state of the art
issues of participation in art
The practices we are studying inherit the interactional turn taken by Western art during the 20th century, under the first impetus of John Dewey and his thought ofart as experience [Dewey, 1934]. After the Second World War, a myriad of artistic practices and aesthetic theories proposed to think of art in terms of relationship, situation and transaction. In the wake of Dadaism and the pioneering gestures of Marcel Duchamp or John Cage, the Fluxus movement advocates the identity of art and life, and opens the way to a radical broadening of the artistic experience, in open forms. ofhappening (A. Kaprow), of the event (G. Brecht), from the situation (Lettrist then Situationist International), or from the social sculpture (J.Beuys)…. The lack of distinction between the work and the act is still evident in the ethics of care cultivated by feminist art (M. L. Ukeles, L. Clarck..), in the task-improvisations by A. Halprin, and more generally in the performances of thepost modern dance American of the 1960s and 70s.
These new modalities for experiencing art have given rise to a vast taxonomy among historians and critics. For example, Paul Ardenne proposed the category ofcontext art to designate “creation in an urban environment, in a situation, of intervention, of participation” [Ardenne, 2002]. Nicolas Bourriaud advanced the concept ofrelational aesthetic to support the emergence, in the 1990s, of artists who claimed to make art “a state of encounter” [Bourriaud, 1998]. More recent, and more relevant to us, the category ofart in common proposed by Estelle Zhong Mengual describes very real encounters since it distinguishes specific collaborative projects between artists and volunteers, carried out over the long term, and building co-production or interaction relationships with proven political issues [Zhong Mengual, 2018.] Also note the work Shared scenes. Being together in the performing arts, directed by Éliane Beaufils and Alix de Morant, which analyzes certain current issues of participation, immersion and interaction in the performing arts [Beaufils and de Morant, 2018].
But the artists who interest our study add a new radicality to participation: by making the studio, the workshop or the public encounter the very situation of art, and the game its experience, these artists create the conditions for encounters. truly individuating. Very important for our study, the concept of individuating encounter (in which is understood the philosophical heritage of Gilbert Simondon 1, and his thought of individuation) is proposed by Baptiste Morizot and Estelle Zhong Mengual in their book Aesthetics of encounter “our reflection consists in considering the subject caught up in the encounter with the work as a individuation process (the process of making the individual), and to question its transfiguring effects on him. »[Morizot and Zhong Mengual, 2018, 85.] However, the authors do not cite any artistic approach from the field of performing arts. Our study therefore has the advantage of filling this gap, with regard to practices that offer an aesthetic of effective and embodied encounter.
Around the table, Loic Touzé and Anne Kerzhero, Collectif Kom.post, Berlin, Tanz im August, 2011
speculative thinking
Our research project situates the issues of participation at the crossroads of aesthetics, cultural anthropology and political ecology. For this, he draws certain conceptualities from the revival experienced by speculative thought in philosophy and the human sciences. The notion ofspeculative gesture, by which we sometimes define "fabulous techniques", is directly borrowed from this thought, since it is the title of a collective work edited by Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise, in which the authors defend the need for a new “speculative empiricism” in contemporary thought [Debaise and Stengers, 2015]. Inherited from the pragmatist philosophies of Whitehead and James, this speculative empiricism proposes to think about any experience starting from its situation, and with regard toimportance it has for its agents, rather than with regard to the categories (moral, cultural, scientific) which determine it. The speculative gesture also consists, following a proposal of James, in considering relations as constituent facts, and not as dimensions added to the experience.[James, 1912]. The relationship therefore has as much existence as its terms, since it is what determines them. This postulation is fundamental for all the “fabulous techniques”.
The concept of speculative fabulation proposed by Donna Harraway [2012] proceeds from the same empiricism, and currently shines on a number of intellectual works that inform our research. Let us cite, among others, the works of Ann L.Tsing, Vinciane Despret or Nastassja Martin, who attempt to combine scientific, literary and speculative approaches. In the perspective of a pluralization of ontologies, the book The touch of the world, Techniques of nature by David Gé Bartoli and Sophie Gosselin summarizes the most significant speculative elaborations of our time, in order to extract a non-anthropocentric approach to nature [Gé Bartoli and Gosselin, 2019]. The work of Canadian philosopher and dancer Erin Manning, who bases her research on the encounter with neurodiversities and what she calls “autistic perception” is essential to our work on transindividual agencies. When she writes that "a body is always more than one: it is a processual field of relations", she gives our project one of its great guiding questions. [Manning, 2013].
ecology of the senses
To understand the ecology of the senses that the fabulous techniques work on, we rely on several fields of study. On the one hand, the clinical field of psychology, in its interactional perspectives [Bateson, 1972], ecological [Gibson, 1979] and enactive[Varela, 1989], and following the founding intuitions of French phenomenology [Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Dufrenne, 1953; Clam, 2012]. Linked to these fields, somatic practices and knowledge irrigate our thinking. In addition to the expertise of most team members on the knowledge of corporeality [Godfroy, 2015; Damian, 2014; Bigé, 2017; Bouvier, 2021], we also rely on the work carried out by the group “Soma&po. Somatic, aesthetic, political", from the dance department of the University of Paris 8 [Ginot (ed.), 2012].
On the other hand, the ecology of the senses is also apprehended from anthropological and philosophical perspectives which question the crisis of sensitivity as cause and effect of the ecological crisis. In this regard, the work of David Abram [1996], Baptiste Morizot [2020] or Erin Manning [2019] are very important contributions for our studies, extending the perspective of the three ecologies (environmental, social, mental) put forward by Félix Guattari [1989]. Furthermore, the workEcosomatics, thinking about ecology from the gesture, directed by Marie Bardet, Joanne Clavel and Isabelle Ginot, also brings valuable knowledge situated [Bardet, Clavel, Ginot, 2018].
Extensions, Yasmine Hugonnet, 2021. Photo Anne-Laure Lechat
Extensions, Yasmine Hugonnet. Photo Anne-Laure Lechat
Play and Game
To think about the work that the fabulous techniques develop on relationship and agency, we call on various theories of play. Psychological approaches to play, such as those of Donald Winnicott, allow us to think about transitional phenomena and the challenges of enlargement of the "potential space"[Winnicott, 1975]. From Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga [1938], many anthropological approaches describe the game in its relationship of proximity and difference with ritual and the sacred. InThe Games and the Men [1957], Roger Caillois develops a vast theory of the game, considered as a free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, regulated and fictitious practice. More recently, the anthropologist Roberte Hamayon has renewed the approach to the game by considering the empirical modalities of "playing", and the processes that this implies: learning, imitation, interaction, competition, emotion and strategy, chance, chance and belief, ambiguous relationship between fiction and reality [Hamayon, 2012].
To study the specificities of the scores on which the games we study are based, we will refer to two models proposed by Julie Sermon in her essayScore(s), composition process and artistic division of labor, namely the score-instruction (which delivers instructions for action, and allows the execution of a performance without the direction of its author), and the score-matrix (which does not generate a particular work, but a series of possible works from objects and/or game rules that will structure the creative process, involving the arbitrary, the random, the combinatory, the improvisation) [Sermon, Chapuis, 2016].
footnotes
1. “The individual is not a being but an act. […] Individuality is an aspect of generation, is explained by the genesis of a being and consists of the perpetuation of this genesis. »Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in the light of the notions of form and information, 1958, Grenoble, Editions Jérôme Millon, 2005, p.191. For Simondon, the individual cannot be considered as a simple “result of individuation”, but rather as a “theater of individuation”. This theater of individuation designates both the process and the “associated environment” of individuation, which can only be transindividual, that is to say collective.