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ÍNDEX2 Editorial

Bartomeu Marí WhereisÍndexHeaded ?

6 ZoomChristoph Menke

TheForceofArt.SevenTheses

8 Chus Martínez ClandestineHappiness. WhatdoWeMeanbyArtistic Research?

12 DisplayPiotr Piotrowski AnArtHistorianbetween

theUniversityandMuseum. TowardstheIdeaoftheCriticalMuseum

16 MediterraneansElizabeth Suzanne KassabPost-ColonialSolitudeinthe

Mediterranean:SomeArabThoughts20 Artistic research

Julie Ault HistoricalInquiryasSubjectandObject

24 Natascha Sadr HaghighianTheGeometryofaCross-EyedSubject

27 AcademyXavier AntichFourDecadesoftheIndependent

StudyProgrammes29 Johanna Burton

IndependentStudy: ProgrammesandParadigms

Biannual JournalAutumn 2010Number 0

Artistic research, thought and education

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Biannual JournalAutumn 2010Number 0

Zoom

How is it possible to put together anarrative of art? ‘Zoom’ is a space fointellectual and bibliographic pointreference.

Display

How are exhibitions brought aboutdoes their research involve? This seattempts to make visible the proces by which exhibitions are conceiveddened.

Artistic research

Why and how do I do what I do? Atalk about their projects in the rst

Academy

What is the role of education? Howcritical visions constructed? ‘Acadedeals with the relationship betweeand the human sciences, as well as csocial intervention both within themuseum and beyond.

Mediterraneans

A space for dialogue on the Near EaEurope and North Africa. Differentoffer new formulations regarding cart, religion, education and the comfuture of the societies in the Medite

region.

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WHERE IS ÍNDEX HEADED?Bartomeu MaríDirector of MACBA

Índex translates into the two dimensions of theprinted page a set of ideas put into practice by theactivities of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de

Barcelona (MACBA). MACBA is not only a con-tainer of works of art; it is an intellectual engine intoday’s society. It is not part of the cultural spherewhere culture is understood solely as heritage, but rather consciously locates itself in the sphereof education, and of the production of ideas andimages of the world in which we live, as well as theone in which we would like to live.

Índex is a compass that guides the navigationof the different areas that connect the Museum toits various publics. MACBA attends to the needof constructing a culture that is receptive to the

contributions of art from within a common spaceof performance. Índex will take shape as differ-ent agendas and projects, both present and future,evolve. It serves, above all, to generate and toexemplify the construction of a new bibliographythat participates in the renewal of culture. TheMuseum is not only a site for the consideration of art, but also of the ways in wich individuals cannegotiate their presence and actions through art.In the pages that follow, Piotr Piotrowski discussesthe change from a linguistic to a performative para-digm, which we have witnessed over the course of the last decade. Well into the twenty-rst century,the work of art exists through performance, anevent in which we are implicated. We should con-sider the Museum as a set of events with different protagonists who are both viewers and actors at the same time. Índex is also a test bed for the con-struction of a new critical language that encouragesthinking from and through art. Discourses on art,or theory, have always followed in the footsteps

Rita McBride. Arena, 1997 (detail) Wood and Twaron structure

MACBA Collection. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Consortium.Long-term loan of the artist

Arenais a highly theatrical large-scale seatingstructure that turns the exhibition spaceinto a space of vision in which the notionof expectation is crucial: what or whom arewe expecting to see? The only response isaction: the museum rendered a performa-tive space, and the visitor another actor inthe play.

Editorial

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to create new productive models, new economicmodels like ours that will increasingly depend onthe economy of knowledge. The question we must ask ourselves is whether we would like to positionourselves as producers or consumers. It is prefer-able, however, to consider the relationships withinthe culture sphere as barter, not as imposition orloss. Any new terminology or vocabulary endan-gers what has preceded it. We do not want theeconomy of knowledge to end up as the fuel for anew society of the spectacle in which public spacehas disappeared. MACBA wants to create academiawhile avoiding academicism. The Museum wantsto educate without being professorial. With theircontributions, Xavier Antich and Johanna Burton join MACBA in this challenge, which is expressedabove all – although not exclusively – through itsIndependent Studies Programme (PEI).

MACBA acts as a constellation, a systemwhose components attract and depend on one an-other. The temporary exhibitions and the MACBACollection are its most visible elements, but they

are meaningless without the constant elaborationof narratives on the past and ctions of the present.The Study Center represents a clear decision toexpand the collection into new areas where art interacts with different spheres of the humanities.The history of contemporary art cannot be writ-ten solely on the basis of individual works; it isalso necessary to consider how these works wereinitially displayed and then received. The historyof exhibitions and of the reception of art is one of the tools for understanding the transformationof the aesthetic, symbolic and moral values of art

over time. The MACBA Collection and the StudyCenter could not be understood without consider-ing the Independent Studies Programme.

Our cultural context is clearly lacking inknowledge and opinion about the present. Thestudy of the recent past seems to hold no academicor social value. For this reason, it is meaninglessto increase material heritage without heedingand communicating its intellectual and symboliccomponents, without investigating how art andits events have been generated and perceived. ThePEI trains new kinds of professionals in the sphereof cultural production from a patently multidis-ciplinary perspective. From the Study Centerand the PEI, two new types of activities guide theMuseum’s development: on the one hand, thehistory of exhibitions as a scientic discipline that is essential to writing art history, and on the other,the focus on cultural and artistic productions origi-nated within the connes of the Mediterraneanregion, from the Balkans to the Maghreb, via the

of practices, innovations and inventions. But oncethese movements and shifts in value have been ac-cepted, a new vocabulary and chronology becomenecessary. This is the spirit of The International, anassociation of museums created to bring us closerto the recent, but distant, history of non-centralEuropean countries. Addressing relevant artisticand cultural productions from regions borderingon the Mediterranean allows us to act as an inter-face on the Western side of a cultural context inwhich neighbours do not talk to or understand oneanother. In this publication, Elizabeth SuzanneKassab reects on the forms of representation of her culture as articulated by Arab intelligentsiaover the course of the twentieth century.

This issue of Índex focuses on the questionof artistic research, which it places at the heart of the Museum’s current concerns. As Chus Martínezputs forward in her thesis, the notion of artisticresearch posits that artistic practice lies outside themodernist paradigm where the autonomous workof art is separated from the world in which and for

which it is created. It is, rather, through researchthat works of art exist and are available to percep-tion – that is, ‘take place’. And, as artefacts, worksgenerate opinion and action. Artistic research, likemost disciplines in the humanities, engages in aspeculative methodology. The research of artistsNatascha Sadr Haghighian and Julie Ault, for in-stance, will be developed into exhibition processesto be held at the Museum. MACBA does not respond to outside events, it provokes and pro-duces them. We are far from the paradigm of thewhite cube – and from its opposite, the black box

– where the outside world must not get inside aspace preserved for the genesis and perceptionof art. The Museum cannot divide the world intoa sanitary and protected inside and a soiled anddangerous outside: what the Museum houses andgenerates form part of one unique reality. The factsof art are expressed in realities that often have yet to be named. One of the primary tasks of artisticresearch is to create a new vocabulary that allowsus to relate not only to history and the recent past, but also to the present. Philosopher ChristophMenke speaks from the present when introducingthe notion of ‘force’ in his update of Adorno’s con-ception of art. Menke criticises the fact that ‘neverhas the aesthetic at the same time so strongly re-ected a simple means of enhancing productivity’.

The acquisition of knowledge is one of thefeatures of the art experience, and neither researchnor knowledge should be the exclusive heritage of science. Clearly, new standards for cultural produc-tion and distribution must be activated in order

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Bosphorus and the Middle East as the gateways tothe Arab world.

Working with individuals, institutions andentities located in the Mediterranean (whetherin Europe or North Africa) should help create aunique and dynamic exchange in the near future.The MACBA Collection has already begun work inthis direction, as will be evident in the presenta-tions of the years to come. In the much shorterterm, the collection will explore constructing aplace for the interrogation of its own cosmopoli-tanism and the relevance of rationalism. In Spain,modernism in aesthetics emerged in the 1950s(not in the rst decades of the last century). Andthat modernism was, from the beginning, deeplycritical of the original postulates of the avant-garde: rationalism is regionalist and abstraction ismaterial and gestural, not geometrical or cerebral.The way in which the comings-and-goings of themodern are passed on to these times is the essenceof this historiographical project. And one of themain questions is how the local is manifest in the

new global theatre of cultural transactions.Índex is part of a publishing project that has

evolved from the production of exhibition cata-logues to a broader endeavour that constitutes atrue pillar of the Museum’s mission. The rangeof publications that MACBA intends to produceis now larger in scope. It will include scienticpublications that not only analyse the evolutionof aesthetic forms, but also help form opinionand spark debate. Índex stands in for theMACBA Agenda ( AG), separating factual information onthe programme activities from the discourses,

inspirations, motivations and processes throughwhich contents are developed. While the publish-ing industry and traditional print media are inter-rogating the future of paper, at MACBA we aredecidedly anachronistic: we attempt to conciliatedifferent tools for communicating ideas. Rita McBride. Arena, 1997 (detail)

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THE FORCE OF ART.

SEVEN THESESChristoph MenkeFull professor of philosophy at the Goethe Univer-sity of Frankfurt, where he specialises in ethics andaesthetics. His publications includeTheSovereigntyofArt:AestheticNegativityinAdornoandDerrida (1998) andReectionsofEquality (2006).

1.

At no point during the modern era has there been more art – has art been more visible, more present, and more inuen-tial – in society than today. At the same time, art has never been so thoroughly integrated into the societal process astoday; simply a further element in one of many forms of communication that make up society: a commodity, anopinion, an act of knowledge, a judgement, an activity.At no point during the modern era has the category of theaesthetic been so pivotal for cultural identity than in thepresent epoch, which in its initial enthusiasm called itself ‘postmodern’ and is now increasingly moving towardsits conception of a post-disciplinary ‘society of control’

(Deleuze). Never has the aesthetic at the same time so stronglyreected a simple means of enhancing productivity.The ubiquitous presence of art and the central meaning

of the aesthetic within society go hand in hand with theloss of that which I propose to call its force – with the lossof art and of the aesthetic as force.

