define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true); define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS', true); Zeitgenossenschaft – what's next? https://whtsnxt.net Kunst nach der Krise Thu, 10 Jan 2019 12:34:23 +0000 de hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 Gesteigerter Realismus https://whtsnxt.net/279 Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:17:15 +0000 http://whtsnxt.net/279 1. Seit Nietzsche vom Tod Gottes sprach, aber natürlich schon viel früher und eigentlich immer schon, hat sich Philosophie auf eine Negativität oder ein Absolutes bezogen, das sich als Leere auftut.
2. Als Leere oder als Abgrund.
3. Als Entzug des gegebenen Sinns.
4. Als Verschwinden der Realität inmitten der Realität oder als Realität.
5. Die Realität, die in sich verschwindet, hat Jacques Lacan mit dem Begriff des Realen markiert.
6. Es handelt sich um ein immanentes Außen; nicht um eine externe Äußerlichkeit.
7. Zu abstrahieren heißt, von der Äußerlichkeit abzusehen, um auf ein Außen zu blicken, das innen ist.
8. Weil das nicht leicht ist, überspannt die Philosophie oft den Bogen und die Sehne reißt.
9. Das Denken zerreißt in dieser Überspannung und fällt in sich zusammen.
10. Aber es gibt kein Denken, das dieser Gefahr ausweichen könnte.
11. Zum Denken gehört, dass es sich nicht auf sich verlassen kann.
12. Es muss sich von sich selber lösen, um Denken zu sein.
13. Ein Denken, das sich nicht selbst verließe, wäre nichts als Rekapitulation des bereits Gewussten und -Adressierung des bloß Wissbaren.
14. Es erstreckte sich auf nichts Neues.
15. Ohne Neugierde bliebe es ganz bei sich.
16. Denken aber heißt Weiterdenken, heißt, nicht aufhören zu denken, heißt, sich und seine Ergebnisse in Frage zu stellen.
17. Aber das Denken kann nur Fragen stellen, indem es welche beantwortet.
18. Es muss sich eingestehen, dass jeder Frage Antworten vorausgehen und dass die Frage selbst bereits eine Antwort darstellt.
19. Hierin kommen Wittgenstein und Derrida überein: Dass es ein Ja gibt, das jedem Nein vorausspringt, dass jede Frage auf eine Antwort antwortet, indem sie sie in Frage stellt.
20. Weiterdenken bedeutet, aus der Enge der sozialen, kulturellen und akademischen Doxa auszubrechen, um ins Offene zu gehen, wie man in eine Wüste geht.
21. Wer weiterdenkt, kommt nicht an seinen Ausgangspunkt zurück.
22. Es gibt Denken nur als katastrophisches Denken.
23. Das griechische Wort katastrophé meint den Umschlag oder die Umwendung.
24. In seiner Interpretation von Platons Höhlengleichnis taucht zwar das Wort katastrophé nicht auf, dennoch spricht Heidegger in ihr von der Umwendung.
25. Sie sei das „Wesen der paideia“.1
26. Paideia übersetzen wir gewöhnlich mit Erziehung und Bildung.
27. Was also haben Bildung und Erziehung mit der Katastrophe zu tun?
28. Dass Bildung und Erziehung wesenhaft katastrophisch sind, heißt zunächst, dass sie vom Subjekt, das kein Kind (pais) mehr sein muss, eine Umwendung -fordern.
29. Im Höhlengleichnis impliziert diese Umwendung die Zuwendung zum Eigentlichen, das die Ideen sind.
30. Voraussetzung dieser Zuwendung ist die „Wegwendung des Blickes von den Schatten“.2
31. Heideggers Pädagogik setzt mit Platon die Möglichkeit der Unterscheidung des Wahren vom Unwahren voraus.
32. Ist es so einfach?
33. Derselbe Heidegger, der das „Wesen der ‚Bildung‘“ im „Wesen der ‚Wahrheit‘“3 gründen lässt, sagt von der Wahrheit (aletheia = Unverborgenheit), dass sie in die lethe (Verborgenheit) zurückreicht: „Das Unverborgene muß einer Verborgenheit entrissen, dieser im gewissen Sinne geraubt werden.“ 4
34. Aber Heidegger sagt an anderer Stelle auch, dass das „Feld der lethe […] jede Entbergung von Seiendem und also Geheurem [verwehrt]. Die lethe läßt an ihrem Wesensort, der sie selbst ist, alles verschwinden.“5
35. Man verfehlt Heideggers Katastrophenpädagogik, solange man sie nicht mit diesem Verschwinden konnotiert.
36. Die lethé, so scheint es, gleicht einem schwarzen Loch.
37. Sie absorbiert nicht nur das Seiende, sie bringt noch sein Erscheinen oder seine Unverborgenheit zum Verschwinden.
38. Das ist die eigentliche Katastrophe: der Umschlag des Seienden ins Nichts.
39. Dieser Umschlag verweist auf das, was Heidegger als „Kehre im Ereignis“ mit der Gegenwendigkeit der Wahrheit assoziiert.
40. Der Begriff der Gegenwendigkeit ist einer der Kernbegriffe von Heideggers Hölderlinvorlesung Der Ister.
41. Er verweist auf die inhärente Spannung im Sein selbst, das mit dem Ereignis zusammenfällt, mit dem Begriff also, der, wie Giorgio Agamben sagt, „zugleich Zentrum und äußerste Grenze von Heideggers Denken nach Sein und Zeit darstellt.“6
42. Agamben hat den Begriff des Zeitgenossen mit einer Dialektik von Licht und Dunkelheit assoziiert: „Der Zeitgenosse ist jener, der den Blick auf seine Zeit richtet, indem er nicht die Lichter, sondern die Dunkelheit wahrnimmt.“7
43. Wie die Aufklärung und die Les Lumières und die Enlightenment genannten Momente des westlichen und außerwestlichen Denkens, hat die belichtete Realität die Tendenz ihre dunklen Seiten zu verdunkeln. Realität ist Realitätsverdunkelung.
44. Was Agamben Zeitgenossenschaft nennt, markiert eine gegenüber der Realität genannten Realitätsverdunkelung kritische Position.
45. Realistisch zu sein, heißt folglich, statt sich an Realitäten zu klammern, um sich ihrer Konsistenz und Kohärenz zu versichern, sich von ihnen zu lösen, um ihre Dunkelheit zu erspähen.
46. Ich will diesen um die Wahrnehmung der Irrealität von Realität erweiterten Realismus gesteigerten Realismus nennen.
47. Es ist ein Realismus, der – statt realitätsgläubig zu sein – realitätskritisch ist.
48. Er versagt sich die Option der Unterwerfung unter die Tatsachenautorität.
49. Es ist diese Versagung, die Agamben zu denken gibt, indem er den Zeitgenossen als Resistenzfigur evoziert.
50. Wirkliche Zeitgenossenschaft verweigert sich den Zeitgeistimperativen.
51. Sie stellt noch ihre Infragestellung in Frage, die oft zu kulturkonservativem Elitismus führt.
52. „Der Zeitgenosse“, schreibt Agamben, „ist der, der die Dunkelheit seiner Zeit als eine Sache wahrnimmt, die ihn angeht und ohne Unterlass interpelliert …“.8
53. Das macht aus ihm einen Zeitdiagnostiker, der den Diagnosen seiner Zeit misstraut.
54. Seiner Zeit zu misstrauen, ohne aufzuhören, sein Verhältnis zu ihr zu intensivieren, ist, was man die Idee der Bildung nennen kann.

1.) Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Bern 1954 (2. Aufl.), S. 30.
2.) Ebd.
3.) Ebd.
4.) Ebd., S. 32.
5.) Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, GA 56. Frankfurt/M. 1982, S. 176.
6.) Giorgio Agamben, Kindheit und Geschichte. Frankfurt/M. 2004, S. 150.
7.) Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, Paris 2008, S. 14.
8.) Ebd., S. 22.

