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So not wanting to operate in this impoverished mode of ‘the limits of the possible’, I need to think of how to go beyond the pluralistic model, an additive mode at whose heart is a very old Enlightenment conceit that cultural institutions are universalist and infinitely expandable – that they can stretch and expand to include everyone of the excluded, elided and marginalized histories. This conceit updated to the realm of post slavery, post colonialism, post communism insists that we must deal with issues of cultural difference and cultural exclusion by practicing their opposite, namely inclusion and compensation. Of course the problem with this infinitely expandable model is that it promises no change whatsoever, simply expansion and inflation.

So an epistemological crisis seems a much more fertile a ground from which to think the notion of an emergent field. An epistemological crisis would allow us to think not competing interests but absent knowledges, it would allow us to posit a proposition that would say that if we were able to find a way to know this, it might allow us to not think that. So the loss or the sacrifice of a way of thinking, as opposed to the cumulative proliferation of modes of operating.

For both Curating and The Curatorial, the notion of an epistemological crisis is paramount, since they are largely fields grounded in a series of work protocols with little cumulative history nor a body of stable empirical or theoretical knowledge at their disposal. Thus the temptation to hurriedly build up a body of named and applicable knowledge that would dignify the field is probably great. While such absences allows for a flexibility of operating and for the possibility of considerable invention, be it of archives or subjects or methodologies – there is an ongoing demand for an end product that coheres around an exhibition, around the act of revealing and concretizing, and that belies all the loosenings that had gone into its curatorial operations.

Our move to “Curatorial/Knowledge” addressed precisely such an epistemological crisis, one in which we would not determine which knowledges went into the work of curating but would insist on a new set of relations between those knowledges. A new set of relations that would not drive home the point of an argument, as in much academic work and would not produce a documented and visualized cohesion around a phenomenon, as in much of curatorial practice. So rather than say, ‘this is the history of curating and it will now ground the field professionally’, we have tried to map the movement of knowledges in and out of the field and how they are able to challenge the very protocols and formats that define it: collecting, conserving, displaying, visualizing, discoursing, contextualizing, criticizing, publicizing, spectacularising etc.’. If curating can be the site of knowledge to rehearse its crises then it has the potential to make a contribution rather than enact representation.

Going back to the question I began with, asking “what on earth do the mean when they say art?” this epistemological crisis allows us not to choose between different definitions, but to make the curatorial the staging ground of the development of an idea or an insight. Ideas in the process of development, but subject to a different set of demands than they might bear in an academic context or in an activist context – not to conclude or to act, but rather to speculate and to draw a new set of relations. To some extent that has resulted in an understanding that it is not that the curatorial needs bolstering by theory, philosophy or history – but rather that these arenas could greatly benefit from the modes of assemblage which make up the curatorial at its best, when it is attempting to enact the event of knowledge rather than to illustrate those knowledges.

Contemporaneity as Infrastructure

In our department at the university we often say that our subject is contemporaneity and that this is not a historical period. Rather we think of contemporaneity as a series of affinities with contemporary urgencies and the ability to access them in our work. Such an understanding of contemporaneity is equally significant for the curatorial, demanding that it finds ways of conceptually entering contemporary urgencies rather than commenting upon them, taking them up as ‘subject matter’ – the endless exhibitions about terrorism or a globalized art world we have endured in recent years, being a case in point. And not only is contemporaneity about the engagement with the urgent issues of the moment we are living out, but more importantly it is the moment in which we make those issues our own. That is the process by which we enter the contemporary.

So finally I would like to put forward a very tentative argument, not fully and deeply worked through yet, about the relation of our expanding field to infrastructure and to a redefinition of ‘archives’, and about this conjunction’s central importance to the understanding of contemporaneity. For Foucault the archive is– “A density of discursive practices, a system that establishes statements as events and things.” So rather than a documentary context, it is this understanding of the archive as establishing concreteness in the world by transforming statements into events, that allows us to take it up within the actual practices of contemporary art rather than as a support structure of knowledge.