2.The way out of this situation cannot involve an attempt toposition art and the aesthetic as mediums of knowledge, of politics, or of critique against their absorption into society.The conception of art or of the aesthetic as knowledge, as politics, or as critique only serves to further contributeto turning these into a mere segment of communicationwithin society. The force of art does not lie in being knowl-edge, politics, or critique.

3.In dialogue with the orator Ion, Socrates described art asan arousal and transfer of force: the force of excitement, of enthusiasm. This force rst arouses the Muse in the artists,

who then transfer it through their works to the viewe

critics – like a magnet ‘not only pulls those rings, if theiron, it also puts power in the rings, so that they in turdo just what the stone does – pull other rings.’ ‘In the way, the Muse makes some people inspired herself, athen through those who are inspired a chain of otherenthusiasts is suspended.’ The context of art is a contethe transfer of force. Being transferred to the artists, viers, and critics is the force of excitement, of rapture, ‘uhe becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his lect is longer in him’.

4.

From this insight into the force of art Socrates drew thconclusion that art must be banned from the city to beof reason. From the very beginning there have been twoopposite ways of defending art against this conclusion. rst line of defence declares art to be a social practice. It ain contrast to Socrates, that the idea of a force inheringwithin art that enthuses to the point of unconsciousnis not applicable. Rather, in art – in its creation, percepand evaluation – there is a socially acquired capacity atart is an act of practical subjectivity. This is the meaninthe ‘Poetics’ contrived by Aristotle, as ‘Poïétique’ (Valéthe doctrine of art as action, as the exercising of a capacthat the subject has acquired through education, meanhis socialisation (or disciplining), and has now chosenconsciously practise. By contrast, there has always beeanother conception of art, which the eighteenth centuwould come to label ‘aesthetic’. This ‘aesthetic’ concepof art is founded upon the experience of a force burgeowithin art that entices the subject to emerge from withor likewise to go behind or beyond; a force, therefore, unconscious – a ‘dark’ force (Herder).

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5. What is force? Force is the aesthetic opposite of (‘poietic’)capacity. ‘Force’ and ‘capacity’ are the names of two anti-thetical notions of the agency of art. Agency is the realisa-tion of a principle. Force and capacity are two antitheticalnotions of the principle and its realisation.

Having a capacity implies being a subject; being asubject implies having ability. What a subject is capable of is making something succeed, accomplishing something.Having capacities or being a subject implies being capableof making an action succeed through practice and study.Making an action succeed in turn implies being capable of repeating a general form in a new, always unique situation.Capacity is the ability to repeat the general. The generalform is the form of a social practice. Therefore, understand-ing artistic agency as the exercising of a capacity impliesunderstanding this agency as an action in which a subject realises the general form that reects a social practice; thismeans understanding art as a social practice and the subject as its participant.

Forces, like capacities, are principles that becomerealised through agency. But forces are the counterpoints

of capacities:— While capacities are acquired through social prac-

tice, people already possess forces before they have becomesubjects. Forces are human, but presubjective.

— While capacities are purposefully enacted bysubjects through conscious self-control, forces effectuateoftheirownaccord ; their effectuation is not guided by thesubject and is therefore not conscious to the subject.

— While capacities realise a socially predened gen-eral form, forces are formative, and thus formless. Forcesshape forms, and they shape all forms that they have shaped back again.

— While capacities are geared to success, forces lackobjectives and dimensions. The effectuation of forcesinvolves play, the creation of something that they have re-ally already surpassed.

Capacities turn us into subjects who can successfullyparticipate in social practices by reproducing their generalform. In the play of forceswe are pre- and supersubjective –agents who are not subjects; active without self-conscious-ness; inventive without reason.

6.The aesthetic conception describes art, as per Socrates, as aeld of the emergence and transfer of force. Yet the aestheticconception not only assesses this differently than Socrates;it understands it differently as well. According to Socrates,art ismerely the arousal and transfer of force. But art doesnot exist in this way. Art is rather the art of transition be-tween capacity and force, between force and capacity. Art iscreated through the diremption of force and capacity.Art is created through a paradoxical capability: being capableof being incapable; being able to be unable. Art is neither

merely reason (Vernunft ) of capacity nor merely playforce. Art is the time and the place for the reversion fcapacity to force, for the generation of capacity from f

7.For this reason art is not part of society, is not a socialpractice; for the participation in a social practice evinstructure of action, of the realisation of a general formthis is why we are not subjects in art, in the creation oception of art; for being a subject means realising theof a social practice. Art is rather the sphere of liberatiowithin the social but from the social; the liberation osocial within the social. When the aesthetic becomesductive force in postdisciplinary capitalism, it is diveits force; for the aesthetic is active and produces effecit is not productive. And likewise, the aesthetic is divof its force when it is supposed to shape social practicwhich allows a focus against the unleashed productivcapitalism; for the aesthetic is liberating and altering,is not practical. The aesthetic as ‘total unleashing of a bolic powers’ (Nietzsche) is neither productive nor pcal, neither capitalistic nor critical.

The force of art pertains to our force. It pertains liberation of the social gestalt of subjectivity, be it proor practical subjectivity. The force of art pertains to lib

This article is an extract from the book by ChrisMenke, Kraft.EinGrundbegriffästhetischerAnthrop2008.

Force.AFundamentalConceptinAesthetic Anthropology is the attempt to read modeaesthetics as a theory of ‘force’. It does so by

that modern philosophy begins twice in ae– in two different, even opposite forms: aaesthetic of the subject and its ‘faculties’ anas an experience and theory of force, whichconceives the aesthetic as a play of imaginaForce denes the aesthetic nature of humaas distinct from the culture of socially acqupractices. Force is the concept of a differendifference between nature and culture, humand subjectivity, play and practice – that mfreedom possible. ‘The last word of aesthehuman freedom.’

Christoph MenEinGrundbegrtischerAnthropFrankfurt: Suh2008.

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Armando AndTudelaUntitled(2), 20Rattan and ste51.4 x 37 x 31.5MACBA ColleBarcelona CityFund

One in a seriessimilar sculptuon minimalist in steel and ratUntitled2distaus from an anaapproach to imin a more psyc

and hallucinat

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That is, the principle of indetermination is also operatthe social sciences, aesthetics and philosophy. In the vact of observing, we alter what we have observed. Neittheory nor philosophy nor criticism can aspire to detewhat art is. It is simply ridiculous to question whetherexists or not, but forcing it to speak a single language, thistorical reconstruction, is sadly impudent.

The traditional hierarchical distinctions between thand action, between criticism and creation are sterile. This an obvious need to think of a more eloquent way of coceiving the aesthetic-cognitive back-and-forth betweenproduction of art and the grammar of theory. Contempoart practice has invited itself to the party of those who asthe complex mission of generating tools to grasp the wo

Taking artistic research seriously means accepting dorganisation in the relations between the disciplines thawith contemporary art. The rise of cultural studies, critictheory and the many variations of post-Marxist understing of the relationship between art and economics is fruan ungrounded – though perhaps historically necessary dence in the possibility of rst unravelling and then staing the meaning of what happens in a work of art, as wel

the ‘creative’ process as a whole.Meaning cannot be explained by its context, though

context may help with its historical interpretation. If this the case, the effort of art and artist to avoid juried shows aacademies would be pointless. Interpreting is not the samunderstanding. Too often the description of the codes thastitute a system, of the relations that act on a work of art orother cultural fact that can be reied, is geared towards pas judgment, to determining whether we are headed in the

Since Marcel Duchamp, and perhaps much earlier – indeed,perhaps forever –, art has been eager to house a knowledgedifferent from academic knowledge and to provide the ulti-mate reason for modifying that academic knowledge. Muchcontemporary art attempts to develop works and situationsthat make it possible to read the past freely, to take ight and approach the unknown.

There is a paradox that cultural studies and the heirs tocritical theory consistently deny because it does not servetheir purposes: artistic practice is temporal and atemporalat the same time. Art and culture must necessarily situatethemselves in this contradiction in the attempt to be withinhistory while escaping it.

Cultural studies recognise that they cannot be conceivedin terms of progress, that there is no single Modernity but many, that universals are now always in the plural. Nonethe-less, contemporary art runs the risk now more than ever of turning into a secondary source. Art and artists know them-selves to be subject to a series of textual and institutional log-ics, and one of their achievements has been to reveal that fact in the sphere of artistic production and reception.

Artistic research names the effort to recognise the

importance and explore the consequences of the follow-ing statement: meaning does not emerge from History but from Fiction. This names an effort, not a method. When wespeak of artistic research, we are not speaking of the fact that many artist engage in exhaustive research before making awork. Nor should we confuse artistic research with con-temporary art’s proximity to the social sciences and theirmethods. The term has been coined, rather, to alert us tothe fact that art has also become a quantum phenomenon.

Becky BeasleyA-Z of Personal2009 42 copies

Design Toni UroMACBA CollectStudy Center

This work was pof the exhibitionTheMaladyofW AProjectonTexSpeculativeImagheld at MACBA November 2009April 2010.

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right direction. If contemporary art has strived to do anything,it is to teleport : to change green into red, to turn around therules of the game to be freed of the constant allocation of meaning and thus ‘unexpress the expressable’.2 For a longtime philosophy has been saying that there are no outstandingrewards and no certainty waiting around the corner. Yet, bothcriticism and the exhibition apparatus are determined to con-tradict this as they strive to render the notion of History plural.

