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Private Investigations

Private Investigations Paths of Critical Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art

Edited by Andrei Siclodi

Unlearning Journalism, Misapprehending Art 21

Alfredo Cramerotti

Private Investigations—Paths of Critical Knowledge Productionin Contemporary Art11

Andrei Siclodi

A Kind of Collaborative Desire44

Including a Conversation with Laura Horelli

Real, Not Real66

Including a Text Contribution by Andrei Siclodi

Alison Gerber

Geoffrey Garrison

Reading the Hidden, Writing the Liminal 30

Judith Fischer

L’avenir est un long passé89

Brigitta Kuster

Was ist Kunst—A Product of Circumstances?76

Ana Hoffner

Detour126

Including a Conversation with Nina Möntmann

Alexander Vaindorf

How to Do Things with Worlds, 26a111

Including a Conversation with Andrei Siclodi

Ralo Mayer

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Andrei Siclodi

For some time now, one aspect of contemporary art has been en vogue in theoretical discussions: art as a field of, and medium for, the production ofspecific knowledge. Especially in relation to the discipline that the academicestablishment calls “artistic research,” the persistent need for a stable basisfor artistic knowledge production has been continually emphasized—aboveall in academia; knowledge production in art, so the mantra goes, must gohand in hand with a socially critical (self-)reflexive approach toward art andits producers. In the globalized knowledge-based society of the twenty-firstcentury, we are told, art must position itself quickly in order to assert its ownsocial relevance and insure itself in the long run. With such arguments, theacademic standardization of artistic criticality is aided and “tenured” by national educational policy. Yet can this top-down criticality, standardizedthrough academic curricula, have any real impact outside a self-referentialframework? Despite all its good intentions, does this not rather serve to en-trench existing hegemonies and (distribution) economies of knowledge? Andwhat alternative strategies might be used to counter an increasingly domi-nant discourse on the theory and practice of “artistic research?”

In recent years it has become fashionable to deal with the subject of “artis-tic research,” or with “knowledge production in art,” both in an affirmativeand in a critical manner. Countless publications have appeared on the topic,attempting, from all possible perspectives, to show that “artistic research”is socially meaningful and to establish its relevance outside the art world.The concept of research used in this connection usually comes from the (eco-nomically validated) natural sciences or else, sometimes, from the social sciences—the latter especially when the practice in question employs inter-views and methods of evaluating data. These references to scientific fieldsmay understandably cause confusion, since this implies that art entails asystematic search for new discoveries, that it is a method for gaining newforms of knowledge to be exploited and commodified also outside the arts.This view, however, overlooks fundamental qualities of art: its autonomy andversatility—in the sense of adaptation and resistance. The autonomy art

Andrei Siclodi

Private Investigations—Paths of CriticalKnowledge Production in Contemporary Art

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process of this search for new concepts, the phrase private investigationemerged, which I propose as an alternative to the dominant term artistic re-search. To avoid any misunderstandings, it should be stated that this is notintended to suggest that artists, like private investigators, collect facts andobservations that their client can use “in court,” that is, as arguments in adispute. I definitely do not want this term to be understood as it would bein reference to a detective. On the contrary, private investigations in art arenot comissioned by clients and are certainly not a method, but rather an artis-tic position. Such a practice takes its point of departure from a very person-ally formed interest in a situation or issue that extends beyond the personal.The “clients,” then, are exclusively the artists themselves. The approach tothe situation or issue is research-based and investigative, although in thiscase the particular path to the possible goal is subject to an individual artis-tic standpoint. Similarly, the artistic method is open: the investigation can,but does not explicitly have to, flow into how the work is realized. A criticalapproach to existing knowledge and the experts associated with it is ratherthe central issue.

In cognitive capitalism, to research something or to search for somethingimplies searching for a general rule, for a validity of the object of researchthat objectifies it, leads to a generally valid conclusion, and finally com-modifies it. To investigate something in the sense of a private investigationmeans radically questioning it in order to formulate a critique with artisticmeans that can resist the impending commodification. By this I do not meanthat this practice must inevitably be an activist one. Nor is it necessarilyabout formulating an explicit critique of something, since criticality can alsobe articulated implicitly, by reformulating existing positions and questionsinto new, meaningful connections. Essential to this is the ability to gener-ate an actual knowledge surplus through simultaneously insuring the cru-cial qualities of a critical artistic practice, namely, autonomy and versatility.

In the end, my interest in artistic investigative practices stems from yearsof collaboration with the artists and theoreticians who have worked at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen within the framework of the InternationalFellowship Program for Art and Theory; the fellows and their projects con-tributed to the development of this institution to a great degree. The expe-riences gained from this have led me to the conclusion that a residence-basedfellowship program, like the one organized at Büchsenhausen, represents a relevant and effective institutional framework for the critical practice

Andrei Siclodi12Private Investigations

claims is only productive when it activates art’s ability to exercise an effec-tive critique of existing conditions. Art’s versatility ensures in the end thatit can adjust to new circumstances, so that the critical process can take placeanew even when signs have changed.

