LETTERS

LECTURE NOTES

To the Editor:

I read George Baker's review of my show [April '99] at Max Protetch with interest and learned something from it. Since I like to communicate I thought I might take the unusual liberty of writing back. I'd like to make two comments where I think there is a misunderstanding. First, my "seminars/lectures" series are not isolated. They come out of the "reading seminar" works that I have been pursuing since 1994. I have conducted numerous other seminars - as an art practice - when invited (sometimes at art events, but also at purely academic events, in which there is no "art context" involved). In fact, I have taught in Geneva for more than two years solely to maintain a seminar. Intellectual labor has been central to my work as an artist from the beginning. (It was thus a bit astonishing that Baker cited Christian Philipp Muller, of whom I am very critical, since I became involved in teaching and working in classrooms many years earlier than he.)

The second remark is about my "unexamined 'theory tourism'" - it has been examined from the very start. I have written about it, using that very term, so I am well aware of this spectacle. But Baker is incorrect when he writes that I fly back and forth between CalArts and NY: I've never gone anywhere specifically for a conference or a lecture. Actually, it's the other way around - when my exhibition schedule brings me to a town, I also try to check out the university circle. In fact, there are people I would like to have visited and photographed but haven't - precisely because I refuse to travel somewhere just for the sake of photographing them. Keep in mind that the images were taken over a span of almost five years. What is really worth addressing is the travel and airport "activism" of contemporary artists (an activity in which I am complicit). At any rate, my "s/l" series is more a travel log of my art activity than the other way around.

Finally, I'd like to comment on what Baker describes as the "chilling passivity" aspect of the work. My project is an autobiographical account - it involves people I read, people I like, people I have identified with. The camera is that of an involved person and not just some formal framing device. In many of the seminars I also spoke and participated where it was permitted. I actually attended some for more than one lecture. The point is not to approach the photo formally (something Baker slightly insinuates) but more as an "index." Also, I stress the fact that in the end this will prove to be a historical record - i.e., to give information we don't really know yet in all its details.

- Rainer Ganahl

New York

George Baker responds:

It may be "unusual" for an artist to reply to a review, but it is certainly welcome. Knowing Rainer Ganahl's work as I do, and appreciating its challenge precisely to the division of labor between artist and critic - between object and discourse - I hoped for, even expected, as much.

My review was driven by the belief that the function of the critic should be neither pure affirmation nor self-aggrandizement (the common spectacle of the knowing critic spanking the ignorant artist in public), but that criticism should be most severe, that it should raise the most questions, precisely in front of the work that one deems the most important.

I am fully aware that the "s/l" series emerged from Ganahl's "reading seminars." But the separation of the two in my review only echoes Ganahl's own separation of the work as presented at the Max Protetch Gallery. The "s/l" series, no matter its origin or links to other aspects of Ganahl's project, was presented on its own, as a self-sufficient piece. As such, it must stand on its own. So I do not think here that I "misunderstand" Ganahl as much as I attempt to highlight a potential problem caused by his own splitting off of the series within the context of a gallery show.

As the most active critical advocate of Christian Philipp Muller's work, I do not think it should surprise anyone that I mention a piece by him in my review and I would be interested in hearing why Ganahl is "critical" of this work. But as always the question of priority remains profoundly uninteresting. Pedagogy has been a crucial aspect of his work since his first "tours" in the early '80s, but pedagogy has been a crucial issue for contemporary art since the reception of Conceptual art at least, and of modernism since the time of David. At any rate, my inclusion of Muller in the review was not intended as a point of comparison or claim of filiation, but as a testament to a structural transformation in which both would be included - the relation of art practice to the academy, and to pedagogy - a transformation whose full exploration, no doubt, would have to include Ganahl's work as one radically reconfigured option.