Dear friends,
you have made an interesting proposition that I would like to comment
on. Let's leave the provocation aside with which you apparently tried to
get our attention and stir up some debate and let's try to be a bit more
objective in favour of a serious discussion. I totally understand that
you are tired of traditional symposium formats. We all have been there.
We all have attended and participated in conferences and panels that
went nowhere, at which the speakers did nothing but present themselves
in the ordinary, boring way and were often not able/ not willing to
respond to each others' ideas, concepts, works or to discuss a subject
sufficiently. People who just read out their paper, speakers of whom you
get the impression they have not considered the subject of the
symposium, theoreticians repeating themselves, artists not going beyond
the information that they provide on their website. Moderators who fail
to generate something like an interesting debate, because the
presentations are so disparate.
There are a number of reasons why this is so. Lousy speakers' fees don't
explain everything. Laziness might be one of the factors. Laziness of
the organisers to find speakers who actually -- in theory -- have
something to say to each other, laziness to take the effort to
communicate with all participants in the panel about their individual
contribution in advance and making them understand what the context is
in which they speak. But also laziness of the speakers to think of
something different than the usual presentation. In all those years that
I am organising these kind of events, I was rarely surprised by someone
making the effort to come up with something fresh, something
extraordinary, although there the space for it was there.
I don't want to play the ball back to you (or eventually myself -- I
have played all positions in this game: curator, moderator, speaker)
asking you to be more inventive and responsive to each other, even after
delivering your speech. Maybe we need a change, a challenge, to refresh.
Maybe we should just stop trying to offer topic-driven conferences to a
larger public and just do little, informal conversations like for
example Andreas did at Tesla or create workshop like situations in which
real exchange is easier. Which all really work well, we know. Since real
and debate is so difficult to achieve in larger groups, why not give up
on that in general, or do it in the way we do it here, have a remote,
but focussed discussion?
But let's look at what you proposed here. Artists talking about each
others' work, not their own. I have seen that, but not too often at
symposiums, granted. However when artists teach at art school, this
happens all the time. This does not excite me per se. You should
elaborate on this, make it clearer what you are expecting to happen, or
define even super clear rules to make it special. Only speak about the
artists who are present? Is there still a kind of general subject to
which the presentations will refer or do you envision it more like a
pecha-kucha, straight forward presentation/reflection of one or many
artworks without a conference like theme?
How this will foster critique? I am not sure it can. Real critique means
also negative critique - in public this is very unlikely to happen. And
why should an artist be more suited to critique another artist's work
than anybody else? Finally the theoreticians - self-absorbed in their
own theory and discourse (like you say) they should now disclose their
subjectivity and/or speak predominantly about the art. What I am missing
rather in our field are more theoreticians who come up with strong
theories...theoreticians who are not caught up in the scholarly world
but have some connection to reality. There is much more to say about
your idea, this is just a quick response, and we should continue talking
about it. I agree, we need more and new formats, because we all want to
talk to each other honestly, but we still hardly know how to in public.
--
su
susanne jaschko
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