SYNAPSE – The International Curators’ Network is pleased to present part 2 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: How critical are you of the notion of an Anthropocene? Do you accept its existence with hesitation, or do you see this paradigm shift as something extant. Further, is this something with inevitable consequences?
JB: The naming of the Anthropocene is a bold rhetorical gesture. It’s one thing to present scientific evidence that human activity is impacting on Earth System Structure, another to say that we are living in an era of our own making, and that this era has been emergent for 250 years. This really does impact on the way we think about history, culture and spheres that are not conventionally defined in relation to the natural world. What it might mean in the immediate future for cultural disciplines is that our goals and priorities shift, and with them our organizational structures and ways of doing things.
SYNAPSE: In Practical Aesthetics, you devote a section to the ‘virtual event,’ pointing out Thomas Demand’s project of “inhabiting and…reconfiguring the historical event” in his piece Poll (2001)
JB: Yes, this is a key work—a very successful work in terms of its capacity to describe the core features of a momentous event. I love the idea that the essence of such an event can be expressed in the medium of Post-it Notes! Demand captures with some subtlety the way that history turns ultimately on a very limited set of possibilities. Poll is the event distilled into its most bureaucratic and constraining features. I would argue that aesthetics is ‘practical’ to the extent that it holds out the possibility of thinking around constraints.
SYNAPSE: How is the Internet changing the image? You mention in Practical Aesthetics that “exhibition space…is material” – do you see a key difference in the materiality of ‘actual’ objects and the materiality of images in virtual spaces?
JB: Yes, but in the exhibition context, continuities are as interesting as material differences. The relationship of media ecologies to material objects opens up exhibiting possibilities, particularly in terms cross-platform relationships. For one thing, the question of how a continuing ‘social practice’ may be captured within an exhibition framework is potentially addressed in the structure of the relational database.
I am also very interested in atmosphere– another ‘Anthropocenic’ topic. Atmosphere is an ‘immaterial’ domain that has provided cultural disciplines with a rich metaphorics for describing the social experience of space. Events are all about atmosphere but traditionally we haven’t thought much about how this tangible quality is produced or perceived. These days, however, architects are concerned with designing micro-climates; at UNSW I am involved in a 3D immersive interactive project that models atmospheric phenomena in virtual space. Such projects—and, indeed, the experience of immersion—offer a way to imagine and conceptualise immaterial dimensions of environment.
SYNAPSE: What kinds of currents in curatorial practice do you find valuable or intriguing?
JB: I found the last two documentas interesting in terms of the way they each in different ways (and with varying degrees of critical success) attempted to trace the trajectory of objects and materials through both exhibition space and geographic and temporal space. I would also locate Patrick Keiller’s The Robinson Institute (Tate Britain, 2012) in this current. This show embodies a pedestrian exploration of the English landscape, folding out into a rich historical, political, geographic description. It incorporates Keiller’s video work, which sets up the narrative of a fictional explorer, but around this he curates eclectically from the Tate collection (Turner, Gursky, Fontana, the Situationists and so on), bringing in maps, meteorites, found objects. The premise resonates more with emergent ecological writing than with curatorial methods but there is something very contemporary about the mix.
SYNAPSE: Are there specific artworks, particularly in an exhibition like documenta13, that you feel serve as examples of the reorganization of institutional art practice mentioned in “Life in the Anthropocene”? Can this form of reorganization – this paradigm shift – happen ‘within’ the institutions themselves, or must it come from the ‘outside,’ in other disciplines and fields?
JB: Pierre Huyghe’s work for documenta13 would be a choice example – but even the ill-fated attempt to present the El Chaco meteorite as art (in the event, the correspondence and the push-back from local communities enriched that whole presentation). Another interesting ambition of documenta13 was the inclusion of various scientific instruments. In the end this borrowing can’t be one sided. It must be generative. The point is not to aestheticize science – to transpose it into our exhibiting structures; it is rather to do something with science.
Ultimately institutional change occurs only when there is a confluence of social, economic and artistic interest driving change. On the other hand, as I say in “Living in the Anthropocene”, we don’t chose to address something of the magnitude of a paradigm shift; it addresses us, obliging us to rethink our ways of operating. Some institutions notice this – others are oblivious.
It can be exciting from the point of view of an institution or of one’s own practice to discover the capacity we have for adaptation, collaboration, invention and so on. The challenge from ‘outside’ should not be met as an imposition or thought of in terms of subjection to a fixed agenda. Just as science brought into the gallery should not be reduced to a mute object of fascination, aesthetics in the wider sphere must not be subservient or instrumentalized but should actively assert its capacity to render the world intelligible in ways that are not envisaged in science.
Clik here to view.
Jill Bennett