3 . Metabolic Museum-University , Ljubjlana 2019 . Photo by David Kunc
of seminars held at the College de France in 1977- 1978 entitled “ Security , Territory , Population ”, philosopher Michel Foucault describes counterconduct as the first instance of critique and the “ art of not being governed quite so much .” In the context of the museum , counter-conduct evokes a tension between emancipation ( for example , from the yoke of consumerist exhibition-making , or the stultification of the art historical canon ), and revisionism with the unabashed return of the universal museum for which the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin is a case in point . This ambivalence makes it confusing , as counter-conduct transports both the exhilaration of a defiant position , and the fear that resistance can turn into public-facing demagogy .
As a methodology of research , academic iconoclasm generates a heteroclite set of artefacts and artworks and constructs relationships of transgressive adjacency between them . These incite disorder in existing taxonomies and promote discordant readings , be this in terms of history ,
body politics , gender , race , ethnicity , or diversity . It creates assemblages or constellations of such materials that together work to suspend the canonical reliance on context , and the specialism of the expert . At KW , I have put together a faculty that includes artists working in different media , situation designers , a composer , a lawyer , a novelist , and a feminist anthropologist . We work to develop a new set of analytical parameters by observing and discussing aggregates of ambiguous objects , artworks , and ephemera from different collections in Berlin .
Meanwhile , just as strategies and forms of control are updated and technologized , dissidence can acquire an anachronistic tinge . Terms like underground or subculture lose their salience and colloquialism , no longer evoking the seditious zeitgeist of the moment . If the European avant-garde and institutional critique of the 20 th century deployed tropes of conceptual and performance art alongside agitprop , today ’ s broader manifestations of the decolonial are affiliated to ever-increasing demands for accountability and overview
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