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Visitors of an Exhibition Space are Suggested to 'Do Nothing'
live performance: device conceived for the use of the audience
incl. payments & legal agreements
2020/2021
1 + 1AP
Courtesy of the artist
ph Katya Ev, Ychaï Gassenbauer, Laure Cottin Stefanelli &Manuel Wetscher
Commissioned for the exhibition In the Long Blink of an Eye, HISK, Gosset site, Brussels (Be), curator Daniella Géo
Exhibition view: In the Long Blink of an Eye, HISK, Gosset site, Brussels (Be), 2020/2021, curator Daniella Géo
Performance statement:
Visitors of an exhibition space are suggested to ‘do nothing’. In return, they are paid the local hourly minimum wage. Visitors willing to participate first sign a contract that provides a legal frame to their commitment to ‘do nothing’, specifying the conditions and payment modalities. The compensation is foreseen for the number of full hours. After ‘doing nothing’, they receive a proof of payment. All applicable taxes and social contributions are paid according to local laws and regulations.
'Doing Nothing'
It is suggested to understand ‘doing nothing’ in the sense of ‘being’ and through the prism of a spiritual exercise: as a possibility to create a void, to experience inaction and being present to oneself. Participants to this performance are asked to accomplish a paradoxical task – to explore a state only defined by negation. Strictu sensu, one cannot do nothing: our bodies require at least minimal activity, our heads at least minimal thoughts forming, our senses at least minimal perceptions captured. Therefore, ‘doing nothing’ proposes an exercise of awareness where expanding emptiness can be gained by refraining from any action, time and again. Far from an attitude of passivity, this approach is close to the concept of wu wei taking its origin from Chinese philosophy: agency without acting. Activating an inner space in deep connection to the self, while sitting quietly, ‘doing nothing’ reveals its generative emancipatory potential. In whichever way 'doing nothing' is enacted concretely, the contract signed by participants formally recognizes that what they are doing is what 'nothing' is.
Conceptual prism:
Visitors of an exhibition space are suggested to 'do nothing' deconstructs the idea of 'doing nothing' as losing time, the idea of productivity as valuable, and the possibility of being present to yourself as a class privilege (full text see p.4 of the "Contract": Conceptual Prism)
Applicable law & regulations: Belgian
Compensation rate: local minimum hourly wages each full hour of 'doing nothing' — €10,25 (upon the Collective labour agreement n° 43 of the National Labour Council). On Sundays and national holidays the compensation is 200% — €20,50
Hours available for 'doing nothing' : 32 hours
Visitors: 600
Participants who signed the contract for 'doing nothing': 21
Shortest duration of 'doing nothing' : 3 minutes
Longest duration of 'doing nothing': 1 hour 30 minutes
Paid hours : 10
Total duration of 'doing nothing' by all participants : 12 hours and 10 minutes
Breach(es) of the contract: 1
Who paid for 'doing nothing'?: Flemish Community, Belgium via HISK - Hoger Institute de Schöne Kunst (Be)
Who was the counter-party of the "contract"? Ekaterina Vasilyeva (administrative alter ego of the artist)
Video documentation of the performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space Are Suggested to 'Do Nothing', exhibition In the Long Blink of an Eye, HISK, Gosset site, Brussels (Be), 2020/2021, images: Katya Ev
Video documentation of the performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space Are Suggested to 'Do Nothing', exhibition In the Long Blink of an Eye, HISK, Gosset site, Brussels (Be), 2020/2021, images: Katya Ev
“For all its deadpan self-explanatory qualities, the title of Katya Ev’s Visitors of an Exhibition Space are Suggested to ‘Do Nothing’ (2020, henceforth Visitors) does not mention what is in fact a crucial aspect of the work: that it employs legal means to explicitly frame ‘doing nothing’ as productive labour. A participatory performance piece, it indeed invites visitors to do nothing, but not without first meticulously spelling out the conditions that ‘doing nothing’ will be both subject to and enabled by. Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors first encounter a reception desk where they are explained the parameters of the piece. If a spot is available, it is possible to take part and ‘do nothing’ for any amount of time, and to be financially compensated for every full hour spent in and on the performance. Before commencing, visitors sign a contract that was developed by Ev in close collaboration with a lawyer, and which is legally valid and binding. Afterward the performance, they are remunerated and receive a proof of payment. They are reminded that, since they have sold their time and labor-power to the artist, they are responsible for paying any applicable taxes and social contributions.
