Some Tales Numerous Questions
Considered one of my favourite museum installations is a small show that may be discovered within the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The set up consists of an oak pedestal and a glass vitrine. The vitrine holds a glass chemistry check tube that’s sealed with a cork. Beside it’s a small label which states:
It’s alleged that Henry Ford requested Thomas A. Edison’s son, Charles, to gather an exhaled breath from the lungs of Ford’s dying hero and good friend. This check tube was discovered at Ford’s Truthful Lane mansion, together with Edison’s hat and sneakers, after Clara Ford’s loss of life in 1950.
This modest set up is titled Edison’s Final Breath?-Not Edison’s Final Breath, cease, however Edison’s Final Breath, Question Assignment mark. Because the label says, it’s merely “alleged” that Henry Ford requested Edison’s son to gather one ultimate sighing breath from the
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Exhibition Prosthetics
lungs of the good American inventor. What’s compelling to me isn’t whether or not the story is true or not, however that the story exists because it does, narrated throughout the vitrine. If exhibitions contain “exhibiting,” in addition they contain a course of by which the act of exhibiting is subsumed by the act of telling-of developing narratives that elide distinctions between phrases and pictures, or between artifacts and artifictions.
The Question Assignment is – does it matter? Does it matter how museums narrate, describe, and in any other case footnote the objects they show? Or as Philippe Parreno said in a latest text-based work: “What do you consider, your eyes or my phrases?”
This example isn’t a brand new one. It has been mentioned beforehand by literary students within the discipline of textual criticism & bibliography, and can also be the premise behind a e book I printed within the 1990s, Texualterity: Art, Idea, and Textual Criticism. Textual criticism is a literary apply that explores how texts relate to one another, how they derive (or “filiate”) from one another, and the way they’re disseminated in tradition. The self-discipline particularly tries to outline the parameters of what constitutes boundaries: the place does a poem start & finish? A Question Assignment like this asks us to contemplate how the identical poem printed in several contexts is each materially and ontologically totally different. We may simply as nicely take the identical Question Assignment and apply it to an art work: the place does an art work start & finish? Or, the place does an exhibition start & finish? Is an exhibition simply in regards to the materialization of particular
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artworks, or is it additionally – and in that case, in what methods – in regards to the numerous conventions that go into the making of exhibitions, which embrace press releases, announcement playing cards, checklists, catalogues, and digital-based media?
Conventions like these are representations. We interact in several sorts of representations each due to the implausibility of re-presenting, and in addition as a result of illustration is a way by which we additional, by the usage of language and pictures, and thru a course of that’s each other- smart and otherhow, the attain of the true. It is because of this that the connection between publica- tion practices and exhibition practices deserves nearer scrutiny. Each may be described as modes of dissemination-a course of by which the varied arts are dropped at an viewers of readers, viewers, and listeners. I exploit the important time period “exhibition prosthetics” to explain an array of those conven- tions, significantly (however not solely) in relation to exhibition practices. Maybe out of behavior, we appear decidedly inured to the expertise of conven- tions like these. They’re part of the equipment of exhibiting-we learn titles, labels, and catalogues as a result of their authority establishes for the art work a way of place. On this respect, shifting nearer to the art work entails shifting away from the art- work-to look nearer at fringes and margins and representations, and ask what appears to me a really basic Question Assignment: to what extent are these numerous exhibition conventions truly a part of the artwork – and never merely an extension of it?
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Exhibition Prosthetics
I need to begin with an instance of a human prosthesis: an arm. A prosthesis is an attachment. an extension. The OED notes that the primary fashionable utilization of the prosthesis as a medical time period occurred in 1706; it’s outlined as. “That a part of surgical procedure which consists in supplying deficiencies. as by synthetic limbs. tooth. or by different means.” That’s. a prosthe- sis remediates-it fills. it extends. it dietary supplements. But it surely doesn’t do that with out additionally turning into part of. not aside from. the physique that it fills. extends. and dietary supplements. Because the literary critic David Wills wrote: the “prosthesis is inevitably about belonging.”
“Belonging” appears to me the proper phrase to explain the complexity of this relationship. The prosthesis originates from a want to make complete. whereas acknowledging that the duty is an unattainable one; that’s. that the prosthesis creates a point of semblance. a point of verisi- militude. however can by no means develop into what has been misplaced.
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It stays without end displaced within the technique of being positioned .
