Contemporary Visual Arts + Culture BROADSHEET | 39.1

c o n t e m p o rary v i s u a l art + c u lt u r e b r o a d s h e e T

volume 39.1 MARCH 2010

CRITICISM | THEORY | ART

ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL 2010 ADELAIDE BIENNIAL OF AUSTRALIAN ART ADELAIDE FESTIVAL ARTISTS WEEK GEERT LOVINK GERALD RAUNIG RANJIT HOSKOTE LUCY ORTA AUCKLAND TRIENNIAL ISTANBUL BIENNIAL POSITIONING THE ART MAGAZINE ART+POLITICS ART+WRITING OUTSIDER ART

FREE

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art University of South Australia

14 May – 16 July 2010

unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum

Bill Viola Observance

Mirror Mirror: Then and Now Gallery 1 and Bestec Gallery 2

Gallery 3 Image: Bill VIola, Observance, 2002, colour high-definition video on plasma display mounted on wall, 120.7 x 72.4 x 10.2 cm, Performers: alan abelew, Sheryl arenson, Frank Bruynbroek, Carol Cetrone, Cathy Chang, Ernie Charles, alan Clark, JD Cullum, Michael Irby, Tanya little, Susan Matus, Kate Noonan, Paul o’Connor, Valerie Spencer, louis Stark, Richard Stobie, Michael Eric Strickland, Ellis Williams, photo: Kira Perov

Del Kathryn Barton Daniel Boyd Andrew Browne Stephen Bush Tony Clark Julie Fragar Louise Hearman Fiona Lowry Nigel Milsom James Morrison Alex Pittendrigh Mary Scott Megan Walch Michael Zavros

wilderness balnaves contemporary painting 5 march – 23 may 2010

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES ART GALLERY ROAD THE DOMAIN 2000 INFORMATION LINE 1800 679 278 artgallery.nsw.gov.au Andrew Browne Curtain 2008 (detail)

CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET PARKSIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063 Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 www.cacsa.org.au

the contemporary art centre of sa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa and health promotions sa. the contemporary art centre of sa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments

contemporary visual art projects project 1

adelaide international 2010: apart, we are together raeda saadeh (palestine) praneet soi (india/netherlands) 24.02–01.04.2010 Raeda Saadeh, Vacuum (video still), 2007 Photo courtesy the artist

Colour Te: Mundi Mundi Plains (Red)

2009

Photograph: Josh Raymond Courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery

shaun gladwell Interior Linework/Interceptor Interseion 26 March – 16 May 2010 A MA J O R EX H I BI T I O N FEAT U R I N G S H AUN GL AD WEL L ’S P RESENTATION AT T H E 2 0 0 9 V EN I CE BI EN N A LE A N D NEW WORK CO MMI S S I O N ED BY CA MPBELLT O W N ARTS CENTRE C AMPB EL LTOWN AR TS C ENTR E , SYDNEY. CNR CA M DEN & A P P IN RO A DS, CA M P BELLTO W N T +61 2 4645 4100

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2010 ExhIbITING ARTISTS INCludE:

16.10 — 14.11.2009 Jayce Salloum, Tamar Guimarães, Tony Birch & Tom Nicholson, Wilkins Hill, Sam Smith, Simon Denny, Ms & Mr, Sam James, Christian Capurro, You Are Here, Ahmet Ö üt, Paul Saint

Raquel Ormella She went that way

Sam Smith, Permutation Set (video still), 2010.

4 channel hd video installation, colour, 1080p, 16:9, 20 seconds (with 16,777,216 permutations)

ARTSPACE is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

ARTSPACE is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

ARTSPACE is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art Organisations Australia) and Res Artis (International Association of Residential Art Centres).

43–51 Cowper Wharf Road Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Sydney Australia www.artspace.org.au

T +61 2 9356 0555 artspace@artspace.org.au Office 10am–6pm, Mon–Fri Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Sun

STEVEN RENDALL

Security, Storage & Recreation

8 April - 1 May 2010

Heide Museum of Modern Art

JOHN BUCKLEY GALLERY

gallery@johnbuckley.com.au | www.johnbuckley.com.au

8 Albert St, Richmond VIC 3121 | Fax: 03 9428 8939 | Tel: 03 9428 8554

Heide Museum Modern A

PostgraduatE studiEs SChool of EngliSh, CommUniCationS and PERfoRmanCE StUdiES (ECPS), monaSh UnivERSity

Postgraduate Research Units in the School of ECPS include: • Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies • European Philosophy • Film Culture and Theory • Literary Studies • Performance • Post-colonial Writing • Social Aesthetics • The Book

The School of English, Communications and Performance Studies (ECPS) sits at the forefront of the ‘new humanities’, marrying traditional scholarly approaches with innovative new ways of thinking and working, across an array of creative, cultural, and social science disciplines. Duly grounded in classic theoretical frameworks and modes of practice, we work at the vanguard of contemporary thinking as it applies to emerging social, cultural and creative trends.

We have a long established reputation for the cutting edge contribution of our research units. We have an international profile as an important seat of progressive thought and avant-garde practice, across the domains of the social sciences and the creative and cultural arts. Many of our academics are world renowned experts with impressive profiles and publication histories.

SYDNEY COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

GRADUATE SCHOOL

Enquiries Welcome Degrees and Programs Doctor of Philosophy Postgraduate coursework Honours

www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps

The SCA Graduate School offers a range of

POSTGRADUATE DEGREES

for students who have a degree in visual arts or equivalent qualifications.

Master of Documentary Photography / Master of Film and Digital Image / Master of Interactive and Digital Media / Master of Studio Art / RESEARCH DEGREES Master of Fine Arts / PhD SYDNEY COLLEGE OF THE ARTS The Visual Arts Faculty of The University of Sydney Balmain Road Rozelle NSW 2039 Australia (enter opposite Cecily St) sca.enquiries@sydney.edu.au +61 2 9351 1104 http://sydney.edu.au/sca Image: Michael Goldberg, Strong Language, Some Violence, Adult Themes, 2008. Artspace, Sydney. Subject Chair, Sculpture, Performance & Installation. Senior Lecturer, Sculpture, Performance & Installation.

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In the Shadow of Photography 20 March – 25 April 2010

In the Shadow of Photography (detail), 2008 multi-component installation, dimensions variable

Somewhere in western Tasmania...

1 Finnerty Street Fremantle Western Australia +61 8 9432 9555 fac.org.au

www.morison.info www.castgallery.org

other side art: trevor nickolls, a survey of paintings and drawings 1972 - 2007 a nets victoria touring exhibition developed by the ian potter Museum of art, the university of Melbourne Benalla art gallery, Benalla (vic) until 29 March 2010

Delivering the best contemporary art, craft and design to regional Victoria and beyond

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oBjects to live By / the art of john Meade a nets victoria touring exhibition developed by the latrobe regional gallery latrobe regional gallery, Morwell (vic) until april 4 2010

siMryn gill: inland a nets victoria touring exhibition developed by the centre for contemporary photography Mildura arts centre, Mildura (vic) until 10 March 2010

the shilo project a nets victoria touring exhibition developed by the ian potter Museum of art, the university of Melbourne the ian potter Museum of art, the university of Melbourne (vic) until 14 March 2010

www.netsvictoria.org.au

THIS WAY UP

national exhibitions touring support (nets) victoria is supported by the victorian government through arts victoria and the community support fund, by the australian government through the australia council, its arts funding and advisory body, and through the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments. nets victoria also receives in kind support from the ngv.

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HEDGEMAZE 7 - 28 March 2010

www.prospect.sa.gov.au/goto/prospectgallery e.admin@prospect.sa.gov.au Christo Crocker, Crumple, 2009. Courtesy the artist.

SASA Gallery Temperature

Anton Hart and George Popperwell 27 February - 26 March 2010

Naturally Disturbed

Sue Kneebone and artefacts from the SA Museum collection Curators: Sue Kneebone & Dr Phillip Jones 6 April - 7 May 2010

Intimate Immensities

Damien Chwalisz, Sally Davis, Matt Davis, Michael Geissler, Sean Humphries, Rachael Hurst, Peter King, Jane Lawrence, Katisca Pedisic, Sasha Radjenovich, Phil Walker, Linda Marie Walker Curators: Rachael Hurst and Jane Lawrence 18 May - 18 June 2010 Image: Sue Kneebone, Saintly sinners, 2008, giclee print

SASA Gallery Kaurna Building, City West Campus, UniSA, Cnr Fenn Place & Hindley Street, Adelaide T: 08 8302 9274 E: sasagallery@unisa.edu.au CRICOS PROVIDER NO 00121B

www.unisa.edu.au/artarchitecturedesign/sasagallery

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NEW FUNDING FOR CURATORS Curator Development Initiative DEADLINE: 1 April 2010

Financially supported by the Sidney Myer Fund, the Initiative will inject up to $60 000 annually into the visual arts, craft and design sector. It provides the opportunity for emerging and mid-career curators to gain mentored placements with a gallery, art institution or university with four grants of up to $15,000 being offered annually.

To download application forms go to: www.visualarts.net.au

Art Stretchers Co P/L 161 Morphett Street, Cnr. Waymouth St., opposite Light Square.

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43 unley road parkside sa 5063 tel: 08 8373 4800 www.adelaideflowerhouse.com.au

contact (02) 9368 1900 nava@visualarts.net.au www.visualarts.net.au www.artistcareer.com.au

Contributors Ken Bolton: Adelaide based poet, editor, publsiher and art critic, front man at Dark Horsey Bookshop, Adelaide Experimental Art Foundation; has written art criticism extensively in Broadsheet, Artlink, Otis Rush, Photofile, Art+Text, Art Monthly, Meanjin, Agenda and Eyeline Robert Cook: Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Photography and Design, Art Gallery of Western Australia; recent projects include Thing: Beware the Material World and Mari Funaki: Works 1992-2009; has written about art and life for several Australian and international publications Natasha Conland: Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art GalleryToi oTämaki, Auckland, New Zealand, Curator 4th Auckland Triennial; curator New Zealand Pavilion 2005 Venice Biennale; co-curator Cafe 2 project, 2006 Busan Biennale and 2006 SCAPE Biennial of Art and Public Space, Christchurch, New Zealand; a ‘curatorial comrade’, 2008 Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions That Turn Charlotte Day: Melbourne-based independent curator, writer and Associate Curator, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Amelia Douglas: Melbourne-based curator and writer with research focus on time-based contemporary art; PhD on Pierre Huyghe from School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne, 2008; co-curator of Found Sound: The Experimental Instrument Project, 2009; Assistant Curator, Australian Centre for the Moving Image 2008-09; lecturer and tutor, contemporary art history and curatorship School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne 2005-09; founding co-editor ofemaj: electronic melbourne art journal; member of UN magazine editorial committee; board member (curatorial) of Bus Projects; currently managing red gallery, Melbourne Blair French: Executive Director, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney; curator and writer; publications include Twelve Australian Photo Artists (with Daniel Palmer), Piper Press, Sydney, 2009, Out of Time: Essays between Photography and Art, CACSA, Adelaide, 2006 and Photo Files: An Australian Photography Reader, Power Publications & Australian Centre for Photography, 1999

c o n t e m p o rary v i s u a l art + c u lt u r e b r o a d s h e e T Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design

volume 39.1 MARCH 2010

Alan Cruickshank Wendy Walker Fiona Scott Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Alan Cruickshank

ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2010, Broadsheet, the authors and artists. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc. print post approved PP53 1629/00022 The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Office: Broadsheet 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063 Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 Fax +61 [08] 8373 4286 Email: editor@cacsa.org.au www.cacsa.org.au

Anthony Gardner: Writer and translator currently living in London, UK; PhD in art history from the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, University of New South Wales; recent texts in Artforum, A Prior, Reading Room, Third Text and other publications in Australia and internationally. Forthcoming book projects on biennales (with Charles Green for Wiley-Blackwell) and postsocialist aesthetics. In 2009, he was awarded an International Fellowship through Hans Belting’s and Andrea Buddensieg’s Global Art and the Museum project (ZKM, Karlsruhe), the inaugural IMA/Eyeline residency for arts writers (IMA, Brisbane) and a Travelling Research Fellowship through the Australian Academy of the Humanities

Subscriptions: Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SA—admin@cacsa.org.au

Alex Gawronski: Sydney based artist and writer; co-founder/director of Institute of Modern Art Newtown (ICAN), Sydney, 2007-, Loose Projects, Sydney 2006-07 and Blaugrau, Sydney, 2000-01; currently teaches at the Sydney College of the Arts

Editorial Advisory Board

Adam Geczy: Sydney based artist and writer; lectures at Sydney College of the Arts; recent exhibitions include Concerts, Lake Macquarie City Gallery and PICA; November 2008 held the performance Saluting the world Food Crisis with a Bottle of Dom Perignon, Croxhapox Gallery, Belgium, where he will again have a performance and installation in 2010; most recent book is Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008) Richard Grayson: London based artist writer and curator; until recently a Research Fellow at Newcastle University, UK Charles Green: Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Melbourne and an artist who works in collaboration with Lyndell Brown Ranjit Hoskote: Mumbai-based contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent; co-curator 7th Gwangju Biennale, 2008; an Associate Fellowship with Sarai CSDS, a new-media initiative of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, and is in the process of developing a new journal of critical inquiry in the visual arts Reuben Keehan: Curator at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney, and editor, with Blair French, of Column; contributor to numerous magazines and journals including Artforum.com, ArtUS, ARTiT Asia, Broadsheet, Art in Australia and Eyeline Geert Lovink: Research Professor of Interactive Media, Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA); Associate Professor of New Media, University of Amsterdam (UvA); founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue Victoria Lynn: Melbourne-based independent curator and writer; Curator Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together; Curator Turbulence, 3rd Auckland Triennial, 2007; Commissioner, Australian Pavilion, 2003 Venice Biennale; Director, Creative Development, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2002-04; author Julie Rrap Body Double, Piper Press and MCA, Sydney, 2007 Eva McGovern: Kuala Lumpur based independent curator and writer; guest lecturer Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore; regular contributor to Off the Edge magazine, Malaysia, Timeout KL; www.arterimalaysia. com; C-Arts magazine Jacqueline Millner: Lectures in art history and visual culture, School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney; a collection of her writings on Australian contemporary art Conceptual Beauty is due to be published by Artspace Visual Arts Centre in 2009 Ian North: Adelaide based artist and writer; Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts, University of Adelaide and University of South Australia; editor Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and New Aesthetics, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 2007 Nikos Papastergiadis: Professor, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications, University of Melbourne; author of Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (Rivers Oram Press, 2006), Metaphor + Tension: On Collaboration and its Discontents, Artspace, 2004; The Turbulence of Migration, Polity Press, 2000; Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity, Rivers Oram Press, 1998; co-editor Empires, Ruins+Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art, Melbourne University Press, 2005 Gerald Raunig: Vienna and Zurich based philosopher and art theoretician; works at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies); co-ordinator of the transnational eipcp research projects republicart (http://republicart.net, 2002-05), transform (http:// transform.eipcp.net, 2005-08) and CreatingWorlds (http://creatingworlds.eipcp.net, 2009-12); member of the editorial board of the multilingual webjournal transversal http://transversal.eipcp.net/ and the Austrian journal for radical democratic cultural politics, Kulturrisse Colin Rhodes: Dean and Professor of Art History and Theory, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; Director of Self-Taught and Outsider Art Research Collection (STOARC), Sydney; contributor to many exhibition catalogues and edited books, and a number of journals, including Burlington Magazine, Art History, Ligeia, Raw Vision and Création Franche; writes on modernism, primitivism and marginal arts Nicholas Tsoutas: Until recently Artistic Director Casula Powerhouse, Sydney; over several decades has been directors of Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Performance Space, Sydney; as director/curator has specialised in areas of conceptual, installation and performance art, contemporary postmodern theory and criticism with particular emphasis on postcolonial critique in relation to globalisation, mobility, cultural exchange and cultural diversity Sarah Tutton: Melbourne-based independent curator and writer; Melbourne Editor of Art & Australia

The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA

International: RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin BORIS KREMER France Curator, translator and writer, Paris MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI Macedonia Director Visual and Cultural Research Centre, Skopje VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director Platform Garanti, Istanbul JULIE UPMEYER Turkey Artist, Initiator, Caravansarai, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, Mumbai BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai EUGENE TAN Hong Kong Exhibitions Director, Osage Gallery JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic, writer SUE HAJDU Vietnam Artist, writer, Ho Chi Minh City RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Kuala Lumpur LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic, Singapore GOENAWAN MOHAMAD Indonesia Essayist, journalist, poet and cultural critic, Jakarta NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland Australia: ROBERT COOK Perth Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curator of Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Curator, writer, editor and Executive Director, Artspace ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist, lecturer and writer CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor, School of Art, University of South Australia

c o n t e m p o rary v i s u a l art + c u lt u r e b r o a d s h e e T Page 18

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volume 39.1 MARCH 2010

COVER Matthew Bradley, First Lunar mosaic with Jupiter inset, 311009 23:16-02:34 from The Aesthetics of Amateur Astro-Imaging series (2010), Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before and After Science, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 February–2 May, 2010

18

critical or congratulatory?, richard grayson, eva mcgovern, charles green, adam geczy,

victoria lynn, ian north, jacqueline millner, amelia douglas, blair french

24

before and after science: interview charlotte day and sarah tutton, amelia douglas

28

politics of internet culture: interview geert lovink, victoria lynn

32

aesthetics and politics in the age of ambient spectacles, nikos papastergiadis

40

in modulation mode: factories of knowledge, gerald raunig

43

insecurity will prevail: a virtual exchange with gerald raunig, anthony gardner

46

the scale of change, ranjit hoskote

48

between art and action: lucy orta, alex gawronski

53

under the counter: interview ken bolton, robert cook

57

what i’d like to talk about when i talk about biennales, reuben keehan

60

last ride in a hot air balloon: interview natasha conland, reuben keehan

63

don’t complain: 11th international istanbul biennial, nicholas tsoutas

66

the solid fraud of outsider art, adam geczy

70

a much maligned monster: why outsider art doesn’t lock horns with the artworld, colin rhodes

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critical or congratulatory?

There has been some discussion recently that art magazines in Australia are failing art and artists, that in their perceived political and cultural ruminations they are defaulting upon the producer and the product. Inherent in this commentary is the perception that Australia’s international profile is suffering from a lack of a “world class” magazine, something like Artforum or Frieze, one that might position Australian contemporary art in a more “positive light” in the Northern Hemispherecontrolled international art domain. This debate further proposed that the current stable of Australian art magazines is either parochial or dated, lacking “exciting debate” about art and artists. Notwithstanding the facts that Australia geographically is sited far from the mass marketplace of the Northern Hemisphere and productions like Artforum or Frieze are impossible to maintain for any length of time due to our small market size, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet magazine is interested therefore in considering what might be the ‘ideal’ Australian visual art and culture magazine, and for whom. Artforum or Frieze for example, would hardly qualify as exemplars. The former is unapologetically American-centric with two thirds of nearly every issue being advertising—the January 2010 issue presented only six feature texts and the usual columns and reviews—while the latter seems to have become a merchandising conglomerate that also happens to publish a magazine. This publication has endeavoured in recent years to engage head-on an area usually timidly embraced, if at all, certainly in Australia, that of critical analysis—some might even see it as “complaint”—endeavouring to encourage debate, occasionally ‘tousling the feathers’ where perceived necessary, seeing art as an ongoing dialectic process in need of constant renewal. Accordingly Broadsheet has invited (in the same manner as the previous issue’s dialogue on the Asia Pacific Triennial) ‘positions’ in response from various critics and commentators.

RICHARD GRAYSON Niche publications: Unlike newspapers, old art magazines don’t even make good wrapping for fish and chips, the paper is too shiny and the pages too small, so they are denied even this modest utility. Recently, researching a project, I sat down in the reference section of a library in London and read through three or four years worth of the UK art magazine Studio International starting around 1974. No-one reading Broadsheet now will remember this publication unless they are of a certain background and advancing age, but for a brief moment—late 1970s maybe—it was an influential publication about visual art in the Non-American Anglo-Sphere.

Then it slid from view and memory and now has a fugitive ghost-life as an online digital publication.

Opening the fake leather bindings of the years 1976-77 was to enter strange territory. A central concern moving in and out of the reviews and articles was how to resolve the imperatives of a ‘progressive’ art practice with the necessities of class struggle, whether contemporary practice might support the emancipation of the working class and what role an artist and the arts might have in raising consciousness for the transformation of mankind and culture. One copy was dedicated to transcribing the proceeds of a four-day conference at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art debating art and politics and the future. The, at the time famous, critic Peter Fuller, on the edge of abandoning his Marxism, confidently predicted that very soon, art would consist of giant holograms set up in public spaces. Another point of dissent was between the teleologies of formal abstraction in painting and sculpture and the claims of the emerging non-object based practices. Debates that are not only quaint to today’s reader but read as if they are from another civilisation, another planet.

Art magazines become identified with certain debates. The degree that this symbiosis is a random evolutionary happenstance and to what extent it is instrumental and a conscious editorial decision is, in the end irrelevant: when it comes to continued currency the editors or writers are powerless to determine how long the debate that they are part of will have relevance in the cultural environment. Art+Text was set up to answer what appeared to be a niche need in Australia for a forum to discuss art and ideas informed by the alien memes of European continental theory. It turned out that this niche was far wider than Australia, and the publication had a heady moment as a glamorous international magazine based on the west coast of America before they went the way of the trilobite. Frieze magazine identified itself with the YBA movement and this for a moment gave it an international currency rather than parish pump relevance.

But then the YBAs got old and the magazine transmutated into an aspirational middle-brow lifestyle magazine giving it a bit of token intellectual ballast to the commercial enterprise of an art fair. Artforum long ago made the shift from being a platform for discussion about the flatness of the Greenbergian picture-plane to being the art-market establishment rag par excellence, which is why, until recent budget cuts, you have to wade through so many adverts to get to your anticipated Roslind Krauss or Fredrick Jameson theoretical text.

The positioning of these magazines as having a reach beyond their own pond has little to do with intention, or rather, the intention may be there, but without some other external factor, that intention remains merely masturbatory fantasy. Without a) the Anglophone interest in European theory, b) the identification with a specific art movement backed by a rich collector or c) identification with an international art movement operating from a centre of the global contemporary art-mart. Each one of the magazines above would have the reach and currency and authority of the Adelaide Advertiser. With a smaller readership.

In common with other hobbyist publications most art magazines have no general readership. No one ever picks up Sports Fishing Monthly more than once unless it is something that they are already interested in—fish, or they’re doing a school project. (This may not be true for the glitzier end of the trade such as Artforum or Burlington Magazine, which the rich—or their assistants—might place carefully on their coffee tables to signify that they move through abstract realms of value as well as more concrete ones.) There is a phrase from Business Management that speaks of the “internal audience”, for instance when an advertising campaign is pitched towards the copywriter’s boss and peers rather than Joe and Jeannette Public. The audience for an art magazine is so internal as to defy both biology and physics. Not only are they internal but they are various (if that word doesn’t give too strong an impression of more than not many people), each audiencette uses a publication in a different way at different times. An individual may contain many audiencettes: the curator who has just staged an exhibition is a different reader than when they are researching exhibitions and hoping to divine who’s current or ‘hot’. Ditto an artist when seeking validation for recent coverage, or more generally checking out the hierarchy, to feel either warm and happy or sick to their gut. Or writers and academics who have their own particular private needs.

Or the collector who is hoping that an expansive feature is going to add value to their latest addition to their portfolio. These multitudes multiply again when one positions the magazine in, or from, Australia. As in a Borges fable, the magazine Broadsheet in Australia may have exactly the same words images and captions as the magazine Broadsheet when it is being launched in Singapore or Venice, but it is an entirely different magazine.

Currently the energies that constituted the art world have guttered, nearly expired. Progressive art, avant-garde art, nearly all art drifted into commodity and now the market and its processes and exchanges that effected this alchemical transformation has become a little wobbly. As Baudrillard (a writer much lionised by Art+Text) wrote before his death in 2007, “Art today, though it has disappeared, doesn’t know that its disappeared and—this is the worst of it—continues on its trajectory in a vegative state”. Which makes thinking about the role of The Art Magazine and how to construct it as a “World Class Magazine” an eccentric undertaking, when the world that the hypothetical magazine must somehow reflect is confused, exhausted, mendacious and empty. Change, if any, is going to come from artists, writers, people getting sweaty, in anger, or in celebration or out of their gourds on happy drugs shaped like little UFO’s and actually doing stuff that poses problems, asks questions, proposes alternatives.

And then perhaps some sort of publication might reflect that outbreak of activity, be used as a means of communication between different gangs and for a moment take on a relevance beyond the event or gang that nurtured it. Then, if the publication gets lucky—like Frieze—they become a part of the commodification and marketisation of what it was for a moment part of and so has an afterlife, or if unlucky—like Art+Text—they just expire. A renewal, a re-engagement, or even something new sparkly and novel and its not going to be found in the broad geographies of the vast abstract ‘world’ but in the specific, the over-looked, the nooks and crannies and weird little niches.

EVA McGOVERN As an independent curator based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I have observed that the status of the visual arts magazine, local or not, is influenced by vanity and confusion. Although the positions put forward in Broadsheet centre on criticality in print media, on the status of art writing and the hierarchy of the artist/artwork

1 9 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 within this, I want to consider a few things in Malaysia that hinder endeavour in the first place. The importance of a print version of an arts magazine, signifying a culturally advanced, sophisticated and self-reflective society (which is mainly congratulatory in its insider production of knowledge and governed by market and/or academic agendas) fluctuates wildly on the priority list of urgent contributions required for contemporary practice. Realistically, when funding for art production is sporadic, and museums are more like mausoleums than living cultural spaces, with audiences pitifully low and little to no popular validation of visual art, why should curators and artists (who form the majority of consistent writers in Kuala Lumpur) produce critically rigorous texts for print media when for various domestic reasons the result is minute readership and little impact? This is not to discredit the importance of written knowledge and critique. It forms part of a necessary energy and informed legacy of an artist/artwork/exhibition and there are a small group of individuals in Malaysia committed to such a purpose.

But who are we writing for and why? Should it matter that very few are actively considering these texts apart from collectors and dealers? Locally do we continue to pursue the creation of a valid and useful print publication even as we exhaust ourselves with the difficult realities of being creative practitioners having to juggle numerous responsibilities in a country with an unstable creative infrastructure?

As an aside Broadsheet is not (directly) available in Malaysia, but given that for my own practice it functions as one of my preferred platforms to play out my needs for criticality I contribute to the magazine and share links to the online version with my interested colleagues in the region. So, why are there more are more magazines appearing in Kuala Lumpur with untrained staff at the helm, who want to be considered of international quality, but who are unable to consolidate vision, style, position and therefore seem uncommitted to the arts because of ulterior motives (whatever they may be)? Because the magazine—regardless of quality, is a status symbol—to own it, produce it, buy it and lastly to read it makes audiences feel part of the mysterious, prosperous and elitist art world.

Unable to comment on the status of art magazines in Australia, I reflect on my own backyard and my aspirations for print media in my region. As an invested cultural practitioner I seek a magazine that is accessible, affordable, intelligently designed, consistently informative, critically rigorous with a multiplicity of local and international voices (but in language that is not a pastiche of dense Western academic approaches) and that also has the budget to deliver high quality colour reproductions. Many local magazines do not. This requires trained, committed and experienced leaders, teams and budgets to deliver even half of this utopian dream.

SentAp!3 is one of the few long standing Malaysian publications that displays this sense of commitment. But due to funding and administrative issues the magazine, made up of local writers reviewing, commenting upon and analysing practice and issues in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, has until recently been on a long hiatus.

Criticality and dialogue should be supported, as well as the creation of platforms for exchange and dissemination of that information to be understood in meaningful and purposeful manners, a remit Broadsheet endeavours to fulfil.

However in the magazine format, I would be inspired by different styles that are not singularly obsessed with tough words and insular commentary, but that has the space to be useful on many different levels (informative, critical, entertaining, commercial, accessible) linked with a cohesive vision. On the question of whether the artist and the artwork should be central to this discussion rather than an ingredient for polemical debate, it surely is a balancing of ego and transparency and of being honest about what and why pieces of text are being generated.

Not always the easiest thing to entertain in the current highly emotionally and commercially charged art world.

CHARLES GREEN: A visual culture and art magazine should be remembered, both by artists and in the future. Certain genres of art writing date instantly: art reviewing is the worst example. Not only is it the least memorable and least useful for art writing in the future, but also it has no real impact on anyone. The concluding sentence of Donald Brook’s long-ago 1973 essay, ‘Post-Object Art’, can be taken as a statement of a particular type of writing associated with art that we might remember, alongside a mistaken focus on art criticism: “If we are disposed to argue with our artists we ought to do it walking alongside, not standing in their way.” Now, what might that mean in practice? Let’s start with the bankruptcy of current genres of art writing, not bankruptcy of the intersection of writing and art. I mean the complete and utter exhaustion of art criticism and art reviewing as productive activities. There is, however, life possible elsewhere. Let’s first backtrack. We can take into account, though it is not particularly useful, the persistent, perpetual cries about a crisis in art criticism. Art reviewing is one of the most ephemeral forms in a magazine, utterly useless except in the absence of other resources in retrospect; I speak from experience as an art historian. Almost all the other art critical forms involve advocacy: art magazine feature writing, which is by and large either curators writing on art or other curators, or a few hyperactive, conscience-stricken academics given the severe, strict promotion disincentives against publishing in Broadsheet or any other art magazine. Given that curators are the most consistent writers, it is not unnatural that they would have colonised

art magazines, though this is not necessarily in the best interests of the magazine (except in certain genres, we’ll come to that) and represents something of a complex undercurrent of conflicts of interest. The curator is a front line role, hard working, often without adequate research training, and is the first and key level of evaluation—first and key level of power other than collectors. Whilst populous art reviewing in newspapers, very rarely in magazines, can blur into both journalism and into art history, neither critics nor art historians any longer occupy significant roles nor do they have the influence they had in the modern art period. Given art magazines do not address a popular audience, the moral is obvious.

So, art magazines have to decide, each one separately, how to deal with contemporary art’s globalisation and simultaneous regionalism. First, the word “globalisation”: the world lazily assumes with its hazy leftist nostalgia that this means “convergence”. This is of course not true. A myriad of economic theorists and political theorists, from Daniel Cohen, Berger and Rawls, all find no sign in the data of convergence. But they do identify divergence, which is in no way inconsistent with globalisation. Globalisation really involves the global organisation of production, which spells out the art world now and any art magazine’s place in it. A good art magazine based in Australia should be also alert for another term in operation—colonisation. This and globalisation are confused by art audiences, but this should not divert a good editor. However, even this misses the point.

Its professionals do not generate art history and its judgements any more. What do I mean? One of my best students quoted a clever phrase, “the knowledge field of contemporary art is mapped by price tags”. The art market is the place in which public reputations and artistic achievements are determined. She continues: In 1991, the ARTnews 200 (whose aim is to portray active collectors on the art market), reported that fifty-four percent of New York collectors collected contemporary art. By contrast, in 2003, the amount had risen to seventy-one percent.

The past twenty years have also witnessed a great inflation in the monetary value of contemporary artworks, with the ‘ultimate value [becoming] whatever the market will bear.

And it will bear a lot’. By determining the monetary value of contemporary art, the collector is thus able to contribute to the historical value of contemporary art. In doing so, the private collector narrates contemporary art as a ‘statusconferring commodity’. Indeed, such trends in private collecting have not gone unnoticed by the contemporary artist. For example, in Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), the artist initiates, participates in and records a sexual encounter with a collector. The first edition of the recorded videotape is then sold to the participating collector, as a comment on the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange.

The concept of an ‘art history’ does occupy a significant place in contemporary art. In particular, ‘art history’ is still used as a lens within which a narrative of the contemporary artistic period is formulated. However, the composition of this narrative by the art historian has no place in an art world governed by money and the market.1 What this young woman means is that the vast growth of both private and corporate collecting and of contemporary art sponsorship has resulted in a narration of this artistic period other than by the art historian. And, I would add, other than by the art magazine. This has affected the operation of the art museum, curatorial practice and art magazines alike. For anyone writing about art and activist theorists alike face a problem: the sheer confidence, power, inclusiveness, size, and even generosity of the post-Darwinian, hyper-globalised world of contemporary art and its museums, galleries and art fairs. Overtly lustful as that world appears at its artfair coalface, it also incorporates and subsumes wide audiences and the desires (foolish though they may be) of most artists. Thus, we can more than glimpse a decline of the intersection of collaborative and networked new media forms in art. Net activist Geert Lovink has recently written on this in a very thorough way.

The commitment of art museums to symposia and discourse does not represent a significant recuperative response from any high cultural level to the problem of emerging anti-hegemonic artistic activities so much as the diffuse desire to represent all types of activity to both general and specialist audiences.

The point I’m driving at that is that the oppositional status of writing within the art world exists as symbolic and decorative—as a style, and even a saleable one, as it turns out, an issue from which no contemporary biennale, triennale or documenta or art magazine is immune. My student concluded her essay with extraordinary perceptiveness, concluding: “The problem with art historians is that they don’t seem to acknowledge that it is the people with money, rather than themselves, who know how to connect art with other people’s lives in the present day.”

How does an art magazine deal with this? I think it spells a need for writing and features in a periodical that shares the experience of artists of the contemporary world rather than that of the market that it imagines exists (this is a more subtle point than it looks) and by doing so, acknowledges the transformation

and at that point, the perspective and the utility of art history comes into focus.

To go back in time and conclude with the search for good faith, exactly as it was back in 1970. How were artists to sustain a critical praxis within the institutions and exhibiting spaces of art? Could the figure of the artist be stretched, expanded and redefined? The same issues face art magazines today in a situation where they, like the rest of the print media, are not good investments. Especially if, in my view, the critic’s and magazine’s role as policeman is simply wrong-headed.

Are there new descriptive methods for new art? Is art history always bad: its chronological structure; causality; a relatively extended time span; a relatively narrow but contested mainstream in which not all artists are good; and, therefore, a long, not necessarily simplifying perspective?

in the art world mapped above without falling for its narrative realism, as does the art criticism I read—whether activist or hagiographic. I’d like to point to three precedents for a useful role for art magazines in the present other than the roles of pawn or small-town flatterer. I believe that artists’ research (and art historical activity in general) is still worthwhile.

I would like to see: 1. Art magazines that dispense with art criticism, in part or wholly. There are precedents: Avalanche’s use in the 1960s of the interview form and the project form. 2. Art magazines that don’t do this by defaulting into playground time for kiddies. Art magazines can and have made history as art, as did Avalanche and Artforum. 3. Art magazines that take art history seriously, as sometimes even does Artforum under Tim Griffin’s and even Jack Bankowsky’s editorships. Art magazines can participate in the reformulation of art history, as can artists, not least as did Robert Smithson. Method is at stake here—the reformulation of writing.

Back in the real world, the point is that the boundary between art and writing is potentially permeable, especially if we don’t ask artists to write art criticism. Artists are increasingly highly trained theoretically and as writers.

Their education after all has been language based, writing based, and they are involved with the same texts and the same anxieties as art theorists and art historians. The populist approach of art magazines is simply out of place amongst such producers. Because art criticism does not bring anything special by way of expertise or information other than its naïve subjection to market hegemony, the situation calls for radical solutions: if the reviewer/arbiter/judge model for writing is dropped, then we have the role of interlocutor or questioner (interviewer is one such role, collaborator another). For the interview model, see the current proliferation of panels in magazines and catalogues, the present one included.

I have adopted this model myself: see my catalogue panel published for 2004: Australian Culture Now, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image/National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne) in 2004; for the interview, see Avalanche back in the early 1970s and even Flash Art’s perennial interviewing. If we drop the idea of magazines concentrating on writing and art in which the first is NOT the interpreter or excavator or assessor, i.e. dependent, then something else may emerge (the concept is regularly put forward and is not my own idea at all.) This different role is not subordinate, is not that of a shadow (a reviewer is not much more than a shadow), and it may be entrepreneurial or curatorial. My example right now is Cabinet magazine. As my colleague Nikos Papastergiadis has observed, it is a question of levels of engagement. It may even be investigative or perspectival,

ADAM GECZY The Australian art magazine: In a recent essay on art criticism (‘Art Criticism in Extremis’), Hal Foster sounds a note of crisis for art criticism in the USA. He asserts that since Greenberg the art critic “pure and simple” has been a dying breed. Artists, cultural critics and theorists indulge in art criticism, but no-one does art criticism with professional and philosophical devotion. Even Michael Kimmelman of The Times, whom he does not mention, has his heart in playing piano and now resides in Berlin and writes the occasional cultural column. Facts such as these are grist to Foster’s critical mill: art criticism is increasingly arbitrary in an artistic culture that is itself arbitrary and forbiddingly diffuse. Foster is not being conservative, he is too sophisticated a writer for this, but what troubles him is a lack of an ethical attitude to writing about art which leads to a fundamental aesthetic standpoint.

As we well know from Art History 101, Greenberg’s somewhat rigid attitudes were as debilitating as they were facilitating. But they were philosophically buttressed and allowed attractors and detractors alike to formulate a position. What Foster finds unappealing is the culture of no position.

It is a notion with which I have a great deal of sympathy. Where I agree with Foster is that the positioning of the arts writer is not in terms of some unassailable autonomy. Like the lunacies of born-again Christians, a part of us somewhere in our conflicted souls cannot but admire the monomaniacal conviction with which Greenberg propelled his project forward. The writer’s philosophy need not be monolithic but without it there is only a kind of verbal miasma.

It would be all too easy to say that the problems besetting Australian art criticism, and by extension its magazine culture, is that we have never had the kind of advocacy and cultural upheaval, imaginary or real, associated with Greenbergianism. The best we could do was to invite him out here in 1968.

It might also be too easy to invoke the provincialism problem, or cite the anxiety of influence, or the importation of style. I would suggest that it is precisely these mitigating factors that have insulated Australian culture for so long—much along the lines of an imaginary affliction that justifies inaction. Hence anything that runs the gauntlet risks being branded reactionary or ungracious. For indeed the problem with art critical part-timers is that the partisanship breeds cowardice.

The dominant tenor of Australian art criticism is that it is in fear of offending.

On the other hand, I have been witness, and even the brunt of criticisms that do not know how to sustain themselves or justify themselves rigorously. But I would say that the most chilling thing about Australian criticism is that it is craven.

Description and promotion seem to be the main aims. John McDonald did and still does from time to time voice a variance, but if he has a position, it is not that interesting, ethical nor philosophical. Is he an art critic “pure and simple”? In a de facto sense only. What McDonald lacks is reflective wordliness—this is the problem with the newspapers—overworked Arts Editors are more interested in writers who can turn copy without too much editorial encumbrance upon them.

The effect of these logistics is articles that are equally prosaic—a product more than a comment. A bit like a lot of contemporary art. There was a coruscation in Australian art magazine culture with Art+Text. Its success was that it was very specific, and as such defined an age. This sort of specificity cannot be sustained, much like a good TV mini-series. To mourn its loss is perhaps misguided, but what we might mourn is the intellectual energy which it represented.

There is a lot more to say but I will only emphasise for now this idea of arbitrariness. Arbitrary art and arbitrary curatorship requires something other than arbitrary criticism—quite the opposite. But this is largely what we have with a few exceptions. The overemphasis on artistic subjectivities as products, and the endless quasi–commercial speculations, the regular puzzlement as to what is good, is what drives the majority of Australian art magazines. A torpid desire to please is legion. However a magazine that complains and is adversarial is not necessarily negative. Quite the contrary. Without some sense of engagement then an art magazine resembles a surf magazine and dwindles into equivalence.

A magazine that sets out to clash and to challenge will never please everyone. There are only two imperatives: the first is that it too has its encomiums, but these, like the criticisms, have critical substance; the second is that it keeps its dissent open, without agenda, without overarching ideology.

2 1 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 VICTORIA LYNN An art magazine needs to be inspirational in several dimensions. As a writer, I want to be so inspired that I would want to write for the magazine and I would hope that artists also wish to see themselves in a magazine because they, too, are inspired by the context in which they appear. Inspiration can take many forms. In my view it should include: rigorous analysis of art based on art historical knowledge, a critically aware perspective that has an international reach; lively writing that sustains the reader from beginning to end; a variety of forms—interviews, focus, reviews, essays, artist pages, history—and a great design with fabulous images.

Unlike other commentators here, I do believe in the short sharp art review: they describe what I have not been able to see, or they offer an informed opinion on what I have seen, and while one might disagree with the analysis, it has the purpose of sustaining a dialogue about the arts at a local level.

Most important from my perspective is to find the ways that local iterations have global content and to bring the global into local relevance. This is true of any publication on the arts that is published outside the so-called centres of art. We need to see ourselves in an international frame, not by aping or comparing ourselves, but by re-formulating diverse contexts and articulating our own unique perspective. This is not about identity, but about what happens when an idiom appears simultaneously in different places. As such a magazine can build networks or connections between practices that have something in common.

Of particular interest to me are the emerging tendencies in art around the world, and how they might be in dialogue with one another. Our public art galleries do not have the budgets to exhibit a sustained program of international art (with a few exceptions), but a magazine has the wondrous opportunity to open up channels with just about anywhere. And this can happen not only across borders but also disciplines. The magazine can be a learning system with loose ends, a montage of both found and freshly produced content, a publication that begs the reader’s involvement. It does not have to be about the big names or for that matter the big exhibitions—it can also look for the vicissitudes of captivating practices that are as alive in Auckland, Adelaide, Abu Dhabi or Athens. Connections across the world in its current fractured state are not easy to maintain and so the choice of an editor in our context (we probably have more art magazines per capita than any other country) is to chart some vital routes.

