5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 1/16The Art of Work, May 16th 2015Day 9Luis CamnitzerTHINKING ABOUT ART THINKINGOne of the problems we face when talking about art education isthat we take the term work of art for granted. Work refers tolabor as much as to an object, while art means the discipline inwhich this is performed, although it is also used as a laudatoryadjective. In any case this divides people in two groups: those whomake the objects, and those who appreciate them. Those whoMichaelSweerts,TheDrawingClass,1656-58.Oiloncanvas.5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 2/16make them are subject to the criteria of meritocracy and theeducational system aims to distill the few that may rise to the top.The art they produce is supposed to attract as great a quantity ofappreciative viewers as possible in order to sustain the market byconsumption of museum tickets or direct purchase of the artworks.This process may be schematically described as a gallery systemthat assists with commercializing the work part, and museumsthat aim to extoll the art part. In the term work of art, theeconomic value is represented in the word work. Museums mayhold the works, but not sell them. Meanwhile the art partremains essentially free or non-tradable. People may take the artpart with them, at least inasmuch as they can carry perception andcognition out the door. This setup makes museums concentrateon selling the act of getting a peek. Mostly financed byphilanthropic handouts, they need to prove their importance byhaving as many peeking visitors as possible.The conundrum that museums face is reflected in art schools aswell. Is the mission of formal art schooling then to preparefeeders into the market or to form researchers in cognition? Theanswer might be both. Curricula dont seem to reflect any clearposition on the subject. Given todays general erosion of thehumanities and the passive openness to whats out there, thecognitive part of the equation is left to the students discretion andinitiative. Angela Vettese puts this in nice positive wording: artschool is a school of doubt: one teaches a subject that cannot bedescribed, since art is both endless challenge and an asymptote.1The above description of shifting responsibilities to the student isadmittedly crude and close to a caricature. It is, however, useful inthat it helps to illuminate the relatively small space occupied by5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 3/16perception/cognition within the institutional picture. And in itssmallness, these processes are only good enough to feed into aclosed system and not into society at large.If art schools operated under an open system focused onimproving communal creativity and communication rather thanon a specialized market they would not filter admissions with theintention of investing only in the futures of a few. The few arethose students who, in fact, will need the least amount ofeducation to make it. They are motivated and ready forautodidactics. In an open system, schools would instead put theirenergy towards educating those who need it the most; those whoseem to be lacking a future. And museums would not be obsessedwith the amount of warm bodies passing through their ever-expanding buildings. They would, instead, pay more attention tohow many minds may have been warmed during circulation.Thehygrothermographisoneofthemostcommondevicesusedtomeasurefluctuationsintemperatureandhumiditycausedbythepresenceofwarmbodiesinmuseumgalleries.The more important point left, however, is not how to make art5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 4/16schools and museums more relevant, but rather what to do withthe perceptual/cognition relationship that makes the art part ofthe work of art term important. This is actually the area thatmost art schools neglect, at least since the time when WalterGropius, while director of the Bauhaus, claimed that art issomething that cannot be taught. It is the part that, helped alongby myth, remains a private and intimate task for which nobodyelse should take responsibility. True art supposedly takes form inan area that is considered unreachable. Its located betweenconsciousness and the unconscious and is subject to magicalinterpretations. Students are therefore left to figure everything outon their own. And yet, this territory is not only present ineverybody, but should be developed and honed in everybody. Itssomething that should not be reserved for the few we are willingto bet upon and we assume will reach success. Art, its true, cannotbe taught under the anachronistic and inefficient definition ofteaching as transference of information. It is this definition thatGropius probably had in mind, and what he didnt realize at thetime is that nothing can be taught. Rather, like everything else, artcan be learned under stimulating conditions that facilitateautodidacticismthe crucial ingredient in any kind of learningand that should force us to rethink education in general. Learnhow to learn is still a good phrase, and it is an underlying notionthat covers art as well.For all this Im a socialist. I believe in a socialism of creation. Imcertainly not against a redistribution of income and consumptionto achieve an economically fair society. I do believe that a goodsociety