One of Alices friends took this picture it's Alice and Saskia running into the Sunset. Alice, my Icarus always eager to get her wings burnt - Saskia traveling into the light - not sure how the sensor in the camera coped but even if it is burnt for all eternity the shadow of this image is probably worth it. I suppose that this is an example of how the creation of Art is becoming at least in the west more democratic and perhaps as we are both reading the "long revolution" this cultural production is part of a long revolution against the theft of culture - the cultural hegemony of the art world. I wonder if putting a link to Wikipedia about Cultural hegemony is in fact an act of cultural hegemony and will end up blowing up peoples computers like when people used to "google" google.
I put this image on because in a strange way it relates to the conversation about collaboration. This week I have mostly been thinking about the "Dialectic". I thought I understood this word but one day while drinking a beer outside S1 studio space with Tim I asked him what Dialectics meant and he said do you mean Hegelian or Marxists Dialectics. I just thought, I suppose- that dialectics was the relationship between two things or points of view which interrelated to each other through dialogue. I said Tim what do you mean by" Hegelian Dialectics." Tim is like my first choice even before Wikipedia - you should be allowed to reference him in academic paper - just be allowed to say "Tim says"(Maybe we can do this in polytechnic publications). He started talking about the Yard we were sat in - us in it drinking beer the light the cobbles the history of the building the conversations going on upstairs and he said the Hegelian dialectics are about the totality of everything - the notion that the only thing which exist is the whole which cannot be divided and that the courtyard was a totality. I said but aren't dialectics a conversation between two different things or ideas and he said within Hegelian Dialectics two different things don't exist. I sneaked off at this point under the pretence of getting another beer cursing Tim for unsettling my Wiki definition of Dialectics and deciding to buy some Hegelian Dialectics for dummies book preferably in the form of a graphic novel so I could say "Coming back at ya Tim." but I never did.
So back to collaboration and the idea that we need to skirt around the sun, not burn our wings and except that we must consistently refine and adapt the space of collaboration to become a totality while recognising that it is the energy of difference which makes this possible.
As for the Beacon event it is slightly irritating that it stimulated such a good and rich conversation between us all afterwards. As this possibly makes it a useful collaboration - it is timely as it's a good thing to discus as we embark on a new project which will bring with it a new set of challenges. It's taught us that we may need to start using a new language for speaking about what we do and situate ourselves happily in a different Totality. I think I will say what I've said to Kate Pahl a lot and that the fact that good outcomes come from bad situations does not make the situation "Good" but perhaps this is a bit mean spirited. The Beacon event allowed us to take some pretty complex ideas into a space which was not really ready to engage on a level which would allow a dialectic to evolve. In Richard Sennets book "Together" he talks about the Dialogical conversation - which is developed around empathy and a dialectical conversation based on sympathy it's a bit drawn out but I think we had neither Sympathy or empathy in the space at beacon. I do think that together we need find a better way to "Talk about" what we do and this is clearly what we will do when the polytechnic develops it's first publication - so in the words of the Youth "We are on it."
The idea of “(a)rt becoming at least in the west more democratic” (perhaps) expresses the very question about art becoming more democratic which is an expression of it not being even possibly democratic. In other words if you ask about it being democratic then the question sets the condition that make it not so. The cultural hegemony of the art world is absolute and is to be avoided. The question becomes how to ask a question without setting the same conditions as the problem itself.
ReplyDeleteHow this relates to dialectics I wonder. The question posed cannot be separate from the problem is the starting point and the question is therefore – how to avoid this trap?
For Raymond Williams it amounts (perhaps, always perhaps! the sign of the true parrot-academic!) to looking at a different point of entry, to the working class, proletarian art forms, demotic expression. This becomes a sapper’s duty, to mine Castle Hegemony and watch it crumble. Then as reconstruction begins build something else. We do so love small cottages built into the walls of ancient towns, houses with the stones of collapsed churches visible in the walls.
To return to collaboration then as you did. Yes, we skirt the sun, lovely, but our wings must burn or we are simply too far away to know for sure it is unbearable and eventually pointless. We make wings together, tell the story to each other and argue about it. The “energy of difference which makes this [collaboration] possible” is recognition that collaboration is lexical form, it has no material reality outside name calling, swearing even, fuc*ing collaborator.
I’m not sure about this dialogical/dialectical conversation stuff. Dialogical sounds all a bit Quakerly and not where things really happen. Oddly dialogics is perhaps (!) reactive and dialectics active, the opposite of Sennett’s tenets.
Dialectics the necessary thus good and dialogics the devils tune, rather boring of course (the Devil makes work for idle hands).
Collaboration is dialectical then, inherently contradictory and necessarily so.