Transgenerational Encounters and Philosophical Concepts:
A Reflexive Social Sculpture Practice Exploration
Research
questions:
1. How
can my social sculpture practice explore
and enter into dialogue with specific concepts of philosophy?
2.
What is the relationship between human participants, more-than-human participants
and experimental gesture making in my creative practice?
3.
How can I best present and disseminate my findings and my practice to the
communities which I feel my work may be of relevance to?
Research Aims:
• To
develop a body of work of social sculpture explorations.
• To
use my practice to explore, reflect upon and articulate my social
sculpture encounters in terms of anti- and posthuman philosophical
concepts.
• To
be able to use a reflective practice in which the material
becomes the art work through a process of transformation/editing in conjunction
with philosophical concepts in dialogue with the performance to
reveal poiesis.
• To
focus on a variety of different generational groups and find ways to
interact with their plural and complex subjectivities.
• To
develop a more specific lexicon to use to articulate my practice. (At
present I am using the term social sculpture because it is the
closest to my practice.)
In
this report, I will describe my research findings to date and the
changes that I have made to my project based on these
findings. I will also outline the methods and methodologies that
I have previously proposed and subsequently developed, as well as
my intentions in relation to using, changing and building on these in
the future. I will not elaborate in this report on the contextual
elements of my project, as this is the basis of the
draft chapter that I am submitting.
When
I began to formulate my research project, my main areas of inquiry were
metamorphosis, hybrid languages, life changes and transformations
through time. However, as I began to conduct the social sculpture encounters,
my focus progressively shifted to participatory interactions and post
performance editing in dialogue with specific philosophical
concepts. These concepts are those of Nietzsche and
his anti-humanism
(his critique of contemporary humanism),
and they were the basis for Deleuze’s, Guattari’s and ultimately Braidotti’s post-humanism. I
am currently working with concepts formulated by all of these
thinkers.
As
I have developed my research project, my social sculpture practice has slowly
developed philosophical dimensions. In making my reflections on these
issues a key element of the thesis, I have begun to transfer into my practice
Nietzsche’s ideas from The Birth of Tragedy that stand in
opposition to the principles of Socratic dialectics. I understand
social sculpture to be the materialization and/or embodiment of philosophy
and a philosophical activity. I came to this realization while
editing the material collected during the social sculpture encounters, because
during this process I found that Nietzschean (anti- and
posthuman) concepts emerged. For example, through my practice,
I have been able to see how every group of people has its own
tragedy. During the social sculpture experiences, poiesis comes to the surface
in different ways. Different groups of participants relate to each other
differently, and the relationship between participants, objects, materials and
the environment varies as well. When participants become overly analytical and
look for intellectual associations in a dialectical frame of negotiation, the
social sculpture in fact reaches its conclusion because the core of the
encounter—that is, the experiencing of literal associations—loses its
energy. At this point, the experience turns into a cliché, and its tragedy—the
essence of the piece—fades away. I don’t decide when this end will
occur; it emerges out
of a need for clichéd associations that changes
the participants’ mood and affects their energy. As my research
project has developed, I have started to make use of reflective practice to
consider how in some instances the poiesis of a piece ended or turned
into comedy due to the appearance of reason and the participants’ needs to
intellectualize or rationalize their actions.
Moreover,
the nonstructural mode through which I facilitate experiences and
reflect on them draws on posthuman elements such as a nomadic
and noncentral ways of working that diverges from the Platonic idea of
mimicking a divine original. In the encounters, there is no plot, plan or
identity but only energy, actions and reactions that take place between people
from different age groups, random objects and other elements that are
naturally placed in an environment that could be based on (though is not
limited to) animals, plants or the weather.
The
combination of devising and overseeing social sculpture encounters and engaging
in reflective practice that incorporates the philosophical and conceptual
elements described above has yielded several categories of findings that are
relevant to my research project.
First,
the performance of my social sculpture encounters has evolved. I began to
conduct the performances outside of the studio space. I started by engaging
with built spaces. Furthermore, I have moved away from producing objects
to producing actions and giving my former objects a new meaning through
dialogic analysis. Eighteen months ago, I started
exploring self-transformations. I explored possibilities by producing
actions that were recorded on video. After a process of recording the
sound separately, I added it to the video. Once the two elements were together,
the work became a video production, in which the two elements affect one
another. In that body of work, I performed my actions in different
environments that conditioned the relationships featured in the piece.
I
came to participatory art after having worked on actions alone. I
began to use recordings of people’s comments on my
performances, and I started looking for groups of people to work
with. The first individuals to become involved in my artistic practice were a
group from North Beach senior centre and a group of teens from Miami Beach
High. During my exploration at the senior centre (November 2015) I
facilitated a playful environment in which I surrendered control of the
action and obeyed their control, decisions and proposals. In other words, I
became material for them. I “provoked” them by bringing in a roll of white
fabric and asking them what to do with it. Another tool of provocation was
the camera sitting on a tripod; the seniors knew that they would be filmed, but
to my surprise they liked it and they took control of the filming as well. I
made audio recordings of their comments after the
action and subsequently edited them into the video.
