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Staged
knowledge
Two
paradigms for the aesthetic appropriation of cultural discourses:
Gitte Villesen and Cerith Wyn Evans
by Daniel Pies
Which relationships do contemporary aesthetic practices have to
the discursive and social orders of knowledge? Do they merely duplicate
these, or do they transform and transcend them by providing alternative
models of organization? Which forms of appropriating knowledge do
current aesthetic production practices establish? When these are
compared with academic procedures for producing knowledge, do gulfs
open up and critical differences emerge? Or is the observed proximity
to these academic procedures more a gesture of legitimation serving
the discursive justification of the artists' own work? How binding
are the relationships they maintain with discursive orders of knowledge?
Speculative constellations
The question of the relationship between aesthetic and discursive
orders of knowledge is posed directly by a number of artistic practices
that seek a closeness with academic forms of knowledge production
both on a thematic as well as on a methodological level. In the
past few years a type of critical artistic practice has become increasingly
common that turns its attention away from context-reflexive working
strategies based on research and toward a speculative reconstruction
of social horizons. In actual case studies, artists such as Gitte
Villesen, Dorit Margreiter, Hito Steyerl and Sean Snyder, for example,
use diverse media to draft specific phenomenologies of the political,
the relation of which to the transdisciplinary project of Cultural
Studies and its various variations is hard to miss.
These practices prove productive, however, by virtue of the fact
that, despite similar analytical and political interests, they manage
to transcend the mode of mere illustration of available discourses
on cultural theory and to explore alternative forms of knowledge
organization, which break with the order applied in their discursive
sister fields. The discursive logic of argumentation is countered
here by the structuring of a speculative constellation. This constellation
does not endeavor to bind or fix its elements in the form of a linear
discourse and within a framing perspective. Rather, a formal coherence
is generated by means of spatial ensembles and disjunctive montages
that preserves the heterogeneity and with it the speculative potential
of the material presented.(1)
Exemplary for this type of practice is Gitte Villesen's installation
"The Building, the Bikeshop, Andy's Furniture" (2001),
last seen in the exhibition "Berlin North" at the Hamburg
Bahnhof.(2) The object of the piece is the Creative Re-Use Warehouse,
a large building complex in Chicago, which artist Dan Peterman purchased
a few years ago and which now houses studios, small workshops, a
kitchen and various community projects. Villesen reconstructs this
social landscape via two photo collages and a video installation.
The collages are placed before the entrance to the projection room
and present fragmented diagrams showing the various projects and
activities taking place in the building and their initiators. The
video installation is made up of three projections. These present
long sequences from detailed interviews that Villesen conducted
with some of the protagonists as they went about their work in the
house. The conversations develop slowly and by way of many digressions,
interrupted again and again by the work of the interview subjects.
Villesen takes on neither the role of the distanced observer merely
recording what is said, nor that of the interviewer asking for specific
information. By means of deliberately distracted camera work - she
continually lets her attention wander to what's going on in the
rest of the room -, and by occasionally switching places behind
the camera - such as when she puts it in the hands of Andy the furniture
maker, so she can try out one of his armchairs - and through the
free-flowing scripting of the conversations, the artist places herself
instead in the midst of what's going on as an integral component
of a movable social interaction. This is guided by certain interests,
but still open enough to uncover different visions and ideas about
the wishes, the living space and the social texture of the projects
on both the spoken and visual levels.
Through their arrangement in space and the temporal choreography
of the various projections, the diachronic flow of the individual
interview sequences is in addition translated into a constellation
of complex simultaneity. The sequences are projected on two adjacent
walls. On one wall two projection surfaces abut, and on the other
a third joins them around the corner. Only one sequence (one conversation
with one person in a room) is shown with audio track at a time on
each of the projection surfaces. The remaining projection surfaces
remain dark, but are alternately activated now and then with short
'silent' sequences that present other activities in other areas
of the house. Accompanied by these temporarily appearing parallel
inserts, each interview sequence wanders around the room onto the
various projection surfaces. By giving the projection sequences
a spatial dynamics and adding parallel projections at certain points
in the sequence, the image of a complex architectonic and social
texture emerges after some time, whose different synchronous activity
spaces coexist as a loose network.
By intertwining different formal systems of reference, Villesen
thus provides a context for the material she presents, which reconstructs
the object of her research as a specific social landscape. She creates
a 'stage of the concrete' which networks the individual sequences
as singular elements and allows a dense communication to emerge.
