Mozart_Wolfgang Amadeus – what's next?

Rethinking Relevance in Art Education

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:17:04 +0000

This article addresses the advocacy for greater legislative support, funding and time allocations to be devoted to arts instruction and the development of arts practices in the arena of public education. Organizations like the National Art Education Association (NAEA) along with individual practitioners, researchers, and teachers of all walks have long been engaged in a struggle to make the argument that the arts are necessary for human development and innovation, not just nice to have around,¹ and not merely an unjustifiable and humanist pleasure that exists only for the sake of those who enjoy them.²

Signs of the Times
I advance the thesis that any advocacy for the arts in the wake of the Information Age must first argue for a paradigm that defines the arts in terms that connote meanings strikingly different than that of “a source of intrinsic satisfaction,” “a shaper of feeling,” or an object of great “aesthetic quality” for the betterment of our daily lives.³ A semiotic turn is required.
Semiotics is characterized as the “translation of content from one sign system into another” or from one system of networked meanings to another.⁴ Charles S. Peirce, the originator of the semiotic theory of signs, -described a sign as “something by knowing which we know something more”⁵. Umberto Eco (1976) writes that, “A sign is everything which can be taken as signi-ficantly substituting for something else”⁶. Pragmatically speaking, we reason “from sign to sign” in order to better understand a concept and surround it more fully.⁷ The umbrella of understandings produced by a sign -system constitutes a paradigm. A paradigm models a pattern of signs and meanings that is consistently self-similar. As long as a system of semiotic exemplars is -embraced as significantly informative, the resultant paradigm may continue to act as a watershed against competing systems of understanding.

Broadsides in the Contest for Semiotic Relevance
NAEA policy broadsides seek to increase public support for arts and art education policies.⁸ I was struck by the semiotics at work in the language and meaning of these broadsides, most of which are couched around the plea: “Where’s The Art? Yet if their intended audience operate under the umbrella of a paradigm that fails to recognize a deficit of art in their homes, social settings, and public school curricula, that audience will see no sense in making the study of the arts an equal priority to other academic subjects. A plea for more art would prove to be an ineffective advocacy gambit. Other NAEA policy broadsides feature the questions “Why Teach Art?” and “Why Study Art?” But these are also likely to be ineffective pleas if their intended audience assumes the answers to these questions consigns students to activities in which to creatively express themselves or learn the names and works of famous artists. In these pleas, the arts are cast simultaneously as an academic subject appropriate for the agenda of public education and also as an academic subject for which relevancy is held in question.
How have certain policies regarding the arts in education come into being and why do they persist? Connotation and collaterality is heavily at work in any semiotic system.⁹ Ferdinand de Saussure¹⁰ offers insight into the role of connotation and collaterality in semiotics by emphasizing the combinatory possibilities between the signs within a system of signs; Saussure describes these combinatory possibilities as syntagmatic relations. For instance, however one defines art will also dictate how one defines the concepts of artist, artwork, art history, art education, arts policy, and arts advocacy. The dynamics of these kinds of connotation and collaterality in semiotically derived understandings produces Buczynska-Garewicz’s “chain of interpretation”¹¹ and Eco’s “unlimited semiosis.”¹² This characterization coincides with Daniel McCool’s explication of the fluid parameters of public policy, explaining that “policy does not exist in discrete units; it is part of a complex system without clear demarcations”¹³.
But just as important to the premise of this article is Saussure’s explication of the oppositional properties in semiotically derived understandings. Saussure described the contrastive properties of sign systems as paradigmatic oppositions wherein “the choice of one term necessarily excludes the other”¹⁴. Art educator Harold Pearse has developed a framework for examining oppositional sign systems defining thought and action in the practice of art education.¹⁵ Pearse’s framework began as an interpolation of the work of Canadian curriculum theorist Ted Aoki¹⁶. Aoki originally sought to adapt Jürgen Habermas’s philosophical inquiry into the paradigms of human knowing¹⁷ in order to inform his own teaching and writing.
According to Pearse,¹⁸ there are at least three prevailing paradigms of thought and action in art education that oppose one another in shaping an understanding of what art is. An empirical-analytic paradigm defines art as a system of production, a cause and effect intervention into a stockpile of empirical and manipulable elements, a commodity-oriented process “that has as its basic intent a cognitive interest in the control of objects in the world”¹⁹. An interpretive-hermeneutic paradigm defines art as a system of communication, the expression of situated knowledge about a person’s relationship with his or her social world.²⁰ A critical-theoretic paradigm defines art as a system of reflection, a relativist and liberatory activity rendering invisible assumptions, -values, and norms newly visible “in order to transform” unjust social relations and empower marginalized individuals and communities within the practitioner’s social world.²¹ In each of these cases, arts practices signify ways of knowing within varying semiotic systems that coexist, but do so oppositionally. Of these three semiotic systems, it is the empirical-analytic paradigm that has dominated in defining art and collateral arts policies throughout the modern era.

Arts Paradigms in Modernity and Postmodernity
In the modern era, our perception of the arts remained anchored in an Age of Exploration ethos when Western art-making was “an instrument of knowledge but … also an instrument of [material] possession”²². The empirical-analytic mindset of the Exploration Age generated a -tenacious definition of art that conflated the sensuousness of raw material with industrialist and capitalist empire-building practices, turning works of art into commodities, collector’s items and symbols of status. The arts, defined as commodities and possessed as totem-like objects fetishizing empiricism and materiality, were commissioned or otherwise acquired at great cost to be displayed in special halls or in royal or papal courts, and collected in cabinets of curiosity with other natural objects. The commoditization of art objects -ultimately served to privilege guild-associated or academically-trained artisanship; the mastery of medium-specific skills and techniques in the production of such objects; the prominence of galleries, exhibition halls, museums and marketplaces to display the quality and/or rarity of either the materials or the exploits involved in crafting and/or appropriating such objects; and the designation of aesthetic beauty ascribed to those objects that most the effectively or completely depicted the -empirical world, served as evidence of scientifically scripted hierarchies, or had the apparent hallmarks of individual creative genius superseding the norm.
Policy rooted in such a definition yields a predi-lection for institutionalized cultural reservoirs preserving objects declared to be great works of art and the masterpieces of Western civilization, framed in con-tradistinction to display cases full of anthropologically authenticated artifacts. Critical theorist and social -philosopher Theodor W. Adorno²³ pointed out how the modernist commoditization of the art object as masterpiece and the artist as individual creative genius in -evidence, for instance, in events like the U.S. Kennedy Center Honors, perpetuates the zeitgeist of goodwill -toward the idea of art as cultural product. Along with this goodwill comes a false sense of security for the masses that arts products are being preserved and that society’s artistic coffers are full – both those arts promoted as being regarded with the highest esteem in Western culture, and those arts that are advertised as the culture’s most popular forms of entertainment.
Richard Kearney makes the pronouncement that -“modernity is where we grew up,” but “postmodernity is where we now live”²⁴. In the contest for semiotic re-levance between opposing definitions of art, Pearse went on to suggest a new system for conceptualizing the thought and action originated through arts practices by arguing that we are now in the midst of a postparadigmatic era, “one in a constant state of flux, a kind of perpetual pluralism”²⁵ of opposing paradigms. Steven Connor summarizes the thesis of Jean-François Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition²⁶ as follows: “The postmodern condition comes about with the collapse of or extreme skepticism toward … universalizing metanarratives. In place of a single narrative of the unfolding of an essential humanity, Lyotard proposes a multiplicity of different histories and local narratives that is incapable of being summarized or unified into one all-encompassing story.”²⁷Pearse describes our postmodern condition as a postparadigmatic paradigm where “earlier paradigms continue to exist as both historical artifacts and governing perspectives for some people”²⁸. Thus, we are said to be in an era when no one paradigm of thought and action is able to dominate, where oppositional paradigms have reached an equivalence that cause them to grate upon one another like great tectonic plates, wearing each other down into localized narratives and constantly rearranging fragments of meaning. If we accept the assumption of a semiotic system that both consumes prior signs and creates new signs in the process, it suggests that we are in the midst of a de/re/constructive paradigm. Such a paradigm would enable a particular redefinition of art most suitable for achieving an increase in current public support for arts and art education policies.
I argue that art-making may effectively be reinterpreted as a system of information, a social process interrogating “the relationship between ideas and art” so as to de-emphasize “the value traditionally accorded to the materiality of art objects” in favor of exploring the social “preconditions for how meaning emerges in art, seen as … [varying] semiotic system[s]”²⁹. What kinds of policies towards the arts ought we to pursue if we are in the midst of a postparadigmatic condition redefining the arts as a system producing the myriad meaning-making processes that inform the human condition?

