4th Moscow Curatorial Summer School
Contributors Alina Belishkina Kseniya Butuzova Giada Dalla Bontà Binna Choi Marina Grzinic Alexander Ivanov Adel Kim Anastasia Kolesnikova Alexandra Khazina Maria Kramar Anton Lapov Elizabeth Larison Sven Lütticken Joana Monbaron Paul O’Neill Caterina Riva Mercè Santos Mir Mateusz Adam Sapija Victoria Sarangova Sona Stepanyan Laura Tammen Alisa Taezhnaya Olga Vad Marina Vinnik Mick Wilson Alexander Zhuravlev Tatiana Zaidal Dobrynia Ivanov and Svitlana Libet
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IDIOMS DICTIONARY on relationship between school and life experience in English and Russian languages
old school (en) - vintage; from an earlier time; retro learn a lesson (en) - to learn something useful about life from an unpleasant experience
school of hard knocks (en) - learning through difficult experiences school of life (ru) - acquired life experience school of thought (en) - a particular philosophy or way of thinking about something
to get a lesson (ru) - learn something regarding life on example to teach (somebody) a lesson (en) - to show what should not be done; punish in order to prevent a recurrence of bad behavior
to tell tales out of school (en) - to tell secrets or spread rumors the old school tie (en) - the way in which men who have been to the same expensive private school help each other to find good jobs
Sources: Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, Cambridge University Press, 2003 McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs, 2002, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. The American Heritage速 Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer, 2003, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
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PHRASEBOOK OF AUTHORITY (OR HOW TO DOMINATE AS A TEACHER IN RUSSIAN SCHOOL) A golovu ty doma ne Have you left your head at home? zabyl? Les ruk ! A forest of hands! (When no one wants to answer) Vozmite dvoinye listotchki Take double sheets (An alarm signal indicating the beginning of test) Vozmi banan! Take a banana! (Banana is 1, F mark in Russian school) Vyidi i voidi snova! Get out and enter again! Po golove sebe postutchi? Tap on your own head! Esli ty takoy oomnyi, vstan I If yo the class in my place! provedi oorok za menia Skaji vsem, vmeste Tell to everyone, we will laugh altogether! posmeemsia Otsenku ia na dvoikh budu Should I divide your mark by two? ? (When two students talk during the test. Dividing the Amark (5) by two means that two people will receive F (2). Dvoiku stavlu poka I write an F-mark with pencil but soon it will be with pen! karandashom, no skoro budet roochkoi! make things better for himself) Poka ty bolel v klasse byla It has been a perfect silence in class while you were ill! idealnaya tishina Deze ona zabyla, a She forgot her homework but she did not forget to make nakrasitsa ne zabyla up! Zvonok dlia uchitelia! The bell rings for the teacher! (Meaning that students are not allowed to leave the is ringing) Kto ne znaet zakon Oma mojet sidet doma Otkryli tetradi, zakryli rty! Open your workbooks, close your mouths! Vyn' banany iz ushei Doma budesh tak razgovarivat' Ia otkazyvaius ot vashego klassa!
Take bananas out of your ears! (When someone does not listen) Talk like this at home, not here! I am refusing to work with your class! (Used very often) by Alexandra Khazina
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DURA DERRIDA,
SED DERRIDA
MateuszSapija: you said today ‘the world does not disappear in the context of an exhibition, it is a part of what we perceive.’ One can conclude that this might be an interrelation. If so, how an exhibition might influence the surrounding and what ways of operating are most fruitful in culturally or politically sensitive environment?' PaulO’Neill: I am concerned with the critical potentiality of the group exhibition form as a productive space for creating new forms of knowledge, and for questioning the parameters of authorship through co-operative and post-autonomous modes of production. Curating involves varying degrees of co-operation with many different artists, curators and writers, and allows for divergent intellectual positions to co-exist, often in contradiction to one another. So I’d suggest curating as a model of “emergence”, as it engenders new practices, new meanings, values and relations between things. But I am not employing the term “emergence” to describe it as something that is a mere appearance of the new. I am using it in the sense of curating being the possible site of dialectical opposition to the dominant, as it has the aspiration of overcoming, transgressing, evading, renegotiating or bypassing the dominant in some small way What is an exhibition? What, why and how to exhibit? Currently exhibitions reach a lot further than being an individual or a group presentation of artworks. They can be a school or a laboratory. They might have 30 curators or none. The possibilities are countless. 4th MCSS conducts an online-roundtable discussion around potentials of exhibitions and their possible role in the curatorial ‘educational turn.’ The imaginary roundtable will form an extension and at the same time will be part of the 4th Moscow Curatorial Summer School Zine. The discussion will take place between the students of the school and the visiting tutors though transferring it to the online realms will allow it to be fluid and open for people who cannot be physically present with us. Please join the conversation @ http://conversations.e-flux.com/
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What is a school?
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I operate inside the university system; I am a professor at the Academy and therefore I am already part of a structure that I could name master knowledge. In a movement, aimed at changing of the imposed Bologna educational system of reforms of the University, that took place in Vienna, in Europe and worldwide in 2008, an important articulated opposition was formed.
European countries that had already introduced the Bologna’s system of reforms, conceived by the EU, which is actually a system of deschooling (bringing and developing stratifications, diversifications, systems of inequality and elitism), reported on these reforms as a failure. There is more. This new educational system proved itself to be well attuned with the hierarchization, control and management procedures of the present EU neoliberal capitalist states. Those under attack especially are the migrants and all those who are seen as not being natural parts of the neoliberal capitalist nation body. Here, I am talking about those seeking asylum, etc., or coming from parts of the global world that is at war (the Middle East, Africa) induced by capital and neoliberal management. When coming to Europe, they are, due to the system of control and biopolitics (which is more and more changing into necropolitics), prevented from entering the EU. Unlike biopolitics that governs from the perspective of the production and regulation of life, necropolitics regulates life from the perspective of a production and regulation of death. Mbembe observes how life is actually regulated within the extreme conditions of a war machine and of global capitalism. The notion of ‘necropolitics’ refers to life reduced to its bare existence, in other words, to life at the verge of death. I suggested that if Foucault's biopolitics as mode of governmentally can be described in an axiomatic way as “make live and let die”, in Mbembe' s necropolitics this expression could be rephrased as to “let live and make die".
