The Gift in Littoral Art Practice 1
by Bruce Barber
Symposium 2000
Christchurch
New Zealand
November 10-13
This essay is based on a paper I presented at "Chimera" the littoral art symposium held in Sydney, Australia in 1996.2 A subsequent essay, "Littoralist Art Practice and Communicative Action" (1997) was published on a web site as part of my Squat installation at the Walter Phillips Art Gallery, Banff Centre during the summer of 1999.3 I have had time to reconsider some of the implications of the theoretical prognoses I articulated in both these earlier texts. This essay represents an affirmation of some of the positions I held then, but is also an affirmation of some of the tendenzkunst characteristics of work associated with some examples of donative art practice. I began "The Art of Giving" (1996) paper with a somewhat polemical quote that engaged the political economy of giving from The Gift: Forms of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1924) a classical text on the subject by the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss.4 I argued that if the 1980's were a time of taking, quoting, appropriating, and expropriation, during the 1990's a new mode of cultural practice - the donative - had surfaced to take its place. Perhaps my idealism at the time had been fueled by the work of some younger artists and cultural groups 5 who were not weighed down in their practice by the legacies of the historical avant-garde(s), the edifice of Greenbergian modernism, or the aesthetic vicissitudes of postmodernism. These were artists whose work, I thought, evidenced a fresh take on community involvement, social responsibility and political praxis. They were engaged in collaborative, infra and extra-institutional, socially progressive endeavours aimed at generating social (and cultural) change.
In this context I wish to continue some of the thinking contained in these earlier essays with a practical reconsideration of the political efficacy of intervention, one of the keywords of this symposium, exemplary and communicative actions within an operative frame of cultural production. I will consider the cultural implications of giving within an economy that privileges other forms of economic exchange, notably those that reinforce systems of privilege obtained through the conventional manipulation of power. Here, I will invoke the theoretical work of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas on communicative action, as both a function of, and prelude to giving, acknowledging the warnings about the gift and reciprocity articulated by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his Logic of Practice (1994).
...one is liable to forget the effect produced by the circular circulation in which symbolic added value is generated, namely the legitimation of the arbitrary, when the circulation covers an asymmetrical relationship" (Bourdieu 1994:100). |
I will discuss five examples of operative art practice that in different ways involve the act and art of giving, four contemporary and two historical. The first example is a performance/action by the Chinese artist Yin Xiaofeng, followed by the Blood Campaign of Canadian/Hungarian artist Istvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin). I will contrast these two examples with other donative works - more firmly within the so-called littoralist camp - two from the mid 1970's, Jumble Sale and Blood The River of life (1974), produced by the New Zealand artist David Mealing, that deserve to be properly located in their historical context as clear antecedents of littoral art practice in the 1990's, and a quarter century later, another blood project, Circulation (2000), produced by the New York based group REPOhistory. The discussion will continue with Bloom 98, an Eco Green Project undertaken by artists working with Vivid, Birmingham's Centre for Media arts and finally "Free Food" (not a project title), events sponsored and produced by artists and their collaborators working in Halifax, Canada, who wish to remain anonymous.
I hope that it will become evident throughout that I am implicitly criticizing cultural work that capitulates to Bourdieu's paradigm of an asymmetrical relationship and does not recognize the legitimation of the arbitrary, contingent and the exigent, that are at the core of any asymmetrical relationship.
The "logic of practice" is implicit within Bourdieu's description of the social habitus - "a system of structured (and) structuring dispositions, [the habitus] which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions" (Bourdieu, 1990:53). In this context the habitus can be read axiomatically as an art system, reproducing itself conservatively according to its normative structured dispositions yet containing within its most progressive (value added) practices the possibility of redemption and liberation.
In 1998 an Agence France-press photograph of Chinese performance artist Yin Xiaofeng (fig 1.) appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines around the world, showing him tossing (gifting) seven earthenware pots containing the ashes of burnt books from a balcony window in the south west Szechuan province of Chengdu. The photograph was captioned with the title "OUT WITH THE OLD ART IN CHINA", implying that "out with the old" was indeed "IN WITH THE NEW." The caption suggested that Yin was the first artist that Chinese authorities have ever given permission to do this kind of "conceptual performance". The newspaper article did not indicate which books were being ritualistically burnt. Neither did it reveal if Yin's quasi liberatory, iconoclastic, yet still, in my view, somewhat totalitarian act - reminiscent of Nazi book burning ceremonies and Fahrenheit 351 - would have been read differently if the books had been Mao's Little Red book, Gombrich's Art and Illusion, Greenberg's Art and Culture or copies of Joyce's Ulysees, any of which would have elicited different readings of his performance.
