DORIS SOMMER:
ARTWORKS AT PLAY (A FEW GAMES FOR CULTURAL AGENTS)
By Andrew Maerkle with Hyesu Cho, Hanna Hirakawa, Qiuyu Jin, Keisuke Nakaya, and Xiyue Yan
ANDREW MAERKLE: The Work of Art in the World is an important tool kit for advancing art practice with a social conscience at a time of increasing privatization of public institutions, increasing state control of speech, and increasing pressure to justify art in terms of its economic impact. Your book provides inspiring examples of artists, activists, and ordinary people exercising their cultural agency at the same time that it lays out a historical groundwork for how we might conceive of art itself as a cultural agent. But so much has happened since the book was published in 2014, starting with the disaster of the Trump regime in the United States and the rise of nationalist authoritarianism in many other countries as well, before we even get to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. What is your understanding of cultural agency and the work of art in the world at this moment?
DORIS SOMMER: I want to first remind everyone that the Italian Renaissance of the Quattrocento was a response to a pandemic. It’s not just the Trotskyites who say that things have to be really terrible before you can think of alternatives, because this was a dramatic moment in art history when the world turned around because there was nowhere lower to go.
At the start of the era, the so-called New World was not yet discovered, and Italy was a map of small, warring principalities, which made money in economic circuits but were far from the type of European colonial power that would emerge a century later. But in 1400 the monks, who were good scholars, came out of the cloisters to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and political figures. They saw that the world had to be remade. And because of all the devastation, there was only opportunity. This important moment in European art history was a response to the absolute devastation of the plague.
So what is art? Art is a disposition that looks at the world and asks what is missing. Not just what is wrong, but what is missing. I learned to ask that simple question from the Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan, who came to Harvard for a course we were doing in the engineering school—he’s a good engineer as well as a good draftsman, and he knows how to sew as well. Someone asked Tavares, “How do you get your ideas? They’re all over the place, but they’re all so good.”
He replied, “I look at the world and I ask myself what is missing.” I think that’s a beautiful, elegant, energizing question, because people are used to asking what is wrong, which can lead us into spirals of critique and despair.
I have made one attempt at Conceptual art, which I will share with you. I’m a Latin Americanist, I speak and think in Spanish. I got tired of seeing the word “protest” everywhere—protesta, protesta. It had become identical to the word for “politics” in art making. There were courses in the Aesthetics of Protest, for example. Eventually I got so tired, I took a black marker at night and vandalized one of the posters. I turned protesta into propuesta, or “proposal.”
That was my excuse for Conceptual art. It’s very easy to do protests, but the trap of doing protests is that you remain locked into somebody else’s discourse. You remain locked into the discourse that you’re trying to override. That’s a problem with the whole vocabulary of decolonialism, anticapitalism, antipatriarchy. The boss is still there, and he is giving us our vocabulary. That’s not a liberationist vocabulary. The Italian Renaissance did not do that. It did not criticize the life of the cloister, it simply left. So I want to say that just for beginners—because what an artist does is to queer the world. You see it one way, you can twist it another.
AM: One of the core concerns in The Work of Art in the World is Kant’s proposal of “common sense.” Looking at the state of the world today, it seems we are as far away from establishing a ground for common sense as ever in recent history. Should we simply say that cultural exchange has always been fraught and fragmented, or is this something that we really do have to confront?
DS: We do have to confront it. Democracy or any other humane form of government depends on people talking to each other, but no one is talking to anyone anymore. We get into social media circuits where everyone agrees with one another, and if you don’t, you leave the circuit. There’s no real conversation or debate. Difference is understood as an obstacle, not as fuel for conversation. We have a lot of work to do. But the tools are there. They need to be sharpened, they need to be refreshed, but they are there.
Friedrich Schiller is one tool. Schiller saw the end of democracy before it began. He was heartbroken when he learned that the Jacobins had cut off Louis XVI’s head. Schiller had always been a revolutionary, but when the news arrived to him in Germany, he said, “Oh, my God, now the trouble is really going to start. There will be more heads rolling in the street, more blood filling the street. It’s going to be mindless violence now: revenge.”
