Display as Experience - embodiment, unity and space in curatorial practice

Display as Experience

1964. Three teenagers are running through the Louvre, passing famous artworks by David, Da Vinci and Gericault. They see the paintings flash by, but do not see them at the same time, mainly occupied by setting a new world record for running to the other side of the museum. An older man, quietly contemplating before one of David’s paintings, is rudely disturbed by the three restless teenagers. This scene of Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (see cover image), in which the main characters see the whole Louvre in nine minutes and 43 seconds, has apparently nothing to do with the way we are used to experience art.

When looking at art, most people want to experience something that temporary lifts them up from their rushed daily life. When making exhibitions, evoking a memorable experience is therefore an important goal. Curators look for ways of integrating this in their display. But contemporary exhibitions that take up whole spaces, or that are in some way a ‘designed’ environment, composed by an artist or other people, are often dismissed as being spectacular or theatrical. Some critics even claim that the museum has turned into an amusement park, losing space for contemplation and debate in favor of quick fun and ‘snack art’. They fear for an audience that only sees exhibitions like Odile, Arthur and Franz do while running through the Louvre in Bande à Part. Is it possible to make a display of artworks which evokes an intense aesthetic experience without losing the intellectual depth we like to find in contemporary art?

In this essay I will be looking at three concepts which I think are intrinsic to the process of creating experience in display; embodiment, unity and space. Although these concepts imply much more than can be shown in this short essay, I want to use them to illustrate my starting point together with two examples. These two examples were paying a lot of attention to the evocation of experience in the way they were curated.

Embodiment

Aesthetic experience plays an important role in the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was interested in the way that human consciousness is an embodied experience. The world is the ground of experience. His position is that subjectivity is something of the world, not apart from it, and it is provided by the “primacy of perception”. Our access to the world is through the body and not through (or not only through) the mind. Al thinking is embodied; it comes from consciousness, which develops from the subject’s bodily perceptions. Embodiment signifies the role of the body in how we experience the world. The artworks we perceive as objects in the world are the result of how our bodies experience them, not just our consciousness recognizing the object. "Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only of the geometrical synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which constitute the cultural world.”

Merleau-Ponty had a problem with the philosophical tendency to reduce every object and phenomenon to nothing more than collected data. He saw his task in philosophy to return to relating to the world directly as it was viewed, not as science described it. The direct aesthetic experience of a work of art is utterly important for him: content and form, what we say and the how we say it, cannot exist apart from each other.

Unity

Experience is something that occurs continuously. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. We have an experience when the things experienced runs its course to fulfillment. For example, we are finished writing a book, solving a problem, playing the game, or go home after a party. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. What I mean by this in this context is what people often call real experience; situations that you remember. This experience has a continuous flow. In a work of art, different occurrences fuse into unity, but still keep their own character. An experience has a unity, constituted by a quality that pervades the entire experience, in spite of the different parts it is made of. An experience is like a train, made up of many different wagons. As a spectator you see the train as a train, not as a collection of wagons. This unity is not practical or emotional, nor intellectual, for these terms are adjectives of interpretation, distinctions that reflection can make within it; we make use of these in discourse about an experience. In thinking of an experience after it has occurred, we may find that one quality rather than another was more dominant, following that this one property characterizes the experience as an entity. We therefore do not often think of an experience as being intellectual and emotional at the same time; however this is probably very often the case.

Space

Apart from embodiment and unity, the last concept I want to discuss as the most important parts of experience in exhibitions is space. When the whole environment participates in the viewing of a work of art, the exhibition becomes an immersive surrounding. As the actor Ben Whishaw declares in his role as John Keats in the film Bright Star: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought.”

The risk of creating an environment is that the viewer will become isolated. This is very likely to happen in current displays of new media. Video installations often take up whole rooms and are entirely cut off from the world through thick black curtains. When we sink into the carpet we forget the immediacy of our bodies. The spectators are cut off from each other; also the possibility of creating a dialogue with other works in the museum is eliminated.