My second example is provided by the bloody actions of Neoist group founding member Istvan Kantor. Since 1979 Kantor has been performing ritualistic blood actions in major galleries throughout Europe and North America, among them: The Ludwig Museum, Koln, MOMA and the Metropolitan in New York City, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Musee d'art Contemporain in Montreal. The artist's modus operandi in this body of work consists of donating (gifting) his blood in the form of an X mark to a suitable museum collection (fig 2). After choosing the institutional recipient for his `gift', Kantor enters the gallery and splashes vials of his blood in a large X fashion on the wall, usually between two key works of art in the gallery collection. This action often results in his arrest or forced ejection from the gallery, with his return forever banned. Notwithstanding his declamation in the Neoism Manifesto (1979) that "Neoism has no Manifesto", Kantor's "neoist research project", in typical avant-garde style, is accompanied by a press release, a letter of intent and/or manifesto.
The artist's "GIFT to Rauschenberg" (1991) for example, is described in a letter thus:
Dear Mar Rauschenberg, I made (a) beautiful gift for you in the form of a blood-X, using my own dark and cold blood splashed on a white wall surrounded by your early works at the Ludwig museum, in Koln, where presently you have a powerful retrospective. Would you please leave GIFT on the wall, to be listed and signed as your own work, an additional piece to Erased de Kooning (1953) and Elemental Sculpture (1953), until it becomes meaningless and obsolete. Revolutionary art is a gob of bloody spit in the face of art history, a kick in the arse to the art world, a tribute to the beauty of vandalism: the ultimate act of creation is, of necessity criminal. My greatest regards, signed,
|
According to an earlier 'manifesto', titled provocatively "Sweet Blood of a Dead Pigeon" (Jan 30 1991), "the function of the blood campaign is to subvert culture, to question the very validity of established culture that is always corrupted by profit and controlled by censorship, to question the order of priorities, especially the fact that property always seems to have priority over people's lives and needs". This is followed by the broadside: "Resistance is our business." Kantor is also responsible for coining the term "ANACHRO", for Creative Anachronism, subtending the notion that we are living within an anachronistic age that demands an anarchic response.
Kantor's blood actions are preceded by the work of many other artists who have used body fluids as their raw material for various types of performance actions. David Mealing, an artist working in New Zealand in the 1970's, produced a very powerful gallery intervention, or "social sculpture", to use a term popularized by Joseph Beuys, by turning the Auckland City Art gallery into a temporary blood bank, replete with nurses, beds, needles, tubes, blood collection bottles, refrigeration equipment and a recuperation area for donors, where they could receive tea and biscuits. Titled Blood the River of Life (fig 3), this event ranks as a prototypical littoral work some twenty years before its time. With the assistance of the local Red Cross blood donor clinic, Mealing's gallery intervention introduced blood as a political agent into the public sphere ten years before HIV and Aids made blood the troublesome product of State managed and independent collection agencies and signal subjects for a rich group of cultural work from artists around the world.6 Mealing's Jumble Sale (December 6th-10th)(fig 4), another antecedent of contemporary littoral art practice, creatively interfaced between the public and private spheres in a somewhat less provocative but similarly intelligent manner. For this 'installation' the artist secured support from members of the public, used clothing shops and other donors to model this situation on the conventional school jumble sale, garage sale or church bazaar where visitors may swap or purchase cheap clothing and exercise their good will toward a deserving cause. In poster advertisements for both events, Mealing refrained from promoting his own name, therefore subordinating his position as author of the event to the spontaneous, exigencies of everyday life.
The New York city based group REPOhistory engages its participants in a variety of ways through street signage, handbills, and computer technology. As with many littoral projects the viewer becomes less a consumer than a critical reader, an active participant in the construction of meaning and ultimately the assignment of value for the work.
