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<font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Hi Katie, everyone,</font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Yes, Hideous Beast's reenactments/peer reviews are a great thing to bring up -- I hope they will be collecting some of their results and putting them online soon. I do remember there was quite a lot of tension at their talk! </font></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">It makes me think also of the recent spate of performance art reenactments - Marina Abromovic's Seven Easy Pieces ( <a href="http://www.seveneasypieces.com">http://www.seveneasypieces.com</a>/ ), the very carefully researched "re-doing" of Alan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Acts (there's a great description here <a href="http://www.lucazoid.com/bilateral/18-happenings-in-6-parts/">http://www.lucazoid.com/bilateral/18-happenings-in-6-parts/</a> ), and Eva and Franco Mattes' translation of classic performance artwoks into Second Life ( <a href="http://0100101110101101.org/home/performances/index.html">http://0100101110101101.org/home/performances/index.html</a> or see on youtube <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8aTHkjaOF8">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8aTHkjaOF8</a> ). Even though this other group of reenactments weren't explicitly critical in nature, they did allow for some critical thinking about both the original pieces and their remakes. </font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">As Judith Rodenbeck mentioned in her wonderful (idc sponsored) talk (if you haven't heard it, seriously do give the mp3 a listen: <a href="http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/idc_events/2006/01/the_open_work_p.html">http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/idc_events/2006/01/the_open_work_p.html</a> ), some of the most influential works of the 60s included (even courted?) boredom, discomfort, and danger. In this context, I actually think "boredom" is the most intriguing. A number of audience members for all these reenactments have expressed feelings of boredom, at the same time they found the project themselves (original and reenacted) "interesting." It makes me think of John Cage's remarks on boredom: "</font><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." </font></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I remember sitting in the audience at the Kaprow reenactment, looking around at who was there and thinking to myself "wow, the original audience for these pieces must have been so much more interesting than this" - I imagined a bunch of crazy 60s bohemians and hippy artists, I guess. I just assumed that there was some kind of live electricity in the original that I was missing out on. But actually, when I looked at the historical photographs, the audience was just as formal, polite, and art-worldy middle-class as the one I had been sitting in. I if you had mixed up a stack of black and white snapshots from both events, I think you would have been hard pressed to pick out the ones from the present. It was as if they had managed to reenact both the piece and the social circumstances which surrounded it. Or to put it differently, I had assumed Kaprow happenings were about the most exciting things I had ever missed out on, and now I see that they were perhaps a bit boring, but in an interesting way.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Maybe as the idea of "newness" loses value, as we are less enraptured by the romance of an avant-garde as a group of artists way out in front of everyone else, one of the things we can do in the current more egalitarian plurality is spend a bit more time on critical re-making. Scientists do this all the time, and very productively.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>-- Sal</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font></div><div><div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">On Jan 21, 2008, at 9:20 PM, katie hargrave wrote:</font></div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></font><blockquote type="cite"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Hi Sal, <br><br>Kanarinka's proposition is an interesting one, and I think that social practices is an interesting case for consideration. As artists, criticism is something we have learned to do: critique our experiences, our world, our peers, and supposedly our own production. For our own work, however, this is intended to occur in the pre-production and production stages so only complete, successful projects are presented to the public. <br><br> For me, the moments where my actions do not butt up exactly with my intentions often appear like failures initially, only to slowly reveal themselves as probing deeper (more successful, surely not) than projects that look the same on paper as they do in action. When we propose a project to a space, a long negotiation commences between that point and the projects completion.<br><br>As Sal has already pointed out, weeding out projects that are not quite right is very simple for studio based practices, but I have a hunch that social artists engage a similar editing process (even if they fail publicly, as suggested). <br><br>It is telling though, that we do not publicly discuss our failures and questions, when oftentimes, those failures present spaces for an increased discourse to occur. <br><br>This reminds me of </font><a href="http://www.hideousbeast.com/"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"> Hideous Beast's</font></a><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"> current project "Field Test: A Peer Review" (also presented at the Open Engagement conference). <br><br>From the Open Engagement website: " Hideous Beast is invested in creating alternate forms of social exchange. Entertainment is a platform we use to this effect. To further this practice, we investigate the efforts of other artists and cultural producers who work in the field of relational art. Many of these examples carry an imperative for the gesture to be repeated. This is apparent either implicitly in the ideology and logic of the activity, or explicitly in the form of instruction sets or public presentation. As an extension of our own search for new tactics of engagement and in order to evaluate these reproducible actions, we will recreate a number of projects that attempt to foster social exchange through entertainment. <br><br>Entertainment resides in a muddy space between the everyday and escape from the everyday. It is a potential place for public/group exchange and collaboration. For the conference we will initiate Field Test: A Peer Review, to select from a range of artist projects that call to be reproduced, and not only recreate these activities, but also open a dialogue for conference participants to evaluate their effectiveness. Reproduction and criticism are both essential to sustaining social/relational practices and the communities that generate them. We believe the OPEN Engagement conference will be a productive place to carry out these investigations." <br><br>At Open Engagement, HB reproduced </font><a href="http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SHOP/SHOP.html"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">N55's Shop</font></a><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">, where the coordinators of the shop label objects as being free to take, use, or, borrow. In representing these types of projects, they seek to open a dialog about the success and failure of the original project, while developing a toolbox of ways in which to potentially make the project more successful next time around. <br><br>While at Open Engagement, their language made for a tension filled artist talk. They were openly asking where their projects (and others) were successful and where they failed. Charlie Roderick, one of the member of HB, told me that he was curious why the social practices folk at Open Engagement were so unwilling to confront those terms. Is it useful (I remember Darren O'Donnell and Harrell Fletcher having particularly strong feelings one way or the other)? <br><br>I am not quite sure where to go from here. We could, i imagine quite easily open a forum for our questions of success and failure in public lectures, but in practice would this be anything different than what occurs now within the networks of our friends and peers whom we discuss these issues with already? <br><br>Documentation of Hideous Beast's Field Test can be seen on </font><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/documentation/sets/72157602440217393/"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Charlie's Flickr here</font></a><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">. <br><br>best, <br>Katie<br><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div style=""><span style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; "><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font></div></span></div></blockquote></div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br>-- <br>Katie Hargrave<br></font><a href="http://www.katiehargrave.us"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">http://www.katiehargrave.us </font></a><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br><br>OPENSOURCE Art<br></font><a href="http://opensource.boxwith.com"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">http://opensource.boxwith.com</font></a><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">_______________________________________________</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Criticality mailing list</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><a href="mailto:Criticality@lists.socialarchitecture.org">Criticality@lists.socialarchitecture.org</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><a href="http://lists.socialarchitecture.org/listinfo.cgi/criticality-socialarchitecture.org">http://lists.socialarchitecture.org/listinfo.cgi/criticality-socialarchitecture.org</a></font></div> </blockquote></div><br></div><br><br><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Sal Randolph</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:salrandolph@gmail.com">salrandolph@gmail.com</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://salrandolph.com">http://salrandolph.com</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span> </div><br></body></html>