It appears that at this late capitalist moment the reprise of the journal-keeping tradition of the Enlightenment period could only have happened on a post-industrial scale of the multitude of self-valorizing individuals that leap with their insta-confessions into the short-circuited eternity of the digital memory of the internet.
A difficultly to access present-value dimension of my urban experience of Manhattan does bring up to my memory other attempts to deal with experience of exile, displacement and diaspora. What I did not expect is that all of these three dimensions are going to be conflated in a single conflictual moment where each struggles to overtake the definition of how my self should find a way to articulate itself in the contingent circumstances of the temporary research stay.
Maybe it is the common fate of all research journals that quickly discover the limitations of the research agendas that they are expected to observe from the margins of the personal experience of the stakes, struggles, and objects that each social field offers to attentive view. Not that the resistance associated with practices anchored in text-regulated relations of ruling, as are the objects of modern and contemporary art, is something new to consider.
Rather in such moments of researcher's personal displacement in social space and historical time a direct confrontation occurs between individual traveling self and the multiple locations that serve as temporary points of arrival. The provisional character of each spatial dwelling must be the circumstance that turns otherwise actualized places into non-places. Relatedly the pressure on the traveling self in the direction of more urgent search for actualization intensifies.
Maybe that's the subtext of all siren calls for going from one place to another. Travel, as a more domesticated form of displacement, not only represses the awareness of the pain and suffering that displacement, as the other side of the coin that going from one place to another mints, has usually entailed. The non-places in this subliminal geography of spatial relations of movement must in this respect share common properties with the spaces of museums that in their progressive development as transparent places where exhibits could claim exclusive attention come to resemble the great many other public places that the first modernity became associated with: train terminals, airports, winter gardens, libraries, city halls, and subways.
While what is conventionally considered to be the private domain comes to mind as a counterpart to public spaces, the extensive crossover in between generically public institutions and private ownership observable in the process of transition from the first towards the second modernity apparently creates hybrid spaces that as non-spaces of corporate headquarters, parks run as public-private partnerships and art museums under certain conditions grant to general public access to the kinds of space that are considered to represent particular good.
One can argue that such hybridization of spaces that serve both private and public interest, as is the case with sponsorship arrangements, art museum bequests and donations, or non-governmental organizations support, goes contrary to the definition of the public sphere as differentiated from others.
One can also argue that legal provisions for the possibility of private support for what lies in the domain of public good violates the autonomy of the latter to the extent that the difference between the public and private interest becomes impossible to draw.
One can further argue that the remarkable indistinction between public and private spaces as is observed in the case of art museums particularly has its roots in the constellation of governmental policies that in their totality represent a mode of regulation that distinguishes one economy from another.
In this respect theoretical reconstruction of metropolitan art museum as institution that is intimately related to the dominant mode of regulation can shed light on the role that cities play in the mode of accumulation that these cities metonymically represent. To speak of New York is to speak of place that has played crucial role in the first modern moment to the extent that one can speak of the long twentieth century as an American century.
Would then Beijing be the metonym for the second modern mode of both regulation and accumulation?
Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts
Friday, July 13, 2007
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Spaces of Utopia Under the Theoretical Scrutiny of Post-Marxist Gaze
The thick volumes of biennial catalogues inspire awe and anxiety at the same time since beyond the enjoyment of the richness that they represent for their readers and fortunate attendees of their bi-, tri-, or quinqu-ennial events that take more after elaborate theatrical shows, which are on many occasions incorporated into the programming of biennials as distributed institutions, than they do just an exhibition in a white cube of gallery or museum.
Here lies the conundrum of the expanded field of representation that Lefebvre may help to answer since his thesis on production of space can prove to be critical beyond the reception it has received at the time of its publication or translation into other languages it being understood that these events in their majority have happened before the 1990s decade.
Of similar importance would be the unexplored quadrants of the theoretical space that Guy Debord charts in his writings as he addresses the society of the spectacle in its relation to the transition from the first to the second modernity. In his interpretation I see the symptom of the transition to the second modernity rather than accurate description of its principles of operation since I perceive Debord's condemnation of social uses of spectacle in what amounts to late modern society, or the first modernity in my terminology, as the pressure that the contradictions of modernity exercise on its institutions to adopt the loops of reflexivity into their normal operation.
