Infinite imagination: the administration of the absurd, the disturbing agents and the institutional hypocrisy. Interview with Luis Camnitzer

Abstract

In this interview, granted by email between March 9 and 23, 2022 and conducted in Spanish, Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer answers questions about the moment of historical review we are experiencing, its relationship with the pedagogies of power and the role of institutions. The artist also reflects on the apparently renewed need for mediation of art versus its possible excess of pedagogization and how this reverberates and/or reorganizes the place that education occupies in the art system today. Camnitzer also talks about the notions of ethics, utopia and optimism and the political and social responsibility that we have, inside and outside of art, in the face of the changes that we are experiencing and promoting as humanity. The conversation featured the work The Museum is a School as a starting point, unfolding and inflection for thinking about such questions.