likely to change.

But in the meantime it wouldn’t hurt for artists to make the methods of exhibition to which they devote their time an end in themselves - as structures with their own distinctive character unrepeatable by other areas of the art scene. This might genuinely leave open the question of what constitutes a gallery, what constitutes art, and what constitutes viewing. And it might make this part of the scene worth paying attention to.

-Simon Barney

Revised version of writing in Arkitekt, #5 edition of Uniglory, co-ordinated by Lisa Kelly, 2001

If only artists were to blame
by Margaret Roberts

It seems too narrow a view to say that artists are to blame for the threatened position of aris, as Simon does in the despair issue of uniglory. Aris’ positions are tenuous primarily because they are usually trying to assert the values of (whatever they are - support? courage? critique? optimism?) in the context of an exploitative, commercial malestream culture. I can’t imagine aris would ever not be threatened, because ari goals will, hopefully, continue to threaten various bits of that culture back. The blame should surely lie primarily with the faults of the hostile dominant culture which aris are devised to resist or at least to help artists survive within.

The purpose of Simon’s reproaches may be partly a game, to tell a few half-truths to make us indignant and paying attention to the rest of what he has to say. So I am not sure to what extent he really is claiming that artists are to blame - or whether its the idea that only artists can decide on the structure etc of aris - but that’s what he says. It is also good to discuss the various ari forms that evolve, and Simon’s stirring of the pot can only be good in promoting critical reflection and radical mutation.

I am curious to know what aims and means various aris have, and what relationships they seek to have with conventional organisational practices. I should think the aims for most artists, and probably many aris too, include recognition and money. Money seems the more difficult of the two - like I have heard said about love, the only way to get enough is to not want any. The briefcase, kitchen gallery, mobile phone number, etc. - are sensible and critical ari responses to the killer price of real estate. They are methods of exhibition which recognise that what is ‘making-do’ in one framework of our position in the world, can be an assertive and critical curatorial mode in another.

On the surface, recognition appears easier to get than money - we just need to give it to each other. But that doesn’t seem good enough if, as Simon also claims, artists are complicit in undervaluing art activities which occur in the ari/’feeder sector’. In making this claim, he implicitly asks the important question - whose attention are we seeking when we seek to be ‘worth paying attention to’? It is a good thing that there are so many artists, that our numbers are increasing, that people publish uniglorys, run aris and artports, criticise them, support them, survive, that artists are also curators, art writers, art collectors, that non-artists also work in the interests (whatever they are) of art and artists, etc., etc. One day there may be enough of us to cause a spontaneous paradigm shift so that it is miraculously self-evident to artists that our (various) judgements of value have significance in themselves.

Architecture is a useful comparison when considering the position of artists and aris. There are some obvious connections - the gallery space and the cost of real estate are overwhelming factors in how artists and aris survive, influencing the ethos of the artworld, the ethics of individual artists/writers etc, and even the nature and content of the artwork we make. We traditionally operate in architecture - in studios and gallery space - even if we now have to work out ways of operating outside of it because it’s become too expensive, or of finding ways to occupy the shrinking public spaces left. Architecture is literally the space in which we develop and show our work, and has a marked effect on how we do both.

The architecture is also more than the innocent bricks and doorways. When we locate ourselves in a studio, a gallery, walking down the road, etc., we are located in an architectural space, and the architectural element of that space - if it can be separated out from the ‘mere building’ - is its meaning. We know its meaning automatically, through the way we think in and of it - the meaning inhabits us as we inhabit the building.

It’s the manipulation of those commonly understood meanings which is the focus of most artists’ work, in one way or another. Engaging with the architecture we inhabit, acknowledging its presence, is one way of responding to the meanings and values which also inhabit us, at least on a metaphoric or symbolic level, which is presumably how those meanings live and mutate in us anyway. My own installation works using architectural space are games in which I am speculating that if I recognise the forms I inhabit, and rearrange them in some way, then the forms which inhabit me may learn they can do the same.