It is exactly this surfeit of complexity as a matter of course that captures my imagination as I develop my ethnographic understanding of second modernity as it manifests itself in biennials, museums, and cultural districts. In this regard it appears important to leave room for realization that the second modernity is less the process of temporal succession then the outcome of what is variously referred to as internal contradictions of capitalism, spatial fix of the next cycle of capitalist restructuring, or change in the mode of accumulation.
Thus dissociated from the vestiges of teleological thinking, the discussion of the second modernity allows for predictive thinkers, cities, or spaces to come into their own in providing both models and prototypes for developments that are at a temporal distance from their historically situated works, cultures, and manifestations. In this frame of reference one can readily appreciate the place of Paris as paradigmatic city of the nineteenth century or even twentieth.
With regard to my theoretical concerns, I see museums, biennials, and urban complexes as those utopic spaces that under the conditions of the second modernity can hold genuine promise for positive alternatives to come true.
Here lies the conundrum of the expanded field of representation that Lefebvre may help to answer since his thesis on production of space can prove to be critical beyond the reception it has received at the time of its publication or translation into other languages it being understood that these events in their majority have happened before the 1990s decade.
Of similar importance would be the unexplored quadrants of the theoretical space that Guy Debord charts in his writings as he addresses the society of the spectacle in its relation to the transition from the first to the second modernity. In his interpretation I see the symptom of the transition to the second modernity rather than accurate description of its principles of operation since I perceive Debord's condemnation of social uses of spectacle in what amounts to late modern society, or the first modernity in my terminology, as the pressure that the contradictions of modernity exercise on its institutions to adopt the loops of reflexivity into their normal operation.
It is exactly this surfeit of complexity as a matter of course that captures my imagination as I develop my ethnographic understanding of second modernity as it manifests itself in biennials, museums, and cultural districts. In this regard it appears important to leave room for realization that the second modernity is less the process of temporal succession then the outcome of what is variously referred to as internal contradictions of capitalism, spatial fix of the next cycle of capitalist restructuring, or change in the mode of accumulation.
Thus dissociated from the vestiges of teleological thinking, the discussion of the second modernity allows for predictive thinkers, cities, or spaces to come into their own in providing both models and prototypes for developments that are at a temporal distance from their historically situated works, cultures, and manifestations. In this frame of reference one can readily appreciate the place of Paris as paradigmatic city of the nineteenth century or even twentieth.
With regard to my theoretical concerns, I see museums, biennials, and urban complexes as those utopic spaces that under the conditions of the second modernity can hold genuine promise for positive alternatives to come true.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
The Position of Modernism in Between First and Second Modernity as Material, Social, and Discursive Process
Between documentary film and fictional cinema fall works that attempt to bridge both. How does subject-matter dealing with poverty, abjection, and marginalization get treatment that goes beyond the response always already wrapped into pieces of the narrative that the majority society has produced in the work of social differentiation?
Zygmunt Bauman says that in the governmental setup of modernity the two extremes of privilege and deprivation serves to bring the rest of society into the fold of self-regulated society that generates its dreams and nightmares on the model of those who are assigned the structural position of excess and lack in terms of social distribution of chances for leading lives that are on one hand desired and on the other hand abhorred.
Possibly, the question is born at the conjunction of theory with the after effect of watching the films that rarely get beyond the circuit of festivals, biennial screenings, and art house distribution, which makes them public at the same time as it puts them out of effective reach by the mainstream audience. The question of the archive as virtual construction with components that conjoin in equal measure social, discursive, and material may shed light of the question of the importance of such limited interventions as are the films that go back to the premise of the social realism and avant-garde that rather than entertain seeks to shake its audience out of complacency.
Rather than being merely different the impact of art on the larger society of necessity draws in its force on the very same components that curtail its effectiveness. The analyses of avant-garde propose that art that has reached that stage in its history has confronted thereby the limit conditions of its autonomy in the bourgeois society that permits freedom of expression within the institutionalized confines of museums, galleries, theaters, libraries and cinemas.
