Ways of Knowing Roundtable
In the lead up to opening of the exhibition, Ways of Knowing, Walker curator Rosario Güiraldes sat down with art critic Claire Bishop, artist and writer Nicolás Guagnini, and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina for a roundtable discussion around the themes of artists, research, and knowledge.
Rosario Güiraldes
I wanted to give each of you an opportunity to talk about how the main ideas of this exhibition intersect with your work. Claire, I’d like to start with you. Your essay “Information Overload,” published in the April 2023 issue of Artforum, was important to the conception of this exhibition.
Claire Bishop
Most of my art critical writing derives from a disconnect between my experience of art and its supporting discourse. In the case of the essay you mention, which I began writing around 2016, I was seeing research-based art in biennials, nonprofits, even Chelsea galleries. I was aware of a formal language being deployed: an aggregative structure with material in vitrines— ephemera, documents, texts, labeled images—and a preference for outmoded media. Much of it had an earnest, intellectual tone. Yet the discourse around this work tended to focus on the subject matter of each installation (its research topic), not on the visual strategies of display. At the same time, I became aware that my capacity to take in this kind of art was decreasing. Was my own capacity for attention reaching a limit, or was this a broader cultural condition?
I remembered experiencing research-driven, fragmented installation art in the 1990s and how excited and stimulated I was to piece together all the different elements. Twenty years later, I was primarily experiencing unease, even panic. Why was this? I understood that this change in visual literacy had to be connected to shifts in the attention economy over the last thirty years: the proliferation of the internet and digital media, the interminable streams of social media, the effort of having to visually block out ads and pop-ups, and the transformation of our news consumption from punctual to perpetual (the very word feed implies saturation and bloating). In short, the way in which we were reading outside the gallery was affecting how we came to read art inside the gallery. And this wasn’t just in the art—it was the curatorial wall texts too.
Nicolás Guagnini
When I started making art in 1977, I was eleven, and the requirement for being an artist was to learn how to draw. When I started teaching art in the early aughts at Barnard College at Columbia University, the college’s requirement was to be able to write a statement.
There has been a discursive shift. Artists must be able either to express what they want to do in an articulate manner or to clearly represent an identity that will replace that discourse and be easily discoursed by a third party in turn. So this is what brought me to both an understanding and a critique of the proposition implicit in the exhibition title Ways of Knowing.
In addition, my generation and the generations that preceded mine in Argentina were all modeled on the figure of Jorge Luis Borges, who was first and foremost a literary critic. I’ve grown up—like the Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby, like Dan Graham, and like many of the people who are my real or imaginary mentors—with the idea that galleries are not good. You have to open your own gallery. Criticism is not good. You have to write your own criticism. Pedagogy is not good. You have to make your own pedagogy. Perhaps because of Dan Graham’s mentorship and his always-negative relationship to sociology, in the past decade or so, I’ve been increasingly more interested in anthropology as a discipline that has to deal with the entwined problem of otherness and knowledge.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
The way I became a curator included my total surprise when I started working with Luis Camnitzer and learned that artists could actually get involved in extremely detailed research. Being an outsider to the art world and learning that artworks like Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola project could involve even rudimentary research not only convinced me to continue in this field but also made me understand that I could be useful. It was the fact that there was a certain proper production of knowledge and a challenging of stereotypes and a questioning of myths that convinced me to stay in this field. And it really had to do with the potential of installation art as a space of study and examining and viewing.
I still understand the exhibition space as a space of thinking and reading, a part of seeing and feeling. In a certain way, I am absolutely culpable of having an intellectualized bias toward what I work on as a curator. I’ve been working for a decade for a contemporary art museum that is also part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico City. Maybe that bias of trying to connect with practices that have a possibility of interaction with an academic community is also something that solidifies the tie between art and research.
I am totally guilty of what Claire is denouncing, but I’m going to try to introduce an alibi. I was recently reading a book by Xavier Nueno called El arte del saber ligero: Una breve historia del exceso de información.1 The author demonstrates convincingly that the concern about the excess of information has existed since classical Roman times. There were real concerns about the proliferation of commentary that was part of the process of editing texts in the Renaissance in order to produce the canon of classical writing. Nueno demonstrates the ambivalence of the Enlightenment toward producing encyclopedias and dictionaries; scholars wanted to avoid creating an unending number of books. So it’s a theme of Western thinking that there is a moment when we are not able to deal with the horrible weight of history. I agree with Claire that the fact that this particular daughter of conceptualism has become the most prevalent suggests either that it has to produce a canon and refine it and get somewhere else or that it will probably start instilling a mild sense of terror.
