A question about the Mona Lisa...

So here's one i've been waiting to write for a while.
I may be officially able to die in peace, because i've seen the mona lisa. I didn't have some longing to see it, per se, but it felt like one of the many things that one should do before senility sets in, or at least that's what we've been taught.
Now, to be clear, i really enjoyed seeing it. Really. It was exciting and beautiful, although small, and if i could re-live the experience, i would pick seeing it over not.

But.

But the thing that stuck out to me the most, was the most exciting and horrible and interesting, was the crowd around it. Holy Shit. I can't even do this crowd justice describing it here (which is why i've included pictures). And more than the crowd itself, the feeling, the engineering of the build up of excitement. Interesting. Let me walk you through it.

When you go to the Louvre, you're going to see the Mona Lisa. It's already set in stone. If you're not going to see the Mona Lisa, then you are making a statement about your disinterest in or disregard for the Mona Lisa, and so your visit is still somehow in reference to the Mona Lisa. The Louvre knows this. So the second you walk in, there are signs pointing you towards your assumed destination. The Louvre is massive, packed ceiling to floor with paintings, impossible to see in one day. So no matter what you've planned, there's a sign - a picture sign that anyone can understand, it's important to note - redirecting you toward the x-marks-the-spot of the arguably most famous piece of art in the entire world.

The Mona Lisa is small. Very small, compared to most of the other paintings in the Louvre. It hangs solitary on a large white wall, which stands in the middle of the room, so that when you first enter the room, you must walk around to the other side of the wall to see the painting. As such, the first thing you see isn't the painting itself, but the massive massive crowd.

In front of you, held a good eight feet back from the painting by a moat of velvet ropes, is a noisy josteling crowd so multi-ethnic the united nations would be proud. Everyone wants a piece of this painting. This crowd is impressive, to say the least. All ages of people crane their necks and lift their children, just to get a glimpse of this magnificent illusive woman. People snap pictures and thrust video cameras over and over and over again, looking more through their viewfinders than their eyes. Everyone wants the experience, everyone wants a piece to take home. The irony of madly trying to capture this masterpiece, famous for its illusive and unprocurable nature, on homevideo (to take home and do what with, exactly?) seems to be very much lost on the crowd.

You have to see it to really understand, but i was very struck by watching this crowd. On one hand, here was art - not TV, not "entertainment", but art art getting more attention than i had ever seen or imagined. As someone who feels that the arts are constantly under funded and appreciated, i felt proud. I felt important to be an artist. On the other hand, there was such a gross feeling about how this art had been made into some sort of empty celebrity - a paris hilton or hedi montag - famous because it's famous but that's it. So what was is? How was i supposed to feel about this experience that was simultaneously such a triumph and travesty in my mind? I still don't know.




What i am more clear about is the questions that this experience brought up for me:

1. Is it important that art be important; in other words, does the promise of a small percent of "great art" being valued as highly important, or the idea that art is somehow of great value in our society in some way aid or promote the actual work? What does the end reception have to do with the making?

2. Is it a bad thing that people are so excited to see something, only because they've been told it's important? Is this "empty celebrity"? Is there any use for it?

3. Is there a way (and what are they) that PMD (or any art for that matter) can use the idea of creating some sense of celebrity/excitement/great-art-fame to gain viewers or support in a way that aids the art rather than depletes or overshadows it?

4. Are we better off not having a Mona Lisa of modern dance?

Day 1 - Identify the Probem(s)

So here we go - day one of my Kloster-woman mini tirade/educational exposition of hypermedia.

Before we get into the technology, bodies, or theory of what hypermedia consists of, it's important to understand where my perceived need for it comes from. Why does PMD (postmodern dance - i'll use this here to represent the time period that i'm referring to, not necessarily the specific values or artists) need it? What is this new technology attempting to save us from? What problems does it attempt to address?

Ultimately, from status and stagnancy in our work, and from the eventual unspeakable:
having to stop making work.

1. People don't know what to do with PMD.

People don’t know where to place postmodern dance. While we as a dance community existing in academia may have taken classes in dance history, or at least been educated through asides in dance classes about lineage and styles, people outside the dance community who find themselves viewing dance may not have ever been exposed to this.
New choreographers attempt to redefine what postmodern dance is at a very rapid pace through the self-proclaimed authenticity of their own new work; even if choreographers don’t acknowledge that their work is in response to work in their near historical proximity, postmodern dance is founded on the tenet of breaking with what came before and defining one’s own unique style and outlook. The dance community may be aware of how to contextually view new work, but a non-dancer would have trouble tracking the constant evolution and re-definition of the genre. This leads to problem #2:

2. We make dances primarily for an audience of "dance people".

While i don't think that there's anything particularly criminal about this - why not make art for the specific niche of people that will understand it to the fullest extent? - i think that staying in this place as an entire arts community is actually really hurting us, an inherent weakness that we've yet to address. Many people who are not writers read books, many people who can’t act see theater, and many people who can’t operate a camera or write a screenplay see movies. When non-dance people continually feel that they “don’t get” what they are seeing in a dance performance, thy begin to lose interest with why PMD is important or interesting. Why is this?