What does the implementation of Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics mean with regard to art studies and migration studies?
An overt racism with fascist elements (also used against the proper working class in neoliberal states) is at work at home in Europe. What we have here is structural and class racism being normalized throughout the entire territory of the EU. Besides racism, we have to add an extremely invigorated state apparatus of repression.
production connectivity ritual linearity ideology utopia polyvariance information market opportunism idle talks
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“In order to name with a unifying term the forms of life and the linguistic games which characterize our era, I have used the notion of “multitude.” This notion, the polar opposite of that of innovations which I have tried to point out. Let me cite some of them here, in no particular order: the life of the stranger (bios xenikos) being experienced as an ordinary condition; the prevalence of “common places” in discourse over “special” places; the publicness of the intellect, as much an apotropaic device as a pillar of social production; activity without end product (that is, virtuosity); the centrality of the principle of individuation; the relation with the possible in as much as it is possible (opportunism); the hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language (idle talk). Idle talk damages the referential paradigm. The crisis of this paradigm lies at the origin of the mass media. Once they have been freed from the burden of corresponding point by point to the one from the other. Idle talk has no foundation. This lack of of daily interaction. Nevertheless, this same lack of foundation authorizes invention and the experimentation of new discourses at and transmitting that which exists, itself produces the states of things, unedited experiences, new facts. [] It seems to me that idle talk makes up the primary subject of the post-Fordist virtuosity []” Paulo Virno
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Today I'm very concerned about hypocrisy and lie all around the society structures. And that is why I've decided to take the song from my soviet childhood (which is still regularly performed bu pupils in Russian school) and the “Law about education”. They are both iconic and they are both fake. I've translated the text of the song with the help of the automatic program – to make it awkward and senseless. As it is - on the certain level. Буквы разные писать. Тонким пёрышком в тетрадь Different letters to write. Thin feather in the notebook Вычитать и умножать, малышей не обижать. Subtract and multiply, kids not to offend. Вычитать и умножать, малышей не обижать. Subtract and multiply, kids not to offend. Учат в школе. Учат в школе. Учат в школе. Taught in school. Taught in school. Taught in school. The goal of education – is to encourage people to make personal contribution in cultural, economic and social development of the country. К четырём прибавить два, по слогам читать слова. To add four two syllables to read words. Книжки добрые любить и воспитанными быть. Books good love and be brought up. Книжки добрые любить и воспитанными быть. Books good love and be brought up. Учат в школе. Учат в школе. Учат в школе. Taught in school. Taught in school. Taught in school. Education must help child to develop his personality and increase the level of knowledge. Education must include the child in social and professional live and form his citizenship. Находить Восток и Юг, рисовать квадрат и круг. Finding the East and South, to draw a square and a circle.
И не путать никогда острова и города. And do not confuse Island and the city never. И не путать никогда острова и города. And do not confuse Island and the city never. Учат в школе. Учат в школе. Учат в школе. Taught in school. Taught in school. Taught in school. The feeling of Love to your Motherland at conscious level – is very important part of social, spiritual, moral and physical development of personality.
Why do you think people are interested in art? I think they want to touch the source of something, you know? teach people to do it or like it. So who knows?
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Decree of People's Commissars "On the elimination of collaboration in the Russian Federation" dated 26 December 1919. "In order to provide the entire population of the possibility of conscious participation in the political life of the country SNK decided: The entire population of the Republic aged between 8-50 years, who can not read and write, it is required to learn to read in their native language or Russian as desired. Training is conducted in public schools, both existing and establish the collaborative population of the People's Commissariat of Education plans. The term collaboration is established provincial and city council of deputies. People's Commissariat of Education granted the right to involve the training of collaborative people in order labor service all collaborative population of the country is not designed to the troops, with their remuneration according to the norms of Educators. By the close participation in the elimination of collaboration People's Commissariat of Education and local authorities are involved in the organization of all the working population ... Learn to read, working as employees except those employed in militarized factories, the working day is reduced by two hours for the duration of training with pay. For collaborative bodies of People's Commissariat of Education is available to use people's houses, churches, clubs, private houses, suitable premises for factories, factories and Soviet institutions. Supply the authorities are obliged to meet the needs of institutions aimed at the elimination of collaborative, especially in front of other institutions. Evading duties established by this decree and prevent collaboration attend schools prosecuted. People's Commissariat of Education is entrusted to two weeks to issue instructions for the implementation of this decree. Chairman SNK Vladimir Ulyanov Managing the affairs of the CPC Vl. Bonch - Bruevich
Pink Floyd Another Brick in the Wall (1979)
We don't need no education We don't need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! Teachers! Leave the kids alone! All in all you're just a another brick in the wall All in all you're just a another brick in the wall
We don't need no education We don't need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone Hey! Teacher! Leave us kids alone! All in all you're just a another brick in the wall All in all you're just a another brick in the wall
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–And rise your hand if you did not understand. / –Let’s see Manolito, what did you not understand? / –Since March until now,nothing!
MY HEART WILL GO ON AND ON...
Let us understand each other perfectly And never make a mistake after it has been made already. Let us live together indulging each other. Because life is short.