The second position that views art as a specific form of knowledge pro-duction—for which I entertain a certain sympathy—often mistakes “trans -ference of knowledge” for “knowledge production.” Whereas “knowledgeproduction” suggests the creation of a unique knowledge that does not existoutside art because it would not be possible for it to exist there, “transfer-ence of knowledge” signifies a communicative knowledge exchange betweenthe art context and other areas of society. This knowledge transfer is bilat-eral, but with completely different intentions on each side.The transferenceof knowledge from art above all takes a form that represents the workmethod and lifestyle of the artist in a broadly naïve, Romantic way as onethat assists creativity and innovation; it therefore views and implements artas a model for a completely flexible labor market. This conception of theartist has in fact been instrumentalized in order to justify the progressivesocial destabilization of more and more areas of life. In contrast, the trans-ference of knowledge into art appears almost harmless because it most of-ten takes the form of aesthetic actions of a symbolic character, whose effectscan be observed outside the art world only in very few instances. A practicethat originated in the nineties, for example, continues to be in favor in re-gional art scenes: “publicizing” information and situations from non–artworld fields in order to raise consciousness in the public about negative de-velopments or conditions in society. This practice greatly overestimates itsown influence because it largely ignores the fact that its “readership” is pri-marily made up of its own core art audience, and it therefore cannot expectto reach the mainstream. The potential “criticality” inscribed in these artpractices can only be viewed as a self-referential artistic design principleused to create products that will sooner or later be commodified within theart market.

New perspectives are therefore necessary for understanding what a criticalartistic knowledge production could be and how it may function. One viablealternative is to do away with tired concepts like “research” and “science” andto look around for other options that can describe, in the most non-hegemonicway possible, the critical artistic practices that are actually in use. In the

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way is at the same time also inherently an act of subjectivization. This iswhat makes this kind of knowledge fundamentally different from academicknowledge, which can easily be instrumentalized by others for ideological oreconomic purposes because of its normative and standardized quality.

**

This book is not primarily intended as a formulation of a theory in opposi-tion to the hegemonic idea of “artistic research.” Instead, the practitioners—who because of their respective practices are hastily shelved as “artisticresearchers”—are given the opportunity to speak up for themselves. An in-tegral commonality among the artists and cultural producers presented here,however, is that their investigative practices are able to resist this catego-rization. These are artistic practices that attempt to infiltrate hegemonicdiscourses of knowledge that are currently emerging in the art context itself,while simultaneously proposing individual paths for acquiring and process-ing knowledge.

All the contributions to this book, with one exception,3 are published herefor the first time and were commissioned for this purpose. They have allbeen produced within the last five years—during or after exhibitions andevents that took place at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. The authors wereinvited to propose or design texts and images about their artistic practices.The result is a visual reader with eight separate formats, each an attemptto reflect the artist’s individual practice and thinking through content andlayout.

What if we consider art and journalism not as two clearly distinct areas, butrather as a shared, multilayered activity? In his examination of the rela-tions between these two fields, which in different yet, to a certain extent, sim-ilar manners deal with processing and publicizing information, AlfredoCramerotti embarks on a journey through the interactions between the rep-resentation and production of reality. Journalism and art are here viewedas two sides of the same coin—a coin that seems to be spinning faster andfaster, so that it is no longer possible to tell heads from tails.

Questioning dominant regimes of perception and mindsets about realityin general forms a consistent thread running through the contributions found in this book. Alison Gerber’s Artists’ Work Classification, for instance,

Andrei Siclodi14Private Investigations

described here, because it provides a sufficiently neutral environment andguarantees autonomy for the practices within that space.1 One essential difference between a residence-based fellowship program and other art in-stitutions (gallery, museum, academy, Kunsthalle) is that a residency notonly unites production and representation under one roof, it also melds thesetogether institutionally. This contextual coextensivity is indigenous to a residency. This means that the processes of investigation, production, andreflection themselves become the subject of questions about representation,causing the art and art-related production (theory) to experience, and con-dition, other forms of representation than in the canonical White Cube. Ad-ditionally, a residency offers, temporarily, time and means to artists andtheoreticians. This tends to result in preproduction investigation taking ona central, if not exclusive, position in the array of activities engaged in dur-ing the residency. If we take into account the diverse practices of acquiringand processing knowledge within this context, it becomes clear that inves-tigation constitutes a further field that exists in a coextensive relationshipto production and representation.The notion of temporariness, as it has beenformulated by Charles Esche, plays a crucial role in this context. Esche statesthat “Temporariness or provisionalism, by which I mean projects or pro-grams that are constantly up for negotiation and alteration at every possi-ble moment, can be, I believe, one trigger for a constructive remaking of art’srelation to the social and the emancipatory. . . .”2 “Temporariness or provi-sionalism” is inherent to any residency. As the parameter that determinesthe frame, it not only decisively influences the participants’ own strategies,it also enables institutional self-critique. The processes of artistic produc-tion and reflection that take place under these conditions, in turn, deter-mine the forms of representation the art and its discourse take, which in thiscase appear heterogeneous, fragmented, and transitory. For this reason, Ihave proposed discursive and performance formats to represent the artisticpractices in this kind of environment. These formats seem necessarily in-complete and transitory, since they themselves reflect only a snapshot of thecurrent state of affairs at the moment they were produced. This is also theirstrength, because through the openness necessitated by their process, theyappeal to a responsive audience that can potentially contribute to the processitself.This introduces the possibility of a displacement, in the sense of a com-ing together of positions from which participants and non-participants, thoseaffected and those addressed, each speak. The knowledge produced in this

