Performing the Process

Aus When Life was a Miracle

Performing the Process Between Procedure and Operation

von Mårten Spångberg, Choreographer, International Festival

In the autumn 2004 Élie During, a French Bergsonist, published an article in ArtPress where he discuss relations between procedure and operation. The article caught my interest and after a years socializing with the text, something applied to our field of expression could find its way in to a text. I am here writing on top of During but my aims are fairly different. However what is central is to understand the establishment of antagonism in front of, as During also argues, positions of dialogue. It is first in the interplay, and reciprocal articulation between procedure and operation that and utterance or expression can elaborate a voice in our post-dramatic, post-fordist, post-democratic society of western Europe.

In Jérôme Bel’s “The Last Performance” something curious takes place. The appropriated dance, performed by five performers consecutively, originally choreographed and danced by Susanne Linke, which as a procedure addresses the body as a site of a certain production related to originality, presence, foreigness etc. but more strongly how we today understand the body and its movements in respect of copyrights. Through the procedure of appropriation, multiplying and displacing a set of movements that seemingly has a very strong relationship to a particular performer, the authenticity of a movement decomposes, and it is through the resolving momentum that the spectator can, or must, read something. Perhaps this ‘something’ was indifferent to the author. That it was enough for Jérôme Bel to, so to say, demonstrate appropriation rather then express something particular in relation to copyrights, movement and the body. That can most certainly be of interest, and would be something that is common to conceptually orientated authors, but does not such an address present a difficulty in the sense that the work, on the one hand propose itself as, I believe, critical, in a contemporary manner but on the other, offer itself to any reading and run the risk to actually counteract itself as a critical proposal and rather fulfill modernist, or even romantic notions of art and its production.

What the spectator, among other things experience, is a procedure, but does the procedure know what it does, produces, or, in other words, what its operation entail? Especially the last version of the appropriated dance, performed behind a curtain held in front of the dancer by two other performers, propose that the appropriation, as much as being read as a critical understanding of the body as producer of some thing, also can be interpreted as strongly idealistic, or even as a proposal of an authentic body. It is not a questions whether Bel’s performance is good or not but there are simply questions to ask in respect of what the operation of the procedure performs in this case. This essay not on Jeorme Bel so here I will only, openly pose the question of what the choice of a female choreographer implies, and especially one which at the time of the creation had, from my horizon, less market value than Bel himself.

The Last Performance utilizes appropriation but I would propose that the particular procedure actually consolidates an assumed authenticity of the body rather than giving it a new position and function in our present environment. It is not enough to now what the procedure used entail, but one need also understand, and thoroughly analyze what operation it performs.

The young Swedish singer Anna Ternheim has over a couple of years released a number of recordings, in a style and manner of any commonplace female singer and songwriter. Her mode of using the voice, the instruments chosen and the sensibility of the production offers mountains of routine references. One could without a seconds hesitation turn her music of and let it pass as just-anotherone. This is music at its cutest and one can not not imagine autumn days with red leaves and a brown sort of melancholic longing. It is a music whose sister is a film like “Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind” and whose brother is “Lost in Translation”, but something odd appears in her songs. Anna Ternheim only sings covers! Her songs are all appropriations, and it is precisely here that she proposes, something in the line of what Walter Benjamin named, a dialectical image. An image which when I look at it seem all proper, but somehow forces me to look back, and it is in the looking back that it first provide access to its riddle, or actual content.

As I write this, I stumble on the formulation, “her songs”. It is indeed ‘her’ songs, precisely as authentic, or not, as any singer with an acoustic guitar and a faiblaisse for folk-components and probably had nothing to do with the writing of the songs. And it is exactly through this that the procedure of appropriation proposes an operation, or the performance of an operation which forces not a reading but an investment from the side of the listener to take a stand respectively the operation’s performance, especially as Anna Ternheim sings songs such as David Bovie’s “China Girl” or Fleetwood Macs “Little Lies”.

Anna Ternheim’s use of appropriation and her articulation of an operation resolves and deviates not only another’s position, but most of all puts her own under a critical spell, as I necessarily must ask myself, why do I listen to a sentimental girl singing covers which indeed makes her, either unbearably cynical, or actually propose an entirely new meaning production which would not refer to appropriation but post-production, i.e. in brief, not to dissolve meaning of an existing artifact (Cherry Levine) but rather to shift, or add new meaning to or of a product (Pierre Huyghe). One could argue that appropriation understand its procedure as one of existence, and that post-production address an artifact as a becoming, something that is under constant reshaping. Appropriation thus relates to subjectivity and post-production to subjectivfication.

Anna Ternheim utilizes the procedure appropriation, within a certain mode of post-production, in order to produce the vision of an operation. The examples chosen here are used due their strong emphasis on one procedure but all utterances, and hence works of art, are evidently activating both procedures and operations, often in very complex manners.

