Transdisciplinary research, curation and production
How to locate aesthetico-political phenomena in disciplinary map? How legitimacy of ideological milieus interconnects with legality of the power narratives? “Symptomatic” reading introduced by Louis Althusser is offered to be merged with contemporary vision of “synergy” as a functional grounding for transdisciplinary research as artistic and curatorial practice.
The talk was given at Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (NL) in the context of Marres Currents #3 exhibition.
The Art of Sightseeing
Denis Maksimov. “The truth us a question of the standpoint”, business card for booking guided tour-performance, ‘The Game of Roles’ at ParisTexasAntwerp, June 2015.
Interview with curatorial team of Marres Currents #3 © by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (December 2015 issue) and catalogue of Marres Currents #3 (in English and Dutch)
Marres Currents #3 was the third edition of the annual exhibition series titled Marres Currents. With this series, Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, presents recent graduates from art academies in the Southern Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. While offering emerging artists and curators a platform, Marres also aims to build an international infrastructure for talent development. Agata Jaworska was invited as guest curator for this year. Her exhibition In No Particular Order during the Dutch Design Week last year showed work of young designers. For Marres Currents #3, Jaworska gathered a team of curators around her. Ina Hollmann, Eva Jäger and Guillemette Legrand, (former) students of the Design Academy Eindhoven. Denis exhibited two conceptual artworks in this show and spoke with curators about their intentions and strategy.
DM: Why did you select these artists?
C: Sightseeing offers a series of probes and modes of inquiry into how to look at the world. We sought work that strove to understand what is happening in society, and manifested this through artistic practice. The participating artists manifest a multitude of ways of doing so - ranging from a simulated flight across the Earth to digging out a cubic metre of the ground. The works raise fundamental questions: how it is we come to get to know the world, and in this, what are the paradigms we take for granted. There is also a sense of adventure - from Fanny Hagmeier’s exhilarating experiments with her own body, to Stef van Dungen’s climbers that scale the Opel garage (painted white to evoke an icy mountain), and the installation by Jan van den Bosch that dares visitors to climb a scaffolding construction. Thrill, self-confrontation and risk are palpable. The works ask us to travel to unknown lands, to re-look at the past, to put ourselves in challenging positions, to question dominant ways of seeing, and through this, to inscribe our voices into the future history of the world.
DM: What role does story telling play?
C: There is a strong communicative aspect to the works. Darcey Bennett presents a story in the form of forensic evidence after the occurrence of an event. He deconstructs a tragedy, laying out all the evidence and asking us to piece it together. The message is fragmented and results in multiple inevitably incomplete versions. Struck by propagandistic accounts of national parks of Congo written during Belgian’s colonial rule, Alessandra Ghiringhelli embarked on her own investigation in the national archives. She presents her own account of history in a series of texts and illustrations. Well aware of the embedded bias of the author, she struggles with the impossibility of achieving objective representation.This exhibition is about embracing the instability of a journey - its narratives are not always proposing solutions or one immutable truth. The travel through Sightseeing is fragmented, sometimes incomplete and at other times confrontational. Visitors navigate between continents, virtual and physical experiences, past and future. They inevitably will compose their own version of the exhibition.
courtesy of Mikael Groc
DM: How did you approach the notion of ‘currents’?
C: The present is a compilation; it co-exists with our knowledge of the past, our memories, our ideas of the future and our life plans. Working with this definition, we view Sightseeing as a snapshot of the present. Some works are speculative - for instance in Treasure Island, Skye Sun envisions an island tax haven populated by extinct species. It is an isolated land designed to attract the world’s wealthiest elite, where, as Skye says, “they can rebuild their world in the image of their investment”. Though these islands are fictional, their power to provoke relies on the fact that they offer a critique of present-day reality. Another work that simultaneously plays with the present and the future is The Dutch Mountain by Mirte van Duppen. Van Duppen makes a documentary of a mountain that could arise in the flat land of the Netherlands. She does this by filming real scenes in the country, fragments of reality that gradually build an image of the mountain in our minds. These visuals are augmented with interviews with experts on the topics of tourism, urbanism and nature. Their specialised comments on how to make and deal with such a mountain in this country ensure the viewer that this future fiction could just as easily be a present day reality. Skye and Van Duppen use different means to construct speculative geographies. The value of their scenarios lies not in their capacity to actually predict the future, but rather, to enable us to see ourselves in a clearer light today. They offer us a mirror of the here and now.
