SYNAPSE – The International Curators’ Network is pleased to present part 1 of our interview with Jill Bennett, who will deliver Synapse’s keynote speech on April 23, 2013. Jill Bennett is a professor of experimental arts, and writer and curator. Her book Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (2012), which explores aesthetics in relationship to historical events such as 9/11 and to problems of affect, was recently published by I. B. Tauris. Also this year, Bennett released Living in the Anthropocene with Hatje Kantz Verlag as part of dOCUMENTA13′s “100 Notes, 100 Thoughts Series.” Bennett is also founding director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts (Australia) and previously founded UNSW’s Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, where she is also the Associate Dean Research at the College of Fine Arts.
SYNAPSE: For dOCUMENTA13’s 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series, you wrote a text called “Living in the Anthropocene,” where you consider some of the challenges and implications of a geological shift toward the ‘recent age of man.’ In another work, Practical Aesthetics, you’ve focused on problems of affect, eventhood, and visualization. How might these two projects relate to one another?
Jill Bennett: I’m interested in how art occupies and is shaped by events—and in the role that art plays in enabling us to understand momentous events or shifts. My book Practical Aesthetics is concerned with art in the social and political climate “post 9/11” – art that makes sense of that climate by examining its constitutive emotions and the media through which these circulate. “Living in the Anthropocene” outlines future possibilities. Both texts in effect deal with a watershed. 9/11 was self-evidently a major event with profound consequences; the Anthropocene or, more specifically, its recognition and naming, may be the catalyst for a paradigm shift – a shift in fundamental belief that changes the way we do things.
SYNAPSE: In “Living In The Anthropocene,” you mention that “art practice will be configured beyond contemporary institutional boundaries,” and explain that this will be a “transdisciplinary revolution.” How is this the case – what might the Anthropocene have to do with the institutional divisions of contemporary art?
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JB: The scope for transdisciplinary work is expanding. Problems like climate change—so called “wicked problems” with complex interdependent variables and no single technological solution—increasingly challenge conventional disciplinary methods. To generate action around these problems often involves thinking in creative ways about issues of communication, behavior, consumption, belief and so on. The grassroots role that art plays in this process has been expanding significantly, particularly with regard to sustainability. One modest example is a project I am currently involved with, called Curating Cities. Instead of presuming that art needs to be curated, it proposes that art can itself curate (literally ‘care for’) the city—but only if art ranges beyond the given spaces of public art commissions.
Art institutions will themselves transform in response to such agendas. In the same way that the trope of globalization influenced not just the content but the structure and shape of exhibitions in the last decade, the concept of the Anthropocene will impact on exhibition practice. And it will raise some fundamental questions because the principles of ecological thinking challenge the logic of high consumption productions like one-off exhibitions, which direct a whole lot of traffic to one place for a very short period of time.
SYNAPSE: How might curators and artists incorporate some of the concepts in your writing on the Anthropocene in their own exhibitions and projects?
JB: The challenge for curators is to find ways to realize ecologies but also to explore how the exhibition itself functions as part of a larger ecological system. In this regard, the recent Manifesta presented an interesting experiment in terms of its transecting geographic, geological and cultural strands. Thinking ecologically means thinking about chains of connection and legacy—not just about ‘relationality’ in the immediate sense. It means reimagining the geographic and temporal structures of exhibitions. This could, for example, entail rethinking the exhibition space as part of a lifecycle rather than as the ultimate destiny of art. This in turn opens up the question of how we encompass practice that is oriented toward external action and that continues to produce effects in the world. Joseph Beuys notwithstanding, there has always been a divide between gallery art and “social practice”, partly because social practice is not exclusively focused on art as a fully resolved outcome.
SYNAPSE: How do your critical and theoretical writings bear on your practice as a curator?
JB: I am into Slow Curating (like Slow Food!). In other words, I’m not exclusively focused on delivering shows. My curating is always linked into emergent collaborative, cross-disciplinary research projects that run over several years. I think art galleries are very important sites of experimental production—but we shouldn’t take their form and function for granted. New ideas don’t always fit elegantly into pre-configured institutional spaces and we should go where our practice takes us.
SYNAPSE: In Practical Aesthetics, you discuss Mauss’ identification of an “obligatory expression of sentiment” and critique the tendency of certain presentations of images – in the media, in art – to oblige us to feel and express empathy or compassion. How is this different from the curator’s task, which is often likewise one of evoking, and shaping, the sentiment of viewers?
JB: The term aesthetics derives from aesthesis: sensory and affective perception. All forms of media engage us at the level of sensation and affect. Art or curatorial practice is not distinctive in this respect, except to the degree that it opens up and scrutinizes the process of engagement. In itself, promoting feeling is neither good nor bad; sympathy and sentiment can be marshaled to different ends and may or may not be accompanied by critical awareness. In the book, I discuss certain instances where sympathy, compassion and indignation become self-righteous, even pernicious—and where an engagement with art can lead to something more productive. Precisely because art deals in affect and sensation, it can be adept at uncovering the workings of media in this regard.
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Jill Bennett