Thus aris’ struggles are not just with the cost of the real estate in which they try to operate, it’s also with these meanings which live in us in various ways - which, for example, makes it obvious to all of us that what aris need is attention from some nebulous authority which everyone knows exists even though we can’t point to any actual committee in the sky who organises it. It’s those meaning and values which give greater value to the judgements of those ‘in authority’ which we need to consciously recognise, instead of blindly acquiescing in them by seeking to be worthy of the attention of … (who? the smh? the vacb? bill whatshisname?….).

That is partly why I object to Simon blaming only artists, when its the faulty architecture we inhabit which is the main problem. Artists may be to blame for not recognising it, but they are not to blame for the architecture itself. It is the source of the values of ‘appeal to authority and structures of exclusion’, etc, which Simon also rejects, and recognises as hard to change. He reminds us that it is our job to outsmart it, like he did himself when he closed down South and picked up Briefcase. But to blame only the artists is to give a greater responsibility to artists than they have the power to meet, inviting the discouragement and burn-out which are also a major threat to aris. We can only start using our power more consciously and deliberately by recognising how little we actually have to lose. The larger share of the blame for aris being under threat, lies with the values and meanings of the wider culture itself and with those who actively promote and benefit from them, including the ‘big bad property developers’ who, for some reason, Simon wants to let off the hook.

Margaret Roberts

Last night I gave an informal slideshow talk about re-enactment and performance art at Concordia University in Montreal. Abe de Bruyn, an Aussie performance practitioner who I had met in Melbourne a few years back, is studying here now, and has initiated a series of guest lectures broadly on the topic of video and performance art.

I collected together a bunch of pictures I took on my recent trip to New York, to discuss re-enacting performance art as a strategy which is relevant to art history, archiving and documentation, as well something which is of social and phenomenological interest.

When you re-enact performance art, you draw things to the surface which you could never have found out about by digging around notes, diagrams, photographs, videos and textual criticism. You could “get closer” to the work, but in doing so, you might become a part of it, “polluting it” with your own 2007-ness, and thus evaporating any hopes you had to witness/experience “the original thing”.

So I showed some images from Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959/2007), and also his Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hoffman (1963/2007). Keg and Lizzie were with me in New York, so it was great they could come along to this talk to contribute their own responses to these two works.

I also showed images of some of the “synthetic performances” by Eva and Franco Mattes which I saw recently at Artists Space in NYC (they’ve been re-enacting performance art events, bizarrely, within Second Life). And finally I showed some images of the re-creation of Anthony McCall’s Long Film For Ambient Light (1975) which Lousie Curham and I tackled earlier this year in Sydney.

En route to putting together this presentation I stumbled across a few “eyewitness reports” on Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces set of re-enactments which she carried out at the Guggenheim in NYC in 2005. I particularly liked this one about Abramovic doing Acconci’s Seedbed, written by Mendi Lewis Obadike.

Seedbed, of course, is the “seminal” work from 1972 in which Acconci lies under a specially constructed wedge-ramp in a gallery and masturbates, fantasising about the visitors who walk on the ramp. His amplified voice is played back into the space.

Of Abramovic’s work in general, Obadike writes, “Often [...] the mystery has been about what I would think were I to experience the work first hand.” However, he’s left wondering about “what really happened” in her version of Seedbed - it’s worth reading his account of the way visitors were stomping on the ramp, under which Abramovic was masturbating, and about his interactions with the (justifiably?) cynical museum guards.

Even more interesting, Obadike points to a project called Learning from Seedbed by Brandon Labelle. In This piece, Labelle reconsiders the role of the wooden ramp in the work - it is more than just a dumb piece of furniture. Rather, the ramp enables particular social and power relations to take place, and should thus be given further attention:

Architecturally, the ramp creates a hidden space, embedded within the gallery as an anomaly, and yet acting as an “amplifier” for the desires of an individual body seeking its social partner. In this regard, the ramp suggests an “architectural performance” in which the negative space under the ramp allows something to occur within the gallery space.

