2023年2月16日 星期四

zaap6 zaap6 seng1 (集雜聲)--Conversation as interdisciplinary practice

 

Background

In 2018 and 2019, I was involved in To Behold, To Voice, To Remap, a project positioned to be participatory, as the co-curator. Towards the end of 2018, we (my collaborators and I) found the project at the bottleneck of communication. There are two layers to this bottleneck: first was how artists from different disciplines interpret and exchange their shared research concern, second was how the project team could find ways to manifest the value of participation to spectators who are used to passivity.  This bottleneck was set against the background of the Hong Kong performing arts scene where boundaries of authorship, spectatorship, and media types are thick and institutional influence pervasive.

Research question

When art education compartmentalised into disciplines of artforms, rendering the lack of language for interdisciplinary dialogue, should artists forget about their professional language and go back to what they share: the daily lives of people living in the same city?

The potential of group conversation as detours intrigues me: a few people sit down with the intention (or so they believe) to discuss certain topics always end up in unknown places after some time, as long as they let the conversation flow. The fact that people cannot stay on the subject during conversation is much condemned in consumerist society, Hong Kong case in point, because it is considered ‘inefficient’ and ‘waste of time’—time measured in monetary terms. In Cantonese, we describe such situations as ‘the detour to the South (or North) Pole’ or ‘a trip to Mars’.

What makes the Poles or Mars so attractive, even more so than the conversation topic that we consciously, diligently or even pains-takingly set out for? Will there lie the insight into how (perceived/ self-imposed) roles and disciplinary boundaries can be crossed?

Influence

-          Terry Eagleton discusses the significance of speech in culture. ‘Speech is an organ with which we cope with our practical environment, and all of our more abstract notions evolve from this humble root.’[1] He also made reference to Herder who ‘considers language to be the decisive factor in human culture’ and Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote that ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’.[2]

-          Grant Kester, art historian, in his book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, advocates for ‘dialogical art’ and analysed a series of projects that ‘define dialogue itself as fundamentally aesthetic.’ In an interview by Tom Finkelpearl, who suggested that ‘actually sitting down and talking to people live, in person, is an integral aspect of almost all socially interactive and collaborative work,’ Kester said that ‘… I’m returning to these issues (to identify a concept of aesthetic experience that can mediate between the individual and the social)… through an analysis of bodily proximity, movement, and so on as forms of affective communication.’[3] 

-          The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is The Highest Form of Art a.k.a. Free Beer by Tom Marioni, a piece of ongoing conceptual art that has been happening since 1970. See https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_act_of_drinking_beer and https://www.5280.com/2018/07/this-month-in-colorado-springs-drinking-beer-with-friends-is-art/

 

Methodology

zaap6 zaap6 seng1 is a word play on a Cantonese adjective. Written in characters which literally mean ‘a collection of a variety of sounds’, it originally describes the noise made unconsciously by someone chewing with his mouth open.

zaap6 zaap6 seng1 is a 12-month conversation series from January to December 2019. (Due to the Anti-Extradition Movement in 2019, the final [12th] conversation was cancelled.) A conversation with a group of 3 to 4 art practitioners from different disciplines took place on every 3rd Wednesday of the month. Each group of artists were to commit to a ‘season’, i.e. 3 months or 3 consecutive sessions of conversations, each season on a different topic with a different group. The rationale for the 3-month time span is to encourage the artists to examine how their daily lives may have influenced their opinions on the topic, and if the mundane of the daily life will provide additional vocabularies for interdisciplinary communication. 

Topics and artists line-up are:

Season 1: on ‘City Living and the Sense of Uselessness’. Participants were a lighting design, 2 performance artists and an art administrator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHZav8Yg6Pk&t=664s



Season 2: on ‘Between Arts and Crafts, the Technical and the Conceptual’. Participants were a dancer, a painter and an art administrator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwF9xd7CS9Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIDG75p-OWg

Season 3: on ‘the Art-life Divide’. Participants were a dancer, a photographer, a high school student and an installation artist.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2538261412865215



Season 4: on ‘Views, Experience and Ideas of Participatory Art’. Participants were a performance artist, a cartoonist and a theatre director.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kuzrjxnVrk

Critical reflections

       I was the moderator of all the sessions and the question that lingers throughout all was ‘how to identify the detour’. Are we only indulging in making pointless remarks? For how long should we wait and see to learn if we have actually found an alternative path or if we have completely lost our way? Should I evaluate the importance of the detour against the theme I have set forth, or to look at it as both the means and the end? 

       The decision to live-broadcast the conversation sessions on Facebook also needs further evaluation. While the intention was to invite real-time exchange, the consciousness to the conversation being accessible to people outside of the group limits free expression to some of the participants who were too careful with the choice of vocabularies or focused more on themselves than others. I was also impacted by the consciousness of the presence of online viewers and worried ‘if they find the conversation irrelevant.’

       While I hoped that the common denominator of living in the same city will provide more through-roads to interdisciplinary exchanges, once the conservation touches on ‘the arts’ in the sense of ‘training in the ways of making art from institutions’, participants fall back easily to their media jargons and become precious of the art form from which they inhabit.

       How does the dynamics of defamiliarisation and affirmation of one’s discipline affiliation fuels the perception of self-identity?

       Have I taken ‘dialogical’ too literally, regarding it but the behaviour of engaging in verbal exchange? Can verbal exchange but the gesture of promoting internal dialogue of tacit and codified, objective knowledge?



[1] Terry Eagleton, Culture (U.S.: Yale University Press, 2016): 81.

[2] Ibid., 83.

[3] Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013): 114, 125.

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