metropolis m

Recently, Dieter Roelstraete stated in e-flux journal that the current obsession with history amongst artists is nothing other than an excuse to avoid dealing with troublesome issues concerning our future. Anselm Franke disagrees, arguing that an understanding of history is essential to contemporary art practice. Within a few months only, e-flux journal, an online journal founded by the e-flux corporation, has established itself as an indispensable platform for critical discourse and art writing. Having emerged out of projects such as unitednationsplaza in Berlin, which, in turn, has evolved out of the initial plan for an exhibition-as-school model for Manifesta 6 in Cyprus, the journal itself is associated with one of the themes that it reiterates now in the debate about the ‘educational turn’ in contemporary arts, as Irit Rogoff, one of its foremost proponents who also provided the blueprint for the discussion in the journal’s first issue, has termed it. One of the focal points of this debate are notions of ‘knowledge production’ and ‘research’ and their inflationary use in contemporary art contexts, and their implication in a new wave of institutional integration of art education in the future ‘knowledge society’. In the context of the e-flux journal, this debate is closely tied to, broadly speaking, the heritage of ‘relational’ and ‘networked’ practices of the nineties which have fostered said formats of ‘artistic research’ and ‘knowledge production’, and to a wider and rather general, perhaps even vague and somewhat meandering discussion of the critical potential and the possibility of a progressive politics in artistic practice today. In e-flux journal #4 there was an article that was not directly linked to the debate on education; however, it connected to this debate in my eyes, perhaps bearing the potential to complement it in crucial ways. This article, written by Dieter Roelstraete, investigates contemporary art’s obsession with the past, the current notorious presence of works and practices that ‘mine’ history, especially modern history. Roelstraete’s article is like a report on several sample cases, and an initial categorization of these ‘archaeological’ practices. The most obvious connection to draw between this article and the ‘education’ debate is that these ‘archaeological’ practices obviously represent one of the most current forms of ‘artistic research’ – the artist as ‘historian’, often a historian that excavates minor, repressed or alternative histories. Roelstraete, however, chooses not to engage in a speculative analysis or synthetic theory about the reasons underlying this hype. Rather, he is suggestively critical about the obsession with history, which keeps us in its mirror hall of references and leaves us spellbound. ‘After all, art’s obsession with the past, however recently lived, effectively closes it off from other, possibly more pressing obligations, namely that of imagining the future, of imagining the world otherwise (“differently”)’, Roelstraete suggests. As the followers of my program for Extra City might know already, I have a certain interest in the past, as shown in exhibitions that seem to be based strictly on the conviction that the ability to image the world otherwise –the ‘utopian faculty’, as we may call it – is now firmly buried in ‘history’ and lives a spectral life. Its mobilization depends entirely on the ability to mobilize the past anew. Every single project we have organized at Extra City in the past two years, I realized, is invested in one or another way in this rewriting of history, attempting to liberate its buried potentials, or activate other possible continuities. The reason for the obsession with the past, particularly the modern past, is not least, in my eyes, our paradoxical relation to it (that is, in the West), the fact that we can no longer live it, but also cannot leave it behind. Modern history, wherever we look and whatever we may think, firmly holds us in its grip. Postmodernism was only a brief, compensatory relief from this dilemma, achieved at the price of giving up or repressing history. Yet the utopian potential thus seemingly liberated has proven itself impotent: Its performative play of signifiers has not led to any ability in conjuring up or ‘constructing’ new worlds; instead, it has lost the historical resonance space necessary for imagining things anew, and has fallen into what we may perhaps characterize as an ‘oceanic depression’, in which everything seems possible and nothing is. In my eyes, there is today less danger in being reactionary through an obsession with history, as Roelstraete warns, but rather in the pretence of being dissociated from it, in the conscious or unconscious affirmation of the oceanic mantras of postmodernism that have become the globally advertised new common good – communication, imagination, dialogue, and so forth. Any attempt at focusing on the ‘more pressing obligations’ and the future will inevitably lead to joining into the chorus of a detached ‘global discourse’ (a recent example in the art world would be the Tate Triennale), or back, yes: to the past. Nowhere, I believe, is this more obvious than in aesthetic practice. The realm of forms, as Peter Friedl said, is limited – suggesting there are perhaps no more than five or six ways of expressing this or that thing or condition. This limitation of forms, of phenotypes, needs to be understood in historical terms. History is the chief curator, so to say, by which all modalities of expression are haunted – or, if that seems too strong of an expression, ‘framed’. To break these frames, formats or genres open, to do away with the ghosts (or employ them for different tasks), one needs to ‘pass through’ the phantasma of history – to borrow the psychoanalytic formula for the analytic treatment. That is: to pass through the phantasma of modernity. To single out that phantasmagorical dimension of modernity is in fact what much important current artistic as well as intellectual work is about – an intersection between the academia and arts, a unique common construction site. Anselm Franke is the director of Extra City in AntwerpDieter Roelstraete The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Arthttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/51