Performance, Politics, Art, Dialogue and Twitter

Politics, Rambles, Theatre

This is a short reflection on publishing the #GiveUpArt Twitter essay as part of the #SOTAflash conference, which ran alongside State of the Arts 2011. I reduced an essay (forthcoming in an Arts-Activism reader from Silent City) to forty 120-character tweets, which I scheduled at three-minute intervals between 11.30 and 1.30 on the day of the conference. My original thought was that this would be a sort of “essay as event” intervention into #SOTAflash and SOTA itself. As it happened, expanded far beyond that to become something else: thanks to the people who were taking part, something more interesting.

I had originally planned not to do anything on Twitter while the essay was being published, but I began to receive so many replies, objections, engagements and arguments – and began to see so many other interesting things to talk about in the feed – that I ended up having multiple parallel conversations about the ideas of #GiveUpArt while the essay was being tweeted. I was getting swept up in currents of conversation around the hashtag. I began to feel quite overwhelmed by the participation, and spent the full two hours frantically reading and responding to the comments.

Because so many ideas were flying around and being argued under the #SOTAflash hashtag already, my Twitter essay became a small nexus of chatter amid a much wider conversation with many other nexuses. Nexii. Nexapodes. I did dominate that feed for two hours, inevitably, but far less than I’d originally expected and worried about. It was thrilling to know that my conversations were just some among many: that the curators of #SOTAflash had created a multi-level and highly participatory site of argument alongside and around SOTA itself. The result is that several participants at SOTA quickly recognised that everything happening on the conference fringe was far more interesting and relevant than the conference itself, in form as well as in content. For my part, I couldn’t begin to understand why anyone would pay money to listen to dull, centrist speakers and have heavily-structured conversations rather than take part in a fluid, chaotic, freely-accessible multi-platform argument taking place in both cyber- and meatspace. Of course SOTA was dull: the form set it up to be so. It’s hopeless to expect anything worthwhile to come out of a conference format so out of touch with trends and currents in the way people now think and create. A hierarchical, authoritarian format will produce thought hemmed in by those structures of power: a horizontal, anarchic format will produce a wild variety of dissent and passionate, provocative thought.

As for #GiveUpArt, well, it became much more of a performance, much more of an event, than I’d originally expected: it was a series of stimulating interactions and conversations triggered by or taking place around the brief bursts of pre-planned thought, and that’s much more interesting than just publishing an essay in short snippets. As a result, I became much more of a performer, tweeting about my own frenetic tweeting, thanking people profusely, arguing more provocatively, enjoying the lights that were shining in my direction. Twitter just is this fascinating blur of writing and performance: it is writing-as-performance, or performance-as-writing. It is a real-time experience with a short-lived archive; readers/watchers are participating not-quite-simultaneously, or even several days after each other. Twitter’s texts are technically almost permanent (and can be made more permanent), but after a week they’re even less likely to be read than books in a library’s backstock. And even though an archive does exist, it’s really no more complete and accurate than an archive of a theatre production: you can see the script, the props, the film of the performance, the programme, the audience interviews, and still not really understand the feeling of being part of the event. Twitter, like so much of the internet, is the transitory masquerading as the permanent.

After the day, I’d intended to archive everything that was tweeted under the #GiveUpArt hashtag. But I got too busy and delayed for a few days, and now, as you can see, Twitter’s search archiving is so minimal that that conversation is no longer easily organised and archivable: to do so, I’d have to trawl through the personal feeds of everyone who participated and extract the relevant tweets, no longer accurately timestamped, and reconstruct the conversation as it happened. That’s far too time-consuming! – and the results would be incomplete and unsatisfying. But as I’ve implied, I’m almost glad it’s too much effort now to archive: I don’t think there’s really any suitable means of completely recording multidirectional Twitter conversations, and I don’t think such a recording would capture any relevant essence of the event. For a reader who wasn’t part of it, it would be like trying to listen in on a crackly audio recording of a busy argument; for a reader who was part of it, it would add nothing to the memory.

On the other hand, another version of the essay is soon to be published in print format, and I’m glad of that, too. It will be another aspect of the same project, in the way 2001’s different elements reflected and expanded on each other. A print essay is only minimally an event, just as a Twitter conversation is only minimally an essay – the two share aspects of each other, but are ultimately (and politically) different. I think I’ll find the print essay less immediately fulfilling than the Twitter conversation, but I also think I’ll remember it and what results more and for longer.

