some notes from day one

Notes from the 2020 Curatorial Workshop | 23-26 June 2020 |Bucharest Biennale.

These are some provisional and summary notes on our first day together. Many important issues have not been included, so take this as a partial account only. We invite participants to provide their own reflections also through the form below.

Paul O’Neill

The workshop began with Paul O’Neill’s When art becomes public: Exhibiting as a form of escape a performative lecture that moved through a series of different voices, switching between discursive and poetic constructions to interrogate what it might mean to construe exhibition as a moment of escape: exhibition as a site for art’s escape from its condition as ‘art’ into a becoming public.

The presentation worked repeatedly through a series of installation shots, which were first prefaced by an invitation to imagine: “imagine a square painting on an orange background … imagine a small child sitting on a colourful chair.” These prompts to O’Neill’s audience, requesting imaginative projection, then became concretized in installation shots of a Mary Heilmann chair (Sunny Chair for Whitechapel, 2016, Green, painted plywood) and a William McKeown painting (Cloud Cuckoo Land  2008-2014 ‘Hope painting – the sky inside’ and hand-printed wallpaper.) These were accompanied by other prompts and other images of works, each proposed in terse descriptions for the listeners to imagine before being given a concrete image. No sooner was the image set in play than it was problematized as not giving the exhibition, not disclosing the exhibition as a becoming.

This meditation on exhibition as escape proceeded with a tone of gentle but unmistakeable melancholy. At one point in the presentation, the fugitive quality of exhibition as a process of becoming was rehearsed under the theme of “that which is not here,” in a way that seemed to riff on the ambiguities of “presence” and of representation. At several points there was a funny reversal enacted of familiar themes. For example, rather than the usual proposition that it is through the agency of exhibition that a work acquires the imprimatur and aura of ‘art’, O’Neill’s listeners were invited to consider that it is in exhibition that art escapes its self-enclosed condition as ‘art’. In respect of the claims for the curatorial and the role of art and curating as research processes, a similar reversal of the familiar moves was rehearsed. Exhibition was re-centralised by O’Neill in a way that did not downplay the discursive, the rhetorical and the poetic operations of writing and speech, but rather in a way that reversed the traditional move that places the epistemic claims of the curatorial at a distance from the mere production of exhibition.

There was an interesting use of philosophical themes—of the contrastive pair ‘ontology’ / ‘phenomenology’ that seemed almost Kantian; and of Levinas’s “the pleasant game of life”. These were woven into references to children’s play, and the game of hide-and-seek where the challenge is “not to be so elusive as to end up ‘out of the game.'” At certain moments, it seemed O’Neill was reworking Levinas’s early thinking in the (1935) On Escape/De l’évasion.) Escape “… is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I is oneself.”

In the discussion that followed there were some interesting challenges raised as participants responded to the layered and nuanced texture of the talk. One question probed at the absence of viewing figures—exhibition goers—from most the images. Another question, citing Andrea Fraser’s declaration “We are trapped in our field,” asked if there was not a danger that this speculative thought on escape remained ‘entrapped’ within a restricted and politically vacant art system. Another question concerned the way exhibition may operate as an institutional “utterance” and the specific contingencies of who exercised agency within an exhibition that bridged a museum with a centre for curatorial studies, in what was described as a highly reflexive critical milieu. These questions drew responses that worked through the specific details of the exhibition-making methodology, the role of the artists as teachers, and the installation site as a learning process in its own right, with various degrees and tendencies of becoming public.

Cătălin Gheorghe

The second presentation of the day by Cătălin Gheorghe under the heading “Farewell to Research. Welcome to Rescription” continued the theme of leave-taking and also continued in the same vein of heavily considered reflection on the nature and operation of exhibition, mobilising a wide range of philosophical and cultural-analytical themes. In his opening, Gheorghe proposed that one of the key questons ‘we’ face is whether or not “‘we’ can write back to the authoritarianism of the acute neoliberalist politics through exhibitions as public letters.”

Gheorghe proposed that ‘we’ are exposed to a set of prescriptions by governments that are mainly “playing the role of doctors” pretending to take care of “the public economic health” by repeating corporate business scripts such as “the necessity to protect the corporations,” the “sacralisation of investments,” property rights, the “benefits” of surveillance technologies, the “heroization of the private sector,” and the apologia of entrepreneurship. Against this prescription, Gheorghe proposed a resistant response of “rescription” an attempt at disobedience, a refusal of the harm that these contraindicated “medicines” do to the body of the society.