The new importance of philosophy and the social scien-ces in the sphere of contemporary art is related to an essentialdiscovery: art today is located in a space uniquely productivefor the interrelation of knowledges that would otherwisenever intersect. This is similar to what Gaston Bachelardattempted to describe in the introduction toThePoeticsofSpace(1957). Space appears where the logic of causality ceasesand another principle takes hold, mainly the principle of re-verberation. Stating that space does not emerge on the basis of laws of causality means that the public sphere is not constructed by merely ensuring a series of conditions, just as the existenceof a parliament or alike does not guarantee that debate will takeplace. Something else must happen, and that is what Bachelardcalls reverberation. Practice proves that transparency is not

enough, that a system of logical argumentation does not necessarily unleash the will to change, let alone change itself.

Bachelard looks to reverberationas an image that expressesthe movement between logics of thought and methods of work that have nothing in common. The possibility of different thinking depends on this so very abstract and difcult to denemental operation. Contemporary art attempts to exist in thisspace of reverberation, rather than in the work-commentaryequation. Art is not a pretext for thought, but rather a thought that operates by means of the constant exchange betweendifferent systems that vacillate between the abstract and theconcrete, and that make us vacillate between them as well.

Nothing productive emerges from translating ideasinto images. The attempt to establish a correlation betweenideas and their representation denies the unexpected and,hence, the hope for change. Reverberation names somethingquite different – and more complex – than interdiscipli-nariness, or the borrowing of ideas and concepts betweensciences. Artistic research understands that artistic practicegenerates concepts on the basis of intuition and that thechallenge lies in their formalisation. That amounts to af-rming that art’s relationship to theory should not obey acause-effect logic. To be truly modern, theory cannot as-sume the role of the eternal mediator between the work andthe viewer; it cannot limit itself to speaking after the fact.Locating thought outside artistic practice means acceptingthat History is the nal instance and judgment the only wayto relate to culture in order to ensure that the last horizon isalways normative; it means that there is only room for thedialectic between good and bad. There are countless exam-ples of interpretations of cultural production on these bases.

It is necessary to think and express oneself in otheTo walk down a different path we have to unlearn the land attend to concepts neglected by critical theory. Thesion is not to renovate thought, but to venture into otheand place them at the core of artistic and cultural thinSustaining, like Deleuze, that meaning emerges fromimplies realising that it is not philosophy that makes an cipated viewer possible, but rather an artistic practice thmade an unprecedented effort to understand itself befogure of the viewer. And that understanding implicate

That is what artistic research consists of, and that an institution that wants to think through, rather thanart is now inconceivable. The production of space is antrust, of future-ness.

According to Bachelard, the mental function thatus closest to the enigmatic vastness of what’s to come idaydreaming. For philosophy, it is a fundamental exercDaydreaming is a way of creating access to grandeur, tha sphere radically opposed to the domestic and differenthe social. It empowers an attitude so very exceptional it takes the daydreamer outside this world, to another wthat bears the mark of innity. It points in the direction

vital multiplication of mortal freedoms; it builds worldcounter-worlds. Daydreaming is a constitutive space thgests the ability to imagine consciousness itself.

2 Roland Barthes used this phrase frequently.

A series of books partake of thisand the concern with thinking dferently: Elaine Scarry,DreamintheBook,New York: Farrar, StraGiroux, 1999; Daniel Heller-RoTheInnerTouch,Archaeologyof

Sensation, New York: Zone Boo2009; Gaston Bachelard, Essaisconnaissanceapprochée, Paris: Lrie Philosophique Vrin, 2006; GBachelard,ThePoeticsofSpace, ton: Beacon Press, 1984 (originasion, Gaston Bachelard, LaPoétil’espace, París: Presses Universitde France – PUF, 1964); Sienne UglyFeelings, Cambridge: HarvUniversity Press, 2005; Gilles DPureImmanence:Essaysonalife York: Zone Books, 2001; Matei (ed.),TheSocialafterGabrielTaDebatesandAssessments, New YRoutledge 2010; Jean-Paul SartrPsychologyofImagination, NewPhilosophical Library, 1948 (oriversion, Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imag psychologiephénoménologiquel’imagination, París: Gallimard,

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AN ART HISTORIAN BETWEENTHE UNIVERSITY AND MUSEUM.TOWARDS THE IDEAOF THE CRITICAL MUSEUMPiotr PiotrowskiProfessor ordinarius at Adam MickiewiczUniversity in Poznan, where he chairedthe Art History Department (1999–2008).He has served as Director of the NationalMuseum in Warsaw since 2009 and is theauthor of a dozen books, including Inthe

ShadowofYalta.ArtandtheAvant-GardeinEasternEurope,1945–1989 (2009).

Despite all the differences between the art history pro-fessor and the curator, concerning different methods of self-expression, the audience, channels of distribution,etc., there are aspects that br ing these two occupationstogether. One of them is ‘scholarship’. According to IvanGaskell, both the professor and the curator are ‘scholars’,1

which means that both produce and distribute knowl-edge. At this point, we may ask a question about the roleof scholarship framing one and the other type of practicerelated to art history, the museum and academia. In orderto answer this question, one must ask another one about the present condition of the humanities and their attemptsto overcome the ‘linguistic turn’ that now belongs tohistory. Maybe in this way we will be able to express ourhope that in contrast of the humanities of that ‘turn’,separating the museum from academia in terms of intel-lectual interests (studying the work of art as an object versus studying it as a text), now, when the linguistic turnis becoming obsolete, we have a chance to build a scholarlyand intellectual community of professors and curatorsworking together.

What does the retreat from ‘linguistics’ in the huities consist in? In a concise but sophisticated mannerissue has been presented by Gabrielle Spiegel, Presidethe American Historical Society, in her address publisin the AmericanHistoricalReview.Without getting indetails of that programmatic statement, let us stress th

Spiegel opposes the ‘linguistic’ turn to the ‘performatone, the study of structures to the study of social pracand reection on the systems of signs to reection onculture. The ‘performative’ project focuses primarilyon the problematic of identity and assumes signicandestabilisation of the idea of subjectivity by isolating itthe ‘soil and blood’ by common migrations, diasporaminority and transnational identities, globalisation, eThe problem is by no means limited to the study of contemporary culture, but pertains also to the study ohistory.2 In fact, if we take into account the studies of Braidotti (e.g.,NomadicSubjects), Judith Butler (BodithatMatter orGenderTrouble) or Irit Rogoff (e.g., TerInferna), and add to them a plethora of feminist, queand postcolonial approaches that constitute the prese

1 Ivan Gaskell, ‘Magnanimity and Paranoia in the Big Bad Art World’, in CHaxthausen (ed.),TwoArtHistories.TheMuseumandtheUniversity, Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2002, p. 14.

2 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Presidential Address: The Task of the Historian’, A HistoricalReview, Feb. 2009, pp. 1–15.

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cultural studies, we will have no doubts as regards thelegitimacy of such a statement.

There are many examples illustrating the engagement of museums in this kind of studies. The question, however,is not whether and in what ways the practices of museumshave been inspired by academic research, as in the case of Linda Nochlin’s great exhibition,WomenArtists:1550–1950, shown in Los Angeles in 1976 (L ACMA), but if thereverse is the case. In that respect, a good example is a Parisexhibition,MagiciensdelaTerre by Jean-Hubert Martin(Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle, 1989), whichaimed at addressing the orientalisation of the postcolonialregions of the world even though it was criticised andaccused of latent imperial and neo-colonialist tendencies.3 In fact, that exposition was one of the rst statements in thepostcolonial debate in art history regardless of the criticism, besides, the statement was made by a museum, not auniversity. In contrast to the inspiration of museums by feminist studies, postcolonialism has been recognised byacademic art history quite late. The direction of the inuencehas been opposite: not from the academia to the museum, but the reverse.

Thus far, we have been dealing with the relations between art history at the university and in the museum inthe context of the new humanities. Now, let us ask a ques-tion about the post-humanities. Most likely, it is a part of a more general reaction to the ‘linguistic turn’, but it takesanother direction and is perhaps more radical. In the post-humanities, the problematic of identity gives way to a muchmore profound revision that is a change of the status of the human being in the environment. Their critiqueof anthropocentrism reaches far beyond the rejection of a thesis that man is the hub of the universe. The point isnot just to endow animals, things, cyborgs, etc., with equal

rights or claim that they can have relations unmediated byhumans, but that the human being as such can no longer be dened in traditional terms in the context of geneticengineering or organ transplantation technology. The post-humanities are humanities after humanism, which produceknowledge criticising or rejecting the central position of man in the universe – this means that they favour different non- or anti-anthropocentric approaches. The key researchproblems of the post-humanities are the limits of speciesidentity, relations between the human and the non-human,the issues of bio-power, bio-politics, and bio-technologyand the study of animals and things. 4

I am most interested in the latter. It is not that a thing– for example, a work of art – suddenly becomes an object of study. What is signicant is that things take part in social

and political life, and the question is how to describeparticipation. Specically, I mean one project that comresearch with display –MakingThingsPublic preparethe ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2005 by a scholar, Bruno Laand a curator Peter Weibel, the latter having many yeexperience both in research and in organising exhibitMakingThingsPublic , with its huge catalogue, is a veimportant event and probably the most signicant cotribution of art history and the museum to the studythings and their social and political role (Latour calls Dingpolitik ),5 demonstrating that there is room for usthe post-humanities. It should be noted that an impufor such studies and considerations comes exactly fromuseum and its engagement in the most radical reseaprojects. It is a perfect piece of evidence that my theson the common scholarly and intellectual attitude ofprofessor and the curator, the academic and the musemaker, has been proved by a fusion of two historico-practices in one and the same project of a radical renethe humanities.

Finally, I would like to distinguish still another of the debate on the comparison of university schola

and the museum, referring to the local context of EasCentral Europe, and ask whether the changes that tooplace twenty years ago (the fall of communism) can hany inuence upon it? At the moment, there is at leaproject combining research and public display, whichaddresses the year 1989 and makes an attempt to recoin that particular context the foundations of the Westhe FormerWestProject carried out by the BAK in Utincluding a series of seminars and conferences to conwith a big exhibition and a publication.

