2 really useful knowledge he exhibition Really Useful Knowledge transforms the Museo Reina Sofía into a laboratory for education, pedagogy, and ideas. This timely exhibition challenges visitors to explore the role Tof knowledge in recent history and in the present—a time of so-called information societies, in which discourses flow in opposite directions and knowledge expands but appears to be constrained by its ubiquity and its multitude of sources. Although its roots stretch much further back, the clearest precursor of the current interest in the uses of knowledge dates from the early nineteenth century, with the dawning awareness of the desirability of a type of education that pages 1–2, 4–5, 9–13 goes beyond mechanical skills and productive activities. CAROLE CONDÉ & This legacy has come down to us today, but it is clearly KARL BEVERIDGE in need of reformulation. This is the deeper significance Art Is Political, 1975 of an exhibition based on a critical review of pedagogy, a Panel of 9 B&W reassessment of our ways of learning, and an analysis of the photographs means and resources allocated to education. This project stands out among the exhibitions that the Museo Reina Sofía has organized to present the results of long-term processes of artistic and intellectual dialogue and research. These “thesis” exhibitions show us a museum that sees itself as a living institution that is not simply a container for our visual culture but is above all an important catalyst for reflection and public debate. The very act of organizing an exhibition of this type in a space dedicated to modern and contemporary art is an example of how knowledge now flows from various sources simultaneously, how it moves outside the academic world, and how it is enriched when it comes into contact with citizens. Really Useful Knowledge springs from close, horizontal collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía and other European museums within the L’Internationale network: an example of transinstitutional cooperation that is starting to produce the visible results of intense collaborative work. § — Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport 3 really useful knowledge 4 really useful knowledge 5 carole condé & karl beveridge n his classic book Orientalism, Edward Said—echoing the maxim of the philosopher Francis Bacon via Michel Foucault—argued that knowledge is power. And, he added, the accumulation of knowledge entails an automatic Iaccumulation of power. This was a principle that operated in his object of study: the colonial logic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our own situation today appears to demand a restructuring of this equation of directly proportional growth, but it also requires us to look to the past in order to understand the tangible or intangible values that have been associated with knowledge. The notion of “really useful knowledge” that this exhibition is based on emerged in a context contemporaneous to the one Said writes about: the early decades of the nineteenth century, which coincided with the working classes’ growing awareness of the role of education in their emancipation. Back then the expression was coined to refer to kinds of knowledge that, beyond the reach of the working masses and behind an apparent nonproductiveness, masked the superstructure underlying an order that was still thoroughly hierarchical. Enabling more individuals and social groups to access it entailed the disturbing possibility of a mass transfer of knowledge in areas such as politics, philosophy, and economics that had previously been reserved for elites and was, perhaps intentionally, shrouded in arcane, almost magical secrecy. The transformation of this knowledge into “really useful knowledge” by those who aspired to become active subjects of the society in which they lived showed a new awareness that all of us today are heirs to: the realization that the value of knowledge does not rely on a measurable level of productivity, that there is a radical difference between value in use and price. Nowadays, the flow of interconnected discourses in an elusive and boundless global context seems to run parallel to a gradual eliticization and commercialization of the academic world. Given this context, is an understanding of the new role of education even possible, as the exhibition suggests? If so, questions such as what criteria define the usefulness of knowledge today, and what strategies can be used to enable access to it, would seem pertinent. While the encyclopedic thought of the Enlightenment ventured to catalog and classify the world’s knowledge, to delimit empirical 6 really useful knowledge experience of reality and make it legible, the contemporary individual finds himself tackling a very different task: to sift through the enormous amount of information that is produced and select the parts that seem to address him. In this process he is the victim of overfeeding, of a saturation that does not allow him to contextualize and connect each of the messages he receives