Vigil for the Death of Free Time

Bevis Fenner

Vigil for the Death of Free Time 

2016

Performance installation

Minimalism was originally a reaction to the individualistic excesses and bank-friendly ambivalence of Abstract Expressionism, which Nelson Rockefeller once described as “free enterprise painting”.  If it were to emerge as a new movement in 2016, then it would undoubtedly represent a similar stance towards the flexibility and obedience of today’s instrumentalised artistic labourers. For today’s culture of voluntarism and precarity is kept alive by nothing less than the ghost of modernism.  Whether they like it or not, artists are sustained by their egos and the myth that they are making a difference. In reality, they are instrumental in creating a post-welfare culture of voluntarism, sustained by the endless labour of self-making. 

I present no alternatives or outsides to the labour power that artist’s frequently misrecognise as capital, except for a futile call for the withdrawal of labour. The clock is an ironic counterpoint to this act, representing the end of clock-time in an age of self-regulated / self-surveilled labour, in which there is no ‘free time’ and the tick of the clock is subsumed into the heartbeat of subjective labour. Performing the act of ‘killing time’ highlights the futility of non-participation. However, in the context of a conference, only a fool would refuse the opportunity to network, because without social networks we are adrift in a sea of signs and possibilities, and unplugged from the cybernetic feedback systems that sustain our labour. The performance serves not only as a reminder that refusal of work is a dangerous and potentially suicidal game but also an act of labour in itself; turning away from the shadows of illusion and language, and towards the shadow within and the potentiality of Jung’s “dark night of the soul”.

Photos by Noriko Suzuki-Bosco

 

The Imaginative Tourist Trail for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016

The Imaginative Tourist Trail is a social art project I am currently running as part of Everyday Tourist Collective (ETC) with Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones. The project was commissioned for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016 and explores the notion of authentic experience of place when it is seen through someone a fictitious frame. We have produced an edition of 200 Interactive Trail Guides / maps in the hope that visitors will engage with the 2.6 mile trail, beginning at The Fighting Cocks pub at Godshill in the New Forest, to produce alternative narratives of the area. We printed the guides using risograph technology and included a series of prompts indexed to eleven alternative tourist sites on the trail. The prompts have are not drawn from historical facts or official narratives relating to the sites and were designed to trigger the imaginations of participants and to inspire them to see the seemingly mundane through new eyes. We hope that the project will help visitors to re-image mundane rural sites and to generate a rich, multi-layered palimpsest of experiences indicating the complex nature of our engagement with place as mediated through both official narratives and emergent and unfolding understandings of our temporal, spatial and imaginative relations to site. All responses are submitted anonymously and have been used to conduct artist-led misguided tours, which have been taking place every Saturday during the course of the festival.

Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones

Based on the understanding that tourism offers a way of shaping people’s experience of reality through narrative, the two week project hopes to bring into question the notions of authorship and authenticity in both art and tourism. Specifically referring to Foucault's concerns about who authorises the author within 'the functioning conditions of specific discursive practices' (Foucault, 1998), we have attempted to facilitate an imaginative environment in which participants are able to mediate between personally authentic place meanings and those authorised by cultural and institutional discourse to develop their own versions of ‘truth’. Indeed, our belief in narratives or histories as absolute truths, limits our experience of reality. Experiencing a place through a fictitious frame not only questions the authenticity of experience but also allows us to engage with reality as imaginative play.

ETC's Tourist Misinformation Station

The Imaginative Tourist Trail 
 

Interactive Trail Guide (edition of 200)

 

Flat Surface Painting, Michael Simpson at Spike Island, Bristol - 16 January to 27 March

