(Dedicated to my students)
Pablo Halguera
The formative years of an artist’s life are often dominated by a single, deceptively simple question: “Who am I?”
I was reminded of this recently when speaking with an art student who confessed that this question had become an albatross—less a prompt for reflection than a source of paralysis. While every artistic life is, in some sense, a long search for a voice, it is in the early years that vulnerability is greatest, self-doubt most acute, and where each misstep can feel catastrophic. In their anxieties I often recognize my younger self, wondering whether I would ever be able to contribute anything meaningful to art, or—as a fellow student once asked—whether there was even a point in adding more things to an already crowded world.
My later training as a museum educator had the unintended effect of teaching me how to step back—how to suspend judgment and regard things with a degree of objective distance. Yet in 2006, after the completion of The School of Panamerican Unrest, I found myself confronting a different kind of distance: the emotional toll of the project, which consisted in me compiling the stories and trauma of others but never processing my own emotions. I realized that I could not set aside myself from the process, nor repress my feelings about what I was experiencing. I realized that if I could not extract myself from myself, then I needed to find a method for self-distancing.
Thinkers as different as Foucault and Carl Jung have approached this problem—treating the self either as an archaeological site or as a set of psychic artifacts. In 2007, when I accidentally rediscovered my teenage and art-school diaries, I decided to conduct such an archaeology: an unsentimental display of early works, not as a vanity of “origins” but as an anthropological study of a self in formation.
Jerome Bruner, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, argued that the self is not so much discovered as constructed—an ‘autobiographical self’ shaped by the narrative forms a culture provides. Seen from this perspective, the interpretive habits cultivated in museum education—labels, frameworks, and ways of reading images—function as tools for making sense of one’s own narrative as much as for interpreting artworks.
In this light, those interpretive methods reveal an implicitly Kantian orientation. They presume that meaning arises when an object—whether an artwork or an experience—is approached with a certain suspension of interest. This stance also illuminates, retrospectively, a parallel with philosophical paths such as ontology and phenomenology, which similarly insist on stepping back to examine the conditions of experience. One inquiry seeks to understand how being becomes available to consciousness; the other, how an artistic self becomes legible when relieved of its immediate aims. Divergent in content, both approaches rely on a shared methodological gesture: a disciplined form of self-distancing.
All of this resurfaced today as I reflected on my student’s question—so simple, yet so disorienting in its implications. It prompted me to articulate, perhaps for the first time, why the self must sometimes be treated not as an expressive vessel but as a material for analysis. Thus, the following manifesto.
Manifesto for a Disinterested Artistic Self
- We affirm that the artistic self is not an instrument.
It is not a career apparatus, a publicity device, nor a stable identity to be curated. It is a field of appearances, deserving the same contemplative freedom we grant to artworks. - We resist the tyranny of self-explanation.
Origin stories, trauma narratives, professional strategies—these may describe us, but they do not constitute us. We allow our artistic self to exceed its own biography. - We adopt an attitude of reflective distance toward our creative impulses.
We observe our patterns, hesitations, and contradictions without anxiety or self-recrimination. We look at ourselves as if viewing a landscape or artifact. - We cultivate free play within the self.
Imagination and understanding may engage one another without the obligation to resolve into statement, identity, or mission. - We decouple self-critique from self-punishment.
Criticism can be a form of curiosity rather than a weapon. We examine ourselves without cruelty, entitlement, or fear. - We recognize the pleasure of indeterminacy.
The artistic self is not a completed work but a provisional constellation. Ambiguity is not failure; it is form. - We renounce possessiveness toward our own image.
We do not cling to frozen representations of who we are as artists. We allow ourselves to drift, to contradict earlier versions of ourselves, to be surprising. - We resist the systemic pressures that demand perpetual self-production.
The disinterested self refuses to be optimized for institutions, markets, or timelines. It claims time for reflection, idleness, and non-aligned thought. - We acknowledge that disinterestedness is a practice, not a posture.
It is a cultivated interval—a space in which the self can be encountered as form rather than function, possibility rather than performance. - We accept that the self, seen disinterestedly, becomes a site of aesthetic freedom.
In such freedom, the artist becomes a witness, not an executor, of the self—open to what emerges when interest is suspended. - We hold that this stance is not an escape from the world but a mode of reentering it differently.
By loosening our grip on the self, we recover a capacity for genuine attention—toward others, toward the world, and toward the artwork itself.
