옛날 생각 나네~
2016년 9월 17일 토요일
박찬국, 개선이 아니라 새로운 시작 (2013)
문명의 지속 능력이 문명 자체에 의해 위협받는 이 의도하지 않는 결과를 가리켜 ‘인류의 곤경’이라 부른다 (진화의 종말, 폴 에얼릭 외)
한국 사회의 중앙 통제와 제도화 욕구는 폭력적으로 정답을 강조한다.
답을 정해놓지 않으면 군림이 어렵기 때문일 것이다. 그래서 원점에서 질문을 하고 그에 맞는 새로운 해법을 찾는 것에 집중하지 않고 당장 써먹을 아이디어와 답을 구하는데 급급하다. 로컬리티의 문제가 중요하다고 떠들지만 로컬리티가 살아 움직일 수 있는 제도를 만드는 것은 하지 않는다. 창의적인 것을 부르짖지만 창의적인 환경을 어떻게 구성할 것인가에 대한 배려가 없다.
새로운 변화를 위한 담론들마저 양날의 칼이 된다. 대부분 익기도 전에 순식간에 제도화 되고 ‘널리 사람들에게 이롭게 하기위한’ 세세한 형식의 강요로 이어진다. 이윽고 새로운 것의 강요는 요란한 줄 세우기 끝에 새로운 통제와 착취의 수단이 된다.
정답은 지켜야 할 정답이 아니라 소비하기 위한 정답이다.
Art & Sex
사회적 유성생식의 역동성/ 예술
진화의 핵심적인 키워드는 섹스, 돌연변이, 개성, 이주라고 한다.
섹스는 두 개의 각기 다른 개체가 또 다른 개체를 생산하기위한 방법이다. 섹스에 의한 증식을 유성생식이라고 한다. 섹스 없이 증식하는 방법은 무성생식이라고 한다.
무성생식은 자기복제에 가깝지만 유성생식은 각각의 형질을 유전하면서도 전혀 다른 개체를 탄생시킨다. 유성생식은 생명체의 진화 역사에 획기적인 발전의 상징이다.
유성생식에 의해 새로운 개체를 탄생시킬 뿐만 아니라 돌연변이의 확률을 높인다.
돌연변이는 환경조건이나 생물체의 필요와 아무 관계없이 일어난다. 돌연변이는 무작위로 발생한다. 돌연변이가 모두 진화하는 것이 아니므로 에너지의 낭비처럼 보인다. 그러나 결국 진화에 도움이 되는 방향으로 작용한다.
동시대 예술은 역동성이 특징이다.
동류들 사이에서 본질적인 미의식을 추구하는 것보다 이질적인 환경과 모호한 공간으로 질주한다. 본질을 내세우기보다는 사건 속에서 존재를 증명 받아야 하기 때문이다.
그래서 독자성이 아니라 다른 것들의 숨겨진 속성들을 드러나게 하고 예측하지 못한 잠재력을 촉발한다. 사회적 이슈 안으로 뛰어들고 다른 영역과 협력한다.
명확하게 스스로를 물질화하여 존재감을 드러내던 ‘작품’의 세계에서 ‘작업’의 세계로 전화하여 다른 존재의 변화를 통해 드러난다. 그 자신 존재의 유연함으로 엉뚱한 상상력을 촉발한다. 기존 데이터의 배열과 재배열 사이에서 새로운 개체가 탄생하는 유성생식의 법칙과 유사하고, 마치 돌연변이의 과정처럼 작동하기도 한다.
‘작품’을 강조하던 시기보다 매우 역동적인 이러한 상황을 진정한 예술의 ‘진화’로 인식하고 활동을 확장시켜야하며 예술제도 안에서도 더 활발한 논의를 필요로 한다.
어쨌든 이렇게 변화하는 예술의 속성을 교육적으로 수용하는 과정을 통해 문화예술교육도 쇄신과 성장을 거듭해 왔다.
예술교육뿐만 아니라 교육과 교육제도 전체를 성찰적으로 조감하는 틀을 제공했다.
그러나 그동안은 문화예술교육을 제도화 하고 빠른 시간 안에 확산시키기 위한 무리수의 연속이었다.
제도가 돌아가는 것을 보면, 어떤 성공모델을 끊임없이 찾아다니며 그 때 그때 이슈가 될만한 것들을 융단폭격 하듯이 복제한다. 이견을 싫어한다. 집단적용과 평가에 용이한 것만 채택하고 나머지는 고사시킨다. 중앙에서 모두 관리하고 지역센타, 단체, 개인은 불신을 전제로 한 시스템 안에 묶어 놓는다.
제도, 사업, 사람이 다 중요한데 운용하는 방식이 모두 닮아 있다.
한국의 문화예술교육 제도는 무성생식 방법으로 증식했다.
무성생식은 복제에 용이하지만 진화는 더디다. 역동성이 떨어지고 참여자들을 소진시킨다.
문화예술교육이 강조된 큰 이유는 지식과 교육, 사회문화적 환경이 지나치게 기능적으로 분화되고 당장 필요한 것에만 맞춰 공급하려는 사회의 틀에 박힌 경직성 때문이었다.
역동적인 가능성의 존재인 사람이 보이지 않고 복잡성과 다중적 능력을 필요로 하는 사회의 요구에도 응할 수 없는 시스템에 대한 성찰에서 비롯되었다.
그런데 솔루션으로 만든 제도가 커지면 커질수록 솔루션을 방해하는 현상이 보이고 있다.
지금 그 심각성은 개선을 통해 해결할 수준이 아니고 새로운 시작을 해야만 할 정도의 상황에 있다고 여겨진다.
지금 눈 앞의 문제는 바로 눈앞의 문제다.
문화예술교육 현장에서 끊임없이 찾고 있는 아이디어와 새로운 지식들은 먼데 있는 것이 아니라 누구나의 바로 눈앞에 있다고 생각한다.
지금까지의 인류의 모든 지식, 모든 경험, 모든 시스템을 원점에서 다시 보고 재구성 해 보려는 과정을 그려보자.
2011년의 논아트 밭아트 nonArt butArt 프로젝트에서 나는 벼농사를 지으면서 그 과정에 대해 생각해본 적이 있다. 농사를 짓는 것은 인류의 경험과 지식의 총화이고 직접 대상인 벼를 비롯한 뭇 생명체들의 스스로 혹은 상호 디자인 과정이다.
흔히 우리는 우리가 벼를 선택하고 벼를 개량했다고 생각할지 모르지만 사실은 식물과 인간 상호작용인 선택과 적응의 결과이다. 벼 뿐만이 아니라 잡초들, 벌레들, 토양 미생물들, 그리고 모든 생명체 활동과 연관된 지구 대기, 기후와 연관되어 있다.
지금 여기는 결과가 아니라 늘 과정이다. 어떤 것을 중심에 놓고 볼 것이냐에 따라 완전히 달라진다. 우리의 관심이 벼가 아니라 잡초인 물달개비로 이동하면 상황이 많이 달라진다.
아마도 ‘익으면 고개가 숙어드는 벼’라는 말은 금방 사라질지도 모른다. 굵고 찰진 쌀 생산이 관심 밖이 되면 벼가 무거운 벼 이삭들을 유지하면서 인간과 공존할 이유가 없어지기 때문이다.
그런 관점을 단순히 관찰과 기록이라는 형태가 아니라 진화과정의 역동성을 드러내는 드라마틱한 과정이 지식과 예술과 생활세계로 연결되게 하는 것으로 문화예술교육은 큰 가능성을 열 수 있다. 우리 프로젝트에서는 농사과정에 다양한 연령층의 다양한 경험과 지식을 가진 사람들이 참여하여 활동하게 하고 오리를 키우고 프랑스 건축가 르 꼬르뷔제의 건축유산을 활용하였다. 모두의 경험은 존중되지만 누구도 체험해 보지 못한 새로운 경험들이 구성되고 예측이 쉽지 않은 변수들과 모호함들을 노출시켰다.
그래서 결국 미흡하더라도 내 주변에서 그리고 원점에서 출발해 보는 것이다.
행성 차원에서 사고하기. 원점에서 시작하기.
문화예술교육에서 중요한 것이 스스로를 둘러싼 세계에 대한 해석과 동시대 이슈를 체감하는 감수성의 문제라고 생각한다.
지금 인류의 문제는 인간 사회만의 성장을 지속하기 위해 끊임없이 행성 전체를 착취하고 생태계를 파괴하는 과정을 멈출 수 없는 지경에 빠진 것이다.
무한 성장을 향한 무한 욕구의 뚜껑이 열린 상황에서 모든 자원과 지식과 에너지가 욕망의 소용돌이로 휩쓸려 들어간다. 성찰과 브레이크가 필요하지만 그냥 생각 뿐이고 멈출 수 있는 힘을 만들지 못하고 있다. 지구를 위한 좋은 생각과 올바른 태도가 거대 국가들의 횡포를 그치게 하기 어렵겠지만 이제는 그런 노력과 감수성 자체가 인간의 ‘지식’과 ‘생활’ 비전이 되어야 한다. 어떻게 불평등을 해소하고 모든 행성의 존재들을 배려하고 일부만을 위한 성장을 멈출 것인가? 지금까지 생산한 인류의 모든 자산과 기술, 지혜들은 이러한 관점에서 재구성되어야 한다. 이 재구성 과정이 그 사회의 역량과 성장의 척도가 되어야 하며 앞으로 세계는 그렇게 될 수밖에 없을 것이다.
