The Exhibitionist

No. 9 / Journal on Exhibition Making / april 2014 THE

EXHIBITIONIST
Overture

Curators’ Favorites

Back in the Day

Missing in Action

Attitude

Assessments

Rigorous Research

Six x Six

Rear Mirror

9 9
USD 15
EUR 10
GBP 10 No. 9 / Journal on Exhibition Making / april 2014
 The Exhibitionist
No. 9 April 2014

contentS

Overture
Jens Hoffmann and Lumi Tan 3

Curators’ Favorites
Monika Szewczyk Idolizing Twilight 5
Chen Tamir Liminal Spaces 9
Hendrik Folkerts WACK the Canon! 13

Back in the Day

Inés Katzenstein Experiencias 68: A Threshold 16
Still from Terence Fisher’s Dracula, 1958,
showing Christopher Lee as Dracula
Missing in Action
Lucy Lippard After a Fashion: The Group Show 24
Introduced by Chelsea Haines

Attitude
Massimiliano Gioni What I Did Last Summer 31

Assessments: Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

Christopher Y. Lew Workers’ Compensation 37
Åse Løvgren More Verbs, Please 38
Laurel Ptak Art in the Age of the Norwegian
Semi-Social-Democratic-Post-Welfare State 47
Johanne Nordby Wernø Love for Labor 48

Rigorous Research
Germano Celant The Territories of Exhibition 51

Six x Six
Ngahiraka Mason, Fionn Meade, Pablo León de la Barra,
Filipa Ramos, María Inés Rodríguez, Syrago Tsiara 61

Rear Mirror
Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers,
and Tina Kukielski Considering the 2013 Carnegie International 75
Jennifer Gross The Société Anonyme’s Dada Destiny 75
 Dedicated to the memory of
Alain Resnais (1922–2014)

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 Overtur e

Jens Hoffmann and Lumi Tan

There are moments when it seems that a horde of vampires has taken over the art world,
sucking from its lovely neck all the life, the creativity, the unruliness, and all the criticality, turn-
ing art into pure entertainment, commodity production, and celebrity culture. The undead are
out there and, sadly, most of them do not look as intriguing and attractive as Christopher Lee
on the cover of this issue.
In our perennial hope to offer some kind of antidote to whatever malady has the art world
in its grip, we at The Exhibitionist have always struggled to maintain and declare our indepen-
dence, and the contributions to this issue—our ninth—are no exception. Seeing the journal as
a place to express an autonomous voice that is separate from one’s institution, to be unafraid to
challenge one’s peers, and to create a place for ignored and forgotten histories, each contribu-
tor here acknowledges that exhibition making isn’t always easy. It necessarily reflects forces
of social and political influence, and the push and pull of negotiating with artists and hosting
institutions. But these tensions can be productive; they can help move the field forward.
The journal itself goes through a few changes in this issue. We are introducing a new
long-form section entitled Rigorous Research, where curators and art historians present
original research on the history of exhibitions. For this first installment, Germano Celant
addresses the evolution of exhibition spaces in the 19th and 20th centuries, and certain seminal
exhibitions that established new standards by reacting to existing models of design and display.
This discussion continues with Curators’ Favorites, where three curators address their
formative experiences with a particular group exhibition that questioned the conventional
organization of the survey show, or sparked productive exchanges between artists and cura-
tors. For Hendrik Folkerts, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Cornelia Butler,
shifted his perception of how a canon is formed through historical exhibitions, and revived
questions originally raised by the first wave of the feminist movement. Monika Szewczyk’s
experience with Bart De Baere’s notorious 1994 exhibition This is the show and the show is many
things was crafted entirely through close readings of the catalogue and impressions from partic-
ipants and viewers; it becomes clear that even decades later, this exhibition’s particular brand
of organized chaos continues to resonate, and to resonate far beyond its actual in-person audi-
ence. Chen Tamir recounts the relentless political challenges that informed Liminal Spaces, a
project that originally aspired to take the shape of an exhibition but ended up being a series
of conferences and research projects in various locations in Israel, Palestine, and Germany;
its effects reverberated through the work of the involved curators, artists, and institutions for
years to come.

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 The Exhibitionist

Two curators, two different generations, two calls for independence: Missing in Action
presents Lucy Lippard’s 1967 text “After a Fashion: The Group Show,” which starts as a
review of Systemic Painting, a group exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, but then segues
into a sharp critique of the strategies of the thematic group exhibition as a form, as well
as a dismissal of Minimalism’s detractors. In Attitude, Massimiliano Gioni reflects on his
much-scrutinized 2013 Venice Biennale, which presented a significant amount of outsider art
alongside contemporary production. He makes a case to retire the notion of the curator as a
promoter or a supporter in favor of a concept more akin to a scholar or an interpreter.
For Back in the Day, Inés Katzenstein reflects on the 1968 exhibition Experiencias 68, a
landmark survey of contemporary work in Buenos Aires curated by Jorge Romero Brest. That
year was a historic one worldwide, marked by much social and political upheaval, and the
controversial positions taken by the young Argentine artists were no exception. A debate on
the role of the artist in society continues in this issue’s Assessments, which focuses on Monday
Begins on Saturday, the first Bergen Assembly exhibition, which came about after literally years
of discussion regarding why and how a new international biennial could function. Christopher
Y. Lew, Åse Løvgren, Laurel Ptak, and Johanne Nordby Wernø—despite their various levels
of distance from the event—share similar opinions regarding the socialist ideas the exhibition
explored, and what it achieved with respect to its aspiration to innovate within the biennial
format.
Six by Six returns for another round with six curators—Ngahiraka Mason, Fionn Meade,
Pablo León de la Barra, Filipa Ramos, María Inés Rodríguez, and Syrago Tsiara—offering
highly personal dispatches from around the globe, again demonstrating the wide range of
exhibition histories that have shaped current curatorial viewpoints. This point again comes to
a head in the contrasting exhibitions reflected upon in Rear Mirror. In our first multi-author
contribution to this section, Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski openly discuss
the satisfactions, regrets, and collective learning that happened in the process of creating the
2013 Carnegie International, which they intended to be enjoyed and interpreted by both a
local and an international audience. In her text on the touring exhibition The Société Anonyme:
Modernism for America, its curator, Jennifer Gross, speaks to the difficulties of translating the
dynamism of the remarkable collection founded by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and
Man Ray to suit the museums to which the show toured; the touring venues consistently tried
to tame the idiosyncratic spirit of the first installation.
How to defend ourselves against the vampires who find the vulnerable skin of the art
world so utterly seductive? We must keep our minds—and our exhibitions—nimble, compli-
cated, and smarter than the average bear. The curators and exhibitions featured in this issue
prove that this continues to be possible.

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 The Exhibitionist

Curators’ Favorites
This is the show and the show is
many things installation view,
Museum van Hedendaagse
Kunst, Ghent, 1994, showing
work by Maria Roosen

Idolizing Twilight
Monika Szewczyk

This is the show and the show is many things. ripe to remember, or, more accurately—as I must
admit I can have no memory of this exhibition,
Whenever I make a show, I invoke this phrase which I did not see, although it haunts me like a
almost like a mantra. It is the beautifully blunt friendly ghost—to think about it, along with the
title of Bart De Baere’s 1994 exhibition at the aid of the catalogue and eyewitness accounts,
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent (a and to articulate the nature of its inspiration.
precursor to S.M.A.K., housed inside the Fine In his review of the show in Frieze, Adrian
Arts Museum). Its dates are listed as Septem- Searle struck a skeptical note: “This is the
ber 17 to November 27, but even cursory re- show. . . attempts to be more a process than a
search reveals that its temporality was anything fixed and final entity,” he concludes, “an organic
but clear. The Belgian curator, along with the collaboration which refutes the supremacy of
13 participating artists (Louise Bourgeois, Anne authorship, and which hands the control of the
Decock, Honoré ∂’O, Fabrice Hybert, Suchan museum over to the artists. This is a sham, of
Kinoshita, Henrietta Lehtonen, Mark Manders, course, and more than anything else the show is
Jason Rhoades, Maria Roosen, Claire Roudenko- an exhausting curatorial conceit.”1
Bertin, Eran Schaerf, Luc Tuymans, and Uri Tzaig) Setting aside his distrust of curatorial ad-
as well as two invited witnesses/critics (Roland venture (for now): Was it really so tiring? Searle’s
van De Sompel and Dirk Pültau), tested an open, summation points to the fact that the (re)viewer
improvisatory, atmospheric ethos of exhibition had to do some serious work to take the whole
making that seems virtually impossible to adopt thing in. He recalls not being sure whether to
as a “model” because its space-time confounds touch or interact with certain works or let them
the calendars and publicity logics of most con- be. (OK, this is indeed something of a cliché for
temporary institutions. And yet, the time seems large swaths of contemporary art, but the cliché

5
 The Exhibitionist
This is the show and the show is many
things installation view, Museum van
Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, 1994,
showing work by Fabrice Hybert,
Suchan Kinoshita, and Anne Decock

captures both great and lame works.) To his covered the entire exhibition and cast all of the
credit, Searle’s description of the cacophonous works “on the edge of visibility,” and still seeing
space is evocative, so that one can imagine walk- no end to the show. Rather, encountering food
ing through it. Projecting myself into his words, and drinks being served in the café (shifted from
I wonder if the entrance—Fabrice Hybert’s ver- its normal location) on crockery by Henrietta
sion of the hotel door in Jaques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Lehtonen (served, perhaps, by then–museum
Holiday (1953)—would have clued me in to the bartender, now director of S.M.A.K., Philippe Van
exhibition’s sense of “living in a movie,” which is Cauteren).
alluded to in the catalogue.2 How, then, to play a It would indeed have been difficult to con-
role other than that of the fatigued skeptic? struct a “picture” of the show, but that was per-
Imagine seeing the many works made haps the very point. I imagine that seeing any
on site specifically for the exhibition: Jason one of these works would have made my day.
Rhoades’s installation (which was purportedly And seeing them together in a single exhibition
based on the Mystic Lamb but looked nothing would likely have left me exhausted but (I think)
like the famed altarpiece in Ghent’s Saint Bavo exhilarated by the messes, as messes are in such
Cathedral), which, on the opening day, accord- short supply in galleries and museums today.
ing to Searle, involved the artist hauling truck- The place you are more likely to encounter them
loads of material from one room to another. Then, is in artists’ studios, and we might ask if This is
close by, Louise Bourgeois’s drawings of spiders the show . . . was more like a studio visit than a
and a “magnificent, haunting sculpture of a nest museum visit.
of gigantic arachnids” (the only work that was The philosopher and curator Dieter
sent in rather than made there in the moment); Roelstraete, who was studying in Ghent at the
early renditions of Mark Manders’s Self Portrait time, describes the experience of seeing this
as a Building project and early versions of his show as entering an encampment. “But it was
eerie attic figures placed on the floor; Suchan not,” he clarifies, “about domicility and homeli-
Kinoshita’s furniture-like objects; fragments of ness, nor were the artists ‘occupying’ the mu-
Uri Tzaig’s Library, with children’s pictures that seum. You saw and heard people tinkering.
could be taken away and books that couldn’t be There was a general sense of everything being
removed; and Eran Schaerf’s workstation, which in transit, in storage, in disarray.” There was also,
reportedly evoked a storage space for the en- he notes, a palpable sense (and later reports) of
tire exhibition. Then, stepping out of the dusk of conflict among certain artists who did not ap-
Luc Tuymans’s subdued lighting scheme, which preciate the spillage of others’ works (and other

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 Curators’ Favorites

assorted incursions) into their allotted spaces. The first contribution is not by the curator
The cardinal problem of any group exhibi- but by Dirk Pültau, whose skepticism surpasses
tion is that it risks somehow reducing the gestures Adrian Searle’s by a long stretch. Pültau ques-
of the participating artists, or otherwise subsum- tions everything, from the working terminology
ing them into a curatorial conceit. How to avoid (the “continuous present,” or the “imperfective”
this and instead construct a space where distinct invoked by De Baere) to the process: “I cannot
artistic energies can relate in a way that poten- stop myself from thinking why certain things had
tially renders each part more complex? The curi- to be written or proclaimed. Even before I had
ous thing is that This is the show. . . attempted to read the text, I was told that there was nothing
do this without really declaring a theme, a com- predictable in this process, that it just took place
mon goal. The artists and the curator, and a little and continued after the exhibition, that every-
later the resident witnesses/critics, came togeth- thing remained open. Bearing this in mind, the
er knowing that the exhibition would be impro- text represents for me an objectification of that
vised through a series of conversations. Instead total mobility. Everything that escapes being
of a theme, the very potentials—plural—of exhi- labeled is here indeed sold with labels. Why?”3
bition space-time were tested with great atten- And, further, “You cannot give a bird’s-eye view
tion to different moods and modes (to invoke De of immanence, nor can you do so without surely
Baere’s terminology). I’m attracted to this fragile damaging the position you have already adopted
conceit because it allows us to think of an exhibi-
tion as an atmosphere—a place where person-
alities, objects, background conversations, and
calendars contribute to a here and now that is
strongly felt, like the weather, and can change.
Considering This is the show and the show
is many things as something atmospheric and
therefore rather virtual has something to do with
not getting too hung up on appearances. Yes, this
is a contradictory approach to thinking about
exhibiting, showing, and (as the French term for
“exhibition” suggests) exposing. I could say I
am curious about the show’s spirit. Or (if the “s”
word makes you cringe, dear reader), I could
say that thinking about this exhibition must in-
volve a review, not only of the impressions that
the works on display made on participants, visi-
tors, and critics, but also of its driving internal
debates. And its ambitions, some unrealized,
which may have been difficult to detect in the
moment. Playing detective 20 years later, I turn
to the catalogue, which recorded these ener-
gies and impulses in various modes. The book
not only refers to, but declaratively departs from,
what was on view. It simultaneously reports on
and forecasts the show.

This is the show and the show is many things

installation view, Museum van Hedendaagse
Kunst, Ghent, 1994, showing work by
Jason Rhoades

7
 The Exhibitionist

and rendering further discussion unmanageable. Antagonism (and agonism) have been ad-
Your text scarcely does this: It speaks too much vanced as a necessary condition of a collective
from a position of knowing.” endeavor. And, in making space for artworks
The text he is referring to is entitled to transform and to relate intimately, This is the
“Modes and Moods: Antique olive 15 lower case show . . . tested the nerves of some of the par-
medium,” an earlier version of which was offered ticipating artists, not to mention some critics and
by De Baere to all participants sometime in the some visitors. But I do not wish to conclude by
summer of 1994. The published text constitutes simply celebrating these tensions as “produc-
a chronicle of the first collective impulses that tive.” Rather, it is more interesting to consider
led to the show and already forms a response the curators’ attempts to learn from artists and
by the curator to some of the artists’ advice.4 Its thereby revise the very notion of knowing.
introduction asks: “Are the artists not the muse- If the show (((resonates))) today, it is in
um’s most important advisors?” (This is indeed a large part, I think, because it carried one of the
question that should be asked again and again.) best titles in the business. (De Baere wisely re-
De Baere’s text appears after Pültau’s cri- vised the original working title, “Extra Muros,”
tique, gesturing toward a reversal of powers upon the advice of the artists.) “This is the show”
alongside a reversal of chronology proposed by sounds so assertive and clear and indeed know-
Luc Tuymans and partly translated into a shift ing, but “the show is many things” allows no
of the “opening” to the end of the show’s run. closure. No wonder it has motivated remakes,
Even more impactful, it seems, is Tuymans’s de- curatorial workshops, and other nods and bows.
cision to lower the lighting scheme of the entire But if it is in fact becoming something of a model
exhibition, an assertion of mood, where things (despite, or perhaps because of, its lack of sta-
are half-visible but seen more deeply, perhaps, bility), it might be interesting to consider what it
which is discussed at some length in a conversa- held up as its own metaphor. It was not another
tion between the artist, the curator, and the two exhibition.7 In his text, De Baere, the classically
witnesses/critics toward the end of an array of trained art historian who loves the Flemish Prim-
artists’ contributions.5 itives, invokes the the Portinari Altar (ca. 1475)
The entire catalogue reads a bit like a cap- by Hugo Van der Goes, elaborating on how the
tains’ log (yes, I do mean “captains” plural), as late-15th-century altarpiece resisted the onset of
we get the sense that we are following not a Cartesian single-point perspective and instead
recipe or a record, but a lively debate about the offers “many moments of approach” and “a clar-
very nature of the show, and, by extension, art ity with a sensual fullness” that “remains a propo-
and exhibition making. And this debate (and the sition.”
making of the catalogue) continued beyond the To note this is not to say that artworks and
opening day. The fact that the exhibition never exhibitions—or artists and curators, for that
cohered neatly, but existed in a twilight that was matter—should be interchangeable. But what
both structural and phenomenal, doesn’t neces- does it mean to relax and admit that they can
sarily mean that it celebrated confusion for its share intuitions?
own sake. Rather, to me at least, it signaled anoth-
er way of knowing. The “position of knowing” is Notes
there, but perhaps misunderstood as Cartesian
1. Adrian Searle, “This is the show and the show is many
by Pültau. things,” Frieze 19 (November–December 1994),
For all of Searle’s allusions to the stupidity https://www.frieze.com/issue/review/this_is_the_show
of Jason Rhoades,6 the artist certainly knew how _and_the_show_is_many_things/.

to produce a very specific energy, mood, or at- 2. See note 6.

mosphere out of a seemingly chaotic arrange-
ment of objects. This is one of the most difficult 3. Dirk Pültau, “To Bart, Roland and the Artists: Between
the Process and Us, Me” in This is the show and the show
things to pull off in an artwork. And when you try is many things exhibition catalogue (Ghent: Museum van
to achieve it in a group exhibition, as a curator, Hedendaagse Kunst, 1994): 6.
you might expect that an artist who is particularly
4. See pages 11–19. The time of this text is meticulously
good at the task might refuse to play well with noted as “15th July, redaction 6th August, scrappings
the other pirates.

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 Curators’ Favorites
[presumably the crossed out passages, which remain, but exhibition. This will enable you to and see things properly, in
with a line through them] 22nd August.” my opinion, in the sense that you see things just before the
point at which they disappear. The vanishing point means
5. In the conversation, Tuymans’s comments offer insight that you can sometimes look at something more intensively
into the unhinged temporality and the particular mood of from a certain kind of depth.” See pages 129–44; quotes are
the show: “I am curious, in this exhibition, to see how things from page 131.
interact with each other. And also how up-to-date the idea
of time can be brought, as well as the idea of space—again, 6. “Instead of the Mystic Lamb, though, we get lots of
I’m thinking of film—how on a material basis you can give placards saying ‘PORK’,” Searle scoffs, “which seems to be
shape to something that’s practically immaterial. . . . The idea one of the few words Rhoades can spell.”
is suggested of making an exhibition that is so dynamic that
you have a continuous movement—and if it is not purely 7. While the installation of Niki de Saint Phalle’s anything-
physical then certainly one which comes about in the mind, but-phallic SHE—A Cathedral at the Moderna Museet in
even also in the parcours people follow when they come and Stockholm in 1966, realized in collaboration with Jean
discover the exhibition. . . . Actually, I’m thinking of a particu- Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt, is held up by De Baere as an
lar period in the day, twilight. If that could be made to go on example, he concludes that it cannot function as a model
and on, it would be phenomenal: a constant twilight in the because the task at hand will not yield a cohesive form.

Participants in the first Liminal Spaces

meeting, Qalandia, Palestine, 2006

Liminal Spaces
Chen Tamir

Liminal Spaces took place from 2006 to 2007. Its various stripes gathered at the invitation of
initial focus was Road 60, which connects Jerusa- Reem Fadda, founder of the Palestinian Asso-
lem and Ramallah, and how it might be possible ciation for Contemporary Art in Ramallah; Galit
through art and culture to overcome political, so- Eilat, founder of the Israeli Center for Digital
cial, and physical barriers created by the Israeli Art in Holon (just outside Tel Aviv); and Philipp
occupation of Palestine.1 Liminal Spaces was not Misselwitz, a German urbanist focusing on refu-
an actual exhibition, but rather a joint research gee camp cities. They rented a store 500 meters
project, a collective micro-residency and pro- from the Qalandia Checkpoint, one of the largest
duction platform, and a series of interventionist, checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah,
site-specific conferences rolled into one. It has and spent three days there and in East Jerusa-
since permeated most of the politically engaged lem listening to presentations by a variety of ex-
art in Israel and Palestine, and opened the way perts, including politicians and urban planners,
for experimental curatorial initiatives well be- and exploring the nearby area.2 The intention
yond. was to have a gestation period of roughly eight
In March 2006, approximately 35 artists, months, after which they would convene again
activists, curators, and cultural producers of in Leipzig, Germany, for a follow-up conference

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 The Exhibitionist
Participants in the third
Liminal Spaces meeting,
October 2007

and exhibition of newly created works, which the European Cultural Foundation, along with
would then be exhibited in Ramallah or Gaza two German sources: the Berlin University of
and in Holon. the Arts and the German Federal Cultural Foun-
All of this, in turn, had grown out of several dation. Support was also given by the Galerie
much looser gatherings of Israeli and Palestin- für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, Germany,
ian artists in 2004. They had come together as where an exhibition of some of the works—or,
Artists Without Walls to discuss if and how they rather, proposals or sketches of works in prog-
might be able to work in and through the Israeli ress that grew out of the first conference—were
Occupation. The meetings allowed the various to be exhibited in conjunction with a conference
artists and curators to build trust and form per- that would give participants a chance to meet
sonal and professional relationships that last to again on neutral ground.
this day.3 (The only artwork they created took But there was considerable disagreement
the form a closed-circuit video that was pro- about how the project was being framed. While
jected on both sides of the separation wall in the German organizers took great pains to not
the Abu Dis area of Jerusalem, thereby creating offend pro-Israel visitors by avoiding terms
a virtual window through the wall that lasted for such as “occupation,” Fadda, Eilat, and the other
four hours.) Liminal Spaces initiators fought to underline
A major element of Liminal Spaces was its the anti-colonialist foundations of the project. A
negotiation with military and political forces. major fear was that it would be co-opted for the
The Israeli Center for Digital Art was able to sake of a false normalization under the guise
work with the army to issue entry permits for of two supposedly equal sides represented by
Palestinian participants, many of whom had Israeli and Palestinian artists.
not been to Jerusalem since 2000. The Palestin- In the words of Eyal Danon, curator at the
ian organizers, Reem Fadda along with Khaled Israeli Center for Digital Art, “The idea of hav-
Hourani, asked the Tanzim, the military wing of ing an exhibition abroad was too similar to
Fatah that controlled the region, for permission European initiatives that brought Israelis and
and protection, which they were granted.4 They Palestinians to Europe to talk. The whole Leipzig
also sought approval from the Boycott Divest- experience was uncomfortable. We had lots of
ment and Sanctions movement that was com- arguments. You can imagine what it was like to
ing into formation at that time. The BDS wanted bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Germany.
to avoid the illusion of a shared or unified goal, When we published anything, we constantly had
and asked for a written statement that did not to negotiate the terms we were using, such as
include the term “collaboration” because of its ‘occupation.’ Often, what was for the other side
“informant” connotation (meaning, Palestinians a huge compromise was for us not even a start-
who supply the Israeli military with information). ing point.”5
The BDS also recommended that Liminal Spaces Eilat says: “They assumed that their audi-
not accept Israeli funding. ences wanted a peace project, a collaboration
The bulk of the funding for Liminal Spaces between Palestinians and Israelis. It’s not that
ultimately came from the European Union and good relations can’t exist between us, but we

10
 Curators’ Favorites

didn’t want to use art to depict bridges that don’t One of Yael Bartana’s projects that came out
exist, or that present an asymmetrical situation of Liminal Spaces was Summer Camp (2009),10 in
in a symmetrical way. One of our aims was to which we see the artist turn toward a cinematic
present problematic terms, not solutions.”6 style that quotes from early pioneering propa-
The Leipzig exhibition was seen largely as ganda, later developed in her infamous . . . And
an unfortunate concession and made it obvious Europe Will Be Stunned . . . (2007–12), which
that such an exhibition in Holon or Gaza, even represented Poland in the 2011 Venice Biennial
if successfully carried out despite the logistical (co-curated by Eilat). During the first conference,
challenges, would fall into the same traps, and Bartana went for a short exploration near Qa-
fail to serve the goals of the project. And there landia with fellow Israeli artist Yochai Avrahami.
were other factors that shaped the decision not They were stopped by the Israeli army and
to have an exhibition, particularly the changing interrogated. The experience had a marked in-
political landscape.7 As Eilat explained: “It was fluence on Avrahami’s practice. “It was obvious
clear that having an exhibition in Holon when I couldn’t make a simple work about crossing a
not all the artists could come, or having an exhi- border. [The interrogation happened on] Satur-
bition in Ramallah with Israeli artists, would be day, and on Sunday Google Earth launched in
very problematic. To insist on it, even if it suc- Israel and I started to map the places I had been
ceeded, would create a false image of normal- to. Since they turned me into a spy, I thought I’d
ization, which we didn’t want. The focus shifted make work like a spy. The experience affected
to meetings and production.”8 all the work I made in the years following.”11 A
The next conference took place in October sketch of Avrahami’s piece was exhibited in the
2007, and, rather than holding it in Gaza, the or- Leipzig iteration of Liminal Spaces the following
ganizers decided to examine segregation and October, and the completed work was shown at
oppression as they manifest in ethnically mixed the Taipei Biennial in 2008.
cities within Israel, such as Modi’in Illit/Bil’in, Other projects grew out of Liminal Spaces,
Ramle, Jaffa, and Lod, and in the Christian Pales- such as Peter Friedl’s stuffed giraffe, which was
tinian town of Taibeh (Taybeh) in the Occupied shown at the 2007 Documenta and consisted
Territories. Students in the newly opened Inter- simply of a taxidermied giraffe; the animal had
national Academy of Art Palestine joined, as well died during an Israeli military strike near the
as several new participants, bringing the total Qalqilya Zoo. The Dutch collective Superflex
number to around 80.9 Among the new partici- did several projects in and around Palestine fol-
pants was the artist Artur Żmijewski, who later lowing the conference, including organizing an
developed several projects exploring the Oc- appeal to the European Broadcasting Union to
cupation, such as the video he made in Holon include Palestine in the Eurovision Song Contest.
called My Neighbors (2011). When Żmijewski The project Picasso in Palestine (2011), which
curated the 2012 Berlin Biennial, he invited the centered on the enormous logistical challenges
International Academy of Art Palestine to collab- in bringing a single Pablo Picasso painting to
orate on the temporary importation and display Ramallah, was conceived by Khaled Hourani and
of the massive key from the Aida Refugee Camp. carried out in partnership with the Van Abbe-
Liminal Spaces installation view,
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst,
Leipzig, Germany, 2006, showing
Yochai Avrahami’s Rocks Ahead,
2006

11
 The Exhibitionist
overall programming at the center fundamentally altered
museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where how I saw cultural work and its potential to influence the
Eilat was by then working. world.
Although Liminal Spaces opened up many
2. A wonderful book, also titled Liminal Spaces, was pub-
channels for collaboration, research, and ex- lished in 2009 consisting of lectures, talks, and discussions
change, it also opened people’s eyes to the that took place during the conferences. And the project’s
seeming impossibility of peace or social justice. website, liminalspaces.org, has recently been restored.

