“communicate itself on its own terms”, was seriously problematic and resulted in an exhibition in which much remained incomprehensible – from the choice of art and the arrangement and juxtaposition of the individual works through to decisions concerning architecture and exhibition settings. As Jérôme Glicenstein has pointed out, the idea that an exhibition can “speak for itself”, avoiding the need for all mediation, is somewhat misguided ; an exhibition is in fundamental ways a system that has the aim of mediating the elements it contains – the artworks – to the viewers ( and this is one of the senses in which one can speak of an exhibition as a “medium” ). But although the reluctance of the Documenta 12 and 5th Berlin Biennial curators to explain their presentational forms and compositional principles was in some ways problematic, it appears that this reluctance was motivated by a challenging belief that the big exhibition has its own modes of aesthetic operation, its own forms of expression and signifying effects that cannot be reproduced or summarized exhaustively in other media or forms of expression. In this way these exhibitions raised a number of interesting and speculative problems concerning the means with which one could understand the big exhibition. If this kind of exhibition offers operations, forms of expression and signifying effects that cannot be articulated using other expressive means – if the big exhibition amounts to a medium for a specific type of knowledge – doesn’t this imply that the exhibition itself could be an instrument for analysing these operations and effects ? And extending from this problem : could the big exhibition be used as a medium for writing its own histories ? One should note that there already seems to be an active interest, not just in the exhibition’s
historiography, but also in the exhibition “qua” historiography – “a part of biennial enterprise could be to focus on historical forms of exhibition making, an exhibition on exhibitions,” as Simon Sheikh writes – as became clear with a project such as Charles Esche and Maria Hlavajova’s “Once is Nothing” at the first Brussels Biennial in 2008, a remake of an earlier exhibition but this time without the artworks. One should also note that it is probably no coincidence that in recent years the most advanced and complex experiment with the exhibition’s form and history was Jean-Luc Godard’s Voyage(s) en Utopie at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006. At the endpoint of these reflections one finds again a fantasy about an exhibition form that simultaneously presents and distances : an exhibition form that presents its objects, the artworks, while at the same time distancing them, divorcing them from their self-evidence, rendering them alien, so as thereby to draw attention to and to profile the processes and means of production of the presentation itself. An exhibition form that shows, but at the same time shows that it shows : we should remember that this was also Brecht’s programme for his epic theatre, his famous “verfremdung”. We should also remember that for Brecht this distancing, this alienation, was a matter not just of exposing the mechanisms of presentation, but also of showing the presented objects in another way, in all their complexity, with their historic differences and lacunae, so as to be able subsequently to bring them together in a critical narrative art, assemble them into critical stories. Returning to the questions with which I began this text, one could say that it is perhaps primarily by means of such a distancing presentation of its objects that the big exhibition should really be able to represent a place with regard to its cultural and historical peculiarities.