„Recently, I sat down with Berlin-based artist Johanna Bruckner at her temporary home at Flux Factory in Queens to talk about her pipeline project Art as Research which asks similar questions to Helguera’s This is not a Panel Discussion (2009) – itself an etymological twist on Tino Sehgal’s This is… series. Bruckner’s work occupies the liminal space between producing text research for a PhD in art practice (Elkins has written on that subject too!) and the desire to create, document, and archive her research in visual form through film and video. Currently working on a staged symposium to be performed in Stockholm later this year, her work is particularly invested in reflecting upon the socio-political context of knowledge production manifested by the ever-proliferating pedagogical arms of international art biennials. Put simply, her work questions what is achieved through parallel biennial programs of presentations, temporary libraries, and pop-up workshops. Is it further artistic product? What is the relationship between artist, curator, educator, and audience, and how can these relationships be reconfigured or reflected upon? Does art speech in this form have any hope of criticality, reflection, or truly democratic engagement of communities outside of contemporary art boundaries? Are these even the goals to which such education efforts ascribe“?
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Art21
Michelle Jubin, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
art historian, critic, curator