Bench Painting 67 [Bruno Resurrect] (reworked 2008) 
Oil on Canvas 
245 x 518 cm


Michael Simpson studied painting at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. Yet while his peers were embracing the brave new world of Pop Art, Simpson turned to the past in order to recalibrate and reconfigure the transformations of faith, illusion and transcendence in secular society. Rather than simply holding a mirror up to social and cultural structures, Simpson’s paintings dig deeper, in ways that align them with Foucault’s methodological approach. Simpson is an archaeologist of embedded power systems of discipline, regulation and illusion. Indeed, both his fascination with the writings and life of Giordano Bruno, a Renaissance scholar burned at the stake for heresy, and what Simpson terms as “the infamy of religious history”, become ways of disentangling the relationship between representation and institutional exclusion, in an age in which aesthetics are dominant. As well referencing the composition and perspectival techniques of Renaissance painting, the Leper Squint series specifically refer to the viewing holes built into the walls of churches that once allowed the inadmissible to ‘participate’ in sermons without entering the congregation. Here, the Renaissance motif of the architectural frame becomes an allegory for our times. In an age of where ‘choice’ and ‘participation’ are the buzz words through which to engage individuals as legal subjects, the screen and the interface masks the power and property relations of political agency. The frame is key in determining our over-identification with institutions of power. Whether it is the neoliberal pedagogies of Big Brother, Dragons Den and the X-Factor or the binary interface Tinder, the frame invites audience into artwork, whilst at the same time ultimately excluding us from its means of production. Here, illusionary forms become part of a technocratic system for rationalising and reorganising labour value and exchange, as exploitation of ‘bare life’, and for the exclusion and eventual elimination of non-participatory subjects. In other words, the interface becomes the dehumanising means necessary for the cultural and institutional rationalisation of Social Darwinism. 

Squint 18 (2015)

Oil on Canvas

229 x 121 cm

Paradoxically, whilst Simpson is deeply critical of ideological dogma and the brutality of organised religion, his paintings also adopt an ambivalence towards the obfuscating glamour and of pop culture and the illusions of our seemingly liberated times. These works are far from agnostic and have a deeply meditative resolve, which balances hermetic withdrawal with critical reflection on the social, cultural and physical architectures of exclusion. Simpson plays with the complex and paradoxical relationship between belief and illusion, playing off the acetic language of American minimalism against the illusionary tropes of renaissance painting. His paintings do not conform to the ‘liberated’ anti-illusionism of minimalism nor the bank-friendly ambivalence of Abstract Expressionism, which Nelson Rockefeller's once famously described as “free enterprise painting”. Instead, Simpson uses the dialogue between illusion and pure form, as a way of questioning the neutrality our architectures of exclusion; the ambivalence that reduces migrants, the homeless, the elderly, the displaced and the marginalised to ‘bare life’. Equally this makes us reflect on the occupation of public space by corporations, in which sovereignty over non-legal subjects is instated with makeshift architecture, the introduction Public Space Protection Orders and the infamous brutality of anti-homeless spikes and on the spot fining.

Far from Simpson’s paintings adopting the critical and complicit stance of Pop Art, they are, in fact deep ethical reflections on the politics of illusion. Thus, in the flesh, they are far from flat and shiny. The surfaces are often heavily textured as if a comb has being dragged methodically through the paint, perhaps in a gesture towards the minimalist paintings of Zebedee Jones. Up close, the illusionary techniques are thwarted as the brush skims the ridges of these surfaces. Yet, as in the case of the meticulously painted shroud-like cloths that appear in some of his Bench Painting series, seemingly weighing down the coffin-like blocks, the adherence to classical painting is challenged by a lightness of touch, which renders this drapery as the ghostly, untouchable projection of cinema. In this direction, Simpson has increasingly described these works as vanitas paintings. In doing this he presents us with a deeply personal paradox, the relationship between figuration and transcendence (his Catholic bodily conscience) and the ontological value in rehearsing death and mortifying the flesh. Indeed, this reflects the paradoxical nature of Giordano Bruno’s fate. In not renouncing his ideas and in his adherence to his belief in the power of transcendence over the body until the bitter end, Bruno ultimately presented himself to the authorities as ‘bare life’. Conversely, he became Christ-like – a body deemed unworthy of life yet in possession of a spiritual and intellectual core, untouchable by his persecutors.

