Making Swiss people tell jokes

[imomus]

Here's a joke:

A man walked into a doctor's waiting room and the room blew down. "I thought you were a waiter", said the man. "I lost patients," said the room.

If you walk into the Swiss Institute in New York over the next week you can have a joke like that (written by me when I was half asleep) whispered into your ear by Piper Marshall or one of the other gallery staff. "The jokes aren't meant to be funny," I told Piper over the phone last week, "I'm more interested in the kind of micro-intimacy built into the situation, the slippage between your status as official gallery staff and that moment when you almost touch a stranger's ear. There's also a slippage between an art gallery and a comedy club, or between the form of a joke and the fact that it doesn't quite make sense or work."

The Spoken Word Exhibition is part of the Performa Biennial, which starts today in New York. I was originally slated by Zach Feuer to do an in-person comedy act -- Bob Newart -- during Performa. But somehow that didn't happen, and instead I've slipped in by the back door: Bob Newart's unfunny jokes (the idea was that he "died daily" onstage) will be chinese-whispered by gallery staff. I don't actually need to be there in person, wearing a curly wig and doing wobbly standup.

The Spoken Word Exhibition is curated by Mathieu Copeland, who included me in his 2006 summer group show at Blow de la Barra in London, The Title as the Curator's Art Piece. The device I came up with then was mechanically-translated texts (very similar to the ones I used for generating lyrics on my Ocky Milk album, heard for instance in this early version of the song Zanzibar) whispered to visitors on request by the gallery staff. This time, Mathieu has extended the technique to all the artists in the show: "The one-week exhibition consists of artworks repeated by the Institute‘s staff," runs the blurb on the Swiss Institute's website. "By leaving the gallery space empty and making works available only on demand, Copeland initiates an exchange between spectators and gallery staff."

I'm delighted that this idea, premiered in my Whispering piece at Blow de la Barra, has, like Adam's rib, been plucked out to provide the entire structure of a show containing work by Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Douglas Coupland, Karl Holmqvist, Maurizio Nannucci, Yoko Ono, Mai-Thu Perret, Emilio Prini, Tomas Vanek, Lawrence Weiner and Ian Wilson. Of course, the idea overlaps slightly -- just in the technique of getting gallery staff involved in delivering the artwork -- with Tino Sehgal's piece at the 2005 Venice Biennale: the guards in the German pavilion greeted visitors with a bizarre dancing chant ("This is so contemporary!"). Sehgal (who's cunning enough to have found a way to sell nebulous stuff like this) describes his work as "a politicized inquiry into the mutability of modes of production".

I was also influenced by my three months at the Whitney, when I discovered what amazing characters the guards there were, and what an under-used resource. The focus on bad jokes clearly also relates to the Book of Jokes I'm currently writing -- a book I'm pleased to say I've this week actually signed a contract for. I'll be spending some of the advance on a belated trip with Hisae to the 2007 Venice Biennale.

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Since this blog entry is about Swiss people telling jokes, I thought I'd end with a comic song by Mani Matter, the Swiss Georges Brassens. It's about a cigarette dropped on a carpet that ends up burning the whole world to ashes. Above you can hear Matter himself singing it, below are some Swiss kids doing a cover.

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Comments

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

but wouldn't the deliverance of the failed jokes be crucial to their transcendental power attained by the presence of the newart persona dying for them? can this task really be laid upon a, i would dare to assume, at best mildly engaged deliverance from the staff?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, I prefer amateur performers to professionals. Gallery staff I would expect to be somewhat clumsy when it comes to telling jokes. You know, when I did this first at Blow de la Barra I asked Detmar Blow to demonstrate how he'd been whispering my clumsily web-translated phrases to visitors to his gallery. He did it "wrong" -- standing too far away, putting voice into his "whisper", and so on -- but there was something really nice and vulnerable about his delivery, a sense that "I shouldn't really be doing this".

I liked that. It's not how I planned it or would have wanted it, but it was his way to do it, and finally his unease with the task was what I liked best. It used (breached) the line between an office and a gallery, between a logistical-managerial space and a performance space, and between our relationship with office workers and our relationship with performers. Because every art gallery has both: there's a little "emplacement" with telephone, computer, filing system, information shelves and so on. Then there's the "white cube" waiting to be filled up with the performer's ideas. The "emplacement" seems rather defensive at times; quite literally behind fortifications. This piece broaches and breaches those, and of course the staff are somewhat compromised and vulnerable, their professional distancing habits ("Would you like the information sheet?") compromised, their boredom replaced by anxiety.

