This blog has been dead for a while - I never seem to have time/energy to write when something interesting happens. I have been as a visiting researcher in the Visual Arts department of the University of California San Diego for 5 months now, auditing interesting seminars about re-thinking art history (Norman Bryson), zombie as useful character for thinking postcolonial and capitalist questions (Ricardo Domingues), indigenous in Latin American art (Mariana Wardwell) and thinking about feminist performance through Brecht's Mother Courage (Emily Roxworthy).
I am also volunteering for the brand new transdisciplinary Visual Arts gallery in the campus, where we'll have a new exhibition, CORPUS, opening next week.
But, most importantly, I have at last had time to concentrate on my PhD project, which is at this point called
A TINKERER'S GUIDE TO BRANCHING REALITIES
A Tinkerer's Guide to Branching Realities can be simultaneously seen both as the 'theoretical' and 'practical' part of the doctorate work - being a 'fictional' art work as much as 'fact-based' writing, including also the 'documentation' of the pieces done. The ultimate ontological question asks 'Why there is something rather than nothing?' The Guide focuses on a question one step towards our everyday experience, asking 'Why is it like this when it could as well be like that?' Reality around us is flexible in many ways - and we are ignorant of the location of the fine borderline between reality and fiction on many levels, starting from metaphysical theories arguing on the nature of reality, going through all different human perceptions and interpretations to the variety of images media feeds us. As humans, we are responsible of making up a huge amount of our reality by ourselves - society, knowledge, practices. For multiple reasons our everyday reality is organized one way instead of another, familiarity causing us to consider this order as 'normal'.
The project strives to momentarily break down the normalized flow of daily life by focusing on subtle anomalies, tiny situations resisting the default logic of life: stranger giving a precious gift, alien plant
growing amongst the ordinary ones, peculiar object found in one's pocket. These situations cannot be
manifestly "art", because it would ruin their ambiguous basis. They have to be subtle in order to gain the effects of coincidentality, authenticity and intimacy. They come near to pranks and hoaxes, but like art, these categories are too established. Pranks usually render someone ridiculous, offering fun to someone else, while anomalies have far more open-ended nature, often lacking the final punchline.
A moment of confusion arises when we encounter an anomaly which does not fit in the classification system we have constructed on the basis of our previous experience. Modern, urban people classify the stimuli they encounter with incredible speed while rushing through their life. A sudden distraction, refusing to conform to this rapid classification, demands extra attention and concentration. The influence often lasts only a split second, but it is enough for revealing the unstable and constructed nature of our ”reality” and thus the abundance of possible realities. The experience of confusion is often emotionally strong enough to arouse interest in the viewer. Creativity is needed when trying to interpret something which does not fit in the preconstructed system. Anomalies can be arranged by 1) a non/artist but as well 2) the experiencer her/himself by letting her/himself in the state of oblivion or 3) by being aware. Both routinized behavior and being very awake allow to notice the anomalies - but in different ways. The anomalies have an important feature of being uncontrollable, making every participator's possibilities equal. Art is ruled by economic and intellectual elites, but money or knowledge do not help to encounter/own these pieces.
The work continues the critical line starting from twentieth century avant-garde art, finding plenty of
inspiration especially in Situationists' and Fluxus' urge to affect the world at large and to challenge the idea of monopolized creativity and capitalistic logic. The idea of using subtle anomalies is rooted in the concepts of nonart and invisible art. According to Allan Kaprow (1996, 98), a nonart piece is created when something which is not meant to be an art object is perceived as an artwork. Therefore, a nonart piece does not have a proper artist-author apart from the observer. A nonart piece will, however, transform into an art work at the very moment it is, one way or another, brought to art context (Kaprow 1996, 98). I define gestures imitating the nonart effect, but made on purpose, as invisible art (cf. Augusto Boal’s concept invisible theater / Boal 2000, 143-147). From the spectators’ viewpoint, the art status of both nonart and invisible pieces is equally ambiguous compared to artart, which is easily identified as art (Kaprow 1996, 101). The ambiguous status emancipates the spectators from the role of the receiver and transforms them into (co-)authors of the art work. The basis of this study lies on the understanding of people as active modifiers of their environment (c.f. Michel de Certeau) and the artist as one of them. Because of this, the Guide treats art as one of the reality-shaping approaches, not an area of interest in itself.