]]> Next Art Education. 9 Essential Theses https://whtsnxt.net/245 Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:51 +0000 http://whtsnxt.net/246 The next art is the art of the next society. Sociologist and cultural theorist Dirk Baecker pinpoints the term Next Society to the society based on the computer as the leading media technology. Baecker develops his argument on the assumption that nothing influences societal structures and cultural forms as significantly as the respective dominating media technology. As a result in the long run, the introduction of the computer will impact society as dramatically as the introduction of language, writing and printing press.[1]
Next Art Education draws upon this assumption by asking for adequate reactions in the field of Art Education.

  1. This is the general starting point: Next Art Education must be radically based on the future. We live in proto-times. It is about becoming, not being. This is best achieved by seriously focussing on “the now”.
  2. The sovereign subject of the modern age is an out-dated role model for educational projects. The hero of the Next Society – it’s neither the intellectual of the Enlightenment who appeals to public reason nor is it the critic as the sole judge over real and ideal –, it’s the hacker.
  3. Along with the computer as the leading media technology comes a surplus of control. Next Art Education is focussing on the cultural techniques necessary to deal with this. The artist of the next society is in control of the cultural techniques of his and her time. His and her art buzzes within the network and vibrates in the media. The artist of the Next Society does not have to be an IT expert, but he or she maintains a creative use of coding techniques and control projects.
  4. Next Art Education breaks with the history of art as a grand narrative of Eurocentric high culture. It operates on uncertain ground. It opens up to the unknown, to Next Art, and attempts to think in terms of Post Art. Next Art Education is recognizably connected to the field of art, but is thinking beyond. Next Art Education knows: Next Art does not remain unaffected by the world in which it arises. It deals with current aspects of contemporary life by utilizing the current methods of presentation and it operates on the current ground of everyday culture.
  5. This goes to the digital immigrants: The dominant culture of Next Art Education is the culture of the digital natives. It is a culture that is emerging in this very moment. We do not have any experience here. It is strange to us. The respect for the natives of the Next Society commands our special attention.
  6. Next Art Education must be based on the principles of cyberspace turned inside out into real life: the connection of all with all, the creation of virtual communities and the collective intelligence. The issues, problems and phenomena on which the students of Next Art Education should be educated must be placed in front of a backdrop of the digital networked global society. And that means that academic institutions can no longer maintain the modern educational goal of critical and likewise contemplative work with books and images. They must be based on the dispersion in the networks and on the operational handling of complexity.
  7. For the Next Society, time is no longer an outstretching line that spans from yesterday to tomorrow and causally joins past with future. History belongs to the age of modernity, as does teleology. For the Next Society, time is an instance – what is essential is the present. In geometrical terms: a dot instead of a line. The cyberspace turned inside out is becoming the medium of a global contemporariness. Cultural globalization therefore is a constantly present layer of reality.
  8. Next Art Education knows that Next Art no longer considers the image as the goal of art, but as its raw material. It no longer strives for one grand masterpiece, but deals with the plurality of images. It produces deep knowledge of the codes structuring our reality and develops the ability to interactively adopt culture in the form of sample, mashup, hack and remix. And it senses that control over our global reality of life can only be attained through forms of participatory intelligence and collective creativity.
  9. In particular, this requires a very thorough rethinking of the basic reference points of Art Education: Next Art Education has not only left behind the opposition of art and technology originating from the 18th and 19th century, but has also moved past the related opposition of nature and culture. There is a new kind of nature in the global contemporariness, a culturally emerged nature implying all the born and grown things as well as all the man made things, which are beyond our control. The homme naturel 2.0, as a starting point for Kulturkritik* as well as for educational projects of the Next Society, is man in the state of Next Nature[2]. According to this, the artist of the Next Society as a role model for Next Art Education projects must be thought of – very carefully with respect to the depth of rooting in academic reasoning – under Immanuel Kant’s premise – as updated with the concept of Next Nature: “Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which [next!] nature gives the rule to art.” (Immanuel Kant 1790, para. 46)

[1] cf. Dirk Baecker, Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M. 2007.
[2] cf. Koert van Mensvoort, Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Next Nature: Nature Changes Along With Us. Barcelona/New York 2011.

