Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating [Hardcover ed.] 0815370067, 9780815370062

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Curatorial Challenges

Curatorial Challenges investigates the challenges faced by curators in contemporary society and explores which practices, ways of thinking, and types of knowledge production curating exhibitions could challenge. Bringing together international curators and researchers from the fields of art and cultural history, the book provides new research and perspectives on the curatorial process and aims to bridge the traditional gap between theoretical and academic museum studies and museum practices. The book focuses on exhibitions as a primary site of cultural exchange and argues that, as highly visible showcases, producers of knowledge, and historically embedded events, exhibitions establish and organize meanings of art and cultural heritage. Temporary exhibitions continue to increase in cultural significance and yet the traditional role of the museum as a Bildung institution has changed. As exhibitions gain in significance, so too do curatorial strategies. Arguing that new research is needed to help understand these changes, the book presents original research that explores how curatorial strategies inform both art and cultural history museums in contemporary society. The book also investigates what sort of critical, transformative, and perhaps even conservative, potential can be traced in exhibition cultures. Curatorial Challenges fosters innovative interdisciplinary exchange and brings new insights to the field of curatorial studies. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students engaged in the study of curatorial practice, museum studies, the making of exhibitions, museum communication, and art history. Malene Vest Hansen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Copenhagen. Anne Folke Henningsen is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. Anne Gregersen is Curator at the J.F. Willumsens Museum and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

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Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions

Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions is a new series focusing on museums, collecting, and exhibitions from an art historical perspective. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. 1. Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums Margaret Tali 2. Art Museums of Latin America Structuring Representation Edited by Michele Greet and Gina McDaniel Tarver 3. The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition Answering Degenerate Art in 1930s London Lucy Wasensteiner 4. Curatorial Challenges Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating Edited by Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Research-​in-​Art-​Museums-​and-​Exhibitions/​ book-​series/​RRAM

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Curatorial Challenges Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating Edited by Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen

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First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​0-​8153-​7006-​2  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​351-​17450-​3  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of figures  List of contributors  Introduction: Thinking and doing exhibitions 

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M A L E N E V E S T H AN SE N , AN N E FO L KE H E N N INGSEN, AND A N N E G R E G E RSE N

PART I

Curating within the changing role of museums as Bildung institutions  1 Curatorship as Bildungsroman: or, from Hamlet to Hjelmslev 

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D O N A L D P R E Z IO SI

2 Curating the nude in Istanbul: some curatorial challenges  22 A H U   A N TM E N

3 Curating the dead body between medicine and culture 

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K A R I N TY B J E R G

4 Fashion curation: unpacking a new discipline and practice  51 M A R I E R I E G E LS ME L CH IO R

5 Exhibition addresses: the production of publics in exhibitions on colonial history 

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M ATH I A S DA N B O LT

6 Multi-sited curating as a critical mode of knowledge production  SA B I N E DA H L N IE L SE N

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Exhibitions and/​as research 

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7 Curating and research: an uneasy alliance 

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S I M O N   S H EIKH

8 Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction 

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P E TE R B J E R RE GA A RD

9 Curating a mild apocalypse: researching Anthropocene ecologies through analytical figures 

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N ATH A L I A B RICH E T A N D FRIDA H ASTRUP

10 Curating experimental entanglements 

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A DA M B E N CA RD, L O UISE WH ITE L E Y, A N D CAROLINE HEJE T HON

11 The forgotten and the forgettable: the making of The World Goes Pop and other stories 

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F L AV I A F R I GE RI

12 Looters, smugglers, and collectors: rethinking models of ownership research and how to mediate it through the form of the exhibition 

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TO N E   H A N SE N

PART III

Revisiting the past and challenging canons 

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13 Multiple modernisms: curating the postwar era for the present 

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K R I S TI A N HA N DB E RG

14 Contested paradise: exhibiting images from the former Danish West Indies 

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M E TTE K I A KRAB B E  ME YE R

15 Against the grain of neutralization: exhibiting the documentary as a curatorial production of subjective knowledge  S U SA N N E N E UB AUE R

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Contents vii

16 Innovative, polemical, dogmatic: the case of Soviet experimental museum displays, 1930–​1933 

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M A S H A C H L E NOVA

Concluding remarks 

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M A L E N E V E S T H AN SE N , AN N E FO L KE H E N N INGSEN, AND A N N E G R E G E RSE N

Index 

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Figures

2.1 The contemporary video work Reclining Woman (After Halil Paşa) (2012) by Turkish artist Özlem Şimşek at the entrance to the Bare, Naked, Nude exhibition, a historical survey of modern Turkish nude painting. Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum 2.2 The wall of drawings in the Bare, Naked, Nude exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2015, showing nude studies by Turkish artists educated in Europe. Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum 2.3 An enlarged photograph of leading members of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1940s during a session of drawing from the live nude model. The photographer is unknown. Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum 2.4 Exhibition view of Bare, Naked, Nude exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2015, showing work by Turkish artists Halil Dikmen, Hasan Vecih Bereketoğlu and Hamit Görele (from left to right). Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum 3.1 Specimens of human material hover between persons and objects of medical study. Here a specimen of an infant in the womb and a failed treatment for the placenta blocking the cervix. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion 3.2 Cut-​out from a PKU blood sample taken from a newborn from which a whole genome analysis can be generated. Even small samples of tissue connect to the person. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion 3.3 Nonmedical curation placing a hand and a foot in continuation of a sliced arm and leg to show that the way of cutting determines what can be known. Photo Jacob Kjærgård and Medical Museion

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List of figures ix 3.4 Skeleton labeled “a negro.” This was noted in the exhibition caption, but not made into a theme in the exhibition. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion 3.5 The conjoined twins rest on a soft-​looking cushion, but are also displayed dissected in three separate specimens of skin, bones, and organs. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion 4.1 Fashion and sustainability on display. The garments represent different sustainable approaches to fashion. The red dresses to the left are from the Issey Miyake A-​POC-​ collection striving for zero-​waste in production. Photo Mattias Lindbäck 4.2 Main exhibitions text introducing the displayed theme of fashion and sustainability. The text demonstrates the two narratives through the exhibition. Most unconventional is the exhibition design text demonstrating the reflective curatorial practice of the display. Photo Marie Riegels Melchior 4.3 In a wonderland space is placed a gold painted mannequin dressed in a red gown with the heart part of the body visible and with red electric lights radiating in sync with loud heart beats. The theme is love. The display creates an emotional experience and makes the actual dress on display less distinct from the display props. Photo Mattias Lindbäck 4.4 Craft and color are essential components of fashion. In this display it is demonstrated by dresses by Alexandra McQueen (far left and right) and Kenzo (in the middle), as well as by the clear visual language of the exhibition design commissioned by the artist Orlando Campbell. Photo Mattias Lindbäck 4.5 Subversive practices challenges fashion design and beauty ideals. For contemporary fashion exhibitions these designs push curatorial practices in new directions as the exhibition Utopian Bodies. Fashion Looks Forward shows. Photo Mattias Lindbäck 5.1 London, Sugar and Slavery. Photo and copyright: Museum of London, Docklands 5.2 Montage of film stills from the video “This is Your History” in London, Sugar and Slavery. Copyright Museum of London, Docklands 5.3 Installation shot of the video projection in London, Sugar and Slavery. Photo and copyright: Museum of London, Docklands

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x  List of figures 5.4 Installation shot of Tea Time: The First Globalization. Photo and copyright: Thijs Wolzak, M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark 73 5.5 The digital trade ledger in Tea Time: The First Globalization. Photo: Mathias Danbolt 74 6.1 Refugees and volunteers at Copenhagen Central Station, September 2015. Photo Mathias Løvgren Nielsen 81 6.2 Refugee camp in Næstved, Denmark, December 2015. Photo: Mathias Løvgreen Nielsen 85 6.3 Rooyeem Afefi who at the time the picture was taken had been living in the refugee camp in Næstved for 4 months and 12 days. May 2016. Photo: Ulrik Hasemann 86 6.4 Intervention in public space: Trailer as foundation and substructure of a three-​dimensional path-​network installation equipped with loudspeakers in front of Tallinn’s ferry terminal. Photo: Hieslmair, Zinganel, Stop and Go, 2015 88 6.5 Rimini Protokoll, Remote Mitte, 2013. Photo: Ute Langkafel 89 8.1 The symposium. Workshop participants gathered around a table laid with objects from the hidden parts of the museum. Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​ Lill-​Ann Chepstouw-​Lusty 110 8.2 The egg race. Using marshmallows and spaghetti to avoid the collapse. Photo: Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Toril C. Skaaraas Hofseth 114 8.3 The board game workshop. The board shows the overall organization of the space into three overarching zones. Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Kirsten Jensen Helgeland 114 8.4 The exhibition. Norwegian Stone Age settlement in COLLAPSE –​Human Being in an Unpredictable World. Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Kirsten Jensen Helgeland 116 9.1 Taxidermied deer in a field of bags with high-​tech modified starch from potatoes grown in the area. From the exhibition. Photo: Iga Kuriata 121 9.2 View of the brown coal beds taken from Mount Søby, a huge pile of waste dumped in what was considered an already devastated landscape, 2014. Photo: Nathalia Brichet 123 9.3 Moesgaard Museum, Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark. Panoramic view of the exhibition. Photo: Iga Kuriata 125 9.4 Writing desk covered in graph paper and drawers with various objects from the field site. From the exhibition. Photo: Iga Kuriata 126

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List of figures xi 9.5 The making of analytical figures. A taxidermy trophy is being coated in brown coal flakes in order to show a multilayered landscape, coinhabited by multiple species. Photo: Nathalia Brichet 10.1 Exhibition photo from Mind the Gut, featuring an outside view of the installation Landscape Epithelia (2017) by Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt in collaboration with the curatorial team. Copyright: Morten Skovgaard 10.2 Exhibition photo from Mind the Gut, featuring several Winogradsky columns and a table with objects and stories from artists, patients, and scientists who have manipulated their own microbiomes. Copyright: Morten Skovgaard 10.3 Group photo of the curatorial team behind Mind the Gut, taken at a MRI scanning session at Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance at Hvidovre Hospital. Copyright: Louise Whiteley 12.1 Dag Erik Elgin, Halbfigur einer rotblonden Frau die in einem Sessel (sitz) vor einem Kamin auf dem zwei Vasen mit Blumen stehen über dem ein von Matisse gemaltes Bild hängt (2015) (Half-​Figure of a Red-​Blonde Woman Sitting in an Armchair in Front of a Fireplace, On Which Two Vases With Flowers Are Standing, Above Which a Painting by Matisse Is Hanging), eleven canvases, each the same size as Matisse’s Profil bleu devant la cheminée (2015) 12.2 Michael Rakowitz: Enemy Kitchen (2003–​ongoing) 12.3 Late Sabbath lunch served at The Fritt Ord Foundation together with chef Tore Namstad 12.4 Marianne Heier, The Guest (2015). Meteorite, posters, sound installation, and performance 12.5 Celine Condorelli, Average Spatial Compositions (2015), milk steel, plywood, upholstery, paint, dimensions 13.1 Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965. Exhibition poster, Haus der Kunst, 2016 13.2 ©Mark Tansey: Triumph of the New York School, 1984, Oil on canvas, 188 x 304.8 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 13.3 From the section 1. Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Era at Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2016. Photo: Maximilian Geuter 13.4 Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965, Installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2016. Photo: Maximilian Geuter

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xii  List of figures 13.5 Postwar advertised at Haus der Kunst, Munich 2016. Photo: Kristian Handberg 14.1 Sébastien Le Clerc. “Sucrerie,” Engraving. Illustration for Jean-​Baptiste du Tertre: Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 1667 14.2 Unknown artist. “De Insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis,” Woodcut. Illustration for Columbus’s letter “Epistola de insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis,” reproduced in Carolus Verardi. Cæsenatis Cubicularii Pontificii in historiam Bætecam ad R. P. Raphaelem Riarium S. Gerogii Diaconum Cardinalem, 1494 14.3 Frederik von Scholten. Frederikssted, 1837. Colored drawing. Helsinore, M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark 14.4 Unknown artist. Portrait of Louisa Bauditz and Her Wet Nurse, Charlotte Hodge, ca. 1847. Daguerreotype. Copenhagen, The National Museum of Photography 14.5 Art historian Temi Odumosu speaking to writer and satirist Anna Neye about the computer game Playing History: Slave Trade on film in the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​ February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer) 14.6 What Lies Unspoken. Participatory sound intervention developed by art historian Temi Odumosu from the Living Archives Research Project, Malmö University, Sweden, in collaboration with the Royal Danish Library and the National Gallery of Denmark. Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Brian Berg) 14.7 Jeannette Ehlers. Whip it Good, 2014. Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. La Vaughn Belle. Chaney (we live in the fragments 003), 2016. Digital Print. Courtesy of the artist. Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer) 14.8 Nanna Debois Buhl. The Mapmaker, 2008. Installation with two rugs and a video. The rugs were produced in co-operation with Ege Tæpper for the Socle du Monde Biennial at HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the artist. Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer)

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List of figures xiii 14.9 Various photographers. Postcards from St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John. Various techniques, 1897–​1993. La Vaughn Belle. Photomontage Series, 2016. Photographs, digital print. Courtesy of the artist. Nanna Debois Buhl. Looking for Donkeys, 2009; video installation on two screens. 16 mm film, HD transfer (audio in collaboration with Jonny Farrow and Pejk Malinovski. Voiceover: Naja Marie Aidt). Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer) 14.10 La Vaughn Belle. Photomontage Series (“St. Croix Pickney”), 2016. Photographs, digital print. Courtesy of the artist 15.1 Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck, installation image, Villa Romana, Florence, 2011. © Villa Romana, Florence, photo: Ela Bialkowsks, OKNOstudio 15.2 Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck, installation image, Villa Romana, Florence, 2011. © Villa Romana, Florence, photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio 16.1 Experimental Composite Display, Art of the Capitalist Era, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1931–​February 1932. Curator: Aleksei Fedorov-​Davydov. Front-​facing wall text reads: “Earlier rationalism and realism in art are replaced by religious symbolism and sensuality.” Left wall text reads: “Bourgeoisie, fighting against the workers’ movement, forms an alliance with the serf-​owning gentry.” Photographic Archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 16.2 Experimental Composite Display, Art of the Capitalist Era, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1931–​February 1932. Curator: Aleksei Fedorov-​Davydov. Wall text reads: “Bourgeois art in the blind alley of formalism and self-​negation.” Photographic Archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 16.3 Composite Marxist Display, The Art of the Great Industrial Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the Proletarian Revolution, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1932–​February 1933. Curator: Aleksei Fedorov-​Davydov. Wall text reads: “Bourgeois formalism and objectivism-​cubism mutates into a self-​serving game of formal-​aesthetic artistic means.” Photographic Archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 16.4 Introductory Gallery, Concise Experimental Exhibition of the Art from the Era of Imperialism, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, June 15, 1931–​early 1932. Curators: Nikolai Punin, Vera Anikieva, and others. Wall text above the doorway reads: “As a Worldview Anarchism

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xiv  List of figures is Bourgeois Ideology Turned Inside Out.” (Lenin, underlining in original). Photographic Archive of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg 16.5 Gallery of Suprematism, Concise Experimental Exhibition of the Art from the Era of Imperialism, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, June 1931–​early 1932. Photographic Archive of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

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Contributors

Authors Ahu Antmen, PhD, is Associate Professor and lecturer of modern and contemporary art at Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts in Istanbul, Turkey. Her recent publications include a compilation of her essays, Bodies with Identities –​Art, Identity, Gender (2014) and Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernity in Turkish Painting (2015). Adam Bencard, PhD, is Associate Professor at Medical Museion and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen. He was one of the lead curators of the Mind the Gut project, which built in part on his cultural and philosophical research into the microbiome. Bencard’s research focus revolves around materialism and materiality, explored in dialogue with experimental curation practice. Peter Bjerregaard, PhD, is Senior Adviser of Exhibitions at Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research is mainly concerned with a theoretical rethinking of the museum institution and with the potential of exhibitions as research. Bjerregaard is coeditor of Materialities of Passing (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Exhibitions as Research (Routledge, 2019). Nathalia Brichet, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Aarhus University. Her research is focused on extractive industries in Greenland and Denmark where she uses fieldwork to collect and exhibit anthropological analyses. She has cocurated exhibitions at the National Museum of Denmark, National Museum of Ghana, and Moesgaard Museum in Denmark. With fellow contributor Frida Hastrup she has published “Sensationelle trivialiteter –​Museer i vores eksotiske verden” and “Terrestrials in Ruined Landscapes: Potentials in an Anthropocene Era” (Fabrikkens Forlag, 2015). Masha Chlenova, PhD, is a modernist art historian and curator, specializing in the Russian avant-​garde. She currently works as project-​based curator

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xvi Contributors at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and teaches art history at New School University in New  York. She recently curated Russian Revolution:  A Contested Legacy at the International Print Center New  York and co-​ organized Inventing Abstraction, 1910–​1925 at The Museum of Modern Art in New  York. She has published widely on modern art and the Russian avant-​garde. Mathias Danbolt, PhD, is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Copenhagen. He specializes in contemporary art and performance with a focus on queer, feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives on art and culture. He is currently researching the effects and affects of Danish and Nordic colonialism in the field of art and visual culture. Danbolt was cocurator of the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony (2017–​2018) with Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Sarah Giersing at the Royal Danish Library. Recent publications include articles in books including Racialization, Racism and Anti-​Racism in the Nordic Countries (Palgrave, 2018), Otherwise:  Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University, 2016), and Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art and Research (Sternberg, 2014). Flavia Frigeri, PhD, is an art historian and curator, and current Teaching Fellow in the History of Art department at University College London. Previously she served as a curator at International Art (2014–​2016) and assistant curator at Tate Modern (2011–​2014), where she worked on exhibitions, acquisitions and permanent collection displays. She cocurated (with Jessica Morgan) The World Goes Pop. Previous projects include Henri Matisse:  The Cut-​ Outs, Paul Klee:  Making Visible, and Ruins in Reverse. From 2010 to 2011 she was the Solomon R.  Guggenheim Foundation Hilla Rebay International Fellow. She has written widely on postwar Italian art, pop and contemporary art, and exhibition histories. Kristian Handberg, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher with the project “Multiple Modernities:  World Images and Dreamworlds in Art and Culture, 1946–​1972” at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and University of Copenhagen (2015–​ 2018). His dissertation for the University of Copenhagen was titled There’s No Time like the Past:  Retro between Memory and Materiality in Contemporary Culture (2014). Recent publications include “The Shock of the Contemporary:  documenta II and Louisiana Museum,” OnCurating 33 (2017) and “The World Goes Modern: New Globalized Framings of the Postwar Era in the Exhibitions After Year Zero and The World Goes Pop,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8 (April 2016). Tone Hansen has been Director of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, since 2011. She served as Head of Council for Arts Council Norway, 2016–​2020 and has curated numerous exhibitions, such as In Search of

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Contributors xvii Matisse. She is a former curator at HOK and scholar at the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo, with the project Megamonstermuseum. She has edited the readers Looters, Smugglers and Collectors: Provenance Research and the Market (Walther König, 2015); Phantom of Liberty: Contemporary Art and the Pedagogical Paradox (Sternberg Press, 2014); We Are Living on a Star (Sternberg Press, 2014), and (Re)Staging the Art Museum (Revolver, 2011), as well as of catalogues such as Marina Abramovic:  Drawings 1963–​2017 (Walther König, 2017) and Catherine Opie: Keeping an Eye on the World (Walther König, 2017). Frida Hastrup, PhD, is Associate Professor in Ethnology, the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. She is the leader of the research project Natural Goods? Processing Raw Materials in Global Times (funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark’s Sapere Aude program), which includes exhibitions as part of its output. This project has resulted in cocurated exhibitions at the National Museum of Denmark and at Moesgaard Museum. With Nathalia Brichet she has published “Sensationelle trivialiteter  –​Museer i vores eksotiske verden” and “Terrestrials in Ruined Landscapes: Potentials in an Anthropocene Era.” Marie Riegels Melchior, PhD, is Associate Professor in European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. In her research and teaching she focuses on the cultural history of fashion, twentieth-​ century Danish fashion, museum studies, and fashion in museums in particular. Her recent publications include Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice (coedited with Birgitta Svensson, Bloomsbury, 2014)  and Dansk på mode! Fortællinger om design, identitet og historie i og omkring dansk modeindustri (Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2013). Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, PhD, is Senior Researcher in the National Collections at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen where she conducts research on photography and other types of images, and conducts curatorial work. Recent publications include “In the Eye of the Storm: Photographs of Russian Prisoners of War in Denmark during the First World War,” Photography and Culture (September 2017): 1–​30, and (with N. I. Boserup) “The Illustrated Contract between Guaman Poma and the Friends of Blas Valera: A Key Miccinelli Manuscript Discovered in 1998” in Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva coroníca (Danish Humanist Texts, 2015). Susanne Neubauer, PhD, is a curator and art historian who gained her doctorate with a thesis on the documentation of Paul Thek’s environments. Her expertise covers installation art and questions of materiality and documentation, Brazilian art and postwar modernism, contemporary curating, and human-​animal relationships in the context of ecoculture and artistic practices. Her recent published work has appeared in RIHA

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xviii Contributors Journal; Konsthistorisk tidskrift; Theory, Culture and Society; Third Text, and ARS (São Paulo). She is currently working on the book Missed Diversities: Brazilian Art in Post-​1945 Germany. Sabine Dahl Nielsen, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge, Denmark, and at Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University. Her dissertation, Art in Urban Public Spaces: Conflicts and Negotiations as Critical Political Practices (2015), defended at KØS and the University of Copenhagen, will be published by Museum Tusculanums Forlag. As part of her doctoral studies she participated in the research network Curatorial/​Knowledge at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Professor Irit Rogoff. She is author of Det fotografiske rum (Forlaget Politisk Revy) and has contributed to anthologies, exhibition catalogues, and journals such as Periskop, Salon 55, Nordic Museology, and Nordic Journal of Cultural Policy. Donald Preziosi, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Critical Theory, UCLA, and Distinguished Research Professor. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of fourteen books on art and architectural history, theory, and criticism, and the interdependence of philosophy, theology, politics, and museology. He has held visiting professorships in the United States, Europe, Istanbul, and Australia. His most recent book is Art, Religion, Amnesia:  The Enchantments of Credulity (Routledge, 2014). Simon Sheikh, PhD, is a curator and theorist. He is Reader in Art and Program Director of MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a correspondent for Springerin and a columnist for e-​flux. His latest publication is Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (MIT Press, 2016), coedited with Maria Hlavajova. He is currently working on a book about art and apocalypse entitled It’s After the End of the World. Caroline Heje Thon is a research assistant and cocurator of the Mind the Gut project at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research and Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. She has a mixed background within biology, art, and art history, which reflects her general interest in people-​environment relations and in particular how art and art-​science collaborations can affect these relations. Karin Tybjerg, PhD, is Associate Professor at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, combining research and curatorship. She was head curator of the exhibition The Body Collected and has published on anatomical collections, history of science, and museology. She holds a doctorate in History and Philosophy of Science from University of Cambridge and has been Keeper of Ethnography and Modern History at the National Museum of Denmark.

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Contributors xix Louise Whiteley, PhD, is Associate Professor and Curator at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. She was one of the lead curators of the Mind the Gut project, which exemplifies her research interests in both the cultural impact of biomedical approaches to the mind, interdisciplinary research, and cocuration practices. These interests derive from a background traversing different disciplines that engage the brain and mind.

Editors Anne Gregersen, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen and curator at J.  F. Willumsen’s Museum, Frederikssund, Denmark. Her current research project investigates the phenomenon of artist-​ curators and artist-​ curated exhibitions. Her PhD dissertation is In Excess: Agendas in the Late Work of J. F. Willumsen (2015). Recent publications include “Visual Overdoses. Transgression from Within in the Painting of Picabia, Schnabel, and Willumsen,” in Café Dolly. Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen. Hybrid Painting (2013); “Painting that Exaggerates, Exceeds, and Insists,” in Wild, Bold, and Late Willumsen (2016), and “Becoming Animal through Curatorial Contagion,” in Becoming Animal (2018). Malene Vest Hansen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is Project Investigator and founder, with Anne Folke Henningsen, of Research Network for Studies in the Curatorial, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. She specializes in contemporary art, and curatorial and museum studies, and has worked as an art critic for decades. Recent research addresses biennialization of art and exhibition history. Publications include “Curatorial Challenges:  Some Contemporary Exhibition Strategies” (2018), “Remembering Istanbul: What, How and for Whom? Canons and Archives in Contemporary Art Biennials (2013),” and Kuratering af samtidskunst (2011). Anne Folke Henningsen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen and specializes in museology, cultural heritage, and uses of the past. She has studied issues of race and religion in South Africa as well as traces and effects of coloniality in Denmark. With Rikke Andreassen she carried out a collaborative research project exploring aspects of living ethnographic exhibitions in Denmark. Currently she is writing a monograph on the use of mannequins in ethnographic displays. Publications in the field include “Performance and Politics of Authenticity in live Ethnographic Exhibitions” (2017) and “Musealiserade temporaliteter:  Tidslighet, tidlöshet och teleologi i etnografiska utställningar” (2016).