I will approach a denition of the ‘former Westreferring to the title of a well-known book by Depesh

Chakrabarty,ProvincializingEurope (2000). Using itmetaphor, I would say that the matter is ‘provincialis West’. Only under such circumstances we can talk abthe ‘former West’ – we must look at it as a province, bin relation to another new centre (a new West). Instit must become one province among many, one amoothers. In other words, what is at stake is depriving West of its central place in the global structure of theand making it horizontally equal to other regions. Stiwhat is the signicance of the ‘provincialisation of th West’ for art history and museums?

Let us realise that the decentralisation of the Weits culture, which means its ‘provincialisation’ in schship, is already going on. Among new initiatives, onemention the December 2008 issue of the ArtBulletin

3 SeeThirdText , No. 6 (Spring 1989).

4 Ewa Domanska, LiterariaCopernicana (in press).

5 Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, in Bruno Latour andPeter Weibel, (eds.)MakingThingsPublic.AtmosphereofDemocracy,Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2005, pp. 14–41.

´

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titled – nomenomen – ‘Decentering Modernism’.6 Also thepostcolonial art history has made the ‘provincialisation’of the West quite clear. The same direction should (andmost likely will) be taken by the study of the art of Easternand Central Europe, and the post-totalitarian studies ona global, comparative scale, taking into consideration thepost-apartheid in South Africa and post-authoritarianismin South America, i.e. cultures after the fall of the regimes based on violence and oppression in different parts of theworld almost at the same moment in time – the late 1980s.As regards museums, the situation is somewhat morecomplex, particularly if the subject in question is a typi-cally Western museum, called by Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach the ‘universal survey museum’, founded in thecountries of the West more than two hundred years ago.7 The reason for that is not just the globalisation of museums– their imperial strategy involved in the global politics andeconomy, such as the global expansion of the GuggenheimMuseum or the Louvre Museum, the most spectacularexample of which is the museum founded in Abu Dhabi. It israther some kind of ‘glocality’, a combination of the globaland the local perspective, and the recognition of changes in

local communities evolving toward the cosmopolitism of the so-called ‘nation state’. The population of specic coun-tries, in particular of their big cities, has been changing fromethnic hegemony toward cosmopolitan differentiation,which makes museums turn into what Michel Foucault called the contemporary ‘heterotopia’, not the utopia of thenational unity. Museums are becoming global not by their

territorial expansion, but by addressing global problemin local, cosmopolitan environments. A perfect exampof that tendency is a new concept of the British Museudeveloped by its director, Neil MacGregor, who refers holdings of the museum, founded to legitimise Britishimperialism, to the ethnically differentiated, multiculand cosmopolitan London of today, in which all theminorities can nd their identities in the culturally relcollections of the museum.8

In fact, simplifying to some extent, one can distinamong three types of museums: the museum as a tempattended by the faithful who believe in the dogma of t‘sacred’ character of art; the museum as a place of enterment, ‘McDonaldised’, as it were, and involved in the gnetworks of consumerism and tourism; and the musea forum that wants to perform critical tasks and encoureection on the changing world both on the macro- amicro-scale. The idea of the museum-as-forum, whichHans Belting refers only to one type of the museum asresponse to the globalisation of culture and its local asi.e. to the MoCA,9 should be applied to the mission of another type, i.e. the ‘universal survey museum’.

The potential of the ‘provincialisation of the Wesrespect to museums I can see in the idea of the ‘criticalseum’ – on the one hand, local, not to say ‘provincial’, on the other, global. The role of museums is not so muhelp develop a new ‘empire’, but a global politeia, a gloconstitution of the world in the local, not to say, ‘provcial’ agora. Only such a museum will be able to suppor

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ways of controlling international politics. It will do it by itsinuence and by addressing local problems, which, becauseof the cosmopolitisation of the local, are acquiring globalsignicance. In other words, what gives us a chance is theidea of a local ‘critical museum’ with global ambitions.

There are at least two levels on which such a museumcan operate. One of them is its participation in the localagora, analysing social and political questions, recognisedas the key ones for a particular community. Since, however,local communities are in the process of global change, asI have mentioned before, to address local issues is at thesame time global. London is not the only cosmopolitanEuropean city with its multicultural social strata. Smallercities in Europe, including Central and Eastern Europe, arechanging their character in the same way, too; however,not to the same extent. Warsaw, for example, is not such acosmopolitan centre as London, is not a metropolis in theabove mentioned degree, and perhaps will never be. How-ever, its character is changing very fast. The local society ismuch more complex and differentiated in terms of ethnic,political, sexual, etc., identities than it used to be before1989. Thus, the critical museum should address these pro-

cesses. The other level is to rethink the internal conditionof the museum in such a historical context and develop asort of self criticism. Something as a critique of local artisticcannons, or relations between local and international art history, should be a subject of a new museum strategy. Inone word: both of them, i.e. museum participation in theagora and reshaping its traditional (national and hierarchi-

cal) concept of the museum, should be a point of depin the process of creating the idea of the critical museand at the same time its new identity in the face of coporary cultural and social processes. The theoretical bof such a museum concept is museum studies, also cacritical museum studies or new museology, and has bdeveloping for some thirty years, mostly at the univeand art criticism.

Will museums – or, more precisely, the type of seum called the ‘universal survey museum’, rooted innationalist ideology and European, Western hegemoprove able to face the challenge? Will the potential oscholarship, if one denes it as a cr itical reection on be used to transform museums into critical institutioto cover the distance between the critique of the insttion and the institution that is critical? Will the museor, again, more precisely, the ‘universal survey museuuse critical theory, well developed in the universitieschange it into critical practice? Will it drop its role ofmausoleum and become a public forum shaping a poAll these questions still remain to be answered.

6 ArtBulletin, ‘Decentering Modernism’, Partha Mitter (ed.), Vol. XC, No. 4,December 2008.

7 Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, ArtHistory,

No. 3/4, December 1980, pp. 448–69.8 Neil MacGregor, ‘Global Collections for Global Cities’, in Jaynie Anderson (ed.),CrossingCultures:Conict,Migration,andConvergence.TheProceedingsofthe 32ndCongressintheHistoryofArt , Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2009,

pp. 65–70; Neil MacGregor, ‘To Shape the Citizens of “the Great City, the World”’, in James Cuno (ed.),WhoseCulture?ThePromiseofMuseumsandthe DebateoverAntiquities, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 39–54.

9 Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age’, in Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds),ContemporaryArtandtheMuseum,Ostldern: Hantje Cantz Verlag, 2007, pp. 30–37.

Piotr Piotrowski has been honoured with tZabel Award for Culture and Theory 2010and funded by the ERSTE Foundation, the acknowledges a cultural protagonist whosededicated to internationally broadening theledge of visual culture in the Central and SoEastern European region. In December, MAhosted the award ceremony.

Igor Zabel (1958–2005) was a Slovenian cuwriter and cultural theorist, actively involvthroughout his life in many elds of theor

culture: as philosopher, author, essayist, liand art critic, translator and teacher of new gof curators and critics of contemporary art

Jean-Hubert Martin, curator of t he exhibitiLesMagiciensdelaTerreheld at the CentrePompidou in Paris (1989) was one of t he pain the course TheHistoryofExhibition.BeytheIdeologyoftheWhiteCube that took plin MACBA in October and November 201His lecture is available in audio format onlat www.macba.cat

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POST-COLONIAL SOLITUDEIN THE MEDITERRANEAN:SOME ARAB THOUGHTS

Three distinct questions characterise the three different phases of modern Arab thought, each question epitomisingthe whole mood of an epoch and a whole set of concerns.

1.During the period known as the Arab Renaissance (al-Nahda), roughly between the mid-nineteenth to the earlytwentieth century, Arab thinkers wanted to understandwhy others had progressed while they lagged behind. Thecolonial encounter with Europe, experienced in the Napo-

leonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, had shown a disturbinggap on all levels and the need was felt to grasp the secret of progress that had led that continent to such an advancedstage. Most thinkers at the time were condent that oncethat was grasped nothing prevented Arabs from improvingtheir situation and from catching up with the Europeans.Identity as such, whether Islam or ‘East’, was not the issue.Rather, a lot of importance was given to the political basisof this progress: political justice, namely a constitutionalrule that would hold rulers accountable and dene therights and duties of rulers and people, was seen as thenecessary condition for civilisational progress, i.e. for eco-nomic prosperity, popular solidarity and patriotic loyalty,for the advancement of knowledge as well as for civil peace.In fact, the turn of the century abounded on the one handin critiques of despotism, and on the other, in present-ing local, Islamic values and principles that are equivalent to the European progressive ones. But the early Europeancolonial forays into the area in the late nineteenth centuryhad already started to alter this preoccupation with com-prehensive progress and to shift it toward a concern with

the acquisition of the means of power that would allowArabs and Muslims to resist Western imperialism. Thitrend became even more pronounced with the establiment of the French and British mandates on Arab landafter the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The comparcivilisational difference became increasingly perceivedthreatening confrontation of power.

2.The second half of the twentieth century was a time o

reection as Arab thinkers started to examine their libtion efforts to date. The 1967 defeat against Israel cameaccentuate this soul-searching mood, and the central qtion was: Why had the nahda failed? What had preventhe fruition of its liberation and renaissance impulses? Why had the post-independence Arab regimes failed tcarry out development, real independence and democ Why had they failed to vindicate the cause of Palestine Why had they not achieved Arab unity? In the seventiand eighties much of the search was done in the cultursphere, in a culturalist tendency to explain the malaiseprimarily in cultural terms. The cultural heritage was rited in order to nd in it the seeds of a second nahda odeep-seated causes of backwardness. Some thought ththe nahda critical effort had not been radical enough asome others blamed that effort for estranging people ftheir own traditions, and proposed instead holistic visof the future based on a nativist, ‘authentic’ tradition, an ideologised Islam. Indeed, the post-independence emost Arab countries turned out to be a disenchanting rience. Revolutions and coup d’états, which were supp

Elizabeth Suzanne KassabPhilosopher and researcher specialisingin cultural studies in the Arab World. Herpublications includeContemporaryArabThought:CulturalCritiqueinComparativePerspective(2010).

