1. What to say with an exhibition?
I used to believe the following to be
true: The medium of art exhibition is an ineffective way to share
information to viewers.
It's true in the sense that I don't
usually go into exhibition spaces in order to learn something. But
these sorts of jaded rules are meaningless in reality. What is
information, or learning, anyway?
Things are also curiously hard to keep
apart. You deal with your breakup in doing your performance piece and
the other way around. And if you're an artist who's given an
exhibition space and, coincidentally, got stuff to say, why wouldn't
you voice it through your exhibition?
You know it's not ideal, but nothing
ever is. So many other things play out in the process. An exhibition
is the outcome from the crude equation of Life divided by Conditions
times Chaos. You already know from the get-go how small your
influence over the end result might be.
When writing about a show, should I try
to suss out the formula I mentioned above? Should I be aware of what
were the conditions of production? I should, but sometimes I wonder
if that isn't taking away the power of the artist to present us with
the works, without needing to point toward interpretative devices
lurking somewhere next to them, the institution hosting the
exhibition, or the world at large?
Or is there another formula at play,
one in which your need to say “I did this, not some imaginary
community” derives from an equation of Privilege times Ego minus
Urgency plus Charisma? OK I admit this is getting a little fuzzy.
Privilege allows you to think you're
doing it all by yourself. Those least vulnerable are the ones least
dependent on communities. On the other end, there are those who are
too scarred by past trauma to be amongst other people again. And why
would you want to rely on such a messy thing as other people if you
really don't have to?
The white cube with its modernist
autonomy might be problematic, but I bet many artists long to be left
alone and show their work in the way they want to, independent of who
they are. Another question entirely is whether or not society should
support these activities of self-expression.
Being able to control your creative
output and own it are crucial aspects of artistic work, especially
when it's the only thing under your control, as Olivia Laing, in
their book The Lonely City, makes clear when writing about the artist
Henry Darger who was alone for most of adult life, creating a visual
world of drawings, paintings, and text, only unearthed posthumously,
in a cramped apartment with very little means.
Perhaps that's why legendary recluse
artists such as David Hammons (or any of the artists presented in
Martin Herbert's book “Tell Them I Said No”) refuse to open the
proverbial door when fame comes knocking. It would lead into other
people stepping all over your process.
2. Community and art
Rejecting all communal notions from
one's practice cuts to the core of the history of Western modern and
contemporary art. It is carried by the idea of autonomous works that
happen in a kind of vacuum, devoid of outside world.
It's a political project, as well.
Independency is Nordic welfare society at its utopian best: everyone
is taken care of and given equal opportunities so no-one is dependent
on their friends or families.
But then this is reality for less and
less people, all the while art is becoming more and more the place
where rehearsals for community-building take place. This happens
partly because conservative austerity politics need a band aid (UK
art institutions give a deeply unsettling example of this), but also
because contemporary art practices are changing from within.
Public has become the primal form of
new art, and exhibition the secondary one. The word public here acts
as a placeholder for assemblies, collectives, public gatherings,
non-patriarchal familial constellations and so forth.
It makes sense that the latest
Helsinki-based art organization born from the ashes of Checkpoint
Helsinki (which, fittingly, came into existence to oppose the
building of a museum) calls itself Publics, produces mostly talks and
hosts events, and seems not to be putting up exhibitions anytime
soon.
Another new local enterprise, Museum of
Impossible Forms, is operating on a similar vein while referring in
its name to the concept of museum, which the art historian Camiel van
Winkel calls the end destination for all things avant-garde.
What was once the fringe program
(talks, workshops) is now the headliner. When I look around, I can
see some people having not really realized this. Others are angry,
even. “Why is art about the other stuff nowadays?” This is
another way of saying “I''m white and feel like I can't get enough
exposure.”
In addition to how petty such
statements ring, it's mindless to get riled up for all the retreats
and workshops & complain how art itself has been forgotten. These
events are what art is today. It's not about some limp relational
turn anymore, but moreso that art is now being done by people who
might possess different needs from those who came before, ie.
basically white privileged men. Although in most cases this change
hasn't reached the highest offices of art power.
The point is obviously not to say that
what all non-white artistic practices add up to is some delightful
communal picnic, but that art in the West is getting a reboot. And in
order to do that, you need to retreat, take stock, plan, discuss,
build a strategy, gather the troops, care for others and stay warm.
The shock that well-off, liberal white
people are currently channeling by accusing identity politics, which
has come to mean “not white hegemonic culture”, is the direct
result of feeling like outsiders in the plethora of communal
activities taking over (especially the local nodes) of the art world.
It follows that no one might need the
kind of formalist-modernist, theme-led exhibitions we are mostly
seeing today, made by curators and artists who received a similar
education in taste, class, and thinking.
3. Will anything change?
Change never comes at once. White male
painters following the macho-mythical abstract expressionist credo
still seem to sell just fine, and formalist exhibitions will be a
thing for decades to come in some form or another, be it by artists
of any identity.