My understanding
of the materials and how to use them in my pieces has also
evolved. Initially, I used materials to produce a piece, and over time I
started to use fewer materials as props for the action. The latest stage
of my evolution in this area is to understand materials as more-than-human
participants (S. Pope) and at the same time to conceive of myself as
material. In so doing, I give control of the action to the participants as the
encounter takes place. In my work, materials play several roles.
During
encounters, materials are an active participant because they interact with
human participants and cause different energies to develop. During editing, I
take the material into consideration through reflective practice. After
editing, I have objects, a video with sound and still photographs. The
combining of video and sound creates an object, and the methods required for
making this object draw on both the main technical strands of my background:
video work and photographs on the one hand, and sound on the other. I
understand sound as a three-dimensional piece. During the sound editing, I
create form and space with the audio and look for different textures.
My evolving
understanding of materials has led to a change in how I label my practice.
I now describe my practice by using Joseph Beuys’s term “social sculpture”
because it is a material-driven approach, as opposed to “relational
aesthetics,” a concept that has no object and that involves much less
in the way of materials because it is focused purely on the social. Based on
this shift in terminology, I aim to create a more appropriate lexicon to use in
my work.
The
nature of control during the artistic encounters that form the basis of
my project has also evolved. During the encounters, my role does not
involve control. In contrast, once I begin to edit and reflect the recordings,
my role becomes exclusively one of control. I explore the relationship between
these uncontrolled and controlled aspects through the action and the piece’s
participants, whether they are people, materials or the environment.
The
previously mentioned incorporation of philosophical concepts in my process
of reflecting on my artistic practice has also been a key development over the
course of this project. I view all the transformations of myself and my
practice as the metamorphosis of the human which Nietzsche discusses.
My work has raised questions and statements to which I find responses
from the concepts of anti-
or posthumanism such as (but not limited
to) nomadism; active and reactive forces; affect; arborescent schema
and rhizome; and tragedy and comedy.
I use
Schon’s reflective practice method to analyze my practice
and to articulate my findings. I developed my own scheme based on
his for my research-based practice, which involves the following
steps:
During
the encounter, I reflect on myself, and I reflect with
the participants through dialogue. At this stage of the
process, my reflection is focused on what is happening during
the period that includes both the production
of social sculpture and the moments immediately after
during the wrap-up session following the performance. Later in
my studio during editing the recordings, self-reflection based
on this material occurs. It is in this space that associations with anti- and posthumanist concepts
appear through reflection. The next step is preparing for the next
encounter, which is influenced by the experience from past ones.
To
give an example of this process in action, during my last encounter at the
new place at which I performed my work (the Jewish Community
Services Senior Centre of Miami Beach), I used a box of fabrics in a
closet that the staff showed me, and the
residents took control by deciding which material from
it to use. Their choice was informed by what I showed
them from my previous work. When the social sculpture
exploration started, a few of them were very upset because I was not
specific about what I was doing and what they were supposed to
do. At the same time, I reflected on the notion
of controlled/uncontrolled and how some participants decided to
leave because I did not want to tell them what to do. Another
group started using the fabrics as dresses, singing songs and
dancing, and I reflected on them and how they
began to play spontaneously. They kept dancing until we finished.
Another group sat, and a few of
them told me that they were not kindergarteners, that
they were upset because they
felt that I had confused them with kids. I
took this reflection of theirs into consideration for
my reflective practice and possibly for my next encounter. There
was a group of 7 women who danced and enjoyed the encounter as
well; they asked me to come back and to keep
“playing”. During editing in my
studio, my next reflections took me to the
discussion of tragedy and comedy in the following way: those
who complained and either left or felt mistaken for kindergarteners
were the group that refused to play. Their
need for understanding before participating was so strong
that it led them to analyze and convert the situation into
a comedy that in fact paralyzed their
creativity (Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy). This same group also
displayed sedentary decisions (Deleuze, Guattari): they needed to
mimic something, and because I
did not provide them with something to
mimic, their sedentary attitude stopped them. On the other
hand, the other group displayed nomadic
actions. They didn’t need to mimic in order to make, they
constructed the social sculpture in a more sensory
and playful way, and they constructed the plot as they
went along. They did not request a plot or need a previous
idea to copy.
Some of
my reflections focus on the differences between working with groups
of teenagers and working with groups of seniors. While the
seniors struggle to understand contemporary art, performance and the
interdisciplinary approach as art, sometimes they are very
spontaneous and free during the encounters and the post encounter
reflections. In contrast, the teens are very knowledgeable and interested in
performance and social sculpture. Even if they have never heard of the concept
of social sculpture before, they naturally and intuitively grasp the idea.
