Tania Bruguera, Generic Capitalism (2009), medium: disruption of public space;

technique: interrupted conference; materials: former Weather Underground members,

planted performers in the audience, interruption of speech by the audience, which takes
over. Photos: Rainer Ganahl, ©Tania Bruguera, 2009, courtesy of Studio Bruguera.

JCS 1.1_Uchill_26-45.indd 26 2/3/12 4:40:29 PM

 JCS 1 (1) pp. 27–43 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of curatorial studies

Volume 1 Number 1
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.1.1.27_1

Rebecca Uchill

Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking

Things Out: Curating the Limits
of Discursive Space

Abstract Keywords
This article considers recent curatorial gestures that draw attention to the art discourse
limits of institutional discursive space. Focusing in particular on the strategies institutional discourse
of formulating discursive structures in unitednationsplaza (2006–09) and Our Literal Speed
of audience alienation in Our Literal Speed (OLS) conferences (2008−), this unitednationsplaza
article explores the possibility of critical engagement with the limits of discursive curatorial interventions
procedures.

In an unlikely moment during the 2009 Art Chicago fair, an assembly of

patrons, academics, students and others gathered in the Merchandise Mart
shopping and convention centre for a panel discussion featuring former
members of the American radical left group, the Weather Underground.
Soon after Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn began speaking, a number
of audience members stood and interrupted – variously questioning or
celebrating the use of radical tactics, and voicing concerns about the state
of present political struggle. The room erupted into heated conversation.
How did an art fair become host to such an explosive dialogue?
The panel discussion, known subsequently as the artwork Generic
Capitalism (2009), was incited by artist Tania Bruguera, who that same
year produced actions that included distributing cocaine to a Bogotá
university audience and performing Russian roulette at the Venice
Biennale. While the precise conditions for her Chicago panel discussion

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 Rebecca Uchill

will be explored in detail below, Bruguera’s very production of a radical

conversation environment in an art fair context marked an experiment
with the constraints imposed upon interlocutors within institutional
space. Such constraints around discourse have been a matter of long-
standing interest for art and museum theory; in many accounts, their
very existence has been grounds for museum scholars to characterize the
institution as a monolith. Danielle Rice (2003), for example, has traced
the sense of Foucauldian disciplining of a public that haunts accounts of
museum operations in scholarship from Duncan and Wallach (1980) to
Sherman and Rogoff (1994) and others. Where Rice rightly challenges
the impulse to position the museum as a dominant producer of knowl-
edge imposed on a vaguely defined audience, there is value in attending
to the ways that institutional agents influence the exchange of ideas and
negotiations of meaning that occur through relational assemblies. To
this end, Foucault’s use of the term ‘discourse’ to encompass a complex
entanglement of statements, exclusions, power relations and regulations,
a shifting term referring sometimes to ‘the general domain of all state-
ments, sometimes [to] an individualizable group of statements, and some-
times [to] a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements’
(Rice 1972: 80, elaborated in Mills 1997: 6−7), is a productive means to
consider today’s socially-based art practices, as well as the curatorial and
museum strategies surrounding them.
Since Rice published her appeal for greater focus on a differentiated
audience, a widespread emphasis on the discursive attributes of art
and museum practices in art theory and criticism of the last decade
suggests a renewed consideration of the art institution’s role as a host
for public discourse, along, perhaps, with a more honest appraisal of
exactly which publics are in fact engaging in it. Grant Kester’s ‘dialogical
aesthetics’  (2004), Jacques Rancière’s active spectator (2004), and the
advocacy for Mouffian agonism (Mouffe 1999) in writings by Claire
Bishop (2004) and Simon Sheikh (2006), all variously explore interactions
between members of an assembly, along with their poetic and political
efficacies and even their degrees of accommodation by those who produce
and maintain the art institutional mainframe. Discourse is increasingly
understood as a critical container of art’s dissemination: the 2005 RAND
Corporation survey of United States visual arts defined academic and
critical ‘discourse’ as one of three major and interrelated mechanizations
that circumscribe art (the others being the museum and the market)
(McCarthy et al. 2005: xv). RAND’s authors imply that the diversifying
and expanding number of participants in art discourse might serve to
distribute previously consolidated power. The debates over dialogical
inclusions, sitings and motivations are often premised on the notion that
structures for discursive exchange comprise the constraints within which
power and ideas are produced. Mindful of these stakes, and taking the
liberty of equating all intersubjective occasions as opportunities for the
perpetuation of discourse formations, this article will explore the curatorial
production of discursive space, focusing on two recent case studies: the
strategies of formatting publics in unitednationsplaza (2006−09) and
audience alienation in the Our Literal Speed Chicago conference (2009).
By focusing on procedures that directly call into question the utopian

