Interviewed for LINE Magazine, Venice Biennale edition
First published, Monday 20th June, www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com
As a collective, your central concerns seem to be the manipulation of responsibility and the complicity of spectatorship. Do you feel that requires a very mediated approach, to direct your viewers in a certain way? Or do you feel you create a situation with no specific expectations of response?
Speaking in very general terms, our work is not directly aimed at mobilising the spectator's sense of responsibility and moral agency. It is not pushing the spectator to identify with our positions nor forcing them to take sides on issues. We are neither pursuing identification nor hard subjectivation. But we are rather trying to construct an event that provides a multiplicity of parallel experiences that allows the spectator to navigate her way through the imaginary, counterfactual world that we stage. It is this singular itinerary of the spectator that matters just as much as the singular itineraries of artist. These positions are not interchangeable, but they are symmetric. That does not mean that the work lends itself to any interpretation, it rather means that the individual experiences and understandings that take place under the conditions defined by the work have incommensurable itineraries. There's no hierarchy of understanding or capacities to understand between the spectator and the artist; no hierarchy of respective experiences. One is embedded in the other, but that doesn't make one more true or correct than the other. What we are trying to accomplish is to create a setting – be that a performance or an installation such as the one at the Venice Biennale – within which the encounter between two divergent itineraries can unfold... and the spectator can assume responsibility for their part in the encounter that is the artwork.
Your idea of existence through absence that is employed in the Biennale space, with the delayed cameras, deliberately shifts the significance onto the viewer, in their sudden awareness of their participation in the work. This shift is something you grapple with consistently - why do you find so much interest in placing the pivotal moments of your works, with the spectators rather than you as creators?
Our work ‘Responsibility for Things Seen: Tales in Negative Space’ is the first time we are not ourselves physically present for the duration of the work. Theatre is premised on the presence of performers. And in Venice, due to obvious human and financial constraints, we are absent for the longest period of the exhibition. And yet by virtue of the video that is being interactively captured, stored and replayed from the computer network we have running in Venice, we could remain present in images if not in person. And so can the audience. Theatre seemingly privileges the presence of performers. But in the Venice setup there's a level playing field, a factual symmetry of positions. Both creators and spectators can be presented and absented, both can be witnessed. This is then an obvious, formal reason for placing the spectator into the work. But there's also another, topical reason. It has to do with the fact that we are inclined to perceive our implication in images only once we appear in them. Our brief appearance confronts us with the fact that we are already implicated in images at least by the context in which those images are brought to us – be that an exhibition display, home TV set, news portal on the Web, cinema screen, newspapers...
Do you think there is a danger of creating a hostile environment by giving the audience such responsibility in your work?
We are not insisting on hard subjectivation, on audience having to perform in order for the work to take place. It is enough to be present to trigger the work. One even doesn't need to stay present if one doesn't have interest. The work will welcome another spectator. To each according to their own interest, from each according to their own insistence. The Venice work is indeed an environment, but one thing that we wanted to avoid is to create a situation of general viewing, a panoptic position from where the entire encounter is transparent. There is a dramaturgy of discovery built into that environment. It is filled with different situations of viewing. The act of watching images always includes a degree of habituation to the apparatuses of capturing, projecting, broadcasting and spectating images. There are social and technical assumptions in production and reproduction of images that we internalise and naturalise. In Venice we wanted to create singular situations, modes and apparatuses of viewing. An environment that is a differentiated topology of spectating: intimate cinema for one, withdrawn spaces, algorithmic film, images of inert presence, etc.
The disjointed set up of false exhibition areas, and the duplicate of the separation wall in the space, provokes an unsettling awareness of the ubiquity of gallery spaces in general. Do you think the space in which a work is viewed is crucial to its understanding? Or has potential to manipulate, create or twist various other interpretations?
