Do Nothing

Do nothing.

Joshua Schwebel

“Innocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even that of a child” (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, 468).

“…the piece will cease to exist.” Robert Barry

In fact, in my estimation, the piece no longer exists. The piece in question is Robert Barry’s contribution to the 1969 Projects Class:

The students will gather together in a group and decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex. This idea will be known only to the members of the group. You or I will not know it. The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist. It may exist for a few seconds or it may go on indefinitely, depending on the human nature of the participating students. We may never know when or if the piece comes to an end.
-Robert Barry

On October 12, 2010 a graduate class of philosophy students from the Institute for Christian Studies joined us in the exhibition space for an introduction to their task. This work was different than any of the others in the show in that its execution depended on a closed conversation among the students, to the exclusion of the curators and their professor, Shannon Hoff. After doing a bit of group interpretation on where the work of art could be situated, we left the students to their own devices. We were unsure of how, if at all, we would display any of the results from this work in the show, and so we decided to take some documentation in case we wanted it later (there were notes and an audio recording made by the students). Ultimately we decided that it was intrinsic to the piece that it remain immaterial in the extreme and so we have not put any documentation on display.

[I should add, that although we did not install documentation, we did reinstall the cue card, as we have done in every case in which a work has been executed. In most cases, a cue card was removed from its original place in the southwest corner of the gallery and moved to function as a combination label and score for the completed work. In the instances when a work had no tangible trace--that is, the works by Barry, Ortiz-apuy, and Raufeisen & Witt--the cards were removed from their original place and reinstalled together in another part of the gallery. The only card that remains on the original wall is Joshua Schwebel's instruction "Do Nothing."]

The documentation we have of the Barry piece is almost a conceptual work unto itself. In order that we would be able to hear parts of their conversation without being let in on the secret, the students recorded clips of their roughly two hour conversation, pausing the recorder every time it sounded like someone was going to say something important. The other residual material we have is the photocopied instructions we handed out to each of them. Each student handed back the sheet with a handwritten note on the bottom saying something to the effect of “We’ve decided to decide.” The students deferred their decision and were delighted to be able to share their conclusion with us with no fear of obliterating the piece.

This last point is an interpretive problem for me as the decision to decide is indeed a decision taken by the group. If the decision to decide can constitute an idea, then the piece is gone; more than over, it has ceased to exist, according to the terms set out by the artist. The piece as it was generated in 1969 still exists, according to Ian Murray one of the students in Askevold’s class. Murray’s classmates don’t remember the idea and so Murray asserts that the work will exist indefinitely.  Its existence, it should be noted, is contingent only on the terms of the artist–like a ready-made, claimed as art–and not dependent on anyone’s memory.  However, the nature of the piece makes Murray’s assertion impossible to falsify: if the decision was ever revealed, the work would no longer exist. We can’t really know if it has been revealed, but since none of his former classmates remember the idea, he is no longer vulnerable to them in his attempt to perpetuate the work.

This work was the subject of contemporary artist Mario Garcia Torres’s What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (in 36 slides), 2004-2006. Torres sought out the 1969 classmates and staged a sort of class reunion during which the former students revealed their sentiments about the class, including some negative ones. One of these is the assertion or rumour that Askevold bugged the classroom during the making of the Barry piece. For more information on Torres’s artistic-historical work on the Barry piece, check out these links:

http://www.johnmenick.com/2007/09/mario-garcia-torres-interview

http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=461

-Joanna Sheridan

Extra Credit: Deborah Kirk and Juan Ortiz-apuy

For the open class on October 23rd, a small group of people executed the works by Deborah Kirk and Juan Ortiz-apuy.

Energy In= Energy Out
“According to Newton’s law of inertia, a system will stay at rest unless it is disturbed by an external force. Energy exists in two states: kinetic and potential. A brick sits on top of a wall– potential (it could fall). A brick is pushed from the top of the wall– kinetic (its potential is released).” - Labbeus Wood, System Wien, 2005
Create a shift in the energetic organization of a space through:
a) a material intervention
b) a relational disturbance

-Deborah Kirk

We interpreted this work as having two components, both of which could be considered as an opportunity to make changes in the exhibition space. As a relational disturbance, our small group toured the exhibition spaces making detailed observations about things that fell outside the parameters of the given system. The  observations were then pared down to the bare minimum of information:

For the material intervention we made a bit of a tongue-in-cheek decision to work with the ample amount of furniture in the art lounge and lined the majority of the leather furniture up against the entrance to the main UTAC gallery space. The entrance was not fully blocked, as visitors could still move freely. The furniture placement, however, was disruptive just to the point of being noticeable and obtrusive. See the before and after below:

For Ortiz-apuy’s instructions we stood together and read aloud:

1 – “How to roll your R’s”

Step 1: Curl your tongue up very slightly just behind the top of your top gums. The tip of your tongue should be loose and should float just below the roof of your mouth -between the upper teeth and the hard palate. This is the alveolar ridge. You can find it by smoothing the tip of your tongue along the tooth sockets and along the top row of your teeth.

Step 2: Tense your tongue, but leave the tip loose so it can vibrate. Breathe out, allowing your tongue to vibrate with the passing air, as you create a “purring” sound.

2 – “How to fake an accent”

Repeat the following sentence but change the ‘TH’ sounds for a ‘Z’ sound, and drop all the “H’s” –making them silent: They have no business here neither

3 – “From TOLD to TONGUE”

Read the following list of words out loud: told, tolerable, tolerably, tolerance, tolerant; tolerate, toleration; toll, tollbooth; toll-bridge; toll-free, tollgate, toll road, tollway, tom, tomahawk, tomb, tombola, tomboy, tombstone, tomcat, tome, tomfoolery, tommy-gun, tomorrow, tom-tom, tonal, tonality, tone, tone-deaf, tone language, toneless, tone poem, toner, tongs, tongue

-Juan Ortiz-apuy

Out of all the works in the exhibition, this work seemed to be the most strictly instructional. There wasn’t the same ambiguity and room for creative interpretation as some of the others: participants were asked to simply recite what was written in front of them. There was still an opportunity to learn something new through the experience of executing the works, partially how to roll one’s R’s and partially to pay attention to pronunciation – the latter being something we don’t normally consider very closely. There are also issues of multi-cultural clash raised by the statement  ”they have no business here neither,” which points to a different set of concerns than we see in the works from 1969. It seems that in this case, the cue card (the hard copy of the instruction) speaks more than the performance of it, in that one can read and consider the implications on one’s own and the group activity is perhaps secondary. One thing that does arise in the experience of performing the work is the embarrassment, however silly, of making noises outside of the system of normal speech.

 

-Ginger Scott and Joanna Sheridan