Michel Foucault would say that’s what happens. There’s violence, you resist it, and then there’s more violence, so you resist more and then there’s even more violence, so better not to enter the spiral in the first place. In terms of aesthetics, I think Adorno is the parallel to Foucault. Don’t dirty yourself, don’t get into the market, don’t do anything that isn’t pure, because you’ll sell your soul and then you won’t have anything to work with. But that kind of purity is a trap.
What did Schiller do? He said try something new. Try to surprise me. Do something clever, something that the opposition doesn’t get yet, but which is interesting. What is it called when you do something surprising and clever that people don’t understand yet? It’s art. It doesn’t matter if it’s visual art or one of the performing arts. It’s something new that people want to struggle with just because it’s a pleasure. There’s that lovely irritant when you deal with art. And since everyone is irritated, you don’t know what to think, you need to listen to other people, and that’s when we achieve common sense—when we can have a disinterested conversation.
Kant counted on things that already existed to stimulate us to have disinterested conversation. He knew very little about art. He wrote his aesthetics more about nature. But he was interested in artists because artists know how to make new things. He was very clear on that.
And Schiller said everyone’s an artist. We all make new things. Who doesn’t care about the way they got dressed this morning, or how they set the table, or whom they will invite for dinner? We are all performance artists, we are all chemical artists, we are all visual artists. Schiller took that very seriously. That was his remedy for the terror and violence of the French Revolution. He confronted a historical event that had been unthinkable the day before, and he didn’t flinch. He said we need more art.
AM: The museum has come in for a lot of criticism over the past century or so in art discourse. It’s seen as a symbol of authority, of dominant values, and a mausoleum for dead art. On the other hand, the museum is an important gathering place. We may not agree with what’s being shown there, but it is at least a place that we can all agree to go to look for art. There’s a value to having a mainstream conversation. What role can museums play in creating venues for cultural agents?
DS: I don’t know what museums are like in Tokyo. I can tell you what they are like almost anywhere in the United States. They cost a lot of money, so poor people don’t go. Do you know that a family of four has to spend a hundred dollars to spend an hour in a museum? Maybe they’ll spend two hours, but then they’ll get hungry and have to eat in an expensive café. It’s not an affordable way to spend the day with your family. So one problem is that it’s expensive. The other is that, since they don’t have the habit of going, poor people just don’t go, even if you give them a free pass. They don’t know what they would do in such a place. They think the museum belongs to the white folks—because poverty in the United States is color coded. So museums here are busy trying to figure out how to bring people together so they can have those conversations.
As you know, I have a mission in the world, which is to teach reading and writing at a high level so that everyone feels they can engage, they feel smart, and they are prepared to have a good job. And, as is outlined in The Work of Art in the World, we can do this through the arts-based literacy program Pre-Texts. We have an important Pre-Texts program in Nairobi, Kenya. One of the ghettos there has a large population of teenagers and adolescents, half of whom are clinically depressed. What do you do in one of the poorest neighborhoods you can imagine, where there is a stigma against mental illness, where people have no money to pay a shrink even if they wanted to see one, and where there are no shrinks? My young colleague Tom Osborn knows what to do. He does Pre-Texts. Because when you tell teenagers to play with a book that they hate, remake it, dance it, sing it in Swahili, do whatever they want, but stay close to the text, then they learn to read well, and they learn to make decisions. Depressed people don’t make decisions; they think the world goes by without them. But artists know that they make decisions. They make decisions and then they want to communicate their art. So the adolescents in Kibera, Nairobi, are pulling themselves out of depression simply by being the kind of everyday artists that Schiller said we all are.
In that sense, I think the museum is a great convening place for teachers and students who are having trouble at school. Not so long ago we developed a new Pre-Texts activity at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in conjunction with the exhibition “Henry James and American Painting,” held in 2017–18. It turns out that Henry James had been a painter before he decided that he wrote better than he painted. But he was friends with all the major American painters of the period, and the exhibition was full of his buddies—paintings by them, paintings of them, landscapes, views of cities.
We had a very heterogeneous group, ranging from immigrants to tourists and a couple of retired English teachers. Most of the participants that day had English as a third or fourth language. We selected three pages from The Golden Bowl to read together. If you’ve ever read Henry James, then you know that his sentences look like French sentences, which means they go on for half a page. And we read that out loud, then we went to the gallery and—we just made this up on the fly—each of us adopted a painting, and decided what passage from the three pages we had just read best related to that painting and why. I would bring you to my painting and tell you why: because of the mood, because of the brush strokes. And in doing that, the participants got the beautiful rhythms and texture of the text too.
