The interest of this very journal and its organizers at e-flux in these notions is well evidenced by two texts on the subject: one in Issue no.0 by Irit Rogoff (whose Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar at Goldsmiths University, co-organized with Jean Paul Martinon, which I have participated in, often questions notions of conversation and how conversational modes play a compensatory role in the art world); and one by Liam Gillick in Issue no.2, which was first formulated for the Hermes Lecture he delivered in Den Bosch on November 9, 2008. But the investment in conversational and discursive practice is also evidenced by e-flux projects in Berlin and Night School at New York's New Museum, which consist predominantly of activities such as talks, panel discussions, and similar arenas of knowledge production and exchange. Here, I should mention that one of my closest encounters with e-flux was The New York Conversations, a three-day event co-organized in the summer of 2008 with A Prior journal (of which I am a contributing editor), which included Anton Vidokle as one of the featured artists alongside Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nico Dockx. While the list could go on indefinitely, I'll mention just one more text, Emily Pethick's "Resisting Institutionalisation," found at →, because her understanding of conversation as above all "a way of preventing a fixed representation" is important for my own understanding, and perhaps also connected to Gillick's sense of conversation as a place to "hide within a collective" and thus become difficult to recognize or represent in a Deleuzian sense.
For an elaboration on the elevated status of conversation as an art in the period, and the attendant attempts by French aristocrats to distinguish themselves from a rising bourgeoisie, see Mary Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) 75-98. One of Vidal's most prescient themes is that of conversation as a form of creating and disseminating knowledge and information in a manner other than the conventional and fundamentally hierarchical school model where those who learn are pupils and those who teach masters. To uphold a veneer of perfection from birth, nobles could not be taught and therefore rejected formal notions of learning. Vidal notes that, "A conversation with one's equals was one of the few acceptable ways for the aristocrat to increase knowledge and to perfect (not acquire) superiority... The salons had initiated a distinctly noble learning process based on the exchange of agreeable and relevant bits of information among equals, in contrast to the authoritarian, pedantic, master–student relationship of the bourgeois academic system" (95). This scenario presents an interesting foil to current experiments-making which privilege the conversational mode – I am not concerned about this a snobbish pursuit. Rather, I see the nobility described by Vidal as under duress, and conversation as a means of self-constitution and self-preservation, which had to remain clandestine. Her main point about Watteau's paintings is not that they show conversations but that they cannot represent what is said.
Show me, don't tell me was organized by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Florian Waldvogel for the inaugural Brussels Biennial, as a satellite exhibition organized by the Witte de With (where, incidentally, I work as the head of that most discursive of departments: publications). I mention the exhibition with a lot of sympathy for the curators and artists, but also a sense that the title rehearses a cocky stance and a binary that was only interesting in that it irritated and was in turn foiled by the joint contribution of Charles Esche (for the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven) and Maria Hlavajova (for the BAK, Utrecht) installed next to it at the former Post Sorting Center in Brussels. The project entitled Once is Nothing discursively restaged an earlier exhibition claiming to critique the unreflexive production of ever-new shows.
See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, ed. and trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 75. All subsequent quotations are from the section "Plural Speech: (the speech of writing)," 3-82.
This strange smoke is also the strangely all-but-sharp punctum of the image of Sands smoking, used on posters for the film, taken from the shot that breaks the long take that captures his conversation with the priest. It hovers almost like a blank speech bubble, enforcing the refusal of speech.
Blanchot's continued meditation on 'the neutral' occurs in dialogue with Roland Barthes, for whom this term is a continually elaborated and multiplied point of departure for developing a movement of thought that suspends binary structures, even the most sophisticated of these – the dialectic. While Barthes thought about the neutral throughout his career, it was not until 1977–1978 that he developed it into a seminar – the second of three he gave while he held the Chair of Semiology at the Collège de France. See Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Dennis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
I must admit that, in North America, where I studied art history, the reading of Beuys has been overshadowed by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh's damning 1980 essay "Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol," Artforum 5, no.18, 35-43. Here, Beuys' assumption of the identity of a shaman and healer is seen as an obfuscation of German post-World War II guilt. For a complication of Beuys' complex play with totalitarian power, see Jan Verwoert's essay in Issue no.1 of this journal.
Both Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze (in dialogue with Claire Parnet) stress the work of conversation as the avoidance of judgment. See especially p.81 of Blanchot's Infinite Conversation where he notes that "we know, first of all, that there is almost no sort of equality in our societies. (It suffices, in whatever regime, to have heard the 'dialogue' between a man presumed innocent and the magistrate who questions him to know what this equality of speech means when it is based upon an inequality of culture, condition, power, and fortune. But each of us, and at every moment, either is or finds himself in the presence of a judge. All speech is a word of command, of terror, of seduction, of resentment, flattery, or aggression; all speech is violence – and to pretend to ignore this in claiming to dialogue is to add liberal hypocrisy to the dialectical optimism according to which war is no more than another form of dialogue." Deleuze's attempt to critique the continual presence of judgment in existing conversations, is made clearest through the folksy lyrics of Bob Dylan: "And while you're busy prosecutin' / we'll be busy whistlin' / cleanin' up the courtroom / sweepin' sweepin' / listenin' listenin'..." – a set of attitudes that could be named neutral, especially the space of acute listening. See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, "A Conversation. What is it? What is it for?" in Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1-35.
The most notable addition would have to be I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) wherein the artist shared the space of Galerie Réné Block in New York with a young coyote for the duration of three days. This time, as the film of the performance attests, the animal-other was very lively and unpredictable. And for all the black-and-white seriousness of the footage, and the heavy symbolism that has been rehearsed around the work (the coyote purportedly stands in for Native Americans), I cannot help but think of the chasm between the artist and the animal as that infinite expanse which stretches under the paws of Wyle E. Coyote, hanging at the edge of a cliff, before he plunges to become a puff of Nevada sand. Why not find some humor in Beuys' work, misread it, laugh out loud and bare our teeth like beasts?