Tag Archives: exchange

Citizenship

Tania Bruguera on Reciprocity, Generosity, and Earned Respect

Tom Finkelpearl:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about reciprocity lately…. When you say you have created a community, that could mean this exchange, the notion that I’ll help you with your sound editing if you do the camera work for me, which seems like reciprocity.”

Tania Bruguera [emphasis added]:

“The mistake is in the use of if. It is not, ‘I do this for you if you do this for me,’ it’s just, ‘I do this for you.’ The point is that each person should say the same. It is not a quid pro quo. Maybe person A is helped by person B, and later person B gets help from person C and D, and person A is helping person C. It’s not a two-way street; it’s a place in the middle, where people meet. It is knowing that you will have support, and things are not seen as debts or gains but as joy.

I always say that I wanted to provide a safe environment [at Cáthedra Arte de Conducta], safe but tough, safe because we were based in trust and honesty, not because it was easy. It is a system based on professional admiration, which each person has to work hard to get from the rest of the group.”

—From Tom Finklepearl, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Collaboration(2013)

This community understanding described by Bruguera is the opposite of the nakedly ambitious—where other people are sources of economic or social capital to be exploited, or lacking such capital, disregarded. Since artists’ opportunities for external validation are so competitive, it’s easy to be lazy and let ambitions guide behaviors.

I’d love to strive for this model of positive contributions:

To stop currying favors and stockpiling IOUs.

To quit politicking with hidden agendas.

To admire the admirable, and to question devotion to the merely influential.

To speak up or be discreet because it’s the right thing to do, not from fear of how it will affect reputations or limit future opportunities.

To pay it forward.

To give freely, and to continually earn each others’ respect.

To create spaces that are safe but tough.

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Art & Development

Eliasson on spectatorship and perceptual experiences in galleries

One of the predominant tropes of the artists in Il Tempo del Postino is their assertion of the socialising and empowering agency of art, which has long been an aim of theatre of the left, from Brecht to Invisible Theatre, developed by Augusto Boal in the 1970s, when social-issue plays were staged in public places, such as shopping centres, often drawing nonperformers, or ‘spect-actors’, into the debate….

The efforts of a number of these artists to orchestrate socialising contexts have been criticised in recent years for being patronising or for actually stultifying exchange.

[Stultifying? See Ranciere.]

A distinguishing factor of Eliasson’s work, though, is that he doesn’t consider language the primary socialising agent. His installations and events operate on the audience’s sensory perception, prompting not a conversational exchange but a subjective psychophysical experience. Although, as Eliasson points out, there is no unmediated neutral state of perception in a gallery, as by definition any aesthetic proposition demands sensory manipulation, he tends to expand effect beyond optical or linguistic cognition. Utopian claims for art creating solidarity through authentic communal discourse become redundant when the subjectivity of perception becomes the means as well as the subject of an artwork. Collectivity, suggests Eliasson, is more about the production of difference, and yet there remains a misperception that representation in the form of language creates a productive space, when in fact it simply describes a space that remains uninhabited. As it was for eighteenth-century romantic ironists, such as August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, for Eliasson it is the employment of the gap between representation and the actual world, between the sun and the evocation of a sun or an audience and their reconstruction, that generates poetic effect.

—Sally O’Reilly, “Olafur Eliasson: Time is on his side,” Art Review, September 14, 2007

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