I’ve recently been talking to several cultural practitioners about how to educate those with a more traditional notion of art in understanding and contextualizing today’s social practice. The notion of expanded or post-studio has been around for some time now, but the historical contextualization of social practice is still very much in formation. My own efforts in this realm have been mostly trial and error, guided by some very sharp and inquisitive theoretical minds, but the way I trace the development of social practice seems to find some resonance with others striving to do the same thing.

Now, I must give a disclaimer – there are so many multiple influences and complex practices that contribute to how we understand social practice today, but from a purely pedagogical standpoint the following seems most useful for bridging the gap. I start at Beuys, simply because he is a well-known albeit controversial historical figure who was able to encapsulate his paradigm-shifting work in a few useful phrases. Most notably, the phrase “social sculpture,” which illustrates Beuys’ idea that activities which structure and shape society are a form of art no longer confined to a material object or artifact. From this radical notion (and buttressed by decades of expanded, non-object based conceptual practice) arose a variety of mostly non-object based practices engaged in social and spatial issues.

These follow several major veins that are relatable but manifest in varied ways. I would describe them as such:

Relational aesthetics – projects focused on congenial gatherings like making and distributing food or beer, discussions, invitations, and exchange (i.e. Rikrit Tiravanija)

Systems analysis – projects focused on uncovering, analyzing, criticizing and/or celebrating current systems that contribute to a deeper understanding of how society works, often with the goal of shifting those paradigms (i.e. Merle Laderman Ukeles, LA Urban Rangers, the work of Teddy Cruz, Urban China)

Pedagogical Practice – projects focused on sharing information in a non-traditional format, often user-generated and multi-disciplinary (i.e. The Public School, SOMA, The Mountain School of Arts)

New Models – related heavily to systems aesthetics, these practices focus on modeling new (or forgotten) societal systems that undertake issues ignored, perpetuated, or inadequately addressed by current systems (i.e. Project Row Houses, Watts House Project, Victory Gardens, Fallen Fruit, various eco urban farming collectives, the work of the Harrisons)

There are of course many variations and overlaps amongst these categories, and work that does not fit so well in any of these. The semantics of these categories can also be argued about – the titles are working titles and may not adequately encapsulate the definitions I have put forth. Nevertheless, I find this framework useful as a starting point. In terms of current work, I do believe that research-based analysis of social and spatial systems (Systems Analysis) is very much where it’s at – though plenty of relational aesthetics practice still exists, more model-based and solution-based practices are prevalent.

This framework still brings up some questions for me, questions that solidified when I examined the very interesting “Map for another LA” put out by the Llano Del Rio Collective just recently. The map is meant to describe growing “collectivist activity” that in many ways fall into the “New Models” category of social practice – though the practitioners may identify as artists or not. I will post further about my thoughts on this map, but now I leave you with a few questions:

1) What core values run throughout these different practices – and why?

2) Are these infrastructural practices?

3) What institutional or civic strategies that may be focusing on the goals described above (systems analysis, new models, new forms of pedagogy) are not considered social practice – and why?

4) Are the “new models” that strive for reproducibility actually spread? Or do they only perpetuate other “new models”?

1) The role of the artwork is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.

2) The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather then the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space) points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art.

3) It is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the “owners” tour is akin to the collector’s). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion.

4) Duchamp: “Art is a game between all people of all periods.”

5) What do we mean by form? A coherent unit, a structure which shows the typical features of a world.

6) What does a from become when it os plunged into the dimension of dialog? What is the form that is essentially relational?

7) There are no forms in nature, in the wild state, as it is our gaze that creates these, by cutting them out in the depth of the visable.

1. Portray a few key ideas. Do not clutter your map with a mass of detail.
2. Lettering should be bold, clear and easy to read.
3. Colors should be standard: Blue – Water, Green – Lowlands, Yellow, Orange – Higher Altitudes, Brown.
4. The scale should be clear and easy to use.
5. Symbols should be carefully chosen and explained.
6. The key or legend should be placed conspicuously in one corner. Title, symbols, colors and scale should be clearly shown. Bordering the key will help it stand out.

To be subversive, is to wish to overthrow, destroy or undermine the principles of established orders. As such subversive cartographies offer alternative representations to established social and political norms. Maps are no longer cast as mirrors of reality, instead they are increasingly conceived as diverse ways of thinking, perceiving and representing space and place which express values, world-views and emotions. Maps are no longer part of an elite discourse: they can empower, mystify, and enchant. More critical assessments of mapping increasingly explore subversive contexts strongly associated with innovative methodological approaches, with mapping seen as an explicitly situated form of knowledge. This shift has been strongly facilitated by the increasing popularity of new media, burgeoning technological change and newly developing mapping spaces (eg OpenStreetMap, WorldMapper and EmotionMap). So subversive mapping has an agency, which can be enacted outside existing cartographic conventions. It has escaped from the grasp of cartographers: everybody is mapping nowadays.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.

~Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction’s charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer’s mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

They are two anonymous North American cartographers whose intention is to map the artistic and cultural landscape of Berlin. For 30 days, these artists are collecting personal opinions from gallerists, directors of art institutions or just art goers like those who pass by the Wooloo-organized open-art-event. They plan to display the hot-spots of Berlin’s art scene, according to public opinion, by (photo)graphic means.

Cartographer 1 and 2 started their research at the „Museumsinsel“ in the middle of May, digging for some art, finding CFA: Contemporary Fine Arts – a gallery whose name could be programmatic for the whole enterprise. The two nameless persons who’ve never been in Berlin before are dressed up like tourists, rather than middle-class gallery goers and – uniformed as they are – pretend to be unsophisticated passers-by. They are inquisitive about Berlin’s artspaces, it’s hot venues, the different types of exhibiting-models, and how Berlin’s art world professionals behave in relation to apparently external visitors. Their aim is to figure out how accessible the art community could be for those who are not a constitutive part of it.

For this purpose Berlin works as a pilot-project for the two Americans. On one hand, they collect information from their contact with experts, but they also assemble their material by meeting the art audience personally – both locals as well as visitors to Berlin. During the official meeting at the New Life Shop on 4th June, the two artists showed up in their everyday uniform to ask spectators for their personal recommendations. As well as filling in a form with contact details, they invited people to leave a mark on a city map of Berlin, suggesting sites for further exploration. The cartographers will visit these sites over the next few days, until the project ends on 15th May, at the same time as the festival closes.

By using the experience they gained from people – based in Berlin or visiting the city – and the artistic landscape, which they have illustrated in a Google-Map, the cartographers intend to create a social network which connects the places they’ve been to with the people they’ve met. They want to minimize the competition felt between galleries in favour of a more easy-going, community-based approach to the ways that art and spaces intresect in Berlin. You could understand the projects’ aim as the creation of an open space and fair play for art(ists) in the city.

But if the map appears objective, it has still been shaped by subjective recommendations, and filtered by the personal perception of the artists. Can this investigation still be an „impersonal“ observation?

The project does not only record what these two external people have found out by grasping thoughts about Berlin’s art scene. The artists also adopt the role of a transmitter: they collect information and point it outwards via a system which draws a symbolic line into physical space. The result is an immaterial „landscape“, in fact a recording of a 30-day-sequence, which is created by those who produce art as well as those who consume it, and transferred by these two artists, according to their individual preferences.

They create a model which sums up the status quo of Berlin’s art world, although in a very subjective way. To gain information from a system at the same time as observing it might not be as democratic as it is supposed to be – just like the self-referential art scene in Berlin.

The results of 30 Days’ research are listed in an online database and marked as a check-mark in an „all over the world“, well known display-format, namely Google-Maps. The venues that the artists have found are also documented through digital photgraphs and exhibited on Wooloo.org, which is an online platform for ongoing participatory art projects.

But in the end, the project constitutes an abstract corpus that the two anonymous Americans bear out from a fluctuating system. Conscious as they are of their public anonymity, their disembodied expertise is only present as a conglomerate of pictures shown at Wooloo.org – as traces of a happening that exists for the duration of the New Life Berlin festival. Apart from the live event on June 4th where people had to label venues on a physical map, the “30-days” project will only truly exist digitally.

This kind of display as well as this (con)temporary art and it’s short term validity seems to be like Berlin’s fashionable art world – moving and changing in any concern. Nevertheless – it is fortunate that the cartographers harvest this empirically captured information about the current state of Berlin’s artistic landscape: it might not be beneficial for Berlin’s art scene, which exists as a self-preserving system, but it will be an essential archive for future academic study.

Christina Irrgang

Christina Irrgang is the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin Associate and studies Theory of Art and Aesthetics at the State University of Media, Arts and Design in Karlsruhe/G and works as a freelance art critic. Contact: irrgang@iwprojekte.de www.iwprojekte.de

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But confusion and combustion occurs when actions in the name of art are thrust upon the individual without her asking. New Life Berlin, a city wide festival branded with the notion of ‘participation’ aims to explore cultural mobility, and presents art to those both concerned with the contemporary arts and those who would never think to ask. It is here at the juncture of engagement and production – reached through varying forms of involvement with the public – that questions around receivership arise.

