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Felix Vogel - Notes on exhibition history in curatorial discourse (OnCurating)

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Felix Vogel - Notes on exhibition history in curatorial discourse (OnCurating)

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‘…Where, then, does this discourse of exhibition history become manifest? In what publications and in what ways was exhibition history practiced in curatorial discourse? In the past few years for example a series of exhaustive studies on Harald Szeemann have been published.[9] Such publications, one part archival material, one part biography—sometimes resembling hagiography—of a single curator have now appeared not just for über-curator Szeemann but also for other comparable figures. A large chunk of the discourse is shaped by collections of interviews, such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s eleven interviews with important curators[10] published in 2008 as A Brief History of Curating[11], which is now in its fifth edition and constitutes the single bestselling publication of publishers JRP Ringier. In its preface and afterword, as well as in individual interviews, this publication presents itself as a decisive contribution to the history of exhibition making. A further example is the journal The Exhibitionist, which has appeared bi-annually since spring 2010. The journal claims to be the first[12]explicitly dedicated to the theme of curating, and in large parts its topic is the history of exhibitions.[13] Further there appeared a multitude of anthologies (mostly with rather generic titles such as What Makes a Great Exhibition?, Curating Subjects or Everything you always wanted to know about curating: but were afraid to ask) that are dedicated to the curatorial field, as well as lectures, conferences, podiums with curators about (their own) exhibitions. In what follows I will attempt to outline this phenomenon more precisely and investigate what conception of exhibition history underpins this discourse.’

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In 1999 the Clark Institute organized a much-discussed conference entitled The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University [1], the theme of which was the supposed gap between art history in museum and university contexts respectively. The organizers intended to examine the prejudice that academic art history is interested too much in theory and neglects the object, while the museum is primarily occupied with questions of funding and audiences, creating low expectations of its research. Whether this situation has since improved or intensified is not a question I am able to answer, instead I would like to speak about a related problem that concerns not art history as a whole but which, following the Clark conference, we might refer to as The Two Exhibition Histories. What concerns me here is mainly the discourse surrounding the exhibition which has established itself beyond the university, but also largely outside of the museum, and which I will provisionally entitle the 'curatorial discourse of exhibition history'.[2]

It is striking that the topic of the exhibition-and thus also its history-has only been properly established as a subject of research in the last twenty years, and particularly within the past decade, both within art history and in related fields. Publications, conferences, research projects, university courses and journals testify to this. Since 2011 Central Saint Martins College in London even offers a postgraduate MA course in 'Exhibition Studies'. Each academic year six or seven students study on the program, only a fraction of them with a background in art history, and many from the fields of fine arts, design or curatorial studies.

This extensive interest in the history of exhibitions may, as Bruce Altshuler states,[3] certainly in part be due to the interest of the so called 'new' art history in context-specific and socio-historical approaches, although this would indicate a remarkable belatedness. Unquestionably, the increasing visibility and transformation of the exhibition since the 1960s has motivated a deeper engagement with its history. One the one hand this refers to the foundation of new biennials and institutions for the exhibition of contemporary art, the expansion of the art market with its countless gallery shows and art fairs, as well as the increasing temporalization of the museum: besides renovations and extensions built to increase temporary exhibition space-not least due to economic and marketing related factors-a critical or artistic engagement with the collection has become almost a necessity for any museum. While these approaches are always based on the permanent collection, the forms of presentation increasingly resemble those of the temporary exhibition, replacing the supposedly rigid, authoritative and atemporal collection display. On the other hand the exhibition is transforming itself to the extent that we must consider a whole new repertoire of typologies that dissolve the traditional formats of solo, group, and thematic shows. We might mention exhibitions in the category of 'relational aesthetics', which according to Nicolas Bourriaud become an "arena of exchange,"[4] or the kind of project- or research-based exhibitions that revolve primarily around the production of discourse. In this context we must also consider the development of artistic practices such as conceptual art or institutional critique, that is, the displacement of the (autonomous) work of art by questions of context and conditions of production, with increased focus on the exhibition itself. Peter Osborne mentions that it is the "exhibition-form" that "fulfils the requirement of providing meaning," i.e. the exhibition as a "unit of artistic significance, and the object of constructive intent."[5] A further and in my view the most important reason is the establishment of curatorial studies programs-since these are conceived as places for practical training as well as theoretical research. The curatorial studies programs on offer sporadically since the late 1980s and early 1990s, but more intensively since the early 2000s, emerged not merely on the foundations of the new and increased function of the exhibition, but also reflected it, in a sense they required a knowledge of their object of study in order to construct it in the first place.[6] To put it differently: the professionalization and subsequent formalization of the curatorial field presupposed a sense of its own history.[7] It is thus unsurprising that it is not art history itself that contributed the bulk of publications on the history of exhibitions over the past decade-rather these emerged from the environs of curatorial studies.[8]

If in what follows I will limit myself almost exclusively to the history of exhibitions in curatorial discourse, this is not primarily intended to create a distinction of judgment between this discourse on the one hand, and that of academic art history on the other. Rather, it is a necessary limitation to strengthen and focus my argument. Such a focus can render territorial strategies more visible, which means asking precise questions such as: who defines concepts and terminologies? Who determines the canon and therefore the history of exhibitions and in what ways? I also suspect that an exhaustive examination of this discourse on the exhibition provides some clues to the issue of the homogenization of exhibition formats, which also allows us to draw some retrospective conclusions about the supposedly transnational format of the large-scale international exhibition since the end of the 1980s.

Where, then, does this discourse of exhibition history become manifest? In what publications and in what ways was exhibition history practiced in curatorial discourse? In the past few years for example a series of exhaustive studies on Harald Szeemann have been published.[9] Such publications, one part archival material, one part biography-sometimes resembling hagiography-of a single curator have now appeared not just for über-curator Szeemann but also for other comparable figures. A large chunk of the discourse is shaped by collections of interviews, such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist's eleven interviews with important curators[10] published in 2008 as A Brief History of Curating[11], which is now in its fifth edition and constitutes the single bestselling publication of publishers JRP Ringier. In its preface and afterword, as well as in individual interviews, this publication presents itself as a decisive contribution to the history of exhibition making. A further example is the journal The Exhibitionist, which has appeared bi-annually since spring 2010. The journal claims to be the first[12] explicitly dedicated to the theme of curating, and in large parts its topic is the history of exhibitions.[13] Further there appeared a multitude of anthologies (mostly with rather generic titles such as What Makes a Great Exhibition?, Curating Subjects or Everything you always wanted to know about curating: but were afraid to ask) that are dedicated to the curatorial field, as well as lectures, conferences, podiums with curators about (their own) exhibitions. In what follows I will attempt to outline this phenomenon more precisely and investigate what conception of exhibition history underpins this discourse.

A first shared feature of the above mentioned publications are the speaker position from which exhibitions are discussed and the forms of speech used to do so. It is almost exclusively curators themselves that appear in positions of authorship, leading to a situation where the curator speaks of and for the object that he/she has produced. Even when curators do not speak about their own exhibitions, they nevertheless speak from a position that is not that of a supposedly objective outsider. This is one reason why the interview-which is usually understood, or at least wants to be read, as a form of oral history-is such a popular format.[14] In Obrist's book as well as in other anthologies of interviews[15] the curator becomes the chief protagonist of a discourse about the exhibition, and within its historiography he/she is both subject and object. A Brief History of Curating is less about the history of curating suggested in the title, than it is a story by and about curators told in first person perspective. The form of the interview, as a seemingly unmediated form of speech, underlines the supposed authenticity of statements and constructs a form of authority that in turn legitimates the curator as author of the exhibition. Such gestures of authenticity are less about the documentary truth of a speaker, and more about a kind of justification, an emphasis on authority in order to legitimate speech acts.[16] The tone of such interviews is casual, harmonious and strictly affirmative. People know each other, cite each other, and criticism is perceived as inappropriate. The interviews at least implicitly assume that the curator him- or herself is the best interpreter of his/her work. Following Isabelle Graw's comment on the artist interview, we might describe this as "faith in intention."

[17] To exaggerate somewhat, this means that curators' statements themselves are already considered to constitute a history.[18] It is therefore less the statement itself that is problematic than the way it is framed.[19]

A similar speaker position is found in the journal The Exhibitionist.[20] Its editor, Jens Hoffmann, the editorial board[21] and the authors are recruited from the 'Who's Who' of the international curating scene, which is why the journal may stand exemplarily for curatorial discourse. It does not contain interviews, but in the section 'Rear Mirror' curators write about their own, often quite recent exhibitions, while another section aptly entitled 'Curator's Favorites' is dedicated to the analysis of historical exhibitions, once again by curators. While the texts about curators' own exhibitions in the best cases can expand on the contexts of a show, clear up possible misunderstandings, and describe the exhibition in the context of its reception, we should not forget that the speaker position is tied to concrete intentions. The statements made here may oscillate between self-critical castigation and unabashed self-praise, but they reveal more about the speaker than about exhibition history. The section 'Curator's Favorites' also does not manage to achieve any in-depth analysis, and certainly this is not its intention in any case. Here, too, we find out more about the speaker and his or her investment in a particular history than about the object under investigation. That curators are both the speakers as well as objects of their own analysis is both symptom and cause of curatorial discourse.

In connection with the position of the speaker and forms of speech we can also determine the object of exhibition history in curatorial discourse. Primarily it centers on the curator him/herself and not on the material exhibition itself, although the latter is determined by multiple human and non-human actors; in accordance with actor-network theory we might consider not merely the exhibited work but also, to name just a few randomly picked from an endlessly extendable list: plinths, the unpaid interns, the art handler. We might continue this line of argument by reflecting on the concept of work-something that goes unmentioned in The Exhibitionist as well as the monographs and anthologies mentioned above, although it has been the subject of investigation in other areas of curatorial discourse. What is required, then, is an examination of work that would situate the activity of the curator within a discussion of immaterial labor[22], or respectively as part of a 'project-based polity'[23], and which would therefore necessarily include the production of a self-reflexive discourse. This must by no means exclude the creative, artistic or authorial part of curatorial work, but should situate it within a critique of the political economy of the culture industry.

The authorship-function of the curator and its possible relationship to anachronistic concepts of genius is an issue I cannot consider here.[24] It is also unproductive to pit the position of the artist against that of the curator.[25] What is important for now is to simply establish the centrality of the figure of the curator for this discourse of exhibition history.

The intensive interest in the pivotal place of the curator for the exhibition is further underscored by the establishment of concepts and pseudo-theories such as 'the curatorial'-a phrase that in some places has come to replace 'the exhibition'. The implications of the rather young verb 'to curate' itself are telling, since it refers to an activity by a curator that contrasts with the formerly distanced relationship to the artistic process. Maria Lind defines the concept of the curatorial, which she develops following Chantal Mouffe's differentiation between politics and the political, as "a more viral presence consisting of signification processes and relationships between objects, people, places, ideas and so forth, a presence that strives to create fiction and push new ideas."[26] Compared to the 'curatorial' 'curating', for Lind, is only the technical aspect, the mere organization and administration of an exhibition. Although Lind constantly speaks of exchanges and relations as the essence of the curatorial, there is a hierarchical order in place, dominated by the curator and reinforced through Lind's choice of vocabulary.

