First Installation: 09.05.2000 Last update: 09.05.2000
INVITATION
We hardly seem to notice how much discourses which accompany artistic practices, like to be guided by simple dichotomies. It has become a familiar mannerism to speak and write in the terms of "East and West", of "before and after" with respect to the East, of "modern and post-modern" with respect to both East and West. Differences certainly exist: but are they dichotomic? Even if we grant dichotomy its rhetorical value of a convenient starting point, one still wonders why discourses about artistic practices should be unable to invent their own exordial topoi, and feel the need to borrow them from other discourses in political science, in historiography, in philosophy. What could be the relation between those two features: conceptual dualism and discursive parasitism?
Dichotomies we have listed, and one could think of more ("mainstream/alternative", "dominant/subaltern"), divide the discursive universe into two non-symmetric domains: into the horizon from where a discourse is being proffered, and into its specific exterior. Without borrowing, discourses accompanying artistic practices seem to be unable to situate themselves, that is, to think themselves. They are incapable of reflexivity, unless they hook themselves to some other discourse. They are expelled to foreign discursive horizons, and pushed to seek elsewhere a signifier which they constitutively lack: the signifier of subjectivation. Could there be a more candid recognition that a discourse cannot be self-sufficient? Could there be a simpler way to expose the deaf mechanism of subjectivation?
We can assume that the force which drives our discourses about "the art" towards this perspicacity, comes from the practice they are "about". So even before restoring their pretext, before seizing upon their inspiration, even before reaching out towards their target, our discourses "about the art" are pushed, by their very pretext, inspiration, and target, to grab for a clutch which will anchor them in a permanent alibi, and make them miss their purport. Unwillingly, they gain subjectivity, and lose what they will.
Why? - Lessing already exposed it at the dawn of the modern notion of the "art". He, too, parasitically borrowed his concepts, and he, too, clinched them into a dichotomy: Mahlerei und Poesie, space and time - representation and discourse. At the very beginning, modern discourse on art localises itself in the terms of this radical dichotomy "discourse/representation", and resigns itself never to reach its other. In its Lessingian moment, the modern discourse relegates the art towards the distant spheres of representation. But Lessing also tells us what "the art of the art" is: it is precisely to transcend the immanent limitations of the two domains, for the artistic bravura consists in rendering time in space, movement in representation, and space in time, Gemaelde in discourse. The art, Lessing tells us, consists in breaking through a specific symbolic prohibition.
In our own vocabulary, we would now say that "the art" articulates symbolic registers frozen in counter-position, in dichotomy, maybe torn by irreducible contradiction. We would suggest that "the art" may be the invention by which modern societies supplement to their lack of what in other places, in other times, was practised as shamanism. Has not Levi-Strauss contended that the shaman eases the tension among irremediably opposed and mutually irreducible symbolic registers, that he provides the fleeting effect of totality, the necessary, although never accomplished, condition of human co-existence?
Our discourses on art do not tell us much about their object; paradoxically, they rather re-present its efficacy. They enact the transversal function of the art in the minimalist form of a dualism. They freeze the artistic process in the mechanism of subjectivation. Under the pretext of aesthetics, they engage in a sort of meta-ethical exercise: for the dimension where the artistic process performs its "reconciliatory" function, is subjectively experienced as a domain where symbolic systems clash, where the human being confronts impossible choices - it is, in short, the locus of the subject.
We should therefore probably reverse our usual understanding of the relation between artistic practices and practices which accompany them. We have grown used to the notion that "the art" could not survive without all those institutions and practices that form its vivid paraphernalia. This image may well participate to a spontaneous social censorship which dissimulates a much more poignant reality. It may well be that institutions, practices, individuals are drawn towards the ambiguous "reconciliatory" effects of artistic practices in a nostalgic search of an ever lost, fundamentally utopian totality - and they are at the same time repelled from these effects because artistic practices present the totality as an illusion, as a recontre manquee, or maybe as a dangerous self-delusion.
This view: that all those many, heterogeneous, noisy activities and institutions which press themselves around artistic practices, lend some sort of "support" to the "art" - feeds on the defunct romantic ideology of the "a-social nature of the art". Presumably, the "art" needs to be tamed, domesticated - presented and represented, explained and interpreted. Should we then conclude to some sort of an immanent failure of the artistic project? For why should it otherwise need this secondary elaboration, this re-presentation of representation, repetition of its effect, whatever the effect might be? A simple, but insistent feature should warn us against fast and easy judgements: practices "about" the arts are just as irreducible to each other as they are irreducible to artistic practices and to their effects. What is more: even within the same "genre", individual critical or curatorial or interpretive practices are often mutually exclusive, and always irreducible to each other.
For quite some time now, it has become impossible to pretend that a "work of art" exists somewhere in its presumed innocence: the filters, ecrans, its supplements are always already part of it. We should now add an additional complication: even among themselves, these "supplements" do not really supplement each other. Our agonistic civilisation does not really allow for shamanistic effects.
This is the locus where we are inviting our guests. We have situated our meeting at the intersection of artistic practices, of "supplementary" practices and of theoretical practices. We have arranged a place where words, things, and eventually people can meet each other: we are inviting you to come and try it out.
The event will embrace dimensions: 1. artistic practices; 2. critical and aristic practices; 3. and theoretical practices. It will proceed in three phases: it will open with the topic "Artistic practices in historical context"; it will close with the topic "Historical context in artistic practices"; and, in between, "Practices and contexts". It is in this median phase that the symposium will take place.
We invite you to the symposium and ask you to prepare a written contribution. Each participant will be expected to present her or his contribution in a quarter of an hour; the discussion which will follow will be considered part of the contribution. Your written text will be transformed into a pre-text by your oral presentation, and your introductory will open towards a dialogic network produced on the spot. We hope for many surprises.