Amongst the projects hosted by New Life Berlin, there are traditional models of receivership offered by Nathan Peters’ Eminent Domain installation, Arts and Conversation curated salons with practicing artists, and Marisa Olsen’s live TV performance Assisted Living to name just a few. The roles of artists and visitor are clearly defined; the artist creates and the public appreciate. While it is true that there are participants in the production of the projects, such as the case for Franck Leibovici’s Powell Opera, ultimately they become part of the artist machine churning out a spectacle for the spectators.

Other artists thrust their work upon the public, uninvited. Flash Job Campaign, headed by artist Per Traasdahl uses artists as ‘catalysts’ to inspire youths in disadvantaged neighbourhoods through 3 hour work placements, ‘flash-jobs’. With one unsteady foot in social work and the other in art work, these small interventions disrupt the established understanding of the role of an art producer and willing receiver. Similarly, 30 Day of New Life Berlin, presented by two anonymous artists, has begun mapping spaces of cultural interest through information gathered from the festival’s participants, but more interestingly though the interrogation of the proprietors and residents of various cultural establishments. Ask a little and ye shall receive a lot.

There is a danger however, that projects like Traasdahl’s Flash Job and Barbara Rosenthal’s Existential Interact where she approaches passers-by and gives an impromptu performance and small tokens, is perhaps blinded by a mis-placed belief that art is ‘good for us’. It is exciting and progressive to reshuffle the rigid modes of artistic production and receivership, however it is potentially offensive and presumptuous to force certain art projects upon the unsuspecting public, under the guise of positive benevolent actions.

New Life Berlin is a dynamic festival, bringing together and testing multiple approaches to participating, interacting and receiving. It is a site for experimentation but we must address the risks involved when dealing with such issues. At least one participant in the works discussed above has removed themselves from the project and we know little about the reactions of the public on the receiving end. An important but seemingly absent project at New Life Berlin is a survey of its audiences’ interpretations, attitudes and criticisms of the festival, gathered from those who ask and receive, and those who don’t ask but still receive.

By Claire Louise Staunton

Claire Louise Staunton is a writer and practicing curator currently based in London with particular interest in sonic and performance interventions www.inheritanceprojects.org

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’30 Days’ is a project by two anonymous North American cartographers in the New Life Berlin Festival who are on a mission to map the artistic and cultural landscape of Berlin by simply asking the local art enthusiasts, “where is the art in Berlin?”

During the 30 days of 1 May to 15 June Mr. and Mr. Anonymous will visit and experience art in Berlin for the first time. They will collect and link art in the places they happen to stumble-upon or are directed to by strangers on the street, tourists or fellow artists to the New Life Berlin festival and relay their findings employing a unique mapping system in conjunction with a Google-map (MAP 1), a physical map (MAP 2), and photographic images. What results is the 30 days ‘mission impossible’; a 30-day scavenger hunt for art around Berlin with no predetermined route, navigating their way through Berlin by relying on local recommendation and discovery.

This process of mapping, or cartography, has a long history dating from about 2300 B.C. Mr. and Mr. Anonymous have this history in mind and are using proven mapping methods , employing a sophisticated means to illustrate the accessibility of the art community in Berlin. I am unsure how scientific Mr. and Mr. Anonymous are about the actual mapping, but the concept is undeniably appealing. Moreover, there is a definite new development in the way they are mapping the art of the city. Within these developments, they rely on trusted methods, and like any great expedition they are depending on local people ‘in the know’ to foster this map. In so doing, they are exploiting ‘word-of mouth’ and making the most of Berlin’s artistic network and associations.

Mr. and Mr. Anonymous made their first appearance at a public network meeting in the New Life Shop on June 4th. It was a casual gathering of artists and writers who were interested in the concept of mapping the artistic culture in Berlin. This event gave Mr. Mr. Anonymous the opportunity to introduce their project whilst remaining individually unnamed. It also gave the public an opportunity to participate in mapping the 30 days project. At the meeting, Mr. and Mr. Anonymous asked everyone to mark on a large map of Berlin where art can be found. This collection of dots started the process of drawing MAP 2 and would lead Mr. and Mr. Anonymous to some suitable Berlin art destinations. I was intending to contribute to MAP 2 by marking where I thought art was to be found in the German capital, but never did. I was stumped from the get-go. Firstly, what is the definition of art? Art is not an object, a place or a space. It’s a philosophy, is it not? And secondly, all the notable museums and galleries were already taken, and there were lots of dots covering the areas I knew. Eventually, I figured a tourist like myself had little to contribute.

