Re: [-empyre-] economics of the art system: the example of documen ta

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Millie et al,

I don't have a comment here about exclusionary practices, if such may  
exist or not,  in new media curating. This would be a topic for  
another day perhaps.   My remarks relate exclusively to  documenta 12  
and its associated magazine project.  On the contrary, Documenta 12,  
if anything,  had few 'star' artists therefore did not play to any  
particular agenda  about who's in and who's out in the artworld much  
less the 'new media'  world, however defined.  Not at all.  My  
observations relate specifically to a certain numbing or anaesthetic  
effect that the mise-en-scene of Roger Beurgel and Ruth Noack's  self- 
described strategy of an exhibition 'without form' and documenta as a  
space, as they put it,  'where art communicates itself and on its own  
terms."  They go on,  "This is aesthetic experience in its true  
sense:  The exhbition becomes a medium in its own right and can thus  
hope to involve its audience in its compositional moves." ( This and  
all further quotes from Roger M. Beurgel, Ruth Noack, excerpt,  
English translation, from Preface, Documenta 12 catalog, 2007).

Because Beurgel and Noack discard contextualization of works of art,  
in a radical way (from the Latin, at the root), they must rely on  
something else, which they talk about as time lines of form, or, to  
quote again, "to approach the internal dynamic destinies of form not  
only theoretically but to actually show them, turning them into  
documenta 12."

Perversely this strong formalist intention maps their strategies.   
Formalist and, more,  essentialist, by which I only mean, dealing  
with 'essence' as a core value or intent in the object d'art.   Which  
could be really interesting of course, like any strongly held  
curatorial position.   And the results are interesting, to be sure,  
in a kind of horribly fascinating way.

In the installation, in every venue,  artworks seemed to be swimming  
in interiors that over determined their impact...kind of like artwork  
in a nightclub or something.   How has this come to be? And does this  
weird effect also extend to the silencing and marginalization of the  
magazine project?

According to their own remarks in the preface, the curators actually  
believe that the public in general  doesn't know about art ( i. e.  
how to interact with it),  and therefore has to somehow be led into  
conditions where they can be led to 'just see' the art.  The effect,  
when you go through the documenta spaces, can be somehow that the  
curating seems heavy-handed or non-existent (take your pick, people I  
talked to felt one way or the other, which comes to the same thing).

This is a bizarre situation.  Let's go to the curators' own writing  
on the subject of their intentions. The curators wanted to 'do  
documenta' (sounds pretty racey in English... like "Debbie Does  
Dallas"!) ---  They call it  "an exhibition without form, mean[ing]  
entering a field of highly contradictory forces".  They obseve   
accurately that "the fascination emanating from the show , as well as  
the expectations it raises are enormously high."  Then they make a  
stunning leap into the first of many unsupported assertions:   "This  
is due to the fact that people are not really well equipped to deal  
with radical formlessness."

 This last statement about 'people' in general  is not supported by  
any evidence in the text.  The curators offer this,  an opinion, as a  
fact or fait accompli.   Who 'people' are and what is 'radical  
formlessness' is left up for grabs.

 The curators set up shop as the friendly (if a bit arch)  folks who  
will help "people" who essentially, through some lack of apparatus,   
apparently can't deal with "radical formlessness"  , who"feel the  
challenge deeply" and here the object of the word 'challenge' is left  
vague--presumably the challenge of being stuck with a task to perform  
without the right  tool or equipment.   So the exhibition itself  
apparently is some kind of tool?

Without developing the equipment allusion further,  lest anyone get  
too curious about this,  (or God forbid, feel castrated or at a  
loss),   the writers rush to take refuge in the impersonal voice:  
"But how does one keep the balance between identification and  
fixation?"  Again we are awash in generalities.  How did the text  
suddenly move to 'fixation', and why is it necessary to 'keep' some  
kind of 'balance' between 'identification' whatever that is, and  
'fixation' which they don't define.  Seems like some worry that the  
public will fetishize art objects unless the curators make some  
careful moves to keep everybody nice and balanced?  Is it bad to be  
fixated or to identify with art or with its content?  Who knew? ?

