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—―Porträt aus Desinteresse‖, René Pollesch, 2008

Under the title ―Decide and make your move‖, the Financial Times [2]

recently presented sociological advice literature dedicated to theenhancement of decision-making. Starting from the diagnosis that good

management usually fails due to the nonexistent structure of those methods

that lead to efficient decisions – a problem that also affects the organization

of one‘s own life – the professors and brothers Chip and Dan Heath suggestfinding a remedy in the principle of trial and error. Short-time emotions that

risk fizzling out all too quickly should be replaced by a regular reality checkof one‘s own convictions and methods. Only through a readiness to think

beyond what is already known and to weigh the diversity of options does

one learn how to deal with one‘s errors and mistakes. Chip and Dan‘s

colleague, Francesca Gino from the Harvard Business School, is also of theopinion that an awareness of the extent of extraneous influences on decisions

could help one better control them.This kind of everyday wisdom along the lines of ―practice makes perfect‖ or

―make the best out of mistakes‖ seems to nestle up without resistance to theneoliberal ideology of ―lifelong learning‖. The theater scholar Kai van

Eikels, for example, noted that improvisation techniques modeled on free

jazz long ago entered into management and organization theories, where

they are referenced as means to enhance creativity in collective production processes: ―In a process of improvisation, there is neither definitively right

nor definitely wrong, since everything that someone does is principallyunder reserve and attains its value only from what he has effected. […]

Valuation management, i.e., the control of possible extraneous perceptions

in the relationship to oneself, replaces the simple do-it-well. Virtuoso

performance in a team is essentially based on the ability to assess at eachmoment what I am worth to the others (or the value of what I am doing atthe moment to what they are doing).‖ [3]

This view also corresponds with the widespread proposition made by

theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Luc Boltanski, and Eve Chiapello thatsome forms of work possess a significant catalyzing function for capitalist

dynamics – particularly those that in the name of commodity, alienation, and

reification critique are committed to the non-perfect, processual, andtemporary as well as project-related quality of artistic activity. Indeed,socially and affectively intensive – thus collaborative, communicative, and

participatory – practices still count as effective ways to avoid market-oriented product thinking – even if the awareness of the expanding creativeindustry, which falls back precisely on these means, has certainly grown.

http://www.textezurkunst.de/90/buchmann-ruhm-subject-put-test/#id13










At this point, however, one shouldn‘t cater too rashly to an explanatory logic

that subsumes all artistic and human activity under an economic morality orthat basically acts as if this didn‘t play a role. No one can reject an interest in

promising decisions – it accompanies any kind of work in a more or less

conscious way: whether it is work on a text, on art, on life, on a relationship,or on oneself.

Precisely this only conditionally controllable relationship between decisionand rule, productive repetition and stagnating routine, is the core subject

matter of the rehearsal. As an artistic format, the rehearsal has become a popular means of the cross-media and cross-institutional linking of visual

and performative forms of presentation. The format of the theater or music

rehearsal is employed, for example, in (installation) films and performance

videos, where it is understood as an integration of potentially dysfunctionalmethods that tend to challenge the rules of their own genre and question or

replace what is all too skillful and virtuoso by the visible testing of newrules. In doing so, artistic production often performs itself as a structurally

open-ended learning process in front of the running camera. According toRuby Rich‘s characterization of Yvonne Rainer‘s debut film from 1972,

―Lives of Performers‖, in which the non-narrative conventions ofminimalistic dance lead to symbolically broken narration on archetypical

power and gender conflicts, it is often about a simultaneous act of rehearsaltime and screen time. [4] While on the one hand the format of rehearsal aims

at linking distinct media and genres (dance, film, photography), on the otherit is the mixing of private and public spheres of production that focuses on

moments which are usually not included in the final product: moments ofwaiting and observing, of making mistakes and failing, of hesitating and

repeating. Such experiences typical of artistic producers are staged inrelation to social, emotional, and media-related behavior and role patterns.

They frequently appear in the form of a both planned – because script-guided – and situation- and process-dependent making of identities, affects,

movements, gazes, and actions. In ―Lives of Performers‖, the format of

rehearsal is played like an instrument that inextricably entwines reality,

mediality, and fictionality. Already here, there are signs of the interest,

manifest in contemporary (installation) films, in reflecting upon the problemof artistic decision-making in regard to social relations of power andrepresentation as well as to the prevailing forms of subjectivization.

