The Problem With Academic Language Isn’t Big Words

I find this very interesting because I recently left an 11-year job in public art to work as a technical writer. The expectations for technical writing are so different than those in the art world but the art world, and probably academia, would benefit greatly from applying the principals of technical writing, which are basically as simple as writing in a way that people can understand. It doesn’t have to be boring. Actually, when you can understand a topic it becomes more interesting. Your exercise above of paring down the paragraph, then having it pared down further is consistent with how technical writing works.

There is no difference except for one of historical context. What Abramovic did was to upturn the radical intent of performance art as it was conceived in the 1960s and ’70s. To whit: a category of art-making that could not be marketed. By introducing the economics of theatrical spectacle into performance art, she made it safe for capitalism. Now we can all sit back back, and watch as her crappy staring contests and nudie shows are dragged out in perpetuity by institutions like MoMA. For the edification of the museum-going public, of course, as opposed to say, a surefire way of getting people to part with $20.

The original language is confused because it’s trying to serve too many interests. It makes an interesting claim, though, that’s lost in your translation.

“Abramović forces the audience to simultaneously engage the past and present, subsequently increasing our awareness of the impact of memory upon the future.”

This claim, as I understand it, is not just that we become aware of how Abramović’s memory fits into her art making process, but that our relationship to our own memory is somehow changed by her work. As presented this is totally unsubstantiated, but it’s interesting, at least, and I’d like to see it developed further.

The problem with academic language is that it seems gratuitous when it’s quoted on a blog. In an academic context, that paragraph is fine. On a blog, you’re right that it can (and should) be boiled down.

But that doesn’t mean that important distinctions aren’t being made by the language used in it’s original context. All academic disciplines require specialized language that seems arcane in any other context. If I were to describe the sun, I could say “It’s a star at the center of our solar system, it’s about 850,000 miles in diameter, and it’s mostly hydrogen and helium.” And that would be great in most cases. But if I were writing in journal dedicated to solar astronomy, that would be way too simple. An academic study of something requires language that differentiates a thing from all the other things that are very similar.

So in the context of art discourse as a whole, parsing out exactly how a re-perfomed Abromovic works seems excessive. But if you’re trying to differentiate it from other discourse about performance art (and even from Abromovic’s own previous incarnations of the same work), some verbal acrobatics are necessary.

Wow… you feel bad? Don’t feel bad or apologize about this… Trembling’s writing is obtuse as it is empty, which is to say, totally par for course in terms of academic treatment of work like Abramovic’s. Particularly this:

“the introduction of Abramović’s body as a metonym for the performances that she re-performed, standing as a material marker of the interpretive act.”

Use of rhetorical figures (metonym/metaphor/synecdoche/etc) in academic writing is usually unfortunate because it doesn’t actually make any relationships in the work clearer, doesn’t really describe our reception of the work in any sensual terms and, moreover, conceptualizes (and therefore simplifies) what is often most obvious about the work itself. You can probably thank Krauss-Buchloh-Bois et al. for rhetorical figure proliferation – and for such nonsense as “material marker” for that matter. However, your simplification of Tremblings already foggy thinking ends up being no more helpful, as you note. Yeah, Abramovic is re-enacting works she already performed… is the aggregate effect to make us think “impact of memory on the future” (eeeee) or just that “it shapes the re-enactment” — neither of these statements gets beyond what is already just obvious, neither are interpretive in any sense and neither help distinguish this work from any other work that is a re-enactment. That is to say, what is most obvious about the work, and what has here lent itself to conceptual-blabbering, is exactly what we should try to understand for its specificity, the difficulty of trying to make distinctions rather than merely categorize. You can see the no-duh train of thought: bodies –> members –> re-enactment –> re-membering = ugh.