So Labelle turns the ramp around in the space and lets people crawl underneath it and try out what it’s like to be on both sides, to play those roles, to reconsider Acconci’s work from different angles. This, I think, is a really rich way to approach “re-enactment” - far from slavish homage-reconstructions (which in effect still maintain the old-skool performer-audience relation) Labelle allows visitor-participants to be “in” on the whole thing from the start.

This approach, I think, is closer to what Curham and I were attempting with our unofficial re-creation of McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light. We approached it as artists, and wanted to have the freedom to frame and organise the work without the restricting “correctness” of an authorised version (although we do have an ongoing and respectful correspondence with the artist).

The point is, that what you end up with is not “the original work” (which is impossible, since “the work” was embedded in its time, place and culture and is thus always going to be different), but instead a “re-mix” (to use Obadike’s term) which we can use, and learn from, right now.

And the “art object”? It turns into an odd hybrid thing - part educational tool, part new artwork, part homage to original work, and partly the original work itself. And what hat do we wear in this business? Curators? DJ’s? Educators? Historians? Luckily the moniker “artist” still has enough flexibility to absorb all these multiple roles.

Creative Time organised a presentation of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann, during the Performa Festival. It ran for three days at a space called Passerby.

Push and Pull is a dynamic installation in which anyone can come and rearrange furniture which is spread around in a room. Well, we might call it an installation now, but in Kaprow’s day (the piece was first presented in 1963) it was a “Happening” (or an “Environment”). It’s clear that Kaprow, in the four years since 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was presented, had substantially reworked his idea of what a Happening should be. If 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was a sort of experimental theatre involving specially prepared “actors”, then by the time he devised Push and Pull, Kaprow had moved on to creating situations where the “audience” was now the primary activator of the work.

In terms of the name of the piece, it’s obvious that “push” and “pull” are verbs describing what we must do to the furniture to move it around the space. But apparently these were also terms used by Hans Hofmann, who had been Kaprow’s painting teacher in California, and to whom the piece was dedicated. Something about Hofmann exhorting his students to “push and pull” various shapes and colours around the arena of the canvas - or perhaps the “push and pull” effect that the resulting composition might have on your eye as it works its way around the surface of the painting.

I read somewhere that this push and pull business was a bit of a joke amongst Hofmann’s students - he became amusingly predictable in his use of the phrase - and it is in this vein of jocular homage that Kaprow named the work. Nevertheless, the importance to Kaprow of “composition” in three dimensional space (and in time, and in social interaction) shouldn’t be underestimated. The room, and the time, and human attention, become frames in which the composition of action and experience takes place.

Here are some notes about my time spent with (and without) the work:

Day 1:
(Thursday 15th November 2007) 12:15pm
Push and Pull is advertised to run from Thursday to Saturday from 12 to 6pm. Not knowing much about the work in advance (is it a performance with prepared actors? do I have to “participate”? do I need to stay for the full 6 hours each day?) I show up at noon on Thursday. I’m the first to arrive. The room looks like a second hand furniture shop after a fire sale, where everything’s been turned upside down by bargain-maddened shoppers trying to get to the good stuff: only the crappy items, it seems, are left behind. Haybales, and some loose hay, scattered around the floor. And a few lamps, boxes of op-shop records and cassette tapes, a half dead TV with only the sound working, an electric typewriter that buzzes but won’t type, chairs and tables stacked on each other in precarious piles. A small electric cooker stashed in a draw, and a few tins of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. The walls are covered with reflective silver wallpaper.

Here are a few pictures of the scene as I found it: here, here and here.

I pick my way through the rubble to get to the box of instructions placed on the floor in front of a big black plastic box with the title of the work painted in rough white letters. The instructions are quite handy: there’s a small paragraph which is just enough to get you started. Essentially, it reads: rearrange some furniture in the room, but beware, others will also rearrange furniture, so what you set up might be quickly changed.

