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The Prehistory of Exhibition History: An Annotated

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grupa o.k., Julian Myers & Joanna Szupinska

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of Exhibition History: An Annotated Bibliography, Art Journal, 76:1, 206-209, DOI:
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 Critical Bibliographies
grupa o.k. (Julian Myers and
Joanna Szupinska)
The Prehistory of
Exhibition History
Art history has long included studies of exhi-
bitions as episodes or turning points within
more expansive narratives. Such moments
have opened art histories based in the studio,
or among the members of a small, bohemian
circle, to a larger social field that includes
politics, audience, and market, before return-
ing to the private or small-group interactions
that have equally served to drive art’s inter-
nal means. In the last decade, though, this
technique, once intrinsic to social histories
of art, has gained a certain autonomy. More
resolutely devoted to art’s public formations,
the history of exhibitions has manifested
in symposia and exchanges at institutions
worldwide, a raft of recent publications,
“remakes” of historically important exhibi-
tions, new academic and para-academic
journals, and, most recently, a flock of dis-
sertations that have taken exhibitions and
curating, rather than art and artists, as their
primary focus. Similarly this output has gen-
erated a small and agonistic body of writing
that reasons out the recent turn.
Why has there been such an explosion
of interest in the history of exhibitions?
The reasons for the burst of activity can be
sketched out only provisionally in this con-
text. We would point, among other things,
to the growing importance of curators in the
field of art and the innovations in exhibi-
tionary form they produced over the course
of the 1990s and early 2000s, which efforts
demanded that the history of art consider
them seriously. Similarly we might refer to
the enlarged geographical and numerical
scope of art’s worlds after 1989—one exam-
ple of what Fredric Jameson has described as
postmodernism’s “scandal of multiplicity . . .
or in other words, the definitive appearance
of the Other in multiple forms and as sheer
quantity or number.”1 Attending to exhibi-
tions, rather than to monographic studies
of artists, allows historians to address this
multiplicity directly. Another effect, though,
has followed: under the pressure of this
expanded field of communication, our confi-
dence in the ontology of individual works of
art seems to have faded, even disappeared.
CAA_AJ_SP17_INTERIOR_FINAL.indd 206
These various conditions are intercon-
nected, but the last point may be the most
important in the context of this journal.
Whereas previous generations of art histo-
rians took their primary task as legitimat-
ing new art within the diachronic story of
modernism, however problematized, new art
histories written by a generation of thinkers
for whom the battles over modernism now
seem rather distant, or exhausted, are more
spatial and social in nature. These scholars
see their task as describing the social worlds
in which something known as art was pro-
duced and perceived. In these accounts the
artwork can no longer be grasped as some-
thing “in itself,” but can be properly under-
stood only as an element in an ensemble or
scenario within which the artwork is the
enigmatic (or catalytic) center. As the ontol-
ogy of artworks has crumbled, the exhibi-
tion, as aggregate form, or a form-of-forms,
has emerged as a vital object of study.
The bibliographic study below will
reason out this development no further,
considering instead artifacts from exhibition
history’s longer durée. And though we were
tempted to include favorite texts from art
histories in a more classical mode—Thomas
Crow’s chapter on the salon in Painters and
Public Life (Yale University Press, 1985) or
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s remarkable essay on
Jacques-Louis David’s exhibition of The Sabine
Women, 1799, in Necklines (Yale University
Press, 1999)—we ultimately went a different
way. Our fascination with the books com-
piled here, which include materials discern-
ible as exhibition history and key artifacts of
exhibition history, is in their difference from
the prevailing forms of writing in the emer-
gent field. One facet of this difference, the
chauvinistic focus on Euro-American narra-
tives in the older books, is not salutary but is
informative. Other aspects, like the relative
openness and experimentation of their form,
are useful countermodels to a contemporary
discourse somewhat waterlogged with its
own self-importance. Despite being a partial
list—one based in personal affinities and
luck in dusty bookshops—it aims to wedge
the present practice of exhibition history
back into the diachronic story that it has
contentiously replaced.
206 spring 2017
Algernon Graves, The Society of
Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791; The
Free Society of Artists 1761–1783: A
Complete Dictionary of Contributors
and Their Work from the Foundation of
the Societies to 1791 (London: George Bell
and Sons, 1907)
This curious tome contains a comprehensive
list of artists shown in the early exhibit-
ing societies of eighteenth-century Great
Britain, including every maker’s name, every
object displayed, and the dates of exhibition.
