Méditeranée at the Oceanographic Museum, Monaco

(Wu Zei by Huang Yong Ping. Photo courtesy of e-flux)

The Oceanographic Museum in Monaco presents an exhibition celebrating the Mediterranean sea. Bringing contemporary art and science together, this exhibition presents a series of maritime objects that illustrate the rich biodiversity and complexity of sea life.

This exhibition also presents a monumental installation by the Sing-Franco artist Huang Yong Ping. The installation consists of a 25 meter hybrid creation - the combination of an octopus and a cuttlefish that engulfs a Medusa-esque chandelier created by the German biologist, philosopher and free thinker Ernst Haekle. The octu-fish devours the chandelier while spreading its tentacles along the ceiling of the museum, stretching out and around the room, taking it over with it's presence.

The title "Wu Zei" is quite ambiguous. In Chinese "Wu Zei" means cuttlefish while the characters for Wu and Zei also connote different things: the colour black and stealing respectively. Yong Ping simultaneously eludes to urbanization of the coast of the Mediterranean sea, recent oil spill disasters and the omnipresence of global warming and climate change. Being one of the world's richest reservoirs of biodiversity, the Mediterranean is also one the places most at risk for corruption, pollution and disaster.

Finally, I will venture, unsurely into the land of Rancièrean discourse, that this could be an interesting example of the paradox of the aesthetic regime of art combining art and non-art, and the heteronomy and autonomy of art in an installation political engaged (the politics part is fuzzy, being a little too obvious; its very obviously politically engaged... in the politics of our ever increasingly fragile environment... however, i'm as yet, learning!)

website: www.oceano.mc
20 November 2010 - 20 May 2012

le maître ignorant

Rancière published Le maître ignorant or The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1991. It is an interpretation of the story of Joseph Jacotot - the original ignorant schoolmaster - who went to Holland as an educator in the 18th century but didn't teach a thing to his students. He didn't teach a thing, not in the sense we disenchanted youth would use that phrase, but in a different sense. He gave his students an edition of Télemacque written in French, of which they did not know a single word, with an edition of the same text in Dutch. The students read the book with the help of the translation and at the end of this experiment were asked to write an essay, in French, a language that they apparently did not know, or rather had never been taught. They each wrote an essay, and succeeded, on the text they had read, in a language they did not speak.

Thus, the ignorant schoolmaster.

This is a text that every person involved in education should read: new educators, older educators, those about to become educators. A revolutionary look at education. Rancière argues here that intelligence is equal, that equality can be a starting point rather than a destination, that intelligence is virtually boundless.

You can download an English version of Rancière's text here: http://ranciere.blogspot.com/2008/03/ignorant-schoolmaster-free-download.html
as well as check out this blog entirely dedicated to Rancière's writings. Despite being a French philosopher (of Algerian decent) most of what Rancière has written has been translated into English, illustrating what an erudite writer he is in the 21st Century.