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 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

foundations of the museum as a dialogical commons, this article tightly

frames these cases, at the peril of omitting their many other notable
attributes and motivations. However, these particular gestures deserve
focused attention for their capacity to both reveal discursive limitations
and instrumentalize them to productive effect.
The formatting of a discursive framework – structured through proce-
dural regulation, spatial order, or other governing directives – is histori-
cally intertwined with art’s production, presentation and pedagogy. Before
the institution of the public museum was established, the seventeenth-
century French Academy literally reconfigured seating arrangements of
its public lectures (called ‘the Discourse’) to move academician Charles
LeBrun’s detractors to more remote locations (Bryson 1981: 33). The
conception of the museum itself as a place where ideas (not objects) would
be arranged as a curatorial operation is a longstanding one. Smithsonian
Institute arts administrator George Brown Goode, who worked on all
major United States exhibitions of the nineteenth century from the
Centennial Exhibition onwards, opined that ‘the people’s museum should
be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should
be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system’
(1891: 433). In 1947, as mid-century modernism advanced the white cube
as sensorial compartmentalization chamber, removing, for example, vocal
utterances (and hence, interpersonal dialogue) from the (assumed visual)
aesthetic experience (see Jones 2006: 5), curatorial innovator Alexander
Dörner instead elaborated on the notion that the museum would be a
place for idea exchange and experiential interaction, by suggesting
that the museum build itself as a platform for idea production with his
oft-referenced postulation that

The new type of art museum must not be only an ‘art’ museum in
the traditional, static sense, but, strictly speaking, not a ‘museum’ at
all. […] [T]he new type would be a kind of powerhouse, a producer
of new energies.
(Dörner 1947: 232)

Throughout the twentieth century, studio art practice has in various ways
assimilated the form of language in practices from Cubism to Dada to
dematerialized processes. Historian Howard Singerman (1999) has
traced some of the motivations for the academic shift towards language-
dominance in studio art programs, including the move to credentialize art
disciplines with the research and publication metrics of science, leading
to a tremendous output of language-based art production since the
1960s. As art itself has become more interaction- or conversation-based
(for example, in the 1960s Happenings of Allan Kaprow, the mid-1990s
conversations between police and youth in Oakland, California, organ-
ized by artist Suzanne Lacy and collaborators, and the 2006 and 2010
conversational perambulations produced by Tino Sehgal for London’s ICA
and New York City’s Guggenheim Museum), institutions have shifted to
accommodate, with varying degrees of success, artworks taking form as
dinner parties, research laboratories, and assorted hang-out constructions
such as tents, forts and risers.

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 Rebecca Uchill

1. While Habermas’s Simultaneously, a growing number of curators attend directly – without

The Structural
Transformation of the an artwork as a necessary catalyst – to the physical formulations of the
Public Sphere (1991 discursive museum forum, literalizing the metaphor of ‘discursive space’
[1962]) does not treat
the museum directly, it
by integrating congregation forums as features of their exhibition produc-
looks to the eighteenth- tions. A notable but by no means exhaustive list of such practitioners
century cultural sphere includes Maria Lind, Ute Meta Bauer, and the curatorial triad of Molly
as a platform for
public discourse, and Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija who oversaw the
the notion of public Utopia Station platform, designed by Tiravanija with artist Liam Gillick,
enlightenment through
such discourse is for the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). A second example is the 2008 Berlin
telegraphed via Kant. Biennial which Elena Filipovic was invited to co-curate with Adam
Later in the text, when
Habermas moves into
Szymczyk. Filipovic explicitly called for more experimental and thought-
the nineteenth and fully structured spaces for congregation and discourse in biennial exhibi-
twentieth centuries, tions, writing that ‘Curatorial discourses [...] increasingly distinguish the
‘publicity’ degenerates
into advertising, and biennial as larger than the mere presentation of artworks. They are under-
cultural objects are stood as vehicles for the production of knowledge and intellectual debate’
treated as market
commodities. (2005: 66). Her desire to reconcile the ‘extraordinary promises they seem to
Cf. Barrett (2011). offer and the conventions through which they frame the artworks on view’
(2005: 67) played out in When things cast no shadow (2008). The project
provided both opportunities for the traditional viewer-object dynamics in
the static exhibition sections (the ‘Day’ component of the exhibition) as
well as ‘Night’ events, which were more experiential, durational, congre-
gational platforms (such as a workshop with Theater of the Oppressed
founder Augusto Boal), organized under the title Mes nuits sont plus
belles que vos jours (‘My nights are more beautiful than your days’). Many
of those events happened outside of the type of institutions commonly
associated with high culture: for example, they were sited in the streets
or at the planetarium. A third example is Maria Lind’s Taking the Matter
into Common Hands, which was a 2005 exhibition that took the form of a
roundtable symposium. Michael Beutler’s Jaspisbänke (‘jasper benches’),
made with colourful fabric, were placed in a transverse seating arrange-
ment with flanked wings around the main conference table, such that the
audience faced each other during any given presentation or conversation.
The curatorial endeavours of Lind and Filipovic/Szymczyk confront the
challenges of engaging an institution’s public through spatialization of the
discursive concept (here, by building both physical and temporal spaces
for assembly and interchange, within or beyond the museum arena).
This twenty-first-century moment finds a widespread endorsement of
social artworks and museums as discursive spaces and sites of mutuality
in producing meaning, in the spirit of Gayatri Spivak’s consideration of
the audience as ‘coinvestigator’ of a presenter (Rooney and Spivak 1989).
But none of these theorists or curatorial practitioners would advocate for
broad-stroked participatory dialogue alone as a critical act. As political
and cultural theorist Nancy Fraser has argued, it is impossible to produce
a ‘bracketed’ public sphere of democratic discourse and equivalences
(1990: 64). While a vision of the museum in the service of a Habermasian
enlightened agora for the practice of public reason may be leveraged
towards certain practical utility today,1 especially in cases where funding
metrics privilege the size of an audience in attendance (a factor notably
less influential in Western Europe where many of the cited curatorial
experiments took place), no amount of curatorial intentionality produces

