Bruce Barber

Bruce Barber (born in New Zealand) is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches at NSCAD University. His artwork has been shown at the Paris Biennale, the Sydney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Walter Phillips Gallery, London Regional Gallery, and ArtSpace Auckland. Barber is the editor of "Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization" and of "Conceptual Art: the NSCAD Connection 1967-1973". He is co-editor, with Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian of "Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State". His critical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. His art practice is documented in the publication "Reading Rooms". He is best known for his early performance work, his Reading Rooms, Squat Projects and his writing and theory on Littoral Art.

Reading Rooms

In his "Reading Rooms", Barber worked with Alexander Rodchenko's 1925 Reading Room as a model for a workers' library and study. These multi-part installations made use of multi-media formats to re-present various forms of corporate advertising and news reporting. The Red Room addressed the construction of masculinity through media representation. The imagery used for critical readings was obtained from various sites of popular culture including film, advertising, war history, weapons magazines and comic books. The "Newsroom" section contained newspaper accounts of male violence; the "Viewsroom" contained slide projections; the "Videoroom" contained video footage of x-rated films and a Marvin cartoon satirising male parenting bahaviour; the "Theory/Criticism Room" provided tools with which readers could alter a selection of magazines. A theoretical essay titled "Excision, Detournement and Reading the Open Text" elaborated the process they would have then been using. Among some of the aphorisms contained in this essay are the following:

3) The excision is less a surgical operation than a cognitive procedure, opening up the possibilities for renegotiating the areas of signification both within and beyond the image or text. Excising elements from the image confirms the existence of a primary context, pretexts and within the image itself, subtexts which disclose the competing economies of the sign(s).

9) Warning: Excision should not become the servant of censorship.

25) Close reading has never been a good substitute for criticism.

29) Absence only becomes a problem where power is concerned. Absence is difference (Jacques Derrida). Open reading allows readers to acknowledge the provisionality of meaning. Power and political efficacy is a function of use. In this context history may represent change yet remain the same.

30) The open reader accepts his/her status as a political subject with all this may imply.

38) Open reading may assist the promotion of critical education.

39) Critical education may become education for criticism.

Bruce Barber, "Reading Room III: The Red Room", Halifax, 1992

Operative Art

In a number of texts, beginning in the early 1980s, Barber has considered the potential for performance work to avoid its ossification into a genre category. Clearly, the type of conceptual performance art that was common in the late sixties and early seventies had run its course. While emerging forms of postmodern performance were appropriating mainstream forms of entertainment, their critical function was often weakened or altogether abandoned. Performance could possibly withstand becoming affirmative culture (Herbert Marcuse) by rediscovering its sources in avant-garde theatre. Bertolt Brecht, for instance, echoed Karl Marx's critique of philosophy when he wrote: "The theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only for those philosophers as wished not just to explain the world, but also to change it." Brecht coined the term "umfunctionierung" (functional transformation) to enable theatre to become an instrument to serve the interests of class struggle. And in his famous essay, "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin extolled the virtues of the "operative" artist, providing as his example the communist author Sergei Tretyakov, who thought of his work not merely as descriptive reporting on reality, but an active intervention. Benjamin believed that cultural practice should refuse modish commerce and should give work a revolutionary use value. This meant the avoidance of the impulse to aestheticize and the ordination of critical agency as a post-aesthetic strategy, one that can contain values that are nominally subsumed under several progressive political/aesthetic ideologies. In an implicit effort to politicize advanced forms of performance, Barber placed the term performance under erasure with the formulation of [performance] .

Since the publication of "Towards and Adequate Interventionist [Performance] Practice" (1985), Barber has explored the radical potential of performance. The table of binary oppositions below represents general differences between two types of political action, configured as acts of protest or resistance. Depending on the circumstances and the type of event, intervention can become an exemplary action, and thus devolve into a form of political posturing, closely implicated in extreme versions of behaviour characterized by violence, anarchic rejection or destructive nihilism. While exemplary actions are usually without theoretical support, interventions attempt to put theory into action. The intentions and ultimately the audience response are different. The exemplary action consists, instead of intervening in an overall way, in acting in a much more concentrated way on exemplary objectives, on a few key objectives that will play a determining role in the continuation of the struggle.

Among the artists that Barber has recognized for their contributions to [performance] practice - Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Critical Art Ensemble and WochenKlausur, among others - he gave a priviled role to the Situationist International as an exemplary model of operative art. The SI and the students they influenced participated in occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, theatrical agit-prop events and other forms of protest. The SI endorsed the fundamental importance of intervention as a post-theoretical and practical aspect of their critique of the "Society of the Spectacle" - as theorized by Guy Debord. Among the theoretically informed strategies that were developed by the SI is the constructed situation. The constructed situation is bound to be collective both in its inception and development. However, it seems that at least during an initial experimental period, responsibility must fall on one particular individual. This individual must, so to speak, be the 'director' of the situation. For example, in terms of one particular situationist project - revolving around the meeting of several friends one evening - one would expect (a) an initial period of research by the team, (b) the election of a director responsible for co-ordinating the basic elements for the construction of the decor, and for working out a number of interventions, (c) the actual people living the situation who have taken part in the whole project both theoretically and practically, and (d) a few passive spectators not knowing what the hell is going on should be reduced to action.