The austere, coffin-like structures in his Bench Paintings appear to float, perhaps alluding to both the resurrection of Christ and the paradoxical relationship between hermetic ascension and the transcendence of enlightenment thinking. Indeed, Simpson has confessed a disliking of gravity, which becomes a Cartesian battle between the desire for intellectual and bodily transcendence and our earthbound nature. Here, the enlightenment shift masks the corporeal relations between power and freedom, previously reinforced by medieval authoritarianism and now reproduced in the biopolitical sphere of liberal forms of governance. Whether its the need for individuals to reproduce and sustain livelihoods within an ever narrowing performative field or the control and regulation of migration, the relationship between the desire for freedom and the exercise of power ultimately comes back to the human body and its right to thrive or wither away. Simpson’s paintings make us all too aware of the cognitive dissonance between the corporeal awareness and representational illusion. Not only does he draw our attention to the weight and encumbrance of the body but also to the conflict between the flat space of virtual projection and the ‘flesh of the world’. The textural and gestural qualities maintained by the act of painting, recalls Merleau-Ponty, in reminding us of the ‘ubiquity of body’ in an age of screen surfaces. Likewise, the minimist trompe-l'œils, invite the bodily imagination to project itself into virtual space more readily than the transcendent cybernetic passivity of the screen interface. Beyond the Cartesian elaboration of the internet, our Godlike propriety over virtual worlds and the impenetrability of the touch screen, the surface of painting reminds us of our own bodies. Here, as artist and writer Bernice Donzelmann suggests, ‘surface is flesh, of sorts’.

Simpson paintings seem to reflect the ways in which the religious illusions that once maintained the deep structures of power and property, as exercised by church and crown, are transformed from the direct disciplining and punishment of bodies – imprisonment, torture and execution – and the allowance or denial of life, to remote governance and the regulation of bodily freedoms and life choices, in which individuals are allowed to choose from multiple paths to either inclusion and life, on the one hand and exclusion and death on the other. Likewise, the Christian parable of ‘the broad and narrow way’ is transformed into a kind of Social Darwinist ‘Wacky Races’, where the object is to install fake scenery to trick your competitors into thinking they are heading towards their own ‘finish lines’, when they have in fact been fast-tracked towards the abyss.

For me, the sheer brutality of contemporary forms of exclusion is represented in the perspectival devices of Simpson’s un-inhabitably shallow architectural spaces. These are not only the spaces of purgatory and divine judgement but the façades, architraves and doorways in which the homeless, the mentally ill, the young, political outsiders and other disenfranchised loiterers wait to be ‘moved on’. Hey remind us that we live in society in which, despite illusions to the contrary, it is all too apparent that we cannot transcend the body. The coffin like forms in Simpson’s Bench Painting series, are a sober reminder of the biopolitical reality of our agnostic times; that subjective freedoms and life choices are ultimately bound to the human body; its inclusions and exclusions, its capacity to thrive or die.

Bevis Fenner & Noriko Suzuki-Bosco for TANTEO 2015 - What happens when you see a place through someone else’s eyes?

   

Based on the understanding that tourism offers a way of shaping people’s experience of reality through narrative, this one day project questioned the definition of authentic experience when a place is seen through someone else’s eyes. It also brought into question the notion of authorship in tourism and art. Specifically referring to Foucault's concerns about who authorises the author within 'the functioning conditions of specific discursive practices', we attempted to facilitate an imaginative environment in which participants were able to mediate between personally authentic place meanings and those authorised by cultural and institutional discourse to develop their own versions of the truth (Foucault, 1998). Indeed, our belief in narratives or histories as absolute truths, limits our experience of reality. Experiencing a place through someone else’s eyes not only questions the authenticity of experience but also allows us to engage with reality as imaginative play. Through processes of deconstructing / reconstructing 'reality' and authoring / de-authoring 'work', the project attempted to facilitate walking practices that would enable participants to move beyond representational discourses and to re-negotiate new 'truths' of place. We also set out to consider Foucault's question - 'what is an author?' via the nexus of conceptual and material praxis and through the collaborative, artist-led
process itself.

The project began with two groups of participants those from TANTEO and
others who were Bournemouth residents. There were also two sets of guided tour
'scripts' to hand out to participants:

• The first set of 'scripts' were historically 'accurate' documents given to the
residents to guide them through an area of Bournemouth. It was their role to
modify, adapt and personalise the texts by re-writing them as their own
'truths' of Bournemouth. This was done by re-writing the 'scripts' in the form
of written narrative and / or photographic representations or 'texts'
comprised of more open visual and literary forms such drawing, painting,
performance, experimental photography and poetry / poetic prose /
'pwoermds'.

