Inhabiting the University

Posted: October 9th, 2009 | Filed under: Modern / Not Modern |

Irit Rogoff gave a great talk tonight, about as clear an articulation I’ve heard of the theory and method behind the new modes of curating and making art that have occupied my brightest hopes for art as an institution in today’s world.

Admittedly, for me that’s not saying much, since I have few bright hopes for what art can be in the context of this world’s economies and flows. But the work that has excited me, the work I wish more of the theologians I read knew about - Raqs, Atlas Group, Platform, Multiplicity, The Long March, even that of my friends, such as 13m3 and the MRCC - shares much in common with Rogoff’s vision.

She described tonight her desire to (and for) work that allows the maker to “inhabit” new ways of knowing, and not just to represent new ways of knowing. And in the context of her prior work, as summarized by my colleague Terri Weissman in her introduction, this means allowing for work that juxtaposes unexpected and seemingly irreconcilable things, provoking new modalities and connections, new ways of being.

Rogoff even connects my favorite theorist of subjectivity, Jean-Luc Nancy, to this effort, applying his ideas of the individual as “singular” and the group as “being in common” to the task of relating one’s art and work to other modes of working, the efforts of other practitioners. “Move like a crab, always sideways,” she advised me in a conversation afterwards, and I thought warmly of my experience with her colleague Sarat Maharaj, who brought to my residency in Banff a similar poetics of institutional navigation. In the face of institutional machinery that prohibits “inhabited” investigation of knowing through the enforcement of proscribed methodologies and systems, Rogoff and her circle of collaborators seem able to drift on their own, if even for a short time, before moving on to the next autonomous, but responsive, effort. Ignore discussions about disciplinarity.

Still, I think - “All good and nice for you, there at the round table.” Many have tried these same techniques here, in the stifling environment of the liberal university. I’ve tried them as well, not to the same extent and commitment as some, and there have been some problems. I would summarize them this way:

When approaching problems no one knew existed, and when doing so through actions and modes that have no category - using art as a guise, or a blank check - one probably must to be willing to accept only short-term projects. That’s something I can live with - I’m not looking to start whole new institutions. But I wonder how long one can mount short projects that have no demonstrable mode of being evaluated within a host’s dominant parameters. For example, after so many non-traditional symposia that shirk traditional formats and outcomes, won’t one have to move on to another institution to get funded?

On the other side, the audience and participation side, one faces the problem of growing less approachable as mobility and mutability increases. If my project is art today and research tomorrow, scholarship for one grant and curation for another, what will it be for the new viewer, the new participant, the new student? In our undergraduate instruction here at the University, it’s clear that no matter how many experiments a young student tries through her four years, sometimes it’s still paintings that are “real art.” (Likewise, a large representational painting just won the crazy Artprize public art competition in Grand Rapids, winning against every form of sited, non-sited, disciplined and undisciplined form.)

I know that for the best of the projects Rogoff celebrates and generates, the main constituency and audience may not even think of the work as art, and that’s OK. But can we really proceed with a total split between our institutional identities and the doors we set up for new entry from potential makers, collaborators, and viewers?

I’m thinking tonight of Rogoff’s talk in light of the book I just finished on the bus today, Jamie Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. I have another bit of writing in the works on this, some criticism of the book as well as some translation in light of some of my closeted tendencies. But I’ll just point for now to the book’s mission as an articulation of how all of life consists of inhabitation, how we each inhabit particular ways of knowing and being and relating, each with its own telos, its own social imaginary, its own “vision of human flourishing.” Like Rogoff, he’s pushing readers to get beyond an understanding of cultural orientation as something representable, intellectualized, separated from the body. But unlike tonight’s brief glimpse into Rogoff’s work, Smith borrows from theologians and theorists who see the process of inhabitation as something directed, something with stakes. It’s possible to get caught up in modes of inhabitation that are destructive to self and others. The construction of new modes, or even the abstinence/retreat from the destructive ones, is almost impossible to imagine as a solitary exercise. Modes of inhabitation, ways of living, rhythms of moving, possess competing ends. These modes and collective, affective practices - liturgies, Smith calls them - exist in the form of the university, the military-entertainment complex, the mall. They’re so large and old, one probably doesn’t leave them as much as one joins another one to inhabit in the same context, the same setting, and with others doing the same.

So maybe the task of “self-regioning” or the micropolitics of the place I’m in requires that I walk less like a crab, sideways, and more like the rest of the people around me - just with a different posture, a different gait. At the least, it was good to be around some other silly walkers tonight at the lecture, something I need to make happen more often.

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