In Other Words

Notebooks or not

When I arrived at the Kunsthalle Zurich last week for a symposium – featuring Claire Fontaine, Jutta Koether, John Miller and Falke Pisano – on art and language, it suddenly dawned on me that I had left my notebook and pen at home. Quelle horreur! This seemed awfully inappropriate, as I was about to listen to the participating artists – including one collective named after a notebook company – talk about how their own artistic practices involve the written word (or the spoken word? The battling press releases were unclear). After having stolen a stack of paper from a nearby gallery and borrowed a pen from a friend, I settled in. Titled ‘In Other Words’, the symposium was the inaugural panel in a series of events of the same name, organized by Peep-Hole, an art project in Milan, with the Kunsthalle Zurich and the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. From the various press releases, I had gleaned that the series would involve artists who use writing and language and had ‘extended the form of their work into a narrative approach.’ The fact that writing does not necessarily indicate a ‘narrative approach’ raised an intriguing question mark, but we would see.

John Miller, Mannequin Lover (2002)

John Miller’s mannequin

As we took our seats, curators Vincenzo de Bellis (from Peep-Hole) and Beatrix Ruf (from the Kunsthalle Zurich) joined the artists at a long table overseen by one of John Miller’s tall, enigmatic mannequins. The mannequin had been in the same spot the night before, when Miller (on guitar), joined by Jutta Koether (keyboards) and Tony Conrad (violin), had given a vivid improvised concert to celebrate the opening of the latter’s survey in the galleries just next door. Miller began proceedings with a genially professorial introduction to his own art criticism. Recalling his time at art school in the late ’70s, when ‘visual purity’ was all the rage, Miller spoke of Conceptualism and Lucy Lippard’s notion of dematerialization, before remarking (acidly if amiably) that the Conceptual artists ‘pretended to think that language was not material.’ As he traced the evolution of art criticism from the 19th-century emphasis on visual purity to the autonomy argued for by Modernism to the contextualization of Minimalist or feminist critique, Miller finished with the ‘unprogrammatic criticism’ that he himself espouses. He cited Pierre Macherey’s seminal 1966 work, A Theory of Literary Production – which describes reading as a form of production, separating the writer’s intent and the critic’s explication – as an important influence. Finally Miller admitted that he has come to write less and less art criticism for actual art magazines because his interest in a more experimental approach to critical language did not seem to suit them. He slyly noted that editors will not say ‘you cannot do this’, but will then chop and change until they get ‘exactly what they want.’

Jutta Koethe, Frontage (Well, Show Me Nothing) (1994)

Jutta Koether’s taunt

Like Miller, Koether emphasized an idea of criticism that, rather than being simply diagnostic or diagrammatic, is engaged in a more experimental poetics of language. She described language as a ‘violent struggle’, and stated her interest in inserting ‘the wrong text into the right situation.’ Then, in her halting delivery, the artist read a text that appeared to be a smash-up of some wonderful lines by everyone from Gilles Deleuze to Emily Dickinson. Koether’s reading had the aspect of a Patti Smith performance, particularly as she gained confidence throughout the reading, finally taunting the audience with her concluding lines: ‘Do you want to go out? Doyouwanttogoout?’ – by which point I think we all did, both impressed and depleted by her performance

Falke Pisano, installation view, BaliceHertling (2008)

Falke Pisano’s theoretical turn

As the artists fidgeted, uncomfortably launching into their talks, it became apparent that each was dully aware of the ‘meta’ nature of their project here: to use language to describe how they use language in their work. This gave some of the talks a distinctly performative aspect – Koether’s, for example, but also Pisano’s, who decided to focus on the idea of the ‘speaker as performance artist.’ Reaching for a sheaf of papers, she tucked her head down and announced quietly: ‘I would like to start with the premise that the part of an artist production that is made public consists of moments of communication, whether it be in the form of an object, a performance, a text, a talk or conversation, an articulation of a position, etc.’ As she began to expound on the ‘conditions of productions’ and the ‘structures that create conditions’, it was clear that we had moved into a defiantly theoretical discourse. Whereas Miller and Koether had been concerned with language as text, Pisano explored the speech act, quoting Paolo Virno: ‘Every utterance is a virtuosic performance. And this is so, also because, obviously, utterance is connected (directly or indirectly) to the presence of others.’ It was refreshing to hear mention of others, whether listeners or readers, since language utilized for the particular intimacy of its exchange had yet to be broached.

Claire Fontaine, STRIKE (K. font V.I.) (2005)

Claire Fontaine among the ruins

While the artists had been conducting their various talks, I had noticed that the expected discomfort of their collective demeanours seemed more exaggerated in the female/male pair of Claire Fontaine. As Pisano finished her talk, Ms Fontaine sighed heavily, before launching into her own. Like Miller, she began by recalling her university days, which she described as hellish and brutal, her French professors having little connection to life outside of theoretical discourse. We nodded. Mentioning twice that we were probably not familiar with their work, which seemed odd considering their relative fame, Ms Fontaine instructed ‘James’ to turn on the slide show. An exterior image of a building came up; across it hung a fluorescent sign reading ‘CAPITALISM KILLS LOVE’. Puzzlingly, she pointed to the sign and described it as a ‘magical sentence – it brings people together. It’s retarded but that shouldn’t be avoided.’ If the argument was unclear, the rage was brilliantly articulated; I thought back to Claire Fontaine’s ‘short biography’, which reads in part: ‘She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship.’ The ruins too were clear; it was the death of the author – in this context, not just authorship but author – that was a bit more abstract.

Undear reader

Unsure how to follow this performance, the other artists gingerly broke into discussion. Beatrix Ruf seized on Koether’s deftly ambiguous statement about inserting ‘the wrong text into the right situation’ in order to dislodge language’s clichés. Then Pisano turned to Ms Fontaine, stating that since Pisano always tries to respond to the form in which she’s in, she wanted to note that being on the panel together has been a somewhat violent, if interesting experience. In response, Ms Fontaine directed her curt reply to Ruff: ‘What’s violent is the context.’ Miller, ever the gentleman, stepped in and tried to steer the talk into a less antagonistic direction, as did Koether, who was quickly rebuffed.

As the discussion devolved into a back and forth between Miller and Fontaine on ever more theoretical concepts – the role of the spectator, the performative contradiction again – I wondered when ‘language’ in contemporary art had come to mean, almost exclusively, theory. During ‘In Other Words’, theoretical language hadn’t just framed the discussion, it had been its subject: the many forms that language takes had been almost entirely absent. When the curators finally called for questions, the room went decisively quiet. This, of course, could have been simply exhaustion – it was the Saturday afternoon following three days of Zurich’s autumn openings – but it seemed to me indicative of something else as well. That both Miller and Fontaine had begun their talks by referencing their estrangement from the dominant theoretical modes of their university days was telling; that language’s ‘violence’ had been broached by nearly every speaker was also significant. Such discourse can act as a dam – stopping short the welcome flood of language, in all its various possibilities. In a recent column on frieze.com about a symposium at the Drawing Center, in New York, Daniel Miller noted that art world panels are usually ‘sadly bereft of martial incident’ – not this one. But the question was why a panel on art and language, or more accurately, art and theory, had become so confrontational. Nevertheless, it was time to depart. So much violence, so little time.