I turn a chair up the right way and sit for a while, with this page of writing in my hand. For someone who generally loves this kind of participatory stuff, even I have trouble getting started. I feel foolish. I feel watched. I begin shuffling around the room, looking at details, picking up and considering objects and then putting them back down again. None of it inspires me. It’s just crap. I feel like the room has been over-prepared. It looks too dishevelled, contrived, composed. It annoys me. I want it to be less “curated” - maybe the furniture should have been just left where it was first placed when the removalists brought it in. These stacks of chairs look like assembled sculptures - like someone was trying to make something “artistic”. This irritation, then, I guess, is my starting point. I begin disassembling the towers of chairs and tables. I begin putting things in order, stacking chairs properly, tidying up, trying to make some space. I figure, it’s only when you have a little order, a little space to move, that any contribution will be discernible.

Another visitor steps in. There’s the inevitable moment of tension between us - am I performing for her? Does she think that I am the artist? Then she goes to read the instructions and the tension shifts. When will she start moving furniture around? She becomes self conscious. I am watching her from the corner of my eye, I want to see if she has the same nervous tentative beginnings. Of course, me shuffling stuff around breaks the ice, and soon she too is nosing around like a dog looking for a good place to pee. She doesn’t stay long, but I guess she’s got the gist of the work.

The guy minding the exhibition is kind to me, he lets me borrow his phone to make a call. But he’s not really interested in Kaprow, he’s listening to music on his headphones and is absorbed in his laptop. I find an old broom and begin sweeping some of the hay away from a section of floor, to make a clean area with a sharp edge. I pile the hay up to make a stack in front of the entrance to the “back room”. I do this partly out of perversity - I know the guy minding the show will have to climb over it to go behind the scenes. Maybe I figure I can force him into being involved in this way. But he catches me doing it. He pulls out his headphones and warns me not to push the hay any further. I’ve discovered the first “boundary” I must not cross.

1:55pm
I go off to have lunch at the Chelsea Food Markets. It’s a drizzly cold day. I write some postcards to friends back in Australia. I take my time. I’m not in a hurry today.

2.50pm
Only an hour has passed, but Push and Pull looks completely different! It’s been occupied by what looks like a university class for retirees, run by an extremely energetic and intelligent Jewish New Yorker. They’ve pulled all the chairs into a big circle and the professor is holding forth on Kaprow’s transition from action painting to action-per-se as art. It’s a topic dear to my heart, so I sit in the wings and listen along. His narrative is compelling and entertaining. He compares a photo of Jackson Pollock making one of his drip paintings with one of Kaprow in his yard of used car tyres. Both artists are literally “in their work”. This leads to a discussion of the role of documentation in ephemeral art practices. The class is remarkably clever, they ask good questions. Even the fellow minding the show has taken out his headphones and put down his laptop to listen in. We all become aware of the camera sitting up on top of the wall in the corner of the room, taking one frame every minute. Later, I suppose, we’ll watch it back and see our hours compressed into seconds. Will this adequately capture what we went through here in this room together?

The class discusses some of the elements within the room. They’re not as random as you might have expected, apparently. The silver wallpaper, the professor muses, has been carefully chosen because of its resemblance to the walls of Andy Warhol’s Factory, often thought of as one big Happening in itself. The cans of soup, naturally, are another little joke about Warhol.

I wonder about this. Warhol’s Factory, and his soup cans, appear almost simulaneously with Push and Pull (1963). How much were the two artists aware of each other? Plus, in pictures of the earliest versions of Push and Pull, (which are available in a handy folder in the room) there is no silver wallpaper, no hay, the room is much more sober, like a “normal” middle class living room. It’s only in later versions that the silver paper appears (during the last 10 years). I’m no historian, but I’d like to know more about what went on behind the scenes of these aesthetic decisions…

The professor, at some length, then discusses Kaprow’s relationship to chairs. In his instructions to Push and Pull, Kaprow writes:

But one caution! Don’t sit on the chairs, because this will destroy the composition. Unless, of course, you once again start pushing and pulling everything around until it works right. Repeat when you leave.

Chairs, the professor points out, are pretty interesting pieces of technology. We only notice them when they stop working - when they cause us pain. As soon as we start sitting on them, they seemingly disappear from Kaprow’s environment. So we have to be careful of them. His students become conscious, for the first time, of their chairs. Perhaps they had not thought them to be an important part of the composition until now. They have unwittingly (through the force of the social requirements of the class situation) made an oval shape with the chairs and their bodies in the middle of the room. It is a small oasis of order and rationality among the chaos.

