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Se a gente fica em função da sobrevivência fica dificil ter um espaço da criação

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Se a gente fica em função da sobrevivência fica dificil ter um espaço da criação

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Como nós como curadores podemos construir junto com os artistas estratégias de resistência?

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Como nós como curadores podemos construir junto com os artistas estratégias de resistência?

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Eu sou sempre a favor do tumulto (ROMAN, Ana)

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Eu sou sempre a favor do tumulto (ROMAN, Ana)

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A critica institucional não existe mais? tá pouco radical (ROMAN, Ana)

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A critica institucional não existe mais? tá pouco radical (ROMAN, Ana)

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crítica institucional por dentro é alimento pro proprio sistema se reciclar, não acham?

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crítica institucional por dentro é alimento pro proprio sistema se reciclar, não acham?

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No brasil uma instituição independente que resiste já é uma critica institucional 

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No brasil uma instituição independente que resiste já é uma critica institucional 

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A curadoria pode de alguma forma ser uma critica institucional?

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A curadoria pode de alguma forma ser uma critica institucional?

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Curadoria como um espaço privilegiado de construção de sentidos e de ruptura 

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Curadoria como um espaço privilegiado de construção de sentidos e de ruptura 

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Curadoria como um relato do momento que vivemos

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Curadoria como um relato do momento que vivemos

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Como as exposições constroem a historia da arte?

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Como as exposições constroem a historia da arte?

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https://projetoafro.com/editorial/artigo/curadorias-em-disputa-quem-sao-as-curadoras-negras-negros-e-indigenas-brasileiros/

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https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/composting-knowledge/

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Curating and the Educational Turn_Paul O'Neill, Mick Wilson

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Curating and the Educational Turn_Paul O'Neill, Mick Wilson

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Z-Library single sign on | Z-Library. Download books for free. Find books

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O ponto de partida deste texto é a interseção entre o que entendo do pensamento que vem sendo formulado por Hans Belting e por Andrea Buddensieg no projeto sobre a arte global, a respeito das novas relações entre a arte contemporânea e a arte étnica, e o que já pode ser percebido na esfera de museus e exposições. A questão que o motiva é: Será que a arte global, tal como concebida por esses autores está se explicitando como força de transformação do que entendemos por arte? E, em caso afirmativo, de que modo essa explicitação se manifesta na própria concepção e organização da visualidade da arte hoje, bem como em sua institucionalização?

O ponto de partida é, portanto, o pressuposto de que a arte global não é mesmo uma hipótese, mas uma realidade cujo alcance precisamos descobrir. E como se trata de um processo novo e recente, só podemos fazê-lo tateando o terreno e buscando evidências na prática expositiva atual de aproximar a arte contemporânea e a arte moderna, da arte que uns chamam de tradicional, outros de primitiva, outros de primeira, outros de antiga, outros de indígena, outros de étnica. Com efeito, parece-me que, se focalizarmos o problema da aproximação, encontraremos, no gesto que aproxima, a matriz do modo como a arte global transforma a arte étnica, mas também, e concomitantemente, a arte contemporânea.

Em seu artigo A Arte contemporânea e o Museu na Era Global Belting deixa claro o que está em causa: a capacidade do museu de arte para enfrentar o desafio da aceleração que a globalização impõe à expansão da produção contemporânea, juntamente com a capacidade da atual noção de arte para sobreviver a esta explosão. Para sustentar seu argumento, Belting invoca a arte global vista como um ramo da arte contemporânea e que é, para a maioria, sinônimo desta última. Do ponto de vista do autor, a história da arte e a etnologia são como dois lados de uma mesma moeda - um deles, o lado Ocidental, define o que se entende por arte, enquanto o outro define a cultura material, os artefatos produzidos por outros, isto é, aqueles que nunca criaram "arte" no sentido ocidental do termo. Foi por esta razão que os museus de arte e de etnografia passaram a existir.

Tais construções mudam com a globalização e com a mudança das regras do jogo. Por um lado, a produção dos artistas contemporâneos não-ocidentais não cabe nesse sistema, porque esses artistas recusam tanto o legado de uma história da arte que não é a sua e o legado étnico, tradicional, que sempre foi enfraquecido, mas também porque a entrada dos países emergentes como novos e importantes parceiros na cena mundial interroga tanto a supremacia do modelo de globalização da arte ocidental quanto a suposta universalidade do mundo da arte, visto com a quintessência artística da herança mundial. A arte global é então a resposta paradoxal a essas questões - nas palavras de Belting "um problema não resolvido" com relação à inclusão de todos os "mundos contemporâneos"; a arte global, por conseguinte, abandona ao mesmo tempo os parâmetros Europeus e Americanos, na medida em que a vitória de uma arte contemporânea que se tornou pós-moderna, pós-histórica e pós-colonial desbarata toda produção étnica e nivela qualquer diferença cultural em um único processo de institucionalização.

Assim, para entender melhor esse problema não resolvido, é necessário visitar museus e exposições para descobrir como a arte global transforma a arte étnica de acordo com uma lógica paradoxal. Mas não podemos desprezar o fato de que meu relato das visitas às exposições européias, especialmente em Berlim, é o relato de alguém que, apesar de usar as lentes fornecidas por Belting, vê a arte com um "olhar brasileiro", isto é, pós-subdesenvolvido, pós-periférico e tropical. Ele é alimentado pela dúvida em relação ao impacto causado no Brasil, na presente crise, pelo colapso dos mercados financeiros e o golpe brutal sofrido pelos principais países industrializados. Tentarei também discernir as tensões negativas e positivas causadas pelo encontro/divergência entre a cultura moderna e contemporânea ocidental e as culturas tradicionais dos povos indígenas. O que deveria ser levado em conta é que a arte moderna e contemporânea brasileira nunca tentou levar a sério sua não-relação com a arte étnica que era e ainda é produzida, porque ela nunca sequer se colocou a questão se os povos indígenas e tradicionais costumavam produzir arte e ainda continuam a fazê-lo.

Se o advento da arte global reconfigura o sentido anteriormente conferido à arte contemporânea e ao seu "outro", a arte étnica, a questão levantada por Belting se torna de grande relevância para nós porque a posição ocupada pela arte brasileira no novo contexto será necessariamente problematizada e questionada, tendo em vista a nossa inserção peculiar no que vem por aí.

Creio que todos nós tenderíamos a pensar que essa perspectiva é correta e que é nessa direção que deveríamos explorar o problema, tendo em vista o recalque no Brasil do reconhecimento da existência de múltiplas manifestações de arte étnica. No entanto, sinto que está se explicitando um fenômeno particularmente perturbador que talvez modifique intensamente todo o quadro e apresente articulações novas, capazes de trazer para dentro da cena brasileira, e de um modo inédito, os dois pólos analisados por Belting, a saber as novas relações entre arte contemporânea e arte étnica.

Com efeito, o que está acontecendo que nos permite levantar essa lebre? Antes de tudo, uma tendência já detectada por Belting no texto Art in the TV Age. On Global Art and Local Art History. Pois nesse ensaio, refletindo sobre o que cabe à arte numa era tecnológica, o historiador sugere que a arte e a tecnologia sempre competiram, desde a emergência da modernidade, em termos de descobrimento e de progresso. Entretanto, diz ele, "hoje a tecnologia parece vencer a velha competição e até conquistar uma indisputada autoridade na constituição de uma nova identidade global. Além disso, a tecnologia controla a experiência do que chamamos realidade virtual, cujo fascínio ofusca o velho papel da arte como o porto do imaginário". Ora, sempre segundo Belting, a vitória da tecnologia teve implicações importantes para a arte: em primeiro lugar, porque a utopia deixou de ser uma de suas reivindicações e tornou-se privilégio da tecnologia; por outro lado, a arte se tornou por excelência o campo da imaginação privada e da criatividade enquanto a TV se tornou a expressão dos interesses econômicos e políticos em escala global; finalmente, lembrando Peter Sellers, o historiador afirma que, contrariamente aos mass media, a arte deve ser lenta, difícil e obscura se quiser manter sua vida e seus direitos no mundo de hoje.

A observação de Belting é importante porque, ao mesmo tempo em que aponta a vitória da tecnologia como vitória da aceleração e da colonização do espaço público, indica que a liberdade e a criação artística se refugiaram no âmbito do privado. Nesse sentido, vale então a pena se interrogar como a individualidade e o próprio processo de individuação vem sendo "processado" tanto pela arte quanto pela tecnologia.

Ora, vista por esse prisma, a vitória da tecnologia sobre a arte também passa a significar a primazia da capacidade da tecnologia de afetar o humano do modo mais intenso, de propor-lhe experiências cujo impacto transformador é inigualável e, no limite, de transmutar a própria individuação, na medida em que interfere na noção mesma de natureza humana. O que equivale a dizer que a potência de transformação da tecnologia, inclusive e sobretudo no tocante à percepção da realidade, é incomparavelmente maior do que aquela que a arte hoje pode vir a almejar.

A fim de se ter uma "medida", se é que se pode dizer assim, do impacto e da intensidade da aceleração tecnológica sobre o humano, vejamos o que diz Konstantinos Karachalios, um especialista do Escritório Europeu de Patentes que se dedicou nos últimos anos à construção de cenários futuros nessa organização. "Se você considerar o progresso tecnológico realizado no ano 2000 como uma "unidade de tempo tecnológico", então calcula-se que o século XX teve, ao todo, 16 dessas unidades. Todo o século XX é equivalente a apenas 16 anos do progresso tecnológico medido pelo ano 2000; isto é, em termos tecnológicos o século todo poderia ser comprimido em apenas 16 anos, com desenvolvimentos cada vez mais concentrados em seu final. Levando em conta esse efeito de aceleração, você poderia imaginar quantas unidades de tempo tecnológico nós e nossos filhos vamos experienciar (e ter de enfrentar) durante o século XXI? Aparentemente, haverá mais do que 100, mas você pode imaginar quanto? Bem, se você simplesmente extrapolar a tendência atual, assumindo que não ocorrerão desastres em larga escala e a longo prazo, pode ser que tenhamos que lidar com um progresso tecnológico equivalente a 25.000 anos (baseado na tecnologia do ano 2000) dentro de duas gerações. Mesmo que você considere "apenas" 1000 anos, teremos que enfrentar desafios semelhantes aos que a maioria das populações da África ainda está enfrentando, populações que foram catapultadas da idade da pedra ou do ferro na modernidade, dentro de 2-3 gerações".

Se Karachalios estiver certo, a pergunta, então, que se coloca é a seguinte: como a experiência humana vai "processar", ou melhor, está "processando", essa aceleração que os especialistas qualificam como "avalanche tecnológica"? A analogia com os povos indígenas soa interessante, não porque estes sejam "atrasados" ou "arcaicos" em termos sociais e culturais, mas porque não trilharam o caminho do desenvolvimento técnico cada vez mais acelerado, optando por outros rumos. Assim, quem já esteve numa aldeia Yanomami, por exemplo, sabe da distância que separa a sua vida cotidiana do nosso universo tecnologizado e constata a sua dificuldade em lidar com nossas máquinas; mas nesse caso, o problema que eles enfrentam não é com a sua sociedade, e sim com a organização social dos outros, dos brancos. A ironia, entre nós, é que vamos ser cada vez mais confrontados com a vertiginosa aceleração que nossa própria sociedade produz e de cujo impacto parece que não temos como escapar. Como se estivéssemos nos tornando um povo primitivo dentro de nossa própria cultura!

Se a comparação faz sentido, o homem da sociedade indígena se torna rigorosamente contemporâneo do homem civilizado; e o Brasil se torna então um campo de provas extraordinário, um terreno de experimentação riquíssimo, no qual se apresenta a oportunidade única no mundo de confrontar as diferentes soluções encontradas no campo da individuação para lidar com a avalanche tecnológica e sua relação com as temporalidades das diferentes culturas. Mais ainda: no âmbito do que Belting entende por arte global, o Brasil emerge como um lugar privilegiado para se acompanhar as transformações do que se entende por arte contemporânea e por arte étnica, e a fecundação, ou não, de uma pela outra. Digo isso porque não são só os artistas brasileiros que podem se apoderar das novas tecnologias como meios de expressão estética - os mais de duzentos povos indígenas, para não falarmos dos quilombolas, dos seringueiros e de outras populações tradicionais que compõem a sociodiversidade brasileira, já estão também entrando na cena.

Foi com essas questões em mente que o espectador foi ver a exposição Os Trópicos. Visões do Meio do Globo, curada por Alfons Hug (Goethe Institut Rio), Peter Junge (curador do Etnologisches Museum de Berlim) e Viola König (diretora do mesmo museu), no Martin-Gropius Bau, em Berlim. Os Trópicos não pode ser considerada, apenas, como mais uma grande mostra em cartaz em Berlim, no segundo semestre de 2008; Hermann Parzinger tem razão quando escreve que se trata de uma exposição "excepcional em vários aspectos". Sua realização é muito importante porque expressa um momento alto do processo de aproximação da arte contemporânea com a arte étnica, segundo a ótica da arte global. Com efeito, a mostra reivindica sua inscrição num movimento que teve início em 1986 na exposição Les Magiciens de la Terre, no Centre Georges Pompidou, passou pela abertura do Musée des Arts Premiers, no Quai Branly, em Paris, em meados de 2006, e agora se manifesta em Os Trópicos como o protótipo ou o projeto-piloto do Humboldt-Forum, a ser criado na Ilha dos Museus. Nesse sentido, a aproximação talvez possa ser entendida como a prefiguração do modo como se pretende estabelecer um marco da institucionalização da arte global na Alemanha, e talvez na Europa. Isso porque o Humboldt-Forum vai exercer um papel simbólico muito forte: concebido para ocupar o reconstruído Berliner Schloss, que será erguido no lugar do antigo Parlamento da Alemanha Oriental, recentemente demolido, o Humboldt-Forum é o principal projeto político-cultural da Alemanha no início do século XXI e será destinado a acolher as artes e as culturas da África, Américas, Austrália, Oceania e Ásia, instalando, assim, a produção das regiões não-européias ao lado dos museus que reúnem a arte antiga e moderna reconhecida pelo Ocidente como patrimônio seu.

No entanto, seria conveniente lembrar que no quadro da crise e das tensões contemporâneas, outros artistas também retomaram, de outros modos, as perguntas de Gauguin. Em 2001, Hans U. Obrist perguntou a Maurizio Cattelan quais foram os começos do começo de seu trabalho, e recebeu a seguinte resposta: "Você começa quando nasce e então morre. Não há um grande começo. Todas as vezes você tenta entender onde está e para onde está indo. Você tenta apenas tornar a viagem mais agradável". É interessante notar que o italiano já não se pergunta de onde viemos, enquanto humanidade, e concentra sua atenção no presente e no futuro do artista. Talvez por isso mesmo, quando se tornou um dos curadores da Von Mäusen und Menschen (Of Mice and Men), na 4 th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, em 2006, Cattelan escreveu, junto com Massimiliano Gioni e Ali Subotnick: "Quase todos os artistas da exposição, ou pelo menos suas obras, parecem envolvidos numa escuridão radical, que poderia ser lida como uma persistência do irracional e do obscuro face à racionalidade e ao fundamentalismo. (...) Diversos trabalhos também compartilham um profundo mal-estar, que ressoa com os espaços nos quais são exibidos, (...) É a percepção nublada da realidade como uma manifestação sinistra das sombrias fantasias de cada um. Com certeza, não é por acaso que a arte atual é predominantemente uma arte de imagens. Para ir direto ao ponto: podemos dizer que vivemos numa era do triunfo da arte figurativa. Mas tais figuras e imagens são antes de tudo e principalmente alucinações; são espectros. Queremos levar em conta a abertura de Sebald para os fantasmas da história".

As observações esboçadas por Maurizio Cattelan às perguntas: Onde estamos? Para onde vamos?, apontam, assim, para a incerteza do presente e a escuridão radical quanto ao futuro. Ora, em 1996, Ugo Rondinone também abordava o tema, realizando sua vídeo-instalação Where do we go from here? ... Do que se trata? O espectador entra numa sala vazia que tem ao fundo, cobrindo a parede toda, uma imensa fotografia preto e branco de uma floresta, retrabalhada de tal maneira que o olhar vai registrando a transformação das árvores à medida que se aproxima da imagem. Do lado esquerdo desta, porém, uma abertura o convida a atravessar a imagem da natureza e a entrar num grande corredor de madeira iluminado por néons, que por sua vez desemboca numa grande sala quadrada, onde o aguarda, em cada uma das quatro paredes, a imagem de um imenso palhaço. Ali, cercado por eles que, escarrapachados no chão limitam-se a olhá-lo, ouvindo o som pesado da respiração deles, o espectador se encontra numa espécie de vazio terrível, do qual nem pode fugir porque a luz que emana dos quatro projetores persegue os seus olhos, ofuscando-os.

Ali, a desconstrução do mito do artista parecia levar a um impasse: pois à entrada da instalação o curador reproduzira o seguinte enunciado de Ugo Rondinone: "Perguntado sobre o que então a arte deveria ser, Beckett afirma que ela deveria ser "a expressão de que não há nada a ser expressado, nada com que expressar, nada a partir do que expressar, nenhum poder de expressar, nenhum desejo de expressar, junto com a obrigação de expressar".

É claro que cada uma dessas aproximações porta consigo pressupostos, princípios, propósitos e objetivos que podem variar, e cujas diferenças mereceriam problematização. Entretanto, parece haver uma constante, um pressuposto invariante que permearia todas elas: é o caráter atemporal da arte, que se traduz na suspensão das temporalidades próprias das obras de todos os tempos. Em Die Tropen, por exemplo, é esse caráter que funda e legitima toda a démarche curatorial, na medida em que a arte pré- moderna dos Trópicos é considerada como "timelesness", enquanto a arte contemporânea, que teria abandonado a noção linear de tempo e progresso, é considerada como uma "máquina do tempo".

Por que a arte pré-moderna é atemporal? Porque na escala de milênios as paixões humanas são sempre as mesmas, são sempre manifestações de uma natureza humana imutável. E é aí que reside, em meu entender, o maior problema da aproximação da arte contemporânea com a arte étnica em Die Tropen, na medida em que tal premissa articula cinco dos sete grupos temáticos que estruturam a exposição.

Que se tome, por exemplo, o grupo temático After the Flood - nature and landscape, que abre a mostra. De saída, é preciso ressaltar que a inscrição da natureza e da paisagem tropicais numa perspectiva bíblica de antes ou depois do Dilúvio já introduz um ruído considerável no entendimento da aproximação das obras escolhidas e expostas porque o espectador não tem mais critério para apreciá-las, sobretudo as que pertencem à arte étnica. Pois como e por quê vinculá-las a essa referência cristã? Tudo leva a crer que a incorporação das obras sob essa rubrica tem o dom de subtraí-las de sua própria materialidade para torná-las expressões metafóricas de um entendimento do mundo tropical informado pelo mito e pela religião do europeu. Assim, a floresta deixa de ser um espaço disputado por culturas em conflito para tornar-se um espaço metafórico. E como tanto os trabalhos contemporâneos quanto os étnicos são tomados nesse mesmo registro, encontram-se em pé de igualdade, isto é não-hierarquizados porque são todos metáforas de uma natureza e de uma paisagem que lhes é comum. Ocorre que tanto a natureza quanto a paisagem não podem se constituir como esse substrato comum porque as próprias noções de natureza e de paisagem diferem radicalmente, quando consideradas sob a perspectiva ocidental contemporânea e sob a perspectiva étnica - um conceito universal de natureza e de paisagem só pode ser suposto como "dado" na cabeça de um homem ocidental moderno!

A Antropologia pós-Lévi-Straussiana já mostrou que a perspectiva dos povos indígenas das Américas difere radicalmente da perspectiva ocidental, sobretudo no tocante à relação entre natureza e cultura. Isso porque tanto os ocidentais modernos quanto os contemporâneos fundamentam, em última instância, sua perspectiva num pressuposto ontológico e epistemológico comum criado pela ciência: o de que existe uma única natureza e múltiplas culturas. Mas essa não é a perspectiva compartilhada pelos povos indígenas nos trópicos americanos. Pois do ponto de vista destes, o mito cria a perspectiva inversa: existe uma única cultura, a cultura humana, e muitas naturezas. Com a palavra o antropólogo Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: "Se existe uma noção virtualmente universal no pensamento ameríndio, ela é a de um estado original de não-diferenciação entre humanos e animais descrita na mitologia. A condição original comum aos humanos e animais não é a animalidade, mas, antes, a humanidade. A grande divisão mítica não mostra a cultura se distinguindo da natureza, mas, antes, a natureza se distanciando da cultura. Assim os mitos descrevem como os animais perderam os atributos herdados ou preservados pelos humanos. Os humanos são aqueles que continuaram como antes: animais são ex-humanos e humanos não são ex-animais".

Na perspectiva ameríndia, todos os seres vêem (representam) o mundo da mesma maneira - o que muda é o mundo que eles vêem. Os animais usam as mesmas categorias e valores que os humanos: seus mundos, como os nossos, giram em torno de caçar e pescar, cozinhar e tomar bebidas fermentadas, em torno de primos cruzados e guerra, em torno de ritos de iniciação, chamãs, chefes, espíritos, etc... Mas as coisas que eles vêem são outras: o que é para nós (por exemplo) o sangue, para a onça é cerveja de mandioca. 19. Assim o ponto de vista ameríndio de que há apenas uma cultura e muitas naturezas expressa a existência de uma epistemlogia constante e de uma ontologia variável. Mas, ao contrário do multiculturalismo, do ponto de vista do multinaturalismo, não há representação.

Uma perspectiva animista não pode ser uma representação porque é "uma propriedade da mente ou espírito, enquanto o ponto de vista está localizado no corpo. A habilidade para adotar um ponto de vista é um poder da alma, e não-humanos são sujeitos na medida que têm (ou são) espírito; mas a diferença de pontos de vista... não está situada na alma. Desde que a alma é formalmente idêntica em todas as espécies, ela só pode ver as mesmas coisas em todo lugar - a diferença é dada pela especificidade dos corpos". E Viveiros continua: "Entre a subjetividade formal das almas e a materialidade substancial dos organismos há um plano intermediário que é ocupado pelo corpo como um feixe de afetos e capacidades e que é a origem das perspectivas". Em suma: "os Ameríndios postulam uma continuidade metafísica e uma descontinuidade física entre os seres do cosmos, a primeira resultando no animismo e a última no perspectivismo: o espírito ou a alma... integra, enquanto o corpo... diferença ".

As análises de Eduardo Viveiros de Castro são de grande valor para o presente ensaio e precisavam ser longamente citadas porque foram elas que permitiram ao espectador tropical detectar, logo na primeira sala, os problemas conceituais da curadoria de Die Tropen e a procurar entender porque emergia uma sensação muito grande de mal-estar com o modo como se aproximava a arte contemporânea da arte étnica, pressupondo um denominador comum que, em vez de ser considerado como "dado", deveria ser a própria problemática a ser tratada, caso se quisesse efetivamente confrontar as obras de modo produtivo e discutir as diferentes perspectivas sobre os Trópicos. Ora, à medida que os núcleos temáticos se desdobravam pelas salas, ia ficando evidente que o equívoco só fazia aumentar, pois parecia que eles reiteravam o problema conceitual inicial. Como se os artistas contemporâneos e os "artistas" étnicos fossem todos produtores de metáforas sobre esses mesmos temas, como se pertencessem todos à mesma boa e velha humanidade ocidental universal, ficando a diferença entre suas obras por conta da diversidade de interpretações.

É evidente que não estão em questão, aqui, a qualidade e pertinência das obras contemporâneas selecionadas, nem a excelência e a adequação das obras étnicas escolhidas no acervo do Etnologisches Museum de Berlim, nem a expertise dos curadores desse museu Não se trata, portanto, de um desconhecimento ou de uma simplificação da problemática da arte étnica concebida pela abordagem etnológica, mas do modo como esta última é abandonada em favor de um "visualistic approach" baseado em temas. Também precisa ficar claro que não se defende aqui a idéia de que a abordagem etnológica é intocável e de que toda e qualquer aproximação entre arte contemporânea e "old art", ou arte étnica, deve ser a priori condenada.

Voltemos então à exposição, e vejamos pelo menos dois exemplos do que no "visualistic approach" adotado suscita incômodo, aos olhos do espectador tropical. Foi pressuposto pela curadoria que a imagem contemporânea e a imagem presentificada no objeto étnico eram equiparáveis, enquanto expressões da relação homem-meio, no núcleo temático que tratava da natureza e da paisagem. Mas como ver num mesmo registro visual e estético a série de fotografias de Candida Höfer sobre os animais tropicais nos zoológicos europeus e o fantástico Elephant Mask of the Kono Society, do Mali? Isso só é possível se encararmos os animais figurados tanto na imagem fotográfica quanto na imagem esculpida como representações simbólicas de animais naturais dos trópicos. Ora, a imagem do animal no zoológico não tem o mesmo estatuto que a máscara de elefante, pois este é um objeto de culto, portanto um objeto transacional, um vetor de acesso e de atualização de potências que, contudo, é visto pela curadoria como uma metáfora de forças míticas e não como a própria presença delas. Assim, tanto o objeto artístico contemporâneo quanto o objeto étnico são reduzidos a um pobre denominador comum, que é a linguagem da representação.

A visão que permite a aproximação e a confrontação, e que fundamenta a apreciação das obras se pretende contemporânea e, num certo sentido, pós-moderna. Como vimos, o próprio texto de apresentação que abre a mostra afirma que as obras assim reunidas o são pela primeira vez. O que significa que o critério que as junta é um critério que recusa ao mesmo tempo o critério formal, picassiano, dos modernos, e o critério de classificação do etnólogo. Tudo se passa, então, como se a curadoria, desinvestindo ao mesmo tempo da função da forma na arte moderna e da função ritual na arte étnica, estabelecesse que a falta de função ou de fundamento outro que não o estético da aproximação pudesse se constituir no próprio solo a partir do qual se pode estabelecer uma articulação inédita. Cabe, então, a pergunta: Que novo sentido emerge dessa articulação? Como ver, por exemplo, a aproximação da tela Sampa, de Beatriz Milhazes, de um cocar do povo indígena Rigbatsa, do Brasil, ou de um Bark Painting, de Papua-Nova Guiné? A pergunta se impõe porque estamos diante de um caso que instiga a reflexão sobre o feixe de ambiguidades que se desdobra.

Antes mesmo de ver Die Tropen, o espectador tropical pudera constatar um fenômeno no mínimo curioso. É que, em Paris, o Musée des Arts Premiers exibia pintura contemporânea dos Aborígenes Australianos como obras de arte étnica, isto é tradicional, muito embora já descontextualizadas da abordagem etnológica; mas, no mesmo momento, a Galerie des Médicis, da Place des Vosges, embora referindo os trabalhos de sua própria exposição às telas do museu, mostrava e punha à venda aboriginal paintings como arte contemporânea, cujo valor estético era paradoxalmente autenticado pelo pensamento mágico e chamânico. Assim, se por um lado o espectador era introduzido no museu às pinturas étnicas criadas por artistas contemporâneos, na galeria estava diante de pinturas contemporâneas criadas por artistas étnicos! Portanto, os artistas aborígenes australianos eram, ao mesmo tempo, étnicos e contemporâneos. Isto posto, voltemos então à tela de Beatriz Milhazes, e à relação que se estabelece entre ela, o cocar indígena e a pintura em casca de árvore.

Se os artistas aborígenes australianos ocupam uma ponta da relação entre o étnico e o contemporâneo no espectro global, a artista brasileira ocupa, seguramente, a outra ponta, caso endossemos o juízo de Madeleine Grynsztejn, atual diretora do Museum of Contemporary Art de Chicago. Com efeito, para ela Milhazes desperta interesse por ser "glocal", isto é alguém que ancora seu trabalho na linguagem internacional do modernismo e ao mesmo tempo finca suas raízes em seu tempo e sua cultura, misturando "figuração e abstração, e até mesmo decoração e artesanato, com um empreendimento altamente intelectual de abstração formal".

Talvez, então, a chave de seu sucesso seja precisamente a ambiguidade de sua pintura: é contemporânea étnica ou étnica contemporânea? Na dúvida, e por causa dela, o espectador tropical se pergunta: O que é ser um artista "glocal"? E em que medida este difere do artista global, tal como definido por Hans Belting, isto é aquele que ao mesmo tempo recusa inscrever-se tanto nos parâmetros da arte contemporânea ocidental quanto nos parâmetros de seu outro, a arte étnica? A questão se coloca porque, ao que parece, não estamos diante de uma negação e superação dessa dupla filiação mas, muito ao contrário, de uma reivindicação de pertencimento a ambas. Mas se isto for verdade, só aparentemente o caso de Milhazes significa uma refutação da tese de Belting sobre o advento da arte global; porque, muito ao contrário, o sucesso da artista brasileira reitera o paradoxo por ele apontado quando afirma que a arte global é "um problema não resolvido", na medida em que se configura como uma arte contemporânea que precisa incluir a representação de todos os "mundos contemporâneos", e portanto, abandonar seus parâmetros euro-americanos, e ao mesmo tempo, como a vitória de uma arte contemporânea que se faz pós-moderna, pós-histórica e pós-colonial para derrotar toda produção étnica e nivelar qualquer diferença cultural, num processo único de institucionalização. Assim, no "visualistic approach" de Die Tropen, o problema não resolvido da superação não-superação se manifesta quando Sampa, de Milhazes, é aproximado do cocar Rigbatsa e da pintura em casca de árvore da Papua-Nova Guiné porque todos eles visualizariam, antes de tudo, a questão da cor e do movimento. Considerar, porém, as três obras nessa chave, não implicaria em prolongar, e fazer inevitavelmente prevalecer o ponto de vista formal, ocidental e moderno da pintura? Do mesmo modo, aproximar o retrato e a máscara nesse mesmo registro não acabaria fatalmente privilegiando e universalizando as representações ocidentais de indivíduo, de pessoa e até mesmo de humanidade? Por sua vez, o animal documentado pela câmera fotográfica não imporia ao animal mítico da máscara a sua "verdadeira" animalidade "natural" como substrato último de seu modo de ser?

"...o mais importante é inventar o Brasil que nós queremos..."

Darcy Ribeiro

O ponto de partida do ensaio Como a arte global transforma a arte étnica (2009), de Laymert Garcia dos Santos, é a interseção entre o conceito de "arte global" (das relações entre arte contemporânea e arte étnica) de Hans Belting e Andrea Buddensieg, e sua institucionalização - particularmente no que tange aos museus e exposições na Europa nos últimos anos. A exposição Die Tropen ( Os Trópicos. Visões do Meio do Globo), com curadoria de Alfons Hug, Peter Junge e Viola Konig, realizada no Martin-Gropius Bau em Berlim no segundo semestre de 2008, é problematizada através de uma lente tropical, um "olhar brasileiro" impactado pelo estopim da crise financeira e as consequentes reconfigurações na geopolítica mundial. Garcia dos Santos apresentou este ensaio na Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, no Recife, em novembro de 2009, no âmbito do Seminário Internacional Depois do Muro: a geopolítica das artes, cuja primeira versão fora publicada na Alemanha no livro The Global Art World - Audiences, Markets and Museums, editado por Hans Belting e Andrea Buddensieg (ZKM/Hatje Cantz, 2009). Ambas as versões foram disponibilizadas no website do fórum internacional geopolítica da cultura e da tecnologia, com curadoria dele e de Gilberto Gil, realizado em novembro de 2010 na Cinemateca Brasileira em São Paulo com apoio do Ministério da Cultura. As instâncias de publicização deste ensaio, junto a seus principais argumentos, nos apresentam indícios importantes dos atuais diagramas e forças em jogo, i.e., do momento de transformação intensa e acelerada que estamos passando no país e no mundo, e suas implicações para a "crítica de arte" no Brasil, a partir da internacionalização das produções artísticas feitas aqui, assim como de sua capacidade de apontar nossas contradições e desafios internos.

Para o autor, a exposição Die Tropen se inscreve num movimento que começou com a exposição Magiciens de la Terre no Centre George Pompidou em 1986, passou pela abertura do Musée des Arts Premiers,Quai Brainly em Paris em 2006, no qual perdura pressupostos conceituais que reificam as convicções convencionais sobre o "ocidente" e seu "outro". O principal problema conceitual em Die Tropen estaria nos modos de aproximação entre arte étnica e arte contemporânea: ambas são consideradas a partir de um denominador comum inscrito no paradigma da linguagem da representação (um "visualistic approach") e do caráter atemporal da arte, e igualmente consideradas metáforas de uma natureza que lhes seria comum. Esses pressupostos, ao invés de serem tomados como dados, deveriam ser a própria problemática a ser tratada, caso efetivamente se quisesse confrontar as obras de modo produtivo e discutir as diferentes perspectivas sobre os Trópicos. Como assinala o antropólogo Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, somente o "homem ocidental" consideraria que temos uma natureza comum e múltiplas culturas; na perspectiva ameríndia, existem múltiplas naturezas e uma única cultura. A especificidade do olhar para as artes indígenas implica em não tomar como referência nenhuma definição de arte previamente dada, seja ela estética, interpretativa ou institucional. Como ressalta a antropóloga Els Lagrou, "o lugar que os objetos poderiam ocupar na escala valorativa instaurada pelo mercado das artes e pelos museus não, necessariamente, pertence ao universo das intenções e valores nativos que podem visar a objetivos muito diferentes dos ligados à conquista de visibilidade ou afirmação de identidade e 'autenticidade'".

O que nos interessa neste ensaio é atentar para a busca de novos modos de aproximação, para a urgência de se inventar e articular novas matrizes e entendimentos para a arte no/do Brasil: "o que deveria ser levado em conta é que a arte moderna e contemporânea brasileira nunca tentou levar a sério sua não relação com a arte étnica que era e ainda é produzida, porque ela nunca sequer se colocou a questão se os povos indígenas e tradicionais costumavam produzir arte e ainda continuam a fazê-lo". O autor aposta que "no âmbito do que Belting entende por arte global, o Brasil emerge como um lugar privilegiado para se acompanhar as transformações do que se entende por arte contemporânea e por arte étnica, e a fecundação, ou não, de uma pela outra".

Nas últimas três décadas, a pintura aborígene contemporânea na Austrália passou a ter boa aceitação no mercado ocidental e nas instituições museológicas, assim como manteve o diálogo com suas tradições ancestrais, acumulando várias camadas de significado. Esta expressão cultural congrega diversos agenciamentos e interesses, às vezes conflitantes, entre os diversos artistas, centros de artes, galeristas, museus, curadores e colecionadores. A antropóloga Ilana Seltzer Goldstein aponta o paradoxo de que o "mesmo país cuja política colonial foi extremamente racista e violenta dê tanto espaço às culturas aborígenes nos museus, crie políticas de fomento às artes indígenas". (E que este apoio público) "Talvez seja uma tentativa de resposta e compensação por este passado obscuro não tão distante. Ao mesmo tempo, encaixa-se perfeitamente no projeto nacional de construção de uma identidade própria para a Austrália, que a diferencie da Inglaterra ". E questiona por que no Brasil praticamente não existe reconhecimento das artes indígenas, e se seria possível e desejável uma política semelhante se desenvolver entre nós. Noutro sentido, nos países andinos é muito presente o debate sobre estética decolonial - como a proposta por Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, dentre outros - a partir das culturas tradicionais e ancestrais, como condição de crítica e contraposição às modernidades coloniais desde fins do século 15 até a globalização atual.

O discurso da "arte global" e sua institucionalização em museus e mercado são intrínsecos à matriz ocidental, ainda predominante mundialmente, mas desde 2008, com a crise financeira e novas configurações geopolíticas, ocorre uma crise desses paradigmas. Esta crise abre brechas para novas articulações e entendimentos, particularmente para o Brasil? Temos uma grande reunião de repertórios, vivências, observações, ao mesmo tempo em que existe a transformação em algo novo... Essas novas forças externas nos ajudam a rever ou reificam os paradoxos, confusões e deslizes semânticos no Brasil? Nosso modelo de desenvolvimentismo e de progresso a qualquer custo tem solapado as comunidades tradicionais e ancestrais e nossa natureza. É possível um discurso da arte brasileira capaz de formular os problemas e de explicitar as forças atuais em jogo? Que discursos estão presentes? Quais mecanismos estão operando? Quais aparatos críticos nós utilizamos? Que diagramas de alteridade são capazes de enfrentar o mercado? Como articular, aproximar outras matrizes? Como inverter as relações cognitivas?