Apart from this focus on the figure of the curator there is a notable tendency to present exhibitions as singularities. Of course this problem also occurs in academic exhibition histories, and it does not mean that there is no analysis of the local, political or social contexts of exhibitions. By 'singularity' I mean that there is very little analysis of exhibitions in connection with other exhibitions, although such synchronic comparison would make sense for several reasons. We could analyze not just similar exhibitions, such as When Attitudes Become Form and Op Losse Schroeven in Christian Rattemeyer's excellent study Exhibiting the New Art[27], but also include other exhibitions taking place at the same time, such as Tucuman Arde in Buenos Aires and Lucy Lippards Numbers exhibitions, thus creating an understanding of the ambivalence of conceptual art. Or we could include Konrad Fischer's exhibition Konzeption - Conception in Leverkusen, which included many of the same artists as the shows in Bern and Amsterdam, with very different results, and which is also of relevance to the emergence of the art market.

We can also observe an increasing „phobia of artworks,"[28] to use Julian Myers' rather self-critical expression, in the discourse of exhibition history. This phobia in turn implies a particular concept of the work of art developed in and through exhibitions, which is however rarely understood and framed as such.[29] There is also a lack of description and analysis of the curatorial notion of production and more generally no typology of exhibition formats. Probably the most difficult task the exhibition presents to us is how to approach its ephemerality. Even if we have photographic and video documentation as well as floor plans, which enable us to know in part which art works were exhibited, in what relation to each other, and how they were staged, this can only provide the background for a necessary in-depth analysis and interpretation-for which we lack definitive terminologies and concepts. Instead of addressing these shortcomings and searching for ways to overcome them, which would imply undertaking a theorization[30] of the object 'exhibition', the authors of curatorial discourse retreat to platitudes, positivist description of art works and a use of curatorial concepts to guide their reading of exhibitions. As a result the actual development and concrete manifestation of an exhibition appears as a natural and unchangeable imperative. Rather infuriatingly that there is no engagement here with corresponding efforts in the fields of art history and museum studies as well as institutional critique, which have developed more critical approaches to museums and comparable institutions. Of course exhibitions are by no means identical with museums, however this very differentiation could be the work of an emerging body of theory.

The question of the object of exhibition history also includes that of its canon, which we will touch on only briefly here. The exhibition canon of curatorial discourse is different to that of academic art history, meaning that here too we must speak of a plurality of canons. For exhibitions too, the criteria for integration in the canon are that they must on the one hand stand out above other exhibitions of their particular time and place while at the same time achieving universal significance.[31] One problem with curatorial discourse is that it focuses almost exclusively on exhibitions from the 1960s onwards. This limitation shows on the one hand that the concept of the exhibition in curatorial discourse is tied to the curator, while it distances itself from exhibitions in traditional museum contexts, or those founded on collections. On the other hand it points to a denial of the historicity of the exhibition. Although there have been radical innovations in the field of exhibition making since the 1960s-both as a result of the appearance of curators as well as due to the new challenges posed by the ('dematerialized') work of art-these innovations are only recognized as such when situated in and delimited by a larger tradition beginning at the latest in the 18th century. I would therefore plead for a longue durée of exhibition history committed to working through its various continuities and ruptures. By contrast the question of who is admitted to the canon and whether to establish a counter-canon seems of little interest to me. It is much more important to analyze who has the right to write the canon, what position this happens from and what objects or practices the canon is attempting to legitimize.[32]

This relates to our next point, about the strategic function of exhibition history in curatorial discourse. Hardly surprisingly I would argue that this function can be described as a kind of legitimation or self-legitimation, which finally seems to imply a genealogical model. Fittingly, Daniel Birnbaum's afterword to Obrist's A Brief History of Curating describes the curators gathered in the book as Obrist's 'parents' and 'grandparents'.[33] The curatorial discourse of exhibition history thus constructs a tradition that determines the practice of its authors, while that practice in turn determines historical precedents and the objects that constitute a history of exhibitions. Exhibition history here means the establishment, in a first step, of a supposed tradition, only to inscribe oneself within that tradition in a second step. Simultaneously commitments are established that imply a kind of standardization for students of curatorial studies, and though they do not necessarily lead to imitation, they do nevertheless make engagement with certain ideas, exhibitions and practices a prerequisite.[34] We must thus always ask, who speaks, and from what strategic position of power these speech acts are performed. Further we must reflect on what they covertly suggest, including those things that remain unsaid.

By way of conclusion I would like to include a few thoughts on the standardization and homogenization of exhibition formats. The curatorial discourse of exhibition history as sketched above conceives of its object, the exhibition, explicitly as global, transnational and transcultural, thus claiming a universalist model of the exhibition. Although it is acknowledged that exhibitions can contain and operate with value judgments and contribute to the establishment of hierarchies-MoMA's Primitivism exhibition of 1984 is a prominent example for this-the exhibition itself is viewed as a neutral form. The format of the biennial[35] and other large-scale exhibitions are considered the paradigmatic manifestation of this model and the transnational curator as its principal actor. When conventions are constructed by an exhibition history that considers itself transcultural, these conventions in turn are defining of and have a normative effect on this supposedly global form of exhibition making. This feedback loop happens quite directly, since the authors of curatorial discourse are themselves important decision- and exhibition-makers.

The claim to universalism of global and transnational exhibitions is problematic in at least two ways. Firstly the implicit claim is hardly realized even on a superficial level. Obrist for example interviews exclusively white and western curators, of whom only two are women, and of the exhibitions discussed in The Exhibitionist almost all took place in the United States and Europe. On the other hand the notion of a transnational discourse implies not only that exhibitions in, say, Dakar or Berlin are comparable, but supposes their complete commensurability. Just as with the neoliberal idea of globalization, inequalities and hegemonial dominances are simply disregarded. How can we deal with this problem? I would go further than even the critics of exhibitions like Magiciens de la Terre, who recognize the positive intention of making an exhibition with a global concept of contemporary art, but interpret it as a failure because, as Christian Kravagna expresses it, the exhibition "only moved from modernist primitivism to the neo-exoticism of postmodernity."[36] A statement such as this requires an in-depth theorization of the exhibition, which goes beyond examining the construction of alterity or equality through the exhibition to an analysis of how the exhibition as such is a hegemonial form. In the face of contemporary demands for a global art history we should question not only the ideological-that is, political, economic and cultural (essentially colonial)-foundations on which the idea of the 'global' rests,[37] but in the same context produce an ideological critique of the form of the exhibition and the discourse of exhibition history.

This text is a slightly reworked version of a paper delivered in summer 2013 at the 2. Schweizerischer Kongress für Kunstgeschichte (Second Swiss Congress of Art History) in Lausanne, in the section Handling Exhibitions - Konvergenzen zwischen Praxis und Theorie. Many thanks to the numerous respondents to the paper as well as to Felicity Grobien and Samuel Korn for important pointers.

