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The noises within echo from a gimcrack, remote and ideologically hollow chamber: a project status report on the middle line sensorium and contemporary practices in the maintenance of productive tensions in the workplace 1 1.1 We know well that works of art can shock the unwary by their relation to accumulated domestic monstrosities, so 1 we should warn you before we proceed: monsters have not been eradicated. 1.2 In reviewing our most recent appraisals of managerial conduct and activities, through which we have distinguished the key discursive components that make “the formulation of the creative and semiautonomous curatorial 2 position possible,” we can surmise a hegemonic character and charm of the rhetoric of ‘participation.’ It is the very tonic of the Liberal-democra-drive feedback loop that buttresses the frontier of management discourse. Among the manifold techniques of regulation, control and abatement crystalizing this discourse as the “performative strategy for the production of meaning and being” that it presently claims to be, is the canny deployment of dialogical frameworks that generate, organize and maintain resonant fields of ‘productive 3 tensions.’ These productive tensions, the grist to the mill of social inclusion that amplifies the spirit of vibrant diversity™, are expertly managed as per the curatorial imperative of mediating encounters within specific frameworks of operation; within boundaries structured according to the rule of possessive individualism; within the hollow enclosure of an echo chamber. Such a technique is a recent mannerism which combines the uneven developments and fractured histories of curatorial praxes, acting as the silent locus of a Baroque Managerialism. Participation and its discontents are elaborated and corralled in all their dramatic tensions and exuberant dynamism, where the postcard image of mediated conflict is the active cypher of value. Also, we note that the present document is not an evaluation of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ curatorial and artistic practices, nor a declaration that such modes of operation ‘should not be,’ or even that they are un-interesting, but simply an illustration of the repurposed theories of compossibility that gather momentum as mere political affectation. 1.2.1 Noise organised for extraction of surplus value isn’t noise, but silence at high volume.
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1.3 The Modern figure of the manager, while also inheriting qualities from pre-Modern exemplars of creative governance and social engineering, is a local, historically contingent assemblage of habits and dispositions recognizable as ‘managerial.’ Curators then, in their present semblance of heterogeneous practices, are typical of a new lineage of managers derived from this genealogy, inundating contemporary art discourse with what could either be the kind of cunning manipulation and slick, technocratic rhetoric we have come to recognise as the staple 1
Quotation from Elizabeth Price’s ‘User Group Disco’ (2010), which appropriates the language of managerial ‘guru’ Henry Mintzberg, and, of Theodore W. Adorno. 2 O’ Neill, Paul. ‘The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s),’ Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012, p. 129. 3 4
O’ Neill, Paul. ‘The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s),’ Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012, p. 120. Watson, Ben. ‘Music, Violence, Truth,’ London: Ian Land & Andy Wilson, The Dolphin Pub, Hackney, 2002, p. 4.
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of representational politics, or else the kind of confused and tragic badinage of the unwitting pin-stripe-Pagliacci, David Brent. These are not necessarily either/or categories of identification that contemporary curators reside within, but rather the two indexical poles of a discursive world of relations that encompasses the diversity of popular curatorial activities and theory. We may locate the renewed spirit of managerialism within the character of the curator, but then the role has become a diffuse contemporary paradigm itself, expanding into the daily lives of anyone hoping to make meaning out of the ‘content’ that suffuses the everyday. This has also come to bear a strong relationship with artistic practices, particularly those operating under the banner of ‘socially engaged art’ which itself is a flag often billowed by the fluctuating winds of cultural policy and its representative middle line authorities. These assorted demonstrations of a managerial complex are emblematic of a pervasive logic that relies upon the institution of cybernetic technologies – parasitic feedback loops replenished with a high sheen of the language of the dictatorial freedom of participatory democracy, in short, a scourge of Human Resources.