Let's grieve and cry openly Together, separately and one after another. We shouldn’t pay attention to vicious words Because sadness is always adjacent to love.
Let's exclaim and admire each other, High-flown words are not to be feared. Let's talk to each other compliments — Because they all are the happy moments of love.
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This is the Casco operational diagram sketch made during the Casco Team Assembly on 6 July 2015, a form of our meetings that came about as one of Site of Unlearning: Art Organization exercises in collaboration with artist Annette Krauss.The sketch is drawn by myself in the process of discussing with the whole team of Casco. The rings are the layers of our constituency such as community, network and public. As this division itself was questioned during the assembly, we came to an agreement that we commit ourselves further to the mediation. Another important question raised was, “where’s time?” Along with it, we realised that we barely make ourselves and our work “visible” - hence undervalued?- so it’d be another focal point for our commitment. Here comes the task of how to make visible and share more broadly our “unlearning” process. As an after image of this diagram and as to prepare my contribution to the summer school, I notice what forms an main and most visible axis of our operation, artist led projects and long-term research projects, figure the image of a satellite: this brings me a passage from Michel Henry’s book From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe “Under the reign of technology, capitalism must sell especially those things that have no relation to life and that do not matter to life in any way. It must sell so-called “communication” satellites, although in this particular form of communication no one communicates with anyone else.” How much of this is true to Casco’s “satellite”? The act of making visible as a form of communication can do in a way of making our life, time that makes life, not death? Binna Choi, Moscow, 15 July 2015
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My Online Curriculum On How To Make Stuff Happen / A Killing Mick Wilson Part One: Dead Things (Make Myself Some Money) 1. I am writing lines from Meena Alexander’s Raw Meditations on Money, Part 1, where a school teacher from South India speaks: “… and they come to me, at dawn three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly (we know this from national geography class, the borders of states, the major cities). They hung themselves from fans. In the hot air they hung themselves so that their father would not be forced to tender gold he did not have, … … Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls. … Gold is labor time accumulated . . . labor time defined. Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard trained in Indian history and geography, Kerala University, first class first. … Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight, breathe into the strokes of catastrophe, and let the school bus wait. You will get to it soon enough and the small, hot faces.” So there, it is now done: I have stolen things. I have even broken those stolen things. I have trampled through stuffs, trespassed into territories. I have stained myself with others’ belongings. I can stand ashamed before the great gate. I can be whitened sepulchral. And I can calmly be asked why I write her lines: I, I, I. Part Two: Family Things (Make Strange) 2. Imagery of an infant climbing kitchen fridge with toy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOoN-V1kxbY 3. Child performing lament of brother’s aging and future death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84DLT4yRcy4 4. Father and son slapping each other’s faces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tJmvT92hdE 5. Grandmother knowingly declares sexual ignorance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWXDqg896W0 6. Nancy Frazer cites Rosa Luxemburg on social reproduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk2VJAW_jHw Part Three: Genocide Edutainment Things (Make Lists) 7. Documentary on the Herero and the Nama. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OZ7Xc5pWQ 8. Documentary on the Armenian Genocide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HzZXIchBhQ 9. Claude Lanzmann: The Last of The Unjust. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aw4EZ8 XT8&list=PLnSESdOycIlAy_As7DTLHr6_vPS6SK6Uj&index=12 10. Documentary on Rwanda: ”Most time efficient genocide…” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sa4jkLjRQA 11. Killings that didn’t make it into my document: Darfur, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Tasmania, Katyn, North America, Central America, South America, East Timor, Myanmar … Part Four: Tricky Affinities Without Solidarity (Make Up Stuff) 12. Coming Words: Celan, Heidegger, and the unknown driver. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/joris/todtnauberg.html Part Five: Examine Old Things (Make Myself Learn More) 13. She seemed to suggest that it was only within the actual experience of labour organizing and other mobilisations of the people(s) that political education happened. Is there political technique that we have forgotten? (Note: Should this be a multiple choice or an essay question? Discuss.)
14. At confession always speak the truth and be a good ol’ soul. 15. Remember “lines of flight”: These are the Bourgeois Revolt’s path of least resistance and refusal of solidarity. Coriolanus knew well, that the people would love us where we were lacked. (Also, watch out for the mother and the aunts.) 16. Remember to be more holy than thou, more critical than thou, more integral than thou, more dispersed than thou, more novel than thou, more thou than thou. That’ll teach ‘em. Part Six: Worrying New Things (Make Myself Ready To Die) 17. Why speak in riddles? 18. Why ask “what is…?” formula questions? 19. Why not get a real job with real money? 20. He said that the amazing thing is that we are, even in the vastness of the worlds, capable of boredom; we are able to construct apparatuses of boring-dumb; we are, in some dimension, sublimely over-sized for the vasty-spaciousness-of-auniverse. And so the wonderment may be that we do not kill on a yet grander scale. Not yet, anyway. Part Six: Value Things (Make Myself Scarce) 21. He said, ”I know you. You better keep your mouth shut, asshole” and I got real scared. 22. But, truth be known, I am more scared of the people who say there should be no curriculum. It is as if they wanted a ”year zero”. They trick. They steal. They lie, like know-it-alls.
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A Question of Schooling: EMANCIPATORY TOOLS, FOOLS & FRAUDS Paul O’Neill: Before we start, I have been detained by some of your suggested reading. I couldn’t get Liam Gillick’s introductory assessment of unitednationsplaza out of my head. I want to avoid conjuring up his nightmare, but I am continually drawn back to it. Can we avoid playing party to the kind of chatting fraternity that Gillick so eloquently described as being akin to ‘sitting in a room with people, self-consciously criticising the idea of middle-aged men sitting in a room, talking about the idea of sitting in a room self-consciously critiquing the idea of middle-aged men sitting in a room’? 1 I want to move beyond a chat, to begin to un-know what we already know in the hope that we can operate in the name of what Irit Rogoff has called ‘not-yet-known-knowledge.’2 That is, departing from us showing off to one another or even professing that we are trying not to do so. I wonder if this is possible.