Formed in 1989 REPOhistory 7, consists of a changing group of artists, writers and others 8 who have developed a forum for developing public art projects based on the reconstitution of hidden histories. Their published goal is "to retrieve and relocate absent historical narratives at specific locations in the New York City area through counter-monuments, actions, and events". According to their literature this work "is informed by a multicultural re-reading of history, which focuses on issues of race, gender, class and sexuality." And like their sister littoral groups REPHistory has chosen to create public art in attempt to expand the audience for art by operating outside of the institutional confines of the museum and gallery structure and directly within the public sphere. Circulation's multilayered website actively solicits the attention of its readers by directing him/her to various links and soliciting participation in the virtual transmission of personalised postcards representing various critical, political perspectives on the circulation of blood within New York City.
(Fig 5)
Bloom 98 is described as a "Quintessentially British" Ecoart project with the intention of "transcending monetary and class values"9 The brochure describes this as an engaged community art project, enacted through a collaborative initiative by a large number of artists. Bloom 98 was a contemporary Live Arts event on Allotments of land provided by local government for community activities. Under the direction of artist and director Harry Palmer, the Uplands allotment Association, Birmingham and Basingstoke, assembled the assistance of approximately 20 artists (gardeners and others) who collaborated with each other and members of their respective allotment communities to produce creative garden projects. The gardens improved formerly vacant lots and industrial land providing their communities with flowers and vegetables on a continuing basis.
My final example is provided by artists members of the so-called Free Food group who organise spontaneous meals at a certain place and time for passersby in the streets of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Several weeks before the event the collaborators meet to produce cheap posters and handbills, gather the necessary food materials, cooking utensils, dishes and cutlery. A day before the meal, they take over one of their kitchens and cook huge pots of very good, elegant vegetarian food for free distribution the following day. The meal usually takes place at a very public location in the city with a high traffic volume such as the public library. Four such events have taken place and the organisers have managed to feed hundreds of homeless indviduals, itinerants, students or those passersby who just want a good meal. Some donate money for the privilege, which enables the group to subsidize their activity. Some restaurants within the city have also donated materials, kitchen utensils as well as vegetables and other foodstuffs for the events. The project is similar to the successful Hungry Bowls initiative sponsored by the Ceramics department of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The price of a ticket, usually between $10 and $15, provides the purchaser with a nourishing bowl of soup and bread and afterwards they keep the bowl made especially for the purpose. Proceeds from the event held near Christmas each year go to Food Bank and other service agencies. 10
With respect to the history and criticism of performance genres within modernist art, each of these examples engage the central problematics - the first two, arguably more than the others - of oppositional and/or subversive art practice. In different ways each event reproduces some of the least desirable features of what, for want of a better phrase, I will call the enactment of protest. If I have some criticisms of each of these works, my aim in this context is not to subvert them or deny their relative efficacy as political art works but rather to enrich the categories of oppositional artwork. I will now explore the terms and conditions of oppositional as distinct from operative practice, and the political efficacy of strategic (exemplary), interventionist, instrumental and communicative actions.
The actions of Yin and Kantor can be described as strategic actions, the others as interventionist/ instrumental, but not quite communicative, in the best Habermasian sense of this term. As an agitational form of protest, strategic (exemplary) actions were criticised by many groups who participated in the events of May 68, in Paris, Nanterre, and other so-called countercultural demonstrations in various urban contexts throughout the 1960's, not only for their implicit absence of theory, but also their anarcho-individualistic, heroic and spectacular character. Advocates argued that the exemplary action has a symbolic use value that is only fully understood after the event - usually as a result of mediation (framing) through the media - and that its spontaneous "unprogrammed" character encourages the "fusion of various political tendencies" that otherwise would not coalesce as collective protest. Yin's action, for example, has been framed as an act of individualised creative freedom, albeit state sanctioned, applauded by the free West. Kantor's Blood Campaign 'gifts'11, conflating as they do, art and crime, are guerilla acts of cultural sabotage worthy of the Futurists. Yet both these exemplary subversive actions encourage the reproduction of the "vicious cycle of provocation-repression", ironically identified to those engaged in this form of social protest, as a mark of success. Like the union tactic of the "wildcat strike" (the?illegal strike), the repression precipitated by such actions is usually so severe that it blocks the formation of all other types of legitimate protest. Furthermore, these subversive actions often serve to reproduce the very mechanisms of authority at which they are aimed.