우리는 분자세계의 비밀을 이제 막 해독하고 있는 중이다. 덕분에 유전자에 대한 이해가 크게 빨라졌다. 세균을 비롯하여 지구라는 행성의 균형을 유지하고 있던 수많은 생물체와 자연현상의 원리를 이해하는 데는 아직도 많이 부족하다.
이해하는 것이 사유와 붙어있고 생체모방이 창의성과 한 몸이고, 두뇌와 다른 신체기관의 기능이 상보적이어서 행동과 사유와 감정이 분리된 것이 아니라 하나의 체계로 통합되어 발전한다는 연구들도 나오고 있다.
글로벌-로컬의 관계를 결국 성장중심으로 사유하는 시스템이 아니라 모든 존재를 고려하는 ‘행성적 감수성’을 강조하는 제도를 디자인 하는 것이 관건이다.
박찬국
e-mail : pckook01@gmail.com
약력
2002-2011 밀머리 미술학교(무빙 밀머리) 디렉터
2008-2011 전주대학교 도시환경 미술과 겸임교수
2009-2011 서울시 아트팩토리 금천예술공장 입주작가
2010 일본 요코하마 BankART Studio 교환 작가 레지던시
2008 문화중심도시 추진단 문화환경권조성 자문위원
2008 서울시 도시갤러리 석관황금시장 프로젝트 예술감독
2008 서울시 디자인 올림픽 거리미술제 ‘어어어 마을대회’ 예술감독
2008 서울 문화재단 창의 인력양성TA과정 강사교육(master for teacher artist)
2008 구로 아트밸리 주민참여 무대막 제작 프로젝트 예술감독
2007-2008 문화중심도시프로그램 ‘도시를 감싸는 무지개 2’ 총괄 디렉터
2006-2007 교육부 교과과정 심의위원 (미술)
2007 문화부 공공미술 추진위원회(Art in city) 위원
2004-2007 문화부 학교 지역연계 문화예술교육 시범사업 주관단체 디렉터
2007 성남 문화재단 문화공동체 만들기 프로그램(풀장환상, 예술공단) 예술감독
2007 국경없는마을 이주민멘토&다문화코디 양성(사회적예술이 실현되는공방)강사
2006 공공미술 추진위원회 2006아트인시티 프로젝트 평가위원(예술경영지원센터)
2006-2007 문화중심도시 프로그램 ‘도시를 감싸는 무지개’ 5개사업 총괄 디렉터
2006-8 광주 문화중심도시 조성사업 인력양성 프로그램 컨듀서과정 교수
2006 사회문화예술교육 평가위원(문화예술교육 진흥원)
2005 사회문화예술교육 5개지역 컨설턴트(문화예술교육 진흥원)
2005 광주 문화중심도시추진단시민문화공동체형성사업 ‘쑤욱’ 5개분야총괄 디렉터
2004 광주 비엔날레 현장 3 큐레이터
2003-2004 문화부 문화예술교육 TF, 교정시설TF, 문화 소외계층TF 위원
1996-2005 한성대강사
1997-2003 성신여대 대학원, 서울시립대 대학원 강사
2002-2005 동신대 겸임교수
2000-2001 공공미술 제도도입을 위한 예술인 협의회 집행위원장
1995-2000 엠 조형연구소 소장
공공미술 작품 설치, 전시
2010 풍부한 무질서 (서울시 금천예술공장)
2010 일본 BankART Studio summer open (yokohama)
2010 Macro Makkolli, Nakasyokku project, konnichiwa yokohama project
2010 독일 뒤셀도르프 plan.d갤러리-액체 달 (뒤셀도르프)
2009-10 Marking time (서울시 금천예술공장)
2009 경기도 어린이 박물관 펜스아트 제작(경기문화재단)
2007-8 BAF전 (대안공간 풀 주관, 대전시립미술관)
2006 침산이 내게 (대구 침산동 대우아파트 설치)
2005 역사가 된 오브제 (문래동 대우아파트 설치)
2005 리얼링 전 (사비나 미술관)
2004 광주비엔날레 큐레이터( 현장 3)
2004 작업실 전 (사비나 미술관)
2003 공공미술 프로젝트 ‘따뜻한 왼손’, ‘고구마 프로젝트’ 디렉터
2003 아트캠프 2003(문예진흥원 지원) 디렉터
2000 서울 지하철 6호선 월드컵 경기장역 프레스코 벽화 설치
2000 서울 미디어시티 2000 (2호선 을지로 4가역 설치)
2000 ‘씽씽(新新)부평’ (부평역 광장 설치)
외 다수의 공공미술 작품설치 및 기획
1993 개인전 광고를 본다(京都市 사카이마찌 화랑)
외 여러번의 단체전 참여
수상
2007 문화부 장관 표창(밀머리 미술학교)
2004 문화부 장관 표창
2004 광주 비엔날레 ‘현장상’ 수상(광주)
1998 환경운동연합 선정 ‘98 환경인상 문화예술부문 본상(서울)
1995 아사히 비어 예술문화재단 미술공모 우수상(東京)
한국 사회의 중앙 통제와 제도화 욕구는 폭력적으로 정답을 강조한다.
답을 정해놓지 않으면 군림이 어렵기 때문일 것이다. 그래서 원점에서 질문을 하고 그에 맞는 새로운 해법을 찾는 것에 집중하지 않고 당장 써먹을 아이디어와 답을 구하는데 급급하다. 로컬리티의 문제가 중요하다고 떠들지만 로컬리티가 살아 움직일 수 있는 제도를 만드는 것은 하지 않는다. 창의적인 것을 부르짖지만 창의적인 환경을 어떻게 구성할 것인가에 대한 배려가 없다.
새로운 변화를 위한 담론들마저 양날의 칼이 된다. 대부분 익기도 전에 순식간에 제도화 되고 ‘널리 사람들에게 이롭게 하기위한’ 세세한 형식의 강요로 이어진다. 이윽고 새로운 것의 강요는 요란한 줄 세우기 끝에 새로운 통제와 착취의 수단이 된다.
정답은 지켜야 할 정답이 아니라 소비하기 위한 정답이다.
Art & Sex
사회적 유성생식의 역동성/ 예술
진화의 핵심적인 키워드는 섹스, 돌연변이, 개성, 이주라고 한다.
섹스는 두 개의 각기 다른 개체가 또 다른 개체를 생산하기위한 방법이다. 섹스에 의한 증식을 유성생식이라고 한다. 섹스 없이 증식하는 방법은 무성생식이라고 한다.
무성생식은 자기복제에 가깝지만 유성생식은 각각의 형질을 유전하면서도 전혀 다른 개체를 탄생시킨다. 유성생식은 생명체의 진화 역사에 획기적인 발전의 상징이다.
유성생식에 의해 새로운 개체를 탄생시킬 뿐만 아니라 돌연변이의 확률을 높인다.
돌연변이는 환경조건이나 생물체의 필요와 아무 관계없이 일어난다. 돌연변이는 무작위로 발생한다. 돌연변이가 모두 진화하는 것이 아니므로 에너지의 낭비처럼 보인다. 그러나 결국 진화에 도움이 되는 방향으로 작용한다.
동시대 예술은 역동성이 특징이다.
동류들 사이에서 본질적인 미의식을 추구하는 것보다 이질적인 환경과 모호한 공간으로 질주한다. 본질을 내세우기보다는 사건 속에서 존재를 증명 받아야 하기 때문이다.
그래서 독자성이 아니라 다른 것들의 숨겨진 속성들을 드러나게 하고 예측하지 못한 잠재력을 촉발한다. 사회적 이슈 안으로 뛰어들고 다른 영역과 협력한다.
명확하게 스스로를 물질화하여 존재감을 드러내던 ‘작품’의 세계에서 ‘작업’의 세계로 전화하여 다른 존재의 변화를 통해 드러난다. 그 자신 존재의 유연함으로 엉뚱한 상상력을 촉발한다. 기존 데이터의 배열과 재배열 사이에서 새로운 개체가 탄생하는 유성생식의 법칙과 유사하고, 마치 돌연변이의 과정처럼 작동하기도 한다.
‘작품’을 강조하던 시기보다 매우 역동적인 이러한 상황을 진정한 예술의 ‘진화’로 인식하고 활동을 확장시켜야하며 예술제도 안에서도 더 활발한 논의를 필요로 한다.
어쨌든 이렇게 변화하는 예술의 속성을 교육적으로 수용하는 과정을 통해 문화예술교육도 쇄신과 성장을 거듭해 왔다.
예술교육뿐만 아니라 교육과 교육제도 전체를 성찰적으로 조감하는 틀을 제공했다.
그러나 그동안은 문화예술교육을 제도화 하고 빠른 시간 안에 확산시키기 위한 무리수의 연속이었다.
제도가 돌아가는 것을 보면, 어떤 성공모델을 끊임없이 찾아다니며 그 때 그때 이슈가 될만한 것들을 융단폭격 하듯이 복제한다. 이견을 싫어한다. 집단적용과 평가에 용이한 것만 채택하고 나머지는 고사시킨다. 중앙에서 모두 관리하고 지역센타, 단체, 개인은 불신을 전제로 한 시스템 안에 묶어 놓는다.
제도, 사업, 사람이 다 중요한데 운용하는 방식이 모두 닮아 있다.
한국의 문화예술교육 제도는 무성생식 방법으로 증식했다.
