A few reasons for a non dismissive art
This project articulates one colloquium, one meeting and a curatorial project
In Critique of Cynical Reason, published in Germany in 1983, Peter Sloterdjik remarks that critique, in all its meanings, is going through tedious times. A time of masked critique restarts, in which critical attitudes are subordinated to professional roles; limited responsibility criticism, tawdry Enlightenment as success factor – attitude at the point of intersection between new conformism and old ambitions.
How to revisit the pertinence and function of critique thirty years later? How to resist the assault by the complicity between critique and social order? How not to be tempted by Wagner’s seduction, Benjamin asked while accusing Baudelaire for his argument that the non-conformist and nonaligned artists revolted against the market by taking refuge in art for art’s sake? Is it possible to redefine the notion of art for art’s sake by ways of political artistic practice? Is it by making political art necessary that, cynically, artists, critics, curators and the market mask false consciousness? Is artistic purism, whose return seems to be taking shape, the quest for an ethos who believes itself to be pure and aseptic? One that the art world needs in infected and stranded times? Is it a symptom of the ideology of order?
The Zeitgeist à la carte responds to all tastes: multiculturalist, ethnicity, minorities, gender, globalization, periphery, emerging countries... with centuries of History. We know that symbolic imperialism can take disguised physiognomies shaped in various family resemblances.
It is from these questions that we intend to promote a critical debate among researchers, curators and artists, reflecting on the multiple theoretical propositions that originate the consensus.
We do not want so much to know how we got here, but, above all, what is the state of play.
Curatorial project
Five in situ exhibitions are presented by a collective of five artists. The concepts of Art, Energy and Circulation make up fundamental interactions by reference to the singularities of the exhibition spaces themselves.
In the particularities of each geographic location and in the multiplicity of their historicities, one finds an intermezzo: art is energy, energy is circulation, be it by land or sea.
Departing from the spaces considered, one travels through relations between knowledge and power, one perverts time and space, one digs into the oblivion of the origin. More symptomatology and less ontology. Less sources and more discontinuities. No beginning or end. Just speeds.
Each intervention configures the experience of a collective in which the depersonalization process constitutes itself as fundamental disparity.
Circulation in a space-time that expands itself, a crossroad, a junction and forking of paths.
Here are a few reasons for a non dismissive art, to be built.