Marg Robert’s perspective

Feb 3 2025

What I learned from the first 5 Ineffable days:

Stage one of Ineffable was a five day artists’ event in which 9 artists from performance, sound/music and visual art backgrounds came together in the Balmain Town Hall to ‘to observe and trial different approaches in disrupting how we habitually devise performances and improvise. Probably because I don’t normally ‘devise performances and improvise’, that intention didn’t sink in until I reread it again just now!  I instead understood the event as an invitation to experiment with expanding our decision-making processes beyond the habitual in whatever area we worked.  But actually, I didn’t really want to fit into someone else’s plan, I just wanted access to the situation to do my ‘habitual’ thing which is to visit a place and watch out for what it is saying to me, then work out a simple way to respond. I don’t really see that as habitual, but as what I like to do most. It is a process that is dependent on the chance nature of the place. As I hadn’t selected this town hall myself, it was quite likely it would stay silent. 

It seems like we each acted as if we were the only artists present in the one big space of the Town Hall. I always like the idea of multiple artists using one space in that way, as it is likely to create accidental interactions as a kind of chance collaboration. However I don’t think this was actually decided in advance. We just did it. Using the whole space must be unavoidable for sound artists as sound by its nature spreads out to whatever walls that contain it, and artists who use their body (‘performance artists’) used them to move things around throughout the space. Artists who don’t use their bodies much as art material (‘visual artists’) tended to construct ‘stationary’ objects that sometimes moved more slowly across and around the space.

My thoughts more specifically:

1. The conventions characteristic of the different disciplines were most obviously on display in these first 5 days as explained above.  Some artists were less obviously in just one of these categories. It's probably too much to equate habit with discipline as I’m about to do here, but makes me wonder if any were successful in breaking the conventions we were already embedded in as the disciplines distinctions were still obvious to others.  But I for one don’t want to become a performance artist or a musician. I want to use movement in the space to indicate that the space is live, not the dead space that galleries try to make it. I expect that working against the ‘dead’ space of galleries is of concern more to visual artists than to artists of other disciplines. Also for me that movement is not ‘performance’ so much as a part of the live space that is reaching across into art space to have a movement effect on an art object. It could be the wind, but at the Town Hall it was mainly our bodies.

2. I understood the offer as being facilitated to challenge habitual ways of working and only got to accept that after I realised that facilitation may be needed more in performance, as performance possibly benefits from others watching or listening and giving feedback to assist development, as a performer’s actions are not as visible/audible to the artist in the way an art object is to a visual artist. In my experience visual artists have more of a convention of group crits where we sit around and discuss an object or installation, and is thought of as feedback and discussion. To visual artists facilitating sounds like teaching or being directed. 

3. How many others took challenging habitual ways of working seriously? Was it meant to be? We didn’t really discuss what habitual ways of working are, why they are a problem (as implied in the term and in the idea that we want to disrupt them).

4. Group meetings enable members to understand others’ expectations, and give feedback on what each are doing individually and its impact on the whole. But those benefits need to be balanced against the way they take up time and may inhibit spontaneous, surprising and improvisational developments. I began writing this text in lieu of a group discussion to clarify what I thought had happened. Two fairly spontaneous meetings were held, the first to introduce each other and the second to reflect on the first 1.5.day’s development. In this second meeting, process decisions were made—that we work so that nothing is too stationary, and that objects only be present in the hall if they were part of a work/experiment. Also decisions were made that visitors are witnesses of whatever was happening at the time and not coming to see a show or to participate themselves. As it turned out witnessing times were planned too late in the evening of days 4 & 5 when most participants present were exhausted, but we still had to be there because it had been advertised.  