3:25pm
I have to run, I’ve got to go off and meet Anthony McCall, a rendezvous I’ve been looking forward to for ages.
Anthony and I talk about Kaprow. He tells me he actually interviewed Kaprow back in the late 1980s for a publication that never eventuated. We talk about why it is that artists of one generation are fascinated with those of the recent past. Like going to visit an old uncle who your parents always dismissed as eccentric and loopy. Only now do you realise just how fascinating and urgent everything that uncle has to say really is.

Day 2:
(Friday 16th November 2007)
I can’t make it to visit Kaprow today. I have other places to go.
I hang out with my friend Michael, we drop his son Lew off at daycare, and walk across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum. Inside, we look at “artifacts” from Papua New Guinea, amazing huge ceremonial masks and ghost canoes, to be carried and worn and danced with during village “happenings”. Many of the masks are safely stowed within glass cases. Every so often the information describing an artifact is augmented by a grainy black and white photo of it being used. These photos are compelling and disturbing. What happened between the photograph being taken and now? The images seem a million miles, a million years away.

Later, I meet my friend Vincent, and we go and visit Catherine, a curator friend of his. They’re trying to organise an exhibition of works which were featured in Lucy Lippard’s 6 Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (c. 1972). I devoured this book a few months ago. It occurs to me now, writing this blog entry, and reflecting on how all these things might be related, that Kaprow hardly rates a mention in Lippard’s book. Why is that?

Day 3
(Saturday 17th November 2007)
3pm:
Vincent and I head down to Passerby for a final dose of Push and Pull. Keg shows up too, and we really start to push things around now. A record player has appeared out of nowhere, and we put on music while we work/play. Yazz’ The Only Way is Up, some crazy Disney tunes, polkas, TV themes. The record player mixes with the sounds of advertisements from daytime TV and we move into something of a frenzy.

Keg begins by making a scarecrow out of a mannequin, a lampshade for his head. She dresses up in a dirty cream kaftan she finds. Vincent grabs a gold sequin shirt and puts it on while he and I systematically disassemble some big black boxes. The boxes are big enough to stand inside. Keg and Vincent ritualistically sweep a ring of hay in the middle of the room. Another girl discovers a cache of spraypaints, some of which still work, and begins spraying “DON’T SIT ON THE CHAIRS” onto the silver wallpaper.

Soon we begin to discover other unspoken “rules”, boundaries not laid down by Kaprow himself. Vincent is hungry, so I try to cook him up some soup, but the guy minding the show outlaws it as a fire hazard. We scowl at him. I really wanted the smell of cheap mushroom soup to mix with the sharp mindbending spraypaint fumes filling up the space. Keg tips the soup over the TV, and we start a list of forbidden activities on the back of one of Kaprow’s instruction sheets. It turns out the soup makes a pretty good glue, and Keg sticks our list, which by now includes “no trespassing into the back room”, “no cooking soup”, and “no peeking behind the silver wallpaper”.

“Behind the silver wallpaper” is a zone which fascinates everyone who comes in. Almost the whole surface of the wall behind the wallpaper is covered with professional celebrity photos, Hollywood stars standing around drinking and posing. In one small section, the wall is clad with a bizarre all-over photographic collage of mega close-ups of pink vaginas (!?). Screwed into the surface of this rude wall-section are odd-shaped plastic noggins like you’d find at a climbing gym. It is this obliquely pornographic section of the wall which our host declaries off-limits. We wonder why.

By now the room has begun to fill up with people. Creative Time is having a book launch in here at five, and early-birds are getting a chance to play with the Kaprow before it gets so full that you can’t move anything any more. Some of these visitors approach us and we talk with them about our experience of the work. Others tell us things — one enthusiastic English chap raves: “I get it now! It’s the social aspect of the work which is important!”; and another girl congratulates us for making explicit the hidden rules which structure any human interaction, no matter how seemingly “free”. We’re really having a good time now, and it’s nearly over. By five, there are beers laid on and we relax and chat with Mark the curator. He tells us that the Kaprow family estate allowed Creative Time to put on this work for free. They simply send a file of notes and documentation from previous versions of the work, and the rest is up to you.