Both Eilat and Fadda have since left the country, 3. Both Artists Without Walls and Liminal Spaces took form
frustrated by the social and political impasses in the shadow of the Second Intifada, which began in 2000
they faced on a daily basis. Fadda especially and ended in 2005. Up until 2000, travel from one side of
the Green Line to the other was much easier. People would
talks about her disillusionment following the commute to work and business was much more fluid. After
third iteration of Liminal Spaces, which took 2000, the separation wall was built, effectively imprisoning
place mostly within Israel proper: “I saw that Palestinians within it, while entry permits to Israel proper
became, and continue to be, extremely hard to obtain. For
Israel had its own colonial racist project to deal Israelis it remains illegal to enter most parts of the Occupied
with, beyond the Occupation. Of course, people Territories (except the settlements).
aren’t going to look past the border because
4. The Tanzim officials even gave the participants a tour of
they already have tons of issues to work with at the area and treated them to a large lunch, during which
home. How do you wake up an entire society? shooting broke out at the nearby Qalandia Checkpoint.
How do you show them they have to salvage 5. Author interview with Eyal Danon, currently director of the
themselves?”12 Israeli Center for Digital Art and a Liminal Spaces organizer,
Eilat continues to serve as an inspirational September 24, 2013, in Holon.

figure to me and several other cultural produc- 6. Author interview with Galit Eilat, founder of the Israeli
ers in Israel, and I’m sure far beyond as well. She Center for Digital Art, October 1, 2013, in Tel Aviv.
has pioneered a shift in the Israeli art scene from
7. Between the first conference in March 2006 in Ramallah
a Westward-looking cultural island largely influ- and the second one in Leipzig in October, Israeli forces
enced by Western Europe and the United States withdrew from Gaza, Hamas won the elections, and the
to one rooted in the Middle East, with ties to newly formed Kadima party took power in Israel based on
Ariel Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan. In July 2006, a
other balkanized areas such as Eastern Europe. month-long war broke out between Israel and the Hezbollah
She accomplished this by focusing the program- in southern Lebanon that was overwhelmingly supported
ming at the Israeli Center for Digital Art on po- by public opinion in Israel. Since the dissolution of the Oslo
Peace Process in the late 1990s, and the growing militancy
litically and socially engaged experimental art. on both sides of the Green Line following the Intifada, the
I probably would never have moved back to Tel Israeli left was shrinking dramatically, and support for the
Separation Wall and military operations such as that in 2006
Aviv a year ago if I hadn’t seen firsthand how
grew drastically.
mixing local and international programming
can be so successful. 8. Author interview with Galit Eilat, founder of the Israeli
Center for Digital Art, October 1, 2013, in Tel Aviv.
Although the mandate at the Center for
Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, where I work, is 9. The conference was timed to coincide with the Riwaq
somewhat different than that of the Israeli Cen- Palestinian art biennial. Many of the international partici-
pants who were invited by the Israeli Center for Digital
ter for Digital Art, and the political situation has Art also took part in the biennial.
changed since 2006, I’m happy to count my-
self among the people who continue to benefit, 10. This two-channel video installation uses, on one side,
footage Bartana filmed in 2006 of Palestinian construction
though indirectly, from the important knowledge workers and international volunteers from the Israeli
and the brave connections forged by the truly Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), who were
pioneering project that was Liminal Spaces. rebuilding a demolished Palestinian house in Anata (East
Jerusalem). This footage is edited to match the Zionist
propaganda film Avodah (1935) by Helmar Lerski, showing
Notes on the other screen.

1. I joined the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon (near 11. Author interview with Yochai Avrahami on September 24,
Tel Aviv) for three summer months in 2006, between the first 2013, in Holon.
and second parts of Liminal Spaces, to fulfill my internship
requirement for the master’s degree in curatorial studies at 12. Author interview with Reem Fadda on October 5, 2013.
Bard College. Born in Israel but raised in Canada, I always Fadda is now associate curator of Middle Eastern Art at the
had a distant but strong relationship to my home country, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project.
and I was curious to learn about contemporary culture there.
Although I wasn’t directly involved with Liminal Spaces, the

12
 Curators’ Favorites

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution

installation view, MoMA PS1,
New York, 2008, showing Lorraine
O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,
1980–83

WACK the Canon!

Hendrik Folkerts

My initial encounter with WACK! Art and the for the exhibition, defining feminism as “the con-
Feminist Revolution was through the exhibition viction that gender has been, and continues to
catalogue. Browsing the pages of this volumi- be, a fundamental category for the organization
nous book, I engaged with a bold and extremely of culture” and that “the pattern of that organi-
exciting universe of artists that would shape my zation usually favors men over women.”1 Butler
view of art history from that point on. In 2008 I contended that feminism should be framed as
visited the exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, the most influential international “movement” of
where it had traveled after its first appearance the postwar era, deliberately invoking the word
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los “movement” to emphasize its connection to the
Angeles. The works on the pages now unfolded verb “to move” and liberate it from any static or
in actual space. I encountered heroines I already fixed meaning the “ism” may connote. With these
knew, such as VALIE EXPORT, Eva Hesse, Lynda definitions in place, Butler presented a stagger-
Benglis, Ulrike Rosenbach, Mary Kelly, Marina ing array of works by more than 125 women
Abramović, Hannah Wilke, and Sturtevant, and artists working in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly
artists whose work I had yet to explore. Both the operating in the Western hemisphere, with
exhibition and the catalogue became invaluable some notable exceptions. Marta Minujín,
resources for me as a student, and, later, major Cecilia Vicuña, Sonia Andrade, Mako Idemitsu,
points of reference in my practice as a cura- Léa Lublin, and Nasreen Mohamedi are only
tor. They proposed questions on the basic op- a few examples of artists featured in WACK!
erations of a historical survey exhibition and its whose work had long been under the interna-
relation to art history’s canon, the legacy of the tional radar.
feminist movement, and the ontology of perfor- Making a survey exhibition of any historical
mance documentation—questions that as yet I movement, certainly one as divergent and strati-
have only been able to partially answer or ad- fied as feminism, can be a problematic endeavor,
dress, but that I hope to engage with much more as it constructs a junction or arrangement of a
in the years to come. variety of artistic practices along a thematic and
Cornelia Butler, the curator overseeing the temporary axis, thereby shaping the very condi-
vast selection of works and artists that together tions upon which canon building is established.
formed WACK!, borrowed from the performance Feminist artists, art historians, and curators,
scholar Peggy Phelan in establishing a premise from the very outset, have provided one of the

13
 The Exhibitionist

most fundamental critiques of the visual arts in should stress again that Butler was not propos-
the 20th century, namely that Art History and its ing this as a new canon. Rather, it was a gesture
canons are based on patriarchial, exclusionary, meant to illustrate the proliferation of existing
discriminatory systems of power. In her semi- artistic practices, with the aspiration of impact-
nal 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great ing the practice and discourse of art globally.4
Women Artists?,” the art historian Linda Nochlin During the period that WACK! Art and the
challenged what was then the still-undisputed Feminist Revolution was traveling across the
idea that the Western male viewpoint is the only United States, there was a general discomfort
possible position in the history of art: the “natu- with the term “feminism” among young artists,
ral” assumption or bias of the art historian, the curators, and art historians—and, at that time, my-
“normal” course of discourse, the “neutral” posi- self as well.5 In my opinion, this originated from
tion of the de facto male scholar.2 This sparked a a certain detachment on the part of an emerging
still-ongoing inquiry regarding what constitutes generation with the issues of historical feminism,
the artistic canon that we encounter on the mu- and a lingering sentiment that these battles (at
seum’s walls, in art history’s chronicles, and on least in the Western hemisphere) had been
the art market. fought and won. In addition, in the wake of the
One of the greatest accomplishments of emergence of gender and queer studies, the
WACK! involved maintaining the critique of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s has
canon that informed the works on display while become, unjustly, associated with essentialist
complicating the formation of a new canon. A and exclusionary “female-only” tendencies.
complete rejection of existing systems might One could certainly argue against all the
have seemed on the surface to be the only way claims above.6 And the fact is that WACK!, hap-
out, so to speak, but it is clear that these systems pening as it did at that specific point in time, did
were and are still very much in place, and that pose a number of important and timely ques-
they are certainly not exclusively bound to no- tions. For example, to what extent can a survey
tions of gender. The latter problematic was ad- exhibition imply a break in, or with, history?
dressed in both the exhibition’s premise and its Framing a certain movement as “historical” may
execution. Although WACK! was not a compre- actively serve to disassociate it from present-day
hensive survey of what could be coined a global issues and concerns. Is there a conversation to
feminism, it did endeavor to include practices be had between those spearheading the feminist
previously overlooked in surveys of feminism movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s
(with a capital F?) that were actually geared to- and those who identify with feminism today?
ward feminisms in Europe and North America.3 And how does a body of work that is very spe-
This sensitivity toward a truly international map- cific to, and critical of, the period in which it was
ping of artistic practices was admirable, though produced relate to contemporary artistic and
I hurry to add that it was still more an acknowl- feminist practices? I am not arguing that WACK!
edgment than a full display of global feminisms. explicitly articulated a break between historical
The fact that it still felt like a feminism of a certain and contemporary feminism, but rather that, as
place was a reminder of the (in this case, physi- a survey exhibition, with a (necessarily) specific
cal) boundaries of the survey exhibition. And I premise and modus operandi, it was uniquely

WACK! Art and the Feminist

Revolution installation
view, MoMA PS1, New
York, 2008, showing work
by Helena Almeida and
Joan Semmel (left) and
Magdalena Abakanowicz’s
Abakan Red, 1969 (right)

14
 Curators’ Favorites

WACK! Art and the Feminist

Revolution installation view,
MoMA PS1, New York, 2008,
showing Niki de Saint Phalle,
Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof
Ultvedt’s Photo de la Hon repeinte
(undated)

able to bring this question to the fore, and conse- As an exhibition, WACK! Art and the Feminist
quently helped facilitate a conversation among Revolution took a position at the intersection of
parties who perceived entirely different sets of many important issues in curating today: chal-
issues at stake. lenging the format of the survey exhibition and
Another critical aspect of the exhibition its undeniable connection to canon building, en-
was its relation to performance and performance couraging intergenerational exchange, and aid-
documentation. The importance of performance ing the ongoing historicization of live and per-
practices in the 1960s and 1970s is inextricably formance art. It clearly demonstrated that while
linked to the feminist movement. The live and these works may be historical, they are far from
bodily actions performed by women artists at “over,” and the artists’ legacies remain open-
that time politicized the relationship between ended and intensely productive.
artist and spectator. Yet what remains of these
moments? WACK! demonstrated, albeit implic- Notes

itly, how we experience historical performance 1. Cornelia Butler, “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of
art today—that is to say, how the documents and Shifting Criteria” in the exhibition catalogue WACK! Art
and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of
documentation of a staged live performance now
Contemporary Art, 2007): 15.
serve as physical markers in space.
Exactly because of the ongoing historiciza- 2. Although Nochlin’s arguments were instrumental in
the advancement of feminist art and art history, they also
tion of early performance practices, there is cur- provoked equally essentializing claims of a feminine
rently much debate about the status of the docu- “greatness,” which caused heated debate among art histo-
ment in relation to the live event or reenactment.7 rians of the 1970s. For a clear response, see Carol Duncan,
“When Greatness Is a Box of Wheaties,” Artforum 14, no. 2
The performance scholar Philip Auslander as- (October 1975): 60–64.
serts that the ontological relationship between
the document and the performance is far less 3. See Marsha Meskimmon's essay “Chronology Through
Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally” in the
significant than the phenomenological relation- exhibition catalogue WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
ship between the document and the specta-
tor, and this was certainly apparent in the many 4. “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria,” 16.

documents I encountered in the exhibition.8 The 5. For example contemporaryfeminism.com, initiated by Jen
documents of the performance work of Carolee Kennedy and Liz Linden.
Schneemann, Lili Dujourie, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono,
6. And I did so in my master’s thesis, “Feminist Visions:
et cetera, et cetera, are powerful works of art. A Constellation of Difference in Psychoanalysis and Feminist
They designate a different connection between Art History” (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2009).
artwork and spectator than is the case in a live
7. For a comprehensive overview, see Amelia Jones and
setting (each scenario brings about complex Adrian Heathfield, Perform. Repeat. Record. Live Art in History
temporary relationships, but of course of very (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
different types) because they do not depend on 8. Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance
a particular moment in time. More than mere ar- Documentation,” Performing Arts Journal (PAJ 84) 28,
tifacts, these documents move beyond temporal no. 3 (September 2006): 10.

confinement and invite the spectator back in,

time and time again.
15
 The Exhibitionist

Oscar Bony
La familia obrera (The Working-Class Family), 1968

16
 The Exhibitionist

Back in the Day

E xperiencias 68:
A Th resh ol d
Inés Katzenstein

Experiencias 68 is a key show in the history of exhibitions. It was part of a

series of curatorial experiments that Jorge Romero Brest, a major Argentine
critic and curator, designed to showcase the most experimental artists of the
late 1960s in Argentina. Though they did not all fall into a distinct category,
these emergent artistic practices, he believed, were approaching an uncertain
and exciting threshold in art, perhaps even the end of art, but an end that he
seemed to understand less as a silencing than as a transformation worth going
through.
The artists in these three shows—of which the first was called Experiencias
Visuales 67 and then, once “the visual” ceased to be seen as central to art, just
Experiencias 68 and 69—found not only a structure for funding, producing,
and exhibiting their works, but also a curator willing to create a kind of labo-
ratory to reflect on and theorize about the new art. The show’s presentation
accentuated the attitude of experimentation and risk that the artists were
beginning to take on.
The importance of Experiencias 68 does not lie solely in its curatorial in-
novation. It resides as well in the dramatic and perhaps paradoxical fact that
this show became the setting for a series of ideas and events that ultimately
effected an unprecedented rupture between artists and institutions in Argen-
tina. It was with this show that the seemingly fluid and mutually legitimizing
relationship between the “most advanced” artists (as emerging artists called
themselves at the time) and the museums that had been faithfully at their side
was fractured, due initially to a specific act of police censorship but, more
generally, to a growing atmosphere of dissent.
It was a politically tense time. In 1966, a military dictatorship had seized
power in Argentina, and its ultra-Catholic ideology resulted in the persecu-
tion of all behavior deemed deviant. The dictatorship gave hippies haircuts

17
 The Exhibitionist
View of Florida Street with artworks
destroyed by the artists in Experiencias 68,
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires,
1968

and arrested young people for no reason except “background checks,” pur-
suing a policy of repression that culminated in violent attacks on university
autonomy and induced hundreds of scientists and academics to leave Argen-
tina for good.
Starting in the early 1960s, the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella—a privately
run, interdisciplinary center for the visual arts, theater, and experimental mu-
sic—was the indisputable core of the art scene in Buenos Aires. Its economic
and intellectual investment in avant-garde art was rivaled by no other institu-
tion. At the helm of the visual arts there was Romero Brest, a critic, curator,
charismatic lecturer, and professor who had held a number of high-profile
positions at various institutions since the 1930s. By the 1960s, thanks to his
power and determination to egg on the most provocative forces in the art
world, he was seen as a visionary.
At the Di Tella, Romero Brest worked toward an Argentine art less
afflicted by an inferiority complex in relation to European and North Ameri-
can art. To that end, he invited esteemed international critics, including
Pierre Restany, Clement Greenberg, William Sandberg, Giulio Carlo Argan,
and James Johnson Sweeney, to serve on the juries of the celebrated “Premios
Di Tella,” or institutional prizes. He held exhibitions of crucial works by very
young international artists such as John Chamberlain, Lygia Clark, Vassilakis
Takis, Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Jasper Johns,
James Rosenquist, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt. And he organized a
number of shows of Argentine art in the United States, among them Beyond
Geometry at the Americas Society in New York in 1968 and New Art from
Argentina at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1964.
On the local scene, his leadership of the Di Tella was extremely success-
ful, as he combined retrospectives of major artists with projects by emerg-
ing artists that were provocative and even scandalous for the time. Marta

18
 Back in the Day

View of Florida Street with artworks

destroyed by the artists in Experiencias 68,
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires,
1968

Minujín, for instance, produced some of her most important environments 1. Jorge Romero Brest,
Conference on Experiencias
and happenings at the Di Tella, among them La Menesunda (Mayhem, 1965), 68, archives of the Instituto
Torcuato Di Tella. See also
El Batacazo (The Long Shot, 1965), and Importación-Exportación (Import-Export, Listen Here Now!: Argentine
1968). These were all works that included audience participation, hyperstim- Art of the 1960s, ed. Inés
Katzenstein (New York:
ulation of the senses, and a general atmosphere of euphoria and confusion. Museum of Modern Art, 2004):
130.
Despite constant attacks in the press and his own philosophical doubts
about the value of this new art, Romero Brest’s support grew for work that
was beginning a powerful process of dematerialization, leading to a radical
transformation of his original program at the Di Tella. The Institute had two
annual prizes, one open to artists from around the world, and one open solely
to Argentine artists. Partly because of pressure from artists who felt that the
prize concentrated too many institutional resources on a single, and always
hotly debated, winner, and partly because of his own sense of what the most
innovative work required in terms of support, Romero Brest decided to re-
name the exclusively Argentine prize “Experiencias” and to distribute the
award budget among an unranked selection of 12 artists.
This change not only spread out available resources more democrati-
cally, but also encouraged the creation of works conceived specifically for
the Di Tella exhibition space. As the very name of the event made clear, the
intent was not to support the production of self-contained, closed, portable
objects geared primarily for visual impact, but to encourage work that was
concerned with the perception and experience of the viewer. Romero said
of the artists working in this vein at the time: “It’s as if they wanted to bring
art closer to life—which is the greatest desire of artists throughout the ages—
going beyond the intermediary of form-symbol. . . . By formulating situa-
tions, artistic creation becomes freer. It is more directly aimed at the freedom
of those who experience it. And that is a goal for any artist.”1
Experiencias 68 was riddled with conflict from the outset. Pablo Suárez,

19
 The Exhibitionist
View of Florida Street with artworks
destroyed by the artists in Experiencias 68,
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires,
1968

2. All translations in this essay

are by the author.
one of the artists invited to participate, decided not to produce the work he
had initially proposed and instead stood at the entrance to the show, handing
3. Primary Structures was
the title of a show curated out copies of a letter he’d written to Romero Brest. The letter attacked the Di
by Kynaston McShine at the
Jewish Museum in New York
Tella, questioning its legitimacy as a venue for the production and reception
in 1966. The term was used of art and calling for a shift in focus toward “life” on the part of art and art-
at that time (even in Buenos
Aires) to refer to minimalist ists. It stated: “These four walls enclose the secret of transforming everything
art. inside of them into art, and art is not dangerous. . . . It is evident that the need
to create a useful language—a living language and not a code for elites—
arises insofar as moral situations are formulated in works, and meaning is used
as material. A weapon has been invented. A weapon only takes on meaning
in action. In a store window display, it lacks any danger.” In closing, Súarez
demanded, “Those who want to be understood must say it in the street.”2
The show, then, opened in a strange atmosphere. One of the most im-
portant figures in the avant-garde scene had issued a condemnation of the
prestigious Di Tella and proposed that the street replace it as the best con-
text for aesthetic and political authenticity. The “living language” that Suárez
wanted to create took the form of a political message that set out to incite an
anti-institutional uprising among the participating artists. Suárez decided to
remain outside the confines of the institution to expose the emptiness of the
legitimation it conferred and its inability to generate truly powerful experi-
ences.
In sweeping terms, the works presented at Experiencias 68 fell into two
groups. The first could be described as making use of languages called, at that
time, “primary structures”—though these pieces were more conceptual than
formalist in nature.3 Works such as Antonio Trotta’s receding mirrors and
David Lamelas’s blank slide projections would fall into this group. Then there
were the more experiential works—that is, works whose structure required
the viewer to take action in order to establish a relationship or a connection
with them. Works by Delia Cancela and Pablo Mesejean, Margarita Paksa,
20
 Back in the Day

Roberto Jacoby, and Oscar Bony fall into this group. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Poesía y
Capitalismo,” Iluminaciones II
Pablo Suárez’s dissident stance resonated strongly with some of the works (Madrid: Taurus, 1980): 183.