We called it the “amoeba tour,” because the group stretched this way and that as it moved through the whole gallery. There was no boss, but we were all leaders. That was a beautiful example of Pre-Texts where leadership was shared, not dissolved, and each one of us took great pride in making the connection and getting everyone to look at what we wanted to feature.
AM: So you’re reading the text against the work, and vice versa?
DS: Yes. And this year we even did a virtual amoeba tour! I lead a course in museum studies for museum docents. Their question is “How do you use a museum to teach?” We worked with the virtual catalogue for the Harvard Art Museum. The reading was the “Panopticism” chapter from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, because it’s about how 17th-century countermeasures to the plague helped produce a society of total control.
One of the students paired Jan van de Velde II’s 17th-century print Landscape with Gallows with a passage that describes how people were summoned as spectators, which is an important part of the text that you might have missed on previous readings. Another student picked a plate from Goya’s Los Caprichos (1797–98) that ties in to a very relevant passage about shame as punishment. Another chose Josephy Beuys’s Felt Suit (1970). Even doing the tour virtually, everyone really got into the connections. The level of rereading of this text via images was deep, touching on themes such as the unruly body, how prison fails to eliminate crime, and the beauty of the punishing tools, or the art of punishing.
So you can go to any school and say to a teacher, show me the book that everybody’s having trouble with—it could be in Japanese or English, it could be chemistry, it doesn’t matter—let’s take that very book that everyone hates and use it to do an amoeba tour. See what happens!
"Nothing Could Be Done About It" from Los Capichos, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (G8453), Harvard Art Museums Collections Online
"The problem, then, is the following: how is it that, in the end, it was the third that was adopted? How did the coercive, corporal, solitary, secret model of the power to punish replace the representative, scenic, signifying, public, collective model? Why did the physical exercise of punishment (which is not torture) replace, with the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs of punishment and the prolix festival that circulated them?"
– Michel Foucault, from
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
AM: With the virtual tour, your students essentially curated a notional exhibition on the “Panopticism” chapter. In the case of the in-person amoeba tour, where you’re encountering something that’s already on display, it becomes almost a decuratorial intervention that scrambles the narrative framework constructed by the curator. It’s a reminder how, for as much as institutional spaces may discipline us, we are capable of inventing work-arounds—or walk-arounds, or woke-arounds, perhaps—to that discipline.
DS: You say you can scramble the meaning of a curated show. My fantasy is to tell the students to go to gallery X, spend 10–15 minutes just roaming around, and then decide which object, painting, or sculpture you are going to adopt to talk about the chemistry lesson. Because this is what we know about pedagogy: If you don’t discover something for yourself, you don’t learn it. If you are shown something, you either resist, or find it boring, or you get it and then forget it. But if the students have a mission—oh, I have to adopt an artwork for my chemistry lesson—they will really look at things.
My other fantasy is to create a Fluxus movement with Pre-Texts. Come join this crazy group of artists, where everybody does their own thing: one does murals, the other cuts paper, another braids hair, and I cook, whatever. We’re all doing Fluxus and we get together to show each other our projects, but part of the work is to use Pre-Texts in our arts. We dance with Pre-Texts, we paint with Pre-Texts, braid hair with Pre-Texts. Because one art form can interpret another art form. And if the art form we start with happens to be a text, it doesn’t matter which genre we use. Everyone does their own art, but we teach kids how to read and write.
AM: This reminds me of the question of where the canon is headed: Is it possible to have common sense at a time when the canon is being reshaped and pulled in so many different directions? Obviously, if you’re in Japan, for example, then you’re trying to keep up with your own Japanese canon, the broader East Asian canon, and the Euro-American canon, along with everything else, and there are inevitable slippages. In the United States and Europe, there are very necessary social-justice oriented reconceptualizations of the canon taking place now, but that also changes the reference points for people. Since we brought up Foucault, has the canon been replaced by a freer form of archive or episteme?
DS: Here’s another reason to invite students to read like artists and not like scholars: When you read like a scholar, you’re joining the club of scholars. Artists don’t join anything. Artists say, “Yeah, I have to read Heart of Darkness, that racist book. Let me show you what I’m going to do with that.” So it doesn’t matter what book you give them. You can wait for the major changes in the canon and still do progressive teaching, because you tell the students to play with the book, to take their revenge on it.
