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imomusFIle this under "things I learned by researching passing references in Pingmag". The last entry with the tag would've referenced the brilliant interview they did with Atelier Bow Wow which had a paragraph about Henri Lefebvre. Okay, they spelled his name wrong, but still -- who else out there is talking about Lefebvre's concept of "the production of space", and his distinction between the space of representation and the representation of space? I snapped it up for my Wired article on junk mail immediately.
This time, in an interesting piece about Liverpool artist Leo Fitzmaurice, Pingmag is relating his "temporary art interventions" to the ideas of Michel de Certeau, whose book "The Practice of Everyday Life" I'd vaguely heard of, and related to Situationism. (He died rather young in the 80s, like Debord.)
But, googling about, I found that some people think that, just as Marx found Hegel standing "on his head" and turned him the right way up (replacing his dialectical idealism with dialectical materialism), so some consider Certeau to have stood Debord the right way up. Debord, you see, thought that there were precise laws of the geographical environment which had "specific effects, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals". Certeau, on the other hand, saw unpurposeful walking in the city as "a symbolic order of the unconscious". He thus inverts Debord's geographical determinism. Think of Debord as a rather cynical, pessimistic ad man (after all, Malcolm McLaren managed to turn his ideas into a marketing campaign for the Sex Pistols). Think of Certeau as more of an activist. Or look at his picture and think of him as John Major unveiling the Citizens' Charter if you want a cheap laugh. Go on, then.
In his Pingmag interview (conducted in Berlin), Leo Fitzmaurice (whose work is a bit like Tony Cragg's plastic trash sculpture, but with flyers and handouts and catalogues instead of Sqeezy bottles) says "I realized after reading Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life that one thing I am doing (and we all do in some way) is to consume public space and by consuming it in some way we make it our own thus privatizing it to some extent. But instead we spend our time consuming other stuff…"
The title of the piece ("temporary art interventions") makes me think of the article I wrote about designer Alex Rich for ID magazine ("Gentle Interventions", that was called, after one of Alex's shows). The theme of turning (or détourning) commercial material into something beautiful and personal also reminds me of what Candice Breitz does with Hollywood movies, when she re-enacts scenes from them, "privatizing" their most melodramatic moments and turning them into something personal. (I happened to have a meeting with Candice on Monday night, and she kindly gave me a book about her work. Oh, and speaking of books, the illustration shows a new book about Certeau that's just come out, and its author, Ben Highmore. I am adding it to my Amazon Wish List -- sorry, my Borders "Shoplifters Welcome Today" list.)
It seems like this stuff is in the air. Some call it "Social Practices". California College of the Arts launched a new course with that title in the fall of 2005. "Social practices incorporates art practice as diverse as urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, "new genre" public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, web-based interactivity, service dispersals, and street performance," says the blurb. "These varied forms of public strategy are linked critically by theories of relational art, social aesthetics, pluralism, and democracy. Artists working within this genre choose to co-create their work with a specific audience or propose critical interventions within existing social systems that inspire debate or catalyze social exchange. Theoretical background for the concentration will be drawn from a variety of contemporary critical sources, including writings by Pierre Bourdieu, Nicolas Bourriaud, Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Okui Enwezor, Andrea Fraser, Miwon Kwon, Lars Bang Larson, and Henri Lefebvre, among others."
Bang! There it is. They've even got Andrea Fraser as their Visiting Artist. (Andrea did a Whitney Biennial piece quite similar to my Unreliable Tour Guide in 1992. Back then, though, it was called "Institutional Critique", not "Social Practices".)
Wikipedia (listen, mate, I never went to art school, all right? I have to pick this stuff up where I can!) spells out one of De Certeau's most interesting ideas: the distinction between the strategic and the tactical.
A strategy is basically a powerful but rather stolid institution, business or operation. It has an HQ, and it produces laws, language, ritual, goods, words, art, technology, discourse. It has overheads and resources. It doesn't change quickly, it's rather inflexible. Its goal is to perpetuate itself through the things it makes. It mass produces and seeks to homogenize its audience, since "maximum efficiency means being able to sell the narrowest array of products to the widest possible market". Strategy creates not just products, but the needs for them. Uniformity helps it do this. Strategy thus imposes order, systematizes. Its contact with the world is rather distant -- it learns about others via polls, focus groups and case studies, and tries to influence them via advertising and PR.