As with most of our theatre works, this work also presumes an operation in space and thus represents a continuation of our interest in the specific givens of different presentational spaces. When it comes to spatial dispositifs we always like to think in terms of interstices, trying to build up a kind of assembly view where disjunctions produce intensive co-relations and ask for speculative watching. We rarely offer manuals for watching. This work is a spatial and temporal displacement. It creates a space of promised relations and different modes of spectating, both watching and observing. That displacement also implies watching from aside, not only from a position of spectator or performer but also from the position of the camera. The act of watching is always in intensive relation with the gaze of the camera and in resonance with the cinematic gaze. Because of this we placed our displays in the specific transitional zones of the cinematic view - holes in the drywall film set (that are usually covered by paintings on soap-opera sets), a backstage - or we directed our cameras toward them - the door ajar, a threshold etc. But these zones are also the drill-holes of gaze, excavation and finding places of the things yet to come. This operation is not literally site-specific; it rather aims at making that site specific. The same kind of operation can be reverted - and this is precisely what we plan to do now, to revert the whole set up to the theatre stage.
Did you initially consider, or do you now think the filtration of Billie Holiday throughout the surrounding pavilions? Do you think it has created interesting juxtapositions and given them a new resonance?
Our space is full of noise coming from a water-filtering machine in the Turkish pavilion and the drone from the Indian one. Billie Holiday from Gotovac’s movie ‘The Forenoon of a Faun’ somehow brings clarity to our pavilion. But I don’t find it interpretative, it has the same role as music in dance, it only replaces the lack of name for the mute images.
Generally, your work focuses on the relationship between performance and audience, and you have described Responsibility for Things Seen: Tales in Negative Space as a specific form of ‘theatre by other means.’ Considering this presentation of your work as theatre, and the fact that you are a combination of dancers, choreographers, dramatists and philosophers, do you feel a resistance to being classed as artists?
We were challenged by this unexpected immersion into the world of visual arts. In preparing our works for the stage we are constantly intrigued by means of translating notions, problems, questions or principles stemming from other organising principles (social, artistic, epistemic...) into the practice of choreography and theatre. Our productions are evidence of our working methods and shifting roles - dramaturges performing, or performers handling the technical desk at shows. Thus we were not so intent on defining our individual roles in this context but more focused on creating the circumstances that enable us, as a collective, to communicate the idea of the work to the visitor.
Also, could you elaborate on your term ‘theatre by other means’? Are the ‘other means’ constituted by the various responsibilities of the audience rather than the performers?
“Theatre by other means” comes from the syntagma “cinema by other means” coined by Serbian film theorist Pavle Levi in order to describe “those forms of cinematography that are not based on the use of normative film technology but other media and forms of expression as a means of producing cinematic effects”. That concept also describes a tradition to which Tomislav Gotovac belongs with his “cinematic” performance art and photography, as is the case with his friend (the cinematographer of one of his “Family Movies” presented in Venice), famous director Slobodan Šijan and his film leaflets. When we were honoured by the invitation of WHW to make a project for the Biennale, one of our main creative problems was to maintain the line of performative presence in the pavilion. We never thought of performing publicly in the gallery and we were not so interested in manipulating the spectators to become performers. So, instead of the stage of showing we opted for the stage of watching. That’s what we call “theatre by other means”. Actually, in the time of our presence in Venice we had performed some discrete performative acts but they were almost hidden. They could be seen only as mediated. Only the spectators who were at one of the displays, and were in fact watching themselves viewed by the camera from the back, who saw themselves surrounded by an image of the people who had been there a few minutes ago - only they could have seen a live performance occurring behind their back. But it was only in the moments when nobody else in the gallery could have seen it, which means – quite rarely.
The displays on the ‘back’ of the displaced duplicate wall present a mixture of prerecorded material and live feeds from the exhibition space. This creates the suggestion of visitors as protagonists, and you as ‘the film’s extras.’ Is this how you see your work practice - as a stage you have created for the viewers to play upon?