A procedure is always related to an operation and vise versa. And an operation is always a multiplicity. It is precisely the multiplicity that makes its articulation no threat to a possible openness of a work. Rather the contrary. To argue for the importance not to articulate a procedure’s operation would offer the audience to read, or simply follow the proposal, or work, precisely in ways that are conform, comfortable, efficient and even offering itself as proof that a modernist or even romantic understanding of art still is valid. The articulation of sets of operations is a means to grasp not what a work communicate, but what its communication is. It is not a matter of deciding for the audience, but a means to make the spectator make decisions. Decision that might counteract with his/her desires, conventions or ideology, but always is an intensification of an experience and a mode of producing differentiation in an active sense.

There are no excuses, and there is certainly something naïve in the desire to play our procedure against representation. The issues in front of us are rather to identity what kind of operations that can allow us to define a regime of art production today. The fundament of the problem is that we don’t, and we cannot fully know what an operation is. It is by maintaining the indeterminacy of such terminology as procedure, protocol, score and even stronger gesture or intervention, that the arts end up imagining that one can deduce aesthetic consequence from a simple procedure without needing to make a precise analysis of its mode of operation, and more alarming that this deduction can be made directly and immediately, independently of the practices and customs with which it is itself bound up.

Before diving further into the identification of operation lets make sure we understand the general concepts of procedure and operation. With procedure I here refer to a general and identifiable, repeatable, finite and descriptive formula that possess content, but a content that is subordinate to its potentiality as formula of production. Operation, instead is a specific, serial (non-repeatable), infinite and non-descriptive production due, or of a certain, or sets of, procedures, which effective nature could not be grasped in and for itself in the general form of its process.

There is no such thing as a pure discourse of operations to which one could correlate an interpretation. Any operation as long as it is a singularity relevant to an artwork is immediately reprehended through some kind of interpretation. One can not force an operation into a single interpretative direction, but most remember that it is identifiable only in a play of divergent interpretations, relating to how the procedure always produce a coordinated multiplicity of meaning whose elements change value and are alike in different ways in each individual case. A single procedure can be used, interpreted, adjusted and adapted to fundamentally different intentions, whereas an operation, or a set of operations, always are singular independently if it refer to a processual or performative regime.

The importance of this discourse is certainly nothing that is unique or specific to the creative forces, but applies to all capacities within a field of production. Independent of ones point of departure a perspective is never innocent but needs itself analysis. How does, for example a critic or presenter, a cultural politician or a fellow creator in the field, apply procedures to work, or experience, and similarly analyze what operations a specific procedure produce or perform. An experience is always biased, and one can neither experience without applying some kind of procedure to the event, and however transparent the procedure is it will always be accompanied by one or other operative capacity. Each productive and receptive agency therefore has a responsibility to, or not, analyze or produce awareness relative, not only its own application of procedure, but also its operations and most of all, must be considered answerable to a certain consistency relatively his/her production.

When we speak about a work as “well done” it is precisely to identify and address its procedure and simultaneously to shortcut its operation. When we speak of a works as “too long”, we address its operation but forget to coordinate it with a procedure. As a receiver one can apply procedures to operations and vise versa, both opportunities however must be understood as ignorant and we must acknowledge that if we do not undertake necessary efforts to analyze both sides of a proposal we will implicitly, if not explicitly, participate in the production of a reactionary, defensive and judgmental field, where those who exclude the operation perform a neo-liberal position which stronghold is defense, and those who cancel procedure become proponent for a fundamentalism which is strictly judgmental. Which might in the end be one and the same position, as they both, in different ways, cancel out the political as opportunity for antagonism. The neo-liberal capacity is one that cancel out the opportunity of a politics by avoiding an application of a specific to the general, i.e. one or many operations to a procedure, and hence are proposing a kind of dialogue where any position can be applied to the procedure prescribed. The neo-liberal procedural address and/or work can be seen as a kind of populist party that applies to individuals that consider the, so to say, conventional western democracy hopelessly outdated, over-administrated and where power is secluded to politicians and not the people. The other camp is not much better and can at best be given a metaphor in the most insensitive activists, with a peace signed sewn onto the arm of the military second hand jacket, screaming down with globalization in a city of which leadership he or she has no clue. But as much as it hurts to read political slogans in the men’s toilet in HAU (Berlin): “Imperialism shall die in the flames or the revolution” – “Hallo, HAU is a bastion of middleclass wellbeing, as any other independent theatre institution in Europe” – at least I find it hilarious to find out that the annual budget of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm is close to 100 million € - “Hallo, no wonder they wont change their program or hire some new turbulent people”. Only by a sincere address to both sides can our field actually produce a healthy and long lasting situation, since this would be one that is based on antagonism and difference, and this difference is precisely dependant on the oscillation between procedure and operation. Similarly, over the last ten years we have in the field of performing arts seen a shift away from representation and display, instead modes of production and an emphasize on method and process, has emerged which at the same time involves a stronger focus on notions of dispositif. The very established: the theatre machinery of representation and production but also the less evident and much more multidirectional the machineries of processes and productivity. But new territories of interest also need new means for analysis, articulation and verification. If one just for a moment venture into some of the, today, process strong work we can immediately detect discrepancies between procedure and operation. A sympathetic example occurred in “Collect-if ” created by a kind of collective with several members, where the audience experienced a staged conflict, during which some of the difficulties of collectivity were being ‘played’ out. The scene paradoxically resulted in a deepened awareness of how procedure and operation always are reciprocal and never interchangeable. Procedures and operations relate respectively to both process and performativity. It is vital to differentiate between the two, and be careful not to use procedures of process to justify, or dismiss, performative procedures and operations, but also notify that a processual procedure cannot verify an operation of a certain performativity, e.g. recent works related to scores has often misunderstood this necessary distinction, where a score either, in itself is understood as ideologically neutral, or the performance related to a score as an offer to the performer to obtain a larger degree of liberty The processual regime manifests the virtualization of a work, the erasing of the material, structure and, finally, representational order to the advantage of the process of its own production. Referring to Sol LeWitt, aesthetic representation is not produced but a result of an emancipated procedure, which effects sometimes can be unpredictable both as representation and as interaction with both performer and viewer. In the performative regime the object and language, its representation, are inseparably knit together. The performance under the circumstances stands in for the work that instigated the conditions for an aesthetic experience. Naturally, this dialectic is not always easy to separate and most performance uses a combination of the two sides.