Through this registry we discover a surpris-
ing heterogeneity in both the offerings and
their authors. Alongside paintings were
shown engravings, architectural models, and
miniatures; alongside male artists we find
women, and together with the professors
are craftsmen and amateurs. The volume also
excerpts anecdotes and meeting minutes
compiled by one Edward Edwards, a member
of the society during the years 1766–72, as
well as others detailing discussions about
what to show, whether to charge an admis-
sion fee, and the nature of public judgement.
The disagreements were intense and, despite
the long historical distance, remain some-
what familiar concerns for today’s practitio-
ners. On one side were democrats, arguing
equality among artists and free admission
for the public. On the other, as the architect
John Gwynn recounted, was an elite dis-
gusted by the “prostitution of the polite arts”
and by watching “their works censured or
approved by kitchen-maids and stable boys”
(315). Guess which group later became the
Royal Academy of Arts.
Ian Dunlop, The Shock of the New:
Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern
Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1972)
We must admit to having long confused
Ian Dunlop’s Shock of the New with the 1980
BBC documentary series by Robert Hughes
that ganked its title. Nevertheless, Dunlop’s
book now seems to us a secret model for
later exhibition histories, many of which
reproduce the critic’s Francophile selection,
among other things. The book studies seven
exhibitions: five French (from Salon des Refusés,
1863, to the International Surrealist Exhibition,
1938), one American (The Armory Show,
1913), and one German (Degenerate Art, 1937).
Dunlop privileges examples that catalyzed
ye olde avant-garde reaction formation and
so focuses in particular on the sociopolitical
5/16/17 8:29 PM
 context of each show. In addition to repro-
ductions of key works, his evidence includes
installation views, portraits of key figures,
reproductions from accompanying publica-
tions, and press clippings. Later exhibition
histories have followed Dunlop’s lead in this
regard, knowingly or not, while also repeat-
ing his pioneering work’s central limitation.
That is, works of art become one more detail
in a beguiling whorl of discourse; they risk
becoming incidental.
Katherine Dreier, George Heard
Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp,
Alexander Dorner, et al., Collection
of the Société Anonyme: Museum of
Modern Art, 1920 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1950)
This is a catalogue of the collection of the
first museum of modern art in America,
published on the occasion of its donation
to Yale University—a bequest brokered by
Marcel Duchamp toward the end of founding
director Katherine Dreier’s life. The contents
of the museum, driven along by the weird
combination of Dreier’s theosophy and
Duchamp’s mischief, amount to a peculiar,
alternate-history version of the early twen-
tieth century, including more women artists
and so-called minor artists. The catalogue
details the story of the Société, but the real
gas is in the various entries on artists by the
institution’s founders: Dreier (euphoric,
cosmic) and Duchamp (kind, precise, and
drily witty). These are joined by entries by
the museum director Alexander Dorner
and the art historian Hans Hildebrandt, as
well as a few by Dreier’s frenemy Alfred
Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum
of Modern Art.
Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond
“Art” (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz,
1947)
Alexander Dorner, famous for his director-
ship of the Landesmuseum Hannover, made
his mark by reorganizing that museum’s
collections from a jumbled display organized
according to the works’ owners, to one
structured around historical “atmospheres.”
These included iconic modernist rooms by
El Lissitzky (Abstract Cabinet, 1927–28) and a
planned room by László Moholy-Nagy (Room
of the Present, 1930). The appearance of the
latter was forestalled by the economic crash
and the Nazi Party’s rise to power. Dorner’s
historical model was an important influence
CAA_AJ_SP17_INTERIOR_FINAL.indd 207
on the early Museum of Modern Art, but
today he comes up most often by way of this
book, a favorite reference of that foremost
chronicler of exhibitions, the curator Hans
Ulrich Obrist. Yet the book is stranger than
Obrist’s borrowed slogans suggest. It tracks
a “biogenetic” development of art from the
“magic reality” of cave painters, through the
Romantics, to the “absolute necessity” of the
abstract art of his present. Dorner argues that
exhibitions realize this modernism especially
well: the book resolves with a chapter on the
Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer, whose exhi-
bitions and typography the author sees as the
apotheosis of the integration of art into fast-
moving currents of modern life.
Jermayne MacAgy: A Life Illustrated by
an Exhibition (Houston: University of St.
Thomas, 1968)
A remembrance of the curator, educator, and
director Jermayne MacAgy, this little book
compiles images of her exhibitions as well
as her personal collection of artifacts, which
included objects as disparate as abstract
paintings, fetishes, banners, and pipe fittings.
