[spectre] Juxtaposium

[susanne jaschko]

Dear friends,

you have made an interesting proposition that I would like to comment 
on. Let's leave the provocation aside with which you apparently tried to 
get our attention and stir up some debate and let's try to be a bit more 
objective in favour of a serious discussion. I totally understand that 
you are tired of traditional symposium formats. We all have been there. 
We all have attended and participated in conferences and panels that 
went nowhere, at which the speakers did nothing but present themselves 
in the ordinary, boring way and were often not able/ not willing to 
respond to each others' ideas, concepts, works or to discuss a subject 
sufficiently. People who just read out their paper, speakers of whom you 
get the impression they have not considered the subject of the 
symposium, theoreticians repeating themselves, artists not going beyond 
the information that they provide on their website. Moderators who fail 
to generate something like an interesting debate, because the 
presentations are so disparate.

There are a number of reasons why this is so. Lousy speakers' fees don't 
explain everything. Laziness might be one of the factors. Laziness of 
the organisers to find speakers who actually -- in theory -- have 
something to say to each other, laziness to take the effort to 
communicate with all participants in the panel about their individual 
contribution in advance and making them understand what the context is 
in which they speak. But also laziness of the speakers to think of 
something different than the usual presentation. In all those years that 
I am organising these kind of events, I was rarely surprised by someone 
making the effort to come up with something fresh, something 
extraordinary, although there the space for it was there.

I don't want to play the ball back to you (or eventually myself -- I 
have played all positions in this game: curator, moderator, speaker) 
asking you to be more inventive and responsive to each other, even after 
delivering your speech. Maybe we need a change, a challenge, to refresh. 
Maybe we should just stop trying to offer topic-driven conferences to a 
larger public and just do little, informal conversations like for 
example Andreas did at Tesla or create workshop like situations in which 
real exchange is easier. Which all really work well, we know. Since real 
and debate is so difficult to achieve in larger groups, why not give up 
on that in general, or do it in the way we do it here, have a remote, 
but focussed discussion?

But let's look at what you proposed here. Artists talking about each 
others' work, not their own. I have seen that, but not too often at 
symposiums, granted. However when artists teach at art school, this 
happens all the time. This does not excite me per se. You should 
elaborate on this, make it clearer what you are expecting to happen, or 
define even super clear rules to make it special. Only speak about the 
artists who are present? Is there still a kind of general subject to 
which the presentations will refer or do you envision it more like a 
pecha-kucha, straight forward presentation/reflection of one or many 
artworks without a conference like theme?

How this will foster critique? I am not sure it can. Real critique means 
also negative critique - in public this is very unlikely to happen. And 
why should an artist be more suited to critique another artist's work 
than anybody else? Finally the theoreticians - self-absorbed in their 
own theory and discourse (like you say) they should now disclose their 
subjectivity and/or speak predominantly about the art. What I am missing 
rather in our field are more theoreticians who come up with strong 
theories...theoreticians who are not caught up in the scholarly world 
but have some connection to reality. There is much more to say about 
your idea, this is just a quick response, and we should continue talking 
about it. I agree, we need more and new formats, because we all want to 
talk to each other honestly, but we still hardly know how to in public.

-- 
su

susanne jaschko








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