Notes
1 The conference proceedings are published as: Charles W. Haxthausen ed., The two art histories: The museum and the university, Yale University Press, Yale 2002.
2 To speak of only 'two' exhibition histories is doubly presumptuous. Firstly, there is never a history, histories are always plural and the two fields mentioned-academic art history and curatorial studies -are each internally heterogeneous, and they frequently overlap both with each other and adjacent fields. Still I would argue that certain disciplinary tendencies can be grouped together. Secondly, an exhibition history divided into only two spheres is also deficient. We might look at artists' engagement with historical exhibitions and display formats (starting with artists of so-called institutional critique right up to contemporary positions such as Martin Beck, Walter Benjamin or Joseph Dabernig), as well as reconstructions of exhibitions (e.g. When Attitudes Become Form. Bern 1969/ Venice 2013, 2013 at Fondazione Prada in Venice), as artistic or 'material' forms of exhibition history.
3 See Bruce Altshuler, "A Canon of Exhibitions," Manifesta Journal No. 11, 2010/2012, p. 5.
4 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2002, p. 18.
5 Peter Osborne, Anywhere Or Not At All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London, 2013, p. 167.
6 An analysis of the intentions, the objects, the (teaching-) methods, the political implications and the way knowledge is produced in and through these programs would be a worthwhile independent study.
7 See Simon Sheikh, "On the Standard of Standards, or, Curating and Canonization," Manifesta Journal, No. 11, 2010/2012, p. 15.
8 That is not to say that there are not excellent publications and ambitious research projects on these questions within academic art history. We might mention the following examples: Mary Anne Staniszewski's, The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998; Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, Abrams, New York, 1994; I.d., Exhibitions That Made Art History, Vol. 1: Salon to Biennial 1863-1959, Vol. 2: Biennials and beyond 1962-2022, Phaidon, London, 2008 and 2013. Also the series Exhibition Histories published by Afterall on exhibitions such as When Attitudes Become Form, Magiciens de la Terre or Lucy Lippard's Numbers exhibitions. Another example is the extensive study, directed by Beat Wyss, on the Venice Biennial at the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich.
9 Hans-Joachim Müller, Harald Szeemann: Ausstellungsmacher, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2006; François Aubart and Florence Derieux eds., Harald Szeemann: Individual Methology, JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2007; Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer, Harald Szeemann: with by through because towards despite: Catalogue of All Exhibitions 1957-2005, Voldemeer, Zurich, 2007.
10 Anne d'Harnoncourt, Werner Hofman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén and Harald Szeemann
11 Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2011.
12 This is not quite accurate however; earlier examples include Manifesta Journal (since 2003), Displayer (2006-2012) or On Curating (since 2008). Further curatorial journals founded after The Exhibitionist include: Journal of Curatorial Studies, Red-Hook und Well-Connected (all since 2012).
13 The Exhibitionist appears in an edition of 3000-by comparison, October has a total circulation of 1650-but it is only rarely found in library catalogues and is seldom cited. In the first instance this may be down to the short existence of the magazine, however, The Exhibitionist is also not intended for reception in academic circles. The aim, as the first editorial states, is to make a journal "by curators for curators" (see Jens Hoffmann, "Overture," in The Exhibitionist, No. 1, 2010, pp. 3-4, p. 3), which suggests a separation of the discipline of curating from that of art history.
14 The problem of oral history and the various implications of the interview format cannot be dealt with in this context. See Dora Imhof and Sybille Omlin eds., Interviews. Oral History in Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst, Verlag Silke Schreiber, München, 2010; Michael Diers, Lars Blunck and Hans Ulrich Obrist eds., Das Interview. Formen und Foren des Künstlergesprächs, Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg, 2013.
15 E.g. Carolee Thea ed., Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators, Apex Art, New York, 2001; I.d. ed., On Curating: Interview with Ten International Curators, D.A.P., New York, 2009; In Hans Ulrich Obrist, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2011, Obrist has himself interviewed about 'his' story by over a dozen other curators, authors, artists and architects.
16 See Michael Wetzel, "Artefaktualitäten: Zum Verhältnis von Authentizität und Autorschaft," in Susanne Knaller and Harro Müller eds., Authentizität. Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs, Fink, Munich, 2003, pp. 37-54.
17 Isabelle Graw, "Reden bis zum Umfallen. Das Kunstgespräch im Zeichen des Kommunikationsimperativs," in Michael Diers, Lars Blunck and Hans Ulrich Obrist eds., Das Interview. Formen und Foren des Künstlergesprächs, Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg, 2013, p. 298.
18 An further analysis, which we cannot attempt here, should compare statements by curators, the type of questions asked and the construction of subject positions with artist interviews or artist biographies-one would find obvious parallels and even borrowings between the two forms of self-presentation.
19 See also an essay by Julia Gelshorn, who examines this issue with regard to artist interviews and their use in art history. Julia Gelshorn, "Der Produzent als Autor. Künstlerische Theorie als kunsthistorische Herausforderung," in Verena Krieger ed., Kunstgeschichte und Gegenwartskunst. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Zeitgenossenschaft, Cologne, 2008, pp. 193-211.
20 I want to emphasize that The Exhibitionist is not an art journal and I would not regard mere exhibition reviews primarily as part of exhibition history. The Exhibitionist never attempts critical judgments in this sense; rather the exhibitions discussed there are relevant grounds for curatorial practice.
21 Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Kate Fowle, Mary Jane Jacob, Constance Lewallen, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Julian Myers, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul O'Neill, Adriano Pedrosa, Dieter Roelstraete and Dorothea von Hantelmann.
22 The beginnings of such an approach are found in Magda Tyzlik-Carver, Interfacing the Commons: Curatorial System as a Form of Production on the Edge, http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Tyzlik-Carver.pdf, Accessed 07.11.2013; oncurating.org No. 16, 2013, http://oncurating-journal.de/index.php/issue-16.html#.UmUYSJQ2y3w, Accessed 07.11.2013, as well as the research and event project Projekt Europa (Kunstverein München, 2004). Many thanks to Sabeth Buchmann for the reference to Tyzlik-Carver.
23 Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London, 2007, particularly pp. 147-210. Oliver Marchart refers to the above in his analysis of the curatorial subject, see Oliver Marchart "The Curatorial Subject. The figure of the curator between individuality and collectivity" in Texte zur Kunst, No. 86, (22) 2012, pp. 29-41.
24 For more detailed analysis see Felix Vogel, "Autorschaft als Legitimation. Der Kurator als Autor und die Inszenierung von Autorschaft in 'The Exhibitionist'" in Sabine Kyora ed., Subjektform Autor? Autorschaftsinszenierungen als Praktiken der Subjektivierung, transcript, Bielefeld, 2014 (forthcoming February 2014).
25 See Anton Vidokle, "Art Without Artists?" in e-flux Journal No. 15, May 2010, http://e-flux.com/ journal/view/136, Accessed 04.11.2013; "Letters to the Editors: Eleven Responses to Anton Vidokle's 'Art Without Artists?", in e-flux Journal, No. 18, September 2010, http://e-flux.com/journal/view/172. Accessed 04.11.2013.
26 Maria Lind, "The Curatorial," in Brian Kuon Wood ed., Selected Maria Lind Writing, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2010, p. 64.
27 Christian Rattemeyer, Exhibiting the New Art: 'Op Losse Schroeven' and 'When Attitudes Become Form' 1969, König, Cologne 2010.
28 Julian Myers, "On the Value of a History of Exhibitions," in The Exhibitionist No. 4, 2011, p. 27.
29 That exhibitions are composed of material objects (in art exhibitions usually works of art) sounds more obvious than it appears in exhibition history. We might ask questions for example about the effects of an exhibition concept on the work of art, on the relations with other works and the respective shifts in reception and interpretation. Peter Osborne comments that „such works are intrinsically double-coded: they have their own [...] significations and modes of experience, and they have the more fully 'post-autonomous' meanings that accrue to them as a result of their place within the overall [...] logic of construction of the exhibition. This is a logic that is itself contradictory: divided between the presentation of the collective exhibition-value of the works and their putative use-values as models within a speculative program of social construction. Such programs are uneasy amalgams of art, economics and politics." Peter Osborne, Anywhere Or Not At All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London, 2013, p. 162.
30 "Theories become functions of science, because the sciences work through the problem of the inadequacy of the world with the help of theory-in positive and concrete terms, because the sciences delegate the task of securing their objects to theories that pose the central questions[.] [...] The surprising effect is that such theories pretend to find the object, while they actually constitute it as an object in the first place. Concisely put: theories deliver the objects of science!" Oliver Jahraus, „Theorietheorie," in Mario Grizelj and Oliver Jahraus eds., Theorietheorie. Wider die Theoriemüdigkeit in den Geisteswissenschaften, Fink, Munich, 2011, p. 29. (Translators note: own translation, the German term Wissenschaft hast been replaced with 'science' and is understood to include forms of knowledge production beyond the natural sciences.) Attempts at a 'theory of the exhibition' are found for example in Ludger Schwarte, "Politik des Ausstellens," in Karen van den Berg and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht eds., Politik des Zeigens, Fink, Munich 2010, pp. 129-141.
31 See Simon Sheikh, "On the Standard of Standards, or, Curating and Canonization," Manifesta Journal, No. 11, 2010/2012, p. 14.
32 See Luisa Ziaja, "Ausstellungsgeschichten. Ansätze der Historisierung im Kunstfeld," in ARGE schnittpunkt ed., Handbuch Ausstellungstheorie und -praxis, Cologne et al., 2013, pp. 23-34, p. 31.
33 Daniel Birnbaum, "The Archeology of Things to Come," in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, JRP Ringier, Zürich, 2008, p. 293.
34 See Simon Sheikh, "On the Standard of Standards, or, Curating and Canonization," Manifesta Journal, No. 11, 2010/2012, p. 15.
35 The term 'biennial' is here less associated with the Venice Biennial and the system of national pavilions, than with large-scale periodic exhibitions in general. Today's biennials are less oriented towards Venice; their genealogy is more accurately traced to the first documenta (Kassel 1955) or the first documenta with an artistic director (1972), as well as the increasing globalization of this format for example after the second and third Havanna Biennial (1984, 1989).
36 Christian Kravagna, "Postkoloniale Ausstellungen im Kunstfeld," in ARGE schnittpunkt ed., Handbuch Ausstellungstheorie und -praxis, Böhlau, Cologne, 2013, p. 52.
37 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, "Art History and Globalization," in James Elkins ed., Is Art History Global?, Routledge, New York and London, 2007, pp. 202-207.
Felix Vogel is academic assistant at the Institute of Art History, University of Zurich. His research interests include garden architecture and knowledge culture between 1700 and 1800, the theory and history of exhibitions, transcultural art history as well as the epistemology and political economy of the humanities. He sometimes curates exhibitions, e.g. the 4th Bucharest Biennial (2010).

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Notes on exhibition history in curatorial discourse

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In 1999 the Clark Institute organized a much-discussed conference entitled The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University [1], the theme of which was the supposed gap between art history in museum and university contexts respectively.

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Exhibition and Museum Studies considers how socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts affect creative production, and how exhibitions become—in and of themselves—contemporary art.

Students focus their questions and research on museums, galleries, and other forums for display, including alternative sites, communities, borders, and places.

We challenge students to consider the shifting and expanding role of visual culture to society and to scrutinize how methods of display alter, inhibit, or promote the work of artists.

(San Francisco Art Institute)

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«I’d suggest an insistence on art seen in relation and in public. The practice of exhibition histories does not focus so much on the isolated, intact artwork but, rather, approaches it in conjunction and puts it into question. How does art develop dialogues with adjacent art—and non-art—with a host environment, institutional ideologies, and among geopolitically and historically particular publics?»

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‘ Informing the Development of Science Exhibitions Through Educational Research’ Antti Laherto, University of Helsinki

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‘ Informing the Development of Science Exhibitions Through Educational Research’ Antti Laherto, University of Helsinki

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This paper calls for greater use of educational research in the development of science exhibitions. During the past few decades, museums and science centres throughout the world have placed increasing emphasis on their educational function. Although exhibitions are the primary means of promoting visitors' learning, educational research is not often utilised when designing these learning environments. Rather, the development of exhibitions in museums and science centres tends to rely on the know-how of the staff. Reviewing and engaging in science education research would complement this expertise and support the educational role of science exhibitions. This theoretical paper therefore suggests such a research-based approach by adapting the model of educational reconstruction for the purpose of exhibition development following the idea of the model for the personal awareness of science and technology. The former model serves as a general framework to involve analytical and empirical research in the development of learning environments, while the latter model provides a specific view of visitors' learning in interaction with exhibits. This study shows how these constructivist models can be interconnected in order to apply educational research in improving the long-term learning profit of exhibition visits. The idea is illustrated with an example concerning the research-based development of a nanoscience exhibition.

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"Why Exhibition Histories?" by Pamela Corey

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"Why Exhibition Histories?" by Pamela Corey

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DOI

«An exciting provocation of exhibition histories is what they might occasion as historical method. We primarily reconstruct past exhibitions through written accounts, often based upon first-hand experience or archival materials. The phenomenological dimension of the exhibition—that which cannot be recreated, if we want to see it as something contingent upon its specific temporality, publics, and milieu—is thus captured through writing as affective recollection or as research-based speculation. As stories, exhibition histories may be more connected to memory studies as much as art history. The story of an exhibition creates something else, an exhibition as memory that takes on a life of its own in distinction to the exhibition as lived experience. As such, how might exhibition histories help us better understand the historicity of historical imagination? What I mean by that is the way that exhibitions bring historical imagination into being, and how the exhibition’s reincarnation as exhibition history also constructs an historical present».

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(Exhibitions as Research ed. Peter Bjerregaard)

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(Exhibitions as Research ed. Peter Bjerregaard)

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Exhibitions as Research will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museology, material culture, anthropology and archaeology. It will also appeal to museum professionals with an interest in current trends in exhibition-making.

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Exhibition and Museum Studies considers how socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts affect creative production, and how exhibitions become—in and of themselves—contemporary art.

Students focus their questions and research on museums, galleries, and other forums for display, including alternative sites, communities, borders, and places.

We challenge students to consider the shifting and expanding role of visual culture to society and to scrutinize how methods of display alter, inhibit, or promote the work of artists.(San Francisco Art Institute)

Exhibitions as Research contends that museums would be more attractive to both researchers and audiences if we consider exhibitions as knowledge-in-the-making rather than platforms for disseminating already-established insights. Analysing the theoretical underpinnings and practical challenges of such an approach, the book questions whether it is possible to exhibit knowledge that is still in the making, whilst also considering which concepts of "knowledge" apply to such a format. The book also considers what the role of audience might be if research is extended into the exhibition itself.

Providing concrete case studies of projects where museum professionals have approached exhibition making as a knowledge-generating process, the book considers tools of application and the challenges that might emerge from pursuing such an approach. Theoretically, the volume analyses the emergence of exhibitions as research as part of recent developments within materiality theories, object-oriented ontology and participatory approaches to exhibition-making.