With a population of 3.4 million in its city limits, Berlin has a young, thriving artistic community and is growing rapidly. Artists flock here from everywhere; it’s somewhere artists can live cheaply and can find great studio space with relative ease. But how approachable are the arts without having specialist information or an artist-friend as tour guide? Mr. and Mr. Anonymous are attempting to find out by identifying all the communities of cultural expression that form the layers of Berlin’s art. They have immersed themselves in Berlin’s artistic realm. They’ve seen a lot of art spaces and met a lot of the people who make those places special. In this sense, 30 Days is a project about overcoming barriers of language and knowledge in order to gain access an art and culture within a large city area. It will be interesting to see if the documentation reveals what the 30 days perceptions of art in Berlin are. The duo have set themselves no small task in trying to articulate what art represents, where art could exist, and survey a multicultural artistic community by just being here for 30 days. A cartographical approach to such questions is unique and very welcome.

The 30 days maps are online at http://www.wooloo.org/30days/

Carali McCall

Carali McCall is an artist living in London.
caralimccall@gmail.com www.art-yo.com

Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com

Any visitor to Berlin cannot help but be struck by the cranes that silhouette the horizon. Germany’s capital is a building site, in which galleries and alternative spaces have flourished, even more since the Wall came down. A and B are aware of this shifting landscape. Whilst cartographers of the past sought to conquer the globe, these cultural nomads are using travel, observation, questioning and report-writing strategies to plot the galleries of Berlin. They work with performance, participatory actions and interventions to gather information, using spatial and cognitive decision making and engaging in dialogue with those they come into contact with.

On a scorching hot day I found myself shadowing cartographers A and B while they mapped a number of galleries punctuating the area. The day began at Galerie Schuster, Heidestrasse 46, next door to The Haunch of Venison Gallery and not far from The Hamburger Bahnhof Gallery of Contemporary Art. Cartographers A and B were wearing t-shirts and shorts, their American accents and strolling demeanor creating a persona of visitor or tourist.

The cartographers’ game-plan for 30 Days of New Life Berlin includes covert attention to the spatial and curatorial qualities of each gallery they map. They photograph the hanging of work and the architectural construction of the gallery, and can be seen surveying ceilings and the hidden surfaces and structures of art works. Attention is paid to lighting: I was surprised to be told that many of the city’s galleries use strip-lighting. Each gallery is evaluated for it’s openness to the cartographer’s questions and visitor information. A and B variously adopt roles as performer, detective, evaluator, researcher, and distributor of information.

We continued to Infernoesque Projektraum, situated in an industrial building at Heidestrasse 46-52, and then on to Zern, a gallery where Andreas Gefeller’s show Supervisions investigates the layering of the unnoticed inner workings of buildings and urban landscapes, photographed from above. Then, nearby, a cobbled walkway and a row of six inter-connected, converted warehouses: Hallen am Wasser (“Halls on the Water”), a complex of galleries whose exteriors are cloaked in a grey fabric facade, which houses painting, sculpture and installations. As A and B continued their rituals of observing the spatial and curatorial qualities of each gallery, I felt a heightened engagement with my surroundings. As we returned to the massive Armadillo like glass shell of Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s Central Station made up of 9,000 interwoven sections, I was acutely aware of having been both participant and spectator in this work.

A and B engaged in another mapping strategy later that day, giving what they said was a performance involving the audience and participants of New Life Berlin Festival at The New Life Berlin Shop in Choriner Strasse. Participants were asked to highlight their favourite cultural locations on a large walled map of Berlin. As they made their marks the purpose of the paper map was altered; from a tool for mapping routes from one place to another, it became an interactive, layered alternative urban and cultural narrative.

The research outcomes accumulated by A and B can be seen on the Wooloo website http://www.wooloo.org/30days and includes three links leading to images, gallery listings and a Google locator map. Its topography can be seen as setting up interconnections between different gallery locations, looking beyond the surface, as if interrogating the gallery substratum of the city. Beyond this, the 30 Days link gauges the ease of cultural integration for the ‘outsider’ who might be a tourist, foreigner or stranger. These strategies raise an awareness of the limitations of cultural language,and question the notion of truth and the hierarchy of art speak,- the self-serving industry chatter that conforms to a system not made clear to outsiders.

The cartographers’ construction of social and cultural maps creates an alternative dialogue and narrative, permitting visitors to the website (and Berlin) to position themselves both as outsiders looking in (and insiders looking out). But is the listing of gallery information and thumbnail images enough to actively engage an online audience? My own live participation enabled an entry point that most other visitors to the 30 Days of New Life Berlin could not have. At the same time, this online information invites its audience to undertake their own mapping and exploration of the galleries in Berlin, and has the potential to radically alter online cultural and social mapping.

Ann Rapstoff

Ann Rapstoff creates performances, interventions and events. She is co-curator of ArtWash. www.annrapstoff.co.uk, www.artwash.co.uk.

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