Recent writing on museums

FormLAB: Artist-led Practices that Transform the Museum

Adapted from “The Artist-centric model in museums” (Joynes, 2018) Published in Looking to New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century (Long Museum, Shanghai).

Leslie D. Joynes, PhD, Visiting Scholar in Art and Education, Columbia University, New York, Founder FormLAB, New York, US Fulbright-Hays Award China. All images and text 1996-2022 © Les Joynes and Artist Rights Society, New York and DACS, London.

[Abstract]

Today, museums have become an index for changes in the arts. Increasingly museums are trending away from privileging architecture (the space) over contents (the arts) (Bishop, 2014).  Museums now partner with artists to create new forms of interaction between spectator, artist and work of art. Artists today are searching for new and significant ways of manifesting art that reflects their participation in broader networks of interconnected communities. Museums can be vibrant sites for artist-led interventions, laboratories and ongoing performances that can expand the spectator’s experience.

A visual artist and visiting scholar on contemporary arts at Columbia University, New York, Dr. Les Joynes (US) will discuss FormLAB©, a museum-installation series he founded at Goldsmiths in 1996, Within museums FormLAB installs transparent-walled laboratories/Wunderkammers that are stages for live creative experimentation and engage spectators with art as open-ended processes. Through live-performance and inter-artist collaboration, FormLAB encourages improvisation and interdisciplinary experimentation. Within these spaces artists and spectators can experience new “proximities” (Enwezor, 2012). By repositioning the museum into an interactive and open-ended laboratory (Bishop, 2004) artists build new forms of dialogue amongst themselves, with materials and with the museum’s host-communities.

Dr. Joynes discusses recent iterations of FormLAB including disappearing neighborhoods in Singapore (Bauhaus Foundation, 2009); a pop-up micro-museum mirroring communities in the Manhattan Garment District (FormLAB, 2009); appropriating contents from a defunct textile factory and orphanage in Central France (Treignac Projet, 2010); excavating and re-appropriating castaway toys from local neighborhoods in Korea (Seoul Foundation for Art and Culture, 2012); blurring art-making and shamanic rituals at Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (São Paulo 2012); colliding traditional and contemporary arts (Zanabazar National Museum,  Mongolia, 2014); using the Great Wall as intervention site, Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing 2017);fragmenting and reconfiguring the museum as a series of thematically-connected geographically-dispersed pop-up micro-galleries in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2019 and Japan, 2020).

Introduction

We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, 1942.

Museum are barometers for visual culture. Today, museums have become an index for changes in the arts. Increasingly museums are trending away from privileging architecture (the space) over contents (the arts) (Bishop, 2014). Museums now partner with artists to create new forms of interaction between spectator, artist and work of art. Searching for spectator engagement with the Artist Centric model of exhibition, artists today are searching for new and significant ways of manifesting art that reflects their participation in broader networks of interconnected communities. Museums can be vibrant sites for artist-led interventions, laboratories and ongoing performances that can expand the spectator’s experience.

A model for Artist Centric Exhibition FormLab builds upon my doctoral research at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK (PhD 2012); postdoctoral research (2014-2016) at the School of Communication and Arts, University of São Paulo, Brazil; and as a Visiting Fellow (2015) at the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, University of the Arts London. A visual artist and visiting scholar on contemporary arts at Columbia University, New York, I discuss FormLAB©, a museum-installation series he founded at Goldsmiths in 1996, Within museums FormLAB installs transparent-walled laboratories that are stages for live creative experimentation and engage spectators with art as open-ended processes. Through live-performance and inter-artist collaboration, FormLAB encourages improvisation and interdisciplinary experimentation. Within these spaces artists and spectators can experience new “proximities” (Enwezor, 2012). By repositioning the museum into an interactive and open-ended laboratory (Bishop, 2004) artists build new forms of dialogue amongst themselves, with materials and with the museum’s host-communities.

Finally I will give iterations and examples of FormLAB discussing how recent FormLAB has been a structure to investigate local culture,  disappearing neighborhoods in Singapore (Bauhaus Foundation, 2009); a pop-up micro-museum mirroring communities in the Manhattan Garment District (FormLAB, 2009); appropriating contents from a defunct textile factory and orphanage in Central France (Treignac Projet, 2010); excavating and re-appropriating castaway toys from local neighborhoods in Korea (Seoul Foundation for Art and Culture, 2012); blurring art-making and shamanic rituals at Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (São Paulo 2012); colliding traditional and contemporary arts (Zanabazar National Museum,  Mongolia, 2014); using the Great Wall as intervention site, Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing 2017);fragmenting and reconfiguring the museum as a series of thematically-connected geographically-dispersed pop-up micro-galleries in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2019 and Japan, 2020).

In a world increasingly homogenized and flattened through travel and media interconnectivity, geographically-dispersed art exploration now generates an emergent conceptual frontier. In this paper I introduce FormLAB, my ongoing studio research and exploration series through which I experiment with new forms of dialogue, unfamiliar sites, cultures, materials and processes. The outcomes of FormLAB’s experiments and research take various forms including video, performance, museum installation and experiments in São Paulo (2012-2013) and Mongolia (2014). This paper serves as a guide to the interdisciplinary work I have embarked on over the years and illustrates some of my insights from the perspective of artist and explorer.

Museums are not only repositories of works of art (content) but are also created as highly visible architectural monuments emblematic of the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright (Guggenheim, New York), Oscar Niemeyer (Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum, Brazil) Frank Gehry (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao), I.M. Pei, (Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar); MAD Architects (Ordos Museum, China), Zaha Hadid (Maxxi National Museum, Rome) Daniel Libeskind (Jewish Museum, Berlin) and Mies van der Rohe (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin) are all talismanic statements of a culture. The problem is the contents.

