PREFACE
A preface does for a publication what introductory remarks do for a lecture: both explain a guiding concern and directly address the readers or listeners. They raise expectations and introduce the central argument to be made by the writers or speakers. After our “Reviews” issue, TEXTE ZUR KUNST now takes another reflective turn to examine a defining format of art history, art, and criticism: “Lecture.” Our interest in lecture may seem counterintuitive – the worlds of culture, journalism, and politics have lately shown a preference for dialogical formats. In light of the growing political polarization that has reshaped Western societies in recent years, however, conversational formats have lost some of their constructive potential.
Why would we propose the lecture, a form associated with presumptions of authority and implicit hierarchies, as a valuable mode of expression? The texts and video lectures of the contributors to this issue exemplify its productivity, employing “the master’s tools,” as Audre Lorde put it, in full awareness of their own entanglements. In raising the question of whether the use of such tools can actually bring change, Lorde’s famous phrase poses a lasting challenge to her audience, as Tavia Nyong’o notes in his reflections on the political effects of his sustained engagement with Lorde’s words.
The contributions to this issue demonstrate how the inherently authoritarian style of address in the lecture format can be repurposed for a critique of power and subversive ends. Each is informed by fertile tensions between rigorous form and open-ended experiment, between demands met and expectations undercut. The lectures by art historians Huey Copeland and Isabelle Graw hew fairly closely to the conventions of the academic lecture – one is an address honoring a cherished mentor on the occasion of her retirement, the other is a historical comparison that highlights structural changes in the art market. The artists Armin Chodzinski and Sibylle Peters, meanwhile, outline in a conversation how prolific the lecture/performance can be when it is conceived as an open experimental setup. Still, these kinds of exploratory approaches necessarily remain reliant on the formal scaffold of the lecture. In this respect, such undertakings – in Peters’s case, quite explicitly – reprise an aesthetic principle developed by John Cage. Branden W. Joseph, in his discussion of Pope.L’s lecture performance Cage Unrequited (2013), underscores discipline as a widely under-recognized element that underlay Cage’s art. Interpreting Cage’s work, Pope.L reveals that the artist’s general embrace of anarchism did not preclude authoritarian gestures.
With their Center for Experimental Lectures, Gordon Hall and Zoey Lubitz interrogate not only the lecture format but also the various specific institutional contexts for which they commission lecture performances, which is demonstrated in their dialogue that includes a critique of positions TEXTE ZUR KUNST has taken in the past. Julia Scher’s video lecture, too, reflects on the circumstances in which it came into being. After introducing her camera and sound operator, whose reflection can be seen in the glass of the Apple Vision Pro Scher is wearing in the opening shot, and then her costume designer, she performs our concept paper for the issue. Her choice to use a pointing rod, a classic lecture prop, underscores the tongue-in-cheek seriousness of her project. Lila-Zoé Krauß’s video contribution similarly foregrounds technological developments and their impact on our imagination. Digital infrastructural change, Graw argues with a view to the online persona @jerrygogosian, has massively affected conditions in the art market – but, as Hall and Lubitz observe, it has left the lecture as a tool of art history largely unaffected. In fact, a different use of visual material, one that abandons the inevitable – whether analog or PowerPoint – double projection slideshow, can open fresh perspectives and yield new insights, as Felix Bernstein and Jan Verwoert demonstrate. The former’s lecture performances are anchored in images, some of them generated by AI. Subordinating everything else to them, Bernstein turns the conventional organization of the lecture, where content and structure serve an argument, on its head. Verwoert intertwines collages of images and thought patterns in his contribution dedicated to the art of mnemonics, which he performs with a musician’s feel for rhythm. In the video, however, which was recorded as a Zoom lecture, he becomes a marginal visual detail.
Going even further, Copeland does not even turn the camera on. On the one hand, this lets him convey the message of his lecture, aptly titled “Voice Lessons,” through the spoken word, and through pauses and intonation; on the other hand, he explains, it sidelines the expectations that his appearance as a Black man would prompt in a predominantly white audience. Therein lies the explicit rejection of a demand to perform. Sophie Seita likewise refuses to straightforwardly meet expectations; she, too, has severed her voice from her body and recorded it as an audio track, and although she does show herself to the camera, it is with her back to the audience and without speaking. That gesture, she proposes, allows her to expand listener’s space for association, even more so as her back doubles the projection screen that is the white wall in front of her.
Contributions like Seita’s enable us to integrate spoken word and physical performance in three dimensions into the context of this issue, “Lecture.” But needless to say, the face-to-face address to the audience that is so central to the lecture cannot be realized in print. Still, you can listen to the contributors’ words and let them affect you. Nyong’o’s essay on Lorde’s lectures reminds us of the powerful political energy such immersion can unleash: the fact that those lectures now have readers, not listeners, does not detract from their resonance.
In keeping with the conventions that govern introductory remarks, we conclude our preface with an acknowledgement of our gratitude to everyone who contributed to this issue, including to Christian Liclair, who played a vital role in conceiving it.
Translation: Gerrit Jackson