An example in which this isolation was prevented is the exhibition Touched of the Liverpool biennale of 2010. For the biennale, a lot of different spaces were used throughout the city of Liverpool. Old warehouses, shop windows and even the cathedral participated in the exhibition. A video installation showing people in the streets throwing stones through the windows of an old industrial building was on display in the same building as it was filmed. The visitors watched it standing up, with some light coming through the shattered windows. One almost expected a stone to fall through the window with loud noises any time soon.

Another work in the exhibition was a seven meter long sword by Kris Martin that hung from the dome of the Liverpool Black-E church (see image 2). The sword would have acted in a different way if it was not hung from the church dome. The space was far from neutral; a huge sword in a church immediately and inevitably evokes a large number of references. When standing underneath the sword, we are grasped by a Lacanian gaze, feeling threatened like Damocles. This was true for most artworks in the biennale; the environment was crucial for the complete experience of the work, and since almost all the works were commissioned for the specific spaces you could say the space was a direct part of the artwork.


1. Kris Martin, Mandi XV, 2007

The biennales main exhibition, Touched, heavily depended on the emotional impact of artworks. In the biennale guide, artistic director Lewis Biggs writes: “What defines art that has this ability to communicate directly, this width of crosscultural appeal? Emotional experience is common to all humanity. Art that evokes emotion in one individual, despite all the cultural specifics that determine that person’s reactions, will reach out to many other individuals with varied cultural backgrounds. Touched presents art with emotional impact. Art that not only can gain our attention but that can move us, motivate us, allow us to find a way to change ourselves.”

The Liverpool biennale’s Touched exhibition was a collection of experiences. All the different spaces created a fragmented collective. Instead of laying emphasis on active engagement and debate, the core was emotional experience. The main goal of The Liverpool biennale was not to create discussion between people, but still did so through the very direct emotional impact of the artworks. Because of the different locations, the audience had the opportunity to focus upon a single work, being drawn into it, and to have a personal experience.

An exhibition with an often very similar starting point took place in 2009 during the Venice biennale (see image 3 and 4). In-finitum, an exhibition on show at the Grand Canal bordered Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, was created by Belgian interior designer, antique dealer and art collector Axel Vervoordt. Because of its extraordinary beauty, the exhibition attracted huge crowds to the palazzo, despite all the numerous other satellite exhibitions next to the biennale. In-finitum consisted off works from all ages; from antique Egyptian sculptures to unfinished Cézannes to commissioned contemporary works. Vervoordt put all these works together in the unusual spaces of the large fifteenth century gothic palazzo, designing the environment for the works. This resulted in dark cellars with dramatic lightning, heavy decorated ballrooms including lounge furniture and bare, light wooden spaces (see images 2, 3 & 4). In his profession as an interior designer he consciously created new homes for artworks that were not very often seen so close to each other. He gave them a chance to communicate with each other, to become new things.

In-finitum was about the infinite, the universe, but also about the mysterious and unfinished. The a-historical character of the exhibition contributed to this theme, taking the visitor on a journey through the ages. In one of the catalogue texts, Italian art historian and curator Francesco Poli writes about the hyphen in the title In-finitum: “the hyphen can be seen as a symbol of union as well as separation, which opens up the space of vision and imagination to the deeper and more inaccessible dimensions of the aesthetic experience of physical and spiritual reality.” Because of the designed environment, visitors could experience the concept of the exhibition without a necessary need for explanation.



2 & 3: Two exhibition overviews of In-finitum, bottom image showing work by Anish Kapoor and Lucio Fontana, top image showing work by Hans op de Beeck and Antonio Canova.
 
In contrast to the Liverpool biennale, which was under the artistic directorship of Lewis Biggs, also director of Tate Liverpool, In-finitum was curated and designed by someone from a different field. Some people might regard this non academic background as a disadvantage, but Vervoordts longtime experience with collecting, antique dealing and interior designing enabled him to put together works from different eras in a building that was very specific. His selection of art and objects displays a richness of centuries of treasures. The thing that attracted most people so much to In-finitum was the intuitive quality the exhibition possessed. It did not desire a thorough intellectual insight, but relied more on immersion in the artworks. There was no signage, labeling or printed information except for the catalogue. Respecting the histories of all the works, Vervoordt laid out an emotional territory that embraced the context of the exhibition, weaving all the works together. Negative remarks that could be heard on the exhibition were that the exhibition resembled a stage set too much. The theatricality is omnipresent in In-finitum. The different floors and rooms of the palazzo all had a different feel and look, like the subsequent acts of a play. The clear routing of the exhibition sent you in the right direction, to make sure you were reading the story in the correct order. Every work was carefully lit with a spotlight, leading you from the almost entirely dark vaults of the palazzo to the light flooded wooden attic.

