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About the process of doing it together in Working-Art: a minor language in art

Abstract:

This paper is an unfolding proposal of the studies carried out on the concepts of language through artistic practice. The production of activities by Allan Kaprow and the teaching artistry of Sandra Corazza are supported by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Teaching practices are aimed at their potential for creation. The mechanisms of an artist’s language are evidenced and placed as developments for creating zones of approach and interaction with education. By these means, the concept of working-art is thought of as a way to escape from the given structures of teaching using reproductive models of programmed content.

Keywords:
Education; Philosophies of Difference; Contemporary Art

Resumo:

O presente artigo é um desdobramento de estudos sobre os conceitos de linguagem através de uma prática artística. A produção das atividades de Allan Kaprow e artistagem docente de Sandra Corazza são movimentadas a partir da filosofia de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Desse modo, as práticas docentes visam aos seus potenciais de criação. Os mecanismos de linguagem de artista são evidenciados e postos como devires para criar zonas de aproximação e vizinhança com a educação. Com isso, um conceito de obra-aula é pensado como forma de escapar às estruturas já dadas de modelos reprodutivistas de conteúdos programados da docência.

Palavras-chave:
Educação; Filosofias da Diferença; Arte Contemporânea

Introduction

When a teacher brings children together, it is not to inform them about the alphabet. It is to teach them a system of order. A system of command that will allow or force individuals to form statements according to dominant enunciations. School is especially useful for this (Deleuze, 2017DELEUZE, Gilles. Deleuze sur le Langage [Deleuze sobre a linguagem] (1975-1976). Universidade de Vincennes, Paris, 1975-1976. YouTube, 27 out. 2017. Disponível em: <https://youtu.be/021Kf364qAw>. Acesso em: 11 out. 18.
https://youtu.be/021Kf364qAw...
, online).

This paper aims to coin a concept referred to here as working-art. To this end, language studies with an artistic practice are articulated, guided by the philosophical thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.; 2015)DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Kafka: por uma literatura menor. Tradução: Cíntia Vieira da Silva. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2015., as well as the activities of Allan Kaprow (2010)KAPROW, Allan. Como fazer um Happening. Boston: Mass Art Inc., 1966. In: SEVERO, André; BERNARDES, Maria Helena (Org.). Horizonte Expandido. Porto Alegre: Santander Cultural, 2010, P. 1-11. and the idea of teaching artistry developed by Sandra Corazza (2013)CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. Para Artistar a Educação: sem ensaio não há inspiração. In: CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. O Que se Transcrita em Educação?. Porto Alegre: UFRGS; Doisa, 2013. P. 17-40.. The subjects and concepts referred to create zones of strength by relating to education in the practice of creative teaching.

Instated to create within dry structures, Kaprow (2003KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003.; 2004)KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista. Parte II. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 6, p. 167-181, jul. 2004. proposes, in his two texts, The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I and II , the integration of space, materials and people, and involving the viewer in the creation of artistic works. He includes components located outside the galleries and museums to create a type of “un-art”, an evocation of the social activities common to the interests of the artist (Kaprow, 2003).

The artist starts out from a certain territory, a domain of having (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.), where he marks the distances and relationships of heterogeneous elements of which it is composed (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011a). This space, which dismisses both hierarchies and subordinations, is oriented towards bringing together materials capable of overwhelming structures, transforming the established and favoring creation. In it, concepts can be created and are free to reach their potential, operating on the structural ties and moving them into uninhabited places.

In order to escape the stiffened and hardened educational models, emphasis is placed on artistic development in order to fight the representation and succession of originals (Corazza, 2013CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. Para Artistar a Educação: sem ensaio não há inspiração. In: CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. O Que se Transcrita em Educação?. Porto Alegre: UFRGS; Doisa, 2013. P. 17-40., p. 19). Working-art then brings to the surface “[...] new and strong breaths of enunciation, which lead us to think and live education in the same way that an artist thinks and lives their art”.

The Language of Alan Kaprow: doing it together

Art has failed as a social instrument of happiness; the crowds do not want to be reminded of their unhappiness and barbarism (Kaprow, 2003KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003.). There is a certain upheaval in artistic activities; they fail to realize that there is fun in life. Secondly, artistic activities fail to perceive that besides questioning the capitalistic moment, they could also offer pleasure without necessarily having to use a bar code to identify it. By using play and games as a form of art and education, the artist becomes a teacher through “doing it together.”