Policy, Purpose, and Habits of Mind
Exploring policy is not fanciful; policy exploration is always a pragmatic exercise since policies are designed to ensure the good of the many. Such purposes are rooted in philosophies and worldviews. Lankford lists “five aims of philosophy of art education”³⁰ as follows: “to justify our reason for being” … such that our goals are so unimpeachable that “society will feel compelled to -support us with salaries, supplies, classrooms, and … mandate that all its children shall study under our -tutelage”³¹; “to clarify ideas” articulating our purposes, our assumptions, and biases so that our policies reflect our goals with as much internal consistency as possible; “to synthesize ideas” bringing contemporary art edu-cation into growing rapprochement and agreement “with other fields of inquiry and social forces”³²; “to -recommend … the shoulds and oughts of art education,” the policies that evolve from the empirical analysis -required to clarify our claims and ideas, and the spe-culation required to bring about new theoretical syntheses;³³ and finally “to raise questions” that enlarge our conception of what is possible in education, of what content should be taught, to whom it should be taught, and under what circumstances.³⁴Art educators must readdress the semiotics of art ideas and art-making actions along with the collateral meanings and oppositional language surrounding these ideas, practices and products before we can expect policies about the arts in education to change for the better. The principles of semiotics suggest that there are habits of mind, habitual interpretations as it were, or “collateral experience”³⁵, which limits the ability of policy-makers and legislators from defining or understanding the arts in any way other than they already see them. Saussure is helpful once again in his emphasis that “no meaning exists in a single item”³⁶ but that definitions and meanings are derived from how signs and events interact. Fomenting a semiotic sea change requires more than just the awareness that the study of language changes language or that the study of the language about a concept changes the reading of that concept. Art educator jan -jagodzinski has suggested a first step: “We should examine cultural practices as signifying systems, as practices of representation, not as the production of beautiful things evoking beautiful feelings. Art-texts produce meanings and positions from which those meanings are consumed…If we replace production for creation then we can begin to get at the social conditions; if we replace consumption for reception we can begin to politicize the act of seeing. The entire syllabus changes when we see art as a form of social practice.”³⁷This article aims to be just such an examination of the signifying systems that define art and collateral arts policies. But writing this article alone will have no effect on public policies; in order to change policies, -habits and actions must be transformed. The interaction of changes in signs and events, habits and actions will ultimately de/re/construct policy approaches as well.

The Semiotics of Policy Change
Ralph Smith described policy as an enterprise “always addressed to actions,”³⁸ staking effective policymaking to the philosophical groundwork of a pragmatist epistemology. In other words, policy-makers and legislators call it as they see it, designing policies that “determine, organize, regulate, or systematize activities in order to bring about that state of affairs which marks a policy’s purpose”³⁹. Thus, to change a policy presumes a need to initiate action that has new and necessary relevance. Logically, if policies require newfound relevance in order to be effectual, prior policies have likely become less than relevant; systems have reached a point where they need to be rebooted.
Hans Löfgren presents a “model of semiotic change” insistent “that the sign is always subject to change and that it must ultimately be defined in terms of semiotic boundaries”⁴⁰. Löfgren’s model is useful in that it is framed as a “discursive intervention,” constituting “a method that analyzes change within the sign rather than in terms of the sign”⁴¹. If we want to effect change in the public policies advocating the arts, policies that are –collateral to contiguous and yet oppositional paradigms defining art and arts practice, we must first explore the interaction between the paradigms themselves.

The Methodology is the Message
The arts practices in an empirical-analytic paradigm stem from habits producing beautiful forms and techniques to evoke the beautiful as determined by those who assume the power to be the arbiters of good taste.⁴² The arts practices in an interpretive-hermeneutic paradigm stem from habits closely describing “the ways in which we immediately experience an intimacy with the living world, attending to its myriad textures, sounds, flavors, and gestures”⁴³ through a selected symbolic medium. The arts practices in a critical-theoretic paradigm stem from habits challenging “the taken-for-granted theories and concepts that govern our disciplines and circumscribe our thinking” in order to reveal “the ongoing inequity and social injustice that shape our society”⁴⁴. In the effort to rethink art education, I would like to advance the argument that the arts practices in a postparadigmatic paradigm stem from habits organizing ideas like those aforementioned, which are both in flux and from a plurality of sources, into useful and -desirable information.
According to library and “information architect” Alex Wright, information is “the juxtaposition of data to create meaning”⁴⁵. In a postparadigmatic model, arts practices inform the human condition by constituting and reconstituting practice-based methodologies for juxtaposing sensory, phenomenal, and cultural data. This is data that has been deemed significant enough for preservation, further inquiry and wider proliferation. Moreover, a postparadigmatic model for redefining the arts and rethinking arts policies deemphasizes Saussurian paradigmatic oppositions in favor of Saussurian syntagmatic relations. A postparadigmatic paradigm provides safe harbor for other paradigms to persist since it is the juxtaposition of definitions and concepts across paradigms that becomes the necessary fodder for new art-making methodologies to be made. Juxtapositions of formal art elements syntagmatically across -paradigms to blend with either phenomenological experience or critical theoretic intent generate reorganizations of human data in a postparadigmatic paradigm where the methodology itself becomes the message.⁴⁶

Organizing Information Through Arts Practices
In redefining the arts as a system producing meaning-making processes that inform the human condition, we must consider the data. Alex Wright defines information as much more than the mere cognition of data.⁴⁷ Data itself is nothing more than relatable facts and elements collected for future reference and use. It is the organization of data that recasts it as information.
Moreover, it is the affect that may be generated by the organization of such data – that is, the ability of particular configurations of data to inform personal emotions and stimulate the formation of new public memories, discourse, and beliefs – which ultimately perpetuates both the significance and the longevity of that data.
The empirical-analytic, interpretive-hermeneutic, critical-theoretic, and postparadigmatic paradigms mentioned throughout this paper are each information systems. As Wright explains it, nature and natural behavior in humans and animals is rife with information systems, evidence of a widespread biological imperative to “preserve information beyond the life of the individual organism through social imitation, and by encoding memes onto their physical environments”⁴⁸. At the molecular level, DNA is no more than a genetic information system. At the behavioral level, the preservation of information held sacred, significant, or simply more salient than the steady drone of stimuli that would otherwise drive us to distraction leads us to a discussion of the creative acts that serve to anchor our attentions.
The very same data, when organized in a different system, is capable of informing with entirely new meaning. Like the letter C, which makes completely different sense depending on the alphabetical writing system it is inserted in, or on whether it represents a musical note, an algebraic expression, or a position on a chessboard, it is in the myriad juxtapositionings of data within systems that we create the meanings we read and respond to. Arts practices are a human behavior that organizes information through very distinct medium-specific, -experientially representative, and/or theory-laden methodologies. For example, Edvard Munch organized information about human suffering in paint on a canvas differently than Käthe Kollwitz organized such information in her prints and public sculptures, and differently again than Alvin Ailey organized such information through his dance choreography.
Systems of information usually coexist in the form of networks and hierarchies, for example in the way that “human memory can be explained as a system of nested hierarchies running atop a neural network”⁴⁹. Networked and hierarchical systems for ordering data are described as follows: “A hierarchy is a system of nested groups. For example, an organization chart is a kind of hierarchy, in which employees are grouped into departments, which are in turn grouped into higher-level organizational units, and so on. Other kinds of hierarchies include government bureaucracies, biological taxonomies, or a system of menus in a software application … A network, by contrast, emerges from the bottom up; individuals function as autonomous nodes, negotiating their own relationships, forging ties, coalescing into clusters. There is no ‘top’ in a network; each node is equal and self-directed. Democracy is a kind of network; so is a flock of birds, or the World Wide Web.”⁵⁰Just as a particular juxtapositioning organizes data into particular information, alter that juxtapositioning and you have altered the organizing narrative and the likely reading and response to that data. A hierarchical organization of data yields a specific reading, from a starting data set to concluding data set; a networked -organization of data clusters its data rhizomatically, yielding multiple impressions of meaning that alter -depending on the perspective.
Beyond the arts practices, some information is organized with such hierarchical precision and equative balance as to awe us with the order in the universe; no matter where you stand, without ambiguity, one locomotive engine pulls the rest of the cars one by one behind it. The progression of ideas in various branches of the sciences comes to mind. On the other hand, some information is organized to access a network of collateral traditions and connotations and to trigger a torrent of empathy for those who likewise suffer the follies of the human experience. For instance, Francisco de Goya’s depiction of a massacre of Spanish civilians by Napoleon’s troops in The Third of May 1808 networks historical data and imagined details painted with an assurance networking this masterpiece to the work of the Old Masters of 17th century Europe. The painting also networks recollections of centuries of paintings depicting the crucifixion of an innocent Christ to a particular split second in between the volleys of a firing squad. Depictions of common folk in the canon of Western art history are networked to viewer’s memories of family and friends in unjust situations. Whatever the intent of the organizing system, information is always organized for a recurring purpose: to be literally re-cognizable, so as to be easily recalled to memory and thus retain its significance.
This brings us around once again to the notion of the arts as an organizing system of the most human information of all – data impressed with social imperatives and emotional meaning. Information wrought from and melded into manufactured forms, cultural symbolism, and liberatory frameworks are richly complex hierarchies and networks of data. Oral, visual, written and performance arts practices depicting heroes and monsters, gods and earth mothers, migrations and holy men, elements and alchemies, the sciences and religions, injustices and fragile ecologies together constitute some of the most dynamic strategies at our disposal for the conservation and recycling of the data that most effectively informs human beings of who we are, where we come from, what our purpose is, and where we may be going.

