{"id":148,"date":"2012-02-19T10:05:50","date_gmt":"2012-02-19T18:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=148"},"modified":"2012-02-19T10:13:38","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T18:13:38","slug":"the-work-of-presentational-art-in-the-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2012\/02\/the-work-of-presentational-art-in-the-age.html","title":{"rendered":"The Work of Presentational Art in the Age of On-Demand Technological Empowerment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I have a friend who is getting his Ph.D. in linguistics by resurrecting a dead Native American language.\u00a0 Working with one member of the tribe, and drawing mostly from hundred-year-old documents that attempted to transcribe a non-written language that has since died, he is recreating, based on educated guesses, other similar tongues that have survived and, well, I don\u2019t know what\u2014he is recreating a lost language from scratch.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this effort as I listened today to the \u201cAfterword\u201d podcast<\/a> from Slate, in which their culture editor June Thomas interviews the author of a nonfiction book.\u00a0 This week\u2019s book was called Rez Life<\/em><\/a>, and it was by Native American author David Treuer, who talked about his life, experiences, and the precarious nature of Native American sovereignty inside America.\u00a0 Tribes, of course, have had an extraordinarily difficult time in the U.S. since the founding of the country and before, and much of their history is marked by whatever the fight of the moment with the government was.\u00a0 At one point in the podcast, Thomas asked Treuer what he thought the next big fundamental fight was going to be for Native Americans, and he lit on \u00a0this idea of the re-appropriation and resurrection of language.\u00a0 And what he notes is that the re-appropriation of language isn\u2019t just about language\u2014it is fundamentally about culture.<\/p>\n

As Treuer says:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not practical [to resurrect a language] in that you\u2019ll be able to use it to buy toothpaste.\u00a0 But it\u2019s practical in the sense that if you want to retain some sort of tribal autonomy, if you want to make a strong case for our continued sovereignty, you also have to take into account a cultural case.\u00a0 And language is one of the ways in which culture is expressed and promoted and carried on\u2026Economics is important; there\u2019s nothing limiting about being Native, but there\u2019s a lot limiting about being poor. But what I\u2019ve noticed and what I think of as being the next big fight is this return to tribal languages and religions. Centuries of neglect of cultural knowledge and tribal languages and derision aimed at these holdouts\u2014these \u201ctraditionals,\u201d who are talked about as being not as bright, not as forward-thinking, not modern, stupid.\u00a0 These were things leveled at traditional monolingual, sometimes bilingual, speakers of their native languages; practitioners of their cultural lifeways. This is turning around.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019ve assimilated too much<\/em>, the buzz seems to be, and we want to find our way back to ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n

This spins me in two different directions.\u00a0 The more obvious one is toward a celebration of the return of \u201cculture,\u201d in ways both artistic and non-artistic, to the center of a society\u2014especially when that effort is viewed less as esoteric and more as salvation from a sort of oblivion.\u00a0 As I watch American society-at-large slowly strip away traditional artsmaking and viewing from our day-to-day lives, I see shadows of a future in a century or two where such traditions are revived from the dead in an effort to salvage a society in need of salvaging.\u00a0 Which is, I guess, weak tea as far as consolation goes, but is an interesting shift, nonetheless.<\/p>\n

But the other direction Treuer\u2019s thought takes me is less obvious, and centers around the current and on-going effort to \u201cmodernize\u201d theatre, classical music and classical dance\u00a0in order to make\u00a0them \u201crelevant\u201d to more people, more \u201cparticipatory,\u201d more \u201con-demand.\u201d I say this as someone who has written a lot about how to try and take steps toward fulfilling that effort, but as I reflect on Treuer\u2019s interview, I am given pause.\u00a0 I, more and more, find a lot of that discussion nerve-racking.\u00a0 This past Monday, You\u2019ve Cott Mail ran a \u201cDigitization of Live Performance\u201d<\/a> edition and included stories from the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, the Guardian<\/em> and AP, among others, all highlighting efforts in the arts to broadcast live performance.\u00a0 These articles, full of wonder at the opportunity to do webcasts and simulcasts of theatre and music, seem to have forgotten that broadcasting live performance is what soap operas and early sitcoms did for fifty years, and that if you\u2019re talking about such things you\u2019re really just talking about, well, television.<\/p>\n