RG
Cuauhtémoc, what you just said brings me to my next question, which is about the historically fluctuating relationship between art and knowledge. In his book Knowledge beside Itself, Tom Holert has written that the establishment of the first art academies in seventeenth-century Europe led to a formalization between artistic practice and scientific or literary knowledge.2 As he notes, however, an overly close association of art with knowledge has been viewed with skepticism throughout history, with art theories emphasizing the autonomy of art consistently rejecting the equating of art with knowledge. What factors might have caused the relationship between art and knowledge to shift once more? Is it related to a crisis in the Western system of knowledge production? What might art teach us about this relationship and more broadly about knowledge?
NG
That is the question. The big critical book on the futility and accumulation of knowledge is of course Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet [1881]. In this book two middle-class clerks purport to synthesize all of human knowledge. They fail and come to ridiculous conclusions.
Claire’s critique is unquestionable. It is impossible to absorb the quantity of information in much of today’s research-based art. Cuauhtémoc proposes that it is a Western problem. He says that the very structure and nature of information itself is to be excessive and unknowable, but to Claire’s point, there is a separation between knowledge and information. There is a threshold between these two fuzzy categories. There is a balance between what is valued as knowledge and what is not. How does that apply to an artwork? Is that the criteria for deciding what is a good artwork?
CB
You can go around in circles trying to differentiate knowledge and information, and it’s very tempting to do that. But I don’t find it a useful exercise, because both terms are linchpins of a neoliberal knowledge economy. But I just want to pause and say that I’m worried that my essay reads like a denunciation, because I prefer it to be seen as a problematization!
I see the essay asking questions: How do spectators engage with the artistic presentation of information? What has happened to attention as a result of ubiquitous digitalization? How can artworks be mapped onto broader intellectual shifts, like the relationship to truth (which has done a U-turn from the 1990s, when it was denigrated by poststructuralism, to the 2010s, when it has been fully redeemed by the left in response to right-wing disinformation)? I’m less interested in denouncing contemporary art than in charting how artists’ relationship to knowledge and information reflect intellectual shifts that show the entanglement of digital technology and capitalism more broadly.
One of the many post-COVID phenomena noticeable in contemporary art is an explosion of interest in alternative epistemologies. This has arisen in tandem with the rise of decolonization discourse and the perceived failures of Western enlightenment rationality. We see any number of exhibitions and performances fascinated with non-Western spirituality, with shamanism, with the ceremonial, the ritual, the esoteric, with healing and care, and many other “ways of knowing.” Importantly, these practices prioritize embodiment and entrainment, rather than the verbal and the textual. All of which is to say that this decade is seeing yet another shift in the artistic relation to knowledge. This kind of neo-ancestralism signals the end of a certain phase of research-based art, which means that it’s an interesting moment to be holding this exhibition and thinking about what lies ahead.
CM
Contemporary art in institutional settings is currently providing space for a number of practices performed or produced by artists that would have been described as culture in a previous era rather than being artistic in a classical sense. That transformation relates to the fact that we have a change of participants in the art world. Aside from what Claire is describing quite accurately as a fascination with the idea of another epistemology outside of Western rationality, there is also the fact that we have different accounts of history coming from different minoritarian identities. These include participants from Native nations and gender-nonconforming identities, and these and many other voices are in conversation. The connection to the internet is key. A lot of artworks are processing contemporary anxieties. The complete crisis of the nation-state is a very important one. Others include the transformation of modern capitalism and the impact of technology on our ways of living, which is extreme. We cannot even pretend to underscore sufficiently how much and how quickly that’s changing everything.
So what we have, borrowing from a concept I learned about from Adam Lerner, is a new salon. Adam was thinking about and activating through practice the idea that we are now doing something like the gatherings that French aristocrats would organize in the evening. You have people actually performing, talking, discussing, a formalized space for the circulation of ideas, images, and power. So rather than having the traditional viewer, the viewer of modernism, we have returned to a situation in which we are trying to evoke something like a society with participants carrying political positions and their own specific knowledges.
