{"id":15378,"date":"2017-12-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/chimeras-in-drag\/"},"modified":"2020-11-04T22:29:18","modified_gmt":"2020-11-04T21:29:18","slug":"chimeras-in-drag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/chimeras-in-drag\/","title":{"rendered":"Chimeras in Drag: A Conversation about Ergonomic Futures"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[354],"project_type":[],"class_list":["post-15378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-studio-visits"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"How do you design a seat for the body of the future? And what might that seat reveal about present conceptions and techniques of the body\u2014particularly in art institutions? <\/strong>Adam Gibbons interviews Tyler Coburn about his project \u00bbErgonomic Futures\u00ab, its relation to Artistic Research, where it falls in the long shadow of Institutional Critique.\r\n\r\nAdam Gibbons: <\/strong>You\u2019ve been working on the Ergonomic Futures<\/em> project since 2016. The project manifests as bespoke museum furniture, created in collaboration with New York architects Bureau V, employing some of the principles of the discipline of ergonomics. This furniture is made for a future body, which imbues it with both a speculative form, and a mode of narrating the institutional structures that it enters. Working in parallel to these seats is a website<\/a> designed with Luke Gould and Afonso Martins, which hosts writing you produced under a disparate set of titles.\r\nWhat status are the seats afforded in the museums they enter? Are they considered artworks, and therefore tended to through the curatorial and conservationist channels accorded to such objects? Or are they held with other museum furniture, looked after by gallery managers and technicians? I assume artwork and furniture would be located in different bureaucratic systems, different storage rooms, and would presumably be subject to different expectations of longevity. Is this distinction something you\u2019re interested in? And lastly, do the seats have individual titles?\r\n\r\nTyler Coburn:<\/strong> The seats don\u2019t have individual titles. Everything \u2013 seat, website, lecture \u2013 is encompassed by the title Ergonomic Futures<\/em>. Part of the reason for this is that I want the seats to read more as furniture than art objects, or as the types of design objects displayed (not for use) in the Decorative Arts sections of museums. Giving titles to the seats might push them more into the art domain. Related to this is the fact that the seats, when possible, enter the furniture inventory of a given museum.\r\nThat said, the seats are always installed with a work caption, which mentions the research behind them, as well as the website. The bodies for which the seats are designed are never described on these captions, thus inviting users to speculate about their intended sitters in a tactile manner. If users also<\/em> navigate the website on their smartphones, while using the seats, then multiple tactile practices come into play.\r\n\r\nAG:<\/strong> How many varieties of the seat exist so far, and do you plan on continuing to evolve the design?\r\n\r\nTC:<\/strong> There are two typologies at the moment. I would like to realize other design typologies; I would also like to continue producing the existing typologies. One parameter for the project is that, in any city, two copies of a given typology are produced: one intended for long-term use in a fine art museum, and the other in a natural history or anthropology museum. This allows the project to draw upon multiple disciplines central to my research.\r\n\r\nAG:<\/strong> Can you provide an exhaustive list of where the seats have landed to date?\r\n\r\nTC:<\/strong> The first seat was commissioned by and exhibited in the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. One copy is now in the Seodaemun Museum of Natural History, Seoul, and the other in Art Sonje Center, Seoul.\r\nThe second seat was commissioned by Lafayette Anticipation: Fondation d\u2019enterprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris and first exhibited in its 2016 group exhibition, Faisons de l\u2019inconnu un alli\u00e9<\/em> (Joining Forces with the Unknown<\/em>). One copy is now installed in Centre Pompidou, and the other will be installed in Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Homme (Museum of Man), Paris in April 2018."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"img_gallery":true,"img":[24445,24447,24449,24451],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"AG:<\/strong> In the DIS<\/em> interview that I read on Ergonomic Futures<\/em><\/a>, you often describe the project with the term \u00bbresearch.\u00ab Is this connected to your wage labor as a teacher? Are there other reasons for using this term? For example, I\u2019m thinking about the way \u00bbresearch\u00ab is often commodified within higher education environments \u2013 for example practice-based PhDs \u2013 but also about the kind of d\u00e9tournement,<\/em> which can take place within the term.\r\n\r\nTC:<\/strong> Oh lord, I just searched that DIS<\/em> interview for the word \u00bbresearch.\u00ab I used it A LOT.\r\nI did an interview with Eleanor Taylor from Kunsthalle Wien last year<\/a>, and this topic came up, so I\u2019ll paste my response below. In short, let me say that I do teach a class dedicated to \u00bbArtistic Research\u00ab methodologies and try my best \u2013 with the help of writing by such people as Tom Holert and Renate Lorenz \u2013 to define this term outside of the \u00bbepistemic violence\u00ab that Lorenz notes, via Spivak, characterizes \u00bbthe Enlightenment\u2019s merciless pursuit of knowledge production\u00ab and its attendant forms of objectification and capture.