A tactic is haphazard and makeshift. All it has is time, and a certain fuzzy cunning. It seeks to infiltrate, but not take over. It's not a terrorist, in case you're thinking of Bin Laden. It doesn't directly challenge strategy, but maintains a sly passive aggressive subversion behind a shield of outward conformity. A tactic works with the basic conditions imposed by strategy. It takes lowest common denominator rubbish (think of Leo's junk mail) and works to make something of it, something it can call its own. It takes space unfit for habitation and makes it habitable. It's got a folksy way of taking something over by merely changing a couple of details (and here we think of the 10% twist thing, the stuff I was talking about in my microproperty piece on Sunday) -- giving a story a new twist in the telling, changing a recipe while making food. The tactic is all about processes, not end results. It could be just one person, or a flash mob, a temporary grouping that melts away before you can label it. And there is something a bit Al Qaeda-ish about it: "Unlike the strategy, it lacks the centralised structure and permanence that would enable it to set itself up as a competitor to some other entity." In the tactic's slipperiness, said Certeau, lies its power. The authorities can't catch up, because by the time they've mapped it, it's moved on.
The art world has been all about this stuff recently. And you can see the application it could have to everything from skateboarding to trendy interventionsim, artists' initiatives, temporary spaces, and so on. Why, Roger McDonald in Tokyo has even named his operation Tactical! My Whitney performance last year showed that the idea might even have come full circle -- my tactical interventions were at the invitation of the strategy, the institution, the museum itself. It can all get a bit recursive:
1. Producers are considered good, consumers bad.
2. But what if we say that consumers are good, producers bad?
3. Because, if you look at what they're doing with stuff, the twist they're giving it, consumers are really producers.
4. And that's good because consumers are bad, producers good. Full circle! Oh no!
Certeau gets just one mention in Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics: "The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him," Bourriaud writes, "so as to turn the setting of his life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture, to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression." I like that -- the artist rents rather than buying.
Wikipedia's biographical entry on Certeau sums it up like this:
"In The Practice of Everyday Life he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture,” nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts." (I'm going to insert the video Groovisions did for Halfby's "Rodeo Machine" here, but please imagine Air's People in the City playing instead.)
[Error: unknown template video]
"In the influential chapter "Walking in the City," Certeau describes "the city" as a "concept," generated by the strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it might be experienced by someone looking down from high above. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or meandering aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian layout of the grid of streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's assertion that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, recombining the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products."
And if this stuff, like Situationism, ends up as marketing? At least it'll be slightly more flattering marketing. And, you know, the junk mail will have to have nice edges, because they'll have to assume we're stacking it up and turning it edge-outwards, or something equally devious. In fact, I doubt they'll ever catch up with us as we stride through their city.
This time, in an interesting piece about Liverpool artist Leo Fitzmaurice, Pingmag is relating his "temporary art interventions" to the ideas of Michel de Certeau, whose book "The Practice of Everyday Life" I'd vaguely heard of, and related to Situationism. (He died rather young in the 80s, like Debord.)
But, googling about, I found that some people think that, just as Marx found Hegel standing "on his head" and turned him the right way up (replacing his dialectical idealism with dialectical materialism), so some consider Certeau to have stood Debord the right way up. Debord, you see, thought that there were precise laws of the geographical environment which had "specific effects, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals". Certeau, on the other hand, saw unpurposeful walking in the city as "a symbolic order of the unconscious". He thus inverts Debord's geographical determinism. Think of Debord as a rather cynical, pessimistic ad man (after all, Malcolm McLaren managed to turn his ideas into a marketing campaign for the Sex Pistols). Think of Certeau as more of an activist. Or look at his picture and think of him as John Major unveiling the Citizens' Charter if you want a cheap laugh. Go on, then.
In his Pingmag interview (conducted in Berlin), Leo Fitzmaurice (whose work is a bit like Tony Cragg's plastic trash sculpture, but with flyers and handouts and catalogues instead of Sqeezy bottles) says "I realized after reading Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life that one thing I am doing (and we all do in some way) is to consume public space and by consuming it in some way we make it our own thus privatizing it to some extent. But instead we spend our time consuming other stuff…"
The title of the piece ("temporary art interventions") makes me think of the article I wrote about designer Alex Rich for ID magazine ("Gentle Interventions", that was called, after one of Alex's shows). The theme of turning (or détourning) commercial material into something beautiful and personal also reminds me of what Candice Breitz does with Hollywood movies, when she re-enacts scenes from them, "privatizing" their most melodramatic moments and turning them into something personal. (I happened to have a meeting with Candice on Monday night, and she kindly gave me a book about her work. Oh, and speaking of books, the illustration shows a new book about Certeau that's just come out, and its author, Ben Highmore. I am adding it to my Amazon Wish List -- sorry, my Borders "Shoplifters Welcome Today" list.)