Although the interplay between the elements of the constellation
is coordinated on a formal level, it is nonetheless not framed by
any overarching principle. Evidently characteristic for this mode
of formatting 'knowledge' is a commitment to the singularity of
the presented material. Its integrity is preserved precisely by
not subjugating it to the logic of the discursive and offering it
as one instance of some generality. This refusal to transcend the
concreteness of the material at hand and to subject it to a generalizing
perspective is just what opens up the speculative dimension of the
constellation. It situates the observers as active authorities,
who are not merely asked to reconstruct a linear argumentation,
but instead called on to organize elements of the constellation
into continually new and possibly contradictory contexts. As if
they were being asked: How should this micropolitics of social organization
be understood? Which norms of political organization does it go
against? And which forms of normativity might be inherent even in
these alternative lifestyles? Thus the general is not superimposed
as a framework for the concrete here, but instead grows out of the
concrete material as both problem and potential. If one were to
posit an ethics of cognition in Villesen's process of knowledge
production and presentation, then it would have to be in the sense
of a commitment to the singularity of a concrete, embodied social
knowledge, whose entry in the register of the representative is
persistently denied.
Theater of intertextuality
Villesen's procedure for the temporally and spatially dynamic imparting
of knowledge already appropriates an aspect of the stagelike. Its
theatrical character is however held in check through a rhetoric
of the documentary that is committed to the singularity of the social.
As opposed to this approach, the works of the Welsh artist Cerith
Wyn Evans that were recently exhibited by the Frankfurt Kunstverein
(3) operate using a different mode of knowledge 'performance'. Released
from any kind of commitment to its social or historical moorings,
this mode of space-encompassing ensemble exhausts the theatrical
potential of the gesture of quotation. Knowledge appears here not
as something to be taught, fashioned to fit this purpose, but rather
in the paradoxical form of an open horizon of references, which
continually elude the observer's grasp.
The contradictory structure of a performance of knowledge where
the very performance at the same time obstructs access to that knowledge
is evident in Evans' installation "Look at that picture...How
does it appear to you now? Does it seem to be persisting?"
(2003). The piece consists of five luxurious chandeliers installed
at random in a large room. Independently of one another the lights
go on and off in their own rhythm: an orchestra that seems to be
playing an unknown score composed for the instrument of light. If
one turns away from the mute performance of the chandeliers, one
discovers on one wall of the otherwise empty room a row of five
small flatscreens, each showing the author and title of a certain
text. Underneath the headings the viewer can follow the transmission
of the corresponding text in Morse code. Letter for letter, each
passage of the text appears on the screens, while, just as slowly,
the corresponding lines of Morse code unwind below.
With the help of the monitors, the play of light across the lamps
reveals itself to be choreography of encoded texts. Each of the
chandeliers conveys one of the texts as translated into light signals,
using the digital alphabet of Morse code. Adorno's "The Stars
Down to Earth", a critical analysis of the astrology column
in the "Los Angeles Times" in the early fifties, is transmitted
via a splendid chandelier in the style of Maria-Theresa, which was
originally designed for Victor Horta's Palais des Beaux-Arts in
Brussels. The delicate crystal chandelier with the calyx-shaped
floral lampshades, by Galliano Ferro, plays the Morse equivalent
of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Paranoid reading and reparative
reading, or, you're so paranoid, you probably think this essay is
about you". A more modern lamp made up of an arrangement of
round bulbs designed by Achille Castiglione serves as transmitter
for Madame de Lafayette's "La Princesse de Clève",
a romantic 17th-century novel that was probably collectively authored
by participants in Lafayette's Salon. In another part of the room,
John Cage's "Diary: How to Improve the World" from 1968
is imparted by a majestic lighting element created from multiple
layers of star-shaped crystal rods. And a many-armed chandelier
from Barovier & Toso broadcasts "Good Night Eileen",
a report by Brion Gysin on his encounters with the medium Eileen
Garrett, who was arrested in 1920 after predicting the crash of
a British airship and subsequently employed by the CIA.
Which interrelationships can be derived from this network of texts
and objects? We could first attempt an answer by looking at the
group of authors presented. But how do Adorno, Sedgwick, Gysin,
Cage and Madame de Lafayette come to share the same cognitive realm?
Could we speak here of a critique of the ideological as the smallest
common denominator? The authors would then represent something like
a bande à parte of cultural criticism, who each however embody
completely different forms of counter-knowledge. For doesn't Adorno's
negative dialectic in "The Stars Down to Earth" serve
as an engine of criticism for just that esoteric knowledge to which
Gysin submits with such evident relish in his politics of ecstasy?
