index issue 00 autumn 2010

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NDEX2 Editorial Bartomeu Mar Where isndex Headed ?6 Zoom Christoph Menke The Force of Art. Seven Theses8 Chus Martnez Clandestine Happiness.

What do We Mean byArtistic Research?12 Display Piotr Piotrowski

An Art Historian betweenthe University and Museum.Towards the Idea of the Critical Museum

16 MediterraneansElizabeth Suzanne KassabPost-Colonial Solitude in the

Mediterranean: Some Arab Thoughts20 Artistic research

Julie AultHistorical Inquiry as Subject and Object

24 Natascha Sadr HaghighianThe Geometry of a Cross-Eyed Subject

27 Academy Xavier Antich

Four Decades of the IndependentStudy Programmes

29 Johanna Burton

Independent Study:Programmes and Paradigms

Biannual JournalAutumn 2010Number 0

Artistic research, thought and education


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Editorial teamXavier AntichMela DvilaMarta GarcaTeresa GrandasSoledad GutirrezAna JimnezBartomeu MarChus MartnezClara PlasenciaIdoia Villanueva

DirectorChus Martnez

Coordination and editingPublications Department of MACBA

Design and layout Enric Jard, Meri Mateu

Translations Jane Brodie/e-verba translations:p. 15, p. 811, p. 2728Dawn Michelle dAtri: p. 67 William Wheeler: p. 2426

Proofreading Wendy Gosselin/e-verba translations:

p. 15, p. 811, p. 2728Keith Patrick: p. 132

Published byMuseu dArt Contemporanide Barcelona (MACBA)www.macba.cat

Images of the works: the artists of the photographs: Noel Allum.Courtesy of Group Material (p. 22);AP Photos / Gtresonline (p. 24); Julie Ault. Courtesy of Group Material(p. 20); Ben Blackwell. Courtesyof Group Material (p. 22 right); TonyColl (p. 23, 5, 9); Natalia Limones(p. 27 top); Pete Mauney (p. 29);Gemma Planell (p. 27); Karl Rabe(p. 31); Koen de Waal (p. 10);Romn Yn (cover and inner cover)

CoverPhotograph from the lmingofThe Names of Christ (2010), by Albert Serra, in the galleriesof MACBA.

Inner coverDetail of the work90 Ringe (1977) by Thomas Schtte.

Pre-printingColornet

PrintingIGOL

ISSN: 2014-0193DL: B-43640-2010

TypographiesGotham Narrow, DTLDocumenta

PaperBiberist Furioso 135 gr and 115 gr


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Biannual JournalAutumn 2010Number 0

Zoom

How is it possible to put togethenarrative of art? Zoom is a spaintellectual and bibliographic poreference.

Display

How are exhibitions brought abodoes their research involve? Thiattempts to make visible the pro by which exhibitions are conceidened.

Artistic research

Why and how do I do what I dotalk about their projects in the

Academy

What is the role of education? Hcritical visions constructed? Acdeals with the relationship betwand the human sciences, as wellsocial intervention both within tmuseum and beyond.

Mediterraneans

A space for dialogue on the NeaEurope and North Africa. Differoffer new formulations regardinart, religion, education and the cfuture of the societies in the Me

region.

Editorial


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WHERE ISNDEX HEADED?Bartomeu MarDirector of MACBA

ndex translates into the two dimensions of theprinted page a set of ideas put into practice by theactivities of the Museu dArt Contemporani deBarcelona (MACBA). MACBA is not only a con-tainer of works of art; it is an intellectual engine intodays society. It is not part of the cultural spherewhere culture is understood solely as heritage, but rather consciously locates itself in the sphereof education, and of the production of ideas andimages of the world in which we live, as well as theone in which we would like to live.

ndex is a compass that guides the navigationof the different areas that connect the Museum toits various publics. MACBA attends to the needof constructing a culture that is receptive to the

contributions of art from within a common spaceof performance.ndex will take shape as differ-ent agendas and projects, both present and future,evolve. It serves, above all, to generate and toexemplify the construction of a new bibliographythat participates in the renewal of culture. TheMuseum is not only a site for the consideration ofart, but also of the ways in wich individuals cannegotiate their presence and actions through art.In the pages that follow, Piotr Piotrowski discussesthe change from a linguistic to a performative para-digm, which we have witnessed over the course ofthe last decade. Well into the twenty-rst century,the work of art exists through performance, anevent in which we are implicated. We should con-sider the Museum as a set of events with differentprotagonists who are both viewers and actors atthe same time.ndex is also a test bed for the con-struction of a new critical language that encouragesthinking from and through art. Discourses on art,or theory, have always followed in the footsteps

Rita McBride. Arena, 1997 (detail) Wood and Twaron structureMACBA Collection. Museu dArtContemporani de Barcelona Consortium.Long-term loan of the artist

Arenais a highly theatrical large-scale seatingstructure that turns the exhibition spaceinto a space of vision in which the notionof expectation is crucial: what or whom arewe expecting to see? The only response isaction: the museum rendered a performa-tive space, and the visitor another actor inthe play.

Editorial


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to create new productive models, new economicmodels like ours that will increasingly depend onthe economy of knowledge. The question we mustask ourselves is whether we would like to positionourselves as producers or consumers. It is prefer-able, however, to consider the relationships withinthe culture sphere as barter, not as imposition orloss. Any new terminology or vocabulary endan-gers what has preceded it. We do not want theeconomy of knowledge to end up as the fuel for anew society of the spectacle in which public spacehas disappeared. MACBA wants to create academiawhile avoiding academicism. The Museum wantsto educate without being professorial. With theircontributions, Xavier Antich and Johanna Burton join MACBA in this challenge, which is expressedabove all although not exclusively through itsIndependent Studies Programme (PEI).

MACBA acts as a constellation, a systemwhose components attract and depend on one an-other. The temporary exhibitions and the MACBACollection are its most visible elements, but theyare meaningless without the constant elaborationof narratives on the past and ctions of the present.The Study Center represents a clear decision toexpand the collection into new areas where artinteracts with different spheres of the humanities.The history of contemporary art cannot be writ-ten solely on the basis of individual works; it isalso necessary to consider how these works wereinitially displayed and then received. The historyof exhibitions and of the reception of art is one ofthe tools for understanding the transformationof the aesthetic, symbolic and moral values of art

over time. The MACBA Collection and the StudyCenter could not be understood without consider-ing the Independent Studies Programme.

Our cultural context is clearly lacking inknowledge and opinion about the present. Thestudy of the recent past seems to hold no academicor social value. For this reason, it is meaninglessto increase material heritage without heedingand communicating its intellectual and symboliccomponents, without investigating how art andits events have been generated and perceived. ThePEI trains new kinds of professionals in the sphereof cultural production from a patently multidis-ciplinary perspective. From the Study Centerand the PEI, two new types of activities guide theMuseums development: on the one hand, thehistory of exhibitions as a scientic discipline thatis essential to writing art history, and on the other,the focus on cultural and artistic productions origi-nated within the connes of the Mediterraneanregion, from the Balkans to the Maghreb, via the

of practices, innovations and inventions. But oncethese movements and shifts in value have been ac-cepted, a new vocabulary and chronology becomenecessary. This is the spirit of The International, anassociation of museums created to bring us closerto the recent, but distant, history of non-centralEuropean countries. Addressing relevant artisticand cultural productions from regions borderingon the Mediterranean allows us to act as an inter-face on the Western side of a cultural context inwhich neighbours do not talk to or understand oneanother. In this publication, Elizabeth SuzanneKassab reects on the forms of representation ofher culture as articulated by Arab intelligentsiaover the course of the twentieth century.

This issue ofndex focuses on the questionof artistic research, which it places at the heart ofthe Museums current concerns. As Chus Martnezputs forward in her thesis, the notion of artisticresearch posits that artistic practice lies outside themodernist paradigm where the autonomous workof art is separated from the world in which and forwhich it is created. It is, rather, through researchthat works of art exist and are available to percep-tion that is, take place. And, as artefacts, worksgenerate opinion and action. Artistic research, likemost disciplines in the humanities, engages in aspeculative methodology. The research of artistsNatascha Sadr Haghighian and Julie Ault, for in-stance, will be developed into exhibition processesto be held at the Museum. MACBA does notrespond to outside events, it provokes and pro-duces them. We are far from the paradigm of thewhite cube and from its opposite, the black box

where the outside world must not get inside aspace preserved for the genesis and perceptionof art. The Museum cannot divide the world intoa sanitary and protected inside and a soiled anddangerous outside: what the Museum houses andgenerates form part of one unique reality. The factsof art are expressed in realities that often have yetto be named. One of the primary tasks of artisticresearch is to create a new vocabulary that allowsus to relate not only to history and the recent past, but also to the present. Philosopher ChristophMenke speaks from the present when introducingthe notion of force in his update of Adornos con-ception of art. Menke criticises the fact that neverhas the aesthetic at the same time so strongly re-ected a simple means of enhancing productivity.