When Okwui Enwezor was curating Doumenta 11 he said again and again, in an effort to ward off the constant tedious questions about which artists were going to be included in the show – that it is a lesser matter precisely which artists or works he would be including, but rather which archives we would be reading them out of. His efforts to privilege the archives and the reading strategies at our disposal have stayed with me as an important principle of contemporaneity.
As Foucault insisted quite early on “The analysis of the archive then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us and different from our present experience, it is the borer of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it ,and which indicates it in its otherness ;it is that which outside ourselves, delimits us.”

When we in the West, or in the industrialized, technologized countries congratulate ourselves on having an infrastructure: properly working institutions, systems of classification and categorization, archives and traditions and professional training for these, funding pathways and educational pathways, excellence criteria, impartial juries and properly air conditioned auditoria with good acoustics, — we forget the degree to which these have become protocols that bind and confine us in their demand to be conserved or in their demand to be resisted.
Following Michel Feher, thinking about the impact of NGOs as modes of counter governmental organization, the shift from consumers to stakeholders has significantly shifted our understanding of infrastructures. From properly functioning structures that serve to support something already agreed upon, to the recognition of ever-greater numbers of those who have a stake in what they contribute to or benefit from. Much of the more activist oriented wok within the art field has taken the form of re-occupying infrastructure: using the spaces and technologies and budgets and support staffs and recognized audiences, in order to do something quite different – not to reproduce but to reframe questions.

We think of infrastructure as enabling, we think it is an advantageous set of circumstances through which we might redress the wrongs of the world, to redress the balance of power within a post-slavery, post colonial, post communist world of endless war. When MOMA NY gets around to putting on an exhibition of contemporary Arab art, it is either celebrated as a great step against Islamophobia or decried as the cooptation of such work into hegemonic systems of market patronage. But whatever the position, there is a sense tat the incorporation of this work within an august context, into the ultimate infrastructure, that ignored its very existence for so long, is a bench mark – a contested benchmark, but definitely one.

So if we keep in mind Achille M’Bembe’s question “Is the edge of the world a place from which to speak the world?” we might reflect about what the absence of infrastructure does make possible, which is to rethink the very notion of platform and protocol, to put in proportion the elevation of individual creativity, to further the shift from representation to investigation.
Thinking about the links between collectivity and infrastructure, the obvious necessities of mobilizing as many resources and expertises as possible at a given moment in order to not only respond to the urgencies of the moment but also in the need to invent the means , protocols and platforms which will make that engagement manifest among strata of stakeholders – then the de-centering of the west is not only the redress of power within a post slavery, post colonial , post communist world but also the opportunity in the absence of infrastructure to rethink the relations between resources and manifestations.
In order to understand the potential of a particular condition we do not mythologize or romantically glorify it, but rather extract from it a revised set of relations – from Tucuman Arde to Collectivo Situationes, from Chto Delat to Raqs media Collective to Kharita, from Public Movement to Public school, from Oda Projessi to X-Urban – these shifts have and are occurring all around us, and while I would not claim that they are a model to be reproduced within far more privileged conditions, I would suggest that they are the archive from which we need to read our own activities.

Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that being lectured about the limits of the possible seems to me to be as impoverished a condition as working without the means of a dignifying infrastructure – nothing more, as Derrida says, than the means of containment. So perhaps the necessary links between collectivity, infrastructure and contemporaneity within our expanding field of art are not performances of resistant engagement, but the ability to locate alternate points of departure, alternate archives, alternate circulations and alternate imaginaries. And it is the curatorial that has the capacity to bring these together, working simultaneously in several modalities, kidnapping knowledges and sensibilities and insights and melding them into an instantiation of our contemporary conditions.

“那到底指的是什么？”

有时候，在我们共同参与的众多讨论中，会听到某人说起“艺术”一词，心中不禁泛起疑问“那到底指的是什么？”

是否指“藏品”、“展品”或“可分类之物品”，所有被认知的实物，且符合收藏展示分类的逻辑，并与机构、基金会和私人组织的经济学一致？

或是圈子或领域内工作的“艺术家”，他们尝试以媒介的简单政治来表现错综复杂的关系，层层迭迭精致细密及自相矛盾的内容及行为，以此作为地方、组织或事件日积月累的沈淀？

或是新的研究模式，创意文化工作者进入档案知识的领域，纳入那些既非主流亦非边缘、将会对文献库主题造成困扰的其他主体及事件，来挑战文献库存在的理由。比如说，种族大屠杀文献中的一株无辜蔬菜；重写监护职责叙事的难民营账蓬设计；或者通过监视，以鸟瞰图作为千百年来政权的混合体；以非象征性和非代表性的方式探索知识生产过程中的文化切入点。

