Yet this a priori recognition confuses the matter. To converse with dictators is to forestall their annihilation, to see-in the sense of acknowledging-them somehow. The thorny issue of whether or not one should talk to dictators (with or without pre-conditions) that continually flared up in the run-up to the recent American presidential elections points to a particular concern in the political culture with regard to how, when, and with whom one should engage in dialogue. Conversation is often understood as an equal, rational, democratic exchange that builds bridges, communities, understandings, and is thus a way for people to recognize each other. This may be understood as an aesthetic point of view insofar as aesthetics is the attention to ways of appearing, perceiving, sensing. At stake are productive notions of how thought can move through conversation and how conversation can move thought that probably have very little to do with clichés of conversation operating in the art world.
With this in mind, I have been thinking about certain staged or filmed conversations, with an eye to how conversation is forged and what it forges. Or, we could remain actively neutral with respect to this binary-however dialectically complex it may be, something seems to be missing from the equation. Why do we so rarely hear of doing or thinking two things at once? A dialectical intertwining of positions might demand that we ask of art (as makers, viewers, critics, students, teachers) to suspend, boggle, or otherwise challenge available discourses and that we in turn develop a discourse to elaborate evasions, deferrals, or misunderstandings of its available notions. 3 Why not show and tell? The same question might be posed to the proponents of the discursive as a way out of a mere looking at art. My attempt to resuscitate this term in all its discomforts stems from its potential to unhinge a particular binary concept, which might be summarized in the title of a recent exhibition curated by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Florian Waldvogel as part of the Brussels Biennial- Show me, don’t tell me. Maybe it is the all-too-powdery whiff of seventeenth-century aristocratic ladies and gentlemen, fanning themselves amidst idle chatter, whose connections to our own aspirations we would rather sweep under the shaggy carpet? 2 Or perhaps it is because we are desperately hoping to talk ourselves out of stale notions of art as a cultural practice that to suggest an art of conversation might at first seem utterly oxymoronic?
1 And yet we seem reluctant to talk about an art of conversation in the same breath. Much has been said of late about “the conversational” or “the discursive” in and around the field of contemporary art.