Forgiving Snow White

© 2007 Gurur Ertem

The work of material fabrication is nothing without the labor of production of the value of the fabricated object

Artistic work in its new definition makes artists more than ever tributaries to the whole accompaniment of commentaries and commentators who contribute directly to the production of the work of art by their reflection on art which often itself contains a reflection on art, and on artistic effort which always encompasses an artist’s work on himself.

- P. Bourdieu, Rules of Art.

I could not be sure where to put Snow White presented at Springdance Festival in my shortcut categories of evaluation- under the “spotlights” or under the “un-illuminated.” I decided the best classification this piece could go under would be the category of the “nightmare” – visions we usually get in the darkness from the back corridors of our mind no matter how illuminated the surrounding might be. I cannot put in under the “trash can.” The work is definitely not something “trash-able” because it will keep sticking its head out of the rubbish, as the un-recyclable matter calling for attention to what we did wrong – did we put the plastics with the paper? This piece is a splinter in thought.

Photo: Anna van Kooij – from Springdance

In the Springdance program, one reads the following:

“The American Ann Liv Young is making choreographies since eight years. She is one of the youngest artists whose work has been presented at major venues in New York City. Ann Liv Young's creations are essentially a reflection of her life, inspired by her experiences with her dancers, family, collaborators and passerby. All of her rehearsals take place in her apartment. The ultra personal becomes the material she molds for performance. Young's mission is to create work that is honest in its inception, creation and execution. Her work combines text, music and choreography to build scenes that set up ideas, images and relationships and then destroy them. Ann Liv Young's work, creation process, titles and intentions are forward and literal resulting in layered, provocative, contrived and thoughtful work that breaks barriers in dance performance. She participated in Springdance/preview 06 with her project Solo. In Springdance/festival she is back with the performance Snow White.”

As this note forewarns, the thread of "Snow White" is only a ghost. It is only tracable in the yellow skirt-blue top- red tiara costume. Rock songs, assertive gesticulations, popular songs sung in a grungy edge, the presence and the use of a dildo, etc...The picture is complete in the so called "aesthetic of rock" which is very popular nowadays among contemporary American choreographers from the "newer generation>" Yet, this particular one is the kind of rock of teenage angst and the unfocused aggressive energy of the adolescent, not the articulate protest version, of, say Ms. Smith or Mr. Dylan...

Liv Young constantly insults her performing partner, the audience and technicians (who are not given any credit of creativity in making the artistic event possible - not only in this particular case, but in general). "The Third Performer" who had taken part in other editions of the show 9(i.e. the previous night) is missing. Young tells us that this missing one went to get a "minor dental operation, and she is fundraising for that" in a mock-live radio show which is a part of her gig. She stays in the bitchy character that she is throughout the whole show, and makes us believe that it really is her. I am reminded by some fellow audience members after the show that she reworks her piece and adapts them to each night thus establishing a continuum with the outside. Young reads (real or fabricated) stories of what happened to her on her way to…, program notes and confesses that she feels like she is copying Miguel Gutierrez’s incessant thoughts (from his performance presented in the same festival the other day), only to remind us that "she made this piece before he made his". Well done in terms of inter-textuality!!!

One needs only to remember Carolee Schneeman, Karen Finley, Marina Abramovich, et al, who have been present in the history of performance with their bodies inside out to be aware that explicit sexuality, the body in/of excess, insulting the audience, acting out or being the b/whitch is nothing new. It might only be “new” or “shocking” to a particular dance audience who views such works under the framework of “dance” (presented in the traditional setting - with performers and audience members in their assigned “places”), not as “performance art.” The “shock” value of the work would be lost if it were presented in a gallery, or in a less traditional setting, and if it were not presented in a festival that had “dance” in its title (which is actually what makes it more interesting for our purposes).

