What makes cooperation "free"? And what role can aesthetic activity
play in this collective process of becoming-free? These are the
questions I was trying to address in the talk I prepared for the
Diffusion program at the Tate Modern - which was also very much
written with the concerns of this list in mind.
The answer is twofold like the question. On the one hand, there is
the need to transform situations in which the parameters of
cooperation are set heteronomously, that is, by a superior force with
its own agenda. To judge from his response to my paper, Charles Green
has difficulty recognizing such problems; I would suggest he consult
both the webpage of the Tate's corporate sponsors, and the "Creative
Industries Mapping Document" produced by the former British culture
ministery of Chris Smith, to begin to understand the management
models of social management that were developed in London and
exported broadly in the late 1990s, along with the Anglo-American
model of finance-led development in a knowledge economy. To think
that the content of practices is not influenced by the frame in which
they are situated is surprising, coming from an art historian well
acquainted with major 20th century themes.
The second element of the answer then concerns the achievement of
some kind of autonomy: that is, how to begin the infinite process of
collectively giving oneself a "law", a way of attaining a
deliberately chosen kind of psychosocial consistency, which can
endure in all its dynamic complexity over a period of time. Here I
spoke of the possibility for aesthetic activity to serve as the
imaginary material for a process of social reflexivity. Given
Charles' way of reducing my position to a vanguardist one (and
reducing _those_ poistions to "Stalinism"), I guess I should restate
that this kind of collective reflexivity can only be attained with
through the relative dissapearence of the artist: his or her
diffusion into broader circles of reflective activity. That's quite
different from the directive role of the vanguard. And that's what I
was trying to get at with the pictures I showed, where you see, not
masses, but attempts at coordination between relatively small groups
of people. Aesthetic gestures are a very important element in these
attempts, because the express difference, they make it into a subject
for reflection, exchange, collaboration.
A further note: the kind of collaboration I am talking about does not
depend on museums. It depends on meetings and actions on the urban
territory. But nor is there any reason to abandon the entire legacy
of experimental art in the twentieth century to a powerful, directive
few. And this is the danger of the privatization process that has
made museums, like universities, dependent on corporate sponsorship,
and wide open to the influence that comes with it. What's needed is
not to return to the old formulas, but to actively reinvent the
institutions. And to exorcize them of the current ideologies, as I
explained in my text.
Of course, these are all politically charged issues. To me, it is
almost incomprehensible that someone can believe in the neutrality or
generosity of a state capitalist enterprise like the Tate Modern, in
what is now a situation of the pure caricature of a neutral,
modernist public-service institution. We are not talking about a
conspiracy here (the word Charles uses). We are talking about a shift
in the structures of governance. As always, the people who institute
and explain these shifts may be very polite, even idealistic in their
way. That shouldn't stoop an intellectual from trying to analyze the
consequences of such a shift. Having carried out such an analysis, I
think I am simply on the other side of a certain kind of fence from
Charles Green. Although I'm not at all averse to working with the few
experimental museums that are out there and that I know about, still
I personally chose not to be a professor, not to work in a museum,
not to shelter behind what I consider to be outdated guarantees, now
constantly at risk of becoming their own caricature. I hardly regret
that choice. And certainly, my ambition is not to be decorative. But
no one can prove the value of these kinds of decisions. At a certain
point, you make your own choice.
best, Brian