In other's words - Sarat Maharaj - Interview

ArtForum, Feb, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum, Sarat Maharaj

THAT SARAT MAHARAJ IS A BIT TOO INTELLIGENT for the art world, as a friend of mine recently claimed, I cannot accept. Without the presence of a few minds like his, the whole business would be just too dull. A biographical remark in a recent publication notes that the South African-born art historian, based in London since 1976, "has lectured and published throughout the world on cultural translation and difference. He is an authority on the work of Richard Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce, and his experimental writings include essays on textile art, sound work [Maharaj's "Xeno-sonics"] and visual theory constructions [the essay "Monkeydoodle"]." The contibutor's note doesn't mention his incredibly articulate manner. The pleasure I get out of listening to Maharaj is always countered by the depressing realization that I will never handle the English language--or any other--with such precision.

I met up with Maharaj at Berlin's Humboldt-Universitat, where he became the first Rudolf Arnheim Professor of Art History last summer. He is spending a semester away from London's Goldsmiths College, where he has taught art history and theory over the last decade. His seminars in Berlin are already famous, attended not only by academics in the city but by critics, architects, and artists as well. On the Thursday evening that I sat in on his lively class, two of the fastest talkers in the business, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, bombarded the audience with more information than a university student typically receives in a semester. In another seminar, Maharaj discussed problems that originate in the analytical philosophy of science and branch out into domains as various as cognitive biology, the writings of Marcel Duchamp, and globalist economics. The author of such essays as "The Congo is Flooding the Acropolis: Black Art and Orders of Difference" (1991) and "Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other" (1994), Maharaj has recently left the semi-obscure confines of advanced critical theory to join the group of curators assisting Okwui Enwezor in preparing and staging Documenta11, which opens in Kassel this June. (The art historian has devoted a seminar titled "Thinking Documenta and Doing Documenta" to creating a reflective space for the critical assessment of this mega-event.) This year will also see the publication of two new books by Maharaj: an extensive collection of essays designed by Ecke Bonk and given the Joycean title Works in Progress: Experiments in Think-speak-write Sequences 1 (INIVA) and A Strife of Tongues: Richard Hamilton/Marcel Duchamp/James Joyce (Typosophic Society), which Hamilton is designing. Maharaj's theoretical competence, combined with his willingness to bring the concepts of cultural, diversity and difference to a more public forum, makes him a key intellectual voice on the Continent today.

DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Your seminar at Berlin's Humboldt-Universitat has quickly become a meeting point for intellectuals and artists. What are you focusing on at the moment?

SARAT MAHARAJ: The main research seminar is simply called Ideas Lab. We are looking at issues in the philosophy-of-science debate between Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos through the flurry of letters they exchanged. Amid lovely passages of gossip, they are tussling with the kinds of restrictions and limits a model of critical rationality actually puts on scientific practice. For Feyerabend, the logic of scientific discovery proceeds less in terms of pregiven notions of rigor and rationality--our stereotype of science--than in haphazard, open-ended, hit-or-miss, patchwork ways. Hence his countermodel, an anarchist epistemology, which is sometimes oversimplified, mocked, and parodied as an "anything goes" paradigm of thinking. Each Ideas Lab session closes with a reading of sections of Ulysses in German and English.

We are exploring problems coming out of art practice. But we find them tied up with some unlikely theoretical areas of counter-representational thinking. The seminar is about ideas, conjectures, models--as well as a kind of unhinging of academic, system-locked philosophy. The Feyerabend-Lakatos debates provide models of thinking and knowing that in some way seem to continue the interrogation of representationalism in Deleuze and Guattari, who were keen to see philosophy as being not so much about depicting what's "out there" as about creating concepts through which to activate new mappings of the world, new feelings, subjectivity, behavior, action.

Feyerabend proclaimed himself a scientific theoretician of an absolute anarchist bent. I find it particularly interesting that he felt this was even better described as a Dadaist epistemology. What he meant by this at moments sounds almost like elements in Marcel Duchamp's Notes to the Large Glass (with its own echoes of and borrowings from Bergson and Poincare). Duchamp's speculations on "ironic physics," "emancipated metals of oscillating density," 4-D geometries, virtual images, etc., add up to poetic elements for a "hilarious painting"-an artwork for which there is no previous model. Feyerabend's Dada model is reminiscent of this nominalist epistemology--Duchamp speaks of a "pictorial nominalism"--the artwork is invented in its making, not according to the givens of what is Art. Hence his fantastic paradox: How to make a work of art that isn't a work of art? One can sense roughly the "unscriptedness" that Feyerabend will take up for his Dada epistemology. More light is thrown on what he means if we mull o ver his remark that his greatest regret was not having taken the job offered to him to be Brecht's assistant. A reflexive, ironic art-practice type of paradigm of scientific thought.