Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics 9783943365979, 3943365972

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Tom Holert

Knowledge Beside ltself

Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics

Knowledge Beside Itself

Tom Holert

Knowledge Beside Itself Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics

J r SternbergPress

Contents

lntroduction Contemporary Art and the Thaffic-Driven Episteme

Chapter 1 Artistic Research: Anatomy of an Ascent

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Chapter 2 Matters of Form: Network, Subjectivity, Autonomy

86

Chapter 3 The Problem with Knowledge Production

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Chapter 4 Being Concerned: Research and Responsibility

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Chapter 5 Interventionist Investigation

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Chapter 6 Just in Time: Durational Work and Temporal Politics

202

Chapter 7 Coming to Terms: Contemporary Art, Civil Society, and Knowledge Politics in the "Middle East"

220

Chapter 8 On the Border of the Knowledge Commons

242

Acknowledgments List of Illustrations About the Author

265 270 273

Contemporary Art and the Traffic-Driven Episteme

lntroduction

The Epistemization of Art The scene of a film: in front of a building on the periphery of a South African nature reserye, several performers, each representing a participant of a fictional tribunal on Indigenous knowledge and bioprospecting hold a conversation on the knowledge of traditional healers and its commodification by governments and pharmaceutical corporations. "Tiaditional knowledge wasn't created for commercial reasons, it is a cultural, collective way of living," one discussant argues; another speaks of the necessity of "knowledge-sharing negotiations." The scene is meticulously staged, the exchange carefully

scripted, and the image changes from color to black and white when the entire setup-technicians, cinematographers, cameras, microphones, lights-occasionally comes into view. Artist-researcher Uriel Orlow considers his twenty-eight-minute fiIm Imbip Ka Mafoauke (Mafaauke\ Tribunal) (2017) "a kind of Brechtian 'Lehrsttick."' Slipping into different roles, the protagonists make 'use of real-world cases involving multinational pharmaceuticals scouting in indigenous communities for the next wonder drug," while spectral figures ("colonial explorers, botanists and judges") haunt the procedures.t Imbi4 Ka Mafauuke is part of Orlow's multipart research-based installation Theatrum Botanicum (2016-17), which includes three single-channel films, sound works, photographs, a slide projection, and a video-a broad tableau of experimental approaches to issues of botany in South Africa. This work exemplifies a development in contemporary art over the past several decades in which the politics and economies of knowledge have become urgent topics. Raising questions of Indigenous knowledge, intellectual property, and decolonial epistemologies, Orlow's project reflects the tendency of addressing (and testing) art's capacity to make knowledge its subject to act epistemically.

Uriel Orlow, "Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke's tibunal)," accessed October l, 2019, https://urielorlow.net/work/imbizo-ka-mafavuke/; see also Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheilh, eds., Uriel Orhu: Theatrum Botanicum (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018).

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lntroduction

An attempt to probe the roles and functions of contemporary art within the economic and political systems of the present, this book considers the emphasis placed in recent years on the immense notion of "knowledge" in art. In curatorial statements, advertisements for art institutions, art criticism, and writing by artists, knowledge has emerged, often alongside "research" or "epistemology," as acore areaof competence for contemporary art, seemingly eclipsing more traditional aesthetic categories that have long organized and filtered art's production and appreciation such as beauty, style, and genre. A connective tissue of the following chapters is the assumption that the numerous epistemic inclinations of modernist and postmodernist art-epitomized in overtly epistemological art movements such as Constructivism, Surrealism, and Conceptual art-have led to contemporary art's deep involvement with a global political economy of knowledge.

At first glance, such epistemization (or knowledgization) of art may seem rather familiar.2 Knowledge, science, and philosophical truth claims have long been considered elements of artistic practice and iconography. The foundation of the first art academies in seventeenth-century Europe led to a codification of the relation between artistic practice and scientific and literary knowledge that introduced the visual artist as a knowledge worker.3 In its own way, the discipline of art history has long promoted an acknowledgment that works of visual art are sites of epistemological activity.a At the same time, however, any too intimate relation of art with knowledge systems and economies has long been deemed suspicious. Knowledge 2 A neologism,

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"knowledgization" is an attempt to distinguish the development this book focuses on from "scientization" or "academization," and hints at a more comprehensive, contempora.ry notion of knowledge that includes its politics and economies, of which changing relations to and within science and academia certainly are a part. See, for example, Tom Holert, Kilnstlerwissen: Studien