Em maio de 2011, um jornal paulistano apresentou a primeira e única banda de rap indígena no Brasil, Brô MC's , do Mato Grosso do Sul. A banda nos ensina, com sua inversão cognitiva, que "esta possibilidade de coexistência e sobreposição de diferentes mundos que não se excluem mutuamente é a lição ainda a ser aprendida com a arte dos ameríndios", a arte como uma arte de construir mundos.

existe em si mesma, organizando o espaço".] Originalmente apresentado no Foro Internacional de Revistas de Arte Contemporáneo, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Cidade do México, 18 e 19 de novembro de 1999.
Nos últimos cinco anos, em minha prática de artista, tenho trabalhado com diagramas. Sobretudo desenvolvendo um tipo especial de diagrama, desenhado a partir dos pronomes 'EU' e 'VOCÊ', que combina linhas e palavras (com referências a tempo e espaço), permitindo trazer para o visível diferentes padrões de relacionamento - envolvendo afeto, atração, conexão, repulsão, etc. Os diagramas produzem um campo afetivo e indicam paisagens mentais, apresentando aspectos de processos de transformação: estabelecem conexões e desconexões entre sujeito e objeto, localizando a construção de identidade em um certo território que configuram. Traçar territórios é parte do processo, do mesmo modo que territórios podem dar origem a outros processos.

Tais diagramas corporificam possíveis estratégias narrativas que podem ser desdobradas a qualquer momento pelo espectador, dando origem a novas estórias/histórias que agora passam a incorporar o/a espectador/a ele/ela mesmo/a, convidado/a (de modo especial) a fazer parte do jogo narrativo. Em minha prática como artista, os diagramas aparecem como meio de tornar visíveis as ligações entre prática visual e campo discursivo: os diagramas não seguem teorias já escritas, mas são estruturas que se abrem para o lado de fora, posicionando-se como uma zona intermediária, membranosa, que querem ocupar. Trabalhar na linha de fronteira e torná-la permeável, tátil, poética - menos fronteiriça e mais uma zona quente e liminar, onde forças livres e disponíveis podem tanto carregá-lo de energia quanto dissolver seus planos pré-preparados. Ali as coisas se movem de modo errático.

Qualquer um que tenha experimentado trabalhar com palavras, imagens e objetos pode ver quão valiosas são as passagens que conectam campo visível e discurso. Manuseá-las (as passagens) possibilita que se construa um projeto de deslocamento entre ambas as matérias (arte e texto), descobrindo os signos de um estado de atenção que permite melhor entendimento acerca de como sentidos e coisas se entretecem e se relacionam entre si. No processo de descobrimento de como localizar-me neste lugar caótico e instável, vi-me na posição de desenvolver estratégias na direção da invenção de meios coletivos para intervenção em um circuito particular: aquele em que costumo atuar, no Brasil. Enquanto grupo (porém agregando também outros artistas), experimentamos diversos modos de estar juntos, planejando eventos onde pudéssemos confrontar nossos trabalhos - não somente entre nós, mas também com o que estava sendo produzido em outros lugares. Apresentações de slides, simpósios, palestras, discussões, encontros, etc., foram organizados com a intenção de descobrir e inventar tópicos e questões relacionados a nossas práticas enquanto artistas. Alguns anos depois de termos realizado tais atividades, fundamos a revista de arte item.

Porque escolher uma revista como forma de ação? É possível incorporar aí um programa interessante que atenda às expectativas dos artistas? Pode uma revista tornar visíveis certas demandas culturais no interior do circuito de arte? Item surgiu como parte de uma estratégia de criar um novo campo discursivo que pudesse articular um certo segmento da produção de arte contemporânea no Brasil, aquela que não vê o mercado como o principal objetivo do artista. Na medida em que o circuito (ou sistema) de arte brasileiro é extremamente frágil (de fato reproduz em sua estrutura muitas das dificuldades e arcaísmos da economia do país como um todo), usualmente os trabalhos de arte que ali circulam não compartilham nenhuma dimensão investigativa, para além de sua presença visual. Este parece ser um tipo de fator 'endêmico' em relação aos trabalhos de arte no Brasil: como em qualquer outro local, o mercado pode consumir o melhor da arte contemporânea, na intenção de integrar-se no cenário do mercado global da arte; mas isso é feito/processado sem que se tome cuidado com as 'camadas discursivas' geradas pelos trabalhos. É quase um lugar-comum considerar que a maioria dos críticos e escritores de arte brasileiros não assumem os riscos excessivos de se aproximar daqueles trabalhos de arte que não se acomodam dentro das expectativas já conhecidas; e os artistas se recusam a articular suas posições em palavras, deixando em aberto uma atenção em relação ao uso do texto como ferramenta para abrir perspectivas para seus projetos.

Obviamente, não desejo aqui criar a impressão de uma superfície monótona. Alguns críticos e artistas importantes desempenham um papel ativo em relação à arte contemporânea, cumprindo seus papéis na cena brasileira. Ainda assim, a maioria dos escritores de arte tem permanecido atada ao hábito de abordar o texto como ferramenta para somente reagir aos trabalhos de arte, ao invés de assumir uma possibilidade mais inventiva de compartilhar com eles algo da substância que permeia a região de fronteira imagem/texto. Quando assumem trabalhar apenas sob a perspectiva reativa, os escritores enfatizam seus papéis como juízes ou didatas, para os quais seus escritos presumivelmente irão estabelecer uma útil e prática parceria com os trabalhos de arte - considerando que estes necessitam de tradutores, com a autoridade (e habilidade) para falar em nome deles. Em termos gerais, os artistas não se importam com o que estes escritores reativos afirmam sobre seus trabalhos, mas sentem que pode ser importante serem mencionados aqui ou ali, nas páginas prestigiosas das revistas de arte ao redor do mundo. Tal é o círculo vicioso da escrita sobre arte: artistas fazem o trabalho; críticos comentam. Existe alguma essência natural pertencente às palavras, trabalhos de arte ou à percepção que poderia garantir que as coisas deveriam proceder assim? Ao reproduzir infinitamente essa estrutura, uma certa hierarquia é produzida: artistas na base, como produtores de imagens; críticos e curadores (e galeristas) no topo, como aqueles responsáveis por organizar a discussão sobre o sentido dos trabalhos. Podemos dizer, com certeza, que esta estrutura não preenche as necessidades da arte como um espaço aberto e experimental. É necessário buscar outro padrão de relacionamento entre textos e obras de arte, que nos faça acreditar que a escrita pode desempenhar um papel maravilhoso na expansão dos sentidos - se as palavras estiverem acopladas aos trabalhos de um modo especial e interessante.

De fato, não importa se os textos aparecem em momento posterior ou simultâneo em relação aos trabalhos. O importante é não cair na armadilha das cadeias de causa e efeito, que podem envolver o trabalho de arte em uma relacionamento linear, estranho ao seu funcionamento, forçando-o a abandonar seu potencial multiplicante, característico dos tempos atuais. O que realmente conta é a habilidade do texto em subverter o padrão de tempo tradicional (a cadeia passado-presente-futuro), interatuando com os trabalhos de modo a enfatizar sua atualidade e pertencimento ao presente: a combinação de texto prospectivo e trabalho de arte fabrica um agregado conceitual-sensorial que de fato opera como produção de real. Temos então um padrão valioso de espaço-tempo, repleto de sutilezas, que lança o leitor-espectador um passo adiante. Ela/ele entrará em um ambiente discursivo onde o processo de vivência dos trabalhos está entretecido com os conceitos trazidos pelo texto, de modo a ela/ele estar submetida/o a um tipo de dupla experiência, sensorial e conceitual: o trabalho de arte, em toda a sua materialidade, exercita plenamente a capacidade de funcionar como ponto de atração, um centro transitório que reordena tudo a sua volta; esta potência de atração é resultado do campo sensorial criado pelo trabalho, do padrão sensível de pensamento que se dá com a intervenção; assim, esse campo sensorial é inseparável da rede conceitual que o coloca em ação e que agora se vê forçada a reconfigurar suas conexões. Assim, o tipo de escrita que podemos chamar de prospectiva fabrica estrategicamente um sentido de presentidade/atualidade que designa e desenha a intervenção proposta.

É com esse propósito que irei me apropriar, aqui, de alguns trabalhos de arte produzidos recentemente no Brasil - no Rio de Janeiro, para ser mais preciso - que podem ajudar no apoio a meu argumento. O que irei dizer não pretende, obviamente, fechar a leitura das peças; as poucas linhas a serem trazidas aqui apontam apenas para a utilização das palavras de acordo com os propósitos deste texto - não procedo assim constrangido por eventalmente compartilhar de um forte senso de intimidade com esses trabalhos, que me permitiria posicionar seus padrões de impacto sensorial de acordo com a rede conceitual primeiramente tecida neste texto. Mas pelo fato de que todos os artistas que irei brevemente comentar têm também estado engajados, com suas obras, em projetos que ultrapassam as simples estratégias pessoais, isto é, têm trabalhado intensamente na construção de uma paisagem coletiva - que faz com que suas intervenções não sejam vistas no isolamento de puras conquistas individuais mas sim como parte de uma possível estratégia de modificação do circuito de arte e suas camadas discursivas. A revista item tornou-se uma forma concreta de ação somente porque temos sido capazes de imaginar as linhas diagramáticas que conectam diferentes artistas (é necessário forjar um sentido de comunidade) em torno de um projeto de intervenção no cenário corrente da arte brasileira. A necessidade de transformação não é uma vaga ambição, mas condição de sobrevivência.

Em 1996, Brígida Baltar cavou um abrigo, no tamanho de seu corpo, nas paredes do ateliê - localizado em sua casa. Ali, pôde experimentar-se; como em um auto-retrato expandido, criado em referência ao seu corpo físico. Esta peça era parte de uma série mais ampla de trabalhos, utilizando coisas encontradas na casa em que vive, algumas vezes coletadas e mantidas em grandes potes ou mesmo utilizadas em outros experimentos (materiais como poeira, tijolos, pedras, partes da estrutura da casa, etc.). Ao mesmo tempo, começou também a coletar elementos de seu próprio corpo ou ligados à história de seu corpo enquanto corporificação de identidade: lágrimas, sopro, imagens, roupas velhas, etc. O que me interessa nesse trabalho é a proposta de ocupar com seu próprio corpo a parede que limita a casa: ela constrói um lugar na linha de fronteira, sentindo as bordas enquanto espaço membranoso e tornando-o visível. Ali ela inevitavelmente se perde, ao mesmo tempo em que mostra ser impossível viver sem que se expandam as linhas que são continuamente desenhadas em torno. Ela enfatiza a importância de agir sobre esses limites, não quebrando as fronteiras de modo simples e ingênuo mas ocupando-as estrategicamente, transformando-as em um espaço espesso, tal qual membrana.

Eduardo Coimbra, com suas imagens e earthworks, tem se deslocado através de problemas semelhantes, no sentido de tornar as interfaces visíveis. Não é seu próprio corpo mas a instituição (museu ou galeria), como espaço envolvente, que é posta em questão através de suas ações. Trazer o lado de fora (terra) para dentro é uma bem conhecida estratégia da landart (e podemos recordar Robert Smithson e seus non-sites), mas Eduardo insere uma dimensão que incluí a imagem, ao posicionar na terra caixas de luz que mostram a paisagem que se conserva fora das paredes do Museu. Gostaria de tornar claro no trabalho seu esforço em conectar os lados de dentro de de fora, enfatizando a interface entre eles não como uma linha, mas enquanto espaço real e espesso a ser explorado.

Vejo a mesma questão na instalação Mergulho no Reflexo (1996), de João Modé, apesar dele carregar o problema em direção ao eu interior, ao espaço interno do corpo. Para esta instalação, o artista raspou todos os pelos de seu corpo (depois de deixá-los crescer nos quatro anos anteriores à exposição), dispondo-os na entrada de um labirinto, que se tornou um ritual de passagem para alcançar a sala principal - construiu uma estrutura de madeira, finalizada com a utilização de materiais apropriados da natureza, tais como cascas de árvore, por exemplo. A sala principal da instalação estava coberta de terra (no piso), e o artista agrupou ali uma pequena árvore, cipós e insetos. Não posso deixar de pensar nesse espaço como um experimento com natureza artificial, considerando o cubo branco da galeria como laboratório, um espaço asséptico e a salvo de seu lado de fora. Mas ao invés do espaço institucional frio, Modé está falando sobre colonizar a si próprio, plantando árvores dentro de seu próprio corpo, deixando insetos correrem sobre suas pernas e braços. Ele criou um espaço ritual de transformação, considerando a subjetividade contemporânea como um espaço amplo e vazio que necessita ser re-colonizado. Auto-colonização, construção de si.

O Puxador (1999), de Laura Lima, também estabelece preocupações com a relação entre espaço interior e exterior. Esta obra-performativa consistiu na ação de puxar a paisagem para o interior do espaço da galeria, por um homem nu - havia diversas cordas atadas ao seu corpo, amarradas a palmeiras do lado de fora. O trabalho "termina" quando a paisagem é finalmente trazida para dentro da galeria. Caso fosse uma artista do anos 70, Laura certamente realizaria ela mesma o esforço performativo do trabalho, experimentando com seu próprio corpo. Mas quando decide trabalhar com o corpo de outra pessoa, inventa uma performance que torna visível o processo de incorporação e corporificação: quer que testemunhemos de que modo a paisagem é transformada em símbolos orgânicos que correm em nossa mente-corpo - recuperando o processo de "metabolismo simbólico" de Lygia Clark. Se a paisagem é efetivamente trazida para a sala, é porque é transformada em imagens orgânicas, substâncias que circulam dentro de nós - apesar de (a paisagem) permanecer fisicamente invisível. Um dos efeitos desta peça é tornar visível o processo complexo de incorporação da informação, mostrando sobretudo o esforço físico envolvido nessa passagem.

O trabalho de Raul Mourão que gostaria de mencionar também envolve o lado de fora, o espaço das ruas. Raul produziu suas 5 pinturas (1999) a partir de sinais comumente utilizados nas ruas do Rio de Janeiro. Onde quer que exista uma área em obras na cidade, esta é demarcada por painéis horizontais de madeira, com fundo branco, demarcado por listas vermelhas em "V". Como indica o artista, a partir de agora todos aqueles que verem estes sinais nas ruas imediatamente os transformarão em pinturas: este é de fato um modo de integrar a arte no espaço público através de estampagem, isto é, através da percepção e memória. Mas o que também me chama a atenção aqui é o fato de que as 5 pinturas repousam no chão justapostas uma sobre a outra, de modo que apenas a primeira pode ser tocada com os olhos. As pinturas tornam-se um objeto, uma escultura que sinaliza um lugar dentro da galeria mas que de fato quer nos carregar para fora, para as ruas. O que constitui seu lugar dentro do cubo branco é o espaço secreto que se desdobra quando o espectador é capaz de ver somente a primeira pintura, as outras quatro permanecendo ocultas aos seus olhos. Não importa se elas são ou não iguais: um espaço secreto foi criado e algo deverá ser feito a esse respeito.

Marssares mantém sua câmera fotográfica no congelador. Certamente não para produzir imagens congeladas, mas com certeza para confrontar-nos com a imagem que registra um objeto em processo de desaparecimento, na medida em que o gelo derreterá por completo se a câmera não for escondida novamente de nossos olhos no interior do congelador. Obviamente, a imagem já foi emancipada da máquina, já está em seu exterior. Nossa mente é mais rápida que o mecanismo da câmera, e se a cada vez que apertamos o botão produzimos apenas uma imagem, quando confrontados com esta imagem particular produziremos milhares. Congelar a máquina parece ser uma estratégia para liberar nossas mentes de uma mecânica que consideramos já conhecida. Ou melhor, tornar-nos conscientes de que a mecânica que produz imagens na arte depende também de outro processo maquínico, notadamente da hibridização do corpo com certos objetos, de modo específico: deixar a mente-corpo ser invadida e pressionada pelas forças sensoriais-conceituais.

Gostaria de finalizar este texto apresentando dois tipos de veículos. Aqui, veículo indica uma estrutura que transporta a si mesma em conjunto com certos conceitos desenhados e projetados, formando um agregado que articula conteúdos discursivos e não-discursivos.

O primeiro veículo é o quiosque de Helmut Batista e Bia Junqueira: uma escultura em forma de banca de jornal (1999), construída para multiusos. Além de vender edições de arte, revistas, livros, etc., pode ser utilizada para encontros (espaço interno) e como tela de projeção - já que suas paredes são construídas com uma superfície semi-transparente que pode receber imagens de projetor de slides ou vídeo.

O segundo veículo está presente em uma imagem de 1994, do início de meu projeto Você gostaria de participar de um experiência artística?. Este projeto, ainda em desenvolvimento, consiste em convidar participantes a utilizar em casa, por um mês, um objeto de ferro pintado medindo 125 x 80 x 18 cm. Como se pode perceber, o objeto parece vazio, mas na realidade carrega diversos conceitos, que também podem ser utilizados. Localizado na linha de fronteira entre ser ou não um trabalho de arte, o objeto pretende produzir um processo de transformação, deflagrando palavras (entre as quais, comentários e críticas), ações e comportamentos, produzidos a partir de um nível intenso de vivência, hibridização e envolvimento por ele provocados (e não exclusivamente derivados de um processo analítico único e central).

Enquanto revista de arte, item se percebe como veículo, ferramenta para estratégias discursivas e não-discursivas.

Originalmente publicado na revista Trópico, em 3 de novembro de 2010.
" Uma história radicalmente condensada da vida pós-industrial

Quando foram apresentados, ele fez uma piada, esperando ser

apreciado. Ela riu extremamente forte, esperando ser apreciada.

Depois, cada um voltou para casa sozinho em seu carro, olhando

direto para a frente, com a mesma contração no rosto.

O homem que apresentou os dois não gostava muito de nenhum

deles, embora agisse como se gostasse, ansioso como estava para

conservar boas relações a todo momento. Nunca se sabe, afinal,

não é mesmo não é mesmo não é mesmo."

David Foster Wallace, Breves Entrevistas com Homens

Hediondos. Trad. José Rubens Siqueira, 2005 (1 a edição no

original em inglês, 1999)

"The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world

to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge

investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why

something will happen soon, maybe today."

Don DeLillo, Comsmopolis, 2003

A vida pós-industrial da primeira epígrafe-conto é o agora, o presente. É o mesmo presente difícil de encontrar, apalpar - o da segunda epígrafe - "porque está sendo ejetado do mundo para dar lugar ao futuro insistente do mercado descontrolado e de imenso potencial de investimentos. É por isso que algo está para acontecer a qualquer momento, talvez hoje mesmo".

A constatação de Vija Kinski, Gerente de Teoria (ChiefofTheory) da personagem central de Cosmopolis, o jovem e trilhardário consultor financeiro Eric Parcker, se revela a partir de uma tontura familiar. Ela afirma o esvaziamento do presente, ou sua carga de especulação sempre projetada para um futuro pretensiosamente previsível, mas aponta para as consequências desse exercício de pura ansiedade no hoje. Um loop perfeito, sem passado: o vídeo ou filme que pegamos pelo meio numa exposição de arte contemporânea não se mostra como uma perda da parte não vivida, mas enuncia o futuro do seu re-começo no instante em que se adentra a instalação.

Estatonturaconhecidanãonosabandonaenquantonavegamos pela 29 a Bienal de São Paulo. Aarquiteturaerrante da exposiçãonos é oferecidacomo um arquipélago com centenas de "ilhas" a seremvisitadas -trabalhosartísticos de indiscutívelqualidadeselecionados sob a rubrica da "arte e política", que exigem tempo, envolvimento e atenção para seremabsorvidos.

A linha narrativa de Cosmopolis marca a esquizofrenia do capital especulativo na aurora daquilo que veio a culminar na crise econômica mais severa da história que vemos hoje, a queda do iene, em 2000. Trata-se da navegação errática de Parcker pela ilha de Manhattan dentro de sua limusine altamente equipada com dispositivos de segurança e de bem-estar, durante um período de 12 horas de um dia qualquer de abril do primeiro ano do século 21, no intuito de conseguir um corte de cabelo. Entre gráficos de bolsas de valores e em constante movimento, o consultor assiste centenas de milhões de dólares escoarem na medida em que o iene despenca e afeta a economia no mundo todo; tem encontros sexuais com sua amante galerista; encara reuniões com vários membros de sua equipe; vê sua limusine danificada por um protesto anarquista contra a reunião do G8 e cinicamente regozija com a passeata que exibe o caixão de seu cantor de rap favorito.

No centro da ficção-científica blasé de DeLillo está um orquestrado desejo de profundidade por parte do autor e de suas personagens, conseguindo alcançar apenas uma superficialidade roteirizável que acompanha o ritmo da flutuação especulativa do capital imaterial e da especulação linguística. O livro apresenta uma economia radical de vírgulas (pausa, respiro, contemplação), e os pontos de interrogação (dúvidas, questionamentos) são substituídos por pontos finais, numa linguagem seca e rígida. O clímax da narrativa se resume ao personagem ter de conviver com o fato de que sua próstata é assimétrica, qualidade que partilha com seu assassino, o lunático BennoLevin, numa conclusão previsível e banhada a testosterona.

A metáfora que se lança em jogo é o esvaziamento do indivíduo de sua carga subjetiva para um corpo depositário de informação infinita, pois vemos a substituição na narrativa do livre arbítrio pela arbitrariedade. O deslocamento incerto, ou mobilidade, é condição paradigmática do livro, bem como o é a condição da vida pós-industrial neoliberal.

Em tempos que marcam um limbo de emergências (política, ecológica, psicossocial) e o desconforto pelo atropelamento constante do devir, há uma patológica explosão de paradigmas simultâneos contra os quais julgar nossa posição no mundo. Tudo se relativiza e se negocia no trânsito errático entre a herança do insistente "universal" (estado-nação) e o seu sinônimo daltônico (crise congênita do estado-nação), o "global". As bandeiras de "Apolítico" (2000), de Wilfredo Prieto, timidamente instaladas no exterior do pavilhão de Niemeyer, atestam a coreografia hereditária da verticalidade dos postes firmes e dos rituais oficiais rígidos de outrora. Na instalação do artista cubano, o "global" não se manifesta como uma ruptura com seu passado totalitário, bipolarizado e bélico, e sim como uma continuação lógica, mesmo que com menos definição e mais arbitrária, de seu irmão "universal" moderno.

As bandeiras estão hasteadas em preto e branco, desprovidas de cor que carimbariam diferenças, fronteiras e valores nacionais. Ao invés de aludir a uma arquitetura globalizada - marcada pelo desejo politicamente correto pela horizontalidade, pela igualdade e pela ideia de comunidade -, elas explicitam o estereótipo, ou seja, a desengonçada indefinição de códigos de diferenciações culturais, seguido da insegurança violenta frente à constante ameaça da homogeneização identitária ocidental.

Daltônicas, sem as cores que garantem a distinção entre as formas, as bandeiras da França pseudodemocrática de Sarkozy e da Itália fascista de Berlusconi são as mesmas. O internacional deu lugar ao "internacionalismo", já que o livre-arbítrio foi substituído pela arbitrariedade.

Sem querer abrir uma caixa de Pandora, dado o perfil heterogêneo do público globalizado da Bienal de São Paulo e (talvez) demandas institucionais menos heterogêneas, mas igualmente globais (lê-se "internacionais"), o vídeo comissionado Opus 666 do projeto Pixação SP é simultaneamente grosseiro e apaziguador, alentador e assistencialista, necessário e desprezível, justo e estúpido. Como resultado do excesso de agendas a serem cumpridas e de especulação de significações possíveis, o ato se neutraliza e se esvazia (não o ato da pixação em si, ou a suposta relevância daquilo que se convencionou chamar de "arte de rua", mas a escolha de apresentar essa documentação na mostra). Desmaterializa-se; torna-se arbitrário.

Em exposições de portes físico e orçamentário gigantescos como as bienais é difícil assegurar a autonomia da arte. Sobretudo quando, em artigos publicados no caderno de cultura dos principais jornais do país, o presidente da Fundação e membro do conselho equalizam a importância de um evento de arte contemporânea com a imagem de um "novo Brasil", em que a arte confere "riquezas e oportunidades", atua como um "termômetro da economia", "gerando progresso e benefício para todos", que "mais cedo do que tarde, mais empresas brasileiras descobrirão como arte é um excelente investimento financeiro e social" e que "[A] indústria cultural brasileira terá papel fundamental no nosso desempenho na Copa do Mundo de 2014 e nos Jogos Olímpicos de 2016, no Rio."

Evidentemente que a esfera econômica é um dos aspectos envolvidos na construção de uma Bienal, mas o problema é quando ela se torna um dos paradigmas de fruição das obras. O excesso como tomada conceitual da carga política contida na arte se traduz no pavilhão como a lógica corrente da hiper-expressão do capital e da hiper-estimulação da atenção e dos sentidos, resultando no atrofiamento da habilidade de interpretar criticamente o discurso proposto. Essa explosão de símbolos na presente edição - arte e política, arte e mercado, arte e investimento, intercambiantes entre si - nos remete justamente à arquitetura do loop perfeito: o "Brasil país do futuro", slogan vociferado desde um país ditatorial, é o hoje - o presente difícil de encontrar e de apalpar, cujo passado de violência, revolução e contracultura é sequestrado pela atualidade e transformado em valor de marketing na corrida pelas eleições.

Static (2009), do britânico Steve McQueen ilustra com brilhantismo o processo da alienação contemporânea. Com uma câmera 35mm, o artista sobrevoa em um helicóptero a Estátua da Liberdade, revelando detalhes inéditos do monumento. O ritmo circular, repetitivo e estonteante do percurso aéreo insiste na exposição de todos os pontos de vista possíveis da estátua, aludindo aos diferentes usos desse símbolo e desse signo, que serviram simultaneamente de paradigmas para movimentos de subversão, de controle ideológico e de potencial de consumo. Hipnotizados pelo som do motor do helicóptero e pelo excesso de imagens de sua superfície, nos damos conta de que a liberdade sofreu um processo de despolitização e foi esvaziada de seu conteúdo semântico. Ela vira apenas um logo, um substantivo vazio de significação, estático.

Tal como a liberdade, o termo "política" vem sendo tão abundantemente proliferado com distintas cargas ideológicas, frequentemente com paradigmas mutuamente excludentes - política da arte, política partidária, política do sujeito, política global, política do capital - em um processo de despolitização, que clamar seu uso hoje sem assumir pessoalmente as rédeas de seu significado não só é difícil, como perigoso.

O curador-colaborador convidado para compor o time curatorial da 29 a Bienal, SaratMaharaj, expôs em sua apresentação no Teatro de Arena/CAPACETE

O programa do CAPACETE no Teatro de Arena, com sua escala arquitetônica reduzida em oposição à sua escala histórica, promoveu encontros entre artistas, teóricos, músicos, arquitetos e acadêmicos de toda parte.

Com microfone, kibe, ou um copo de cerveja na mão, agenciou um estado de vizinhança entre indivíduos, instituições, bairros. Entre. Entre sujeitos, coisas e "Entre, fique à vontade". Nas palavras de Marta Bogea - arquiteta responsável pela tradução das questões curatoriais que lhe foram pautadas em expografia da presente edição do maior evento de arte contemporânea no país - um vizinho em ativo convívio, que não somente reitera, mas que estranha seu próprio anfitrião.

Lembro-me no dia da abertura antecipada da Bienal, logo após a apresentação lotada do artista albanês Anri Sala, no dia 10 de março: estávamos todos no bar em frente ao teatro (um epicentro de vértices formando uma espécie de triângulo isósceles; situação geográfica em perfeita consonância com a intenção do CAPACETE de promover encontros dos mais diversos, comuns, no tecido da cidade). O bar, que hoje está sendo reformado para se tornar uma agência do Banco do Brasil, acomodava imigrantes nigerianos, a elite intelectual paulistana e de outras capacidades, artistas e curadores nacionais e internacionais, putas e garçons. Em dado momento - como dita a tradição nesta cidade - o diretor do programa foi abordado na eminência da estratificação do grupo para que fossem jantar num lugar "mais apropriado para os convidados VIPS e internacionais". A resposta veio pronta e imediata: "Mas nem todos presentes podem pagar 100 paus por um jantar...vamos aqui mesmo no restaurante da Praça Roosevelt que deu a todos um voucher com desconto de 50%. E olhe para os artistas, para as pessoas: estão todos felizes!". Estávamos felizes, e isso bastava. Qualquer baliza que ultrapassasse o paradigma da troca horizontal e fácil, do inusitado e do bem-estar comum entre todos os presentes - não-importasse-quem - era naturalmente alienígena àquela situação. O grande lance é o encontro, o contato, a conversa. Sem hierarquias; ou com elas, para aqueles que escolhessem adotá-las numa escala pessoal, contanto que fosse naquele lugar. Tudo bem. Somos só seres-humanos, recortados e limitados; ambiciosos para o bem ou para o mal (quando é que conseguiremos sair do binário católico-digital, ex-dicotomia, ex-dialética? A matemática, há milênios, nos mostra o padrão do infinito, a curva do π, apenas o provável da probabilidade quântica, o caos, mas, no entanto, nas humanidades, ainda adotamos a "arte e política", "a riqueza e a oportunidade", a direita e a esquerda, o passado e o futuro...e o presente? O presente, acredito, está na escala pontual e diminuta das conversas no café da manhã na Casa da Denise; na fazenda dos meninos; no sabático; no assistir canais de TV aberta; na busca por um coco gelado no Parque do Ibirapuera e, de repente, perceber que a 29 a Bienal está em cartaz, adentrá-la e, ignorantes de sua proposta curatorial, percorrê-la sem um objetivo definido,apenas senti-la, gozá-la, sem ter a demanda de olhá-la com uma defesa crítica para depois cumprir o dever de escrever um texto a seu respeito...).

Assim, não é com honra, pois - como diz meu amigo, também amigo da minha amiga que me pediu o texto acima - a honra sempre carrega um resquício de poder, e portanto pode ser imerecida; é com Alegria que em nome do CAPACETE, agradeço a Agnaldo Farias, Moacir dos Anjos e a toda a equipe curatorial, editorial e de produção da 29 a Bienal de São Paulo, e sobretudo à administração do Teatro de Arena, pela oportunidade de poder ter gerado entendimentos, aproximações, constrangimentos, faíscas, lançamentos, debates, performances, tédios e amizades nesse percurso entre erros, acertos e acertos. A Alegria é, por definição, sempre política.

uma certa preocupação com o verso-título da mostra retirado do poema moderno de Jorge de Lima, "Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar". Segundo Maharaj, a tradução para o inglês por sinônimos mais próximos, arriscaria um ato sexista, dado que a palavra "homem", traduzida para "man" excluiria da navegação mulheres, homossexuais e outras ditas minorias. Optou-se, portanto, pela versão "Thereisalways a cupofseatosail in", que, percorrendo as curvas amorfas e sem objetivo preciso além do lucro a qualquer custo da arquitetura geopolítica global, boomerangueia para o português como "Há sempre um copo de mar para se navegar". Para não correr o risco de descumprir uma agenda politicamente correta de um sistema democrático (sic) capitalista, que se intitulou teleologicamente o único possível, matou-se o sujeito. O sujeito da sentença original é excludente e o da sentença traduzida é inexistente. E sem quorum ou sem sujeitos, não há qualquer tipo de política.

"Oh, shit, I'mdead", diz Parcker poucos minutos antes de Levin puxar o gatilho.
Referências
David Foster Wallace, Breves Entrevistas com Homens Hediondos. Trad. José Rubens Siqueira (SP: Companhia das Letras, 2005)

Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (NY: Scribner, 2003)

Franco Bardi (Bifo), The Pathologies of Hyper-Expression. Trad. De ArannaBove (2007). http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1007/bifo/en#redir

Stuart Hall, "Democracy, Globalization and Difference". In Documenta 11: Platform_1 DemocracyUnrealised(Kassel:HatjeCantz Publisher, 2002)

"IntelligenceAgency", SylvéreLotringer em entrevista com Nina Power. Frieze Magazine, nº 125, Setembro 2009. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/intelligence_agency/

Heitor Martins, "A importância da Bienal de SP para o Brasil". Folha de São Paulo, publicado em 11-07-2010.

Nizan Guanaes, "O termômetro da Bienal de São Paulo". Folha de São Paulo, publicado 24-08-2010, no caderno Mercado.

Roland Barthes, Aula (São Paulo: Cultrix, 7 a. Ed. 1996).

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EDITORIAL A ideia de uma crise no exercício da crítica de arte ronda o imaginário, as entrelinhas e as manchetes. Alimentando acusações e posicionamentos defensivos, tal "falência da crítica" estaria evidente nos mais diversos âmbitos e teria, como um de seus inequívocos indícios, a rarefação do debate crítico.

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A virada social: colaboração e seus desgostos_Claire Bishop

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A virada social: colaboração e seus desgostos_Claire Bishop

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A virada social: colaboração e seus desgostos

Claire Bishop

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Direitos autorais 2021 Claire Bishop

facebook.com/revistaconcinnitas

concinni@gmail.com

ISSN 1981-9897

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Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art_Anthony Gardner, Charles Green

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Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art_Anthony Gardner, Charles Green

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The Manifesta decade: debates on contemporary art exhibitions and biennials in post-wall Europe

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The Manifesta decade: debates on contemporary art exhibitions and biennials in post-wall Europe

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The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel DuchampElena Filipovic

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The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel DuchampElena Filipovic

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"Quanto mais produzimos como sociedade, mais ficamos sobrecarregados e mais valiosa se torna a curadoria"

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"Quanto mais produzimos como sociedade, mais ficamos sobrecarregados e mais valiosa se torna a curadoria"

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Michael Bhaskar, Curadoria: o poder da seleção no mundo do excesso

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Issue 09
Eds. Marianne Eigenheer, Barnaby Drabble and Dorothee Richter

Curating critique

The reader presents a cross-section of the voices that populate the ongoing debate about, on the one hand, how and in what terms curating functions as a critical cultural practice, and on the other, what methodologies and histories exist with which we can critically analyse curatorial work today. This collection of essays was first published in 2007 by Revolver, in Frankfurt am Main and ICE, Institute for Curatorship and Education, Edinburgh College of Art as the first ICE Reader.

The Reader was quickly sold-out and it is in the spirit of wishing to make the valuable contributions within available to a broader public that we are reissuing the entire book as an issue of the on-curating journal. The Book was conceived of by its guest-editors Barnaby Drabble, curator and lecturer ECAV and Dorothee Richter, curator and head of Postgraduate Program in Curating, Institute Cultural Studies of the Arts, Departement Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts, and commissioned and edited by Marianne Eigenheer, director of the Institute for Curatorship and Education at Edinburgh College of Art and editor of the ICE series. We are very grateful to all authors and contributors for their permission to re-publish, and to all supporters of the original publication.

