Bruce Barber

In his Reading Rooms, Barber worked with Alexander Rodchenko's 1925 Reading Room as a model for a workers' library and study.

These multi-part installations made use of multi-media formats to re-present various forms of corporate advertising and news reporting.

The Red Room addressed the construction of masculinity through media representation.

The imagery used for critical readings was obtained from various sites of popular culture including film, advertising, war history, weapons magazines and comic books.

The Newsroom section contained newspaper accounts of male violence; the Viewsroom contained slide projections; the Videoroom contained video footage of x-rated films and a Marvin cartoon satirising male parenting behaviour; the Theory/Criticism Room provided tools with which readers could alter a selection of magazines.

A theoretical essay titled "Excision, Detournement and Reading the Open Text" elaborated the process they would have then been using.

Among some of the aphorisms contained in this essay are the following:

3) The Excision is less a surgical operation than a cognitive procedure, opening up the possibilities for renegotiating the areas of signification both within and beyond the image or text. Excising elements from the image confirms the existence of a primary context, pretexts and within the image itself, subtexts which disclose the competing economies of the sign(s).

9) Warning: Excision should not become the servant of censorship.

25) Close reading has never been a good substitute for criticism.

29) Absence only becomes a problem where power is concerned. Absence is difference (Jacques Derrida). Open reading allows readers to acknowledge the provisionality of meaning. Power and political efficacy is a function of use. In this context history may represent change yet remain the same.

30) The open reader accepts his/her status as a political subject with all this may imply.

38) Open reading may assist the promotion of critical education.

39) Critical education may become education for criticism.

Bruce Barber (born 1950 in New Zealand) is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches at NSCAD University.

His artwork has been shown at the Paris Biennale, the Sydney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Walter Phillips Gallery, London Regional Gallery, and Artspace NZ in Auckland.

Barber is the editor of Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization and of Conceptual Art: the NSCAD Connection 1967–1973.

He is co-editor, with Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian of Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State.

His critical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines.

His art practice is documented in the publication Reading Rooms.

He is best known for his early performance work, his Reading Rooms, Squat Projects and his writing and theory on Littoral Art.

In a number of texts, beginning in the early 1980s, Barber has considered the potential for performance work to avoid its ossification into a genre category.

Clearly, the type of conceptual performance art that was common in the late sixties and early seventies had run its course.

While emerging forms of postmodern performance were appropriating mainstream forms of entertainment, their critical function was often weakened or altogether abandoned.

Performance could possibly withstand becoming affirmative culture (Herbert Marcuse) by rediscovering its sources in avant-garde theatre.

Bertolt Brecht, for instance, echoed Karl Marx's critique of philosophy when he wrote: "The theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only for those philosophers as wished not just to explain the world, but also to change it."

Brecht coined the term umfunctionierung (functional transformation) to enable theatre to become an instrument to serve the interests of class struggle.

And in his famous essay, "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin extolled the virtues of the "operative" artist, providing as his example the communist author Sergei Tretyakov, who thought of his work not merely as descriptive reporting on reality, but an active intervention.

Benjamin believed that cultural practice should refuse modish commerce and should give work a revolutionary use value.

This meant the avoidance of the impulse to aestheticize and the ordination of critical agency as a post-aesthetic strategy, one that can contain values that are nominally subsumed under several progressive political/aesthetic ideologies.

In an implicit effort to politicize advanced forms of performance, Barber placed the term performance under erasure with the formulation of [performance].

Since the publication of "Towards and Adequate Interventionist [Performance] Practice" (1985), Barber has explored the radical potential of performance.

The table of binary oppositions below represents general differences between two types of political action, configured as acts of protest or resistance.

Depending on the circumstances and the type of event, intervention can become an exemplary action, and thus devolve into a form of political posturing, closely implicated in extreme versions of behaviour characterized by violence, anarchic rejection or destructive nihilism.

While exemplary actions are usually without theoretical support, interventions attempt to put theory into action.

The intentions and ultimately the audience response are different.

The exemplary action consists, instead of intervening in an overall way, in acting in a much more concentrated way on exemplary objectives, on a few key objectives that will play a determining role in the continuation of the struggle.

Among the artists that Barber has recognized for their contributions to [performance] practice - Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Critical Art Ensemble and WochenKlausur, among others - he gave a privileged role to the Situationist International as an exemplary model of operative art.

The SI and the students they influenced participated in occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, theatrical agit-prop events and other forms of protest.

The SI endorsed the fundamental importance of intervention as a post-theoretical and practical aspect of their critique of the "Society of the Spectacle" - as theorized by Guy Debord.