Writing about dance performance

Sarma 5 Nov 2001English

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Contextual note
This "poetics" on Ploebst's critical writing was commissioned by Sarma and published at its launch in November 2002.

Biographical side-note. - When I was fifteen, I definitely had to gain access to a system promising extensions to the depressing chicken-shacks of education and training. Most suitable for this purpose seemed to me to be that which we call "Art" -not "beautiful", but rather dirty, resisting, uncovering art. Here, I supposed, one was allowed think and act outside the customary standards, and that was a great relief. Today, somewhat circumstantially, I am writing: "The decision to become engaged in art, in whatever form, is the putting up and reflection of alternative theses as a reply to the conventional question about the qualities of individual existence within our society."

(Art # Art) = Art. - Affirmative, decorative, linear and harmonising applications of art are by no means unproductive in a contemporary societal context. For they serve excellently as symptoms of complex cultural crisis images for a critical-analytical diagnosis of civilisation, and often give an outstanding documentary of the political condition of a society and its organisation. Their antithesis - let us call it "oppositionally discursive art" -, if it succeeds, irritates perception, disturbs the authority of the habitual, loosens the rigidifying gaze and stimulates the mind.

The breakdowns of the bourgeois education canon on the one hand, and of socialist cultural ideology since around 1970 on the other, left a vacuum in West and East alike, which became flooded with neo-liberalist pragmatism and spectacle-infatuated consumerism. In Europe, the bourgeois conception of art was attacked as early as the first quarter of the 20th century. In the 60s, the image of the artist as an elitist "genius" began to dissolve; two decades later, the military sounding term "avant-garde" was deployed.

Consequences: 1.) This means that at the beginning of a new century we are confronted with a transformed art image, which however is still curtailed by a wide frame of reactionary art ideology. It is exactly this ambivalence which presents a challenge to all those involved, whichever aesthetic order they may be attached to. 2.) Artist, opus and recipient are involved in a complicated volume of communication, which only by its complete functionality makes "art" as such visible. 3.) Within conditions of existence which become increasingly stratified, this art system takes its position as an instrument of world-assertion which, like the sciences and technology, continuously increases its radius of action. 4.) To the global conservative art clientele, which pumps enormous financial resources into anachronistic, but representative and system-affirmative branches like the opera, every extension of the bourgeois art conception is a thorn in its side.

Art & War. - At the beginning of the 20th century, war was declared on the stale aesthetics of conservative blocks, which, however, drew their weapons of fascism, national socialism and communism, and returned fire: all the free tendencies as well as all extended art answering to democratic openness were to be exterminated. The attempt did not succeed, but the cultural damage was inconceivable. In western post-war democracies, during the last 50 years a considerable free art market with broad mainstreams, numerous tributaries and - in spite of protest, sensational scandals and aggressive reactionary discrediting attempts - strong counter-currents evolved. But regardless of its variety, the capacity of the art market is restricted: works of art which expose themselves beyond a certain aesthetic border are often impeded or rejected in their attempt to enter market dynamics.

Markets & Media. - The international and intercultural communication system "art" depends on various art market systems and on national and local financing structures of public and private support organisations. Thus, it quickly becomes clear that: any art journalism is a forming part of the communication and market structure, but this is very hard to grasp by mass media. It seems the more important to get a clear notion about what art journalism should do. The critical mediation of artistic statements, personalities and structures is a delicate task. It defines its legitimacy mainly through the potential plurality of opinions in multifarious media landscapes.

Democracy & Freedom. - Art employs its own logical systems which rightfully are only loosely connected with the political, scientific and economic logics of their environment. Art should be a virus nesting in the sociogenetic information structures of society, working on them, changing them, clarifying them. In order to be able to achieve this, art has to be as independent as possible. The freedom of art together with the freedom of speech is one of the most important attributes of a democratic order. Whoever stands up against the freedom of art - for whatever reasons - makes an argument against democracy. Therefore, defending this freedom (by the way, a sister of press freedom) remains an important assignment of art journalism.

