Transdisciplinary Dreaming

Jeroen Boomgaard Transdisciplinary Dreaming

From the moment of its conception, Art never thought of itself as the arts. By conception I mean the magical moment at the end of the 18th Century when romantic theory formulated art as a separate domain, a visionary way of understanding the world. Or, rather, as a way of being one with the world, that could only be received and hardly taught. The story of the origins of this notion of art, a notion that we still carry with us and struggle with today, need not be retold. Let it suffice that from the beginning it regarded itself as a countermovement, a resistance against and healing of the fragmentation of the world. A sensory and sensitive being in the world, leading to works of art reproducing this sensory and sensitive experience, revoking it for viewers willing and able to go along without really understanding what was happening. Art was supposed to be a counterweight to the upcoming scientific disciplines that were trying to grasp the world, exploring for the sake of exploitation, by dividing it and breaking it into pieces and particles.

Although romantic theory postulated art not as a collection of disciplines but as a collective or trans- discipline, the reality of the art world at that time was still caught up in endless debates about the hierarchy of the arts, or the hierarchy of genres. In reality, the arts were, from the beginning of the 19th century, becoming more separated than before in the new locations for their production and presentation: theatres, concert halls, museums, and exhibition spaces. From the very start, the ideal of a unified and unifying art would remain a dream, an unfulfilled longing in the very heart of what has become known as the ‘autonomy of art’.

Transdisciplinary practices

As this publication shows, transdisciplinarity is regarded as an important tool for studying and dealing with the complex ecologies of human and non-human interaction. The idea of transdisciplinarity practice, however, is not new. Already in the middle of the nineties, Gibson et al. published an influential text in the social sciences in which the transdisciplinary approach was central. In this text, entitled The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, the authors described what they called the ‘Mode 2’ of knowledge production.1 According to them, ‘Mode 2’ assembles “a diverse range of specialists to work in teams on problems in a complex applications-oriented environment. […] In Mode 2 the shape of the final solution will be beyond that of any single contributing discipline.”2 This new form of knowledge production was not the result of a paradigm shift in the sciences, but was simply a consequence of new market conditions and demands starting in the 1990s in which knowledge production was no longer a more or less autonomous field of research and development, but was increasingly financially and politically dependent on the possibility of offering answers and solutions to urgent questions and needs in society. The new mode of operation required practitioners that possessed specific skills, one of the more important being creativity: a creativity that enables them to mobilise and manage perspectives and methodologies, as well as develop new theories or refine research methods.

The middle of the nineties of the last century also witnessed the rise of what is being called ‘new genre public art’. A form of art in public space in 36

which the frame and impulse for the proposed work of art is no longer the built environment, but the social processes that play or do not play in a certain neighbourhood or belonging to a particular group of people.3 These art practices that are also known as ‘community art’ distinguish themselves by operating along guidelines that are very similar to what Gibson et al. see as the ‘Mode 2’ of knowledge production. Here too, urgent issues are at stake, and although the artworks may not pretend to offer answers or solutions, they certainly have the ambition to intervene in a given situation in such a way that change becomes a tangible prospect, a near future, and no longer an abstract ideal. And in this case too, transdisciplinarity is at the very core of the way of working. Art projects working with communities in forms of participation are transdisciplinary, not only in their use of a combination of art disciplines along the lines of a so-called ‘post-medium condition’, but also in the way they incorporate theories and strategies from other fields of knowledge, and operate them in a managerial way. The artist in these projects is no longer a ‘maker’, in the sense of a craftsman with a very specific knowledge and skill, but is instead an organiser, director, and/or manager that is specialised in bringing together contrasting and sometimes opposing agendas and ambitions as part of a communal enterprise that succeeds (more or less) in engaging people in designing a (possible) new present.

Both phenomena, the ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production and the new genre of public art, can be regarded as the result of larger changes in society. This text is not the place to elaborate that; for the moment, it is sufficient to understand that they possess a critical as well as an affirmative potential.

