Institutional critique is defined
Summary: Institutional Critique is defined here by Fraser as contrasting from our contemporary understanding of power and different from political practice. It serves to criticize power from a stance of limited power to mitigate that power and is done as an ethical practice. It about being critical and reflective from our positions with the hope of being transformative.
And all of this presents a very different relationship to wealth and economics than it does for artists working in the States. And when Canadian artists I know move to the States and change their bio line to “based in Brooklyn,” it seems like a shift starts to happen around how they’re positioned in relation to the market, or how they understand their art practice and the ways in which they sustain their practice in relation to money. AF: Yes, it’s very different. Outside of the United States, I’ve spent the most time working in Germany, where there is a great diversity of institutions: public institutions, membership organizations like Kunstvereins, private museums, artist-run organizations, as well as an art market. To me, that seems to be the best scenario.
Question: I would like to know more about how Canada's art market differs from the US and really how other art eco systems function in other parts of the world. Having sold my art online for years now, it is certainly clear that most of my commercial opportunities are US based and or have some historical connection there. Now that I am learning more about the Canadian art landscape, I'm able to work more critically and diligently towards a more balanced approach to my own art practice. Having said that, is there room for growth in the Canadian commercial market and is that something that is wanted by Canadian artists and art workers?
We have a long history of artist-run centres, for example, where practicing artists are supposed to make up the majority of folks serving on the board.
Connection: This reminds me of the interview I had with Alana Traficante, the Director at Gallery 44, an artist run center. Gallery 44 have several committees made up of staff, Gallery 44 members, board members and community advisors. Their Board is a majority artist run board. https://www.gallery44.org/about
housework is not work
Connection: Housework, I assure you is work as I am speaking from personal experience. What does it mean however that once a household becomes more affluent that that housework is outsourced through different means? Click and collect and grocery deliveries are much more common now and some households employ nannies who are taking time away from their own families to raise someone else's children. Both are jobs with lower wages and benefits. Nannies are often given work that is beyond their job description and expected to do it or risk their positions. Nannies share intimate details of their employers lives, are essential to the functioning of the home and yet even with all of these complicated arrangements, their pay remains low and under valued. Under valued, that is, until they are unavailable and parents are left scrambling trying to balance child care and work responsibilities. The pandemic revealed this inequality when to the great displeasure of parents, they were forced to stay home and manage their children's online learning.
"Unpaid care labor and paid care labor, and the way they are valorized, have become even more closely connected in recent decades. As women from “first-world” economies have entered the waged workforce, their formerly unwaged labor has been passed on to predominantly migrant women from so-called “second-” and “third-world” economies, who face low pay and precarious working conditions, often living in uncertainty with zero-hour and flex-working contracts. Migration and the feminization of labor are inextricably connected." -author iLiana Fokianaki
Marxist feminists in the 1970s articulated a prominent critique of domestic labour by revealing how its social and economic devaluation derived from the essentialising link to the female character or physique. The transformation of domestic work into an internal need, aspiration, and an attribute of the female personality – its essentialisation or naturalisation – made unpaid housework invisible as a form of labour and its economic as well as cultural devaluation socially acceptable. Because housework was viewed as a woman’s natural calling – it was ‘transformed into a natural attribute of female physique and personality’ and thereby altered into non-work, invisible work (Federici 1975, 2).
Summary: Marxist Feminists in 1970's criticized the devaluation of domestic work socially and economically because it was being fundamentally linked to the female identity . Housework was seen as intrinsically tied to a women's being (ontological reality) and therefore seen as an extension of who they were. In this way, the work that women did in the home was expected. It was this expected link between females and housework that rendered it unseen and unpaid within culture. This ultimately took the assumed work out of housework and made it possible for women to not question doing anything else but housework.
demand wages for art work.
Question: How do independent curators properly pay themselves for the work that they do when there is no official pay scale through carfac for curators and what does that imply?
How should we approach our placements in light of this article? Many other fields of work are paid for placements as part of their classwork. Why should art placements be an exception?
“a” archive
What does Fatona mean by little "a" archive? Can we bring the little "a" archive into the big "A" archive?
