CULTURAL ENGAGEMENT INDEX
http://www.philaculture.org/research/reports/cultural-engagement-index-cei
this is an interesting new research tool out of Philadelphia
It was developed "to track trends in consumer cultural engagement over time" and marks a shifting lens from "arts" to "culture".
What seems to be meant by it is a shift from asking questions only about if/when/how/why people attend "professional" arts events to asking questions about how people engage in artistic activities throughout their lives, including sitting in your apartment all by yourself screwing around with Garageband. "The CEI asks questions about both attendence-based activity and personal practice. " There was a similar study a year ago our of Irvine California. And I have a sneaking suspicion that a similar kind of thinking might be behind Chez Bushwick's new Capital B project.
I don't know that the findings in the CEI are necessarily surprising, but the shift makes me wonder about how the contemporary performance spaces/artists can position themselves in relationship to this shift.
Does it mark a push to break-down the divide between "professional artist" and "hobby artist"? Does it mark a push to re-value the hobby artist as a way to increase engagement in professionally planned/created events as audience members?
Or does it simply recognize the anarchic proliferation of the means to production (i.e. Youtube, iTunes, IMovie and Garageband make it so anyone can make art and get it out there)?
How does the person who makes art as a personal practice fit into our communities?
How with this shift affect the way cultural activities are funded? curated? presented? professionalized? taught?
As a "cultural anthropologist" I also find it interesting that this lens shift perhaps indexes a change in how society thinks of the arts - before art was not part of culture? art as personal practice is cultural practice, but art as professional production is a service provided?
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Storytelling vs. Noveltelling
Alrighty - so I have a book cracked open on my desk because I am struggling with something. Last night I saw Nature Theater of Oklahoma's RAMBO SOLO at Soho Rep.
My quandry here is that after the show Pavol, Kelly and Zach were discussing the work and kept talking about story-telling and how the piece was based on a desire to collect stories that meant something to people. And then the resultant piece (as magical as it is) is actually a retelling of a novel. This statement and the subsequent post is irrelevant to Nature Theater's activities and in no way meant to critique them or their rigor or dramaturgy, its just a thought the show and subsequent discussion triggered in me. You see, in my little back water of cultural/philosophical anthropology, stories and novels are two sort of mutually exclusive things - thanks in part to an essay Walter Benjamin wrote called "The Storyteller" back in the early 1900s and which theorized their mutally exclusive natures.
What NTofOk's show made me ponder is this: so much of contemporary performance these days is creative responses to films, novels, and other "representations-of-experience". At the core of this otherwise live experiential exchange between artists and listener/watcher is not an experience the artist lived through, but a representation-of-experience the artist read about or watched in 2D on a screen at some point before. What is that about?
How does this/can this co-opting of the representation-of-experience then translate to the contemporary hunger for "experiences"? Is there some difference in the take-away from a piece of performance that is a retelling of a story/experience vs. a representation-of-experience? If so what is it? And would we children of the Spectacle even know the difference having grown up in a world enveloped by representations-of-itself?
OR
is it that in our "post-modernness" we are just replacing the problematic truthiness of the "social/practical knowledge" at the heart of the Benjaminian story, with the very real intensity of perplexity, doubt and confoundedness at the heart of the human experience?
My quandry here is that after the show Pavol, Kelly and Zach were discussing the work and kept talking about story-telling and how the piece was based on a desire to collect stories that meant something to people. And then the resultant piece (as magical as it is) is actually a retelling of a novel. This statement and the subsequent post is irrelevant to Nature Theater's activities and in no way meant to critique them or their rigor or dramaturgy, its just a thought the show and subsequent discussion triggered in me. You see, in my little back water of cultural/philosophical anthropology, stories and novels are two sort of mutually exclusive things - thanks in part to an essay Walter Benjamin wrote called "The Storyteller" back in the early 1900s and which theorized their mutally exclusive natures.
- Storytelling in Benjamin's context is a (primarily oral and therefore LIVE) craft in which experiences are exchanged and useful knowledge is passed on (a moral, practical advice or maxim).
- Whereas the novel, (like modern cinema or modern plays I would argue) is instead a representation-of-experience and reproduces the confounding nature of human life.
What NTofOk's show made me ponder is this: so much of contemporary performance these days is creative responses to films, novels, and other "representations-of-experience". At the core of this otherwise live experiential exchange between artists and listener/watcher is not an experience the artist lived through, but a representation-of-experience the artist read about or watched in 2D on a screen at some point before. What is that about?
How does this/can this co-opting of the representation-of-experience then translate to the contemporary hunger for "experiences"? Is there some difference in the take-away from a piece of performance that is a retelling of a story/experience vs. a representation-of-experience? If so what is it? And would we children of the Spectacle even know the difference having grown up in a world enveloped by representations-of-itself?