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setting, about this generation’s personal connection to the government, inorder to induce a discussion about the progressive extension of individualis-tic ways of life.

The interest in micropolitics, which can often tell us more about the stateof society than an overarching narrative can, is also shared by Brigitta Kusterin her work about the relationship between South and North. Following thespoors of German colonialism in Africa, a historical chapter long overshad-owed by the legacy of National Socialism, she undertakes a journey througha specially assembled library of colonial knowledge, whose inventory notonly consists of European reports of colonial presence, but also includes sto-ries about this period transmitted orally in Africa. Upon closer observation,it becomes clear that the “imagined” (oral transmissions) and the “real”(archived testimonies) are not so different in their veracity—a finding thatsubstantially enhances the meaning of the fundamental question as to whata document is.The special achievement of Kuster’s investigations and meth-ods is that she constantly maintains an equal distance from all the testi-monies and discourses that come into play—even on the level of the smallestdetails in the production of her own video works.This is seldom achieved evenin scholarly fields.

Whereas ghosts for Kuster are testimonies to a past that we thought wehad overcome, Judith Fischer, though also interested in the process of haunt-ing and its sites, focuses more on how it forms images and on the possibili-ties for “capturing” these artistically. Through a practice of concretizingintermixture, she places her triad of image, text, and film on a level thattreats all media equally in the process of production. In the end, the hybriddiscourse over what an image is feeds on a plethora of theoretical and fictionalreciprocal overwritings and reformulations, materializations and disappear-ances, copies and corrosions; the knowledge gained is then stored itself innew images, texts, and films.

Scrutinizing the real is also central to Ralo Mayer’s conceptual practice.The artist uses the performativity of language as the basis for an artisticallysynthesizing process, which leads to literary narrative ends, preferably inthe form of science fiction. Chameleon-like, Mayer adopts the position of theghostwriter in order to construct literary “worlds” in which an abundance ofdisparate information, from all possible (mass) media sources, is brought to-gether in a new, meaningful arrangement. Social critique above all resultshere from the artist’s formulation of (science-)fictional alternatives to the

Andrei Siclodi16Private Investigations

takes the everyday reality of the artist as a point of departure, drawing upa systematic “universal handbook” of artistic labor. The importance of suchan endeavor is advocated because, among other things, the mostly immate-rial labor that the artists perform is generally not even perceived by society.As a result, old-fashioned, Romantic-modernist conceptions of artistic pro-duction continue to be reproduced. Although Gerber’s Artists’ Work Classi-fication resembles the results of a sociological investigation, it is anythingbut: in fact it is a subversive act undermining the reality of dominant dis-courses about the reality of art and its producers.

The reality of art is juxtaposed by Ana Hoffner with the reality of the var-ious forms of racism and discrimination that are generated and supportedby the national and global apparatuses of power in our day and age. Hoffner’slecture performances combine reenactments of historically relevant artisticworks—in this case, a lecture performance by Xavier Le Roy and a per-formance by Raa Todosjevic—with current discourses on artistic research,and with critiques of postcolonialism and racism.The result is an act of eman-cipatory subjectivization: a vigorous staging whose dramaturgy culminatesin the demonstration of established mechanisms for the violent exercise ofpower and for subjugation, thereby rephrasing the question “What is art?”as “What is life?”

“What is life?” is also a central question in Alexander Vaindorf’s work. Theartist discusses his practice in a conversation with the curator and criticNina Möntmann, using two projects as examples.These works are about thedifferent ways the individual is valued within society in various economicand social structures in relation to the European Union: on the one hand, inthe formerly exemplary welfare state of Sweden, and, on the other, on thelevel of the micropolitics that relegate migrant workers from outside the EU(in this case, from Ukraine) to a non-negotiable position at the bottom of theladder of law. For the second, Vaindorf is concerned with making these mi-cropolitics visible and comprehensible, which he does artistically by engag-ing in an expansive, semidocumentary “field research.” While Vaindorfrelates to his subjects from the position of the artist, he attempts, as far aspossible, to overcome this distinction. The other work deals with the role ofthe institutions of public education in forming the relationship between cit-izens and the state in Sweden. Using a classic conceptual artwork from Swe-den from the nineteen seventies, Will You Be Profitable, Little Friend?, byPeter Tillberg, Vaindorf asks teenage students in Stockholm, in a workshop

18Private Investigations

status quo. The textual work forms the basis for all of Ralo Mayer’s furtherartistic articulations—to a certain extent, it generates the script for the work.