Winsom
True and Functional
Shwetal Patel in discussion with Shaheen Merali
Summary: This article is an interview with Shaneen Merali, one of the founding members of the Panchayat Collection which was established in 1988 until 2003. The collection consists of archive material reflective of a decade of work done by artists and creatives mostly in Britain, mainline Europe, North America and Southeast Asia with a focus on Black and Asian communities. The collected works demonstrate a commitment to different social and political views of their time like race, gender and (dis)ability through various exhibitions and community initiatives like workshops. The interview details the circumstances around the founding of this archive and the social political milieu that contributed to the life and growth of the archive over the decade of collecting. Panchayat grew organically out of the need to collect documents being produced at the time by artists, writers, poets and actors hungry to expand the vernacular to be more reflective of themselves and provide a counternarrative as a form of mediation. The Archive is now housed at the Tate Library.
sorry contemporary
Question: What does Merali mean by "sorry contemporary"? Does Merali say this because they feel that the contemporary art mindset is lacking in making the effort to expand the narrative of art through archives and practices like those that grew out of the experiment of Panchayat? If so, do you agree?
We have to continue to operate as artists, curators and archivists—as people who are willing to be collecting rather than remaining within the narratives, which are applied to us, but to create the counternarratives that challenge us.
Connection/Question: One important Canadian archive that seems to have grown from humble beginnings is the Wedge Collection, "one of the Canada’s largest, privately owned contemporary art collections focusing on exploring African diasporic culture and contemporary Black life." What are other Canadian art archives that "create counternarratives" like Panchayat?
Black Atlantic
Connection: In our Intro to Curatorial Studies class we referenced this video by Ayesha Hammed titled "Black Atlantis" which builds on the curated exhibition "Black Atlantic". Here Hammed tells the story in video journalistic form that revolves around two sugar cane plantations in Barbados and Trinidad exploring themes of the Black Diaspora.
https://www.internationaleonline.org/dialogues/23_black_atlantis_the_plantationocene/
Rastafarianism and the Punk movement were expressions of historical pain and radicality that involved black history, populist political expression and encountering ‘colonial’ traits. Panchayat as a collection was influenced by the fragmentary presence of information accompanying these trials and experiments with the formations of collective notions of Black power in midst of mainstream power structures. The collection provided for and enabled many artists from diverse backgrounds and concerns to communicate the historic changes in the local and international environment under the edifice of Black Art or issue-based arts or even New Internationalism.
Summary: Rastafarianism and Punk were examples of movements that sought to give voice to black history, populist politics and wrestled with colonialism. It was these types of movements that Panchayat sought to document as artists from many backgrounds struggled to voice these historical changes through Black Art or issue based arts or New Internationalism. The work that was being produced and documented were expanding the conversation away from imperialism toward a more varied perspective that reflected the people rather than the traditional colonial values present in Britain and globally at the time.
Panchayat primarily remained a way of further examining issues and a depository of information from contested arenas, one which is often a subject deemed as either specialist or neglected or relegated, due to its origins in a specific agenda. As the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson,stated, ‘We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately’. In a mediated manner, Panchayat’s activities can be seen as interventionary, or coming from an intermediary agent or means, by indirect mediation, indirectly.
Summary: Panchayat operated in a mediating way during the late 80's-2000's through exhibitions and conferences. These would feature subject matter that was excluded or neglected by the more widely accepted narratives. Panchayat offered an avenue to talk about contemporary political and social issues in order to bring about resolution in an indirect way and expand the narrative of art to include more voices. Merali quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to illustrate her point about mediation.
Kobena Mercer’s concept of vernacular realism, as the constant reference of artists to their realities, is easily observable in the photographic work of Samena Rana, whose physical disability impeded the process of ‘taking photographs’, whilst her aesthetic decisions influenced her work and perspective. Due to her (dis)ability, she held her camera in a certain way and shot images from the position of her wheelchair. She often shot images of objects she found beautiful from above and in this way a vernacularism developed through the manner in which people looked at their specific conditions.
Connection: Kobena Mercer's concept of vernacular realism and the example of the artist photographer taking photos from the vantage point of her wheelchair reminds me of the Cripping the Arts Symposium and terminology like cripistemology. Cripistemology is the knowledge of disability understood by the experience of those with disabilities. It is not knowledge which can be understood by factual or medical knowledge but is knowledge that is formed from the understanding of or one could say the venacular of disabled people.
https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/issue/view/128
The collection was characteristic of its time, representing contemporary artists who produced issue-based work, with a particular focus on cultural identity. As with all archives, the collection is fragmentary and reflective of the conditions of self-funded collecting. The collection addressed the interdependent relationships of cultural conditions, predominantly in the so-called critical decade of the 1980s, which witnessed artists embracing the new technologies. Video art, copy art and digital media were being used to explore, through a range of aesthetic devices, the political and social formations of identities, imagination and artistic production and the policing of sexuality, the emerging migration and refugee crisis of the early 1990s.
