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IMMEDIATISM AND THE LIVE, PARTICIPATORY ARTS
“Art is not art if it merely decorates the coffee
tables of the rich.”
- Unknown
At this point I would like to draw a distinction between improvisational
dance, theater, storytelling, music and song—the live, participatory
arts—and other art, trade and artisan forms such as painting, photography,
writing, weaving, carpentry, gardening, etc. I distinguish between these
not to devalue other art forms, but rather to emphasize the unique benefits
the live arts have to offer us. To be sure, all art forms have important
roles to play, and none of them are duly respected and remunerated in
modern society. But I would like also to acknowledge the particular oppression
of the live arts in our consumer culture, since they are very difficult
to commodify. You cannot typically hang these arts on the wall, nor put
them in your CD player, nor sell them in the market.
I have used the terms live, participatory, improvisational,
and bodybased arts interchangeably in this essay, and I would
like now to add the term immediate arts to this list. The concept
of Immediatism—a term coined by author Hakim Bey—will
be especially valuable to explore here (see Immediatism, AK Press,
1994.) The “live” arts are powerful because they are happening
in the moment, and are experienced directly. There is no media between
the art, the artist, and the viewer. Hence the term im-mediate,
meaning both “now” and “no media.”
Consider a painting, for example, which you are admiring at a museum.
In order for you to see this painting, the artist must first conceive
the idea for the painting. After the idea, comes the paint, the brush,
the canvas. Afterwards, the painting is sold to the gallery, where it
is then sold to the buyer. It then hangs on the wall of someone’s
home or a museum, where people may or may not have the chance to see it.
How many layers of media stand between the artist and the viewer? Between
the concept and the canvas? At each successive layer of media, there exists
a greater and greater possibility of something becoming “lost in
translation,” especially when any monetary exchange can often involve
censorship.
The fact that live, participatory arts cannot easily be materially commodified,
measured, or quantified is one reason why they are consistently undervalued
by our society. Some artists can earn money selling a painting, sculpture,
rug, or basket of fruit, but since performing artists offer little “product
to take home” it is difficult to make a living in a society that
places value almost exclusively on material goods. Performing dancers
and actors, once occupying central roles in tribal cultures, are today
arguably the lowest paid and least appreciated of all artists—maybe
even all professions¬¬—in modern society, and might even
be considered a type of endangered species.
Yet, this immediate quality is precisely the reason the live
arts can be so valuable to us in trying to build a New Society. Exclusion
from the marketplace has certainly suppressed the immediate arts, but
at the same time, immediate artists are therefore much more free from
the competitive and materialist pressures of the marketplace. By practicing
these arts, we are offered a glimpse of a what a world based on cooperation,
rather than commercialism, might look like, a perspective which can be
difficult to find these days. Since anyone and everyone can experience
the live arts for themselves, at no cost, there are far fewer opportunities
for a consumerist culture to taint, co-opt or enlist this type of art
for its own agenda.
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