Outtara Watts is a contemporary artist from the Ivory Coast of West Africa.  An interview Outtara did with American critic Thomas McEvilley, one which he had hoped would help move his art forward on the contemporary art scene, something happened; disappointment. At the beginning of the interview, introductory questions are asked which (very slowly) move into a few questions regarding art in general, eventually leading to McEvilley finishing the interview without talking to Outtara about the artworks he is creating.  Through this, enters the realm of a third space, which is constructed only to please the audience.

Third space is a relatively new idea and is best defined as a space in which cultures meet, at least on the surface. It is a very superficial melding of cultures and little to nothing is actually known by each culture of the other. Popular culture plays a very large role in creating third space through literature, media and technology.

Magazines like National Geographic do a phenomenal job of photographing tribes of third-world countries and giving brief histories of their traditions. However is there any real indication that these stories are not simple speculation or that they very lightly skim the surface of deeply rooted traditions created over thousands or millions of years. The United States and much of the West has no idea and probable does not care about the indigenous tribes of South American people being pushed from lands their ancestors have been on for centuries, they only care about a good story. Publishers realize this and use it to create a more desirable product.

In the West, reality television is something everyone hates to love; it is the true definition of a guilty pleasure. But is it really reality? The people starring in many reality series are paid millions of dollars to be filmed on a day-by-day basis doing whatever it is they do. But if you are to look at a series such as Survivor, one of the first reality tv-shows, you begin to question what reality is. Apparently its a bunch of people on a “deserted island” competing with one another for a prize of a million dollars. WHEN HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO ANYONE IN REAL LIFE? NEVER. Its all about ratings and money, that is in no way reality nor will it ever be.

Now back to the interview between Outtara and McEvilley. The questions McEvilley raised regarding schooling and upbringing were questions Westerners would truly be interested in, but that just shows the simple-mindedness and naivety of the industrialized world. Not only were these questions uninquizitive, they were demeaning to Outtara as an artist and person, much like reality tv is to reality.

Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist who was educated at Harvard and is credited with the ‘race card,’ but I digress. In her article entitled Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness, she outlines a persons belief system and what sorts of interactions have the power to change that person’s ideology. Piper also notes how ideology is pernicious (wicked) in that it makes people behave idiotically, and selfishly, but also the mechanisms that ideology uses to protect itself.

Piper outlines three of these protective mechanisms as follows:

The false identity mechanism is the use of what a person believes as objective fact to support their own self-esteem and having the confidence to label themselves as normal. In other words thinking of homosexuals as strange or unequal, blacks as ignorant and/or unequal, and sadists as perverts. Stereotypes play a large role in the false identity mechanism along with inequality. Inequality has plagued society for millions of years, and likely always will, but it is truly a social construct and identity mechanism that people use to feel better about themselves.

The illusion of perfectibility mechanism grants justification to personal opinion.  The opinions of others do not matter simply because you have created enough support in your head to change your views regardless of counter-evidence. This mechanism creates arrogance in people which in short leads to isolation because people do not like being in the company of those who are intolerant of other’s opinions or beliefs.

The one-way communication mechanism resembles the prior mechanism in many ways.  One-way communication creates a personality not welcoming to critics (because any question of your attitude or ideas is taken as a personal attack) and counting those critics as immoral or psychotic. Morality is subjective and everyone has different morals, without this the world would be a boring place. However, if someone is unwavering in their morals, they use one-way communication to rebel or outcast anyone who thinks differently.

In essence, society is inherently wicked. There is a constant urge by most people to stand up for their views and shoot down the views of others. Communication plays a huge role in not only influencing a person’s ideology, but also deconstructing that ideology. Intolerance of race and sexuality are constructs instilled by parents and early influences that are hard to modify. These ideas become even harder to influence or deconstruct if a person is arrogant or unable to communicate well with others.

Performance art can be demonstrated in many ways and is usually linked to theatre and the fine arts. However, performance has changed since the turn from modern to the post-modern, and artists are thinking of new ways to illustrate their ideas with their bodies. Happenings are loosely scripted shows where the artist controls the reigns and the audience becomes part of the piece. Shoot, by Chris Burden in 1971, is the perfect piece to compare to a Happening because while it was scripted, it did not go as planned.

Chris Burden described this performance by saying “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” In Burden’s plan, the bullet was supposed to merely graze his arm; however, as you can tell from the picture above this was not the case. Burden’s “friend” (who would shoot their friend) aimed too closely and from 15 feet away shot through his arm. This may not be the case as Burden may have flinched when the shot rang out, but honestly either of the two could have easily happened. Taking into context, this was during the later years of the Vietnam War. This was the first war Americans were able to watch on television and one year after draftees destroy their draft cards in Washington, D.C.. Burden is commenting on the Vietnam War. Thousands of young American men were being drafted and being shot at in Vietnam, simply because they weren’t pursuing a higher education. Nonetheless, the American Government was sending people to get shot at.

