“There are two alternatives left. Either the ‘crime’ will make us happy or the ‘relation’ will end our happiness.” Marquis de Sade¹
“During one of the Anti-Apartheid demonstrations in the old South Africa, while a unit of white cops was dispersing and gallying the black demonstrators, a cop with a bludgeon on his hand was chasing a black woman. And unexpectedly the woman lost one of her shoes and the cop, submitting to his “good manner” automatically, took up the shoe and gave it to the woman. At that moment they looked each other and both realized the ridiculousness of their situation – after such a politeness, it was impossible for the cop to continue chasing the woman and strike her with the bludgeon, so he bowed his head to the woman and turned away…”²
According to Zizek, the moral of this story is not the cop’s discovery of the goodness inside him. In other words, it is evident that we are not faced here with an example where natural goodness defeats racist ideology. On the contrary, although the cop was most probably – in terms of his psychological manner – a standard racist, here the winner was only his “superficial” politeness, a discipline he had previously acquired. “When the cop gave his hand to give the shoe, this gesture was beyond the moment of physical contact. They were living in two different socio-symbolic universes where any indirect contact between a white cop and a black woman is impossible: For both of them, the barricade dividing the two universes was removed for an instant and it seems as if a hand from another universe – from a ghost universe – reached out a casual reality.”³
In his discussions, Zizek talks about the state of spoiling the game, for a moment or for a while, which develops spontaneously in life. In this respect, it is possible to see what is being attempted in the performative arts today in the staging of such encounters. There is now a tendency to both cross the line and to go out from the galleries and museums into the public space, art production is now in the process of transformation through more experimental practices that are open to mutual interaction. When art is thought together with performative art activities, making a direct contact with life, transforming the life and sometimes creating “gaps” in meaning in life, it can be said to be a state of encounter, as Bourriaud says.
According to Bourriaud, the role of artists since the 1960s has been to explore the links that bind people together. However, what has changed today when compared with the 1960s, is the problematic of the art. “What characterized modernism was the intense self-awareness of each art that encountered its own history” 4 and what characterizes today’s art is the understanding of its resistance capacity in the global social sphere. In other words, the problem is not about enlarging the borders of art. “In the past, internal relations within the world of art were being emphasized in a modernist culture calling for the subversion through language and privileging the “modern”, but today what is emphasized is the external relations within the framework of an eclectic culture in which the work of art resists against the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. 5
In one of his performances (“Turkish Jokes”,1994), Jens Haaning broadcasted Turkish jokes by setting up amplifiers on the lamp poles in a square in Oslo. When we think of language as a code, a micro community is constituted from the people who can decipher this code. Such a micro community, gathered by the laughter, consisted mostly of the immigrants who had come seeking job opportunities, and may be felt themselves to be at the centre of that geography for the first time. From Bourriaud’s perspective6, “Turkish Jokes” could be viewed as a performance that reversed the state of exile through a work of art, at least for a while. In this kind of art, exemplified here by the work of Jens Haaning, the economic, political and social factors that make the other “the other” are removed for a while, mechanisms are devised to reverse existing relations, to include others.”
In response to the 2000 Austrian general election, in which an extreme rightist party came to power for the first time, the German director Cristoph Schlingensief designed an incredibly powerful protest performance. He placed a container in front of the Vienna State Opera, which is situated in the heart of Vienna, to function as a concentration camp where the foreigners were kept before being transported to the airport, and from there to be deported. On the front side of the container, a placard was attached, it read, ‘Ausländer Raus’ (‘Foreigners Out’). Some of the actors, most of whom were the friends of the director, played the officials whilst others played the foreigners. At the beginning of performance, i.e. during the “concentration” of the foreigners by the officials, a leftist group, thinking that it was real, mounted a counter attack to release the foreigners. Thus the work was completed. As expected, that performance sparked a debate all over the country; it reached the top of the political agenda. The reason why it was so much debated, was its exposure of the mentality of extreme rightist policy.
Schlingensief’s way of showing its opposition was not through acting in an obvious oppositional manner, but on the contrary through reproducing the reality, as in Baudrillard’s definition of hyperreality, “Simulations substitute the real one without referring to any reality. Therefore, the reality of production or allusion gives way to a hyperreal consisting of simulations. Imaginary and visionary ones become invalid as well as the reality itself. “awareness raising”, “dialectic overlap” etc. against the programmed, molecular orientation. The only way of resistance proposed by Baudrillard against these chains of simulation – this “hyperrealist” system – is to pursue the dialectic of system and adopt a “catastrophic” strategy based on radical tautologies and to play to the death.”7 In a sense, in a hyperrealist world the “Foreigners Out” performance of Schlingensief pursues the system’s own dialectic as proposed by Baudrillard.
In this context, the activities of the Yes Men, an activist duo consisting of Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, should be mentioned. Their work related to the Bhopal disaster which occurred in 1984 and which was caused by the leakage of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals from the plant of the American Union Carbide India Limited. The leak resulted in the poisoning of over 150.000 people and to the death of 18.000 people. In 2004, during the legal struggle between the Dow Chemical Company and India, Andy Bichlbaum managed to appear on the BBC news by presenting himself as a Dow Company representative. He accepted all responsibilities and promised to pay damages and compensate all of the victims. The pretence worked perfectly but after a few hours, the real company authorities issued a denial and declared itself to be not responsible, and thus the performance was completed. Although the activity had no direct bearing on the Bhopal hearings, it is evident that the necessary attention was drawn to the matter, at least for a while, via the simulation of what must have happened. There is no doubt that the company was damaged morally. In the globalized world, activist art activities, like that of the Robin Hood like act of the Yes Man, try to draw attention to issues around the state and social justice, a justice which appears to diminish each day.
In today’s art where the art is moving out from the galleries and museums to the public, in order to organize the relations. It is evident that the problematic (if any) regarding to what extent or at which point the activist activities are artistic (aesthetic) is not privileged. However, it is possible to consider that Nicolas Bourriard’s analysis of performative arts should be recognized, with their reorganizing of social relations, within the concept of a “relational aesthetic” – i.e. the efforts to reinterpret or redefine ethics and aesthetics, which were suspended in the post-modernist period, but which today are crucial to art practice.
[1] Vergine, L., Body Art and Performance, by Skira Editore S.p.A. Milano, 2000 p(19)
2 Zizek, S. Kırılgan Temas, Metis Yay. İst. 2006, s(15)3 A.g.y.
4 (S. Concor –postmodenist kültür /130)
5 Bourriaud, N.İlişkisel Estetik, Bağlam Yay. İst. 2005 s(50)
6 A.g.y s(49)
7 Jameson, Lyotard, Habermas, Postmodernizm, Kıyı Yay. İst. 1994 s(8)