The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that men themselves change circumstances and that the educator himself must be educated.
[…] The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.
No intoxication is as intoxicating as enjoying the freedom of others.
We have no art, we do everything as well as we can.
When the first Portuguese explorers arrived at the Guinea Coast in Western Africa in the fifteenth century, they are said to have been extremely surprised by the peculiar relationship that, to their eyes, the ‘natives’ had to a certain type of objects, anthropom-orphic or zoomorphic idols made of stone, clay or wood that were venerated by them as actual gods.4 Asked by the Portuguese if these idols had been manufactured by them, the locals replied affirmatively; asked if they were true divinities, they gave the same response. The explorers coined a word to encapsulate this unsustainable contradiction: the adjective ‘feitiço’, coming from ‘feito’, past participle of ‘to do’ or ‘to make’. The term suggested form, figure and configuration, but also something that was artificial and fabricated, and even fascinated and enchanted, mapping a semiotic field in which fact, construction, agency and truth combined together.
For the Portuguese, such fetishism had to be either naïve or cynical, the result of a lack of awareness of the incompatibility of human agency and ‘objective truth’, or of a conscious attempt at obscuring that awareness. For these anti-fetishist men, the fetish hid the origin of the object — the human work of manipulation — and thus transformed the creator into the created. Their goal, as modern men, was to make the fetishists realise it was their voices that were speaking, not the objects’, and so end their alienation.
But the societies from which the explorers originated also made objects whose constructed or received status, immanence or transcendence were ambiguous. The images of the Virgin Mary, or later Louis Pasteur’s experimental setups,5 likewise combined apparent human agency with the contradictory claim that they conveyed an objective truth. That the Portuguese couldn’t recognise their own fetishistic practice is perhaps a function of a strategic dispositive that frees practice from theory, and that allows foragency to continue, independently from theoretical intervention. Anti-fetishism, as a theoretical perspective, doesn’t quite know what to do with the agency involved in the experience of the fetish: it is always at pains to identify a subject to which it can assign the force that ‘by mistake’ is attributed to the fetish object. The moderns couldn’t testify to the strange efficacy of the fetish’s ‘displacements of action’ precisely because the distinction they maintained between fact and construction grounded another, more essential distinction — the distinction between knowledge and illusion, or between a form of practical life that doesn’t make one see knowledge as separate from illusion and a form of theoretical life that does.6 This displaced junction of fact and fiction is what Bruno Latour denominates ‘faitiche’, a portmanteau word combining ‘fait’ and ‘fétiche’ to refer to ‘the solid certitude that allows practice to go into action without ever believing in the distinction between construction and contemplation, immanence and transcendence’.7
Art Object as Fetish Object
Ricardo Basbaum began the project Você gostaria de participar de uma experiência artística? (Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?) in 1994, and it continues today. It operates by ‘offering a painted steel object (125 by 80 by 18 centimetres) to be taken home by the participant (individual, group or collective), who will have a certain period of time (around one month) to realise an artistic experience with it.’8 During the time that the participants have the object, they are entitled to decide how to use it, if at all — where it should be taken, what should be done with it — on the condition that they send documentation to be archived and made accessible on the website www.nbp.pro.br. The rectangular-shaped object is made of painted steel, with oblique edges and a circular hole in the middle. Its bottom (or top) is ‘missing’, giving it the appearance of an oversize cake mould, or even an oversize sandcastle mould (without turrets). It is painted entirely white, except for the upper (or bottom) rims, which are navy. The object itself, or its shape, has been part of theatrical performances and dance routines, displayed as outdoor sculpture, incorporated as an instrument in a musical performance and transformed into a different artwork (titled NBP-B, or Novas Bases para Personalidade — Branco, 2006). It has also been used outside of the cultural context (as a beach utensil, the body of a children’s car, a cat bed,
