Without Rhyme or Reason

Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete,

individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied,
important art-action-experience one can undertake today.
Walter de Maria, Meaningless Work, 1960

There are certain actions that could indeed be conceived of as meaningless work. For
artist Walter de Maria these include the transfer of objects from one box to another
and back again, back and forth, back and forth, or maybe the act of digging a hole
and then covering it up again with the same soil, back and forth … and so on.i For de
Maria the repetitive events of a burgeoning administrative culture offered
innumerable templates that could be appropriated and redeployed within the context
of an art practice, once emptied of their original purpose, deliberately rendered
unproductive. The gesture of filing letters in a filing cabinet, he argued, certainly had
the potential to be truly meaningless but only if it remained an open act, only if the
person performing the action were not a secretary, furthermore if some attempt were
made to periodically scatter the papers willy-nilly on the floor. The secret to
performing meaningless work it would seem then is not to do with the action itself, but
gauged rather by the resulting lack of accomplishment, the sense of never getting
anyway or of failing to identify – let alone reach – the desired goal. It is July 31st
2010. A woman clocks in for work at 9.00am, smartly dressed in black, hair worn
back. She begins the task of arranging fifty chairs, slowly, methodically, in what
initially seems like the rather utilitarian preparations for some unspecified institutional
event. Gradually she positions the chairs into neat formation – a regimented grid –
before appearing to change her mind. The seating arrangement is disassembled and
regrouped into a single long line, evenly spaced. Yet, before long this too is
abandoned, seemingly deemed unfit for purpose, somehow not quite up to the job.
The deliberation continues. New options are tested and rejected – over and over,
again and again.

At first glance perhaps, it could be possible to conceive of this lone individual as a

diligent host, akin to the wedding planner intent on finding the perfect model of
seating for accommodating the capricious whims of their nuptial guests. Or else, at
times, she seems more like an over-zealous conference organizer maximizing the
possibility of delegate interactions, willfully breaking up the order of the group circle
into intimate network hubs for optimal coffee-break dialogue. On occasion, her
actions evoke those of the novice teacher, undecided how best to organize her class;
uncertain where to place the chairs to keep the space dynamic, deliberately stalling
from falling too quickly into line. Every option is pitted with as many concerns as
merits. A herring-bone row serves only the traditional talk-and-chalk; informal
clusters invariably reinforce the striation of existing friendship groups; lecture theatre
lines privilege efficiency of transmission over the close proximity of a one-to-one; a
student’s glance is often angled, tangential, forced sideways by the diagonal seating
arrangement of a V or the curve of a U. Every solution, it seems, harbors a new
problem needing to be solved. At first glance then, the woman’s gestures of assembly
and disassembly might appear to have some utility, performed as part of the process of
making ready, as preparation for some future-possible event. Barely an hour in and the
promise of utility appears questionable, a little suspect. At times, the arrangements
appear determined, as though they were diagramming a specific scenario or had a
plan in mind. But in other moments, the organization of the chairs becomes frustrated
or distracted, sent off course – a touch wild. In the absence of any named occasion to
plan for, the seating configurations remain wholly speculative, hypothetical,
abstracted. After two hours, there is still no prospect of resolution in sight, each
reconfiguration of chairs seems to thwart the logic of the previous permutation,
refusing to allow the possibility of any narrative to emerge. The ebb and flow of action
is maintained over the next eight hours – the duration of a typical working day – until
5.00pm, the time for quickly downing tools and clocking off. Nothing has been
achieved, no conclusions have been gleaned, no resolution granted. Throughout the
day, the unfolding event remains suspended at the level of the preliminary; the
anticipated guests never arrive, their presence can only be (barely) imagined. Over
time, the intent or purpose with which this task is performed appears increasingly
foolhardy or misplaced, for the arrangement of the chairs lacks any sense of utilitarian
purpose or design, any definitive function. Each configuration is disbanded before any
chance of inhabitation, collapsed almost as soon as it is proposed. The different
arrangements operate as propositions for potential and yet unfulfilled relational
interactions – imagined meetings or fictional gatherings – that are barely asserted
before they become reconceived according to a different plan. These are disposable
structures, sketches; never intended for actual use. The task of assembling chairs is not
preparatory; rather this is it.