By way of contrast, intervention (instrumental actions), allow a range of critical and/or resistant strategies to be attempted without (usually) precipitating a crisis or "culture war" of the kind evident recently in the US, Canada and elsewhere. In the form of an interruption or mediative action 12. a cultural intervention within a context characterised, for example, by its resistance to change, may encourage several positions (and responses) to be adopted by those engaged in the enactment or performance of social protest, as well as those at which it is aimed. The major problem is that the intervention may simply remain at the level of theory, instead of engendering (and engineering) an authentic state of praxis on the part of those participating.
The origin of the use of the term intervention in the discourse of art can be traced to the writings of Karl Marx, specifically the famous "11th Thesis on Feuerbach" (1845), in which he argued that "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."Almost a century later Bertolt Brecht paraphrased Marx with: "The theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only for those philosophers as wished not just to explain the world, but also to change it." 13 In his famous essay "The Author as Producer" 14 Walter Benjamin, Brecht's contemporary, extolled the virtues of the operative artist, providing as his example the communist author Sergei Tretiakov "whose mission was not to simply report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively" (Benjamin, W 1969: 223; emphasis added). Benjamin's prognosis for the political project of the photographer was similar "What we should demand of the photographer is the text that would wrench his (sic) work from modish commerce and give it some revolutionary useful values." Benjamin's concept of the operative artist "intervening actively" implies both the subordination of any impulse to aestheticise and the ordination of critical agency. In other words it could be characterised as a post-aesthetic strategy, one which nonetheless could contain those values nominally subsumed under several aesthetic ideologies.
In the late 1950's the International Situationists (I.S) endorsed Brecht's and Benjamin's operative/interventional projects for artists committed to social change. In the very first issue of the I.S. review outlining the situationist project, they endorsed the fundamental importance of intervention as a post-theoretical and practical aspect of their critique of the (Debordian) society of the spectacle.
The constructed situation is bound to be collective both in its inception and development. However it seems that at least during an initial experimental period, responsibility must fall on one particular individual. This individual must, so to speak, be the 'director' of the situation. For example, in terms of one particular situationist project - revolving around the meeting of several friends one evening - one would expect (a) an initial period of research by the team, (b) the election of a director responsible for the co-ordinating the basic elements for the construction of the decor etc., and for working out a number of interventions, all of them unaware of all the details planned by the others), (c) the actual people living the situation who have taken part in the whole project both theoretically and practically, and (d) a few passive spectators not knowing what the hell is going on should be reduced to action 15 |
If exemplary actions, are without theory; interventions attempt to put theory into action, to wed theory to practice. Both are intrinsically related to one another, as was understood clearly by those who participated in the occupations, sit-ins, teach ins, theatrical agit-prop events and other forms of protest evident during the 1960's. However, the intentions and ultimately the "audience" response are different.
The exemplary action consists, instead of intervening in an overall way, in acting in a much more concentrated way on exemplary objectives, on a few key objectives that will play a determining role in the continuation of the struggle. 16 |
Fig.6 |
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTIONS |
EXEMPLARY / STRATEGIC |
INTERVENTION / INSTRUMENTAL |
|
Anarchic / individualistic |
Collective / collaborative or |
|
spontaneous |
planned |
|
dynamic/direct/focused action |
exhibits less dynamism/ indirect |
|
absence of theory |
theory laden/movement toward praxis |
|
induces repression/confrontation |
integrative, mediative/ interruptive/provocative |
|
cathartic provocative dialectical |
non-cathartic attempts to lessen provocation / encourage dialogueusually undialectical |
|
theatricals pectacular |
performative non-spectacular |
|
projective |
reflective |
|
The table of oppositions above represents the general differences between two types of political action [performance], configured as acts of protest or resistance. Depending upon the circumstances and the type of event, intervention can become an exemplary action, and thus devolve into a form of political posturing, closely implicated in extreme versions of behaviour characterised by violence, anarchic rejection or destructive nihilism.
