Any relationship between human beings can always be reduced to a simple opposition: boss/employee, friend/enemy, teacher/pupil, actor/spectator, class/party, enlightened/ignorant, representative/people, oppressor/oppressed, man/woman, rich/poor, and so on. At the same time, it is obvious that the dynamic of a relationship is not described by such static confrontations: any form of participation in relations of production, political and artistic processes or an educational setting involves the participants in complex interactions in which originally fixed roles change and unpredictable situations constantly arise; that is, everything is in a lively state of exchange and transformation. The search for a way of uniting and overcoming articulated oppositions is in fact the basis of political life, because (setting aside certain nuances) the redefinition of equality is always at stake in an analysis of these oppositions.

Since the early to mid-20th century artists conceived the viewer as a passive recipient of "aesthetic experience" / the "spectacle of mass culture" (for example, Brecht's critique of theater that made the viewer passive and his theorization of "epic theater," the Situationist International and Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" and the Independent Group, which both critiqued the passive spectator versus the active spectator). The concept/construction of the passive spectator was also critically re-thought and re-theorized by Artaud, who called for engagement, for active spectators. Also, we can find traces of these two critiques and re-thinkings of the spectator in Kaprow's Happenings (and writings) to Bourriaud's "relational aesthetics". But, these two theories of the spectator (active vs. passive) keep not only a certain binary in place but they also assume the stability and the reification of the master/student, the intellectual/ignorant, the active/passive, etc. But, what of an "emancipated spectator" -- in which Jacque Ranciиre recently theorized? What about a transvaluation of all the values placed on the "spectator" (active or passive)? How can we re-think, without resurrecting or reifying old binaries, the spectator, the viewer, the on-looker -- as well as the participant, the relational, and all of their attendant "aesthetics" of all of these notions, theories, re-thinkings? This class will focus on Jacques Ranciere's essay "The Emancipated Spectator" (_Artforum_, Mach 2008). The reading is available at a.aaaarg.org (Ranciere, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator (Artforum).  This is a TWO session class, for 3-hour class.  No Fees.

The central theme of Lehrstьcke is the question of sacrifice, consent and renunciation – precisely the slogans that seem to represent the quintessence of ideology and the very mechanisms of deception it involves. Those slogans function as the firm pillars of ethics and morality, the core of what the ruling ideology imposes as its agenda: sacrifice yourself, renounce, consent. This is what Mr. Keuner, in Stories of Mr. Keuner, refers to as the ideology of small fish in relation to sharks: the moral education of small fish consists of inculcating that the highest aim that the fish can achieve is to sacrifice themselves for the interests of the sharks. Religion is thus the conviction that the true life of a fish begins only in the stomach of a shark (GW 12, p. 395).[1]

Me-ti said: “Every teacher should learn to stop teaching when the time is due.”

B. Brecht

Right from the outset, discussions around Bertolt Brecht's “learning plays” (Lehrstьcke) were shot through with a series of mix-ups and misunderstandings that largely determined their reception and subsequent fortune. As Brecht himself pointed out, even their name was unfortunate. In fact, by joining the doctrinaire overtones of the German word “Lehre” to the idea of a closed or finished piece that is implicit in “Stьck”, the name “Lehrstьcke” suggested that the pieces were intended to indoctrinate the public by means of the more or less direct transmission of a moral or political lesson, of content (Marxist theory) that had been defined in advance of the theatrical act. Brecht himself coined the English translation of “Lehrstьck” as “learning-plays,” a term that puts the emphasis on the act of learning rather than on what is learned, and on the process of representation rather than the text or finished work. Although the overtones of the English translation were a more accurate description of what took place in these theatrical practices, the stamp of the German expression Lehrstьcke was to have a greater influence in their reception. The learning-plays were seen in terms of indoctrinating pedagogy, rather than learning practices.