a clothes basket, a fish tank and a water-collection receptacle), and has been buried underground for a moon cycle. Very often, in one way or another, it has functioned as a frame, a window through which participants have literally looked at the world, with their eyes or their cameras.9
Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? originated in another project by Basbaum, titled NBP, short for Novas Bases para a Personalidade (New Bases for Personality), begun four years earlier. The project’s website defines NBP as a ‘sign, made of three letters, a sort of general motivation or pretext for work (almost a programme of action), a means for impregnating space. Almost an atopic common place.’10 The project is, at the risk of oversimplifying, an attempt at reflecting on contemporary art (both its practice and its ideas) in relation to notions and processes of communication and subjectivation, through the production of drawings, diagrams, installations and writing. The shape that, reproduced recurrently, provides the visual basis of the project is also the origin of the object distributed in Would you like to participate…?, looked at from above (or below). This sign, which resembles an eye,11is deliberately simple in its combination of straight and round forms: NBP’s specific shape was designed to be as easily memorisable as its sign: after experiencing any NBP work the viewer leaves with NBP and its specific shape in his or her body — a kind of implanted or artificial memory, as the result of a subliminal sensorial contamination strategy.12 Or, using a different set of images, NBP’s shape is a constructed form, designed by Basbaum, that contradictorily presents itself as an elemental form — a fact of nature, a simple, geometrical given, akin to a universal category. The shape is, therefore, both a fact and a fiction. The object/sign that is at the basis of NBP and Would you like to participate…? is, arguably, a form of faitiche, one that has allowed Basbaum, for the last two decades, to develop an artistic practice that reflects the concepts, mechanisms and functions of art, understood not just as a set of objects but as a set of social relations and discourses with a specific history and materiality. This insightfulness is due to the fact that not only are the NBP sign and the resulting object faitiches, but that art objects in general, at least since the time of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century, are also conceived of as a combination of (subjective) manufacture and (objective) autonomy that defies the principle of contradiction. What makes this ‘painted steel object’ peculiar is not only its awareness of that fact, but also its programmatic attempt to function as a vessel that replicates that combination.
Moreover, the project it gives occasion to thinks through both its principles and what it makes possible. As Basbaum has written, Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? was developed basically as a project to encounter possibilities of movement of some lines of flight in the art circuit … composed as a set of protocols regulating it along the standards of a basic dialogical structure involving artist, object and participant. The public or general audience only accesses the project later, at the documentation or archive level.13
If all the above is the case, the NBP sign and NBP object can be considered the ideal modern work of art. This is perhaps a counterintuitive, even perverse, maybe grandiose statement, given the fact that Basbaum’s projects, through their engagement in participatory dynamics and discursive practice, seem designed to step out of the modern canon. However, the NBP object’s combination of autonomy and heteronomy brings its experience close to that which Friedrich Schiller, in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794), described as the quintessential aesthetic experience — that of standing in front of the statue of Juno Ludovisi, looking at it (or her, as in this experience the statue acquires a subject quality), but also, importantly, being looked at by it/her. And, in the NBP object’s ability to set up a situation in which it is possible to reflect not only on that experience, but also on what it enables (namely, the discursive apparatus and the social structures of the art system), Basbaum’s project extends the self-reflective character of the modern artwork, as defined since early Romanticism, to a remarkable degree.