1.3.1 These procedures, embedded as they are in the relative heteronomy of the crumbling late-Capitalist technostructure, ape the value-producing mechanisms that demand commodities primarily to be countable, measurable and separable in order to be commodities. The tasks of the curator have altered very little in their “acts of collecting or assembling, ordering, presenting, and communicating,” even in this late-stage Baroqueness of managed entropy which understands that “[a]s exhibited objects the materials assembled are ‘in action’: that is, 5 they obtain changing and dynamic meanings in the course of the process of being related to one another.” This evolved managerial logic of course requires and bolsters the expedient civic language of participation as an alibi for the pre-figurative systemic function of value production, where value is located in the aesthetic programme of framing productive tensions as ends in themselves. Curators have appropriately learned to disavow consensus among things and people, but in favour of a more streamlined and nuanced version that merely obfuscates the processes of mediation: homeostasis. This tendency is rather based upon temporary equilibriums, whether these are exhibitions or events as ‘micro-utopias,’ which acknowledge their indebtedness to the interdependence of the elements and individuals that comprise (and not necessarily generating) them. Operationally, what makes participation and its corollary, empowerment, attractive to government, business and civil society entities is its promise of overcoming decisions between governors and governed without invoking conflict or radical modification of the existing arrangement; if everyone is participating, then how can there be any 6 grievance? Participation as an ideological aesthetic practice manages dissensus by constituting both a sanctioned arena of antagonism that consequently perpetuates existing conditions, nullifying any substantial critical efficacy, and also, 7 a “politics of marginality.” The first of these lacks an essential anthropological understanding of the multifarious modes and tactics of discourse through which different publics organise, whose sociability and forms of critical reflection may not depend upon the faculties ordained by the rational-critical organisation of ‘civil society.’ And, by commodifying margins of encounter these zones of productive tension, fashioned from a curatorial position as the panoptic apparatus of Liberal hegemony, disregard an ‘unwanted remainder.’ This is the action of the curatorial 5
Von Bismarck, Beatrice. ‘Curatorial Criticality – On the Role of Freelance Curators in the Field of Contemporary Art,’ http://doublesession.net/indexhibitv070e/files/vonbismarckcuratingcriticality.pdf, (accessed: 18/11/2012). 6 Vishmidt, Marina, ‘The Cultural Logic of Criticality,’ Journal of Visual Art Practice, 7: 3, p. 262. 7
Foster, Hal. ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ The Return of the Real. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 303.
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apophenic lens through which undesirable, ‘unnecessary’ noise is disregarded in favour of a discursive pattern that fits with the external framework of participation itself. Rather than enacting an ethics of listening, the managerial practice of selective hearing performs a renewed process of ‘othering’ upon the ‘unconventional.’ Like the 1836 Parisian exhibition Salon des Refusés, which displayed a number of paintings rejected by the official Paris Salon now seen as integral to the Western canon of fine art, and, significantly, was sponsored by the French government, contemporary curatorial practices similarly operate by means of engaging with a formally sanctioned subversion. However, it is the incommensurable instances of noise that management cannot negotiate, and are thus not considered ‘productive’ in relation to its pre-figurative agenda. Such monstrosities are deemed so as a consequence of their excess in relation to managerial calculation. 2 2.1 A recent example of this managerialism in its full affirmational Baroqueness is the 2008 project Carte Blanche at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK) in Leipzig. Carte Blanche invited several private individuals and organisations to make use of the GfZK gallery space and administrative infrastructure to present their own bodies of artworks, which of course meant that the host organisation facilitated numerous attitudes and curatorial approaches that were in opposition to their own organisational ethos. The participants were literally given ‘carte blanche’ to approach the project as they pleased which suggests an unbounded freedom, but it this very giving of carte blanche that is embedded in the operations of Baroque Managerialism, which is a delegation of action and also a