The Exhibitionist
on six hinge exhibitions
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Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective
Curated by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson
Guggenheim Museum, NY
1997-98
Published in The Exhibitionist, Issue 9 (March 2014)
Published in The Exhibitionist, Issue 9 (March 20By the time one made it through this retrospective, split between the signature uptown building and the downtown Guggenheim SoHo (a venue from 1992-2001), and the separate gallery presentation of the constantly permutating The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981-97), it felt rather deliriously like having seen several retrospectives. The orphaning logic and destabilizing of medium convention so prevalent in the readymade eclecticism and print media looting of combines and combine paintings like Monogram (1955-59), Untitled (1954), Bed (1955), Odalisk (1955-58), and Canyon(1959), made the descent down through the Guggenheim architecture feel like some kind of cultural unburdening and overdue revelation. Departing into sustained asides, for instance Rauschenberg’s transfer masterpiece Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (1958-60), the exhibition also made room for excerpts from the oddly prescient if symptomatic quality of Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) (1984-1991), a massive undertaking of photographs, paintings, sculptures, and videos created and exhibited in eleven countries, endemic to the transnational platforms that were emerging in the 1980s and 1990s. Walter Hopps, in close collaboration with Rauschenberg and Susan Davidson, kept an embrace of such “counter” formats and venues present throughout the overall exhibition strategy. Letting the alarm of a piece like Soundings (1968), find unexpected dialog and response with the relaxed poise of the then overlooked ‘Cardboards’ series from the early ’70s (both were shown downtown), is a further example, and one of many in the exhibition, of how a retrospective can use pivotal works rather than be bound or constrained by them, animating the right imbalance within the work itself. The retrospective exceeded and thereby evaded a falsely progressive narrative without falling into chaos or mere cacophony, letting Rauschenberg’s intersection of art, media, and technology provoke and echo into the next century. With a Rauschenberg retrospective again on the horizon at MoMA, it will be interesting to see how this restive precedent is considered and taken into account.
Instytut Awangardy (Avant-Garde Institute)
Curated by Foksal Gallery Foundation Warsaw
2004-present
Published in The Exhibitionist, Issue 9 (March 2014)
Whether it’s Trostky’s bullet-riddled villa in Coyoacán, Mexico, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s retreat house in Sussex, or the Nietzsche House in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, a trip to a preserved and thereby altered place of truly significant creative production falls somewhere between the tourist cliché of encountering a time capsule and courting the uncanny: both embarrassing and comforting to the visitor, equal parts homage and opportunism. Occupying the top floor of a 1960s apartment building on Solidarności avenue, now maintained by the Foksal Gallery Foundation, the Avant-Garde Institute is a doubly elegiac gesture, as it was the home and studio for almost two decades of the artists Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński and their partners. Stażewski, a painter and an important player in the international avant-garde scene of the 1920s and 1930s, took over the flat in 1962 and made it a social hub for meetings and cultural exchange. He invited, the younger, conceptually inclined Krasiński to live with him in 1970 during the difficult sociopolitical times of the period. Upon Stażewski’s death in 1988, Krasiński gradually morphed parts of their shared flat into a tribute to the elder artist and their friendship, enacting a visual archive and display. Krasiński maintained the wires and discoloration where Stażewski’s paintings had hung, for example, and deployed his own signature blue tape discreetly across parts of the apartment and studio, underscoring ephemeral moments of their shared creative life and quietly resistant aesthetic dialogue. By maintaining the exactitude of Krasiński’s in the moment, self-aware historicizing gesture, Foksal Gallery Foundation has become the caretaker of a potent site and paradoxical testament to the local avant-garde and its contested legacies.
Hall of Northwest Coast Indians
Curated by Franz Boas
American Museum of Natural History, New York
1900–present
Published in The Exhibitionist, Issue 9 (March 2014)
The German anthropologist Franz Boas is known for his founding role in American Anthropology, especially his articulation of such influential concepts as cultural relativism, diffusion, and historical particularism. But his curatorial contributions and professional disagreements at the American Museum of Natural History from 1896–1907 are overlooked and worthy of further consideration, especially considering their belonging to the fertile and fraught “museum era” that still has combustive and vast infrastructural influence in regard to inherited ideas of philanthropic rhetoric, curatorial intentionality, ethnographic display, and museum education and research paradigms.
While significant changes have been made to the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians since it opened under Boas’s aegis, a remarkable amount of his initial presentation and curatorial framing remains. Whereas conventional didactics usually pin down an image or object, making it perform in stasis as an embedded illustration or representative configuration within a specific historical progression, the social situations of the Boasian exhibition occur en media res, repeated and altered through different narrativizing permutations and implied power relations, placing the viewer/student in the midst of a social fray that operates on both functional and symbolic levels. Demanding active interpretation, the exhibits posit differences and distinctions across and within various native cultures so that affinities arise comparatively, and elicit competing, revisable, participatory interpretations. The mixed format, research-based exhibition department that Boas envisioned, wherein more accessible exhibitions and expert-oriented displays would play off and inform each other, lies dormant here, a case study to be re-activated and learned from.