The acquisition of knowledge is one of thefeatures of the art experience, and neither researchnor knowledge should be the exclusive heritage ofscience. Clearly, new standards for cultural produc-tion and distribution must be activated in order


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Bosphorus and the Middle East as the gateways tothe Arab world.

Working with individuals, institutions andentities located in the Mediterranean (whetherin Europe or North Africa) should help create aunique and dynamic exchange in the near future.The MACBA Collection has already begun work inthis direction, as will be evident in the presenta-tions of the years to come. In the much shorterterm, the collection will explore constructing aplace for the interrogation of its own cosmopoli-tanism and the relevance of rationalism. In Spain,modernism in aesthetics emerged in the 1950s(not in the rst decades of the last century). Andthat modernism was, from the beginning, deeplycritical of the original postulates of the avant-garde: rationalism is regionalist and abstraction ismaterial and gestural, not geometrical or cerebral.The way in which the comings-and-goings of themodern are passed on to these times is the essenceof this historiographical project. And one of themain questions is how the local is manifest in thenew global theatre of cultural transactions.ndex is part of a publishing project that hasevolved from the production of exhibition cata-logues to a broader endeavour that constitutes atrue pillar of the Museums mission. The rangeof publications that MACBA intends to produceis now larger in scope. It will include scienticpublications that not only analyse the evolutionof aesthetic forms, but also help form opinionand spark debate.ndex stands in for theMACBA Agenda ( AG), separating factual information onthe programme activities from the discourses,

inspirations, motivations and processes throughwhich contents are developed. While the publish-ing industry and traditional print media are inter-rogating the future of paper, at MACBA we aredecidedly anachronistic: we attempt to conciliatedifferent tools for communicating ideas. Rita McBride. Arena, 1997 (detail)


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THE FORCE OF ART.

SEVEN THESESChristoph MenkeFull professor of philosophy at the Goethe Univer-sity of Frankfurt, where he specialises in ethics andaesthetics. His publications includeThe Sovereigntyof Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (1998) and Reections of Equality (2006).

1.At no point during the modern era has there been more art has art been more visible, more present, and more inuen-tial in society than today. At the same time, art has never been so thoroughly integrated into the societal process astoday; simply a further element in one of many forms ofcommunication that make up society: a commodity, anopinion, an act of knowledge, a judgement, an activity.At no point during the modern era has the category of theaesthetic been so pivotal for cultural identity than in thepresent epoch, which in its initial enthusiasm called itselfpostmodern and is now increasingly moving towardsits conception of a post-disciplinary society of control

(Deleuze). Never has the aesthetic at the same time so strongly reected a simple means of enhancing productivity.The ubiquitous presence of art and the central meaning

of the aesthetic within society go hand in hand with theloss of that which I propose to call its force with the lossof art and of the aesthetic as force.

2.The way out of this situation cannot involve an attempt toposition art and the aesthetic as mediums of knowledge, ofpolitics, or of critique against their absorption into society.The conception of art or of the aestheticas knowledge,as politics, oras critique only serves to further contributeto turning these into a mere segment of communicationwithin society. The force of art does not lie in being knowl-edge, politics, or critique.

3.In dialogue with the orator Ion, Socrates described art asan arousal and transfer of force: the force of excitement, ofenthusiasm. This force rst arouses the Muse in the artists,

who then transfer it through their works to the viecritics like a magnet not only pulls those rings, iron, it also puts power in the rings, so that they indo just what the stone does pull other rings. Inway, the Muse makes some people inspired hersethen through those who are inspired a chain of otenthusiasts is suspended. The context of art is a cthe transfer of force. Being transferred to the artisers, and critics is the force of excitement, of raptuhe becomes inspired and goes out of his mind andlect is longer in him.

4.

From this insight into the force of art Socrates dreconclusion that art must be banned from the city tof reason. From the very beginning there have beenopposite ways of defending art against this conclusrst line of defence declares art to be a social practiin contrast to Socrates, that the idea of a force inhwithin art that enthuses to the point of unconsciouis not applicable. Rather, in art in its creation, peand evaluation there is a socially acquired capacart is an act of practical subjectivity. This is the mthe Poetics contrived by Aristotle, as Potique (Valthe doctrine of art as action, as the exercising of athat the subject has acquired through education, mhis socialisation (or disciplining), and has now choconsciously practise. By contrast, there has alwayanother conception of art, which the eighteenth cewould come to label aesthetic. This aesthetic cof art is founded upon the experience of a force buwithin art that entices the subject to emerge from or likewise to go behind or beyond; a force, therefunconscious a dark force (Herder).

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5. What is force? Force is the aesthetic opposite of (poietic)capacity. Force and capacity are the names of two anti-thetical notions of the agency of art. Agency is the realisa-tion of a principle. Force and capacity are two antitheticalnotions of the principle and itsrealisation.

Having acapacity implies being a subject; being asubject implies having ability. What a subject is capable ofis making something succeed, accomplishing something.Having capacities or being a subject implies being capableof making an action succeed through practice and study.Making an action succeed in turn implies being capable ofrepeating a general form in a new, always unique situation.Capacity is the ability to repeat the general. The generalform is the form of a social practice. Therefore, understand-ing artistic agency as the exercising of a capacity impliesunderstanding this agency as an action in which a subjectrealises the general form that reects a social practice; thismeans understanding art as a social practice and the subjectas its participant.

Forces, like capacities, are principles that becomerealised through agency. But forces are the counterpointsof capacities: While capacities are acquired through social prac-tice, people already possess forcesbefore they have becomesubjects. Forces are human, but presubjective.

While capacities are purposefully enacted bysubjects through conscious self-control, forces effectuateof their own accord ; their effectuation is not guided by thesubject and is therefore not conscious to the subject.

While capacities realise a socially predened gen-eral form, forces are formative, and thus formless. Forcesshape forms, and they shape all forms that they have shaped back again.

While capacities are geared to success, forces lackobjectives and dimensions. The effectuation of forcesinvolves play, the creation of something that they have re-ally already surpassed.

Capacities turn us into subjects who can successfullyparticipate in social practices by reproducing their generalform. In the play of forces we are pre- and supersubjective agents who are not subjects; active without self-conscious-ness; inventive without reason.

6.The aesthetic conception describes art, as per Socrates, as aeld of the emergence and transfer of force. Yet the aestheticconception not only assesses this differently than Socrates;it understands it differently as well. According to Socrates,art ismerely the arousal and transfer of force. But art doesnot exist in this way. Art is rather the art of transitionbe-tween capacityand force, between force and capacity. Art iscreated through the diremption of force and capacity.Art is created through a paradoxical capability: being capableof being incapable; being able to be unable. Art is neither

merely reason (Vernunft ) of capacity nor merely plforce. Art is the time and the place for the reverscapacity to force, for the generation of capacity f

7.For this reason art is not part of society, is not a spractice; for the participation in a social practicestructure of action, of the realisation of a generalthis is why we are not subjects in art, in the creatception of art; for being a subject means realisingof a social practice. Art is rather the sphere of libwithin the social but from the social; the liberatiosocial within the social. When the aesthetic becoductive force in postdisciplinary capitalism, it is its force; for the aesthetic is active and produces it is not productive. And likewise, the aesthetic isof its force when it is supposed to shape social prwhich allows a focus against the unleashed producapitalism; for the aesthetic is liberating and alteis not practical. The aesthetic as total unleashing bolic powers (Nietzsche) is neither productive ncal, neither capitalistic nor critical.

The force of art pertains to our force. It pertliberation of the social gestalt of subjectivity, be ior practical subjectivity. The force of art pertains

This article is an extract from the book by CMenke,Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff sthetischer Ant2008.

Force. A Fundamental Concept in Aest Anthropology is the attempt to read modaesthetics as a theory of force. It does that modern philosophy begins twice in in two different, even opposite formaesthetic of the subject and its facultieas an experience and theory of force, wconceives the aesthetic as a play of imaForce denes the aesthetic nature of huas distinct from the culture of socially practices. Force is the concept of a diffdifference between nature and culture, and subjectivity, play and practice thafreedom possible. The last word of aehuman freedom.

Christoph MeEin Grundbegtischer AnthrFrankfurt: Su2008.


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CLANDESTINE HAPPINESS.WHAT DO WE MEANBY ARTISTIC RESEARCH ?Chus MartnezChief Curator of MACBA

Thanks to a high intensity laser, Anton Zeilinger was able toteleport light particles (photons) for the rst time in 1997.The laser shoots photons in different directions, and thephotons then form pairs called quantum entanglements. Inthis binding, the union of the photons is stable regardless ofthe physical distance between them. When Zeilinger, in hisexperiment, changed a quality of one of the particles, the twinparticle immediately and spontaneously underwent the samechange. Teleportation is based on the physical property thatallows information to be exchanged between two particles,once they have been entangled quantumly, at a rate faster

than the speed of light. Although science neither thinks norexpresses itself in these terms, we imagine that within a fewdecades it will be possible to teleport a micro-organism and,soon thereafter, objects and, nally, human beings.