in that second group: Mensaje en el Di Tella (Message in the Di Tella, 1968) by

Roberto Jacoby included a sign condemning racism in the United States, a
French telex reporting live the explosive news of what was happening that
May in France, and a flyer that said: “The avant-garde is the intellectual
movement that permanently repudiates art and permanently affirms history.
All the phenomena of social life have been converted into aesthetic material:
fashion, industry, technology, the mass media, etc.” And, like Suárez’s letter,
the work declared: “Aesthetic contemplation has come to an end because the
aesthetic has been dissolved in social life.”
The other work that shifted attention away from the aesthetic object—
in this case, in favor of sociological research—was Oscar Bony’s controver-
sial and celebrated La familia obrera (The Working-Class Family, 1968), which
displayed a proletarian father, mother, and son in the middle of the gallery.
The family sat on a pedestal while a recording played the sounds of their daily
domestic life. In this work, Bony staged the two pillars of Western society—
work and family—both as monuments and as objects on (inherently humiliat-
ing) public display. Even though Bony paid them per day as much as the hus-
band would have received for a day’s work in a factory, the artwork created a
situation where the economic exchange that underlies all work was not bound
to any form of productivity whatsoever. It turned the concept of the family
as a moral nucleus on its head, making it into a unit that, by placing itself on
display for money, prostituted itself. What does it mean for a worker to waste
time in the (presumed) non-productivity of art? To be, as Walter Benjamin
describes objects in a collection, “things freed from the drudgery of being
useful”?4 “Work” in this piece was reduced to the pure expenditure of human
time “in the abstract,” to use Karl Marx’s term, and as such it belittled the
worker’s skills, suggesting an equivalence between a hour of “real” work and
an hour of “non” work as dictated by an artist. In this process, the artist
became a sort of shady class torturer on both sides—that is, for the worker as
well as for the art audience.
But, curiously, the work that ignited the wick of scandal was not Bony’s
act of sociological violence, nor the catastrophic news and earth-shattering
ideas voiced by Jacoby, nor the attacks in Suárez’s letter. It was, rather, a work
that (at least initially) formulated an innocent exercise in architecture and
semiotics. El Baño (The Bathroom, 1968) by Roberto Plate was an empty,
compartmentalized white space suggesting two rows of bathrooms, one des-
ignated for women and one for men, which viewers could physically enter.
The blank walls of the work were available for scribbling. The writings, which
soon included graffitied sexual comments and attacks on the government, led
to a police inspection and court-ordered censorship, and, one week after the
opening, access to the piece was physically blocked.
21
 The Exhibitionist
5. Lamelas and Trotta did
not sign the document of the
In solidarity with Plate and in protest against the establishment of a
protest. moralist police state, eight days after the censorship took place, the other par-
6. “Para nosotros, la libertad,” ticipants in the show, at least those who were in Buenos Aires, moved their
Primera Plana 283 (May 28, works from the gallery to the street immediately outside the Di Tella and
1968): 75.
destroyed them.5 All the major players at the Di Tella came out to explain the
7. From an artist statement
published in Patricia Rizzo,
situation to the press and the sponsors. Romero Brest took center stage at a
Experiencias 68 (Buenos Aires: press conference in which he tried to frame the problem philosophically. With
Fundación Proa, 1998): 69. By
“obscurantism” Trotta was a sense of disconcertedness, but also of honesty and courage, he wondered
referring to the beginning of
a period of social repression,
aloud, “Is it important to take action at the institution, even if that action
censorship, and fear, which abets its destruction?” With that question, he voiced the classical paradox of
actually consolidated as
such in 1976 with the start of institutional critique and specifically alluded to his growing sense that some-
the most atrocious military
dictatorship in Argentine
thing was coming to an end.
history. According to an anonymous journalist writing for the influential maga-
zine Primera Plana, “No exhibition in recent years has been so coherent with
its self-destructive principles. . . . The privileging of event over contempla-
tion, of morality over aesthetics, was operative from the outset, and that is the
key to understanding the public’s strange fascination with this show. . . . The
triumph of a perception based on disruption was the step by which the avant-
garde turned its back on frivolity and chose instead commitment.”6
Antonio Trotta was one of the two artists who did not agree with the
course the show was taking. “When a work of art is destroyed, obscurantism
begins,” he wrote.7
One year later, the last edition of Experiencias was held. There were some
very strong works in that show, for instance Liliana Porter’s false shadows
(1968), Luis Camnitzer’s Arte Colonial Contemporáneo (Colonial Contemporary
Art, 1968), which consisted of a sign stating the title of the work located at the
entrance of the exhibition space, and closed-circuit experiments by Grupo
Frontera. But the institute was under pressure to cut costs, and Romero Brest
boldly proposed changing the exhibition space into a television studio run by
visual artists, or a research center on mass-media theory. He suggested that
the pressures of experimentation would inevitably cause works of art to dis-
appear and that, thus, the exhibition space was ceasing to be the ideal context
for art and its operations. The Institute’s art centers ended up closing in 1969,
and Romero Brest decided to venture into a project called Fuera de Caja
(Out of the Box), which consisted of producing art for consumption—art as
design.
At the same time, the conservative political climate was giving rise to an
unusual degree of radicalization among intellectuals and artists. Avant-garde
artists were at the forefront of the transition from the so-called “art of ideas”
to political radicalism; from criticism of art institutions to outright rupture
with those institutions; from the symbolic destruction of the autonomous and
bourgeois work of art to the end of the work of art in all its material forms and

22
 Back in the Day

the politicizing of its reception; from the art object to intervention in the mass 8. I am referring to the artists
who were proposing a “media
media.8 One work paradigmatic of this political radicalization was Tucumán art” as theorized by the
brilliant critic Oscar Masotta.
Arde (Tucumán Is Burning, 1968), a famous but failed counter-information Media art was a proposal for
project designed by a group of artists, writers, and trade unionists whose aim an art based on the analysis
and artistic use of mass media
was to reveal the alliance between the mass media and the government by for producing aesthetic and
political content. Roberto
setting up an alternative network of information between artists and union Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, and
members. Raul Escari signed a manifesto
of media art, and Masotta
The cultural and political atmosphere grew more difficult. Amid police wrote extensively about it
during these years. For more
persecution and ethical self-questioning on the part of artists themselves, information about this, see
at the end of the 1960s many remarkable artists left Argentina for various Inés Katzenstein, Listen Here
Now!.
European cities (David Lamelas, Juan Stoppani, Alfredo Rodríguez Arias,
Roberto Plate, Cancela-Mesejean, Antonio Trotta) or stopped making art
(Pablo Suárez, Margarita Paksa, Oscar Bony, Roberto Jacoby). Years later,
when most of them resumed their artistic practices, they employed tradition-
al techniques, formats, and even topics, effectively renouncing the powerful
public and political content of their earlier works. Experiencias 68 was perhaps
the bitterest battle in this history, the tear most difficult to suture, the thresh-
old between two moments impossible to join.

23
 The Exhibitionist

Ten installation view, Dwan Gallery, New York, 1966, showing works by Jo Baer, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson,
Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris

24
 The Exhibitionist

Missing in Action

A fter a Fa sh io n:
T h e Grou p Show
Lucy Lippard
Introduced by Chelsea Haines

“After a Fashion: The Group Show” is an ar- of criticism by challenging the traditional
ticle by Lucy Lippard originally published in complaint lodged at these works: that Mini-
the winter 1967 issue of The Hudson Review, malism is boring, unemotional, and overly
a quarterly literary magazine with a historic cerebral. She deftly deflates the pervasive
reputation as a major forum for emerging binary between intellectual rigor and aes-
writers. While the text is ostensibly a review thetic experience; argues that boredom often
of Systemic Painting, a group exhibition curated derives from not carefully paying attention
by Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim to the work of art itself; and attacks the old-
Museum, Lippard’s analysis operates in the fashioned humanist idea that art needs to
service of a much wider examination of the relate or refer back to the everyday world.
exhibitions and subsequent criticism gener- She contends that such objections to Mini-
ated around Minimalist practices at the time. malist art stem from a stagnation and lack of
In her signature bold, clear prose, fresh, independent thinking in American art
Lippard scrutinizes three 1966 survey exhi- criticism—a field that at that time was still
bitions of Minimalist work (which she refers almost entirely defined by tenets established
to as “rejective” practices): Systemic Painting at by Clement Greenberg two decades earlier.
the Guggenheim, Primary Structures, curated Lippard chose to never become tied
by Kynaston McShine at the Jewish Museum, to any institution, which gave her a unique
and the artist-organized Ten at Dwan Gallery freedom to break with convention in both
in New York. Each of the three projects is her writing and her curatorial practice. At
carefully judged: The two museum surveys the time of this article’s publication, she
“included good work, but suffered from a had recently organized Eccentric Abstraction at
confusion of styles and quality,” while Ten Fischbach Gallery in New York. The exhi-
“did assemble works of high quality” but bition included works by Eva Hesse, Louise
ultimately failed in its expressed goal as a Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, and Keith
conclusive take on Minimalism. Through Sonnier, among others, and dealt for the first
these three case studies, Lippard charts the time with what Robert Pincus-Witten would
pitfalls that often occur in the organization later dub Postminimalism. Less a movement
of so-called definitive group exhibitions. She than a new approach and attitude toward
chiefly faults them for combining diverse the art object, it adapted the formal vocabu-
works under a common, all-encompassing lary of Minimalism to more acutely personal
theme; only exhibiting one work per artist; and emotional ends. From Eccentric Abstraction
and treating historical work with attenuation to “After a Fashion”—just a few years later,
or altogether removing its influence from the in 1969, these new practices would serve as
framework of the exhibition. the foundation of Harald Szeemann’s semi-
Lippard also provides incisive criticism nal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form.
25
 The Exhibitionist

After a Fashion: The Group Show

After innovation—the critical deluge; after the deluge—fashion; after fashion—the group
show; after the group show (and its coverage by mass media)—criticism of criticism. These
episodes replace each other rapidly on the art scene today, crowding good and bad art alike
off the stage in preparation for the next act. We are now in the last phase of reaction to the
current rejective, or minimal, styles. By the last phase, I do not mean that such styles are fin-
ished, but that they can soon settle into the relative calm after the museumistic storm; major
artists continue to innovate within their innovation and others line up for a new chorus. In
1966–67, non-sculptural structures and structural, or “systemic,” painting will be much in the
public eye. This is the fourth season that primary structures have been visible in the galleries,
at least the eighth that the styles now dubbed Systemic have been around. The former were
sanctified in the spring at the Jewish Museum and the latter just now at the Guggenheim.
At the beginning of every season, not only museums but galleries get the synthesizing
group show fever, introducing novelties or recalling the triumphs of the previous season. A
small but ambitious exhibition at the Dwan Gallery, largely organized by the artists them-
selves and called simply Ten, attempted to establish an “absolute” standard of rejective paint-
ings and structures hitherto blurred by institutional mistakes; it did not succeed, but it did
assemble works of high quality, marred by an occasional inclusion or exclusion. Lawrence
Alloway’s Systemic Painting, a bigger show, presents a broader target. Like Kynaston McShine’s
Primary Structures, it was a worthy project and included good work, but suffered from a confu-
sion of styles and quality. In addition, such collections always suffer from their limitation to
a single piece by each person. They would be better off with at least two works by a more
discriminate choice of artists.
My dissatisfaction with the Guggenheim exhibition was based on the premise on which
it was organized as well as the selection’s qualitative unevenness and the inexplicable omission
of all West Coast artists (Davis, Kauffman, Irwin, Pettet, Wheeler, Makanna, for a starter).
It presented neither a frankly heterogeneous group noting various directions and suggesting
new affinities, nor a strictly homogeneous group noting approaches to a shared preoccupa-
tion. Very different works were massed under a common label, which implied a common
theme and inspired the false assumption that all these artists do have something in common.
Systemic Painting included at least three major directions, often opposed to each other, and
still other overlapping minor directions, and the catalogue preface concentrated on historical
events and critical intramuralism preceding all of these.
The first division would be “hard-edge” painting (Smith, Kelly, Huot, Fleming, et al.), a
term applied to a broad area of geometric or free-form painting with a certain ambiguity be-
tween figure and ground, one or few images, two or three bright colors, and a crisp execution.
(This area and its “concrete expressionist” counterpart could have been eliminated without
detriment to the show as a unity or a proposition.) The second division would be structural or
“primary” painting, also represented at Dwan. It has no image and is often near monotonal,
or modular (based on an identical repeated unit), either colorless (Martin, Ryman, Lee) or
very subtly and minutely colored (Baer, Mangold, Humphrey, Novros, Barry, Gourfain). The
third is a recent offshoot of hard-edge that reintroduces bright, garish color and is fundamen-
tally opposed to structural styles. Whereas hard-edge painting is flat and often single-imaged,
and structural painting is flat and all-over, this third strain deals with a new sort of illusionism

26
 Missing in Action

that superficially contradicts the mainstream tendency of modern painting to assert its native
two-dimensionality. The vehicle is often the shaped canvas (thirteen out of twenty-eight of
the Systemic painters worked with non-rectangular, or multiple, canvases, and others combined
more than one panel into a single rectangle).
[...]
The Dwan exhibition has been called, jokingly, an “anti-Stella show,” its absolute con-
tainment being opposed to the kind of idiosyncratic space for which Stella rejected the
rejective. This is an indication of Stella’s importance to the whole tendency and of the mixed
feelings his subsequent delinquency has aroused, though it should have been obvious all along
that despite his statements, he was always disposed to a non-mechanical and offbeat ap-
proach. The prime prototype for the rejective vein is Ad Reinhardt, whose unequivocal art-
for-art’s-sake stand and elimination of all but the square, trisected canvas made up of three
imperceptibly different blacks predicted current trends to a great degree. His black painting
at Dwan, one of an “ultimate” series begun in 1960, was visible to only the most attentive
eye as more than a solid surface. In its apparent blankness, it stood aloof from the rest of the
exhibits, demanding still more esthetically open eyes and minds than the most deadpan of its
companions. Its essence is not form, nor the evocative qualities of blackness, but a pervasive
black light that is steadily, dully luminous, firmly anchored to the all-but-invisible cross, or
trisection, that gives the surface a necessary structure and keeps it from being just a black
relief. Reinhardt’s influence on the younger artists shown here, or rather the lack of it, has yet
to be fully investigated, though it is no coincidence that Stella’s early works were symmetri-
cal, black, even at times cross-shaped (Die Fahne Hoch), or that he owns two Reinhardts. The
Reinhardt retrospective at the Jewish Museum should cause adjustment of historical schemes
that minimize his contributions over the last twenty years.
There was almost no color in the Dwan show, the work being limited to severe black,
white, gray, gray metals, and white light, except for the very narrow borders of blue-green
and green-blue on Jo Baer’s “blank” double canvas. Yet there was a great deal of variety,
disproving the notion that all rejective art devolves to the same endpoint. Here was the real,
preconceived, “systemic” group. Don Judd’s piece consisted of a row of six identical galva-
nized boxes projecting over three feet from the wall. Its magnificent inertia may not seem
rebellious, but it is in fact a statement of opposition to the cleanly easy-to-like attractiveness
provided by so much current art (witness the Guggenheim show). Judd’s refusal to relate parts
to parts hierarchically, his stolid repetition, is both logical (because it looks implacably “cor-
rect” and because straight lines and even numbers give the impression of logic) and illogical
(because its impressiveness is way out of proportion to its simplicity and because it is just there,
filling space). Why should six metal boxes make any demand on our sensibilities? They are
well made but not perfect, not smoothly or sensuously surfaced; they are calming, even numb-
ing. Yet they have a candor, exactitude, visual coherence, and conceptual complexity that is as
aesthetically satisfying as the most elaborately ingratiating object.
[...]
The intellectual rigor and detachment of rejective art (a term I prefer to “minimal” or
“reductive” because it does not imply attrition) is a source of annoyance to more conservative,
or less singly involved, critics, because the great personal commitment of these artists is a
commitment to making visual objects, rather than to humanism. In the Systemic catalogue,
Lawrence Alloway asserts the need for critics to reintroduce “other experience” into their
appraisals of an art steadfastly opposed to personal interpretation, and Hilton Kramer has
concluded that Systemic Painting is “an art for critics . . . derived mainly from an analysis of
critical theory. Their physical and visual realization offers us not the intervention of a sensibil-
ity so much as the technical implementation of a theoretical possibility. The very use of a ‘sys-
tem’ suggests a flight from sensibility, a conscious evasion of ‘other experience.’” He is right
about the conscious evasion, but that is in itself indicative of a sensibility little understood
by those who simply don’t react to this kind of work. With all due respect to Mr. Kramer’s

27
 The Exhibitionist

opinions, there is no reason why critical commitment to an art should detract from that art,
or in any way suggest that the art derives from the criticism. As a matter of fact, most of the
artists in the Systemic show do not agree with each other, or with “their” critics, on theoretical
or emotional grounds, as is proved by the statements in the catalogue.
The main issue is: Why should critical commitment be interpreted as critical dominance?
One reason is the intellectual quality of rejective art; another may be the fact that there has
been little American art criticism of note over the last twenty years. As a result, the few good
critics (particularly the only author of a sustained critical theory, Clement Greenberg) have
been over-appreciated. There is no question that one of the problems facing the young or
so-called “new critics” today is, as Mr. Alloway observes, a revaluation and adjustment (not
a devaluation) of Mr. Greenberg’s notion of the history of American painting for the last
twenty years. Yet even Mr. Greenberg owes the basis of his theories to his acquaintance with
the artists themselves and his knowledge of their intentions, problems, and solutions. Given
the circumstances of the New York art world today, and the art “world” in many senses is New
York, it would be most unnatural for critics not to know any artists; those of the same genera-
tion are all the more likely to coincide in their viewpoints. The idea that the critic should have
nothing in common with the artist is one promulgated by art historians more accustomed to
dealing with artists who have been dead for some time. A great majority of the fundamental
ideas presented by the new critics come from the artists, from their works and from constant
dialogues. If the critics spend more time classifying, analyzing, justifying these ideas than the
painters whose task is to provide them in visual form, that is not a matter of exerting influ-
ence. The best contemporary literature on the Cubists, for example, was produced by friends
of the artists, though needless to say all the friends did not have valid contributions to make.
All major critics have been partisan. Aesthetic experience can only be so objective. It should
hardly be surprising that the more aesthetically attracted one is to a work or type of work, the
more one seeks to explore, hopefully not to rationalize, this attraction. Without some strong
commitment, criticism becomes the pedantic, review-oriented, nitpicking, wage-earning
esoterica to which book and art reviewers often succumb.
The new criticism is opposed to the “review syndrome” that has plagued contemporary
art writing with minutiae, poetry, fanciful journalism, social commentary, and explanations
based on a vague premise of Zeitgeist. It is founded on the experience of looking at art objects
and thinking about their achievements and effects. Ideally the conclusions drawn are read-
able, but not necessarily easy to read. Like the art it takes its lead from, much recent criticism
does not aim to entertain or explain. Yet it is a sad commentary on criticism, and its recep-
tion outside the confines of the art world, that serious and frequently scholarly commitment
to the idioms of the present is suspiciously interpreted as commercialism, chic, partisanship,
academism, or an exercise in boredom. My digression on criticism may be outside the scope
of an art chronicle, and can be interpreted as still more critical intramuralism. Yet one of
the most depressing facts about writing art criticism today is the extremely limited audience.
Artists don’t need it, the general public is too lazy, and knowledge of the contemporary visual
arts among the so-called intelligentsia, the readers of quarterlies everywhere, is abysmally
nonexistent. There is no reason why art should be considered outside the intellectual do-
main. If a certain knowledge of recent theater, fiction, film, opera, and music is considered
de rigueur for a cultivated person, why shouldn’t it also be necessary to know the recent
history and major literature of painting? Yet museums and galleries are visited for vaguely
culture-seeking motives, or not at all. The art world is no more insular than any other cultural
subculture, probably less so, since there is no language barrier. Supposedly all the arts are
experienced for aesthetic pleasure and discussed in print for intellectual pleasure, or at least
enlightenment. Yet serious art criticism cannot depend on any outside readership, no matter
how “cultivated,” to know even the most basic names, facts, or categories involved.
By its very restrictiveness, rejective art opens new areas of aesthetic experience. It even
tends to be overstimulating. Above all, it has to be looked at. It will not provide instant depar-

28
 Missing in Action

tures for the familiar picture-finding, landscape-spotting, memory-inducing that often passes
for enjoyment of abstract art. Like a sky or a large body of water, one of Reinhardt’s black
paintings, for example, must be seen whole, as itself, without crutches of associative relation-
ship to other objects or sights. So many viewers are lost without this crutch that the new art is
often called “boring” or, at the other extreme, it is said to “test the spectator’s commitment.”
The fact is that the process of conquering boredom that makes the pleasure of art fully ac-
cessible is a time-consuming one. Most people prefer to stay with boredom, though it does
seem, in view of the deluge of recently published comment about boredom in the arts, to be
a pretty fascinating boredom. It is ironical that Harold Rosenberg should be one of the most
vociferous detractors of “artistic boredom” for, despite his poetic and social insights, he is well
known for his frequent inaccuracies of visual observation, his lack of interest in really looking
at anything.
The exclusion of “lyricism, humanity, and warmth of expression” horrifies Mr.
Rosenberg (writing in Vogue). Yet do we really turn to painting and sculpture for any of these
qualities? Is there any reason why the rarefied atmosphere of aesthetic pleasure should be
obscured by everyday emotional and associative obsessions, by definite pasts, presents, and
futures, by “human” experience? Humanist content and the need for humanist content in
the visual arts in this century is rapidly diminishing; at the moment it rests with photography,
film, and the stagnation of figurative art. A painting that is asked to be both a painting and
a picture of something else that has nothing to do with painting per se is likely to suffer from
its contradictory roles. Visual art is visual. Abstract art objects are made to be seen and not
heard, touched, read, entered, interpreted. The expansion of the visual media into other
areas has produced many effective results, but they have increasingly less to do with visual art
and more to do with a new art of fusion.
Thus the issue of introducing “other experience” into art is, in the context of rejec-
tive styles, and for better or for worse, irrelevant. Literature, as a verbal medium, demands
a verbal response. But advanced music has not been asked to explain itself symbolically or
humanistically for years. Why should painting and sculpture still be scapegoats?

A few paragraphs containing extended descriptions of specific works

have been omitted in this reprinting of the original article.

29
 The Exhibitionist

30
 The Exhibitionist

Attitude

W hat I Did
L a s t S u mm e r
Massimiliano Gioni

The summer of 2013 was, for me, moderately psychologically unsettling. Not 1. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
“The Entropic Encyclopedia,”
because organizing the Venice Biennale scarred me somehow, but because— Artforum 52, no. 1 (September
once the critics and the public got the chance to visit The Encyclopedic Palace, 2013): 311–17. Having quite
bushy eyebrows myself, I have
the exhibition I curated in the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale—in the eyes only the utmost respect for
Buchloh.
of many observers I was transformed into a proponent of Rudolf Steiner’s
anthroposophy, a follower of Carl Jung, a believer in Spiritualism, and a dis-
ciple of Aleister Crowley. The fact that this year’s biennale included Steiner’s
drawings, Jung’s Red Book, paintings by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and
Augustin Lesage with plentiful references to early-20th-century Spiritualism,
and pastels by Crowley the magus, alongside many other objects of somewhat
odd provenance, not only raised questions and eyebrows—the legendarily
bushy ones of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh were apparently dislodged higher
than anyone else’s1—but initiated a very interesting process of assumed iden-
tification between my supposed beliefs and the content of my exhibition. Fre-
quently, commentators took for granted that I had chosen to include certain
works or objects because I espoused the ideas or values that they expressed.
In other words, if there are Steiner drawings in a show, the curator must
think that Steiner is a great artist and that his philosophical theories are not
only legitimate, but to be admired and celebrated. These assumptions were
made not only by the many fervid admirers of Steiner who started writing
me heartfelt letters, or the various Crowley-inspired organizations that sent
me magazines and catalogues—some truly interesting, others simply frighten-
ing—but also by a number of people from the art world, even professional
critics.
What do such reactions say about our expectations, and the role we
attribute to the task of a curator or exhibition organizer?
First and foremost, they suggest that a curator is presumed almost by