Summary: The larger purpose of building and collecting the archive emerged as a response to that time with a focus on cultural identity. In the 1980's to 2000's there emerged art that was embracing new technologies like video, photocopies and digital media. Various social and political themes were explored in that work like identity, artistic production and the policing of sexuality to name a few.
community galleries
Connection: When Merali describes these galleries it reminds me of Whipper Snapper Gallery on Dundas Street. It's a small gallery dedicated to "the underdog". They run programming like exhibitions out of their tiny storefront space and also workshops and special projects. https://whippersnapper.ca/
I graduated with a degree in Fine Art (Sculpture) from the University of Wales, Newport and returned to London where I quickly realised that one had to be involved in some sort of relationship with education. However, at that time, education somehow felt limiting, and many of us sensed the importance of working within community education. In many ways, this was very stimulating, as we came into contact with other people who had similar ideas about working with communities and who were mainly operating through workshops in community settings. Many artists were involved in working in these settings in the outlying boroughs of London but also in more centrally located places including Paddington, Westminster, Brixton and Lambeth. We managed to reconfigure ourselves as artists in settings that were mainly meant for youth culture, in terms of youth centres, for instance, or sometimes in centres for young offenders, interfacing with youth workers, as well as with other artists, alongside actors, dancers, writers and poets. In hindsight, one realises it was a really important way of responding to how we understood ourselves as artists and writers in relation to ‘the community’. It came out of a necessity to allow forms of expression for artists and groups in creative ways other than hanging out in the street. We were functioning in a space that was ‘off street’ at a time of a high volume of stop and search activities by the police. It is hard to imagine that certain citizens could not always use the streets in those days, but had to find other places in which to congregate. Thus, one found oneself working within youth and community centres.
Summary: After graduating with a Fine Art degree and returning to London Merali quickly realized the importance of community education and found many other artists doing similar work in and around the boroughs of London. Artists used settings meant for youth such as youth centres for young offenders to run workshops in community alongside other creatives like writers and poets. Instead of being on the street they were operating in a way that allowed for young creative expression to be nurtured and gathered within community centres and away from policing. This way of gathering was a response that grew organically out of necessity.
Not surprisingly, this goal of unanimity has also led to the establishment of what is considered a more democratic composition of public-art selection committees. There has been a generous and well-intentioned effort to include on these committees not only panelists with backgrounds in the arts, but also representatives from the local community in which the public installation will be situated. Yet if followed to its logical conclusion, the concept of “public” that this phenomenon implies reveals itself to be quite ludicrous. For public space is either communal—a part of the collective citizenry—or it is not. Somewhere along the line, our democratic process has presumed that the sentiments of one particular community, simply because of its members’ propinquity to the prospective installation, should be granted greater significance. What this suggests is that we have arrived at some reliable formula for articulating the precise radius that distinguishes that community’s interests from the larger field of public life. Thus the ideas of the local community and of the general public are put into an adversarial relationship, implying a fundamental conflict between those inside a particular neighborhood, area, city, etc., and those outside.
Summary: Public-art selection committees are being established in a more democratic way in order to be more ecumenical. Not only are they made up of people with art backgrounds but also of people who are representatives of the local community where the art will find it's home. Phillips argues that public is either a collective citizenry or it is not and is critical of the idea that particular community should be consulted just because it is situated in proximity to the proposed site. She outlines that doing this puts a conflict between the general public and the specific local community.
Challenge/Question: It seems to me that Phillips reluctance to consult the local community would go against what she is saying earlier about temporary public art as a more "focused" project able to respond to "immediate issues". Isn't it essential to involve the local community in order to better gage what is an immediate concern?
the temporary is important because it represents a provocative opportunity to be maverick, or to be focused, or to be urgent about immediate issues in ways that can endure and resonate.
Connection: When Phillips states the importance of temporary Public art because of it's ability to allow artists to respond to a timely issue it reminds me about what Boris Groys outlined as entering the flow of time in his article. Temporary Public art would have a beginning and end while speaking to an "immediate" issue.
Space, it has been suggested, not the artwork, is the material of curators, and their instrument the exhibition.35 When space is the street, the artwork becomes roadwork, the exhibition a procession, a parade, a march.
Connection: As Canadian curators in Toronto it is important to be aware of the history of our own Carnival. It is also exciting to find out that York University now houses the archives for the Toronto Caribbean Carnival formally know as Caribana. The Kenneth Shaw ( founding member of Caribana) archives were transferred to the university library in 2019 and they include varied documents of the event over the years from photographs to meeting minutes to proposals etc. The documentation of this event in Canadian history by it's founder and the effort that is being given to preserve these archives is essential to Black Canadian history and culture. "The documents preserve the legacy of Black artists who found self-expression through carnival to celebrate the abolition of slavery."
