blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

A quick follow-up on today’s workshop with Brian Eno:

He’s a very smart and gentle person and I’m glad about that. Since I witnessed the moronic Matthew Barney, I’m always a bit anxious about meeting people whose art I like. Even more peculiar with Brian Eno since he has created at least two pieces of music that through some circumstances I hold very dear.

The workshop was basically constructed around a game in which people had to come up with impromptu and unusual pieces of art in order to identify the different theories and preoccupations about art we all have and then try to vaporize them in a falsification process. It was also meant to make us question what art actually is and why the students do it, arguing that this question is rarely asked in art schools. I much agree, having the impression that in art classes people spend more time debating about techniques and technology than about the motivation and impact of their work, because it’s such a personal issue for many. So this game, or competition, was divided into two parts: show your piece and then talk about it while getting a certain amount of points for both. This was pretty interesting since it nicely displayed the gap between what something is able to express without words and how the reception of the same thing might change when the concept behind it has been thoroughly explained – the score sometimes doubled.

One group actually presented shit. Bags with poo. They never revealed whether it really was theirs or if they scraped it off the dog-ridden Berlin sidewalks, but come on! This is 2007 and not 1967 and besides the fact that poo is hardly shocking anyone, I would never have the nerve to go for that and I was actually pretty embarrassed about their bluntness. They said that they shat for the prize, the first score being about the unusualness of the artwork, which was honest though. Still I was kind of angry about the whole thing.

I believe we did a good job in finding a consensus about what we think is art, but I felt that we pretty much failed at the first part too. What we could agree on, are basically three requirements: there has to be someone, let’s call him or her the artist, who creates something or declares it to be art, often through a performative act. There has to be something which we call the artwork, but this can also be an idea or eventually every conceivable thing, living beings included. Finally, there has to be someone else, let’s call that audience who feels affected by that artwork in some way. This someone might be a single person, even the artist him or herself. So what we get as a result, is basically a triangular relationship in which something is happening, which we would then call art. We think of this as a kind of resonance between the artist and the audience, with the actual art and the world around it as the space and medium in which this resonance happens.

So how to display the space that resonates? We stuck with this physics-derived metaphor and chose air, where, being the medium through which we perceive, this resonance is happening. We got a plastic bag and tried to inflate it but eventually just turned it upside down so it would form a volume that contained a few liters of air. It was a rather beautiful bag, but, as I said, it pretty much failed in terms of conveying our idea. Its sculpural quality was recognized and honored, but the conceptual side of it was only understood when explained, so it couldn’t stand on its own. I really profoundly doubt that obscurantist conceptual art (which we probably could be found guilty of as well with this piece) can live without explanation. Sure it can as long as people buy it, but it will leave the vast majority of its audience clueless. What eventually won was a project that made all the audience dance through the building. I think they probably deserved it, especially since the sight of us dancing made the almost pathologically expressionless and somehow very sad doorman nearly smile.

Two more thoughts from the following discussion –

“In art, often price determines the value whereas mostly value determines price.” That is an interesting statement, if you consider how the art market works. I don’t know how this came to be, but I suspect that so much has changed since the time when art was something much more measurable through the assessment of skills and materials, that you probably need some parameter to gauge quality with. You can negotiate a price, but you can’t discuss about money, so it’s some kind of secondary quality that gets attached and reevaluated every now and then in relation to the market which is probably a factor in itself.

Unfortunately, we just did the very first part of the falsification process and the only theory about art we couldn’t falsify was that art has to have an effect. I deeply agree with that and I was really happy about someone actually making a point for that. If it doesn’t affect anyone (who may well be the artist) it’s nothing.

I will also post a recap of Brian Eno’s lecture Before and after Darwin on WMMNA as soon as I find the time!