CS1 by Vivan

SPECTATORSHIP

The Society of the Spectacle

What Jerome Bel said about the book of The Society of the Spectacle in his performance : ‘We don’t live a life anymore, it has been replaced by its representation.’

For me, by watching the video itself is a representation. How the filmmaker represent what he has recorded and what he wants people to watch is representation.

It makes me think of what I have learned from reading The Way of Seeing by John Berger. Such as the video, news, films are actually framed and controlled by the person who shoot and edited it. We are watching the way that person’s gaze.

In the video, it mentioned that power is the root of spectacle. Spectacle(refer to mass media) is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. With the appearance of spectacular society, it ruin the quality of  human life because of lack of authenticity and this also affected human’s perceptions.

One thing I thought of is human beings are so easily affected by images. Image always help to understand something more easily. Image comes before word.

There is a statement created by Karl Marx,’within the capitalist mode of production we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they’re actually useful for, but we instead recognize them based on their value in the market.’ Therefore in the society of the spectacle, there is a point saying that the commodities(material/product/thing) rule the workers and the consumers instead of being ruled by them. Commodity as the power that was colonising all social life. The consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified具体化 spectacle. In society of consumer, spectacle uses images to make-believe people think of the things they need and must have.

Tourism – is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalised.

---

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey

In the introduction of the article, writer used psychoanalysis to review the fascination迷恋／魅力  in the film is strengthen by the fascination that already happened individually and society which shaped him.

[Political weapon] Film reveals the society which interprets sexual difference and this control the images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. By using psychoanalysis theory to shows the patriarchal society that has structured film form. Woman function in forming patriarchal is when she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis, and thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male, bound by a symbolic order in which makes the man have fantasy and obsession through linguistic command. 

Destruction Pleasure as Radical Weapon

Erotic pleasure in film.

Hollywood style has the skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure, coded erotic into the language of dominant patriarchal order.

Pleasures that offer from cinema:

– scopophilia, looking & being looked at taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. Erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object, it can produce obsessive voyeurism. Playing on audience voyeuristic fantasy and sense of separation, sexual stimulation.

– Darkness, light & shade promote illusion of voyeuristic separation, give spectator an illusion of looking in private world.

– Develop scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect, where mainstream film put attention on human form (human face, human body, relationship of human form & its surrounding).

– Jacques Lacan describe mirror:

Recognition of joyous of imagines the mirror image to be more complete & perfect than own body experience. Recognition (reflected body as self) overlaid with misrecognition (outside body itself as an ideal ego, alienated subject).

Woman as Image, Man as Bearer来人 of the Look

– sexual imbalance, active/male and passive/female. Traditionally, women appearance with strong visual and erotic impact being displayed and looked at by male gaze.

 

---

 

 The Ballerina Phallic by Susan Leigh Foster

The text explained and analysed how a ballet duet of female and male dancers, which show the very distinctive gender behaviour – masculine and feminine qualities. She always be the object that putted in front and adored by him.

Ballet spread all over the world through colonial, media and performances. It’s aesthetic has transformed form time to time. Yet, it shows the very clear image and ideal of balletic bodies to the world.

Both her and his bodies bear the marks of colonisation and colonial contact.

An interesting point saying that the dancers erase the painfulness, struggle of their body from their facial expression. Only showing lightness, effortless of appearance even though they are doing some extreme movements.

However ballerina always become the focus point while dancing a duet with a male dancer, she achieves no tangible and enduring identity. Just as he conveys her, and she conveys desire. She exist as demonstration of the desire which is not real. He manipulated her (phallus) with his forces. To say this, it related with the gendered bodies developed historically in ballet tradition. In ballet performance, she, either she look through his eyes in order to actively assert attraction / empathise passively as the object he desired. This is all because of male hegemony, masculine logic which makes woman to be the perfect object for male gaze. The ballerina-as-phallus has problematizes the male viewer’s gaze: his identification on stage is an unmanly man (a man in tights), where he must pass on his way to become the object of fascination. In most of the dance performances, gendered identities often being considerate.

 

Index:

Spectacle – a visually striking performance or display.

– presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

Narcissism – formation of the ego and the ideal ego,
the role of narcissism in love, sexual relationships, and self-concept.

Detournement – a term coined by Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) movement of the 1960’s, Detournement is usually translated into English as ‘diversion’ and was the method of artistic creation used by the situationists.

Commodity Fetishism – is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value

Castration Anxiety -(psychoanalysis) anxiety resulting from real or imagined threats to your sexual functions. An overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis. Example like eunuchs? The counterpart of castration anxiety for females is penis envy.

