When my daughter, like other children, didn’t start drawing and painting animals, houses or families, I got a little concerned. I convinced myself it was completely normal but still, and after some time I decided that maybe, while painting together, I could ask her what she was creating. Busy with acrylics, painting on small canvases, I thought, should I wait until she says the painting is finished, but I couldn’t hold myself and asked. With brush in hand, taking her time, pausing for a moment, she said as if it was the most obvious: something yellow.
Nowadays she does paint houses and people but then, something yellow. To me, the idea of painting something yellow – I know it’s my daughter – is absolutely brilliant. No intention appeared necessary, no motif, even imagination was redundant, there was no story, no direction but also not nothing. It was simply something yellow, and it was exactly that: something yellow. She was not painting an image but was engaged in some form of material relation to the brush, the paint, the canvas, surface and space. It wasn’t abstraction either, it was something.
After a session, kind of off-hand, my psychoanalyst said: in regard to psychoanalysis all dreams are images. Thinking about it, I wondered, since the introduction of smartphones, Instagram reels and so on, have we started to dream in portrait, in images that are higher than they are wide? I’m not sure, but I think my dreams are the other way around, if not the shape of a classic television image, I’m after all Generation X. A person of three or so years old it appears has yet to frame the world into images and can still reflect without shape and edges. Who knows, maybe small children’s dreams don’t arrive packaged as images, as scenes from Hollywood movies or with dramaturgies of intensification and optimised in regard to attention span.
Thinking about it, Jean Luc Godard famously announced, not a just image, just an image, but however just, as in whatever, just is, it’s still an image and not something. But then again, he was after all a filmmaker, and we get it, just an image is an image that’s not anchored in the sense of ethics, politics, economic and social conventions, but obviously the moment something can be made into an image, framed and given some form of coordination, it’s no longer just enough, not enough something.
Some ten years ago I was rehearsing for a show, not exactly coincidentally titled “La Substance, but in English.* We had the luxury of working in two studios at the same time with just a door in between. At some point, obviously stressed, I ran from one group of dancers in one studio into the other to work with a second constellation. As I stepped through, the handle still firmly in hand, one dancer seemed to be without a task, doing something, and I asked, what she was doing. She answered in the middle of a movement: I’m just dancing.
It might come across as insignificant but to me, those four syllables completely changed my comprehension of dance. I’m just dancing, proposes that dance, even though it might or not move in space, doesn’t necessarily submit to conventional forms of telos or directionality. A Godardian, just a dance, and it caught me that dance is, almost, unique in the sense of not having to attach to a narrative or form of imaginary, it can just be dancing. The person in the room wasn’t dancing this or that dance, there was no mimetic dynamic activated, nothing to conclude or master, but most of all the dancing didn’t intend to generate any other meaning than being a dance. Does that not mean that as much as the dance can be just a dance the spectator, or the dancer, is not obliged to interpret anything, not supposed to make sense of the event, not understand an underlying or whatever meaning, not to be grasped or panic-stricken by some or other ethical mediation, and is not there to attend the dance but rather to be with it, as a complicit, for no particular reason, but with a notion of purposiveness without purpose.
This is where Godard’s words really open up, if the images, or the dance, are just an image, does that not propose that the spectator, the viewer is permitted the same position, to be just, to be without content, identity or framing.
It might seem easy to just dance, even to make a piece with just dancing, but, in fact, it’s the other way around. What is easy is to make dance into everything else, add metaphor, give it a story, purpose or even worse justification, force it into drama and conflict, add character or theatre to the dance, hinge it on theoretical discourse or conceptual refinement, in short, make it into images and with that install it in common teleology, economy and the efficiencies of attention. Oftentimes those qualities or criteria are attached unconsciously, they are sneaky and hard to keep at bay.
At that moment dance and dancing loses its inherent value – its qualities and characteristics without added rationale or arguments – and becomes a service, support or simple illustration. It becomes an instrument that’s justified in regard to efficiency instead of aesthetic engagement. This form of instrumentalization of art, perhaps dance in particular, moreover indicates that the spectator can, or is even obliged to identify what is taking place, what’s going on and what the work communicates. The work reciprocally confirms the onlooker who implicitly and unavoidably becomes a consumer of the event, the artwork, even the human beings that execute the dance. Because of the possibility to identify with the event and hence the consumption of the artwork the spectator is engaged in processes of reading, interpretation and the act of choosing, which are processes that, although the choices provided might feel awkward or provocative, are manageable without any jeopardy in regard of the viewers’ subjectivity.
This path however is tempting and one that’s prominently promoted by contemporary societies and their governments, but we should remember that to the same extent that art is justified in regard to its ethical relevance it also gives up on forms of autonomy, on modes of elaborating space and time that’s not from start correlated to established modes of knowledge, attention, identity and value, symbolic and actual.
What a something yellow and just dancing is doing is not to dismiss political engagement, concern or care but what is crucial is that it’s art that doesn’t tell the viewer what’s right or wrong, good or bad, but regards their ability to create their own commitments. Since there’s no or very little content and frame offered, since what is at stake is not immediately coagulating into becoming an image, the condition of choice is transforming. From a choice between this or that, in social media terms from like or not, sushi or sashimi, flat white or cappuccino, which are choices that although they appear to be “yours” are provided and hence strategically offered, to an entirely different situation, the possibility of a choice being generated. Not taken but created.
This is how I understand Godard’s proposal. Just an image, is an image that doesn’t indicate a number of possible choices, such as screwdriver or sex on the beach, democratic or republican, but instead offers an open situation in regard to which the individual spectator, viewer or participant is given the autonomy to make or produce – in the sense of poiesis – a choice, or call it position. This form of, or making of a choice implies not a standard of commitment but a moment of possible emancipation.
In the context of attention, what makes something yellow and just dancing, as well as Godard’s words, astonishing is that attention is not given. There is no prescribed form of attention, but attention instead becomes the first thing that spectator or viewer, or reader, needs to figure out, how to attend, how to form a relationship with what is at hand.
In the world that we live in today all forms of attention have become financialized, may that be hyper, slow, hanging out, scattered, optimized or AI-produced attention, it’s still the same. Low-level attention is not better or worse than multi-tasking it’s just different segments of the same economy. Something yellow and just dancing tells a different story because modes of attention are not prescribed. At least temporarily, these and similar proposals fall outside the economy of attention.
Instead of making art about this or that, however urgent this or that might be, perhaps we today need to insist on making art and dancing that withdraws from being framed, made into images and hence valued for its relevance to society. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that art has other jobs than to comment on current political events or inform the audience about certain inequalities, on a personal or global scale, and that one of them is to make us generate choices instead of choosing between this or that already given choice, because this is not commentary, nor enlightenment, but the making of politics, the making of the under commons, the making of worlds, our worlds.
* In regard to classical philosophy the substance refers to the original matter, the stuff that makes everything else possible. In order to qualify for being the fundament of everything the substance cannot possess any qualities, features or criteria. It can be nothing else than something. Obviously, the fundamental material, the substance, cannot be translated, after all it is everything. “But in English” thus is trying to be funny.
