EX IT
FORMS OF IMAGINING 16.09–13.11.10 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
HIB ION
Martin Beck, Nina Beier, Luca Frei, Sriwhana Spong, Pernille Kapper Williams Curated by Tessa Giblin
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Introduction Artworks Exhibiting Space, Time and the Exhibition Itself List of Works Unrecorded Interview
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Introduction
For the galleries and museums that house tem porary exhibitions, one after another, year after year, the space of the gallery and its apparatus of display can evolve like a chameleon – performing, disappearing or establishing itself as a context for the exhibition. The space of the gallery asserts itself in response to the imaginations and politics of the artists who inhabit it, and the worlds they build. Exhibitions brings together artists whose practices are responsive to politics of display, for whom the practice of exhibition-making is a motivation of their work, and who consider the exhibition as a medium. This particular gallery in Project Arts Centre in Dublin, is a windowless room with many views. Devoid of natural light but aided by a high ceiling, the gallery has naturally become a room for experimentation where artists and curators install artworks in an imagined context and, in doing so, will that context into being. This exhibition thus keeps in mind the many different evolutions of its own space, becoming a theatre during Gerard Byrne’s In Repertory, a cinema for Katya Sander’s A Landscape of Known Facts or a writing studio during PHILIP. Exhibitions listens to what artists tell us about the space they work in, and the performers, signifiers and props they use to hint at the conditions of their production. It also holds a not-so-metaphorical mirror to the sum of conventions that exhibition-making can sometimes be. Artists are embedding the context of production, conditions of display, time, space and discourse into artworks which then co-exist with other artworks. The realm of the exhibition begins as you enter the room, the moment a card is slipped into your pocket, or perhaps now, as you read this. Exhibitions is a project that is aware of its own form and is thus self-referential, introducing a super-sized version of its own generic discourse in the form of an over-sized gallery guide, collected at the threshold of the room. It’s a show in which the company of artworks is nevertheless surprising, hoping that visitors will find their own way to play and navigate the arena. Tessa Giblin
Exhibitions entrance and Nina Beier, exhibition view, Project Arts Centre, 2010
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Martin Beck
(b. 1963, Bludenz, Austria)
Martin Beck’s video installation About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007) is presented in a specifically designed room within the gallery. The video is a looped study of the assembly and disassembly of Struc-Tube, a modular display system developed by the American designer George Nelson in 1948 and reconstructed in 2005 by Beck. During a single camera take, two workers efficiently assemble and disassemble the system. StrucTube is based on a simple keyhole connecting solution that holds together the skeletal structure. It can therefore be assembled without tools by any unskilled worker: a worker who may not belong to a union or demand fair pay. Beck calls the connector joint based exhibitions systems of the 1950s ‘models of efficiency’: ‘[They] represent condensed spatial and practical knowledge, they are symbols of economic organisation and dissemination; and they are emblematic of a tendency that translates modern rationality into an administrative effort.’
Such display systems are based on a rational spatial grid logic – similar to the one that structures the film Powers of Ten (1968) by Charles and Ray Eames, the subtitle of which, About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, Beck used as the title of his artwork. Connected to the system, an exhibition panel displays the phrase ‘the artist in social communication’, a quote from a greeting card exhibition for which the system was first used. Midway 4/5
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Martin Beck About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 2007, HD video stills
through the assembly, the workers are interrupted by a labour organiser who enters the scene and asks them to join a meeting. Burdened with additional installation work to be completed elsewhere, they decline the invitation. The workers return to their job, finish the assembly and leave the scene, while the camera keeps running with a view of the assembled system. Later, the workers return and begin to dismantle the structure. The labour organiser appears again to repeat the same invitation which again has to be declined by the workers. The film finishes on the identical frame to the one at which it began, a re-enactment shot of an archival image of the original installation. From there the film loops back and the cycle continues. Emily Pethick notes that Nelson’s Struc-Tube system ‘prefigured a shift from industrial, unionised labour relations to a more casual, precarious labour market,’ and observes the action of the workers’ looping endeavours in Beck’s film as ‘continuous assembly and disassembly without rest breaks or payment for overtime.’ Throughout the film and its installation, ideas about display, power and manipulation gradually accumulate. Beck writes of the motivation and function of these modularised exhibition systems:
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All quoted passages are taken from Martin Beck – About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (Casco, Utrecht and Four Corners Books, London, 2007).
Martin Beck About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 2007, HD video still
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‘The viewer’s movement through an exhibition and access to various kinds of information follows an open path, but within a regulated set of possibilities. The emancipatory experience provided by the possibility to take in information is framed by an apparatus that simultaneously facilitates sovereignty and control … The modular exhibit system and its emblem, the connector joint, are at the heart of the paradox that continuously haunts modernity’s utopias: they liberate as they regulate and they regulate as they liberate.’
