MAKING UP - TEARING DOWN

Curated by VestAndPage

LIST OF ARTISTS

Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon)
Christina Georgiou (Cyprus)
Snežana Golubović (Serbia)
Gisela Hochuli (Switzerland)
Lynn Lu (Singapore)
Heike Pfingsten (Germany)
Melissa Garcia Aguirre (Mexico)

RADICAL TRANSPARENCY AND ECO-INTELLIGENCE IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ART

By Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)

There are some Performance artists whose creativity draws on a cutting-edge research to reveal and illuminate apparent inconsistencies in human response to various kind of crisis (private, public, political); others who seem instead to direct their creative efforts to introduce new approaches on how to feel and think about different aspects of human life (social, domestic, nomadic) through their practice; and others who adopt radical transparent1 working methods to approach possible solutions, which have also a potential to stimulate people to question themselves, in order to take and make new decisions about how to re-think to and re-form their lifestyle and personal behaviour.

However, today it is relevant to point out that exists an upcoming generation of live artists whose actions are aimed to explore what it means to be intelligent and fully aware not only about human emotions, habits and social lives, but also about environmental issues too, scanning into the sense in which people can become more caring about the ecological impacts of how to live and create mechanisms for positive change. As consciousness and knowledge may guide people’s decisions in better directions, their performances appear to be specifically designed to awaken the mind to investigate more profoundly cutting edge ideas in fields like economics, taxonomy, information science, and particularly on what constitutes human habitats, analyzing how and why people’s surroundings transform, evolve or devolve. These artists seem all animated by a common urgency, which is the one to analyze the causes of “an increasing self-deception that human habits of consumption on a worldwide scale are creating an ecological deficit at a rate unparalleled in history, due to our heedlessness of the links between how we live and the effects on the planet.”2

By arising several questions about the connections and the consequences between the decisions we make daily; how to gauge with accuracy the damage we produce to our single lives if we persist to behave in a certain way; what we can do to change our way of living, and cope with our present fears, these artists represent a sort of “vanguard of a dawning awareness, one that may well add a crucial missing piece in our collective efforts to protect our planet and its people.”3

In 1983 Harvard neuropsychologist Howard Gardner declared that there are other important kinds of intelligence besides the verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical skills: visual-spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, emotional (interpersonal and intrapersonal), existential; and in 1999 he added also the naturalistic one.4
Animated by the talent of caring for, taming, or interacting subtly with various forms and kinds of objects, Performance artists have started to tell about their needs, asking to be checked for quality, while trying to identify truths by scratching the surface of apparent reasons and nonsense, also in order to find out why we all still insist to measure our abilities (defined as intelligences) by just testing visible pattern-recognition, as if this was the only thing we were born for.

Undoubtedly “our world of material abundance comes always with a hidden price tag”5, and we can’t normally see at what extent runs the price we will have fully to pay for it. On the contrary, exploring other early-human skills like i.e. sensitivity to the elements, sense of direction or readiness, Performance artists have begun to understand and use their spatial intelligence to inform their artistic work - exactly in its process of making - notably to evoke an open expanse emotional territory, where a wider range of feelings (positive) can possible influence the viewer (the action witnesses) to deepen his/her reflection, and maybe realize that what counts the most is probably something else. It’s a silent call that invites people to gather together, to take more responsibility and acknowledge (or better anticipate) the result of the impact produced on ourselves and the surroundings by our individual choices and actions, even “warning us that our obliviousness lets us slip into a grand self-deception that the small and large decisions in our material lives are of no great consequence.”6

In our Anthropocene age, which began with the Industrial Revolution the activity of one species, humans, started to drive biogeochemical systems that sustain global life unfortunately in the wrong direction, by forgetting and not recognizing anymore the links between what sustains human life (and life in general) and its origins. For the frantic pressure to acquire and get the things that we now depend on to live, we have lost a large part of our ability to sense, conceive, project and make for the better to our detriment.7