或是这样的一群人，他们成立偷渡移民组织，或者是时间银行，又或者是基因工程或基因改造的变异个案的贮藏库，再或者是伪装成跨国公司的代表，为灾民提供收容所？他们模仿社会各种结构及规则，大胆进入援助救难的领域，表现批判的姿态。

或者另外的一群人，他们通常都相当年轻，挤拥在地下室读着一些模糊的复印材料，坚持要了理解世界某些逼切的议题，掌握一些不明确的工具来应对这个世界，并使他们的参与变成一种宣言表演？

以上种种构成了我过去十年所经历体验的“艺术世界”。这轨迹中清晰指向的，或是对策展、收藏、评论或判批评估的影响的目的，是它开启了一个无确定目标的过程，结果可以是学习、研究、对话、聚会、或是把全新视角带入专业的圈子。这些目的分离的边界，使他们被记录于不同的经济及目的论，分散成知识、影响、结构及行动的多条线索，并强调自身与其他事物的关联；而过往何为艺术，艺术藉不同的对象表现出某种“显明”（原文：the manifest），提醒我们从这个世界中浮现的存在。

“艺术”世界充满多种实践，充斥大量不协调但共存的规则，引致在相同的领域中，各参与者对同一个词汇有多个矛盾的理解。不单如此，我要说的是这远远不止于解除各种形式或实践的固有意义，而是正经历一场大型的知识论危机。我的观点从这里开展：我对把拓展的领域理解为多元化，或共存实践的增长，或是之前被精致艺术所划定的狭隘领域的扩大并不感兴趣。

除“艺术”外，我想加上“实践”、“观众”、‘策展人’、“空间“、“展览”、“行为”、“介入”、“教育”以及许多其他一同与之失去定位的词汇。历史赋予“艺术”众多含义，它的边界一直在向外伸展，包含更广范的活动。但与此同时，它并没有支持自己转化成为完全不同的东西。知识论危机令我感兴趣之处，并不是以更完善或更相关的知识或定义去取代旧有的概念，而是当实践或生产被推到自身边缘的极致时会出现什么情况。它们会崩溃还是扩大？会否物极必反，并从中发展出另一套可能的意义？

当斯托法努·哈里（Stefano Harney）和费德·莫顿（Fred Moten）为e-flux杂志的教育特刊撰写了一篇关于债务的研究文章。他们以由不负责任的市场借贷引发的金融危机中，核心的 “邪恶”的“债务”概念，引申出另外的意思。“但是，债务是社会的，债权是反社会的。”他们写道：“债务是双向的，而债权则是单向的。债务向各个方向延伸、扩散、逃避、寻找避难所。负债的人向其他负债人寻求庇护，互相借贷。于债务避难所，你只能欠账越来越多，因为这里没有债权人，也没有真正的偿付。这避难所或坏债之地，我们可称之为逃亡者。”

这些就是知识论危机的特质，从之前的定义脱身，拒绝原来的意义，拒绝道德碑铭，拒绝以好或有被误解风险的潜在威胁来区分所带来的安稳。资本化的债务使数百万人面临失去家园经济破产，在这个时候声称债务是社会的有什么意义？这表示我们已不满足于从一个既定的定义去选择我们的立场，要把定义从内到外重新审视，使之再具意义。

多元化的局限

同意多元化这一讲法不是更简单容易吗？多元化常常被指是和而不同，相异的事物并行不悖，皆大欢喜，但多元文化主义正正就是这样一种和谐的幻觉！关于他们所说的“艺术”到底指的是什么的困惑，以及这种知识论上的迷失，就意味着争议的出现。每种理解不仅建基于新自由主义艺术市场以及它的邪恶孪生儿文化外交所赋予的立场，而是出自于了解世界及它的实践的不同方式。然而，对立的区分方法于最初分辨二者时或有必要。但于我而言，它最终强化霸权和另类活动之间的分野，这种区分对于重新梳理这个领域的可能性毫无益处。

