HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview

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Two Sentence Description

Using the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens), PME-ART will warmly welcome each person who enters the gallery. Together we will examine the intersections between community, audience, data and real life.



Short Description

HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview blurs the lines between performance and installation. As you enter the gallery you are given a pad of post-it notes and asked a series of thought-provoking questions. The post-it notes with your answers are stuck onto the wall in a grid with all of the others. The members of PME-ART then attempt to understand something about everyone who enters the gallery by placing the post-it notes into categories. (Feel free to disagree with the categories your answers are put into.) By putting the answers into categories we’re trying to learn what we all have in common. To find out how we all are, and are not, a community. To achieve some sort of overview. However, because each of the answers we receive will likely be unique and complex, it will require our full creativity and humour to find categories that actually make sense. This is the challenge we have set for ourselves, an examination of the intersections between community, audience, data and real life.



Long Description

You have an appointment. You don’t understand precisely what the appointment is about but the person who randomly phoned was extremely charming, their ideas in and around hospitality seemed intriguing, and you have a bit of free time so, what the hell, you decide to take a chance and attend. The appointment is at the artist-run centre Articule so you suspect it will have something to do with art.

When you arrive at the gallery you are handed a pad of post-it notes and told you will be asked a series of questions (we are thinking of around six). You should answer these questions spontaneously. Your entire answer must fit on one post-it. Your answers will be anonymous. As you write down each of your answers, the post-it note is taken from you and placed on the wall. The entire gallery is covered in rows and rows of post-it’s, each one containing a single answer.

Soon you to are taken to the wall, to a specific section of the post-it note array, and you watch as post-it notes are rapidly removed from the rows and placed in smaller groupings, each grouping representing a ‘category’. You watch as your own answers are placed into different groups and listen to the explanations. You may also not agree with a category your answer is being placed within and you can certainly say so, discuss these decisions and how they are being made.

And yet as soon as one series of categories are established they are just as quickly undone, the post-it notes placed back in their original rows as the process begins again, as a completely different set of categories are tentatively set out. For example: answers that suggest ‘power comes from the self’, answers that suggest ‘power comes from working together with other people’ and answers that suggest ‘power is something we are subject to, that it comes from above’.

As this process of categorization and re-categorization is enacted, together the spectator and performers can think about how such processes are in many ways arbitrary, at the same time seeing whether or not they can also shed new light on the original questions, whether or not we can make interesting observations about the community of people who have agreed to partake in this experiment. Of course, as you watch, this process also makes you further consider your own approach to this very particular game.

This is just one of the ways people might experience PME-ART’s gallery-based project HOSPITALITY 2. We will also take the post-it notes out onto the streets, into cafes and restaurants, to parties, learning everything we can about the community of people willing to answer our questions. During the four-week span of the exhibition there will be events and discussions that will question and re-invent the project from different angles, culminating in a performance on the final evening in which we arrange and re-arrange the post-it notes in every possible combination, constantly explaining and re-imagining as we go.

HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview uses the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens) in order to examine certain intersections between community, audience, data and real life. But at the core of Gradually This Overview is a distinct paradox. On the one hand its questioning produces the widest possible range of responses, showing individuals in all of their personal eccentricity and diversity. On the other hand it attempts to categorize these answers into meaningful patterns, patterns that the extreme diversity of the answers constantly reject and defy. If we were simply to ask people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions it would be very easy to turn their answers into data. We are definitely not choosing the easy route. Instead, we are much more interested in the paradox of seeing what happens when we allow the full diversity of human response to crash into our attempt to arrive at a meaningful overview of some kind of community.



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A short video regarding HOSPITALITY 2

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A short video regarding HOSPITALITY 2.



HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview
A project by PME-ART (Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren)
Installation / Performance
April 23 – May 16, 2010


We are in the gallery during gallery hours:

Wednesdays & Thursdays: 12pm - 6pm
Fridays: 12pm - 9pm
Saturdays & Sundays: 12pm - 5pm

Performance: April 28, 7pm
Artist talk: May 2, 3pm
Finissage/performance: May 14, 5pm

At Articule
262 Fairmount O.
Montreal, QC
www.articule.org

Feel free to drop by any time or make an appointment at
hospitalite-hospitality@pme-art.ca or 514-284-3113



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Yes, of course none of the questions are so simple and I certainly don't have answers (and I am concurrently terrified that I'm becoming something a bit like a "didactic Marxist professor.")

It's a tepid cliche, but I guess I just think everything is, in one way or another, political. I like what Boris Groys says when he says: art that says it is not political is in fact political in favor of the market and in favor of the current status quo.

I also like what Brian Holmes says when he says: what he likes about using the word "we" is that one never has the right to do so, it is always an attempt to call forth some collective action and some temporary collective form of agreement.

Of course I also want to be successful, In fact, sometimes I think I'm the most purely careerist person I know. So life is full of such contradictions. But I also want to struggle with them. (Though of course I also fear being a hypocrite.)



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The word political...

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It suddenly struck me how the word political, in circles I frequent, is so often used to mean progressive, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, etc. Of course this is only one side of the equation. Fascism is equally "political", the Christian right are also very much political, etc. This one-sided use of the term, a kind of common-usage Freudian slip, which I myself am frequently guilty of, somehow relates to the absolutely intractable nature of the situation. An inability to naturally, and therefore usefully, reflect from both sides.



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Environmental Disco Metal



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Throwing molotov cocktails at Cirque du Soleil.



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A novel about an actor...

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A novel about an actor who gets cast as the lead in a big-budget Hollywood action film, thinks the script is complete garbage, the premise reactionary, and hates ever moment of shooting it. Critique of culture comes as no surprise.



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A list of titles from 2010

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As close as possible to absolute sincerity.

The stories we tell ourselves (about ourselves) are not necessarily true.

Decadent Formalism.

The Fascist Now.

Animal Promises.

How not to be irrelevant.

Resistance As Work-In-Progress.

Secret Societies of Canada and Quebec.

To Take A Stand.

Unofficial and Superficial.

Your suggestions, once again made possible.

It’s a thin time for culture.

To be in the world but not of the world.

We had planned for all of this to go differently.

I knew it was an idea that would get me in trouble.

The power of humor to end thought.

Not enough and too much.

The untrained mind shivers with excitement at everything it hears.

Revenge fantasies of the politically dispossessed.

Don’t expect.

Individualism was a mistake.

Blood is a very specific color.

We saw it all happening.

Fascists of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Immanence.

People are damaged, people are insecure.

A radical cut in the texture of reality.

Turbo-Capitalism.

Sublime Resistance.

Systems of difficulty.

With my best work behind me.

In the future there will be no art, only really great dinner parties.

Almost happiness.

Let’s all be ashamed together.

Some favorite books.

Perfection made easy.

I had meant to fail.



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The ten styles

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The ten styles

(I) The choku tai, the style of “things as they are.”
(II) Rakki tai, the style for “mastering demons.”
(III) The Kamo no Chõmei style: the “old words in new times.”
(IV) The yugen, the “style of twilight.”
(V) The yoen, the “style of ethereal charm.”
(VI) The awareness of things, the mono no aware.
(VII) Sabi: rust; solitude.
(VIII) The ryohõ tai, “style of the double.”
(IX) Ushin: “deep feeling.”
(X) Koto shirarubeki yõ, “this should be,” muss es sein.


- Jaques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London



(A longer explanation of the ten styles in the post directly below.)



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Old words in new times

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In fragment 252 of a book, Autobiographie, chapitre dix, I wrote the following:


Thus, approaching forty, the age when life becomes as delicate as dew, like a hunter building for himself a hut out of branches for the night, like the aging silkworm spinning its cocoon, I constructed a final shelter for my body. If I compare this dwelling with what was formerly mine, it’s truly a very tiny shack. In my declining years, my dwelling shrinks.

