Liam Devlin

{E}QUALITY

‘Let’s talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It’s a Gigantic project.’
Joseph Beuys

The manner in which Yvonne Buchheim has collected the material that forms the Song Archive Project (SAP), and its subsequent treatment for exhibition, performance and, of course, the publication of this book, can be situated within the shifting relationship between the assumed positions of the artist and the audience, the speaker (or indeed singer) and the spectator. The challenge to the distinct positions of the artist/ actor/speaker who embodies knowledge and action and therefore power, as opposed to the passive, receptive, powerless audience, has been an important foundation to radical art practices from the early twentieth century.

From the Dadaist use of ephemeral mass media in their montages and Duchamp’s readymades, to Beuys’ declaration that ‘we are all artists’, there has been a concerted effort to create a more expansive understanding of artistic endeavour, to imbue art with a political and social agency, and to destroy the false boundaries between art and the everyday.

Within the world of theatre and performance, Bertolt Brecht challenged the traditional function of plays that sought an audience’s emotional identification with its characters that usually lead to a climatic catharsis, believing they bred passivity. His theory of ‘Epic Theatre’ highlighted the constructed nature of theatrical production. Through Verfremdungseffekt or ‘estrangement effect’, Brecht hoped to provoke his audiences to adopt a critical perspective not only to the play itself, but also to the constructed nature of social relations in the world outside the theatre.