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 Introduction Thinking and doing exhibitions Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen

In the seminal 1996 exhibition studies anthology Thinking about Exhibitions, editors Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne define exhibitions as a fundamental site of cultural exchange: Exhibitions are the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, where signification is constructed, maintained and occasionally deconstructed. Part spectacle, part socio-​historical event, part structuring device, exhibitions –​especially exhibitions of contemporary art –​ establish and administer the cultural meanings of art.1 Thinking about Exhibitions was published more than twenty years ago, but the emphasis it placed on the importance of exhibitions remains highly relevant. Indeed, with accelerated globalization, new web technologies, and the increasing transnational interchange of people, art, capital, culture, communication, and the neoliberal “experience economy,” the cultural significance of the exhibition has grown exponentially. Curatorial Challenges takes up where Thinking about Exhibitions left off, addressing the exhibition as a primary site of cultural exchange now in museums of art, science, and culture. Our aim is to investigate the current challenges facing curating in contemporary society today and to explore what practices, ways of thinking, and types of knowledge production curating exhibitions might possibly challenge. The last decades have brought about ever more challenges to the museum in its traditional role, while how exhibitions are curated has been given broad critical and public attention, turning it into a field of increased self-​ awareness. The Foucault-​ inspired field of “new museology” defines museums, collections, and exhibitions of art and cultural artifacts, or so-​ called cultural heritage, as producers of narratives that actively participate in the construction of dominant ideas that shape our perception of time, space, and history, as well as influencing the identity of subjects, communities, classes, and nations. As such, the museum has been defined as “one of the most indispensable framing institutions of modernity,” in the words of art historian Donald Preziosi.2

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2  Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen Museums are no longer self-​evident Bildung institutions for what “we”— in the sense of the Western European Enlightenment—used to think of as spaces for democratizing cultural education and important pillars in community and nation building. Today, in a world marked by the global and all-​ pervasive reach of contemporary and digital media, museums must reconsider their potential to present democratic exhibition cultures. New museum strategies and research within new museology have recently explored what has been described as a shift from a focus on collections to visitors.3 Moreover, new research fields are developing that consider visitor studies, digital interaction, and participation, on the one hand, and a more abstract and theoretical probing of “the curatorial,” on the other.4 Neither of these, however, is the focus of this book. Curatorial Challenges engages directly with the exhibition as a departure point for critical investigation within the context of the increasing focus on the curatorial, curating, and the role of the curator. Critical curatorial studies is a burgeoning international research focus, within the broader field of museum studies. This book contributes to the field by presenting numerous interdisciplinary investigations of what the curatorial can mean in regard to exhibitions. Our interest lies in curatorial practices in the specific context of exhibitions of art and cultural artifacts in various settings. The chapters compiled here present a genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange between curatorial thinkers and doers, with contributors from both art history and cultural studies and with theoretical perspectives, as well as in-​depth case studies from authors based in both academia and museums, and other exhibitionary institutions. The chapters present reflections born out of praxis with curating exhibitions as well as reflections on the exhi­ bition as a producer of meaning and culture.

Exhibition cultures Traditionally, museums of art or cultural history encompass different approaches to and attitudes about exhibitions, and thus demonstrate differences in the framing of objects as either originals or artifacts. In the field of art, temporary exhibitions seem to form the vital function of breath that keeps the institution alive. Contemporary art is often produced directly for specific, temporary shows, tending toward gigantic scale in strongly branded and/​or commercial events in museums and the ever-​growing international biennial culture, but also in small, emerging, and alternative sites. In museums of cultural history, the dynamics of “permanent” and temporary exhibitions are somewhat different, with less emphasis on short-​term temporary exhibitions. Yet here, too, there is an intensified focus on temporary exhibitions and efforts are continuously made to find new exhibition formats for knowledge exchange and engagement of the spectator/​visitor/​ user—each term indicating changing and different roles of the museum in

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Introduction 3 its relation to the public. New exhibitions and events are, in short, essential for museums today in order to gain public and political interest. But exhibitions are more than just meeting the need for maintaining the relevance of the museum in the experience economy; exhibitions are also sites for research and knowledge production. External demands for strengthening academic research in museums combined with internal interest from museum staff in understanding exhibition making as integral in research processes, and vice versa, have to some extent shifted the status of the exhibition from the mere presentation of concluded research results to an important active venue for analysis itself.

“The curator”: a changing concept The concept and role of the “curator” is in flux, and it can differ greatly within art and culture. The English word “curator” has been used to signify the caretaker of a collection, taking its etymological meaning from the Latin “curare,” or taking care of, or looking after. However, in the art world today, a curator is often defined as an “exhibition maker,” to quote the legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who was one of the first freelance independent art curators to emerge in the late 1960s.5 Traditionally curators in museums operate as discrete and almost “invisible” exhibition makers. In the field of art now, however, more often than not they work highly visibly, or “indiscretely” with distinct concepts, especially independent curators, who often become prominent stars in the transnational exhibition circuit.6 Today, the independent curator is an official profession. Starting in the late 1980s, a series of new postgraduate programs and schools have educated international curators as independent experts whose primary field is exhibitions, and not as traditional caretakers of the five pillars of the museum—collecting, preserving, researching, exhibiting, and communication—as defined by the International Council of Museums.7 In this new position, the curator of art often seems to take on the role of the critic:  selecting artists and art works and making exhibitions with a clear thematic or political concept or narrative. This is sometimes done in combination with so-​called paracuratorial formats, such as seminars, talks, publications, events with after-​hours bars, and other types of knowledge-​ exchange related to exhibitions. The existence of institutions purely devoted to exhibitions in the field of art—such as the Kunsthallen or large-​scale perennial exhibitions as biennials of international contemporary art—has created fertile ground for this new culture of curating, which now also influences museums of art. In museums of cultural history, the “indiscrete” curator is a rarer creature. Here, most curators operate behind the scenes, so to speak. However, ways of differencing the monolithic authoritative voice of supposed objectivity are starting to emerge. Sometimes this is done by inviting artists to intervene

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4  Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen in museum exhibitions and even to cocurate, or by framing exhibitions with explicit statements of curatorial interest, thus acknowledging their inherent partiality. Traditional frames are thus widened with collaborations across cultural spheres. Exhibitions, for their part, are always historically situated and frame positions—the “exhibition rhetoric” can consolidate and advance existing power positions and narratives.8 But they can also contest and interrupt them. The main objective of this book is to establish innovative interdisciplinary exchange to bring new insights to the field of curatorial studies that bridges theoretical museum studies and museum practices. It focuses on the challenges of curating in three thematic sections:  (1) curating within the changing role of museums as Bildung institutions; (2)  exhibitions and/​as research; and (3)  revisiting the past and challenging canons. Each section features articles written by international scholars and curators who are working and thinking in the fields of art, and cultural history, both established and emerging international scholars and curators from universities, museums and independent players. While some articles are based on personal experiences from curating exhibitions, others stem from seeing and analyzing exhibitions. We have selected and grouped—curated—the articles according to our three main sections. However, as it will become apparent, many articles bring reflections that also touch on and elaborate vital themes of the other two sections. The texts presented here grew out of the conference Curatorial Challenges at University of Copenhagen in May 2016, the concluding event in the two-​ year project Research Network for Studies in the Curatorial funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. We wanted to expand this interdisciplinary approach to initiate an international scholarly dialogue with colleagues from both universities and museums, with thinkers and doers, emerging and experienced. We wanted to discuss how and if we can think curating as research. What sort of knowledge is produced in and through curatorial strategies? And what sort of conservative, or perhaps critical and transformative potentials can be traced in exhibition cultures? The Curatorial Challenges conference was a chance to form a temporary hothouse to cultivate interdisciplinary dialogue on curating. It confirmed our initial assumption of a need for thinking more about exhibitions and the analyses compiled in this volume constitute a step toward this end.

Notes 1 Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W.  Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2. 2 Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World:  The Idea of the Museum (London: Ashgate, 2004). 3 Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).

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Introduction 5 4 Prominent voices in this debate include Iritt Rogoff and Jean-Paul Martinon of the Goldsmiths Curatorial/​Knowledge PhD program. See, for example, Rogoff in conversation with Beatrice von Bismarck, in Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, eds., Cultures of the Curatorial (Berlin:  Sternberg Press, 2012), or Jean-​Paul Martinon, ed., The Curatorial:  A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 5 Szeemann curated more than two hundred exhibitions and called himself “Ausstellungsmacher,” exhibition maker, after he left the job as director at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. 6 On the “indiscreet curator,” see Sanne Kofod Olsen, in Malene Vest Hansen, Sanne Kofod Olsen, et al., eds., Kuratering af samtidskunst (Roskilde: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2011). 7 For more on early curatorial programs and schools and the development of the international independent curator, see Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 8 See Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, 175–​90.

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Part I

Curating within the changing role of museums as Bildung institutions As the number of museums has grown dramatically worldwide in recent years, the traditional role of the museum as a Bildung institution is increasingly challenged. From the beginning of the public museum’s history during the European Enlightenment, exhibitions have constituted a fundamental aspect of their purpose: museums are defined as institutions that put objects— of art, science, cultural history—on display for the public. As an institution, the museum “speaks exhibitions,” to quote curator Bruce W. Ferguson.1 And yet the vast technological, economic, cultural, and political changes of the last decades present a range of new challenges to museum exhibitions and the curators who create them, profoundly impacting the presentation of art and artifacts, methods of display, professional interconnections, and relationship to the public. The chapters presented in this section discuss a series of very different exhibitions that address topics and themes in a wide range of fields—from art to medicine, fashion, colonial history, and contemporary migration. The exhibitions also span a vast geography, from Istanbul to London and Helsingør, in public and private museums that include new cutting-​edge institutions to established collections with long histories as traditional Bildung museums. Nevertheless, all of the chapters share a focus on the exhibition as a privileged public space in the Western museum tradition. They investigate the exhibition as a historically situated space in time, within which specific exhibitionary strategies can think with things and imagine “social truths,” and consolidate and question them framing and activating public discussion and (self-​)reflection, as well as creating spaces for learning and unlearning. Curatorship is “a dangerous practice,” according to art historian Donald Preziosi in his chapter “Curatorship as Bildungsroman:  Or, from Hamlet to Hjelmslev.” The text functions as a theoretical frame for the rest of the chapters in Part I. Preziosi argues for curating as an “epistemological technology: a craft of thinking” or “a creative performance using the world to think about, and both affirm and transform the world.” Through a deconstructionist analysis, he relates the curating of exhibitions and museums to the fundamental cultural strategies of religion and societies as such, because

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8  Curating within the role of museums curating is a way of fabricating “social truths.” For Preziosi, curating involves the managing and articulating of what should be remembered and what should be forgotten or hidden, thereby legitimizing power. He introduces the metaphor Bildungsroman, traditionally an educative narrative, to define curating as an ongoing process that is never neutral, innocent, or permanent, and when it presents the fictions of factual representation, is also a form of critique. How curating exhibitions can discreetly bring about a critique of cultural representations and social truths is central to art historian Ahu Antmen’s chapter, “Curating the Nude in Istanbul.” Reflecting on her own curating of the exhibition Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting, Antmen views the exhibition as an experiential, visually rhetorical situation, a designated space to see and think within a certain framework. Rejecting the well-​known classical tradition of the nude in Western art history, Antmen focuses on how the genre was translated in Turkish art, using the exhibition to communicate its many cultural translations and tensions. In contemporary Turkey, the limits of exhibiting the nude are being tested, and while major public art museums are currently closed to the public, private museums have become potential spaces for adventures into knowledge, rather than emblems of authority. Within this context, Antmen explains her approach in Bare, Naked, Nude as focusing both on aesthetic transformation in terms of style, as well as how what she calls an “other modernity” becomes visible. As a modernist image, the nude meant very different things in different contexts. For her, the exhibition becomes an exercise in learning and unlearning of established “truths” and new knowledge. The exhibition as testing ground is also at the core of science historian Karin Tybjerg’s chapter, “Curating the Dead Body between Medicine and Culture.” Here Tybjerg addresses the role and limits of collecting and exhibiting the contested material of the human body. She discusses historical material collected for medical purposes, arguing for exhibitions that simultaneously present the specimen as medical object and as human material with cultural and existential connections. She explains how she curated the exhibition The Body Collected at Medical Museion in Copenhagen to present a synthesis between medical and cultural modes of display, while also attempting maintain open discussions at the same time focusing on medical practices and research. In this way, Tybjerg argues, the museum can play an important role mediating between the medical profession and the public, who themselves are subject to medical care and decisions. In “Fashion Curating:  Unpacking a New Discipline and Practice,” ethnologist Marie Riegels Melchior analyzes recent fashion exhibitions and sees a change from historical surveys to spectacular shows or explorative laboratories, that is, exhibitions that change the focus on fashion objects from popular to “high art” visual culture. As part of this development, Riegels Melchior argues, the museum is sometimes treated more like an open use, collection-​free gallery space that risks becoming a commercial venue for

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Curating within the role of museums 9 the fashion industry. She relates this shift to the new profession of educated fashion curators, who function as independent auteurs, often organizing the museum spaces into events that conform to recent changes in museums that focus on visitor-​friendly experiences, younger audiences, and other stra­ tegies used to legitimize the museum institution in contemporary society. Art historian Mathias Danbolt is also concerned with how exhibitions address their public. His chapter “Exhibition Addresses:  The Production of Publics in Exhibitions on Colonial History” focuses on how exhibitions in museums can work as catalysts in bringing critical publics into being. Danbolt argues that curatorial modes of address condition and produce particular forms of publics, which are not predefined as in visitor studies. By analyzing the curatorial strategies in two exhibitions on colonialism in European museums of maritime history, London, Sugar and Slavery, at the Museum of London Docklands, and Tea Time: The First Globalization, at the M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark, he demonstrates how each exhi­ bition engages with colonial legacies in radically different ways, and thus create very different publics. Modern culture scholar Sabine Dahl Nielsen focuses on the creation of new and critical publics by developing a strategy of “multi-sited curating,” combining and connecting the exhibition site of the museum institution with a network of other exhibition sites in urban public spaces, which sometimes comprise potential sites of social conflict. Her chapter, “Multi-sited Curating as a Critical Mode of Knowledge Production,” argues for the critical potentials of multi-sited curating when dealing with urgent contemporary challenges such as migration. Dahl Nielsen bases her argument on her cocuration of the exhibition(s) Transit: Mobility and Migration in the Age of Globalisation, which is based at Denmark’s KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge, with installations in train stations, transit spaces, and local trains that travel from the center of Copenhagen to its suburbs. The project not only exhibits already existing art works but also actively commissions new art projects and involves contemporary artists in curating specific sites themselves. In this way, the multisited exhibition, like the aforementioned exhibitions in this section that probe subject matter, contexts, publics, and disciplines, transgress the traditional institutional boundaries of the museum.

Note 1 Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 183.

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1  Curatorship as Bildungsroman Or, from Hamlet to Hjelmslev Donald Preziosi

Curatorship—the practice of curating—is, to put it bluntly, a dangerous practice. As a theatrical performance, it involves the critical use of parts of the material environment both for constructing and deconstructing the premises, promises, and potential consequences of what are conventionally understood as realities, or social, cultural, political, philosophical, or religious truths. It is a way of using things to think with and to reckon with—to struggle with and against—their possible consequences. It is an epistemological technology: a craft of thinking.1 As such, it is not innocent or innocuous, and may even be terror-​inducing, eliciting what Plato referred to as theios phobos, or “divine fear” or “holy terror.” We always and everywhere navigate the world in relation to our perceptions of its formations; perceptions that are continually changing as the world turns. Curating entails the conscious juxtaposition and orchestration of what in various Western traditions were distinguished as “subjects” and “objects”: what are conventionally differentiated as “agents,” and as what is “acted upon.” Curating not only precedes and is more fundamental than exhibitions, galleries, collections, and museums; but it is also not unique, nor exclusive, to any of those institutions and professions. In fact, it is not even an “it” at all but is, rather, a way of using things: potentially any things.2 In short, curating is a creative performance using the world to think about, and both affirm and transform, the world. It is semiautonomous of other copresent social practices, existing primarily in explicit or implicit relation to what it is contrasted with. And the most important “other” in that equation is religion: artistry and religiosity are deponent or dependent positions with respect to representation, inextricably interrelated. Neither art nor religion exist autonomously, but semiautonomously, each defined primarily in relationship to its other. Contemporary debates over curatorship thus will be more adequately understood and reckoned with as aspects of this more fundamental discourse. For those of us concerned with the so-​ called challenges facing museums, exhibitions, and collections, any investigation into such issues should more realistically unfold within these broader and deeper contexts. What is being curated coexists with its curations. Above all, curating itself is a challenge to what is taken as reality.

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12  Donald Preziosi A very great deal is therefore at stake in the critique of curatorship. In fact, there are three general dimensions to that practice. Whether we use the term to refer to the caring, organizing, and managing of objects or phenomena, whether material or virtual, curating is, firstly, a form of stagecraft, or the orchestration of entities or phenomena in space-​time. Secondly, it is a mode of dramaturgy, or the practice of dramatic orchestrations. Thirdly, the theatricality of curating is also a rhetorical practice, an art of persuasion. So, whether curatorship invites or banishes, explains or masquerades, persuades or dissuades, it is never neutral, innocent, or permanent. In short, there is no “it” about it, but more of a when and a how, as well as a why. Curating is thus a form of critique. By critique I mean more than simply “criticism” but rather a method of foregrounding underlying assumptions and beliefs about social and cultural realities—that is, what are staged and manifested as if they were realities or social truths. Moreover, as a practice of what I am calling Bildungsroman (traditionally, an educative narrative), curating problematizes stable or fixed distinctions between art and religion. It does so by foregrounding the processes of knowledge-​ formation and understanding, or what I  will call the epistemological technologies of fabricating social truths, by bringing to consciousness the “fictions of factual representation”; that is, the artistry or artifice of what is staged as if it were “fact.”3 Fundamentally, then, curating is an artistic practice. I would like to focus for a moment on William Shakespeare. One of his most famous, complex, and challenging plays was called The Tragedy of Hamlet, King of Denmark. It was first performed in London in 1599 and published in its final form in 1603. While the amount of discussion and debate about Hamlet is enormous, I want to focus my remarks by recalling Sigmund Freud’s endless fascination with the play one hundred years ago, and consider the significance of his fascination for recent theoretical and critical investigations involving the problems in the design, organization, and management of museums and exhibitions, especially as it pertains to ideas about time and space, and about the twin arts of memory and amnesia. What does Freud have to do with curatorship? Why would his keen interest in Hamlet a century ago be relevant to our own interests now, with the current challenges to curatorship? Curatorship does not exist prior to its challenges, and I  prefer to pay attention to curatorship itself as a challenge. But what does curating itself challenge? What could or should it challenge, trouble, destabilize, or make problematic? Or even terrify? Further, is curating a form of terrorism? Freud’s fascination with Shakespeare’s Hamlet concerned what is repressed in memory—phenomena that would later return in another form or in another place in one’s consciousness, a return of the repressed.4 Here I will consider curatorship as a historiographic practice that gives explicit attention to the fabricating, managing, and articulating of both what should

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Curatorship as Bildungsroman 13 be remembered and revealed, and what should be forgotten or hidden. In psychoanalytic terms, this is what is liable to return in unexpected or unrecognizable forms. Hamlet, whose father is murdered by his uncle Claudius in order to solely possess Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, later recognizes that the murder did not get rid of his father, but actually had the effect of turning him into a ghost: something that will continue to haunt his own present, as well as the kingdom of Denmark forever. It was only in attending to his father as a phantom—virtually rather than materially—that Hamlet could now be seen to engage with and appear to obey his father’s wishes. He then does so as the new king of Denmark, thereby in effect acknowledging that the real power behind his throne is the ghost of his father, whose voice only he can hear, using it as a guide to his own actions as the new monarch. A virtual link to a transcendent reality. In terms of stagecraft and dramaturgy, the play is also very complex in other ways, but for our purposes here the phenomenon of repression is central. It is, moreover, a manifestation of the inextricable connection between art and religion. By “listening” to his father’s immaterial spirit or ghost, Hamlet is performing a religious act, a piece of theater that problematizes and makes indistinct and indeterminate the verbal differences between art and religion. I’ll call this problem “Hamlet’s dilemma,” and it is a paradox as ancient as the foundations of kingdoms or nation-​states themselves, whose coherence and legitimacy has been typically linked—as much by hindsight as in advance—to a “spirit,” divinity, or principle, which could then seem to serve as a catalyst for the performance or practice of being a subject or citizen. This is a problem or paradox as old as the views articulated by Plato 2,500 years ago in the dialogue on the nature of civic life known as The Republic (Ta politeia), where what was at issue was the perception of consistency and order. Plato claimed that the structure and order of the state should echo or reflect the order of the universe itself: that is, the cosmos, at least insofar as that organization was properly interpreted by those legitimately holding or desiring power.5 Four hundred and fifty years on, Shakespeare’s Hamlet stands as an early modern articulation and expression of this central problem or paradox of political power and its legitimacy: namely, its connection to and validation by an invisible or immaterial power or spirit, knowable mainly through its material effects. As Derrida succinctly put it fifty years ago, “a divine teleology secures the political economy of the fine arts.”6 In other words, artistry is validated and legitimized by being linked to a transcendent reality; the material world making sense not by its formal order alone but by the perception that it is linked to an underlying or overarching immateriality, or to transcendence. It was Gilles Deleuze who once referred to philosophy as fundamentally the critique of transcendence, writing in his text The Logic of Sense:

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14  Donald Preziosi The error of all specifications of the transcendental as consciousness consists in conceiving the transcendental in the image and resemblance of that for which it is supposed to provide the foundation … metaphysical and transcendental philosophies agree in conceiving determinative singularities only as already imprisoned in the mold of a supreme Ego, a higher I.7 One has only to consider the organization and underlying motivation of so-​called histories of art, which typically are grounded in an evolutionary idea: the underlying progress (or regress) of the idea of art as such over time and space, which makes it possible to imagine a teleology or evolutionary growth of the spirit of artwork.8 Truly a Bildungsroman. Even texts such as George Kubler’s The Shape of Time9 still imagine the evolution of the idea of art underlying the chronology of artworks themselves. Hegel himself fell into such a trap over two centuries ago. Such issues are directly relevant to the problems of our own contemporary societies, which struggle with the catastrophic rise of religious terrorism around the world, especially those terrorisms that seem endemic to monotheist theatricalities—forms of curatorship, in fact—such as Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, in all their sectarian variations. In each of these traditions, their religious legitimacy is a rhetorical function of the coherence of their artistry. So, again, what does the tragic story of a Danish king Shakespeare called Hamlet, not to mention the tragedies arising out of the conflicts between art and religion, especially within the still-​existing monotheisms, have to do with contemporary museums and their management? Or, for that matter, with the art and craft of curating or caring for and about objects, subjects, and other phenomena? Such issues may become more clearly related, and timely, when seen as strategies for managing time. The art of writing histories—historiography— is one methodology for designing or staging time and memory. It is a way of dealing with the power of “the past” in relation to what is distinguished as “the present.” However, there are a number of ways of “shaping time,” or we might say, of “curating” the relations of the past to the present, as well as alternative modes of organizing and managing exhibitionary space. According to Michel De Certeau, in his widely praised essay “Psychoanalysis and Its History,” written some forty years ago, there are two chief strategies of articulating, managing, or (as I would put it) “curating” time, which contrast with one other.10 In the first strategy, called psychoanalysis, the past is contained within the present, but in disguise or repressed, that is, existing in the present but hidden or in costume or masquerade. By contrast, in the second strategy, historiography or history-​writing, the past is juxtaposed with and staged “adjacent to” the present. Historical space is thereby organized and divided between (A) the place of observation, and

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Curatorship as Bildungsroman 15 (B) its object of study or attention. It is based upon a clean “break” between past and present, staged as two distinct domains. On the one hand, there are places such as museums, exhibitions, collections, archives, or libraries whose contents are organized according to a variety of familiar ways, and typically in order to suggest sequences of affiliation, influence, or demonstrations of cause-​and-​effect relations. On the other hand, psychoanalysis treats the relation between past and present as one of imbrication—that is, one thing put in the place of another—as well as repetition, or one thing reproducing the other but in another form. These two strategies of articulating time and the “spacing” or shaping of time are different methods of giving “the past” explanatory power, while simultaneously making the present capable of explaining the past as its product or effect.11 Each zone or period of time is imagined as capable of explaining and justifying or legitimizing the other. The world that you see as the result or product or fulfillment of what is understood as its antecedents, an ancestral past, the latter understandable in terms of its effects or outcomes. In other words, prologues to products of effects in the present. A “newer” testament fulfilling the hopes and desires of an older one. The term I have been using here—Bildungsroman—is a traditional word from German literary history that refers to a type of story or novel about the maturing process of a hero or protagonist of a story, specifically with how he or she matures and develops socially, morally, and psychologically. The term literally means a “story of education” or personal formation: in short, the shaping, on many levels, of the subjectivity of an individual subject. In a Bildungsroman, subjectivity or identity is understood not as permanent or fixed or unchangeable, but rather as an ongoing, dynamically evolving process: a continuing creation or fabrication and the dynamism of curatorship. In other words, for you, “I” am the “you” that you have staged for me, which I acknowledge by performing it, by acting out the “you” that you see “me” as being. A particular role that also coexists with all the other “mes” that I  may have been, or, all those “yous” I  am continually becoming for you or others. “Who I am” is what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming and will continue to become. Subjects are conventionally understood and reckoned with relationally, as entities presumed to have agency so as to be distinguished not only from other subjects but also from objects, the latter being whatever are acted upon by subjects. At least in traditional occidental metaphysics, philosophy, or religion, which themselves contrast with cultures and societies for whom what we may distinguish as “objects” may also be understood more explicitly as having agency or being agents. Where a “vital materiality” runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman, again problematizing subject-​object dualisms.12 Any individualities are syntheses of dividualities or semiautonomous selves. Notions of identity or subjectivity presume specific kinds of relationships with its other(s): what identity is contrasted with and which by that contrast