However, once the material side of the movement of modernity towards modernism is brought into account the dilemmas of autonomy and involvement that the very conditions of existence of art maintain in permanent relevance may begin looking different from the stalemate that the discourse on artistic autonomy seems to consign the efforts to bring art into concert with developments lying outside its exhibition spaces. In material terms the very spaces for the exhibition of art have to be built for that express purpose, should the mass audience be sought for the works that their creators want to make public.
While the historical discourse on museums stresses generic features of the practice of showing of things in public, the material conditions for gaining large scale exhibition venues for common use have only arisen with the decisive entrenchment of changes that in their sum have become constitutive of the first modernity as formation having social, economic, and political underpinnings. In this light the reclamation of the Louvre Museum as civic institution rather than the royal palace is more indicative of the revolution in the conditions of capital accumulation than it is of the gains for the fledgling French republic in public space since before the last decade of the eighteenth century the command of the material forces that went into erection and upkeep of architectural spaces on the scale of the Louvre were only available to the person occupying the pinnacle of the rigid social hierarchy that pre-revolutionary ancien regime enshrined.
Whether the intuition of the national museum that Louvre has become is also reflective of the ideological need for legitimization of the then newly ascendant republican regime or not, the work of ideology that monumental structures perform has little to do with the substantive nature of the political regime around these structures. For that reason, the material history of the museums can probably more felicitously mapped onto the preconditions for the creation of the wealth of nations than onto the rise of nationalism, as it has more commonly has been.
In the heyday of nationalist movements the whole constellation of sites, sights, and statements has been commanded into the production of the anamorphic illusion of the incontrovertible existence of the nation that only came into its naturalized own in the mirror of the bourgeois self. As the larger situation in which the bourgeois society has gone on to reproduce itself has changed over the course of movement from the first industrial revolution towards the host of revolutions in the growing number of fields the very nature of the connection between the self and the spaces where it was supposed to find its naturalized reflection has underwent changes that justify the introduction of second modernity as term of reference with which sense can be made of the spaces of the disorganized capitalism of the world operating as a single unit.
Thereby the assemblage of the social forces within which art becomes institutionalized in the spaces it does adds to the existing material dynamics that has conjured the productive forces for their construction in the first place. The spectacular growth in the number of museums worldwide, as well as in the countries of the First World specifically, has largely escaped theorization. That leaves room for venturing a hypothesis that the saturation of the urban space with places that are capable of lending themselves to ideological uses can bespeak of the uses for ideology that fall out of conventionally conceived critique of ideology.
In this point I concur with Scott Lash that a new kind of social critique has to be offered in order to adequately account for the changes that the transition from the first modernity to the second has as its precondition. Specifically, it may call for theorization at the speed at which certain significant events are occurring. Such real-time theoretical activity finds its paradigmatically contemporary to the moment of writing expression in blogging when journalistic reportage from around the world provokes the reaction that brings conceptual framework and the information on actual developments into confrontation.
From this perspective the third dimension of the discussion - that of the discourse - gains in relief as museums gain in unprecedented degree to which they are able to dictate the terms of their integration into the daily life. At the same time the scholarly attention to museums becomes ever more important both in terms of impartial understanding of the relations of ruling within which museums have to operate in the second modernity and in terms of cultural map making that different agents in the field of art would appropriate for their purposes in their turn.
In this situation I expect to bring my dealing with the contradictions of the presently occurring foundational change in the defining structures of modernity to bear upon the subject matter of the Guggenheim Museum on one hand and the international art biennials on the other. The notion of the future archive of contemporary art unites these two terms of comparison by virtue of its centrality to the issues of urban culture, minority art, and museum studies.
Zygmunt Bauman says that in the governmental setup of modernity the two extremes of privilege and deprivation serves to bring the rest of society into the fold of self-regulated society that generates its dreams and nightmares on the model of those who are assigned the structural position of excess and lack in terms of social distribution of chances for leading lives that are on one hand desired and on the other hand abhorred.
Possibly, the question is born at the conjunction of theory with the after effect of watching the films that rarely get beyond the circuit of festivals, biennial screenings, and art house distribution, which makes them public at the same time as it puts them out of effective reach by the mainstream audience. The question of the archive as virtual construction with components that conjoin in equal measure social, discursive, and material may shed light of the question of the importance of such limited interventions as are the films that go back to the premise of the social realism and avant-garde that rather than entertain seeks to shake its audience out of complacency.
