Network Society

In this final, fourth installment of Network Society I want to turn my attention to problems of teaching. To begin, I should briefly trace my own understanding of the practice of art. Art, as I first understood it, when I started to identify myself as a maker twenty years ago, was a means of expression. This fundamental definition gave way to the various theoretical complications that burdened the whole notion of expression: there is no pure, unmediated communication between sender and receiver; art and its various forms are languages, and as languages they are processes subject to social determinations; the artist's intention is one of several intentions that imbue the work of art with meaning (the viewer and the market add their own).

Many practitioners of my generation have claimed the status of art for the activities we perform: gallery installation, documentary video, writing, and teaching. We have embraced a pragmatic aspiration toward the ideal of autonomy. Autonomy implies an improvisational approach, the terms to be negotiated within each context. We learned to be malleable; to bend and twist according to the shapes and forms dictated by given sets of circumstances.

Teaching from my experiences raises contradictions in the institutional context of the classroom. I teach my students that art can be anything. Yet I know that the institutions that house art and the markets that support them will only permit so much within carefully managed and prescribed contextual limitations. This is the game that teachers train their students to play: think without limits, practice within limits. The students know that the permissive atmosphere of art school is a mirage and start internalizing the actual and imagined constraints of a real-world art career as freshmen.

I try to juggle all of these concerns in my teaching. I tell my students that art is a practice of making meaning for one and others, using established forms of language. The meanings we make and the languages we use change over time and through varying contexts. Students ask: how then does one approach the task of making art? I respond that art, like all other human practices, comes from desire. Desire is not a specific aim and it does not have a definitive object. Desire is the impulse to joy and it is often accompanied by feelings of terror. Art is a language game with established conventions and contexts. No single context can contain the full significance of an utterance. In seizing upon the excessive nature of meaning, we approach autonomy.

My positions are bound to the intellectual history of my own development as an artist. Poststructuralist theory laid the foundation for much of my thinking. My practice was formed during the heyday of postmodernist theory in the art world, when regimes of truth were ruthlessly attacked. Today, in my own artwork and in my teaching, I have had to reevaluate the informing ideas of my beliefs. The critique of truth that evolved out of postmodernism, providing the foundation of a desire-based practice, can lead to a dangerous kind of relativism if left unchecked by the actual consequences we face in life. The limits of a desire-based model of art are the very real, concrete, stunning disappointments we each must endure. Ideal formulations collapse in the face of the actual conditions of existence: the demands of the market, the great social injustices, and the fact of mortality. On many levels there is a reality principle at work that each of us must face. The world is a dangerous place. There are stakes and conse quences attached to every move that constitutes a work of art.

I ask my students: how many of you believe the earth is flat? How many of you believe that the rules of gravity are different in different parts of the earth? Of course, no one in the room raises a hand in answer to those two questions. Then I ask them: How many of you believe that HIV is the cause of AIDS? This last question goes directly to the heart of my current preoccupations and it is the cause of my reevaluation of some poststructuralist premises.

As a documentary artist who makes work about AIDS, as a person with AIDS, I have become heavily invested in the critique of truth claims, because my life depends on it. The claim that AIDS is a death sentence was effectively refuted by my generation of AIDS activists. Many people died, many continue to die, but the refusal to accept that AIDS is a death sentence led to the development of treatments prolonging my life and the lives of many others. My peers and I were encouraged by our student readings of Michel Foucault to fight against the death sentence of AIDS. The idea that truth is a field of contestation gave us more than a tactical approach to our activism: it gave us hope.

Now we face a contradiction. Some so-called AIDS dissidents have mobilized doubt around the well-established fact that HIV is the cause of AIDS. With millions of cases worldwide, most in resource-poor countries, doubt about the cause of AIDS can lead to government inaction. In an April interview on South African television, Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa (a country with over four million cases of HIV/AIDS), stated that he would not take an HIV test to set a public example because it would confirm "a particular paradigm." Mbeki went on to say that since the leading scientists in the world admit that they do not have all the answers about AIDS, he hesitates to dispense the current drugs available to fight HIV. The consequences of his statement could be catastrophic. [1]