Contrasting the modernist “white cube”
aesthetic then becoming a dominant mode,
MacAgy’s exhibitions used dramatic light-
ing, scrims, decorative potted plants, and
theatrical displays. Famously, she arranged
freestanding suits of armor on a giant
chessboard (Arms and Armor, Palace of the
Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1953).
The book’s introduction, by her friend and
coconspirator Dominique de Menil, charac-
terizes MacAgy in ways that now seem cli-
ché: she was “a freak with a touch of genius”
who possessed a “sixth sense that only
madness or love can give” (11–12). Along
with pronouncements of her diligent work
ethic and brilliant intuition, her personal-
ity is a central feature. She was “a master of
seduction” whose divisive nature won her
both enemies and devotees (10). Assembled
four decades before Harald Szeemann’s own
catalogue raisonné in 2007—which is widely
seen as the first such compilation of an exhi-
bition maker’s production—this portrait of
MacAgy is a seductive anomaly.
Margaret Hall, On Display: A Design
Grammar for Museum Exhibitions
(London: Lund Humphries, 1987)
We first spotted On Display on the office
bookshelves of P!, the New York City gallery
founded by Project Projects designer Prem
207 artjournal
Krishnamurthy, who referred to the volume
as the holy grail of exhibition design. This
primer on museum technics was written by
the British Museum’s “Royal Designer for
Industry” Margaret Hall, who was respon-
sible for the 1972 exhibition Treasures of
Tutankhamun, arguably the first blockbuster
show in a contempo-
rary mold. Regarded as
a classic in the design
field, the book is more
Reviews
or less unknown among
art historians and curators. That should
change. If scholars wish to consider exhibi-
tions as a medium, we must reckon with
their component parts and conventions.
Curators, for their part, should grasp the
wide range of possibilities that have served as
the discipline’s common grammar over the
last century and which extend well beyond
the white cube. This is especially important
in the moment of the ontological crisis men-
tioned above, in which artworks are increas-
ingly shown as, or together with, artifacts of
a wider culture.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White
Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1976)
This slender volume rearranged our respec-
tive foundations so completely that it is
difficult to recover just why. It must have
something to do with the ongoing domi-
nation of the white cube itself, which still
remains, rather bizarrely, the default means
of signaling that the viewer is in the space
of art. Brian O’Doherty’s precise scrutiny of
this near-omnipresent mode of display—the
result of a worldview in which the apparatus
of exhibition was newly understood as itself
the carrier of meaning—still retains dis-
ruptive power. The claim to a transcendent
and hygienic way of seeing has a history,
O’Doherty explains, and is not the only way
art can be known.
Jean Clair and Harald Szeemann,
eds., Bachelor Machines, exh. cat.
(New York: Rizzoli International, 1975)
Harald Szeemann’s introduction to his
best-ever exhibition is a weird one, spilling
over in the final third into an enthralling,
if abstruse, biographical theorization of his
own practice. Having departed his director-
ship of the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 under
unhappy circumstances, he was writing as
5/16/17 8:29 PM
CAA_AJ_SP17_INTERIOR_FINAL.indd 208 5/16/17 8:29 PM
 more or less a free agent—or unemployed,
depending on how you look at it. Szeemann
imagines this perplexing new condition
through the Duchampian lens of the bache-
lor machine, a closed circuit of energy driven
toward pleasure or destruction rather than
function or reproduction. He furthermore
pictures himself as a paradoxical institution
called the Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor,
and describes the agency’s workflow like so:
“I have an idea. I hire myself to realize the
idea. Since the decision is ultimately passed
down to me by the agency, and because I
am the agency, I accept the commission to
carry out my idea” (11). Long seen as a blue-
print for independent curators, Szeemann’s
premise actually encompasses the peculiar
psychology demanded of much precarious
labor. It speaks too of the lifelong mindfuck
that can result from identifying with one’s
subject matter so completely.
AA Bronson and Peggy Gale, eds.,
Museums by Artists, exh. cat. (Toronto:
Art Metropole, 1983)
This compilation, which accompanied an
exhibition at the Toronto artist-run center
Art Metropole, discusses the museum as
“a preserver, a classifier, [and] a structure
for remembering,” and by way of artists’
“attempts to distance, engage, alter and sim-
ulate [it] as an act of consciousness” (11, 7).