The work of art, this time, sees its visual character decreased, but only in order to give occasion to an experience that makes whoever enters into contact with it enter a new sensorial space and a reconfigured social space, in which new processes of subjectivation may occur. Basbaum has said, in discussing his installation me-you + system-cinema + passageway (NBP), shown at the 7th Shanghai Biennial in 2008:
The installation space proposes an experience which can only be held by subjects — and this is a proper effect of the artwork — who accept to locate themselves at the realm of a transformation process (a premise for any art piece but one which only a few are interested in providing).14
An Instrument of Mediation
Proposing an experience that wants to give form to subjects in order to begin a transformation process is, in essence, what pedagogy is about. So again, like in Schiller, the aesthetic experience leads to a pedagogical programme — one with a typically modern emancipatory goal. But if in Schiller in the passing from (individual) aesthetic experience to (collective) aesthetic education the object-art (Juno Ludovisi) is lost on the way, in Basbaum the object-art (the NBP object and sign) very much remains. It is — as an object that might be used for ‘whatever’ (for art or for something else), as a sign that gives form to thoughts — ever present in Basbaum’s work. The process of education, of the formation of subjects in search of transformation, is always mediated by this object, as the fundamental support for the social relations that are eventually generated. The object of mediation within the process of pedagogy is important not just because it is the vessel that contains the content to be taught. On the contrary, its relevance resides in the type of social relationships it shapes between the ‘teacher’ position, the ‘student’ position and the context in which the pedagogical process takes place. A simple look at two theories of pedagogy as emancipation may show how different conceptualisations of such an object can result in diverse social relations, alternative behaviours and, possibly, diverging results that might not fulfil the initial emancipatory goal.
In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), Jacques Rancière recounts the story of Jean-Joseph Jacotot, a pedagogue who became a reader in French literature at the university of Leuven at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because many of his students could not speak French and Jacotot could not speak Flemish, there was a need to establish between them ‘the minimal connection of a common “thing”’.15 This ‘thing’ became the bilingual version of Les Aventures de Télémaque, a book written by Fénelon in 1699.
Jacotot made the students adopt the book as an interpreter, asking them to learn the French text with the help of the translation. To his surprise, the students learnt the language without the need for a transmission of knowledge from the teacher, disrupting conventional conceptions of the pedagogical process as one of transfer. By not transferring and not explaining, by not proposing a method but concentrating only on working on the students’ will to learn, the master, Jacotot, established a relation ‘that had as a consequence an entirely free relationship of the intelligence of the student with that of the book — the intelligence of the book which was also the shared thing, the egalitarian intellectual connection between master and student’.16
The book is then the means by which Jacotot’s students achieve the goal of the pedagogical process, the tool that allows them to learn when they have decided — or perhaps have had their wills ‘forced’ by Jacotot — to do so. Télémaque, as Rancière says, is not a masterpiece, just a simply written book in French, with a variedvocabulary and a severe moral — characteristics that are too generic to justify the choice of the title. Télémaque is, in fact, an abstract object of mediation: it is a ‘mere’ bilingual book, one that is the product of human intelligence, and that, precisely because of this, can serve as a mediating tool that posits the equality of all intelligences, including those of Jacotot and his students.
The NBP object is perhaps like Télémaque in this sense: it is an abstract object, one that doesn’t in the first instance relate to those who eventually are in touch with it. It comes from elsewhere: in the case of Télémaque, from over a hundred years earlier, from a different country and a different language. NBP, taken from a ready-made design by an artist, similarly comes with a minimal set of demands and expectations, and, because of this, in order for any type of pedagogical process to take place, it is necessary that those who come into contact with it have already decided this is what they want to spend their time and energy with. The education of wills is, then, a prior, necessary condition for any pedagogical engagement and any potential emancipatory process.
But, as The Ignorant Schoolmaster shows, when the pedagogical process is mediated by an abstract object, something needs to be left behind. While Rancière tells us Jacotot’s story, we never learn who his students are, where they come from and why have they decided to be his students. Speculating on who could attend courses at the university of Leuven in the 1810s is not necessary — it is enough to point out that they could attend the university, and dedicate themselves to studying a bilingual text of which one of the languages was alien to them. The abstraction of the object of pedagogical mediation, it seems, is accompanied by an abstraction of the socio-political conditions in which the pedagogical process takes place. For Rancière, this is a matter of principle: those conditions need to be rendered abstract in order to make sure emancipation is not denied by the context. But, in avoiding this, something is risked: by attempting to universalise an abstracted object of mediation (and not considering the possibility of contextual determinations), material inequality might remain untouched, and, because of this, equal access to the process of emancipation become impossible.