The mere statement of this astonishing discovery socrucial to quantum physics whets the imagination not onlyof physicists but also of laymen who know nothing of matter.The fact that the nding is calledteleportation, a name takenfrom a literary genre science ction , is also signicant. Thechoice of that word set the details of the experiment travellingthrough worlds beyond the laboratory. Teleportation incitescuriosity and manufactures the ction of an almost intuitiveunderstanding of the experiments logic: one word sufcesto join the familiar and the strange. The fortunate choice ofthis term cannot be attributed only to the desire to communi-cate the news, though of course that played a part. It reects,mostly, the need to produce osmosis between knowledges of

very different natures, and it posits that generatingnicative forms of meaning is key to future discove

Much contemporary art shares this intuition. oft-repeated but poorly dened expressionartistic resis the term that best describes the precise and acutments between areas of knowledge, between the sunderstanding.

In answering the question what is reality, AZeilinger says: That which we can agree on. We undertake a thorough reconstruction of the basic cthat we use every day reality, time, matter, spac

so that we can use them to dene new situationinside and outside the laboratory. We live our livmersed in categories. If we want to use those cateinterrogate reality, just as a lawyer interrogates awe must understand what they mean at each momAnd thats where philosophy comes in; it is whatexplains the historical dramatisation of those cate

Artists, like scientists, are pioneers when it cocreating new forms of connectivity between worldseem to have nothing in common. They embark onnovels, conceiving treatises, discovering archives,therapies and choreographing bodies, that is, on thstudy of everything that contributes to different fotions of what we callreality. It would be banal to desthat as mere play. We nd ourselves, rather, beforeform of research that is more aware than ever of thlel between producing art and understanding the w

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1 A conversation that took place at Traunsee Akademie on 21 July 2Zeilinger is a full professor of quantum physics at the Institut fr Qund Quanteninformation of Vienna.


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Armando AnTudelaUntitled (2), 2Rattan and st51.4 x 37 x 3MACBA ColBarcelona CiFund

One in a seriesimilar sculpton minimalisin steel and raUntitled 2 distus from an anapproach to iin a more psyand hallucina


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That is, the principle of indetermination is also opthe social sciences, aesthetics and philosophy. In tact of observing, we alter what we have observed.theory nor philosophy nor criticism can aspire to dwhat art is. It is simply ridiculous to question wheexists or not, but forcing it to speak a single languhistorical reconstruction, is sadly impudent.

The traditional hierarchical distinctions betweeand action, between criticism and creation are sterilis an obvious need to think of a more eloquent way ceiving the aesthetic-cognitive back-and-forth betwproduction of art and the grammar of theory. Conteart practice has invited itself to the party of those wthe complex mission of generating tools to grasp th

Taking artistic research seriously means acceporganisation in the relations between the disciplineswith contemporary art. The rise of cultural studies, theory and the many variations of post-Marxist unding of the relationship between art and economics ian ungrounded though perhaps historically necessdence in the possibility of rst unravelling and theing the meaning of what happens in a work of art, athe creative process as a whole.Meaning cannot be explained by its context, thocontext may help with its historical interpretation. If the case, the effort of art and artist to avoid juried shoacademies would be pointless. Interpreting is not the understanding. Too often the description of the codesstitute a system, of the relations that act on a work of other cultural fact that can be reied, is geared towar judgment, to determining whether we are headed in

Since Marcel Duchamp, and perhaps much earlier indeed,perhaps forever , art has been eager to house a knowledgedifferent from academic knowledge and to provide the ulti-mate reason for modifying that academic knowledge. Muchcontemporary art attempts to develop works and situationsthat make it possible to read the past freely, to take ightand approach the unknown.

There is a paradox that cultural studies and the heirs tocritical theory consistently deny because it does not servetheir purposes: artistic practice is temporal and atemporalat the same time. Art and culture must necessarily situatethemselves in this contradiction in the attempt to be withinhistory while escaping it.

Cultural studies recognise that they cannot be conceivedin terms of progress, that there is no single Modernity butmany, that universals are now always in the plural. Nonethe-less, contemporary art runs the risk now more than ever ofturning into a secondary source. Art and artists know them-selves to be subject to a series of textual and institutional log-ics, and one of their achievements has been to reveal that factin the sphere of artistic production and reception.

Artistic research names the effort to recognise theimportance and explore the consequences of the follow-ing statement: meaning does not emerge from History butfrom Fiction. This names an effort, not a method. When wespeak of artistic research, we are not speaking of the fact thatmany artist engage in exhaustive research before making awork. Nor should we confuse artistic research with con-temporary arts proximity to the social sciences and theirmethods. The term has been coined, rather, to alert us tothe fact that art has also become a quantum phenomenon.

Becky BeasleyA-Z ofPersonal2009 42 copiesDesign Toni UrMACBA ColleStudy Center

This work wasof the exhibitioThe Malady of A Project on TeSpeculative Imheld at MACBNovember 200April 2010.


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right direction. If contemporary art has strived to do anything,it is toteleport : to change green into red, to turn around therules of the game to be freed of the constant allocation ofmeaning and thus unexpress the expressable.2 For a longtime philosophy has been saying that there are no outstandingrewards and no certainty waiting around the corner. Yet, bothcriticism and the exhibition apparatus are determined to con-tradict this as they strive to render the notion of History plural.

The new importance of philosophy and the social scien-ces in the sphere of contemporary art is related to an essentialdiscovery: art today is located in a space uniquely productivefor the interrelation of knowledges that would otherwisenever intersect. This is similar to what Gaston Bachelardattempted to describe in the introduction toThe Poetics ofSpace(1957). Space appears where the logic of causality ceasesand another principle takes hold, mainly the principle of re-verberation. Stating that space does not emerge on the basis oflaws of causality means that the public sphere is not constructed by merely ensuring a series of conditions, just as the existenceof a parliament or alike does not guarantee that debate will takeplace. Something else must happen, and that is what Bachelardcallsreverberation. Practice proves that transparency is notenough, that a system of logical argumentation does notnecessarily unleash the will to change, let alone change itself.

Bachelard looks toreverberation as an image that expressesthe movement between logics of thought and methods ofwork that have nothing in common. The possibility of differentthinking depends on this so very abstract and difcult to denemental operation. Contemporary art attempts to exist in thisspace of reverberation, rather than in the work-commentaryequation. Art is not a pretext for thought, but rather a thoughtthat operates by means of the constant exchange betweendifferent systems that vacillate between the abstract and theconcrete, and that make us vacillate between them as well.

Nothing productive emerges from translating ideasinto images. The attempt to establish a correlation betweenideas and their representation denies the unexpected and,hence, the hope for change. Reverberation names somethingquite different and more complex than interdiscipli-nariness, or the borrowing of ideas and concepts betweensciences. Artistic research understands that artistic practicegenerates concepts on the basis of intuition and that thechallenge lies in their formalisation. That amounts to af-rming that arts relationship to theory should not obey acause-effect logic. To be truly modern, theory cannot as-sume the role of the eternal mediator between the work andthe viewer; it cannot limit itself to speaking after the fact.Locating thought outside artistic practice means acceptingthat History is the nal instance and judgment the only wayto relate to culture in order to ensure that the last horizon isalways normative; it means that there is only room for thedialectic between good and bad. There are countless exam-ples of interpretations of cultural production on these bases.

It is necessary to think and express oneself in To walk down a different path we have to unlearn and attend to concepts neglected by critical theorysion is not to renovate thought, but to venture into oand place them at the core of artistic and culturalSustaining, like Deleuze, that meaning emerges fimplies realising that it is not philosophy that makecipated viewer possible, but rather an artistic practmade an unprecedented effort to understand itself gure of the viewer. And that understanding impli

That is what artistic research consists of, and an institution that wants to think through, rather thart is now inconceivable. The production of space trust, of future-ness.

According to Bachelard, the mental function us closest to the enigmatic vastness of whats to codaydreaming. For philosophy, it is a fundamental eDaydreaming is a way of creating access to grandea sphere radically opposed to the domestic and difthe social. It empowers an attitude so very exceptiit takes the daydreamer outside this world, to anoththat bears the mark of innity. It points in the direcvital multiplication of mortal freedoms; it builds wcounter-worlds. Daydreaming is a constitutive spagests the ability to imagine consciousness itself.