 The curators  claim that the role of art didactically is to keep  
the great unwashed (sorry, you folks out there in TV land)  from  
either identifying or fixating on art:  "But how does one keep the  
balance between identification and fixation?  Art can teach us this  
discipline, "  they stolidly assert.

 Why is this a discipline?  Why is art supposed to teach us not to  
connect with itself?  hmmm.. this gets quite puzzling if not   
downright daffy.   The curators want not to highlight artists names  
nor 'all-encompassing concepts' (again, this is left undefined.. do  
they mean aesthetic categories like 'tragedy' 'beauty' 'sublime'---  
one can only wonder).  Nor do they wish to 'favor geopolitical  
identity' , as -empyreans- have here observed with annoyance!  So  
what's left?  Well, they admit to liking certain artists ("certain  
artists matter to us more than others"_)
and concepts ("of course particular concepts remain essential").    
Quite a dazzling nonchalance.  Wow,  we're now informed they've got  
some favorite concepts and favorite artists, and that's about it.

Then the coup de grace:  the curators assert in what (only) way  
exhibitions of art in general have value, as follows, "exhibitions  
are only worth looking at if we manage to dispense with preordained  
categories and arrive at a plateau (wait! I thought there were a  
thousand!!!) --- where art communicates itself and on its own  
terms."  Whoa!  Who the 'we' is in this statement is unknown.   Guess  
I could read it as 'we curators' or 'we human beings who are trying  
to look at art'  (and incidentally their characterization of  
exhibitions as scenarios for 'looking at' stuff is charmingly  
archaic).   And then, what art's own terms  may be once the  human  
factors of identity, place, subject, and content are stripped away is  
mystifying.   Like trying to conduct scientific experiments without a  
topic or an hypothesis.

Nevertheless  the curators desire that 'the exhibition becomes a  
medium in its own right and can thus hope to involve its audience in  
its compositional moves."   There it is.  The exhibition hopes to  
involve us in its moves.   OK!! That's the beginning and the end of  
the whole enterprise.   Documenta, for them, is a work of art by  
them, the curators.   If you follow their train of sentiments  
(calling these a line of 'thought' seems overly generous),   what you  
get is a situation in which the art and artists involved are just  
elements or incidents within a grand schema or sketch or flourish,  
made by.... you got it, the big guys, who know how to balance  
things.   The exhibition is supposed to  deliver 'its audience' into  
a state of suspension between 'identification and fixation'.     
Millie, its not about which artists are chosen or whether somebody's  
been excluded.  Its about  any particular artistic thought/action (eg  
art 'objects')   being neutralized within a larger scheme that weighs  
in as the positive value.  The flip side of all this positivity, is  
the negative referent, the ignorant public, who is the only subject  
left to this positive forcefield: here you and I  will be treated as  
we should be, pupils,  who need to be brought up (elevé, which means,  
of course, also, educated)  to a plateau where we may wander around,  
I guess, awash in  the mystery of 'art communicating itself'--- its  
'self' being berift, finally, of anything except its colors, its  
mass,  its relative light or lack of lighting its placement next to  
or far from other objects,  its lack of identifying tags on the wall  
nearby.    If this isn't disturbing as an ethos,  I don't know what is.

-cm





On Jul 30, 2007, at 1:24 AM, Millie Niss wrote:

> Christina,
>
> It's good that there were so many good people involved who did  
> their best, and of course those people deserve all the credit they  
> can get.  What I don't understand is where these situations come  
> from when virtually all the actual artists that I have run into  
> seem to be ethical, hard-working, and doing legitimate work.  Who  
> gives these institutions so much money and power and where do they  
> find their personnel?  They clearly aren't drawing from the same  
> new media community that you and I and the rest of the list belong  
> to, where people help each other and do good work...
>
> P.S. Sorry for the multiple copies of my message. My email is  
> broken in three different ways (literally) and I was using my cell  
> phone which has a tendency to want to send the message before I  
> have finished composing it.  I had hoped that I stopped it in time,  
> but apparently the "cancel" commands did not work.
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