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In a rich multi-disciplinary studio culture that is relevant and responsive to the needs of industry, students are able to learn how to research, interpret, and present narrative and content through three-dimensional design. Hands on drawing and modelling techniques as well as digital communication skills can also be developed by students. Lectures, workshops, seminars, and tutorials focus on providing the cultural, social, and technological context of the subject area.  (Lincoln University)

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This paper calls for greater use of educational research in the development of science exhibitions. During the past few decades, museums and science centres throughout the world have placed increasing emphasis on their educational function. Although exhibitions are the primary means of promoting visitors' learning, educational research is not often utilised when designing these learning environments. Rather, the development of exhibitions in museums and science centres tends to rely on the know-how of the staff. Reviewing and engaging in science education research would complement this expertise and support the educational role of science exhibitions. This theoretical paper therefore suggests such a research-based approach by adapting the model of educational reconstruction for the purpose of exhibition development following the idea of the model for the personal awareness of science and technology. The former model serves as a general framework to involve analytical and empirical research in the development of learning environments, while the latter model provides a specific view of visitors' learning in interaction with exhibits. This study shows how these constructivist models can be interconnected in order to apply educational research in improving the long-term learning profit of exhibition visits. The idea is illustrated with an example concerning the research-based development of a nanoscience exhibition.

Antti Laherto University of Helsinki

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British Art Studies Issue 19 - Why Exhibition Histories?

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British Art Studies Issue 19 - Why Exhibition Histories?

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'"London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories” thus provides an excellent opportunity to reflect upon and re-evaluate the significance of exhibition histories as a practice of knowledge and subfield within the discipline that has gained solid ground in the past decade or so.'

'There is no doubt that the practice of exhibition histories has a synergetic relation to the question of the canon. If we understand canonization as a dynamic procedure of valuation based in a continuous process of consensus and contestation and—for better or worse—a hegemonic logic of inclusion and exclusion, then alternative stories of display and reception serve to challenge the status of the existing canon.'

Lucy Steed, Brook Andrew involved in project.

https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-13/why-exhibition-histories

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"Conversation Piece" is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question. Readers can also join in by adding a response at the bottom of the page.

When Jacques-Louis David removed the deposed monarchs' bibelots from the Louvre, keeping only paintings and sculpture for the edification of the people, it was an act that declared the "exhibition" to be a newly hegemonic strategy ( Fig. 2). In other words, when the same artist had earlier charged admission to his own studio for interested viewings of the Sabine Women, it had none of the fraught significance that attended the opening of the Louvre: les expositions would now be understood to produce citizens out of former subjects, public space from princely cabinets, universal civilization from the motley hoardings of royalty. Napoleon would take up the task of further supplying works for this ravenous exhibitionary logic: his navy waited patiently for the Titian and Veronese paintings to be brought to them in crates, ransom against ransacking by troops waiting for the Doges of the waning Venetian Republic to allow their people to be "liberated" to the rule of the Napoleonic code. Likewise, as the British blockaded French ports against the export of Terror, the French organized what is arguably the first "world's" fair, presaging a century of gigantic "beaux arts" machinery that would, in turn, provoke the first Biennale in 1895. The nakedly national act of juxtaposing foreign goods-in the French case, the former Royal manufactories now arranged against foreign wares to stimulate competition and consumption for the home team-was part of the DNA of these exhibitionary complexes until the Venice Biennale was forced to banish its own market operation in 1969. The Western procedure of exhibition was always about capital, whether cultural, political, or fiduciary.

As Mathur suggests, there is thus no exculpation from canonization for the modern exhibition-and no plausible history of "exhibitions" that originates outside of Western capitalism. Indeed, the most creative of its curators saw the artistry of this larger craft, subjecting their own works and ideas to a larger logic (or illogic) of the exhibitionary ensemble. The act of assembly could offer history-or hagiography, as in Sir John Soane's semi-public architectural academy that testified to his notably eclectic tastes, its chaotic jumble of fragments celebrated by the current museum's online tourist portal as "quite purposeful-each room a work of art in its own right". If David would sublimate his personal aesthetic to the goals of a revolutionary collective, Soane bent the state to his own personal vision, persuading Parliament to pass an act guaranteeing the preservation of his collection in its exact configuration at the time of his death. Two exemplars of history, and hagiography, at work.

In my own work in this domain, I have struggled with the behemoth of the archive (which exhibitionary complexes are designed to produce), in order to forward my own counter-arguments to the argument of the exhibition (and the hagiographies that can emerge in its wake). In rebuttal to the general awe the literature holds for Harald Szeemann, for example, I offer the friction of local anti-tobacco activists, who saw his ready acceptance of US capital (in the form of sponsorship by Philip Morris) as just another component of Szeemann's wholescale importation of New York art world values and artworks into the canon and canton of Bern. When Attitudes Become Form was the site of that contestation, as the "avant-garde" was revealed to be a wholly imperial formation, in the arguments of a local art instructor and former tuberculosis patient opposed to Szeemann's high-handed ways and poisonous corporate sponsor. Similarly, I insist that we grapple with the discourse-production of the exhibitionary apparatuses and tackle the chimeras they spawn. Fairs, biennials, and the contemporary art market have partnered in producing the "Dutch Millet" and "Brazilian Rodin" of the nineteenth century, and the "Pakistani Picasso" of the twentieth century. I call this canonizing violence "Predicated internationalism"-the modified figure can be allowed in the world picture, but always with an asterisk enforcing their subsidiary status. Particularly in the twentieth-century case of the Pakistani Picasso, for the Urdu-speaking artist now known simply as "Sadequain", much more remains to be done. The only way to do it is in collaboration with scholars of multiple languages and contexts, well aware of the "Picasso manqué" syndrome on the one hand, and the extraordinary heroics of figures negotiating the ever-shifting Euro-Asian divide on the other.

With regard to the exhibition as a moment or an instance, exhibition history needs to move away from an interrogation that construes the exhibition as a collection of things. It should try to intuit it as a meshwork of the semiotic (representation, signification, a registration in the socius), the forensic (evidence of creative will, heritage, culture, or lifeworld), and the installative (experience, site production, experiment of feeling, authority of presenting). All this comes to conspire in the exhibitionary, and not the inert, privileged moment of the exhibition, which over time has dispersed across various modes of activating presence in space to include pedagogical and performative engagements with the civic milieu or public sphere, actual or virtual ( Fig. 3).

Mukherjee twisted, knotted, folded, and twined fibre into monumental sculptures for over twenty-five years in New Delhi, India ( Fig. 4). Working off the loom, it could take Mukherjee up to a year to produce a single piece. The heavy pieces (weighing up to 100kg), made matters of transport, display, and housing complex. For most of her career, Mukherjee was at pains to sell or showcase her work; her home and studio-garage were crammed with unsold sculptures. "There was no question of living with them", she states. But Mukherjee's lamentation of the "exotic, lovely and spacious studios artists had in the west" was always underscored by her refusal to "quit" India. "Environment" meant access to material, material such as hemp fibre ( shan), dyes, and cheap labour, which she could not source easily anywhere else. At home, peers dismissed Mukherjee's sculptures as "mythic", "exotic", even "twee". Perhaps it is for this reason too, that Mukherjee repeatedly sought international audiences, securing ways to ship, display, and house her "pachyderm" works. Her sculptures were by no means ignored; included in major international exhibitions and biennales, a solo show was also dedicated to them at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1994, curated by David Elliot. But it is only now, after her death, that her work is eliciting greater international attention.

Her 2015 retrospective exhibition at New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art, did much to advance her slightly wacky and singular body of work, generating the kind of awe and recognition which she had struggled to achieve. In June 2019, Met Breuer in New York staged her first solo show in the USA, Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee. Only now are scholars reassessing her sculpture, since few thorough assessments were produced during her lifetime. Such belated appraisal for Mukherjee's materials and work process signals the need for a radical analysis across multiple registers, and in hindsight, an account of why she was relegated to the margins. This analysis alerts us to Geeta Kapur's insight that time lags across global spaces; modernism and the process of modernisation do not unfold at the same speed across space and time. Moreover, as Keith Moxey writes, more inclusive art-historical attempts have failed to account for those material and historical inequalities that are bound up with legacies of power struggles to date. Moxey asks,

Curated by Elliott, the show Mrinalini Mukherjee Sculpture prized the craft-like and feminine qualities of Mukherjee's practice and advanced her work as part of a Third World modernism, securely removed in time and space. The show provoked debate as critics also repeatedly sought to tie Mukherjee's part vegetal, part animal fibre sculptures to discourses around ethnicity and identity, Third World feminine craft, and Hindu Vedic mythology. Others picked up on the ambiguities and tensions provoked by strange feelers and tentacles protruding from the large biomorphic sculptures. The alien creatures "colonised the space from another reality-zone"; for one critic, they brought to mind the malignant and rapidly multiplying plants of the dystopian sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham ( Fig. 5). Viewed in this way, Mukherjee's own tendrilled creatures become both a subject of exotic fascination as well as of potential fear, illustrating the difficulties around the creation of space for productive dialogue about her "modernist" sculpture. Today, Mukherjee's fibre sculptures continue to excite complex debates about modernism, third world art craft, and the role of women artists. Tentacular, from the Latin " tentacle " (tentative) meaning "to try, to have a feel for", these sculptures solicit debates around the struggle over what it means to be modern, who can claim it, and on what grounds.

What are the implications of such unequal power relations for historical narratives? Even if the historical record attempts to interlace the various narratives of global art in an effort to produce a richer tapestry of the past and the present, these threads will inevitably be woven together according to the idiosyncrasies of a particular loom.

For Mukherjee, art residencies to work abroad were typically difficult to negotiate, given the labour-intensive and time-consuming nature of her work process. Going through the correspondence and Kafkaesque paper trail of Modern Art Oxford, one finds amusing anecdotes. In 1990, Robert Hopper, then director of the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust explained to Mukherjee that although they still referred to the space as a "studio", the practice of most artists that they worked with was to use it for the "display of work as opposed to actually fabricating it on site". Henry Moore Sculpture trustees argued that due to the long period of fabrication required by Mukherjee, its potentially open-ended "contract with the future", the Trust had no infrastructure in place to support her. Moreover, to secure a visa for an Indian national complicated matters further; where would Mukherjee live and who would support her? What about her health insurance? Who would cover that? Hopper's letter clarifies what kind of makers and art practices the Trust could support and those it could not. Polite but firm in tone, Hopper advises that it therefore made more sense to ship the work rather than invite Mukherjee to make it in situ. But freighting the heavy and large sculptures to Dean Clough Studios, Halifax, would prove to be equally difficult. In a fax dated 14 April 1994, we read: "No carrier is willing to accept the airfreighting of these packages." After numerous "dead ends", following an invitation by Modern Art Oxford to showcase Mukherjee's work in 1994, a single air company was willing to accept the airfreighting of Mukherjee's strange 6-ton crates and at a huge cost.

Before he got his first camera in 1982, the late Hong Kong-based, self-taught artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925-2009) collected publications and printed matter from exhibitions he visited. Armed with his prized possession of a camera, Ha photographed not only the exhibitions that he was part of as an artist, but also almost every single exhibition that he attended. Ha documented over 2,500 exhibitions in Hong Kong and internationally, and kept prints as well as over 3,500 contact sheets made between 1982 and 1999. These photos-often filed neatly into dedicated albums, envelopes, and paper bags, hand annotated by Ha-and exhibition-related printed matter, accumulated over time to form a significant part of Ha's personal archive. His archive, which dates back to 1950s, was tucked away on the top floor of a walk-up building in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong until 2014, when the Ha family approached Asia Art Archive (AAA) to work on this collection of materials ( Fig. 7).

