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?
Terry Eagleton, Culture (U.S.: Yale
University Press, 2016): 81.
Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2013): 114, 125.
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