Now I move to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and Femen, a feminist group that often go topless or nude into public space and protest religious, political, sexist, national and international topics. These women protest everywhere from political rallies to church courtyards on the Sabbath day. Many are beaten, and arrested, they even staged a kidnapping of a Clergyman (or at least I think it was staged….).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbyQorX9IXQ

Now compare this to Shoot. Shoot was scripted, something could have gone wrong (and did), and it had a purpose. When Femen made this video, they had a plan (or script), there were chances for something to go wrong (Police arrest namely), and they had a purpose. The purpose being to comment on the people who go missing in Ukraine simply for being political activists and trying to raise awareness about corrupt government.

Both of these acts are related to the Happenings of New York because of the loosely scripted act and the engagement of the audience. Chris Burden had his friend, a member of the audience, literally shoot him (insane), and Femen kidnapped a Clergyman outside of what seems to be a church in daylight with people around; both these cases show a great importance of audience. While Happenings don’t require the use of the body, performance art is strengthened by the body, creating a human to human connection.

In Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane, he first discusses the printing press and uses it to characterize the the changed content of a pictorial surface by its resting angle with respect to human posture.  In other words, historically, the top of the plane is where a humans head would be and the bottom towards his or her feet.  Looking back to Renaissance paintings, this vertical positioning is essential to their style. 

Now fast forward a few centuries to the 1950s in New York and you see the work of Robert Rauschenberg.  Rauschenberg set out to change the experience of art by promoting the flatbed or work-surface picture plane.  He was not only changing the angle of imaginative confrontation, meaning he was changing the way the viewer looks at art and therefor changing the context completely, but in a Greenbergian sense creating art for art’s sake.

With Pilgrim (1960), Rauschenberg incorporates a chair into the painting.  This is not only abstract expressionism, but it changes the picture plane by making it three-dimensional.  The other dimension he adds does not have nor does it add context to the painting; but its simply a chair with stripes that match the pattern of the painting but are not the same color making the chair and painting [collectively] fall under Greenberg’s idea of art for art’s sake.  While it doesnt have so much to do with the active movements and brushstrokes of the artist like a Jackson Pollock painting, it does take the context away and insert the viewer into something they may not be completely comfortable with receiving.  Rauchenberg created a picture plane that is not relatable to anything before it and is a cross of abstract, representational, pop and modern art all collated into one magnificent genre.

However the most relatable aspect of Rauchenberg’s work is the expulsion of the medium into the third dimension and this inclusion of pieces people use on a day to day basis.  While these everyday pieces still lack context for the most part, it does add to the connection of the viewer to the artist creating a bridge between the two and allowing the viewer to be included in the artwork by adding their own imaginative confrontation.

Modernist art can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in which technological changes created cultural changes for much of the West. Postmodernist art was designed to contradict modernism, critique social norms and entice revolution, breaking apart the capitalist, democratic and industrial ideas brought about by modernism. Terry Barrett even says that “Postmodernism does not merely chronologically follow modernism, it reacts against modernism, and might better be called anti-modernism.” Postmodernist criticize modernity claiming that it shepherds ideas of oppression of people even though there is a promise of freedom and equality with modernism.

The split between modernism and postmodernism is truly a split between art which is considered aesthetically pleasing and art which often reaches the borders of what art actually is.  For instance, if looking at a painting from the enlightenment period, there is definitive evidence it is a painting and it looks beautiful. But then you look at a Happenings from the 1960’s in Andy Worhol’s studio and question what the word beautiful means and if it can be interpreted objectively, only to come to the conclusion it cannot.  Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder and that is one thing postmodern artists strive to do; break down the barrier between aesthetics and beauty, showing they are not related.

Postmodernism also brought about artists like Jackson Pollock and with Pollock art became more of an act than a final piece; thats not to say his works aren’t worth thousands of dollars. With the rise of Jackson Pollock’s popularity came what is known as abstract expressionism. Pollock said his paintings were not made to beautiful, but he made them to express how he was feeling, and this expression was the art. Furthermore when looking at the concept of “art for art’s sake” which was brought up by Greenberg and was aimed at taking the context out of art and straying as far away from it as possible and tying it back to postmodernism there is a simple link.  This goes back to the idea of postmodernist art breaking down modernist art by not looking at the final piece, but at the artist and the extension of the artist into the work or the artist making the work an extension of themselves.