Glenn D. Lowry

Transcription

Hello everyone! What I want to talk about today is the idea of disruption from the perspective of art museums and artists in general. And I wanna try and lay out a few big ideas and use a couple of examples. And the examples I want to use, really have to do with how artists, who are the most creative people of our society, deal with the problem of disruption, and deal with their own inner feelings, fears and anxieties. But I'm an historian by training, so I have this terrible tendency to try and put things in context, to try and look at how things happen, the antithesis that give rise to the present. So you have to forgive me if I move back and forth between the immediate past and the present. But what I've been thinking about lately is how a number of enormously powerful social events that are underscored by tremendous political changes, whether they're the Arab bump rising in the Arab Spring in the Middle East, whether it is Occupy Wall Street in New York, or the riots in London, and in Rome, or the protest here in Athens. How these events, actually, are fundamentally disruptive and they're disruptive, not because they deal with issues of disenfranchisement, and disillusion, and disengagement, because that's too simple. That would simply be an outpouring of anger. And anger leads to violence, and I think there's something much more interesting and much more fundamental, that is underneath these events. And that is that it's actually about aspirations, it's about change, it's about a desire to see the world differently, about a desire to deal with social justice, it's about a desire to move off of the status quo and to take charge. And even though many who are involved in this protest may not know how to do that, their energy is something we need to pay attention to. And it's a kind of energy that artists often know how to channel. And it's not infrequent that artists even anticipate this kind of social and political change, and give voice to how to deal with it. And I'm particularly interested in how performance art, something that was really popular in the '60s and early '70s, has become really important again. And how certain performance artists have created conditions in which we as individuals can actually engage and change our lives. Think about Yoko Ono and her Voice Piece for Soprano, a work that she conceived early in the 1960s, but which was only recently performed at the Museum Of Modern Art, a year or so ago. And what she did was to give instructions to people, to scream against the wind, to scream against the wall, to scream against the sky, she invited people, anyone, to step up to a microphone and to vent. To say what they had to say, to say it loudly, to actually disrupt that hollow quiet space of the museum. If you think about how transgressive that is, then you begin to realize the importance of what Yoko was trying to do. She was trying to build a kind of constituency of people who understood that power could be leveraged away from institutions and back to people, that each of us, individually, has a responsibility to act on our own, that she was giving us licence to interrupt in the normal flow of events, within the more sacred space of a cultural institution. And I think there is a connection, between this kind of performance, that engages a really broad audience in what might on the surface seem like a transgressive act and the kind of energy that is coming off the street as people want to deal with something different in their lives. And the difference between what Yoko was trying to do and what a traditional work of art tries to do is really clear. A great painting like the "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" by Picasso or a kind of conceptual object like the urinal called "The Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp They exist in space, but their meaning is derived by our looking at them, and thinking about them. What Yoko did, and what other performance artists do, is they invite us to be the art, not to look at it, but for us to invest our meaning in a piece that others can share. There's nothing more interesting than growing up and Roman Ondák, for instance, took the idea of time and space measured by parents who marked the height of their children on a wall. If you think about it, we all had that kind of experience, and that's when we first learned that we were growing, because we could measure ourselves against the previous mark. What Roman does is to invite literally anyone who enters the gallery, to have their name, their height, and the date, marked on the wall. And what you get overtime, is this kind of kaleidoscopic series of markings, that trace the pattern of everyone who was in the room. But what's important about this work, from my perspective, is that it actually transfers the art away from the museum, to the individuals who actually made it. Each and everyone of us who stood for a little while, and had our height inscribed on the wall. Eeach of us who sat there and participated in a kind of communal exercise with lots of other people. And what that does, is it inscribes the individual into the space of the institution. It moves the work of art into something that we all make, that we share. And in doing that, it creates a very diffrent kind of community and a very different kind of experience. I was talking about this recently with Paul Chan, an American artist. I was asking him if he saw any kind of connection between this new interest in performance and all these social and political events that are rippling through our society. And he said that actually when he went down to New Orleans in 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city two years after many attempts to rebuild the city, it's still left in a shambles. The Lower Ninth Ward, one of the poorest parts of the city, still didn't have electricity, still didn't have water. People were literally without hope. When he went down there, what he said was that he began by talking to different community groups, school groups, church groups, theather