Performance Research

A Journal of the Performing Arts

ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20

A Politics of Knowledge in Contemporary Art?

Tom Holert

To cite this article: Tom Holert (2016) A Politics of Knowledge in Contemporary Art?,
Performance Research, 21:6, 57-62, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2016.1239901

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Published online: 01 Dec 2016.

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Download by: [Vienna University Library] Date: 11 December 2016, At: 07:25
 A Politics of Knowledge in Contemporary Art?
TOM HOLERT
Among the premises of this talk1 is the
assumption that the institution(s) of
contemporary art, at least in parts, operate
within the wider systems of a global knowledge
economy. This may sound like a truism, since
contemporary art in its various manifestations
seems hardly imaginable any more beyond the
structures of algorithmically organized finance
on the one hand and the edu-capitalist
infrastructures of museum programming,
Bologna-ized art schooling, MAs in curatorial
studies, the commercial gallery’s press release,
art biennials posing as universities or self-
organized platforms of critical learning and
production on the other. However, even if this
picture of art’s teleology amounting to its
frictionless circulation as knowledge product
should prove exaggerated, it does provoke
the question as to where art’s potential role
as a critical agent across the networked spaces
of knowledge capitalism is to be located.
The oppositional voice readily raised by
contemporary art’s practitioners – should and
can it be recruited for activist causes and
initiatives that aim at righting the wrong of
knowledge politics worldwide? How do the
various laboratories of radical pedagogy and
critical knowledge production that are (more or
less loosely) associated with the edu-capitalist
infrastructures of art participate effectively in
the struggle for A2K (access to knowledge) or
the de-colonial fight against the expropriation
and destruction of indigenous knowledges?
Or, staying closer at home, where do artists
and other art practitioners address and reflect
upon the very structures of knowledge
commodification and bureaucratization that
constitute contemporary art’s own material-
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 21·6 : pp.57-62
http: //dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1239901
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 57
discursive environments of education, 1
The article was first given
as a talk in January 2016
publication and exhibition? for the symposium ‘Please
Recently, I received an invite by New Worry! Critical Pedagogies
in Graduate Art Education’
Theater, an independent, artist-run space
at the Migros Museum für
for choreography, performance and theatre Gegenwartskunst /
in Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany. The invite Institute for Contemporary
Art Research (IFCAR) at
announced a discussion with Victoria Sobel and the Zurich University of
Casey Gollan, two members/founders of Free the Arts (ZHdK).
Cooper Union, the New York student-led activist
group which since 2012 has coordinated direct
actions in response to the New York art school’s
pursuit of tuition-based educational programs
and other attempts to tinker with the school’s
historical mission of free education. These
interventions were framed as contributions to
a larger debate on financialisation, the economy
of debt and education in the United States and
elsewhere. The discussion was scheduled to take
place at Between Bridges, a non-profit exhibition
space initiated by artist Wolfgang Tillmans in
London in 2006 that moved to Berlin in 2014.
Free Cooper Union’s approach towards the
crisis of art education and the particular crisis
imposed on the students and faculty at Cooper
Union is significant on various levels. For one,
the experiences of countless struggles within
(and contestations of ) neoliberal edu-factories
around the world (from Vienna to San Diego,
from London to Zagreb, from Hong Kong to New
York) that took place in the past years resonate
in the critical diagnosis – a diagnosis that
directs our attention towards the pathologies
of educational institutions, their ‘incoherence,
non-aspiration and compromise’, in short their
‘entropic condition’(Sobel and Gollan 2016).
These pathologies are supposedly caused
by multiple, intersecting factors such as the
‘increasing pressures to corporatize’ and the
ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 57
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
28/11/2016 11:22
 concurrent ‘broader entanglement of education
and finance’ of which Sobel and Gollan speak
on behalf of Free Cooper Union. The urgency
to act upon and fight the corporate university
and the financialization of education, their
general rottenness and failure (particularly in
those countries where the state has abandoned
the field of education to leave it to private
enterprises – but also in those former welfare
states where social democrats have passed
the governance of education on to neoliberal
management), entails an array of tactics and
strategies. New kinds of acting-thinking seek
(and still believe in) ‘the possibility of reform
and resistance’ from within the institutions
themselves, a critique that deliberately invokes
and refers back to the tradition of institutional
critique, only to exceed it, to go beyond it,
by way of ‘new forms of collaboration and
organizing’. The invention and enactment
of such different ‘modes of alternative
governances’ may lead to ‘cultural shifts’ and,
as Sobel and Gollan emphasize, ‘a redefined art
education curriculum’.