Not removed from my house in Chicago is a constructing that I take into consideration usually. It’s situated on the nook of Racine and Adams Road. Each morning I stroll previous it whereas taking my canine for a stroll. For a number of years, it was what we name a “blended use” loft build- ing – half enterprise, half residence. (Though, as I write this, the enterprise half is being transformed to a Montessori faculty.) The principle entrance is on the entrance of the constructing; there’s a stairway with six steps that result in the carry. Individuals who use wheel- chairs can not entry the constructing from this level of entry. They have to go round to the facet of the constructing, the place a specifically designated wheelchair carry has been put in within the automobile park. This location separates and isolates customers from the pedestrian move of the sidewalk. The carry was put in whereas the constructing was being retrofitted. The very technique of “retrofitting” reminds us of that change to a build- ing, like change to a textual content, that entails a technique of hyphenation. It’s in a state of affairs like this that
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Exhibition Prosthetics
the prosthesis is an attachment, and the purpose of attachment turns into pronounced, awkward, and by no means fairly belongs in the way in which that we wish it to-the clunky hyphen syndrome.
If buildings are our bodies – and I feel they’re – so too is our social topography. City and rural areas alike have labels that determine, mark, and in any other case caption our expertise of this topogra- phy. Think about for instance a street signal from Lake Placid, New York, which states: “deaf baby space.” Indicators like these aren’t unusual within the US. Their function is to make evident by language and the conference of yellow diamond-shaped hazard indicators that which is in any other case not self-evident. One can not “see” the deafness of a deaf individual, and so the prosthesis right here operates in a manner that simul- taneously stands and stands in for that which is absent.
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It might be mentioned that by definition the prosthesis aspires for seamlessness, to include itself into a complete, in order that it’s indivisible from the entire. Human prostheses are in the present day extremely elaborate – they work each as a visible and useful surro- gate to the unique. Generally they function as a vogue “accent” – as is the case with the brand new “Immaculate Prosthetic Limb.”
A prosthesis like this might, with none irony in any respect, be described as elegant. Nonetheless, they weren’t all the time like this. Previously their function concerned functioning as a visible reproduction as a way to include the physique’s corporeality. About 30 years in the past, I had a deaf classmate named Roger who had one arm, and the opposite was a passive or “beauty” prosthesis. It was my first 12 months of faculty. I used to be studying signal language, and Roger was in
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Exhibition Prosthetics
my class. On the primary day, the instructor tried to show us to signal “Good morning.” So all of us mentioned, “Good morning” again to her – besides Roger, who signed “good morning” together with his proper hand solely. The instructor was good; she did not notice Roger had just one arm, so she mentioned, “it is essential to observe my indicators fastidiously, and if I exploit two palms you will need to additionally use two palms.” So she did it once more, she signed “Good morning.” Roger, perplexed, however compelled to make folks completely satisfied, responded in the one manner he may: together with his proper hand he eliminated his prosthe- sis, after which, with one hand holding the opposite hand, signed again – with a smile – “Good morning.”
All three of those examples: the wheelchair carry, the deaf baby signal, and Roger contain incapacity as a result of the prosthesis is traditionally and etymo- logically mentioned as an extension of the human physique. The physique is each a actuality and a metaphor – a metaphor for different our bodies. Books are our bodies, exhibitions are our bodies, buildings are our bodies -what is it that makes a physique “full”? What makes a physique of an exhibition “complete”?
In Mieke Bal’s e book Double Exposures, she explains, “The discourse round which museums exist, and which defines their main perform, is exposition” (Double Exposures, 2). Exposition entails the doubling of each exhibiting and telling. Which is what I’m doing proper now: exhibiting and telling in regards to the apply of exhibiting and telling.
And so it will appear that the connection between a physique and its prosthesis is a dialogic relationship, every “informing” the opposite, every
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Some Tales Numerous Questions
supplementing the opposite. The French critic Gerard Genette has spoken of verbal appendages. akin to titles and captions. as paratexts: that which is along- facet the principle textual content. However alongside isn’t sufficient; there may be motion between the physique and its exten- sions. a motion that’s peritextual in design. a motion that entails the peregrinations of a shifting floor.
What I discover significantly partaking about Edison’s Final Breath? is how the label is contained throughout the vitrine. neatly positioned beside the check tube con- taining maybe Edison’s final breath. Like Piero Manzoni’s well-known cans of Merda d’artista. it isn’t the contents of the check tube or the can that matter as a lot as how they’re labeled. as a result of we con- struct which means on the premise of our beliefs about these labels. e ” “C ”
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Some Tales Numerous Questions
This in flip makes a museum like Sir John Soane’s Museum so compelling: Soane’s Museum has no labels on the partitions, which is exactly as Soane supposed. As an alternative of labels, Soane ready three guidebooks for the museum, and the guidebooks modulate the motion of tourists to the museum.
