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«Según el principio que afirma que tan sólo en la casa en llamas es posible ver por primera vez el problema arquitectónico fundamental, así el arte, una vez que ha llegado al punto extremo de su destino, permite que pueda verse su proyecto original» (Giorgio Agamben).

The consolidated and accredited research group of the Basque university system Creation in Art and Applied Aesthetics for the City, the Landscape and the Community ([KREAREak), attached to the Department of Sculpture and Art and Technology of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) proposes and coordinates this monographic issue of AusArt in which we recognise and involve ourselves from teaching, research and creation with ways of doing/thinking/reinventing the possibility of transmission of specific knowledge of art.

As the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the progressive and indomitable acceleration of the frequency of change in the production of knowledge can be observed, incessantly questioning knowledge and its modes of transmission, and implicitly denouncing the demand for its possible redefinition or cancellation. [Thus art]. Therefore, from a position situated as teachers, researchers and creators, we propose to address the challenges for a transmission [or perhaps non-transmissibility] of the specific knowledge of art for times of renewed risk given the treatment [uses and abuses] that the culture industry carries out on the very notion of art and its productions, with hardly any margin of differentiation between its own practice and those of culture, understood as a set of conventions that determine our vision of the world. Vision augmented by technological images and artificial intelligences, inseparable from the growing industrialisation of this production in art. And simultaneous vision to the ‘slow deciphering of what is not seen, the deciphering of the reverse side of everything’ as Enrique Vila-Matas' declared passion reencountered in Franz Kafka's aphorism “To do the negative will be imposed on us, the positive has already been given to us”, intensified by connecting it with what Jean Luc Godard said in his reiteration of this aphorism: ‘we must not forget that cinema images come from negatives and that today, with videos and computers, the negative no longer exists; we only have the positive’. But we already have the positive at birth. If we are left without contradictions, what are we going to do to move forward?‘ And from the unappealable question, to be ready to give an account of a contemporary will that seeks the questioning and historical redefinition of the political potential of art and its transmission’.

Esta complejidad que implica el desempeño y ejercicio del saber en arte sustentado, en parte, por la particularidad del sujeto que pone en práctica esos saberes, conlleva una dificultad a la hora de mostrar la operación técnica en la que «lo no dicho viene trazado» (Ángel Bados), mediante la cual tiene lugar una experiencia de sentido en arte. Nos planteamos igualmente una enseñanza como proceso que dispone a hacer en gerundio, haciendo, en la que las directrices no aparecen determinadas, y se mantenie en un ámbito no exento de incertidumbre. Alejada de prácticas como las criticadas por el artista Anton Vidokle (citado por Selina Blasco) susceptibles de ser interpretadas como «herramientas de adoctrinamiento que ejercen un efecto de homogeneización sobre las prácticas artísticas de todo el mundo sin precedentes». Una enseñanza, decimos, versus enseñar como instrucción o adiestramiento. A teaching in art that cannot be modelled, always in situ, reinventing the how of a repetition that tries to inquire (to work) about something that cannot be defined and that precisely articulates its cause. Versus the instruction that strives, in a Western and globalised civilising context, to systematise and issue knowledge ‘as an operation to master uncertainty and turn what we do not know into a resource to be exploited’. ‘A so-called ‘global learning revolution’ according to which it no longer matters what you know but what you learn’, in the words of Marina Garcés. A patrimonialist culture, which produces classified knowledge (she says) and produces infinitesimal knowledge and memory (we say), as opposed to the defence of a knowledge (she insists) that ‘is alive when it incorporates the awareness of what is not known, claiming “the importance of learning not to know”.

Thus, from this situation, we promote encounters and exchanges while maintaining the underlying desire for the political potential of art and its transmission. Recognising that we are immersed in an economy (already strategic) that is supported by a ‘cultural industry’ that often masks and distances us from what (from the margins) art really gives us back (as a remainder) as symbolic capital that reactivates new ways of looking and ways of seeing. And so, encouraged as teachers, researchers and creators from different contexts and circumstances, these reflections have been produced through experiences, stratagems, essays, tactics and/or results, linked to conceptual and practical contributions that deal with a transmission in art [or its impossibility].