Look, if I had to eliminate every racist or sexist book I’ve ever read, I would have nothing in my hands! You have to read with some irony and some revenge. I remember a theater piece called I’m Not Your Uncle, which turned Uncle Tom’s Cabin on its head. Here is Tom on stage holding baby Eva, who is sick, and he says to the audience, “What should I do with her?” And somebody said, “Take her to the hospital.” And somebody else said, “Drop her,” and he did! So there are ways of having one’s revenge with these books when you’re thinking like an artist.
AM: What is the scope for being a cultural agent or carrying out Pre-Texts? In the contemporary art world, we tend to associate educational initiatives with institutions—the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, documenta, the Venice Biennale—and that affects how we conceive of what is possible. Are you not so dependent on institutions?
DS: I am of course dependent on institutions. If I can’t work with schools, if I can’t work with ministries of culture, I don’t have a base. You mention documenta. This year Pre-Texts will be part of documenta fifteen, which is essentially dedicated to artist collectives and community-based arts. So that’s a horizon to acknowledge.
But if I worked as a curator in those museums you mention and used my best judgment as a connoisseur of art in my work, it wouldn’t change my judgment of an exhibition to use it as a space for Pre-Texts. Why would it? We didn’t ask the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to hold an exhibit on Henry James. Had it been an exhibit on nineteenth-century landscape art, I could have still said let’s read some Henry James, or let’s read some travelogue, or let’s read something that has nothing to do with those paintings! I mean, how much does Foucault’s essay have to do with Beuys’s Felt Suit? The trick of thinking like and with artists is to make those metaphoric bridges.
If we ask kids to use your exhibit to make a joke of the chemistry lesson, that means they have to read the chemistry lesson in order to make a joke. It’s an extra activity, but it doesn’t change the work of the curator. It puts it to yet another use. There will be people who know art and are interested in art who will come to see the exhibit for its own sake with nothing added. But there are many people who don’t go to museums. How do you say the museum belongs to you and you should use it, and let’s start with the text that you hate, let’s make a joke of that?
"This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint... But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians... The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."
Felt Suit, Joseph Beuys (1995.231.A-B), Harvard Art Museums Collections Online
– Michel Foucault, from
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
AM: In Bilingual Aesthetics, first published in 2004, you argue that bi- and multilingualism improves civil society. What are the contours for linguistic hegemony in our world today? We tend to think of English as the globally dominant language, when in fact China has more than a billion Mandarin speakers, and they’re not necessarily being accounted for in those discussions. Japan has some 120 million Japanese speakers, which is by no means a hegemonic number, but it’s enough to create its own universe, which then reinforces language barriers between Japan and the rest of the world.
DS: Yes, it’s those universes that don’t need the rest of the world. If you want to look for monolingual people, they are in the center of empires. The Russians. The English. It’s the people at the borders who are multilingual.
I’ve had so many conversations with people in the United States who say that some people have a talent for language, others do not. And I say to them, “Is everyone on the West coast of Africa smarter than you are then? Are all Eastern Europeans just brilliant?” Show me an Eastern European or a West African who doesn't speak three, four, half-a-dozen languages. It’s a consequence of being conquered and reconquered and cut up and pasted together over centuries. You learn to survive by multiplying the languages you can manage. There’s a certain disadvantage to linguistic hegemony—an intellectual and aesthetic deficiency.
GA: Is the potential of Bilingual Aesthetics most fully realized then where there’s a clear power imbalance between a dominant language and other languages that are being integrated into that context through immigration and other forms of exchange?
DS: Probably. As I say with the chemistry lesson, I think that the energy of resentment or revenge is a real energy for art making. It’s not nice to talk about feeling angry or vengeful, but if you think about the artists we admire, or the moments when we feel really creative or disruptive, some of that is the energy that goes into bilingual creativity. It’s about making a joke on the boss, who won’t get it.
HANNA HIRAKAWA: I’m interested in the distinctions between “sympathy” and “empathy” and how they play out in your thinking. How do you differentiate the two?
DS: It’s an important question, thank you for asking it. The word empathy has become very popular, very widely used in education, in therapy, in politics. But think about it. What does it mean?
