THE EXHIBITION; DEAD OR ALIVE
“Art that would not have entered life will be inventoried in the Archaeological Museum of Antiquities. ”
“The exhibition presents this random deployment of art in relation to what is not art, this way of approaching the moment when it disappears.”
“An exhibition is letting an object present itself. ”
“A work of art is a stimulus, and should generate and unleash a process. And that process doesn’t take place in the work, it takes place in the public.”
“All artists are alike. they dream of doing something more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.”
“The fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting.”
You might (as an artist) become uneasy at the claim that the contemporary curator is an artist. “How dare you!” Nevertheless, you might only pause at the further claim that the contemporary art exhibition is art proper, and what is not art is the singular or severed art objects that inhabit or comprise the holism of the exhibition. Art objects, in essence, are the things that people collect after the exhibition is over.
Ironically, if that is the right word, it is the curator that makes exhibitions, and it is the artist that makes art objects for exhibitions. Thus the pivotal intervention of the hand of the curator at the moments of selection and arrangement of art objects is fundamental to what constitutes art today, especially if art is something that becomes art the moment it is exhibited to a public, to a life, to another mind, in order to live. Art objects alone are for crates and hard drives.
Further, is the exhibition surplus to the artist’s requirements? Not “surplus” in the psychoanalytic sense of orgasmic meaning and desire — although we have more than enough of that in artist statements and in academic settings. Nor in the Marxist and art market sense of surplus value under capitalism. Rather in the fluid and flaccid sense of the spillover of surplus energy and liveliness from the artist’s studio, which now lies flat and dried up on the white walls and polished concrete floors of the gallery, under the direction and thumb of the curator, waiting to be temporarily resuscitated by a human subject before being decapitated by a collector. Or is the art object made in anticipation and for the exhibition and the human subject to come? This is rather obvious. But perhaps not, especially against the virtual social field of Instagram, wherein images of art objects are severed from the physical and human field of the exhibition as we know it. What do all these eventualities (in a world of more and more JPEGs of paintings and less and less experimental and artist-run spaces) say about the artist and art today? Are exhibitions greater than the sum of their parts in a world defined by objects to the detriment of the aesthetic field of form, feeling, relation and physical receptivity that determine the exhibition?
I must confess — after only admitting it to myself in the process of writing this — that this text is an intervention in my loss of attachment, faith, even love, for the exhibition as I idealise in my head. Maybe I am trying to convince myself of the value of the exhibition while simultaneously turning away from it as more and more simulacrums successfully streamline the awkward physical world of art.
Periphery Space, 2019.
Before we continue, here are a few defining prompts concerning the exhibition:
The exhibition has a life that is necessarily fleeting and residual.
To critically catch the conscience of the exhibition in words is also fleeting and residual and most of the time, fugitive.
The exhibition is presented as an event that is spontaneous and urgent, even though the exhibition itself has been carefully conceived and curated with a human subject in mind.
The exhibition is a holism, an object that cannot be broken down into parts, even by the most compartmentalised fetishist, or artist, who only sees himself in the art of others.
The exhibition is judged on the basis it is whole. It is what the Speculative Realists call a “flat ontology”.
The idea that we can love one painting out of a room full of paintings is reductive and short-sighted. We love one painting relative to the rest.
The exhibition is always waiting. It has been laid to rest by the artist in the white evil church. The artist has abandoned it; he only returns to drink wine and talk the talk while ignoring the objects that lay dead on the walls and floor.
The artist’s dependency on the exhibition puts the curator in demand. The exhibition is the nexus between artist and curator; and the human subject is the nexus between a dead art object and a live one.
Art objects are orphans in an orphanage.
The artist is not a fetishist of their art objects.
The artist is a fetishist of exhibitions and other art objects.
The exhibition is an object.
The exhibition is dead; dead until a human subject comes around with intention.
Not the unintentional gallery technician or attendant who switches on the lights and presses ON on the projector at noon. NO.