The various configurations evoke the possibilities of communication, however, the

location of the action itself collapses all hope of functionality or utility, for the chairs
are arranged in the shallow waters of the Los Angeles River, just under Fletcher
Bridge in Elysian Valley. This is not a place wherein a briefing meeting might take
shape, nor an exam or time-share seminar. It is not the place for a congregation; a
reception; the patient formation of a seated queue; the first confessional of a self-help
group; the gathered reunion of the class of ‘74; a game of bingo; job interview or
speed-date. But then again, neither was the large pool of water fronting the Haus der
Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in Berlin, where the same female protagonist
(who is, in fact, Croatian artist Vlatka Horvat) performed a similar day’s work in
2007. In this context, Horvat’s arrangement of the chairs at first signaled towards the
possibility of exchange and dialogue, echoing the original aspirations of the
institutional frame within which her performance was situated. The House of World
Cultures was conceived in the 1950s as a meeting place for and between different
cultures, a proposition that like all utopian visions existed better as a blueprint,
without the interference of human inhabitation. Mirroring the failure of the
institution, each hopeful configuration of chairs is inevitably abandoned, never
inhabited. Dialogue is only ever intimated towards, never actualized. The propositions
never attain stability, but rather their structure appears somewhat liquid, precarious.
Even on dry land, there remains a certain absurdity to the interminable
rearrangement of these chairs. Performed on an urban plaza in Essen in 2009, the
work appeared no less indeterminate, no less fluid. On this occasion, the chairs
themselves seemed curiously animate, almost anthropomorphized; where Horvat’s
attempt to organize them appeared like the plight of the military commander
disciplining the direction of her wayward troops. The configurations seemed at times
like drills or a parade, where the chairs were coaxed to momentary attention, before
falling out again at ease.
The work – an uninterrupted eight-hour filmed performance which operates
collectively under the title This Here and That There – is undeniably shaped by the
specificity of its context; as much by the physical restrictions and constraints
established by the site itself, as by the conceptual and historical associations that
inevitably gather around any site-specific practice. This latest iteration of the project
in the LA River was commissioned by Outpost, an art organization based in LA,
concerned with blurring the boundaries between art, social practice and public life.
The work can be seen to extend Horvat’s concerns around the relationship between
body and site, exploring how an individual negotiates the specific terms of occupation
and inhabitation within situations or spaces that appear limited or framed by absurd
rules. Horvat’s work often takes the form of an attempt to find imaginative solutions
within the terms of an illogical – curiously self-imposed – system or structure. She
engages in endless actions; irresolvable quests, repeated tasks that are inevitably
doomed to fail or that are recursively performed. Her work often plays out according
to a model of purposeless reiteration, through a form of non-teleological
performativity, or in relentless obligation to a rule or order that seems absurd,
arbitrary or somehow undeclared. Seen in these terms, Horvat’s endeavour within the
project This Here and That There might be conceived as Sisyphean, where the perpetual
assembly and disassembly of the chairs evokes the plight of Sisyphus, locked forever
into the action of rolling a rock to the top of a hill, only for it to then roll back down
again. Though the term Sisyphean is often used to describe a sense of indeterminable or
purposeless labour, it actually refers to a tripartite structure whereby a task is
performed in response to a particular rule or requirement, fails to reach its proposed
goal and is then repeated. More than a model of endless or uninterrupted
continuation of action, a Sisyphean practice operates according to a cycle of failure
and repetition, of non-attainment and replay; it is a punctuated performance. A rule is
drawn. An action is required. An attempt is made. Over and over, again and again –
a task is set, the task fails, and the task is repeated. Ad infinitum

According to Christy Lange in her essay Bound to Fail, the engagement of artists such
as Walter de Maria in relentlessly repetitive – even Sisyphean – action, serves “no
purpose other than to exhaust the person performing it. He will eventually have to
stop, and therefore fail to complete his task.”ii The practice becomes one of
maintaining the meaninglessness of the task at hand, which is no mean feat. As de
Maria warned, “Caution should be taken that the work chosen should not be too
pleasurable, lest pleasure becomes the purpose of the work”.iii For other
commentators of the period, meaningless work did not lack purpose as such only
purpose of a teleological kind – it had no goal. Its purpose then was perhaps more
lateral, for by determinedly engaging in boring, repetitive action it might be possible
to attain a curious state of immersion, where one’s sense of self is collapsed, dissolved
into space, no longer distinguishable from the performance of the task. By working
through ordinary boredom it is suggested, it could be possible to attain a state of super
boredom, the experience of total presentness.iv Certainly, there are moments of boredom
and restlessness within Horvat’s performance, however her labour seems more one of
striving to find new solutions or permutations to her problem, to find ways of
exhausting the system rather than it exhausting her. Whilst the rule serves to delimit
or determine certain actions, it also functions for Horvat as a point of creative
pressure or leverage against which to work. The failure of each repeated attempt to
find the ‘right’ configuration of seating operates as the momentum for the work, the
impetus for the development of new permutations and solutions to the task at hand.
Politically speaking, this opening out of possibilities within a limited frame becomes a
way of creating the potential for alternative modes of existence within situations that
had been perceived as inflexible or irrevocably constant. The authority of the rule
collapses in the wake of a performer who – like Sisyphus – refuses to buckle under its
pressure, or who persistently endeavours to find new ways of creatively inhabiting the
instruction through the performance of unlimited repetitions within its limited terms.