It seems like this stuff is in the air. Some call it "Social Practices". California College of the Arts launched a new course with that title in the fall of 2005. "Social practices incorporates art practice as diverse as urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, "new genre" public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, web-based interactivity, service dispersals, and street performance," says the blurb. "These varied forms of public strategy are linked critically by theories of relational art, social aesthetics, pluralism, and democracy. Artists working within this genre choose to co-create their work with a specific audience or propose critical interventions within existing social systems that inspire debate or catalyze social exchange. Theoretical background for the concentration will be drawn from a variety of contemporary critical sources, including writings by Pierre Bourdieu, Nicolas Bourriaud, Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Okui Enwezor, Andrea Fraser, Miwon Kwon, Lars Bang Larson, and Henri Lefebvre, among others."
Bang! There it is. They've even got Andrea Fraser as their Visiting Artist. (Andrea did a Whitney Biennial piece quite similar to my Unreliable Tour Guide in 1992. Back then, though, it was called "Institutional Critique", not "Social Practices".)
Wikipedia (listen, mate, I never went to art school, all right? I have to pick this stuff up where I can!) spells out one of De Certeau's most interesting ideas: the distinction between the strategic and the tactical.
A strategy is basically a powerful but rather stolid institution, business or operation. It has an HQ, and it produces laws, language, ritual, goods, words, art, technology, discourse. It has overheads and resources. It doesn't change quickly, it's rather inflexible. Its goal is to perpetuate itself through the things it makes. It mass produces and seeks to homogenize its audience, since "maximum efficiency means being able to sell the narrowest array of products to the widest possible market". Strategy creates not just products, but the needs for them. Uniformity helps it do this. Strategy thus imposes order, systematizes. Its contact with the world is rather distant -- it learns about others via polls, focus groups and case studies, and tries to influence them via advertising and PR.
A tactic is haphazard and makeshift. All it has is time, and a certain fuzzy cunning. It seeks to infiltrate, but not take over. It's not a terrorist, in case you're thinking of Bin Laden. It doesn't directly challenge strategy, but maintains a sly passive aggressive subversion behind a shield of outward conformity. A tactic works with the basic conditions imposed by strategy. It takes lowest common denominator rubbish (think of Leo's junk mail) and works to make something of it, something it can call its own. It takes space unfit for habitation and makes it habitable. It's got a folksy way of taking something over by merely changing a couple of details (and here we think of the 10% twist thing, the stuff I was talking about in my microproperty piece on Sunday) -- giving a story a new twist in the telling, changing a recipe while making food. The tactic is all about processes, not end results. It could be just one person, or a flash mob, a temporary grouping that melts away before you can label it. And there is something a bit Al Qaeda-ish about it: "Unlike the strategy, it lacks the centralised structure and permanence that would enable it to set itself up as a competitor to some other entity." In the tactic's slipperiness, said Certeau, lies its power. The authorities can't catch up, because by the time they've mapped it, it's moved on.
The art world has been all about this stuff recently. And you can see the application it could have to everything from skateboarding to trendy interventionsim, artists' initiatives, temporary spaces, and so on. Why, Roger McDonald in Tokyo has even named his operation Tactical! My Whitney performance last year showed that the idea might even have come full circle -- my tactical interventions were at the invitation of the strategy, the institution, the museum itself. It can all get a bit recursive:
1. Producers are considered good, consumers bad.
2. But what if we say that consumers are good, producers bad?
3. Because, if you look at what they're doing with stuff, the twist they're giving it, consumers are really producers.
4. And that's good because consumers are bad, producers good. Full circle! Oh no!
Certeau gets just one mention in Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics: "The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him," Bourriaud writes, "so as to turn the setting of his life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture, to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression." I like that -- the artist rents rather than buying.
Wikipedia's biographical entry on Certeau sums it up like this:
"In The Practice of Everyday Life he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture,” nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts." (I'm going to insert the video Groovisions did for Halfby's "Rodeo Machine" here, but please imagine Air's People in the City playing instead.)
[Error: unknown template video]
"In the influential chapter "Walking in the City," Certeau describes "the city" as a "concept," generated by the strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it might be experienced by someone looking down from high above. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or meandering aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian layout of the grid of streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's assertion that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, recombining the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products."
And if this stuff, like Situationism, ends up as marketing? At least it'll be slightly more flattering marketing. And, you know, the junk mail will have to have nice edges, because they'll have to assume we're stacking it up and turning it edge-outwards, or something equally devious. In fact, I doubt they'll ever catch up with us as we stride through their city.