There’s a sense in which I feel that the art world or the art museum is akin to a refugee camp for forms of academic thinking that are not entirely legitimate in the university world. The art museum in particular is now occupying what used to be the space of the fine arts for these other interactions.
And in that sense it doesn’t seem extravagant that forms of artistic practice characterized by trying to process information find accommodation in the museum as well. A lot of what artists do is to give an experiential character to these arid, sometimes hard-to-find speculative or blatantly unbelievable accounts. There is an attempt to produce a concrete experience on the basis of a history of art.
RG
Claire, I wanted to ask you about installation art and how “Information Overload” and your thinking and previous writing are connected. In the essay you describe research-based art as an accumulation of materials— graphs, charts, videos—a lot of stuff. And in this exhibition there are many discrete artworks and individual bodies of work in traditional mediums. There are series of photo- graphs or drawings; there are moving-image works and large-scale installations. How did your writing on installation art inform your thinking about research-based art? Are they in fact one and the same? And then, following from that, do you think that works in traditional mediums are at odds with how you define research-based art?
CB
My definition of installation art is quite simple: any gathering of dispersed objects in a space that come together as a single work. But the question of what constitutes an installation was already falling apart when I published my book in 2005.3 The unity of installation art had been put under pressure by relational aesthetics and its openness to different temporalities and socialities. None of those artists were using the word installation to describe their work—everything was a project. Form was delayed and postponed rather than definitive and finalized.
You’re right that I privilege installation as a mode of research-based art. Of course, there are more concise examples that have more discrete and unitary forms. But I wanted to underscore this genre’s aggregative quality, its tendency toward modular repetition and excess, in order to more clearly elaborate the type of attention it elicits (skimming and sampling).
I ignore other types of research-based art too. I decided not to deal with the film essay, which is a significant avenue of this practice. One reason is because it already has a huge literature; another is because it’s linear. By contrast, my argument about the historical emergence of research-based art centers on the shift from linearity (as seen in Conceptual art and other serial modes, like photodocumentary) to the rhizome: the spatialization of visual materials for the viewer, which mirrors the rise of hyperlinking. My example is Renée Green’s project Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93).
NG
Cuauhtémoc did an incredible job of diagnosing how the public sphere and the counterpublic sphere have collapsed. He mentions the crisis of the nation-state, the destruction of the attention span, and the impact of technology. I would like to point out the existence of three fantasies that are linked to both the crisis of the nation- state and the crisis of democracy itself as a place where the public sphere will function in a way that we suppose the legacy institutions in which we exist—for example, the Walker Art Center, academia, or the gallery system—do.
The first thing I see is that the demand on freedom of expression is not viable in society because the salon that Cuauhtémoc mentions is a kaleidoscopic fractal salon. In the eighteenth-century salon, there were limited numbers of participants belonging to the aristocracy in a room. In the contemporary salon there are echo chambers that are global. That in turn creates a demand that the university realize democratic freedom of speech, and there’s a demand that the museum realize the question of authentic experience.
Those two demands are fantasies. We have seen in the crisis of museums and universities that these demands made a concrete limit. And then there’s the third fantasy, which is the fantasy of the other outside the West, the fantasy of the original. The fantasy of otherness would be that there are original things and original peoples and original epistemologies that are completely outside the West and that we are going to find them and present them and that they have a level of truth that will provide us with an experience.
And thirty or forty years after Néstor García Canclini’s notion of hybridity or Kenneth Frampton’s ideas on architecture, we have Rosario’s exhibition, in which perhaps the organizing principle for presenting this way of knowledge happens to be primarily a grid. I don’t know that any form of knowledge consumption, distribution, and classification represents the West more than the grid. This is to point out that conversations will be a lot more fruitful if we don’t think that there is an absolute other, that there will be an authentic experience, and that the university will actually provide freedom of expression. We should work perhaps with the reality of this collapse of the public sphere and the counterpublic sphere.