There is a finely tuned relationship and oftentimes competition between the museum and its contents. The museum is expected to be a good bet, a purchase of vetted artwork that carefully selected based on existing norms of museum-hood. Whose norms are we using? Who made he rules? When were these rules made. What do I tell my four year old goddaughter wept “this ….art….is….not….fun!”  I look at the art work: it is a dull assemblage of dull grid lines on dull-painted canvas, placed dully in a dully-lighted white cube space. How boring. I looked at her and say “You are right – this art is not fun” She looks up at me quizzically: “then why are we here?” I think for a moment and respond that this is what people do – they go to a museum because they think it is good for them. She looks at me with a face that says – Adults can be so stupid.

Often we are taught to think that if something is unpleasant or unfamiliar we must engage it to build character. That, well we don't know – and we were taught to shut up and do it. Museums and art don't need to be boring. Sometimes – something just looks like it is art (because it was made by an artist from some great school, that the artwork is a conceptual artwork and has had something evacuated from it and that we are supposed to appreciate the absence of that something - but we as spectators don't know precisely what that something was that was jettisoned and what was the dialogue going on between some curator and some artist back in 1967 and we cant make heads or tails of that which is in our gaze. It looks like art. And that is often not fun. What is particularly not fun is looking at art made by artists that are no longer having fun. Sometimes, often they are engaged more with making something seem like art than enjoying the making. Art making is one of the most engaging and enjoyable and challenging and difficult and meaningful things I do. And I know when I am not having fun – then I am not engaged and then I am making unengaged work. After innumerable references and readings of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) artists have been looking for ways of distancing themselves – often mirroring the anxiety of mechanization, urbanization, digitalization and modernization  - and that is interesting and there is a jouissance in the creation of any art be it intellectually playful or not – making art is not the same thing for everybody – but if the artist  and the viewer are just going through the motions of making or looking then art becomes a consumable readymade devopid of what it actually signifies. And, it looks like art.

As a graduate student at Goldsmiths in London I had a great time. For the most part we were open-minded, open-ended and experiencing art as it came to us and as it came at us. On the MA Fine At program each of us brought a sense of exploration and curiosity. We explored new materials, talked to each other, presented our work in mute tutorials in which we did not sell our idea – we mutely presented it so as to learn from its reception. As if reading Rorschach ink-blots each student in a tutorial would have a unique interpretation of an artwork and that was tremendously helpful to us. And it was fun and built trust. I spent my weekends foraging for found materials in the Isle of Dogs, in abandoned buildings and construction sites and flea markets. II felt an urgency to collect the ephemera that seemed to wash up all around us in the city. I even beach-combed on the River Thames at low-tide collecting found pipes, bits of plate and odd bones that had resurfaced after being dropped over-side centuries before. My studio became a midden for found objects that I would manifest slowly into works of art.

And that is when I began to explore the notion of the studio-as-laboratory.[2] Alone or in front of others I found that I was an actor in my own theater -  I was the spectator and the spectated. The subject and the object.

Soon, the studio moved beyond four walls to become a mobile structure of preservation to collect, observe, arrange and display these found objects to the world. Beginning in 2002, I expanded the scope of the lab to not only delve more deeply into the essence of found objects, but also to explore unfamiliar geographic contexts. During the next 15 years, I evolved this into a studio/laboratory that would move with me to new sites and become an important interface in which I could learn more about other cultures.

In the next section I introduce the artist-centric focus of FormLAB, how it grew into a system to observe art processes in the studio and later into a nomadic structure to observe the unfamiliar in different cultural contexts and through shared processes with other individuals. (See image 2)

Searching for spectator engagement with the Artist Centric model of exhibition

Museums are essentially interfaces between the public and the museum’s content. The contemporary art museum has evolved into an institutional structure with, for me two very interesting origins: the notion of an organized, tamed and thematically programmed public space and the notion of private collection. (below concept image of FormLAB for Sao Paulo).

We are taught how to behave in museums. There is a behavior and set of expectations not unlike that of visiting a church: quiet, reverent, and obedient. Museums can be intimidating with works of art that cost hundreds of millions of dollars (don't touch) that for many are challenging to decipher (don't ask). I was recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and while looking at some of the Dekoonings observed a young family in the museum for the day: a father of about 35 years old, his wife, their adolescent daughter and a howling baby in a stroller. It was a Saturday and they had just paid fifty dollars (assuming the eldest was under 16) and they all looked tired and were probably jet-lagged. I observed them for about five minutes. As a six-legged and four-wheeled unit they methodically visited every piece of art in one of the rooms on the fifth floor. The mother and father painstakingly visually rote-learned each work of art as if they were going to be on some devilish midterm art history examination. Brows-knitted in concentration Mom and Dad crammed the images into their minds with purpose, With the mechanical movement of a car moving through a Toyota assembly line their heads swiveled to the painting, then to the printed caption that denoted the artist, medium and year, duly noting this they looked again and moved on to the next painting. The daughter was not looking at anything  - she was looking at her phone, perhaps checking up with friends online telling them how bored she was. The toddler was seat-belted and retrained as a captive in his stroller, screaming.

