Beauty Mark:
Curation I
12 January 2015
Am I in a dream? No — I’m too aware of being confused. In a dream, confusion is normal and unremarkable. In waking life, confusion is a pain, and something of a madness.
I’m confused because I can’t find a spot of terra firma from which to survey what I see. Is Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of Ways of Curating, crazy? Or is it “just me”? I can’t be sure, because I might be blind.
Blind or blinded or at least blinkered by the environment in which I was brought up, a bourgeois environment in which manners and discretion were tremendously important, if too often distorted by hypocrisy and pointlessness. I have thought through and reformed my manners and my discretion in an attempt to make them sincere and purposeful. But I remain troubled by the belief, which I do not share, that they are somehow unnecessary or damagingly artificial.
Something even more important in the bourgeois environment is making sense. Making sense is not as simple as it sounds, because the rules for making sense are fed to bourgeois children along with their cereal, and only rarely examined consciously. Basically, it is a matter of observing the law — the laws of men and the laws of physics. Pennies must add up to dollars, and behavior must comport with standards of the permissible. If I say, “This is my house,” I must be able to support the statement with deeds and mortgage instruments. If I cannot do that, I am not making sense, no matter how justified I feel.
The bourgeois mind is uncomfortable with the claims of philosophy, because quite often they do not make sense. They describe things that ought to be the case, perhaps, but that aren’t in fact the case. They are not backed up by documents and accounts. They are just words in the air. The bourgeois mind is wary of speculation — curiosity without rigor, or whose rigor is limited to the organization of words.
***
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a fortysomething Swiss fellow. He seems to be a well-intentioned person, highly intelligent if a bit wide-eyed and somewhat humorless. By humorless, I mean that he appears to be capable of keeping a straight face while writing the following description of an exhibition (so to speak) at Zurich’s sewage museum, the Stadtentwasserung.
Cloaca Maxima, as the resulting exhibition was called, addressed themes that affect everyone directly. There were many connections to the permanent collection of the Stadtentwasserung itself, though the point of departure was the video by Fischli and Weiss, which consisted of real-time photographs from observation cameras in the sewers. According to Dominique Laporte’s A History of Shit (1978), waste in Western societies has been gradually domesticated and, hence, banned from public view, the high point being the nineteenth-century hygienist movement. Laporte theorizes that the absolute division between the economy (as the site of filth) and the state (as the site of purity, with an all-filtering sewer) separated the private still further from the public, thereby reinforcing their borders.
Art, by contrast, situates itself within transitions and passages; it opens up opportunities for the public incursions into the private and vice versa. Excrement is freed of its negative connotations by being employed discursively. Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (small sealed cans, each said to contain 30 grams of the artist’s shit) plays with exactly this kind of alchemical transformation — reinforced by the fact that the price per can was comparable to the price for 30 grams of gold.
Whoa! You lost me at Laporte’s theorizing!
Ways of Curating abounds in statements of this kind. They are held, maddeningly, to be self-evident, in no need of argument. (This hermetic quality is reinforced by the reiteration of the names of certain artists and thinkers, some but not all of whom will be familiar to the general reader. They rather powerfully convey the sense that Obrist lives in a bubble.) The most shocking thing about Ways of Curating, however, is Obrist’s bland assumption that he is talking about Art.
***
Regular readers will be familiar with my contention that “conceptual art” is a contradiction in terms, and also with my frustration at failing to suggest a plausible replacement. Good news. Not only has reading Ways of Curating sharpened my grasp of the issue, but Obrist may even have helped me to find a better term. The term that I propose to take the place of “conceptual art” is “cultural fiction.” This new term underlines the one thing that I did know about “conceptual art,” which is that it is a branch of literature. Sooner or later, what’s called conceptual art comes down to a statement, in words, of the concept(s) involved in the work. Sometimes, the statement appears in the work itself; more often, it appears on an explanatory title card, or in a philosophical essay in the accompanying catalogue. In Obrist’s world, the statements come not only sooner than later but often in lieu of actual work. Among the handful of words that stud nearly every page of Ways of Curating — toolbox (a deplorable vogue word that insults real craftsmen, plumbers included), laboratory, and interstices are three — the standout is conversation.
At a café in Paris one late morning in the spring of 1993, I was talking to the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. I was twenty-four. We were discussing a particular kind of art, one that had grown remarkably over the last century: art that included not only objects to be displayed, but instructions to be executed. This, we agreed, had challenged traditional understandings of creativity, authorship, and interpretation. Boltanski and Lavier had been interested in such practices since the early 1970s; both had made many works that presented directions for action to the viewer, who became the work’s performer as well as its observer. This kind of art, Lavier pointed out, gave the viewer a measure of power in the making of it. He added that the instructions also gave life to his works, in a very real sense: they provoked not silent contemplation, but movement and action, amongst the visitors to museums or galleries in which they were displayed. Boltanski saw the instructions for installations as analogous to musical scores, which go through countless repetitions as they are interpreted and executed by others.
Starting with Marcel Duchamp, we began to list instruction-based artworks that came up as we talked…
I don’t want you to think that I find the idea of “instruction-based artwork” silly — I don’t, even if it has nothing to do with art. But isn’t it clear here that the truly exciting thing is the conversation, the rush of ideas, the list of names? Can’t you feel the heady enthusiasm of what in my college days was called a bull session? The show that Obrist went on to design, do it, was structured so that such conversations would have to take place before its installation in another city: the design was deliberately incomplete. Everything that could be done to reduce an “art exhibition” to the ephemerality of a conversation was done. Permanence in time and space was scrupulously resisted. Obrist happens to be a conscientious archivist of his conversations, but the difference between having a conversation and reading a transcript of that conversation is almost precisely the difference between writing a novel and reading it. The writing of a novel is quite literally exhausted, emptied, evaporated when the manuscript is bundled off to the publisher. It can be remembered (by the author only) but never re-experienced. That is what Obrist prizes about his toil in the fields of art.
Another recurring motif in Ways of Curating is the chronicle of first meetings that Obrist has had with artists and other art-world figures. In many cases, these meetings took place when Obrist was still in his teens. He has been not only drinking but bottling this Kool-Aid for a very long time.
As the great actress says near the end of Being Julia, “Not remotely.”