[performative utterance] + [prostituted prop] + [performative principles] = art as research [SITE}

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A long time ago I got in the habit, never since broken, of writing down things instead of talking. It is possible that I was lead into art making because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. — Robert Morris, 2013 [Lecture @ University of Chicago] 

Robert Morris’ artistic praxis finds ground in art as research. In this vein, his substantial body of work exhibits a thoughtful exploration of the art object as performative, the viewer’s position as interventional, and the thought theme, agency, called into question. It seems a logical intent to unpack how these explorations of the performative, intervention, and agency via his use of substitution, imitation and exchange are evident in his performance, Site (1964). Additionally, his praxis and resultant works fluidly cross genre boundaries between sculpture, performance, dance, text, criticism, and art history in a way that disrupts the regulatory fiction of disciplinary coherence.

I am not yet ready to throw down the gauntlet of a definitive argument, but the above paragraph is the direction I am heading. Though if I must throw down a specific gauntlet, it will be that Robert Morris’ artistic praxis and resultant works fluidly cross genre boundaries between sculpture, performance, dance, text, criticism, and art history in a way that disrupts the regulatory fiction of disciplinary coherence. Of course, I totally stole this and repurposed it from Judith Butler’s constitutive notion of gender coherence. I have simply overlaid it relative to disciplinary coherence. Perhaps this makes Robert Morris’ praxis less inter-disciplinary and more transGENRE*. Ha. I will have to reread Butler [Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory] to see if it is a fit. Could be an interesting part of the argument, since Greenbergian Modernism is so freaking patriarchal, isolates the genre’s as uniquely discrete, and Morris pushed up against this in his praxis and essays.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy. — Henri Poincare, 1902
The abolition of logic, the dance of the impotents of creation! — Dada Manifesto, 1918
Illogical judgments lead to new experience. — Sol LeWitt, 1969

*Abstract Appendix TRANSGENRE [stolen from Wikipedia and shoved through the notions of Judith Butler | italics denote my word substitutions]

1.  Of, relating to, or designating a practice whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of genre disciplinarity, but combines or moves between these.
2. Practices who were assigned a disciplinary genre, usually at birth and based on their physiological neural activation, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.
3. Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the genre (and assumed genre) one was assigned at birth.
4. A transgenre practices may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular discipline and identify elsewhere on the traditional genre continuum, or exist outside of it as other, agenre, genre neutral, genre ueer, non-binary, third genre  etc. Transgenre practices may also identify as bigenre, pangenre, or along several places on either the traditional transgenre continuum or the more encompassing continuums that have been developed in response to recent, significantly more detailed studies. Furthermore, many transgenre practices experience a period of identity development that includes better understanding one’s self-image, self-reflection, and self-expression. More specifically, the degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity is referred to as transgenre congruence. 

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender]

Footnotes later...assume ideas are being borrowed and mashed together.

Judith Butler and transGENRE (ha)

Just playing with labels and understanding the fluidity of the less than fixed disciplines within the academy.

I don’t care for the term interdisciplinary. It is too loose, too overused and misused. It also infers a dividedness. An interdisciplinary artist would appear to dip her toe in discrete finite disciplinary pools; but this seems not quit accurate. Artists, the list to numerous to list, that are prolific in production, persistent in practice through life, and are known not just locally but more globally, tend to have a transgenre practice (even if what is publicly presented is mongenred). Like life and practice, the lines become blurry in their fictions.

At first with the unpacking of Butler’s notions of the constitutive nature of gender, I transferred it the nature of interdisciplarity as a kind of transgenre practice. So I move from Butler’s transgendered people to transGENRE practices.

TRANSGENRE [stolen and morphed from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender]

1. Of, relating to, or designating a practice whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of genre or disciplinary roles, but combines or moves between these.


2. Practices who were assigned a disciplinary genre, usually at birth and based on their physiological neural activation, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves.


3. Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the genre (and assumed genre) one was assigned at birth.


4. A transgenre practices may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular discipline and identify elsewhere on the traditional genre continuum, or exist outside of it as other, agenre, genre-neutral, genrequeer, non-binary, third genre, etc. Transgenre practices may also identify as bigenre, pangenre, or along several places on either the traditional transgenre continuum or the more encompassing continuums that have been developed in response to recent, significantly more detailed studies. Furthermore, many transgenre practices experience a period of identity development that includes better understanding one’s self-image, self-reflection, and self-expression. More specifically, the degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity is referred to as transgenre congruence
   [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender]

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Of course once I finished this play, I went to google only to discover the usual, transgenre is not a new notion. Of course I knew this would be so for even Plato (and Bart Simpson) thunk (!) all my thoughts before me.