Examples of these tendencies can be found with George Kuchar (―I, an

Actress‖, 1977) and Andy Warhol (―Screentests‖, 1960s), as well as in

contemporary works by Rashid Masharawi, Omer Fast, Keren Cytter, MartinBeck, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Eske Schlüters, Clemens von







Wedemeyer, Maya Schweizer, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, and Constanze

Ruhm – works in which a shift takes place away from the individual andtoward collaborative and systematic forms of production consequently. The

format of rehearsal provides the opportunity to have those involved in art

production (artist or director, camerapersons, light technicians, assistants, etcetera) enter the picture in the sense of a demystifying visualization of

hierarchies dominated by the division of labor. It appears as if the format ofrehearsal, mostly vacillating between improvisation-, communication-, and

process-oriented staging, manifests the flipside of an all too genre-specific performance art and the linking of visual and performative arts at the

intersection of ―ordinary‖ [5] and artistic work. The exposure of disciplining

methods and standardizing conventions is accompanied by gestures of theaimlessly unproductive, aborted, wasteful, and erroneous – Warhol‘s

―Screentests‖ can serve as a historical example of this. ―Before the

Rehearsal‖ (2009) by Maya Schweizer is a contemporary example in thissense – a short video in which a comedy group, alternating betweenrehearsal and critique of maneuver, discuss in detail how they can best

promote their work. But they seem to get nowhere.

II.

Notably, the rehearsal, which is in most cases oriented toward the

performing arts, can be found foremost in those performative forms of workthat, while relating to theater, do not want to be theater in an explicit way.

Staged as an anti- or meta-theatrical work-in-progress, the rehearsal as aself-reflective presentation of the rules based on the repetition of

conventions, roles, and behavior patterns that the actors and actresses (and

with them the viewers) must first comprehend in order to see through their

own, oftentimes ambiguous, positioning within hierarchical orders permeated by claims to power and validity. While Yvonne Rainer‘s presence

as a choreographer giving strict instructions in ―Lives of Performers‖ has anephemeral and fleeting, almost after image-like character, the Palestinian

director Rashid Masharawi stages his body as a dominant pictorial content,including classical, trademark profile postures reminiscent of Hitchcock.

The American author and theater director Richard Foreman, in turn, appears

physically absent in the images of his most recent film production ―OnceEvery Day‖ (2012, his first film in 30 years), but with his spoken, command-like stage directions he is an acousmatic, indeed authoritarian figure of the performance.

For the evidently die-hard author, the rehearsal provides a stage for (self-

)critical questioning. Nowhere else do artists appear in their privileged

position as decision makers who are allowed to fail. At any rate, admitted







failure makes them sympathetic and one of us, [6] as the recipients agitated

in this way could believe with relief. The hesitant subject tormented by theawareness of the form not completing itself corresponds with the code of

conduct that is as critical of modernity as it is (neo-)romantic. Yet the image

of the (self-)entrepreneur widespread in the context of post-Fordist andneoliberal debates often also appears broken in the genre of the rehearsal:

Time and again one sees directors beset with doubts, acting out theirinsecurity in exaggerated claims to perfection – in the face of which they

must necessarily fail. Our proposition is therefore that, precisely in theformat of rehearsal, one can discern an ambiguity between the logic of

exploitation (in the sense of the performance optimization and efficiency

enhancement of artistic resources) and its unavailability (in the sense ofundercutting self-marketing and quality standards or a surplus of utilizable

output), and thus a particularly suitable field for contemplating the tension

between the autonomy and determinateness of artistic decisions.For in the end, the rehearsal is also aimed at the institution and history of

modern art, which thus appear as an instable repertory of rules and practices,and brings the validity of their constitutive rituals of rejection, which are

based on repeatable norms, into the arena: Composition is followed bydecomposition, the professional performer by the amateur, plan and script by

participation and social experiment. Tellingly, the rehearsal also serves as ameans to bring artistic decisions into agreement with the concerns of social

milieus beyond the classical exhibition visitors. By operating as a sourcecode to produce symbolic and real situations, the rehearsal becomes a

fictionalized form of instructions typical of Conceptual Art – a ―linguistic‖form of work, then, that allots the viewers the status of potential producers.

