Part I of this ongoing essay, published in e-flux journal no.3, worked through Maurice Blanchot's notion of conversation developed in his polyphonous book The Infinite Conversation, ed. and trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). It focuses particularly on Blanchot's idea of conversation as interrupted thought and speech; and on genuine interruption as coming from autrui, or "the other." Blanchot's notion of autrui, which is somewhat enigmatic and radically open, posits silence as a key form of interruption and a space of neutrality. Thus conversational interlocutors that greet us with silence – such as God, animals, and finally a rock (as these are found in certain films, artworks, and poetry) – featured prominently in the text. Further following Blanchot's notion that true conversation is shaped by the profound silence of the other, which is always understood beyond binary opposition, Part I posed the question of whether what currently passes for conversation is really that. The question may never be resolved, but is likely to spur the continuation of this multi-part essay infinitely, without end or a clear horizon.
Thanks to Michał Woliński for noting Żmijewski's legacy recently.
Though this is not to say that this is what Blanchot meant with the title of his eponymous book!
See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 165-166.
As audience participation matched the engagement of the invited speakers.
I have never attended one of Wilson's discussions so cannot elaborate on their content, but what I know from meeting the artist is that the crafting of a discussion is of great importance, and that of absence of all recording devices makes for an atmosphere that puts a much greater emphasis on participation and the role of each participant as a witness to an event. The task of memory could here be taken as primary. Or, given the inability to remember perfectly, one could completely give oneself over to participation and let oneself then be the evidence of what took place by virtue of any transformation of the person.
Jonah Lundh is a freelance curator developing a program of conversations for this artist-run center, and Candice Hopkins is the curator of exhibitions there.
As can be seen in the photograph, Jungen's Talking Sticks are usually displayed to emphasize their relation to the sports equipment they are made from – baseball bats. But in the context of his work, which often takes up questions of First Nations identity and its commercialization in North American sports culture, they are often seen to echo totem poles (at the size they might be made for the tourist industry). Having worked with Jungen at the time he developed these carvings, I do recall discussions of their formal relation to the kind of carved staffs, which are often decorated with First Nations motifs and paraded at official functions by the Lieutenant Governor of the province of British Columbia (the Queen's representative) or the presidents of the universities in Vancouver. Each time, such objects slyly enact a kind of transfer of sovereignty from the First Nations, which never took place legally and continues to be a point of debate.
See Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front, ed. Keith Wallace (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002).
What are you reading now was added towards the end of writing this text, but it seemed right to interrupt myself in this context.
Recall Libera's highly controversial LEGO Concentration Camp (1996), which was recently purchased by the Jewish Museum in New York.
This is not the first instance in which Dawicki has used conversation as a form of meta-art to stress impossibility or refusal. In his earlier work with the members of the artists' "supergroup" Azorro (supergroup in the sense that each artist also has an independent practice), entitled Everything has been done (2003), a conversation expresses the impossibility of making certain works of conceptual art quite simply because they have already been conceived. But in the case of the current work about the difficulty of addressing the Holocaust in art, the tone is very different. The conversation is situated amidst works that deal much more symbolically with the search for knowledge, failure, death, and palliatives, using a variety of neo-conceptual pictorial media (and one soft-sculpture consisting of the artist's clothes, tied together to form an escape line out of the window of the gallery). Ironically, this conversation about strategic silence was totally missed by a reviewer in Gazeta Wyborcza, who took time to mention every other work in the exhibition. See Dorota Jarecka, "Przegrywamy do Końca" Gazeta Wyborcza, May 28, 2009, 14.
The structural undercurrents of conversation in court proceedings and the construction of judgments in particular are explored in a recent single-channel video work by Judy Radul: a seemingly natural conversation that turns out to be completely constructed on the basis of the three elements announced in its title: Question, Answer, Judgment (2008).
Those who have seen the film may know that the defendant happens to be one of the editors of this journal, Anton Vidokle. And I am as aware that my text may be read as an act of collusion (with those already accused of collusion!) as I am interested in forging a way to speak from within such conditions of complicity. In eschewing the fiction of critical distance, it might be possible to think through more complex notions of thinking critically, not only about dead or distant figures, but also about the people we tend to have conversations with and the very conditions we are immersed in.
Interestingly, in a recent review of Vidokle's activities by Taraneh Fazeli in the Summer 2009 issue of Artforum titled "Class Consciousness," the focus is not awareness of social class – rather the title alludes to the educational activities of e-flux, which are discussed in terms of social consciousness, but not in terms of class.
Diedrich Diederichsen, "On (Surplus) Value in Art," ed. Nicolaus Schafhausen, Caroline Schneider, and Monika Szewczyk (Rotterdam and Berlin: Witte de With Publishers and Sternberg Press, 2008), 48.
Mary Vidal. Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature and Talk in Seventeeth and Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 95. Thanks to Søren Andreasen for recommending this fascinating book.
Not that the latter is void of tension. In fact there is some debate about whether the aristocrats are already on the island and finding it difficult to leave, or whether they are about to embark. Regardless of whether the good trip is deferred or coming to an end, the conversationalists are in limbo.
One was "The New York Conversations," in June 2008 in the new e-flux space; another was the above-mentioned "Rotterdam Dialogues: The Artists" at Witte de With, where Rosler was a keynote speaker.