From the Archives - M.A Chapter One - Sensory, Social and Participatory Art

Researching the work of Lygia Clark - through practice

An excerpt from my 2009 M.A looking at examples of other related practices


Introduction

In this chapter I have looked at some examples of sensory and participatory art practice to help me position my research in a wider context and to clarify what is particular about my own enquiry. Through reviewing my practice thus far, I was aware that the senses have the ability to evoke memories and emotions in people, giving a stronger connection between them and an artwork. This led me to ask what, as an artist, I want to do with these strong responses. For me this is where participation has a role to play, since participation is a perfect partner for the subject area of the senses, suggesting a degree of physical interaction and emphasising important aspects of the relationship between people and art. 

As soon as we begin to think in terms of a ‘participatory arts practice’ we are led to consider some fundamental questions, such as “What is an artwork?” and  “Who is the artist and who is the audience?” The texts and artworks I have discussed in this chapter were chosen because they also address these questions.

Participatory art and society

In recent years the French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud has become famous for his advocacy of relational aesthetics, which he defines as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."   Bourriaud describes relational aesthetics as a conversation, a true exchange that goes against the idea of the artist owning the act of creation, of the traditional ‘quick hit’ of the viewer receiving information through an artwork made independently of them.
For Bourriaud such a conversation should take place within society and it follows that artwork of this kind is made not by an artist observing and commenting on aspects of society, but by society itself. In this formulation the traditional/leading artist becomes an instigator facilitating the conversation - and society, the participants, become artists too.

An example of the kind of conversation mentioned by Bourriaud could be ‘Twelve Museums’ 2002 by Becky Shaw. Shaw worked with Michael Gill who had the onset of dementia and together they built ‘Twelve Museums’, an architect’s model of a clear acrylic building. The model was complete with rooms and corridors which ‘housed’ and ordered Gill’s thoughts, memories and knowledge (in the form of pictures of objects) and which were becoming increasingly confused as a result of his illness. The making process involved Shaw interviewing Gill and transcribing his thoughts into drawn diagrams.

What is interesting about this project is Shaw’s reflections on collaboration. She wondered if she had made an artwork that Gill happened to be involved in, and whether the work showed her impression of his thoughts rather than his own. Shaw also questioned whether it said anything about a mind with onset dementia as opposed to any mind that had been attempted to be ordered in such a way.
Perhaps Shaw had not documented Gill’s mind, an impossible task, but had preserved a conversation between the two of them, about the task of documenting a mind? Shaw and Gill are having a ‘conversation’ as a way of finding something specific out - it is a kind of research with art becoming part of a problem solving process.

Bourriaud’s work relates in certain ways to the ideas of artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys used the term ‘Social Sculpture’ to describe his work and defined this as sculpting our thoughts, our words and our surroundings. Beuys also felt that art had a responsibility to society, that it should be the way in which we explore and find solutions to social issues. He felt that art and life were one and the same and therefore everyone is an artist. There are two strands to participation in Beuys’s work. On the one hand his work drew on the idea of participants as observers who came and saw his lectures, performances, drawings, physical sculptures and also the man himself.

On the other hand his philosophies about art and its purpose were not about himself but rather the human condition, something we all participate in. Perhaps, rather than direct participation, Beuys contribution was to urge us to participate in art as a whole and to do this by acknowledging that it is not distinct from the rest of your life or society as a whole, it is a way of being.

Sensory experience

For the artist Alan Kaprow the audience is less an observer than in Beuys’ work Participation is experience and experience is everyday life, the mundane, the things we do without thinking, noticing. Kaprow is known for his involvement in the ‘Happenings’ of the late 1950s and 1960s. Occurring only once or twice, the happenings would involve an environment in which a group of people would be gathered. There they would encounter a series of objects such as junk materials and as with life these things would be multisensory and could be interacted with. They would move unexpectedly and there would always be an element of chance in what happened. Kaprow’s later work such as ‘Maneuvers’ Naples 1976 would retain the chance element but involve more instruction. For ‘Maneuvers’ seven couples were given a script to act out, describing two people passing each other through a doorway. The couples then chose where they would carry out their ‘performance’. Some chose a very public doorway; others preferred to do it more privately. Important to both approaches is the element of chance, a risk of ‘failure’ and the act of playing. By play Kaprow did not mean the naïve way in which it can be considered but in the sense that it is learning through doing.