\r\nOkay: here\u2019s the longer response, from the Kunsthalle Wien interview, to a question about whether I consider myself a conceptual, post-conceptual, or research-based artist:\r\n\r\n\u00bbI think conceptual art denotes a historical period, and I think post-conceptual is a modality still in search of definition. That said, I\u2019m apprehensive at the extent to which \u203aresearch-based\u2039 practices have become implicitly synonymous with post-conceptual ones. I\u2019m ambivalent about this new classification of \u203aresearch-based\u2039 artist: the way it presupposes that only certain artists are researchers, when in fact many artists do research within their practices. Moreover, there\u2019s a sense that delineating \u203aresearch\u2039 as a category gives it an institutional legitimacy; we need look no further than the research PhDs cropping up (particularly in Europe) to see this trend in action.\r\nI\u2019m ambivalent, because obviously research is a big part of my work. As an artist with neither commercial gallery nor market, I potentially stand to benefit from the funding offered by some of these programs. But I do worry that we\u2019re seeing the construction of a new benchmark for artistic professionalism \u2013 one that artists will eventually have to meet, if they want to pursue a teaching career.\u00ab\r\n
\u00bb(I) try my best\u2014with the help of writing by such people as Tom Holert and Renate Lorenz\u2014to define this term (\u203aartistic research\u2039) outside of the \u203aepistemic violence\u2039 that Lorenz notes, via Spivak, characterizes \u203athe Enlightenment\u2019s merciless pursuit of knowledge production\u2039 and its attendant forms of objectification and capture.\u00ab<\/span><\/strong><\/blockquote>\r\nAG:<\/strong> There seems to be an assumption in your work that the museum will continue to exist in a recognizable material format, which implies that history will continue to be recorded and displayed along similar lines to the ambitions of the twentieth century. Is this a practical consideration or a semiotic one, which presupposes the continued hegemony of forms of knowledge originating from Enlightenment \u2013 and colonial \u2013 ideologies, and applied socially and politically through museums and other cultural institutions?\r\n\r\nTC:<\/strong> I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a need to divide practical and semiotic considerations here, given that the practical ambition of the project \u2013 for the seats to survive until the right bodies come along to use them \u2013 is preposterous. The designation of these seats as \u00bbmuseum furniture\u00ab is a tactic by which seats intended for future bodies can parasite the temporality performed by certain institutions, wherein \u00bbtimeless\u00ab objects are (often painstakingly) preserved as such. This temporality, in my opinion, is one component of the forms of knowledge applied and performed through the museum \u2013 particularly, the nineteenth-century heritage model of the museum.\r\nIn short, I hope this project makes its audience question the presupposition you mentioned, given its (ironized) faith in the stability and endurance of this predominant model of museum.\r\n\r\n "},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"img_gallery":false,"img":[24453],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"AG:<\/strong> As we talk, I\u2019m thinking of Marcel Broodthaers, and of the paradox in his practice, in which he draws attention to the normalizing discourse of museums (in line with their Enlightenment relationship to bourgeois culture) and (in what may now appear to be a conservative position) to the onslaught of the spectacularization of culture, as described by Horkheimer and Adorno. As far as I can see, most of the institutions you\u2019ve worked with in your project seem to reflect the traditional bourgeois values familiar throughout museum history, which of course aren\u2019t immune to neoliberal values of expansion and accessibility that most cultural institutions are now implementing through funding mechanisms and political influence.\r\n\r\nTC:<\/strong> If I had my way, all of my seats would end up in museums most indebted to the nineteenth-century heritage model: sites where we find capital-letter discourses (and the normalizing tendencies that come with capitalization) articulating their claims: the art historical museum, the anthropological museum, etc. Given that my project \u2013 particularly the writing on the website \u2013 works against normalizing tendencies in fields like ergonomics, I see this furniture generating the most friction when sited in such institutions.\r\nMethodologically, I\u2019ve drawn a lot from my colleagues Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers\u2019s writing on parasitical strategies in art<\/a>. The authors are attempting to build a genealogy that\u2019s parallel and at times coextensive with that of Institutional Critique, by looking at practices that reveal networks of dependency and value extraction far more complicated than unilateral host-parasite, institution-artist models. They draw influence, as do I, from Andrea Fraser\u2019s writing in the past ten years: for instance, her claim that \u00bbIt\u02bcs not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It\u02bcs not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.\u00ab\r\n
