NEWSPEAK 1: PROVOKASJON

PROVOCATION: SITUATION VACANT
om utstillingen Provokasjon, Babel 20.-25. februar
av Simon Harvey

People in Trondheim know little about contemporary art, even less than those in Oslo. Tromsø is the true cultural capital of Norway.

This statement is probably recognizable as a provocation. An outrageous thing to say certainly, exclaimed with devil-may-care bias and emotion, but nevertheless it remains impotent in its transparent subjectivity. In a Trøndelag cultural constituency that may or may not care about art it hardly creates the kind of stir that Korean artist Nam June Paik achieved in Cologne 1960 when in a fit of avant-gardist passion he cut off the necktie of fellow Fluxus traveller John Cage. But then again, wasn't that a little egotistical? Let's lend some gravitas to the idea of provocation, some objectivity, and begin again in a scienfific register.

Surely one of the greatest provocations of all time has been Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution put forward in The Origin of Species, that this year celebrates its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of outraging creationists the world over. Perhaps this monumental provocation, actually a calm reflection by a compassionate and genteel man on the savagery of natural selection, might tell us something about the competitive agitations of avant-gardist art practices. In the survivalist world of contemporary art there are, amongst other colourful creatures, two energetic species that stand out and, occasionally, fall out: Homo provocans (artist), powerful, and Homo provocandum (audience), opinionated, fit, but sometimes fit only in the sense of being fit-to-be-provoked. The former, bushy tailed, active, usually a performance artist or a maker of shocking works, feels the need to provoke and the latter, frequently ruffled, duly gets up to dance. In practice though, provocation is a kind of sub-set of avant-gardist behaviour that, though acting boldly and at its sharpest point, nevertheless stutters in its moment of action like the first few lines of this essay.

During the Twentieth Century there has been a long and continuous history of provocation in art and everyday life although none of it quite defines the idea. Futurist agitations fed into Dada, thence, skipping over surrealism which was considered too high culture, we came to Lettrisme and the Situationist International (SI), Fluxus, mail art and later punk. For many, the Dadaists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia were the most effective of artist provacateurs and indeed the latter's collected writings are entitled I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation.

In a bestiary of artist agitators some of the protagonists of Situationism and Fluxus also survive the reappraisals of the turn of the century and continue to animate and agitate the pages of our Twenty First Century art histories. It was a rich period for provocation and quite literally called for explosive action. When the Dutch magazine PROVO appeared in 1965 in Amsterdam (Constant, the Dutch architect and co-founder of SI, was a participant) it contained a diagram reprinted from `The Practical Anarchist` (1910) purporting to show how to make a bomb. The so-called `flux mass` in New Jersey in 1970 was an echo of the Darwinian provocation to creationism: priests' assistants wore gorilla costumes to the accompaniment of barking dogs, bird calls and gunshots.

Some fluxus performances have probably influenced more recent artist's practices. It is difficult not to make the connection between Yoko Ono's performance `Cut` at the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) Sep 1966, at which audience members were invited to get up on stage and remove her clothes with tailor's scissors while she knelt for an hour, and Santiago Sierra's foregrounding of the callous contractual relations involved in making an art work in, for instance, his 2001 Venice Bienale performance at which he dyed the hair of 200 immigrants, paying them for their participation. Herman Nitsch brought the DIAS event to a gory and provocative end when he was arrested for his shocking work `5th Abreaktionsspiel of OM Theatre` in which he ritually mutilated a lamb's carcass on stage and projected male genitalia over it.

How then do these high points in provocation fail to produce closure on the subject? It is partly down to the rich possibilities for extremely varied and new actions, but sometimes more negatively because they are recuperated into the very art histories that they seek to provoke or to spurn, leaving us dissatisfied with their effects. If avant-garde offerings are always laced with provocation then the same issues that act to defuse the former will apply to the latter. For instance the role of the avant-garde has been partly defined as struggling to eliminate the gap between art and life. The Situationists split up over this issue with a Debord-led faction rejecting all cultural activity. Provocation as an explosive principle of SI activity died in the in-fighting.

Sometimes provocation mutates into something else: for instance absurdity or shock for its own sake. Shock is an illegitimate cousin of provocation and it too has lost some of its power to move. Indeed, it doesn't travel well, it is often stage-bound in its theatricality, and we can always walk away from it if we so desire. The carnivalesque is another relative, or at least a context for provocation, in that social hierarchies are challenged and abused, but the carnivalesque leaves open the question, as with all confrontation, as to whether this is revolution or simply letting off steam.

So what is provocation's potentiality? Unlike shock it usually travels well and crosses borders between different disciplines. While shock can amount to little more than a brutal attack that at its worst eliminates competition, there is often a symbiotic relationship between Homo provocans and Homo provocandum that is surely productive. Somebody told me recently that provocation demonstrates the status quo that would otherwise remain in the shadows. I would agree with this modality of provocation: that it calls something forth (actually a dictionary definition of the word), but would also hope that it goes further and creates an agonistic forum for ongoing discussion; one that opens up a portal in the avant-garde to the radically new.

The recent exhibition in Trondheim entitled `provocation` might be viewed as just such an agonistic event. It both calls into being a discussion and acts as a signpost to somewhere else. When the Sex Pistols' single `Pretty Vacant` came out in 1977 its accompanying poster showed two long distance coaches with destinations `Boredom` and `Nowhere` (referencing a late Situationist image). The exhibition here in Babel gallery perhaps reassigns my opening provocation. In the centre of Trondheim there are long distance road signs that are irrelevant for many locals - for Oslo and Narvik and beyond - pointing to (in Trondheim's compass) Norway's cultural peripheries: boredom somewhere south and nowhere somewhere north.

© Simon Harvey