Mediterraneans

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Yto BarradaNoftheWorldNationinArabic, 2003C-Print 80 x 80 cmCourtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris

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Yto BarradaFoundations, 2003C-Print 60 x 60 cmCourtesy of the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris

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to bring to power more dedicated rulers, truly committedto patriotic goals, whether in Egypt with Abdel Nasser, orin Syria and Iraq with the Baath party, ended up being moreauthoritarian, repressive and self-serving regimes than theones they replaced.

3.For many Arab countries the turn of the millennium brought with it further defeats in all domains: in democraticstruggles, in economic conditions, in educational systemsand in oppositional structures. It witnessed an alarmingsocial, political and military polarisation with a growingforeign occupation of the area. The dominating feeling sincethen has been one of incapacitation, of impotence, of total bankruptcy (’ajz ). The question now is: Why did the project of Enlightenment fail in the Arab world? While the rst phase was one of hopefulness, supported by a sense of pos-sibility, the second phase was one of soul-searching in themidst of an ominous mood of humiliation and anger. Nowwas the time of overwhelming despair, but also of a come back of the political, after a long interlude of culturalism.Critical thinkers, former political prisoners, artists as well

as activists started to emphasise again the political nature of the general malaise, combining cultural critique with politi-cal critique and pointing the nger again to the absence of democracy, the rule of law and public spaces of debate. It isat this intersection of cultural, moral and political critiquethat the concept of Enlightenment is actively discussed, between surges of activist mobilisation and dips into severeresignation and hopelessness.

While much attention has been devoted to the studyof Arab ideologies, whether nationalism or Islamism, littleif any attention has been paid to the critical efforts that have been made throughout these phases, especially after the

1960s, when the critical gaze was turned inwards, awayfrom polemics and justicatory rhetoric. Indeed, the last decades have witnessed a critical revisiting of commonlyused notions, such as authenticity, identity, national com-munity and cultural indigenisation. They have producedcritiques of hitherto prevailing ideologies, such as secular-ism, Islamism, Arabism and the Left. These critical effortsare an integral part of the Arab intellectual landscape. Theyneed to be acknowledged and they also need to be put in thelarger post-colonial context of such cultural critiques. Fornot only has contemporary Arab thought been reduced toits extremist ideologies, it has also been explained self-referentially, i.e. in terms of its alleged essence, of ‘Islam’or some essential ‘Arab’ character. It has rarely, if ever, beenunderstood through a post-colonial prism, i.e. throughthe post-colonial quest for an empowered sense of self, fora thought of one’s own and for an afrmation of identitywithout losing sight of the universally human dimension:a formidable challenge, not only for Arabs, but of all peopleswho have had to operate with the dening parametersimposed by a dominating other. Typically, the malaise that

is at work here is experienced in solitude, as if one werin carrying its burden. Perhaps, Arabs, more than othehave fallen into the trap of exceptionalism, some of it, inicted. Only a comparative study of Arab debates, wputs them in conversation with African, Latin AmeriIndian, African-American, Native American and, clohome, with Greek, Turkish and Iranian discourses, caus appreciate better the challenges and promises, as was the universal and specic aspects of those Arab debIn all these discourses across regions, religions, langucultures and traditions, one nds at a certain point ina certain shift of interest: from identity to democracyessentialism to agency, and from ideology to cr itical ting. One also sees a growing concern with historicisaand a need for a double critique, internal as well as exArtists of all kinds participate in voicing this complexdifcult critique. A comparative attention to them cahighly enlightening and rewarding.

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab participated in tTheNextMediterranean:shore-to-shorediaart,economyandsocietyheld at MACBA inand November 2010. Other participants in included: Costas Douzinas, director of the BInstitute for the Humanities at London Uniand Yto Barrada, artist and co-founder of thmathèque de Tànger. The lectures will be avaudio fomat at www.macba.cat and the textDouzinas will be published in the digital coQuadernsportàtils (Portable notebooks).

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HISTORICAL INQUIRY ASSUBJECT AND OBJECT Julie Ault

Artist, researcher and editor. In 1979, she co-foundedthe New York-based artists’ collective Group Material,which explored the relationship between aestheticsand politics.

The archive of Group Material during the processof recompilation, at the Downtown Collection(Fales Library) of the New York University

Artistic research

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Since the New York-based artists collaborative GroupMaterial disbanded in 1996, I have continued its represen-tation through live narration and writings, and respondedto inquiries on a case-by-case basis. As the only foundingmember who remained until its conclusion I felt a respon-sibility to keep recounting the group’s practice. (Long-termmember Doug Ashford has done likewise.) Group Material’scultural practice was temporal and the forms employedwere ephemeral. When the group ceased its activities I wasintent on preserving its ephemerality and not becoming his-tory. Fearing a revisionist encapsulation in which conictsand contradictions of collaboration are resolved in their rep-resentation, I resisted our work being dened or objectiedin a monograph by an art historian, and reserved the right to cohere our history at some future point.

Following a decade of active narration I decided it wastime to relinquish responsibility (and control) and address

Group Material’s history with lasting effect. I needed

confront the material traces that had inltrated everycabinet and spare spot in my apartment, as well as thepsychic traces that permeated memory. Collecting msaved by other members’ as well and joining it all togin an archive would permit access to Group Material more coherent way than had been possible, and opendoor for further historical representation.

Tackling the mission of recuperating Group Maas a two-pronged ‘housecleaning’ operation involvedgathering and organising the pool of material to consthe archive, and simultaneously distilling from that binformation to make a book. While formalising the a

sought to make Group Material newly public, the prowas also conceived as a laboratory in which to investthe logic, structure, implications and practice of the aI spent several months processing the material in its to-be permanent home – the Downtown Collection York University: handling, reading and looking at evpaper, image and item; taking note, cross-referencinglecting and reecting. The more I reviewed the more I understood the malleable and fallible nature of memand memory repeatedly threw documentary fact intotion. Alternatively edied and mystied, the experiedemonstrated the utter insecurity of the categories ‘stive’ and ‘objective’.

Looking back, I realise while telling the story of Material these past years I have unwittingly told somThis discovery occurred when encountering informales that I had long since blotted from memory. SurpI read on and the divide between recollection and fac

1 Janet Malcolm, TheSilentWoman.SylviaPlathandTedHughes, New Vintage, 1995, p. 205.

‘Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page

but his own vastly overlled mind. The problem is to clearout most of what is in it, to ll huge plastic bags with theconfused jumble of things that have accreted there overthe days, months, years of being alive and taking things inthrough the eyes and ears and heart. The goal is to makea space where a few ideas and images and feelings may beso arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile amongthem... But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrongthings in...’1 Janet Malcom

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expanded. Certain retrieved information was basic whilesome signalled that Group Material is much more complexand debatable than I had meanwhile fabricated. It seems Ihad convinced myself that the streamlined storyline, which

I repetitiously recounted for years, was accurate.Of course documents and artefacts are not intrinsically

truth telling either; they are fragmentary and disconnectedfrom context. Archives set the stage for history writing, yet they can mislead and even lie through omission. Essentialpieces of information, which might answer questions andredirect research, are not necessarily tangible or archived.

While retrieving Group Material for myself, for thegroup and with the larger purpose of public representationin mind, inhabiting the dual roles of observer and observedcreated a central methodological challenge, which at timeswas confounding. Flipping between my own and other

members’ muddle of memory as well as the accumulationof material sometimes felt like too much and not enough.But, ultimately my insider relationship to the subject inconjunction with a more independent association to thepotential for archives to shape historical representationseemed to productively balance one another.

Each aspect of cohering the archive and making ShowandTell:AChronicleofGroupMaterial has embodied spe-cic and abstract purpose. A set of vexing questions fuelledthe work. How does bringing documentation togetherimply shaping history, and writing history? How do arte-facts – whether material or informational – communicate?Can contexts be in effect communicated? What archivalstructure and practices will animate and complicate without over determining meanings? How does the archive archive? What tense is the archive? Where does the archive end? What denes its frame? What can the collective subjectivedo when given the chance to write its own history? What isgained and lost in the process of subjecting ephemeral andperipheral activities to conservation, from inducting theminto history? What kind of suitable forms can be shaped to

embody the historicising processes, gathered knowledand diverse purpose that drive this inquiry? How to mwhat is missing evident as a layer of historicising? Howdoes the subjective transform the material to a public

sphere without manipulating it? Can one effectivelychallenge history writing while writing history?

The book’s main section was conceived as a chroncle composed of reprinted documents and images, witguiding text running throughout. ShowandTell takes ingredients and methods from the archive, which emb both private and public material. The making of the gras a specic context along with its structure and procesinseparable from its public creations, yet the bulk of exrepresentation focuses on Group Material’s projects. SandTell widens the focus to include conveyance of intnal workings in each layer of material that forms the b

and stresses aspects of the collaboration that are otherinvisible.Group Material comes to life in the archive. Work

through the material, I was struck by the vividness andchanging character of internal correspondence, minutemeetings, exhibition proposals and press releases prod by the group. Emotional intensity is palpable in early cmuniqués, proposals and press releases are bombastic,ics and debates of the times are glimpsed through langand graphic design bespeaks period styles. A selectiondocuments is reprinted in their original form and scaleShowandTell . They are valued as ‘original language’, wvividly conveys what we perceived we were doing at ttime far better than writing that depicts from the distaof time would, whether by someone inside or outsidethe group. This material would commonly be considesource for writing rather than substance for presentatiBy design the book encourages that the documents beregarded as primary texts rather than ancillary illustratThis method situates readersinthearchive, inviting a mplicity of interpretation.

Detail of the installation of Group MaterialDemocracy:PoliticsandElection, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988

Detail of the installation of Group Material AIDSTimeline,Berkeley Art Museum, New York, 1989

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2 Ibid., pp. 109–110.

