Tom Holert
To cite this article: Tom Holert (2016) A Politics of Knowledge in Contemporary Art?,
Performance Research, 21:6, 57-62, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2016.1239901
Article views: 6
Download by: [Vienna University Library] Date: 11 December 2016, At: 07:25
APolitics of Knowledge in Contemporary Art?
TOM HOLERT
on the one hand and the edu-capitalist Cooper Union, the New York student-led activist
infrastructures of museum programming, group which since 2012 has coordinated direct
Bologna-ized art schooling, MAs in curatorial actions in response to the New York art schools
studies, the commercial gallerys press release, pursuit of tuition-based educational programs
art biennials posing as universities or self- and other attempts to tinker with the schools
organized platforms of critical learning and historical mission of free education. These
production on the other. However, even if this interventions were framed as contributions to
picture of arts teleology amounting to its alarger debate on financialisation, the economy
frictionless circulation as knowledge product of debt and education in the United States and
should prove exaggerated, it does provoke elsewhere. The discussion was scheduled to take
the question as to where arts potential role place at Between Bridges, anon-profit exhibition
as acritical agent across the networked spaces space initiated by artist Wolfgang Tillmans in
of knowledge capitalism is to be located. London in 2006 that moved to Berlin in 2014.
The oppositional voice readily raised by Free Cooper Unions approach towards the
contemporary arts practitioners should and crisis of art education and the particular crisis
can it be recruited for activist causes and imposed on the students and faculty at Cooper
initiatives that aim at righting the wrong of Union is significant on various levels. For one,
knowledge politics worldwide? How do the the experiences of countless struggles within
various laboratories of radical pedagogy and (and contestations of ) neoliberal edu-factories
critical knowledge production that are (more or around the world (from Vienna to San Diego,
less loosely) associated with the edu-capitalist from London to Zagreb, from Hong Kong to New
infrastructures of art participate effectively in York) that took place in the past years resonate
the struggle for A2K (access to knowledge) or in the critical diagnosis adiagnosis that
the de-colonial fight against the expropriation directs our attention towards the pathologies
and destruction of indigenous knowledges? of educational institutions, their incoherence,
Or, staying closer at home, where do artists non-aspiration and compromise, in short their
and other art practitioners address and reflect entropic condition(Sobel and Gollan 2016).
upon the very structures of knowledge These pathologies are supposedly caused
commodification and bureaucratization that by multiple, intersecting factors such as the
constitute contemporary arts own material- increasing pressures to corporatize and the
58 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 216 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N
H O L E RT : A P O L I T I C S O F K N O W L E D G E I N C O N T E M P O R A RY A RT ? 59
60 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 216 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N
H O L E RT : A P O L I T I C S O F K N O W L E D G E I N C O N T E M P O R A RY A RT ? 61
62 P E R F O R M A N C E R E S E A R C H 216 : O N R A D I C A L E D U C A T I O N