TALKS,
PAMPHLETS (COMMENTARIES, REFLECTIONS…)
Jože
Barši
1
I
seriously doubt the possibility of any major changes occurring at the
level of the institution. I see the institution as a more or less
unfavorable framework for the concrete actions of individuals. And
such actions are the responsibility of either the students or the
teachers. After all, they are the people that, apart from the
administration and other non-faculty staff, constitute the academy.
This is why I find all the seemingly minor differences so important –
the otherness that occurs within formalized procedures as well as
outside them.
A
thing that seems particularly important is “connecting” these
differences. In the beginning, there is similarity, which is helpful;
in the stages that follow, however, there is the coexistence of
conflicting positions which, in their non-unifying function, lead to
rethinking. Let me stress: the idea is not, and should never be, to
impose one approach, one formalization, one visualization. In the end
it always turns out that the coexistence of differences makes
otherness possible. Or in other words: it is important to take a
militant stand on one’s beliefs without losing sight of the fact
that we are safe only when thinking about and standing up for the
safety of the one taking the opposite position. This does not mean
relativizing everything or, as I said, imposing a single approach.
Far from it – it means, above all, an even stronger
conceptualization of diverse territories.
What
is the thing I call militancy of thought, what is it that I am after?
The coexistence of thought, of course. Coexistence with what? The
point here is that thought is material, as material as any other
material encountered at our institution. We could say: an idea is not
a concept but an operation, an act that works in the material world,
and as such, an act of radical desublimation – not of exaltation,
not of transfixion, but of affirmation. Or more precisely, it is the
emptiness/nothing/nonsense/ problem that subsequently affirms the
possibility of emancipation.
To
sum up the words of Rado Riha: “An idea is an object of a special
kind, and as such non-designed, it is a token of the object’s
artificiality and its ontological insecurity, which is a mark of
still-openness.
“This
is not about Kant’s idea of transforming the world in the manner of
the relation theory—practice or contemplation—operation. Far from
it. It is about thought being an object among other objects, not
theory that affects practice as a consequence, but an object sharing
the fate of all other objects in the world.
“The
question is thus not ‘What is an idea?’ but ‘What does an idea
do in the world?’. Thought is ‘after something’. Of course,
it’s not after forceful realization – beware of your wishes
coming true; what is important is that thought establishes a distance
to itself. That it wants something, that it ‘is after’ something,
but that it adds another thought act to this ‘wanting’. There is
a thing that makes one think, there is a source of thought, of
thought about something, and as such the thought is independent of
its source, it thinks the thought itself. It is a presupposition of
pure thought which in operation produces its materiality, and as such
works in the real world, and in its working produces the interference
that is not evolutionary.”3
An example of this thing, or if you will, of good work functioning in
the world, is that it makes or forces us to think.
2
Talk
on the rounds of the Academy: fall semester, January 2011
Last
year I spoke about the thought that, in the act of thinking, produces
its materiality; this semester was dedicated to the problem of the
representation of this thought. To put it differently: the
discussions were about the relation formal—informal. Our point of
departure was Charles Harrison’s texts.
Sculpture
retrograding to the traditional model is a matter of ignorance and
economy. A thing that causes concern is that practice – any
artistic practice – does not have the power to resist having its
fate dictated by sponsors, no matter how insignificant. If art
possessed real social and economic power, we wouldn’t even think
about reverting to traditional models. The obvious regression of,
say, public sculpture in Slovenia would not, in all likelihood, even
be possible in this form. Of course, the problem – or part of the
problem – is our saying nothing. This is also the topic of our
discussions this year: how historically achieved developments in
modernism have again, obviously, been lost4,
forgotten; developments that, in my view at least, form the basis of
contemporary art practices. Of course, I am not referring to early or
high modernism, but to the efforts that those who opposed Greenberg
and Fried invested in minimalist and post-minimalist practices. We
covered the lessons dealing with the late 1960s, trying to bring the
antiformalist approaches of the time into relation with present-day
developments. Of course, the point is not to uncritically accept or
glorify or mystify practices concurrent with high modernism, but to
reflect on them, comment on them, critically address them. To
research, review, and discuss them with the aim of stimulating
reflection on contemporary artistic practices.
The
point is also not the autonomy of art or fetishizing it; as soon as
art turns into a commodity, it becomes dogmatic and decadent.