Rather than being merely different the impact of art on the larger society of necessity draws in its force on the very same components that curtail its effectiveness. The analyses of avant-garde propose that art that has reached that stage in its history has confronted thereby the limit conditions of its autonomy in the bourgeois society that permits freedom of expression within the institutionalized confines of museums, galleries, theaters, libraries and cinemas.
However, once the material side of the movement of modernity towards modernism is brought into account the dilemmas of autonomy and involvement that the very conditions of existence of art maintain in permanent relevance may begin looking different from the stalemate that the discourse on artistic autonomy seems to consign the efforts to bring art into concert with developments lying outside its exhibition spaces. In material terms the very spaces for the exhibition of art have to be built for that express purpose, should the mass audience be sought for the works that their creators want to make public.
While the historical discourse on museums stresses generic features of the practice of showing of things in public, the material conditions for gaining large scale exhibition venues for common use have only arisen with the decisive entrenchment of changes that in their sum have become constitutive of the first modernity as formation having social, economic, and political underpinnings. In this light the reclamation of the Louvre Museum as civic institution rather than the royal palace is more indicative of the revolution in the conditions of capital accumulation than it is of the gains for the fledgling French republic in public space since before the last decade of the eighteenth century the command of the material forces that went into erection and upkeep of architectural spaces on the scale of the Louvre were only available to the person occupying the pinnacle of the rigid social hierarchy that pre-revolutionary ancien regime enshrined.
Whether the intuition of the national museum that Louvre has become is also reflective of the ideological need for legitimization of the then newly ascendant republican regime or not, the work of ideology that monumental structures perform has little to do with the substantive nature of the political regime around these structures. For that reason, the material history of the museums can probably more felicitously mapped onto the preconditions for the creation of the wealth of nations than onto the rise of nationalism, as it has more commonly has been.
In the heyday of nationalist movements the whole constellation of sites, sights, and statements has been commanded into the production of the anamorphic illusion of the incontrovertible existence of the nation that only came into its naturalized own in the mirror of the bourgeois self. As the larger situation in which the bourgeois society has gone on to reproduce itself has changed over the course of movement from the first industrial revolution towards the host of revolutions in the growing number of fields the very nature of the connection between the self and the spaces where it was supposed to find its naturalized reflection has underwent changes that justify the introduction of second modernity as term of reference with which sense can be made of the spaces of the disorganized capitalism of the world operating as a single unit.
Thereby the assemblage of the social forces within which art becomes institutionalized in the spaces it does adds to the existing material dynamics that has conjured the productive forces for their construction in the first place. The spectacular growth in the number of museums worldwide, as well as in the countries of the First World specifically, has largely escaped theorization. That leaves room for venturing a hypothesis that the saturation of the urban space with places that are capable of lending themselves to ideological uses can bespeak of the uses for ideology that fall out of conventionally conceived critique of ideology.
In this point I concur with Scott Lash that a new kind of social critique has to be offered in order to adequately account for the changes that the transition from the first modernity to the second has as its precondition. Specifically, it may call for theorization at the speed at which certain significant events are occurring. Such real-time theoretical activity finds its paradigmatically contemporary to the moment of writing expression in blogging when journalistic reportage from around the world provokes the reaction that brings conceptual framework and the information on actual developments into confrontation.
From this perspective the third dimension of the discussion - that of the discourse - gains in relief as museums gain in unprecedented degree to which they are able to dictate the terms of their integration into the daily life. At the same time the scholarly attention to museums becomes ever more important both in terms of impartial understanding of the relations of ruling within which museums have to operate in the second modernity and in terms of cultural map making that different agents in the field of art would appropriate for their purposes in their turn.
In this situation I expect to bring my dealing with the contradictions of the presently occurring foundational change in the defining structures of modernity to bear upon the subject matter of the Guggenheim Museum on one hand and the international art biennials on the other. The notion of the future archive of contemporary art unites these two terms of comparison by virtue of its centrality to the issues of urban culture, minority art, and museum studies.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Documenta's Relevance to the International Art Biennials as Instances of Dealing with Artistic Archives
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.
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.
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