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The reader presents a cross-section of the voices that populate the ongoing debate about, on the one hand, how and in what terms curating functions as a critical cultural practice, and on the other, what methodologies and histories exist with which we can critically analyse curatorial work today. Th…

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Issue 24 / December 2014

After the turn: art education beyond the museum

Michael Birchall & Philipp Sack

Editorial

Artwork by Dan Perjovschi

Sponsor, 2005

Vagabond Reviews

More Bite in the Real World: Usership in Arts-Based Research Practice

Artwork by Dan Perjovschi

Press Is Gone, 1999

Megan Johnston

Slow Curating: Re-thinking and Extending Socially Engaged Art in the Context of Northern Ireland

Artwork by Dan Perjovschi

Art You Can Buy This, 2014

Lena Seik

"What does it have to do with me?"  The Learning Museum, or How the Principle of Aesthetic Research Makes Cultural Education More Accessible

Artwork by Dan Perjovschi

Artist, 2008

Amanda Cachia

Disability, Curating, and the Educational Turn: The Contemporary Condition of Access in the Museum

Artwork by Dan Perjovschi

Artist Citizen, 2008

WochenKlausur

Lets Talk About Another Concept

Artwork by Dan Perjovschi

Citizen—Consumer, 2008

Yet Chor Sunshine Wong

Building, Dismantling: Community Orientations and Counterpublic Art in Hong Kong

Imprint

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It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for. Curators also court collectors, sponsors, and museum trustees, entertain corporate executives, and collaborate with the press, politicians, and government bureaucrats; in other words, they act as intermediaries between producers of art and the power structure of our society.

A press release for a recent conference on curatorial practice (at which I originally presented this paper) portrayed the figure of the curator as a knowledgeable and transparent agent moving between cultures and disciplines-a cultural producer par excellence. Furthermore, it seemed to suggest that art has become a subgenre of "the Curatorial":

The conference "Cultures of the Curatorial" aims at positioning the Curatorial-a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions-within a transdisciplinary and transcultural context and exploring it as a genuine method of generating, mediating and reflecting experience and knowledge. . . . Between art and science forms of practice, techniques, formats and aesthetics have emerged which can be subsumed under the notion of the "Curatorial"-not dissimilar to the functions of the concepts of the filmic or the literary.

The necessity of going "beyond the making of exhibitions" should not become a justification for the work of curators to supersede the work of artists, nor a reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts. Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.

1. Overreaching

Curatorial practice is predicated upon the existence of artistic production and has a supporting role in its activity. While artists may well produce art in the absence of curators, if no art is being produced, curators of contemporary art, at least, are out of a job. For this reason, attempts to curatorially "produce" art and artists by the simple expedient of including them in a show often result in little more than a curatorial embarrassment, as in the famous case of Roger Buergel's inclusion of celebrity chef Ferran Adrià in the last Documenta.], who, in my view, conceives of the political space as something merely festive and communal." Jennifer Allen, "MACBA Director Takes On Culture and Cooking," Artforum, → (accessed April 25, 2010).] While Adrià may indeed be a genius as a chef, his talent does not automatically turn his cooking into a new form of art, and neither did Buergel's framing of it. As Buergel said shortly before the opening of the show:

I have invited Ferran Adrià because he has succeeded in generating his own aesthetic which has become something very influential within the international scene. This is what I am interested in and not whether people consider it to be art or not. It is important to say that artistic intelligence doesn't manifest itself in a particular medium, that art doesn't have to be identified simply with photography, sculpture and painting etc., or with cooking in general; however, under certain conditions, it can become art.

All true up to a point, but what is that point? What are these "certain circumstances" that Buergel alludes to, under which cooking can come to be considered art? Part of the reason why the transformation of cooking into art did not take place at Documenta is that Adrià's cooking was not already anchored in the stream of commodities and careers constituted by the art system; in this regard it is interesting to note in comparison that Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks and is still recognized as an artist, though in reality he is only an average cook. The extraordinary aspect of his cooking is not its quality as cooking, but rather its presentation by Tiravanija himself as an artist who cooks. It is important to distinguish between the artistic decision to include an activity within an artwork and the curatorial power to designate something as art or like art through its inclusion in an exhibition.

Another example of how curatorial power can be distinguished from artistic authorship by its legislative authority over what takes place within the space of art could be seen in the last São Paulo Biennial. Whereas, in a kind of grand authorial gesture meant as a comment on the crisis of biennials, the curators first announced that the entire biennial would be devoid of art, the concept later changed, presumably when this gesture was found to discourage professional visitors from attending. The void became merely partial: only the second floor of Oscar Niemeyer's biennial building was to remain empty, while the ground floor became a "public square," "opening itself up as the ágora in the tradition of the Greek polis, a space for meetings, confrontations, frictions." However, when a group of local graffiti artists decided to intervene and tag the second floor, the curators reacted in a punitive, institutional fashion by having one of them arrested and then testifying against her in court, leading to her being jailed with common criminals for nearly two months and eventually sentenced to four years' probation.

This incident again brings to mind the work of Tiravanija, who also encouraged indeterminate, open spaces. At an opening of one of his early exhibitions in New York in the early 1990s, a belligerent visitor picked up some of the raw eggs Tiravanija was intending to cook with, and proceeded to smash them against the gallery's walls. But in this situation, no one was punished, or even asked to stop and leave. This negative action was allowed to run its course, just as any other activity in the space of Tiravanija's artwork, and this person eventually stopped and left the gallery.

Yet another example of such a tendency is the "Curating Degree Zero Archive," a traveling exhibition of "curatorial research" designed as a kind of artistic installation. Conceived by curators, the exhibition circulates through a network of public art institutions largely run by curators. The issue is not whether curators should have archives or open them to others, or to what degree this is interesting or not; rather, the question concerns whether the people in charge of administering exhibitions of art should be using the spaces and funding available for art to exhibit their own reading lists, references, and sources as a kind of artwork. Even more ludicrous is the fact that the dissolution of the self-contained (autonomous) artwork is cited as a justification for supplanting the work of artists in the museum altogether, as shown on the website of this curatorial project:

Archives have become an increasingly common practice in the art world since the 1960s. On the one hand, there are archives founded by artists or collectors; on the other, a more recent development, there are those founded by curators, who sought to make their collections of materials accessible and make their selection criteria public. That desire may have arisen from the dissolution of the notion of the self-contained artwork, which has been eclipsed by a contingent art object that makes a new form of cultural memory necessary and always contains a note of protest and a critique of museum practices.

2. The Job

Curatorial work is a profession, and people working in the field are not free agents but are rather employed to perform a task on behalf of an institution or a client. It's a job, both for those affiliated with institutions and for so-called independent curators. With the job come institutional power, a degree of security, and a mandate for a certain range of activity, which may involve a certain sense of institutional authorship, but emphatically, to my mind, does not include artistic claim to the artwork on which this activity is predicated.

While some artists occasionally do work as curators, it's important to acknowledge that the relationship between artists and curators is structurally somewhat like the relationship between workforce and management: like the workers, most artists suspect that their "supervisors," the curators, do not really understand the art, that they are controlling, egocentric, and ignorant, and are mismanaging the (art) factory and mistreating the producers (something like the scene from Godard's sausage factory in Tout va bien). Yet there is real resentment out there, not very different from the feelings artists harbored towards art critics in the 1960s and '70s. Many artists-from extremely established artists to younger practitioners new to the field of art-feel that curatorial power and arrogance are out of control.

For artists, precarious working conditions have been a reality for most of the history of modern and contemporary art. Artists have never benefitted from the kind of organization that many Fordist factory workers or other unionized laborers managed to achieve, and whose improved wages, hours, and working conditions improved the situation even in many non-unionized fields. Artists, in their capacity as artists, have always worked as independent producers, mostly without stipends, salaries, pensions, unemployment protection, or contracts.

Naturally there have been exceptions, such as the artists' union in the USSR. However, it's enough to read the letters of Rodchenko to realize that the union was more of a problem than a solution: it was an instrument of a totalitarian state, the ideology of which by that time excluded Rodchenko's type of production. Consequently, he was unable to receive a pension and died in poverty. Meanwhile, at the center of the so-called "free world," Mondrian also died in poverty in New York. Neither ideological structure provided much security for even the most accomplished artists.

Before we attribute the rise in popularity or social relevance of curators since the 1990s to larger ideological, geopolitical, or economic shifts such as that from Fordism to Post-Fordism, let's again consider the institution of art: it seems to me that this increase in social significance came partly from the declining power of art criticism, with curators assuming the agency of the critic in addition to their executive power in the museum. It may be argued that art critics did deserve to be marginalized for having vastly overreached at a certain point in the 1960s, when it seemed more culturally significant for a certain art critic such as Clement Greenberg to write about a work of art than for that work to have been made in the first place. But imagine the frustration of the artist who believes herself to be liberated from the tyranny of the critic only to discover that the situation has changed: rather than two competing powers-the critic and the curator, who could be played against each other-there is now only a single totalizing figure that she cannot bypass!

Furthermore, are we sure that this curatorial gain does not bring a correspondingly diminished status for the artist? The nightmare scenario for artists is that the supervisors bypass the workers altogether and begin producing art themselves, or automate the process of art production to render artists redundant. For owners of the culture factory-whether state or privately owned-it would be rather convenient if artists, who are a historically disobedient group, could be replaced with a disciplined contingent trained to obey authority, and production costs slashed through the elimination of a large part of the labor force. In such a scenario the economic gain would be enormous, entailing the replacement of a group that holds the rights to their own production with one comprised of salaried employees.

3. Curator as Producer

Last year I was invited to speak at a conference in Philadelphia on "curatorial activism." One of the participants spoke about her salaried directorship of a New York art institution as an activist practice. When I pointed out that people who are paid to go to a demonstration are not activists, but essentially hired bodies, the audience became visibly uncomfortable. But my point was less about money than why it is not enough these days to take on a challenging job, do it well, with real dedication and engagement, and take pride in that, without trying to upgrade its status by presenting it as activism, cultural production, or the production of art.

In fact, the debate with regard to the boundary between curatorial practice and artistic production is one that curators are engaging in among themselves, as Michelle White makes clear in a recent conversation with fellow curator Nato Thompson:

I also think that the term cultural producer, aside from the particular conditions of our moment, is a healthier or more honest way to articulate the contemporary role of the curator. It acknowledges the complexity of the collaboration that has to happen when something like an exhibition is organized or a project is carried out, which involves, as you said, a much more complex institutional web of financial as well as physical logistics from the relationship of collectors, patrons, boards of trustees to the possibilities of display space. It is certainly beyond the simple curator/artist dichotomy. But at the same time, in working on site-specific projects or exhibitions with living artists where collaboration is essential to produce meaning, I have found myself questioning the boundaries of my involvement in the aesthetic and conceptual production. So, I wonder, are there risks in assuming this more egalitarian position as producer?

To respond to this question: yes, there are big risks for artists. As an artist, how do you exactly say no to the curator who invited you to participate in a show, but seems to want to credit herself as a collaborator or co-author, when you risk not being invited the next time? While perhaps politically and socially well-meaning, this type of approach runs the risk of making an unsolicited claim of co-authoring artists' works commissioned by the curator. I really do not think that many artists feel that collaboration with a curator is essential to produce meaning. To my mind, this type of claim would be an extremely unwelcome and unwarranted intrusion, particularly if one keeps in mind that the figure claiming this share of authorship is not some underpaid art installer or intern researcher, but someone with the power to include, commission, or exclude artworks.

Similarly, it seems to me that we should also be very careful to avoid assigning any kind of meta-artistic capacity to curatorial practice. While steps taken in this direction have often been made with good intentions, invoking the expansion of a more general category of "cultural practice," they nevertheless carry with them the danger of lending credibility to something like a potential colonization of artistic practice by academia and a new class of cultural managers. If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist's capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.

If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use-rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the "freedom of art."

I suspect that it's not coincidental that the rise of the "independent curator" has taken place alongside a pattern of increasing privatization over the past couple of decades in the cultural field. Curators and institutions of art, whose authority is in part derived from representing public interests and being responsible to the public, are increasingly becoming private agents guided largely by self-interest. For this reason they have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics, while still retaining a certain claim to objectivity in their evaluation of art and in their obligation to public address.

It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled-and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment-exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics-through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth-rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art's only possible, ultimate destination.

4. Artist as Curator

On the other hand, there is quite a history of artists making use of certain aspects of curatorial and organizational work in their practice by assuming the role of curator. At times this has been a response to the inadequacy of existing institutions, their hostility to artists, or their total absence-prompting the creation of many of the artist-run spaces of the 1970s-or as a response to a particular emergency, as with ACT UP and Gran Fury. As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler's If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer-a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.

Likewise, what passed largely unnoticed in Paul Chan's production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was Chan's peculiar positioning of the artist in relation to the work: he did not write the play, direct it, or act in it. The set was essentially a city street. Chan's artistic involvement consisted largely of spending many months teaching as a volunteer in a local college, building close relationships with local community groups and grassroots organizations-in other words, creating the conditions necessary for the production and reception of the play, while ensuring that part of the money raised for the project would go to local needs other than culture.

I feel that whereas artists' engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of art serves to open up the space of art and grant it increased agency, curatorial and institutional attempts to recontextualize their own activities as artistic-or generalize art into a form of cultural production-has the opposite effect: they shrink the space of art and reduce the agency of artists.

An artist can aspire to a certain sovereignty, which today implies that in addition to producing art, one also has to produce the conditions that enable such production, its channels of circulation. Sometimes the production of these conditions can become so critical to the production of work that it assumes the shape of the work itself. This should not be confused with the job curators have and the work they do. As an artist, I would not attempt to propose a solution for curators; they themselves need to come up with ways of thinking and working that do not undercut the sovereignty of artists.

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Art Without Artists? - Journal #16 May 2010 - e-flux

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It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for.

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Museum curators are misunderstood. People don't know what a curator does, and they like to talk about curating in all sorts of ways that anger and frustrate the museum world.

Approximately half of all adults in the UK do not visit museums.[efn_note] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/culture-and-community/culture-and-heritage/adults-visiting-museums-and-galleries/latest#main-facts-and-figures[/efn_note] Those who do visit at least once a year are unlikely to meet a curator (although they will meet many other people vital to running a museum service). Most people are unlikely to know a curator personally, unless they are themselves a creative and cultural worker (The Panic! report showed that 'respondents were most likely to know other cultural and creative workers...In contrast, they tended to be less likely to know people working in more traditional 'working-class' occupations.'). [efn_note]Brook,Orian. Culture is bad for you (p. 78). Manchester University Press. Kindle Edition.[/efn_note]

So how is the average person on the street to understand who curators are and what they do if they never meet them in real life? They can only go by what they see on TV, in the movies or in the books they read. How are curators portrayed in popular culture and how does this measure up with the reality of the sector?

I conducted an unscientific survey of pop culture curators, based on the responses to a question I posed on Twitter about curatorial representation.

What curator characters are there in pop culture? I can think of Charlotte in SATC, Ross (kind of?) on Friends, Marnie's half-arsed attempt at a gallery career on Girls before she pivots to singing (lol). There must be more.

- Kathleen Lawther (@kathleenlawther) September 13, 2020

I ended up with a list of curator and curator-adjacent characters to work with. I had not seen/read all of the source material, nor was I prepared to do so for the sake of a blog post/my own amusement, so I read wiki summaries of the texts that I wasn't familiar with, and began sorting my data.

But are they actually a curator?

The first thing I wanted to analyse was whether the characters met my definition of being an 'actual' curator. My criteria for this was not particularly stringent - do they appear to work in a museum or gallery with responsibility for a collection of objects? I also wanted to differentiate between those who were clearly not a curator or any thing like it, and characters who had comparable roles in GLAM institutions but were not curators. I also separated out museum directors/owners, cos that's a whole different ball game. The fact that there is a lot of variation in this list crowdsourced from my twitter followers (who are mostly 'museum people') shows that one thing is certain - no one can agree on what a curator actually is.

If not, what are they?

Of those categories, its possible to break each segment down further. Why did I conclude that a whopping 20% of the sample were absolutely not curators? In some cases, they worked with artefacts, but not in museum setting (archaeologists) or they managed some kind of attraction that could not strictly be called a museum. The biggest segment of non-curators have what I have called an 'interchangeable arts career', where the character needed to be seen to do something creative, artsy and either respectable or daringly bohemian depending on the vehicle. Often they will be working in an art gallery in one instalment and pursuing a career in music or acting the next. These types of characters, usually female, are also likely to appear in romcoms and give up their careers after marriage.

What are the curator adjacent roles?

An accompaniment to the complaint that 'no one knows what curators actually do' is the refrain that no one knows that 'there are other jobs in museums, actually, we're not all curators!'. Fortunately it seems that the world of pop culture does know this, and a range of other GLAM roles are represented in my sample. In addition to authentic museum jobs like conservator, registrar and learning and engagement specialist, I've included in these group 'jobs' like art dealer and gallery owner which function within the world of the film or show to illustrate that the character is rich in economic, social and cultural capital.

What about the actual curators?

So who are the real museum curators represented in pop culture? How can we categorise them? The following graph shows some distinct types I observed. The largest is also the most generic - a fairly traditional museum curator stereotype. The next biggest is art curator which I have distinguished because it signifies something different - glamour, power, the avant garde, while museum curator characters are all stuffiness, dogma, and tweed.

I've included some GLAM generalists here, which is a bit like interchangeable arts career, but with an emphasis on history and academia. These characters flit between being librarians, archivists and curators; like the generic museum curator they tend towards tweed.

Curators dealing with dinosaurs are well represented. One might think this is because dinosaurs are an exciting subject for entertainment, but none of the Palaeontology curators appear in big action films. Rather they are 'nice guys' including Ross Gellar in Friends and Cary Grant's character in Bringing up Baby, so I've dubbed them Dino guys.

Another trope that only appears once on my actual curators list is none the less too on the nose to ignore: the Sad Little Man. Why would a curator in a British sitcom be represented as an introspective, nerdy man who tries to cling on to his role running the 'most tedious museum in the world' despite the fact it has no visitors? I couldn't possibly comment. You would have to ask Steve Coogan. Of course that was the 1990s and things are very different now...

What are demographics of curators in pop culture?

With this sample its possible to analyse the demographic of curator characters, as well as what their representation tells us about how the wider world sees curators. How does the diversity of curators in pop culture[efn_note]For the rest of the post I am using the whole sample of 65 characters for my analysis, since they were all nominated as 'curators' even if, as we have seen, that's an ambiguous term.[/efn_note] measure up to the real museum workforce[efn_note]Data from Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case: A Data Report, 2018-19 https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/equality-diversity-and-creative-case-data-report-2018-19[/efn_note]?

Gender

Swipe to compare the gender identities of curators in pop culture with UK museum data

The first thing to say about gender is that the real life data has more categories - none of the pop culture sources featured non binary curator characters. This is not surprising seeing as representation of gender diversity in the media remains poor. ACE has only recently (2016/17) started collecting data on non binary gender identities, which is reflected in the chart. In this sense we can say that yes, museum curators are slightly more gender diverse in real life than in pop culture. Between male and female gender identities, there are slightly more female curators depicted than male, which rings true with the ACE data.

Ethnicity

Swipe to compare the ethnicities of curators in pop culture with UK museum data

As with gender, there are a few caveats to the data on the ethnicity of curators. Obviously I cannot find out how a fictional character would self-identify, so I have noted the ethnicity of the pop curators as I perceive it based on their presentation or description. I have used the same terminology as ACE where applicable to allow for comparison. There was only one non-human curator on my list, Animal Crossing's Blathers. I haven't played the game so I have based my analysis of him entirely on Laura Humphreys' investigative journalism. Although he's an owl, he reads White in his characterisation and history of problematic collecting. Still I have counted him as N/A to err on the side of caution. (Side note/side eye emoji: ACE has two categories for White but only one for all other ethnicities).

Representation of curators is overwhelmingly White. As with gender, its worth noting that pop culture representations are not diverse, whatever profession is being portrayed, so it is not surprising that most of the characters are white. It's also worth noting that the ACE data is for all staff across NPO museums, which includes roles like front of house and security which are known to be more diverse. So while it seems like real life curators are more diverse than in the movies, this should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of the non-white curators in the sample, there was only one Black character, the best friend of the protagonist in The Devil Wears Prada. This is worth mentioning because the character is an example of the Black best friend trope; the only Black curator visible in pop culture is a problematic cliché, rather than a well-rounded character.

Are Curators Goodies or Baddies?

It should come as no surprise then that the vast majority of representations of curators are White, and a slight majority are female. What I really wanted to know is are curators seen as heroes or villains?

I concluded that within the world of their characters, 48% of curators are goodies. If you include antiheroes (who I would argue the audience is supposed to root for even if they are not 'good') and men who you are meant to like and want to get the girl but are actually total creeps (Hello Ross Gellar my old Friend, and that one guy from Love Actually), then sympathetic depictions of curators clock in at 57%.

The large percentage of 'unclear' reflects that either a) I haven't consumed the source material and couldn't tell from the wiki plot summary, b) the curator character has a minor role that doesn't influence the action either positively or negatively, or c) life is complex and no one is definitively either a goody or a baddy.

Having said that, who are the baddies? What are these evil 15% of curators up to? Nefarious acts include: keeping and displaying looted artefacts, covering up uncomfortable truths about beloved figures in history, unethical acquisitions, and plots to capture and stuff beloved creatures. I find these villains more interesting than the 'good' characters because I don't think many of the goodies achieve their goodness through their curatorial practice. The baddies on the other hand act out their badness through very real museum behaviours.

Stay tuned...

There's much more to say about how curators are portrayed in pop culture. What is the most popular subject specialism? What genre has the most curators? Do pop curators have PhDs? Do they follow the Spectrum standards? Is this audience supposed to find them sexually attractive? Let me know if there's a particular angle you want explored.

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Who are museum curators according to pop culture?

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Museum curators are misunderstood. People don't know what a curator does, and they like to talk about curating in all sorts of ways that anger and frustrate the museum world.

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O CURADOR ESTÁ PRESENTE / O ARTISTA ESTÁ AUSENTE

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O CURADOR ESTÁ PRESENTE / O ARTISTA ESTÁ AUSENTE

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"uma abundância de coisas, com uma escassez de contexto"

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"uma abundância de coisas, com uma escassez de contexto"

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'This next sentence will be heinous, so brace yourself," my friend Charles said on Gchat last March: "Isn't normcore just a clothing manifestation of poptimism?" ("Okay just pretend I never typed that," he added, after a few seconds had passed. I was probably rinsing some fruit.)

"Normcore" was, at the time, the subject of a recent New York Magazine feature by Fiona Duncan, about a partly hypothetical trend wherein fashionable people opt for plain old utility jeans and comfy sneakers. "Poptimism" is an attitude in which chatty listeners show, or affect, the same respect for pop music that they would once have reserved for indie rock. It's basically a critical inversion of the old idea that obscure is better. (At least that's what I think. People have ardent views about what poptimism is and isn't, or was and wasn't, which they argue about because, with total sincerity, it's a joy and a pleasure to worry about things that are not things.)

My reply to Charles was, "Not quite," although both movements - not even movements, but attitude shifts, or not even attitude shifts but little foil-wrapped theories to suck on at work - are just riffs on the fact that taste, as we've traditionally understood it, is obsolete. In the 1990s, it actually mattered what you liked. Being into something meant seeking it out, and spending time with others who did the same. Now that the Internet has made everything available and rendered physical platforms pretty much useless, "it's not just what we like, but how we like it," writer and Canadian Art editor David Balzer says in his lucid new book, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else, "a constellation of likes that, through social-media comments acting as didactic panels in an exhibition, paint what we hope is a complex picture."

That's what poptimism speaks to. But I would argue that "liking" matters less and less, and that's where normcore comes in. ("Normcore," by the way, is nowhere near as insipid as it seems in listicle form; you should read Duncan's essay, if you haven't.) Normcore is a pose - imagine being so interesting that you could wear sweatpants and still seem worth knowing - but it's also a conclusion we're only just shy of, in which garments say no more about you than your favourite bands do. The medium is irrelevant. What matters instead is a notion of who you are, and how strongly you're able to impress it, whatever the channel. What matters isn't taste, but sensibility.

Curationism provides a fast but deep account of the rise of the curator through the art world into popular culture (both normcore and poptimism are discussed). It is written, very deliberately, for a general audience. "Curation" is of course a buzzword, but its history is a great case study for where we're at: an abundance of stuff, with a scarcity of context.

From the 16th century onward, Balzer writes, the curator had a relatively simple role: He tended and arranged collections. Starting in the modernist era, the curator became a tender of knowledge as well, divining and connecting significant works, particularly as works began to proliferate. "In the 1960s and 1970s, the art world increasingly yearned for a figure to make sense of things, to act as advocate for an ever more obtuse, factionalist art scene," Balzer writes. "Too many artists, too many movements, too many works in too many shows, too much discussion: Who would parse them?" Here begins the curator's ascent.

With the rise of conceptualism, which "dematerialized" art works, refining them down to ideas, the curator became an agent of the arcane, an alchemist type who could make something out of nothing. From there, the curator went on to become a star in his own right, at times eclipsing the work he turned his attention to; we watched the eyes move without following the sightlines. In a 2010 "video portrait" of Hans-Ulrich Obrist, one of the art world's top curators, performance artist Marina Abramovic is shown "holding up a sign reading, THE CURATOR IS PRESENT/THE ARTIST IS ABSENT. She wears the clear-plastic-frame glasses that are Obrist's trademark, as if to suggest that, for the duration of this video, she is he, or he has somehow possessed her."

(On this idea of curator-as-spirit, consider the words of designer/creative director Telfar Clemens, interviewed by Duncan for Bad Day magazine. "Everything right now is becoming one stream of content. In the future, things are going to be a mix: music, fashion, movies, art. I think there's going to be a lot of slashes and everything's going to be marked by a hashtag. For my brand, I want everything I do to be recognizable, no matter what medium. Everything should be recognizable as Telfar. It's a concept and a brand. It's my name." The ultimate aim is to leave the body.)

The curator's job has been, among other things, to find the through line. She provides a practical function, telling us who to trust with our attention; moreover, she fulfills an emotional-psychological one, by making sense of a world overrun with entities and ideas. But once curators themselves proliferate, and the curators need curating, and the notion of "curation" becomes so romantic that dilettantes assume the pose until it's commonplace - then everyone and no one is a curator, and curation is everything and nothing, and nothing makes sense again. What happens when there are no more arbiters of taste, no rank of persons who, through instinct, experience and training, know best?

The notion is a little frightening at first, for various reasons. There's the anxiety of being lost in stuff, with no one to guide you through the stacks. There's the bummer of never getting to join the rank of persons who know best (less noble but no less real, as shown by the rise of curatorial-studies programs, which Balzer discusses). There's the fear that critical appraisal will die out altogether, and no one will care any more about context; then, with no one to guide us to and through difficult work, culture will become culture-porn and we'll all just be scratching our asses and laughing at memes.

The first two fears have substance, although neither is worth fretting too much about (still, fretting about them is more fun than fretting about climate change). The last is, clearly, more of a canard. Curationism is at best a humanism - an interest in other people, and in their interests, over the vagaries of taste. Anyway, taste has "become a very facile way of reading character," Balzer says over the phone. "I think that sensibility - at least what I'm assuming you mean by sensibility - could open up a much richer idea of what it means to understand somebody else." The curator's ascent is partly the effect of something sweet: Through the torrent of stuff, and beyond the hierarchies of taste and cultivation, we are really just looking for the sense of someone else. Someone whose forearm to clutch as we make our way through the crowd, or someone just to think about.

Maybe we reach the point where we choose our curators based on affinity, the way we choose our friends. Then the curator is no more exalted than the guy in the red overcoat we fixate on in the rush from one terminal gate to the next, or the recommendation wall at the video store. Something about them is, somehow, for us.

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curationism: how curating took over the art world and everything else

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The rise of the curator in popular culture

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'This next sentence will be heinous, so brace yourself," my friend Charles said on Gchat last March: "Isn't normcore just a clothing manifestation of poptimism?" ("Okay just pretend I never typed that," he added, after a few seconds had passed. I was probably rinsing some fruit.)

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Issue 13
Eds. Dorothee Richter, Rein Wolfs

The second part of the publication for the symposium, Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Programme in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), deals with notion of art-mediation and addressing publics in the realm of institutional critique. The question remains: how can a practice that intends to radically show the conditionality of art, its financial entanglements, and its function as a means of distinction, be related to institutions and curators' activities therein? Is this not a contradiction in terms? The aim of the symposium was to explore these contradictions, as well as the possibilities and limitations of critical curatorial practice.

Contributions by Giovanni Carmine, Maja Ciric, Neil Cummings, Helmut Draxler, Beryl Graham, Damian Jurt, Hassan Khan, Marysia Lewandowska, Isin Onol, Dorothee Richter and Yael Eylat Van-Essen.

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The second part of the publication for the symposium, Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Programme in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), deals with notion of art-mediation and addressing publics in the realm of institutional critique.

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Issue 13
Eds. Dorothee Richter, Rein Wolfs

The second part of the publication for the symposium, Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Programme in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), deals with notion of art-mediation and addressing publics in the realm of institutional critique. The question remains: how can a practice that intends to radically show the conditionality of art, its financial entanglements, and its function as a means of distinction, be related to institutions and curators' activities therein? Is this not a contradiction in terms? The aim of the symposium was to explore these contradictions, as well as the possibilities and limitations of critical curatorial practice.

Contributions by Giovanni Carmine, Maja Ciric, Neil Cummings, Helmut Draxler, Beryl Graham, Damian Jurt, Hassan Khan, Marysia Lewandowska, Isin Onol, Dorothee Richter and Yael Eylat Van-Essen.

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The second part of the publication for the symposium, Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Programme in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts), deals with notion of art-mediation and addressing publics in the realm of institutional critique.

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Michael Birchall

Editorial

Winfried Stürzl

Between Hype and Attitude. Motivations, Presentation Strategies and Fields of Conflict for “Curartists”

Marc James Léger

Homo Academicus Curatorius: Millet Matrix as Intercultural Paradigm

Anne Koskiluoma, Anna Krystyna Trzaska

Curatorial and Artistic Practice as Political Process: an interview with Artur Zmijewski

Sophia Ribeiro

An interview with Kristina Lee Podesva

Chloé Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar

Interview with Raqs Media Collective on the  exhibition, Sarai Reader 09

Monika Molnár and Tanja Trampe

Public Art: Consequences of a Gesture?* An Interview with Mary Jane Jacob

Dorothee Richter

Artists and Curators as  Authors – Competitors, Collaborators, or Team-workers?

Jacqueline Falk, John Canciani

Interview with curator Valerie Smith

Michael Birchall and Nkule Mabaso

Artist-curator Gavin Wade on authorship, curating at Eastside Projects and the post-industrial city

Sheena Greene

“Italian Conversations: Art in  the age of Berlusconi”: an interview with Fucking Good Art

Annemarie Brand and Monika Molnár

Authorship (ext)ended: artist, artwork, public and the curator: An interview with Ute Meta Bauer and Yvonne P. Doderer

Ashraf Osman and Daniela N. Fuentes

An Interview with Tania Bruguera

Charlotte Barnes

Marion von Osten on her collaborative style and multiple roles

Imprint Issue 19

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One hears time and again that contemporary art is elitist because it is selective, and that it should be democratized. Indeed, there is a gap between exhibition practice and the tastes and expectations of the audience. The reason is simple: the audiences of contemporary art exhibitions are often local, while the exhibited art is often international. This means that contemporary art does not have a narrow, elitist view, but, on the contrary, a broader, universalist perspective that can irritate local audiences. It is often the same kind of irritation that migration provokes today in Europe. Here we are confronted with the same phenomenon: the broader, internationalist attitude is experienced by local audiences as elitist-even if the migrants themselves are far from belonging to any kind of elite.

Any genuine contemporary exhibition is not an exhibition of local art in the international context, but rather an exhibition of international art in the local context. The local context can obviously be seen as already given, already familiar to the local audience, whereas the context of an international art exhibition is necessarily constructed by the curator. Every exhibition is, if you will, a montage in that it does not depict any real local context in which art functions, but is always artificial through and through. There are more than enough examples of how this artificiality can cause irritation. In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin famously equals the exhibition of an object with its reproduction, and defines the "exhibition value" of the artwork as an effect of its reproducibility. Both reproduction and exhibition are operations that remove the artwork from its historical place-from its "here and now"-and send it along a path of global circulation. Benjamin believes that as a result of these operations, the artwork loses its "cult value," its place in ritual and tradition, its aura. Here, the aura is understood as the artwork's inscription in the historical context to which it originally belongs, while the loss of aura results from its removal from that world of lived experience. The copy refers to the original but does not truly present it. The same can be said about the exhibited artwork: it refers to its original context, but actually prevents the exhibition visitor from experiencing it. Having been liberated, isolated from its original environment, the artwork remains materially self-identical but loses its historical place, and thus, its truth.

Almost contemporaneously, Martin Heidegger writes in his "Origin of the Work of Art": "When a work is brought into a collection or placed in an exhibition we say also that it is 'set up.' But this setting up differs essentially from setting up as erecting a building, raising a statue, presenting a tragedy at a holy festival." Heidegger differentiates again between an artwork inscribed into a certain historical and/or ritual space and time, and an artwork that is merely exhibited at a certain place but removable, thus without context. However, in his later writing Heidegger begins to stress the technological, artificial character of our relation to the world. For Heidegger, the subject does not have an ontologically guaranteed outside position vis-à-vis the world. Rather, this position is artificially constructed by modern technology. Technology creates the framing, or Gestell (apparatus) that allows one to position as a subject and experience the world as an object, as an image. This framing defines our relationship to our environment, and invisibly guides our experiences of it. However, as Heidegger describes, this apparatus remains concealed from us because it opens the world to our gaze as something that is familiar, "natural."

I would argue that exhibitions defamiliarize local contexts and reveal their Gestell -the way in which their framings operate. This is where the exhibition begins to be understood not as a pure act of presenting, but as the presentation of presenting, a revelation of its own strategy of framing. In other words, the exhibition does not only present certain images to our gaze, but also demonstrates the technology of presenting, the apparatus and structure of framing, and the mode in which our gaze is determined, oriented, and manipulated by this technology. When we visit an exhibition, we do not only look at the exhibited images and objects, but also reflect on the spatial and temporal relationships between them-the hierarchies, curatorial choices, and strategies that produced the exhibition, and so forth. The exhibition exhibits itself before it exhibits anything else. It exhibits its own technology and its own ideology. In fact, the framing is nothing but an amalgamation of technology and ideology.

In relationship to the exhibition, one can speak of two different types of gazes, which we can call the frontal gaze and the gaze from within. When we look at an image-whether a painted image, an image on a computer screen, or a page in a book-we use the frontal gaze, which allows us to scrutinize the object in all its aspects. If we interrupt the process of contemplation, the frontal gaze allows for a new process to begin from the same point in space at which we stopped. But this precision and stability of vision is achieved by disregarding the context of our visual experience: we are in a condition of self-oblivion, detached from the outside world, absorbed and captivated by the object of our contemplation.

However, when we visit a new place-a new city or country, for example-we do not just concentrate on a particular object or series of objects; instead, we look around. In so doing, we become very aware of our specific position. The image of the new place is not in front of us-rather, we are inside of it. This means that we cannot grasp the new place in its totality and in all its nuance. The gaze from within is always a fragmentary one. It is not panoramic, as we can see only what is in front of us at any moment. We know we are inside a certain space, but we cannot visualize this knowledge in its entirety. Furthermore, this gaze is also fragmentary because it cannot be stabilized in time. If we were to visit the same place later, we could never reproduce the same trajectory, the same history of our own gaze. And while this applies to visiting a new place, the same can also be said of a familiar place: it is always seen from within. It is visible and known, though not necessarily visualizable or reproducible. The same can be said of an exhibition that is always seen from within.

In our time, considering the Gestell-the technological framing of our view of the world-one likely thinks of the internet before thinking of exhibitions. However, the gaze of an ordinary internet user is a strictly frontal gaze, concentrated on the screen. In using the internet, its hardware and software-its Gestell -remain concealed to users. The internet frames the world for its user, but it does not reveal its own framing. That opens a possibility for the exhibition of art, and, more generally, for data, that circulates on the internet. Such a form of exhibition is able to thematize the internet's hardware and software, thus revealing its hidden mechanisms of distribution and presentation. Making such rules of selection explicit subjects them at the same time to questioning and transgression. In other words, the internet comes to be investigated as medium, as material form, not merely as a sum of "immaterial" content.