德里达（Derrida）在他的藉作《大学之眼》（The Eyes of the University）中分析了八十年代巴黎“哲学学院”的成立。他说：“边界，不管是窄是宽，其作用只有一个，就是限制可能性。”

因为不愿意停留在“可能性的局限”这种匮乏的理解，我需要思考如何超脱这种多元主义的模型，思考一种附加模式，它源自古老启蒙主义的自高自大，认为文化机构高举普世价值以及可以无限扩展，延伸至包容所有被排除在外、省略以及被边缘化的历史。这种自负，在后奴隶主义、后殖民主义和后共产主义的领域内更新，它坚持我们必须以反面，即包容和补偿来处理文化差异和文化排拒。当然，这种无限扩展的模型并没有许诺任何改变，而只是扩展和膨胀。

因此，知识论危机于思考一个新兴领域上，是更为肥沃的土壤。从知识论危机的角度，我们不是去思考利益的冲突，而是其中缺乏的知识。我们假设一个命题，既然我们能够找到方法来认识“这一点”，很可能我们就没有思考“那一点”，即放弃某种思维方法而不是持续增加操作模式。

就策展和与策展相关的实践而言，知识论危机的概念极其重要，因为策展是以一系列惯例为基础，但却没有多少过往的历史例子可供参照，也没有稳固的经验或理论知识作为依据。因此仓促命名及建立一套可供应用的知识，并藉此来提高对这个领域的认知，这一股冲劲或是好的。虽然这种不管于文献档案、艺术主体还是方法论的欠缺，都有利于灵活操作和创新，但人们持续要求一套完整理论来贯穿各个展览、揭示以及具体化的行为，用以掩饰策展实践中的所有松散部份。

我们探讨策展与知识的关系，正是探讨知识论危机。在这里，我们不去框定“那些”知识可以进入策展的体系，但坚持这些知识彼此之间全新的联系。这些新的联系不会如许多学术研究般归结到一个论点，也不会像策展活动般把某一现象归纳成视觉纪录。所以与其说“这是策展的历史，它将从此建立一个专业范畴”，我们倒不如去勘察不同界别的知识是如何应用在策展领域，以及这些应用如何质疑界定策展领域本身的惯例和形式，如收藏、保存、展示、可视化、建立论述、给予脉胳、评论、传宣以及奇观化。如果把策展看作是一个知识场域，在这里正在上演自身的危机，那么策展或能对各知识领域发展作出贡献，而不只是具演绎的功能。

回到上面提到“当某人说起“艺术”一词时，那到底指的是什么？”，我在上文中勾勒的知识论危机，使我们不必从既有的定义中作选择，而是把策展看成是形成和发展观点或识见的舞台。观点和识见在这里是处于一个形成的过程，这个过程响应不同脉络的需求，或是学术的或是行动主义的语境，不下结论也不急于行动，而是去猜想和思考新的关系。某程度上，这种旁观姿态可以形成这样的理解：不是策展需要理论、哲学、历史等知识学科的支持，而是反过来这些学科会大大地得益于策展擅长的组合形式，策展为知识生产的盛会揭幕，而不是在举例说明那些知识。

当代性作为基础结构

在我们伦敦大学金匠学院的学系里，我们经常说我们研究的是当代性，而它不是一个历史时期。我们理解当代性为一系列关系密切的迫切议题，以及藉我们的工作去参与的能力。这种当代性的理解对于策展来说也是同等重要，因为它要求寻找方法，从概念上进入这些迫切议题，而不是隔岸观火地把它们当成是“主题”，比如说，近几年来有无数令人难以忍受的关于恐怖主义和全球化的展览。当代性不仅仅是关于参与当下的迫切议题，而更重要的是视这些问题为我们的问题。这就是我们进入当代的过程。

最后我要提出一个初步、仍有待更仔细深入思考的论点，就是之前所说拓展领域与基础结构，以及与被重新定义的“文献库”的关系，以及此关系对理解当代性的重要核心位置。对于福柯来说，文献库是“众多实践的浓缩，是以事件和事物作陈述的系统”。所以，根据这个理解，文献库不是一个记录档案的脉络，而是具体的东西；它将陈述转化为事件，从而使我们可以把它结合到当代艺术的具体实践中，而不只是背后的知识结构。