Artists who renounce this freedom and subject themselves to political, religious or economic systems, also stop producing art. There is the erroneous assumption that national socialist painters, musicians or writers brought forth art. Their products are mere propaganda material, and therefore do not really find a place in the context of contemporary art theories. I also maintain that religious music or e.g. military music have less to do with free art than with compositions for TV ads. Furthermore, pictorial works for the decoration of churches are closer to advertising posters than e.g. to the "freer" art works of Marcel Duchamp. Only within border-transgressing linkages, propaganda, advertising or entertainment can be attached again to an expanded art context for the sake of discourse. Thus, artists who actually do not produce works of art still produce art. Children produce art. Mentally disturbed people create magnificent works of art. Machines fabricate art. Together with free artists they all produce evidence of a parallel reality which is closely associated with our social reality, but mirrors a second, disorderly society difficult to administrate ideologically in an everyday context.

Art through the body. - At this point, we encounter dance performance. Even in simple ballroom dance, the body guided by music leaves the regimentation of the customary behavioural codex. With their whole bearing, the dancers move to the level of a gesture of being different. In an extended art definition, the kids in a disco are artists too, just like tournament and show dancers. In dance - and this now is valid for art dance in a narrower sense - the human body produces artistic contents live, from itself and with itself as tool and material. Here, the body is not merely an image like in a great deal of performance art, but a tightly woven connection of subjective and social processes projecting themselves onto the cultural field through movements within defined structures of space, time, sound and light.


Medial mediation. - One approach to mediation which to me seems to be the most plausible and which therefore I endeavour to develop, is the translation of dance performance ideas in their structural contents and sociocultural context into texts which can be used in mass communication. This simply means learning to understand and to make understandable what happens within the dynamic field of construction, representation and perception of a dance piece. It also means developing a critical eye and checking whether single works of art or artistic edifices of ideas, in connection with the overall appearance of dance performance as a form of art, appear to be of greater or lesser relevance in correspondence with other fields, and as parts of the cultural and societal environments. The final phrasing of the texts thus produced, one has as much as possible to take into account the journalistic conventions of the carrier media (newspapers, journals, magazines, books etc.), even if very often this leads to a significant restriction of an author's mediation capacity. Like art (and not too rarely), its mediation is restricted by "technical" limits much more frequently. It is interesting to take space within these limits optimally, and also to soften up existing limitations as much as possible.

Problems of critique. - Within the field of dance, the especially socially relevant forms seem to be those which act at its conventionally stipulated borders. The position of a critic becomes problematic mainly when he tries to install arbitrary aesthetic claims as a yardstick for the whole, to prefer traditional settings to further developments, to bathe in sentimental judgements of taste and to avoid contextuality. It is important to me not to step into these traps, but to put emphasis on the discussion of oppositional discursive art, which constantly renews itself, and to render the new with its historical predecessors plausible as a model for cultural development in critical reflection. Another task of the medial go-between which goes beyond the direct art discourse is the critique of institutions, of cultural policy and the market. In order to remain trustworthy as a critic, or rather to become more critical, every journalistically active person has to be subject to a continuous learning process in order to deepen him/herself and his/her knowledge. Within a broad spectrum of cupidities, he/she over and over again has to conquer positions of independence, of proximity and distance at the same time. He/she has to understand the meaning of today's zeitgeist, but must not let him/herself be tricked by various trend designers and hype hysterics. Finally, a critic must not want to be an artist in the same instance. But now and then, he/she should work as a curator or communicate concentratedly with artists, the better to understand processes of development, and to be able to gain intensive access to the thought processes of those whose work he/she has to mediate.

Conclusion. - Art is an open system. Critique has to be an open system, too. Nowadays, a critic is not an art judge in the old sense, but he/she holds some responsibility as a participant in the shaping of a complex discursive dynamic. To define this, to assert oneself with respect to the artists and the audience, is an ever-challenging exercise of life. Writing about dance performance means continuous investigation of representations of alterities in an ephemeral structure of reception. Language itself is closer than we think to the art it should mediate. It is the codes universally applicable in the media which limit communication here. We should not cease to work on their enhancement.