Artwork

Artwork notes, and photos of Artwork at WOK Warsaw and /SAC Bucharest

Artwork notes 

Probably there is something interesting, something particular in those works that worth our effort to shape them – they might contain new ideas, forms, practices, sensibilities. Yet, sometimes I have the impression that by finalizing them in products we also finish them – that the products, the "artworks" are the tombstones of practices, thoughts, affects, perspectives behind them. Why all the effort to create artworks just to be finished in products to be consumed? To be kept alive they should be practiced, not just seen. (2020 August 29, Băla) 

Dream in which I was thinking about artists as the new philosophers. In the past philosophy was embodied, Diogene lived in a barrel… Now artists are the ones inventing practices and forms of life. Without practices you cannot think, you're trapped in the known, recycling old thoughts, of your own or others. You need some experiences that force you to think. (2018 December 5, Vienna) 

All the freedom, autonomy, creativity, richness of art practices happen inside some implicit frames and mindsets that artists and curators interiorize. Depending on where you are in the art world, you are under commercial, ideological, or entertainment imperatives. They overlap but usually one of them dominates. In events like this Berlin Gallery Weekend, the commercial one does, in most biennales and publicly financed venues the ideologic one, in performance and dance the entertainment one. Despite all the implicit or explicit submissions, there are some good works in all these 3 spheres, yet, I'm more interested in art and artists that challenge or play with implicit imperatives, certainties, and limits. Usually, they are isolated, and institutionally ignored, although, there are times in which common movements are rising, and these meta artists get some traction: Conceptual and performance artists went against commercial rule in the 60s and 70s. Dancers around Judson Church in the 60s and "conceptual" dance of the 90s-00s went against the entertainment (spectacle) rule. Certain East European artists went against the official ideology in the socialist block, forming little parallel artworlds because they were canceled from the art world. Unfortunately, there are also times, like now, when art is submissive and conservative, and the deviating artists appear to be extinct, but they probably aren't. (2023 Mai 1, Berlin) 

As artists, it is difficult to believe or even to accept the majority of religious, spiritual practices, because of intellectual and especially aesthetic reasons. An eventual interest in these things is just anthropological, or for fun. I feel that a better alternative is to create “religious”, “spiritual” practices in which you can believe. Otherwise, you become trapped in a very “critical”, cynical, dry, impotent and sad. (2018 May 17, Berlin) 

I fear entering a sort of working and efficiency mindset that is on the opposite spectrum of "Artist at Work" by Stilinovic. On the other hand, our "normal" human relationships with ourselves and nature are instrumental most of the time, so maybe Artwork can be a way out of instrumentality. "Artwork" is a good title I guess, except "work". I don't like to work and I don't like to see work. Art made through toil is showing, you look at it and see "production", uninteresting. When it feels like work I know that it's time to stop what I'm doing. (2023 June 8, Centrale Fies) 

Being creative, developing your practices could be the most important aspect of spirituality. The founders of religions, somatic methods, psychotherapies created something new that worked for them and people close to them. But, in time, their findings and their experiences tend to become dry dogmas. Reading about miraculous healing I noticed that usually it happens when people take their health in their hands and go their way. It makes sense because in this way they have their process, they create their practice (treatments) according to their particular, unique situation. You can say that they have a spiritual process, and you can also say that they go through something like an artistic process. (2020 August 27, Băla) 

Certain artworks produce a zooming out, and an apparently complete art world becomes a limited place. During our Postspectacle actions, I felt that we cast a shadow on the entire activity of performing arts with their implicit motivations and parameters. Some artworks do jumps that transcend their art world and radically change it. Through certain gestures, the limited nature of a context can become evident. What appeared as an entire world becomes only a part of a newly expanded world, and the old established perspectives become suddenly very limited. Duchamp understood his practice as an escape from retinal art (the entire art world at the time) to philosophical art, expanding what art could be. Kossuth was saying that all that was important, art currents, styles, contents of paintings, what used to be everything in art lost importance – through a conceptual perspective they're just paint on a canvas. Seeing all art as performance, would be a similar radically expanding gesture that does to conceptual perspective what the conceptual did to the retinal one. Through the performance perspective, it's not just the idea that matters, or the aesthetic of the artwork, or what it represents but everything else - concepts, experiences, activities that lead to the work - the process, the practices in the background of any artwork, the performance behind it. 

