Ways of Knowing

On Friday March 3 2006 I attended a conference at Teachers College, Columbia called Ways of Knowing and was very interested in a paper given by the artist/philosopher Richard Jochum. His paper was called dis-positiv which he described thus:
"dis-positiv puts philosophers and critics on display thereby inverting the traditional realm of art and its critics. By physically changing the discourse the project challanges the audience to look at some of the less obvious ways in which art is shaped."
He does this by actually displaying well known critics, philosphers of art or gallerists in transparent enclosures in galleries. The audience then views the critics etc. as the work under scrutiny. I liked this inversion. It challenges, amongst other things, the conventional relationship of theory to practice in that it is always the artist/artwork that get scruitinized through the lense of theory and not the other way around.