CM
The difference between the public sphere and the salon is that in the salon freedom of speech is not applied in the same way. What is interesting about the salon is that there’s a general rule that is beginning to fail in precisely dogmatic conversations, which is the idea of curiosity. So curiosity animates a lot of the works that are being considered, in the sense that they tend not to be so partisan or argumentative as others that Rosario could have chosen.
Another aspect that is interesting is that, I would argue, this exhibition is not a collection of identities; there’s nothing of the fantasy of absolute otherness. There are moments of not even knowledge or specific knowledge coming through some of the works, but in reality there’s no arguing outside of certain strategies or rules of art. Those are the elements of that modulated encounter. But my main point probably has to do with the feeling that the standards of these spaces are not to be defined by the ideas of liberal democracy. Because in the end the space of argumentation is not expected to lead to decision making.
Our world is being reformed by the progressive demands coming from inclusivity and the #MeToo move- ment. The museum world, particularly in the United States, feels very advanced in relation to other institutions. Until now, beyond the demands for fairness and representa- tion, for changing the outlook of institutions and their staffs, there isn’t a clear idea of where you want to get. Independent of that, I would argue that there is a sense in which the institution’s change of outlook is moving a certain political sphere of representation. And there has been an effect in that regard. So maybe I’m basically saying, yes, there’s no total freedom of representation, of speech, but nonetheless there’s a certain attempt not to rule in a partisan sense.
RG
As you were talking, Cuauhtémoc, I was thinking two things. The first relates to representation. In the script of the work of Cabello/Carceller, there’s a moment when one of the characters talks about this moment of overrepresentation and whether we need to overrepresent ourselves within institutions, because we’re talking about this new paradigm or this new model of institution or public sphere that is still being created.
Of course, starting to think about this interest in research led me to think about its roots as a practice that was so entangled with the colonial project and with colonial expansion and imperialism. The Maori educator Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote a seminal book in which she discusses a shared sentiment among Indigenous communities that research is the dirtiest word there has ever been.4 And so that needs somehow to be wrestled with. What does it mean and how does that history inform our discussion?
Many of the artists whose work is included the show are not from the global north or Western qua Western. There are a lot of artists from the global south, from Central and South America, from Asia and Africa, also Native artists. And so this question about research in their way of describing their work was very predominant. I’m interested in what that means in relationship to reclaiming a term that is burdened with this historical baggage. So I wanted to think about this question of counterresearch. How might a notion of counterresearch help us think about some of the artworks or practices represented in the exhibition?
CM
Cabello/Carceller’s video about Erauso is in my view a masterpiece of a certain genre. The work has two screens, which create a diptych. This form addresses the question of the grid. They are alluding to the idea of a polyptych. And then they are also suggesting the duplicity of the narrative that goes from the past to the present and then to the future. If we are going to talk about the demand of research in art, this will involve challenging academic knowledge and other established forms of knowledge. In Cabello/Carceller’s work, the viewer is challenged to learn through modes of historical thinking that are extremely innovative and demanding. The artists raise these questions: What is the relationship between gender and postcolonial histories? What is the condition of gender history? What does it mean to bring research outside the expectations of academia, of distance?
Smith’s book is extremely important, and there is a serious concern with research and its relationship to colonialism and imperialism and capitalism. It is true that research is power, but it’s also a modality of the powers to be. She’s not advocating for the elimination of research; she’s trying to open Indigenous research or bicultural research or at least research that is made in relation to the needs and the positions of Indigenous communities. As a Maori, she’s right in bringing up the question of the necessary bias of research.
Many of the works in the show touch on something that I would call supplementary research. In the case of Gala Porras-Kim, there is a certain body of knowledge and a tradition of scientific archeology, and she develops methodologies that are parasitic and that extend and disarm those archeological arguments and modes of representation and produce a different set of representations
So the production of that second narrative is the actual knowledge product. She’s not content to just be critical in the sense of looking at the possible failures of existing research. She adds something that actually goes in the line of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s useless effort. There’s a certain idea that the accumulation of knowledge can be supplemented so as to turn it in a different direction. And that is probably a way to address the idea of information overload.