3. Ephemerality and permanence.

How many times have we herd the phrase "dance is ephemeral"? Since January, nine. I counted. Ephemerality becomes the excuse for why dance can't be studied, becomes the reason why it's hard to pin down, becomes the nail in dance's economic coffin. Why? Because it actually is. While there are certainly aspects of the ephemeral nature of dance that are extremly positive and exciting, dance's ephemeral nature is the major roadblock for the majority of "non-dance-people" who "don't get it". The audience member is put in the position of not only having to come to terms with an entirely new foreign vocabulary and mode of thought, but also to remember as much as they can about what they are seeing, in the time span of a single piece, sometimes only minutes long. "Some postmodern dance is emotionally resonant with many viewers but some, like a movement equivalent of Joyce’s cryptic Ulysses, requires investigation and study... [audiences then] flat out feel like they “don’t get it” and are provided no way to work towards their idea of what “getting it” might entail. They think that they are supposed to take something from the performance that they have never been told how to understand or appreciate, and feel lost, overwhelmed, and put out by something that they would have, at one point, been excited to be a part of. We then get the view of postmodern dance as cryptic and self-indulgent because we as choreographers are uninterested in or unwilling to teach the audience how to watch what we give them. Additionally, we have yet to create a way to convey to our audiences everything that we are able to see in it as its creators...It is not only interesting, but crucial, to involve the audience beyond the performance and in so doing, create some sort of support system so that the audience has evidence and consciousness of the ongoing process of watching, processing, and understanding a dance piece." (Thesis, 4-5)

3. "as long as the audience can connect to something – one movement – anything, that’s fine with me.”

NO.
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
This is killing modern dance. While the sentiment is on target (that the audience doesn't have to understand or feel attachment to every thing that happens, but hopefully moments will feel important, clear, and moving to them even if the whole is cryptic or dense) the widespread adoption of this tenet is (and i'll say it again) KILLING us. Think about it: if you went to see a dance piece, and you took one thing away from the entire (let's say hour long) performance, wouldn't you want your money back? I would.
Why are we as choreographers settling for “one thing”? It seems inherently compromising to our work, and even more unfair to our audiences. It is a cop out to say that we are satisfied with a singular thing resonating with our audiences. What we really want is for our audiences to understand that there are many things at play in each performance, in each piece, and even in each singular movement, and that any one or combination of those meanings or understandings that they see is inherently right. So perhaps the problem isn’t that audiences aren’t able to “see one thing” in a performance - perhaps out problem is that, as choreographers, this is all we’ve asked them to do. Theo and i were talking about how a characteristic of postmodern work (of many forms) is a lack of caring. He writes:

"The post-modern mindset (identical to hipster mindset) finds caring to be the greatest human weakness, as it renders one victim to heartbreak. The result is a body of work, or a culture of individuals, containing no heart, who care about nothing, and who's pieces are merely illustrations of aloofness. After all, how can anything fail in a world where all rules are meaningless constructs?"

Let's just put it out there: i Care about my work. i Care about the meaning(s) emotions(s) interpretation(s) and ideologies that are present in my work. And i, the choreographer, CARE that you, the audience, see and connect as many of them as humanly possible.

4. "If we tell people how to look at our work, it cheapens the work and makes it less artistic"

again my friends,
NO.
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
When we educate our audiences in how to look at dance, how to understand connections between visceral movement and subvisceral components (subvisc = “The implicit meanings and themes inherent in the viscera of a dance performance.” just like subtext = “The implicit meaning or theme of a literary text”), we simply give them tools to work harder as viewers with. As we give our audiences tools to work harder, we set the standard for ourselves as choreographers higher and higher. If our audiences are working harder, then we better damn well be making work that takes more and more ability, more and more understanding and craft at watching, to watch.

5. For PMD, Product is not equal to Process.
So looking back today (6/10) i realized that this was the one point that this post was missing, so i'm adding it in in hindsight. In dance (and i have always felt this way) performance, to me, is not an acceptable (or at least highly problematic) translation or representation of the process to the audience. Now, i know that the point of performance isn't really to show the audience the process; the point is to show the final cumulation of what you've been making. However, it's always seemed so unfair, un-encompassing, and simply untruthful that the performance never really shows all the gems and excitement of the process, which to me (and i would argue many other dancers) is always the
best part. The dance isn't the performance. The dance is the preparation, invention, audition, context, rehearsal, revision, interaction, showing, reworking, performance, feedback, reaction, and all the emotions and logic associated with those steps of the process. So why are we showing the audience the dance instead of the dance?

and last,
6. The PMD economy is failing, in free fall, kaputz, dead, done, dying.

"I am always surprised at the number of dancers and choreographers I talk to who seem to feel no need to rebel against this system in hopes of changing it. I have often felt the pull of multiple jobs, and my desire to make dance a livable profession comes from my desire to have more time to devote to the work that I love and find important – the making of dances. If dance artists were able to devote their entire work life to dance making rather than downwards of 15 hours a week, then the subtleties and sophistication of the work at hand would increase dramatically. It is important for me to express that this goal then seems to be not entirely an economic one, but an effort to make a shift in the was that artists are able to produce and enrich their work and themselves as artists. By talking about it economically, we are not invalidating the artistic and invaluable nature of our work, only looking at our creative processes realistically within the system in which they function." (Thesis, 9)

The DTW blog recently had a discussion about the need for artists to embrace marketing here, and it's exciting to know that (even while some artists remain adamantly opposed to letting marketing have a place in their artistic vision) many artists are beginning to look into both mainstream and alternative methods with which to propagate and support their art.

SO.
These are the main problems that my "hypermedia solution" is attempting to address.
In the coming days, I'll lay down some of the theory that the program is built on, talk about the process of making and programing it, and post some samples of the program here as well. I would love as many comments and challenges as you care to leave - the only way that i keep developing this work is through the constant evolution of it via feedback of other creative artists and audience members.

More tomorrow!