Autonomy in artistic practices must always be relative; that is, open
to criticism, to the “reality” of its environment, and to the
changes that new circumstances bring. Furthermore, the relativeness
of this autonomy must be checked and rechecked, put into the context
of a world of changing circumstances, that is to say, the history we
live and create. Because, if we were to allow the autonomy of art to
become fixed, that would entail also accepting some conventions and
protocols of what artistic practices should be like. Now, obviously,
this is something that cannot be completely avoided at a school like
ours, but what I would like to stress is this reverse side of art,
which speaks of that which is (as yet) not art, not part of the
professional field or part of what experts/connoisseurs recognize as
art(works).
3
Talk
at the opening of the Utopian
Seminar exhibition
at the Museum of Architecture and Design: spring semester, June 2011
Speeches
at exhibition openings are expected to be short, just a few words
about the works and a thanks to all the people involved.
Nevertheless, I’d like to take this opportunity and actually say
something. My “say” will refer to a whole year’s worth of work
and reflections that we – teachers and students – have fairly
successfully shared.
I
won’t talk about individual works; after all, these are still
student works, done, in terms of time and space, at the Academy of
Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. I find it important to talk about
how the year-long project evolved and what it triggered. What effect
it had, and how this in turn affected the agents of the community, or
better, the agents of the Utopians collective. Unlike historical
utopias, our project was not the result of the thoughts of one person
and his or her dissatisfaction with the state of society. Our
experiment was particularly demanding in that it involved a great
number of people, students and faculty. The procedures, protocols,
methods, and practices of teaching changed to the extent we accepted
the idea of equality of intelligences. What this means is simply that
we do not enter the familiar positions of knowing, but depart from
the fact that we are equal in our capacities for learning and that we
do not enter the process as a tabula rasa, but bring the whole range
of our previous knowledge, learning, and opinions to it.
If
a community is a group of different people recognized as equal, a
collective must be goal-oriented to be efficient in its work; think,
for instance, of a business venture. The paradox inherent in this
relationship is apparent already in the definitions: a community as a
group of individuals and a collective as a venture of orientation
that enables efficiency. This relation must exist not only between
individuals, but also between individual professional fields. Our
project involved the participation of students of visual
communication, industrial design, sculpture, painting, and their
professors. Collectives came together, disintegrated, fell apart, got
along, did not get along, and reassembled. Regardless of all the
drama and the passivity involved, I find this mixing, transferring
and also quitting crucial. This effort invested in being together,
despite the different positions of departure in terms of profession,
personality, and opinion, is crucial. Being part of a community is
easy – as long as one abides by the rules of the game. The problem
arises when a community must act as a collective working toward a
common goal. This makes the game more complicated. The militancy of
individuality, one’s thought or idea must be defended, but in a way
that preserves the dignity of the thought of another, which
necessarily entails defetishizing one’s own professional field and
in no way disparaging any professional point of view. Our aim was not
to arrive at a consensus on what art and design are, or a consensus
about a correct formalization of contents. A creative collective is
not consensual; it is a space that ensures and enables constructive
disagreements, differences, and divergences between practices. It is
a coexistence of conflicting positions, which does not entail
relativizing everything; on the contrary, through disagreement
individual positions are reactivated, mobilized, made topical, and
reconsidered. This means that individual practices are not
reconciled, there is no conclusion, but a dynamic relation that
reconfigures the sensuous experience over and over. At the same time
defetishizing individual practices enables new formal freedom.
The
procedures of formalizing are not stipulated, but open in the process
of the operativeness of a (still) working idea; in this they differ
from, for instance, fixed concepts or familiar definitions. This is
where the collective is so important, even if it consists of only one
school, one institution, one task group, or as few as just two
people. Education or learning is not just accumulation of empirical
knowledge in solitude, between a book and a student, far from that:
learning is the mixing of bodies that enables encounters, and as a
consequence, also discord, conflicts that can turn out to be
essential for dismantling old views and introducing new ones. A
school is a space of possible interactions between a teacher and
students, a teacher and a single student, or students amongst
themselves. The latter is particularly important in an art school. To
observe what the others are doing, compare it with one’s own work,
or confront those surrounding one with commentaries, questions,
skepticism, or justifications; to embrace such encounters with an
open mind. On this subject Deleuze offers that thinking is an
encounter and it is this encounter that is making us think.5
An encounter is always an encounter with something unrecognizable
that arouses interest – that curiosity innate to many animals and
to children, though subsequently often suppressed in the dogmatic
thought processes enforced by institutions.
4
Talk
on the rounds of the ALUO: fall semester, Affirmation
and Sense,
January 2012
As
I have often said in the past, making the transition from tasks
assigned by a professor or the study program to more independent work
that is to culminate in a diploma work is extremely difficult for
students. This year I have decided to take a different approach. I
have spent far less time dealing directly with specific student works
and focused more on teaching from the sidelines as it were. Two
notions took center stage: affirmation
and sense.