5. Priority given to movement: In that second meeting there was pressure on those (most of the visual artists) with stationary tendencies to move around more. We didn’t consider counter measure where performers spend parts of a day stationary to disrupt their habitual tendencies to move. But (as I said earlier) I happen to quite like making stationary art that moves (because it is an implicit critique of the stillness conventional in visual art and contradicts that convention’s denial of the live space in which it is located), particularly if that movement can be done without taking on the body-performance of performance art. It fits a minor convention/genre of moving or performing object, and the body moves things around because it is part of the live space, not because it is part of the artwork that’s moving.  

6. Nature of movement: It would be good to discuss the nature of movement because it is the core of this project. When using movement (or anything) myself I want to show that it is in this space here, not an evocation or representation of something somewhere else (which is also a convention I want to work against, a convention that is not peculiar to visual art).  I also like to de-emphasise the body as art material and emphasise the space—aesthetically because the space is bigger, and politically because it works against the human-centredness of modern culture.  I think of us as needing space to live in, but the space does not need us—when the human species is extinct, the places will still be there in one form or another, just not very inhabitable, which won’t worry the places.

In thinking about where I got this idea of the nature of movement I remembered we learned the importance of natural (‘mundane’) movement largely by osmosis at art school, but it was probably credited to dancer Yvonne Rainer, who discovered/invented and wrote about minimal dance. I found her “no” manifesto from the late 1960s, as part of the minimal art emphasis on the actual place here that we share with the materiality of the artwork. I understand it as a critique of the convention that art’s purpose is to take viewers away to somewhere else, a convention of Western visual art, music, dance etc of recent centuries, countered by experimenters such as John Cage and other minimal artists. I see it as trying instead to show that the important place is here where viewers are with the materiality of the artwork, not the distant or transcendent other place that people feel they need to escape to.  It is the basis of site-specificity and must also be part of the broad critique of representation. While the site specific critique was justified as ‘anti-commodification’, I prefer the more precise claim that it is using artwork to encourage people to see the importance of the ordinary places we live in and need to protect if we are to have a hope of limiting climate change. 

I see that performance work in Ineffable could be seen in a similar light.  I think I see attempts in Ineffable performances to enrich that ‘mundane’ space that’s here with us now, to show an alternative to the boring bitumen and cement expanses that modern culture has made places into and from which most people would want to escape to somewhere else. I see attempts to invite in the enigmatic and magical that Hans Belting suggests had to be denied when the Modern culture appeared via the scientific revolution that rejected such richness as superstitious magic that needed to be archived into the past.  But I’m curious about what performers think are the origins of ways of performing that you do.  

Marg

5 Han Belting claimed the change in how the image was read occurred because of the change brought about by the scientific revolution around the 16thC: The image formerly had been assigned a special reality and taken literally as a visible manifestation of the sacred person. Now the image was, in the first place, made subject to the general laws of nature, including optics, and so was assigned wholly to the realm of sense perception. Now the same laws were to apply to the image as to the natural perception of the outside world. It became a simulated window in which either a saint or a family member would appear in a portrait. (Hans Belting Likeness and Presence 1994:471)

16 February 2025

This is turning into a good conversation. I started writing a response to Alan but didn't get back to it to finish it—to say I was grateful for response and to say how I liked his idea of making/doing things not intended to produce something at the end. It is like what I learned from Terry Hayes, most of whose art practice seems to have been to spend the allocated time anywhere moving objects around with no intention to 'resolve' anything, which I first saw in his I believe you have something to tell me at Articulate in 2011 (http://articulate497.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-unintended-consequences-i-believe.html) and which he repeated in various other ways later (http://articulate497.blogspot.com/search/label/Terry%20Hayes). I can see how you Alan do something like that but perhaps your intention is different in some respects. And I wonder where that thinking/practice comes from, there may have been others who did it, unless you and Terry came to that idea yourselves. I expect it was in the air back sometime, part of process art and I remember Robert Morris's idea that the 60s produced a shift in focus from what artists produce to what they start with. 