One thing I will record now is part a conversation which took place in a chat window while all the tweeting was going on. Its subjects are parallel to those of #GiveUpArt, just as it took place in parallel to the event, but I thought some readers might find it interesting. I’m the first speaker; the second is a Marxist anthropologist friend of mine, a comrade of protests, meetings, arguments and 12-hour tabletop RPG sessions.

12:42
It’s a bit intense
Trying to engage everyone who replies; difficult to keep up!

12:43
It got away from you. How exciting!
Creating through dialogue is quite exciting.

12:46
I fucken love it

12:46
This is why I’ve been watching your work with such interest. I knew you were thinking about such things when I was there, and I was just beginning to think about them.

12:50
The more I work with dialogue, the more I become convinced its a vital creative frontier.

12:50
Well working with it makes you realise how much all art (ignoring your essay, or at least its rhetoric) is dialogic, and merely conceals its origins.
Some of the comments around this are relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sei-eEjy4g
People accusing her of “ripping off” the Clash, vs a dialogic understanding of hip-hop.

13:01
Oh yeh, MIA loves pressing those buttons :-D

13:01
Well it’s the essence of hip-hop. There was an amazing paper at this autonomist conference I attended about how hip-hop is an act of creation in the commons.

13:02
And those are the roots of all poetry
Baba Brinkman’s thesis is that hip-hop is a return to the roots of folk poetry and performance

13:02
Well Negri would argue that all productivity is immediately production in common, and it takes juridical private property to convince us otherwise.

13:02
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBX_eKDABx0
http://www.babasword.com/writing/poetry/rhymerenaissance.pdf

13:03
Essay as event… Wonderful.
“Work can be liberated because it is essentially the one human mode of existence which is simultaneously collective, rational and interdependent. It generates solidarity. Capitalism and socialism have only succeeded in subjugating work to a social mechanism which is logocentric or paranoid, authoritarian and potentially destructive.” Negri and Guattari

13:08
Ooh nice

13:14
Damnit, I’m signing up for twitter.

13:17
Oh no!
You’ve buckled
It happens to us all eventually
Do you mind if I publish the bits of this conversation about #GiveUpArt in a reflections blog tomorrow?

13:19
Of course not.
Fuck ownership.
I’m pleased my work’s of some use.

#GiveUpArt : A Twitter Essay for SOTA flashcon

Poetry, Politics, Rambles, Theatre

NB. This post was prepared before the essay was published. It was even more fun than I expected, with lots of people joining in the discussion — this archive is totally unrepresentative of the event. But I’m out of time and energy to edit this, so I’ll be updating a fuller archive of the conversation, with more reflections, tomorrow.

State of the Arts is an annual conference that “brings together a wide range of creative voices to debate issues around resilience, audience and the value of arts and culture.” #SOTAflash is a distributed response/participation in SOTA, organised by artist-curators, asking anyone to contribute in a simple, direct and free way.

The following essay was published for #SOTAflash on Twitter between 11.30 and 13.30 on Thursday 10th February 2011. It was intended for that form — a live, tweeted essay — and so this is an archive of a live event (with “live” being a deliciously problematic condition in this Age) rather than a reproduction of that essay. A version of this piece intended for print publication is forthcoming in Silent City’s “Arts & Activism”; a third version will be published online soon after.

I insist on the pieces being different events/essays because in each case the form so utterly changes the content: this is by now an old saw, but it’s still cutting. Rewriting the essay for Twitter was fascinating: ultra-concision was required (due to hastags, I only had 120 characters to play with), and this led to using an active, first person present voice, where the original essay was passive and reflective, using a third person conditional. That’s simply because first person present is the tense which uses the fewest characters, but it’s interesting to note that that grammatical fact has hugely influenced how Twitter feels in general. It is a first person present medium. Another aspect of rewriting for Twitter was that I knew that not everyone would be following the essay from start to finish: a reader had to be able to arrive and leave at any moment. Each aphorism had to stand alone, and be a suitable introduction or conclusion to what it followed or was followed by. The thoughts are therefore more generalised and elliptical than in the essay for print publication: to me, they’re somehow more artistically satisfying, but less journalistically and politically useful.