Young’s performance might have worked as intended for the “un-initiated” members of the audience - of which we did not have many. The work fails as it is based on a false conception of the audience. Because of the presentational format and the framework under which it was put, the audience is seated in its “place,” therefore, asking people what they want as they passively sit is based on mistaken assumptions. When someone from the front seat blows her nose, Young hails aggressively that "people cannot blow their noses in her performances". She herself creates the spatiality of the “entertainer” and the “entertained”. She asks continually "what it is people want from her in the remaining 6 minutes of the 'show'" and a Dutch lady in her mid ages feeks compelled to answer – who said she wanted to see "some dance" giving the best possible and the easiest to play with answer Young could get. The lady got called on stage forcefully and danced a “dancy dance” with Young. The piece is successful in creating an ambiguity - tension of believing or not believing. We remain unsure whether the audience members were planted or not. I was told afterwards by the conspirers that they were not planted.

Young also acted like she wanted to give the audience what they wanted – because "they pay her rent"! This is another false assumption because the majority of her rent is paid by the Dutch government – with money of those who have no idea that there is a dance festival in their town! (See previous post).

It was not really an interactive performance like she probably meant to invenst in and therefore she failed to devrive her conceptual categories for understanding. It does not really call for audience responsibility, like, say, Abramovich’s early performances. What she is successful at creating is an overbearing feeling of embarresment. People conspired for the sake of the belief in art - like the belief in a punishing God who can be angry if one does not conspire.

Let us remember the fate of the attempts by some artists in the 60s in the art milieu to break the circle of belief like the exhibition of artists’ shit (Manzoni), etc. Because such gestures apply to the artistic field and only make sense within it, as an act of an intention to provoke or deride - something annexed to the artistic tradition since Duchamp- they are immediately converted into the "artistic actions" and are consecrated by the apparatuses of celebration/s. As such, we are only reminded that history matters and the field of art has its rules - even if to be pretended to be broken.

“Art cannot deliver the truth of art without concealment, by turning this unveiling into an artistic manifestation. And it is significant, a contrario, that all the attempts to question the field of artistic production itself, the logic of its functioning and the functions it fulfills, […] attract unanimous condemnation. By refusing to play the game, to contest art according to the rules of art, their authors are not questioning a way of playing the game, but challenging the game itself and the belief underlying it, and that is the only unforgivable transgression” (Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 170).

In this case, the effect of challenging the belief in the game and its underlying assumptions is not achieved, so we can forgive (!) Snow White.

ART IS NOT BEYOND BELIEF

© Gurur Ertem 2007

In matters of magic it is not so much a question of knowing what the specific properties of the magician are, or those of instruments, operations and magical representations, but of determining the foundation of the collective belief, or better, of the collective misrecognition, collectively produced and maintained, which is at the source of the power that magician appropriates.

- Pierre Bourdieu, Rules of Art: The Structure and Genesis of the Literary Field (1996 [1992]).



Simon Dove, the curator and artistic director of Springdance Festival (Utrecht, NL) which took place between 18-28 April, framed this year’s edition around the notion of belief. The festivals overriding theme was BEYOND BELIEF and Dove wrote in the preface

“What we believe determines the basic principles on which we base our life. Belief can be the source of the greatest human inspiration, but it can also be the cause of deep intolerance and war. What we believe in shapes our attitudes to much of what we experience and equally influences even what we are prepared to experience at all.”

By citing a naïve Wikipedia entry on belief on the same page which equates it with the fixity of conviction, Dove incites an interpretation of this notion as strictly opposed to truth and knowledge. The relationship between belief and knowledge is not necessarily one of opposition. When we believe in astrology we do not necessarily think it has a valid claim to truth. We do not believe in it, but read it anyway. Truth, reality, experience, knowledge, belief and "the possible" exist in illegible complicated relationships and these relationships are not necessarily antagonistic; they might at times form strategical alliances, as in the field of arts.

Dove also notes in the preface to the Springdance program that the works presented in the festival offer us an opportunity to extend what we see, what we experience and what we know, aiding us to venture beyond our current beliefs. I do think that the program fulfilled this promise, justifying the international prestige of Springdance. I do not doubt that successful works of art are ones that exploit, resignify or reappropriate the relationships comprising the lexicon of truth. Mostly, good works are creative commentaries on the "possible", on the "real", and how the world might have been "otherwise". Like science, art challenges the "taken for granted", and juxtaposes seemingly distant realities by establishing previously unthought connections between them. Yet, unlike science, it does not attempt to monopolize the valid explanation of natural phenomena. Granted all this, one can say that art is a game in and a game for truth, and being a part of it involves belief.