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16  Donald Preziosi establishes its being and the artifice or artistry, of its consistency. At the foundation of all of this, more generically, is design, or the designing of a world as surveyed over by ourselves. I will call such an artistic design practice “worlding.”13 Subjects and objects exist by imbrication, as contained within each other, as nodes in networks or assemblages made up of heterogeneous entities that together form the stagecraft and dramaturgy of our experiences. Rhizomatic fabrications. I am linking curating to sets of practices or assemblages that involve fabricating, juxtaposing, and maintaining and linking together disparate entities, persons, and phenomena, which perform certain social, political, philosophical, and theological tasks at particular times and places for particular audiences or users. Any mode of curatorship is necessarily defined in relation to some idea of what it is that is being “cared” for. In considering the significance of an artifact such as a book, a painting, a design, or a building, as soon as it is attributed to a source or subject, and thereby taken as the effect or product or the ideology or intention of a subject, its “autonomy” is instrumentalized in order to manufacture transcendence and immateriality. Machineries for creating and maintaining as a fact the fiction—the artifice— of divinity. But if the dualism and fixity of the subject-​ and-​ object paradigm is deconstructed, then anything that exists will exist by virtue of what is outside and beyond what is framed as an “it.” That is, the dualism of intention and effect is dissolved into a multiplicity of actions without distinct beginnings or ends:  endless rhizomatic formations where what might be staged as agency is not unique to an isolatable portion of the assemblage of actions, actors, entities, and products, but is a circumstantial crystallization that may occur or “take place anywhere or anytime.” Let me put this more bluntly: once you make a strong distinction between creative agency and the materiality of what is being acted upon, once you stage signification as a relationship between what signifies and what is signified, you make it possible to imagine transcendence and immateriality or spirit. Immateriality is itself a social artifact: beneath all this is the metaphysics of signification, where, as Derrida once put it, once you make a strong distinction between what signifies and what is signified, or a formation and its content or meaning, you make it possible to imagine that a “signified” might have a reality of its own: an existence apart from its expression or representation. The origin of the “god” fiction. It is worthwhile repeating his remarks in full: The maintenance of a rigorous distinction—an essential and ­juridical distinction—between the signans and the signatum, the equation of the signatum and the concept inherently leaves open the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is of a

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Curatorship as Bildungsroman 17 relationship to a system of signifiers. By leaving open this possibility— and it is inherent even in the opposition signifier/​signified, that is in the sign—Saussure … accedes to the classical exigency of what I have proposed to call a “transcendental signified,” which in and of itself, in its essence, would exceed the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier. On the contrary, though, from the moment that one questions the possibility of such a transcendental signified, and that one recognizes that every signified is also in the position of a signifier, the distinction between signified and signifier becomes problematic at its root.14 To put this even more explicitly: any transcendental spirit, god, or supernatural force is essentially a linguistic or semiotic artifact; a topological product of the system of signs itself; “the artifice of eternity,” as the poet William Butler Yeats once put it.15 About a decade ago, I spoke about the amnesiac relationships between art and religion when giving a presentation in Copenhagen. At that time, I  discussed Søren Kierkegaard’s observations on the oblique relations between what have been conventionally distinguished as materiality and immateriality, or spirituality.16 The person I  did not discuss then was someone whose work I  would now like to mention because it is a powerful and fundamental critique of the dualisms of Saussurian linguistics and semiology, and it is directly relevant to our interests in curatorship now. I  am referring to the great Danish linguist and philosopher of language, Louis Troll Hjelmslev, whose book On the Foundation of Language Theory (Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse) was published in Copenhagen in 1943.17 Hjemslev’s writing was an antecedent of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who in their 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, cited Hjelmslev as the key catalyst for launching the evolution—indeed the Bildungsroman—of their own research and writing, which has had such profound effects and consequences for contemporary theory and criticism.18   I have understood my task with this text not to be a “criticism” of the institution or profession of curatorship, but rather a critique of curatorship itself. Once again, I  do not simply mean an examination of the flaws or imperfections of a specific practice or profession, nor a series of criticisms designed to “improve” a flawed institution or an institution seemingly “in crisis,” but rather an analysis focusing upon the basic grounds for curating’s possibility, reading backwards from what is claimed to be natural, obvious, or self-​evident. The aim of critique is the essential work of philosophy: not only to articulate the historicality and artifice of naturalness, the fictions of facticity, but also, as philosopher and gender theorist Barbara Johnson has written, to make clear how such artifice is commonly blind to itself.19

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18  Donald Preziosi For Deleuze, the essential task of philosophy has always been the critique of transcendence:  that is, the account of how it is fabricated, promoted, and legitimized. Critique is concerned with the deconstruction and exposure from within of what a system’s basic presuppositions conceal—the blind spots and amnesias about what produces and maintains a system or systems in the first place. What in fact is repressed in conventional museology and curatorship. The void or “black hole” or “ghost” in the machinery of a theory, dogma, doctrine, belief, philosophy, or religion. Critique is more concerned with establishing primarily what a statement or claim presupposes or where it derives from, and secondarily, with what that statement purportedly “means.” In other words, that what it does, it really does do. Critique, then, is a strategy of reading—a method of very closely and carefully reading statements, claims, theories, and beliefs—foregrounding not the weaknesses or stupidity or absurdity of a professional doctrine or dogma, but rather foregrounding a theory’s structurally necessary silencing of what gives it its apparent naturalness or cogency. For example, a religious system’s repression of its own artistry, or what I have referred to elsewhere as Plato’s Dilemma, and upon which I have here modeled what I call Hamlet’s Dilemma. As a strategy of close and attentive reading, then, critique is a “deconstruction of the validity of the commonsense perception of what is unquestioningly taken to be obvious.”20 In this case it is a sibling of religious exegesis itself: a Bildungsroman, perhaps, or a romance of unknown siblings. The work of Hjelmslev was crucial for Deleuze and Guattari because it constituted a brilliantly effective deconstruction of Saussurian or structuralist linguistics by elaborating a nontranscendentalist and genuinely materialist approach to signification as rhizomatic assemblage. What Hjelmslev understood was that an effective theory of signification must take into account the simultaneity and codetermination of “form” and “content,” which for Deleuze and Guattari was emblematized by the phenomenon of the rhizome, without beginning or end, and capable of being linked to any other distinguishable portion of any sensorium; anything palpable. In A Thousand Plateaus, the authors refer to Hjelmslev as: The Danish Spinozist geologist, that dark prince descended from Hamlet who pointed to a way out of the conventional form/​content dualism, making possible the notion of the rhizome as emblematic of meaning-​ production; as an epistemological technology that, as “univocal” no longer required a transcendental signified (as Derrida independently put it) for its legitimation and justification.21 Deleuze, Guattari, and Hjelmslev always insisted upon the open-​endedness of texts and books and upon their being occasions for continuity through the creativity and artistry of users.

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Curatorship as Bildungsroman 19

Notes 1 Regarding this, there are numerous important studies about the uses of the built environment. One of the most important of these, and especially of architectural design as a mode of thinking, is Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought:  Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–​ 1200 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998). Her earlier text, The Book of Memory:  A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990), describes the indeterminacy of images and texts, and their openness to engagement with readers and viewers to activate their ongoing significations. 2 For a detailed investigation of these points, see Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Oxford: Blackwell Manifesto Series, 2012). 3 See Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse:  Essays in Cultural Criticism (London:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 121–​34. 4 For an excellent investigation of such practices, see Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Neurons and Signifiers,” The Aggregate, vol. 2 (March 2015), accessed April 11, 2016, www.we-​aggregate.org/​piece/​neutrons-​and-​signifiers. Alexander deals with Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” [1895], in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1 (1886–​1899): Pre-​Psycho-​Analytic Publication and Unpublished Drafts, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1966), 281–​397. For Freud’s drawings of neural networks, see Lynn Gamwell and Mark Solms, From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind (New York: Binghamton University Art Museum, 2006). 5 Plato’s dilemma about whether to banish mimetic or representational art (painting, sculpture, theater) from his ideal city because such work would negatively impact on the souls of citizens is explicitly addressed in The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1935), 243–​45 and 464–​65. The European discourse on representational art begins in effect with a debate on its dangers to a well-​ordered community. Art and terror were twins at birth. 6 See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” in Mimesis des articulations, ed. Sylviane Agacinski, et  al. (Paris:  Aubier-​ Flammarion, 1975), 57–​ 93, and Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–​25. See also Donald Preziosi, Art/​Religion/​Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity (London:  Routledge, 2014), especially “Godless in Copenhagen:  Theses, Corollaries, Consequences,” 73–​83. 7 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, ed. Constantin V. Boundas with Charles Stivale (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1990), 128, or Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Editions du Miniut, 1969). 8 See Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History:  Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989 and 1991); The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); see also Preziosi and Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is. 9 See George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962). 10 Michel de Certeau, “Psychoanalysis and Its History,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota

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20  Donald Preziosi Press, 1986). Originally published as “Histoire et psychanalyse,” in La nouvelle histoire, ed. F. LeGoff, R. Chartier, and J. Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978), 477–​87. 11 Kubler, The Shape of Time. 12 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 13 See Donald Preziosi, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen and Architecture Is When Theory Is the Residue of a Journey,” The Journal of Visual Culture 15, no.  3 (October 2016): 301–​10. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Semiology and Grammatology:  An Interview with Julia Kristeva,” Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1981), 19–​20, or Positions (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972). 15 W. B.  Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” stanza III. For the full text, see www. mrbauld.com/​yeats1bz.html. See also Preziosi, Art/​Religion/​Amnesia, 40 and n. 8, “Godless in Copenhagen,” 73–​83. 16 Donald Preziosi, “Godless! Modern Criticism of Religion,” invited talk, University of Copenhagen, January 29–​30, 2007; essay published in Danish as “Fortryllet lettroenhed  –​kunst, religion og hukommelsestab,” in Gudløs! Religionskritik i dag, ed. Malene Busk and Ida Crone (Copenhagen:  Tiderne Skifter, 2008), 203–​18. 17 Louis Troll Hjelmslev, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse) Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1943). 18 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1987), or Mille Plateaux, Capitalisme et Schizophrenie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980). 19 A useful discussion of these points, as well as an excellent summary of what is entailed by a critique of the metaphysical forces structuring any text, may be found in Barbara Johnson’s introduction to Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xiv–​xvi. 20 Ibid., xv. 21 Op. cit., 43 and 99, n. 33.

Bibliography Alexander, Zeynep Çelik. “Neurons and Signifiers.” The Aggregate. Accessed April 11, 2016. www.we-​aggregate.org/​piece/​neutrons-​and-​signifiers. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter:  A Political Ecology of Things. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–​1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. —​—​—​. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. “Psychoanalysis and Its History.” In Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —​—​—​. “Histoire et psychanalyse.” In La nouvelle histoire. Edited by F. LeGoff, R. Chartier, and J. Revel, 477–​87. Paris: Retz, 1978. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

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Curatorship as Bildungsroman 21 —​—​—​. Logique du sens. Paris: Editions du Miniut, 1969. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Rhizome: Introduction.” In I&C No. 8: Power and Desire. Diagrams of the Social (Spring 1981): 49–​71. —​—​—​. A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. —​—​—​. Qu’est-​ce que la philosophie? Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1991. —​—​—​. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University. of Chicago Press, 1981. —​—​—​. Mimesis des articulations. Edited by Sylviane Agacinski, et  al. Paris: Aubier-​Flammarion,  1975. —​—​—​. “Economimesis.” Translated by Richard Klein. Diacritics 11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–​25. —​—​—​. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1981. —​—​—​. Positions. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972. Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a Scientific Psychology [1895].” In Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1: (1886–​1899), Pre-​Psycho-​analytic Publication and Unpublished Drafts. Translated by James Strachey, 281–​397. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1966. Gamwell, Lynn and Mark Solms. From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind. New  York:  Binghamton University Art Museum, 2006. Hjelmslev, Louis Troll. Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse. Copenhagen:  Ejnar Munksgaard, 1943. Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Preziosi, Donald. Art/​Religion/​Amnesia:  The Enchantments of Credulity. London: Routledge, 2014. —​—​—​. “Fortryllet lettroenhed  –​kunst, religion og hukommelsestab.” In Gudløs! Religionskritik i dag. Edited by Malene Busk and Ida Crone, 203–​ 18. Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter, 2008. —​ —​ —​ . “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen and Architecture Is When Theory is the Residue of a Journey.” The Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 3 (October 2016): 301–​10. —​—​—​.Rethinking Art History:  Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. —​—​—​. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is. Oxford: Blackwell Manifesto Series, 2012. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Yeats, W. B. “Sailing to Byzantium.” Stanza III. www.mrbauld.com/​yeats1bz.html.

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2  Curating the nude in Istanbul Some curatorial challenges Ahu Antmen

In his “Theses in the Philosophy of Curating” curatorial theorist Jean-​ Paul Martinon makes a distinction between curating as merely a kind of “pointing” activity (i.e., Mieke Bal:  “Look!” “That’s how it is!”) and the “curatorial,” which he explains as a rethinking of those pointings, or a renewed effort to encounter bodies of knowledge.1 The “curatorial” is thus defined as a disruption of knowledge, and paradoxically, the birth of knowledge. Martinon talks of how the “curatorial” proceeds by inventive steps or missteps from space to space, as our bodies move in the spaces of an exhibition. His interpretation thus frames the curatorial as an experiential situation created in a certain space; that is, an activity that includes the audience, the institutional framework, and the cultural context. It is within this framework that I will discuss my own experience of curating an exhibition of the nude in modern Turkish painting, Üryan, Çıplak, Nü (Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting, at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2015 and how this experience challenged me to reflect on the concept of the “curatorial.” I think the concept calls for a questioning not only in terms of knowledge but of an acknowledgment of rhetoric as a possible way to knowledge. Curating, after all, entails persuading bodies to move through a designated space in a certain direction and manner; persuading eyes and minds to see and think within a certain framework. It is an educative process, one that instructs its audience and cultivates its agent through a kind of allurement. It is like rhetoric in the sense that it is a mode of altering reality. As the American rhetorician Lloyd Bitzer puts it, “not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.”2 So how does this creation of discourse as exhibition, or what curator Bruce W. Ferguson has called “exhibition rhetorics” come about?3 How is it created? From the outset, the exhibition at the Pera Museum was an art historical survey of the nude spanning the late-​nineteenth-​century Ottoman era to the early-​twentieth-​century Turkish Republic, a visual chronicle of styles from academic Realism to Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism.4 And perhaps that was how the exhibition was received by many viewers.

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Curating the nude in Istanbul 23 However, that certainly was not my only aspiration for what it would communicate, which was the cultural transformation unfolding during this era, as well as the internal pressures each artist must have felt. I  wanted it to communicate aesthetic transformations in terms of style, but also to open a path for a re-​reading of the cultural translations at play within those styles. Turkish versions of Western modernist styles certainly displayed a belated tableaux of artistic modernism, but perhaps a rereading from an “other modernity” perspective could shift the angle of a West-​centric narrative. The subject of the nude body and its growing visibility in the geographical setting of an Islamic cultural context certainly deserved attention as a process of self-​confrontation and scrutiny, rather than a mere attempt at Westernization. Above all, I wanted the exhibition to communicate the nude not only as a form of art that symbolized, in the words of Lynda Nead, a “high-​art tradition,” and thus required disinterested appreciation based on an aesthetic of form but also to stimulate skepticism in this notion of disinterestedness when viewing a naked body.5 This would hopefully encourage the awareness of looking as a gendered subject, at objectifications of gendered bodies. The museum, in turn was interested in presenting “art history,” in a self-​ assigned semipublic role since Turkey’s public art museums have not and do not fulfill this role. Even borrowing from such institutions for the exhibition, which were closed at the time, proved to be problematic.6 There are currently three public museums of painting and sculpture in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, and their holdings are considered the richest in terms of art historical significance, especially regarding the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, there has not been a time when all of these museums have been open to the public simultaneously. Thus it is almost impossible to view art historical surveys in Turkey unless private museums take on the task. Private museums, such as the Sabancı Museum or Istanbul Modern Art Museum exhibit their own collections in permanent museum displays, but these reflect their owners’ taste rather than presenting thorough accounts of art historical developments. Few nudes are included in these collections. The Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture, which holds a considerable number of the earliest examples of nude paintings and drawings, has been closed to the public for more than a decade. When this museum opened in 1937 on the orders of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, some nudes were exhibited amongst a majority of landscapes and still lifes. The exhibition at the Pera Museum was not the first historical survey of nude painting in Turkey; in fact, the Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture had organized an exhibition comprised of the nudes in its collection in 1994. It is interesting that during that time, there were no discussions regarding the “risks” of such an exhibition. Although cultural reactions would vary regarding the exhibition of nude paintings and sculptures in various parts of Turkey, how such an exhibition would be received among those carrying pro-​Islamic conservative sentiment in Istanbul, the art capital

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24  Ahu Antmen of the country, was not an issue in the early 1990s, as is the situation in more recent times. Almost two decades of AKP rule (The Justice and Development Party), in power since 2002, has brought with it an ascending sense of social conservatism and religious fundamentalism, reflected in public discussions regarding women’s rights, especially on issues such as abortion, pregnancy, family roles, dress codes, and so on. Thus there was room for concern about the potential hostility that the exhibition could provoke in the current cultural climate of Turkey. While the public manifestations of this ascending sense of conservatism could be heard frequently in political speech, the Pera Museum was embarking on a historical survey of the nude. In such a climate, this choice of subject for an exhibition could be easily be interpreted as a counteroffensive, reflecting the likes of the modernist secular Turkey. The exhibition found almost full page coverage in The International New York Times, and reflected this context:  written by Susanne Fowler, and titled “Artists who tested Turkey’s limits,” this lengthy article included a comment by an academician that the exhibition could be deemed a political act.7 Fowler’s title pointed to how the first Ottoman Muslim artists found the courage to exhibit the first nudes in Turkish art history, but surely with an allusion at how limits were still being tested in Turkey, although almost a hundred years later! I must confess that I was intrigued by how contexts could make meaning, how bodies in paint were never just that, and could reverberate contextual actions and reactions. I was also wondering, how my own intentions, as the curator of the exhibition, would surface beyond this cultural context and the already “art historicized” account of the nude in Turkish painting. How to do this through experience—that is, the curatorial—rather than through the mere presentation of wall texts to guide the audience? How to create a situation in space that can be called visual rhetoric? I  considered the texts on the walls, the catalog, the press release, and the interviews as part of the verbal rhetoric. But wasn’t visual rhetoric an experience that was also beyond all of that as the shaping factor? I realized the authority and at the same time the futility of the position of a curator. I also realized the idea of exhibition, with its relational and interactive features, not as an “end product” as curator Aneta Szylak points out, but as a process.8 The curator might be manipulating content, but the audience would develop their own content, based on each individual experience. Beginning with the title Üryan, Çıplak, Nü (Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting), my first concern was that the audience be made aware that these were the first-​ever representations of the naked male and female body on paper and canvas in Turkey. These were radical manifestations of evolving Turkish modernity from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, just before the founding of the modern Turkish state. It was during this era that the forerunners of Turkish painting traveled to Paris for art education, and to gain the opportunity of studying from the nude model. Taking into consideration that for the Muslim

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Curating the nude in Istanbul 25 population of the Ottoman Empire, figurative art was itself considered disrespectful, if not downright blasphemous despite the founding of an art academy in 1882, one can discern the meaning of such artistic endeavors. In the (Second) Constitutional era beginning in 1908, through the Occupation of Istanbul (1918–​1922), the War of Independence, and the founding of the Republic in 1923—obviously a very tumultuous period for the Ottomans— the situation was relatively less repressive for artists, although the first public exhibition of the nude (which as a concept was gendered female in the Ottoman imagination), was only possible as late as the year 1922. By the time of this exhibition, male artists had gained the opportunity of life class from male models at the art academy, and female artists could work from female models at the Fine Arts Academy for Girls (the İnas Sanayi-​i Nefise Mektebi). In the early 1920s when the first nudes were exhibited, artists used the terms “üryan” (etymologically Arabic), “çıplak” (etymologically Turkish), and “nü” (etymologically French) interchangeably to denote the same meaning: an unclothed human body; this in itself was a reflection of the linguistic confusion surrounding the concept. Using these words next to each other implies a procedure, from Ottoman to Turkish to French, and towards modernization or Westernization, the cultural model for Turkey’s progression towards a modern nation-​state. A little anecdote written by Turkish artist and writer Malik Aksel can help to illustrate the push and pull between tradition and modernity in terms of the representation of the nude in Turkish art. This piece was published as late as 1974, and sums up the situation regarding perception of the nude in Turkey, even to this day. “Professor! Is it true you are painting nude women?” “Yes it’s true, what’s the problem?” After a moment of hesitation, “You mean completely naked?” “Yes, of course.” “I don’t understand, you mean stark naked?” Upon realization that he just couldn’t comprehend, and about to lose his mind, I said, “Oh, you are strange Mr. Accountant. Can you imagine something like that? We clothe the model, we drape them, we place them behind screens, we paint their shadows.” It was then that the accountant took a breath of relief. “Why didn’t you say so from the beginning? Don’t you speak Turkish? Naked is something, completely naked is another thing, stark naked is altogether something different. You can’t have naked pictures in a closed society like ours. Trees are clothed in the winter, and naked in the summer. But humans are not trees, they cannot be naked.”9 It might be interesting to hear that there are more than fifty fine art faculties in public and private universities in Turkey, and that only a very few will offer life classes, although it is formally in the curriculum. So this anecdote

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26  Ahu Antmen sums up the current situation as well. Any exhibition of the nude is equally problematic outside of centers such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. It is owing to certain “shared meanings,” to use cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s phrase, that create such restrictions, rather than legally defined boundaries.10 One of the very outward expressions of male hegemony in Turkish society is actually how the nude is gendered female rather than male, and by extension conceptualized as the modern, Westernized woman, and by further extension, the “unveiled.” Equally superficially, the “veiled” woman signifies the traditional and the local. As scholar Fatmagul Berktay has pointed out, the fact that women are objectified by both religious/​traditional and secular/​modern politics in Turkey results in the utmost concern about their representation.11 Needless to say, both fields are dominated by men. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir states that the representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men, which they describe from their own point of view, and then confuse with absolute truth.12 Taking a cue from her take on “truth” in the exhibition, I  wanted the viewer to enter through a challenge with representation itself; and chose a work that I hoped would be the key to the curatorial message of the show. The fact that this work was a contemporary video piece by a woman appropriation artist might be a clue to my intentions:  Özlem Şimşek’s

Figure 2.1 The contemporary video work Reclining Woman (After Halil Paşa) (2012)  by Turkish artist Özlem Şimşek at the entrance to the Bare, Naked, Nude exhibition, a historical survey of modern Turkish nude painting. Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum.

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Curating the nude in Istanbul 27 (b.1982) Reclining Woman (After Halil Paşa), a video appropriation of a late-​nineteenth-​century painting. Placed in the entrance to the exhibition, this work was the visitor’s first encounter. It was placed in an enclosed room of its own, in the claustrophobic, dark atmosphere that symbolized the confined space of the woman’s quarter, the harem of a house. Simsek herself had become the reclining woman in the painting, and she had toyed with the concept of pose in relation to reclining nudes by barely recognizable transitions from images of her dressed and naked body. The painting she appropriated was a reclining but dressed figure, although her pose, the color of her light pink dress, and the apparent anatomical features of her body seemed to connote the reclining nude, not a subject nor a genre that could exist in late-​ nineteenth-​century Ottoman art. In the video appropriation of this image, the reclining figure seems less vulnerable as an object as she actually returns the viewer’s gaze; staring back, as a live woman, blinking once in a while, but looking all the while at our looking. In that dark space, everyone, before entering the next room to see the drawings and the paintings, became an intruder. And everyone also became a voyeur. Or at least that was the psychology I had hoped to trigger in transferring the claustrophobic feeling of the painting into the room. The architectural design, with its roof-​like ceiling, was also very effective in creating this private atmosphere.13 The next room was a move from the private to the public, because it opened up to drawings hung in very close proximity all the way up to the ceiling, almost like a student’s exhibit, or a visual chronology of style on the wall. I was hoping it would be reminiscent of an attic where one keeps one’s old drawings and possessions; but also the metaphor of the attic as memory. This metaphor of the attic in keeping these drawings was actually perhaps not so metaphorical in the case of Turkish artists, because most of these drawings would not have been shown, and even the oil paintings of nudes I came across in some collections had been kept rolled for decades and thus not fit for exhibition. This was again a room where I hoped one felt one’s experience of looking: To see some of the drawings one really had to crane one’s back, or bend down low; perhaps the best way was to lie down on the sofa provided, but then one would have to feel like a reclining figure oneself, perhaps also being looked at by other visitors to the exhibition. Another significant gesture in this space was a photograph, which was perhaps one of the most dominant images in the exhibition, and which for me was as important as the works on show to transfuse the curatorial idea of the exhibition. It showed the major figures of the Turkish modern art scene, all educators at the Fine Arts Academy in Istanbul, all men, staring at a nude model facing them. This model, with her back turned toward the viewer, was actually dividing the room in a way: standing between these men drawing, and all the drawings on the other wall. Through her presence, the vulnerability of being looked at in this way, and thus the vulnerability of all the other depicted figures, as well as the authority of the artists’ gaze could be felt, or so I hoped.

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28  Ahu Antmen

Figure 2.2 The wall of drawings in the Bare, Naked, Nude exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2015, showing nude studies by Turkish artists educated in Europe. Photo Credit:  Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum.