"University Archivist Michael Moir says the records are very rare in the context of Carnival arts, immigration and multiculturalism, and are remarkable as the result of Kenneth Shah’s decision to include the roles of observer and recorder with those of festival organizer and participant. These records are now available for research, providing a rare opportunity to bring life to a generation of Black performers who connected with large international and multicultural audiences drawn to Toronto by its Caribbean festival,” says Moir."
Santiago Sierra
Connection/Question: Socially engaged art that's focus is shock value often seem to me to be social or psychological experiments gone bad or executed poorly. https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/shock-artist-puts-spotlight-on-indian-waste-workers-with-excrement-exhibit-1.645741
Some collaborative projects don't only exploit others but also cause self-harm to the artist. I am thinking of Wafaa Bilal's work where he spent a month in a room at a Chicago gallery and allowed himself to be shot by a paint ball gun controlled by the public online, which caused him to suffer from PTSD. https://momus.ca/artists-in-isolation-wafaa-bilals-domestic-tension/
Should methodologies of socially collaborative art that cause harm to the artist themselves, not solely the collaborators also be ethically assessed?
It’s worth looking closely at Lind’s criteria here. Her assessment is based on an ethics of authorial renunciation: The work of Oda Projesi is better than that of Hirschhorn because it exemplifies a superior model of collaborative practice. The conceptual density and artistic significance of the respective projects are sidelined in favor of an appraisal of the artists’ relationship with their collaborators. Hirschhorn’s (purportedly) exploitative relationship is compared negatively to Oda Projesi’s inclusive generosity. In other words, Lind downplays what might be interesting in Oda Projesi’s work as art—the possible achievement of making dialogue a medium or the significance of dematerializing a project into social process. Instead, her criticism is dominated by ethical judgments on working procedure and intentionality.
Summary: Curator Marie Lind's work compares and critically assesses Hirschhorn and Oda Projesi's work process by making an ethical judgement. In sharp contrast Hirschhorn's projects is exploitative of the participants involved while Oda Projesi's work is marked by inclusive generosity towards her participants. Lind does not focus on assessing the art itself but on the process and methodologies used by the artists in their socially collaborative artwork.
It is more than a union of artist-run centres, it has a connective tissue. It is in motion.
Question: As AA Bronson describes the beginnings of Artist Run Centres in Canada he continually mentions media's role in connecting artists to one another across Canada. He called video and periodicales "connective tissues". He mentions Image Bank and File Magazine which functioned as ways in which artists stayed in touch with each other and their work by providing images and contact information. The Canada Council helped create the travel grant, which eliminated the need for Image Bank and allowed artists to now travel in person to meet and work on projects. What role do social media and online communities play in doing what AA Bronson notes in this history of Artist Run Centres? Are online communities like Etsy (now international) a response from artists feeling that they don't have a voice of their own today? I would like to know how ARC's in Canada continue to promote interconnectivity among Canadian artists by harnessing this online world?
Canada Council instituted the travel grant
https://canadacouncil.ca/funding/grants/arts-across-canada/travel
Image Bank
https://vincenttrasov.ca/index.cfm?pg=cv-pressdetail&pressID=3
Vincent Trasov
Michael Morris
Ingrid Baxter
Iain Baxter
Global South
Connection: Decolonization in the South African Apartheid pursued forgiveness rather than prosecution through the TRC in sharp contrast to the Nuremburg trails. The Apartheid Museum was established in 2011 to house the story of the rise and fall of apartheid in South Africa. The museum offers permanent and temporary exhibitions as an alternative approach from the perspective of the oppressed.
https://www.apartheidmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc
What are the implications of this for contemporary curators and museums that are responsible for interpreting contested histories and whose prime matter is knowledge? How are curators and art institutions positioned within the colonial matrix, and is it possible for them to restructure knowledge and power – to return agency to those who have lost it?
Summary: Questions are asked about the responsibility of the curator and museums, specifically is it even possible for them given their colonial heritage to interpret previously hidden historical truths and return this knowledge to it's original owner?
Coloniality is ever-present. Even decades after the period of formal colonisation has ended, it has persisted through structural forms of privilege and bias. Beyond their more obvious economic and social manifestations (such as the racial stratification of labour and the proliferation of inequality and racism), these oppressive hierarchies also pervade the realm of culture; but so much of the modern world we know and experience has been constructed out of Western imperial categories that the coloniality of knowledge is perhaps harder to discern and much more insidious to overcome.
Summary: Coloniality years after it has formally ended persists in the obvious social and economic realms but also in culture. These Western imperial forms of bias and privilege can often be subtle and difficult to perceive and overcome.