무성생식은 복제에 용이하지만 진화는 더디다. 역동성이 떨어지고 참여자들을 소진시킨다.
문화예술교육이 강조된 큰 이유는 지식과 교육, 사회문화적 환경이 지나치게 기능적으로 분화되고 당장 필요한 것에만 맞춰 공급하려는 사회의 틀에 박힌 경직성 때문이었다.
역동적인 가능성의 존재인 사람이 보이지 않고 복잡성과 다중적 능력을 필요로 하는 사회의 요구에도 응할 수 없는 시스템에 대한 성찰에서 비롯되었다.
그런데 솔루션으로 만든 제도가 커지면 커질수록 솔루션을 방해하는 현상이 보이고 있다.
지금 그 심각성은 개선을 통해 해결할 수준이 아니고 새로운 시작을 해야만 할 정도의 상황에 있다고 여겨진다.
지금 눈 앞의 문제는 바로 눈앞의 문제다.
문화예술교육 현장에서 끊임없이 찾고 있는 아이디어와 새로운 지식들은 먼데 있는 것이 아니라 누구나의 바로 눈앞에 있다고 생각한다.
지금까지의 인류의 모든 지식, 모든 경험, 모든 시스템을 원점에서 다시 보고 재구성 해 보려는 과정을 그려보자.
2011년의 논아트 밭아트 nonArt butArt 프로젝트에서 나는 벼농사를 지으면서 그 과정에 대해 생각해본 적이 있다. 농사를 짓는 것은 인류의 경험과 지식의 총화이고 직접 대상인 벼를 비롯한 뭇 생명체들의 스스로 혹은 상호 디자인 과정이다.
흔히 우리는 우리가 벼를 선택하고 벼를 개량했다고 생각할지 모르지만 사실은 식물과 인간 상호작용인 선택과 적응의 결과이다. 벼 뿐만이 아니라 잡초들, 벌레들, 토양 미생물들, 그리고 모든 생명체 활동과 연관된 지구 대기, 기후와 연관되어 있다.
지금 여기는 결과가 아니라 늘 과정이다. 어떤 것을 중심에 놓고 볼 것이냐에 따라 완전히 달라진다. 우리의 관심이 벼가 아니라 잡초인 물달개비로 이동하면 상황이 많이 달라진다.
아마도 ‘익으면 고개가 숙어드는 벼’라는 말은 금방 사라질지도 모른다. 굵고 찰진 쌀 생산이 관심 밖이 되면 벼가 무거운 벼 이삭들을 유지하면서 인간과 공존할 이유가 없어지기 때문이다.
그런 관점을 단순히 관찰과 기록이라는 형태가 아니라 진화과정의 역동성을 드러내는 드라마틱한 과정이 지식과 예술과 생활세계로 연결되게 하는 것으로 문화예술교육은 큰 가능성을 열 수 있다. 우리 프로젝트에서는 농사과정에 다양한 연령층의 다양한 경험과 지식을 가진 사람들이 참여하여 활동하게 하고 오리를 키우고 프랑스 건축가 르 꼬르뷔제의 건축유산을 활용하였다. 모두의 경험은 존중되지만 누구도 체험해 보지 못한 새로운 경험들이 구성되고 예측이 쉽지 않은 변수들과 모호함들을 노출시켰다.
그래서 결국 미흡하더라도 내 주변에서 그리고 원점에서 출발해 보는 것이다.
행성 차원에서 사고하기. 원점에서 시작하기.
문화예술교육에서 중요한 것이 스스로를 둘러싼 세계에 대한 해석과 동시대 이슈를 체감하는 감수성의 문제라고 생각한다.
지금 인류의 문제는 인간 사회만의 성장을 지속하기 위해 끊임없이 행성 전체를 착취하고 생태계를 파괴하는 과정을 멈출 수 없는 지경에 빠진 것이다.
무한 성장을 향한 무한 욕구의 뚜껑이 열린 상황에서 모든 자원과 지식과 에너지가 욕망의 소용돌이로 휩쓸려 들어간다. 성찰과 브레이크가 필요하지만 그냥 생각 뿐이고 멈출 수 있는 힘을 만들지 못하고 있다. 지구를 위한 좋은 생각과 올바른 태도가 거대 국가들의 횡포를 그치게 하기 어렵겠지만 이제는 그런 노력과 감수성 자체가 인간의 ‘지식’과 ‘생활’ 비전이 되어야 한다. 어떻게 불평등을 해소하고 모든 행성의 존재들을 배려하고 일부만을 위한 성장을 멈출 것인가? 지금까지 생산한 인류의 모든 자산과 기술, 지혜들은 이러한 관점에서 재구성되어야 한다. 이 재구성 과정이 그 사회의 역량과 성장의 척도가 되어야 하며 앞으로 세계는 그렇게 될 수밖에 없을 것이다.
우리는 분자세계의 비밀을 이제 막 해독하고 있는 중이다. 덕분에 유전자에 대한 이해가 크게 빨라졌다. 세균을 비롯하여 지구라는 행성의 균형을 유지하고 있던 수많은 생물체와 자연현상의 원리를 이해하는 데는 아직도 많이 부족하다.
이해하는 것이 사유와 붙어있고 생체모방이 창의성과 한 몸이고, 두뇌와 다른 신체기관의 기능이 상보적이어서 행동과 사유와 감정이 분리된 것이 아니라 하나의 체계로 통합되어 발전한다는 연구들도 나오고 있다.
글로벌-로컬의 관계를 결국 성장중심으로 사유하는 시스템이 아니라 모든 존재를 고려하는 ‘행성적 감수성’을 강조하는 제도를 디자인 하는 것이 관건이다.
박찬국
e-mail : pckook01@gmail.com
약력
2002-2011 밀머리 미술학교(무빙 밀머리) 디렉터
2008-2011 전주대학교 도시환경 미술과 겸임교수
2009-2011 서울시 아트팩토리 금천예술공장 입주작가
2010 일본 요코하마 BankART Studio 교환 작가 레지던시
2008 문화중심도시 추진단 문화환경권조성 자문위원
2008 서울시 도시갤러리 석관황금시장 프로젝트 예술감독
2008 서울시 디자인 올림픽 거리미술제 ‘어어어 마을대회’ 예술감독
2008 서울 문화재단 창의 인력양성TA과정 강사교육(master for teacher artist)
2008 구로 아트밸리 주민참여 무대막 제작 프로젝트 예술감독
2007-2008 문화중심도시프로그램 ‘도시를 감싸는 무지개 2’ 총괄 디렉터
2006-2007 교육부 교과과정 심의위원 (미술)
2007 문화부 공공미술 추진위원회(Art in city) 위원
2004-2007 문화부 학교 지역연계 문화예술교육 시범사업 주관단체 디렉터
2007 성남 문화재단 문화공동체 만들기 프로그램(풀장환상, 예술공단) 예술감독
2007 국경없는마을 이주민멘토&다문화코디 양성(사회적예술이 실현되는공방)강사
2006 공공미술 추진위원회 2006아트인시티 프로젝트 평가위원(예술경영지원센터)
2006-2007 문화중심도시 프로그램 ‘도시를 감싸는 무지개’ 5개사업 총괄 디렉터
2006-8 광주 문화중심도시 조성사업 인력양성 프로그램 컨듀서과정 교수
2006 사회문화예술교육 평가위원(문화예술교육 진흥원)
2005 사회문화예술교육 5개지역 컨설턴트(문화예술교육 진흥원)
2005 광주 문화중심도시추진단시민문화공동체형성사업 ‘쑤욱’ 5개분야총괄 디렉터
2004 광주 비엔날레 현장 3 큐레이터
2003-2004 문화부 문화예술교육 TF, 교정시설TF, 문화 소외계층TF 위원
1996-2005 한성대강사
1997-2003 성신여대 대학원, 서울시립대 대학원 강사
2002-2005 동신대 겸임교수
2000-2001 공공미술 제도도입을 위한 예술인 협의회 집행위원장
1995-2000 엠 조형연구소 소장
공공미술 작품 설치, 전시
2010 풍부한 무질서 (서울시 금천예술공장)
2010 일본 BankART Studio summer open (yokohama)
2010 Macro Makkolli, Nakasyokku project, konnichiwa yokohama project
2010 독일 뒤셀도르프 plan.d갤러리-액체 달 (뒤셀도르프)
2009-10 Marking time (서울시 금천예술공장)
2009 경기도 어린이 박물관 펜스아트 제작(경기문화재단)
2007-8 BAF전 (대안공간 풀 주관, 대전시립미술관)
2006 침산이 내게 (대구 침산동 대우아파트 설치)
2005 역사가 된 오브제 (문래동 대우아파트 설치)
2005 리얼링 전 (사비나 미술관)
2004 광주비엔날레 큐레이터( 현장 3)
2004 작업실 전 (사비나 미술관)
2003 공공미술 프로젝트 ‘따뜻한 왼손’, ‘고구마 프로젝트’ 디렉터
2003 아트캠프 2003(문예진흥원 지원) 디렉터
2000 서울 지하철 6호선 월드컵 경기장역 프레스코 벽화 설치
2000 서울 미디어시티 2000 (2호선 을지로 4가역 설치)
2000 ‘씽씽(新新)부평’ (부평역 광장 설치)
외 다수의 공공미술 작품설치 및 기획
1993 개인전 광고를 본다(京都市 사카이마찌 화랑)
외 여러번의 단체전 참여
수상
2007 문화부 장관 표창(밀머리 미술학교)
2004 문화부 장관 표창
2004 광주 비엔날레 ‘현장상’ 수상(광주)
1998 환경운동연합 선정 ‘98 환경인상 문화예술부문 본상(서울)
1995 아사히 비어 예술문화재단 미술공모 우수상(東京)
poor images
히토 슈타이얼이 하는 얘기는 솔직히 디씨 유저라면 다 아는 얘기다. 내 학부 졸업 미전 때 주제이기도 했었다. 한국에선 솔직히 poor images의 주인이 누구냐 했을 때 급진주의자의 몫은 아닌 것 같다. 디씨->일베 테크를 타면서 노무현 전대통령의 이미지 생태가 어떻게 이뤄져 있는지만 보더라도... 하지만 역시 그렇다. 안 되는 것, 잘 못하는 것에 관심 갖지 않는 이상 현시점에서 할 수 있는 것은 많이 없다는.