Art+Text was not one entity. It had two editors and was very much a product of their personality and talent, the period and an emerging generation of artists in the 1980s who continue to influence contemporary art today. Paul Taylor moved to New York providing the magazine with international writers of some standing. Paul Foss, the second editor, and a scholar and published translator of French theory brought a European perspective to the magazine. This all coincided with the increased engagement with French theory by the arts in the early 1980s.

It was a vibrant publication that was the product of a great mix of personality, location and relevance to the rising tides of the era. Clearly that time has passed.

We face now a dumbing down of culture in our daily media, so much so that investigative journalists requested a government grant system during Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit because the newspapers would not support serious research. And despite the worrying rise of nationalism in all corners of the world there seems to be amnesia when it comes to our own contemporary histories (1970s onwards). While people of my generation remember what happened, and studied it, I wonder what the generation of artists coming through now really know about Australian art in the 1970s and 1980s. This is where the occasional historical and critical essay in a magazine can be a great connector.

This magazine publishes the long essay, which few other magazines do. Indeed, the recent tendency for international biennales to produce a ‘reader’, such as Istanbul, and the edited essays that are produced by Whitechapel Gallery, suggests that there is a broad need for the critical essay. Academics often write for refereed journals, and these publications are years in the making. In the long essay we can hear from our leading thinkers almost as they write.

Perhaps one of the key challenges for all of us is the level of unpaid support that artists, editors, writers and designers all provide government funded publications. $AUD500 for a 3500 word text is more like an honorarium. In the USA and in some Australian publications, a writer is paid $1 a word. Anything less really does limit the available pool of writers—they either have to rely on independent resources, they are already employed in a full time capacity or they are doing the magazine a ‘favour’. How then, can you hope to encourage a lively critical debate in Australia? Great criticism has to be supported by professional rates.

IAN NORTH The ideal magazine—the Platonic sphere of perfect forms, it seems, does not exist—nor, then, can the perfect publication, which by definition would satisfy all markets, all demographics. Magazines come out of specific contexts and arise from particular needs. Like art itself, the house of publishing contains many mansions.

These may be converging along with a globalising planet, but there is still a long way to go before ultimate blending: if the world is an eco-system then many a micro-climate and environment persist, and with them much variation. I would

not like to see any current Australian magazines fail unless pushed aside by more vigorous, conspicuously superior newcomers. However dodgy some of them are in terms of quality control, they are part of the humus which grows our culture.

Besides, they have value to their followers and sometimes beyond—witness some of the essays commissioned by Art Monthly Australia over the years—in a country where we in the arts still have to do too much for too little, and which the arts fail to get a fair run in our mass media. Even so, the best art magazines, in the sense of providing nourishment for life, could be a mix of something like the London Review of Books, with a side dish of New Scientist or the like, and maybe the Quarterly Essay. I am not being entirely facetious. Indeed, even these august publications sometimes seem overly influenced by passing fads or the political parade, so what price the art magazine in the longevity stakes? As someone asked, if you were given only three months more to live, which would you prefer to spend your time reading: Jane Austen or Artforum?

As James Elkins has pointed out, never has so much art criticism been published in a variety of forms and venues, but never has it been so little read.

Certainly reviews in the average newspaper or art magazine, not to mention catalogue essays puffing up exhibitions to promote sales and reputations, are not usually studied with close attention by anyone except those immediately involved, and are generally ignored by art historians. Again as Elkins suggests, we would have more respect for such efforts if they more frequently manifested ambitious judgements, based on a solid platform of historical and intellectual understanding; if they self-reflexively assessed the nature of the judgements passed; if, in short, they were informed, structured and insightful enough to aspire to the condition of art history. They might thereby escape ending up in the circular file, the dustbin, indeed, of history. Peter Schjeldahl’s work in The New Yorker comes to mind: his writing is far more engaging than the routine turgidities of the more specialised art press, and registers the thrill of engaging with specific works of art.

Such observations draw attention to two very basic problems with art magazines that are so obdurately familiar they are hidden in plain sight. First, specialist art magazines tend towards extreme tedium. Ask the ordinary art person, a student, say, or art school graduate if they read art magazines, and the common response is, “I flick through the pictures” (of Frieze or whatever) with a sting implied: “Magazines are not worth my time to read.” The very emphasis on the visuals highlights a second problem, one as old as art magazines themselves—reproductions are simply no substitute for the being there, for seeing or experiencing actual works of art. You just cannot trust the colour of paintings in reproduction even in the best of magazines, nor the cropping or selection of an installation or performance still, nor, usually, can you gain an accurate sense of physical presence and scale (a lot of magazines do not bother to include measurements with their captions). Some, like this magazine do not run to colour, giving them a conceptual-type seriousness in aspect, whether deserved or not.

Parkett used to take reproduction seriously in its own precious way (and no doubt still does), as did L’Oeil much from its inception in 1955 (the reproduction issue was taken more seriously in the 1950s than now. Both of these publications persist, by the way). Can writing compensate for the inherent shortcomings in the printing process? It can’t, of course. Still, it might be worth noting that colour via pixels seems more believable than per the printing press, with the virtual world also offers the moving image—good for video, exhibition walk-throughs and surveying sculptures and installations.

But, not to dodge the ‘ideal’ question entirely: what do we (artists, art historians, aficionados) want from a magazine? In two words, stimulation and information. From art itself. Then from artists, in their own statements and suitably non-hagiographic interviews. (I confess, as if to a guilty pleasure, to enjoying the now defunct Art World, with its well-chosen selectees, succinct interviews and its emphasis on Australia and New Zealand within a world context). Then also from contextual essays written by specialists for non-specialists dealing with particular issues which might bear on our understanding of art (we can hardly expect them to help us make art, but who knows?). I would want to make a special pitch for analytic philosophy and bioaesthetics, areas still scarcely noticed by art historians and cultural commentators, to their considerable loss and detriment, but that is another story.

Then there is the rather large and pertinent question of how much the local can influence wider contexts, and vice versa—and to what degree all situations are local. I recall Wystan Curnow hilariously recounting in a Biennale of Sydney lecture many years ago how he rang Artforum to spruik a possible piece on Colin McCahon, only to be abruptly informed that they were not interested in New Zealand. Silly Artforum, knocking back an artist whose works knocks the socks off the likes of Mark Rothko or Francis Bacon (to give as examples contemporaries from both branches of Euro-American hegemony). But these things are rarely straightforward. Magazines do tend to have quasi-local constituencies. For this reason Broadsheet might want to consider opening up to more Australian artists.

One instinctively applauds its emphasis on the region, generously conceived to include Asia tout court and the Middle East. It is refreshing, too, to register this magazine’s fine contempt for the Euro-American zone of influence. It is rare among art journals in exuding a ‘read me’ imperative, and in evincing an edgy relevance to vital cultural concerns.

There has been a marked, misguided tendency for years to equate art with content=politics=ethics and it is fair to say that Broadsheet has not been immune to this. Wider, deeper, philosophically rigorous considerations of beauty, for example, so readily caricatured as ultra-conservative by non-philosopher commentators, could moderate this tendency to cover the more overtly politically pretentious biennale-type events, ambulance-chasing the inevitable disasters and catastrophes occurring in these overblown concatenations of activity. Of course, it is good to be global, without, one hopes, generating new loci of cultural cringe, though there is ample evidence of that happening also: a burka’d bomb-thrower is certainly sexier to some critics, or academics trying to prove their international connections and gain an Australian Research Council grant than is a mere local.

Postcolonial=politically-correct, all too easily, and work reflecting this nexus, is readily assimilated by roving international curators and ravenous international markets. Indeed, the whole area of the postcolonial has long since become academic in two senses, providing material for university courses and allowing artists countless thousands of cheap art shots. But my jeremiads are not intended in any way to deny the cognitive—just to provoke an opening up, a fluidity.

More of a hunch than a program, therefore difficult to talk about.

I have barely mentioned that ever-present elephant, the market place, because it has been exhaustively discussed elsewhere. The market has certainly made monkeys out of the idealistic, in the short term, at least, and the Global Financial Crisis probably has occasioned only its temporary taming. But artists striving for some sort of authenticity, and art historians, may again have their day, and with any luck will not be entirely suborned: may magazines march alongside them.

JACQUELINE MILLNER At its best, art criticism is a form of critical inquiry, where the writer uses the art object to think with. It is moreover embodied thinking, where the instinct to rigorously scrutinise and test the work’s logic, to compare it to precedents and evaluate the depth and range of its ideas, wrestles with the desire to give oneself over to the work, to enjoy it—sensually, spiritually, emotionally. This interplay is capable of blazing trails of thought and feeling, of sparking narratives that not only open up the work to the reader, but also enrich the perspective of the critic.

Conceived in this way, art criticism resonates with the aesthetic experience more generally—that moment when cognition and powerful affect combine to ‘strike’ the viewer—and remains a vigorous and valuable discourse.

In one sense, the words of the art writer will always fail the artwork —American visual studies scholar James Elkins provocatively titled one of his books about art criticism On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998). Fail, because words can only ever re-present the full visual experience after the fact; fail, because all too often the affective aspects of that experience are lost through over-reliance on analytical and ‘objective’ language (or alternatively, swamped in the overweening language of strident opinion). In another sense, however, words will always triumph, because how we see a work of art is very much determined by what we have read. As David Carrier points out in his book Writing About Visual Art (2003), “art critics and historians verbalise responses to visual works of art, structuring our thinking in ways very hard if not impossible to escape”. He goes further: “Perhaps there is no way that art is, apart from how it is represented in art writing... we know art directly, but writing imposes ways of thinking about these visual artifacts. Visual thinking is verbally structured by the rhetoric of art writing.”2 Carrier is referring to art writing in general that includes not only more contemporaneous art criticism—the staple of art magazines—but also art history and art theory with their greater retrospective range, and, of course, the type of art writing with clear pedagogic intent that we encounter in the art gallery and the museum. Even the responses of those viewers who purposefully consult neither catalogue essays nor wall texts, so as to safeguard a more ‘authentic’ or ‘direct’ experience, are nonetheless structured by writing about art: the criticism, history and theory that constitute the very discourse of art and underpin the institution(s) of art, where debates about value and meaning take place.

If we accept Carrier’s argument—and it is difficult to seriously dispute it—then clearly the art writer bears a heavy responsibility in terms of how the artwork is perceived and understood. Arguably, in the age of the internet, given the proliferation of artist and gallery sites where catalogues and reviews have a much larger readership than previously and are often the first port of call for researchers and students, this responsibility weighs more heavily still. In using the work as a point of departure for broader thinking, the art writer must take care to respect the work’s integrity, acknowledging its resistance to interpretation as much as honouring the creative investment of the artist within it.

Art writing finds its special resonance in that space between speculation and the real life material object with its own specific social context. In this space, rigorous scholarly analysis, philosophical and political reflection, rhetorical argument, and creative narrative co-exist. This renders art writers philosophical bricoleurs, who must at times even construct the very normative frameworks for writing about art from the ground up. While this may appear like a charge of

dilettantism, rather it demonstrates the genuine interdisciplinary adeptness of art writing, whose interpretative speculation and scholarship are nonetheless ultimately grounded by the art object. This openness to discourse has drawn art writers from a range of disciplines: from the ranks of novelists, like Siri Hustvedt, who describes the perception of an artwork as a “visual adventure in an imaginary space”; from the field of analytical philosophy, like Arthur C. Danto and Carrier himself, to whom “art criticism is a mixture of observation and fantasy”; and from amongst artists.

Since the term “art writing” takes in criticism and history—different genres with distinct functions and traditions—it could fall prey to eliding the differences between them. Yet the term usefully reminds us of their mutual indebtedness. That art criticism relies on the frameworks of art history is rarely disputed, but that art history often develops and grows from the frontline insights of art criticism is perhaps less widely acknowledged. Criticism can be a form of research; over a period of time it can offer valuable clues to the historian, for instance, and provide a rich resource for students, historians, curators and of course, artists.

To think with the works at hand and open them up for expansive speculation and the conceiving of alternative visions; to understand the works through the writing process and have others join in the debate; to move, to delight, to instruct; to encourage broader, more critical but also more sensually attuned thinking, and have it carry over into other aspects of life: these are the objectives that inform art writing at its best.

It is this sort of writing that I would like to read, and at times encounter, in arts magazines. Criticality is not about “complaint”; rather it is about rigorous and informed engagement. It is enhanced by vigorous interdisciplinary debate, whereby the discourses of art history, theory and criticism are refreshed by the perspectives of practitioners of visual culture, as well as ideas from fields as disparate as literature, urban studies, the natural sciences and political history.

Art magazines should nurture such interdisciplinarity. One way is to feature a wide range of art writing genres, from more academic, historical approaches, for instance, to more writerly, poetic responses, from empirical studies to interviews.

Another way is to solicit the views of writers outside the established field of art criticism, as well as increasing the profile of writers beyond our national boundaries and the loyal stable. Such interdisciplinary dialogue can also be facilitated by a thematic, rather than event-based focus, and benefit from a publication having a robust online presence with reader response functionality. In such interdisciplinary dialogue, perhaps, lies a strategy to protect art magazines from some common pitfalls, such as preaching to the converted, or mistaking ‘the art world’ for the complexity of the lived experience of art for makers and audience alike.

For it behoves the critical art magazine to take issue with the suggestion that the production and reception of art is ruled exclusively by Mammon, that money is the ultimate arbiter of art. Such a suggestion misrepresents how art functions in the world, diminishing the countless personal aesthetic experiences that draw artists and writers, as much as the general public, into the domain of art in the first place.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: It’s clear that most established arts magazines and journals dedicate more space to advertising than to discussion. In Australia—well written, non-academic, critical, engaged, historically informed texts of a decent length that are able to address the context of a work’s production and have a respect for art history —these are scarce on the ground. Five hundred word reviews are useless and for the most part they’re tags—“I was here, I was there”, etc. Negative arts criticism (what used to be known as “critique”) is also noticeably absent, with many authors either taking an affirmative position, or siding with a ‘critical artist’ in order to adopt a critical stance by proxy. Who benefits from the publication of such material? Gallerists, dealers, collectors? The artist? Their buyers? The curators? Sometimes I wonder if art criticism as a whole can (or should) be ‘saved’.

Perhaps its repurposing is final, and we should see this as a catalyst for change.

Several years ago, Rex Butler wrote about art criticism’s capacity to create things, to take the work of art “beyond its own understanding of itself”.

This is true, but it does not mean that art remains silent without interlocutors and it does not mean that artists are incapable of speaking for themselves. In Australia, publications such as SPEECH, un magazine and the earlier Artfan, actively turn to formats such as artists’ submissions, text-based art, panel discussions and interviews to try and get away from art criticism and to present texts and images with a future. By which I mean texts as tools for research and thinking rather than headstones for past events. This is particularly important given that the majority of contemporary arts publications still take their cue from gallery-based exhibitions, an annoying trend for writers who often want to focus on connections between ideas rather than on ‘an exhibition’ or ‘an artist’s practice’. Arts writing is, after all, very badly paid. To get the most out of it, writers need to be able to have the freedom to at least practice their craft—to indulge in the ‘writerly’, and to maintain control over content.

2 3 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 I am also constantly aware of the expectation (from artists, readers, the public and editors) that Australian arts publications should have a primary responsibility towards covering contemporary Australian art and artists. To back the home team, to spread the word, to document the scene, it’s because of these expectations that arts critics appear again and again as boorish bouncers at an overrated nightclub.

At my most cynical, I picture the critic in the guise of a large, neon, flashing arrow, silently pointing in the direction of something, somewhere, deemed to be worthwhile. It’s a depressing vision, but I do take solace from the ongoing efforts of independent publications, online journals, blogs and zines that attempt to counter cultures of exclusivity.

There is a dire need for texts capable of supporting a breadth of focus and depth often denied by more commercially driven publications. In Australia specifically, there is also a major lack of arts journals that focus equally on local and international arts practice. Why is it (surprisingly) difficult to publish a feature on an artist that’s not from Australia in a major Australian art journal if you’re an Australian writer? There’s still a weirdly monocular perspective that lumps all Australian art together rather than presenting it as part of a much broader context of production and reception. We could also do with a few more publications that don’t read like padded out what’s on guides, and that are interested in presenting content that may not necessarily be classed as ‘topical’. Cabinet, Artforum and Frieze have all encouraged this kind of writing, and that’s why they’re all still worth reading. This is also one of the major reasons why I founded emaj (electronic melbourne art journal): to try and make a non-partisan space for thinking about arts practice in Australia and internationally. There are always alternatives to the status quo, they just need to presented as viable.

BLAIR FRENCH Edge to edge, floor to ceiling, the wall behind my desk is fully lined with haphazardly sloping bookshelves packed in the top half with file boxes labeled to pronounce the equally happenstance if comprehensive publication acquisitions that trace a quarter century plus in the life of a contemporary art space and its employees: Agenda, Antic, Art Network, Art+Text, Art World, Like (Art), Midwest, Monica, On the Beach, Postwest, Praxis, Tension, Visual Arts+Culture, World Art. (And somewhere there is also a printout of key texts from Globe-E—someone really should have published a Globe-E anthology by now.) Every day I am faced with the labels of the ‘lost’ magazines when I walk through the door, taking their place on shelves above those holding the current magazines, both the old-stagers and the new kids, the widely accepted ‘journals of record’, Art & Australia and Art New Zealand, the commercial industry magazine Art Collector, the key, familiar, long-serving Art Monthly, Artlink, Broadsheet, Eyeline and Photofile and the new and to an extent artist-run and/or instigated and/or focused Runway from Sydney and un magazine from Melbourne. (Of course, also represented are the standard international titles through which we sate some element of our desire to be part of something more, elsewhere, still, but they are not my concern here.) To be blunt, even in our desire to reevaluate and ‘do better’ we should not lose sight of our rich, complex if desperately uneven history of art magazine publishing, even when it threatens to avalanche down upon us.

This long list of titles (itself of course incomplete even as a survey of art magazines in Australia and New Zealand) serves to remind us of some basic and commonplace conditions of art magazine publishing here. The act of art magazine publishing is a precarious one. It is commercially unsustainable without public (or private) subsidy, or total embrace of a ‘trade-rag’ identity (and none of these things provide more than the fleeting illusion of stability). Magazines cannot help but live with the very present spectre of their demise, and so in this business hope and expectation all too often gives way quickly (and understandably) to an overriding pragmatism. We might observe also that the longevity or otherwise of individual titles does not necessarily correlate to editorial clarity and insight, quality of writing or urgency of any critical engagement with the key forms and issues driving art practice. And whilst not a very accurate indicator of the health of the sector, we might note—we should note—that given our relatively small population base (and so market) we continue to produce a great volume of art writing in magazine form. Quantity is not the problem.

Consider that first list again. Each of these titles had their moment.

Some of these moments were too brief, their covers shut permanently thanks perhaps to blank bank accounts; or due to their initially unforeseen isolation from (shunning by) the comfortable climate of cultural consensus that passed as their immediate intellectual environment (as well as their subject matter, and/or their public funding source); or due to changes in the institutional bodies and structures that produced them whether as commitment to intellectual inquiry and engagement or as cultural cache, ‘proof’ of intellectual relevance or gravitas; or due to disillusionment in the face of broad disinterest; or perhaps due simply to premature but advanced and utter exhaustion. Some flared then lost their way or ran out of ideas or continued pursing those ideas as the world about them refocused elsewhere. Others revealed themselves as having always been ultimately devoid of new or interesting ideas in the first place, or as having just simply been ill conceived or poorly managed. And of course some had moments that stretched

into periods, then stretched again across multiple periods developing the ability to absorb, adapt to and reflect back the ascendant practices and rhetoric of the day.

We admire tenacity. We relish a good tale of survival against the odds. And we are too happy to accept a comfortable mediocrity if it presents itself as sustainable.

Yet despite this last point in particular, we so often eulogise Art+Text and do so for all the reasons that made it an exception. It is the one example we can point to locally of a magazine that flared briefly, and then flared again, and then again.

Its relative longevity was based in an intellectual nimbleness and partisanship, not a passive, all-embracing inclusivity. It found a way for rigor and relevance to collude with the manufacturing of industry profile. It was argumentative and propositional in an editorial agenda whilst keeping close to current practice (mostly, although not always in a provocative rather than reflective manner).

It constantly repositioned itself in anticipation of shifts in cultural trajectories rather than in response. And in doing all this it convinced us—relentlessly—of its own importance. We eulogise it also because nothing has formed to fill the space left by its departure—a regular lament heard around Sydney in particular and a scenario that amplifies a tendency to accept what we’ve got in terms of publishing (as is the case in other cultural spheres) as the alternative could well be... well... nothing.

Does this mean we need to see a new Art+Text? No, of course not—we eulogise it also because hand on heart we knew its time had come, certainly on these shores, and with this comes an unspoken relief that it did not settle for a comfortable middle age on government subsidy. (The danger of my veering into naïve romanticism here is acknowledged.) We do, however need something new that draws upon a similarly unabashed self-confidence, intelligence and unswerving commitment to a position, to an idea. Properly supported the right new initiative could go some way to galvanising and providing a concentrated public platform for the critical energies that buzz about certain areas of practice at the moment, even as a means to undertake some rudimentary sifting, focusing and articulation of these energies. And within such an initiative, whatever philosophically astute and culturally confident positions it may adopt (so long as it does adopt and reveal such), maybe we could finally see less space given over to polite exhibition review, less of a sense of the publication being led by the schedules and interests of the art industry, less fascination with the subject(ivity) of the artist and see, quite simply, more informed grappling with art by text. (Forgive me—those two words again.)

In a more abstract sense, and despite my own general valuing of cultural continuity and memory, I do think we’ve reached a point where the art magazine scene needs to be shaken up a bit. In the publicly subsidised sector at least we need to concentrate limited publishing resources rather than continue to spread them widely and thinly. Polite even-handedness can be stultifying. We need to value both the immediate and historical impact of smart, committed, compulsively driven but short-term editorial agendas. We often tend to value particular magazines for the work they did within quite limited periods of time—periods of intense relationships to key practices and emergent cultural concerns and so periods of their great influence. These are periods also of their simultaneous writing and making history. Accept that an editorial vision or even a publication will likely have a limited period of time in which it is most effective both in the moment and as future cultural history. Embrace and support and value that. Then ensure there is capacity to assist something else coming to light in its wake, something newly provocative and timely that has the capacity to re-energise us all over again.

We over-emphasise ‘the new’ and ‘the emerging’ within art practice itself, often at the expense of practices just reaching a point of maturity with newly formed capacity to really kick the culture along in interesting ways. With art magazines (some might say with publicly subsidised infrastructure in general) it’s the exact opposite. (How did we find ourselves holding onto two wrong ends of the pole at once?) For the moment at least, concentrating on magazines and thinking in that context about both money and writing, I’ll end my contribution/complaint by asking, isn’t it time to cease being satisfied with merely oiling creaky joints?

Isn’t it time to view not just art but art writing and art publishing also as “ongoing dialectic processes in need of constant renewal”?

Notes 1 Alana Kushner, ‘The Art World’, unpublished paper, University of Melbourne, 2006 2

David Carrier, Writing About Visual Art (Aesthetics Today) New York: Allworth Press, 2003: 12-14

3

An acronym for Seni Tanpa Prejudis (“art without prejudice”). Sentap in Malay means to lift or bring out, especially with a jerk

Page 20: Li Mu, Blued Books, 2008-09 Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photos courtesy the artist

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before and after science interview: charlotte day and sarah tutton

This issue of Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet focuses primarily on the visual art presentations of the 2010 Adelaide Festival—the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before & After Science; Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together, issues discussed by visiting international and domestic critics, commentators and artists at Artists Week: Art in the Global Present; plus recent developments arising from events such as the 11th Istanbul Biennial and the forthcoming Auckland Triennial. Inspired by the concepts of alchemy and transformation the 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before & After Science, is curated by Sarah Tutton and Charlotte Day. Art Gallery of South Australia, 27 February–2 May, 2010.

AMELIA DOUGLAS AMELIA DOUGLAS: In planning for the 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, you have delved into ideas of shamanism and mysticism, psychedelia and transmutations, pulling together a constellation of artists and practices whose works intersect with and promote what we might call a zone of “not knowing”. There is a focus here on the seemingly libratory promise generated by extreme uncertainty: upon the not-known or to-be-known as arenas of profound philosophical potential.

Firstly, do you have any thoughts as to possible reasons behind this increased attention to doubt, or to paraphrase the title of one of the Sandra Selig works in the exhibition, “universal uncertainty”, within Australian contemporary art recent years? And, secondly, do you think this uncertainty more frequently mirrors ‘an uncertain world’ (if you’ll forgive the clichéd expression) or provides some antidote to what might be perceived as an ever-increasing rationalisation and standardisation of cultural systems and mechanisms?

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: Our approach to curating this exhibition was intuitive which is perhaps less popular in our particularly risk adverse climate.

We basically threw out our road map and endeavored to lose ourselves. We wanted to be responsive to what we saw around us rather than prescribe certain themes or seek out practices to illustrate a particular concept. We were most struck by the ways in which artists are drawn to and inspired by the tension between what is known and unknown and when we finally came up for air we found ourselves surrounded in equal measure by doubt and uncertainty and hope and faith and it is at this intersection that Before & After Science emerged. Our feeling is that the measure of uncertainty in the world has led to rigid and dogmatic responses to things, perhaps its human nature to want to hold on fast to something. This is not a particularly Australian condition. In fact much of the work in Before & After Science is more universal in its observation. What we hope to achieve is to advocate for the speculative nature of art practice, its faculty for drawing out our powers of perception and utilising imaginary realms to inform our understanding of things. Researching the exhibition we came across a passage by the Melbourne philosopher John Carroll that resonated strongly for us: “living with uncertainty has become our permanent condition. For us, sure answers belong to once upon a time, to a lost past. At best, what we know flickers obscurely, like fairy lights glimpsed haphazardly through a dense mist. Anything deep is enigma”.1 We agree with Carroll that this can be “a fertile and exciting place to be”2 and Before & After Science makes a strong case for this sentiment.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: Before and After Science is the title of Brian Eno’s 1977 studio album, produced on the cusp of his progression into ambient electronics in the late 1970s. When did you first hear this album? Does the spectre of Brian Eno ghost this exhibition as a whole? The 1970s seems to figure as a watermark for many of the artists in this exhibition: a moment where the high tide mark of 1960s utopianism was visible yet out of reach; a decade since associated with the implosion of grand narratives initiated in the 1950s. But in your treatment, the 1970s finds almost equal par with the 1870s—perhaps revealing a fidelity to a model of temporality in which discreet markers of ‘before’ and ‘after’ merge and overlap. Do you think this is the same kind of ‘before’ and ‘after’ that was familiar to Eno? CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: First up, we should dispel any notion that either of us are die-hard Eno fans or experts. While we do admire Eno, especially the way he envisaged new public contexts for art and music without specific narrative end we were drawn to the title more for what we felt it described about the

exhibition than to the album itself. There are many spectres that, as you say, ghost this exhibition, from William Burroughs to Joseph Beuys to Buckminster Fuller. We were very much drawn to the idea of ‘getting lost’ in the work of artists we have been influenced by, especially those whose thinking was lateral or off beat in some way but have been shown over time to be remarkable visionaries.

The ‘before’ and ‘after’ is about a way of thinking that isn’t linear or necessarily progressive in a modern sense, nor categorical. Hany Armanious’ practice with the way he blends up such a wide range of historical and cultural references and connections is important to the exhibition in this regard. This is an approach that we have extended in the catalogue through asking writers from a range of backgrounds, poets, songwriters, cinema academics, philosophers, to respond to the works of particular artists. We wanted to throw open the approach to writing about art, take it out of a specific art historical framework, and into other realms of possibility.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: Science fiction plays a big part in this show, but not quite in the way that the genre is perhaps normally understood. Your catalogue essay includes references to William Burroughs, Ursula Le Guin and Jorge Luis Borges. These are all writers who implicitly understood the dialectical relationship between fiction and reality; how fiction can be used to construct reality and vice-versa. What is it about sci-fi that interests you?

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: We kept coming back to science fiction, in ways and routes that were often unexpected. Science fiction has often been used as a vehicle to explore political or social realities, Margaret Atwood’s recent Year of the Flood (2009) being a good example, and in the context of such rapid technological change and political uncertainty, it is more pertinent now than ever. There is a speculative quality in sci-fi that echoes with many of the works in the exhibition, as well as a tendency towards utopian and dystopian narratives, a means of imaging the future.

Nicholas Mangan’s Nauru Project and James Morrison’s futuristic diorama are two works that come to mind. Channeling Chris Marker, Nicholas Mangan has created a collage of moving images that juxtapose natural beauty with destruction and waste.

The landscape of Nauru, mined of phosphate, appears as a luna-scape, frighteningly devoid of life. James’ intricate papier-maché man, devil and birds suggests other evolutionary paths and connectivity between the human and natural worlds.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: 2009 was the dual bicentennial anniversary of Charles Darwin, and exhibitions and events like SuperHuman: Revolution of the Species and Reframing Darwin (in Melbourne), have generated increased attention to both the history of science, and the re-writing of scientific doctrines, in recent months.

Science as a discipline is all too often reductively associated with dogmas of ‘linearity’ and ‘certainty’. But in actuality, scientists are often great explorers of imaginary worlds and who value above all else the fragility of conclusions. Would this view be shared by many of the artists you’ve been working with or not?

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: As much as we want to keep the concept of art as open as possible we are also keenly aware to avoid a reductive view of science.

Good science is always creative, and as you say, wary of finalities and conclusions.

Scientists like artists need to see our world from an imaginary standpoint outside of itself. There is an often-quoted line by Levi Strauss “Art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought. It is common knowledge that the artist is both something of a scientist and of a bricoleur.”3 This idea of

2 7 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 the artist at the crossroads between science and magic is one of the subtexts of the exhibition. Simon Yates’ robot of Sir Isaac Newton, Anti Gravity (2010), which will roam the gallery, draws this connection vividly. Newton, a scientist and an alchemist who changed the way we think about our universe, is a poster boy for the ideas that we are delving into. Similarly, Matthew Bradley’s The Aesthetics of Amateur Astro Imaging (2010) brings into relief this connection between science, art and creativity, and the eternal exploration of the unknown.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art is the oldest, most established national biennial in Australia and it is the only one with an exclusive focus on Australian art. There is a big expectation that the ABAA will provide a critical ‘survey’ of recent Australian practice by established and emerging artists working right across the nation. How does Before & After Science depart from or reaffirm some of the curatorial imperatives embedded in the history of the ABAA? How does this exhibition compare, in terms of thematics, design and curatorial focus, to the 2008 Biennial: Handle with Care curated by Felicity Fenner, or Linda Michael’s 2006 Biennial: Twenty-First Century Modern, for example?

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: There is still the expectation that the ABAA is a snapshot of art in the current moment, but we haven’t approached it as a survey of the range of what artists are making today—really that would be an impossible task given the scale of the exhibition, and not one that particularly interests us. Certainly too, the context for the Biennial is not the same as when it was first established, when there were not many other opportunities for contemporary Australian artists in major Australian institutions. The programs of the Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne) to only mention a few have changed the public exhibition landscape. We envisage our exhibition in dialogue with the previous Biennials and also other major exhibitions that showcase the work of contemporary Australian artists. Felicity Fenner and Linda Michael’s exhibitions reflected two distinct curatorial premises both with a strong thread running through the exhibitions that related thematically. An important aspect of Fenner’s Biennial was her focus on Australian artists of various backgrounds/descent and concentration on artists who had not exhibited in any previous Biennial, as well as the emphatic environmental theme that ran through the works. Michael’s focused on an Australian inflection on modernism and was particularly timely.

Our curatorial grip is not so tight as these previous two exhibitions, in the sense that our Biennial is more eclectic in its nature. The connections between artists and works vary. Some are formal or material, other via a shared sensibility, interest or particular approach. We want to keep the reception of the works as open as possible, to avoid determining what the works are about, but creating a speculative energy around them—in this sense we are asking our audience to come to the works in a more open way too. We hope our catalogue offers an inroad into this way of thinking. Also the special edition of Art & Australia as well as our involvement in a day of the Artists Week program with a Keynote lecture by the intrepid philosopher/archeologist Michael Taussig, extrapolates our approach developed in the exhibition.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: Have many of the works have been developed specifically for the Biennial?

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: More than half of the artists have created new work specifically for the Biennial, the remaining works have been created in the last twenty-four months, with a handful having been exhibited previously in a different configuration. In a number of instances the artists are working in a new medium or area of interest. We’re excited to be presenting a number of new collaborations between artists—a large scale painting by twelve women from the remote community of Punmu working under the auspices of Martumili Artists, Sandra Selig and Leighton Craig, and David Noonan and the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, who have interpreted one of David’s works as a tapestry. Other artists such as Christian Thompson, as well as Sandra Selig, have taken the opportunity to take their work in new directions, in both cases working with sound.

‘The Edge of Reason’, with Keynote speaker Michael Taussig presenting his paper ‘When the Sun Goes Down: A Copernican Turn of Rembrance’. His recent book What Color is the Sacred? (2009) was influential on our thinking about the exhibition as a whole. Following this, curator Hetti Perkins will be in conversation with the Martumili women, and South Australian artist/educator John Barbour will chair a panel discussion ‘Irrational Solutions’ with writers Lisa Gorton and Justin Clemens and New Zealand artist Julian Hooper, who is participating in Adelaide International 2010. Art & Australia will feature a meditation on Benjamin Armstrong’s work by author Alexis Wright, and an essay by New York based artist Rob McKenzie.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: Your curatorial directives seem at times to be very broad.

There are so many artists working in Australia at the moment whose works might pique your self-confessed interest in the transformation of the “humble into the precious, old into new, mundane into mysterious” or whose practices engage with “mystery” or “alternate states of consciousness”.4 How did you narrow down the field? What restrictions or frameworks did you set in place? This is a question about methodology.

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: What we relied upon heavily was debate between ourselves. The beauty of working collaboratively is that we have had to justify each decision to each other. As you say there are many artists not included in this Biennial that equally explore the themes and practices we have focused upon, but our selection has been based on creating an exhibition as a whole, with synergies and ruptures between particular works. There are a number of artists that do not immediately appear to sit neatly within our framework, but on closer reading, and in connection with other artists, a new way of looking at their work can be revealed.

AMELIA DOUGLAS: conVerge, the 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art also engaged with ideas of science, didacticism and truth. Andrew Best, in his 2002 review of the Biennial, wrote “while still having undeniably dominant economic and rational muscle, science can no longer be seen as the top of a hierarchy of ways in which to perceive reality?”5 Are you making a similar argument?

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: The obvious connection with conVerge is that both Biennials use science as a point of comparison, to develop paths of inquiry.

The focus of conVerge was more specifically about connecting art and science, on new technologies with most of the artists collaborating or working closely with scientists. Whereas conVerge was an exploration of new media practice at a high point in its development, our Biennial is definitely more low tech, and probably more about haptic experiences than virtual realities. If recent world events are any indication, it appears that many of the most pressing global issues to do with economics and the environment are argued on a platform of belief rather than scientific opinion. Perhaps this is the result of a loss of confidence in objectivity, but seems to be motivated by other things too—consuming self-interest and also a deep-seated conservatism. We’d argue therefore that science has lost some of its political muscle but hasn’t been replaced by a more complex understanding of reality. Before & After Science is about the true value of the speculative —knowledge acquired through imaginative inquiry. What we hope to encourage and show through the way contemporary artists work, is a more lateral and holistic way of thinking that draws on intuition and fact, both analytical and emotional understandings of things, and connects the present with the past through reflection on historical continuities and ruptures. Given our evolutionary development, us humans are well placed to comprehend the complexity of the world and find creative solutions to current problems, if only we can alter our mind-set.

Notes 1 John Carroll, Ego and Soul, Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2008: 2

ibid:

3

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962

4

Email correspondence with Charlotte Day and Sarah Tutton, from their (draft catalogue essay), ‘Before and After Science’, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, January 2010

AMELIA DOUGLAS: What can we expect to see in terms of satellite events or associated programming outside of the Art Gallery of South Australia for this exhibition? How has the relationship between the Adelaide Festival, the Art Gallery of South Australia and ABBA impacted on the scope of such programming?

5 Andrew Best, ‘Zap! Bzzzt! Zap!, conVerge: 2002 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Broadsheet 31.2, 2002

CHARLOTTE DAY/SARAH TUTTON: As has happened in the past, a program of artists’ talks and performances will be held over the opening weekend, with artists from interstate and overseas talking about their work in situ. The twelve women from Martumili Artists in the eastern Pilbara and Christian Thompson, who is visiting from Amsterdam, will perform in the Art Gallery of South Australia forecourt on the first weekend of the Biennial. The Victorian Tapestry Workshop will present a lecture on their work with contemporary artists, focusing on their recent collaboration with David Noonan. We have also worked with Victoria Lynn, the curator of Adelaide International 2010 to develop Day 4 of Artists Week, titled

Page 24: Sandra Selig, Surface of Change (detail), 2007 Photo courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Opposite: Newall Harry, Reverse Missionary (Geist), 1996-2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Above: Posters by Hendrik-Jan Grievink, courtesy of Institute of Network Cultures, Netherlands

politics of internet culture interview: geert lovink

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Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist and internet critic, with a background in social movements and tactical media. In the 1990s he focused on the contribution of artists and designers in social movements through his concept of tactical media. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam School of Interactive Media (HvA), a research centre dedicated to the social dynamics, politics and aesthetics of new media and internet in particular. He also teaches at the new media program of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam and is professor in media theory at the European Graduate School. Lovink is co-founder of the Internet groups nettime and fibreculture, and author of the books Dark Fiber:Tracking Critical Internet Culture (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice) (2002), My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (2003), Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (2004) and Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (2007). His institute has recently organised conferences and related publications on urban screens, a critique of the creative industries, online video, network theory, the culture of search and Wikipedia research. His forthcoming book is on critical issues in Web 2.0. Geert Lovink will present his Keynote paper ‘Artistic Strategies Within Web 2.0: The Politics of Internet Culture’ at Artists Week. Adelaide International 2010 Curator Victoria Lynn interviewed Lovink in Amsterdam, October 2009, her visit to the Netherlands made possible by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

VICTORIA LYNN: You are currently completing a book on critical issues in Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0?

GEERT LOVINK: In technical terms it means a major upgrade in comparison to the first wave of applications and services dating back to the mid-1990s. There are three distinguishing features: it is easy to use; it facilitates a social element such as linking to each other; and users can upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text. Web 2.0 is a hype term, agreed. But what it makes unique is the royal space it gives to the user, and that’s not always the case in media history. Web 2.0 could very well be the ‘brief summer of the user’.

VICTORIA LYNN: What for you are the critical issues in Web 2.0?

GEERT LOVINK: The ideology of ‘participatory culture’ is a pressing issue.

We know that of the whole potential, only ten percent of people make active use of it, and of that ten percent only ten percent have a dominant voice. Therefore, to make democratic claims is weird. It’s post-representational. Another issue is the hidden, and not so hidden power relationships between people: how can the user—according to the theory—participate in a decentralised and quasidemocratic structure? We know the claims that the techno-evangelists make, but what is the reality? What are the actual power games that are happening there?

What are the commercial interests? What’s the role of the State and the new forms of censorship that are happening? What are the new enclosures, the new “walled gardens” as they are called? If everyone is your ‘friend’ how can there be a lively public debate? This ease of communication comes with the so-called ideology of trust. Trust is very important especially also for e-commerce, related to the whole rhetoric of safety and security. That implies and means guarding off a lot of these ‘open’ networks that are in fact the complete opposite of open networks.

They operate like enclosures. These information architectures are aimed at excluding outsiders. The participants themselves are trying very hard to manage themselves, in search of constant self-affirmation, trying to manage their busy lives. They have to wall themselves off against an overflow of information, files, impressions, invitations. You can also say that these tools design the ‘personal information autonomy’. That’s a positive way of looking at platforms most users get addicted to. They need to check the updates and check out what others are up to—simply because they can.

VICTORIA LYNN: Is it through these forms of addiction and production of desire that the virtual world of participatory cultures online starts to affect life in the real world?

GEERT LOVINK: I don’t think so. Web 2.0 is about the integration of the real and the virtual. They are no longer opposites. The goal is a synergy of the real existing social life with the annotated environment. This is done to abstract value from one’s intimate environment and personal relationships. It is not proven that it generates new social forms. We could also say that it initiates new social contexts in real life situations. The third body, consisting of a data cloud that surrounds us, is becoming real. However, unlike the cyber-prophets predicted it is not a virtual reality out there that we step into. The movement has gone in the opposite direction and collapsed into ever smaller devices. Social networking sites are honest about their purpose. They do not claim that you will meet new people.

For that you have special services like dating sites. The companies that own the

social networking sites know through research that, in order to be commercially viable, they have to parasite and exploit your existing social relationships.

Meet your old school friends; meet your friends and family that live overseas, make contact with people at work that you don’t see that often. These are all existing social relationships. What you need to do is to reconnect. They are not new and these social networking sites in fact thrive from the exploitation of these existing networks. No-one makes a secret out of that. This is the most affective way to set up a Web 2.0 venture.

VICTORIA LYNN: Do you think that the ideology of participatory culture is having an affect on our cities, architecture, or larger cultural context?