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I am trying not to imagine us being in the room Gillick describes, but it’s such an affecting image of a common experience that it seems impossible to fully ignore. It provides a very familiar picture of how the ‘public discussion’ is enacted in an art world context, but it departs from art teaching in the university context where everyone is ‘encouraged’ to turn up. I am always surprised that anyone has bothered to turn up when I am speaking and then, when I am in the audience, I wonder why more people haven’t. Neurosis aside, what’s so compelling about Gillick’s text is not necessarily its situated content, but the degrees of displacement he so willingly expresses as a self-conscious accomplice within a co-conspiratorial context. What this scene inadvertently reveals when published as a transcript is a disjunction. It does so by establishing a separation between at least two distinct audiences: a text initially performed for those who were present, now available to be read by those who were not. So, at least one reader is assumed to be an absent participant within, but without, the particular eventful experience. The event has taken place in some other time and place, but is deemed universal enough to be ‘read’ as a general condition of how such moments are experienced. This is what makes the scenario so troubling, because it asks us to think about for whom these events are actually intended. Does it matter if anyone shows up, other than those invited? It’s always good to talk, to be engaged, but in an art world context, it’s often even better to be seen to be doing so, for it to be known that we are talking. There are certain known figures in the art world, for example, who wait for their names to appear in public event announcements and then they don’t bother to turn up. I would call this the e-flux phenomenon. Mick Wilson: I interpreted Liam Gillick’s piece as a gentle provocation at the self-seriousness of the art world when it congregates to discuss anything. But let me approach this image of people discussing the conditions of their discussions – as posited by Gillick – from another direction. Consider a mundane everyday experience of art school teaching: the staff meeting. Recently, my colleagues and I, working on a fine art programme based in Dublin, were trying to resolve the question of how and when we should organise meetings. The arguments spun around whether there were too many meetings or not enough; whether we should schedule people to be on campus more often so that meetings would arise organically and so forth. What emerged in these discussions was an argument from some colleagues that meetings were somehow extraneous, they lay outside the core activity of teaching and making art. The counter-argument was made that meetings are in fact the essential activity of the art school teacher. Art school teachers meet with their students and we meet with each other. These meetings take many forms. Sometimes – rather more often than one might at first assume – the meeting is a process of reflection upon the conditions of the meeting. There is a reflexive moment – a mise en abîme is effected and we have meetings about meetings. This dynamic resonates with Gillick’s opening gambit in his paper for unitednationsplaza. Of course, some readers may wish to distinguish between a private and functional ‘getting-business-done’ staff meeting – ‘functional’ is of course a moot qualifier. Further, the art world
discussion that at first appears as a non-instrumentalised encounter in the public domain can also be a place where business gets done and deals get brokered. Accepting the need to start our discussion not by trying to impress each other, but rather by trying to engage each other and our imagined readers, I think it might help to note that, while proving how well-informed one is about contemporary art may score points in a public seminar or catalogue text, it rarely impresses anyone in a staff meeting at art school. This is funny, given that the staff meeting is where people most often decide to parade their performative identities as tenured radicals who are against the ‘system’ and on the side of the student. The room for bad faith in all of this is very great. Luis Camnitzer addressed this very robustly in ‘Fraud and Education’: ‘The […] mistake is promising by implication, that a degree in art will lead to economic survival after graduation. […] Basically, what we have here is a pyramid scam.’3 PON: Yes, publish and be damned, but let us not forget that symposia, conferences or art educational events, and their subsequent publication are nothing new, so I do wonder why this new alignment of ‘discussion’ and ‘discursive’ with ‘exhibition’, ‘event’ or ‘programme’ has emerged as a recent phenomenon in an art world context. In some cases, the ‘discursive event’ operates as a supplementary or extraterritorial space, as in, for example, the five ‘Platforms’ of documenta 11, or frieze Talks or documenta 12’s discussion programme and its much maligned ‘magazine project’. But, in many other cases, they are caught up in the exhibition as the main event. Examples include unitednationsplaza, Berlin, 2007; Be[com]ing Dutch: Eindhoven Caucus, 2007; The Madrid Trial, 2007; Citizens and Subjects: Practices and Debates, Utrecht, 2007 and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ongoing mobile ‘24-hour Interview Marathon’ to name but a few instances in the last year where the content, structure and form of the discursive setting appears to function as the ‘eventful’ immaterial work; or at least that is how they are discussed within art world discourses. They are mediated in a similar way to that used to frame, brand or describe the semi-autonomous, hermetic artwork, the curated exhibition-form or the ‘authored space’. So, enough said already! MW: As regards these developments and what has been said already, you have given me the opportunity to argue elsewhere that this ‘discursive turn’ in recent art practice harmonises with a particular mode of reputational economy that constitutes the contemporary art world. It seems clear that there is a lot more work to be done in respect of this ‘discursive turn’, even though we may feel as though there is ‘enough said already.’4 PON: I am suggesting that we could be saying things differently in the art school and wider art world. Art-worldly conversations, or discursive modes of engagement, seem to conflict with the activities of teaching, lecturing or tutoring within an educational environment. In art schools, the presence of the educators and the students is encouraged, if not enforced, whereas, although art-world events happen in the here and now, they don’t seem to be asking us to be present or to come prepared to take part in the same way. Is this a disavowal of the art educational system or a more sinister admission of a failure of the ‘real time’, ‘present’ and ‘participating within’ model of discursive engagement? Is this, in turn, accompanied by an interest in reframing how the discursive happens – a kind of distant learning, rather than a new model of teaching per se? In an art school or university context, teaching – formal or informal lectures, one-to-one tutorials, group seminars, discussion groups and so on – occurs primarily at the level of presence, enunciation and reception. To prove that learning has happened, however, is a more retrospective process; once it has happened, there is a process of recognition. Something has shifted in the learner – they have graduated