2016년 9월 13일 화요일
Mohammad Salemy, ART AFTER THE MACHINES (2015)
This text is brought to you from the intersection of collaboration and hyperstition. What makes this experiment necessary is the severity of the cultural crisis in which art stubbornly refuses to find itself. For art to make sense and to survive the uprooting effects of the escalating cybernetic revolution, it needs to be something other than what it has been. The place to consider the future of art is as much the world of thought as it is the artist’s studio or the gallery.
This project itself could only be possible with the help of computers and social networks, which facilitate multiple dialogues on the same topic from different time zones and geographies. Much like a group exhibition, my role as a curator in constructing this text has been to arrange and connect concepts and propositions in ways that reveal my thought process while leaving space for readers to insert their own.
This text is collaged from social media conversations with Jason Adams,Julieta Aranda, Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Zac Davis, Lucca Fraser,Michael Ferrer, Aaron Gemmill, Amy Ireland, Joshua Johnson, Deneb Kozikoski, Suhail Malik, Reza Negarestani, Patricia Reed, Rory Rowan,Daniel Sacilotto, Keith Tilford, and Peter Wolfendale.
1.
If we were to begin with the assumption that art has always existed, and try to explain its givenness, then we would have to create a concept of art that fits within the set of existing artworks and their histories. However, if we instead begin by developing a concept of art as a condition in order to understand whether a new kind of art is possible, then we could very well find out that today, much of what is taken to be art simply isn’t. If we are to hang onto anything that might be called or resemble art, our efforts have to include not only understanding what art is, but also what art does, and even more importantly what it ought to do.
2.
If we take naive humanism as art’s main problem today, then the solution can become a nontrivial one. By removing the diverse and subjective interpretations or experiences of art as its condition of possibility or telos, we can collapse the entire edifice of the dominant art paradigm. However, the problem of the existing human-centered art does not only lie in its variegated interpretation, but also in the relaxation of epistemic standards for the adjudication of its value. Moreover, the problem lies in the short circuit with which the value of an artistic proposal is gauged as being only relative to the artistic act with which it is affirmed and produced.
3.
This is why art as a product cannot have value by itself. To simply assume that any act of creative affirmation by humans is good in itself is precisely what allows the relativist assertion that“everything is art” to never exhaust itself. Art must respond to the problem of enablement, i.e., how the making of artworks enables both the maker and the viewer to think. Thus, art production cannot be merely formal play. “Formalization” involves one’s ability to work within constraints set by the genre, medium,display space, and/or the audience. This has far more import than pure play and experimentation. If anything, rather than being playful in relation to form, art needs to be approached as a strategy of gaming the cog no sensible topology, or the surface of the work.
4.
Art’s problem cannot be solved at the level of viewing and interpretation. This is because the conceptual import of interpretive practices does not merely occur correlationally from the viewers’ confrontation with a produced work of art, but involves a type of conceptualization that allows a work of art to become possible in the first place. At the level of production, the artist not only utilizes a “technique” in the larger sense of the term, but also introduces sufficient fidelity to maintain certain assumptions. The artist does so in order to maintain the functionality of the work, while speculating on how cognition automatically generates assertions about art’s metaphysical availability to the viewer. The artist begins with a certain set of ideas and access to a level of already produced knowledge, as well as an understanding of how proactive risk-taking opens up the outcome of the artwork to contingency. This type of work is a process and is not that different from, for example, the way high-speed algorithmic trading works.
A simple wormhole effect is created using a revolved curve, a projected grid, and a light. Made using Autodesk Maya, this image is best known as desktop wallpaper.
5.
While art cannot be conceived only in terms of signals,information, language, and rules, it should also not be legitimated strictly through its indeterminate and interpretive bio-phenomenological experience in a designated space called the museum, gallery, or any given public space. Nor can any faith be restricted to the viewer for the artwork’s completion through experience. The future valence of art will depend on its modularity and adaptability to multiple platforms. For art to face the machines, it needs to leave the church of humans and become fully processual and transmittable.
6.
To have conceptual and rational demands from art is to state that whatever value artworks have does not just reside in the conceptually indeterminate notion of interpretation, understood to be exclusively on the side of the subjective act of viewing. Art-making, therefore, must concern itself with the productive intentions of the maker, which one way or another will always be worn like an identity tag on art’s sleeve. To maintain this fine balance means making the functions of the work executable on the level of the surface without succumbing to humanist feedback loops.
7.
On the level of viewership, the social aspect of art operates according to certain constraints such as the spatial and material limits that inform and also constrain its appearance. This is why the art part of art-making must crisscross both the material and social levels of its production in order for it to reasonably assert new rules, or as some might say, have any meaning. Otherwise,what remains for art to accomplish besides habitually assuming its monopoly on certain kinds of social values and operations, like religion or representational politics?
8.
There is a fundamental distinction between two senses of art: a general one, which includes all human activities aimed at new forms of beauty or unconditional and indefinable value—the various media and their historical accretions, such as literature,theater, music, architecture, cinema, games; and a more specific sense, as an identifiable gallery- or museum-based practice that includes various historical performative attempts to break with itself. Most people talk about art in reference to the latter of the two. This limited definition, of course, has little more than historical inertia and economic power holding it together as a concept. Isn’t this why it endlessly invites the relativist wisdom of curators and critics, since it presumes to articulate a motley collection of practices that seem radically variegated in content but are secretly conjoined?
9.
The modern definition of art that privileges its visual character essentializes the historical incident of modern art through museology and photography—two powerful nineteenth-century technologies. They legitimate today’s art through its historical mirror image and the materiality of the ritual called exhibiting contemporary art. The exhibition space imbues artworks with ameta-quality within these secular cathedrals of sorts, conflating works with what we identified above as the general sense of art in order to colonize and lay claim to all other creative practices under the name of contemporary art.
A project of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's plan for "Monumental Propaganda," Vladimir Tatlin's vision for Russian modernity only made it as far as the model stage, but lives on for us in screenshot courtesy of Salemy.
10.
The emergence of a future art will directly depend on two fundamental conditions. First, the art of tomorrow needs to be freed from the shackles of the logic of art history and particularly the long but thick chain that leashes it to modernism. Second, art needs to be freed from serving as the purveyor of meaning, a duty that accompanies this history. These two conditions are needed if we are seeking to secularize art from its domination by humanity.This double liberation does not require the re-elaboration of art’s significance; on the contrary, it requires a form of downgrading rather than elevation. We must begin by asking ourselves: What conditions have made visual arts a concern of Western culture?This question requires us to rewrite the history of the rise of art’s significance in relation to Western thought and philosophy from the prehistoric ages to our own time.
11.
Art’s extraction from its history and ontology is a separation that only loosens its ties to its human past so it can invent today its machinic future. By positing truth, in the future art will be able to maintain its negative condition of skepticism, and simultaneously focus on the positive conditions required to construct new perspectives. However, art cannot rid itself completely of meaning until the emergence of a true form of atheism that negates not only gods but also the vitalism of nature, the human, the material universe, language, and, finally, the machine. Until then, we have to ensure that artists are not the ones intending to produce direct meaning.
12.
We can only carve out a better definition and role for art if we forgo its historical inertia from the twentieth century onwards.This has constituted artists’ obsession with both defining art and transgressing its definition for no other purpose than transgression itself. When combined with the postmodern compulsion for difference, diversity, and multiplicity, this originates nothing other than a catastrophic lack of criteria for making judgments on art and the consequent indeterminacy of contemporary art. This has reduced today’s art practice to redundant affirmative creations: as transgression for its own sake becomes the sole driver, the corollary impulse is the imposition of one’s will over any and all existing constraints. Finally, art becomes an abrupt intervention whose authority and value are endowed automatically in the act of creation—even if,paradoxically, this very occurrence is indexed within its particular history of formal play and transgression.
13.
As an important injunction, we have to avoid the vulgar equation between art and science like the bubonic plague. Today’s art has no direct epistemic effects, or if it does, they are merely contingent. Despite claims about the production of knowledge via qualitative or even quantitative research projects, which might be effective for the purpose of art funding, art today is not directly about knowledge production. In fact, the only way that we might positively recuperate art is by preventing it from masquerading asa form of intuitive knowledge by colonizing all other forms of creativity, including design. The status of each of the visual arts, as they operate today, has to be understood as a species belonging to a wider genus and not the other way around.
14.