2 Roland Barthes used this phrase frequently.

A series of books partake of tand the concern with thinkingferently: Elaine Scarry,Dreaminthe Book, New York: Farrar, SGiroux, 1999; Daniel Heller-The Inner Touch, Archaeolog

Sensation, New York: Zone B2009; Gaston Bachelard,Essai connaissance approche, Paris: rie Philosophique Vrin, 2006Bachelard,The Poetics of Spac, ton: Beacon Press, 1984 (origsion, Gaston Bachelard,La Polespace, Pars: Presses Univerde France PUF, 1964); SienUgly Feelings, Cambridge: HarUniversity Press, 2005; GillesPure Immanence: Essays on a York: Zone Books, 2001; Ma(ed.), The Social after GabrielDebates and Assessments, New Routledge 2010; Jean-Paul SPsychology of Imagination, NewPhilosophical Library, 1948 (version, Jean-Paul Sartre,LIma psychologie phnomnologiqlimagination, Pars: Gallimard


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cultural studies, we will have no doubts as regards thelegitimacy of such a statement.

There are many examples illustrating the engagementof museums in this kind of studies. The question, however,is not whether and in what ways the practices of museumshave been inspired by academic research, as in the case ofLinda Nochlins great exhibition,Women Artists: 15501950, shown in Los Angeles in 1976 (LACMA), but if thereverse is the case. In that respect, a good example is a Parisexhibition,Magiciens de la Terre by Jean-Hubert Martin(Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle, 1989), whichaimed at addressing the orientalisation of the postcolonialregions of the world even though it was criticised andaccused of latent imperial and neo-colonialist tendencies.3 In fact, that exposition was one of the rst statements in thepostcolonial debate in art history regardless of the criticism, besides, the statement was made by a museum, not auniversity. In contrast to the inspiration of museums by feminist studies, postcolonialism has been recognised byacademic art history quite late. The direction of the inuencehas been opposite: not from the academia to the museum, but the reverse.

Thus far, we have been dealing with the relations between art history at the university and in the museum inthe context of the new humanities. Now, let us ask a ques-tion about the post-humanities. Most likely, it is a part ofa more general reaction to the linguistic turn, but it takesanother direction and is perhaps more radical. In the post-humanities, the problematic of identity gives way to a muchmore profound revision that is a change of the status ofthe human being in the environment. Their critiqueof anthropocentrism reaches far beyond the rejection ofa thesis that man is the hub of the universe. The point isnot just to endow animals, things, cyborgs, etc., with equal

rights or claim that they can have relations unmediated byhumans, but that the human being as such can no longer be dened in traditional terms in the context of geneticengineering or organ transplantation technology. The post-humanities are humanities after humanism, which produceknowledge criticising or rejecting the central position ofman in the universe this means that they favour differentnon- or anti-anthropocentric approaches. The key researchproblems of the post-humanities are the limits of speciesidentity, relations between the human and the non-human,the issues of bio-power, bio-politics, and bio-technologyand the study of animals and things. 4

I am most interested in the latter. It is not that a thing for example, a work of art suddenly becomes an objectof study. What is signicant is that things take part in social

and political life, and the question is how to descparticipation. Specically, I mean one project tharesearch with display Making Things Public preparethe ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2005 by a scholar, Brunand a curator Peter Weibel, the latter having manexperience both in research and in organising exMaking Things Public , with its huge catalogue, is aimportant event and probably the most signicantribution of art history and the museum to the stuthings and their social and political role (Latour Dingpolitik ),5 demonstrating that there is room forthe post-humanities. It should be noted that an imfor such studies and considerations comes exactlmuseum and its engagement in the most radical rprojects. It is a perfect piece of evidence that myon the common scholarly and intellectual attitudeprofessor and the curator, the academic and the mmaker, has been proved by a fusion of two historpractices in one and the same project of a radicalthe humanities.

Finally, I would like to distinguish still anotof the debate on the comparison of university schand the museum, referring to the local context ofCentral Europe, and ask whether the changes thaplace twenty years ago (the fall of communism) any inuence upon it? At the moment, there is atproject combining research and public display, waddresses the year 1989 and makes an attempt toin that particular context the foundations of the Wthe Former West Project carried out by the BAK inincluding a series of seminars and conferences towith a big exhibition and a publication.

I will approach a denition of the former Wreferring to the title of a well-known book by De

Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe (2000). Using imetaphor, I would say that the matter is provinc West. Only under such circumstances we can tathe former West we must look at it as a proviin relation to another new centre (a new West). Iit must become one province among many, one others. In other words, what is at stake is depriv West of its central place in the global structure oand making it horizontally equal to other regionswhat is the signicance of the provincialisation West for art history and museums?

Let us realise that the decentralisation of theits culture, which means its provincialisation inship, is already going on. Among new initiativesmention the December 2008 issue of the Art Bullet

3 SeeThird Text , No. 6 (Spring 1989).4 Ewa Domanska,Literaria Copernicana (in press).5 Bruno Latour, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, in Bruno LatoPeter Weibel, (eds.)Making Things Public. Atmosphere of Demo,Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2005, pp. 1441.


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ways of controlling international politics. It will do it by itsinuence and by addressing local problems, which, becauseof the cosmopolitisation of the local, are acquiring globalsignicance. In other words, what gives us a chance is theidea of a local critical museum with global ambitions.

There are at least two levels on which such a museumcan operate. One of them is its participation in the localagora, analysing social and political questions, recognisedas the key ones for a particular community. Since, however,local communities are in the process of global change, asI have mentioned before, to address local issues is at thesame time global. London is not the only cosmopolitanEuropean city with its multicultural social strata. Smallercities in Europe, including Central and Eastern Europe, arechanging their character in the same way, too; however,not to the same extent. Warsaw, for example, is not such acosmopolitan centre as London, is not a metropolis in theabove mentioned degree, and perhaps will never be. How-ever, its character is changing very fast. The local society ismuch more complex and differentiated in terms of ethnic,political, sexual, etc., identities than it used to be before1989. Thus, the critical museum should address these pro-cesses. The other level is to rethink the internal conditionof the museum in such a historical context and develop asort of self criticism. Something as a critique of local artisticcannons, or relations between local and international arthistory, should be a subject of a new museum strategy. Inone word: both of them, i.e. museum participation in theagora and reshaping its traditional (national and hierarchi-

cal) concept of the museum, should be a point ofin the process of creating the idea of the critical mand at the same time its new identity in the face oporary cultural and social processes. The theoretof such a museum concept is museum studies, alcritical museum studies or new museology, and hdeveloping for some thirty years, mostly at the uand art criticism.

Will museums or, more precisely, the typeseum called the universal survey museum, rootnationalist ideology and European, Western hegeprove able to face the challenge? Will the potentscholarship, if one denes it as a critical reectio be used to transform museums into critical institto cover the distance between the critique of the tion and the institution that is critical? Will the mor, again, more precisely, the universal survey muse critical theory, well developed in the universchange it into critical practice? Will it drop its romausoleum and become a public forum shaping poAll these questions still remain to be answered.

6 Art Bulletin, Decentering Modernism, Partha Mitter (ed.), Vol. XC, No. 4,December 2008.

7 Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach, The Universal Survey Museum, Art History,No. 3/4, December 1980, pp. 44869.

8 Neil MacGregor, Global Collections for Global Cities, in Jaynie Anderson (ed.),Crossing Cultures: Conict, Migration, and Convergence. The Proceedings of the 32nd Congress in the History of Art , Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009,pp. 6570; Neil MacGregor, To Shape the Citizens of the Great City, the World, in James Cuno (ed.),Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and theDebate over Antiquities, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 3954.

9 Hans Belting, Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age, in Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds),Contemporary Art and the Museum,Ostldern: Hantje Cantz Verlag, 2007, pp. 3037.

Piotr Piotrowski has been honoured with thZabel Award for Culture and Theory 2010and funded by the ERSTE Foundation, acknowledges a cultural protagonist whdedicated to internationally broadening ledge of visual culture in the Central anEastern European region. In December,hosted the award ceremony.

Igor Zabel (19582005) was a Sloveniwriter and cultural theorist, actively invthroughout his life in many elds of thculture: as philosopher, author, essayisand art critic, translator and teacher of neof curators and critics of contemporary

Jean-Hubert Martin , curator of the exhibLes Magiciens de la Terre held at the CentrPompidou in Paris (1989) was one of thin the courseThe History of Exhibition.the Ideology of the White Cube that took pin MACBA in October and November His lecture is available in audio formatat www.macba.cat


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POST-COLONIAL SOLITUDEIN THE MEDITERRANEAN:SOME ARAB THOUGHTS

Three distinct questions characterise the three differentphases of modern Arab thought, each question epitomisingthe whole mood of an epoch and a whole set of concerns.