Geoffrey Garrison’s practice deals directly with scripts, specifically thosefor films. His own film works, in turn, result from deconstructing and re-contextualizing existing movies whose plots strike his interest for specificreasons that are initially subjective.These plots, as well as the way they wererealized in the original film, function as points of departure for Garrison’sscreenplays, in which biographical, political, and social aspects—actors, locations, etc.—are introduced from his investigations into the backgroundof the original films. The newly developed screenplays are finally realized in fragments, condensed to their essential elements as the artist sees them.

**

This book, to a certain extent, aims to open up a field of discussion aboutwhether or not art in the twenty-first century can be relevant for society out-side the art world, and if so, how and where. We are now only at the begin-ning of this endeavor, but the direction, in my opinion, is already set: it isclear that criticality, resistance to economic instrumentalization, and a pro-ductive maintenance of autonomy as well as versatility will play a crucialrole as parameters for artistic practices.Yet not only artists and cultural pro-ducers who act according to these criteria are needed; institutions that areas free as possible from national forces and neoliberal agendas are requiredas well in order to offer these productions an appropriate platform.Therefore,new concepts for institutions need to be devised and discussed.There is stillwork to be done.

1 I have argued this position in an earlier text. See Andrei Siclodi, “Private Investigations: The Way We Want Them,” in Vector, vol.3 (Iasi, 2006), pp. 62–71.

2 Charles Esche, “Temporariness, Possibility and Institutional Change,” in Simon Sheikh, ed., In the Place of the Public Sphere? Oe—Critical Readers in Visual Culture, no. 5 (Berlin, 2005), p. 122.

3 The texts by and about Alison Gerber originally appeared in the Artists’ Work Classifi - cation (The CF Pod Press, 2007).

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Alfredo Cramerotti

I would like to invite the reader totake a brief journey into the world ofinformation processes such as news-making, investigative journalism,and reporting, and, in addition, intothe world of art practices dealingwith these. What I am interested indisclosing (a little) is the complex re-lationship between the informationproduced and distributed by journal-ism and the information generatedby art.

My idea is that the notion of truthhas undergone a shift in the last

Alfredo Cramerotti

decades: once clearly a domain of thejournalistic method (what happenedin the world, why it happened, andwhat the foreseeable consequenceswere), it is increasingly becoming apreoccupation for artistic activity(why things are presented in certainways,whom they benefit, and in whatconditions).

An emergent way of researching, pro-ducing, and distributing informationabout people, “histories,” and situa-tions today no longer passes through

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the work of the artist (as it has beenconceived so far). Since the age of Enlightenment, when addressing thepublic interest was of primary con-cern for the bourgeoisie, the profes-sion of the journalist has become anobject of negotiation. It is now a con-stant process of conciliation betweenthe sources of information, the em-ployer’s interests, the power exertedover the subject of the reporting andover the audience, and the expecta-tions of the very public it serves.Thisnegotiation between multiple termsis the reason why journalism is todayconducted in the pressroom, and notin the field. As something (we are told)is happening somewhere, we get in-stant access to broadcast footage inreal time, mediated by experts thatcomment on the live feed of the im-ages and by digital editors that mix,overlap, crop, and insert graphicsand running text. What we get in omniscience we lose in context andsense. We no longer know in whichsituation something takes place,since the context is very much con-structed, mediated, and delivered tothe viewer for consumption. Morenews any time, more journalism uni-versally coded, more events thanksto the multiplication of newsworthi-ness.We have reached the point thatwe need to have “meta-media,” theexplanatory industry. We considereverything as either reliable or ma-nipulated and rely for judgment onmedia watchers and critics, commen-tary programs, articles on the inter-pretation of other articles, and so on.

In this context, to explain means alsoto influence.

Questioning and Delivering

Aesthetic journalism works on theborders of reality and fiction, usingdocumentary techniques and jour-nalistic methods but self-reflexivelyexamining its own means; ultimately,it is not about delivering informationbut about questioning it. What I con-sider worth examining is a culturalpractice that meshes the criteria ofjournalism and art, questioning andpossibly reversing the tradition ofboth fields: an activity—produced either by artists or journalists—thatqueries the realm of fiction as thesite of imagination and that of jour-nalism as a site for reality. We startto get closer to the core of reality it-self when we make our reality not agiven, irreversible fact but a possi-bility among many others.