This modus operandi continued within the exhibition Hans Ulrich Obrist curated at Soane’s Museum in 1999. The exhibition consisted of labor by a lot of up to date artists, amongst them Cerith Wyn Evans, Steve McQueen, and Douglas Gordon. Relatively than labeling the artwork, Cerith initiated the design of a foldout brochure that operated like Soane’s guide- books – a complement to the exhibition that was additionally a part of the exhibition.
Amongst archivists, checklists and related printed supplies are described as “ephemera.” The phrase derives from the Greek ephemeron which means that which lasts very briefly. One may argue that ephem- period encompass the incarnation of the ephemeral- it’s the kind of unexceptional on a regular basis stuff that usually will get thrown away. But, whereas exhibitions themselves are temporal- a typical gallery present final 4 weeks – it’s the ephemera that outlive and outlast the exhibition. On the Museum of Fashionable Art in New York, ephemera aren’t catalogued like books, however relatively are compressed into vertical files- folders organized by artist. These vertical information/artist information are labeled: “The folder might embrace announce- ments, clippings, press releases, brochures, critiques, invites, small exhibition catalogs, and different ephemeral materials.” This materials is essential in
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Exhibition Prosthetics
phrases of how we learn art- how we work our strategy to it and thru it. This topic has not escaped the discover of important and curatorial scrutiny. In 1993 the Cleveland Museum of Art printed The Customer’s Voice: Customer Research within the Renaissance- Baroque Galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1990- 1993. It would sound like an arcane publication – it’s – however additionally it is a really minute research of how museum guests reply to the precise methods visible info is offered within the type of wall labels, brochures, and interpretative texts. Within the case of wall labels, the research explored variation in content material, writing fashion, size, fonts, and placement. In 1994 Trevor Fairbrother curated an exhibition on the Boston Museum of Fantastic Art known as “The Label Present: Modern Art and the Museum.” It was an attractive present; works that usually had one label had two or extra, and the labels have been additionally signed by the people who wrote them- a vital distinction to the methods museums usually aspire to current themselves as disinter- ested authorities.
A really intriguing research may likewise be fabricated from titles and press releases. Generally they quote an exhibition; typically they counterpoint an exhibition; typically they’re the exhibition itself-or part of it. Felix Gonzalez-Torres (in his press launch for “Untitled (Vultures)” at And- rea Rosen Gallery in 1995) and Seth Worth (in his press launch for “Gray Flags” at Alogon Gallery in Chicago in 2008) created press materials that was basically as a lot artwork as anything in
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“Our function as anist is extra controversial now as a result of there are these, claiming absolutely the authority of faith, who detest a lot of our work as a lot as they detest most of our politics. As an alternative of rationally debating topics like abortion or homosexual nghts, they condemn as immoral those that favor selections and tolerance. They disown their very own darkish facet and enlarge everybody else’s till, on the excessive, dOOlors arc murdered within the title of defending life. I’m wondering, who is that this God they invoke, who’s so petty and imply? Is God actually in opposition to gun comrol and fooj stamps for poor youngsters?”
excerpt from “The Artist as CII/zen” by Barbra Srrefsand delivered February three, 1995 01 John F Kennedy Faculty ofGovernmenl at Harvard UnH’ersity.
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Exhibition Prosthetics
the exhibition. Worth, particularly, supposed it this fashion, simply as Douglas Gordon as soon as contributed the title of an exhibition as a contribution to the exhibi- tion. [“Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow,” Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1999]. Art historians usually converse of provenance as a type of owner- ship. Nonetheless, possession can also be in regards to the authority, and the authority of titles, captions, and so forth is in flip part of the provenance of the work. Fairbroth- er’s “Label Present” tried to attract out this topic, however his was a singular, if not an iconoclastic effort. I’m stunned at instances when critics and historians fail to acknowledge the instability of titles and captions, and the way these modified and altering states replicate the ways in which artworks are unmade, remade, and remodeled in the middle of their transmission as cultural objects. Jackson Pollock’s titles, for instance, have been steadily re-titled by his critics and collectors. Quantity 9 turned Summertime; Quantity t 1950 turned Lavender Mist; Quantity 11, 1952 turned Blue Poles; Quantity 30, 1950 turned Autumn Rhythm. That is all crucial as a result of we do not usually think about the extent to which artists are additionally authors of their very own press releases, announcement playing cards, and catalogues. “Authorship” is usually an imbricated technique of overlapping authority; it’s hardly ever, within the matter of exhibition ephemera, easy or simplistic.