This photograph from the 1940s also signified, at least in the Turkish cultural context, more than just a few artists staring at a nude model. The nude in art was still considered obscene by the majority of people in Turkey, especially those with strong Islamic sentiment, and always cause for complaint if exhibited in public. The Fine Arts Academy, especially in the heyday of pro-​Western modernist nation-​building, was a symbolic institution as the epitome of the modernist project, with its professors embodying the ideal Turkish citizen:  modern, art-​loving men who could disengage from gazing at a naked body of a woman as a woman’s body, per se, for the sake of art. These were men who were “civilized” into forgetting that they were men; but also that they were Muslim men. Thus their gaze had to be educated in a twofold sense of disinterestedness, forgetting, as philosophy scholar Peggy Z. Brand, who quotes from David Hume, describes as “both their individual being, and their peculiar circumstances.”14 The degree of indifference in two of the figures who seem to have dozed off, seems almost like a gesture of disinterestedness. All through the 1920s to the time this photograph was taken, there are many articles written by Turkish artists and writers discussing the distinction between obscene images of the naked body, and the artistic nude, very much like the distinction Kenneth Clark makes between the naked and the nude some years later.15 Many of these

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Curating the nude in Istanbul 29

Figure 2.3 An enlarged photograph of leading members of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1940s during a session of drawing from the live nude model. The photographer is unknown. Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum.

articles are written in a pedagogical tone. In the early decades of the Turkish Republic, art was seen as a tool that could educate the masses, and interestingly, the nude played a symbolic role. Being able to make a distinction between the naked and the nude was almost a “rite of passage” in becoming the ideal modern citizen. The inclusion of the contemporary video and this historical, archival photograph, as well as the architectural design in the first two rooms of this exhibition of nude paintings constituted for me what I envisage as the curatorial:  a possibility to activate a thinking process that might prompt some questions while walking through an exhibition of mostly naked female bodies. One of the questions that kept me busy, while curating the exhibition was how the genre of the nude in modern Turkey is still so coded with antireligious fundamentalism, anticonservatism, modernism, secularism, democracy, and freedom. Another question concerned representations of the naked body through images which reflected both modernity and tradition. Daring and restraint merged in the eroticized bodies of faceless models. Indeed, many of the nudes in early Turkish modern painting have their backs turned, or their heads turned, or their faces smeared: an obvious contradiction to their erotic poses. This in itself reflects an insight into the freedoms and chains of the cultural context.

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30  Ahu Antmen The paradox of my own position as a feminist art historian also kept me thinking. I  was bringing together paintings that require disinterestedness within the cultural context of art history, while remaining skeptical throughout about the possibility of disinterestedness regarding the nude in general. As Peggy Z. Brand has articulated so clearly, a feminist stance toward art recommends the antithesis of disinterestedness promoted by eighteenth-​century philosophers such as Imanuel Kant, or Edmund Burke, or Hume, and promotes interest with regard to how the image of woman is used or possessed; to refuse to “dis” one’s interest.16 Thus, I have to confess that I was most pleased when the exhibition received comments and reviews that reflected an interest in the cultural contexts of the representation of the naked body in art rather than merely the formal aesthetics and historical changes in style, and commented on the exhibition’s “desexualization” of the nude.17 Another question that persisted during the course of this exhibition was the possibility of triggering others to see the paintings in the exhibition beyond a Western-​centric art historical narrative. Focusing on a single genre suggests linearity, as it makes it easier to compare and contrast, and thus judge, according to a different cultural chronology. Many viewers strolled through the exhibition looking not at the paintings but at the copying, the mirroring, and the mimicry, making these images representations of not this or that model, but a complex sign of artistic inferiority. And for sure, all the paintings did indeed bear the traces of the Western modern masters. However, this was just one of the ingredients. Another component was the perception of artistic modernism itself, reflecting a world that Stuart Hall described as “absolutely littered by modernities and by practicing artists who never regarded modernism as the secure possession of the West, but perceived it as a language which was both open to them but which they would have to transform.”18 Thus in 1951 artist Hakki Anli’s (1906–​1990) belated cubism could be ridiculed, but the same works could also be seen as an artistic process on the way to the distinctive semi-​ abstract nudes of his later period. And in contrast, certain artists such as Yuksel Arslan (1933–​2017), whose work had no visual resemblance to any Western source and thus other Turkish modernists, could suddenly be seen in a new perspective. All of the issues I have tried to discuss point to the curatorial as a kind of “rhetorical situation” of which the exhibition is the medium. According to Lloyd Bitzer, who proposed this term in an essay of the same title, a rhetorical situation creates a rhetorical discourse; and it is the situation that calls the discourse into existence, and not the other way around.19 I  find this framework relevant to the idea of the curatorial as a situation rather than discourse, much like an installation piece in which the physical and psychological participation constitutes a more direct and lasting learning experience than the instructions regarding that piece. An exhibition as an experiential medium is similar; it is a possibility to activate discourse.

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Curating the nude in Istanbul 31

Figure 2.4 Exhibition view of Bare, Naked, Nude exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2015, showing work by Turkish artists Halil Dikmen, Hasan Vecih Bereketoğlu and Hamit Görele (from left to right). Photo Credit: Uğur Ataç and Engin Şengenç. Courtesy of the Pera Museum.

Bitzer lists a set of explanations about what he means by “rhetoric is situational,” and one of these explanations points to how “many questions go unanswered and many problems remain unsolved; similarly, many rhetorical situations mature and decay without giving birth to rhetorical utterance.”20 He goes on to add that the situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. “Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity,” according to Bitzer.21 Carrying this framework into the curatorial field, we can say that it is not only the curator, nor the curator’s intention (generally in the form of an accompanying text to the exhibition), but also the exhibition as a situation and space that is the ground for discourse. This kind of thinking no doubt shifts the authority of the curator towards the viewer, and gives prominence to the exhibition itself as more than an illustration of a curator’s concept. It suggests that the utterance related to the exhibition is actually produced in a thought process by the viewer’s situational knowledge. My experience as curator of Bare, Naked, Nude led me to believe that it certainly is not merely the curator, with an intent to generate a certain discourse, that constitutes the “curatorial.” Perhaps the curatorial is a guided tour without the guide, or a playful venture of filling in the blanks with one’s

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32  Ahu Antmen own eyes, an exercise in learning, but also in unlearning. Private museums in Turkey, such as the Pera, have the opportunity to become the advocates of such alternative learning experiences, opening up to becoming spaces for an adventure into knowledge, rather than emblems of authority.

Notes 1 Jean-​Paul Martinon, “Theses in the Philosophy of Curating,” in The Curatorial-​ A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-​ Paul Martinon (London and NewYork: Bloomsbury, 2015), 27. 2 Lloyd F.  Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 25, selections from vol. 1 (1992), 3 [www.jstor.org/​stable/​40237697]. 3 Bruce W.  Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics:  Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 175. 4 The Pera Museum in Istanbul is a private museum founded by the Suna and Inan Kirac Foundation in 2005. 5 Lynda Nead discusses this issue by focusing on the famous distinction Kenneth Clark makes between the naked and the nude where the idea of the nude is based on a Kantian aesthetic of pure form and distinterested appreciation, arguing that this critical framework seems inadequate when considering visual representations of the body. See Nead, The Female Nude:  Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 13. 6 Disclosure of stolen paintings from both the Istanbul and Ankara State Museums of Painting and Sculpture involving staff, well-​known auction houses, and high-​ profile collectors caused a scandal in 2012 and led to restrictions in lending works. The official reason given for the restrictions was that the museums were reviewing their inventories. 7 See Susanne Fowler, “Artists Who Tested Turkey’s Limits,” International New York Times (December 29, 2015): 10. The Internet version has a different title: “An Examination of the Nude Figure in Turkish Art at the Pera Museum” (January 4, 2016) [www.nytimes.com/​2016/​01/​05/​arts/​design/​an-​examination-​ of-​the-​nude-​figure-​in-​turkish-​art-​at-​the-​pera-​museum.html?_​r=0], accessed May 22, 2016. 8 Aneta Szylak, “Curating Context,” in The Curatorial –​A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-​Paul Martinon (London and NewYork: Bloomsbury, 2015), 219. 9 Malik Aksel, “Unlikely Coincidences” (my translation), in Sanat ve Folklor, ed. Beşir Ayvazoğlu (Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2011), 163–​4. The article was originally published in a journal: Turk Edebiyati 35 (November 1974). 10 Ahu Antmen, Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2015), 15–​16. 11 Fatmagul Berktay, “A Place Where the East and West Meet: The Construction of Female Imagery” (my translation), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce 3 (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2002), 277. 12 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Picador,  1988). 13 The architectural design of the exhibition was carried out by Isil Unar and Cem Kozar, through discussions regarding the curatorial concept, and I am grateful to them for their efforts to translate ideas into space.

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Curating the nude in Istanbul 33 14 Peggy Z.  Brand, “Disinterestedness and Political Art,” in Aesthetics:  The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Malden, MA, and Oxford:  Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 159. 15 Celal Esad Arseven explains the nude: “Whether it is male or female, paintings of naked bodies hold an aesthetic value in terms of art. If the enthusiasm for the aesthetic that these paintings elicit from the viewer is great enough to take precedence over feelings of lust and sexuality, then these paintings are called nudes, or what the French call the nu. If, however, a painting does not possess any artistic beauty or quality but merely evokes lustful sentiments, it is called a pornographic painting, which we translate as bahi.” See Celal Esad Arseven, “Nude Painting,” Yedigun 322 (May 9, 1939): 4–​5. My translation. According to Kenneth Clark, to be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, but to be nude is a projection of the ideal view of a body reformed in certain aesthetic traditions. For Clark, the representation of the naked body is not a subject but a genre in art, based on balance, symmetry, and thus idealization. Clark argues that an educated viewer would not find sexuality in a naked body but rather the ideal architecture and beauty of the human body as a design abstracted from nature. See Kenneth Clark, The Nude-​A Study in Ideal Form (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1956), 3–​6. 16 Brand, “Disinterestedness and Political Art,” 159. 17 Joan Altabe, “Behold, the desexualized nude,” examiner.com, December 6, 2015 [www.examiner.com/​article/​behold-​the-​desexualized-​nude], accessed December 10, 2015. 18 Stuart Hall, “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” in Modernity and Difference, Iniva Annotations 6 (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001), 19. 19 Lloyd Bitzer discusses his concept of the rhetorical situation in an article of the same title, “The Rhetorical Situation,” 1–​14. 20 Ibid.,  5–​6. 21 Ibid., 6.

Bibliography Aksel, Malik. “Unlikely Coincidences.” In Sanat ve Folklor. Edited by Beşir Ayvazoğlu. Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2011. Altabe, Joan. “Behold, the Desexualized Nude.” examiner.com, December 6, 2015. Antmen, Ahu. Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting. Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2015. Arseven, Celal Esad. “Nude Painting.” Yedigun 322 (May 9, 1939): 4–​5. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. London: Picador, 1988. Berktay, Fatmagul. “A Place Where the East and West Meet:  The Construction of Female Imagery.” In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce: Modernleşme ve Batıcılık, 275–​85. Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2002. Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 25, Selections from Vol. 1 (1992), 1–​14. [www.jstor.org/​stable/​40237697]. Brand, Peggy Z. “Disinterestedness and Political Art.” In Aesthetics:  The Big Questions. Edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer, 155–​71. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

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34  Ahu Antmen Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1956. Ferguson, Bruce W. “Exhibition Rhetorics:  Material Speech and Utter Sense.” In Thinking About Exhibitions. Edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 175–​90. London & New York: Routledge, 1996. Fowler, Susanne. “Artists Who Tested Turkey’s Limits.” International New  York Times. December 29, 2015. Hall, Stuart. “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History.” In Iniva Annotations 6: Modernity and Difference. Edited by Sarah Campbell and Gilane Tawadros, 8–​25. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001. Martinon, Jean-Paul. “Theses in the Philosophy of Curating.” In The Curatorial –​ A  Philosophy of Curating. Edited by Jean-​Paul Martinon, 25–​34. London and NewYork: Bloomsbury, 2015. Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude:  Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Szylak, Aneta. “Curating Context.” In The Curatorial –​A Philosophy of Curating. Edited by Jean-​Paul Martinon, 215–​24. London and New York: Bloomsbury,  2015.

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3  Curating the dead body between medicine and culture Karin Tybjerg

At Medical Museion in Copenhagen, visitors go quiet when they see the large display of preparations of embryos and infants. They move toward the case to look closer or draw back to take it in at a distance. Rarely are they unaffected. The display case contains malformed infants in glass jars, which look like they are asleep, together with specimens of infants dissected to display pathologies inside. Tiny embryos, transparent and beautiful, contrast with a large glass jar containing a whole womb with an infant, and a rubber balloon from a failed medical intervention to shift a blocking placenta (Figure  3.1). The specimens are both persons and medical scientific specimens; they are nature and cultural artefacts; they interest and repulse us.

Figure 3.1 Specimens of human material hover between persons and objects of medical study. Here a specimen of an infant in the womb and a failed treatment for the placenta blocking the cervix. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion.

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36  Karin Tybjerg Exhibiting such objects in particular and human bodies in general is an enduring curatorial challenge. As objects of display, human specimens— preserved embryos, organs, shrunken heads, or skeletons—affect viewers, and the power, attraction, and repulsion they exert have been used in many different contexts:  medical, religious, political, commercial. Precaution, however, often dominates the display of this powerful material today, as evidenced by warnings, special admission restrictions, or declarations of respect or gratitude at exhibitions.1 Moreover, the past twenty-​five years have seen a new wave of regulation as well as renewed debate about whether and how human material should be displayed, but it has not resulted in any convergence in practices, which still vary from country to country and from discipline to discipline.2 Two main debates have shaped the discussions about the collection and display of human material. In the museum world, discussions have centered on the retainment and display of human remains from other cultures in anthropological and archaeological collections, which have often been collected as part of a colonial imbalance of power and are subject to claims of repatriation. In the field of medicine and medical museums, the main debate concerns whether adequate consent has been given to collect and display bodily material; a debate that was ignited in the late 1990s by the Alder Hey scandal, where infant material was collected without consent, as well as by the immensely popular exhibition Body Worlds, which showed plastinated bodies in spectacular poses to teach anatomy. Both debates highlight the ambiguous nature of the human specimen as part of a person with personal ties, as well as a material object and source of knowledge, both medical and historical.3 My argument in the following, which is mainly concerned with material collected for medical purposes, falls into two parts. First, I  will argue that the discussion of whether human remains should be exhibited has overshadowed the question of how they should be exhibited and resulted in cautious approaches and modes of display that tend to separate medical and cultural understandings of the specimens.4 Second, I  will show how shifting the focus away from these debates, opens up avenues for curating the material that simultaneously present the specimens as medical objects and as human material with cultural and existential connections. To illustrate the approach, I will lay out the curatorial strategies behind the exhibition The Body Collected at Medical Museion in Copenhagen (opened May 2015), which sought to produce a synthesis between medical and cultural modes of display. The exhibition sprang out of a wish at Medical Museion to display our historical collections of pathological specimens, which had gained a reputation for being hidden away. At the same time, the museum wanted to maintain its focus on modern biomedicine. The solution was to exhibit the specimens as part of a continuous history of collecting bodily material to gain medical knowledge, spanning from

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Curating the dead body 37 early-​nineteenth-​century malformed embryos to twenty-​first-​century blood samples in biobanks.5 The exhibition therefore raised issues pertaining to both historical and contemporary material: for the historical material, the questionable medical practices of collecting infants and embryos and labeling a skeleton “negro”; for the modern material, questions of consent and the balance between discussing medical practices, while not jeopardizing donation of bodily material to medical research. The aim of the exhibition was to focus on medical practices without excluding the many questions raised by the material.

Debates on anthropological and historical human remains Intense debate surrounds human remains in ethnographic and archaeological collections, which descendants or culturally affiliated groups have demanded be repatriated and sometimes reburied. Debates concern both whether such material can be rightfully owned by museums when it was collected under questionable circumstances, and whether it can be exhibited and curated by curators who do not belong to the cultural groups in question. More generally, the exhibition of any material from dead bodies has been questioned and criticized. These debates have resulted in extensive programs of repatriation and in limiting or avoiding displays of human material in ethnographic exhibitions. Museums have also attempted to redress the balance by actively highlighting issues of colonialism or by co-curating exhibitions with relevant cultural groups. This practice has, however, been criticized for maintaining the museum as an authority.6 On the other hand, the general acceptance of repatriation claims among curators and caution in exhibiting body material have been criticized, for instance by sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, who argued that museums should guard their cultural authority relative to emotional claims on behalf of the exhibited bodies. Especially in the case of bodily material that no one is reclaiming, she questions the reluctance of museums to display the material in light of the acceptance and interest shown by public audiences; the removal of human remains, for example, gave rise to public outcry both at the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and at Manchester Museum.7 Collections of historical medical collections can also be seen in the light of wrongful appropriation of bodies of people in socially vulnerable positions— not due to colonialism, but to poverty, criminality, or simply dying in hospital without relatives. Famously, graves were robbed in Victorian Britain as a result of doctors paying for corpses, as described by Ruth Richardsons’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute.8 This story is often highlighted in exhibitions about historical human remains. The Museum of London for instance staged an exhibition, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men based on Richardson’s work, which took a cultural historical view focusing

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38  Karin Tybjerg on the people whose bodies were procured through dubious and unlawful practices. The debates in ethnography and social and cultural history shifted focus from the knowledge that can be gained from investigating dead bodies to respect for those whose bodies they were and their relations, that is, from the body as an object of study to the body as a person. Consequently, curators began to focus on indigenous interpretations and on patients’ viewpoints rather than those of the ethnographic and medical fields.9

Debates on medical and contemporary human material Moving onto the case of human material in medicine, recent debates have been shaped by the scandal at Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital (Alder Hey), where a large amount of bodily material from infants—whole bodies of stillborns, fetuses, organs, and tissue samples—was collected and retained between 1988 and 1995 without the knowledge or consent of the parents. The scandal centerd on a particular pathologist, but the case demonstrated more broadly that historical and nonformalized conventions internal to medical practice had come far out of step with the expectations of patients and the public and had failed to change according to shifts in the relationship between doctors and patients. In a comment following the scandal, David Hall, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics, wrote that the affair ended the “benign paternalism” of shielding patients and relatives from the details of medical investigations.10 For the future, he stated a hope that although openness around procedures might reduce the amount of specimens available to research in the first instance, it might lead to more donations in the long run, as many people do wish to help future patients. The scandal, however, led not so much to openness as to a law regulating the procurement and storage of human material called the Human Tissue Act 2004, which requires consent for removing human tissues, provenance on all bodily material retained, and a license for institutions keeping human material. Alder Hey was a grotesque example of overstepping the remit of medical professional responsibility. The tension between maintaining a supply of human material to produce knowledge and securing the dignity and choice of the people who donate the material is, however, more general. And questions become even starker when it comes to medical museums as the educational and cultural needs served by museum exhibitions will be perceived as a weaker claim for retaining material than medical research and teaching. This is especially true for museums that are part of medical institutions, which prioritize their responsibility to medical research and take great care not to damage the relationship between the public and the medical profession. This has led to conservative approaches to access and display as well as a strong emphasis on the medical uses of the retained material even when it is historical. Bill Edwards of the Gordon Museum, for instance, stressed the importance of research and teaching, stating

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Curating the dead body 39 that “[m]‌any people have been cured because of the teaching and training that goes on in the Museum.” Likewise the introduction to the catalogue of the Vrolik Museum at the University of Amsterdam, describes how the collections have been used for teaching and for new research in congenital malformations.11 The value of medical research is the main argument, and openness becomes of secondary importance, as too much public attention has been seen to lead to restrictions and regulations. A particularly well-​ known exhibition containing modern anatomical material is anatomist Gunther von Hagens’ show Body Worlds. The hugely popular exhibitions of plastinated bodies—some placed in spectacular poses, swimming, playing chess, or astride an anatomized rearing horse—have toured the globe and drawn large audiences (44 million since its opening in 1995 according to the webpage). There have been questions about the methods of procuring bodies, the commercialism, and the way the bodies are presented, but von Hagens deflected criticism, maintaining that the main purpose was educational: “BODY WORLDS exhibitions were conceived to educate the public about the inner workings of the human body and to show the effects of healthy and unhealthy lifestyles.”12 Visitor responses were mixed and mirrored not only the educational intentions, but also personal experiences, horror and awe, thus responding to the ambiguity of the bodily material.13 Medical professionals, on the other hand, protested against the show fearing it might deter future donors of bodies to medical research and teaching.14 The argument that collections and displays are about medical research and education is so strong and accepted that it is used as the main argument both for historical medical collections and for von Hagens’ show downplaying its clear cultural and artistic ambitions.

Restrained modes of exhibiting medical human remains The debates outlined earlier, about whether human material can be retained and displayed, have, I  will argue, affected how human material has been displayed. The controversies have resulted in modes of display that are not only cautious, but also limit the potential of the powerful material. Exhibitions that contain medical, human material often use one or more of the following strategies to bypass the issues brought out by the debates: 1. Limiting access to human body material. This is common in medical collections, where the pragmatic and legal reason is the protection of the material donated for research and teaching, but where it also restricts the audience to those with a medical frame of understanding. For ethnographic material, stipulating that the material has to be curated by members from particular communities similarly restricts access. 2. Bracketing material as medical or medical historical. This is way of ethically “ring-​fencing” the material and reducing curatorial responsibility

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40  Karin Tybjerg for the collections displayed. If the material is exhibited as a medical collection or as a historical snapshot of a past collection practices, then the main responsibility for the categorization of the abnormal and the collection of children’s bodies falls to the historical actors or the medical profession. A  consequence of this practice is that anatomical or pathological collections are often exhibited as complete objects where the organization and captions are not curated. Examples of historical medical collections exhibited in this way are the old set-​up in the Hunterian Museum in London where the pathological and comparative collections were displayed in the so-​called “crystal-​gallery” while the cultural historical material concerned with grave robbers and medical breakthroughs was displayed on separate band of display boards. Similarly, at the Berlin Museum of History of Medicine at Charité, the specimen collection has its own separate room where it is organized according to medical principles, while the broader cultural history is displayed in adjacent rooms. Another way in which displays of specimens delineate the medical from the cultural is to exhibit the main collection as a modern, timeless medical collection and then place the historical material on the side. This is done by the Anatomical Museum at Leiden University Medical Center, where the main collection, which consists of both old and modern specimens in modern looking vessels, is used for teaching medical students, while the overtly historical material, for example infants of different races decorated with beads, is placed on the side in a historical vitrine and given limited attention in terms of positioning and lighting. Similarly, the Vrolik Museum has a main collection in “timeless” exhibition cases, while the historical material is placed by the walls in wooden vitrines. . Focusing exclusively on the destinies of the collected people. Exhibitions 3 with a cultural historical focus often bring the issues surrounding the sourcing of the bodies or the questionable medical approaches to race or pathology to the forefront relative to medical inquiries. For instance, as stated earlier, the exhibition Doctors, Dissection & Resurrection Men at the Museum of London placed dissectees at the center of its story of how bodies were sourced in Victorian London. All the exhibitions listed here are of high quality and offer their viewers a range of aesthetic, scientific, and culturally informed views of the collections. My errand here is not to criticize them, but to point out a tendency to choose particular framings for the collections that protect them from criticisms arising from the debates about the medical and anthropological specimens. The exhibition strategies described earlier display the material as (1) medical and focused on the scientific angle; (2) medical and cultural, but showing the two separately; or (3) cultural with the focus on the persons collected and categorized. In that way, medical and cultural ways of viewing the collections are only tenuously held together. Medical displays tend to focus on current

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Curating the dead body 41 value for medical research and teaching, and history is either sidelined or shown as a snapshot of a historical medical practice. In contrast, historical displays present specimens from the point of view of the collected persons and speak up for the dissected and medically marginalized, which were also central interests for the social history of medicine. The distinctions are subtle and my presentation here emphasizes the polarization, but nonetheless we may speak of a rift between presentations of specimens as either medical or cultural or as keeping the two apart.

Curatorial strategies in The Body Collected at Medical Museion The Body Collected is similar to many medical displays in taking a mainly medical point of view on how medical knowledge has been generated from collecting and investigating human material. It did not, however, focus on the content of medical knowledge, but rather on the ways in which the bodily material was used to generate it. Medical science was thus treated as a cultural enterprise without being reduced to cultural and social questions. The curation mirrored the position of Medical Museion as part of a medical faculty, but with an independent location and a research agenda that includes history, philosophy and communication of medicine. The following curatorial strategies were adopted to soften the boundary between medical and cultural views on the body. 1.  Insider/​outsider: exhibiting medical collections publicly The first step of the curatorial strategy was to exhibit the anatomical and pathological collections publicly without excluding particular groups of objects from the display or restricting access—a process, which many medical collections have been going through in recent years with more or less caution. This move breaks down a boundary long upheld between the public and the medical profession. As stated earlier, the doctor-​patient boundary has already been challenged in a number of different contexts. With medical practices more open and regulated, there is an increased need for insight into and understanding of the working of the medical profession and an exhibition can be a step in the direction of providing not just concrete information about the use of a given sample donated but a broader sense of the workings of medical science. An objection to this approach is that by displaying for example the whole infants, we put material on display that does not comply with modern understandings of consent, even if they were collected according to the professional standards of the time. The treatise describing the rare double child from the mid-​nineteenth century, indicated a consultation with the parents as its publication was delayed according to their wish, but some specimens are likely to have been procured under less publishable circumstances.15 Once the infants are in our collections, we prefer, however, to display them

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42  Karin Tybjerg over keeping them in storage or burying them. We also displayed blood samples from ourselves and from the author of this paper’s infant daughter in the modern section of the exhibition as we did not have permission to display samples from contemporary medical collections where consent is given to research, but not to display. So we put our blood where our mouth is, so to speak. Another objection to the openness from the medical research side relates to biobank collections, which are of enormous value to research. One of them—the PKU biobank of blood samples from newborns procured for diagnostic purposes—contains samples of 99.9 percent of the Danish population born from 1982 and onward (Figure 3.2). The Danish National Biobank was very careful with this piece of information as any concern about the uses of the material can compromise the collection if people start to pull out their samples. At the museum we did wish to include the coverage of the biobank, but we refrained from highlighting it. Similarly, we chose not to exhibit a glass full of embryos whose feet had been cut off for use in biological research heeding an admonition to consider it carefully from the director of the body donation program at the Rigshospital (main hospital in Denmark). The museum plays an important role mediating between the medical profession and the public who are subject to medical care and decisions. By exhibiting human material, we attempted to create a place where questions can be considered before they concern our relatives’ or our own bodies. By opening access to the medical material, both our own hidden insides, and

Figure 3.2 Cut-​out from a PKU blood sample taken from a newborn from which a whole genome analysis can be generated. Even small samples of tissue connect to the person. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion.