Often museums are events to be “done” – part of a checklist of things to do when in New York. Incidentally a couple of students who were quietly chatting together wasted no time – they just took a picture of each work of art and were soon out of the room. I thought this was smart – there was no pretense. No pain. They were documenting the visit – would possibly never look at the pictures but having taken them they perhaps alleviated some anxiety of forgetting.[3]

Museums are different experiences for different people. I started visiting museums as soon as I could walk – and the experience is accumulative – the works of art become familiar and even like old friends. The rooms at MoMA become more familiar to me than any apartment I have lived in – they are constant and relatively unmoving. The works of art are stationed, unmovable. The museum becomes linked to my memory – as if I could visit the home I grew up in from my childhood which I left when I was eighteen. For me the museum is in its constancy a safe haven for seeing art – it is a standardized context. Imagine a 33 rpm vinyl record from the Rolling Stones. Each song possesses its own character and each is constructed to be introduced, the thanatos birth and death of repeated chorus or instrumental – a climax is reached and the song reaches some destination and is followed expectantly by the black space-vacuum silence of the grove gaps that indicate a space between the distinctive audio elements. A museum for me can be similar – each work of art is punctuated with three-dimensional space. White space. Grey space. Black space. It is in the space around, below and above an object we can determine that it is a work of art. Just like the letters which you are reading that become words in this text that are intelligible on the white space of the paper or computer screen. There is something compelling about the static-ness of architecture and interior space – it does not often rearrange itself. Buildings do not stand up and move away, nor do they overnight reconfigure themselves. The inertia of buildings, the weight of walls and roofs ensure that the museum will remain static, at least for a while.

And this static becomes then a potential platform for artistic intervention. Performance is one of the ways that artists have long activated museums spaces – performances engage a apace, activate it, sometimes elevating the experience vertiginously where the spectator no longer experiences the work of art as mute but as alive and potentially unpredictable. So, what if we look at the notion of predictability? How can an artist create a détournement of the expected. Not merely to pause the relationship of the spectator with a mute relationship with the spectated – but rather to activate and explore these relationships.

Today, artists are increasingly aware that they are wittingly or unwittingly participating in new forms of network. Compared to artists twenty years ago contemporary artists today are connected to multiple layers of community: home community, family, friends, college chums, people from artist residencies, fellow artists in international exhibitions and a world beyond Facebook – a new local and new conceptions of proximity.

Now trained in technique, critical theory, arts research, and with experiences across several disciplines the contemporary artist today reflects themselves with an abundance of new relationships, excitements, trepidations, and wonder with these new loci. And this has the potential not only to transform the itinerant contents of the museum but also the conception of the museum. It is not what the museum is – but what the museum does. The museum becomes a focal lens from the perspective not only of the spectator but also simultaneously the artist. Within new forms of installation – new engagements within the museum – beyond institutional critique – the artist today can build new interfaces.  

Artists today are searching for new and significant ways of manifesting art that reflects their participation in broader networks of interconnected communities. Museums can be vibrant sites for artist-led interventions, laboratories and ongoing performances that can expand the spectator’s experience.

Conceptual development of Form Laboratory

 In this section I introduce FormLAB – an exhibition series I produce in museums and public spaces.  does as a series of operations, and how it activates my practice as an artist.

 In London in 1997 I conceived FormLAB as a system to observe and examine art-making processes. I wanted to observe the ontogenesis of a work of art: the evolution from raw materials, to a work-in-process, and finally to finished work (and sometimes devolving back again to raw materials). (See image 3)

As FormLAB developed in Berlin, 2008; Singapore, 2009; New York, 2009; Treignac, France, 2010; Seoul, 2012, São Paulo, Brazil 2012; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 2014; Beijing, China, 2017), I began to explore how the LAB could entreat disruption and the unfamiliar within my art-making processes particularly within unfamiliar environments.[4] I became interested in Walter Benjamin’s conception of the photographic apparatus as revealing a hitherto unknown optical unconscious that is revealed through such techniques as multiple exposure, long exposure, use of negatives and essentially using the medium in unexpected ways to create new ways of seeing. For example on a Bauhaus sponsored project at the Hansaviertel, Berlin and in Singapore I explored the creation of images through dance, LED light and long-duration photography using medium format and digital cameras.

This was followed by FormLAB’s exhibition at an art center in Treignac, France (2010) at an art center located on the grounds of a former 19th century textile factory and former orphanage. I created a simple assembly line with fellow Goldsmiths artists that positioned the work as an open-ended performance. This iteration shows the emergence of shared practice between two artists constructing assemblages from found objects collected in surrounding locales.

Engaging Unfamiliar contexts: Producing FormLaboratory, I worked with a variety of artists and local inhabitants in different geographic settings. I drew inspiration from French Surrealist André Breton’s (1989-1966) Cadavre Exquis games and how these game presented the opportunity to destabilize art-making processes.[5]

 By presenting “live” art or art-making as a process (observable within performance spaces such as a museum), I sought to interrupt the spectators’ passive gaze. I presented them with spontaneity and movement encouraging them to experience works of art as a dynamic series of processes with multiple outcomes that continually change over the duration of the exhibition.[6]  The radical nature of shared art-making can lead to unexpected discoveries that are unique to local-specific contexts, bringing about new ways of engaging with art, sites and performances. This has the potential to disrupt the static visual economies and narratives often reinforced by museums, art fairs and commercial galleries.[7]

Shared processes with others and utilizing found objects that have been collected over time offers a structure where I can explore the spaces between the Self and the Other.[8] FormLaboratory becomes a lens into cultural traditions through the creation of dynamic interdisciplinary structures (what I refer to as shared art-making). It appropriates found-objects, sound, music, oral tradition, performance, and emergent technologies and reinterprets them anew. Shared processes with local inhabitants of an unfamiliar culture creates an othering of self and a resulting parapraxis[9] through the invocation of a subconscious. Michel Foucault writes of an “…unveiling of the non-conscious.”[10] It is this “othering of the self”[11] that evokes a fecund unfamiliar territory in my practice. What was particularly unexpected was how each experiment led to multiple new outcomes. Just like the multiple lines in an ever expanding folded paper in the Cadavre Exquis experiments, FormLAB generated new performances using poetry (Alien Poetry Society, 2010), Utterance (Glossolalia, 2010, 2013).