There is always a pendular movement between art’s impact on knowledge—its capacity to make knowledge cognizable—and the theoretical and aesthetic blindness of the sciences, which supposedly produce knowledge. Considered as a mode of rationality with a particular way of accessing and manipulating its outer forms and materials, art is then a type of technology searching for solutions to the epistemological shortcomings for which science has no patience. In this regard, art needs to be understood in terms of its intended and unintended cognitive role, and even perhaps its contingent socio-cognitive role within the gated community of art professionals who are the real laborers involved in its social production.
15.
Of course one might argue that contemporary art, in a limited sense, can provide a genuine inter/subjective experience, which may trigger a particular set of reflections, and so therefore it can be engineered to produce certain beliefs or represent certain social standards. However, in the abundance of all other forms of direct and accessible 24/7 media, do we really need art with its professional attire and technical language to create this kind of social construction?
16.
Only from this limited angle might art be integrated within an avigational paradigm of knowledge, escaping the conceptual dead ends fancied by artists who justify the value of their work by comparing it to the use value of science, a path that leads nowhere but down the enchanting Romantic humanist stream. Nowadays a great number of artists claim to be performing the labor of scientists by simply incorporating the result of systematic endeavors within their own production: artists as historians,artists as archivists, artists as social scientists, artists as anthropologists, and even artists incorporating neuroscience,physics, and mathematics, and so on. On the other hand, we should deflate the value of knowledge or even science in its present constitution. This is different from insisting that art cannot produce any knowledge whatsoever. In understanding that not all knowledge is sacred and that art produces no objective knowledge, we can comprehend that art’s cognitive trajectory is dissimilar to the interrogation carried forth by sciences and vice versa. Now, if knowledge becomes just a secondary concern and the focus is instead placed on art as a platform bridging the internality of the art world to its externality, art will then make available different forms of knowledge that science has not and will not be concerned with.
Inherently responsive, the skin not only protects us from microbes and the elements, but also regulates body temperatures while permitting the sensations of touch, heat, and cold.
17.
Building a new purpose for art in the twenty-first century begins by downgrading it to a rigorous science of the surface, or the smallest component of what aesthetic theory refers to as form.What is form, if not the interaction and overlaying of multiple topological surfaces? What is form, if not the form that the multiplicity of surface effects place on the surface of perception?As the science of the surface, involved art has to come to terms with its metaphysical deficit and has become creative within its limited superficial resources. This deep science of the surface is the essential component for the construction of a stereoscopic vision of art/science. It involves taking away art’s metaphysical credit cards and forcing it to be resourceful with its own ontology.This is the first step in the long road to art truly becoming the form of thought. For art’s autonomy from science, it has to first become the true master of its own domain. This strategy entails not limiting art to just the local effects of its surface qualities, but using them as a path out of this very locality.
18.
As far as aesthetics are concerned, art nevertheless produces an objective knowledge of surface effects. The skin through which art impacts its surrounding world is where its potential as a platform lies. The reduction of art to this surface level is indeed necessary if we intend to teach and pass on the idea and practice of art to our machines. Consider, for example, the look and feel of fictional worlds and the aesthetics of social insights and interactions. Art can, in such contexts, facilitate access to knowledge for both humans and machines. On this higher level, which unfortunately from our twentieth-century position may in fact seem too low, art can provide modes of compression in form. Good metaphorical examples are: the bar code, the QR code, or even emoticons. The spatiotemporal imitations of these simple forms, which facilitate human-human, human-machine, and machine-machine interaction are not necessarily limiting. Affective optical and sonic exchanges between the cosmos, the environment, and living organisms have always been wireless and quite effective in aiding life. However, this compression must essentially be understood in terms of art’s role in cognitive processes and not as the venerated production of a special kind of hyper cognitive luxury product.
19.
With its indirect and silent modes of address, art can help us understand the subtle difference between providing insight and constructing knowledge. Art, like the best kind of philosophy, is no longer “knowledge of” but rather “knowledge of how to do something.” The goal of an artwork can be to help cement a functional cognitive product that is more real than a belief, i.e., an action—not by acting as knowledge, but as the medium of knowledge production. Art, both as an object and process, can become a facilitator of knowledge production, supplying the world with a set of abilities to conceive and move, rather than to promote adherence to or the endorsement of a concept. Through the material capacities of the artwork or the temporal dimensions of the process of its making and display, art can comport intelligence—machinic, human, or both. A type of art as insight and navigation rather than knowledge and belief can also be thought of as an art of epistemic orientation. In conclusion, the production of knowledge is not what constitutes an artwork as such. Art has a cognitive role but should not be thought of as a cognitive product. This, again, suggests a continuity rather than an interchangeability with the idea and practice of science.
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus, 1771. Oil on canvas.
20.
A scientific theory can be artistic, but it can’t be soundly scientific if being creative is its sole aim. Similarly, artworks can incidentally“produce direct knowledge,” yet art can’t reliably produce knowledge if doing so is its intended aim. There are unreliable and unsound extremes in both art and science, which effectively define a spectrum that begins with nonsense and ends in propaganda.
21.
In this regard, art’s position is similar to philosophy and can vaguely be considered a type of cognitive philosophical modeling.By enabling the conditions for the production of knowledge—and since art isn’t just the effect produced by the artwork, but is also shaped by a set of normative social practices—art’s infatuation with its own changing definition is extremely tied to its indeterminate subjective effects amongst any number of potential viewers. However, the sociability of art has less responsibility than its material production for its ineffective indeterminacy. Future art could synchronize its material and normative commitments with social commitments, thereby beginning to allow concrete and determinate artistic judgments. This is how the sociability of art can once again become a kind of knowledge that presses forward,rather than being stuck in indeterminacy and whimsy.
22.
The rigorous art of tomorrow must bridge the gap between the sciences and humanities, yet remain on the humanities’ side of the divide. The artificiality of art’s surface can be precisely aligned with the artificiality of pure thought, which has its own open-source and collectively produced synthetic surface. Through this process art can confidently abandon its claims about production and accept its function as it ramifies the limits and possibilities of how we know what we know.
23.
Art, whether artists agree or not, is the void of meaning folded incognitive wrapping paper, visible only as the surface of cognition and as the materialization of both the historical and semantic emptiness which it carries. It is a series of verifiable claims inserted into the real world and reified to take up the empty space of meaning, a void occupying another void. Contrary to science,which functions as an uneven mediation between what the world is and what it ought to be in favor of the real world, art needs to bethought of as the outer form of both the inner and outer worlds,another mediation between the empirical and the constructed in favor of what the world ought to be. In the unequal conflict between art’s powerful ontology versus its weak epistemological potential, rigorous art always ultimately sides with the latter.
24.
Art needs to be removed from its contemporary ivory tower to deal with the implications of its appearance, but unlike twentieth-century modernisms, today art cannot afford to be solely about the limitations of its supporting material, or only conceived in relation to its own history and ontology. While it's true that art is the forming of information on its supporting material, like a hard drive, computer monitor, or gallery space, we should resist reducing it to, for example, the examination of the effects of light on nano-scale particles and using computers to work out how theses interactions could potentially be useful. We urgently need art today because it can be reconfigured to play a productive role in the reconciliation of human and machine subjectivities. We need art because it is only through art that we might be able to find a nontrivial cybernetic system for reestablishing a shared inhuman ethical foundation. This work cannot be automated and relegated exclusively either to humans or to machines. We ought to fully employ art, before our excessive humanism destroys the possibility of emergence of an ethical AI. We ought to teach our machines how to make and understand art and how its production is crucial in the social process of co-individuation.
25.
In regards to the notion of art as an isolated activity by a single individual, we ought to throw the artist as a precious flower into the compost heap. The reverence of the absolute figure of the artist is a symbolic recognition of the exceptional place of humans in the world. The inhuman essence we share with our machines will continue to resist subjective singularities. Art should be reconfigured to reference that which is produced by and for a collectivity of humans and machines.
26.
Art does not need to worry about an audience. It must begin byknowing that audiences need art more that art needs them.
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/mohammad-salemy/
This project itself could only be possible with the help of computers and social networks, which facilitate multiple dialogues on the same topic from different time zones and geographies. Much like a group exhibition, my role as a curator in constructing this text has been to arrange and connect concepts and propositions in ways that reveal my thought process while leaving space for readers to insert their own.
This text is collaged from social media conversations with Jason Adams,Julieta Aranda, Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Zac Davis, Lucca Fraser,Michael Ferrer, Aaron Gemmill, Amy Ireland, Joshua Johnson, Deneb Kozikoski, Suhail Malik, Reza Negarestani, Patricia Reed, Rory Rowan,Daniel Sacilotto, Keith Tilford, and Peter Wolfendale.
1.
If we were to begin with the assumption that art has always existed, and try to explain its givenness, then we would have to create a concept of art that fits within the set of existing artworks and their histories. However, if we instead begin by developing a concept of art as a condition in order to understand whether a new kind of art is possible, then we could very well find out that today, much of what is taken to be art simply isn’t. If we are to hang onto anything that might be called or resemble art, our efforts have to include not only understanding what art is, but also what art does, and even more importantly what it ought to do.
2.
If we take naive humanism as art’s main problem today, then the solution can become a nontrivial one. By removing the diverse and subjective interpretations or experiences of art as its condition of possibility or telos, we can collapse the entire edifice of the dominant art paradigm. However, the problem of the existing human-centered art does not only lie in its variegated interpretation, but also in the relaxation of epistemic standards for the adjudication of its value. Moreover, the problem lies in the short circuit with which the value of an artistic proposal is gauged as being only relative to the artistic act with which it is affirmed and produced.
3.