It is also interesting to note here the original idea that drove us within the KREAREak group during the 2023/2024 academic year [we will continue] to direct part of our focus towards the organisation of a programme of workshops (as indeterminate at times as it was spontaneous when we set it in motion) sustained, to a large extent, by our interest in a mode of transmission that (we hope) would be capable of questioning the experience of art. As has already been stated by different voices and times, we were (are) aware that ‘critical tact, responsibility to the poetic and artistic form, can be exemplified, but not taught’, noted here and now in the voice of Georges Steiner. We might even conclude that it is a matter of a mise en act. And with Franz Kafka, quoted by Giorgio Agamben, we asked ourselves ‘if art could become the transmission of the act of transmission, that is, if it could assume in its content the very task of transmission, independently of the thing to be transmitted’ (because, we say, transmission does not come from conjugating the verb to teach, nor does it come from conjugating the verb to transmit). Or intransmissibility, which ‘is equivalent to making the work the very vehicle of the untransmissible’, a task taken on, according to Agamben, by Baudelaire ‘who understood that, if art wanted to survive the ruin of tradition, the artist had to try to reproduce in his work that same destruction of transmissibility’. Consistency of ‘estrangement-value’.

From our condition (teachers/artists/creators) it was significant to take up again this reflection on how a disciplinary knowledge, in this case that of art, sustains some mode of transmissibility that, in critical times with its time situated between past/to come, can restore that criterion for action, its concrete space and its knowledge. Being aware of the difficulty, the artists Ana Laura Aláez, Ainara Elgoibar, Susana Talayero, the architect Clara Eslava, the workshop leader Alfredo Hoyuelos and the town planner Pablo Sendra were invited on that occasion to carry out workshops aimed at master's students and graduates with whom we shared our uncertainty about the transmission of the specific knowledge of art in complex contexts of the time. In addition to the objectives of doing/thinking by doing/thinking, another basic objective that we set ourselves for the development of the workshops was necessary/imperative. It consisted of focusing on the spatiality, materiality and conditions of the different venues where the workshops were held (Suzane Lacy). From the perspective of sculpture and with the aim of ensuring proximity, comfort, work, communication, thoughts and doings, the simplicity resulting from the configuration of large square platforms appeared as an identifying/common/repeated element, which we understood favoured encounters. Platforms composed of the arrangement of as many tables as were available in each of the spaces worked on. Gathered around them, participants, guests and organisers, we exchanged conversation to rehearse a situation of knowledge and subjectivities back and forth, trying to incorporate views that would amplify our own. Coincidence, chance, or encounter, in one of the workshops, the architect Clara Eslava shared this text written by Alvar Aalto:

«La gran mesa tenía dos niveles. En el centro del tablero se esparcían los instrumentos de precisión: una regla de acero de hasta tres metros, un compás, un escalímetro, y otras cosas por el estilo. Junto a la mesa se reunían los ingenieros más jóvenes, entre los cuales se encontraban también mujeres de formación universitaria. Aquel era el centro del trabajo; pero como ya he dicho la mesa tenía dos niveles. Yo fui el habitante del nivel inferior desde que comencé a gatear a cuatro patas. Parecía una espaciosa plaza, dominada tan solo por mí. Después alcancé la madurez suficiente para mudarme al nivel superior, al mismo tablero de la Mesa Blanca. Allí se dibujaban planos y mapas que reflejaban gran parte del territorio finlandés; tarea nada fácil, y que por aquel entonces no entendía. En ocasiones se ausentaban algunos ingenieros para hacer correcciones de campo en los grandes bosques y en las extensas tierras salvajes y, de esta forma me quedaba un pequeño sitio en la Mesa, donde también yo podía dibujar. Me trasladaron entonces al nivel superior. Supongo que así, a los cuatro años, también aprendí filosofía».

KREAREak group