Reflections of a ZKM Participant

Now that I have a bit of distance some
impressions continue to reverberate. I was aware that part of the desire
for the OLS project (at least as we interpreted
things) was to question the normative
representational and formal strategies of art
history, criticism, theory, and practice. In our
presentation we chose to reproduce and fragment a
working process that engaged themes of the
conference without explaining that process as a
narrative or argument. I came to see pretty early
on that not only presentational norms, but the
performative conditions of all aspects of the
conference were being questioned, both in the
presentations and the discourse (or lacks
thereof) surrounding them. It was quite an
adventure, and for me an interesting antidote to
the "artist talk" (ordered around a selection of
works) or "formal paper" (pursuing a theme,
antecedents, and arguments) that I usually
present. Even knowing that these norms were being
explicitly framed and questioned, the lack of
formal zones of discussion (until the end) was
actually rather disquieting. Yet this instability
was productive in that my responses and those of
other participants did find more informal, less
regulated spaces of articulation.

I think some people expected to respond to, and
hear explication of the presentations. It seemed
some were more comfortable than others with being
left without specific guidance and formal
explanations of the form of the event. Overall, I
felt this lack of structuring (where
intentionality is not stated and reinforced at
regular intervals) was actually productive in a
different modality. For instance, I had a feeling
that some participants approached the event as a
stage or frame for interventions "about" the
question of performance in art discourses and
practices. Others enacted many of these questions. In
other words, the questions were performed, not
merely stated, or presented as subject matter. I
thought there was an admirable "play" in the mix
between presentations that addressed the stated
themes, and others that produced questions and
problems around those very same themes. A
particularly rich moment for me was when during
The Weather Underground's presentation where the
civil rights movement as performance came up. (In
many ways the global anti-war movement, the BPP,
Yippies, RAF, or TWU itself, could also be framed
similarly.) What I find intriguing about this
notion as it arose was the way it mirrored the
earlier draft of your OLS statement, but
resonated more because it came from a different,
specific, (and unexpected) perspective. (By the
wya, I don't know if it was intended, but the
appearance of Bernardine and Bill directly after
the highly theatrical and difficult to sit
through Tino Sehgal interview was prescient. It
was the perfect shift of register. Just when I
thought possibilities for politics and contention
were evacuated into bland, cynical,
neo-conservative musings on "consumer choice"...
The politics and people "outside the space" of
the conference became legible. I also really
object to the idea that marketplace values have
unproblematically supplanted politics in the art
world - or anywhere else that matters. Markets
are in no way democratic. They regularly function
to produce and reproduce all kinds of
inequalities.)

The diverse presentations, their forms, and their
differential impacts I found truly stimulating.
Perhaps for other participants these gaps and
differences created problems of genre
instability, but for me those breaks were the
most specific opportunities for shift and
challenge that the event made legible. I was
especially struck by certain repetitions and
re-versioning around the practice of Art &
Language in particular. As someone with a less
than comprehensive knowledge of their work, it
was not only a chance to delve a bit deeper, but
it also embodied the complexities both in their
practices and attempts to present and re-present
such a conceptual / visual / scholarly /
performative hybrid.

If I might make a few concrete suggestions as to
form, it might be interesting to have a daily
roundtable next time, or perhaps to begin with
perspectives, reflections, and revisions of the
ZKM events when we next convene in Chicago. (It
might also be fun to close on a destabilizing
note next time…)