OCA students take an early Barthes in Manchester

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
>DigIt, the Manchester International Festival exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery that OCA students visited on the 18 July, is the sixtieth incarnation in one shape or another of an idea that had originally been devised in 1993. The basic concept is for an artist to come up with a particular set of instructions to make a piece of work and for another artist or the audience to perform it in a gallery. Many of the works had been devised at earlier exhibitions in the series. Hence it was interesting to see how the idea of the show had dated over the twenty years.
Certainly, some of the pieces seemed to evoke an even older tradition of happenings and events that artists such as Allan Kaprow had developed as early as 1960. For example, Yoko Ono encouraged viewers to write their wishes on luggage labels and to hang them on a tree – prompting one cynic to write: ‘I wish that curators would stop recycling the Wishing Tree – it’s been done to death!’ Another instructed the audience to hug someone for a particular length of time while Louise Bourgeois simply told the viewer to go out and smile at a stranger. A more enjoyable and interactive work was John Chamberlain’s creation of a room full of clothing, in which the audience was encouraged to assemble characters from different garments, a little in the manner of a small child playing with dolls.
In general the need to keep the instructions as simple as possible and the self-conscious desire to step outside traditional art practices meant that many of the works seemed shallow. Hence there were instructions to make a savoury paste from a recipe, to take part in a beer-drinking game or simply to go into a room and hum. Even where artists managed to be subversive – most obviously, Ai Weiwei who gave precise instructions as to how the viewer could disable one of the security cameras through painting over it – there was a sense that what we were seeing was not just a souvenir of an artist’s practice but a cut-down version of their work.
Not surprisingly, one of the most successful pieces was by Christian Boltanski, one of the originators of the concept, whose work has always addressed the very questions of authorship and authenticity that the exhibition explored. Boltanskihad instructed the curators to commission a local photographer to take 25 photographs of a primary school class and to display them in a grid formation in the gallery.The uniformity of the children’s poses – each seen half-length, lit from the side and smiling to the camera – over-rode the differences in their gender, clothes or ethnic background. In this way the work posed questions not just about the individuality of the child but about whether the artist or the local photographer was the author and how the work might change when it was reinterpreted elsewhere with a different photographer, school and camera.
Sol LeWitt was another artist in the exhibition to have used a grid, thus recalling Rosalind Krauss’s observation of how grids had (in her view willingly) ‘condemned’ so many artists from Mondrian to Agnes Martin ‘not to originality but repetition’. LeWitt would no doubt have shared Krauss’s analysis of the grid as ‘a system of reproductions without an original’ for his work shared her interest in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In many ways the latter’s description of realism as ‘consisting not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy’ might serve as the last word on the exhibition itself. Except that for many contemporary artists and viewers they might add the response: so what?
After viewing the exhibition and spending a long time looking at Manchester Art Gallery’s great new display of its twentieth century collections, we visited another of the festival’s exhibitions: a restaging of Tino Sehgal’s This Variation, which he showed at Documenta in Germany last year. The artist, whom many have tipped for the Turner Prize, had commissioned a score of actors to perform inside a pitch black space within a derelict former railway warehouse. It was only once we had entered the space that we became aware of the actors who danced around us uttering sudden cries and a capella calls. After a while the actors entered into a deliberately impenetrable dialogue with each other about the nature of art and the nature of commerce.
As with the exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, the piece was interesting primarily in asking questions about how we as viewers were to respond to it. For example, if we brushed against one of the actors or vice versa were we to apologise or to assume that it was part of the piece? Could we talk to other members of the audience or join in the dialogue with the actors? How much freedom did the actors have to interpret the artist’s wishes and finally how long were we supposed to stay since the piece was a six hour marathon in which the audience came and went? In the hey-day of such events and happenings, I think we might have responded more spontaneously and with greater interest. Yet, given the disorientating and initially terrifying experience of the darkness, in our case, it was not as long as we had hoped.
Allan Kaprow’s essay ‘Assemblages, Environments and Happenings’ of 1960 and Rosalind Krauss’s ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern Myths’ of 1986, which contains the quote from Barthes are reproduced in the OCA’s recommended course book ‘Art in Theory 1900 – 2000’.
Top image Ai-Weiwei’s demonstration 008
Next image Yoko Ono’s Wishing tree