31
 The Exhibitionist

definition to be a supporter, defender, and admirer of the works he or she puts

in a show. This idea, which in my view is quite reductive and naive, has gained
ground since the mid-1990s with the emergence of a generation of artists and
curators who could be linked in various ways—and I’m drastically oversimpli-
fying—to Relational Aesthetics. According to this interpretation, the curator
acts a sort of agent. He or she supports a group of artists (who may be from
different generations, their number and backgrounds varying from show to
show as the curator’s stable continues to morph and change) and exhibits
them with the tacit or explicit conviction that they are “the best”—that these
particular artists should be chosen over others, that they are the trailblazers,
the groundbreakers, right now.
This may be an inherited notion from the early-20th-century avant-
garde, or from the postwar period and its neo-avant-garde. It is a model that
became dramatically widespread in the 1980s, when certain curators would
preponderantly champion specific movements and tendencies. In the 1990s,
a new generation of curators imposed a new generation of artists, but repli-
cated the same relationships of complicity between curator and artist. This
conception is therefore grounded in a total identification between the cura-
tor and the work of the artists he or she exhibits. It is a conception that in
my opinion forces a competitive model onto both exhibitions and artworks,
imposing—whether intentionally or not—the idea that an exhibition or mu-
seum is a hierarchy, a club, a mechanism of exclusion and hence of adding
value, aimed at presenting the best works by the most important artists.
This model of curator-as-promoter has been joined or replaced by the
model of curator-as-creator, whose job seems to be playing with the exhibi-
tion format itself, and with the rules of the artwork-presentation game. But
here as well, it appears that, by tacit consensus, everyone sees the curator as
supporting and admiring all the works in a show, and entrusting them all with
the task of embodying a certain idea of quality.
In contrast to these two models, I prefer to see the curator as a scholar
or—better—as an interpreter of the works on display. Being a scholar or
interpreter doesn’t necessarily imply a passive, bookish, or neutral stance to-
ward the works, but rather a quite dynamic one, in which the very way the
works are presented, the installation, the montage, the spatial arrangement
and choice of critical apparatus—texts, captions, settings—provide a series
of tools for interpretation, a hermeneutic space for viewers. And the view-
ers are invited not just to contemplate objects assumed to be beautiful or to
memorize a list of names assumed to be important, but above all to ask them-
selves why a given artist and work has been included rather than another, and
venture into a series of encounters, juxtapositions, relationships, and narra-
tives that complete, question, and enrich one another.
The act of exhibiting thus becomes an interpretive learning process in
which what is on display is the act of interpretation itself, and in which both
32
 Attitude

curator and viewer become involved as they move through the exhibition. 2. Manuel Borja-Villel,
“To Have and to Hold,”
Unlike the curator-as-supporter, the attitude of the curator-as-interpreter Exhibitionist 8 (October
2013): 8. A similar position
requires a healthy detachment from the objects under examination. Although is expressed by Anselm
nowadays we live in an era of radical relativism and know that any claim to Franke in his exhibitions and
in his recent contribution to
objectivity is impossible, an interpreter or a scholar is generally expected to The Exhibitionist: “New Ways
Beyond Art,” Exhibitionist 8
maintain a certain distance from his or her subject of study, or at any rate (October 2013): 54–64 (in
can study a subject without necessarily becoming a supporter of it. To use a particular p. 57). His refusal
of what he calls the “clinical
crude example: We don’t expect a scholar of the Holocaust or of Adolf Hitler exhibition” model represents
a similar claim against the
to be a Nazi. Actually, we expect a sort of balance, a scientific detachment. presumed objectivity that
Whereas a curator who deals with Steiner is necessarily a Steinerist. too often is projected onto
institutions and museums.
Thinking of curators as scholars and interpreters also means granting The productive confusion
them room to disagree with the views expressed by some of the artworks and between artworks and
artifacts that characterizes
objects on display. It means letting them include objects and works without his exhibitions resonates with
many ideas I am trying to put
conferring any primacy on those objects or works, regardless of their sup- forward in this essay and in
posed quality, for the sake of demonstration or for the sake of argument. It my exhibitions, particularly
when it comes to exposing
means letting them include certain objects and artworks because they raise the implicit narratives that
museums often take for
questions and problems, not because they form a canon or a hierarchy. granted or prefer to hide.
Being an interpreter also means approaching the artworks and objects
in an exhibition without prejudice, or, rather, with an awareness of the preju-
dices that form one’s horizon of interpretation. It means putting one’s ear to
the work to make out what it is whispering, to let it speak without too much
interference, recognizing the partiality and subjectivity of both the work and
one’s own interpretation. Being an interpreter means giving the work space to
exist without necessarily sharing its viewpoint. It means passing on the stories
the work contains without necessarily identifying with it and with them. It
means being able to understand Steiner or Jung without thereby becoming
their ideologues, mouthpieces, or supporters. It might even mean the chance
to gently misinterpret a work, so long as one acknowledges that one’s inter-
pretation is indeed partial, and not the presentation of some definitive truth.
In fact, I think today this is the most important responsibility of curators and
institutions, be they biennials or museums: a systematic questioning of the
accepted canons and hierarchies of art history and, by extension, truth. Or,
as Manuel Borja-Villel put it in the last issue of this journal, “the questioning
of a totalizing view through the articulation of exceptions and discontinuities,
[through which] the very learning process becomes part of the narration.”2
Of course, I’ve never tried to disguise my partiality—my affection,
even—for the works and objects I put in my exhibitions, and for certain fig-
ures who I believe have been unfairly sidelined. But that doesn’t mean I share
their ideas or beliefs. Being an interpreter also means entering into an em-
pathetic relationship with one’s object of study, the better to understand it,
to hear its original voice, even to help it reverberate in all its intensity. But
it doesn’t mean slavishly accepting it. That is the risk run by curators who
turn themselves into artist promoters: that they’ll become the custodians of a
33
 The Exhibitionist
3. Inexplicably, among
the many reviews, nobody
dogma and a message, messengers rather than interpreters—a job that is best
pointed out that if the true left to gallerists and estate representatives.
intent of the exhibition was
rigorous research, why In The Encyclopedic Palace, figures such as Steiner, Jung, Kunz, af Klint,
not stage the exhibition in and Crowley (to stick with the examples cited earlier) offered evidence of
the original spaces of the
Kunsthalle Bern, which, possession by images—with bodies literally becoming their medium—which
coincidentally, are in danger
of being closed due to budget
to me appeared quite contemporary, as images and communication tools
cuts and populist politicians? become ever more bodily invasive. The choice to include specific examples
4. Germano Celant is in fact of mediumistic painting was also meant to foster reflection on the supposed
an incredibly sophisticated
curator who throughout
autonomy of artworks, and of abstract art in particular. Many artists who
his legendary career are considered outsiders, non-canonical, or self-taught seem to share a com-
has radically reinvented
exhibition formats. His 1976 mon fate: They are not recognized as artists because their work is supposedly
Ambiente/Arte exhibition at
the Venice Biennale deserves
linked to a practical purpose, whether therapeutic or divinatory, that falls
to be much more thoroughly outside the presumably gratuitous realm of pure art.
studied. More recently, his The
Small Utopia. Ars Moltiplicata, In summer 2013, there was much renewed discussion of Harald
staged at the Prada
Foundation in Venice in 2012,
Szeemann’s groundbreaking methods of exhibition making. The re-creation
was a masterful curatorial of his 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form staged at Fondazione Prada
endeavor proposing a richly
complex reading of art history. in Venice by Germano Celant, Thomas Demand, and Rem Koolhaas de-
serves a quick aside, not only because it became one of this summer’s most
talked-about exhibitions, but because it paradoxically proved—once again,
if proof were ever necessary—that Szeemann’s talent cannot be so easily
emulated or (worse) sterilely repeated.
History, Karl Marx said, repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
Perhaps Celant, Demand, and Koolhaas should have remembered these
famous words. How sad, instead, to witness the complete desiccation of an
exceptional moment of explosive creativity in the curators’ transformation
of the 1969 exhibition, installed in the incongruously grandiose and frescoed
rooms of Ca’ Corner. What was meant as a rigorous exercise in philological
reconstruction appeared more like a CSI episode in which forensic calcula-
tions expunged any trace of life from the already stiffening corpse of art his-
tory.3 The problem with the reloaded version of When Attitudes Become Form
was not only that it failed to be an accurate reconstruction—and how could it
have been, in such a different setting?—but that it presupposed an objective
view of art history, in which alleged masterpieces can be ossified and glorified
by restoring their original presentation.4
What the Venetian travesty seemed to miss completely was possibly the
most crucial and inspiring aspect of Szeemann’s legacy from the less famous
but perhaps more complex period of his career, which stretched from Bachelor
Machines (1975) to Austria in a Net of Roses (1996), by way of Visionary Switzerland
(1991), Monte Verità (The Breasts of Truth, 1978), and The Penchant for the Total
Work of Art (1983). That crucial and inspiring aspect was his total allergy to
accepted categories of art and non-art, quality, and taste. Szeemann’s
encyclopedic shows were all founded on a systematic questioning of the sta-
tus of the objects on display, calling upon a combination of artworks and
34
 Attitude

documents, masterpieces and found objects, often even blurring the line 5. Szeemann played with
the idea of reconstructions
between original and copy.5 and remakes throughout
his career, starting with
Of course, in the Szeemann system, the inclusion of eccentric figures reconstructed machines
and oddball objects was infused with romanticism, and he often seemed un- inspired by the writings of
Raymond Roussel and Franz
conditionally infatuated with all the works and artists in his shows. But his Kafka, which he presented in
Bachelor Machines.
most radical contribution—or at least what has served me most as an inspira-
tion and tool of liberation—is a concept of the exhibition that, to borrow an
effective wording, goes beyond categories of good and evil. A type of show
where it no longer matters whether the artists on display are the best and
the works the most important. An approach to exhibition making that is no
longer competitive, that is concerned not with imposing hierarchies, but with
expanding the art historical canon, with writing and rewriting a minor his-
tory of art. An approach to exhibition making in which artifacts and artworks
serve as figurative evidence of visions of the world, traces of existential
adventures, documents of cultural models and cultural imaginaries, rather
than simple objects to be contemplated for their alleged beauty or value,
whether monetary or aesthetic.
Poor Harald Szeemann must be spinning in his grave from the way his
name is trotted out on all sides these days. And, to be honest, he certainly
hasn’t been the only one to envision new forms of exhibition making. This
same year, another interesting paradigm has gained ground to the point that
it is unfortunately already in danger of congealing into a trend. In Rosemarie
Trockel’s 2012 solo exhibition A Cosmos—masterfully curated by Lynne
Cooke and presented in various iterations, the richest and most complex
being at the New Museum in New York (full disclosure: I’m its associate
director)—the German artist’s works are accompanied by those of famous or
little-known traveling companions, friends, artists, and dilettantes who shared
Trockel’s impatience with categories and genres.
In a similar way, Philippe Parreno opened the doors of his 2013 retro-
spective at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to the works of John Cage, Merce
Cunningham, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe,
and Tino Sehgal. This notion of hospitality could perhaps provide a model
for a type of exhibition—solo or group, it matters little—that includes works
and objects of varying provenance, in a polyphony devoid of hierarchies. To
welcome guests into your home, you don’t have to subscribe to their views;
you just have to offer a warm, clean, well-lit place where they can be them-
selves and express their opinions. Hosts and guests may disagree, but, to echo
a famous writer (beloved to builders of encyclopedic palaces): While disap-
proving of what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it. Perhaps,
to take an overly romantic view, the curator’s role is precisely that. Which
may be the same as saying I’m a Steinerist, a Jungian, and a Crowleyite, not
because I believe blindly in their ideas or works, but because I believe their
ideas and works are worth sharing.
35
 The Exhibitionist

Assessments

Bergen
Assembly
2013:
Monday
Begins on
Saturday
36
 The Exhibitionist

with each section loosely inspired by the communicate with dolphins, Hammer
eponymous Soviet science fiction novel evokes a conspiratorial air in which ap-
Workers’ by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pub- plied research devolves into LSD-fueled
Compensation lished in 1964. In the novel, researchers delusions. Christian von Borries’s atmo-
happily toil days, nights, and through spheric video I’m M (2013) is what the
the weekend, combining magic and sci- artist calls a science fiction documen-
Christopher Y. Lew
ence to investigate human happiness. tary in five parts. Its images of street
While this situation could also serve as scenes and independence-day celebra-
“To biennial or not to biennial?” was an optimistic description of the plight tions in Mexico are accompanied by a
the question proposed by the city of of today’s creative workers, Degot and moody soundtrack of beeps and drones.
Bergen in 2009. While their verb choice Riff preferred to draw parallels be- The scenes are decontextualized by the
may have been dubious, their answer tween the Soviet institutional system of music, becoming both a document of
in fall 2013 was a conceptually tight the 1960s and Norway’s contemporary a specific time and place as well as a
exhibition that avoided trendy spec- socialist society. They compared—occa- visual essay unmoored.
tacle and kept in mind its sociopoliti- sionally with too much concision—two Other video works—such as a
cal locale. Exhibition organizers Ekat- systems constructed on different foun- history play set in Norway and the
erina Degot and David Riff—calling dations: one built on the backs of the Middle East by Jumana Manna and
themselves “conveners” rather than proletariat, and the other on capitalist Sille Storihle, IRWIN’s interviews with
curators—mounted a show scattered petroleum interests. Describing the so- applicants for a fictitious passport,
across 11 sites in Norway’s picturesque ciopolitical conditions for the triennial Wong Men Hoi’s meanderings through
second city. Monday Begins on Saturday, in their catalogue essay, Degot and Riff Bergen and its environs, and Ane Hjort
the first edition of the triennial Bergen liken Norway’s egalitarian spirit and Guttu’s interpretation of her son’s play-
Assembly, was predicated on the notion modest demeanor to “an expensive time as art—all play to a specific aes-
of the institution—a seemingly utopic and prosperous Soviet Union.” One of thetic, one that favors narrative and a
workplace where the process is valued the few truly socialist nations, Norway certain level of didacticism. While the
as much as the outcome. is also a country that is integrated into content of the works was timely and
An undercurrent of creative dili- global capital. It is dependent on that apt, a dry, cerebral quality ran through
gence ran throughout the show. It was system as an oil-exporting nation with much of the exhibition, demanding
emblematic, for instance, in the per- one of the world’s largest sovereign patience and attention—evoking, per-
formative installation Artworks of the wealth funds. haps, the durational experience of
Future (2013) by Mariusz Tarkawian. Largely comprised of long-duration bureaucratic queues.
Working six days a week, seated at a videos, the exhibition favored moving Clearly not an exhibition of art for
desk in the Kunsthalle project space, pictures that were expository in nature. art’s sake, Monday Begins on Saturday did
Tarkawian made a series of index- Chto Delat’s new video A Border Musical point to the act of research as both a
card-size drawings illustrating future (2013) emphasizes Russo-Norwegian means and an end. The Strugatsky
works by established, lesser-known, and connections by describing a love af- brothers put it well in their novel in
even imaginary artists. They included fair and ensuing culture clash between their description of the workers:
a nude made by Rineke Dijkstra in a lower-class Russian musician and a
2020, signage by an anonymous artist Norwegian from Finnmark. Taking the They worked in an Institute that
highlighting class inequality in 2060, form of a musical, the video leaves little was dedicated above all to the prob-
a two-headed satyr Matthew Barney room for ambiguity in its depictions of lems of human happiness and the
will make in 2021, and other humor- immigration, love, and community. Jan meaning of human life, and, even
ous prognostications. Presented in a Peter Hammer’s Tilikum (2013) presents among them, not one knew exactly
grid surrounding the desk, Tarkawian’s a relationship of a different sort. The es- what was happiness and what pre-
installation envisioned a future art sayistic video revolves around Tilikum, cisely was the meaning of life. So
world engendered by the daily work of a bull orca who killed his Sea World they took it as a working hypoth-
drawing. trainer and two others in three separate esis that happiness lay in gaining
Monday Begins on Saturday was incidents. Teasing out connections be- perpetually new insights into the
structured as 11 individual institutes tween marine mammal entertainment unknown, and the meaning of life
(Tarkawian’s project was part of the facilities, Cold War research, animal was to be found in the same process.
Institute of the Disappearing Future), psychology, and New Age aspirations to

37
 The Exhibitionist

Pure research, thus, becomes yet an- aspect. If Bergen was to climb aboard As a local, it is hard for me to assess
other art form, a practice that contin- the biennial ferry ride, it had to chal- Monday Begins on Saturday without being
ues to develop regardless of outcome. lenge this format and not just make somewhat prejudiced by the prepara-
The photographs of Soviet researchers another biennial in the city-branding tions and pre-exhibition statements.
exhibited in the Institute of the Disap- tradition. The groundwork should thus Consisting of an exhibition spread
pearing Future—scientists poring over have been laid for the possibility to over 11 sites in Bergen (most of them
drawings and models, or examining begin “maturing away from exhibition/ white-cubish art institutions), a publica-
punch cards—depict iconic scenes from event culture and embark on moving tion (which didn’t differ much from an
an era that could not sustain itself. De- beyond a spectacular, large-scale, inter- exhibition catalogue), and a conference,
scribing the realities of socialism, Degot national exhibition-festival,” to quote its structures didn’t move far beyond the
and Riff write in their catalogue essay, Maria Hlavajova’s essay in the afore- usual biennial basics. The rebaptizing
“These rooms were about a system mentioned reader.2 of “triennial” as “assembly” and “cura-
where production failed but research What eventually became a trien- tor” as “convener” became Orwellian
blossomed.” The only ones to appre- nial (and not a biennial) took the name newspeak in this regard. That said, Riff
ciate what blossomed and bore fruit Bergen Assembly, with a subtitle that and Degot clearly stated during the
were the ones who themselves put in hinted at its investigative nature: “An opening days that what they had made
the work. Or, in other words, if no one Initiative for Art and Research.” The was an exhibition, and, as exhibition
witnessed the collapse of the Institute advisory board chose not to use the makers, they manifested a fine touch in
of One Hand Clapping, did it make a word “curator,” but rather “convener,” letting the artworks come through with
sound? and, together with public declarations their own agenda and language while
that the event would gather profession- conveying an urgency in their curatorial
als from different fields, the new institu- statements.
tion certainly suggested that something The irrational, magical, and uto-
More Verbs, new—not just another triennial—was pian sensibility of the Strugatski novel
Please coming to town. resonated through the exhibition,
The first iteration, Monday Begins which avoided the traps of merely re-
on Saturday, was made by the hands and peating, visualizing, or ornamenting
Åse Løvgren
heads of Ekaterina Degot and David vulgarized political truths. Many of the
Riff, with the title borrowed from a artworks were in different ways treating
How to biennial? This was the fre- 1964 science fiction novel by Arkady contemporary sociopolitical situations
quently repeated question of a 2009 and Boris Strugatsky. The different sites while musing into the future either from
international conference that inves- were formulated as research institutes, a contemporary or earlier position.
tigated the potential for a perennial taking inspiration from the novel, for For instance, there was a section of six
exhibition based in Bergen, Norway. instance the Institute of Political Hal- Socialist sci-fi films, the earliest from
The conference was followed by the ex- lucinations and the Institute of Love 1924. This combination of historical,
tensive Biennial Reader, which collected and the Lack Thereof. Degot and Riff contemporary, and future (!) references
both previously published and newly wrote in the publication: made the magical come to life in vari-
commissioned essays about the bien- ous productive ways. For instance
nial format.1 In addition, the local art The focus was on a particular topic Alexander Rodchenko’s documentary
community in Bergen arranged several with a rather narrow group of photos (1933) of the harsh Karelian
discussions, alternately investigating, artists, using the novel as an aes- landscape took on an almost dystopian
criticizing, dismissing, or supporting the thetic device to take a sidelong or aspect in this exhibition; some of them
city’s ambition to add an international oblique look at the contemporary felt surprisingly contemporary.
art exhibition to its portfolio of cultural conditions under which so-called Wong Men Hoi’s video The East Is
institutions. research-based practices in art op- Red (2013) was maybe the most success-
In the local debate, in which I took erate. More importantly, and per- ful example of a work that connected
part, most of the art scene resisted hints haps more boldly, we wanted to the different localities and histories
from politicians wanting to make it into reveal the possibility for imagining permeating the whole exhibition. In
a provincial opportunity for showcasing an afterlife for dialectical material- the work, sequences showing the pro-
Bergen artists. Rather, the hope was to ism on the magnetic fields of con- tagonist lost in the Norwegian moun-
find other ways of activating the local temporary art.3 tains with his revolutionary red flag are

38
Assessments

Monday Begins on
Saturday installation
view, KNIPSU as the
Institute of Love and
the Lack Thereof,
Bergen, Norway,
2013, showing Chto
Delat’s A Border
Musical, 2013

Ane Hjort Guttu, still

from Untitled (The City
at Night), 2013

Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

39
 The Exhibitionist

Monday Begins on
Saturday installation
view, KODE 1 as
the Institute of
Imaginary States,
Bergen, Norway,
2013, showing Maxim
Spivakov’s Marks,
2013

Monday Begins on
Saturday installation
view, Bergen
Kunsthalle as the
Institute of the
Disappearing Future,
Bergen, Norway,
2013, showing Pelin
Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

Tan and Anton

Vidokle’s 2084:
Episode I, 2012

40
Assessments

Monday Begins on
Saturday installation
view, Bergen
Kunsthalle as the
Institute of the
Disappearing Future,
Bergen, Norway,
2013, showing
Socialist sci-fi films
(left) and Soviet
photography (below)

Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

41
 Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

42
The Exhibitionist
Assessments
Monday Begins on Saturday
installation view, Bergen Kjøtt as
the Institute of Defensive Magic,
Bergen, Norway, 2013, showing
Stephan Dillemuth’s Department
of surv31llanc3&3ncr1pt10n
(2013)

Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

43
 Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

44
The Exhibitionist
Assessments
Monday Begins on Saturday
installation view, KODE 1 as the
Institute of Imaginary States,
Bergen, Norway, 2013, showing
IRWIN’s NSK Passport Holders,
2007–ongoing, and IRWIN and
NSKSTATE.COM’s Words from
Africa, 2007

Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

45
 The Exhibitionist

Monday Begins on
Saturday installation
view, Bergen
Kunsthalle as the
Institute of the
Disappearing Future,
Bergen, Norway,
2013, showing
Mariusz Tarkawian’s
Artworks of the Future,
2013

Monday Begins on
Saturday installation
view, Østre as the
Institute of Pines
and Prison Bread,
Bergen, Norway,
2013, showing Wong
Men Hoi’s The East Is
Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins on Saturday

Red, 2013

46
 Assessments

interspersed with interviews with activ- project has changed the project itself 2. Maria Hlavajova, “How to Biennial? The
ists from the Norwegian Mao-Leninist from dealing mostly with a European Biennial in Relation to the Art Institution,”
ibid, 296.
political movement of the 1970s. In situation and poetic utopianism to deal-
the mountains, the man is passed by ing with global issues of unequal social 3. Monday Begins on Saturday (Berlin:
joggers and people on Sunday walking and geographic mobility, and how this Sternberg Press, 2013): 22.

trips, clothed in the ubiquitous training mirrors historical changes in Europe.4 4. Meaning, from the Yugoslavian collapse
clothes with shrieking colors as a con- The interviews show the “magnetic and the rise of new states to an integrated
trast to his gray outfit. They show no field of contemporary art” meeting EU with strong control over its borders.

interest in his endeavor; obviously there with real people in urgent situations—a 5. Monday Begins on Saturday, 13.
is no room for his utopian flag or social meeting that is simultaneously absurd,
radicalism in a society where body humorous, and heartbreaking.
culture and consumerism have taken Chto Delat presented their film A
over. Border Musical (2013), set in the cities of Art in
In a similar vein, the artist Ane Kirkenes and Nikel, on either side of
Hjort Guttu stated during the con- the border between Norway and Rus-
the Age of the
ference that the conformist Norwe- sia, respectively. The border represents Norwegian
gian post–welfare state situation is not a high degree of inequality in terms of Semi-Social-
the best environment for visionary living standards. Rather than stating
thoughts. In the exhibition she present- the obvious, however, A Border Musical Democratic-
ed, among other works, Untitled (The enacts different sets of values and cul- Post-Welfare
City at Night) (2013), a video that prob- tural habits, and our sympathy oscillates
lematizes art’s (lack of) interaction with between the different parties, with no
State
the outside world and how artists relate final moral lesson or synthesis offered.
to their public role through their works Or, in keeping with the dialectical ter- Laurel Ptak
or practices. It tells the story of an artist minology, maybe Chto Delat’s video is
who decides to stop exhibiting her work the actual synthesis, the space where Monday Begins on Saturday presented dif-
because of what she experiences as an conflicting statements can be enacted ficult questions about the function and
unbridgeable separation between art and brought together without a final status quo of art today, while grounding
and real life. reconciliation. this inquiry within much broader social
Another work that dealt with the Degot and Riff, writing about their narratives. The organizing principle,
distinction between art and life, and encounter with Bergen, mused upon along with the exhibition’s title, were
how life sometimes intervenes and what narrative they could add to this skillfully lifted by curators Ekaterina
changes an art project, was IRWIN’s city: “Artists are words—usually adjec- Degot and David Riff from a 1964 sci-
video installation NSK Passport Holders tives, sometimes substantives, seldom fi novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky,
(2007–ongoing). The NSK State was verbs.”5 For my part, I would have liked written during the height of the Cold
invented in 1992 by the groups belong- more verbs in their narrative—not as War and parodying the Soviet research
ing to the Neue Slowenische Kunst in more artists or artworks, but in the boom then in progress. The novel de-
(NSK) art collective. The state doesn’t sense that their endeavor would perform picts the scientists as a motley group of
have any territory or national borders. rather than present, and explore its own state-funded researchers ceaselessly in-
Rather, it is a virtual state in time: format. In the aftermath of the trien- vestigating eccentric things, often using
transnational, spiritual, and utopian. nial, Bergen certainly has a lot of sub- bizarre methods. The exhibition asked
Citizenship is open to all, and one can stantives, such as dialectical material- us to contemplate the figure of the artist
apply for an NSK passport through the ism, but no more verbs than before in in parallel by problematizing the notion
state’s website. Since the beginning of order to imagine the world differently. of artistic research. This played out in
the 2000s there has been a considerable its very framework, which divvied up
increase in applications by Nigerians, Notes artworks among various fantastical “re-
who seemingly hope to use the pass- 1. Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and search institutes” spread throughout the
port to immigrate to Europe, and the Solveig Øvstebø, eds., The Biennial Reader city of Bergen. There were institutes
(Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunsthall; and
videos show interviews with some of of Perpetual Accumulation, Lyrical
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010).
these people. It is interesting to see how Sociology, Tropical Fascism, Political
this new reception of the NSK State Hallucinations, and more.

