Three seating arrangements, theater, round table and banquet.

During the last couple of weeks I have attended 8 solid days of theoretical and aesthetic conferences. They began on November 9th with an all-day symposium focused on artists writing titled The Art Text, in which various artists and curators presented texts trying to expand the notion of artistic research and writing could be. Then from November 10-11 I attended a two-day theory and urbanism conference titled The Commons, which examined everything from public space, to urban planning, to ecology, to the past and present revolutions in Iran, to the legacy of Marx and so on, and it featured some very big names, Harvey, Negri, Ranciere. Then finally from November 14-18 I attended a five-day series of marathon-length talks or dialogs, titled The Saloon, where several artists associated with the Goteborg Biennial spoke each day, for around three to four hours each, about their work to another artist, curator or theorist of similar or related persuasion. These talks were followed each night by intimate dinners with the artists, curators and many of the audience members that were involved.

I mention all these events not to boast on the shear number of symposia that I have sat through in the past week, in the class rooms, auditoriums and parlors of three formidable institutions; nor to remark on the avalanche of information, almost too much to retain and which left me quite mentally and physically drained; no…I mention them because they have made me reconsider how public conferences, like these, can function as pedagogical situations. Though all of these events had their problems, from the duration of some of the presentations—some too short and some too long; to the performances of some of the speakers—many whose presentations I would much rather have read than have been read to; and the content of some of the presentations—unrelated to the subject of their conference or simply redundant. But what was successful in both The Art Text conference and The Saloon (and unfortunately a bit lacking from The Commons) was how they enabled all ages and ranges of experience to learn and present together. These events were open to anyone wishing to attend and anyone wishing to present (of course not all participants were selected) and in their attempt at combining larger presentation forums with smaller more intimate gatherings, they seemed to me to offer an experience of collaborative learning, involve all the participants in the process of knowledge production across disciplines, across respective educations and ages.

Certainly there were inherent hierarchies and contests for position during these events, where the established professionals tended to hold council over the less established. And particularly during The Commons conference the overly competitive academic and sometimes combative tone of this event tended to squelch questions from those not thoroughly schooled in theoretical rhetoric and debate. But in the smaller sessions of The Art Text and in the more dialogical moments of The Saloon presentations—especially in the intimate dinners following most of the talks—this feeling of collaborative learning and teaching was most particularly felt. The best events were ones that combined a kind of close-knit learning environment in which all were required to participate by request and by the arrangement of the room—through round tables or enclosed seating arrangements, in which it was difficult to be on the periphery—with the addition of more public and formal orations presented from podiums to rooms of people, which required a more performative presentation. One needed both the formal and the informal to establish a structure for presentation while also giving space, in the smaller scenarios, to a slightly more private comfortable and open dialog to occur.

Conferences are of course pedagogic projects. They are organized to spread and challenge knowledge. We sometimes forget the pedagogic role that conferences can have when we become overawed by the notoriety of keynote speakers or the public performance of our professionalism. And of course presentations or lectures by renown individuals are an important part of these events (though I am not so sure about public displays of our professionalism), but conferences without situations for active informal conversation in which all participants are invited and given space to talk, lack something from the pedagogical experience. The Latin root of conference, conferre, means to bring together and when a conference is organized as much around the participants as the presenters then it will most clearly represent this origin, and bring all together to learn.