1.During the period known as the Arab Renaissance (al-Nahda), roughly between the mid-nineteenth to the earlytwentieth century, Arab thinkers wanted to understandwhy others had progressed while they lagged behind. Thecolonial encounter with Europe, experienced in the Napo-

leonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, had shown a disturbinggap on all levels and the need was felt to grasp the secret ofprogress that had led that continent to such an advancedstage. Most thinkers at the time were condent that oncethat was grasped nothing prevented Arabs from improvingtheir situation and from catching up with the Europeans.Identity as such, whether Islam or East, was not the issue.Rather, a lot of importance was given to the political basisof this progress: political justice, namely a constitutionalrule that would hold rulers accountable and dene therights and duties of rulers and people, was seen as thenecessary condition for civilisational progress, i.e. for eco-nomic prosperity, popular solidarity and patriotic loyalty,for the advancement of knowledge as well as for civil peace.In fact, the turn of the century abounded on the one handin critiques of despotism, and on the other, in present-ing local, Islamic values and principles that are equivalentto the European progressive ones. But the early Europeancolonial forays into the area in the late nineteenth centuryhad already started to alter this preoccupation with com-prehensive progress and to shift it toward a concern with

the acquisition of the means of power that would aArabs and Muslims to resist Western imperialism.trend became even more pronounced with the estament of the French and British mandates on Arab after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The comcivilisational difference became increasingly percthreatening confrontation of power.

2.The second half of the twentieth century was a tim

reection as Arab thinkers started to examine theition efforts to date. The 1967 defeat against Israelaccentuate this soul-searching mood, and the centtion was: Why had thenahda failed? What had prevthe fruition of its liberation and renaissance impul Why had the post-independence Arab regimes faicarry out development, real independence and dem Why had they failed to vindicate the cause of Pale Why had they not achieved Arab unity? In the sevand eighties much of the search was done in the csphere, in a culturalist tendency to explain the maprimarily in cultural terms. The cultural heritage wited in order to nd in it the seeds of a secondnahda odeep-seated causes of backwardness. Some thoughthe nahda critical effort had not been radical enougsome others blamed that effort for estranging peoptheir own traditions, and proposed instead holisticof the future based on a nativist, authentic traditan ideologised Islam. Indeed, the post-independenmost Arab countries turned out to be a disenchantrience. Revolutions and coup dtats, which were

Elizabeth Suzanne KassabPhilosopher and researcher specialisingin cultural studies in the Arab World. Herpublications includeContemporary ArabThought: Cultural Critique in ComparativePerspective (2010).

Mediterraneans


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Yto BarradaN of the World Nation in Arabic, 2003C-Print 80 x 80 cmCourtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris


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Yto BarradaFoundations, 2003C-Print 60 x 60 cmCourtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris


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to bring to power more dedicated rulers, truly committedto patriotic goals, whether in Egypt with Abdel Nasser, orin Syria and Iraq with the Baath party, ended up being moreauthoritarian, repressive and self-serving regimes than theones they replaced.

3.For many Arab countries the turn of the millennium brought with it further defeats in all domains: in democraticstruggles, in economic conditions, in educational systemsand in oppositional structures. It witnessed an alarmingsocial, political and military polarisation with a growingforeign occupation of the area. The dominating feeling sincethen has been one of incapacitation, of impotence, of total bankruptcy (ajz ). The question now is: Why did the projectof Enlightenment fail in the Arab world? While the rstphase was one of hopefulness, supported by a sense of pos-sibility, the second phase was one of soul-searching in themidst of an ominous mood of humiliation and anger. Nowwas the time of overwhelming despair, but also of a come back of the political, after a long interlude of culturalism.Critical thinkers, former political prisoners, artists as wellas activists started to emphasise again the political nature ofthe general malaise, combining cultural critique with politi-cal critique and pointing the nger again to the absence ofdemocracy, the rule of law and public spaces of debate. It isat this intersection of cultural, moral and political critiquethat the concept of Enlightenment is actively discussed, between surges of activist mobilisation and dips into severeresignation and hopelessness.

While much attention has been devoted to the studyof Arab ideologies, whether nationalism or Islamism, littleif any attention has been paid to the critical efforts that have been made throughout these phases, especially after the

1960s, when the critical gaze was turned inwards, awayfrom polemics and justicatory rhetoric. Indeed, the lastdecades have witnessed a critical revisiting of commonlyused notions, such as authenticity, identity, national com-munity and cultural indigenisation. They have producedcritiques of hitherto prevailing ideologies, such as secular-ism, Islamism, Arabism and the Left. These critical effortsare an integral part of the Arab intellectual landscape. Theyneed to be acknowledged and they also need to be put in thelarger post-colonial context of such cultural critiques. Fornot only has contemporary Arab thought been reduced toits extremist ideologies, it has also been explained self-referentially, i.e. in terms of its alleged essence, of Islamor some essential Arab character. It has rarely, if ever, beenunderstood through a post-colonial prism, i.e. throughthe post-colonial quest for an empowered sense of self, fora thought of ones own and for an afrmation of identitywithout losing sight of the universally human dimension:a formidable challenge, not only for Arabs, but of all peopleswho have had to operate with the dening parametersimposed by a dominating other. Typically, the malaise that

is at work here is experienced in solitude, as if onin carrying its burden. Perhaps, Arabs, more than have fallen into the trap of exceptionalism, some oinicted. Only a comparative study of Arab debatputs them in conversation with African, Latin AmIndian, African-American, Native American andhome, with Greek, Turkish and Iranian discourseus appreciate better the challenges and promises,as the universal and specic aspects of those AraIn all these discourses across regions, religions, lcultures and traditions, one nds at a certain poina certain shift of interest: from identity to democessentialism to agency, and from ideology to criting. One also sees a growing concern with historand a need for a double critique, internal as well Artists of all kinds participate in voicing this comdifcult critique. A comparative attention to themhighly enlightening and rewarding.

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab participated inThe Next Mediterranean: shore-to-shoreart, economy and society held at MACBAand November 2010. Other participantsincluded: Costas Douzinas, director of tInstitute for the Humanities at London Uand Yto Barrada, artist and co-founder mathque de Tnger. The lectures will baudio fomat at www.macba.cat and the Douzinas will be published in the digitaQuaderns porttils (Portable notebooks)


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HISTORICAL INQUIRY ASSUBJECT AND OBJECT Julie Ault Artist, researcher and editor. In 1979, she co-foundedthe New York-based artists collective Group Material,which explored the relationship between aestheticsand politics.

The archive of Group Material during the processof recompilation, at the Downtown Collection(Fales Library) of the New York University

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Since the New York-based artists collaborative GroupMaterial disbanded in 1996, I have continued its represen-tation through live narration and writings, and respondedto inquiries on a case-by-case basis. As the only foundingmember who remained until its conclusion I felt a respon-sibility to keep recounting the groups practice. (Long-termmember Doug Ashford has done likewise.) Group Materialscultural practice was temporal and the forms employedwere ephemeral. When the group ceased its activities I wasintent on preserving its ephemerality andnot becoming his-tory. Fearing a revisionist encapsulation in which conictsand contradictions of collaboration are resolved in their rep-resentation, I resisted our work being dened or objectiedin a monograph by an art historian, and reserved the rightto cohere our history at some future point.

Following a decade of active narration I decided it wastime to relinquish responsibility (and control) and address

Group Materials history with lasting effect. I neconfront the material traces that had inltrated evcabinet and spare spot in my apartment, as well apsychic traces that permeated memory. Collectinsaved by other members as well and joining it ain an archive would permit access to Group Matemore coherent way than had been possible, and odoor for further historical representation.

Tackling the mission of recuperating Groupas a two-pronged housecleaning operation invogathering and organising the pool of material to the archive, and simultaneously distilling from thinformation to make a book. While formalising t

sought to make Group Material newly public, thewas also conceived as a laboratory in which to inthe logic, structure, implications and practice of I spent several months processing the material into-be permanent home the Downtown Collectio York University: handling, reading and looking apaper, image and item; taking note, cross-referenlecting and reecting. The more I reviewed the mI understood the malleable and fallible nature of and memory repeatedly threw documentary fact tion. Alternatively edied and mystied, the expdemonstrated the utter insecurity of the categorietive and objective.

Looking back, I realise while telling the stoMaterial these past years I have unwittingly told This discovery occurred when encountering infoles that I had long since blotted from memory. I read on and the divide between recollection and

1 Janet Malcolm,The Silent Woman. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, New Vintage, 1995, p. 205.

Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overlled mind. The problem is to clearout most of what is in it, to ll huge plastic bags with theconfused jumble of things that have accreted there overthe days, months, years of being alive and taking things inthrough the eyes and ears and heart. The goal is to makea space where a few ideas and images and feelings may beso arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile amongthem... But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is notmerely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger ofthrowing the wrong things out and keeping the wrongthings in...1 Janet Malcom


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expanded. Certain retrieved information was basic whilesome signalled that Group Material is much more complexand debatable than I had meanwhile fabricated. It seems Ihad convinced myself that the streamlined storyline, whichI repetitiously recounted for years, was accurate.Of course documents and artefacts are not intrinsicallytruth telling either; they are fragmentary and disconnectedfrom context. Archives set the stage for history writing, yetthey can mislead and even lie through omission. Essentialpieces of information, which might answer questions andredirect research, are not necessarily tangible or archived.