The Arts in the Wake of the Information Age
In his article Art Education for New Times, Paul Duncum defines and describes the cultural ramifications of the Information Age.⁵¹ The Information Age was that period over the last quarter of the 20th century that saw the rapid globalization of information and communication technologies and the proliferation of the ability to digitize and manipulate information and its traffic. The cultural developments of these new times include: “the treatment of culture as an ordinary, material commodity; the proliferation of electronic visual images; and, the multifaceted construction of individual identity”⁵². The resultant social effects of this glut of data have been described as follows: “Human beings now produce more than [5,000,000,000,000 megabytes] worth of recorded information per year: documents, e-mail messages, television shows, radio broadcasts, Web pages, medical records, spreadsheets, presentations, books … That is 50,000 times the number of words stored in the Library of Congress, or more than the total number of words ever spoken by human beings. Seventy-five percent of that information is digital … As the proliferation of digital media accelerates, we are witnessing profound social, cultural, and political transformations whose long-term outcome we cannot begin to foresee.”⁵³Consequently, there has been a reorientation of traditional canons and worldviews within contemporary visual arts and art education disciplinary practices so as to now draw upon and consider the vast traffic of visuality, material culture tropes, and media messages that mark our era.⁵⁴ This paradigm shift, mining the potential of new juxtapositions, has also become the source of vigorous debate within the art education field in recent years over what is art content and what is non-art content.⁵⁵Harold Pearse cautioned that art educators “cannot operate the same way in a world revolutionized by -communication technology and depersonalized consumerism in which we are inundated by the products of the mass media that cause us to constantly question what is real … [and] what is original”⁵⁶. A significant number of art educators, well aware of the contem-porary shift to a postmodern and postparadigmatic -paradigm, have already embraced the opportunity to change the way we organize the data. It has not been a coincidence that the push for Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) has heightened during the global tilt from an Exploration and Industrial Age ethos into an Information Age ethos. This article however is not an -argument for VCAE, but rather for the semiotic reinterpretation of the definitions of art that the rise of VCAE has helped to reveal. Caught up in what designer Richard Saul Wurman calls a “tsunami of data”⁵⁷, where do art educators go from here?

Redefining Art as a System for Organizing Data That Reveals the Human Condition
“Genuine change – change without repetition – has to involve integration: the construction of the new upon the old even as the old is, in this process, reconstructed.”⁵⁸Pearse advises that every art educator in this postmodern era “needs to be versed in semiotics and methods for decoding sign systems”⁵⁹. The preceding quote from Löfgren is reflective of the inherent utility in drawing upon the syntagmatic constitution of a postparadigmatic paradigm in order to foment a semiotic sea change facilitating the public’s understanding of the arts as a system for organizing data that compellingly tells the human condition. Keeping in mind that the most enduring information is information that deeply impresses both our cognitive and affective awareness, I propose policies that promote the arts as a means to better inform ourselves about the things that matter the most to us as local and international communities. The arts enhance human information, recalling and -refining the cargoes of meaning our collected data -carries in tow. Based upon a postparadigmatic recon-ception of the arts, this is information that may be organized around canonized art objects and conventional art-making techniques, a plurality of cultural tropes, and/or iconoclastic themes of social critique in any combination and without partiality.
Arts-based methodologies for organizing human data effectively inform not because they are beautiful, but are beautiful because they carry a berth for our emotions and enthrall our attention, making them altogether effective at delivering their memetic cargo. The arts connect us bodily to ideas that make sense to us. Hence, I suspect that beauty, wherever it is attributed, lies in the re-cognition of the data that most directly informs and validates the story of one’s life. For example, the words of a printed obituary tell of a death, but Mozart’s final Requiem Mass validates and informs in ways that bind the facts surrounding a life that has passed with an unforgettably sublime expression of grief.
While revising an early draft of this article, I happened across the following diagram of a promising new method developed by Syracuse University researchers for delivering insulin to the body through oral dosages rather than through injections. Delivery is accomplished by binding insulin peptides to biomolecules of vitamin B₁₂, protecting the insulin as it passes through the walls of the gastrointestinal tract until it is able to reach the bloodstream.
This image⁶⁰ serves as an unexpected metaphor for the effective organization of data about the human -experience and the natural world when that data is bound to a methodology that makes art of life and carries that data safely through the boundaries of language, through cultural divides and the passing years. By attaching some elemental form or cultural trope or just idea (the insulin peptide) to an idiosyncratic new methodology for making art (the protective B₁₂ biomo-lecule), the commonplace is made significant and its ability to inform is made more complex, durable, and ultimately more transportable as meaning throughout the corpus of human social interaction.
Methodology is defined “as the entire research process from problem identification to data analysis”⁶¹. Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund have defined arts-based research in education as the “arts for scholarship’s sake”⁶². In my own pedagogical practice I have watched a sixth grader sifting through commonplace materials such – wood scraps and bolts – as part of her methodology for crafting the facsimile of a life-sized little girl. I have supported a fourth grader as he duplicated and reflected on the significance of a commonplace cultural artifact – a U. S. passport – as part of his methodology for representing personal freedom, social mobility, and family identity. And I have witnessed a third grader reinterpreting a commonplace critique – the injustice of bullying – in an iteration of a political cartoon, part of his methodology offering subtext to a rendered standoff between forest animals and an army of bulldozers. In each of these instances of young students extending their scholarship in the art studio, the methodology became the message.

Suggested Policies Advocating a New Relevance for Arts Education
Once the arts are thus redefined, policies reconceptualizing the relevance of the arts begin to reveal themselves. I propose that the targeted audience should first be fellow arts practitioners and arts educators before focusing on the public at large. Löfgren suggests a compelling reason for this strategy: “Social change … always has consequences for the relation of individual and societal. Change liberates the individual from embedding, or recontainment, in the societal. This makes social change dependent on an individual process that has two phases: the articulation of newly liberated individuality and its reinstitutionalization into society.”⁶³Connecting Löfgren’s suggestion to Lankford’s “five aims of philosophy of art education,”⁶⁴ I believe arts practitioners and arts educators have the unique opportunity in this day and age to show what an informing arts practice allows us to accomplish. Our newly liberated individuality as arts practitioners and educators will consequently yield new arts education policies that reconceptualize the justification of “our reason for being,” clarify and synthesize ideas, “recommend … the shoulds and oughts of art education,” and “raise questions” that enlarge our conception of what is possible in education. Rather than advocacy broadsides asking questions no one outside our field is seeking to answer, I suggest that we make some bold claims and provide the information that warrants those claims. I am proposing several suggestions to start.

The Arts are a Renewable Resource. Refresh Yourself!
Tell the story of Julia Marshall’s postparadigmatic definition of art as conceptual collage⁶⁵, the artist as bri-coleur creating ideas from diverse and seemingly incompatible arrays of available things, and the arts practices as “strategies of juxtaposition, decontextualization, and blending”⁶⁶. In a postparadigmatic paradigm, arts policy should focus less on the idea of the arts as precious objects, events, and legacies to be preserved intact, and more on the idea of the arts as a generator of new innovation, refreshing old data in array of cross-disciplinary contexts.

The Arts Work To Save Lives and Ecologies.
Tell the story of Potters for Peace, an organization of -ceramic artists developing innovative and aesthetically designed water-filtering ceramic technology in juxtaposition with public health and social justice concerns in order to confront the number one killer of children worldwide, unsanitary drinking water⁶⁷. In a postparadigmatic paradigm, arts advocacy should focus less on the idea of the arts as historical artifact, and give equal light to the arts as a source generating contemporary -solutions for age-old problems.

