Art as a tool for the future?
Angela Lammert

In art, there are no tools without skills. No skills without notation. And no notation without a process-based concept of form. The relationship between idea, design and work has shifted. Not only does the technique of layering as a form of notation retain proximity to producing and processing, it should also be applied as a metaphor and artistic principle that can be deployed to keep developing polarisations in check. Especially in light of the debate about a “culture war”, we should pay attention to the question of the HOW in artistic practice. What are the arts to do when the world – and not only Europe – is “haunted” by a “spectre”? And how does the search for form imagine a “poetic rationality” (Senthuran Varatharajah) that informs an image or a text, a sound or a film? How can art visualise the upholding of differences in a relational framework of antagonisms?

Trends come and go. Tools change. Skills lose their relevance. But the ability to remain open to new ideas is what really makes the difference – according to the wording of an online job ad. “Art as a tool for the future” was the phrase used in reference to digital media. “Art as a tool” to change the world – this describes a topic that is both old and new, now applied to the concept of a “useful museum” (Alistair Hudson). However, the Latin ars was one translation of the Greek word technē: knowledge that is not given by nature. In its original sense, technē is technique without aim and purpose. It is an idea that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy called to mind when he spoke – as part of an event series held at the Akademie der Künste¹ – of the largely image-driven notion of art in Europe being blown apart by the global expansion of contemporary art practice.

A changed practice, changed skills

Changes in artistic practice give rise to altered skills, technical capabilities in a broader sense. The concept of unskilling, originally stemming from the social sciences in the context of the industrialisation and mechanisation of work processes, was introduced to the art discussion by Ian Burn in the 1980s. Benjamin Buchloh, Claire Bishop, John Roberts and others pursued the theme further, discussing it as an essential tendency in 20th- and 21st-century art. These evaluative discourses must be viewed critically with regard to the effect of new media on classic techniques such as illustration or printmaking. For example, there is the question of whether the sound of charcoal can become a resistance act of the material, or in what way sound and theatre can be part of illustrations. Print techniques such as etching slow the process of drawing and allow for another possibility of self-observation, a more conscious kind of drawing. The impact of new means of communication on classic techniques affects all media, not just the visual arts. Take, for example, Trisha Brown’s dances on paper, which she created by grasping pieces of charcoal between her toes – as a drawing performance. Drawing in the air becomes an attempt at depicting and creating movement. Consciously looking at the drawing influences the dance and, conversely, the drawing is not possible without the dance movement. This creates a notation of the gestural rhythm of movement. At the same time, the visual control of the trace of the dance determines the performance itself. If the material becomes weightless, can the “glitch”² be understood as its resistance? A tool used in a different way, on the brink of predictability and as the “enemy of the marketable and epistemic lack of alternatives”.³ And, last but not least, the studio or the desk can also serve as a tool, as a place of control – or loss of control – or as notation. Seeing is not the focus, but rather the process of seeing, the transformation.

With the shift that has taken place, “thinking with your hands” is no longer a prerequisite part of architectural practice as research. The question is whether teamwork with artists can be considered one of the skills, or whether what exists acts as a part of the artist’s own work, as dismantling and reassembling give rise to the “new”, or rather to new skills, and the capacity to shape the design process is the facility that an architect needs to acquire. Have artistic abilities been lost, and what new ones have developed? What do artists need to be capable of, and which tools do they employ in the process? Which discourses channel which skills and tools, and how are we to conceive of them? Are tools toolboxes? The German word for tool, Werkzeug, is made up of Werk (work) and Zeug (gear). The word Zeug has its origins in the Middle High German word ziehen, meaning to pull, or a means of pulling: tools as catalysts that set something in motion or change its state. If the change does not stem from an evolutionary assumption, if it is not declared to be a dogma, and failure labelled as creativity, then each creative process of change is a necessary experiment with an expanding toolbox.