hospitable ‘opening up’ which in recent practices has been uncritically accepted as a completely positive gesture. The Hospitable Hand is one that is equally controlling, and maintains a complex and reciprocal relationship with guests. As well as this anticipated area of conflict arising from distinct approaches, the participants themselves each negotiated the tensions between one another and within their own organisations during the phases of planning and exhibition. An ‘introductory’ exhibition was also curated by GfZK staff and associates Barbara Steiner, Ilina Koralova, Andreja Hribernik and Julia Schäfer that marked the beginning of the project and highlighted some of the fundamental issues that comprised the conceptual framework of Carte Blanche, entitled Friendly Enemies. As well as laying the groundwork for subsequent theoretical engagement through participation, this part of the exhibition also explicitly alludes to the political theories of Chantal Mouffe, whose concept of agonism (summarised in the exhibition title) is described in her publication, The Democratic Paradox (2000). Agonism is a concept attached to Mouffe’s description of a radical democracy in which the focus on pluralism depicts individuals sharing a common space as political adversaries, or, ‘friendly enemies’ who acknowledge their differences rather than aiming to achieve a rational, idealistic consensus. However, it is clear that in “implementing frictions” Carte Blanche enacted a coordinated division of labour in which the project’s participants satisfied the “primary interest” of the host institution “to challenge continually the system if art and its 8 values.” The project here is the source of frictions rather than a tool that highlights the structural antagonisms which occur between individuals as a consequence of the very system GfZK hoped to critique. The tensions mediated by GfZK were productive in relation to a performative agenda that dramatizes difference as an ideological construction. This instance of curatorial experimentation exemplifies management’s role of effecting
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Steiner, Barbara. ‘On Display,’ Cultures of the Curatorial, B. Von Bismarck, J. Schafaff, T. Weski (Eds.), Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, p. 262.
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the “conduct of conduct,” with a clear emphasis on the novelty of form and the appropriation of the activities of 9 participants. 2.2 The turn towards representing dissensus is concurrent with the postmodern traumas of pluralism and geopolitical awareness. However, coupled with the managerialism described already, such activity only serves to perpetuate the Liberal-democratic alibi of individual freedom. Freedom, as the defining factor of this perfectly interwoven nexus of power, is the ultimate mythos, the most 10 powerful of all rhetoric as it is literally value-less.
From ‘Cultural Identity & Global Process’ by Jonathan Friedman (1994).
3 3.1 If all possibilities are extant, this can only be a totality of incompossibles, which harbours as yet unactualised and 11 incommensurable genres… monstrous but exhilarating hybrids. 3.2 An echo chamber is a hollow enclosure often used in sound and music recording which effects the amplification of a source transmission. Here, it refers to a social situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified and reinforced by transmission inside an ‘enclosed’ system, the effect of which is to manage and disregard conflicting views and political adversaries. Such an enclosure is remarkable by its implementation of technology which both intensifies the reverberations of the transmissions ‘inside’ while regulating or abating the noise ‘outside.’ We understand a clear link between this phenomenon and contemporary curatorial praxes. This curatorial activity in its myriad forms, bounded as they are in the suggested mantra of Baroque Managerialism, operates with the commendable intentions of critically engaging with occurrences of power structures and their abuse by private
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Vishmidt, Marina. ‘Everyone Has a Business Inside of Them,’ http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/everyone-has-business-inside-them, (accessed: 10/11/2012). 10 Poole, Matthew. ‘Anti-Humanist Curating: Finding a Way Further In,’ Journal of Visual Art Practice, 9: 2, p. 100. 11
Brassier, Ray. ‘Genre Is Obsolete,’ Noise and Capitalism, A. Iles, Mattin (Eds.), Artekule, 2010, p. 86.
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interest. However, the very process by which they function, and engage with people, is simply an inherited arrangement of procedures that serve the same ends as their projected target of critique. Can we find in ‘noise’ a rehabilitative potential for critique?