\u00bbIf I had my way, all of my seats would end up in museums most indebted to the nineteenth-century heritage model. [\u2026] I see this furniture generating the most friction when sited in such institutions.\u00ab<\/strong><\/span><\/blockquote>\r\nThe parasite is a topic that I\u2019ve engaged literally in another project, A Wide Blank<\/a>. For Ergonomic Futures<\/em>, I\u2019m thinking about the dynamics of hosting \u2013 and the fact that the French word h\u00f4te<\/em>, as per Derrida, connotes both hospitality and hostility. My seats are entering institutions with an avowed purpose: to function as museum furniture. They\u2019re donated and thus come as gestures of goodwill. But they also enter with an ulterior motive and a will to persist in a very different way than an artifact. Far from being a once-functional thing, they\u2019re waiting for their function to be realized in the fullest."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":10,"img_gallery":false,"img":[24455,24457,24459],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"AG:<\/strong> Is the body an institution for you?\r\n\r\nTC:<\/strong> Hmm. I suppose if you follow Fitzpatrick and Post\u2019s host-parasite model, then it would be relevant to characterize it as such. But with Ergonomic Futures<\/em>, I\u2019m thinking much more about the visitor\u2019s body \u2013 and about the degree to which an institution should cater to that body. See my story \u00bbSeat\u00ab on the website, which draws heavily on an excellent essay by Joel Sanders and Diana Fuss on the museum seat<\/a>.\r\n\r\nAG:<\/strong> The categories through which you write seem a far cry from the discipline known as Human Factors and Ergonomics (or abbreviated, as per the managerial logic it is aligned to, HF&E). It is incumbent on the reader to place your writing in relation to this field, however obliquely.\r\nWe have talked about the model of the parasite \u2013 or different sorts of parasite; through the appropriation of the term ergonomics, which you place centrally in the framing of the project, and the technical aspects of producing the gallery benches, are you inserting your work into the language of ergonomics as a discipline, alongside other forms of parasitism in relation to museological structures?\r\n\r\nTC: <\/strong>I\u2019ve been interested in ergonomics for several years, though as I age and feel the effects of decades of poor posture, I find myself more aware of how the objects of the designed world purport, with relative degrees of success, to accommodate our bodies. In conducting research on the field, I was surprised to learn that ergonomics was a child of Taylorism and thus tasked to increase the efficiency of the working body: to minimize wasteful movements, to keep the eye trained on its machine, to quicken the pace of materials as they raced towards the market \u2026"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":10,"img_gallery":false,"img":[24461],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Ergonomics retains an intimate relationship to labor in Henry Dreyfuss\u2019s 1955 book, Designing for People<\/em>; Niels Diffrient\u2019s Humanscale<\/em> publications, from 1974; and later seminal contributions to the field. The more comfortable a worker feels \u2013 at his seat, within his machine \u2013 the more productive he will be. What fascinated me was the way the discipline constructed body types to serve as the measure of design. Humanscale<\/em>, for example, includes measurements for \u00bbstandard\u00ab elderly, disabled, and obese bodies, as well as those of black, white, and Japanese descent.\r\nWhile it\u2019s admirable that ergonomics considers different types of bodies, I nonetheless wonder about the implications of these typologies, and how they may figure into broader social notions of normality and ability. Ergonomic Futures<\/em> takes a circuitous route in addressing these topics: by ergonomically designed seats for unspecified bodies to come, it throws the typological tendencies of the discipline into the future. The effect is to render each of us ill-fitting in the present, no matter our shape or make. In other words: by virtue of the project\u2019s temporality, none of us can be the right, standard, or normal body for which the seats are intended."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"img_gallery":false,"img":[24463],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"AG:<\/strong> The narratives and the language hosted on the project\u2019s website veer obstinately away from the normalizing tendencies of ergonomics and propose the unknown bodies to come, or \u00bbChimeras in drag, \u00ab as you coin the emergent category. The points of contact which ergonomics make strike me as surprisingly bound up in the investigation that Institutional Critique has pursued over the last half-century or so. Ergonomics, in its most benign state, is sometimes described as considering the relations between a human subject and a system, which is a summary that could be broadly applied to practices associated with Institutional Critique.\r\nAs Andrea Fraser notes in her 2005 text, \u00bbFrom the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, \u00ab which you previously quoted, artists have had to contemporize their understanding of the breadth of what might be understood as the institution: \u00bbMoving from a substantive understanding of \u203athe institution\u2039 as specific places, organizations, and individuals to a conception of it as a social field, the question of what is inside and what is outside becomes much more complex.