A R T I S T P R O J E C T
The nOTebOOk
dora garcÍa
Once, a friend, Guillaume Désanges, told me that, in the exhibitions of
my work, one could only see a very small part of the thought processes
that linked the exhibited pieces together, and that there should be a way
to present—as honestly as possible—all the connections, side alleys,
forks in the road, roads not taken, repeated names, repeated fi gures,
fl eeting mentions, tentative suggestions, ideas en passant . . . that there
should be a way to present these ideas and the transitions between ideas
without being hermetic, pedantic, or overwhelming. The answer to this,
I thought, was in my notebooks. I don’t really make drawings or
sketches, but I do try to relate and name “honestly”—that is, pour
myself—all the elements of an ever-expanding network of ideas that
eventually become my artistic practice. I am able to go back to these
notebooks and trace the genesis of an idea, and I believe that others
could too. The following pages are a way to present content by using
mostly diagrams, graphics, and image patterns—and this comes, je
believe, very close to the way I think.
106
© 2022 artMargins and the Massachusetts institute of technology
all images courtesy of dora garcía.
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00318
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POsTscrIPT
Art production is often accused by neoliberalism of being elitist, and at
the same time of living on subsidies. These paradoxes are frequent in
the neoliberalist idea of culture; par exemple, neoliberalism often char-
acterizes the left at the same time as being “gauche caviar” (donc, rich) et
as being unable to make a living. En même temps, neoliberalism and
capitalist predecessors are very comfortable with the idea of art as a lux-
ury product or a prestige token for those who can pay for it, and in this
order of things, the educational and the pedagogic in art have no place.
Donc, it is only logical that in this order of things, the educational
is equated with a low-quality product. But in the context of crisis—that
est, now—we are happy to remember and celebrate the tradition of peda-
gogy in art, which is inextricably linked to the left ideal of a society of
equals. In a society of equals, everyone has a right to culture. The right
to culture is the right to both produce and receive culture, which are as
closely linked to each other as writing and reading. What is at stake is
not whether art should or should not be pedagogical (I am afraid art is
quite indifferent to such “should”s and “shouldn’t”s) but the possibili-
ties for constructing a society where learning is a pleasure and where
this pleasure is within everyone’s reach.
“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean
that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the
educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to
become themselves.”
— Pau lo Fr eire, We Make the road by Walking:
Conversations on eduCation and soCial Change
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