Critical and even dissensual forms of community art may still be used for or function as the affirmation and consolidation of existing conditions in line with the agendas of the commissioning authorities. ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production, on the other hand, in aiming for a smoother flowing of processes and streams, without any critical intention, may still lead to enlarging and enabling networks that bring with them a redistribution of knowledge and knowledge production, undermining existing hierarchies and institutional power in doing so.4 How is it possible that art has, in a certain sense, become “entrapped” in these transdisciplinary practices? As I show in this text, the ambition to become a part of new forms of knowledge production and new ways of intervening in everyday reality has a long history.

Training in transdisciplinarity

The art politics of the Soviet Union in the first ten years after the Revolution can be regarded as the initial moment that art was supposed to be useful in bringing about concrete change.5 Vkhutemas, an art school comparable to but less well-known than Bauhaus, offered a study programme that focused on synthesising the arts for this purpose. During its short existence from 1920 to 1930, it set up a revolutionary training programme for young artists eventually in the form of a two-year propaedeutic course in which students were supposed to master all forms of arts and crafts, in order to be able to create a ‘synthetic’ form of art that would build a new form of collective life. The pictures show students experimenting with poor materials (the only ones available at that time), but creating amazing constructions along the lines of Rodchenko, Popova, Stepanova, and Tatlin. Constructions were built that 38

were intended to be a rationalistic answer to the needs of the new society but were nevertheless truly amazing, in the sense that they hardly offered any clues as to how and for what they could be used.6 During the peak of its existence, the school would be training 500 students in its basic year, all being prepared for a life in the service of the proletariat that was expected to develop a new style of life for itself, but that needed trained specialists to lead the way in this collective effort. Most of these experiments testify to a rhetoric of change, of dynamic forms spiraling out from the center in an upward movement providing a collective impulse to a collective way of life.

The case of Vkhutemas is interesting because it shows that the idea of art as a unified form of aesthetic education was still very much alive in that time, but that it had also become restless and impatient. Although Vkhutemas assembled study and training in the fine arts and crafts, the emphasis was on creating a total environment for a new life and production that would go together with radical

VKhUTEMAS Classroom

new forms of literature, theatre, music, and cinema. It sought to dismiss the bourgeois forms of art production and reception, to dismiss ‘art’ as it had become during the 19th Century: an individual expression to be enjoyed by an elite audience in venues inaccessible to the masses. The new synthetic language of forms did not want to be seen as art, and its practitioners would rather call themselves engineers or constructivists. The bourgeois palaces of art were exchanged for the public spaces of squares and parks, the bourgeois home left behind for the factory and the workers club. As Rancière notes in relation to the films of Dziga Vertov from that period: “The choice is not between two kinds of art. It is between two sensible worlds: the old one in which art was the name by which writers, artists, sculptors or filmmakers put their practice at the service of a particular consumption, and the new one by which they make things that enter directly into production in common, which is the production of common life.”7

The production of the common-life-to-be in the ‘here and now’ of the Soviet Union, however, caused considerable problems. In spite of being called rationalistic, the constructions for daily life were hard to explain and understand. As a language of unknown forms expressed in common materials, they did not seem to elevate the taste of the common public nor convey a clear message. To the authorities they had a limited propagandistic value, and to the proletariat masses they were intended to serve they were too limited in meaning and entertainment. On the one hand, the new language of forms was ‘real’ in its honest use of material and lack of misleading narration. But on the other hand, it remained symbolic when it failed to do what it intended or promised to do: create concrete change. 40

The end of the school and the movement in the Soviet Union is well-known. Art had to furnish “a form that is intelligible to the millions”.8

Turning transdisciplinarity around

The dilemma the constructivists encountered haunts all avant-garde attempts, and is still a major problem for the interdisciplinary art practices of today. Artists, of course, have learned, and most of them are less naïve, or less optimistic, than their revolutionary forerunners. They know that any public project can flip from being critical to affirmative. But for many artists, this risk is still to be preferred over the feeling of impotence in the sheltering and confining institutions that keep art disciplines, even in their post-medial condition, clearly separated. To step outside into the real, lived conditions of daily life, in projects and with processes that cannot easily be called ‘art’, means that the artist can be held accountable for the new social reality starting to exist or, much more frequently the case, failing to exist. By aiming to create a better future in the here and now, the artist becomes responsible for a ‘here and now’ she may not want to be part of or feel to belong to. The dilemma is well-known and is as old as art itself. The transdisciplinary way of working appears in this light to be nothing more and nothing less than a final act of disappearing, of becoming another small part in the realities- and lifestyle-producing machines of the creative industries.