Watching is an operation happening all the time in exhibition spaces but we don’t necessarily understand ourselves as protagonists when we are spectators. The surveillance cameras are placed in positions to catch the visitors as they are watching the screens in order that they see their own passive gesture. By joining these shots with narratives that appear in the form of accompanying titles the spectators indeed become the protagonists - their passive watching gets activated. Since the prerecorded material of us is also mixed into these algorithmic movies we do appear as extras, however, not in the spatial background but rather in the temporal background. There are further nuances: in these films sometimes one seems to appear as a protagonist sometimes as an extra, the roles are interchangeable. They depend on our interest and attention. These films are perceptively demanding, they don’t follow the rhythm of our habituated ways of reading moving images. As was already mentioned, people start to feel much more implicated when they notice themselves as a part of some visual-narrative structure. This is the entry point for their speculation about their singular positions, roles and most importantly relations and responsibilities we all have towards images that surround us.
The choice of Tomislav Gotovac’s work alongside yours highlights certain similarities in your practices. On a simple level, one of these is nudity. Is this something you newly adopted in your performance in order to appease Gotovac’s insistence on nudity? Why was it important for this to be performed naked, and not previous performances such as Points of Convergence or 1 Poor and One 0?
The photo film Parametricism / ‘No Future’ is a staged reconstruction of the spatial displacement of the replica of one found wall of the pavilion. In order to create the idea that the space behind that wall holds potential to be whatever space imaginable we also staged the building of parametric architectural objects - trying to index a kind of future, utopian space. Also, an interest for promises and affective impact of utopian, impossible spaces is something we keep pursuing in the recent works we did. To arouse the image of an almost archetypal collectivity we opted for nudity. The other reason was also that nudity is a standard costume of collective in performance art.
Gotovac was an artist who believed that art had to be anarchic in order to survive. How do you think he would feel about having his work included in the Venice Biennale - the biggest and oldest international art festival in the world?
Gotovac was unpredictable, in life and art alike. Out of respect for his work and out of a certain fascination with his persona we find it futile to speculate what his opinion on the matter would have been.
It seems to be important to you to honour Gotovac’s career - does this simply stem from a personal engagement with his work, or does it go beyond that?
Gotovac was a regular guest at our performances and every once in a while we had intriguing artist-to-artist exchanges. Somehow we cherished a relationship of mutual respect. Some years ago some of us organised a research project “Cinematic Modes of Choreography” that aimed to locate specific choreographic practices or the choreographic unconscious in other fields of Eastern European art - performance art and experimental film - from the 60s and 70s and extract principles of choreographic thought from these sources. As a part of that project we initiated a re-enactment of Tom’s performance action “100” (that happened back in 1979).
From its very beginnings BADco. had a keen interest in the legacy of Eastern European performance art and in our performances you’ll find reverberations or references to artworks of Damir Bartol Indoš, Július Koller, Stano Filko, The Factory of the Eccentric Actor, Mladen Stilinović and others.
We found this tradition of artistic thinking much more fertile in terms of artistic problems than the traditions of theatre or dance. And not only Eastern European performance art. One of our latest pieces is called “Semi-Interpretations or How To Explain Contemporary Dance To An Undead Hare” which clearly refers to Beuys.
Considering your work is critical of how art is presented and viewed, and furthermore it relies on temporality, how do you feel about the market value of your work increasing due to its inclusion in the Biennale?
It is difficult to talk about market value of this artwork without taking into account that the installation running for six months at the Arsenale will continue its life both as an installation and as a setting for a theatre performance that will become an integral part of the project Responsibility for Things Seen. We thus place ourselves on the intersection of two very different environments - the visual arts and the performing arts scenes - both with their own rules and sets of problems. The Venice Biennale is certainly a meeting point of powerful curators and well-off collectors, and their encounter with the artist who is in most cases in a very precarious position. On the other hand, traditionally the field of performing arts has been one of collective work, co-productions and large theatre houses. Of course, this has changed. We see more and more work for the stage that is easy to transport (in terms of set design), but also easy to communicate (in a typical festival context). So, still at work, not interested in single-issue pieces, and with work that results from the complex constellation of different interests and expertise of the collective's members, we cannot yet tell whether five years from now this exhibition will be our one-time excursion into one of the focal events of the visual arts market, or a gateway event to an audience that is only now getting to know us.