In Paulo Freire’s ‘Education as Practice of Freedom’ (1973) a very different object of mediation leads the pedagogical process.17 The text proposes an educational model that lays its emphasis on the concrete situation of the ‘students’, on the perception of matters affecting daily life as one’s own matters, and on the realisation that intervention into context and even its transformation is possible:
The education our situation demanded would enable men to discuss courageously the problems of their context — and to intervene in that context; it would warn men of the dangers of the time and offer them the confidence and the strength to confront those dangers.18
As a response to the four-million school-age children who were not in school, and the sixteen-million illiterates of fourteen years and older that could be found in Brazil in the 1950s,19 Freire, as coordinator of the Adult Education Project of the Movement of Popular Culture of Recife, launched a model of education based on ‘culture circles’ — discussion groups in which those gathered attempted to ‘clarify situations’ or ‘seek action arising from that clarification’, led by an individual acting in a ‘teacher’ position.20 The topics — nationalism, profit, remittances abroad, the political evolution of Brazil, development, illiteracy, suffrage for illiterates, democracy — were introduced by a discussion focusing on the notion of culture and its distinction from nature, leading to questions about agency in the form of men and women’s intervention on the world around them. The circles began with the search for a vocabulary for the groups, selecting generative words — words phonemically rich, and with a pragmatic tone. Words like ‘rain’, ‘land’, ‘bicycle’, ‘brick’ or ‘work’ were used as generators of sounds through their syllables, which, recombined, resulted in new words and sentences that contributed to progress in literacy and simultaneously incited debate on local and national problems. The pedagogical process generated in this manner learning content within and throughout itself.
As well as the generative words, the groups used a series of ten figurative drawings by Francisco Brenand that were meant to spark a discussion of what culture and civilisation might be 21 depicting situations such as the ‘unlettered hunter’, a drawing of an indigenous hunter shooting birds with arrows; the ‘lettered hunter (lettered culture)’, a man in hat and boots shooting at birds, but this time with a rifle; or ‘the hunter and the cat’, a cat chasing two mice. The last drawing showed the culture circle itself: the group, and the ‘teacher’, all looking at one of the illustrations, seeing themselves as part of the pedagogical process.
Like in Rancière’s example of Jacotot, the goal here is emancipation, and because of that transmission of knowledge (and therefore of hierarchies) is avoided. But, unlike in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, context comes to the fore, and the object of mediation must speak directly to it. So while Télémaque was an abstract object of medi-ation, Brenand’s images and the generative words must to be concrete: to guarantee that those entering the process of education actually care about learning, the pedagogue must ensure that the starting point is some-thing close to them and that they see them-selves as an originating part of that process.
Basbaum’s NBP object is also, perhaps, concrete in this manner — in its awareness that participation within an art project (Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?) could involve a specific size and a specific shape that primes interaction, as well as implying, perhaps, a familiarity with a certain set of codes and forms that are the result of a historical development. A historical development that, in his case, might be traced back to Lygia Clark’s work of the late 1950s and early 60s with abstract forms susceptible to manipulation — a characteristic that turned them into the material support for social relations. The abstract form of the NBP project becomes concrete through the familiarisation, within an art environment, of the language of abstraction — abstraction as a mere form and as an art-historical language — and through the creation of a situation in which such language can be practised within a dynamic of play and interaction. The possibility of suspending conventional relations and uses (enacted by the statue of Juno Ludovisi and, potentially, every artwork since) is maintained, but this time stressing the potential of transformation that results from it.
A Sociology of Liberation
On 12 January 1972, Fred Forest published in Le Monde a blank rectangle of 10 by 15 centimetres with a footnote instructing readers to express themselves through writing or drawing within it, and to cut the whole page off, frame it and send it to him. Against the wishes of Forest, the newspaper included the rectangle in the ‘Arts’ section, and didn’t publish any of the 800 responses, which included cartoons, political messages, insults, intended artworks, proposals for meetings and even a note from an intern in a psychiatric hospital who claimed this was his only means of contact with the outside world. The experience, called Space Media, was repeated with newspapers in Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Argentina and Brazil.