]]> Zeichnung – Gedankenstriche zu einer altbekannten terra incognita https://whtsnxt.net/203 Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:27 +0000 http://whtsnxt.net/202 Die folgenden Gedankenstriche unternehmen einen Versuch. Sich der Zeichnung aus der Disziplin der Kunstgeschichte heraus nähernd, soll das Zeichnen im kunstpädagogischen Feld des Systems Schule in einer erkenntnisorientierten und gleichwohl ergebnisoffenen Dimension perspektiviert werden2.
– Zunächst eine Bemerkung zum Modus kunsthistorischen Arbeitens. Die akademische Disziplin der Kunstgeschichte integriert, wie jede Disziplin, heterogene Denk- und Arbeitsweisen. Das „Erklären“ der Bilder (=Werke) aus ihrem kulturellen und geschichtlichen Ort heraus wirkt jedoch, in Anlehnung an Erwin Panofsky, weit in die Kunstpädagogik hinein. Im Fachdiskurs betrifft dies, neben dem an humanistischer Bildung orientierten kunstpädagogischen Denken, auch kritische Positionen der Kunstvermittlung, die sich über Bourdieu wiederum, wenn auch implizit, an der kunstgeschichtlichen Denkweise Panofskys informieren3. So divers hier argumentiert wird, die Kunstgeschichtsschreibung, auf die rekurriert wird, ist – zumindest -implizit – mit Panofskys Stufenmodell und dem hieraus folgenden „Erklären“ von Kunstwerken verbunden. -Dieses „Erklären“ basiert darauf, den Entstehungszusammenhang der Werke mittels historischen Wissens (Quellentexten und anderen historischen Zeugnissen) zu rekonstruieren und die den Werken eigene Motivik hieraus auf ihren symbolischen und inhaltlichen Gehalt hin zu interpretieren4. Paradigmatisch liesse sich dies an Panofskys Arbeit zu Albrecht Dürers auf 1514 datierten Kupferstich Melencolia I aufzeigen5. Auch wenn dies den Rahmen hier sprengen würde, wird gerade an Panofskys Auseinandersetzung mit dieser Grafik Dürers eine folgenreiche Perspektive auf die grafische Kunst deutlich. Panofskys Überlegungen orientieren sich, bezogen auf das grafische Blatt der Melencolia I, ausschliesslich an wiedererkennbaren Motiven, und damit gegenständlichen Darstellungen und deren Zusammenstellung im Bild. Die grafische Darstellungsweise, ihre anschaulichen Qualitäten und deren eigene Sinnstiftung spielen in den Überlegungen Panofskys dagegen keine Rolle. Den Fokus seiner kunstgeschichtlichen Argumentation bildet der dargestellte Gegenstand.
– Bezogen auf eine kunstpädagogische Situation im schulischen Kontext hat insofern ein durch Panofsky informiertes Denken Konsequenzen: Nicht die (Selbst-)Tätigkeit des künstlerischen Prozesses steht von Panofsky ausgehend im Zentrum, sondern die Wiedererkennbarkeit eines Gegenstandes. Auf das Zeichnen bezogen bedeutet dies: Die potentiell vielfältigen Möglichkeiten eines zeichnerischen Prozesses werden auf das „fertig“ gezeichnete, gegenständliche Produkt einer vorstrukturierten zeichnerischen Tätigkeit (Einhaltung der Perspektive, Volumina, etc.) reduziert. Albrecht Dürer, mit dem sich Panofsky wiederholt intensiv auseinandersetzte, spielt für diese Tradition westlicher Zeichnungskunst eine bedeutende Rolle. 1525 erschien Dürers Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirkel und Richtscheyt6, die der perspektivischen Konstruktion von Gegenständen und Körpern als Mass des zeichnerischen Handwerkes gewidmet ist. Bekannt ist etwa die in diesem Zusammenhang stehende Grafik Dürers zum velum, einem Zeichenapparat zur perspektivischen Wiedergabe eines dreidimensionalen Körpers auf der Fläche7. Inwieweit heutige Curricula in ihren Kompetenzzielen mit diesen Underweysungen des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts korrespondieren, wäre zu überprüfen.
– Mit Bezug auf Pazzinis Entwurf einer KunstPädagogik, die aus ihrer Zeitgenossenschaft mit der jeweiligen Gegenwartskunst Konsequenzen für ihr pädagogisches Handeln zieht, hier eine andere kunsthistorische Skizze zu möglichen Dimensionen der Zeichnung. Gegenstand der folgenden Skizze ist nicht eine Zeichnung, sondern eine fotografische Arbeit des Künstlers Jeff Wall, ein 119 x 164 cm grosses Diapositiv im Leuchtkasten, dessen Titel gegenständlichen Bestand und Handlung des Bildes erläutert: Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the Dept. Of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver8. Das Diapositiv gibt den Blick auf den Künstler frei, der mit seiner in Arbeit befindlichen Zeichnung am Tisch vor dem Präparat – einem mumifiziert erscheinenden Arm mit Hand –  sitzt, den Blick auf Skizze oder Präparat gesenkt, die rechte Hand ruht mit dem Zeichenstift auf dem Zeichenbrett auf. Der Tisch steht in einer Ecksituation vor einem Fenster, durch das offensichtlich genügend Licht hereinfällt, das die weissen Kacheln der Wand zurückwerfen. Eine auf dem Fensterbrett stehende Schreibtischlampe gibt kein zusätzliches Licht. Der Künstler sitzt in der linken Bildhälfte, rückwärtig gefasst durch einen Hängeschrank und, darunter stehend, aufeinandergetürmte Plastikkübel. Die rechte Bildhälfte ist dem Tisch mit dem Präparat vorbehalten und wird rechts durch das Fensterbrett, die darauf stehenden Utensilien und das spiegelnde, und insofern den BildbetrachterInnen keinen Blick nach aussen gewährende Fenster beschlossen. Die Anordnung der Situation lenkt, und dies kann hier nicht weiter in einer genaueren Bildbeschreibung ausgeführt werden, den Blick auf drei zentrale Bildbereiche: das Präparat, die Zeichnung mit der ruhenden Hand des Künstlers und dessen Kopfwendung auf Zeichnung und Präparat. Die Verbindung dieser Zentren liegt in der Handlung des Zeichnens selbst, also einem Moment, den die Fotografie gerade nicht zeigt. Vielmehr stellt Wall über die Verschiebung des Zeichnungsaktes in eine ruhende Situation das Zeichnen als ein Verhältnis dieser Zentren dar. Das aus diesem Verhältnis entstehende Produkt, die Zeichnung des mumifizierten Armes, muss sich die Aufmerksamkeit der Betrachtung mit den anderen Zentren teilen: Zeichnen wird hier als ein Prozess erfahrbar, der nicht auf das Produkt ausgerichtet ist, sondern dessen Relevanz im Akt des Zeichnens selbst liegt. Wie auch immer dieser aussehen mag. KunstPädagogisch tritt damit gegenüber der perspektivischen Konstruktion des dargestellten Körperteiles als Produkt der Zeichnung der Zeichenprozess in den Vordergrund. Was sich, im Diapositiv Walls bei aller Tiefenschärfe der Fotografie, in der reduzierten Wiedererkennbarkeit des mumifi-zierten Armes in der bereits sichtbaren Zeichnung niederschlägt: Der Winkel, in dem der Blick der BildbetrachterInnen auf die Zeichnung fällt, verunklärt diese Wiedererkennbarkeit in Richtung einer Bündelung von gezeichneten Linien.
– Die voranstehenden Überlegungen zu Jeff Wall’s Adrian Walker verzichten darauf, die kunsthistorischen Bezüge des Werkes zu anatomischen Zeichnungen oder den kompositorischen Aufbau der Bildanlage zu Dürers Zeichner, der einen liegenden Akt zeichnet in Bezug zu setzen. Die Gegenständlichkeit des Diapositivs wurde nicht auf ikonografische Anspielungen oder ikonologische Implikationen hin befragt. Vielmehr ging es darum, den bildlichen Sinn des Diapositivs im Modus der kunsthistorischen Arbeitsweise der Ikonik Max Imdahls zumindest ansatzweise zu erarbeiten. Anders als die gegenstandsgebundene Arbeitsweise Panofskys ermöglicht die Ikonik, auch die nichtgegenständlichen Bildanteile hinsichtlich ihrer Sinnstiftung für den gesamten Werkzusammenhang zu erschliessen9. Dies ergibt für den Umgang mit der Zeichnung, die auf dem Verhältnis von darstellenden Linien, Spuren, Formationen und freistehender Fläche beruht – und dies unabhängig davon, ob es sich um gegenständliche oder freie Zeichnungen handelt – durchaus Sinn10.
– Dass und wie künstlerisches Handeln und dessen materieller Niederschlag Erkenntnis generiert, wird unter dem Begriff der künstlerischen Forschung intensiv diskutiert11. Ohne den Begriff fahrlässig auszuweiten, hier eine kurze Überlegung zu einem Erkenntnismodus der anatomischen Zeichnung bei Leonardo – als einem derjenigen Künstler, deren Zeichnung bis heute intensiv rezipiert wird. Seine Studienblätter zum Muskelverlauf der Schulter oder zur Lage und Verbindung des Uterus zeigen einen erkenntnisorientierten Umgang der Zeichnung, die dem Verständnis anatomischer Zusammenhänge dient. Anders als in einer Visualisierung von vorhandenem Wissen erproben diese Zeichnungen ihre anatomische Erkenntnis, indem sie sie erst aufzeigen. Anders ausgedrückt: Leonardo erzeichnet sich (und uns) ein anatomisches Verständnis. Insofern öffnen diese Zeichnungen den Erkenntnisprozess, auch wenn sie, auf eine gegenständliche Betrachtung reduziert, die korrekte Lage der Organe und Muskeln zu definieren scheinen.
Eine kunstPädagogische Perspektive ist zur Entwicklung eines Verständnisses von Zeichnung nicht nur auf Werke früherer Zeiten, sondern auch auf die Gegenwartskunst gewiesen. Deren Umgang mit der Zeichnung ist durchaus heterogen. Gerade deshalb aber sind gegenwärtige Positionen für den kunstpädagogischen Umgang mit der Zeichnung von Interesse. Fokussiert wird hier zumindest ansatzweise auf die Zeichnung bei Tacita Dean, Toba Khedoori, Kateřina Šedá.
– Tacita Dean ist spätestens seit der documenta 13 (2012) für ihre grossformatigen Kreidezeichnungen auf Tafeln bekannt12. Dean nutzt das Dunkel der Tafel ebenso wie die Abstufungen des Weiss der Kreide. Verwischt und im Wechsel von Tafelgrund und Weisshöhung akzen-tuiert, evoziert Dean mit ihren Zeichnungen erzählerische Zusammenhänge. In die Kreidelandschaften eingefügt sind schriftliche und gegenständliche Verweise auf ein Geschehen, dass das Dargestellte (wie Berge, Wellen, Schiff, menschliche Figur) in erzählende Zusammenhänge einbettet. Ebenso wirksam wie diese konkreten Verweise auf tradierte Erzählungen und -Geschehnisse ist die Verweisstruktur der materialen Kreidezeichnung selbst. In ihren Fingerspuren, Verwischungen und Abdrücken weist die Zeichnung ihre Entstehung, und damit die Evokation von Darstellung, als einen individualisierten Prozess aus, dem insbesondere die Veränderung eigen ist.
– Toba Khedoori isoliert in ihren ebenfalls grossformatigen Zeichnungen Objekte (Stuhl, Fenster, Tür) in einer weiträumigen Bildfläche13. Ihr Zeichenwerkzeug besteht aus Wachs, einem scharfen Gegenstand, Ölfarbe und den Sedimenten des Arbeitsprozesses. Khedoori überzieht die Fläche mehrfach mit einer transparenten Wachsschicht, ritzt die Umrisslinien des frei in der Fläche schwebenden Objektes ein und füllt die Flächen mit Ölfarbe. Was an Staub, Flusen, menschlichen Haaren während des Arbeitsprozesses aufgewirbelt wird, schreibt sich in die Wachsschicht ein. So präzise und konkret die Formgebung der Ritzzeichnung das -Objekt in der Fläche definiert, so offen bleibt das Verhältnis des Objektes zu den zeichenhaft in den Wachsschichten eingeschlossenen Sedimenten. Die Zeichnung prägt jedoch beides: präzise Definition und unkontrolliertes Sediment.
– Kateřina Šedá agiert mit ihrer Arbeit over and over im sozialen Raum14. Was hieraus hervorgeht, sind einerseits die Veränderungen, die die künstlerische Aktion Šedás im Denken und Handeln der Beteiligten auslöst. Andererseits aber entsteht aus solchen Aktionen Šedás eine Art installative Summe, die in Ausstellungen sichtbar (und teils hörbar) wird. Der Zeichnung kommt darin ein hoher Stellenwert zu. Als reduzierte Notation, konzeptuelle Überlegung, Akzentsetzung, Reflektion, Ordnungs- und Vernetzungsmoment durchziehen kleinformatige Zeichnungen Šedás Installation des over and over. Gegenüber den der Installation integrierten fotografischen und Videoaufzeichnungen stellen die Zeichnung Šedás jene Distanz zum Geschehen der Aktion her, die etwas sichtbar werden lässt. Anders ausgedrückt: Šedá lotet Zeichnung, eingebunden in die Installation over and over, in ihrer reflektiven Dimension aus.
Und jetzt? Zu wünschen ist, dass das Verständnis dessen, was Zeichnung und Zeichnen in der Schule ausmacht, sich an der Differenz der Zeichnung reibt, die Heterogenität aushält, und, nicht zuletzt, die Zeichnung als ein Handeln zu verstehen, dessen Relevanz in Prozess und Handlung des Zeichnens, statt in dessen Produkt liegt. Mit allen Herausforderungen eines ergebnisoffenen (kunst)pädagogischen Geschehens im System Schule.

