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Altering a Fixed Identity: Thinking through Improvisation

This article confronts the hitherto implicit interrelationship of improvisation to notions of experimentation in contemporary avant-garde practice/theory. It draws on Kaprow's definition of experimental art (1960): Blurring art with life casts doubt on normalized, institutionalised constructions of art. In addition, situations in life that are 'artistically framed' charge experience with metaphoric power. The author applies this definition to an understanding of improvisation as doubting the certainty of art through opening art up to everyday experiences. Such improvisational experimentation makes us alert to the ways in which our senses and meanings are conditioned in life. This way of thinking about improvisation emphases art’s symbolic power, challenging readings that reduce improvisation to mean all experience (Hallam &Ingold 2007). It also challenges polarised readings of improvisation in art as either a radical and risky process of producing the new (Prevost 1995), or as a means of engaging well-trodden patterns of repetition (Bailey 1996).

The author’s own experimental art practice, Calendar Variations 2010-12 forms a key case study that offers complex and contradictory experience to Kaprow’s morphology of ‘experimentation as improvisation’. Focused by Kaprow’s Calendar score 1971, this project formed a critical response to normative, policy driven approaches to socially engaged art. It also forms an experience of improvisation feeding into social life and energising social, cultural and ecological systems.

The paper was selected for the ’Art of Improvisation’ panel at the Association of Social Anthropologists’ conference, ‘Art and Aesthetics’, co-convened with Coessens and Ravetz, Delhi 2012. The resulting co-edited issue of Critical Studies in Improvisation, examines how the diversification of contexts in which improvisation acts as a generative metaphor provides an opportunity to rethink and re-articulate improvisation as form and process through notions of failure, certitude and doubt bringing together in a single issue musicians, visual artists, anthropologists and artistic researchers (http://www.criticalimprov.com/issue/current).