The meaning of these distinctions becomes patently clear, of course, when we consider the use of the terms direct/strategic action and intervention in either the power vocabularies of the State and special interest (terrorist) groups. Intervention as indirect action is usually precipitous, and as historical events have testified, intervention as a euphemism for neo-colonial incursion can lead to forms of local resistance that will eventually lead to armed struggle and ultimately war. Intervention as (strategic interruption), particularly when it is used by a group attempting to counter or resist the power exhibited by another group, that is in control, is very different from the interventions used by a controlling group attempting to reinforce its control. When employed as political rhetoric by the state, intervention is usually synonymous with incursion, an action that will reproduce/reform, or transform already existing or previously extant power relations. C.I.A. incursions (interventions) in Chile in the early seventies, Nicaragua, Bermuda and elsewhere in Central America, as well as more recently Russian intervention in Chechnya and its other republics, attest to the major differences between the two. Interventionist strategies employed by the left attempt to interrupt the passive consumption of the dominant ideologies and contest the hegemony of the state, whereas the interventionist strategies used by the right tend to reproduce them, thus exercising or maintaining their control. 17
Communicative action is very different from direct action or intervention, although it may seem to employ some of the characteristics of both. Jurgen Habermas, who has arguably done more than anyone to theorise various forms of political action within the public sphere, distinguishes between strategic, instrumental and communicative actions. The distinction, he argues, between actions that are oriented toward success and those toward understanding is crucial.
in strategic actions one actor seeks to influence the behaviour of another by means of the threat of sanctions or the prospect of gratification in order to cause the interaction to continue as the first actor desires, |
Whereas
in a communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect (Bindungseffekt) of the offer contained in the speech act (Habermas, 1990:58). |
He distinguishes between openly strategic actions and those that are covertly strategic; the first involves the systematic distortion of an event and unconscious deception on the part of the participants, the second involving various types of conscious deception, is manipulative and therefore inherently propagandistic.
In another passage Habermas asserts that:
communicative actions (occur) when social interactions are co-ordinated not through the egocentric calculations of success of every individual but through co-operative achievements of understanding among participants. (Habermas in Thompson and Held 1982:264)* (emphasis added) |
He argues that art has an important place as a critical mediating agent in what he terms "the decolonising process"; How art could, or should mediate decolonisation is less clear in his work. If science, philosophy and art are thoroughly institutionalised and therefore subjected to increasing ideological incursion by what he terms "the legitimating practices of the state", how can any one `sphere' - such as art - become the privileged site for communicative action? The question then, he wrote in 1983 "is how to overcome the isolation of science, morals and art and their respective expert cultures" (1983,90:19), and return them to the public sphere.
Habermas has consistently affirmed that art, along with philosophy, law, politics and economics, are important sites for mediation, communicative rationality and pragmatic action. He is somewhat ambivalent however about the extent to which this can occur in an institution that the forces of an increasingly technocratic and bureaucratic modernity have rendered into increasing autonomy from the life world. As a Kantian, he has remained somewhat resolute in his defence of the separation of pure and practical reason from aesthetic judgement.
In modern societies, the spheres of science, morality, and law have crystalised around these forms of argumentation (instrumental reason). The corresponding cultural systems of action administer problem solving capacities in a way similar to that in which the enterprises of art and literature administer capacities for world disclosure. (Habermas,1987:207). |
It is clear from this last statement, which he employed in his extended critique of Derrida's purported collapsing of the genre distinction between literature and philosophy, that while he views art and culture generally as an important locus for theoretical attention, he maintains a boundary between forms of communicative action that can occur within the spheres of political, legal or philosophical discourse, and those that can occur within the domain of art and literature. For Habermas art remains at the level of representation, distanced from the material reality and "spatio-temporal structures" of the life world, and as such, can not be considered as ideal a site as is language - or rather speech - for the deployment of communicative action.
At an early stage in the development of his communication theory, Habermas recognised the inherent problematic of communicative actions that do not offer the possibility of their own (dialectical) transformation. While his system/lifeworld paradigm could adequately describe the instrumental logic behind the progressive development of administrative bureaucratisation and the economic forces driving the conflict(s) between the system and the lifeworld, 18 communicative actions, wrongly used, could have, as his intellectual mentor Walter Benjamin himself understood, wholly undesirable consequences.
With his Frankfurt School mentors, Habermas does recognise a important place for art as a critical mediating agent in the decolonising process; however, how art could, or should mediate is less clear. "The issue now", he writes in 1983 "is how to overcome the isolation of science, morals and art and their respective expert cultures" (1983,90:19), and return them to the pubic sphere. By the early 1980's it seemed as if Habermas was beginning to heed Marx's injunction in his Theses on Feuerbach. And by this time he had fully articulated the restrictions wrought upon life world activities by the hegemony of expert cultures and their rarefied exclusive esoteric languages. However Habermas' own work as a philosopher still remained somewhat distanced from that very life world which he so wished to protect.