The exhibition is waiting for receptivity and relation, for someone to say one painting is good and the rest are bad.
The exhibition is a cap and a handful of clay on the lively and destructive process in the studio.
The art object is a corpse widow the artist has committed to the white evil church of fair-weather believers.
The exhibition excludes the artist but is inclusive of everyone else, like normal church goers.
Perhaps the artist is the devil, the source of the human subject’s predilections that are now solicited from him in the exhibition.
The exhibition, at its best, solicits surplus thoughts and feelings. It lives on them.
Without you the exhibition doesn’t exist.
The exhibition tries its hardest to not be an exhibition. It denies its own existence via its mediation through supplementary lively events that explicate and reinforce its need for nurturing to become the thing it isn't, alive when alone.
The exhibition, alive to the human subject, is a transparent thing. It is not an object then, it is a subject.
Those who collect art objects as fetishes orphaned from the exhibition are collecting the promise of something alive.
If we determine the exhibition as alive, it is alive to the human subject who is presently alive to it.
The exhibition illustrates a limit to process where a limit may not exist in process.
What if art were just a process? What if art were a way of being rather than becoming? Why do we need art objects to reify process? Being to become?
The exhibition eats itself; the art object perseveres.
The exhibition is in the wake of a life and a process. It waits.
The exhibition is a sacrifice.
The exhibition is psychological warfare (for the artist)
The exhibition is desperate for a lover; someone to inhabit the space between things. As Dan Graham said, “artists dream of being more social”.
Gene Beery, Artists Paint Themselves, c. 1970, acrylic on canvas, 25.4×40.6 cm
Discourse is a two-way street that is rarely taken in the drive-by narcissistic commentary of virtual culture. That said, I am slowly discovering what draws me back to the exhibition as opposed to the singularity of an art object. It’s the discourse, or the possibility of words therein, that occurs between me and the exhibition. It is not a discourse between two people about art, which, in my experience, gets us nowhere. It is the asymmetry between writer (subject) and art (object) that invokes real art discourse.
The notion of completed and dead art objects activated by the lively exhibition in the presence of the human subject to receive them, like the tree in the forest, stems, on reflection, from the last two years of cancelled, restricted and virtual substitutes for the physical exhibition during the pandemic. That aside, including the satiated and homogenising culture of Instagram, a critique of the exhibition as a relevant or necessary entity for experiencing objects as art was already forming in my activity as a fair-weather curator in a rural setting, where fantasies of a potential audience became an anxiety in the accumulating absence of one. There was also, in recent years, Berlin Opticians Gallery, now lapsed, that combined, like a hybrid car, the virtual with the physical exhibition while acquiescing, albeit with style, to the marketplace of art objects for sale. Berlin Opticians was a virtual and physical pop-up that inhaled the effervescent present in its online exhibitions, but also oriented itself towards the past via the heritage sites where its exhibitions took place offline. It was a civilised enterprise that promised but never fulfilled a meta-institutionalised critique (even if by accident and surplus to agenda).
I must also mention Object-Oriented Ontology’s (OOO) Graham Harmen et al, or more broadly speaking, Speculative Realism. Through my reading of OOO I became excited by something that was counter to the way I had thought about art objects in relation to the human subject. My process of thinking and writing about art privileges the exhibition over the art object, and the human subject in relation to the art object, or more specifically, the continued defence of subjective relation against objective reality in-and-of-itself. However, it must be said that when it comes to art objects, Graham Harmen has said that art objects need a human subject. In one instance the object-orientated ontologist remarks positively and empathetically on the heightened human relations with art objects in the Relational Aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics being a practical theory that seems more important today than it was when I first read the book some fifteen years ago as an art student.) Once again, like Heidegger, art confounds another philosopher vis-a-vis the principals and propositions of their philosophy.
Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics, 1998, Les Presses du réel.