From its origins, journalism hasconstantly struggled between its“mission” and its power position. Art,on the other hand, is no less impli-cated in a dualism: artists are keento appeal to a particular audience(the art audience of the globalized cir-cuits as described earlier), pursuingat the same time something beyondthe artistic field, as if “more real thanreality.” Often non-fiction work byartists is uncritically taken for reli-able information, as a valid counter-account to media journalism. How-ever, since an act of interpretation isnever neutral, art and journalism

22Private Investigations

broadcast or media journalism; still,it reaches a (specialized) worldwideaudience: the public of the “global-ized” circuits of art exhibitions, bien-nials, film festivals, and so forth.However small this public may be interms of time (the last few decadesfrom the nineteen-sixties onwards)and space (146 biennials worldwideto date, for instance), this receptionand redistribution of “knowledge”has affected, and still affects, ouridea of the way we know things aboutthe world and about ourselves. This“interaction” between art and jour-nalism is something more than atrend, and it is different from sociallyresponsible art. It has developed tothe point of forming a new mode ofjournalism, an “aesthetic journalism,”varying in intensity according to the degree of journalistic method ap-plied by the artist. Aesthetic jour-nalism is that mode of investigationon social, political, geographical, eco-nomic, or cultural issues carried outthrough the circuits of art. It is nowa phenomenon that lends itself to anexamination of the information pro-duced and the approach adopted.

Reality and Fiction

Just for a moment, imagine journal-ism and art as a multilayered singleactivity rather than as clear-cut sep-arated fields. Journalism provides aview on things, art a view on the view(feeding back on the first). Even ifone is a coded system that speaks forthe truth (or so it claims), and the

other a set of activities that ques-tions itself and its means at everystep (or so it claims), in the end bothare methods of representation andmediation for the human condition.Humans act and think (and repre-sent what they think) in a perpetualballooning between reality and fic-tion. When a journalist undertakesan investigation about this or thathistory, problem, or situation, s/he se-lects a number of images and wordsout of a continuum of life. In this case,there is a subtraction from a hugeand complex number of relations andprocesses (what we call reality). If anartist makes an artwork on the samesubject (a film or an installation, forinstance), s/he creates a narrativewhere there was none or a differentone. In this case, there is an additionto reality. The flux between addingand subtracting creates the environ-ment in which we live. In terms ofrepresentation, there is very littlechange if a story is “factual” or “fic-tional”—an account and a depictionis produced. What changes dramati-cally, however, is how this story istold and distributed, and the conse-quences that will affect our behavior.

The profession of journalism impliesalmost an ethical stance: to serve thehighest number of people possibleand to be a witness of history, not itsmaker. In this process, the journalistmay or may not pronounce her or hisbiased view and fallibility in the pursuit of truth. This has conse-quences on the public actions, unlike

25 Alfredo Cramerotti

no less than the difference betweenthe coded journalistic representationand its artistic counterpart. This isthe value of journalism “being” aes-thetic, rather than journalism usingaesthetic means (which it does verywell and has always done). Since journalism adopts the knowledge-able mode (providing a representa-tion as a substitution for the accidentreported), it has become the modusoperandi for dealing with that whichcannot be experienced firsthand.Journalism is necessary for us tohelp deal with an increasingly com-plex civilization, separations of roles,and procedures in administration,science, culture, and technology.Thespecialized activity of the journalistmediates these fields to those whohave no direct experience of all themultifaceted aspects of society andits occurrences. Since the journalis-tic attitude is so successful in pro-posing the model as the event, it hasspread into many other areas outsidethe journalistic field, constructingthe boundaries of normalcy for bothrepresentation and reality. In thissense, the journalist is an artisan,someone who carefully designs in-formation (declaring, or not, its dis-tortion) in order to present an under- standable picture of the world “outthere.” My invitation to the reader toconsider art and journalism as twosides of a unique activity generatesthe main question: is it possible towork with aesthetics, allowing theviewer’s interpretation, and still beinformative, precise, and relevant?

If truth telling is shifting from thenews to art, how can we negotiatethe confinement of art within theboundaries of institutions, biennials,and a few public projects?

Art and Journalism

To summarize, it is a matter of diver-sifying what has now become uniform.We could envision an activity of pro-ducing and distributing informationin which fixed positions are under-mined: journalism approached as anart form, art considered as a journal-istic method. Below are a few aspectsof this interaction, either from thepoint of view of the audience or theproducer, less to provide directions to follow than to create a chance todiscuss them.

FormatsThe artist-as-journalist is able to

research possibilities in many fieldsand circumstances; resourcefulnessis one of the skills of art people. Thefirst thing that pops to mind is to in-vite artists to produce investigativeworks not exclusively for the artisticscene but for different communica-tion channels: television, the Internet,radio, and magazines. It would be cru-cial to initiate a relation with mediachannels (from local TV networks to national newspapers and radioprojects) and propose works realizedaccording to an aesthetic approach—not “about” art but through art—anduse these possibilities. Artists havebeen dealing with media channels,

24Private Investigations

find themselves on the same level re-garding the narratives they propose;this brings us back to my earlier in-vitation to imagine a notion of infor-mation which includes the artistictreatment of reality.

