Patrick D. Flores – “Time to Unlearn”: Urgency and Practical Intelligence in the Southeast Asian Museum

Patrick D. Flores – “Time to Unlearn”: Urgency and Practical Intelligence in the Southeast Asian Museum

The full article can be found at the following link https://cimam.org/forum/time-to-unlearn-urgency-and-practical-intelligence-in-the-southeast-asian-museum-by-patrick-d-flores/

This week’s reading suggestion moves away somewhat from the path we have traced in the past weeks of presenting and analysing academic articles that take biennials as their starting point in a variety of disciplines ranging from sociology to history of art and anthropology. What we want to propose to you as this week instead is a paper that was first given as a keynote speech delivered at the CIMAM conference of 2017 by Patrick D. Flores, professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines. There are two reasons we thought this text would contribute to the discussion we are trying to generate around biennials: the first is his reading of the biennial model (Flores went on to curate the 2019 Singapore Biennial) and the second is his poetic and compelling way to problematize the notions of learning and unlearning in relation to both the colonial and nationalist project with particular regard to the southeast Asian context. In the day in which RCEP is announced as the world’s potentially biggest unitary trade zone it feels particularly important to give some further thought about the cultural framework within which this is taking place.

The biennial model is the focus of Flores’ introduction to his original speech which was added when the text was recently published in CIMAM’s forum section. In it the academic and curator reflects with clarity on biennials, describing them as a “productive platform […] laying at the intersection of the art world, the public sphere, academic production, popular culture, and social movements.”

underlying the model’s current struggle to come to terms with the condition of the world expressed in art, stressing the necessity to undergo an unlearning/relearning process which necessarily involves a variety of disciplines and approaches. The publicness of biennials, as opposed to other art institutions, means that they seek to engage with audiences far beyond the “art world” and therefore often seek engagement by practitioners from other fields. In the logic of what has emerged recently, also through our series #BiennialsInTimesOfCovid19 we feel this point needs to be addressed more consciously and reflectively also within an idea of sustainability (cultural as much as environmental). Possibly this would also go a far way to answer his concerns over the struggle biennials face in regard to fatigue and repetition.

These thoughts fed directly into his 2019 Singapore project, titled “Every step in the right direction” to create a biennial situated at the intersection between a festival and a seminar, as dual space in which art becomes part of a much wider and open section of life while also allowing for an experience of art necessary to unfold its criticality. A space envisioned with such premises aimed at the production of a space through a “double, but not binary, movement between the ethical and the geopoetic.” Such reflections prove particularly relevant within a cultural space, such as the Southeast Asian one, which has been entangled in orientalist, colonial, revolutionary and nationalist narratives for much of the past century and often all at the same time.

The second aspect, developed in the original speech by Flores, moves away from an institutional critique of biennials but while doing so allows us to gain an important insight into his curatorial approach to the region and its cultural complexities. In itself, and through its approach to learning institutions, this text feels like a must read for those of us engaging in biennial making throughout the world. In his rich analysis of the relation between art, politics and learning institutions (specifically universities) we are asked to confront structures of power that go way beyond the cultural context of the Philippines and Southeast Asia as a whole. If we put his reflections in the context of the current discussion about biennials and their challenges it is easy to see this as a text able to generate a wide range of reactions.

Just to give the readers one suggestive starting point of how his thoughts correlate to today’s situation we want to share one quote taken from the speech:

“the idea of learning itself is honed within multiple agencies within the structure. I call this intense co-implication in which the person who assumes curatorial roles and gains curatorial effects refunction, translate, or remediate structural prerogatives. The agency here becomes polytropic, taking on different figurations and is in the process of variable turning.  In many ways, this modality of learning is self-teaching. Where in most parts of the region, curatorial or museological education is not fully formalized, many of the most interestingly idiosyncratic curators had been self-taught, a condition that has enabled them to embody the bureaucracy and not oppose it as if it were a burden or an impediment. The nimbleness, agility, or artfulness of this agent reveals a metis. James Scott turns to the word metis, which he translates as practical knowledge that is decisively local and that is related to mutuality derived from the anarchist lexicon. He concludes that democracy rests on the “assumption that the metis of its citizenry should, in mediated form, continually modify the laws and policies of the land.”[38]