the art world discussion that at first appears as a non-instrumentalised encounter in the public domain can also be a place where business gets done and deals get brokered. Accepting the need to start our discussion not by trying to impress each other, but rather by trying to engage each other and our imagined readers, I think it might help to note that, while proving how well-informed one is about contemporary art may score points in a public seminar or catalogue text, it rarely impresses anyone in a staff meeting at art school. This is funny, given that the staff meeting is where people most often decide to parade their performative identities as tenured radicals who are against the ‘system’ and on the side of the student. The room for bad faith in all of this is very great. Luis Camnitzer addressed this very robustly in ‘Fraud and Education’: ‘The […] mistake is promising by implication, that a degree in art will lead to economic survival after graduation. […] Basically, what we have here is a pyramid scam.’3 PON: Yes, publish and be damned, but let us not forget that symposia, conferences or art educational events, and their subsequent publication are nothing new, so I do wonder why this new alignment of ‘discussion’ and ‘discursive’ with ‘exhibition’, ‘event’ or ‘programme’ has emerged as a recent phenomenon in an art world context. In some cases, the ‘discursive event’ operates as a supplementary or extraterritorial space, as in, for example, the five ‘Platforms’ of documenta 11, or frieze Talks or documenta 12’s discussion programme and its much maligned ‘magazine project’. But, in many other cases, they are caught up in the exhibition as the main event. Examples include unitednationsplaza, Berlin, 2007; Be[com]ing Dutch: Eindhoven Caucus, 2007; The Madrid Trial, 2007; Citizens and Subjects: Practices and Debates, Utrecht, 2007 and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ongoing mobile ‘24-hour Interview Marathon’ to name but a few instances in the last year where the content, structure and form of the discursive setting appears to function as the ‘eventful’ immaterial work; or at least that is how they are discussed within art world discourses. They are mediated in a similar way to that used to frame, brand or describe the semi-autonomous, hermetic artwork, the curated exhibition-form or the ‘authored space’. So, enough said already! MW: As regards these developments and what has been said already, you have given me the opportunity to argue elsewhere that this ‘discursive turn’ in recent art practice harmonises with a particular mode of reputational economy that constitutes the contemporary art world. It seems clear that there is a lot more work to be done in respect of this ‘discursive turn’, even though we may feel as though there is ‘enough said already.’4 PON: I am suggesting that we could be saying things differently in the art school and wider art world. Art-worldly conversations, or discursive modes of engagement, seem to conflict with the activities of teaching, lecturing or tutoring within an educational environment. In art schools, the presence of the educators and the students is encouraged, if not enforced, whereas, although art-world events happen in the here and now, they don’t seem to be asking us to be present or to come prepared to take part in the same way. Is this a disavowal of the art educational system or a more sinister admission of a failure of the ‘real time’, ‘present’ and ‘participating within’ model of discursive engagement? Is this, in turn, accompanied by an interest in reframing how the discursive happens – a kind of distant learning, rather than a new model of teaching per se? In an art school or university context, teaching – formal or informal lectures, one-to-one tutorials, group seminars, discussion groups and so on – occurs primarily at the level of presence, enunciation and reception. To prove that learning has happened, however, is a more retrospective process; once it has happened, there is a process of recognition. Something has shifted in the learner – they have graduated
and moved on, for good or for bad. To grasp how teaching could develop as a more fallible and actualised practice, we might aim to become more ‘precarious’ in our assumptions with regard to what can be taught or learnt. I would argue for a shift away from the worn out libertarian portrayal of emancipation as enlightenment and the replacement of one universal truth with another– one that is primarily registered as a positive, transformative progress, a loosening of the restrictive, where one state of being follows another – a process of becoming a less antagonised and more effectual, or socially adequate, subject. I prefer to think of emancipation as something that is taken rather than given. It begins from the principle of equality, à la Rancière. In The Nights of Labour, for example, Rancière argues for emancipation as the right to think for oneself, the right to more dead time – historically the preserve of the bourgeoisie (and the terrain of aesthetic pleasure) – for the anonymous thinker, the artisan or the worker poet.5 In this way, art and the political are granted equal power. Replacing the notion of emancipation, as liberation of creative possibilities, with that of more free time to do what we could do, implies accessing a potentiality rather than completing a given transformation. Rather than aiming to seize control of the workplace, there is a seizing of the rights to non-work time. If we are to think about this non-work time as the productive space for education, we might begin to think of critique as the time permitted for self-assessment rather than that allocated to being examined or appraised. Educative learning, then, moves from consensus to exploration, and from ascertained value judgements towards a more precarious and less prescriptive understanding of what can be done rather than what has been achieved within the institutional context and beyond. As Ernest Laclau argues, in order for a radical (re)formulation of emancipatory discourse to occur, we must begin with a greater understanding of how it has been historically constituted. According to Laclau, this should be followed by a bringing-together of ‘two incompatible lines of thought’: one that ‘presupposes the objectivity and full representability of the social, the other whose case depends on showing that there is a chasm which makes any objectivity ultimately impossible’ - an unbridgeable dichotomy whereby ‘emancipation means at one and the same time radical foundation and radical exclusion; that is, it postulates, at the same time, both a ground of the social and its impossibility.’6 MW: This question of ‘emancipation’ is very troubling, and in some way, shape or form it recurs across a whole range of art, educational and activist debates. It is troubling because it always seems to orbit around intractable questions of social structure and agency. I think it is interesting to see the renewed appeal of Rancière’s work for many educators in this context. The key work in question is perhaps Rancière’s book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster.7 It ‘tells the history of a professor, Joseph Jacotot, who created a scandal in Holland and France in the 1830s by proclaiming that uneducated people could learn on their own without a master to explain things to them, and that masters, for their part, could teach the things they themselves did not know.’ Rancière’s claim is that ‘we must follow Jacotot and change perspectives in a radical way. The teacher must be ignorant so that the pupil himself is the one who does the explaining and, contrary to all empirical evidence, equality in intelligence must be taken as the starting point for education (and for the social order).’ Firstly, it is important to register that this engagement with Rancière’s thinking provides a welcome counter to the critically deadening effect of a number of rival, and somewhat over confident, pedagogical discourses – ranging from Gardiner’s ‘multiple intelligences’ to the prescriptions of activist educators on ‘access’, ‘equality awareness’ and ‘social inclusion’. In a way that is compatible with Friere’s critical pedagogy, Rancière troubles the work of the would-be ‘emancipator’ – emancipation is here presented as work done for the self with the other and not selfless work done to the other. I am not sure if this is consistent with your suggestion that
‘teaching could develop as a more fallible and actualised practice’; perhaps, by ‘fallible’, you mean a practice that acknowledges – without believing to thus conquer – its own incompleteness and ignorance. On the other hand, it is also interesting that this turn to Rancière is happening at a time when the general question of art education is being given so much attention across contemporary art practice and its ever-proliferating discussions, seminars and roundtables. Education was one of the three leitmotifs of documenta 12. In 2007, Artforum dedicated its March issue to the importance of Rancière’s thinking on contemporary art now. From Manifesta’s ‘Notes for an Artschool’ to frieze’s ‘Art schools then and now’; from ArteContexto’s recent dossier on ‘teaching visual arts’ to frieze Art Fair’s recent roundtable on art education (Oct 2007), the future model of the art school is clearly something that exercises the imagination and energies of a broad swathe of players on the international contemporary art scene. Here we have a conjunction between the art world ‘discursive event’ and the question of the future of the art school. But you’re directing us to consider something else, which is the difference between experiencing the art world discussion-event and experiencing the art school programme. Both situations are making some kind of claim to be ‘open,’ to be emancipated to some degree, if not emancipatory in their effect. PON: ‘Education’ and ‘emancipation’ appear to be two awkward bedfellows in a self-reflexive game of endless foreplay – not unlike Gillick’s setting up of his position as both outsider and insider, neither of which will ever climax together because they are too willing to please each other, perhaps neither asking what the other really wants. The potentiality of this proverbial foreplay is deemed sufficient, even if it might be lacking in any actual fulfilment for those knowingly involved. Attention to this lack is also apparent in a newfound interest, in academic and art-world circles alike, in the ontological musings of Jean-Luc Nancy on ‘being singular plural’, in which subjectivity is already a ‘being with’ community. In a related manner, the interest in Georgio Agamben’s writing on ‘potentiality’ – as a mode of capable existence – demonstrates an interest in failure and fallibility where ‘to be potential […] means to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity […] where sensation is in relation to anaesthetics, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness.’8 MW: This picture of the endlessly deferred end-fuck is hilarious. It was so common for lecturers in art school to fuck their students. I wonder if students and lecturers still fall in love, or fuck, or both or anything. It’s funny, isn’t it, the way the erotics of education have had such a long life – Socrates, Plato and all that larking about? This transference – and of course so often it is such a corrupt exchange – makes the question of teaching about co-location of bodies as much as about the protracted dialectics of presence/absence. The teaching body is more than a talking body… PON: But what of the potentiality of the discursive in art’s context. Discursive events, realised within the context of internationalised art circuits, attempt to convey a sense of ‘commonality’ and ‘connectivity’, to situate singular positions within a much broader discourse.9 Common, that is, to a generalised idea of mutual practices, as a means of forming positions alongside like-minded people, connected to similar forms of practice, which each participant assimilates as part of their own critical discourse. This is much in the same way that self-organisation is described in Anthony Davies, Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen’s co-authored essay, ‘There is no Alternative: THE FUTURE IS SELF ORGANISED’, as ‘a social process of communication and commonality based in exchange; sharing of similar problems, knowledge and available resources.’10
In 1989, Benjamin Buchloh identified an urgent need for articulating the curatorial position as part of art discourse, where practice as ‘doing’ or ‘curating’ necessitated a discourse as ‘speaking’ or ‘writing’, in order for the curator’s function to be acknowledged as part of the institutional superstructure of the art world at the level of discourse.11 This interest in discourse, as a supplement, or substitute, for practice, was highlighted in Dave Beech and Gavin Wade’s speculative introduction to Curating in the 21st Century (2000) in which they stated that ‘even talking is doing something, especially if you are saying something worthwhile. Doing and saying, then are forms of acting on the world.’12 So, it seems fair to characterise the discursive as an ambivalent way of saying something vis-à-vis doing. This may seem a somewhat optimistic speculation when assessing the reproductive powers of language, which have been part of the stock assumptions of a wide range of experimental art practices and attendant commentary.13 This tendency has been given further impetus by what you called ‘the Foucauldian moment in art of the last two decades, and the ubiquitous appeal of the term “discourse” as a word to conjure and perform power’, to the point where ‘even talking is doing something,’ with the value of the discursive as something located in its proxy for actual doing within discourses on art and curatorial practice.14 MW: There has been a great deal of currency given to theories of the ‘performative’ and ‘doing things with words’. What is interesting is that a suspicion of ‘mere words’ Persists. We are ambivalent about how we value utterances and suspicious of rhetoric, and at the same time, we recognise the constitutive powers of language – the way discourses produce world-and-subject together. Zizek’s self-mocking and self-congratulatory story about how he bluffed his way through an art world seminar is typical of this ambivalence.15 He describes responding off the cuff, making up some stuff