Nina Beier
(b. 1975, Aarhus, Denmark)
Nina Beier’s conversational practice deliberately leaves elements of the artwork’s production up to the individuals and scenarios with which she collaborates, giving her works the permanent possibility of accident. She includes three artworks in Exhibitions, two of which have been developed specifically for the show. In Trauerspiel (2010), the idea of a sculpture is communicated by the artist to a hired actor, who is asked to re-make the artwork that is subsequently exhibited in the gallery. The resulting clay piece is set atop a standard metal structure and installed in front of another of her artworks, Morphological Mimicry and Mymphathetic Magic (2010), a curtain made of canvas which hangs behind the work. This curtain, made in exactly the same colour as the clay work, makes the sculpture nearly impossible to document from a fullfrontal position, with the sculpture effectively mimicking its environment like a defensive strategy of the wild. When the exhibition closes, Trauerspiel (or ‘mourning play’ and as opposed to ‘tragedy’) will again be destroyed, waiting to be communicated to another actor – the person whose job it is to turn the script into a play. One of the two new pieces – On the Uses and Dis advantages of Wet Paint (2010) – was made continuously for the duration of the exhibition. A variably coloured patch of wall, a small warning sign and the aroma of fresh 8/9
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Nina Beier Trauerspiel, 2010, clay sculpture; Morphological Mimicry and Mympathetic Magic, 2010, canvas curtain and metal stand
Nina Beier Trauerspiel, 2010, clay sculpture; overleaf: On the Uses and Disadvantages of Wet Paint, 2010, paint previously used in Dublinbased art galleries
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paint, are the signifiers of the activity which sees the patch painted over each morning. With the paint acquired from Project Arts Centre’s own repertoire of half-used paint cans and supplemented by art galleries and museums across Dublin, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Wet Paint imports a memory of exhibition display, branding display or gallery maintenance, and introduces to the exhibition ideas of the incomplete state. ‘A final, parting paradox (but certainly not the final one),’ writes Chris Sharp in the artwork Text, ‘although haunted by instability, Beier’s art continually seeks to remind us how mediated art is, not just in terms of how it is presented, its context etc., but on a more fundamental level, which is to say that it is less the offspring of a pure, creative impulse than the product of learned and established rules, implicit taboos, and prohibitions … This text then, and others like it, could likewise be seen as a form of mediation, a way to read the work, or even a set of rules. Yet as we all know, rules are made to be broken, and Beier not only has a knack, but … [a] talent for breaking them.’
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Luca Frei D2, 2010, wood dowelling, chain, hooks (detail)
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(b. 1976, Lugano, Switzerland)
Luca Frei’s sprawling sculptural installation takes the name of the postcode in which it is shown – in this case, the Dublin 2 postcode D2. Lengths of standard wooden dowelling are pierced by hooks at each end and linked by metal chains into a long procession. The form that evolves from this construction is a sculpture, a prop and a tool – both individually and collectively. Luca Frei has a background in exhibition design as well as art making, and the two practices here easily dissolve into one as the artist liberates the form from a permanent position, perspective or reading. A responsive and tactile object to be handled and played with, the sculptural configuration of D2 changes over the period of the installation. ‘In this way,’ the artist noted during an interview at the Vanabbemuseum in March 2010, ‘a structure can lead you, guide you, and also provoke you.’ For Luca Frei, the specific employment of certain materials enables them to communicate through a language of their own. When thinking about the weight, smell, feel and balance of the piece, what connotations might the chains conjure? As a prop, D2 is unlikely to be manipulated all at once: it is an adaptive, consisting of separated pieces, all intrinsically linked together. The movement caused by repositioning one length of wood, or by animating the swing of the chain, has the potential to ripple through the entire snake.
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Luca Frei
It is unlikely however that it will, as it is essentially too big. Overall, Luca Frei identifies D2 with the act of drawing. Viewed in this way, D2 is a line in space that creates both fragments and entire sentences of marks, tracing a history of movement. With our own movement through the space we too create the drawing. The drawn line thus has the potential to divide the exhibition space, to demarcate one side from the other, top from bottom, horizontal from vertical, this artwork from that artwork, leaving one curious most of all, as to what it might look like from up there.