OR
is it that in our "post-modernness" we are just replacing the problematic truthiness of the "social/practical knowledge" at the heart of the Benjaminian story, with the very real intensity of perplexity, doubt and confoundedness at the heart of the human experience?
Monday, March 23, 2009
ADHD culture
Last Wednesday I saw the Wooster Group's new piece La Didone - a Kitch Sci-fi / Classical Opera mash-up in true Wooster style. And tonight I went to the PERFORMA-PECHA-KUCHY (or whatever the thing is called) night, which for those not yet acquainted with this movement - it is Chatauqua for the modern attention deficit ages - 12 lectures, 6mins each, 20 slides each - with alcohol and "social networking" added into the mix.
Something LeCompte said once in a published conversation with Foreman (in Rabkin I believe) - something about always wanting more than one thing to look at as a salve for fending off boredom - or at least that was how I remembered her statement. And Foreman's response was something similar, except for him the interruption subverts the interpretants ability to complete or fix or determine the meaning of the event that was interrupted. Again my interpretation/memory of his statement.
The collision of two events, or 12 events, or many many events as a way of keeping death (metaphorical) at bay. Keep the meaning in continuous flux, keep the actions constantly flowing, skipping, slipping. Which makes me think of Camille de Toledo's Coming Of Age At the End of History - which is a silly little book I found on a shelf at St Marks. I have no idea what kind of judgment to pass on it, beyond it being a nice little primer on the trajectory of philosophy and culture for the generation that experienced its formative youth between 1989 and 2001. About 3/4s of the way into the book Camille arrives finally at Hakim Bey's TAZ (temporary autonomous zone). And for some reason, I have always kind of felt like maybe the strategy of distraction/ event excess, is also a strategy of creating the possibility to experience/constitute a TAZ at the level of perception. Or as Foreman says in his description of ASTRONOME to create an ambiguity, in which the interpretant/interpreter can experience freedom?
I love art/events that suffer from attention deficit for precisely this reason - it stays alive, it breathes ambiguity, and it lets me be free to take up the responsibility of interpretation.
The one caveat - it has got to be RIGOROUS, thick, rich, and provocative.
p.s.
Peachy Coochy - do you think they are aware of the potential double vaginal connotations of the title of their event? Especially for those of us who being mildly dyslexic on top of mildly ADD have a very difficult time remembering the order of letters when they hold no anchor-able/already familiar meaning and can't keep our minds from wandering through the chaotic cloud of significance to places perhaps unintended.
Are stem cells temporary autonomous zones?
Something LeCompte said once in a published conversation with Foreman (in Rabkin I believe) - something about always wanting more than one thing to look at as a salve for fending off boredom - or at least that was how I remembered her statement. And Foreman's response was something similar, except for him the interruption subverts the interpretants ability to complete or fix or determine the meaning of the event that was interrupted. Again my interpretation/memory of his statement.
The collision of two events, or 12 events, or many many events as a way of keeping death (metaphorical) at bay. Keep the meaning in continuous flux, keep the actions constantly flowing, skipping, slipping. Which makes me think of Camille de Toledo's Coming Of Age At the End of History - which is a silly little book I found on a shelf at St Marks. I have no idea what kind of judgment to pass on it, beyond it being a nice little primer on the trajectory of philosophy and culture for the generation that experienced its formative youth between 1989 and 2001. About 3/4s of the way into the book Camille arrives finally at Hakim Bey's TAZ (temporary autonomous zone). And for some reason, I have always kind of felt like maybe the strategy of distraction/ event excess, is also a strategy of creating the possibility to experience/constitute a TAZ at the level of perception. Or as Foreman says in his description of ASTRONOME to create an ambiguity, in which the interpretant/interpreter can experience freedom?
I love art/events that suffer from attention deficit for precisely this reason - it stays alive, it breathes ambiguity, and it lets me be free to take up the responsibility of interpretation.
The one caveat - it has got to be RIGOROUS, thick, rich, and provocative.
p.s.
Peachy Coochy - do you think they are aware of the potential double vaginal connotations of the title of their event? Especially for those of us who being mildly dyslexic on top of mildly ADD have a very difficult time remembering the order of letters when they hold no anchor-able/already familiar meaning and can't keep our minds from wandering through the chaotic cloud of significance to places perhaps unintended.
Are stem cells temporary autonomous zones?
Monday, March 16, 2009
What is it in an ending?