Tony Albert’
https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/albert-tony/
Brook Andrew
Black Mirror
In the end, instead of denying statistics, or ignoring the subject of gender, race and sexuality altogether, we all need to stop making excuses and to face these issues head-on in order to come up with solutions, possibilities, and strategies for addressing these inequities. Mainstream curators need to join the ranks of curatorial activists working worldwide to institute change, and to collectively work towards transforming what is, in the end, an abhorrent situation for Other artists in the art world. Now is the moment for curators to work together to acknowledge the problem, to come to a resolution, so that all peoples and their creative outputs have the opportunity for equal exposure.
Summary: Reily makes a plea for art organizations to stop excluding artists based on race, gender and sexuality and face the problem head on through curatorial activism. For her, curatorial activism is the development of an ethic of curating that specifically acknowledges the omissions of these people groups in the narratives of art and reverses that pattern through inclusion. She poses questions around how this can be accomplished and how it has come to be. She lists curators who are addressing the issue and spends a large portion of the article presenting data showing that recent exhibitions continue to exclude specific groups of people. Energy is spent addressing the denial of the data by her colleagues as she pushes them to move forward with the work of what she calls “equal exposure” meaning that all creatives and their work should have opportunity to be seen in art exhibitions.
The thesis of my forthcoming book, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, takes as its operative assumption that the art system—its history, institutions, market, press, and so forth—is an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists.
Challenge/Question: Yes, I think what the author is saying is a really important point to curation but can art systems not only exclude people but also participate in systemic violence and systemic death? In the 15th Annual Architecture Exhibition of the 2016 Venice Biennale, the exhibition The Evidence Room explores the architecture surrounding Auschwitz, used as evidence that the structures were made for the purpose of being a death camp.The exhibition was shown at the ROM in 2017-2018. The art of architecture is not just excluding people here but art was made by European white men as a tool of death for the elimination of people. Fred Wilson also illustrates this in his work Mining the Museum, specifically with Cabinet Making 1820-1960 and his inclusion of a whipping post among chairs. Artists were making objects of beauty while also making objects used to erase specific groups of people. Both examples highlight how art systems can be used to exclude people by systemically erasing them through death and destruction.
https://canadianart.ca/reviews/architecture-and-horror/
https://www.mdhistory.org/return-of-the-whipping-post-mining-the-museum/
These curators—and others like them interested in art world injustices—have curated everything from biennales and retrospectives to large-scale thematic exhibitions, focusing on both historical and contemporary material.
Connection: Sheri Niro, the Canadian indigenous artist is part of a group that has been historically marginalized. The work she showed in 2017 through photographs as part of her ongoing project titled Battlefeilds of my Ancestors connects architectural landmarks to genocide against indigenous people. The Ryerson statue that was part of the exhibition has since been taken down and illustrates the results of thinking ethically about the curatorial process.
https://www.scotiabankcontactphoto.com/2017/archived/battlefields-of-my-ancestors-2
Telling History: An Archive and Three Case Studies
https://www.kunstverein-muenchen.de/en/program/exhibitions/past/2003/telling-histories
We visit museums far less often than we visit their websites and follow their activities across the internet.
Connection 3: This is true of my own experience as I follow the Louvre on Instagram but have never been. I often check what the AGO is doing and other smaller public galleries by visiting their social media or by checking their websites.
Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were created to select certain objects—the artworks—take them out of private and public use, and therefore immunize them against the destructive force of time. Thus, our art museums became huge garbage cans of history in which things were kept and exhibited that had no use anymore in real life: sacral images of past religions or status objects of past lifestyles. During a long period of art history, artists also participated in this struggle against the destructive force of time. They wanted to create artworks that would be able to transcend time by embodying eternal ideals of beauty or, at least, by becoming the medium of historical memory, by acting as witnesses to events, tragedies, hopes, and projects that otherwise would have been forgotten. In this sense, artists and art institutions shared a fundamental project to resist material destruction and historical oblivion.
Summary 1 (first part of the article beyond what is highlighted): This is a philosophical argument mapping out how we get to modern day curation by entering space and time. Art was for the preservation of history by resisting the loss of materials from the ravages of time. Traditionally that mandate was guided by a belief in a universal art history. The exclusion of specific cultures/ideas has led the art world to realize that our collective identity is infinitely more varied than we had previously thought and since it is impossible to be perfectly inclusive there is still a threat to the role of the museum. The author suggests that entering the flow of time, which houses all material things including people, is the key to solving this problem. His ultimate answer to entering the flow of time is the art of curation which for him embodies Gesamtkunstwerk, a term coined by the opera composer Wagner.
