Theory of the self and community
Community as a concept is so lamented in Western theory that even discussing it here feels like opening another Pandora’s Box. When Friedrich Schiller first published The Aesthetic Education of Man in 1794 he was lamenting the social alienation that came with the violence and emerging capital-democratic revolutions in France. His notion that aesthetic education could set humanity free is, to a great extent, still with us today. Terms he coined, such as the play-drive or the aesthetic impulse, have helped individualize the process of self-awareness and development. In Schiller’s world – and others like Emmanuel Kant whom he borrowed liberally from – it’s the singular, the individual that through reason must find him/her self. The idea that art and education, and more specifically aesthetic education, is tied to freedom is still a central argument for art’s inherent qualities. It’s the reason why museums fancy themselves educational institutions. It’s also the reason why art is taken seriously as an area of humanistic study and why, above all else, art is still at its very core an endeavor in pedagogical study and labor.
In Schiller’s time, on the heels of the French Revolution, the notion of the self was still in development and since a “public” – our modern understanding of public – can only exist as a collection of autonomous and individual selves, we see that the two ideas were intrinsically tied and are born together from the same set of emancipatory preoccupations. But Schiller’s conditions are not ours. He lived at a time when the self was subject to someone else – a monarchy – and a king’s subject cannot be one’s own. Centuries later, individuality isn’t under threat. Today we have a quite a different problem. One only has to consider the current social, economic and ecological urgencies, and those yet to come, to realize that we will be required to radically re-think our game plan. Are there sites where art can make a difference?
Where we take the art world and its priorities, and where it will take us, will continue to be intensely debated. It will have to come to terms with its post ‘68 disillusionment, look outside its euro-centric borders, reconsider its neo-liberal policies that act as a sort of qualitative gatekeeper, and rethink its entrenched apprehensions of speaking in terms of “we.”
There is a difference between this historic, but now universalized, European notion that one owns consciousness individually and alone, as opposed to the notion that one begins a “process” of consciousness, as in consciousness building with others. How one goes about understanding these concepts depends on a lot of things, and we don’t want to create an either/or dialectic. What’s clear is that our understanding of art today is, and has been, greatly impacted by those ideals developed centuries ago. The dream of the autonomous self is as complicated by today’s world as the autonomous object of art and understanding and unraveling that individualistic paradigm will require some work.
Either in Habermas’ case when he speaks of ideal speech situations or when contemporary thinkers like Enrique Dussel discuss the idea that citizens have a stake in their “obediential” system of government and power because it ultimately is born from them, they are talking about having a stake in how we collectively form, and have formed, systems of organizing ourselves (7). Habermas cites this originary transformation in Europe, Dussel speaks from a Latin American perspective, but what is important here is that this line of thinking is a legitimization of community decision making, at the theoretical level, and it allows artists and others to begin to think of their labor in dialogue with a larger structure of social and cultural work in politics.
This reflection should not be confused as a “call to arms” but rather a recognition that artistic processes that begin to question how and why we collaborate as communities and individuals is already taking place. As noted earlier, the art world is a wide-open space where many things can happen. Artists working in a collaborative method should be able to practice alongside artists working in their studios. This is not an either/or situation. The fact that collaborative and community driven processes, many found in Medellin and elsewhere, are only just now finding their way into the discursive paradigm of art and theory, should be embraced and seen as a teaching and learning opportunity – to consider the re-constitution of a civic space and identity, a learning, a re-learning and consciousness building process that is fundamental to this kind of work and its larger cultural project.
How one taps into this kind of creative work is where curatorial methodologies come into play.
Being aware of what the city of Medellin could give us requires a sustained form of research that isn’t easy to maintain in this kind of platform, where one is working outside the host city for a great deal of the planning period. This focus on time and a sustained presence is not without its demands. Apart from the practical difficulties this implies, it also requires us to question Modernity’s focus on and privileging of “ideas” as an artistic act in and of itself – art as idea as idea. Ideas can be easy to come by and conceptualism’s staying power, despite the brevity of many of its gestures, is testament to the facility with which the art world’s economy, turns over new ideas and new works of art with blazing speed. It certainly can be argued that today this conceptual privilege of the “new idea” has more to do with a certain “entrepreneurial” spirit that we misguidedly value above all else (8). Not coincidentally, this “entrepreneurial” mind-set, requires a skill-set perfectly matched for curatorial work, banking its future on conducting research, managing data, and producing new bits of information.
A related inquiry, is the history of the curatorial act as a “gesture” – a model inherited from Modernism’s affinity for the speech act and the artistic enunciation as a linguistic metaphor. A more appropriate response would be a move towards a focus on listening. Apart from requiring more time, being present requires a variety of different skill-sets we will invariably have to learn once again from artists – and that’s the way it should be. As curators we must always remember, despite our ever-growing presence, that our curatorial methodologies have to be aligned with the artists we work with. Despite the institutional and professional challenges this may imply, it cannot be any other way.
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