Kaprow’s work is close to the model of participation I was trying to develop in this research, particularly because of its physical sensory nature. If I wanted my participants to respond and to take that response as far as possible then I would not be providing a prescribed ending, or any ending, for the response to happen there must be play and in dealing with the unknown there is risk.
Beuys’ materials stood out for me when thinking of making something that would provoke a sensory response. Felt, fat, dead hares and copper materials relate to life, past and present, but through Beuys’s intervention they are also depicting another, fictional world. By re-contextualising the relationship between life and art, Beuys’ work makes us look, in a new way, and to take that experience somewhere further, towards something more interesting than what already exists around us.

Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica is also significant to this research.   He wanted to remove the passive spectator and to challenge the traditional ‘owning’ artist, leaving in place the participant and an experience that is their own. Oiticica saw his work as a proposal, which the participant then takes over. This can be seen literally with his series of “Parangoles” (1960 – 1968), cape like structures made out of found everyday materials that Oiticica asked carnival goers, and samba musicians to wear.
Oiticica asks his participants to use their senses in the exploration of his work, not so to talk about the senses and the body, but more specifically about life and the world around us, in his case, 1960s and 1970s Brazil. In the mid 1960s Oiticica made ‘bolides’, (Fig 12) a series of small box like interactive sculptures. One of these (Bolide, Caixa 18 1966 – Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo) was made in dedication to a young man from the shantytowns who had been gunned down by police. It is a black box covered in images of the dead man from newspapers and containing a bag of red pigment with words written on the skin. Then, in another, the dead man’s picture is at the bottom of the box, invisible until someone pulls out the container of earth that has buried it, using two straps.
Rather than symbolizing life or trying to re-create it, it is about creating an analogy for the way that things in life exist. Oiticica wanted to put people in a position where they were handling things with respect. They may not know this man, this death, but that process of handling things with great care was intended to remind them of deaths, they may have known, and the possessions of the dead they may have handled.

During the 1970’s Oiticica had an eight-year stay in New York. His environment and therefore sensory language shifted. Cocaine, sexuality and celebrity became the new subjects, his sensory language was heightened; New York is, after all, a sensorily dominating place. With this work the artwork/participant relationship becomes extreme, confused even.
In an unrealized idea for ‘A NIGHT IN THE OPERA -in homage to the Marx Brothers’ a question arises: are the participants ex- spectators or have they reverted back to being the spectator? The idea is that people would sit on cushions and mattresses exploring objects whilst watching a film. In that film naked people would enter a room one by one and slowly start to dress each other in clothes or objects and ornaments. They would dress each other faster and faster with more and more people entering the room.

What is happening in the film is very sensory, a tactile experience, but are the people in the film really participants? They have specifically been instructed rather than left to explore and own the work as before. Then there are the people watching, yes they are interacting and having an experience within the space, but surely they are spectators rather than participants?
This work appears to take away from Oiticica’s previous work in which the artist simply offers a proposition that the participant then takes and experiences, leaving the artist invisible. However, in my view, Oiticica is still attempting to do this with the films and images by seeing how his methods through physical sensory experience can be applied to this media. His way of making films often felt as if he was trying to keep it as close as possible to being within that film, the sounds, the speed and detail. The experience is there but it is partly imagined.

One of the questions Oiticica’s work raised for me concerns the experiences of the participants. Despite a large body of writing about his own work, the opinions (and therefore confirmation of how and if this relationship worked) of participants is missing, something that is also the case in the work of artist Lygia Clark.

