today

Drawing number two in progress.

I think what I liked about this drawing was the way that the blank paper became a space that enabled conversation —a kind of arena for thoughts. What is depicted in the drawing approaches Chantal Mouffe’s definition of the political, the friend/enemy distinction (see below, February 22nd) … So you might say that the drawing concerns the political, rather than politics. Even though the work itself doesn’t arrive at a final definition or concrete representation of the concept.

In this case, the conversation revolved around the concepts of ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘you’ … and the difficulty of defining these concepts in relation to politics in general, and to the current situation in the Netherlands in particular.

Each work seems to point me towards creating more and more elaborate guidelines for the participants, to start the process with i.e. an overview of what I see as the distinction between politics and the political, and the story of my thinking around the idea. But this assumes that this dynamic of friend/enemy, us/them, citizen/not-citizen is an aspect of everyone’s social and political awareness – and not something that needs to be further discussed, of discovered and further defined through each successive encounter.

If I begin with this definition I feel that I will be determining the outcome. But isn’t the way that I begin the drawing already creating this distinction? As I set the process up, seating someone opposite me across the table? And this unfamiliar situation of making a drawing with someone, me, more or less an unknown quality – is this situation of knowing/not knowing analogous to the friend/enemy relationship?

Labels: studies for the shape of government, the netherlands