Beginning within the early 1990s, a physique of labor has developed across the prosthesis. For a present on the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in 1997, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska com- posed and printed an “errata” to the exhibition
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catalogue that explores the connection between on a regular basis objects and artwork objects. It was just a few years earlier that Felix Gonzalez-Torres created his singular and well-known poster tasks. It is very important put this within the context of the early 1990s. The inventory market crash of 1987 ended the megalomania of the 1980s and redirected aesthetic practices in direction of one thing way more modest in scale. And never all of those tasks concerned a physi- cal materialization of a printed object: some have been performative, akin to Andrea Fraser’s Museum Excessive- lights (1989) on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which concerned turning the gallery docent tour right into a reflexively important efficiency. Fraser’s work was a prelude to the manifestation of artwork as a type of institutional critique that developed within the early 1990s in work by Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Renee Inexperienced, amongst others-a topic pursued within the exhibition “What Occurred to the Institutional Critique” at American Fantastic Arts in New York within the fall of 1993. Laurie Parsons did a related challenge on the New Museum in 1992, which, like Fraser’s efficiency, used sure immaterial exhibition conventions in a brand new manner. The New Museum Annual Report, 1992-1994 describes Parsons’ challenge within the following manner:
“As her contribution to the exhibition [The Spatial Drivel, artist Laurie Parsons developed the Security and Admissions Project, in which all printed materi- als were removed from the gallery and information was given verbally instead by the Museum’s security
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One of the most compelling and lesser-known examples of prosthetic art that I have encountered took place during Documenta in Kassel, Germany in 1997. It was called Novaphorm Hotel. The project was conceived by the German artists Lisa Junghanss and Martin Eder. The hotel itself was essentially a Bed & Breakfast that the two artists operated as an unofficial part of Documenta. Junghanss and Eder rented two flats in Kassel, renovated them, and advertised their availability through the official Documenta Visitor’s Services. Operating in the ambiguous territory of quasi-official spaces, Novaphorm Hotel was “dissemi- nated” among the public by way of various publications related to hotel culture: postcards, door hangers, business cards, and registration cards.
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The publications were designed by a collabora- tor, Peter Hankel. The pharmaceutical packaging has a distinct, if not allusive purpose; the omnipres- ent motto of Novaphorm is “wirkt zur gegewart” – it “affects the present.” It affects the present because Novaphorm is essentially an exploration of the rela- tionship between individuals and social spaces, and how a certain social situation will affect bodies moving through it. Like a body under the influence of bio- and psychopharmaceuticals, the body is not itself: it defines itself in relation to exterior circum- stances that ultimately construct it.
Novaphorm Hotel, like other collaborations between Junghanss and Eder, was an installation that was also a performance project where the artists, as part of a social and monetary transac- tion, served their guests by creating a “relaxation space”: the breakfasts were sumptuous, and both Junghanss and Eder were around to talk with their guests, and guests were around to talk with other guests – at nine in the morning over coffee or two in the morning over beer. Novaphorm Hotel had a very modest goal of occupying a distinct social space between art and life that is in the end both art and life.
It was during the same decade that Hans Ulrich Obrist started organizing projects that redefined the parameters of place by taking the exhibition outside the gallery and the museum. His first exhi- bition, entitled “The Kitchen Show,” took place in 1991 in the kitchen of his apartment in St. Gallen. In the catalogue, Hans Ulrich explained: “[The]
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place to begin is the concept to current an exhibition in an unspectacular house.” As his curatorial reuvre grew, so did the definition of what constituted an unspectacular house. In tasks he did with the museum in progress in Vienna, he turned the Aus- trian every day newspaper Der Commonplace right into a museum by a sequence of interventions: artists have been invited to create tasks that have been printed as a part of the common editorial content material of the paper.