[(Anonymous)]

I am all for this democratic kind of art. Remember when artists had to learn about lighting and perspective and all of that? God, what a waste of time!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the moment someone invented the camera it went out the window, didn't it? And the emphasis switched to originality, to using the context as a metaphor for life outside the gallery, and so on. Some of us find that more interesting than perspective, or perhaps a wider kind of perspective.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear some news on that book. Is it finished yet?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, I still have to write some interstitial chapters (a journal by a Japanese lodger, to provide an alternative -- hey! -- perspective) and an ending.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Okay, I hope that it will be available in Sweden too. But since I can order Whimsy's book on the net I might as well be able to order your book when it comes out.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, but thank God we got rid of that stuff! How oppressive all that technique was. The artist was formerly a tyrant. We were all offended and ashamed by his achievement. But we took away his greatness. Now it is free to all. The man on the street is on par with the Great Masters. All he must do, if he wishes, is push a button on a camera. Make sure your subject is in the center of the viewfinder! Great "composition"! **This photo was voted a "Hit" from Hit, Miss, Maybe**

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm probably as much of a reactionary old art elitist as you are, my conservative friend. I just don't use technique as the basis for my firm belief in talent hierarchies.

[(Anonymous)]

It's amazing. Europe. And arts.

I live in Argentina, in july I made an art intervention on a tunnel, where they make art shows since a few years ago.

it was an intervention on the lighting system, i took each of the 18 fluorescent tubes that enlightened the place and shifted their circuits so they would glitch. also, i put a motor with a timer on each tube, that would turn on and generated noises. Each tube had a different timing, so the 18 tubes together generated random noise patterns that could not be predicted and changed permanently ...


BUT it was impossible to work with the guards of the place. I mean, it IS an art gallery. It's been that for over 3 years. SO you would assume that they can undersand a little about that. all they had to do was to turn on one switch in the morning and turn it off at night.
but it was impossible. every time i went there things were upside down -and not in a good way.. -. they would turn off the main power switch, resetting most of my setup.. or FIX the glitched lights completely destroying the visual effect.... and so on.


so, i know my case was of particulary bad luck. but i can't avoid being shocked when you tell this about gallery guards directly following artist's directiond and interacting with the public. it's amazing that that works.

(javier)

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

right, technique can't be the basis of artistic value. i'd say, art always had a conceptual basis. someone like leonardo, while certainly technically apt, wasn't about technical virtuosity, he didn't even finish many of his works, because he felt more like moving to the next idea. rubens, long before warhol, had his factory, with specialists for certain elements of a painting - planned by the "maestro", executed by a team. as does jeff koons today.
the very first paintings mankind left in some caves, were not only about representation of observations, but about perception, analysis, world view. they are absolutely philosophical.

but it is very simplistic to see painting/visual art made by hand replaced by photography. graphic techniques are applied today no less than before. it is all about speaking in visual codes. and for some things, technical abilities are required, for others less so.
it might be easy to take a photo (under a lot of circumstances, or with certain premises, it isn't technically easy at all), but the important part is the editing of the easily snapped, or found materials. and that requires knowledge and abilities.
but you can't do anything without form. even if the form is denied, there is a minimum of presentation required, if the art work is available to a public in any way, even if the artist choses just to speak about his idea. then, it will be considered how, and in what context he speaks about his concept, and that is a form of realization. when lawrence wiener says, the art work doesn't have to be realized, i'd say it ain't possible to omit realization.
if i write "a cathedral built of stuffed wiener dogs. don't build the cathedral" - then there will be no cathedral. but there is a text published in the comments section of a weblog.

anyway, i found the "bob newart" idea of the dysfunctional performer much more interesting than the self-referential play with the requirements of a gallery space and its staff. there is way too much of that going on right now, artists commenting/mocking other artist's works, reflecting the parameters of art institutions (not so often the business side, unfortunately. that wouldn't be tame enough, and might alienate that very business). it smells a bit of "easy smartness". that planned clumsiness might well be a new slick. too tame. maybe i'm underestimating, but i'd like something more intense - like the great newart i know you'd be.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

to have to rely on staff can be tricky in germany, too. i showed a digital projection of drawings at a big, famous art institution in düsseldorf. with their own, seasoned technicians, so i thought everything would be just fine for once, even if i couldn't come to oversee putting up the installation myself. but they took a wrong cable and the picture was a blurred mud. when i pointed that out to the technician just before the opening, he said: right, that looked different at the other place - he even had seen the first station of the exhibition in another town! also the curators hadn't noticed anything. i wonder, if the sound of the installation, muted for the opening (not to disturb speeches etc), was ever turned back on.

wiener dog

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I had a stuffed wiener dog as a child and not once did I think it a cathedral but an entire world.
I'm up for sum slippage and Nic I'm amazed at what your doing and you do not have to apply for any grants to do it!

a trail into the deep dark recesses of the woods

[(Anonymous)]

See also (http://www.ubu.com/ubu/wellman_magoo.html)