The Arts Work To Keep Technology Interfaces Human.
Tell the work of art educators Stephen Carpenter and Pamela Taylor and their juxtaposition of autobiographical and education theory data in the creation of computer hypertext utilizing text, images, and video in response to Jasper Johns’s 1983 painting Racing Thoughts. In a postparadigmatic paradigm, arts practice in art -education develops methodologies for coming to terms with living in “a technomediated culture that has changed forever the way we see” and a means to generate new methods for “informing and being informed by” works of art “in a way that reflects the technome-diated culture in which we live”⁶⁸.

The Arts Organize New Information About All We Continue To Hold Dear.
Tell the story I have outlined in this article. In a postparadigmatic paradigm, arts policy should advocate funding for arts initiatives that valorize informing arts practices as a present catalyst for social renewal and community enterprise, and not merely as a reservoir for perpetuating socio-cultural traditions.

In Conclusion
If we apply Löfgren’s insights to the quest for effective arts education policy, there will have to be a period where arts educators each live out and activate the change in their own arts practices and pedagogy as an individual “instantiation of semiotic change”⁶⁹ based on new language about the arts. We must accomplish this before we can reasonably expect “societal instantiation of semiotic change”⁷⁰ to fully manifest itself as new national purpose and public policy toward the arts. I have argued for the timeliness of a reconceived paradigm for understanding and advocating the relevancy of arts practices in the wake of the Information Age. This article rethinks the semiotics defining art in an era of shifting paradigms and the questioned relevance of the arts in education. My hope is that this policy exploration will serve to provide new language for arts and arts education practitioners first, and ultimately for those policy-makers we seek to influence.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: International Journal of Education & the Arts, 9 (Interlude 1), 2008, www.ijea.org/v9i1

1.) Elliot W. Eisner, The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven & London 2002.
2.) S. Fish, “Will the humanities save us?”, The New York Times [Opinion], http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us [1/8/2008]
3.) Harry S. Broudy, “Aesthetic education in a technological society: The other excuses of art”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 1 (1), 1966, pp. 13–23, here p. 21.
4.) Charles Suhor, “Towards a semiotics-based curriculum”, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 16, 1984, pp. 247–257, here p. 250.
5.) Charles Hardwick (Ed.), Semiotics and significs: The correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Bloomington 1977, p. 31.
6.) Umberto Eco, A theory of semiotics. Bloomington 1976, p. 7.
7.) Deborah L. Smith-Shank, “Semiotic pedagogy and art education”, Studies in Art Education, 36 (4), 1995, pp. 233–241, here p. 235.
8.) NAEA, 2008, National Art Education Association advocacy web site www.naea-reston.org/news_advocacy_15flyers.html [2/26/2008].
9.) Roland Barthes, Mythologies. St. Albans and London 1973; Steve Baker, “The hell of connotation”, Word and Image, 1 (2), 1985, pp. 164–175; Terry Eagleton, Literary theory: An introduction. London 1983.
10.) Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in general linguistics. London 1974.
11.) Hanna Buczynska-Garewicz, “The interpretant and a system of signs”, Ars Semeiotica, 4, 1981, pp. 187–200, here p. 188.
12.) Eco 1976, p. 68.
13.) Daniel McCool, “The theoretical foundation of policy studies”, in: Idem (Ed.), Public policy theories, models, and concepts: An anthology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1995, pp. 1–27, here p. 4.
14.) David Silverman, A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about qualitative research. London 2007, p. 71.
15.) Harold Pearse, “Brother, can you spare a paradigm? The theory beneath the practice”, Studies in Art Education, 24 (3), 1983, pp. 158–163; Harold Pearse, “Beyond paradigms: Art education theory and practice in a postparadigmatic world”, Studies in Art Education, 33 (4), 1992, pp. 244–252.
16.) Ted Aoki, “Toward curriculum inquiry in a new key”, in: James Victoria, Elizabeth Sacca (Eds.), Presentations on art education research: Phenomenological description, Potential for research in art education, 2, Montreal 1978, pp. 47–69.
17.) Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and human interests. Boston 1971.
18.) Pearse 1983, op. cit.
19.) Op. cit., p. 159.
20.) Op. cit., p. 160.
21.) Op. cit., p. 161.
22.) Claude Lévi-Strauss quoted in John Berger, Ways of seeing. London 1972, p. 86.
23.) Theodor W. Adorno The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. London 1991.
24.) Richard Kearney, The wake of imagination: Toward a postmodern culture. Minneapolis 1988, p. 18.
25.) Pearse 1992, p. 250.
26.) Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis 1984.
27.) Steven Connor, “Postmodernist culture: An introduction to theories of the Contemporary”, in: Michal Payne (Ed.), A dictionary of cultural and critical theory, Oxford 1996, pp. 428-432, here p. 431.
28.) Pearse 1992, p. 249.
29.) Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the information age: Technology and conceptual art”, LEONARDO, 35 (4), 2002, pp. 433–438, here p. 434.
30.) E. L. Lankford, “Philosophy of art education: Focusing our vision”, Studies in Art Education, 33 (4), 1992, pp. 195–200, here p. 197.
31.) Op. cit., p. 197.
32.) Op. cit., p. 198.
33.) Ibid.
34.) Op. cit., p. 199.
35.) Smith-Shank, 1995.
36.) Cited in Silverman 2007, p. 72.
37.) jan jagodzinski, “A para-critical/sitical/sightical reading of Ralph Smith’s Excellence in art education”, Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 11, 1991, pp. 119–159, here p. 149.
38.) Ralph Smith, “Justifying policy for aesthetic education”, Studies in Art Education, 20 (1), 1978, pp. 37–42, here p. 37.
39.) Smith 1978, p. 37, emphasis in original.
40.) Hans Löfgren, “Projecting a model of semiotic change”, boundary 2, 24 (2), 1997, pp. 245–268, here p. 256.
41.) Löfgren 1997, p. 246.
42.) jagodzinski 1991; Mary Ann Stankiewicz, Roots of art education practice. Massachusetts 2001.
43.) Mary Beth Cancienne, Celeste N. Snowber, “Writing rhythm: Movement as method”, Qualitative Inquiry, 9 (2), 2003, pp. 237–253, here p. 238.
44.) Gloria Ladson-Billings, “It’s your world, I’m just trying to explain it: Understanding our epistemological and methodological challenges”, Qualitative Inquiry, 9 (1), 2003, pp. 5–12, here p. 11.
45.) Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering information through the ages. Washington 2007, p. 10.
46.) Julia Marshall, “Visible thinking: Using contemporary art to teach conceptual skills”, Art Education, 61 (2), 2008, pp. 38–45.
47.) Wright 2007.
48.) Op. cit., p. 19.
49.) Op. cit., p. 7.
50.) Ibid.
51.) Paul Duncum, “Art education for new times”, Studies in Art Education, 38 (2), 1997, pp. 69–79.
52.) Op. cit., p. 69.
53.) Wright 2007, p. 6.
54.) James Elkins, Visual studies: A skeptical introduction. New York 2003; Gustavo E. Fischman, “Reflections about images, visual culture and educational Research”, Educational Researcher, 30 (8), 2001, pp. 28–33; Hal Foster, Vision and visuality. Seattle 1988; Kerry Freedman, “Social perspectives on art education in the U.S.: Teaching visual culture in a democracy”, Studies in Art Education, 41 (4), 2003, pp. 314–329; Nicholas Mirzoeff (Ed.), The visual culture reader. (2nd ed.) New York and London 2002; McLuhan, Understanding media: The extensions of man. Massachusetts 1964/1994.
55.) Paul Duncum, “Visual culture: Developments, definitions, and directions for art Education”, Studies in Art Education, 42 (2), 2001, pp. 101–112; Freedman 2000; Michelle Marder Kamhi, “Where’s the art in today’s art education?”, Arts Education Policy Review, 104 (4), 2003, pp. 9–12; Peter J. Smith, “Visual culture studies versus art education”, Arts Education Policy Review, 104 (4), 2003, pp. 3–8.
56.) Pearse 1992, p. 248.
57.) Cited by Wright 2007, p. 6.
58.) Löfgren 1997, p. 264.
59.) Pearse 1992, p. 250.
60.) Figure 1, as can be found on the blog via the QR code at the end of this text: Vitamin B12 as a Carrier for the Oral Delivery of Insulin. Amanda K. Petrus et al., “Vitamin B12 as a carrier for the oral delivery of insulin”, ChemMedChem, 2, 2007, pp. 1717–21.
61.) John W. Creswell, Research design: Qualitative & quantitative approaches. Thousand Oaks 1994, p. xvii.
62.) Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Richard Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. New York 2008, p. 1.
63.) Löfgren 1997, p. 263.
64.) Lankford 1992.
65.) Marshall 2008.
66.) Marshall 2008, p. 40.
67.) A recent story about Potters for Peace may be found at www.thebatt.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=1ff695c9-b065-42e2-81d2-22e0522787a4
68.) B. Stephen Carpenter, Pamela G. Taylor, “Racing thoughts: Altering our ways of knowing and being in art through computer hypertext”, Studies in Art Education, 45 (1), 2003, pp. 40–55, here p. 48.
69.) Löfgren, 1997, p. 260.
70.) Ibid.