And people in leading positions don't
give up their power without a fight. Since old institutions are
unwilling to change their practices, from hiring to bathroom policies
and from curatorial thinking to their relationship with the state,
new institutions will pop up, as perhaps could be said was the case
with Publics and Museum of Impossible Forms.
The fruits of modernism are still
edible. But if we think about the leading critical discourse, the
most on-demand artists, or the most talked-about art-related books
currently published, then in that realm doing exhibitions today is
getting close to proclaiming you're a Cubist. The performance of
professionalism today requires you organize a retreat.
In a country like Finland where
considerable support for art abound, the community-building in art
can result in a group of well-funded (and -meaning) artists creating
images of how such an activity might look like, usually for an
institution who wants to be seen as Ethical.
Art becomes a rehearsal for life,
removed from any other agency than art professionals' need to seem
like they're renewing themselves to suit the times. But perhaps this
is needed. They are stories and we live from stories.
Many of us might feel disappointed
after attending to these social art-gatherings. They are followed by
another one, on a different topic, and then again another one, all
the while we try to keep our own lives afloat.
We might do less modernist exhibitions,
but we still have busy, precarious, and very modern lives. That's
how art happens today to the people who live it: through an endless,
drowning stream of deadlines and unmissable events. The difference
between a retreat and a corporate team-building exercise can seem
non-existent at times.
Unfortunately, art will most likely
always be exploitative in some way. Artists won't be paid, producers
and directors will, or vice versa. Only selected few will succeed,
even if the selection criteria changes, and the many left behind
should shut their traps and be happy that at least someone is finally
getting that extra funding.
There's nothing so ethical and urgent
that we artists couldn't turn it into blatant careerism. And you
can't really be angry at that. As I said earlier, life is not ideal.
Rent is rent. We do what we can, under circumstances we can't fully
control. Good intentions vs. needs we can't surpass, all that.
Managing a nuanced perspective on
things becomes particularly vexing when you're feeling overwhelmed by
the extreme, life-destroying urgency of climate change, for example.
You don't want the many shades of truth, but just the one. An artist
has gone through these motions only to realize that, say, flying to
biennials is bad for the environment and a grueling way to live, too.
So they turn their own realization into a dictum and hold everyone up
to this standard of their own making.
This is grossly self-centered, and
uneven, because everyone has different reasons for doing what they
do. We can't force each others as individuals to do things in a
different way just because that way fits us and our abilities.
Universalism and essentialism are not needed here, either.
Conducting change obviously requires
listening, and a cool head. Mostly nothing about the art world caters
for such qualities, which is why we have the kinds of lives we do. We
are finding ourselves in a paradoxical situation: Artists are
engaging in new kinds of thinking in settings that are, at their
core, hostile to the idea of sustained attention. Infrastructural
change in art couldn't be more urgent: the structure of doing things
is in direct violation with what most of us would like to do.
What is perhaps not always understood
is the magnitude of such change. Most art institutions think, in
Finland at least, that they can go about their business as usual just
as long as they cherry-pick a more “diverse” set of artists for
their events. But you cannot include people, aggressively
marginalized by the state and white patriarchy, into the inner
sanctums of art and expect them to not turn around the very
structures and ways of doing art. It's not only a matter of who is
doing the art, but under what terms, and for what end.
This much is clear to most people
working in the lower confines of the art world, where everything
isn't about pleasing your donors or Ministry of Culture. But
understanding something is not the same as changing it.
 |
| Kim Modig: Social Anxiety Matrix #2 (2017) |
4. Whose standards?
I argue that, collectively and
unconsciously, we still regard the solo exhibition, or the museum
group show, or the inclusion to a big biennale, or the star guest
visiting your insitution or city, to be the gold standard. The
archetypes haven't changed yet. This is why we all still talk about
museums and refer to them in titles and texts, although a growing
number of us artists work in a way that has little connection to what
happens within those walls. When will we cut the cord for good? And
can you survive outside?
Everything is still in relation to the
old models, or simply just made in the same way but with a different
topic, which means that a way of life an exhibition tries to depict
is not really meant to enter the building. Think of it like this:
Exhibitions about queer art should be presented in a way that is
inviting to queer life.
Consider also how European Futurism and
Surrealism looked like white boys with rich parents fooling around.
Art is how you live. So what would art spaces look like if their very
infrastructure would reflect some other lives? What if those spaces
wouldn't look like the lives of upper-class people, with designer
glass at the museum café, expensive jewelry at sale in the museum
shop, and the exhibitions spaces made to look immaculate? But
contemporary art has never been about class revolution, but the
cementing of its horizontal power structure while adding a new coat
of paint on it.
Before depression hits, let us return
to the question of reading a show, and to a compound issue, that of
subjectivity.