Kaprow stresses the power of doing it together both in his artistic production and in his classes. He sees and believes that art is built through the spectator’s collaboration with the artwork, in having the audience work together with the artist. In this way it is more than a strategy, it is a means of constructive and collaborative activity that involves collective thinking processes.

Kaprow (2003)KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003. states that art is a club, an elitist and closed activity that only a few intellectuals are concerned with thinking and talking about. There are passwords required to access this closed group - ways to become a member and move through the environments of such a space, taking risks and creating pathways for the artist to ride.

The un-art or admission password is whatever has not yet been accepted as art, but has caught an artist’s attention with that possibility in mind. They are evocations of some everyday practice, situations ready for artistic use. However, how can one deal with artistic production without an object for their work? Although apparently resolved depending on the context, this is a question that still raises discussions due to the force it carries.

Historically, there are productions that displease the club but still do not break its structure. Cubism, for example, was called an aberration by critics, but was first and foremost the creation of a product: a painting, a technical human production that maintained its status as art, both in exhibitions and in places revered as sacred for this very purpose (museums and art galleries).

Art creates sensations, and even an audience with little contact with contemporary artistic production is able to make sense of the subjectivities it carries (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011aDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 1. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira, Aurélio Guerra Neto e Celia Pinto Costa. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011a.). It is not merely about learning or a certain meaning, but about what each one can experience. In the course of these experiences, a language capable of transforming singular and given meanings is created, freeing humankind from interpretation, and making indirect discourses vary in their forms (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.).

A pathway in structural saturation is then opened, flowing through aesthetic rather than technical creation (Deleuze; Guattari, 2010DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. O que é a Filosofia?. Tradução: Bento Prado Jr. e Alberto Alonso Muñoz. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2010.). Rising to the surface, sensation creates a finite within infinite possibilities, experiencing the world, causing it gain new forms of language that are conducive to minor uses in art and education.

In terms of language, it comes into being by being spoken and when it is combined with socially consecrated enunciations, “[...] words of order do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by ‘a social obligation’” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2015, p. 17). Thus, the ordinances that are established within art (not conditioned by external factors) are placed within structures that open the way to sensations, earning subjectivation within themselves.

With this in mind, sensation is a new source of creative force, a new possibility that began in the core of something already saturated and structured. There is a power that moves it and is responsible for our perception of things and how we come into contact with the world (Schöpke, 2010SCHÖPKE, Regina. Dicionário Filosófico: conceitos fundamentais. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2010.). It imprints a transforming purpose onto our senses - a way in which we connect with the world in a subjective way. There is no ordering or objectification, it is force in expression; a modifier of what is already meaningful. According to Deleuze and Guattari (2015, p. 42), “[...] language compensates for its deterritorialization by a reterritorialization in the senses”.

As materials are handled, new ways of production emerge. The process is the work of the un-artist . Finding the strength to call their works from out of the studio, one inhabits a certain space and allows it to pour out: the power of doing what has not yet been done is where artistic works are stretched to new uses. According to Kaprow (2003, p. 03)KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003., by “[...] setting in motion the uncertainties without their acts having meaning”, one is allowed to experience the world around them with new boundaries.

With this kind of art, the need for specific places to produce and exhibit art is eliminated. Strength is given towards the creation of an artist’s minor language, without the need for direct interference in the sacralized: it is an escape from artistic models. A production that should find shape without falling into the dogmatism of representation, but be able to innovate through sensational experiences in practice.

From the Kaprowinian perspective, this kind of production creates pre-significant transformations that engender relative deterritorializations (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 96). It is the language of an artist on the run, “[...] put into practice in a diffuse way: where enunciation is collective”. By opening the possibilities of broad abstractions, it becomes art through the practices that are done together; when such efforts are recognized as a structure, it then turns into art.

The “ password 1 ” into the art club as described by Kaprow (2003)KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003. does not work by itself, as the mere effort of evoking the un-art makes art lose its meaning. The ‘un’ is artistic negation in itself, ‘un-calling’ it to be what it now claims. The institutionalization of the resulting production of an un-artist causes the prefix to be lost; the access gained is the loss of its negatory nature. Similarly, when teachers put their pedagogical work into educational models, they lose the power of experimentation by causing it to be explained. Working-art that wants to be a template also loses its sufix, conditioned to work within what is already programmed. If it is absorbed, then it is no longer on the outside; the artist is therefore left to be content to enter the club by paying its admission fee and continue to follow the already given and sacred models.

