Launching the Poetry of My Body with the Tootsies of my Brain (Thoughts about a new MFA concept)

Abstract

Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer—the basis of the art collective Discoteca Flaming Star—present the crossing of two different texts: one that draws together the thoughts and questions that grew out of the experience of jointly directing the Intermedia Arts postgraduate programme at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design since 2011 and, the other, a pulp-fiction-like writing exercise that presents an absolvent of the programme in its master form in a near future. The fictional story also serves as a container for ideas to guide the transformation of the above-named postgraduate programme into a master’s degree in the Fine Arts/the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) body, theory & poetics of the performative. These ideas emerged in conversation with students, former students and colleagues at the Stuttgart Academy. With this text, the authors’ intention is to present relevant questions to do with the current teaching of performance art in the context of visual arts academia, while also placing an emphasis on the passing of life time when teaching, when studying. The two registers of language, the academic (contained in the footnotes) and the pulp fictional, were chosen to physically draw the tension present in everyday artmaking amid an academic context—its freedom, its demands. By writing the text, the authors hope to keep open the wide horizon of art practice itself—bearing in mind as well the constraints of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) points of a master’s degree—moving between invention and rigorousness.

Notes

1 Intermedia Arts is a postgraduate programme at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and an alternative (until 2019) to the usual required pedagogical course for students in art education. Under the direction of Discoteca Flaming Star (since May 2011), this area of study can be understood as a laboratory site for interactive and intermedial artmaking that explores fields and relationships between visual arts

and performing arts in installations and performances. The name itself points to the difficulties of grasping a kind of work that deals with the live moment as an autonomous artistic praxis, not to mention positively defining the necessary tools and methods, gestures and actions, persons and roles, spaces and temporalities.

2 Discoteca Flaming Star is an interdisciplinary collaborative art group, a group of people who use songs and other forms of oral expression, understanding them as a personal response to historical events and social and political facts. Through conceptual, visual and musical transfers, they create performances, sculptures, drawings, stages and situations whose foremost intention is to question and challenge the memory of the public, transforming old desires and finding invented pasts, or pasts that never occurred. DFS is the place where the oracle speaks through the non-chosen. DFS is a love letter written in the present continuous, a love letter to thousands of artists. www.discotecaflamingstar.com

3 Academy: It appears that the art academy could comprehend performance according, above all else, to the interpretation of performance’s individual formal components:

• ▪ The documentation of a live performance is judged as a work of photography or film. The outfitting of the space is considered installation, and the props are seen as sculptures.

• ▪ Work with time and space, the handling of objects and the spending of time together with the audience are seldom perceived as a work’s core, as a productive state of uncertainty between other material forms of production.

In favour of optimizing comparability by means of the sketch on which performance is based, performative approaches are marginalized not only within a blatantly objectand commodity-obsessed art market, but also in academic contexts. Show us: an art academy with a dance studio. Demonstrate to us: a course of study in the visual arts that includes instruction in public speaking.

4 Variation on Fehlfarben’s ‘Das war vor Jahren’, Monarchie im Alltag, 1980. ‘Wir tanzten bis zum Ende / zum Herzschlag der besten Musik / Jeden Abend Jeden Tag / wir dachten schon, das wär der Sieg’.

5 The ‘MFA body, theory & poetics of the performative’ (working title), planned for launch in autumn 2017 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, follows the programme ‘Intermediales Gestalten’ that was started in 1981 by Professor Satorious Michoux. Due to the educational reform in the state of Baden-Württemberg (Bologna model) the programme has to be altered in order to continue its artistic spirit. This new MA will be an update of ‘Intermediales Gestalten’ and will build on the structures it has established over the years: videolab, audiolab, dance studio, voice training, theory, a whole theatre for half of the year, colloquiums, writing, trips and group projects, individual mentoring, stagecraft.

6 Perform it again and again, even if only a single viewer is present. This MA does not want to be about the archaeology and the analysis of performance, but about the artistic process, the in-the-making, the thing itself. The actualization of concepts of intermediality and performativity is proposed beyond the ‘live act’; instead, it begins with the experience of image making, a kind of ‘live presence’ constructed and deconstructed through temporalities, rhythm, the contamination of the different media and its technologies through one another and the activation of different paths of publicness and distribution.

7 Our friend, the artist William Locke Wheeler, commented on this text: ‘The only thing I’m missing, content-wise, is the beauty and value of shyness, introversion and inner reflection. I don’t know, maybe that’s not in the concept because it has too many dangerous associations with the individual “genius” artist locked away in her studio, but they are still a beautiful part of group processes and the self-as-other, I think. Maybe this thought also has something to do with the active/passive continuum as it relates to learning and knowledge.’