a series of lectures and screenings curated by Anke Bangma and hosted by TENT. and Witte de With
December 2004-April 2005
hosted by TENT. and Witte de With centres for contemporary art, Rotterdam
This lecture series looked at ethnographic films, scientific spectacle, performance, body art, theatre and dance, to explore how the body can be understood as a site of cultural conditioning and as a source of knowledge and meaning.
The body is not a “natural given”, but shaped by cultural conditioning. It is the protagonist of both voluntary and involuntary actions and gestures, producing language and cultural meaning, while at the same time itself being grasped and defined by it.
Historically, the accumulation of knowledge about the human body by the human sciences (medicine, physiology, psychology, ethnology, …) is intimately connected with the management of the body and the disciplining of behaviour. As a consequence, bodies have not only been literally mined and exploited for their productivity and value, but also been categorized as normatively legitimate or undesirable. As Judith Butler has said, not all bodies matter in the same way.
Bodily language is therefore not so much the expression of a personal inner world, but a discursive gesture. But exactly because the body is a site of cultural conditioning, it has also been put forward by artists and theorists as a site for transgressing the cultural constraints of meaning and behaviour.
Félix-Louis Regnault, motion studies of African people at the 1895 Exposition Ethnographique in Paris
December 16, 2004
lecture: FATIMAH TOBING RONY: SCIENTIFIC POSITIVISM, TAXIDERMY AND THE THIRD EYE
Cultural theorist and filmmaker Fatimah Tobing Rony argued that early ethnographic cinema was a primary means through which race and gender were visualized as natural categories. Central to her talk were the movement studies of African people at the 1895 ethnographic exposition and the film Nanook of the North. Based on these works, Rony showed how the scientific “realism” of photography contributed to notions of race, evolution and civilization, and how capturing the life of the primitive Other followed the paradigm of taxidermy: preserving a lifelike representation of something that is actually already dead. However, Tobing was careful to present the ethnic Others in these ethnographic pictures not simply as people who are observed and objectified but as performers who look back.
Fatimah Tobing Rony (Indonesia/USA) is a cultural theorist and filmmaker. She is assistant professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of California (UC), Irvine and author of The Third Eye. Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Duke University Press, 1996). Her films include On Cannibalism (1994), Concrete River (1996), Demon Lover (1998), and Everything In Between (2000).
January 20, 2005
lecture: HEMMA SCHMUTZ & TANJA WIDMANN: THAT BODIES SPEAK HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME
Under the title That bodies speak has been known for a long time, Hemma Schmutz and Tanja Widmann curated an exhibition with works by John Baldessari, Daniel Herskowitz, Antje Majewski, Catherine Opie, Francesca Woodman and others (Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2004). In their lecture they approached the speaking body by examining the gesture.
One way of grasping the gesture is to try to fix it, to understand it as decipherable and legible (as can be seen in classical rhetoric, 18th century theatre, French history painting, early film or in contemporary management courses). The other way is to comprehend the gesture as a contradictory, ambivalent, and performative element: as a “means without end”. Following Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and the “Mnemosyne Atlas” of Aby Warburg, the curators looked at the body as the protagonist of both voluntary and involuntary actions, as the conveyor of contradictory messages, while at the same time highlighting its potential for resistance.
Hemma Schmutz (Austria) is a curator; she was director of Depot, Kunst und Diskussion together with Stella Rollig from 1884-97; a curator at the Generali Foundation from 1998-2004; and is currently director of the Kunstverein Salzburg. Selected exhibitions include double life (Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2001) and Designs fuer die wirkliche Welt (Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2002).
Tanja Widmann (Austria) is an artist and an independent curator; her recent exhibitions include 2004 “The personal is political”, und peinlich (Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2004).
February 3, 2005
screening: HARUN FAROCKI: HOW TO LIVE IN THE FRG (1990) 83″
In this film Harun Farocki assembles a genre picture of contemporary society with shots of scenes where life is rehearsed and ability is tested. Wherever one looks, people appear as actors playing themselves; they take on roles. A play in the theater of life made up of training courses, fitness tests for things and people. Be it in birth preparation classes for expectant parents or in practice runs for sales talks, on the military training ground or during role-plays for educational purposes. Everywhere the incessant effort to be prepared for the emergency of “reality” can be felt. How To Live In The FRG assembles out of a wealth of details a picture of a society in which childbearing and dying, crying and taking care of people, crossing streets and killing are taught and learned in state or private institutions, indeed have to be learned.
