ART&RESEARCH

The Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? [Fig. 1.Installation shot, Nameless Science, apexart] project was started in 1994 (see www.nbp.pro.br) and is still going strong in 2009 – there is not an established deadline for it. As far as the project itself is capable of generating interest and there are participants who will join in, it will continue. I’d like to comment here, briefly, on some aspects of the development of my PhD research, which took the Would you like…? project as its main topic.¹

When the academic research started in 2004, it seemed that including Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? as its main line would mean a new impulse for the artistic project itself. I asked myself, “Maybe the academic world would offer some space for its further development, a different quality of space that would allow one to problematize it, make it fold over itself and generate a conversation that might add new layers to it?” Obviously I had to be conscious of the fact that “university” and “art world” are two distinct territories, and each one of them has its own legitimating mechanisms – that is, what is interesting to the art world might not seem so attractive to the academic world, and vice versa. Therefore, taking an art project to the university requires one to think in advance about the development of some strategy dedicated to soften – or even dismantle, if possible – some of the barriers and borderlines that these two self-confident territories have erected to protect themselves against (in general sense) the world. Recognizing the particular characteristics of each is not meant to establish any hierarchical relation; on the contrary, it makes easier to spot the passageways and contact lines that might make it possible for the two fields to communicate in more dynamically and productively.

Because it was developed basically as a project to encounter possibilities of movement of some lines of flight in the art circuit, the Would you like…? project has been conducted as a sort of autonomous system, composed of a set of protocols regulating it along the standards of a basic dialogical structure involving artist, object, and participant. The public or general audience only accesses the project later, at the documentation or archive level. In that sense, the presence of Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? at Documenta 12 was very significant, for the installation displayed there was in fact the very first opportunity to exhibit the project in its entirety, presenting an architectonic-sculptural structure that functions as the project’s museum (or, on that particular occasion, a museum inside a museum), framing dialogically the protocols of relationship between artist, object, participant and audience. Thus, to produce the necessary displacement of such long-range activity towards the academic procedures requires a careful approach in order to realize which particular aspects could be further reworked, extended and linked to specific investigative topics.

One of the key elements of the Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? installation display, which has been present since the project started, is its diagram. [Fig. 2 Diagram] (PDF 808KB) There, in a combination of lines and words, the main dialogical guidelines of the project are portrayed, together with information on some of its generative statements (e.g. the NBP – New Bases for Personality project), other series of works developed in tandem and which share mutual influence, and also with some data information on number of experiences, names of the cities included in the network, etc. Yet also important to the diagram are the layers of comments included successively during the project’s development, throughout the years – you can read, for instance, at the diagram’s top right corner, the dates of the project’s four phases until now (phase 4 is still ongoing). Thus a decisive moment for the development of the PhD research was when it appeared evident to me that the way to problematize the Would you like…? project was to extract the topics, themes and questions directly from the diagram – that is, literally localizing them in the diagram. With such a gesture, the research would not define its contours from a position of exclusion, but could be conducted from within the project’s proper structure. Then, a set of eight different blocks – each including groups of concepts – was added to the diagram, to be extended later through discursive tools.

The PhD thesis, which can be considered a specific exercise of “hypertrophied” writing (in the sense that it extends a particular form of writing through several pages to fulfill certain academic requirements), was thus achieved with a body of text that advanced each of the eight conceptual blocks further. The concrete presence of these eight conceptual blocks as drawing, in the diagram, made it also possible to practice different modes of writing, letting the proper academic discourse shift closer to a sort of poetic or fictional use of words and phrases. The result was a body of texts completely interconnected with the diagram – a sort of hypertext where different parts relate among themselves, mixing drawing (diagram) and discourse – and that is now a concrete and particular part of Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? In some ways, such text has still to find a concrete way to access a more public audience, to make itself as available as the art piece; at the same time, it creates true access for the art project to the academic space, making it function there not just as a “passive conceptual monument” but as a provocative poem that resists interpretation and always asks for more (or less).