Contradictory evidence is at the heart of the archiveand prominently gures in this portrayal of Group Material.A four-page incendiary letter written by cofounderTim Rollins to the group in 1980 is fully reprinted alongsidedocuments that represent a more harmonious collabora-tion. Tim’s letter rants and rails rhetorically. It evidencesmajor clashes in the collaborative’s rst months but it alsoshows how seriously he regarded the collaboration and ar-ticulates what was at stake for the group. As Janet Malcolmasserts, ‘Letters are the great xative of experience. Timeerodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to usthat we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling... conduit to unmediated experience.’2

The guiding text that lters throughout the chroniclewas conceived as a nonspecic voice imparting otherwiseinaccessible circumstances, facts and anecdotes alongsidethe archive materials. It represents a close reading and distil-lation of multiple documentation and composite memory.This text captions, reports, digresses and discloses, coalesc-ing subjective and objective knowledge into a seamlessvoice that augments the material. A depersonalised present-tense mode is used, intended to situate readers in the times

of events and suggest collective subjectivity, distinct fromrst person retrospection. Trains of information such as thecontinuities and discontinuities of the group’s composition,conicts and contradictions endemic to its process, and howGroup Material structured itself and nanced its work runthroughout.

While reading through the les I noted many interest-ing segments in all types of documents, initially regardingthis as source material for the guiding text. The number of full documents that could be reproduced was limited bythe budget, which led to creating a layer of diverse extractsvarying in author purpose, length and style. Unied by

typographic design treatment, these also lter throughout the chronicle.Image wise, snapshots portraying the various mem-

bers and incarnations of the group, although in some casesthere are no photos, and formal installation photography of the collaborative’s forty-ve projects are presented on equalfooting.

Despite the multiple layers of motley material that compose the chronicle, the goal was to bring the elementsinto a carefully designed formal system that stresses all thematerial as primary and equivalent. The book’s visual tone builds on Group Material’s aesthetic style. Analogous tothe decentralised thematic exhibition format the groupadvanced, the chronicle is thought of as an exhibition spacein the form of a book.

Revisionist and interpretive tendencies have beenrestrained in ShowandTell in favour of creating a usefuldocumentary foundation and introduction to GroupMaterial’s archive. The organisation of the archive and the

response to that process through the book provide a form and base interpretation to use, negotiate and takwith. The project is also a case study in archiving, hisinvestigation and history writing, shaped from the qutions and problems enmeshed in an amalgam of perscollectively and socially vested inquiry.

From 1979 to 1996, the artists collaborativeMaterial produced over forty-ve projects twide range of social, political and artistic issperiod. While many of its exhibitions and ptook place in art institutions, the group alsosubway cars, buses, newspapers and billboais the rst book to chronicle Group Materiatice and chart the origins, processes and contheir activities. Organised by founding grou ber Julie Ault in dialogue with long-term mDoug Ashford, and with the input from othmembers including Sabrina Locks and Tim the book draws heavily on Group Material’It also includes reections by three of the grmembers, as well as an investigation of the project, AIDSTimeline(1989).

Some of the issues addressed by Group Maresonate in SICK80 s/TheAIDSCrisis,ArtCounter-biopoliticalGuerrilla, a seminar di by Beatriz Preciado that took place at MABCin November 2010. Portions of the contentseries are available in audio format onlineat www.macba.cat

Julie Ault (ed.)andTell:AChrofGroupMateLondon:Four Books, 2010.

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THE GEOMETRY OF A

CROSS-EYED SUBJECT

My deliberations over the incident described below have brought me to the edge of my maematical capabilities, which are not, admittedespecially developed. Still, to me it seemed vireconstruct the situation geometrically in ordunderstand what was happening to my eyesiBasically, I started going cross-eyed in a stransort of way. Not that I was seeing double; insta hole developed exactly in the middle of my of vision – meaning straight ahead, when loo

from my seat in the cinema in the House of WCultures – and it permitted me to look only aleft and right sides anking the projection scr

The incident occurred during the prograDocumentaryMoments at the DocumentaryForum in Berlin. The lmmaker Eyal Sivan announced the previously unscreened lmHencGlance, which Chris Marker had passed on toand which is based on Alain Resnais’ short calised documentary lm about Nazi concentrand extermination camps,NuitetBrouillard (andFog , 1955). However, the lm explicitly dnot originate from Marker himself. As becameevident,HenchmanGlance is composed of sim

Natascha Sadr HaghighianAs an artist, she has worked in different formats, including video, performance andsound. Both in her solo works and groupprojects she is concerned with socio-politicalquestions.

Image of the Israeli trial against Nazi ofcerAdolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.This was the image used by Penguin Booksin 1994 for the cover of Hannah Arendt’sEichmanninJerusalem:AReportontheBanalityofEvil .

Artistic research

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edits (shot /countershot) of two plot threads that get synchronised through the editing.NightandFog was cut together with the recordings of thetrial of the State of Israel vs. the Nazi ofcer Adolf Eichmann. One sees Adolf Eichmann from above,a slightly slanted frontal shot. He sits in a glass booth, his gaze directed ahead, and apparently, orin fact, watches a screening of the lmNightandFog , which can be seen alternating with the imagesof Eichmann himself. The sound of NightandFog runs continuously through all the lm’s images.According to Eyal Sivan,NightandFog was in fact shown to Eichmann during the trial. Chris Markerreconstructed this occurrence through editing.

I was already unprepared for what was about to unfold on the screen because I had never seenNightandFog . But as early as the rst minutes of the lm, I was predominantly preoccupied withmy optic apparatus, which had gone completelyhaywire. I simply could not look at the screen. But I was also unable to exit the cinema. It was one of those events that one attends out of respect, above

all if one has grown up in Germany. So for thirty-three minutes my eyes wandered aimlessly alongthe dark edges of the projection. In the corner of my eye I hazily chased the screen in hopes that something would change and enable me to look at it again. Like when I was a child, secretly watchingscary movies that I actually could not endure. I hadalways said to myself, now that you have begun,you have to ‘see’ how it turns out.

In his book LookingAwry:AnIntroductiontoLacanthroughPopularCulture (1991), Slavoj Žižekdescribes a scene from the lmManhunter (1986)

in which the policeman watches super 8 lms be-longing to murdered families over and over again inorder to learn something about the murderer’s mo-tive. He discovers the thing that connects the fami-lies: they all had their lm developed in the samelaboratory. And ultimately that is where the mur-derer is found. As Žižek says, the irony of the lmlies in how the policeman’s method, on a formallevel, creates a perversion. The perversion consistsof the overlapping, or even coincidence, betweenhis gaze and that of the murderer. His methodrequires that he view the super 8 lms with the eyesof the murderer. In the course of this operation, thesubject splits and his gaze becomes perverse. Theperverse gaze onto the victim takes place in faithfulservice to none other than that victim, in its name,and in its interests. Žižek places this overlapping of gazes into a correlation with pornography, whichI have yet to fully grasp. Here, pornography is thegenre that shows all there is to show, hiding noth-ing from view, while in a radical way bringing about

the loss of the side view. But maybe the feedbackthat emerges from the short circuiting of complexelds of vision helps to reconstruct the hole, whichoccurred during the screening of HenchmanGlance.Neither the subject-object relation, nor the associ-ated lines of sight arising while showing images, areunidirectional . The object gazes back, and depend-ing on what the intention of the production of that relation is, this gaze, owing to circumstances, getsreected back. If I understand the concept of jouis-sance correctly, it is to be found precisely here. Thesubject is penetrated by the object’s gaze and viceversa, and the principle of pain within this relation-ship turns into a suffering that, to be sure, differsfrom an emphatic compassion.

In my contemplation of Eichmann, of how hecontemplates the horrible crimes he helped commit,I attempt, on the one hand, to see the pictures withhis eyes. This means that I take on his gaze, placingmy gaze parallel to his, and I try to see what he seesin the images of the concentration camp. I do this inthe name of the victim, as does the policeman

inManhunter . On the other hand, I try to read hisface. This means that I watch from the oppositedirection, fromNightandFog towards Eichmann’sface, and I try to recognise where and how his faceis stimulated by the images. Thus, on the onehand, Eichmann in his glass booth seems like awild animal in the zoo; on the other hand, he sitsnext to me, so to speak, and passes me his popcorn.It is probably clear that something perverse, maybepornographic, occurs here; but, as it seems to me,the question of what part I play in this is onlyanswerable geometrically. On which axis is the eye

of the subject located, and from which cut-set doesthe object gaze back; and, above all, which coordi-nates are subject and object here?

When two sets intersect, a cut-set comesinto existence. In my case, at the moment of thescreening of HenchmanGlance, intersectionsemerged that created a hole in the projectionscreen instead of a cut-set. Like an endless feed- back loop that happens when one pivots the axisof the camera and holds it towards the screen. Afeedback that needed me as a coordinate in orderto pivot the axis. The emergence of a hole duringthis event may lie in my coordinate’s inability todevelop a direction or a radius of action withinthe array of HenchmanGlance, making my coor-dinate begin to rotate. The murderer, the evil, isalready well-known and, yes, already put to death,and therewith the motivation for my complicitydraws a blank. The already-well-known axis withthe coordinates murderer/policeman-witness/victim, which uses the policeman-witness in order

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to rectify the murderer/victim axis (and therefore has aclear direction) turns around on itself, becomes locked intoa zombied loop of the resurrection of evil. In the process, a blindness-causing monster emerges from the screen, whosemotive we will surely never be able to resolve; for here it isthe idea of evil-in-itself, in its totalitarian monumentality,that is being animated.