1.) Terra incognita bezieht sich hier auf ein am Institut LGK HGK FHNW laufendes Projekt zum Zeichnen im Bildnerischen Gestalten, Sek II, siehe www.kunst-mobil.ch [4.1.2015]
2.) Wenn hier auch nicht weiter auf das kunstpädagogische Symposium -Zeichnen als Erkenntnis eingegangen wird, sei zumindest auf die Website verwiesen: www.zeichnen-als-erkenntnis.eu [10.3.2014]
3.) Zu Bourdieus Auseinandersetzung mit Panofsky siehe: Heinz Abels, „Die Zeit wieder in Gang bringen. Soziologische Anmerkungen zu einer unterstellten Wirkungsgeschichte der Ikonologie von Erwin Panofsky“, in: Bruno Reudenbach (Hg.), Erwin Panofsky. Beiträge des Symposiums Hamburg 1992, Berlin 1994, S. 21–22. Weiterführend hierzu siehe: Beate Florenz, „Kunstvermittlung: Eine epistemische Praxis“, in: Flavia Caviezel, et al. (Hg.), Einblicke in Forschungspraktiken der Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, Zürich 2013, S. 41–46.
4.) Erwin Panofsky, Sinn und Deutung in der bildenden Kunst. Köln 1996. Ekkehard Kaemmerling (Hg.), Ikonographie und Ikonologie: Theorien – Entwicklung – Probleme. Köln 1994.
5.) Raymond Klibansky, Saturn und Melancholie: Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt/M. 1990.
6.) Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der messung mit dem zirckel un richtscheyt in Linien, ebnen unnd gantzen corporen [Unterweisung der Messung mit dem Zirkel und Richtscheit in Linien, Ebenen und ganzen Corporen]. Unterschneidheim 1972 [1525].
7.) So der Holzschnitt: Albrecht Dürer, „Zeichner, der einen liegenden Akt zeichnet“, um 1527 entstanden, 7,6 x 11,2 cm, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett.
8.) Jeff Wall, „Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in a laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver“, Diapositiv im Leuchtkasten, 1992, 3 Abzüge + 1 Künstlerabzug, 119 x 164 cm.
9.) Siehe Max Imdahl, „Cézanne – Braque – Picasso. Zum Verhältnis zwischen Bildautonomie und Gegenstandssehen“ (1974), in: Ders., Gesammelte Schriften, hg. v. Gottfried Boehm, Frankfurt/M. 1996, S. 303–380. Imdahl erarbeitet ikonisches Denken in diesem Text an Malerei und Zeichnungen.
10.) Siehe Max Imdahl, „Zu einer Zeichnung von Norbert Kricke“ (1988), in: Ders., Gesammelte Schriften, hg. v. Angeli Janhsen-Vukicevic, Frankfurt/M. 1996, S. 539–546.
11.) Zur künstlerischen Forschung siehe insbesondere: Elke Bippus (Hg.), Kunst des Forschens: Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens, Zürich 2009; Corina Caduff et al. (Hg.), Kunst und künstlerische Forschung, Zürich 2010, Isabelle Graw (Hg.), Artistic research, Berlin 2010.
12.) Auf der dOCUMENTA (13)  war die folgende Arbeit zu sehen: Tacita Dean, „Fatigues“, 2012, Chalk on blackboard, 230 x 1110 cm; 230 x 557 cm; 230 x 744 cm; 230 x 1110 cm; 230 x 557 cm; 230 x 615 cm. Siehe auch: www.frithstreetgallery.com/works/view/fatigues [2.11.2014] sowie den Katalog: Theodora Vischer, Isabel Friedli (Hg.), Tacita Dean, Analogue: Zeichnungen 1991–2006, Göttingen 2006.
13.) Siehe zu diesen Arbeiten Khedooris: Toba Khedoori: Gezeichnete Bilder (Ausst.kat.), mit Textbeiträgen von Lane Relyea und Hans Rudolf Reust. Basel 2001.
14.) Siehe: Fanni Fetzer (Hg.), Kateřina Šedá. Talk to the sky ’cause the ground ain’t listening (Ausst.kat.), Luzern 2012. Sowie, zu „over and over“: Kateřina Šedá, Over and over, Zürich 2010.

]]> Now and Elsewhere https://whtsnxt.net/123 Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:44 +0000 http://whtsnxt.net/now-and-elsewhere/ The Problem and the Provocation
We would like to begin by taking a sentence from the formulation of the problem that set the ball rolling for this lecture series. In speaking of the “hesitation in developing any kind of comprehensive strategy” for understanding precisely what it is that we call contemporary art today (in the wake of the last twenty years of contemporary art activity), the introduction to the series speaks of its having “assumed a fully mature form – and yet it still somehow refuses to be historicized as such.”1
Simultaneously an assertion and a reticence to name one’s place in time, it is this equivocation that we would really like to discuss.

The Old Man and the Wind: Joris Ivens’ Film
At the very beginning of Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan’s film Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind), we see a frail Joris Ivens sitting in a chair on a sand dune in the Gobi Desert, on the border between China and Mongolia, waiting for the arrival of a sandstorm.
Elsewhere in the film, an old woman – a wind shaman – talks about waiting for the wind.
Buffeted as we are by winds that blow from so many directions with such intensity, this image of an old man in a chair waiting for a storm is a metaphor for a possible response to the question “What is contemporaneity?”
It takes stubbornness, obstinacy, to face a storm, and yet also a desire not to be blown away by it. If Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, celebrated in Benjamin’s evocation of the angel of history, with its head caught in turning between the storm of the future and the debris of the present, were ever in need of a more recent annotation, then old man Ivens in his chair, waiting for the wind, would do very nicely.
It is tempting to think of this dual obstinacy – to face the storm and not be blown away – as an acute reticence that is at the same time a refusal to either run away from or be carried away by the strong winds of history, of time itself.
We could see this “reticence,” this “refusal to historicize,” as a form of escape from the tyranny of the clock and the calendar – instruments to measure time, and to measure our ability to keep time, to keep to the demands of the time allotted to us by history, our contemporaneity. Any reflection on contemporaneity cannot avoid simultaneously being a consideration of time, and of our relation to it.