This is why art as a product cannot have value by itself. To simply assume that any act of creative affirmation by humans is good in itself is precisely what allows the relativist assertion that“everything is art” to never exhaust itself. Art must respond to the problem of enablement, i.e., how the making of artworks enables both the maker and the viewer to think. Thus, art production cannot be merely formal play. “Formalization” involves one’s ability to work within constraints set by the genre, medium,display space, and/or the audience. This has far more import than pure play and experimentation. If anything, rather than being playful in relation to form, art needs to be approached as a strategy of gaming the cog no sensible topology, or the surface of the work.
4.
Art’s problem cannot be solved at the level of viewing and interpretation. This is because the conceptual import of interpretive practices does not merely occur correlationally from the viewers’ confrontation with a produced work of art, but involves a type of conceptualization that allows a work of art to become possible in the first place. At the level of production, the artist not only utilizes a “technique” in the larger sense of the term, but also introduces sufficient fidelity to maintain certain assumptions. The artist does so in order to maintain the functionality of the work, while speculating on how cognition automatically generates assertions about art’s metaphysical availability to the viewer. The artist begins with a certain set of ideas and access to a level of already produced knowledge, as well as an understanding of how proactive risk-taking opens up the outcome of the artwork to contingency. This type of work is a process and is not that different from, for example, the way high-speed algorithmic trading works.
A simple wormhole effect is created using a revolved curve, a projected grid, and a light. Made using Autodesk Maya, this image is best known as desktop wallpaper.5.
While art cannot be conceived only in terms of signals,information, language, and rules, it should also not be legitimated strictly through its indeterminate and interpretive bio-phenomenological experience in a designated space called the museum, gallery, or any given public space. Nor can any faith be restricted to the viewer for the artwork’s completion through experience. The future valence of art will depend on its modularity and adaptability to multiple platforms. For art to face the machines, it needs to leave the church of humans and become fully processual and transmittable.
6.
To have conceptual and rational demands from art is to state that whatever value artworks have does not just reside in the conceptually indeterminate notion of interpretation, understood to be exclusively on the side of the subjective act of viewing. Art-making, therefore, must concern itself with the productive intentions of the maker, which one way or another will always be worn like an identity tag on art’s sleeve. To maintain this fine balance means making the functions of the work executable on the level of the surface without succumbing to humanist feedback loops.
7.
On the level of viewership, the social aspect of art operates according to certain constraints such as the spatial and material limits that inform and also constrain its appearance. This is why the art part of art-making must crisscross both the material and social levels of its production in order for it to reasonably assert new rules, or as some might say, have any meaning. Otherwise,what remains for art to accomplish besides habitually assuming its monopoly on certain kinds of social values and operations, like religion or representational politics?
8.
There is a fundamental distinction between two senses of art: a general one, which includes all human activities aimed at new forms of beauty or unconditional and indefinable value—the various media and their historical accretions, such as literature,theater, music, architecture, cinema, games; and a more specific sense, as an identifiable gallery- or museum-based practice that includes various historical performative attempts to break with itself. Most people talk about art in reference to the latter of the two. This limited definition, of course, has little more than historical inertia and economic power holding it together as a concept. Isn’t this why it endlessly invites the relativist wisdom of curators and critics, since it presumes to articulate a motley collection of practices that seem radically variegated in content but are secretly conjoined?
9.
The modern definition of art that privileges its visual character essentializes the historical incident of modern art through museology and photography—two powerful nineteenth-century technologies. They legitimate today’s art through its historical mirror image and the materiality of the ritual called exhibiting contemporary art. The exhibition space imbues artworks with ameta-quality within these secular cathedrals of sorts, conflating works with what we identified above as the general sense of art in order to colonize and lay claim to all other creative practices under the name of contemporary art.
A project of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's plan for "Monumental Propaganda," Vladimir Tatlin's vision for Russian modernity only made it as far as the model stage, but lives on for us in screenshot courtesy of Salemy.10.
The emergence of a future art will directly depend on two fundamental conditions. First, the art of tomorrow needs to be freed from the shackles of the logic of art history and particularly the long but thick chain that leashes it to modernism. Second, art needs to be freed from serving as the purveyor of meaning, a duty that accompanies this history. These two conditions are needed if we are seeking to secularize art from its domination by humanity.This double liberation does not require the re-elaboration of art’s significance; on the contrary, it requires a form of downgrading rather than elevation. We must begin by asking ourselves: What conditions have made visual arts a concern of Western culture?This question requires us to rewrite the history of the rise of art’s significance in relation to Western thought and philosophy from the prehistoric ages to our own time.
11.
Art’s extraction from its history and ontology is a separation that only loosens its ties to its human past so it can invent today its machinic future. By positing truth, in the future art will be able to maintain its negative condition of skepticism, and simultaneously focus on the positive conditions required to construct new perspectives. However, art cannot rid itself completely of meaning until the emergence of a true form of atheism that negates not only gods but also the vitalism of nature, the human, the material universe, language, and, finally, the machine. Until then, we have to ensure that artists are not the ones intending to produce direct meaning.
12.
We can only carve out a better definition and role for art if we forgo its historical inertia from the twentieth century onwards.This has constituted artists’ obsession with both defining art and transgressing its definition for no other purpose than transgression itself. When combined with the postmodern compulsion for difference, diversity, and multiplicity, this originates nothing other than a catastrophic lack of criteria for making judgments on art and the consequent indeterminacy of contemporary art. This has reduced today’s art practice to redundant affirmative creations: as transgression for its own sake becomes the sole driver, the corollary impulse is the imposition of one’s will over any and all existing constraints. Finally, art becomes an abrupt intervention whose authority and value are endowed automatically in the act of creation—even if,paradoxically, this very occurrence is indexed within its particular history of formal play and transgression.
13.
As an important injunction, we have to avoid the vulgar equation between art and science like the bubonic plague. Today’s art has no direct epistemic effects, or if it does, they are merely contingent. Despite claims about the production of knowledge via qualitative or even quantitative research projects, which might be effective for the purpose of art funding, art today is not directly about knowledge production. In fact, the only way that we might positively recuperate art is by preventing it from masquerading asa form of intuitive knowledge by colonizing all other forms of creativity, including design. The status of each of the visual arts, as they operate today, has to be understood as a species belonging to a wider genus and not the other way around.
14.
There is always a pendular movement between art’s impact on knowledge—its capacity to make knowledge cognizable—and the theoretical and aesthetic blindness of the sciences, which supposedly produce knowledge. Considered as a mode of rationality with a particular way of accessing and manipulating its outer forms and materials, art is then a type of technology searching for solutions to the epistemological shortcomings for which science has no patience. In this regard, art needs to be understood in terms of its intended and unintended cognitive role, and even perhaps its contingent socio-cognitive role within the gated community of art professionals who are the real laborers involved in its social production.
15.
Of course one might argue that contemporary art, in a limited sense, can provide a genuine inter/subjective experience, which may trigger a particular set of reflections, and so therefore it can be engineered to produce certain beliefs or represent certain social standards. However, in the abundance of all other forms of direct and accessible 24/7 media, do we really need art with its professional attire and technical language to create this kind of social construction?
16.
Only from this limited angle might art be integrated within an avigational paradigm of knowledge, escaping the conceptual dead ends fancied by artists who justify the value of their work by comparing it to the use value of science, a path that leads nowhere but down the enchanting Romantic humanist stream. Nowadays a great number of artists claim to be performing the labor of scientists by simply incorporating the result of systematic endeavors within their own production: artists as historians,artists as archivists, artists as social scientists, artists as anthropologists, and even artists incorporating neuroscience,physics, and mathematics, and so on. On the other hand, we should deflate the value of knowledge or even science in its present constitution. This is different from insisting that art cannot produce any knowledge whatsoever. In understanding that not all knowledge is sacred and that art produces no objective knowledge, we can comprehend that art’s cognitive trajectory is dissimilar to the interrogation carried forth by sciences and vice versa. Now, if knowledge becomes just a secondary concern and the focus is instead placed on art as a platform bridging the internality of the art world to its externality, art will then make available different forms of knowledge that science has not and will not be concerned with.
Inherently responsive, the skin not only protects us from microbes and the elements, but also regulates body temperatures while permitting the sensations of touch, heat, and cold.17.
Building a new purpose for art in the twenty-first century begins by downgrading it to a rigorous science of the surface, or the smallest component of what aesthetic theory refers to as form.What is form, if not the interaction and overlaying of multiple topological surfaces? What is form, if not the form that the multiplicity of surface effects place on the surface of perception?As the science of the surface, involved art has to come to terms with its metaphysical deficit and has become creative within its limited superficial resources. This deep science of the surface is the essential component for the construction of a stereoscopic vision of art/science. It involves taking away art’s metaphysical credit cards and forcing it to be resourceful with its own ontology.This is the first step in the long road to art truly becoming the form of thought. For art’s autonomy from science, it has to first become the true master of its own domain. This strategy entails not limiting art to just the local effects of its surface qualities, but using them as a path out of this very locality.
18.
