In Terms Of

Tag: Yoga

  • The Most Bleed Possible

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Brody Condon
    Tuesday, November 3, 2015
    School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, New York

    Brody Condon in Miami Beach in 2010 (photograph and GIF by David Toro)

    Though the outrageous antics of Jim Jones and Charles Manson reverberate through the American public consciousness, a broad history of less-sensational activities from the 1960s and 1970s probably had a larger if surreptitious impact on US culture. Encounter groups, the human potential movement, large-group awareness training: these cultic approaches to self-actualization came shortly after mind expansion through psychedelic drugs in the sixties and just before business motivational seminars and self-help gurus of the eighties (followed by the deliriums of late-night religious programming and inspirational infomercials). Today, soccer moms practice yoga and mindfulness is all the rage, but once upon a time, New Age ideas were a serious threat to mainstream Judeo-Christian values. The objectors were partly correct, but I digress.

    Born in Mexico, Brody Condon is an American artist working in Berlin who has recently been mining the New Age practices of the Esalen Institute and Erhard Seminars Training, among other groups, cults, and otherwise strange organizations, through an aesthetic lens. Using live action role play (LARP) as an artistic form, Condon creates scenarios of psychic strain through what he calls performance engines, described during a lecture at the School of Visual Arts as “creative performative systems that drive action … that drive social choreography.” Through these events—typically documented on video—he produces not only an “emotional significant group encounter but also a psychologically charged art critique.”

    Brody Condon talks about performance engines (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Crucial to Condon’s practice is gestalt practice, which he described as a conception of the physical body, the environment, and the mental state of the individual as an integrated, organic whole. Conversation gestalt therapy, he said, focuses on an individual’s expression and experience of the present moment—there is neither past nor future. Condon is not interested in actual healing and trauma. Likewise, there is no crossover with drama therapy or art therapy. Participants are supposed to maintain some critical distance when in the moment. The artist emphasized that performance engines are an alternative to, not a replacement for, real political dialogue. He also framed his work as an “experiential essay.”

    Some works come across as simple. For Circles of Focus (2015), one project from a four-year collaboration with the Scottish artist Christine Borland, people were encouraged to free-associate about museum objects they handled. Other pieces are just plain weird. Extracurricular Anatomy (2015) took place at the Laboratory of Human Anatomy at the University of Glasgow, where Condon and Borland devised a performance for five fourth-year anatomy students, three cadavers (two real, one played by a living person), and a carnivorous plant. One participant uttered sounds when touching parts of the cadaver, which the plant positioned above the body’s head “interpreted.” A second person “psychically communicated” with the plant and told a third where to dissect a geometric section from the body. “Yeah … that happened,” Condon said.

    The finished version of Future Gestalt (2012) consists of video of the fifth and final session of a performance that took place under a Tony Smith sculpture Smoke (1967), installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—a building designed by the architect William Pereira that, for Condon, represents an “antiquated version of the future.” Smith’s sculpture embodied the “facilitator,” intended to be an artificial intelligence or “interdimensional entity” that, like a cult leader or psychotherapist, guided the four performers. Wearing colorful, loose-fitting robes and “playing fictional versions of themselves in the future,” the performers spoke to the sculpture, sometimes in shrills, clicks, and whispers; it also talked to them. The audio of Condon’s instructions and commands (such as “focus,” “responsibility,” “empathy,” an “control”) was split, with a clear signal sent to the performers’ earpieces and garbled distorted audio filled the room at LACMA. Watch the clip below for a taste of the work.

    Brody Condon, sample from Future Gestalt (2012) on Vimeo.

    LARP communities throughout the world volunteer to participate in Condon’s works. He also posts open casting calls, which convene both professional actors and regular folks, but the artist’s approach that contrasts the feel-good nature of most audience-involved art. Before screening footage from Zeigarnik Effect (2015), commissioned by Momentum 8: The Nordic Biennial, Condon explained, “I’m not casting, and they’re not performers. I’m providing a service for them. I’m providing an event for them to immerse themselves in, for a day to five days at a time. And often they pay me to participate.” This low “token fee” gives him more power as an artist and “changes the power dynamic of participatory work.” In museums, artists typically treat visitors as material. Condon perceives himself as a service provider. A live feed of Zeigarnik Effect was presented in a split screen. Condon said this was a nod to the psychiatrist Ian Alger, who in the 1970s introduced the two-camera technique in therapy. Alger would simultaneously record both sides of a patient’s face; the patient would choose the preferred side—or something like that.