The rise of technology that has allowed for easier creation and consumption of art has been a vexing and intriguing problem for arts organizations for a while now\u2014a lot longer than the rise of television in the 1950\u2019s or the advent of the personal computer 25 years ago.\u00a0 In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote the famous essay \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u201d<\/a> which, in the particular, concerns itself with the fate of the fine, formerly-non-reproducible arts like painting and theatre in the face of new technologies like photography and film, and in the abstract dissects the live arts experience in an attempt to understand what might really go missing in a world of reproductions.<\/p>\n

Rolling forward 80 years, one might now think instead of \u201cThe Work of Presentational Art in the Age of On-Demand Technological Empowerment.\u201d\u00a0 Not as catchy, perhaps, but when Benjamin writes of the stage actor versus the screen actor it echoes today, even if in a more gradated, though strong and obvious, form.\u00a0 The implication, per Benjamin, is that the camera allows an increased distance from the actor and art, and places the audience in the role of critic.<\/p>\n

This troubles Benjamin because of a concept called \u201caura\u201d that he proscribes to live events, which he defines as follows:<\/p>\n

\u201c[Aura is] a most sensitive nucleus\u2014namely, its authenticity\u2026the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.\u201d\u00a0 For Benjamin, this is the germ at the center of the live event, the essence of which cannot be transmitted through technology\u2014whether photography or film or, one presumes, digital interfaces like YouTube.\u00a0 With the advent of film, Benjamin explains, \u201cfor the first time\u2026man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What we give up there, of course, also allows us to gain.\u00a0 The advent of film, just like the advent of photography, makes proliferation of whatever portion of the art we can transfer to the new media much easier, dissemination more expansive, viewership more diverse.\u00a0 The analogy that comes to mind for me is something like the antidepressant Prozac\u2014a drug developed at the cost of about $900,000 that was sold at a mark-up to cover (and more) that initial cost, but that lost its exclusive patent in 2001, leading to many cheaper, generic alternatives, and to a proliferation of those alternatives into whole new segments of the population.\u00a0 The difference, perhaps, is that those generics miss only the brand name, not the effectiveness of the drug, whereas with live art that is arguably not the case.\u00a0 In a way, it is the inability to transfer the visceral impact of a live theatre experience to film (the effectiveness of our \u201cdrug\u201d) that has been the barrier to effective consumption on a mass scale.\u00a0 There\u2019s a reason that good movies and great television don\u2019t just look like filmed stage plays.\u00a0 What we do works in a room.\u00a0 It looks like shit on a screen.\u00a0 And perhaps that\u2019s exactly Benjamin\u2019s point.<\/p>\n

Looping back to David Treuer and his efforts to maintain Native American culture, at another point in the interview, Treuer talks about how \u201cblood quantum,\u201d<\/a> the process by which eligibility and benefits in many Native American communities are apportioned based on what percentage of Native American blood is in a person, was a policy that the United States government liked because they thought that ultimately it would mean that all the Natives, having over a few hundred years intermarried with whites, would essentially be so watered down, blood quantum-wise, that Native Americans as a concept would simply cease to exist.<\/p>\n

Trying to push live media into a digital world feels more than a little to me like watering down our blood\u2014which of course is an awkward thing for me to feel, because I do strongly believe that theatre and classical music and classical dance do<\/em> need to find ways to innovate their way into more popularity.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t want them to lose their specialness, their, to use Treuer\u2019s word, \u201csovereignty\u201d in the process.<\/p>\n