But what if it does not?

We then arrive at password 2: the antiart.

The antiart provokes what has been formerly established and considered as a kind of nonart exhibited in museums and galleries, attacked and hated by artistic models. It is a mistake to confuse them, as it now has objective intentions: to break the functioning of the non through the resistance of the anti . It is a countermove, meant to go against the established. A counter-significant regime is then created (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.), establishing lines of destruction. The transformations of this kind of production in art are either controversial or strategic, destroying what is in its path, creating new signs and meanings.

Over time, artistic production has been consolidating and structuring itself so as to assume a position of judgment in terms of the value of the productions. Therefore, what is produced is subject to be quali-quantified in terms of technical and aesthetic value: a signature, a compulsory verification to mediate what may or may not be exhibited and measured as art. Antiart is not interested in the assessments of what it produces: it is solely concerned with itself.

With the limited artistic audience (it is an elitist club after all), an anti-artistic movement eases the burden on production and above all, questions it. The act of doing it together is a solution that can shake the structures and change the audience into artists by getting them involved. It is not a craft teaching, it is a work that builds on everyday activities (Kaprow, 2010KAPROW, Allan. Como fazer um Happening. Boston: Mass Art Inc., 1966. In: SEVERO, André; BERNARDES, Maria Helena (Org.). Horizonte Expandido. Porto Alegre: Santander Cultural, 2010, P. 1-11.), and by doing so makes art in the midst of life.

Both the nonart and the antiart lose their premise and value as they are invited to join the club. “[...] we know it’s art because a concert ad, a title on a book cover, and an art gallery affirmed that they were” (Kaprow, 2003KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003., p. 04). However, one must think of ways to produce art that provoke and question structures. However, how to be art that denies itself?

To answer this question we have password 3 , the art Art , a production seeking to structure itself, wanting to innovate itself and to be taken seriously. For several moments, it has been conditioned as a superior craft, easily recognizable to many sacred traditions: museums, galleries, cinemas, books, etc. In this work the club is defended, retaining in itself the status of art.

This type of production does not imply a fight or disaffection for the antiart and the nonart , on the contrary: it wants them to participate. By evoking the work contained in its doings in a process of appropriation, it causes transformation, putting into practice a significant regime (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.). The regime, therefore, relatively deterritorializes and jumps from sign to sign, but still signifying.

However, wouldn’t it be risky to belong to this club? How to be self-sufficient in artistic production and still cause a disruption or a break from the relations of production? A nonart , when called on to function as an art Art, at least retains its own process; something external still survives, sustaining itself, without anything being excluded or decontextualized.

The art Art is “[...] a brightly lit common reality” (Kaprow, 2001, p. 06) and exhibits its creativity by inevitably comparing it with a super life. In contrast, a comparative fragility requires that the artist makes an effort so that when they find potential they neither overemphasize it nor put it on “extra-everyday-life” pedestals.

Calling on what is lacking and what is yet to come is a necessity, a breath of change. The nonart wants to strike the club management ( password 4 ), destroying the institution to bring it back to its feet. It therefore calls upon the old members to transform new sign regimes (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.).

Thus, a minor language is created in the artistic practices of Alan Kaprow. By calling on the audience to do it together, forms of content and expression are constructed through his activities, forfeiting given and singular meanings. The action carries new contours to the bodies in different directions, providing that encounters favor potential that can engender experimentation.

Pre-established meanings are dismissed, optimizing only sensations. Due to a lack of models, a creation of language is built during the acts, establishing an exclusive lexicon of collective uses. We then have an environment of experimentation that runs outside programmed bodies, one that pauses the incessant explanation and single senses. And as it is an unknown path, it is necessary to find and invent it with new possibilities, testing and selecting the contents, giving rise to a form.

Minority is made up by what will happen and not by what is already established. The result is a language without predefined rules, but built by affinities and collective actions. In doing so, models and organizations are abandoned, letting the acts be guided by the forces they can capture. There is no longer a distinction between right and wrong, but forces that play variations.