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Curating the dead body 43 the inside workings of the medical profession, are brought into the public sphere. 2.  Curating collections: breaking into the object of the collection As mentioned earlier, one consequence of the controversial nature of the collections is that whole collections are often displayed as single objects, freezing a moment in medical history. When curating The Body Collected at Medical Museion, we were clear from the outset that we wanted to curate the material, that is, go beyond setting up a strict historical or medical organization, and we thereby took curatorial responsibility for the display. So although the main point of view was medical, the exhibition did not import collections wholesale into display cases. That said, we also did draw on the medical organization in the displays to show the process of knowledge-​ making and categorization of collections. An obvious sign of our curatorial work, was that exhibition texts were placed inside the cases. They explained aspects of medical practice and significance from a modern, nonmedical point of view. More subtly, we also set up the material in the exhibition cases in ways that it would never have been displayed in a medical context. For instance, we exhibited sets of slices from an arm and a leg together with a hand and a foot where skin and fat are removed to reveal veins and sinews (Figure  3.3). Placed together these specimens made the point that what we learn from dissecting the body

Figure 3.3 Nonmedical curation placing a hand and a foot in continuation of a sliced arm and leg to show that the way of cutting determines what can be known. Photo Jacob Kjærgård and Medical Museion.

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44  Karin Tybjerg depends on how it is cut. The slices revealed how muscle, bones, and nerves are situated relative to each other, whereas the peeled hand and foot showed how veins and sinews connect the body. This is a general or philosophical point about investigating nature, rather than a medical one. This example also highlights a curatorial strategy where the scientific processes were not explained in texts, but were sought translated into an exhibition language that showed how the specimens were used to produce scientific knowledge. This approach combined viewing the material as timelessly scientific and viewing it as historical or cultural and thereby placed the specimens between nature and artefact, between scientific object and human being.16 3.  Combining the past and present on equal terms The Body Collected was unusual in offering a continuous history that included both historical pathological collections and modern biobanks.17 The two periods were equally weighted in the exhibition and formed a continuum between past and present practices. The display thus combined specimens of infants and brains that were easy to relate to with tiny samples obscured and made alien by large freezers and black-​boxed technology. Conversely, the obstetric collection containing infants and fetuses was far removed from modern practices, while the contemporary collections were literally close to us as they contain samples from our bodies. This combination of modern and historical material was the key to circumventing some of the difficulties with collecting human material. The strongly affective material in the historical collections, which is troubled by issues surrounding the collection of infants, was made more humane by showing that the scientific goals of understanding the causes of disease were similar to those pursued today; historical medical researchers did what they could with the means available at the time and the problems are not made worse by exhibiting the material. At the same time, looking at the historical collection made it more comprehensible how the tissue samples in biobanks are used to categorize and understand disease. In this way the exhibition addressed one of the problems with tissue donation in modern medical science, namely that people often do not understand how the material they are donating might be used. 4.  Allowing a medical gaze: controversial cultural issues as a second order concern The Body Collected was about how human material was used to produce knowledge rather than about the ethics of procurement, the consequences of medical categorizations, or the rights of donors. Delving into the controversial issues of who were collected and how medicine has been used to uphold existing hierarchies produces important exhibitions, but the point I advocate here is that it should also be possible not to bring these questions to the forefront, where they

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Curating the dead body 45

Figure 3.4 Skeleton labeled “a negro.” This was noted in the exhibition caption, but not made into a theme in the exhibition. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion.

can easily dominate the exhibition as they have dominated the social history of medicine in recent years.18 At the same time, the controversial questions should not be hidden or ignored, as the exhibition would then be complicit in freeing medical science from considering ethical questions. In The Body Collected the controversial issues were noted on captions and in a separate text track containing the stories of people who were collected. A caption, for instance, drew attention to the label “a negro” on a the head of a skeleton (Figure 3.4), and in the track about the collected bodies we recounted, for example, the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, black woman whose cervical cancer cells were multiplied, commercialized, and distributed to laboratories around the world where they are still in use. The other persons described whose bodies were collected are an unknown criminal, the double child born of poor parents, and lastly “you.” In this way, the exhibition allowed the visitor to view the material from a medical viewpoint, but pointed out that the visitor is “the body collected” too. 5.  Allowing an existential and personal response Although the viewpoint is medical, the curatorial strategy aimed to allow space for an existential and personal response. Because of the multiplicity of meanings in the specimens, it was paramount for us to make room for a

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46  Karin Tybjerg

Figure 3.5 The conjoined twins rest on a soft-​looking cushion, but are also displayed dissected in three separate specimens of skin, bones, and organs. Photo Morten Skovgaard and Medical Museion.

cultural and emotional response. Meeting these objects is a confrontation with one of the fundamental condition of our lives: that we are bodies of blood and flesh and that we can become sick and die. While the specimens were exhibited in a way that mirrored medical ways of displaying collections, the style of display was softened by the use of natural wooden surfaces, wooden benches containing the stories of the people who were collected, and saturated colors. This nonclinical design sought to mellow the distinction between the medical point of view and our own experience. There can be a tendency to present medicine as coolly objectifying people and ourselves as engaging emotionally and existentially. But the division is not so sharp. We also regard ourselves as objects; and doctors are emotionally engaged and care for the experiences of their patients. In the published medical record of the ten-​days long lives of a pair of conjoined twins in the exhibition, the doctors and nurses followed the wellbeing of the infants and stated at the end that the infants died “without seeming agony.” The next paragraph concerns their dissection. Medicine contains this doubleness of caring and investigating and it was shown by the exhibition case that contained both the dissected skeletons and organs, but also rested the stuffed skins of the infants on a cushion that looked soft. The specimen is so light that it cannot compress a cushion, but the conservator cut out a nesting of foam, which is covered in cloth, so the body rested rather

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Curating the dead body 47 than was perched on a hard shelf. In that way the museum cared for the persons as well as displayed them as specimens for investigation.

Curating the body as an object and a subject I have argued that awareness of the controversy and debate surrounding human material have often resulted in exhibition strategies that either leave the collections as they are—as medical or historical objects—or curate them so thoroughly that the questioning of medical practices obscure those practices. But neither reflects a full picture. Both our sense of our own body, the medical view and historical practices are needed to handle the inherent mixed character of the human specimens as both culture and nature, persons and objects. The aim of the curatorial practices outlined here was to avoid placing culture on the side of the patients and science on the side of medicine. Both the objective and the subjective view belong to both and more vigorous curating of collections of human remains may bring this out. While the human material is rightly surrounded by debate and regulation, precaution must not prevent us from exploring the potential of these objects to investigate the boundaries between person, body, culture, history, and science. As expressed by Ken Arnold while in charge of the Wellcome Collection in London: Although there is, of course, a perpetual need to be watchful that a healthy exploration of a difficult subject does not slip into a thoughtless exploitation of strong material, this sensational aspect of medical history surely provides a key to the special significance of the whole subject. An excessively cautious and fearful approach to such displays thus runs the risk of substituting packages of worthy but uninteresting education for windows onto the real world.19 In other words, the controversy surrounding the curation of the dead body is closely related to the importance of the material, and the curatorial challenge is to both probe inside ourselves and investigate medical science for a more nuanced picture of our bodily relations to the world.

Notes 1 Warning at the section on embryology at the Body Worlds exhibits of plastinated bodies; limited access at eg University of Leiden’s Museum of Pathology and Gordon Museum at King’s College London; and a statement commemorating the dead at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at Charité. 2 Recent regulations and recommendations: in the United Kingdom, the Human Tissue Act 2004; in Germany, the Stuttgart conventions, Bundesärztekammer, “Recommendations on the treatment of human remains in collections, museums and public places,” in Deutsches Ärzteblatt (August 2003):  C 1532–​1536; in Norway, Nasjonalt utvalg for vurdering av forskning på menneskelige levninger,

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48  Karin Tybjerg Etiske retningslinjer for forskning på menneskelige levninger (Oslo: De nasjonale forskningsetiske komiteene, 2016). Denmark has no official recommendations. 3 On the ambiguity of the specimen as both object and person, see Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24, tracing how parts of people become things in medical museums; for recent times, see Cathy M. Gere and Bronwen C. Parry, “The Flesh Made Word: Banking the Body in the Age of Information,” Biosocieties 1, no. 1 (2006): 83–​98, on how parents and medics discussed which samples counted as parts of the deceased children in the wake of the Alder Hey scandal; and Maria Olejaz, “When the Dead Teach: Exploring the Postvital Life of Cadavers in Danish Dissection Labs,” Medicine Anthropology Theory 4, no. 4 (2017): 127–​32, on how medical students relate to bodies they dissect as both objects and persons. 4 For an overview of arguments for and against exhibiting the dead, see Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “Should We Display the Dead,” Museum and Society 7, no. 3 (2009): 133–​49. 5 Karin Tybjerg, “From Bottled Babies to Biobanks:  Anatomical Collections in the 21st Century,” in The Fate of Anatomical Collections, eds. Rina Knoeff and Rob Zweijnenberg (Farnham, UK:  Ashgate Press, 2016), 263–​278; and Karin Tybjerg, ed., The Body Collected (Copenhagen: Medical Museion, 2016). 6 Bernadette T. Lynch and Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “Legacies of Prejudice: Racism, Co-​ Production and Radical Trust in the Museum,” Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 25, no. 1 (2010): 13–​35. 7 Tiffany Jenkins, Keeping their Marbles:  How Treasures of the Past Ended up in Museums … and Why They Should Stay There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 8 Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge,  1987). 9 The historiographical turn toward social history of medicine privileged topics concerned with laypersons, patients and sufferers; see Roy Porter, “The Patient’s View: Doing History from Below,” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–​98. 10 David Hall, “Reflecting on Redfern: What Can We Learn from the Alder Hey story?,” Archives Of Disease In Childhood 84 (2001), 455. 11 Bill Edwards on Gordon Museum quoted in article on King’s College Alumni Community site https://​alumni.kcl.ac.uk/​page.aspx?pid=570 (accessed February 16, 2018); Laurens de Rooy, ed., and Hans van den Bogaard (photos), Forces of Form: The Vrolik Museum (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA, 2009), 8. 12 Angelina Whalley and Gunther von Hagens on BODY WORLDS website, https://​ bodyworlds.com/​about/​philosophy/​ (accessed February 16, 2018). 13 Eg Susan L.  Jagger, Michelle M.  Dubek and Erminia Pedretti, “ ‘It’s a Personal Thing’: Visitors’ Responses to Body Worlds,” Museum Management and Curatorship 27, no.  4 (2012):  357–​74; and Tony Walter, “Body Worlds:  Clinical Detachment Versus Anatomical Awe,” Sociology of Health and Illness 26, no. 4 (2004): 464–​88. 14 Louise Jury, “Anatomy of a Row: The Bodies at an Exhibition that May Deter Donors,” The Independent, March 16, 2002, www.independent.co.uk/​news/​ uk/​ h ome-​ n ews/​ a natomy-​ o f-​ a -​ r ow-​ t he-​ b odies- ​ a t- ​ a n- ​ e xhibition- ​ t hat- ​ m ay-​ deter-​donors-​9241270.html; Anatomischen Gesellschaft, Statement zu den “Körperwelten” –​ Ausstellungen, /​www.uni-​marburg.de/​fb20/​anatomie/​prosek/​ pdf/​statement.pdf. 15 Carl E. Levy, Beskrivelse af et Par ved Underkroppen sammenhængende levende födte Tvillingesöstre (Ischiopages) (Copenhagen, 1857).

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Curating the dead body 49 16 Karin Tybjerg, “Exhibiting Epistemic Objects,” Museum & Society 15, no.  3 (2017), 269–​86. 17 See note 5. 18 Social history of medicine brought out important stories, but also delegitimized the study of others such as medical elites, medical content, and conceptual change in biomedicine as argued by John Harley Warner, “The History of Science and the Science of Medicine,” Osiris 10 (1995): 173. 19 Ken Arnold, “Museums and the Making of Medical History,” in Manifesting Medicine –​Bodies and Machines, eds. Robert Bud, Bernard Finn, and Helmuth Trischler (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 162.

Bibliography Alberti, Samuel J. M. M. “Should We Display the Dead?” Museum and Society 7, no. 3 (2009): 133–​49. —​—​—​. Morbid Curiosities:  Medical Museums in Nineteenth Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Anatomischen Gesellschaft, Statement zu den “Körperwelten” –​Ausstellungen www. uni-​marburg.de/​fb20/​anatomie/​prosek/​pdf/​statement.pdf. Arnold, Ken. “Museums and the Making of Medical History.” In Manifesting Medicine  –​Bodies and Machines. Edited by Robert Bud, Bernard Finn, and Helmuth Trischler, 145–​74. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999. Bundesärztekammer. “Recommendations on the Treatment of Human Remains in Collections, Museums and Public Places.” Deutsches Ärzteblatt (August 2003): C 1532–​36. De Rooy, Laurens, ed. and Hans van den Bogaard (photos). Forces of Form:  The Vrolik Museum. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA, 2009. Gere, Cathy M. and Bronwen C. Parry. “The Flesh Made Word: Banking the Body in the Age of Information.” Biosocieties 1, no. 1 (2006): 83–​98. Hall, David. “Reflecting on Redfern:  What Can We Learn from the Alder Hey Story?” Archives of Disease in Childhood 84 (2001): 455–​56. Jagger, Susan L, Michelle M. Dubek, and Erminia Pedretti. “  ‘It’s a Personal Thing’:  Visitors’ Responses to Body Worlds.” Museum Management and Curatorship 27, no. 4 (2012): 357–​74. Jenkins, Tiffany. Keeping Their Marbles:  How Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums … and Why They Should Stay There. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016. Jury, Louise. “Anatomy of a Row:  The Bodies at an Exhibition that May Deter Donors.” The Independent, March 16, 2002, www.independent.co.uk/​news/​ uk/​home-​news/​anatomy-​of-​a-​row-​the-​bodies-​at-​an-​exhibition-​that-​may-​deter-​ donors-​9241270.html. Levy, Carl E. Beskrivelse af et Par ved Underkroppen sammenhængende levende födte Tvillingesöstre (Ischiopages). Copenhagen: I Commission hos C. A. Reitzels Bo og Arvinger, 1857. Lynch, Bernadette T. and Samuel J. M. M. Alberti. “Legacies of Prejudice: Racism, Co-​ Production and Radical Trust in the Museum.” Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 25, no. 1 (2010): 13–​35. Nasjonalt utvalg for vurdering av forskning på menneskelige levninger, Etiske retningslinjer for forskning på menneskelige levninger. Oslo:  De nasjonale forskningsetiske komiteene, 2016.

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50  Karin Tybjerg Olejaz, Maria. “When the Dead Teach: Exploring the Postvital Life of Cadavers in Danish Dissection Labs.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 4, no. 4 (2017): 125–​49. Porter, Roy. “The Patient’s View: Doing History from Below.” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–​98. Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. London: Routledge, 1987. The Human Tissue Act 2004. Tybjerg, Karin. “From Bottled Babies to Biobanks:  Anatomical Collections in the 21st Century.” In The Fate of Anatomical Collections. Edited by Rina Knoeff and Rob Zweijnenberg, 263–​78. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2016. Tybjerg, Karin, ed. The Body Collected. Copenhagen: Medical Museion, 2016. Tybjerg, Karin. “Exhibiting Epistemic Objects.” Museum & Society 15, no. 3 (2017): 269–​86. Walter, Tony. “Body Worlds: Clinical Detachment versus Anatomical Awe.” Sociology of Health and Illness 26, no. 4 (2004): 464–​88. Warner, John Harley. “The History of Science and the Science of Medicine.” Osiris 10, Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science (1995): 164–​93. Von Hagens, Gunther and Angelina Whalley, eds. Body Worlds –​The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. Heidelberg: Institut für Plastination, 2002.

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4  Fashion curation Unpacking a new discipline and practice Marie Riegels Melchior

In December 2015, I visited the exhibition Utopian Bodies: Fashion Looks Forward at Liljevalchs Art Gallery in Stockholm. The exhibition was created by Sofia Hedman and Serge Martynov, the curatorial team behind the independent exhibition company MUSEEA.1 The exhibition came to my attention via various Swedish scholars, among them a colleague from the Center for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, who wrote me to ask if I  had heard of it. He reported that, to his surprise, fashion scholar Christopher Breward, a former Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, had visited, describing it as a “benchmark exhibition.”2 Urged on by this enthusiastic hype—very common to the fashion world at large, but not yet as common in the museum world—I initially saw the exhibition on the museum’s website before actually visiting it in person. The visual appeal of the display was striking, even based on an internet view. Experimental, twentieth-​ century, and contemporary fashion was staged in a variety of scenarios reflecting interpretations of the future of fashion and human creativity. Clearly the intention was to create a distinct sensual experience of fashion display that was not to be found in other fashion spaces, such as luxury fashion stores or conventional museum fashion displays, where exhibition designs are still dominated by the display of fashionable dress in chronological order, installed behind protective glass cases, and with an emphasis on the single museum object.3 Filled with the excitement of both of my colleagues’ tips and my own visits to the museum website, I entered the exhibition and was frankly amazed by the visual power of the display as experienced in person to convey utopic, imagined futures for fashion and the adorned body. Many different organizing principles were in use through the numerous exhibition rooms, which represented eleven narrative themes reflecting upon the idea of the utopian, as something possible to realize through progress, to follow suit with Oscar Wildes saying “Progress is the realization of utopias.”4 The show thus dealt with the themes of sustainability, change, technology, craft and form, craft and color, resistance and society, resistance and beauty, solidarity, memory, gender identity, and love.

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52  Marie Riegels Melchior The exhibition showcased dressed mannequins on different levels like a surreal, colored mountain landscape; dressed mannequins in long rows, side by side, to create an image of the masses; dressed mannequins in glass cases to draw attention to the objects’ pristine and special nature compared to the free-​standing display. Specific atmospheres were also created through the choice of wallpaper color and lighting. Dark rooms were dramatically lit, with projectors rotating from one displayed object to another. Routes were defined through rooms, creating for example an elevated bridge surrounded by islands of display through which the visitor walked as if in an amusement park, stimulated by multiple impressions. And in the room curated under the theme of love, a red heart prop hanging from the ceiling, its pumping sound intensifying as visitors approached it. The visual richness was overwhelming. It was almost impossible to zoom in on the individual object isolated from the display props. The curatorial gesture was to interpret the tangible, materialized fashion, and call upon the vision within the objects. In the room dedicated to the theme of technology, the latest innovations within wearable technologies to empower people to new skills were displayed in a laboratory-​like setting, as in early sci-​fi movies, by the use of white electric light, dark shiny surfaces, and monitors transmitting information and imagery of wearable solar panels, portable air filtering systems, portable navigation tools, and recycling techniques of fiber based materials.5 The influence on the exhibition’s curators was clear:  architect, exhibition maker, and professor of fashion and museology Judith Clark. Clarks approach draws from the history of fashion curation as expressed by the fashion photographer and curator Cecile Beaton (1904–​1980) in the temporary display Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1971 and from former fashion magazine editor and special consultant to The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Diana Vreeland (1903–​1989). During their time, Beaton and Vreeland radically changed the curatorial approach to the display of fashion as outsiders in a field of historic scholarship and conservational concerns about how to collect and preserve the past.6 As such, the exhibition was characteristic of both fashion display with a capital F and of the new profession of fashion curation.7 Its installations built more on traditions of visual contextualization of fashion in a commercial setting—whether it be the fashion show, fashion editorial, or the new medium of fashion film—in order to create an image that conveyed meaning and emotion. The curatorial practice was so significant, so foregrounded, and so interesting in the way it experimented with the staging of fashion objects, maximizing the aesthetic communication of objects that are essentially static and silent by nature. Having said this, Utopian Bodies had even more ambition, doing something quite unusual compared to other fashion exhibitions:  it very literally highlighted its curatorial practices through a parallel narrative that ran through each room and display, which explained its staging practice and exhibition design choices. For example, underneath

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Fashion curation 53

Figure 4.1 Fashion and sustainability on display. The garments represent different sustainable approaches to fashion. The red dresses to the left are from the Issey Miyake A-​POC-​collection striving for zero-​waste in production. Photo Mattias Lindbäck.

its main text panel, where each display’s themes were introduced, a historic image of a utopian idea was presented, followed by a text explaining its vision, history and adaptation to the display in question. This text, with its recurrent headline “exhibition design,” acted as a guide to decoding both the display space and the organization of props and fashion objects, and turned what could have been merely an entertaining experience into an intellectual endeavor for which the visitor needed some basic knowledge of art, philosophy, and cultural history in order to get anything out of it. Another example, in a room dedicated to the theme of sustainability, the exhibition design text explained that part of the display was artist Orlando Campbell’s rendering of French inventor Augustin Mouchot’s (1825–​1912) prototype of a solar concentrator capable of producing ice that displayed at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878.The curators wanted to make the statement through the installation design that, even in the late nineteenth-​ century, there were similar ambitions to create sustainable solutions long before the current debates. (See Figure 4.2.) The curatorial approach was out of the ordinary, and points again to the profession of fashion curation. With the objective of exploring the disciplinary content of fashion curation, one could therefore ask what added value this subtext, this alternative exhibition narrative, provided, and what value

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54  Marie Riegels Melchior

Figure 4.2 Main exhibitions text introducing the displayed theme of fashion and sustainability. The text demonstrates the two narratives through the exhibition. Most unconventional is the exhibition design text demonstrating the reflective curatorial practice of the display. Photo Marie Riegels Melchior.

is added by the professionally trained fashion curator in communicating fashion in public galleries and museums? The remaining portion of this article considers and answers these questions. Moreover, I  am interested in exploring the field of fashion curation itself, since I have observed changes in practices and conventions of fashion

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Fashion curation 55 exhibition making over the last several years that correspond to the introduction of the educated fashion curator. These changes appear to go hand in hand with museological changes in museums, where visitor-​ friendly experiences, a focus on attracting younger audiences to stimulate recreational museum-​ going habits, and other welcoming strategies are being used to legitimize the museum institution in contemporary society.8 The distribution of fashion curation in galleries and museums, I believe, indicates new interpretive modes in understanding fashion as a visual cultural phenomenon similarly to contemporary art: in this case, taking fashion beyond its commercial existence as designed interventions to make humans reflect upon themselves and their future as dressed bodies. In light of these questions, I am both fascinated and puzzled by the exhibition Utopian Bodies. Fashion Looks Forward, not the least by Breward’s statement that it was “a benchmark exhibition.” The field of fashion exhibitions has recently expanded quite dramatically, and the potential for fashion displays within the museum context seems broad, from more specialist-​ oriented displays to blockbuster, monographic shows by established fashion designers. The display in question, exploring the utopia of fashion, was an homage to the love of fashion and its potential to comment on the human condition of life, inviting the viewer to join in the journey. But despite my fascination, the journey seemed to obscure some of the challenges of fashion curation, challenges that need to be addressed or at least discussed in order to understand the direction in which curatorial practice is headed concerning the interpretation of fashion in museums. Utopian Bodies created a pleasurable image, but it was somehow difficult to digest. Fashion, recognized most often as popular culture, was turned into something elitist—art, even—by the exhibition’s ambition to interpret fashion curatorial practices.

Fashion: a curatorial challenge per se Despite the ambitions of exhibition maker Judith Clark and dress historian Amy de la Haye in founding the MA degree in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion in 2004, the role of the fashionable object in the display Utopian Bodies was unclear. It increased the difficulty in reading the exhibition. The objects in the exhibition appeared more like postmodern symbols free floating until the next catchy interpretation. Depending on their contextualization, they could convey multiple meanings. Even though there was a clear differentiation between the fashion objects and the exhibition props, this distinction was only apparent if the visitor noticed which objects had conventional exhibition labels indicating the name of the fashion designer, the collection to which the object belonged, and the year it was launched. The order of things was blurred, as was whether objects were on loan from museums or were privately owned, though the latter seemed more likely due to the less restricted way of handling the objects in the display.

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Figure 4.3 In a wonderland space is placed a gold painted mannequin dressed in a red gown with the heart part of the body visible and with red electric lights radiating in sync with loud heart beats. The theme is love. The ­display creates an emotional experience and makes the actual dress on display less distinct from the display props. Photo Mattias Lindbäck.