This dramatic narrative might seem restrictive. The feeling of a staged exhibition would close the curtains, leaving no space for the audience to contemplate their own stories. But on the other hand, the dramatic set of In-finitum is as much curated as a show in a more ‘white cube’ environment. The only difference is that we are so used to the structure of white walls and light from above that it does not strike us as being designed anymore. With the staged environment being so explicit in the exhibition, the structure is laid bare, enabling the spectators to find their own way through the play.

Returning to Merleau-Ponty, content and form cannot be seen loose from each other. In the case of In-finitum, it is therefore vital that the surroundings of the artworks in the exhibition are completely adapted to the art, to help in the creation of new dialogues. The experience is carefully constructed. As the critic York Lethbridge writes in his review for Magenta Magazine: “the quality of the experience in seeing In-finitum is a reminder that encounters with art can be powerful and deeply personal”.

Both In-finitum and the Liverpool Biennale depart from the idea that an exhibition should be an experience. Although both exhibitions have very different content (it is hard to equally compare contemporary works with an a-historical collection of almost everything), both rely heavily on the bodily experience we have as a visitor. Whereas the biennale is a more fragmented collection of different experiences, In-finitum reaches a high level of unity in its theatrical ways of display; many different artworks, objects, things, become one in a new context. Both exhibitions would not have been the same, would maybe have been almost nothing, without their surroundings. Space is a crucial part of the means they use to reach their goal. If this is a decayed warehouse, a slightly kitsch church or a fifteenth century palazzo with its feet in the water does not really matter, as long as these spaces are used as strength and not as a burden. Spectacle and theatricality has been given a bad taste. But when used in the right ways it can add value to the way we see art. It can create new dialogues, a sense of universal oneness. As the Liverpool biennale’s artistic director writes in the catalogue: “Art without emotional force is without intellectual power.”


4.Overview of the first floor of Palazzo Fortuny during In-Finitum.


Bibliography

Books

Biggs, Lewis, ed. Liverpool Biennial, International Festival of Contemporary Art - The Guide. Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art Ltd, 2010.

Cherry, Deborah. “A Sea of Senses,” in Right About Now, edited by Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007.

Dewey, John. Art as experience. New York: Perigee, 2005.

Emerling, Jae. Theory for Art History. London: Routledge, 2005.

Miki, Tatsuro and Axel Vervoordt, “About In-Finitum”, in IN-FINITUM, edited by Axel Vervoordt. Gent: Vervoordt Foundation, 2009.

Meijers, Debora. “The Museum and the ‘ahistorical’ exhibition,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Narine. London: Routledge, 1996.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London:Routledge, 2002.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. London:Routledge, 2004.

Klonk, Charlotte. Spaces of Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Poli, Francesco. “Traces and Mirages of the Infinite in Contemporary Art,” in IN-FINITUM, edited by Axel Vervoordt. Gent: Vervoordt Foundation, 2009.

Magazines

Lethbridge, York. “Mapping the Studio & In-Finitium: Fortuny & Pinault Collections”, Magenta Magazine, Fall 2009, Volume 1, No.1. Accessed 3 December 2010. URL: http://www.magentamagazine.com/1/reviews/fortuny-pinault

Exhibitions

IN-FINITUM, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 6 June – 15 November 2009

Touched, part of the Liverpool Biennial, International Festival of Contemporary Art, Liverpool (several locations), 18 September – 28 November 2010

Into the Unknown: the void in contemporary art

Upon entering the room, you look for the artwork. After a quick look around the room, you notice that where you expected an object, you see nothing but a black circle. You are careful to approach it. After close examination you have to conclude it is not just a black circle, but an actual opening in the floor. You cannot see the bottom, since the hole is covered in dark pigment. The unexpected emptiness in this room is an artwork by Anish Kapoor (1954). The work, called Descent into Limbo, evokes a sense of fear upon first seeing it, but also seduces us to investigate the possibility of disappearing underground.


Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg

What is it that makes emptiness so attractive and so fearful at the same time? The Void has been a fascination of many in art history and critical theory. In this essay I will investigate the meaning of the void in contemporary art, using Kapoor’s work as a start and finish point.

“The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It's very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It's a space of becoming… 'something' that dwells in the presence of the work… that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance”(Anish Kapoor in Bhabha, 1998: 11-41).


A very short history of nothing

“The non-existent was not; the existent was not
Darkness was hidden by darkness
That which became was enveloped by The Void”
(Rigveda creation hymn, 1700 BC)

The void, emptiness, or just nothingness, has been a disturbing presence in human life since ages. The fact that people have lived before you lived, and after you have died, is a void in our consciousness that is hard to grasp. The paradox of creation from the void, of being and non-being, has come up in most past cultures. A very old example can be found in the work of Thales, a Greek philosopher who denied the existence of nothing around 600 BC. His statement was that there can only be nothing if there is no one to contemplate it. Epicurus later originated the idea of atoms, basic units common to matter. With this discovery the idea is born that there can be a void, an empty space through which atoms move. Later on the vacuum was discovered. For a long time this has been a problematic idea: God would not create nothing. Galileo, defying these religious problems, believed that a vacuum was possible and made its properties understood. In further history, scientists have always been researching the emptiness of atoms and vacuums. Modern physics now states that everything came from nothing; it is possible that the universe could have emerged out of the vacuum (Close, 2009: 1-23).

Transcendental nothing and atheist nothing

An old example that comes to mind when thinking of voids is the oculus in the roof of the Pantheon in Rome, which is an ancient way to let light into a vast space. But the sight of the beam of light flooding the church holds for most people meaning far beyond the roof of the church. The word oculus is also the Latin word for eye. In the context of the church, or in its original form of temple of all Gods, the oculus is linked directly to a heavenly realm. In this case the void has a clear metaphysical or transcendental meaning.


Pantheon, Rome, 126 AD

After the disappearance of Christianity as the most important base of daily life in the West, philosophers of the enlightenment believed the world itself to be enough, without a governing God to which we are subject. Contemporary critics now speak of the return of religion. In my opinion religion never left; it just changed names and forms. But this change left things in an uneasy way. How do we talk about a feeling that there is something bigger than us humans, without returning to visualize a man with a beard?
In the essay Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud writes about the particular feeling I tried to describe above. One of his friends wrote Freud a letter reacting to his essay on the illusion of religion. He speaks of having “a particular feeling of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’. This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it, but it was the source of the religious energy that was seized upon by the various churches and religious systems, directed into particular channels and certainly consumed by them. On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion” (Freud, 2004: 1-2). Freud further explains the thoughts of his friend as a loss of connection with the world around us (when a man is born, the string with his mother is cut and therefore the bonding with the surrounding world is lost). A lot of people, like the friend of Freud, feel this void in their life. Through religion they seek for connection with the universe.
This so-called God-shaped-hole originates from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who stated for the first time that “God was dead” in his book Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Nietzsche writes: “After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!” (Nietzsche, 2001: 108). According to Nietzsche we have to learn to live with the fact that the comforting idea of an existing personal God is no longer there, and have to let go of the shadows that remain. Gilles Deleuze writes in one of his essay on Nietzsche: “Did we kill God when we put man in his place and kept the most important thing, which is the place?” He states that instead of God burdening us from the outside, we have placed the weight on our own back. After the Reformation, the death of God became a problem between God and man, until the day humanity discovers this problem as such and chooses to carry this new weight. Humanity seems to want the logical outcome of the death of God; to replace God, to become God himself (Deleuze, 2001: 71).
A lot less transcendental views of the void can be found, for example in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Sartre sees nothingness as an essential part of being: being cannot escape nothingness. “Nothingness is the putting into question of being by being; that is, precisely consciousness or for-self. (…) Nothingness is the peculiar possibility of being and its unique possibility. Since nothingness is nothingness of being, it can come to being only through being itself.”(Sartre, 1958: 79) Nothingness is a state of non-being. Nothingness does not itself have Being, but is sustained by Being. Sartre disagrees with Hegel that Being and Nothingness are opposite, or are opposed as thesis and antithesis respectively. He says that Nothingness is the contradiction, and not the opposite, of Being. Nothingness is logically subsequent to Being. Sartre, and also Jacques Lacan, did not suffer from the God shaped hole very much. Even more so, they used this conception of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Because nothing and being are equated in Sartre’s writings, creation also comes from nothing; therefore a God is not needed for us to exist.
The representation of nothing


Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, Russian Museum, St Petersburg

How do we give a definition of the void in art? This seems like an almost impossible task. As Mathieu Copeland writes in the catalogue of ‘Voids; a retrospective’: “The desire to work with nothing can manifest itself in many complementary ways and generates numerous approaches: pure voids, spaces left empty, (…) voids emerging from the desire to empty everything, voids resulting from the desire to add nothing, voids as signature, unfulfilled voids and conceptual voids, voids as refusal etc”(Copeland, 2009: 167).
In the essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde, Jean-Francois Lyotard writes about what art should do to deal with something that cannot be shown. In art, we expect something happening (for example, making a painting) to be followed by something else happening (another color, another painting). But we forget the possibility of nothing happening. The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety. It gives to waiting, which can be a negative feeling, but also a positive (suspense, welcoming the unknown). This contradictory feeling leads back to the romantic notion of the sublime (terror and pleasure at the same time). Throughout history, the negative dialectic of ‘is it happening?’ was often wrongly translated as a waiting for a fabulous subject or identity, for example ‘is the prophet coming?’ According to Lyotard artists can represent this feeling in the right way. Art cannot show the unrepresentable, but it can hint at the existence of the unrepresentable, by negative representation or abstraction. There should always be an unrepresenatable surplus that the work cannot offer relief for, for example by way of a merely pleasant form (Lyotard in Morley, 2010: 27-41).
The problem with Lyotards view is his proposition that art should not approach the unrepresentable directly. By pointing this out, he remarkably links his own words to the biblical command to not make any images of God. By looking at abstraction as the best option, he returns to a new form of iconoclasm. Near nothingness gives more space for contemplating infinity. This attitude can be found in many protestant churches, but also in some early modern art, for example in Malevich’ black square. However, if one takes a closer look, the square, which can be seen both as a black square on top of a white ground and as a black hole surrounded by a white border, actually closely resembles Descent into Limbo by Anish Kapoor. It is nothing, but at the same time there is an immense space involved.

Descent into Limbo

“The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness”(Jacques Lacan in Miller, 1986: 140).
What role can art play in the void we have to deal with? Let’s go back to the artwork by Anish Kapoor. Descent into Limbo is one of the best examples of how Kapoor deals with the void. The void is by most critics and authors acknowledged as one of the key elements in his work. But what happens is exactly what occurs so often; they try to fill up the void. In various essays and articles about Kapoor’s work, numerous references are being made to Eastern religions and philosophies, because the artist has partially non-Western origins. Most authors seem to be caught by the intimidating emptiness of the void, as they try to fill it up with metaphysical ideas and categories. However, this has partially to do with some of the titles Kapoor gives his work. Often he uses Sanskrit names for his works, the old liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism. Interesting is that the Sanskrit word śūnyatā means emptiness or void, but can also mean fullness. In Buddhism, emptiness is characteristic in Buddha’s observation that nothing possesses an essential identity. In Buddha’s teachings, the realization of the emptiness of phenomena is a key aspect of the nurturing of insight that leads to wisdom and inner peace (Williams, 2009: 124-125).