In everyday activities, Alan Kaprow (2003)KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003. tells us that this game is just a comedy theater and invites us to laugh at this whole situation. By establishing rules that aim to break themselves from within and play a game that is played by doing, he points to a way out, avoiding definite aesthetic roles and giving up definitive assignments; being a non-artist is to be carried away by sensations.

A Minor Language in Art: the class as an atelier

Addressing the issues that matter to creation, language is a fundamental area for the Philosophies of Difference. From the linguistic turn movement onwards, scholars from several fields of knowledge have used this key concept to create new possibilities to think the world through it. By opening itself beyond (the given) structures, a minor artist language offers a possibility for the teacher to become an artist, besides protecting them from “[...] the sad image of forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011aDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 1. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira, Aurélio Guerra Neto e Celia Pinto Costa. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011a., p. 35). There is no given or ready-made educational form, but processes that engender escape routes through the act of doing.

A minor language then is promoted by sensations, an escape from the interpretive logic that saturates and is conditioned to programmed uses. By running outside what has been established, the minority pushes the majority to new meanings. Thus, in atelier-classrooms, experimentation is key in order to allow a teaching-developing artist come closer and allow these flows to pass through.

By imitating a given educational model, Corazza (2013)CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. Para Artistar a Educação: sem ensaio não há inspiração. In: CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. O Que se Transcrita em Educação?. Porto Alegre: UFRGS; Doisa, 2013. P. 17-40. tells us that the teacher only represents what is already established and programmed in the educational field. One way of breaking away from this model is having teachers assume their own artistic development, rehearsing the contents to be cross-referenced in order to create a working-art through their practices and subjects.

According to Deleuze and Guattari (2011b)DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., language occurs through the reproduction of order-words that structure and isolate without allowing modifications. Thus, an indirect discourse brings variations to meanings and goes on to change them. By gaining expressive form, indirect discourse culminates in agencing, where abstract and collective machines of enunciation operate escapes and captures that update the territories.

According to Deleuze and Guattari (2011b)DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., the order-word is responsible for marking power within a language, crossing acts and enunciations. This imposition causes bodies to gain definite contours (Almeida, 2003ALMEIDA, Júlia. Estudos Deleuzeanos da Linguagem. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP, 2003.), enabling the transmission of given (and collectively accepted) information, caused by the social obligations (implicit or not) of a linguistic system. Significance is attributed to the signs, trapped in the already given boundaries.

This ordering makes new forms unfeasible, as it is meant to be understood and obeyed. However, there are other things at stake, since each enunciation carries an indirect discourse. A variation is then put into play - it does not hide or show itself objectively, but it does implicitly play.

These mutations engender acts that modify and “[...] define themselves by the set of intangible transformations that are taking place in a given society, and which are attributed to the bodies of that society” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 19), going into redundancy with the enunciations by not obeying the orders. Variations then begin to take shape, and can be reproduced within collective use.

A working-art carries along with it an implicit discourse that, by hiding (but never concealing) itself provides opportunities of experimentation through its collective acts. By widening itself, it breaks with the single meaning and allows the unorganized flow to have the strength to snatch the orders given. Teachers are not required to be real artists, but to convene their interests as activities to be done collectively, integrating the students to create together.

One way of thinking about these practices is by looking at the subjects that make up part of the formal syllabus. How can they be practiced without orders being given in absolute ways? Leaving room is a way that allows for a development that hovers in this atelier-classroom, so that the indirect discourses can remain in a sensorial zone.

In order to be able to think of a purposeful deviation from the working-art, it is necessary to escape an order-word (which is not the result of sensational processes). A class is weakened when content is thought of as an end product, the result of a previously established model. When nothing escapes, nothing is created, nothing leaves, and reproduction and repetition is all one has.

That is why working-art is under a constant process with itself. It begins to be elaborated long before it is brought into the atelier-classroom. When we set it into motion, a conflict sets in. It is not quite clear what is being done here, but it is often the reverse of what is desired (because of the pure experimentation that the working-art suggests). There are no programmed and defined paths as it is a constant environment of possibilities.

