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![ALTERNATIVES TO THE EXHIBITION What you see is [still] what you see. In other words: to state what causes us to continue believing in art.](../img/nom_alternatives_en.gif) |
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The multiplication and spectacular nature of the exhibition as a foremost space in art is perhaps an indicator not so much of its validity as of its crisis. Beatriz Herráez (art critic, Vitoria) is preparing a series of sessions at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica to debate and explore alternatives to the exhibition. Not all artistic practices adapt easily to the museum. In fact, there is a long tradition of artists who have worked in more experimental, speculative territories that call for a reconsideration of ways of working in art.
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BEATRIZ HERRAEZ
In 1993 Gilles Mahé signed a document with the collector Rudy Ricciotti in which he agreed, for a sum equivalent to the artist’s subscription to a golf club, that he would devote all of his thoughts to his patron while playing this sport. Gilles Mahé joue au Golf en pensant à Rudy Ricciotti (1993-96) is the product of a peculiar and ironic form of sponsorship that stretches to their limits many of the myths and fabulous tales associated with the idea of patronage, the figure of the artist and the exhibition—without a single object to show. And it is precisely this fiction of the construction of a character and the bad conscience generated by this privileged subject that explain how artists, in the words of Boris Groy, ‘feel obliged to present society with a specific, consumer-friendly form of everything they have seen and imagined in their hours of solitary reflection, work that is visible but impossible to see...’.
In the 20th century, art underwent a hitherto unknown process of acceleration that was not without its attendant risks. After this frenetic race that began with the expansion of the historical avant-garde movements (as champions of ideological programmes and exhibition protocols that articulated a complex and sophisticated spatial and editorial mechanism by habilitating structures for the dissemination of activities and ideologies) the history of recent art has slowed down in its ongoing attempt to re-establish the physical and programmatic limits of artistic practice and the exhibition space that was blown sky high in the early decades of the 20th century. The creation by the protagonists of the avant-garde movements of a new public territory for criticism and activism (and even propaganda) took the form of different proposals and experiences such as the Abstraktes Kabinett or the Room for Constructivist Art devised by El Lissitzky (in which the viewer could change exhibition places by moving panels, modifying the lighting and even covering up some of the images on show) or Société AnonymeInc. by Duchamp, Katherine Dreier and ManRay, a proposal that set out to bring art and the company closer together in a series of lectures and debates that included radio broadcasts or the programming of events that were offered to institutions such as the MOMA and the Stieglitz Gallery in New York. The models introduced by these artist-believers were quickly assimilated and their objects turned into fetishes (paradoxically, some of the works produced by El Lissitzky are the property of an institution like the Getty, which also includes in its archives numerous International Situationist documents), though many of their strategies and schemes of functioning introduced a new way of understanding artistic practice as a point of departure for reflection and discussion.
More recent experiences of an alternative to the exhibition concentrated intensely in the 1960s and ‘70s with the dematerialization of the object, the product of the suspicion generated by the conversion of avant-garde radicalness into an exchange value. Initiatives that pick up the capacity and determination of artistic practice to propagate itself beyond the physical bounds of the museum in an attempt to generate spaces of social and political dialogue, to once again integrate the work into the context that generates it. The linguistic and textualintervention of the conceptual materializes in the accumulation of endless lists, files, registers and catalogues that in some cases merely serve to increase the sensation of an inability to come up with an effective, autonomous model in art. The complex diagrams and immaterial files drawn on the walls of the apartment of George Maciunas, relating performance with the royal festivities in Versailles; Broodthaers’ Eagle Museum and The Store by Claes Oldenburg are some of the most effective projects in the analysis and critique of the museum register and the exhibition seen as a succession of works that respond to an exclusive need for recognition of the object, its economy, rationalization and control.
The experience of the exhibition as a complex combat that opposes the verbal and the visual, frenetic accumulation and the ‘I’d rather not…’ represents the extremes of a inexhaustible itinerary around disparate experiences comprising projects that are as diverse as they are endless. The total dissolution of the aesthetic dimension; radical exercise in artistic practice; the critique of culture structures; the rapprochement of art and politics or new production methods are just some of the models produced by this tension generated between the exhibition seen as the mere presentation of the original and proof, and alternative practices that advocate a dissolution of the object—and have resulted in a new kind of formalism.
Perhaps US critic Robert Nickas, with his show of objects without a theme, has come up with an alternative, albeit politically incorrect, to the usual exhibition format. His initiative was to show artists and works whose names begin with the letter C. The text on the invitation to the opening of an exhibition he curated in 1998 at the Elisabeth Cherry Gallery read:
‘Lately, I've been thinking that life is short, and it isn't fair to play around with other people's work and what it means. After fifteen years of organizing shows for galleries and museums, I've taken a different view of my job, such as it is. I've always kept a list of the artists who have made things that interest me, so it's a very long list and it continues to grow. The only way for this list to have any clear order is for the names of the artists to be arranged alphabetically, from A to Z. Looking over the list one day, I realized that each section could be turned into a show of its own (or any number of shows), and a theme with which to bring works by different artists together would be unnecessary. The list is the organizing principle in this case, the letter D and the randomness of alphabetical order […]. […] the ways in which the various works overlap at times seem inevitable as if they were meant to end up together and remain surprising, even to me. I am now happily of the opinion that shows don't have to be about anything imposed upon the works of art that are in them; shows can simply be about the works themselves.’ |
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| Exposició “First Papers of Surrealism”, Nova York 1942 (instal·lació de Marcel Duchamp) |
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