The following is an edited extract from a dialogue I took part in which originally appeared on http://www.beardscratchers.com/ (currently undergoing reconstruction - I'll put a direct link here when it becomes available), on the general topic of aesthetics. My interlocutor, in bold type, was a student of art history.
More than any other area of philosophy, in my opinion, philosophical aesthetics needs to be linked directly to aesthetic experiences, so that we don't remain wholly on the level of theory. Examples are good; or even better, let's start with direct 'criticism' (in the broadest sense - slapping a few labels on your reaction to a piece of art first of all), and then try and tease out more general implications. Unlike mathematics, where one's reaction to the shape of a specific triangle has to be suppressed in order to recognise the abstract properties it shares with other triangles, aesthetics is an area of theory which acknowledges its own basis in particular, sensuous experiences. Longinus' or Burke's discussions of the sublime are very good at exemplifying (reading Burke is a whole aesthetic experience in itself: meditating on which parts of a woman's body he finds most aesthetically pleasing, he calls attention to the region "about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried." Mmmm...sorry, got carried away there!)
Burke however, like Kant, was more concerned with aesthetic experience in general - our reactions to landscapes, people, animals or everyday objects. The question which has come to the fore of discussion since those two were writing back in the eighteenth century is, what links our aesthetic experience in general with the category of 'art'? I think it is a particular delineation of the contents of our experience, a certain 'marking off' in space and time - one which is emphasised in traditional art by the frame of a painting. By using a device like this, the painting is almost asking us to direct our attention in a certain way, to focus on it, so that everything outside the frame - both in the outside world of the gallery and in our just-passed thoughts and sensations of that hour or that day - is put, for the time being, out of focus, relative to the things within the frame. Which is not to say that there can't be a relationship between inside and outside - that the painting can't engage with feelings or beliefs that we had long before stepping in front of it, or that it must only be appreciated 'in itself' - but this relationship must be of a certain kind. It can be comparative, symbolic or metaphorical, for instance: allegories do this quite bluntly, but something 'realistic' like a Vermeer also creates its own little world, in which certain people or objects, or even something as insubstantial as the light entering a room, incite one's memory or sympathy, relate subtly to one's 'external' thoughts.
What I think it should not be - this would destroy the 'focus' I mentioned earlier - is a casual, everyday or 'environmental' relation (I'm grasping around for the right word here), such as exists among the other things one might find in an art gallery: when you go in the door, your attention scans over the walls, the labels, the skylight, the security guard etc, and you think, 'yep, typical art gallery' - you recognize the scene and nothing in it holds your focus. But if you do that with the paintings as well - and let's be honest, it's often hard not to much of the time, unless we happen to be real connoisseurs - then we're missing the aesthetic experience they are trying to provoke; this is 'gallery drift', where you walk past a wall of paintings with a glazed expression, glance at their labels for five seconds, look up, think 'oh yeah, another one of those...maybe the next one's more interesting...', and move on. Big 'blockbuster' exhibitions of famous artists often encourage this tendency.
In my opinion - I'm sure some of you artistic people out there will disagree, and please do! - a lot of modern, 'conceptual' art can do the same: partly because it challenges the traditional idea of 'framing' (the object, or by implication, one's attentive experience of it) by explicitly calling up our 'environmental' idea of 'what belongs' in an art gallery, or what should be in or out of focus, and trying to disrupt it. This is a great tactic for capturing one's attention straight off - 'a urinal in an art gallery?! wow - crazy! that'll shock the bourgeois!' (Duchamps) or 'hey, there's nothing in this gallery...wait a minute, they just turned the lights off...and they've gone back on again: this isn't just part of the gallery, this is the artwork. Now that's clever.' (Martin Creed). But once the point is realised, does it actually encourage the separate, sustained focus one needs to have an aesthetic experience? It challenges 'gallery drift', it makes one stop in one's tracks for a moment - but this kind of art also relies on our characteristic inattentive mode to achieve its instantaneous effect; what it doesn't do is help us out of it, because all too often there isn't the depth to develop our focus. You couldn't really say that Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin create a 'world' with their art, one that draws you in in the way that Vermeer does - rather, they rely on the everyday 'world' of the gallery. (I don't want to exclude all modern art and sound horribly conservative, so I'll add that some modern installations can create their own world out of the gallery space - Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread have done it for me.) So, in that sense, when people pose the question a propos of Lucas or Emin, 'but is it really art?', they do have a point; such art may have value of a kind, but it isn't a kind that links our experience of it with other cases of 'aesthetic' sensation, something that is not only pleasurable, but 'marks itself out' from the rest of our experience, instead of blurring together (like too many similar boozy nights on the town!).