Language is anchored in the following assumption, “[...] One must be just informed enough not to confuse “Fire!” with “Fore!” or to avoid a really unfortunate situation...” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 13). Discourse then carries a necessary notion not to be deceived, responsible for attributing a subjective power to the order. It requires some minimum information to be emitted and accepted. When done indirectly, it is practically disregarded, not allowing transformations (or confusions) during the act.

Art preserves in itself gesture, smile, breath, light and no longer depends on who made it. It is a composite of sensations (Deleuze; Guattari, 2010DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. O que é a Filosofia?. Tradução: Bento Prado Jr. e Alberto Alonso Muñoz. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2010.). Even when limping, it has the strength to stand alone and it is in this very effort that it sustains itself. Therefore, art, in its minority, extracts sensations from materials; it is not a performance, it tears them out of sounds, stones and light. Even the mad extract a set of these in their works when they paint, draw or sculpt. Art is a language that does not compare with any other; it is signless significance, a world that communicates through other means.

The artist believes that it is no use painting a world that is already given, a world governed by pictorial rules. Going beyond these ideas, the painter lets go of the references. From this moment on, there is the chance of the ongoing process of creating in an empty world waiting to be filled, resulting in the sensation of a remaining abyss. By erasing any trace of social consecration of enunciations, potency is brought to their artistic creation. It is then when the artist realizes that there is no longer a need for representativeness.

Nevertheless, some orders need to be given in a working-art in order to avoid unpleasant situations. This minimum, strict information is also creation and transformation. By not imposing relationships, a chasm is made possible so that one can connect points in different ways, generating variations. Thus, in this path, an experimentation zone is strained, where paths are created by the abstractions of what is yet to be.

Therefore, this minor language that “[...] is affected by a strong deterritorialization coefficient” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2015, p. 35) - and in a working-art - is created by playing a game (Kaprow, 2003KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista Parte I. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 4, p. 216-227, mar. 2003.). In the absence of a ready-made formula, it operates on the escape of orders and models, causing sensations (rather than single meanings) to emerge: strength in what may yet come to be. Besides making programmed bodies overcome inertia, it puts them to work in parallel with creation. In short, there is no longer something to be obeyed, but something to be experienced.

Indirect discourse then gains importance, for it is where the deviation from orders is contained. Made possible by transmission, facilitating and giving new forms and doings to language, it is hidden from common sense and carries with it a variation or modification. It gains boundaries by pragmatic use, favoring deterritorialization.

The new forms and works that this language provides allow the construction and solidification of variables. In guiding towards this perspective, Kaprow sets infinite meanings in motion, which are captured by the audience as sensations. By doing so, one avoids the conditionalities of the structured orders to be the sole responsible for creation in language.

The minor language engenders processes of creation in the abstractions, giving them new forms and meanings. Therefore, the communicability between the teacher-artist and the student-audience is where the working-art takes place, changing into a process of minor uses (even if still dependent on some minimum orders to prevent confusion).

The following questions are then posed: Is minority, provided by sensations, a form of creation of an artist’s language? What can we do to invent in education? If there is escape by doing it together in working-art, artistry plays an important role in seeking teaching transformations and possibilities not dependent on what is already given and established. And as such, it is not just for the act of creating, but above all for life itself in multiplicities and intensities.

Through invention, forms of content and expression are opened to assume an agency role (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.). Such agencing is responsible for pointing out creative relationships and how transformations can take place. There is a territorial part, which is given - the curricula and laws, the invariables of teaching - but they need a way to be put into motion. Thus, there is the practice, the actions that put the elements that constitute this space to forces of tension, gaining new boundaries and routes as they are formalized. In this way, a sensation has no unique meanings and its contained forces can gain varying thresholds and definitions, calling a people to come forth.

Traces and singularities can then be seen and extracted from the flow (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011d, p. 94) and “[...] in order to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally: agency in this sense is a true invention.” It is then necessary to define the subjects that will come into play and the movement of stratifications of the forms of content and expression.

Agency is a tetravalence (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.). In one of the axes (the plane of the content and expression), there is a process that can drag them along the other axis (territoriality), modifying them and creating new ancestries, joining the speech of so many others who have spoken before. Actions and passions act as a force that, driven by practices and pragmatics, manages to have the knowledge expressed in its actions and statements vary. The second (vertical) axis has to do with territory, where there is the (stabilizing) territoriality on one side, and, on the other, the compelling deterritorialization.