GEERT LOVINK: Web 2.0 further assists an acceleration of social life and social relationships. You can send and receive real-time updates about where you are and what you’re up to. In the past you would do that through telephone, letters, you would hear that through gossip, or you would meet people on the streets.

This is now all happening online. Most architects and urban planners have been remarkably slow in paying attention to these developments, let alone that these technologies alter their designs. Exceptions in the Netherlands would be projects like Martijn de Waal’s Mobile City and the work Ole Bouwman is doing at the Netherlands Architecture Institute.

VICTORIA LYNN: Who is watching us?

GEERT LOVINK: In terms of links between Google and Facebook with the CIA and NSA? That’s not very well known. Over the next five to ten years we are going to hear much more about that. People are still in the mode of exploring these social networking worlds and the powers those that control us or have an interest in knowing what we are doing in our social lives. We know that secret services are active on Facebook etc. and collect data in order to create social profiles of groups that they have identified as potential security threats. There are companies that harvest this information and resell it. Our social lives are becoming the main source of income. Revenues no longer come from advertisements. The French theorist and economist Yann Moulier Boutang has described this process really well by using the ‘bees that pollinate’ metaphor. I like it not so much because he compares us with insects but because of the analogy with the billions of clicks we make each day. It’s us who create the user profiles. We play a vital and active, creative role in this process. We’re not passive victims of some capitalist plot.

In the same way we need to rethink our attitude towards surveillance and control.

Without a critical understanding of the ‘pollination’ process we will merely repeat old school they-rule-us approaches.

VICTORIA LYNN: They are selling our data?

GEERT LOVINK: Very much so—our profiles are packed with personal preferences and fluctuating micro judgements of events, opinions and products. Michel Foucault’s phrase of us producing the power that rules over us, is becoming ever more true.

VICTORIA LYNN: With this production of so much information on ourselves in the form of the image, do you think we are in a situation now where we can say that everyone is an artist?

GEERT LOVINK: There is certainly an incentive to express oneself in a creative manner. There is an urge for an expression of the Self, and this is reproduced, time and again, in real-time, because there are all these new services that invite our instant input. It’s the minor fluctuations that make the difference these days.

Over the past few years, people created profiles and designed an overall image of the Self. The online subject has to constantly perform creatively and reinvent her or himself. You cannot be dull, boring or uninteresting. You cannot hate the system or behave like a renegade. It is just not an option. It doesn’t even exist and it would be interesting to ask why this is the case. Is it the tyranny of the positive? You are everybody’s friend. That’s the iron default. There is no ambiguity or antagonism. You can’t have enemies or people you don’t like. Or people that you like but had a falling out with. It’s hard enough to ‘unfriend’. All the things that happen in the social world out there do not find a representation in the online world. It is a self-promotional happy new age environment that wants to create the feeling that we all feel good, that there is nothing adverse happening with ourselves. These environments are event free. You can’t just say that something serious happened to you. It is the last thing that you would express there. So they are peer sites of the Self, or as Foucault called it, technologies of the Self, and what you do there is you create or do self-management. I like very much the work of the critic Eva Illouz, and her book Saving the Modern Soul, Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self-Help. She has done a lot of research on dating sites.

For instance, she writes about the tyranny of intimacy that you share with others online. Another book that I really like of hers is called Cold Intimacies, in which she writes explicitly about that type of self-representation that you find out there.

VICTORIA LYNN: It is not really a space in which you can have a critical perspective.

GEERT LOVINK: No, that is the big difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0. It is a world without controversy and discussion. People can organise themselves, yes, but mainly through a limited form of positive association. There are a few quite impressive tools out there for self-organisation. No doubt there is a lot of empowerment happening in some cases such as the possibilities that an artist now has when he or she makes a video and puts it up there and the incredible amount of people that can see it, in comparison to the video festivals or the galleries or very obscure places where work has previously been seen. The multiplications of audiences inside Web 2.0 is very real and websites like digiactive.org do interesting work in this respect. But there is no element of public discourse out there, and very consciously. This has been left out and this is the case for all the Web 2.0 applications. Do blogs have a discussion or a debate culture around them?

Yes, some do. Some blogs are absolutely great tools for commentary especially on daily news or current affairs. But then again that does not necessarily create a rich and diverse public discourse. If you already know what you want to achieve, and have the ability to create organisational “crystals” (as Elias Canetti calls them), then Web 2.0 is a perfect set of tools. But if you find yourself amongst a scene of busy youngsters and vague people that have a hard time to navigate the contradictory complexities of late postmodernism, then it’s most likely only to be a short-lived adventure.

VICTORIA LYNN: Online groups such as nettime, fibreculture, crumb, empyre and so on, are a product of Web 1.0?

GEERT LOVINK: Yes, and we can only guess that if there is ever going to be a Web 3.0 then elements from the Web 1.0 public debating culture might return.

What we can also see is that slowly the social networking functionality is now being taken out of these very large sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and turned into applications that people can own and run themselves and in that sense can create independence from the massive control that is happening on these concentrated websites. Could we have imagined a couple of years ago that there would be a Facebook with three hundred and fifty million users? That is an incredible number. They can potentially get in contact with each other but do not form a ‘public’. At best they are confined ‘publics’. On certain public forums it is possible to clash and have debates, but they are, significantly enough, not seen as part of Web 2.0.

VICTORIA LYNN: What is going to happen, can it be sustained?

GEERT LOVINK: You could say that the hyper growth of Web 2.0 is so titanic, it is bound to explode into a thousand pieces. That’s inevitable. People will get suspicious and bored with the claustrophobic atmosphere of this very American definition of all these nice ‘friends’ and what they do in their daily lives.

The definition of ‘social’ is so rigid.

VICTORIA LYNN: How do we archive all of this and is it necessary? There are so many images out there, so much documentation of lives.

GEERT LOVINK: Funnily enough, Web 2.0 is one of the least archived places.

Harvesting Twitter is one of the main challenges for Google at the moment.

The controversy over Facebook settings is all about this. Can these social activities become indexible and become visible on the open internet? Web 1.0 was, and still is, much better archived. That has got to do with the centralised activities and initiatives that we know right now, such as archive.org, the Library of Congress, a few European libraries, the National Library in Canberra and so on. But these initiatives are simply too small for the large players like Google or Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and so on. They don’t allow these smaller archives to harvest them. Today’s large sites are archives in themselves. It is unknown if these gigantic commercial entities have any interest in long-term archiving, even with all the good intentions they have towards existing archives. Maybe they do not have the capacity to store it all. Just think of blogger.com and the millions of blogs that have disappeared. Blogger deletes them automatically when they are no longer used. A site like this is a very static entity in comparison to the current real-time trend.

VICTORIA LYNN: It challenges the whole notion that you can archive contemporary culture.

GEERT LOVINK: There is also a fundamental shift happening at the level of protocols and the very architecture of the internet, from the archive to the flow and the river. We see that in many metaphors (just think of Google Wave). Silicon Valley is gearing up for the colonisation of real-time, away from the static archive.

Some have even said goodbye to the very idea of ‘search’ and that is interesting, because search is, in the end, a time-consuming activity with often unsatisfactory outcomes and one that originated in library science.

VICTORIA LYNN: ‘Search’ is a library-based model?

GEERT LOVINK: Yes, you go back to the archive and search a database. This could, potentially, be the point where the Google empire will start to crumble, and this is why they are at the forefront of creating Google Wave, which integrates all the feeds of your Facebook and Twitter accounts etc., into one real live event happening on the screen. It is an online tool for real-time communication. Wave is flow based, river based. It is no longer the case that you sit there and go back to the archive, which is a completely different approach. The internet as a whole is going live, which means that you’ll only see a segment. In this way the internet is trying to come closer to the messiness, the complexities of the social world.

VICTORIA LYNN: Even though the Facebook site, for example, was set up to mirror the social networking we do in our lives, could you say that the complexity of our life in a technological environment—with all the feeds etc.—is forcing the technology to change and adapt to a social networking that is at the same time real and virtual?

GEERT LOVINK: I would not put it that way. The virtual wants to penetrate and map out the real lives and social relationships to such an extent that the movement is going in that direction, not in the other way. There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. There is all the evidence that the virtual is becoming more real. All the investment is there, and moving away from Second Life, and virtualisation and pretending to be someone else. We are not being encouraged to pretend to be someone else, but to be ourselves. You have to log in; you have to tell your name. The idea of the virtual where you could potentially become something else has broken down. When we are talking about the virtualisation of everyday life, we are referring to the fact that the technologies themselves are becoming smaller and more mobile.

VICTORIA LYNN: What are some of the more extreme examples of censorship of these “walled gardens” that you have come across?

GEERT LOVINK: Well, Australia’s proposed web filter legislation. It is quite a sad story. Many Australians don’t even realise that they are already living in a closed and monitored media environment. Filtering happens both ways. From here, in Amsterdam, one cannot access the iView programs from the ABC TV portal.

It tells you that you are outside of Australia. The website says: “Due to licensing agreements, the service will initially be available via the web, with all shows only accessible via streaming in Australia. Geo-blocking is in place to prevent the content being accessed from outside Australia.” YouTube is using a “suggested location filter”. Sites often say: “Content unavailable. This video is not authorised for your location.” Such nation-based IP blocking goes against the very idea of the internet, even if it is done with the best of intention, such as the case of content of the Norwegian national archives that can only be accessed inside that country.

I wonder if people realise what that means for the Australians themselves. Do they really expect this to happen when they go to a BBC site that says, sorry, you are not in the UK, you cannot look at this website?

3 1 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 VICTORIA LYNN: What about information coming in?

GEERT LOVINK: It happens as much going outside as coming inside. There are one million Australians living offshore. Why are they, I should say we, suddenly excluded from this? Should they be exempted? Should they fill out forms? It is networked madness. Control is also fierce in large structures in universities, company websites, and intranets. The problem of course is that the control is very invisible, indirect. People haven’t really noticed it too much. Why? Because there is no conflict. As long as there is no immediate conflict, there is nothing to worry about. But if people get fired, if there is a breakdown of infrastructure, if there is a real conflict in the world happening, we will immediately see a direct optimisation and utilisation of these tools that are now still used for marginal purposes. In that sense we could say that mainland China is leading the way. It is the dream of many politicians to have a Great Firewall.

VICTORIA LYNN: What role can an artist have in a network such as that we have painted here? Or, if not an artist, how can we critically intervene? Is it in the figure of the hacker, the critic?

influence not only on the island of Sicily but across Italy and the world. It is an offline network related to family relationships, business ties, with a technical component. For young people of course they would think the other way around.

They wouldn’t necessarily start with their existing social network offline.

So offline and online are blurring and maybe this is why there is no overriding network theory available at the moment because we are in this state of transition.

My contribution has become more and more focused on details which have started to become large entities in themselves. An example is Wikipedia where millions of people contribute—it is the fifth largest website in the world.

VICTORIA LYNN: So rather than painting a whole network theory at the moment, you are saying one has to focus on these particular nodes within the network that are emerging and growing very fast?

GEERT LOVINK: They are already completely mainstream except that the artists, academics and journalists have a very hard time catching up and understanding the critical concepts within these large universes.

VICTORIA LYNN: What is an example of what is at stake in Wikipedia?

GEERT LOVINK: There are still lots of artistic ways to show how power operates.

We haven’t really done enough work in this field. It would be great if more artists would engage with this internet world, to turn it upside down and inside out.

So many of us take the freedom of the internet for granted and treat it as a secondary PR tool. Let’s question it from the inside. With that I also mean irony, play with it. The problem is that you need a bit of technical insight in order to do this, so the call from the 1990s that the artists of the digital age should also have technical expertise and they should be able to deconstruct the tools that they are using I think is still very valid. This can only be done by changing the curriculum and teaching more technical skills, with a critical deconstructivist agenda.

We cannot just be users, consumers or prosumers. We have to break through the glass ceiling of the smooth interfaces and start programming. This was, and still is, the task of the artist. It is not enough to make nice, or disturbing, visuals.

This is the problem we have with visual studies. It is naïve because it limits itself to the symbolic value of imagery, without understanding the wider (techno-social) context in which these images circulate.

VICTORIA LYNN: What are some of the main bodies of thought about the network?

GEERT LOVINK: Networks have always existed, so we can very easily write a history of networks that starts with the Egyptians, Greeks or elsewhere. The network form of social organisation has always existed and the study of it has a structured body of knowledge started with the rise of sociology in the post-Second World War period.

The first social network theories are from the early 1970s. The internet started in 1969. So there must be a coincidence there. Important work was done by Mark Granovetter, who defined networks through its weak ties, not by adding up your close friends. The network effect becomes important once you start to explore the social edges of your contacts. We are now so familiar with this cultural logic that everybody has almost intuitively understood that these ‘social media’ are about expanding your social horizon: how to reach into other groups of people, finding the nodes that are bridging people from one scene to the other; from one discipline or sub-culture or whatever context you are in, and this happens on a local, national and global level. Then there is Manual Castells, who, in the 1990s, formulated his theory of the network society. He presented a theory of flows, and the ways in which these flows are interconnecting. I appreciate his work, but I find it too descriptive and uncritical. It also lacks awareness of aesthetics and visual culture and of the media per se. This type of sociology is a very dry. The ideas are presented as a given. What they lack is an understanding of the utopian and imaginative power of critical concepts. In itself there is nothing wrong with the Castells’ network society notion. And that is the case with many of these network theories: they are often quite descriptive. They come from social science, and this is why many people in the arts and humanities have shied away from them.

There are truisms. The current network theories are not necessarily innovative, creative or subversive. A recent theorist would be Bruno Latour who is involved in actor-network theory. It describes how actors perform within a network.

His main contribution is that there are also non-human actors: bots, viruses, computer programs, and software in the background that present themselves as human and that we vaguely understand are not human, but we still perceive them as such. The term “network” refers to an entity that both organises social life and is also the internet—a technical protocol that is associated with a very boring, traditional office culture. A couple of decades ago, social networks would never have been associated with computers because computers were very exclusive, they were hidden. Maybe the computers themselves were networked, but not the users. That really only changed in the 1990s and now we are undergoing this revolution at the moment that hasn’t really stopped. This revolution blurs the two: social networks of people and technical networks at the level of internet and mobile communication. Today, we can’t even distinguish between the internet and a network such as the Sicilian mafia—a classic social network that has its

GEERT LOVINK: How do people collaborate? We did a conference in 2004 called ‘The Art of Free Co-operation’. What does that imply? If we start to collaborate, what are the power relationships? Who is moderating? Who is in charge?

Who defines what knowledge is? How do you resolve online conflicts? All this is being fought out at the moment within a place like Wikipedia. If you look at academia and education in general they still speak about Wikipedia as something that is forbidden. You can’t quote it and copy/pasting from it is plagiarism, even though everybody is doing it. So the large knowledge institutions are by and large in a process of denial, instead of looking at it from the perspective that they could learn something from it. What I call for is much bigger involvement of scholars and artists in projects like Wikipedia. Go for a ‘wikiwar’ if you think what is being stated there is not true.

VICTORIA LYNN: Is there an example of someone who is taking a creative approach to Wikipedia?

GEERT LOVINK: There was a very interesting debate about wikipediaart.org for instance. As the website explains, it was a collaborative project initiated by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, originally intended to be art composed on Wikipedia, and thus art that anyone could edit. The idea was that anyone could start adding photos or videos with each different entry. One aim was to pose questions around copyright. The Wikipedia Art project was considered controversial by those in the Wikipedia community, and removed from the site fifteen hours after its birth.

Why is Wikipedia shying away from the visual aspect? Because geeks have dominated the environment and claimed the collective imagination of what this collaborative online encyclopedia should be, the whole idea of Wikipedia Art struck them as being from another planet and not to be tolerated.

VICTORIA LYNN: What are some of the changes that you think we are going to see in the immediate future?

GEERT LOVINK: Technology will become more mobile, and more invisible.

We are witnessing a growing amount of machines being connected to the Net. This ‘internet of things’ has been predicted for quite a while. It also involves remote sensing, so that you can sense what is happening in your house, for example. It means an interconnection of everything with everything in a very cheap way. That is about to happen. This will be another revolution. A further drop in prices is connected to this development. Network technology becomes more ubiquitous, being more available, being around everywhere, to a point where it leaves the IT and media spheres and enters different fields such as decentralised energy distribution. This will give us new incentives to create new spaces, new spheres of our own where we are not so bothered by others. There will be an inevitable rush to design spaces for one’s own autonomy.

VICTORIA LYNN: It seems to me that the only people in the museums that are interested in emerging technologies are the marketing people, at best, but in terms of content or the different ways you can use technology to address the issues that are at stake today are not being taken up. Do you think there is a danger that the museums will start to only be talking to one generation?

GEERT LOVINK: As long as the arts blossom outside the museum, it doesn’t really matter. If that is not the case, we have a problem. If the arts are thriving in society, it is a problem for the museum, and not for society. But if nothing happens in society and everybody is looking at all these centralised institutions to do something, then you can wait forever because they are not going to resolve these issues any time soon. What lacks in museums and the art market is a basic curiosity and a will to experiment, but in the end whose problem is that?

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aesthetics and politics in the age of ambient spectacles

Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications, University of Melbourne. With Victoria Lynn he is Convenor of Artists Week: Art in the Global Present, and respondent to Gerald Raunig’s keynote presentation ‘The Industrial Turn: Enslavement and Resistance in the Machines, Factories and Industries of Creativity’, Artists Week Day One session ‘Art & Politics’. The following text discusses the relationship between these themes of ‘Art & Politics’, by comparing the thoughts of Jacques Ranciere, who has written on the significance of avant gardist experiments with everyday life and new techniques of visual and literary representation, and those of Gerald Raunig who is fascinated with the shared aspects of artistic and activist techniques of communication as framed by a new kind of cosmopolitan political and aesthetic consciousness. The original version of this text was presented at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, October 2009.

NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Baudrillard’s much misunderstood claim that the Gulf War only happened on television was not a ridiculous denial of its reality, but an astute observation that the ‘real’ terrain that was being contested was the public imaginary.1 It is worth recalling that in the weeks after 9/11 most USA and many Western TV channels were fixated on the image of the planes crashing into the twin towers. In the absence of a hard explanation of the causes and amidst endless speculation over its consequences, the media kept replaying the scenes of the terrible collisions.

The documentary representation of 9/11 was perhaps the first to underscore what the Retort collective called the contradictory “struggle for mastery in the realm of the image”.2 The images of war not only dominated the banners of newspapers and television broadcasts, but also passed from mobile phones to internet sites. Okwui Enwezor has gone so far as to argue that after 9/11 the relationship between the image as a representation of an event and a signifier of a historical epoch collapsed.3 He noted that as the image of planes crashing went ‘live’ from New York it was met with a global response that was summed up by the Le Monde headline “we are all New Yorkers now”. However, the feedback from these spectacular images soon thickened to such an extent that Enwezor claimed that they blurred the function of the image as a signifier of an event.

Boris Groys, another astute commentator on the function and power of the image in contemporary society has noted: “the act of war coincides with its documentation, with its representation”.4

Now no act of war seems to be complete until the warrior also acts like an artist who can document and disseminate the act of destruction.

This conjunction, and the ongoing interplay between the event and the image disrupted the visual order that previously underpinned the analysis of the image in the time of war. For instance, writing in the aftermath of the images of the Vietnam War, Susan Sontag insisted that while the photographer was often entangled in a moral dilemma between wanting to stop the acts of violence that occurred before his eyes, he was nevertheless committed, if not actually desirous, that the event continues so that he can capture the image of the horror.5 This hunt for the decisive image is now overwhelmed by the endless flow of digital images.

On the internet the war is covered from every angle. With cameras strapped to their helmuts soldiers record and then disseminate both their shameless exploits and their heartfelt messages. This provided a low-to-the-ground version of the army’s practice of releasing video aerial footage of the moments before the destruction of a target captured by missiles ‘armed’ with a camera. In this context, the veteran anti-war filmmaker Brian de Palma decided that the only way to tell the story of this war was through a montage of images that were produced by mobile phones and amateur video cameras.6 In one of her last published essays Sontag noted that “the pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib reflect a shift in the use made of pictures—less objects to be saved than messages to be circulated”.7 Does the blurring of the boundary of the combat soldier and the war photographer mark not only transform the role of the witness but also herald the emergence of a new aesthetic realm, one that also blurs the boundary between the act of representation from political intervention?8 Opposite: Lucy & Jorge Orta, Fallujah–In the Name of God, 2007 Photo courtesy the artists

There is no doubt that the physical act of destruction and the circulation of the images of 9/11 were intended as a single political action. It is also widely recognised that the repeated screening of the 9/11 footage enhanced the experience of trauma. For weeks after the event the images not only incited a sense of stunned disbelief, but also destabilised the meaning of habitual images of everyday life. Ordinary signs of Muslims doing their daily duties, were, according to Talal Asad, suddenly switched onto a stigmatic spectrum. Banal signs were compressed with unspecified anxiety and turned into possible images of terror.9 Again we must note that the paranoid projection of suspicion and fear is commonplace in times of war. However, if the Retort collective is correct in arguing that power is being reorganised “under the conditions of the spectacle”, then this realignment of the function of the image comes to haunt not just Sontag’s empirical distinction between the documentary function of an image and the event that it depicts, but it also prompts a review of the critical function of aesthetics when politics operates as a form of spectacle.

Throughout modernity art asserted its criticality through two diametrically opposed strategies: iconoclasm and redemption. Just as much as it violently ripped apart the symbolic universe it inherited, it also found aesthetic force in the surplus of ordinary signs. Art simultaneously provided a counter-point to the already known and discovered new resonances amongst the surrounds. However, these two aesthetic strategies also reflect a dramatic shift in the function of the artist. In modernity, the artist is neither the primary nor the dominant generator of imagery. Mass culture is an aesthetics machine.

This process of incorporation and the new techniques for dissemination have radical implications for the function of the artist. Many people argue that the artist is now a critical navigator in an atmosphere that is already saturated with images, symbols and narratives. This does not mean that we live in a world in which artists are powerless. I do not subscribe to the view that artists are excluded from politics, or that the aestheticisation of politics has left no room for an aesthetic critique. The question is not if, but how art is entangled in the politics of everyday life.

With sparkling optimism, Brian Eno once claimed that ambient music —the genre that he pioneered—had the capacity to exert a surrounding influence: a critical tint to the all pervasive influence of commerce in the sonic environment.

Unlike the production of Muzak that stripped away all the atmospheric idiosyncracies and then replaced it with a cheerful sound that was intended to alleviate the tedium of commercial space, Eno thought that ambient music would induce a contemplative atmosphere that accommodated many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular. Eno’s faith in the interaction that occurs between music and the listener revealed a joyful confidence in the openendedness of this process. It is neither nullified by the intrinsic doubt over the origins, nor hampered by uncertainty in its destination. For him the surplus of possibilities is an expanded space from which both the artist and the audience can produce new points of clarification and unexpected levels of complexity.10

How do we read the open-endedness of art,11 and in more general terms, what is the critical function of art after 9/11? If, as I have already noted, the complex circulation of the 9/11 footage had the ghostly effect of making the event appear to happen again and again, as it was entangled in a near endless sequence of transmissions, from the mass media to inter-personal networks, then in what sense did this chain of unending co-productions, this new loop of ‘ambient fear’ become the aesthetic field of the War on Terror? It is possible to answer this question by arguing that the ordinary citizen became more and more implicated within the spectacle of war because the colonisation of everyday life had already intensified the experience of uncertainty. The experience of fear becomes more diffuse when society has undergone a radical social transformation through the dissolution of the boundaries and the commodification of the practices that were previously contained with the civic, cultural and domestic spheres.12 In this context, the function of art is no innocent bystander. Two sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have gone so far to argue, that it was the artistic vision of authenticity, independence, flexibility and mobility, that motivated the reorganisation of the culture of capitalism and provided the “sources of new forms of exploitation and new existential tensions”.13 Boris Groys has also posed the question, would the video tactics of Al Qaeda and the documentation of the scenes at Abu Ghraib have been possible without the history of perfomance art?14 Similarly, if the Taliban is so committed towards iconoclasm, then why were they so scrupulous in documenting their destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddha sculptures?15

It is difficult to register the precise impact of the War on Terror on the public imaginary, let alone the interlinking between avant gardist stategies and neo-liberal tendencies. But it is possible to consider the interplay between recent political events and emergent trajectories in contemporary art. I turn to art, not because it has a superior moral vantage point, nor for its putative capacity to anticipate the future forms. I am more concerned with the ways in which it articulates the contradictory possibilities within the emergent forms of the present. I am not seeking to define the function of art as a political legislator or a social regulator. That would be absurd. Nor do I share the kinetophobic conclusion drawn by Boltanski and Chiapello: that artists will need to resume their liberatory critique with the proviso that they undo “the link that has hitherto associated liberation with mobility”.16 Boltanski and Chiapelo cast this link as if mobility is the cause of precarity. On this point I am in total agreement with Nicolas Bourriaud’s defence of contemporary aesthetic practices that are engaged with the condition of precarity, and endorse his claim for the “need to reconsider culture (and ethics) on the basis of a positive idea of the transitory, instead of holding on to the opposition between the ephemeral and the durable and seeing the latter as the touchstone of true art and the former as the sign of barbarism”.17

Hence, it is worth reiterating some general principles. I uphold the view that art can explore the conditions of belief beyond a rational calculation of cost and benefit, as well as test the boundary between the permissible and the forbidden. Similarly, I do not share the pessimistic view that the function of the spectacle and the colonisation of the public space have led to a muting in visual literacy or the evisceration of the spheres for democratic dialogue.

In short, I will argue that the spectacle is not confined to an ideology of fear and manipulation. The new mobile communicative practices have reconfigured rather than collapsed the potential for critical interface. Hence, it is no longer a matter of whether aesthetic imagination can intervene, but rather examine the extent to which it re-frames a given set of conventions and or disrupts rules. And we should recall, that if, as claimed by Benedict Anderson, artists were at the forefront of imagining the form of national consciousness that led to the construction of the nation-State,18 then the post-national and cosmopolitan forms of belonging that are currently being developed by artists deserve serious consideration. However, before raising the stakes even higher, I will now turn to the theoretical debates on art and politics, in order to see how they assist in clarifying the meaning of art amidst the ambient spectacles of everyday life.

A Measure for Art and Politics The relationship between art and politics has been examined from many different perspectives in art theory. From Victor Burgin’s examination of the “unbroken thread” in art historical treatises in which he identifies a recurring correlation between the social value of art and non-aesthetic qualities such as spiritual sensitivity or political commitment,19 to T.J. Clark’s promotion of the model that art becomes revolutionary through its ideological critique of the everyday,20 and even in Arthur C. Danto’s exploration of the triple transformation of art in its transfiguration of the ordinary,21 there is a common argument that art acquires an elevated status—it becomes revolutionary—as it is embedded within the social or propelled by external political forces. By exploring a long tradition of artistic practices that invoked a democratic intention to bring art closer to life, these theorists have successfully countered the false autonomy that modernism sought to pin to art. However, in the process they have also tended to either displace or dissolve the critical tension between art and politics. For instance, in T.J. Clark’s account art only becomes fully alive and therefore reaches its destined value

after the revolution. The fullness of art’s value, and paradoxically its fusion with everyday life, is delayed until the oppressive conditions have been overcome and a new regime assumes power. This sequential model of transferring power and the linear process for the creation of a new social order not only reduces the agency of art to a subordinate role, it effectively excludes the artist from the process of social transformation.

While such overt ideological perspectives are now frowned upon in the current critical discourse on art, the discussions on the function of art continues as it were, in the words of one of the most dogged critics, just “a mute form of political economy”.22 The effects of art are thus still held inside the guiding hand of social, economic and political change. For instance, at every opening of a biennale there is the accusation that art has sold out to civic marketing—no critique of an artistic intervention into the ruins of urban space is complete until the underscoring beat of gentrification is spelt out, and no sooner do artists form a collective than their identity is immediately subsumed by the label of social movement. In each instance, the motivation of the artists and the function of art are made legible by reading them against a pre-determined code.

Quite often such criticisms are entirely justified. Art is used to promote other goals. However, to focus on the weight of co-option, to confine attention towards some inevitable destiny, or to assume a homogeneous identity is to miss the wood for the trees. Of course art can never exist in pure space. However, the point is not if art is entangled with social, political and economic structures, but how it weaves itself into these scenarios, and whether or not it can retain a critical force. This question is more difficult to answer. While modernists sought solace by stressing the autonomy of art over power, and social historians unpacked the complicities between the meaning of art and its specific context, there is now a tendency for critics to oscillate between the wish for an idealist escape from power and the determinist complaint that art is trapped.

To grasp the way art is entangled in a complex ecology of extra-artistic processes and structures, that is, to see the way it operates in the contemporary imaginary, we need a broader aesthetic framework. Aesthetics is usually understood as a form of cultural judgement or philosophical attitude that separates the art object from its context. My aim is not to reverse this claim and simply reduce aesthetics into a discourse for highlighting the imperious force of power or reveal the hidden hand of history. On the contrary, I will argue that aesthetics defines the relationship between art and politics as neither the representation of political messages, nor even the political inspiration that is drawn from art, but rather that it is the transformation that occurs through inter-subjective relations. Attention to this ‘live’ passage in the perceptual sensorium has never been the main object of interpretation in art theory criticism.23 It is toward the writings of Jacques Ranciere and Gerard Raunig that we must now turn in order to develop an affirmative conceptual framework for art and politics.

Ranciere’s work is an unlikely starting point for the reinvigoration of the debates on art and politics. For decades he operated at the intersections of political philosophy and social history. Then in the early 1990s he wrote a number of essays on the significance of the avant gardist experiments with everyday life and the new techniques of visual and literary representation. At one level, this turn towards aesthetics was consistent with the enduring question that frames the entirety of his life’s work—what is the relationship between knowledge and emancipation? Or to put it in his own words: “How do individuals get some idea in their heads that makes them either satisfied with their position or indignant about it?”24

Before focusing on Ranciere’s recent texts on modern and contemporary art, it is worth making the approach via his earlier and path-breaking book called The Ignorant Schoolmaster.25 This complex historical and philosophical rumination follows the writings of Joseph Jacotot, a French Professor, who at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, asserted that two people could teach each other what neither already knows. For instance, Jacotot claimed that an illiterate father could teach his son to read. This text was both a calculated attempt to unsettle the master/servant dialectic that frames pedagogy, and a marvelous illustration of the primacy of metaphoric imagination in all forms of knowledge production.

According to Ranciere, the emancipatory effect of Jacotot’s method was not directed by the superiority of his acquired knowledge of things, but his faith that knowledge emerges from the ordinary practice of observation—that is, the inherent capacity of all people to look, select, compare, connect and interpret.

The link between knowledge and emancipation, is expressed in Ranciere’s phrase: “equality of intelligences”.

The constellation of points that define Ranciere’s account of the interplay between aesthetics and politics bear a striking resemblance to the five presuppositions that also marked the starting points for Jacotot’s experiment with knowledge and emancipation. First all people are equally intelligent. Second, explication is the myth of pedagogy. Third, the master’s claim to be in possession of the truth enforces the stultification of the student. Fourth, equality is neither given nor claimed, it is practiced. Fifth, the art of storytelling, that is, the ability of a person to place himself in a narrative and produce his own story, is not only the verification of emancipation, but also the basis of democratic dialogue.

3 5 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 Jacotot relished in the way people created their own stories. When they observed a painting, or followed a play, he claimed that they always possessed the capacity to create their own narratives. The sum of these narratives never headed toward a neat consensus, but rather, proceeded according to the logic of singularity, division and multiplicity. Through Jacotot’s work Ranciere could see a reversal of the conventional perspective on the link between knowledge and emancipation, and he could thereby propose that equality was a habitual practice, “rather than a reward situated firmly in some distant future”.26

If the fear of the spectacle of war arises from the collapse of the distinction between empirical and representative status of the image, and in more general terms, if the critical function of art has been already subsumed by capital’s perpetual drive for differentiation, then this would leave little if any room for art as a source of emancipation. Aware of these perceived dead-ends Ranciere entered the debates on art and politics with the determined attempt to create some ‘breathing space’, an intermediary zone that enables an affirmative engagement with the way art can modify the realm of the “visible, sayable and possible”.27 In his most influential book The Politics of Aesthetics28 Ranciere defined aesthetics as the reconfiguration of perceptual order through the imaginative recoding of everyday objects and relations that leads to the creation of new modes of political subjectivity. His concern with the definition of the concept of aesthetics was also the focus of his most recent book Aesthetics and its Discontents.29 For Ranciere, aesthetics refers not only to a discipline for either appreciating the formal properties of a given artistic object, or articulating the affect that comes from an encounter with art, but rather it is the discourse through which artistic practices, sensible affects and thought are constituted through mutual inter-dependence.

His aim is not to separate art, affect, and language, which would presuppose that they can be discerned in isolation of each other and then placed in a proper hierarchy, but rather to investigate the way affects, meanings and practices of art are already entangled.

Ranciere claims that the “knot” that holds together this three-fold relation is evident in all the key points of aesthetic discourse. First, art only exists insofar as there is a specific mode of appreciation. This training of the gaze is not the problem that is in need of being cleared away, but rather the necessary starting point for the constitution of art. Second, aesthetics is not just the discipline that trains ‘the good eye’—for distinguishing between the worthiness of the subject and spotting the reconfiguration of forms, but rather it is the discourse for the identification of art. Hence, it is the means by which art is made intelligible.

Third, the denunciations of aesthetics are coeval with the discourses on art.

That is, the complaint that aesthetic theory fails to grasp the ineffable complexity and boundless force of art is a contest for sovereignty that simultaneously rejects the false illusions of theory and demands that theory must renew the search for a path that reaches towards the horizon that art has already established. This gap between the forms of representation are not a sign of fault in either the faculty of reception, or the capacity for articulation, but the constitutive lack that drives translation. Finally, the claim that art has its origin in human nature is also tied to the destiny of a ‘people and place’. The sensorium that defines human nature is always related to a social order. The critical inflection that Ranciere gives to each of these points is the basis of his conception of aesthetics as a “regime of the functioning of art and a matrix of discourse, a form of identifying the specificity of art and a redistribution of the relations between the forms of sensory of experience”.30

By posing an affirmative link between aesthetics and political transformation Ranciere was not seeking to return to the claims that aesthetics derives its validity from its contribution towards the realisation of a future revolution, but rather he is outlining the terms by which art carries a form of politics within it. This perspective has considerable pertinence for rethinking the spectacle. In particular, it challenged the dominant assumption that the image invariably imposes an ideological distance between reality and interpretation, and that the subject by being trapped in the abyss of images is not just separated from truth, but also from the essence of his or her real humanity. Ranciere’s approach is a break with what he calls the long line of theorists and artists such as Guy Debord and Pierre Bourdieu, who Ranciere claims repeat the “Platonic disparagement of the mimetic image”.31

This melancholic tradition has conveniently set up visuality, spectacle, and spectatorship as the source of deception, superficiality and alienation.

The authentic form of being or the truth of reality is always presented as if it can only be found by discarding the falseness, superfluity and illusory effect of the world of images and achieving direct contact with life. Ranciere claims that this negative ideology on the function of the image has persisted ever since Plato expressed his distrust of the theatre and the arts in classical Greece.32 To establish an affirmative framework for understanding the relationship between art and politics, Ranciere introduces the phrase “the aesthetic regime in the arts” to define the commencement of the period in the late nineteenth-century when visual and literary techniques were invented to juxtapose and relate the visible with the invisible.33 From this period, and through techniques such as fragmentation and montage, Ranciere was able to outline the three basic modes of representation,

from “naked” images that serve as a depiction of the original, to “ostensive” images that transform themselves as they react again the original referent, and the “metaphoric” image that plays on the “ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, bringing about a local reorganisation, a singular rearrangement of circulating images... It aims to play with the forms and products of imagery, rather than carry out their demystification”.34

From this perspective Ranciere asserts that the status of the image is not a mask that hides truth, or a foil that can displace our grasp on reality, but the “supplement that divides it”.35 He also countered the assumption that the person engaged in looking at an image, or even the contemporary subject that is surrounded by images, will inevitably succumb to the role of passive dupe.

Whether the viewer is sitting quietly before a performance of classical drama, or surfing the web, Ranciere claims that he or she always has the capacity to not just observe and follow the line of a story, but also the ability to see another storyline, which may in fact depart from the intended message and create a new narrative.

Hence, the task of the artist is not limited to helping the viewer to be active in their own condition of spectatorship, that is, by either casting the illusion of the image in such a manner that it brings attention to its own illusory techniques, or inviting the audience to step into the production of the artwork. As valid as these ‘reforms’ may appear to be, they still reinscribe the presumption that the primary position of the audience is passivity, and that it is only through the force of the artist’s hand that their critical faculties are awakened.36

Once we frame the flow of agency between the artist and the audience outside of the master/servant dialectic, then we can immediately grasp Ranciere’s point that the emancipatory potential of art does not come from the locus of the artist’s intentionality but rather through a process he defines as the “distribution of the sensible”. This is the crucial phrase in Ranciere’s thinking. It recurs in all his major philosophical works and is the conceptual spear with which he cleaves open his profound and persistent disagreement with the Platonic worldview.

For Ranciere, the experience of democratic equality has always been constrained by both philosophical arguments and authoritarian practices that limit the capacity of all individuals to partake in the acts of governance. The distribution of the sensible refers to a different kind of interaction between self and collective governance. It does not refer to the channelling of power by or for the people, but the sensory apprehension of possibility. This transformation of the realm of the senses is not the outcome of being invested with greater levels of power. Distribution of the sensible addresses the transformation that arises from the active involvement of the excluded in the articulation of the common.

Hence, Ranciere defines the logic of transformation through the interplay between the rise of new subjects and the rearticulation of the common. Aesthetics and politics are thus posited as “two forms of distribution of the sensible, both of which are dependent on a specific regime of identification.”37

By giving primacy to the distribution of the sensible and stressing that aesthetics and politics are two forms that address this social task, Ranciere overcomes both the false hierarchy that separates one from the other, and distances himself from the view that the two concepts need to be understood in relation to each other. He proposes that both are formed within their independent “regimes of identification”. Aesthetics and politics are different ways, distinctive discourses, unique modes of addressing the task of distribution of the sensible.

While they operate within their own system they do not exist in separate realities.

They share a common space and both have their respective capacity to suspend the normal coordinates of sensory experience and imagine new forms of life.

That is, aesthetics and politics, in its execution of the distribution of the sensible, is also in contestation with any given order of aesthetics and politics that excludes or constrains democratic dialogue. Aesthetics does this by means of overturning the existing hierarchy of signs and inventing new narratives. In short, aesthetics is engaged in the distribution of the sensible as it invents specific forms that link the realm of individual affect to a social way of being. Hence the intervention of aesthetics is always political because the “principle behind an art’s formal revolution is at the same time the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience”.38 However, while the principle of the distribution of the sensible underpins both aesthetics and politics, Ranciere goes one step further as he claims that the aesthetic regime precedes the political.39

By stressing that the “real must be fictionalised in order to be thought”, Ranciere lays claim to the ground from which aesthetics can critique the given order of politics. Politics and aesthetics both proceed by three fundamental imaginative acts—surveillance across territory, definition of boundaries and modulation of flows. However, as the task of politics is structured to organise the zone of the possible and the permissible, it also produces a system that filters the experience of equality through a hierarchy of authority. The same stultifying effect can be evident in the formalisation of aesthetic practices. Ranciere’s bold move against these regressive tendencies starts with his claim that aesthetics and politics are committed to a distribution of the sensible. Hence, his perspective is not just a reversal of the negative ideology of the image, and an open invitation to encourage the active participation of the spectator. It posits that transformation occurs in the individual and collective sensorium. This new conceptual framework

3 7 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 for aesthetics has parallels with a number of other French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The common thread that runs throughout this body of thought is an overturning of the opposition between the image and the real, and a critique against the view of the spectacle as a purely illusory and alienating form of representation.

Gerald Raunig, a younger Austrian scholar, has also worked with this body of thought and in particular adopted the Deleuzian conceptual framework to develop a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the recent forms of collective aesthetic practice. While Ranciere’s work has laid down a broad conceptual framework that connects art and politics, it has thus far remained as a reflection on the potential perceptual reconfigurations, rather than producing a commentary from the emergent social transformations. Ranciere’s work has zoomed in and out of the imaginary worlds proposed in novels, films and visual installations, outlined a theoretical framework for the effects of art, but it has never tracked the intersubjective relations that Gerald Raunig claims is now the crucial juncture of art and politics.40

Raunig shares Ranciere’s view that the politics of art is not found in the depiction of political struggles. Like Ranciere, Raunig also rejects the modernist claim of aesthetic autonomy and argues that, while art is not subordinate to politics, they are both discrete fields that rest on the same terrain. Ranciere’s work begins from a crucial disagreement with the Althusserian circles and gained his distinctive perspective and he distanced himself from what he called the “extravagant topology” of the politicised French intellectuals.41 Raunig’s engagement with art and politics also emerges from a struggle against the academicist discourses of the old left, and sees himself as being part of a “broad assembly of artistic platforms of resistance”.42 Raunig’s response to the contemporary condition of precarity and his fascination with the crossover between artistic and activist communication techniques is, in my view, framed by a new kind of cosmopolitan political and aesthetic consciousness. For instance, he repeatedly celebrates the way that the anti-globalisation movement and new artistic collectives have sought to re-route information flows and widen the legal and political frameworks from a Sstate-centric perspective of citizenship,43 to the articulation of a political agenda that “explodes the national framework, as it were, from the inside”.44 While there is considerable overlap between Ranciere’s and Raunig’s stance on politics and aesthetics, there are, however, two significant differences. Firstly, there is a difference in the interpretation of the legacy of the avant garde, and in particular the function of the “break”. And secondly, Raunig introduces a new approach towards appreciating the aesthetico-political dimensions of the social interactions that are formed through these actions.

