Attempts to new forms of ‘trans-scriptive' curating

This presentation focuses on a case study that I was asked to propose in this symposium - The Exhibition and its Histories - that I conceived for Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, a not-for-profit contemporary art institution based in Stockholm that I direct since last year. Instead of adopting the traditional format of a group exhibition, the exhibition series The audience is the mother of self-invention unfolded as an ambitious weekly programme of short-lived exhibitions and performance-based events by Swedish and international artists, curators, filmmakers, and musicians. For two months the series mapped out still-undisclosed art historical epistemologies, in particular the expanded definition of scoring as a trans-scriptive device. Throughout the 20th century artists used scores as a way to map out movement and to record thought. Graphic notations, verbal instructions, storyboards and stage directions have been elaborated as de-scriptive and pre-scriptive sign systems, focusing on the ability of artistic processes to translate concept and work. In the 21st century, artists have revisited and re-interpreted the infinite possibilities proposed by scores as classic modernist tools. Annotations, variations, reconstructions and additions to the originals have become recognised trans-scriptive methods of work. These have evolved from the status of draft or documentary materials standing in for objects, images or actions, into forms that put equal emphasis on both copy and original, or play with the act of re-staging historic precedents. This approach created a productive space for discussion about the tensions between scoring and forms of agency involving the audience. It raised questions about the degrees of authenticity of a performance that transforms into an image, and its reception as documentary material. Spectators are chroniclers directly involved in the constitution of an artwork; they can replace visual components with the inscription of the artwork into its medial reception, constantly dispersing. By confronting these polarities — of ‘before’ and ‘after’, precondition and anecdote — The audience is the mother of self-invention analysed the complex interaction between trans-scriptive procedures, event, mediation, reception and dissemination. The premise of the series questioned and re-articulated some consolidated conventions inscribed in how group exhibitions are temporally and physically represented, communicated and received by their publics. Throughout its institutional history – established in 1974 as the artist association Fotograficentrum, acting in the 1980s and 1990s as the publisher of the art magazines Bildtidningen and Index, in 1996 having become a Foundation that initiated acclaimed projects by international artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe and Harun Farocki – Index has always attempted to challenge prevailing norms and structures of aesthetic and curatorial production, putting at centre of its attention on-going explorations and interest in visual displays and viewer-related experiments encompassing the changed conditions of presentation and reception of art. This approach will continue with the second instalment of Counter-Production, a group exhibition curated by myself and Ilse Lafer and in partnership with the Generali Foundation, Vienna, which in order to question how artistic productivity is experienced and addressed in the context of an exhibition today, it presents a risk-taking new approach in virtualizing it by means of cinematic strategies. The initiative of making an exhibition as a film should not be considered a matter of documentary representation but, rather, an experiment rooted in the tension between the staging of the documentary (portraying the experience of the exhibition from the side of those spectators who saw the first installment at the Generali Foundation, while attempting to meet the expectations of viewers in Stockholm) and the documentary of the staging (articulated through the transcription of an exhibition into filmic ‘space’).

Towards a history of exhibitions in Scotland

A Conceptual History of Exhibition-making

Since 1989, we have not only seen (geo)political and cultural changes in Europe, former West and East alike, but also a renewed interest in the exhibition as the main vehicle for contemporary art, not only in terms of presentation, but also production: the exhibition as medium. We have also seen the specialization of exhibitions into what can be characterized as instituted genres of exhibitions. We must therefore ask ourselves not only what a history of exhibitions will tell us about art, but also about history, and about how it is written and read, rewritten, and re-read. Are such histories necessarily always written by the victors—short term as well as long term, internationally as well as nationally? This keynote looks at a few examples, both canonical and non-canonical, in order to sketch out how a typology of exhibitions must be established, but also to ask what makes exhibitionary articulations readable and translatable, and indeed successful and unsuccessful within their parameters and strategies. In other words, the question is: is it possible to predetermine the effects and affects of exhibitions within their chosen type and/or efforts to not conform to type? What are its relations to histories and counter-histories, i.e. what sort of horizon is set up by a given exhibition in its types, forms, and articulations?

Exhibition Histories: What and how? From research, publishing and pedagogy

Lucy Steeds will address the questions on which the symposium is based and add some of her own. In doing so she will draw on her work for Afterall’s book series, Exhibition Histories, and speak from the perspective of the course and research programme that she co-leads at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, MRes Art: Exhibition Studies.

Transcendental or Dialectical – Two options for a history of art exhibitions

In the last years writing the history of art exhibitions has become a respectable academic enterprise. Aside from the pressing methodological questions this new scholarly work raises (especially which source material can be used and how), this historiographical enterprise also presents some theoretical, epistemological challenges. The most complex of which is what kind of history we are dealing with in this case? Are we writing a general, successive history of art exhibitions that can be considered as a new version of a general art history? Or does art exhibition history share in the complex rethinking of art history as a discipline as conducted recently by art historians like Georges Didi-Huberman. In his writings, especially on German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg, art is not considered as belonging to ‘a’ history, but much more as a ‘means’ through which we can reflect on the complex historicity of human life and culture. In my presentation I want to revisit Didi-Huberman his argument through the lens of a polemic around Alois Riegl’s notion of artistic volition (Kunstwollen) that took place between art historian Erwin Panofsky and museum curator Alexander Dorner in the 1920s. In this debate Panofsky presents a transcendental model for art history, which can be aligned with the ambition to write a general history of art, whereas Dorner takes a complex relativistic position that shows already the first traces of complex and impure dialectics, which he would later work out in more detail in his 1947 publication ‘The Way Beyond ‘Art’’. By discussing these two positions I want to demonstrate the limits of Panofsky’s model and the contemporary potential of Dorner’s proposal and hope to show the profound link between current re-thinking of art history and the rise of art exhibition history.