February 10, 2005
lecture: TRACEY WARR: BODY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SITE
In her lecture Tracey Warr drew on a wide range of body art and site art from 1970s to the present in order to examine the visualisation and performance of embodied consciousness in dynamic interaction with the natural environment.
Tracey Warr (UK) is a curator and writer focusing on artists working with body and site. She has worked with artists such as James Turrell, Stelarc, Marina Abramovic, Helen Chadwick and Cornelia Parker. Warr is a regular contributor to Performance Research journal and edited the survey book The Artist’s Body (with Amelia Jones, Phaidon, 2000). She is director of the MA in Arts & Cultural Management at Dartington College of Art, UK.
Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, Polaria: Remote sensing of arctic polarised light, 2002
February 17, 2005
screening: CONTEMPORARY ROMANTIC: ON BODY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SITE – a screening programme selected by Tracey Warr
A number of contemporary artists are re-engaging with Romantic subject matter: consciousness and the natural environment and elements of consciousness that are outside being conscious (sleep, dream, bodily experience and processing). This screening programme presented a selection of artists’ work addressing this issue. With the following works:
Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson, Polaria, 2002, 10”
Bruce Gilchrist & Jonny Bradley, Thought Conductor, 2000-01, 10” and Divided by Resistance, 1998, 10”
Jo Joelson, Definitions of Outline, 2003, 10”
Marcus Coates, Local Birds, 2001, 10”
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, 32”
James Turrell & Carine Asscher, Passageways, 2000, 30”
Tacita Dean, Fernsehturm, 2001, 44”
February 24, 2005
lecture: MAAIKE BLEEKER: DYS-APPEARING BODIES AND CORPOREAL LITERACY: THE ANATOMICAL THEATRE RECONSIDERED
The historical anatomical theatre symbolizes the emergence of a particular constellation of ideas and practices underlying what became the dominant conception of the body, including the prevailing notions of how the body can be known, and, what it means to know. This inaugural moment was highly theatrical in character, and occurred in a theatrical space.
With The Anatomical Theatre Revisited, Maaike Bleeker proposes a return to the theatre and to theatricality as an “operational divide” (Rosalind Krauss) to explore some of the implications of these ideas and practices, as well as of alternative conceptions of embodiment, perception and knowledge emerging from what is by now a history of critique of Cartesian subjectivity.
Maaike Bleeker (Netherlands) is a cultural theorist and dramaturge, working on the intersection of theatre, dance and visual art. In 2002 she received her PhD at ASCA with The Locus of Looking. Dissecting Visuality in the Theatre; currently she is assistant professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Recent projects as a dramaturge include: Show, written and directed by Jeroen van den Berg (st. Ado, Amsterdam, 2004); Memory Explosion, written and directed by Guy Amitai (Gasthuis, Amsterdam, 2004); and *Laylah, the Creature Beyond Dreams, Gil & Moti (2004).
Milica Tomic, I Am Milica Tomic, video still, 1998
March 3, 2005
screening & talk: MILICA TOMIC
Milica Tomic showed and discussed video works such as I Am Milica Tomic (1998) and Sama (2001), in which she makes ironically and painfully clear how the individual is caught up in power games and constructions of gendered, political and nationalist identity. In I Am Milica Tomic her own body is literally wounded by the true and false declarations she makes about her own identity: “I am Milica Tomic. I am Norwegian. I am Korean. I am Milica Tomic. I am Indian…”. Sama (Alone) confronts the ways in which male and female identities are constructed. It combines images of men playing Preference, a card game that is not only played for fun, but also as a ritual enacting of traits culturally valued in men, such as power and cleverness, with images of a female “turbo-folk” star singing her song.
Milica Tomic (Serbia) is an artist based in Belgrade.
March 10, 2005
screening & talk: CHAT: EMOTIONAL ATTACKS
Artist Chat (Germany) develops choreographies, performances and installations for the context of visual art and theatre to open up theatrical spaces of emotional experience. In her work, she has explored the dynamics of the masses and the organisation and choreographing of collective behaviour in a variety of settings, includes public spaces, highways and shopping malls. Her collective performances Demonstration (2003), for example, evolved around the questions: How much physical contact do we need, or can we stand? What impact does wireless communication have on our courage to face each other in real life? It is only for a short moment that you may feel frightened by a crowd of strangers; then you become part of it yourself. Being in a crowd means to be manipulated, mentally and physically. The crowd shapes our individual characters. Taking a distance may be the only way out.
