Wolfendale, Peter, The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens
This text, delivered from a position of rational inhumanism, is a critique of humanism while at the same time, preserving some features of it. Wolfendale links the language of the ‘we’ to our capacity for cultural self-consciousness and the conceptions of agency, selfhood and value that are bound up with it. He addresses his critique from an entirely Western position because his criticism is precisely a response to this conception.
In the first half of this paper, Wolfendale traces the history of the tradition of rational humanism leading up to the post-human nexus. He compares different readings of humanism philosophy so that in the second part of the paper he can articulate his own position in response to this while retaining elements from it that he considers worth saving and repurposing for inhumanism. Wolfendale concludes this history with Nietzsche and Foucault because both see ‘transitions in evolution’ as offering opportunities for increased self-consciousness and the possibilities of experimentation with ‘technologies of selfhood’ pointing beyond the human.
In the second half of this text, Wolfendale outlines the genealogy of reason and its eventual liberation from the animal that is homo sapiens. He views this as unavoidable, in part as a consequence of the co-evolution of language and technology which resulted in our capacity to transform our solutions to a, more or less, integrated cultural infrastructure through which we can increasingly: “simulate and modify our environment”…“provide new modes of evolution driving changes in biological evolution”…and…“reformat the biology of the human species so that it can better reformat the neurology of human individuals”. He states that rationality is not tied irrevocably to these morphological and computational forms but that this inhuman system of our bodies transforms us into “subjects responsible for our thoughts, agents responsible for our actions and selves responsible for our own cultivation”.
I chose to analyse this text because I was looking for answers to questions emerging out of my studio practice such as, what is a rational and responsible response to the slow and durational inevitability of climate change? What is human? And, do we have collective potential?
This text is an academic response to these and similar questions surrounding the future of homo sapiens. It has helped me to see more clearly the context of my questioning while at the same time affirming for me the idea that the mutation of our species is of monumental importance and an open secret. My appreciation of the extent of the impact of technology on our lives too, has been transformed.
With regard to my own studio practice, I will continue to explore our human condition as the subject in the landscape of climate transformation and the algorithmically driven post-anthropocene. I wish to explore more explicitly the potential of the liminal to evoke the notion of emergency or crisis and to use this as an implicit mnemonic for emerging agency and cultural self-consciousness. Ongoing research will also look at how artists and philosophers are responding to new modes of biological and technological transformations such as The Human Cell Project, artificial intelligence and biotechnology.
Bryan-Wilson, J. 2003. Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece
Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2003), pp. 101-123. Published by: Oxford University Press.
In this text, Julia Bryan-Wilson describes the event of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, first performed in 1964. She analyses the work from its historical and theoretical contexts and explores its many diverse interpretations. She also considers Ono’s comments about the piece, Ono’s biography and her ‘fluid and flexible’ identity in her reading of the work.
Bryan-Wilson’s interpretation places Cut Piece squarely in Ono’s personal history as a Japanese woman who faced starvation and danger after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. These experiences, she argues, make the piece relevant as an exploration of the widely experienced deprivations and atrocities of war. She maintains that Ono’s gender and nudity are vital to this argument in that they acknowledge the impact of war on women and personalise war’s brutality.
Three interlinking gestures involved in the performance are identified by Bryan-Wilson: invitation, sacrifice and gift. Although this work is often seen through the lens of violence against the female body, Bryan-Wilson reminds us that Ono invites the audience to collude with her by cutting her clothing. As the piece develops, she says, the sacrifice begins - a ‘metaphoric giving’ in which Ono takes personal risks. The gifts, or mementoes, are the small scraps of cloth cut from Ono’s clothing which, argues Bryan-Wilson, serve as a memory of the performance and as reminders of the radioactive aftereffects of the war and the future. In this way, Bryan-Wilson illustrates that the actual physical cutting is not the goal, only its subtext. She also asserts that the specific register of meaning, with its implication of nudity and shredded ruined clothes, would have been beyond the appeal of the male gaze in 1960s Japan.