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 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

the museum as a truly open forum of dialogue, where all voices have equal 2. Manifesta 6 was
intended to be
opportunity to speak. These particular conditions are addressed by curator co-organized by Mai
and critic Simon Sheikh when commenting that ‘‘[p]erfect representation Abu ElDahab, Anton
Vidokle and Florian
is a logical impossibility, and instead, the postmodern condition of poli- Waldvogel. For more on
tics and representation becomes a process of articulations, an inscription its cancellation, please
of essentially empty signifiers with historical and hegemonizing content’ see Abu ElDahab,
Vidokle and Waldvogel
(2006: 144). Citing Chantal Mouffe (2002), Sheikh thus encourages art (2006). For more on
institutions to move away from their empty, imperfect welfare-driven the transposition to
unitednationsplaza, see
aspirations and instead to become platforms for ‘agonism’: Vidokle and Zolghadr
(2007).
This is a very different notion of ‘the institution’, not just the art
institution: not as the pillar of tradition and a stable social order, but
rather as the producer of a certain instability, flux and negotiation. In
short, a conflictful rather than consensual notion of democracy, and
one that is directed towards process rather than endgame. If we want
to address the problems the art institution is facing, without reverting
to a historical and unusable model and rhetoric, I think that it is para-
mount to emphasize the democratic potentials of the art space.
(Sheikh 2006: 149)

For Sheikh, operating at the centre of European New Institutionalism, it is

the curator’s role to bring critique, conflict and dissensus into institutional
practice as a democratic project. In this thinking, the various publics,
constituencies and interests of a museum are inherently conflictual, and
this conflict may be rendered productive through a kind of postmodern
self-criticism operating through a distributed self, directed at its own
enmeshed, heterogeneous institutional body. But do all (or even most)
museum publics know that they are being invited to enter a space of
intended conflictful democracy? Another way of ‘emphasizing the demo-
cratic potentials’ of art spaces is precisely by confronting their shortcom-
ings in rendering these limits legible to their publics, and it is to two such
gestures that this text will now turn.
Abandoning the pretext of exhibition design as a means of producing
space for audience engagement, Anton Vidokle’s ‘exhibition as school’,
unitednationsplaza (2006−09) (UNP), comprised a series of direct attempts
to structure a public. The art school that the curator and artist had origi-
nally planned for the (infamously cancelled) Manifesta 6, was opened
instead as a cycle of projects in Berlin, New York and Mexico City.2 Vidokle
collaborated on developing this premise with artists, architects and theo-
rists Boris Groys, Jalal Toufic, Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Natascha Sadr
Haghighian, Nikolaus Hirsch, Tirdad Zolghadr and Walid Raad, many of
whom presented seminars and workshops. The original unitednationsplaza
building was in Berlin, where the project earned its name after Gillick
placed this title upside-down on an otherwise nondescript structure,
home to the initial seminar series, library and bar (Vidokle 2011). As an
ersatz school and meeting grounds, the problematics of discursive rela-
tions between participants – along with the curatorial formulations that
structured these relations – were available for experimentation from the
outset, and seminars were conducted in many forms by different guest
facilitators. Vidokle, who never hosted a seminar himself, saw his role as

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 Rebecca Uchill

unitednationsplaza (2006–2009), original building in Berlin (2007), with addition by Liam Gillick.
Photo: Courtesy of e-flux.

unitednationsplaza (2006–2009), opening dinner (2006). Photo: Courtesy of e-flux.