I agree, somewhat, with Terry Eagleton's prognosis that as an academic Habermas is "aloofly remote from the sphere of political action" but that his work as an intellectual represents a "political strike for the life-world against administrative rationality." Eagleton however, also generously admits that:
...art itself is for Habermas one crucial place where the jeopardized resources of moral and affective life may be crystalized; and in the critical discussion of such art, a kind of shadowy public sphere may be re-established, and so mediating between the separate Kantian spheres of the cognitive, moral and aesthetic. (Eagelton, 1990:402) |
Some will argue that each example of the art of giving discussed at the beginning of this paper can be framed as either liberal altruism, or as leftist tendenzkunst - and perhaps both. Like Marx's criticism of this "wretched offal of socialist literature" The tendenzkunst argument insists that while evidencing the `correct political tendency' the work remains still at the level of representation, merely acting out the forms of cultural politics without providing the important political substance that would engender real change. Armed with the legacy of Marx, Engels, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs et. al., many on the left would argue that the artist/intellectual should align him/herself with the appropriate progressive or revolutionary forces within society and their representative social groups and political parties. Like Marx and Engel's critiques of Ferdinand Lasalle, each giving example could be criticised for evidencing the correct political tendency but lacking the correct engagement with its object of concern, which would necessitate an adoption of the appropriate (time honoured), and normative political strategies for social change.
Mealings work, REPOhistory and The Free Food examples insist that giving can be used `strategically' to further a number of identifiable life world and humanitarian goals, as well as provide some critical intervention into the ideological fabric of our culture. The Bloom 98 example attempts to develop "new working relationships between like thinking artists. As Harry Palmer suggests "it is hoped this project will celebrate the adversities, break down the solitary conventions and demonstrate new ways of collaboration."
Claude Levi Strauss argued that "The automatic laws of the cycle of reciprocity are the unconscious principle of the obligation to give, the obligation to return a gift and the obligation to receive" (1987:43) But as Bourdieu demonstrates in his critique of Levi-Strauss's structural logic of the (Maussian) law of reciprocity, in reality "the gift may remain unreciprocated" (98). For Yin and Kantor, and to a lesser extent perhaps, Mealing, the New York, Basingstoke, Birmingham and Halifax artists, this realisation would necessitate that the givers themselves become the first targets of conscientization. But each cultural intervention, exemplary or not, engages "a logic of practice" that encourages an infinite variety of exchanges or gifts, challenges, ripostes, reciprocations, and repressions to occur. These examples of operative art practice have the capacity to creatively engage their public in conscientization and in this sense alone provide service of some social and cultural value. But in accordance with Bourdieu's wry observation on the politics of giving and receiving these examples acknowledge also:
The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise than as laid down by the `mechanical laws' of the `cycle of reciprocity' (and that this) is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token its logic.(99) |
In contrast to Mauss and Levi-Strauss' insistence on laws and structure in the cycle of reciprocity, of obligation and exchange, Bourdieu's logic of practice privileges individual agency, in all its unpredictability and contrariness, as the primary component of a generative model of giving (and understanding). Perhaps this logic of practice, like that promoted by Habermas himself "provides an alternative to money and power as a basis for societal integration." (Calhoun 1992:31) And without an acknowledgement of individual agency within communicative action, that is of the potential for contrariety - the act of giving, the gift of food, the gift of labour, the gift of blood, and of life itself, would seem valueless.