5. Everything affects everything
Do I look at the artwork without any
“external” explanation? And is it really a matter of either-or:
Either I look at the works only, or I take into account everything
else? It's not. Things bleed and stick to each other. I find it
impossible to take anything apart from another thing, without at
least a thread hanging between them, holding up a connection. You can
try it yourself. Imagine a box with a lid and try now to remove the
lid.
Is the name of the artist in the title
of an exhibition the perfect example of the fact that we are still
simple creatures who cannot think in fluid ways about object-subject
relations and multiplicity of agencies?
Or, we can think about them, you know,
pick up a Karen Barad book and quote it, but we're still seemingly
far from such boundless thinking managing to change the way our world
works. It's little like the situation above with exhibitions and the
much-needed modes of producing and experiencing art.
Even though we know it's not the artist
who, in this multi-actor sense, does a show on their own, we still
insist on placing the artist's agency above anyone and anything
else's. And this is why our whole thinking must change if we want to
get rid of the long shadows of modernism and colonialism in art.
Is there a threshold in having an
agency in something? What still counts as influencing a work of art?
The line is impossible to draw. I'm thinking of Iggy Lond Malmberg
and their solo performance Boner (Baltic Circle, 2014), where
Malmberg said something like perhaps we perform Hamlet so often
because the crown in the storage of a theater wants us to do so.
Free, individual will is getting to be
a thing of the past, and perhaps this mythical freedom has been
unfathomable to almost everyone except for the ones who came up with
it, ie. the men in charge. So how should we begin to write about
shows under this new sun of intra-agencies, where we are constantly
pushing and pulling each other unknowingly, blurring the lines that
used to separate me from you or from a thing?
It's not new. This stimulating yet
confusing problem of multiple agencies simultaneously in play has
always existed in our attempts to say something. When you try to
express yourself, you end up bringing in so many other things to the
forefront. Our bodies emit all kinds of data from smells to affects,
and our words and actions carry infinite interpretative
possibilities.
Let me return to the question of
information from which this text begun. Maybe the exhibition is not
at all any worse a communication platform than, for example, talking
to another person. To write about an exhibition is to unearth both
what I assume the show is trying to say, but also what it's saying
regardless its makers' best attempts. This is the case with any human
communication.
Here, we need to make a decision. It's
up to you whether you want to believe the human, or the artwork, in
front of you or not. If you don't, you can read them in the worst
possible way. Sometimes that's healthy, sometimes violently cynical.
You could say noise is always there,
surrounding the signal. The receptor can, by all means, concentrate
on the noise only and deem the message meaningless, or to excavate
the signal out from the static and consider its intent. Again, the
noise is at times more exciting than what is being communicated, so
the choice is not so clear-cut.
In informal art discourse, née bar
talk, née the talk that actually molds our attitudes much more than
any seminar or book can ever do, we often look for problems in
something we've just experienced together. The show was horrible, the
talk was sub-par, the event was pointless, the commercial galleries
in our home town are all crap. This is how many of us talk (kudos to
you if you ever don't!), and this is how we connect. We congregate
around faults.
What is it in the structure of our art
worlds that make us retort to this conscious amplification of noise
and diminishing of signal? I think it's a question worth pondering.
Is it the precariousness? That we're all scared for our livelihood
and/or legitimization, and so we want to drag other initiatives down
to level the playing field?
5. Aftermath: writing?
These, I feel, are the two main
trajectories at play in art today: The fundamental change in the very
forms of how art is done, experienced and presented (for whom and by
who), and secondly, the revolutionary expansion of agency, which will
sooner or later change our understanding of authorship and
creator-mediator-spectator dynamics.
But all of this is not simply a matter
of disseminating information, like I said in the beginning, but of,
well, I'd like to leave that part open. I'll end with a rumination on
writing.
To understand how those trajectories
play out in our practices, we can think of how to write about art
today. One tactic could be to think more about who is this for. If
this is not for me, what am I doing here? Furthermore, if this thing
here leaves me cold, why wouldn't I go somewhere warm? And yet
sometimes it might prove wise to test different climates. But for one
last time, all these maxims become meaningless in life, where choices
are rarely binary. And sometimes there is no choice. You just are
somewhere.
I could also propose we start from an
understanding that being in the same space with artworks is not a
one-sided affair. When entering an exhibition, you might want to ask
yourself: Who is this "I" that is hanging out with the
exhibition here today and what does this I do to the exhibition, and
vice versa?
The chameleon once again faces the
choice between a reflexive urge to fuse in with the surroundings, or
a Promethean obsession to challenge your environment. You are marking
the space with your energy. Is it healing, antagonizing, wobbly, or
dry kind of energy?
This unbound and always changing
multiplicity is who I am, and it's what an artwork with which I'm
spending time, has to deal with too. And how the work conducts that
dealing reverberates back to me. I am not only writing criticism
about artworks: The works are writing on me.
Published subsequently in Sorbus Gallery's upcoming publication, 2019
