Critique d’art

Actualité internationale de la littérature critique sur l’art

contemporain
49 | Automne/hiver 2017
CRITIQUE D'ART 49

Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space,

History, and Art
Elitza Dulguerova
Translator: Phoebe Clarke

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/27143
DOI: 10.4000/critiquedart.27143
ISBN: 2265-9404
ISSN: 2265-9404

Publisher
Groupement d'intérêt scientifique (GIS) Archives de la critique d’art

Printed version
Date of publication: 21 November 2017
Number of pages: 47-55
ISBN: 1246-8258
ISSN: 1246-8258

Electronic reference
Elitza Dulguerova, « Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art », Critique d’art
[Online], 49 | Automne/hiver 2017, Online since 21 November 2018, connection on 24 November 2018.
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/27143 ; DOI : 10.4000/critiquedart.27143

This text was automatically generated on 24 November 2018.

EN
 Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art 1

Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions

about Space, History, and Art
Elitza Dulguerova
Translation : Phoebe Clarke

REFERENCES
Claire Bishop, Museologia radicale : ovvero, cos’è « contemporaneo » nei musei di arte
contemporanea ?, Monza : Johan & Levi, 2017
Caroline A. Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fair, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of
Experience, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2016
Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory
and Art, Londres : Routledge, 2017, (Routledge advances in art and visual studies)
The documenta 14 Reader, Cassel : documenta : Museum Fridericianum ; Munich : Prestel,
2017. Sous la dir. de Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
documenta 14: Daybook, Cassel : documenta : Museum Fridericianum ; Munich : Prestel,
2017. Sous la dir. de Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
Viva arte viva : Biennale arte 2017 : la Biennale di Venezia 57, Venise : Biennale de Venise, 2017.
Sous la dir. de Christine Macel
Klaus Siebenhaar, documenta. A Brief History of an Exhibition and its Contexts, Berlin : B&S
Sienbenhaar, 2017, (documenta archiv)

That large-scale recurrent international exhibitions structure our experience of

contemporary art and play a determining role in its relationship to the market and the
museum (as well as their own entanglement with each other), that the exponential
increase in the number of biennials, and their expansion and geographical dispersion
over the last thirty years is characteristic of the current recomposition of the art “world”
- all these observations are commonplace nowadays. But the difficulty remains: how can
we think with them, what do they teach us? Several anthologies have laid the
groundwork, connecting the increase in biennials and the explosion of the polarised Cold

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 Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art 2

War world1, insisting on the importance of historical studies, appealing to researchers

and not only to the actors of the events.2 Classifications of biennials in light of the
“global” turn in contemporary art are multiplying.3 The publications reviewed in this
article show how dynamic this field of reflexion is, as well as its concerns and
uncertainties: How should the space of art be conceptualised today, in an age of
accelerated or “global” physical and digital circulation? How should national narratives
and simple instrumental juxtapositions be avoided in writing its history? Has art itself
become global and if so what would its characteristics be?
The book by Caroline A. Jones is driven by the ambition of defining the condition of
artworks today and producing its historical and philosophical genealogy, thus travelling
over the course of three centuries and several continents, in order to describe the
accelerating effect biennials and international art fairs had, according to her, in the
process that transformed works from objects into experiences. Far from giving a linear
historical account, Jones tries to circumscribe an epistemological condition, which
enables her to back Descartes's theories through the works of Olafur Eliasson and to insist
on the importance of “trans”4 thought (not in the sense that queer theory might give it
but as an opportune way of referring to the circulations-translations-displacements-
exchanges between different countries, cultures, persons and artworks). Her book, which
is written with verve and, quite often, humour, has the undeniable quality of being
reflexive, of clarifying and affirming its methodological and ideological choices: a rare
position, which encourages its readers to closely follow the course and the organisation
of the arguments. But the emphasis placed on theoretical construction ends up being
tiring, with its repetitions and reminders of the key-words of this new doxa (“blind
epistemology”, “world picture”, “critical globalism”). In many ways, this work is
(another!) answer to Clement Greenberg's modernist theory, which the author devoted
one of her previous books to.5 The global artwork she describes is no longer an artisanal
object destined for a viewer's gaze but rather an experience set in the event's
temporality, engaging its audience in a poly-sensorial way (“blind epistemology” replaces
Greenberg's optical perception). Point by point, this definition refutes “medium
specificity”, all the while maintaining the importance of a strictly artistic finality: “I
intend ‘globalism’ here not to refer to a passive condition or context, but an aesthetic
operation. It is analogous to 'modernism' in its construction, in that I want it to designate
the response of creative artists, who through stylistic and formal operations in their
media, distinguish their art from industrial, technological, and mediatic processes.” 6 Yet,
just like “modernism”, Caroline A. Jones's “globalism” has a tendency to essentialism and
simplification. Despite the impressive bibliography and several stimulating developments
(for instance on Harald Szeemann and Philip Morris, on the political importance of
différend, on anthropophagy as aesthetic operation beyond the Brazilian context), the
book is as “global” as its title suggests, sometimes rushing over its subjects, sometimes
leaving out details or, on the contrary, historical contexts that are wider than particular
case studies.7 However, it remains intellectually provocative, raising the great question of
establishing the connections between the histories of biennials and artworks.
Contrary to Caroline A. Jones, Panos Kompatsiaris only examines two events, very closely
and over the course of a very short period: the 7th Berlin Biennale, in 2012, and the 3 rd
Athens Biennale in 2011.8 In order to maintain a critical distance with his subject, he
adopts an anthropological approach, refusing the “curators' perspective” on biennials,
whose hold on the subject he deplores (p.12), as well as the very term of “biennalisation”,