I spoke about them at Friday lectures throughout the semester.
Starting
something that will eventually evolve into one’s artistic practice
means starting to “think for oneself”. Learning in this case is
not just empirical mediation between ignorance and knowledge, but
much more than that. One’s entire body is involved in the learning
processes, the whole scope of sensation and thinking. We could put it
this way: knowledge is not accumulated dogmatic principles of
knowing; rather, learning is thinking beyond thinking. Here “beyond”
means the space beyond empirical knowledge, beyond the familiar and
prescribed representation.
This
“beyond” is not the realm of some childish imagination. I
understand imagination in terms of the effort to arrive at thought,
to arrive at something that matters to us and that for this reason
makes sense to us. Of course, it is necessary to be aware of the
conditions of defining sense that only originates in an environment
free of sense and therefore floating in the indefiniteness of
senselessness. Sense is an event that happens or does not happen; it
is not fixed, but rather a dimension. This does not mean that we
cannot think about the sense of doing something. It is very important
that students are aware of the paradoxes of sense and senselessness
and operate with them. A thought that is contaminated with sense from
the start can only produce sterility, ineffectiveness and dogma.
Sense is uncompromised only when it comes close to a problem. A
problem is closer to unformalized sensation than the linear process
of “rational” thought. Summing it up very briefly we could say:
sense = a problem. The questioning, deliberating, fantasizing
triggered by a problem is what establishes the possibility of some
inner logic, and thus, the sense of a solution.
A
thing that really matters to a person is what has sense for them. It
is the subject’s encounter with a difficulty, a disruption, an
irritation that causes a problem. Or: the reality of a problem is not
restricted to familiar empirical knowledge but is closer to some
ignorance, to not-knowing; this not
is only a negation to the extent that the solution is as yet unknown.
It is operative in being the starting force: “it’s necessary to
start”, or “something bothers me”, or “I want to do something
differently”. The affirmation that replaces the not
then
becomes the driving force of thought and related practice.
Affirmation is thus some kind of premonition… a premonition of a
solution? Premonition speaks of the fact that the operation
“problem–idea” is unconscious, outside empirical knowledge,
outside conscious thought, and non-representational. And only as such
it enables a student to work independently as an artist, which is,
after all, our goal at our institution.
5
Why
the need to repeat? Panel discussion at the opening of the exhibition
The
Present and Presence – Repetition 2,
October 2012
We
repeat to memorize, to remember, or to do something again or over.
Maybe to pass an exam or finish school. In this sense, repetition
relates to school and learning. We can repeat something once, twice,
or over and over again. Repetition is often indicated with numbers –
thus there is the 1st
U3, the 2nd
U3, etc. Sometimes numerals only extend so far; the second U3 is not
only the 2nd
U3, but to a much greater extent Weibel’s U3, where as the curator
of the 2nd
U3, Peter Weibel stirred up the Slovenian art scene with his
selection and conceptual framework. Judging from the reactions,
something similar happened again this year at the Museum of
Architecture and Design’s biennial BIO 23 – “Weibel happened to
designers”, as my colleague Žiga Kariž put it. Anyway, both these
cases show that there are repetitions and then there are repetitions.
There are repetitions that have, in addition to an ordinal numeral,
also a name to distinguish them from their predecessors. Such
repetitions are not meant to make us remember, but rather to push
their predecessors into oblivion. What is at focus is the idea of a
different view, which in the form of difference affirms
reconsiderations of a given theme.
Affirmation
is related to sense, although it is born in the realm of uncertainty,
apparent impossibility or ignorance. A child learning to walk does
not repeat falling in order to learn to fall better; the child
repeats falls in order to eventually learn to walk. This is what I
find essential about repetition. This is how I see Ader’s falls,6
which he repeated until, in his last project, he fell for the last
time, figuratively speaking, or learned to walk, although he lost his
life in the process. But that was the point of his repetitions. To
repeat not because of falling; repeating the falling is just a step
toward something else. Repetition is thus not something new for the
sake of novelty, but a density of differences that affirms thought
and, eventually, learning.
In
learning, virtually everything counts and everything can appear in an
endless number of possible constellations. Everything counts, but not
in the sense of counting that interests bankers, economists, the
administration; everything counts in terms of precision. Every little
detail, no matter how small, can change the context and the content
of the entire constellation when appearing in a new place. And if
everything counts, the need to be extremely precise is all the more
binding.