As far as aesthetics are concerned, art nevertheless produces an objective knowledge of surface effects. The skin through which art impacts its surrounding world is where its potential as a platform lies. The reduction of art to this surface level is indeed necessary if we intend to teach and pass on the idea and practice of art to our machines. Consider, for example, the look and feel of fictional worlds and the aesthetics of social insights and interactions. Art can, in such contexts, facilitate access to knowledge for both humans and machines. On this higher level, which unfortunately from our twentieth-century position may in fact seem too low, art can provide modes of compression in form. Good metaphorical examples are: the bar code, the QR code, or even emoticons. The spatiotemporal imitations of these simple forms, which facilitate human-human, human-machine, and machine-machine interaction are not necessarily limiting. Affective optical and sonic exchanges between the cosmos, the environment, and living organisms have always been wireless and quite effective in aiding life. However, this compression must essentially be understood in terms of art’s role in cognitive processes and not as the venerated production of a special kind of hyper cognitive luxury product.
19.
With its indirect and silent modes of address, art can help us understand the subtle difference between providing insight and constructing knowledge. Art, like the best kind of philosophy, is no longer “knowledge of” but rather “knowledge of how to do something.” The goal of an artwork can be to help cement a functional cognitive product that is more real than a belief, i.e., an action—not by acting as knowledge, but as the medium of knowledge production. Art, both as an object and process, can become a facilitator of knowledge production, supplying the world with a set of abilities to conceive and move, rather than to promote adherence to or the endorsement of a concept. Through the material capacities of the artwork or the temporal dimensions of the process of its making and display, art can comport intelligence—machinic, human, or both. A type of art as insight and navigation rather than knowledge and belief can also be thought of as an art of epistemic orientation. In conclusion, the production of knowledge is not what constitutes an artwork as such. Art has a cognitive role but should not be thought of as a cognitive product. This, again, suggests a continuity rather than an interchangeability with the idea and practice of science.
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus, 1771. Oil on canvas.20.
A scientific theory can be artistic, but it can’t be soundly scientific if being creative is its sole aim. Similarly, artworks can incidentally“produce direct knowledge,” yet art can’t reliably produce knowledge if doing so is its intended aim. There are unreliable and unsound extremes in both art and science, which effectively define a spectrum that begins with nonsense and ends in propaganda.
21.
In this regard, art’s position is similar to philosophy and can vaguely be considered a type of cognitive philosophical modeling.By enabling the conditions for the production of knowledge—and since art isn’t just the effect produced by the artwork, but is also shaped by a set of normative social practices—art’s infatuation with its own changing definition is extremely tied to its indeterminate subjective effects amongst any number of potential viewers. However, the sociability of art has less responsibility than its material production for its ineffective indeterminacy. Future art could synchronize its material and normative commitments with social commitments, thereby beginning to allow concrete and determinate artistic judgments. This is how the sociability of art can once again become a kind of knowledge that presses forward,rather than being stuck in indeterminacy and whimsy.
22.
The rigorous art of tomorrow must bridge the gap between the sciences and humanities, yet remain on the humanities’ side of the divide. The artificiality of art’s surface can be precisely aligned with the artificiality of pure thought, which has its own open-source and collectively produced synthetic surface. Through this process art can confidently abandon its claims about production and accept its function as it ramifies the limits and possibilities of how we know what we know.
23.
Art, whether artists agree or not, is the void of meaning folded incognitive wrapping paper, visible only as the surface of cognition and as the materialization of both the historical and semantic emptiness which it carries. It is a series of verifiable claims inserted into the real world and reified to take up the empty space of meaning, a void occupying another void. Contrary to science,which functions as an uneven mediation between what the world is and what it ought to be in favor of the real world, art needs to bethought of as the outer form of both the inner and outer worlds,another mediation between the empirical and the constructed in favor of what the world ought to be. In the unequal conflict between art’s powerful ontology versus its weak epistemological potential, rigorous art always ultimately sides with the latter.
24.
Art needs to be removed from its contemporary ivory tower to deal with the implications of its appearance, but unlike twentieth-century modernisms, today art cannot afford to be solely about the limitations of its supporting material, or only conceived in relation to its own history and ontology. While it's true that art is the forming of information on its supporting material, like a hard drive, computer monitor, or gallery space, we should resist reducing it to, for example, the examination of the effects of light on nano-scale particles and using computers to work out how theses interactions could potentially be useful. We urgently need art today because it can be reconfigured to play a productive role in the reconciliation of human and machine subjectivities. We need art because it is only through art that we might be able to find a nontrivial cybernetic system for reestablishing a shared inhuman ethical foundation. This work cannot be automated and relegated exclusively either to humans or to machines. We ought to fully employ art, before our excessive humanism destroys the possibility of emergence of an ethical AI. We ought to teach our machines how to make and understand art and how its production is crucial in the social process of co-individuation.
25.
In regards to the notion of art as an isolated activity by a single individual, we ought to throw the artist as a precious flower into the compost heap. The reverence of the absolute figure of the artist is a symbolic recognition of the exceptional place of humans in the world. The inhuman essence we share with our machines will continue to resist subjective singularities. Art should be reconfigured to reference that which is produced by and for a collectivity of humans and machines.
26.
Art does not need to worry about an audience. It must begin byknowing that audiences need art more that art needs them.
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/mohammad-salemy/
Marina Garcés, What Are We Capable Of?
What Are We Capable Of?
From Consciousness to Embodiment in Critical Thought Today
Revised by Erika Doucette
Two centuries of modern critical thought have brought forth many definitions of critique, which differ based on the object and context of the critique. I would like to start by proposing a definition that summarizes the main aspects of a critical tradition in quite a transversal manner: “Critique is a kind of discourse that has practical and liberatory effects on what we can see, what we can be, and what we can do.” I am sure you may appreciate this classical definition. After years of crisis of critical thinking, I believe this definition and its demands are still valid today. Its validity certainly depends on our capability to endow critique with new meaning, that is, situate it within the real conditions of our present world and to manifest it in the way we determine our actual mode of existence, which I will show in my intervention here. This will be composed of three moments.
Following the abovementioned definition of critique, I will begin by referring to:
1) What we can see – I will elaborate on a new form of dogma that critique is faced with, a dogma without any pretence: the self-evidence of globalized capitalism.
2) What we can be – I will point to the question of embodying critique and consider what it means to be affected.
3) What we can do – I will question the conditions for creating critical thought today based on my experience in the project Espai en Blanc (“blank space” in Catalan)[1].
What We Can See
In nearly all its different meanings and traditions, critique has something to do with the idea of showing or bringing light to that which we do not see: a hidden truth, the conditions of possibility, a contradiction, an irrationality, the intolerable, the limits of our existence, and so on. Therefore, critique is like an effect of vision; it is not reflective but is supposed to possess the power of transformation: to transform conscience, the subject, history, forms of existence, etc.
However, one of the main characteristics of globalized capitalism—which presents itself as the only possible concept of the world—is that it no longer wears any masks, for it has nothing to hide. The secret of production no longer exists. After having shed all its masks, its self-evidence is its legitimation. This world conveys to us “everything there is already exists.”
Since the fall of communism and its disappearance as a vision of social transformation, much has been said about the triumph of capitalism. If we observe the state of the world today, even in its superficial appearance, it is clear that capitalism’s triumph has not been a real success. Its promises, virtues, and achievements are no longer the basis for its legitimacy. It rests on the self-evident truth that capitalism is the only possible reality in this world. Because capitalism is not forced to defend or justify itself its self-evidence has become a new form of dogmatism. This dogmatism without masks cannot be demystified or combated by any form of exposure.
The world today cannot be freed from this illusion by bringing capitalism’s self-evidence to light, although it is a sort of enchantment. This enchantment neutralizes critique. The self-evidence of this world neutralizes critique and reduces it in three ways to:
1) a moral judgment: we approve / condemn the state of things
2) an aesthetic judgment: we like /dislike this reality and choose different styles of living in this world
3) a psychological judgment: we feel good / bad about this reality, which only becomes worse in view of the number of new mental diseases in Europe and “developed” societies.
Regarding these three forms of reduction, critique finds itself trapped between impotence and indifference. I analyzed precisely this oscillation between impotence and indifference from an ontological approach in my book En las prisiones de lo posible, Ed. Bellaterra (2002) (In the prisons of the possible). My analysis addresses the paradox of living in a world where everything is possible but cannot be changed, which led me to develop the concept of “irrevocable contingence.”
From a political point of view, prisons of the possible more specifically signify the kidnapping or expropriation of the world as something we are capable of transforming collectively and as a reality that we develop together at the intersections of collective action. Globalization can be considered as the configuration of a unique world without a common dimension. We enable and experience the proliferation of countless lived worlds that remain separate from yet confirm one another and conform to a unique reality. Some have studied this as a consequence of the privatization of existence. From the point of view of these lived and privatized micro-worlds we can see the world in its self-evidence and we are able to assess it (using the three ways of judgment mentioned above) although this vision does not directly haven an effect of transformation. What is necessary for these effects of transformation to happen? How can we be affected by our own experience of the world?
What We Can Be
Something has to tear us away from our powerless and indifferent existence. Something has to tear us away from our role as victims and spectators.
In Spain, we have experienced something that can contribute to illustrating this issue. A process of critical resignification took place following the 11-M bomb attack in Madrid.[2] Survivors or those who lost someone in the trains created an association rejecting the category of the victim, which was the term that was officially used up until that point. They began to call themselves “the affected.” The transformation that took place thorough the use of this the term is very interesting transformation, particularly in terms of their political situation. This transformation can be summarized by three main aspects, raising three sets of questions:
1) They reject the passivity and receptivity of pain to open up the possibility for a wider transformation of oneself. Victimization is a unidirectional process that has a very specific effect. However, what does it mean to be someone who has been affected? Where do the effects of being affected begin and end?