(image: Glossolalia. 2010 © FormLAB, ARS, New York).

 “Alien Poetry Society” was a performance and poetry series inspired by 17th Century English mystic Thomas Traherne’s poem The Celestial Stranger. Traherne wrote of a mysterious extraterrestrial traveler who discovers Earth for the first time exclaiming: “Such strange kinds of creatures….Such mysteries and varieties, such never-heard-of colours, such odoriferous and fragrant flowers…. Verily, this star is a nest of angels - this little star, so wide and so full of mysteries.”[12]

(image: Still from video of The Visit (2010) HD video 8 minutes, 2010 © FormLAB, ARS, New York).

 In Brazil (2012, 2013) and Mongolia (2014) I explored these disruptions through interdisciplinary collaboration, not only working with other artists but also working with individuals and groups outside of the discipline of visual arts, which led me to develop projects with a shaman and traditional and contemporary musicians. In the next section, I introduce two recent interactions of FormLaboratory in Brazil and Mongolia.

Site and magic: FormLAB-São Paulo (2012)

FormLAB (2012) Brazilian Museum of Sculpture. The outcomes of this exhibition included a multi-media installation in the museum: a lab structure and assemblages created within the lab, videos of found object collection and live performances during the exhibition. (see images 4, 5, 6). Outputs also included single and two-channel video documentation, individual and group performances, an installation (see images 2 and 9) as well as discrete sculptures including a hanging sculpture. These outputs became a documentation of the events of the artists-interface with the culture.

Working with a Candomblé Pai-de-Santo or shaman in Brazil became turning point for FormLAB because it introduced shared processes with individuals outside of the arts. Personally, I wanted to learn about Brazilian indigenous culture through the eyes of one of its spiritual practitioners. The Pai-de-Santo, a Candomblé priest experienced the world of objects and forms differently seeing them through rituals infused with local deities and spirits. We both mutually benefited from this experience: he wished to explore art-making as part of his Candomblé practice and I sought learn about Brazilian culture through its multi-faceted mystical ceremonies.

Through FormLAB as an experimental performance space I experienced Brazil in a way that followed an unpredictable path. Because this path lacked any common signposts (exploring the unfamiliar through common lenses onto the exotic)[13] its outputs could not be over-determined.

FormLAB in São Paulo was an opportunity for me to further visualize the laboratory space as studio, stage and in a sense, panopticon,[14] in which I could experiment and encounter the unexpected and as a place where both participants and spectators could observe creative cooperation and the processes that compose the emergence of the artifact.

Prior to the exhibition I and my team collected objects from various neighborhoods around São Paulo in Centro, Cidade do Paraíso, Vila Mariana, Jardins, Praça da Luz. Higienópolis, Jardins, Avenida Paulista, Liberdade, Pinheiros, Praça da Praça da Sé and Anhangabaú. During the exhibition a steady stream of found objects were brought into the FormLAB space by local university students. These found objects were then assembled in live performances within the museum using plastic foam.[15] (see still image of outdoor performance using plastic foam, and found objects at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, São Paulo, July 2012. See image 7).

The LAB became a lens and a catalyst for me to explore São Paulo through its topographies, found objects, sites and cultural traditions, exploring what American artist Gordon Matta-Clark -1943-1978) referred to as a city’s ‘living archeology.’[16] In Brazil I discovered how FormLAB simultaneously inhabited both private and public spaces. [17] It became a structure in which I could build unique and unpredictable personal connections with these sites and inhabitants. Symbolically it became a vehicle for my nomadic practice fostering the creation of my own personal micro-heterotopias.[18]

Image 8: Floor plan of the exhibition space at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture with flow of raw materials through FormLaboratory into finished artifacts in the museum space.  2012 © Les Joynes, Form Laboratory, ARS, New York.

Image 9: Installation of lab structure and sculptures made during FormLaboratory performances at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, 2012. 2012 © Les Joynes, Form Laboratory, ARS, New York.

In São Paulo, I conceptualized the exhibition space as a processing site and observation center, creating a central Laboratory structure and a space displaying both raw material, works in process and completed assemblages. As the exhibition progressed, the museum space was populated by sculptures that were created daily during the exhibition in and around the museum. (see images 8 and 9). During the exhibition, I assembled and created sculptures (see image 10, 11). often in front of live audiences. They could observe that an artwork was not just the finished object but also as a structure that encapsulated moments that comprised its multiple timelines that map the artifact’s ontogenesis. The work with a Brazilian shaman underscored my engagement with the unfamiliar. The discovery of indigenous mystical traditions and exposed me to other perceptions of form through ritual and use of magical objects.

Image 10: Les Joynes pouring pigmented polyurethane creating composite found-object assemblages within the FormLAB structure at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Sao Paulo, 2012. 2012 © Les Joynes, Form Laboratory, ARS, New York.

Image 11: Pigmented polyurethane composite found-object assemblage created outside at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, Sao Paulo, 2012. Mixed media, found objects, ceremonial feathers, polyurethane, Ht. 25 cm x Width 24 cm, x length 28 cm. 2012 © Les Joynes, Form Laboratory, ARS, New York.

At the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture I created performances that combine the lab’s process-based making structure with the practice of local ritual. These were captured in a series of two-channel HD videos that were presented during the exhibition. (see stills from two-channel videos: 12, 13, 15). The exhibition changed daily.  As new performances were created they and the artifacts were added to the exhibition so that the museum visitor could experience a sense of observe multiple timelines and recursivity. Museum visitors could come the next day and experience different events, videos and objects.

 The artifact created during the performance was installed near the exhibition’s entrance.

(see image 15).