Notation as a visual thought process

This change and extension of tools is rooted in an understanding of notation as a formal method of discovery and a visual thought process across all media. This also references the interface between artistic and scientific images. In science, fuzziness can, paradoxically, result in the most precise readability. Above all, however, the concept of notation covers the musical cosmos of notes and musical notation. It also refers to the written note. The idea of notation has undergone a shift – both in the old arts and in those that are newly developing. With their utopian and associative potential, a sketch or set of instructions for a performance can, just like musical or dance notation, which is linked to a set of symbols, be described as notation and used as a tool. Particularly in light of society’s tendency to impose a corset of simple answers, art that goes beyond the theory of symbols or signs is of political significance. A hybrid and multifaceted musical score with graphic and linguistic elements functions simultaneously as a memory system and production medium, as an analytical and conceptual toolbox. In music, the visual characteristics of notation as an instrument for articulating form are not just relevant in the context of graphic scores. Mauricio Kagel, for example, experiments with layering in his photographic music notations, utilising changing light dynamics and the superimposition of a negative onto itself as a tool. The material becomes an instrument because the differentiation of musical elements makes the graphical problems part of the composition process.

The pictorial nature of notation highlights the materialisation and visualisation of notations. One reason is that sign systems are finite, whereas the artistic power of the imagination and the visual do not anticipate this finiteness. Today it seems more urgent than ever come to an understanding of the formal possibilities of merging political content and poetic power, as well as their communication through the media. The American art critic, writer and political activist Susan Sontag asks: “How is one to exorcise the feeling that ‘style’, which functions like the notion of form, subverts content?”⁴

Images and texts as tools for layering time

Without the spectres of the past as a part of the present, there is no future. Without a critical approach to the visualisation of thinking in social media, to the way these media layer time in images and texts, there is no independent thinking. Without independent thinking, there can be no freedom of the arts and no democracy. Without historical knowledge, no sustainability for the future. Without a layering of time, no “ghosting” as a way to overcome boundaries governing access to the present. For this reason, if for no other, there follow two historical examples of the connection between notation and skills as key elements in tools.

After the end of the war in 1945, Bertolt Brecht worked with The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels). He attempted to translate the famous text into a didactic poem, using the form of a hexameter, the six-footed classical metre of ancient poetry. This was a “rule” he applied as a tool in an endeavour that was both political and artistic, one that he had already begun during his period of exile in the US. Several versions of this experiment survived. His manuscripts show not only the sequence of steps that went into the creation of this text but also the visual process of conceptualisation evident in his distinctive mnemonic, structural and writing techniques. The spectre of Marxism – “visible and large and not born of the war alone” – becomes a ghost, a revenant, who “climbs into tanks and flies with deadly bombers”, with a “rough voice and a gentle one. Cursing and arguing” (Bertolt Brecht, 1945). “Revenants” can react to the crises of the present day and open them to a different future. What lesson can contemporary art learn from this thinking, and how can it be utilised as a tool for criticism, applicable both to online chats and to those in the media wielding the power of interpretation?

We know how much Brecht used imagery and collage techniques in his manuscripts. As for Karl Marx, whose manifesto Brecht wanted to translate into a contemporary framework, it is hard to say. His excerpts and notes on geology, mineralogy and agricultural chemistry, with nearly one hundred distinct illustrations, can be considered a discovery in this context. The ever-worsening crisis on our planet prompts an ecological reading of these texts, which must be placed in relation to art’s increasing preoccupation with such issues. To what degree is the technique of combining the scriptural and the pictorial, text and image, as a unit of thought, useful in a critical approach to social media? How can the aesthetic qualities inherent in recording and revealing layers of time be encouraged, invigorated and enhanced as testimony to an open mindset and as a central building block of an open society? How can the tools of temporal layering be made accessible and productive for people of all backgrounds and orientations as instruments of critique?

Translated by Peter Rigney

Angela Lammert is head of special interdisciplinary projects in the Visual Arts Section at the Akademie der Künste.

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Was heißt noch Kunst?”, in Robert Kudielka and Angela Lammert, eds., Grenzenlos Kunst?, Dortmund, 2016, pp. 207–217.
2. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London: Verso, 2020.
3. Viktor Fritzenkötter, Glitch: Von produktiven Fehlern und dem Einfall im Ausfall, Digitale Bildkulturen, Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2025, p. 70.
4. Susan Sontag, “On Style”, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Dell, 1966, p. 29.