Lygia Clark’s work also explores the relationship between art and the viewer or participant, and without their presence in the artwork, it does not exist. For example in ‘The I and the you: Clothing-body-clothing series’ (1967-69), two participants, a man and a woman, are dressed in thick plastic overalls, facing each other and joined at the navel by a rubber tube used for underwater breathing, with hoods covering their eyes. Inside the overalls is a lining which has attached to it textures that are either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. In the man’s overalls he feels against his skin feminine materials such as plastic bags filled with water, in the woman’s she feels wire wool against her chest. There are also zippers in different parts of the overalls enabling the participants to explore inside each other’s ‘bodies’.

I had only seen photographs of this work and so tried to imagine myself within it, to feel the wire wool against my chest, inside a sweaty plastic suit. I imagined I would be aware of my body as a result. However, the point of Clark’s work is that you have to be within it to know. Her work is about ‘us’ the viewer and potential participant, it is about our bodies, addressing the way we perceive the world which is through our bodies and therefore senses, together with our minds. Her work is a reaction against separating the mind from this process, and she has done this by creating work that uses our very methods of perception, our senses and physical awareness of the world we inhabit, to communicate her point. She does this by forcing us to experience.
What was missing was the voice that confirms that all of this is true. Where were the words from the couple who stood in plastic overalls? If it is for them, because of them, then surely we need to hear how it made them feel?

Or was I misreading Clark’s work? Are the missing voices important to the work? In 1973, as a part of her ‘Collective bodies’ series, Clark made ‘Baba Antropofagica’. Involving several participants, one of whom lies on the ground while the rest stand around him with small spools of thread held in their mouths. They then released the thread to fall onto the person on the floor forming a giant slimy web. Was it necessary here for Clark to know what the participants thought? Did she need to know if they were in agreement with her about the awareness of their own bodies?  Were the participants, in fact, just another material manipulated and instructed just as the thread was, to demonstrate to an audience observing beyond the participants, and beyond the camera, the idea of bodily awareness? The audience watches the participants and thinks through the sensation, rather than physically feeling the experience and thinking it through?

Both Clark and Oiticica experimented with a balance that is necessary to work made in opposition to the traditional view of art. How involved was the artist in the process? How much did they lead a participant’s actions and responses to the artwork? Did they step back and let the work go completely? If so, when and how?

The difference between their participatory model and the one I have explored is about what happens beyond that, namely what happens when the participants take over? If this is the work, my feeling was that it was important for me to discover for myself the participant’s responses and make use of them.
With ‘Twelve Museums’ and other projects in which participation is a means to find out something about society, participant’s responses and the initiating artist responses are both documented. Are participant’s responses valued and shown only when there is a real use for them, because a question has been asked and their involvement is the only way to answer it?

In which case are those participants simply a means to an end and those involved in Clark and Oiticica’s work actually right to be left alone, unsung? It could be said that the works with the ‘silent’ participants have no purpose, other than for the sake of experience of just seeing what occurs. as with Kaprow’s emphasis on chance and risk, of the unknown.
Imagination and the senses

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller make installations that explore the power of sound and narrative. Entering their installation ‘The Dark Pool’ 1995 (Fig 15) I found myself in a dimly lit room filled with tables and chairs covered in different objects. The room felt like a mixture of an artist’s studio, scientist’s lab and scholar’s study, all from another era. As I moved around the space I also encountered sound, people reading or having conversations that you could only hear when you positioned yourself near the sound’s source. The work suggests a story, someone’s story perhaps, but it is ambiguous, it is up to us, the viewer to decide. ‘Dark pool’ was a space I could physically enter and walk around, even sit down in. However it was not until one other person, without comment from the gallery attendant, picked up one of the books, that I knew I could interact with it more fully. I felt a sense of excitement then, knowing that I wanted to - and would - make something that people could interact with fully, to be able to watch the novelty of this unfurl, being introduced as a normal way to interact with an artwork.