Forest was a member of the Collective of Sociological Art, a group that, according to its first manifesto, published also in Le Monde in 1975, takes into account the traditional ideological attitudes of the publics it addresses. It makes use of the methods of group dynamic development, survey and pedagogy. As well as putting art in relationship with its sociological context, it pays attention to the channels of communication and distribution — a new theme within art history and one which demands a new type of practice.22
For the collective, which also included Hervé Fischer and Jean-Paul Thénot, the role of the artist was to elucidate the real nature of art, increasing awareness and liberating him or her from the alienation to which other approaches to artistic practice led. The object of the study of aesthetics and art history could not be the artwork itself, but the process of social circulation in which its meanings are constituted, and in which they change. Or, in Forest’s words: For the ‘sociological artist’ the problem is not to know what to represent or how to represent it, but how to provoke a reflection on the conditions of our social environment and its mechanisms.23 A few months after his empty newspaper space, Forest organised a survey in Val-de-Marne, near Paris, about the nuclear family, titled Voulez-vous jouer avec nous au portrait de famille? (Would you like to play family portraits with us? ), which involved engaging the local population in an exercise of self-portraiture.24 Basbaum’s similarly titled Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? doesn’t include the word ‘play’ in its title, but this absence doesn’t negate the importance of the idea of a game to the work itself. The documentation of many of the 134 artistic experiences shows children as the protagonists, and when it is adults who are pictured, they tend to reflect a youthful even childish joy. Entering the context of art, the project seems to say, is a game of sorts, a game in which normal conditions are suspended, echoing the free play of faculties that Schiller, after Kant, saw in the aesthetic experience (and which Schiller identified as the promise for a new politics).
In Basbaum, such play is often regulated, as in Freire, by a series of loose frames that are adapted to the diverse contexts in which the event is to take place. The interactions are reflected in diagrams that capture the group dynamics, as well as relationships between concepts, places, actions and results. They function as both cognitive maps and choreographies for movements, like those Herbert Beyer drew on the floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s.25 But words are central to Basbaum’s play, especially the pronouns ‘me’ and ‘you’. These pronouns, the relationships between them and their transformations, mirror the processes of subjectivation that Basbaum looks to give occasion to in his games and installations. As he writes, these pronouns are addressed to the viewers, opening up spaces where he/she can locate him or herself. Thus the diagrams always show a kind of me/you game, reinforced by the presence of other words that stress issues of time, space and action (‘instant’, ‘here’, ‘play’, ‘stop’, ‘affection’, etc.).
It’s a kind of mental or psychological game that relates to what the Situationists used to call ‘psychogeography’ — a particular state resulted from the displacement and experimentation of oneself.26
Through these mappings, the work elaborates a sociology of art, exploring the conditions (institutional, political, social…) that allow for an object and a practice to be seen as art. The focus has shifted from a more or less local, Brazilian scale in the beginnings of Would you like to participate…? to a progressively international one (it was, for example, the first project to be announced and activated in advance to documenta 12 in 2007). But, as pointed out above, the work also offers a situation of experimentation that transcends analysis to propose transformation. Because of that, it is exemplary in bringing together two entities that are very different from each other: a discourse that comes from things themselves (from art objects and the social relations that give occasion to them, that are constructed around them and perhaps through them) and a political act that tries to enact a change in the participating subjects and that therefore needs to be independent of things. A study of context, and a way to escape from it.