Some kinds of art performances clearly question the audience to deepen discussion, give hints to reflection, and may well be able to serve as prompts for more profound considerations. Today, “our inability to instinctively recognize the connections between our actions and the problems that result from them, leave us wide open to creating the dangers we decry. Our brains are exquisitely attuned to exactly indicate and instantly react to a fixed range of dangers, such as snarling animals. But our perceptual system misses the signals when the threat comes in the form of gradual rises in planetary temperature, or minuscule chemicals that build up in our body over time”8, and similarly, about the causes of continuous social/civil conflicts which affect the whole world, a global disease which seems to have no end.

Virtually it is as if what we see today was conceived in a more naive time, that’s why Performance artists’ intelligence wants to enucleate what is the importance of the simple act of knowing/doing the real thing, declaring as fundamental mostly the important fact to recognize and understand the countless ways that human and natural systems interact, and the effects of that interaction onto the human body, the mind and the spirit, the surroundings, and the environment in general too.
In the systems we live in, shifts and many position displacements (subtle or radical) seem to be outside our perceptual apparatus, as they are often too macro or too micro. “We can understand them intellectually, but we don't perceive them directly. So they don't mobilize the system built in for humans to survive threat. Today it is like to face a threat that eludes us. That's why we need to take extra steps.”9 And that’s also why contemporary art needs to go further, focusing primarily on analyzing the presence of the Man in this world, which is always more than a simple, mere condition.
Modern technologies, a globalized economy, and complex webs of relationships present new challenges that require new skills, also behavioural, adjusting, rewinding human historical memory, because what we don't know, or forget, can hurt and damage us.

To discuss the difficulty of re-discovering the collective Self is still probably a menace for the decisions we still pursue individually, but to explore emerging approaches for improving our collective knowledge, becoming more mindful and effective citizens of this world, can produce consistent benefits to us all. What contemporary Performance art can offer, is to awake our minds to the most impellent necessities, such as readily available information, access to communication and open sources, and to create new motivation into people to deal with particular specific circumstances, which demand wider comprehension for solution.

When it comes to the environment and the surroundings, there are three fundamental key factors that each Performance artist needs to have clear in his/her mind: to foresee the impact of his/her own action on him/herself, the others (audience), and the surroundings; favour action improvements, by attuning action improvements with the surroundings as much as possible; finally, to share what the performer has learnt from his/her own action experience.

The results of this process derive also from an ongoing upgrade to the artist’s intelligence through mindfulness of the true consequences of what s/he does, to be ready to face and solve the unpredictable, to change for the better, and the spreading of what s/he knows, so others may do the same. If we transfer to our human systems this kind of approach, following those three simple factors, then we might create together an invisible but powerful worldwide force that improves those same systems. “No one of us needs to have a master plan or grasp all the essential knowledge. All of us will be pushing toward a continuous improvement.”10

Such efforts to put specific ideas into practice, help to raise a sense of urgency. That’s also why responsible artists gather the on-the-ground, detailed, and sophisticated data that can guide their actions, although partially. This means to begin dealing with problems we've created, by taking a thorough, ongoing analysis, adopting a determined discipline to pursue an intelligent result.

If the distinction between ‘the good and the bad’ is information that is available to anyone of us, we need to expand and refine our lens to concentrate our sight much more on the material world, to see through the visible, and should favour things and actions that may be better in their impacts with the surroundings. Artists can surely create a process for a perpetual becoming, though only by speaking of a great hope for improving the human footprint on the planet. It will sound strange, but it is essential. Performance artists are here to tell us that we have to start again to do small things, verifiable, transparent, that we have to be trustworthy, that our consumption must reduce and become fully compassionate, and that those are ideals towards which we all have to strive for, as we're not there yet. We still waste, destroy and exhaust our natural resources, and we grow anxious, anguished, depressed, weak, we loose power because we are stuck into our own complains, but this methodology that Performance art expresses, offers a vast opportunity to rethink everything we do, and to encompass our life to extend our comprehension on what we do and why, at every stage. Like many ideas in life, the creative inspiration often comes from a series of small, imperceptible revelations, which say us that making sensible choices that improve things for all of us on the world we live in, is an act of pure compassion, a simple act, which is easy to do in any time.

