I was invited to participate in an improvisation with eight musicians. I worked projecting in a big screen the word processor of my computer, in which I wrote one by one the names of the musicians of the ensemble and made a list of positive and negative things about each of them.

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Background concepts:

In the last years, negative criticism towards artists has practically disappeared. There is a general opinion that negative criticism is something unproductive and resentful that is not helpful for anyone ("if you have nothing good to say about it, then you better don't say anything"). Nowadays most of the art reviews contain either positive statements or just inoffensive neutral descriptions of the art works. Also the artists themselves avoid criticizing other artists (at least openly). This happens mostly because of the increasing professionalism in the art world, which forces artists to be extremely polite since they have to take care of their own careers and reputation.

As a result, a lot of artists end up having a deluded conception about their own works just because no one dears to publicly say anything negative about them. Under my point of view, this situation became very harmful for the art productions, which, since they are not subject of criticism, are then no subject of corrections and reformulations, and therefore stay very often in a permanent precarious condition.

The aim of the so-called "Positive / Negative" idea is not to state comprehensive criticism about these artists, neither it pretends that its statements are the ultimate truth. The positive and negative statements were taken from general opinions that are repeatedly heard among the audience, but never openly said to the artists. "Positive / Negative" is just a device that effectively showed a certain group of problems, confronting at least partially the overall propagated hypocrisy that results of the current lack of criticism in the art world in our days.

Ensemble:

Jean-Luc Guionnet - alto saxophone
Seijiro Murayama - percussion
Alexandre Babel - percussion
Diego Chamy - visuals
Clare Cooper - guzheng
Robin Hayward - tuba
Christof Kurzmann - electronics
Andrea Neumann - inside piano (left the stage without playing)
Clayton Thomas - double bass

Live at Ausland, Berlin, during the second edition of the series called "Nine Lives".
10th of June 2009