策划第十一届文献展的当奥奎·恩维佐 (Okwui Enwezor)尝试迥避计划邀请那些艺术家的烦厌问题时就反复重申，选择那个艺术家或那件作品是一个相对次要的问题，更重要的是我们将会从那些文献库来认识他们。他把文献库以及阅读文献库的策略放在重要位置，并将之与我们分享使用，对我来说，这亦成为当代性的一个重要原则。

福柯很早就提出“对文献库的分析涉及一个特许领域：它和我们很近，但又与我们当下的体验不同，它是环绕着我们、悬垂着的时间锥子，以自身的特异之处标示自己；正是在我们自身之外，所以划定我们的界限。”

在西方社会，或者说在工业化、科技化的国家，我们庆幸有基础结构：运作正常的机构、分类的系统、文献库以及与此相关的传统和专业训练、经费来源、教育通道、高标准、公正的评审以及配备空调及良好音效的大会厅。但是，我们忘记了在很大程度上它们变成了一种束缚和限制我们的惯例，我们需要考虑保留它们或是抵抗它们。

让我们根据米歇尔·法赫（Michel Feher）的说法，去思考非政府组织（NGO）的影响。非政府组织把消费者变成了持份者，这种转变改变了我们对于基础结构的理解，从前它们是正常运作的结构，支持某些我们认可的东西，而现在它们得到更多作出贡献或受益的持份者的认同。在艺术领域，大部分以社会行动为本的作品就是对基础结构的再占领：利用场地、科技、财政预算、工作人员以及观众群体来作相当不同的事情，不再重现，而是以不同框架重新设定问题。

我们认为基础结构可以起推动作用。我们认为这是有利条件，可以用来纠正世界上的一些错误，调整后奴隶主义、后殖民主义、后共产主义世界的权力平衡。纽约现代艺术博物馆（MoMA）克服困难展出阿拉伯的当代艺术，一方面它可以被当作是克服对伊斯兰恐惧迈进一大步的庆祝，也可以被当作是把这些作品带进市场赞助这种霸权系统的同谋。从任何角度而言，现代艺术博物馆作为一个备受推崇的基础结构，把长期以来被忽略的阿拉伯当代艺术纳入到它的体系之内，当中或有争议，但肯定是一个重要的里程碑。

如果我们记住阿启里·恩本比（Achille MBembe）的问题“是不是站在世界边缘才能谈世界？”。我们可以思考在没有基础结构的地方造就了什么可能性，这也是对于平台和惯例的重新思考，提升发挥个体的创意，进一步把再现转化成调查研究。

谈到集体和基础结构的关联，我们显然有必要把最多的资源和专业能力动员起来，不但对当下的迫切议题作出反应，而且要找出新的方法、章法和平台，使不同阶层的持份者的参与能够呈现出来。西方的去中心化不但纠正后奴隶主义、后殖民主义和后共产主义的权力关系，也是一个契机，在基础结构未出现之前，重新思考资源与实现的关系。

为了理解特殊条件下的可能性，我们不会把它神秘化或浪漫化地颂扬一番，而是从中提炼出全新的关系，从展览“Tucuman Arde”到艺术组织“Collectivo Situationes”，从“Chto Delat”到“Raqs Media Collective”，再到“Kharita”, 从公共运动到公共学校，从“Oda Projesi”到“X-Urban”，这些转化就在我们身边发生。我并不是提供一些用来复制的范例，而是建议这些是我们需要阅读的文献库，并通过它们来了解我们的活动。

对我而言，我可以诚实地说，被告诫可能性的局限就如在贫乏的基础结构中工作一般──别无其他所指；正如德里达所说，这只是约束的手段。或许集体主义、基础结构或当代性之间的必要关系，在我们这个正在拓展的领域中，并不是对抗的行为，而是一种能力，能够找出不同的出发点、另类文献库、不同的流通方式以及其他的想象。正是通过策展，我们有能力把这些东西都集合起来，同时在多个不同的模式中工作，“骑劫”各种知识、感情和识见，并将它们铸造成当代状况的实证。