HH: I would say with “sympathy” you’re with another person and you’re listening to them, but their emotions or thoughts are primary, whereas with “empathy” it’s more like you are stepping into the other person’s emotions and thoughts.
DS: That’s exactly right. Do you find that there is an ethical or political difference in those approaches?
HH: Yes, in the sense that “sympathy” is more respectful of the other person’s thoughts or emotions, even if you’re not completely objective toward them.
DS: I agree with you. So when people, in their very best intentions, exercise empathy and say to someone else “I know how you’re feeling, I feel what you’re feeling,” that sounds generous, right? But when men say that to women, how do we feel? How can you dare to say that you know what I’m feeling? Be with me, help me, care about me—but to tell me that you know how I’m feeling?
What happens when white people say that to Black people? Or even when adults say that to children? If you ask parents whether they really understand the feelings of their children, honest parents will say they don’t. They love their children, they’re devoted to their children, but to be able to step into those feelings? Impossible. That’s the ethical distance that we lose when people just run into empathy. It’s a real loss. It’s a loss of autonomy.
In one sense, there are two people with feelings who care about each other, and in the other, there’s only one set of feelings, and if there’s only one set of feelings, then I can make decisions for you. So it reinscribes the colonial “I know better than you,” the patriarchal “I know better than you.” It’s a dangerous road, because it feels magnanimous or noble, but it’s actually self-aggrandizing. So thank you very much for asking an important question and then answering it for us.
XIYUE YAN: I have a question about how the bilingual aesthetics of code-switching works across dialects, rather than different languages. There are many dialects in China, some of which are essentially foreign languages to each other. In your book you touch on the tensions between Spanish and native languages in Latin America and standard American English and African-American English in the United States. Are those sociocultural power structures also in operation in a context like China?
DS: China is such an interesting place, because people think that it’s all one language over there, but there are many different languages that are tied together by the writing system. There’s a wonderful movie by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, A City of Sadness (1989), which is set in Taiwan during the transition from Japanese colonial rule to the arrival of the Kuomintang government-in-exile from mainland China. I love that movie because the hero is in fact the written Chinese language. The protagonist is a deaf photographer who writes beautiful poems, beautiful love letters, and everyone can read them, from other Taiwanese to mainland Chinese to Japanese speakers. For me the glue, the magic there, which also extends from past to present, is the written language.
So China is a special case, because you have a lingua franca that is written, not oral. It’s a wonderful thing! I imagine you could do really creative studies based on the recognition that the spoken languages are different while the written languages are one. Where are the theater pieces, the films, the stories where people pass each other notes but can’t talk to each other, or purposely make a mistake? Anyone who speaks more than one Chinese language is playing those games. Do a show about how complicated this is and how it’s the visual that makes China possible!
In other countries dictators give harangues in the forced, consolidated national language. Italy had to destroy all of its dialects to get consolidated. France did the same. The Bretons still don’t want to say they’re French. But the diversity of China’s languages is possible because of its beautiful writing system.
Reproduction of a Mycenaean Dagger, (1926.32.25), Harvard Art Museums Collections Online
"The art of punishing, then, must rest on a whole technology of representation. The undertaking can succeed only if it forms part of a natural mechanics. 'Like the gravitation of bodies, a secret force compels us ever towards our well-being. This impulsion is affected only by the obstacles that laws oppose to it. All the diverse actions of man are the effects of this interior tendency.' To find the suitable punishment for a crime is to find the disadvantage whose idea is such that it robs for ever the idea of a crime of any attraction. It is an art of conflicting energies, an art of images linked by association, the forging of stable connections that defy time: it is a matter of establishing the representation of pairs of opposing values, of establishing quantitative differences between the opposing forces, of setting up a complex of obstacle-signs that may subject the movement of the forces to a power relation."
– Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
QIUYU JIN: Returning to Pre-Texts, when you hold workshops at museums and schools, do only teachers and students participate, or are there volunteers as well? Do they need a minimum level of education to work with the program?