Raunig’s evaluation of the historical claims of the avant garde to “awaken the citizen” and to “fuse art with everyday life” is far more sceptical than Ranciere’s position. While Ranciere took inspiration from the avant gardist experiments, 45 Raunig seeks to distance himself from the practices and theoretical models that he claims endorsed the “diffusing and confusing of art and life”.46 Raunig goes so far as to claim that the main movements in the 1910s and 1960s not only “came to no good end”, but due to their grandiose or abstracted ambitions, they also tended to displace rather than overcome the boundary between aesthetics and politics.47 For instance, Raunig rejects the judgement, often expressed by Marxist art historians, that during the French Revolution Gustav Courbet achieved a “fusion of art and politics”. Instead he offers a counterview that stresses the manner in which Courbet alternated from being an artist and an activist. While shuttling between these positions Courbet was, according to Raunig, recomposing what it means to be an artist and an activist, but he was not simply dissolving the boundary that separated the one from the other.48

Raunig’s emphasis on the shuttling between rather than the blurring of the fields of art and politics, can be compared to Ranciere’s claim that art and politics have their own specific regimes of identification. However, the contrasting views over the status and effect of avant gardist shock techniques marks a fundamental disagreement. For Ranciere, the use of a break or what he calls the “division”, is not just a formal technique, but it is the principle means for the distribution of the sensible. The idea of the “break” in Ranciere’s texts is crucial to both the materiality of a collage “which combines the foreigness of aesthetic experience with the becoming-art of ordinary life”, and it also central to his account of the collective projects that designed integrated spaces in which painting and sculptures are no longer separate objects, but realise themselves in life as they sacrifice “the sensible heterogeneity which founds aesthetic promise”.49 The potency of these aesthetics practices reside not in the resolution of the contradiction between freedom and alienation, art and life, but the articulation of a break with the given political order. Hence, the renunciation of the avant gardist idea of the “break” is akin to throwing out the baby of social transformation along with the sullied waters of twentieth-century revolution.

Ranciere and Raunig also differ in the way in which they attend to intersubjective encounters. Raunig’s perspective on inter-subjective experience and his analysis of the transversal organisation of artistic collectives not only extends Ranciere’s commentary on the role of art in political transformation, but provides an instance of methodological innovation that goes beyond the conventional approaches of art history and philosophy. It starts from the claim that the

political context is not just a background, but the field through which the artist is constantly passing. The focus upon politics is no longer on whether but how the artist passes through politics. With historical cases such as Courbet, Raunig measures this shuttling passage through a critical reading of archival sources, but more significantly, in relation to contemporary practices his methodology proceeds from both theoretical reflection and participatory observation techniques.

The theoretical perspective on flow is a crucial part of Raunig’s conception of aesthetics and politics. In order for Raunig to retain his claim that aesthetics and politics retain their distinctive identity, and also for him to distinguish this claim for the modernist position of the autonomy of art, he must define how the dynamics of flow is both a constitutive force in the fields of art and politics, and how these respective fields reconfigure their specificity through the process of interaction. To outline such a theory of flow Raunig draws on two Deleuzian terms concatenation and transversality. Concatenation refers to sequential practices of fluid movements between each field that occur for limited durations and result in the creation of temporary alliances. The dynamics of concatenation are generated by the tensions within and between constituent parts. These complex, unstable and highly differentiated entities interact in a manner that stimulates new lines of movement and resist consolidation into a fixed hierarchic structure. The flows that constitute a concatenation invariably lead towards a mutual transformation in both fields. As movement is ongoing the identity of the two fields always remain at point of difference from each other. It is the perpetuation of this difference that also ensures that the dynamic of concatentation does not tend toward any neat reconciliation or cosy consensus. However, unlike Ranciere’s concept of redistribution of the sensible, which focuses on the intervention that aesthetics brings to the political regime, the concept of concantenation attends to the flows between the fields of aesthetic and politics.

This new perspective on flow draws on the history of artistic and activist crossovers in the European autonomous movements. Like the autonomous movements, the new artisitic collectives that Raunig analysed, were a direct reaction against the colonisation of everyday life. Both the activist and aesthetic collectives shared similar organisational forms and political aims. They did not seek to gain control over the central organs of institutional power, but were more concerned with the expansion of democracy in everyday life. They sought to subvert the dominant structures and invent new networks of social organisation.

They rely neither on top down authority, nor on a form of polycentric dispersal.

Their mode of collective organisation has an irenic disposition that Raunig expressed through a set of negative movements—“refusal to speak for others, with abandoning identity, with the loss of a unified face, with the subversion of the social pressure to produce faces”. 50

At one level, Raunig appears to be indifferent to the debates in art criticism over the formal differences between art and activism. He is not seeking to validate activism by showing how arty it can be, nor does he justify the value of art by stressing its contribution as a form of social struggle. However, at another level, Raunig pays scrupulous attention to the adoption of the strategies developed within site specific, community and conceptual art. The interplay between artistic and activist strategies is described in terms of cooperation, the transfer of skills from one field to the next, and the linking together of social struggles, artistic intervention and theory production. Hence, the second and most significant feature of this practice is what he calls “transversal activism”.

Transversality is an a-centric geometric concept that refers to the movement that occurs across the time-space continuum. Movement is normally thought of as a linear passage from one point to another. Change is thereby defined by delineating the difference in an entity between the departure from one point and arrival at another. This perspective tends to stress the negative or positive impact of an external force, and overlooks the dynamic agency of the entity in motion. Transversality provides an alternative perspective on the transformation that occurs in the time and space of movement. By focusing on the interplay between forces and forms in motion it tracks the movement of forms that occur during the process of moving. Raunig adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the transversal to describe the organisational principles of numerous resistance groups that at times operate in isolation from each other, and on rare occasions, seem to come together for brief moment or co-operate across vast distances.

An apposite definition of transversal activism can be found in the motto of Viennese Volxtheater Favoriten: “living revolutionary subjectivity in the here and now instead of saving up wishes for changes in the party funds—for the some fine day of the revolution”.51 This collective takes as a given that the prevailing socio-economic conditions alienate individuals and dehumanise social relations.

However, rather than seeking to first overthrow the existing order, and then build a new society in which the “new man and woman” will discover their true identity, they dedicate themselves to embodying freedom in the living present. This is not to say that they have overcome the prevailing conditions.

Many of the commentaries on artistic collectives tend to gloss over mundane practicalities and produce hyperbolic claims in regards the social impact of their aesthetic gestures.52 When the autonomists adorned themselves in Native American costumes and went fishing in Italy, or the Situationists invited Parisians to go for a derive, there was a tendency for critics to mark these gestures in

hyperbolic claims, as if this was the beginning of the downfall of the State.

While Ranciere upholds a favourable assessment of the older avant garde, he dismisses contemporary artists engaged in relational aesthetics for being merely derisive of power and turning art in on itself. He also rejects both the aesthetic value and political force of artistic strategies that are formed in direct relationship with new social movements. In fact, he goes so far as to describe the effect of relational art as “undoing the alliance between artistic radicality and political radicality”.53 This rather severe judgement is not, as Nicolas Bourriaud has counter-claimed,54 a result of either his failure to see the actual aesthetics choices, or his lack of attunement towards the politics of precarity. His criticism comes directly from his link between the aesthetic and political act of division and the distribution of the sensible. Relational art is, in his view always heading towards some point of convergence, in which the meaning is determined by the rule of ethics. Now an ethical turn in art might not sound so objectionable. However, for Ranciere “ethics is a kind of thinking in which an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action”.55 In this house of ethics, there is no room for radical dissensus. The break is now subordinated to an overriding need for consensus. But why is the equality of intelligences suddenly suspended by an ethical turn, and how would the philosopher know the kinds of responses that arise from a relational practice? Was he there, or put another way, from what topology does this judgement come from?

Ranciere’s definition of ethics, which suffocates and eliminates the crucial force of the break/division/supplement, obscures a more complex process of negotiation. Ethics, is neither the colonial mode of incorporation, that assumes that all guests who enter my house will follow my rules, nor is it the unconditional surrender to the guest who can treat my house as if it were his house. Ethics is not just the imperative to incorporate the other, but it also the moment of hospitality that articulates both the transformation of the guest and a break in the host’s rule of the house. Such a perspective on ethical conduct as the mediation between stranger and host is closer to Raunig’s approach.56 His focus is more attuned to the subtle interplay between small gestures in specific places, and the articulation of new capacities as participants collaborate to confront their joint problems.

For instance, his evaluation of collective art practices is not marked by grand claims in relation to formal innovation or political intent, but rather attends to the handling of those practical aspects of everyday life that throw up profound and at times incommensurable claims, such as how does a transnational collective communicate when there is no common language? How does the collective bring to the public a debate about the rights of ‘illegal’ migrants without exposing the status of these people to the authorities? Raunig conceded that these debates “required a great deal of energy, incited many conflicts and could only be maintained by most actors for a certain period of time”.57 In short, this reflexive method grants attention to not just grand aims but also acknowledges the significance of the relative failures, in particular those failures that are experienced in the full knowledge that the outcome of persistence is neither fatalistic futility nor an absolute resolution.

Art as techne I want to end this section by making a quick link between the function of mobility in the aesthetic consciousness and the long philosophical tradition that defines critique as a techne for distinguishing a way of interrupting and connecting the flows of association. Art does not proceed as an investigative expose followed by a judicious declaration of truth. It does not posses a fixed knowledge of things, but rather develops a critical attitude towards the possibilities in and between things.

Art begins in curiosity, the sensuous attraction towards difference and connection.

In every metaphor and with each new bruise, we all learn how to distinguish and compare signs and forces. Jacotot provided for Ranciere the starting point for understanding the fundamental power of innovation that proceeds from the practice of observation. This inherent capacity to learn and feel is for Ranciere the basis of all aesthetic innovation and political equality.58 Art for Raunig is also a relational mode of thinking that simultaneously serves as an instrument for suspending the existing order of things, and a platform for imagining alternatives.59 Thus affects, thinking and practice are transformed through the action of carriage and connection. The point of developing a new framework on aesthetics and politics is not to put these elements in their respective order, but to understand the effect of one being moved across the other.

At this level of generality we find shared principles between these thinkers. The differences emerge when we consider their assessment of the specific ways in which art is political. These differences are pertinent because under the contemporary skies the politics of art have undergone radical change. During the earlier epoch of totalitarian regimes the aestheticisation of politics, such as Leni Reifenstahl’s choreography of the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party, adopted the frame and optic of the cinema. In the context of the War on Terror the aestheticisation of politics is immersed in the continuous relay of mediated individual responses to ambient fear. The participatory logic of contemporary forms of mediated transmissions has, as noted in my introduction, disrupted the conventional understanding of the image.

I suspect that the debates on aesthetics and politics that I have charted thus far only takes us part of the way towards understanding the full dimensions of these changes. The artistic strategies of the twentieth-century have, in general terms, been classified under two headings: iconoclasm and redemption. Throughout modern history we can see a common expression of discontent against the existing social order in artistic, political and philosophical statements. They all proceed from the shared starting point that human potential is restricted. They may differ in relation to identifying the restrictive forces and articulating the form of human subjectivity, but they all possess the aim to overcome the perceptual and real constraints that are imposed by habits, norms and rules. Within this core aim is a vision that I am calling a “cosmopolitan imaginary”. It is the affirmative side of the exilic drive that also runs throughout modern culture.60 I am not suggesting that political, aesthetic and philosophical modes of thinking will eventually converge along one horizon. I imagine them heading out like discrete elements, one colliding with, or swerving away from the other, generating energy through their motion and interaction, and when they connect they also immediately alter each other’s composition and trajectory. It is a restless and dynamic form of mobility that gathers momentum from, rather than permanently settles into clusters of likeminded elements.

Such a general theory of mobility and creative transformation has not yet eventuated. That which is nevertheless vivid and radiant is the instanciation of the techne of art. It arises from the rub and swerve of affects, intellect and practice, rather than heads towards some utopian space. This process of flow and rupture has a multiplicity of singularities, and as numerous commentators have noted, it is from these instances that there is also a reframing what it means to be human and the form of the social.61 When affects, intellect and practice find their radical point of juncture this is also the exquisite force that we know as eros. Consider this anecdote that Georgy Katsiaficas recounts to illustrate the eros effect of political struggle: “Look”, he began, we’re driving the bulls (the police) up the walls. They don’t know what to expect from us. Years ago, when we were fighting them everyday on the Ku’damm (Berlin’s main shopping street), there were a few thousand of us ready to go at it. It was such a hot day we couldn’t stand it, and you know if we were hot, it must have been hell in full riot gear.

A few people took off their clothes and before you know it, people were jumping into the Hallensee (a nearby lake) to cool off. Then we all stripped and jumped in. Thousands of us were enjoying ourselves at the beach, while the bulls stood by sweating like pigs not knowing what was happening. The city government, the media, the bulls could never figure out who gave the order to jump in. They still can’t understand our politics or our culture, especially when we don’t lose our sense of humour.62 Notes 1 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Paul Patton trans., Sydney: Power Publications, 2004 2

Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London: Verso, 2006: 15

3

Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the document in Contemporary Art, New York: Steidl/ICP, 2008

4

Boris Groys, Art Power, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008: 122

5

Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986: 12

6

Brian de Palma’s aptly named film Redacted (2007), was in his words a sequel to his earlier film Casualties of War (1989). However, the key difference between the two films is that the story of abuse in the Vietnam War is told through the flashback memories of a central character, whereas the Iraq War is represented through a myriad of stories that were found on the internet 7

Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times, 24 May 2004

8

This was the theme of the 2008 Brighton Photography Biennial, Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, curated by Julian Stallabrass 9

Talad Asad, On Suicide Bombing, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007: 16

10

Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, London: Faber and Faber, 1996

11

Of course I am referring to Umberto Eco’s 1962 essay which gave emphasis to the role of the audience as an active participant in the constuction of aesthetic meaning, and therefore placing the receiver rather than artistic initiator as the “focal point of a network of limitless interrelations”, thereby anticipating many of the moves developed by artists in the 1960s and laying the conceptual foundations for the relational practices of the late 1990s. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989: 4 12

The process by which capital penetrated and redefined social relations in the spheres of pubic life and personal intimacy was first analysed by Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, London: Radius, 1989

3 9 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 13

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappelo, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Gregory Elliott trans., London: Verso, 2007: 468 14

Groys, op cit: 122

36

Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, op cit: 274

37

Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents: 26

38

Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: 17

15

In contrast to the violent footage shot by the Taliban, Lida Abdul shot the video Clapping with Stones, in which she records men standing in the site and tracing the contours of the void created by the absence of the sculptures. See Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘Hope in White Ruins’, Art Monthly Australia 199, May 2007: 23-26

39

For instance, he argued that in the aesthetic regime the details of everyday life were transfigured “as a trace of the true” well before the ordinary was the object of attention in the dominant modes of rationality. ibid: 34

16

Boltanski and Chiapello, op cit: 536. With the exception of some rather manic Futurist manifestos, the idea of mobility was rarely, if ever, expressed as an unequivocal liberatory goal

40

17

41

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Ranciere on Art and Politics’, Open 17, Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2009: 23 18

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983

19

Burgin argues that since the sixteenth-century the study of the meaning and function of art has been traditionally bound by methods of analysis that were formed within the humanities. The historical and theoretical techniques that were devised presumed that the object of art was fixed and hence interpretation proceeded by projecting observational principles that could decode its inherent material properties, and relate it more general claims on moral and social issues. These techniques also shaped the social perspectives and theoretical attitudes that were used to define the agency of the artist. Hence Burgin concludes that as the task of art was defined as either the illumination of latent meanings, or the agitation against conventional patterns of perception, these tasks acquire meaning by being implicated in the intertextual production of meaning. Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, London: MacMillan, 1986: 145, 204

20 Timothy J. Clark, Image of the People, Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982

Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Aileen Derieg trans., Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007

42

Gerald Raunig, ‘A War Machine against the Empire: on the Precarious Nomadism of the Publix Theatre Caravan’, 2002, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0902/raunig/en

43

Ranciere makes a similar move in ‘Art of the Possible’, op cit: 259

44

Gerald Raunig, Transversal Multitudes, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0303/raunig/en

45

Ranciere’s celebrated the aesthetic avant garde as the agent that anticipates and invents the “sensible forms and material structures for a life to come”. Politics and Aesthetics: 63

46

Raunig, Art and Revolution, op cit: 17. Raunig’s work is also timely because while it highlights the historical link between avant gardist and collective art practices and the autonomous movements that developed since the late 1960s it also points for the need for further work in this area. See also Anja Kanngieser, Performative Encounters, Transformative Politics: Creative Experiments as Radical Politics, Germany 2000-2006, Phd Dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2009 47

Raunig, Art and Revolution: 203

48

ibid: 97-98

49

Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents: 47, 39

50

Gerald Raunig, Transversal Multitudes, op cit.

51

Quoted in Raunig, Art and Revolution: 206

21

Danto claims that since Pop Art the making of art increasingly proceeds from a transfiguration of the ordinary, the alignment of the institutions of art with populist cultural needs, and the involvement of the audience as active constructors of information and values. This argument claims that all three elements are in a state of dynamic interplay, however, it also subsumes the liberty of the artist to reinvent his or her agency and extend the forms of art within the modern revolution in subjectivity and the dismantling of traditional stuctures of authority. The revolution in art is thus once again carried by greater forces.

Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post Historical Perspective, New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1992: 3-4

22

Sven Lutticken, Idols of the Market, New York: Sternberg Press, 2009: 93

23

The reception of Gerald Raunig’s and Brian Holmes’ criticism in art theory is symptomatic of this ambivalence towards live experience and the politics of everyday life. As will become obvious in the course of the essay the criticism that these theoretical approaches merely repeat ‘old’ and ‘irrelevant” activist dogma, lack a theory of protest, fail to address the new dynamics cross-disciplinary alliances.

Or that they focus on practices that have no import for aesthetic consideration, is simply disingenuous and myopic. See Sven Lutticken, Idols of the Market, ibid: 23. For an earlier exercise in understanding the relationship between aesthetic practice and the politics of experience see Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics, Art, Place, Everyday, London: Rivers Oram Press, 2006

52

It was this supposed lack of critical standards for measuring the aesthetic effects of collaborative art practices that motivated Claire Bishop’s essay, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006, http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=10274 53

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Ranciere on Art and Politics’, op cit: 23

55

Jacques Ranciere, The Philosopher and His Poor, John Dury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker, trans, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004: xxv

56

25

57

26

ibid: 138

27

Jacques Ranciere, ‘Art of the Possible’, Artforum XLV(7), 2007: 259

28

Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004

29

Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity Books, 2009

30 31

ibid: 14 Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Artforum XLV(7), 2007: 274

32

The problem with Plato and Aristotle is a foundational point in Ranciere’s thinking. In Plato’s Republic he finds the primal text that articulates the paradoxical love for democracy and contempt for the ordinary, unruly and passionate wishes of the people. For Ranciere the struggle for emancipation has always been constrained by a long line of political philosophers who denounce the chaos of the populist will of the people and define good government as the mechanism for controlling democracy. Against this patrician views of governance Ranciere speaks in favour of a political position that he calls the “interval” –that is, a form of relational thinking that is engaged in connecting knowledge across different borders, a kind of citizenship which is not contained within the parameter of national rights or constitutional texts, but one that moves across the gap of the particular and the universal, that refuses the separation between these positions and is constantly disrupting the boundary that clarifies one identity by keeping it out of the messy reach of the other. See Jacques Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran, London: Verso, 2006 33

Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2007: 5

34

ibid: 24-25

Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents: 21

54

24

Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kirsten Ross, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991

Ranciere, The Philosopher and his Poor: 76

Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents: 110

Gerald Raunig,‘Instituting and Distributing: On the Relationship Between Politics and Police Following Ranciere as a Development of Distribution with Deleuze’, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1007/raunig/en Raunig, Art and Revolution: 218

58

Ranciere retains an abiding belief that the measure of revolutionary aesthetics and politics is found in their expression of a “common humanity”, The Politics of Aesthetics: 27. For Ranciere, equality is not a political ideal that must be defended or attained, but rather a pre-political condition—a human capacity that enables strangers to become mutually intelligible. In categorical terms he states art is the implementation of equality. The Politics of Aesthetics: 53

59

See also Gerald Raunig, ‘What is Critique? Suspension and Recomposition in Textual and Social Machines’, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808/raunig/en

60

Nikos Papastergiadis, Modernity as Exile, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993

61

Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, Van Abbe Museum Public Research #2, /WHW, Eindhoven, Zagreb, Istanbul, 2009: 14. Antonio Negri, ‘Contemporaneity Between Modernity and Postmodernity’, in Antinomies of Art and Culture, eds Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008: 28 62

Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006: 136

35

For a quick summary of the itinerary that linked the study of aesthetics to politics see his ‘Afterword’, in The Philosopher and the Poor: 224-227

Page 36: Lucy+Jorge Orta, The Gift–Life Nexus Oaxaca, 1999–2002 Photos courtesy the artists

in modulation mode factories of knowledge Gerald Raunig is a philosopher and art theoretician based at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste and at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP), Vienna. From 2002-05 he was the co-ordinator of the transnational EIPCP research projects republicart (http://republicart.net), transform (http://transform.eipcp. net, 2005-08) and Creating Worlds (http://creatingworlds.eipcp.net, 2009-12). His recent publications in English are Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press 2007; Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: <Myflybooks 2009; and the forthcoming A Thousand Machines, New York/Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press (2010). This text, which addresses Raunig’s current research interests and introduces his keynote text at Artists Week ‘The Industrial Turn. Enslavement and Resistance in the Machines, Factories, and Industries of Creativity’, appears on the EIPCP website at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0809/raunig/en.

Gerald Raunig “Welcome to the Machine!” This was the way the university welcomed students in a satiric drawing by the German artist and writer Gerhard Seyfried in the 1970s.1 Taking a closer look at the drawing, however, the “machine” turns out to be more of a factory, because it arranges the automated mass production of the specific commodity of knowledge in the universities. Seyfried’s knowledge factory also has elements of a ghost train (with all kinds of horrifying surprises for those riding it)—a flipper device (the students as flipper balls being launched and propelled), and a three-tier Nuremberg funnel (although knowledge here is funneled in, as it should be in a factory, in masses and anonymised). These kinds of illustrative transfers of central components of the factory as fordist core institution to other institutions have always been widespread. Yet what does it mean, when even at the transition to post-fordist modes of production the metaphor of the factory still continues to be applied to the university?

A factory is generally understood to be an assemblage of machines and workers, through which all aspects of production are striated, mechanised and standardised on the basis of the division of labor, an assemblage of machines and workers—that means what is at stake here is the relationship between these two components, their exchange and concatenation. Karl Marx accordingly developed two different perspectives of the ‘factory’ in the chapter about the factory in Capital.2 From one perspective, it is the “collective labourer, or social body of labour” that determines the production process as “dominant subject”. Here it is primarily a matter of the “combined co-operation of many orders of workpeople, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill, a system of productive machines”.

From this perspective it is hence the living labor and virtuosity of the workers, who are responsible for operating and tending the machines with the help of their skill.

Seen from the other perspective, however, the machinery comes into view, “the automaton itself is the subject, and the workmen are merely conscious organs, co-ordinate with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with them, subordinated to the central moving-power”. Operating the machines here becomes service to the machine, virtuosity is transferred from the worker to the machine, the living labor of the workers is enclosed in the machine. And according to Marx, it is precisely this second aspect that characterises the capitalist use of machinery, the modern factory system.

This view of the factory, reduced to one of two perspectives, as a capitalist usage of machinery turning subjects of production into objects of the machines, and turning machines into subjects, exactly corresponds to Gerhard Seyfried’s view of the university as factory: it is not only knowledge itself that becomes a commodity here, but also the knowledge producers’ modes of subjectivation—according to Seyfried’s picture unambiguously identified as the subordination of the students, who thereafter appear solely as passive components of the knowledge factory, as formatted knowledge reproducers.

Seyfried’s picture identifies the university as factory and machinery: upon passing through the portal, the students immediately find themselves on a conveyor belt. They are sternly and constantly moved along with the aid of various rough mechanisms of drilling and machinic harassment: through the gears of basic knowledge, the disciplining sluices of exercises, the stress-presses of exams, the imprisonment of administrative rules, the mills of specialised knowledge, all the way to the final examinations that undertake the inclusion of the docile and

the exclusion of the stubborn rejects. Exclusion is imagined drastically here as permanent removal from the knowledge factory, taken to the extreme in Germany of the 1970s as “employment ban”. Inclusion, on the other hand, means a specific form of the segmentation of space, the hierarchical arrangement in space, literally the imprisonment into space. Within the territory of the university as factory the conveyor belt perpetually conveys the students towards uniformity as standardised graduates.

The main statement of this picture is simple: the university-factory is a monstrous machine, in which initially different and diverse students are turned into uniform people and made fit for exploitation in a uniform society. In light of the advanced conditions of the commodification of knowledge and the striation, homogenisation and market economicisation of the universities, of course this metaphor of the university as factory appears more fitting than ever. But it does not go far enough.

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND TRAINING AS PERMANENT (SELF-) OBLIGATION Seyfried’s picture does not cover the potency of the actors, nor does it cover their entanglements. In analogy to Marx’ one-eyed look at the factory, it emphasises the students as victims, constructing a sharp opposition between the institutional apparatus and the students dominated by it. It not only misses the contemporary amalgam of repression and students’ self-government, but also omits all the other components of the factory university: the teachers in all their hierarchical gradations, the spheres of influence of the administration, and the many aspects of service, from the cleaning crew to the cafeteria and security staff, whether they are tenured or radically outsourced and precarious.

Even the image of the sincere and innocent first-year student, who trips uncorrupted over the threshold of the knowledge factory and is first exposed to the mechanisms of alienation upon entering the institution, is somewhat too simplistic—even for the situation in the 1970s. Today there are more and more experiences and accounts from students, who view their studies from the start purely as a transitional phase between school and job, who regard teaching as a service financed by their tuition and accordingly demand their share of co-determination: co-determination no longer as grassroots democratic selforganisation, but rather as a relationship between student-stakeholders and service-providing teachers regulated by exchange value.3

The ideal of a step into the university fostering emancipation from patriarchy, family, school and rural communities presumes that the subjects also want, plan and take this step. Yet the tendency seems to be that the step from the institutions of school and family to the university no longer takes place as a break, but rather as a seamless transition into a mode of existence of growing insecurity.

If the transition from the institution school into the institution university (and perhaps also into the factory) was, in fact, once a promising new beginning, then it is particularly the seamlessness of this transition (like the merging of unpaid traineeships as a student with precarious employment afterwards) that indicates the phases (and their significant territories) previously marked by institutions becoming indistinguishable, that also indicates the co-existence of various postinstitutional forms of precarisation. A central component of permanent selfdiscipline is the concept of life-long learning, but no longer as an emancipatory Enlightenment idea of adult education, as overcoming class boundaries and a vehicle of social ascent, but rather as a life-long (self-) obligation, as an imperative and life-long prison of continuing education.

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THE MODE OF MODULATION The ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ is probably Gilles Deleuze’s most famous essay. Almost like a manifesto, the French philosopher summarises here the theses of his friend Michel Foucault on confinement (and on its crisis, agony and what follows from that), inventing highly quotable formulations on the transformations from societies of discipline to societies of control, along with presenting his strategy of the creatio continua of concepts. As marginal as the article may have been for its author, its distribution and reception have conversely had a massive impact. However, the brevity and terseness of the ‘Postscript...’ also have a shadow side: despite all its conceptual potential, the weakness of the article lies in the rather un-Deleuzian pattern of a temporal sequence of discipline and control.

What we are experiencing is less to be explained as a linear development from the societies of confinement and closed milieus in the direction of societies of open circulation, but rather an accumulation of both aspects: the social subjugation of worker/student subjects comes along with the subjectivation mode of machinic enslavement; forced adaptation in the institutional “internment” is accompanied by new modes of self-goverment in a totally transparent, open milieu, and discipline through personal surveillance and punishment couples with the liberal visage of control as voluntary self-control.

Modulation is the name of this merging of discipline society and control society: as the aspects of discipline and control are always to be seen as intertwined, their cumulative effect is even more evident in the example of the contemporary knowledge factory. While the students’ time is organised in detail in modules, molded, striated, and discipline is taken to an extreme, the modulatory state of learning never ends. “Indeed, just as businesses are replacing factories, school is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment.”4 Yet what Deleuze still describes as separated and subsequent attributions for discipline and control actually flow indistinguishably into one another: in the new mode of modulation, you never stop beginning, and at the same time, you never finish learning.5

The imperative of life-long learning implies a twofold appellation: an appellation to mold and modularise not only education or work, to stratify, striate and territorialise all relationships, the whole of life, and at the same time an appellation to be prepared to constantly change, adapt, vary. Modulation is determined by this twofold appellation, it is based on the interplay of the clean temporal and spatial separation and striation of the modules with the

inseparability of endless variations boundlessly modulating. Whereas modulation means restraint in one case, the insertion of a standard measure, bringing every single module into form, in the other case it requires the ability to glide from one key to another, to translate unknown languages, to interlock every possible level.

If the disposition of modulation consists on the one hand in forming modules, on the other it demands a constant self-(de-)formation, a tendency to permanent modification of the form, to transformation, to formlessness.

EDU-FACTORY: RESISTANCE IN THE FACTORY OF KNOWLEDGE Following Foucault/Deleuze,6 the first three qualities of the factory were: concentration, distribution in space, arrangement in time. As post-fordist forms of production became hegemonic, there was undoubtedly a process of dispersal, in the course of which the factories increasingly became diffused in society.

The factory, now the fabbrica diffusa, no longer functions in this transformation simply according to the old mechanisms from the nineteenth-century.

Concentration, distribution in space and arrangement in time have not entirely lost their significance, but they have certainly varied their functions. The theory of the fabbrica diffusa was invented by the autonomia, the Italian struggles of the 1970s. For the Operaist and Post-operaist theories that emerged in and from these struggles, one of the most important components of the diffusion of the factories into society consists in the exodus of the workers from the factory. This is seen here not as an effect, but rather as the catalyst of the far reaching capitalist transformations of the last decades of the twentieth-century (post-fordism, immaterial and affective labor becoming hegemonic, cognitive capitalism).

From and in this theoretical environment, a new generation of activist researchers has developed in the last decade, who have taken on particularly current interpretations of the knowledge factory and established their field of action far beyond Italy as a global one. Not without reason, in 2006 the transnational network of activists in the field of education gave themselves the name edu-factory. The factory that is meant here is again the knowledge factory,7 but this time in its twofold form: the old figure of the university in its exchange relationship with the purported social and territorial outside, with society and the metropolis, but also the assemblage of institutions and cooperative networks of knowledge production that has become diffuse.

Above and page 42: Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Spelling Dystopia, 2008-09 (production stills) Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photos courtesy the artists and Galerie EIGEN+ART, Leipzig and Berlin

The edu-factory mailing list was started in 2006, dealing with themes relating to the neoliberal transformation of the universities and forms of conflict in knowledge production.8 A first round of discussion focused primarily on conflicts at the universities, the second on the process of the hierarchisation of the education market and the constitution of autonomous institutions. And specifically these two lines are also what define the relationship of the edu-factory to the university, its double exodus strategy: here exodus does not mean simply leaving the university, but rather the battle for autonomous free spaces in the university and simultaneously self-organisation and auto-formazione beyond existing institutions.

Just in time for the onda anomala, the wave of protests, occupations and strikes at the Italian universities in late 2008, the edu-factory collective published the book L’università globale: il nuovo mercato del sapere (manifestolibri).9 The book summarises the most important texts from the online discussions, and in many presentations throughout Italy it has become a hinge for the discourses fanning the flames of the onda anomala and accompanying it. In the introduction to the book there is an interesting contradiction relating to the name of the network, which represents the paradox of the edu-factory. The central slogan is: “Ciò che un tempo era la fabbrica, ora è l’università.” As once was the factory, so now is the university. Yet two pages later, we read that the university does not function like a factory at all. I think this obvious contradiction leads us to realise that the university as factory is no longer to be read only as a metaphor.

Nevertheless, let us return to the association of the university as factory that was established at the beginning of this article, which remains at the level of the metaphor. In the course of the remarkable spread of struggles, occupations and strikes at European universities in recent months, the edu-factory organised countless meetings (mostly, but not only in Europe), which primarily addressed the invisible concatenation of these singular struggles. To promote one of these events, which took place in conjunction with the German education strike in June 2009 at the TU Berlin, the organisers in Berlin used none other than Gerhard Seyfried’s picture from 1977, which so strikingly illustrates the university as factory and yet misses the most important characteristics of the transformations of knowledge production in cognitive capitalism. I think that the re-circulation of the simplifying picture, like the contradiction in the factory definition of the edu-factory, is not based simply on a kind of enchantment with the powerful metaphor of the knowledge factory as an apparatus of repression, but rather that it—consciously or unconsciously—takes recourse to the possibility conditions of resistance in the mode of modulation.

With Marx we saw that the two perspectives of the relationship between workers and machines in the factory were reduced to the aspect of subjugation to the machinery. In ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, the modes of subjectivation are not omitted at all, but we encounter the problem of the temporal sequence of discipline/repression (including the forms of resistance to this) and control/self-government. If we want to understand today’s modes of existence and forms of knowledge production not simply as emerging from the sequence of discipline and control, we must assert a complex and modulating amalgam of social subjugation and machinic enslavement, but also draw up possibilities of new modes of subjectivation and forms of resistance, especially taking into consideration the changing complexity of this amalgam.

An understanding of modulation as the simultaneity and interaction of discipline and control can neither take recourse to the old forms of resistance in the days of the factory, nor can the resistive counterpart be conceived simply just as a deterritorialisation of control opposite reterritorialising discipline. The pure appellation to decentrality, deterritorialisation and diffusion is not sufficient to draw lines of flight from the assemblage of social subjugation and machinic selfgovernment.

The full ambivalence of the fabbrica diffusa in the mode of modulation, its mechanisms of appropriation and its potential for resistance, also allows us to understand the sites of knowledge production not only as sites of the commodification of knowledge and the exploitation of the subjectivity of all the actors, but also and especially as sites of new forms of conflict. And this could ultimately also be a reason for the edu-factory’s insistence on a struggle for the traditional site of the knowledge factory, for autonomous free spaces within the university. The factory was and is the site of concentration—as far as the valorisation of labor and forms of resistance is concerned. In a situation of precarisation, but especially of diffusion, of the extreme dispersal of cultural and knowledge workers, schools and universities are perhaps the last places where concentration is possible. In this sense, it may indeed be said—what once was the factory, is now the university. And at the same time it is clear that the university assumes new functions as a concentrate in the mode of modulation. Potentially also as a site of organising, of conflict, of struggles.

Notes 1 Seyfried’s satirical drawing became famous especially on the cover of the first edition of a widely read university-critical book: Wolf Wagner, Uni-Angst und Uni-Bluff, Berlin: Rotbuch 1977 2 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Erstes Buch, IV.13.4., MEW 23, 441 f. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1867-c1/ch15.htm#S4] 3

Experiences like this, however, should neither lead to moralistic admonishments, nor to culturalpessimistic complaints about the young people of today. Instead they should be linked–as in Deleuze’s concluding remarks in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’–with the insight that the new subjectivations lead to a new necessity to analyse them, and that new critical stances and new forms of resistance also emerge from this: “Many young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated’; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.”

4 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societes’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990, New York: Columbia, 1995: 177-182, here: 179 5

In this sense–and going beyond Deleuze–my concept of modulation covers aspects of discipline as well as those of control. Deleuze takes his concept of modulation from Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa Genèse Physico-Biologique, employing it only within the framework of the second paradigm, especially in his aesthetic writing from 1983 on: in Francis Bacon, where he describes Bacon’s diagrammatised form as “a temporal, variable and continuous mold, to which alone the name of modulation belongs, strictly speaking” (: 134), or in his first cinema book The Movement-Image (especially: 24). Here too we already find the dual relationship of molding, of the mold on the one hand (in this case in photography, which embodies the “immobile section”) and modulation on the other (exemplified by the movementimage of the film, the “mobile section”, here especially by the two methods of the moving camera and montage: “Photography is a kind of ‘molding’: the mold organises the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium at a certain instant (immobile section). However, modulation does not stop when equilibrium is reached, and constantly modifies the mold, constitutes a variable, continuous, temporal mold.” (: 24) On the concatenation of aesthetic and political modulation, cf. Gabu Heindl, Drehli Robnik, ‘Öffnungen zum Außen: Der Entwurf des Diagramms bei Deleuze und das Diagramm des Entwurfs bei OMA, Eisenmann und UN Studio’, in UmBau–Theorie der Praxis 19, 2002 6

Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societes’, ibid: 177

7

Cf. Irving Louis Horowitz and William H. Friedland, The Knowledge Factory-Student Power and Academic Politics in America, Chicago: Aldine, 1971; Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning, Boston: Beacon, 2000

8

What was especially remarkable was the stringency of the instituting process. Instead of installing an open mailing list, the list was initially only opened for two longer rounds of discussion and then closed again–also to the surprise of many list participants. Single authors determined specific thematic lines for one week each with their input. This stringent form imbued the debates with a coherency and intensity that can usually not be maintained for a long period of time on open mailing lists. The address for subscribing to the mailing list, which meanwhile mainly informs about current struggles and conflicts around knowledge production in various regions of the world, is edufactory-subscribe@listcultures.org, the URL for the web site is: http://www.edu-factory.org

9

The English version was published by Autonomedia January 2010

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insecurity will prevail 1 a virtual exchange with gerald raunig ANTHONY GARDNER As 2009 drew to a close, two conferences made it clear that the art and education systems in Europe were in a state of shock, perhaps of decline, but most of all uncertain about what direction they should be taking. At the first—the Former West conference held at the basis voor aktuele kunst (better known as BAK) in the Dutch city of Utrecht in early November—there was a marked tendency, especially among younger German-language participants, to dismiss the kinds of art-making and artistic space-making seen throughout much of central and northern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s, and which now often goes by the name of New Institutionalism. Something oedipal was obviously at play here. For a new generation of curators and critics, those figures who had instigated and promoted New Institutionalism—those who had sought to ingest the strategies of institutional critique from the neo-avant garde in America and Europe, and to create new smallish art institutions that built on and absorbed positions of critique—had fetishised “political” and “activist art”, transforming the always imminent revolution-to-come into a curatorial conceit, an exhibitionary brand name, a cop out. Names such as Simon Sheikh and Maria Lind, or entities such as Rooseum in Malmö and the Kunstverein München, were especially open to criticism, it seemed, deemed little more than the new curatorial authorities willing to sell out the urgencies of activism if it could lead to a book being published by Sternberg Press or having an article in Texte zur Kunst. And at the forefront of this list of names was the writer/philosopher/historian/activist Gerald Raunig: someone whose books and essays (including Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth-Century, or the forthcoming A Thousand Machines) sit largely outside the frames of New Institutionalism, but whose co-creation of a smallish, online “institution” publishing critical cultural texts called the EIPCP (or the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, an organisation I will return to presently) has seemingly looped him back into the ranks of contemporary cultural figureheads ripe for critique and even rejection.2

Dissonance like this continued in the second event a few weeks later, at the annual Historical Materialism conference in London. Amid the rather quaint returns to an unreconstructed Marxism as the basis for contemporary cultural action, petitions for an indisputably “left wing art” (whatever that might still entail) and calls (sometimes ironic) to comradeship, were claims that operating with and within institutions, however large or small they may be and regardless of whether they were institutions of art or education, was at best a compromise of activist potentialities. What was being demanded, in other words, was cultural revolution grounded not in New Institutionalism but in a vehement antiinstitutionalism, like a desperate yearning for something beyond the current state of affairs affecting European knowledge production.3

There was some method to this madness. Whether ‘old’ or ‘new’, extant institutional models were failing across Europe, either losing their prima facie independence to become yet another arrow in the neoliberal quiver (a circumstance befalling many of the biennales, Kunsthallen and Kunstvereine across the continent, given their utter dependence on State and/or corporate support) or being drawn to their unfortunate and perhaps premature close (as occurred, in different ways and for different reasons, with the unitednationsplaza in Berlin in 2007 or the Rooseum in 2006, among other venues). By late 2008, the disintegration of Europe’s universities was also escalating, induced by the dual effects of the neoliberal bubble having burst in September that year and the reshaping of those universities throughout the 2000s into conveyor belts pumping out student numbers, quick-fire vocational degrees and easily quantifiable research (an educational economy also known as the Bologna Process). In response to the universities’ dependence on the crumbling finances of the neoliberal State, and the drastic consequences of this for student-to-staff ratios, research quality and infrastructural maintenance, students in Austria, in Germany, in France —and thereafter, like ripples on a pond, in the varied contexts found in London and California—began their long-term protest, taking over university buildings, calling for renewed student- and research-oriented programs, and denouncing the privatisation of universities by declaring “we won’t pay for your crisis”.4

To find solace in institutional forms, as New Institutionalism and other aesthetic political projects arguably did, at a time when institutions of just about any sort appeared worthy of distrust, could thus appear (perhaps understandably) to be out of the question. To daub Raunig’s work with the taint of a renewed institutionalism, or to see his writings as antagonistic to the politics of an emerging generation of artists, curators, writers and their activism was however, deeply flawed.