It is no accident that on the internet, artists function as the so-called content providers. It is, however, quite a shift for the history of Western art. Traditionally, in this context, content available to artists was limited to Jesus Christ, the Holy Virgin, the Christian saints, in addition to the gods of the ancient Greek pantheon and important historical figures. The content providers were the Church and its historical narratives. It follows then that the goal of the artist was to give these contents shape and form, and to illustrate these larger content-providing practices, rather than to produce specific content. Today, however, what is the content that artists provide for the internet? It partially consists of digital representations of artworks, which are merely the artworks that already circulate on the art market.

It is more interesting, however, when artists use the possibilities for producing and distributing art that are specific to the internet. In those cases, they document content that is not covered by mainstream media. It might be too strange or, on the contrary, too trivial to be recorded by standard journalism, or it might be documentation of forgotten or publicly repressed historical events. But it can also be produced by artists themselves-actions, performances, and processes that they initiated and then documented-or it can be total fiction, but where the process of creating the fiction is documented. The cumulative effect of these strategies is not far from nineteenth-century realism, when artists combined conventional approaches to representation with personalized content and subjective interpretation.

This is to say that artists on the internet use the means of production and distribution prescribed by the internet to be compatible with protocols that are usually employed to spread information. Twentieth-century formalist art theoreticians such as Roman Jakobson believed that the artistic use of the means of communication presupposes the suspension, or even annulment, of information, which in the context of art means a total absorption of content by form. However, in the context of the internet, the form remains identical for all communication, thus immunizing content from this absorption. The internet reestablishes, on a technical level, the conventions of presenting content dominant in the nineteenth century. Avant-garde artists protested against these conventions for being arbitrary and culturally determined. But a revolt against such conventions makes no sense in the context of the internet, because the conventions have already been inscribed into the technology of the internet itself.

The situation changes, however, when internet data is transposed into offline exhibition spaces. Online, artists operate through combinations of pictures, photos, videos, sound sequences, and text that build into a meta-narrative. In the exhibition space, however, they come to be presented in the form of an installation. Conceptual artists already organized the installation space to convey a certain meaning analogous to the use of sentences in language. After a period dominated by formalism, in the late 1960s conceptual art made artistic practice meaningful and communicative again. Art began to make theoretical statements, to communicate empirical experiences and theoretical knowledge, to formulate ethical and political attitudes, and to tell stories again.

We all know the substantial role that the "linguistic turn" played in the emergence and development of conceptual art. The influence of ideas from sources such as Wittgenstein and French Structuralism was decisive. But the new orientation towards meaning and communication did not make art somehow immaterial or make its materiality less relevant, nor did its medium dissolve into message. On the contrary, every artwork is material, and can only be material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas, and political messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the "linguistic turn" precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. These philosophers understood thinking as a use of language, which is wholly material-a combination of sounds and visual signs. Thus, an equivalence, or at least a parallelism, was demonstrated between word and image, between the order of words and the order of things, between the grammar of language and the grammar of visual space.But if the presentation of art on the internet became standardized, the presentation of art in the exhibition space instead became de-standardized. The reason for this de-standardization is clear: the space of the exhibition is empty; it is not preformatted in the way a webpage or website is. Today, the white cube plays the same role as a blank page performs for modernist writing or a blank canvas for modernist painting. The empty white cube is the zero point of exhibition practice, and thus the constant possibility of a new beginning. This means that the curator has an opportunity to define a specific form, a specific installation, a specific configuration of the exhibition space for the presentation of digital or informational material. Here the question of form becomes central again. The form-giving directive shifts away from individual artworks to the organization of space in which these artworks are presented. In other words, the responsibility for form-giving is transferred from the artists to the curators who use individual artworks as content, only this time within the space that the curators themselves create.

Of course, artists can reclaim their traditional form-giving function, but only if they begin to function as curators of their own work. Indeed, when we visit an exhibition of contemporary art, the only thing that truly remains in our memory is the organization of the spaces of this exhibition, especially if this organization is original and unusual. However, if the individual artworks can be reproduced, the exhibition can be easily documented. And if such documentation is put on the internet, it then becomes content, ready again for a form-giving operation inside the museum. In this way, the exchange between the exhibition space and the internet becomes an exchange between content and form. The exhibition becomes the means through which the relationship between the form and content of art on the internet can be thematized and revealed. Additionally, curated exhibitions of this art can reveal the hidden mechanisms of selection governing the distribution of text and image on the internet.

At first glance, the distribution of information on the internet is not regulated by any rules governing its selection. Everyone can use cameras to produce images, to write commentary on them, and to distribute the results with little censorship or selection process. One might think, therefore, that traditional art institutions and their rituals of selection and presentation have become obsolete. Many still see the internet as global and universal, even while it has become increasingly evident that the space of the internet is rather extremely fragmented. Even if all data on the internet is globally accessible, in practice the internet leads not to the emergence of a universal public space but to a tribalization of the public. The reason for that is very simple. The internet reacts to the user's questions, to the user's clicks. The user finds on the internet only what he or she wants to find.

The internet is an extremely narcissistic medium-a mirror of our specific interests and desires. It does not show us what we do not want to see. In the context of social media we communicate mostly with those who share our interests and attitudes, whether political or aesthetic. Thus, the non-selective character of the internet is an illusion. The actual functioning of the internet is based on non-explicit rules of selection by which users select only what they already know or are familiar with. Of course, some search engines are able to scrape the entire internet, but they always have particular goals, and are controlled by large corporations and not by individual users. In this respect, the internet is the opposite of, let's say, an urban space in which we are consistently forced to see what we do not necessarily want to. In many cases we try to ignore these unwanted images and impressions, yet they often provoke our interest and more generally serve to expand our field of experience.

To perform a similar role, we can say that curatorial selection should be a kind of anti-selection, a transgressive selection even. The act becomes relevant when it crosses the dividing lines that fragment the internet and, more generally, our culture. It reinstates the universalist project of modern and contemporary art. Rather than fragmenting the public space, such selection works against it by creating a unified space of representation where the different fragments of the internet come to be equally represented. The creation of such universal spaces was the traditional occupation of the modern art system.

The history of modern world exhibitions began in the nineteenth century, famously with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. In the art context, the great museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as exhibitions like Documenta in Kassel or numerous biennials, made and still make the claim of presenting the art of the world. Here, individual items are removed from their original contexts and placed in a new artificial context in which images and objects meet historically or "in real life" with each other that otherwise could never have encountered one other. For example, Egyptian gods sit beside Mexican or Inca gods in their respective universes, and in further combination with the unrealized utopian dreams of the avant-garde. These removals and new arrangements call forth uses of violence-such as those in economic and direct military intervention-by demonstrating the forms of order, law, and trade that regulate our world, as well as the ruptures, wars, revolutions, and crimes to which such orders are subjected.

These orders cannot be "seen," but they can be and are manifested in the organization of the exhibition and in the way it frames art. As visitors, we are not outside this frame, but rather inside it. Through the exhibition, we are exhibited to ourselves and to others. For this reason, the exhibition is not an object, but an event. The aura is not lost when an artwork is uncoupled from its original, local context, but is rather re-contextualized and given a new "here and now" in the event of an exhibition-and thus, in the history of exhibitions. This is why an exhibition cannot be reproduced. One can only reproduce an image or an object placed in front of the viewing subject. However, an exhibition can be reenacted or restaged. In this respect, the exhibition is similar to theatrical mise-en-scène, but with one important difference: exhibition visitors do not remain in front of the stage, but enter the stage to participate in the event.

We live within a system of nation states. However, inside every national culture there are institutions that embody universalist, transnational projects. Among them are universities and large museums. Indeed, European museums were from their inception universalist institutions that attempted to present universal art history rather than specific national art histories. Of course, one can argue that this universalist project reflected the imperial policies of nineteenth-century European states, and to some extent this is true. The European museum system has its origin in the transformation during the French Revolution of objects used by the Church and aristocracy into artworks-objects to be looked at only, rather than used. The French Revolution abolished the contemplation of God as the highest goal of life, and substituted this act with the secular contemplation of "beauty" in material objects. In other words, art as we know it today was produced by revolutionary violence, and was from its beginning a modern form of iconoclasm. This is to say that European museums attempted to aesthetically suspend their own cultural traditions before aestheticizing and suspending non-European cultural traditions.

The goal of the Enlightenment was the creation of the universal and rational world order: a universal state in which every particular culture would be recognized. We are still far from reaching this goal. Our moment is characterized by an imbalance between political and economic powers, between public institutions and commercial practices. Our economy operates on a global level, whereas our politics tend to operate on a local level. However, today's art system plays a role in symbolically substituting such a universal state for the organization of biennials, Documentas, and other exhibitions claiming to present universal, global art and culture of a non-existent utopian global state. Under current conditions, an exhibition can only be relevant if it constructs such a utopian and universalist context that does not yet exist.

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Curating in the Post-Internet Age - Journal #94 October 2018 - e-flux

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One hears time and again that contemporary art is elitist because it is selective, and that it should be democratized. Indeed, there is a gap between exhibition practice and the tastes and expectations of the audience. The reason is simple: the audiences of contemporary art exhibitions are often local, while the exhibited art is often international.

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Why Do We Look for Data in the Museum?

In Art Project 2023, João Enxuto and Erica Love imagine the future of the Google Art Project, the search giant's effort to reproduce images from the world's top museums as it develops over the next decade. The multimedia performance documents the slow erosion of the museum under the logic of corporate interests and the breathless adoption of digital innovation by none other than Google, whose stated goal is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google purchases the Whitney Museum's Breuer building and repurposes it as an "immersive" and "interactive" physical interface for the Art Project, where patrons have access to high-resolution images of the original works of art. Each room is curated based on algorithms that crawl the user's profile to predict optimal artworks. Art history PhDs leave the academy to work as handsomely paid human docents, guiding users who log in with Google Plus accounts. Tech luminaries hail the initiative as a "democratic platform that erases the territorial boundaries and spatial limitations that hampered the circulation of the world's greatest artworks."

In a short time the Breuer building is deemed "too expensive" to maintain and is replaced with a 3D-printed replica, assembled by a Google subsidiary. Slight aberrations in digital files begin to appear, causing equal parts panic and spectacle. Eventually a slew of works begin to disappear from Google's backup servers. Within months, they are all gone.

Enxuto and Love close their dystopian scene with a fictional article from the 2023 issue of Artforum, entitled "On the Future of the Museum." The piece quotes Marcel Breuer's comments at the presentation of his new Whitney Museum building in 1963: "It is easier to say what [the museum] should not look like. It should not look like a business or office building, nor should it look like a place of light entertainment."

The critique of the museum was a defining discourse of the twentieth century. At the start of the century, early modernists lambasted its entombment of "real" life. Later it endured Foucauldian and postcolonial critiques that characterized the museum as an embodiment of Western colonialism and cultural hegemony. The museum survived these critiques; they were largely confined to academia and critical theory. But today the museum faces more virulent destabilizations that have emerged alongside new behavior from the general public, wherein patrons transform the museum's physical assets into digital assets-uploaded, downloaded, visualized, shared, and digitized. Museums of various stripes now adapt to "users" who treat institutions not as a storehouse of physical objects but rather as a data set of image files.

Today we find the museum organizing itself for transmission and retrieval, anticipating the final aspirations of an algorithmic regime. The resulting database logic aligns the institution with interests originating from the model of the Silicon Valley enterprise-in constantly updating streams/cycles, the museum reformats its content towards structured, indexed, or digitally stored data sets or sets of relations among data. That this information is designed for queries, updates, algorithmic manipulation, and mass scalability is of central importance.

The museum is pressured into adapting to the logic of the database from all sides. Increasingly we access it, and its contents, by executing a query. At this juncture we begin to entertain questions of absurd technological determinism. For example: Is a museum a database? While this may be a ridiculous provocation on its face, we have seen that anxious cultural institutions are among the first to uncritically adopt the metabolism of database, to transform the institution into an indexed site of transmission. Though to many it appears somewhat emancipated from its traditional critiques-the notion of transparency, democracy, and access have been loosely ascribed to the newly digitized institution. Yet beneath the surface the museum has become contingent on a metabolism that is eager to mimic the logic of the database, the engine feeding the scalability required by the private digital enterprise.

The Metabolism of the Database

Several years ago Hito Steyerl asked if the museum was a factory. But today our factory is something more like a data center. We are confronted with networked capitalism that runs at digital speed, where questions of solidarity and sustainability transform into questions of algorithmic regulation. Meanwhile digital natives and administrators hector institutions towards "innovation" by pointing to their own inevitable cultural irrelevance. A market logic arises in which institutional relevance is modeled after corporate risk.

Under the guise of the "digital as a dimension of everything," this loosely organized group has been successful in implementing all manner of networked, data-driven modifications, from mobile apps to active social media engagement and marketing, or immersive digital experiences embedded into the museum's halls. These innovations are in response to the "reality that the digital touches every aspect of a contemporary organization," one that "mandates that it be woven into the fabric of the institution across departments and objectives." But where does this apparently self-mandating drive originate? Who has tasked the museum to scale its holdings according to a techno-utopian plan of universal access and networked exchange? As it becomes clear that museums cannot equal competitors that natively leverage digital networks, in turn their administrators are measured by the alacrity with which they can match their alternatives in the realm of content production, publication, and dissemination. An institution's cultural capital appeals to metrics that emerge from the metabolism of the database: the ability to be queried, manipulated, updated, sorted, and accessed simultaneously.

While the initiatives advanced under this banner of "the digital" range from the illuminating to the absurd, ever so slightly the imperatives of the database are integrated into the museum. For one, most major museums have now appointed managers of digital programming. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has appointed a "Director of Digital Content and Strategy" who in a press release stated her goal of "achieving scale for the Museum's programs." Both inside and outside the museum, thinking that used to be confined to an esoteric corner of database theory has suddenly been foisted into popular media, a development conditioned by the everyday tools that use databases to power popular applications and platforms.

In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich describes "database logic," a new Panofskian "symbolic form" favored by new media objects. This, he claims, is nothing less than "the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself." If "the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database." He also referred to its "blind victims" who uncritically adopt the database form. Yet we might extend beyond the theories of the database as a new media object and begin to think through the social and political implications for the cultural institution. Assessing a politics of the database means assessing the potential for its logic to literally operationalize neoliberal practices in the cultural sphere.

Branded Content

Once an Apollonian, Enlightenment edifice, today the museum anxiously produces content to satisfy the swift mill of digital networks. But when the museum engages in digital content marketing, what is it marketing-beyond its own obsolescence?

The rhetoric of "the digital museum" resembles the New Institutionalism that emerged in the 1990s, when museums were repurposed as socialized spaces and courted participatory patronage. Today the museum looks less to the rituals of relational aesthetics-social, collaborative, and open-ended-but instead to the entrepreneurial paradigm of the technology enterprise. For the first time in the history of institutional critique, the speed with which new subjectivities are formed has dramatically increased. The institution now employs the tools of digital exchange as the prism through which to engage in its own critique. While digital natives tend to associate this type of institutional critique with its broadly leftist forbearers, the rhetoric of the digital museum may also be viewed as a new elite reconstituting the museum along technocratic logics. The so-called "Open Data" movement-which aims to "democratize the ability to produce information and knowledge, rather than confining the power of data to its producers"-has been awkwardly transposed onto the world of museology. The same criticisms of the Open Data movement apply to the unquestioned rush to digitize the museum's contents, specifically the charge that such initiatives amount to a "neoliberalization" of information formerly held in the public trust. That is, to convert the institution into a market-ready form and, crucially, to transition the individual into a relationship with the museum that is entrepreneurial, self-directed, and deterritorialized.

While by no means monolithic, the Open Data movement did not arise out of a vacuum. Its agenda of transparency engages in a "politics of the benign" in order to argue for the inherent moral value of liberating information. This in spite of the ideological assumptions and corporate support of such initiatives. The transfer of content from an institution to various telecommunications and software platforms may not present immediate negative effects, but couching it in the rhetoric of corporate PR strategy about freely accessible information is perhaps the perfect dream of neoliberal ideology.

The calls for the digitization of the institution are not only based on the database form or the inherent qualities of their respective digital formats. Instead, these demands are grounded by the database's ability to accept the new types of user desires and expectations, both haptic and epistemological. On the one hand, the innovations appeal to practical patron behavior. The Metropolitan Museum's iPhone app, for example, relies on structured data to power user experience. As increasing numbers of patrons began relying on mobile phones, it seemed logical to update the services available to visitors. Yet the more interesting questions lay at the very heart of the most basic gesture of the museum. A definitive aspect of the traditional museum was the marking off of a cultural space that celebrates historically significant developments according to a telos. In effect, for a long time it operated as a stage that pointed to genius, mystery, and expression that owed little to digital dissemination or algorithmic supplication, where ideas and skills are deemed worthwhile to our culture independently of their potential to circulate in networks. While it operates in service to varying ideologies and purposeful constructions of usable pasts, a museum is always somewhat of a playground, designed as much for scholarship, preservation, and inquiry as it is for momentarily placing oneself in a fiction. And so today contemporary museum makes demands on our leisure time at the very same moment that the database form determines which images are displayed to society at large. Thus the museum cedes this control to databases, whose content circulates through networks governed by proprietary algorithms. Such an oversimplification is useful to frame the manner in which the museum's fundamental cultural position is drawn in, seduced by a transformation into an indexed collection, structured much the way a good database would be: consistent, atomic, scalable, and easily searchable.

Consider what is at stake when the museum outfits the audience experience to accommodate Google Glass. Never mind the more general question about the genealogy of such an idea, which originates with a massive private enterprise's attempts to normalize a product into increasingly biometric terrains. When a museum joins in this accommodation they surrender to the idea that their holdings are objects in a database, revealing the first shift of an institution embroiled in the logic of net utopia. By digitizing the works so that they can be rendered and made searchable with image recognition technology, the institution-tasked with holding cultural objects in the public trust-moves the aesthetic experience into a hardware apparatus whose proprietary format is dictated by a private company. As the institution crosses over this line, they begin a process that denigrates the free play of narrative, the outsized imaginative force that silently sweeps through the heterotopia of the museum space and advances the indexical, algorithmic performativity of its data as yet just another platform for user experience. The institution also willingly transfers enormous amounts of hard-won cultural capital-in the form of content, attention, and cultural imprimatur-into the networks of lean, global technology organizations in exchange for the momentary spectacle of a suite of soon-to-be-deprecated hardware.

Database and Collection

We cannot seek data in the museum the way we look for it in the database. When we do, we find the database form mapped onto a historiographical function for which it was not designed. Information stored in a database is not designed to conjure, remind, or encourage users to look back in retrospect. On the contrary, these data exist to power an application, usually an algorithm that predicts or optimizes future functions. Though we often use the term "memory" to measure the storage capacity of a database, this is far from the same type of memory that the museum constructs and preserves. It is not passive data collected and stored by virtue of its a priori importance but instead material that achieves utility only through its potential to unequivocally deliver a command to an actor with a specific intent, an intent to which the database delivers unmatched efficiency and competitive advantage.

For Manovich, the museum both requires and produces narrative, while the logic of the database eschews narrative in favor of ordered, efficient, end-user retrieval. The museum contextualizes its holdings through scholarship, discourse, and display. Thus those who assemble and maintain museum collections-curators, directors, conservationists-operate with a fundamentally different set of concerns than a database administrator. The database administrator has specific, technical principles for database design that will allow them to implement proper indexing, integrity, and structure. Every factor considered relates directly to optimal end-user performance, not, as it were, some higher calling to organize information as an abstract service of historical memory. But what are the characteristics of the "end user" posited by the architects of the museum-as-database? To assume that such a decision is a neutral outgrowth of the self-evident mandate that cultural institutions respond to capital's drive to organize the world's information is to fundamentally conflate the specific attributes of museum and database.

The digital database can, in large part, replace the museum's traditional function of presenting an object-by-object view of art history for contemplation and study. However, the museum allows us to step out of time, whereas the database is by definition obsessed with time. The museum marks off a space, but the database is an apparatus necessary for the deployment of information into any situation that will accept its format.

Despite the well-known resources such as MoMA's online collection, the Getty's Open Content Program, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art's newly available digital archives, it appears unlikely that the museum will become a database in the literal sense. Nearly all of the data on the backend of major museums are not, of course, only datasets: they are merely another means by which to represent really-existing physical holdings. Even as they account for shifts toward more common methods of engaging with the museum, these digital archives do not yet replace the original institutional mission of physical retrieval and storage. The exceptions are institutions solely dedicated to storing works that were born digital. However, there is a crucial difference between this type of arts-tech collaboration and the rest of our museums that are too often paved over in favor of blindly fostering disruption and increasing access.

In a recent panel at South by Southwest, entitled "Everyone's a Curator: Do Museums Still Matter?" several digital media professionals from major museums asked, "How can museums compete for engagement online?" In other words, how can a museum act more like a database? Willa Köerner, assistant manager for digital engagement at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, offered this:

Museums are just starting to accept the fact that the Internet and social media have given rise to a whole new way of disseminating information, where friends' (and even strangers') comments and opinions often mean more than anything an "expert" could have to say. Information and ideas have been set free, and museums are still learning how to function in this free-flowing, democratized arts and culture ecosystem.

The museum derives its special status from the "un-queryable" structure of its objects. And this museographic status has been concomitant with the aesthetic subject's relationship to art in the West since the Enlightenment. The "museum as database" posits an opposition to this legacy model, which might be roughly organized under the vague neologism "the digital." "The digital" semantically smuggles in the ideology of "the digital"-a strange mix of neoliberal thought and Silicon Valley logic in which every existing structure constitutes a problem that can be solved by crowdsourcing, geolocation, algorithms, and shared digital networks. But the construction of these databases involves the biases, desires, and fraught decisions of their architects. Further, they privilege the end user, the optimized query, and the scalable totality. An institution's newly adopted "open access" mantra does not hold the promise of being culturally autonomous, as one might contrast it to the hegemonic decisions made by a Western museum curator in structuring a collection of cultural artifacts. In fact, the notion of a culturally autonomous database is perhaps the height of ideology itself.

The notion that "raw" data arrives on the scene free of bias, somehow a reflection of the natural order of phenomena, a mere element that constitutes its eventual conversion into knowledge, likewise soothed the epistemological uncertainties of postmodernism. The institution, wary of grand narratives and "great men"-those slivers of anectdata amid a world awash in measurement-could suddenly align with both the free market and the digital database as part of what Karsten Schubert has called "The 'Discovery' of the Audience."

A cultural database that is free of ideology is a convenient myth that came out of the rhetoric of the institution as a passive platform. As Lane Relyea has shown, a database always appears as "a passive object, never a verb." Meanwhile, the art world's "projects and platforms" mobilize these data through networks. In Your Everyday Art World, Relyea relates these forms to advances in digital technology. For Relyea, the logic of the database is that which "weakens ties within the museum's collection, renders it more passive and informational, that transforms it from being a canon or a tradition or and ideology into being, simply, one's personal toy box."

A database comes precisely into the zone of utility when the phenomena from which it extracts information are too large to be displayed in one view. The database in this case is an instrument of documentation and measurement, one always set up to be queried in a partial manner. Though the database can play a part in "democratized" communication over nonhierarchical networks, it has its own special meditative powers. There is hegemony in data. Data are valuable because they extract from reality: the earliest appearance of the notion of data was gleaned from nature. As Rob Kitchin argues in The Data Revolution, the way that data are understood by a society has changed throughout history. Citing Daniel Rosenberg, he points out that the emergence of the term is associated with modernity and the growth of science, and thus its alignment with the "pre-factual" or "pre-analytical." Likewise, today "big," mobile data-the very aggregations supposedly upending the humanities and cultural research-emerge alongside the very recent veneration of the free-market ethos, an informational economy whose inefficiencies are modeled away by structuring data through algorithmic architectures and global-scaled storage.

New Inputs, New Interface

Prior to new media, the database was a foreign entity. Traditional art unified the art object and its display interface and this fusion made the database an unwelcome form in both theory and practice. Yet, as Manovich explains, new media separate the work from its interface, allowing the database to store and render different versions of the original. Here the database acts as the "support" with many compatible methods of display interfaces. If new media lend themselves to the database, they also impel the end user to shift the narrative burden on to the very structure of that database. Narrative, then, is not an end in itself but merely a byproduct of navigating a database with varying potential result sets. Manovich continues with the claim that "databases can support narrative, but there is nothing in its form that would foster its generation." Instead, the narrative is always immanent by virtue of the various human decisions made by the database administrator. It is masked, however, by the production of a result set that appears to the end user as an agnostic, empirical list of objects. The logic, the structure, and the query through which the information had to first pass are always hidden.

After the initial crest of New Media discourse in the late aughts-once the insularity and specificity of the "Art Formerly Known as New Media" ceased to serve as a useful distinction] and exceed[ed]] the terminology by which they have, at least initially, been theorized and categorized."]-scholars such as David Joselit have turned their focus to the "image explosion" referenced by contemporary artists. The definition of such work is then expanded to "embrace heterogeneous configurations of relationships or links," and gains its value from image circulation in free networks and neoliberal markets. For Joselit, "what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting." In the "epistemology of search" value is created through proper indexing and connectivity-a theory which is directly related to the metabolism of the database. The museum exhibition could then be a format for content, pulling the theoretical position of the museum away from the storage function and moving it back towards a site of user experience, rewritable in its tenuous embrace of narrative-" after art comes the logic of networks where links can cross space, time, genre, and scale in surprising and multiple ways."

Now that the internet has left the realm of novelty so fetishized by net artists, a new task develops for a generation for whom the construction of cultural myth has always involved the use of digital media, algorithms, mobile devices, and data. Representational fixity is constantly in flux for post-internet artist Artie Vierkant, whose text "Image Object Post-Internet" situated such reflections on digitally informed production in art historical context. Characterized by the "denigration of objects and our relationship to space," the post-internet condition accommodates the "infinite reproducibility" of our digitized materials, and reduces the value of the original to "little more than a curiosity." Freed from the "one-to-many" paradigm of traditional image creation, post-internet art engages in a read-write relationship with the networks that disseminate cultural "image objects" that are not so much consumed as they are proliferated in an environment of "ubiquitous authorship." It is worth noting here that "one-to-many," along with its counterpoint "many-to-many," are standard descriptions in database theory.

The Museum of Horizontality

The often-utopian logic of the post-internet artist is coterminous with museum administrators who are compelled to compete on the supposedly free market of the digital network, abandoning the special scarcity and status given to traditional Western notions of art. In contrast to its role as a physical custodian of a hierarchy, the museum is now seduced into what Boris Groys terms a "horizontality" of art, which accepts all artistic production as an infinite set of "aesthetically equal images." By embracing the mechanics of the global image market, the museum would appear to follow the artists whom increasingly seek validation by way of measurable, scalable digital networks.

Here digital images and their proliferation in networks overwhelm the relations that once made the museum relevant as a project of modernity. Donald Preziosi has explored the museum as an "epistemological technology of the Enlightenment," pointing to its role as a "civic instrument for practicing history." Our fascination with the museum, as he says, is related to our desire to solve mysteries. Here the museum, like the novel, demonstrates the ways in which we piece the world together in a "rational and orderly" manner, a "natural or inevitable" reflection of a logical museological past. Yet here we might consider the institutional acrobatics required to substantiate this role under a post-internet subjectivity in which "there can be no original copy."

Yet this foreclosure is not so clear-cut. In fact, for Groys there is another layer to this ontology of the widely embraced digital copy and the meritocratic network. Groys does acknowledge the challenges presented by the digital image file, which is mere invisible information that may circulate as free copies. However, Groys views the digital image as both strong (it can become independent of any one exhibition practice) and weak (it surrenders its context to a limitless variety of modes of distribution). The digital image file is iconoclastic, in a sense-not a visible image but, rather, an image file that is weak in that it is only visible through some curatorial aid or display.

But the essential point here is that this involves even more curatorial aid than was required by the traditional Western museum. As Groys says, these copies of invisible image files appear to us each time as originals: "not be merely exhibited but staged, performed." Since the author is continually changed each time a digital image is displayed, the curatorial agency of the museum may transcend its traditional role while simultaneously obviating the supposed cultural autonomy and non-narrative nature of the database. Within the digital image file's iconoclasm Groys perhaps finds a powerful redemption for the museum, as here the database is recognized as merely being the earliest stop in the supposedly free journey from image file to musealized cultural object.

Instead, museums now take on a heightened responsibility for "staging the flow" of time, as Groys argues in another essay. Institutions also must stage increasing varieties of creative acts, which due to heavy reliance on digital networks are often born into an environment that is already more suitable for its exhibition than the museum wall. This staging serves as a governance, a regulatory central bank in an image economy, minting specie currency that can be rapidly re-lent, repackaged, and circulated throughout a vastly more rapid exchange system, one originally tinged with the value of an asymmetrical aesthetic gaze.

Finally, for Groys, when such digital image files are placed back into musealized space, we more clearly reflect upon the acts of digitalization themselves, creating a new function that, though technologically determined by surface networks, is in the end a re-empowerment of the institution. But nonesuch route is available for the museum as it slips further into a database logic, under which it presents itself solely as a disembodied brand for image production and dissemination.

The curatorial acts of the museum space cannot be replicated as one might replicate an entire database. Despite its best efforts, the museum is not a pure database. Even if it were, its objects are encountered differently, in effect "re-queried" by each individual subject in ways that go beyond the strict definitions and schemas of the database form.

Heterotopia and Internet Centrism

Curator Daniel S. Palmer worries about the implications for institutions that reproduce objects online in earnest, injecting criticality into a debate that seems to otherwise unfold by way of the digital natives' unchecked proliferation of a museum's digital content. Palmer warns that these images and the digital modes of participation they advocate "lack the original object's material conditions and the contemplative possibilities offered by the heterotopia of a gallery space." The site-specific nature of display, collection, scholarship, and education are glazed over by the spectacular disinterested scroll that distributes images in a manner that obliterates the fundamental requirements for the museum's subject.

While pleas to retain the heterotopic museological space appear to re-empower the "hegemony" of the Western museum, this is only a problem when we ignore any manner of abuses committed by the owners of the network of networks known as the "internet"-a privately run infrastructure manipulated for profit by the owners of the means of transmission and storage. Holding a database in some higher esteem, since it does not require the subject's mediation into cultural narrative, does not cure the hegemony of the museum any more than it escalates institutions into a technocratic quandary with far more potential for transgressions of capital. And this is where we find that an ideology of Internet Centrism dictates the very terms of the question at hand.

Internet Centrism is a widely held view that treats the internet as a separate, monolithic entity rather than a pluralized network. It casts the internet as a "thing" that swallows all related activity into its own totalizing logic, one which creates "digital worlds" that are somehow separate from society's class interests. Yet nothing "belongs" to the internet as such-we merely use it to locate information held on different servers. Rather than laying full claim to cultural artifacts, TCP/IP are means of exchanging data that are not always immanent to a medium. And because of this misplaced faith in the means of transmission, Internet Centrists often ignore the fact that it is a network administered according to the interests of a technocratic ruling class. Those users who advocate for "liberated" or "open" digital transmission may fail to see that privately run digital networks and data brokers are in themselves hegemons par excellence whose claims to structuring a new democratized exchange could hardly be more disingenuous.

For the Internet Centrist, to maintain a "legacy" institution is akin to hindering the logical progression of digital technology, to cling to an outmoded and inefficient set of behaviors. The greatest utility can be derived from aggregating, mapping, and indexing cultural images to be accessed in one master database, accessible via one universal user interface. This denies the existence of a plurality of interpretations. Such hermeneutics shed new light on a body of art production or discourse that is by no measure unitary or optimally organized. The story of the institution, the artist, and the society from which they emerged are at most absorbed as attributes in a grand database schema.

The Internet Centrist asks us, a priori, why we are not looking for data at the museum, and makes adjustments accordingly. This ideology mistranslates characteristics across discrete entities: from museum to database and vice versa. When mediated through the logic of the database, our reliance on the museum to allegorize the past-which Donald Preziosi claims is its singular power to which we are held in thrall-crumbles under the weight of the basest desires of an expanding appetite for rewritable content and socialized experiences. 26 The curatorial choices that follow will work in accord with the logic of the private networks that handle them, not the interests of the authors who produced them.

A database is structured to accommodate information that is too vast to be accepted in one gesture, and it is indexed consistently so as to allow for uniform, logical retrieval of any of its components. While the museum has storage, its mode of display is fundamentally at odds with the notion that content must be indexed as a matter of its very existence-its holdings are traversed not by an algorithm but by a human subject. What's more, the cultural technology platforms that run on digital databases have codified the singular art object into their architectures at precisely the time when that format becomes nearly obsolete in its relationship to contemporary art practice. As such the database creates something more fraught than the notion of a canonical object: each row is a single manipulatable object stored as a result set for which fewer and fewer of its users might query to restage history.

The metabolism of the database, though it collects and stores objects, seeks an ahistorical utopia that will transcend time to achieve an infinitely scalable present. A stream of "free," "open," and decontextualized image files that are organized for retrievability by an algorithm are not only an affront to the museum's subject, but also to the most essential concerns of a historiographical fabric that resists network production.

If the museum is where we accumulate or mark off time by means of objects, then the database is where we accumulate the data produced by an ever-mutating present. At a time when the myth of the ideologically free database and its image metabolism make incursions into the institution, the museum may, contrary to the economic conditions that surround it, retain its historical role as an expression of humanity's desire for a making things not just total, but immortal. Still, if the museum calls out to be modeled like a database, it will be because the museum has always stood as a symbolic reflection of a society's structure.

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Mike Pepi is a writer living in New York. He runs Cloud-Based Institutional Critique, a New York-based reading group dealing with digital technologies and their relationship to arts institutions, organized through thepublicschool.org. In February 2015 he will co-edit, along with Marvin Jordan, a special issue of DIS Magazine dedicated to Big Data.

© 2014 e-flux and the author

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Is a Museum a Database?: Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia

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In Art Project 2023, João Enxuto and Erica Love imagine the future of the Google Art Project, the search giant's effort to reproduce images from the world's top museums as it develops over the next decade.

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1. The Contract

The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the artist from work, but to his or her proletarization via alienated construction and transportation work. In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need an artist as a traditional producer. Rather, today the artist is more often hired for a certain period of time as a worker to realize this or that institutional project.

- Boris Groys

When his readymades entered the space of art, Duchamp effectively rearranged the contract between the exhibition and the work of art into what we now accept as the status quo, liberating the artist from the laws of traditional taste by breaking open a space within the exhibition for artists to work-or, more precisely, to think. In a wily chess move, the presentation of industrial objects as art freed the artist from manual labor and allowed simple spatial and temporal arrangements within an exhibition to release a dynamic cosmology in which the ontological and epistemological foundations of art itself could be simultaneously made and unmade. This advanced the position of the artist enormously; he or she became free to do and exhibit anything, and the institution was thus expected to respect the will of the artist by staying out of the way.

But there was a high price to pay for the total sovereignty Duchamp gained for the artist, and this is only becoming clear almost a century after Duchamp exhibited his fountain: Duchamp's liberated artist could only appear when sanctioned by an art institution. In other words, the basic condition allowing the artist to produce whatever he or she pleased was that the liberated artistic gesture must only appear in sanctioned spaces of art. This has likewise given enormous authority to art institutions, which are in turn just as responsible for producing art as artists themselves. From a white cube in New York to a remote Nepalese mountaintop, the sanctioning forces of the art world are the sole enabler of art, but also the artist's ball and chain.

2. Artistic Sovereignty

And yet, an artist today nevertheless aspires to a certain kind of sovereignty, to the freedom to work as one pleases. Unlike artists, say, before the French Revolution, who worked merely to satisfy a commission from the church or the aristocracy, or to serve public taste and critics, artists today understand themselves as being not only capable of deciding what kind of practice they want to have, what subject matter is important to them, what form it may take, and so forth; they also understand themselves as fundamentally free to follow their own personal interests or to respond to urgent events in the world around them. And this fundamental freedom is understood as a basic condition of any work of art, as the pillar that the content and form of any artwork rests upon.

