For some time now – let’s leave it at those vague terms – there have been multiple crossings between the cultural and educational spheres, to the point that some have even spoken of “an educational turn in art.” An important part of that turn would have occurred from curatorial practices and Irit Rogoff is perhaps one of the people who have most actively and visibly contributed to this, especially after having organized
SUMMIT non aligned initiatives in education culture
in 2007. It is also symptomatic that the editors of the brand new
e-flux Journal
published an article by Irit Rogoff herself on the matter in their first issue, released at the end of last year.
Rogoff’s article, precisely titled
Turning
, ends with a rather passionate defense of the word ‘parrhesia‘, a common term in Greco-Roman culture that Michel Foucault rescued in one of his lectures in Berkeley. According to Foucault, parrhesia is ” a verbal activity in which the speaker expresses his personal relationship with the truth, and risks his life because he recognizes explaining the truth as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In the parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of dying instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy“. For Foucault,”the problematization of truth has two aspects, two main aspects… One is that which concerns ensuring that the processes of reasoning are correct by ensuring that a proposition is true. And another concerns the question: what is the importance for the individual and for society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognize them? “
In the last paragraph of her article Rogoff states: “Increasingly, I think that “education” and “the educational turn” should be just that: the moment in which we attend to the production and articulation of truths – not the truth as that which is correct, as probable, as a fact, but the truth as that which brings together around it subjectivities that are not collected or reflected by other acts of language.“
It could be said that, in truth, Irit Rogoff’s article intends to be in itself an act of parrhesia, since what the text questions in the first place is the orientation of that pedagogical turn. Rogoff says: “When we take a ‘turn’ we move away, we approach or we move around something,” and rather we are the ones who are in motion instead of it. Something is activated in us, perhaps even ‘
So Rogoff raises a double question that concerns on the one hand the capacity of artistic and curatorial practices to capture the dynamics of the turn, and on the other, the type of impulse that occurs in that process:
“First, this requires that we somehow break with the logic according to which, from process-based and experimentation result reflection, unpredictability, self-organization and critical thinking that characterize the way education is understood within the art world. Many of us have worked quite consistently with this conception, and while some of its premises have been considerably productive in much of our work, it has nonetheless lent itself too easily to the emulation of art education institutions, with their archives, libraries and research-based practices as main representational strategies. On the one hand, introducing these principles into contemporary art exhibition venues marked a distancing from object structures, markets and dominant aesthetics, and an insistence on the procedural and irreducible nature of any creative enterprise. Although on the other hand, everything has led too easily to the emergence of a kind of “pedagogical aesthetic” according to which a table located in the middle of the room, a few empty shelves, a growing archive of assembled pieces and parts, a classroom or a reading stage, or the promise of a conversation have taken away from us the responsibility of rethinking and dislocating those dominant places daily. Having generated several of these modes myself, I am not sure I want to do without them completely, because the impulse they made manifest – the need to force these art spaces to be more active, more critical, less endogamous and more stimulating – is an impulse in which I would like to continue believing. In particular, I would not want to abandon the notion of “conversation”, which, in my opinion, has been the most significant change in art in the last decade. “
Aware that these initiatives run the risk of being detached from their original impetus and solidified into a recognizable ‘style’, Rogoff invokes at the end of the discussion the Foucauldian notion of ‘parrhesia‘ “-the public, free and
flagrant
– discourse- perhaps as a better model through which to understand some kind of “educational turn” in art.” For Rogoff it seems that “the ‘turn’ we are talking about should result not only in new formats, but also in new ways of recognizing when something important is being said.”
The author herself recognizes in a passage of the text that an agenda more romantic and idealistic than this of parrhesia is hardly imaginable, however she argues that in her analysis, Foucault does not tell us at any time what truth, nor to what ends it would be oriented. “The truth, it seems, is not a position, but an impulse“, Rogoff concludes. These considerations do not prevent us from thinking that the critical, sincere, public discourse subject to the moral duty of the author, functions at another level as an instrument to distance herself from a series of practices whose proliferation and normalization has distorted them in the eyes of the artistic sphere, and with which she is associated almost automatically.
Even so, as we have hinted, Rogoff does not remain in the mere denunciation of these processes of ‘neutralization’ of practices that may have had at some point a revulsive or critical character, and raises some interesting ideas to base “an education that is more“, understanding that “becoming more” that Rogoff paraphrases to Roger Buergel, as “the possibility of focusing our energies on what can be imagined and not only on what we must oppose, or at least that plays some kind of negotiation on this point.“