For one thing, it misunderstood Raunig’s own position vis-à-vis New Institutionalism as one based in deep seated ambivalence—ambivalence about what role these self-critical institutions were playing within neoliberal conditions, about how these institutions risked becoming mere expedients (as another philosopher-critic George Yúdice might put it) for perpetuating the governmental status quo, and thus about the need to find alternative models and alternative theorisations for contemporary cultural politics.5 For all the important research that he has done on the revivification of institutional critique in recent years, Raunig is decidedly not an apologist for its finer, nuanced failings. And yet, however ambivalent he may be about such politicisations of contemporary culture that response should not be misconstrued as a sign of weakness or apathy. Indeed, it is precisely this sense of ambivalence that is one of the foundations for Raunig’s cultural politics: a militant ambivalence, we might say that stands in stark contrast to the ultimately rather naive, ambivalent militancy of the anti-institutionalists. The key to this is Raunig’s awareness that institutions are not entities to be avoided or disowned absolutely, as though they could somehow be transcended by one’s political positioning. Instead, institutions can and perhaps must be entered and transformed from within, their internal machinations rewired to promote something quite different from the usual neoliberal agenda we might expect of institutions. This “something else” would be a concatenation (to use one of Raunig’s own preferred terms) of the practical and the theoretical, a contiguity or an interweaving of the two to the point where the one may become the other: reconceiving the current state of affairs can have long-lasting practical effect, while to change something substantively is to mould new methods and new concepts within contemporary thought.

The EIPCP is one of the more overt manifestations of this, taking the distributive medium of the newspaper—and especially the modernist newspaper or illustrated press brimming with insight and invective about the socio-cultural contexts of the period—and transforming it within the “prosumer” and precarious conditions of the internet. It is not only the publication of alternative opinions and analyses to the neoliberal norm that is at stake here; the wide distributive potential of those publications, through a “globalised” technology, shows that other ways of envisaging the world do indeed exist, and actualises the means by which a different kind of worldly machine can emerge through, because of and despite the so-called “realities” of globalised neoliberalism. The key is to reimagine control of the means of production and distribution of knowledge, discourse and thus perception of and in the world. This is equally true with what is happening in numerous universities across Europe, especially in terms of redeveloping university education from the grassroots level up through joint action by students and staff, a push whose roots lie in the free university courses and infrastructure organised by Joseph Beuys in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, or Michel Onfray in France in the 1990s. And in moves that may have the apparatchiks of Melbourne University’s own version of the Bologna Process (the creatively named Melbourne Model) or of the impact provisions in the forthcoming ERA (The Excellence in Research in Australia), though given the general apathy with which university education is treated in Australia by funders, employees and students alike, probably only mildly concerned—similar attempts to reconstruct tertiary education are continuing apace in Croatia, through the actions of the Solidarity University in Vienna, or in the Zurich Art Academy, Raunig and his colleague Klaus Schönberger are currently instigating a new art theory course within “the free space of the art school”, as they call it, to ensure that students can have “opportunities to try out new forms of text and theory production, of aesthetic and political intervention”.6 Rather than denounce and steer away from institutions such as universities, art schools and art spaces, then, a more pronounced trend has emerged in which

institutions are infiltrated, occupied, and remobilised toward goals and interests that do not necessarily accord with—are, in Raunig’s terms, “monstrous” when seen through the filters of—neoliberal governance.7

Such “monstrous” knowledge production, in which “aesthetic and political intervention” concatenate for the purposes of critique and reconstruction, has been crucial to those seeking to resist the privatisation and economisation of just about everything. It has been particularly evident, though, in the formerly communist States of Central and Eastern Europe. These contexts were struck hard and early by rampant neoliberalisation (from 1989) onwards in the name of “progress”, providing terrifying insight into just how far corporations, governments and their minions were willing to go to transform populations into underemployed and/or freelance workers and cities into billboards advertising goods that locals, for the most part, simply could not afford (and were not expected to buy—advertisements for Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Audi were not, after all, directed toward them). At the same time, however, these insights were matched by an awareness of how strong social, cultural and artistic responses could create new infrastructural and discursive conditions in which art could be made, exhibited, analysed and historicised. From the AptArt programs established

by Viktor Misiano and a tight circle of colleagues in Moscow in the early 1990s, to the “subjective art histories” debated in Lia Perjovschi’s artist-run-spaceas-artwork called the Contemporary Art Archive/Centre for Art Analysis through the 1990s and into the 2000s, artists worked with theorists, musicians, curators, dancers to actualise different cultural spaces and worlds from within the harsh

conditions of privatisation and exploitation being imposed on them from above.

The arts thereby interwove to form a shared struggle for self-organisation against neoliberal machinations, an aesthetic that sought something different from both the communist past and the privatised present, and which has formed a fragile legacy of resistance that continues in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg (in the art- and text-making machine of writers, artists and philosophers called Chto Delat, for example), as well as in cities that are not usually implicated in postcommunist conditions, such as Paris (as with the work of Bureau d’Etudes) or Vienna, home to the EIPCP and its own drives toward new modes of and conditions for knowledge production.

If, as this last point suggests, Raunig’s work can be seen in relation to these “lines of fight” that have emerged across Europe amid neoliberalism’s crushing authority, a crushing of both State communism and the remnants of socialism throughout Europe that sparks what I would call “postsocialist aesthetics”—then what about artistic contexts and production in Australia?

Are they divorced from the concerns facing Europe or the responses triggered by them? The answer would be a fairly clear-cut ‘no’, I think. Self-organised cultural struggles against an emergent, and then omnipotent, neoliberalism are undoubtedly central to Australia’s art histories since the early 1970s on, from the development of such artist-run spaces as Pinacotheca, Inhibodress and their peers outside the metropoles of Sydney and Melbourne, through the not-quitefranchising of Art Projects into Q Projects, to the important interrelations (perhaps alter-globalisations) articulated between artist-run spaces worldwide in the

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Space Traffic and inFest projects involving West Space, or in Russell Storer’s important exhibition Situation at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. (How the emergence, consolidation and ‘normalisation’ of these spaces correlated with or differed from the many tangled histories of aboriginal art coops and community art centres would also make for a fascinating concatenation here.) Another mode of self-organisation, one critical of both the overwhelmingly Anglo-European composition of urban artist-run spaces and the identitarian conceptualisations of community art centres, would be worthy of further consideration too, especially as figured through collectives such as the Brisbanebased proppaNOW. Their attempts to develop a heteronomous space of artistic production that like a fury, shadows the racialised rhetoric of local politics and international relations—and this is quite consistent across the collective, from Richard Bell’s acerbic wit to the markedly different text pieces of Bianca Beetson or the attention to imagery paid by Tony Albert—but which also refuses the corralling of identity into tropes of traditional/urban/authentic/eccentric, suggests a drive to singularity, to a singular politics of being “proppaNOW”, echoed in Raunig’s own advocacy of singular aesthetic politics of “monstrosity”.

I am hoping that the 2010 Artists Week in Adelaide will provide an opportunity to test this imbrication out, given its drawing together within the one city, if not quite the one venue, Raunig’s Deleuze-inspired discourse on abstract machines and the work of proppaNOW. What kinds of dialogue or exchange might emerge between these two modes of aesthetic politics and activist discourse?

And if concatenations were to develop between such very different contexts and impetuses for the production of knowledge and critique, could they avoid the pitfalls of translation and the will to explicate, and potentially smuggle, one discursive world within the other? If the latter suggests a will to knowledge, to authority and to hegemony—a will that still has cultural and theoretical bite, it seems, not least in the unfortunate veneration of Chantal Mouffe’s apologia for hegemonic yearnings in her writings on agonism and antagonism—then what we must attend to instead is something that Raunig has also recognised. Indeed, it may be one of his most important assertions, albeit delivered in an almost off the cuff manner, buried as a footnote in a text published in the proceedings to the 2009 ‘Spaces of Art’ conference at Artspace, Sydney. Namely, that “My humble advice for emerging artists, curators, writers and critics”—though the advice could be considered beyond emerging practitioners as well—“is not to just follow every fashionable idea or concept and instrumentalise it, but to concentrate on a certain theory and create an exchange between it and your own work and your own thoughts”.8 In so doing, not only will specific cultural productions and contexts still be able to maintain their singular force, rather than be smothered by the discourses of others, but can also ensure ongoing resonance with those other discourses, a sharing of singularities that may open out to richer modes of cultural exchange grounded not in relations of dominance and authority, but perhaps in “a constant becoming, questioning, struggling”, as Raunig also suggests in A Thousand Machines.

Why might this be important? One reason would be the need to dispel the urge, still strong in art circles in Australia and elsewhere, to subsume one context within another so as to explain and translate it away. (If, as proppaNOW’s work suggests, this has long affected Aboriginal aesthetic politics, it has equally affected much of the writing about local artist-run spaces, and particularly the presumption (quite wrong, as it turns out, and quite tired) that those spaces have merely epitomised and imported the western European relational aesthetics championed by Nicolas Bourriaud.9 Just as importantly, though, it will open up ways of thinking critically about the kinds of becoming and monstrous “unbecoming” analysed by Raunig. As with other writers drawing together art and activism, or art and revolution, Raunig has a tendency not to refer to contemporary art practices beyond a select type: a type that is avowedly pedagogical in appearance and intent, located within or in relation to broader social protest movements, and whose “situational realism” (if we can describe it as such) is extremely difficult to represent in imagery or words (PublixTheatreCaravan at a border space protest near Strasbourg in 2001, as described in Art and Revolution; Universidad Nómada in Spaces of Art; Yomango in A Thousand Machines). ‘Activism’ thereby risks becoming a genre or medium of art—representable despite itself—rather than something that may be mobilised in many different kinds of art and through various aesthetic registers. (It should be noted, however, that Raunig’s references to cinematic imagery that bookend A Thousand Machines, and particularly his analyses of the bicycle as social and societal machine, provide a marked distinction here.) The result, in other words, is a tendency to fetishise the infrastructure, and not just the work, of art (a tendency that this brief exchange with Raunig’s work does little, admittedly, to counteract).

Perhaps most significantly, however, proppaNOW’s insistence on critiquing identity politics by working through them—that is, through a selforganised Aboriginal collective in Brisbane—stands in marked contrast to the general disregard for identity shown by Raunig or his artist-subjects. For Raunig, identity constructs remain bordered, calcified, incapable of maintaining the deft fluidity needed to function through and against contemporary neoliberalism and the conditions of precarity it both feeds and feeds on. In the precariat’s monstrously ambivalent politics of occupation, concatenation and transformation, as Raunig

has noted of protest movements in Barcelona, “La inseguridad vencera, insecurity will prevail...”.10 And so it may: from the flash mobs seeking to barricade the large-scale meetings of the G8 or G20, to the many-headed hydra that is Chto Delat, unstable and insecure formations have proven potent in fighting within and against the states of precarity authorised by neoliberal governance, using such insecure formations to try to evade all senses of authority—including that of a stable social movement—so as to resist the will to authority and hegemony on which neoliberalism thrives. And yet, I can’t help but wonder whether such politics of insecurity are only really viable for those who, by virtue of history, race, class and so on, can still find senses of potency or even, however paradoxically, security within that insecurity. Does the tactical dissolution of identity tout court risk displacing the various histories (personal, social, singular, shared) that necessitated identity politics, even in its most vulgar and static formations?

And might this disavowal of identity histories therefore actually be reinforcing the amnesiac conditions of the present, even as these revolutionary struggles seek to locate themselves in constellation with parallel struggles from the past, from 1848 to 1871, and from Cuba to Rhodesia to Gwangju? While insecurity and ambivalence may be compelling forces in some circumstances and in some revolutionary praxes, what organisations like proppaNOW may suggest is that in other contexts—and I would include here a revolution about which Raunig maintains a discomforting silence throughout his writings, namely the revolution required to combat climate change—ambivalence may not be the answer after all. In contexts like this, the institutions and mindsets of governance will still need to be occupied and transfigured from within, and on this count Raunig’s work is exemplary in the exchanges it can spark. But sometimes, perhaps, la inseguridad no debe vencer; sometimes, insecurity should not prevail.

Notes 1 This text is indebted to the actual exchanges I have been fortunate to have with Gerald Raunig, including his very generous submission to me of the manuscript for his forthcoming book, A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement, trans. Aileen Derieg, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), due for publication in 2010 2 Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007; Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines 3

On a formal level, the key figure within this discourse, at least at these two conferences, was Kerstin Stakemeier, a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy and former co-director of the Space for Actualisation in Hamburg. The informal discussions on these topics continued well beyond the conference seminar rooms on both occasions, however

4

On the situation in Europe, see for example Lina Dokuzovic and Eduard Freudmann, ‘Squatting the Crisis’, available at http://eipcp.net/n/1260352849, and the‘Bologna Burns!’website: http://bolognaburns. org/; and for the walkouts and protests in the University of California system, see Brian Holmes, ‘The U. C. Strike’, available at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/the-u-c-strike/

5 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in a Global Era, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. For more on Raunig’s reflexive critique of critique, see the issue of EIPCP called ‘The Art of Critique’, including Raunig’s editorial essay for the issue, titled ‘What is Critique?’ (available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808), as well as other issues on ‘Institution’ (from 2004), ‘Do you remember institutional critique?’ (2006) and ‘Critique’ (also 2006) 6

Gerald Raunig and Klaus Schönberger, ‘Zurich: Studying Theory at the Art University’, available at http://eipcp.net/n/1258669861

7

See for example, Gerald Raunig, ‘Monster Institutions: Institutional Critique, Next Phase’, in Reuben Keehan (ed.), Column 4: Spaces of Art, Sydney: Artspace Publications, 2010: 70-72, where Raunig analyses and develops the discourse of “monster institutions” initiated with fellow EIPCP theorist Stefan Nowotny and the Spanish art collective Universidad Nómada, and practised in such spaces as the MACBA in Barcelona or the Reina Sofia in Madrid. See also the EIPCP issue on ’Monster Institutions’ from 2008, available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0508 8

Raunig, ‘Monster Institutions’, op. cit., footnote 9: 72

9

One of the more recent examples of which can be found in Daniel Palmer and Tessa Dwyer, ‘Doing It For Themselves: Artist-Run Alternatives & Contemporary Australian Art’, in Britta Schmitz et al, Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2003: 44–55, a text that, by absorbing the activities of artist-run alternatives into Bourriaud’s discourse, may not really be “doing it for themselves” after all 10

Raunig, A Thousand Machines, op. cit.

Opposite: Tara Donovan, Untitled (Styrofoam cups) (detail), 2008 Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photo courtesy the artist and PaceWildenstein, New York

Page 46: Praneet Soi, Piggyback (detail), 2009 Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photo courtesy the artist, Gallery Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

the scale of change

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Ranjit Hoskote is a Mumbai-based cultural theorist, art critic, prolific exhibition curator and prominent poet. As an art critic he has authored a biography, monographs and major essays on leading Indian artists, including Vivan Sundaram, Jitish Kallat, the Raqs Media Collective, Shilpa Gupta and Praneet Soi (exhibiting in Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together). As a cultural theorist, Hoskote has addressed the cultural and political dynamics of postcolonial societies and globalisation, the relationships between the aesthetic and the political and the connections between popular visual art, mass mobilisations and the emergence of fluid and fluctuating identities within the evolving metropolitan cultures of the postcolonial world. Hoskote was co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim. His latest curated project Detour: Five Position Papers on the Republic (conceived as a ‘critical homage’ on the centennial of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, 1909), was held in Mumbai, December 2009-January 2010. Ranjit Hoskote prefers to call Mumbai, Bombay.

RANJIT HOSKOTE CONTEXTS AND VECTORS: THE INDIAN ART SITUATION The global attention that contemporary Indian art has received in recent years has been largely fixated on the boom in the Indian art market, itself a resonance of the resurgent Indian economy. This reveals only one dimension of the dramatic transition through which the subcontinental art situation has passed since the early 1990s. Indeed, it is true that the market has transformed the lives of many Indian artists and opened up undreamt-of opportunities for them, in terms of experimentation with media and materials, gallery infrastructure, and the expansion of consciousness that comes with travel. Paradoxically, however, the demands on many artists have increased to such an extent that their freedom to extend themselves in bold new formal and conceptual directions has been reduced.

Meanwhile, some of the most expressively and conceptually stimulating artistic projects are being conducted outside the market scenario. These projects are staged in those richly productive grey zones of engagement where a self-critical art practice bypasses the gallery and auction-house circuits, to forge solidarities with other cultural practices.

Under this rubric, I would place not only video and intermedia art, but also social projects and new-media initiatives; interfaces between imagemaking, pedagogy and activism; and projects that are research-based and archival in orientation. This tendency in contemporary Indian art is strongly represented by artists like Ravi Agarwal, who attends closely to the crises of ecological devastation and the important public question of environmental change; Shilpa Gupta, who addresses the complex politics of prejudice, self-articulation and violence in the Indian subcontinent; and the Raqs Media Collective, whose three members combine a commitment to dissent and its defence with their articulation of plural, layered narratives of place and belonging as a guarantee against the monopolistic claims of religion, nation and State. Significantly, Agarwal and Raqs were first presented in the context of international contemporary art by Okwui Enwezor in his documenta 11 (2002), and Gupta, although based in India, received wide support and acclaim internationally long before she began to show her work systematically at home.

This is not to argue that the more mainline practices of painting, photography, sculpture and graphics are in decline. Quite the contrary: the Indian art scene provides testimony to the continuing refinement and amplification of these forms, with individual practitioners combining the expressive and the critical, the poetic and the political in compelling and unpredictable ways. Printmakers like Zarina Hashmi, photographers like Dayanita Singh, Sunil Gupta and Sonia Jabbar, painters like Mehlli Gobhai, Manu Parekh, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, Gargi Raina, Jitish Kallat and Praneet Soi, sculptors like Bharti Kher, Jagannath Panda and Sumedh Rajendran continue to extend their medium, revisit and interrogate questions of formal language, and explore the psychological impulses and cultural contexts that form their principal subject matter. And while these mainline practices are largely sustained by the gallery system, they can also summon assistance—both in terms of conceptual repose and production support —from the emergent infrastructures provided by residency programs, grant-making institutions and foundations.

I will reflect here on some of the major aspects of this transition, writing as one who has participated intensely in the contemporary Indian art situation since 1988 as critic, theorist and curator. I write, also, as a friend of the Indian artists who are my contemporaries, having collaborated with many of them in numerous image-making and discursive adventures. If I were to describe the changing ecology in which Indian art has developed during the last decade, I would identify the Indian art market boom as only one among four key vectors of change, the other three being: the schisms and scissions within the Indian nation-State, which have altered the textures of public life and the scope of cultural expression; newly available media and technologies of image-making and communication; and transcultural experiments in travel, dialogue and collaboration.

The first decade of the twenty first-century has not been synonymous in India with any single major political event—as the 1960s had been with the end of the Nehruvian consensus on national urgencies, the 1970s with the draconian Emergency and the end of the utopian phase of the Republic, the 1980s with the decline of strong national parties and the advent of regional power centres, and the 1990s with the cataclysmic violence following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, 1992. However, the period 2000-09 has witnessed the deepening of India’s political schisms, even as a newfound advanced-nation level of prosperity has become accessible to a few, while the many continue to fight subsistence-level crises of food availability.

Although the ascendancy of the Hindu-majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party was broken electorally by the centrist Congress Party and its allies in 2004, the public sphere remains sharply polarised. An aggressive, upper-caste Hindu majoritarian movement claims the ground of hypernationalism; it is opposed by equally assertive subnational movements and lower-caste mass mobilisations.

India’s religious and ethnic minorities face the dilemma of facing inward to embrace communitarian values or facing outward to play their role as citizens of a modern nation-State fully. Since successive governments have followed the populist policy of appeasing ultra-orthodox sentiment in every community, the tenor of public life has gradually grown intolerant of dissent and idiosyncrasy.

This negative development has had a specific effect on the artist’s claim to intervene in the public sphere. The artist’s freedom of expression has been infringed repeatedly by the discourses of politicised religiosity and ethnic pride, most viciously in the case of MF Husain, a foundational figure in the history of modern Indian art. A sustained campaign of legal harassment and mob violence by the Right has forced the nonagenarian painter, writer and film-maker to exile himself in the UK and the UAE. At the same time, many artists have wrested opportunity from catastrophe: they have been prompted by the situation to mobilise alliances with writers and cultural activists, to organise platforms of resistance against illiberalism and censorship.1

Alongside these political developments, Indian artists gradually found themselves in possession of newly available technologies of imaging and communication from the late 1990s onward. The advent of advanced video technology, the internet, graphic interfaces, virtual-reality software and digital retrieval systems has amplified the scope of artistic production and also, crucially, transformed the nature of artistic practice. For many artists, the work of art has been rendered unstable, versional, re-programmable and open-ended: it is no longer the irreducible summation of a process so much as it is a provisional statement of the process, not a destination but a log entry.2

The globalisation-era potential of the Indian art world was most productively realised in a range of transcultural experiments in dialogue, encounter and travel that began in the late 1990s. With agencies like the Japan Foundation, the Goethe Institute, the Triangle Arts Trust and the Prince Claus Fund underwriting these experiments, Indian artists, critics, theorists and curators benefited enormously from residencies, workshops, conferences and collaborations held both in India and overseas. A cross-fertilisation of ideas took place during these exchanges.

The most revolutionary outcome of these transcultural experiments was the shift in paradigm and perspective for an entire generation of Indian artists, who abandoned the colonialist centre-periphery model of the world, in which the West was always the donor and the non-West always the recipient of contemporary culture, a relationship marked by the syndromes of belatedness, imitation and permanent apprenticeship. Instead, these artists began to perceive the world, correctly, as an assembly of multiple, improvisational, self-renovating modernisms: a conversation among regional trajectories of the contemporary.3

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STUDIO One of the most palpable changes that took place in Indian art practice during the early years of the twenty first-century was the transformation of the studio, its locus, nature and textures. Until relatively recently, most artists worked at home or in a rented apartment in the neighbourhood. In some cities, artists would join together in a cooperative structure or negotiate with institutions such as the Lalit Kala Akademi/National Academy of Fine Arts, to establish studio spaces: the Cholamandal Artists Village near Chennai embody the first option, while the Garhi Studios, New Delhi, exemplify the second. While painters tended to work in isolation, sculptors found it necessary to work with a modest team of assistants and executants. With the scale of exhibition spaces and the tempo of invitations and commissions having been scaled up, however, many artists now find it possible and indeed imperative to extend their studios into a space between laboratory and factory, with the work process departmentalised and delegated among assistants.

Krishnamachari Bose and Riyas Komu in Mumbai work on this model, for instance, as do Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta in New Delhi.

For another kind of artist, such as Ashok Sukumaran, the studio has become portable, virtual and tactically mobile: often no larger than a laptop opened up and worked on in airport lounges and while on residency in remote parts of Europe or North America; often, the studio has no materiality beyond an exchange of drafts and diagrams via email. And yet, for artists like Sukumaran and Shaina Anand, his collaborator in a series of social and community-based projects, public space often becomes the widest possible studio space: they tune into social relationships, trace the contours of political asymmetries of access over sidewalks and hydrants, map the invisible metropolitan architecture built around electrical connections and cable television networks.

The economies of making in which Indian artists now operate may usefully be described by the opposition of distribution and delegation. By distribution, I mean a participatory process of art-making that is fundamentally democratising and transformative; that empowers its participants with information, skills and a potential autonomy; that activates an audience. Under this rubric, I would place the Raqs Media Collective, the Cybermohalla initiative undertaken by SARAI in the shantytowns of Delhi, the discursive platforms orchestrated by CAMP (Critical Art and Media Practices) in Bombay, and the PeriFerry festival of the arts organised by the Desire Machine Collective in Guwahati, in turbulent north-eastern India. In all these projects, expressive and critical activity fold into one another; collaborations among artists, theorists, curators and activists are encouraged; and an effort is made to convene a new and engaged audience for cultural practice from among various social classes.

Delegation, on the other hand, implies the production of individual art works whose realisation—for reasons of scale or technical complexity—requires mixed teams of art school trained assistants, technicians and labourers. While its apologists present this tendency as a return to the sixteenth-century atelier, it is really a simple industrialisation of art practice inspired by the practices of twentieth-century monumental sculptors, functioning between studio and factory.

This operational method is a response to the voracity of collectors, to cavernous exhibition spaces and the pressures of a career that typically begins with art school recruitment and is pursued through complex negotiations with dealers, gallerists, collectors and investors across the globe. I do not wish to make a value judgement favouring distribution and deploring delegation; my purpose is simply to indicate the variety of scales at which art is now practised in India.

CO-PRODUCING THE GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY For many decades, between the 1950s and the 1990s, Indian artists saw themselves as apprentices or understudies to an international art system that was fundamentally and inviolably Euro-American, visitors who would never be asked to sit down at the high table. They shared this syndrome with all other postcolonial subjectivities, whether from Nigeria, Egypt, the Philippines, the Caribbean, or indeed, for a considerable period, even Australia and New Zealand.

This has changed completely, especially with the advent of the internet and the strengthening of the global biennale system, as well as with the rise of a new generation in every postcolonial society, which does not share the inhibitions and self-debilitating doubt of earlier decades. Not only has the high table lost some of its prestige, but it now takes its place in a room where numerous other tables have asserted their own relevance.

The nature of the global contemporary has changed radically, with a clear recognition that the colonial asymmetries of power and knowledge mask entangled histories of complicity and repression, that the fortunes of people thought to be mutually remote are in fact closely connected, that the butterfly effect ensures our mutual interrelationship, whether through collaboration or catastrophe, on Spaceship Earth.

Increasingly, therefore, many Indian artists realise that they are active participants in defining and constructing the global contemporary. I use this term “global contemporary” to designate the present as a predicament, which must be addressed creatively and innovated around. It is not merely a given existential situation or a trend to be subscribed to. Indeed, the global contemporary is not legislated and exported across the planet from Western Europe and North America;

it proceeds from highly differentiated starting points, from vigorous theatres of the Now being staged in Abidjan and Buenos Aires, Jakarta and Bombay, Rabat and Beirut, Seville and New Orleans, Manila and Ljubljana. The contemporary is a series of entanglements among diverse histories of political struggle, cultural vision and artistic exploration. In this context, the Indian art situation offers an extraordinary traversal of choices and temporalities.

Consider the coordinates of the new atlas of Indian art that I have drawn here. There are four generations of Indian artists working simultaneously: think of these as the latitudes of our atlas. In each generation, we find artists who subscribe to one or another of at least six major perspectives: think of these as our longitudes. Mapped in these terms, the atlas includes artists whose work has evolved from critical apprenticeship to the Schools of Paris or New York and found anchorage in a renewed classicism, a renegotiated Sublime or a vigorously critical abstraction: M F Husain, Akbar Padamsee, Ram Kumar, Jehangir Sabavala, Mehlli Gobhai, and Zarina Hashmi. It also includes artists who formulate a language reflecting the local and immediate combined with sophisticated and historically informed references to the 1960s Western avant-gardes: Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, Rameshwar Broota, and Gulammohammed Sheikh. It has room, also, for artists whose subtle politics of self inspires them to combine autobiography with allegories of the nation-State: Ranbir Kaleka, Atul Dodiya, Surendran Nair, Subodh Gupta, Dayanita Singh, Gargi Raina, Nataraj Sharma, and Jitish Kallat.

Further, we find artists who deconstruct the fixities of identity through the ambiguities of belonging, often in risky, performative modes: Bharti Kher, Nikhil Chopra, and Tejal Shah. The list is far from exhausted, since there are also artists who scrutinise the politics of information networks and mediatic flows, and who deconstruct the official discourses that control the individual subjectivity: the Raqs Media Collective, Shilpa Gupta, Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand. And this capacious atlas still has place for artists who confront terror and displacement, and emphasise a resilient optimism, in an epoch whose leitmotifs are occupation, torture, surveillance, migration and genocide, in a variety of media from painting to assemblage and installation: Krishen Khanna, Sudarshan Shetty, Baiju Parthan, Praneet Soi, Sumedh Rajendran, Riyas Komu and Anant Joshi.

Such entanglements, which I have elsewhere described as forming “continents of affinity” mapped against nationalist and Cold War geography, are increasingly being recorded by new curatorial and theoretical frameworks emerging from India. Significantly, 2008 marked the first time that major biennales were co-curated by Indians—Manifesta 7 by the Raqs Media Collective and the 7th Gwangju Biennale by myself.4

Correspondingly, the rubrics of debate have changed. The tedious themes that dominated much discourse in the Indian art world between the 1950s and the 1990s have been rendered irrelevant. The anxiety of national identity, typically phrased in the form of specious binaries such as “Indianness vs. internationalism” or “tradition vs. modernity”, has receded. The chimera of ‘authenticity’, to be secured as the guarantee of an embattled local against an overwhelming global, has been swept away. I would speculate that the vacuum left behind by this lapsed, unproductive rhetoric will be filled by the awareness that transcultural experience is the only certain basis of contemporary artistic practice.

As the cultural theorist Nancy Adajania and I have argued elsewhere, transcultural experience—and the corresponding stance of “critical transregionality”—gives the cultural practitioner “strategic and imaginative freedom... to link regions on the basis of elective affinities arising from common cultural predicaments, jointly faced crises, and shared choices of practice”.5 This is not a means of escaping the urgencies of the globalised local; rather, it sustains a responsible and responsive encounter with the contemporary, with all its manifold provocations.

Notes 1 For an account of the foundational proposals of postcolonial India, framed through the debates among Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru, among other thinkers, see Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, New Delhi: Penguin, 1998. For a study of the major social and political developments that have taken place in India since Independence, see Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: A History of the World’s Largest Democracy, New Delhi: Picador, 2007 2

For a detailed account of technological change and its effect on Indian art practice, see Ranjit Hoskote, ‘The Elusiveness of the Transitive: Reflections on the Curatorial Gesture and Its Conditions in India’, in Joselina Cruz et al eds., Locus: Interventions in Art Practice, Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2005: 225-237 3

For a substantial account of the opening up of transcultural exchange and dialogue, and its formative influence on the younger generation of Indian artists from the late 1990s onward, see Nancy Adajania, ‘Probing the Khojness of Khoj’, in Pooja Sood ed., Ten Years of Khoj, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2009

4

Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Scales of Elaboration’, in Okwui Enwezor ed., Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions (exhibition catalogue), 7th Gwangju Biennale; Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2008: 40-53

5

See Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Retrieving the Far West: Towards a Curatorial Representation of the House of Islam’, in Shaheen Merali ed., Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation, London/Berlin: Saqi & Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2008: 121

between art and action lucy orta

ALEX GAWRONSKI Utopia is a word that, since its popularisation via Thomas Moore’s famous 1516 tract of the same name,1 has been abused and misappropriated numerously.

This holds true in the contemporary art world also where the concept of utopianism, though central to twentieth-century modernism, has since been largely discredited and maligned. Curiously, the notion of utopianism has recently come to the fore again, if not generally, then certainly within the domain of the by now, thoroughly globalised contemporary art scene. One reason for this is the nature of this wider globalised scene itself, a corporatised scene driven by the demands of trans-national business everywhere purveying the spread of ‘turbocapitalism’. Thus, within the contemporary art world corresponding with this global situation, those artists aware but critical of corporate globalisation have turned evermore to exploring ways of addressing and circumventing its significant negative quotient.

Among such practitioners is the British, Paris-based artist Lucy Orta, exhibiting in the Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together for the Adelaide Festival. Orta’s practice, alongside her contemporaries like Andrea Zittel, Atelier van Lieshout, the N55 collective and Thomas Hirschhorn to name but a few, is predicated overall on a utopian investigation and critique of the effects of corporate globalisation on the contemporary individual. Moreover, such a practice questions in particular, globalisation’s dire effects on subjects unable to access the material and social privileges that globalisation, as a positivist discourse, invariably promises. The utopianism evident in Orta’s work, its desire to not only represent life but change it, is by no means naïve though. Neither is it nostalgic for romanticised images of earlier avant gardes. Utilising a range of inter-disciplinary means, Lucy Orta, in close collaboration with her husband Jorge, an Argentinean artist and activist,2 challenge through their collective multidisciplinary activities, globalisation’s hegemonic assumptions. In doing so, they also indict globalisation’s rampant tendency to isolate and discard those deemed unnecessary to its hyperbolic operations.

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For Adelaide International: Apart, we are together Orta presents a continuation of her Nexus Architecture project (1993-2002), a series emblematic of her wider practice.3 For these public pieces, which combine architecture, performance and fashion, invited individuals come together to be physically joined by clothing specially designed by Orta, often in collaboration with the participants themselves.

Some of these clothing items have also been designed remotely via the Internet by interested would-be participants.4 This process further extends the metaphoric implications of the term Nexus which means, “link or bond, (where) the symbolic content is more important than functional. The inter-connected system of channels, zippers and connecting elements (of Nexus Architecture) are direct embodiments of the idea of social link—a ‘social sculpture’”.5

The social aspect of these works is eminently apparent with mass participants joined together either front to back in snaking queues or as a standing group interconnected in grid formation. The nature of these performances, like the clothing itself, which is reminiscent—albeit in a quasi sci-fi mode—of outdoor or adventure wear, is ambiguous. For instance, are such performances, given that they are often semi-obstructive interventions occurring in public places, actually protests, or are they just art? Such a question is even more pertinent considering some of the contexts in which Orta has produced Nexus Architecture. At the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997 for example, Orta collaborated with migrant female labourers from the Usindiso women’s hostel who co-designed their own costumes6 and at the Biennale’s opening, “formed a defiant chain linking the city and exhibition venues”.7 Similarly, in 2002 Orta organised Nexus Architecture x 110–Nexus Type Cholet, for a group of one hundred and ten children in Cholet, France. While undoubtedly playful, this piece was also an extension of another presented in 1998 in Lyon and designed to bring public attention to the “Global March Against Child Labour”, a steady increase in child labour being one of globalisation’s more archaic pseudo-Victorian manifestations.

With works such as these mind, it would seem that Orta’s greater project was transparently linked, in a spirit of protest, to the idea, also prominent in today’s global art world, of art as activism. Yet, Orta herself, not discounting her strong conviction in the social import of art, complicates this assumption, The work we do is entirely an artistic endeavour based on a conception of how we envision contemporary art and its ability to communicate with all kinds of different audiences and intervene in all walks of life as a means to building a more equitable and sustainable world. We are picking up from where Beuys left, convinced that art has the power to transform not just the individual, but society at large and we are eager to try as many different artistic formats and strategies as possible.8 The reference to Beuys and his “social sculpture” may seem odd taking into account the German artist’s almost messianic self-fashioning. Indeed, such fashioning of the artist as righteous redeemer appears distinctly alien to the Orta enterprise which these days operates predominantly under the appellation Studio Orta, a collective that consists foremost of Lucy and Jorge Orta, but is additionally, a virtual canopy under which many different people work, with different competences from artists, technicians, curators, administrators etc., who come and go depending on the scale and time frame of a project. We have a permanent staff to manage the day-to-day running of the different studios, conditioning of artworks and touring exhibitions. Our practice has grown and the work more voluminous so our physical spaces have enlarged too. We now occupy a studio in central Paris, The Dairy (2000) and Les Moulins (2007), which are both near Paris in a new cultural development we are instigating... We founded Studio Orta in 1991 so that we could work with and employ associates with a vision to create a large enterpriselike structure in the spirit of the Factory—it’s difficult to ignore the Warholian legacy.9

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Studio Orta appears then not only to upset the traditionalist envisaging of the artist as solo-genius but perhaps more tellingly, appropriates too the language and structures of corporate globalisation. The corporatised ring to the name Studio Orta, at the same time, undermines through the collective’s actual activities, the fundamental profit motif central to all contemporary corporations.

In this way, it were as if Studio Orta had recognised the social implications of the term “corporation” meaning a collective entity, a corporate body whose individual members share the same outlook, concerns and ethical responsibility.

This of course, is the antithesis of the notion of corporatisation we have become accustomed to, where ethics and individual identity are subsumed for the sake of the anonymous accumulation of wealth and its application as the predominant post-political expression of power and domination today.

Somewhat surprising though and equally as anomalous as Orta’s previous reference to Joseph Beuys is her invocation of the Factory and the “Warholian legacy”. For while the spectre of Warhol’s venture might be difficult, nigh impossible, to escape in a contemporary cultural climate already way beyond mere capitalist saturation, the social and collective dimension of the Factory are leagues removed from those of Studio Orta. In the latter instance, the socialisation of production is incorporated into the very nature of the products, the artworks, performances and clothing themselves. In this manner, the collective modality is logically broadened in a multiplicity of ways to encompass public—art and nonart—arenas. In the case of the former Warholian model, on the other hand, the social dimension functions as the atavisation of the cult of personality central to post-World War II USA (and global) culture. Whereas Warhol’s social effort is “implosive” in a Baudrillardean sense—insofar as it coolly regards the Social as non-existent other than as a proliferation of mechanical representations and their endless repetition—Orta’s is utopian in its belief that art-making must and should spread naturally into fields other than its own networks.

Further pursuing such socialist possibilities for art are Orta’s events collectively titled 70x7 The Meal, “sculptures and wall works”10 which are also being exhibited at the Adelaide International. 70x7 The Meal was first instigated in 2000 and it is important to mention Jorge’s crucial role in this series; The relationships—artist, artwork, production, diffusion and spectator—were central to Jorge’s preoccupations, promoting the idea of artist as a mediator of a collective process, someone who could develop subjacent ‘feasibility structures’ to realise collective ideas and projects, and this is something we still practice today in works like 70x7 The Meal.11 For these works, which are explicitly collective and socialising in character, Orta would invite seventy members of a chosen location, a town or city, to invite seven other people to attend a dinner specially orchestrated by the artist and her Studio. In the process of realising numerous situations of this kind, Studio Orta would design and have manufactured, limited edition porcelain plates, one for each person attending. These plates are encrypted with images and words that emphasise sociability and interconnectedness and, of course, their intrinsic relationship to the communality of eating. In locations like Innsbruck, Austria; Cologne, Germany; Antwerp, Belgium and Napa in the USA, the plates were editioned by no less auspicious a company than Royal Limoges in France. However,

instead of using this fact to cheaply elevate the objects and the events to a level of petit-bourgeois fetishism, Orta often chose to give away the plates at the end of each meal to their users. In this way, these communal performances become part of a micro gift-economy where the gifts of food, company and precious objects were offered in exchange for the time and participation of those agreeing to take part.

Additionally emphasising the gift economy inherent to the 70x7 The Meal series is Orta’s frequent use of discarded produce for its essential gastronomic component. Recently, Orta, like many, has recorded being appalled at the general extent of global food waste. Thus, the cycle 70x7 The Meal was also partially influenced by Orta’s “dismay during French agricultural demonstrations (where) each year tons of fruit are dumped onto the highways to protest against imported goods”.12 By now, this is a well-documented phenomenon of global capitalism which prefers to destroy perfectly good food if it means a company can maintain its competitive edge. Indeed, such companies capitalise on consumer fear of rotten or contaminated food by making them believe that such destruction is necessary for “hygiene purposes”.

Significantly, numerous others see the situation differently. Veteran French filmmaker Agnes Varda for example, in her alternatingly playfully autobiographical and excoriating documentary The Gleaners and I from 2000, (and therefore coinciding with the inception of 70x7 The Meal) documents this very same phenomenon. Yet, alongside her indictment of mass food waste, Varda simultaneously charts the tradition of gleaning in France that allows anyone to legally retrieve produce discarded after crop harvesting. Viewed in this light then, Orta’s 70x7 The Meal events, as well as other of her works in a similar vein, most notably All in One Basket and Hortirecycling,13 tap into such a tradition while simultaneously increasing local awareness of an endemic global problem.

The use of such leftovers—which in small town contexts reference as well, longstanding regional traditions that seek to maximise a food’s usability—is however only one aspect of these orchestrated gatherings. Indeed, on some occasions local celebrity chefs have been invited either to cook meals from abandoned produce or to prepare dishes especially for them using local seasonal foods. Employing well known chef’s acts as a supplementary means of publicly addressing the issue of global food shortages while again, celebrating the social importance of dining.

Naturally, 70x7 The Meal, as an important aspect of the Orta oeuvre, raises some fairly complex questions about readily held conceptions of the Social and of the social function of art. For example, it could be superficially deduced from these events that they automatically prefigured the Social as an intrinsically unified and unifying ideal. This, nonetheless, is not the case when one recognises that these situations are deliberately predicated on inviting people from very diverse backgrounds. 70x7 The Meal, Act III, Innsbruck for instance, included “musicians, actors, politicians, organic farmers, bureaucrats, business people, doctors, etc.”14 thus allowing “the possibility for new connections and dialogues between diverse segments of society that would not ordinarily meet”.15 Furthermore, the unexpectedness of encounters facilitated by these means, consciously takes into account possible friction and disagreement as much as it does the new friendships, affection or “perhaps even love”16 that may arise from them. In fact, the utopian quality of 70x7 The Meal lies not only in its overt highlighting of communality but also precisely, in its transgressing the normatively isolating institutions that otherwise keep conflicting values and their bearers pigeon-holed and apart. To express the freedom to disagree, and in person, is as much a liberating experience as it to connect and bond.

