Practice in the Art Museum, 2001

1.)

Extracted from Control Magazine Issue 16, 2001

Within the institutional reality in which contemporary art predominately currently exists, a realm of art museums, art journals, art schools, art collectors etc., there is still an innate aversion to the agencing of practices in art that are founded on the complexities of social exchange. Thus the ‘art museum’ is represented as a context that defines a social environment that from the outside is to be looked up to as a symbol of transmissional authority, and from the inside operates as a modus operandi for society’s institutions that is increasingly at odds with the social processes of exchange that are actually shaping modern daily life.

It is in other areas of art activity, in other social environments in which art exists such as in educational art, community art, psychiatric art, that models of exchange in communication between people and the rich complexity that they generate are seen as valued practice. …But within the realm of the institutional art world these more mutualistic social practices in art are at best marginalised, if not excluded altogether as they are deemed to undermine the authoritative criteria of authorship and of ownership based on possession. And this is the crux of the problem for within these social practices there is an implicit divestment of authorship, and the emphasis on art practice being a process-based experience, a process in time, not contained in an immortalised object. But the point I wish to emphasise is that the way in which we approach an institutionalised space is all dependent on our starting point, ie. the physical environment may be beyond our capabilities to rebuild as we desire, but what we represent within it, how we use that space, can enable our psychological approach to change and embrace quite divergent ideologies and perceptions. For the space in reality is relative to how we enter it, what perceptual framework we bring to bear on the experience.

3.)

The procedures of everyday creativity

At the micro level, procedures of everyday creativity act on and redistribute a discursive space, raising a new and different set of problems. Once again, these strategies privilege a productive apparatus that short-circuits institutional directions. As such, the grid of “praxis” is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, where it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it. Popular procedures manipulate the mechanisms of “practice” and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what “ways of operating” form the counterpart, on the viewer’s side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.

These “ways of operating” constitute the innumerable practices by means of which artists re-appropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to discursive structures and deflect their functioning by means of a multitude of “tactics.” These articulate the details of everyday life; the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already engaged in acts of “praxis.”

4.)

The formal structure of practice

It may be supposed that these operations—multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed within devices whose mode of usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions—conform to certain rules. In other words, there must be a logic of these practices. We are thus confronted once again by the ancient problem: What is an art or “way of making”? From the Greeks to Durkheim, a long tradition has sought to describe with precision the complex (and not at all simple or “impoverished”) rules that could account for these operations.’ From this point of view, “popular culture,” as well as a whole literature called “popular,”‘ take on a different aspect: they present themselves essentially as “arts of making” this or that, i.e., as combinatory or utilizing modes of consumption. These practices bring into play a “popular” ratio, a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination which cannot be dissociated from an art of using. In order to grasp the formal structure of these practices, I have carried out two sorts of investigations. The first, more descriptive in nature, has concerned certain ways of making that were selected according to their value for the strategy of the analysis, and with a view to obtaining fairly differentiated variants: readers’ practices, practices related to urban spaces, utilizations of everyday rituals, re-uses and functions of the memory through the “authorities” that make possible (or permit) every-day practices, etc. In addition, two related investigations have tried to trace the intricate forms of the operations proper to the recompositon of a space (the Croix-Rousse quarter in Lyons) by familial practices, on the one hand, and on the other, to the tactics of the art of doing and making, which simultaneously organizes a network of relations, poetic ways of “making do,” and a re-use of marketing structures.’

1.)

Shifting centers of interest and changing problematics

[We] regard facts not as simple, une-quivocal truths but as complex things, assemblages of meanings, opinions, theories and actions that would have to be acknowledged for their ability to separate and divide as much as for their ability to form common platforms for seemingly inevitable decisions. [Dingpolitik] – Heidegger recalled that the term Ding originally referred to a form of archaic assembly, and, recently, Bruno Latour has latched onto this genealogy to redefine “things” in terms of “matters of concern” rather than “matters of fact,” as quasi-objects and quasi-subjects that fall between the two poles of this dichotomy. (Lütticken) If this doesn’t sound too contradictory, Latour has nicely framed the notion of “construction” under the rubric of “things,” which in old English and German denotes a space for negotiation, shifting centers of interest and problematics. a.) The method for determining the function, organization and “construction” of space inside a given social group comprises one of the most visible modalities of collective and individual practice — “The handling of space is one of the means to this end, and it is hardly astonishing that the [artist/curator] should be tempted to follow in reverse the route from space to the social, as if the latter had produced the former once and for all. This route is essentially “cultural” since, when it passes through the most visible, the most institutionalized signs, those most recognized by the social order, it simultaneously designates the place of the social order, defined by the same stroke as a common place.” …If [we] describe an objective bound to disciplinary or institutional constraints, like history, curatorial practice or the “book form,” then we do so without the intent to prove or favor one solution over another. Instead, [we] regard these practices in writing and research as a model for critical inquiry and creative exchange, where words (whether they produce a revolution or an aversion of the eyes) concretely bear upon choices and perceptions we make in material life. [Medea-Material]

2.)

Spencer’s model of geopolitics is rather sophisticated for his time. He argued that increases in the size of a social aggregate necessitate the elaboration of its structure. Such increases in size are the result of migrations and joining populations. Although Spencer visualized much growth as the result of compounding and recompounding—that is, successive joining together of previously separate social systems he also employed the concept of compounding in another sense: to denote successive stages of internal growth and differentiation of social systems. Throughout Principles of Sociology, a theory of geopolitics and labor is developed. The mechanistic theory of the division of labor implies that the public is the product of necessary causes, and not an end which by itself influences activity. As the social milieu extends, the collective conscience spreads itself over more and more concrete things, and, accordingly, becomes more abstract.

3.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein compares, in a famous paragraph of his Philosophical Investigations, our language to an old town: its development can be traces back both to spontaneous generation and, though limited, to conscious planning. Wittgenstein writes of a labyrinth of narrow lanes and places, old and new houses, some of which have annexes from different times; and all this is surrounded by new suburbs where streets are symmetric and houses are uniform – likened to a contemporary metropolis appears as a linguistic formation, an environment that is above all constituted by objectivized discourse, by a pre-constructed code, and by a materialized grammar.

4.)

The regulatory, the operative and the distributive

Spencer employed the terms primary, secondary, and tertiary compounding, by which he meant that a society had undergone a qualitative shift in the level of differentiation from a simpler to a more complex form. These stages of compounding marked a new level of differentiation among and within what Spencer saw as the three main axes of differentiation in social systems: (1) the regulatory, in which structures, mobilizing and using power manage relations with the external environment, while engaging in internal coordination of a society’s members; (2) the operative, in which structures meet system needs for production of goods and commodities and for reproduction of system mem bers and their culture; and (3) the distributive, in which structures move materi als, people, and information. [Forms-of-Life] “…In order to get clear about aesthetic words, situations and contexts you have to describe ways of living.” [35]