Selber / Können?

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:17:04 +0000

Vorrede
In seinen fragmentarischen Überlegungen zu Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart betont der Soziologe und Philosoph Norbert Elias, u. a. im erklärten Widerspruch zu Mozartbiograf Wolfgang Hildesheimer, dass die musikalische Erziehung Mozarts u. a. durch seinen Vater Leopold einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf dessen künstlerische Laufbahn hatte. Norbert Elias schreibt: „Mozart erhielt durch seinen Vater eine sehr gründliche traditionelle Schulung“¹. Zu diesem schulmäßigen Kanon „erwarb er sich auf seinen Reisen ein sehr viel breiteres Wissen über das Musikleben seiner Zeit“². Und diese Erziehung hat Folgen: „Aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach beförderte die Vielfalt der musikalischen Erfahrungen, denen er auf seinen Reisen ausgesetzt war, seine Neigung zu experimentieren und nach neuen Synthesen verschiedener Stile und Schulen seiner Zeit zu suchen“³.
Letztlich, und dieses ist für meine folgende Überlegungen entscheidend, bedeutet Elias’ Beharren auf der Relevanz der musikalischen Erziehung, dass die Künste (bis zu einem gewissen Grade) erlernbar sind. Die Vorstellung des außerhalb des „normalen Lebens“ stehenden Genies wird damit ad acta gelegt. Elias stellt also fest, dass man sich klarmachen müsse, „dass die Entwicklung des Künstlers die Entwicklung des Menschen ist. Musikspezialisten mögen viel von Musik und wenig von Menschen verstehen und so eine autonome Künstlerpuppe konstruieren, ein sich immanent entwickelndes „Genie“. Aber dadurch leistet man nur einem falschen Verständnis der Musik selbst Vorschub“⁴.
Diese Verortung des Künstlers in die Sphäre des fast schon Alltäglichen bereitet eine Idee vom Künstlersein vor, die die artistische Tätigkeit als eine sieht, die, frei nach Joseph Beuys, „Jedem“ möglich sei und nicht mehr an extraordinär handwerklich Begabte gebunden ist.

Die Lehre
Im Rahmen von sogenannter „partizipativer Kunst“ stellt sich die Frage nach den Voraussetzungen, die der an der Kunst Teilnehmende mitzubringen habe, besonders dringend. Und diese Dringlichkeit findet sich bereits seit dem Barock, schon damals nämlich gab es partizipative künstlerische Artefakte. Diese z. B. in Form von gleichsam poetischen Maschinen, die sich ungefähr so beschreiben lassen: Auf drei übereinanderliegenden unterschiedlich großen, drehbaren Scheiben stehen unterschiedliche Worte für Subjekt, Verb und Objekt geschrieben. Durch das Drehen der Scheiben entstehen dann unterschiedliche Konstellationen dieser Worte, die sich zu grammatisch richtigen, mehr oder weniger sinnvollen Sätzen und Gedichten zusammensetzen lassen. Das Drehen der Scheiben ist allen möglich, so dass die Herstellung des Gedichtes ein offener Prozess ist, an dem Viele teilhaben können. Diese Gedicht-Maschinen⁵ führen das Schreiben von Poesie also als eine Produktion vor, die kaum an Voraussetzungen geknüpft ist.
Der barocke Dichter Georg Philipp Harsdörfer schreibt dann auch über Dichtung, dass jedes „Hirn … ein Reimgedicht zusammenzubringen sollte lernen können“⁶. Dieses „Lernen“ kann etwa mit dem „poetischen Trichter“ erfolgen, den Harsdörfer 1648–1653 schrieb, einem schulischen Handbuch, das z. B. grammatische Regeln ebenso erläuterte wie Versmaße und verschiedene Redewendungen dem zukünftigen Dichter vorstellt. „Eintrichtern“ hat hier noch keine negative, weil autoritäre Konnotation, sondern quasi eine basisdemokratische, denn genau dieses „Eintrichtern“ ermöglicht eine ästhetische Arbeit, die nicht nur ausgewählten Spezialisten vorbehalten ist.
Die Vorstellung, dass Kunst lehrbar sei, tritt nicht zufällig im (deutschen) Barock auf den ästhetischen Masterplan⁷. Bekanntlich entwickelt sich erst in dieser Zeit so etwas wie eine einheitliche deutsche Grammatik. Deutsch wurde so langsam zur „gelehrten Sprache“, die sich zunehmend von der lateinischen emanzipierte. Mit dieser Konstituierung einer gleichsam regelgerechten Sprache einher ging die Konstituierung des Subjekt- und Autorenbegriffes⁸. Letzteren nämlich hat es im -Barock noch nicht gegeben, Kopie und Übersetzung gelten damals als ebenso wertvoll wie eine „originäre“ Schöpfung. Kurz und knapp formuliert: Eine Sprache, die gerade erst beginnt korrekt beherrschbar zu sein, lässt weder an kunstfertig-geniale Produktionen denken noch an das Vorhandensein (selbstherrlicher) Autoren.

Denken statt Können
Was folgt ist bekannt: Parallel zur Entwicklung des (bürgerlichen) Subjektbegriffes und seiner Orientierung an Kapitalismus kompatiblen Werten wie Leistung und Individualität entwickelt sich auch die Inthronisierung des künstlerischen Genies, das Werke schafft, die sich außerhalb des Kanons allgemeiner Kompetenzen verorten sollen und deren Herstellung angeblich nicht gelernt werden kann. Erst in der Moderne dann wird diese anmaßende Behauptung kritisch zurückgewiesen. Diese Zurückweisung beginnt in der Bildenden Kunst wohl in der Avantgarde-Bewegung Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, etwa in den bilderstürmerischen Aktionen des Dadaismus oder der Konzeption des legendären „Bauhauses“, die Kunst wieder als lehrbar bedenkt.
Kein Zufall ist es dann auch, dass die moderne Konkrete Poesie, die in vielerlei Hinsicht an den Dadaismus anschließt, sich wieder mit der Poetik des Barock beschäftigt, so hat Gerhard Rühm 1964 Gedichte der „Pegnitz Schäfer“, einer Gruppe, der u. a. Georg Philipp Harsdörfer und Siegmund von Birken angehörten, neu herausgegeben⁹. Und Karl Gerstner konzipierte in Tradition des „Poetischen Trichters“ sein Buch „Do it yourself Kunst – Brevier für jedermann“. In Kapiteln wie „Aus einem Wort einen Roman schreiben“, „Bild zum Bildmachen“ oder „Mit Bildern schreiben“ erklärt Karl Gerstner dort wie jedermann problemlos zum Künstler werden kann. In dem einleitenden Kapitel „Was ist Kunst“ stellt Gerstner dann auch klar: „seit Marcel Duchamp 1914 einen Flaschentrockner zum Kunstwerk deklariert hat, gibt es eine Version Kunst, die … nichts mehr mit Können zu tun hat“¹⁰. Diese Kunst habe deswegen nichts mehr mit Können zu tun, weil sie nicht mehr in erster Linie auf herzustellende Sinnlichkeiten beruht, Gerstner sagt es so: „Kunst ist nicht ein Ereignis, das auf der Retina stattfindet, sagt Marcel Duchamp, sondern im Gehirn dahinter. Das Entscheidende ist nicht das Handeln, sondern das Denken“¹¹.