NG
To taxonomize, again, Cuauhtémoc’s discourse: he speaks of the “supplementary” and the “parasitic.” Those are both cousins and functions of hybridity. Without the hybrid, those two ideas wouldn’t exist. I think that work like Porras-Kim’s is post-Western art. The work is predicated not only on a grid but also on the mastery of realistic representation in Western terms. As Cuauhtémoc said, these are politically oriented toward a notion of inclusion and—this is a forbidden Hegelian term—progress. Art can provide a model for things, and what you’re describing— supplementary, parasitic—implies an absorption, a reabsorption, regurgitation, or, if you will, a digestion of the West.
I think what Rosario has identified, in the way cura- tors do, is maybe a repurposing of the absurdity that Claire identified in research-based art. In many ways Claire opens a discussion and says, “Well, this is good for nothing.” Your essay is critical, Claire, let’s make no mistake about it. Rosario’s exhibition argues in response, “Wait, there’s research-based art that actually does something or tries to do something.”
RG
I was excited to think of the show as a way to try to answer that call, to wrestle with those arguments. And that led me to necessarily be kind of partial in the kind of work I decided to look at. To me it also represented a departure from interventionist work, like that of Forensic Architecture. I was interested in thinking about that other kind of work that is embedded and that results from a variable relationship of the artist to a subject matter or a territory or a history but that was not necessarily trying to intervene. But I wanted to continue with a question about evaluation and quality. I think that becomes important because in a way, Claire, I’ve taken your essay as sort of arguing for what’s good research-based art and what isn’t and how we ground that kind of evaluation. It’s probably a question that doesn’t have an answer. But do we have a more or less objective way of judging? And what kind of criteria do we have to judge research-based art?
CB
I would say I’m no longer in the business of providing criteria and allocating value judgments. I’m more interested in asking questions: Why has this kind of work taken the forms that it has taken? What do these devel- opments tell us about culture more broadly? In what ways are they symptomatic? Of course, at the end of the essay I gesture toward some practices that I find more interesting or that run counter to the norm. This is because diagnosis alone can be unsatisfying and it’s helpful to rise to the challenge of redemption! My own personal gauge, which I don’t expect to apply to anybody else, is whether the work moves me. Can it move beyond the cerebral and the intel- lectual and connect me to something larger than myself?
I also appreciate metabolization: research that has gone through lived experience rather than being cut-and-pasted into a vitrine or a shelf of further reading.
Last summer I saw Walid Raad’s lecture-performance at Hamburger Kunsthalle, which on paper didn’t sound promising: an investigation of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection and its relationship to the Hamburg museum.5 But by the end I was in tears. Walid managed to take a dry research topic and turn it into a metaphysics of seeing and believing, combining the preposterous with the political (self-restoring angels, the financialization of weather data, gremlins in Hudson River School paintings, insects that swarm around goblets, shady art collectors controlling US foreign policy).
I try and write from a position of fidelity to my response while in the work, even if I don’t understand it immediately. Everyone has different criteria and will be affected by different things, but I think there’s a value in articulating these differences.
When Nic mentioned the prevalence of the grid, it does make me wonder if artists are just making minor variations on well-established moves. It makes me think of artists that value the embodied as a counterpoint to the virtual. I recently attended a sound bath by Guadalupe Maravilla that offered a physiological, vibroacoustic way of knowing—entirely bypassing the cerebral taxonomies and the optical.
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Healing sound bath performance as part of Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. Courtesy MoMA Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY. -
Healing sound bath performance as part of Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2021. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. Courtesy MoMA Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /Licensed by SCALA /Art Resource, NY.
RG
On the question of the grid and taxonomy and the structured way of organizing information, the process led me to ask, OK, if we want to land this idea of an exhibition about research-based art, what is a more universally accepted common ground around the presentation of information or artifacts? I was interested in the idea that some artists are sort of reappropriating established conventions of categorization like taxonomies. And I felt that this would be a way into trying to find some common ground also with viewers and with an audience that is coming to this without necessarily being immersed in these ideas.
But with what you’re touching upon with Guadalupe Maravilla, that is where, for instance, I come back to the ideas of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and the sense that there are ways of knowing that haven’t been universally accepted, especially by the Western world. What is that experience? It cannot be canonized academic knowledge. It’s some- thing else. And there’s a unique way in which artists can make that point come across, move you to tears, give you a different kind of experience in your body with a sound bath. And I think that I’ve simply tried to organize some of those different modalities. And some of them perhaps necessarily had to have this more legible, formal way of presenting themselves.