Lastly, the other facet of Studio Orta’s multitudinous projects appearing in the Adelaide International is the The Gift–Life Nexus. This cycle, consisting principally of objects, began in 1996. In the case of the specific artefacts to be presented in Adelaide, they have all been refashioned from work produced for ‘Fluid Architecture’, a workshop instigated by Studio Orta in Melbourne in 2002. The types of objects that comprise The Gift–Life Nexus are most commonly sculpted and constructed heart-shaped forms that view the symbol of the heart, central to the history of art in the West and elsewhere, “as a symbol of the gift of generosity, life and empathy”.17 Moreover, Orta has stated that dealing with so loaded a symbol allowed for “an open-ended discussion on the meaning of ‘heart’ —religious, emotional, scientific, literal—with a huge diversity of communities”.18 However, a more personal side to this project underwrites its more semantic aspect. The Gift–Life Nexus first came about after, a dear friend of ours died a senseless death on a waiting list for a heart transplant and this made us aware of the fact that there are thousands of deaths per year in France due to lack of organ donations—in a country that can afford solutions!

(Therefore) we believed that the role of art in this sensitive subject area could be used to generate workshops, actions and exhibitions that could awaken a consciousness... we embarked on ten years of research leading to the production of artefacts, installations and performances under the heading Opera-tion Life Nexus19 with the collaboration of over forty cities around the world.20

The associated The Gift–Life Nexus works consequently invoke yet another gift economy, which ultimately imply questions of life and death. Actually, there could be no more potent a gift economy than that suggested by organ donation, which is in the most literal sense, usually a gift of life. Once more, the centrality of the motif of the gift economy is foregrounded in Orta’s practice. Its dramatic proximity to considerations of life and death in The Gift–Life Nexus pieces are equally present—albeit more subtly—in the 70x7 The Meal performances; the gift of food also bestows life. Similarly, the gift of shelter implied through the Nexus Architecture project indicates related concerns for the fragility and vulnerability of life particularly as it is exposed to the challenges of a cut-throat post-industrial world. Perceived from a global perspective, the highly emotive and ethically complex matter of organ donation calls to mind also the massive illegal, ‘heartless’ and basically sinister, contemporary trans-national trade in body organs. The disturbing reach of such trade—that regularly involves bribery, coercion, kidnapping and murder—simply illustrates that in a globalised scenario overwhelmingly purveying the instrumentalism of Capital, life is cheap, even if its constituent components are extremely expensive. Overall, Orta aims to partially circumvent the instrumentalism of the global-capitalist ethos by proposing alternative methodologies and works that are open-ended, poetic, emotive and ambiguous.

By now, the utopian dimension of Orta’s practice will be clearly apparent; its privileging of collectivity, co-operation, experimentation and gifting all testify to a utopian impulse. This impulse is certainly evident in the three related strands of works showing in Adelaide International. Similarly apparent, is the distinctly humanitarian aspect of the Studio Orta enterprise, a fact doubly emphasised by statements made by Lucy Orta herself; “Art-making is profoundly emotional, an expression of hope, a proposal for alternative living, it’s a life project; it’s a commitment with yourself as well as with society.”21

Of course, such stressing of the utopian and humanitarian capabilities of art-making have until relatively recently been more or less ridiculed; the globally dominant model of contemporary artistic endeavour being largely —whether ‘ironically’ or not—a quasi-corporate, individualistic business-geared one. What Studio Orta’s multifaceted activity proves is that a utopian and humanitarian direction need not automatically signify theoretical backwardness or naïvety. In fact, one of Orta’s more renowned supporters is the French theorist of time, speed, technology and art, Paul Virilio, a writer who could be accused of idealism, but certainly not of simple-mindedness. Like Virilio, Orta recognises the dystopian surfeit—social, economic and personal—that comes with contemporary globalisation. And while Orta does not believe that her art, or any art for that matter, could alter this situation holus-bolus, she is certainly convinced that art can change life on a micro-level. Micro-change affected by a commitment to collective action is made powerful when it is recognised as interconnecting with diversely distributed practices similarly inclined. Furthermore, commitment to change of any kind avoids the habitual cynicism associated with many facets of the global, hyper-capitalistic art industry, and consciously distances itself from this.

In place of slavishly craving adulation within this network, Studio Orta utilises the art world’s presentational structures as merely one avenue of possibility among others.

On a contrasting note, the importance of ambiguity to the output of Studio Orta saves it from misguided evangelical readings. The Nexus Architecture series could equally read ‘negatively’ as representations of an enforced or artificial connection. These works could also be read as theatrically enacting the kind of servitude commonly associated with the prison chain gang, despite the colourful, celebratory garments. Meanwhile, the term “nexus”, used variously throughout Orta’s production, could distantly conjure the distinctly nightmarish world of the ‘Nexus 6’ Replicants or clones popularised by Ridley Scott’s iconic 1982 film Blade Runner. The ‘nexus’ in this instance is a biogenetic one and therefore relevant as a potential reference for Orta’s endeavour, because of the latter’s strong emphasis on the innate relatedness of disparate and otherwise physically disconnected individuals and communities. Pursuing this contra-dialectic it could be remembered as well that personal connection, as well as the desire for it, instead of basically biological is actually, eminently contextual.

For instance, a writer like the outspoken Czech novelist Milan Kundera, would remind anyone that for those who grew up under Communist, or other types of forcibly communalising dictatorships, there could be nothing more liberating than the solitude of one’s own time and thoughts. Could this not also be the case though in a post-Communist, neo-liberal era where sociability is regularly pre-packaged or dictated predominantly through an emphasis on the consuming experience and spaces of shopping? Facing the sheer ubiquity of such a pervasive contemporary focus is not dis-connection as legitimate and freeing a gesture as the pseudo-social celebration of capital’s intervention at every level of subjective life?

Ultimately though, as far as Lucy and Studio Orta’s production is concerned, it is the challenging ambiguity separating belief from critique and action from fiction, that positively propels art in a fraught global context. Rather than hopelessly implosive and contradictory, it is the unavoidable tension or “agonism”22 engendered by such dialogue that the Orta project regards alternatively as vitally constructive; it is regenerative for art and for the future expansion of its possible social roles.

Notes 1 Moore’s Utopia, as has often been misunderstood, was not the author’s attempted representation of a ‘perfect land’ but a satirical and hypothetical vehicle by which to address current issues of European politics and questions of Statehood. After all ‘utopia’, derived from the Greek, literally means “no-place” 2

“Firstly as Jorge and I work together it’s important to mention his background as this has played a core role in the foundation our common practice, although new influences have evolved the form, our conception of art has remained pretty constant. In reaction to the oppressive dictatorial regime in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 Jorge’s passion and engagement for art was an extension of the youth movement ideologies and his personal mentors and friends, were artists Edgardo Vigo and Graciela G. Marx in Argentina, Clemente Padín in Uruguay and Dámaso Ogaz in Venezuala. Mail Art was used to exchange their ideas and strategies across Latin America and elsewhere overseas and they believed in the statement: ‘An art from the base upwards, without artists!’” Email interview with the author December 2009–January 2010

3

“Nexus Architecture (1993-2002) is regarded as an emblem of my practice”. Email interview, op cit.

4

This aspect of the Nexus Architecture is entitled D-FORM. It “proposes a method for creating Nexus suits that evolve through an analysis of our personal/emotional qualities and the body language of our postures. The challenge here is to preserve the collective integrity of the Nexus metaphor, yet allow each suit to manifest the uniqueness of each participant’s personality. The project is online and anyone is free to personalise, design and create a suit http://www.studio-orta.com/dform_project/”. ibid.

5

ibid.

6

“For the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale we began experimenting with personalising the suits and invited a group of migrant female labourers from a local shelter to select preferred graphic designs from Dutch Wax prints and Zulu Kangas, which produced some of the most spectacular pieces, each stitched by the women themselves.” Orta also mentions “the positive empowering results of the Johannesburg workshops, and the women’s attachment to the symbolic meaning of their garments”. ibid.

7 Robert Pinto, Nicholas Bourriaud, Maia Damianovic eds, Lucy Orta, London, New York: Phaidon Press, 2003: 19 8

Email interview, op cit.

9

ibid.

10

ibid.

11

ibid.

12

ibid.

13

The All in One Basket (1997-) and Hortirecycling (1999-) projects generally involve the explicit gathering and recycling of discarded food at markets like Les Halles in Paris. Many of these foods would be turned into preserves exhibited and sold either at the markets themselves or at galleries.

As part of these interrelated series, Orta would video the process and record interviews with people about their attitudes to food and shopping. See Robert Pinto, Nicholas Bourriaud, Maia Damianovic eds, Lucy Orta: 63-68

14

ibid: 95

15

ibid.

16

ibid.

17

Email interview, op cit.

18

ibid.

19

Some of these works revealingly betray a historical link to the early twentieth-century materialist theatre experiments of the Russian Constructivists. See in particular Orta’s works, Nexus Architecture x 50 – Nexus Type Opera.tion VII and Modular Architecture x 10, 1996. Robert Pinto, Nicholas Bourriaud, Maia Damianovic eds, Lucy Orta: 126 and 128-129 (respectively) 20

Email interview, op cit.

21

Robert Pinto, Nicholas Bourriaud, Maia Damianovic eds, Lucy Orta: 13

22

“Agonism” is a term championed by French theorist Chantal Mouffe to express the necessity of maintaining tension in democratic political process. This avoids the compromises of a collapse into a false and begrudging consensus. Agonism also acknowledges the centrality of difference in all communication and champions disagreement as both a necessary and vitally constructive force in genuinely democratic society and politics. See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London, New York: Verso, 2000

Page 49: Lucy & Jorge Orta, The Gift–Life Nexus Sèvres, 2000 Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photo courtesy the artists Page 50: Lucy & Jorge Orta, 70x7 The Meal act IV Dieuze, 2000 Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photo courtesy the artists Page 51: Lucy & Jorge Orta, Urban Life Guard NIO 0317, 2005 Photo courtesy the artists

under the counter interview: ken bolton

5 3 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0

Robert Cook Here’s where I interview Ken Bolton. In July last year Art Writing was published, a paperback compilation of Bolton’s critical writing on art in Adelaide in the 1990s and 2000s.1 The cover is (process) yellow with a black and white of Bolton holding a wine glass close to his chest, his thumb at that soft bit where neck turns to breastbone. Maybe he’s at an opening. He’s smiling. He has big hair, looks like he could be someone from The Models. What else is cool about the cover is that whoever did the design made “art” part of the title small and white and “writing” big and black. The small white “art” almost disappears against the yellow background. It is there as a ghost. To me this forces attention upon the writing before the art that is being written about. Process precedes subject.

Now of course, this cannot happen—we all know (sarcasm) that the art kicks the writing into motion. I’ve always been curious how far written discourse permeates making, how it shapes it, how the desire of the artist is shaped by the desire of the critic (fake Lacanian theorising!). And now, this stuff that can’t be known, this precious unknowningness, is right there on the cover! However, on another level Bolton’s writing really does precede the art in the title. He is, after all, one of Australia’s foremost poets (I can’t say famous because, Les Murray aside, ‘famous poet’ is an oxymoron here), making work alongside the late John Forbes, and the living Laurie Duggan, John Tranter et al. He is a writer therefore, and then he is an art writer (though his editorship of Otis Rush brought the two together). So the fact that an entire book of art writing had been put out interested me—how was the art to be fashioned in the writing, how was it to follow, how was it to lead? Plus, more generally, I’m always interested in what poets have to say about art and the how of their saying it. I’m far more interested in them than novelists on the subject.

When novelists encounter visual art they too often strain for literary effect. Poets don’t seem to; they are more pragmatic and searching, less in love with the idea of art to put it on the novelists’ pedastal. In doing so, their writing generates thought, doesn’t shut it down with fancy phrasing. Plus, there’s a neat lineage of poets on art that includes Frank O’Hara, also a curator, and John Ashberry as the most obvious. But the younger American poet Jeremy Sigler writes about art too, and makes it; he’s amazing. It’s an interesting field. Happily, there’s nothing overly literary about Ken’s writing on art. And this makes sense because there’s nothing overly literary about his poetry either. In fact, he refers to it as nothing but thinking; it is collagey and philosophical instead. His art writing is similarly open. It sprawls, lurches. It doesn’t seem to know the destination. And to me at least, there’s a resulting refusal to polish. I do not get the sense that once he’s found where he is wanting to go with a piece that he starts again and sets up the flagposts, makes it all coherent as a whole (that’s the way I try to operate). I get the sense that he leaves it alone because the steps are essential to conveying the activity of finding an idea. The result is that we don’t really know which trip he’s on when we start reading. I might be romantic about it all but that’s the poet thing at play, the wanting to find the new thing. Here’s where I interview Ken Bolton.

ROBERT COOK: Ken, thanks for agreeing to shoot the breeze—I’m interested in speaking with you for a couple of reasons. One is that your book is Adelaidespecific, and it opens up a range of cultural centre/periphery-type questions that for those of us working in other (admittedly more exotic and gorgeous) far-flung locales remain as relevant as they are desperately unfashionable. The other is that to me you are a ‘proper’ writer who writes about art. That is, you are not a dour (or, hey! even foppish) ‘arts professional’ writing for arts professional reasons, to show off to peers, to inhabit the discourse, to get even, to set the record straight, to rack up research points, to get the next job.2) You write—and this is totally evident in the writing—out of curiosity, not ambition. This makes your writing on art I think different from criticism and art-writing as we typically know it. It makes it also somewhat unique, especially in this country. What say?

KEN BOLTON: I’ve probably seemed all of those things at various times to people here—dour, foppish, mean-minded, show-off, etcetera. I don’t mind showing off, to stay amused, but you are right, none of it was done for professional advancement.

I’ve somehow never been on that ladder. The centre/periphery thing—yes, it’s not fashionable—are we whingeing too much? Can it possibly look good? What will change anyway? Those are the things you think, or that Adelaide thinks.

Not me. I’m ambivalent about Adelaide, maybe—or is it that my loyalty is just not that deep-rooted? I’m ‘Sydney’, I just happen to be living here. But it’s gone on for a long while now, surely. Perth sometimes seems to me saved by its relative isolation, forced to make greater efforts. But this is maybe conjecture.

ROBERT COOK: “Greater efforts” would be a neat title for a Western Australian journal of arts and culture. It would fit. Perth is home to some super above- and under-the-radar artists for whom starting is the easy part, and that’s hard enough, but the long haul is like another thing entirely. The complications of those greater efforts are enormous. But let’s get back to that. Or, you know, not. For now, maybe fill us in on the Ken Bolton narrative arc, that is, what took you to Adelaide and, just as importantly, why did you stay? What did it offer you as a writer?

KEN BOLTON: I was given a residency at the Experimental Art Foundation in late 1981. After that, part of which involved designing and printing a series of books, the EAF offered me a job as their printer. So, I left Sydney for good. (At the time I was living in Coalcliff, a little north of Wollongong. I was squatting. I had no prospects much, unless I started teaching.) There was not a lot keeping me in Sydney, or so I thought, and I made the move, thinking Funding will flow my way, there are no good poets in Adelaide. I stayed because I made friends very quickly and found a place for myself embedded in the art world. My academic background had been Art History at the University of Sydney, under Donald Brook, Bernard Smith and others. I even knew Noel Sheridan a little, so I was ‘connected’ with the EAF in any case. (Noel was its first director and Donald, with Noel, was associated with the ideas and attitudes the EAF was built around.) Adelaide is an easily negotiated town and I liked it. I took almost no part in its literary life, but the art scene was genuinely interesting. What Adelaide offered me as a writer was anonymity. It was great at that stage of my life to be operating at a distance from the world of real writing—like a poet in a small country town. Not that Adelaide was that. But, as I say, I didn’t persevere with the local writing. And in a contrasting parallel world I was at the centre of a lot of activity, not ‘small town’ at all, mostly talking and watching and listening. I could be a critical voice in a bubbling art world and, as a writer, be an isolated punter at a long remove from literary centres and from my writer friends.

ROBERT COOK: About this critical voice and its structure. It’s a super dumb way of getting at it, but Adelaide seems like a character in your book. Is it? To you, I mean? If so, what characterises him/her for you? What kind of shoes would she wear to an opening? Or better, perhaps, do you have an ‘Adelaide of the mind’ that shapes things for you as you write, as you walk, as you talk?

KEN BOLTON: I hadn’t thought of Adelaide figuring in my critical writing. I suppose it’s an entity that one berates, or talks up, or occasionally tries to reassure or to characterise for it to see itself. But I don’t have that much leverage here. I don’t have a role via which I can speak to Adelaide. I don’t want to either. I write for an ideal notional reader, to amuse and interest them and to do it by finding out what I think myself. Compared to other Australian cities, Adelaide is a little older and greyer, a little more Anglo, a little less Irish, a little less Labor and so on.

Its art scene is a microcosm that I hardly leave. I don’t have much perspective on

it, or distance. In fact I’m in one faction of it, though it sometimes seems a faction of one. I doubt that the art scene (the ‘faction’, whatever) reflects the city as a whole. The scene here is less pretentious than those of Melbourne or Sydney, but that is purely a function of money. (The more pie there is to divide up the more sniffiness is used to police exclusivities.) And in that respect—the pretention factor—it is interestingly the opposite of the East Coast’s image of Adelaide, which is usually personified as a chardonnay-quaffing and fluted-toned chatterer. Its art scene is not like that. It does lack argument, I think. Things should be contested more, here, or more openly. But small scenes feel they can’t afford it, I guess.

Adelaide art tends to be a little cool and is usually thoughtful. There’s a whole range of course. But it doesn’t often extend to the brashness of Brisbane allows or, unfortunately, the unselfconsciousness that Sydney permits. I think. Australians generally don’t vary that much across the continent, not the way in which the Americans or British do. The vowels change a little. But our art is not markedly different from city to city. My point is that these attempts to generalise about city cultures are not that interesting. Adelaide’s main problem, culturally, is that it doesn’t take itself seriously because Melbourne and Sydney don’t attend to it at all, and they constitute ‘the national’. Adelaide’s own media tends to echo (and thereby internalise) the national media’s low opinion of South Australian cultural production. That way their ability to analyse and criticise it remains untested. The main print media here are determinedly parochial and anti-intellectual. National issues and international issues are usually kept well off the front pages in favour of mind-numbing, infantalising dullness.

ROBERT COOK: You seem to work against this in your writing in the way you treat Adelaide very seriously and with a touch of mockery. It’s a nice twinning. By serious I mean you don’t spend too much time connecting out when you write about an artist. You keep it contained in what they are doing. By this you imply, I believe, that making art in Adelaide is like making it anywhere else. It is an end in itself, not a step somewhere else. It totally, therefore, gets over the cringe thing. And by mockery, you mention The Big Three etc., and seem to poke fun at a jockeying for position in the art world. So you both inflate and deflate. Is that how you see it?

KEN BOLTON: All true. As regards centrality, it probably reflects my own ambivalence.

Otherwise, people will jockey for position: it’s not all that unforgiveable.

It’s partly a legitimate (certainly natural) attempt to get proper attention for their work. You might feel they owe it to the work. To a degree. Totally cut-throat networking can look pretty creepy though. I like Sydney and Melbourne, and their art, I think. And I don’t have any special brief for Adelaide. The need to ignore Adelaide reflects a political economy of prestige that is being protected. That is all that is going on. It’s a reflex move.

ROBERT COOK: About the structure of your book. I have to say I loved the decision not to use pictures illustrating artworks you’re discussing in the book. It gives the enterprise a weight and confidence as it makes one consider the prose as prose.

It also reverses the usual dynamic of art writing somehow deferring to the artwork, only existing as a shadow of it in some ways. What was it like for you considering your own writing in this way? Related, I suppose, what are your thoughts on art prose as prose? Do you read much of it? Is it high or low on the genre scale?

KEN BOLTON: You either need a lot of pictures or none. I can read Peter Schjeldahl, say, on art I have little idea about and still enjoy it. So I didn’t mind the no illustrations option. This was the publisher’s decision, as was the focus on just Adelaide art.

ROBERT COOK: Okay, right, but do you read art writing much?

KEN BOLTON: Not a lot anymore. Peter Schjeldahl I like, especially his writing of the 1980s and 1990s. Also George Alexander. And I liked reading T.J. Clark, Greenberg and Fried, Lucy Lippard and early Rosalind Krauss. Paul Taylor was good. Most current writing seems too dutiful and industry-respectful to be much fun. But these opinions are excusing my real laziness, I think. I should read more current art writing than I do. Time is a factor.

ROBERT COOK: I wonder though, if there were really great stuff to read, you’d read it, right? It may be that once you get a sense of the lie of the discourse, it is not that important to read critics as such, but more interesting to read widely, to read history, literature, sociology and what-have-you that informs and opens out your approach to life that will filter in through the art writing and make it more human, more engaged in real matters. Is that how you see it—the sense of this in your work is what makes your writing interesting to me?

KEN BOLTON: I think I read whatever will make me more interested in things generally. Which sounds admirably open-minded, but I’m not all that adventurously omnivorous. I was reading some Donald Kuspit recently—so I do still read the stuff —a book I hadn’t finished and have owned for a while (quite a while), and I liked it. I must have stopped (back in last century) because I’d got too used to his mind

and pre-occupations. I’d had enough for just that moment. But I suspect that with my art reading if someone is offering a perspective I already have under my belt via a terminology that I prefer—derived from 1960s/1970s thinking and Wolheim, Nelson Goodman and Donald Brook, and from attitudes formed in literary writing and my thinking about it—then I don’t read on, out of plain, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know this stuff’, a kind of impatience.

ROBERT COOK: You have mentioned Donald Brook twice now. I always had him pinned, maybe wrongly, as a systematiser, which I don’t think you are so much, though there are touches (maybe ironic touches?) of it. What has been his influence on your approach?

KEN BOLTON: He was an influential teacher when I was at the University of Sydney.

His general outline of the range of definitions or conceptions of what-art-is was very good. At the same time I was excited by art history—or do I mean art? I knew nothing about it until I attended the lectures, beyond having looked at various books on art in the library the year before. Donald was not very interested in Art History and now seems to regard it as entirely misguided. I think his then position was almost conflatable with the (Greenbergian) one that holds that true art is the new analysis and distillation of art’s means and that all else is non-art, being kitsch and/or craft—because it sought to repeat knowable, reachable goals and to resemble (to imitate) currently acceptable art. “Art-properly-so-called” (a phrase of Brook’s that I love) would of course not resemble known art, in fact it would hardly be recognisable as art. So what most of us are calling art is not the real thing, in Donald’s view. I’m sure this would not be Donald’s self-description, of course. Anyway, it’s a line that appeals to me, though I don’t wish to rule out anywhere near so much from consideration. Donald Brook would object to being coupled with Greenberg—against whom he argued very successfully, attacking the American’s dependence on “taste”, and “eye”. Early Greenberg, at least as stated in the essay on art and kitsch, was less open to attack. Greenberg came to want art as heroically decorative. Donald Brook wanted it to “do philosophy”.

This simplification probably does neither of them justice. I was imbibing Donald Brook at the same time as Greenberg, Fried, the Minimalists, Sol Le Witt and Lucy Lippard, and others. My thinking (to call it that) has its roots there. I’m not a systematic thinker. I’m not even, primarily, a thinker—except in the more general sense, in which artists and writers and critics qualify as that. Everyone does it, surely.

ROBERT COOK: Do you write art prose in a different way from poetry, with a different revision process, a different idea, or completion process? I assume of course the answer is yes, but still, articulating the difference would be interesting.

KEN BOLTON: Distraction is often the principle driving my literary writing. I want to follow ideas and associations and verbal textural patterns and contrasts wherever they might lead, partly because I’m not that interested in my performance as a thinker. But in art critical writing there is something to focus on, and I write more denotatively, therefore, a little less connotatively. I don’t think I write especially good prose. I mean, I try. But I don’t write often enough for one thing. And my poetry is no training for clarity of thought or logically developed argument.

It has some virtues, but not, centrally, those. Thinking is all my poetry does, pretty much, but it is not concerned to be exactly linear or conclusive. Linearity is pretty unfashionable, I realise, but not with me. So it’s not that.

ROBERT COOK: I’m still curious though. Your poetry seems both spontaneous and crafted. “Scored” might be a term you’ve used (I’m misapplying it). Do you do that, worry over format, pacing, the arch of a paragraph etc., when art writing?

Or do you relax a little? To me, there’s a weird pitch and turn to your art writing, and I’m interested in whether this is something you try to do, like the gears are shifting, or whether it is more like the thoughts have their own momentum and you allow them to simply be rather than overly formalising it all or troubling too much over pacing, spacing, timing, etc.

KEN BOLTON: “Scored” probably is the term, though I’d want to avoid licensing the misreading that then sees the poem’s performance as the work, not the words on the page. It is largely about pacing, emphasis, weighting and to some degree, sometimes, a kind of embodiment—a making of the poem something gestural, to do with impulse, reticence, all the moods, really. I’m not conscious of charting those as a dominant, governing factor in my critical writing. But it is probably there. Some of the pieces offer themselves as more of a performance, an actingout, than others.

ROBERT COOK: I wonder then, why not combine the two modes, in the fictocritical mode? Or are you wanting not to sully your poetry—which I assume is the thing that defines you as ‘an artist’—with that mongrel genre?

KEN BOLTON: From a literary point of view I’m all in favour of mongrelising. I think the shifting from register to register is what our minds do all the time. I think

5 5 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 handling the ‘high’ in a low register and the ‘low’ in a high register are even better than the constant shifting, that they often present insights where the appropriate register has already delivered all that it can. If one’s emotional verdict is that something is a dud, then one’s high-minded evaluations of it have to take that into account, and they should be able to. If a theorised judgement seems to be forming that something you sort of like is trivial, well, maybe it’s growing up time.But taking it further, as an artistic principle in the writing of art criticism. Well, almost no-one publishing the stuff wants you to do that, or will thank you for doing it.

They don’t want you to deliver art: they want writing about art. If no-one wants to publish it, it is probably poetry, right? Or it might as well be. (Poets all nod here: we all know how to make this joke. People who read poetry, some of them, will like this sort of stuff. I think.)

ROBERT COOK: I think there is a place for a serious ficto-critical journal in this country, but I should get over that.

KEN BOLTON: People who like visual art want to read about it (sometimes), they don’t want to find the writer going off on their own jag. But maybe they would if it was marketed to them as just that. I hate the term “ficto-criticism”. They’re just plain old essays, aren’t they?

ROBERT COOK: Okay, I hate myself for the above question! I wrote it and then un-wrote it and then put it in to make it seem like I had an ‘agenda’. I have been going through a phase of wanting never to write performative essays ever again, and then thinking maybe I should but treat them more seriously, like they meant something.

KEN BOLTON: You should. You can worry later about how they’re categorised.

“Ficto-criticism” suggests a kind of special pleading: “You’ve got to understand, this is ‘special writing’.”

ROBERT COOK: Ouch, yeah, I guess that’s what I want, me and Radiohead, “so fucking special...” The worrying later about how they’re categorised was kinda the point Gerald Murnane was making in some essay or other I will track down...

It was a good point. Backtracking a little though, can you clarify what you mean when you say “If a theorised judgement seems to be forming that something you sort of like is trivial, well, maybe it’s growing up time?” Does this mean we are to somehow cede our desire (which Lacan said was a no-no!), to bend us into some kind of rational shape?

KEN BOLTON: Lacan? “That fruit-loop?” (Danielle Freakley, ‘The Legendary Short Session, and other crimes against the client’, The Freakley Omnibus, 2002.)

It’s not a no-no, it’s an option. I’m not talking about (D)esire. I’m talking about acknowledging that some things are worth less time than others, a choice you make. If you’re big enough to live with Infantile-but-I-love-it, go ahead. I too, like Hitchcock and Mel Brooks movies—some of them. For example, how does Lacan feel about High Anxiety?

ROBERT COOK: I’ll call Slavoj Žižek, he’s sure to know. But surely, there is something to be gained by considering why one is drawn to the infantile? Ruling it out seems to perhaps fall into the trap of repression for the sake of what the theorised field constitutes to be as sound and reasonable. That strikes me as frightening though I find it very interesting then that you are indicating that your critical work puts you on the line as much as the art. Have any works or art situations maybe ever actually made this shift occur for you, where your outlook has evolved in a definite, discernable way from an encounter?

KEN BOLTON: I see your point. I’m not advocating life under the lash of the lacerating Super-ego. I like a lot of stuff I don’t think is really good. Sometimes that realisation can make you like it less. Sometimes your desire-driven tastes re-assert themselves and say, No!, this has to be accommodated, maybe within your working notions of Art. I really do mean it’s a choice. Writing about art—because it makes you try to arrive at evaluations that are sufficiently articulated—does lead you to affirm, re-affirm, reconsider, abandon or modify judgements and criteria.

ROBERT COOK: Okay, so what internal forces drove you to start writing about art?

Related to this, do you also write about writing? If not, what is specific about visual art that intrigues in distinction to writing?

KEN BOLTON: I’m not sure how driven my writing on art is. Aesthetic issues seem to me inherently interesting. I like thinking about them. That they’re located, so to speak, in visual art means I can examine them with more disinterest than I could or can when it’s literary work, say. Within literature, I have much more of an axe to grind, a personal investment in the critical fortunes of certain styles and lineages. I’m part of it. But visual art is another world where the problems appear to me, a poet, in the abstract as it were, out of my own sphere. I do write literary criticism occasionally, but don’t do it as sharply as I do with visual art. I’m less

happy, less adroit, often feel more compromised or constrained. It tends not to pay well, either. That’s another factor. Not that art writing has made me rich.

ROBERT COOK: I’m still interested in your process. I was talking about your book recently with an artist who lives in Adelaide (he had read the parts about him) and he said one thing he appreciated about your writing is that you might see an exhibition and write about it six months later, the assumption being you’re mulling it over, taking it seriously, not pressed by deadlines perhaps, but by your internal considerations. Is that the case?

KEN BOLTON: Yes. Some exhibitions I forget about, but once you lock onto an artist, or flatter yourself that you have, you naturally begin to track them, to try to establish that you have got the shape of the work right, the velocity and trajectory. Often you haven’t. Sometimes your old notes can reveal how differently you saw somebody’s work in their early days.

ROBERT COOK: Related to this (and maybe it’s the same question) you often mention during a profile-type piece, a half dozen or so other exhibitions by that artist, stretching almost a decade back. And you seem to really remember these in detail. It’s silly but do you take notes, or just have an amazing memory? It would be really cool if you took notes when you weren’t necessarily going to write about the show, like an over-curious gumshoe.

KEN BOLTON: Actually, I do. Less often now, because I’m not called upon to review stuff so much lately. But sometimes I can’t resist. So there’ll be scraps of notes and some kind of argument, with the art, or with myself, written out, some in note form, some in full sentences and paragraphs. Along with jokes and all the rest. Why not? I always did make notes and draw diagrams of where things were in the show and rough cartoons of what works looked like. (No matter how bad the drawings, the fact of making them causes you to remember much more clearly.)

A review didn’t always eventuate. I do it now if I like the show a lot or like thinking about it, arguing with it—as if explaining to an imaginary listener. But the articles probably give a stronger illusion of that concern than I am entitled to claim.

The profile articles, for instance, often cannibalise old reviews of mine, aided with elaboration of the original notes that might have been made years before, arguments that couldn’t be included in a short review perhaps (but which got made in a draft). I keep it all on file, along with catalogues and invites.

ROBERT COOK: I like the picture that this gives me. I also like the idea of that kind of engagement with the work, the seriousness and respect that implies. Equally, it hits on what is, to me, distinctive in your writing, and it is something I guess I’ve been groping to adequately describe. It’s an internal conversation, argument, rumination, as much as (or rather, much more than) a public address. Does that make sense to you? I guess when you’ve said your poetry is “all thinking” there is an internality about that too. It differs therefore, with how I might write because I am always interested in voice, how I sound, as I create a Robert Cook character.

Also, interestingly, the way your writing ‘happens’ very closely approximates the conversations I will have about an exhibition, a piece of work etc., with curators that I am (very) close to, that are very pragmatic and searching and open-ended and have a kind of tone that never makes it into print. Your work seems to get that.

KEN BOLTON: Glad you like it, of course. There are probably instances where I’ve written critical stuff ‘in persona’, in a performative sort of way. Establishing a tone is a way of trying to control how the stuff is read. It’s also a way of being entertaining for the reader. It can also be a way of unfairly limiting argument: the critic as a Kingsley Amis/Jeremy Clarkson figure. I doubt the Robert Cook persona resembles him?

ROBERT COOK: It’s so hard to tell. He rarely calls these days because he’s like so totally busy trying to make it as a male valley-girl beat poet on the American college indie pop scene. His ambitions aside, how do you see the two worlds of art and poetry in this country, comparatively that is. Art must seem more central, more acceptable, more mainstream? Is it, therefore, amusing to you to hear artists complain of their status here, especially from the poet’s perspective? It must be a million times easier to get an exhibition than to publish a book of poems?

The audiences, though small for contemporary art, probably dwarf poetry’s.

KEN BOLTON: I don’t mind artists making those kinds of complaint. (I do hear them all the time, yes.) Artists have to put a lot of money into making and storing, framing and transporting, etc. Some of this is a fetishising that must bore even them. At other times it is exciting. Yes, it is easier, I think, to get to an exhibition than have a book published. And the money surrounding art means it pays for the attention it gets—it buys press, and tries to ensure ‘good’ press. And then it basks in that press. Novels get a similar treatment. But poetry, no. Visual art audiences make themselves visible—they turn up to these (highly subsidised) openings and drink and talk to each other, and go home. Poetry’s audience, big or small, is less

visible. It’s probably voluntary though, uncoerced. The art crowd certainly look cooler. Not meeting the audience is great though. Not meeting the poet probably is, too.

ROBERT COOK: The idea of the constructed, if not exactly coerced audience is interesting. I’m interested how do the scenes work differently to your mind?

I know nothing of the poetry scene, but from the outside it seems incredibly intense—maybe all I have in my head is the John Forbes vibe as presented in a doco I once saw. It is probably impossible to generalise across time and place but is one more constructive than the other?

KEN BOLTON: There’s almost no pie to share apart from the gaining of critical attention. And the latter is hard to quantify. A large part of the readership is made up of other writers and happens online. I doubt that very much of that attention is close, or sustained: it’s more a kind of monitoring. When someone begins to get some buzz around their work then it attracts greater focus and maybe hardcopy sale—books. But not enough for the major publishers and their publicity budgets to fund newspaper column-inches of attention. So no-one’s head is likely to be turned much by that attention. It’s evanescent. Uncorrupting, but unsatisfying.

The intensity is around poets’ commitment to particular kinds of intelligence and kinds of knowledge (or whatever—apprehension?) that particular literary orientations make available. There’s always a poetry war going on, declared or not, about what kind (or kinds) of writing is good (or “are good”). Often one sort is anathema to another—for a practitioner, if not for a general reader. In that regard poetry resembles philosophy, I think—which is full of camps that cannot bear to recognise each other. Well, so it seems to me. Think of Picasso’s distaste for Bonnard, or the Minimalists’ and Conceptualists’ hostility to Post-painterly Abstraction—which was returned, of course. They probably shared an identical kind of annoyance at Pop Art, which was their contemporary. I’m not saying there isn’t the occasional generous spirit about.

ROBERT COOK: In a way you couldn’t have constructed a more marginal position for yourself to take all this in, or to live both in and outside of. Is this how you see it, marginal?

KEN BOLTON: I’ve been able to generate just enough recognition to console myself, if I need to, that I really do exist. Only just enough, it’s true. I’m not so bothered by it. Currently I’m not so bothered. There’ll come a day when I’m more properly bitter, maybe. I hope not.

ROBERT COOK: I wonder, have you ever hankered after fame? Say the fame of an Ashberry? And considered moving to America and all, to personally invade the scene maybe? I ask because it’s what every Australian (not just Perth or Adelaide or Darwin or Hobart-based) artist asks themselves—do I stay, do I go, or do I juggle a bit of staying with a bit of leaving? Related to this is, I guess, have you always stayed true to poetry? Have you started the great Australian novel that will make you the new Malouf?

KEN BOLTON: The New Malouf! I always wanted to be known to other writers and, maybe to people who read poetry. And breaking in on another scene and its queues and hierarchies and tribes was never a very likely move for me. I think poetry was the medium through which I handled ‘being Australian’, a job all Australians have, so that anyone’s take on it is of some interest here. In principle, anyway.

I was never likely to go to America and do that amongst them, or to the UK, or New Zealand. In-principle seems a governing phrase here. I mean, in principle one is writing for a local audience, though in fact almost no-one reads you. Going where there’s not even an in-principle supposition of interest would be difficult.

I was happier to stay here and pretend I wasn’t alone. I’ve occasionally thought about going and ‘breaking in’ back in Sydney. But why? The second part of your question: I wrote an ‘ordinary novel’ in collaboration with John Jenkins, a poet I’ve written lots of poetry with. It is unpublished, though probably salvageable.

(It was never going to make us “The new Malouf”. I love that phrase!) I hardly ever read standard novels: Bolano a bit recently, and I’m re-reading Harry Mathews and Gilbert Sorrentino. Have you? Are you, as we speak, working away on a novel, on one, or several?

ROBERT COOK: The novel thing? No. I don’t think that would be my form at all.

I have no powers of description. Now, I think most people are interested in how people sustain practices, and you do so, I gather, by working at Dark Horsey.

Has this been a nice substitute to working at a University as it keeps you intimately connected to ideas and writing and art?

KEN BOLTON: Dark Horsey is the Australian Experimental Art Foundation’s bookshop—but the job also involves my being the general meet–and–greet, information desk person for most visitors. I answer a lot of phones and all that.

The pay is arts–industry level. That is, not good. The hours are short, so I have time to use that I wouldn’t have doing a forty or fifty hour week.

ROBERT COOK: Is it a context that is necessary in some way for you to do what you do as a critic and as a poet?

KEN BOLTON: I don’t read in the shop and very rarely try to write there. It’s been a job that has turned out to be more secure than it might have. I do like being somehow (imaginatively, maybe?) in the art scene here: ideas regularly sluice through it and that is about my speed. I pick up ideas without being such a great or deep reader. Barthes and Foucault I’ve read a lot, and some Kristeva, but not much Derrida or Deleuze. Some Baudrillard. Adorno and Benjamin I’ve read a good deal—and Adorno is not an art-world favourite. I might not have read these things in another climate. Actually, I think this gives a false impression.

ROBERT COOK: Heavy thinker?

KEN BOLTON: Yeah. I know enough about these people to sell the books, as I do with many other authors. It’s pretty shallow knowledge, if you could call it that. I do a lot of other reading—mostly history, cultural history and reviews of things, and literary texts—poetry, novels occasionally. Running a bookshop has made it possible to get these things more cheaply. Given an initial priming of aesthetics and art history, it is the art itself—accommodating it to one’s ideas, making extensions to fit the new art in—that ‘informs my thinking’. (I don’t really feel entitled to that phrase.) The art has thinking of a kind and provokes it (Manet, Picasso, Matisse, Kirchner, Richter and Peyton, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Eva Hesse, Smithson). Figurative art, if it’s any good, makes a lot of evaluations, by design and by accident. Abstract art does as well, though differently. And writers I’ve grown up with, my own crowd, Anna Couani, Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan. In a dialogue or dialectic with them, and with phrases and phrasings from Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, and Adorno, Barthes and others—such as Greenberg and Donald Brook—that’s what has informed my thinking. Not methodical, trained reading—because I read for pleasure. Some difficult works, sure, but only if I am enjoying the difficulty. It’s the clash, the argument between them (between O’Hara and Lowell, Adorno and Heidegger) that produces the moves that you make your own arguments with or around. And this cloud of unknowing and partial knowing and history of opinions is with one as you try to do your own writing: poetry, in my case. And one thinks pretty hard about the art you’re making, while you’re in the process, a kind of deep mulling. The art-writing has been a way of responding to the world I seem to have embedded myself in. I would possibly not have been engaged with art so much, with particular careers and practices, if I hadn’t been here. Who knows? The assumption that I might—or must necessarily—reflect the AEAF critical line is something I have ignored. I don’t and haven’t. Under so many different directors my own take naturally has not always been theirs.

ROBERT COOK: Well, do you have the dream of writing fulltime or is that kind of hideous to think about?

KEN BOLTON: I think if I had a history of long periods in which to think and write in tandem, I might have produced different things. But I’ve probably adapted so much to writing out of distraction, snatched time, daydream, that I’m not sure I’ll ever find out if that is the case. That said, once I have a larger project begun, I find it no trouble at all to let much of the rest of my life just happen to me—the routine of bookshop hours, etcetera—and have the periods of writing link up (over weeks, months even, almost as though there has been no interruption). It’s the regularity of the job’s routine that makes it possible to write. I might not get anything done if I had too much time.

ROBERT COOK: Cool. And hey! we’re almost out of time ourselves. Let’s end this like it’s The 7PM project. What’s coming up next for you Ken Bolton? Oh stuff it, what about the next thirty years? What’s The Plan?

KEN: It’s about time I formulated a plan. I’d like to get away, to Europe, Mexico, Vietnam, but maybe I’m dreaming. There are some new books in the offing: two collections of poetry—A Whistled Bit Of Bop, from Vagabond Press and Sly Mongoose, from Puncher & Wattmann. Sydney presses. And appearing any minute, a book called The Circus, an account of ‘life in the circus’, a circus in Northern Italy. It’s full of poetic longueurs: the Strong Man ironing his tights, the ballerina wondering whether to leave or not, the ticket seller bored out of his brain, a kid in the ticket line wondering is he really wasting his money, the lion yawning, a death, a comeback, a happy moment. Illustrated by Michael Fitzjames.

The Circus is published here in Adelaide, by Wakefield Press. So, I will seem, to some, to have been very busy.