On
the other hand, “everything counts” does not mean that this
refers to accumulating empirical knowledge or dogmas taught at
school. Far from that, “everything counts” includes the whole
range of diversity of sensation. Let’s recall the process of a
child learning to walk. The entire body is involved in this, the
whole scope of feeling and thinking. One must use all of one’s
imagination in order to learn, and this I understand as the effort
invested in arriving at a thought, in arriving at something that
matters to us and that makes sense to us because of that. At the same
time this “at” in the phrase “arrive at thought” refers to
the space before thought, not non-thought, but the fullness, the
intensity of feeling, the excitement that will lead us to the point
where we are forced into thinking.
However,
thinking does not come easily, naturally; there is nothing natural
about thinking. Thinking is closer to an intrusion than honest hard
work. It is the fruit of the encounter between necessity and thought.
To think does not mean “I think” but rather “something is
forcing me to think”, or more precisely, “the thought itself is
forcing me to think” – it is stuck in my mind; I am probably or
certainly thinking even when it seems I am not thinking. We see
evidence of this in the solutions that come to us in a flash,
appearing out of nowhere, as if the thought had resolved itself
without any conscious or rational effort on our part – and it
probably has.
A
prerequisite for thinking to start is an intense encounter manifested
by the perception of something – our noticing something.
Encountering, as sentient beings, something outside us triggers
thinking or makes us think. In short: from sentient to self; but it
is not “I” who thinks, it is this operation “from–to” which
triggers the process in us. A thought is an intrusion, an invasion of
something in us; we do not start thinking, it is this density, this
intensity of what we feel that excites us, forcing us to formulate a
problem, and thought is triggered in us.
At
the same time we need to be aware that the sense of an operation only
originates in an environment free of sense and thus suspended in the
indefiniteness of senselessness. Sense is an idea; here, thought is
not reduced to sense, sense originates and is structured only inside
the process of thinking. Senselessness is thus a building block of
sense and the purpose of thought. This is the core problem of the
politics now in power: it desperately wants a university that would
produce knowledge directly applicable in industry and business. Art,
as well as most humanities, is acutely aware of the conditions
determining sense: they only originate in an environment free of
sense and thus floating in the indefiniteness of senselessness. I
like to use the metaphor of a wild meadow: we water it without
knowing where and what will bloom and show up different from the
rest. The point of sense is not some predetermined purpose;
university should be free of seeking immediate effectiveness. Sense
only appears when a problem has been resolved. And a problem is a
premonition of something, a certain particularity, disjointedness
that creates the possibility of some inner logic and sense of a
solution only in the processes of solving a problem.
The
operativeness of such activities (including art) is thus not on the
side of direct effect, like it is for politics; it is operativeness
in this indeterminateness that enables daydreaming or fantasizing.
Fantasizing sums up the difference between the operation of thought
and the emptiness of thought or nothing that is part of artistic
activity. Art work constructs an empty space that makes fantasizing
possible, which is not an operative thought but tries to provide
meanings ranging from a not-quite-determined space of nothing, minor
flashes of fantasy, daydreaming, and, eventually, thought that has
the capacity to become operative and thus operate in the world. Here,
the operativeness of thought is something different than the
operativeness of art. The latter is on the side of constructing empty
space; removing templates, educational patterns and quotes allows
something to flow into the empty space. The content of the flow
cannot be controlled; it is a matter of thought. Let me repeat: the
thing of art, or rather, the operation of art is nothing; if you
will, art is nothingness. This nothingness, which also implies
worthlessness, is the reverse side of good art, of work that
functions, in its process and in its structure, as a logical machine
(it must be thus). On the other hand, the idea of nothingness (in the
sense of worthlessness) relates to an object that is unrecognized,
non-designed, formally open, and ontologically uncertain, which makes
fantasizing possible.
In
the final analysis, such reflections cover both sides of this unusual
definition of an artwork, following, on the one hand, its inner
logic, and on the other containing an element of formal or some other
uncertainty that enables the still-openness of the work and pertains
to the field of an idea that is still alive and operative. The sense
of repetition can thus be found in the field of action – or in the
field of the still-openness, vitality and operativeness of an idea.
1
At the end of each term, professors at the
academy make a round of the studios pertaining to individual years.
2
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana.
3
Notes taken at a lecture delivered by philosopher Rado Riha at the
Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the
academic year 2009/10.
4
I am referring to the developments, movements and practices that
occurred in the time of modernism, but did not belong to the
practices of painting or sculpture in the way described by the
theoretician of modernism, C. Greenberg and his followers.
5
Gilles Deleuze, Razlika in ponavljanje[Difference and
Repetition] (Ljubljana: Filozofski inštitut, 2011) 230.
6
Bas Jan Ader (1942 – 1975), Dutch artist; much of his practice
involved fallings.
Translated by Tamara Soban
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