We no longer care about what art is, but what art can do and mean for people. Dada, conceptualism and Fluxus broke the mold of what art had to be, and I'm sorry if you lament that, but wake up and smell the coffee! Things have changed! A great deal of art these days is certainly not 'pleasureable' and may not 'mark itself out' from its environment, but that is no longer the ideal for many artists. I find it exhilarating that artists today are seeing themselves as political and social commentators rather than living room decorators, and I think it is this politically and socially conscious strain of art that we should nurture. We would be missing something if we abandoned the current practice of contextualizing contemporary art exhibitions with art historical ones, but I would hate to favor traditional painting and sculpture over the exciting things happening today.
What is important about much contemporary art is that it does blur boundaries. It colors the way we interact with our environment and other people. Artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Lee Mingwei personally interact with visitors in and outside of the gallery, the former cooking and eating meals with them, the latter asking them to give him a tour of locations of personal importance. Acts such as these require a sustained focus and surely result in later reflection on the part of the viewer/participant. Before you retort by saying that such artists cannot interact with every visitor, let me add that the resulting documentation of such events, exhibited in the gallery space, also requires sustained attention from viewers. Furthermore, there is still opportunity for a high level of craftsmanship if your aesthetics must require it. Artist Sarah Sze installs sculptural landscapes in uncommon places with uncommon materials. Last summer at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, she created aquatic environments out of surgical supplies that were displayed under glass tiles in the museum's conservatory. These landscapes were wondrously complex and delicate.
In response to your Martin Creed reference, I would like to cite an artist who can actually pull off conceptual pieces that hold viewers' attention: Robert Gober. He created one of the most arresting conceptual pieces I have ever seen, which I saw installed at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston a few years ago. He installed a fake window high up on the wall of a small room. Outside the window, which was barred to look like a jail window, was a bright blue sky. As soon as I walked into the darkened space, I felt claustrophic, sad and hopeful all at once. The work does not occupy a discrete space in the gallery but had the kind of magnetic impact that a painting can have. Yet Gober's window goes further than any painting can because it is formally beautiful but also affects the space around it, transforming it into a place that feels radically different from the gallery in which it places itself.
It is difficult to find works that satisfy all the requirements that many critics seem to put forth: that it be formally beautiful, maintain the viewer's attention and inspire contemplation, and have significant meaning. Works like Sze's can only offer meaning such as the viewer, curator, or artist herself projects it. Tirivanija and Mingwei's work cannot touch all viewers in the way the artists would like, but they continue their work anyway. After all, it is the gesture that counts and not just the time spent or the belly filled.
The Robert Gober sounds great, and that's precisely the kind of (supposedly) 'conceptual' art that I think connects to our non-artistic aesthetic experience in the way I'm talking about. The fact that it's not a painting makes absolutely no difference to what kind of art it essentially is. The way in which modern media allow the artist to affect so much more strongly the space the viewer finds him/herself in is a major advantage over painting; but I wouldn't say that this new use of space has anything innately conceptual about it - rather, it strengthens the potential of the core aesthetic experience. It's new, but it's still an 'artistic' resource in the strong, aesthetic meaning of the word I've been using.
As for Fluxus, it did explore, and cross, the boundaries - in music for instance, John Cage did much to disrupt those between music and noise, music and silence, musical performance and other kinds of performance. A lot of his work, and that of others at the time such as LaMonte Young, was very definitely not music by any even vaguely sensible use of the word; but as I said cautiously a propos of Emin, that doesn't mean it can't have value of some kind. The value you stress in conceptual art is that of social and political commentary, which is all well and good as an aim. But - this'll lead to more controversy, but what the hell, it's interesting - can it be a central aim of art? It seems to me that much of the most significant social and political commentary is in words, not in installations. Writers can express their vision of society precisely, at considerable length, utilising scores of ideas backed up with hard analysis, facts, metaphors and powerful rhetoric: artists are limited to ambiguity and a low level of structure to their 'commentary'. Until you show me a conceptual artist whose work has had, or could have, anything like the influence that the writings of Plato, Hegel, Marx and company have had on Western society, I remain unconvinced. Good traditional (in the broad sense, i.e. aesthetic) art can, as a side-effect, change the way people look at society; but the visceral impact that enables it to do so has nothing to do with concepts, or being clever - it arises from an aesthetic engagement.