groups, artists, about what they felt and what they needed. He developed the idea that he could produce with them a play "Waiting for Godot", Beckett's masterpiece, that would be more real than reality. That he could create a condition that was more real than the reality these people were constantly told about, a reality that was reinforced to them by the media and by politicians, but which they knew wasn't true. The result of that was actually an extraordinary event in which the entire Lower Ninth Ward came together to see a performance of "Godot." And "Godot" of course is the classic play that deals with the existential condition of waiting. But waiting is both about hope and anxiety. It's about the way in which we anticipate and are frustrated. And in fact, the two protagonists of "Godot" sit around talking about all the important issues of the world, waiting for Godot who of course never arrives. They don't even know if they're waiting for him in the right spot. And what Chan was able to do was to present this play in a way that its reality, its sense of time and space became for the community of the Lower Ninth Ward more real than the reality they were living. I think the classic example of this is a piece that Marina Abramović, legendary performance artist did, over a year ago at the Museum of Modern Art, called "The Artist is Present", where she created in the center of our museum a kind of charismatic zone, almost like an arena, maybe even a sporting arena, where she sat with someone else while other people looked. People were invited to sit with her for as little or as long as they wanted to. Some people sat for 8 hours, other people sat for a few minutes. When she proposed this piece my initial thought was, "You're out of your mind! Why would anyone come in and just sit with you? And even more, why would other people want to watch other people sitting?" Think about it. It's a really strange thing. And she said, "You don't understand! What you don't understand is that we're going to transform the museum, we're going to make it into an experience, we're going to move away from that object on the wall to everyone who's in the museum being part of the art. And everyone who's there is going to have a relationship to me and to each other." And by doing that she catalized a fundamentally different way about thinking about the institution. Now, what was amazing is that some people showed up and they brought her flowers, other people showed up and they proposed marriage. (Laughter) Some people showed up and they took their clothes off. We have a lot of guards at the museum and they were quickly moved off site. One woman showed up with a cryogenically frozen rat to give her as an offering as if she were some kind of oracle at one of the great Greek Temples here. But, what each one of those people did was to bring to that experience, to bring to the museum their deeply held personal feelings and emotions. And she was a way of releasing and catalyzing that kind of feeling and in doing so the thousands of people who got to sit with her and the hundreds of thousands of people who got to watch the sitting and who often engaged in their own relationships, all participated in something deeply and inherently disruptive that I think is one of those lessons we can all learn from. 'Cause what they did was to collectively say, "Art is important, art is meaningful and we, we can make art. We don't need it to be received from others. That she he gave licence to individual action, to individual responsibility to move into that arena with her, to sit with her, to share their feelings, to expose themselves. And the result of that was literally unlined and instantaneously, so people around the world could see a kind of portrait of everyone who came to the museum and wanted to be with her. Now, I think about this issues a lot because I know that these are difficult times that we live at a moment, when the status quo can't hold, when we go about our daily existence and if we think it's fine we are wrong. We need to take action, we need to be engaged, we need to think like artists, we need to recognize that to be complaisant is not to live. We have to be responsible and that responsibility means taking risks. That's what artists do everyday of their life. They wake up and they push themselves to new limits. They are unsatisfied with knowing what to do. They want to be in that space, in that zone where they are creative, where they're nervous and anxious, and they can be creative. And that creative process is something we have to nurture, something that is actually all of our collective responsibility. We have to create the environment in which change can occur. And that's what brings me back to the protest in New York or the protest here in Athens. These are opportunities. We can look at them and say, "Well, they'll all just pass. Nothing really meaningful will happen. Life goes on." If we do that and if we simply think that these are events that other people are participating in, they are not our events, we will have missed the fundamental lesson that they have to offer. Because the people who are acting are acting not for themselves alone, but their are acting for thousands and tens of thousands of other people. And we have to find a way, like artists do, to channel that energy, to move into another space and to recognize that one of the the most powerful and meaningful ways that that can happen is to nurture artists. I wanna leave you with a quote from a much earlier time, from another revolution as it were, the Soviet Revolution, and from a writer who had it right that current social circumstances dictate new forms of art. We cannot be satisfied with the present. We cannot let others act for us. And that's the lesson of disruption. Disruption is about change. It's about not fearing change. It's about recognizing that new opportunities exist at every corner and if we let things go by there will never be the kind of creative ferment that is what is at the heart of our creativity in our society. Thank you very much. (Applause)