Hi Lorna,

Thanks for passing me the link to your report on the Grand Tour, and also thanks for having included me as an interviewee.

I wanted to add a couple of comments. I am encouraged by the seriousness with which you approach art, and talk to the people you've met this summer. As an artist, this is something very important to me, because it means that you are interested in doing something with my work, you are putting my work to your own use.

This is related to your question, Can art change the world? The short answer, I'm afraid, is: No, art cannot change the world. But the second part of my answer is: Art cannot change the world, people do.

One cannot expect an art work to change the world, because the world is infinitely broader and more complex than that. One also cannot expect an exhibition -- even one with millions of Euros of funding -- to change the world.

However, as people involved in the production of artworks, in the curating and exhibition of artworks, and in the discussion of artworks, we can make a change in the world by how we apply our system of values within it, and how we negotiate those values with the values of others. An artwork is nothing but the "thing" that is the medium for applying and negotiating these values. An exhibition is nothing by the "forum" within which this applying and negotiating of values takes place.

Both my projects at Documenta 12 deal with the idea of literacy: image-literacy in the case of "Album III", and cultural/linguistic/poetic literacy in the case of "A Dance For Those Of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned To Ice...". For instance, seeing the two video monitors with the sign-language interpreters in "A Dance..." -- and seeing people who speak languages that most visitors to Documenta will not be familiar with and will experience as alien -- opens the question: How do we deal with others who are experienced as alien to us. And, conversely, how do we communicate to others who do not value our language enough to wish to learn to use it?

These questions are questions of value. Is an "other" as valuable as I am? Am I valuable even though I am marginalized in society? I believe that viewers of my work in the exhibition will at some level ask themselves these questions, and in that sense will each have to determine their own moral position in the world. Does this change the world?

As an exhbiition, Documenta 12 is very interesting at many levels. For instance, you saw how different it is from something like the Basel Art Fair. At Basel, value is determined by money, and this is based on some consensus about the personal reputation of an artist. At Documenta -- an exhibition that everyone recognizes has a noticeable absence of "art stars" in the Artforum or Frieze Magazine sense -- lay viewers and even art-insiders are confronted with hundreds of artworks produced by people whose "reputation" they are not familliar with. This is a conscious curatorial decision, and it certainly runs the risk of backfiring (ie., of getting bad reviews at Artforum and Frieze).

However, this curatorial decision expresses a system of values that suggests that the curators believe that it is the experience of viewers with artworks that is the source of artistic value, rather than things like the consensus on personal reputation. Of course, all of the artists are highly reputable "back home", but this is not something that an art-system dominated by the US and Europe is interested in. Does this shift in values expressed by the curators change the world?

Like in Ricardo Basbaum absurd box (which is empty and meaningless unless it is put to use), and like that drawing you saw in Basel (which suggested that you scream out loud) -- the answer is always in YOU.

Thanks, Lorna, for pushing people to seriously consider these questions.

Luis, from Toronto.