Platform for (un)Solicited Research and Advice

Reckoning with Unknown Knowns:

a brief for Manifesta PLATFORM FOR (UN)SOLICITED RESEARCH AND ADVICE

The development of ACAF’s curatorial contribution to Manifesta 8 begins with a quest to identify the ‘unknown knowns’ of the contemporary art system. What do we believe, but don’t know we believe, about contemporary art and curating? And what about politics, human geographies or histories, and the communication of cultural difference through today’s culture infrastructure? What codification occurs along the points where the mundane details of everyday life meet with the industries of politics and culture?

Art appropriated as a tool for a social and political agenda has inhibited us in locating the deep beliefs and knowledge that we are not fully aware of, but which we harbour in our collective unconscious. It is time to begin understanding this collective unconscious of art and locate what might be the actual problems at hand, or even better, what could even offer some solutions.

The Theory of Applied Enigmatics is rooted in an analysis of the condition of art today, and from there looks to operate as a kind of cultural algorithm, leading us towards some resolutions for the questions above. Through its application, the theory should lead towards the emergence of a multi-layered and complex project that while remaining part of what we call the ‘art system’ makes a route to its goal without using most of the widely accepted or highly criticized paths to a ‘successful project’.

Brief

Following from our work for Manifesta 8, we would like each of you to submit your own art practices and beliefs about art to a similar set of criteria in order to begin to understand the ‘unknown knowns’ of the contemporary art system as it impacts the how, why, and what of your artistic production, as well as its reception within this system and beyond. We want you to question your assumptions about the role (and limits) of art within the socio-political realm and dominant contemporary art system. This is not intended as a purely academic exercise, but rather can be used as a tool to help you expose the inner-workings of the system you are apart of with the goal of increasing the potency of your art and generating new meaning within the field of cultural production.

We will use two analytical tools during this process:

Future, Backwards

This exercise is designed to help participants gain a shared understanding of their challenges and the broader context. The exercise helps participants to increase the number of perspectives that they can take in understanding their past, and of the range of possible futures. It can also help to identify patterns of past perception that are determining a future. The exercise invites participants to reflect on the past and to compare and contrast different aspirations for the present and the future. The exercise is designed to generate shared insight to support the group to move forward in collaboratively and creatively solving its problems.

Assignment: an ARPANET text chat*

The creative assignment we propose is that, using the results of the above process, you (working in groups of three or four) will invent a plausible dialogue between a few individuals who you find instrumental in the evolution of received notions about art and cultural politics today. The individuals may be theorists, artists, critics, public intellectuals, philosophers, politicians, or economists for example. The prescribed format for the dialogue is a rudimentary text chat held via ARPANET, the earliest instantiation of the present-day Internet which was developed by researchers at the United States Dept. of Defense in the 1960s. Please observe the following guidelines when creating your text:

• The text chat will take place during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
• Your chosen individuals should be contemporary with each other such that a conversation between them is plausible (this creates the pretense of shared space of history, world events, cultural references, and language, at least on a cursory level).
• It is important that you can articulate a link between each individual’s thinking and current ideas, attitudes, or policies that impact the contemporary art system.

* Nota bene: One of ACAF’s contributions for the Manifesta 8 catalogue is a dialogue in this format. It documents a conversation between Ronald Reagan, Edward Said, Marcel Broodthaers, and Jane Fonda.