The Inclusion interviews Luis Camnitzer / "Codes, Languages and Dialects" by Luis Camnitzer
The Inclusion is very pleased to share an interview with Luis Camnitzer conducted via email on Monday, 22 November, 2012:
The Inclusion: You have written of drawing inspiration from a memorable neologism spray-painted on a wall outside a university in Bogotá: educreation. We occupy a moment at which economies of cognitive labor are increasingly efficient assimilators of the creative potentials of, and within, education - evidenced not least by the rampant proliferation of privatised schooling and concomitant bureaucracies of academic capitalism. In this climate, do you feel it remains possible to eke out stimulation from this expression?
Luis Camnitzer: Before answering, I want to note that educreation actually was sprayed on a wall completely unrelated to the university and therefore appeared as totally out of context. The interesting thing was that I saw it about thirty years after I had seen another word sprayed on some other out of context wall. That earlier word was educastration. Both times I was on the way to give a lecture at the same university. The second time I mentioned both the coincidence of finding inspiring words for my lectures in this university and the optimistic trend implied in their (correct) sequence. After my second lecture, a couple of students asked me to have coffee with them next morning to discuss more issues. We met at a Starbucks- equivalent and suddenly someone waved wildly to somebody behind me. A guy approached our table and greeted the waving student who then proceeded to introduce me mentioning names neither of us knew what to do with. Once the guy left I was informed that it was he who, as a biology student, had written educastration on the wall thirty years earlier.
Unfortunately, educastration is still implemented today, mostly because the word education is used for training and not for critical thinking. In an anachronistic manner, this training is based on a crafts approach and on stressing the accumulation of data. This was good for an employment market that functioned on the basis of discrete disciplines. But even from the point of view of a capitalistic market that thinks little beyond crude slavery, what seems to be needed today is flexibility in the acquisition of knowledge and adaptation of a quickly changing reality. Hence, education would be more useful for both capitalist survival and social progression were it to focus not on data but on how to acquire data as well as how to make new connections that generate knowledge. This would allow the new professionals to be creative yet retain their choice of ideology as regards how society should evolve. So, yes, educreation seems to point the finger to the only pedagogical approach with some chance at current relevance, unless we really want to pursue the neo-feudalist trends that pose the danger of becoming prevalent today.
The Inclusion: On its facade, DRAF is presently exhibiting your text piece entitled “The museum is a school: the artist learns to communicate, the audience learns to make connections.” Your conception of this work as a contract with the audience disturbs relationships between the artist, visitors and the museum. The pedagogical role of the institution becomes an imposition by virtue of your expression's quasi-legalistic format and the direct way in which you phrased it. The message is clear: it's a statement you cannot escape. Why a contract? And, how do you think this work affects both the institution where it is installed and the audience of that institution?
Luis Camnitzer: The “contract” part is only there to force accountability. It empowers the public to tell the institution: “Hey, you say that on your façade but then you are not really doing it.” By having the institution proclaim it, I’m hoping to force it to check critically on its mission and its ways, and to revise these if needed. If it doesn’t do it in spite of the statement, the institution will be exposed as a hypocritical entity and hopefully dutifully punished as such. For the public it is a warning that the expectation is not to consume art, but to use it as tool for empowerment. In a museum world where the exhibition places measure their success by the numbers of people coming to the building instead of by the amount of activated minds, I think this is an urgent shift for to look. Museum education today seems to be a synonym for public relations of shows organized without having real education and empowerment in mind. Art is seen as a form of production and not as a method for cognition. The legalistic and declarative format of my statement is designed to call some attention to the problem, and if unable to achieve agreement, to at least elicit some thoughtful argumentation so that things are not taken for granted.
Luis Camnitzer has been exceptionally generous to share with The Inclusion an essay entitled "Codes, Languages and Dialects," first delivered during the symposium After Midnight: Indian Modern and Contemporary Art, 1947/1997 at the Queens Museum of Art in New York on 26 October, 2012. The symposium was a precursor to the exhibition The Rising Phoenix: A Dialogue Between Modern and Contemporary Indian Art curated by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala and scheduled to open at the Queens Museum of Art in 2014-2015.
- Codes, Languages and Dialects -
Esperanto, the international language Ludwig Zamenhof invented in 1876, was consistent with his anti-nationalist ideas. He declared: "I am profoundly convinced that every nationalism offers humanity only the greatest unhappiness... It is true that the nationalism of oppressed peoples – as a natural self-defensive reaction – is much more excusable than the nationalism of peoples who oppress; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; both give birth to and support each other...” Zamenhof dreamed of a world united by one common language, a language that would erase all conflicts. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize, but didn’t get it.