I’m interested in how the essay will be received by my followers, by folk participating in #SOTAflash, and by folk at SOTA itself. I’m writing the introduction to this archive two days prior to publication, so I have no idea what will happen. It may be entirely ignored except by those regular followers it annoys, or it may (some hope!) be a surprise hit. Either way, it will be part of the geographically and intellectually distributed uprising of thought that #SOTAflash, I am sure, will be — I’m excited to find out how it fits into that ecology, what responses it will receive, and what else folk are planning to produce.

Enough of the intro: here’s the essay.

* * *

I’m answering the State of the Arts flashcon callout for crowdsourced contributions with a Twitter essay.

The following 40 tweets are a Twitter essay called #GiveUpArt – condensed from a piece in Silent City’s coming ‘Art & Activism’

In 99, in J18’s aftermath, ‘Give Up Activism’ was published, generating much discussion & debate http://bit.ly/ebm85j

What follows is ‘Give Up Activism’ hacked into tweet aphorisms in which ‘activism’ becomes ‘art’; activist, artist; &c.

A problem in art now: the artist mentality: folk see themselves as artists, part of a wider community of artists.

The artist mentality problem is particularly obvious precisely when folk involved try to push beyond its limitations.

I mean not to criticise folk who try to push limits, but to provoke thought on problems if we are serious about it.

Artists identify with art: it’s a role in life, a job, not a thing they just do but a vital part of self-image.

To see self as artist: to feel advanced in seeing the need for & how to achieve art, to lead struggles to create it.

Art, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour: it is a specialised separate task.

Experts jealously guard & mystify the skills they have, keeping people separated and disempowered.

Artists assume other people don’t do anything to make their lives creative, & so feel a duty to do it on their behalf.

Artists define their works as those that count as art, disregarding the creative struggle of thousands of non-artists.

The harder we cling to the role of artist, the more we actually impede the creativity we desire.

Real creative revolution means breaking out of preconceived roles & destroying all specialism, reclaiming our lives.

The passivity of the spectators lies in their ability to assimilate roles & play them according to official norms.

The repetition of images offers models from which all must choose: thus the ultimate conservatism of the ‘artist’.

The supposed creative activity of artists is a sterile routine – a repetition of actions with no potential for change.

Artists would resist revolution: it would disrupt the easy certainties of their role & the niche they’ve carved out.

Like union bosses, artists are eternal representatives and mediators.

Easy to be the ‘artist’: art doesn’t challenge society, is an accepted form of dissent just as it’s not revolutionary.

Even if we do things that are not accepted, the way art is like a job means that it fits in with our upbringing.

The artist role is a self-imposed isolation from all the people we should be connecting to.

The artist role separates you from the rest of the human race as someone special and different.

Artists tend to think of their own ‘we’ as referring to some community of artists, rather than a social class.

Some folk have the strange idea that all must be persuaded into being artists & then we’ll have creative revolution.

Specialists recruit to their own tiny area to increase their power & dispel the realisation of her own powerlessness.

The political party substitutes itself for the proletariat: its own survival & reproduction become paramount.

In political parties revolutionary activity becomes synonymous with ‘building the party’ and recruiting members.

Art is like a Party: people’s primary loyalty becomes to the community of artists and not to the struggle as such.

Art is an illusory community, distracting us from creating a wider community of creativity.

In Marxist groups the possession of ‘theory’ is the all-important thing determining power.

In Art, power is the possession of the relevant ‘artistic capital’ – knowledge, experience, contacts, equipment, &c.

Art reproduces capitalist life: the basis of alienation is that we live in service of a thing that we have created.

If we reproduce capitalism in the name of art that declares itself revolutionary, we’ve lost before we’ve begun.

We should develop means that are adequate to our radicalism. I have no clearer insight into how than anyone else.

Arts-activism: a valiant attempt to get beyond our limits that has made clear the ties that bind us to the past.

Art is a form partly forced upon us by weakness: radical art is often the product of mutual weakness and isolation.

It may not even be within our power to break out of the role of artists.

Maybe when struggle is weak, those working for creative revolution become marginalised, seen as that special group.

To escalate creative struggle we must break the role of artist, try to push at the boundaries of our constraints.

The artist role in itself must be problematic for those who desire creative revolution.