The controversial words of Diana Vreeland, special consultant to the Costume Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, “Never worry about the facts, just project an image to the public,” seemed somehow to haunt the exhibition. This is also a recurring critique of fashion curation, exemplified by dress historian Lou Taylor’s review of Judith Clark’s inaugural fashion exhibition Malign Muses, shown at the then two-​year-​old fashion museum ModeMuseum in Antwerp in 2004, and in 2005 under the title Spectre: When Fashion Turns Back at the Victorian & Albert Museum in London.9 Taylor noted that although the exhibition aimed to explore with a critical theoretical perspective the relationship of contemporary, avant-​garde fashion to history, it ended up being “mind over matter.”10 This meant that theoretical ideas dominated the selection of fashion objects, which were in turn transformed into representations of ideas. In the book Clark published following the exhibition Malign Muses, this priority worked well, according to Taylor, but as for the exhibition itself, the communication of Clark’s very subjective interpretation of fashion became difficult to follow. Clark’s unconventional approach to the museum object could, however, be viewed in positive terms as an alternative way to overcome the challenges of displaying fashion in the absence of a living body. The living

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Fashion curation 57 body—soft, flexible and in movement—is out of reach in museum fashion displays, so garments designed and intended for living bodies need to be staged and displayed in alternative ways in this context. Museologist Anne-​ Sofie Hjemdahl has addressed the issue of the absent body and its surrogate, the dress form or the commercial fashion mannequin. These basic garment scaffolds challenge the living elements in dress objects, neither making the body invisible nor proposing a specific generic look to the displayed garments.11 They provide challenges to curatorial work, particularly when the aim is to illuminate the authentic experience of garments worn by people made of flesh and blood. Here, Clark’s alternative can be viewed as a solution, which suggested a shift in the focus from the dressed body to the conception of fashion as visual culture. In addition to the balance between mind and matter, conservation issues are also a challenge in the display of fashion. The act of display is a stress factor for most fashionable objects per se, because natural fibers are vulnerable to light, heat and moisture. Since the 1980s, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Costumes (ICOM Costume) has offered guidelines for the handling, care and display of garments that balance long-​ term conservation issues with the educational purposes of museum collections. For museums displaying fashion, these restrictions shape current conventions around the limits of image-​creation and the installation of fashion in innovative ways. But as fashion curation shows, these guidelines are often suspended when privately owned objects are favored with no formal restriction of care. In fact, the challenges of curating fashion appear to be escalating in relation to the changing understanding of the role of museums over the course of the twentieth-​century. Exhibiting fashion is an exceedingly recent enterprise, dating back to the mid-​twentieth century and developing from the early 1970s onwards. If stasis characterized fashion display in the early years of the practice, dynamism does so now. In previous years, it could be difficult to differentiate between fashion and dress displays. In the museum, fashion was perceived as dress, as the understanding was focused on the material object. It was presumed that visitors would learn, like the working curator in museums, how to look at and identify the objects, their style, and their design elements, in order to classify their origin, designer, materials, and function, and this knowledge was imparted on informative labels and text panels. Gradually, however, fashion exhibitions were transformed and differentiated by a stronger theatrical and visual approach that mirrored representations of fashion in the visual, popular culture of fashion editorials in fashion and women’s magazines, as well as of fashion retail window decorations. The focus of museum visitors’ interest was forced in other directions from beforehand. Visitors were expected to attend these kinds of dreamscapes, enjoy the experience, and become informed about fashion designer biographies, as monographic fashion designer exhibitions and retrospectives became the dominant fashion exhibition genre.12

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58  Marie Riegels Melchior Recent developments in curating fashion in museums have, in other words, put more emphasis on exploring nonchronological themes related to understanding fashion as a popular, cultural phenomenon.13 In keeping with contemporary museological debates about the purpose of the museum, contemporary fashion displays like Utopian Bodies:  Fashion Looks Forward want the visitor to join the explorative laboratory, which is synonymous with the fashion display as a site for generating potentially new interpretations and understandings of fashion, rather than educating the visitor about historical ones.

Fashion curation The emergence of the new fashion curator profession can to some extent be compared with the development of the independent art curator in the 1960s as a professionally trained persona. The concepts and skills associated with “curation” have moved beyond museum practices to suggest caring for any kind of collection, with registration, conservation, research, and communication as main working spheres. The curator has become an auteur, an independent exhibition maker with the ability to organize spaces into events. Like the art curator, the fashion curator is typically a freelancer, working in both public museums and private or commercially owned spaces. Also like the art curator, the fashion curator is visible, conspicuous, and communicative, participating in both the construction of meaning as well as its interpretation.14 But what skills does the fashion curator have to develop? In the MA course in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion, students are initially introduced to the history of curating fashion in museums. Clark and de la Haye have divided the history of fashion curation into two parts: before and after 1971, when Cecil Beaton transformed the display of fashion with his special exhibition Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Dress museology might, in other words, be the principal characteristic of fashion curation before 1971. After this point can be described as fashion museology, as the approach to displaying fashion turned both imaginative as well as gradually more analytical and theoretical.15 This course unit focuses on teaching both history, delineating the canon of the field, as well as changing methodologies in relation to museum practices where fashion is displayed. After this the students take a course in research methods, teaching students how to analyze, evaluate, and disseminate research findings, including the act of translation between theory and practice that is so essential to the curatorial job. The course unit named “collect/​recollect” investigates how the cultural value of objects is inevitably defined by contexts networked through a process of exchange, which is described in the course catalog as “an examination of why sensitivity to context is essential to the presentation of cultural artefacts.”16 (See Figure 4.4.)

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Figure 4.4 Craft and color are essential components of fashion. In this display it is demonstrated by dresses by Alexandra McQueen (far left and right) and Kenzo (in the middle), as well as by the clear visual language of the exhibition design commissioned by the artist Orlando Campbell. Photo Mattias Lindbäck.

Finally, just prior to undertaking their Master’s project, students are required to hone their collaborative skills, since it is acknowledged that collaborations are essential to obtaining significant results in the curatorial process. Students could, for example, work together to create an exhibition from scratch, finding a location, identifying the story to be told, collecting objects from museums and private archives, fundraising, and so on. The Master’s project requires students to demonstrate their curatorial skills and, to use a repeated metaphor by Clark, to demonstrate the conversational skill between theory and practices essential to creating a display contextualizing cultural objects as fashion and thereby telling an important story.17 According to the course description, the value of fashion curation is in its interpretive contextualization of fashion in order to explore and provide further understanding of the phenomenon. Though fashion is not explicitly defined in the program’s description, the way it is treated suggests something akin to the cultural studies understanding, in which fashion means something like a cultural constitution of the embodied identity. Fashion is not only materialized as dress, but as image as well. Fashion derives from an idea, but is experienced as materialized matter.18 The medium of the exhibition, combining text, objects, and space, is therefore appropriate for

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60  Marie Riegels Melchior communicating fashion. What students are not trained in, however, is the material culture of fashion, or fashion theory as such. They are expected to encounter this kind of knowledge through collaborations in which the fashion curator coordinates other professionals in delivering theory, object knowledge, and so on, for the curator to then further interpret and craft into a display.

Fashion museology and curatorial challenges The profession and practice of fashion curation can thus be perceived as an extension of the development of fashion museology from the 1970s onward. Fashion curators increasingly prioritize an interpretive approach to fashion over the more conventional object-​based approach that characterized dress display before the 1970s, regardless of whether they possess an art history or social history background. Changing perceptions of knowledge can explain this transition as well as the development of new interdisciplinary fields of study that have drawn attention to visual culture, such as fashion. From the point of view of the museum, the new museology program of the late 1980s—with its emphasis on museums’ awareness of their purpose rather than their methods so that they are accessible to all visitors without regard for cultural capital, upbringing, or education—encouraged museums to engage popular exhibition topics as a welcoming strategy.19 As a subject, fashion suited museums’ intent and front stage activity with its broad appeal and celebrity factor, especially when monographical fashion designer exhibits invited ordinary people to get a glimpse of the glamorous life of the privileged few.20 This approach also entailed accessible annotations that could be read by visitors with no knowledge of fashion, presenting messages that revolved around the human condition of body and identity construction. The discourse of the so-​called “experience economy” that has accompanied the neoliberal approach to museums over the last two decades has further pushed museums to acknowledge fashion, utilizing fashion displays and fashion logics per se to increase visitor numbers, extend museums’ visibility on different news and social media platforms, and informally co-​brand museums with high-​end fashion houses.21 Fashion displays and fashion curation make museums attractive in many ways, but as Utopian Bodies demonstrated, it comes with the consequence of transforming exhibition practices and the logic of museum work. This has traditionally been centerd around the authentic object, the material evidence of what has been publicly agreed upon as important cultural heritage. Fashion curated displays operate with delight in the public museum space, but with less enthusiasm when it comes to interpreting museum objects. The museum is treated more like a collection-​free gallery space in the fashion curation approach. One might wonder whether the museum is being regarded as a knowledge—Bildung—institution with these fashion exhibition interventions, or rather as an appropriate, symbolic and legitimate site

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Figure 4.5 Subversive practices challenges fashion design and beauty ideals. For contemporary fashion exhibitions these designs push curatorial practices in new directions as the exhibition Utopian Bodies. Fashion Looks Forward shows. Photo Mattias Lindbäck.

for reflection. Fashion curation might end up posing a catch-​22 dilemma with respect to the purpose of the museum, as the fashion curation approach to fashion risks muddling that exact purpose. The museum and its special exhibition program become a news item, a medium for the commercial fashion system to obtain visibility in non-​commercial spaces.22 What was intended to create accessibility ends up being an elitist event that preaches its understanding of fashion to a choir of insiders—or, to outsiders, reproducing the mystery of fashion as something belonging to magical dream spaces rather than to the ordinary act of dressing the human body. Is this the way we want our museums to develop? Immediate curatorial challenges seem to have even larger museological implications than the shift from the modern museum to the postmodern museum. Museologist Eilean Hooper-​Greenhill’s critique of museums, which called for the “post museum,” may have come true with respect to the practice of fashion curation.23 The museum is envisioned as a cultural institution not obligated to collect, conserve, or research, but rather to interpret and communicate on behalf of its visitors. In this respect, the exhibition Utopian Bodies is indeed a “benchmark,” as Breward stated. The variety of fashion displays currently on offer in museums, galleries, and other cultural venues, stimulated me to explore and further understand

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62  Marie Riegels Melchior the new profession of fashion curation and its value in terms of exhibition-​ making. Utopian Bodies: Fashion Looks Forward demonstrated the popularity of fashion displays, but rather than curating cultural heritage as it is materialized in various fashion objects, the exhibition curated concepts and interpretations of fashion utopias. It was emotionally invigorating to join the “journey” through the futuristic landscape of the display, and all the senses were stimulated along the way. It was uncomfortable, however, to be uncertain of what the exhibit hoped to teach those who had not already been taught the visual language of contemporary fashion or the language of visual display. The added value of the approach, besides the visual feeding of the eye, seemed exclusive and inaccessible to the general public and museum visitor.

Curating utopia? Curating fashion is still a challenge and further developments must be welcomed. Fashion curation should not be forced to choose between matter or mind, to use Taylor’s phrase, but should be an exploration of fashion’s hybrid nature as it is produced by the entanglement of the social and the material. Providing images to people may have been the objective of fashion magazines since the 1960s, and it may still be today. But providing them with the knowledge to interpret these images, and to understand how they are produced, might be a more important role for museums or gallery spaces today—especially in the present consumer society, where fashion dominates (at least in part) by supplying us with a continuous stream of images that encourage the creation of even more—than just contributing to the further production of images. The fashion history scholar as fashion curator appears to be still of great importance in museums and galleries, to teach us how to navigate and make sense of the increasingly interpreted, narrated, and fashioned world around us. Professional fashion curators make the practice of fashion curation more differentiated, and their attention to form and exhibition design is refreshing. But fashion curation as yet another layer of interpretation must not completely displace the transmission of fashion as a cultural and historic phenomenon, because the latter is critical to making some sense of our human condition as dressed and fashioned bodies.

Notes 1 See www.museea.com, accessed May 22, 2016. 2 Ibid. 3 A recent example of this kind of display was the semi permanent exhibition Fashion & Fabric (2014–2019) at the Danish Museum of Art & Design in Copenhagen. The duration of the show explains the approach and the need to protect the museum objects from touch and dust. However, the exhibition

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Fashion curation 63 demonstrated a convention that with new exhibition technologies improving object conservation potentially could be transformed, but tend to be reproduced within both art history and social history museums. 4 “Progress is the realization of utopias” argues Oscar Wilde in essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in Linda Dowling, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (New York: Penguin, 2001), 141. 5 For example, Pauline Van Dongen’s The Solar Shirt (2015) and Byborre’s BBsuit 0.2, which is able to clean polluted air through a filtering system; Billie Whitehouse and Ben Moir’s Navigate Jacket (2013), and, for example, the Swedish initiative “Smart Textiles” work with recycling methods as well as new kinds of fiber recycables. 6 Judith Clark and Maria Frisa, Diana Vreeland after Diana Vreeland (Venice: Marsilio, 2012) and Judith Clark and Amy de la Hay, Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 7 Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye, “One Object:  Multiple Interpretation,” Fashion Theory 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 137–​69. 8 Janet Marstine ed., New Museum Theory and Practice (Oxford:  Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 9 Lou Taylor, “Spectre:  When Fashion Turns Back,” The Art Book 13, no.  1 (February 2006), 16–​18. 10 Ibid., 17. 11 Anne-​Sofie Hjemdahl, “Exhibiting the body, dress and time in museums: a historical perspective,” in Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice, eds. Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 108–​24. 12 Diana Vreeland popularized the living fashion designer monographic display in museums with her inaugural exhibition of Yves Saint Laurent in 1983. This turned the museum into a space for the production of fashion and its meaning, not just its representation. 13 This is well illustrated in the documentary “The First Day of May” (2016) directed by Andrew Rossi, following the making of the fashion exhibition China. Through the Looking Glass, curated by Andrew Bolton and showed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. 14 Sanne Kofod Olsen, “Den indiskrete formidler:  kuratoren som postmoderne subjekt,” in Kuratering af samtidskunst, ed. Malene Vest Hansen, et al. (Museet for Samtidskunst, 2011), 67–​79. 15 Marie Riegels Melchior, “Introduction: understanding fashion and dress museology,” in Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practic, ed. Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (London: Bloomsbury), 1–​18. 16 www.arts.ac.uk/​fashion/​courses/​postgraduate/​ma-​fashion-​curation/​ (accessed May 22, 2016). 17 Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye, “One Object:  Multiple Interpretation,” Fashion Theory 12, no. 2 (2008): 137–​69. 18 Lise Skov and Marie Riegels Melchior.”Research Approaches to the Study of Dress and Fashion,” in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, ed. Joanne Eicher, vol. 10 (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 11–​16. 19 Peter Vergo, The New Museology (London: Reaktion, 1989). 20 The recent monographic fashion designer exhibition Alexander McQueen. Savage Beauty shown at The Metropolitian Museum of Art in New York in 2011 and at The Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2015 demonstrated the fact.

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64  Marie Riegels Melchior More than 650,000 visitors in New  York and more than 490,000 visitors in London, making it The Victoria & Albert Museums most visited show. 21 B. J.  Pine and J.  H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy:  Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). 22 Andersson, Fiona. “Museums as Fashion Media,” in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London: Routledge, 2000), 371–​89. 23 Hooper-​Greenhill, Eilean. “Changing Values in the Art Museum:  Rethinking Communication and Learning,” in Museum Studies, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004).

Bibliography Andersson, Fiona.“Museums as Fashion Media.” In Fashion Cultures:  Theories, Explorations and Analysis. Edited by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, 371–​89. London: Routledge, 2000. Clark, Judith and Amy de la Haye. “One Object: Multiple Interpretation.” Fashion Theory 12, no. 2 (2008): 137–​69. Clark, Judith and Maria Frisa. Diana Vreeland after Diana Vreeland. Venice: Marsilio, 2012. Clark, Judith and Amy de la Haye. Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Dowling, Linda, ed. The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose. New York: Penguin, 2001. Hjemdahl, Anne-​Sofie. “Exhibiting the Body, Dress and Time in Museums: A Historical Perspective.” In Fashion and Museums:  Theory and Practice. Edited by Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson, 108–​24. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hooper-​ Greenhill, Eilean. “Changing Values in the Art Museum:  Rethinking Communication and Learning.” In Museum Studies. Edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. Marstine, Janet, ed. New Museum Theory and Practice. Oxford:  Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Melchior, Marie and Birgitta Svensson, eds. Fashion and Museums:  Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Olsen, Sanne Kofod. “Den indiskret formidler:  Kuratoren som postmoderne subject.” In Kuratering af Samtidskunst. Edited by Malene Vest Hansen, 67–​79. Roskilde: Museet for Samtidskunst, 2011. Pine, B. J and J. H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Skov, Lise and Marie Riegels Melchior. “Research Approaches to the Study of Dress and Fashion.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Edited by Joanne Eicher, vol. 10, 11–​16. Oxford: Berg, 2011. Taylor, Lou, “Spectre: When Fashion Turns Back.” The Art Book 13, no. 1 (February 2006),  16–​18. Vergo, Peter. The New Museology. London: Reaktion, 1989.

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5  Exhibition addresses The production of publics in exhibitions on colonial history Mathias Danbolt

How can we, as curators and academics, working in museums, archives, and art institutions engage critically with the colonial legacies that have organized the archiving, assembling, and framing of our collections? How can the exhibition format be used to address histories of institutional injustice without reproducing the logics we seek to critique? What role can exhibitions on colonial history play in instigating public awareness, debate, and critical conversations about colonialism and coloniality today? That is, how can exhibitions take part in creating new and critical publics? This article will respond to these questions by discussing the politics and poetics of what I call exhibition addresses. In the following I argue for the importance of attending to how exhibitions address publics through two analytical sketches of exhibitions on colonialism in European museums on maritime history, namely London, Sugar and Slavery at the Museum of London Docklands, and Tea Time:  The First Globalization at the M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark, Elsinore. The radically different rhetorics and design strategies at play in these exhibitions make them a fruitful starting point for discussing how curatorial modes of address can condition and produce alternative forms of publics.

Exhibition rhetorics and its publics Bruce W. Ferguson argues that exhibitions constitute “the medium in contemporary art in the sense of being its main sense of communication–​–​the body and voice from which an authoritative character emerges.”1 He calls for the importance of approaching exhibitions as “strategic systems of representations” where not only the exhibited objects, but also the paratextual features (architecture, wall texts, labels, design, lightening, brochures, etc.), can be mined for their ideological, political, didactic, psychological, social, and pedagogical effects.2 In order to consider how exhibitions address their audiences and condition spaces for response, Ferguson argues that we need to understand the “management of meanings” at play in exhibitions’ “­institutional utterances.”3

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66  Mathias Danbolt In order to examine the effects of the exhibition as a complex communicative situation unfolding in power-​ ridden time-​ spaces that Ferguson describes, it is helpful to set it in dialogue with Michael Warner’s concept of “publics” and the political function that the idea of publics has had in the modern social imaginary. Warner distinguishes between publics and audiences:  where an audience can be measured and counted, a public, in Warner’s terms, is a “virtual social object” that only “exists by virtue of being addressed.”4 In contrast to groups or communities that are organized around identity or belonging, publics come into existence by way of attention.5 It is an utterance’s circulation in what Warner calls the “stranger sociability” of discourse that enables it to assume a public.6 The chosen form of a public address reflects an idea of how one wants to grab people’s attention, as well as who one might hope to speak to: the address’s imagined or anticipated public. Even though publics are always virtual, they perform a crucial role in the organization of communicative and political exchange. The interest in concepts such as exhibition rhetorics and publics is far from novel or unique. One of the central outcomes of what Peter Vergo described as “the new museology” in the late 1980s was a radical change in attention toward the museum’s purpose as a public institution.7 Proponents of new museology sought to “democratize” the museum by demystifying and redressing its authoritative function, approaching visitors as “active subjects in the making of the museum’s purpose.”8 This development has taken place alongside the so-​called “postcolonial turn” in museum studies, reflecting attempts by many museums across the West to critically reflect upon their colonial roots, “reinventing themselves by implementing politics of recognition for previously marginalized groups and attempt to repair historical wrongs.”9 Despite this investment in making the contemporary museum into a “public” institution proper, Jennifer Barrett has argued that there has been “a surprising lack of sustained critical reflection” on the term public itself within new museology.10 The term keeps being “used loosely” in museum practice as well as in museum studies, mainly as synonym with “audiences,” “visitors,” or “users.”11 The conflation of public with users is especially evident in the bourgeoning field of visitor studies, as well as in the increasing reliance on user survey data in the (financial) management of the museum sector and museum programming. Conceptual nuances are important if we want to avoid reducing the concept of publics to statistically predefined visitor demographics based on presumed identity interest. An uncritical adaptation of these neoliberal management tools of “target groups” and “segments” in contemporary museum practice risks turning exhibition curation into a persuasion game where one is expected to cater to “users,” already defined. One of the things that gets lost in this target-​group framework is the ways in which exhibitions can function as an act of poesis that call publics into existence. From a curatorial point of view, I see the focus on exhibition

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Exhibition addresses 67 addresses as an attempt to highlight the importance of thinking ambitiously about how exhibitions can work as a catalyst in bringing publics into being—publics that may form across otherwise presumed sedimented markers of difference. Considering the publics produced through the act of being addressed can, in other words, better help us understand the complex ways in which identities and identifications are negotiated and produced in the exhibition encounter.

Exhibition addresses as analytic The focus on exhibition addresses functions as a supplementary exhibition analytic that allow us to examine which ideas of publics can be gleaned from considering an exhibition’s rhetorical strategies. One of course encounters the same methodological challenges when analyzing exhibition addresses as in other exhibition analyses. Exhibitions represent a form of “multilayered, multimedia communication,” where the different rhetorical gestures “hold possibilities and constraints” that shape experience.12 The meaning making processes in exhibitions are thus a product of the interaction between narratives that accrue from how individual objects are framed and narratives established as the viewer sequentially walks through the galleries.13 While the attempted itinerancy of an exhibition experience more or less can be choreographed tightly, no curator can control the semiotic production generated by the encounter with an exhibition’s multitude of elements. Exhibition analyses are thus always situated and partial. This is also the case with my analytical sketches of the exhibitions addresses in London, Sugar and Slavery and Tea Time:  The First Globalization. While the exhibitions differ in format, histories of production, curatorial intentions, and design strategies, they both seek to address aspects of the European history of colonialism and trade by combining traditional exhibition techniques (objects in vitrines and images in frames, accompanied by labels and wall texts) with multimedia technologies (videos, projections, and digital gaming technology). The following analyses center on the main form of publics that the exhibitions produce through their choice of historical perspective and protagonists, frames of historical identification, and summons of engagement, which I identify as a public of accountability and a public of infotainment, respectively. London, Sugar and Slavery The exhibition London, Sugar and Slavery opened as a permanent gallery installation at the Museum of London Docklands in 2007 as part of the bicentenary anniversary of the end of the British trade in enslaved Africans in 1807. Following the museum’s focus on the history of the Port of London, the exhibition seeks to narrate the so-​ called “untold story” about how London became one of the world’s largest and most important ports in the

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68  Mathias Danbolt transatlantic enslavement trade. London, Sugar and Slavery approaches this story of wealth accumulation through the displacement of millions of people in the form of thematic displays, which include over 140 objects, as well as paintings, etchings, photographs, videos, sound pieces, and interactive elements. How does London, Sugar and Slavery address its publics? The fact that the museum is situated in a former sugar warehouse at the West Indian Dock in East London, a location that was an active part of the trade history to which the exhibition speaks, gives special weight to the space itself. The exhibition is installed on the third floor of the building, where the first thing that captures the eye is the massive wall-​to-​ceiling information panel of the more than 3,000 slave ships that departed from London to Africa and the West Indies (see Figure  5.1). This overwhelming listing of names of ships, ship owners, captains, destinations, and dates of departure and arrival, sets the somber mood of the exhibition. While ledgers like these provide narrative starting points with their listing of notable men, they simultaneously ­evidence the violent erasure of the perspective of the enslaved whose archival traces are often limited to mere numbers in the lists of “cargo.” The ledger, printed in white on a black background, works as a subtle indication of how the imperial project was built on the foundation of enslaved black bodies, as the introductory wall text of the exhibition spells out in more detail: “Behind the growth of London as a center of finance and commerce from the 1700s and onward lay one of the greatest crimes against humanity.”14

Figure 5.1  London, Sugar and Slavery. Photo and copyright: Museum of London, Docklands.

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Exhibition addresses 69 Despite the absence of a strict itinerary, the thematic displays, with their mixture of archival objects, images, and extensive wall texts and labels, appear to be semichronologically structured, starting with topics relating to the organization of the enslavement trade and the plantation system in between London, Africa, and the Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, followed by panels on the histories of resistance, rebellion, and the abolition movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and toward the end, panels addressing the “Continuing Presence” and “Legacies” of the transatlantic enslavement trade in London today.

“This is your history”: a public of accountability One of the largest panels in the first part of the exhibition is entitled “Africans in London.” Like the other panels in the exhibition, the inclusion of printed quotes from poems and speeches by historical figures, and the widespread use of image reproductions that are enlarged, cropped, and magnified, make the panel visually dynamic and give it a collage-​like nature. Reproductions of paintings of Africans in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as well as contemporary photographs presenting Londoners of African descent today dominate the panel. The insistence on the intimate relationship between the past and the present is further underlined in a four-​minute video screened on a monitor in between the images. The video starts out with a hectic montage where contemporary video footage from the streets of London and the beaches of Ghana and Barbados get interspersed with prints from the eighteenth century depicting scenes from the transatlantic enslavement trade. As the cuts between the past and the present flickers, a voice-​ over starts: “The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship […].” As the credits notes, the voice-​over is extracted from the former enslaved African Olaudah Equiano’s (1745–​ 1797) autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, published in 1789. While the voice-​over continues, the video shows footage of contemporary Londoners of different ages, genders, and geographical backgrounds looking into the camera while lip-​syncing Equiano’s text. After the recitation is over, the screen turns black and a white text appears: “This is your history” (see Figure 5.2). The statement “This is your history” is emblematic of how London, Sugar and Slavery seeks to address its public. The “you” referenced in this statement is not a specific or identitarian “you”—a fact underlined by the different faces that ventriloquize Equiano’s words. It is a virtual “you” that can be inhabited by different bodies and positions, singular and plural. The utterance is constative as well as performative: it implicates us all in the history of enslavement and colonialism. The use of direct address ensures that no one standing in the gallery can claim to be untouched by this history, as we are positioned as participants and witnesses to a history that still informs

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Figure 5.2 Montage of film stills from the video “This is Your History” in London, Sugar and Slavery. Copyright Museum of London, Docklands.

and shapes the present. We are thus summoned to pay heed to a common history, independent of whether one is a descendant of the slave traders or of the enslaved, or neither of these. Toward the end of the exhibition, the use of direct address appears with even greater force. Every fifteen minutes a three-​minute large-​scale video is projected directly onto the panels, vitrines, and displays—including the visitors—in the latter part of the exhibition (see Figure 5.3). On the background of a visual collage of new and old images, a series of sentences in red flash up while being read aloud by a voice-​over: YOU will be taken away from your family YOU will not have a home YOU will not keep your children YOU will not keep your real name YOU will be someone’s property After a while, another voice breaks in and disrupts the finality of the statements’ verdicts: YOU will have no voice We fought for a voice

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Figure 5.3 Installation shot of the video projection in London, Sugar and Slavery. Photo and copyright: Museum of London, Docklands.