Other work in this exhibition such as ‘Opera for a small room’ 2005 and ‘Killing machine’ 2007 were sensory in the same way a film is, through sound and vision but not physically interactive. I was reminded of rides at Disney World that you pass through with parts of sound happening and lightshows illuminating a story in animatronics and objects, the work happens in front of you like a show.
Interaction is not a requirement to all participation however. As with the literature that often inspires Cardiff’s and Miller’s work, the viewer is not passive; we are given a story to finish, something incomplete and open to our interpretation. This work does not tell us what to think.

With Cardiff’s series of works ‘Walks’ 1991-2006  I felt that this type of participation extended to become collaboration. Using binaural technology Cardiff records herself taking a walk -- it could be through a gallery or a public park. You then, as a gallery visitor, pick up a set of headphones and trace Cardiff’s footprints, you are hearing her walk, but also her voice instructing you where to go next and occasionally she drifts off into bits of narrative. You also hear things that don’t make sense, gunshots, and singing. Was this here when Cardiff was, or has she added in fake sound effects? You believe your physical surroundings and you believe what you are listening to but reality is confused, is this your experience or hers? The answer is, it is both. It is the mingling of two imaginations, hers and yours. Though Cardiff is no longer present, she has set up an experience; the work is a prompt for the participant’s imagination.

The artist has let go; but I wondered if she wants to know what happens, if she asked friends who have taken a ‘walk’? How would she quantify what happened, the participant’s response? Should Cardiff interview them? Should the participant do his or her own recording in response, another layer of sound?

This work is an example of knowing through doing, of the importance of actual experience, even if that is a strange hybrid of the participant’s and Cardiff’s, fact and fiction, physical and imagined. Cardiff is in a position where she can never truly understand the effects of this work, the situation she has left for people.
In her book ‘Walks’  Cardiff says;
 ‘I’ve been creating portholes into my other worlds’
 and on the same page she quotes a Bob Dylan lyric:
 ‘I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours’
Cardiff’s desire is to occupy her other worlds, to make real the dreams and imaginings from there. However at the same time showing is not enough. There is the suggestion of a deal, that says though she will give us a glimpse at something, there is work for us the viewer/participant to do here too. We complete the work by bringing our own ‘other worlds’ into being. In that sense the existence of the work is a result of two creative processes, two explorations, Cardiff’s and ours.

Conclusion
From Bourriaud, Shaw and Beuys I learnt of a need for a conversation between art and society. However though I acknowledged that this inevitably leads to finding out things about society, about those involved in the conversation, I disagreed that this finding out should be its sole purpose. I felt that a conversation, as with Kaprow's work, should involve chance, risk and play, a space for the ‘seeing what happens’.  To not approach it in this way means the conversation becomes more of an ‘interview’ between an artist and participants from society, and places the artist back into the traditional position of author, singularly leading the situation.
Oiticica and Clark affirmed for me that sensory art needs to be experienced by participants in order to be known. Their work showed constant shifts between artist, artwork and audience to enable this participation to happen. In the absence of my own physical experience and therefore true knowledge of their work I sought the voice of their participants, which was, also absent. This confirmed for me that listening to the participants taking part in my multisensory and participatory art practice was necessary to understanding what it is. My practice consists of both the participant’s experience within it and my own, if I only understood my own part in it, then I have only had half the information required.
Through Oiticica, Clark and Cardiff I realised that the participants complete the work, not by passively experiencing something, but within that experience their imaginations collaborate with the artists through a channel that is the work. My desire to know, rather than just acknowledge the ‘other half’ of my work, that of my participant’s experience, seems to be the one thing I did not share with the artists I have researched. I did not want to ‘know’ in the sense of interview and find out a specific aspect of society or a specific participant I simply wanted to be able to ‘see’ what it was that had been made.