The artist as social acupuncturist

How would you react if a stranger stops you on the street and invites you for a ‘talk’ at, say, Shivaji Park? Would you trust him? Or, what if, when you visit your favourite salon in Bandra for a haircut, a ten-year-old girl steps up with a pair of scissors? Would you trust her with your head? And what if you were told by either of them that the situation you find yourself in was actually part of an artistic performance?

This is how Toronto-based playwright Darren O’Donnell’s artistic practice works — you don’t even know you are at a ‘performance’, but you are — and guess who are the players — you, and others like you, giving ‘interactive’ art a new meaning altogether, with the focus not on art, but on interaction. 

When O’ Donnell graduated from theatre school, he set out with the modest ambition of using art to make the world a better place to live. But it soon became clear that art had become socially irrelevant and theatre even more so. It propelled him to rethink the assumptions underlying theatre as a form of artistic practice.

The outcome of his rethinking is encapsulated in his artistic manifesto, Social Acupuncture: A Guide To Suicide, Performance And Utopia. In this book, O’Donnell argues that of all the artistic forms — painting, theatre, music, cinema — it is theatre which is struggling the most for currency and relevance. Why? Because it cannot be easily commodified — the fundamental requirement of capitalism. Unlike other art forms, theatre requires its producers and consumers to be present in the same place at the same time — an expensive proposition, and one that does not lend itself to economies of scale.

Yet, this very disability that has rendered theatre irrelevant in the age of mass-produced and mass-consumed entertainment holds the key to its reinvention. Theatre’s uncommodifiablity means that it is largely a local phenomenon — making it uniquely suitable for drawing in the members of a community or neighbourhood, and engaging them in artistic practice — in such a way that art becomes socially relevant.

It is this realisation that drives the work of O’ Donnell, who was in Mumbai recently to explore the city’s artistic landscape. His company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, follows what he calls the “aesthetics of civic engagement”. He calls the art produced by such an aesthetic “social acupuncture”. Just as the pin-pricks of acupuncture needles cure by redirecting the energy flows in the body, art as social acupuncture works by pricking at the excesses and deficiencies of the social body. 

Specifically, O’Donnell’s work focuses on the democratic deficiencies caused by the lack of free public spaces for unstructured interaction. Come to think of it, isn’t it strange that, in our cities, strangers don’t talk to each other, except under the banner of consumption — say, to buy a ticket, order a pizza, and so on? 

O’Donnell’s response to this relentless commodification was an artistic practice that, instead of producing art-objects that merely served to grease the wheels of commerce, generated relationships. His first such project, The Talking Creature, attempted it by inducing encounters between strangers. Participants would approach people at random and invite them to a predetermined public place for a conversation — not to talk about anything in particular, but just to talk. In the process, the taboo (and fear) of talking to strangers was broken, and the encounters were remarkable for their “openness, relaxation, trust and joy.” What more can one ask of an artistic experience?

In another project, Haircuts For Children, O’Donnell trained 10-year-olds to cut hair, and arranged to have them offer free haircuts to adults in salons around town. The objective was to flip the typical power dynamic, so that the adult yields control, trusting the child not to chop off his ear. “The sophisticated intimacy that develops between the young stylists and their adult clients intimates new kinds of social interactions among generations,” says O’Donnell.  

Such participatory projects are not what we typically consider beautiful art. But the problem is not with the projects, they are with our failing criteria, so change them, says O’Donnell. If, by doing so, art can get out of artistic enclaves such as galleries and auditoriums and engage actively with the real world, well, why not?