The coming together of these two elements is perhaps best visualised through the notion of faitiche that this text began with: the faitiche is, like the fetish in Marxism, a materialisation of social relations that are veiled by affect and desire. But it is also what allows for a mediation between the concrete and the abstract, between theory and agency, and it provides insight from its concreteness into larger practices, processes and structures. The fetish, as a cultural fact that is irresolvably made and given, becomes a privileged site for both understanding how the world works, and imagining how it could work differently. And this makes the NBP object, as a faitiche, in its both concrete and abstract nature, almost the perfect art object, simultaneously the window through which to see what art objects are and a programme for activating them in search of new ways of being and being together.
Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical Philosophy, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976, pp.61–65. Also available at http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/TF45.html (last accessed on 20 February 2011).↑
Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Infabulation’, Manifesto for a New Theatre: Followed by Infabulation (trans. Thomas Simpson), Toronto, Buffalo, Chicago and Lancaster: Guernica, 2008, p.54.↑
Motto of Immaculate Heart College. Quoted in Corita Kent and Jan Steward, Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit, New York, Toronto, London, Sydney and Auckland: Bantam Books, 1992, p.6.↑
For an account of this encounter, see Bruno Latour, ‘Sur le Culte moderne des dieux faitiches’, Sur le Culte moderne des dieux faitiches, suivi de Iconoclash, Paris: Les Empécheurs de Penser en Rond/La Découverte, 2009, pp.15–134. My argument, for the next few paragraphs, follows Latour’s in this text. ↑
In Pasteur’s own formulation, the fermentation of lactic acid that he registers in his laboratory is real because he has carefully set up, with his own hands, the scene where the fermentation reveals itself. Ibid., p.44.↑
See ibid., p.36.↑
Ibid., p.53.↑
http://www.nbp.pro.br/projeto.php (last accessed on 10 July 2011).↑
For a full list of experiences, including dates, participants’ names and visual documentation, see http://www.nbp.pro.br/experiencia_data.php (last accessed on 10 July 2011). ↑
http://www.nbp.pro.br/nbp.php (last accessed on 8 July 2011). ↑
See Guy Brett, ‘Art in the Plural’, in Novas Direções (exh. cat.), Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna, 2002.↑
http://www.nbp.pro.br/projeto.php (last accessed on 8 July 2011).↑
Ricardo Basbaum, ‘Would you like to participate in an artistic experience’, Art & Research, vol.2, no.2, Spring 2009, available at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/basbaum.html (last accessed on 13 July 2011).↑
R. Basbaum, ‘me-you + system-cinema + pasageway (NBP)’, in Annette Balkema, Li Ning and Xiang Liping (ed.), The Shanghai Papers, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2008, available at http://rbtxt.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/shanghai_papers_txt2_.pdf (last accessed on 10 July 2011). ↑
Jacques Rancière, Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle, Paris: Fayard, 1987, p.8. Translation the author’s. ↑
Ibid., p.25.↑
Paulo Freire, ‘Education as the Practice of Freedom’ (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), Education for Critical Consciousness, New York: The Seabury Press, 1973, pp.1–84.↑
Ibid., p.33.↑
Ibid., p.41.↑
Ibid., p.42.↑
The ones printed in the book are versions of those drawings by Vicente de Abreu, as the originals were lost. ↑
Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest and Jean-Paul Thénot, ‘Manifeste I de l’art sociologique’, Le Monde, 10 October 1974; reprinted in H. Fischer, Théorie de l’art sociologique, Tournai: Casterman, 1977, p.25, and F. Forest, Art sociologique, Paris: Union Général d’Editions, 1977, p.153–54. Translation the author’s.↑
Fred Forest, Art sociologique, op. cit., p.197. Translation the author’s. ↑
See ibid., p.71.↑
As life-size floor plans for the exhibition ‘Bauhaus 1919–1928’, which took place at MoMA from 7 December 1938 to 30 January 1939.↑
‘Ricardo Basbaum on Urban Tension’, November 2002, available at http://rbtxt.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/interview_urban-t_basbaum.pdf (last accessed on 8 July 2011).↑
For more information about how the project developed in relation to documenta 12, see http://www.nbp.pro.br (last accessed on 8 July 2011). ↑