The cover of my edition of Hannah Arendt’s bookEichmanninJerusalem:AReportontheBanalityofEvil (1994) also shows the courtroom of Eichmann’s trial. Onesees Eichmann in the glass booth, from above, a slightlyslanted frontal shot; before him, set up with the same lineof sight as Eichmann, stands a 16 mm projector that getstruncated at the edge of the picture. One does not see what Eichmann sees. The other people in the image – three policeofcers guarding, one person who sits behind the projector,and another person wearing headphones – look withEichmann in the direction of the projection. Our gaze stays onthe side axis, and something in this graph stays incomplete,exits the picture, so to speak. It is the gaze-axis of Eichmannthat we unavoidably incorporate, that directs us, however,not onto the 16 mm projection, but into the inside of the

book and therewith into Hannah Arendt’s deliberations overthe banality of evil. Here too the incorporation of the axisof the gaze enables the monster’s exit from the glass booth,though not in the sense of him taking our gaze hostage, but, rather, in the sense of his gaze being taken apart, beingdismantled into everyday-seeming decisions that are met,decisions that are capable of creating the monstrous. Some-thing becomes apperceptible, allowing for a processof cognition.

In April 2010, Natascha Sadr Haghighian par

pated inOnArtisticResearch, a lecture series MACBA that will be compiled in the Contratcollection, which is published jointly by MACthe Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.In 2011, she will present her new work at the MACBA. This production furthers the conceher earlier work, which revolves around the nof ‘representation’ and the recovery of archivart centres.An interview with the artist is available in auformat at www.macba.cat

In the newest edition(2006) of the PenguinClassics Series, the coverimage of Eichmannin Jerusalemwas, interestingly,replaced. Instead of thecourtroom, the cover nowshows a slanted image of Eichmann, looking fromabove into the camera. With this gaze lookingdown on us and the magni-ed eyes caused by his thickspectacles, he seems to target the viewer. The gure of Eichmann is cropped, out of context. A slanted whitestripe forms the back-

ground behind his headand chest, framed aboveand below by blue spaces.Obviously this gaze doesnot lead into the book. Thelm continues. N.S.H.

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FOUR DECADES OF THEINDEPENDENT STUDY

PROGRAMMESXavier AntichDirector of the MACBA Independent StudyProgramme (PEI). A writer with a PhD inphilosophy. He teaches art theory at theUniversitat de Girona.

The emblematic, indeed almost foundational, beginn

of the Independent Study Programmes (ISP) lies in acties that took place at the Whitney Museum of AmerArt in New York. In the eld of art studies, the historthese programmes is inseparable from a certain momin theory and politics that took shape in the seventieretrospect, it hardly seems an overstatement to compthe inuence of these programmes on the sphere of etion in art, theory and politics to the inuence exercithe workshops at the Vkhutemas, a school founded iSoviet Union in the twenties.

In any case, what was perhaps most essential toprocess that got underway at that time was – if it is po

sible to formulate it in these terms – a double impugnand, hence, a double proposal. First, there was awarenof the irreversible nature of the rupture between stagcategories of artistic practice, on the one hand, and crcal reection and theory, on the other. Different straiconceptual and political art had already introduced wwould eventually give rise to a new sort of practice thwould not await later conceptualisation or theorisingpractice is – and defends the right to be – a theory of iformulation of its own meanings, and indeed the meof artistic practice in general and its social dimensionnew tendencies would end up wholly altering the naof Fine Arts Studies almost everywhere. Second, ther

an equally irreversible awareness of the fact that acadstudies in art history and museum practices were unding a sort of deforestation; attention was shifted awathem and focus was now placed on dening new tencies in artistic practice, a fact that forced a reformulatistaid academic studies of art histories. This was, thentwo-fold context in which Independent Study Progr began their experiment.

Lecture by Doug Ashford, member of GroupMaterial, in the framework of the seminarTheNewProductivisms , MACBA Auditorium, March 2009

Class of MACBA's Independent Studies Programme(PEI) with Xavier Antich, MACBA Study Center,October 2010

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At present, it is evident that the history of Independent Study Programmes is intrinsically linked to the evolution

of critical thought. It is not surprising that the Whitney’sISP in the seventies revolved around theoretical concernsrelated to semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism andMarxism that gave a specic meaning to the ‘theoreticalturn’ on which Independent Study Programmes were based.Thus, in their commitment to rejoining theory and artisticpractice and in the need to construct a space outside therealm of institutional and academic knowledge (from whichthese programmes afrmed their ‘independence’) and out-side their organic burdens, Independent Study Programmeshad an educational component more focused on producingknowledges at the intersection of forms of practice than onconveying knowledge.

Four decades after their launching, Independent StudyProgrammes everywhere are still struggling to dene thenature of their ‘independence’ and the production of knowl-edge to which they are, more or less intensely, commit-ted. The Whitney programme, for instance, now involvesthree interconnected, though conceptually differentiated,programmes: the Studio Program, the Curatorial Program

and the Critical Studies Program. The design of other pro-grammes is less conventional and perhaps more demandingfrom an epistemological perspective: the modest programmeat the Escola de Artes Visuais Maumaus (Lisbon), forinstance, and mostly the newer Campus Expandido pro-gramme of the MUAC (Mexico), which reafrms the urgent need to rethink the museum as, among other things, asphere for the production of critical knowledge. MACBA’sIndependent Study Programme (PEI) formally began in January 2006 (on the basis of activities that had been tak-ing place for the previous ve years). It emerged withinthe context of the reformulation of independent study

programmes, an attempt to nd a new place for these pro-grammes in the face of the new challenges generated by cog-nitive capitalism and the onset of a new wave of discoursesthat openly encouraged assimilating any and all culturalexperience into consumerism. Just like the ‘theoretical turn’that had been explicitly and radically assumed when theseprogrammes emerged four decades earlier, the re-politi-calisation of educational practices in the arts, as well as theneed to reformulate the social dimension of those practices,constituted a deeply rooted attempt to nd a new meaningfor Independent Study programmes that aspired to continueto be independent’ from the aforementioned challenges.

A series of initiatives and activities (lectures, semi-nars and courses) that took place before the launching of MACBA’s PEI served to dene the various conceptual,theoretical and practical approaches that would eventu-ally constitute its framework. This was an attempt to openreection and research on artistic practice to the sphere of theory and the criticism of discourse that emerged on the basis of post-structuralism, gender technologies in criticalfeminism and queer theory, psychoanalysis and therapy,

different forms of political imagination connected to sand political activism, the study and analysis of urbantransformations and processes, and the criticism of theconomy of culture. On all of these fronts, MACBA’s Pworked with academics and university professors, artiand curators, theorists and cultural critics, as well as diferent actors involved in social and political activism, lmovements, educational reform, and museum-relatedand research. It was on the basis of these efforts and ales that, in 2006, MACBA launched its Independent StProgramme, the rst of its kind in Spain. From the ver beginning, the programme received the support it wasfrom a museum that wanted to make knowledge, reseaand the production of discourse the core of its practice

Just as, in the early phases, Independent Study Prgrammes evolved alongside cultural studies – especiallthose related to visual culture, feminist, subaltern andcal theory in general–, recent reection on the developof the ‘independent’ nature of these programmes necesarily entails evaluating to what extent they have causacademic programmes in leading universities to evolvThis can be analysed, to a certain extent, by looking to

instance, the Master of Arts Program in Curatorial Stuat Bard College (New York); the Master of Science in VStudies at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technolo(Cambridge, MA); the Master in Modern Art: Critical &Curatorial Studies (MODA) at Columbia University (N York); the Curatorial Practice Program & Visual and CStudies at California College of Arts & Crafts (San Francisco); and, in Europe, the post-graduate programmesGoldsmiths College at the University of London and tRoyal College of Art (also in London), the Critical Studprogramme at the Malmö Art Academy (Lund UniversMalmö), Kunstraum at the University of Luneburg (G

many) and the curatorial programme at the De Apple ACentre (Amsterdam). While this is not the place to draw conclusions a

the dialogue that has taken place in recent years betwedependent Study Programmes and academic programit is possible that, given the relative uniformity of thesgrammes (even in terms of their names), it is still sompertinent to question from what ‘place’ these spaces foproduction of knowledge dene themselves. And perhfor this reason it is not farfetched to rethink the privileplace occupied by New York as the ‘city’ in the early yeof Whitney’s ISP. If Independent Study Programmes tas always, have to rethink their task, that rst of all shoimply knowing where they stand, a question that in tuimplies, among other things, dening – by problematiit in a dialectical manner – the place of enunciation to wthe processes of subjectivation that they mean to promare committed, as well as the social and public sphere twhich they aspire. And that seems no small thing.

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INDEPENDENT STUDY:PROGRAMMES AND PARADIGMS Johanna Burton

Art historian and critic; associate Directorof the Independent Study Programme of the Whitney Museum of American Art of New York from 2008–10. She currentlyserves as Director of the graduate pro-gramme at the Center for CuratorialStudies, Bard College, New York.

Artist Martin Creed with students at the Centerfor Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York,on the occasion of his exhibition Feelings, heldthere in summer 2007

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The recent attention and emphasis placed on what has beencalled during the past few years by many in the eld of art ‘the educational turn’ is a good place to begin my brief com-ments on the history and contemporary evolution of the‘Independent Study’ Programme. Indeed, while I would not wish to cast a blindly disparaging eye on this latest enthusiasmfor – or perhaps better, valuing of – the endlessly malleable(if nonetheless rarely tested) structures of teaching andlearning within the sphere of artistic conceptualisationand actualisation, it is perhaps useful to consider just what the implications are for such a focus, to say nothing of sucha nomenclature. Unlike previous well known ‘turns’ –linguistic , ethical and, more recently,affective– the stakesfor said educational turn seem to operate mostly at the levelof rhetoric, and I mean this for better and for worse.