In a world in which the goal of stopping the flow of time is taken over by the internet, the function of the museum becomes one of staging the flow—staging events that are synchronized with the lifetimes of the spectators. This changes the topology of our relationship to art. The traditional hermeneutical position towards art required the gaze of the external spectator to penetrate the artwork, to discover artistic intentions, or social forces, or vital energies that gave the artwork its form—from the outside of the artwork toward its inside. However, the gaze of the contemporary museum visitor is, by contrast, directed from the inside of the art event towards its outside: toward the possible external surveillance of this event and its documentation process, toward the eventual positioning of this documentation in the media space and in cultural archives—in other words, toward the spatial boundaries of this event. And also towards the temporal boundaries of this event—because when we are placed inside an event, we cannot know when this event began and when it will end. The art system is generally characterized by the asymmetrical relationship between the gaze of the art producer and the gaze of the art spectator. These two gazes almost never meet. In the past, after artists put their artworks on display, they lost control over the gaze of the spectator: regardless of what some art theoreticians say, the artwork is a mere thing and cannot meet the spectator’s gaze. So under the conditions of the traditional museum, the spectator’s gaze was in a position of sovereign control—although this sovereignty could be indirectly manipulated by the museum’s curators through certain strategies of pre-selection, placement, juxtaposition, lighting, and so forth. However, when the museum begins to function as a chain of events, the configuration of gazes changes. The visitor loses his or her sovereignty in a very obvious way. The visitor is placed inside an event and cannot meet the gaze of a camera that documents this event—nor the secondary gaze of the editor that does the postproduction work on this document, nor the gaze of a later spectator of this document. Ai Wei Wei tweeted this image of himself in bed after suffering a hemorrhage caused by police aggression. Ai Wei Wei is the second most followed artist on Twitter, despite Twitter being illegal in China. That is why, by visiting contemporary museum exhibitions, we are confronted with the irreversibility of time—we know that these exhibitions are merely temporary. If we visit the same museum after a certain amount of time, the only things that will remain will be documents: a catalogue, or a film, or a website. But what these things offer us is necessarily incommensurable with our own experience because our perspective, our gaze is asymmetrical with the gaze of a camera—and these gazes cannot coincide, as they could in the case of documenting an opera or a ballet. This is the reason for a certain kind of nostalgia that we necessarily feel when we are confronted with documents of past artistic events, whether exhibitions or performances. This nostalgia provokes the desire to reenact the event “as it truly was.” Recently in Venice, the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” was reenacted at the Fondazione Prada. It was a very professional reenactment—and so it provoked a new and even stronger wave of nostalgia. Some people thought how great it would be to go back to the 1960s and breathe the wonderful atmosphere of that time. And they also thought how awful everything is at the Biennale itself, with all its fuss, compared to the sublime askesis of “When Attitudes Become Form.” At the same time, visitors from a younger generation found the exhibition unimpressive, and liked only the beautiful guides in their Prada clothes. The nostalgic mood that is inevitably provoked by art documentation reminds me of the early Romantic nostalgia towards nature. Art was seen then as the documentation of the beautiful or sublime aesthetic experiences that were offered by nature. The documentation of these experiences by means of painting seemed more disappointing than authentic. In other words, if the irreversibility of time and the feeling of being inside rather than outside an event were once the privileged experiences of nature, they now became the privileged experiences of contemporary art. And that means precisely that contemporary art has become the medium for investigating the eventfulness of events: the different modes of the immediate experience of events, their relationship to documentation and archiving, the intellectual and emotional modes of our relationship to documentation, and so forth. Now, if the thematization of the eventfulness of the event has become, indeed, the main preoccupation of contemporary art in general and the museum of contemporary art in particular, it makes no sense to condemn the museum for staging art events. On the contrary, today the museum has become the main analytical tool for staging and analyzing the event as radically contingent and irreversible—amidst our digitally controlled civilization that is based on tracking back and securing the traces of our individual existence in the hope of making everything controllable and reversible. The museum is a place where the asymmetrical war between the ordinary human gaze and the technologically armed gaze not only takes place, but also becomes revealed—so that it can be thematized and critically theorized.
Summary 5: The internet is dated because it documents to stop the passage of time (like traditional museums) while curation is cutting edge because it "stages the flow" of events within time. The direction of observance for the internet is from the outside in while for curation it is from the inside out. Even "reenacted" events fail to connect in current time despite the fact that they are nostalgic for those who have previously experienced it. Being present at an event in the time and space that it is happening, surrounded by all the circumstances of the location in terms of world events, personal events, people that accompany you becomes the sought after "privileged experience" to be investigated critically afterwards.
