INTRODUCTION PUBLICATION (EDITION I)
Excerpt from Marijke Hoogenboom’s introduction, accompanying the launch of the publication of Edition I (2005), May 2006:
(…) Finally there is why we have gathered here today at all: This book. Featuring the work of six artists, three curators, many collaborators and the first edition of 'If I Can’t Dance...' in 2005. Most of you have not seen it yet (I hope), but there is something interesting and unusual about it. It is not the kind of book you open, read through and close again. If you flip through it, you will be pretty much confused. It obviously has many directions, and you won’t find one single mode to approach it. Intuitively you might start turning it around; like a map, trying to find your way (and actually by turning a map you will even be more lost than ever).
Until you understand, that this book provides several entries, for each different artist you will have to start anew, re-open the book and look for the exclusive passage that takes you to the chapter you are looking for. I have concluded that this book, offered to us today, is many books; each of them paying tribute to the specificity of the artist's work. And all of them to the collective experiment of collaborative curating and expanded processes.
But there is another issue that struck me while I was reading. Something a bit more fundamental. What is it that this book tries to achieve? Or in general terms: How can we make sense of a creative process afterwards?
Everybody will agree that the making of works of art implies inventions that cannot easily be put into words. But rather than turning to the traditional interpretative sciences (or humanities), that primarily look for the general and abstract creative knowledge from the loom that produced it, I am keen to explore other options.
In order to change the rules of the interpretative game, the interdisciplinary scholar (here we go again, but he’s really called like that) Paul Carter has proposed the beautiful term Material Thinking. He says: "Material thinking occurs in the making of works of art. It happens when the artist dares to ask the simple but far-reaching question: What matters?, What is the material of thought?"
Carter claims that one cannot make sense of a creative process purely on the basis of its outcome and insists that the meaning of the artwork can't be detached from the matrix of its production. "Otherwise it will be under-interpreted or over-interpreted and its investment simply dumb-down."
In The Netherlands we keep nurturing the unproductive distinction between 'doeners en denkers' (those that do and those that think). A position that in my view completely neglects the intellectual character of an artwork and that ignores creative research as an intrinsic part of artistic production.
I am impressed that the 'If I Can’t Dance...'-book deliberately takes another position and applies a couple of ways to access the depth of the artistic process; ways that are complementary to each other, rather than exclusive: The critical writing. The artist’ interview. And last but not least the photographic documentation. A book, like a work of art, a machine for re-combinations?
So let's suppose If I Can’t Dance... is advocating for the reintegration of study and process. For the possibility to interconnect theory and practice, without neutralising the material circumstances that characterize the making of every artwork. Is that a way forward to ban the usual cynicism of judgmental journalism and to contribute to a more joyful approach to reflection that is bound up with the strong desire: to find out what is done and why, and what others in the world did and how?
Tim Etchells, leader of the UK performance group Forced Entertainment listed his own rules for critical writing: "That it should open doors, not close them; that it should in some way mirror the form of its object; that it should work with a reader as a performance might; that it should be a part of the work, not an undertaker to it."
I wonder, if this book – and its artists and authors – is at the very end also suggesting another kind of critique; not from outside looking in, not about creative practice, but from inside, of the medium itself, and pushing practitioners and public alike towards new understandings (...)
(…) Finally there is why we have gathered here today at all: This book. Featuring the work of six artists, three curators, many collaborators and the first edition of 'If I Can’t Dance...' in 2005. Most of you have not seen it yet (I hope), but there is something interesting and unusual about it. It is not the kind of book you open, read through and close again. If you flip through it, you will be pretty much confused. It obviously has many directions, and you won’t find one single mode to approach it. Intuitively you might start turning it around; like a map, trying to find your way (and actually by turning a map you will even be more lost than ever).
Until you understand, that this book provides several entries, for each different artist you will have to start anew, re-open the book and look for the exclusive passage that takes you to the chapter you are looking for. I have concluded that this book, offered to us today, is many books; each of them paying tribute to the specificity of the artist's work. And all of them to the collective experiment of collaborative curating and expanded processes.
But there is another issue that struck me while I was reading. Something a bit more fundamental. What is it that this book tries to achieve? Or in general terms: How can we make sense of a creative process afterwards?
Everybody will agree that the making of works of art implies inventions that cannot easily be put into words. But rather than turning to the traditional interpretative sciences (or humanities), that primarily look for the general and abstract creative knowledge from the loom that produced it, I am keen to explore other options.
In order to change the rules of the interpretative game, the interdisciplinary scholar (here we go again, but he’s really called like that) Paul Carter has proposed the beautiful term Material Thinking. He says: "Material thinking occurs in the making of works of art. It happens when the artist dares to ask the simple but far-reaching question: What matters?, What is the material of thought?"
Carter claims that one cannot make sense of a creative process purely on the basis of its outcome and insists that the meaning of the artwork can't be detached from the matrix of its production. "Otherwise it will be under-interpreted or over-interpreted and its investment simply dumb-down."
In The Netherlands we keep nurturing the unproductive distinction between 'doeners en denkers' (those that do and those that think). A position that in my view completely neglects the intellectual character of an artwork and that ignores creative research as an intrinsic part of artistic production.
I am impressed that the 'If I Can’t Dance...'-book deliberately takes another position and applies a couple of ways to access the depth of the artistic process; ways that are complementary to each other, rather than exclusive: The critical writing. The artist’ interview. And last but not least the photographic documentation. A book, like a work of art, a machine for re-combinations?
So let's suppose If I Can’t Dance... is advocating for the reintegration of study and process. For the possibility to interconnect theory and practice, without neutralising the material circumstances that characterize the making of every artwork. Is that a way forward to ban the usual cynicism of judgmental journalism and to contribute to a more joyful approach to reflection that is bound up with the strong desire: to find out what is done and why, and what others in the world did and how?
Tim Etchells, leader of the UK performance group Forced Entertainment listed his own rules for critical writing: "That it should open doors, not close them; that it should in some way mirror the form of its object; that it should work with a reader as a performance might; that it should be a part of the work, not an undertaker to it."
I wonder, if this book – and its artists and authors – is at the very end also suggesting another kind of critique; not from outside looking in, not about creative practice, but from inside, of the medium itself, and pushing practitioners and public alike towards new understandings (...)