This book, however, indicates that we are aiming for another kind of transdisciplinarity, one that keeps its distance from demand-driven, desiredesigning projects that many public space art practices have become part of. When the new

approach is described in terms of ‘not-knowing’ and ‘listening to matter’, it not only becomes clear that we are far removed from any suggestion of the easy applicability of this ‘method’, but it also shows that it is exactly this notion of applicability that entrapped art practices in the ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production, and is in danger of entrapping the upcoming field of artistic research once more. To be part of the ‘team’ that builds a new environment with better living conditions, even if it is only on the small scale of a specific locality, has been the ideal of many artists working in and on the public domain of the Netherlands since the 1970s.9 And the idea still lives on that involving artists in the planning and designing process from scratch will have a beneficial effect on both the work of the artist and the final result. Neither of the two proves to be true. The negative effect is not only due to the complexity of the process, the endless delays and redesigning operations, the protracted negotiations and reformulations – those things certainly play an important role – but it is first and foremost the inscription of the artistic practice into the format of a given process, a set of rules and regulations, of interests and expectations, that leave little or no room for dissensual input. It is not that the outcomes are decided on beforehand, it is the way these outcomes are to be obtained that reduces the role of the artist to ‘out of the box’ scribbling in the margins.

The transdisciplinarity that is central in this publication does not have a clear order of appearance. Its processes are undefined and are, to a certain extent, undefinable. This is perhaps similar to the somewhat mystical nature of the romantic ideals for art. Romantic art, too, took ‘not knowing’ as its point of departure and ‘listening to matter’ as its main method. The difference, however, is that the 42

transdisciplinary approach presented here does not see itself as opposite to science and research. On the contrary, it connects to and merges with other researchers trying to escape from empirical or hermeneutic standards. I would like to call this “Mode 3” knowledge production: that which questions the notion of knowledge beforehand. In this, the arts are not the creative element in a wellorganised, goal-oriented design process, but are central to a research that avoids being held to well-defined processes and protocols because it wants to be open to what is usually excluded.

The artist-researcher of today does not fold, twist, weld or melt material in order to force it into being a tool for a new society. The artist-researcher tries to see the shimmering of matter and hear its whispers. The outcomes of this kind of research have a postponed applicability: they do not nail down a new model for society in the here and now, but they have the ambition of envisioning a new way of living together, of all human and non-human, living and non-living things, sometime in the future. To position art as a form and method of research does not mean, to me, to create a new discipline equal to or competing with existing academic disciplines. Its purpose is to open up a space and time in which art can unfold its potential, protected from the double bind of impact: to be successful in audience response, or to be effective in societal processes of innovation and change.

1 Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (2010) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: SAGE Publications Ltd. I am very grateful to Benoit Antille for this reference. Benoit is writing a dissertation on the notion of the project at the University of Amsterdam.

2 Ibid., p. 4-5. 3 See Kwon, M. (2002) ‘Chapter 4: From Site to Community in New Genre Public Art: The Case of “Culture in Action”’ in One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge (Mass.)/London: MIT Press. See also Bishop, C. (2012), Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London/New York: Verso. 4 Gibbons 2010, p. 15. 5 Bishop 2012, p. 51-52, quotes Alexei Gan who writes in 1922 in Constructivism: ‘A time of social expediency has begun. An object of only utilitarian significance will be introduced in a form acceptable to all (…). Not to reflect, not to represent and not to interpret reality, but to really build and express the systematic tasks of the new class, the proletariat.’ 6 See Bokov, A. (2020) Avant-garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930, Zurich: Park Books. 7 Rancière, J. (2013) Aisthesis; Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, London/New York: Verso, p. 229. 8 Rancière 2013, p. 243. Rancière quotes here from the notes from the Party Cinema Conference Resolution, 1928, but the same resolution was taken for all other forms of art that were increasingly being condemned as ‘formalism’. Not much later, Bauhaus and experimental forms of art in Germany met the same fate. 9 See also: Boomgaard, J. (2011) Wild Park: Commissioning the Unexpected; The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Amsterdam.