In 1936 there was an attempt to include Esperanto in the curriculum of New York’s secondary schools. The petition was rejected with the argument that Esperanto is a code and not a language, and that therefore it didn’t qualify. Code here meant the form information may take regardless its effect on communication, and that is how I will use it here.
The rejection was polemical, I don’t know the exact arguments, nor do they matter here. What interests me is the difference between code and language and when the decoding of the information present in a code ends its reference to the original language to, because of translation, install itself in a new language.
The original language has collective tacit understandings that express shared intuitions. A code may represent those understandings but won’t generate any, at least as long as it doesn’t become a language. The borderline between code language is blurry and fragile, hence the polemic.
It could be said that when a second language is acquired one has to go through a period of learning a code. Words don’t have meanings or resonances; they are objective signs. They remain as shells until they are translated into the first language of the learner. Only later, with fluency, the second language becomes independently coherent and may reflect collective subjectivities.
All this, in a more complex fashion, applies to art. Art is often referred to as a universal language similar to Esperanto. We often make art as a form to codify ideas and meanings that are alien to it. Maybe that is why we often don’t know exactly what the hell we are doing and don’t know how to classify it. It is then when we tend to attribute everything to intuition.
Some time ago I was invited to talk to a group of students. I was asked about my opinion in regard to the assertion that Latin American art is a minor manifestation of the arts made in the hegemonic centers (this being a euphemism for New York). I said that I thought that this was fine. That what surprised me was that in Latin America nobody talked about the art of the U.S. as a minor or inferior manifestation. The student of course thought that I believed that Latin American art is better than U.S. art.
It doesn’t really matter what my opinion is about superiorities. I explained that in that statement we were comparing two preciously wrapped packages and only discussing the wrapping paper rather than what was in the packages. This formalist approach makes us believe that art is a universal language. If we were to look into the packages we would realize that art, at least to a great extent, is a local affair. That is, art in its point of origin is a language. Once it travels it becomes a code, to then possibly become a language again. But by then it doesn’t necessarily return to the original language. More likely it becomes a dialect. The new version will have idiomatic deviations and won’t reflect the collective subjectivities of its origin, but instead those of the new location. In this new place the art object loses any interest. What matters is the whole in which the object articulates and is articulated.
Maybe this explains why perfectly good foreign movies are redone, mostly in a degraded form, to have a broader audience thanks to the inclusion of local tacit understandings. It’s surprising that nobody thought of painting a new version of the Mona Lisa for better consumption. It is a fact however, that the original understandings in as much they may be hermetic, distract from the narrative power.
When the Mona Lisa was shown in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1963, Macy’s sold bath towels with a reproduction. It was a low-resolution image limited by what the fibers of Egyptian cotton might allow. Today the resolution is probably much better. One now is able to buy a, quote, “soft and absorbent hand towel made of 100% polyester microfiber which is completely durable. Your towel won't fade, crack or peel. The color of the hand towel is white. Great idea for gift and promotion!” for 19.97. It is, again I quote, “Carson's Collectibles Hand Towel of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (Extremely High Quality, Licensed).”
The point is that foreign tacit understandings in an original piece may remain perceivable in the new setting but not be very useful. By remaining beyond comprehension and staying in the code stage, they distract from the work’s narrative power. Though not fully, we understand Mona Lisa’s smile. We also get the landscape. Then the info, like the way she is dressed and holds her hands, tells us that she is from a different time and place. We know some of the history but empathy is highly reduced. Would we date her? I really don’t know. Does the painting expand our knowledge and enrich our culture? I doubt it. And yet, is it expensive? For the trip to NY the insurance was 100 million dollars, today the equivalent of 743 million dollars. Did Duchamp help us any in all of this? Definitely, he took her out of the code and introduced her into contemporary language.
The discussion of what is in the package allows us to understand that in art we are not really facing an object but a problem that was formalized and solved in the object. This makes “objectivity” here not only a pun, but something very relative and possibly out of reach. At the same time it is this objectivity, as opposite to subjectivity) what would be needed to achieve a universal language.
It is here where the difference between language and code comes in. I believe that when there is a genuine aesthetic, one relating to its environment and achieving full communication, we are in the presence of a language. When the formal aspects of an aesthetic come to other places or publics where they are only understood as forms, we are in the presence of a code.
As an art student during the fifties they tried to convince us abstract art was the inescapable symbol of the avant-garde. The hegemonic centers already had their “informalism”, “art autre” or “abstract expressionism.” These movements introduced much complexity and confusion to the topic, but our discussion continued along the simplistic lines of figuration versus abstraction. In a school that faithfully followed the French Academy, abstraction was not just equivalent to rebellion. It gave a way out from the pedagogical prison. That sign of liberty allowed keep art categories on a level of banal generalization as well as keeping an irrational mixture of aesthetics and political ideologies leading to contradictions that nobody discussed.