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 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

being that of a facilitator of a framework wherein every participant could

‘define the degree to which they participate for themselves’ (Vidokle 2011).
The audience/student structure that he endeavoured to create was one
characterized by porosity, open for individuals to penetrate more deeply
if they desired.
Curator Tirdad Zolghadr’s multi-day seminar for unitednationsplaza,
‘That’s why you find me in the kitchen at parties’, addressed art’s ‘discur-
sive rituals’ (unitednationsplaza 2011). The seminar included a launch for
Frieze editor Jörg Heizer’s book Plötzlich diese Übersicht: Was gute zeit-
genössische Kunst ausmacht/Suddenly This Overview: What Constitutes
Good Contemporary Art (2007) with scripted critical responses from
moderators, a lip-synced enactment of a conversation by the artist group
Art & Language performed by another artist group (the Jackson Pollock
Bar), and an audience-choice wildcard event that took the form of speed-
dating networking. According to Zolghadr (2011b), he introduced this
array of discursive formulations as a response to UNP’s specific limi-
tations against discursive openness: ‘It’s a setting where everyone feels
watched. [...] It was very visible and everyone knew it was visible. So
trying to turn it into [something] radically democratic [with] no speaker/
audience divide would not have been honest’. Instead, Zolghadr said,
he led his audience through a number of discursive formats in order to
‘reconsider matters of infrastructure and/as art, as well as discourse and/
as curating in more complicated ways’ (Zolghadr 2011a). In this sense,
Zolghadr’s UNP project was one of structuring discourse as a self-critical
experimental procedure.
unitednationsplaza’s second iteration appeared at New York’s New
Museum in 2008−09 under the moniker Night School. Here the organ-
izers again aspired to confront the obstacles to public engagement in the
museum commons, as Vidokle indicated in his introduction to Boris Groys’s
opening lecture: ‘Audiences are perhaps groups of consumers of leisure
and spectacle. They have no political agency and no necessary means or
particular interest in effecting social change. […] While the audiences for
art became enormous there is no public among them’ (Vidokle 2008).
In its school-as-an-exhibition premise, the full cycle of projects in unit-
ednationsplaza interrogated the extent to which a public might be formu-
lated in an exhibition or art space, but Night School was the only iteration
of the cycle that defined a model group to play that role. Vidokle, along
with artist Liam Gillick and New Museum Director and Curator of Public
Programs Eungie Joo, selected a ‘core group’ of official enrollees from
an application pool in order, according to Vidokle, to ensure continual
access and more dedicated engagement. This constituency, reportedly
numbering 28 official students (with a smaller group of approximately
fifteen who attended regularly) enjoyed such privileges as free admis-
sion to all Night School events, New Museum memberships, and private
meeting times (in and outside of the museum building) to engage with
invited speakers (Vidokle 2011).
Despite efforts to place a core group into central engagement with Night
School, spatial and procedural impositions challenged the ‘penetrative’
intentions of unitednationsplaza. Whereas in Berlin people could smoke
pot in the bathroom and argue until 2 a.m., the New Museum events were

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 Rebecca Uchill

subject to that institution’s existing rules and constraints. Aside from the
Thursday night sessions, the events required paid admissions, lengthy
seminars were held in rooms where food and drink were not permitted,
and conversations were predetermined to end by the museum’s closing
time (Vidokle 2011). Zolghadr similarly attributed the differences between
the two instantiations of the project as relating to differences in tempo-
rality, space and degrees of access:

[unitednationsplaza’s] temporal factor is a very important one, but

linked to that is the fact that there was an actual building which is
set apart and which is there for the space of one year. That creates
in turn a particular kind of atmosphere [and] gathers, shall we say,
an identity that people recognize, pick up on, and talk about and
revisit during the course of the year. This creates a particular kind of
small milieu of its own: its own weird rules and understandings and
gossipy hysterical reactions and all manners of things.
(Zolghadr 2011b)

Comparatively, the New Museum was not purely dedicated to the Night
School project and every participant – whether a presenter, organizer or
an accepted student – was a guest of the hosting agency, which, according
to Zolghadr, affected the mood of the project:

The New Museum has the vibe of the king of the hill. As you walk
in the very design of the space and the vibe that the staff gives off
is very much that of, you know, you’re a visitor here and you have a
particular role and once you fulfill it you can leave again. This is not
really singling out the New Museum, this is a museal atmosphere that
predefines your sense of entitlement, it cuts it down to size, let’s say.
The UNP was different. I’m not saying the discourse fully lived up to
its radically democratic/experimental promise, it wasn’t quite as level
playing field as that, there were a lot of tensions and contradictions.
But at the end of the day it did create something a little more unpre-
dictable where people felt like there was a margin of maneuver. [...]
Anton [Vidokle] did a good job of fine-tuning this particular tone.
(Zolghadr 2011b)

Night School’s restrictions were also reported by core group member

Taraneh Fazeli, when she expressed anxieties about the onus and viability
of being an active participant in a museum space that ‘purports’ to be a
‘nonhierarchical, centerless system’ despite its essential structures that hier-
archically situate and inscribe the procedures of subjects and objects alike:
‘The ease of critique within the museum setting smacked of an indulgent
pseudorebellion; for many of us, the palpable suspicion of being leveraged
as cultural capital undermined the potency of the project’ (2009: 132).
To illustrate the frustrations of being inserted into the role of participant
within the delimiting institutional frameworks of both UNP and the New
Museum, Fazeli referred to an artwork by Chris Evans that occurred at
unitednationsplaza in 2007. Entitled I Don’t Know if I’ve Explained Myself,
this work physically separated presenters, placed in the kitchen, from the

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 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

audience, seated in an adjacent room with an artwork (RothStauffenberg’s

2004 Amsterdam 1992) and a video feed connecting them to presenters
discussing the work. As discussants Michael Baers, Tirdad Zolghadr,
Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Annika Eriksson began their conversation,
the inscrutability of the sound feed provoked a mood shift in the audi-
ence, from ‘perplexed to agitated’ (Evans 2011). Some audience members
placed Nikolaus Hirsch’s stacking cubes, designed specifically as flexible
seating for UNP, across the kitchen door in a ‘blockade’, while a second
group remained seated, turning their chairs to face and address each
other, as described by Evans:

They demanded that an assistant at UNP who had been filming the
event, from within the audience’s room, stop filming as they did not
want to be part of someone’s cultural capital – someone’s artwork.
At one point they decided to put together a list of people they would
invite themselves to UNP and of ways that they might bypass UNP’s
structure.
(Evans 2011)

Chris Evans, I Don’t Know If I’ve Explained Myself (2007), performance at unitednationsplaza, Berlin,
22 March. Amsterdam 1992 from the series ‘Black Box’ by RothStauffenberg was discussed by artist
Michael Baers, writer and curator Tirdad Zolghadr, artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and artist Annika
Eriksson. Photo: Courtesy of Chris Evans.

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 Rebecca Uchill

Evans describes a group that, like Fazeli, feared having their conversation
leveraged for another practitioner’s project.
To read this work simply as an articulator of dissensus does not
adequately interpret its engagement with specific spatial, institutional
and historical referents. The suspicions revealed in Fazeli’s rebuttal to
Night School, about being co-opted through engagement, precisely
mimicked concerns that were intentionally and structurally incorporated
into the physical structure of Evans’s UNP piece. Placing presenters in
the kitchen referred on the one hand to Seth Siegelaub’s 1970 Halifax
Conference, which similarly separated presenters and spectators on
different floors of a building (Zolghadr 2009); simultaneously, the actual
UNP kitchen was preloaded with its own cultural significance related
to issues of access and exclusion. The UNP kitchen was intended as a
‘green room’ open for anyone to use, but one had to first discern if one
was welcome to enter and join in drinks and other kitchen use (Zolghadr
2011b). ‘Core’ Night School participant Fazeli, in principle designated to
have enhanced access and autonomy, also felt palpable constraints based
on institutional hierarchies, whether actual or existing in the common
imagination.
The unitednationsplaza projects described here reveal participants’
desires to interrogate and experiment with co-investigative audiences
through various methods of structuring of discursive formats: participant
selectivity, spatial configuration, invention of an autonomous institu-
tion, and attempted integration of that institution into another. In these
respects, these projects of UNP and Night School marshalled numerically
and spatially delimited publics to point to the limits of open engagement
in knowledge production: practical, imagined and self-imposed. What is
polemical about this demonstration is the acknowledgement and inti-
mated acceptance of such limits, forcing both producers and produced
publics to determine their willingness to operate within them or, perhaps,
a desire to find other possibilities for engagement.
Where unitednationsplaza events may have formatted audiences at
the edge of discursive limits, the Our Literal Speed conference détourne-
ments have addressed a relatively unstructured ensemble of participants,
creating an environment of destabilization and even alienation. With artists
and art historians Abbey Shaine Dubin, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew
Jesse Jackson, Andrew Perchuk and John Spelman as core members, the
OLS group describes itself on its website as ‘a series of events in the
vicinity of art and history in Europe and North America’ (OLS n.d.). What
this amounts to is a series of conference and exhibition-related inter-
ventions and manifestations, ranging from a 3’ 33” performance at the
2010 Whitney Biennial that was pressed into a 45 rpm record to a 2008
installation at Karlsruhe’s Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie
featuring the Jackson Pollock Bar performing an imagined panel discus-
sion between the Utopia Station curatorial protagonists discussed earlier
in this article.
Many of Our Literal Speed’s activities critique the norms of academia
through actions that could be termed ‘conference remixes’. The group’s
work in this vein has involved incorporating music, lighting schemes
and banners into lecture hall addresses; planting artist Theaster Gates

