Criticality2

criticality

a conversation

Lilia Mestre & Pia Louwerens

Pia Louwerens: The notion of criticality has accompanied me throughout my research with the workgroup material practices, not in the least because of the workgroup’s initial interest in critical making. When my practice was embedded in West Den Haag (see embeddedness), one of my main questions became how to practice criticality from a position of proximity. When thinking about criticality, my frame of reference is shaped by a.pass. a.pass is an educational platform for artistic research based in Brussels (Belgium), where I participated in the post-graduate programme, and where I am currently involved as an Associate Researcher. Lilia Mestre is the artistic coordinator at a.pass. In the following, we will engage in a conversation to tease out what it actually is for us, this criticality. In preparation for our talk, we read an interview with Karen Barad, which we will refer to throughout our conversation.

Lilia, can you maybe start by saying how you think criticality is practiced at a.pass?

Lilia Mestre: We practice it in many ways. I don’t think we are very interested in critique as an end in itself, so it’s not about finding some weak spots that are most suitable for deconstruction. That would be a somewhat reductionist concept of criticality. I do think that how we approach criticality entails deconstruction, but as a means of understanding the complexity that propositions bring to the fore. What kind of clusters, lines and apparatuses surround practices, performances, texts, and research and how and what do they produce as meaning?

I like the idea of consciousness as put forward by Karen Barad, as a conscious critical view; something that creates awareness could be called critical, right? Criticality can be seen as a skill or a tool that develops a set of antennas—maybe antennas is a good metaphor. Seen this way, criticality becomes a sensitive tool, responsive to what is proposed. I see criticality as the desire to understand how to be involved.

PL: When I look up the etymology of ‘critic’ or ‘critique’, it leads to the Greek word krinein ‘to separate, decide’ which comes from a root that translates as ‘to sieve’, thus ‘discriminate, distinguish’. So, it’s an interaction with an apparatus that makes a selection, or distinguishes. Funny actually, the two-slit experiment that Karen Barad bases her theory on is a sieving experiment as well, literally. It’s the sieving that causes a diffraction pattern. According to Barad, studying the experiment doesn’t tell you anything about the thing that you sieve, but you will know something about the phenomenon, which is the sieving plus the thing that came out.

LM: Perhaps the understanding of the apparatus, whether a two-slit sieve or an artwork, makes visible what the performativity of the apparatus itself is. It’s like a mise-en-scene of the apparatus. As in the apparatus of theatre, which contains the setting, the scenario, the operation itself including the audience.

PL: There’s this really beautiful part in Barad’s book, where she wonders where the apparatus ends, and describes how there are no edges to it. Even the person seeing that mise-en-scene is part of the apparatus, the building that we’re in is part of the apparatus, the printer that prints out the result is part of the apparatus, the people that funded the whole thing are part of it, the people sweeping the hallway. When you see things this way, there’s this constant expansion.

For me criticality holds this tension exactly, of a noting of difference and selection on the one hand, and constant expansion through awareness on the other. The selection or cut that it makes causes things to appear, and excludes other things.

Can you give an example how this resonates in a.pass?

LM: In a.pass, the participants are invited to be part of the institutional apparatus, somehow. They are part of the development of the practices generated in the institution. We practice it in the sense that a.pass is not a stable structure. We have many institutional questions that arise from the participants’ practices. We can take this one: ‘what is criticality?’ and your invitation to write together. If we dig into this: How is this going to change our relations? Not just the existing relationship between the two of us but also the relation between the institutions that are part of this publication, like West, the Workgroup and all the others participating. I think that a.pass as an institution is shaped through the research practices that are present each moment, but also through how people deal with them and what their desire for criticality is, how much they want to move through it or not. The capacity of listening. The desire to be confronted or not. I think all these things are determining what happens in a.pass and how content and infrastructures of research are interwoven.

PL: This idea that one can participate as a mode of criticality, the idea of becoming part of the apparatus, is something that I clearly recognize as a practice in a.pass. In art education on often finds practices of critique for which the intentions of the artist have to be determined, to compare them to the work that either deviates from or falls in line with that intention. I was thinking that what seems different to me in the forms of feedback and critique that I experienced in a.pass, is the invitation to participate.
I think Vladimir once explained it to me as treating the group, or thinking of the group as a sort of extension of your body as a researcher, in that you are really invited into the apparatus. In turn you always consider how you invite others into your work, making them part of it. It takes away the illusion of the object of critique as separate from yourself as a participatory subject.

LM: The sense of participation in the context of criticality is also very important if we think about the audience that we want to address. Let’s say that art is like the spectacle of phenomena, right; art exposes a certain phenomenon in certain conditions and invites people to attend through the conditions provided.
I want the invitation, for me as an audience member, to be similar to the one that you described. I want to be able to participate, which doesn’t necessarily mean active participation. But I want to know what is the invitation for me to respond and let feelings, emotions, thoughts, whatever it wants to create with me, appear. This is the potential of modifying it already, or at least to be able to be responsive to it.

How do you do that in your practice?

PL: As you know I’m very present in my work and my practice, as a subject that is an object as well. So,
I read everything both through myself and with a kind of distance. I see myself as practicing institutional critique, but it is inherently a critique of myself as part of the institution or situation. This way I hope to invite others to consider their institutional entanglements as well.

LM: This is hard and very interesting work, because ultimately, you see yourself as an apparatus already, right, with a structure that conditions your power position, paradoxes, problems, and alliances. I think it’s important to acknowledge that objects of study are complex objects and include the self and its context and background, including social class, gender, race, economic support, species, and so on.

The question is then: How can we create a soft distance which is set artificially, so it’s a real artificial one (because what the hell is real?) that enables criticality? This refers back to the baboon anecdote in the interview with Barad. A researcher of baboons decided to pretend to be a baboon—pretending became a tool to get in touch with her object of research, and actually be more objective.

I like to think of it as friendship (see artificial friendship). Friendship opens to the possibility of diffraction, as Barad calls it. Then criticality is not just about choosing or making distinctions, but it enables an accumulative process of relations that are critical in themselves. In the sense that one can think of criticality itself as being a friend. Curious friends give you tools, open and close doors for elements that are already part of it, right, that you are already entangled with but have not seen yet.

PL: I’m starting to realize now that this is a mode of making, for me. Practicing criticality creates so much material, all the time, and for me it is exciting to simply re-stage it in the place where I found it. It’s like Barad’s description of the expanded apparatus. To be with something and seeing, activating all your antennas, while taking into account how you are part of it, creates a kind of generative feedback loop, an abundance, in every singular situation. This is both a mode of criticality and source of creativity, if I may be so romantic to use that word. Now we’re back to a.pass, because I think it’s something that I got from you since you use this expression a lot, but it also really does ‘open up’—a continuous folding and unfolding.