Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

notes to pages 269– 72
of new higher- level courses. The report for the business school group
says these will include 12,000 new business courses’ (http:/ / news.bbc.
co.uk, 21 January 2005). The Bologna Accord also changes the ethos of
education itself. Degrees will be short- term with clear and comparable
outcomes, instead of a more individual system tailored to the needs of
each subject.
62 See Irit Rogoff, ‘Academy as Potentiality’, in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y, Frankfurt:
Revolver, 2006, pp. 13– 20.
63 Two key words for the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. project, and for Rogoff’s writing
on the ‘educational turn’ in curatorial practice, are ‘potentiality’ and
‘actualisation’. She defi nes potentiality as a possibility not limited to an
ability, and a possibility of failure. Actualisation refers to the potential for
liberation in objects, situations, actors and spaces. (Rogoff, ‘Turning’.)
Rogoff ’s prioritisation of openness as an inherent value parallels that of
many contemporary artists.
64 Mark Dion, conversation with the author, 25 November 2009. This is one
reason why Dion (with J. Morgan Puett) has set up Mildred’s Lane, a
summer residency programme for art students on a farm in Pennsylvania.
See www.mildredslane.com.
65 Martha Rosler Library toured from New York to Liverpool, Edinburgh,
Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin and Antwerp (in other words, to European
venues that could afford to cover the transportation costs).
66 ‘Man in his physical state merely suffers the dominion of nature; he emancipates
himself from this dominion in the aesthetic state, and he acquires
mastery over it in the moral.’ (Friedrich Schiller, ‘Twenty- Fourth Letter’,
in Walter Hinderer and Daniel Dahlstrom [eds.], The German Library
vol.17: Essays, New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 156.)
67 One is reminded of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, who insisted upon
this privacy in relation to her experiments at La Sorbonne in the early
1970s. Yve- Alain Bois recalls that when a curator asked to come along to
her classes there she erupted in anger: ‘It was impossible to “attend” one
of these “courses”, to retreat from it as a spectator. Anyone not wishing
to take part in the great collective body fabricated there, each time according
to a different rite, was sent packing.’ (Clark, cited in Bois, ‘Nostalgia
of the Body’, October, 69, Summer 1994, p. 88.)
68 Roland Barthes, ‘To the Seminar’, in The Rustle of Language, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996, p. 333. He begins the article with a
poignant observation: ‘Our gathering is small, to safeguard not its intimacy
but its complexity: it is necessary that the crude geometry of big
public lectures give way to a subtle topology of corporeal relations, of
which knowledge is only the pre- text’ (p. 332).
69 Unlike the beautiful, which for Kant remains autonomous, ‘purposiveness
without a purpose’, in distinct contrast to practical reason and
morality.
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