This concludes the #GiveUpArt Twitter essay for #SOTAflash. It can be read in the archive now live at http://wp.me/pgMJK-5w

Thanks for reading #GiveUpArt for the #SOTAflash conference, whether live or archived. Apologies to all who’ve been feedspammed!

A Politics of Festival: Blog for Forest Fringe

Politics, Rambles, Theatre

The folks at Forest Fringe, the free and radical performance space at the Edinburgh Festivals, asked me put a blog post together about the politics of the Festivals after a Twitter exchange about Devoted & Disgruntled. You can read the result — an exploratory trip through capitalism, performance, rootedness and festival — at their blog here; some extracts are below:

“Here’s the core idea in the Forest Fringe’s question: if the Festival should be politicised, then that politicisation requires not reform (a part played here by shows with political themes but without politicised means of production), but revolution, which is to say, by overturning, by radically changing the means of artistic production. That in this crucial political-artistic moment (“crucial” comes from “crux”, as in “cross”, as in “crossroads”), a political Festival would be a Festival which reimagines not just what theatre we make, but how we make it, which overturns not just what we’re talking about, but what our intentions are in speaking.”

“Much of the Festival works on these principles: Some people own the means of production — access to venues, equipment, marketing sources, &c. Other people rent those means of production in order to produce a show — and of course the owners of the means of production charge more for that rent than the cost of running the means. And still others sell their labour to the owners. […]The more capital you have, the more capital you can and must make. The bigger your venue empire, the more efficiently you can wring money out of the people using your venues and the bigger still your empire can become. Moreover, you start benefiting from economies of scale — the way buying lots of a thing makes the cost of the thing cheaper than buying only a little of a thing — so that you have easier access to better marketing, better equipment. That means more audiences come to your venues, and more of the renters — the people putting on shows — want to use your venues. The short story: the big venues at the Festival, the ones whose logos you see everywhere, are expanding every year.”

“in many of the big venues, people are selling their labour for the lowest of low costs: “experience”, a bed, and free tickets. When there is a wage, it’ll be the minimum. This is so grossly like 19th century factory economics that it hurts: such a venue is a performance-factory where the bosses own the labourers’ houses and pay them in tokens only redeemable at the bosses’ own shops. I would not be surprised if in coming years the big venues started charging for their employees’ accommodation.”

“Revolutionary political economy tries to think of other ways society could function than this untrammelled libertarian marketplace. I’m not going to get into the huge debates here, but I am going to sketch out some of the possibilities and how they relate to the Festival, using theatre as an example. There’s state socialism, where a government, democratically controlled or otherwise, runs all the theatres for the benefit of employees and audiences. There’s anarcho-syndicalism, where freely organising voluntary associations, strongly encouraged by social pressures, build and run free theatres and shows for the benefit of all, with or without a monetary system. There’s benevolent feudalism or philanthro-capitalism, where individual beneficient dictators own and run the theatres out of their own pockets and to their own principles. There’s liberal charity, where those with time and privilege to give organise theatre for those without. And there’s liberal democracy, where we all pretend that our rare rituals of voting have any influence whatsoever over the behaviour of the elected “representatives” who make pragmatic decisions about how theatre is run determined by whichever way the political and financial wind is blowing.”

“What I mean is, you’re bringing a show to Edinburgh, not just to the Festival. There is a year-round arts scene here which you might want to find out about, engage with, and give something back to. There are people living here who might want to be involved in the Festival somehow, but you’re too busy marketing to tourists: you don’t think about how to find them, let alone make your show accessible and affordable to them, let along encourage them.”

“Festival advertising is a barely regulated market, and the result is possibly the least effective method of matchmaking between audiences and shows. You have to be very savvy to find what you’re looking for, and you have to be very lucky to find something surprising. Most of us just follow big name reviewers, or directors/writers/venues/companies/performers we trust, or go to whatever’s free, or stick with plays and comedians we already know. Maybe we’ll risk one or two chancers, and then go home disappointed. This is terrible for art, for politics, and for life. We have to be able to do better.”

“The Festival is an industrial powerhouse: performance is a factory, and a show is the product of a lengthy production chain. As such, it is already a deeply political artistic space. I am saying that we — performers, audiences, workers — need to take control of that political space. We need to start making conscious decisions about what we want that space to be, and start acting them out. Better still, let’s think about the best way of making those decisions together.”

“Seize the means of artistic production!”