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Just as inseparably
as the demand for creativity has been linked with the
idea of the artist since the early 19th century, its
significance and function has become permanently unstable
in postindustrial society. Takeovers on the part of
economic production and management models have disrupted
the exclusive claim to creativity formulated by art
in processes of appropriation, which have also integrated
autonomy, authenticity and liberation in new enterprise
strategies, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have
demonstrated.
The requirement profiles of post-fordist working situations
sound like an echo of criteria that were previously
reserved primarily to artistic practice and the expectations
associated with it, since they include techniques situated
in the field of self-realization, self-management and
freedom, as well as the ability, for instance, to make
paradoxes productive.
Role model functions are accordingly attributed to artists.
Posing the question
of the current social task of educative institutions
in the art field necessarily includes taking the conditions
of affirmative economic instrumentalization into consideration.
Apart from the issue of whether art - or anything at
all - can actually be taught, as it is raised by James
Elkins in his discussion of the task of art ,
the functions of those institutions that go beyond the
further dissemination of a "norm of deviation"
are also a subject of debate. This is a debate that
evolves its profile against the background of an artistic
and cultural practice that insists on social relevance,
and which owes its importance to the special enabling
proximity to the production process, which is inherent
to educational situations.
Expanding on the
approaches of "institutional criticism" from
the late 1960s and the 1970s, beyond the spatial, social
or discursive functions of the institution "academy",
it is primarily its effects that are important. This
applies to a matrix of individualization with its symbolic
and economic utilizations, which are produced and further
disseminated in educational situations. Avoiding and
eluding the naturalizations, hierarchizations and processes
of inclusion and exclusion tied to these situations
presupposes, according to the thesis that follows, a
structure of agency that refuses institutionalization,
which urges spatial, temporal and social contingency,
and which comprehends itself as subject and object in
its reflexive disposition.
The present considerations
focusing on the critical potential of academy education
center around a specific form of project work as practiced
since 1994 at the "Kunstraum ("Art Space")
of the University of Lüneburg" and since 2000 by
the "/D/O/C/K Project Area" of the College
of Graphic Art and Book Art in Leipzig. In both cases
the project work, intended to be both transdisciplinary
and spanning different professions, brings together
artists, scholars and scientists of different disciplines
- art history, cultural and visual studies, sociology,
philosophy and media studies -, professionals in the
art field and students from the respective institutions.
The processual working form in the projects allows for
varying demarcations between tasks, positions and fields
in the different phases, making it possible to topicalize
and reflect on them. Beyond the possible processes of
approximation, but also of rejection between the disciplines
or between art and science, the roles of all participants
are continuously available for disposition and change
several times within a project.
In terms of content,
the work of the KUNSTRAUM and the D/O/C/K Project Area
so far has been organized around themes such as the
definition, formalization and acknowledgement of project-oriented
art, possibilities and situations of self-organized
structures in the cultural field, the significance of
"immaterial" labor in the art and cultural
field, constitutions and transformations of cultural,
professional and institutional identities, the relationship
of art, ecology and sustainability, or opening up archivist
practices beyond the discourse of memory.
What is determinant for the project work in both locations
is a relational understanding of the social field "art"
on the one hand and a relationship between theoretical
and practical activities characterized by a "network
of relationships and transfers" on the other.
As an experimental educational model with an emancipatory
orientation it is intended for testing all contingencies.
Gathering practical experience is not exhausted in recapitulating
and rehearsing established skills and circumstances,
but rather is focused specifically on their potential
for change.
The already latent
risk that the model experiment could be transformed
into an integrated component of the institution, that
it could have more of a stabilizing effect on the institution's
exercise of power, is increased in both Lüneburg and
Leipzig by the fact that the project work being conducted
with this conceptual orientation does not involve singular
events or processes, but is instead meanwhile able to
look back on several years of practice. In order to
avoid the trap of an experiment mutating into a permanent
establishment reinforcing the process of the institutional
appropriation of critical approaches and methods, KUNSTRAUM
and /D/O/C/K Project Area concentrate primarily on hybrid,
process-oriented, transitory, contingent and performative
procedures. These are procedures that, in several respects,
forestall institutional rules and the demands they impose,
especially in their most recent efficiency-oriented,
economicized manifestations as produced by modularization
and continuous evaluation processes: the processuality,
intersections and overlapping of roles and disciplines,
abandoning the semester rhythm, ever new formations
of discursive spaces, the transience of the respectively
collaborating communities, and the performance character
that is always included in the arrangement are some
of the potentially resistive dimensions of the project
work.
In the following, I would like to discuss three of them
in particular, specifically those that deal with overlapping
roles, with the transitory and with performativity.
I.