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 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

Darby English, ‘(Untitled)’ (2009), presentation for Our Literal Speed: Events in the Vicinity of Art and
History, The Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, The Renaissance Society, and the
Merchandise Mart Conference Center, Chicago, 30 April−2 May. Photo: Courtesy of Darby English.

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 Rebecca Uchill
3. The quote was taken
from Cavell (1971: 114).
38
JCS 1.1_Uchill_26-45.indd 38
(reading a script co-authored by OLS) as an unannounced presenter at
the 2010 College Art Association’s Contemporary Art Historians panel
(thus interrupting that prestigious conference’s business-as-usual); and
hosting a reading by artist Mary Ellen Carroll of a paper by David Joselit to
a University of Chicago audience (which included Joselit himself), taking
questions as his avatar. The discrepancies in knowledge enforced by these
tactics of remixing and even inscrutability, undermine any aspiration to a
knowledge commons that might be assumed of conference attendance or
participation. The actions referenced above had the dual effects of frus-
tration (audiences asked Gates why he had not been introduced) (Gates
2011) and novelty (people attended to and perhaps addressed Carroll in
a more playful way than they would have had Joselit himself appeared
at the podium). The 2009 OLS conference in Chicago – the second in an
intended series of three – was staged throughout the city, and included
an exhibition, a commissioned music CD, and a May Day march through
the streets of the city. The conference program bore the heading: ‘A
Discursive Altamont for a Nameless Decade’, invoking the name of the
1969 California concert marked by discord and violence. With these spec-
tacular tactics, OLS introduced ruptures and forced awareness of presen-
tational, conversational and interpretative norms that prevail in academic
discursive environments. One reviewer of the conference demonstrated
that this ‘undigested, unfixed, inconsistent and  collectively produced
palimpsest’ had indeed pointed her attention to the conventions and
physical structures of the ‘pedagogical parergon’, as she assessed the
unsuitable contexts of ‘bland’ papers and gargantuan conference halls
(Kryczka 2010).
The perplexity cultivated by OLS’s gestures served at times to high-
light the limitations surrounding access to knowledge. Art historian Darby
English responded to this circumstance with a silent slide show containing
material he had presented weeks before at a Harvard University confer-
ence on Clement Greenberg. In Cambridge, English had spoken about the
‘performance of modernism’ in the 1971 DeLuxe exhibition in Houston’s
black Fifth Ward neighbourhood, with protagonists including the Menil
family, Peter Bradley and Clement Greenberg. In Chicago, his slides and
on-screen text were more suggestive than narrative or historical, stripped
of identifying captions and presenter overview. A DeLuxe installation-in-
progress image was accompanied by the words ‘No doubt such art will
not repeal the enclosure acts, but it seeks to annul our spiritual-biolog-
ical-political accommodations and attachments to enclosure’.3 The slide
show proceeded with textual calls for liberation from enclosures written
by English himself, appended to the bottom of a dark gray screen and
shown for a full fifteen seconds: ‘An encounter with form that changed
yours’; ‘Your freedom to do something with it.’ Neither the sources of the
texts nor the images were revealed to the OLS audience, in a presenta-
tion favouring audience sense-making over presentation didacticism. As
English (2010) reflected on the event, ‘Unlike at Harvard, there was no
subject to illustrate at OLS. In fact, apart from linkages established (imag-
ined/projected) during and after by audience members  between the
explicit art historical content and the explicit political-historical content,
there was no subject’.
2/3/12 4:40:33 PM
 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