Even as I touch on this subject merely as a precursorfor my larger discussion, this thought is still worth devel-oping here since in many ways, in fact, it makes the largercontext for our understanding of education today all theclearer. And so, to clarify what I mean by ‘rhetoric’ andthe role it plays: On the surface of things, an emphasis oneducation should only be good, particularly at a moment

in which a rampant anti-intellectualism denes a great dealof the art world (not a historical rst, but as urgent as everto combat). Yet, just what comprises education as it wouldwant to be redened – which is to say how its presence isperformed, how it is represented, how an audience is meant to recognise its contours – is another matter. The implica-tion, de facto, of the educational turn, is that previouslyeducation persewas turned away from, rejected, repressedor, at the very least, ignored. While there are obvious (and,yes, persistent) examples of programmes (in both art prac-tice and art history) wilfully deaf and dumb to the politicaland ideological shifts of the last four decades (at least), there

is at least a fairly widespread general competency whenit comes to recognising the increasing roles of mediation,discussion and research (and other such nebulous terms)as central to both artistic practice and the evaluation of itsforms – and this not over the last ve years but over the last hundred and fty. In other words, as empathetic (and evendelighted) as I am to believe there is a new imperative foreducation afoot, I can’t help but feel inclined to ask what this shift enumerates or if, somewhat counter-intuitively,the claim works to preclude further investigation. In otherwords, in claiming a radical mode of interrogation, one that disperses and dispels known modes of analysis, the edu-cational turn might render its own means tautological, itsown ends inconsequential. There is nothing one can’t ask;therefore there is nothing one can ask.

In pointing up what might be only one outcome of works, practices, events, exchanges that profess themselvesas educational (thus enumerating in one word both theprocess and the content), I don’t actually mean to overturnor even disavow the ‘educational turn’, but rather to refocusattention on just what such words mean when they become

used too easily as shorthand. As Irit Rogoff (among othas pointed out, the ‘educational turn’ opens up all maof epistemic inquiry yet simultaneously threatens to c(if it hasn’t already) into a kind of style – less an activitya new, strange, formalism. While I am interested in watelling the difference and evaluating this condition, mimmediate driving question for the context at hand is mpragmatic.

As an art historian and critic who has never operatstrictly upon my own turf (I have taught not in art histodepartments but in the context of art practice, cultural tand curatorial studies), I never turned away from educand so did not need to turn back. Central to my practic(both writing and pedagogical) has been a belief that a stellation of argument, debate and analysis is foundatito every practice and to every practitioner, regardless owhere on the spectrum of production they fall. And yeshould be said (regardless of my own position), that thword ‘education’ within the academic and art context never fallen easily on the ears. Indeed, it’s worth pointout, I think, that ‘education’ programmes in institutioof higher learning and museums are still regularly disr

garded, held apart from more rened modes of concepproduction and equated with outreach to ‘the public’ owith modes of translation that operate on a top-downmodel using ‘access’ as a catchword more or less equatto mitigated knowledge, doled out in tolerable spoon-fuls. This works in marked counter-distinction to whaoutline above, where the ‘educational turn’ is posited investment in rigorous, informed, yet experimental intigations – where, in other words, structures are rendetransparent, self-reexivity is required, and the very simeaning-making is necessarily one of contestation.

Of course, I highlight these institutional inectio

(whereby the ‘educational turn’ is an extension of conceptual practices, while institutional education is seenkind of bending to the lowest denominator) only to ofcontext for my own position. Within the academy (orits strange extensions, such as those I’ve been lucky ento be a part of) education is seen neither as a form to beinhabited nor as the bridge to a general population. It imedium neither to be turned away from nor toward, binstead to be inhabited powerfully and historically. (Tmy view; others would have it otherwise.) This is to sais only within education itself that we debate the use-and relevance of things like: linguistics, ethics, affect, eThat one could take or leave ‘education’ itself is of anoorder, and I hope it’s worth the admittedly winding paget here that this comes to be one of my main points. Ecation, in my view, is not taken up or let go: it is the vethe framework for inquiry, and it is neither a free-oatnor an empty signier.

The etymology for ‘education’ is telling: its originpertain to ‘training’, specically the training of childreanimals. The implication of ‘education’ at its roots, the

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that it addresses individuals neither ruled fully by culturalmores nor by biological drives but rather informed by – andchallenging – both. Perhaps this is, in a sense, the promise of the ‘educational turn’, though I’ve never seen it enumeratedas such: to locate, reveal and repurpose the site to whichwe cleave and bend those rules we never even realised wehad learned. But if the ‘educational turn’, as I understandit, is both open-ended and yet extremely self-referential (it purports to be exible and ranging, yet serves mainly thosealready inaugurated), how might we think its untappedpotential but also regard more accurately its past?

All manner of experimental schools and pedagogicalscenarios are in existence globally today, with so many dif-ferent aims and constitutions. The one I know best is veryclearly also a model for most of the others: the Whitney In-dependent Study Program (ISP), which I attended ten yearsago and then worked within as a faculty member for twoyears. The history of the Program is long and rich, startingin 1967 and continuing to run today, headed up by a singu-lar gure, Ron Clark. The ISP – for America very unusuallycomingling international students who work as artists,

curators and art historian/critics – does not situate iteach year as newly plumbing the terrain of our currenup-to-the-minute context, but opts instead to engagof questions that must be regarded as both historicalcontemporary. There is something beautifully stubbofor some, also frustrating – about the unapologetic agof the ISP, which refuses to move on from foundationquestions of ideology, hegemony and representation were set out in thinkers from Brecht and Lacan to StuHall. (There is no lack of newer readings, but the fountion of the ISP should be seen as that: a solid ground which the rest is built.) What has remained ‘indepenthen, about the ISP is its resolute disinterest in occupya continuously, ever-overturning ‘contemporary’ spaand its dedication instead to pointing back (and perhthen, forward) to moments of historical (and recent hcal) paradigms that can and should be newly reconsidfolded back onto themselves – and pressed into new

There are much more obvious ways that the IS‘independent’. There is no degree, almost no fees. ItI always thought, a little like going to a school that has

Lecture organised by Ana Paula Cohen at the Centerfor Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York,September 2009

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ed from the realm of ‘education’, or at least from its generalcomplexion. But this is to grant it too idealised and too safea status: any independent entity, and this includes the oneunder discussion, is also always under threat of dissolution,due to the very operations it outruns.

Currently I direct (as of July 2010) the graduate pro-gramme at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard Col-lege. Students do get a degree, and they pay a great deal intuition. Perhaps denoting one sense of ‘independent’, it isunclear at times, what they are being trained in or what theoutcome of their efforts will be. It’s a different structure, aradically different structure, from the idea of the ‘independ-ent study’ I detail above. Yet, there are seeds here, within agraduate programme that sits within a teaching museumon the campus of a mostly undergraduate liberal arts col-lege (itself interestingly understood as signifying a kind of liberal, left-leaning, gently politicised ecology). The Centerhas been in operation for nearly twenty years, it is one of the rst such facilities to come into being. The notion of the ‘curatorial’ is always forcefully under debate, thoughlike ‘education’, this word tends, at times, to eclipse its ownstrange pragmatism.

Throughout his career, and to very different ends at different times, Lacan returned to what he named the ‘fourdiscourses’, which, he believed, could account more orless for the way we, as subjects, understand ourselves to be addressed (and to speak) in the various contexts we areconsidered (and constituted). These are The Master’s Dis-course, The University Discourse, The Hysteric’s Discourseand The Analyst’s Discourse. The four discourses, while being in a kind of obvious oppositional tension, all generateone another. The Hysteric’s Discourse, that is to say, deeplyinforms the Analyst’s Discourse (and vice versa), whichdeeply informs the Master’s Discourse and so on. What

matters to me here – in regard to ‘independent study’ – isthat when one focuses too myopically on a single discourse(The University Discourse is descr ibed by psychoanalyst and theorist Bruce Fink as ‘a kind of encyclopedic endeav-our to exhaust a eld’), the most important effects (whichoccur outside this singular frame) can never be considered,and the inquiry merely collapses back on itself. In otherwords, a discourse that examines only its own terms, ironi-cally enough, can’t see its own contours at all. If we are topursue a legacy for ‘independent study’ it can’t be by wayof institutional autonomy (impossible anyway) or radicalwithdrawal (something I often wish were possible but fear isnot), but, rather, by pursuing the intersection of discourses,turning not toward or away but burrowing in.

ÍNDEX Number 1 will include contributfrom Franco Berardi, Natasa Ilic,Chus Martínez, Reza Negarestani,The Otolith Group and José Luis Pardo.

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Exhibitions

Weekdays: 11 am to 7:30 pmSaturdays: 10 am to 8 pmSundays and holidays: 10 am to 3 pmClosed: Tuesdays (except holidays),December 25th and January 1st

PublicationsMACBA publications can be consulted at www.macba.cat A selection of the texts from MACBApublications is available at www.macba.cat

Ràdio Web MACBARWM programmes are availableon request through downloading or bypodcast subscription.http://rwm.macba.cat/

TV Web MACBATWM posts on a daily basis quotes, videoreferences, self production videos, textsand different kinds of materials, all relatedto the exhibition AreyouReadyforTV? http://twm.macba.cat/

Library, at the MACBA Study CenterFrom Monday to Friday, 10 am to 7 pmClosed on holidays

MACBA Central, museum shop/bookstorein the MACBA building Weekdays, from 10 am to 8 pm(closed Tuesdays)Saturday, from 10 am to 8:30 pmSundays and holidays,from 10 am to 3 pm

Friends of MACBA

The Friends of MACBA programmtickets free of charge to all the exhiband activities organised by the musIt also offers member-only visits anactivities.For more information, seewww.macba.cat/amics

Museu d’Art Contemporani de BarPlaça dels Àngels, 108001 BarcelonaTel: 93 412 08 10www.macba.cat

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‘The mission is not to renovate thought, but to ventureinto other logics and place them at the core of artisticand cultural thinking.’ Chus Martínez

‘Will the potential of scholarship, if one denes it asa critical reection on reality, be used to transformmuseums into critical institutions, to cover thedistance between the critique of the institution

and the institution that is critical?’ Piotr Piotrowski

‘What can the collective subjective do when giventhe chance to write its own history? (…) Can oneeffectively challenge history writing while writinghistory?’ Julie Ault

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