47
 The Exhibitionist

The Institute of the Disappear- ity and the standardization, if not mar- plight of artists in cities such as New
ing Future set the tone with a hand- ketization, of higher education known York—the cultural context with which
ful of 1960s Soviet press photographs as the Bologna Process. One artist, a I am most familiar—her scenario actu-
by Anatoly Boldin, Anatoly Khrupov, candidate in an “artistic research” PhD ally has the chilling effect of seeming
Vladimir Lagrange, and others, depict- program, has articulated his skepticism not far removed from science fiction.
ing young, determined, fashionable- and sense of what’s at stake: “What And this is where Monday Begins on
looking women and men hovering over kind of broader implications did [artis- Saturday’s most subtle and important
desks, contemplatively working ideas tic research] have for art’s relationship work was done. Its audience was tasked
and materials into plans for the collec- to the discourse of science, to capital, to with keeping three visions for society
tive future. The pictures read as faded nationalism, and the EU as a political constantly in tension: communism’s
propagandistic promises that scientific body, and to art’s conception of and re- past, capitalism’s seemingly hegemonic
and rational forms of knowledge could lationship to itself—its own procedures, future, and the welfare state’s wan-
lead to the realization of an ideal com- itineraries, competencies, and sense of ing present. The exhibition obliged us
munist society, but they also invited political or cultural efficacy?”2 to think not just about what artworks
viewers to scrutinize how knowledge Rather than making us more and their juxtaposition might mean in
might be instrumentalized today. cynical, however, the exhibition had a the context of an exhibition, but about
Two rooms away, watching Pelin miraculous way of provoking the desire something much heavier: What is the
Tan and Anton Vidokle’s episodic, on- to imagine what spaces of artistic non- role of the artist, of self-expression, and
going video 2084, it was difficult not to complicity might look like. This very of knowledge in contemporary society?
compare those faded Soviet promises to question is deliberated in Ane Hjort What do we want them to be, and what
the artistic and creative forms of knowl- Guttu’s subtly powerful video Untitled structures must we transform or newly
edge that are in the clutches of neolib- (The City at Night) (2013). The work imagine to get us there?
eral capitalism today. In Episode 1 (2012) recounts the story of how one anony-
we encounter a number of young, de- mous artist becomes entirely detached Notes

termined, fashionable-looking women from art’s social and financial order. 1. Quinn Slobodian and Michelle
and men from Berlin’s international In the video, the artist, who works at Sterling, “Sacking Berlin,” The Baffler 23
(July 2013).
art scene. As they read aloud excerpts an art gallery, is traumatized one day
from sci-fi novels and extemporane- when a homeless acquaintance of hers 2. Michael Baers, “Inside the Box:
ously theorize about art, culture, and is ejected with hostility by a coworker. Notes from Within the European Artistic
Research Debate,” e-flux journal 26
society in the year 2084, another spec- She finds herself forced to question (June 2011).
ter of the future springs to mind. As the what art’s function really is and eventu-
city’s mayor has—in reality—spelled ally settles on an extreme form of with-
out in his forward-looking 10-year plan, drawal, coming to terms with a quiet
“Berlin will be the mecca for the cre- meaning found in self-expression as she
ative class.” Lauding the figure of the continues over the years to generate an Love for Labor
artist, with all its risk-taking individual- enormous archive of obsessive, abstract
ism, has been in part what has allowed work, knowing that it will never have an Johanne Nordby Wernø
the city to abolish collective forms of audience.
equity such as unionized workforces In a memorable moment during
and public housing.1 the exhibition’s opening symposium, The 11 venues of the premiere edition
The exhibition’s fixation on artistic the Oslo-based Hjort Guttu described of the Bergen Assembly triennial in-
research was, in one sense, a measured herself as “the utmost product of cluded several artist-run spaces, a for-
curatorial retort to its larger context as the Norwegian semi-social-democratic- mer meat factory on the city’s outskirts,
the inaugural edition of a contempo- post-welfare state.” She recounts an the Kunsthalle, and two museum wings
rary art triennial initiated by the city entire artistic life thoroughly subsidized, near the central lake. All were col-
of Bergen and described as “An Initia- replete with free education, grants, and lectively cast as one big spatial anal-
tive for Art and Research.” Meanwhile, employment within state-run institu- ogy to Monday Begins on Saturday, a 1964
across Europe, funding and educational tions, providing her with the stable sci-fi novel by the Russian brothers
opportunities for artists increasingly fall means to have a family, buy a home, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Inspired
under this rubric of “research” in step and bypass the need for gallery repre- by the book’s caricatures of the Soviet
with measures such as cultural auster- sentation. If one compares this to the Union’s numerous more-or-less scien-

48
 Assessments

tific institutions of what-have-you, tion—was nicely executed as a con- dysfunctional residency in an old-fash-
Ekaterina Degot and David Riff named ceptual whole, although it was far from ioned facility in Armenia where artistic
all the venues “Institutes” of various du- obvious how the works in each Institute endeavors go unsupported by its selfish
biously utopian purposes, for example corresponded with its declared area staff. Another strong work was Jan Peter
Zoopolitics, Imaginary States, and, lest of research, as announced on bronze Hammer’s film Tilikum (2013), which is
we forget, Love (and the Lack Thereof). plaques at each entrance. about research on dolphins and orcas in
Bergen Assembly had already been I’d made a second visit to the the United States, all in the service of
rigorously examined long before this Venice Biennale immediately before the entertainment industry.
first edition actually opened, most nota- going to Bergen (also for a second visit), The exhibition’s title alluded to the
bly through the well-attended interna- and it may be an unfair comparison, direction of the present state of the
tional preparatory conference of 2009, but the selection of artworks at the host nation, which, in today’s Europe,
To Biennial or Not to Biennial, and the Assembly did strike me as very homog- has been a much privileged and pro-
subsequent Biennial Reader published by enous. In particular the dominance of tected one. The Scandinavian welfare
Hatje Cantz in 2010. It was thus only video work felt exhausting. For reasons model is said to secure citizens from,
after an art-world think tank had been still obscure to this writer, the moving among many other unpleasantries, see-
called to put forward its conclusions image was intentionally given priority ing their Mondays begin on Saturday.
that the city of Bergen, a municipality by the curators. The result of that deci- Labor policies are strict, and the rights
known for an enviably close and re- sion was an exhibition that only a small of employees are defended to what
spectful collaboration with its own art percentage of visitors could experience probably seems like an absurd degree
scene (enviable in particular to those in anything near its entirety. Speaking to many outsiders. In their catalogue es-
from the larger, but in this respect less of utopias, one such dream state would say, Riff and Degot satirized their hosts
privileged, capital city of Oslo), decided be that someone with only a day or by scoffing at the (allegedly typically
on a triennial—not biennial—structure, three in town—the case for most visi- Norwegian) notion of taking weekends
and had an artistic board invite its cura- tors—might succeed in finding the time off. Meanwhile, though, they must have
tors. Or “conveners,” as the Assembly required for such a volume of time- known that they were running the risk
terminology went. based work. The dominance of film of ignoring the numerous significant
The young institution certainly and video left me enjoying the mere idea debates, exhibitions, and publications
raised the stakes for itself by deciding of many of the works in question—an recently on the precarity of “flexible”
on not one, but two challenging themes. idea based on written descriptions, the artistic labor and its obvious connec-
First, on a formal level, the ubiquity of excerpts I did manage to see (the films tions to post-Fordism and exploitation.
biennials/triennials. And second, on thus sadly reduced to sound bites), and Is it really still in vogue to maintain
a curatorial level, the topic of artistic the general buzz among visitors. Not no distinction between work and rest?
research. Its take on both was promis- my preferred way to experience art. Is it really heroic to be so on fire you
ing. The choice of an exhibition recur- Film and video works not to be can’t ever put your research away and
ring every three years rather than every missed (and these I saw in full, I promise) just watch Homeland for a while? The
two will provide more time for reflection included Ane Hjort Guttu’s two pieces. norm of stressing how much busier you
between editions. And its particular Her Untitled (The City at Night) (2013) in are than others at all times has become
take on the (well-worn) angle of “artis- the KODE 4 museum was a slow, quiet, a straitjacket, and personally I find it
tic research” made the topic come alive yet spellbinding portrait of a perhaps- bolder when artists and curators put
in a very welcome way. random local artist working for years on their laptops away and go hiking or
The Moscow-based curatorial team a large art piece nobody will ever see, cooking together on Sundays.
of Riff and Degot invited artists, writ- reluctant to attract attention and stub- Such an understanding of Sundays-
ers, and so on to be not artists, writers, bornly defensive of her oeuvre. Works off, however, is perhaps at odds with an
and so on, but “researchers,” in line relating to ideological systems blended opposing one (which is admittedly also
with the novel’s cast of characters. This with those dealing with research ac- a reasonable view) favored by the cura-
recasting of the venues as individual tivities, which were sometimes under- tors: that refusing to rest on societally
Institutes, and the curators’ stated at- stood more as a visual paradigm than designated days is a subversive act, pre-
tempt to “write” with the works of as knowledge production, as in Josef sumably because it entails a sabotage
artists in space as well as with the works Dabernig’s Hypercrisis (2011), screened of the rationality, productivity, and ef-
of writers on the page—in short, the in the School Museum. In this humor- ficiency demanded by capitalist society.
whole transition from novel to exhibi- ous 17-minute film, a writer goes on a This conflict aside, Riff and Degot are

49
 The Exhibitionist

overall both instructive and amusing in

their seemingly benevolent analysis of
contemporary Norway, dubbed a “side-
ways glance” at a rare remaining social-
ist realm, and their comparison of it to
1960s Soviet culture.
That said, the country’s first non-
socialist government in a very long time
was installed this fall, and the policy for
arts funding immediately changed, as
did government attitudes toward immi-
gration, taxes, private ownership, and
more. The onset of a new, conservative
political orientation only lends accentu-
ation to works such as Wong Men Hoi’s
film The East Is Red (2013), shown in
the Østre venue. Combining narrative
fiction with a straightforward series of
interviews, this Chinese artist portrays a
significant generation in recent Norwe-
gian history: the men and women who
led the way when 1968 gave name to a
movement. Many of these leftists, once
fascinated by chairman Mao and today
approaching retirement, come from
prominent positions in the Norwegian
media, education, and legislation. The
societal changes they have witnessed
over the years have been amazing. Oil
was discovered in 1969, and nothing
was ever the same again.
Although more restrictive with pub-
lic funding, even the new conservative
government has assured the people that
its strong economy will keep securing
not only general welfare but also con-
tinued arts funding. Anyone fearing
that this Northern utopia will follow the
British or Dutch into a shattering of the
conditions for art production has simply
read too much sci-fi.

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 The Exhibitionist

Rigorous Research

T h e t e r r itor ie s
o f E x h ibit io n
Germano Celant

Beginning with the earliest salons in the mid-19th century and the first Venice
Biennale, methods of environmental communication have been crucial in
conditioning the emotional and physical, as well as the perceptual and con-
ceptual, consumption of art. The imaginary space reflected in the environ-
mental context of an exhibition—the limited sphere stretching from wall to
ceiling to floor in which works are installed and shown so that the public
might enjoy them—is a powerful space indeed.1
Starting with the Salon de Refusés in Paris in 1863 and continuing with
the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1884 and the first Venice Biennale
in 1895, the setting and architecture in which
the artworks were exhibited was a cross between
a living room and an art studio. It was an “in-
habited” setting, though on a vast scale: whether
an industrial one such as the 1867 Salon at the
Universal Exposition in Paris, or a former rid-
ing stable, as in the Palazzo dell’Esposizione in
Venice’s Giardini. It contained furnishings and
decor—draperies, divans—to surround the
paintings, which, naturally, were framed. In the 1903 Venice Biennale installation view showing the Sala del
Paris exhibitions and those of the same period Lazio with works by Adolfo Apolloni, Honored Carlandi, and
Giulio Aristide Sartorio in collaboration with U. Coromaldi,
in Vienna and Venice, the buildings called upon C. Innocenti, E. Nardi, A. Nuts, A. Poma, and A. Bartoli
to house these large-scale events tried to evoke a
house of the muses, with an eclectic classical style based on grand entrances,
columns, plaster, and stucco. The interiors were crafted by artisans to give
them the look and feel of spacious 19th-century residences.
The idea was to emphasize the regal, aristocratic aspect of the artworks,

51
 The Exhibitionist
to help them conceptually “fit in” with the homes of the nobility and rich
bourgeoisie. The overall effect aimed to impress, often employing a quadreria
arrangement in which works were closely hung side by side, above and below
one another, just like the early art collections shown in 19th-century paintings.
The predominant exhibition strategy for sculpture involved pedestals, and for
paintings, placement at a certain height from the ground, almost always above
a wooden frieze that served as a baseboard and environmental frame, not to
mention a cover for the heating vents. The territory of use was delineated by
this and by the molding above, which, along with the massive portals, marked
the passage between the wall and the decorated, vaulted ceiling, without
employing the top and bottom corners of the room in any way.
Only in the early 1900s, with the emergence of avant-garde movements
such as Cubism and Futurism, did factors encouraging greater flexibility
in exhibition methods (due in part to the “humble” status of artists and a
need to reuse the precious resource of wall space) lead to the employment of
draperies, sacking, and sheets of colored paper to protect the wall structure,
allowing multiple, repeated uses at no added cost. In essence, it was a transi-
tion from an objective space—hinting at an aristocratic or bourgeois social
sphere and often characterized by frivolous touches and features halfway
between a bath house and a cemetery—to a flowing, embracing, impersonal
space, without connotations of class or status. An increasingly neutral en-
vironment, it was thought, would not assail or impress visitors, but instead
allow them to concentrate on the products on display. It was a way to avoid
ideological and social associations that create a forceful, intimidating effect in
favor of a more abstract space, an extension of the background for the art.
This physical extension became all-envelop-
ing, functioning as an abstract womb, a global
experience: for instance the Austrian room at
the 1907 Venice Biennale, which featured the
Hagenbund group from Vienna and the Manes
association from Prague, decorated by Joseph
Urban in pure Werkbund style, or the room de-
voted to Gustav Klimt at the 1910 Venice Bien-
nale, with decorations and exhibition design by
Gustav Klimt’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale, with exhibition E. I. Wimmer.2 In these two cases, the environ-
design by E. I. Wimmer, 1910
ment became “light” and luminous, with subtle,
graceful decorations running across monochro-
mic white walls. The goal was a limpid clarity that would help focus attention
on the sequences of interwoven color in the objects, paintings, and sculptures.
This was a first step toward the conceptualization of art, where move-
ment within the exhibition space was not prompted by the decor, furnish-
ings, or materials, but took place in a limbo. It marked the abolition of the

52
 Rigorous Research

overflowing, overwhelming environment in which one was prompted to finger

the fabric or sit down in favor of a terrain that wrapped around the visitor
and yet was intangible, where the art object could visually “shine.” It moved
in the direction of a framework underpinning the mental scheme, an abstract
conception of looking, of perceiving. A directionless shell inhabited by things
presented together, all of the same value. For this purpose, as early as 1911
in Der Blaue Reiter, a show organized in Munich by Heinrich Thannhauser,
monochrome sheets of paper were used to cover the walls, creating a uniform
background that stretched from the floor to the edge of the ceiling. This was
a way of erasing the physicality and tactile, sensory nature of the visual field
in order to form an aseptic, neutral vessel where the explosions of color set
off by the key figures in the movement—from Wassily Kandinsky to Franz
Marc—could flow freely.
Elsewhere, pictures presented themselves as tools for conveying magni-
tudes and distances, planes and coordinates, that were essentially rational,
intelligible, and communicable, as if reflecting a science of measurement and
methods of representation. In this case, space was translated into a geometric
and volumetric equation, without hierarchies, as in 0.10: The Last Futurist
Exhibition of Paintings (1915) in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which included works
by Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. Here, space was a measurement
of quantity, rather than quality. What mattered was the accumulation of
paintings and sculptures that “occupied” the overall environment to the point
of invading the corners. The channels of interaction between viewer and art
were reduced to a minimum, so that the works served to indicate distances
and areas, proximities and positions. They became a consequential succession
of entities that moved from the private realm of the studio into the public one
of the Soviet masses to form a compact, uniform whole, pointing to a path
and vision that stripped away all decoration in favor of a conceptual formula-
tion. The intellectual value of the exhibition was also linked to the presence
of texts and statements on the wall, helping to define the philosophy behind
its poetic message. The system Malevich adopted to hang the paintings did
not employ the chains typically used in the era, and Tatlin also did without
pedestals, since his Reliefs were suspended in the corners, suggesting an exhi-
bition strategy that canceled out the physical perception and weight of the
object while highlighting its value as an image, free of traditional connections
to the floor or wall.3
These environments and exhibition designs were part of a quest for
osmosis and total fusion between artwork and architecture.4 In the 1920s,
artists began to seek a consonance between visual and three-dimensional
practice, between interior and exterior context—home and street. Art moved
into all kinds of places, from public squares to railway carriages, apartments
to restaurants, clubs to bars. Initially, this took place through the visual

53
 The Exhibitionist

appropriation of walls, as in Ivan Puni’s 1921

room at Der Sturm in Berlin, where the walls
were covered in large shapes and numbers, with
drawings and paintings set among them. An-
other example is El Lissitzky’s total Proun envi-
ronment at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of
1923, where every distinction between the sur-
rounding walls and the sculptural and visual
elements was erased, aiming for the complete
union of all components. The effect was one of
Installation by Ivan Puni, Der Sturm, Berlin, 1921
total integration, in which the art melted away
and spread throughout the architectural vessel.
They became one and the same, as in Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1923–43)
in Hanover, Germany, or Piet Mondrian’s Salon de Madame B (1926) in Dres-
den, Germany. In such cases, the art dissolved
into concrete densities of pure color and mat-
ter; it became a hideaway, a retreat, constructed
according to Dadaist or Neoplasticist principles.
Eventually, with El Lissitsky’s Raum für konstruktive
Kunst (Room for Constructivist Art, 1926) in
Dresden, it was transformed into a variable ma-
chine, with exhibition structures such as optically
shifting walls and moving panels and showcases.
El Lissitzky, Raum für konstruktive Kunst (Room for Constructivist
Art), Internationale Kunstausstellung, Dresden, Germany, 1926
The transition away from interweaving decor
and art, and then from melding together art and
environment, which inevitably led to the sensual
intermingling of architecture and image, became concrete in the 1930s, in
both Europe and the United States. There was a move to end the fusion and
confusion between politics and aesthetic manifestation, between the senso-
rial order and the mental processes of art. More specifically, emphasis began
to be placed not on the concrete, sensory significance of a work, but on the
Platonic value, the ideal. In Europe, a figurative kind of art was favored that
shunned imperfection and classicism, transmitting a very ideological sense of
purity, while on American shores there was a tendency to extol artistic trends
that dealt with abstract thought and the spirit, keeping a distance from politi-
cal and social issues. These two poles struggled to define the social image of
art in an ideological or ideal sense. They both presented a vision of worldly
affairs based on the “ought” of establishing a “kingdom” of alternative truth,
whether diabolical or celestial.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture,
Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theater, Films, Posters, Typography
opened in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its goal was to

54
 Rigorous Research

present the languages of modern culture and show the prophetic, futuristic
side of the early-20th-century avant-garde movements, which could be seen
as revolutionary compared to the social and political ideas being advocated in
Europe, specifically in Germany, Russia, and Italy. And since the vision of the
future was linked to a metaphysical aspiration, an ideal not yet in existence, it
was shown and exhibited in a white space, indicating a “void” that transcend-
ed all points of anchorage, whether physical and material or iconic and deco-
rative. It was a limbo in which painted and sculpted objects could float, along
with all the other languages that run parallel to art: film, music, photography,
design, architecture, graphics. This marked the
creation of an ahistorical dimension, the white
cube, where all kinds of experimentation can be
manifested and accepted, doing away with any
concern for “realism.”5 The museum therefore
offered itself as an artificial, abstract construct
in which to explore a conceptual and ideal
obsession: the radical, overreaching statement
of a utopian outlook, transcending the present. Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions,
Here the images emerged, delineating history Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theater, Films, Posters,
Typography installation view, Museum of Modern Art,
without taking it as a context because it was New York, 1936
the work that was to be perceived, avoiding any
critical approach. Its value derived from its universal, humanistic merit.
To accentuate its positive impact, it was shown in a setting outside current
events—an absolute, empty horizon—to underscore its presence.
Since its conception in about 1928, New York’s Museum of Modern
Art identified this context with the aseptic, pared-down language of the Bau-
haus.6 Its spaces and exhibitions, such as the first one on Cézanne, Gauguin,
Seurat, van Gogh (1929), were designed around a sequence of white walls,
delimited at the bottom by a baseboard, and at the top by the edge of the ceil-
ing, with chains hanging down for the paintings. As a whole, the environment
was “emptied” of all the decorations or signs found in the exhibition settings
of the 19th and early 20th centuries so that the aesthetic experience would
not be disturbed by the presence of extraneous elements. It was an invitation
to focus and meditate on the objects hanging there, in order to fully grasp,
without distractions, the inherent idea of the artwork. It was an exercise in
foregrounding the object’s power, putting aside all other situations and reali-
ties. The emptiness served as a dialectic foil for the fullness of the art. At the
same time, it removed any link to the circumstances surrounding the object,
any contiguous or previous historical context. It pushed away any reference
to a place or time. It forced the gaze to forget, since they were devoid of any
decoration, both the walls and the architecture. It seemed to suggest shaking
off the very existence of the place, and, as a result, erasing one’s own body:

55
 The Exhibitionist

pure idea and spirit. One was invited to inhale the pneuma of art, to achieve
purification.
It has been pointed out, however, that putting art into an ahistorical lim-
bo not only makes viewers forget the convulsive, chaotic nature of everyday
life, but also tends to eradicate any political or ideological spirit that might
have linked the art (and therefore tainted it) to the European dictatorships of
the time.7 In this sense, outlining the art’s presence, without letting any refer-
ence to contemporary events or the real world seep through, transformed
the work into pure energy, almost a virtue on which to found a new world.
The political excess that had characterized all the avant-garde movements,
from Futurism to Constructivism, was winnowed out and dissolved so that
the social aspect was separate from the aesthetic one, and the process of art
was transformed into the pure pleasure—half meditation, half trance—of
the psycho-physical experience. Suspended in a void and uprooted from any
social or political terrain, art was seen only as the perceptible power of the
“new.” Purged of all historical dross and chaff, it gleamed only to satisfy the
person reflected in it, like an empty mirror.
And yet this attitude, which seemed to divide power from culture, was
transformed into a freshly ideological tool. By celebrating the uniformity of
the ideal, it tended to cancel out any other social and political diversity. The
distance from society achieved by the white cube rapidly spread, plunging
art into an abstract dimension and reducing it to its minimum level of ap-
pearance.8 Art was thus deported from any specific place into a realm of
self-representation, woven only out of stories peripheral or intrinsic to the
language itself. Benchmarks of comparison could be found only within the
history of the order of artistic discourse, excluding all political or social
aspects. The desire for self-expression was translated into the mere exhibi-
tion of self, seeking out forms and materials to translate a personal story.
This self-absorption found justification and definition only in an environment
devoid of other things that could distract the attention of the viewing public.
A neutral situation creates a sense of uniqueness, the first phase of qualitative
enjoyment. It is a mechanism that underpins the story of “the new” because
there is no comparison or correlation: A single actor appears on stage.
This univocal mode of exhibition, highlighting only the product of
an individual’s fancy, immediately prompted artists and architects to take a
stand against the inherent danger of a language that reflected only itself, with
no chance of infinite multiplication within a dynamic game of mirrors. In
1938, in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, artists such as Man
Ray, Salvador Dalí, Jean Miró, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Oscar
Domínguez blended together objects and lighting, pathways and installations,
to create a single, indivisible unit. This all-enveloping experience was echoed
in 1942 by the architect Friedrich Kiesler in designing and building Peggy

56
 Rigorous Research

Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in

New York. In both cases, instead of reflecting
itself in a mirror, the object became part of a
narrative flux spreading out through a dance
of relationships and intersections. And yet this
dynamic, vital approach to exhibition making,
which denied the death of context, did not reject
the power of immortalizing the object by placing
it against a white surface, similar to the gilded
Installation view of the Abstract Gallery at Peggy Guggenheim’s background of ancient icons. The sanctification
Art of This Century gallery, New York, 1942
of the artwork took root and became circular,
exhibiting itself in a mysterious, timeless limbo.
For 40 more years, the neutral, abstract framework of white walls, ceil-
ings, and even floors would be used to present objects, suspending them in
the void so as to avoid all intrusions of information. In the 1970s, however, an
awareness developed that the silence of the exhibition space was a linguistic
tool, hence one that could be studied and analyzed, modified and altered.
This move stemmed from the decisive turn taken in the late 1950s with the
rise of the environment—from Allan Kaprow to Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg
to George Segal. The object was transformed into an environmental skin, a
fertile womb that elicited the physical, bodily participation of both artist and
viewer. This densely fluid experience called on the whole gamut of the senses:
the vision, texture, and taste of one’s surroundings. The active richness of this
kind of context, which began to play a key role, opened up new territories in
exhibition architecture, so that, somewhere in the 1950s, its extensions spread
from the collector’s or dealer’s apartment to the artist’s loft-studio.
In the 1960s, the loft setting became a widespread exhibition device in
large-scale industrial spaces of spectacular capacity. Galleries in New York,
Düsseldorf, Turin, Los Angeles, London, and Rome moved into abandoned
factories or run-down buildings, while venues such as Artists Space or PS1
in New York were opened as alternatives to museums. A tradition was born
of converting former garages (such as Galleria L’Attico in Rome), artisans’
workshops (Deposito d’Arte Presente in Turin), or textile or metalworking
factories (for instance those in New York’s SoHo from 1970 on) to create a
new kind of exhibition discourse that referred to the workplace—the artist’s
loft—and established a direct parallel between production and distribution.
The walls were left in a rough state, and worn wooden floors took the place
of the marble ones found in uptown galleries.
What remained, however, was the color white, which continued to cancel
out context, sidestepping the political and ideological slant of the individual
artist or of how specific themes or languages were explored. The concealing
superstructures that influenced how art was perceived in an exhibition were

57
 The Exhibitionist

removed, as a statement, in 1976 for Ambiente/

Arte. Dal Futurismo alla Body Art (Environment/
Art: From Futurism to Body Art) in the Central
Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. On that occa-
sion, the architect, Gino Valle, and the curator,
myself, freed the spaces of all the white fabric
and wooden panels that covered the brick walls
of the building in the Giardini. The removal of
the devices usually used to hide the exhibition
architecture marked yet another step in build-
ing an awareness of the real context, which was Dismantling the existing pavilion to install Ambiente/Arte. Dal
Futurismo alla Body Art (Environment/Art: From Futurism to Body
used by the artists themselves—including Robert Art) in the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 1976
Irwin, Maria Nordman, Mario Merz, Doug
Wheeler, Joseph Beuys, and Jannis Kounellis—to create their own sensory
and perceptual environments. This emphasis on the real situation, in con-
trast to the spatial and temporal void, grew stronger in 1980 with The Times
Square Show, which was held in a former massage parlor on 41st Street and
7th Avenue in New York and included the street artists Jean-Michel Basquiat
and Keith Haring. Another example, in a more bourgeois vein, was Chambres
d’Amis (1986) in Ghent, curated by Jan Hoet, who invited artists such as Giulio
Paolini, Paul Thek, Panamarenko, and Luciano Fabro to show work in apart-
ments made available by private individuals.9
The relationship between art and society—that is to say, the political
and cultural significance of the artist’s activity—could not be ignored by the
1991 show Degenerate Art, curated by Stephanie Barron at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. Here, it was impossible to avoid the political and ide-
ological connotations linked to Nazism’s repressive view of the avant-garde
movements of the early 20th century. The context could not be resolved with
environmental sleight-of-hand, using white to reflect the absence of inter-
pretation, without minimizing the barbarism. It was necessary to take and
express a stance, as Frank O. Gehry did in his exhibition design, conveying
the repression and negation that inevitably had a bearing on the exhibition of
the historical artworks. They could not be seen as a utopian achievement, but
rather as victims of a coercive, negative force, which weighed on the percep-
tion of the whole. The answer therefore lay in the heavy, concrete nature of
the walls, which were no longer the perimeters of a limbo, and in the ghet-
toization—accomplished using wire mesh that evoked the fences of concen-
tration camps—of the space in which the works were experienced. It was an
initial step toward the material involvement of the exhibition architecture in
how art is received and perceived. To avoid idealization, the environment had
to be concrete and real, but this effect was constantly renewed by the creation
of a limbo setting, albeit one with industrial connotations.