In fact, public exhibitions of art also started at the time of the French Revolution, when the royal palace was returned to the hands of the people in the form of the first fully public exhibition of painting and sculpture by contemporary artists of that day. The audience for this salon show at the Salon Carré became, in a sense, the first real "public": a group comprised of new citizen-subjects who had just violently gained political power and instituted a republic in the name of popular sovereignty. And while the exhibition did not include any explicitly politically or socially engaged art-but rather traditional paintings of landscapes, nudes, and mythological and religious motifs-the actual experience of being able to enter the royal palace to view art was surely political in itself, for it was intimately connected to the Revolution. The mere fact of entering the palace-as-exhibition demonstrated, in a material way, the belief that the legitimacy of the state is created by the consent of its people and that the state exists to serve the people, and not the other way around.

This situation created unprecedented positions and opportunities both for artistic practice and for art institutions: the sudden presence of a public offered artists the potential to transform community through art's critical function, to engage groups and influence public opinion in a way that could in turn result (and did result) in tangible social and political change. It is in no way accidental that several decades later saw the emergence of such figures as Courbet, Manet, and others who helped to institute the paradigm of critically engaged art practice we still aspire to follow today. For arts institutions, the emergence of an art-viewing public marked a transition from private collections to a much more meaningful social function. And it was through this commitment to a public, to an idea of popular sovereignty, that both the artist and the institution suddenly managed to obtain sovereign positions for themselves as well. Interestingly, all this was possible within a process of mere spectatorship: looking at art objects and representations. Here it is important to insist that, though we now live in a more complex time, art exhibitions still carry this potential today.

While it's tempting to assume that artistic and popular sovereignty are connected and interdependent, this is not always the case. Claims to artistic sovereignty are often found in the works of artists who are in the most unfree circumstances. Much like popular sovereignty, artistic sovereignty is perpetually contained, contested, recuperated, or co-opted. While as an artist you may think you are free to do as you please, in order for your work to be economically sustainable, critically acknowledged, or even simply brought into contact with the art public, it needs to conform to certain network protocols that dictate the forms of art production that circulate. With the ever-increasing professionalization of artists, curators, and other practitioners in the field of art, it seems that the industry of contemporary art is actually moving towards a certain restoration of a more prescriptive position vis-à-vis the artist. This reality necessitates a more focused positioning of liberated artistic work within, against, and beyond the contextual superstructure that enables and envelops the sovereign artistic gesture.

3. What Is Contemporary Art?

Politics and biography have merged. We are all tolerant of art that is rooted in specific stories. This is the inclusive zone where the artist plays his or her own perspective for a collective purpose. The drive is towards unhooking from who you are while simultaneously becoming only yourself. Some people can sleep with their eyes open.

-Liam Gillick

After Duchamp, the artist can now address the politics of the exhibition, but it's equally true that the artist can never produce outside of these politics. After all, is this not what prompted many artists, primarily centered in and around Yugoslavia, from Mladen Stilinović to NSK, to auto-institutionalize themselves in order to produce legitimacy as they simultaneously produced work? Artists now continue to produce their own self-defined institutions, but this tactic is quickly becoming insufficient for gaining the freedom to work. Just as social networks are rapidly auto-institutionalizing everyone by introducing a common protocol for making individual people visible to each other across long distances, even the artist seeking a total exit from the art system must paradoxically not venture too far in order for such a heroic gesture to exist within the frame of art. There are no longer any artist unions worth mentioning, for why should they be necessary when artist and institution alike are inextricably bound together by the supra-institution of Contemporary Art?

Carl Schmitt famously wrote, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." But an exception from what? What is the implicit contract-the constitution that grants contemporary art its legitimacy as a strong systemic power? What is the contract that a new Duchamp in our time must break? And how would this break be made apparent?

For decades now many have looked to politically or socially engaged art to provide the means of breaking through, and for many years this kind of work did succeed in doing so. Now, however, the enclosure of contemporary art has accounted for this work in its calculations, for we have come to see the insertion of political art in museum spaces as a zombie-like caricature of social commitment, a walking dead of social life and artistic currency that masks a total confusion with regard to the question of how to render artistic form relevant and challenging. The vast number of artists filled with genuine social commitment are wisely secretive of the fact that they must inhabit a double life, knowing that the social relevance of their work is trapped in their own subjectivity and even in their process of developing their work. These same artists tend to be increasingly uncomfortable and elusive at their own openings as they watch the exhibition context hermetically seal the very content of their works into the forms they use to present it.

This is not because political consciousness has become irrelevant to art, but because the concrete social conditions that these artists address in their work have been overshadowed by the much more pressing politics of what constitutes contemporary art in the first place-the question of why this or that work is even being shown in a given space. Recent biennials and documentas have evaded thematization specifically under the banner of a vague and relativistic, open-ended idea of heterogeneous plurality. But this is possible only as the master theme becomes increasingly clear: more contemporary art.

Paradoxically, this has produced an entire generation of amazing artists who opt for a hyper-formalism that borders on the arcane, because they know that the only option available to them is to advance the enclosure of the art context by adopting a museological format within their very own exhibition-ready works-employing plinths, shelves, and vitrines as artistic forms par excellence. They know, like Duchamp perhaps did, that their freedom must be bought using the currency of the regime that governs them. The exceptions tend to be artists working in video, because video allows a window into a world that does not concern the art institution.

These are the most immediate exit points we have available at the moment. Without delving too deeply into Duchamp scholarship, we still look forward to something that can escape the enclosure of the present time-not as a messianic hope for total rupture, but simply as a means of articulating a form of agency that does not lean entirely on the professional superstructure of art in order to come into being as art. It is the implicit drive behind the amplified pitch of a great deal of art writing, because many practitioners in art, and almost all artists, still believe, in spite of their cynicism, that a similar break is still possible, and that this break can align itself with a cohesive social project. In the meantime, we function more and more like NGO employees who are alcoholic yet naively idealistic. The first step is perhaps to recognize the scale of the system of enclosure that needs to be broken, then its structure, then its openings.

The systemic enclosure of contemporary art is much larger than a consensus around exhibition codes, curatorial sensibility, and relevant artists, because the very function of cultural spaces themselves has been superseded or redeployed by a political superstructure. Over the past decade, contemporary art has merged increasingly with the sensibilities of actual, concrete political structures, which have discovered in contemporary art and culture a means of exhibiting liberal, enlightened, globally conscious moral values. The artistic field is happy to serve in this diplomatic capacity, because expanding its rule allows it to bury its own ontological crisis. To create more institutions, more artists, in more places allows artists and institutions alike to escape the question of what is actually happening. There is a lot of money in this game, for it is in many cases financed by municipalities, monarchs, and oligarchs who have discovered in the cultural field a new, advanced form of social capital. Many well-intentioned artists can cash in for the first time in their careers and still have their work exhibited in flattering spaces and celebrated by some of the greatest critical minds of our time, who are flown in and hosted for this very reason. Many of the same artists worry that they cannot deviate from the path, as the stakes have suddenly become very high.

The paradox comes in the fact that the instrumentalization of art as a tool to promote liberal and democratic values coincides in so many ways with the actual history of art, from the modern period back to the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance. This produces an even more confusing effect for those who see the role of art compromised by its deployment in a broader field of cultural politics, because it also appears that it may not be the art system per se that is expanding, but the very liberal tradition that undergirds it. As if rescuing art from the industry of contemporary art were not difficult enough, moving one level higher, even contemporary art itself becomes harder to disentangle from cultural diplomacy and municipal and state marketing. But it is also here that contemporary art becomes almost hysterical in its structural instability.

As a product of the so-called postmodern era, the classification of art as "contemporary" emerged as a convenient means of playing two sides of a paradigmatic shift simultaneously. Contemporary art distances itself from the period of modernity and its culturally sited humanistic project by casting a more modest temporal rather than ideological signifier-a momentary distraction from liberal humanism though an articulation of a more fluid and inclusive project that could encompass artistic practices supposedly less readily integrated into the Western humanistic worldview, simply for being made in the current moment. But just as we now know postmodernity to have been an extension or expansion of modernity, and not a break with it, so does contemporary art sustain its link to the Western liberal tradition while simultaneously claiming a cultural exteriority that has allowed for its enormous lateral movement across the world in the period of globalization. Inherent in the DNA of contemporary art is this drive to cover the world and draw complex artistic localities into a context and format that renders them coherent and available to other localities, within a comprehensive discourse. It is prematurely alarmist to say that this is always a colonial project, even if it often moves in parallel with soft and neo-colonial economic colonization, always in search of capital for more spectacle. But we can say with some certainty that contemporary art has a very peculiar way of distancing itself from the universalizing impulses of modernity by replacing these impulses with a much more concrete, actual universal format for drawing art from all corners of the globe together into a single, massive container.

So what is the edge of the container of the contemporary-what is not contemporary? For many artists, it is very literally history. And here we start to see that many of the young museological artists whose serenely arcane or anachronistic forms serve to absorb the space of the museum into their work also attempt to escape the enclosure of the present by producing work in a way that stretches back if not to high modernism or the Soviet era, then even further. For them, it is a contact with the past that can break the imperative to be in the present time, and it is through this that they assert their sovereignty and regain their subjectivity. But to return to Duchamp, what his readymades produced was not just an exceptional space for his own works, but a rupture at the most vulnerable point in the epistemological and systemic foundation of art. He did something that the field of art was forced to come to terms with somehow, even by producing a new tradition, for there are innumerable artists today, in contemporary art and not, who do not recognize Duchamp's break and continue to work in a way that extends from the nineteenth century, or simply an era that did not need to come to terms with the structural and systemic edges he exposed.

In this sense, Duchamp's break becomes such a tantalizing moment to return to precisely because he was able to unravel a system by making works out of its very edges, by using the limits of the system that validated it as the very material for his work. It is not unlike Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), in which a prisoner liberates himself using the debris found in his prison cell-a material and metaphysical demand for freedom. This is arguably not an aspect of Duchamp that carried into the era of institutional critique, which notoriously functioned firmly within the confines of the contemporary art system to, so to speak, redecorate the prison canteen or rearrange the furniture. On the other hand, institutional critique was absolutely crucial for recognizing the integration of contemporary art within a global system of power-and this constitutes the core challenge facing any Duchampian break today in a way that did not concern Duchamp in his own time. Could it be, then, that if we are to take the lessons of institutional critique to heart, that a Duchampian break today would necessarily have to take into consideration not only the aesthetic field and its logics of museological enclosure, but would also have to identify the weak points and systemic inconsistencies of the meta-museum of global liberal democratic capitalism that has absorbed it?

4. The Task of the Curator

In a 1995 film by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster entitled Smoke, Harvey Keitel plays the part of Auggie. Auggie runs a Brooklyn tabacco shop and has a personal project: he photographs the same intersection at the same time every day, not unlike photoconceptual practices such as those of Ed Ruscha. There is some ambiguity as to whether Auggie sees this as explicitly an art project, and perhaps this is because the film marks a point when contemporary art practices had become so assimilated into the popular imaginary that everyone-shopkeepers and accountants, junior stock brokers and Kurdish militants-was expected to have a conceptual art project, or something like it, in their daily life. Everyone is an artist indeed. But the early nineties also mark the ascendance and rapid proliferation of the figure of the curator, and two decades later, with the rise of the internet and social media platforms, it is arguably curating rather than artistic methodology that has come to dominate the popular imaginary as the primary creative act. Self-design accomplished through selective aggregation of friends, images, words, brands, and so forth takes the place of the act of artistic creation. As Kyle Chayka has recently written:

Today, the verb "curate" can be applied to just about anything. The rise of social media, with ascendant platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Svpply, and Pinterest, has lead to an increased awareness of how we present the things we like and the objects and brands we associate ourselves with. We now carefully choose just the right image and just the right product to display, building up an aggregate identity of small judgments. Choice as a creative or intellectual act was before the province of the curator. Now, it's possible to curate everything from a Facebook photo album to a Pinterest fashion moodboard, bookshelf selection, or pop-up shop of artisanal food products. It was not always thus.

But curating does not limit itself to social platforms and biennials. Take Soho House for example, a boutique hotel and members-only club with branches in more than a dozen cities. Soho House hosts curated screenings, temporary exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, and even has its own art collection. It also organizes art tours and publishes a monthly magazine-designed to look very much like an art publication-in which the word "curated" is used liberally. Soho House is not the only enterprise to profitably deploy a curatorial model as business model.

While Duchamp's readymade granted enormous sovereignty to artists, it also endowed curators with an awesome power to decide which artworks could become comprehensible as art by being exhibited; in this way, the production of art was subordinated to the realm of exhibition-making and curation. And yet, over the past decade or so we find a similar process underway in the contextual framing of our experience of life itself-now formed by curatorial decision-making processes that arbitrate between a mass of goods and experiences based on their aesthetic effects. When artists confronted the advent of mechanical reproduction, their response brought about the invention of an entirely new kind of art-abstract art. Today, when artists seeking the freedom to work as they please do so by employing curatorial methodologies in their work, and when curators themselves seem to be the proven beneficiaries of Duchamp's contextual break, should it not be the task of the curator to pose these questions concerning sovereignty and contextual freedom? If we accept that the artist's compromised position within the exhibition and within the strategic deployment of global contemporary art is primarily a contextual problem of political containment, whereby artworks are reduced to scraps of content, then perhaps the curator is in a position to slice through this knot.

But how? The most immediate solution would be to look affectionately to the figure of Auggie, whose project documenting the everyday life of his local street corner blurs the line between a personal hobby and a fully-formed artistic practice. He has the appearance of an artist whose sovereignty is so absolute that he has no need for contemporary art, and it is tempting to think that valorizing a practitioner working at the very border of contemporary art would be enriching for all. This might make for a wonderful exhibition, but as we have established already, such a contextually inclusive gesture would accomplish little in merging the worlds of art and life, because the expansionary impulse of contemporary art has already injected art into daily life, just as it has enclosed art practitioners within a particular life-world known as the art world. If the curator is indeed the inheritor of Duchamp's contextual break, then how precisely do we thematize the enclosure of contemporary art that curators themselves have been tasked with maintaining and expanding?

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Breaking the Contract - Journal #37 September 2012 - e-flux

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The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the artist from work, but to his or her proletarization via alienated construction and transportation work. In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need an artist as a traditional producer.

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It would be radical-but probably right-to say that the rising interest in nature among artists and art professionals has less to do with nature and a lot more to do with the institutional structure of the art world itself. The rise and development of museums, public collections, and all other participating institutions in this history has been dependent on an idea of social structure and citizenship that is now radically changing: one could even say that nature embodies the last institutional twist in the history of institutionalized art, as the emergence of Nature-as a space and a ground-embodies not so much an institutional alterity to the museums and white (and nonwhite) cubes, but rather the very possibility of a rebirth outside the frame of history. Yes, history. I do believe that more important than the problem of culture is the question of history and national identity that art has been dealing with for so many centuries. However, this is not the question that preoccupies me here.

Both democracy and museums had a short-lived, minor revival at the very edge of their decay, before continuing their descent. The transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century was marked by the energy of discourses inhabiting art institutions, an energy of renewal that affected not only the big institutions, but also the role of medium- and smaller-sized ones. The question of the future of representation within the Western democratic system was answered by the proliferation of philosophers and different curatorial and artistic agents promoting access, ideas, and the archive. The past gained a plurality and the question of history started to fragment into the problems of the legacy of postcolonialism. The archive was the first door: the document-still white-preceded the entrance of materials and artistic voices from different territories and histories. Restitution started to gain body and reality, in regard to the question of race in the art world. Still, the energies of renewal were possessed by enthusiasm, by an economic and social growth that unprecedentedly empowered art to see itself as capable of opening the social to its past through new and different ideas of education, participation, social wealth, and access. The art world believed in itself and many politicians in Europe supported this wave-at the beginning-as a way of activating the Union and creating a resonance between the old continent's dreams and this new political organization, which on its surface seemed a genius development of all those historical loose ties among nations that were never friends, but permanently interdependent. It was only natural that the Union needed to spread a strong sense of culture, one that was critical and, at the same time, capable of capitalizing on the old flavor of history through a renewed "park" of art institutions. This also explains why the tsunami of critique of the old and the belief in its force were interwoven. But, more importantly, this also explains why the whole exercise of investigating the limits of established art institutions and the possibilities of new formats was a very controlled impulse; one was absolutely convinced that at the end of the rainbow was a pot of gold. The emerging interest on the part of the press in museums and the "stars" that created exhibitions enhanced an idea of access that was mostly sponsored by low-cost airlines. All of a sudden, cities were like the musicals that reemerged as a genre in new North American cinema. Thanks to Zara, Uniqlo, or Swatch, many old forgotten buildings in city centers started to sing and to smell. All the glories of past centuries responded to the arrival of all these tourists as if they were new wings in old art institutions presenting both the identity of the past and the city under a new form and a new light-and, of course, wearing new clothes.

The art world said "access" and access it was! The citizens started to open the doors of their houses. Did you say hospitality? Et voilà, millions of apartments were redecorated with white and bright elements and opened-in a competitive quest-to visitors. Who said that shelter was not the notion that would reign in the old continent? Who could now claim that the wishes expressed by art and its institutions were not listened to? Millions listened to the call ... Never had it been possible to peek into the private houses of the Catalan bourgeoisie, for example, if you did not belong to their inner circle, but now, just log into an app and you can not only see their spaces, but also compare their prices with yours. It is true that this could be seen as an undesirable development, but this development still has everything to do with us, with the language and the desires we expressed with these words which cannot be entirely and independently blamed on tourism and the marketing of all the city centers of Europe. Tourism is the complex result of seeing the enormous importance and impact of the transit of people as an incredible source of income, as well as of using this type of transit as a veil to cover the arrival of those thousands of people that seek refuge and a future in the developed territories. These two forms of transit cannot be separated from one another.

But what has all of this to do with art? Or contemporary art? One cannot truly claim that development occurred in the right direction, that museums and art institutions gained relevance, that curators were established in a new and unprecedented way, or that criticality and the new formats are visible, now that collectors and the market rule the art world in the absence of public money or foundations defending the common interest. I would say a lot of it has to do with how contemporary art sped up and was used to speed up a transformation of our society in directions that, while overall positive, are at the same time rapidly growing dangerous as we are unable to create a political frame for it. Art has been obsessed with the tensions created between elites and public communities. No other field of practice and study has dedicated so much effort and speculative thinking to addressing this question. And it is this very question that determines today's development of technology and politics.

Ocean

The field of art has indeed contributed massively to generating a sense of experience about gender, nature, and race, and has served as an amplifier of other disciplines concerned with the same questions and rights. However, it is equally important to face and to discuss the transformation of our institutional structures regardless of their scale, to understand the interdependency of the evolution of our public sphere and the capital dedicated to it and the future of art, and to reconsider the relationships we are building not only with technology as an industry, but also with technology as a substance that itself needs to be reevaluated in terms of gender, race, and in relation to nature.

Art and its world have been from their origins directly dependent on urban and industrial developments. Even if in the past-and also in recent years in a limited way-many have been pointing towards the nonurban as a possible context for future artists in which to make art, the fact is that it always sounds like a last resort and, in actuality, the countryside (read as an "other" to the wealthier urban centers) is neither fully considered to the extent of its possibilities nor stands to make a comeback. Art has never-for reasons related to the development of education and our physical and necessary dependency on demographics, on the presence of an audience-reflected properly on an "other" contrary to and outside of the modern models of production and transmission. Why should we? Art, in the way it has been conceived, has not needed fields and farmers but rather citizens and scholars. Institutions need to be where the bureaucracy is and where politics are formed. But are politics even really taking shape in cities today?

The question of understanding the nonurban context is a very complex one, and one that also relates to the rise of the internet in an intriguing way.

Art in nonurban contexts has historically taken other forms, ones that relate to craft and to community values, such as tradition, but also to traditional notions of gender and work. And until now, projects proposing contemporary art in the countryside have mostly stressed the historical interest artists have in the landscape or the way they conceptualize certain elements of earth and nature, but have failed to engage with the reality of the people inhabiting those areas. Probably only Canada and some northern parts of Scandinavia have created institutions with collections responding to indigenous art and First Nation concerns and views on the world. Otherwise, it is still very difficult to find examples of logics that defy empirical-even if some are critical-views on different knowledges.

Postcolonial theories and debates have raised enormous awareness about the realities of those suffering the normalization processes imposed by imperialisms of all kinds, and yet, those same realities have been the subject of an enormous fictionalization of local cultures and indigenous wisdoms. Somehow, our institutional and academic ways of reading the real have left space for exceptions of the best kind. Art has displayed an enormous interest in the testimonials of the oppressed, forcing those voices to sound oftentimes like factory workers displaced in a nonindustrial context. Furthermore, the antagonism towards technology, social media, and all the miseries left behind by the evolution of labor in our developed and service-oriented centers has created an idealized view of indigenous peoples as possessing an original wisdom that we have lost. The rise of interest in ayahuasca and the growth of an industry dedicated to substances that are supposed to enhance our quality of life-like superfoods-go hand in hand. Many scholars-such as oceanographer Osvaldo Ulloa-have denounced the systematic construction of the indigenous as the original ecological subject, as if nearness to their lives will serve to provide benefits to ours that we can incorporate into our ways of production and consumption, without much change except a new empathy for their way of living. Indeed, there is a space for difference and an attention that were not there before, but these have come with a failure to deal with more complex differences that cannot be easily described. Further, the political situations of many indigenous communities are endangered like never before and any mechanisms to protect their resources are silenced in the face of public and private interests, such as capitalist extraction.

It is not only radical ways of conceiving life that are affected or at stake here, but the many millions living in territories that are of no interest-not even for an exercise in exoticism-to the powers that be. The reality of the countryside is leading to the rise of old-fashioned right-wing values. Poverty marks the lives of many who see how educational systems only shape individuals according to models of labor and life that have nothing in common with the reality they are living in: a reality of millions of kilometers of country dispossessed of any beauty, sense of sustainability, or health, and also remote, disconnected, and suffering from endemic class, gender, and discrimination problems.

In these circumstances, it is a prerequisite to read the interest in nature not as a subject, but as a necessary turn towards new conditions of space, politics, action, gender, race, and interspecies relations. As of late, it is much more common for art practitioners to say "nature" than "countryside," for example. The reason is to be found in the philosophies common in the art sphere: those that proffer a systematic thinking against nature, on the background of nature, on the otherness of nature, in a dialectical manner with nature, which have made nature much more legible, in all its nonurban forms.

It is because of the prevalent discourses and understanding of nature that we are still nonspecific about the future of art in a nonurban context. Nature and art are other names for life, and life needs to be reintroduced into our thinking in a big way. But the interest in nature preserves-probably for good reasons-a level of indeterminacy regarding the actions that attract artists and inspire us to think about the spaces that exist outside institutionalized life. This seems easy to say, but it is radically difficult to imagine it in nonnegative terms. Institutions have been our language and the form we invented to organize ourselves. Therefore, every time a scientist says they have discovered a new species of fish, they are saying that there is a whole part of life- a sentient part-that we have not responded to. And this response is not just a question of "expanding" our aid or action towards it. Rather the contrary: intelligent life and sentient life should-and eventually will-function like an imperative to organize differently every structure that plays a role in our relationship to nature.

This idea of coexistence, interspecies communication, etc., is not entirely new. Such notions have a long history, and yet it has been mostly science that has paid attention to intelligence existing in nonhuman realms, but also more importantly, to the different philosophical minds that have tried to describe the political and epistemological dimensions of this crucial phenomena. Humanities and the sphere of visual culture have been skeptical and conservative in embracing any theory or study taking this possibility seriously. The entanglement of the questions of rationality, language, and labor has acted as a barrier for those presenting ideas of intelligence based on forms and dimensions of consciousness that defy the classic parameters that safeguard the status of the human and uphold production as one of the most important functions of our human lives. Language and labor structure two of the pillars of our early, modern, and late capitalist life: education and production. Both go hand in hand, since the major goal of education-and more and more so-is none other than being able to work. Education makes labor possible, by producing capitalist subjects, and it has as a secondary mission to familiarize workers with future labor scenarios. Education for the sake of knowledge, or for the nourishment of our capacity to speculate or preserve old forms (classical studies, for example) through new forms (computer science, etc.) has dramatically lost its importance. We speak of research, and there are a few who still believe that research does name the speculative worlds that ancient academia nourished and protected, but research nowadays is mainly a tool that extends hypothesis to the doors of industry.

Another of the big prejudices that culture and the visual arts have with regards to the idea of nature possessing an intelligence that may influence our political forms and languages has to do with gender. Women have historically been seen as those defending sensorial forms of communication that defy classical-and narrow-understandings of rationality and the role it plays in the definition of social norms. Therefore, to accept expanded views on the sensorial implies accepting and undertaking a reform of the social norms that situate certain behaviors, knowledges, and artistic productions in a secondary realm in relation to the canons that cultural and artistic institutions have created. And this has been the case for centuries: a misogynistic prejudice runs all through the history of Western philosophy and art and has determined the silencing of so many other forms of relating to life that would have rendered the premises of, for example, institutional critique radically conservative and opportunistic towards the old order-as indeed they are.

While it would be wrong to think that when one says "ocean," one is naming a "subject," we might be so radical as to posit that to say "ocean" is, today, to say "art"-art without the burden of institutional life, without the ideological twists of cultural politics, art as a practice that belongs to artists, art facing the urgency of socializing with all who care about life. In other words, to say "ocean" is to replace the historical notion of the avant-garde with a code that is not determined by form and the invention of new gestures, but by an investigation of the substance of life, identifying this as the mission of art.

This would imply that all those artists directly interested in life underwater, in nature, in new forms of sensing from nonhuman-centered perspectives, are "in." But it also means that all those not directly interested in thinking along these lines-who do not identify the intelligence of art as lying in its radical interest in life-are even more important than those who are. Think about the current situation of all the structures constituting the art world; about the impoverishment of a language inherited from past left and liberal social visions, and the impossibility of reinventing these dreams and their premises under a late-capitalistic economic system; and about the need for a new sensorium to invent new notions, to build new sentences, to embrace a new idea of equality and social justice. If we do, we can see that to say "ocean" is to say the expansion of museums, of public space ... that the ocean is a source that reprograms our senses and contains a potential for transforming the future of architecture, of communications, of gender entanglement, of economy, of art.

The Teacher-Curator

At the end of 2017, I was invited by the TBA21-Academy to curate an oceanic expedition for their program The Current, a series of three-year cycles organized around the state of the ocean. I was the third curator, preceded by Ute Meta Bauer, who successfully finished a three-year cycle, and César García-Álvarez, who did only one trip. For my cycle, the artist group SUPERFLEX and I were commissioned to curate three expeditions led by artists and scientists and three public gatherings whose form would be defined by the person or collective in charge. The crucial part of this initiative and its programs was the problems it posed to curatorial practice and to my own individual work as a curator within an art institute.

The invitation not only provided me with an opportunity to see curatorial practice in "a new light" or an "expanded" field, but actually forced me to reimagine the whole question of the future of curatorial practice. Am I still a curator if I direct an art school but do not program exhibitions in a consecutive and publicly accessible manner? Is the title "curator" needed for an organizer of expeditions that take their name from the old habit of exploring territories to enhance not only knowledge but also frontiers and possessions? Will there be a role for curators-as well-trained mediators-in a world where seeing is not only a human or animal trait but a technological threat?

Our field-as curators-is constituted by the questions we are able to ask.

When I moved to an art school, I was motivated by several inquiries. A very simple one: How are art schools to become part of the art institutions that nourish our social space through artistic and speculative production? Why has our view of art schools been so reductive? If they contribute to the development of artists and thus art, they should also actively participate in forming the field of attention and study around nature, and also around the questions about the future of race and gender that are so crucial to the future art practice. What does the term "education" include today? If education is the key to curing all of our social ills-from doubts about the reality of climate change to gender and racial inequality-then why don't countries, private foundations, and all the forces in favor of a free and democratic society unite to create educational programs capable of responding to this?

Never before has a term said so little. From literacy to digital skills, "education" names basic requirements to be part of a system, but it lacks the force of an approach to thinking that is capable of tackling the biggest challenges we will face. No one seems to be ready to gather the many parties-contemporary art included-that are searching for new modes of communication and pedagogical systems, for a collaborative effort toward bringing younger generations and populations with less access to art to experiences that would help them renegotiate their relationship to nature and formulate new knowledge.

Few people saw how my plan to introduce into the curricula of an art institute ways of rethinking nature, race, and gender could contribute-modestly, but steadily-to a transformation of a field otherwise bound to the processes of exhibition and the market. Moreover, as a woman my move toward education was perceived as a retreat to something minor-perhaps important in principle, but incapable of having the same impact that art spaces or galleries have. Once the hype of education as a twist in exhibition-making-as reported by numerous articles in art magazines-had passed, the reality of art education returned to the way we knew it from the past. There seemed to be a big difference, as well, between an art school directed by a man and one directed by a woman, a difference that negatively affected the ambitions I had. When run by men, the schools are seen as still possessing some of the charm of the avant-garde heroic gesture of advocating for a free space, which resonates with radical politics. However, the very moment a woman was in charge, questions about teaching-versus curating-began raining down upon me. But if we once proposed the idea that artists can curate, surely today we should propose the idea that teachers can curate? What are the kinds of methods, exhibitions, and public exchanges this would generate? In post-liberal Western societies we face a recurrent problem of failing to identify women-and all minorities-as capable of producing a meaningful and strong public sphere, and this affects and distorts the perception of what is possible in the future of our art and cultural systems. So the idea that teachers can curate makes sense. Teachers, understood as practitioners of paideia (the rearing of citizens), aim to cultivate a closeness, an insight into a subject that helps each individual communicate their experience and therefore create a sensing system that goes hand-in-hand with a language to convey it, to make it communicable.

So, let's embrace the imbalance and all the imbalances that are needed to create new balance. Anyhow, the teacher-as-curator is nothing new. We accept the expert, the magician, the shaman, the leader, the CEO, the collective as curators, yet we seem to have a problem with curation by the harmless teacher or the person in charge of creating a bond with a group of young people.

One of my favorite examples of this exercise of turning everything into a classroom, then into an exhibition, was performed by a school teacher: Raphael Montañez Ortiz. He was a primary school teacher in a public and very poor school in Harlem, New York City. He was asked by the parents of his students to create a method to convey their experience of being Caribbean and African-mostly of Puerto Rican descent-to their children, who were in an educational system that taught them in English and in a culture very different from their own. It was this teacher-curator who founded El Museo del Barrio, a museum that miraculously appeared in the classroom to perform the many operations of explaining, demonstrating, and translating cultural realities that were very far from the city.

In my short, but very intense, time at El Museo del Barrio, I had the great pleasure of talking to Raphael and many other artists of his generation about the challenges of conveying diasporic culture to children, such as introducing them to "the sound of the coquí frog." At the time, I did not understand the meaning of this statement, and so I underestimated it, or perhaps more precisely, categorized it as a beautiful metaphor. But it was meant literally. The coquí gets its name from its mating song. The male of the species sings " coquí, coquí." For Puerto Ricans in the US, missing the sound of this song is one manifestation of the enormous pain that colonial processes of the past and present have created. Their exile is perceived as migration, and they have a political status that never allows them to arrive at full citizenship, nor fully retreat into their native land and its symbols.

Raphael represents a specific paradigm in a theory of the teacher-curator that I want to put forward. He embodies a model that is helpful for understanding what this teaching-curating function may mean. In the late '60s he was highly involved, alongside Gustav Metzger, in the question of destruction-a question that he never truly abandoned in his practice as an artist. In the '70s, with the publication of his Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, he revitalized his research on behavior and creation. He very soon-at least in his thinking-identified in the myth of destruction the question of a potential new and authentic origin. One of the most interesting traits of his thinking is how it surpasses radical individualism, seeking profound political responsibility. His teaching was not understood-not even by himself-as part of his artistic and curatorial practice. And yet I would claim that his study of Mesoamerican rituals and of all kinds of therapies that allow one to be "born again" were part of a long research practice that worked to propose a vision of how to deal with all we are not: how to deal with knowledge if we don't have it, how to deal with whiteness if you are not, how to deal with feminine sensing if you are male, how to deal with wealth if you are not rich ... how to deal with all these dualities if you don't want to be bound by any of them, and how all these poles and dialectical systems affect our ability to deal with complex racial, cultural, and economic realities.

Conclusion

Like Raphael Montañez Ortiz and many artists of his generation, it is imperative now to learn to situate behavior inside art practice, inside artistic production, and to become aware of the how, observing not only the language we use to address problems, but also the conditions we create to allow for different experiences of volumes, symbols, images, power, connections, media, etc. Doing so holds the key to understanding the future of a practice of mediation that can be identified with the teacher, and with all the hyper-pedagogical resources we may need to invent, positioning art as the experience of freedom, nature as the experience of gender. The teacher-curator is that figure that insists on the importance of matching together gender and nature with the efforts that are ahead of us in the decolonizing processes that we need to maintain-or actually, activate-in all cultural structures, which seems to be a relevant task to collectively undertake with young artists. At the same time, the continuous production of opportunities to include alumni and a broad community of artists and those interested in art is also a must.

And yet, there is another key question, different from but parallel to those mentioned above. It concerns the status of ignorance: the ill-suited tools we have inherited to deal with it, the question of transmission when reading decreases, and the challenge of embracing with joy those spaces that function outside our institutionally shaped modern minds. I have come to believe that the many multiple and different futures that may lie ahead of us are dependent on our ability to interpret ignorance and its structure: an ignorance that suggests that knowledge absorption as our traditional educational methods conceive it is in deep crisis; an ignorance affected but the structure of media, like it was in the late eighteenth century; an ignorance radically dependent on self-affirmation, just as traditional class structures are eroding. Recently, a researcher from the media analysis nonprofit Harmony Labs in New York explained to me in a private conversation that people share news and tweets that they identify with, not those that inspire them or make them change their minds. What goes viral on social media are thus those things that reinforce of our own views, while we keep private the things that alter our views. The reason for this, as writer Ingo Niermann explained to me, is that stability is privileged before change. Even when a person or a piece of information or a documentary changes our views, it also creates a vertigo, a sense of losing the old ground before having a new one to stand on-a new ground from which to be assertive and defend this new acquired sense of the real. It is the production of a ground from which to defend one's values that matters, from which to create a sense of identification that does not-or at least not only-consist of ultra-conservative views, or the rehearsal of the liberal and left-progressive ones that we need to work on.

Therefore, I would insist that ignorance is a real active force, and in order to reach the goals of equality and freedom, it is important to invest in the understanding of the structures and the experiences that constitute the transmission of ideas and feelings today.

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Gathering Sea I Am! - Journal #112 October 2020 - e-flux

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Chus Martínez writes of this issue: While it would be wrong to think that when one says "ocean," one is naming a "subject," we might be so radical as to posit that to say "ocean" is, today, to say "art."

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About ten years ago, I wrote a paper which was later published in our journal titled “Art Without Artists.”1 What triggered the text was an invitation to speak at a conference on curating, organized by a curatorial studies program in Germany. At the time I was a bit irritated at being constantly mistaken for a curator and wanted to try to clarify things, so I wrote a pretty confrontational text against curating, somehow not realizing how awkward it would feel to read it to a room full of curators and curating students. Halfway through my presentation it suddenly dawned on me that I was basically attacking the cops in the middle of a police academy assembly … I think I started feeling a little sick. There was not much of a discussion after the presentation. What followed was more like an uncomfortable silence. Nevertheless the text circulated widely and elicited a lot of responses, although I have not been invited to address a curatorial studies program since.

In hindsight, my arguments in that essay may have been a little theatrical and overblown. Curators and curating are probably not quite the monsters I made them out to be. I tend to agree with an observation Boris Groys made in a recent essay that no matter how subjective, a curator of public exhibitions may still be capable of producing more radical and surprising encounters than the numerical, algorithmic logic of social media, or other seemingly more democratic means of aggregating things and making them visible.

There is something in “Art Without Artists,” however, that interests me in relation to the present moment and the topic of this issue of e-flux journal: the notion of artistic independence, autonomy, or sovereignty. Here is what I wrote on sovereignty in 2009:

If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use—rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the “freedom of art.”