Slavoj Žižek – a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic, a senior researcher. He writes widely on a diverse range of topics, including political theory, film theory, cultural studies, theology, and psychoanalysis.

Karl Marx – was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx’s work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. 

What is performativity and how have the performing arts appropriated the word wrongly?
What is the difference between constative and performative?
How did Derrida take the concept of performativity back to Platonic principle of the idea and what is his contribution?
How can the performative explain our societal role and what are those processes that make an action performative?
How can the speech act theory help us understand our relationship with our audience ?

 

PERFORMATIVITY

 

 

Signature Event Context (Jacques Derrida)

In the first paragraph, author discuss about the word Communication. This word does not limit itself to semantics, semiotic and linguistic, where it does not only possess one meaning.

 

In my point of view, this is one way of communication without speaking or writing.

This is the story telling part of Pushpanjali dance (Bharata Natyam). A way of using abhinaya(facial expression) and hand gestures to communicate with audience. But in order to understand it, you need contextual informations.

 

 

There is a point saying that ambiguous (indefinite) of the word ‘communication’ can be reduce by the limits of what it called a ‘context’.

Another important point from the text is that compass of voice/of gesture would face factual limit, an empirical经验 boundary of space and of time; while writing, at the same time and same place, would able to relax those limits & open wider scope on the same field. The meaning of semantics message will then be transmitted and communicated by different means in more powerful way. Thus the wholeness of meaning will not affected.

 

Why a context is never be completely determinable? This structural uncertain would have double effects:

1. it would mark the theoretical inadequacy不足之处 of the current concept of context

2. it would necessitate a certain displacement & generalisation of the concept of writing.

 

I am interested with Analogy打个比方:

-A comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

– some analogies can be understand by the people who speak the same language or same region & country. Some small group of people usually has their own analogies which only they understand them.

 

Performativity by James Loxley

Showing performative in language.

J.L.Austin defined two views of language:

1. Logical Positivism – that the normal or defining business of language is making statements, and that statements are to be assessed in terms of their truth.

2. The Descriptive Fallacy – the mistaken assumption that language use is essentially constative, aimed at the production of true or false statements/descriptions.

An important point: To say, in this instances, is to do: Austin christens this kind of sentence or utterance(statement,spoken word)话语 performative, to make clear that here ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.

Austin explained that there are rules in order to have successful performative and he stated 6 conditions:

1. existence of an accepted conventional procedure that include the utterance of certain words by certain person in certain circumstances and having the conventional effect.

2. the person and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate.

3. procedure must be executed by all participant both correctly and

4. completely

5. the procedure designes for use by persons having certain thoughts and feelings, then the participants invoking the procedure must have those thoughts and feelings, participants must intend so to conduct themselves, further

6. must conduct themselves subsequently.

Then a performative can consider success or felicitous恰当.

But does it have to be so formulated or structured?

There are also example of penalty awarded even though no foul in a football match. In this circumstances, the performance is not consider void无效. It is returning such utterance话语 to constative(denoting a speech act or sentence that is a statement declaring something to be the case).

Non-serious Performative

When the language use in a non-serious way such as in a performance, drama or poem, the performative utterance will become void. Non-serious utterance is also understood as imitation of a seriousness, called as ontological(specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them) realness.

Index

• semantics – the study of meaning, the study of linguistic development
• analogy – http://examples.yourdictionary.com/analogy-ex.html
• speech act – is an utterance that has performative function in language and communication.

 

---

 

Being Performative (Butler)

In the subtopic Rethinking the body, Challenging Identity: The Demands of Politics,   Judith Butler questioned around how identity is being shape and constructed and asking if is the body is shaped by political forces to keep the body bounded and follow the markers of sex.

The  normative way of thinking about man and woman is always in a binary fashion and there are 3 levels:

1. sex/sexed body – female and male

2. the level of social and cultural identity of gender, which their characteristic divided properly into feminine and masculine.

3. level of sexuality and desire, which is men desiring women and women desiring men.

Feminism, Sex and Gender

Binary division is Hierarchical, where men and masculine are the primary and central, where the opposite sex is the marginal. Feminism or feminists try to challenge this framework.

• gender is the cultural constructions of sex.

Butler’s strategy is to try articulating the interflow of multiple sexual discourses at the site of identity in order to render the category, permanently problematic. The difficulty of categorise intersex and transsexual people, and explore the significance for a politics of sexuality of cross dressing and gender differentiations.

 

Performativity and The Construction of Identity

What important here is that implications drawn from Butler’s diagnosis of trouble of gender , and conceptual resources that make good that diagnosis.