However, they struggle with participating spontaneously and without prejudices,
and there are big differences in their performances between when I work
with them and when I leave them to work on their own. They also struggle to
give comments relating to their experiences after the action.
The
methodology used in my research until now was based on Nietzsche’s
triangulation. Nietzsche proposes the use of diverse approaches in order to
increase knowledge, which echoes the often-interdisciplinary nature of
practice-based research. The form of triangulation that I deploy in my
methodology incorporates the following three angles: philosophy, social
sculpture, and dialogic. More than being the third element of the
triangulation, dialogic will transform the triangulation methodology
into something that is more akin to circulation in its dynamics. I will use the
dialogic idea in an auxiliary role to allow the philosophical
concepts and social sculpture elements to reciprocally inform and
transform one another. Therefore dialogic is the transmission element
that transforms the triangulation into a circulation methodology.
In A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of circulation. They
explain the work of the philosopher as a work of creative process, the material
being the concepts that they create. They wrote this book using a structure
that they refer to as a “rhizome,” a metaphor that is also supposed to indicate
the way in which the book should be read. They also state that their work
could be read in any order as it has been created as an assemblage of concepts
that circulates with no specific order. Later on in this
project, I will analyze how my process of making social sculpture is a process
of making philosophy. In my work, performance becomes the process of
revealing concepts of philosophy.
Recently,
I have been reflecting on the impossibility of one of my main premises, namely
the idea of “giving myself up” during the social sculpture encounters.
Throughout the RDC1, I expressed this idea as an objective, and my practice was
also grounded in it. I have now concluded that it is not possible to give
oneself up. Rather, what is possible is to go to the edge of doing so (for
example, as Yoko Ono did on her “Cut” piece, 1964). This conclusion does not
invalidate my RDC1 discussion but rather prompts me to focus on the boundary
between the possible and the impossible, which also brings in utopianism as a
frame of work. I currently doubt that it is possible for me to truly give
myself up, but nonetheless I will keep trying, and I will analyze my attempts
to do so. During and after RDC2, instead of focusing my analysis on “giving
myself up” I will focus on, explore and map out the boundary between possible
and impossible as I attempt to give myself up and discover where this
attempt leads me next. In his article Utopian Prospect of Henry
Lefebvre, Nathaniel Coleman posits that “demanding the impossible
may always end in failure but doing so is the first step toward other
possibilities nevertheless”. Sometimes it is the absence or
impossibility (Lefebvre) of something that actually allows us to see or
understand how something functions (Michael Bowdidge). The projection to
those new processes, namely utopianism, will also be explored.
Further
Practice
Other
questions that were raised after RDC1 were: How can I make social sculpture
without interacting with people? Can I achieve the “social” element of a piece
by myself? Can I raise awareness of the “social” by making a nonparticipatory
piece? What happens to the “social” element of social sculpture when there is
no human participant? These questions have parallels with John Cage’s “4:33”
and the implications of removing sound from his composition. These questions
in turn raise further, more practical
queries: What does a social sculpture equivalent of
4:33 look like? How can I create social sculpture that raises social
questions without interaction with human participants? What happens if I remove
the human participants in a participatory piece? If I leave it only to the
more-than-humans and or environment, will I have returned
to an object-making practice? Are there examples of this
potential type of social sculpture with no people present that
already exist? Can I became other to myself? What kind of activities can I
do (and in what order) to bring about something unexpected?
Aside
from exploring the reflections described above, I also have several other
objectives that I intend to pursue in relation to my research-based practice.
I aim to explore ways to disseminate my findings not only in the art
world, but also in educational, academic, institutional and noninstitutional
environments. On a spatial level, I intend to keep exploring different
environments, with a view to working more closely in nature or open urban
spaces. Finally, I hope to interview and work with other artists with similar
interests, and I would like to start a social sculpture platform that offers a
space for interested participants to share their findings.
Humble
new knowledge
In
conducting this research project, my aim is to develop a new methodology, which
I call circulation. This methodology departs from Nietzsche’s triangulation.
The three angles of the concepts of posthuman philosophy, social
sculpture practice and dialogic will compose the dynamics of the circulation
methodology. I also hope to develop a more specific lexicon to be used in
articulating my practice.
I am pushing up against the
limits of what social sculpture practice is and can be, and I
am watching it derail in different ways, as the contradictions which are
in it become increasingly apparent. The research might actually be more about
all the ways in which social sculpture doesn’t work… (MB)
“Social Sculpture is a definition developed by the artist Joseph
Beuys in the 1970s on the concept that everything is art, that every aspect of
life could be approached creatively and, as a result, everyone has the
potential to be an artist. Social sculpture united Joseph Beuys’ idealistic
ideas of a utopian society together with his aesthetic practice. He believed
that life is a social sculpture that everyone helps to shape.” Tate glossary of
art terms, tate.org.uk