Luca Frei D2, 2010, wood dowelling, chain, hooks
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Sriwhana Spong Costume for a Mourner, 2010, Digital video stills
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(b. 1979, Auckland, New Zealand)
Sriwhana Spong’s film depicts a dancer who wears the artist’s remake of a costume originally crafted by Henri Matisse. Piecing together the few documents and archives that have survived from the original Ballet Russes production of Le Chant du Rossignol, Spong’s resulting outfit brings a sculptural garment back to life and propels a dancer to explore the movement of his body within it. The costume is oriental and structured in its design: white fabric patterned with dark black triangles and adorned with spiky eaves around the crown of the head. Costume for a Mourner is based on a scene in Le Chant du Rossignol (itself based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Nightingale) in which mourners attend the bedside of the ailing Chinese Emperor. Choreographed and performed by Benny Ord who inhabits the role of a mourner, it is the scene in which the Emperor is haunted by the presence and vision of Death. In the original tale, the nightingale, which years before had been replaced at court by a mechanised version of itself, returns from his banishment in the forest to comfort and restore the Emperor in his hour of need. Stravinsky’s score for Le Chant du Rossignol was developed into a Ballet Russes production under the directorship of Sergei Diaghilev in 1920, later choreographed by George Balanchine in a 1925 production, for which Henri Matisse designed the set and costumes. Diaghilev was renowned for disliking the
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Sriwhana Spong
translation of ballet to film and so when re-imagining the original performance, a dancer has little material to work with besides the costumes, their images and the original Stravinsky score. Spong’s Costume for a Mourner is thus in many ways a revival of a forgotten piece of art, reuniting costume with music, and asking a dancer to inhabit the imagined movement of the time. It is also a study of form, with the rigid structure and density of the Matisse costume playing with the dancer like an object, rather than cladding the body in order to reveal the form within. The relationship between technological advancement and natural beauty is also explored through the story of the ballet and the story on which it is based. A parable of the industrial revolution and forthcoming modernisation of the world, the loved nightingale was replaced by a mechanical version of itself upon banishment. Echoing Diaghilev’s distrust of film and resistance to its documentary use, the thing that inspired such beauty is remembered on the limbs of memory, waiting to be recalled when such machinations can fulfil their need no more. As Sarah Hopkinson writes in the artist’s monograph Nijinsky, Sriwhana Spong’s works ‘are based not on research or facts, but on a rarefied blend of rumour, myth and hearsay.’ It is a practice that: ‘ … allows her to inhabit the ambiguous space between histories and cultures, to dance on the peripheries, and consequently to direct us back to her chosen subject’s ideological framework and the conditions of its social mediation.’ 20/21
Pernille Kapper Williams (b. 1973, Odense, Denmark)
Pernille Kapper Williams’ simple mirror lies very flat to the wall. It is an orb – a body carried within a body – which holds inside of itself the exhibition, the artworks and you. It reflects the part of the room you are not usually called on to witness, the space behind you, and shows a glimpse of the behaviour of artworks when you’re not looking. Williams’ piece is also a direct quotation of the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, and uses Ader’s words to stimulate an embodiment of his motivated emotional crisis – in essence, to ‘make a scene’. Bas Jan Ader produced the eponymous art work in two photographic versions, in which he wrote in large, black letters on a white wall, please don’t leave me. In one version, the wall was then spot lit by a lamp perched on a folding ladder, and on the other a cluster of light bulbs hanging in front of the text illuminated the words. As the writer Jan Verwoert has observed in relation to this piece and also Ader’s film I’m Too Sad to Tell You (which is a portrait of Ader crying), to utter: ‘please don’t leave me is to appeal to another not to go. It is a spoken act that seeks to provoke (re-)actions in the real world … Ader cries to make you feel the sadness. He addresses the appeal not to leave to you in order to subject you to its impact.’
Pernille Kapper Williams’ artwork allows us to embody the gesture of the artist; invisible at first encounter, please don’t leave me has been written on the mirror while 22/23
Pernille Kapper Williams Homage to Bas Jan Ader (Please Don’t Leave Me), 2007, Mirror
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Pernille Kapper Williams Homage to Bas Jan Ader (Please Don’t Leave Me), 2007, Mirror (reflecting artworks by Nina Beier and Luca Frei); left: Homage to Bas Jan Ader (Please Don’t Leave Me), 2007, Mirror (reflecting artworks by Sriwhana Spong and Nina Beier)
covered in steam. The plea, then, is only revealed by a second intimate encounter, in which the spectator’s moist breath recreates the condition of steam, to reveal the message inside the mirror. It is an homage that approaches the message of Ader in its own earnest and tragic melancholy. Hidden behind the layers of images that constitute the rest of the reflected exhibition, the intimacy of Ader’s words are inescapably woven into the characters – both artistic and of the public – who gather in a room, for a time, creating the social sphere that is the art world. Texts by Tessa Giblin
Exhibiting Space, Time and the Exhibition Itself
The act of exhibiting is something that constantly evolves and is consistently probed. Yet as exhibitionmaking has acquired a certain autonomy, it has become ever more difficult to grasp. Numerous critical, theoretical and historical analyses have therefore focused on ‘exhibitions’ in the past twenty years. These studies notably share a desire to draw up a list of the most significant shows of the modernist movement – the art history of the latter half of the twentieth century has thus slowly developed into a history of exhibitions. One book that made a splash when published in the early 1990s, edited by Bernd Klüser and Katharina Hegewisch, was even titled Die Kunst der Ausstellung (The Art of Exhibitions). Yet because it relies on direct testimony from the main organ isers of key twentieth-century exhibitions, the book offers no objective viewpoint on these events and it likens – in a rather rash way – the practice of curating to a form of art. How and why did exhibiting come to be viewed as an art medium?