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 Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art 3

which evens out the heterogeneity of practices, places and contexts. Using sociological
and ethnographical surveys and a coherent corpus of theoretical references,
Kompatsiaris analyses what is at stake in these two biennials, where political and artistic
action are both central, in the context of the European economical and social crisis (in
this respect, the book offers an unexpected genealogy of the dual documenta 14, split
between Germany and Greece). The book bears the marks of the doctoral thesis it is based
on, but several of its conclusions are convincing: for example the observation that the art
biennial has become “an interdisciplinary site of knowledge production, education and
social engagement” rather than a site of visual display (p. 186), or his choice to analyse
them as events that are by definition contradictory and polysemic, without absolutising
or essentialising them.
International events often generate their own historicisation. At least two 2017
publications examine the history of documenta. Klaus Siebenhaar's short informative book
didactically retraces the different occasions on which it was held, usefully providing
researchers with visitor statistics or participation demographic data, thus supplementing
the online archives of documenta.9 The special issue devoted to documenta published this
year by ONCURATING.org, edited by Nanne Buurmann and Dorothee Richter is more
polemical and decentered, problematising specific aspects or years, insistently
questioning the very study of these biennials as historical objects and noting, in their
historicisation, the disconcerting absence of a history of display, of artworks-in-display. 10
As for publications produced by documenta itself, what can they teach readers who were
not, previously, visitors? The documenta Reader11, edited by Adam Szymczyk and Quinn
Latimer shares certain traits with the challenge set out by Catherine David and Jean-
François Chevrier twenty years earlier on the occasion of documenta X: to overwhelmingly
include texts that do not deal with art, in order to display “a political context for the
interpretation of artistic activities at the close of the twentieth century”, “a polemical
attempt to isolate specific strands for artistic production and political endeavor […]”12.
The 2017 Reader does not comment on its editorial choices, but opts, de facto, for literary,
philosophical and artistic engaged texts, multiplying voices from different places,
languages, positions and stances. And when Adam Szymczyk writes in the first person in
the introductory essay, he only does so in order to exemplify an extremely critical
position regarding “[…] the neocolonial, patriarchal, heteronormative order of power and
discourse, which is precisely the hegemonic order supporting the neoliberal machine
today […]” (p. 26). Whereas the 1997 historical project examined the past half-century,
the 2017 project opens up the narratives of asynchronous spaces and temporalities of
various lengths, covering the colonial period, its territories and its prolongations, with a
special attention given to misunderstandings, dissension and crisis situations. The
reproduction of a series of documents of power that determine relationships with the
Other, the “documents of Empire/documents of decoloniality”, inserted between the
texts and the portfolios, mirrors this spatiotemporal dynamic in the book itself. Debt is
one of the themes that recurs throughout the Reader, via the figure of Marcel Mauss,
whose gift/counter-gift theory feeds the hopes of alternative (economical, historical)
models. The complicated and even complicit relationship that contemporary art, and
particularly its international events networks, entertain with the neoliberal economic
system is at the heart of the reflexion on biennials. In this book, the emancipatory project
is left in the hands of the readers, amplifying the ambiguity in the title, Reader, at once an
object (the compilation of texts) and a subject (the person reading the book), who is

