From the perspective of Chinese contemporary art museums, Documenta's and other biennials' development over last century can appear distant. However, the recent trans-nationalization of the gallery and museum institutions of the country that until a generation ago was still considered an opponent of the Western bloc, China, together with other Asian countries, undergoes the process of re-evaluation it its cultural archive with the purpose of making it readable on a global scale.
The influx of the curators from around the worlds to the projects that numerous museums in mainland China, as well as in its major cities, heralds a process of coming to terms with difficult past that these institutions have inherited as they confront radical change in the conditions of what can be possible in exhibiting, commenting, and curating. This period of relative freedom finds echo in the situation in which Documenta in Kassel, Germany, has started its operation in 1955.
Half a century later this five-year biennial has grown into truly global phenomenon that not everyone hails in positive terms. The shadows of imperialistic past haunt the intentions to encompass in a single urban location the breadth of the contemporary moment. Whether the problematics of staging of the artworks that have challenged successive exhibiting and curating committees of Documenta completely displace the question of artistic archive into the theoretical shadows of its international exhibitions remains important to the extent that there are lessons that international biennials elsewhere can draw from it.
Every biennial in its media presence, list of participants, and institutional relevance of its themes has the international dimension in-built into its mode of operation. At the same time, the comparative perspective has to recognize the process whereby the international art biennial has turned into institution with its distinct set of expectations, forms of support, and relevance to kindred discourses that bring every international art exhibition into communication with all others that share with it positions on the relational field of artistic events.
That this field stretches from the local to the global scale speaks of the transformation in the large context in which artworks and the spaces where they become public are frequently called to reflect, to act upon, or to make a statement about. Even where the discussions around modernism, avant-garde movements, and multiple reactions to these seem foreign, the quality of exploration of what portends to be shared condition remains promising as societies the world over attempt to come to terms with risks, flows, and imaginaries that know no borders.
In this respect the coincidence of the international art exhibition with the change in the mode of capitalist regulation may prove more fortuitous than strictly causal as so many spatially and temporally contingent factors are at play in each instance where centers and peripheries, post-colonies and post-empires, and linguas francas and vernaculars meet.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Documenta Archive as Structure of Allegorical Memory
The instance of Documenta, an international art exhibition taking place each five years, dislocates the coordinates of the usual bi-yearly cycle of art biennials in the direction of greater involvement of the premises on which these international events are built.
Without falling into unreserved apology for the impact that art exhibition can have on their viewers, hosting cities, and represented cultures, even if prevalent curatorial discourse protects the autonomous sphere of artistic expression as such, I want to find my distance from the condemnation that art exhibitions as components of contemporary event culture expose themselves to.
In so far as larger economic situation is not directly influenced by the art exhibitions as such I perceive the attacks on museums, art exhibitions, and biennials as stemming from the post-political situation. As described by Perniola the feature of the post-political situation is the predominance of the network logic of operation where as opposed to the political divisions that separated the political field into contending camps, the post-political situation does not produce a clear-cut pattern or structure of the social field that could be readable in political terms.
The resulting opacity, frequently attributed to the on-set of the society of the spectacle, draws on the network logic of operation where each individual can consider others, as actual or potential network members, in terms of colleagues the interaction with whom is primarily mediated by networks, data, and requirements of the moment. In this respect, spectacular events can hardly lend themselves to political reading in so far as the larger political field has been reorganized on the post-political lines.
Furthermore, the outrage that museums, biennials, and art auctions inspire in the hearts of their commentators appears to represent the symptom of the death of the political since the spaces of artistic representation and discourse are positioned in the remainder of the public sphere that while not able to summon political forces for its reproduction as structuring structure is in need of the spaces that hold the potential of memory of the historical situation when the political as principle of social vision and division has still been in force.
By that token, art works become involuntary allegories of the collective memory that in the process of its multiplication and disintegration into particularized archives of recollection undermines the structuration of the social field on the lines that would correspond to political narrative.
In this respect, politics has given way to post-politics when the reigning discourse in the public sphere has slipped from the narrative grip of the first modernity towards the indeterminacy of the second modern moment where circulation, deterritorialization, and flows take precedence over accumulation, striation, and places.
Without falling into unreserved apology for the impact that art exhibition can have on their viewers, hosting cities, and represented cultures, even if prevalent curatorial discourse protects the autonomous sphere of artistic expression as such, I want to find my distance from the condemnation that art exhibitions as components of contemporary event culture expose themselves to.
In so far as larger economic situation is not directly influenced by the art exhibitions as such I perceive the attacks on museums, art exhibitions, and biennials as stemming from the post-political situation. As described by Perniola the feature of the post-political situation is the predominance of the network logic of operation where as opposed to the political divisions that separated the political field into contending camps, the post-political situation does not produce a clear-cut pattern or structure of the social field that could be readable in political terms.
The resulting opacity, frequently attributed to the on-set of the society of the spectacle, draws on the network logic of operation where each individual can consider others, as actual or potential network members, in terms of colleagues the interaction with whom is primarily mediated by networks, data, and requirements of the moment. In this respect, spectacular events can hardly lend themselves to political reading in so far as the larger political field has been reorganized on the post-political lines.
Furthermore, the outrage that museums, biennials, and art auctions inspire in the hearts of their commentators appears to represent the symptom of the death of the political since the spaces of artistic representation and discourse are positioned in the remainder of the public sphere that while not able to summon political forces for its reproduction as structuring structure is in need of the spaces that hold the potential of memory of the historical situation when the political as principle of social vision and division has still been in force.
By that token, art works become involuntary allegories of the collective memory that in the process of its multiplication and disintegration into particularized archives of recollection undermines the structuration of the social field on the lines that would correspond to political narrative.
In this respect, politics has given way to post-politics when the reigning discourse in the public sphere has slipped from the narrative grip of the first modernity towards the indeterminacy of the second modern moment where circulation, deterritorialization, and flows take precedence over accumulation, striation, and places.
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