February 2nd Recap - Part Two: Rogoff.

Part 2 - WE: Communities, Mutualities, Participations (Irit Rogoff)

Reviewing my notes from our discussion around this article, I am struck by how scattered they feel to me. I wonder whether it is because I found the article rather impenetrable or because my brain was fatigued and having trouble both thinking its own thoughts and capturing others’ at the same time.

Random flashes.
- Idea that meaning is present in the interconnectedness
- Idea of “mediality” (as opposed to reality)
- Hopeful movement from critique→criticism→criticality (proposal to define criticality as something that is moving and changing is maybe a better way to approach it than “critical standpoint” from which there are values …. because in some areas of life, lack of criticality is paralyzing and in others, certain kind of criticality has paralyzed it)
- If I try to tell a story about what I just experienced, I will miss some details; idea that audience won’t get anything unless everything is explained
- Both writers (Hickey and Rogoff) discuss their topics (beauty and community) as action and relationship, think of them as an ongoing process
- People have a fear of things being arbitrary when you talk about relativism (it doesn’t matter what I say, it’s all relative); but what we do have to land us is the social.
- Idea that we look at things differently but that the differences are not arbitrary.


Transforming the world via community cliff-jumping.
- Flash: “one does not learn something new unless one unlearns something old. Otherwise one is simply adding information and not rethinking a structure.”
- This requires a lot of risk, scary that we have to give something up and sit in limbo in order to create the kind of collective space that can actually be critical
- We have emotional attachements to the things we think are true; art as site for us to uncover and restructure our entire way of thinking (similar to psychoanalysis)
- Maybe this article is calling for psychoanalysis on a community level (re-envisioning)?
- “This is us, we who are supposed to say we as if we know what we are saying and who we are talking about”
- “The reason I would wish to think of 'art' in relation to such a 'space of appearance' is recognition that when something called 'art' becomes an open interconnective field, then the potential to engage with it as a form of cultural participation RATHER than as a form of either reification, of representation or of contemplative edification, comes into being.”
- Rather is the problematic word there (we did a lot of work with “Emancipated Spectator” to unpack the polarity between spectatorship as bad and participation as good, and here it seems we’ve moved back to “spectatorship is bad”)
- We all seem to like these ideas in theory. Does the fear enter the picture because we know we will need put these things into practice? Real-world practicalities make this desire to investigate and reimagine everything seem daunting … “I’d never get through my day, if I was always trying to reimagine how to do things.”


Call for “working with no models”.
- Is working without models about time? Political act happens in the present, no planning of space and time for it; no directionality in preparation for it.
- Constant desire for potentiality – is it born out of the fact that people are trying to protect themselves from the disappointment of whatever results when something is actually chosen or realized?
- Is the desire to keep potential open an easy way to not have to be rigorous in one’s artistic practice; a way to make excuses for not committing to anything?
- We seem to have this idea of wanting things to be organized in a rhizome-like way (decentralized), as compared to model of world as a tree (which has a base/centre). But is decentralizing control in this way related to too much potentiality?
- Maybe too much potentiality slows the process of growing one singular thing (editor’s note: to me, this is related to our discussion around relational aesthetics and the question of “what is the artist’s responsibility?”)