Collaborative Art Project

How to make An Art

How to Make An Art concerns the importance of expanding and enhancing one’s network as an artist. American artist Dakota Havard, who moved to Tilburg in 2017, initiated a project at SEA Foundation to meet new people in the art field. Artists from all over the Netherlands were invited by SEA Foundation to be his guest for a day. From Groningen to Maastricht they were happy to come and participate. During eleven one-on-one meetings in Tilburg, Dakota Havard acts as a host, inviting art-professionals he does not know into his home and studio. Together they spend the day talking, walking, painting, creating, working, eating and drinking, bringing forth plans, notes, paintings, poems, scenarios, tokens or memories. A selection of the recordings, collections and outcomes are presented at SEA Foundation in the weekend of 17-19 May 2019.

SEA Foundation

SEA Foundation gives art-professionals opportunities and tools to develop their practice. SEA Foundation strongly believes in the power of ‘together’. How to Make An Art is an excellent way to convey this belief. It is an illustration of our broader mission to deepen connections through exchanging working methods and sharing socio-cultural perspectives. SEA Foundation carved out a possibility to stimulate collaboration and experimentation. The fact that all guests leave content and inspired, shows the structure of the project to be prosperous.

Experimental and personal

How to Make an Art is not result-oriented and is not about productivity or benefit. Rather, Dakota Havard takes on an experimental and personal approach, without expectations or a preconceived plan. He and his guest share a day of their lives. Mutual trust, vulnerability and attention are immanent, because they take their artistic practices into the private and domestic sphere. This project can be seen in light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics.

Hospitality

In Of Hospitality Jacques Derrida discusses the encounter with ‘the foreigner’ (l’étranger). He addresses questions that relate to: when is someone (classified as) a foreigner and who has the right and power to decide this? Derrida states someone can also be ‘like’ a foreigner, when they do not have the same understanding of jargon, principles or habits. In his words: “without speaking the same national language, someone can be less ‘foreign’ to me if he shares a culture with me” (Derrida, 2002, 133). L’étranger also translates to ‘stranger’, which aptly applies to How to Make an Art. The host and guest do not know each other, and yet they are intensively bound to each other for a day.

Open to ‘strangers’

Aiming to define ‘foreign’ or ‘stranger’ comes with social, political and ethical implications. This extends to hospitality. Who has the right to hospitality and when? And, again, who makes the decisions? How to Make an Art originated from the conviction that we need to be welcoming towards each other and open to new – ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ – experiences and ideas. Dakota Havard welcomes other artists in his studio and home. He moulds a safe and open space for them to work and “just be” in. In this project’s case, the host did not choose the guests himself. They were chosen for him, after which he sent personal hand-written invitations. This is an explicit case of Derrida’s declaration: “Let us say yes to who or what turns up” (Derrida, 2002, 77).

Spatial, relational, affective

According to Jacques Derrida, when you open up your home to strangers, there is inevitably a power-relation involved. That is to say, hospitality starts with the ‘master of the home’ rendering the visitor permission to cross the threshold. This threshold is literal, but also metaphorical. Dan Bulley clarifies this, by stating that hospitality is a “spatial, relational practice with affective dimensions” (Bulley, 2015, 5). It is spatial, because it concerns going from an ‘outside’ to an ‘inside’. Moreover, it shapes a new space that depends on the relation between host and guest. The affective dimension gives this new space structure: matters of belonging, comfort, security and ease dictate the hospitality.

Power-relation

Since hospitality forms this new space, both host and guest are momentarily destabilised at first. This is where Jacques Derrida’s power-relation comes in. He argues that the guest is an ‘intruder’, making the host a ‘hostage’ in his own home. That is, when having visitors over, you behave differently – albeit unconsciously – than when you are by yourself. Behavioural standards are involved. The guest has power, in the sense that if they were to behave rudely or violently, they defy the hospitality. They can make the host feel like a stranger in their own home. On the other hand, the host has the power to ‘control’ this behaviour, because the guest can be shown the door at any moment.

Encounters

How to Make an Art is a way to explore this interplay between host and guest, and to substantiate hospitality. The structure and approach of the project stand above the content; the outcome is subordinate to the process. As Dakota Havard states: “Sometimes content is not even created.” How to Make an Art revolves around encounters. Encounters between people, practices, ideas, customs and backgrounds. In doing so, it carries forward key points of Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of ‘relational aesthetics’.

Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud discusses ‘relational art’, with which he means: “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (Bourriaud, 1998 [2002], 14). He wrote this in the context of art in the 1990s that revolved around audience participation. Respectively, his notion of ‘relational aesthetics’ regards evaluating artworks based on “inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (1998 [2002], 112).

Participation

In the case of How to Make An Art, the participatory aspect arises on two levels. To begin with, the exhibition contains an event. Dakota Havard makes and shares homemade hotdogs, and the artists propose the audience to connect (to) the works. Secondly, Dakota Havard explains that he and the guest are each other’s audience. They participate in each other’s practices. Not only do the artists form relations, but the creations also receive new layers of meaning when they are put in relation to each other and to the audience.

Forming relations

Relational aesthetics is based on the principle that the world consists of connections between people, rather than separate individuals. Everyone is part of a greater whole. For Nicolas Bourriaud, but also in How to Make an Art, “each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum” (1998 [2002], 22). This fits in perfectly with SEA Foundation’s mission. The project truly is about forming these relations and opening up a space for hospitality. A space where the most unexpected – and therefore the most interesting – encounters, experiences and ideas can arise.

Sources:
Bourriaud, N. (1998 [2002]) Relational Aesthetics. Translated by S. Pleasance and F. Woods. Les presses du réel.
Bulley, D. (2015) ‘Ethics, Power and Space: International Hospitality Beyond Derrida’, in: Hospitality & Society, 5: pp. 185-201.
Dufourmantelle, A. and J. Derrida (2000) Of Hospitality. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.