The redefinition of the curriculum of an
art school (that could very well result in the
complete overhaul of art schools as we know it)
is thus interlinked with the opposition against
a regime of privatization, financialization and
corporatization that determines and disciplines
education and research, at universities as
well as art educational institutions such as
the Cooper Union. Usually, the radicalization
of the curriculum is elicited by a situation
that is experienced as repressive, unjust and
exclusionary. But different from what may
have been the case in the past, a politics of the
curriculum today is not limited to changes in
the area of subjects and texts, of reading lists
and scientific paradigms. Instead, the entire
structure and infrastructure of education is
being questioned; new models of learning
and schooling, of knowledge production
are being conceived, such as the very ‘para-
institutionality’ hinted at by Sobel and Gollan.
A few days after the arrival of the
announcement of their talk, another (more
or less independent) space that situates itself
58 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·6 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 58
at the crossroads of pedagogy, production
and politics, Casco – Office for Art, Design
and Theory in Utrecht – advertised the
second instalment of its We Are the Time
Machines Study Forum, entitled Commoning
Art Organization, scheduled for 30 January
2016. At the top of the announcement, one of
the participants of the upcoming roundtable
discussion at Casco’s facilities, educator and
theorist Andrea Phillips, is quoted from her
2014 text ‘Remaking the Arts Centre’:
But rather than what I would call content-driven
critique, what I am interested in is managerial
and organizational change that embeds political
equality within the organization itself. This
necessitates a more humble and messy approach
in which the aesthetic is placed on lateral terms
with the more mundane opening up of facilities and
capacities. (Phillips 2014: 228)
Commoning hence starts with a displacement,
an orientation away from themes and issues
to being negotiated within an existing and
established educational framework. Instead,
this framework is considered to be in desperate
need of reinvention. In other words, the
restructuration of already existing and the
founding of new art institutions shall prioritize
the politics of organization and rethink the
privilege of their alleged content and mission,
that is, art and aesthetics.
The provincializing of art within the social
context/assemblage that always constitutes
and exceeds an art institution appears to be
one of the strategies to enable actual change
concerning the ways in which the production,
pedagogy and experience of art is to be pursued.
This shift towards the materiality, affectivity
and economy of organizing and the temporary
or continuing marginalization of artistic
practice is not something entirely alien to art
practitioners, though; the histories of self-
organized spaces, autonomous institutions
or urban pedagogies that address social and
political issues reaching beyond the aesthetic
(and involve artists) are manifold, just be
reminded of the Paris Commune, the Bureau
de Recherches Surrealistes or Gordon Matta-
Clark’s FOOD.
28/11/2016 11:22
 The current focus on organization among
art practitioners, however, seems to be
immediately related to a political economy
of knowledge that undermines and obstructs
any effort to provide a different concept of
social cooperation that takes seriously the
right of each participant and any sub-group
to co-create and co-determine the path of the
organization in question. A peculiar property of
knowledge as theorized in the recent discourse
on knowledge commons, is its incompatibility
with regard to conventional commodities in
models of economic balance. This approach
is largely inspired by thinkers such as Gabriel
Tarde and by the post-operaist notion of the
dissemination of thinking, innovation and
collaboration in the social factory, that is
beyond the narrow confines of the division
of labour within companies (Vazquez and
Gonzalez 2016: 144). Such conceptualization of
knowledge as a common good claims that it is
constructed not by property rights provisions
and commercialization of teaching and research
findings but ‘rather through the patterns of use
and social relations arising from practices and
experiences associated with its production and
use’. In this perspective, knowledge can assume
the role of a ‘“rebel” resource, hardly tamed
under the capitalist order of production and the
state’ (2016: 140 – 151).
In relation to contemporary art and its
platforms, the consequence of the insight into
such (relative) epistemic autonomy may lie in
the opening up of a debate on ownership and
belonging, in the self-confidence derived from
the acknowledgement that knowledge grounds
in ultimately uncontrollable social assemblages
and in a practical turn of art institutions, that is,
in a shift away from discourse to action.