58
 Rigorous Research

How does one escape from the trap that renders history unreal? To avoid
giving the object a sacred value and instead put it into a specific historical
context, one can surround it with informational content that anchors it in its
time, so as to state its presence, give it a place in history, without dissolving it
within a limbo. This was attempted with Piero Manzoni (at MADRE, Naples,
in 2007 and at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2009), where Manzoni’s
works were shown intertwined with the cultural activities of other artists—for
instance Alberto Burri, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, and Lucio Fontana—
working in the same time span, from 1957 to 1963.
Another way to achieve awareness of temporal, historical, and even
physical context is to create a concrete, perceptible link between whatever
is on display and the architecture that houses it. In Athens, in 2013, an ex-
hibition titled The System of Objects, curated by Maria Cristina Didero and
the architect Andreas Angelidakis, reinstalled part of Dakis Joannou’s collec-
tion in the headquarters of the DESTE Foun-
dation in Athens. Drawing inspiration from Jean
Baudrillard’s theories about tools of seduction in
consumer society, the show presented a series of
exhibition “scenarios,” typifying the choice of
an environment according to different methods
of display. The idea was to escape the atempo-
ral embrace of the
white cube and ush-
The System of Objects installation view, DESTE Foundation, Athens,
er visitors through a
2013 series of moments,
or enclosures, that
illustrated different attitudes toward architectur-
al distribution.
Each setting was different in its dimen-
sions and materials, with different consequences
for how the art was perceived. The exhibition The System of Objects installation view, DESTE Foundation, Athens,
2013
moved through hallways and stairwells, rooms
and terraces, drapes and pieces of paper, metal
and wooden frameworks, luminous passageways and rents in the structure.
This yielded a sense of disorder and chaos. The labyrinth of materials made
visitors conscious of their own position, and of their kinetic and sensory expe-
rience. Along this path, no one setting was better than another; they were all
simply different. And yet the process was not subjective, since it was anchored
to a design tradition that relies on a variety of three-dimensional forms, from
the cube to the parallelepiped, with soft surfaces or transparent ones, made
of brick or glass. The idea was to reveal the richness of exhibition options,
giving different, unexpected depth with respect to the objects on display—not

59
 The Exhibitionist

to reassure visitors, but to help them become aware of the design register
of the installation, which used velvet and varnish, light and shadow, airiness
and solidity to influence their perception. Increasing this range of functions
increased art’s power to expand, riding out all these journeys through matter
and space. It enabled it to construct a spatial and material transcription that
was an extension of interpretation, as well as an exploration of what it means
to exhibit.

Translated from the Italian by Johanna Bishop

Notes

1. Read more in Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube (Santa Monica, California: Lapis Press, 1976);
Germano Celant, Ambiente/Arte. Dal Futurismo alla Body Art (Venice: Edizioni la Biennale di Venezia, 1977);
Ottant’anni di allestimenti alla Biennale, catalogue of an exhibition curated by Giandomenico Romanelli
(Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1977); Germano Celant, “A Visual Machine: Art Installation and Its Modern
Archetypes” in the Documenta 7 exhibition catalogue vol. III (Kassel, Germany: D + V Paul Dierichs GmbH &
Co KG, 1982): XIII–XXIV; and Paolo Rizzi and Enzo di Martino, Storia della Biennale, 1895–1982 (Milan: Electa,
1982).

2. Ottant’anni di allestimenti alla Biennale, 63, 69.

3. Malevich, catalogue of an exhibition curated by Troels Andersen (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970):
61–63.

4. Germano Celant, Ambiente/Arte, 8–73.

5. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, op. cit.

6. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origin of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2002).

7. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1983) and Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London:
Granta Books, 1999).

8. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, op. cit.

9. Bruce Altshuler, Biennals and Beyond: Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962–2002 (London: Phaidon, 2013).

60
 The Exhibitionist

six x si x
N g a h i r a k a Ma so n
Fio n n Mea de
Pa b lo L e ó n d e l a Ba rra
Fili pa R a mos
M a r í a In é s Rodríg uez
S y r ag o Tsia ra

61
 The Exhibitionist

Ngahiraka Fionn Pablo León

Mason Meade de la Barra
Te Māori: Te Hokinga Mai Robert Rauschenberg: Ethnographic Galleries
(The Return Home) A Retrospective 1964
1997 National Museum of
1987 Curated by Walter Hopps and Anthropology, Mexico City
Curated by Hirini Moko Susan Davidson
Mead, Douglas Newton, Guggenheim Museum, New York The Mexico City Anthropology Museum,
and David Simmons a jewel frozen in time, hasn’t changed
By the time one made it through this Robert much since it opened 50 years ago. Its 11
Auckland Art Gallery, Rauschenberg retrospective, split between ethnographic galleries—less visited than
New Zealand the signature uptown building and the down- the 11 archaeological galleries—are dedi-
(traveled to New York, Saint town Guggenheim SoHo (a venue from 1992
cated to exhibiting the indigenous groups
to 2001), plus a separate gallery presenta-
Louis, San Francisco, and who survived the conquest and coloniza-
tion of the constantly permutating The 1/4
Chicago as Te Maori: Maori Art tion, and who still, in one way or another,
Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981–97), it felt rather
maintain their customs and languages.
From New Zealand Collections) deliriously like having seen several retrospec-
The groups are classified by culture, and
tives. The orphaning logic and destabiliza-
tion of medium conventions—so prevalent
the dioramas and vitrines display scenes
Te Māori was a remarkable exhibi- in the readymade eclecticism and print- of everyday life, clothing, housing, hand-
tion that changed the way New media looting of works such as Monogram crafts, textiles, and religious objects.
Zealand museums and galleries (1955–59), Untitled (1954), Bed (1955), Oda- Between the ethnographic displays are
lisk (1955–58), and Canyon (1959)—made murals by various contemporary artists
negotiated, displayed, and inter-
the descent through the Guggenheim’s of the 1960s. The murals were commis-
preted cultural objects made by architecture feel like some kind of cultural sioned by the museum’s architect, Pedro
indigenous people. The curators unburdening and overdue revelation. The Ramírez Vázquez, to be in dialogue with
developed an innovative methodol- show departed into sustained asides, for in- the various indigenous cultures. The
ogy for display, interpretation, and stance Rauschenberg’s transfer masterpiece artists include Luis Covarrubias, who
34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60). painted a series of maps of the country;
related activities that was based on And it also made room for excerpts from Carlos Mérida, who did a steel mural
the values, meanings, and philoso- the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Inter- with stained-glass windows in the Huichol
phies of the culture being repre- change (1984–91), a massive undertaking section; Manuel Felguérez, who made a
sented. Their process drew in tribal characteristic of the transnational platforms metal screen with geometric shapes; and
that were emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, Mathias Goeritz, whose rope wall draw-
elders and descendant communi- which involved creating and exhibiting pho- ings reproduce geometric patterns from
ties—the cultural owners of the sa- tographs, paintings, sculptures, and videos the Nayar region. Created at the same
cred and beloved objects—not only in 11 countries. Walter Hopps, in close col- time as the Museo de Arte Moderno
to serve as interpreters, but also to laboration with Rauschenberg and Susan located across the road, these murals are,
Davidson, kept an embrace of such “coun- in a way, a parallel and invisible museum
actively participate in decisions re- ter” formats and venues present throughout of modern art—one where the distinc-
garding permissions for the works the overall exhibition strategy. Letting the
tions between the contemporary and the
to travel to strange and distant alarm of a piece such as Soundings (1968) find
indigenous collapse and exist within the
unexpected dialogue with the relaxed poise
places as the exhibition toured. In same timeframe.
of the then-overlooked Cardboards series from
an increasingly globalized world, the early 1970s (both were shown downtown)
it was the first time Māori episte- was a further example—one of many in
La Ruta de la Amistad
the exhibition—of how a retrospective can (The Route of Friendship)
mology was witnessed and engaged 1968
use pivotal works rather than be bound or
with outside Māori settings and Curated by Mathias Goeritz
constrained by them, animating the right
contexts. Māori worldviews were imbalance within the work itself. The ret- Periférico, Mexico City
showcased, leading to a far greater rospective exceeded and thereby evaded a
understanding of the relationships falsely progressive narrative without falling La Ruta de la Amistad was a sculpture proj-
into chaos or cacophony, letting Rauschen- ect envisioned by Mathias Goeritz, a Ger-
we have with ancestral objects as man artist exiled in Mexico, as part of
berg’s intersection of art, media, and tech-
ceremonial, functional, and part of nology provoke and echo into the next cen- the cultural activities for the 1968 Olym-
living culture. On the local front, tury. Another Rauschenberg retrospective pics. He invited 22 international artists to

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 Six x Six

Filipa María Inés Syrago

Ramos Rodríguez Tsiara
Contemporanea ± 1961 Paris-Moscow 1900–1930
1973 2013 1979
Curated by Incontri Curated by Julia Robinson Curated by Pontus Hultén
Internazionali d’Arte / and Christian Xatrec Centre Georges
Achille Bonito Oliva
Museo Nacional Centro de Pompidou, Paris
Villa Borghese parking lot,
Rome Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (traveled to the Pushkin
Museum, Moscow)
To be contemporary is to be under- Research and archives, and archi-
ground. This seemed to be the mes- val research as an integral element Paris-Moscow 1900–1930 was a
sage of Contemporanea, a large exhibi- of the curatorial process, have massive, comprehensive exhibi-
tion project (covering approximately increasingly become a constant in tion of the early-20th-century
110,000 square feet) that took place Reina Sofía exhibitions. This ar- Russian avant-garde movement,
in the empty parking lot of the Villa
chival work underscores the notion which encompassed architecture,
Borghese. It consisted of 10 sections:
art, cinema, theater, architecture and that the exhibition is a space of painting, literature, music, the-
design, photography, music, dance, knowledge production, and the ater, cinema, the applied arts, and
artists’ books and records, visual and museum a platform for its visu- even propaganda. Presented in
concrete poetry, and counter-infor- alization. It is within this frame- the wake of Camilla Grey’s 1962
mation. In all of them, often simulta- work that the exhibition ± 1961 book The Great Experiment: Russian
neously, live actions of various scales was presented. It was an exercise Art 1863–1922, it was the first of
took place among displays of objects in the microhistory of the recent a series of blockbuster shows that
and documents. The design included
past, and an extraordinary way in signaled the (re)discovery of Rus-
no pavilions or solid walls. Instead,
the different sections were delineat-
which to explore a moment of con- sian Modernism by the Western
ed by a complex system of vertical fluence of several different ideas, world, revealing convergences
panels of wire mesh, placed parallel energies, and personalities from and divergences between Russian
to one another at various distances, many different fields of contem- and French Cubism, Construc-
which created a grid that dictated the porary creation. John Cage was tivism, and Symbolism. The fact
rhythm of the overall exhibition. The without a doubt a main figure, for that two years later the exhibi-
structure was a strong visual element, his ideas and also for his generos- tion traveled to Moscow, giving
but one that was also traversed by the ity as a teacher, a person, and an Russians the chance to see for the
gaze. This revolutionary use of space
artist. La Monte Young, George first time, at home, works that had
was matched by an equally particular
use of time: Contemporanea remained Brecht, Yoko Ono, Robert Morris, been hidden for decades, was of
open until late in the evening. It is Walter De Maria, and the superla- historic importance as well. The
said that Pier Paolo Pasolini was one tive Simone Forti were also there, show created new opportunities
of the most faithful attendees of the among several other personalities for considering the revolutionary
evening film sessions. of that time. experiments in art and life that
were buried after Joseph Stalin’s
Alternativa Zero: Tendências Fernando Gamboa: implementation of the Socialist
Polémicas na Arte
La utopía moderna Realism doctrine.
Portuguesa Contemporânea
(Zero Alternative: Polemic (The Modern Utopia)
Tendencies in Portuguese 2009 Dream Factory
Contemporary Art) Curated by Ana Elena Communism: The Visual
1977 Mallet Culture of the Stalin Era

63
 The Exhibitionist

Ngahiraka Mason Fionn Meade Pablo León de la Barra

the exhibition raised awareness is on the horizon, this time at New York’s create a circuit of monumental concrete
among New Zealanders regarding Museum of Modern Art, and it will be sculptures along 17 kilometers of Mexico
interesting to see how this restive precedent City’s recently built Periférico, the main
the diversity of our sculpted forms is taken into account. ring road. Participants representing the
chiseled from wood, bone, and five continents included Joop J. Beljon
stone. Te Māori still holds the record Instytut Awangardy from the Netherlands, Gonzalo Fonseca
(Avant-Garde Institute) from Uruguay, Alexander Calder from
in New Zealand for exhibition at-
2004–present the United States, Helen Escobedo from
tendance, but even more important Curated by Foksal Gallery Mexico, Clement Meadmore from Austra-
is the fact that it can take credit for Foundation lia, and Mohamed Melehi from Morocco.
finally drawing Māori people into Warsaw
(Goertiz had insisted he needed a black
the museum. Almost 30 years later, African sculptor, but his European sculp-
Whether it’s Leon Trostky’s bullet-riddled
Te Māori remains a touchstone that tor friends could only find a Moroccan!)
villa in Coyoacán, Mexico, Leonard and
The sculptures range from geometric to
inspires artists, critics, historians, Virginia Woolf ’s retreat house in Sussex,
amorphous and are painted in bright col-
and curators, both indigenous and England, or the Nietzsche House in Sils-
Maria, Switzerland, a trip to a preserved and
ors. (Search YouTube for “Raquel Welch
non-indigenous. thereby altered place that witnessed truly sig- Mexico 68” for videos of her dancing in
nificant creative production falls somewhere front of the sculptures wearing space drag
Trade Routes: History between the tourist cliché of encountering a for her 1970 TV show Raquel!). Recently,
time capsule and courting the uncanny: both construction near the Periférico freeway
and Geography
embarrassing and comforting to the visi- threatened many of the sculptures, and
1997 tor, equal parts homage and opportunism. they were moved to the Patronato Ruta
Curated by Okwui Occupying the top floor of a 1960s apart- de la Amistad and arranged in a cluster,
Enwezor ment building on Solidarności Avenue, now which changed the intended visual and
2nd Johannesburg maintained by the Foksal Gallery Founda- spatial experience of the sculpture route.
tion, the Avant-Garde Institute is a doubly Goertiz specifically imagined La Ruta de la
Biennale, South Africa elegiac gesture, as it was the home and studio Amistad as an exhibition to be experienced
for almost two decades of the artists Henryk from a car in motion—a radical idea, then
The second and final Johannesburg Stażewski and Edward Krasiński and their and now. It makes me think of other pos-
Biennale closed a month ahead of partners. Stażewski, a painter and an impor- sible “sculpture routes” for today—routes
tant player in the international avant-garde that could exist on the Internet highway,
schedule. The organizing entity scene of the 1920s and 1930s, took over or routes in the air that would only be vis-
and financial backer, the Africus the flat in 1962 and made it a social hub for ible from an airplane or outer space.
Institute for Contemporary Art, meetings and cultural exchange. He invited
folded, and the exhibition ceased the younger, conceptually inclined Krasiński Luis Barragán: Sitio + Superficie:
to live with him in 1970 during the difficult Su obra y la vanguardia en el arte
to exist. Its early closure has con- sociopolitical times of the period. Upon (Site + Surface: His Work and
tributed to its legend; the show was Stażewski’s death in 1988, Krasiński gradu-
the Artistic Avant-Garde)
ahead of its time for the way it re- ally morphed parts of their shared flat into
1996
a tribute to the elder artist and their friend-
sponded to international relations, Curated by Carlos Ashida with
ship, enacting a visual archive and display.
histories, and geographies. The fact Krasiński maintained the wires and discolor-
Elena Matute
that it even occurred at all was itself Antiguo Colegio de
ations where Stażewski’s paintings had hung,
for example, and deployed his own signature San Ildefonso, Mexico City
a small miracle. Apartheid had only
blue tape discreetly across parts of the apart-
recently ended, and South Africa Happening in parallel with an exhibition
ment and studio, underscoring ephemeral
was straining to come to grips with moments of their shared creative life and of Luis Barragán’s architectural work, this
its own history and the vagaries of quietly resistant aesthetic dialogue. By main- exhibition rethought Barragán through
cultural understanding. The bien- taining the exactitude of Krasiński’s in-the- parallels with works of art. It showed
moment, self-aware historicizing gesture, him not so much as the modern archi-
nial was key in raising awareness tect of colored walls and serene spaces,
Foksal Gallery Foundation has become the
on the international art scene re- caretaker of a potent site and a paradoxical but as an artist who, through architecture,
garding diasporic and third-world testament to the local avant-garde and its dealt with space, light, color, percep-
peoples. It had enough charge in contested legacies. tion, emotion, and mysticism, creating

64
 Six x Six

Filipa Ramos María Inés Rodríguez syrago tsiara

Curated by Ernesto Museo de Arte Moderno, 2003

de Sousa Mexico City Curated by Boris Groys
Galeria Nacional de Arte with Zelfira Tregulova
Moderna de Belém, Lisbon This exhibition focused on Schirn Kunsthalle
Fernando Gamboa, a multifaceted Frankfurt, Germany
In spring 1977, the charismatic art
critic, photographer, filmmaker, figure of great importance in the
and pioneering curator Ernesto de symbolic construction of Mexico This exhibition documented the
Sousa—a pivotal figure of Portu- as a nation on the world stage. A transition from early modernist
guese cultural life in the second half museum director, curator, and dip- non-objective experiments to
of the 20th century—organized lomat, Gamboa put together a host figurative Socialist Realism. In
Alternativa Zero, a highly experimental of spectacular and visionary dis- its investigation of the formation
undertaking that became a touch- plays that brought together pre-Co- of Soviet mass culture, it avoided
stone for the history of exhibitions
lumbian Mexico and modern Mex- the usual binary concept of a gap,
in Portugal. The title referenced the
curator’s views on the country’s situ- ico. Every detail of his exhibitions, or cut-and-dried discontinuity,
ation in the wake of the 1974 April from the opening ceremonies to the between the two, which had
Revolution. At a time when govern- graphic design and even the instal- previously dominated the relevant
ments had very brief life spans in a lation process, became an ideologi- discourse. The curator, Boris
country that was starting to rediscov- cal signifier, conveying a precise na- Groys, selected a great number
er the meaning of democracy, how to tional imaginary. Examples include of artworks that revealed the
interpret such a doubting declaration the Mexican pavilion at the Venice effort to create the image of the
as “zero alternative”? As a remark on
Biennale in 1950, Arte mexicano, del “new Soviet man” and continue
the country’s stagnation and loss of
faith in revolutionary ideals, or as a
precolombino a nuestros días (Mexican the “Great Utopia” experiment
tabula rasa marking the beginning of Art from the Pre-Columbian Era to on a massive scale. Images of the
a new era? The project became both Today) in 1952 in Paris, or Obras Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and
a cry of desperation and a strong maestras del arte mexicano (Master- Joseph Stalin, who embodied the
reaffirmation of the inner necessity works of Mexican Art) at the 1958 ideal of the new Communist life
that moved the featured artists. This Feria Internacional in Brussels. Or- in the photomontages of Gustav
month-long event gathered approxi- ganized by the same museum that Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, and
mately 50 participants (among them Gamboa directed in the 1970s, El Lissitzky, met with pillars of
Helena Almeida, Ana Hatherly,
The Modern Utopia included mostly official Socialist Realist painting
Alvess, Albuquerque Mendes, Fer-
nando Calhau, Julião Sarmento, and materials drawn from Gamboa’s such as Isaak Brodsky, Alexander
Ângelo de Sousa) and had more than estate, some displayed in vitrines Gerasimov, and Vasilii Iakovlev.
10,000 visitors. It combined concerts, like those Gamboa used in his own The fact that Groys moved
workshops, performances, living the- shows. One of the most represen- beyond traditional aesthetic
ater actions, conferences, and myriad tative was an X-shaped vitrine that criteria about “good” and “bad”
artistic proposals in a format clearly alluded to the significance of using art and inserted a consideration
inspired by de Sousa’s visits to Docu- the letter “x” in the name of the of the mass distribution of socialist
menta 4 and especially Documenta 5.
country (as opposed to how it was imagery was a provocative
Passages de l’image spelled before: Méjico). This ex- and daring curatorial position
1989 hibition opened the door to much that enriched the reconsideration
Curated by Catherine David, critical reflection on the relation- of this aspect of Russian art
Christine van Assche, and ship between political power and history.
Raymond Bellour grand cultural constructions.