What began in Rainer‘s ―Lives of Performers‖ as putting something to thetest – the entwinement of real and fictive, social and symbolic roles – today

appears not only as sine qua non, but as a normative performancerequirement of artistic productions between theater and film. They are often

at the service of performatively rehearsing those flexible and self-reflectivemulti-identities that artists and media consumers share – a moment that the

film ―Rien du Tout‖ by Clemens von Wedemeyer and Maya Schweizer

makes a (meta-)subject. It is a 35mm and video film from 2006 copied toHD format, conceived – like most exhibition films – as a spatial installation.While the world of theater is represented by 35mm film and thus associated

with customary cinema in material-aesthetic and technological terms as well,video technology documents the world ―out there‖, in this case in the form

of a parking lot that is obviously to be understood allegorically. LikeRainer‘s ―Lives of Performers‖, ―Rien du Tout‖ also makes reference to the







theater-based traditions of (art) film, to Samuel Beckett‘s theater -reflective

play ―Catastrophe‖ that deals with an authoritarian director and his actress,whom he patronizes excessively. In ―Rien du Tout‖ it is school pupils who

are being cast for a theater play about the Parisian banlieue in the Middle

Ages. In the face of the imminent failure of the production due to thedirector‘s rigid formal corset, they start mixing ―fictive‖ and ―authentic‖

roles. In other words: The work form ossified by its conventions becomes avibrant event thanks to the amateur rehearsal.

III.

I mean, you rehearse how to be someone else, and then you try to rehearsebeing the one who was first learning how to be someone else.

—Bree [Jane Fonda] in ―Klute‖, Alan J. Pakula, United States 1971

Insofar as the rehearsal alternating between improvisation and staging inneo-narrative avant-garde film tends to intertwine ―Minimalist‖ conventions

(modularity, seriality, fragment) and ordinary gestures, actions, andmovements, meaning the everyday body, it manifests itself as a

biopolitically coded model situation. Reflecting on dominant forms ofsubjectivization in their interaction with institutional, social, and media-

related identity formation, these kinds of rehearsal formats raise the questionas to the portion of artistic work in the obviously fetishistic representation of

―other‖ (because dominant) actors in the art business. The (avant-garde) fear

of the social ineffectiveness of art has given way to the fiction of a medial

(re)producibility of socially precarious subjects. While the artistic

―experiment‖ suggests a seemingly open-ended, improvised, and playful procedure, the artistically conceived rehearsal tends to stage the production process in correspondence or confrontation with institutionally and socially

prevailing forms of the division of labor and the attendant subjects and bodies.

Nevertheless, it is by no means the case that the rehearsal merely serves to

celebrate the artistic experiment as a social or media event, as was the casewith the (neo-)Fluxus or performance spectacles starting in the 1960s.

Instead, the rehearsal takes recourse to unspectacular routines of repetition,

albeit to increase virtuosity. The impression of long-windedness and at times

boredom is deliberately accepted – see Warhol‘s ―Screentests‖ orMasharawi‘s ―Waiting‖ (2002) – in those work forms that serve

(programmatically voyeuristic) long-term observation. In these cases, it isless about optimizing performances than failure in the face of the task of not

playing a role, of playing actors who act as if they were rehearsing theability to play someone else, as if one were this other person – and for the

first time at that: ―You try to rehearse being the one who was first learning



how to be someone else.‖ Such a ritual of constantly starting anew and not

being able or wanting to fulfill a well-played role, gives rise to a motifcomparable with the rehearsal that can be equally attributed to exemplary

positions in painting (from Edgar Degas, to Sigmar Polke, all the way to

Silke Otto-Knapp) and works conceptually situated between drawing, photography, film, sculpture, and installation. For example, Keren Cytter‘s

sketches and films are at once accelerated and intensified portraits oflibidinously entangled people (like you and me) – narrative modules

engendered by scripts exposing the artist‘s equally affective and aestheticview of her subject matter, her own social milieu. In the process, its essence