The problem occurs when an artistfeels obliged to strip down his inves-tigative work to bare facts. It is moreimportant, in my view, to vary one’svocabulary according to different con-texts than to continue to propose thedichotomy of facts/fiction. These areno longer two distinct ways of deal-ing with the world around us—oneobjective and the other fictionalized;they are rather types of a single ac-tivity of producing and distributinginformation.We could consider adopt-ing the label “media worker” not onlyfor journalists,TV, or Internet editorsbut also for artists, performers, mu-sicians, storytellers, and poets. Pro-ducers who include the use of imag-ination, open-ended meanings, andindividual interpretations of docu-ments could fruitfully expand thejournalistic (and artistic) attitudes.The hybridization of journalism withart adopts imagination, narrative,and abstraction to implement the re-search and delivery of information; itdoes not attempt to be objective at allcosts, nor discard creativity in favorof neutrality.

Audience and Public

I will admit that I am the first personto rarely take the extra mile; I am

often satisfied with an overview of aproblem, quite content to not join ina critical, specific analysis.This, prob-ably, is not enough. Should we—asaudience—not be called into ques-tion for accepting things “as theyare?” A public becomes an audiencewhen it takes the liberty to add some-thing to the narrative offered by thework of art, the documentary film, orthe journalistic reportage. As an au-dience member, I should be able toanalyze the relation between “whathappened” and its representation, beit a video projection in a gallery or anarticle in the morning paper. In thissense, seeing and frequenting “jour-nalistic art” is no more relevant thanwatching CNN; reading, making, orcritically engaging with art does nothappen without putting one’s agendaand interests at play.What I considerreal or as truth—as well as what Ithink is purely imagination and con-struction—is very much shaped bythe way that information relates tomy world. I would call “aesthetics”precisely that experience of relatinginformation, signs, and symbols tomy background and life.

There is an inevitable division be-tween the individual experience ofsomething and its representation,and we cannot escape this. Our per-sonal experiences cannot be true for someone else; its“knowledgeable”representation, on the other hand,goes beyond the individual experi-ence. This gap between the actual incident and its “model” is no more

27 Alfredo Cramerotti

opportunity that must be kept alivein artistic practice, eventually to ex-pand into traditional journalism andother media formats.

Alienation, Playfulness,Transparency

Unlike the work of the artist, who focuses on representation but is rel-atively free of the time-bound issue,the work of the journalist is one of estimation, an act of creation withone eye on the consumer and theother on the deadline. Journalismhas to allow a range of readings ofwhat it produces, and possibly refo-cus the constant shift of attentionand engage more “vertically.” A fewelements could be employed to keepat bay the pretension of neutralityand objectivity—in particular, alien-ation, playfulness, and transparency.

1. Alienation: Bertolt Brecht andHelene Weigel, for their theater inthe nineteen-twenties, wanted theaudience to assume an attitude ofcritical distance and aimed at dis-turbing their connection to the playand breaking with viewers’ expecta-tions. Such an approach, if applied to media production, does not com-pletely reveal the authors’ agendas(as everything is part of a staging act) but can displace expectations.Moments of alienation allow the sub-ject of the investigation to be framedat least in a different way than itspicturesque image.

2. Playfulness: To play with repre-sentation means, for instance, to in-

clude the production crew or themechanism of editing into the scene,that is, within the frame of the visi-ble, and to make it transparent.Thistechnique is well known in the worldof art; just think of the work of OmerFast: in his video works,he addressesthe viewer through a complex andmultilayered narrative, but makesthe untruthfulness of the mecha-nisms of narration the very point ofhis work. This approach, though, isnormally avoided in both “journalis-tic art,” which tends to overlook it,and media journalism, where crewand setups remain hidden.

3. Transparency: Current mediaprograms try to provide that feelingof “being in the place and moment,”which is supposed to help the appre-ciation of truth (i.e., the arrangementof the news studio as a pressroom).However, these strategies rarelymake the reasons clear why a team,or reporter, has chosen that locationand that subject, and not othersources and interview partners, andwhat the specific interests behindthose choices are. In short, it wouldbe useful to know the principles be-hind any investigation.

WithdrawalRepresentation activities like jour-

nalism and art are always devel opedand sustained within a pre - vailing cultural system. Thus, any claim of truthful perspective cannot exist; it can only be presented as such.The withdrawal concept is a measureto counter this claim based on two

26Private Investigations

one way or another, since the nine-teen-sixties “Warholian” times (artas media industry or vice versa).From Gerry Schum and his Televi-sion Gallery to Ian Breakwell usingtelevision and radio programs toreach a broader audience, up to thepresent with crossmedia ventureslike GNN (Guerrilla News Network).This latter case is a news channel on television and the web whose aim is to build programs about socio -political topics (the War on Terror,the environment, intelligence, and soforth) driven by a musical narrative.The idea behind it is that producerscan either snub the populist ap-proach to information, and give wayto manipulation of facts and repre-sentations, or embrace the very realmof advertising, music videos, and popformats in trying to build a mean-ingful commentary. The bottom linein all of this is that an artist whowants to effectively work with an audience, rather than for one, mightbe better off pursuing collaborationwith other platforms (so to speak),such as journalism, rather than ex-pecting this or that media opportu-nity. Bringing in expertise, time(something the media environmentcannot afford), and attention (an-other element lacking, because oftime pressure), demanding fundingand distribution structure in ex-change. It has been done in the pastand can be done now—even at thecost of subjugating to the rules of media production. It is neverthelessworth the attempt, since reciprocal

influences are not foreseeable andwill depend upon a significant re-ception by the audience.