YOU will not make music The world listens to our music YOU will have no rights Our brothers and sisters died for our rights The repeated invocations of the horror that will happen to “you” places the addressee in the imagined situation of the enslaved. By interrupting the exhibition viewing, the video projection thus seeks to force the visitor to “Consider slavery /​what it is /​what bitter drought and how many millions are made to drink it,” as the 1766 quote from Lawrence Stern that appears in the projection phrases it. Not without pathos, this direct address calls us to reflect on the unimaginable violence of being reduced to property, while also asking us to remember the continual history of resistance, of people surviving against all odds. These exhibition addresses in London, Sugar and Slavery convey what I suggest is a public of accountability. They anticipate and call forth a public that is willing to account for and respond to the exhibition’s proposition of how we all are entangled in the unfinished history of colonial relations. The use of multimedia strategies to invite identifications with the historical perspective of the enslaved is central in this regard. By giving Equiano the role as a historical protagonist who speaks to and through the bodies of contemporary Londoners, the exhibition suggests not only the importance of including the

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72  Mathias Danbolt voices of the colonized as sources for the history of colonialism, it also reads as a rejoinder to the colonial logic of the museum dominated by imperial objects, ledgers, and images. The question of accountability that the exhibition calls forth thus points towards the institution as well as the visiting public. Tea Time: The First Globalization In a leaflet from the M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark, the permanent exhibition Tea Time: The First Globalization is marketed with the headline “Family Fun:  In the interactive games the whole family can control world shipping, [and] try their luck as a merchant in the 1700s.”15 This emphasis on experience and playfulness reflects the museum’s overall profile after it reopened in 2013 in a new structure built by the renowned architecture firm BIG in an old dry dock in front of Kronborg Castle in Elsinore. According to the museum’s homepage, its mission is to tell “the story of Denmark as one of the world’s biggest seafaring nations from the fifteenth century until today.”16 This broad perspective is presented through a series of thematically oriented multimedia galleries where the audience is invited to experience Danish maritime history “through the eyes of sailors, ship owners, captains, and sailors’ wives.”17 The Tea Time exhibition seeks to place the current debates on global economy and trade into a historical perspective by focusing on its so-​called “first” phase, as the introductory wall text explains:  “In the eighteenth century the world was connected by one vast trading network dominated by Europeans. Beautiful, tasty goods and cruel destinies were transported between the corners of the Earth in large sailing ships.” The choice of framing the story of Denmark’s colonial engagement by centering on the “beautiful, tasty goods” rather, than the “cruel destinies,” reflects the particular “eyes” we are invited to embody in this gallery, namely the historical figure of the merchant. One of the first focalizers that brings this perspective into view is the large digital copy of Balthasar Denner’s (1685–​1749) painting Tea Time at the Duchess (1732) that shows a man of letters standing beside four women drinking tea in an opulent interior. The painting not only introduces us to a merchant figure, it also highlights, quite literally, how the colonial network of trade altered the domestic lives of the wealthy, as animated background lighting illuminate objects in the painting (a silk dress, a cotton shirt, the tea, etc.) while texts describe the geographic origin of the commodities. The desire and skills of reaping the “fruits” of colonialism that the painting puts on show is the main theme as well as the narrative motor of the exhibition, that invites the audience to participate in a historical simulation game, produced by game company Conduro.

Playing history: a public of infotainment “Become the best merchant,” reads an exhibition text on a large touch screen installed on a wooden pedestal besides the animated painting. When placing

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Exhibition addresses 73 one of the black leather-​bound books in the base of the pedestal beside the screen, one activates a historical simulation game: You are a merchant in Copenhagen in 1780. Your trading company Det Lauringske Slavehandelsocietet (The Lauringske Slave Trade Society) has acquired the frigate Cronprintzen, with a crew of 60 sailors. Together you can travel the world to buy and sell goods. But which routes are the most profitable? Can you make the trading company the largest in all of the realms? With the digital trade ledger in hand, the viewer is invited to “sail out into the world.” In the exhibition this world is made up of six geographical “islands” scattered around the room. Each station represents a territory in Danish-​ Norwegian empire in the mid-​eighteenth century:  the Danish West Indies in the Caribbean, Danish Guinea on the Gold Coast of Africa, the Danish territories in today’s India, the Danish colonies in the North Atlantic, the Danish trading post in Canton in China, as well as the center of the empire, Copenhagen. Each “island” contains a large vitrine with a selected number of objects and images that speak to the territory and its role in the colonial trade system. The “islands” are architecturally distinguished from each other as the frames for the vitrines are constructed by the main commodity exported from the historical sites, and that one can trade with in the game: the Copenhagen station is built with bricks, the West Indian station is made up with sugar barrels, while the African station is supported by enslaved bodies, represented in the form of sculpted black feet and hands that stick out of the

Figure 5.4 Installation shot of Tea Time: The First Globalization. Photo and copyright: Thijs Wolzak, M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark.

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Figure 5.5 The digital trade ledger in Tea Time:  The First Globalization. Photo: Mathias Danbolt.

sides of the frame (see Figure 5.4). The brevity of contextualizing texts and object labels, together with the rather spectacular design, suggests that the game space is the exhibition’s privileged mode of address. When placing the book on the plinths that accompany the different islands, an element of “techno magic,” to use curator Benjamin Asmussen’s term, turns the ledger into an interactive interface for buying and selling cargo from one’s ship (see Figure 5.5).18 With the amount of cash one starts out with, one can buy bricks and weapons in Copenhagen, gold, ivory, and slaves in Danish Guinea, raw sugar, rum, and tobacco in the Danish West Indies, and so forth. To avoid going bankrupt, one needs to learn the commercial logic of the trade. Slaves, for instance, do not sell well in the North Atlantic port in the game, while this “cargo” is high in demand in the West Indies. The objects and images in the vitrines hold clues and information that can aid one’s ability to perform as merchant. When returning the book to the starting plinth, a screen sums up one’s accumulated fortune or deficit, including the journey’s total number of “crew fatalities” and “slave fatalities.” The best merchant enters the “Today’s High Scores.” The game space in Tea Time summons what I  suggest to call a public of infotainment, where information about colonial history is conveyed in a framework of entertainment and play. The exhibition not only opens up colonial history through a game, it also presents colonialism as a game, as it invites the audience to take part in a competitive struggle of capitalist accumulation and exploitation seen from a merchant’s perspective. The investment in learning by doing is central to how the game conveys knowledge. Yet the game design seems more oriented toward activating the audience, than creating a context for a nuanced venture into colonial history. The

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Exhibition addresses 75 insights potentially gleaned from the game are highly contingent on one’s ability to play the game well. While the game can be seen a seductive way of pulling the visitors into contact with a horrific chapter of history that for so long has been marginalized in Danish museums, few design elements explicitly problematize the cynical logic that the game relies on when inviting us to reenact the dehumanizing logics of the enslavement trade itself.19 Except for a sentence on an introductory wall text that reads “Don’t forget, though, that your choices have consequences for others than yourself,” the mention of “slave fatalities,” and the use of black body parts in the architecture of the African “station,” the exhibition seems to presume that the audience has the necessary preknowledge to engage with the scope, extent, and historical effects of colonial violence. The relevance of framing devices that problematize the cynicism of the game does not appear to be entirely lost on the museum, as its educational workshops for school children ends with a discussion of slavery today in light of the United Nation’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” from 1948.20 But such direct calls for reflection and discussion do not reach the average visitor of the gallery, who can play the game and (re)enact its colonial choreography of dehumanization relatively undisturbed, mirroring the detachment from the brutality of slavery that the historical merchant is presumed to have had. Whereas London, Sugar and Slavery uses insistent forms of direct addresses to ask the public to reflect upon one’s position in a colonial history presented as radically unfinished, Tea Time’s historicist framework clearly separates the past from the present. By presenting the past as seen “through the eyes” of a historical figure, the exhibition secures that potential questions of accountability remain within the confines of the game space. Tea Time thus presents the act of playing ignorant and cynical as a way to address, if not redress, colonial ignorance and cynicism.

Museums and the (re)production of publics While an in-​depth national comparison falls beyond the scope of this article, the different ideas of publics that can be gleaned from the exhibition addresses in these two shows can be said to highlight diverging understandings of what it means to give justice to the history of colonialism and enslavement in British and Danish public cultures, respectively. London, Sugar and Slavery’s summoning of an emphatic public centered on giving dignity and humanity back to the historical subjects dehumanized by the enslavement trade reflects the growing debates in the British museum sector on the importance of sensitive approaches to historical representations and their implications for critical “understandings of nation, community and identity” today.21 The museum’s collaborative engagement with communities from the African diaspora in the creation of the gallery, might in part explain the exhibition’s emphasis on an accountable public.22 Yet, the

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76  Mathias Danbolt focus on accountability cannot be reduced to a question of audience demographics in multicultural London. After all, the rhetorical framework of London, Sugar and Slavery insists on addressing a virtual “you” which cuts across positions and identities, past and present. Tea Time’s choice of letting a Danish merchant serve as the exhibition’s point of departure reflects how a specific national framework structures its content as well as intended audience’s identification. M/​S Maritime Museum is here in line with a general tendency in Danish museums to “collect and preserve the Danish experience broadly and strengthen Danes’ collective memories, not to focus on particular regions or groups.”23 The absence of other voices than the Danish one in the framing of Tea Time continues as such the long tradition of privileging the colonizer’s rather than (also) the colonized’s perspective when telling colonial histories in Denmark.24 That the exhibition’s invitation to entertain the cynical operations of colonial trade and enslavement appear to have gone without any public critique or debate, speak to how questions on the affective sensitivities of colonial representations tend to be dismissed as “political correctness” in Danish public culture.25 My interpretation of the idea of publics called forth in London, Sugar and Slavery and Tea Time may not, of course, echo the ideas that the curators had in mind when making the galleries. By privileging rhetorical effects over curatorial stated intentions, however, analyses of exhibition addresses can hopefully create a ground for more nuanced discussions on how exhibitions can shape public culture and the culture of publics—an issue that remain a central curatorial challenge today.

Notes 1 Bruce W.  Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics:  Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds., Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 126. 2 Ibid., 128. 3 Ibid., 133. 4 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 55 and 67, respectively. 5 Ibid., 71. 6 Ibid., 122. 7 Peter Vergo, “Introduction,” in The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989),  1–​5. 8 Jennifer Barrett, Museums and the Public Sphere (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011), 4. 9 Felicity Bodenstein and Camilla Pagani, “Decolonising National Museums of Ethnography in Europe:  Exposing and Reshaping Colonial Heritage (2000–​ 2012),” in The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History, eds. Iain Chambers, et al. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 39. 10 Barrett, Museums and the Public Sphere, 1.

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Exhibition addresses 77 1 Ibid. 1 12 Corinne A. Kratz, “Rhetorics of Value: Constituting Worth and Meaning through Cultural Display,” Visual Anthropology Review 27, no. 1 (2011): 29. 13 Mieke Bal, Double Exposures:  The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New  York: Routledge, 1996), 4. 14 All quotes from wall texts and labels in the exhibitions are transcribed by the author. 15 M/​ S Maritime Museum of Denmark, “Architecture & Maritime Culture:  A World-​Class Museum in Hamlet’s Elsinore” (information flyer, 2018), retrieved January 8, 2018, Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen. 16 M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark, “Welcome to the New Maritime Museum of Denmark,” n.d. http://​mfs.dk/​en/​welcome/​, accessed January 10, 2018. 17 Dejong Koosmann, “National Maritime Museum.” www.kossmanndejong.nl/​ en/​project/​nationaal-​maritiem-​museum/​. (n.d.), accessed 10 January 10, 2018. 18 Benjamin Asmussen, “Teknomagi  –​Udstillingstanker IX” [Technomagic  –​ Thoughts on Exhibition IX], Historieblog. Om historie, formidling, museer og teknologi (March 10, 2014), http://​historieblog.dk/​2014/​teknomagi-​ udstillingstanker-​ix/​, accessed January 3, 2018. 19 Andersen, Astrid Nonbo, Ingen undskyldning: Erindringer om Dansk Vestindien og kravet om erstatninger for slaveriet [No Apology: Memories of Danish West Indies and the Demand for Reperations for Slavery] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2017), 257. 20 Benjamin Asmussen and Majken Bjørnholt, “Den første globalisering? Kolonihistorie på museum i udstilling og undervisning” [The First Globalization? Colonial History in Museum Exhibitions and Education], Dansknoter 1 (March 2017): 40. 21 Laurajane Smith, et  al., eds., Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1. 22 See David Spence, “Making the London, Sugar and Slavery Gallery at the Museum of London Docklands,” in Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambigious Engagements, eds. Laurajane Smith, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 149–​62. 23 Peggy Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums put the Nation and the World on Display (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 28. 24 Andersen, Ingen undskyldning, 2017, 254. 25 See Mathias Danbolt. “Retro Racism:  Colonial Ignorance and Racialized Affective Consumption in Danish Public Culture,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 7, no. 2 (2017): 105–​13. doi: https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​njmr-​2017-​0013.

Bibliography Andersen, Astrid Nonbo. Ingen undskyldning: Erindringer om Dansk Vestindien og kravet om erstatninger for slaveriet [No Apology: Memories of Danish West Indies and the Demand for Reperations for Slavery]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2017. Asmussen, Benjamin. “Teknomagi –​Udstillingstanker IX” [Technomagic –​Thoughts on Exhibition IX]. Historieblog. Om historie, formidling, museer og teknologi. March 10, 2014:  http://​historieblog.dk/​2014/​teknomagi-​udstillingstanker-​ix/​. Accessed January 3, 2018.

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78  Mathias Danbolt Asmussen, Benjamin and Majken Bjørnholt. “Den første globalisering? Kolonihistorie på museum i udstilling og undervisning” [The First Globalization? Colonial History in Museum Exhibitions and Education]. Dansknoter 1 (March 2017): 40–​43. Bal, Mieke. Double Exposures:  The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New  York: Routledge, 1996. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Malden: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011. Bodenstein, Felicity and Camilla Pagani. “Decolonising National Museums of Ethnography in Europe:  Exposing and Reshaping Colonial Heritage (2000–​ 2012).” In The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History. Edited by Iain Chambers, et al. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Danbolt, Mathias. “Retro Racism:  Colonial Ignorance and Racialized Affective Consumption in Danish Public Culture.” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 7, no. 2 (2017): 105–​13. doi: https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​njmr-​2017-​0013. Ferguson, Bruce W. “Exhibition Rhetorics:  Material Speech and Utter Sense.” In Thinking About Exhibitions, 126–​ 36. Edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. New York: Routledge, 1996. Koosmann, Dejong. “National Maritime Museum.” www.kossmanndejong.nl/​en/​ project/​nationaal-​maritiem-​museum/​. (n.d.). Accessed January 10, 2018. Kratz, Corinne A. “Rhetorics of Value:  Constituting Worth and Meaning through Cultural Display.” Visual Anthropology Review 27, no. 1 (2011):  21–​ 48. doi: https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1548-​7458.2011.01077.x. Levitt, Peggy. Artifacts and Allegiances:  How Museums put the Nation and the World of Display. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark. “Welcome to the New Maritime Museum of Denmark,” n.d. http://​mfs.dk/​en/​welcome/​. Accessed January 10, 2018. —​—​—​. “Architecture & Maritime Culture:  A World-​Class  Museum in Hamlet’s Elsinore” (information flyer, 2018). Retrieved January 8, 2018. Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen. Museum of Docklands. London, Sugar and Slavery Gallery Reveals City’s Untold History (press package). London: Museum of Docklands, 2007. Smith, Laurajane, eds., et al. Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements. New York: Routledge, 2011. Spence, David. “Making the London, Sugar and Slavery Gallery at the Museum of London Docklands.” In Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambigious Engagements. Edited by Laurajane Smith, et al., 149–​62. New York: Routledge, 2011. Vergo, Peter. “Introduction.” The New Museology. Edited by Peter Vergo, 1–​ 5. London: Reaktion Books, 1989. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

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6  Multi-sited curating as a critical mode of knowledge production Sabine Dahl Nielsen

When taking a look at today’s international art scene, it becomes apparent that many art institutions are currently venturing into urban public spaces and engaging in so-​called “off-​site curating.” As has been the case over the last twenty years, curators increasingly continue to facilitate urban art interventions, initiate street art projects, realize participatory community projects, and contribute to the staging of talks, film screenings, and performances in a variety of urban settings. I  will address this curatorial arena by arguing that a terminological shift can be made advantageously from off-​site curating to multi-sited curating. In contrast to off-​site curating, which commonly refers to curatorial projects realized in extra-​institutional contexts, that is, outside the traditional venues of museums, art galleries, or other cultural institutions, the term multi-sited curating implies that such sites are more than merely a selection of separate spatial units and should be perceived as multiple, in the sense that they are interrelated, intertwined and situated within a series of mutually dependent flows and networks. In this way, the curatorial focus shifts towards the tracing of a topic, a conflict or social problem across several sites. Consequently, I will argue that experimenting with multi-sited curating allows for the exposure of translocal processes, which are often characterized by asymmetrical power relations, social actors in motion, as well as conflicts, negotiations, and social struggles that extend over multiple locations. Drawing on critical mobility studies, conflict theories, and ethnographic reflections on multi-sited research, this article will explore how these theoretical fields of research are relevant in relation to curatorial projects realized in urban public spaces. These considerations will take their analytical point of departure through a concrete curatorial research project that I am currently working on, Transit: Mobility and Migration in the Age of Globalisation. First and foremost, this curatorial project intends to emphasize—in a very concrete and tangible way—how transit nodes in today’s globalized societies are interconnected in a multiplicity of ways. The project seeks to stress the fact that mobility flows are often characterized by asymmetrical power relations, as well as differing means of participation.

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80  Sabine Dahl Nielsen In our present-​day world, people travel like never before. But they do so for very different reasons, to varying degrees, and—very significantly— on completely different terms. Many people visit remote destinations for holidays, regularly commute to work, and often visit family, friends, and acquaintances in other countries. At the same time migration is on the rise, and Europe is currently seeing one of the largest influxes of refugees in recent history. The Transit project will initiate a series of commissions that focus attention on the many different kinds of travelers whose paths intersect every day in public transit nodes, or the spaces and means of transit in public contact-​and conflict zones. The overarching ambition of the project is partly to explore key themes in contemporary art pertaining to mobility, migration, and globalization, and partly to incorporate present-​day public transit nodes as specific sites of such explorations. The project also aims to experiment with multi-sited curating, which focuses on the network-​like connections between transit nodes and other locations, seeking to accentuate those links by creating an exhibition that spans a range of physically separate sites. The Transit project is currently in an open-​ended production phase and will be realized in the fall 2018 with a multisited exhibition within the institutional framework of KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces. Rather than providing a fully elaborated description of the yet to be realized project, therefore, I will present some insights into my current considerations concerning multi-sited research, and to share my thoughts on how such an approach might possibly contribute to, enrich, and challenge curatorial practices. Firstly, I will briefly introduce the sites of the exhibition project in order to give concrete points of reference for these reflections. Secondly, I  will discuss some methodological ambivalences I  am encountering in trying to undertake multi-sited curatorial research. This section will especially focus on the challenge involved in thinking beyond so-​called sedentary and nomadic notions of site. Finally, I  will argue in favor of a curatorial approach that seeks to ground the exploration of wide-​ranging networks in specific local sites and contexts.

The exhibition sites The exhibition Transit: Mobility and Migration in the Age of Globalisation will take place concurrently at a number of different sites. It will be realized at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, at the Copenhagen Central Train Station, at Køge Train Station, and as performance projects which will take place in transit on the local S-​train line E that travels from Copenhagen to Køge. Since KØS is Denmark’s only museum dedicated to art in public spaces, I believe that it is important to explore transit nodes, which currently constitute some of the most discussed and contested public spaces in the age of globalization.

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Multi-sited curating  81 The specific choices of the Copenhagen Central Train Station and the train stations located along the S-​train line E rest partly on the fact that as transit nodes, they function as contact zones for a wide range of different travelers. The choice is also partly based on the fact that these stations offer very concrete links to a wide range of other locations locally, nationwide, and internationally. As sites, the selected stations will thus make it possible to elucidate how present-​day urban societies are anchored in their local settings at the same time that they are embedded within wide-​ranging networks. These sites will also enable the project to examine how public transit nodes often constitute zones of social negotiation, crisscrossed by many different travelers and their various narratives, agendas, experiences, concerns, hopes, and dreams.

Transit nodes as zones of social negotiation: a concrete case The Copenhagen Central Train Station clearly constitutes one such a zone of social negotiation. It is a site where tourists, commuters, migrants, and refugees converge. In the summer of 2015, for example, large numbers of refugees began arriving at the station. (See Figure 6.1.) Volunteers that had gathered rather spontaneously greeted them there. Soon after, however, the Danish authorities evicted both the refugees and the volunteers because they were said to prevent the free flow of other travelers. The volunteers asked for a

Figure 6.1 Refugees and volunteers at Copenhagen Central Station, September 2015. Photo Mathias Løvgren Nielsen.

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82  Sabine Dahl Nielsen space where they would be able to help the arriving refugees without causing any disturbance, and after some prolonged negotiations they were allowed to use such a space on a temporary basis. According to the agreement, this permission was only valid until the spring of 2016. Since then, volunteers have attempted to help refugees on an ad hoc basis while searching the station area and to reorganize themselves—primarily by means of social media—as a bottom-​up-​driven organization called Unlimited Voices. This is, of course, just a roughly sketched example, but one which helps to illustrate how transit stations often function as potential sites of social conflict:  as places where different kinds of travelers come into contact, asymmetrical power relations are played out, and existing mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are constantly negotiated. In short, this example reveals how stations function as sites where mobile agents perform situations of “negotiation in motion,” as critical mobility theorist Ole B. Jensen has recently termed it.1

A sedentary versus nomadic notion of site So, what is a site? And more specifically, how do we think of and relate to urban transit nodes as such? Taking a closer look at the existing literature on the topic, two seemingly dichotomous theoretical positions can be discerned. As mobility researchers such as Tim Cresswell, Vincent Kaufmann, and Ole B.  Jensen have pointed out, there has been a shift from a sedentary to a nomadic perception of site, with a strong dividing line between, on the one hand, theories seeing mobilities through the lens of place, roots, spatial order, and belonging, and, on the other hand, theories focusing on flows, flux, and dynamism.2 Among exponents of the first position, research tends to focus primarily on encounters between supposedly sedentary local inhabitants and mobile foreigners. In this latter category one group, migrants, is viewed as aspiring to settle down permanently, while another, tourists, is seen as wanting to break out of their everyday settled lives, but only for a limited period of time.3 Both forms of mobility are regarded as presenting potential danger to local cultures, which are commonly conceived of as stable, homogeneous, and historically rooted communities. Contrary to this position, however, discourse on globalization tends to denounce the sedentary notion of site as a historical fiction.4 With this approach, there is a shift of attention within this discursive field, as calls are made for research into the “borderless and unbounded space of flows,” to quote sociologist Manuel Castells, the “sociology of flows,” as sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry have described it, and the “anthropology of movement,” as anthropologist Anna Tsing has termed it.5 The discourse has also been reinforced by Deleuze and Guattari, who have pursued the concept of nomadology, thus seeking to identify tendencies towards deterritorialization wherever they may be located and finding ways of amplifying them.6

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Multi-sited curating  83 A similar shift from a sedentary to a nomadic perception of site is also discernible in the widely acclaimed and often cited art historical theories of Miwon Kwon. In her book One Place After Another –​ Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity, Kwon accounts for three paradigms within the field of site-​specific art practices: the phenomenological, the social, and the discursive.7 It should be noted, that Kwon does not necessarily perceive these three paradigms as being located within a chronological span of time. Rather, she emphasizes the fact that all three can potentially coexist within the same period of time, even within the same piece of art. However, Kwon still employs a notion of site that tends to shift focus from site-​as-​locality to site-​as-​discursivity. Relating to site-​specific art practices, Kwon thus notes that a transition is currently taking place that alters the definition of site from, “a physical location –​grounded, fixed, actual –​to a discursive vector –​ ungrounded, fluid, virtual.”8

Site as assemblage: a third position? At the beginning of this article, I  mentioned that I  would like to share a methodological concern that I am grappling with in my curatorial research. The question is, is it possible to think beyond the sedentary and nomadic notions of site briefly outlined here? As a tentative answer to this question, I argue that critical mobility studies and multi-sited ethnography can provide some interesting—and, I think, in curatorial terms challenging—alternatives. In short, critical mobility studies and multi-sited ethnology suggest that sites should be explored as locations that are networked, yet  always also performed locally though materialized and socially embodied practices. What is productive in critical mobility studies and theories on multi-sited research is the attempt to complicate the idea that sites are always either stably grounded or characterized by a condition of constant flux. Thinking beyond sedentary or nomad conceptions of site, attention is drawn to the fact that sites should always be understood in their complex relationship to fluid and fixed, flow and stasis, friction and movement. According to critical mobility theorist Mimi Sheller, new approaches to the study of sites have been emerging over the past decades, especially within the Anglo-​American social sciences. Thus, researchers are increasingly “interrogating who and what is demobilized and remobilized across many different scales.”9 As Sheller notes: “Critical mobilities research is crucially concerned with friction, turbulence, immobility, dwelling, pauses, and stillness, as much as with speed or flow, and examines how these textured rhythms are produced, practiced, and represented in relation to the gendered, raced, classed (im)mobilities of particular others.”10 Referring back to my previous example of the Copenhagen Central Train Station, it becomes possible to complicate the idea that everyone and everything is in flux in the age of globalization. Taking a closer look at refugees, for example, it becomes evident that their mobility is often restricted or

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84  Sabine Dahl Nielsen prevented, that their itineraries are fraught with turbulence, and that their experiences of speed and flow on the train trip to Copenhagen often become punctuated by moments of unwanted immobility, for example in the station’s main hall while they, either with or without the assistance of volunteers, await new possibilities of remobilization. Flow, as it turns out, is not frictionless and unhindered. On the contrary, it is often opposed, differential, redirected, challenged, and stopped.