When I was rolling up your long list of conditions, Vilma, I wasn't thinking at the time that we were 'making movement', I was trying to roll them into a neat bundle so that they wouldn't be damaged as they were twisted and might tear easily. So that explains my confusion, I couldn't understand why you didn't seem to be assisting in rolling them up, I couldn't work out what you were doing, so I left, and you seemed to want that. So you must have thought the same about me, leading you to think somehow I was just trying to move rather than actually roll up the long list.

re stillness and visual art - I think stillness is basic to the convention of visual art because at its core visual art is an invitation to viewers to imaginatively remove themselves from the mundane physical world and escape into 'grace' as Michael Fried put it. But dance film and even music also have their own different ways of being 'spatially autonomous', or focusing on 'taking people away'. I think it's one way all art forms are 'political' - by supporting the basic values of modern culture which includes the devaluation of place.  By trying to incorporate the actual place (including its space and time) we are working against that role, we are being implicitly critical (through doing rather than through saying) and through being a model for people to also have regard for the place they are in.

Alan Schacher’s perspective

5 February 2025

Response to Marg’s notes.

I don’t think I found new ways to observe and trial different approaches in disrupting how we habitually devise performances and improvise, because in a way that is precisely what improvisation should be, an in the moment response. My tendency is to construct and to disrupt as part of a flowing composition that is not intended to reach and end-point.

Thus I worked mostly with objects and materials in the space, adapting them with other found items, with or in response to the sounds being made, and also mostly being careful of others’ claimed spaces. Although I initially reacted because the entire space seemed to have been claimed when I first arrived.

Personally I can’t claim I broke the conventions I am already embedded in. I was cautious to join in a lot because of creating and adding to a sound or visual cacophony.

That said in retrospect from the images I’ve seen what we did was very interesting.

Should the event be structured with rules? This is not necessarily facilitation. It is a form of improvisational structure.

As for counter measures where performers spend parts of a day stationary, this to me would be a statement that is both physical and visual. So it would seem to be an intentional durational activity. So mostly I would rather step out and sit down when I stopped, since presence itself is a statement. In this week I moved in order to do something not moved to create movement.

Alan

16 February 2025

Marg just quickly...

My activity is what I would call an attempt at whole space real time composition, so it's partly inspired by, or is a form of,  free-improvised music and free-improvised dance plus a kind of assemblage practice: this goes with this goes with that until it doesn't, or someone else did something I need to respond or react to or counterbalance, or, I just follow a thought, image, impulse and that in turn leads to a new association. 

So there is definitely an associative thought/image process going on.

Alan

Vilma Bader's perspective

WeiZen Ho’s perspective

16 February 2025

Responding to Marg’s notes written on 5 February 2025:

Perhaps it would have been more inclusive and clearer to say “ assemble, devise and improvise”; what I meant to say in the original invitation refers to the “making-process”. However, having read Marg’s description, it would have been more precise to say, “an invitation to experiment with expanding our decision-making processes beyond the habitual, in whatever area we worked in.”

Adding another perspective to Marg’s self-reflection that “I just wanted access to the situation to do my ‘habitual’ thing which is to visit a place and watch out for what it is saying to me, then work out a simple way to respond”, it appears to me there is an enduring principle that is pushed and extended by ‘the chance nature of the place’; the commitment to building a relationship to the specificity of place can be enough of a disrupting element to provoke permutations (sometimes delightfully unexpected) of a principle.

I did feel it was important for everyone to naturally do what they would normally do - it felt more honest, revealing how we would naturally approach things/situations. It felt like evolving parts of elements coming together, and pulsing out, breaking apart.  Our initial actions acted as a point of departure for observations, affecting decisions which would occur or shift our processes over a longer period of time, was the hope. This led to a natural point as a result of being affected by each other’s approach, of having to negotiate in a circle, for some, trying to keep the individual conversations open, until another negotiation round. What often remains, are these seductive points which remain unresolvable. I wonder if there we can learn to see these unresolvable matters as a series of continual dialogue, instead of oppositional stances.