In its announcement of the Commoning
Art Organization discussion, Casco
formulates accordingly:
As an art institution we ask: How can artworks
and other activities taking place through art
institutions be shared as knowledge – embodied
and practical – for the commons? How should art
and art institutions act if they intend to practice
the commons, rather than only reflect on it?
(Casco 2015)
H O L E RT : A  P O L I T I C S O F K N O W L E D G E I N C O N T E M P O R A RY A RT ?
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 59
The questions of course touch on the old
binarism of theory and practice; the art
institution invokes the desire to overcome
its own apparent ineffectiveness with regard
to the actual transformation of capitalist
modes of (organizing and limiting) knowledge
production; it thus looks for a shortcut from
theorizing to practicing the commons. An
institution/collective that has developed
a certain stance and distance in relation to
larger, less flexible and more conventional
institutions, Casco is somewhat (self-)obliged
to test ways of pedagogy and production that
differ from those practiced at contemporary
institutions of art and education.
These institutions impose strictures on
processes of democratization or on a liberal/
radical understanding of pedagogy and
practice, while routinely staging spectacles of
discursivity and criticality. Seeking their raison
d’être in austerity measures, marketability,
popularity and turn-outs or referring to the
necessity of generating income through tuition
fees, commercial endeavours, real-estate deals
and the exploitation of intellectual property
rights, the neoliberal university, but also the
museum and other sites of formerly public
education adopt and appropriate the languages
of criticality, while callously dismantling
any common ground for negotiation, any
infrastructure of equality.
Now, what writer Marina Vishmidt has
recently dubbed ‘infrastructural critique’ (in
subtle but potentially decisive distinction from
‘institutional critique’) (Vishmidt 2017) marks
a particular stage of interventionist practice
that does not stop at conveying the inherent and
embodied ideologies of the modernist and post-
modernist gallery, museum or academy, but
rather works beyond disclosure and diagnosis
towards modelling – through a ‘more humble
and messy approach’ (Phillips 2014: 228) – the
very ‘space of “para-institutionality”’, suggested
by Sobel and Gollan. This space opened up by
infrastructural critique is imagined to being
designed and maintained within or alongside
existing institutions. It is thus a space of
institutional practices that refuses to operate
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 by surrendering to the logic of the neoliberal
institution that – however it may indulge in
poses of self-criticality – ultimately pursues
a de-politicizing politics of control, evaluation
and business-as-usual according to so-called
economic imperatives.
Examples of infrastructural critique are the
collaborative practices of organizers and art
practitioners such as Marion von Osten, Ursula
Biemann, or Alice Creischer/Andreas Siekmann
who, since the 1990s, have worked (in von
Osten’s and Biemann’s cases largely in and
from Zurich’s Shedhalle) on a reconfiguration
of the art project through opting for translocal
and transdisciplinary modes of cooperation
within and beyond art institutions. Through
stressing the importance of realizing the
project less by following a curatorial or artistic
directive but through shared commitments and
urgencies, infrastructural critique (understood
this way) refuses the principle of the thematic
exhibition and looks instead for formats,
platforms, performativities and interactions
that enable common research and transversal
pedagogies along the lines of an aesthetic-
political objective (that, in some cases, may only
be articulated in retrospect). The ‘Trans-local
organizational model’, as Marion von Osten has
termed her preferred type of of collaboration,
challenges the separation of art practices as well
as the distinction drawn between practicing
and instituting art. Instead von Osten proposes
‘‘relational work/life models that insist on other
ways of doing culture’ (von Osten cited in Choi
2014: 283).
In a recent article for Afterall, in which he
refers to von Osten’s model of institutional
translocality, Sven Lütticken has provided
a sketchy map of the scene of alter- and para-
institutional practices that have emerged over
the past ten years or so. Lütticken mentions
organizations and initiatives such as ruangrupa
in Jakarta, the Republic of Indonesia, CAMP
in Mumbai, India, 16 Beaver in New York,
USA, MayDay Rooms in London, England,
and Casco in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Such
alter-institutional practices, in Lütticken’s
view, ‘create social assemblages that can
60 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 21·6 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 60
encompass artists, intellectuals and activists
as well as groups that art institutions rarely
consider “target audiences”, such as cleaners
and refugees’; moreover, they ‘place a strong
emphasis on pedagogic and alter-academic
forms, from workshops, lectures and seminars
to dinner conversations’(Lütticken 2015: 8).