While English’s presentation quietly entreated its viewers’ projective

imagination, artist Tania Bruguera provoked her audience’s vociferous
engagement through a more disruptive contribution to OLS, described at
the beginning of this article. Her panel, featuring Dohrn and Ayers, was
the second that Bruguera had organized for OLS. The first, in Karlsruhe,
focused on the past; the third, proposed for Los Angeles, sought to
confront the future. In Chicago, the panel was intentionally derailed by
four audience plants, who were instructed by Bruguera to intervene with
their own sincere responses to the panel discussion. By activating the
audience in such a way, Bruguera unsettled conference expectations for
all concerned – not even the panelists had been forewarned.
Bruguera’s project ensured that no member of the assembly had full
access to the mechanizations of the project. The effect was to move senti-
ment in the room away from irony or in-jokiness and lead instead to an
earnest sense of urgency in the conversation. As an organizational method,
Bruguera’s intentional obfuscation ultimately produced an environment
where interchange and discursivity prevailed, but also a sense of having
been misled on the part of participants, most accustomed to being privy to
organizational knowledge, who in this case were not. On the next day of
the conference, Bruguera’s piece became a launching point for a conversa-
tion about degrees of access: artist Rainer Ganahl expressed a feeling of
betrayal, Bruguera asserted that the piece was sincere, and artist Sharon
Hayes questioned whether Bruguera’s strategies actually levelled the spec-
tatorial power dynamic. In both the panel event and its pursuant conver-
sation, Bruguera’s provocation shifted the group away from certain norms
of spectatorial reception. By immersing the entire group in the experience
of outsider status, the conference crowd confronted their concurrent-but-
disjointed experiences in a rare transparent reception process.
Art historian Christa Noel Robbins suggested that this collective expe-
rience of outsider-ness had a productive effect:

OLS did a good job on the first evening of marking out who was and was
not in-the-know – or at least of creating the illusion of such a marking.
[Y]ou had to know who [Joselit and Carroll] were in order to know that
what you were watching was a performance by Mary Ellen Carroll and
that what you were hearing was an actual paper written by Joselit, who
sat silently in the second row. [During the question/answer session,]
whatever demarcation of togetherness had initially been achieved
quickly disintegrated. For one began to wonder, as Gregg Bordowitz
stated, who exactly was the target of this gag. The tone was set that
first night as tense and cautionary, though there was an excitement too.
People were talking and perhaps with more freedom than they would
have if Joselit had been at the podium. As the days progressed I began
to wonder whether the kind of community forged out of that initial
pulling-apart wasn’t actually something very like togetherness after all.
No one said that togetherness was supposed to feel good.
(Robbins 2009)

By positioning everyone as an outsider, Our Literal Speed produced a kind

of shared experience. Like UNP, OLS exposed the limited availability of an

39

JCS 1.1_Uchill_26-45.indd 39 2/3/12 4:40:33 PM

 Rebecca Uchill

open, level ground for communicability and collective interchange. In the

case of OLS, this demonstration was produced using curatorial strategies
of exaggeration and play with the conference format, leading to an experi-
ence of knowledge disjuncture and alienation.
Curators and art program organizers are certainly not the only agents
that shepherd social practices or attend to their dialogical structures.
However, to the extent that the expressive, historical and discursive prac-
tices of art are channeled through systems of preservation, exhibition,
pedagogy and assembly – and that these systems, even at their most
experimental, have regulating capacities – investigating the curatorial
motivations and methods for producing discursive space with attention
to their contextual systems can be a revealing process. Indeed, and contra
the RAND study’s conclusion that enhanced participation in discourse
will expand power, the curatorial motivation to organize spaces of discur-
sive transactions and negotiations may threaten to contain and consoli-
date power, rather than to enable and open up new opportunities. Or, the
inward-facing conversation about art discourse may become so recursive
that it no longer addresses most publics in a relevant way. Understanding
the particularities of curatorial approaches to discourse production is there-
fore all the more pertinent. As Shannon Jackson suggests, confronting the
operations of social art practice are aligned with the process of critically
navigating public life: ‘To reckon with the complex experience of social
work means reckoning with its force as both support and constraint. What
a pleasure, what a pain’ (Jackson 2011: 247). In all of the pleasures and
pains of their procedures, unitednationsplaza and Our Literal Speed take
up the call to ‘reckon’ with the opportunities and limitations that discourse
avails, both as infrastructure and as medium.
To what effect were audience and participant regulation or aliena-
tion deployed in unitednationsplaza and Our Literal Speed? By expressly
revealing particular architectures of discourse, and experimenting with
them, these projects called attention both to discursive enclosures and the
possibilities of their expansion. They also highlighted the dead-ends that
foreclose such expansions. While those latter are hardly uplifting revela-
tions, the exaggeration of discursive constraints in these projects was more
poetic than maniacal: there was no insistent structuralist paradigm being
imposed, and the participating subjects of UNP and OLS were positioned
to make individual assessments about how or whether to participate.
What does one choose to do in an environment such as UNP or OLS?
Accept the revealed limits of a discursive commons? Ignore the project’s
perceived co-opting or sidelining procedures and walk away? Imagine
other means of transforming the given field? The questions posed by
these projects make moments of limited communication or disjuncture of
shared knowledge into productive opportunities.
As experiential discursive spaces, unitednationsplaza and Our Literal
Speed revealed their own enunciative limits and opened them up to active
critique. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, these curatorially inflected
conversations effectively called attention to the production of art discourse
not as a matter of individual agency, but rather through common practice –
making all participants to some extent complicit or subsumed in its structure
and efficacies. Foucault outlined discourse as being comprised of ‘the set of