The notion of artistic sovereignty came up again a few years later. Here is what Brian Kuan Wood and I write on the subject in a 2012 essay called “Breaking the Contract”:

Over the past decade, contemporary art has merged increasingly with the sensibilities of actual, concrete political structures, which have discovered in contemporary art and culture a means of exhibiting liberal, enlightened, globally conscious moral values. The artistic field is happy to serve in this diplomatic capacity, because expanding its rule allows it to bury its own ontological crisis. To create more institutions, more artists, in more places allows artists and institutions alike to escape the question of what is actually happening … The paradox comes in the fact that the instrumentalization of art as a tool to promote liberal and democratic values coincides in so many ways with the actual history of art, from the modern period back to the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance. This produces an even more confusing effect for those who see the role of art compromised by its deployment in a broader field of cultural politics, because it also appears that it may not be the art system per se that is expanding, but the very liberal tradition that undergirds it.2

Thinking about this again a decade later, it may be that the liberal tradition is contracting, not expanding. The years leading up to 2020 have been marked by identitarian fragmentation and political closure in many parts of the world, combined with what Liam Gillick aptly refers to as a “neoliberal counterreformation begun by Milton Friedman et al., enacted by Thatcher–Reagan, and now conclusively pantomimed by Trump and the hysterically fabulist global strongmen of 2019 and their all-too-real and shocking new forms of nationalism.” All of these forces seem to pose a much greater threat to the possibility of artistic or any other kind of freedom than narcissistic curators, dictatorial cultural managers, didactic museums, or patronizing funding institutions.

The threat is painfully real. Over the past decade I have worked extensively in Russia and it’s incredibly sad for me to observe a relentless closure of possibilities for public expression, along with attacks on cultural institutions, filmmakers, theater directors, and others. Turkey has been another very important place to work for e-flux and me personally, and it’s surreal and devastating to see colleagues I know well jailed indefinitely for organizing artistic and cultural projects, charged with promoting terrorism. Recently we had extensive discussions about the possibility of publishing a version of e-flux journal in China, only to realize that it would not be possible to do so under the ever-tightening conditions of censorship and surveillance.

In the landscape that is gradually emerging, it’s not so fantastical to imagine the eventual replacement of all international exhibitions with beer festivals, local food and craft fairs, or other types of events that reaffirm a particular identity and sense of belonging, rather than offering an encounter with something or someone outside of that tightly constructed place. It’s also becoming possible to imagine a reduction or even a termination of human movement: from the reemergence and fortification of numerous national borders, to increasing visa restrictions and the exclusion of entire religions or nationalities from entering certain countries, to perhaps requiring a permit to leave. I grew up in the Soviet Union and I do remember living in a regime under which you can’t leave the country without permission from the state.

e-flux was started at the end of the 1990s, when the general global trajectory appeared very different. As we wrote in the introduction to the June 2019 conference that this issue stems from:

From the 1990s onward, national boundaries would dissolve, centers and peripheries would level out, and the internet would host worldwide cultural exchange. In many ways this really did happen, but some other things also happened. As people and ideas began to move across borders, money did too. Faced with an unmanageable planetary scale, capital became a more efficient regulator of flows than laws or nations. Suddenly, capital rises to become the primary form of representation and expression for the global community, and its flair for flexibility and recombination would even be mistaken for a democratic, autonomous, or anti-authoritarian character, sealing it in as a new form of sublime non-governance. Capital’s twin, the internet, would also democratize many scarce resources and forms of representation just as efficiently as it would mask its control by state agencies and some of the largest corporations in human history.3

Both e-flux and the e-flux journal have been possible largely through the coalescence of these technological, economic, and political factors of the past two decades, but also through a certain productive conflation or dissolution of boundaries between artistic, curatorial, and editorial methodologies that seem particular to our period. In turn, these are very much influenced by the logic of content aggregation and an accelerated pace of information and knowledge acquisition and accessibility. It’s entirely possible that my irritation with the expansion of the curatorial sensibility came largely from the fact that basically we were using the same methodology to develop e-flux, which I wanted to see as an artistic work at that time.

Both e-flux and e-flux journal came out of exhibitions. I started e-flux following a small one-night show I co-curated with a couple of friends in a hotel room in Chinatown in 1998. We didn’t have any money and I was merely trying to find some effective way to invite people without the costly printing of invitation cards. Email seemed to have worked, and that became what we still do today. Coinciding with the rapid expansion of internet, this method created a vast international audience. A few years later this project somehow resulted in an invitation to co-curate a biennial on Cyprus. Our plan was to make this biennial largely discursive: to replace the exhibition with a kind of free, experimental school. A number of artistic projects had taken the form of schools in previous years. I think the main novelty of our gesture was its scale: a large international biennial becoming a platform for a school during the expansion of the European Union, when seemingly every country wanted to join, and when modern, contemporary, and particularly conceptual art were emerging as a symbol of a kind of new EU cultural identity. Because the school idea was largely indebted to and inspired by artistic projects, we realized that on a certain level this biennial was becoming a kind of an artwork itself, but were apprehensive to say so publicly in 2005.

A lot of my ideas at that time were influenced by Utopia Station: a large-scale artistic and curatorial project organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Molly Nesbit at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and elsewhere. Participating in Utopia Station was both very inspiring and truly vexing: Was it a curated exhibition or an artwork by Rirkrit involving many other artists and thinkers? I think Molly was hoping that it would become something like an artistic political movement, inspired by the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein and the World Social Forum. As I learned later, it was also largely self-funded by Rirkrit, because the Venice Biennial, despite its enormous size, is notoriously short on funds.

The biennial on Cyprus, Manifesta 6, never happened. It imploded and was cancelled a few months before opening, after we ran into serious nationalist paranoia and opposition that conflicted with our idea of an open and inclusive project. The cancellation was followed by a number of lawsuits, so despite some discussion of moving the biennial to other venues and locations, no other institution wanted to touch it. Nevertheless, in part because by then e-flux had developed a stable economic base, I was able to realize a version of the school as a self-organized project in Berlin under the name unitednationsplaza. Variations of this project took place a little later in Mexico City and New York, and this is where I encountered most of the original contributors who helped shape e-flux journal: Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Jalal Toufic, Raqs Media Collective, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and others, as well as the cofounder of the journal, Brian Kuan Wood, and Mariana Silva, our art director.

The idea to start a new publication actually came from Liam Gillick during preparations for the New York iteration of unitednationsplaza at the New Museum. Liam suggested that in addition to seminars and talks, we should start publishing position papers and do so by any means possible: not to worry about budget, design, printing, or any kind of production, but simply make available existing, urgent texts as rapidly as possible in whatever form, even if this simply meant a stack of Xerox handouts in a museum lobby.

The New Museum was not particularly interested in this plan. Despite the fact that they had quite a history of publishing throughout the 1980s, including the influential anthology Art after Modernism, edited by Craig Owens, which became required reading in most art programs, by 2007 the museum seemed to have lost all interest in critical theory or publishing. So once again, and similarly to what happened with Manifesta, a necessary idea that was discarded by an established institution could be realized independently through e-flux, particularly since we had the electronic distribution system and some resources to actually pay writers and editors. Brian Kuan Wood, who had recently moved to New York from Cairo, and was a participant in the project at the New Museum, was willing to quit his job at the Tribeca Film Festival and start this new publication at e-flux as editor in chief (and basically the journal’s sole employee …) Our first issue, e-flux journal #0, was published online in November of 2008. Here is a key sentence from the editorial, which as I remember was extremely difficult to finalize and was a result of a very long discussion between Brian, Julieta Aranda, and me: “With this first, inaugural issue of e-flux journal, we begin something of an experiment in developing both a discursive space and a site for actual art production, in which writers, artists, and thinkers are invited to write on topics of their choosing.”4

Rereading this sentence now, it strikes me as a little peculiar: Why emphasize the fact that artists and thinkers choose their own topics? Isn’t this something simply taken for granted? Who chooses the topics if not the artists and thinkers?

This brings me back to the issue of artistic sovereignty. Generally speaking, the word itself is somewhat disliked and viewed with suspicion, maybe due to George Bataille linking it with sexual domination and violence, or Carl Schmitt’s Nazi jurisprudence of the “state of exception.” What I mean is something else. Again to quote from the essay written with Brian in 2012:

An artist today aspires to a certain kind of sovereignty, to the freedom to work as one pleases. Unlike artists, say, before the French Revolution, who worked merely to satisfy a commission from the church or the aristocracy, or to serve public taste and critics, artists today understand themselves as being not only capable of deciding what kind of practice they want to have, what subject matter is important to them, what form it may take, and so forth; they also understand themselves as fundamentally free to follow their own personal interests or to respond to urgent events in the world around them. And this fundamental freedom is understood as a basic condition of any work of art, as the pillar that the content and form of any artwork rests upon.5

While this may be a fundamental conceptual condition, in practical terms it usually creates enormous frustration, because it’s so impossibly difficult to achieve or maintain any type of independence or autonomy in the world of relations, interdependencies, divisions, and hierarchies. Furthermore, an artist has to continuously work to produce this condition, because it’s not something that simply exists in the world, but is something that requires perpetual internal and external work, and this is kind of exhausting. I suppose all of this must sound a bit romantic and old fashioned: artistic freedom, sovereignty, autonomy, independence, etc., Ten or twenty years ago, when we started e-flux and the journal, this would have sounded like a naive throwback to the 1960s or ’70s. But having observed how conditions in the art world have become even more instrumentalizing and alienating to artists over the past two decades, while world politics has taken a clearly reactionary turn, it’s possible that the discourse of previous eras can somehow offer a new radicalism for the years to come. Look at Bernie Sanders for example: a politician whose ideas would seem conventional and non-controversial in the late ’60s now appears to be the closest thing we have to a model of US electoral political radicalism in 2020.

I suppose in a way e-flux has been a two-decade-long attempt to create conditions for this type of artists’ self-management. And not merely for myself, Julieta, or Brian, but as a shared space to inhabit with others: artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, everyone who works at e-flux, our readers, our audience, etc. I am not really sure this always works, and we have never been able to resolve many internal and external contradictions, so this attempt has only been partially successful at best … But then here we are.

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Art and Sovereignty - Journal #106 February 2020 - e-flux

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In the landscape that is gradually emerging, it’s not so fantastical to imagine the eventual replacement of all international exhibitions with beer …

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A quintessential aspect of aesthetic modernism in the nineteenth century is that it produced not only a body of artworks and a profusion of - isms, but also a body of institutions and a template of practices that, unlike the art itself, were accepted almost without protest by the European and American art public. As early as the late nineteenth century, the field of exhibition-making also had isolated examples of figures similar to the independent curator of contemporary art-although, of course, without the institutional support that is usual today. One such "proto-curatorial" figure was Joséphin Péladan, who among other things was the founder and director of the Catholic Rosicrucian Order of the Temple and the Grail (L'Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal) in Paris. In the 1890s, Péladan organized large group exhibitions as the order's main public events, in which he presented artists who had been selected in accordance with his very particular conceptions of art. Viewed from today's perspective, he was a typical independent curator who, at every level and wherever present, defended his "particular position" in art, communicating it through his public image and lifestyle as well.

Today, Péladan is not well known for his curatorial work, not because he was so far ahead of his time that, say, his contemporaries did not understand him, but rather because, when it came to positioning himself successfully in art with an enduring place in history, he made several "mistakes." Among other things, despite Péladan's hard work and the genuinely large influence he enjoyed in his day, he did not do enough, and above all was not sufficiently convincing, to ensure that he would be "right" in art history. He did not persevere long enough in his practice, he was not successful enough in assembling a coherent group of artists, and he was not well connected to the market. Furthermore, he was so extremely pompous and so obviously contradictory that it made it difficult for anyone to take up his cause openly and in earnest. Mario Praz described him as heroic in intention and comic in results. Péladan experienced a small revival in the late 1960s, when symbolism as a movement again acquired a certain general importance. Hippies, too, found him interesting because of his strange attire, his fascination with magic and the Near East, his rejection of weapons, and the like.

Péladan

A brief look at the life of this bizarre, complex individual is needed if we want to understand his proto-curatorship and compare it with contemporary curatorial practices. Joseph Péladan (1858-1918), as he was originally called (he later changed his first name to Joséphin), was born in Lyons in the family of the fervent Catholic journalist and mystic Louis-Adrien Péladan. He thus acquired his zeal for mysticism and Catholicism from his family, while his delight in costumes, mysteries, unusual rituals, and pseudonyms (Sâr Mérodack, among many others) was common among occultists and artistic circles of the time. We need only recall, for example, the group Les Nabis. Péladan carefully crafted his external appearance: he wore long tunics, silk and lace, had long hair and a long beard, and sported eye-catching, provocative accessories.

He travelled in Italy as a young man, after which he arrived in Paris filled with fervor and loudly announced his mission in the press. Among other things, in a review of the 1883 Salon, he wrote: "I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy." In short, he declared war on every kind of realism. In 1884, he published his first major literary work, the novel Le Vice suprême, which was followed not only by other novels but also many plays, articles, reviews, and scholarly works on art. He even published two travelogue-type books- La terre du sphinx (on Egypt) and La terre du christ (on the Holy Land)-and some esoteric "self-improvement" books, including books on becoming a magus and becoming a fairy. Among his many other extraordinary accomplishments, he claimed to have discovered a new location of the tomb of Christ. He called his vast cycle of novels La décadence latine: his belief that the corrupt and irreligious Latin race must fall appears as a common thread and motto in most of the works. The novels reflect his fear of democracy and the coming of the barbarians. They deal with mysticism and strange events, and they are usually plotted around Péladan himself in the guise of a literary character. Péladan's hero is always in pursuit of the Ideal, for which he makes the greatest sacrifices and renounces everything worldly, as deeply infatuated noblewomen try to seduce and distract him. Only rarely is this formula abandoned. Art is normally involved as well-its redeeming potential, the struggle for true art, and so forth. For example, in the novel L'androgyne, Péladan promises to crusade against all that is ugly, all that is vulgar, both in his writing and in real life. To this end, he advocates an indivisible art that can take us back to the Catholicism of the Renaissance, which, he argues, produced the greatest number of masterpieces-the highest proof of the existence of God.

Despite his enduring fascination with the occult, Péladan was an idiosyncratic and fanatical Roman Catholic who zealously promoted the Catholic faith. He believed that while the church opposed sorcery, it was not against magic and even supported it. The bombastic fanfare around the publication of his novel Le Vice suprême brought the occultist Stanislas de Guaïta to him, and together in 1888 they revived the Rosicrucian Order (L'Ordre de la Rose-Croix) in Paris. Philosophical differences soon led to internal disputes, and at the start of the 1890s Péladan founded his own Catholic Rosicrucian order, the Order of the Temple and the Grail.

The members of the Order performed works of mercy to prepare for the coming age of the Holy Spirit and, most importantly, sought an inner perfection that would allow them to live a contented life on a perverted earth. The main focal points of the Order's work were aesthetic, and its most visible public events were, in fact, exhibitions-art salons held regularly from 1892 to 1897. These were typical oppositional exhibitions, which proclaimed that, unlike the once-official Salon and similar contemporary art shows, they were presenting "true" art. This, of course, meant art as it was understood by the enthusiastic curator Péladan, who with great fervor and pomposity invited his chosen artists to exhibit.

Péladan, the Proto-Curator

What aspects, then, of Péladan's manner of exhibiting the art of his day make him seem so close to the modern-day curator?

The first is, certainly, the simple fact that, quite unusually for his time, he decided to convey his philosophical and critical views and ideas about art not only in writing but also through large group exhibitions. He evidently decided on the exhibition form because it allowed him to use other people's works to illustrate and communicate his worldview, and the beliefs he was advocating. This understanding of the exhibition makes his approach identical to that of today's curators: an exhibition is not only a medium for showing art but also a vehicle that can work toward a variety of goals, for instance, encouraging social renewal. Apart from his love for art, what justified and confirmed Péladan in his commitment to such work was his dedication to a higher goal, the Catholic renewal of society. This, to be sure, makes him ideologically distant from contemporary curators' commitment to fight global capitalism or support politically correct views, but the principle is basically the same.

Because of this "utilitarian" attitude toward exhibition-making, Péladan is, in fact, already a typical curator with a particular position, one that defines all his projects in a characteristic way and stamps them with a distinctive mark. Turning things around a bit, we can say that by enforcing his own ideas, dictating the messages, using a characteristic "form" for his exhibitions, and choosing very specific artists, Péladan developed a distinct authorial style of curating in which his name alone informed viewers of what they could expect.

Like modern-day curators, Péladan also established his own circle of artists, for whom he was a fervent supporter and advocate. As is true today, the curator's proximity meant, for the artist, considerable help in becoming established, but also that the curator's worldview, narrative, and speech would considerably define his art, shaping an interpretation and staking out an understanding of him and his work that he himself might not necessarily embrace.

Furthermore, with Péladan's work, we can already witness the merging into a single job of the two positions that are usually kept separate in the art world, namely, those of producer and artistic director; indeed, it is this specific combination that gives curators today such extraordinary power. The ability to organize and coordinate numerous large productions thus brings the producer as well a direct means for establishing his ideas, views, and artistic aspirations, since in the process the producer is not divorced from the creative function but rather defines even the exhibiting artists and their work, and conceptualizes the event as a whole. It is understandable, then, that such a curator-as-producer also takes the lion's share of the prestige and fame, as the greatest part of such bonuses attaches specifically to his name.

Péladan, the Producer

If, of the two positions just mentioned, we first look a little closer at the producer's side, we find that Péladan performed this role very well and used work methods that are completely modern. He knew how to acquire devoted collaborators, the necessary funding, and a prestigious venue, and how to promote the event in a way that would attract media attention and the widest possible public. Let us take his first salon as an example.

Labelled as a geste esthétique and acta Rosae crucis (acts of the Rose Cross), the exhibition was held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel from March 10 to April 10, 1892. Describing the show in today's terms, we would say it took an interdisciplinary and intermedia approach, was conceived as an integrated spatial installation-a kind of "environment"-and included many accompanying activities. On the opening night, the exhibition rooms were festooned with flowers and fragrant with heavy oriental perfumes, and the guests were greeted with the prelude from Wagner's Parsifal as they entered. Among other things, the opening also featured specially composed music by Erik Satie. This whole "circus" (excessive even for those days), which Péladan took in dead earnest, was just what the viewers wanted; they flocked to the show in droves, perhaps looking not so much for aesthetic delights as to satisfy their curiosity and lust for sensation. Those present on the day of the opening included Paul Verlaine, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and even Émile Zola, who was hated by the symbolists-names, in other words, that guaranteed the event's reputation as a prestigious occasion. We can conclude that the salon was very successful, despite receiving a mixed response from the critics.

Péladan solved the problem of funding, and made the social connections needed for success, by involving powerful and influential sponsors in his shows. For his first salon he found such a backer in Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, who initially was one of his most important collaborators and also took part in the salon as a painter. De la Rochefoucauld generously supported the first salon financially and put his reputation behind it; he was thus crucially important in creating the initial momentum for Péladan's salons. Nevertheless, already in the first salon he and Péladan quarrelled a great deal over all sorts of things, and in the end de la Rochefoucauld had no choice but to leave the group. De la Rochefoucauld, the salon's main financial backer, who held with Péladan the highest position in the Rosicrucian Order, apparently fell into Péladan's disfavor because, among other things, he tried to win acceptance for some of his ideas about the selection and installation of the artworks at the salon.

Péladan designed his art project to be explicitly international; he exhibited many Dutch artists, including Toorop, as well as such Swiss artists as Schwabe and Hodler, the latter shone at the first salon with his work Disappointed Souls. Another well-represented group were the Belgians, who also seem to have been the most enthusiastic about Péladan, especially Jean Delville, who for a time served as a kind of ambassador for him and his order in Brussels, and Fernand Knopff, who provided illustrations for his novels. Although successful in attracting foreign painters to his salon, Péladan was not particularly successful in his attempts to expand the Order's network beyond Paris, and its foreign affiliates never really developed.], 175).] Among other reasons, the Order's involvement with visual art was probably too short-lived for such an expansion; Péladan announced that the Paris Rosicrucian salon of 1897 would be the last, and when it closed, he apparently stopped curating contemporary art.

Péladan, the Artistic Director

Presumably, it was Péladan's ability and success as a producer and organizer that secured him the interest and participation of a wide range of artists. Left to fend for themselves on the free market, artists in the nineteenth century increasingly saw regular exhibiting and press coverage as matters of survival and became increasingly dependent on-and in an unequal relation to-potential exhibitors. Given the comparison with today's curatorial practice, it is particularly important to underscore that Péladan considered exhibition-making as a subjective creative challenge where he could have his ideas and views recognized and where he could realize his ambitions, while the artist was left to adapt to all this-or otherwise only invited to participate if the curator deemed him suitable. With the exhibition so devised, Péladan then saw it and defended it as, essentially, his own intellectual property, explaining and justifying it from his own personal perspective.

In this respect, Péladan created precise directives for the artists and works he would consider presenting at the Salon de la Rose-Croix. Although the expression "curatorial concept" was not in use at the time, his writings and public statements define in precise terms the kind of art he supported and considered worthy of being shown in the salon. Péladan did, however, conceptualize his exhibition practice in the form of the Order's art program, which was published as a set of rules. Although the ideas and subject matter of his desired art do not in themselves interest us here (at least not primarily), these rules can be summarized to get a sense of the considerable clarity of Péladan's concept, as well as the freedom (or lack thereof) he allowed art and the artist. He writes in Section II of his rules that the Rosicrucian salons strive "to ruin realism, reform Latin taste and create a school of idealistic art." In Section III, he says that the order accepts works by invitation only and "imposes no other programme than that of beauty, nobility, lyricism." Nevertheless, in Section IV he lists "for greater clarity" the kind of subjects that will be rejected "no matter how well executed, even if perfectly": history painting, patriotic and military painting, "all representations of contemporary, private or public life," portraits (with rare exceptions), "all rustic scenes," landscapes, any still life, seascapes, humorous scenes, flowers, and so on.

"The Order favours first the Catholic ideal and Mysticism," he wrote, followed in importance by legend, myth, allegory, dream, and it wished to see content related to these topics "even if the execution is imperfect." These rules also extended to sculpture, and busts were not accepted except by special permission. Due to the fact that the art of architecture "was killed in 1789," the only acceptable works in this field were "restorations or projects for fairy-tale palaces." The preferred technique above all others was the fresco. Drawing, less as a physical than a psychological technique, was also highly favored because the medium crossed the boundary between the earthly and the spiritual. Women were entirely excluded as exhibiting artists.

To such truly "conceptualized" exhibitions, where the selection of artists was combined with rules about the content, Péladan then added a third level, where through focused writings and statements before, during, and after the event he further imprinted his story on the whole entity thus designed. As eloquently and as loudly as possible, he tried to justify his exhibitions and selections as universal, the most sensible, and the best selections of art at the present moment, and to achieve this, he skilfully employed all sorts of operations that are still being used by curators today. For instance, he was very adept at justifying and legitimizing new artistic positions by juxtaposing them with established antecedents and emphasizing the similarities. Because exhibitions also by this time had an intensive presence in the media realm, his message, in relation to the artist's, was already clearly in the foreground, especially because Péladan, like the successful curator today, was extremely careful about the media coverage of his events and knew how to make himself a very attractive personality for the press.

Not unlike modern-day curators, Péladan was already criticized for trespassing too far into the artist's domain-but criticism did no real damage. In response, and in a way quite characteristic of today's debates on the topic, Péladan would entangle himself in contradictory and contrived-sounding explanations about how he was truly exalting the artist and the artist's freedom. When it came to displaying his positive, devoted attitude toward the artist, Péladan could be extremely vocal. In the catalogue of the first salon, he wrote:

Artist, you are the priest: art is the great mystery and when your efforts result in a work of art, a holy beam descends on the altar ... Artist, you are the king: art is the true empire; when your hand writes a perfect line, the cherubims themselves descend to take pleasure in it as if in a mirror ... Artist, you are the magician: art is the great miracle and proves our immortality.

Conclusion

In short, Joséphin Péladan tried to define the art of his day in a manner that was quite rare for the time but is today exceedingly common. But because the curatorship of contemporary art did not come to be until much later, we should assume there to be certain differences between today's curator and such isolated "proto-examples." So as not to get lost listing every possible specific difference, let us look at a difference that does seem to be at the very heart of the phenomenon. Until at least the first decades of the twentieth century, roughly speaking, the situation in the art field as a whole was fundamentally different that it is today; that does not mean that certain segments weren't already to a certain extent compatible with today's curatorial practice, but others weren't yet in tune with such practices. For example, at the time it was already possible to organize a large group exhibition of contemporary art in accord with one's own concept; to acquire the agreement and participation of artists, and a circle of supporters and backers; and attract the clear interest of the public and media; yet in contrast with today's art world, the institutionalization of such curatorial practices, which might allow them to happen regularly and widely, was completely absent. In the nineteenth century, the contemporary art exhibition was still very much in the domain of the market, and many years would pass before it became the preferred form for supporting contemporary art on the part of the big backers and commissioners, politics and capital, and the today ubiquitous but then nonexistent art institutions. Among other things, the (large group) exhibition of contemporary art was not yet understood as something that, in the ritualized setting of a museum or gallery, could create narratives, generate meanings, shape worldviews, beliefs, and values, and so potentially even influence society in line with the desires of those who commissioned it. For such large structural shifts to occur, it had to become clear that such an exhibition does not only show and sell contemporary art but can also do much more, especially in terms of constructing specific integral messages and communicating them such that the potential ideological implications go unnoticed.

Still, despite the institutional sector not being immediately ready to adopt ambitious proto-curators, it is hard to say that Péladan had no influence at all on the field of contemporary art curatorship. His practices and strategies came into curatorship mainly by indirect routes, mostly through the mediation of artists who in the early twentieth century increasingly cultivated a practice similar to Péladan's. Unfortunately, we are only vaguely aware of this current, probably because serious thought about Péladan's influence-even on such central, iconic twentieth-century artists as Kandinsky, Malevich, Hugo Ball, and Duchamp, and on such groups as the Vienna Secession, Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists-is establishing itself in the art-historical discourse slowly, timidly, and in bits and pieces. It seems that we do not wish to see the characteristic practices of the pioneers of contemporary art as linked to similar practices Péladan had employed quite strikingly not long before, to the great attention of both press and public.

Because these iconic artists' influence on the development of the exhibiting of contemporary art-and the development of contemporary curatorship and curatorial practices-is sufficiently well known, I will not discuss it here. Instead, I would like to propose a more active scrutiny of Péladan's influences on these artists in areas where I see a possible connection with contemporary curating. Here I propose three categories of influence, which may have operated separately or, even more often, as a whole, as an effective integrated work model.

First, we should note the importance of Péladan's use of the exhibition medium as a distinctly independent means of expression that is able to tell its own story and so requires a specific kind of "dramaturgy and directing." In this regard, the exhibition is not merely a passive juxtaposition of artworks; rather, it is simultaneously an interdisciplinary and intermedia platform, a "synaesthetic environment," and an intensive media event. We can assume that these aspects were reflected in the pioneering exhibition projects of the key figures of early-twentieth-century art-although, given the scant research into the connections between them and Péladan, it is difficult to determine the exact nature and extent of this reflection.

Second, Péladan's specific logic in constructing his own career in the art field seems to have been very influential: what is important here is the way he established and designed himself as a public persona with a clearly readable identity. Péladan-and we must not forget that he was himself an artist-actively tried to shape his own mythology, to turn anything connected with himself into an event, to develop his profile on different levels and through very different activities, and in a way to transform himself into an institution. While Péladan was certainly not the only one to do this, we need to consider more thoroughly his role in the evolution of the type of artist that came into its own in a real way in the decade before the First World War-the artist who forges his profile not only by creating artworks but through a variety of activities, including writing (among other things, manifestos), public performances, all sorts of organizing (of groups, events, and so forth), developing networks, a specific way of acting and dressing, unusual gestures, rituals, and the like.

And last of all, however unexpected as it may sound, the influence of Péladan's worldview is also probably greater than it seems at first. I am thinking mainly of his specific view of art in general, its aims and potential. Here the key element is his distinct contribution in raising the status of art, which was based on his understanding of art as a medium for presenting spheres that are suprarational, and as an effective tool for improving the world. Accordingly, Péladan also raised the status of the artist, who with this sort of responsible, priestly mission was now suddenly in a different position than before, also vis-à-vis society. With this understanding of art, a great deal was now expected of the artist, and much more, too, was permitted him. In the twentieth century such views became increasingly established, also in the art field. Péladan's contribution, however, was overlooked, mainly, I suspect, because his mystical explanations for these views, with their strange combination of Catholicism, elitism, conservatism, pomposity, and incoherence, were difficult for a wider audience to accept. But it is worth pointing out that in the early twentieth century, the leading figures of contemporary art themselves very often connected their work to mysticism, even to a mysticism that is sometimes surprisingly close to Péladan's.

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Joséphin Péladan: A Proto-Curator? - Journal #63 March 2015 - e-flux

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A quintessential aspect of aesthetic modernism in the nineteenth century is that it produced not only a body of artworks and a profusion of - isms, but also a body of institutions and a template of practices that, unlike the art itself, were accepted almost without protest by the European and American art public.

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Boris Groys_Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk

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Boris Groys_Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk

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Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were created to select certain objects-the artworks-take them out of private and public use, and therefore immunize them against the destructive force of time. Thus, our art museums became huge garbage cans of history in which things were kept and exhibited that had no use anymore in real life: sacral images of past religions or status objects of past lifestyles. During a long period of art history, artists also participated in this struggle against the destructive force of time. They wanted to create artworks that would be able to transcend time by embodying eternal ideals of beauty or, at least, by becoming the medium of historical memory, by acting as witnesses to events, tragedies, hopes, and projects that otherwise would have been forgotten. In this sense, artists and art institutions shared a fundamental project to resist material destruction and historical oblivion.

Art museums, in their traditional format, were based on the concept of a universal art history. Accordingly, their curators selected artworks that seemed to be of universal relevance and value. These selective practices, and especially their universalist claims, have been criticized in recent decades in the name of the specific cultural identities that they ignored and even suppressed. We no longer believe in universalist, idealist, transhistorical perspectives and identities. The old, materialist way of thinking let us accept only roles rooted in the material conditions of our existence: national-cultural and regional identities, or identities based on race, class, and gender. And there are a potentially infinite number of such specific identities because the material conditions of human existence are very diverse and are permanently changing. However, in this case, the initial mission of the art museum to resist time and become a medium of mankind's memory reaches an impasse: if there is a potentially infinite number of identities and memories, the museum dissolves because it is incapable of including all of them.

While the museum emerged as a kind of secular surrogate for divine memory during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, it is merely a finite material object-unlike infinite divine memory that can, as we know, include all the identities of all people who lived in the past, live now, and will live in the future.

But is this vision of an infinite number of specific identities even correct, e.g., truly materialist? I would suggest that it is not. Materialist discourse, as initially developed by Marx and Nietzsche, describes the world in permanent movement, in flow-be it dynamics of the productive forces or Dionysian impulse. According to this materialist tradition, all things are finite-but all of them are involved in the infinite material flow. So there is a materialist universality-the universality of the flow.

However, is it possible for a human being to enter the flow, to get access to its totality? On a certain very banal level the answer is, of course, yes: human bodies are things among other things in the world and, thus, subjected to the same universal flow. They become ill, they age, and they die. However, even if human bodies are subjected to aging, death, and dissolution in the flow of material processes, it does not mean that their inscriptions into cultural archives are also in flow. One can be born, live, and die under the same name, having the same citizenship, same CV, and same website-that means remaining the same person. Our bodies, then, are not the only material supports of our persons. From the moment of our birth we are inscribed into certain social orders-without our consent or often even knowledge of this fact. The material supports of our personality are state archives, medical records, passwords to certain internet sites, and so forth. Of course, these archives will also be destroyed by the material flow at some point in time. But this destruction takes an amount of time that is non-commensurable with our own lifetimes. Thus, there is a tension between our material, physical, corporeal mode of existence-which is temporary and subjected to time-and our inscription into cultural archives that are, even if they are also material, much more stable than our own bodies.

Traditional art museums are a part of these cultural archives-even if they claim to represent the subjectivity, personality, and individuality of artists in a more immediate and richer way than other cultural archives are capable of doing. Art museums, like all other cultural archives, operate by restoration and conservation. Again: artworks as specific material objects-as art bodies, so to speak-are perishable. But this cannot be said about them as publicly accessible, visible forms. If its material support decays and dissolves, the form of a particular artwork can be restored or copied and placed on a different material base. The history of art demonstrates both these substitutions of old supports by new supports and the efforts of restoration and reconstruction. Thus, the individual form of an artwork insofar as it is inscribed in the archives of art history remains intact-only marginally affected by material flux, if at all. And we believe that it is precisely this form that, after the artist's death, somehow manifests his or her soul-or at least a certain zeitgeist or certain cultural identity that has disappeared.

We can thus say that the traditional art system is based on desynchronizing the time of the individual, material human existence from the time of its cultural representation. However, the artists of the historical avant-garde and later some artists of the 1960s and 1970s already tried to resynchronize the fate of the human body with the mode of its historical representation-to embrace the precariousness, instability, and finiteness of our material existence. Not to resist the flow of time, but to let it define one's own artwork, to pursue a certain self-propelled fluidity, rather than trying to make the work, or oneself, into a self-eternalizing being. The idea was to make the form itself fluid. However, the following question emerges: What is the effect of this radicalized precariousness, of this will to resynchronize the living body with its cultural representation within the relationship of artists to art institutions?

I would suggest that the relationship between these entities went through two different periods: the first is enmity on the part of the artist against the art system and, especially, art museums, complete with attempts to destroy them in the name of living art. The second encompasses the slow morphing of museums themselves into a stage, on which the flow of time is performed. If we ask ourselves what institutional form the classical avant-garde proposed as a substitute for the traditional museum, the answer is clear: it is the Gesamtkunstwerk. In other words, the total art event involving everybody and everything-as a replacement for a totalizing space of trans-temporal artistic representation of everybody and everything.

Wagner introduced the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his programmatic treatise "The Art-Work of the Future" (1849-1850). Wagner wrote this text in exile, in Zurich, after the end of the revolutionary uprisings in Germany in 1848. In this text he develops a project for an artwork (of the future) that is heavily influenced by the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. At the beginning of his treatise, Wagner states that the typical artist of his time is an egoist who, in complete isolation from the life of the people, practices his art exclusively for the enjoyment of the rich; in so doing he follows the dictates of fashion. The artist of the future, says Wagner, must become radically different: "He now can only will the universal, true, and unconditional; he yields himself not to a love for this or that particular object, but to wide Love itself. Thus does the egoist become a communist."

Becoming communist, then, is possible only through self-renunciation-self-dissolution in the collective. Wagner defines his supposed hero as such: "The last, most complete renunciation [ Entäusserung] of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascent into universalism, a man can only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his being. The celebration of such a death is the noblest thing that men can enter on." Admittedly, there remains a difference between the hero who sacrifices himself and the performer who makes this sacrifice onstage (the Gesamtkunstwerk being understood by Wagner as a musical drama). Nonetheless, Wagner insists that this difference is suspended by the Gesamtkunstwerk, for the performer "does not merely represent in the art-work the action of the fêted hero, but repeats its moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of necessity which consumes the whole individuality of his being." In other words, Wagner understands the Gesamtkunstwerk precisely as a way of resynchronizing the finiteness of human existence with its cultural representation-which, in turn, also becomes finite.

All the other performers achieve their own artistic significance solely through participating in the hero's ritual of self-sacrifice. Accordingly, Wagner speaks of the hero performer as a dictator who mobilizes the collective of collaborators, with the exclusive goal of staging his own sacrifice in the name of this collective. In the sacrificial scene, the Gesamtkunstwerk finds its end-there is no continuation, no memory. In other words, there is no further role for the dictator-performer. The artistic collective dissolves, and the next Gesamtkunstwerk is created by another artistic collective, with a different dictator-performer in the main role. Here the precariousness of an individual human existence and the fluidity of working collectives are artistically embraced, and even radicalized. Historically, we know that many artistic collectives followed this model: from Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol's Factory and Guy Debord's Situationist International. But the contemporary name for this temporary and suicidal dictatorship is different: the "curatorial project."