2) Reparation (punishment for the guilty and indemnification for the victim) is no longer the only desire after suffering acts of aggression. What does someone who has been affected expect? What is his/her hope? What kind of horizon does his/her condition open up?
3) The perfectly individualized victim identity fades into a common field of experience. Who are the affected persons? What kind of institutions recognize or do not recognize them?
The spectator can only condemn the bomb attack and feel the horror of that vision. The victim can only suffer pain and expect reparation. But what is an affected person capable of? What can the affected do? That’s the question Foro opens up. It’s also the question they pose to us.
This allows the creation of a new framework for questioning the possibilities of critique today. Critical thought has always claimed to “raise consciousness.” Can we maintain that? Is a call to raise consciousness relevant despite the self-evidence of our reality? If we are able to see and know just about everything (i.e. the world is already illuminated) and still nothing happens, the problem we are concerned with is the embodiment of critical discourse: how can critical thought acquire a body? If consciousness only leads to individual judgment as to the evidence of the word [world], affectation opens up a common field of experience and, as shown above, another horizon of expectations where we do not know exactly what we are capable of.
The shift from consciousness to affectation moves us from focusing on the mind to focusing on the body. In other words, it brings about a shift from the duality of light/darkness to the ambivalence of vulnerability. In what sense is vulnerability ambivalent?
On the one hand, vulnerability refers to our emotional incapacity and incompetence. I refer to an expression taken from the interesting book Therapy Culture. Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London 2004) written by Frank Furedi. That is what a new form of power called “therapeutic power” cultivates: a need for institutional intervention in almost every aspect of our existence and in the management of our precarious and privatized lives.[3] That is also the dimension that is more exploited in the everyday, widespread experiences of precariety today. In this sense, vulnerability also represents the base on which the entire exploitation of our lives is constructed.
On the other hand, vulnerability also enables us to fundamentally bond with others, tying our existence to others’ existences. In Judith Butler’s recent book Precarious Life she analyzes this sense of vulnerability. The starting point for her analysis is the experiences of violence and grief, both of which are relevant to the experience of a terrorist attack, such as 11 S. She views violence and grief as capable of bringing out from within us the dimension of our existence that makes us something more than an individual and creates a bond that not only connects us but also constitutes our existence and poses the question of a “WE,” of a commonality.
11 S and 11 M have brought about a new vocabulary, which could perhaps provide us with a new political starting point. However, it would be a missed opportunity if these new semantics were to remain only within the context of catastrophe, disaster, and life-threatening situations. It is important to emphasize that vulnerability is not only a determination of a passive human existence that is only related to pain and suffering. Vulnerability is not simply receptive. It also signifies our real capability of exposing ourselves. To be vulnerable is to be capable of exposing oneself. Or, in other words, vulnerability entails our capacity to be affected. In this sense, vulnerability is not a form of being incapability but a potential, which is necessarily a collective power.
This second sense of vulnerability, following Butler’s work and going beyond the field of suffering and pain opens up an approach to vulnerability that is not defined by powerlessness but rather by the revelation of the impossibility of being an individual. It is a means of discovering interdependence. Experiencing interdependence, experiencing “WE” as a dimension of our own existence, is a way of taking back our world today. In a world held hostage by globalized capitalism, interdependence can only emerge in the shadow of a threat: the threat of the destruction of the planet through human action. This is a heteronomous sense of interdependence that lets everyone know our existence is in the hands of others. But as we have seen, there is another autonomous sense of interdependence, through which we realize the world is the common dimension of our particular existence. If we are able to acknowledge that dimension interdependence is the real meaning of autonomy, not in the sense of individual property that must be protected from the world and others, but in the sense of a common virtue.
This relationship between interdependence and autonomy is not self-evident, in fact, it is not obvious at all: it shatters the self-evidence of our world. Interdependence does not mean that my life is jeopardized through connecting it to the actions of others, but that my existence always contains a “WE” dimension even if it is repeatedly proven otherwise. How can we get to that dimension? How can we experience it? Through the work of critique, through a transformation that radically changes what we can see, what we can be, and what we can do. Foucault defines critique as the creation and critique of ourselves in our autonomy. For me, this autonomy means what I have been saying here. Being a mature subject capable of judgment is no longer most important, it is much more significant to have the courage to engage in a mode of existence that dares to be affected and exposed. It is no longer about the conquest of freedom as subjects move toward becoming independent from the world and others; it is now more about the conquest of freedom in our interlacements. To explore these in all their autonomy as a collective virtue is, from my point of view, the scope of critical thought today.
What We Can Do
What I have mentioned here profoundly affects how we should construct critical discourse today. If we pretend critical discourse has the practical liberatory effects I mentioned in the beginning our goal must be to provoke, awaken, and arouse this “WE” dimension of our existence. In this sense, critique remains a practical form of discourse that pretends to show us something we do not see. This is no longer a vision of our consciousness and cannot simply be announced or declared. It must be done. It must be manifested, but how?
We could always say that words are actions still comfortably rest within the role of critical thinkers, and just listen to ourselves. But that is not enough, in fact, I think we have all experienced how the field of critique often reproduces a ghetto, just another one so many other ghettos, making it impossible to break the chains of impotence and indifference.
It is obvious that it is not up to us to decide on or program a revolution. It is, however, urgent that we question and alter the conditions for creating critical discourse today. This means enabling a shift of at least two things:
1) From the centrality of the object of critique, which is always in front of us, always cut off, and isolated by its distance to the question of WHO is affected by the problems we pose and analyze. That is what embracing critique means. The discourse commonly constructed around “THEM” (taking its cue from the analyst or expert rhetorician) shifts to become a question of “WE,” for which there is no longer an object of analysis, but a common field of experimentation.
2) From the legitimacy of qualified voices (intellectuals, proletarians, students, precarious, immigrants, and so on) to the proliferation of an anonymous voice whose limits are difficult to define--so difficult, in fact, that the question of who the affected are remains open. These anonymous voices remove the legitimated voice from its chair, not to silence it, but to point to its incompleteness and to force it to encounter its “WE” dimension. Then, critique is a discourse no longer presented to others, but a discourse that is crafted together with others.
If we desire liberatory effects on what we can see, what we can be, and what we can do in a world of privatized modes of existence and if we seek to aim for the possibility of an autonomous experience of interdependence, then these two ways of shifting critical discourse and the conditions for creating critical discourse are still imperative today.
In the beginning, I mentioned the Espai en Blanc project. It is based on collective and practical thought and developed five years ago at the intersection of philosophy and activism. In the beginning, we said we had wanted to make thinking exciting again. To us, exciting meant giving it its own life, that is, to be exposed and affected by our own thought. To some extent, everything I have mentioned here has been a result of this collective experience. Over the past five years we have done several different interventions, publications, etc. The critical intervention in Barcelona that has shaken so many people was not based on what we said void of any context, but how we said it. Over the last two years, we have been organizing monthly gatherings in a bar in the center of Barcelona where everyone is invited to come and discuss a problem that we announce using on posters, by using blog, and via a mailing list. No lecturers are invited; no names mentioned... and therefore there is no public or spectators. Those who take part come to think together with others. It is so simple, but it has really revolutionized the way we are affected by what we think and the way we embrace new questions and problems. This year, more than a hundred people came each time. We tried to open it to a forum on Internet to include even more voices and expand the temporal dimension of the discussions. But it did not work. Why not? The point of this gathering is to be there. To be affected by the silence and by the words we search for together and sometimes manage to find. There is no idea or knowledge of individual consumption at these encounters, instead they invite the public to strengthen their views and voices together.
I will close with this very modest example, because in our world, we hear big words every day that have no effect. They are too often used as a shelter to protect us and to maintain a distance between the world and us. Critique must destroy that distance and help us not to find a shelter but the courage to engage in our interdependent autonomy. Canetti says this wonderfully: “only together can men free themselves of the ballast of their distances.”[4]
[1] For more information about Espai en Blanc see at: http://www.espaienblanc.net.
[2] Margarita Padilla and Amador Fernández-Savater have done invaluable work on this issue. See their contributions“Las luchas del vacío” in Espai en Blanc nº3-4, “La sociedad terapéutica” Bellaterra (ed.) (Barcelona 2007) and in the Red Ciudadana tras el 11-M. Cuando el sufrimiento no impide pensar ni actuarby colectivo Desdedentro (Acuarela Libros & A. Machado, Madrid 2008).
[3] See the Espai en Blanc publication nº3-4, “La sociedad terapéutica,” Bellaterra (ed.) (Barcelona 2007)
[4] Canetti, E.: Crowds and Power, transl. by Carol Stewart, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2005.y poder,Mondadori, 2005, p. 69
시청각 정서영 개인전
작가가 깊고 깊은 사유를 통해 만들어 낸 물질과 공간에 대한 반응 같은 것. 조각이란 무엇인가에 대한 끈질긴 탐구. 예민하고 단단하단 인상을 받았다만, 포스트-모던한 것이 이젠 좀 지겨웠다는 것이 솔직한 감상.
2016년 9월 10일 토요일
페북에서 한 작가가
"자기 작업 열심히해서 전시하는 작가들에게 눈 겨누고 성실하게 열심히 좋은작업하는 건 소용없다 미술은 결국 정치다 라고 생각하면 너무 힘들지 않을까?"
왠 프로테스탄트 윤리를. 이런 코쿤형 작가가 많아지면 미술 동네는 쇄락할 거라는 예견은 정말 맞을 거라는.