By bringing FormLaboratory to Brazil I wanted to use art making processes as a way to explore its numerous and often hidden layers of culture. During the three months I was there in 2012 I discovered unfamiliar yet fecund niches of culture particularly through Brazil’s unique indigenous rituals through which I began to comprehend how others may so differently perceive form and space.[19]

Through its daily documentation I was also aware that I was making certain decisions how I documented these events. Should events be documented through the open mechanical eye of the camera “passively recording reality” while roving between what occurs, what is framed, and what is desired by the operator?[20] How would the camera record the view from the perspective of the artist (or collector) and that of the artist? Jean Rouch speaks of the filmmaker’s use of the camera as participant in a cinema verité,[21] something that reveals a mechanical eye’s gaze on a specific event. Is this event [22] truthful, or is the mere presence of the camera undermining its aim of objectivity?[23]

Can it be ethnologically objective? Or does it need to be? And if so, how would I achieve this? It also poses an important question around how the artist questions himself or herself within different geo-cultural contexts.

 Body and City: Urban Exploration in São Paulo (2013)

 From January-April 2013 I created a series of performances, videos and workshops intervening body with urban sites in São Paulo. The outcomes were a series of performances, two-channel videos that interfaced the artist’s body within different urban sites, and structures, including a theater experiment and two sound performances. I worked with Chris Moffett (US) and cinematographer, Marcela Sneider (Brazil) as well as the theater group Cia Comedians Tropicales (Brazil). Moffett and I created performances in São Paulo that explored the movement of the body walking along dense forested neighborhood streets, climbing up steep stairways, and trekking through make-shift pathways. In São Paulo we also occupied different public spaces (Centrô, Copán, Vila Madelena, Républica), using the city as a stage (reacting with out bodies to different urban structures, interacting with passersby and exploring the polarities of minimal and maximum/exaggerated movements) in different sites.

Following this, Moffett and I continued our performance-based exploration of the city creating a video series of site-specific body interventions with the city exploring the body in movement making HD videos including Walking in Vila Madelena (2013), Staring at the Sun at Copán (2013) and Sleeping in Républica (2013) (see images 16 and 17).

For FormLaboratory I worked with Sneider to create several performances in São Paulo including Dancing in Paulista (2013) and Dancing in Mercadaõ (2013) which also improvised performance within public spaces. 

FormLaboratory exploring speech and utterance (2013)

Building upon the speech experiments of FormLAB-Treignac (2010) [24] I created a theatrical performance with the improvisational theater group Cia. Les Commediens Tropicales. [25](see image 20)

Inspired by Kurt Schwitters’ Die Ursonate 1922–32 I wanted to combine non-sensical speech with acting to observe how words and speech could in some way be abstracted into shapes and forms. I also met with Brazilian Concrete Poet Augusto de Campos (b. 1931), his son, composer and artist, Cid Campos and artist and poet Lenora de Barros (b. 1953). Augusto encouraged me to explore a project with a Mongolian Xhoomi (plurivocal) throat singer. Our discussions on human utterance, poetry and form inspired me to propose FormLaboratory to explore Mongolia in 2014.

FormLaboratory-Mongolia (2014)

I exhibited FormLaboratory at the Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art in Ulaanbaatar in 2014.[26] The outcomes of the project were a series of videos created in remote locations in Mongolia, an installation of a LAB structure in the museum and a series of interdisciplinary performances. Because my art practice with FormLaboratory was increasingly geographically dispersed, visiting Mongolia for 3 months was a valuable opportunity for me to observe nomadic culture in the countryside and in urban settings. Central to the notion of Mongolian culture in the Mongolian ger [27] – a circular felt covered transportable dwelling that is ubiquitous all over Mongolia. I created a series of videos including Buryiat (2014) examining the act of observation (mine of them and theirs of me). (see images 21, 22).

As part of this project I led an overland expedition to Northern Mongolia setting out with a camera operator, horse guide, an interpreter and a driver to the flat Khovsgol steppe region in the Restricted Border Region with Siberia. Over several days we traveled by jeep and visited different gers and families along the route. Approaching mountains to the north we late traveled by horse finally reaching our destination, a nomadic encampment of Tsaatan reindeer herders and a shaman at whose oort (a tipi-like structure) we stayed (see image 23).

The next evening I participated in a shamanic ritual after which I created the performance Shapeshifter (2014) (image 1) in which I anthropomorphized a reindeer.[28]Returning after the exhibition with video footage I installed a ger in the main exhibition hall of the Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art in Ulaanbaatar. (see image 24) I used the ger space as a museum within the museum to stage interdisciplinary performances with contemporary and traditional artists, musicians and dancers.[29] The result was a series of performances in the museum captured on video. (see image 24).

FormLAB Mongolia was the most remote work I had made to date. While it built on previous iterations of FormLaboratory it became a springboard for me not only to encounter the unfamiliar but also to engage it through art-making.  For video go to www.formlaboratory.com/artistexplorer.html)

FormLAB Beijing (2017): Artist Explorer: an emerging conceptual art form

Does exploration and intercultural collaboration constitute a new conceptual art form?

Today, the predominance of international art fairs and blockbuster museum exhibitions can have the effect of reducing art into a set of homogenized products made for the global consumer rather than events that continue to help us place in question ourselves within our societies. [30] The advancement of rapid communications and cultural exchange have prompted artists to search for new and significant ways of creating art in an effort to form new communities through multi-faceted forms of cultural dialogue.[31]

Exploration encourages me to be more reactive and initiate forms of personal inquiry that may contribute to an ongoing dialogue in art and creative discourse. It sparks new forms of open-ended[32] pathways of discourse through my practice. Modern and contemporary artists have long used the act of collecting, particularly the collection of found objects, as a way to explore the layered histories of objects and sites, and their significations. A vital function of contemporary art is to push the boundaries of aesthetics into new forms we may consider. The Artist Explorer thrives within the unfamiliar. The unfamiliar acts as a productive stressor: a resource to bring new knowledge into places, exhibitions, circumstances. It is what the artist does with the unfamiliar that is most compelling—the fresh perspective, the creation of a new form.