Contemporary art can be seen as a series of exits from what appeared as complete artworlds: from retinal to conceptual to performative art worldviews. This aim of challenging and surpassing itself, the implicit certitudes about what art is, this meta aspect makes contemporary art an interesting perspective, it's like a form of strange religion. This capacity of expansion makes contemporary art capable of integrating works that in other spheres are not acceptable. New forms are acknowledged and embraced by contemporary art rather than by their disciplines, which often seem rigid by comparison (dance, music, theater, literature, film). (2017 July 27, Sacadat) 

A big problem with spirituality is that it provides packaged solutions for you, for your life. This is a trap because "spirituality" arises exactly from creatively engaging with our problems. Spirituality can be any exploratory, creative way of dealing with life. That doesn't mean that you have to reinvent the wheel, for sure it's helpful to be in a dialogue with the past practices and solutions, but that doesn't mean to submit to them. They worked the best for the people who created them because what is important in them is the real process of engaging with your particular situation, not so much the final. (2020 March 16, Băla) 

There is an interval representation – performativity on which any artwork could be placed. I prefer the performativity end of the spectrum. Don't show it, do it. I'm not so interested in giving you content, to inform you, but to directly affect you, your ways of encountering the work. (2019 November 30, Bucharest) 

There is an entire thing in art right now with performance. They say that the time of the object is gone, objects tell us nothing about the new world, we live in a cognitive, affective, immaterial economy where the main activity is the production of subjectivity, so it is the time of experience, of performance. But, the paradox is that performances are expected to be objects, formalized, clean and easy to grasp, safe and easy to swallow, objects ready to sell and consume, safe protective walls between performers and audience – screens. They have to be controlled, choreographed until nothing can actually happen anymore, until they become safe images – audience, present conditions, nothing can affect them anymore – producing robots on stages, in galleries, in life. Performance instead of challenging the logic of object oriented capitalism, is completely colonized by it, transforming people and experiences into objects, images, spectacle. (2010 March 30, Bucharest) 

Florin Flueras, Arwork (2020-)

With Eliza Trefas, Martina Piazzi, Florin Flueras. 

Artwork in contemporary art contexts 

Artwork is a method that borrows from somatic, spiritual, therapeutic techniques and aesthetics but it is centered on transforming artworks into practices. It extracts and abstractly formulates conceptual and performative operations behind artworks. The operations are then embodied and applied to other spheres of life. Central to Artwork is the idea that artworks should be practiced, that art shouldn't just be seen, it should be lived. Why all the effort to create artworks just to be finished in products to be consumed? An artwork is the crystallization of a practice, it's also the documentation of a practice. If it's actualized in our bodies, it can also be a portal back to that practice. In Artwork, works that are done mostly to be looked at are activated in the bodies of visitors /clients /students, they're transformed into Artwork – an artwork and a new method at the same time. Artwork is ambiguous, it can appear as performance, therapy, exhibition, workshop, promotional event, text, artwork or a combination of these, depending on the context – art, philosophy, spirituality, therapy, education, literature. Ideally, people from many of these fields are brought together at the same event. Artwork is the meeting of these publics, conventions and perspectives around artworks as practices. 

Artwork in performance and dance 

In Artwork, works in any medium are transformed into practices and performances. Artwork embraces an ontology of art as performance – artworks are processes, rather than the products of those processes – they're generative performances through which works come into existence. Artwork takes the works from the products, objects, images, spectacle back to the performances and practices behind them.

Among the many forms Artwork can take are sessions in ambiguously set spaces, having an atmosphere between an art venue, a promotional booth for the Artwork method, and a studio for somatic therapy sessions. The performers can be seen also as gallery guards and Artwork method representatives, creating a complex and possibly puzzling situation – exhibition, somatic method launch, performance, workshop, therapy. Artwork crew can work with interested people, individually or in groups. People, ideally invited from different contexts (art, therapy, spirituality, philosophy, contemporary dance…), have to negotiate their presence there, choosing their degree of participation on the range Artwork client - spectator. For people choosing to be spectators, the sessions, with their mixture of performers and people attending them, might appear as performances. 