TimeAs mentioned, television, radio,

and press production cannot affordto take a long-term view. Artists andart institutions, instead, can produceworks over a span of months ratherthan minutes and can adapt theiragenda (because they have time) topursue unpredictable leads. A longerand “vertical” investigation, also inhistorical terms—rather than a “hor-izontal” one from theme to theme—allows one to connect with manyother related issues and provides the chance to make more works, dis-tribute widely, and possibly generate economic returns from different com-missioners. This form of productionof information is an option for bothdocumenting and fabricating, sinceit depends not on the author or thesubject but on the receiver. If we, asthe public, accept the opportunity to “develop” this or that topic in timeas part of our own story, we activatea sort of witness process, and webecome audience(s). It is a matter of adding knowledge, linking whatwe already know with what we do not know, and putting the new in sequence with the other knowledge.Two aspects are equally importanthere: for the author, not to be forcedto adapt to the speed of the news industry; for the spectator, not to be required to accept (or refuse) theinformation on the spot. It is an

29 Alfredo Cramerotti

members of a given society (either interms of conformity or antagonism),now this is no longer the case. Today,cultural dynamics play an increas-ingly important role, and criteria for economic achievement and well-being are no longer sufficient for aproper comprehension of phenomenalike, to name one of the most cited issues, the so-called clash of civiliza-tions. It seems we have to rethink society from the bottom up, and re - address many of our referents in cultural, even aesthetic, terms. Notsurprisingly, multinationals and cor-porations put huge effort into rein-vesting their profits in cultural and artistic projects in order to create a“culture” that can travel beyond na-tional schemes and monetary value.Aesthetic practices first developed ajournalistic “trait” to expand art’sgrasp on life, since the tools at its dis-posal, like the search for the sublimein the traditional aesthetic approachof painting and sculpture, were nolonger relevant. The last few genera-tions of artists feel they cannot leaveresearch on, and commitment to, so-cial and political meaning outsidetheir practice.They therefore engagewith structures of production and distribution outside the specific con-straints of art.This trait could shapethe future view of the world, via a re-adaptation in artistic terms of jour-nalism and the news industry. Butrather than abandon the aestheticapproach in search of journalistic neu-trality, the real challenge is to “con - taminate” one with the other, making

it impossible to distinguish the twoapproaches, and thereby “alerting”the viewer about the mechanisms atplay in representation and reporting.

Only time can tell if this will be established as the essential featurefor our understanding of the world. Isee aesthetic journalism as an in-strument for rendering sharper andmore persistent our curiosity (essen-tial for approaching something we donot understand) and for making thecontours of reality more visible. Infact, to think about something in a “secure” way by means of structuredinformation (like professional jour-nalism) is to reduce the unknown tothe expected and, therefore, to takeaway the possibility of learning. Inorder to be able to learn something,we first have to unlearn what we takefor granted.

Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator,editor,and artist interested in the relationship be-tween reality and its representation.

Image courtesy of the author.

28Private Investigations

approaches: to show an image thatdoes not reveal its content but refersto something else outside the pic ture;and to not show an image at all.Withholding visual evidence, or in-formation in general, is seen as alack of professionalism in journalis-tic criteria; but what is lack in onefield can be wealth in another. It isvery important to open up the possi-bility of seeing something differentin what is told, not claiming to tell,“what it is all about,” but rather pro-posing a selection of reading possi-bilities. The 2003 video Schwarz auf Weiss (Black on White) by the art col-lective Klub Zwei (Simone Bader andJo Schmeiser), for instance, presentsa succession of images of the Shoahthat are withdrawn and substitutedby a text referring to those imagesand a voice-over. This kind of narra-tive removes the pictures that are be-ing spoken about, instigating in thespectator’s mind a reflection aboutwhat distinguishes an image as a his-torical document. Jalal Toufic is an-other interesting author regardingwithdrawal: in his book Forthcoming(Atelos, 2000), he cites (or perhaps in-vents) a photographer who was sentto Bosnia to document the destruc-tion of the war and returned “withthousands of largely blurred and haphazardly framed photographs of intact buildings with no shrapnel,with not even broken glass.” In see-ing those pictures, one could perceivethe war in Bosnia, precisely throughthe intactness of the streetscapes portrayed in the images.

Regardlessof thetruthfulnessofwhatis reported (omitting? forgetting? in-venting?) what counts is the activityof perennial reworking, researching,and reading of things by the audi-ence; it requires us to suspend ournotion of the “experienced” as some-thing fixed and immutable. With-drawal is treatment of the reality ina fictitious way, not fabricating ordocumenting, but rather reading thefacts as though they were an artwork.This goes hand-in-hand with both thedisappearance of art as a distinct (au-tonomous) and coded (with specificmedia and tools) practice, and withits contamination byother disciplineslike journalism or science. It chal- lenges our idea of representation asan artistic effort and of engagementas a political one.