- - -
P.S.: the timelapse movie that Creative Time made of the whole shebang is here.

On Sunday night Lizzie and I went down to Long Island City to see the “re-do” of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. I’m a big fan of Kaprow’s work and his writings, and I’m also really interested in re-enactment or re-creation as a method of experiencing ephemeral artwork from the past. (Karinne Keithly has written another account of 18 Happenings over here).

A few notes on the event:

They had re-built the original loft inside a waterside ex-factory. The space was huge, but the “loft” was more intimate in scale. I found this architectural re-construction to be interesting in itself. Lofts were the cheap art spaces of the 60s, but of course these are no longer within reach of anyone without big bucks. Refurbished warehouses are often the art spaces of our current times, but, as in the case of this one, they are no longer cheap. You get the post-industrial look without the bargain price tag.

The “loft” was made entirely of pine 2 by 4 beams, with transparent plastic stretched over the surfaces to make “walls”. Inside, there were three rooms, and a small quantity of chairs (for the “visitors”) were lined up in each room. If you were sitting in one room, you could see into the adjacent room (but the vision became a bit milky).

Each member of the audience was given a set of 3 cards which directed where we should go (eg, my sequence was room 2, then room 3, then room 1). The six acts of the piece were announced by a bell ringing (although it was an amplified pre-recorded bell). We stayed in one room for two acts, then changed, then two more acts in another room, then changed for the final two acts.

The ringing of the bell between the 6 “parts” sometimes seemed like the end of a round in boxing - the action was suspended by the bell, rather than seeming to have come to its own ending.

There was a fifteen minute break between acts 2 and 3, and between acts 4 and 5, when we were allowed to “freely move about” before finding our place for the next act.

The performers were all quite young, in their 20s I would say.

The happenings themselves: a few things I noticed… A kind of stiffened movement style, almost robotic, certainly not casual, but not balletic either. Businesslike, perhaps.

Sometimes the performers stood on the spot and did deep knee bends, or scraped a shoe slowly and repeatedly across the floor, or held arms out straight in front and then rotated one around to the side. That kind of thing.

In other parts, they read from scripts stuck to red painted script holders which they held. I remember one part being a kind of lecture about art, and a lecture about time. These two lectures were delivered simultaneously, by two different performers, in two different rooms. The scripts for the lectures were interwoven with each other - sometimes one would pause mid-sentence, and the other lecturer would continue speaking. These juxtapositions seemed sometimes to have meaning, at other times they were absurd. It was difficult to follow two lectures at once.

Slides were occasionally projected in room three. I was in that room when a slide of a bearded man’s lower face was projected. I wondered if that was Kaprow, as he had had a beard.

The wheeled “mirror man” which I remember seeing a picture of in some long-lost research on Kaprow had been reconstructed for this event. I liked it a lot. It rolls on two bicycle wheels (sans tyres) and it has a paint tin for a head and a record player in its “stomach” and kind of awkward wooden arm which holds cards(?) - maybe these cards are the chance operators in the John Cage tradition. Anyway, this device is wheeled about a bit (although, disappointingly for me, it was wheeled away from the room I was in at the time (room 3) and into room 1. From the distance of two rooms, we heard a record being played (cheesy polka music?).

There was “live painting” - a stretched blank canvas was worked on both sides simultaneously by two performers - the paint came from red and green house paint tins. One did vertical stripes and the other did rounded shapes. The floor around the canvas was streaked (Pollock-like) with the remnants of previous nights’ painting.

In room 2 (the middle room) a long horizontal pole hung above head height was wrapped with four scrolls which, towards the end of the piece, were pulled down to hang freely in the space. Performers stood on both sides of these scrolls and read from them - they were inscribed with words hastily painted on - seemingly randomly - and the simultaneous reading of the scrolls made for a beautiful cacophonous music.

