9th Bucharest Biennale
‘Handfuls thrown into air and scattered over earth’,
Curatorial Workshop
| 23-26 June 2020 |
But rationalism has no identifiable content and reason no recognizable agenda over and above the principles of the party that happens to have appropriated its name. All it does now is to lend class to the general drive towards monotony. It is time to disengage Reason from this drive and, as it has been thoroughly compromised by the association, to bid it farewell.
What I have told so far is one side of the story: many things were achieved despite Reason, not with its help. The other side is that Reason did leave its mark. It distorted the achievements, stretched beyond their limits, and is therefore at least in part responsible for the excesses that are being propagated under its name. My arguments in the following essays will deal with the false consciousness created by the presence of this distorting agency.
Feyerabend, Paul (1987) Farewell to Reason, Verso. p. 13
The above quote, taken from the introduction to Paul Feyerabend’s (1987) Farewell to Reason, may be used to suggest something of what may be at stake in the exhibitionary heading “Farewell to Research.” For two decades now there has been a high profile international project and debate with respect to forging a practice of research that is at one and the same time a practice of art: artistic research. It is normal stuff, even if it still may be described as “a peculiar emphasis—placed for quite some time, e.g. in curatorial statements and the self-descriptions of art institutions—on notions such as ‘research’ and ‘knowledge production.'”(Tom Holert, ‘Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics’)
The Biennale’s heading is glossed by questioning the general success of the proposition that artistic practice may be explicitly framed as a matter of enquiry, and the particular success that this proposition has had within the academy. Specifying art practice as a matter of formally recognized enquiry, is now as well-established a model for framing the nature, purpose and operation of artistic practice as that of describing artistic practice as a matter of personal expression, of critical negation, of avant-gardist provocation, of formal experimentation, of exploration of media specificity, of social activism, of luxury-goods production, or of aesthetic invention. This is a development that can be narrated with reference to the Bologna process, or to the “knowledge economy”, or to regimes of extraction and “immaterial labour,” or to the immanent tendencies within conceptual and post-conceptual art practice, or to the incorporation of the art academies within university sector, or to the neoliberal rhetoric of creativity, or to some admixture of these.
For some players involved in building occasions, forging temporary infrastructures, and establishing resources for enquiries that proceed in artistic practice, there is/was found here a hope for critical opening: a space for interruption to business as usual. Some have expressed the belief that such research practices might engender a transformation of the public art school and a renegotiation of the social contract of higher arts education. This project appeared to some as the possibility to get beyond the neoliberal managerial reduction of education to employability, and of research to R&D. For others, it appeared also as a means to get beyond the routines of reproducing the liberal middle-class entitlement of the artist, and the tired practices of shock entrepreneurs and of performers of a fashionable criticality voided of actual praxis. For others this project of enabling artistic research became a site for arguing art’s exceptionalism. Yet more and other desires are presumably working here also.
Whatever the fate of such aspirations, and it would seem too early to decide upon such things, the exhibition proposition of a “Farewell to Research” asks: “Could a farewell to such research produce novel forms of articulation while proceeding from the perspective of visual art? Could we formulate a proposition based on a recomposition of three conceptual spaces (creative practice, artistic thinking, curatorial strategies) that intersect when artistic research takes place?” It seems then that a reversal or negation or twisting of institutional investment is proposed as the way to make good on the promise of art as enquiry.
There seem to be resonances here with Feyerabend’s ambivalent valuations of ‘science’ and ‘Science.’ This may be seen in the tension between an affirmed research that generates “novel forms of articulation” and proceeds by a “recomposition” of “creative practice, artistic thinking, curatorial strategies,” on the one hand, and an “academicized” Research, on the other hand.
There is another version of this ambivalence, cast explicitly in terms of wage labour, by Harney and Moten:
Realizing that you have to supervise to teach for money … can then lead to two forms of collective organization. We can take from the job our money and do something else altogether, or we can work to overturn a system that chains study to supervision because only this overturning is going to break that line. And at a certain point, since any exodus both goes nowhere and undermines what it leaves, these two forms of organizing come together. Any other approach is just waiting around to be offered “supervisor of the month” or a “Distinguished Teaching Award.”
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. 2019. “Plantocracy or Communism.” In M. Hlavajova and W. Maas (eds.) Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent. Utrecht / Cambridge, MA: BAK/MIT Press. p. 55.
It may give us pause to see the choice to be made cast as that between a collective project that goes nowhere, yet undermines where it is; and a winsome longing for the individualized prize, awarded for internalizing the values of that institution where one has found oneself.
exhibition.school 