A remark on the art of categorizations.

Categorizing as a strategy in the arts has always been part of artistic esthetics. The last decennium however, the translation of art in a knowledge production machine has began to occupy a disproportionate part of the discourse. This shift in vocabulary not only changed the role of the arts of today's society, it also pushed the arts (and 'artistic research' in particular) into the realm of economically viable, 'useful' and productive societal gestures. This means that the arts have little by little pushed themselves out of the focus of esthetics and into the zone of political knowledge production. The arts have come to be labelled not just as a place for (un)pleasurable contemplation, but as the perfect place to gather (critical) knowledge about its own and other societal preconceptions.

Now, if we look at the concrete results of this knowledge production processes, or take a closer look at the processes of categorizing themselves, this uncompromising view on the arts has to be understood with a little leniency. Artistic practices and their need for copying scientific strategies and vocabulary (the artistic laboratories, the information 'mappings', words like 'virus', 'contamination', 'rhizome', etc…) in one and the same gesture seem to propose an order of things, and create the acute experience of the impossibility of this categories to contain the information that they are supposed to comprise. Very often the categorizations in the arts rather reveals their own limitations: the absurd gesture of getting a grip on what is utterly quixotic and impossible to communicate in a thoroughly transparent way.

In that sense, it seems more appropriate to talk about the processing of knowledge than about the production thereof: as the surrealists showed us, art is rather a game of mislaying informations than one that makes sense of their belonging. Art does not in the first instance produce knowledge so much as an experience that we try to turn into knowledge through interpretation. What the arts keep on opening up are cracks in our systems of understanding, of placing our experiences in a pre-defined context wherein they can be understood according to the conventions of interpretation. What the arts insist upon in their recuperation of scientific systems is the absurdity of our endless attempts to create difference, to translate the mystery of things into analyzable data, to render the world-we-live-in into a comprehensible grid of information. The experience of things is not so much about 'what they mean' or 'how we can use them', but rather about 'what they do', and how they change my relations: to myself, but also to the other, and to the environment; en ecology of things that keeps on surprising me in its sheer complexity of potential associations.