CM
One thing that we need to keep affirming is the idea that there are mileposts, there are certain works or certain moments that redefined the root entirely, that actually made it very difficult to just reestablish the same arguments that we used before. And I tend to believe that Forensic Architecture has done that. What was impressive when we made the project on Ayotzinapa is that because it was made entirely with a device that was foreign to the aesthetics of empathy, the impact was huge.6 And I mean that the criteria here are not so much about the social impact but just the idea that you would challenge the aesthetics in a specific field. And suddenly something that was alien—like this very dry, scientific order of exposition—lent it not only authority but also a certain immediate utility that most of the other works that have tried to engage with the spectator couldn’t make any longer, like an argument that was beyond any avoidance. In this case—let me be very specific—Forensic Architecture demonstrated convincingly that the Mexican army was informed and participated in the events step by step.
Forensic Architecture has really changed our notion of what we expect from media. They’ve been copied formally by the corporate media. So that confronts us with a very peculiar situation because I understand that it is possible that occasionally artworks will become effective in the general information sphere.
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Installation views of Forensic Architecture: Hacia una estética investigativa at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2017. Photo by Oliver Santana. Courtesy Forensic Architecture and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC/UNAM, 2017. -
Installation views of Forensic Architecture: Hacia una estética investigativa at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2017. Photo by Oliver Santana. Courtesy Forensic Architecture and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC/UNAM, 2017.
RG
What you’re saying is leading me to want to follow up with a question about spectatorship. I think you and Claire come from different understandings of who is the subject and the viewer of art. So can each of you to talk about your conceptions of spectatorship and how they inform your perspectives?
CM
Claire will be better at this, but when I read Claire or other people, it’s not that I feel that they have a conception of spectatorship; they’re reporting on concepts of spectatorship that are in the works. We need to go back to reread Brian O’Doherty because he is in a sense the author of the concept of the difference between the viewer and the spectator in that regard.7And I believe it is entirely logical that when the installation art moment became central, these spectators that O’Doherty had dealt with in Minimalism also became knowing spectators. But I guess that we all agree that occasionally what we have is not the spectator or the viewer but a combination of the citizen, the policeman, the victims, and the lawyers.
CB
OK, I do not have a theory of spectatorship beyond saying that I think spectators are always human. I’m not a posthumanist or animist who imagines various nonhuman actors to be the spectators of art—at least, not yet. As Cuauhtémoc says, each work of art generates a model of spectatorship. Each work assumes a spectator who will attend to it in some way. Each work sets up a relationship to its audience. In my latest book, I’ve shifted from thinking about the “spectator,” which is always a model of the subject gazing at an object, to thinking about attention, which is more relational, in the space between viewers and the work.8
NG
Claire, I’m going to go back to this question of the ritual and your experience in the Guadalupe Maravilla sound bath. We could talk about this, for instance, in relation to the development of Latin American modernism. When Joaquín Torres-García comes back from Europe and says: “OK, we have the grid, and inside the grid I’m going to place the elements of these rituals. I am going to include the man, the sun, the fundamental elements of the ritual.” We can talk about the production of modern autonomous artworks under the pressure of those knowledges and those rituals, particularly and especially synthesized in Neo-Concretism, in Lygia Clark’s Bichos, in which the artwork is completed by the participant.
We could describe Latin American modernism as the autonomous object developed under the pressure of the ritual. What moves both of you is the confirmation of a truth. For Cuauhtémoc, the reason why this Forensic Architecture piece is moving is that we all know that the army did it. Nobody doubts that the army did it. In general terms, Mexican society kind of knows that the army did it. But if somebody comes and tells you, “It is the truth; it was the army,” we can confirm that it is the truth. And if you, Claire, can go to the ritual and say, “Yes, it is my body; I need the healing,” it is there.
There is a connection between the need for the truth and the experience, that the experience relieves us from seeking the truth in information, seeking the truth sorting out this information in permanent competing attention. It’s the one moment when we can find that we don’t have to make the enormous effort to decide whether it is this or that or that or that or that. But I see that we are today in an inverse trajectory in which we don’t need to derive a set of theories and objects from the ritual and the experience. Rather we’re trying to get rid of those objects and theories to get back to the direct experience. I’m not sure that’s inherently good.