Harald Szeemann, who initiated the curatorial turn in contemporary art, was so fascinated by the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk that he organized an exhibition called "The Tendency to Gesamtkunstwerk" ["Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk"] (1984). Considering this historical show based on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it becomes necessary to ask: What is the main difference between a traditional exhibition and a modern curatorial project? The traditional exhibition treats its space as anonymous and neutral. Only the exhibited artworks are important-but not the space in which they are exhibited. Thus, artworks are perceived and treated as potentially eternal-and the space of the exhibition as a contingent, accidental station where the immortal artworks take a temporary rest from their wanderings through the material world. In contrast, the installation-be it artistic or curatorial-inscribes the exhibited artworks in this contingent material space. (Here one can see an analogy between this shift and the shift from theater actor or cinema actor to the director of theater and cinema.)

The curatorial project, rather than the exhibition, is then the Gesamtkunstwerk because it instrumentalizes all the exhibited artworks and makes them serve a common purpose that is formulated by the curator. At the same time, a curatorial or artistic installation is able to include all kinds of objects: time-based artworks or processes, everyday objects, documents, texts, and so forth. All these elements, as well as the architecture of the space, sound, or light, lose their respective autonomy and begin to serve the creation of a whole in which visitors and spectators are also included. Thus, stationary artworks of the traditional sort become temporalized, subjected to a certain scenario that changes the way they are perceived during the time of the installation because this perception is dependent on the context of their presentation-and this context begins to flow. Thus, ultimately, every curatorial project demonstrates its accidental, contingent, eventful, finite character-in other words, it enacts its own precariousness.

Indeed, every curatorial project necessarily aims to contradict the normative, traditional art-historical narrative embodied by the museum's permanent collection. If such a contradiction does not take place, the curatorial project loses its legitimation. For the same reason, the next curatorial project should contradict the previous one. A new curator is a new dictator who erases the traces of the previous dictatorship. In this way, contemporary museums continually morph from spaces for permanent collections into stages for temporary curatorial projects-temporary Gesamtkunstwerks. And the main goal of these temporary curatorial dictatorships is to bring art collections into the flow-to make art fluid, to synchronize it with the flow of time.

As previously mentioned, at the beginning of this process of synchronization, artists wanted to destroy art museums. Malevich offers a good example of this in his short but important text "On the Museum," from 1919. At that time, the new Soviet government feared that the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text, Malevich protested against this pro-museum policy by calling on the Soviet state to not intervene on behalf of the old art collections, because, he said, their destruction could open the path to true, living art. In particular, he wrote:

Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy, one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist's shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy.

Later, Malevich gives a concrete example of what he means:

The aim [of this pharmacy] will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and all his art-a mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often more alive than actual representation (and take up less room).

It is obvious that what Malevich proposes here is not merely the destruction of museums but a radical curatorial project-to exhibit the ashes of artworks instead of their corpses. And in a truly Wagnerian manner, Malevich further says that everything that "we" (meaning he and his artistic contemporaries) do is also destined for the crematorium. Of course, contemporary curators do not reduce museum collections to ashes, as Malevich suggested. But there is a good reason for that. Since Malevich's time, mankind has invented a way to place all artworks from the past on one chemist's shelf without destroying them. And this shelf is called the internet.

Indeed, the internet has transformed the museum in the same way that photography and cinema transformed painting and sculpture. Photography made the mimetic function of the traditional arts obsolete, and thus pushed these arts in a different-actually opposite-direction. Instead of reproducing and representing images of nature, art came to dissolve, deconstruct, and transform these images. The attention thus shifted from the image itself to the analysis of image production and presentation. Similarly, the internet made the museum's function of representing art history obsolete. Of course, in the case of the internet, spectators lose direct access to the original artworks-and thus the aura of authenticity gets lost. And so museum visitors are invited to undertake a pilgrimage to art museums in search of the Holy Grail of originality and authenticity.

At this point, however, one has to be reminded that according to Walter Benjamin, who originally introduced the notion of aura, artworks lost their aura precisely through their museumification. The museum already removes art objects from their original sites ofinscription in the historical here and now. Thus for Benjamin, artworks that are exhibited in museums are already copies of themselves-devoid of their original aura of authenticity. Inthis sense, the internet, and its art-specialized websites, merely continue the process of the de-auratization of art started by art museums. Many cultural critics have thereforeexpected-and still expect-that public art museums willultimately disappear, unable to compete economically with private collectors operating on theincreasingly expensive art market, and be replaced by muchcheaper, more accessible virtual, digitized archives.

However, the relationship between internet and museum radically changes if we begin to understand the museum not as a storage place for artworks, but rather as a stage for the flow of art events. Indeed, today the museum has ceased to be a space for contemplating non-moving things. Instead, the museum has become a place where things happen. Events staged by museums today include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth. The flow of events inside the museum is today often faster than outside its walls. Meanwhile, we have grown accustomed to asking ourselves, what is going on in this or that museum? And to find the relevant information, we search for it on the museums' websites, but also on blogs, social media pages, Twitter, and so forth. We visit museums far less often than we visit their websites and follow their activities across the internet. And on the internet, the museum functions as a blog. So the contemporary museum does not present universal art history, but rather its own history-as a chain of events staged by the museum itself. But most importantly: the internet relates to the museum in the mode of documentation, not in the mode of reproduction. Of course, the museums' permanent collections can be reproduced on the internet, but the museum's activities can only be recorded.

Indeed, one cannot reproduce a curatorial project; one can only document it. The reason for this is twofold. First, the curatorial project is an event, and one cannot reproduce an event because it cannot be isolated from the flow of time. An artwork can be reproduced because it has an atemporal status from the beginning, but the process of the production and exposure of this artwork can only be documented. Second, curatorial and artistic installation is a Gesamtkunstwerk that can be experienced only from within. The traditional artwork is perceived from an outside position, but an artistic event is experienced from a position inside the space in which this event takes place. In this way, visitors to a curatorial or artistic installation enter the space of the installation and then begin to position themselves inside this space, to experience it from within rather than from without. However, the movement of a camera can never fully coincide with the movement of an individual visitor's gaze-as the position of a painter or a photographer making a reproduction of a painting coincides with the gaze of an average spectator. And if any form of documentation attempts to reconstruct the inner view and experience of an art event from different positions, it necessarily becomes fragmentary. That is why we can re-cognize the traditional reproduction of an artwork but are never able to fully re-cognize the documentation of an art event.

Nowadays, one speaks time and again about the theatralization of the museum. Indeed, in our time people come to exhibition openings in the same way as they went toopera and theater premieres in the past. This theatralization of the museum is often criticized because it might be seen as a sign of the museum's involvement in the contemporary entertainment industry. However, there is a crucial difference between the installation space and the theatrical space. In the theater, spectators remain in an outside position vis-à-vis the stage, but in the museum they enter the stage, and find themselves inside the spectacle.

Thus, the contemporary museum realizes the modernist dream that the theater itself was never able to fully realize-of a theater in which there is no clear boundary between the stage and the space of the audience. Even if Wagner speaks about the Gesamtkunstwerk as an event that erases the border between stage and audience, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth that was built under the direction of Wagner did not erase this border but, rather, radicalized it. Contemporary theater, including Bayreuth, uses more and more art, especially contemporary art, on stage-but it still does not erase the difference between stage and audience. The inclusion of contemporary installation art remains inscribed in the traditional scenography. However, in the context of an artistic and curatorial installation, the public is integrated into the installation space to become part of it.

The same can be said about mass entertainment. A pop concert or a film screening creates communities among those in attendance. However, mass culture itself cannot make these communities self-reflective-cannot thematize the event of building these transitory, precarious, contingent communities. The perspective of the audience during a pop concert or movie screening is too forward-directed-to the stage or screen-for them to adequately perceive and reflect upon the space in whichthey find themselves, or the communities to which they temporarily belong.That is the kind of reflection that advanced art installation allows us to achieve. To borrow Marshall McLuhan's vocabulary, the medium of installation is a cool medium-unlike the internet, which is obviously a hot medium, because it requires users to be spatially separated and to concentrate their attention on a screen. By cooling down all other media, contemporary art installation offers visitors the possibility of self-reflection-and of reflection uponthe immediate event of their coexistence with other visitors and exhibited objects-that other media are unable to offer to the same degree. Here, individual human beings are confronted with their common fate-with the radically contingent, transitory, precarious conditions of their existence.

Actually, the traditional museum as a place of things, and not events, can be equally accused of functioning as part of the art market. This kind of criticism is easy to formulate-and it is universal enough to be applied to any possible artistic strategy. But as we know, the traditional museum did not only display certain things and images; it also allowed theoretical reflection and analysis of them by means of historical comparison. Modern art has not merely produced things and images; it has also analyzed the thingness of things and the structure of the image. In addition, the art museum does not only stage events-it is also a medium for investigating the event, its boundaries, and its structure. If classical modern art investigated and analyzed the thingness of things, contemporary art begins to do the same in relation to events-to critically analyze the eventfulness of events. This investigation takes different forms, but it seems to me that its focal point is reflection on the relationship between event and its documentation-analogous to the reflection on the relationship between an original and its reproduction that was central to the art of modernism and postmodernism. Today, the amount of art documentation is permanently growing. One also begins to document performances, actions, exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and artistic projects that become more and more important in the framework of contemporary art.

One begins also to document the work of artists who produce artworks in a more traditional manner because they increasingly use the internet, or at least a personal computer, during their working process. And this offers the possibility of following the whole process of art production from its beginning to its end, since the use of digital techniques is observable. Here the traditional boundary between art production and art display begins to be erased. Traditionally, the artist produced an artwork in his or her studio, hidden from public view, and then exhibited a result, a product-an artwork that accumulated and recuperated the time of absence. This time of temporary absence is constitutive for what we call the creative process-in fact, it is precisely what we call the creative process.

André Breton tells a story about a French poet who, when he went to sleep, put on his door a sign that read: "Please, be quiet-the poet is working." This anecdote summarizes the traditional understanding of creative work: creative work is creative because it takes place beyond public control-and even beyond the conscious control of the author. This time of absence could last days, months, years-even a whole lifetime. Only at the end of this period of absence was the author expected to present a work (maybe found in his papers posthumously) that would then be accepted as creative precisely because it seemed to emerge out of nothingness.

However, the internet and the computer in general are collective, observable, surveillable working places. We tend to speak about the internet in terms of an infinite data flow that transcends the limits of our control. But, in fact, the internet is a machine to stop and reverse data flow. The unobservability of the internet is a myth. The medium of the internet is electricity. And the supply of electricity is finite. So the internet cannot support an infinite data flow. The internet is based on a finite number of cables, terminals, computers, mobile phones, and other equipment. Its efficiency is based precisely on its finiteness and, therefore, on its observability. Search engines such as Google demonstrate this. Today, one hears a lot about the growing degree of surveillance, especially online. But surveillance is not something external to the internet, or merely a specific technical use of its services. The internet is, in its essence, a machine of surveillance. It divides the flow of data into small, traceable, and reversible operations, thus exposing every user to surveillance-real or potential. The internet creates a field of total visibility, accessibility, and transparency.

If the public follows my activity all the time, then I do not need to present it with any product. The process is already the product. Balzac's unknown artist who could never finish his masterpiece would have no problem under these new conditions-documentation of his efforts would comprise this masterpiece and he would become famous. Documentation of the act of working on an artwork is already an artwork. With the internet, time became space indeed-and it is the visible space of permanent surveillance. If art has become a flow, it flows in a mode of self-documentation. Here action is simultaneous with its documentation, its inscription. And the inscription simultaneously becomes information that is spread through the internet and instantly accessible by everybody. This means that contemporary art work can produce no product-yet it still remains productive. But again: if the internet takes over the role of the museum as the place of memory-because the internet records and documents the activities of the artist even before his or her work is brought into the museum-what is the goal of the museum today?

Contemporary museum exhibitions are full of documentations of past artistic events, shown alongside traditional works of art. Thus, the museum turns the documentation of an old event into an element of a new event. It ascribes this documentation a new here and now-and as such gives it a new aura. But, unlike reproduction, documentation cannot be easily integrated into contemporaneity. The documentation of an event always produces nostalgia for a missed presence, a missed opportunity. It does not erase the difference between past and present, as reproduction tends to; instead, it makes the gap between past and present obvious-and in this way thematizes the flow of time. Heidegger described the whole world process as an event staged by Being. And he believed that we can get access to the eventfulness of this event only if Being itself offers us this possibility-through a clearance of being ( Lichtung des Seins). Today's museum is a place where the clearance of being is artificially staged.

In a world in which the goal of stopping the flow of time is taken over by the internet, the function of the museum becomes one of staging the flow-staging events that are synchronized with the lifetimes of the spectators. This changes the topology of our relationship to art. The traditional hermeneutical position towards art required the gaze of the external spectator to penetrate the artwork, to discover artistic intentions, or social forces, or vital energies that gave the artwork its form-from the outside of the artwork toward its inside. However, the gaze of the contemporary museum visitor is, by contrast, directed from the inside of the art event towards its outside: toward the possible external surveillance of this event and its documentation process, toward the eventual positioning of this documentation in the media space and in cultural archives-in other words, toward the spatial boundaries of this event. And also towards the temporal boundaries of this event-because when we are placed inside an event, we cannot know when this event began and when it will end.

The art system is generally characterized by the asymmetrical relationship between the gaze of the art producer and the gaze of the art spectator. These two gazes almost never meet. In the past, after artists put their artworks on display, they lost control over the gaze of the spectator: regardless of what some art theoreticians say, the artwork is a mere thing and cannot meet the spectator's gaze. So under the conditions of the traditional museum, the spectator's gaze was in a position of sovereign control-although this sovereignty could be indirectly manipulated by the museum's curators through certain strategies of pre-selection, placement, juxtaposition, lighting, and so forth. However, when the museum begins to function as a chain of events, the configuration of gazes changes. The visitor loses his or her sovereignty in a very obvious way. The visitor is placed inside an event and cannot meet the gaze of a camera that documents this event-nor the secondary gaze of the editor that does the postproduction work on this document, nor the gaze of a later spectator of this document.

That is why, by visiting contemporary museum exhibitions, we are confronted with the irreversibility of time-we know that these exhibitions are merely temporary. If we visit the same museum after a certain amount of time, the only things that will remain will be documents: a catalogue, or a film, or a website. But what these things offer us is necessarily incommensurable with our own experience because our perspective, our gaze is asymmetrical with the gaze of a camera-and these gazes cannot coincide, as they could in the case of documenting an opera or a ballet. This is the reason for a certain kind of nostalgia that we necessarily feel when we are confronted with documents of past artistic events, whether exhibitions or performances. This nostalgia provokes the desire to reenact the event "as it truly was."

Recently in Venice, the exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form" was reenacted at the Fondazione Prada. It was a very professional reenactment-and so it provoked a new and even stronger wave of nostalgia. Some people thought how great it would be to go back to the 1960s and breathe the wonderful atmosphere of that time. And they also thought how awful everything is at the Biennale itself, with all its fuss, compared to the sublime askesis of "When Attitudes Become Form." At the same time, visitors from a younger generation found the exhibition unimpressive, and liked only the beautiful guides in their Prada clothes.

The nostalgic mood that is inevitably provoked by art documentation reminds me of the early Romantic nostalgia towards nature. Art was seen then as the documentation of the beautiful or sublime aesthetic experiences that were offered by nature. The documentation of these experiences by means of painting seemed more disappointing than authentic. In other words, if the irreversibility of time and the feeling of being inside rather than outside an event were once the privileged experiences of nature, they now became the privileged experiences of contemporary art. And that means precisely that contemporary art has become the medium for investigating the eventfulness of events: the different modes of the immediate experience of events, their relationship to documentation and archiving, the intellectual and emotional modes of our relationship to documentation, and so forth. Now, if the thematization of the eventfulness of the event has become, indeed, the main preoccupation of contemporary art in general and the museum of contemporary art in particular, it makes no sense to condemn the museum for staging art events. On the contrary, today the museum has become the main analytical tool for staging and analyzing the event as radically contingent and irreversible-amidst our digitally controlled civilization that is based on tracking back and securing the traces of our individual existence in the hope of making everything controllable and reversible. The museum is a place where the asymmetrical war between the ordinary human gaze and the technologically armed gaze not only takes place, but also becomes revealed-so that it can be thematized and critically theorized.

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Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk - Journal #50 December 2013 - e-flux

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Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were created to select certain objects-the artworks-take them out of private and public use, and therefore immunize them against the destructive force of time.

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Lucie Kolb & Gabriel Flückiger

Editorial

Lucie Kolb & Gabriel Flückiger

New Institutionalism Revisited

An E-Mail Exchange between Lucie Kolb & Gabriel Fluckiger

Writing New Institutionalism

An Interview with Jonas Ekeberg

“The term was snapped out of the air”

An Interview with Charles Esche

“We were learning by doing”

An Interview with Maria Lind

“We want to become an institution”

Rachel Mader

How to move in/an institution

Felix Vogel

Notes on exhibition history in curatorial discourse

Alex Farquharson

Institutional Mores

Astrid Wege & Vanessa Joan Müller

Kunsthalle: A Model for the Future

An Interview with Liesbeth Bik

“Both a radical and mild change”

Imprint

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oncurating.org is an independent international journal (both web and print) focusing on questions around curatorial practise and theory.

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Supported by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)

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Issue 31 / July 2016

Spheres of Estrangement: Art, Politics, Curating

Matthew Hanson

Editorial

Anke Hennig

Estrangement A Retro-Vision for 2016

A conversation between Franco ‘Bifo’ Beradi and Penny Rafferty

Society’s Richer Yet She’s Thin as a Rake.

by Josephine Baker-Heaslip

Halfway

Jonas Becker, Dan Bustillo, Joey Cannizzaro, Claire Ruud

Like when the teacher leaves the classroom: A conversation about artist-run programming within exhibitions

Alistair Hudson, Jeni Fulton, Paul Stewart and Sam Thorne.

Recuperation of Art and Activism. An e-mail correspondence.

Ken Gonzales-Day

Lilian Cameron, Suzana Milevska, Jared Pappas-Kelley, Adrian Shaw, Paul Stewart

Propositions: Applying Estrangement through Art, Learning and Curatorial Frameworks

Alison Hugill in conversation with Carson Chan

Curating Architecture: The Architecture of Estrangement

Jack Schneider

Call of Cthulhu

Penny Rafferty and PUNK IS DADA

Vampires from Aesthetics to Ethics—1922 to the Present

Imprint

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Issue 33 / June 2017
ed. Nanne Buurman, Dorothee Richter

On the occasion of documenta's 14th edition, this special issue scrutinizes the ways in which the Kassel-based periodic exhibition has been contributing to curating the history of the present since its inception in 1955. From diverse perspectives, the authors engage with questions of how documenta's iterations played a significant role not only in the making of a history of contemporary art but also in the canon of the relatively young field of curatorial and exhibition studies. Focusing on documenta's engagement with artistic and broader cultural developments, as well as its implication in shifting socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts, the texts assembled in this issue touch upon documenta's continuous dedication to instituting and reconfiguring the contemporary throughout its history. Its characteristic dedication to contemporaneity and institutional temporariness have continuously challenged researchers to reflect and revise their methodologies and epistemological foundations. Due to documenta's specific character as a recurring large-scale exhibition with a relatively stable framework that has to be reinterpreted anew every five years, documenta's potentials for mediating ideologies and power structures, notions of authorship and agency, as well as relations between the local and the global have furthermore fueled negotiations of the relationship of art and politics from the outset. The texts in this issue call attention to how it not only scripted paradigmatic models of subjectivity but also gradually widened its scope from a Eurocentric vision to a more worldly frame of reference, provoking reflections on its role in the globalization of the arts and its entanglement in (neo)colonial and (neo)liberal power relations in capitalism at large.

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On the occasion of documenta's 14th edition, this special issue scrutinizes the ways in which the Kassel-based periodic exhibition has been contributing to curating the history of the present since its inception in 1955.

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Issue 43 / December 2019
eds. Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb

The symposium "Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)" asked questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market?

This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin Jaeggi, and Paolo Bianchi-all professors or lecturers at the Zurich University of the Arts-provides an internal perspective of today's curriculum-based universities in relation to an education model like Black Mountain College-which can be seen as the opposite.

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The symposium "Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)" asked questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market?

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Issue 36 / April 2018
eds. Emanuele Guidi, Lorenzo Sandoval

Spaces of Anticipation

This issue developed from a research project by Lorenzo Sandoval and Emanuele Guidi that looks at artistic and curatorial practices so as to explore the role and potential of artistic and cultural institutional models. So far, Spaces of Anticipation has taken the form of a symposium with the same title at EACC (Castellón, Spain, 2014); the research exhibition Making Room. Spaces of Anticipation, and a second symposium and workshop (2015) both at ar/ge kunst (Bolzano, Italy). The term ‘anticipation’ aims at proposing an affirmative approach to the research as intends to elude the use of ‘post-isms’ and ‘future-ism’ terminology, which have been largely employed as parameters to discuss present conditions and their responsibilities.

In these terms Spaces of Anticipation aims at gathering practices and relations able to ‘re-territorialize’ existing models of institutions through a genuine ‘desire of becoming’ by acting within present and unexpected conditions.

by Emanuele Guidi and Lorenzo Sandoval

Spaces of Anticipation

by Christian Nyampeta and Jonatan Habib Engqvist

How To Rest Together

by Valentina Desideri and BAR Project

Working Care

by Céline Condorelli and Manuel Segade

Conversation Piece

by Emanuele Guidi and Lorenzo Sandoval

Making Room – Spaces of Anticipation. Research Exhibition at ar/ge kunst

by Binna Choi

Could Curating Be in Time?

by Alex Martinis Roe

An Exercise in the Practice of Affidamento

by Antonia Alampi and Alec Steadman

Undoing the Present: On Labor Conditions, Economic Survival, and Other Questionable Practices of the Art World

by Krüger & Pardeller

A Model of Possible Action. An Unfinished Protocol

by Sol Calero, Emanuele Guidi, and Lorenzo Sandoval

Welcome! A Conversation with Sol Calero about Tropical Hospitality, Latin American Legacy, and the Potential of the Exotic

Teobaldo Lagos Preller

A Former Jail, A Diagram, A Space for Openness: What Is to Be Done? Interview with Justo Pastor Mellado, Chilean Curator and Critic

by Lorenzo Sandoval

Spaces of Anticipation. Symposium at EACC in May, 2014

by Luis Berrios Negrón

Earthscore Specularium

Imprint

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This issue developed from a research project by Lorenzo Sandoval and Emanuele Guidi that looks at artistic and curatorial practices so as to explore the role and potential of artistic and cultural institutional models. So far, Spaces of Anticipation has taken the form of a symposium with the same ti…

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Issue 07

Being-with community ontological and political perspectives

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Edited by Elke Bippus, Joerg Huber, Dorothee Richter, Institute for Critical Theory, Zurich University of the Arts

This edition of On-Curating.org places ontological and political perspectives on notions of community at the centre of its debate. We believe that such an explicit discussion of community on a theoretical level is an urgent requirement in the context of ‘curating’ since cultural articulations always implicitly or explicitly address and produce communities. It was Jacques Rancière in particular who in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible pointed out the importance of access to visibility and audibility since these are what enables or prevents access to a community. "The distribution of the sensible makes visible who can participate in the communal according to what he does. A particular activity determines thus who is and is not capable of being communal." In his perspective, aesthetics, visibility and politics are causally linked.

Contributions by:
Michaela Melián, Thomas Bedorf, Jörn Etzold, Lars Gertenbach, Ruth Sonderegger, Roberto Nigro

Supported by the Institute for Critical Theory and the Postgraduate Program in Curating, Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS), both Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)

by Steven Henry Madoff and Brian Kuan Wood

We Would Prefer Not To

by Herman Melville

Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall-street

by Hendrik Folkerts

Turning the Glass

by Steven Henry Madoff

Reticence and Mortgage: Bartleby as Sanctuary

Roberto Nigro

THE FRENCH DEBATE ABOUT THE COMMUNITY

Ruth Sonderegger

ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF A 'COMMUNITY OF EQUALS'

Jörn Etzold

COMMUNITY AND PRACTICE: NANCY, ARISTOTLE, ARENDT, MARX

Lars Gertenbach

THE IMAGINARY AND THE ABSENCE OF COMMUNITY. REFLECTIONS ON AN ELUSIVE CATEGORY

Thomas Bedorf

BEING OTHER, BEING DIFFERENT: A NORMATIVE GAP IN THINKING THE 'IMPOSSIBLE COMMUNITY'?

Michaela Melián

CARTE BLANCHE STRASSE, 2003

Elke Bippus, Jörg Huber, Dorothee Richter

Editorial: BEING-WITH: COMMUNITY – ONTOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Edited by Elke Bippus, Jörg Huber, Dorothee Richter

BEING-WITH: COMMUNITY – ONTOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Lars Gertenbach and Dorothee Richter

The Imaginary and the Community. Deliberations Following the Deconstructivist Challenge of the Thinking of Community

Imprint

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Eds. Dorothee Richter and Rein WolfsInstitution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique? Part 1

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Eds. Dorothee Richter and Rein WolfsInstitution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique? Part 1

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Issue 8
Eds. Dorothee Richter and Rein Wolfs

Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique? Part 1

The symposium Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Program in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts) was opened with the provocative question in how far it is possible to exercise institutional critique by curating exhibitions.
"Institutional critique" is a term designating artistic practices and positions such as those of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser and Hans Haacke. The question is: how can a practice that intends to radically show the conditionality of art, its financial entanglements, and its function as a means of distinction be related to institutions and curators' activities therein? Is this not a contradiction in terms? The aim of the symposium was to explore these contradictions as well as the possibilities and limitations of critical curatorial practice.

Contributions by
Dorothee Richter, Rein Wolfs, Oliver Marchart, Irene Grillo and Maren Brauner, Stih&Schnock, Maria Lind, Søren Grammel,Olga Fernández
** Carte Blanche San Keller

by Dorothee Richter and Rein Wolfs

Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?

by Oliver Marchart

Curating Theory (Away) the Case of the Last Three Documenta Shows

by Dorothee Richter

A Platform and Some Projects, Postgraduate Program in Curating, Zurich

by San Keller

Carte Blanche: MINUTES: PREVIEW

by Irene Grillo and Maren Brauner (Editing: Benjamin Weiss)

Walking as a Form of Critical Curating

by San Keller

Carte Blanche: MINUTES: PRE-, PRE-, PRE-, PRE-, PREVIEW

by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock

Who Needs Art, We Need Potatoes

by San Keller

Carte Blanche: MINUTES: PRE-, PRE-, PRE-, PREVIEW

by Maria Lind

Contemporary Art and its Institutional Dilemmas

by San Keller

Carte Blanche: MINUTES: PRE-, PRE-, PREVIEW

by Søren Grammel

A Series of Acts and Spaces

by San Keller

Carte Blanche: MINUTES: PRE-, PREVIEW

by Olga Fernández

Just What is it That Makes 'Curating' so Different, so Appealing?

by San Keller

Carte Blanche: MINUTES: PREVIEW

Imprint

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The symposium Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?, organised by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Zurich Postgraduate Program in Curating (Institute for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural Analysis, Zurich University of the Arts) was opened with the provocative questio…

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eds. Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel Dorothee RichterContemporary Art Biennials–Our Hegemonic Machines in Times of Emergency

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eds. Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel Dorothee RichterContemporary Art Biennials–Our Hegemonic Machines in Times of Emergency

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Issue 46 / June 2020
eds. Ronald Kolb, Shwetal A. Patel Dorothee Richter

Biennials are each in their own way a complex constellation of different economical and geopolitical, and representational cultural aspects within its own power relations. With all their underlying deficiencies (canonical, hegemonic, colonialist, hot money-funded, politically influenced, hierarchical), biennials tend to establish international discourse, at best, rooted in local cultural specificities and contexts. With this edition of the journal, we wanted to include a variety of cases and research areas, not ordered along a historical trajectory, but rather, ordered by theme. With a mix of over sixty new contributions and reprints of important articles for the biennale discourse this issue is like a biennale: too much to experience at once.

Contributors
Agustina Andreoletti, Rasheed Araeen, Defne Ayas, Marco Baravalle, Alessia Basilicata, Julia Bethwaite, Amy Bruce, Sabeth Buchmann, Vasyl Cherepanyn, Sven Christian, Giulia Colletti, Catherine David, Ekaterina Degot, Diana Dulgheru, Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, Okwui Enwezor, Brandon Farnsworth, Rime Fetnan, Patrick D. Flores, Natasha Ginwala, Eva González-Sancho Bodero, Resmi Görüş, Martin Guinard, Bregtje van der Haak, Catalina Imizcoz, Răzvan Ion, Andrés Jaque, Melody Du Jingyi, Anni Kangas, Daniel Knorr, Omar Kholeif, Ronald Kolb, Panos Kompatsiaris, Yacouba Konaté, Daniela Labra, Ilse Lafer, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Bruno Latour, Teobaldo Lagos Preller, Eva Lin, Yung Ma, Anna Manubens, Sarat Maharaj, Oliver Marchart, Federica Martini, Vittoria Martini, Lara van Meeteren, Louli Michaelidou, Christian Morgner, Gerardo Mosquera, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Ksenija Orelj, Anita Orzes, Shwetal A. Patel, Delia Popa, Farid Rakun, Raqs Media Collective, Dorothee Richter, Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv, Miriam La Rosa, Mona Schubert, Henk Slager, Robert E. D'Souza, Nora Sternfeld, Fatoş Üstek, Katerina Valdivia Bruch, Mirjam Varadinis, Raluca Voinea, Wilson Yeung Chun Wai, Bart Wissink, Beat Wyss, Xinming Xia, Nathalie Zonnenberg

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Biennials are each in their own way a complex constellation of different economical and geopolitical, and representational cultural aspects within its own power relations. With all their underlying deficiencies (canonical, hegemonic, colonialist, hot money-funded, politically influenced, hierarchical), biennials tend to establish international discourse, at best, rooted in local cultural specificities and contexts.

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"and here I am"-De-Colonial Aspects of Advanced Curatorial Work (of Art)

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"and here I am"-De-Colonial Aspects of Advanced Curatorial Work (of Art)

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My tattoo is my Angelus Novus. It witnesses the catastrophe I produce by "piling up wreckage upon wreckage."[1] That the tattoo is a gift given to me by my daughter has turned the world and its time inside out. I understand: my daughter is not younger than me; we all are in the same age, the living, the dead, and the unborn; the child is only a paradigm of all the non-dissociable forces of life, of life as inseparable; we have been caught up in an eternal whirl; it makes us believe that there is succession, progress; that "what we call progress, [is] this storm,"[2] which, in the end, is the motivated architectural potential of eternal encounter. Always witnessed by the angel of history, this storm both demands and allows further research.[3]
Habemus Angelus Novus-The Anarchic Event
A last scene deserves attention, one that may be a continuous methodological reflection on the conditions of artistic existence and the work of art, rather than an art-project as such. The tattoo on my arm demands care or maintenance. This imperative allows me to have it, to bear it, and to use it. It is impossible to eliminate a tattoo. A tattoo cannot be dispossessed. Therefore, it cannot be possessed either. It is a paradigm.

Ella Hardliz, untitled, black tattoo drawing, arm-length, 2014 (photo: Ronny Hardliz, 2015)

When after a car accident I was spending more time at home, my then five-year-old daughter came to me with a black marker and said she was going to draw a tattoo on my arm. I decided to have this drawing tattooed on my arm right where she had drawn it.

The tattoo's origin is the child and her or his relation to the parents. This relation may be denied but never annulled. While today eternal bondage has fallen into disgrace (seen as moral and as authoritarian domination and limitation), from the perspective of the impossibility of possession, the tattoo's indisputability is liberating. Precisely because the care of a tattoo, a child, or a garden, etc., is being demanded from me, it is a borderless having. Again, this having is not possession but habit. It is not merely doing or simple agency, not the factum as such that gives permission to what is done or made, that gives permission to the facts. Permission is given because the action to take care has been demanded.

PhD-Study-A Curatorial Problem
Driven by a childish joy, Walter Benjamin bought Klee's aqua tinta print Angelus Novus in 1921 and hung it as his companion in every apartment he stayed in, even on vacations or during his exile in Paris. When he had to leave Paris in September 1940, fleeing from capture by the Nazis, he entrusted it to the custody of Georges Bataille, who concealed it in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, thus saving it for posterity. Two weeks later, Benjamin ended his life in Portbou.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, monoprint drawing with watercolours, 31.8 cm x 24.2 cm, 1920 (Israel Museum)

For Benjamin, the Angelus Novus is the angel of history. He looks back on what the progression of history leaves behind. Embedded in times of war, Benjamin qualifies these outcomes as "wreckage" and "debris" resulting from "catastrophic" "smashing."[4] But the wind that carries the angel through time originates in "Paradise" and has a "violence" that makes us understand the universal condition of the angel of history. Perhaps our time has invented Paradise and history; and this violence, as a qualitative entity, comes with it. But what marks the Angelus Novus as an eternal creature beyond any current condition is the pure state of a witness to which he is reduced. In this state, he cannot but "fixedly contemplat[e]"[5] what he is being carried away from: "His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread."[6]

As human beings, however, we do not have wings. The "storm [...] blowing from Paradise"[7] is not carrying us steadily through time. Rather, we are doomed to build sails and sail against or into the wind, to take the wind out of someone's sails, to be upwind or downwind, and to be blown down at times. We do not just stare at the condition of the world: we make use of it. This does not necessarily mean that we should turn around and face the future progressively, or that we should try to prevent the smashing or even try "to make whole what has been smashed."[8] Maybe we should try to understand the demand presented by the current state of the world, as witnessed by the angel of history, and take it as the liberating permission of creating our own past.

My daughter came to me with a black marker and said: "I am going to draw a tattoo on your arm." I decided to have the drawing tattooed, as a way of documenting her work. This moment marked some kind of an exit from the academic aesthetics of the PhD-study I was occupied with at that time. At once, there was another practice involved, a practice that was not directly responsive to the problems of the PhD and, nevertheless, closely related to many aspects of my work, my research, and my history. Although this practice could no longer be understood as discourse as art practice, it was still discursive: it allowed for a practical or material discursivity to speak in its own right as an equivalent part of the PhD discourse.

When I started the PhD, it demanded the answering of some methodological questions: What is the practice at stake in a research project of which practice is a major component? What is the difference between art practice and research practice? What does it mean, specifically for an artist, to engage in such research?

My art practices are situated in the transdisciplinary field of art and architecture. The architectural base of my art practices generates a hybrid operational field that is always set in or in touch with the respective fields. Despite this clarity, the practical question of ethos with regard to a mixed-mode study is less obvious. To which practice does the study relate, and how, at the moment one's main practice becomes studying itself? Intuitively, the answer from a standpoint of ethos was clear from the beginning: there cannot be a separation between research practice and art practice, between the practice of studying and the practice of being studied, within one and the same person. The only way to engage in studying one's own practice is to use the practice of studying as one's own practice by means of one's own ways of doing. It's a question of finding a way of engaging in the study as an architectural art practice.

The double meaning of the word "study" as both research practice and architectural typology presented an entry point congruent to my art practices. This duplication of the "study" also reflects the double modality of the work: as both discursive and visual practice.

To engage in studying as a visual art practice the first step is to visualize the activity of studying: as a spatial activity in a study room, i.e., by documenting it with visual media such as film. Each practice when being documented-if conscious of it-changes under the apparatus of documentation. Documentation and its inherent complications with distance and neutrality, when applied to the intellectual and architectural examination of the "study," immediately reveals it as an inherently architectural art practice-a more particular form of critical spatial practice.