There are two alternatives, on one hand there is the traditional museum that seeks to preserve cultural items from the passage of time and then there is curation which seeks to enter the event of time and space. Traditional museums preserve love and beauty from death and remove it from time in order to be viewed. Curation seeks to enter the experience of love and beauty as an event of life and death within the flow of time.
If the public follows my activity all the time, then I do not need to present it with any product. The process is already the product.
Connection 5: As an artist who has mostly shown her work on the internet I find this to be true of my experience on Instagram. This article was written in 2013 when instagram was only 3 years old and not yet showing stories or reels. In 2010 most online images of the art studio process were photos found on blogs, personal websites and social media. Etsy started encouraging its artists and makers to submit photos proving that they were actually making the items being sold in their shops by hand in an effort to prove authentication. Artists responded and added these types of photos to their sites in abundance. TikToc started in 2016 and shortly after Instagram made the move in 2017 to start stories and became more video based as the years passed. Fast forward to 2023 when it's normal to see the creative process on instagram. In fact, my art process reels are now my most popular posts, not photos of the original piece being made in the reel. The process quickly becomes the product.
In the theater, spectators remain in an outside position vis-à-vis the stage, but in the museum they enter the stage, and find themselves inside the spectacle.
Question/Connection 4: Is this really true of theatre/music? Couldn't one argue that the audience is integrated into the performance? What about improv that takes it's cues from the audience or Taylor Swift concerts with elaborately decorated stages and bracelets being made and exchanged between the audience along with participation in lyrics (people memorize responses to certain of her songs) or when Tracy Chapman performed "You've got a fast Car" for the first time because Lionel Ritchie had forgotten his disks, abandoned the stage and Chapman was pushed back on with just her guitar and a mic and the audience connected so deeply with her that the song became an instant hit or when audience members are integrated into the opening scene as costumed performers walk in through the aisle, singing the opening song of the broadway musical The Lion King with all the lights and colours. I think this could be Gesantkunstwerk or is curation solely used in the context of the museum?
However, the relationship between internet and museum radically changes if we begin to understand the museum not as a storage place for artworks, but rather as a stage for the flow of art events.
Summary 4: This is the alternative to understanding the internet as storage. As art events happen in time and space they are a living (and dying) answer to the changing landscape of museums. Even if the event is recorded, it is a document and not a reproduction since one must be present in place in time to fully experience an event. Talking about the “theatralization of the museum” Wagner did not erase the difference between stage and audience. With a curatorial installation the public is integrated. Mass entertainment is also built on the idea of the public being passive onlookers. The modern museum, through curations, analyzes and criticizes as an event in time, not only displaying but offering an alternative to the suspension of time by entering time through exhibition.
Malevich offers a good example of this in his short but important text “On the Museum,” from 1919. At that time, the new Soviet government feared that the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text, Malevich protested against this pro-museum policy by calling on the Soviet state to not intervene on behalf of the old art collections, because, he said, their destruction could open the path to true, living art. In particular, he wrote: Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy, one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy. Later, Malevich gives a concrete example of what he means: The aim [of this pharmacy] will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and all his art—a mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often more alive than actual representation (and take up less room).4 It is obvious that what Malevich proposes here is not merely the destruction of museums but a radical curatorial project—to exhibit the ashes of artworks instead of their corpses. And in a truly Wagnerian manner, Malevich further says that everything that “we” (meaning he and his artistic contemporaries) do is also destined for the crematorium. Of course, contemporary curators do not reduce museum collections to ashes, as Malevich suggested. But there is a good reason for that. Since Malevich’s time, mankind has invented a way to place all artworks from the past on one chemist’s shelf without destroying them. And this shelf is called the internet.
Connection 1: Concerning Malevich there is a documentary featuring a controversial Polish artist living in the United States called Stanislaw Szukalski who lost all of his life works after WWII and was remaking art before his death in 1984, which were now being transformed into new works featured on Netflix. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/movies/struggle-the-life-and-lost-art-of-szukalski-review.html
Indeed, every curatorial project necessarily aims to contradict the normative, traditional art-historical narrative embodied by the museum’s permanent collection. If such a contradiction does not take place, the curatorial project loses its legitimation.
Summary 3: The act of curation as a solution is not even legitimate as an act if it does not aim to contradict the museum's permanent collection. Each curatorial work needs to be different and temporary from the last to be legitimate and enter the flow of time as an event that lives and dies.
