Further Responses to Drifting and Navigating, Part 1

From: Kenneth Lum
Date: November 20, 2009 4:18:58 GMT+01:00
To: Anthony Marcellini
Subject: Re: artpractical.com : The Istanbul Biennial: Not Going the Distance

Hi Anthony,

I read your text and have some comments.

My question for you, as someone who did not visit this latest edition of the Istanbul show is this: In what ways was the employment of Brecht employed in a more historically direct way to the social and political situation of Turkey (and the Ottoman conclusion)?

Afterall, Turkey became a republic in the 1920s, coinciding with Brecht's most significant period of work. In what ways did Turkey's own emergence into modernity parallel or were influenced by a particularly European Marxist thought? i am sure there are linkages, some perhaps very marked, but it seems to me that your well-written paper opens up such questions for me—especially given the fact the show is curated by four Croatians. i have no idea the composition of the show, so thus a caveat in my comments.

Sincerely,

Ken

Ken Lum is a Vancouver-based artist whose work has been included in Documenta XI, Shanghai Biennale, Sydney Biennale, the Sáo Paulo Bienal, The Venice Biennale and the Johannesburg Biennale, among many others

From: Aurélien Mole
Date: November 20, 2009 10:44:00 am GMT+01:00
To: Anthony Marcellini
Subject: Re : Istanbul Biennial Text

If it's true that the Brechtian situation maintains distinction between an author who knows and an audience supposely there to learn, it's also true that the audience is aware of this situation and should be able to criticize it. Brecht never hide education behind "spectacle." Thus the goal (teaching the masses) may be wrong, but the means (making a power dynamic explicit) is not that far from Rancière's project.

Reading "The Emancipated Spectator," I wondered one thing. At the foundation of Rancière's proposition for a mutual situation of self-constructed knowledge there's the hypothesis that we all know something. Using this knowledge help us to learn more. But where does this knowledge come from? Rancière never tells; it seems to be a fact.

How strange.

This may be linked to Bourdieu's concept of inheritance. Rancière says that you can learn to talk by yourself, but if you've been raised by wolves, you'll never even say your name. To learn to talk, you have to be among people who talks. And some people speak better than others, reflecting the class to which they belong. We learn from our community.

Don't you think ?

All the best,

Aurélien

PS: About a political proposition, I thought that it would be great to invite an artist to do something that wouldn't be regarded as a work of art in the end. I thought about Judi Werthein's project with illegal immigrants and the Brinco shoes. For me, it's a horrible artistic project, but the same thing could have been OK if not considered as an artwork.

Maybe artists can do other things than art and can do it well? Maybe Manzoni's affirmation that "whatever the artist does is art" is at the origin of art's non-efficiency (regarded as an aesthetic proposition) on a political level?

What do you think ?

Aurélien Mole is a Paris-based artist, art critic, and curator with le Bureau, who also does photographic documentation of exhibitions.