Another model, closely linked to the former, but
not entirely the same, is what Lütticken terms
‘para-institutional practices’ and that often
are initiated by artists (2015: 8‑10). Among
them can be counted Jonas Staal’s New World
Summit, Renzo Martens’s Institute for Human
Activities, Ahmet Ögüt’s The Silent University,
Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement
International or Fernando García-Dory’s
Inland. These para-institutions, according to
Lütticken, ‘usually work in collaboration with
more traditionally established institutions, even
though these may themselves be pursuing an
alter-institutional practice’(8, 9). However, alter-
and para-institutions are not to be considered
so much as two ‘oppositional models’, but
rather as constituting ‘a fractured continuum
of approaches’, both relying on the crucial
role of pedagogy, privileging the seminar, the
workshop, the roundtable discussion and the
lecture as formats of collectivity (8, 9).
If such pedagogic formats still cater to the
desires of institutional and organizational
self-reflexivity and improvement from within,
other forays into para-institutionality actively
shift the scope and reach of the art institution
in order to partake in the distribution of
knowledge, removing barriers, changing
conditions of accessibility and modelling
new types of transmission and circulation
of knowledge.
In an attempt of making this point slightly
more palpable, I would like to conclude by
turning to Fernando García-Dory and his Inland
project, which the Spanish artist explicitly refers
to as a ‘para-institution’. Inland, García-Dory
explains on his website,
is a project that examines the role of territories,
geopolitics, culture and identity in the relationship
between the city and the countryside today. Its aim
is to introduce the possibility of contemporary
28/11/2016 11:22
 art practice in relation to the rural, and how that
context might modify the way art happens and
circulates.… INLAND is envisioned as a para-
institution of ‘polyvalent specialist mobile units
working in emergency contexts’ that always
operates ‘in relation to an “official” institution, that
is, a state, a company, or an art institution.’ This
provides an entry point to think about the ‘growth
of social formations, from a social movement to
a state to a multinational chain. (García-Dory 2010)
The project is thus conceived as a roaming
module that is meant to enter specific settings
of practical and epistemic production in the
area of agriculture, be it urban gardening or
the world of shepherds. Envisioned as a para-
institution, it is also to be seen as a parasite of
sorts, moving in, attaching to and inhabiting
already existing organizations. The politics
of knowledge implied in this strategy of on-
demand cooperation patently (dis) orients
contemporary art practice towards providing
ameliorative expertise, designed as an advisory
service in situations of crisis or deadlock.
Introducing the ‘possibility of contemporary art
practice’ (in García-Dory’s case, particularly:
‘in relation to the rural’), may reflect back and
transform the art practice itself, as much as it is
to act on the ‘emergency context’ at hand.
García-Dory started launching Inland as
a cultural strategy in support of rural life …
specifically made up of an international conference,
artistic production through a residency program,
an exhibition and a publication. It continues now
extending its methodology in different countries
(in 2015 is operating in Italy, Netherlands, Finland
and Germany) to question harmful EU policies
regarding the rural, and culture, and recovering an
abandoned village as organisation’s headquarters
and ‘community of practice’. The project provides
artists, farmers, intellectuals, rural development
agents, policymakers, curators and art critics,
amongst others from the rural and urban spheres,
with an open platform for presenting their research
and practice. The content is gathered here before it
is conveyed to the rest of society.
Thereby, the tradition and the expertise of
contemporary art as a practice of critique and
exhibition become a discursive and aesthetic
architecture, an ‘open platform’, for a variety of
constituencies, ideally assuming the dimension
H O L E RT : A  P O L I T I C S O F K N O W L E D G E I N C O N T E M P O R A RY A RT ?
PR 21.6 On Radical Education.indd 61
of a transdisciplinary/cultural/local assemblage.
As a facilitator and instigator, García-Dory
shares a lot of intentions and methodologies
with the protagonists of infrastructural
critique discussed earlier; furthermore, the
inland ‘mobile method’ of ‘placing’ artists in
rural contexts, is reminiscent of models such
as John Latham’s Artist Placement Group in
the late 1960s/early 1970s; however, García-
Dory’s programmatic statements read as being
even more detached from past, avant-garde
assumptions of political and aesthetic radicality.