Play it yourself
Ästhetische Fragen nach der Möglichkeit einer Kunst ohne Kunstfertigkeit waren auch typisch für viele Werke der 1990er Jahre. Besonders in der Kunst des Crossover zwischen High and Low, und dort insbesondere zwischen Kunst und Musik wird immer wieder die Relevanz von handwerklichem Können kritisch reflektiert. Eben dieser Problematik stellt sich damals z. B. der schottische Künstler Dave Allen in seiner Werkgruppe der „Song Paintings/Drawings“ seit 1996. Da steht etwa „For those about to rock“ auf einem der gezeichneten Blätter. Darunter dann ist die von dem Künstler gleichsam „heruntergerechnete“ Notation des gleichnamigen Songs der Heavy-Metall-Band AC/DC aus dem Jahre 1981 zu sehen. Auch simple Griffe hat Dave Allen auf „AC/DC – For those about to rock“¹², 1998, gezeichnet. Abschließend ist „G x 6 + A x 6 + Back to Chorus till end“ auf der Zeichnung zu lesen.
Diese Werkgruppe Allens behauptet also nicht nur, dass Kunst erlernbar sei, sie hinterfragt zudem trotzdem das hiermit implizierte pädagogische Moment. Schließlich ist dieses Moment hier auf ein Minimum -reduziert, indem die „Spielanleitung“ durch ihre grobe Vereinfachung auch dem „unmusikalischsten“ Menschen erlaubt, den vorgestellten Song kinderleicht spielend zu interpretieren. „Play it yourself“ heißt also hier das emanzipative, überaus antiautoritäre Motto.
Selbstverständlich steht solch’ Verneinung von künstlerisch ausgefeilter Könnerschaft auch in der Tradition der Punkmusik. Man denke nur an die 1977 in dem britischen Fanzine „Sideburns“ erschienene, inzwischen legendäre Zeichnung mit den Anleitungen für die drei Gitarrenakkord A, E, und G sowie mit der Aufforderung: „Now Form a band“, an die Allen auch formal mit der Gestaltung seiner „Song Paintings/Drawings“ anspielt, die Grenzen von High and Low souverän missachtend.
Doch die Wurzeln dieser Haltung liegen auch, wie bereits ansatzweise ausgeführt, in der Konzept und Fluxus Kunst der 1960er Jahre. So hat z. B. Robert Filliou mit seinem „Prinzip der Äquivalenz“ bereits 1968 erklärt, dass „GUT GEMACHT SCHLECHT GEMACHT NICHT GEMACHT“ gleichwertig seien¹³.

Aktivismus (aus)üben
Die Lebensumstände auf „unserem“ Globus haben sich im neuen Millennium drastisch verschlechtert: Schuld daran ist vor allem ein Kapitalismus, der jetzt neoliberal und globalisiert in Aktion tritt und dabei die Ausbeutung von Ressourcen und Arbeitskräften rasant „optimiert“. Diverse Finanzkrisen, soziale Unruhen weltweit, ein immer desaströser werdender Umgang mit der Umwelt und, damit zusammenhängend, eine konsequente Weigerung auf die Klimakatastrophe zu reagieren – die Lobbyarbeit der Global Player macht es möglich – sind einige der Folgen dieser katastrophalen Entwicklung. Kein Wunder also, dass Kunst, die im 21. Jahrhundert noch ernst genommen werden kann, eine politische ist. Ein Teil dieser Kunst ist der künstlerische Aktivismus. Prompt sind in den letzten Jahren mehrere Handbücher erschienen, die das Lernen auch dieser Kunst ermöglichen sollen: “Das Guerillakunst-Kit“, 2013, von Keri Smith, das von Florian Malzacher und dem „steirischen herbst“ herausgegebene „Truth is concrete – A handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics“, 2014, und „Beautiful Trouble – Handbuch für eine unwiderstehliche Revolution“, 2014, zusammengestellt von Andrew Boyd und Dave Oswald Mitchell. Gemeinsam ist diesen drei Büchern der Anspruch tatsächlich – im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes – gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit zu verändern. Wie die bisher von mir vorgestellte Kunst den Primat von „professionellen Künstlern“ im Betriebssystem Kunst nicht akzeptiert, so akzeptieren diese drei Handbücher nicht den Vorrang der „professionellen Politiker“ vor dem „normalen Bürger“. Und diese Handbücher leugnen den Unterschied von Kunst und Politik. Darum stellt z. B. „Beautiful Trouble“ diverse realpolitische Strategien anleitend vor, die ästhetischer Struktur sind. So zeichnen sich die sogenannten „Flashmobs“, also die scheinbar spontanen, aber meist via sozialer Netzwerke organisierten Menschenaufläufen an prekären öffentlichen Orten, durch ihren performativen Charakter aus, politische Graffiti haben ihre Wurzeln eben auch in revolutionären Wandgemälden und eine alternative Medienarbeit im TV, Radio und Internet ist in seinen Ursprüngen erstmals Anfang des letzten Jahrhunderts von Bertolt Brecht kritisch reflektiert und realisiert worden¹⁴. Das durch die Handbücher initiierte Üben und engagierte Ausüben solcher Strategien kommt sicher nicht in den Ruf genialer Natur zu sein, dafür löst es den von Marcel Duchamp ins Spiel gebrachte Widerspruch von Denken und Handeln auf – auch dieses macht ihre Qualität aus.

1.) Norbert Elias, Mozart. Frankfurt/M. 1991, S. 106f.
2.) Ebd., S. 107.
3.) Ebd., S. 108.
4.) Ebd., S. 159f.
5.) In Jonathan Swifts Buch „Gullivers Reisen“ (1726) findet sich übrigens im 5. Kapitel des 3. Teiles eine literarische Beschreibung einer solchen.
6.) Georg Philipp Harsdörfer, Der Poetische Trichter, Zuschrift an der Hochlöblichen Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft, Nürnberg 1647, ohne Paginierung, ed. Darmstadt 1969.
7.) Zwei weitere barocke Handbücher für das Lernen von poetischer Sprache: Justus Georg Schottel, Teutsche Vers- oder Reimkunst. Lüneburg 1656; Siegmund von Birken, Teutsche Rede-bind- und Dicht-Kunst. Nürnberg 1679.
8.) Siehe auch: Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matias Martinez, Simone Winker (Hg.), Texte zur Theorie der Autorenschaft. Stuttgart 2000.
9.) Gerhard Rühm (Hg.), Die Pegnitz Schäfer. Berlin 1964.
10.) Karl Gerstner, Do it yourself Kunst – Brevier für jedermann. Köln 1970, S. 11.
11.) Ebd.
12.) Abbildung auf whtsnxt.net via QR-Code.
13.) Siehe auch: Robert Filliou, Katalog Sprengel Museum Hannover. Hannover 1974, S. 59.
14.) Siehe auch: Bertolt Brecht, Radiotheorie, 1927–1932.

I think to make art is to make a break. And to make a cut. There’s a cut in the continuity of being, in the continuity of survival

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

CH/MH: Is there an artwork that had a lasting effect on you?
MD: The work of Samuel Beckett. I mean the importance it had for me and for the particular historic moment of the end of the twentieth century. I think he is the one who went the furthest in a certain way. There are various reasons for this, and I think one of them has to do with an enormous will to reduction. What Beckett did was to create an infinitely shrinkable world. There is never little enough. You can always take away more.
Take the “Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable”. In the beginning, there is some sort of plot. Some sort of characters. In the second novel you have Malone, who is dying alone in his room and who invents stories as he is waiting for death. The space has shrunk, there is no more travel. And then you have the third novel, where you don’t even have this. You don’t even have a space, you don’t even have a character, you just have a voice. A voice, which just rambles on and continues, and it doesn’t matter what it says in the end. It’s just a sheer thrust of perseverance, of persistence, which carries the whole thing. So just persist. You have to go on. And you know how this ends, it ends in the most beautiful way: “I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on“.
I think this is incredible literature, I don’t think literature has ever gone this far this radically. This is just so completely reduced. A bare minimum. And extremely powerful.

So what is art actually?
I think to make art is to make a break. And to make a cut. This would be the simplest way of answering your question.
But there are different ways of answering. One of them would go to Freud’s theory. I think what Freud conceives as drive, ‘der Trieb’, actually has to do with the transition between something natural and a creation of a separate space, and that everything he describes as the specificity of culture actually has to do with the structure of the drive. The drive is as if it were swording. Swording of a natural hang. It gets sworded towards a different sort of end.
I speak about a sort of natural need, but which in the process of its satisfaction actually gets sworded. It produces something else than merely the satisfaction of a natural need. If you look at the way Freud describes culture in the “Unbehagen in der Kultur“, he defines culture using a list.
And the first point would be the question of tools. We’re getting more and more tools in order to be the masters of nature, so that we can do all the magic things, we can look at far away distances through the telescope, we can see the invisibles in the microscope, we can talk through distance with the telephone, we can do absolutely magical things. And Freud uses the wonderful word, he says: “Der Mensch ist ein Prothesengott“. So he’s a god with prostheses. You just need some prostheses and you are god. So, you have these extensions of the body. And what actually the drive to master nature produces at the same time – something more than the simple mastering of nature – it produces prostheses, a sort of ‘in between space’, a space which elongates your body, prolongs your body into the world. The airy space between the inner and the outer is libidinally invested.

