Gaston Meskens – What's Wrong With Ideology? Life and work at the Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction
Gaston Meskens
[…] ‘The Boulevard of Broken Dreams was only a story. It is fiction’, she said. ‘The palm trees were plastic and the street was going nowhere. It was fake, but that doesn’t matter. Every populated physical environment is décor. Also here, outside. The rubbish in the alleys and on the bare zones of the city is fake. It is put there. The animals are dead and stuffed. The shops are full, but nothing is for sale. Taxis drive in circles and trains shuttle back and forth. People are dressed up, but for no particular reason. It is all sculptured, assembled and pretended’. She pauses. … ‘But we can easily take it away if we want, and return everything back to normal’.
The air in the corridor is damped and the ventilator thrums. You put down your suitcase. ‘Why would you do that?’, you ask. ‘The only thing normal here might just be the desert. The desert that connects the cities. The desert that is enclosed by the continents. We travel through it to escape it, and linger in the fata morganas we construct for each other. We set up decors to hide that there is nothing behind them and to enable ourselves to concentrate on pure encounter. So why would you take it away if you need it for us to recognise you in the first place?’ […]
From the film ‘Twilight Hotel’ (Tragic Realist Fiction, 2014, 24’05”)
Gaston Meskens:
“I started the art project “The Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction” somewhere in 2006. Meanwhile, it developed as a life’s work and a conceptual framework for all my artistic and philosophical activities. The project can be understood as a critical reflection on the idea of ideology-driven ‘social engineering’ in the way it became a socio-political practice in 19th and 20th century modernity, and it develops in all possible art forms (text, prints, drawings and paintings, music & soundscapes, found objects, installations, web presence, performances and happenings).
‘The Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction’ is a research institute, and its research programme is concerned with the way humans deal with the uncertain, the ambiguous, the complex and the unknown in social and political interaction in a world ‘still struggling with the cramps of modernity’. The basis of the research programme is a critical theory that targets strategies of conformism, positivism, profitism and populism in social, cultural, scientific, economic or political contexts, but the programme essentially wants to go beyond critical analysis as such. The aim is to research and formulate a ‘new humanism’ that could inspire new social life forms and political interaction methods that would be resilient to these strategies and that would enable and inspire real dialogue on well-being, solidarity and social justice.
As a philosopher, I take that research serious, and it became an activist and professional academic practice in itself. In that way, ‘The Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction’ is not only a critical analysis of the society we live in today, but at the same time also a philosophical and artistic experiment in ideological thinking. As a researcher of my own institute, I act in the ‘real’ worlds of art, of science and technology, of academic philosophy and of the international politics such as those of the United Nations. I present my socio-political critique and my vision on a new humanism in these worlds and I integrate reflections on these activisms back in my art practice. All these worlds have their own self-confirmative ratios, languages and codes, and depending on who I meet in these worlds, I tell variations of the story of who I am and of what I do.
Last but not least, the concept of the Institute also provides a frame for self-critique: I am critical towards power and profit in my philosophical activism, and reflexive about my activism in my art. I think ‘hyper-reflexivity’, as the highest end state ‘overlooking’ everything, will always result in melancholy, although not in its current simplistic meaning of depression it got from modernity. In August 2016, The Institute organised the ‘2nd World Conference on the Value of Melancholy in Times of Cheap Commitment’ in Antwerp, and on that occasion it reformulated the meaning of melancholy as an ethical experience in social interaction, and declared it the highest intellectual condition a human being can reach. The text ‘Revisiting Melancholy’ is taken up in the publication that will be made available to the INBOX visitors on the occasion of the show. “
Official opening
Thursday 15 September 2022
Film programme
TRAGIC REALIST FICTION – So Here We Are
17 & 18 September 2022 / museum opening hours
M HKA auditorium
Salon: Melancholies of Modernity
Thursday 29 September 2022, M HKA Auditorium, 18h00 – 21h00
The show in M HKA INBOX goes together with a salon in which invited speakers and the audience will discuss current interpretations of how the ideology of modernity still shapes our world today. In addition, the salon will reflect on the proposed need for a re-reading of modernity as suggested by the expo in INBOX. The point of departure is that the traditional historical reading of modernity as a self-confident unidirectional process of emancipation and scientific, industrial, social and political progress is too simple.
Firstly, the emergence of modern democracy and science can be understood as emancipatory liberations from the emperors and the priests, but the idea is that the ‘methods’ of democracy and science we inherited from modernity are no longer able to grasp the complexity of the social problems we face. From this perspective, the difference with art is meaningful: while modernity made democracy and science to become self-confident producers of rational truths (claiming that justification of these truths could be provided by the logic of their own internal rational methods), art was the only interaction mode for which modernity was a gradual process of self-reflection and critical self-relativisation.
Secondly, the traditional interpretation of modernity tends to overlook typical ‘early signs of reflexivity’ that happened in socio-political modernity itself. As examples, in their attempts to democratise knowledge and to strive for emancipation and liberation, people such as Paul Otlet and Wilhelm Reich, but also Walter Benjamin and Rosa Luxemburg, were visionary critical about the modern exploitation and commodification of the human being, but at the same time their work could be called vulnerable and therefore melancholic, given that it could easily be set aside as naive by modern economic and political powers that, at the same time, would manipulate and appropriate thoughts of these thinkers and activists into their own strategies. The idea is that we cannot fully understand the ethics of complexity of todays challenges if we don’t try to reflect on these early ‘philosophical activists’ in terms of how and why their visionary ideas are still of key importance for well-being and social justice but also still vulnerable today.
Gaston Meskens is an artist and philosophical activist with a background in science. He studied theoretical physics with a focus on cosmology and nuclear physics at Ghent University and developed since then a ‘philosophical activist’ and art practice in parallel. He is the founder and coordinator of The Institute of Idle Curiosity for Elements of Seduction and of the New Humanism Project and occasional guest lecturer at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Trinity College Dublin, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the Aachen Technical University, the World Nuclear University, the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK, Ghent) and the University of Hasselt.
More info at https://www.normsanddialectics.net/