Anish Kapoor does speak about his intentions to evoke a sublime experience. On first glance this intention could justify the previously mentioned metaphysical interpretations. But for Kapoor the sublime experience is always linked with primary human sensations. Kapoor recognizes the void in many presences. The presence as fear can be seen as a fear for the loss of self, from a non-object to a non-self. This fear has to do with the idea of being consumed by the object, or in the non-object. Kapoor has always been drawn towards this notion of fear, towards a sensation of falling, or vertigo. Imagine yourself falling into the black hole of Descent into Limbo. He sees this kind of work as an inversion, a turning inside-out. Fear is like darkness, the eye is uncertain, the hand feels in hope of contact with walls. You look to see if you can find the bottom of the black hole (Van Winkel, 1995: 39-46).
Kapoor also called the void a state within. It has a lot to do with fear, in Oedipal terms, but more so, with darkness. In the case of Descent into Limbo, the Void has a phenomenological presence, but this phenomenological experience on its own is insufficient. The work creates narrative without the storytelling, which allows the spectator to be directly into contact with psychology, fear, etc. According to Kapoor this makes the void a potential space, not a non-space (Morley, 2010: 91-92). Descent into Limbo is apart from a void or a black hole above all an object, but an object able to render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever envisage.



Reference List

Bhabha, Homi K. Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness, http://www.anishkapoor.com/writing/

Close, Frank. Nothing – a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, 1-21
Rigveda creation hymn, 1700 BC, translation via Nothing: a very short introduction, 5.

Copeland, Mathieu. “Qualifying the Void” in Hendricks, Jon et al. Voids/Vides: A Retrospective of Empty Exhibitions, Paris: Editons du Centre Pompidou, 2009, 167.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche- Pure immancence: Essays on a Life, New York: Zone Books, 2001, 71.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its discontents, London: Penguin, 2004, 1-2.

Kapoor, Anish, “Interview with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton” in The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, London: MIT press, 2010, 91-92.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” in The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, London: MIT press, 2010, 27-40.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII – The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986, 140.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, section 108.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge, 1958, 79.

Williams,Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Second Edition, London: Routledge, 2009, 124- 125.

Winkel, Camiel van. “On the Sublime in the Work of Anish Kapoor”, in Anish Kapoor, Tilburg: De Pont, 1995, 39-47.

Towards a Critical Institution

Towards a critical institution

Daniel put up his striped posters on the street, Andrea slept with a collector, and Hans did his political poll in the MOMA. It did not work; they were all swallowed and digested. They are all part now of what they have been trying to escape so hard. I even watched Andrea sleep with the collector in the Pop Life exhibition in Tate Modern; I do not think her plan was to have anything to do with Tate or Pop art. I can hear you think; what is the point anyway, when you get eaten by the institution you try to avoid? Maybe they should have embraced it; at least they would have made more money.

It all started when Marcel put up his fountain. But that is almost an entire age ago. In the meantime we went inside the white cube and out again. We dumped our collections and moved into the Kunsthalle. We tried building stuff in nature, but came running back to the gallery in no time. Institutional critique has had its best time. I do not mean to say we should stop being critical about the institute; we should never stop being critical. But I propose we should be critical from within the wonderful institutions we have and use them as a powerful instrument in the art world.

The audience has changed a lot as well. Now that we have Wikipedia, we always want a second opinion. Educating the audience through wall texts and colorful flyers is not enough anymore. Even the Japanese tourist standing in front of Vincent’s sunflowers wants to listen to an audio tour.

To work towards a critical attitude, institutions need to move around the art itself, which is always the starting point. Maybe Andrea and Daniel should try to talk to the institute and find ways of working together instead of avoiding each other. Programming around an exhibition should not have an inherent political agenda, but create open possibilities for the audience to reflect critically on different situations. The exhibition as the center of a critical platform. As seen in institutions like the ICA, South London Gallery or the Whitechapel gallery, this often takes the form of artist talks, events and discussion nights. Interesting guests are invited to enrich the experience the audience gets in seeing an exhibition. In the case of a recent exhibition at the ICA, Olga, Pjotr and Boris from the Russian collective Chto Delat? curated an exhibition with lots of events around it, using the ICA as a host for this critical platform.

I do not mean to say seeing just the exhibition is no longer enough. There is nothing wrong with enjoying Vincent’s paintings on a Sunday afternoon. But I do think it is important that art is accessible on different levels. When you want to find out more, and are interested in deepening your experience, the possibility should be there. The institute should play a key role in working directly with the artist to create possibilities for providing knowledge and stimulating discussion about contemporary art.