ARTONTRIAL

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Letting Go Poem

An Paenhuysen

When I teach art criticism, my favourite exercise is inspired by the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, who was an advocate for co-creative writing. Once, at the closing of an exhibition, Filliou, together with the artist Emmett Williams, asked the audience to write down the name of something or somebody they would gladly get rid of. These were then collected and read out loud as a collective poem. I adapt this exercise, giving everyone a post-it and ask them to write down what they as art critics would like to let go of. We collect the post-its and read them out loud. The word that pops up most is ‘fear’. Writing itself is actually the remedy for fear. Take Jacques Derrida, who stated in a 2002 documentary film that ‘nothing intimidates me when I write’. But then, even for him, there is sometimes a moment upon falling asleep: ‘All of a sudden I ́m terrified by what I ́m doing.’ Derrida concluded: ‘When I’m awake, conscious, working, in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half sleep.’

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Writing and researching

Rosario García Martínez

How willing are cultural institutions to enable spaces for the production of knowledge, linked not only to works and exhibitions, but also to what happens around them, something that makes them public?

The machinery of the Museum includes a prolific editorial production of expensive catalogs with the words of directors, curators, sponsors and specialists in art theory. But the editorial lines around practices that enable other voices are not naturalized.

On the other hand, personally, how much time do we allocate in a subversive way (since it is not officially considered as part of the job) to write and research about our work? How much do we demand that this be enabled in our institution? Talking about writing and research in art-education implies talking about professionalization. If it is a matter of rethinking the museum, it is important that spaces and resources are institutionally promoted to materialize and make accessible a knowledge that can be thought of today as public heritage, due to its vitality for the training of future cultural professionals and for its value to think the meaning of museums in today’s society.

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Ways of Seeing (Photography)

Nathalie Goffard

It was John Berger in his now iconic four-part BBC series Way of Seeing (1972), who taught the West to realize that the act of viewing images had been revolutionized with the invention of the camera, serial reproduction, and the emergence of mass culture. Until then, a work of art could never be in two places at the same time. On the other hand, the prominence that the role of the spectator’s gaze was acquiring introduced a new problem in contemplation: the ubiquity of images, but also of multiple visions. Four decades have passed since Berger tried to explain to the public that his ways of seeing were culturally determined and guided by hierarchies and power networks, and it may seem almost naive that we did not know it before. But no, thinking about the image requires the passage of time and distance, those same characteristics that photography had to acquire so that we would finally stop thinking that it was a trace of reality. Possibly, we do not yet have the maturity to analyze these ways of seeing in the present. Although visual culture is so far exponentially cumulative, adding more and more layers and readings, we are also faced with greater ubiquity (now physical and virtual spaces) and perspectives (gender, decolonial, etc.). It is undoubtedly the great challenge for art criticism today; to be able to decipher the places from which images are viewed, produced and disseminated. The Museum is no longer the only legitimator of the works from an analytical reading, still less the Market; in this new symbolic order, the cumulative ubiquity of looks, images and their spaces have become the problem in itself.