Notes 1 Ken Bolton, Art Writing: Art in Adelaide in the 1990s and 2000s, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide. ISBN 978-1-875751-34-1 2 A stupid gag, the idea behind which doesn’t hold water. Just wanted to get at where Ken is coming from, which I do think is different from the academic’s, the curator’s, the director’s

what i’d like to talk about when i talk about biennales

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REUBEN KEEHAN Let’s get this out of the way early—there is only one aspect of biennales that matters, and that is their capacity to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do. If criticism, which has for so long struggled to exercise its authority on biennales, can have any recourse to its founding responsibility of passing judgment—as distinct from, say, issuing the standard complaints about scale, elitism and locality-branding—surely judgment can only be passed on how well, in the first instance, biennales perform this triadic, propositional function, as a methodological prelude to grappling with the propositions themselves.

This is my attempt to have done with the biennale debate, my concession to that conceit of modernist criticism that exceeds even the idea that through expertise, connoisseurship and social standing one possesses the authority to pass judgment, and that is to have the last word. And yet a combination of personal insecurity, persistent suspicions about the currency of art criticism—and, indeed, of art, more of which shortly—and professional experience of the biennale form’s ability to reinvent itself lead me to the understanding that there will be no last word on anything, at least until the ice caps melt or some future dystopian State bans art criticism for its sheer uselessness. Failing that, I have resolved to limit the frequency of my reflections on biennales to once every two years.

I should also say at this point that the idea that biennales might have some speculative and propositional function with regard to the nature of art is not new. I, for one, first encountered it in Terry Smith’s address to the opening symposium of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney, which argued that biennales had succeeded criticism—now “largely promotional”—in attempting to articulate the state of contemporary art.1 Smith’s observation was muddied somewhat when, shortly after he made it, biennales demonstrated that they could be as largely promotional as art criticism, a development exemplified by the impact of a peaking art market on the production and reception of the 2007 Grand Tour.2 Now that things have settled down a little, though, the point stands.

It has, moreover, been beautifully illustrated by What, How & for Whom/WHW’s recent 11th International Istanbul Biennial: What Keeps Mankind Alive?, whose deft execution and careful contextualisation clearly proposed an empowering and anti-spectacular role for art. WHW eschewed the intellectual and presentational sprawl that has come to typify so much biennale-making to construct instead an organised and accessible platform for a tight, focused selection of work to deliver a vision of art that drew explicitly on Brecht’s notion of education as a process of providing agency.

What Keeps Mankind Alive? was educative in a three closely integrated ways. Firstly, a direct sense, in a manner that Charles Esche later described as “art as informative intervention”, offering “possibilities for learning [that] ranged across geographies and cultures”3—Sanja Iveković’s report into the status of women in Turkey, for instance, scattered across all the major venues as screwed up balls of paper, unnoticeable apart from their searing red colour; or Marko Peljhan’s eerily clinical installation of documentation relating to the planning and execution of the Srebrenica massacre. But also reflexively, problematising the language of representation, the very medium that offers art its informative possibilities, through the affecting mechanism of personal reflection—Rabih Mroué’s lectures on the role of photography in political propaganda are exemplary here, as is Deimantas Narkevičius’ almost autobiographical interview with Peter Watkins on the ethics of the documentary. In contrast to the more standard role of the audience passive consumers whose reflection on the cultural production is at best evaluative, such insertions offered an appropriately critical standpoint from which to consider the various discursive encounters presented by the biennale, imbuing a final sense of the education as the production of agency.

What was most striking about this, especially for what was widely regarded as such a political biennale—not to mention, rather patronisingly given the geopolitical makeup of the show, as communist nostalgia—was that the exhibition functioned by and large as an exhibition. The project was well crafted, tidily organised, thoughtfully selected and carefully installed according to the

broadly accepted standards of exhibition making, even in venues not typically used for the presentation of art. It was as if after forty years of critique, the white cube, with a few slight variations, has proved to be the medium most amenable to publicly speculating on the nature of contemporary art.

Of course, this is not so much of a problem if the Istanbul Biennial is considered in the context of its propositionality. It is one argument among the great many being offered by biennales around the world at what is no longer a startling rate. What distinguishes it is the clarity and effectiveness with which the point was made. From a critical perspective, we can say that because What Keeps Mankind Alive? made its point about contemporary art clearly, it was a good biennale, and here the traditional evaluative function of art criticism—the temerity to ask “is this good or bad?”—can be live a little longer.

It was a good biennale because it respected the intelligence and patience of the viewer—the Biennial was broken into three smaller exhibitions at the main venues, each of which, though substantial, was not so vast as to not be experienced in a single visit. It was a good biennale in its approach to constructing its propositions through the judicious selection of individual works without sacrificing the need for the works themselves to be shown in the best possible light, which is to say, the need for the works to maintain a margin of their autonomy within the overall conception of the biennale. Here again, the biennale is no major departure from regular exhibitions. And it was a good biennale because it was even handed, its curators resisting the urge to apportion disproportionate space, resources and attention to show-stopping works at the expense of others; this was a boon not only to the consistency of the exhibitions in an experiential sense, but also, one imagines, to the artists in an ethical sense.

The need for ethics of exhibition-making of compelling relevance to biennale-making is an important point to raise here as it functions as another perspective from which to determine the success or otherwise of such projects.

One framework for thinking through such an ethics has been offered by Raqs Media Collective, hinging on the notion of curatorial responsibility, who ask: “What does it mean to undertake to bear the burden of work of representation of our ideas and concepts in and through the bodies and bodies of work of people other than ourselves?”4 What responsibility does a curator hold, in other words, to those whose productive capacities they mobilise in their service, or in and possibly against the service of forces to which they themselves are subject, which is to say, in the exercise of their critical agency?

We should, by now, be familiar with the notion of the curator as a critical agent, or at least that of the figure of the curator who, at the historical nexus of a complex of power relations, has lately found itself possessed of an agency, that like all agency, has the potential to be exercised critically. Without this agency there would in fact be no such thing as a curator; rather, there would be an amalgam of social forces going by the name of ‘curator’. Each iteration of that word, curator, would be entirely contextually determinant, relying for precise interpretation on the particular manifestation of those forces at any given moment in the performative exchange between speaker and listener.

This is not to say, however, that the meaning produced in this exchange would be discontinuous, any more than the social forces at work in its construction would be discontinuous; nor would the curator radically indeterminate. The curator would emblematically be reliant on the context that produced it, and subject to shifts in that context. Critical agency, the capacity to think and feel, to form opinions and to act on them, is what provides the figure of the curator with its continuity, and is thus a vital element in considering what curators produce—exhibitions, biennales and so on—in relation to the forces and imperatives that would seek to determine them and in whose service they often act. It is here that those generic aspects of biennales criticised to the point of cliché—locality branding, gentrification and cultural diplomacy—have their relevance, but only in negative relation to the precise and particular manner in which the curator’s agency is exercised against them.

Above: Raeda Saadeh, Vacuum (video still), 2007 Adelaide International 2010: Apart, we are together Photo courtesy the artist Opposite: Sanja Ivekovik,Turkish Report 09, (installation view Istanbul Biennial), 2009 Photo courtesy the artist

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What Raqs, for their part, in effect propose is the responsible exercise of the agency at the disposal of the curator—curatorial responsibility—in the simplest of terms, and that is the production an exhibition “that can look good and think acutely”, which can in this thinking offer “a sustained productive contemplation, not just the curation of experiments and experience, but also the curation of reflection, a practice that dares to be theory and which must be held to account if it fails to be theory”. Taking aim at “shoddily mounted exhibitions prefaced by badly written, lengthy theoretical discourses”, they add that this thinking must be sophisticated enough to “withstand ruthless interrogation, at least at the hands of the artworks that constitute the exhibition itself”. An exhibition or a biennale must say what it does, do what it says, and do both to the best of its ability if it has any respect to those who produce its content and to those who constitute its public. In relation to the criteria for the judgment of biennales established at the outset of this text, then, we might say that in order to be properly propositional, that is, to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do, and to do so incisively, a biennale must in the first instance be responsible, but that at the same time, if responsibility entails a daring to become theory, then propositionality will always be what is produced.

What then have we learnt of art from the thousands of biennales that have taken place over the past two decades, and where might this knowledge lead us? I want to close this text not by attempting answer that question, but by constructing a possible framework in which it might be considered, a framework that is, appropriately enough, an admixture of the work of others.

We have to note that the expansion of the notion of contemporary art that has taken place alongside and through the emergence of the biennale-form as the critical register of contemporary art—at least at a mediatic level—has, for all its challenges to Euro-American cultural hegemony, nevertheless occurred under the sign of a contemporary art that remains disturbingly closely calibrated to that of Western art. Contemporaneity has yet to divest itself of the expansionist and exoticising logics of modernity, engendering an orthodoxy according to which, to quote a recent text by Omnia El Shakry, “only non-Western art is expected to have questions of identity as a touchstone”.5 More provocatively, El Shakry adds that “art reduced to the status of geo-political identity politics is evacuated of all meaning”. Speaking on a panel during the opening week of the Istanbul Biennial, Bassam El Baroni observed that the practice of representing identity, initially deployed as a defence against the homogenising effects of globalisation, is inadequate to the task on account identity’s fragility, its tendency to fragment under the monolithic weight of capital (leaving behind, we would have to assume, the hollowed out image of its own otherness). Against this “aesthetics of identity”, El Baroni proposed a “logic of assemblage”.6 The oddly avant gardist tone of this proposition echoes a surprising point made by Paolo Virno in a recent interview published in the journal Open. In response to a question about the importance of

art to political movements, Virno offered the following: the most important effect of art is set in the formal sphere. In that sense, even art that is remote from political engagement touches upon the social and political reality... It demonstrates the inadequacy of the old standards and suggests, in the formal sphere and through the formal work of poetry, new standards for the appraisal of our cognitive and affective experience.7 In cobbling together these important observations, I don’t want to suggest that the best thing we can learn from the biennales of the past two decades, responsible and irresponsible, propositional and otherwise, is that the best course for art is an escape from representation or from political engagement, that the most ethical position is one of hermeticism and disengagement, of effectively disavowing agency. Nor—should there be any misunderstanding—do any of the artists or theorists to whom I have just referred. But I do feel that if a biennale, or any other exhibition for that matter, is to exploit effectively the integral relationship between responsibility and propositionality, it will ask fundamental questions of art and aesthetics. These questions, if they are to be taken up by curators, need only be modest—probably should only be modest—but they should be properly artistic questions—what art is, what art can be, what art can do. Then criticism, once it is finished with its evaluations, will have something it can really engage with.

Notes 1 Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art in the Conditions of Contemporaneity’, symposium paper, On Reason and Emotion Symposium, Biennale of Sydney 2004, 4 June 2004 2

I examine the ethical and critical implications of these developments in ‘On criticism, institutional and otherwise’, Broadsheet 37.2, 2008: 99–101

3

Charles Esche, ‘Best of 2009’, Artforum, December 2009:

4

Raqs Media Collective, ‘Curatorial responsibility’, conference paper presented by Shuddhabrata Sengupta at To Biennale or Not to Biennale?, Bergen Biennale Conference, Bergen, 20 September 2009.

All subsequent references are drawn from this presentation

5

Omar El Shakry, ‘Artistic sovereignty in the shadow of post-socialism: Egypt’s 20th Annual Youth Salon’, E-Flux Journal, issue 7, June 2009: www.e-flux.com/journal/view/70 6

Baroni was participating in the panel discussion ‘Who needs a world view’, moderated by Brian Holmes, 12 September 2009

7

Quoted in Sonja Lavaert and Pascal Gielen, ‘The dismeasure of art: an interview with Paulo Virno’, Open, issue 17: www.skor.nl/article-4178-en.html

last ride in a hot air balloon auckland triennial: a conversation Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is the evocative title of the 4th Auckland Triennial, helmed by Natasha Conland, Curator of Contemporary Art at Auckland Art Gallery.

Drawing together a geographically wide-ranging selection of around thirty artists, including a significant representation from Asia and the Middle East, Conland’s framework references shifting notions of risk and adventure in a context defined by the repercussions of the economic downturn. Perhaps more importantly, though, the metaphor that gives the project its theme suggests the vitality and relevance of artistic perspectives on the world, a curatorial preoccupation that will appropriately see a considerable number of new commissions appearing across the exhibition’s five central Auckland venues, and the notable dedication of two major symposia to critical reflection on the work, the exhibition and its contexts. Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon, 4th Auckland Triennial, 12 March–20 June.

Reuben Keehan REUBEN KEEHAN: I thought I’d start this conversation by avoiding the standard question about the proliferation of biennales and how this might impact on your thinking in the lead-up to the Auckland Triennial, and instead focus on a technical aspect of exhibition-making, which draws to some degree of a canonical criticism of biennales, but is by no means limited to that field. I hope you don’t mind me bringing this up, but when I ran into you in Brisbane recently and commented on the quite extraordinary standard of exhibition installation at the APT6, you described it as “intimidating”. How are you approaching the issue of installation in preparing your exhibition? How heavily does it figure in your thinking?

NATASHA CONLAND: The most important thing to remember for me, specifically when approaching anything like the display, layout or configuration of a biennial or triennial, is that they are still exhibitions. In other words that they are at once satisfying for the viewer when they cohere like one. However, what I mean by satisfaction may differ from another, it could be that they build and collapse on points of the theme spatially like an exhibition ought to. The exhibition’s theme largely comes alive in the spaces of the exhibition—its relationship of tonality, form, media. Too often when we arrive into exhibitions of ‘the new’ they emerge like a collapsed suitcase—tagged to the wall is a signpost “these thirty people are here”. Or by contradistinction, one approaches a heavily manicured space, which feels like it is hiding something of the content in favour of the exterior values of display, their ‘communication’ tools or attempts to amplify the exuberance of the art works. A space that is too controlled leaves no room for anything unpredictable to escape. And it’s not just that controlled spaces are only found in museums, they are also found in project spaces, commercial galleries and other homes of exhibitions. So what do I mean then by controlled in relation to the practical specifics of display? That it’s ordered? Not exactly. More that its infrastructure, intent or architecture rings too loudly and overwhelms that primary contact with the works of art. They must be allowed to leak. If for any reason I feel intimidated by an exhibition’s display standards per se, it’s usually when its majesty or organisation has no leaks, and therefore nothing for me to creep into, or even notice without being told.

REUBEN KEEHAN: This paucity also seems to apply to your choice of venues across the city. While you’ve maintained some of the standard partners of previous Triennials, your use of a fifth venue, Shed 6, is something of a departure. Could you elaborate on what you’ve described elsewhere as a consideration of the experience of moving between venues as part of your curatorial approach?

NATASHA CONLAND: The venues are intentionally close to one another in the central city area. Auckland is not renown for its walkability, but it was quite important for me that the venues have the potential to be treated as part of one experience, or one walk around the city, despite having very different characters. The Shed 6 venue was selected very early on, but as a commercial site, it’s taken quite a while to secure. Due to the rapid and raw development in the inner city area in Auckland there are relatively few open, accessible, former industrial spaces or warehouses. So the idea wasn’t to find a destination so much as a venue that opens up part of the inner city, in this case the immediate west of the CBD, which is seldom tackled on foot. Of course there are some associated aspects of the theme here to do with journeying and travel. One of the aspirations for adventure is of course its delivery into the unknown. Through the subject of the exhibition, and its critique of the terms of modern exploration, I am perhaps more interested

in exploration of the known. I don’t think any of the venues will feel majestic.

Despite the number of islands in our harbour, I didn’t spend a great deal of time trying to conquer a venue in the Hauraki Gulf. The walk is explored in my writing on the Triennial as an attempt to map an experience which moves beyond what is in fact possible to route. This is the polyphonic way we traverse each route through space and time, noticing things differently. And of course an exhibition is a space/time medium. This is of course close to what de Certeau describes as opening up absence or gaps in the known.

REUBEN KEEHAN: The idea of adventure—as it is expressed in both your wonderfully metaphorical title, and in the curatorial statement that has been circulated —seems to embody a certain tension, a simultaneous romanticism and a critique of that romanticism, which strikes as a particularly Antipodean experience of European modernity, at least at the level of pop cultural representation. So I wondered if this was another level on which your Triennial is a particularly ‘Auckland’ project.

NATASHA CONLAND: I wanted to ground some larger more general interests within some particulars of the site for the Triennial. First perhaps was a subtle critique of the pride New Zealanders, and perhaps Antipodean culture in general, has in the culture of the ‘edge’ as risk-takers, experimenters, a small country which battles extreme geography, economic change and swift political shifts.

This is not the subject of the Triennial by any means but certainly it informs it.

I’m interested in the extension of this idea, where the romanticism of the ‘cliff dweller’ literally takes us or extends too. Of course, I was initiating some work on the theme just prior to the most recent economic crisis, and yet it was much in the air. I was reflecting on the positive association between ‘adventurous reforms’ and adventurous attitude. And how we attribute gains by extension in the field of art.

Above: Robert Hood, Leap into the Driveway, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch

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REUBEN KEEHAN: Much of the work in your exhibition has been specially commissioned. Was this done in relation to the framework you’ve set up around a specifically artistic perspective on the world, and if so how have artists responded to this brief?

NATASHA CONLAND: Yes, where possible. And whereby there was a very specific work already exhibited that we both wanted, there has been quite a bit of discussion around its re-collaboration in the exhibition. Of course, the artists all responded very differently to the subject. In this way for me, the subject grows in our hands over the last eighteen months, and also prior to discussions about the work proper, through conversations in passing. Many treated the subject quite tangentially. Bundith Phunsmbatlert is a good example here. Adventure for him is articulated as something interior, silent, invisible even. So the physical trappings of the work merely serve to take you to an imagining elsewhere. He starts with a poem. Sometimes we talked a lot about the physical presence of how to tackle the subject. With Alicia Frankovich, we both felt it was important within the scope of the exhibition’s topic to start with the physical rather than the performative, and encourage people to begin with the body as form. Michael Stevenson and I have had an ongoing discussion about various entry points into the subject of adventurous economies, of the peculiarity of narratives around islands and the relationship between the natural and theoretical sciences. Conversations were long, and therefore so was the commissioning process, which was perhaps more difficult for securing hard information. I also wanted to steer away from cinema, which has a very specific relationship to the subject and history of travel and adventure. Despite this, there is still a reasonable quantity of moving image, but my hope is that is embedded differently into the subject. The most direct here however is Marine Hugonnier’s work, which, despite many conversations around possibilities for generating a new film, we ended up deciding to show the trilogy as an examination of the cinematic tools for discovery, albeit through the mixed lens of anthropology and cinematic device.

REUBEN KEEHAN: The cinematic obviously bears a relationship to certain modes of spectatorship, particularly the contracted mode, where a viewer willingly submits to a predetermined timeframe for viewing a work. Video obviously operates in a way that is closer to the modes of engagement spectators enact in the white cube. But there does seem to be a strong sense of a kind of ‘adventure time’ that distinguishes itself from the viewer’s ‘everyday time’ in your exhibition planning.

This was something that I felt very strongly in the last Biennale of Sydney, for instance, which might be framed as a relationship between spectatorship and tourism.

NATASHA CONLAND: I have just finished writing on Philippe Parreno’s text for the catalogue, and perhaps that’s influencing my thoughts today. But I ended up with a quote from him for developing a physical form that has the capacity for tangential wandering, which I related to in the way I develop space: “Reading is also a physical state; it demands a particular attention, a floating attention. The moments where you disconnect from reading, when you start dreaming are very pleasant.

You are at once inside your head imagining things while you’re being spoken to.”

For me this kind of reading and viewing are very much related. I have to say I’m not terribly interested in tourism. I think the motivations for tourism are not those of the exhibition experience. Tourism proper that is, has a lot to do with your ‘bucket list’, what are the things I want in my bucket when Iend my mortal coil, although there is some wonderful critical and fictional writing around the subject.

For me again this relates to the issue of gains and rewards, which needs to be addressed critically. It’s a problematic measure to justify tourism as the benefits of experience against the cost of its impact—not just on the environment.

REUBEN KEEHAN: To pause on this question of reading for a moment, you’ve been quite explicit about the need for a solid discursive context in which the Triennial should function, thus your inclusion of both an opening and a finissage symposium, and a substantial catalogue. What sort of areas will be explored in these symposia and how might the questions they raise figure in the framing of the exhibition as an object or collection of objects for reading and viewing?

NATASHA CONLAND: Some of my structuring of the program is motivated by my own experience of biennials and perhaps the visitor’s desire for different kinds of nutrients at different times. At this point it’s too difficult to describe what impact they will have but these were my intentions upon structuring our program—that over the course of the opening weekend, which collides with social activity and the largest proportion of artist visitors, we will hold a series of talks, panels with a different topic relevant to the theme. In a way this is quite a curated program, designed in very broad terms to tease out varying and individual strands of the topic. But in a way, I don’t answer these, or introduce them. There will be a mix of artists and curators, critics within the discussion, both participating and chairing it, and I hope the effect is to build over the three days, to snowball through quite a wide-ranging discussion. In May I am developing a symposium for the exhibition and its reception in partnership with one of the other directors from the venues, Leonhard Emmerling of St Paul Street Gallery. Rather than forming an ‘examination of the topic’, I have preliminarily titled it ‘the shape of things’ and, taking a three day format (Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday), it addresses the before, during and after experience of the exhibition. So it’s time-based.

We begin with a discussion about what comes first—art, practice, idea. Then, on Saturday, it’s questions put to the exhibition itself, as a tool, as a medium, its different forms and potentials. Then on the Sunday some of the same questions, and some subject-relevant ones, will be asked of the role of review, criticism and reflection.I very much want curators, critics and artists from around New Zealand to attend this. It’s hard outside the lure of opening, but I want these questions to be asked of all of us. How do we handle the tools we are given? Leonhard says it opens me up to risk and review within the context of the Triennial, but I’m not concerned about this, and it’s not the point. Rather, this should also be a creative platform for seeking a certain kind of consciousness around our medium, which is not necessarily driven by subject.

REUBEN KEEHAN: The trajectory from practice to framing to review is an interesting one. Is that methodology similar to the one you applied in developing an exhibition concept and coming up with the list of artists?

NATASHA CONLAND: For me, it seems, there are thoughts that occur along the way.

Sometimes it’s really in the final making where the subject appears. Often absurd links take place, uncanny relationships between artists who I’d imagined had only eclectic relationships. For me this is exciting. But I wouldn’t call it a methodology at outset. Perhaps it is though.

REUBEN KEEHAN: On reading the list of artists, I was struck by how it felt right from the perspective of a rather intuitive curatorial sensibility. Perhaps intuition is the wrong concept to evoke here.

NATASHA CONLAND: It reminds me however, of how there is a lot of bravery in emancipating the exhibition space as a curator.

REUBEN KEEHAN: What do you mean by emancipating?

NATASHA CONLAND: This is a big word. But it’s come up a lot for me with this exhibition. It is passive rather than active. It has to do with wandering rather than mapping. And, it also has to do with some connection between the desire for the exhibition experience and space as ‘optional’, and travel and adventure as things that operate at the micro level as something ‘liberal’. To say liberating would be ridiculous. But it’s about acknowledging the counterpoint system of being, which has a powerful dynamic within the context of a group exhibition.

REUBEN KEEHAN: The point about desire is a good one, and perhaps a better way of getting at what I was trying to say with the equation of spectatorship and tourism, which seems to elude the question of being. Considering desire seems to be a little more complex than simply stressing the circulation of goods or bodies in an exhibition space.

NATASHA CONLAND: But how to quantify it? Somehow it sits adjacent to our need for coherency. But despite this, I’m sure upon entering an exhibition you can’t predict which work will hold your attention. If you do so, you might have to enforce it, and you enter into a pedagogical space.

REUBEN KEEHAN: Do you think a curator needs to bear this in mind, or even to implicate their own desiring potential in the complex of social and discursive relations they propose in the exhibition space? Would that be a more realistic approach than quantifying it?

NATASHA CONLAND: I’m sure it’s the case with you and I as much as artists, and all variants of ‘the audience’, that some works we simply want to attend to lightly and some dwell on, argue with, implore for more and so on. As for how the curator accounts for this in their planning, I don’t think you can or should. As for implicating your own desire—it’s probably pretty hard to remove.

REUBEN KEEHAN: Surely, though, some thought goes into constructing a space of encounter?

NATASHA CONLAND: Absolutely. The curator spends more time in the area of encounter—physical and conceptual. I have produced one exhibition where I worked in a mode of what I called method research. I discussed the process quite intensively over the period of the opening weekend with the artists present. What comes through here, is that there is, almost imperceptibly, a kind of feminism to relinquishing the pedagogical function—or should I say the authorities of the medium. I’m not even sure I could stand by this statement. But we did talk about it a lot at the time.

REUBEN KEEHAN: Is there a reflexivity that’s demanded here? You’ve spoken about the possibility of opening yourself up to review within the duration of the exhibition at a more overtly discursive level. But what about at the more subtle level of discourse production at which the arrangment of objects in space functions?

The white cube is a good example of a space that artists and curators have found a means of critiquing. Given Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s observation the abandoned industrial space has become the successor to the white cube as a global exhibition standard, is there potential to create avenues for reflexivity within the Triennial format, which in this instance will of course use such an industrial space as a venue?

NATASHA CONLAND: To acknowledge some influence here, I’m also interested in the idea of ignorant spectatorship, or the lack of mastery within the exhibition idea. And, I’m reacting a bit to the easy critique of a small biennial, which seems to try hard to say something large, and then seemingly fails by lack of coherence.

And yes, the white cube has an authority that has been rightly critiqued, as has its follow-up industrial form, for its control of the reflexive space of art institutionally empowered terms. The white cube is but one device among many options.

Its history by now has some neutrality—at least in the Western tradition, which pushes it to the background. To recreate an alternative, as we saw in documenta XII, is to foreground again some aspects of curatorial intervention which exercise an acoustic level, which is often uncomfortable.

Page 61: Jorge Macchi, 12 Short Songs (video still), 2009, Photo courtesy the artist Above left: Alex Monteith, Red Session No 2, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist Above right: Shilpa Gupta, Singing Cloud, 2008-09 Photo courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris

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don’t complain 11th international istanbul biennial

NICHOLAS TSOUTAS Today the language of politics is effectively, de-politicised... which allows for the euphoric celebration of a range of marketable differences (usually touted as pluralism) must be replaced by the politicisation of culture. Today when the dilemma ‘barbarity or socialism is more real than ever and the future of the world appears divided between pauperised war zones and the stable fascistic system of the rich zones, this is our task.1

Arriving at the opening night of the 11th International Istanbul Biennial: What Keeps Mankind Alive?, one was immediately confronted by a cacophony of megaphone amplified protests, hooter blasts, shouted political slogans and shrill whistling from the audience, successfully drowning out the speeches of the Turkish Minister of Culture and the CEO of the chief sponsor KOC Holdings. One sensed that What Keeps Mankind Alive? was not going to be just another biennale survey of contemporary art. This very vocal protest effectively highlighted the acute relationship of contemporary art and the role of sponsorship, by asking a crucial question as to whether art can be political and critical simultaneously, when it is subject to and dependant upon corporate funding. Some would argue today that contemporary art has been hijacked by collectors and sponsors and functions unquestionably in the service of the self-interested perpetuation of corporate Capital.

KOC after all is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, corporate oligarchies around, upon which the modern Turkish economy is reliant. A group of anarchists in Istanbul was asking whether it is indeed possible to stage a vibrant political exhibition funded by a wealthy Turkish Industrial company whose politics they disagreed with. Ms. Curlin, a member of the WHW (curators of the Istanbul Biennial), commented during an interview: “But that is one of the reasons we decided to make our budget transparent and to show where the funds are coming from, to discuss the issue of finances. We don’t want to pretend it is not there.”2 It seems there was some legitimacy in their protest, particularly when Turkey is positioning itself as a modern secular democratic economy, desperately attempting to secure entry into the European Union and to be perceived differently from its Middle Eastern neighbours. From the outset, WHW’s strategic critique of transparency began with the Biennial itself, for it could not make the claims of revealing its context, process and production without itself being subject to the rigorous interrogation that it sets out to achieve, for that would have been a fundamental contradiction.

In the main venues Antrepo 3 and Tutun Deposu (The Tobacco Factory) and just as significantly the catalogue itself, WHW exposed the financial and organisational structure of the Biennial, the budget breakdown and allocation of resources, along with very interesting demographic gender statistics and social profiles of all the participants. A flat inverted map of the world clearly articulated the fact that only twenty-eight of the seventy artists originated from the West, but supplementary statistics suggested that forty-five percent of all selected artists live and work in the West. However, the curatorial gaze was strategically and unapologetically focused on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, intervening, inverting and subverting the ‘normal’ flow of art defined through the art power centres of (the Western worlds of) New York and Europe. Whilst institutional critiques are not unexpected from artists, such transparency provided a context for curatorial priorities as well as an exemplary institutional critique of biennale models.

It is a making of the invisible visible that is consistent with the Brechtian imperatives of exposing the back-of-stage, its support mechanisms and the fictions of the theatre’s reality. In doing so WHW played out deliberately different geopolitical discussions on the political nature of centres and margins, selection processes, economic inequity and social justice. This was more than a welcome relief as it subverted the ubiquitous trajectory of biennales manipulated by the West. Clearly What Keeps Mankind Alive? aimed to renegotiate the priorities of art in relation to the world it functions in.

WHW deployed the strategy of making things transparent and not to shy away from the difficult potentialities of art, by speculating upon and interrogating what has been historically concealed by liberal capitalism. This is particularly evident in the simple but politically potent work of Mladen Stilinovic’s installation Nobody Wants to See (2009), in which the numeral 3 is placed opposite a stack of paper on which the number 3 is printed 600 million times to emphasise the global impact of the three richest men in the world, whose corporate capital assets exceed the total capital assets of as many as 600 million of the poorest.

The work explicitly and elegantly challenges the audience to consider what in fact they are looking at, by conflating the act of looking with the realisation of its political consequences. Stilinovic emphasises a gross economic and political inequity, conceived of unproblematically within capitalist democracies. WHW are articulately blunt on this point; in their catalogue essay they state with a sense of political urgency that, Politics must break with this hegemonic logic of capitalism whose servant it continues to be; and if its abolishment does not appear to be on the immediate agenda, capitalism must be socially, economically and ecologically brought into check.

Of course no-one knows how this endemic crisis will unfold... but depend on the actions of its actors.3 What Keeps Mankind Alive? is synonymous with the Leninist revolutionary question “what is to be done?” By raising this question, WHW actively confronts the precarity of today’s political climate, by creating a condition and platform that enables artists, their art and their audiences to examine the biennial as a representative form, as a microcosm of the world around us, by developing strategies that explore the relationships between society and art from social, political and economic perspectives. By utilising the Brechtian theatrical device of making things transparent, the question becomes more urgent, for it seems more relevant today when society is consumed by the fear of perpetual economic crisis of rampant capitalism.

In these terms then, how can we continue to afford not to complain?

Turkish artist Huseyin Bahri Alptekin’s neon sign Don’t Complain (2007)—located just inside the entrance to the main Biennial venue, Antrepo 3, by the wharf on the European side of the Bosphorous—assumes a critical relevance in the way in which one engages with the Biennial itself, as well as WHW’s curatorial framework, particularly if the very premise of the Biennial was to engage, think and be sufficiently motivated to act politically and change the society we live in.

This is what the audience was to be challenged by and implicit in the meaning of Alptekin’s illuminated sign.

Don’t Complain was installed high on a wall, as if it were both a warning to comply and a threat of intimidation if you did not. The political strength and potential of the work lay in its inherent ambiguity, for it even looked like an official sign placed there by the bureaucracy. If one accepted Alptekin’s authoritarian sign literally, it directly and indirectly implicated the viewer in its discourse as it allows the very political condition that one may wish to complain about, by imposing its will and subject to submission. Don’t Complain is an imperative that implies a hierarchical situation, although telling someone not to complain is also in the words of the artist; in essence complaining at the same time. The message is open to many interpretations, depending on potential addresses, and projects a desire for a more active stance towards social reality.4 In addressing the question “what is to be done?” and with a better comprehension of the meaning of What Keeps Mankind Alive?, Don’t Complain is a critical index as to how we engage the Biennial’s objectives. Its placement immediately to the right of the entrance is no accident, but of a curatorial design. How do you in fact complain in a world where capitalism functions only within the frameworks and imperatives of market driven economies that are protected and secured by its own authority? If you don’t complain, do you not do so because there is absolutely nothing to complain about, as you accept the system without question or reservation? If you don’t complain do you acquiesce and become complicit as you find it impossible to complain, or because you are impotent to do so and your silence consents to the existing state of things?

If you complain and it merely falls on ‘deaf ears’, your complaint is rendered inert, reducing you to a disempowering silence of impotence. Of course, it depends on what you complain about; things are different if your complaint strikes a chord in relation to the distribution of wealth, social justice, political equity or radical or revolutionary change. In relation to change, some things only function on appearance, since to change the system fundamentally is neither negotiable nor desirable. Postmodernity absorbed and made space for all differences, as it conceived of a space for opposition before it was ever thought of, thereby neutralising it in the process:

What is finally becoming more obvious today, in the context of the triple crisis—economic, ecological and geopolitical—is that mainstream cosmopolitan culture has been largely absorbed into a predatory system of capture and manipulation, instilling commercial ideologies and generating self interested blindness even in the spaces devoted expressly to vision... provoking a widening crisis of legitimacy.5 Alptekin’s Don’t Complain functions ironically and contrary to its literal meaning, for in its shadow it acknowledges and generates the call to resistance, to social and political action. It functions as a provocation and a challenge to act against one’s complacency, for something must be done in the prevailing circumstance.

Don’t Complain creates an awareness that is a precondition for radical action, by highlighting the self-regulation demanded by the muteness of Don’t Complain.

This silence is the rule that we should trust the State and its democratic institutions, as everything will be alright in the end. Yet it is in this forced silence that the seeds of dissent and the need for change become clear, through the adoption of a more radical strategy of opposition that is not only resistant to the dominant art systems, but can also work as a more productive form of criticism.

Alptekin’s work serves as an instruction in the art of looking more intentionally as a subversive gesture, because it is here that you turn the systems of surveillance and repression against themselves. This is nowhere more relevant than in Hrair Sarkissian’s photographic series Execution Squares, which on the surface appear innocent enough documentary images of three civic squares in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Lattakia and Damascus. These are places devoid of people, without social gatherings, since they are where public executions take place, revealing that not all is as it seems. Sarkissian pushes this ambiguity and the critical possibilities of photographic mediums with a determined capacity to make his subject transparent, a strategy employed by WHW and extending Brecht’s ideas, making the unspoken be spoken and the invisible present. The work demands that we interrogate our consumption of art and imagery more acutely, more critically, more politically, to explore other forms of resistance in the aestheticisation of politics. Sarkissian transforms any discussion of public space into a form of social action. Brecht explains that the end is with us when the figures of oppression no longer need masks. It is necessary here to consider the relationship between violence and the mask, a relationship that Marxist thinkers including Althusser called, “the question of ideology... What is it to unmask an instant of oppression?

What is the exact function of the mask... other than to unmask the real”.6

WHW have curated a biennial platform with a context that has the potential to create a political space enabling art to examine its own presence and capacities, to shift perceptions by suggesting radical possibilities towards better ways of living. What Keeps Mankind Alive? is not a revolutionary exhibition, even though the curators have made an exhibition that demands change, and constructed as a site of intervention against the prevailing conditions of art, provides a forum for independent cultural debate. When the curators say that it is a provocation to make the viewer think about the art that they are looking at, they want the viewer to go further and use the experience of that art as a means of activating political change. What Keeps Mankind Alive? demands action.

It demands responsibility from art to explore and contribute to the very process of change by developing other forms of resistance to art.

Where the commodity as described by Marx acted to conceal the social realities of labour that produced it, the meta-commodities of our time act to conceal the collective deliberations that create the environment in which any labour, leisure or productivity of culture can take place.

The Government of human affairs has been privatised by the calculations of supposedly liberal law. The veil over all this is what we have been calling the aesthetics of blindness.

However, if that is the case those of us working art, face only a very important question, how could the veil be lifted?7 “What keeps mankind alive?” is one of the most fundamental questions of modern philosophy, but by linking it directly with “what is to be done?” and distilling it through Brechtian and Marxist discourse, the curators are pushing the limits of contemporary art by reinvesting it with a political obligation. “What is to be done?” requires political solutions, and for that art, artists and curators (as made clear by WHW) find solutions that reconsider the past in order to re-imagine the future, through a direct and active engagement with the cultural processes that frame and produce art. In this sense the curators reflect optimistically what it means to stay alive, necessitating an activist responsibility to art and in this context, they clearly have no trust in the perpetuation of capitalist politics. They suggest we need to dispel the amnesia that capitalism has so effectively imposed on communist ideologies and to re-think its possibilities into the future.

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“Through the exhibition we reflect on the position that the Biennial occupies in concrete ideological and economic landscapes, which dictate the world of art too. We are especially interested in exploring the possible ways in exiting the impasse of the double bind discourses of global neoliberalism and local ethno-nationalism that is often presented in the form of false choice. For us the questioning of the position of culture and especially of critical art practice in Turkey, and in what ways such a representative event can contribute to the discussion about the alliance between art and activism today.8 While the Biennial was deliberately curated by the WHW within the framework of a classic white cube and on the surface did not seem too out of step with other global biennales, the proposition that it was possible to take a critical position and produce temporary agencies of perception that aimed to make one think about art’s political capacity, in ways that one could not have thought otherwise, was a radical paradigm shift. This subversive strategy suggested that it was still possible for art to remain relevant and have a sense of political agency. That WHW could construct a Biennial that excluded and disempowered the centre by proactively focusing on art practices from the periphery and that were politically charged, was a provocation for all art institutions and biennales, reinforcing the idea that culture is the only field of political struggle.

What Keeps Mankind Alive? is the international biennal that the art world has been waiting for, and judging by the enthusiastic responses it would suggest that art can still function aesthetically while pursuing a highly charged and provocative agenda. It could be considered then no coincidence that the Istanbul Biennial 2009 might claim some impact through its political agendas, in fuelling the anti-International Monetary Fund activist confrontation with Turkey’s civil and military security forces during the Istanbul meeting of the IMF. “The exhibition can also be a place to sharpen new symbolic weapons, or to shift the old terms... allows for self-conscious experimentation... and for debate about possible worlds... to engage with this knowledge, rather than ignoring it as a way to contribute to systemic change.”9 So, should we not complain or, taking the precedent set by the curators of the Biennial, it is not a question of not complaining, but actively complaining with political purpose that engages the conditions of the society and economies that we live in.

Notes WHW, 11th International Istanbul Biennial 2009, What Keeps Mankind Alive? (catalogue), Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür Sanat, 2009: 120 1

2

See www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/arts

3

WHW, op.cit: 97

4

ibid: 59

5

Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost, ‘The Politics of Perception-Art and the World Economy’, What Keeps Mankind Alive?, ibid: 342

6

Alain Badiou, The Century, Malden: Massachussets, Polity Press, 2008: 47

7

Holmes and Pentecost, op cit: 340

8

Interview with WHW, www.artinfo.com

9

Holmes and Pentecost, op. cit: 345

WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999, based in Zagreb, Croatia. Its members are Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Natasa Ilic, Sabina Sabolovic and designer/publicist Dejan Krsic. WHW organises a range of production, exhibition and publishing projects and directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb.

“What”, “How” and “For Whom” are the three basic questions of every economic organisation concern the planning, concept and realisation of exhibitions, as well as the production and distribution of artworks and the artists’ position in the labour market. These questions formed the title of WHW’s first project dedicated to the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 2000, and became the motto of WHW’s work and the title of the collective. WHW will visit Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in late February and early March 2010 as guests of Artspace, Sydney, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and the Australia Council’s International Visitors Program. Among their public presentations will be their participation in the Artspace symposium ‘Common Knowledge: Collaboration and Collectivity in Artistic, Curatorial and Critical Practice’ on 23 February, and a lecture in Melbourne, 3 March. See the Artspace and MUMA websites for details.

Above: Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Sikayet Etme/Don’t Complain (installation view), 2007 Photo courtesy the Estate of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin izniyle

the solid fraud of outsider art ADAM GECZY The term ‘Outsider Art’ was coined in 1972 by the English art critic Roger Cardinal as an umbrella term to describe the art produced by those not associated with, admitted or educated by the art scene; usually the insane, but also the parochial ingenu. ‘Outsider Art’ also incorporates the ‘Art Brut’ of French postwar artist Jean Dubuffet, and folk art as part of its lineage. By and large this kind of art is characterised by a rawness in both conception and design, which assumes a deeper plenitude of psychic penetration, a child-like honesty made possible only from the lack of inhibitions of either the censoring superego or the arbitrary rules of mainstream culture. It is the perception that art from so-called outsiders comes to us uncivilised and unalloyed that gives it its allure; a negative cachet that is caught up, I would argue, with a diagnostic voyeurism. This is far from the only thing that makes Outsider Art suspect. It is an ostensibly innocent descriptor that masks a deep problem: its insulation from the discourse of ‘high’ art. It presumes a set of alternative (‘outside’) criteria proper to it, which, by implication, ‘normal’ art discourse is ill-equipped to accommodate. Now that Outsider Art is a well and an accepted (by some) genre of art (and of the art market), rather than an innocent epithet made in passing, its premise of inside vs. outside, its claim to rules beyond the ken of those possessed of reason, accountable knowledge and history, is cause for considerable alarm. For it enframes a manner of thinking with recourse to an exclusive mysticism that is profoundly conservative by manner of its exclusionism, its suspect clubbiness, and for the way it spurns a normative level of accountability, to which ‘insider’ art is generally answerable.