Along the horizontal axis, agency articulates the two series - the machinic, which mixes the assemblage of bodies, actions and passions (content), and a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformation of bodies (expression). Even though they are reciprocal, they maintain their independent forms, entering “a relationship of presupposition [...], relaunching each other” (Zourabichvili, 2004ZOURABICHVILI, François. O Vocabulário de Deleuze. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumara, 2004., p. 9). Elements of different natures combine “without any centralized hierarchy or organization” (Silva, 2000SILVA, Tomaz Tadeu da. Teoria Cultural e Educação: um vocabulário crítico. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2000., p. 15), where heterogeny dissolves “any essentialist notion of ‘subject’ as a singular or privileged ‘human’ entity” (Silva, 2000SILVA, Tomaz Tadeu da. Teoria Cultural e Educação: um vocabulário crítico. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2000., p. 15), escaping the traditional dichotomous philosophies that separate man from everything that is nonhuman.

As part of the construction of the assemblages, it is noticed that the elements then move and [...] negotiate the variables in such or such variation, according to such or degree of deterritorialization, to determine those that will establish constant relations or obey the mandatory rules, and those which, on the contrary, will be the fluent matter for variation (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 48).

Kaprow’s activities form an escape from the territory of art. There needs to be a force so that one can shake the structures of artistic production. Much more than a thought embedded in the implicit of the enunciation, the acts resist what has already been given, and in doing so, carry sensations capable of deterritorializing the audience that does it together.

By mixing the bodies of participants and objects, new ways of relating them to each other are provided, and Kaprow transforms them incorporeally, by incorporating other uses. Itis an agency that has its peak of deterritorialization in the activity, where the public body turns into the artist body through the artistic act. Ultimately, one has a new regime of signs that works within the action they engage in, providing other ways of life.

By evoking these common doings to an artistic status, they make sensations ignore distinctions between form of content and expression within abstract machines. By finding actions and passions, provisional forms build “a realness to come” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 106). Powers are made possible by the movement of a working-art that operates the subjects in the discomfort of the lack of senses: absence of what art used to attribute before. Thus, a minority is drawn in parallel in the creation of a language between the work and the public, a thinking and a doing together.

The expression does not carry ideologies (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b.), it is an opinion-free form. Therefore, Kaprow’s (2010) activities break away from the representational mold at the moment that his actions open space in the need of not being “taught” by anyone. There is an advising but not an ordering of what can be done. The audience is meant to create according to their sensations and to build their own agencies. The process goes beyond the collective of enunciation by doing it together.

During the transformations that these collective doings engender, the territory of the language of art is widened, where new possibilities arise by crossing different languages with the same language. Such agency begins with formless subjects: there is no working-art model to follow. What artist-teachers provide their students with is built through (or by) practice and it is through these processes that the variables are determined for the minor use. However, one must be aware that it is “language that depends on the abstract machine and not the opposite” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 35-36), and thus the force to deterritorialize will come from sensations - a minor use that seizes the structure.

The Minor Use as a Way of doing it together in Working-Art

Major uses tend to sediment and stiffen educational content, isolating it and founding structures. By ordering and representing, information is nourished by socially consecrated enunciations, searching for ready-made forms in the meanings. One of the possible ways out of dryness is in the minor use, letting expression mutate into language.

Thus, it is appropriate to think of working-art as the possibility of minor language within already given educational models. By placing oneself outside the programmed bodies, one seeks strengths that teachers carry with themselves - in juxtaposition with the required content to be prepared. Artistic development is made to put into practice potent educational works.

Indirect discourse can then vary the order-word, causing certainties to be diluted. Sensations become sense, enabling the emergence of new forms. A zone of experimentation that transforms certainties by breaking away from the impositions of the given allows this force (sensation) to find its own development.

Education can deviate from the sad images of representation and content, turning away from larger flows and providing new elements in the territory capable of changing it. It is not related by representation. Rather, forms of expressions and forms of content communicate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization, each intervening, operating in the other (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 31). Modifying and modulating, they make room for creation; it is an action/passion that makes sense even in a rigid structure.

Above all, it is impossible to conceive a smaller language with strict rules. Earlier acts of significance do not provide for the “[...] implicit or non-discursive assumptions” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2010DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. O que é a Filosofia?. Tradução: Bento Prado Jr. e Alberto Alonso Muñoz. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2010.b, p. 15). Thus, the immanent relations of the enunciations are kept covered as if by curtains, in order to subvert the meaning in favor of sensations.