It was asserted that an exhibition “could be seen as a medium for an insurgent message,” a form of “counter-narrative” opposed to the promise of the grand narrative of economic success in the terms of the capitalist status-quo.” However, he added that a rescription “should be autonomous in its construction, more decolonial in its goals.” The danger Gheorghe identified, was a particular entrepreneurial lobby that focussed on making exhibitions as displays for commodity artworks, with a refusal of meaningful and critical discourse and seeking only the sparkling and celebratory impressions of joy in consumption.

Gheorghe then introduced artistic research, saying that within this context it had seemed to seek to avoid this logic of commodity production by appealing to a cognitive or knowledge-making potential within art. However, Gheorghe proceeded to talk of the possibility of replacing “research fetishism in producing art” with his term of rescription (understood as “post-methodological and post-capitalist” in nature). Through rescription a new world could be both politically and artistically disclosed.

At this point Gheorghe introduced the term transposition in place of exhibition/exposition, and asserted that those artists and curators who would pursue rescription—a refusal of the neoliberal dominant—would test the possibility to replace the exhibition with transposition. This led onto the language of becoming other than oneself and onto the figure of the “xeno-” Citing the work of Armen Avanessian and Markus Miessen he noted the desire for the xeno- might be understood as “a desire to become a stranger to oneself and others.” Leading to the additional claim that “there is an ‘unknown outside’ which is experienced through an impure reason where speculation takes the place of contemplation.”

There were several points in Gheorghe’s talk where the resonances with the previous speaker’s presentation were very prominent, perhaps especially at this point where an image of “the outside” and a desire to be other than oneself were invoked.

A theme that took prominence in Gheorghe’s presentation at this point was that of temporality. He invoked a complex imaginary of time that entangled a future/past/present knot, that was no longer congruent with the linear progressive accumulation of time-is-money in the regimes of capital.

From this point forward in his talk, Gheorghe choreographed an intricate and dizzying movement across the three tropes of exhibition as poetic, exhibition as genre, and exhibition as apparatus. In one short movement of thought, he rehearsed the different ways in which Foucault’s apparatus (dispositif) was read differently by Deleuze and by Agamben, and in so doing proposed a mutiple reading exhibition as aparatus. First in Deleuzean terms:

an exhibition could be seen as a cartographic field that can be traversed following the light of the lines of visibility, the enunciations of the lines of utterance, the arrows of the lines of force (that are mixing words and things), and the processes of the lines of subjectivation which will result in lines of flight. Deleuze introduces a possibility of flight through a fracture in the process of catching the subject in a form of subjectivation. At the margin of the map there is always a possibility of escaping, through “lines of cracking, breaking and ruptures” from the disciplinary focus of an apparatus, but there is the inescapability of entering in a process of becoming-other, part of a new, more current, controlling apparatus. As a subject visiting an exhibition, you have the power to delimit yourself through the diagnosis of the material you see, but you will always operate in the entangled lines of a new apparatus.

This is then complemented with a reading of exhibition-as-apparatus via Agamben’s version of the apparatus, yielding the assertion that:

in an exhibition, a spectator or participant is exposed to a discourse of subjectification through a process of desubjectification. From this position of a negative understanding of apparatus as a modelling machine, Agamben is proposing a profanation of the apparatus, a kind of restitution to common use of what has been captured through the functioning of the apparatus. And here is created the tension of the contradiction in which an exhibition is situated: on the one hand an ‘exhibition as apparatus’ is trying to create a kind of dispositio for the viewer to be captured in a discursive framework that is created to provide a critical meaning to challenge prior forms of subjectification, constructed through exposing the subject to different kind of political apparatuses of control, but on the other hand an exhibition could be easily framed in the negative, and be described as a controlling machine, even if one deployed with an emancipatory … prospect.

In the discussion that followed, the questions from participants addressed the different possible sources for this figure of “transposition.” There were also questions as to how temporality and spatiality were being invoked within the analysis (specifically the privileging of temporality seeming to present a problem for how the terms of spatiality could be invoked). In responding Gheorghe affirmed the specific theoretical nature of his contribution as an attempt at proposing a practice of rescription, as a strategy of Farewell to Research, in the same spirit as Feyerabend’s Farewell to Reason.

break-out groups

For the final session of the day, the participants in the workshop broke into four subgroups. The request was that each group—taking account of the two speakers today Paul O’Neill and Cătălin Gheorghe, but also taking account of their own interests, references and experiences within the group—would respond to the question: what are the different ways in which “exhibition” may be understood?