Witness, for example, the woeful statements that emerged from ‘Forget Fear’, the 7th Berlin Biennale, earlier this year, a largely state-funded exhibition that purported to be about the intermingling of politics and art but that in many ways ended up perpetuating the kind of thinking it claimed to be complaining about. As curator Artur Żmijewski stated in his introduction: ‘My critique of my own field is ultimately very simple and can be summarized in one sentence: art doesn’t act, and doesn’t work.’ By this, I assume he means that he can’t gauge art’s efficacy, which strikes me as a very narrow way of thinking about art’s myriad functions. Associate curators of the Biennale, the Russian art collective Voina (War), told the following anecdote in one of the show’s accompanying publications: ‘Kazimir Malevich, after the revolution in Petrograd, armed with a pistol, passed through artists’ studios asking who was still painting birches and demanded real art. Armed with a weapon. That is real art.’ Reading this immediately made me want to reach for a brush to paint a picture of a birch tree. The moment vehemence and violence go unchallenged is the time to start ringing the warning bells. Right-wing rhetoric disguised as activism – for this is what Voina is spouting – is always bizarrely simplistic: it implies that the world isn’t large enough to accommodate a multitude of responses to its many problems. I prefer to ask: How can change be manifested if it can’t first be imagined? And who would ever assume that imaginations run along straight lines?

What might be seen as an innocuous creative act in one country can be seen as a threat to national security in another. For many artists, the simple act of expression can be a radical gesture of defiance: one that refuses to allow the imagination to be censored, whatever the consequences – and thousands of artists are jailed as a result. In this issue of frieze, Elizabeth Rush looks at performance in Burma, a country brutalized by decades of military rule and censorship. She concludes: ‘The most tenacious and telling art in Burma isn’t painted, printed or hewn. It simply takes place.’

dOCUMENTA (13) is about to close in Kassel, Germany. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, it is possibly the most admired large exhibition I have visited – its complexities an antidote to the over-simplifications that took place in Berlin. In her response to the exhibition in this issue, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie cites the career of octogenarian Lebanese artist and writer Etel Adnan as being symbolic of the show’s intentions. She notes: ‘Adnan has been responding to wars and unconscionable acts of violence with great sensitivity and steadfastness for more than half a century. Her commitment to her role as an increasingly endangered species of public intellectual, and her belief in the capacity of her art not only to make sense of the world but to allow her to fall in love with it over and over again – these are the qualities […] that give Christov-Bakargiev’s exhibition its heart.’ Adnan’s paintings, one of which is on the cover of this issue, might not appear initially particularly radical: they are modest, delicate, thoughtful things. And yet, for so many people, the simple act of being able to respond to the world they find themselves in is an enormous privilege, and one that Adnan embodies, declaring: ‘I write what I see, I paint what I am.’

I interviewed the American artist Suzanne Lacy for this issue, an artist who – despite the fact that for over four decades she has worked tirelessly for social justice – still makes art ‘for what some might consider quite romantic reasons: to invent, to give shape through imagination, to play’. I asked Lacy how she gauged the success or failure of a work of art. She replied: ‘The best I can hope for is to relate a set of experiences that move us in a direction of understanding each other better, understanding social systems better, thinking about new ways to make art.’ I can’t think of a more timely way to define what activism is, or could be.

Translated Text
Frieze艺术杂志2012年9月刊
（作者）Jennifer Higgie

（标题）吆喝和细语
（副标题）争议性的话题：艺术与社会行动

（内容）我近来听到不少说法，是关于“社会行动”（activism）与艺术之间的关系。艺术是不是社会行动的一种方式呢？这当然不是一个简单的问题。近些年来，不少的艺术展览、书籍和研讨会，都就这个问题展开探讨。有人认为是，有人以为非，其关键在于如何对社会行动这个名词概念的理解。这个概念通常暗指某种集体的行为、一种尝试改变社会政治而努力的行为。然而，我的理解却是更加广义的，毕竟，参与政治社会行动可以有不同的方式，不一定只有集会才算是社会行动。