Belief is a notion over-determined with/by the field of religion. However, it is inherent in the field of art as well. I argue, pace Bourdieu who is the most unrefutable sociologist of art so far, that to enter the g(f)ame of art one should be predisposed to invest in it.

It is a general property of fields (see Bourdieu's Field of Cultural Production) that the competition for what is at stake (the legitimate definition of dance in this case of a "contemporary dance festival" for example) conceals the collusion regarding the very principles of the game. The struggle for the monopoly of legitimacy helps to reinforce the legitimacy in the name of which it is waged, which is the reason and the product for multiple position-takings within the field. Conflicts over, for example, the legitimate reading and/or interpretation of, say, Marx, Racine, (or even of Ann Liv Young’s Snow White, reasons for which I will explain in the next post), actually safeguard what is essential: the conviction invested in them by the protagonists. “Participation in the interests which are constitutive of membership of the field (which presupposes them and produces them by its very functioning) implies the acceptance of a set of presuppositions and postulates which, being the incontestable condition of discussions, are by definition sheltered from debate” (167). For example, we want to win the game by scoring more goals, being presented at more festivals, being more written about, etc, but, we do not question the given-ness of the conditions that make the game (the field of art) possible. We play by the rules and believe in them often even when we think we challenge them. We believe in dance as a form of art even when we cannot define and contest the traditional boundaries of what can be counted as dance.

The permanent production and reproduction of the illusio, the collective adhesion to the game that is both cause and effect of the existence of the game – is the best concealed effect of this invisible collusion. “Charismatic ideology of creation” is the visible expression of this tacit belief which constitutes the principle obstacle to a rigorous science of the production of the value of cultural goods. This ideology steers the gaze towards the most visible aspect of processes of production and prevents us from asking "who has created the creator" and the magic power of transubstantiation[1] with which the creator is endowed. As Bourdieu writes “it is only enough to pose the forbidden question to perceive that the artist who makes the work is himself made, at the core of the field of [artistic] production, by the whole ensemble of those who help to ‘discover’ him and to consecrate him as an artist who is ‘known’ and recognized – critics, writers of prefaces, dealers, etc.” (Bourdieu 1992: 167)

Cultural producers, institutions of mediation, production and distribution contribute to the making of the value of the artists they support by the sole fact of bringing them into a known and renowned existence. The artist is drawn into a cycle of consecration and is introduced into more and more select company and places (Springdance is definitely a brand in the field of contemporary dance, and being presented here, the value of a work is certainly quadrupled). It is also possible to talk about the conditions that determine where the person who trades in art such as curators, publishers, (not only in terms of economic, but also as symbolic and social capital) get the power to consecrate which has been recognized in them. It is not that the ‘discoverer’ ‘discovers’ something that has not been discovered before. The power is derived from different kinds of capital the discoverer enjoys. The principle of the effectiveness of acts of consecration resides in the field itself and it is futile to search for an originary moment of that creative power. It is established in the system of objective relations which constitute the space of the arts: “The discoverer’s symbolic capital is inscribed in the relationship with the writers and the artists he supports, their own value being defined in a set of objective relationships uniting them with each other and opposing them to other writers and artists, in the relationship with other dealers and publishers, of unity or rivalry depending on the competition between them, and in the relationship with critics whose verdicts depend on the position they occupy in their own space and the position of the author and the publisher in their respective spaces” (169-170).

Acts of de-sacralization of the consecrated are recuperated into the sacred when exhibited within a consecrated frame that hides its principles of possibility. The artist (Marcel Duchamp being the most famous example) who attaches his name to a ready made conferring on it a market price which is not measured at the same scale as its costs of fabrication owes his magic efficacy to a whole logic of the field that recognizes and authorizes him; his act would be nothing but a crazy or insignificant gesture without the universe of celebrants and believers who are ready to produce it as it is endowed with meaning and value by reference to the entire tradition which produced their categories of perception and appreciation (169).

As Marcel Mauss indicates, to whose thoughts Bourdieu is indebted, it is impossible to understand magic without the magic group. It is because, the power of the magician is a legitimate imposture, collectively misrecognized, therefore recognized.

It might be a good moment to leave here until the discussion of Ann Liv Young’s work Snow White in the next post.

