Happy New Year! Busy New Year, at least.
Scratching 20 minutes in between work, house-purchasing and picking the kids up from school.
I’ve got another video posted, this one is of the nativity play. This begins to raise difficult questions: Is this visual art at all? Isn’t it just theatre, with attendant props, set, musical support and script? Should this be on a visual arts blog at all? Especially considering my rant against the 2010 Turner Prize winner, published in AN last Feb.
My own answer to this is as follows: I work across multiple art forms, I’m certainly not ashamed of that, and the visual is a very important, if not core, aspect of that.
On the one hand, this is “A Sacred Ritual”. It’s not a participatory visual art piece inspired by ritual, it’s not a piece of participatory theatre inspired by ritual, it’s not a piece of participatory music inspired by ritual. The poetry (not yet published) is not following Kurt Schwitters as ritualised poetry. It is sacred poetry for a ritual.
On the other hand, this isn’t ritual at all.
Let’s look at Catherine Bell’s 6 characteristics of ritual activity: Traditionalism, invariance, rule-bound, formality, sacred symbolism, performance:
The only sense in which this is traditional is that it throws many traditions together and mangles them.
There are no rules, although there is a little formality brought in by the fact that many participants are quite scared and are desperately looking for formal rules to follow.
There is little invariance here. I’ve never done this before, the only invariance between this and previous events is the use of a central fire, and 4 “quarters” to begin and end the ceremony.
There appears to be sacred symbolism, in the form of the goddess of the wheel of the year. But is the goddess of the wheel of the year (Dea Rotorum Anni) sacred? You won’t find her in any history books or archaeological museums. I made her up. She has no tradition, ancient or modern, prehistoric or revived, New World or Old.
There is performance, that is what you will see in this video. Whether the previous video, the burning of a painting, counts as performance, I’m not sure. I don’t think it does, as there are no active human participants in that bit.
So, in Bell’s formulation of ritual: Not “Is it ritual?”, but rather “How ritually is it?”, it’s hardly ritual at all. It only ticks one of the 6 boxes. Yet, anyone looking at this will immediately count it as ritual.
This is why I think this can be explained as visual art. First, it is visual. Second, it contains masses of art. Third, it follows in the footsteps of all those conceptual artists who have taken a subject and deconstructed it, subverted it, and raised questions about its nature and essence.
And yet it isn’t art. It’s not “being presented” in a context, it’s not challenging the participants to think about the world differently. Maybe these videos, and this blog, are doing that, but the event in itself is not.
So, what is it? All contributions welcome!
You will never see a school nativity play in the same way again