It is a mistake to continue to believe that what we don’t know and can’t see does not matter. For example, when a Performance artist faces the unknown, s/he becomes an active agent fully concentrated for a change. S/he put him/herself in the condition to master and manage the emotions of the Self effectively, and sustainably, accepting the failure s/he can find on his/her way with open heart. S/he is called to modify continuously his/her plan, ascertaining promptly how situations, conditions and circumstances modify progressively, to lessen unknown obstacles at a minimum degree. It is a pure matter of presence (direct and indirect), fair distribution of energies, participation, risk, control (loosing or mitigating), actions relevancy and acceptability, feasibility, maintaining balance, exploring possibilities by getting insight. Here and now, as always.

Ideally, Performance artists’ visions are purely organic processes mostly finalized to provide values for enhancing human living conditions, sustained by a conscious effort to protect the performer’s Self and the surroundings where s/he operates, from further depletion and degradation, a code of ethics that governs his/her social responsibilities towards his/her environment.

There is always a void to be bridged between knowledge and action. The performer’s ability to deal with him/herself, gives him/her the ability to take action, in his/her personal sphere, and beyond in the social sphere. The empathy s/he feels for anything and everyone is around him/her while performing, is the same kind of empathy that we recognize so useful in our interpersonal relationships, and that we must be also able to extend to anything which is part of our life. In a sentence, the chance of a sustainable future is evident only by thinking relationally. “It’s because we don’t think in a relational way that we need to explore why we don’t, how we can, and what it means. The world is increasingly complex, interdependent and unsustainable, yet conversely, the way we perceive, think, and educate tends to be fragmentary and limited, and we tend to live ‘like there’s no tomorrow’. Addressing this mismatch requires developing competencies in systems thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking, but it requires something more fundamental and challenging besides: no less than our becoming ‘conscious agents of cultural evolution’ towards a more ecological culture and participative worldview, consistent with and able to address the highly interconnected and endangered world we have created.” 11

Clever and sensed art actions are able to produce in the fruiter some sort of immediate reflection which are stored into his/her own memory, functioning successfully as splinters of new information, which subsequently can offer a possibility to become shapers of a more positive future aligning decisions with values. Sometimes solutions are already in our hands, but it is as if we don’t realize they are there, and that to convert the chain that seems to link every human action and its multiple impacts as irredeemable, it is not an impossible thing to do.

Of course they are still many problems and issues that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the “debate over what must be done immediately” becomes crucial in an increasingly warm and over crowded world. That's because as the global economy has grown frenziedly, but now that financial markets seem always to be ready to explode and drop into a chasm, our ability to make complex material achievements to feed our consumerist desires (which will be never satisfied) has outpaced our ability to comprehend the consequences. Humans evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present, but nowadays it is as if we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose, and probably couldn't make sense of the information even if we had it. Are we too blind? Have we lost completely the ability to react for the better? But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? What if we could think full-ecologically? 12

When Performance artists work on environmental issues, their intention is not the one to alarm the audience through some specific sort of action, but, mostly, by exposing ruthlessness or uncaring, grace, pain or suffering, they attempt to make the audience realize how little we know about things around us: ignorance is like a beast always pregnant. It could be said that by choosing a relatively young discipline such as Performance art, where, among others, the main tools of expression are the artists’ living flesh and the objects used during the action, it is as if Performance artists have begun to compile a sort of imaginary environmental and biological impact Decalogue of their every decision. This, in order to communicate better topics they concern, while delivering, through the action itself, information on how much it’s important to be tuned for understanding even the most unpredictable consequences that are due to specific choices. It is like saying that we all must be aware of the causes and consequences of what we are doing, and the radical impact on the surroundings that what we are doing will provoke.