Instruction and Intuition

Aesthetics is about what our sensesexperience; in this sense, it is impor-tant to query not the way art andjournalism supposedly transform theworld, but the way they can trans-form the meaning of the world. Artis-tic investigation becomes a tool toquestion both the selection of the material delivered to us and the spe-cific reasons for why these things are selected. Cultural production ingeneral, and art in particular, is in-creasingly at the forefront of how we un derstand the world we live in.If in the nineteen-fifties or sixties the economic mechanisms were themain referent for our experience as

Colophon

Private InvestigationsPaths of Critical Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art

Edited by Andrei Siclodi

Contributions by Alfredo Cramerotti, Judith Fischer, Geoffrey Garrison (with Laura Horelli),Alison Gerber, Ana Hoffner, Brigitta Kuster, Ralo Mayer, Andrei Siclodi, Alexander Vaindorf(with Nina Möntmann).

English translation and copy editing: Geoffrey Garrison

Photographs: unless otherwise stated, the contributors

Graphic Design: Penthouse Perfection, Vienna

Printing: agensketterl Druckerei GmbH, A-3001 Mauerbach

Print run: 750

The book is published in the series: BÜCHS‘N’BOOKS – Art and Knowledge Production in Context, Volume 3Edited by Andrei Siclodi c/o Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Weiherburggasse 13/12, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria Tel: +43 512 278627, Fax: +43 512 278627/11E-Mail: office@buchsenhausen.at, www.buchsenhausen.at

Copyright © 2011: Authors and photographers, Büchs‘n’Books, Künstlerhaus Büchsen-hausen/Tiroler Künstlerschaft

ISBN 978-3-9502583-1-8

Produced with the support of:

Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator, editor, and artist interested in therelationship between reality and its representation.

Judith Fischer is a writer, lecturer, and artist who works in the fields andcontext of literature, philosophy, (horror/haunted house) film, theory, andvisual art.

Geoffrey Garrison is interested in how fictions shape our understandingof the world. Based on a belief in the inadequacy of representation, hisworks focus on dead ends, erasures, free associations, and lacunae in fic-tional and historical narratives.

Alison Gerber is an artist interested in work and public life.

Ana Hoffner is a performance artist dealing with queer and migration/(post) colonial politics.

Brigitta Kuster is an artist, video/film maker, and author. Her work fo-cuses on topics such as migration, transnationality, (post) colonialism,and gendered differences.

Ralo Mayer is an artist whose performative investigations into post- Fordist science fiction, the history of space travel, and multidimensionalgeometries generally lead to translation monsters oscillating between installation, film, and text.

Andrei Siclodi is a curator,author,and cultural worker based in Innsbruck.He is founding director of the International Fellowship Program for Artand Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, and editor of the publicationseries Büchs‘n’Books – Art and Knowledge Production in Context.

Alexander Vaindorf is an artist born in the former USSR and based inStockholm.

For some time now, one aspect of contemporary art has been en vogue in theoretical discussions: art as a field of, and medium for, the production ofspecific knowledge. Especially in relation to the discipline that the academicestablishment calls “artistic research,” the persistent need for a stable basisfor artistic knowledge production has been continually emphasized—aboveall in academia; knowledge production in art, so the mantra goes, must gohand in hand with a socially critical (self-)reflexive approach toward art andits producers. In the globalized knowledge-based society of the twenty-firstcentury, we are told, art must position itself quickly in order to assert its ownsocial relevance and insure itself in the long run. With such arguments, theacademic standardization of artistic criticality is aided and “tenured” by national educational policy. Yet can this top-down criticality, standardizedthrough academic curricula, have any real impact outside a self-referentialframework? Despite all its good intentions, does this not rather serve to en-trench existing hegemonies and (distribution) economies of knowledge? Andwhat alternative strategies might be used to counter an increasingly domi-nant discourse on the theory and practice of “artistic research?”

This book is not primarily intended as a formulation of a theory in opposi-tion to the hegemonic idea of “artistic research.” Instead, the practitioners—who because of their respective practices are hastily shelved as “artisticresearchers”—are given the opportunity to speak up for themselves. An in-tegral commonality among the artists and cultural producers presented hereis that their investigatives practices are able to resist this categorization.These are private investigations, artistic practices that attempt to infiltratehegemonic discourses of knowledge that are currently emerging in the artcontext itself, while simultaneously proposing individual paths for acquiringand processing knowledge.

Private Investigations includes contributions by Alfredo Cramerotti, JudithFischer, Geoffrey Garrison, Alison Gerber, Ana Hoffner, Brigitta Kuster, RaloMayer, Andrei Siclodi, and Alexander Vaindorf.

ISBN 978-3-9502583-1-8