Butler rejected mirror-image phenomena, where characterizing body as passive, and culture as active. What is required is an account of this terrain that able to get past the gender polarity(difference) of natural bodies and culture meanings, one who is able to rethink the complex relation between corporeality and identity.

Identity, culture is the process of creating identity, here is where the difference between body and self  is produced.

Concept of Performativity:

The identity we describe through the term gender is constituted组成 through the performance of a set of Acts that forge伪造 us as gendered subjects.

Butler mentioned that gender is prior to the various act, posture and gesture that conform根据 expected gender identity and this is performative = gender reality.

 

Our gendered acts.

The effect of gender is produced by the stylisation of body, bodily gesture, movements and style creates an illusion of an abiding gendered self.

When this repeatable acts and repetition of recognised style is being put in the public, it is conventional. This is not identity but is gender identity in being performed.

The Power of Gender Norms

In this topic, author used the theories from different philosophers such as J.L.Austin, Judith Butler and even Michel Foucault and discussed around this topic.

 

The conventional of speech situation is part of the necessary conditions of the shared world. For Austin, it is seemingly enough to call philosophy back to recognising everyday communal dimension of linguistic life. Butler thinks the norms of gender is radically  different presupposition. The performative norm is a form of  compulsion, and the composition of body itself an exercise in confining it within a limit.

It is important to understand the force and power that characterise the social relations among speaking body.  Butler’s main influence was Michel Foucault. Foucault thinks that force stops the possibilities and energies arising from other source. He also analysed a productive and positive mode of power. He mentioned that power is not a singular thing, it conceive relation of force and works on active object. Our identities are not necessary single or simple however it has been formulated and practiced. For example, the classification of homosexual in mid 90s not just got complaints, it become resources for a demand for political and legal recognition, it also continue challenge the way of thinking about nature sexuality.

 

 

Feminist – explanation of sex & sexuality which assume the meaning of human’s social existence can be derived from faces of physiology.

The body is ‘an historical idea’ rather than ‘a natural species’ by Merleau-Ponty.

Body is understand to be an active process of embodying, reflecting cultural & historical possibilities. Body is an historical idea – it gains meaning through a concrete & historically mediated expression in the world.

Beauvoir – body is a historical situation, and is a manner of doing, dramatising, reproducing a historical situation.

Gender as an act, as a corporeal style: is intentional & performative(dramatic & non-referential).

Woman (gender) – as the cultural interpretation/signification of biological fact.

To be a woman:

• become cultural sign
• to materialize oneself follow historically delimited possibilities.
• repeat corporeal project.

those who fail, regularly punished.

Read also:

http://feministtheorykeywords.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/thoughts-on-judith-butler/

INDEX:

Binary – relating, composing, involving 2 things.

Feminism -the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

Feminist theory – to understand the way of systemic political & cultural structure are enacted & reproduced, through acts & practices, and how analysis of ostensibly表面上 personal situations is clarified through situating the issue in shared cultural context.

Gendered body – acts its part in a critically restricted corporeal space & enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.

J.L.Austin – was a British philosopher of language. He is remembered primarily as the developer of the theory of speech acts.

Judith Butler -is an American continental philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory.

Jacque Derrida -a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

 

---

 

 

 Biopolitics-An Advanced Introduction by Thomas Lemke

 

what is biopolitics?

Biopolitics is an intersectional field between biology and politics. The term is commonly attributed to Rudolf Kjellén in the 1920s who also coined the term geopolitics; however, it appears in print at least as early as 1912.

Biopolitics

Capitalism and the Living Multitude: Michael Hardt and Antonin Negri 

For Hardt (theorist) and Negri(philosopher), biopolitics stand for a new stage of capitalism资本主义 characterised by the disappearance of the borders between economics and politics, production and reproduction. As many activists search for theoretical instrument to analyse international politic and reconstructing of modern capitalism. They both see the economic dimension of Empire as a new stage of global capitalist production in which all states and regions of the world are integrated and connected. This foundation does not refer to the configuration of the global market but also to a previously unreached depth of capitalist socialisation. This included the constitution of manpower, production of bodies, intellects and affects.

‘Cognitive Capitalism’ slowly take over. It is distinguished by an informatized, automated, networked, and globalised production process then lead to a decisive transformation in the working subject. (knowledge and creativity, language and emotion, are central to production & reproduction within society)

This process created ‘ immaterial labor’:

1. involved in informationalized and incorporated communication technologies industrial production.

2.  the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks.