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An exhibition is a space
‘All exhibitions – whether artistic, commercial or educational, however varied their installations – agree on at least one point: they make you walk about.’¹ Some historic venues such as museums and galleries have hosted so many exhibitions that one might wonder about the capacity of a space to assimilate the various artistic propositions that have successively configured it. Whereas museum hangings are characterised by a certain inertia, temporary exhibition spaces find themselves metamorphosing over time, as what might be called the spirit of the place becomes enriched or saturated. This spirit results from a set of factors that determine the venue’s nature and character, notably
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Suffice it to say that the confusion engendered by this stance – along with the great debate on the involvement of curators, their role with respect to artists, and their status as creators – has become a stock discussion item and the object of pointless controversy. It is more important to realise that ever since the 1960s artists have been extensively exploring the relationship of a work to space and the consequences of its display and exhibition. So when analysing the practice of ‘exhibition’ it now seems pertinent to consider, first of all, recent approaches adopted by certain artists whose works address issues of hanging, presentation, and relationship not only to the venue but also to other works and to the beholder. It is perhaps these concerns, very much in the air these days, that are the clearest markers of a truly contemporary attitude. For an exhibition at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in the autumn of 2010, curator Tessa Giblin brought together artists sensitive to the issue of presentation, whose works exploit the principle of exhibition not only as an end but also as a means. The issue of the venue itself immediately emerges as crucial. Titled Exhibitions, the Dublin event also raised the tricky question of time-based experiences because it was held in an arts centre whose multifarious programming includes not only the visual arts but also performing arts such as dance, music and theatre. Finally, it is tempting to explore the principle of selfreflexiveness: the exhibition is perhaps ultimately the best tool for describing and understanding its own mechanisms by placing the ‘Exhibition’ on show, exhibiting its very principles in a kind of evocative, endless reflexivity. Several instances of this phenomenon exist, but their intentions differ. Re-situating Exhibitions in this perspective will help us to underscore its uniqueness. What, then, are the stakes behind exhibiting contemporary art in the year 2010, given recent developments in both art-making and curating, especially if we consider their connections and relations of cause-and-effect?
its history, the traces left by varied, successive shows, the audiences that have frequented the exhibition space, and finally the people in charge of organising it. These various factors generate a dialogue and forge the venue’s unity. Meanwhile, every individual perceives and interprets that exhibition space according to what he or she has seen and experienced there, as a function of his or her background and physiological and physical predispositions. The spirit of a place is developed and constantly transformed through the relationships it entertains with the people who enter, view, and contemplate it. Memory thereby plays a determining role in this relationship to the spirit of a venue. Although one is aware of these various factors when entering the exhibition gallery at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, two other parameters suddenly become clear: firstly, the immediate environment of the exhibition venue, which opens onto the centre’s reception area. This specific sense of space encourages visitors to stroll around freely. Next, the gallery itself is windowless and hence devoid of natural light, which initially seems to make it a stereotypical ‘white cube’. That is to say, it develops – according to modernist principles denounced by Irish artist Brian O’Doherty – an ideal neutrality, becoming a space that effaces itself in favour of the works it hosts. If one has the ‘white cube’ theory in mind when seeing Exhibitions, one becomes aware of the limits of this utopia of effacement, specific to this particular codification of exhibition design. Not only does the exhibition venue condition the relationship of works to one another and their juxtapositions, but the configuration of that space simultaneously influences the beholder’s perception of the objects it contains. Exhibition design therefore appears to be a tool for analysis of the evolution of exhibition practices. Indeed, the presentations that El Lissitsky proposed and executed in the 1920s paved new paths by expanding the range of possibilities. Yet whereas El Lissitsky took film as a metaphor for exhibitions (the visitor being the ‘editor’ of the film of the exhibition), Herbert Bayer was interested in photography as a structuring principle, using photography a model for vision. The relationship of the beholder to the works as a function of his or her field of vision and movement through space thereby became the core of the revolution then taking place in hanging and display. On immigrating to the United States, Bayer took and developed his concept of exhibition through a series of projects that came to fruition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, from Bauhaus 1919–1928 in 1938 to The Road to Victory in 1942. A counterpoint to this modernist reinvigoration of exhibition practice could be seen in Frederick Kiesler’s explorations of exhibition design, because Kiesler shifted the focus away from museums, being equally interested in art galleries
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and even window displays in New York department stores. This move in the direction of the general public would have its consequences – indeed, the work of American designer George Nelson should be seen from this perspective. In 1953 Nelson edited a book titled Display, which contained a certain number of standard layouts for various types of exhibition. The alleged autonomy of this approach to hanging with respect to the venue converges with the issue of the modernist aesthetic imposed by the principle of the ‘white cube’. Nelson’s StrucTube, developed in 1948, was the subject of a 2007 video piece by Martin Beck, About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. In Dublin an HD video version was projected in a space next the main exhibition gallery, showing two people systematically assembling and then disassembling Nelson’s tubular display unit, which Beck had reconstructed to the letter. The projection space was part of the work, each wall being painted in differing values of gray while the screen was painted as a white reserve in a black wall. The StrucTube was therefore present via its image – it was not present in the physical space of the exhibition, but had been recorded in an inversely dark, black studio with no perceptible boundaries. In contrast, the sound of the video piece – sounds typical of the erecting and dismantling of a display – was audible throughout the entire space of Exhibitions, like a cyclical breath recommenced with each loop of the video. What Beck’s video installation presents is an image of – and more particularly the idea and a critique of – the standardised display system, for the work and its configuration interrogate the space of exhibition. By placing oneself halfway between the projection space and the rest of the exhibition area it is possible, from a single viewpoint, to juxtapose the image of a system of exhibition and the exhibition itself. The issue of ‘display’ and the way in which works are arranged in space thus becomes increasingly resonant in Exhibitions as the beholder becomes increasingly aware of what would seem to be a kind of theatre with the theatre. There is a distinct formal connection between Beck’s work and that of Luca Frei, even though the former is presented in video form while the latter takes place in the exhibition itself. D2 is a sculpture composed of wooden rods, connected by chains, which can be handled and moved about. It is a kind of tool that turns the beholder’s movement through space into a drawing. The incessant reconfiguration of space implied by D2 constantly harks back to the installation of the exhibition itself and visually echoes the soundtrack of Beck’s video piece. Visitors who handle D2 imitate, in a certain way, the gestures of the actors in About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe; the visitors perform, in real time, the action that is endlessly done and undone on the surface of the video screen. Time is at work both in the flat image of constructing a space and the sculpture that transforms space into drawing.