CM
I wouldn’t necessarily characterize the drive of the artists and their spectators as a search for the truth. I would say that they are all on journeys that need to be accounted for. One that is important in the sense of this spatial display is the notion of a need for evidence, mate- rial evidence. I guess one important element of the way in which we experience the museum today is precisely that it is not the internet. It’s not something that can just be fabricated with artificial intelligence. And that’s going to pose a significant challenge in the future because again we are going to live in a world of images that are going to be entirely made up. And so the index is over. Welcome to whatever construction you want to make. And the second issue is not so much the journey of truth but the possibility of a reversal of the account.
And again some of the issues here are about when it is possible to actually grasp a certain complicated or dirty reality. And that has an importance in questions of coloniality, that you are never facing something clear. Everything is dirty. There’s no argument that comes out without having to pay a certain lip service to violence.
And I would say that another thing that is still very important is that you should be able to step out from the official account. Now those are the same elements that produce the mentality of conspiratorial, paranoic theories and narratives. I would argue that the fact that a lot of this work is very similar to fiction is something to be discussed.
Much of what is wrong in the political sphere is coming from, again, the notion of expertise, the idea that citizens want to know, and the fact that they are able to enjoy the most complicated narratives without any limit or any need for proof. I take it for granted that there’s a new narrative order. I imagine that Claire is also a little bit concerned about the fact that we are entering a twenty-first century made of a lot of narratives.
NG
Cuauhtémoc, you have an incredible insight regarding the flip side of Ways of Knowing and Rosario’s exhibition. The works have an analogous structure to conspiracy theories. I think that’s a fundamental insight.
And the reason why I say that is because we spent years and years talking to students and saying, “Read McLuhan, the medium is the message. Read Walter Benjamin.” And then Donald Trump comes along and applies all these lessons masterfully with a phone, with a new medium. And I don’t think it can be argued that the mastery of this new medium-as-message is in the hands of progressives in any way, shape, or form. I have yet to see a progressive gaining power tweeting or governing by Twitter. The replacement of reason by affect is one of the effects of the use of technology, and I think the far right has a monopoly on the use of media for that right now. Hopefully this changes, but I think Cuauhtémoc has an insight that truly transcends our field.
CB
Right. But also it’s not only the new medium that is being exploited but an appeal to the past and to the spiritual and the religious. Trump is now ending rallies with prayer, in a direct appeal to evangelical Christians. He is weaponizing the same kind of trans-individual fervor that is mobilizing artists to look to ritual and ceremony—albeit for quite different ends.
NG
At the iconographic level—Celtic iconography, Masonic iconography, Viking iconography, alchemical iconography—all this has been taken over by the far right. So the idea that the structure of the conspiracy theory is analogous to the structure of the work of some forward- thinking contemporary artists is a very important insight.
CM
I guess I should quote my favorite saying by the late Carlos Monsiváis, which was, “Either I don’t understand what is happening or what I understand has already happened.” Yeah, welcome to the new world. And I guess that one important thing we need to say is that we are going to have to walk through it without any map. I learned that maps haven’t gotten us too far. And yeah, it’s scary, it’s exciting. Luckily the most important problems are not going to be addressed by our generation.
CB
Yes, there is also AI, which I see as the big threat on the horizon. The informatization of daily life—be this through data and metrics or tips and hacks—all of this is going to be upended by the dubious truth value of AI-generated images and text. It’s going to throw another wrench into the itinerary of truth, knowledge, and research (which I see as intertwined terms). AI will be the problem of our decade, and perhaps many decades to come. We will see how artists react. At best, perhaps, we can hope for new modes of sensory, embodied, and nonvirtual work or an emphasis on haptic, material spaces and social relations. But we can’t really predict what artistic backlashes to AI-generated images and knowledge will be.
NG
For the time being, it’s text-based. Whoever can write the best prompt will end up with the best image for now. It still depends on the text, but this will change tonight probably.
CB
And Duchamp wrote good texts.▪︎
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Explore this roundtable as well as other essays and materials in the Ways of Knowing exhibition catalog. Available 24/7 at shop.walkerart.org/
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