through different means. This situation could be summed up in an image: at the goods issue area of a factory, a copious, useless surplus conceals from the eyes of the workers the products that are earnmarked for the market: that which has real value. A critical pedagogy such as the one that inspires this exhibition can only be based on a conception of the individual as a subject with the capacity to emancipate himself, personally and at the social level; ultimately, with the capacity to discriminate among the discursive flood that threatens to engulf him. In this sense, really useful knowledge would be something like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, which was invisible to everybody because it was hidden in plain sight, presiding over the room, on the mantelpiece. Knowledge has now become the raw material that fuels cognitive capitalism in its control of the production of intangible assets, the value of which is increasingly unable to escape market dynamics. Nowadays, knowledge is often generated in the form of an inert, massive stockpile of data for individual use, which silently bear witness to the gradual disappearance of the public sphere: through a surprising play on words, the equating of production and knowledge and the use of stock market or commercial terminology in unrelated academic disciplines seems to suggest a return to remote contexts such as the one that gave rise to the concept we are dealing with here—a return that paradoxically comes from the opposite direction: from a seemingly free and universal access to knowledge. We have moved from a time when “really useful knowledge” was shrouded in an almost cabalistic guise of secrecy and inaccessibility, to a time—our own—in which this supposedly universal access functions as a thick screen that seals off the ultimate meaning of the knowledge and, above all, its uses. We are in danger of returning to a situation in which knowledge is “gnosis”—the supreme form of knowledge that initiates could attain and that Gnosticism sought in a complex philosophical-religious context in antiquity. And this 7 really useful knowledge danger leads to the desire to distill that which is knowledge from that which is not; that which is productive from that which is, in a loose and open sense, useful. This exhibition springs from the capacity of the arts to set up relationships that are not mediated by knowledge, to support critical thought, and to chart unexpected connections that can create invisible communities and new experiences of the common sphere, and to share them. In its complex and sometimes hermetic tautology, gnoseology—the discourse on knowledge itself—can turn to artistic production as a valuable tool, one that is not just illustrative but above all speculative in itself. The Museo Reina Sofía thus becomes a testing ground for new pedagogies; a laboratory that reminds us of the possibility of collectively enjoying public experiments, actions, and resources, based on the analysis of artistic forms interacting with social relations, be they real, from the past and the present, or desired. This new project in a sense runs parallel to and complements a series of other exhibitions that materialized in these rooms and originated in research projects that the Museo Reina Sofía is involved in. From The Potosí Principle, which explored the role of the primitive accumulation of capital in the early modern age, to the more recent Playgrounds, an exhibition that paved the way for this latest one by analyzing the proportional relationship between work time and leisure time, between recreation and productivity, that characterizes the world we live in. Really Useful Knowledge offers both a diagnosis of one of the challenges facing the institution as a generator of knowledge and an excellent opportunity to reconsider the museum’s institutional role in this regard. § — Manuel Borja-Villel Director, Museo NacioNal ceNtro De arte reiNa sofía 8 really useful knowledge 9 carole condé & karl beveridge 10 really useful knowledge 11 carole condé & karl beveridge 12 really useful knowledge 13 carole condé & karl beveridge un saber realmente útil October 28, 2014 — February 9, 2015 [ real ly use un saber realmente útil ful kn nowle edge ] 1 78 Carole Condé & Karl Beverige Ardmore Ceramic Art 19 81 What, How & for Whom / WHW Raqs Media Collective Really Useful Knowledge “That Thing Which Belongs to the Entire World,” 34 Afterword to an Hicham Benohoud Autodidact’s Diary 37 93 Marina Garcés Daniela Ortiz Beyond Access: [artist pages] The Problem of Having a Useful Relation to Knowledge 98 Primitivo Evanán Poma and 46 Association of Popular Artists of Sarhua Darcy Lange To Effect a Truthful Study text by Gabriela Germaná of Work in Schools 104 52 Adelita Husni-Bey Phil Collins 106 56 Mujeres Públicas Chto Delat? [artist pages] What Sort of Knowledge Is Useful Today? 110 62 Lidwien van de Ven Carla Zaccagnini 113 70 Luis Camnitzer Ariella Azoulay Looking Through Art [artist pages] and Around It 74 122 Azzedine Meddour Iconoclasistas 75 126 D.