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MIGRATEURS
JOSEPH GRIGELY
ARC Musee d’ An Moderne de 10 Ville de Paris
In collaboration with Aligherio Boetti, he curated a challenge of Boetti’s work of airplanes that appeared within the inflight journal of Austrian Airways in 1992, and the pictures have been additionally made into jigsaw puzzles that got to youngsters. A associated challenge is “Level d’ironie;’ a hybrid poster/ exhibition, which started in 1997 with the Help
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of agnes b.: an artist is given free reign to design every challenge. 100 thousand copies are produced and distributed free in museums, cafes, colleges, cinemas, and associated venues. Initiatives like “Level d’ironie” work in a manner that realigns the conventions by which artwork is disseminated. Such realignment was the modus oper- andi of the “Migrateurs” exhibitions Hans Ulrich curated on the Musee d’artwork moderne in Paris, the place artists have been invited to make use of a wide range of public areas within the museum – the bookshop and the cafe amongst them-for installations. As well as, every exhibition was accompanied by a low-cost catalogue that, relatively than reiterating or quoting the exhibition, functioned to inflect the exhibition. On this regard, Hans Ulrich’s legacy from the 1990s was to remake curatorial prac- tice a type of institutional criticism.
Hans Ulrich additionally created conditions and opportu- nities for artists to de- and re-materialize their work in new conditions outdoors of the museum – and to take action as a mainstream manner of working. His e book Delta X: Der Kurator als Katalysator, which was printed in 1996, gives a microhistory of the emergence of this apply. I rely myself among the many many artists who benefited from the preliminary expertise of working with Hans Ulrich.
Since 1994 my work has explored the disjunction between visible and auditory expertise. This physique of labor is inflected by my deafness -I’m completely deaf, and have been since I used to be ten years previous. It isn’t the deafness that’s essential, a lot because the implica- tions of it, and the way in which it realigns the sensory world. What does the world seem like with the sound turned
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off? How would possibly it’s that language may be mentioned to caption human expertise? Painters like Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Canaletto steadily painted folks engaged in some sort of conversational discourse, however the inhabitants of these work, for all that they are saying, say nothing in any respect.
A latest challenge, involving images of individuals singing from the New York Occasions, known as
. “Songs With out Phrases”. I eliminated the captions from the images, after which reprinted them as a sequence of captionless, unvoiced photographs. It’s a easy gesture; a course of of constructing that entails unmak- ing. Exhibitions typically have a foul behavior of claiming an excessive amount of, and the labels and captions and wall texts that characterize up to date exhibition practices have a manner of doing precisely this. It was Susan Sontag who instructed us that each photograph needs a caption. Whereas this can be true within the case of sure photo- graphic genres and traditions, typically talking, it isn’t true of photographs, the place a caption works in a manner that narrates, even chaperones, the picture.
There’s one other manner of eradicating captions from photographs. All you need to do is flip off the sound in your TV. I first outlined this challenge whereas working with Hans Ulrich on his “do it” exhibition – the house model: Watch the information with out sound. Watch a live performance with out sound. Watch a sitcom with out sound. At first it appears contrived and awkward, however after some time, the contrivance and awkwardness begin to get attention-grabbing as a result of they remind us simply how ambiguous the physique is when it does not have phrases to maintain it. This ambiguity is semantically
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Exhibition Prosthetics
liberating. The images of individuals singing within the New York Occasions even have this fashion of reminding us that visible representations aren’t simply in regards to the visible discipline, however in regards to the auditory discipline as nicely.
Lots of my conversations with listening to individuals are inscribed on paper, and it’s through the use of papers like these that I assemble wall items and installa- tions. This has been an ongoing topic of my work for the previous fifteen years.
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A latest wallwork is titled We’re Bantering Drunkening About What’s Necessary in Life. The title comes from one of many dialog papers throughout the work. A big piece like this takes me three or 4 months to finish; I typically make solely two a 12 months. The coloured papers are particularly laborious to work with as a result of their placement is determined by so many components: the form and measurement of the paper, the
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coloration of the paper, the precise phrases, and the way in which they’re written. Josef Albers astutely remarked that you simply can not put one coloration beside one other with- out additionally altering each. That is additionally true for verbal narratives: you can’t put one phrase beside one other with out additionally altering each. That is how relational grammar operates, and the way relational practices contain not simply the semantics of language, however extra typically, formal relations .
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A bit of show within the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, is one in all my favourite museum items. An oak pedestal and a glass vitrine make up the set up. A glass chemistry check tube is sealed with a cork within the vitrine. There’s a small label beside it that reads:
Henry Ford is claimed to have requested Thomas A. Edison’s son, Charles, to seize an exhaled breath from the lungs of Ford’s dying hero and good friend, Thomas Edison. After Clara Ford’s loss of life in 1950, this check tube, together with Edison’s hat and sneakers, have been found at Ford’s Truthful Lane residence.
Edison’s Final Breath? is the title of this small set up.
–
Cease saying “Edison’s Final Breath,” as a substitute say “Edison’s Final Breath.”