Like the complete art objects that come packed in their crates and hard drives, the contemporary exhibition space is, for the most part, dead, with the potential to “live again” (Evil Dead II, 1987). Towards this potential liveliness, the dead gallery space is first populated by objects, singular objects conceived one at a time in the lively studio of the artist. These singular objects are arranged to activate the dead space and form what we call an ‘exhibition’. The exhibition is a thing that exists between the dead space of the gallery, the dead objects that inhabit the gallery, and the lively human subject with intent to come. This curatorial activation has nothing to do with filling the space floor to ceiling. It is more sophisticated and manipulative than that. It is so specialist we have a job description for it: curator.
This curatorial sophistication comes with a mime artist’s white gloves, and an awareness and privileging of the negative dead space of the white cube. The art objects are arranged in relation to the negative space of the white cube, which anticipates a human subject, resulting in an inherent anxiety between the non-spaces of the white cube and the art objects that furnish it. Unlike the seventeenth-century salon, the contemporary exhibition stresses the negative space of the gallery. And yet the gallery furnished with art objects is as dead as an unfurnished gallery, as both are detached from their maker, making and most importantly, a human subject to experience them. This is my contention, or discursive constraint for the present thoughts on dead art things and their potential liveliness in anticipation of exhibition and the human actor that receives them in the gallery.
The privileging of a human agent to mediate and correlate between objects, gallery and art, is a traditional philosophical stance. It is critically counter to the inventor of OOO, Graham Harman, who claims he is defending reality against the privileging of human agents to mediate reality. Harman’s project is to take out the middleman of subjectivity.
(As a side note, you could say “art writing” is a manifestation of OOO, with its habit of writing alongside the exhibition through evasive and subjective meanderings that swerve out of the way of the object for fear of confronting it, head on. In a sense art writing is the process and ambition of becoming an object alongside the exhibition. Whereas art criticism has no such delusions; it is absorbed into the exhibition. Art criticism ceases to exist for the public — in any meaningful way — after the exhibition is over.)
From “theanyspacewhatsoever” catalogue with Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno et al, 2008.
So what can we say about the contemporary exhibition that hasn’t been already said. This perspective on the exhibition is one that is quite personal, shaped as it is by a context that is as hard to escape as to see. It is entangled with an activity that concerns looking and experiencing exhibitions for the sake of language, of discourse, of words. I am an art critic. I articulate my experiences of art through the personal history of once being an exhibiting artist, one who made work with an exhibition in mind.
You could say the fantasy of the exhibition is antithetical to the lively process in the studio. If so, the exhibition is antithetical to liveliness. The liveliness that brought the exhibition into being needs to be substituted by an actor that does not act but receives from the soliciting exhibition. Could we say that art is the difference between the exhibition and the human subject? That art exists, not in the art object, but in the negative space that comprises the exhibition, negative spaces statically charged with the presence of an art object, the withdrawal of the artist, and the promise of someone to come?
Martin Heidegger
What I am propounding here, in the same metaphysical language, is art is alive, but not always. It is alive in two spaces: when being made in the studio, and in the negative space between the in-human art object and open-human subject. In these two spaces, art is the perpetual and destructive flux in the studio, or the static space between the closed art object and open human subject that coalesce to form the relationship that is the exhibition. Art is the relationship between closed and essential art objects and open and changing human subjects. Art is both eminent and immanence.
Art is being defined here in a Heideggerean sense of relation and use. Art is something we use. When it is not in use, or in flux, it is a static object minus the friction of change and human relation in the exhibition. When it is in use, continuing to lean on Heidegger, art becomes transparent, like the hurley becomes transparent in the hands of the hurler at the moment of unthinking and unflinching skill.
Hurler. Hurley. Hurling.
The live studio, contra the live exhibition, is a space of making and doing, experimenting and playing, and disappearing within the process, so the artist and object, both, become transparent in the reciprocal to and fro of lively subject and changing object. Then there's the moment in which the work is done and the fantasy-object of the outside world comes into play, with its agents and institutions, positive and negative spaces, wherein the dialogic between experience and intellect takes place. Art is when private and public collide.