On Time
Time girds the earth tight. Day after day, astride minutes and seconds, the hours ride as they must, relentlessly. In the struggle to keep pace with clocks, we are now always and everywhere in a state of jet lag, always catching up with ourselves and with others, slightly short of breath, slightly short of time.
The soft insidious panic of time ticking away in our heads is syncopated by accelerated heartbeat of our everyday lives. Circadian rhythms (times to rise and times to sleep, times for work and times for leisure, times for sunlight and times for stars) get muddled as millions of faces find themselves lit by timeless fluorescence that trades night for day. Sleep is besieged by wakefulness, hunger is fed by stimulation, and moments of dreaming and lucid alertness are eroded with the knowledge of intimate terrors and distant wars.
When possible, escape is up a hatch and down a corridor between and occasionally beyond longitudes, to places where the hours chime epiphanies. Escape is a resonant word in the vocabulary of clockmaking. It gives us another word – escapement.

Escapement2
Escapement is a horological or clockmaking term. It denotes the mechanism in mechanical watches and clocks that governs the regular motion of the hands through a “catch and release” device that both releases and restrains the levers that move the hands for hours, minutes, and seconds. Like the catch and release of the valves of the heart that allow blood to flow between its chambers, setting the basic rhythm of life, the escapement of a watch regulates our sense of the flow of time. The continued pulsation of our hearts and the ticking of clocks denote our freedom from an eternal present. Each heartbeat, each passing second marks the here and now, promises the future, and recalls the resonance of the last heartbeat. Our heart tells us that we live in time.
The history of clockmaking saw a definite turn when devices for understanding time shifted away from the fluid principles of ancient Chinese water and incense clocks – for which time was a continuum, thus making it more difficult to surgically separate past and present, then and now – to clocks whose ticking seconds rendered a conceptual barricade between each unit, its predecessor and its follower. This is what makes now seem so alien to then. Paradoxically, it opens out another zone of discomfort. Different places share the same time because of the accident of longitude. Thus clocks in London and Lagos (with adjustments made for daylight savings) show the same time. And yet, the experience of “now“ in London and Lagos may not feel the same at all.
An escape from – or, one might say, a full-on willingness to confront – this vexation might be found by taking a stance in which one is comfortable with the fact that we exist at the intersection of different latitudes and longitudes, and that being located on this grid, we are in some sense phatically in touch with other times, other places. In a syncopated sort of way, we are “contemporaneous” with other times and spaces.

My Name is Chin Chin Choo
In Howrah Bridge, a Hindi film-noir thriller from 1958 set in a cosmopolitan Calcutta (which, in its shadowy grandeur resembled the Shanghai of the jazz age), a young dancer, the half-Burmese, half-Baghdadi-Jewish star and vamp of vintage Hindi film, Helen, plays a Chinese bar dancer. And in the song “My Name is Chin Chin Choo,” a big band jazz, kitsch orientalist, and sailor-costumed musical extravaganza, she expresses a contemporaneity that is as hard to pin down as it is to avoid being seduced by.
The lyrics weave in the Arabian Nights, Aladdin, and Sinbad; the singer invokes the bustle of Singapore and the arch trendiness of Shanghai; the music blasts a Chicago big band sound; the sailor-suited male backup dancers suddenly break into Cossack knee-bends. Times and spaces, cities and entire cultural histories – real or imagined – collide and whirl in heady counterpoint. Yesterday’s dance of contemporaneity has us all caught up in its Shanghai-Calcutta-Delhi-Bombay-Singapore turbulence. We are all called Chin Chin Choo. Hello, mister, how do you do?

Contemporaneity
Contemporaneity, the sensation of being in a time together, is an ancient enigma of a feeling. It is the tug we feel when our time pulls at us. But sometimes one has the sense of a paradoxically asynchronous contemporaneity – the strange tug of more than one time and place – as if an accumulation or thickening of our attachments to different times and spaces were manifesting itself in the form of some unique geological oddity, a richly striated cross section of a rock, sometimes sharp, sometimes blurred, marked by the passage of many epochs.

Now and Elsewhere
The problem of determining the question of contemporaneity hinges on how we orient ourselves in relation to a cluster of occasionally cascading, sometimes overlapping, partly concentric, and often conflictual temporal parameters – on how urgent, how leisurely, or even how lethargic we are prepared to be in response to a spectrum of possible answers.
Consider the experience of being continually surprised by the surface and texture of the night sky when looking through telescopes of widely differing magnifications. Thinking about “which contemporaneity” to probe is not very different from making decisions about how deep into the universe we would like to cast the line of our query.
A telescope powerful enough to aid us in discerning the shapes and extent of craters on the moon will reveal a very different image of the universe than one that unravels the rings of Saturn, or one that can bring us the light of a distant star. The universe looks different, depending on the questions we ask of the stars.
Contemporaneity, too, looks different depending on the queries we put to time. If, as Zhou Enlai famously remarked, it is still too early to tell what impact the French Revolution has had on human history, then our sense of contemporaneity distends to embrace everything from 1789 onwards. If, on the other hand, we are more interested in sensing how things have changed since the Internet came into our lives, then even 1990 can seem a long way away. So can it seem as if it were only recently that the printing press and movable type made mechanical reproduction of words and images possible on a mass scale. One could argue that time changed once and for all when the universal regime of Greenwich Mean Time imposed a sense of an arbitrarily encoded universal time for the first time in human history, enabling everyone to calculate for themselves “when,” as in how many hours ahead or behind they were in relation to everyone at every other longitude. This birthed a new time, a new sense of being together in one accounting of time. One could also argue that, after Hiroshima made it possible to imagine that humanity as we know it could auto-destruct, every successive year began to feel as long as a hundred years, or as an epoch, since it could perhaps be our last. This means that, contrary to our commonplace understanding of our “time” as being “sped up,” we could actually think of our time as being caught in the long “winding down,” the “long decline.” It all depends, really, on what question we are asking.
And so Marcel Duchamp can still seem surprisingly contemporary, and Net art oddly dated. The moon landing, whose fortieth anniversary we have recently seen, brought a future of space travel hurtlingly close to the realities of 1969. Today, the excitement surrounding men on the moon has already acquired the patina of nostalgia, and the future it held out as a promise seems oddly dated. Then again, this could change suddenly if China and India were to embark in earnest on a second-wave Cold War space race to the moon. Our realities advance into and recede from contemporaneity like the tides, throwing strange flotsam and jetsam onto the shore to be found by beachcombers with a fetish for signs from different times. The question then becomes not one of “periodizing” contemporaneity, or of erecting a neat white picket fence around it; rather, it becomes one of finding shortcuts, trapdoors, antechambers, and secret passages between now and elsewhere, or perhaps elsewhen. Time folds, and it doesn’t fold neatly – our sense of “when” we are is a function of which fold we are sliding into, or climbing out of.
A keen awareness of contemporaneity cannot but dissolve the illusion that some things, people, places, and practices are more “now” than others. Seen this way, contemporaneity provokes a sense of the simultaneity of different modes of living and doing things without a prior commitment to any one as being necessarily more true to our times. Any attempt to design structures, whether permanent or provisional, that might express or contain contemporaneity would be incomplete if it were not (also) attentive to realities that are either not explicit or manifest or that linger as specters. An openness and generosity toward realities that may be, or seem to be, in hibernation, dormant, or still in formation, can only help such structures to be more pertinent and reflective. A contemporaneity that is not curious about how it might be surprised is not worth our time.