This kind of artist’s ecological intelligence focuses not only on what it is to be consumed, in which measure and how. It's also about the ability to accept that a man, or a woman, lives in an infinitely connected world with finite resources, that the need to survive, even in harsh conditions, can be only by carefully conserving every resource available to them, because during a performance, for its particular, ephemeral nature, the artist has no other choice than working in that way. It is how s/he perceives and understands that makes the crucial difference, and allows him/her to partly comprehend the complexity s/he is dealing with, being aware, on the other hand, that also from a completely free creative perspective, it is required “a vast knowledge, one so huge that no single brain can store it all.” 13

Each one of us needs the help of others to navigate the complexities of the today world. In order to survive and guarantee our future, we must trigger our individual intelligence to work and cooperate collectively, to learn and improve healthily as a species; it is an ability which is inscribed into human beings’ genetic memory and “that resides in a distributed fashion among far-flung networks of people.” 14

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FOOTNOTES

1. ‘Radical transparency’ covers three spheres: the geo-sphere (including soil, air, water, fire and climate), the biosphere (our bodies, those of other species and plant life) and the socio-sphere (conditions for workers).
Retrieved July 7, 2011 from:
http://www.theecologist.org/reviews/books/271304/ecological_intelligence_by_daniel_goleman.html.
2. Retrieved June 5, 2011 from: http://danielgoleman.info/topics/ecological-intelligence/
3. Retrieved June 12, 2011 from: http://flowpsychology.com/2010/05/22/industrial-ecology/
4. Gardner, Howard. (1999) Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books.
5. Retrieved June 9, 2011 from: http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=2847
6. Goleman, Daniel. (2009) Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything, New York: Broadway Business. Chapter 1.
7. Retrieved July 3, 2011 from: http://qn.som.yale.edu/content/do-we-need-more-ecological-intelligence
8. Retrieved July 9, 2011 from: http://www.newsweek.com/2009/04/17/truth-and-consequences.html
9. Retrieved July 3, 2011 from http://qn.som.yale.edu/content/do-we-need-more-ecological-intelligence.
10. Retrieved June 27, 2011 from: http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/ecological-intelligence
11. Retrieved June 23, 2011 from http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/stibbe-handbook-of-sustainability/chapters/ecological-intelligence
12. Retrieved June 27, 2011 from: http://smallplanetpartners.com/time-10-ideas-changing-the-world-right-now
13. Retrieved June 27, 2011 from: http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/ecological-intelligence
In his book on Ecological Intelligence Daniel Goleman writes that “challenges we face are too varied, too subtle, and too complicated to be understood and overcome by a single person; their recognition and solution require intense efforts and we need the collective determination to do all this… Evolutionary anthropologists recognize the cognitive abilities required for shared intelligence as a distinctly human ability, one that has been crucial to helping our species survive its earliest phases. The most recent addition to the human brain includes our circuitry for social intelligence, which allowed early humans to use complex collaboration to hunt, parent, and survive. Today we need to make the most of these same capacities for sharing cognition to survive a new set of challenges to our survival… A collective, distributed intelligence spreads awareness, whether among friends or family, within a company, or through an entire culture. Whenever one person grasps part of this complex web of cause and effect and tells others, that insight becomes part of the group memory, to be called on as needed by any single member. Such shared intelligence grows through the contributions of individuals who advance that understanding and spread it among the rest of us.”
14. Ibid.
“The shared nature of ecological intelligence - states Goleman - makes it synergistic with social intelligence, which gives us the capacity to coordinate and harmonize our efforts. The art of working together effectively combines abilities like empathy and perspective taking, candor and cooperation, to create person-to-person links that let information gain added value as it travels. Collaboration and the exchange of information are vital to amassing the essential ecological insights and necessary database that allow us to act for the greater good.”