One side thought, but a complentary one before I leave:

Did we have an audience at the festival except for us the believers? Very few indeed. This has been a major topic of conversation I’ve witnessed and participated in throughout the festival. The owners of the pastry shop which was recommended in the festival brochure had no idea that there was a contemporary dance festival in their town (which is not more than the size of the district of Besiktas-Istanbul). It was surprising for us given that Springdance is one of the "prestigous" oldest festivals of its kind (read of "contemporary dance"). What this example teaches us is that despite various strategies ranging from greatly conceived logos, brochures, posters, ways of integrating the urban landscape into the field of dance, democratically inpsired public participation and appreciation cannot be guaranteed. As Bourdieu and Darbel found out in their study on French museums in Love of Art, making museums accessible by, for example, abolishing fees of entry, public participation (not only measured in number, but also in terms of the time invested) did not automatically increase. Even if different classes had formal access to institutions of art by public cultural policy measures, they did not have the disposition (habitus) to take part in appreciation of art. What is revealed in these examples is that only some people are initiated into a belief in art, by family, education, class dynamics, etc.



[1] Note how Bourdieu is using concepts and arguments from the field of religion, one of the reasons for which can be the Durkheimean lineage of thought he pursues – such as consecration, transubstantiation, etc. Transubstantiaiton literally means “the conversion of the Eucharistic elements (sacrament commemoration the last supper, in which bread and wide are consecrated and consumed - bread and wine) wholly into the body and blood of Christ. Consecration is making holy – actually, making something holy that would otherwise be profane.

ON BELIEF

Some Reflections Triggered by Springdance in the Light of Current Political Debates in Turkey[1]


History is the present. When history is the only condition of possibility of making sense of truth, of time, of ourselves and of the creative possibilities we are predisposed to realize, making sense of the present in Turkey separating wheat from chaff, without participating in a collectively re-active euphoria against perceived threats, confusion of information, and drowning in/by numbers is no easy task.

So far, in my reflections, I wanted to keep my sociological self in check and moderated the amount of academic jargon. I also wanted to keep this blog free of socio-political polemics, and wanted it to function as a framework for reflecting on the field of contemporary dance. Yet, after ten days of immersion at Springdance Festival which was thematized around the concept of belief and having encountered the fact that structuring of the debates took place around this concept in the aftermath of important developments in the current Turkish political context, I was incited to reflect on the issues. Another thing which triggered me to write on this is an observation I made at Springdance Festival closing party.

At the closing party of the festival I felt the urge - like a well meaning tourist looking for exotic artifacts to eternalize in a frame - to photograph the woman who was accompanying the DJ (sister, friend, relative, lover?), dancing and singing along with us all. The punctum of the picture would be – for those coming from the doxic experience sharing my habitus in Turkey, that the young woman was clad in turban (the words Turks use to refer to a religious headscarf). As I sustained my temptation to record the evidence that “it is possible” and held hands with her while we were singing and dancing Khaled’s Aysha Aysha equte moi…, my partner, who is thankfully not trained as a sociologist who is supposed to ask for permission before picturing his “subjects”, grabbed my “smart phone” so here are the images that compelled us to reflect on:

Turban is the incongruent element of this image for many Turks; it does not belong in this picture. "It is an aberration; you cannot believe and dance at the same time! If you do so, than you have other intentions. This is a political message indicating that you are coming full speed to demolish the republic and bring sharia!" This kind of threat perception does not leave room for those to dance differently and enjoy it, too.

Wearing the turban as an expression of adherence to a particular world view and self care is not more irrational or spiritual than singing and drumming ‘krishna krishna hare krishna’ on the streets of New York, going to India for retreats where everyone eats nothing but veggies and is dressed in white, or from flying from Scandinavia to Cuba to be converted into Santeria in exchange for 500 dollars. It is probably only not as ‘cool’ as those. Still, it is not totally ungrounded to read the turban as a political symbol. However, radical secularists are mistaken when they claim the “correct” reading of what it is a symbol of.