Studying is a spatial practice, albeit unspectacular. Filming the activity of studying is a first attempt to grasp it by means other than words and concepts. As the spatial conditions of a study room are often very restricted and prevent it from being fully captured on film, the means of documentation must be adapted. For example, the camera can be turned by ninety degrees in order to capture a wall's full height. The result of this simple rotary motion is a vertical image. More importantly, however, such rotation introduces the force of gravity into the medium of film. A sequence recorded in a vertical format when projected on a horizontal screen of a conventional cinema appears rotated by ninety degrees.

Reflections on Rejuvenation
Consequently, it makes the spectators' heads turn. Documentation possibly changes both the documented practices and the practices of reception.

My study of the "study" by means of visual documentation provided valuable insights on fundamental issues of studying such as writing, reading, or thinking and its implications on the underlying trope of the "architectural." Nevertheless, in its rather hermetic logic, it also left the tentative "artistic" definition of a universal PhD practice, i.e., the practice of studying, in a loop. Although it is proven that hermeneutic circles are a reliable means of knowledge production, there was an urgency of breaking out of these loops, not without, however, rescuing previous methodological insights into the new practice. If knowledge can be embodied, then the task at hand was the translation of my current practices into practices that would embody-rather than examine-the new methodological knowledge. This then would be what I'd expect from a PhD: a radical transformation of one's own practices.

While the watershed of this translational move is indeed marked by the event of the tattoo, the strategic move towards it was propelled by an encounter with Irit Rogoff, the co-inventor (together with Jean-Paul Martinon) of the Curatorial/Knowledge PhD programme at Goldsmiths College, and my subsequent participation in this programme as a DocMobility fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Both the thoughtful setup of the programme structure with approximately six three-day-seminars per year, thus allowing for the seminars to become a place of common experience, on the one hand, and the particular contents of the seminars, which I perceived as an advancement of post- and de-colonial studies through critical edges that emerged from a definition of the concept of "the curatorial" through the introduction of "the philosophical" as an intellectual, distantiated lens, on the other, made it possible to achieve this goal, the translation of one's own practices.

On curating, this is where my contribution must be situated. It is driven by the urgency to say: wait a minute-let's talk about curating, rather than just keep on curating. It is "the curatorial" as a research of "other ways to engage with our current woes"[9] that is applicable to the artistic practice of PhD study. The production of a PhD is, therefore, a curatorial problem.

My daughter's marking may be interpreted as a form of reversed inheritance of a drawing talent. I never met my grandfather. My father told me he was a talented draftsman. He established and ran several bookbinding factories in Prague during the inter-war period, which was the time of the first Czechoslovak Republic. After World War II, the Czechoslovak Communist Party confiscated the factories. My grandfather's talent marks my daughter's drawing. His talent has passed through my father's body, through my own body, and through my daughter's body back onto my body: it is an indirect signature of inheritance. I am marked by an indirect inheritance, passed on through the younger generation: a reversed or inversed inheritance. Such a drawing clears the way for an archaeological research practice that is not scientific in the sense of an uncovering of truths but, rather, to a drilling art practice of graving graves and unhinging gravities, thus creating truths. These issues concern life and death rather than knowledge.

Missed Encounters-Beginnings of Idiotic Research
So, instead of asking whether there were entanglements of my family with the machinations of the Nazi forces occupying the country during World War II, or if there are Jewish roots in my family that have been subsurfaced for those very reasons, this research does not lead back to the roots, back to my ancestors and their imbrications with those historical issues that irredeemably concern all of us in the West. Quite on the contrary, it leads forward to roots. Putting my personal life and history at stake in research allows for invigorated steps to yet unknown terrains, meeting current urgencies that have seemingly nothing to do with my past. Yet, related to the potential past of the tattoo, a past that is yet to come, current urgencies attain a potential for alternate readings.

While praising the concept of the Curatorial/Knowledge PhD programme I should not forget the vivid power it has generated by attracting curators, artists, and other scholars driven by a shared motivation. For this reason, it is by no means a coincidence that it was upon an invitation of one of these colleagues, the Israeli curator Joshua Simon, that the headstone for the translation of my practice was laid-within the frame of the PhD and beyond that for the current work. It allowed me to do collaborative work with kids in Arad using and further developing my filming methods. More importantly, however, it allowed me to decide instinctively to travel haphazardly through a sort of no-man's-land, the West Bank.

There, it was the visit of the Cinema Jenin that made me understand the importance of film in my work. No particular event or conversation testifies to this moment, except, maybe, the moment when I entered the cinema and there was a wild bunch of kids sack racing on stage to frenetically loud music: outbursts of joy!

My research travel to Israel and Palestine may be seen as a journey to my Jewish and Muslim roots. It is the responsibility, but also the privilege of an heir to Western history, a history that has always been intricately entangled with non-Western history, that gives me the permission to approach the non-West. Addressing some of the colonial realities that Western history has shaped is a way of translating my past into advanced art practice (as opposed to, e.g., uncovering and artistically wrapping facts about my own family's history). On another level, my father's passionate Super-8 filmmaking might also be interpreted as such a step forward to the roots, as a step away from my grandfather's drawing talent to an alternate form of drawing. My own step towards architecture is yet another variation, retracing a genealogy from making graphs to making cavities and unhinging gravities, which point towards a further set of practices of acting. The tattoo, which might also be seen as the empty sign of contemporary melancholia, symbolizes and gives permission to become active with potential sets of new critical architectural gestures and, beyond that, new forms of culture.

The idiot is neither the one who does what seems rational nor the one who does what seems pleasurable. According to Deleuze, referring to Dostoyevsky, the idiot is the one who knows that "beyond consciousness and passion" there is a question, there is a question, there is a question-but what is it? Maybe research is idiotic, when it is searching for questions rather than answers. To answer this question, one would have to start with the end and then ask, by looking back, whether there is (or there will have been) a question. The result is, in short, and exclusively, a study that is a production of a mode of writing and also a production of other modes of researching. If there appears knowledge, then it has been hardly produced; rather, it has been having and using knowledge (or ways of knowing) by means of the work of art as the work that art has and does.

De-Doc: Decolonizing Documentary Film Methods in Artistic Research
One could also, conveniently, distinguish between discourse and spatial practice. At least since Foucault's discourse on language, we know that discourse is a spatial practice. However, consequently, does he not also show us inversely, maybe unconsciously, that spatial practice is discursive? When building a (research) wall parallel to an already existing wall as its inverted model, then this entire setup-the walls, the gap between them, and the territories that are both supporting them and being separated by them-enter into a relation with various sociocultural and spatial discourses. Through an original sequence of spatial "quotes" and "glosses," the wall draws a line that is a critical sketch of original knowledge, with its own "logic" and "integrity," by constructing nothing new, as it were. As in writing, also in spatial practice disinterested desire may shine through, thus shedding lights hitherto unknown.

Such work of art may contribute to a formulation of art practice that spends itself in a voiding and thus becomes a critical life-form vis-à-vis dominant ideology. By looking at what has been done, a seemingly idiotic question for the work of art shows at the root of such work: How to receive the political through academic study?

This question shows its idiocy by means of showing. It politicizes a deeply rooted private use, which is idiotic. It reveals the question "What is the question?" as its foundation. To reveal idiocy is idiotic. But the question "What is the question?" is the most fundamentally critical, as the revelation of idiocy is a pure political act. What remains to be done, in conclusion, is to keep the distance and to stay in touch and to continue-go to the crossroads!

What is the question that joins three missed encounters in a research project into collaboration? First, the cinematographic exploration of the acquaintance and potential friendship between Bataille and Benjamin as an incommunicable instance of getting ready to overturn things; second, the cinematographic exploration of the current use of the prehistoric cave of Lascaux in the South of France as evidence of the current cultural capitulation; and third, the cinematographic exploration of artistic representations of the current state of Palestine as means of cultural resistance.

An abysmal sensation of nausea or exhaustion has become prevalent for people around the globe. It is being produced by diverse colonizing conditions, all of which seem to be both universal and out of our sphere of influence: migration, climate change, digitalization, neoliberal management and politics, or private experiences of the individualist self. The powers at play can be countered through political action. Nevertheless, the question of how we can immediately cope with such divesting forces remains urgent.

The above-described sensation touches upon existential issues such as death, love, or ecstasy that are central to artistic thought and production. Art has the capacity to wrest these issues from people's everyday economic contingencies and reflect them in quasi-timeless realms of aesthetic episteme. It is possible to convey sensation of lost ground to the viewer through a particular technique of filming: by unhinging physical forces such as gravity or inertness within the reference of an architectural space.

"and here I am"-Unoccupied Territories
The constellation of the three paradigms- the state of Palestine, the caves of Lascaux, and Benjamin's thinking in exile-provides aesthetic understanding of such states of exhaustion, which are useful for the invention of counter-strategies adaptable to everyday life. The appropriateness of the chosen paradigms is not scientifically justified. They follow an artistic intuition, in which materials associate via an aesthetic epistemic mechanism. The paradigms constituted themselves during doctoral studies as relevant and interconnected, yet largely unexplored instances for the rest of the studies. They lend themselves to further exploration with regard to one of the main outcomes of the doctoral studies: the autonomous camera. This is a camera that moves according to own logic.

These are the presumed paradigmatic counter-strategies: the Freedom Theatre in Jenin (West Bank) represents and resists the occupation of Palestine in a socio-cultural form of theatrical practice; the only everyday use of the caves of Lascaux in the South of France with precious prehistoric paintings consists in the cave keeper's daily control of the measuring instruments; during his exile in Paris, Benjamin kept a drawing by Klee called Angelus Novus like a guardian angel and maintained a curious friendship with Bataille that to date has remained largely unexplored.

Plays, paintings, or drawings and texts can be filmed, but they cannot just be performed in front of the autonomous camera. The director and the protagonists are forced to actively relate to the dominant logic of the camera. In this collaboration, content and form translate into new cinematographic representations. The cancelled physical forces within the projected architectural space generate the sensation of nausea or exhaustion: the sensations the documentary talks about become tangible for the public.

"What is the question?"-De-Doc Also Reads As: De-Doctoral Study
There is a risk that the chosen approach-the autonomous camera-by reproducing the forces it aims to examine, might colonize and suffocate the autonomy of the protagonists. Preliminary tests have shown that the protagonists rather rely on their embodied knowledge and confidentially perform what needs to be translated into the film. Paradoxically, the effect of the autonomous camera is in itself decolonizing.

"Ahmed lives in the Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank. He has grown up under occupation, likes football, falls in love with a girl he spots on the street, and discovers an unexpected taste for the limelight when he accidentally walks into the local Stone theatre. However, he is also fascinated by the balaclava that he finds hidden in his parents' bedroom, a legacy of his father's time as a resistance fighter.

[...] Ahmed Tobasi performs his own story, written for the stage by Hassan Abdulrazzak, which charts his journey from being a member of Palestine's Islamic Jihad to becoming an actor. Along the way he asks if the stage really can be as powerful as an AK-47. The enthusiasm with which the audience claps at the end suggests that it can be, even if it's not entirely clear whether we are clapping the show itself or Tobasi's remarkable personal voyage of transformation that saw him imprisoned for four years at the age of 17 before coming under the influence of Juliano Mer Khamis, one of the leaders of the Jenin Freedom Theatre.

Ronny Hardliz, Unoccupied Territories (part 1) ‚and here I am', film still, 4K video installation, 2019 (in progress)

[...] Mer Khamis was a stern taskmaster, and a man who believed that 'theatre can be as violent as the gun'. He was gunned down outside the theatre in 2011."[10]

The continuous occupation of Palestine by the Israeli State creates a sort of unoccupancy of the territory, which is the fertile soil of Palestinian aggression and recalls the impotent angel of history. Such aggressions need outlets, and the Palestinians have become involuntary experts for the potential guidebook: How to engage with an occupying force? The Freedom Theatre in Jenin in the North of the West Bank has found a cultural means to deal with the on-going traumatization of the population. In workshops, it practices theatre mainly with kids and women of the refugee camp, and it broaches the issue of occupation in professional plays, which are shown throughout the West Bank and internationally. Instead of letting culture be oppressed through occupation, the theatre practices cultural resistance by disseminating its own narrative to the world.

Can the curatorial collaboration of a white, male, Western artist with a Palestinian cultural institution be de-colonial?

Can there be a de-doctoral practice, as opposed to a post-doctoral one?

Is there an "extreme" of advanced curatorial work of art that succeeds in evacuating domination to such an extent it leaves everyone-those living, the dead, and those yet to be born-rejuvenated to the same age?

Like an idiot, who asks what the hell the practice in a practice-based PhD is supposed to be, I'm haunted to continue searching for questions. No construction can possibly be erected above the merit of a PhD. Rather, there is lateral displacement that puts the work in yet another unknown light-and thus makes it advance.

And here I am, documenting particular cases of lost ground, thus telling these stories and my own in a unique collaborative invention, the invention of a new past. By means of using and translating their and my stories into new forms of representation, there might be a chance of saving us from becoming lost causes.

Rather than capitalizing on outcomes and climbing to post-doctoral heights, the study funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation is a de-move, a kind of back-folding or ritornello, a dwelling on the same, a moving still image, a decolonizing contemplation. "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet"[11]: and here I am.

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"and here I am"-De-Colonial Aspects of Advanced Curatorial Work (of Art)

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My tattoo is my Angelus Novus. It witnesses the catastrophe I produce by "piling up wreckage upon wreckage."[1] That the tattoo is a gift given to me by my daughter has turned the world and its time inside out.

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1. An Image of a Stone

An artist goes for a hike in the hills on the outskirts of Beijing. She is searching through the lush forest for a stone that bears no visible trace of human manipulation, and stumbles across a sizeable rock with an intriguing shape. It appears untouched by Homo sapiens, and she brings the rock back to her studio in Shanghai, a journey of 1,400 kilometers. As the stone is neither small nor smooth, the journey becomes a complicated and cumbersome project. Once in the studio, the rock becomes the model, or motif, for a 1:1-scale black-and-white picture. It sits at the center of a naturalistic depiction, covering most of the picture plane. As a lithograph, Refined Still Life #1 becomes a visual echo or afterimage of the artist Yu Ji's endeavor.

Why am I so fascinated by Yu Ji's work? I am not usually attracted to artworks like this. And yet my fascination is definitely connected to the simple effect of being drawn to something that I did not expect. The work has haunted me since I saw it in the artist's studio in 2016. Shortly afterwards, I invited her to exhibit the lithograph as part of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, but the work still continued to pose unexpected questions. In 2018, I returned to the work, exhibiting it in the group exhibition "Soon Enough: Art in Action" at Tensta Konsthall, after having written a column about it for Art Review. My curiosity was triggered not only by the artist's openness to allowing the unexpected and mundane to become part of the work. I was also drawn to her presumably boring and unnecessarily laborious act of transporting a perfectly ordinary rock-after all, most of earth's stones are untouched by human beings-over a great distance, which nonetheless testifies to an interest in the land and its properties and faculties. Somehow this resonates with art as a form of understanding that goes alongside politics, science, and religion, even encompassing such other forms of understanding while carrying a unique potential to also go against them.

Then there is the creation of the material artwork: it is complex without involving high production values (lithography being an old technique for reproducing images by drawing on the flat surface of limestone). The peculiar repetition of the object depicted and the picture itself is also captivating-an image of a stone without any trace of human hands, made precisely by human hands and the very same stone. Such tautologies can be gimmicky and nostalgic, but here the return to an old-fashioned technique arises from the work asking for it, rather than from melancholic attachment (such as in the frequent fetishization of celluloid film and slides by artists in the 1990s). The demand in turn has to do with something foundational in reproducing an image that is obviously not only pre-digital, but pre-electrical.

Every time I hear the argument in politically engaged art circles that art-making as we know it-whether discrete art objects, research-based work, or more performative practices-cannot continue under the conditions imposed by the politics of hard-line right-wing governments, I am reminded of Refined Still Life #1, because I disagree: now is the time to intensify our focus upon art as it has been practiced, in all its variety-perhaps with new distinctions. What was instructive about Yu Ji's work is connected to its combination of simplicity and something extremely laborious that points to the very ground on which we stand. The work was not meant to be majestic-quite the contrary-and yet in my eyes it is grand precisely because of its modesty. Such distinctions should warn us against focusing on a single privileged form of art or art-making aligned to the good political taste of the connoisseur. Rather, distinctions should be based on complexity, relevance, and urgency, often situationally so. We need to distinguish inquiry from gesture, pertinence from entertainment, uniqueness from routine. We need to ask what the artwork does, and test it with changing "wheres," "whens" and "hows." This amounts to various definitions of "quality" that need to be continuously debated. And simultaneously-and importantly-we need to make time for civic engagement, whether through art or not. Many of us are able to make the crucial decision about how we prioritize time.

In this context, the self-determination of the artist is not to be disregarded. Following through with counterintuitive thoughts is indispensable here-to believe in the spark of an idea, or even a shard of a vision, which at the stage of the making of the work is often unintelligible to others, yet this spark can be trusted. The challenge today-and for some time-has been to avoid becoming ensnared in political panic, and to avoid dropping everything because of it. In his 2017 exhibition "You Don't Have to Understand Everything" at Tensta Konsthall, artist Naeem Mohaiemen addressed the security panic in post-9/11 US, and how that triggered his interest in the 1970s as another period of security panic that overlapped with novel models of life and society. Faced with authoritarian, nationalist, and fascist forces, we need new beginnings, and new beginnings typically abound in places of uncertainty and fear.

This is also where relevant art, such as Yu Ji's lithograph, tends to arise. Awkward and hard to grasp, and yet insistent, it is about the possibility of seeing and doing things otherwise, and continuing to doing so. The kind of artistic intelligence at play in selecting, among innumerous untouched natural objects, a particular one that carries traces from millions of years ago, is about being proactive and procreative rather than reactive. It demands another kind of art-one that already exists, but tends to be marginalized, even among those with whom it shares many interests and concerns. At its best, art cultivates the counterintuitive, manifesting the notion that everything can be different-through means that we did not expect, have not yet imagined, or maybe even forgot existed. Just starting down this path means cultivating this already existing, yet marginalized, form of intuition.

2. The Curatorial

More than ten years ago I started to think in terms of "the curatorial." At the core of "the curatorial" lie connections-between artworks and other material, the space, the specific time of presentation. Colleagues and peers were interested in similar ideas: discussing the emergence of the field of curating, Beatrice von Bismarck has emphasized the "constellational mode" of "the curatorial," i.e., the dynamic field of constellations in which are embedded various activities having to do with making art public. Irit Rogoff has talked about curated projects as "events of knowledge," settings where different kinds of knowledge come together and something new is tested. Curated events contain epistemological processes and are presentational rather than representational, a distinction that Rogoff credits to the visitors to an exhibition. This is how I formulated it around the same time:

For me the term "curating" is used as the technical modality of making art go public. It is a craft that can be involved in much more than making exhibitions-beyond the walls of an institution as well as beyond what are traditionally called programming and education. This is "curating in the expanded field." The curatorial is understood as a multidimensional role that includes critique, editing, education, fundraising, etc. But even more importantly, the curatorial goes beyond "roles" and takes the shape of a function and a method, even a methodology.

Understood in this way "the curatorial" can be compared with Chantal Mouffe's notion of "the political." Searching for a more appropriate model of democracy than the prevalent representative forms-which are now being severely challenged in many parts of the world-Mouffe outlines a version in which opposition is crucial and consensus, with its tendency to minimize disagreement and dissensus, is the problem. Mouffe argues for "the political" as an ever-present potential that cannot be precisely located, but which grows out of the antagonism between friend and enemy. "The political" is the aspect of life that is connected to disagreement and dissent, and is therefore the antithesis of consensus. For Mouffe, "politics"-as opposed to the political-is the formal side of practices that reproduce social and structural orders. With this in mind, the politics/political distinction can be mapped onto the curating/curatorial distinction, with curating-as opposed to the curatorial-as a technical modality we know from art institutions and independent projects. "The curatorial," on the other hand, would be a more distributed presence aimed at creating friction and pushing new ideas through signification processes and relationships between objects, people, places, ideas, and so forth. "The curatorial" does not stop at the status quo.

3. Fuel to the Fire

Natascha Sadr Haghighian's installation Fuel to the Fire at Tensta Konsthall in 2016 can be seen as an example of the curatorial: it raised topical issues like the militarization of the police, images as testimonies, and institutionalized racism and violence. The patio heaters and fleece blankets usually associated with outdoor seating were used in Sadr Haghighian's work as markers of enclosure or exclusion. In one area the blankets carried screen-printed images of incidents of police violence that provoked significant protests. The installation also included parts of a balcony from a Swedish Million Program housing unit from around 1970, a sound piece with leaking headphones, and newspaper clippings echoing media stereotypes and alternative narratives. A newly produced Fuel to the Fire newspaper published material on the history of SWAT police and the role of eyewitness video in creating a crisis of legitimacy for the police. The free newspaper also included interviews with activist Hamid Khan, cultural geographer Irene Molina, and journalist Somar Al Naher, among others, and could be taken home as study material.

Fuel to the Fire was prompted by the fatal shooting of Lenine Relvas-Martins, a sixty-nine-year-old resident of the Stockholm suburb of Husby, near Tensta, on the night of May 13, 2013, by Piketen police-a Swedish SWAT team-in his own apartment. Neighbors were present and witnessed a crucial moment in which Lenine's dead body was carried out in a body bag, covered by a red fleece blanket adorned with a heart. The police claimed in their report that Lenine was injured during the incident and taken to a hospital. However, images taken by neighbors and freelance journalist Björn Lockström proved that they tried to cover up Lenine's death, and the police were forced to "correct" their report. The incident caused protests in Husby and resulted in a significant uprising in many major cities in Sweden. Nobody was held responsible for the fatal shooting, nor was it discussed in mainstream print media in the immediate aftermath of the incident. Instead, the media reported mainly on car fires and youth violence, furthering a stigmatized image of the northern suburbs of Stockholm.

Fuel to the Fire traced the Piketen police back to its beginnings in American SWAT teams. Standing for "Special Weapons and Tactics," SWAT was founded in Los Angeles in the late 1960s after the 1965 Watts riots and was first used during a raid against the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The story of the emergence of SWAT teams proves the intimate relation between police militarization, social segregation, and institutional racism. It also exemplifies how these developments have reached a global scale, with SWAT teams spreading literally across the planet since their origin in Los Angeles, including to a place as seemingly peaceful as Sweden.

After an open invitation in 2011, Sadr Haghighian began making intensive research visits to Tensta and other parts of Stockholm in 2014, meeting with both individuals and groups who all contributed to the shaping of Fuel to the Fire's narrative. Participants in Nyhetsbyrån (The news agency), Tensta Konsthall's long-term initiative for young people interested in developing storytelling skills through text, audio, or other artistic practices, followed the process. In autumn 2016, Nyhetsbyrån produced its own newspaper that took the exhibition as a starting point. Over the course of the exhibition and as part of Nyhetsbyrån's public program, Leandro Schlarek Mulinari, a PhD student in criminology at Stockholm University, formed an open reading group addressing issues like scare tactics, the police's own reporting, and how the suburbs are described by the media. Additionally, a film program and symposium further unpacked the themes and questions raised in Fuel to the Fire.

Fuel to the Fire can be described as an installation version of an agitprop work from the 1920s-clear, forceful, and taking a position, and even incorporating the characteristically bold red, white, and black palette of the Russian avant-garde. It caused debate both on social media and in the mainstream media, with some considering it polarizing or criticizing it for not allowing the perspective of the police to enter the discussion. This is a valid point: the artist consciously chose not to include this perspective since it has been given so much space in other contexts. And, of course, an artwork does not have to be "balanced."

The curatorial precisely attempts to inhabit this lack of balance and struggles to expand and amplify it, in contrast to "curating," which usually seeks to rebalance the work or otherwise hasten the return of equilibrium. When curating engages with the world outside the traditional boundaries of art and its institutions, it often assumes that this sphere is not only separate from the sphere of art but should also be left as is. Any work of art, project, exhibition, or programming at an art institution is then placed in service of that aim. The curatorial, by contrast, assumes that the world outside the institution, as well as the institution itself, is always already unbalanced, and for this reason, it does not shy away from tension and divergence. Condensed into the lithograph of the stone by Yu Ji, it is the relative deficiency of artistic routine and common sense that constitutes the curatorial.

4. Tensta Konsthall

Trying to situate the curatorial in the context of Tensta Konsthall, as its director from 2011 to 2018, meant emphasizing the mediation between artworks and people, driven by a sense that much of what a given artwork has to offer is rarely tapped into sufficiently. As a private foundation founded in 1998 by a locally based artist and his peers, the mission of the Konsthall-which applies for and receives support from the municipality, the national arts council, and the region-is to simultaneously work with contemporary art and to have a local presence in its Stockholm suburb of Tensta. Today, 90 percent of the twenty-thousand or so people living in Tensta have a translocal background. While more than one hundred languages are spoken in the area, many people come from East Africa and the Middle East. The population has a lower overall income than the national average, as well as higher unemployment rates, similar to other suburbs in Sweden's capital-one of the most segregated cities in Europe. More than an exception, Tensta can be seen as the new normal, pointing to the future.

Certain artworks already take mediation and untapped potential as their point of departure, such as Ahmet Ögüt's educational platform The Silent University. Founded in collaboration with Delfina, The Showroom, and the Tate Modern in 2012, The Silent University took the form of a language café at Tensta Konsthall in 2013, where people without legal papers could practice their language skills. In this way, the work activated the "silenced knowledge" of migrant populations, who are sometimes highly educated in their countries of origin but given little academic opportunity in their new home. The Silent University has taken different forms in the different places it has manifested. In Bremen, Paris, Athens, Amman, and elsewhere, lectures, seminars, and workshops were held for people whose legal status otherwise prevents them from using their academic credentials. Fahyma Alnablsi, who was trained as a teacher in Damascus but couldn't get a job as one in Sweden, was the receptionist at Tensta Konsthall and led the language café there, assisted by a handful of volunteers. Initially, the language café met once a week, but then began meeting twice a week, with monthly excursions to other parts of the segregated city of Stockholm.

The Silent University started at Tensta Konsthall as a part of the 2013 exhibition "Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden," which looked at history and memory in Tensta through the people there and the location itself. Works by around forty artists, architects, researchers, local associations, and musicians ranged from nineteenth-century watercolors of rooms rented by a single woman who was a member of the precariat living in Södermalm-socially similar in that period to Tensta today-to commissions by artists such as Petra Bauer and Peter Geschwind, archival material from the Kurdish Association, and a soundtrack by the hip-hop star Adam Tensta. Two Tensta Museum branches in the middle of the city, at the Stockholm City Museum and the Museum of Medieval Stockholm, emphasized the institutional play between a suburb often thought of as a ghetto and the fragile private foundation of the Konsthall and the established municipal museums in the primarily white and wealthy city center.

Through the adventure called "Tensta Museum," which also looked at Tensta as an example of a "new Sweden" that is different from the internationally recognized image of the country as a generous welfare state with a blond and blue-eyed population-the reality of which has changed significantly over the last thirty years-the team at Tensta Konsthall got to know many new people and organizations. One of them-a local Swedish language school run by the municipality-asked if they could hold their classes at the art center. A setup then emerged that functioned as a classroom, which in turn led to other groups, such as a homework assistance group, local city administrators who hold team meetings, and a Save the Children parents forum, holding meetings and activities in the space.

After that, "Tensta Museum" developed into a continuing program, through which a fragile organization run more or less as a project with insecure funding could pretend to have the stability and continuity of a museum. There were commissions from artists such as Laura Oldfield Ford, Ylva Westerlund, and Mats Adelman, and presentations of works by Jakob Kolding, Halil Altindere, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, as well as original drawings by Tensta's planning architect, Igor Dergalin. This self-institutionalization generated the Nyhetsbyrån initiative (which became part of Sadr Haghighian's Fuel to the Fire) as a course for eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds to use journalism, art, and design to tell different stories about places in the city similar to Tensta. As a collaboration between the department of media studies at Stockholm University, the illustration department at Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft, and Design, and Tensta Konsthall, the course drew from all three fields and connected directly to Tensta Konsthall's exhibitions. Interestingly, it turned into a springboard for young people writing for the local newspaper or well-known blogs, producing TV programs, and even publishing their poetry.

5. Contact Zones

Known in different parts of the world as "education," "learning," and "programming," mediation in the context of my time at Tensta Konsthall was based on finding and establishing contact surfaces and shared concerns between artworks, artists, other cultural producers, and individuals as well as groups and organizations. Mediation does not aim at unanimity but rather underlines inquiry, debate, and unexplored possibilities. Instead of thinking in terms of "communities," we thought in terms of "contact zones," a notion developed by anthropologists Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford, to emphasize transversality between various groups rather than coherence within them.

Pratt uses the term "contact zone" to describe social spaces where various cultures collide and try to deal with each other, often through asymmetrical power relations arising from colonial history, slavery, and their repercussions. Pratt also employs the term to reconsider the prevalent models of community in academic and social work. Seen as a contact zone, Tensta Konsthall sometimes included a certain amount of "auto-ethnographic" material-texts, images, and other documents in which participants describe themselves. This material also dealt with the representations that others make of the participants, as well as with material produced by people who do not live and work in Tensta. This form of "transculturation" whereby subordinate groups engage with material from a dominant group aims to replace reductive concepts of assimilation commonly used in colonial cultures. While some projects within this frame at Tensta Konsthall testified to the fact that subordinate groups cannot usually control what comes out of the dominant culture, it remains possible-and normal-to determine what gets absorbed and how.

James Clifford describes contact zones as "places of hybrid possibility and political negotiation, sites of exclusion and struggle." He uses the notion when discussing the work of North American tribal museums and minority cultural centers. Developing the vocabulary further, he talks about "contact perspectives" and describes the relations prevalent in contact zones as "contact relations" that make possible new collaborations and alliances. The work carried out there is "contact work." Like Pratt, Clifford emphasizes these zones as conflictual rather than consensual, with both negative and positive historical possibilities that need to be confronted. At Tensta Konsthall it seemed particularly relevant to bring such "contact phenomena" into discussions where different agendas and different views on coercion, exploitation, and ethnocentrism could share the same project and generate reflection and critique.

Placing art as the heart and brain of Tensta Konsthall meant showing both art exhibitions and other kinds of curated projects, which both were and were not related to the local area. An example of a classical, more straightforward art exhibition held at Tensta Konsthall was the 2013 solo show by Iman Issa, which featured abstract works about memory and the human ability to form associations. Using photography, text, sculpture, video, and audio, she presented fragments from everyday experience-a trip to the zoo, a day at school, a family vacation-that were described with barely any adjectives, names, or other details. Issa's process was to first strip down the description of a moment so that only the most common elements remained, and then to rethink and create anew the moment, inspecting the space that emerged. In this way, she reflected on how individual experience is linked to collective experience. Included in the show were several works that excerpted from the autobiographies of Arab intellectuals such as Nawal El Saadawi and Edward Said. In one interesting example of curatorial mediation, the Konsthall team took these autobiographies as a starting point to create a series of introductions to the show in Arabic, which were then sent to two women's centers in the Tensta neighborhood.

Remaining art-centric is essential, as is trying to find and develop contact zones with artworks, artists, groups, and individuals beyond a specific locale. At Tensta Konsthall, this entailed consciously aligning activities at the center with education curricula, in the shape of seminars, workshops, and lectures. One example was the seminars offered in collaboration with the Stockholm School of Economics, as part of Goldin+Senneby's dispersed retrospective "Standard Length of a Miracle" in 2016. Later that same year, as part of Marion von Osten's "Viet Nam Discourse Stockholm," a whole course in choreography was held at the Konsthall. Thanks to a collaboration with a number of universities across Sweden, a class entitled "Migration Course: On the Politics and Practices of Migration" also drew together professors and researchers specializing in migration to give onsite lectures and seminars in Tensta. All of this forms part of the contact and conflict zones, which in and of themselves constitute public, or semi-public, space.

6. The Eros Effect

Every so often, I play devil's advocate with myself, borrowing some of the arguments formulated by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in their 2015 book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. They warn against the danger of being content with the local and with the "prefigurative politics" they describe as a desire to realize a future world right away, as much art today exemplifies. Srnicek and Williams argue that privileging temporal, spatial, and conceptual immediacy leads to "folk politics"-"a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power." For Srnicek and Williams, the automatic praise of immediacy as authenticity is extremely dangerous. Fleeting practices are favored over systematic and structural work, tactics over strategy, and the past over the future. Small-scale projects and transparency occupy us with patching up little wounds rather than, as the authors write, "building counter-hegemony."

I agree: localism can certainly distract from larger concerns, and folk-political action can easily give the instant gratification of "having done something." The "independent blips of resistance" can be pacifying. Importantly, Srnicek and Williams bring up the long-term strategy of the ordoliberals in post-WWII Europe, who managed to create a neoliberal utopia based on a new political common sense through private elite organizations like the Mont Pelerin Society targeting "second-hand dealers"-journalists, academics, teachers, and the like. They managed to defeat Keynesianism and replace the law-based legitimacy of democracy with the efficiency-based legitimacy of a well-functioning economy. The impossible became the inevitable. In the face of this, the authors advocate cultivating some of the core concerns of left modernity-an image of historical progress, a universalist horizon, and a commitment to emancipation.

Let's return for a moment to the context of Sadr Haghighian's Fuel to the Fire. It was part of an ongoing series at Tensta Konsthall entitled "The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements, and the Struggle for Social Justice," a multiyear inquiry into the relationship between art and solidarity movements, which after 2015 unfolded through a series of commissions, exhibitions, workshops, presentations, and film screenings. Inspired by the many research-based projects by artists on emancipatory postcolonial struggles and liberation movements during the 1960s and '70s, and faced with fascist parties gaining ground in Europe and an increasingly tough social climate, it seemed important to return to the notion of solidarity in order to test its validity today. Will solidarity still be relevant in the future, or is it a historical concept? Is it necessary to find new ways to describe the political movements of today and their struggles, sympathies, and commitments? What does recognizing the urgency of a situation imply, and how do we act upon it?

The entirety of "Eros Effect" borrowed ideas from a 1989 essay of the same name by the researcher and activist George Katsiaficas, which argues that the emotional dimensions of social movements are just as important as their political dimensions. The concept of the "eros effect" turns away from earlier theories that considered "mass movements" as either primitive, impulsive emotional outbursts, or as exclusively rational efforts to change social norms and institutions. Katsiaficas instead suggests that social movements have always been both, and that the struggle for liberation is equally an erotic act and a rational desire to break free from structural and psychological barriers. Franz Fanon made similar observations when he stated that resistance to colonialism has positive effects on the emotional life of individuals.

To stay with a question and develop themes over time has proven a rewarding methodology that is not unlike a strategy. It has facilitated being internationally connected and locally embedded at the same time, combining theory and practice, history and current affairs, present and future scenarios. It has meant shifting from micro to macro without necessarily being scalable. Maintaining an active interest in abstraction can be advantageous in this; while it might not be human scale, it is nevertheless small scale, not unlike Yu Ji's rock functioning as a prism moving from a geological fragment to the volcanic beginnings of the earth, from the here-and-now to prehuman history. Here, proximity is more critical than immediacy. Moving slowly but steadily is possibly more rewarding for art in the long run, and for the people who engage with it. We are individuals and groups who make up a kind of constituency, in the middle of something that could be called "the curatorial." Maybe these are, in fact, modest and searching moves towards building a counterhegemony-an art-centric one.

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This text is based on a paper presented at e-flux in 2017 in response to the premise "current political circumstances have made us think again about what it means to share knowledge in a clear and direct style."

Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm. She is currently serving as the counselor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden, Moscow. She was the director of Stockholm's Tensta Konsthall 2011-18, the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010) and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München and in 1998, co-curator of Europe's itinerant biennial, Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg. In 2015 she curated Future Light for the first Vienna Biennial, and in 2019 she co-curated the Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara. She has taught widely since the early
1990s, including as professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo 2015-18. Currently, Lind is a lecturer at Konstfack's CuratorLab. She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogs and other publications. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press, and Seven Years: The Rematerialization Art from 2011 to 2017 appeared in the fall of 2019.

© 2021 e-flux and the author

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curador crítico de arte
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Internacional: Harold Szeeman

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