Thanks to U.S. decisions during the Cold War, abstraction was to be seen as an anticommunist aesthetic. It didn’t matter that the Utopian ideals of abstract art were much closer to an egalitarian society than figuration. While figuration told stories to a passively listening public, abstraction hoped to engage individuals in looking at things different and creatively. But the actual social relation established by either abstract or figurative art didn’t matter either. After all, Hitler, Churchill and Eisenhower were all united in their active love for figuration, and Andy Wyeth was the blockbuster artist of the period.
So, the condemnation of figuration was not really because of its looks. It was because of the stories it told. If the stories were propaganda for something they didn’t like, it was bad. If Andy Wyeth’s Christina had dragged a red flag while crawling towards the house on the hill, he would have been damned. The code would still have worked, the understanding would not, and the language would have been inappropriate.
In that sense the only artistic style that came close to an international language probably was functionalism. Practical necessities generated a clear code, and since those necessities were shared internationally and regardless ideologies, it also became an accessible language. The most lasting lesson came from the understanding that functionalist architecture and design were addressing a clearly formulated problem and solving it elegantly without any interference or need for local taste or understandings.
In spite of the internationalist ambitions of European avant-gardist movements, many initial abstractionist works were the result or mere illustrations of mystical beliefs. Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian among many, followed principles of theosophy and made programmatic works that maintain the split between code and language and are not universally understandable. The mixture of visible objectivity and underlying obscurantism may confuse the public even more than figuration. Figurative work at least expresses its obscurantism openly.
Mysticism is not necessarily defined by outright cults and may confine itself to definitions that one way or another just try to transcend material presence. Many U.S. conceptual artists were looking for some kind of spiritual essence of art. They tried to integrate code with language and resorted to tautology. The confirmation of auto-existence excluded poetry and performance as interferences that prevented that integration. While theoretically sound for an international language, the premise itself was not shared. Local needs and crises demanded political applications. Conceptualism in other countries already was and sometimes became a very different language, even when sometimes it looked like the code was being shared.
When European abstraction “arrived” in Latin America, it did so in appearance but without the theoretical background that had generated it. And even that appearance was distorted in many cases, since the vehicle was magazine reproductions. There is the well-known case of the disappointment of an Argentinean artist confronted with an original neoplastic painting by Mondrian. He discovered that the painting was not as industrially perfect as the reproduction had promised. Not only was the hand made quality visible, but it also was important. As much pro as against, the suggested slickness of the reproductions had a great stylistic influence on Argentinean abstraction.
When code and language are imported instead of originating locally, the seduced artist has to decide how to handle it. In terms of abstraction, some decided to continue playing with composition, others gave more or less hidden meanings, and yet others recycled the package for other purposes. But I believe that no Latin American artist became a theosophist in order to make abstract paintings.
Sure there are universal themes in art, the same as there are in science, and they have to be generic enough to stand apart from localism. In art they tend to be so general that they become trivial. In figurative art there were things like love, maternity and death or, if the wish was to avoid drama and have some freedom: still life and landscape. In abstraction we have either a selective coding of reality or a pure formal composition. The first is close to stylization. The second comments on art issues. Locality, however, tends to contaminate anyway. In Uruguay, Torres García believed that pure abstraction belonged to “cold” cultures. In Chile, many years later, Vergara Grez created the “Andean Geometry” movement. By means of “the extension, the silence and the void” he searched for “trascendence and spirituality as opposed to atheistic technomerchandise.”[i]
In 1951, Max Bill, a typical internationalist artist, exhibited in Sao Paulo and then also received the Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Biennale. His piece was the Tripartite Unity of 1949, a take-off from the Moebious strip and based on the mathematics of non-oriented surfaces. In its moment it was considered as an emblematic example of an art without borders. Max Bill greatly influenced the work of Brazilian artists. A classic piece in Brazilian art history, and product of this influence, is “Caminando” (Walking) by Ligya Clark in 1963. Clark picks up on the Moebius strip, but deviates from Max Bill in many fundamental aspects. The piece takes the shape of a disposable bracelet that is simultaneously worn by two people. Thus the piece leaves the field of mathematics to become a symbol of affective relations.