The ‘act’ of ‘doing nothing’ itself takes place on a chair placed in the exhibition space and can consist of anything, insofar as the contradictory and ultimately impossible proposition to ‘do nothing’ must be interpreted as they see fit. Nonetheless, some instructions are given: visitors are invited to be attentive to themselves as well as to their surroundings, to try to be fully ‘present.’ As such, the performance is supposed to facilitate and foster a pleasant, positive experience of ‘doing nothing’ marked—again, contradictorily—by a kind of plenitude. This experience, the website for the work states, possesses a “generative emancipatory potential."
In these notes, I want to begin to rise to the challenge [...] of considering and examining it alongside the work’s emphatic equation of ‘doing nothing’ with productive labour and its concomitant, and acute, emphasis on legal regulation. For, as is evident, the putatively emancipatory ‘act’ of ‘doing nothing’ here is compromised and contaminated from the outset by capitalist relations, and is threaded through state and legal apparatuses that enable and reproduce these relations—most conspicuously, the labour contract. What to make of the work’s simultaneous foregrounding of legal regulation and the emancipatory potential it would contain? And how to conceptualize this emancipatory potential when it is so clearly entangled with precisely those things that one would imagine we need emancipating from? These contradictions, which Visitors all but flaunts, strike me as especially fruitful and instructive for attempts to move beyond a simply and straightforwardly oppositional understanding of emancipation [...]". Steyn Bergs, "Nothing/Doing: On Visitors of an Exhibition Space are Suggested to ‘Do Nothing’", TIM Magazine #2, 2021 full text here
Bibliography:
2022 "Conversation with Cassandre Langlois", exhibition Tout dans le cabinet mental, Le Credac, Ivry (Fr)
2022 Colette Dubois, 'Entretenir vaut mieux, Marc Buchy and Katya Ev', HART Magazine n°223 (Be)
2022 Pascale Viscardy, "Entretenir vaut mieux", Flux News #88, Apr 9, 2022 (Be)
2021 Steyn Bergs, "Nothing / Doing", TIM Magazine #2 (Be)
2021 Claire Contamine, "Visitors: Ne Rien Faire, Tout Gagner", Art Même #84 (Be)
2021 Jozefien Van Beek, "Dode konijnen, kapitalisme en feminisme", De Standaard (Be)
2021 Bas Blaasse, "In a Long Blink of an Eye, HISK-laureaten in Brussel", HART Magazine (Be)
2020 Leslie Veisse, "Please, come and sit. On 'Visitors of an Exhibition Space Are Suggested to 'Do Nothing"
Credits
Idea & dramaturgy: Katya Ev & Azad Asifovich
Legal conception & draft of the contract: Katya Ev & Julie Van Elslande (Jubilee, Be)
Discursive frame —copyright: Katya Ev, Mélanie Weill, Jesse Van Winden (Jubilee, Be)
Scenography: Katya Ev, Azad Asifovich
Casting & direction: Katya Ev
Performers (hosts): Titouan Russo, Mélanie Weill
Online form for the contract—web development: Gijs de Hejs (OSP, Be)
Graphic design for the contract: Katya Ev
Related artworks & performance documentation
film based on live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021
photographs based on live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021
6P1.jpg)
contract for live performance Visitors of an Exhibition Space, 2021
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artist's edition: legal agreement for self-performance
2022
Performance activations