London, Asia pithily inverts the idea of the city as containing the world. Instead, it places London within Asia, so that its histories can be seen as internal to the region, rather than as disconnected impositions from outside. The potential implications of this phrase are extensive: for artists, migration to London from Asia might not mean leaving behind a frame of reference for producing their work. Curators located in the West might no longer be viewed, in benign terms, as mediators and translators tasked with bridging cultural difference, or in the blunter language of older anthropological literature, "culture brokers" engaged in acts of arbitrage. It could mean that works of art can find audiences and make meaning as easily in London as in any other city in Asia. London, Asia posits a fairly seamless network of circulation, in which differences between center and periphery, (erstwhile) metropole and (former) colony, are still recognizable but do not impede movement.

This idea of art infrastructure borrows from anthropological studies of power grids, road systems, or media, which themselves build upon the major insights of Actor-Network Theory. Following their lead, art infrastructure can be seen as an assemblage of material and immaterial, human and non-human "actants", which have varying degrees of agency in the movement of people, things, and ideas across ever-expanding and shifting networks of circulation. To some extent, this is a call for more attention to art institutions, including the relationships between kinds of institutions that might seem to be quite distinct in their aims, such as commercial galleries and non-profit art centers. But it also prescribes the movement away from a focus on discourse and toward apprehension of materiality. As a method, it allows for analysis of the way that works of art are shaped-often quite literally-by the networks in which they circulate. Art infrastructure connects to and works within other infrastructural forms, like systems of shipping or finance capital, or supply chains for concrete or steel, or the media or political systems that control travel or the spread of images and ideas.

Attention to the connections between art infrastructures and broader infrastructures of circulation typically allows for deeper understanding of the constraints under which art is made and understood. But taking art infrastructure as an object of analysis is especially appropriate to a contemporary art that has always already been global, and that resists separation from context. Curators of canonical exhibitions of the "aughts", including documenta xi (2002) and When Latitudes Become Forms (Walker Art Center, 2003), seized upon such work as it was being made. But to record the histories of those exhibitions-the visual arguments made by curators about contemporary art-would be to miss the place of these events within broader histories of infrastructural change. From my perspective as a historian of Indian contemporary art, it would be to ignore how Sheela Gowda's work, shown in Latitudes, was amplified by feminist artists of color in London. And it would be to miss how Enwezor's storied inclusion of Indian documentary film in documenta xi was connected to the replacement of state film funding with international sources, like grants from the Ford Foundation and Channel 4.

One of the greatest contributions of the exhibition history boom in recent decades has been to address instances of artistic display and reception whose intensity exceeds and eludes prevailing institutional mediations. Scholars have highlighted ways that exhibitionary forms share the qualities of festivals, rituals, ceremonies, theater, and protest-modes of collective gathering and performance that, in their affective excesses, trouble the propriety of museum and gallery spaces. Much attention has also been given to how discourses around exhibitions emerge and circulate through modes of everyday and intimate social exchange-whether storytelling, rumor, gossip, or scandal-that fail to coalesce into rational discourse, and that elude registration in familiar archival modes of curatorial notes, catalogues, reviews, and photo documentation. Against stable mediating institutions, exhibition histories have alerted us to the hunger for immediacy, for embodied experience, for the presencing of the political, and for other allegedly irrational relationships to objects and persons that fall out of alignment with a traditional conception of the bourgeois public sphere ( Fig. 11).

In this anti-normative guise, exhibition histories have the potential to dislodge the primacy of the generic liberal regime of mediation that has long served as the standard against which modernities of the Global South are compared. This decentering of the "free world" is most clearly exemplified in scholarship that takes seriously art produced under conditions of authoritarian rule or strong religious persuasion. Attuned to the excesses of populist sentiment, scholars like Patrick Flores, Sohl Lee, and Karin Zitzewitz have foregrounded the charismatic, erotic, and emotive energies brought to the ritual of viewing. On the side of elusion and fugitivity, Joan Kee, Tina Le, Anneka Lenssen, and Chika Okeke-Agulu have redeemed the situated integrity of artistic displays that are often too readily dismissed as populist, propagandistic, fundamentalist, corrupt, cynical, or merely instrumental. This growing body of research denatures the liberal norm of medial transparency and its attendant values of autonomy, agency, free speech, and direct communication.

If, as I have implied, the study of exhibitions should attend to the limits of conventional forms of institutional mediation, we may wish to register the sheer diversity of media ecologies and sociologies of art worlds within which instances of artistic display are embedded. But we should also resist sliding into simple empiricism that treats exhibitions merely as a class of primary sources for an ever-expanding global art history. The point, rather, is that nothing about exhibitionary form is self-evident. With the discipline moving towards narratives of artistic modernities that are assembled and imagined across multiple medial scales, clinging to a Eurocentric model of the exhibitionary complex-centered on the public museum, private gallery, and independent criticism-becomes increasingly untenable ( Fig. 12).

The sense of urgency that attends to the creation of new types of institutions and new modes of mediation today tells us that established norms and forms of museology are already faltering. Several trends can be observed. Experiments deeply rooted in the specificity of urban and rural formations in the Global South run apace, whether in the likes of the artist collective ruangrupa, which revels in the chaotic energy of Jakarta, or the folkloric museum Arna Jharna, which opens itself up to the sacred ecology of the Thar Desert. Impact investing and social enterprise drive the long-term development of alternative artistic infrastructures, such as the multi-disciplinary platform of the Dhaka Art Summit and the grass-roots business network of Économusées. Finally, digital technologies afford object lessons that break down barriers between the singular artifact and the wisdom of indigenous communities, as with Te Papa's and Vanuatu Cultural Centre's initiatives to unsettle property claims of the (settler-)colonial state.

Bibliography

Aramphongphan, Paisid (2015) "Real Professionals? Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and Dance." Performing Arts Journal 110: 1-12.

Bharucha, Rustom (2014) "Museums Are Not for Posterity: The Making and (Un)Making of Museums in the 21st Century." In Making a Museum in the 21st Century. New York: Asia Society Museum, 129-136.

Butt, Gavin (2006) Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dhaka Art Summit (n.d.) www.dhakaartsummit.org.

Économusées (n.d.) www.economusees.com.

Flores, Patrick D. (2013) "Social Realism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines." Afterall 34 (Autumn/Winter): 62-75.

Geismar, Haidy (2018) Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age. London: University College London Press.

Janes, Robert R. (2009) Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance, or Collapse? London: Routledge.

Kantilal Patel, Alpesh (2017) Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kee, Joan (2013) Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Le, Tina (2018) "Material Conceptualisms: Philippine Art Under Authoritarianism, 1968-1986." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

Lee, Sohl (2014) "Images of Reality/Ideals of Democracy: Contemporary Korean Art, 1980s-2000s." PhD dissertation, University of Rochester.

Lenssen, Anneka (2014) The Shape of the Support: Painting and Politics in Syria's Twentieth Century". PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mahlouji, Vali (2014) Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis. London: Black Dog Publishing.

David Murphy (ed.) (2016) The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Okeke-Agulu, Chika (2015) Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Soon, Simon (2016) "Images Without Bodies: Chiang Mai Social Installation and the Art History of Cooperative Suffering." Afterall 42 (Autumn/Winter): 36-47.

Teh, David (2012) "Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship." Afterall 30 (Summer): 108-117.

Teh, David (2018) Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98. London: Afterall.

Zitzewitz, Karin (2014) The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India. London: Hurst & Co.

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Why Exhibition Histories?, a conversation piece convened by Saloni Mathur

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"Conversation Piece" is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question. Readers can also join in by adding a response at the bottom of the page.

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The Exhibition as Landscape
1951

Architecture Review

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"Following its debut in 1955 as a major exhibition with international ambitions, documenta became a place where West Germany’s image of itself was moulded anew. Every four years (later, five years), its organisers and curators set themselves the task of illuminating current trends in art. The Deutsches Historisches Museum is breaking new ground by considering the history of documenta one to ten in the context of the political, cultural and social development of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1955 and 1997. Works of art, films, documents, posters, oral history interviews and other original objects of cultural and historical value illustrate how documenta, as an art event and a historical venue, commented on, demanded and reflected political and social change. " https://www.dhm.de/en/exhibitions/documenta-politics-and-art/#/

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From the outset in 1955, documenta confronted its visitors with modern art, that is, with artistic styles that had been labelled 'degenerate' in Germany for more than a decade until 1945. In Kassel, the Federal Republic commended itself to its Western partners with a programme that perpetuated a past that it ostensibly sought to overcome. Almost half of those who participated in the organisation of the first documenta had been members of the Nazi party, the SA or the SS. By contrast, works by Jewish or communist artists who had been persecuted or murdered were not present at documenta. There was apparently no place for the victims of persecution, war and mass murder in the narrative of the young Federal Republic's supposed 'fresh start'.

documenta was closely connected with the political agenda of the Federal Republic in the 1950s and 1960s; it thus reflected the tensions of the Cold War. Modern art, previously denigrated, advanced to the status of official state art - through considerable financial backing and political support - and served as a means of cementing the Federal Republic's bonds with the West. Located near the eastern border with the GDR - the former Soviet occupation zone - documenta also addressed an East German audience, even though it did not welcome the art of the GDR. It was not until the 1970s, in the wake of Willy Brandt's policy of détente, that documenta showed any interest in East German and Eastern European artists.

Over the years, the documenta forged its career as a major international event with festival appeal, where young people came in throngs and could even discuss art with the artists in person. However, the traditionally minded among the educated middleclass felt provoked by the event and sometimes even protested against it. In the following decades, the 'documenta' brand established itself internationally as the model for popular and commercially oriented art events in a globalised (art) world. Time and again, it became a platform for political activism, as the feminist artists' group Guerrilla Girls impressively demonstrated at documenta 8 in 1987.

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documenta. Politics and Art - Deutsches Historisches Museum

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From the outset in 1955, documenta confronted its visitors with modern art, that is, with artistic styles that had been labelled 'degenerate' in Germany for more than a decade until 1945. In Kassel, the Federal Republic commended itself to its Western partners with a programme that perpetuated a past that it ostensibly sought to overcome.

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Why Exhibition Histories?Conversation Piece coordinated by Saloni Mathur

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Why Exhibition Histories?Conversation Piece coordinated by Saloni Mathur

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British Art Studies, titled “London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories”, takes as its point of departure the idea that exhibitions provide an important lens through which to explore the entangled art histories of Asia and Britain.

Another is the shift in focus away from the individual artist or artwork, towards the exhibition as a meaningful object of art historical inquiry.

Do exhibition histories represent a specific methodology? An archival strategy? A conceptual approach? What is the relationship of exhibition histories to nations and canons, to post-colonial critique, and to the interdisciplinary terrain of cultural studies, more broadly? And finally, what is gained and what is lost by delineating exhibition histories as a separate field or subfield within the study of art history?

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"Conversation Piece" is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question. Readers can also join in by adding a response at the bottom of the page.