3. involves the production and manipulation of affects and requires human contact, labor in the bodily mode.

‘Human rights through a Biopolitical lens?’

 

economic exploitation: that is, the act of using another person as a means to one’s profit, particularly using their labor without offering or providing them fair retribution. Marxist theory points to the entire capitalist class as an exploitative entity, and to capitalism as a system based on exploitation.

 

 

BODY 

• body as site.
• body itself is performative.
• is always already in presentation and representation.
• artist’s body as source material and expressive medium.
• in many forms of performance, body is employed or reemployed to expose norms by transgressing it.

BODY ART

– works that involve the artist’s enactment of her/his body in all of its sexual, racial, and other particularities.

LIVE ART

– challenge categories of practice of art & theatre. It is an aesthetic of the present moment, of here (space, place) and now (time), immediacy encounter.

– an event between artist & spectator, or maybe the artist create a situation and let the spectator experience the work in a specific place and time even without the present of the artist.

– body, time , space

– offers a means to critique cultural norms, fixed perceptions and sedimented values as they pertain body, identity n society.

– performer remakes identities and social relations.

 

ALIVE (live art)

• obsess with liveness (to be as real as possible, live element), to shock, to destroy pretence, to activate audience
• always using Shock Tactics.
• Lasting (visual art) and temporary, immediacy (live art).

TIME

• concept of TIME is important in live art performance, performance has consistently replaced or qualified material object with temporal act.
• contemporary live art experimentation with time – improvisation & chance, employing actions in real time and space, repetition, duration.
• live artists brings the spectator into the present moment of the making and unmaking of meaning, where you really have to be there.
• time itself is a product of structures of thought.
• live art works try to break the boundary of culture norms and challenge male gaze.

SPACE & PLACE

• I think that there is space in our body also, not only the outer space from our body. We can feel the space inside our body as well.
• In the text, there are resistance of rules and perceptions from live artists about the usage of space and place. For example, gallery has their own rules and regulations of the space. But live artist try to break the rules or choose to perform in unconventional place, like outside of the gallery.
• place is the product of certain rationales or ideologies that order its architecture, the habitual practices, social encounter that happen within it.

Franko B, I miss you.

In my point of view, this performance has break the boundary of performance. To me, the stage looks like a run way. He repeated walking back and forth just like the modelling show. But in fact, he changed the content of it. He shown his white painted naked body and his dripping blood in order to create shocking sensation to the audience and to send out certain meaning/message behind the performance.

 

This was a short teaser of Chi Too’s work. He is one of the artist from Malaysia but he created a slogan for himself: Can’t pain, can’t draw, can’t dance.

In this video, however it is short, but I can understand SPACE and at the same time I can see the involvement of the spectator and how important the role of SPECTATORSHIP.

 

Title: The Pursuit of Oblivion by Damien Hirst.

In the first page of ALIVE, Adrian Heathfield uses this artwork as the example. He mentioned that this work seems more about presentation of some phenomena than representation, where Damien Hirst used the original element or object to create art work but not to re-make the element to become ornament.

The art work also challenged the space between sculpture, installation and live art. Adrian found the work creates sense of shocking to the viewer. In his opinion, this work has made a shift in contemporary visual art where lasting become temporary and immediacy.

All these points are closely related and happened to Live Art as well.

 

 

Title: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst.

– A shift to the live.

– with this picture I understand ‘liveness’ that mentioned in the text. The shark that is not alive looks so liveness.

BODY ART PERFORMING THE SUBJECT

Antonin Artaud,

“theater of cruelty,” an intense theatrical experience that combined elaborate props, magic tricks, special lighting, primitive gestures and articulations, and themes of rape, torture, and murder to shock the audience into confronting the base elements of life.

• Anti-feminism Feminism.
• challenging male gaze. In the text, the writer used Carolee Shneemann’s art work, Interior Scroll as example. Her exotic enactment of her body and sexuality were challenging the male gaze.
• destabilise conventional art, break the boundary.
• Voyeurism (sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviour, private nature) often used in body art performances, sometime to challenge male gaze.
• In Yayoi Kusama’s performance, it shown the otherness with the normative conceptual of the artist as Euro-American male. She as an asian female performed in New York public places with her naked body.

About Dadaism:

• not a movement, its artists not artists and its art not art
• Dada had only one rule: Never follow any known rules.
• Dada was intended to provoke an emotional reaction from the viewer (typically shock or outrage).
• influence by Abstraction and Expressionism.