Brian Eno – Operational diagram for ‘Discreet Music’ (1975)
The first impulse would be to locate such instances of noise and to mine these moments for disciplinary augmentation, though this would be a further implementation of the managerial logic that requires, as a structural virtue, for its participants to adapt (to changing market conditions). We suggest that the present curatorial discourses consider the kernel of thought at the heart of the content of their aims, rather than the form of their presentation. Of course, numerous practices surely exist that already traverse such logic, particularly those that aim primarily to be research-based, context-specific, and work alongside individuals who provoke legislative change or media attention in different situations of uneven power distribution. But, we also offer another possible mode, related to this conception of noise. It is that curators salvage what they can from the accumulated discourses of the last few decades while recognising the character of such discourses as being the mere churning of junk and ruin sloughed up by a failing system: “the core operation of salvage has not to do with scrapping the last bits of value from the busted, but with recognising how that busting alone brings to life the specificity of a 12 thing, the partial logic embedded in the whole… [invoking] the visibility of what it deserved to be all along.” This process turns noise on the curator rather than upon their public – we turn to the unwanted remainder of curating as a practice through this act of salvage by recognising the inherent antagonisms of a material entity imbricated with the structural alienation of Capitalist production. Contrary to the dominant belief of the Baroque Managerialism, mobilisation of a public cannot be siphoned from the social-situation-as-action-painting. Rather than the anticipated transgression of anti-management, or anticurating, we see in noise the possible non-blueprint of an ab-management. 3.2.1 Feedback can reach a point where it is generating more noise than the system as currently constituted can manage or optimize for its own ends, thus broadening a point of indistinction between feedback and a new system – the 13 system that the feedback may propose when it overwhelms the system’s integrative capacities.
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Evan Calder Williams quoted during the ‘Salvagepunk Symposium’ at Warwick Arts Centre, January 2012. Vishmidt, Marina, ‘The Cultural Logic of Criticality,’ Journal of Visual Art Practice, 7: 3, p. 263.
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3.3 Positive feedback is a process in which the effects of disturbances on a system can include an increase in magnitude of perturbation, and, we see the foundational thoughts towards ab-management as such a process, as an action of maladaptation. If curators recognise and critically question such ‘affirmative’ managerial traits as expertise, innovation, delegation, reputation and the capacity to measure and separate things for their most productive commensurability, then the tensions realised by such projects will not be productive in terms of a prefigurative agenda, but will generate multiple ‘monstrous’ methods, not just forms, antithetical to a single hegemonic perspective. The materials of such tensions are extant within given situations and their happenstances, rather than implemented by managers.
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Bibliography Brassier, Ray. ‘Genre Is Obsolete,’ Noise and Capitalism, A. Iles, Mattin (Eds.), Artekule, 2010.
Foster, Hal. ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ The Return of the Real. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996, p. 303.
O’ Neill, Paul. ‘The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s),’ Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012
Poole, Matthew. ‘Anti-Humanist Curating: Finding a Way Further In,’ Journal of Visual Art Practice, 9: 2, pp. 91 – 101.
Price, Elizabeth, ‘User Group Disco’ (2010)
Steiner, Barbara. ‘On Display,’ Cultures of the Curatorial, B. Von Bismarck, J. Schafaff, T. Weski (Eds.), Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012
Vishmidt, Marina. ‘Everyone Has a Business Inside of Them,’ http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/everyone-has-business-inside-them, (accessed: 10/11/2012).
Vishmidt, Marina, ‘The Cultural Logic of Criticality,’ Journal of Visual Art Practice, 7: 3, pp. 253 – 268.
Von Bismarck, Beatrice. ‘Curatorial Criticality – On the Role of Freelance Curators in the Field of Contemporary Art,’ http://doublesession.net/indexhibitv070e/files/vonbismarckcuratingcriticality.pdf, (accessed: 18/11/2012).
Watson, Ben. ‘Music, Violence, Truth,’ London: Ian Land & Andy Wilson, The Dolphin Pub, Hackney, 2002
Williams, Evan Calder. ‘Salvagepunk Symposium’ (2012)