While retrieving Group Material for myself, for thegroup and with the larger purpose of public representationin mind, inhabiting the dual roles of observer and observedcreated a central methodological challenge, which at timeswas confounding. Flipping between my own and other

members muddle of memory as well as the accumulationof material sometimes felt like too much and not enough.But, ultimately my insider relationship to the subject inconjunction with a more independent association to thepotential for archives to shape historical representationseemed to productively balance one another.

Each aspect of cohering the archive and makingShowand Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material has embodied spe-cic and abstract purpose. A set of vexing questions fuelledthe work. How does bringing documentation togetherimply shaping history, and writing history? How do arte-facts whether material or informational communicate?Can contexts be in effect communicated? What archivalstructure and practices will animate and complicate withoutover determining meanings? How does the archive archive? What tense is the archive? Where does the archive end? What denes its frame? What can the collective subjectivedo when given the chance to write its own history? What isgained and lost in the process of subjecting ephemeral andperipheral activities to conservation, from inducting theminto history? What kind of suitable forms can be shaped to

embody the historicising processes, gathered knowand diverse purpose that drive this inquiry? How twhat is missing evident as a layer of historicising?does the subjective transform the material to a pubsphere without manipulating it? Can one effectivechallenge history writing while writing history?

The books main section was conceived as a ccle composed of reprinted documents and images,guiding text running throughout.Show and Tell takesingredients and methods from the archive, which e both private and public material. The making of tas a specic context along with its structure and pinseparable from its public creations, yet the bulk representation focuses on Group Materials projecSand Tell widens the focus to include conveyance ofnal workings in each layer of material that forms t

and stresses aspects of the collaboration that are oinvisible.Group Material comes to life in the archive. W

through the material, I was struck by the vividneschanging character of internal correspondence, mimeetings, exhibition proposals and press releases by the group. Emotional intensity is palpable in eamuniqus, proposals and press releases are bombaics and debates of the times are glimpsed through and graphic design bespeaks period styles. A selecdocuments is reprinted in their original form and sShow and Tell . They are valued as original languagvividly conveys what we perceived we were doingtime far better than writing that depicts from the dof time would, whether by someone inside or outsthe group. This material would commonly be conssource for writing rather than substance for presenBy design the book encourages that the documentregarded as primary texts rather than ancillary illuThis method situates readers in the archive, inviting aplicity of interpretation.

Detail of the installation of Group MaterialDemocracy:Politics and Election, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988

Detail of the installation of Group Material AIDS Timeline,Berkeley Art Museum, New York, 1989


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2 Ibid., pp. 109110.

Contradictory evidence is at the heart of the archiveand prominently gures in this portrayal of Group Material.A four-page incendiary letter written by cofounderTim Rollins to the group in 1980 is fully reprinted alongside documents that represent a more harmonious collabora-tion. Tims letter rants and rails rhetorically. It evidencesmajor clashes in the collaboratives rst months but it alsoshows how seriously he regarded the collaboration and ar-ticulates what was at stake for the group. As Janet Malcolmasserts, Letters are the great xative of experience. Timeerodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to usthat we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling... conduitto unmediated experience.2

The guiding text that lters throughout the chroniclewas conceived as a nonspecic voice imparting otherwiseinaccessible circumstances, facts and anecdotes alongsidethe archive materials. It represents a close reading and distil-lation of multiple documentation and composite memory.This text captions, reports, digresses and discloses, coalesc-ing subjective and objective knowledge into a seamlessvoice that augments the material. A depersonalised present-tense mode is used, intended to situate readers in the timesof events and suggest collective subjectivity, distinct fromrst person retrospection. Trains of information such as thecontinuities and discontinuities of the groups composition,conicts and contradictions endemic to its process, and howGroup Material structured itself and nanced its work runthroughout.

While reading through the les I noted many interest-ing segments in all types of documents, initially regardingthis as source material for the guiding text. The number offull documents that could be reproduced was limited bythe budget, which led to creating a layer of diverse extractsvarying in author purpose, length and style. Unied by

typographic design treatment, these also lter throughoutthe chronicle.Image wise, snapshots portraying the various mem-

bers and incarnations of the group, although in some casesthere are no photos, and formal installation photography ofthe collaboratives forty-ve projects are presented on equalfooting.

Despite the multiple layers of motley material thatcompose the chronicle, the goal was to bring the elementsinto a carefully designed formal system that stresses all thematerial as primary and equivalent. The books visual tone builds on Group Materials aesthetic style. Analogous tothe decentralised thematic exhibition format the groupadvanced, the chronicle is thought of as an exhibition spacein the form of a book.

Revisionist and interpretive tendencies have beenrestrained inShow and Tell in favour of creating a usefuldocumentary foundation and introduction to GroupMaterials archive. The organisation of the archive and the

response to that process through the book providform and base interpretation to use, negotiate andwith. The project is also a case study in archivinginvestigation and history writing, shaped from thtions and problems enmeshed in an amalgam of pcollectively and socially vested inquiry.

From 1979 to 1996, the artists collaboraMaterial produced over forty-ve projewide range of social, political and artistiperiod. While many of its exhibitions antook place in art institutions, the group subway cars, buses, newspapers and bilis the rst book to chronicle Group Mattice and chart the origins, processes andtheir activities. Organised by founding g ber Julie Ault in dialogue with long-terDoug Ashford, and with the input frommembers including Sabrina Locks and Tthe book draws heavily on Group MateIt also includes reections by three of thmembers, as well as an investigation of project, AIDS Timeline (1989).

Some of the issues addressed by Groupresonate inSICK80 s / The AIDS Crisis, ACounter-biopolitical Guerrilla, a seminar d by Beatriz Preciado that took place at Min November 2010. Portions of the contseries are available in audio format onliat www.macba.cat

Julie Ault (edand Tell: A Cof Group MatLondon: FourBooks, 2010.


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THE GEOMETRY OF A

CROSS-EYED SUBJECT

My deliberations over the incident describ below have brought me to the edge of myematical capabilities, which are not, admiespecially developed. Still, to me it seemereconstruct the situation geometrically in understand what was happening to my eyBasically, I started going cross-eyed in a ssort of way. Not that I was seeing double;a hole developed exactly in the middle of of vision meaning straight ahead, when

from my seat in the cinema in the House oCultures and it permitted me to look onleft and right sides anking the projection

The incident occurred during the proDocumentary Moments at the DocumentaryForum in Berlin. The lmmaker Eyal Sivnounced the previously unscreened lmHenc Glance, which Chris Marker had passed oand which is based on Alain Resnais shoalised documentary lm about Nazi conceand extermination camps,Nuit et Brouillard (and Fog , 1955). However, the lm explicitnot originate from Marker himself. As becevident,Henchman Glance is composed of s

Natascha Sadr HaghighianAs an artist, she has worked in differentformats, including video, performance andsound. Both in her solo works and groupprojects she is concerned with socio-politicalquestions.

Image of the Israeli trial against Nazi ofcerAdolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.This was the image used by Penguin Booksin 1994 for the cover of Hannah ArendtsEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on theBanality of Evil .

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edits (shot /countershot) of two plot threads thatget synchronised through the editing.Night andFog was cut together with the recordings of thetrial of the State of Israel vs. the Nazi ofcer AdolfEichmann. One sees Adolf Eichmann from above,a slightly slanted frontal shot. He sits in a glass booth, his gaze directed ahead, and apparently, orin fact, watches a screening of the lmNight andFog , which can be seen alternating with the imagesof Eichmann himself. The sound ofNight and Fog runs continuously through all the lms images.According to Eyal Sivan,Night and Fog was in factshown to Eichmann during the trial. Chris Markerreconstructed this occurrence through editing.

I was already unprepared for what was aboutto unfold on the screen because I had never seenNight and Fog . But as early as the rst minutes ofthe lm, I was predominantly preoccupied withmy optic apparatus, which had gone completelyhaywire. I simply could not look at the screen. ButI was also unable to exit the cinema. It was one ofthose events that one attends out of respect, aboveall if one has grown up in Germany. So for thirty-three minutes my eyes wandered aimlessly alongthe dark edges of the projection. In the corner ofmy eye I hazily chased the screen in hopes thatsomething would change and enable me to look atit again. Like when I was a child, secretly watchingscary movies that I actually could not endure. I hadalways said to myself, now that you have begun,you have to see how it turns out.

