<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-15">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }</style>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Dear friends,<br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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. </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">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 <span lang="en-GB">caught</span>
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.</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
su
susanne jaschko
</pre>
</body>
</html>