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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.
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Krzysztof Wodiczko, Voices of the tower,
1996
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