Within the project
work described here, the role of the teacher -
distributed among several actors - is characterized by a
reflective way of dealing with one's own position within
the charged field that opens up between institutional
responsibility and independent research, between a
hierarchical transference of legitimized knowledge and
collective experimental work. Not unlike the position of
curators, which also involves transference, teachers generally
execute a balancing act seeking to bridge the
differences that Pierre Bourdieu notes between priests
and prophets in "Genesis and Structure of the
Religious Field" (1971). Priests, in this case,
have "a socially acknowledged and institutionalized
capital of religious authority", their duties
consist in establishing order and sometimes maintaining
the symbolic power of the institution, meaning the
church here. The prophets, on the other hand, are
focused on questioning the "conventional
order", producing and disseminating new salvation
goods that can serve to discredit the old ones. In other
words, they meet orthodoxy with heresy. Here too, there
is a possibility of a movement of acceptance that turns
from change into affirmation, as the development of the
struggle for power between priests and church on the one
hand and prophets and sects on the other can result in
the sect becoming church, which is simultaneously fated
to trigger a new reformation.
Applied to the context
of the academy, this applies, on the one hand, to the
mediating role assumed by teachers, in which they pass
on to the students the preconditions for entry into
the field that they have fulfilled themselves, while
assuring their position in this field at the same time
by disregarding these same criteria in their artistic
and/or research practice and questioning the established
school of thought. Caught in this quandary between obligations
to the institution that appoints them and the autonomy
claims of the field, teachers in the art field organize
their work in the intersecting area of administrative
or economic and artistic demands.
In this way, they largely exemplify the problems of
post-industrial working conditions as they are currently
treated in the discourse revolving around the concept
of "governmentality" introduced by Foucault.
The self-technologies through which an "autonomous"
subjectivity that has become a guiding model in society
are linked with state economic objectives are deployed
here.
Based on and simultaneously
deviating from Bourdieu's dichotomous model, a scope
of action furnished with critical perspectives can be
determined for teachers in attitudes and procedures,
with which they place themselves neither on the side
of the priests nor of the prophets, but instead integrate
the relationship between both roles in activities of
researching and experimenting. Alternately assuming
tasks, practices and attributions of both positions
in a mode of critical reflection means locating oneself
in a third - transitory, flexible and hybrid - position,
of which the characteristics are respectively redefined
in carrying out one's own practice.
II.
This third position
of the teachers is supported by being embedded in
collective working processes that are founded on the
formation of temporary communities. Instead of forming
fixed groups for working on one or even several projects,
the association and cooperation takes place respectively
because of changed questions and corresponding interests.
Situations and discourses both internal and external to
the academy can be the starting point for
project-specific participation, for which formats,
methods and goals first develop in the course of working
together. Here the temporary character of the
association guarantees both the continuation of an
individual practice of the single participants and the
projective "proposal" character that Miwon
Kwon posits as criterion for a successful "community-based
art" - a projective "proposal" character,
through which the collective work develops its potential
to shape existing social, economic or institutional
relationships and thus also its critical potential.
With these characteristics,
both KUNSTRAUM and the D/O/C/K Project Area see themselves
as socially and discursively constituted spaces without
a necessarily fixed location. These are spaces, for
which Foucault's - in several respects relatively unspecific
- definition of "heterotopia" has a certain
relevance, although it is a relevance that is expanded
by the strategy of the performative: by means of a shifting
re-performance of circumstances and conditions in the
cultural field, both spaces develop their potential
as counter-placement and counterbalance, "in which
the real places of culture are simultaneously represented,
contested and turned".
III.
Beyond the
characteristics already mentioned, the performative
qualities of the project work are ultimately rooted in
the inclusion of a link to practicing and performing
procedures. When themes such as self-organization,
networking, self-positioning or a concept of artistic
work were the focal point of this kind of project work,
they were not only the subject matter of historical or
theoretical investigation and treatment, but also
developed into a part of the respectively individual
practice as the work was conducted. In the course of the
collaborative work, all the participants - students,
teachers and invited guests - were equally integrated in
processes such as that of networking as well as in
procedures and strategies of a self-positioning in the
field. On the basis of a critical analysis of the
conditions and circumstances of these kinds of
activities, they were staged using exhibitions,
conferences or video in such a way that they were
actuated and shifted in repetition, in Judith Butler's
sense,
by the participants themselves. The fact that they were
capable of being performed demonstrated that the
conditions and circumstances were not given, but
contingent and capable of being shaped; the performance
carried out the shaping. The political potential of the
project work described is inherent in this interplay of
imitative proximity and theatrical distance, which is an
integral component of it. Not least of all, this
political potential spotlights the quandary of teaching,
in order to break with its naturalizations.
Translated by
Aileen Derieg
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