65
 The Exhibitionist

Ngahiraka Mason Fionn Meade Pablo León de la Barra

its positioning of postcolonialism, Hall of Northwest Coast Indians works that predated many of the West-
multiculturalism, and globalization 1900–present ern so-called pioneers of minimal art,
Curated by Franz Boas light art, perceptual art, and installation
to make it exciting and tense. The American Museum of Natural art. Included in the show were works by
inclusion of the Māori painters History, New York many artist friends who were influential
Emily Karaka and Selwyn Muru to his practice, such as the muralist José
The German anthropologist Franz Boas is Clemente Orozco, who made paint-
represented an exciting paradigm
known for his founding role in American an- ings of vernacular architecture, Chucho
shift at a highly difficult time. thropology, especially his articulation of such Reyes, from whom he learned the use of
influential concepts as cultural relativism, extreme colors, Josef Albers, with whom
Documenta 11, Platform 5 diffusion, and historical particularism. But
he shared the use of abstraction and col-
his curatorial contributions and professional
2002 or, and Mathias Goeritz, with whom he
disagreements at the American Museum
Curated by Okwui shared notions of spiritual and emotional
of Natural History from 1896 to 1907 are
architecture. At the same time, the exhibi-
Enwezor overlooked and worthy of further consider-
tion created (without showing Barragán’s
Kassel, Germany ation, especially considering their belonging
to the fertile and fraught “museum era” that
work next to the artworks) new dialogues
still has combustive and vast infrastructural between Barragán’s work and the lead
I was taken by the spectacle and influence in regard to inherited ideas of phil- plates of Carl Andre; the use of light
power of Documenta 11. The key anthropic rhetoric, curatorial intentionality, in space by James Turrell, Dan Flavin,
ethnographic display, and paradigms of mu- and Robert Irwin; the minimal furniture
ideas I came away with centered on
seum education and research. While signifi- designs of Donald Judd; the delimited sur-
1) critical thinking and 2) inclusion. cant changes have been made to the Hall faces of pollen and rocks by Robert Irwin,
Organized as a series of platforms of Northwest Coast Indians since it opened Wolfgang Laib, and Richard Long; and
for critical inquiry, Documenta 11 under Boas’s aegis, a remarkable amount of the wood sculptures of Richard Nonas.
exposed contemporary art on the his initial presentation and curatorial fram- Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s poster-stack work
ing remains. Whereas conventional didactics “Untitled” (1992), bearing an image of
world stage in a way that hadn’t usually pin down an image or object, making clouds and a bird, echoed the view framed
been attempted before. The exhi- it perform in stasis as an embedded illustra- by Barragán’s rooftop window, through
bition was pioneering for how it tion or representative configuration within which only the sky, clouds, and passing
explored its own conceptual frame- a specific historical progression, the social birds and airplanes were visible.
situations of the Boasian exhibition occur
work, as the platforms created, en media res, repeated and altered through Tropicale Modernité
problematized, and revolutionized different narrativizing permutations and 1999
Documenta itself as an institution. implied power relations, placing the viewer/ Curated by Dominique
Platform 5 was key in furthering student in the midst of a social fray that op- Gonzalez-Foerster
erates on both a functional and a symbolic Mies van der Rohe Pavilion,
my understanding of the relation- level. Demanding active interpretation, the Barcelona
ship between contemporary art, exhibits posit differences and distinctions
politics, and postcolonialism, and across and within various native cultures so
Like most art during the 1990s (before the
that affinities arise comparatively, and elicit
I witnessed and enjoyed knowledge Internet brought everyone in contact with
competing, revisable, participatory interpre-
bases that reflected my own epis- tations. The mixed-format, research-based
everything), this exhibition I only experi-
temology. Documenta 11 produced enced through its catalogue, a small pam-
exhibition department that Boas envisioned,
phlet the size of a CD booklet. Neverthe-
new knowledge without apology wherein more accessible exhibitions and
less, it’s as if I had been there: I remember
expert-oriented displays would play off of
and influenced future international with clarity the neon sign in the shape of
and inform one another, lies dormant here,
large-scale exhibitions to become a case study to be reactivated and learned the Japanese character for “double hap-
more fluid and open to wider audi- from. piness,” the fish tank next to the exterior
ences. pool, the TV near the Barcelona chairs
Rosemarie Trockel: showing an endless jungle landscape, and
Deliquescence of the Mother the two white towels in the interior patio
The Beauty of Distance: 2010 next to the smaller pool, facing Georg
Songs of Survival in a Curated by Beatrix Ruf Kolbe’s Alba (Dawn, 1925) sculpture—
Precarious Age Kunsthalle Zurich an homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

66
 Six x Six

Filipa Ramos María Inés Rodríguez syrago tsiara

Centre Georges Pompidou, Louise Bourgeois Women Without Men

Paris 1990 2009
Curated by Peter Curated by Anna Kafetsi
Passages de l’image is a landmark in the Weiermair National Museum of
relationship between contemporary
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Contemporary Art,
art and cinema. Presented at the end
of 1989—at the beginning of the Barcelona Athens
digital revolution—it signaled the ar-
rival of a new era in which relations This exhibition was enlightening Shirin Neshat’s film Mahdokht
between photography, cinema, and in my early years, when as a young (2004) was first presented in the
art would broaden, and in which cin- student I was looking and exploring framework of the 2004 exhibi-
ema would become more established here and there: square-eyed, round- tion Transcultures, organized by the
in the museum. Passages de l’image was eyed, triangular-eyed, the mind National Museum of Contem-
articulated according to notions of
simmering, the senses attempting to porary Art in Athens. The work
interruption, fragmentation, multi-
plication, and repetition—terms that grasp something of all that sprang subsequently evolved, taking the
are dear to the nature of the mov- forth along the way. In spite of hav- form of the five-screen video in-
ing image. These coordinates deter- ing artists in Colombia as extraor- stallation presented in this show,
mined not only the overall exhibition dinary as Louise Bourgeois—for which tells five parallel stories
design but also the movement of the example Beatriz González, Débora of women. It was a unique op-
spectator within it. In some cases they Arango, or Feliza Bursztyn—at the portunity for Greek audiences to
even seemed to affect the inner con- time no local institution had given encounter and deeply appreciate
dition of the viewer, as with the mir-
any of them an exhibition that the high quality of Neshat’s po-
roring holograms by Michael Snow,
a gesture that could be said to an-
showed their bodies of work and etic filmic language. Neshat is an
ticipate the simultaneous gaze of the career trajectories in any coherent Iranian artist who has lived most
viewing habits of the post-digital era. way. This exhibition was the first I of her adult life in self-imposed
With more than 200 films and vid- ever saw that showed works from exile in the United States, and
eos, the exhibition constantly alluded different periods in a manner that in this work she captures and
to the phantasmagoric condition of enabled me to understand how an reconstructs the experience of
the image, also because many of the artist could move from one medium being caught between two cul-
images presented in the show could to another, always with the same tures, a position that allows her
only be perceived through dream
impulse, always staying close to to maintain a critical, reflective
and imagination, as it was impossible
to see everything in a single visit. her personal obsessions. Bourgeois position toward the identities and
never tired of saying, “Art is a guar- the conditions under which Mus-
Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc antee of sanity.” lim women live today. Through
Godard 1946–2006, In Search the stories of Mahdokht, Zanin,
of a Lost Theorem Documenta X Munis, Faezeh, and Farokh
2006 1997 Legha, the artist portrays how
Centre Georges Pompidou, Curated by Catherine very different women can achieve
Paris
David some form of freedom and in-
At the gallery entrance, a large Kassel, Germany dependence from the restrictive
sign read: “The Pompidou Centre bonds of Iranian society.
decided not to carry out the exhibi- What most interested me about
tion project entitled ‘Collage(s) de Catherine David’s Documenta X was William Kentridge:
France. Archaeology of the Cinema’ the space she gave to the word and Refuse the Hour

67
 The Exhibitionist

Ngahiraka Mason Fionn Meade Pablo León de la Barra

2010 Rosemarie Trockel turned the retrospective For someone like me, living then at the
gaze and the aspiration for an overview in- periphery of the art world, Dominique
Artistic director: David
side out here, as works in wide-ranging me- Gonzalez-Foerster’s small, subtle inter-
Elliott dia from each decade of her career stood ventions domesticated and tropicalized
Sydney Harbor close together in ethnographic-style vitrines. the rational grid of modernity. They
Past works were “surveyed,” to be sure, opened up another possible line of
but arranged as they were in Wunderkam- thought and action—one that allowed us
To paraphrase the artistic director mer-like constructions, they also looked to rethink other modernities. As she said
of this exhibition, the 17th Bien- back—indeed, confronting the viewer like in the conversation with Jens Hoffmann
nale of Sydney: “The European a tribe, refusing historical linearity in their published in the publication, “Sometimes,
Enlightenment is over.” The sheer apparition-like assembly. The swollen-head modernity by itself, especially when it
sculpture Hydrocephalus / Wasserkopf II (1982),
chutzpah of David Elliott! Was he comes to architecture, gets too dry in its
for example, sat before the sleek black
positing a celebratory provocation, abstract intentions; but, balanced with im-
ceramic finish of a thirsty outstretched leg,
mature desires, lots of water, and plants,
or (as many thought) something ir- mockingly titled Geruchsskulptur 2 (Aroma
it becomes something more complex and
Sculpture 2, 2006), which in turn jostled the
ritating and without foundation? more beautiful at the same time.”
diminutive goblin-like creature Kiss My Aura
Shows of this magnitude inevitably (2008) hunkered below the overflowing, un-
attract their share of criticism, but ruly knitted work Untitled (1989). Archetypes Da Adversidade Vivemos!
of mother and father were absorbed in the (From Adversity We Live!)
I was struck by the general lack of 2001
angular looking-back of Trockel’s roundup,
curiosity about what was behind exposing the cultural codes and clichés that Musee d’Art Moderne de
such a provocation. To someone underscore our need for empathetic iden- la Ville de Paris
like me, it was both thrilling and tification while also giving heterogeneous
form to her diffusion of gender, ego, and Quasi-Cinema
concerning that ideas such as
character. Filtered and atomized through- 2001
power, colonization, and indig- out the exhibition, the liquefaction of the Wexner Center for the Arts,
enous people would provoke such mother was Trockel’s versioning of self. By Columbus, Ohio
ire from the globalized art world, literally and precisely marginalizing her (traveled to Whitechapel Gallery,
which prides itself on its tolerance own works, she refused to be periodized and London)
thereby completed, insisting instead upon
and sensitivity to difference. We boundary conditions that can be reconfig- The Structure of Survival
must stimulate optimism and criti- ured and made cruel. From the ceramic sofa 2003
cally transform thinking so we can sculptures that blocked and also moved the The 50th Venice Biennale
visitor from the opening gallery into the next
identify the emperor, undressed as room, to a room that featured new ceramic Tropicália: A Revolution
he is, with nowhere to hide. Elliott wall sculptures followed by the large-scale, in Brazilian Culture
had simply recognized the obvi- nearly monochromatic “knitted painting” 2005
ous: that the West is not the whole series that preceded the vitrine interven- Museum of Contemporary
tions, to the lockdown style of collages that Art, Chicago
world. ran the perimeter of a back room, work from
(traveled to the Barbican, London)
Trockel’s past decade of production insisted
Sakahàn: International on a dialogical tacking between new work
All curated by Carlos Basualdo
and returns from the past. The first of a
Indigenous Art
series of retrospective inversions (it was fol-
2013 During a period of five years, Carlos
lowed by Flagrant Delight at WIELS, Brussels,
Curated by Greg A. Hill, in 2012, curated by Dirk Snauwaert, and Basualdo curated four influential exhibi-
A Cosmos, curated by Lynne Cooke and tions articulated around the artistic and
Candice Hopkins, and intellectual ideas of the Brazilian artist
presented at the Museo Nacional Centro
Christine Lalonde de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the New Hélio Oiticica. The title From Adversity We
National Gallery of Museum, New York; and Serpentine Gallery, Live! was based on a phrase by Oiticica;
Ottawa, Canada London, in 2012–13), it was here that Trockel the show presented artists’ responses
first carried forward and asserted the concep- to the continuous social and economic
tual mantle of the late Marcel Broodthaers in crisis in Latin America. The highlight
Sakahàn was a first. Its mandate as her magisterial critique and inimitable was the reconstruction of Oiticica’s Eden
an exhibition presented every five toying with retrospective desires. installation, which was first presented at

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Filipa Ramos María Inés Rodríguez syrago tsiara

because of artistic, technical and to thought. The program “100 2012

financial difficulties that it pre- Days, 100 Guests” was a manifesto Curated by Dada Masilo,
sented, and to replace it by another for the diversity of thought. It en- Philip Miller, and
project entitled ‘Travel(s) in Utopia, sured that art didn’t remain inside Catherine Meyburgh
JLG, 1946–2006, In Search of Lost
four walls, in a purely contempla- Onassis Cultural Centre,
Theorem.’” Godard had crossed out
“technical and financial,” a prophet- tive state, but rather tied into differ- Athens
ic gesture that seemingly announced ent discourses, confronted different
the miscarriage of the project from social, political, and economic re- When I entered this show, I was
its very beginning. Among the out- alities and situations. In an audito- already familiar with William
comes would be the resignation of rium with furniture by Franz West, Kentridge’s brilliant use of film
Dominique Païni, director of cul- architects, urbanists, economists, installations and idiosyncratic
tural development at the Pompidou. philosophers, scientists, writers, drawing-animations as visual ve-
Travel(s) in Utopia became not only an
filmmakers, and musicians were in- hicles through which to express
exhibition about the making of an
exhibition, but a unique manifesto vited to discuss poetics and politics, anti-apartheid political views
about the quasi-impossibility of mar- new territories, identities in flux, and utopian ideas. The way this
rying an idea with its concretization. and globalization. This Documenta South African artist appropriates
The show gathered a few paintings was also significant in establishing a and transforms the Constructivist
from the Pompidou collection and more horizontal set of parameters tradition of Russian art around
many excerpts of films by canoni- for the encounter between Western the period of the October Revo-
cal filmmakers (Robert Bresson, Fritz and non-Western cultural expres- lution had always attracted me.
Lang, René Clair, Nicholas Ray, and
sions. Whereas Magiciens de la Terre But having the chance to watch
Godard himself), presented on LCD
screens, monitors, and television de-
(1989) had adopted an iconic posi- him in person on stage was some-
vices scattered amid a chaotic and tion in “opening” routes of art be- thing else! It was the first public
seemingly unfinished arrangement tween the center and the so-called performance in Greece of his
of domestic props, fake walls, electric periphery, here that relationship “chamber opera” Refuse the Hour
cables, and maquettes of the show as took place under different param- (2012), a work based on an in-
it had initially been conceived. Bril- eters in which other forms of ex- stallation he had presented at
liantly fragmentary, frustrating, and pression and cultural construction dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). Em-
incomplete (like many of Godard’s found a legitimate platform. It was bodying the role of a storyteller,
films), Travel(s) in Utopia was a sort of
a space for exchanging knowledge he narrated the myth of Perseus,
hand grenade that exploded inside
the Pompidou, and one of the most and meeting people. inserting his words into a totally
corrosive examples of institutional subversive (in terms of both con-
critique ever made. 31 Panorama de tent and form) spectacle that in-
arte Brasilero cluded music, projected images,
Animism 1999 dance, and opera. It perfectly
2010 Curated by Adriano epitomized his comprehensive
Curated by Anselm Franke Pedrosa artistic practice.
Extra City Kunsthal,
Museu de Arte Moderna de
Antwerp
(traveled to the Museum of São Paulo Krzysztof Wodiczko:
Contemporary Art, Antwerp Guests
[M HKA]; Kunsthalle Originally formulated as a sort of 2009
Bern, Switzerland; Generali national salon that would reflect Curated by Bożena
Foundation, Vienna; Haus der the most recent developments in Czubak

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Ngahiraka Mason Fionn Meade Pablo León de la Barra

years is to recognize and critically Group Material: Democracy Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1969.
survey global movements and un- 1988–89 It also included works by Francis Alÿs,
Commissioning curator: Gary Meyer Vaisman, Minerva Cuevas, and
derstandings related to indigenous Garrels Victor Grippo, among others. The Structure
art, moving forward into the future. Dia Art Foundation, New York of Survival expanded on this idea, but now
It is conceptually connected to researching the influence of the favela and
This four-month exhibition by Group informal aesthetics of artistic and social
larger global movements for indig-
Material—the only entry here that I didn’t practices. I remember the simple elegance
enous rights, the widespread re- personally experience—was a collaborative of one room: a wall with Gego’s wire
vival of indigenous languages, and effort involving many, including Dia’s then- sculptures, another covered with Yona
treaty rights that enable redress of curator Gary Garrels and the artist Yvonne Friedman’s Styrofoam packaging, and, in
Rainer. (Group Material at the time con- the middle, Oiticica’s unrealized models
past grievances with colonizers.
sisted of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Felix sitting on tables made of glass panes and
Indigenous people are staunch ad- Gonzalez-Torres.) The show grew out of a concrete blocks. In Quasi-Cinema, Basual-
vocates for envisioning better life two-year project, eventually adopting the do presented Oiticica’s lesser-known work
patterns and life expectancy for pace of a commercial gallery in organizing made during his exile in New York in the
four exhibitions and related town meetings 1970s, including the Cosmococas (1973),
future generations, and recovering addressing subthemes of timeliness and civic developed with Neville d’Almeida, which
and perpetuating art practices and urgency: Education and Democracy, Politics and consisted of leisure spaces with ham-
philosophies is a necessary part of Election, Cultural Participation, and, finally, mocks or mattresses and slide projections
that. These motives, however cre- AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study. The re- showing images of Marilyn Monroe and
lated publication, as well as the installation Jimi Hendrix drawn with lines of cocaine.
atively stated and constructed, are documentation featured in the invaluable Even more interesting were Oiticica’s
not yet generally popular in the recent book Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group works specifically about homosexuals and
mainstream art world, and thus it Material, give an initial sense of what Doug transvestites, specifically the film Agrippina
is up to indigenous and concerned Ashford has eloquently written about as é Roma-Manhattan (1972), with Mario
the Group Material curatorial method: “To Montez and Antonio Dias as actors,
non-indigenous curators to lead defend the notion of an artwork as an en- and the slideshow Neyrótika (1973), show-
the debate and stimulate dialogue. counter with a person and then display this ing Oiticica’s community of friends and
There are still too few indigenous encounter in the context of new politics was hustlers in bunk nests he had built in his
curators, critics, historians, advo- Group Material’s contradictory innovation, apartment in SoHo. Finally, the Tropicália
the design of a place where the self expands exhibition departed from Oiticica’s “pen-
cates, or genuine and authentic by rupturing in relationship to others. . . . It etrable environments” of the same name,
opportunities to showcase how we meant that we would have to try to invent and presented the cultural moment of
are, rather than who we are, in the visual solutions (to argument) that would be resistance that happened in Brazil during
world today. The good news is, able to question themselves.”1 Group Ma- the late 1960s. Its name referred to Tropi-
terial’s curatorial example of institutional calismo, a term coined by Oiticica himself,
indigenous peoples are bearing collaboration (including the implications for and the show included visual arts, film,
witness and giving voice to our collecting practices), democratic yet agonis- theater, fashion, and architecture. It also
consciousness, rather than only to tic processes, and countless innovations in presented works by contemporary artists
both timeline- and chronicle-oriented his- who continue and reactivate the legacy
our struggles.
toriographic formats of display (both inside of Tropicalismo, including Ernesto Neto,
and outside the gallery space) is legendary, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Marepe,
Goldie & Lindauer: and deservedly so. Group Material: Democracy Rivane Neuenschwander, and avaf.
Approaching Portraiture exemplifies a collaborative curatorial model
in need of more extended institutional Desvíos de la Deriva.
2010
presentations and critical reconsideration. Experiencias, travesías y
Curated by Ngahiraka morfologías (Drifts and
Mason and Jane Of Mice and Men: Derivations: Experiences,
Davidson-Ladd The 4th Berlin Biennial Journeys, and Morphologies)
2006 2010
Auckland Art Gallery
Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Curated by Lisette Lagnado
Toi o Tāmaki, Massimiliano Gioni, and with Maria Berrios
New Zealand Ali Subotnick Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Berlin Reina Sofía, Madrid

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Filipa Ramos María Inés Rodríguez syrago tsiara

Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and the Brazilian art scene, this edi- The Polish Pavilion at the
Freie Universität Berlin) tion of the biennial took a differ- 53rd Venice Biennale
ent focus under the curatorship of
By proposing to examine the delinea- Adriano Pedrosa. Pedrosa chose to Meeting Krzysztof Wodiczko’s
tion between life and non-life on the
open it up to discourses generated Guests is an experience I’ll never
basis of aesthetic symptoms, and to
question the obsolete chasm between by Brazilian culture proper, in or- forget. As a spectator I felt a pe-
nature and culture, Animism became der to expand the idea of territory culiar sense of being caught be-
the right thing (literally) at the right and generate a space where visitors tween visibility and invisibility,
moment. As a research project, it would confront the constructions together with the nameless pro-
constituted itself at the same time as that constitute the idea of national tagonists of the work. In Wod-
the outspread of some of the prin- representation and the fragility of iczko’s consciously blurred pro-
ciples that informed its theoretical its symbols. His proposal generated jection I could imagine, rather
spine, namely the Speculative Real-
a necessary debate on the founda- than recognize, the silhouettes
ism metaphysical movement (which
recognizes the value, agency, and tions of this event, a debate that of migrant workers washing or
independence of all manner of non- asked us to think about our rela- repairing windows, talking to
human entities, rebalancing the tionship with the outside world: the one another, while remaining un-
human and the nonhuman to fasci- art world and the world in general. knowable strangers to the specta-
nating egalitarian possibilities), and its How do we perceive our culture, tor. Playing with the notion of the
various declinations. As an exhibition and how is it perceived by oth- host who remains unseen on the
format, by combining the display of ers? On what does the survival of edges of legitimacy and illegality,
erudite scientific and historiographic
what we are depend? The title of this work managed to grasp the
references with a cross-disciplinary
approach that was particularly at-
the exhibition came from a work ambiguity of self-identification
tentive to the moving image and to by Claire Fontaine, Mamõyguara opá in the migration process. Even if
various sorts of documentary sources mamõ pupé, a version in Tupi (the you think you know them, these
and artistic practices, it heralded the local native language) of the well- workers remain terra incognita.
arrival of an ethnographic turn in known slogan “foreigners every- There is always an obstacle that
artistic and curatorial practices alike. where.” Translated into a language blocks real contact, such as the
The interests, topics, methods, and that has largely fallen into disuse, window that reduces the work-
format of Animism anticipated many it marked not only a cultural con- ers’ ability to enter and see. The
of the tropes of Christov-Bakargiev’s
flict and acculturation generated demonstration of this twofold
panoplied dOCUMENTA (13) and
the Encyclopedic Palace of this year’s by colonization, but also—as some weakness marked Wodiczko’s
Venice Biennale. unfortunate critiques of the project genuine insight.
indicated—evidence that art can be
Pierre Huyghe a closed and exclusive space onto Heterotopias: The 1st
2013 which territoriality and fear of the Thessaloniki Biennale of
Curated by Emma Lavigne other are impressed. Contemporary Art
Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007
Paris
Montones (Heaps) Curated by Maria
My relationship to this project is 1976 Tsantsanoglou, Catherine
hardly expressible in words. It starts Curated by El Sindicato David, and Jan-Erik
from the fact that to call it an exhi- Barranquilla, Colombia Lundström
bition would be truly simplistic, or State Museum of
would require a radical reformula- This is one of those exhibitions that Contemporary Art,

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Ngahiraka Mason Fionn Meade Pablo León de la Barra

Historic portraits of indigenous The cinematic allure of this biennial, titled The Reina Sofía’s unique exhibition pro-
Māori are beloved treasures in Of Mice and Men after John Steinbeck’s gram, under the direction of Manolo
novella, was undeniable and indelible. Borja-Villel since 2008, has heavily em-
the Auckland Art Gallery’s col- The various settings along Berlin’s Augus- phasized intellectual research and critical
lection, which includes 63 such traße—including a ballroom, a cemetery, inquiry. This show presented research and
works by Gottfried Lindauer, and a church as well as private apartments, documentation regarding the architec-
horse stables, and a shuttered Jewish girls’ tural, poetic, and artistic drift among the
an academically trained 19th-
school—configured an exhibition-as-film- avant-garde that took place in Brazil and
century Bohemian immigrant, set dynamic, populated with the seductive, Chile from the 1930s to the 1970s, which
and 22 works by Charles F. figurative acuity of works by artists such moved away from European and North
Goldie, a second-generation co- as Mark Manders, Matthew Monahan,
American notions of modernity, order,
Rachel Harrison, Francesca Woodman,
lonial New Zealander who was and rationality to explore possibilities for
and Tadeusz Kantor. Cribbing from the
schooled in Paris and worked leisure, playfulness, and sensuality. The
dispersed urbanity of exhibitions such as
show included original drawings done by
during the early decades of the Jan Hoet’s Chambres d’Amis (1986), the stakes
Le Corbusier during his lectures in Rio de
20th century. Goldie’s approach were heightened beyond location scout-
ing or using the city as background. The
Janeiro in 1936, in which he proposed his
to portraiture was ethnographic spectral implications of World War II, the vision for the city; Roberto Matta’s archi-
and highly staged, whereas Holocaust, and the division of East and tectonic drawings of unrealized projects;
Lindauer favored a dramatic West Berlin lingered untethered as mood the Valparaiso Open School’s utopian
enhancement within the neglected patina community project and discovery jour-
use of light and shade in model-
of many of the settings. As the curator neys; Sérgio Bernardes’s futuristic projects
ing each individual. The histori- Okwui Enwezor commented at the time, for Rio de Janeiro; and Lina Bo Bardi’s
cal record tells us that they had the exhibition was “dazzling in its settings democratic culture projects such as the
many critics in their day, but in desolate, crumbling apartments and an SESC Pompeia, a workers’ leisure cen-
the market value of their works abandoned Jewish school on the potholed, ter where culture and sports coexist. The
charmingly decrepit Augustraße. The cura- exhibition foregrounded the visionary
now, and the connections the tors guided viewers through spaces haunted Flavio de Carvalho (1899–1973), a paint-
descendants have to those por- by history.”2 While the placement of Paul er, architect, urbanist, and thinker who,
trayed, reveal a different reality. McCarthy’s Bang Bang Room (1992) in the among other projects, proposed to build
To indigenous Māori, the por- former Jewish girls’ school, for instance, a City for the Naked Man; built a leisure
or the presentation of Tino Sehgal’s Kiss house-temple on the outskirts of São
traits are a conduit to ances- (2002) in the run-down vintage chic of Paulo; and wore on the streets of the city
tors and are accorded the same the Clärchens Ballhaus dance hall enacted what he called the New Look (1956), a suit
respect as carved representations emptying-out theatrical gestures that ac- for the tropics consisting of a skirt and a
of ancestors. To its credit, the tively held their own against that haunted loose shirt, allowing for continuous venti-
patina, the decontextualized gloss of un- lation. In the exhibition, the suit was hung
gallery seeks the permission of specified periodizing that characterized the on a rail from the ceiling in a dynamic
descendants when reproducing biennial seems increasingly significant with
display by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
the portraits or loaning works for time. Displacement and trauma were im-
that moved automatically backward and
plied backdrop presences, and the works of
exhibition elsewhere. This prac- forward, recalling how de Carvalho in
art role-played or stood in while the viewer
tice is part of the legacy of the enacted the tracking shot.
1931 had walked against a religious pro-
groundbreaking 1987 exhibition cession in the center of São Paulo.
Te Māori, which brought with it Notes

new modes of cooperation be- 1. Doug Ashford, “An Artwork

tween museums and descendant Is a Person” in Show and Tell:
communities. A Chronicle of Group Material
(London: Four Corners Books, 2010): 225.