Obviously I haven't experienced the works by Tiravanija and Mingwei that you cite, so I can't say for sure that they wouldn't have an impact on me, but your description doesn't convince me that their activity belongs in the same class of 'art' as Gober, or Whiteread. Again, it may have value - the similar ideas and antics of the Situationists back in the 50s-60s I think are great, wish I'd been there; and given that it doesn't have a recognised name, 'art' might do as well as any; but I think it's more a species of utopian philosophy-in-action than a genuinely aesthetic endeavour. If you think my critical requirements too narrow, I'll say that craftsmanship isn't a big issue for me. Craft doesn't guarantee aesthetic appreciation; the latter depends on values that go beyond pure skill. And I take back any suggestion that art has to be 'pleasurable', since in order to sustain it you'd have to stretch the meaning of pleasure so far as to be incomprehensible. But distinctiveness, depth, a 'metaphorical' rather than 'environmental' relationship to reality, and thus the capacity to create a 'world' - these feel to me to be important characteristics of art that are more valuable to explore than to throw aside.
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Thursday, 13 September 2007
"Atonement" or bifurcation?
The new film adaptation of Ian McEwan's "Atonement" is without a doubt an accomplishment, but not exactly a perfect one. The grand sweep a narrative like this seems to ask for is missing; the film has to change tone half-way through. Perhaps this was in the nature of the book (I'm afraid I haven't read it, so am entirely unqualified to be the film's reviewer, on that score); or of its plot: one expects that the atmosphere of the pre-war scenes should not be without frivolity, which in the nature of things sets them apart from the tragic mood of the later sections. (Then again perhaps this itself is a historical cliche - why should we automatically assume the interbellum years didn't contain their own share of personal misfortunes? or vice versa, that some people didn't have a "good war"? was the reaction of the friend I saw the film with last night.)
This break is enforced by a quite decided gap in cinematic quality (and consistency) between the first hour and the rest of the film. The later sections have their glories: one is the already notorious tracking shot around Dunkirk beach, which must have tested the film crew to their limits (as well as the composer, who had to fit several verses of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" as seamlessly as possible into counterpoint with the full orchestral score). There were several fine bits of acting too I thought: the confrontation scene between Briony and the couple she wronged, and more subtly the television interview with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony as an ageing novelist. But there were also some fairly stale parts - sentimental scenes like the dream encounter between Robbie and his mother, or Briony's conversation with a dying French soldier (- the sentiment inadequately disguised by playing the whole scene in French).
The first half of the film on the other hand felt extraordinarily fresh, beautifully judged in emotional tone and balance, and handled with startling fluidity and skill. The intercutting between the protagonists, obviously an essential feature in a drama of romantic separation, was superb: Cecilia, disgusted with the conversation, dives into the garden pool, and in answering motion Robbie surfaces from a duck in his bathtub, gazing upward meditatively - the camera follows - through the skylight to the bomber humming overhead in the blue summer sky. Or more ecstatically as both prepare for dinner, Cecilia dressing in blurred mirror reflection, Robbie typing the fateful note of apology to the strains of Puccini (if it was) on his gramophone, both somehow woven together in a sequence almost the equal in tenderness of Julie Christie's and Donald Sutherland's in Don't Look Now. (There was nothing correspondingly inspired in the later scenes - Keira Knightley looking sad on a beach cuts to James McAvoy looking sad in a field of poppies - both beautiful shots; but their editing the depths of banality.) The psychological transitions were just as acute. A hilarious satire of childish precociousness cunningly highlights the very trigger which sets off catastrophe - Lola's rape and Briony's misaccusation both appear as consequences of their "acting above their age". And in its early days, Robbie and Cecilia's romance is a fine mixture of comedy and passion.
What prompts the title of this post is the very end of the film. To be exact, the ends - plural: although not as even-handedly as the book (I am told), we are still given two conclusions for Robbie and Cecilia's story. One is more tragic, but at the same time less realistically played, so that the emotional power is for me undercut by ambiguity. It isn't that I can't handle ambiguity, or want everything cut-and-dried; but I am really quite uncertain what it is supposed to achieve here. I felt the same way about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi": what exactly is the motivation for two mutually-excluding stories? What is the interference pattern (if you'll pardon the gratuitous use of analogies from quantum physics) that is supposed to emerge from this strange narrative "double-slit experiment"? Because it seems to me that the introduction of this level of self-consciousness is signally inappropriate to the tragic themes of both books. Self-reference works in the comic or the ironic mode, but for genuinely tragic material, fate should appear (as it did for the Greeks) as the horribly inexorable, unshakeable structure and ultimate author of reality. We humans - whether characters or authors - cannot change it; we only come to terms with it. One kind of coming to terms is indicated by the title of the film. The word "atonement" has one of the plainest and yet profoundest etymologies I know: like many a German word, all you need to do is split it, and you have "at-one-ment"; to "make/set (at) one", to unify, to make whole. Can it really be right to create bifurcating stories, Borges' "garden of forking paths", in the service of an act whose whole significance is one of unification?