DS: We often work with volunteers, but every place is different. If I were a better administrator, we would have a more robust process. But I can mention our work in Colombia as one example. In 2016 the government forced through a peace accord with the FARC guerillas after more than half the country voted “No” in a referendum. So in Colombia today there’s a lot of tension, and some resentment, but peace is on everyone’s agenda. And the federal bank, the Banco de República, has a nationwide project called La Paz se Toma la Palabra, or Peace Speaks Up. We work with this project to train community organizers, local artists, and even mothers who have time on their hands how to promote peace by teaching high levels of reading and writing through art. We work in areas where people are not well educated, but you do not have to be well educated to be a facilitator, because a student will come to you and say, “How do you say this in English?” and then all you have to say is “Go find out and you tell me.” A good teacher says that, whether they know the answer or not. You don’t have to know very much at all, you just have to be curious and patient and have high expectations of all the children.
AM: Like Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
DS: That’s my favorite. Because ultimately the teacher is like a psychiatrist. They’re not telling the story. They’re sitting there listening. “Uh huh, tell me more. . . . And then? . . . And what do you think?” If they say much more than that, they’re not letting you develop. So don’t worry about working with people who are uneducated.
In Colombia, we met with the governor of the state of Antioquia, the capital of which is Medellin—the homicide capital of the world for many years, as you may remember. When we spoke with him about setting up workshops, he said, “I want to make something very clear right now. All of our teachers are good—both the ones who know how to read and the ones who don’t.” He was defending his teachers who don’t know how to read, because that’s what you have in the country. What are you going to do, fire them?
We have to figure out ways in which an uneducated person can support children who are getting educated. And if they become artists and curators, then it has a possibility. Otherwise they just reproduce the adults in the neighborhood, and the adults in the neighborhood are undereducated. That’s why the governor wanted to work with us.
HYESU CHO: English has a privileged position in many Asian countries. In South Korea, everyone is obligated to learn English, even though it’s not an official language. For example, everyone has to take an English test to get a job, even when the position does not require English. Many Koreans feel as if they are immigrants in the United States or some other English-speaking country, which is not solely related to the US military presence in South Korea. I think the high suicide rate is in part symptomatic of the language pressure that everyone feels. What is your opinion about the position of English in Asian countries or other postcolonial contexts?
DS: It takes your breath away to think about the suicide rates for young people across the world. Korea has one of the worst, but it’s bad in Japan too, as well as China, and no one looks at Africa. That’s why we’re working with Pre-Texts in Nairobi. You can imagine what English means in Kenya. Hundreds of years of slavery and torture basically, not just economic and political pressure. English is the enemy and everyone has to know English. Parents pressure their kids to know English in order to do well in school, otherwise they won’t get ahead, and then the kids get depressed and some of them kill themselves.
What can I say? We have to do something. Parents need to be educated about parenting, for one. But we can also make English more fun than it is now. That’s a small contribution that Pre-Texts can make. Whether in Kenya or South Korea, an arts-based approach to English learning will make kids feel like this is an opportunity. “Oh, I never get to dance, I never get to paint, but I can do it in English class!” and that may change the relationship.
It’s so interesting to think about the pressure of English, even if you don’t emigrate to the United States. We’re all diasporic citizens in this globalized world, even those of us who stay in the same place for generations.
"Landscape with Gallows, Jan van de Velde II (R15279), Harvard Art Museums Collections Online
"Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it."
– Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
KEISUKE NAKAYA: You mentioned you will be bringing Pre-Texts to this year’s documenta fifteen. What are you preparing?
DS: We will be included in the installation of the Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera. She’s working hard with the curators to develop a framework for us, because they’re taking a risk. We initially thought we would be working with a local school in Kassel to teach the science teachers what to do with art, but the opportunity never materialized. So Tania decided that we should be in her ecosystem right there in the exhibition.
Our idea is to gather 20–25 artists and have them commit to 15 hours of training across five sessions of three hours each, where we will teach each other different art forms through a text we have chosen. I don’t know for sure who will sign up or what art forms we’ll use, what text we’ll use, but it could be the birth of our new Fluxus campaign.
You know, everyone pursues their career path more or less as a fantasy. I have to say I’m beyond that. Because we can talk about the ethics of sympathy or empathy, we can talk about the imperialism of English in South Korea, we can talk about so many difficult, deep dysfunctions in the world, but the one thing I know how to do is teach people how to read and write. And I know it’s important, so I have a mission. If we can get clever, charming, brilliant artists and curators to play with us, we may have a few less suicides in the world. Maybe. It’s worth trying.