Photo by Courtney Hammond.

The Lucky Penny, a new experimental performance company formed by the frenetic Blake Beckham and production guru Malina Rodriguez, launched its programming last week with a lecture by installation/conceptual artist Melissa Dyne and Khaela Maricich, the New York-based performance artist who’s also a pop musician and the founder of The Blow. After arriving in Atlanta to play a show at The Drunken Unicorn the night before, the two discussed their current collaboration: a music-based performance piece that’s currently on tour across the U.S. The event was co-sponsored by Dashboard Co-op and was hosted by The Arts Exchange in a dreamily decorated auditorium.

The event proved to be thoughtful and challenging with several interesting questions raised in the conversations between the two artists and their audience: Can there be a thoughtful pop performance? How does a public come into creation, and what does it mean for a public to have ownership of the objects of their adoration? What are the creative potentials afforded in undermining the anonymity that being in an audience provides?

Uploaded to YouTube in February of 2009, this video shows a fan singing an a cappella cover of “True Affection” by The Blow. Although it was clearly recorded at home, the video has received over 26,000 views at the time of writing this article.

The artists’ talk began with a brief discussion and an example of the proliferation of fan-made music videos for songs by The Blow (for example, this fan-vid for “True Affection”). For the artists these videos were simultaneously flattering and somewhat mystifying. Inspired by that spirit of the unexpected, I found the talk an exciting opportunity to question the possibility of political action in a world that is dominated by public opinion polls and the ecological uncertainty of the aggregate effects of an explosively growing world population.

Can there be a thoughtful pop show? The rise of journals such as Gaga Stigmata, a publication dedicated to the study of Lady Gaga, and the exploration of the “misanthropology” on websites like Black Metal Theory, suggests that the question is already off the mark, because it presupposes that there is a place (a concert venue) that can exist without being filled with thought. How is “thoughtful” antithetical to what constitutes a “pop show?”  The puzzle is more complicated than is initially obvious. And, in asking if there can be a thought-full pop show, I suspect there’s actually another, very different question to ask: Who gets to be heard?

The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their book on Franz Kafka, state that pop (whether music or writing) is an escape for pure language that allows for assemblage-making free from societal constraints. Pop might be the only place where thinking, as a generative practice, is possible. But of course, thinking is also a disruptive activity, and as such there is pushback against the kind of thinking we call entertainment. This is Slavoj Žižek‘s constant concern; just as he reached a zenith of popular appeal, his epigraph shifted from being “the Elvis of cultural theory” (The Chronicle of Higher Education) to being “the most dangerous thinker in the West” (The New Republic).

This equation works in both directions: the dangerous mind often becomes the mode of comic entertainment. When entertainment ceases to show itself as entertainment, things get dangerous. Audiences become uncomfortable as they experience the breakdown of social expectations.

Photo by Courtney Hammond.

Photo by Courtney Hammond.

Photo by Courtney Hammond.

In their talk Dyne and Maricich gave several examples of the discomfort that audiences exude when the stage is turned on them. Audiences bring certain expectations to performances, and many of these conventions are site-specific. For example, in a space that usually operates as a white-cube gallery and attracts such a crowd, the audience will be less likely to holler at musicians during a performance (unlike, say, at The Drunken Unicorn where The Blow performed last week). While performing at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Dyne and Maricich designed the sound and light system to shift the nature of the event—from the audience watching the stage to the stage and the audience becoming one thing—thus disrupting the anonymity of being in a darkened room.

Performing as The Blow, the artists draw inspiration from a wealth of movements and moments. Dyne mentioned connections to New Mexico and the impact of the Earthworks artists of the 1970s. Maricich’s youth near Olympia, Washington, was significantly influenced by that area’s independent music scene whose creed held that musical talent was less important than how interesting the performance of that music was. I found their discussion of Robert Irwin most informative, and the inclusion of Irwin in the conversation provided some ground for understanding how The Blow mobilizes aesthetics toward something larger than spectacle or decoration.

Early in his career, Robert Irwin was an accomplished painter. But as he developed his techniques, he became increasingly concerned with the act of perceiving itself. This shift in his thinking led to his installations that acted to increase the viewers’ awareness that they are viewing something. Dyne and Maricich, while showing some works by Irwin, shared a humorous (but perhaps apocryphal) story of the accidental destruction of one of Irwin’s installations when a visitor unknowingly walked into and shattered a nearly invisible column. According to Dyne and Maricich, Irwin’s response was something to the effect of “At last, my work has become invisible!” The sentiment speaks to an aesthetic strategy that would undermine the fetishizing of an art object.

It seems to me that, for The Blow, the “Robert Irwin moment” is present in these fan videos that promulgate on places like YouTube. The performers are in constant engagement with defining and creating a public, and a public is created in the circulation of a text—be it written, aural, or in some other published medium. The concept of “a” or “the” public arose in response to the widespread distribution of magazines and newspapers. We call these periodicals “publications” because they are the process by which publics are made. A (the) public is a social phenomenon in response to an historical condition.

While “the public” is a social response to the conditions of its times, a public is not an entity that can be held accountable for its actions (and so we understand that Serrano’s Piss Christ was destroyed by a member of the offended Catholic public in France last year). We legally recognize only that individuals are responsible for their actions, not categories of people. Hannah Arendt went so far as to state that revolutionaries are actually not responsible as agents of change during revolutions, because they are ultimately subjected to the tides of history. (She points to the French and Russian revolutions as exemplars of these pendulum swings in ideological and violent positions).

The Blow performs in museums, galleries, and rock venues such as The Drunken Unicorn shown above. Photo by Courtney Hammond.

In a similar manner we understand that “the public” has a disproportionate influence on our daily affairs. Public opinion polls pressure us into voting on particular candidates, not because their political positions resonate with us in particular, but rather with “who we are generally” during election cycles. So, too, pop careers are built on the caprice of a social force that cannot be held accountable in the end, yet somehow as individuals we each must square ourselves with the effects of what are thought to be aggregate decisions made on our behalf.

This is a familiar dilemma, grappled with since the inception of the modern era, and it is one that Nicholas Bourriaud‘s Relational Aesthetics took on. I am inclined to include The Blow as having a practice that meets the rough trajectory of Bourriaud’s shorthand concept. For Bourriaud, the artists he included in his survey of art practices in the 1990s demonstrated a tendency to create small self-contained utopias, or “microtopias,” as opposed to the grand visions of the utopian avant-garde. Indeed, perhaps Bourriaud’s concept also embodies this entertainment-that-is-no-longer-entertaining problem. With the exception of Claire Bishop’s critical essay in the august pages of October, the overall tone of the response to relational aesthetics has been off-the-cuff derision as exemplified in the video by someone in residency at the Banff Centre and this video by Hennessy Youngman (highly recommended!). These video responses are funny in that they challenge the potential of relational aesthetics as a tactic for undermining the current state of affairs. But, then again, what’s so funny about undermining the current state of affairs?

Microtopias may be small and perhaps insignificant to the annals of history, but they are spaces of radical transformation nonetheless. Microtopias, such as the spaces that The Blow creates at their shows, facilitate their fans’ ability to transform their mundane living spaces into stages for potentially billions to view. Many would-be radicals don’t necessarily grasp that being radical isn’t just about being novel, aberrant, or cool. Rather, being radical is about returning to the root and redirecting growth from below.

In this respect, The Blow presents what I surmise could be a successful strategy for future political and ethical engagement by demonstrating to the public the process by which a public can be made. And this can be done without a particular end in mind. Creating creators.

Click here for a PDF of Claire Bishop’s essay, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” that contains extensive background on Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas, as well as criticism of these assumptions.