Collection and exploration are tools I employ to create a space where I am more reactive. Tapping into the unconscious, “automatic action” and self-experimentation may reveal subliminal impulses (a familiar Surrealist frontier for exploration) invoking what André Breton defined as “pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by other method, the real functioning of the mind.” [33]

As a nomadic extension and surrogate of my studio, FormLaboratory has evolved into a system whereby I might continue to challenge my practice as an artist and an art-making system connecting me with other cultures. During FormLaboratory’s iterations, I continue to be drawn to explore unfamiliar cultures often in remote locations.[34] Artist exploration resists commodification and at the same time fosters new personal connections [35]developing the artist’s own personal or private discourse that can emerge when engaging the unfamiliar.[36] Taking part in shared processes also helps new forms of dialogue to evolve. Working with a Pai-de-Santo in Brazil (2012), other artists, musicians and performers in Mongolia (2014), we learned about one another. We discovered what it means to make art work in tandem, and the experience of evoking a third or shared mind.[37] There is the risk however that art making in remote locations will simply fall into the tropes of how we look at the unfamiliar (i.e. in museums of natural history and cabinets of curiosity). Museums, particularly museums of natural history have often phrased (displayed) nature in a way that stages the moment of wonder of discovery (discovering a pride of lions in the African savannah, for example).  The unknown is thereby presented innocuously behind plate glass with taxidermied lions  - objects that stutter between real (dangerous) and unreal (safe).

Exhibitions often present art within a certain norms –often in ways which the audience can access and experience a sense of attraction to a work of art, a sense of wonder and a sense of surprise and unexpected.  As an artist I am using exploration and disruptions of the familiar as a way of re-examining how I create art. Is the artist’s desire for exploration a response to a globalizing culture? By ceaselessly creating new connections, globalization flattens and homogenizes the world. Homogenization raises the stakes for the explorer to encounter something new and novel. Everybody now can be an explorer, booking in an instant a package tour to Mount Everest or having the capability to access and visit indigenous cultures in South America, for instance. As discoverers of new signs artists are increasingly travelers constructing new semiotic connections with new materials, processes, discourses on art. As Carol Becker writes (2002): “Artists flock to the ambiguities and marginalities that cause others to flee”[38] As such, these individuals are more comfortable with working within a context of the unfamiliar. In an ever-globalizing world, the act of exploration signals a desire to challenge conventional practice, discovering new forms of creative dialogue to reinterpret the old into the new. [39]

Conclusion

How can artists utilize exploration, collections and shared performance as part of an ongoing creative practice? What creates the impulse to travel to remote locations and thereby cross-collaboration? What kind of new works does this generate?

During this postdoctoral research project at University of São Paulo I have had the opportunity to reflect on FormLAB’s recent performance work in Brazil (2012, 2013) and Mongolia (2014). I have introduced my work as artist-explorer and introduced FormLaboratory a geographically-dispersed studio as a lens into the process of art-making. FormLaboratory also serves as a vehicle for me as an artist to explore new remote cultures in remote locations. While FormLAB was initially created as a vehicle and structure to interface me with geographically-dispersed environments, it also serves as a space that privileges experimentation and the evocation of the unexpected.

Exploration engenders encounters with the unfamiliar, creating new processes that move beyond old forms of practice. I have previously cited examples of FormLAB’s experiments in Brazil and Mongolia. Artists strive to develop their own creative territories: zones familiar enough for them to work but alien enough to keep them challenged and moving toward discovery.

Because artists are increasingly connected via mobile and internet technologies, art can be better perceived as an emerging conceptual form of exploration. FormLaboratory then supports the artists’ enhanced geographical mobility, eclectic focus, and need to connect to new publics. The Artist Explorer challenges aesthetic tropes moving beyond the familiar in order to challenge themselves, their processes and perceptions. With an emphasis on becoming more reactive, willingly engaging with creative interruptions, chance, and failure as they arise in a continual effort to catalyze art and new knowledge.

Selected Bibliography

G. Bataille, Formless (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985).

C. Becker, Surpassing the spectacle: Global transformations and the changing politics of art (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

N. Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York, Lukas & Sternberg, 2007).

A. Breton, Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation, 1948. (La Dragonne, October 7–30, Paris, Galerie Nina Dausset)

M. Craig-Martin, On Being an Artist (London, Arts Books Publishing, Ltd., 2015).

P. Crowley & P. Hegarty, Formless: Ways In and Out of Form, Bern, Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, 2005.

P.K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, (London, Penguin Books, 1962).

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, (London, Faber and Faber, 1942).

Enwezor, Okwui and Bouteloup, Mélanie... [et al.] Intense Proximity: an Anthology of the Near and the Far, (Paris, Artlys: Centre National des Arts Plastiques, 2012).

J. Ezard, “Mystic's 350-year-old treatise to be published,” The Guardian Online, October 15, year?. Accessed January 9, 2016, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996).

Michel Foucault, Diacritics, (Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Sprint 1986). 

J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, (New York, Da Capo Press, 2004).

 J. Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

 A. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman, (New York, Penguin Books).

 R. Keefe, & P. Smith, eds. Vagueness: A Reader, (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1987).

 A. Mahon, A, “Displaying the Body: Surrealism’s Geography of A Pleasure," Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, (London, V&A Publications, 1987).

 Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, (London, Routledge, 1979).

 Peter Muir, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect; Sculpture, Space, and the Cultural Value of Urban Imagery, (Burlington, VT, Ashgate, Publishing Co, 2014).

 National University of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Public Housing in Singapore: Examining Fundamental Shifts, 2014, https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Public-Housing-in-Singapore.pdf. Accessed January 21, 2016.

C. Oldenburg, Store Days: Documents from the Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962): Selected by Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams, (New York, NY, Something else Press, Inc., 1967).

R. Smithson, Flam, J., ed. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996).

S. Sontag, On Photography, (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

M. Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2008).

J. Watts, K. Cockcroft, N. Duncan, Developmental Psychology, (Auckland Park, South Africa, Double Story Publishers, 2010).

Notes:

[1] Bishop writes “Rather than a highly individualized artistic epiphany, viewers to these galleries encountered a euphoria of space

first, and art second. Bishop, C (2013) Radical Museology, 2013

[2] In the early 2000s curators began to express an interest in the notion of the laboratory as ‘still untouched by science’ from “Laboratories is the answer, what is the question?” TRANS 8 (2000) from Bishop, Clare, (2004) Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics: October (Fall 2004): pp. 51-79.

[3] “…photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure.” Susan Sontag (1977) On Photography, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.9.

[4] Reactiveness entreats failure, learning and serendipity. Pagan Kennedy in her article How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity (The New York Times, January 2, 2015) gives an example of the Super Encounterer,  a term coined by Information Scientist, Dr. Sanda Erdelez, based at the University of Missouri to denote someone who finds surprises almost wherever they look. This is for me akin to the discoveries made by the Flâneur who is constantly roving to discover.

[5] A. Breton, A., Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation [exhibition catalogue], (La Dragonne, October 7–30, Paris, Galerie Nina Dausset).

[6] For me observers include the artists, participants and the spectators. The LAB disrupts expectations of the processes (which engage the unfamiliar) and destabilizes the notion of the exhibition being a passive display of works of art: sculpture, drawings, installations, moving image, photographs – the collections of which may change and mutate during the exhibition.

[7] Robert Smithson in his essay “Cultural Confinement” (1972) writes: “A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a transient object or surface disengaged with the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. Next comes integration. “Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized, it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement” (Smithson, 1996, pp. 154-155).

[8] Okwui Enwezor writes of the receiver of the artwork encountering “a phenomenological space within which dimensions of temporal and historical, aesthetic and critical methodological and disciplinary models converge so as to produce new relationships of proximity. Enwezor, O. and Bouteloup, M.[et al.] (2012) Intense Proximity: an Anthology of the Near and the Far, Paris: Artlys, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, p 11.

[9] “an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of an unconscious ("dynamically repressed") subdued wish, conflict, or train of thought guided by the ego and the rules of correct behavior” Wikipedia [Internet] Accessed January 21 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_slip

[10] Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, Vintage Books. P 364.

[11] There is a sense of the self being “buttressed” through self opposition a notion that we are that we are that what we are not in Hal, F (1996) in The Artist as Ethnographer in The Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 179-180.

[12] The Celestial Stranger is part of Thomas Traherne’s treatise The Kingdom of God in Thomas Traherne’s: Poetry and Prose (Ed. Denise Inge). SPCK Publishers, London, 2003 (Ezard, 2002)

[13] For example FormLAB enabled me to diverge from familiar paths to discover a culture through tourism: museums, travel guides, eco-tourism, food guides, newspaper articles, the internet – all of which often may encourage one to discover commonly appreciated attributes rather than experience a culture through the “chance-gaze” of the flâneur.

[14]Panopticon is a concept for surveillance within prisons created by the British Philosopher and social theorist, Jeremy Bentham in the 18th Century.

[15] industrial-grade two-part polyurethane, which for me alludes to sediment in which archaeological objects are encrusted.

[16] In Waste Value and the Formless Other in Muir, Peter Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect, Sculpture, Space, and the Cultural Value of Urban Imagery, (Ashgate, Publishing Co., Burlington, VT, 2014).

[17] The Lab space offers me the familiarity of a studio space. It can also transform into a lens onto each visited site and also become a performance space and stage.

[18] “From Other Spaces,” Foucault, M, translated by Jay Mishkowiec, Diacritics, 16/1 (Spring 1986), pp. 22-27.

[19] Michael Taussig writes, “Underlying all our mystic states are corporeal techniques, biological methods of entering into communication with God. According to Marcel Mauss, “Les Techniques du Corps,” Lecture 17, May, 1934, translated by Ben Brewster as “Body Techniques,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology(1979), London: Routledge. Pp. 95–123.

[20] Malcolm Turvey in his article “Vertov, the View from Nowhere,” and the expanding “Circle,” (October 148, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014, p 81).

[21] Ethnographer, Jean Rouch (1917-2004) writes about the invention of the cinematic eye stating, “Dziga Vertov understood that cinematic vision was a particular kind of seeing, using a new organ of perception – the camera. This new perception had little in common with the human eye; he called it the ‘ciné-eye.’ Rouch, Jean in Intense Proximity: an Anthology of the Near and the Far (2012), on “The Vicissitudes of the Self: the Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer,” (Paris, Artlys, Centre national des arts plastiques, p 368).

[22] Susan Sontag writes in On Photography, “…photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure,” (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.9).

[23] In Boutang and Chevallay’s documentary film, Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, Claude Levi-Strauss refers to Tristes Tropiques as written “with a lens that’s called a fish eye...It shows not only what is in front of the camera, but also what is behind the camera. And so, it is not an objective view of my ethnological experiences, it’s a look at myself living these experiences.” (1955) Levi-Strauss in Boutang, PA and Chevallay A. Claude (2008), Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words (Claude Levi-Strauss par lui-meme), (Arte Editions, [documentary film], Time code 1:04:50).