When Jacques-Louis David removed the deposed monarchs' bibelots from the Louvre, keeping only paintings and sculpture for the edification of the people, it was an act that declared the "exhibition" to be a newly hegemonic strategy ( Fig. 2). In other words, when the same artist had earlier charged admission to his own studio for interested viewings of the Sabine Women, it had none of the fraught significance that attended the opening of the Louvre: les expositions would now be understood to produce citizens out of former subjects, public space from princely cabinets, universal civilization from the motley hoardings of royalty. Napoleon would take up the task of further supplying works for this ravenous exhibitionary logic: his navy waited patiently for the Titian and Veronese paintings to be brought to them in crates, ransom against ransacking by troops waiting for the Doges of the waning Venetian Republic to allow their people to be "liberated" to the rule of the Napoleonic code. Likewise, as the British blockaded French ports against the export of Terror, the French organized what is arguably the first "world's" fair, presaging a century of gigantic "beaux arts" machinery that would, in turn, provoke the first Biennale in 1895. The nakedly national act of juxtaposing foreign goods-in the French case, the former Royal manufactories now arranged against foreign wares to stimulate competition and consumption for the home team-was part of the DNA of these exhibitionary complexes until the Venice Biennale was forced to banish its own market operation in 1969. The Western procedure of exhibition was always about capital, whether cultural, political, or fiduciary.

As Mathur suggests, there is thus no exculpation from canonization for the modern exhibition-and no plausible history of "exhibitions" that originates outside of Western capitalism. Indeed, the most creative of its curators saw the artistry of this larger craft, subjecting their own works and ideas to a larger logic (or illogic) of the exhibitionary ensemble. The act of assembly could offer history-or hagiography, as in Sir John Soane's semi-public architectural academy that testified to his notably eclectic tastes, its chaotic jumble of fragments celebrated by the current museum's online tourist portal as "quite purposeful-each room a work of art in its own right". If David would sublimate his personal aesthetic to the goals of a revolutionary collective, Soane bent the state to his own personal vision, persuading Parliament to pass an act guaranteeing the preservation of his collection in its exact configuration at the time of his death. Two exemplars of history, and hagiography, at work.

In my own work in this domain, I have struggled with the behemoth of the archive (which exhibitionary complexes are designed to produce), in order to forward my own counter-arguments to the argument of the exhibition (and the hagiographies that can emerge in its wake). In rebuttal to the general awe the literature holds for Harald Szeemann, for example, I offer the friction of local anti-tobacco activists, who saw his ready acceptance of US capital (in the form of sponsorship by Philip Morris) as just another component of Szeemann's wholescale importation of New York art world values and artworks into the canon and canton of Bern. When Attitudes Become Form was the site of that contestation, as the "avant-garde" was revealed to be a wholly imperial formation, in the arguments of a local art instructor and former tuberculosis patient opposed to Szeemann's high-handed ways and poisonous corporate sponsor. Similarly, I insist that we grapple with the discourse-production of the exhibitionary apparatuses and tackle the chimeras they spawn. Fairs, biennials, and the contemporary art market have partnered in producing the "Dutch Millet" and "Brazilian Rodin" of the nineteenth century, and the "Pakistani Picasso" of the twentieth century. I call this canonizing violence "Predicated internationalism"-the modified figure can be allowed in the world picture, but always with an asterisk enforcing their subsidiary status. Particularly in the twentieth-century case of the Pakistani Picasso, for the Urdu-speaking artist now known simply as "Sadequain", much more remains to be done. The only way to do it is in collaboration with scholars of multiple languages and contexts, well aware of the "Picasso manqué" syndrome on the one hand, and the extraordinary heroics of figures negotiating the ever-shifting Euro-Asian divide on the other.

With regard to the exhibition as a moment or an instance, exhibition history needs to move away from an interrogation that construes the exhibition as a collection of things. It should try to intuit it as a meshwork of the semiotic (representation, signification, a registration in the socius), the forensic (evidence of creative will, heritage, culture, or lifeworld), and the installative (experience, site production, experiment of feeling, authority of presenting). All this comes to conspire in the exhibitionary, and not the inert, privileged moment of the exhibition, which over time has dispersed across various modes of activating presence in space to include pedagogical and performative engagements with the civic milieu or public sphere, actual or virtual ( Fig. 3).

Mukherjee twisted, knotted, folded, and twined fibre into monumental sculptures for over twenty-five years in New Delhi, India ( Fig. 4). Working off the loom, it could take Mukherjee up to a year to produce a single piece. The heavy pieces (weighing up to 100kg), made matters of transport, display, and housing complex. For most of her career, Mukherjee was at pains to sell or showcase her work; her home and studio-garage were crammed with unsold sculptures. "There was no question of living with them", she states. But Mukherjee's lamentation of the "exotic, lovely and spacious studios artists had in the west" was always underscored by her refusal to "quit" India. "Environment" meant access to material, material such as hemp fibre ( shan), dyes, and cheap labour, which she could not source easily anywhere else. At home, peers dismissed Mukherjee's sculptures as "mythic", "exotic", even "twee". Perhaps it is for this reason too, that Mukherjee repeatedly sought international audiences, securing ways to ship, display, and house her "pachyderm" works. Her sculptures were by no means ignored; included in major international exhibitions and biennales, a solo show was also dedicated to them at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1994, curated by David Elliot. But it is only now, after her death, that her work is eliciting greater international attention.

Her 2015 retrospective exhibition at New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art, did much to advance her slightly wacky and singular body of work, generating the kind of awe and recognition which she had struggled to achieve. In June 2019, Met Breuer in New York staged her first solo show in the USA, Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee. Only now are scholars reassessing her sculpture, since few thorough assessments were produced during her lifetime. Such belated appraisal for Mukherjee's materials and work process signals the need for a radical analysis across multiple registers, and in hindsight, an account of why she was relegated to the margins. This analysis alerts us to Geeta Kapur's insight that time lags across global spaces; modernism and the process of modernisation do not unfold at the same speed across space and time. Moreover, as Keith Moxey writes, more inclusive art-historical attempts have failed to account for those material and historical inequalities that are bound up with legacies of power struggles to date. Moxey asks,

Curated by Elliott, the show Mrinalini Mukherjee Sculpture prized the craft-like and feminine qualities of Mukherjee's practice and advanced her work as part of a Third World modernism, securely removed in time and space. The show provoked debate as critics also repeatedly sought to tie Mukherjee's part vegetal, part animal fibre sculptures to discourses around ethnicity and identity, Third World feminine craft, and Hindu Vedic mythology. Others picked up on the ambiguities and tensions provoked by strange feelers and tentacles protruding from the large biomorphic sculptures. The alien creatures "colonised the space from another reality-zone"; for one critic, they brought to mind the malignant and rapidly multiplying plants of the dystopian sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham ( Fig. 5). Viewed in this way, Mukherjee's own tendrilled creatures become both a subject of exotic fascination as well as of potential fear, illustrating the difficulties around the creation of space for productive dialogue about her "modernist" sculpture. Today, Mukherjee's fibre sculptures continue to excite complex debates about modernism, third world art craft, and the role of women artists. Tentacular, from the Latin " tentacle " (tentative) meaning "to try, to have a feel for", these sculptures solicit debates around the struggle over what it means to be modern, who can claim it, and on what grounds.

What are the implications of such unequal power relations for historical narratives? Even if the historical record attempts to interlace the various narratives of global art in an effort to produce a richer tapestry of the past and the present, these threads will inevitably be woven together according to the idiosyncrasies of a particular loom.

For Mukherjee, art residencies to work abroad were typically difficult to negotiate, given the labour-intensive and time-consuming nature of her work process. Going through the correspondence and Kafkaesque paper trail of Modern Art Oxford, one finds amusing anecdotes. In 1990, Robert Hopper, then director of the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust explained to Mukherjee that although they still referred to the space as a "studio", the practice of most artists that they worked with was to use it for the "display of work as opposed to actually fabricating it on site". Henry Moore Sculpture trustees argued that due to the long period of fabrication required by Mukherjee, its potentially open-ended "contract with the future", the Trust had no infrastructure in place to support her. Moreover, to secure a visa for an Indian national complicated matters further; where would Mukherjee live and who would support her? What about her health insurance? Who would cover that? Hopper's letter clarifies what kind of makers and art practices the Trust could support and those it could not. Polite but firm in tone, Hopper advises that it therefore made more sense to ship the work rather than invite Mukherjee to make it in situ. But freighting the heavy and large sculptures to Dean Clough Studios, Halifax, would prove to be equally difficult. In a fax dated 14 April 1994, we read: "No carrier is willing to accept the airfreighting of these packages." After numerous "dead ends", following an invitation by Modern Art Oxford to showcase Mukherjee's work in 1994, a single air company was willing to accept the airfreighting of Mukherjee's strange 6-ton crates and at a huge cost.

Before he got his first camera in 1982, the late Hong Kong-based, self-taught artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925-2009) collected publications and printed matter from exhibitions he visited. Armed with his prized possession of a camera, Ha photographed not only the exhibitions that he was part of as an artist, but also almost every single exhibition that he attended. Ha documented over 2,500 exhibitions in Hong Kong and internationally, and kept prints as well as over 3,500 contact sheets made between 1982 and 1999. These photos-often filed neatly into dedicated albums, envelopes, and paper bags, hand annotated by Ha-and exhibition-related printed matter, accumulated over time to form a significant part of Ha's personal archive. His archive, which dates back to 1950s, was tucked away on the top floor of a walk-up building in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong until 2014, when the Ha family approached Asia Art Archive (AAA) to work on this collection of materials ( Fig. 7).

London, Asia pithily inverts the idea of the city as containing the world. Instead, it places London within Asia, so that its histories can be seen as internal to the region, rather than as disconnected impositions from outside. The potential implications of this phrase are extensive: for artists, migration to London from Asia might not mean leaving behind a frame of reference for producing their work. Curators located in the West might no longer be viewed, in benign terms, as mediators and translators tasked with bridging cultural difference, or in the blunter language of older anthropological literature, "culture brokers" engaged in acts of arbitrage. It could mean that works of art can find audiences and make meaning as easily in London as in any other city in Asia. London, Asia posits a fairly seamless network of circulation, in which differences between center and periphery, (erstwhile) metropole and (former) colony, are still recognizable but do not impede movement.

This idea of art infrastructure borrows from anthropological studies of power grids, road systems, or media, which themselves build upon the major insights of Actor-Network Theory. Following their lead, art infrastructure can be seen as an assemblage of material and immaterial, human and non-human "actants", which have varying degrees of agency in the movement of people, things, and ideas across ever-expanding and shifting networks of circulation. To some extent, this is a call for more attention to art institutions, including the relationships between kinds of institutions that might seem to be quite distinct in their aims, such as commercial galleries and non-profit art centers. But it also prescribes the movement away from a focus on discourse and toward apprehension of materiality. As a method, it allows for analysis of the way that works of art are shaped-often quite literally-by the networks in which they circulate. Art infrastructure connects to and works within other infrastructural forms, like systems of shipping or finance capital, or supply chains for concrete or steel, or the media or political systems that control travel or the spread of images and ideas.

Attention to the connections between art infrastructures and broader infrastructures of circulation typically allows for deeper understanding of the constraints under which art is made and understood. But taking art infrastructure as an object of analysis is especially appropriate to a contemporary art that has always already been global, and that resists separation from context. Curators of canonical exhibitions of the "aughts", including documenta xi (2002) and When Latitudes Become Forms (Walker Art Center, 2003), seized upon such work as it was being made. But to record the histories of those exhibitions-the visual arguments made by curators about contemporary art-would be to miss the place of these events within broader histories of infrastructural change. From my perspective as a historian of Indian contemporary art, it would be to ignore how Sheela Gowda's work, shown in Latitudes, was amplified by feminist artists of color in London. And it would be to miss how Enwezor's storied inclusion of Indian documentary film in documenta xi was connected to the replacement of state film funding with international sources, like grants from the Ford Foundation and Channel 4.