In his bookLooking Awry: An Introduction toLacan through Popular Culture (1991), Slavoj iekdescribes a scene from the lmManhunter (1986)

in which the policeman watches super 8 lms be-longing to murdered families over and over again inorder to learn something about the murderers mo-tive. He discovers the thing that connects the fami-lies: they all had their lm developed in the samelaboratory. And ultimately that is where the mur-derer is found. As iek says, the irony of the lmlies in how the policemans method, on a formallevel, creates a perversion. The perversion consistsof the overlapping, or even coincidence, betweenhis gaze and that of the murderer. His methodrequires that he view the super 8 lms with the eyesof the murderer. In the course of this operation, thesubject splits and his gaze becomes perverse. Theperverse gaze onto the victim takes place in faithfulservice to none other than that victim, in its name,and in its interests. iek places this overlapping ofgazes into a correlation with pornography, whichI have yet to fully grasp. Here, pornography is thegenre that shows all there is to show, hiding noth-ing from view, while in a radical way bringing about

the loss of the side view. But maybe the feedbackthat emerges from the short circuiting of complexelds of vision helps to reconstruct the hole, whichoccurred during the screening ofHenchman Glance.Neither the subject-object relation, nor the associ-ated lines of sight arising while showing images, areunidirectional . The object gazes back, and depend-ing on what the intention of the production of thatrelation is, this gaze, owing to circumstances, getsreected back. If I understand the concept of jouis-sance correctly, it is to be found precisely here. Thesubject is penetrated by the objects gaze and viceversa, and the principle of pain within this relation-ship turns into a suffering that, to be sure, differsfrom an emphatic compassion.

In my contemplation of Eichmann, of how hecontemplates the horrible crimes he helped commit,I attempt, on the one hand, to see the pictures withhis eyes. This means that I take on his gaze, placingmy gaze parallel to his, and I try to see what he seesin the images of the concentration camp. I do this inthe name of the victim, as does the policemaninManhunter . On the other hand, I try to read hisface. This means that I watch from the oppositedirection, fromNight and Fog towards Eichmannsface, and I try to recognise where and how his faceis stimulated by the images. Thus, on the onehand, Eichmann in his glass booth seems like awild animal in the zoo; on the other hand, he sitsnext to me, so to speak, and passes me his popcorn.It is probably clear that something perverse, maybepornographic, occurs here; but, as it seems to me,the question of what part I play in this is onlyanswerable geometrically. On which axis is the eye

of the subject located, and from which cut-set doesthe object gaze back; and, above all, which coordi-nates are subject and object here?

When two sets intersect, a cut-set comesinto existence. In my case, at the moment of thescreening ofHenchman Glance, intersectionsemerged that created a hole in the projectionscreen instead of a cut-set. Like an endless feed- back loop that happens when one pivots the axisof the camera and holds it towards the screen. Afeedback that needed me as a coordinate in orderto pivot the axis. The emergence of a hole duringthis event may lie in my coordinates inability todevelop a direction or a radius of action withinthe array ofHenchman Glance, making my coor-dinate begin to rotate. The murderer, the evil, isalready well-known and, yes, already put to death,and therewith the motivation for my complicitydraws a blank. The already-well-known axis withthe coordinates murderer/policeman-witness/victim, which uses the policeman-witness in order


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to rectify the murderer/victim axis (and therefore has aclear direction) turns around on itself, becomes locked intoa zombied loop of the resurrection of evil. In the process, a blindness-causing monster emerges from the screen, whosemotive we will surely never be able to resolve; for here it isthe idea of evil-in-itself, in its totalitarian monumentality,that is being animated.

The cover of my edition of Hannah Arendts bookEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1994) also shows the courtroom of Eichmanns trial. Onesees Eichmann in the glass booth, from above, a slightlyslanted frontal shot; before him, set up with the same lineof sight as Eichmann, stands a 16 mm projector that getstruncated at the edge of the picture. One does not see whatEichmann sees. The other people in the image three policeofcers guarding, one person who sits behind the projector,and another person wearing headphones look withEichmann in the direction of the projection. Our gaze stays onthe side axis, and something in this graph stays incomplete,exits the picture, so to speak. It is the gaze-axis of Eichmannthat we unavoidably incorporate, that directs us, however,not onto the 16 mm projection, but into the inside of the book and therewith into Hannah Arendts deliberations overthe banality of evil. Here too the incorporation of the axisof the gaze enables the monsters exit from the glass booth,though not in the sense of him taking our gaze hostage, but, rather, in the sense of his gaze being taken apart, beingdismantled into everyday-seeming decisions that are met,decisions that are capable of creating the monstrous. Some-thing becomes apperceptible, allowing for a processof cognition.

In April 2010,Natascha Sadr Haghighian parpated inOn Artistic Research, a lecture serieMACBA that will be compiled in the Concollection, which is published jointly by Mthe Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona.In 2011, she will present her new work atMACBA. This production furthers the coher earlier work, which revolves around tof representation and the recovery of arart centres.An interview with the artist is available iformat at www.macba.cat

In the newest edition(2006) of the PenguinClassics Series, the coverimage ofEichmann in Jerusalem was, interestingly,replaced. Instead of thecourtroom, the cover nowshows a slanted image ofEichmann, looking fromabove into the camera. With this gaze lookingdown on us and the magni-ed eyes caused by his thickspectacles, he seems to target the viewer. The gure ofEichmann is cropped, outof context. A slanted whitestripe forms the back-

ground behind his headand chest, framed aboveand below by blue spaces.Obviously this gaze doesnot lead into the book. Thelm continues. N.S.H.


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FOUR DECADES OF THEINDEPENDENT STUDYPROGRAMMESXavier AntichDirector of the MACBA Independent StudyProgramme (PEI). A writer with a PhD inphilosophy. He teaches art theory at theUniversitat de Girona.

The emblematic, indeed almost foundational, begof the Independent Study Programmes (ISP) liesties that took place at the Whitney Museum of AArt in New York. In the eld of art studies, the hthese programmes is inseparable from a certain min theory and politics that took shape in the severetrospect, it hardly seems an overstatement to cothe inuence of these programmes on the spheretion in art, theory and politics to the inuence exthe workshops at the Vkhutemas, a school foundSoviet Union in the twenties.

In any case, what was perhaps most essentiaprocess that got underway at that time was if it

sible to formulate it in these terms a double imand, hence, a double proposal. First, there was awof the irreversible nature of the rupture between categories of artistic practice, on the one hand, acal reection and theory, on the other. Different sconceptual and political art had already introducewould eventually give rise to a new sort of practwould not await later conceptualisation or theoripractice is and defends the right to be a theorformulation of its own meanings, and indeed the of artistic practice in general and its social dimennew tendencies would end up wholly altering theof Fine Arts Studies almost everywhere. Secondan equally irreversible awareness of the fact thatstudies in art history and museum practices wereing a sort of deforestation; attention was shifted them and focus was now placed on dening newcies in artistic practice, a fact that forced a reformstaid academic studies of art histories. This was, two-fold context in which Independent Study Pro began their experiment.

Lecture by Doug Ashford, member of GroupMaterial, in the framework of the seminarThe NewProductivisms, MACBA Auditorium, March 2009

Class of MACBA's Independent Studies Programme(PEI) with Xavier Antich, MACBA Study Center,October 2010

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At present, it is evident that the history of Independent Study Programmes is intrinsically linked to the evolutionof critical thought. It is not surprising that the WhitneysISP in the seventies revolved around theoretical concernsrelated to semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism andMarxism that gave a specic meaning to the theoreticalturn on which Independent Study Programmes were based.Thus, in their commitment to rejoining theory and artisticpractice and in the need to construct a space outside therealm of institutional and academic knowledge (from whichthese programmes afrmed their independence) and out-side their organic burdens, Independent Study Programmeshad an educational component more focused on producingknowledges at the intersection of forms of practice than onconveying knowledge.

Four decades after their launching, Independent StudyProgrammes everywhere are still struggling to dene thenature of their independence and the production of knowl-edge to which they are, more or less intensely, commit-ted. The Whitney programme, for instance, now involvesthree interconnected, though conceptually differentiated,programmes: the Studio Program, the Curatorial Programand the Critical Studies Program. The design of other pro-grammes is less conventional and perhaps more demandingfrom an epistemological perspective: the modest programmeat the Escola de Artes Visuais Maumaus (Lisbon), forinstance, and mostly the newer Campus Expandido pro-gramme of the MUAC (Mexico), which reafrms the urgentneed to rethink the museum as, among other things, asphere for the production of critical knowledge. MACBAsIndependent Study Programme (PEI) formally began in January 2006 (on the basis of activities that had been tak-ing place for the previous ve years). It emerged withinthe context of the reformulation of independent study

programmes, an attempt to nd a new place for these pro-grammes in the face of the new challenges generated by cog-nitive capitalism and the onset of a new wave of discoursesthat openly encouraged assimilating any and all culturalexperience into consumerism. Just like the theoretical turnthat had been explicitly and radically assumed when theseprogrammes emerged four decades earlier, the re-politi-calisation of educational practices in the arts, as well as theneed to reformulate the social dimension of those practices,constituted a deeply rooted attempt to nd a new meaningfor Independent Study programmes that aspired to continueto be independent from the aforementioned challenges.