• A second set of 'scripts' had all historical details removed, leaving only
fragmented lexical, syntactical and grammatical information. The new 'scripts'
were be given to core TANTEO participants to carry with them on their walks.
These participants will then use the 'scripts' as structural guides to develop
imaginative narrative responses whilst walking. These new 'truths' will then be
used by participants to generate literary / material / performance responses
of their own.

Participants from TANTEO project

Reflection

Our aim for this project was to use the prepared text/script to open up alternative ways of engaging with place and its’ historical narrative and to question the authenticity and ‘truths’ of such experience. The texts provided structure and anchor point for the participants to imaginatively engage with historical truth to generate subjective freedom and to add a layer of personal narrative.

Note: Majority of the people taking part in the project were ‘visitors’ hence the feedbacks mainly reflect the use of the second set of text/script.

Findings:

Both group of participants decided not to use the prepared text/script very early on in the project. Many found it ‘boring’, ‘too arduous’, ‘too formal (to find your way in)’, ‘difficult to engage with the actual experience because too busy thinking about the words to fill the gaps with’, ‘tourist texts are only skim read anyway’, ‘historical information about historical places are not personal enough to be interesting’, ‘tourist texts take away the humanness of the experience’ and ‘text guides you to read a place in a particular way.’

How can you be guided without being guided into interaction?

Instead, they consciously attempted to find ways to engage with the places on the map in ways that did not make sense.

They:

- photographed

- recorded sounds

- sketched

- engaged in conversation with staff on the premise

- asked local residents questions

- collected objects, etc.

Many attempted to find the ‘unofficial’ narrative, the alternative authentic experience that could be gained from directly experiencing the place.

One of the participants gave examples of two successful artist-led walking ‘tour guides’ that she had experienced in Vienna. The artist created narratives of historical buildings that did not exist any longer and whilst taking a group of people on a guided tour of the city would recite the stories at the locations where the buildings used to be. The absence of the buildings made the participants look even more closely at what was not there. The ‘encounter’ triggered powerful imagination to see beyond what one could physically see. On reflection this idea seems a little prescriptive in perhaps an even more spectacular or touristic way than our dissolved . Is it possible to provide imaginative triggers that allow participants to paint their own pictures in their minds or even to find those alternative images and visually poetic associations in the geographic environment themselves?

The idea of ‘post-tourist’ was also discussed. However it was pointed out that alternative ways of experiencing a place (‘off the beaten track’, ‘extreme tours’, ‘AirBnB’) quickly became catagorised experiences. Words such as ‘unique’, ‘authentic’ and ‘different’ that were used to express certain experiences as being unlike any other experiences were simply set of commercial languages to sell the idea of authenticity.

On reflection, we feel that:

- texts are valid ways to encourage experience but the text/script we had prepared was too complex, too formal and dry

- perhaps we could have worked only with historically ‘accurate’ text and asked the participants to modify that

- a structure or framework to guide the participants in to ways of engaging with the place is important

- the structure needs to envision possibilities for how it might facilitate imagination and creative use by participants

- the structure needs to pre-empt / forsee, possible ways in which it might disadvantage, oppress or exclude participants (see 'responsiveness' in Joan Tronto's 'Ethics of Care')

- whilst it is possible to theorise resistive spatial practices in advance, these cannot be implimented as closed structures to 'fill in', only as cues for improvised 'performances'

- participants need a key or way in to caring about / for spaces, in order to 'reproduce' them through practice

- it is not possible to demand people to be imaginative and to 'dwell' in a place - the imagination requires 'tools'

- in order to see through others eyes, it is first necessary to identify with 'the other' - participants and janitor were both 'the other' at Bournemouth Natural Science Society

- six different locations to cover in one walking session was too many and (still) question:

- how can we successfully create a situation where historical narratives and personal stories are woven together to form rich multi-layered experiences that can be termed as being ‘authentic’?