Martin Beck About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 2007, HD video still (installation view)
From the visual vantage-point mentioned above, a beholder can see the assemblers/disassemblers of StrucTube with one eye, while the other eye takes in visitors altering the unstable configuration of Frei’s piece. In almost stereoscopic fashion – and in a kind of fourth dimension – the time-and-space reality of the exhibition clashes with the projected reality through the common denominator of the shared act. Exhibition time
In the French theatre, the first or second scene of Act I is called the ‘expository’ scene – its role is not just to present the plot but above all to ‘expose’ or ‘show’ the spatio-temporal context. The relationship between theatre and exhibition has thus often been discussed, if not exploited. In 2007 Bernard Blistène organised an exhibition titled Un théâtre sans théâtre (‘A Theatre without Theatre’) which finally offered insight into the complexity of exhibiting happenings, performance art, and films. The question of action within an exhibition – that is to say, an event with a beginning and end, a time-based dimension, indeed a narrative that perhaps repeats itself in a loop, or the intervention of live action in the exhibition space that thus becomes stage – is a core concern of curators today. Thus Mathieu Copeland’s Exposition Chorégraphiée (‘Choreographed Exhibition’)² and Pierre Bal-Blanc’s evolving, travelling show The Living Currency³ questioned the scenic space and time of an exhibition. They attempted to propose a re-reading of the heritage of performance art and to work on the relationships between visual arts and theatricality. ‘Time’ and ‘action’ thus join ‘place’ as concerns specific to exhibitions, like the classical rule of the three unities in theatre. It was in fact dance that inspired the film by Sriwhana Spong featured in Exhibitions, more specifically a costume designed by Matisse for a Russian ballet. Spong’s 2010 film is called Costume for a Mourner. The startling costume makes us attentive to the movement of the dancer’s body in space, and by extension to our own movement through space – the space of the exhibition itself. Since there is no visual record of the original dance, Spong explained that she worked on archive documents when reconstructing the costume. Her work thus evokes the crucial issue specific to exhibitions as a result of new art practices, namely of the distance between an original and its retranscription. ‘I remade the costume based on images of the original, and passed it on to Benny who created a three-minute dance. This piece is very much about distance, translation, archives and the imagined gaps between documents.’ ⁴ While in the theatre a play is designed to be repeated and adapted, the same is not true of happenings, performance art, or exhibitions. Yet right from their early historic performances, artists were asked to repeat events that were
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supposed to remain ephemeral.⁵ Jean-Jacques Lebel, for instance, was asked to ‘re-enact’ a happening that had been partially improvised so that it could be filmed – footage from the happening Pour Conjurer l’Esprit de Catastrophe (‘To Ward Off the Spirit of Catastrophe’, 1962–63) was shot and used by Gualtiero Jacopetti for his film Malamondo. The result turned out to be a failure. And yet the idea of re-enactment now seems to inspire several artists such as Artur Zmijewksi, whose film Repetition (2005) is based on very accurate repeat of a documentary film on a behavioural psychology experiment (the Stanford Prison experiment conducted by Professor Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971). However, here it is more a remake than a re-enactment. Aernout Mik’s work, meanwhile, established a link between video and performance, the latter being enacted in order to be recorded – it was the video piece that was put on show (just like Spong’s film in Exhibitions). So what is the nature of such work: video piece or performance art? It is clear that Mik’s piece cannot be appreciated ‘live’. And yet for another artist, Tino Seghal, it is crucial that the performance take place in the exhibition itself, configuring it. Seghal therefore forbids any documentary trace, eliminating the possibility of contemplating the work via its image, via the filter of editing and camera angles. This radical approach guarantees the integrity of a piece – based on a precise protocol, it can be performed, re-performed, and recounted. As with theatre plays, every performance of performance art is different. There are subtle changes in presentation and portrayal. In general, a work changes according not only the temporal context but also, and above all, the spatial one. In a certain way, Exhibitions questions the polysemic quality of artworks. Indeed, not all the works were made specially for this event, so questions arise as to the capacity of a work to change and evolve depending on its environment. More broadly, the issue of the interpretation of a work in the exhibition context was at the heart of an earlier show organised in 2009 by the Project Arts Centre, Every Version Belongs to the Myth, for which three versions of the gallery guide, the main interpretive tool, were produced. They not only presented three different views on the works but also undermined all interpretation of the show by suggesting that no interpretation could ever be unequivocal. If everyone can interpret a work according to the way it relates to other works and to the space, that is probably because the work itself changes. Its relationship to the place of its production and the place of exhibition already modifies it, which explains why some artists feel the need to work in situ, hence in an ephemeral way (although the market often gets the better of this kind of approach), or else to adapt the work to the project in consultation with the curator. Somehow a work always winds up escaping the artist, often transcending its maker in order to live its own life.
