Alien Art

For art today, […] the task lies in finding its relevance in the midst of the political, demographic, and psycho-social transformations –relative to the shifting and crossing of collective and individual boundaries. Shifts in external boundaries (ethnic and state borders, for example, North-South, East-West) are closely bound up with migrations and the crossing of these boundaries. The face of Europe and North America in particular is being transformed in this way. These in turn impose themselves on shifts in internal boundaries –ideas, beliefs, ideologies, languages, metaphors, slogans– psychological traces, lines, both shortcuts and roadblocks, running across the individual territories of human minds. The migratory movements within each of us necessarily include crossing one important internal boundary, the line drawn between the person one has been but no longer is and the person one will become, thus establishing, by transgression, an extraterritorial demilitarized zone, which is where the alien feels most at home. Coming to terms with the varying directions of these internal shifts and crossings (and their corresponding demilitarized zones) is a complicated process, but the mapping of these zones constitutes one of the most important social movements taking place today […]

[…] The artist who would dare make a contribution to this present, understood as a home where past and future dwell together (Benjamin), as well as to the history of this present and future (Nietzsche, Foucault), would need to learn how to operate much like a nomadic Sophist in a migrant polis, providing new tools of language for it (in the performative sense of metaphoric speech-acts) for aliens alienated from themselves for lack of language. Like the Sophist in ancient Greece, the new Sophist, as a practitioner of democracy in that politically guaranteed but practically nonexistent empty space called "public," must practically recreate an agora or forum each time she or he wishes to speak or listen. Even in a democracy, the liberal state or corporate estate fills this space with its own "publicity" (Habermas), instead of leaving it for the "free communication of thoughts and opinions" (Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1791), becoming in effect a "tyrant of opinion" (Tocqueville). The Sophist must be prepared for an adversarial role in going beyond corrupted forms of communication. In a democracy the most important right is the right to representation. Neither a pedagogue nor a demagogue, the Sophist is an interrupteur, a "switch" always ready to open rather that close the communications circuit. There must always be room for this empty space, open to a multiplicity of expression and interpretation (Lefort). Alien art is this empty space, existing only between the lines. […]


Krzystof Wodiczko. Critical Vehicles. Writing, Projects, Interviews (Cambridge-London: The MIT Press, 1999): 24-25.

 

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Voices of the tower, 1996

 

 

Krzysztof Wodiczko, the homeless projection: a proposal for the city of New York, 1986

 

Krzysztof Wodiczko, proyección pública, 1983