Wagner introduced the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his programmatic treatise “The Art-Work of the Future” (1849–1850). Wagner wrote this text in exile, in Zurich, after the end of the revolutionary uprisings in Germany in 1848. In this text he develops a project for an artwork (of the future) that is heavily influenced by the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. At the beginning of his treatise, Wagner states that the typical artist of his time is an egoist who, in complete isolation from the life of the people, practices his art exclusively for the enjoyment of the rich; in so doing he follows the dictates of fashion. The artist of the future, says Wagner, must become radically different: “He now can only will the universal, true, and unconditional; he yields himself not to a love for this or that particular object, but to wide Love itself. Thus does the egoist become a communist.”1 Becoming communist, then, is possible only through self-renunciation—self-dissolution in the collective. Wagner defines his supposed hero as such: “The last, most complete renunciation [Entäusserung] of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascent into universalism, a man can only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his being. The celebration of such a death is the noblest thing that men can enter on.”2 Admittedly, there remains a difference between the hero who sacrifices himself and the performer who makes this sacrifice onstage (the Gesamtkunstwerk being understood by Wagner as a musical drama). Nonetheless, Wagner insists that this difference is suspended by the Gesamtkunstwerk, for the performer “does not merely represent in the art-work the action of the fêted hero, but repeats its moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of necessity which consumes the whole individuality of his being.”3 In other words, Wagner understands the Gesamtkunstwerk precisely as a way of resynchronizing the finiteness of human existence with its cultural representation—which, in turn, also becomes finite. Poster for the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europäische Utopien seit 1800 (Tendency toward the Gesamtkunstwerk: European Utopias since 1800), Zurich, Markus Raetz and Albin Uldry, designers, 1983. The Getty Research Institute, 2011.M.30. Copyright: 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich. All the other performers achieve their own artistic significance solely through participating in the hero’s ritual of self-sacrifice. Accordingly, Wagner speaks of the hero performer as a dictator who mobilizes the collective of collaborators, with the exclusive goal of staging his own sacrifice in the name of this collective. In the sacrificial scene, the Gesamtkunstwerk finds its end—there is no continuation, no memory. In other words, there is no further role for the dictator-performer. The artistic collective dissolves, and the next Gesamtkunstwerk is created by another artistic collective, with a different dictator-performer in the main role. Here the precariousness of an individual human existence and the fluidity of working collectives are artistically embraced, and even radicalized. Historically, we know that many artistic collectives followed this model: from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory and Guy Debord’s Situationist International. But the contemporary name for this temporary and suicidal dictatorship is different: the “curatorial project.” Harald Szeemann, who initiated the curatorial turn in contemporary art, was so fascinated by the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk that he organized an exhibition called “The Tendency to Gesamtkunstwerk” [“Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk”] (1984). Considering this historical show based on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it becomes necessary to ask: What is the main difference between a traditional exhibition and a modern curatorial project? The traditional exhibition treats its space as anonymous and neutral. Only the exhibited artworks are important—but not the space in which they are exhibited. Thus, artworks are perceived and treated as potentially eternal—and the space of the exhibition as a contingent, accidental station where the immortal artworks take a temporary rest from their wanderings through the material world. In contrast, the installation—be it artistic or curatorial—inscribes the exhibited artworks in this contingent material space. (Here one can see an analogy between this shift and the shift from theater actor or cinema actor to the director of theater and cinema.) The curatorial project, rather than the exhibition, is then the Gesamtkunstwerk because it instrumentalizes all the exhibited artworks and makes them serve a common purpose that is formulated by the curator. At the same time, a curatorial or artistic installation is able to include all kinds of objects: time-based artworks or processes, everyday objects, documents, texts, and so forth. All these elements, as well as the architecture of the space, sound, or light, lose their respective autonomy and begin to serve the creation of a whole in which visitors and spectators are also included. Thus, stationary artworks of the traditional sort become temporalized, subjected to a certain scenario that changes the way they are perceived during the time of the installation because this perception is dependent on the context of their presentation—and this context begins to flow. Thus, ultimately, every curatorial project demonstrates its accidental, contingent, eventful, finite character—in other words, it enacts its own precariousness.
Summary 2: Wagner proposed that we make art ideally in varied forms (Gesamtkunstwerk) and for the purpose of love by being self-sacrificing. If the performer on stage connects with being finite, realizing too that the art itself is finite then this is the way of being in sink with time. Participants further the artistic significance by experiencing the hero’s death to self. Curation is a continuation of Gesamtkunstwerk as an event that seeks to collaborate different fields of discipline in order to organize exhibitions, which have a beginning and end in the flow of time, an idea initiated by the work of Harald Szeemann.