My present “house” covers a thirty-one square foot surface and is six feet high. Since I no longer need a stable home, its foundation is simply set on the ground. Thus I could easily move elsewhere if some unpleasantness arose. Presently I have paused in the scrub, near Villerough-la-Crémade: at noon I built a canopy, added a small terrace of reeds and, inside, against the western wall, in a niche I placed the portrait of Kamo no Chõmei, which I shift slightly each day, so that his face is lit by the rays of the setting sun. Above the sliding door, I install a small shelf where I put three volumes of poetry, my notebooks, and a pot of basil.


In the book, the description of the hermit’s retreat is protected by two other fragments (notebook “pages,” numbers 253 and 254) which are pages of silence, respectively:


page of silence, prose


and


page of silence, poetry


As a hermit, I place myself under the authority and example of Kamo no Chõmei, the poet-hermit of thirteenth-century Japan. The hut contains his portrait and the description itself is transposed from Chõmei’s own hut, site of his own seclusion after the great fire of Kyoto.

This fragment is written in a special style, invented by Chõmei, which he calls “old words in new times.”

Like other medieval Japanese poets, Chõmei has left behind his list of styles, the very one I chose to guide my own footsteps through the novel’s prose.

Chõmei’s choice was not accidental. Before his great “stylistic” decision (to live in seclusion), he was closely connected to a strange poetry enterprise, as secretary of the “poetry office” of Emperor Toba II, he was one of the chief compilers of the Shinkokinshu, the eighth imperial anthology, great “poem of poems” from which I drew one of the most constraint-bound visions for my Project.

Since The Great Fire of London was to be a story of the Project, this explains why I decided that it would be composed as a story in ten styles, in his honor.

The ten styles

(I) The choku tai, the style of “things as they are.”
(II) Rakki tai, the style for “mastering demons.”
(III) The Kamo no Chõmei style: the “old words in new times.”
(IV) The yugen, the “style of twilight.”
(V) The yoen, the “style of ethereal charm.”
(VI) The awareness of things, the mono no aware.
(VII) Sabi: rust; solitude.
(VIII) The ryohõ tai, “style of the double.”
(IX) Ushin: “deep feeling.”
(X) Koto shirarubeki yõ, “this should be,” muss es sein.

In the course of the preceding chapters (and in this very one here), I’ve already mentioned some of these styles, the yugen, the rakki tai, the “style of the double” (this indirectly by emphasizing the “double” nature of the photographs entitled Fez, and elsewhere; by double, I mean both an object (of thought, or of prose, or of poetry, or images), and its “style,” in this particular sense: it’s a double in the “style of the double”). This was to provide a perpetual resource for my novel, a trace of which remains in my present effort.

The interpretation given to these styles, transposed in haphazard fashion from medieval Japan to the nighttime bedroom of a mock hermit in the waning years of the twentieth century, was to be quite obviously an invention, I made a great effort to steep myself in my understanding of these styles (within the narrow limits of poetry, disregarding the religious dimension). I made a particular effort for style (VI), mono no aware, gathering under this title a French recreation of 143 poems selected from the imperial anthologies (this book also contains a selection entitled sabi (style VII)), but I know full well that I am a long way from clearly fathoming the original meaning (which moreover seems rather difficult to grasp nowadays even in Japan, if I can judge by commentators’ contradicting interpretations. In addition, each poet seems to have had his own interpretation of the styles, and even his own list: Chõmei’s is not Teika’s…) Therefore, I had rather blithely and obliviously appropriated this very suggestive division of the ways for approaching a prose-written reality (written in poetry as well, the poetry specific to the project.)

To each branch of The Great Fire of London there was to correspond, not a style, but rather a sort of characteristic “cocktail” of styles, composing a complex stylistic figure, governed by constraints. With this goal in mind I had forged myself a vision of each of the styles, based on the original examples I had been able to collect, but above all (rapidly abandoning this point of departure), based on a meditation focused chiefly on their names. Free to choose, I was able to test the invention of a thing by “deducting” it almost entirely from its name (and from a few elements of a “definite description,” like in the already mentioned case of the yugen). The totality of a prose narrative world would thus be divided up into areas dominated by a single style or a combination of styles, like colors.

- Jaques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London



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