“I think the artistic is like a double-edged sword.“

An Interview with Janna Graham, Nicolas Vass, and Annette Krauss by Laila Huber

Janna Graham: This is definitely the case in the moments that social movements are alive and things are moving quickly. At other times, when they are more static the artistic sometimes stands in as a placeholder for other ways of thinking. I think it is a bit like holding onto the two poles, you can’t get rid of the term artistic because it sometimes allows for a certain kind of space and a certain amount of poetry, specific resources and maybe something less formulaic to be made possible. And yet you don’t want it to be there because it also comes with authorship, signature, and commodity. And those things cause real tensions in collective work. Sometimes this tension is useful. Other times it gets in the way.

Annette Krauss: What I would like to add to this in terms of intervention and the artistic, is the tension again between long-term and short-term moments: an intervention, at least this is my vision about the notion of intervention, is long term. And in a strange way, when the term artistic comes with it, I immediately think about it as [snapping fingers] momentary.

Janna Graham: For me, even intervention sits on the edge. When it is used in melodramatic TV series in relation to the family of someone with an addiction, for example, “We staged an intervention” means you are going to bring people together and interrupt a person at the height of their issue and get them into rehab. So it has a long term goal—rehabilitation—but a temporariness to it in the act; it is a dramatic moment where you make a disruption or rupture and then something comes after. If you add artistic to it, it concretizes it as gesture or short-term action that is also somewhat patronizing, i.e., rehabilitation of another. So, I think you have to actually work at the term and the practice to make it long term because the first connotation for me is very much symbolic, short term, rupture, a little bit more in keeping with the avant-garde notion of the artistic or activist versus one who is engaged in long-term social justice work.

Annette Krauss: With this kind of intervention intending to cause a rupture, the problem is always: what comes after the rupture? It is this moment of putting something out of balance, which could happen very dramatically, but what does it need after the rupture to not become a dramatic backlash. For example, with school projects I am involved in, it always sounds big: “a year, amazing,” or half a year, but just as important would be the question of how to establish a continuation of the discussions and practices with the students? This is something that bothers me. I was always quite happy when teachers where not around so much when the students and I met, and I would always ask, “Do we want to have the teachers with us when we are working together?” Now I actually think that there is also a downside to the situation that teachers are not with us, since I believe it is very important that they understand the kind of process we went through—although maybe the process might be completely different when they are there. It is about entering a structure that is so tough, so tight, at the same time there is a certain thinking process happening. That is what made me think about this long-term aspect, and the tension between long-term and short-term engagements. And I agree that there is a tremendous process of authorship that goes along with the “artistic.” That is what we struggle with all the time. If you enter this “artistic intervention” as a group, it is already something, but even then there are forces (art worlds, art discourses, and I don’t want to exclude myself here) that want to brand it, which is very often quite counterproductive.

Paolo Freire developed the banking concept of education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Pedagogia do Oprimido, 1968), 1970.

Many thanks to Veronika Aqra for the transcription.

Janna Graham, Nicolas Vass, Annette Krauss, Laila Huber ( 2014): “I think the artistic is like a double-edged sword.“. An Interview with Janna Graham, Nicolas Vass, and Annette Krauss by Laila Huber . In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 05 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/i-think-the-artistic-is-like-a-double-edged-sword/