40

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 Hanging Out, Crowding Out or Talking Things Out

conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance

with which that practice gives rise for partially or totally new statements, and
in accordance with which it can be modified’ (1972: 208−09). While united-
nationsplaza and Our Literal Speed strategically employed the negation of
a false or superficial commons to expose the pitfalls of particular discursive
landscapes, they also made available a more positive negation act: of looking
to possibilities beyond given realities and structures. Gestures of regulation,
alienation and negation thus had the unexpected effect of leveraging their
institutional formats to make space for new discursive possibilities.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following individuals for generously sharing
their time and ideas during interviews for this article: Tania Bruguera,
Darby English, Chris Evans, Theaster Gates, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Anton
Vidokle and Tirdad Zolghadr. I am grateful to Lucian Gomoll, Lissette
Olivaras and the other organizers of ‘The Task of the Curator’ conference
at the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, which gave me the opportunity to present and develop an
early draft of this text. Finally, my article greatly benefitted from the
insightful feedback of Niko Vicario and the Journal of Curatorial Studies’
reviewers, to whom I am thankful.

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Contributor Details
Rebecca Uchill’s publications include On Procession: Art on Parade (2009) and
Adrian Schiess: Elusive (2007), along with articles in ASPECT: The Chronicle of
New Media Art, Visual Resources and Art Papers. She was Associate Curator
of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and is now complet-
ing her doctorate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Art program at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studies the institutional
conditions for contemporary art production, display and dissemination.
E-mail: ruchill@mit.edu

43

JCS 1.1_Uchill_26-45.indd 43 2/3/12 4:40:34 PM

 CALL FOR PAPERS

EUPOP 2012
Inaugural Conference of the
European Popular Culture Association

11-13 July 2012

London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London.

Individual paper and panel contributions are invited for the inaugural conference of the European Popular Culture
Association (EPCA). EUPOP 2012 will explore European popular culture in all its different forms This might include
European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Comics, Popular
Literature, Sport, Heritage and Curation. And more - we’ll be guided by the submissions. Closing Date for this call:
18th February 2012

This conference will launch the European Popular Culture Association. There will be opportunities for networking
and for developing caucus groups within the EPCA. Presenters at EUPOP 2012 will be encouraged to develop their
papers for publication in a number of Intellect journals, including the new Journal of European Popular Culture,
the journal of the EPCA, other film journals including Film, Fashion and Consumption, and various music journals.
Journal editors will be working closely with strand convenors - a full list of Intellect journals is available at: http://www.
intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/index/

Papers and Complete Panels for all strands should be submitted to the email contact below. Paper/panel submissions
will be as always subject to peer review: Submit paper or panel proposals* to: europop@arts.ac.uk (The same address
should be used for general administrative queries)

The European Popular Culture Association

The European Popular Culture Association (EPCA) promotes the study of popular culture from, in, and about Europe.
Popular culture involves a wide range of activities, outcomes and audiences;EPCA aims to examine and discuss these
different activities as they relate both to Europe, and to Europeans across the globe, whether contemporary or historical.
CLOSING DATE FOR THIS CALL: FEBRUARY 18th 2012

EPCA and 2012 EPCA Conference Directors

EPCA President, Pamela Church Gibson p.church-gibson@fashion.arts.ac.uk

Director of Research & Exchange, Graeme Harper graeme@eupop.org
Conference Administrator: Sarah-Jane Simpson europop@arts.ac.uk.
Sarah can be reached at europop@arts.ac.uk. We would suggest that you contact her speedily if you are coming from
abroad and are wanting to discuss the availability of accommodation. Although the conference is well in advance of the
Olympics, we have placed a notional hold on inexpensive hotel rooms and need confirmation asap.

JCS 1.1_Uchill_26-45.indd 44 2/3/12 4:40:35 PM

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