March 24, 2005
lecture: BOJANA KUNST: THE DISOBEDIENT BODY OF PERFORMANCE. BEING RESISTANT TO REPRESENTATION?
The revolution of the 1960s and its pursuit of happiness resulted in the intrusion of private pleasures into the political arena. By demanding a representative space for private desires, this kind of revolt wanted to open the path for individuals and their desires, to break through old social limitations, and to connect private and public activities. Yet in the contemporary Western welfare society the demands for happiness have been transformed into a commercialized longing for the realization of pleasures. The organization of happiness has become a global economy. In this lecture Bojana Kunst reflected on this problem from the perspective of the body and will challenge the established ways of transgressing and subverting cultural meaning and behaviour. The critical orientation of art projects can no longer be understood only as a formation of oppositional standpoints, a presentation of opposite contents, or a reflection of already existing forms. Today, these kinds of projects use the same procedures as we ourselves do in our private or public activities; they succumb to the same bureaucratic laws and participatory problems.
Bojana Kunst (Slovenia) is a philosopher, dramaturge and editor of Maska performing arts journal. She is author of The Impossible Body (1999) and Dangerous Connections (2004).
Meg Stuart, Alibi, 2002
Thursday March 31, 2005
lecture: JEROEN FABIUS: EXPLODING WAYS OF READING THE BODY: THE AESTHETICS OF REDUCTION AND DISAPPEARANCE IN THE WORK OF MEG STUART AND WILLIAM FORSYTHE
Dance can be seen as a form of cultivating embodied meaning. Choreographers Meg Stuart and William Forsythe both explode the idea of a vocabulary of dance based on the conventions of the body. For Stuart this exploration is of the body in public space; for Forsythe the explorations is set against the conventions of ballet. Stuart zooms in on minute details, emphasizing stillness and reduction, allowing the spectator time to read a great variety of socially inscribed meanings on the unstable surface of the performing body. Forsythe deconstructs the vocabulary of ballet, breaking the formal rules of movement , and handing control over the design of the performance to abstract logarithms and the choices of individual dancers. The result is an aesthetics of disappearance, as the spectator, in the face of abundance, fails to grasp it all.
Jeroen Fabius is a choreographer, performer and cultural theorist. He is currently director of Dance Unlimited, a postgraduate programme for choreography and new media based in Amsterdam, and coordinator of the dance theory research group The Knowing Body at the Theaterschool Amsterdam.
Thursday April 7, 2005
lecture: BRIGITTE FELDERER: POLITE MACHINES
Between 1770 and 1790 a high Austrian official, Wolfgang von Kempelen, constructed two machines to perform at the Habsburg court: a chess playing android and a speaking machine, which could be read as a deaf body and a bodiless voice. Starting from this example of eighteenth-century “courtoisie” and mechanical art, this lecture will explore the radical conceptual changes that have occurred in the concepts of courtesy and politeness and in notions of the body.
Brigitte Felderer (Austria) is a curator and cultural theorist, teaching at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She curated the exhibitions Wuenschmachine, Welterfindung. A History of Technical Visions since the 18th Century (Wiener festwochen); Rudi Gernreich. Fashion will go out of fashion (steirischer herbst), and Phonorama. Cultural History of the Human Voice (ZKM). Her publications include Hoeflichkeit. Aktualitaet und Genese von Umgangsformen (with Th. Macho,. eds.) and Kempelen. 2 Maschinen (with E. Strouhal).
Thursday April 28, 2005
workshop/lab: LINA ISSA: REPORT ON BODY
Artist and PZI participant Lina Issa (Lebanon) invited participants to join her ongoing project Report on Body, and to carry out a set of simple exercises and discuss the experiences they generate. Report on Body investigates bodily experience and the intimacy of motion. Merleau Ponty has described bodily perception as a double movement: both inwards, perceiving itself, and outward, perceiving the world. Issa’s collaborative project explores the experience of moving inward and being still in the world, as well as on the experience of the body in relation to its surroundings. The workshop provides a setting in which participants can practice the integration of inner and outer focus, and train the awareness of of perception while moving or witnessing movement. What do you notice and what moves you?