HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY

IN THE MAKING OF THE MAKING OF:

The Practice of Rendering Performance Virtual

Bojana Cvejić

We don’t have money, so we have to think.

Anon. appropr.

At the moment “education” is being addressed at this symposium, all opinion-making and discourse-leading centers in the artworld have had their say on the topic, from Documenta 12 or the cancelled Manifesta 6 to many conferences, festivals, magazines and laboratories in the performing arts, academies burgeoning all over. The topic may no longer be hot if it now begs for a timely historicization. Pages of critical analysis could be spent to prove that “education” was a reactionary curatorial device in the first place. I’d rather summarize that debate in two rationales explaining why “education” surfaced in recent art curatorship.  The political one follows first. Curators have managed to make generally accepted their claim that the arts entail a specific form of knowledge production, being transdisciplinary, discursive, creative, experimental, critical, open in approach etc. The institutional transformation that the academy was striving for – and is, in a certain way, losing in the current neoliberal economization of knowledge, the process in which research is assessed by the viability/feasibility a project promises – is now reappropriated and championed in the arts. Being “transdisciplinary”, “creative”, “experimental”, “critical” are attributes of the atmosphere of the late academic cultural, poststructural theory. The only difference is that the artist lends a cooler image than an academic researcher: a trickster, a manipulator who has developped the skills of a “knowledge-pirate”, a methodological omnivore who can churp from as many areas of knowledge as the occasion suits her (a Dutch daily reports[i]). Driven by the free-market logic to constantly update topics, methods, tactics and language, the artist understood her advantage over the academic was (to use the jargon of technocrats:) to pick up speed –the speed of information, that is– or  die:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors […] and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[ii]

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PROGNOSIS ON COLLABORATION

Bojana Kunst

“The absolutely desperate current state of affairs fills me with hope«

(Karl Marx)

On the time left to live

I.

In 2007, Carnegie Mellon University organised a series of lectures entitled Last lecture, for which several professors were asked to talk about what was really on their minds. If they had had to deliver the last lecture of their lives, what would that have been like and on what subject? The invitation from the university with the rhetorical implications of determinacy was clearly intended to challenge the lecturers and prompt their imagination to yield some additional value. The challenge got a totally different twist to it in September 2007, however, in the lecture given by Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science, entitled Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.  After stating that he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and only had half a year left to live, he began to talk in an optimistic and humorous way about his childhood dreams, giving insights into computer science and also giving advice on creating multi-disciplinary collaborations, group work and interaction with other people. All that was accompanied by enchanting life lessons and even push-ups on stage. His lecture immediately received media attention. The lecture video became an online hit at social networking sites such as YouTube, Google Video, etc., and within a few days, the promise of him publishing a book with his lecture was worth 6 to 7 million dollars.[1]

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