And couldn't Gysin in turn very well share a common resonance space
with the idea of romantic love formulated 300 years earlier by Lafayette
and her circle? But how, then, do Lafayette's "La Princesse
de Clève" and Castiglione's modernistic lighting unit
fit together? Could the lamp's composition of numerous individual
bulbs to form a closed globe be read as a hint at the collective
authorship of the text? And could the reference to Gysin as inventor
of the cut-up technique and to John Cage's random combinations possibly
be read as a reflexive commentary on the principle of assemblage,
of which the installation itself is an example?
The interpretive undertaking of trying to construct correlations,
counterpoints and resonances between the elements of the installation
could be carried on endlessly, and probably quite fruitfully. But
what becomes evident from this forced open-endedness of interpretation
is the curious structure taken on by the unfolding horizons of knowledge.
For these do not take the form of canonized interrelationships that
can be discovered systematically. They are most decidedly not organized
as a solid foundation for an order of knowledge that is lying in
wait to be learned and then made available as cultural capital.
Instead, Evans takes up on a structural level the heretical impulses
in the texts and authors he employs and establishes an ephemeral
theater of intertextuality, which by means of loose sets of references
brings about an open resonance space, in which the knowledge that
is called up is potentiated, scattered, reproduced and commented
upon along continually new paths.
The open and endlessly unfolding character of these potential knowledge
horizons is however contradicted in a strange fashion by the hermetics
of the installation: the ensemble made up of authors, texts and
objects seems to be self-sufficient as a complete, close-ended cycle
of communication. The texts are enciphered by computer and enter
into a mute conversation by way of light signals. The viewers are
able to observe what is happening, but they are not specifically
addressed. They function less as receivers and more as witnesses
- witnesses of occurrences that elude direct comprehension, but
which entrust them with precisely the kind of reconstructive task
that inevitably carries them away in the implied stream of interpretations.
The experience of witnessing this event does not however end with
this retrospective task of reconstruction. In their role as witnesses,
the viewers are continually brought back forcibly to the event that
continues to unfold before their eyes in the present moment. The
insistence of the visible persistently inhibits the activity of
deciphering, consisting primarily of the self-referentiality of
what is witnessed. In this sense a self-contained image is formed
of an intertextual ceremony, which openly displays its performance
character. Cerith Wyn Evans' installation thus fluctuates between
the pictorial nature of the arrangement, the concreteness of the
objects and the inherent potentials of the performed knowledge.
The ethical dimension of this form of 'performance' of knowledge
seems to lie precisely in the shunning of responsibility for the
present fate of the performed knowledge. The responsibility assumed
is of a hermeneutic type, which regards itself as committed only
to the past history of the knowledge by way of an historical reconstruction
of texts in the contexts that give them meaning. This also has the
effect of eroding the foundations for a treatment of knowledge based
on the ideals of middle-class education. Such an education would
not be committed to the potentials inherent in the past history
of knowledge, but merely to the rote ordering scheme that manages
and reproduces this past. It is precisely this routinized mechanism
of reproduction that Evans suspends in the encoded hermetics of
his space-dominating imagery. He thus returns the viewers to a state
of literal deciphering, in which past knowledge step-by-step and
in continually new constellations not only gains a new present meaning
beyond its disciplinary administration, but becomes above all a
sign of an open future that remains committed to the radical potential
of a past way of thinking.
However fundamentally different Villesen's and Evans' processes
of knowledge production may be, they do appear to converge in one
point: both refuse to leave the question of an adequate treatment
of disparate modes of knowledge to the rules and regulations of
the disciplines. They create instead different and independent models
for formatting knowledge, which in their deviation from the traditional
norms of knowledge production call for the renegotiation not only
of how given knowledge is represented, but also of the accompanying
ethics of cognition.
My thanks to Jan Verwoert and Sören Grammel for their comments
and discussion.
Translation: Jenny Taylor-Gaida
1) Cf. Jan Verwoert, "Research and Display. Transformations
of Documentary Practice in Recent Art" in Gregor Neuerer (ed.):
"Untitled (Experience of Place)", London, 2003.
2) Hamburg Bahnhof, Berlin, January 31 to April 12, 2004.
3) Frankfurter Kunstverein, March 31 to May 23, 2004.
Published in Springerin Band X Heft 2 - Summer 2004
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