[-empyre-] Process as paradigm - systems theory and pieces

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:

it's interesting to me to follow some of the discussion and observe that art works or performances (if they constitute something resembling a complete or completable form, whether choreographed/composed or interactive and real-time-processed by the artists) - or  "pieces" as we also used to refer to them, are being considered "reductive", as Raquel's post implies.  

This is very curious to me.  Now, of course you are free to validate process and the processual, and we can have debates over the issue of continuity, perpetuity, and observation, and who participates  in observing long processes. Could one not also argue that the emphasis on process might be naively anti-art (as Fluxus tried to be before ending up in the museum), an evacuation of aesthetics and form  – unless it finds very particular aesthetic modes of presentation (pieces), self-contradictingly,  as one can see in the El proceso como paradigma catalogue, for example "Sandbox" or Roman Kirschner's "Roots" , –  and a further evacuation of its celebration as communal ritual, or of certain principles of aesthetics that had helped to shape relations between artists and audiences within traditional and ancestral conventions replacing or extending the ritual aspect underling all ceremonies, music, dance and theatrical events or openings/revealings of works in an exhibit.   

What are the new rituals?  A soup cooked by Rirkrit Tiravanija?  the constitution of convivial relations?  Thomas Hirschhorn's grunge installation "Bataille Monument" out in a Turkish-German social housing complex on the edges of Kassel? 


what are the occasions of processual art that are charged when audience and performers, or audiences and a "piece" in a musem or exhibition or movie theatre or concert hall encounter each other?  perhaps the "relational" of a display of process or an invitation to visitors to keep an interest over a long time in processes,  needs to be addressed somehwat, in terms of the beheaviors that I had asked about repeatedly here. 
I am not saying that the theatrical event needs saving, at a time when you posit the web.2.0 era of distributed communications networks. But i am curious how you will generate attention for processes-to-be-exhibited?

When Baruch Gottlieb refers to intrinsic-coherent and extrinsic-coherent events,  he also implies analogies between artistic/arts-science/bio-art processes, AI and generative art processes (software art processes are excluded as they are "immateriel"? like ideas? )  and complexities of political narrative constructions of processes such as the Gulf War or the war in Afghanistan?  I was not sure i understood the analogy and how this relates back to Raquel's question of whether artists or processors would exhibit processes in a museum or art center?  Are you suggesting that an outside context, such as a war, of the eruption of a volcano, or the explosion of a bomb in a crowded marketplace possibly provides a >>unifying context<< for an art process that might be exhibited at a given moment over time? 

How do you compose or arrange with such extrinsic materials (and if they are narratives or scientific data or forensic evidence or, as Michael Taussig might call them, mysteries and magico-religious ideas/sacred sociologies), how to you rescript them and invite visitors or audiences to perform? How are they to perform your pieces?  Their pieces? 

I would also like to ask Raquel Rennó how she would set up criteria of selection for processes (probably a term that needs to be defined much more closely and more specifically if relating to arts organizations/gallery spaces that exhibit) that are worth (interesting/challening/cognitively or sensorially or aesthetically pleasing or provocative?) exhibiting over time,  and how much time would you give the processes, and how would invite your audiences into the processes?

regards

Johannes Birringer
dap lab / dans sans joux

PS   attached a frame grab from allison kudla process ("Growth pattern) included in El proceso como paradigma. 



 Raquel Rennó > writes >


 There are many groups developing very good
work that are not reduced to a piece or have their process as the main thing
in their work. Is it really possible to have it in a exhibition in a way
that can be revealing and stimulating to the visitors or we should always
have "complete" pieces to be shown as usual? 



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