reveals itself to be just as transient as the variable and ephemeral identity of

the characters. What arises between the figures is not always acomprehensible system of relationships permeated by social and emotional

conflicts, which endeavors more or less successfully to bring itself in

harmony with the script – it is not the actors and actresses who rehearse the performance, but the performance that rehearses itself within a course ofevents oscillating between improvisation and staging. It thus performs itself

as a part of a progressing, serial rehearsal without – as is the case with

Clemens von Wedemeyer‘s films, for instance – the ―rehearsal‖ itself becoming the genre. In Cytter‘s ―The Victim‖ (2006), script and film are

instead bound to each other in a feedback loop. In that the form of the story

emerges from the fact of being filmed, new loops are repeatedly created,which themselves log social scripts. While the film proceeds self-reflectively

on the level of plot and dialogue, the script, the acting, and other conditions

of the performance – the process of decision-making, for example – are brought to the fore. The actors and actresses talk about their wages, like with

Brecht, discuss their functions, like with Godard, or describe the cameramovements, like with Rainer.

IV.

In the aforementioned examples, the principle of trial and error

recommended by the management and organization research cited at the beginning correlates with a systematic subversion of performance and

quality standards – either in the form of exercises repetitively revolving

around themselves or of an unproductive, because all too scrupulous, puttingto the test. Traces of failure (in the face of the norm, the system, the market,or one‘s own expectations) that are kept visible or also claimed often serve

the (self-)verification of a distinctive subjectivity – precisely where rulesformat artistic decisions or force one to deviate from the norm in order to

comply with it. In this respect, production forms that are comparable withrehearsal processes seek not only to examine and expose mechanisms that



require deviating repetition in order to constitute rules and simultaneously

put them up for debate. As already suggested, they additionally imply afundamental work on art – understood as ―history‖, ―institution‖, ―business‖,

―system‖, or ―network‖. It is therefore historically and socially specific

forms of organizing actors, methods, and resources that point to altered orchanging power structures and give rise to an interest in the readability of

artistic decision-making as a process alternating between plan andcontingency, system and chance, coercion and free choice. The tensions

between autonomy and heteronomy associated with this are one of the keyissues of Annemarie Matzke‘s recently published study ―Arbeit am Theater.

Eine Diskursgeschichte der Probe‖. [7] Regarding the rehearsal as an ideal

―medium of representation for artistic work‖, [8] the theater scholar and performer attaches to it the distinction between labor and agreed wages,

which is ―pre‖-artistic and structurally underpaid artistic labor. Matzke

analyzes ―the relationship between art and labor […] via the discourse ontheater rehearsal […]: in the sense of working on theater‖. [9] This can entaila type of labor that contradicts itself, namely in regard to its complicity with

the political-ideological constitution of the institution of theater (or of artand of cinema).

One could regard Masharawi‘s video ―Waiting‖ as an example of this, since

the rehearsal marks a moment of interruption and standstill. The Palestinianactors and actresses who subsequently appear are instructed by their director

not to ―play‖ the state of waiting, but simply ―to wait‖ – an instruction thatamounts to the attempt, which is doomed to fail, to stage the act of waiting

in front of the camera as a state of inactivity. On the one hand, ―Waiting‖thus becomes an example of the dedifferentiation between ―art‖ and ―life‖.

But on the other, the film is also a metaphorical reflection on the state of political standstill and the permanently installed form of transition (life in

refugee camps), in which the Palestinian population finds itself:Contradicting the assumption that the rehearsal always already implies the

anticipation of a result and an event toward which one can work in a sensible

manner, the process of waiting is indifferent toward the notion of a future

that can be planned. Insofar as the filmic fiction is unhinged by Palestinian

living conditions, Masharawi‘s ―Waiting‖ appears as the metonymy of a political-artistic project for whose realization it is worth rehearsing.Produced as a commissioned work for Fareed Armaly‘s contribution to

documenta 11, ―From/To‖ (2002), [10] ―Waiting‖ was shot as – ostensible –

documentation of the casting process for Masharawi‘s then planned full-

length film of the same title (produced a year later), in which actors andactresses from Ramallah were to take part. Due to the tense political



















situation, the director was not able to return on time to the casting in

Ramallah, so it ultimately took place in Jordan, where Masharawi was at thetime. The question his filmic study poses regarding the interplay of (self-

)perception and being perceived as the conditions allowing the possibility

for interaction, action, and participation becomes an allegory of institutionaland social power structures. In the division of person/figure and actor/role,

the schizophrenia of a subject comes to light that requires the fiction ofcommunity to be able to put itself to the test.