The ongoing transformations that artistic practices offer education make it possible to compose heterogeneous elements in an agency that stresses new possibilities. By attributing a free sense (or free senses) to bodies, ignoring the distinction between the natural and the artificial, the unformed matter operates not to “represent, even something real, but constructs a realness to come” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2011bDELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 2: volume 2. Tradução: Ana Lúcia de Oliveira e Lúcia Cláudia Leão. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2011b., p. 106).

The forms of content and expression function in mutual actualization, and though transformation is made to exist through its telling, it is through socially consecrated expressions that it is created. Kaprow’s activities enable an abstract machine that allows a greater flow of sensations rather than meanings. In this agency, broad senses are constructed to the materials, gaining new profiles.

Acting in one another, information and communication “[...] depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given social field” (Deleuze; Guattari, 2010DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. O que é a Filosofia?. Tradução: Bento Prado Jr. e Alberto Alonso Muñoz. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2010.b, p. 18). Even if the artistic audience can associate free meanings according to their perceptions, there are still invariables. For example, if you are in an art gallery, what you see is art; if the object was produced by an artist, it is a work of art; if the curator names the exhibit, it shapes the image of the exhibit.

Kaprow’s password 4 (2004KAPROW, Allan. A Educação do An-Artista. Parte II. Concinnitas, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 6, p. 167-181, jul. 2004.; 2010)KAPROW, Allan. Como fazer um Happening. Boston: Mass Art Inc., 1966. In: SEVERO, André; BERNARDES, Maria Helena (Org.). Horizonte Expandido. Porto Alegre: Santander Cultural, 2010, P. 1-11. tells us that being in the world is to be made by the mixtures, experiences, and existences of what is discarded by formal art: it means modernizing and using artistic practices to your advantage. By working away from the representative structures, one escapes through play (play by playing). Becoming a geologist without ever having been one, a builder of liquid houses, becoming passionate about the beauties of banality… in short, engaging in working-art together.

Teaching practices are now dissociated from given and established parameters. We enter a zone of experimentation and have the possibility of joining forces with the other, calling forth a collective (Deleuze; Guattari, 2015DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Kafka: por uma literatura menor. Tradução: Cíntia Vieira da Silva. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2015.). The doing of something together is the strength of working-art, putting aside teaching models and seeking, in the artist’s development, the skills that will allow people to populate an atelier-classroom with new works.

Modernity has always sought languages that are clean and without deviations. Hybridizing, intersecting, conjuring, juxtaposing, transcending (Corazza, 2013CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. Para Artistar a Educação: sem ensaio não há inspiração. In: CORAZZA, Sandra Mara. O Que se Transcrita em Educação?. Porto Alegre: UFRGS; Doisa, 2013. P. 17-40.) are inventive opportunities for education, creating the necessary leaks to break away from the models. Contaminating the educational system with artistical developments by using new practices instead of old techniques is key

In this perspective, Kaprow’s activities help one think about doing working-art in a gratifying sense, a useful play-game that abandons mimesis and allows one to experience pleasure in the act. The idea is to imitate a non-artistic practice for fun, and by doing so evade the hierarchical lure of competition. By leaving immobility, life brings the possibility of reaching a creative work that allows the expression to flow, revealing the exchange of components by juxtaposing what was previously separated.

Therefore, by considering how contemporary artistic practices can vary, the development of artist-teachers who transform their class into a zone of constant creation is fostered. In this way, it is in a minor language that experiments are carried out, provided by zones of indetermination of the given meanings.

Referências

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  • DELEUZE, Gilles. Deleuze sur le Langage [Deleuze sobre a linguagem] (1975-1976). Universidade de Vincennes, Paris, 1975-1976. YouTube, 27 out. 2017. Disponível em: <https://youtu.be/021Kf364qAw>. Acesso em: 11 out. 18.
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  • SCHÖPKE, Regina. Dicionário Filosófico: conceitos fundamentais. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2010.
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Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    10 Feb 2020
  • Date of issue
    2020

History

  • Received
    27 Feb 2019
  • Accepted
    30 Apr 2019
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