\u00ab\r\nIn reviewing the terms under which the phrase \u00bbInstitutional Critique\u00ab emerged in the early 1980s, Fraser draws from canonical figures such as Hans Haacke in order to identify how this dialectical formation of \u00bbinside and outside\u00ab can be understood in terms relevant to the ongoing critical positioning that already takes into account the \u00bbsocial field\u00ab as an implicit precursor to the complexes which form institutions \u2013 including the bodies of the artist and viewer.\r\nThese complexes undergo critique at multiple points in Ergonomic Futures<\/em>: through your interactions with other practitioners, and in the implication of artist as institution, which I find to be particularly noticeable in the anecdotal form and highly personal tone of the language on the website.\r\nThere is clearly a strong connection to Institutional Critique in your work, and I wondered to what degree this influenced your research into ergonomics and the other disciplines at play in this project?"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"img_gallery":false,"img":[24465],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"TC:<\/strong> I\u2019m certainly a student of Institutional Critique, though my interests have always been less with questions of the institution and more with those of site, which, per Miwon Kwon\u2019s seminal writing, can be defined physically, institutionally, and discursively. For instance, Kwon describes how the \u00bbaesthetics of administration, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, has converted to the administration of aesthetics in the 1980s and 1990s, \u00ab wherein artists play with or literally<\/em> assume managerial and service roles vis-\u00e0-vis institutions. (Think: Andrea Fraser\u2019s 1994\u201395 project with the Generali Foundation, where the artist provided \u00bb\u203ainterpretive\u2039 and \u203ainterventionary\u2039 services.\u00ab) Such works signal more than a shift in strategies of Institutional Critique; the artist steps into a managerial role, and management, in turn, considers the artist as a model for an increasingly flexible and precarious worker.\r\n
\u00bbI wonder if it\u2019s possible that \u203aArtistic Research\u2039 too often permits or tolerates the thing Kwon fears most about these changes: the way a \u203arenewed focus on the artist leads to a hermetic implosion of (auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences\u2039? Are we content, as artists, to be the means by which disparate content gains common value?\u00ab<\/span><\/strong><\/blockquote>\r\nKwon claims that \u00bb[c]oncurrent with, or because of, these methodological and procedural changes, there is a reemergence of the centrality of the artist as the progenitor of meaning.\u00ab In other words, what reemerges are discursive practices \u2013 often wildly interdisciplinary in scope \u2013 for which the artist serves as the \u00bbnarrator-protagonist\u00ab: the force that constellates the chaos.\r\nIt\u2019s easy to understand how the valorization of the artist as such abets management practices that seek to imbue a spirit of creative individualism in workers being cut free of safety nets (Freed from security, and thus more free to be me<\/em>). I can also see these changes preparing the way for the rise of \u00bbArtistic Research\u00ab as a scholarly field, where the artist \u2013 not the field \u2013 often defines the methodologies and forms of meaning making that constitute their practice.\r\nTo elaborate on our earlier thread, I wonder if it\u2019s possible that \u00bbArtistic Research\u00ab too often permits or tolerates the thing Kwon fears most about these changes: the way a \u00bbrenewed focus on the artist leads to a hermetic implosion of (auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences\u00ab? Are we content, as artists, to be the means by which disparate content gains common value?\r\nI\u2019m dwelling on this art historical narrative because Ergonomic Futures<\/em> is an attempt to dial down my subjectivity and centrality to my artistic practice: in developing a project borne of conversations with researchers and articulated through collaborations with architects, craftsmen, graphic designers, and web designers; in submitting my seats not to the care of a fine art collection, but to the staff responsible for the furniture and support structures of institutions; and in making the question of selfhood not reflexive but speculative, which is to say that the \u00bbnarrator-protagonists\u00ab of this project have yet to come. Who can predict the meaning they\u2019ll make from the furniture that\u2019s been prepared for them?"}],"intro_preview_headline":"","intro_preview_txt":"How do you design a seat for the body of the future? Adam Gibbons interviews Tyler Coburn about his project \u00bbErgonomic Futures\u00ab.<\/span><\/strong>","intro_preview_img":15707,"post_id_old":"21773","post_author":"","post_subtitle":"Interview with Tyler Coburn by Adam Gibbons","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":false,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":null,"post_copyright":"ccl_default","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":"","related_posts_post":[8958,9562]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15378\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/9562"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/8958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=15378"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=15378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}