This break is enforced by a quite decided gap in cinematic quality (and consistency) between the first hour and the rest of the film. The later sections have their glories: one is the already notorious tracking shot around Dunkirk beach, which must have tested the film crew to their limits (as well as the composer, who had to fit several verses of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" as seamlessly as possible into counterpoint with the full orchestral score). There were several fine bits of acting too I thought: the confrontation scene between Briony and the couple she wronged, and more subtly the television interview with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony as an ageing novelist. But there were also some fairly stale parts - sentimental scenes like the dream encounter between Robbie and his mother, or Briony's conversation with a dying French soldier (- the sentiment inadequately disguised by playing the whole scene in French).
The first half of the film on the other hand felt extraordinarily fresh, beautifully judged in emotional tone and balance, and handled with startling fluidity and skill. The intercutting between the protagonists, obviously an essential feature in a drama of romantic separation, was superb: Cecilia, disgusted with the conversation, dives into the garden pool, and in answering motion Robbie surfaces from a duck in his bathtub, gazing upward meditatively - the camera follows - through the skylight to the bomber humming overhead in the blue summer sky. Or more ecstatically as both prepare for dinner, Cecilia dressing in blurred mirror reflection, Robbie typing the fateful note of apology to the strains of Puccini (if it was) on his gramophone, both somehow woven together in a sequence almost the equal in tenderness of Julie Christie's and Donald Sutherland's in Don't Look Now. (There was nothing correspondingly inspired in the later scenes - Keira Knightley looking sad on a beach cuts to James McAvoy looking sad in a field of poppies - both beautiful shots; but their editing the depths of banality.) The psychological transitions were just as acute. A hilarious satire of childish precociousness cunningly highlights the very trigger which sets off catastrophe - Lola's rape and Briony's misaccusation both appear as consequences of their "acting above their age". And in its early days, Robbie and Cecilia's romance is a fine mixture of comedy and passion.
What prompts the title of this post is the very end of the film. To be exact, the ends - plural: although not as even-handedly as the book (I am told), we are still given two conclusions for Robbie and Cecilia's story. One is more tragic, but at the same time less realistically played, so that the emotional power is for me undercut by ambiguity. It isn't that I can't handle ambiguity, or want everything cut-and-dried; but I am really quite uncertain what it is supposed to achieve here. I felt the same way about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi": what exactly is the motivation for two mutually-excluding stories? What is the interference pattern (if you'll pardon the gratuitous use of analogies from quantum physics) that is supposed to emerge from this strange narrative "double-slit experiment"? Because it seems to me that the introduction of this level of self-consciousness is signally inappropriate to the tragic themes of both books. Self-reference works in the comic or the ironic mode, but for genuinely tragic material, fate should appear (as it did for the Greeks) as the horribly inexorable, unshakeable structure and ultimate author of reality. We humans - whether characters or authors - cannot change it; we only come to terms with it. One kind of coming to terms is indicated by the title of the film. The word "atonement" has one of the plainest and yet profoundest etymologies I know: like many a German word, all you need to do is split it, and you have "at-one-ment"; to "make/set (at) one", to unify, to make whole. Can it really be right to create bifurcating stories, Borges' "garden of forking paths", in the service of an act whose whole significance is one of unification?
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
A tale of two conferences
As an aspiring academic of sorts, concern for the health of my CV drives me to attend conferences both in Britain and abroad - even when this begins (as it occasionally does in the wake of such occasions) to raise concern for my sanity. "Conference-land" is a peculiar place indeed - as you can discover at second-hand, without the pain and with extra entertainment, from the academic satires of David Lodge ("Changing Places" and "Small World"). I would recommend them to anyone either as a preparation or (better) a replacement for full exposure to an international confederation of those strange beings, bluntly yet so justly referred to by the Germans as Fachidioten (Fach meaning specialism or pigeonhole - you can work out the rest!).
But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.
The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.
Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).
Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.
In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.
The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):
But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.
The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.
Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).
Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.
In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.
The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):
After an unexpected and mysterious prelude in which someone (we could not yet see who) moved around slowly, spider-fashion, directly over the heads of the audience on a translucent sheet of perspex, we scaled ladders and hay-bales to reach the main performance space, a stage constructed as it were on the second "floor" of the barn. At the back was the musical half of the duo - the drummer Fritz Hauser - and tiptoeing and circling backward and forward over the stage was the dancer Anna Huber, now more fully visible. (The photo below is from her publicity.)
Both artists are Swiss, internationally recognised and highly professional, and doubtless more used to performing to well-heeled audiences of modern dance aficionados in Zurich, but having let themselves in for this peculiar one-off event, they had to accept that the atmosphere was going to be rather different (not least in the literal sense of being quite dusty).
And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.
What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.
The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.
Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.
And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.
What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.
The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.
Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.
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