about different frames for the work of art, and then watching his partners in the conversation turn his bluff remarks into a full blown category of analysis. There is something troubling about the way the words we utter escape us and overturn our plans. It brings us back to the theme of ignorance. There is another order of ignorance that we might also include in our discussions: the ignorance that Bourdieu identified many decades ago in Academic Discourse,16 his study of French university students and their induction into a style of writing and speaking. In this study, he described various mechanisms of social reproduction whereby students unwittingly acquired habits of thought and speech which were determined not by the explicit content or reasoned argumentation of a given curriculum, but rather by the unspoken rules and the tacit value systems operated – again unwittingly, unknowingly – by their teachers. The uncritical enculturation of students is thus something that can happen – perhaps especially unknowingly – where education is presented as ‘open-ended’ and the learning is ‘self-organised.’ This enculturation happens not because of the explicit values in the curriculum, but because of an unknowing habituation to that which ‘goes without saying.’ It is not just that the rules in play are disavowed – ‘the only rule is that there are no rules…’ – but rather that the rules are unknown to all players as rules. PON: As a student of Althusser, it is perhaps no surprise that Rancière resists Bourdieu’s sociological model, and that Bourdieu’s analysis is popularly read as an objective and legitimate ‘study’ of how distinction and reproduction are shown to exist at the level of the social system. For Rancière, Bourdieu succeeds in his apparent ability to be inside everyone’s head, all at the same time. That is, his discourse was both in keeping with his times whilst being explicable to most people who, in turn, identified themselves within that which was being explained for them. For Rancière, the problem lies not in the interpretive analysis of class division and social privilege, and its inscription into the everyday, but rather
how authority is derived through and from a discourse which presumes a certain ‘ignorance’ of, and on behalf of, the objects of study. Those who are the basis of the study are those who are excluded. They necessitate the legitimacy of the system’s authority to disavow the arbitrariness of that legitimacy. For example, the working class students who are excluded from certain bourgeois privileges within the educational system and yet are not aware of the reasons for their exclusion. This is Bourdieu’s central concept of social exclusion – that of the structural effect produced by the actual existence of the system itself. It could be summarised as something like this: they are excluded because they don’t know they are excluded; because they are excluded and, because it remains unrecognised, the system will continue to reproduce these exclusions. The ‘ignorance’ of the excluded is taken as a given in its articulation by the voice of authority. MW: Rancière’s critique of Bourdieu – ‘the sociologist king’17 – is very persuasive, but Bourdieu’s self-critique is also important. Just as Gillick and my colleagues and I have discussions about the conditions of the discussion, Bourdieu has sparkled in his ‘lecture on the lecture’18 and his reflections on the ‘skholè’19 – the utopian space of retreat from the market and practical utility that the academy claims for itself as the guarantor of free open enquiry and learning – ‘dead-time.’ The over-riding issue facing all educators is the pervasive marketisation of education and the recasting of education as training for the marketplace of casualised labour. We cannot resist this logic by reinstating a mythos of the free open academy, but we must resist this logic by constructing some notion of emancipatory action in the learning situation. We don’t have a ready solution, so we feel ourselves to be talking in circles, but we still get things done everyday; we still make decisions and we still teach and learn and show up for the seminars or make excuses to our teachers or our students for not showing up, or whatever. We cope. This is not to celebrate this situation, but rather to try and describe it as something that is not fully spoken about yet. This, in turn, makes me wonder about the petty cruelties that we swap with each other in the everyday exchanges of the art school, for example the kind of scenarios James Elkins points to in his discussion of the role of the ‘crit’ in art school: It may seem surprising to people who haven’t been to art school that such things can happen […] At this particular school, critiques were held in front of all the students and faculty, and it was not uncommon to have the artist cry in front of everyone. […] Critiques are unpredictable, and they are often confusing even when they are pleasant and good-natured […] I have not forgotten what it is like to be on the receiving end of a truly dispiriting, unhelpful, belligerent, incoherent, uncaring critique. (And it’s hardly better to have a happy, lazy, superficial critique).20 These exchanges are a technology of affect and subject construction – something that seems typical of how cults recruit through induction processes. This technology of exchanged utterance works upon the various actors involved in a way that cannot be exhaustively specified or finally known, but in a way that does inculcate certain habitual dispositions and patterns of desire. The consequence of the ‘crit’ is not a judgement or an interpretation, but rather the important content becomes the reciprocal performances of attitude and personal investment, the construction and contestation of a ‘working draft’ of social role and identity. Recognising the intertwining of social structure and agency is about recognising the question of emancipation as an always incomplete project that entails a re-construction and re-integration of the social rather than being simply a matter of a self-producing ‘good’, ‘free’ subject. Like you, I want to hold out for a powerful transformative experience in art education – in any education – but there can be no
guarantees of emancipation or autonomy. Even the ostensibly reasoned exchange of opinions about our works will not free us from our ignorance, our ignorance which is our social condition. We don’t need to celebrate ignorance (‘the naïve’) or overcome ignorance (‘the expert’), but perhaps – and this is the big fudge – we need to come to know and dwell in ignorance even as we are transformed within it. If our education can transform us, it can just as readily make monsters of us as it can gods. We would be all the more foolish to think we could know in advance what it is that we will as a result of these educational ‘transformations.’ Education – being brought to know, or coming to know – as a conservative force of social reproduction undoes itself as an emancipatory project all the time… PON: Yes, time – it’s all about time, more time, all the time, to become what we could never know in advance, which reminds me of the admin…we haven’t discussed administrative responsibilities yet. Another time maybe… Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson, 2015, transcribed from a conversation in 2007-08.