If, as Benjamin says, the aura of a live arts experience is unable to transfer to a facsimile of that arts experience, is there still value in the facsimile?\u00a0 If, with mediation like a television or a computer screen or whatever, the presentation of the aura of that experience from artist to audience is lost\u2014if, in a way, the \u201cculture\u201d of presentational live art disappears without the particular \u201clanguage\u201d that only is transmissible through breathing the same air and hearing the words or music echo in the same room\u2014where does that leave us?<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m left with is the unsettled feeling that, before we go out and innovate ourselves into second-rate television, we need to understand what the unchangeable constants are of our forms\u2014and that we are foregoing that crucial conversation out of fear for basic survival.\u00a0 What makes what we do, what we do?\u00a0 What do we turn into if we let it fall by the wayside? What makes \u201ctheatre\u201d no longer \u201ctheatre?\u201d This, essentially, is the flipside of mission\u2014the understanding not<\/em> of what we were created to do, but of what the peculiarities of what we do actually do<\/em> to people, and how important those particular aspects are.\u00a0 David Treuer makes the distinction, here, between \u201cculture,\u201d which sits at the core of you, and which you change only under peril of ceasing to be what you are, and \u201cidentity,\u201d which is changeable and able to be manipulated.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour culture is something that you don\u2019t choose,\u201d says Treuer.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s this contested, strange, nebulous, often times unconscious, habitual way of being.\u00a0 You don\u2019t choose your culture as much as you choose your identity. You are what you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her most recent Jumper<\/a> post, Diane Ragsdale exhorts us to move toward reform, quickly and decisively.\u00a0 She’s talking about form, and organizational structure, and elitism and accessibility, and all of the stuff that we are all so worried about right now.\u00a0 It’s why Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0<\/a> is all the rage, and why WolfBrown is distributing papers on “participatory art”<\/a> and “audience engagement.”<\/a>\u00a0 It’s the zeitgeist of the moment, in part because it has to be–and I’m on board with all of it, with this one caveat: we must do all of this while remembering the core of what we are.<\/p>\n

“If our goal for the next century is to hold onto our marginalized position and maintain our minuscule reach\u2014rather than being part of the cultural zeitgeist, actively addressing the social inequities in our country, and reaching exponentially greater numbers of people,” Ragsdale says, “then our goal is not only too small, I would suggest that it may not merit the vast amounts of\u00a0time, money, or enthusiasm we would require from talented staffers and\u00a0artists, governments, foundations, corporations, and private individuals\u00a0to\u00a0achieve it.”<\/p>\n

I’m not sure I can simply agree, much as I might want to.\u00a0 This, more than anything, reminds me of Veruca Salt, forever simply wanting more without pausing to ask whether that was going to truly get her someplace she wanted to be at the end.<\/p>\n

In the southern rainforests of India, a sect of Brahmins has been singing the same songs for thousands and thousands of years.\u00a0 They pass the songs downward through the generations, taking care that the exact length, intonation, order and speed are maintained.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very, very careful process, painstaking and inefficient, but it\u2019s also absolutely necessary, because the songs they sing are so old that they\u2019re in a language that no one understands anymore.\u00a0 The music has literally outlived the knowledge of the words<\/em>, making the singing a true act of faith and the passing down of its non-literal attributes fervent and difficult.\u00a0 The art is the only aspect of a society that has maintained through the generations, the strong bone strung like a lattice with fragments of a time that has disintegrated away.<\/p>\n

We are not making television.\u00a0 We are not making music videos.\u00a0 Yes, listen to Diane, yes, listen to Nina.\u00a0 But listen with your hand on your own pulse, knowing who you are.\u00a0 We can make these arts more accessible within the confines of what they are\u2014we can play with our identity without giving up our culture.\u00a0 And in some form, I believe\u2014if we can do that, just that<\/em>\u2014this art will endure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a friend who is getting his Ph.D. in linguistics by resurrecting a dead Native American language.\u00a0 Working with one member of the tribe, and drawing mostly from hundred-year-old documents that attempted to transcribe a non-written language that has since died, he is recreating, based on educated guesses, other similar tongues that have survived […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-audience-development","9":"category-main","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}