DM: You were asked to make an exhibition of selected graduation projects from art academies. Why did you bring in design and architecture?
C: The interesting thing in projects such as Skye Sun’s Treasure Island or Anja Kempa’s Remembering Spring is that the emphasis is not on the architectural design of the buildings, but rather on the narratives that they carry. These projects are ultimately about how buildings and their surroundings can manifest our hopes and fears about the future, and in a broader sense, how our material world ultimately fulfils a psychological and social function. People are working with narrative structures regardless of their formal training and discipline. We felt it was not only our role to convey what is happening at art academies but also what connections we could make to the works we encountered. This is not a discussion that is solely relevant to the art or design field. It is simply about being human and responding to the world.
DM: Could you give us a sense of the experience you aim to create for the show?
C: The first image that will confront the visitors is We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right by Roel Neuraij. It is a photograph of a globe that he has rotated so that the location of where the photo was taken is touching the ground. Normally we orient ourselves in relation to where we are in the world, but this image asks us to consider how the world is positioned in relation to us. We hope this image sets the tone, introducing a bit of disorientation at the outset.Near the entry there is a film of Neuraij’s father, a physicist who takes us through an equation in order to calculate not our weight on the planet, but rather the force of the planet upon us. In Neuraij’s words: “The scientific method has been designed to discover rules and laws that operate beyond the human, but because we ourselves are inadvertently human, so is our science.” Neuraij studies the space between the Earth as an astronomical object and as it is understood by humans. The exhibition continues to present an inherently human experience of the world. Fanny Hagmeier subjects her body to extreme conditions, whether manmade or natural. Naked, she stands in a car wash, she swims next to a sea vessel, she lies on frozen ground, all in search of her bodily limits, and the sense of being alive through self-experimentation. She subjects her body to various conditions not unlike a scientist that is testing how one body reacts to various environments and forces.
One area of the exhibition brings together journeys from various places - Iceland, Iran, Congo, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. These stories compile an incomplete atlas of the world. They accept the fact that subjectivity is an inevitable aspect of observation, measurement, analysis, description, and other methods used to understand and depict the world. The sense of experimentation and exploration continues throughout the exhibition both in the approaches of the artists and - we hope - in the state of mind of the viewer. Seeing something familiar with fresh eyes is one of the intentions of the show. The artists we selected have constructed practices that are largely about re-investigations. As a viewer, your investigation of the show (as a sight seer) will also be informed by a willingness to suspend disbelief and explore with fresh eyes.
Recontextualisation is upcycling
a guided tour through the political peculiarities of the architectural memory by Denis Maksimov - presented at Marres Currents #3 in Maastricht in 2015
The architecture is the most political form of artistic manifestation. The architect’s function is comparable to the one that is assigned to deities in religion: masterminding the experience of a space. Enormous Gothic cathedrals had communicated the power of the divine, while lavish royal estates and palaces highlighted the invisible, but uncrossable line between commoner and aristocrat. In the epoch of modernism, advancement of industrial revolution and liberal capitalism, the proportion of utilitarianism in design and architecture suppressed aesthetic concerns. Le Corbusier introduced to the world the idea of clean-slate practicality in response to the process of democratisation and sharp increase in demand for the spaces. The political role of architecture was meant to be forgotten, just like the representational role in painting was to be abandoned in the eyes of Kasimir Malevich in radical Russian Suprematism. However the strategy of negation, and that is true for both art and architecture, created new ideology rather than anti-ideology. Herostratus burned the Temple of Artemis in search for eternal fame, and prohibition of mentioning his deed and name immortalised his destructive role even without major efforts from media - just like Islamic State fighters attacks of Palmyra.