I found Alexander Refsum Jensenius unpacking of the differences within disciplinary labels and providing a nice little visual

interdisciplinary —>  multidisciplinary —> Cross disciplinary —>  interdisciplinary —> transdisciplinary 

Responsive Textabation #3 OBJECT [gender specificity] is to BECOME as SUBJECT [the biological] is to BORN.

“…there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as object rather than the subject of constitutive act…When Simone de Beauvoir claims, ‘one is not born, but, rather becomes woman.’”  

 – Judith Butler. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay on Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In: Theatre Journal. Vol 40, No. 4, pg. 519, December 1988. 

This quote functions on a multiplicity of levels. The primary function is to establish a baseline theoretical structure to understand the nature of agency in regards to identity formation. This understanding of object and its connotative characteristics (specifically that it can only move, act or perform when an outside force is involved) will then be overlaid with additional structures such as the performativity and the theatrical to map out an argument for the social context and lack of autonomous agency in construction of female identity. The notion of object as something that can only operate under the influence of something else is critical to the entire argument. The combination of this notion tied to the implication of female identity formation as artificial and a cultural construct brings her to her real argument of gender itself, not the male or female identity, but gender as an artificial cultural construct. She circles back finally to identify the implications for feminist theorists.

—-end of requested response—-

 A more subtle but critical function of choosing to set her beginning baseline as OBJECT is the overall content of her essay, female and gender identity and agency. These topics touch such a deeply rooted notion of self, even the most mature and liberated scholaress is likely to not be able to fully strip (ha) herself of the cultural baggage she has used to navigate social space either in compliance or rebellion. So to dehumanize the subject (hmm) matter of the essay creates, oddly, a safe place for the reader to find temporarily stable ground on which to set their bags. Further her choice of slipping straight from object to de Beauvoir’s quote functions as a nice ease of readable metaphorical transition into the muddy waters of gender – OBJECT [gender specificity] is to BECOME as SUBJECT [the biological] is to BORN. This is again is a nice safe ground built on logic. We stand here as she rips the binary and gender from beneath our feet.

—-way outside the scope begins here—-

 Sigh. In navigating social space it is much easier for me to choose (as though i actually had independent agency) A or B. If the eye doctor said is 1, 2, 3, or 4 better, i’d be done for, Frankly i only seem to be able to navigate between 2 choices and even that is a challenge. Judith, I’d like to hold the illusion of a little ground to stand on please. The quote also functions to please Roland Barthes from the grave as he mubbles dirt bound, “’Author as object. Oh yes! Yes! Yes! You nailed it perfectly Butler.’”

agent as object. yes, I can only think and act under the influence

Judith Butler when discussing the doctrine of constitution, makes a distillation from phenomenological ("more radical") viewpoint that "takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts."

The notion of me as an object vs the subject screams Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" in a nicely explanatory way. An object moves only under the influence of another force outside itself; it does not stand up and walk away of its own accord. There are attributes, perhaps geno and phenotypical, inherent to the object that may impact the basis of its movement but the movement is a direct result of something else which in turn was acted upon by something else...

And to compound that we, me as object has a multiplicity of forces moving me.

As I write rebuttals in opposition to some of Plato's extremist notions, i.e. the separation of the body from intellect with the body being highly problematic and bad and the mind, the intellect, being the good, the reasoning reasonable, I am left to discover that my entire rebuttal mirrors what I've only just read in Bonaventure. So did I independently derive my notions or were they shaped hundreds of decades after Bonaventure's thinking had spread through Western philosophy. Barthe's argument would surely hold in my case that I am surely infected with Bonaventure's notions that have become embedded and remain in culture. Sigh. So I am an object writing under the influence of an amalgamation of cultural, historic, and sociological phenomenon. I cannot even claim the words to be my own since they where acquired through exposure to others already operating under the influence of language.

I am lost as sole originator because I can only function under the influence. Even within the first page of Butler's essay, I now find her pushing on the object that is me.

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Thinking and working under the influence with my blood cultural and historical levels off the chart, I may be chargeable by the thought police as not author just object. No matter that I might isolate myself I am simply not a discrete autonomous object.