Communicative Action and Littoral Art

According to Barber, communicative action is very different from direct action or intervention, although it may seem to employ some of the characteristics of both. Jurgen Habermas, who has arguably done more than anyone else to theorise various forms of political action within the public sphere, distinguishes between strategic, instrumental and communicative actions. The distinction, he argues, between actions that are oriented toward success and those toward understanding is crucial. In strategic actions one actor seeks to influence the bahaviour of another by means of the threat of sanctions or the prospect of gratification in order to cause the interaction to continue as the first actor desires. Whereas in a communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect of the offer contained in the speech act (J.L. Austin). Donative and Littoral art practices work in a way that challennges the strategies of the postmodern era: taking, quoting, and appropriating.

In a number of essays on "littoral art," Barber has emphasized donative art practices as examples of communicative action. Donative art actions insist that giving can be used strategically to further a number of identifiable lifeworld and humanitarian goals, as well as provide some critical intervention into the ideological fabric of our culture. While donative practices may activate a cycle of reciprocity, gifts may remain unreciprocated. Each cultural intervention, exemplary or not, engages a "logic of practice" (Pierre Bourdieu) that encourages an infinite variety of exchanges or gifts, challenges, ripostes, reciprocations, and repressions. The logic of practice privileges agency in its unpredictability and provides, according to Habermas, an alternative to money and power as a basis for societal integration. Among the artists engaged in donative art practices and who are mentioned in Barber's writings are: Istvan Kantor, David Mealing, Yin Xiaofeng, REPOhistory, Kelly Lycan & Free Food, Bloom 98, WochenKlausur, Ala Plastica, Peter Dunn & Lorraine Leeson, Art Link, Hirsch Farm Project.

Bruce Barber, "Diddly Squat performance #2", 2003;Photo by Miklos Legrady

entences on Littoral Art

These sentences were written by Barber in 1998. Paragraphs on Littoral Art can be found on the Squat Official Site 1) Littoral art describes the intermediary and shifting zones between the sea and the land and refers metaphorically to cultural projects that are undertaken predominantly outside of the conventional contexts of the institutionalised artworld.

2) Littoral projects are lifeworld affirming as opposed to system reproducing. Littoral artists work between the private realm and the public sphere.

3) Littoral artists recognise their position as political subjects and act accordingly.

4) Social actions may (re)produce cultural judgments.

5) Cultural interventions may lead toward social change.

6) Public, community based art is essentially political.

7) The political positions that artists adopt should be followed ethically.

8) Littoral artists acknowledge Marx's injunction in his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach that it is not up to "philosophers (artists) to simply interpret (represent) the world; the point is to change it."

9) In Littoral art projects social interactions should be co-ordinated with less emphasis on egocentric calcultions of success for each individual and more through co-operative achievements of understanding among participants.

10) Social and cultural actions can be strategic, exemplary, instrumental or communicative. Communicative actions attempt to lessen provocation and encourage dialogue. They are the result of the conjoining of theory and practice into a political praxis.

11) In Littoral art projects no one individual should assume absolute control of the communicative process; rather it should be, in the best sense possible, participatory and democratic.

12) Public art projects are aimed at stimulating dialogue and participation within a specific community to engender (or engineer) conscientization, and possibly, social change.

13) The interaction between marginal groups, and their integration in such projects, can lead to extraordinary results in which artistic, social and environmental objectives overlap.

14) Littoral art helps to stimulate dialogue and elevate the standards of conversation between different communities and disciplines whose paths would normally not cross.

15) The littoral artist may use any form and employ any materials, techniques or procedures to reach his/her objectives.

16) Littoral art is more about giving than taking.

17) Within littoralist art practice, donative art strategies extend the language of the altruistic gift into a more politically efficacious education about the nature of giving and reciprocity.

18) Littoral artists acknowledge their debt to history and respond positively to successful models presented by the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes of the more recent past.

19) Littoral art projects can provide a powerful incentive for social integration as opposed to individual competition.

20) Littoral art can provide an alternative to capital accumulation and power as an indicator of success.

21) Political correctness cannot rescue a bad idea. It is difficult to subvert a politically correct position.

22) Littoral projects may become art if they are concerned with art and enter the fields of discourse associated with art theory and criticism.

23) Some successful littoral projects may begin from a position of naivete.

24) Surveillance is a form of control. Observational techniques represent methods of social control.

25) Littoral artists should attempt to understand the effects of their actions and interventions in the public sphere and learn from their mistakes.

26) Artists may perceive the littoralist projects of others to be better than their own, but they should strive to approxiamte success at every level of their social engagement.

27) Littoral projects may engage directly with an institution.

28) Once the immediate objectives of the project are established, the course of events should be allowed to unfold organically. There may be many side effects that the artist cannot imagine or control. These may be used to stimulate and/or assist the development of new work.

29) The process is social and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.

30) There are many elements involved in a littoralist project. The most important may not be the most obvious.

31) If the artist uses the same methodology in a group of projects but changes the techniques and materials, one would assume that the artist's work privileged the method.

32) Banal ideas cannot be rescued by privileging the aesthetic values that may reside in the work.

33) It is difficult to bungle a good littoral project.

34) When an artist displays his/her craft too well, it may result in the loss of the social importance of the work.

35) These sentences comment on littoral art but are not art.

External links

* [http://www.novelsquat.com/ Official Site]