What role can artistic and curatorial practices play in exposing and challenging the mechanisms of self-censorship and executive cancellation within academic institutions, particularly in contexts where external political pressures dictate cultural programming?
As cathartic creative practices, satire, parody, and caricature productively and constructively win sympathies. From historical figures including Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier, to current activists like The Yes Men, Temporary Autonomous Zone author Hakim Bey, and Bavo with their (counter-)strategy of over-identifying with fashionable trends, tactical live and online interventions using contemporary resources playfully expose and challenge the authoritarian paralysis and overkill of institutions.
In what ways has the contemporary university become an arena for the spectacle-driven culture wars, and can the concepts like agonism and dissensus help rehabilitate frameworks for creative discourse?
The erosion of critical thinking – including the self-critical reflection of creatives – means intellectual bankruptcy in the contemporary university. Avoiding or ironing out intractable controversies suppresses our vital human need to learn by exchanging perspectives. In a context of stultified conformity, conceptual tools like Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism and Rancière’s dissensus serve to emphasise the creative value of difference. These tools can fire public debates and conversations as long as they are not used as yet another academese smokescreen.
If the university is irretrievable as an incubator for exploring challenging, and even dissenting and provocative ideas, what alternative spaces or methodologies become necessary to sustain and protect radical creative inquiry that doesn’t just speak to the initiated, but also engages audiences across the political spectrum in critical debate?
Informal networked environments and communities offer a dynamic counterweight to academic institutions that are heavy by nature and by history. Florian Schneider’s ever relevant comparison of institutions versus ekstitutions in (Extended) Footnotes on Education (e-flux, 2010) evokes distinctive border economies that allow ‘an increased variety of actors to smoothly switch from the mode of institutions to that of ekstitutions and back – seemingly without compromise. They actually profit from the sharp boundaries between institutional frameworks and ekstitutional networks.’
Sonic Acts, an interdisciplinary Amsterdam-based arts organisation founded in 1994, launched the Sonic Acts Academy in 2016 as an alternative space for creative inquiry and for engaging a wider public in critical debate. As author of the symposium’s opening keynote, Why an Academy? Justification and Provocation (watch full keynote on youtube), the following might be relevant to today’s conversation.
Justification, because an organisation sitting outside formal higher education authorities may be able to tackle key issues not addressed by others:
- much artistic research is being appropriated and subsumed by institutions solely motivated by expanding their portfolios, competitive edge and profits.
- institutions often – wilfully or inadvertently – repress the art they house, cloaking it in polite rhetoric and removing subversive elements.
- much university research remains relatively inaccessible; genuine or token efforts to broaden relevance and dissemination often insufficiently account for the kinds of bridging that are needed, or refuse to concede that certain forms of research require expertise in their understanding, as well as their elaboration.
Provocation, because it’s hard to get beyond the obstacles all sorts of academies (educational, cultural, professional) have confronted for more than two thousand years:
- reference organisations readily become over-codified or over-territorialised by their actual or would-be stakeholders.
- academies promoting alternative voices are built on tensions that can be productive, but that are also exhausting.
- finally, and crucially, experimental, transdisciplinary intersections for sharing and building artistic knowledge cannot be fixed.
Sally Jane Norman is Denis Adam Chair in Music, New Zealand School of Music–Te Kōkī. Her research interests are in sound environments, embodiment and expressive gesture, art and technology, transdisciplinary research and cultural policy.