    Brody Condon, sample from Ziegarnik Effect (2015) on Vimeo.

    The concept and script for Level Five (2010–11), the earliest and most historically grounded work, drew from elements of Erhard Seminars Training, Alcoholics Anonymous, Scientology, and gestalt therapy. Level Five was Condon’s reconceptualization of self-actualization seminars, using two actors with years of LARP experience to keep the psychological flow going (what he called “run-time game management”) during the two-day event. The performers—a mix of LARPers, actors, and volunteers—arrived as characters, emoted as them, and stayed in character for the duration of the piece. Filmed with three cameras, Level Five was streamed live next door, at the Hammer Museum’s theater. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Hammer has been offering weekly Mindful Awareness sessions since 2012.

    “In role playing,” Condon said, “bleed happens when the thoughts and feelings of the character start affecting the player, or vice versa.” Coming from a background in performance art, he wants “the most bleed possible.” Back in the day—Condon played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid—it was off limits for role-playing games to affect your real life. Today there are levels of bleed. “Rather than forgetting the existence of an original self,” the artist said about Level Five participants, “the character becomes a tool for projection, self-exploration, and experimentation.” Sometimes performers intentionally try to puncture the illusion; sometimes they experience a minor schizophrenic break. For each work trained professionals are on hand, Condon revealed, to pull a person aside in either case. “We can’t stop these events,” he said. “Once they start, they run…. If they hate what’s going on, they leave.”

    Brody Condon, sample from Level Five (2010–11) on Vimeo.

    One wonders exactly what Condon gets out of the whole thing—he is the one instructing people to inhabit a fictional character whose personality is subsequently gutted. Getting to the core self of a fictional person is “the funnest part to me, it’s the most twisted part.” He explained: “You’re attending a seminar that’s meant to push you, to get you to the core of your being, to strip layers of your socially constructed personality—but you’re doing that as a fictional personality.” The idea is twisted indeed, and you wouldn’t get the same results with a film or stage play. At the time of conceiving Level Five, Condon said, “I was interested in the genealogy of New Age culture in the United States.” After thriving in the 1970s, he told us, the human-potential movement was depoliticized and sold it back to the masses via motivational seminars for businesspeople, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial philosophy, and life coaching.

    A work looking beyond the West, Four Sessions (2014), was executed in Seoul, South Korea, for the fourth Anyang Public Arts Project. Condon found four traditional craftspeople—an instrument maker, a mother of pearl inlay master, a mudang shaman, and a slack-line performer (a.k.a. a tightrope walker)—that are Intangible Cultural Treasures in Korea and identified by a number. He instructed them to pick an object from their studio or to collaborate with him to make an object. Number 24 (the lacquer craftsman), for example, brought a bowl he was never able to finish because it was tied to a past trauma, and Condon made a drum with Number 30 (the instrument maker). Again borrowing from gestalt therapy, the artist ordered the participants to converse with these objects, which spoke back. What’s more, the Intangible Cultural Treasures pretended to be an inanimate object themselves that their objects, now alive, talked to. The piece of rope that belonged to Number 58 (the slack-line man) chastised him for failing to practice.

    Brody Condon, sample from Intangible Cultural Treasure No. 58: Traditional Slackline Performance (2014) on Vimeo.

    Four Sessions felt like the weakest of the projects Condon presented, but that’s probably because the video clips he showed lacked English subtitles. (The excerpts on Vimeo are now translated.) I also got the impression that Condon struggled to maintain order—the participants seemed to battle with him directly and indirectly. Though they were instructed to come alone, they brought family members and apprentices. One man’s daughter and her friends played with their cell phones while the sessions took place. The stubborn shaman resisted the academically trained mediator for Four Sessions, a Korean psychotherapist who did PhD research on the history of shamanism. The psychotherapist, in turn, did not bow to Condon’s authority. There was also a certain amount of bickering. Common trait among the four Intangible Cultural Treasures, the artist said, were peer jealousy, worries about money, and complaints about corruption within the Intangible Cultural Treasure system. Perhaps the difficulty was that the four participants did not adopt a persona or role. They were playing themselves going through a somewhat experimental therapy session that was too much like garden-variety psychotherapy.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

  • Help the Aged

    Amalia Ulman in Conversation with Dr. Fredric Brandt
    Thursday, June 5, 2014
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, introduces the speakers (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    The twenty-five-year-old artist Amalia Ulman announced that she just had plastic surgery while spending time in California for her recent solo exhibition, Used & New, at LTD Los Angeles. The before-and-after pictures of her profile, projected onscreen above her, showed nearly imperceptibly minor work on her nose, straightening a slight bend. Ulman also revealed that she had Botox fillers injected under her eyes. According to comments in an Art in America interview published a day before this event, Ulman considers the eye fillers and the nose job to be art.