艺术创作与政治是分不开的，它们之间的关系可以是赤裸裸的，也可以是很微妙的。比如以直接政治宣传为目的艺术就是赤裸裸的，而通过资助或赞助的形式来间接影响艺术活动则是微妙的。纵观二十世纪，艺术作为政治工具来批评社会是越来越直接了当。然而，对于有些人来说，艺术并不能够改变社会。他们的理由是：即使是最激进的社会行动艺术，也不外乎是自由市场经济的一部分。艺术市场的背后都是金钱的逻辑，由大富豪控制着。对于这些大富豪，我们不要被他们的收藏品味所蒙蔽：他们表面上收藏自由派或者偏政治左派的艺术品，但其实他们在政治上并不是真的自由派。所以，在艺术怀疑论者看来，艺术无非就是时代的反射，艺术创作只是对各种社会现象的反应，而不是为这些现象提供解决办法。因此，他们得出这样的结论：艺术改变不了社会，真正能够改变社会的是直接介入的政治行动。在我看来，这些怀改论调有失偏颇：他们是在给艺术开处方，处方限制了艺术的潜在可能性。

举个例子，在今年初的第七届柏林双年展上，官方主题是“忘掉恐惧”，该展览想探讨政治与艺术的纠缠。然而，展览的结果不但没有理清政治与艺术的关系，而是延续了艺术无能于政治的看法。策展人Artur Zmijewski在开幕时声称：“我[作为策展人]，对这个展览会的看法很简单，可以用一句话来概括：艺术不行动，艺术不奏效。”我想Artur是在说自己无法知晓艺术的效能。这种提法是很狭隘的，忽视了艺术众多的社会效能。这届双年展的助理策展人、来自俄罗斯的艺术团体Voina（这名字是战争的意思）在随后的活动上还讲述了一则小故事：“在前苏联革命队伍拿下彼得格勒后，先锋艺术家马勒维奇（Kazimir Malevich）拿着一把手枪到艺术区去，询问谁还在画白桦树，要求他们搞真正的艺术创作。像他那样拿着手枪，才是有行动能力的艺术。”听到这里，我很想马上拿起画笔去画白桦树。激烈的暴力如果没有遭遇抗争，那就要敲响警钟了。Voina的说法，就是右派的言辞佯装成为社会行动的主张，这些言辞把艺术和政治的关系简单化，暗示着这个世界不存在解决问题的多种方法。我倒是想问：如果连艺术想像都不可能了，那么又如何能改变社会呢？

相比之下，即将落幕的第13届卡塞尔文献展则没有把艺术与政治的问题简单化，而是展示了两者之间关系的复杂性。卡塞尔文献展是我最敬仰的大型艺术展览，这一届的策展人是 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev。她说此次展览的目的可以用一位黎巴嫩艺术家的艺术生涯来类比。这位黎巴嫩艺术家叫Etel Adnan，她同时也是作家，目前已八十多岁了。Carolyn说：“半个世纪以来，对于战争和没有良心的暴力行为，Adnan的反应总是带有很高的敏锐感，并且持之以恒。她充分体现了一个公共知识分子的角色。在公共知识分子正渐渐成为稀有物种的今天，她的奉献就显得更加重要。她的艺术生涯，体现了她对艺术效能的信仰，这种信仰使她一次次地爱上艺术。她的这些素质……也就是我们此次文献展的心脏。” Adnan有一幅油画刊登在这一期的Frieze杂志封面上。乍看上去并不是很激进，而是谦逊的、精巧的以及深思熟虑的。但是，对于许多人来说，这么简单的艺术表现已然是很了不起了，因为他们生活在不同的国家，在这些国家里，能这样做需要很大的勇气。正因为如此，Adnan声称：“我书写我所看到的东西，我用油画记录我是什么。”

就艺术和政治的关系，我还采访了美国的艺术家Suzanne Lacy。她四十年来都不辞辛劳地为了社会正义而努力工作。但她的回答却带着浪漫主义情调。她说她的艺术创作就是从无到有的创造，将脑海里想像的东西具体化为一个型，艺术创作就是要好玩。这种回答听起来似乎与她为社会所做的事情无关。我接着问她如何衡量一件艺术品的成败，她说：“我最希望看到的[成功的艺术品]，就是这些艺术品可以促发某些体验，从而让我们更好地互相理解，更多地了解体社会体系，促发我们去想像新的方法，来创造艺术。”我觉得这句话就是社会行动（Activism）这个概念的时代注脚。