Text from the Whitney Biennial Catalog
Though Praxis' language is contemporary, the character of its project draws on strategies from experimental performance art of the 1960s and 70s. Through direct, yet intimate interactions with the public, for example, the New Economy project recalls the activities of Fluxus, the radical network of visionary artists who sought to change political, social as well as aesthetic perception through performances that were often absurd and shocking in appearance yet historically pivotal at the same time. It also recalls the ideas of the artist and influential teacher Joseph Beuys, whose notion of "social sculpture" substituted the traditional understanding of sculpture, and art more generally, as fixed material objects for a definition of ephemeral actions and processes that could transform everyday lives. In analogous ways, Praxis, through their interactive, nurturing performances, offers alternative modes of economic and social exchange that serve as a comforting antidote to the potentially alienating effects of today's world often dominated by technology and consumerism.
In the West, oddly, we enter, or seem to, New Worlds in years that consist of many zeroes. Whether the Year Zero, when the spirit of Christ was grafted onto the pagan body of an unwitting Greco-Roman Imperium; the Year 1000, when a now Christian but underdeveloped Europe began its long recovery from barbarian and infidel in-vasion; or our own ‘Millennium,’ with its prospects of equilibrium and prosperity (after a particularly ‘blood-dimmed,’ in Yeats’ memorable word,century) each turn of tide has given rise to previously unimaginable social and cultural forms. These ‘upheavals’ [Aufhebung], as Hegel called them, have both surpassed and preserved Art Past, and we moderns must worship (and scavenge) at the sacred mound (heb-= ‘heap’) that marks Art Past. ‘Art,’ as we have known it, the art-historical art of private, secular images for collection, was the issue of the public, religious image of recollection instituted by the rise of radical reforming monastic orders after the year 1000, transformed through half a millennium by waves of renaissant modernity and attendant ebbs of iconoclasm. We now moving around another such historical impasse. The refigured art-historical space-time that will ensue we can only dimly apprehend, but any new way of art-making will, as always, emerge, on the edges of the work of ascetics, pagans, barbarians, heretics, and nomads. From an age with neither technology nor capital to one with, increasingly, only technology and capital, new work, in keeping with our ideology of a sensual mastery of Natura, the world into which we are born, is increasingly performance rather than representation, requiring encounter and engagement more than contemplation. The work of Praxis brings together these many historical and esthetic strands in an almost uncanny recapitulation of the many, often antagonistic, cults and cultures which have fused into what we flatter ourselves to think of as a ‘ civilization.’ Rather than simply accept the rather recently invented (Romantic, not classical or ‘Roman’) figure of the ‘artist’ as the principal bearer of that culture, Praxis effects a (near-literal) return to zero in its search to join what Nietzsche somewhere calls ‘fractured forms.’ (Unlike that wounded professor of classical philology, and ultimately pessimistic visionary of Becoming Modern (Out of the Spirit of the Past), they could not have known that prax(e)is was the title given to the book we know as Acts (of the Apostles). Just as the early Church invented the figure of the ‘holy (wo)man’ when no other social agent was available to mediate the frictions of a social order in molt, Praxis conducts a prolonged inquiry into the range of social functions that a newly empowered technology of art may convincingly offer. They have diffused their art through a series of often risky modalities involving personal, at times nomadic, presence and actual reciprocity and exchange. Their work may be seen as a series of artistic enquiries using the potential of ‘skin,’ that most social of bodily, social, and sense-organs, through often risky modalities involving personal, at times nomadic, presence and actual reciprocity and exchange. Because they are artists, not believers, they work with the senses rather than sense. One could say that this is a ‘religious’ quest, but in the degree-zero meaning of the word: as the French would put it, la religion is what ‘nous relie,’ that which ‘binds us.’ But they wear those bonds lightly, ‘ joyfully,’ as Nietzsche used the term in his Joyful Science.. This is the perpetual youth of Greek techne (= Latin artes et scientiae). Indeed, The New Economy (in Greek neo- means ‘young,’ not ‘new,’ just as the most common substantive derived from techne is teknon, ‘child’), may be seen as a micr ocosm, on the most humble (< humilis, ‘[down to] earth’) and intimate scale, of the symbolic exchanges on which great religions are based. They have offered care in a choice of touchingly evocative ways: a prayer in exchange for a hand-written votum; an embrace; a Band-Aid, that industrially confected ‘second skin’ whose healing function is eloquently condensed in its very name; or a washing of the feet, the traditional gesture of welcome offered the traveler, or a dollar-note. The latter is perhaps the most lyrical gesture in the entire Christian liturgy, on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, commemorating Christ’s washing of the Apostles’ feet just before the Last Supper. Indeed, ‘Maundy’ is the contraction of Latin mandatum [novum], His ‘new commandment’: ‘that you love [agape] each other as I have loved you in order that you may love each other.’ (John 13:34). The subtle tripling of love in the injunction situates the act firmly in the realm of the symbolic, further authorizing and legitimating its esthetic, inevitably but ambiguously distanced, status. This symbolic status is further confirmed in the offer of an American dollar-bill, with its cryptic and confused references to God, trust (and to those otherwise somewhat suspect and faithless art(isan) bearers of techne, the Free-Masons)—with the culminating reassurance Annuit coeptis, ‘He has blessed our [under]takings.’ For money is, for better or worse, the ultimate symbolic signifier in the late-capitalist consumer democracy we producers dwell in, both ethereal and earthly, and without which almost nothing of what we do would be as it is. More recently, Praxis has further etherealized its practice by allowing the requests for prayers (normally mediated by paper slips perpetually available at their storefront in New York) to be transmitted electronically and honored ‘telepathically.’ Telepathy, ‘ sensing/suffering at a distance,’, whether personal or political, is in many religious forms among the highest marks of holiness, and, in a world of techne, one of the only ways to wholeness. Almost exactly a hundred years ago, one of the founders of our modernist esthetic, returning from a distant society decidedly not based on techne (and one where, interestingly, bared skin had far greater significance), delivered of a great painting that plainly uttered its own gospel. This rarety, a strip of ‘still lives,’ was, like the last work of Gauguin’s frère ennemi the failed preacher Van Gogh paradoxically influenced by the panel paintings of ultra-classicist Puvis de Chavannes, who was to die the following year). As with much prophetic wisdom, the utterance is put in the form of a series of questions: What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?. In a world bathed in flesh, both dead and live, these questions are decidedly alive. They are not merely conceptual, objects-within-an-object (although Praxis has created sublime object-based work with skin-bindings, secretions, and Band-Aid ‘paintings’), end-points of the striving of suffering art and artists. One thinks here of the work of nomadic near-contemporaries like Jamie Lee Byars, who died and lies buried in a Christian cemetery in the Egyptian hinterland where Christian monasticism was invented, or Paul Thek, who also worked in flesh and latex, in the spirit of ‘Art is Liturgy..’ They are to be (re-)conceived, and we to be engaged, directly, again and again, à deux. |
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