Tagore in China
In a strange and serendipitous echo from the past, we find Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and artist who in some sense epitomized the writing of different Asian modernities in the twentieth century, saying something quite similar exactly eighty-five years ago in Shanghai, at the beginning of what was to prove to be a highly contested and controversial tour of China.
The poet [and here, all we need to do is to substitute “artist” for “poet”]’s mission is to attract the voice which is yet inaudible in the air; to inspire faith in a dream which is unfulfilled; to bring the earliest tidings of the unborn flower to a skeptic world.3
Tagore’s plea operates in three distinct temporal registers: the “as yet inaudible” in the future, the “unfulfilled dream” in the past, and the fragility of the unborn flower in the skeptic world of the present. In each of these, the artist’s work, for Tagore, is to safeguard and to take custody of – and responsibility for – that which is out of joint with its time, indeed with all time.
We could extend this reading to say that it is to rescue from the dead weight of tradition the things that were excluded from the canon, to make room for that to which the future may turn a deaf ear, and to protect the fragility of contemporary practice from present skepticism. Tagore’s argument for a polyvocal response to the question of how to be “contemporary” was misinterpreted, in some senses willfully, by two factions of Chinese intellectuals. One faction celebrated him as an uncritical champion of tradition (which he was not), while the other campaigned against him as a conservative and “otherworldly” critic of modernity (which he refused to be). Between them, these partisans of tradition and modernity in 1920s China missed an opportunity to engage with a sense of the inhabitation of time that refused to construct arbitrary – and, indeed, uncritical – hierarchies in either direction: between past and present, east and west, then and now.

On Forgetting
As time passes and we grow more into the contemporary, the reasons for remembering other times grow, while the ability to recall them weakens. Memory straddles this paradox. We could say that the ethics of memory have something to do with the urgent negotiation between having to remember (which sometimes includes the obligation to mourn), and the requirement to move on (which sometimes includes the need to forget). Both are necessary, and each is notionally contingent on the abdication of the other, but life is not led by the easy rhythm of regularly alternating episodes of memory and forgetting, canceling each other out in a neat equation that resolves itself and attains equilibrium.
Forgetting: the true vanity of contemporaneity. Amnesia: a state of forgetfulness unaware of both itself and its own deficiency. True amnesia includes forgetting that one has forgotten all that has been forgotten. It is possible to assume that one remembers everything and still be an amnesiac. This is because aspects of the forgotten may no longer occupy even the verge of memory. They may leave no lingering aftertaste or hovering anticipation of something naggingly amiss. The amnesiac is in solitary confinement, guarded by his own clones, yet secluded especially from himself.
Typically, forms of belonging and solidarity that rely on the categorical exclusion of a notional other to cement their constitutive bonds are instances of amnesia. They are premised on the forgetting of the many contrarian striations running against the grain of the moment and its privileged solidarity. On particularly bad days, which may or may not have to do with lunar cycles, as one looks into a mirror and is unable to recognize one’s own image, the hatred of the other rises like a tidal bore. Those unfaithful patches of self are then rendered as so much negative space, like holes in a mirror. Instead of being full to the brim with traces of the other, each of them is seen as a void, a wound in the self.
This void where the self-authenticated self lies shadowed and unable to recognize itself is attributed to the contagious corrosiveness of the other. The forgetting of the emptying-out of the self by its own rage forms the ground from which amnesia assaults the world. In trying to assert who we are, we forget, most of all, who we are. And then we forget the forgetting.

Kowloon Walled City and its Memory
Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities (Walter Benjamin4).
A few months ago we spent some time in Hong Kong, learning what it means to live in a city that distills its contemporaneity into a refined amnesia. We were interested in particular by what happened to the walled city of Kowloon and its memory.
Kowloon Walled City and its disappearance from the urban fabric of Hong Kong can be read as a parable of contemporary amnesia. The Walled City was once a diplomatic anomaly between China and the British Empire that functioned as a long-standing autonomous zone, a site of temporary near-permanence, an exclave within an enclave.
Kowloon Walled City is not just a border in space; it also marks a border in time – a temporary suspension of linear time by which the visitor agrees to the terms of a compact laid out by the current shape of the territory, a walled compound where a delicate game between memory and amnesia can be played out, apparently till eternity. This is the frontier where reality begins to cross over into an image.
Visiting the “Memorial Park” that stands on the former site of the Kowloon Walled City today is an uncanny experience. As with all “theme parks,” walking in this enclosure is like walking in a picture postcard spread over hectares rather than inches. The constructed, spacious serenity of the park, its careful gestures to the tumult of the walled city by means of models, oral-history capsules, artifacts, replicas, and remains intend to provoke in the visitor some of the frisson in the fact that he or she is standing at what was once both condemned as an urban dystopia of crime, vice, and insanitation, and hailed as an anarchist utopia. The neighborhood itself may have disappeared, but its footprint in popular culture can be discerned in the simulacral sites of action sequences in cyberpunk science fiction, gangster and horror films, manga, and multi-user computer games.
The walled city had approximately thirty thousand people living in one-hundredth of a square mile, which amounts roughly to an average population-per-unit-area density ratio of 3.3 million people to a square mile. This makes it the densest inhabited unit of space in world history.
If we think of this space as a repository of memories, it would be the most haunted place on earth.
Why do such spaces – sometimes crowded, sometimes empty (but apparently crowded with ghosts) – appear in a manner that is almost viral, such that the trope of empty, but haunted streets, set in the near future of global cities, begins to show the first signs of a cinematic epidemic of our times? Will we remember the cinema of the early twenty-first century as the first intimation of the global collapse of urban space under its own weight?
Or is this imaginary appearance of a haunting, suicidal metropolis more of an inoculation than a symptom, an early shoring-up of the defenses of citizens against their own obsolescence? How can we remember, or even represent, an inoculation that could be an obituary just as much as it could be a premonition or a warning?
The surrealist poet Louis Aragon, speaking of the disappearing neighborhoods of Paris as the city morphed into twentieth-century modernity, once wrote that
it is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of the cult of the ephemeral … Places that were incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know.5
What happens when someone from within these spaces that were “incomprehensible yesterday and that tomorrow will never know” decides to make themselves known? How does their account of the space square with its more legendary reportage?
I recall the Walled City as one big playground, especially the rooftops, where me and my friends would run and jump from one building to the next, developing strong calf muscles, a high tolerance of pain, and control of our fear, and our feet. The rooftops were our domain, shared only with the jets that passed overhead almost within reach of our outstretched arms as they roared down the final approach to Kai Tak Airport. Among the tangle of TV antennae we hid our kid-valuable things, toys and things we didn’t want our parents to know about because, well, most of them were stolen or bought with money we earned putting together stuff in the little one-room “factories” that were all over the Walled City – if our parents knew we had money, they’d have taken it. We were good at hiding things, and ourselves (Chiu Kin Fung6).