Yesterday I saw Palissimo's latest piece Weddings & Beheadings. It has some beautiful images, but never quite cohered for me. In trying to sort out why that might be, I arrived at the sensation I kept having during the last half of the show: "Okay this is the end. No wait, one of the dancers is changing into a new costume over there on stage right/left." At which point a new piece would begin and I might or might not again think to myself "Okay this is the end. No wait, one of the dancers is changing into a new costume over there on stage right/left." This happened maybe four or five times before the show really did finally settle into an ending with the performers revealing our reflections in the wall-to-wall mirrors at the back of the stage and coming and joining us in the audience.
Each of these endings had their own beauty, but somehow this reversal of the Gertrude Stein commandment to always BEGIN AGAIN, found itself unsettled in what seemed, to me at least, to be Palo's attempt to END AGAIN, and again, and again. There was something quite different about this experience from the normal sensation I feel in pieces that 'begin' again and again. Rather than a sort of serial sensation of anticipation of something coming, I felt a serial sensation of conclusion.
Ending again and again. Perhaps this is what it feels like when one gets older, and rather than everyone having babies, everyone starts dying off? I don't mean that to be a morbid thought. Just an observation.
We have so many ceremonies that are about beginnings, even graduations are really about marking passage into a new beginning. Hell, funerals are somewhat paradoxically about beginnings, beginning the rest of your life without that person. But Edward Said (in his book On Late Style) identifies the artistic vocation with memory. I'm not certain I agree with Said, but if I follow the thought, art becomes what has already passed, a fragement mostly lost to fragile biochemical inscription, an object shared only as trace, a calling up of a moment that had its end already. And if one were to follow the logic of this understanding, one could arrive at a conclusion that art is a re-membering of dead things, of things that ended long ago (or just a moment ago). A repetion of endings?
End Again.
Each of these endings had their own beauty, but somehow this reversal of the Gertrude Stein commandment to always BEGIN AGAIN, found itself unsettled in what seemed, to me at least, to be Palo's attempt to END AGAIN, and again, and again. There was something quite different about this experience from the normal sensation I feel in pieces that 'begin' again and again. Rather than a sort of serial sensation of anticipation of something coming, I felt a serial sensation of conclusion.
Ending again and again. Perhaps this is what it feels like when one gets older, and rather than everyone having babies, everyone starts dying off? I don't mean that to be a morbid thought. Just an observation.
We have so many ceremonies that are about beginnings, even graduations are really about marking passage into a new beginning. Hell, funerals are somewhat paradoxically about beginnings, beginning the rest of your life without that person. But Edward Said (in his book On Late Style) identifies the artistic vocation with memory. I'm not certain I agree with Said, but if I follow the thought, art becomes what has already passed, a fragement mostly lost to fragile biochemical inscription, an object shared only as trace, a calling up of a moment that had its end already. And if one were to follow the logic of this understanding, one could arrive at a conclusion that art is a re-membering of dead things, of things that ended long ago (or just a moment ago). A repetion of endings?
End Again.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
A challenge?
Okay so last night I saw a show, it shall remain unnamed, suffice it to say I definitely would rather have watched the fat kid dancing.
But it triggered a thought in my head - what do you do with live musicians on stage? How do you make a performance that isn't continually upstaged by their very real, much more interesting presence?
I'll explain a little. The show was 4 dance pieces, and a few of the pieces had live musicians playing on stage along side the dancers. The problem I kept having was that the musicians were mesmerizing, and the dancers just got in the way. This has happened before sometimes with video - where I find myself watching the big video screen and the actions on the video screen and being almost annoyed that the live performers occasionally block my view. Sometimes with technical artists - where I end up watching the technical artists just off to the side of the stage, because their reality, their factness and the machinery and the intricacy of their actions is so much more fascinating than the 'theater' being staged. Its not that I want these "distractions" to be hidden. Its that I wish the other stuff had as much tension, alive-ness, potential for failure, earnestness, focus.
Maybe?
Its a crap first post perhaps, but I think of it as an aesthetic challenge.
I wish more performance groups would work with live musicians (especially the cutting-edge ones making new 'experimental' music) and I wish they would take the technical artists more seriously - they are artists too, not wrench monkeys, and I wish live performance would start experimenting more with the digital tools that are being created all over the place - I don't mean video, I mean robots, and sound machines and the re-appropriation of old machines that have been tweaked and updated into something new by those wiz-kids at ITP - there are so many more interesting machines now, thanks to all the new technologies.
The challenge perhaps is to find ways of educating ourselves about and then integrating all these old arts and new arts. And then in the making of the works being sensitive to finding the right balance, so that I don't wish those poor dancers (as hard as they are trying) would just go stand up stage, be quiet and stop moving because I just want watch the kids with the weird instruments break their shit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