Like everything else, objects, symbols, and practices have histories and gain new meanings which may at times contradict the previously accumulated ones. Some practices are acts of resignification that might be processes initiated by the actors themselves or may be the result of unintended transformations as they come into contact with different cultural fields of force. Sociological constructivist view of culture teaches us that cultures are not unitary wholes but are webs of meaning, maps of valuation and blueprints for living that are constantly defined and redefined in and through the words and actions of their members. As systems of valuation, cultural differences are real, but the boundaries between them are shifting and permeable. Their content is fluid, internally varied and dynamic.

Nilufer Gole is a sociologist who analyses different dimensions of Islamist movement (especially of female actors) in Turkey in the last two decades under the framework of “alternative modernities.” As she observes, although the original European code of modernity has constituted the crucial starting point and cultural reference point ofr modernization attempts in Turkey, it has been continuously and creatively appropriated and altered, as in some other ‘non-western’ contexts. In the Turkish case of voluntary modernization, the public sphere has been institutionalized and imagined as a site for the implementation of a secular and progressive way of life. Under this “authoritarian modernism” religious signs and practices have been silenced as the modern public space has set itself against the "Muslim social imaginary" (Gole, 2002). In a way, western concepts of modernity acquire not only different meanings, but also unexpected intensities when they travel into different contexts, and secularism is an instance of this. It is possible to become aware of the unspoken, implicit borders and the stigmatizing, exclusionary power structures of the secular public sphere once we analyze the ways in which Islam is problematized in it (178).

L’affaire foulard - the turban/the headscarf issue - has been a hotly contested issue in Turkish politics since 1980s. The debate had reached a climactic heat when Merve Kavakci, a deputy from the moderate Islamist party FP (which was closed down in Feb 28th by a ‘post-modern’ coup de etat) walked into the parliament to take her oath in her headscarf. The event was interpreted by some as resistance to domination, and others as an unexcusable threat to the republican secular values, etc. A very interesting analysis of this incident is Gole’s: Kavakci embodied powerful symbols of modernity (she was a college educated engineer trained in the United States – because one cannot go to public colleges wearing a turban in Turkey, spoke very good English, wore a two piece suit instead of an overcoat like secular, divorced her ex Jordanian-American husband) that ignited more enmity than sympathy. She embodied the stranger intruding into one’s domain, places of privilege. Secular elite women do not want signs of Islam in public space - without really understanding what their notion of “public space” amounts to – and argue that if these women want to cover themselves up, they should do it in the private realm. What can be inferred from this strange proposition is that they want women who cover their hair to be locked up at home therefore contributing to their assumed domination.

Under the rubric of recent developments [1] one founding members of CYDD (Association for the Support of Contemporary Life), a personal acquaintance, formulated the wholesale rejection of “the appearance of Islamic identities in public space” with a Malthusian overtone: “We do not want these [as if referring to ‘things’] to reproduce. This is why we formed the Association.”

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Granted all this, there is no a priori reason to assume that all claims for cultural difference and recognition are justifiable before being submitted to the test of discursive and deliberative justification. Recent history of cultural politics is full of contests where the protection of the identity of a particular group in accordance with the understanding of some of its members would have meant discriminating against its women and children. But, for this process of deliberation to be possible, treat all parts who might be effected by decisions should be treated as equal partners (principle of egalitarian reciprocity) instead of being disqualified from debate with wrong labels attatched to them which deny the historicity of significations. Of course, it should be questionedto what extent a movement based on religion can contribute to social transformation without closing down and/or limiting the identities it has helped to politicize. It can also be debated whether moderate Islamists have the potential to form alliances with other oppositional or resistant political practices by circulating in the fields of religion and power. It can also be inquired how these upwardly mobile Islamic groups with material and symbolic capital to appropriate cultures of modernity relate to other groups within Islam and ask whether they claim the monopoly of legitimate interpretation of Islam, of good and just life. Instead of crying out that secularism is under threat, we should ask how democracy can be possible under the shadow of hawks.


[1] For the unfamiliar reader I can summarize these developments as the events around the presidential election of this year. Immediately after the moderate Islamic candidate was announced who is the current Minister of Foreign Affairs from the ruling party, there was an e-ultimatum in the website of Turkish Military Force. Mass protests against the candidate were organized by seculars led by CYDD under the approving shadow of the military, although protestors also carried slogans against a possible military intervention as well as against shariat.