During the 15 minute breaks, only a few of us continued to “move about freely” - most of the visitors found a place to sit in their new room, plunked themselves down and waited. Which was fine, since that, too was “moving about freely”. I tried to take a few photos of the moment of “musical chairs” which I found to be one of the most fun moments, and which I’m sure Kaprow would have relished.

At the end of the event, we went into room 1 (we had been in 3) and discovered a table had been set up, and oranges had been squeezed. We had had no idea that that had been going on. In general, the feeling of “missing out” on action that was going on in other rooms was a common thread throughout the whole event. There was no way that a single visitor could have a “whole picture” of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. In one of the breaks we spoke to a performance artist from Calgary who said he had heard that some people had come back a second time to the event, and had tried to trade their room-directions cards with someone else, so they could be in a different room from the previous time. This guy figured that Kaprow would have been into that, too. We also mused that the long breaks between relatively short acts may have been designed so that visitors could go and enquire as to what had happened in the other rooms - thus pushing us to interact with each other, and to recount, immediately, what our experiences had been like, and to compare them with each other.

I was also aware of a tendency within myself to think that immediate visual presence was the superior way to experience one of the happenings - rather than, say, hearing something going on from 2 rooms away. It took a bit of effort to consider “distanced sensing” (and imagining) as a legitimate experience (one, in fact, unavailable to those close to the action).

Having read Kaprow’s essays, I felt this “re-do” of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts gave me new insight into what he was doing and thinking. Especially his concept of framing, with which he was obsessed. The movement of action from the frame of the abstract expressionist, into action in the “real world”. The wooden framework with stretched transparent plastic created a framing device for the action of the performers (which included painting-as-action) AND for the visitors. We were all framed by the loft, the plastic membrane somehow homogenising everything - or at least bringing it to an aesthetic equivalence - although I’m not really sure how much other visitors were aware of this.

The director of this event, Andre Lepecki, in a statement handed out on the night, stressed that “This re-doing [...] is not attached to notions of bringing to life ‘the past as it really was’. [...] We are aware that Kaprow’s work can only be re-done once we embrace it as an always moving, always provisional, always renewed set of dynamic propositions.” I liked this idea, and I’m sure Kaprow would have too. A paradox - to re-do the work faithfully, it has to be done dynamically (rather than slavishly following the “original”. But I wasn’t really convinced that this particular version of the piece achieved that. After the show, I asked one of the performers how much agency they had - how much they could inject themselves into the work, invent new actions and so on. Oh no, she said, it is all scripted very finely in advance.

It’s possible, I guess, that Kaprow’s legacy (tons of notes and scores left behind in archives) may have made “improvisation” a bit tricky. The performer I spoke to said they had all auditioned for the parts - they were dancers or movement performers mainly, and they were not especially encouraged to become familiar with Kaprow’s work in preparation for the event. I wondered about this. I wondered how Kaprow might have done it. In recent years (before he died in 2006) he ran lots of workshops for young artists. I imagined that this re-doing of 18 Happenings could have been an opportunity for such a workshop - where all participants are given access to all the historical documents, and allowed a role in workshopping how the re-doing might best occur. This might have resulted in a messier and less cleanly respectful rendition of the work, but it might also have brought it into the present in a more exciting way.

Having said that, I appreciated the precision of the re-do, from the point of view of an embodied pedagogical experience. It was a terrific opportunity to see/feel “for onself” what it might have been like, what the space might have been like, how the actions pan out in real time - rather than rummaging through archives for information and scores and trying to imagine it.

Lizzie (and a few other visitors we spoke to) said they found the event a bit boring. I was fascinated by the whole thing, but I must admit my interest is in no small part academic, and I suppose collegial, since I’m also in the “business” of re-enactment as part of my art practice.

I suppose, then, rather than “rediscovering the absolute contemporaneity of Kaprow’s work” (as Lepecki writes), this re-do of 18 Happenings is of educational interest. It might not have been the most amazing piece of performance art I’ve ever been to, but I think, partly, with Kaprow, that is for a reason. His work, perhaps, has been so influential on contemporary performance that when we look back to the originating events they seem a bit hokey and unsophisticated in comparison.