Do you have any idea of what good art is? Which art do you regard as good?
Well, this is not a subjective question. There is a strong tendency to bring art to the question of taste. And the question of taste is kind of dangerous because it always goes down to the question of narcissism. There is something profoundly narcissistic in the judgement of preference. ‘I prefer this, I drew connaissances, I prefer the late Beethoven quartets against symphonies.’ The difference which means difference as such and which means that you are distinguished and that you can distinguish yourself from the common lot of people by being the man of refined taste, to see all these differences that the others don’t see.
I have this conception of art, which is that art has to do with universality and infinity. It introduces something into the continuity of being, into the continuity of our survival. A break. Which is a universal break. A break to universality. It can speak universal. What is important in art is not a question whether it is an expression of a certain individual or whether it is an expression of a certain ethnic group or nation or of a certain age.
I think that the break is such that it turns the universal into particularities. But the problem is, how to do this within your subjective means, which are at your disposal, within the nation to which you belong, or language, or culture, within a particular type of civilisation, within this historic moment – which are all very finite things. How to produce universality and infinity out of this? And this I think is the moment of art. And this is not a production of spirit, this is a material production of the break. And I very much like this saying, which is on T-shirts like: “Art is a dirty business, but somebody has got to do it“. You have to get your hands dirty. This is a very material thing. You produce the idea with the material. With the material, with the matter, it has always been the sensual that one works with in art. And trying to immediately get to universality or the infinity of a beyond, an idea, the sublime or whatever – this is, I think, a big mistake. You cannot do this. You just have to produce it the hard way. But it depends on being able to produce a break.
And from there it has to be judged. I don’t think it can be judged from the question of taste, it’s not just a question of whether I like it or not. It has the power to produce universality. It creates a potential virtual audience, which goes far beyond this. And I think the awareness that is going beyond this, beyond my particular taste and reaction, is what makes good art.

Is art a benefit for society? Why does there have to be someone who does this dirty job?
Well, I think that in the question with which I started, the question of drawing a line, making a cut in the continuity of our animal or social being, of our finite being, that this is what defines humanity. I’m not saying that art is the only way to do this. I think thought is something which does this also, it breaks with the conditions of its own production. A sort of firm practitioner philosophy. I think philosophy similarly, but also very differently makes a perceptional break in the continuity of particular received ways of thinking.
We have one of the definitions of men, like homo sapiens as the thinking animal, but the trouble is that thought is very rare. It’s not that men think all the time, it happens very rarely. There are very few occasions when thought happens and when it does, it seriously changes the very parameters of the ways you conceive the world, yourself, whatever. There’s a handful of thinkers. This is a strange thing in the history of philosophy, there’s only a handful of thinkers with which we have to deal continually. But I don’t think – this is important – that thought is some sort of prerogative of philosophy, that philosophers are very special because they have this specialisation in thought. I don’t think that at all. I think thought can happen anywhere. In silence and …

Does it also happen in art?
Oh yes. It does most definitely. It has a different way and the question of art working with sensual, sensuous material means is very important, it’s a materialised thought. It’s the thought which works within the matter and shapes the matter. It is attached to matter. This is very important, the materiality of thought. And I think it does actually happen in a number of areas of human endeavour. And art is one of the most reflected.

Which are the others?
Do you know the work of Alain Badiou? He has made a list of four truth procedures, four areas where truth emerges.
These are: Science, completely constructed science like mathematics. It doesn’t refer to anything in the world. You just create your own entities, pure entities. Then: Poetry and art as such. Then politics. Politics not of opinions but politics of truth. I mean there’s an opposition. Democracy basically is a democracy of opinions. Anybody is free to hold any kind of opinion and then you count the votes. This is not a politics of truth. There is a sort of truth at stake in politics, which has to do with justice and equality and all kinds of things, but it has to do with an idea. And then there is the question of love, which is the emergence of a truth event somehow. A subjective truth event.
Badiou lists the four areas as the areas in which this break happens. And I don’t know if this list is the best or conclusive in some sense. Maybe this list is too neat in some way. I think things are messier in life. In many everyday situations, which actually suddenly end quite unexpectedly, people show an inventive creativity and do something very unexpected. And actually change the parameters of the situation and their own lives and the lives of others. I would leave this field open.

I just had this spontaneous thought if humour might be one of those areas, too?
Well, humour is one of the … Yes, you have an old suggestion which goes back to Aristotle, that man is a laughing animal. You have the various proposals of definitions of men, one is the thinking animal and one is the tool-making animal, which goes back to Benjamin Franklin. Marx takes this up that one defines man as a tool. And then you have Aristotle’s suggestion: Man is a laughing animal. So the only animal that can laugh – to laugh at what? To laugh, precisely, at being able to produce a certain break. The break in meaning. One way of describing this where I started – to make a break, to make a cut – is also to make a break in meaning in order to produce sense, if I may use this Deleuzian opposition between meaning and sense. And sense is the sort of unexpected thing which emerges. In order to produce this you have to cut down the usual expectation of meaning. The very horizon of meaning in which you move, in which you live your life. And this is the capacity of art.
Well, as far as humour is concerned, I would just point out that there’s a question of humour and there’s a question of ‘Witz’. Freud has written a book on ‘Witz’ and a different paper on humour and he says that those things are absolutely not to be confused. Additionally, there’s a question of comedy and there’s a question of irony. So we have four different things, which are not the same. We may laugh as a result, but there is laughter and laughter. Laughter itself does not have to be subversive. It can also be very conservative.

Who becomes an artist? What is it that makes people become artists?
I don’t think there’s a rule. There’s the capacity. The break making capacity. The way that we relate to ourselves is always conditioned by a break; This is a question of redoubling. Culture is a question of redoubling: it redoubles the normal life. It redoubles into something else.

But still there are some people who don’t become artists or intellectuals.
No no, of course. I think the capacity is there. But that is a capacity which defines humanity. And … how the hell do you become an artist? What particular things have to come together? I think what makes the greatness of art is precisely its singularity. Which means that if you could establish this rule, art would stop to be art.

But couldn’t it be that there is some reason why people start to make art? Robert Pfaller once suggested that artists might have some traumatic experience that they – all their lives – try to handle by making art.
Don’t we all have to handle some sort of traumatic experience? It’s very hard to say. I mean the question has been asked many times, so you have art schools which can precisely teach you everything except your sensuality.

Yeah, but art school starts at a moment where you already decided to go to art school. Who is likely to go to art school? So there are two aspects of this question. The one is: How do you become a good artist? The other question – which actually interests me – is: Why does someone want to become an artist? No matter if good or bad, if successful or not: what makes a person take up this way?
If you want to become an artist, what do you want to become? If I take some of the greatest musicians of all times, like Bach and Mozart or Haydn. You can see what? Who was Haydn? He was hired by the Esterhazy family as a craftsman. I mean, did he want to become an artist? I don’t think he ever thought of himself in that way actually. He was a paid craftsman. And if you look at Mozart, all the time he was trying to get hired by some court or something. If you look at Bach, who was employed by the church in Leipzig to produce a piece of music for mass every week.
It was not a question of genius or inspiration. You were hired. Because this was another craft and I don’t think anybody would look at themselves this way today. If you want to become an artist you don’t want to become a craftsman. You see yourself as a person with a special vocation, which goes beyond usual vocations.

Let’s stick to today’s understanding of art: Do you think artists are narcissistic?
The question of art and narcissism … I would say that on the one hand it’s profoundly narcissistic. It’s usually linked with a project of profound narcissism. But I don’t think that this is what makes art. As I said before: art is not expression. It’s not an expression of yourself. People may want to do it for that reason, to express themselves, but what makes the break and what makes the universal appeal, the claim of art, is not a question of whether they express themselves well or not. It’s just not the question by which art is ever judged. So on the one hand I’m sure that the motivation for doing this is in most cases narcissistic.

Did I understand you right when you said art is not an expression – could you say art is one of the ‘Prothesen’?
Yes. Oh yes.

I really like this picture.
The ‘Prothesengott’? Yes. But, well, Freud uses this in the context of technology and tool-making.

I have the feeling that it’s very good, maybe not only for tools.
Yes. It’s a good thing. It’s not just a question of tool. A tool is never a tool. It’s a libidinally invested extension of the body.

So you could also say art is a libidinal extension of yourself. Of the body.
Well, it has something to do with the libidinal extension. The way Freud introduces it, it has more to do with technology than with art. But I think it’s nevertheless a useful metaphor, also to think about art.

Could you also call it ‘object a’? Art as an extension towards ‘object a’?
Yes, of course. I didn’t want to use the heavily technical Lacanian language for this. I mean this could be described in another language, but what Lacan calls ‘objet a’ is precisely the transition object. The object of transition between the interior and exterior, neither falls into interior nor the external world out there; the objective world. I mean it’s neither subjective nor objective. In this sense it’s always in this zone of indeterminacy, in the zone, which is opened in between. And which is the zone of ‘Prothesen’ if you want, I mean the Prothesen always fill the zone: you put something between subjects and objects. You extend your body into the world, but the world extends into you.