This collision between studio process and exhibition outcome is not a big bang but a protracted limbo. The art work is an object. You could even say that it has an essence, one that is sealed off from the world until that world comes in contact with it with human openness and intention. It is an object that is made up of being and time. It is an object that has rubbed and is rubbing against the world. It belongs and doesn’t belong. It is alive in the memory of the artist, until that memory is infused with the fantasy of the exhibition and the other human subject who will experience it detached from the lively process — now a memory — of the studio.
The second the artist withdraws from the process of making, art becomes an object. Whether stored in a hard drive or a crate, it is a sleeping object, one that is both dead to the world and open to its lively potential. I imagine art objects with sensors, activated by the very presence of a mind and a body that can converse with it in hushed tones and physical gestures in the gallery. In the gallery, when human sensors are blinking red, the art object once again becomes transparent, as it did in the studio with the artist or the hurler in full unthinking and unflinching flow.
It’s a strange convention, isn't it? the exhibition. This temporaneous event, both dead and alive, is enlivened by the human subject who receives and lives it. Like capitalism, there are no fire exits from this white church of the exhibition. Artificial it may be, antithetical but necessary to the artist’s process it certainly is, transformational of objects that sit outside the official language of art it possibly can, the exhibition democratises art objects into what the Speculative Realists call a flat ontology, wherein the objets d'art collide like billiard balls on a pool table outside the mediating influence of the human subject. I don’t deny that there is something seductive about an object-on-object ontology, especially for artists, who have to speculate on the real subjects that experience their work in the exhibition in their absence. The artist will never experience their own art objects like the other does and will. That’s the sacrifice.
Tristan Garcia
Tristan Garcia helps the case of OOO with his lyricism in contrast to the Gradgrind prose of its inventor, Graham Harmen. There is something democratic about OOO, a levelling of the aesthetic field. And not just as a metaphor for society in its beautiful flatness and speculative democracy. In Tristan Garcia’s Speculative Realism, “showing” and “exhibiting” are very different phenomena: showing being a gesture that includes the subject gesturing to the object for your attention; whereas the exhibition “is letting an object present itself” after the subject (artist) withdraws. The exhibition is not natural no matter how hard it tries to be. It is a setup. It is an arrangement. It elicits suspicion in the human subject. It is a prearrangement waiting to be rearranged in the other’s mind and nerves. There is something collaborative and lively about the demand “Show me your work”.
“Painting is a secretive business anyway. [The painter] is someone who’s not suited to the public. Someone who wouldn’t speak up in public, but goes for it here [in the studio] in secret.”
“It makes a big difference when the paintings are hanging there like a performance, like an opera you have written on paper on the studio wall, in the dirt. Then suddenly it is there. It was really good. ”
I cannot imagine experiencing an exhibition as a non-artist, or without my imaginary semantic friend. The exhibition is a lonely space without the practical experience of making art or the need to transform that practical empathy into words, or what I have defined here as subject-object discourse in the absence or impossibility of human discourse. That said, I still think that the exhibition is a sad rather than flat ontology, the arc of its horizon curving downward towards the liquid ocean of its metaphorical source.
Bruce Nauman in his San Francisco studio with “The True Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain” (Window or Wall Shade)”. c.1960s.
Although for art market reasons rather than philosophical ones, I like how Bruce Nauman contractually forces borrowing institutions to destroy his neon text replicas after the exhibition is over. Should this be a natural outcome of art objects following an exhibition? If so, John Baldessari didn’t need to preserve the ashes of the 10-plus years of paintings he cremated and housed in a bronze urn in the shape of a book. The gesture seems to defeat the statement. Or was Baldessari’s positive nihilism an effort towards a flat ontology between objects and their ashes? In the end I believe art is a way of being a thing not becoming a thing. And more importantly, the exhibition in its attunement to a public in the event of the presence of a human subject, makes art present.—James Merrigan
*find out more about Small Night and its forthcoming ART&TEXT project here