The future of knowledge
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear HHR,
Thanks so much for your compelling letter. Immanuel Wallerstein is indeed – besides Edouard Glissant – a wonderful toolbox for our times.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about decommodified institutions and new structures of knowledge production. In his essay, “Utopistics”, Wallerstein wrote about historical choices of the 21st century, exploring what are potentially better – not perfect – but better societies within the constraints of reality.
We travel from dreams that were betrayed to a world-system in structural crisis that is unpredictable and uncertain, towards a new world-system. In order to find a new sense of fulfillment, individually and collectively, there will be a tendency to increase the number of decommodified institutions. During an interview Wallerstein once told me, “Instead of speaking about transforming hospitals and schools into profit-making institutions, let’s work it the other way. … I think we move in the direction of de-commodifying a lot of things which we historically commodified. And this could be a very decentralized process. …If you look at a lot of movements around the world, local and social movements, what they are objecting to in many ways is commodification.” Examples are public libraries, which are free, or public galleries, which are mostly free.
Artist Gustav Metzger (whose works, dating from 1939 to 2009, we will show at the Serpentine Gallery this coming autumn), who has pioneered an art practice without commodification, says, “We transform these possibilities in a cooperative manner. We cannot radicalize enough against a radicalizing world. I see the possibility that artists will increasingly take over their own lives and their own production in relation to society in a wider sense.”
New structures of knowledge production are an important aspect of newly emerging world-systems. In the late 18th century science and philosophy became divorced from one another. As Wallerstein says, what will change everything is to question it, to find a new, unified epistemology. “Whereas the ‘two cultures’ were for 150 to 200 years centrifugal, complexity studies and cultural studies are centripetal, that is, moving towards each other.”
Recipes for engaging with public space
English architect Cedric Price conceived centripetal models of a transdisciplinary art centre and a transdisciplinary school in his visionary projects The Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt. This does not make him – and this is the paradox – a utopian architect. Much less than Archigram, for example, who has been interested in producing utopian drawings, Price took a pragmatic position and suggested engineering solutions. The Fun Palace was developed in the late ’60s but remained unrealized. What can best be described as a model for a transdisciplinary cultural institution of the 21st century, it was a complex comprised of various moveable facilities that gave shape to theatre-producer Joan Littlewood’s ideas about how such an institution should work. The complex, according to Price, was designed to enable self-participatory education and entertainment and would essentially have a limited life span. It was seen as a university of the streets, which would be easy for people to visit and would also function as a test site.
Projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt applied certain concepts from The Fun Palace to a school, or university setting. The Potteries Thinkbelt was preceded in 1969 by the Atom project, which was an atomic education facility spread out over a whole city. The education was not intended for only one age group but was seen as a continuous necessity for all members of the community. Thus this place of learning for all included an industrial education showcase, a home-study station, open teach-toys, open-air servicing, life-conditioners, electronic audio-visual equipment – all of these elements spreading across the city in an atomic way. So the whole city would become what Price called a ‘town-brain’. This laid the foundation for the Potteries Thinkbelt, where Price’s research into simple architectural components that build a complex system reached a kind of a peak. There, he drew up not only the hardware, but developed an entire program, a major project that had a lot to do with his discussions with the cybernetician Gordon Pask. It was also tied in with the effort to reuse the entire area of northern Staffordshire, a relic of the waning British ceramics industry. The ceramics industry no longer used the railway lines or stations, so Price proposed to establish a university research facility which would be belt-shaped and would go through this whole area using this reactivated infrastructure. The plan was for a university of about 20, 000 students built on a network of rail and motorways, where different stations would become places of knowledge production. His was the idea of a ‘classroom on the move’ where you would have all sorts of housing for professors, researchers and students: crates, sprawls, capsules… Should the existing infrastructure not be enough, inflatables designed by Price could be easily and swiftly added.
Potteries Thinkbelt and The Fun Palace remain unrealized, but can be revisited now, without the nostalgia of being ‘projects from the past’. They can be seen as instructional models or recipes or triggers for artists and architects to engage with, and reclaim, public space in new and critical ways.
Viva el manifesto!
The Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt also play a role for the ‘marathons’, which I conceive as content machines.
Last year at the Serpentine Gallery we did the Manifesto Marathon, the third in the Gallery’s series of Marathon events in the annual Park Nights program, in the pavilion designed by Frank Gehry. After an initial marathon in Stuttgart, the first Serpentine Marathon happened when Julia Peyton-Jones and I invited Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond to design the 2006 pavilion. For the Manifesto Marathon, protagonists from art, architecture, science, literature, philosophy, music, fashion and film delivered their manifestos over a two-day ‘futurological congress’ in the park. The Manifesto Marathon drew on the Serpentine Gallery’s close proximity with Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, which has been used as a platform by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell and William Morris, among many others.
The historic avant-gardes of the early 20th century and the neo avant-gardes of the ’60s and ’70s created an era of radical manifestos.
We now live in a time that is more atomized and has less cohesive artistic movements. At this very moment there is a reconnection with the manifesto as a document of poetic and political intent. The Marathon was a declaration of artistic will and new-found optimism. Internet-based and other new modes of publication and production are a means to disseminate ideas in the form of texts, documents and radical pamphlets.
The futurological congress at the Serpentine Gallery presented manifestos for the 21st century. We then continued the process on December 31st and January 1st this year at Vitamin Creative Space in Beijing, where after having purposefully abstained from a rush of concerted activities around the Beijing Olympics, we directed our scope to a pluralistic view of the sciences to transcend the fear of pooling knowledge. There was even a book machine which linked it to the Laboratories [Editor’s note: research in rapid urbanization leading to cross-discipline art projects] which you and I organized in Guangzhou as part of the 2005 Triennial.
Dearest Hanru, I remember very well that when we started to collaborate in the ’90s it was a moment of economic crisis and we often discussed what is really urgent in the art world. I thought it would be interesting for our letter exchange to think further about what is needed for the 21st century.
With all best regards from London to San Francisco via Tokyo
Hans Ulrich
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Originally printed in ART iT No.23 Spring 2009