Ideology of ever-penetrating utilitarianism, the totalitarian control of ‘logos’ (rationalism) over ‘pathos’ (intuition), makes such acts incomprehensible for the public consciousness. Moreover, arrival of modernism twisted time-space perception to the contemporary phenomenon of ‘ever-lasting present’ - the buildings in architecture, as they are constructed for particular function, automatically presupposed to serve this function eternally ‘as of now’, unconsciously presuming their relevance in the period when history as the process of changing epochs has finished.
The dichotomy between the potential that architecture possesses and out-timed practical relevance is evident in the building you find yourself inside at the moment, former Opel garage, that has been ambitiously re-appropriated as ‘Marres aan de Maas’.
Memory is a peculiar thing. Conversion of the former bastion of advancing culture of ever-penetrating consumer capitalism into the institution of contemporary art signifies an important process of transition from modernist society to the next formation of common living. Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, which still defines the way we approach the overall majority of the aspects of our existence, is incredibly strong. It is an example of meta-ideology, which frames thinking on the level of unconsciousness - the hardest level to reach for any educator. Notions of ‘work’, ‘product’, ‘service’ and so on define the very matrix of our ’reality’.
So here comes contemporary, post-conceptual art. Impractical, hard to grasp, annoying curious. ‘The art market’, ‘art impact’ and expanded field are outlining the space of employment of aesthetics as the tool for achieving specific goals of design. The second half of 20 century is the epoch of advancing ultra-capitalism, where everything had become a ‘product’ of ‘labour’ - even the life itself, as it was brilliantly demonstrated by Michel Foucault.
But in our time, we might be heading towards the world where the very notion of ‘work’ might pass
into the history. The concept of unconditional income has the potential to change the way we
approach the essence of what does it mean to be human in fundamental sense of the word.
Following this, ‘the art world’ won’t be seen anymore in the light of utilitarianism. Art as a tool of
education and emancipation in left-oriented thinking or as mere aesthetic design for packaging of the
consumer products both represent the mode of rapprochement of the artistic activity as a specific tool
within utilitarian model of society as a machine. But deep thinking about art as a pure language of
culture is missing in public debates.
The robotic labour, artificial intelligence and automatisation of utilitarian functions can bring two
outcomes.
The first option is a total war caused by increasing gap of inequality between rich (who will be getting
even richer) and poor (who will become more numerous and poorer), in case the current, ultra-
capitalist model of inheritance and succession would not be challenged by structural reformation.
The second option is ‘recontextualisation’ of utilitarianism through artistic activity and triggering the liberation of artistic geniuses in every one of us. Which one is to choose - depends on the choices we make as political animals. Intuition, fantasy and pathos is something machine cannot imitate. Systematisation and automatisation of humanism leads to the cornered and horrific dangers of approaching intuitive ‘pathos’ of human nature as an animalistic sickness.
As you see in case of Marres aan de Maas, this monument to the process of ‘upcycling’, modernisation and re-appropriation of the utilitarian architecture, there is no need to destroy the old world in order to build the new one. Contemporary post-conceptual art can play the role of interlocutor, Charon, who has capacity to peacefully guide crossing the waters of poisonous postmodern Styx. The waters of multiple crises, desperation and sense of lostness in the world of multiple realities, where one is claiming not only the opinion, but the facts as well. Demystification of political claims is hard to achieve in the flux of postmodern manipulations with the media - however attention to culture as an ultimate centrepiece of constituting ‘human’ have potential to provide an alternative.
Strategies of ‘upcycling’ and ‘recontextualisation’ by the means of artistic interventions are meant to reduce the tension of ‘uselessness’, assigned to history and anything that does not fit into closed systemic views, which are dictated by the narrative of contemporary utilitarianism. The space, that once was selling cars, is currently offering possibilities for (self)reflection and thinking beyond the certain borders of design. The complexity of it’s memory and initial utilitarian function are not meant to be forgotten. It should be analysed on the level of it’s unconscious formation - to rethink ideology, one need to look into the elements of it’s initial constitution: the architecture and functionality of public spaces being the perfect example.
If the Opel garage can be reimagined into the ‘museum at the sea’, why couldn’t the nation state be ‘upcycled’ into the form of common living, that will not have egocentric, inevitably ‘game-over-winner- takes-it-all’ resulting nature?