It occurred to me that this piece, in fact, was a transitional work. Conceived in the late 1950s, Kaprow himself was just moving out of the two dimensional frame of abstract expressionism and collage etc and into the frame of the room-space and time (see his great essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”). Soon, he would abandon the gallery/theatre convention of framing and attempt to frame action in the broader world through the “paying of attention”. And “visitors” would become fully-blown participants. Much later, it seemed as if Kaprow disappears from the art scene altogether, as his blurring of art and life results in “just doing” life. In this sense, it’s a privelege to see 18 Happenings as a small step on that long path.

Keg and have been attending Artivistic here in Montreal. It’s a DIY kinda conference about the junctions between art and activism, and this particular edition seems to be about occupation and space and nature. Big topics and sometimes the delegates struggle with large theoretical issues - the best sessions are grounded and case-study based. See a few pictures from the conference here.

Some of my favourites from the conference:

Mushon Zer-Aviv from the group You are not here. They do these interesting map overlays of two grids creating a new “walk” where an experience of another city is carried out. Eg, you can walk through Baghdad in NYC, or through Gaza in Tel Aviv. It’s a pretty thorough and sophisticated result, by the sounds of it. Mushon has worked with the Conflux psychogeography festival in New York.

Bob TheBuilder who is part of a group called au travail/at work, which regards an artist’s employment as a kind of unofficial “artist in residence” project:

The workplace is considered as a field for experimentation and discovery wherein are deployed the conflictual relations arising between private Utopias, collective necessities, and economic realities.

There’s a report about au travail/at work in Parachute magazine here, which runs through a few example projects. And a more snappy news article here.

We also met the Think Tank That Has Yet to be Named, who are heavily involved with innovative organising and action in their hometown of Philadelphia. Particularly interesting was their concept of Metaphorical Agency as a way of thinking about solving difficult problems. I am sure we will stay in touch and exchange some resources and tactics. They’ve compiled some amazing readers about participation and gentrification which look very useful.

It was something of a reunion for Andrew Gryf Paterson and I. Andrew came to Sydney in 2005 and ran a workshop on using mobile phones as a tool for art practice. At artivistic, he presented a moving story about a community-run greenhouse in Helsinki which he got involved with. He co-ordinated workshops, learnt to sing Finnish folk songs, and also helped organise for its meaningful dismantling when the contested city space it was located in meant its days were numbered.

Keg and I attended a session by Katerie Gladdys, who is involved with a thing called “Ground Truthing”. It’s where you physically walk the land to test whether satellite “photos” (which are actually digitally produced confections based on light-spectrum data) are telling the truth (about for example, the particular mix of vegetation on an area of land). She drew from de Certeau and Mircea Eliade in terms of theoretical thinking about human relationships to land and space.

Speaking of human relationships to space, Barcelona-based artists Anja Steidinger and Gerard Cuartero-Betriu did a comparative study of two residential building projects: Walden 7 (Barcelona) and Habitat 67 (Montreal). They asserted that although the two residential buildings are similar in form, Walden 7 offers a much richer environment for community activity and unplanned human intervention. Habitat 67, they found, was hampered by restrictive codes on what kinds of activity can be carried out in the spaces, and was therefore “utopian” only in aesthetic and not in lived experience. Read more about their project here.

We were fed a delicious dinner of weeds (burdock root and red clover, mainly) by Nicole Fournier, who cooked ‘em right in the empty field where she’d picked ‘em (out the back of the artivistic industrial building hq). I got her details as I figured she would be a good contact for our own WeedyConnection agent NoBody, who is also fascinated with weeds…

Along those lines, another link for NoBody is the food for free edible weed mapping project by Bristol’s Duo Irrational.

Oh and at the risk of making this blog post unusably long, here is another link: Ryan Griffis and the Temporary Travel Office. They organise unusual city tours (have a look at some of them here) and are based in Chicago. I missed their presentation at Artivistic, but Ryan and I agreed to exchange some ideas for tours and how to run ‘em.