eipcp
european institute for progressive cultural policies
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Rethinking Art as Experience Conference Part One, 25 and 26 November 2005 Part Two, 17 and 18 March 2006 In recent years several projects developed at the museum have sought to propose new ways in which art can exist in the public sphere. Recent examples include the exhibition "How do we want to be governed" (MACBA 22 September - 7 November 2004), which employed a museological method based on articulating artistic work and social dynamics. To this end, the curator´s work involved establishing dialogues with different groups in the city. In this way, the exhibition continued the research carried out by the museum over the last few years into ways of articulating artistic processes, social sciences and political activity. In Autumn 2004, a new presentation of the collection opened at the museum under the generic title of "Relational Poetics", proposing reflection based on the writings by Edouard Glissant about the poetic of the relation as a critique or alternative to an essentialist idea of cultural identity. This line of work continues with the Michael Asher exhibition (2006), amongst other activities. Relationality is a concept that enables us to intervene controversially in the debate on art institutions and their audiences, restoring political density to a concept used to defend a soft pseudo-articulation of the artistic and the social that creates a simulation of participation by trivialising and making a spectacle of the concept of antagonism as constitutive of the social. But relationality is not only a debate about the social restricted to the museum field, but is an epistemological question that cannot be dissociated from critical discourses of the different forms of essentialism. As Leo Bersani explains, "notions of social relationality have, at least since Descartes, been determined by the privileging of epistemological concerns over questions about the nature of being. Following Heidegger and his critique of Cartesian epistemology, we would reverse this priority, although by being we of course do not mean an ontological essence or entity, but rather something like a principle of universal connectedness. A modern reflection on being must be aware of itself not as an approximation of metaphysical truth; rather, the ontology most congenial to an age of information is one that identifies being as relationality, as the principle of connectedness assumed by all technologies of transmission, as well as by the social imaginary that can refract or violate it". Bersani defines the relational subject as constituted by and as subject positions, emptying the opposition between subject and object of meaning. Art, Bersani goes on, "illuminates relationality by temporarily and heuristically immobilising relations". From the standpoint of the museum, we understand the relational as a space for art that temporarily suspends institutional autonomy and explores new forms of interaction with the social. Although without aiming to overexpose this process without predetermiting a regime of visibility. We understand the museum as a space for this experimentation, not only, nor principally, to exhibit it. We seek ways in which art can make a meaningful contribution, through its specific nature, to multiplying public spheres. And this process can be defined in terms of relations between different subjects, different forms, different spaces. But it also seemed necessary to us to recuperate the relational debate from the aristocratic ghetto of the "relational aesthetic" of Nicolas Bourriaud and the Palais de Tokyo, which seems to us a perverse reification of both political activism and the new Post-Fordist forms of immaterial production. As Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri explain, the transition to Post-Fordist capitalism implies the emergence of immaterial and cognitive work as a new productive paradigm in which the affective, the communicative and the relational become the instruments or technologies of the production process. Capitalism penetrates subjectivity and puts it to work, and in this way the traditional modern idea of culture and art as an autonomous sphere, alien to instrumental reason, enters into irreversible crisis. Bourriaud´s "relational aesthetic" seems to us to correspond to a falsely open idea of the museum, which is in fact regressive and immobilist to the extent that it "aestheticises" the immaterial and communicative paradigm and the social and creative processes implicit to them, by imposing regime of pure visibility that interrupts its effectiveness and freezes and fetishises them. It appears necessary to us here to propose another relationality and return to John Dewey´s reflection on "art as experience" in 1934: "the task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognised to constitute experience". And also to revive a whole, broad experimental tradition in 20th-century art that explored meaningful methods of restoring forms of subjective appropriation of artistic processes, going beyond institutional over-determination and, therefore, capable of reviving art´s transforming potential within the broadest possible frame. PROGRAMME Conference Part One, 25 and 26 November 2005 Friday, 25 November: Relational poetics. Spectators of worlds of forms and relations. Visibility and relationality. Visibility, transparency and opacity. Art and Relationality. Saturday, 26 November: Public art, institutional critique and relational art. After institutional critique. Notions of community. Building of institutional networks or network institutions. With bernard blistene, leo bersani, kaja silverman, helmut draxler, jesus carrillo, whw, alexander alberro and beatrice von bismarck Part One, 23 - 26 November 2005 23 and 24 November 2005 Saturday, 26 November. Transformations of Institutional Spaces.
Presented by Jesús Carrillo |