It features certain likely suspects—the artists
Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert
Filliou, and Claes Oldenburg, and the cura-
tors Harald Szeemann and Jean-Christophe
Ammann—but matches them irreverently
with less-known examples like the Canadian
conceptual artist Garry Kennedy and the
archive of the fictional Canadian novelist
Cornelia Lumsden. Bronson’s essay is the
book’s pinnacle. He whips madly through a
personal history of the independent scene
in Canada, describing galleries where he
“first tasted blood” before resolving in a
fugue state, drifting through “a long chain of
dream palaces, of the museum, of history”
(30, 36).
Rasheed Araeen, “Our Bauhaus,
Others’ Mudhouse,” Third Text 6,
Spring 1989 (Abingdon, UK: Taylor and
Francis)
Magiciens de la Terre, 1989, curated by Jean-
Hubert Martin and staged at the Centre
Georges Pompidou and Parc de la Villette in
Paris, is praised as the first truly inclusive
CAA_AJ_SP17_INTERIOR_FINAL.indd 209
global exhibition of art. But it is also faulted
for its Western perspective and flawed fram-
ing concept, which cast Western and non-
Western artists alike as “magicians of the
earth.” Strikingly, the strongest critique of
the exhibition came from one of its partici-
pants, the Pakistani-British sculptor, writer,
and editor Rasheed Araeen. The journal he
founded, Third Text, published an entire issue
of responses to Magiciens. Araeen’s furious
essay was its most forceful critique and is
one of the greatest negative reviews ever
written. Attacking the exhibition’s failure
to justify the “togetherness of works that
represent different historical formations,”
he wrote, “it is claimed that all the works,
irrespective of their cultural origin, are
presented ‘on equal terms.’ But is this ‘equal-
ity’ not an illusion? How is this ‘equality’
achieved, if not by ignoring the differences
of different works? . . . No wonder the
common denominator here is a presumed
‘magic’ of all works that transcends socio-
economic determinants” (7–8). Araeen
makes this criticism at the cusp between two
paradigms: between an antagonistic politics
of recognition derived from Hegel, and the
illusions of equality that dominate today’s
biennial culture. Only in a carnival, Araeen
warns, is everyone equal.
1. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic
(London: Verso, 2009), 428.
grupa o.k. is Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska.
Myers is an associate professor in the Graduate
Program in Curatorial Practice at the California
College of the Arts, San Francisco, and senior edi-
tor of The Exhibitionist, a journal about exhibition
making. Szupinska is the curator of exhibitions at
the California Museum of Photography, part of
the University of California, Riverside.
209 artjournal
Mechtild Widrich
Imaging Her Aesthetics
Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting
Exhibition organized by Sabine Breitwieser,
with consulting curator Branden W. Joseph
and Tina Teufel. Museum der Moderne,
Salzburg, November 21, 2015–February
28, 2016; Museum für Moderne Kunst,
Frankfurt, May 31–September 24, 2017;
MoMA PS1, New York, October 22, 2017–
February 2018
Sabine Breitwieser, ed. Carolee
Schneemann: Kinetic Painting With texts
by Breitwieser, Branden W. Joseph, Mignon
Nixon, Ara Osterweil, Judith Rodenbeck,
and Carolee Schneemann. Exh. cat. Salzburg:
Museum der Moderne, and Munich: Prestel,
2015. 331 pp., 450 color ills. $60
Kenneth White, Carolee
Schneemann, and Duncan
McCorquodale, eds. Carolee
Schneemann: Unforgivable With texts
by Stéphane Aquin, Emily Caigan, R. Bruce
Elder, Ron Hanson, Juan Carlos Kase,
Brett Kashmere, Anette Kubitza, Erica Levin,
Scott MacDonald, Thomas McEvilley, Ara
Osterweil, Melissa Ragona, Maura Reilly,
Kristine Stiles, and White. London: Black
Dog, 2016. 288 pp., many color and b/w ills.
$59.95
In 1971 Linda Nochlin turned the question
“Why have there been no great women art-
ists?” into an investigation not only of the
structural restraints on female artists, but
of art history as a whole with its cult of a
genius detached from societal structure. She
thereby identified an individual-glorifying
and monograph-producing culture as the
basis on which (patriarchal) art history was
based. Genius might now be an outdated
category, but consistency is still pertinent
when assessing whether the career of an
artist has been successful. Both the exhibi-
tion catalogue that accompanied the wonder-
ful and comprehensive retrospective at the
Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Carolee
Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, and the anthology
Unforgivable by Black Dog Publishing (which
accompanied a small exhibition of the same
name at Work Gallery, London) consider
Carolee Schneemann’s career as a coherent
oeuvre, confidently unfolding from her early
painting practice.
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