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 Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art 4

encouraged to actively read, resist, create counter-knowledge. This withdrawal of the

editors’ voice is however questionable, as it precludes access to some of the content,
artworks in particular. Conceptualising history as intertwined narratives is also the aim
of Daybook, another documenta 14 publication that replaces the traditional little guide to
the artworks.13 The artists are of course present, but they take part in a superposition of
temporalities: one temporality follows the chronological order, enumerating the 163 days
the documenta lasts in place of page numbers; the other goes backwards, and is comprised
of dates chosen by the artists, from the “future” (2058) to (biblical) “beginnings”. Among
the publications that remain as the vestiges of the now-finished exhibition, this sequence
of subjective dates, which blends personal experiences and political events, lets the
reader meander in a stimulating yet disconcerting way, encouraging the search for the
reasons of chance (for instance, why is the only date mentioned twice the assassination of
Salvador Allende?).
Conceptualising time in the ways in which it can be “contemporary” without necessarily
being of today is one of the preoccupations at the heart of Claire Bishop's argument in
Museologia radicale 14, that defends the idea of asynchronous thought that would move
among temporalities, invalidating the very notion of anachronism. Paradoxically,
according to Bishop, this alternative thought is not within the domain of biennials,
inasmuch as they fall under the category of consensual and relativist presentism, which is
wary of any kind of historical commitment. Rather, it comes from museums (she
examines the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Reina Sofia in Madrid, MSUM in
Ljubljana), the only bastion against the privatisation of the art world and the prevailing
spectacle. In the context of the disengagement of States regarding culture, permanent
collections, rather than temporary exhibitions, might have become, according to her, the
genuine spaces of experimentation.

NOTES
1. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-wall Europe,
Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press, 2005. Ed. by Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic
2. Cf. The Biennial Reader: An Anthology of Large-scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art,
Bergen: Kunsthall; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Ed. by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, Solveig
Øvstebø
3. Cf. Bydler, Charlotte. The Global Artworld, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art, Uppsala:
Uppsala Universitet, 2004; Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: the Exhibitions That Created
Contemporary Art, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Ed. by Charles Green, Anthony Gardner
4. The importance given to transnational thought appears as a characteristic trait of our
contemporaneity, which replaces the indeterminate interstitial state of “international” with the
idea of movement. Cf. the concept of “trans-Pavilion” formulated by Christine Macel, the curator
of the 2017 Venice Biennale in her essay « Viva Arte Viva Arte… », Viva arte viva : Biennale arte
2017 : la Biennale di Venezia 57, Venice : Venice Biennale, 2017, p. 16-31
5. Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight alone: Clement Greenberg's modernism and the bureaucratization of the
senses, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005

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 Thinking with Large-scale Exhibitions about Space, History, and Art 5

6. Jones, Caroline A. The Global Work of Art: World’s Fair, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience,
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 227
7. For further criticism of a previous text by Caroline A. Jones, cf. Martini, Vittoria. « The Era of
Histories of Biennials Has Begun », The Biennial Reader, Op. cit., p. 9-13
8. Kompatsiaris, Panos. The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and
Art, New York, London: Routledge, 2017
9. http://www.documenta-archiv.de
10. Documenta: Curating the History of the Present, ONCURATING.org, vol. 33, June 2017. Ed. by Nanne
Buurman, Dorothee Richter
11. The documenta 14 Reader, Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2017. Ed. by Adam Szymczyk and
Quinn Latimer
12. Politics-Poetics documenta X – The Book, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1997, p. 24. Ed. by
Catherine David and Jean-François Chevrier
13. documenta 14: Daybook, Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2017. Ed. by Adam Szymczyk and
Quinn Latimer
14. Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? - With
drawings by Dan Perjovschi, London: Koenig Books, 2013. This book has just been published in
Italian: Bishop, Claire. Museologia radicale : ovvero, cos’è « contemporaneo » nei musei di arte
contemporanea ?, Monza : Johan & Levi, 2017

AUTHORS
ELITZA DULGUEROVA
Elitza Dulguerova is assistant professor of contemporary art history at the Université Paris I.
Since 2016 she is a delegated scientific adviser at the Institut national d'Histoire de l'art in the
field of 18th to 21st-Century Art History, where she supervises the programme 1959-1985, au
prisme de la Biennale de Paris. She is interested in the social history of art in Russia/USSR and in
the exhibition as artistic and social challenge in contemporary art. These two aspects come
together in her book Usages et utopies : l’exposition dans l’avant-garde russe prérévolutionnaire (Les
Presses du réel, 2015).

Critique d’art, 49 | Automne/hiver 2017