Disappearance and Representation: Haunting the Record
What does disappearance do to the telling of that which has disappeared? How do we speak to, of, and for the presence of absences in our lives, our cities?
Ackbar Abbas, in his book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, meditates at length on disappearance, cities, and images:
A space of disappearance challenges historical representation in a special way, in that it is difficult to describe precisely because it can adapt so easily to any description. It is a space that engenders images so quickly that it becomes nondescript – we can think about a nondescript space as that strange thing: an ordinary, everyday space that has somehow lost its usual system of interconnectedness, a deregulated space. Such a space defeats description not because it is illegible and none of the categories fit, but because it is hyperlegible and all the categories seem to fit, whether they are the categories of social sciences, cultural criticism, or of fiction. Any description then that tries to capture the features of the city will have to be, to some extent at least, stretched between fact and fiction … If this is the case, then there can be no single-minded pursuit of the signs that finishes with a systematic reading of the city, only a compendium of indices of disappearance (like the nondescript) that takes into account the city’s errancy and that addresses the city through its heterogeneity and parapraxis.7
A parapraxis is a kind of Freudian slip, an involuntary disclosure of something that would ordinarily be repressed. It could be a joke, an anomaly, a revealing slip-up, a haunting.
What does it mean to “haunt the record”? When does a presence or a trace become so deeply etched into a surface that it merits a claim to durability simply for being so difficult to repress, resolve, deal with, and put away? The endurance of multiple claims to land and other scarce material resources often rests on the apparent impossibility of arranging a palimpsest of signatures and other inscriptions rendered illegible by accumulation over a long time, and across many generations. In a sense, this is why the contingent and temporary character of the Kowloon Walled City endured for as long as it did. There is of course the delicate irony of the fact that the protection offered by its juridical anomaly with regard to sovereignty – a constitutional Freudian slip with consequences – was erased the moment Hong Kong reverted to China. The autonomy of being a wedge of China in the middle of Hong Kong became moot the moment Hong Kong was restored to Chinese sovereignty. Resolving the question of Hong Kong’s status automatically resolved all doubts and ambivalences with regard to claims over the custody and inhabitation of Kowloon Walled City.

A Chinese Sense of Time: Neither Permanence nor Impermanence
It is appropriate to end with a quotation from a Chinese text from the fourth century of the Common Era, a Madhyamika Mahayana Buddhist text, The Treatise of Seng Zhao.
When the Sutras say that things pass, they say so with a measure of reservation, for they wish to contradict people’s belief in permanence.
(And here we would gesture in the direction of the assumption that this contemporaneity is destined to be permanent; after all, this too shall pass).
And when the sutras say that things are lost, they say so with a mental reservation in order to express disapproval of what people understand by “passing.”
(And here we would gesture in the direction of the assumption that this contemporaneity is destined to oblivion; after all, something from this too shall remain).
Their wording may be contradictory, but not their aim. It follows that with the sages: permanence has not the meaning of the staying behind, while the wheel of time, or Karma, moves on. Impermanence has not the meaning of outpassing the wheel. People who seek in vain ancient events in our time conclude that things are impermanent. We, who seek in vain present events in ancient times, see that things are permanent. Therefore, Buddha, Liberation, He, it, appears at the proper moment, but has no fixed place in time.8
What more can we say of contemporaneity? It appears at the proper moment, but has no fixed place in time. In that spirit, let us not arrogate solely to ourselves the pleasures and the perils of all that is to be gained and lost in living and working, as we do, in these interesting times.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst im e-flux journal #12, Januar 2010 unter
http://www.e-f lux.com/journal/now-and-elsewhere/ [8.9.2013].

1.) Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, “What is Contemporary Art? Issue One“ e-flux journal, no. 11 (December 2009).
2.) See Raqs Media Collective, “Escapement,“ an installation at Frith Street Gallery, London, July 8, 2009–September 30, 2009.
3.) Rabindranath Tagore, “First Talk at Shanghai,“ in Talks in China (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1925), quoted in Sisir Kumar Das, “The Controversial Guest: Tagore in China“ in Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China, ed. Tan Chung (Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1998); online version at.
4.) Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 88.
5.) Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant in Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993), 456.
6.) Chiu Kin Fung, “Children of the Walled City,“ Asia Literary Review 10 (Winter 2008), 72–73.
7.) M. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 73–74.
8.) Chao Lun: The Treatise of Seng-chao, trans. Walter Liebenthal (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1968).

]]> A Plea For Realism https://whtsnxt.net/079 Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:41 +0000 http://whtsnxt.net/a-plea-for-realism/ Die folgende Rede wurde am Symposium ‚contemporary art excludes the 99 percent’ am 18. Mai 2012 in Hong Kong gehalten.1

Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe: We all share the same dream. The dream that one day 100% of humanity will take an interest in, enjoy and sometimes be thrilled and moved by contemporary art – that every major town will have its own major contemporary art institution. That everyone will buy and collect some kind of contemporary art, maybe printed off the internet, maybe bought from art car boot sales. And that art will become a kind of intelligent mass entertainment. In my ideal world a cross between Baywatch and Heidegger.
Yes we are on our way! Millions more people are interested in art than were once! There are plans announced every day it seems for big new art institutions. But we are not there yet. Not 100% not even 98%. Far from it. The vote today in this house is actually between those of us who live in a utopian dreamworld – and those of us who can acknowledge reality. I am pleading for realism today. Ladies and Gentlemen, I love contemporary art but I do not believe in it. Art is not Jesus. It will not rise on the third day and be the salvation of mankind. Art is not a God to worship, or a religion to follow, OR a political programme to believe in. At the moment it is a cultural and commercial activity conducted by a tiny minority of human beings.

I was scared
Ladies and Gentlemen, when I was invited to speak in favour of this motion, my first thought was No Way. I’d spent the day queing for an hour to get into a Biennale or the Pompidou or Frieze or something, and inside you could hardly see the art there were so many people. And I thought I can’t argue this. 1% that’s tiny! Couldn’t they have made the motion like ‘excludes the 75%? I thought: I remember the eighties. It was a cultural desert. Galleries and art show are twice as full today as they were thirty years ago. Do you remember, sir? And then I picked up a newspaper. And the headline said World’s population – seven billion – doubled since 1970. And I thought – oh yes that’s why! And I got out my calculator and I thought what is 1% of seven billion, and it’s – any guesses – seventy million – that’s quite a lot. I’ve never seen seventy million people at an art gallery – and it’s a hundred time more than the number of subscribers to all the world’s art magazines combined.
This isn’t really a motion about concrete figures, of course, it’s about the spirit, about the idea that really very very few people today are interested in contemporary art.

Inequality today
I know you probably think I am going to start with criticising the elitism of the art market, and I will soon, I promise I will try to make you all squirm in your seats. Particularly you sir! I made a documentary in 2008 called ‘The Great Contemporary Art Bubble’ which followed the art market from its peak in May 2008 until the crash, and revealed the way it was stage-managed by tiny elite. But that is not the only reason why I have a perspective that qualifies me to talk to you here now. For the past two years I have been making another documentary about the opposite of the art market – about poverty, an animated history of poverty, and my words to you tonight are based on what I have learnt making these two radically different – but connected – films.
Ladies and Gentlemen in 2010, the renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article which defined the economics of the age in which we are now living. Riffing on the famous line from the American constitution it was called “For the One Per Cent. By the One Percent. Of the One Percent.’ Stiglitz’s complaint is that we are living in an ever more unequal society, where 1% of Americans own 25% of the wealth, and controll 40% of it. In 2010, China’s Gini-coefficient – a measure of how wealth is distributed in a society – stood at 0.47 (a value of 0 suggests total equality, a value of 1 extreme inequality). In other words, inequality in China has now surpassed that in the United States. Today 45% of the world lives on less than two dollars a day. Everywhere we look we see inequality on the rise. There are exceptions, Brazil, India, countries which had far greater inequality than anywhere else, are getting a bit less unequal.
Today contemporary art is for the one per cent by the one percent and of the one percent.