The knowingness with which Ono uses the camera as integral to the work is seen by Bryan-Wilson as a reassuring presence and witness authorising the actions on stage. This almost excessive documentation, she suggests, is by necessity fragmented: “an incomplete archive of a live event which speaks of a worry about the preservation of, and eventual degradation of memory.”
From this text, I have gained a deeper understanding of the genealogy of mid-20th century performance art, post-war art and feminist art as well as a greater appreciation of how an artwork can be interpreted in diverse ways given different historical, theoretical and contextual viewpoints.
Bryan-Wilson’s essay sets out very clearly how thoughtfully and effectively Ono creates a space in which something can happen. Of particular interest to me, is that this work is an entirely immersive experience, carefully engineered to draw the audience into active physical participation and a complicit situation. Audience engagement is designed to be personal and palpable: sensations of discomfort and intimacy to be mutually shared by the artist and participant. As a consequence, images, objects and experiences of the work are memorable. They are loud and vivid with meaning. With regard to my own study and studio practice, this text strengthens my intention to explore the coalitions and connectedness between all elements of the work, viewer and space. Also, to test the notion that meaning emerges from an encounter and is the precondition for an artwork to exist.
COCKER, E., 2009. Pay attention to the footnotes
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2 (2), pp. 139-150
Emma Cocker draws on her experience of working in collaboration with the investigation-led performance project ‘Open City’ to reflect on a critical shift in her practice from a mode of writing about to one of writing with or alongside performance. Later in her article, she describes this activity as a writing encounter between writing and performance.
Cocker suggests that the activity of Open City’s project could be located within the tradition of publicly-sited performance practice of resistance and wandering or understood in relation to medieval sauntering or even to the tactics and propositions witnessed in works by 20/21st-century conceptual artists. She situates her own turn towards a dialogic or performative model of art-writing however to the development of Site Writing and the shifting demarcations between art, writing and criticism.
In this article, Cocker reflects on the long-established connection between city and text and explores how her own strategies used in this work function in spatial and temporal terms. She describes this work as “six postcards that included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other”. Footnotes within the text are used as, “a creative and critical device for producing points of slowness and blockage”. Cocker embodies rather than comments on the ideas explored within the Open City project and shifts her writing from critical or contextual towards invitational and performative. The postcards encourage participation and the questioning of conventional patterns of behaviour through the exploration of the dissident potential of wandering. Referring to Yoko Ono’s early conceptual practice, she explains how her work attempts to explore the gap between telling someone to physically act and asking them to conceptually imagine.
To conclude, Cocker describes how the texts produced in collaboration with ‘Open City’ were later translated into spoken word for an aural interaction as part of a live collective event. This extended work attempted to synchronise the movement and speed of individual bodies in the public realm to produce the possibility of a new collective rhythm culminating in a collective moment of stillness. Cocker reflects on the outcomes of this new direction, sharing her observations about what happens when a text becomes spoken in contrast to when it is read.
One of the key focus areas of investigation in this project was “how movement and mobility affect how place and locality are encountered or understood”. A criticism of this work would be that the experiences of the disabled community had not been considered. I also wonder whether the use of instructions as a device within the text might be at odds with the inherent contingency of the intention that participants deviate from normative patterns of behaviour.
This article has helped me to see that text can bridge time zones as well as generate the capacity to create the impetus for as yet unimagined events. With regard to my intention to explore our human condition as the subject in the landscape of climate transformation and the post-Anthropocene, I would like to investigate the notion of ‘an experience of a collective moment of stillness’ and Cocker’s use of this to orchestrate a public spectacle as well as a space of private reflection. In particular, I would like to explore the potential of stillness to conjure up a sense of hidden energies, unexpected power or limitless action or, to be used as a tactic for preparing for the not-yet-known.