No need to apologize to Trembling, this is exactly the type of “no shit, dude” writing that needs to get called out and tossed out. Why would you need to quote someone just to use the words “embodied documentation” or “re-membering.” Also, if I can just mention another “discourse marker” of lame, it is when the work is described as “forcing the audience” to do something. To do what? To do nothing: to care, to interpret, to understand, to evaluate, to consider, to challenge, to remember — that is obviously up us, and what Trembling has chosen not to do.

What’s “different” about Abramović’s “performative re-enactments” (which we’re now encouraged to truncate into “reperformances”) is the manner in which they’ve been authenticated – or so says Abramović. She discussed this at the symposium following her MoMA retrospective (http://bit.ly/9gCdvD), and cited her reperforming of “Seven Easy Pieces” as an enactment of how she believes reperformances should be authenticated, including her own.

It’s fine if people want to get absorbed in writing about her as a “metonym” and discussions about “memory,” etc., but Abramović herself has made it clear that establishing a system of authentication is an essential step in legitimizing the “presence” of her reperformances (and the reperformances of others). She talking about copyrights, branding, granting permissions, etc., as a necessary means to protect and preserve the integrity and authenticity of performance art. At present, no such “system” exists (as it does for music, writing, etc.).

So, if Abramović has her way, “performative re-enactments” can be differentiated by whether or not they’ve been legitimized/approved by those entrusted to uphold those as-of-yet-undetermined protocols.

It never ceases to astonish me how often academics restate basic ideas in their writing. In academia, more is always more. You would think with all these presumably intelligent, educated people it wouldn’t be necessary to use words like “metonym” and “material marker” in the same sentence, describing the same thing. But you would be wrong. And this is a comparatively lively example. I would quote some catalog essays that say even less in many more words, but I don’t want to be responsible for the spontaneous lobotomy that would surely follow.

Ever hear about Art Baloney Blog? It’s got excerpts of fabulous linguistic privilege. http://artbaloney.wordpress.com

I am an academic. Let’s make one thing clear: being an academic is not an excuse for bad behavior. Among the worst behavior that academics engage in is pathetically bad writing. Being incomprehensible is not a virtue ~ anywhere.

PS: Paddy is smart and handsome like me but no relation.

PS2: It is interesting that the passage he uses as an exemplar is “about”Marina Abramovic. My view of her recent charade in NYC is that is was vacuous and that the emptiness has been well hidden by a thick layer of academic jargon and art-world-speak. The performance and the descriptions are symbiotic.

On some level I believe writers and critics feel the need to ‘out-art’ the artist by using language as a medium. The question I ask after reading most anything is if I would want to sit next to the writer on a long plain ride. Would the smug factor destroy my will to live or do they seem okay. I take an iPod on planes for a reason. That being said: Why is it writing brings out the most inane language that speaking doesn’t?

I personally have to re-look-up metonym every time I come across it (this time being no exception), but it means something different from metaphor and the distinction makes it a useful word. Trembling’s paragraph doesn’t say that Abramovich evokes the body. It says that she presents the body, right there (a material marker), and the body isn’t metaphorically referencing memory in some kind of artsy poetic way but directly standing in for memory which, I might add, is a physiological process that happens in the body (hence the metonym). It’s not the most elegantly written paragraph I’ve ever read but it’s not the worst, and it’s talking about something much more interesting than just the impact of memory in the art making process. It’s talking about attaching memory to the materiality of the present. And by the way, this is how memory works. It always happens in the present, and this has both physiological and narrative implications for the memories of the future. There’s tons of interesting work being done on memory that questions common sense assumptions about what it actually is and what it actually does. Trembling’s paragraph reaches out to that research and Paddy’s don’t.

You might disagree with Trembling and argue that in fact this is not what Ambramovich is doing at all. Or you might argue that the exploration of memory as a material process in the present is just not interesting enough nor relevant to the appreciation of artworks. Or you might simply walk away and refuse to engage with Trembling on Trembling’s terms. But changing Trembling’s argument into something completely different (and less interesting) is playing kind of dirty and also kind of playing dumb.

