“We have an open approach to writing here,” I was told. “There was a student who refused to write the obligatory MA Essay, so he made a large wooden cabinet as his qualifying writing assignment,” the anecdote went. This was May 2020. I was on Zoom, sitting in an apartment that was slated for demolition. Painting was peeling off the ceiling and falling into my hair. I hoped the advanced dilapidation of my living quarters was not visible to the person introducing me to the position I was being offered as professor of art theory and the history of ideas. “We feel this kind of openness allows each student to develop their own process-based approach to language.”
I swallowed hard. I can’t get behind this, I thought to myself. In this pedagogical permissiveness, I could see a refusal to confront how violent language is, or, how deeply it cuts into artistic practices, art works, and the dense sociality of overlapping art worlds. Such permissiveness pretends that there is a way out, that social reality isn’t governed by logocentrism, and that the way people write about art and who gets written about isn’t the basis for power. When I look at the Swedish funding landscape, or the movement of an international artistic elite, or the vast network of market-alternative residencies and transnational project funding, I see the role of language in art gaining strength, not losing ground. I see no value in pretending that rhetorical articulation does not matter for artists, and I feel an incredible sense of urgency to grant as much self-determination in this to the emerging generation as possible. But I nodded, discretely brushed some ancient plaster off the sleeve of my shirt, and asked about the start date.
The deep reservations I felt in 2020 about the approach to my field at the Royal Institute of Art have become a question that structures many profound and deeply (productively) challenging encounters over the last four years: Do we, the faculty and staff at Mejan, prepare our students to tolerate or respond to the violence language enacts? What are the consequences for students’ individual trajectories and for the art scene in Sweden in general if we do not prepare them for this confrontation? What skills are we under an obligation to impart if we take seriously the fact of their exposure to this violence as artists? And finally, how can we offer skills and stage a pedagogical form of confrontation without enacting—or even perpetuating—an old and toxic hierarchy between language and material, between those who think and those who make?
What do I mean by “the violence enacted by language”? There are two levels to the answer: First, the violence inherent in any articulation and, second, the way power uses language to control and discipline artists (along with the rest of us, really). Let’s take a recent example of the second level. On March 2, 2024, Dan Jönsson published a review in Dagens Nyheter of a large solo exhibition by Selma Selman at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg. Selman identifies as a multidisciplinary artist born in Bosnia and Herzegovina of Romani origin. Jönsson opens his review by describing the documentation of a performance presented during documenta 15 in 2022 (the work is not on view in the exhibition he is discussing) entitled Platinum (2021). He writes:
In the film, some of the artist’s male relatives were seen working on extracting platinum from catalytic converters of cars, i.e. precisely the kind of contraptions that in recent years have proved susceptible to theft in Swedish residential areas. Some of them might therefore have ended up with Selman’s family, and the installation’s ambiguous allusions to international crime in the midst of the carefree everyday grind, together with the sumptuous enamel portraits, made the whole thing come together in a rarely fruitful way.1
The reviewer first, assumes that Selman’s (Roma) male relatives are extracting platinum from stolen cars; then suggests that they are part of an international crime ring; goes on to imply that viewers might be watching the destruction of property belonging to the Swedish middle and upper-middle class; and finally praises the illicit undertones of Selman’s artwork as “fruitful” without identifying whom “sumptuous portraits” might serve. Jönsson’s language employs racist stereotypes of the Romani people and subtly reinforces the trope that art evokes the danger of illegality for the pleasure of an elite audience.
The history of racism directed against people of Romani origin in Sweden is long, and it is not my intention to retrace the important work done by Katarina Taikon and documented by Lawen Mohtedi, among others here. 2 My point is that when my students leave the classroom, I know they are entering a field of public discourse about art in which an artist’s work can be inaccurately described in the terms above in a major national newspaper with impunity. Public hostility to difference is escalating across Europe, and if the artists we graduate are going to survive—aesthetically and ethically—in the face of this swelling violence, they must feel they have the option to speak back rather than respond by withdrawing or going mute.
Of course, there are many ways to respond to the kind of violence Jönsson employs. Though his attack takes place in language, in theory it is possible to make a cabinet, a film, a painting, or a sculpture that indirectly confronts his authority to write as he does, to challenge his racism on art’s own terms. If aesthetic objects can respond to violence is not the question here; the question is rather how to prepare students to tolerate the inevitable confrontations with and in language that result from the presentation of artworks.
This returns me to the two levels I mention above, the violence of articulation and the violent instrumentalization of language. We didn’t talk about racism in the writing sessions with graduating students over the course of this winter, when the texts you are about to encounter were developed. Instead, we talked about how much to expose a material process to the written word. If we assume from the outset that any linguistic articulation of what is at stake in artwork amputates it in some way, cuts it off from some possibility or another, what is gained from submitting to this violence? What can be offered to the reader in 300 words, and what must be withheld to leave space for a full aesthetic encounter to flourish? What insight into grief, emotional crisis, the way information dissipates between signal beacons, or industrialized food processes does language provide the viewer? What does refusal accomplish in this context?
Every graduating student who chose to participate in the seminars and is represented by a short text in these pages answers these questions on their own terms, in a way that reflects their individual processes. Each accepted the confrontation between their work and language, and struggled together with their colleagues, as well as with me and the external editor Orit Gat, for an answer. To my mind, providing the space for students to struggle with language and expecting them to use it is the only way to prepare them for what will come next—whether that is signing their name to a letter of public protest, responding to a problematic reading of their work, or deciding when to refuse articulation and demand the viewer meet them in the process.
I was struck this year by students’ self-honesty and grace in the context of this confrontation—with each other’s work in the classroom and with their own conflicted relationships to language. The courage they demonstrate in that pedagogical space and in the space of this book, coupled with sincere criticality about the way the power games languages play affect their work, reveals that given a platform and generous pedagogical support artistic writing can function as a complex form of a resistance in the field of art. I was trained to respect the authority of language, to fear its violence but ultimately also to submit to it. Perhaps the reader and I can both learn something about how to respond otherwise to such violence from these students’ ambivalence: their tentative and partial refusals and their moments of tantalizing conceptual transparency.
| 1. | Dan Jönsson, ‘Starka men konstnärligt svaga romska berättelser’, Dagens Nyheter, 2 March 2024 (Accessed 12 March 2024, translated from Swedish by the editor). |
| 2. | See: Lawen Mohtadi, Den dag jag blir fri: En bok om Katarina Taikon (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 2012), for the English version see: Lawen Mohtadi and Katarina Taikon, The Day I Am Free & Katitzi, trans. Jennifer Hayashida (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019) and Lawen Mohtadi and Devrim Mavi, eds., Rasismen i Sverige: Nyckeltexter 2010-2014 [Racism in Sweden: Key Texts 2010-2014] (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 2014). |
Natasha Marie Llorens is Professor in Art Theory at the Royal Institute of Art and co-director of the Center for Art and the Political Imaginary.