To extend upon the note that “artists who don’t use their bodies much as art material (‘visual artists’) tended to construct ‘stationary’ objects that sometimes moved more slowly across and around the space.” - the observation I was trying to make is that the bodily actions involved in the “making process’ of the material-into-eventual object with its practical intent and experimentation, and long pauses which can be regarded as ‘fixidity’ in space, activates curiosity on my part as a watcher. However, again from my lens, the movement of travelling, for example occurs by shuffling from left to right of a table length, and that in itself is already interesting.

Stationariness or fixidity is an important counterpoint and intentional use in compositional dynamics. It is a tapestry I need to use more as a conscious consideration, as I abandon it sometimes in real-time image-making even though I had every intention of activating more periods of stillness; to elicit a difference in the energy of the image-in-making.

In terms of being successful in the breaking of conventions we were already embedded in, I was more concerned about wanting and attempting to, before even reaching a place of perceived success; in that even IF one wants to conceptually shift something, it takes many attempts to embody this shift in thinking.

The shifting of conventions (I'm unsure if this is even possible) MAY occur within the discipline and not necessarily always across; perhaps it's more useful to also add that watching another person work in the same discipline through sharing space can lend another perspective or invigorate each other, IF relevant. Another way of looking at it is playing against and with structures learnt through conventions; and we always need some kind of scaffolding where we have to build a level of skills to, then weave in and out of the structure; wrinkle, bounce, oppose, duplicate, replicate. Sometimes I imagine this process as merely having a moment in time, a day perhaps, where one attempts to wear someone else's mind and body.

“How many others took challenging habitual ways of working seriously?” It may not be relevant or of interest for everyone, this is true.  Disrupting was one of the many ways in which to explore if that can extend or expand vocabulary, not to delete or substitute the way one has established working processes (which they are already happy with or have found "success" with). It would be good to uncover ways in which everyone tried to do this…

“We didn’t consider counter measure where performers spend parts of a day stationary to disrupt their habitual tendencies to move” Great idea, i will attempt to come closer to this idea and am finding it difficult already.  I guess that's why Ira Ferris tried the motif of napping as a body performance at Articulate.

When using movement I sometimes  (but not always) use a simple action and continue with this until an image builds in my mind which can embrace the simultaneity of the action evoked/invoked by the place; to also create incidental sounds which can deepen the image.  However the attempt to complete the image isan impossibility as the body or the mind (whichever comes first) 'falls apart' and the decision is to let it rest, begin again or completely depart to something else.

In addition, depending on situation, I use habitual ways of devising, drawing on existing vocabulary, like modulations, oppositional tapestries, a-rhythmic extension, different height and diagonal  body placements, etc to weave into the image building process to extend image-action phrases.

I frame this image using the geometries, corners of the building through trial and error.

I have also barely begun looking at the context of body action-movement in relation to the greater place in which the building resides on.  The social pathways between the public and building trajectories and trialling has begun in small ways, through building some verbal histories about Balmain from residents and owners of businesses from very different sociocultural backgrounds... still so much to uncover.  From this perspective I see how Daniel's blind-and-mut- in-mask motif has gathered the public around him, allowing engagment in a 25-hour or more endurance action.

Origins to the way I perform: I have a background in which performing was associated with being examined and marked by a panel of people who have been allocated some status by an institution. I disliked the putrification of joy. I handed back instrumentation and all its codes and found my way back through the untrained voice which actually used the training of the instrument,  percussiveness of my dialect and the phonics of certain South East Asian languages.  Then, through the influence of people like Alan and his association with BodyWeather practices, and being able to look at how street rituals are enacted in my home region, my interest in performance returned.  One of multiple approaches does take on created social settings, which are deconstructed from hundreds of ways in which a scene of ritual is set up, and I enjoy how it begins in such an ordinary everyday object-people setting.