can only function if equalization is achieved through aredistribution of power. And this can only work within anenvironment of shared and non-competitive creativity. I haveradicalized my position regarding this topic over time. I nowbelieve that traditional approaches to the teaching of artappreciation leads students towards refined consumption rather5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 5/16than advancing their critical thinking and creativity. And further, Ibelieve that traditional art schools are essentially craft schools attheir most primitive level, and finishing schools when they are attheir best.In examining the tenets of traditional art education, I will firstaddress art appreciation, which has historically been promoted bylooking at artthat is, at the packaging of the object (orpresentation). Sometimes this is accompanied by an anecdotalhistory of the piece, and with luck, also an intellectual history.More progressive approaches have dealt with looking through art,and by doing so aim to promote associations in the viewers mindswith the hope that the exercise improves their performance inother disciplines. Personally I would prefer looking around thework of art to find out what conditions generated its existence.This means trying to identify what question the piece is trying toanswer, and to then answer the question myself by any meanspossible. Thus, a process of problematization places the layviewers on the same level with the artist. It essentially permitsthem to embark on the same research, and establishes room forcreative dialogue.On the second topic, of what I termed the crafts and finishingschool, I would say that training in crafts evades the institutionsresponsibility of dealing with cognition. Coupled with thetraditional selection of so-called talented students, this confirmsmy view that what operates here is both an institutional andpedagogical laziness. There is a widespread reluctance torecognize that education should be a social service. I dont meanthis here as something corresponding to Relational Art, butsomething that literally serves society. Teaching crafts is easy.Teaching how to socially behave and circulate in the art market iseasy as well. Cognition, as we already know, is not easy. Socialservice is not easy either.5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 6/16WheeldiagramforBauhauscourseworkstructuredbycraft,asdevelopedbyWalterGropius,Weimar,1922.First we have to decide on what constitutes service. When in therealms of art: Is it the refinement of taste? Is it the revealing oftechnical tricks and their relevance in history, and, moreimportantly, within the narrow margins of the history of art? Or isit where cognition has to be served and needs the development ofcomplex approaches to knowledgeof connecting what ispresumed to be non-connectableso that nothing may diesubmerged in conventionality and stereotypes? These questions5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 7/16are not limited to the preparation of producers of art. They alsoextend to the institutions that present the production.The accepted level of neglect during the course of studies is not allnegative in its consequences. One can say that it leaves room fordiscovery and autodidactic processes; that when coupled withmediocre interactions it might be better that students be left alone.But then, autodidacticism and discovery processes are prettymuch the same. We should recognize that these processes workbetter when nourished rather than when left to happen by defaultor by miraculous appearances. Forcing the teaching of content inabsence of a theory that helps remove wasteful hesitations duringautodidactic learning is a form of perverse censorship. Critiquesessions try to address this issue, but how much are critiquesexamined? What do they address? How deeply do they reach intothat area between consciousness and the unconscious? Critiques,unfortunately, are mostly part of the finishing school of themanners type.Art, when taken as an autonomous and isolated discipline, isdifficult to define and therefore open to obscurantistinterpretations. Recently Saul Ostrow offered some nice thoughtson this. Unexpectedly enough, I found them on Facebook:5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 8/16As an undertaking [art] involves unstable events,procedures and effects devoid of syntax. Subsequently,these are significantly affected by their orderinghow theycome to be organized affects how they are to be interpreted.Art therefore is not an object, but some thing manifested atthe intersection of ideation, and its realization. This givesrise to the paradox; what is to be represented defines theform of the thing to be made, which in turn limits whatmight be expressed. As such the relation of form andcontent is conflicted.2I wish somebody told me at least that when I was a student. Thewords above are better than doubt and asymptote even if Ialso recognize their truth. Today I would put Ostrows statementin the context of disorienting dilemmas, those that serveMezirows transformational pedagogy. His statement is alsoreminiscent of something that Ortega y Gasset wrote aboutlanguage that later led to the notion of languaging. Alton Becker,referring to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varelas