How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann
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the other it presents them in a way that seeks to have maximum impact on the subjectivity of the viewer. By bringing these two dimensions together, the object that is produced and the object that is consumed (or actively and intentionally related to), the exhibition in an exemplary way participates in the hegemonic manner in which individual subjectivity is shaped in Western market societies.
And, finally, the very notion of “product” is mirrored in and at the same time ennobled by the conception of the artwork. Market societies derive their wealth from the production of material objects and their circulation through commerce, and the visual art field is engaged in the exact same process. Visual art not only reiterates these basic components of Western societies but, through the museum, even constructs an entire ritual designed to dignify them by removing their objects from a sphere of practice and use, elevating them to a seemingly higher realm in which meaning and subjectivity are produced.
According to this line of thinking, “autonomy” is a euphemism for art’s subjection to basic elements of bourgeois democratic market society, and the art exhibition is the place where these values and parameters are cultivated and performed in their respective relation to each other. This brings up two decisive questions that this book attempts to deal with: How is this governing function played out in exhibitions today? And, secondly, if every exhibited artwork—consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or unwittingly—becomes part of the setting outlined above and therefore participates in the political biases of the exhibition format, is there a way for artists to act upon this format?
To understand these questions it is helpful to return to the suspicions and ambitions of the avant-gardes of the 20th century, who attacked art’s autonomy in order to lead art “back into the praxis of life,” as Peter Bürger phrased it. 3 The museum in particular was seen as the embodiment of art’s exclusion from social life. Yet, the history of the avant-garde movements has shown that their attempts to increase art’s social effectiveness by breaking with its fundamental conventions—the museum and the notion of the artwork—were largely bound to fail. On the occasion of a Dada retrospective in Paris in 1967, Max Ernst told the curator Werner Spies “to put the spirit of Dada on exhibition [ … ] was like trying to capture the violence of an explosion by presenting the shrapnel.” 4 The avant-garde’s self-conception was based on an oppositional stance to the conventions of art, but despite their fundamental goal of changing art’s relationship to society, their attacks took place as art and therefore necessarily within a relationship to these conventions. This double-bind-like character of their criticism, which remained attached to (or even dependent on) what it criticized, became blatantly clear when the first avant-gardes became historical and re-entered not only the museum but, with it, also precisely those conventions of a symbolical and material fixation that they had strived to overcome. This was also true for the event-oriented neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and early 1970s, whose re-integration into the museum meant a return to the very conventions that had originally been negated: the material object and the fact that it remains throughout history. Any exhibition about Fluxus, Happening or Performance Art renders this visible: instead of the singularity and the live quality of the event, we see relics, material substrata and endlessly reproduced videos. However, this museification of the avant-gardes even makes sense in a way, for their critique of the separation between art and a living practice actually belonged to the museum. Only there could the attacks against the conventions of art be understood. Avant-garde art ultimately became an art of the museum precisely by struggling to wrench itself free from it. The avant-gardes have without a doubt succeeded in significantly modifying the notion of the artwork by opening up new contents and forms. But, viewed in terms of their own ambitions, namely to fundamentally change art’s social reality, they failed.
From today’s perspective and for a generation of artists that fed off the achievements (and failures) of the avant-gardes, their legacy includes two lessons to be learned: first, although the avant-gardes marked the 20th century as an era of artistic rupture with convention, their own history demonstrates that there are some conventions that cannot be broken. Among them the objecthood of the artwork, its status as a product and the artwork’s historical persistence. As these conventions constitute the idea of art in the modern era, one cannot break with them without ultimately breaking with what constitutes art itself. Art that doesn’t offer a possibility of enduring over time either is made durable (as with the event-oriented neo-avant-gardes, Fluxus, Happening and Performance Art), or in the long run falls out of the canon of visual art (the Situationists might be the best example of this, as they came closest to a complete withdrawal from museification). Second, the avant-gardes taught us that art was never autonomous to begin with. The German philosopher Hermann Lübbe once said that, in art, “self-purpose is state purpose” 5—a useful phrase for describing the societal function of art in modernity. The fact that art lost its practical, immediate function does not mean that it no longer has a social and political function. Autonomy does not mean that art breaks free from its use for non-aesthetic purposes, but rather indicates that the level on which this purpose is fulfilled has shifted from the form and content of individual artworks to art’s conventionalized ways of production, presentation and experience in which very basic constitutive parameters of modern societies are kept and cultivated.
In the ninth of his Ten Theses on Politics, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière states that the “end of politics” and the “return of politics” are two complementary ways of “forgetting politics.”6 Societal significance can neither be carried into the arts, nor can it be left outside. A political relevance is always there, but this does not mean that it cannot be shaped. The fact that the exhibition affirms, enacts and cultivates a number of the most basic categories of a democratic market society does not imply that the public sphere which the exhibition participates in producing does not exist. It also does not mean that the political bias of art is already completely determined a priori by this institution. Yet it is only from within these conditions that we can start a discussion on art’s significance, and the consequences of this assertion is what this book will explore: the artwork does not gain a societal impact by rupturing these conventions; it is via these conventions that there already is a societal impact. The exhibition format, as the avant-gardes taught us, cannot be taken out of art, just as it cannot be taken out of art’s politicity. It is essential to a work’s praxis, and therefore part of art’s public and political existence. Any impact art has can therefore occur not by breaking with this context, but by making it the place where art takes place in praxis.
The four artists in this book—James Coleman, Daniel Buren, Tino Sehgal and Jeff Koons—exemplify such work on and within the exhibition ritual. Each of these artists operates upon some of the very fundamental parameters of art in modernity, which constitute art’s intrinsic connection to the socio-economic order of modern societies: the notion of evolutive time, the focus on the individual that recognizes and differentiates him or herself vis-à-vis the material object, and the status of this object as a product.
Given that the museum—in its original conception—is a machine that produces an evolutive and linear conception of time, development and progress, how can an artwork exist in the museum without subordinating itself to this conception of history? How can an artwork within the museum, which already implies a specific notion of time, insert a different temporality? The works of the Irish artist James Coleman provide a highly complex answer to this question. Many of his visual-acoustic installations thematize issues and practices of cultural memory. Yet as his works are composed in a fragmentary and structurally time-based way, remembering plays an essential role in the constitution of the artwork itself. If anything, it is only in the viewer’s perception and memory that the images and the spoken words come together to form a “work.” This, one might say, is true of many multimedia installations today. But as Coleman prohibits any technical recordings of his work, one’s own necessarily fragmentary and subjective memory gains a different, constitutive status. I had to rely on my own memory in writing about the work at the center of the chapter about Coleman, Box (ahhareturnabout) from 1977. His works are marked by a particular