Having worked through concepts such as
bioregionalism or Deep Ecology and promoting
new localisms and trans-local politics, as well as
post-capitalist models of communal production,
García-Dory seems interested in finding new
purposes and utilities for art, ‘taking biophysics
and territories as the basis and central reference
point for the phenomena of art and culture’.
His is a social business model/module that aims
at blurring the art/non-art boundary for the
sake of mutual benefits in a commonist vein.
The desired outcome is a ‘collective activation’
– ‘involving rural communities, cultural
producers, and the surrounding territory’.
García-Dory doesn’t shy away from non-
governmental organization (NGO) lingo. And
some of his Inland and other projects have
a deliberately optimistic, even utopian ring. At
the same time, they’re posited as participating in
support of anti-capitalist, commonist resistance,
creating an ‘itinerant pedagogical body, landing
in regions in which the local commons are most
disputed’. García-Dory further elaborates on
the specific combination of collaboration and
contestation of the module:
As a para-institution, Inland is working together,
against and beyond existing institutions. It is
structured around different axis and lines of work
– from training to commercialization – which feed
back on each other and become a self-sustained
model that adapts and replicates. Inland’s value lies
in the applicability of its method. It promotes cells
in specific rural locations – some of which remain
undisclosed – whilst operating at a supranational
level, setting up agencies in different countries
to affect agrarian and cultural policy frameworks
in Europe.
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 After such forays into aggrandizing grant
application jargon that addresses economic
as well as policy-related issues, the artist’s
punchline, at the end of one of his statements
on Inland, reads astonishingly unruly: ‘Rural
is the new queer.’ It may be worthwhile to
further consider to what extent the queering of
a category such as ‘the rural’ or the aspiration/
expectation to being queered by invocation of
(or association with) the rural, could qualify as
a politics, a politics of education and knowledge.
The turn to the local and the emphasis on
the translocal, the transversal pedagogy, the
interventionism and the commons dimension
of García-Dory’s and similar para-institutional
endeavours coming from an art world
environment certainly constitute elements
of a politics of knowledge that goes beyond
art only to rescue art from (or better equip
art to better resist) the powerful knowledge
politics that produces the hierarchies,
inequalities, formalisms, epistemic violences
and bureaucracies that make necessary the
organizing and activating of groups such as Free
Cooper Union, institutions such as Casco, para-
institutions such as Inland or conferences such
as this one.
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REFERENCES
Casco (2015) Statement for ‘We Are the Time Machines,
Exhibition Project (2015‑2016), http://cascoprojects.org/
tools-tooling, accessed 5 September 2016.
Choi, Binna and Marion von Osten (2014) ‘Trans-local,
post-isciplinary organizational practice: A conversation
between Binna Choi and Marion von Osten’, in Emily
Pethick, Binna Choi and Maria Lind (eds) Cluster:
Dialectionary, Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 274–285.
García-Dory, Fernando (2010)‚ INLAND (2010 … ), www.
fernandogarciadory.info/index.php?/projects/inland/,
accessed 5 September 2016.
Lütticken, Sven (2015) ‘Social Media: Practices of (In)
Visibility in Contemporary Art’ in Afterall. A Journal of Art,
Context and Equiry, 40 (8) autumn/winter: 519.
Phillips, Andrea (2014) ‘Remaking the Arts Centre’, in
Emily Pethick, Binna Choi and Maria Lind (eds) Cluster –
Dialectionary. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 214–230.
Sobel, Victoria and Casey Gollan (2016) Email invitation
for the presentation of Free Cooper Union, sent by New
Theatre and Between Bridges on 15 January 2016, quotes
from a biographical entry on Sobel and Gollan published
at different places online such as the New York Vera List
Center for Art and Politics, www.veralistcenter.org/engage/
people/1991/victoria-sobel-and-casey-gollan/, accessed
5 September 2016.
Vazquez, Alfredo Macias and Pablo Alonso Gonzalez (2016)
‘Knowledge Economy and the Commons: A Theoretical
and Political Approach to Postneoliberal Common
Governance’, in Review of Radical Political Economics 48 (1)
March: 140–157.
Vishmidt, Marina (2017) Beneath the Atelier, the Desert:
Critique Institutional and Infrastructural in Maria
Hlavajova and Tom Holert (eds.), Marion von Osten. Once
We Were Artists. A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice,
Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, forthcoming.
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