theoriesabout autopoiesis, quotes Ortega:In effect language is never a fact, for the simple reasonthat it is never an accomplished fact but is always makingand unmaking itself, or, to put it in other terms, it is apermanent creation and a ceaseless destruction.3Though it does not deal with deeper problems of ideation,Ostrows statement shows one of the reasons why there might be areluctance to address these issues in a schooling situation. At thesame time he is also providing a handle on how to do so by settingthe stage for thought without interference. Intersections andconflict seem to be too intangible to quantify and systematize.5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 9/16They escape competency assessment grids needed academicallyto determine who is better. Art, if it should remain effective,cannot be fitted into this form of rationalization, the one that, asdefined by Marcuse, furthers dominance. Yet, its notpedagogically difficult to create situations in which ideation isfostered, conflict can be understood, and the ungraspablebecomes apparentand, more importantly, where their effectscan be administered for communication. In fact, its in this zonewhere real cognition takes place and may become dialogical.Whenever we ignore the ensuing challenge, we reaffirm thedominating idea that art-making is reserved for a chosen few, thatart is based on therapeutic self-searching, that anything an artistdoes is art, that whoever doesnt understand an art product is aPhilistine, and that art is an industry by and for a minute fractionof the worlds population. In fact, this is the exact opposite of asocialism of creation. We are in fact confirming the distribution ofpower instead of seeking an egalitarian redistribution.All this makes me prefer to view art not as a means of productionbut as a form of thinkingart thinking, in fact. It makes me see thata textbook is a monologue that transfers information, and thatfiction is dialogical because it demands empathy. Its a situationsimilar to languaging, inasmuch as it makes artlike languagea particular case: something akin to a slice to be analyzed incomputerized tomography. Art thinking is much more than art: it isa meta-discipline that is there to help expand the limits of otherforms of thinking. Though its something as autonomous as logicmight be, and though it can be studied as an enclosed entity, itsimportance lies in what it does to the rest of the acquisition ofknowledge. With a little pomposity I like to say that science is amere subcategory of art. Science is generally bound by logic,sequencing, and experimentation with repeatable and provableresults.Mostly it presumes that there is something knowable outthere that can be instrumentalized and represented. It doesnt THINKINGABOUTARTTHINKING LUISCAMNITZER5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 10/16matter if it is in what in science is called Mode 1, beingpropositional, or Mode 2, being interventionist. Art is all of that,plus the opposite. It stays in both modes simultaneously. It createsitself while it allows the play with taxonomies, the making ofillegal and subversive connections, the creation of alternativesystems of order, the defiance of known systems, and the criticalthinking and feeling of everything. More than any other means ofspeculation it allows us to travel back and forth seamlessly fromour subjective reality to consensus and possible but unreachablewholeness. It allows a mix of the megalomaniacal delirium ofunbound imagination with the humbleness of individualirrelevance. In a different context Deleuze and Guattari define thehumbleness with: When something occurs, the self that awaited itis already dead, or the one that would await it has not yetarrived.4I would think that the ability to deal with thisindeterminacy is more important than training people to properlyfit into assigned functions within the social machine. Its from thispoint of view that Im somewhat skeptical of art schools. I wouldprefer if art thinking informed everything we learn and everythingwe do, in all the educational settings we have to stumble throughduring our lives.5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 11/16WheeldiagramsforcourseworkatOntarioCollegeofArtToronto,asdevelopedRoyAscott,Ontario,1970.What we have now in institutionalized art education is a smallgroup of artisans intended to serve a bigger group of onlookers. Ifwe were to translate the art situation to literacy, its like training asmall group of calligraphers in the hope that they will have some5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 12/16ideas that merit a Nobel Prize in literature. Its then also expectedthat the rest of society will understand what they are doing. Whendealing with literacy directly, however, we expectthat everybody(not just the calligraphers) will know how to read and write. Evenif they dont know how to correctly spell Nobel.What is at heart here is really how we process information. We aresurrounded by a technology based on algorithms,conceptualization, pattern recognition, fuzzy thinking, and theabsorption of errors as an integral part of systems. Technologysurpassed quantity to move within the realms of quality.Meanwhile our pedagogical systems are still operating within therealist aesthetics of the