One of Nina Beier’s works on show in Dublin, Morphological Mimicry and Myphathetic Magic (2010) was being simultaneously displayed in a different version in The Object Lesson organised by curator Christophe Gallois at Luxembourg’s Musée d’Art Moderne (9 September 2010 – 30 January 2011). The repeated showing of a work might be compared to a musical score, to the repeated playing of a piece of music, implying the concept of variation. In the case of this work the variation is fairly subtle. In Dublin, MMMM is shown with another Beier work, Trauerspiel (2010), which evokes Brancusi’s Bird in Space not only in terms of its slender shape (although, conversely, the texture is totally different, being a rough surface that catches the light) but also in its relationship to the base and surrounding environment. In Luxembourg, MMMM was again shown with another bird-shaped sculpture, The Very White Marble, although this time the work was by artist Marie Lund, set on a much lower plinth (of stone, similar to Brancusi’s, whose base became an artwork on contact with the form it hosted). Beier and Lund’s artistic concerns centre on the interpretability of an artwork, on various ways of altering or activating it, and on its public reception, all revealing a determination to interrogate its very status. ‘Their works veer away from traditional considerations of form and content in order to grasp the object in terms of potentiality: far from lending substance to a [given meaning], it condenses the different times which overlap in it, but also the varied interpretations and narratives it may give rise to.’⁶ Beier’s oeuvre sharply poses the question and highly contemporary issue of explication. The process of interpretation plays an important role in her works. On The Uses And Disadvantages Of Wet Paint (2010), also exhibited in Luxembourg, is a wall painting – a trace on the wall of varying colour that must be redone every morning (in Dublin, the work employed leftover paint used by the city’s museums and galleries; in Luxembourg it relied on paints previously used in the museum). The colour changes every day, the successive layers increasing the area of the painted surface and reviving the smell of wet paint. These various coats of paint are layered by the bark of a tree, so a crosssection of the work would make the layers of time visible. Beier moreover decided – in the same élan of collaborative effort – to accompany the exhibition with a series of films and performances programmed in conjunction with artist Aurélien Froment. Froment chose films that might trigger a dialogue with the ideas raised in Exhibitions as well as with an earlier Beier performance piece, Repertoire (given at Art Statements, Basel, 2010).
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Nina Beier Trauerspiel, 2010, clay sculpture; Morphological Mimicry and Mympathetic Magic, 2010, canvas curtain and metal stand
Together the pair put together a Repertoire on Selected Films and Screen Savers, a project built around their individual artistic concerns and, in a way, on their mutual expectations. The screenings took place over four consecutive days, like a film festival, except that here it occurred in the context of the exhibition. The screens were physically linked to the show, for that matter, since they were held in ‘The Cube’ next door, which is less of a ‘white cube’ than a ‘black box’ suited for projection in the dark. Between the two spaces there arose a paradoxical relationship simultaneously of dichotomy and twinship. Dark and light, negative and positive – opposites that must be joined in order to make interpretation possible. Actor Feidlim Cannon is not the performer but, like the film, the tool and medium of his performance. Sitting in the middle of the audience, facing the screen, he begins a spontaneous, improvised commentary based on his
personal life and experience as a professional actor. Alongside the audience he watches films by Jean Comandon, Jean Painlevé, Andy Warhol and Hollis Frampton, whose pictures fuel and guide his speech in an almost unconscious way. His monologue establishes a link between screen and audience that strangely culminates in a kind of dialogue. By creating an original cinematic experience, he reveals our relationship not only to the screen but to other spectators, like the mysterious messages uttered by the Delphic Oracle, making us aware of our own presence. Contemplation thus becomes active. Repertoire on Selected Films and Screen Savers, screened in the context of Exhibitions, evokes the tricky question of exhibiting cinema, a practice and phenomenon increasingly employed not only by artists but also by curators and institutions. The thematic museum installation titled La Mouvement des Images, curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006 is a prime example. Movies versus exhibition: two senses of time intersect and interrogate one another. The assimilation of cinema to exhibition and vice versa necessarily demands reflection on our relationship to images. As a consequence of this forced relationship, it becomes clear that the theory of photogénie elaborated by film theorist Jean Epstein in the 1920s can be used as an analytical tool for ‘exhibitions’. Exhibiting exhibitions
The title of the show is plural, Exhibitions, as though this exhibition about exhibition-making involved several shows – perhaps like several joint solo shows organised around the same theme, like the programming instituted several years ago by Christian Bernard at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva. But not only that, apparently: the plural might also correspond here to the various ways that exhibitions are reconsidered, or more exactly to the various approaches developed by the artists in Exhibitions discussed so far. Another plurality should be mentioned,⁷ namely the one confronted by every visitor to the show. Exhibitions does not impose an unequivocal interpretation, so everyone can devise his or her own tale – which rightly raises the issue of the level of authority of curatorial discourse. This authority may be a major characteristic of exhibition-making. Historically, a certain number of exhibitions have sought to impose a viewpoint, such as the 1937 exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ (Entartete Kunst) in Munich, which ultimately had the opposite effect from the intended one. In general, political propaganda has largely made use of exhibition tactics, which can be particularly effective, notably with The Road to Victory show at MoMA in 1942. Educational exhibitions in Germany in the late 1920s – such as Die Presse (Cologne,