I agree with Lonestar about the whole “forcing the audience” thing. That construct betrays an insecurity about the writer’s own subjective point of view. One of the more brutal aspects of academia is the pervasive assumption that everything stated must be somehow irrefutable. But it seems like Trembling is working on it: “I don’t think I have all the answers. I don’t want all the answers. I want to fail so that I can relearn things.” That sounds like an excellent attitude to me, and putting academic writing up on a blog is a pretty brave strategy for making it happen.

@sally: Let’s say I change “The artist’s memory and documentation of past performances shapes its re-enactment” to “The artist’s memory and documentation of past performances shapes its re-enactment and its reception”.

How is this different than “attaching memory to the materiality of the present.” Why do I need a whole paragraph about this?

But it seems like Trembling is working on it: “I don’t think I have all the answers. I don’t want all the answers. I want to fail so that I can relearn things.” That sounds like an excellent attitude to me, and putting academic writing up on a blog is a pretty brave strategy for making it happen.

This I very much agree with.

because it’s not just that the memory is shaping the re-enactment. The re-enactment is the memory, in a very literal sense. (I’m not saying I buy it that this is what Ambramovich is doing, but I do think it’s the claim that Trembling is making).

Academics are vampires, sucking on multiple levels. As Agnes Martin expressed it, so many words have been written about art that it is mistaken for an intellectual exercise.

see: http://www.artlies.org/article.php?id=1825&issue=64&s=1

Charles Gaines: Reconsidering Metaphor/Metonymy: Art and the Suppression of Thought.

Swapping words for the sake of criticism leads to more confusion…

p.s.

hi jeffrey

I don’t want to hijack this thread with a tangent but that Gaines essay is pretty problematic. Metonymy can be critical, but metaphor is just emotional, bypassing limitations of political conditions, and operating merely in the realm of the aesthetic. Wha? So emotions have no place in criticality? Try telling that to someone who is actually suffering some oppression and trying to change the situation. And naming the limitations of political conditions is one thing, but what about the situations that are repressed and made invisible by those conditions? How are you supposed to bring them up if all you do is iterate the status quo? I agree that metaphor is potent and dangerous, but it’s also indispensable. And I’m not even talking about art yet, just day to day communication.

I am re-membering a song here…  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIsnvlkhkqI&feature=youtube_gdata

The intellectual property land-grab scenario… Artist makes work without asserting directly his/her authority on the work and the writer citationally grafts the aura of the work into the essay claiming intellectual authority via reinterpretation, if that property is valuable, disputes arise in the public sphere. That writer creates a metonym where they are the author of the art work, and redirect the flow of notoriety to themselves. I am glad that Paddy is calling out other critics for the vapid prolixity that wags their argument. I for one enjoy the battling and pouting that follows. It makes me think of Macho Man rapping. My two scents: I don’t think you can imbue your body as a site of performances by other artists. The work seems more about issues of documentation effecting the purity of the work, in the Greenbeegian sense. I’d like to see her do Gilbert and George with a hologram of herself. That said, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is real issue with the aesthetics of ideas. People just don’t like their lilies gilded.

Employing metaphor or any other type of poetic can be a fantastic way to write about art. Still, Abramović’s intentions behind her reenactments in “Seven Easy Pieces” were made fairly clear: little (if any) documentation of these seminal performances existed, so her reenactments of them were based on fragmentary evidence (including memory, textual accounts, etc.). Abramović tried to recreate these performances as faithfully as possible, though she understood that her cobbled-together, rigorously documented reenactments would necessarily (and problematically) supplant the original performances. This is why she took pains to thoroughly acknowledge who performed the original works (and when), because she is quite aware – and a major proponent – of how significant context, presence, and authorship is in regards to performance art. For Abramović, reenacting these performances (and, now, having people reperform her own) is an imperfect answer to a critical problem in performance art, which is that it’s an inherently contingent and ephemeral form of art. Abramović feels that it’s important for these/her works to be preserved, and relying on sheer “memory” is probably the most ersatz kind of documentation. Video/photo documentation is better (but still problematic), but to Abramović, it’s still better than nothing. Next to attending the actual performance, *authenticated* reenactments/reperformances seem to be her preferred form for people to experience the works.