In Horvat’s work, the myth of Sisyphus is conjured through the economic or

diagrammatic vernacular of the instruction manual or informational guide, where its
failure and repetition become explored as playfully propositional as much as
existential conditions of lived experience. The performed task is staged as a
conceptual game, however, inevitably – as a body performs within a system – the
“demonstration (of an idea) at some point becomes more real”.v The critical
inconsistencies produced by the artist appearing to move between different positions
– between seriousness and levity, investment and disinvestment, humour and despair
– complicates any single reading of the Sisyphean tendency. Interpretation remains
multifaceted and shifting, never fixed. Horvat’s makeshift non-performances refuse to
either achieve their desired end or offer the transcendental possibilities promised
through ‘eternally returning’ action. The irresolution produced by the punctuated
cycle of Sisyphean failure and repetition in the work prevents a sense of the inevitable
disappointment experienced in the moment of completion. Closure is deferred in
favour of “a sense of waiting for something to happen” where according to Horvat
the condition of indecision or dissatisfaction points to, “an experience that is never
about ‘now’. It is about some point ‘later’, some thing not-yet-here, not yet visible or
known”.vi Her actions remain forever suspended at the point of anticipation, at the
threshold of what is still yet-to-come. To lack definitive purpose is to refuse to behave
according to dominant teleological or goal-oriented expectations, to remain
unmotivated and without clear aim. Purposelessness is activity liberated from its
servitude; or else the expectant state of promise or potentiality before purpose has
been fully declared, before a use or function has been defined.

During Horvat’s performance, the identifiable configurations of chairs offer moments

of fleeting stability, which merely punctuate or interrupt the longer episodes of
formlessness or of unruly, vertiginous disorder. The process of repetition inevitably
confuses or breaks down the rhythm or logic within the activity, enabling the
possibility for moments of irresolution to become fore-grounded or privileged. Within
this disrupted, deconstructed or even inverted syntax of the performance, the task
might become one of trying to produce an authentic experience of inbetweenness or
even liminality. For Horvat, “the event proper, for which this activity is presumably
but a preparation, is always absent or does not take place, so the act of getting ready,
of ‘setting the stage’ becomes the event”.vii Repeatedly, Horvat arranges the chairs
only to then begin another configuration or permutation, seemingly uncertain about
how to resolve her appointed task. Alternatively, each proposition is deliberately
sabotaged and the failure of the task becomes a way of postponing resolution, a tactic
for avoiding definitive declarations or decisions that could then disable the
potentiality of the situation. In this sense, Sisyphean labour becomes generative,
where repetition always produces something new or different, the possibility of
endlessly playful and mobile reinvention. For cultural theorist Roger Caillois,
infinitely repeatable – yet also potentially open-ended – action operates at the heart
of play for, “the possibilities of ludus are almost infinite … what to begin with seems
to be a situation susceptible to indefinite repetition turns out to be capable of
producing ever-new combinations”.viii Horvat’s prolonged endeavour of arranging
chairs in the LA River might then be considered as a form of ludic investigation or
play, where the work operates as an open space of potentiality where closure is traded
in favour of endlessly unfolding permutations.

Emma Cocker, 2010


























































i See Walter de Maria, ‘Meaningless Work’ (1960), published in La Monte Young, (ed.) An
Anthology of Chance Operations, (La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963), p.28
ii Christy Lange, ‘Bound to Fail’, in Tate ETC, Issue 4 / Summer 2005, accessed at
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/boundtofail.htm on 25.08.10
iii De Maria, ‘Meaningless Work’ (1960)
iv See for example, Dick Higgins, ‘Boredom and Danger’, Source No. 5 (January 1969)
v Vlatka Horvat, Unpublished conversations with artist, 2007-2008
vi Horvat, 2007-8
vii Horvat, 2007-8
viii Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash, (University of Illinois Press, 1958 /
2001), p.31