Contemporary art doesn’t exclude
But Let me tell you a few things that I think a few ways that contemporary art does NOT exclude 99%. Personally, I don’t think contemporary art is difficult to understand. Most of it is not much more difficult to understand than a movie or rap video. Some of it is as exciting – Omer Fast film. Some of it even looks like a graphic novel or cartoon. Art is not as complicated as people in the art world like to think it is
Also I don’t think all art excludes 99% of people. There are big figures today for people going to museums and modernist exhibitions – some art only excludes say 75% of people. My point is not that poor people don’t understand art, it’s that the nature of contemporary art today as a social system is what is excluding.
Many of you will be latching on to the verb ‘excludes’. Contemporary art you will say does not exclude anyone – the institutions or the market does. Contemporary Art is free you will be thinking. Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, that is because if they charged for it, it wouldn’t be 1% of went – it would be 0.0000001%. Yes there may be queues for the latest show by Damien Hirst in London and it costs a tenner to get in. But imagine if it cost the same as a show by a rockstar, like Prince or Bowie – $100. How many people would go then?
Some artists participate in this exclusioon – creating inflated luxury objects – the shiny stuff – others don’t. But the point is the 99% don’t experience contemporary art as something purely offered up by artists – for them it is the bigger experience
Once they are inside these exhibitions, the experience often has little to do with art. The big new museums built by Starchitects like Gehry and Herzog and De Meuron are experiences of space not art – thrilling cavernous temples, often offering funfair like experiences on a scale that could not be obtained anywhere else – Carsten Höller’s slides, Murakami’s cartoons, Anish Kapoor’s crazy mirrors. Even if you think that 7% of humanity – a huge half a billion people go to art exhibitions, then I would argue few of them are there for an artistic experience.
In fact it is in the way the art experience is structured now that we can understand exclusion. First the thrill of empty spaces, awe at scale, then a funfair ride … then the exhibitions… Most of us wander round these institutions like serfs in Tsarist Russia, mud-spattered peasants, gazing at over-sized trophies funded by banks and billionaires. Appropriately, the most famous works of art today are actually the ones that carry messages about wealth and exclusion – of which Hirst’s £50m diamond skull is one obvious example. This art offered by the nought-point-one-per-cent for the voyeuristic titillation of the one percent.
Why do we feel that? The art market and its record-breaking prices – that keep on rising and rising, while the 99% get poorer and poorer. Let me introduce you to Lewis’s Law, a bit like Moore’s law. – the more unequal the society, the higher the prices paid for art.
Most of us wander round these institutions like mud-spattered serfs in Tsarist Russia, gazing at over-sized trophies funded by banks and billionaires. Appropriately, the most famous works of art today are actually the ones that carry messages about wealth and exclusion – of which Hirst’s £50m diamond skull is one obvious example. This art is offered by the nought-point-nought-nought-one-per-cent for the voyeuristic titillation of the one percent.
Perhaps, ladies and gentlemen, contemporary art could have profound meanings, or even raise interesting issues in the minds of the all those art lovers who see it. But the puffed-up market has overshadowed all those possibilities with a new almost repulsive meaning, that obliterates all the other subtler ones are could have, used to have – and that meaning is that we are living ever more in a society of emperors and slaves.
And that brings me onto my main point. Contemporary art today does not just exclude the 99%, it actually embodies their exclusion.
All these new art institutions, all these incredible prices paid for works of art, all these spaces so full of art – they are all made possibly economically because of the concentration of wealth in the top one per cent of humanity. The growth of art today is based on the exclusion, economic and social, of the 99%. It is significant that the guy who paid a record price for Warhol’s green car crash in 2007 was a Greek shipping billionaire. Now when I think about the suffering of the Greek people, I think how the art world today is built on exclusion.
That is the tragedy of art today. The more inflated the market, the richer the art world becomes, the more the majority art excluded. We need to reverse that.

Wiederabdruck
Die Rede erschien zuerst online unter http://www.benlewis.tv/artcrit/contemporary-art-excludes-99/ [29.01.2013].

1.) http://www.intelligencesquared.asia/hong-kong-debates/contemporary-art-excludes-the-99-percent.html

]]> What is Contemporary Art? https://whtsnxt.net/003 Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:35 +0000 http://whtsnxt.net/what-is-contemporary-art/ What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentiethcentury artistic movements? The contemporary delineates its border invisibly: no one is proud to be contemporary,” and no one is ashamed. Indeed, the question of where artistic movements have gone seems embedded in this question, if only because “the contemporary” has become a single hegemonic “ism” that absorbs all proposals for others. When there are no longer any artistic movements, it seems that we are all working under the auspices of this singular ism that is deliberately (and literally) not one at all …
Widespread usage of the term “contemporary” seems so self-evident that to further demand a definition of “contemporary art” may be taken as an anachronistic exercise in cataloguing or self-definition. At the same time, it is no coincidence that this is usually the tenor of such large, elusive questions: it is precisely through their apparent self-evidence that they cease to be problematic and begin to exert their influence in hidden ways; and their paradox, their unanswerability begins to constitute a condition of its own, a place where people work.
So it is with the contemporary: a term we know well enough through its use as a de facto standard by museums, which denote their currency through an apparently modest temporal signifier: to be contemporary is to be savvy, reactive, dynamic, aware, timely, in constant motion, aware of fashion. The term has clearly replaced the use of “modern” to describe the art of the day. With this shift, out go the grand narratives and ideals of modernism, replaced by a default, soft consensus on the immanence of the present, the empiricism of now, of what we have directly in front of us, and what they have in front of them over there. But in its application as a de facto standard this watery signifier has through accumulation nevertheless assumed such a scale that it certainly must mean something.
If we pursue it further, however, and try to pin it down, it repeatedly escapes our grasp through a set of evasive maneuvers. And perhaps we can say that the ism that is simultaneously not is its evasive maneuver number one: the summation that does not admit to being critical or projective (in the grand tradition of modernist ideological voices), to denoting an inside and an outside, a potential project, but that is simultaneously there, saying nothing. So why the extra qualifier? Why insert an extra word into “museum of art”? Like any evasive maneuver, this one works by producing a split: between the term’s de facto usage, which momentarily holds your attention by suggesting the obvious parallel with the “current,” with its promise of flexibility and dynamism, while simultaneously building a museum collection along very specific parameters – masking ideology. To follow the self-evidence of the question at hand, we could note the morphological Frank Gehry walls of a spectacular contemporary museum to be in fact made of concrete and steel – their suggestion of formless flexibility, their celebration of the informal, is frozen in some of the heaviest, most expensive, and burdensome institutional public sculpture around. The contemporary suggests movement, yet it does not itself budge.
This contemporary museum is acutely aware of other contemporary museums in other places. It is a node in a network of similar structures, and there is a huge amount of movement between them. Evasive maneuver number two could be the one that shifts your focus to a presumably de-centered field of work: a field of contemporary art that stretches across boundaries, a multi-local field drawing from local practices and embedded local knowledge, the vitality and immanence of many histories in constant simultaneous translation. This is perhaps the contemporary’s most redeeming trait, and we certainly do not miss the old power centers and master narratives.
In many ways, this is an evasive maneuver worth making. And we can even avoid the conservative critique that this horizontal movement cheapens what it encounters, reducing it to spectacle. Certainly the quantity of work placed on display can become an issue, but networks now spread much wider than ever before – much has been made available, and it is up to you to sort through it. The contemporary as a cacophonic mess gives us enormous hope.
But let’s not underestimate how the contemporary art system can atomize with some degree of cohesiveness. True, many peripheries have been mobilized not as peripheries, but as centers in their own right. But, seen from the so-called peripheries and centers alike, does this system really learn, or does it merely engage with its many territories by installing the monolithic prospect of hyperspectacle? If we are indeed aware that something is lost and something is gained in any process of translation, are we as certain that the regime of visibility installed by contemporary art functions by placing various local vernaculars into contact with each other on their own terms (as it promises to do), or is it something like the international biennial circuit, asserting its own language distinct from center and periphery alike?
In this way, the contemporary starts to reveal itself to be something like a glass ceiling, an invisible barrier that seals us together precisely by its very invisibility. We acknowledge one another, individual artists, certain cities, social scenes, a few collective tendencies that seem to arrive more as common interests than social projections, but nothing attains critical mass under any umbrella beyond “the contemporary.” It’s not so different from how we understand capitalism to work, through one-to-one relationships that are seemingly too small-scale to be complicit with anything, masking the hidden ultimatum of an innocuous protocol – if we begin to discern its shape, either it shifts, or we become obsolete: uncontemporary. But then perhaps that would not be such a bad thing …

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: e-f lux journal # 12, January 2010, http://www.e-f lux.com/journal/what-is-contemporary-art-issue-two/ [3.4.2013].

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