(Footnotes) 1
Tirdad.eds. Printed Project 06: I Can’t Work Like This, (Dublin, Visual Arts Ireland, 2007), p. 41. A.C.A.D.E.M.Y, (Frankfurt am Main,
2
3
ArteContexto
4
Curating Subjects
Editions, 2007). The Nights of Labour: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth Century France
7
in Emancipation(s), The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
8
A.C.A.D.E.M.Y,
include: Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future Stopping the Process: Contemporary Views on Art and Exhibitions, Ed. Mika Hannula Curating Degree Zero: An International Curating Symposium, Eds. Barnaby Drabble The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice Curating in the 21st Century Wolverhampton, 2000); The Producers: Contemporary Curators in Conversation (Series 1-5) Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility 10
Art and its Institutions 11 Buchloh stated: The curator observes his/her operation within the institutional apparatus of art: most prominently the procedure of abstraction and centralisation that seems to be an inescapable consequence of the work’s entry into the superstructure apparatus, its transformation from practice to discourse. That almost seems to have become the curator’s primary role: to function as an agent who offers exposure and potential prominence – in exchange for obtaining a moment of actual practice that is about to be transformed into myth/superstructure. L’Exposition Imaginaire: The Art of Exhibiting in the Eighties
one another; biennials are compared to their previous incarnations; art fairs now evidently attempt to critique themselves through curated discussion programmes, such as the Frieze Art Fair talks programme which runs programmes, are an intermediate means of conveying ideas about art that now include the position of the curator. Many of the writers and readers of art magazines are curators, where each group exhibition will be considered as part of a ‘common’ discourse around curatorial practice. 12 Wade, Gavin and Beech, Dave. ‘Introduction’, in Wade, Gavin, ed. Curating in the 21st Century,
13
Wilson, Mick. op. cit., p. 202.
14
Ibid. p. 202. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory The Truth of Zizek Academic Discourse
17
18
20
The Philosopher and His Poor In Other Words Pascalian Meditations Why Art Cannot Be Taught, (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois press, 2001) , p.3
21
PROPOSAL FOR A CONVERSATION TO BE HELD IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE CITY — Как арт-объект мясо — старье, сейчас уже такого не делают, это фэшн. This rotten meat as an art obejct is so not in the trend anymore
— В Петрограде стали всех расселять, и был дом такой ПалеРояль, точно как в Париже, с борделем, и пришли большевики, всех поселили вперемешку. Политика уплотнения.
In Petrograde people were stettled apart and so there was a house called Palais Royal like in Paris with a brothel and when the Bolsheviks came they forced people to live all together. Policy of mixity, so to speak.
— Революция не имеет конца. Вот у Замятина «Мы». Там мужчинаматематик влюбился в скрытую революционерку, а им нельзя любить. Он ей говорит: у нас была одна революция и она закончилась. А она ему: тогда скажи мне, какое конечное число, ты же математик, да еще и философ. Он говорит: что за абсурд, конечного числа не существует. И она отвечает: так и революция, она никогда не заканчивается. Она ему изменила с революцией и он ее убил за это.
Revolution doesn’t have an end. For example, in Zamyatin’s «We». There’s a mathematician there who falls in love with a hidden revolunionary and people were prohibited to fall in love there. And so he says: we had one revolution and now it’s over. And she replies: My dear, you’re a mathematician: tell me, which is the last number?” “But that’s absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can’t be a last one.” “Then why do you talk about the last revolution?” She cheated on him with the revolution and he killed her for that.
— Ханна Арендт была права политика и любовь несовместимы. Hannah Arendt was right. Politics and love are incompatible.
— Как часто вы переживаете чувство оскорбления? How often do you feel you are being offended?
— Каждый день. Every single day
22 School as a new sect The word sect comes from the Latin word secta, form of a variant past participle of the verb sequi, to follow (you can also find homonymic Latin word secta, form of the past participle of the verb secare, to cut). The present list of meaning includes here a definition of a religious faith or denomination, charismatic leaders, the use of psychological manipulation and mind-altering practices, voluntary membership, punishment of dissent and deceptive recruitment tactics. A model of sect is very base for suggested in a plenty of political, social, cultural and semantic models such as non-materialistic knowledge, left ideas of locomotive power of revolution (Etkind A.), postcolonial theories and others. Besides sects are found in all religions, the structure and ideology could be found in loads of non-religious groups such as therapeutic, economic, cultural, educational, corporate, or political: The Skeptics Society, Wallmart, Richard Dawkins, Apple, Virgin Group, Dieter Rams, Tesak (Russian neonazi), Socionics, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and others. Considering the school as a sect where cult followers believe the teacher rather than concepts or manifests, we might identify the curator (read teacher) as a sect leader. However, such didactic model of teaching and learning based on passive learning and authority as a test of truth, might involve instruments of socratic model as well. Thus, a new educational sect represents a mixed educational system which combine the teacher’s role as the primary agent and inductive methods such as discussion, dialogue and problem solving. Socratic model of teaching and learning based on giving questions, not answers. This new knowledge is a product of shared evidence moderated by curator includes shared goals and objectives, shared questions and problems, shared information and data, shared modes of interpreting or judging that information, shared specialized concepts and ideas, shared key assumptions, shared point of view (Paul, R. and Elder, L.), shared ambiguity. You will find more images and texts reflecting on mixed educational system by sect followers via the zine. Maria Kramar
4th Moscow Curatorial Summer School