Page 212 - The Black Box Book

platforms of transmission and exchange but may now just as often in-
tervene within and divert the direction of its otherwise pervasive data
flows. Networked art practice, in this sense, is an interventionist practice,
consciously documenting and exchanging the affects and effects of our
globally networked society.
6 Months Without takes its place within a genealogy of concep-
tual and performance art in which documentation and information pro-
vide the work’s material base. This tradition includes On Kawara’s I Got
Up (1968–1979), in which he sent two picture postcards stamped with
the time he woke up from his location daily. Tehching Hsieh’s One Year
Performance series (1978–1986) also explores self-deprivation, variously
of freedom (Cage Piece, 1978–1979), personal time (Time Clock Piece,
1980–1981), outdoor space (Outdoor Piece, 1981–1982) or personal space
(Rope Piece, 1983–1984, with Linda Montano) or of making art at all
(No Art Piece, 1985–1986). Rönkkö, like Kawara and Hsieh, explores regi-
mented documentation and communication of daily existence and themes
of autonomy and restriction simultaneously. Unlike the well-rehearsed view
whereby documentation is understood as undermining the authenticity or
liveness of performance, Kawara, Hsieh and Rönkkö’s strategy arguably
exists to generate documentation as the vital material of the performance.
The main distinction between Kawara and Hsieh‘s systems of doc-
umentation and Rönkkö‘s in 6 Months Without is that Kawara and Hsieh
developed systems prior to online algorithms and GPS, but Rönkkö
investigates these experiences in an online world of default self-surveil-
lance. As with Kawara and Hsieh‘s exhibitions too, stepping away from
the pervasiveness of online experience produces physical proof that
is progressively reified and fetishized. In Rönkkö’s case, the archives
of unique handwritten letters she relied upon to communicate across
the offline/online, private/social divide come to stand both in place and
as the work (Figure 7 and Figure 8).
The experience of being offline for a day invites further speculation
on how it would feel to be offline for longer. How long could you be offline?
What would it be like to be offline for six months? When we talked with
Nastja about this work, one of the things that came up was, of course,
the conditions of the global health pandemic caused by COVID-19 and
resulting ‘lockdowns’. Many of us have spent much more time online in
2020 than we might have otherwise. And therefore, our desire to be offline
might have increased. Since then, people have written to Nastja to ask her
whether she felt better prepared for the pandemic because of her experi-
ence making the project. So, the work develops a strange resonance and
increased relevance over time where her idea of its performance stopped
at the end of that six months, but other people’s interest in the possibility
of re-enacting or re-performing the work has continued. Re-enactment
as a form of preservation becomes resonant with this work, particularly
in our current environment affected by anti-pandemic measures.
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CASE STUDY: THE MUSEUM OF ORDURE
The Museum of Ordure (2001–onwards) actively resists preser-
vation by “present[ing] the process of digital decay ‘ bit rot’ ex-
ploring cyberspace as a site where language and imagery
disintegrates just as in the physical world” (Whitely, 2011,
p. 155). The formation of the Museum was directly informed by the practice
of pioneering performance artist Stuart Brisley and primarily his estab-
lishment of the Collection of Ordure in 2000, inspired by Freud’s dream
of a Museum of Excrement (Brisley, n.d.). Brisley’s work since the 1960s
has investigated the physiological embodiment of psychological alienation,
derangement and trauma. Living and working through the post-WWII and
cold war periods, Brisley explored the construction and estrangement of
the subject in the context of the material and ideological conditions of
East-West European power relations, through durational performances.
In 1972 he made the work And for today… nothing in which he immersed
himself in a bath of black water for two hours a day for two weeks, sur-
rounded by rotting offal. A year later, in 1973–74, during his DAAD res-
idency in West Berlin, Brisley crossed the wall and visited Poland, later
loosely chronicled in his short novel Beyond Reason: Ordure (2003).
In this novel, he introduces the heteronym Rosse Yael Sirb as the curator
of the Collection of Ordure.
The stated mission of the Museum is “to examine ‘the cultural
value of ordure, shit, rubbish’ and the waste of human resources through
various ownership, production, and management regimes” (Museum of
Ordure, n.d.). A museum dedicated to shit, to the excremental product
of capitalist overproduction and consumption and its cultural, environ-
mental and political implications and impact more broadly. A reliquary of
something which, since the late eighteenth century, has been anathema
to sensibility, something undesirable to be expunged, never to return.
The efficient management and disappearance of which becomes a hall-
mark of public hygiene in maintaining health, efficiency, and taste, and
hence, by extension, a society‘s civilizing influence in comparison to “prim-
itive cultures that had failed to differentiate muck from what mattered”
(Moore, 2018). Shit is undoubtedly essential, however, whether as bodily
or social excrement. It is also inescapable, we realise, in the context of
the climate emergency, with digital oversaturation and overconsumption,
bullshit jobs and human-induced ecosystem collapse, when “ it is easier
to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (Fisher, 2009).
In elevating something as apparently transient but wholly imminent as
ordure as a deserving subject of museumification, the Museum of Ordure
critiques assumed cultural value otherwise and elsewhere.
The earliest snapshot capture of “www.ordure.org” by the Way-
back Machine web crawler took place at 01:22:00 on 24 January 2001.
It comprises of links to an introduction, “OrdureAbfall” by the curator
Rosse Yael Sirb; two texts concerning Sirb by Brisley, one a biography and
the other entitled “The Viable World of Rosse Yael Sirb” that later featured
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