Losing Hold of Experimenting

Abstract

In his description of the tenet of the 56th Venice Biennale All the Worlds’ Futures (2015), curator Okwui Enwezor builds a thought-provoking bridge across current historical ruptures in the fields of art, culture, politics and economics, and Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, who is so confused about the storm of progress blowing from paradise that she can only fly backwards towards the future, her eyes persistently stuck on the events of the past. By bringing this mythological premodern figure to the current global landscape with its unforeseen number of refugees and immigrants, environmental upsets, chaos, dystopia, and promise of change, Enwezor makes visible why the challenge of seeking new realities, truths and futures – that we have learned to link with the idea of experimenting – is not a mere cliche of utopian modernity, but even some sort of imperative of the present time that we simply cannot stop pondering or practicing. Yet, in the age of post-colonialism, post-modernism, and post-humanism that have all questioned the modern labels of ‘progress,’ ‘objectivity,’ ‘potentiality,’ and the ‘new,’ we are also painfully aware that we are ‘living in the end times’ as Slavoj Zizek expresses it, and that there is not necessarily anyone waiting for us at the end of history any more. In the midst of these puzzling considerations, many avant-garde artistresearchers have started to consider experimentality from partly new perspectives aiming not so much at building new laboratories and showrooms for (white, elitist, and male-centered) Enlightenment thought, but to discuss and practice various kinds of experimental activities in ways that pay homage to unknown others, be they other human beings or some other groups of animals, spirits, dark material, trees, air, historical ghosts, or whatever. Along this development, the criteria for experimenting have also changed, even radically. The positivist and utopian tones of modernity have largely been replaced by epistemologically more complex, even messy, forms of knowing, participating and presenting, that now also guide many activities of art and science. As Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze suggest, the potentiality inherent in this ‘new logic’ can be developed further only by a refusal to represent issues and phenomena that in themselves escape representation (Agamben 1999). In other words, we need to understand that ‘potentiality,’ be it artistic, scientific or whatever, must remain ‘enigmatic yet non-arbitrary; in short, a new logic, definitely a logic, but one that grasps the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason.’ (Deleuze 1997: 82) Giving up overtly rationalized forms of reasoning and experimenting has also led to rethink the methodologies of both art and science. As Brian Massumi emphasizes, we should no longer label or categorize newness and innovation in already existing labels and concepts, especially if we tend to reproduce the social worlds of predetermined order and discourses of methodological certainty. 1 The new methodology of experimenting might also be described in terms of ‘ungrounded,’ ‘fluid,’ or ‘groundless’ methodology, for it seeks no longer merely rational and linear rules for knowing, but aims instead to stimulate deeper and also more engaged ways to reflect, participate, and accommodate anticipated social and existential situations and preferred spatial and timely dimensions. 2 Seen in this way, experimenting becomes differentiated also from the ‘normal’ – or normality acts in this new context no longer as a gradient for the ‘new,’ but more like a cut-off point actually preventing all experimenting, including from falling or failing. Against this background, one might think that the decision to choose ‘experimentation’ in 2015 as the main theme for the 1st Artistic Research Pavilion in Venice was not only topical and important, but at the same time extremely challenging, even risky. Would the curators and initiators of the research pavilion