Unfolding: Intro
Unfolding: Abstracts
Unfolding: Reader
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Unfolding the critical: Introduction
On 28 February and 1 March 2003, Sarma curated a small international colloquium during the festival Ampersand, which was organised by arts centre Monty and work-place wp Zimmer in Antwerp (Belgium).The issue of art criticism triggers a question of what the 'critical' element of this criticism actually implies. Does art criticism hold this 'critical' aspect on a lease, or does it share this capacity (and the task) with the creation of art and the curatorial compilation of a program? How is the 'critical' implemented in these practices? How to disentangle this cluster of concerns and criteria? And above all, in what way can it be applied in the artistic field at the present time?
Sarma's objective is to stimulate dance and performance criticism and this by means of both online and offline activities. It wants to enhance reflection on the particular genre by widening up its scope to art criticism in general and to critique in a broader sense of the word, including philosophical, ethical, political, cultural etc. aspects. When reflecting upon criticism, many authors are prone to address poetical matters of description and interpretation, even contextual matters. Still, the question of what the critical component consists of remains often open. What does 'being critical' actually hinge upon?
One could assume that the critical locates itself in an operation, since a critique is performed upon something, and this in myriad ways: analysing a discourse, dissecting an artistic structure, pointing to an ideological subtext, rendering visible the delusion of the media In these concrete instances criticism is able to outline its target, to name its strategies, but what seems to escape is its very core: why is criticism critical? Always ready to claim its critical character, criticism seems to cover its ignorance with arrogance. Being critical happens to be the blind spot of criticism.
In the field of the arts there is a modernist tradition, exemplified by Clement Greenberg, that posits the activity of 'auto-critique' or 'self-criticism' as the motor of a progression towards a purified essence. This immanent criticism does not criticise from the outside, as the Enlightenment did, but from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticised or by means of methods characteristic of the discipline itself. Nowadays we might unmask this folding upon oneself as 'narcissism'. With the crisis of modernity an explosive world seems not to call for a detached contemplation in art and its criticism anymore but for a reconfiguration of aesthetics that opens up to different ethical and political stances. What does 'self-criticism' mean in this light, when we leave a modernist praxis behind and are confronted with this heavily intrusive context?
The new millennium brought forth also a proliferation of disciplines and specialisations. More than ever, art lives by fostering crossovers, intermediality, remediation, transversality, etcetera. A similar dispersal and complexity marks the current embodiment of professional roles: the critic becomes dramaturg, the dramaturg curates events, the curator is an art philosopher, the art philosopher turns artist, etcetera. If every role has its attributes and particularities, what then happens in the spill-over of this role hopping? Does it allow us to understand better the blind spots of a praxis by assuming other ones? What distinguishes the critic from the curator from the artist? And above all: what does the critical respectively mean in these different practices?