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Exhibitions, oversized gallery guide, held by Nina Beier
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1928) and Film und Photo (Stuttgart, 1929) imposed a specific pathway: the visitor’s gaze was guided from start to finish, in the goal of mastering and imposing ideas and discourse. Exhibition-goers each undergo a unique experience depending on culture, state of mind, and personal involvement – and also physiological condition. A second visit may alter the initial impression, since a certain number of sometimes highly subjective and hard-to-quantify parameters come into play. Nevertheless, understanding the stakes involved in exhibition-making means realising that a work on show is particularly subject to interpretation. The oversized Gallery Guide designed and produced for visitors to Exhibitions develops a certain degree of irony – indeed, self-mockery – on the part of the authority represented by the curator. A photograph of the guide, held in the hands of a woman visiting the exhibition, is included in the visual documentation of the show, implying that the tool of interpretation has not only almost attained the status of symbol but is also part of the show and its content. It becomes clear that the guide must be perceived, in addition to its function as guide, above all in its form, its very configuration. The amount of information offered to visitors conditions an exhibition, and the clear trend in institutional shows such as those organised in France at the Grand Palais entails increasing, on one hand, the number of interpretive tools while offering visitors a maximum amount of commentary on the works on the other hand – at the risk of indigestion. Catalogues are evolving toward a basically commercial format despite the scholarly content, shamelessly dissecting a
work through x-ray photography in order to provide standardised knowledge, constructing an official and conventional – often caricatural – interpretation that adds nothing to the pleasure of looking at a work (indeed, can destroy that pleasure). In the same spirit, a visit to an exhibition is now paced and regimented by an audioguide. All of this suffices to fuel the emblematic divide between people for or against labels. This discussion of parergons – that is to say, everything surrounding a work, from the frame and beyond – concerns not just historians, curators and exhibition designers, because ever since artworks have been photographed in display situations artists themselves have taken these various parameters into account. This was notably true of sculptors such as Rodin, followed by Brancusi who, for example, no longer distinguished work from base. The strange upshot is that today museum curators will display his sculpture with its base on yet another base! It was during the contemporary period that a constructive critique of parergons was steadily elaborated through the work of artists such as Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler and, more recently, Andrea Fraser. As exhibitions slowly became the best tool for measuring and assessing the act of exhibiting itself, one artwork could thus present itself as the ‘label’ for another. Unlike the previous generation, the artists on show in Dublin do not adopt a tone of protest. Their themes are often more pleasant, yet are the fruit of a history of exhibitions that is becoming increasingly resonant. Exhibitions has not arisen from an endless self-reflexiveness – its guiding principle is neither experimental nor political, as might be the case with other exhibitions on exhibitions that often entail ‘re-enacting’ the exhibition in a new context. In Dublin it is the artists, not the curators or historians, who reflect on the stakes of putting on (a) show through their own action and work. In a way, the ‘heart’ of Exhibitions is the 2007 mirror piece by Pernille Kapper Williams, Homage to Bas Jan Alder (Please Don’t Leave Me). Given its reflective nature, it is the centre of a symmetry between the exhibition and its reflection. Placed opposite the wall where Spong’s video piece is displayed, William’s mirror is also a screen that shows the exhibition in movement, depending on the beholder’s position and angle of view. It offers a simultaneously reversed and refreshed view of the exhibition. Like Beier’s work, for that matter, it must be activated: in order to grasp it the beholder must not only look at it but breathe in front of it. This piece thus illustrates at least two of the curatorial concerns discussed above, namely a work’s relationship to space and to other works on show, and the activation of that work – the question of interpretation – by the visitor/beholder/viewer. Yet the mirror triggers another reflection. It transforms the exhibition into a surface – a picture – as manifestly demonstrated by the various photos of the show through the mirror taken by Denis Mortell to document the 38/39
Remi Parcollet Translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre
1 Olivier Lugon, ‘Oublier l’exposition’, Art Press, special issue 21, 2000. 2 Une Exposition Chorégraphiée, curated by Mathieu Copeland. With Jonah Bokaer, Karl Holmqvist, Philippe Egli, Jennifer Lacey, Roman Ondák, Michael Parsons, Michael Portnoy and Fia Backström. Exhibition from 8 November to 21 December 2008 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, France. Coproduced by the Kunsthalle, Sankt Gallen. 3 The Living Currency/La Monnaie Vivante was an exhibition that opened in 2006 at the Micadanses dance studio in Paris, then travelled in 2007 to the stage of Théâtre Stuk in Leuven, Belgium and in 2008 to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London. In 2010 a new version was premiered at the Teatr Dramatyczyny in Warsaw in conjunction with Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, prior to another presentation at the Hebbel Theatre during the Berlin Biennial.