    “We thought it was too good to be true,” said Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, for his organization to pair a young artist who thrives on beauty and appearance with the world-renowned cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt, famous for his contributions to the New New Face, a term used to describe his and others’ medical practice in a 2008 article in New York magazine. It was, in Castet’s words, “a match made in heaven.”

    Castet introduced Ulman’s work—in photography, sculpture, and installation—as concerning value creation, wealth, game theory, and 89plus, a project on artists born in 1989 or later, on which he and the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist work. She understands her art as analyzing class and addressing social and power relations, especially in representations of the second world—she has singled out Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece—through dollar/euro/pound stores as well as on lifestyle blogs such as Apartment Therapy, where it’s hard to tell if an object is well or poorly made based on a digital photograph. Ulman’s work, which deals with beauty, consumerism, and social media and takes both digital and physical forms, has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Criticism on her is hard to find via a Google search, as writers are inclined to publish Q&A interviews with the artist rather than analyses of her work.

    Amalia Ulman, before and after her recent body modifications

    Born in Argentina, raised in Spain, and educated at Central Saint Martins in London, Ulman regularly posts photographs to Instagram that seem to have a gauzy soft focus like television shows from the 1960s. The whites and pale pinks in her aesthetic palette are, coincidentally or not, the same hues generally ascribed to the Caucasian race and the color of its skin. Her postinternet worldview is typical of a newer generation in which the older Marxist critiques of society do not apply, or at least not as much. Ulman has admitted to reading theory, but her work is quite different from that of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s, and that of Nikki S. Lee and Laurel Nakadate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ulman’s criticality is questionable, since she’s seemingly complicit with existing power structures in supporting the elegantly bland (or blandly elegant) qualities of life. But don’t hate her because she’s beautiful.

    Ulman began the evening’s conversation by reading a prepared artist’s statement from printed pages, while the audience of largely twentysomethings followed along, craning their necks to take in a projected PowerPoint presentation. Ulman recalled being introduced to art at a young age—8 to be exact—by a television program on Orlan, the artist whose career-long project is to transform herself via plastic surgery. The Australian performance artist Stelarc and the photographer David LaChapelle were also formative influences, she said. While speaking, the carefree Ulman casually tossed her just-read pages onto the floor between her and Brandt, as if she were lackadaisically scrolling a website, and asked the doctor about his work.

    Fredric Brandt preaches his aesthetic gospel (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    With whitish-blond hair, Brandt bore an uncanny resemblance to Andy Warhol. The sixty-four-year-old cosmetic dermatologist also possessed a face that had obviously undergone extensive work. (An article in the New York Times noted that he experiments on himself.) The old medical tools and processes such as peeling and collagen injections, Brandt said, were developed a long time ago. Collagen injections, for example, are no longer available. People in their forties and fifties made appointments with him in the old days; now he gets younger first-time clients. With the language of a benevolent, confident self-help guru, Brandt used phrases such as “subtly refreshed” and “continuity of youth” and revealed that few patients have expectations to fix an aged face. “We can improve on Mother Nature,” he professed. “I’m not going to make you look like a porn star—unless you want to.” Not many people do.

    “We understand the age and face better,” Brandt said, saying how doctors can separate and empty fat pockets to affect the reflection of light. His clients “don’t want to look young” but instead “don’t want to look tired.” Besides feeling better, they also express a desire to “extend their life in the workforce,” an honorable motive that may not do enough to combat institutional or structural biases against older employees. Making a distinction between a person’s chronological age and his or her biological age, Brandt encourages his patients improve their looks for themselves, not for their husbands—the implication here that women, not men, receive treatment from him. Brandt made two points I agree with: that people shouldn’t impose their beliefs on others, and that you should criticize yourself before criticizing others.

    “Botox is the most amazing drug that came along in the mid-nineties,” Brandt continued what essentially had become a monologue, “and it really changed the course of cosmetic dermatology.” Botox replaced collagen injections and works by shrinking lines, lifting the eyebrows, and changing the shape of the face, he said. Is it all necessary? “People come in and they’ll point out these flaws in themselves that nobody can see. And I say, ‘I can fix that little scar or line but that’s not going to affect your appearance to anybody else but yourself.’” Brandt points out other areas for work—he called it educating his patients—that could improve their face, making them beautiful.

