We might wonder however about this double-mediative function in love_potion. On one hand it can be understood as “Consensus” defined by Rancière as “a reconfiguration of the visibility of the common” [2006b] whose role is to turn a political into an aesthetic function of art. That is to say that “political matters” become “artistic practices”. This takes place through reorganising the common space in such a way that it can not lend itself to “a dispute, to the polemical framing of a controversial world into the given world” [2006b]. However, what Consensus produces is not merely empty political space, but the space which has the potential to be reframed by artistic practice. And perhaps this is what takes place in love_potion with the use of double-mediation. In the space created by Consensus, where ritual and mystery aestheticise everyday activities to then reshape them into a happening or a performance. love_potion creates an experience in which life becomes life because it is not there. This is the clash, “the mystery of co-presence” [Rancière 2006b]which negotiates the distance between art and life in the act of turning gardening tasks into ritual and then staging a performance of sharing borage herbs in the potion of love. The negotiation which takes place is made stronger by the very relation with the work which is completely experienced by the “tactical gardener” who contributes to the organisation of the common in the form of invisible network. And creation of distance between the realms of network, life and artwork is essential for it obliges the participant/performer to realise and assess those very distances.
In love_potion by leaving open the moments in which to enter the work, the common is not instituted once and for all. The relation with the audience in this piece requires active engagement and agreement not only to participate in the work but also to allow love_potion to enter the life of the participant. That is perhaps a moment in which we are invited to open “our selves to a state of fragility and vulnerability” where “weaving together the processes and relations that co-emerge through growing ingredients, making potion and encountering others” [love_potion b] take place. Perhaps this is also where the sociality, the so called human bond or the common is being distributed in love_potion which if staged in the gallery as a performance is a mere representation of what it becomes when entwined in everyday activities of the performer. Invisible network of “tactical gardeners” intertwine processes and relations, online and offline, time and space. They negotiate for themselves life and art in each phase of the love_potion which they decide to stage or in which they participate. love_potion is at the same time the origin and the representation of what it creates. Representation here takes on different function, similar to that of Consensus, which is to actively compose a common space to be reshaped by artistic practice. The clash between the actual experience of the ritual proposed by love_potion performed in the everyday, and non-experience represented by staging it in the gallery has the potential to create dissensus which plays out “the politics of works of art” [Rancière, 2006a: 65].
Another situation of the common can be encountered by the participant in the sessions organised by the Department of Reading [DoR] . It is a project which is interested in suggesting new ways of reading which create and add new textures to the written text by allowing for interventions in and on the texts. It is done on the website dedicated to the project which uses wiki, a tool permitting collaborative edition of texts and with the use of Skype as a space where debates about the texts take place. The sessions organised by the Department of Reading are communal reading meetings taking place at the same time in a physical space of a gallery and virtual context of the DoR website and messaging window. The reading sessions are not limited to acts of passive reading and aim to “physically” intervene in and on the texts which exist on the server and are distributed via the DoR website. The intervention might take a form of annotation or alteration of the text also with the use of images. This “evolving practice of reading” of the DoR sessions makes visible not only communal reading processes involved within each session, but also the ways in which those processes are made visible and categorised in the common.
Here, however, the common is established by another framework and produces something different to the invisible network of tactical gardeners. The participants in the sessions are virtually connected. Not only do they share the time which could be considered an immaterial node in this networked activity, but they are connected to the same server where text is stored. They are also “gathered” within a Skype window where discussions and conversations take place. Thus this network is organised by shared time and virtual space materialised by the visibility of participation in the session. What is also shared in this community is the physical distance of the majority of participants from each other. Here, the common exists by its defined temporality, physical dislocation and the virtual connectedness of its members.
A session of the Department of Reading creates and at the same time represents the processes at work, as they are archived on the website. Is the representation of this network practice organised by Consensus? It might be too early to answer as DoR is still in the stage where practice of reading within the community evolves. But also in the DoR session mystery seems to have its use. “Heterogeneous realities” [Rancière 2006b] of written text, reading practice, discussion, technology allow “for other forms of intervention and encounter” [Department of Reading].
Dislocation in case of Department of Reading sessions, and disconnection among the “tactical gardeners” in love_potion create the political space as it makes visible the in-between areas of the common. Rancière says that: Polityka działa według wzorca teatralnego, jako związek między sceną a publicznością, jako przekaz wytwarzany przez ciało aktora, jako gry bliskosci i dystansu.
[2006a: 17]
Transposing this statement into the network paradigm, the relationship is played out in the distance between the networks’ forms of organisation and how they are made visible. The lack of physical connection between the participants arguably makes the realisation of the common even stronger because it is not a representation of sociality such as is the case in many of relational artworks. Network art has the potential to embody the common where all the “realities” become visible. This is how the connection with ethics can be re-established in the contemporary art today, through the realisation of the common where “artistic practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices” [Rancière, 2006a: 45] and where the common is not just an ethos but “polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities” [Rancière 2006a. s.42].
This text follows from the research in progress. Please contact me directly with comments and questions on HYPERLINK "mailto:magda@falmouth.ac.uk" magda@falmouth.ac.uk