4 Sriwhata Spong interviewed by Danae Mossman, Flash Art 271 (March/April 2010). 5 Marina Abramovic notably exploited ‘re-enactment’ for her 2010 retrospective at MoMA, which took the form of an exhibition. 6 Press release, Musée d’Art Moderne (Mudam), Luxembourg. 7 Designer Maki Suzuki and physiotherapist Yoyo Suzuki were invited to test the exhibition; they decided to see it without any information concerning the content, and with no interpretive tools, that is to say without knowing the names of artists or titles of works. In a way, their visit assumed the form of a performance (or workshop), since it was documented through photographs and comments by Tessa Giblin, published in ANAL magazine. Paradoxically, the text and photos provided information on the exhibition based on the experience of visitors who had none.
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exhibition, and those taken by Saskia Vermeulen during an ‘Unrecorded Interview’ with Maki Suzuki and Yoyo Suzuki. The photographic document ation of Exhibitions thus illustrates the curatorial concept of encouraging experiential experimentation. Visiting the exhibition is a way of questioning the exhibition, the way things are set in space and unfold in time. Looking at Exhibitions through its picture – its documentary record – makes it possible to pass through the looking glass to the other side, the better to understand and appreciate the experience.
Martin Beck About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 2007, HD video (installation view)
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List of Works Martin Beck 1. About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 2007 HD Video installation, 16:19, 11 minutes and 58 seconds Nina Beier 2. Trauerspiel, 2010 Clay sculpture 3. Morphological Mimicry and Mympathetic Magic, 2010 Canvas curtain and metal stand 4. On the Uses and Disadvantages of Wet Paint, 2010 Paint previously used in Dublin based art galleries Luca Frei 5. D2, 2010 Wood dowelling, chain, hooks Sriwhana Spong 6. Costume for a Mourner, 2010 Digital video, 8 minutes and 22 seconds Pernille Kapper Williams 7. Homage to Bas Jan Ader (Please Don’t Leave Me), 2007 Mirror, diameter 60cm Nina Beier in collaboration with Aurélien Froment Repertoire on Selected Films and Screen Savers, 2011 Performed by Feidlim Cannon in Project’s Cube Including: Jean Comandon, La croissance des végétaux (The Growth of Plants), 1929; Jean Painlevé, La Pieuvre (The Octopus), 1927; Andy Warhol, Screen Test #2, 1965; Hollis Frampton, Zorn’s Lemma, 1970; Aurélien Froment, The Best of Screen Savers, Ever, 2011
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On Thursday 30 September, Maki Suzuki and Yoyo Suzuki visited Exhibitions. We asked them to record their responses as they first experienced, and then came to feel familiar with, the seven different artworks in the group exhibition. The Suzuki brothers spent an hour and a half in the gallery, speaking with Aurélien Froment and Tessa Giblin and into an Edirol, avoiding the gallery guide and its explanatory texts and context notes, not knowing which artist made what. Up the stairs, into the bar and a Guinness later, Maki and Yoyo began to tell us about their very recent trip in a small car around Ireland. From the Giant’s Causeway, passing by the Tudor Cinema, and collecting potatoes in the fields, the brothers took care to avoid a pre-planned itinerary and would often find themselves on a dark, narrow country road passing by lonely fields or sleeping homes in the hope of finding a place of rest for the night. In these quite stressful moments, with eyes firmly glued to the road, Maki forced himself to take pictures into the darkness. He felt that the pictures would be embedded with the memory of a significant, fleeting moment; a moment which could unlock the memory of a voyage, in whole. Maki then proceeded to recall the story of the moment he gave up smoking. He and Kajsa were visiting Aurélien in San Francisco, and were so happy to be together that they smoked constantly and communally. (Maki wondered whether there might be a correlation between smoking and happiness.) As soon as he and Kajsa returned to London they gave up permanently, both overdosed on nicotine and not feeling well. Aurélien then showed Maki that this was a mostly fabricated memory – that in fact soon after Maki and Kajsa had arrived in San Francisco, they had heard of a relative’s severe illness. All three decided to give smoking a rest for a few days. Aurélien began again a few days later, but Maki and Kajsa decided it was the right moment to quit altogether. We were left with just these pictures of a significant, fleeting moment, and a half-fabricated memory of the interview. Due to a technical blunder, the one and a half hour conversation had been recorded with the microphone switched off, and the 655MB wav file, uploaded the next morning, had nothing on it.
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Unrecorded Interview
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Exhibitions Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published by Project Press based on the exhibitions program of Project Arts Centre. Dublin, May 2014 ISBN 978-1-872493-45-9 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artists, Writers and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers. Text: Tessa Giblin, Remi Parcollet Graphic Design: Conor & David Sub-Editor: Kate Heffernan Exhibitions 16 September – 13 November, 2010 Martin Beck, Nina Beier, Luca Frei, Sriwhana Spong, Pernille Kapper Williams Curator: Tessa Giblin Assistant Curator: Saskia Vermeulen Production Manager: Joseph Collins General Manager: Niamh O’Donnell Artistic Director: Willie White Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland Tel: + 353 (0)1 881 9613 info@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to all the artists and lenders, and also to Remi Parcollet, Aurélien Froment, Maki Suzuki and Yoyo Suzuki.