One of the greatest contributions of the exhibition history boom in recent decades has been to address instances of artistic display and reception whose intensity exceeds and eludes prevailing institutional mediations. Scholars have highlighted ways that exhibitionary forms share the qualities of festivals, rituals, ceremonies, theater, and protest-modes of collective gathering and performance that, in their affective excesses, trouble the propriety of museum and gallery spaces. Much attention has also been given to how discourses around exhibitions emerge and circulate through modes of everyday and intimate social exchange-whether storytelling, rumor, gossip, or scandal-that fail to coalesce into rational discourse, and that elude registration in familiar archival modes of curatorial notes, catalogues, reviews, and photo documentation. Against stable mediating institutions, exhibition histories have alerted us to the hunger for immediacy, for embodied experience, for the presencing of the political, and for other allegedly irrational relationships to objects and persons that fall out of alignment with a traditional conception of the bourgeois public sphere ( Fig. 11).

In this anti-normative guise, exhibition histories have the potential to dislodge the primacy of the generic liberal regime of mediation that has long served as the standard against which modernities of the Global South are compared. This decentering of the "free world" is most clearly exemplified in scholarship that takes seriously art produced under conditions of authoritarian rule or strong religious persuasion. Attuned to the excesses of populist sentiment, scholars like Patrick Flores, Sohl Lee, and Karin Zitzewitz have foregrounded the charismatic, erotic, and emotive energies brought to the ritual of viewing. On the side of elusion and fugitivity, Joan Kee, Tina Le, Anneka Lenssen, and Chika Okeke-Agulu have redeemed the situated integrity of artistic displays that are often too readily dismissed as populist, propagandistic, fundamentalist, corrupt, cynical, or merely instrumental. This growing body of research denatures the liberal norm of medial transparency and its attendant values of autonomy, agency, free speech, and direct communication.

If, as I have implied, the study of exhibitions should attend to the limits of conventional forms of institutional mediation, we may wish to register the sheer diversity of media ecologies and sociologies of art worlds within which instances of artistic display are embedded. But we should also resist sliding into simple empiricism that treats exhibitions merely as a class of primary sources for an ever-expanding global art history. The point, rather, is that nothing about exhibitionary form is self-evident. With the discipline moving towards narratives of artistic modernities that are assembled and imagined across multiple medial scales, clinging to a Eurocentric model of the exhibitionary complex-centered on the public museum, private gallery, and independent criticism-becomes increasingly untenable ( Fig. 12).

The sense of urgency that attends to the creation of new types of institutions and new modes of mediation today tells us that established norms and forms of museology are already faltering. Several trends can be observed. Experiments deeply rooted in the specificity of urban and rural formations in the Global South run apace, whether in the likes of the artist collective ruangrupa, which revels in the chaotic energy of Jakarta, or the folkloric museum Arna Jharna, which opens itself up to the sacred ecology of the Thar Desert. Impact investing and social enterprise drive the long-term development of alternative artistic infrastructures, such as the multi-disciplinary platform of the Dhaka Art Summit and the grass-roots business network of Économusées. Finally, digital technologies afford object lessons that break down barriers between the singular artifact and the wisdom of indigenous communities, as with Te Papa's and Vanuatu Cultural Centre's initiatives to unsettle property claims of the (settler-)colonial state.

Bibliography

Aramphongphan, Paisid (2015) "Real Professionals? Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and Dance." Performing Arts Journal 110: 1-12.

Bharucha, Rustom (2014) "Museums Are Not for Posterity: The Making and (Un)Making of Museums in the 21st Century." In Making a Museum in the 21st Century. New York: Asia Society Museum, 129-136.

Butt, Gavin (2006) Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dhaka Art Summit (n.d.) www.dhakaartsummit.org.

Économusées (n.d.) www.economusees.com.

Flores, Patrick D. (2013) "Social Realism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines." Afterall 34 (Autumn/Winter): 62-75.

Geismar, Haidy (2018) Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age. London: University College London Press.

Janes, Robert R. (2009) Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance, or Collapse? London: Routledge.

Kantilal Patel, Alpesh (2017) Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kee, Joan (2013) Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Le, Tina (2018) "Material Conceptualisms: Philippine Art Under Authoritarianism, 1968-1986." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

Lee, Sohl (2014) "Images of Reality/Ideals of Democracy: Contemporary Korean Art, 1980s-2000s." PhD dissertation, University of Rochester.

Lenssen, Anneka (2014) The Shape of the Support: Painting and Politics in Syria's Twentieth Century". PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mahlouji, Vali (2014) Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis. London: Black Dog Publishing.

David Murphy (ed.) (2016) The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Okeke-Agulu, Chika (2015) Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Soon, Simon (2016) "Images Without Bodies: Chiang Mai Social Installation and the Art History of Cooperative Suffering." Afterall 42 (Autumn/Winter): 36-47.

Teh, David (2012) "Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship." Afterall 30 (Summer): 108-117.

Teh, David (2018) Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98. London: Afterall.

Zitzewitz, Karin (2014) The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India. London: Hurst & Co.

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Why Exhibition Histories?, a conversation piece convened by Saloni Mathur

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"Conversation Piece" is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question. Readers can also join in by adding a response at the bottom of the page.

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BA (Hons) Graphic Media student's course

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BA (Hons) Graphic Media student's course

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'The first topic I have chosen for Contextual and Theoretical Studies of my second year of studying Graphic and Media Design is  ‘Exhibition studies’.  The aim of this option is to develop historical, social and theoretical purpose of exhibition design and curation as well as understand how it relates to my own area of practice.'

Week 3's review is quite interesting as it prioritizes the analysis of architecture rather than areas of conflict (e.g. the objects on display and how they were attained).

I haven't figured out where this student is studying though...

https://thevidlis.wordpress.com/exhibition-studies/

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The exhibition archive is to give international visibility and accessibility to East European art events, and to enable cross-national research and comparisons. With the collaboration of international experts essential data of exhibitions and event series of key importance are collected and contextualized.
http://tranzit.org/exhibitionarchive/

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ausstellung invisible history of exhibitions _ bkv karlsruhe

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ausstellung invisible history of exhibitions freie schule fÅºr kunsttheorie und -praxis badischer kunstverein karlsruhe 24.04.-20.06.2010

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"Exhibition studies strive to look forward, inciting a continuing critical reflection on curatorial roles, exhibition practices, and cultural histories for the decades ahead."

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Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display on November 4-6, 2021 will highlight exhibition case studies that have created ruptures in how Blackness has been framed through exhibitions and stresses how Black artists have been viewed and African diasporic art histories have been shaped.
https://ccs.bard.edu/events/494-reshaping-the-field-arts-of-the-african-diasporas-on-display

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Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display

Register for link and password on eventbrite here.

As part of its 30th anniversary program, CCS Bard is pleased to present the online conference Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display on November 4-6, 2021, and will highlight exhibition case studies that have created ruptures in how Blackness has been framed through exhibitions and stresses how Black artists have been viewed and African diasporic art histories have been shaped.

Reshaping the Field is inspired by and honors art historian and curator Bridget Cooks's groundbreaking monograph Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, which was the first critical exploration of exhibitions in major American art museums that focus on African American artists. Cooks identifies in her study two methodological paradigms: the "anthropological," emphasizing Black racial difference and white normalcy, and "the corrective approach," aimed at redefining and expanding American art. Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display aims to expand the field of exhibition histories through a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped the domain of Black art today.

While addressing the seemingly never-ending tension between art as universal versus identity specific with a transdiasporic view (US/UK), each panel approaches this inquiry in different ways, showing that the question of Black identity in art and exhibition-making is inherently historically and systemically produced. Yet the conference aims to reflect on the sociopolitical circumstances that were essential to the emergence of a field of study and mode of exhibition that is constantly reshaping itself and challenging normative orders. This conference is the first to focus exclusively on exhibitions featuring African diasporic art in the US and the UK, combining the perspectives of art historians and curators, who represent both secondary researchers and contemporary witnesses, which means that we will have the opportunity to gather knowledge that traverses art historical research and oral history while generating primary sources. This approach is particularly invaluable in regard to the contributions by historically Black colleges and universities, from 19th century until the middle of the 20th century, that laid the groundwork for collections and the support of artists that allowed the field to emerge.
Confirmed speakers:
Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, Associate Professor at the University of Tampa, US; Bridget Cooks, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies, University of California, Irvine, US; Abby Eron, Registrar at the Howard University Gallery of Art; Amber Esseiva, Associate Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, US and CCS Bard alum; Cheryl Finley, Inaugural Distinguished Visiting Director of the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History & Curatorial Studies, Spelman College, and Associate Professor of Art History at Cornell University, US; Languid Hands (Imani Robinson and Rabz Lansiquot), independent curators and Curatorial Fellows at Cubitt Gallery, UK; Julie McGee, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Art History and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, University of Delaware, US; Kobena Mercer, Charles P. Stevenson Chair of Art History and Humanities, Bard College, US; Derek Conrad Murray, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US; Serubiri Moses, independent curator and CCS Bard alum, US; Senam Okudzeto, Artist and Educator, Switzerland and US; Monique Renee Scott, Professor of Art History and Director of Museum Studies at Bryn Mawr College, US; Jamaal B. Sheats, Director of Fisk University Galleries, US; Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, US; Howard Michael Singerman, Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of Art and Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York, US; Marlene Smith, artist, curator, and Research Manager of Black Artists and Modernism, University of the Arts London and Middlesex University London, UK; Lucy Steeds, Reader at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK; and Brittany Webb, Curator at the John Rhoden Collection, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, US.

Reshaping the field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display is organized by Nana Adusei-Poku, Associate Professor and Luma Scholar at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

This conference is made possible in part through the generous support of the Luma Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and through funding from Dutchess Tourism, administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.

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bard ccs center for curatorial studies and art in contemporary culture admissions academic programs faculty courses application management

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Reshaping The Field Arts Of The African Diasporas On Display - CCS Bard

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Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display Register for link and password on eventbrite here. As part of its 30th anniversary program, CCS Bard is pleased to present the online conference Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display on November 4-6, 2021, and will highlight exhibition case studies that have created ruptures in how Blackness has been framed through exhibitions and stresses how Black artists have been viewed and African diasporic art histories have been shaped.

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The following pages explore situations that productively challenge and refine our understandings of ‘art’, ‘exhibition’ and ‘history’, mindful of what these terms might mean for the present.

How are understandings of the ‘global’ and the ‘located’ differently shaped through contemporary art presented to publics in disparate contexts and times? How have curators experimented significantly with the exhibition form? How have artists experimented with what is possible with exhibitions? How do exhibitions connect with – or develop into – longer-term projects, through recurring events, instituent practices and institution building? These are among the questions explored here.

This research is developed in close relation with Afterall’s Exhibition Histories book series, doctoral students and the Exhibition Studies research master’s programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and with the support of our project partners: Asia Art Archive, based in Hong Kong; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; and the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg.

https://www.afterall.org/research/art-becoming-public/

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The following pages explore situations that productively challenge and refine our understandings of 'art', 'exhibition' and 'history', mindful of what these terms might mean for the present.

