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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