 

ART & POLITIC

• Link about Gustav Metzger (an artist who affected by politic and Nazi):

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/26/gustav-metzger-null-object-robot

• about Joseph Beuys:

http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm

• political art is art that produces a reverberating double effect, a heterology: ‘the readability of political signification…
• legible n illegible

 

ART & LIFE

• Jean-Jacque Lebel framed that happening as a mean of overcoming art, leaving theatre behind, arriving at life.
• Happening as the art of participation.
• example of works that showing what happen in the street as performance; juxtaposing the ‘staged’ with the ‘unstaged’.

BODY POLITIC 

• Live art brings artist body into view in new ways, engaging questions of ownership.
• body reveals politics
• live art practices, where body is the material, take that already culturally marked body and remark it.
• ‘Embodied’ signified the materiality of body.
• many works related to feminism issue and also sometimes over patriarchy.

[I WAS PERMITTED TO BE AN IMAGE BUT NOT AN IMAGE-MAKER CREATING HER OWN SELF-IMAGE]

by Carolee Schnerrman 1979

• signifying body as a site of oppression – feminist history, women use body as medium and message

[Does women have intellectual authority while naked & speaking?] by Elwes 1985.

Ranciere – insists upon the emancipatory解放 act that is spectatorship, where one who looks is actively engaged in narrating and translating, story to make it her story (spectator is an active role).

• Street Action, necessity of resistance.

 

Minding the Matter of Representation: Staging the Body (Politic)

Basically explain and discuss about the performing art scene and history in West. Theatre, dance, live art and academic study in performing and visual art. Looking at the big picture of the society and politic and relates them with art and body.

• Social norm about the privilege ‘universal’ and the marginalise ‘other‘ (black, women, disable, gay, lesbian..) is so clear.
• Artuad – body-as-desiring-machine.

 

Manifesto宣言 on Liveness

According to Tim Etchells, real people in real time really pretending. The processes of transformation of costumes, props and sets and pretence are what the culture is made of and think of. Gets made and unmade.

In one of the letter, he written like this:

‘Why should we trust audience at all? I mean, who are these people.’

This make me think that why performers always try to give their best to the audience? just because they pay for the ticket? or just a respect? or to show off ourself ?

Audience always come to a show with certain expectation. But the question is do we have to satisfied the audience?

---

 

FOUCAULT

1. Performance is an action, in order being, doing, showing doing and explaining ‘showing doing’. Human actions in the category of ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts & everyday life performances in social, gender, race, work, the internet and more.

As Performance – everything and anything can consider as performance. To perform as a student, a teacher, president, and etc.

Is Performance – where the intension is to perform.

2. Performance studies – study about performance. Synthesis综合 wide variety of disciplines including performing arts, social science, feminist studies, gender studies, cultural study and more.

– performance studies is open where there is no finality, it is flexible, allow to be explore and update. It was designed to answer the need to deal with the changing circumstances of the glocal (combination of local and global).

– Performance study embodies the values, theories, and practices which can apply in many fields. For art field, when you have the knowledge of performance studies, you understand and appreciate art work more.

– Richard Schechner, pioneer of performance studies. He is a scholar, a professor, theatre director, author and editor.

– Victor Turner, anthropologist.  He developed the concept of Liminality. He studied ritual and social change.

 

QUESTIONS:

1. Confuse about the similarity of body art and live art. Can body art also call live art?

 

 Index:

• spectatorship – viewer is involved and engaged in the viewing experience. http://tonymckibbin.com/course-notes/spectatorship-theory
• performativity – is everywhere, and almost everything depend on how you see it. For example how the macbook perform its ability and its function. 

How my friend shown his hunger and desperate towards the food. It is very performative.

• alterity/otherness -Other and self are inherently joined and so when we ‘speak’ of otherness, we inevitably ‘speak’ of its other. It also refers to the divergent from what that is given.
• gender – is a performative act (one is not born as woman, but becomes a woman) by Judith Butler.
• scopophilia -sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity.
• identification – Human understand the mirror stage as an identification: the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.
• Fluxus – flowing,fluid. An international network for artists, composers, designers blending different media and discipline (Intermedia) in 1960s.

Augusto Boal – created the Theatre of the Oppressed which is a series of theatrical    analyses and critiques developed in the 1950s.

Antonin Artuad – important figure of evolution of the modern drama theory. Theatre of Cruelty was his most noted drama theory.

Joseph Beuys – a German artist who active in diverse range of art forms. 

Jacque Ranciere – French philosopher. His aesthetic theory has become references in visual art.

Jacque Lacan – a famous French structuralist psychoanalyst. His ideas have influenced on critical theory, feminist theory,sociology, clinic psychoanalysis and etc.