2. Okwui Enwezor, “Best of 2006,”

Artforum (December 2006): 296.

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Filipa Ramos María Inés Rodríguez syrago tsiara

tion of the meaning of the term, I was too young to have seen, but Thessaloniki, Greece
whereas to call it a magnum opus that I know to be foundational in
would be to signal the end of a bril- the history of exhibitions. It was Seven years ago, a new experi-
liant artistic endeavor. It is hard to curated—or, rather, organized—by ment started in the form of the
convey in rational, linguistic terms
El Sindicato (The Syndicate), an Thessaloniki Biennale, which by
something that was felt in the guts
before it touched the brain, some- artists’ collective that established now has already had its fourth
thing that acted on the body—tears, its own space in the 1970s and edition. Taking as a working plat-
cramps, fever, goose bumps, pleasure, proceeded to generate one of the form Michel Foucault’s seminal
tremors—with an intensity not usu- most dynamic, political, risky mo- 1967 essay “Des Espaces Autres”
ally felt in an art museum. Presenting ments in Colombian art. Montones (Of Other Spaces), the exhibition
more than 50 projects and illustrat- was part of a series of 26 interven- attempted to create a space where
ing the full extent of a body of work tions that, together, reformulated artists from diverse cultural back-
and research that spans more than
current notions of exhibiting and grounds could exhibit together,
20 years, Pierre Huyghe turned the
Pompidou’s South Gallery into a site displaying (both the artist’s and the surpassing the obstacles of the
of effects and affects, a synesthetic curator’s) working processes. These market and already-established
experience that summoned all our interventions also formed commu- art centers. Artists from central
senses to deal with extremely com- nities—not only artistic, but also Asia, Latin America, the former
plex and ever-changing processes. neighborly—that became not only Soviet Union, the Middle East,
Everything seemed to be linked by audiences but actually part of the and Western Europe presented
an invisible thread that traced the projects themselves, activating the their works inside museums, old
artist’s tropes, obsessions, and inter-
space and the works. Montones con- monasteries, mosques, the port
ests. The exhibition space appropri-
ated a part of the street, becoming
sisted of heaps of materials that public space, the airport, and
a sort of aquarium where all forms were brought into the space, mostly even on the surface of the sea. It
of life dwelled. Persons, animals, and by the artists themselves, and ex- was a moment of optimism and
plants, sounds and visions, tempera- hibited raw, unaltered. From these strong belief in our potential to
tures and the different states of water heaps they moved on to a second articulate an alternative discourse
shared the same space and became exhibition called Dispersión, which that the world needs, envisioning
one. Human, a live white Ibiza hound consisted of putting the heaps at the new biennial as an experi-
with a magenta leg, materialized in the disposal of the audience. Visi- mental site to rethink relation-
front of our eyes, and in that moment,
tors dismantled them and carried ships among art, politics, and the
intensity became visible. We could
almost touch it, for a second, before them out of the Sindicato to other market, and especially among the
it melted into air. spaces of reception and diffusion. art scenes of the so-called periph-
The heaps thus disappeared into ery. Today, Greek society suffers
the city, infiltrating public and from the severe consequences of
private spaces and acquiring new a global economic crisis that dis-
identities and uses adapted to their proportionately affected south-
new owners. In this way the experi- ern Europe. The existence and
mental art of the Sindicato con- persistence of the Thessaloniki
tinued in the same vein in which and Athens biennials, despite this
it started, using the exhibition as a situation, is a sign of resistance,
dialectical space of representation after all.
and action, with artist and public
playing equally important roles.

73
 The Exhibitionist

74
 The Exhibitionist

Rear Mirror

Considering the 2013 The Société Anonyme’s

Carnegie International Dada Destiny

Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski Jennifer Gross

Daniel Baumann (DBa), Dan Byers (DBy), and Tina The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America provided a
Kukielski (TK): Our first working meeting in preparation unique opportunity to witness the influences of institutional
for curating the 2013 Carnegie International was at Frieze, priorities on curatorial practice and the shaping of art history.
in London, in October 2010. After a long walk around the Primarily drawn from a singular institutional collection, it ex-
park, and about six more months of conversation, we’d got- posed sometimes-conflicting agendas through local interpre-
ten to know one another and set to work. tative intervention as it toured, even as its overall structure
Over the course of three years, we opened an apart- remained consistent. The exhibition traveled to four venues
ment space in Pittsburgh, where we held more than 50 talks (the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Phillips Collection
by local and visiting artists, writers, filmmakers, and others. in Washington DC, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Frist
Visiting artists stayed there, too. We did a ton of internation- Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville) before returning to the
al travel, some separately and some together. We got to know Yale University Art Gallery, its originating institution, in 2012.
Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Museum of Art very well. We A modernist treasure trove assembled in the 1920s and
each lived in the city, in the neighborhoods of Lawrenceville, 1930s by members of the Société Anonyme under the guid-
Polish Hill, and Squirrel Hill. And we worked very closely ance and vision of Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp, the
with assistant curator Amanda Donnan and curatorial assis- Société Anonyme Collection was for many years an under-
tant Lauren Wetmore. recognized and underutilized resource at Yale.The works were
This iteration of the Carnegie International, which given to the university in 1941 after Dreier and Duchamp were
lands in Pittsburgh every four or five years, is composed of unable to fund a museum to house the collection indepen-
35 artists from 19 countries, an ongoing engagement with dently. Dreier did organize a survey from the collection on the
Pittsburgh and its arts community (the apartment), and two occasion of the original gift, but in 2002, when the notion of a
exhibitions within the exhibition: a show on the history of traveling show of the collection was conceived, the history of
avant-garde playground design in Europe, the United States, the organization had, remarkably, never been examined in any
and Japan (guest curated by Gabriela Burkhalter), and an depth in an exhibition context.
exhibition of the museum’s modern and contemporary art The original institutional mandate for the traveling show
collection, tracing relationships between the collection and was to assemble a group of “greatest hits” by artists such as
past Internationals and picking up on themes in the current Piet Mondrian and Joseph Stella that would tour the country
edition. In the process of organizing an exhibition that would while Yale University Art Gallery renovated its facilities.
affect people’s lives (and hopefully change their minds), we Research soon suggested, however, that a more ambitious
also deeply considered the potential, role, and form of the project might reinstate the Société Anonyme to its rightful
biennial-type exhibition. place in art history.

75
 The Exhibitionist

DBa: Let’s talk first about what we

really got “right.” I am proud of how
we consciously rooted this show in
Pittsburgh. We took the risk to realize
projects even (or because) they were
not visible or understandable to a
public outside the city. As an example:
After visiting the Carnegie Museum,
the Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra
suggested painting its Hall of Archi-
tecture purple. It used to be green,
but only those who’d seen it before
could fully grasp the radicality of
the change. It taught me a great deal
about the local and why it is a “prob-
lem”: It might be invisible to the glob-
al and can’t be successfully marketed
within the art world.

TK: I think leasing the apartment

2013 Carnegie International installation view, showing Gabriel Sierra’s Untitled (111.111.111 x 111.111.111 =
12345678987654321), 2013 was rather sly and effective. It became
something of a second home for a
number of us. We were hosts, cooked big meals, made tea, hung out in the back patio, and got to know some of
the local arts community.

DBy: Our first decision, about how we would work together, was crucial, and I think it was directly evident in
almost every aspect of the exhibition. We all agreed on the artist list, and we laid the show out together. There
were moments when it looked like lobbying or consensus building, but we were self-aware, and tried to reintro-
duce true argument into our decision making. We discovered themes and repetitions by listening to one another,
by arguing, by stepping back, by seeing things through two other people’s eyes. This made the exhibition human.
We ended up appealing to art’s power to change our minds.
Thus, the show was somehow built on reception—on the ways the works could communicate among one
another and outward. We figured out that we had to value communication. If a work used obfuscation, delay,
and fragmentation (so many great works do), in the end we still had to articulate the value and meaning beyond
those tactics of delay. It was exhausting at moments, but rewarding beyond any other professional or intellectual
experience I’ve ever had.

TK: I certainly learned how difficult and how rewarding it can be to work in a team. And, with that, how a
thousand ideas are better than one.

DBy: I can tell you that the doubt, the hard-fought ethical conversations, the playful exchanges, and the collec-
tive intuitive moments of the curatorial process actually made their way into the visitor experience. At least four
people on tours asked me, “It looks like you three were having fun. Were you?” We were, indeed. It’s incredible
to think that this quality can be perceived by visitors.

DBa: I liked giving as many tours as possible to learn how the show was perceived. I also love that the first big
project we realized was a playground. And that our blog shared what we were doing with the public.

TK: Early on, someone mentioned writing travel reports. We agreed that it was a good idea, especially when
we were traveling alone, so we could “radio” back to camp. And we actually did it, at least for a while. It took
discipline, but it was a very useful and thoughtful tool that I will return to again.

76
 Rear Mirror

The Société Robert L. Herbert, with the assistance of Eleanor S. Apter and Elise K. Kenney, created the primary record
Anonyme’s of the organization and its legacy at Yale in the formidable 1984 catalogue raisonné of the collection. While Yale
Dada Destiny
University Art Gallery had shared individual works through an active loan program, only two or three masterworks
from the collection were ever on view at Yale in the intervening 60 years. When exhibited, these were folded into a
Jennifer Gross
traditional Modernist narrative—a practice that dismissed the donors’ intent for the collection of more than 1,000
works to be seen as evidence of the complex and inclusive history of Modernism they had exhibited, collected, and
lived.
The Société Anonyme produced more than 40 publications, 80 exhibitions, and countless initiatives in music,
film, and public programming. When Modernism
for America debuted at the Hammer Museum in
2006, it was not surprising that the airing of the
Société’s full range of accomplishments and the
re-creation of their curatorial practices trans-
formed the general understanding of early-20th-
century Modernism. The exhibition also reintro-
duced numerous artists whose works had been
excluded from canonical accounts of the period.
The efforts by members of the Société Anonyme
to avoid subjective aesthetic values radically
challenged established definitions of Modernism,
accounts of the theoretical and aesthetic con-
cerns that motivated its creation, and entrenched The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America installation view, the Hammer Museum,
curatorial approaches to its history and display. Los Angeles, 2006, showing works by Marcel Duchamp
The exhibition was designed to use the
Société’s own methods to address issues that—
even in its own time—hampered a comprehensive understanding of Modernism. The Hammer Museum embraced
the exhibition’s ambition to present this neglected history clearly and fully. The art historian Christopher Bedford
commended this approach in his review for The Burlington Magazine:

As Gross notes in the exhibition catalogue, . . . “The Société Anonyme ultimately amassed a collection that is
a time capsule of modern art practice from 1920–1950, unmediated by traditional art-historical and curatorial
analysis.” . . . It is precisely the broad, inclusive, and non-hierarchical net of this “time capsule” structure that
liberated Dreier from the constraints that were to govern the formation of the collection at MoMA, and it is the
same principle that elevates the present show above less inventive historical surveys.1

The exhibition’s audiences responded enthusiastically to its insistence on representing the breadth of the
Société’s collection and programming initiatives, in contrast to the familiar, highly edited story of Modernism.
Many observed that the Société’s curatorial methods seem as radical today as they did nearly a century ago. For
example, referring to the exhibition’s re-creation of the nationality-based groupings in the Société Anonyme’s 1926
Brooklyn International Exhibition, Bedford described the shock of its “brazen lack of organization and hierarchy”
for viewers trained in “vigilant discrimination between great artists and their lesser brethren”:

To see Miró, Dove, and Duchamp mixed indiscriminately with relative unknowns such as Giovanna Klein,
Laszlo Peri, and Lotte Reiniger is a lesson in the power of disciplinary history and discourse to shape the way
we present, perceive, and, in fact, expect to see the art and artists of the past. The many modernisms made
apparent in this gallery are evidence of the tacit but powerful revisionism undertaken by an exhibition that at
first appears benign and slavishly adherent to historical reconstruction.2

Nancy Troy, in her review of the Hammer installation in Artforum, more directly expressed the radical implications
of the Société Anonyme’s version of the history of 20th-century Modernism:

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 The Exhibitionist

consider- DBy: I can certainly say that I learned

ing the 2013 new languages. You both talk about art
carnegie
differently than I do, and now some of
inter-
national
your language is mine as well.
As far as what we wish we’d done
Daniel differently, I for one wish we had found
Baumann,
Dan Byers, and
an artist who wanted to transform the
Tina Kukielski outdoor sculpture court somehow. They
are lonely sculptures that have begun
one side of a conversation. They need
antagonists, or friends.
And I think music—on its own, not
just in artworks—could have found a
way into the show.
2013 Carnegie International installation view, showing Nicole Eisenman’s Couple Kissing, 2013
TK: Unsurprisingly, there are a few art-
ists I regret not inviting. David Hammons
is someone we discussed early on, then couldn’t figure out the right approach. We thought about restaging an
older work. He would have been the only repeat artist—meaning, he was included in the 1991 International.

DBa: To curate a group exhibition is always to regret not being able to invite certain artists. We’d decided to
limit the exhibition to about 35 artists in order to represent their art with more than a few works apiece. And
sometimes, as Tina mentioned, we excluded an artist who had participated in a previous Carnegie International,
or whose practice was similar to somebody else’s, for the sake of diversity. Other than that, I would say, in the
words of Edith Piaf, “Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien.”

DBy: We talk so much about the museum as a public space. It’s central to the idea of our show, and its potential.
It would have been great if someone had offered to make admission free for the run of the International, to
better test our ideas.
I’d have liked to have included one more artist, in addition to Mark Leckey and Frances Stark, who pushes
the comingling of the digital and the self, and the strange relationships that result. But, happily, their works ended
up being in dialogue with spaces in the museum, and with works by very different kinds of artists.

TK: I would have liked more opportunities to do that—to put artworks in immediate dialogue with other art-
ists’ works. When we did get to do it, for instance pairing
the abstraction of Sadie Benning’s paintings with Zanele
Muholi’s portraits of the LGBTI community in Africa,
or juxtaposing Sarah Lucas’s wild anthropomorphy with
Henry Taylor’s freewheeling brush, it was a surprise for
everyone, including us.
We screened several films by Kamran Shirdel, whose
work is little known outside of Iran, in the museum’s the-
ater. The room is comfortable and dark, but I regret that
we did not find a way to include at least one of his films
within the galleries. The thin line between fact and fiction
that Shirdel walks in these films also crops up in the work
of Yael Bartana, Frances Stark, and Rokni Haerizadeh.
We were constantly making connections between artworks
and artists in our minds and in our writings, but physical
2013 Carnegie International installation view, showing Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases, juxtapositions can be convincing in ways that our words
2007–13, and Lara Favaretto’s Jestem, 2013 cannot.

78
 Rear Mirror

The Société The strategy of inclusion pursued in the

Anonyme’s current exhibition itself encourages us to
Dada Destiny
question the aesthetic predilections upon
which MoMA’s narrative was based, using
Jennifer Gross
ephemeral materials to reconstruct inter-
personal relationships that united artists
across generations and widely divergent
aesthetic commitments—conjuring a flow-
chart that would look radically different
from the one [Alfred H.] Barr created in
1936. Indeed, the present exhibition and its
accompanying catalogue encourage us not
simply to appreciate the alternative story
of modernism revealed by the Société Ano-
nyme, but to take the next logical step and The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America installation view, the Hammer Museum,
reexamine MoMA’s own early history. . . . Los Angeles, 2006
Reincorporating these episodes into a nar-
rative of modernism that is not structured in terms of formal coherence, established movements, or singular
artistic achievements would allow for a more nuanced and stimulating account in which the Société Anonyme
might turn out to play a central, rather than a marginal, role.3

In fact, the Museum of Modern Art seemed to embrace Troy’s challenge seven years later by grappling with
Modernism’s collaborative origins in Leah Dickerman’s ambitious exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925
(2012). Although the structure of the exhibition
adhered to a “masters”-driven narrative, its sub-
text was illustrated in a flowchart of relationships
mapped onto the title wall. This image evoked
the geographical flowchart of the Société artists’
network included in the Modernism for America
catalogue. Dickerman similarly documented the
importance of the culture of creative exchange for
these artists, reinforcing the idea of interwoven
community as a defining force in Modernism that
had been put forth in the Société Anonyme exhibi-
tion.
Given the Société Anonyme exhibition’s
success in Los Angeles, it was surprising, as the
The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America installation view, Yale University Art show traveled, to encounter in some of the subse-
Gallery, 2012 quent host institutions a drive to erase the singular
character of the exhibition and collection, and to
market a traditional Modernist-master narrative. Even after the exhibition’s eclecticism had been affirmed by both
popular and critical reception, the curatorial premise was still in play. One museum (unsuccessfully) proposed
changing the title of the show for marketing purposes to Duchamp, Kandinsky, Léger, and Company, a sugges-
tion that obliterated the radically inclusive founding principle of the organization and marginalized its founder,
Katherine Dreier.
Essential to conveying the group’s visionary assault on the emerging, narrow Modernist art historical narrative
was the replication of its original exhibition practices—including a re-creation of Marcel Duchamp’s 1920 inaugu-
ral exhibition for the Société Anonyme, down to its gray rubber flooring, Lightolier fixtures, and lace paper doilies
around the paintings. Upon entering this space at each venue, visitors experienced firsthand the nuanced exchange
of ideas between artists of diverse aesthetic practices that was at the heart of the Société Anonyme’s mission.

79
 The Exhibitionist

consider- DBy: I worry that for all of our interest in dissonance, dissidence, and the political, there is a kind of copacetic,
ing the 2013 soft hum that surrounds the exhibition, smoothing edges. A quietness. On the other hand, many people who
carnegie
see this exhibition are not versed in the vocabulary of contemporary art. In order to introduce conversations
inter-
national
that we think are important today—alternative histories; gender, sexuality, and bodies; economic inequalities;
various kinds of violence; a diminished sense of civic responsibility; the subversive potential of pleasure;
Daniel et cetera!—the works have to speak at least some form of common language.
Baumann,
Dan Byers, and
There is still a lot of “work” that visitors must do in the exhibition, and many layers, but without giving them
Tina Kukielski a way in, it wouldn’t be possible to shift people’s thinking and propose an intellectual or psychological risk that is
potentially rewarding.

DBa: There are definitely works that are deeply political and
are understood as such by visitors. I would include in this
group the Bidoun Library and works by Rokni Haerizadeh,
Dinh Q. Lê, Zanele Muholi, Pedro Reyes, Kamran Shirdel,
Transformazium, and others.

TK: I agree that a lot of the political content of the show is

delivered in a subtle way. In some instances, as in the Sweet
Earth (1993–2005) photographs by Joel Sternfeld, the political
is embedded within something rather beautiful. In position-
ing Sweet Earth alongside the instruments from guns project by
Pedro Reyes, or the challenge to Middle Eastern stereotyping
that is the Bidoun Library, I do believe that the subtlety of
intent comes alive. These works are not didactic. Rather, they
evoke an elegiac mood whose dissident quality reveals itself
over time. This is why I find Pedro Reyes’s title Disarm such
apt nomenclature.

DBa: The show is political in the sense that it is self-aware. It

promotes art not as a guide, an alternative, a commodity, or
a substitute for religion, but as a tool to understand our lives,
the lives of others, beauty, imperfection, and places of resis-
tance. The exhibition doesn’t show off. It refuses to speak the
language of spectacle, which was our conscious decision. In
today’s world, obsessed as it is with branding and promotion,
that in itself is political.

DBy: I’m glad that we sort of rode the wave past the institu-
2013 Carnegie International installation view, showing Pedro Reyes’s Disarm
tional embrace of performance. That wave crested, and we
(Mechanized), 2012–13 and the Bidoun Library
got off. It just didn’t make sense for the way we wanted the
museum to behave among the art and the people visiting.
My essay in the catalogue, which is partially about the texture and use of the museum by actual people,
actual bodies, in relationship to artworks and the institutional mission, was almost completely hypothetical. But
the museum—and the exhibition—looks and feels the way I hoped it might. More than any other museum show
I’ve ever been involved in, with this show, I see how the viewer completes the work. This project has made me
think so much about the communicative potential of curating.

80
 Rear Mirror

The Société When the exhibition returned to Yale

Anonyme’s to inaugurate the gallery’s spectacular,
Dada Destiny
newly renovated and expanded exhibition
galleries, these valuable inflections were
Jennifer Gross
excluded from its presentation. Privileg-
ing connoisseurship over art-historical
context, the gallery declined to re-create
Duchamp’s installation and rejected the
Société’s nationality-driven installation of
the 1926 Brooklyn International Exhibition.
The resulting installation, which featured
focused groupings of works by individual
“master” artists—while beautiful—lacked
the dynamic aesthetic of earlier venues.
When the exhibition concluded in the
summer of 2013, rather than fulfilling the The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America installation view, Yale University Art Gallery, 2012
Société’s radical premise of an inclusive
Modernism, Yale again pursued a traditional Modernist narrative, integrating selected works into its permanent
collection galleries. This decision obscures the influence of the Société Anonyme even within the institution that
houses and stewards the organization’s history and collection.
The curatorial efforts of the artists of the Société Anonyme embodied a diverse history of Modernism and
captured the full range of remarkable artistic endeavors produced during this tumultuous period. As the collection
is once again subsumed by conventional institutional practice and its founders’ intentions are once more largely
subverted, the Société Anonyme, and the majority of the artists in the collection, await the appreciation, under-
standing, and scholarship they deserve.
But in the wake of Modernism for America, propelled by these artists’ prescient ambitions for a more inte-
grated Modernism, an incremental rewriting of the history of art has already begun. It can be seen in a number of
dissertations and small-scale exhibitions, both in America and in Europe, that keep the flame of the Société’s vision
glowing steadily, as a challenge and an inspiration.

Notes

1. Christopher Bedford, “The Société Anonyme. Los Angeles and Washington,” The Burlington Magazine (October 2006): 716.

2. Ibid.

3. Nancy Troy, “The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America,” Artforum International (October 2006): 256.

81
 The Exhibitionist

Contributors

Daniel Baumann Åse Løvgren

Co-Curator, 2013 Carnegie International; Director, Adolf Wölfli Artist and Curator, Bergen, Norway
Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Bern, Switzerland
Ngahiraka Mason
Dan Byers Indigenous Curator, Maori Art, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand
Co-Curator, 2013 Carnegie International; Richard Armstrong
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Fionn Meade
Pittsburgh Senior Curator of Cross-Disciplinary Platforms, Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis
Germano Celant
Director, Prada Foundation, Milan Laurel Ptak
Director and Curator, Triangle Art Association, New York
Hendrik Folkerts
Curator of Public Programs, Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs, Filipa Ramos
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Freelance Curator and Critic, London

Massimiliano Gioni María Inés Rodríguez

Director, 55th Venice Biennale; Associate Director and Director of Director, CAPC musée d‘art contemporain de Bordeaux, France
Exhibitions, New Museum, New York
Monika Szewczyk
Jennifer Gross Visual Arts Program Curator, Logan Center for the Arts,
Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, deCordova University of Chicago
Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts
Chen Tamir
Chelsea Haines Curator, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
Doctoral Student in Art History, the Graduate Center, City University of
New York Lumi Tan
Associate Editor, The Exhibitionist, New York
Jens Hoffmann
Editor, The Exhibitionist, New York Syrago Tsiara
Director, Contemporary Art Center of of Thessaloniki, Greece
Inés Katzenstein
Curator and Founding Director, Art Department, Universidad Torcuato Johanne Nordby Wernø
Di Tella, Buenos Aires Director, Unge Kunstneres Samfund (UKS), Oslo

Tina Kukielski
Co-Curator, 2013 Carnegie International; Curator of the Hillman
Photography Initiative, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Pablo León de la Barra

UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Christopher Y. Lew
Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1, New York

82
 The Exhibitionist

Photo credits

pp. 5–7: Dirk Pauwels, courtesy S.M.A.K.; pp. 9–11:

courtesy Eyal Danon; pp. 13–15: Matthew Septimus,
courtesy MoMA PS1, New York; p. 16: courtesy Carola
Bony; pp. 18–20: courtesy Patricia Rizzo; p. 38 (top):
Liz Eve; pp. 40–45 and 46 (top): Nils Klinger; p. 46
(bottom): Monika Żak; p. 59: Fanis Vlastaras & Rebecca
Constantopoulou; pp. 76, 78, 80: Greenhouse Media;
pp. 77 and 79 (top): Joshua White; pp. 79 (bottom) and 81:
Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

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 The Exhibitionist

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The Exhibitionist no. 9, March 2014. © 2014