Artwork in healing 

The therapeutic and transformative functions of art are often minimized and avoided because of the impression that they diminish an artwork, or expel it from the art field. Yet, some artists transformed their lives or parts of their lives into art. Artwork explores the opposite, the transformation of art into life – the embodiment of artworks based forms of thinking, feeling and acting. Artwork transfers to life art instruments, processes, practices, aesthetics, exploratory attitudes, and introduces an art sensibility and attention in everyday perceptions, in the senses, in what we already see, hear, touch, feel, do. Being centered on artworks, the Artwork method might appear as paradoxical and counterintuitive at times, deviating from the well meaning, enforced positive feel of most therapeutic approaches: Most somatic/spiritual practices aim at improving strength, balance, coordination, flexibility, appearance, Artwork, through works like Collapse Yoga, listen to the deep desires of the body for asymmetry, incoordination, weakness, relaxation, unbalance, abandon, collapse, freedom. Most somatic/therapeutic/spiritual practices aim at self-awareness and self-knowledge. Artwork, through works like Unimages, makes us increasingly unknown, stranger and puzzling to ourselves and others. Most practices seek normalization and control of emotions. Artwork, through works like Unexperiences, deviates affectivity, creating artificiality and playfulness in our states, opening us to meta-experiencing. Most practices aim for more clarity, light, safety. Artwork, through works like Fear Darkness makes the body sensible to darkness, amplifying its fear – the royal bridge to the unknown. Most therapies want to enhance the stability of our reality. Artwork through works like Undreaming approaches reality as a virtual reality, as dreaming that can be eventually Undreamed. Most somatic/spiritual practices idolize life. Artwork, through works like Unexist, connects us with death. Most practices speak about love as a nice abstract attitude towards nature and others that it's good to have. Artwork, through works like Love, is interested in embodying love – it actualizes love in the body, sometimes as an ecstatic, unbearable feeling. Most practices push for sociality. Artwork, through works as Pillar Artist, agrees with Simondon that we have to pass through the ordeal of solitude, to get to the "collective" – to form the necessary affects and capacities, the body that is truly capable of community. Most somatic/spiritual practices pursue "presence". Artwork, through works like Unhere, introduces disconnections from the time, place and situation in which we find ourselves, alienations that open the possibility of new connections.

Artwork in philosophy/spirituality 

Our lives are formed by the culture in which we are, by our mental environments and embodied certainties. To shape them differently we need practices that act at the level of their structures – technologies of the self, forms of life experiments. They were the domain of religion, and they can feel disciplinary, rigid and inadequate now, many not updated in hundreds or thousands of years. If our practices are rigid, disciplinary, conventional… that's what we become. Forms of experience and practice that appear in dialog with contemporary situations and phenomena are proposed in art. It's the domain where new answers and the awareness of new problems appear. Many artworks explore new thoughts, new sensibilities and forms of experience. Not just for the sake of novelty but out of an involvement with personal and collective contemporary issues. Nietzsche saw the potential and the need to approach life through art but he noticed that, sadly, the artists are not applying their craft to it. Artwork aims to remediate this and to contribute to the urgent project of affecting the forms of life that enable the current realities. 

Contemporary art has at its core the drive to surpass itself, to deviate from the consensus and mess with its axioms, through works that expand what can be considered art. In art, and especially performance you can sometimes feel that body practices can give access to the meta-conceptual, to the levels where the implicit perspectives, realities are shaped. Artwork is interested in these meta-experiences, meta-practices that shape the quality of other practices, and what and how it is possible to experience things in general. We become what we do, our practices. We can be artworks.

Artwork in education 

Artwork can also take the form of workshops, courses or retreats. Via experience people are introduced to artworks, to contemporary approaches of art. Artworks are activated in the participants' bodies to create experiences that provoke new thoughts, perceptions and feelings. Most of the selected artworks activate body affects, capacities, experiences that introduce perturbations, anomalies and twists in self-presentations, perceptions and conventions. The participants will be also invited and assisted in creating their practices based on artworks. They can be as performative /somatic /spiritual /therapeutic as each of the participants desires and they can be ritualized to become everyday practices. This sets the conditions for one of the aims of Artwork, the participants to create their artworks as well. 

Artwork in writing 

For each work actualized in Artwork will be a text. The texts are based on notes written from inside while practicing the artworks. They combine the style of explorers' live diaries with theoretical inputs associated with those explorations. In the past, the unknown was spatially distributed, the extraordinary was geographically accessible. There were fantastic stories and speculations about places like Antarctica, Amazonia… which were firing the imagination of explorers. There were alien cultures and subjectivities that had the power to activate possible exits from the implicit certainties of one's time and space. Now cultures are more and more homogeneous. It feels like there is nothing to explore, that we already know what is, and there is nowhere to go. In this situation, art can be one of the last possible explorations still available to us. Contemporary art has at its core the drive to surpass itself, to deviate from the consensus and mess with its axioms, through works that expand what can be considered art. It's where new territories can be explored. 

Artwork at fairs 

Artwork can appear in art fairs, alternative healing fairs, educational fairs, conferences… At the booth, information and short Artwork sessions can be provided. Posters, flyers, booklets advertise Artwork events, Artwork philosophy, Artwork texts, Artwork sessions, Artwork retreats, Artwork embodied art education, Artwork healing, Artwork spirituality, and the Artwork artworks that can be activated in people's bodies and lives. 

More on Artwork

Thanks Solitude Project Bucharest, AFCN Bucharest, Artworlds Bucharest, Swimming Pool Sofia, Radar Sofa, Aether Sofia, /SAC Bucharest, Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Inszper Warsaw, CNDB Bucharest, apap – Feminist Futures.

📷 Petre Fall & Florin Flueras