A series of initiatives and activities (lectures, semi-nars and courses) that took place before the launching ofMACBAs PEI served to dene the various conceptual,theoretical and practical approaches that would eventu-ally constitute its framework. This was an attempt to openreection and research on artistic practice to the sphere oftheory and the criticism of discourse that emerged on the basis of post-structuralism, gender technologies in criticalfeminism and queer theory, psychoanalysis and therapy,

different forms of political imagination connectedand political activism, the study and analysis of urtransformations and processes, and the criticism oeconomy of culture. On all of these fronts, MACBworked with academics and university professors,and curators, theorists and cultural critics, as wellferent actors involved in social and political activimovements, educational reform, and museum-relaand research. It was on the basis of these efforts aes that, in 2006, MACBA launched its IndependenProgramme, the rst of its kind in Spain. From the beginning, the programme received the support itfrom a museum that wanted to make knowledge, rand the production of discourse the core of its pra

Just as, in the early phases, Independent Studgrammes evolved alongside cultural studies espthose related to visual culture, feminist, subaltern cal theory in general, recent reection on the devof the independent nature of these programmes nsarily entails evaluating to what extent they have academic programmes in leading universities to evThis can be analysed, to a certain extent, by lookininstance, the Master of Arts Program in Curatoriaat Bard College (New York); the Master of SciencStudies at MITs Program in Art, Culture and Tech(Cambridge, MA); the Master in Modern Art: CriCuratorial Studies (MODA) at Columbia Univers York); the Curatorial Practice Program & Visual aStudies at California College of Arts & Crafts (Sacisco); and, in Europe, the post-graduate programGoldsmiths College at the University of London aRoyal College of Art (also in London), the Criticaprogramme at the Malm Art Academy (Lund UnMalm), Kunstraum at the University of Luneburg

many) and the curatorial programme at the De ApCentre (Amsterdam). While this is not the place to draw conclusion

the dialogue that has taken place in recent years bdependent Study Programmes and academic progit is possible that, given the relative uniformity of grammes (even in terms of their names), it is still pertinent to question from what place these spacproduction of knowledge dene themselves. And for this reason it is not farfetched to rethink the prplace occupied by New York as the city in the eaof Whitneys ISP. If Independent Study Programmas always, have to rethink their task, that rst of aimply knowing where they stand, a question that iimplies, among other things, dening by problemit in a dialectical manner the place of enunciatiothe processes of subjectivation that they mean to pare committed, as well as the social and public sphwhich they aspire. And that seems no small thing.


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INDEPENDENT STUDY:PROGRAMMES AND PARADIG Johanna BurtonArt historian and critic; associate Directorof the Independent Study Programme ofthe Whitney Museum of American Artof New York from 200810. She currentlyserves as Director of the graduate pro-gramme at the Center for CuratorialStudies, Bard College, New York.

Artist Martin Creed with students at the Centerfor Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York,on the occasion of his exhibitionFeelings, heldthere in summer 2007

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The recent attention and emphasis placed on what has beencalled during the past few years by many in the eld of artthe educational turn is a good place to begin my brief com-ments on the history and contemporary evolution of theIndependent Study Programme. Indeed, while I would notwish to cast a blindly disparaging eye on this latest enthusiasmfor or perhaps better, valuing of the endlessly malleable(if nonetheless rarely tested) structures of teaching andlearning within the sphere of artistic conceptualisationand actualisation, it is perhaps useful to consider just whatthe implications are for such a focus, to say nothing of sucha nomenclature. Unlike previous well known turns linguistic , ethical and, more recently,affective the stakesfor saideducational turn seem to operate mostly at the levelof rhetoric, and I mean this for better and for worse.

Even as I touch on this subject merely as a precursorfor my larger discussion, this thought is still worth devel-oping here since in many ways, in fact, it makes the largercontext for our understanding of education today all theclearer. And so, to clarify what I mean by rhetoric andthe role it plays: On the surface of things, an emphasis oneducation should only be good, particularly at a momentin which a rampant anti-intellectualism denes a great dealof the art world (not a historical rst, but as urgent as everto combat). Yet, just what comprises education as it wouldwant to be redened which is to say how its presence isperformed, how it is represented, how an audience is meantto recognise its contours is another matter. The implica-tion, de facto, of the educational turn, is that previouslyeducation per se was turned away from, rejected, repressedor, at the very least, ignored. While there are obvious (and,yes, persistent) examples of programmes (in both art prac-tice and art history) wilfully deaf and dumb to the politicaland ideological shifts of the last four decades (at least), there

is at least a fairly widespread general competency whenit comes to recognising the increasing roles of mediation,discussion and research (and other such nebulous terms)as central to both artistic practice and the evaluation of itsforms and this not over the last ve years but over the lasthundred and fty. In other words, as empathetic (and evendelighted) as I am to believe there is a new imperative foreducation afoot, I cant help but feel inclined to ask whatthis shift enumerates or if, somewhat counter-intuitively,the claim works to preclude further investigation. In otherwords, in claiming a radical mode of interrogation, one thatdisperses and dispels known modes of analysis, the edu-cational turn might render its own means tautological, itsown ends inconsequential. There is nothing one cant ask;therefore there is nothing onecan ask.

In pointing up what might be only one outcome ofworks, practices, events, exchanges that profess themselvesas educational (thus enumerating in one word both theprocess and the content), I dont actually mean to overturnor even disavow the educational turn, but rather to refocusattention on just what such words mean when they become

used too easily as shorthand. As Irit Rogoff (amonhas pointed out, the educational turn opens up alof epistemic inquiry yet simultaneously threatens (if it hasnt already) into a kind of style less an aa new, strange, formalism. While I am interested itelling the difference and evaluating this conditionimmediate driving question for the context at handpragmatic.

As an art historian and critic who has never opstrictly upon my own turf (I have taught not in art hdepartments but in the context of art practice, cultuand curatorial studies), I never turned away from eand so did not need to turn back. Central to my pr(both writing and pedagogical) has been a belief thstellation of argument, debate and analysis is founto every practice and to every practitioner, regardlwhere on the spectrum of production they fall. Anshould be said (regardless of my own position), thword education within the academic and art contnever fallen easily on the ears. Indeed, its worth pout, I think, that education programmes in instituof higher learning and museums are still regularlygarded, held apart from more rened modes of conproduction and equated with outreach to the publwith modes of translation that operate on a top-domodel using access as a catchword more or less to mitigated knowledge, doled out in tolerable spofuls. This works in marked counter-distinction to woutline above, where the educational turn is posiinvestment in rigorous, informed, yet experimentatigations where, in other words, structures are retransparent, self-reexivity is required, and the vemeaning-making is necessarily one of contestation

Of course, I highlight these institutional ine

(whereby the educational turn is an extension ofceptual practices, while institutional education is skind of bending to the lowest denominator) only tcontext for my own position. Within the academyits strange extensions, such as those Ive been luckto be a part of) education is seen neither as a forminhabited nor as the bridge to a general populationmedium neither to be turned away from nor towarinstead to be inhabited powerfully and historicallymy view; others would have it otherwise.) This is is only within education itself that we debate the uand relevance of things like: linguistics, ethics, afThat one could take or leave education itself is oorder, and I hope its worth the admittedly windinget here that this comes to be one of my main poincation, in my view, is not taken up or let go: it is ththe framework for inquiry, and it is neither a free-nor an empty signier.

The etymology for education is telling: its opertain to training, specically the training of chanimals. The implication of education at its root


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that it addresses individuals neither ruled fully by culturalmores nor by biological drives but rather informed by andchallenging both. Perhaps this is, in a sense, the promise ofthe educational turn, though Ive never seen it enumeratedas such: to locate, reveal and repurpose the site to whichwe cleave and bend those rules we never even realised wehad learned. But if the educational turn, as I understandit, is both open-ended and yet extremely self-referential (itpurports to be exible and ranging, yet serves mainly thosealready inaugurated), how might we think its untappedpotential but also regard more accurately its past?

All manner of experimental schools and pedagogicalscenarios are in existence globally today, with so many dif-ferent aims and constitutions. The one I know best is veryclearly also a model for most of the others: the Whitney In-dependent Study Program (ISP), which I attended ten yearsago and then worked within as a faculty member for twoyears. The history of the Program is long and rich, startingin

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