V.

As for the question of whether and how artists – or even more difficult,

groups of artists and activists – come to decisions regarding the forms andcontents of their productions, the rehearsal appears to be a suitable means for

addressing precisely this theme. It enables one to overcome idle habits,routines, and role relationships by visibly acting them out and revising them.

At the same time, rehearsing in front of the camera demonstrates an interestin overcoming stereotypical perception and emotional patterns through

unpredictable affects as the conditions allowing the possibility of the new, ofwhat has not yet been tested. In this sense, Richard Foreman has sustained

interest – this applies to both his theater work and his film productions – in

amateur actors and ―bodies that haven‘t rehearsed,‖ as he once said. In

―Once Every Day‖, a number of actors perform fragmentary procedures,repetitive choreographies, and semi-ritualistic patterns of behavior that are

repeatedly interrupted by instructions given by the director himself. On aconstantly changing set, Foreman‘s actor - bodies (comparable with Bresson‘s

―models‖) rehearse series of sequences in ever new variations. The tableaux

vivant created in this manner elude any kind of narrative logic and appear as

loops, ellipses, and fragments in the filmic montage. The documented work process seems to get nowhere due to the reiteration of gestures, movements,and actions, and the function of artistic decision-making is thus deleted.

In contrast to the rhetoric of experiment that established the unintentional,

processual, and never-ending as a value in itself, the described examples alsoimply the recognition – which could be called ethical – of the impossibility

to exploit every emotion, every idea, and every performance in the sense of a

higher economic morality: The rehearsal inevitably also produces unusabletime – precisely because it aims at optimization and results. For the processof rehearsal (or its performative undermining) not only consists of progress,

but also of setbacks, empty rituals, and routines that fizzle out, just likesomething else can only emerge through (Fordist) repetition or, as Matzke‘s

book shows, also through (seeming) inactivity or senseless activity. She cites

the account of a rehearsal given by Carl Weber, one of Bertolt Brecht‘s



Friedrich Bormann

/

Gabriele Brandstetter, Annemanie Matzke (eds.),

Improvisieren. Paradoxien des Unvorhersehbaren. Kunst-Medien-Praxis,

Bielefeld 2010, pp. 125 – 160, p. 146.

[4]

―If the performer could not be separated from the performance, nor the performance (with its ‗ordinary‘ movement) f rom daily life, then how tosort the dancer from the dance? Thus rehearsal time was now screen

time, the private now public, and emotion […] The unity of the filmderives from its constant themes of artifice and deception, as variously

manifested in dance or film, product or process, story or image, male or

female, art or life.‖ See Ruby Rich, ―Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction‖,

in: The Films of Yvonne Rainer, Bloomington, p. 4.

[5]

Cf. Jacques Rancière, ―On Art and Work‖, in: same, The Politics of

Aesthetics, New York 2007, p.

42.

[6] In allusion to the work and exhibition title of Martin Kippenberger and

Tanja Widmann.

[7] Annemarie Matzke, Arbeit am Theater. Eine Diskursgeschichte derProbe, Bielefeld 2012.

[8] Ibid., p.

78.

[9] Ibid., blurb.

[10]

From/To, shown for the first time at Witte de With in Rotterdam in1999, is a research-based, collaborative installation that maps

―Palestine‖ not as a topography but as a contemporary topos. Anupdated version was made for the documenta 11, curated by Okwui

Enwezor, that retraces concepts of identity based on connecting lines between idealistic and essentialist positions, in which art production is

set in relation to orientalist discourses.

[11] Carl Weber, ―Brecht as Director, in: TDR 12 (1967– 1968), No. 1., pp

101 – 107, p.

102f.; cited in: Annemarie Matzke, op.

cit., p.

237.

























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