Additional Notes on 12 Seconds

I’m at home sick today, so just a few more thoughts on last Friday….

Context

One of the persons who poured water on me seemed adamant (although in the same breath seemed somewhat unsure) that because this took place in a cultural/art context, it was permissable to go ahead with it, and this permission, as stated in the paper people were given, seemed to absolve people of responsibilty, even though it stated this was a form of torture.  I don’t really have a way to resolve this one, but it was a prime factor in doing this performance (is performance even a correct word to use?)  I’ve had some very interesting email exchanges with Eric, one of the facilitators involved, which I’ll quote below:

“There’s an even larger point here, though, and frankly I’m still struggling with it: If I believewaterboarding is torture (to my surprise, I find that I’m still ambivalent), how can I justify participating, even in the role and context you’ve designed? To put it another way, if there’s no difference between “simulated” drowning and drowning, is there a difference between “simulated” torture and torture?

True, you designed this. It’s self-inflicted. No one is putting you through this against your will. Maybe that makes all the difference. (A parallel question would be whether the masked men in the video (his “heroes”) tortured Hitchens or not, regardless of the conclusion that Hitchens came to about the practice in retrospect.) In effect I’d be there as a safeguard, even a rescuer. But I’d also be helping to hold down the towel. I’d be participating. What does that make me? If waterboarding is torture, then what does that make of those who participate, even in such a controlled environment? To put it bluntly, does that make us torturers?

Does doing this whole thing under the rubric of theatre or social provocation change any of that? In a nutshell, this is my struggle. Does the context of an action determine whether it’s torture or not, or is that determined by the act itself? What difference does intention make? And this is precisely an echo of the moral and political issue: Does an intended and worthy purpose justify an action or not? You mention your interest in the provocation, “individuals reacting to this from the position of the executioner, so to speak.” Well, in a way, that’s the uncomfortable place I’m speaking from.”

I’m interested not only in the pyschological dimensions of how people respond to a situation where their normal moral perameters are suspended, which have been documented in quite famous experiments, but how people react to similar situations that place the burden of ethical or moral constraints on a cultural context.  And I’d be very disingenuous if I did not mention my own personal curiosity as to just what it must feel like to be waterboarded, my very first impression upon reading about it years ago being, ‘can’t be that bad, can it?’

An Added Complexity of Context and Documentation

I’ve been asked why I let so many people ‘waterboard’ me, if it was so unpleasant.  I have no interest in mimicking David Blaine, or for that matter, seeming macho or masochistic. After what felt like an hour, I asked Eric how long we’d been doing it.  He responded with 25 minutes.  I wasn’t sure I could continue, as I was getting worn out and was shivering from the cold. It’s embarrassing to admit, but what I was thinking at that moment (it was being filmed, I should mention) was ‘have I got enough (recorded) to be long enough to watch?’.  How much needs to be documented to be art?  Or interesting?  Which sounds like it bucks what I mentioned earlier, that I do consider this to be torture.  Ah, yes, the artist as a tortured soul, a martyr, how very droll. . . .    There was also the fact that I was getting used to what to expect from the experience of drowning on a board.  It maybe sounds blasphemous, and can only be attributed to the fact that it was in a controlled environment being facilitated by people who I trusted completely (even though I had just met them the week before).   It can also be viewed, maybe, perhaps, as a commentary on the state of the field of contemporary art:  as more artists join the fold, with ever more galleries, ever more spending on art, ever more MA graduates churned through the gates of countless post graduate programs, how do so many abide by the cardinal rule of contemporary art, which is to be the exception to ‘the rule’ (read: to have a singular art practice that is recognizably differentiated from one’s peers in a continuously expanding field, risking, if you are pessimistic, a creative entropy of micro-differences [think of the proliferation of 'landfill Indy' music...]). In other words, and crudely illustrated, just what lengths must artists go to to get noticed? 

The Shudder of the Real

Susan Sontag included it in her definition of ’style’:  that level of engagement with ‘reality’ within an artistic (or otherwise)  practice - you could call it distance (to reality). Some practices seem to be concerned with ‘intra’ art progressions and formal concerns (in its worst case perpetuating outmoded formal ’schools’ or aesthetic formulas) upholding a belief that art serves as a buffer and respite from the weight of reality, while others collapse this mediation between art and reality, abetted by the evolution and proliferation of mass communication technology, and focus on the ‘real’ (or a psychotic realism), which assumes a position that all mediation must be tossed to the wind (theory and language included).  This could be seen as a return to the modernist creed of iconoclasm, of a deliberate crossing of normative values and with it, a whiff of the YBA movement -  the differences being that in the former, the iconoclasm was primarily a formal concern (but not in the case of performance artists such as Valie Export, or early conceptualists who sought to do away with object - hood all together by creating works that referenced reality directly, while in the latter, it has become profitable for institutions to embrace scandal and provocation rather than ridicule it.  (In a way, it’s a false dichotomy to say that art is either totally engaged or withdrawn from the world:  even the most impartial, ‘disinterested’ or disengaged art [Roger Hiorns, for example] is made in ‘the world’, of components of historical specificity). 

Add to this something I read about a couple of years ago while at Goldsmiths:  the notion of the experience economy, ie, that economic offering that transcends those previous developments of the commodity form (raw commodity, goods, services etc) and deliver a memorable experience or memory that you pay for. (In an art context, it’s not about quiet contemplation of objects in a private space, but of human relations and the social context surrounding the work - think Bourriaud’s  ’Relational Aesthetics’, or  Rirkrit Tiravanija cooking in a gallery, and the types of social relations that is meant to produce, bla bla).

 According to the authors of a book called ‘The Experience Economy’, we are entering the age of the final economic offering, the ‘transformation economy’, a commercial event that transcends the experience economy by customizing and tailoring experiences for each individual client’s needs (in this sense, it’s the need to change, become ‘better’, etc).  I reckon that 12 Seconds falls under the remit of an experience economy’s offering of a memorable, if disturbing, experience, but one that is general and not custom suited for each participant.  I’m not sure why I’m banging on about this, but I guess it’s to highlight the parallel tendencies of art and capitalist production to venture into fields normally foreign to its production in order to sustain itself and maintain the imperative of ‘the new’.  I guess maybe it’s more a question, if anyone still begs to ask it, of the future of artistic autonomy, and specifically, of its claim (if practitioners still make this claim) as a sight of resistance against social,  cultural and political hegemony.  Or maybe I’m missing something.                           

Power Reversal

Although it maybe wasn’t immediately apparent to those who went up the ladder, but there was a bit of power reversal occurring.  Or I could be just stating the obvious, I don’t know.  Those who wielded the water pitchers were not necessarily in control:  with the confrontation of the spectacle of music, light, masked faces, and the instructions, there was diminished space or time to consider one’s actions.  There was a diminishment in power, but not a total absence of it, as exercised by participants (there was one who slowed the pace by seeming to ask questions, pulling the towel off my face, and walking over to the actor who was making drawings, before exiting).  In contrast, although I was tied to a board, and the recipient of the waterboarding, I could stop the performance at any point, and could dictate the pace of participants.  

I realize this freaked some people out, and I do apologize if this propelled you to ask some difficult questions.  I hold absolutely no judgement over those who ‘did’ and those who ‘didn’t’.  It’s a very difficult situation to be in, and I apologize if anyone felt manipulated.  

If anyone would like to see the show (there was a lot of work besides this performance/video piece!), please get in touch via my email or this website, and arrange to drop by.