@ Jeffery-Art Baloney rules!
@ Paddy-Thanks for calling this jargon heavy bullshit writing out! I think the artworld at large would be better served using by using more everyday language.

@Jesse P. Martin If Abramovic knew in doing “Seven Easy Pieces “that her cobbled-together, rigorously documented reenactments would necessarily (and problematically) supplant the original performances,” then why do it? Why not leave those works in the realm of fragmentary evidence and memory where they were clearly consigned by the intent of their creators? Why is there a need for an answer to “the critical problem of performance art, however imperfect,” or even, for that matter, the necessity of raising a question in the first place? My problem with Abramovic is that her motivations are more self-aggrandizing than critical. That she colluded with an institution to package herself as a star—successfully I might I add—precisely through re-enactments of her own and other works that were devised to be anti-institutional. Well, you might say, that was then, and this is now, but if you ask me, it’s rather like silkscreening Malevich on a T-shirt. It belongs in the gift shop, not in the museum proper, though of course, I completely understand that these days, there’s very little difference between the two.

Hi all, I’m the tremblings in question. First, sorry I’ve been absent from these conversations but I’ve been without the internet for a bit. In order to to be efficient let me get a few things out there. I wrote a version of the article in question in 2006-2007 as part of my dissertation that was completed in 2008. The person who wrote the piece seems a thousand times removed from the type of scholar I now consider myself. I’d like to think that I write a bit better these day because I’m older, but I think I’ll always feel that way. There seems to be two primary conversations happening here: the values of academic writing and the concepts embedded in the quoted paragraph. I’m much more interested in the latter so I’ll start there.

The argument I’m trying to make in the piece centers on using the performance and documentary forms at work in S.E.P. as source material for writing about S.E.P. That’s what the essay is “about.” The quoted passage centers on one way I understand the connection between memory and materiality in a performing body. Like I said in my response to Paddy on Tumblr, the essay has more to do with my resistance to talking about performance in terms of essences or essential qualities. That I get sort of called out about that here is nice because I get to see ways I’m doing the very thing I claim to resist. The whole forcing the audience word choice was poor, but rooted for me in an excitement or an A-HA experience or idea rather than making the audience all think or feel the same thing. But I’m going to change it because I think it needs it.

I buy into the hype that the performances in Seven Easy Pieces were re-performances and not re-enactments. There’s an ontological distinction at work for me that I spend a good deal of time talking about in the essay. One of the biggest challenges of talking about performance pieces as art are the issues surrounding art and objecthood. I want to resist talking about S.E.P. or the performances they are based on simply as/as simple objects. I am less sure about the retrospective work at the MOMA. I guess I find S.E.P. to be more ingenuous than The Artist is Present and the retrospective works? I’m not sure. But my essay isn’t about the MOMA works or their problematics. I think the other major change to the quoted paragraph would be to say “The answer gets increasingly complicated because of the introduction of Abramović’s body as a metonym for the performances that she re-performed, standing as a material marker of the interpretive act of remembering.” I stand by the rest of it. Metonymy is a useful concept to talk about bodies in performance and particularly the body at work in S.E.P. These are some of my initial thoughts.

As far as academic writing goes, I get it, but I’m always surprised at how strong the reactions are. Paddy has already owned up to taking one paragraph out of context. It felt like poaching. To be fair I opened myself up to that by posting the snippet in the first place. No harm no foul. But i disagree with her friend that I was demonstrating some type of linguistic privilege. I want people to understand what I write and not just other academics. But yeah I’m drawing on a particular discourse and sometimes the language I use boggs things down. Sometimes I just write badder sentences. It’s a process for me.