Works Cited
Baxandall, Lee, and Stefan Morawski (eds) Marx and Engels on Literature and Art St Louis and Milwaukee: Telos Press, 1973
Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings ed. Peter Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott, New York: Schocken, 1986
Blackburn, Lisa and Hartom, John, Empty Bowls Project Pamphlet (self-published) Franklin, Michigan, 1990
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice Standford, California: Standford University Press, 1990
Calhoun, C. (ed) Habermas and the Public Sphere Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992
Eagleton, T. The Ideology of the Aesthetic Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990
Hardin, Garrett. The limits of Altruism: An Ecologist's View of Survival Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977
Habermas, J. "Consciousness raising or redemptive Criticism - the Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin" New German Critique Special Issue on Benjamin No 17, Spring 1979
Habermas, J. Legitimation Crisis Trans. T, McCarthy Boston: Beacon, 1979
Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action Boston: Beacon, 1984
Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve lectures, Trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass., 1989
Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action trans. Christian Lenhardt, Shierry Weber Nicholsen with introduction by Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge Mass, MIT Press, 1990
Hyde, Lewis, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of property New York: Random House, 1983
Mauss, Marcel The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies New York, London: Norton, 1967
Sahlins, Marshall Stone Age Economics Chicago: Adline Publishing Co., 1972
Thompson, J.B and Held , D., (eds) Habermas Critical Debates (including a reply to my critics by Jurgen Habermas) Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1982
Willis, Paul Common Culture Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1990
1 This paper continues some of the arguments engaged in four of my earlier essays:
"Performance for Instruction and Performance for Pleasure (1980), "Notes toward an
Adequate Interventionist [performance] practice" (1985), "The Art of Giving" (1994) and
"Littoralist Art Practice and Communicative Action"(1998).
2 Published in FUSE Vol19 No 2 Winter 1996
3 see Parkin, Andrew and Van der Platt, Medina (eds) Essays on Habermas (forthcoming).
4 "The theme of the gift, of freedom and obligation in the gift, of generosity and self-interest
in giving, reappear in our own society like the resurrection of a dominant motif long forgotten."
(Mauss,1924,1967:66).
5 Group Material, Artlink, Wochenklausur Group, Dogs of Heaven, Cultural Transmissions Network,
Burobert, Grupo Escombros, Hirsch Farm project, Platform, Progetto Cuspide; Projects Environment,
Protoplast, TEA, Terra Cultural Research Society, REPOhistory.
6 A Globe and Mail (Toronto) report August 1, 2000 suggests that with the purported reduction of HIV
and AIDS cases in the west, the production of artwork, literature, theatre and performance based on
these themes has diminished.
7 This far REPOHistory has produced six large public art projects. Their goals are "to raise questions
about the construction of history, to provide multiple viewpoints that encourage viewers to think critically,
to explore how histories and their interpretations affect us today, and to engage with specific communities
in order to facilitate their efforts to construct their own public histories."
8 Current Members Neill Bogan, Jim Costanzo, Tom Klem, Janet Koenig, Lisa Maya Knauer,
Cynthia Liesenfeld, Chris Neville, Jayne Pagnucco, Leela Ramotar, Greg Sholette & George Spencer
9 Palmer, Harry : catalogue/poster statement 1998
10 Hungry Bowls is based on the Empty Bowls Project (1990) originated by artists Lisa Blackburn,
and John Hartom of Franklin, Michigan. Their project has been used as a model for many similar philanthropic
littoral projects around the world.
11 Bolton, Richard Culture Wars Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts New York: The New Press 1992
12 see Barber, B, Guilbaut, S and O'Brian Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power and the State Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1996 and Bolton, R., Culture Wars: 1992
13 Brecht, B., "Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction" in Willett, S., Brecht on Theatre 1933-1947 "(1936)pp 71-72
14 addressed to the antifascist league meeting in Paris, 1936.
15 I.S. No 1 1958:13 for another discussion of this quote see Barber, B "Notes toward an Adequate Interventionist
[Performance] Practice" in ACT Vol I No. 1 New York; Inter (French version) No 46 Summer 1990 Quebec. Also in
Barber, B. Reading Rooms Halifax, Eyelevel Gallery publications 1992.
16 Ibid.
17 See also Barber and Guilbaut, S. "Performance and Social and cultural Intervention: Interviews with Martha Rosler
Parachute. I have previously discussed the differences between direct (exemplary) actions and intervention as a critical
strategy by contrasting the art actions of the Guerilla Art Action Group (G.A.A.G.) to that of Adrian Piper, a black feminist
artist/philosopher. See B Barber "Towards an adequate Interventionist [Performance] practice" Reading Rooms, Halifax:
Eyelevel Gallery, 1993.
18 As Habermas argued in Legitimation Crisis (1975) the system has penetrated deeply into the lifeworld, progressively
reorganising its practices in accord with its own rationalising, systematising and bureaucratic logic. The instrumentalising
of human activity, he posited, destroys the possibilities of democratic participation in social interaction and political
decision making.