Recently concept of transparency has been voiced in the, so to say, critical dance and performance environments in Europe. Generally speaking transparency in this form is something that in e.g. architecture was strongly emphasized in the 90s; to present materials and construction in order to make a buildings ontology visible as such. In performance this terminology is less concrete and refers, most often, to how a performance show what it is and, of course, its what it shows. This discourse is laid out in respect of display and is therefore inscribed in a performative regime. The question is though if that regime is vast enough to grasp the possibility of transparence of a performance? Isn’t transparency always already an illusion, hence an actual transparency would include a disappearance, or at least partially resolved of orientation? In this case it is certainly a transparency with modification since it after all is performed, usually with the aim to purport the same, or similar, meaning in each consecutive performance. But more acute isn’t it also, precisely, to emphasize procedure over operation, and to produce works that can be utilized by each and every ideological position, referring to the, or an, aesthetic utterance as to ethics or politics. Ultimately, at its most successful, such works of arts and performances offer an unconditional, and simultaneously totally indifferent, capacity of differentiation and at this very moment seizes to be possible to desire. Procedures are not desirable as such, but it is always its contextual/specific operations that produce potentiality of engagement, or the opportunity for desire to emerge. We fool ourselves if we announce “doubling is cool”, when we mean that in performing arts under certain circumstances and in particular contexts are interesting to apply procedures of doubling due specific contexts of investigation. We are not unconditionally overwhelmed by doubling, not even generally interested? What about scale model railways? That’s also a procedure of doubling.

In fact strongly procedural work fool itself when it argues for transparency and clarity of proposal hence it thus offer to the audience to apply any kind of aesthetic consequence. However work that emphasize operation often has a tendency to become obscure and similarly offer, or force the audience to approach the work with strong tools in order at all the ability to orientate in the experience. With a more abstract terminology one could say that strictly procedural work proposes smooth space, and that operational utterances proposes striated space. Strongly operational work hence can be abused by critiques with perhaps even contradictory agendas. An example, in brief, could be Alain Platel’s dance-theatre which initially strong socio/political topography with its clear leftists subtext easily could be used as a backdrop for a post-political discourse promoting the individuals efforts where identity politics were transformed into a sentimental survival of the fittest generated by contemporary spectacular economies.

In the processual regime Platel also brought important perspectives. The long preparation periods had a bearing on how the group for each new creation formed a community, which very establishment were part of the work. Something that today seems to have been lost is the importance of specific operations and instead long preparation periods appear to have become obligatory without consequence. Similarly, conceptually orientated work has been strongly identified with its performative regimes when its central consideration in fact often were articulated in and through processual regimes.

It is even so my belief that especially in the performative regime, works emphasizing procedure is far more complicated than what the performing arts has estimated because it in fact promotes its own disappearance through a proposal of being open. However cutting edge its appearance might come across it is often a façade behind which highly populist strategies are lurking without being acknowledged.

Almost ten years ago Xavier Le Roy addressed the context of performance: “I understood that the content of a piece was not enough for a critical position” Over these years process has gained a new understanding, conceptually orientated work has emerged and almost vanished. The market has seen the fall of strong institutions and net-works and simultaneously the raise of so many economically biased procedures and operations. So perhaps Xavier Le Roy’s sentence needs be updated to: It is not enough to make good pieces any more. It is not enough to know what we are doing and why, we also have to know what the doing does. It is first with a desire to know what procedures applied perform, what their operations are, that the field of choreography and performance again can formulate a politics of consequence.