First publication - Translit #5 (2009)

Recently I understood clearly that art couldn’t help but be communist. This is not at all a manifestation of ideology, as it would seem to some. Nor is it dogma. It is just that suddenly it became obvious that all art – from Ancient Greece to the present day; that art which has overcome the egoism and conceit in itself – contained the potential to be communist. Regardless of its pessimism or optimism, such art is dedicated not to some social group but to one and all. This is not some kind of propaganda trick. That’s what happens with an artist whose art is not afraid of people. Often art is either afraid of losing itself in the crowd or, the other extreme, it attempts to be artificially populist so it isn’t suspected of being refined or subtle, or is addressed to an in-crowd of discerning connoisseurs and experts.

The emancipatory function of theater in the territory of ex-Yugoslavia has some specific traits. Since the falling apart of Yugoslavia, or better, of self-managing socialism, things have taken a turn. However, let me first dwell in the past in order to make my argument.

While the official culture and the network of institutional theatres in Slovenia (one of the six republics of the ex-Yugoslavia) had the role of mirroring the political and social values of the Yugoslav self-managing socialism,[1] there were a number of professionals who organized themselves outside the context of the official culture.[2] Theatre institutions, along with the Academy for Theater, Film, Radio and Television, represented the dominant structure in control of the production, distribution and education of theatre in the Slovenia, in which theatre was predominantly understood as drama theatre and where the literary text played the starring role. This was not at all a coincidence, as language and literature were the bearers of national identity; therefore, the theatres were one of the main fortresses enforcing this identity. Despite the monopoly over theater culture, this system had a certain amount of tolerance, which allowed deviations in order to sustain the image of tolerance. Between the late 1950s and the 1990s, we therefore witnessed the emergence of a number of experimental groups and alternative theater and dance groups in Slovenia.[3]

During the long and still unfinished post-dictatorship in Chile, in which four governments from a social democratic coalition provide consistency and continuity to the knotting between modernization, neoliberalism and progress forged by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean theater undergoes major transformations. In the period from 1990 to 2010, a professional kind of theater is strengthened, retreated into a rather self-referential practice, mainly funded by the state competitive funding system which limits its scope to academic spaces and independent theaters with a restricted public, tending to form a system that closes up upon itself This tendency has contributed to relegate to the margins, to invisibility or silence, other theatrical experiences that seek to open out different paths from the theater towards other areas of the social or political. Still, the last few years, and perhaps underpinned by the strong rejection to the recent victory of a rightist government in the country, these previously dispersed experiences, have leaned to congregate and strengthen. They are theater companies that come from different cities of the country – Teatro Pъblico (Public Theater) and Teatro Versiуn Oficial (Official Version Theater) in Santiago, Teatro La Peste (The Plague Theater) in Valparaiso, Teatropello in Talca, to name a few- which, coming in and out of the professional theater circuit, have joined different social and political groups simultaneously, and have been involved in specific social conflicts and struggles They are still incipient but decisive gestures that re-build bridges between theater and politics.

The art world is going through a period of intense fascination with collectives. This is often combined with an enthusiastic interest in pedagogy. Curators, critics and institutions champion collectivity and pedagogy as, among other things, an alternative or corrective, if you will, to the art-star economy of the 1990s and its spectacular demise. These recent interests have benefited from the enormous influence of the French philosopher, Jacques Ranciиre. Seeking an explicitly political inflection in the terms of pedagogy and collectivity, many have turned to Ranciиre's writings on spectatorship and the emancipatory potential in art. This appropriation in the visual art context has tended to ignore the extent to which Ranciиre's own thinking occurs within a nexus of pedagogy and the collectivities that occur in performance. Returning to that nexus affords us the opportunity to tease out some of the implications in this shift from the image as teleology to a performative scene of reception.

http://www.spunk.org/texts/art/sp000338.html

THE THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED IMAGE THEATER TECHNIQUES: RASHOMON

Inspired by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's study in multiple perspectives, Rashomon is an improvisatory technique that highlights the role of perception in the creation of the "Other." Rashomon is specifically designed for the study of the rigid patterns of perception that create a negatively-charged Other, in an oppressive, closed, recurring situation; as such, it is particularly suited for exploring the role of individual perception in generating biases and hate.