Bruce Barber (born 1950 in
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
) is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in
Halifax,
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia ( ; ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. Nova Scotia is Latin for "New Scotland".
Most of the population are native Eng ...
, where he teaches at
NSCAD University
NSCAD University, also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design or NSCAD, is a public art university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university is a co-educational institution that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. The univ ...
. His artwork has been shown at the
Paris Biennale
The ''Biennale de Paris'' (English: Paris Biennale) is a noted French art festival.
History
The 'Biennale de Paris' was launched by Raymond Cogniat in 1959 and set up by André Malraux as he was Minister of Culture to present an overview of young ...
, the
Sydney Biennial, the
New Museum of Contemporary Art, the
Walter Phillips Gallery
The Walter Phillips Gallery (WPG) is a contemporary art gallery in Banff, Alberta. It was established in 1976 as a part of The Banff Centre in Banff National Park.
History and mission
Walter J. Phillips was a printmaker and painter, from th ...
, London Regional Gallery, and
Artspace NZ in
Auckland
Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about ...
. 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
![Barber5](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Barber5.jpg)
In his ''Reading Rooms'', Barber worked with
Alexander Rodchenko
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (russian: link=no, Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Ро́дченко; – 3 December 1956) was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders ...
'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 behaviour; 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.
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
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
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
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
theatre.
Bertolt Brecht, for instance, echoed
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
'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
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish ...
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
Use value (german: Gebrauchswert) or value in use is a concept in classical political economy and Marxist economics. It refers to the tangible features of a commodity (a tradeable object) which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or ...
. 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
erformance
Since the publication of "Towards and Adequate Interventionist
erformancePractice" (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
erformancepractice -
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler (born 1943) is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday ...
,
Adrian Piper
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial ...
,
Guerrilla Art Action Group,
Critical Art Ensemble and
WochenKlausur, among others - he gave a privileged 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
![Barber6](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Barber6.jpg)
According to Barber,
communicative action
In sociology, communicative action is cooperative action undertaken by individuals based upon mutual deliberation and argumentation. The term was developed by German philosopher- sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his work '' The Theory of Communic ...
is very different from direct action or intervention, although it may seem to employ some of the characteristics of both.
Jürgen Habermas, who has arguably done more than anyone else to theorize various forms of political action within the
public sphere
The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the ...
, 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 behavior 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 challenges 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
Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence ...
) 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
Istvan Kantor (aka "Monty Cantsin", and "Amen!") ( hu, Kántor István; born August 27, 1949, Hungary) is a Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and one of the early members of Neoism.
Life
Kantor was bo ...
,
David Mealing,
Yin Xiaofeng,
REPOhistory
Founded in New York City in 1989, REPOhistory was a multi-ethnic group of writers, visual and performance artists, filmmakers, and historians. The organization's name means "repossessing history" and was modeled after the movie title '' Repo Man'' ...
,
Kelly Lycan & Free Food,
Bloom 98,
WochenKlausur,
Ala Plastica,
Peter Dunn & Lorraine Leeson,
Art Link,
Hirsch Farm Project.
[Barber's essays on this subject are collected in Bruce Barber, ''Littoral Art and Communicative Action'', edited by Marc James Léger (Champaign, IL: Common Ground, 2013).]
References
Further reading
* Bruce Barber, ed. ''Condé and Beveridge: Class Works'' (Halifax: NSCAD Press, 2008).
* Bruce Barber, ''Performance,
erformanceand Performers: Volume 1, Conversations'', edited by Marc James Léger (Toronto: YYZ Press, 2007).
*Allen, Jim "The Skin of Years" Interviews with Jim Allen by Phil Dadson and Tony Green Clouds Publishing and Michael Lett Gallery Auckland New Zealand 2014
*Curnow, Wystan "The Critic's Part: Wystan Curnow Art Writings" 1971-2013 edited by Christina Barton and Robert Leonard Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi Institute of Modern Art at Victoria University press, Wellington New Zealand 2014
*"TRAFFIC: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980" eds: Grant Arnold, Karen Henry, Douglas and McIntyre Co-published with Vancouver Art Gallery (2012)
*"The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1968-1978 " Garry Neill Kennedy (Editor) MIT Press (2012)
External links
Official siteOfficial site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Barber, Bruce
Living people
Canadian performance artists
New Zealand emigrants to Canada
Canadian expatriates in Switzerland
NSCAD University faculty
1950 births
Canadian conceptual artists
European Graduate School alumni