However, the problem when we do this type of analysis is that we base it on biographical observations and compilations of anecdotes. In the narration of the history or histories of art, these anecdotes are coupled with very individual cases that aspire to be exemplary. In the case of Clark, as well as that of Helio Oiticica, we have an example of the “anthropophagi” theories proclaimed in Brazil some thirty years earlier by Oswald de Andrade. While this might be true, it is also incidental. What really matters here is that broader dynamics like recycling and syncretism always were an important part in dependent cultures. The fact if Clark and Oiticica did or did not continue Andrade’s thoughts does not really affect the evaluation of the social and cultural impact of their work.
To start the study of culture from individualized anecdotes inhibits the understanding of what real energy the artist used as an activating lever. We can tell from were influences came and where they went, but the results from that study remain in a very narrow and relatively incestuous field. At the end of the research we have a net of biographies and a collection of works coordinated with that net. And that net continues to depend on hegemonic criteria, not on local ones.
Maybe more than other places, Latin America is in an odd position. It is part of the so-called Western culture and yet it is kept separate. A culture heavily subject to colonizing influences, the information about hegemonic processes affected artistic production. The unidirectional flow of information, and the temptation to measure up with and in the centers, unavoidably had an impact on a great number of artists. But on the other hand, local conditions were also nourished by that flow, or the flow created new needs. This ambivalence leads to a lot of musings about identity and the role of locality.
Some months ago I read a book on experimental philosophy. The authors in the anthology spoke very critically of what they called “epistemic romanticism.” With the term they refer to the belief that the knowledge of correct epistemological norms that lead to “justified belief” are wired in our brains and that by using certain strategies that may be discovered. These strategies are based on intuition. A critique of this position is supported by several studies that prove that intuitive processes are not constant, but vary from culture to culture. The most apparent difference is in the use of causality among Western cultures compared to holistic connections used in Eastern cultures. [ii] Although these studies don’t refer to art, it is in art where intuition is referred to the most and questioned the least.
In its normal use, intuition is a rather mysterious and unexplainable instrument, but nevertheless a source of certitudes. According to some authors, intuition is a skill that helps to make decisions based on pattern recognition and the comparison of configurations.[iii] In other words, it is a process of re-cognition, not of cognition. This explains the speed of intuition, since the reference pattern and the new pattern to be compared are taken in as a whole and not through time-bound reading. There is a popular intuition and an expert intuition. It is particularly popular intuition that is subject to affects and contextual influences, or to be “primed.” Being a skill, intuition may be developed and refined. It is the expert intuition we invoke in the search for truth, but they are truths that remain culturally conditioned.
Artists clearly belong to the more expert class of “intuitors,” but we can’t lose sight of the fact that this skill does not lead to absolute truths. It is an expertise that functions to access certain truths that are true within some cultures but not within others.
Without being an expert in these topics, it would seem that the belief that artistic values have universal validity is based on “correct epistemological norms” imposed by hegemonic cultures. By referring to these cultures, these norms create a platform for action that becomes the “correct” one at the detriment of others. Dominant expertise then develops within this platform and its assumptions.
In a world where information still flows in one direction, it is this notion of what is correct, and this expertise that establish themselves as a reference to evaluate other forms of expertise. It makes me think of vegan hamburgers. Taste and texture is compared with real meat hamburgers rather than with other vegan concoctions, and where the name already implies subordination to the dominant meat culture. Within the dominant culture these values become self-evident, and self-evidence is an intuitive act. And within other cultures they try to become self-evident as well.
There is a self-evidence of originality and first-ness that makes us feel that intellectual production is a race. Histories of the avant-garde movements seek to find first dates so to declare everything after as derivative when not directly as copycats. This is not only a privilege exercised by the cultural centers. Although a symptom of the insecurity of the cultural centers, the race is played with equal intensity by cultures on the periphery that forget that it is a hegemonic game.
Some time ago I speculated about what the cultural impact would be if we erased Picasso or Michelangelo from art history, from museum holdings, from phone books. What would happen if any trace disappears, how and why would the world be poorer? I’m afraid that the impact wouldn’t be as great as common assumptions and the market would like us to believe. However, if we lost those artists who are able to stand behind us, the ones we don’t necessarily see as individuals or find out their names, those who don’t care about themselves, but those that understand us and lead us to make new connections we wouldn’t have found alone, well, that impact would be enormous. That’s not bad.
[i] Accessed on 10.26.2011
http://www.mac.uchile.cl/exposiciones/anteriores/mayo2007/r_vergara_grez.html
[ii] Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols y Stephen Stich en Joshua Knobe, Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2008.
[iii] Tom Rand, “Intuition as Evidence in Philosophical Analysis: Taking Connectionism Seriously,” Ph.D. thesis for University of Toronto, 2008, pp. 7 onward.