Would you agree that artists and philosophers share similarities in the realities they live in?
Yes. I think there’s a lot of common ground. The tools with which they work are different, but I think they work on a common ground and that they can’t be clearly delineated. One way of differentiation – which I particularly dislike – is to say that artists have the passions and the feelings and they work with this and philosophers have the reason and understanding and they work with this. I don’t think this opposition is worth anything. It never works this way. I think that any human activity has both: indiscriminately has passion and reason inscribed into it.
If you look at the history of philosophy – look at Plato, look at Spinoza, look at St. Augustin, look at Hegel, Marx, Kant, Wittgenstein – there is a huge passion. This is terrible passion you have in this. They are passion-driven. These are not works of intellect. This is a completely wrong and common conception of philosophy that they just rationalise with some concepts. If it doesn’t involve the passionate attachment and the passionate involvement, then it’s not philosophy. There is very, very serious passion at work in this. And at the opposite end I think there is very, very precise thinking involved in art. If not it’s just no good art.

We were talking about passion and reason – do you think artists or philosophers can have a family? Do you think it can be organised to do such an ambitious or passionate work and to have love for people?
I think on the general level I don’t see why it should be exclusive. But this is not a question which concerns only art. I think it’s a question which concerns any sort of passionate attachment to your profession. I mean it could be a lawyer, a politician, a scientist, all kinds of things. It can be sport. It can be all kinds of things and it does produce problems, very practical problems, how the hell you deal with your family, with your love, with your private life. I think it very much depends on what kind of person you are. There are people who would somehow erase this and there are people who would always find ways, no matter how. They can work twenty hours a day but they will nevertheless find a way to have a private life.

And what can you tell me about passion? Where does it come from and what can you do to prevent its disappearance?
To prevent its disappearance?

Is there anything that can be done?
Have you ever read Ovid? “Remedia Amoris“, the remedies against love. The question that he asks is the opposite. Not how to keep the passion going but how to help from prevent it happening.
You can see through this a thousand years of antiquity: It’s not the problem how to keep your passion alive. It’s a problem of detachment. “Remedia Amoris“ are rather humorous. Ovid’s advice is: don’t go for it. Keep your mind, otherwise you go crazy. Passion is folly. This is a bad thing for you. It would completely ruin your life. So you have a history of passions. this is a stage of antiquity and then you have a certain stage of Christianity which again is very differentiated in itself. I mean the passion is the passion of Christ. So the passion worth having is the passion in this other sense. There is a passion worth having and which is this suffering you must undergo in order to be a worthy person, to be worthy of redemption. So this underscores, this gives the word passion a very different meaning. It comes from ‘patior’, ‘passus’, which means suffering. Like ‘Leidenschaft’ comes from ‘leiden’.
If I put it in this very, very reduced, simplistic way, the question of passion, which drives you, the question of passionate love is a question of romantic love, a certain conception of romantic love, which we deal with.

It’s a very interesting point that you made about the difference between trying to get rid of it or trying to keep it alive. You said before philosophy is always passionate, driven, so in this way it’s actually necessary to keep it. I didn’t only mean passion in private life, but also as an activating thing like in your work.
Yes, there has to be a passion which drives this. There’s an interesting passage in Helvetius. Helvetius, he was an enlightenment French philosopher and he has written this book ‘De l’esprit’ in 1759 and the book was actually burnt at that time and banned. He has a passage there which I always found terribly funny, he says: “Why are passionate people more intelligent than others?“ And he completely overturns this at either having intelligence – and then you can control your passions – or if you let the passions have the upper hand, then you lose your head. He puts these two together and he says: People never use their intelligence. I mean unless you are driven by a serious passion you won’t use the capacity for intelligence. It’s only the passionate people who are intelligent. Otherwise people are lazy. Come on, why use your head? You can always get along somehow. So, it’s only the passion, which actually drives you to use your reason. And this is just a funny way of putting it that you can’t see the two as being on opposed sides.

Do you have an influence on it, can you do something to keep it or to feed it?
I think passion is what drives you, drives you towards something. And it’s not that passion as such is enough. It’s not that it just drives you and you let yourself be driven. It actually demands a hell of a lot if you want to pursue this passion! It demands that you put something at stake, to risk.
To risk the usual ways of your life, the ‘bequemes Leben’, if you are lucky enough to have a comfortable social position. You have reduced yourself to the question of biological and social survival within a certain slot. And this is where the question of break comes in. The passion is what makes a break. But the break, it conditions, it demands a hell of a lot of ‘Anstrengung’ and you have to put things at risk. Sometimes drastically at risk. You risk everything for the question of passion, to pursue your passion.
What Freud names ‘Todestrieb’ (death drive) in “Jenseits des Lustprinzips“ (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle“) is too much of life. There’s too much of life, more than you can bear. So this is the excessive moment which derails the usual course of things and in order to pursue this it takes a lot of courage or persistence, perseverance. I think most people give up at a certain point. There are many ways of giving up, also as an artist. One way of giving up is to somehow be content with your role or to … ‘übereinstimmen’. So that you consent to being that role. And this is a socially assigned role which can bring glories, which can bring awards. If it started with a break – the break starts functioning as the institution of the break. The break itself gets institutionalised and highly valued.

It has a place then.
Yes, it has a place then. Freud has this wonderful phrase “people ruined by their own success“. It’s a wonderful phrase. And I think that in art many people are ruined by their own success. Precisely by succeeding in what they wanted to do and then they fit into this. They have made an institution of themselves and somehow started to believe that they are this. You have this wonderful phrase in Lacan: who is a madman? It’s not just an ordinary person who thinks that he’s a king. The definition of madman is a king who thinks that he’s a king. And you have this madness among artists who believe that they are artists. This is psychosis in a certain sense if you really think that you are what you are. You really think that you are an artist. This is the end of art, I think.

You were saying that one has to be courageous to proceed with passionate work. I have the feeling that there is another big thing, besides from missing courage, which might be a cushion for passion: The desire for containment, for feeling secure. I don’t know the best translation, I mean ‘Geborgenheit’.
Geborgenheit?

Yeah. You know Geborgenheit? Feeling secure.
Security, yes. Sicherheit.

A warm feeling.
Feeling at home. Is there a good way to feel at home? I don’t know. I think there’s always an ideological trap in this. What you mostly feel at home with is always ideology because it offers a sort of security. I mean security in the sense of providing a certain status within which you can dwell. And also security of meaning, which means it provides you with: “what does it all mean?”. ‘We live in parliamentary democracy, we’re a free society, in the era of progress and prosperity’, etc. I mean the worlds which somehow fulfil a certain horizon of meaning which situates you within a certain social moment and social structure, within a certain type of social relations. And this is always ideology, ideology is what makes this run. And I think that the break that we are talking about – the break with meaning or the break with the continuity of things – it could be described as a break with ideology. Art and ideology are at opposite ends. Art always makes a break, a cut into the ideological continuing of what you most feel at home with. I mean which is entrusted upon you. And this is not to say that art is not ideology, it can easily be turned into ideology.

At that point when you feel content.
Yes. When you feel content in your role. One could make a certain opposition between art and culture. I think culture is a sort of domestication of art. You have canonical artworks, which you are taught, at school. And it’s a question of what comes into the canon and is it a good thing to have a canon or how to include, exclude works. Of course you always have a canon. There’s no escaping this, but at the same time you have to understand that culture is always a domestification of what is dangerous or excessive in art. It domesticates things by giving them a sort of proper place and value. You can say: ‘Well, Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist of all time.’ I mean it’s quite true, but it’s also a very forced statement to somehow domesticate Shakespeare’s work.

It ends their quality of being a break by giving them a place.
Yeah. Giving them a certain continuity.

I have the feeling it’s a regressive desire.
For home?

Yeah. Isn’t it?
Yes. Ultimately yes. I think that being at home means being in the ideology and being in the meaning and having some sort of meaning secured. And I think that creating home as a way of being with yourself – or being with another person – is precisely to try to deal with the unhomely element of it. To keep the unhomely element of it alive. I think that love is keeping the non-homely element alive. It’s not to finally ‘go home’ with someone, but actually to keep this thing in the air. Keep this thing in the air. And comedy is precisely – to keep the ball in the air. Keep the ball in the air, I mean constantly.

So then I can come to my last question: How can one become happy in life?
(laughing): It beats me!

So this is why I kept it till the end. Is there a good strategy?
Ah, god knows!

Conny Habbel met Mladen Dolar on June 5, 2009 in Ljubljana.

Wiederabdruck
Dieses Interview erschien zuerst im Onlinemagazin „WIE GEHT KUNST?“ (www.wiegehtkunst.com) der Künstlerinnen Conny Habbel und Marlene Haderer.