[24] See formlaboratory.com/artistexplorer.html.

[25] Including Carlos Canhameiro, Daniel Gonzalez, Jonas Golfeto, Michele Navarro, Paula Mirhan, Tetembua Dandara, and Weber Fonseca. See teatropedia.com/wiki/Cia._Les_Commediens_Tropicales.

[26] A US Department of State and CEC-ArtsLink supported project.

[27] Traditional Mongolian nomadic dwelling made from wood and felt.

[28] See link: http://www.formlaboratory.com/artistexplorer.html

[29] This work was particularly inspired by Cabaret Voltaire (1916), which included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Tristan Tzara, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Ernst, the Cadavre Exquis experiments of Andre Breton (1918), and the Cut-up works of William Burroughs (1970). There is a parallel in the way in which we collect objects (take for example the creation of assemblages or cabinets of curiosity).

[30] Hal Foster in “The Artist as Ethnographer in Foster, H,” (1996), The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, writes that the 1990s was wary of the sway of institutions overshadowing the work of artists. I think the institutions overshadow and sometimes (but not always) eclipse artists’ work. Individuals, artists, non-artists, museum-goers, moviegoers, consumers consume art and part of the package is the packaging – the museum, the installation – it has become part of the reading and the aesthetic. We consume art in numerous contexts, art fairs such as Miami Basel, Basel, Basel Hong Kong, Armory, Frieze, all position art as objects of desire to be consumed, often complicit with shared commercial interests where museums present objects to be consumed as visual experience.

[31] Lucy Lippard writes about artists and their communities and socially engages the concept of “conversation art”  and their relations (Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics – confirm meaning of relations) between individuals (See Lippard, L. in the Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, (Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice, Oxford: Berg, 2010).

[32] Clare Bishop in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (2004) speaks of art produced in the 1990s as being “open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be ‘work-in-progress’ rather than as completed objects,” (Bishop, Clare, 2004). Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics: October 2004, p. 52.

[33] Arthur Danto writes, ”Actions are considered ‘automatic’ when they take place without their agents being conscious-or fully conscious- of their taking place.” The term ‘action’ excludes mere reflex motor responses, in the sense that a great many automatic actions begin as conscious actions to which the agents become habituated through repetition, whereas reflex responses have no history of explanation through consciousness at all, so that their causes are entirely mechanical or physical. (A. Danto, Philosophizing Art, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1999, pp. 17-2-).

[34] Travel challenges me and destabilizes my practice. It is from destabilization that I am able to learn. The remoteness of a location can also invoke a sense of Otherness and of alienation, perhaps it is a tamed sense of alienation where we were protected by the context of returning, having structures, guides, horses, etc. More importantly than the mere act of making artwork in remote locations is what the artist does with this: what is learned about the new cultures, and from the processes. How the artist learns that art might not just be about exhibiting in public spaces (an American artist exhibiting work in Brazil, for example), but rather the deconstructive and reconstructive processes that can result and revolve around working in remote locations.

[35] Through exploration and travel, the artist engages new signs and new pathways where the artist can position the Self  “…as semionaut, an inventor of trajectories, through signs.” Nicolas Bourriaud in conversation with Slaie Staebler in Toward an idea of destination: In conversation with Nicolas Bourriaud in Enwezor, Okwui and Bouteloup  Mélanie [et al.] and Intense Proximity: an Anthology of the Near and the Far, (Paris, Artlys, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, 2012, p. 59).

[36] Francis Frascna in “To be a Pilgrim,” (Art Monthly, October 2015), writes about the artist’s emphasis on the self, the use of private languages as a way to negate the commodification of the art market – to emphasize a “secularized inner world,” creating an artwork that has subjective use-value separate from exchange value, p.8. The notion of making works of art in far-flung places is perhaps on the cusp of being a conceptual art – if it is not already such. The notion of the artist as explorer can indeed become a token of exchange as much as a life-style artist can become such a token.

[37] Brion Gysing and William Burroughs in The Third Mind (1978), speak of shared process invoking ‘an unseen collaborator,’ “a third and superior mind.” William S. Burroughs and Gysin, Brion, The Third Mind, (New York, NY, Viking Press, 1978, p. 19).

[38] C. Becker, Surpassing the spectacle: Global transformations and the changing politics of art, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p.5).

[39] As artists are conditioned to constantly expose themselves with the unfamiliar they uniquely skilled in innovating meaningful dialogue between themselves and the host culture.

Biography

Dr. Les Joynes (US) is an artist and scholar on art, museums and visual culture at Columbia University, New York. He has been advising global companies since 1989 and assisted in the first Taipei Biennial “Site of Desire” (1998). He visiting faculty at Renmin University and has presented on Columbia, Cambridge, UAL London, University of California and the National University of Singapore. He is founder and director of FormLAB©, a museum exhibition series exploring artist centric installations in museums. He is also US Department of State sponsored research fellow on art education and recipient of US Fulbright-Hays Awards for Mongolia and China and an author of Going Beyond: Art as Adventure (2018) and Mapping Madness: Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing [catalogue, 2016], and contributions to Flash Art and Art in America. He serves on the editorial board and artist-selection for the journal ProjectAnywhere.

He received an MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London; Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Tokyo; BA Hons Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art, London; PhD Fine Art from Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; and Post-Doctorate in Fine Art from University of São Paulo, Brazil. He received his M.Sc. from Boston University and Vrije Universiteit Brussels Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences and conducted research on knowledge transfer and strategy during his MBA at California State University. He lives and works in New York and is represented by Thomas Jaeckel Gallery, New York.