    Putting science aside, Brandt talked about other matters, such as routine. He does yoga. “I do have a spiritual side,” he said. What about diet, Ulman asked the doctor. He minimizes sugar intake and doesn’t east red meat, which has inflammatory qualities that can accelerate aging. And because he is gluten free, he avoids filling up on bread when dining at restaurants.

    Although Brandt stopped short of calling himself an artist, he strongly emphasized the aesthetic nature of his work and touted his great eye for facial improvements, citing the golden ratio and the rule of thirds as tools in his kit. His instincts are so refined, he bragged, that he can look at someone and know exactly how make them look better. The face, Brandt said later in the talk, is a painting that he creates.

    Amalia Ulman and Fredric Brandt at the Swiss Institute (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    Ulman and Brandt briefly discussed insurance issues, with the doctor favoring private-pay systems and urging healthcare companies to stay out of plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, which would introduce chaos and make costs skyrocket. In an interview in Kaleidoscope, Ulman expressed interest in getting Korean plastic surgery, which I understood to mean that she wanted to look more Asian. She prodded Brandt to talk about “corrective” surgery for Asians to look more Western, but the doctor didn’t bite, though he did acknowledge that Asians may desire a Western-looking eye. What about patients who don’t really need work, Ulman asked. “Your perception of yourself is the hardest thing to change,” he responded. Brandt also emphasized that his work is reversible: “If you don’t like it, it goes away.”

    During the audience Q&A, someone brought up Michael Jackson, who Brandt said was “a very extreme transformation.” “You can’t have ten rhinoplasties,” snipped the doctor, “and expect your nose to look good.” Where does the desire for change come from, someone else asked. “Within us there’s an innate sense to want to look good,” he answered, which for him explains why things like mirrors and hair salons exist in our world. The role of the media, he continued, is to educate, to provide tools and information on procedures that weren’t available twenty years ago. “Obviously the media, all the images out there affect you, but they’re educating you, and probably … it’s not like they’re forcing you [to do] anything you didn’t want to do. They’re reinforcing your own thoughts of what can be done.”

    A young man in the audience described how the technology for antilock brakes, originally developed for Formula One racing cars, has become a standard feature for even the cheapest car. Has social good, he asked, come from Brandt’s work? Obviously prepared, the doctor said that scars, accidents, and birth defects all benefit from reparative surgery. Botox, he said, helps with migraines, bladder dysfunctions, prostate problems, and eye spasms. (Remember that Viagra was developed to alleviate symptoms of pulmonary arterial hypertension.) Someone else asked about new and old standards of beauty. Brandt wants to democratize beauty: “We’re taking typical standards of beauty and applying them to more people … like photocopies.” But at the same time, he said, “I would hate for every one of my patients to look the same.”

    A noted collector of contemporary art, Brandt first acquired a Monochromatic Joke painting by Richard Prince—the one about the psychiatrist stealing his patient’s act—in the 1980s. He also owns one of Yayoi Kusama’s white Infinity Net paintings, which he described as “ethereal.” Brandt enjoys how John Baldessari masks the identity of people in his artworks with colored dots, changing our perception of their faces. In sum, he said that he like feel-good art.

    It was odd that Brandt showed no interest in Ulman’s work, not even asking her once about her own practice. At one point she even asked him “What do you think of my nose?” and he responded with “I think you’re a pretty woman,” eventually conceding with “Good, it looks good.” I was amused with how one narcissist out-narcissized the other. What was even more surprising, though, was the dull affect of the audience throughout the event. I expected the crowd to be, by default, deeply skeptical of Brandt’s line of work, with its impossible standards of beauty and synthetic body transformation by a wealthy elite. (What, with all the concern over genetically modified foods and an obsession with all things organic and artisanal.) Then I realized that’s the old way of thinking. Lifestyle drugs and unnecessary medical surgery are more popular than ever and much less controversial than in the past. Plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, as common and unobtrusive as wearing contact lenses, are no longer garish procedures, if handled by the right doctors; they also allow people to happily and blissfully maintain their personal brand. Who could possibly object to that?

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Anna Soldner, “Face to Face with Amalia Ulman and Dr. Fredric Brandt,” Dis Magazine, June 6, 2014.

    Watch