nineteenth century based on arithmeticnumeracy and rational accumulations. The infinite dots thatcompose visual reality were then transferred one by one to acanvas. Letters today add up to words and words to sentences.In conventional everyday life we still try to reach infinity bycounting 1, 2, 3, and onward, and our respect for virtuosity isbased either on endless internalized labor and masterylike thatutilized in touch-typingor upon infinite masochist endurance.Quantity here defines quality, but we remain standing on aquantitative platform. Conventional wisdom expects that the more information we canprocess within this approach, and the more we know, the wiser wewill be. We train to acquire ability and erudition to then aim toout-perform in an imaginary Olympics. In art, the conventionalphrase used to express an inability to make art is still skill-basedand is expressed with the phrase I cant even draw a straightline. Rulers are dismissed as complex and inaccessiblecontraptions. All this signals either the profound failure of generalpedagogy, or its success in training for an interpretation ofaccountability that is alien to mature, creative individuals. In5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 13/16other words, it is anti-social and, in terms of creation, anti-socialist.Some years ago on Yahoo Answers somebody named Paula didactually ask for help because she couldnt draw a straight line. Shebelieved that drawing is strictly a skill to render and nothing morethan that. After her public complaint about her disability, Paulathen tried to redeem herself and added: I can be creative becauseI do write and I can crochet and later also: The best thing I everdrew was a raccoon.Apparently there were many answers. Xandra#15s advice, the onevoted best by other users, appeared on the top of the web page.Xandra#15 tried to help while appearing reassuring by sharingPaulas handicap. She wrote: I can't draw a straight line either.But I've gotten the art award at my high school for two years in arow, and the thing I'm best at is drawing realistic things. Inreading this we already learn that straight lines are not real things.Xandra continued and recommended: You just have to learn howto draw what's in front of you before you can draw what is in yourhead. In a narrow and well-intended way, Xandra thought shewas describing academic drawing. In fact, however, she wasreferring to the processing of information. And here her limitationwas in separating inside-the-head information from outside-the-head information, and believing that this is all the informationthere is. She assumed that these two types of information aretotally different and therefore avoided not only seriousphilosophical issues, but also the possibility of any meaningfulcommunication. More then referring to drawing or to any artisticability beyond drawing, one big difficulty she encountered was intaking things out of her head. She believes that trainable skills aremore important than cognition.5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 14/16SchoolofVisualArtsadvertisescreativitynexttothesalt,pepper,andketchupinits2009marketingcampaign.Both Paula and Xandra#15 are examples of people encounteringobstacles that keep them away from art. Paula is trying to enterthe art world not knowing that the whole problem is not how torestate what is visible, but how to imagine and grasp what isinvisible, which makes the world of information much morecomplex. Xandra#15, on the other hand, does not realize that forthe moment she is only advocating a form of trivial and emptycalligraphy alien to any pursuit of knowledge. Yes, in her case it isabout processing information but, ironically, she leaves theinformation part out of it. By doing this, any possibility of criticalthinking or of establishing connections is also eliminated. Paulaand Xandra#15, whoever they may be in real life, are typicalexamples of the students we encounter in high school. Raccoons5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 15/16ShareThisspecialissueofe-flux journalispublishedincooperationwithWuhanArtTerminus(WH.A.T.)andwithsupportfromREMAIMODERNArtGalleryofSaskatchewan. 2015 e-flux and the authorRELATEDand crochet will not get them into art schools; neither will theability to draw straight lines.These are, however, the people who need us the most and that weshould reach wherever they are. Its not really because without usthey wont be able to go in or out of art school, or will be able toproduce art. It goes deeper. No matter how well some day theymight render faithfully what they see, the danger is that theirminds may not be able to differentiate between prepackaged,indoctrinating conventions and their own potentially challengingthoughts. They may not even realize that challenging thoughtsexist. Not only will they never art-think, but they also may end upvoting Republican. ARTTHE ART OF COOKING: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JULIA CHILD ANDCRAIG CLAIBORNEMARTHAROSLERMAY7 201 5 ARTON THE DOCUMENTARYHARUNFAROCKI MAY1 2201 5CONSTRUCTION WITH STEEL AND TECHNOLOGYSUPPORTED5/27/2015 e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale SUPERCOMMUNITY Thinking About Art Thinkinghttp://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/thinking-about-art-thinking/ 16/16