Rosemarie Trockel: Deliquesence of the Mother
Curated by Beatrix Ruf
Kunsthalle Zurich
2010
Rosemarie Trockel turned the retrospective gaze and the aspiration for an overview inside out here, as works in wide-ranging media from each decade of her career stood close together in ethnographic-style vitrines. Past works were “surveyed,” to be sure, but arranged as they were in Wunderkammer-like constructions, they also looked back—indeed, confronting the viewer like a tribe, refusing historical linearity in their apparition-like assembly: a swollen head sculpture, Hydrocephalus / Wasserkopf II(1982), for example, sat before the sleek black ceramic finish of a thirsty outstretched leg, mockingly titled Geruchsskulptur 2 (Aroma Sculpture 2, 2006), which, in turn, jostled a nearby diminutive goblin-like creature, Kiss My Aura (2008), hunkered below the overflowing hang of an unruly knitted work, Untitled (1989). Archetypes of mother and father were absorbed in the angular looking-back of Trockel’s roundup, exposing the cultural codes and clichés that underscore our need for empathic identification while also giving heterogeneous form to her diffusion of gender, ego, and character. Filtered and atomized throughout the exhibition, the liquefaction of the mother is Trockel’s versioning of self. By literally and precisely marginalizing her own works, she refuses to be periodized and thereby completed, insisting instead upon boundary conditions that can be reconfigured and made cruel. From the ceramic sofa sculptures that blocked and also moved the mover from the opening gallery into the next room, to a room that featured new ceramic wall sculptures, followed by the large-scale “knitted painting” nearly monochromatic series that preceded the vitrine interventions, to the lockdown style of collages that ran the perimeter of a back room in the show, work from Trockel’s past decade of production insisted on a dialogical tacking between new work and returns from the past. The first of a series of retrospective inversions—followed by the exhibition Flagrant Delight at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, (2012), with curator Dirk Snauwert, and A Cosmos at Reina Sofia, New Museum, and Serpentine Gallery, (2012-2013), with curator Lynne Cooke—it was here that Trockel first carried forward and asserted the conceptual mantle of late Marcel Broodthaers in her magisterial critique and inimitable toying with retrospective desires.
Group Material: Democracy
Curated by Group Material
Dia Art Foundation, New York
1988–89
This four-month exhibition by Group Material—which I didn’t personally experience—was a collaborative effort with many, including Dia’s then-curator Gary Garrels and the artist Yvonne Rainer. (The collaborative Group Material at the time consisted of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.) The show grew out of a two-year project, eventually adopting the pace of a commercial gallery in organizing four exhibitions and related town meetings addressing subthemes of timeliness and civic urgency: Education, Politics and Election, Cultural Participation, and, finally, AIDS and Democracy: A Case Study. The related publication, as well as the installation documentation featured in the invaluable recent book Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, give an initial sense of what Doug Ashford has eloquently written about as the Group Material curatorial method: “To defend the notion of an artwork as an encounter with a person and then display this encounter in the context of new politics was Group Material’s contradictory innovation, the design of a place where the self expands by rupturing in relationship to others. . . . It meant that we would have to try to invent visual solutions (to argument) that would be able to question themselves.”1 Group Material’s curatorial example of institutional collaboration (including the implications for collecting practices), democratic yet agonistic processes, and countless innovations to both timeline- and chronicle-oriented historiographic formats of display (both inside and outside the gallery space) is legendary, and deservedly so. Group Material: Democracyshows a collaborative curatorial model in need of more extended institutional presentations and critical reconsideration.
Footnotes
1 Doug Ashford, “An Artwork is A Person,” in Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (Four Corners Books, 2010), p. 225
Of Mice and Men: The 4th Berlin Biennial
Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick
Berlin
2006
The cinematic allure of this biennial, titled Of Mice and Men after John Steinbeck’s novella, was undeniable and indelible. The various settings along Augustraße—including a ballroom, cemetery, and church, as well as private apartments, horse stables, and the exhibition’s touchstone use of a shuttered, former Jewish Girls School—configured an exhibition-as-film-set dynamic, populated with the seductive, figurative acuity of works by artists such as Mark Manders, Matthew Monahan, Rachel Harrison, Francesca Woodman, and Tadeusz Kantor. Cribbing from the dispersed urbanity of an exhibition such as Jan Hoet’s Chambres d’Amis (1986), the stakes were heightened beyond location scouting or using the city as background. The spectral implications of World War II, the Holocaust, and the division of East and West Berlin lingered untethered as mood enhancement within the neglected patina of many of the settings. As curator Okwui Enwezor commented at the time, the exhibition was “dazzling in its settings in desolate, crumbling apartments and an abandoned Jewish school on the potholed, charmingly decrepit Augustraße. The curators guided viewers through spaces haunted by history.”1
While the placement of Paul McCarthy’s Bang Bang Room (1996) in the former Jewish Girls School, for instance, or the presentation of Tino Seghal’s Kiss (2002) in the run-down vintage chic of Clärchens Ballhaus, enacted emptying-out theatrical gestures that actively held their own against that haunted patina, the decontextualized gloss of unspecified periodizing that characterized the biennial seems increasingly significant with time. Displacement and trauma are implied backdrop presences, and works of art role-play or stand in while the viewer enacts the tracking shot. Perhaps an apotheosis of auteur-curating, the scenographic pre-conditioning of artwork and viewer has increasingly become assumed bulwark and background to the circulation of contemporary visual culture and biennial fanfare.
Footnotes
1 Artforum, December 2006, p. 296