In the reporting back from the sub-groups and the break-out discussions some themes emerged in common across the groups. One was about the tensions between a globally distributed participant group and what was seen as a tendency toward imposing eurocentric constructions in the discourses of the contemporary art system in general, and in the terms of this particular workshop also. This was linked to the questions of the postcolonial and the decolonial. A concern proffered was that certain discursive modes seemed intrinsically and irredeemably structured by Eurocentric colonial-modernity, and a fetishization of the ‘other’ (“cannibalization of the knowledge produced by the other.” ) This might be heard as an echo of the theme of desiring to be other than oneself that appeared in both presentations, although no0t directly or explicitly framed in this way.

Another question that arose was that of access and the structures of inclusion / exclusion in play. On the one hand, ‘access’ simply referred to the question of the complex and dense lecture formats seeming to demand a high level of attention and specialized prior knowledges. However, this was not the only question of ‘accessibility’ in play. For example, on group noted that the operation of cultural production in-and-for online spaces impacted people in terms of degrees of access, strength and stability of connection, and whether they were located in an urban or rural context, in a global ‘hub’ or a global ‘periphery,’ and so forth. This access was both a matter of technical infrastructure but also of the modes of cultural performance and formats of discourse being proposed. In what way was ‘going public’ being construed if these dynamics of inclusion / exclusion were left unconsidered?

Other themes that came up were what might curating learn from activism; how the exhibition as play, and the operation of humour might provide means of countering entrenched powers and interests; the question of melancholy and the possibly privileged status of certain affects, or perhaps the geopolitical distribution of certain moods: melancholy, hope, futural longing and despair.

In the closing phase of the discussion it was noted that the question of formats, and the question of geopolitics should be held open, while the week unfolded. That the thinking together of this first day was still unfinished, and not a discrete unit in itself, but some preliminary points of entry into a conversation. The main thing that was set in play for these first few moves in conversation, was a problematization of the any simple given-ness of the exhibition.

The problem of a specifically eurocentric mode of universality—speaking from a place, a location, a situation, but proposing that one could produce a view for all from this one place as if speaking from no place/all places simultaneously. It was suggested that he very idea of a universal public, of a universal access, might have hidden within its emancipatory and liberational promise, the murderous side of modernity. That murderous side of modernity that proposes a universal humanity as the very device through which to operate various exclusions from the human.

Finally, that the theme of exhibition was drawing out a very wide-ranging and at times highly abstracted form of reflection and discourse, was underlined. Perhaps these wide-ranging philosophical, cultural and political meditations on exhibition might in part be seen as a consequence of the complex positioning of exhibition as a knowledge making strategy across much more than just the art field.

some resources referenced

These are some of the sources that were referenced in the papers and in the discussions (not complete).

Giorgio Agamben, “What is an apparatus?”, in What is an apparatus? and other essays, Standford University Press, 2009

Armen Avanessian, Lietje Bauwens, Wouter De Raeve, Alice Haddad, Markus Miessen (eds.), Perhaps It is Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match, Sternberg Press, 2018

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010

Nicolas Bourriaud, “The Exhibition in the Age of Formatting”, in Critique d’art, 47 | Automne / Hiver 2016

Gilles Deleuze, What Is a Dispositif?, 1992. Two Regimes of Madness
Hal Foster, What Comes after Farce?, Verso, London, 2020

Ane Hjort Guttu, “The End of Art Education as We Know It”, in Kustkritikk. Nordic Art Review, May 2020

Jens Hoffmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show. A conversation between Jens Hoffmann and Maria Lind”, in Mousse Magazine 31, December 2011–January (2012)

Andrea Frazer, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” in Artforum, Vol. 44, Iss. 1 (2005). It may be interesting to note that Frazer is taken to task by critics such as Brian Holmes and Gerald Raunig for producing this kind of closure within the art institution.

please contribute your thoughts

If you would like to propose material, ideas, discussion points to share with the participants, you can submit these here. We will create a collation of these and share via the website over the next few days.