How are understandings of the 'global' and the 'located' differently shaped through contemporary art presented to publics in disparate contexts and times? How have curators experimented significantly with the exhibition form? How have artists experimented with what is possible with exhibitions? How do exhibitions connect with - or develop into - longer-term projects, through recurring events, instituent practices and institution building? These are among the questions explored here.

This research is developed in close relation with Afterall's Exhibition Histories book series, doctoral students and the Exhibition Studies research master's programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and with the support of our project partners: Asia Art Archive, based in Hong Kong; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; and the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg.

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The following pages explore situations that productively challenge and refine our understandings of 'art', 'exhibition' and 'history', mindful of what these terms might mean for the present. How are understandings of the 'global' and the 'located' differently shaped through contemporary art presented to publics in disparate contexts and times?

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MA Exhibition Studies - Liverpool John Moores Uni

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MA Exhibition Studies - Liverpool John Moores Uni

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Exhibition Studies engages with exhibition formats, through a theoretical and practical understanding of what constitutes an exhibition in the 21st century.

https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/study/courses/postgraduates/exhibition-studies-ma#:~:text=Exhibition%20Studies%20engages%20with%20exhibition,exhibition%20histories%20from%201850%20onwards

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Tuition fees 21/22

Home (full-time, per year): £7,750

Home (per credit): £43.05

International (full-time, per year): £15,600

About this course

Exhibition Studies engages with exhibition formats, through a theoretical and practical understanding of what constitutes an exhibition in the 21st century.

The programme considers the history and practice of exhibition culture, specifically the mediation of curatorial projects in galleries and museums, biennials and other survey exhibitions.

As a student, you will be based in the School of Art and Design, the oldest art school in the UK outside of London.

Additional funding for this programme is available via the Susan Cotton Travel Award and other study bursaries.

MA Exhibition Studies

There are many ways to fund postgraduate study for home and international students
Fees
The fees quoted at the top of this page cover registration, tuition, supervision, assessment and examinations as well as:

Library membership with access to printed, multimedia and digital resources

Access to programme-appropriate software

Library and student IT support

Free on-campus wifi via eduroam

Additional costs
Although not all of the following are compulsory/relevant, you should keep in mind the costs of:

accommodation and living expenditure

books (should you wish to have your own copies)

printing, photocopying and stationery

PC/laptop (should you prefer to purchase your own for independent study and online learning activities)

mobile phone/tablet (to access online services)

field trips (travel and activity costs)

placements (travel expenses and living costs)

student visas (international students only)

study abroad opportunities (travel costs, accommodation, visas and immunisations)

academic conferences (travel costs)

professional-body membership

graduation (gown hire etc)

Funding
There are many ways to fund postgraduate study for home and international students. From loans to International Scholarships and subject-specific funding, you'll find all of the information you need on our specialist postgraduate funding pages.

Please be aware that the UK's departure from the EU may affect your tuition fees. Learn more about your fee status and which tuition fees are relevant to you.

Bursaries and study awards

The Liverpool School of Art and Design offers students across all taught postgraduate programmes opportunities to apply for scholarships aimed at broadening student knowledge and experience.

The Michael Pugh Thomas and Julia Carter Preston Legacy scholarships consist of a number of £1,000 awards and are open to full-time and part-time home and international students who wish to study for a postgraduate qualification in art and design with LJMU. Part-time applicants can only apply once over the two years of their course.

To be considered for the scholarship, you must submit a 500 word letter to apsadmissions@ljmu.ac.uk after being formally offered a place on a Masters programme in the School of Art and Design. The application deadline to be considered for the Scholarship for entry onto a programme in September is 30 June.

Please ensure you include your name, contact details, the full title of the course you have applied to study on and 500 words stating why you should be awarded the scholarship, the benefits it will bring to your studies and any exceptional circumstances you face in studying for a postgraduate qualification. Further information for international students about finance, fees and scholarships can be found here.

The School's main travel bursary for existing students, The Susan Cotton Travel Awards, consists of three European Awards of £1,600 and two International Awards of £2,300. The awards are intended to help you undertake significant domestic or international travel in support of your work and personal development. The awards aren't necessarily about academic study, instead they focus on the spirit of travel and adventure. Previous winners of the bursary have travelled to a tropical island to experience life at its most basic, cycled the length of the Danube, spent a month in Morocco and inter-railed through Europe.

Employability

Further your career prospects

LJMU has an excellent employability record with 96% (HESA 2018) of our postgraduates in work or further study six months after graduation. Our applied learning techniques and strong industry connections ensure our students are fully prepared for the workplace on graduation and understand how to apply their knowledge in a real world context.

Graduates of our MA Exhibition Studies have gone on to work for major cultural institutions, including The Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), British Music Experience (Liverpool), and National Museums Liverpool.

"MA Exhibition Studies is the only degree of its kind in the UK to focus on the craft and culture of exhibitions. I look forward to working with students to develop new and engaging ways of curating, exhibiting and demonstrating the value of art."

Sally Tallant OBE, Executive Director, Queens Museum - New York

The student experience

Discover life as a postgraduate student at LJMU.

News and views

Browse through the latest stories and updates from the University and beyond

Course modules

Discover the building blocks of your programme

Your programme is made up of a number of core modules which are part of the course framework. Some programmes also have optional modules that can be selected to enhance your learning in certain areas and many feature a dissertation, extended report or research project to demonstrate your advanced learning.

Core modules

Studio Practice (Exhibition Studies)
30 credits

Studio Practice is a subject specific module, allowing for the understanding of practice and research methodologies relevant to Exhibition Studies. It provides an opportunity to share, investigate and contextualise experiences of exhibition making and aims to:

introduce you to the professional practice of exhibition making

develop awareness of the core practices, models, and challenges of exhibition making

provide you with technical and critical skills and methodologies relevant to the enhancement of your practice

analyse and critically evaluate exhibitionary practices, histories and strategies through specific exhibition case studies

Research and Practice 1
30 credits

This module is shared by all students studying on taught postgraduate programmes at Liverpool School of Art and Design and allows you to collaborate across programmes.

A series of lectures, seminars, tutorials and visits will introduce you to current and emerging practice in relation to a diverse range of historical, theoretical and critical principles

Guest lecturers will expose you to areas of collaboration

Seminars and tutorials will require you to share, discuss and evaluate your ideas and practice with others

Research & Practice 2 (Exhibition Studies)
30 credits

Significant historic exhibitions, together with key readings, will form the core syllabus of Research & Practice 2 (Exhibition Studies). It aims to:

deepen the practice of exhibition research

introduce the histories and practices of exhibition-making

Collaborative Practice
30 credits

You will have the opportunity to work closely with internal partners within the School of Art and Design, the wider LJMU academic community or external partners in the UK and internationally. Through key partnerships you will engage with a range of collaborative projects which challenge the notion of the interdisciplinary practice within the context of contemporary art and design and which enable you to propose, plan, organise, publish and promote your work within the context of an external body.

Guest lecturers will expose you to areas of collaboration

This module is shared by all students studying on taught postgraduate programmes at Liverpool School of Art and Design and allows you to collaborate across programmes

Major Project (Exhibition Studies)
60 credits

This module encourages you to engage, more broadly, in active learning and to reflect on and identify further intellectual development and training needs. It enables you to:

conduct an extended independent research project

identify appropriate topics and research questions, analyse and structure research material, develop cogent arguments, sustain an enquiry over a lengthy period of time and organise a lengthy piece of writing

Teaching

An insight into teaching on your course
Study hours
Your studies commence with a full timetable of seminars as you get to grips with your MA and the school-wide collaborative practice module. The main study days for the majority of your MA are Tuesday and Friday with a full week of preparation for the School-wide Masters degree show in April/May.
Teaching methods
The programme is underpinned by the work of the Exhibition Research Lab. It draws on the internationally distinguished expertise of staff and visiting staff engaged in theoretical and applied research in the field of exhibitions studies and curating. There is also collaboration with key cultural local and national institutions.

Applied learning
Operating in close partnership with Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, FACT (Foundation for Creative Art and Technology) and RIBA North (Royal Institute of British Architects), we can offer our students opportunities to develop public presentations, curatorial projects, and exhibitions in real-life contexts.

Assessment

How learning is monitored on your programme

To cater for the wide-ranging content of our courses and the varied learning preferences of our students, we offer a range of assessment methods on each programme. Assessment techniques vary from module to module to reflect relevant assessment approaches and the key learning points of each topic.

You will be assessed by: coursework, written essays, reports, oral presentations, projects and evaluations. The major project will comprise a written dissertation or practical project (thesis exhibition) and a written report. In most modules, more than one piece of assessment is required. Programme assessment seeks to replicate professional curatorial and exhibition practice.

Course tutors

Our staff are committed to the highest standards of teaching and learning

The development of the students throughout the year is incredible, you can really see how much the course enriches their knowledge of the subject, in particular when they take on an area of specialism and use this for their final project. One of the most delightful aspects is seeing the students perform well when they start working in museums and galleries, then I feel like I've prepared them well for the cultural sector.

School facilities

What you can expect from your School

Liverpool School of Art and Design is housed in the RIBA award winning John Lennon Art and Design Building in the Mount Pleasant Campus and offers extensive studio spaces, lecture theatres and a dedicated public exhibition space.

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Entry requirements

You will need:

a minimum 2:1 in a visual arts-related subject (non standard applications and those without a degree will be assessed on the basis of experience)

a reference

to attend an interview

to be able to demonstrate the ability to benefit from and contribute to the programme

Additional information:

IELTS English language requirement: 6.5 (minimum 5.5 in each component)

Pearson PTE Academic requirements: 64 (minimum 59 in each component for UKVI Purposes)

RPL is accepted on this programme

If you have any specific queries, please contact apsadmissions@ljmu.ac.uk

Application and selection

Securing your place at LJMU

You will apply for the majority of postgraduate courses using our online application form. You should complete the form thoroughly and provide a detailed personal statement which reflects your suitability and aptitude for the programme.

Short-listed applicants will be invited to attend an interview. Whilst we do recommend an interview on campus (to meet with staff and see our facilities), Skype interviews are available if you are unable to come to Liverpool. The interview will assess your suitability for the programme and provide you and the interview panel with the opportunity to gain further information.

During your interview you will need to provide evidence of your learning capability, study opportunity and commitment to a postgraduate programme of study.

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LJMU's unique Exhibition Studies MA is dedicated to the understanding of and engagement with the history, theory, and practice of worldwide exhibition cultures. With close links to local and international arts organisations, this unique programme of study focuses on the history and practice of curation.

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Jim Supangkat:

The paradigm underlying both modern and contemporary Indonesian art ‘… displays moralistic and social dimensions that are forged through historical processes. It manifests itself in consensus or similarity of attitude, an obvious sign of which is a general tendency for works of Indonesian art – right up to the present – to be moralistic and political. Another sign is a tendency to understand Indonesian art history with reference to social change and development. Such a perspective differs fundamentally from the underlying perception of modern art history, which regards contradictions, influences, breakthroughs and developmental theories as paradigms. For this reason, the development of Indonesian art is more closely allied to social history than to art history.