It would be good to begin with the presumption that Cardinal’s term implies. Much like Lawrence Alloway’s coinage of Pop, Cardinal may have begun with a throwaway term; and while the coinage may belong to such people, they are less responsible for the acceptance, continuing theorisation and relative hardening of the term. Its scattered acceptance is problematic. To begin with it is a notion based on principles that are philosophically lazy. If there is an outside to art, there must be an inside. The rejoinder is easy to anticipate: the inside represents the art schools and academies, the galleries and museums, the critics and the connoisseurs, the educated amateurs and the enthusiasts, that fête, recognise and patronise the artists themselves. But this is just all gloss and rhetoric. The ‘art world’ is too much of a disordered, discordant mass to have an inside let alone an outside. Since at least the Middle Ages, art has always had its share of outsides. From the Renaissance at least, art’s life and development is firmly based in a dialectic between what it wants to be and what it doesn’t; what ought and ought not. This of course reaches a head in Modernism—active in the key terms avant garde and vanguard—in which the dialectic between belief and apocrypha finds its point of contestation in form and style. If we look at the different movements burgeoning in the early twentieth-century, we would have to say that this institution was multiple, a heterogeneous pool. The possibility of defining an inside to an outside is an errant absurdity.

It is with Modernism that an inside-outside dynamic, constructed as it may have been, becomes most visible. For the avant gardes were highly critical of institutions. Despite the institutions they made of themselves or that were made of them in the dialectical passage from radicality to acceptance, the avant garde at its youthful peak was ipso facto of the institution, namely the academy, which they saw as the guardianship of habitual, stereotypical modes of artistic production.

Broadly speaking, the dissatisfaction with art schools and their accompanying salons was two-fold. The first was the repetitiveness that they perpetuated, and second they were inadequate microcosms of the kinds of freedoms to which the radical artists wished to aspire. While the avant garde defined themselves

as against the establishment, they needed that institution against which to fight their battles. The spontaneity and energy perceptible within avant garde works still derives from the energy of heterodox resistance.

Therefore for the notion of Outsider Art to be tenable it must ignore the very binary on which Modernism, and to some extent Postmodernism, is built; of spontaneous luminaries fighting their battles of truth against the sclerotic lethargy of the art establishment. Over and above the debate of what constituted admissible art or inadmissible art—whether that be what satisfied public propriety or what was appropriate for the salon or equivalent academic showing—the presiding debate was what was good and bad art. This still sits within the claims made by the institution of art: what enshrines the institutions, the beliefs and the knowledge systems that allow for the consensus of the value of objects as symbolically invested, that is, imbued with the quality of artness. A large portion of the activity of artists and those comprising their ‘world’ is to separate the good from the bad.

What constitutes good art and bad art is of course a relative and vexed question, and highly variable. At one extreme it can be read ideologically (e.g.

Entartete Kunst or ‘Degenerate Art’), or on the other, in the way I prefer to see it here, as understood in the Kantian sense of the distilling process that occurs all the time with moral beings, for whom almost every moment of the waking day is spent in making choices; hence the right and good passage as opposed to the less favourable. If the difference between good and bad is seen in terms of inside and outside then so be it, but this is not what the apologists of Outsider Art mean, as we well know.

Thus one way of looking at the so-called art world is as a system of fluid and constantly redefining demarcations. This is especially present and apposite to the age of ‘contemporaneity’, the wobbly term that has snuck in past postmodernism as the prevailing rubric for the times. Its looseness can be attributed to the sheer abundance of different styles and attitudes caused by digitisation and globalisation. There is also a subtle implication within the term that not all art produced now is necessarily contemporary. Rather, contemporary art is defined according to what most sums up the spirit of the times: its discontents, its contradictions. What makes the notion of the contemporary so challenging is that it follows a dialectical model whose terms of reference are shifting.

The profusion of biennales throughout the world, what many would agree as endemic of the globalised and diffuse nature of the contemporary within art, is critical to the manner in which the contemporary is trying to instate and constantly to redefine itself. We might do well to remember the famous discourse of marginality that is still a driver and an inhibiter for postcolonial nations such as Australia, whose remoteness from the more febrile and lucrative art markets makes some forms of ambitious art making and art marketing unjustifiable.

And within the so-called centres themselves—be they London or New York—there are hundreds of galleries who complain of not being satisfactorily accepted within so-called mainstream and cutting-edge markets and opportunities. The art market is always winnowing out its own. In short, there have always been outsides to art, and these outsides are multiple and exist according to many categories; so to stake a claim for a principle outside is either simplistic or carries the ignorance of arrogance. If Outsider Art is part of what has been rejected, then maybe for good reason. Yet there is a substantial amount of art which is called Outsider by some—and which shares the traits typical to tâchisme or other more ‘insider’ terms—that is well worth looking at and which garners as much attention as other ‘mainstream’ art. The brutiste tendency is very much part of that composite,

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Above: George Widener, Untitled (detail), date unknown Photo courtesy the artist and The Museum of Everything, London Page 68: Anthony Mannix, The Passage of Elemental Force, 2004 Photo courtesy the artist

which many recognise as what makes up contemporary art. So if we were to use the simplistic dialectic of Outsider Art against itself, we might well say that the simplistic, binaristic contrariness is merely a posturing that is always already subsumed by the difference inherent within ‘the contemporary’ within art.

But this is not what the apologists of Outsider Art would want us to believe–as we well know.

What we today accept as Modernist art has a substantial debt to the kinds of tendencies that Outsider Art wishes to own for itself. We can go further than that and look at concepts of freedom and liberalism inherited from the eighteenthcentury and in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Extraordinarily Rousseau—particularly in the works Émile and The New Héloïse—is credited with having overhauled the way in which children were treated and represented.

The way he shaped our idea of childish innocence and the alacrity with which his thought was adopted is well known. More extraordinary still is the degree to which his ideas still have purchase today, extending to those who neither know nor care about the Enlightenment philosophe. Rousseauian notions of untutored energies allowed free rein, the voice of childish innocence was to be preserved at all costs, as it bespoke a quality uninhibited by the false consciousness of cultured society. Rousseau’s concept of society is a tissue of laws which have lost their moral substance through having severed themselves from the constituents that gave birth to them. The culture-nature opposition was sadly endemic of this, since it suggested that humanity had lost its fundamental bond to what was natural, hence true and free. For Rousseau humans could never be free so long as they invested too little in social standards at the expense of those taught by nature.

In effect, Rousseau constructed an idea of nature that had never existed before. Philosophy had always spoken of natural laws, but these were seen as extensions of God, irrespective of whether one was Cartesian or Spinozist.

But Rousseau’s importance lay in the way he crystallised the Enlightenment and pre-Romantic notions of independent agency through absorbing them into a concept of Nature. As opposed to viewing Nature as an extension of God’s will and his abounding substance, Nature now belonged to Man. It became the object

of human striving. Whereas nature was part of God, man and his relationship to nature, had effectively replaced God. With this came a series of potent myths of non-mediation whose ramifications Rousseau could barely have imagined. A wild fruit, a fruit that not been tampered with, is immeasurably better than one that has come from a farm; so too, a gesture that comes to us without premeditation or forethought is truer than one that shows the characteristics of culture and tutelage. In short, it gives us a more accurate snapshot of Nature and is closer to whom we really are.

Together with the increasing notice given to children at the end of the eighteenth-century came a fascination with the insane. The Romantic identity is tightly woven within the growing valorisation of untutored, non-rulebound forms of expression. Foucault’s groundbreaking studies in the 1960s and 1970s in this regard are well known: the growth of the discourse of reason after the Renaissance witnessed a parallel growth of that of unreason. The implication of this was that reason could not subsist without a culture of diagnosis and sequestration.

This binarisation of society also created a countermovement amongst artists in particular. Thus the interest in children, the insane and the primitive from poets to doctors comes as result of increasing consensus in certain circles, pre-eminently artistic but also philosophical, that their expressions yielded a more poignant truth than what could be could gained from due tutelage and reflection. Géricault’s portraits of the insane are part of this trend; as are Goya’s etchings and paintings of lunatic asylums and black masses. Rimbaud’s dérèglement des sens (disorder of the senses) becomes a catchcry for successive generations of artists and climaxes in Abstract Expressionism. With Pollock in particular, art met its inevitable deadend; that is, according to the narrative of unfettered expression. (As theorists like Rosalind Krauss have shown, when taken into the realm of performance art, Pollock’s work is far more fluid, continuous and less oppressively mythological.)

When we look back on figures like Rimbaud or Pollock, and others like van Gogh, Artaud or even Klee, or the German Expressionist artists of Die Brücke, it is hard to gauge the limits of outsider-ness, let alone what characterises its style.

All of these artists are definitely ‘in’ the art world. They are cardinal members of the history and language of art. There are numerous others who fit the bill as well, such as Gauguin, but for the sake of concision allow me to concentrate on those few I have mentioned. Pollock always played the outsider and his marketing was reliant on that. By no wish of his own, van Gogh is the same. Pollock was a student of Hans Hofmann and van Gogh was largely self-taught, but constantly sought out the advice of his peers, who were some of the most brilliant artists of his time. He had worked at the art dealers Goupil et Cie, had attended classes in Paris of the famous academician Fernand Cormon, and was in contact all his life with his brother Theo who was manager of Goupil in Paris. To name him naïve is tendentious and of benefit only to the commercial market. Klee can be singled out not only because of his famous dictum of “taking a line for a walk”, or for obeying chance over conscious design, but because of the uncanny regularity with which so-called Outsider Art looks like bad imitations of him. All the artists who formed the Die Brücke group in 1905 were architecture students with no art school training.

They attempted to crystallise the still developing interest by the avant garde in African sculpture, with the Fauvist revolution of Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, as well as an ebulliently pantheistic body culture imbued with vitalist narratives of complete freedom.

Rimbaud deserves special mention as he is the archetype of the artist-outsider and visionary ingenu. Beginning writing seriously at thirteen, and abandoning it when he was twenty, he epitomises the youthful, impatient flourishing of raw emotion and explosive intelligence that youths and die-hard romantics think art should be. His 1873 Saison en Enfer (Season in Hell), which he composed aged nineteen, is not only astonishing for being written in the still nascent genre of the prose poem, but ranks with any visionary tract from St. Augustine or Hildegard von Bingen. Its third line reads, Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l’ai trouvée amère.—Et je l’ai injuriée. (“One evening, I sat Beauty on my knee. And I found her bitter. And I insulted her.”) It is a refrain that endears itself to anyone who wills an alternative, antinomian vision.

Rimbaud is held up as the success that can possibly be achieved, when an artist is left to his or her own devices, freed from the false expectations of parenthood and education.

Artaud is another priestly figure within art whose madness had often led to gross misinterpretation. For like van Gogh, he had his bouts of sanity, and much of his art represents an effort to negotiate the two poles of mental activity.

While his fellow Surrealists were busy holding up Artaud up as the token madman, Artaud was desperate for recognition within their coterie, not as an outsider who was—similar to complaints made by feminist and racial minorities—both idolised and vilified. Like van Gogh, his work is an intricate odyssey into self-analysis, since he found the diagnosis and forced empathy of doctors and artists deficient.

Artaud wrote a vertiginous text on van Gogh in which he declared that he had been victimised by a society who had failed him and driven him to suicide, “suicided by society”. Both Artaud and van Gogh were social beings whose efforts at clear and unduped expression are too easily seen as a symptom of madness, as opposed to their effort to escape it. In the words of Louis Sass from Madness and Modernism:

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It in no way diminishes the unique and uncanny brilliance of his writings to suggest that the sensual excesses of his ‘theatre of cruelty’ may be better understood not as expressions of a naturally overflowing vitality but as defenses against the devitalisation and derealisation that pervaded his being.1 Sass goes on to articulate that the main source of Artaud’s agony lay in the constant loss of self brought about from his collapse into psychotic states, and the powerlessness that it brought. The ‘magic’ that he sought in life and art was both bereft in the bourgeois mind and in danger of being unreachable as a result of his own mental failure.

It is important to emphasise at this stage that I have no real problem with the equations of art and madness, except when it is simplistic and when madness, just as childishness or the noble savage for that matter, are made into a fetish that ultimately debilitates other narratives of art production. I am critical of art that readily avails itself of discourses that too easily lapse into regions of pure abstraction, pre-articulacy, and which by implication are immune from ‘conventional’, ‘reasonable’ discourses and their constrictive power relationships.

By contrast, there are contemporary artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois who are remarkable for the way irrationality is a talismanic standard, which threatens to explode the work of art and the individual, at any moment, but is also kept in check with ironic reflection.

One category that has been omitted is that of the other kind of child artist, the artist in the state of mental decline. There is a narrative of development that persists since the Renaissance that artists begin as tempestuous revolutionaries and end as heroes at peace with the world, finally after a long life of apprenticeship to art, plumbing the secrets of childish immediacy. An artist like Matisse is a model in this regard. Apart from the way in which this myth came to eclipse other forms of development and became a kind of mandate for artistic success in old age, like all myths, there is a sizeable grain of truth. There is a serenity that can creep into the art of old and experienced artists that strikes us with its untrammelled honesty. But this obsession with honesty can be taken too far. The madness of mental decrepitude is as seductive to some of art’s audiences as the mental weaknesses that give vent to the mucky, questionable truths of outsider artists. To quote Martin Filler, “one man’s serenity is another’s senility”.

The late works of Titian, venerated as a watershed in his career for their freedom, were executed while the artist was not in full possession of his faculties and physically ill. Willem de Kooning’s last paintings are celebrated as feats of freedom yet they were made while the artist was in an advanced state of Alzheimer’s disease such that his assistants had to hand the paint to him, effectively choosing the colours themselves. The last paintings of Picasso, before his death in 1973 at the age of ninety-one, have also been subject to steady criticism, even as early as the exhibitions in Avignon’s Palais des Papes in 1971,1972 and 1973. Critical responses were lukewarm, and many commented on the mad jumble of paintings whose evident haste was either the product of a man who had taken leave of his senses or had become governed by the idea of his inviolable genius, or both. These are instances of what the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith has called the “senile sublime” or better, “the dross of dementia”.2 What is to be noticed is the manner in which these examples are still fervently defended, and the eagerness with which some people respond to the work of artists which manifest a loss of agency, as if that lack of intent, will and knowledge provides an easier access to primal truth, whatever that is, or whether not really knowing what you are doing can make challenging art. It is stupidity and badness dressed up a religious insight.

(Equally, the defenders of Outsider Art have lobbied together as a kind of cult.

Like a cult, it uses ineffability to dodge objection and to gain more devotees.)

What this short list of artists aims to underscore is that the history art is so populated with artists with mental disorders (salient, repressed, hidden, manifest or diagnosed; we are now led to believe that most artists show symptoms of the latest mutation of Asperger’s syndrome, itself a construction by a Viennese doctor) that it is impossible to make any disassociation. Nor is there sufficient evidence that any similar line can be drawn between artists with formal training and those without. Well before the avant garde, art has always had an agonistic, and indeed parasitic relationship to the outsider—the heathen, the heteroclite, the healer. The narrative of the avant garde exposes a cycle within art that is recurrent within many other endeavours as well, from science to politics: discourses refresh themselves with others from the outside; assimilate and develop, then fall into stagnation and disrepute (take Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the scientific revolutions for example). In short, there is always already an outside within art. And as the example of Artaud has shown, these outsides are multiple, and are often inadvertent, still less desirable to those who inhabit them.

Even were Outsider Art to call itself a rhetorical title—like Vauxcelles’s phrase that gave way to Fauvism—then this would necessitate an a rhetorical twin of ‘Inside’.

The hypothetical consequences are ludicrous. In short, the semantics of Outsider Art are binaristic, yet once this binary is scrutinised, the logic is found wanting.

To lay a term like Outsider Art at art’s door is about as redundant and as presumptuous as sending an outdated manual on motor mechanics to DaimlerBenz.

Before I conclude with the family traits of Outsider Art, it would be unfortunate not to mention Aboriginal art in this discussion, since it can be viewed as being Outsider on several counts. It belongs to a marginal community whose political, spiritual and intellectual needs have been inadequately met. Most of its artists —and certainly all of those who come under the indeterminate banner of ‘traditional’—have not had formal art training in the sense of what is offered

by Federal and State institutions. While it is very hard to generalise in this area, Aboriginal Art has always campaigned for parity with the other arts, and has always been distrustful of efforts to put it on a pedestal. Equally, it has come in for its fair share of criticism for the desire to be equal to non-indigenous arts (and at the same time being commercially and internationally more successful), while yet protesting that non-indigenous eyes have a limited access and comprehension of the sacred, secret nature of their art. (The counter-argument, voiced less often, is just as valid: indigenous people are not necessarily adequately initiated into Western ways of thinking; mutual responsiveness, tolerance and patience are of course key here.) The issue of a right of admission to a particular discourse is prevalent to colonised peoples, however, since it maintains the right of difference.

Problematically, but without the specific cultural harness, Outsider Art craves the same indulgence. By definition, it asks to be judged by criteria ‘outside’ that of art while wanting to be positioned as art. Outsider Art places itself within its own special quarantine, insulated from mainstream criticism.

This alternative discourse that it claims for itself is permanently hidden, since it belongs to the regions of inarticulateness—as we have seen, either childlike, psychotic, or primitive. Yet it wishes to claim for itself something more nuanced than a symptomatology, which was what Freud came dangerously close to, or to some, fell into, in his essays on art. Outsider Art is also a-historical; the phenomenon of ‘outsiderness’ can be located in time but it does not follow the same kind of development as the history of style within conventional art, be it Western or Eastern (especially Chinese, Japanese and Korean). But the more it is unpacked, the call for different criteria from those of ‘conventional’ art discourse is more like the desire to escape criticism. And this kind of sequestration leads to indifference. In the end curiosity leads to boredom. What makes matters worse is that the apologists of Outsider Art are mostly well-versed art historians or critics, who hopefully have heard of the political consequences of groups that deludedly set up an independent framework for themselves. Outsider Art is an Animal Farm but with one major difference, namely its paucity of members.

How many Outsider Artists so-named really would have wished to have been called as such? The example of Artaud is well taken. Would Adolf Wöllfli have wanted such encouragement? Colin McCahon’s work is a series of sallies into the dark in the desire to be heard, to be accepted and embraced and to belong. Thus the wellcredentialled apologists of Outsider Art preside over their flock like psychiatrists in an asylum whose cells are filled with holograms.

The principal problem with Outsider Art—and I have been saving this until last—is the most obvious: it is so often so bad. Yet unlike mainstream art, Outsider Art indulges itself with the special liberties of the inchoate and astray.

The good artists that have been claimed within Outsider Art’s pantheon are few: Wöllfli, Wols and Jean Dubuffet number among them. The latter’s membership is always provisional since his brutisme is a developed style and strategy, not to mention that he is a darling of the French establishment, who is treasured for having managed to divert attention, ever so briefly, away from the art world of the USA with an approach that was less derivative of Abstract Expressionism than tâchisme. For all its faux-alternative self-styling, the newness delivered to us from eyes untrammelled by ‘reasonable’ culture are deadeningly monotonous: an inadequate mastery of figure—ground relationships; spirals; elongated heads (sometimes with spirals for eyes—Mad magazine was on to something); big buglike eyes; lots of images of people shouting à la Munch; obsessive hatching or dotting or scribbling; excremental forms; more scribble; concentric circles (sorry, no offence artists from the Western Desert); vivid psychedelia (sorry, no offence you designers of album covers of the 1960s and 1970s); stick figures; vomit-like form; more scribbling. Outsider sculpture looks like the wood forms that children assemble while waiting for their father to cook their sausages on the barbecue; later it goes into the fire—wisely. It is a saving grace that there is no such thing as ‘Outsider Music’, otherwise we would be overhearing ensembles of ‘players’ sawing away on instruments they do not know how to use.

The analogy is more intended than flip. One of the most stirring and stimulating aspects of art is that we are brought into the bosom of a struggle.

But the most compelling of these is when more than one dimension of human endeavour is enmeshed; when the struggle with form encompasses a struggle with psychology, politics and belief. Intensity commonly arises after repeated attempts at this struggle—an attempt, as Mallarmé saw it, of distillation. Art is all about the abyss, but it is most liberating and therefore most interesting when its expression is somehow a product of resolution, not regurgitation.

Notes 1 Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992: 238 2

Martin Filler, ‘The Late Show’, The New York Review of Books, Vol 56 No 10, June 11, 2009: 28

a much maligned monster why outsider art doesn’t lock horns with the artworld COLIN RHODES The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956) Outsider Art has been around loosely as a concept for almost a century, though the specific term was not used until 1972. It gained wider usage in the 1980s and 1990s, largely as a result of increased, if contentious, usage in the USA among specialist dealers and collectors wanting to distinguish the work in which they were interested from folk art. Things are further complicated by the common contemporary usage of the French term “Art Brut”, as representative of a kind of core category at the heart of Outsider Art.

Art Brut was coined by one of France’s most celebrated postwar artists, Jean Dubuffet in the mid-1940s to define the loosely connected group of marginal art types he collected between around 1940 and his death in 1985.

The collection proper began in 1945 during a three-week trip to Switzerland to visit psychiatric hospitals. His original intention had been only to collect information and photographs for a projected series of publications by Gallimard on the art of the insane, but his experiences convinced him to begin acquiring original works. In 1947 he established the Foyer de l’Art Brut in the basement of René Drouin’s gallery in Paris, and a year later he established the Compagnie de l’Art Brut—to administer his already unrivalled collection—whose founder members included André Breton, the poet and leader of the Surrealist movement, and major publishing and artworld figures such as Charles Ratton, Jean Paulhan and Michel Tapié. The Collection de l’Art Brut, housed since 1976 in a dedicated museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, became the touchstone for the emergent field of Outsider Art. Like other art-historical fields it has its own canonical figures, like Adolf Wölfli, Heinrich Anton Müller, Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill and Henry Darger; contemporary ‘stars’, such as George Widener and the late Judith Scott; and a mass of important figures, such as Paulus de Groot, Rosemarie Koczÿ, Ody Saban and Anny Servais; new discoveries, like Aurie Ramirez and Susan King, together with also-rans and faux-outsider wannabes.

The scope of Outsider Art was defined largely by collectors, dealers and professional artists, who were interested in creative production that lay beyond even the underground scenes so familiar in late modernist counterculture. It has come to embrace the work of artists springing from a fairly broad range of sociocultural and socio-medical groups, ranging from the stereotypical, institutionalised psychotic to intellectually disabled people, mediums and untutored isolates.

Often all that seems to connect the outsiders is their unconnectedness with the dominant artworld and significantly, their absolute committedness to something the artworld calls “a practice”. No amateurs of art these; though often it is not art that they consider themselves to be making. Still contested as the defining epithet, even within the field (too American, say the French; too European say the Americans), the term “Outsider Art” is simultaneously an accolade and a millstone for its originator, Roger Cardinal, who originally meant it solely as an Anglophone equivalent for Art Brut, when he used it on the cover and title page of his 1972 book on the subject.1 The Outsider Art label has rarely been viewed as synonymous with Art Brut, though—it is, after all, an attempt at equivalence rather than translation in the first place. In fact, in the mid-1990s, Cardinal himself had suggested, “I am sure we need to countenance a wider application of the term ‘Outsider Art’... as an acknowledged international phenomenon... that is indebted, yet not subservient, to Dubuffet’s original thinking.”2

Conceptually Outsider Art also has clear resonance with the British writer Colin Wilson’s notion of “the Outsider”, as described in his eponymous book, published in 1956 to great acclaim. His existential construction of the myth of the creative cultural outsider refers more particularly to writers and artists already inscribed in the mainstream, such as Vincent van Gogh, William Blake and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and fictional characters like Herman Hesse’s Harry Haller (Steppenwolf), Albert Camus’ Meursault (L’Étranger), and Jean Paul Sartre’s Roquentin (La Nausée).

Wilson’s formulation describes a stream of modernism not so much tilting against the putative art establishment, as railing against the very heart of hegemonic culture: What can be said to characterise the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality... the Outsider is a man (sic.) who cannot live in the comfortable insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. “He sees too deep and too much” [Barbusse], and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois’ complacent acceptance, it is not simply to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs.3 Yet, in spite of all this, and despite problems they might have experienced or sometimes created for themselves, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Blake and even Van Gogh were highly functioning members of their cultural milieux. Outsiderism, for Wilson then, is essentially a posture adopted by individuals in relation to dominant culture; perhaps with seeming inevitability, but consciously embodied nevertheless.

It is perhaps an accident of their shared modernism that the language of Wilson’s construction of the outsider is reminiscent of that Dubuffet employed for his artistes-brut, who he claimed are “people unscathed by artistic culture”.4 Their works, he said, “ignore the narrow and arbitrary groove through which customary art passes, and freely chart a course through the vast territories which the thoroughfares of culture have left abandoned, to the point of forgetting that these territories even exist”.5 In the 1949 description of Art Brut he argued, “These artists derive everything—subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, styles of writing, etc.—from their own depths.” Moreover, this very solipsism is then equated with the manifestation of a kind of primal general authenticity: “We are witness here to a completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists’ own impulses.”6 So, Dubuffet’s outsiders are rather more emphatically alienated.

Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut as a provocation, designed to attack artworld mores. It was a piece of late surrealist posturing; an épater le bourgeois that extended along a particular line the more general surrealist tendency to annex anything that represented a flipside of hegemonic, rationalist culture, from Oceanic art to spiritualist drawings and objets trouvés. And these were ‘his’ artists; his preserve. The orientation was towards separation from other art worlds, rather than rapprochement. In this sense it is rather easy to take up the other side of the dialectic and dismiss it; though as in all dialectic arguments of this type,

7 1 c o n te m porary v isual art + c ulture b roadsheet 3 9 . 1 2 0 1 0 neither side will meet, so neither will be proved right. More importantly, Dubuffet believed absolutely in the quality of the work he collected, whilst he never really believed in the completely autistic wellspring of its creation that he often claimed in his polemics. Later he even argued that Art Brut represents, as Cardinal puts it, “an unattainable point at the antipodes to cultural conformity”.7

Dubuffet also always asserted that he did not intend it to be synonymous with psychotic art, although he was the first to note that the psychiatric hospital was the most likely place to discover Art Brut. This was in the days of the largescale institutionalisation of mental health service users, and at a time when those patients were granted little in the way of rights to personal choice and even ownership. Thus, not only was work produced—outside the normal situation of artmaking—more visible because its production was more obviously concentrated in a closed population, but also easier to acquire through medical staff. There is very little by way of active consent by artists in Outsider Art’s founding collections, including the two most famous psychiatric collections: the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg (of tremendous importance to Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Dubuffet), and the one at the Saint-Anne Hospital in Paris (which was a key surrealist resource, and later a touchstone for some of the CoBrA group).

The founding myth of Art Brut is based on essentially Romantic conceptions of the creative subject and expressive theories of art, both of which it shares with surrealist thought. Similarly, Dubuffet’s later attempts to designate a kind of buffer zone between Art Brut and the professional artistic mainstream by creating another category, at first referred to as the “Annex Collection” and subsequently called “Neuve Invention” (Fresh Invention) only serves ironically to confirm a rationalist clinging to the need to produce a qualitative taxonomy of marginal arts. Arguably Dubuffet’s major achievement in the area of his activities, to which Art Brut belongs was not that he was the first to encourage audiences to take the work seriously—he only intensified and broadened a European project already begun by artworld and medical cognoscenti.8 Rather, his activities as collector and polemicist ironically (though not surprisingly) acted as key factors in the production of a dynamic artistic field, supported and defined by a specialist market and a discourse.

In truth, the Art Brut notion springs from a more general modernist tendency to look for inspiration and anti-cultural ammunition in groups that lie outside the putative history of Western culture and its art, from Chinese calligraphers, Peruvian potters and Nigerian woodcarvers to European peasants, children and mentally ill people. And in turn this is based on European Romantic traditions of favouring intuition over rationality, or ‘nature’ over ‘culture’.

If Outsider artists include mentally ill people, spiritualists and mediums, people with intellectual disabilities and plain ordinary, untutored people, then it is because they are, even today, the ‘others’ of normative culture. And as artists who are unable to function in the nexus of training, production, discourse, collecting, grant-getting, criticism and museumification that has characterised the dominant artworld for more than two centuries, they appear destined to remain outliers.

“Good!” some might say, “Leave the real artists to get on with it.” Though critics who hold this position are usually also those, who are suspicious of, or even reject, emotion-driven, expressivist, and irrationalist threads in dominant histories of art.

Out are Dubuffet and Wols (in fact, so far out that some people mistake them for artistes-brut), Arnulf Rainer, Georg Baselitz, Niki de Saint Phalle and Annette Messager. In are Andy Warhol, Carl Andre, Art and Language, Jenny Holzer, Sam Taylor-Wood and Gregor Schneider. But where does someone like Daniel Spoerri, or even Cornelia Parker sit in these lists?

Outsider Art is a difficult concept. Not because it’s particularly sophisticated. Not because it’s hard to understand. I don’t think it is. Not even because it’s surrounded by arguments about terminology and its inclusions and exclusions (which it is). It’s difficult, I think, because logic says it probably shouldn’t exist. The (not unreasonable) questions that come from those not already seduced by the field are commonly phrased as: Whose ‘outside’ is it? How do you define the inside that Outsider Art is outside of? Aren’t we all outsiders in some way or other?

If there are collectors, museums and academics who write about it, hasn’t it come inside already? More subtly (and perhaps damningly) sometimes the question is along the lines of: “So, it’s the artists who’re outsiders, not the art. How can you construct a category based on biography?”

All of this is a caricature; a blunt instrument that overlooks subtleties of otherness and engagement with world-views outside one’s own. And of course, biography has been no less important in art history in its examination of the mainstream as in that of its marginalia. At root, I think, is the more vexing observation that some good art has been more or less habitually excluded from mainstream presentations and histories, and that though it doesn’t reside in the Artworld, it can be observed to share a family resemblance to Artworld art.

I should say a little bit about what I mean by the ‘Artworld’. I’m referring to the professional artworld, and specifically to those dominant conditions of production, circulation, display, reflection and critique that constitute a recognisable, if not quite rigidly defined, system. In any time or place this is a world, in which discourse is made and altered by artists themselves as much as by institutions, in a complex set of dynamic relationships. Like any mainstream field, to be in it as a contemporary one has to be engaged in discourse about it,

and recognised as being so (this holds as much for a research chemist or a lawyer as it does for an artist). To be part of it is something a person has to work at, not least because to be inscribed in the system of the discourse is to be visible.

And once you’re gone, to be in it, one has to be inscribed in its histories. Disordered it may be, but the contemporary, international(ist) Artworld is sufficiently ruleand behaviour-driven to constitute a tottering monolith. Its borders may be frayed, but you know for sure when you are inside.

Professional artists are under pressure to be framed within recognisable Artworld discourses (which is one of the things Dubuffet raged against in his anticultural polemics), so however much they might see themselves as outsiders, or cultural guerrillas, they participate in the Artworld. This goes as much for Wols or Van Gogh (whatever his market fortunes were while he was still alive) as it does for Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. Outsider artists, by definition, are not part of that Artworld matrix. They are a mixture of practitioners who share eccentric perceptions in relation to dominant culture that are communicated through the medium of visual art, where those perceptions are lived and embodied, rather than the result of the active adoption of some critical position. Outsider Art is invariably earnest (though it can also be witty) and very often immersed in metaphysics.

Yet, though it seems to be true that irony and (self-) criticality are demanded of the successful contemporary Artworld artist, surely we don’t have to ask this of all artists? More often than not outsider artists belong to socially marginalised groups; their position is not the result of an adoptive anti-establishment stance.

And often that marginalisation is a function of assumed pathology.

I want to argue that Outsider Art not only comes from conditions of production emphatically outside the context of the Artworld, but also that there are special things about the conditions of its production that go beyond a pathologising of the creative subject and the adoption of adversarial postures.

So, the notion of difference is important, but not in a pathological sense. Rather than starting from a position, in which dominant views of the world and one’s conduct in the world are normalised, I want to argue from a position of recognising other world-views as different, but no less valid from a creative point of view: Ken Grimes’ revelations of alien interventions and conspiracy theories, for example; Anthony Mannix’s eroto-daemonic representations of a hallucinatory Sydney; Aloïse’s chimerical love affair with Kaiser Wilhelm II; or Minnie Evans’ celestial visions. And I want to argue the validity of this point strongly, even (perhaps especially) in the cases where the practitioner constitutes what the British jazz singer and writer, George Melly famously referred to as a “Tribe of One”; that is, where there is little or no experience of, or connection with other art and artists, as in the case of Roy Wenzel, whose spontaneous work is an intense reliving and remixing of memory seen first through a homemade viewing device in the shape of a Dutch train window. The image he makes is never the tangible phenomena behind the viewer.

At base, there is to be sure, a quality judgement to be made. Not all Outsider Art is of high quality; just as not all Artworld art is of high quality. No one seriously argues that all art is of the same standard, though at times, apologists for Outsider Art have claimed either that all of it is of the highest quality, or that it is inappropriate to make quality judgements at all. Neither position is helpful.

Not least because both in their way block discussion and debate about the art itself, and both play into the hands of critics who would have it that Outsider Art is just bad art. If artistic production coming from these other creative places is worth attending to as art, some of it at least must be of very high quality. I believe this to be the case. A Wölfli, or an Aloïse, or a Martín Ramírez, for example, are rich indeed in aesthetic and conceptual content. Without this, Outsider ‘art’ would be interesting only from a socio-cultural point of view.

Outsider Art, though, is usually unresolved, in the sense of the kind of self-reflexive concern for art production and the measured development of practice that is what we might expect from the professional artist. This is not because outsider artists are not fully committed to artifact-making. They are.

Rather, it is because making is driven by narrative and, very often, didactic intent.

Art is not the end, but the vehicle by which to achieve the end; a communicating vessel. The look of Outsider Art is socially and economically determined.

Since its creators have tended to be poor and more knowledgeable about vernacular technologies of building and decoration, this has always affected their approach to making. A kind of bricolage aesthetic clings to its products, from drawings and paintings to whole environments (in Finland the term ITE Art, from “itse tehty elämä”, meaning DIY art, has been adopted as the category description). Yet, when he could afford it, someone like Howard Finster, for example, would typically buy the best quality house paints possible for his paintings and use new boards, rather than finding them in the trash. He’d demonstrate the durability of the finished object to potential buyers by hitting it with a hammer. On the whole though, because it uses poor materials and mixes them according to availability and effect, without concern for longevity, Outsider Art is a conservator’s nightmare.

The heterogeneity of materials characteristic of much Outsider Art (that arises out of necessity) has become a common feature of contemporary Artworld art (as a matter of artistic choice). A visit to any biennale or art school graduation exhibition will throw up any number of examples of artists working primarily with what I want to call poor materials—that is not just traditionally inartistic

Again, this taps into a general strain within modern and contemporary culture.

The great structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put the position more emphatically than Dubuffet: In whatever field it may be, only the first initiative is wholly valid. The succeeding ones are characterised by hesitation and regret, and to try to recover, fragment by fragment, ground that has already been left behind... The grandeur inseparable from beginnings is so undeniable that even mistakes, provided they are new creations, can still overwhelm us with their beauty.10

materials, but stuff that might be ephemeral, discarded, sub-standard, and plain cheap. In many ways this chimes with the anti-aesthetic trend in modernism and postmodernism that runs through Dada and its descendents, as well as in the intellectual and highly symbolic vein that has grown out of twentieth-century performative practice, along with its residues and transformations as installation work. But it embodies a level of introspection that sometimes borders on the hermetic. Perhaps more subtly pervasive in more recent times has been a tendency to subvert entirely old hierarchies of media and exhibit, especially, works on paper that might be both small in scale and on poor quality sheets using implements with fugitive inks, such as fibre-tip and ballpoint pens, as has been the case with much of Tracey Emin’s output, for example. The general feeling conveyed in installations is often that of compulsive-obsessive activity, or of related notes and thoughts gathered together suggestively but in an unrefined state. It is Duchamp’s notes on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) meeting with the mind of Sartre’s autodidact from Nausea, and the two opened like Pandora’s box.

But of course, we viewers are not meant to read compulsive-obsessive referents as literal qualities, and certainly not to literalise it as medical diagnosis. Rather, it is creative strategy; the ordering of parts in ways that make viewers work at meaning that is (presumably) presupposed but not revealed. Intentionality is the key in the art mainstream—poor materials are employed purposefully; that is, the very materiality of the work is part of its content intentionally. This broken stick of furniture, this scrap of paper, this battered, kitsch souvenir of an event or place has been chosen precisely because of its nature and the content that either it contains and can be teased out of it, or which can be insinuated.

Similarly, because outsider artists tend to be autodidacts, the level of technical know-how in respect of conventions of representation is usually low, so that images are generally ungainly and often naïve. This is something to which practitioners and lovers of expressivist art tend to react favourably, whilst those more wedded to conceptualism or mimetic traditions don’t. This is a matter of taste; one tends towards the vernacular, the other to high culture.

Dubuffet summed up the former position in ‘Notes for the Well-Read’ (1945): A song bawled out by a girl scrubbing the stairs knocks me over much more than an erudite cantata. To each his own.

I like the little. I also like the embryonic, the ill-fashioned, the imperfect, the mixed. I prefer raw diamonds, in their gangue.

And with all their defects.9

Over the last forty years or so, the contemporary Artworld has allowed for the functional acceptance of much Outsider Art as image or material thing into the fluid system of museumification. It has even begun to be interested in outsider writing (or écrits brut) and outsider music. Wölfli’s and Darger’s immense bodies of writing are now being published11 and studied, for example, and as long ago as 1986, the New Zealand-born musician Graeme Revell released a recording of music

by Wölfli on his Musique Brut label.12 Outsider Art used to look like the prototype for much modernist practice and therefore was more often valued as a source —in a kind evolutionary schema; and when valued for itself it was as something essentially different. Nowadays it often looks like what Dubuffet scathingly called the “usual art”; that is, the accepted and acceptable production of the contemporary mainstream. It does this unwittingly however. It’s why some people, and especially artists have begun to describe Outsider Art as “too commercial” —an interesting inversion and a reflection I think, on its appropriation by the market rather than the position or status of its creators, either past or present.

It’s also another convenient way to block any mainstreaming tendency.

It is tempting to think that Outsider Art may pose some implied threat to those in the mainstream, who are wedded to the idea of a globalised, predictable artworld; one that has institutionalised an ultimately theatrical antagonism to the art establishment and political critique of the status quo, whilst desiring what Adam Geczy calls “a normative level of accountability”, and inhabiting a comfortable academicism. If the idea of an artistic underground in the 1960s was characterised by various levels of interventionism and activist, politicised resistance to official culture, in the postmodern worldview all art production is political and at the same time is part of official structures—the rhetoric of late modernist transgression becomes the language of the New Academy. I am not necessarily against this, but being a good citizen of contemporary art is surely neither a necessary nor a sufficient qualification for being an artist. Though it might be necessary if you want to join the club.

Notes 1 Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art, London: Studio Vista, 1972. Cardinal is always (been) keen to point out that Outsider Art was conceived as an English language equivalent for Art Brut, and that, “My book dealt directly and explicitly with Art Brut, which is the term used throughout the text.” (‘An intercontinental perspective’ in Laurent Danchin and Martine Lusardy, Art Outsider et Folk Art des collections de Chicago, Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998: 18) 2

Roger Cardinal, ‘Toward an Outsider Aesthetic’, in Michael Hall and Eugene Metcalf eds, The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1994: 28

3

Colin Wilson, The Outsider, London: Victor Gollanz, 1956: 15

4

Jean Dubuffet, ‘Art Brut in preference to the cultural arts’, in Allen Weiss ed., Art Brut: Madness and Marginalia, Art & Text 27, 1988: 33

5

Jean Dubuffet, ‘Make Way for Incivism’, in Allen Weiss, ibid: 34

6

Jean Dubuffet, ‘Art Brut in preference to the cultural arts’, op cit.

7

Roger Cardinal, ‘Towards an Outsider Aesthetic’, op cit.

8

In the case of psychotic art, this is clearly articulated in John MacGregor’s excellent study, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989 9

Jean Dubuffet, ‘Notes for the Well-Read’, in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York: Abbeville Press, 1987: 86

10

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992: 408

11

Notably Elka Spoerri ed., Adolf Wölfli–Writer, Poet, Draftsman, Composer, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997; Michael Bonesteel, Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings, New York: Rizzoli, 2001; and John MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002. Collections of écrits brut include: John Oakes ed., In the Realms of the Unreal–‘Insane’ Writings, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. Studies of écrits brut include: Michel Thévoz, Le langage de la rupture, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978; Allen Weiss, ‘Écrits bruts: the other scene of writing’, in Shattered Forms: Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992; Collection de l’Art Brut, Ecriture en délire, Lausanne: Collection de l’Art Brut, 2004 12 Graeme Revell and Adolf Wölfli, Necropolis, Amphibians & Reptiles–The Music Of Adolf Wölfli, UK: Musique Brut, 1986

Above: Malcolm McKesson, Mistress Reducing Man to Page (c.1975) Photo courtesy the artist and Henry Boxer, London

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27 FEBRUARY – 2 MAY Detail: James Morrison, Worm blood dripping, 2009-10, papier mache and ink, 198 x 82 cm; Courtesy the Artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. Photo credit: Simon Hewson.