This is the fourth and final preparatory post before we embark on the project “Our Ancient Group Material” with the participants of the “Democratising Classics” panel over the next four weekly posts. In many ways, these four preliminary posts, taken together, mirror the four posts to come in that they use the structure of Group Material’s Democracy (Education, Politics, Cultural Participation and a pressing case study – for them the AIDS crisis) as a way to give different perspectives on the question of democracy. Daniel G. Andújar’s project Let’s Democratize Democracy is ostensibly educational in how it calls on the active role of the people to question democratic structures, beyond the politicians who represent them. Martha Rosler’s Watchwords of the Eighties was directly engaged in pressing political issues in early 1980s US culture, especially Reagan’s economic warfare at home and foreign policies in Central and South America in opposition to the myth of “too much” democracy of the mid-1970s. Juliana Huxtable’s exhibition A Split During Laughter at the Rally attempted to find a new aesthetic for protest for diverse and gender non-conforming communities as a means of expanding cultural participation in an under pressure democracy.
For this post, we want to posit the question of medium as the case study that is at the hear of contemporary democratic crisis. While all three artists discussed so far engage with democracy in terms of experimentation with medium (Andújar’ slogan and a design (black lettering on yellow background) that is flexible in its appearance in a variety of forms, Rosler’s repeated multi-media performances and Huxtable’s video and posters for her new aesthetic of political protest), each one, in some way, returns back to the traditional spaces of contemporary artistic production, whether the gallery (for Huxtable) or the global art exhibition (Documenta 7 for Rosler). Andújar is more expansive in the contexts for his project and the use of airplane advertising infiltrates commercial media, but in the end the project is documented within a museum space.
The same return to traditional spaces is apparent for Classics. Even though the academic discipline of Classics has been open to the online journal and blogging formats (perhaps the most successful being EIDOLON), these platforms have yet to disturb the traditional venues for Classical scholarship (the peer-reviewed journal and the monograph with an established university press). We recall several conversations with both established and early career Classicists who, while writing for EIDOLON or their own blogs, still saw their main scholarly output as being the paper journal and book, with their online work as somewhat of a bonus.
It is here that we believe that the discipline of Classics can learn the most from contemporary artists who are willing to question, test and disrupt established channels and context for the distribution of their work. Consider the following example of the duo Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet, who work collectively under the name les gens d’Uterpan and their project You are a dancer.
You are a dancer was created during their residency at BAC-Baltic Art Center, in collaboration with curator Pierre Bal-Blanc (director, CAC Brétigny) and Philippe Vannini (president, Aligre FM 93.1). For the project, Vigier and Apertet challenged the limitations of the exhibition space by expanding it to the radio. Over the course of a year, they explored the radio as a democratic medium that reaches people in their own intimate, personal context, by producing a range of programs, from a 4 second jingle (You are a fucking dancer) to a hit single (Radio skills arouse the idiot czar, 3:35 minutes).
(UPDATE: In our original post we had included a link to the radio station website that archived both the jingle and the hit single isolated from the stream of the radio programs they were part of. However, when we communicated with Vigier and Apertet, when they read this post they reiterated the need for the work to be experienced within the original radio broadcast context and so generously sent us clips of the jingle and the hit single as part of the programming. You can listen to both here, with the full credits below:
Tube/hit : Radio skills arouse the idiot czar
Credits:
from October 1st, 2014 to September 30th, 2015 – Broadcast of You are a dancer
Radio Aligre FM 93.1, Paris, France
an invitation by CAC Brétigny
in the frame of their residency (2009-2014)
6 sessions recorded at BAC-Baltic Art Center broadcasted on Radio Aligre FM 93.1 during 1 year
Conception: Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan)
Recordings and sound design: Nicolas Martz
Texts: Franck Apertet and Annie Vigier
Translations: Dominic Gould
Voices: Franck Apertet, Dominic Gould, Annie Vigier
Contributions: Laurent Seigneur, Davide Napoli
Consultant: Hassane M’Béchour
French translations: CAC Brétigny
Recordings: BAC-Baltic Art Center, CAC Brétigny
Jingle: You are a fucking dancer
Credits:
June 6th – December 9th, 2016 – Broadcast of You are a dancer
Freies Radio Innsbruck FREIRAD, Innsbruck, Austria
an invitation by Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen
4 sessions one of them especially translated into German broadcasted during 6 months
Conception: Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan)
Recordings : Paul Jousselin, Nicolas Martz
Sound design: Nicolas Martz
Texts: Franck Apertet and Annie Vigier
Translations: Dominic Gould
Voices: Franck Apertet, Dominic Gould, Karin Mihatsch
Contributions: Laurent Seigneur, Davide Napoli
Consultant: Hassane M’Béchour
German translations: Karin Mihatsch
Recordings: BAC-Baltic Art Center, Ircam-Centre Pompidou
Patron: Olivier Onic
Thank you to Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan) and Karin Mihatsch their head of projects and edition manager for being willing to share these recordings).
Writing about the project, Vigier and Apertet explain that by:
Using radio, we transpose our work and the skills of the choreographer by applying his/her injunctions, orders and incentives to the listener. The displacement of the choreographer’s authority through the use of radio plays with the qualities and restrictions of the radio system itself. Our strategy lies in combining the specific character of radio and the choreographer’s authoritarian ascendancy over the body to highlight which specific conditioning and regulations our society casts over individuals. Each session applies a principle of injunction and authority inherent in or in relation to our practice (orders, exhortations, systems of enunciation, rhythmic scores). The sessions have different lengths. Their purpose is for radio broadcasting only. Each session has its own format and programming procedure according to its nature, its radiophonic status and the intended impact.
In a long interview on the radio show (which you can listen to below), about the project, they explain that they want to engage performers and their bodies beyond their physical presence, and that was why they used the medium of the radio. At the same time, their interviewer, who works for the radio station, accepts that even though we are listening to the radio, there could be a much more open format available given the genres of the medium. He notes:
When you hear something and you know it is a documentary, this format educates people and so you are expecting education. And so the authority of the radio is there in the different formats of the programs.
It is within these formats that Vigier and Apertet intervene by creating not only a jingle and a 3-minute hit, but also a news program and a documentary. So the artists and choreographers not only engage the democratic ideals of the radio medium, but also its limitations as a series of authorizing formats or genres. Our question to Vigier and Apertet is if they felt their project went too far in disturbing the traditional contexts of the exhibition space whereby it was almost imperceptible?
There is a comparable gesture for our project “Our Ancient Group Material” which, as a remote project that extends the boundaries of the traditional academic format of the panel, not only temporally and spatially, but also conceptually, could be seen as too subtle and not focusing on the mainstream (how many classicists are open to the radical effects of contemporary art on their age-old discipline?). At the same time, we still hope this project provokes a call for breaking free of this authoritative format and opening up the work of the scholars and teachers included to broader audiences through the blog format. To our panelists we ask, how far are you willing to go in aiding the expansion of the platform for for discussion about Classics and democracy whereby the very medium of that discussion could potentially explode the traditional contexts for discussion and scholarship?