Artistic actualizations of an ethnographic approach By activating a practice of multi-sited curating, the Transit project attempts to draw attention to the fact that mobility flows are often characterized by conflicts, negotiations, and the playing out of asymmetrical power relations. As a methodological approach, multi-sited research has been developed within the last decades, primarily within the fields of ethnography and anthropology. It is a method of research that follows a topic, conflict, or social problem across a series of different sites. In his seminal text, “Ethnography In/​Of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-​Sited Ethnography,” the American anthropologist George E. Marcus proposed multi-sited research as a way to examine the increasing circulation of people, material objects, information, and signs through the process of globalization.11 According to Marcus, multi-sited research provides a method for analytically exploring translocal processes, groups of mobile agents in motion, as well as conflicts, negotiations, and social struggles that extend over multiple locations. In relation to the Transit project, travelers, for example, can be traced across several sites; they may start their journey in one place, arrive at another, stay there for a shorter or longer period of time, and then maybe end up settling down, continuing on to new destinations, or retracing their tracks. Following the travelers and conducting multi-sited research thus allows for various geographic locations, social networks, and power related issues to be examined. Danish poet Pejk Malinovski’s (b. 1976) research-​based art project This Room is helpful here as an example of how the commissioned art projects realized within the context of the Transit exhibition are being developed in accordance with the aforementioned reflections on multi-sited research. In the summer of 2015, Europe experienced a large influx of refugees and migrants from Syria, Africa, and other places. Images of people walking through Europe filled the news. With This Room, Malinovski raises the question as to where they all went. That is, the refugees who walked up the highways, who came on trains and trucks and boats, and who camped out at the Copenhagen Central Train Station. Many of them were shipped off to camps all over Denmark. These are former prisons, schools, tent camps, temporary structures fitted to house refugees. Often, however, these camps are situated in remote, rural areas, out of the public eye. With his project, Malinovski proposes to explore the refugees’ trajectories, their often

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Figure 6.2 Refugee camp in Næstved, Denmark, December 2015. Photo:  Mathias Løvgreen Nielsen.

conflict-​ridden experiences of public transit nodes along the way, as well as their current, limbo-​like stays in small rooms within the camps. Rooms such as these appear as transitional types of site, which the artist himself describes as “suitcases stuck between destinations.”12 (See Figures 6.2 and 6.3.) In accordance with Marcus’s theoretical reflections on multi-sited research, Malinovski’s project thus seeks to expose translocal processes characterized by asymmetrical power relations, groups of mobile agents in motion, as well as conflicts, negotiations, and social struggles that extend over multiple locations. During the initial phase of the project, Malinovski plans to visit a series of camps and establish relationships with refugees staying there. He will lend technical equipment to those refugees who wish to participate in the project, which will be used to keep audio diaries. Subsequently, Malinovski and the refugees will work collectively and collaboratively on shaping these audio diaries into presentable material, recounting various stories of flight and negotiations in motion. The audio recordings will lay the foundation for a radio documentary, a virtual reality film, and a series of public talks and debates. Formats that, using various aesthetic media and activating a multiplicity of sites and publics, seek to explore how today’s contested transit nodes can be perceived as locations that are networked, yet  always also negotiated locally though materialized and socially embodied practices.

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Figure 6.3 Rooyeem Afefi who at the time the picture was taken had been living in the refugee camp in Næstved 4  months and 12  days. May 2016. Photo: Ulrik Hasemann.

Potentials of multi-sited curating In my article, I have until now discussed how a curatorial strategy based on the perception of sites as networked assemblages clearly poses a challenge: how can we consider a multiplicity of trajectories and interconnections between sites, without neglecting the relevance of local contexts? Also, I have stressed how the strategy seeks to highlight the fact that mobility flows are often characterized by varying intensities, asymmetrical power relations, and unequal means of participation. Consequently, I  have argued that urgent questions such as who is moving, why, and under which specific conditions become possible to address when activating the notion of multi-sited curating in the medium of the exhibition format. Posing the aforementioned questions of course appears relevant when working on a curatorial project that deals specifically with conflict-​ridden transit nodes, and that does so by realizing a series of new commissions across a multiplicity of interrelated urban sites. However, it is important to stress at this point that the relevance of employing multi-sited research within the field of curating has the potential to exceed seemingly obvious cases such as the Transit project. Indeed, Marcus has reflected explicitly on so-​called “obvious” and “nonobvious” applications of multi-sited research strategies.13 As noted by anthropologists Simon Coleman and Pauline

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Multi-sited curating  87 von Hellermann, examples of such obvious cases might involve “tracing movements of migrant transnationalism in diaspora, or the history of the circulation of objects and techniques, or studying the relations of dispersed communities that define macro-​processes in the global flow of capital and expertise.”14 Transitions such as these usually remain overtly traceable. Different challenges are presented in those cases where the connections between sites are not as clearly discernible, or where the terms of tracking or following a material process do not work as smoothly in constituting multisited fields of study. However, the point is that, in direct continuation of Marcus’s reflections, although one might be working with sites that appear to be disjunctive in space or time and perhaps also in terms of social category, multi-sited research might still provide a productive and curatorially challenging mode of approach.

Modes of activation The question that arises is, how can multi-sited curating be activated in practice? There are not any simple or clear-​cut answers to this question. What is important to stress in this context, however, is that curatorial practice is thought of not only as a means of putting things on display but also as an active mode of knowledge production. My approach here relates to recent interest in the relationship between curating and research. It is an interest that has generated the notion of “the curatorial,” which, as curatorial theorist Simon Sheikh has pointedly stated, “is … not necessarily something that takes on the form and eventual character of the exhibition, but something that employs the thinking involved in exhibition-​making and researching.”15 Similarly, I am interested in the practice of multi-sited curating and its capacity to perform a certain kind of inquiry, which, by definition, transgresses traditional boundaries, in relation to institutions, sites, publics, and artistic media. With the Transit exhibition, for example, the attempt to perform such an inquiry implies that there are equally important components of the curatorial project which range from the process-​based coproduction of urban art projects, the staging of debates, talks, and seminars, and the screenings of films and videos, to the carrying out of collective and collaborative workshops with children and youngsters from local neighborhoods along the S-​train E line, and the production of a freely distributed publication in collaboration with the Danish newspaper Information. As to how multisited research can be conducted within this kind curatorial framework, my answer would be that the different components should strive to analyze, actualize, question, debate, and contribute to the potential negotiation of existing transit nodes and their various practices of mobility and migration. There are at least two already existing projects that are relevant to Transit as precedents: the research-​based video projects of the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann (b. 1955)  and the urban curatorial project Stop and Go:  Nodes of Transformation and Transition, the last of which is institutionally based

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88  Sabine Dahl Nielsen at the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna and seeks to explore nodes and hubs alongside major traffic corridors by means of multisited research.16 Both practices are characterized by being collective and collaborative in their approach, by critically examining issues pertaining to mobility and migration, and by conducting practice-​ based research which seeks to examine translocal processes characterized by uneven power relations, groups of mobile agents in motion, as well as conflicts, negotiations, and social struggles that extend over multiple sites. For Transit, I have commissioned a performance by artist Runo Lagomarsino (b. 1977), Every Day People Follow Signs Pointing to Some Place Which Is Not Their Home, which will be enacted by citizens with translocal backgrounds in train carriages along the route from Copenhagen to Køge. Another commissioned work includes a collective audio walk project by the multi-​media collective Rimini Protokoll, which both deals with and can be experienced in states of transition on the S-​train E line route. (See Figure 6.5.)

Figure 6.4 Intervention in public space: Trailer as foundation and substructure of a three-​dimensional path-​network installation equipped with loudspeakers in front of Tallinn’s ferry terminal. Photo: Hieslmair, Zinganel, Stop and Go, 2015.

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Figure 6.5 Rimini Protokoll, Remote Mitte, 2013. Photo: Ute Langkafel.

Finally, a large-​scale video project is also currently being developed by the artist collective Superflex. This project, which will use Køge Train Station as site, takes a nearby situated rampart as a historical point of departure for reflections on contemporary transit nodes as sites of power related conflicts and negotiations. As mentioned above, the Transit project also involves the production of a newspaper in collaboration with Information, which will be distributed for free at a series of stations along the train route. This newspaper will focus on today’s transit nodes as zones of conflicts and negotiations, and its contributions will span a variety of formats such as essays, reportages, portraits, dairy notes, interviews, short stories, and reproductions of works of art. The contributions will focus on issues pertaining to mobility, migration, and globalization, and they will be written, produced, and edited by journalists from Information, freelancers, researchers, authors, and artists, as well as different types of travelers, for example, refugees, migrants, commuters, and so on. In this way, the newspaper will address the exhibition related issues by activating a broad spectrum of different—and therefore most likely also conflicting—positions, thus potentially creating new spaces for political negotiations of existing conditions.17

Mobile methods In relation to the Transit exhibition, it is important to note that its various components not only deal with issues pertaining to mobility, migration,

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90  Sabine Dahl Nielsen and processes of globalization on a thematic level:  they are also reflected in the applied methodological approaches, as the various modes of inquiry are performed in states of transformation and transition. Here it is helpful to briefly touch upon the important questions relating to the methods of mobility research. Theorists such as Monika Büscher, John Urry, and Katian Witchger identify what they term “a dozen mobile methods.”18 These include artistic and architectural explorations of transit nodes, observing people’s movements (“follow the people”), participating in patterns of movement (“walking with,” “travelling with”), mobile video ethnography, virtual mobility through texting, websites, blogging, emails, and so on, mobile positioning methods (e.g., GPS), researching mobile memories (e.g., souvenirs, postcards, letters, etc.), mapping of sites, and researching slowing-​ down, redirecting, and friction places and routes. The Transit project will explore some of these methods, in order to question, debate and negotiate current understandings of what it means to be on the move. Rather than selecting the preferred methods singlehandedly as an individual curator, I  will work collectively and collaboratively in accordance with the criteria of multi-sited research.19 In practical terms, this means that I  am currently in the process of contacting and initiating collaborations with a long list of different agents from within the field. For example, a series of artists and artist collectives who address issues pertaining to migration and the politics of mobility, the National Rail Services, the Centre for Urban Mobility Studies, the research network Art, Culture and Politics in the “Postmigrant Condition,” architects and urban theorists working with mapping practices, the newspaper Information, and volunteers from the organization Unlimited Voices. The aim is to arrange a series of workshops, screenings, and discussions where such agents can meet, debate, disagree, and coproduce in different ways. In this way, I  hope to instigate collective and collaborative modes of knowledge production that can expand our understanding of urban transit nodes. Exactly what this will lead to in terms of concrete exhibition materials is, of course, difficult to tell at this early stage. Obviously, this methodological unpredictability adds to the curatorial challenges. However, I would argue that taking on these challenges also turns the curatorial into a more interesting, complex, and politically engaging practice.

Notes 1 Ole B. Jensen, Staging Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2013). 2 See Tim Cresswell, On the Move:  Mobility in the Modern Western World (London:  Routledge, 2006); Vincent Kaufmann:  Re-​thinking Mobility: Contemporary Sociology (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2002), and Jensen, Staging Mobilities. 3 Regina Römhild, “Practised Imagination:  Tracing Transnational Networks in Crete and Beyond,” Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 11 (2002): 159–​90.

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Multi-sited curating  91 4 Helmuth Berking, “Raumtheoretische Paradoxien im Globalisierungsdiskurs,” in Die Macht des Lokalen in einer Welt ohne Grenzen, ed. Helmuth Berking (New York and Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2006). 5 See Manuel Castell, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1996); Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), and Anna Tsing, “Conclusion:  The Global Situation” (2002), in The Anthropology of Globalization:  A Reader, eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (Malden, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell, 2008): 453–​87. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). 7 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 8 Ibid.,  29–​30. 9 Mimi Sheller, “Mobility” (2011), 2.  Retrieved from sociopedia.isa:  www. sagepub.net/​isa/​resources/​pdf/​Mobility.pdf. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 George E.  Marcus, “Ethnography in/​ of the World System:  The Emergence of Multi-​ Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–​117. 12 The quote is from the artist’s project description: “Many of them [the refugees arriving in 2015] were shipped on to camps, all over Denmark. Former prisons, schools, tent camps, temporary structures fitted to house refugees. Often these camps are situated in remote, rural areas, out of the public eye. I grew up close to one of these camps in the 80’s and my parents were involved in helping refugees in the integration process, they helped with legal work, called public institutions, checked in with lawyers, we had communal dinners, my brother and I played with the Palestinian, Turkish, Iraqi children. But there was always the possibility that they might be sent back the next day, that they might be moved somewhere else. One of my strongest memories from this camp were the small rooms, where 8–​10 people would sleep on bunk beds, all their belongings stuffed in big suitcases. The room itself was a kind of suitcase, stuck between destinations.” 13 George E. Marcus, “What Is At Stake –​And Is Not –​In The Idea And Practice Of Multi-​Sited Ethnography,” Canberra Anthropology 22, no. 2 (1999): 7. 14 Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann, Multi-​Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (New  York and London: Routledge, 2011), 3. 15 See Simon Sheikh’s contribution to this volume, and Simon Sheikh, “Towards the Exhibition as Research,” in Curating Research, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (London and Amsterdam: Open Editions and de Appel, 2015), 33–​34. 16 For additional information on the practice of Ursula Biemann, see www. geobodies.org/​. For further insight into the Stop and Go project, see Michael Zinganel and Michael Hieslmair, “Stop and Go,” JAR: Journal of Artistic Research, no. 14 (2017). Retrieved 22 January 2019, from www. researchcatalogue.net/view/330596/330597​. 17 Here it should be noted that the mentioned projects are currently being developed. They are therefore still susceptible to substantial changes. 18 Monika Büscher, John Urry, and Katian Witchger, Mobile Methods (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

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92  Sabine Dahl Nielsen 19 Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann, Multi-​Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (New  York and London: Routledge, 2011), 22–​23.

Bibliography Berking, Helmuth. “Raumtheoretische Paradoxien im Globalisierungsdiskurs.” In Die Macht des Lokalen in einer Welt ohne Grenzen. Edited by Helmuth Berking. New York and Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2006. Büscher, Monika, John Urry, and Katian Witchger. Mobile Methods. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Coleman, Simon and Pauline von Hellermann. Multi-​Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods. New  York and London: Routledge, 2011. Cresswell, Tim:  On the Move:  Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980. Jensen, Ole B. Staging Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2013. Kaufmann, Vincent. Re-​Thinking Mobility: Contemporary Sociology. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2002. Kwon, Miwon, One Place after Another: Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Lash, Scott and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage, 1994. Marcus, George E. “Ethnography in/​of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-​ Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–​117. —​—​—​. “What Is at Stake –​and Is Not –​in the Idea and Practice of Multi-​Sited Ethnography.” Canberra Anthropology 22, no. 2 (1999), 6–​14. Römhild, Regina. “Practised Imagination: Tracing Transnational Networks in Crete and Beyond.” Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 11 (2002), 159–​90. Sheikh, Simon. “Towards the Exhibition as Research.” In Curating Research. Edited by Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, 32–​46. London and Amsterdam: Open Editions and de Appel, 2015. Sheller, Mimi. “Mobility” (2011). Retrieved from sociopedia.isa: www.sagepub.net/​ isa/​resources/​pdf/​Mobility.pdf.

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Part II

Exhibitions and/​as research

Connections between exhibition making and scholarly research are nothing new. It would seem, however, that a certain way of conceptualizing and practicing such connections curatorially is currently gaining momentum. Rather than understanding exhibitions as more or less separate end products of prior and concluded research processes, or as the translation and dissemination of the results of such research to the public, the new approaches addressed in this section emphasize the analytical processes of exhibition making itself, and insist on the poetic and creative insights stemming from this practice.1 The reflections into the entanglements of research and exhi­ bition making presented here are based on practical curatorial work or analyses of previous or existing exhibitions as case studies. Thus some, indeed most, studies are autoethnographically informed, while some are based on readings of other people’s curatorial practices. This mixture of approaches and subject matter creates an interesting dynamic between the contributions, which despite their engagement with the same overall theme of the intricate connections between exhibition and research, do so quite differently. The juxtaposition of these diverse texts hopefully generates fruitful frictions that in turn will bring interesting new insights to the fore. The interdisciplinary strategy and ambition that permeates this anthology is most visible in this section through the analyzed cases based on exhibitions of art, cultural, and medical history. This interest inform the essays in more subtle ways as well, when for instance art historians take inspiration from cultural history in their analyses or when exhibitions within the framework of medicine-​or cultural history employ artistic tools and means of display. Art historian Simon Sheikh’s chapter “Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance” reflects on how one conducts research for an exhibition, and how this research influences the exhibition itself. On the basis of ideas of artistic research, he attempts to establish some working definitions of curatorial research, and different methods and outcomes, to address whether there is an entity we can call a “research exhibition.” Sheikh differentiates between academic and professional research, and suggests how these two aspects of exhibition research can lead to a “curating differently,” in his terms.

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94  Exhibitions and/as research In his chapter “Exhibitions as Research, Curator as Distraction,” anthropologist Peter Bjerregaard takes his own curatorial work on the exhibition Collapse –​ Human Being in an Unpredictable World, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, as a point of departure for thinking about research and curating. He argues that the making of an exhibition should not merely reflect and disseminate established knowledge, but produce new knowledge in the process. Using his own experience in curating Collapse, Bjerregaard suggests distraction as a way of generating new knowledge, both curatorially and in the public. Similarly, anthropologists Frida Hastrup and Nathalia Brichet analyze their own curatorial practices in the making of the exhibition Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark at the Moesgaard Museum outside of Aarhus, Denmark. They explore the process of curating the exhibition in their jointly written chapter, “Curating a Mild Apocalypse: Researching Anthropocene Ecologies through Analytical Figures.” The authors explore research-​based exhibitions as thoroughly collaborative, generative, and analytical feats, arguing for the need for curators-​cum-​researchers to take center stage as the responsible creators of the perspectives communicated. A further collaborative contribution, “Curating Experimental Entanglements,” is provided by curator and medical humanities researcher Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley who has an interdisciplinary background including theoretical neuroscience and science communication, and research assistant Caroline Heje Thon with a background in biology and art history. In the essay, the authors analyze their own process during the making of the exhibition Mind the Gut at the Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Instead of curators making the exhibition with factual input from scientists and then commissioning artists to comment or critique after the exhibition is complete, the authors sought to design and create a museological experiment in cocuration between scientists, artists, and museum staff, with the exhibition process itself becoming research material that provided insights into the possibilities and pitfalls of cocurating. In her chapter “The Forgotten and the Forgettable: The Making of The World Goes Pop and Other Stories,” art historian Flavia Frigeri examines exhibition making as a hub for research, when revisiting or indeed recuperating “that which is forgotten” in the exhibition The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern. She addresses the challenges and outcomes that research-​ driven exhibitions offer, and asks how they contribute to the reframing of contemporary institutional practices, while also rewriting art history. In the final chapter of this section, “Looters, Smugglers, and Collectors: Rethinking Models of Ownership Research and How to Mediate It through the Form of the Exhibition,” artist and curator Tone Hansen asks where research ends, and an exhibition begins. Taking the exhibition In Search of Matisse at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, south of Oslo, as her point of departure, Hansen reflects upon the possibilities of there being

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Exhibitions and/as research 95 a moment when the institution leaves further investigations to the audience, and how provenance research and artistic interventions can inform and influence an institutional understanding of a collection, not to mention polemical issues of ownership and heritage. Taken together, the curatorial challenges presented in the essays in this section thus revolve around the relations between exhibition and research as seen from different perspectives—perspectives that perhaps challenge and enrich each other?

Note 1 Mattias Bäckström, Att bygga innehåll med utställningar. Utställningsproduktion som forskningsprocess (Lund:  Nordic Academic Press, 2016)  and Peter Bjerregaard, Exhibitions as Research. Experimental Methods in Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 2019) are just two recent texts that deal with these issues.

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7  Curating and research An uneasy alliance Simon Sheikh

In the ever expanding field of curatorial studies, issues around the future of the discipline, in terms of various ways of practicing, are, not surprisingly, quite central, and therefore so is the question of how what constitutes research, both in terms of a specific curatorial mode of research, and in terms of the object of study is defined and delimited. Moreover, both of these aspects, intrinsically linked as they are, are also suffering from a split identity, which is fundamentally caught up between two modes of knowledge production. Two modes that always shift between being complementary and conflicting: the idea of research in an academic sense, and the idea of practice in a professional sense. On the one hand, then, the curatorial is examined and executed as an academic form, and on the other, curating is seen as a practice within galleries, museums, biennales, and other forms of exhibition-​making. And more often than not, these streams are seen as separate, particularly in terms of research methods and aims: there is an apparent meta-​level of curating, sometimes called the curatorial, with its aspects of theorizing, historicizing, and politicizing the practice, and on another level the hands-​on, realpolitik of exhibition-​making, and its concerns with installation, funding and publicness. It is thus not only noteworthy, but downright striking, that the first educational programs in curating were facilitated not by universities but by art institutions, such as the Le Magasin in Grenoble, the Whitney in New York, and De Appel in Amsterdam. Such programs were only to be integrated into the university structure proper with the advent of programs like those at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths in London, but again it is crucial to recall that these academic programs were not only practice based courses, but also instituted by art schools and art departments rather than theory and history based academia, such as, notably, art history. In other words, even when formally academic, curatorial study programs, came out of the training of practitioners, not theorists, even if this field of study has now also migrated back to art history departments in the form of curatorial studies, exhibition history, and the like. This leads to a paradoxical situation with regard to research methods, and attests to a rather major difficulty in even approaching a uniform use of the term research in conjunction with

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98  Simon Sheikh curating, despite the solidification of curatorial discourse; that is, curatorial speak (both as shop talk and lingo) and curatorial education (as witness by the proliferation of curating programs around the world). So, curating as practice, or, if you will, method, and the history of curating and curators, has become an object of study, while at the same time contemporary curating claims itself to be a form of researching: a practice that employs research not only in the preparation of its projects, but also is a specific form of research that is, in a word, curatorial. This somewhat paradoxical situation is, however, not only present, constitutive even, of curating as a field or object of study, but also evident in the relation between curatorial educational programs, particularly those based in universities, and the professional field of practitioners, of curators and curating departments and teams in galleries, museums, and other art institutions. Furthermore, I  would argue, that we are currently witnessing a double movement of simultaneous contraction and extraction. That is to say, practitioners of curating more often than not see themselves in opposition to academic studies, or a certain form of research culture, and thus distance themselves from the curatorial, while, at the same time, a number of practitioners and arts organizations try to see themselves as research based, or following certain trajectories, or as serving as places for enacted research. Such art institutions include Grizedale and Showroom in the United Kingdom, BAK and CASCO in the Netherlands, and Betonsalon in France. Beyond Western Europe, there are places like Clark House in India and Raw Material Company in Senegal, to name but a few. As small-​ scale institutions, these initiatives do not research their collections, which is where museums would traditionally locate their research, but rather pursue questions about the social and political interactions of contemporary art and society. Nevertheless, this is, of course, a false dichotomy. Rather, we are dealing with different concepts of the curatorial, and questions of what constitutes research and public engagement, as most public institutions today need to be not only spectacular, and think of audiences and constituencies in quantitative ways, they also need to be research based, and educational, thinking of their audiences and constituencies in qualitative ways. Indeed, an initiative like the L’internationale confederation of six major European art museums, working through their collections and programming through critical and postcolonial theory, is an example of how notions of curatorial research is becoming increasingly institutionalized, also in the professional field outside of academia itself.1 Initially, the term “the curatorial” was merely an adjective that related to matters and styles of curating (including curating in the expanded field, such as formats that did away with the exhibition itself), but has, in the last decade curiously taken on the status of a noun, indicating a notion that not only relates to curating, but is also separate from it. In a sense, it is an expansion and abstraction of the practices of curating. In their recent anthology entitled The Curatorial, which includes the telling subtitle A Philosophy of

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Curating and research 99 Curating, Jean-​Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff make a case for the curatorial as separate from curating: If “curating” is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then “the curatorial” operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-​ up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge. So to drive home a distinction between “curating” and “the curatorial” means to emphasize a shift from the staging of the event to the actual event itself: its enactment, dramatization and performance.2 The use of the curatorial is here, then, an analytical tool and a philosophical proposition, and by indication, a separate form of knowledge production that may actually not involve the curating of exhibitions, but rather the process of producing knowledge and making curatorial constellations that can be drawn from the historical forms and practices of curating. The curatorial could thus be posited as a form of research, not just into exhibition-​making, but a specific mode of research that may or may not take on the spatial and temporal form of an exhibition. After the advent of the curatorial and post-​research, the exhibition would, so to speak, simply be the designation for any project realized through curating and all that this implies in terms of addressees and research methods. The curatorial is, in this sense, not necessarily something that takes on the form and eventual character of the exhibition, but something that employs the thinking involved in exhibition-​ making and researching. In the expanded field of curating, the curatorial is itself an activity of research; although there is no consensus definition of research, it would seem to encompass varying, and sometimes divergent, ideas of the exhibition as a form of research. The curatorial project is a vehicle for researching into something specific—into a particular field of interest or topic, into a particular cultural location or local artistic practice—or for cultural research understood as experimenting with various forms of public address and congregation, building, or even antagonizing communities, whether designated and located or universal and unknown, inoperative or becoming. Within exhibitions or otherwise, the curatorial is that which can research into, and onto, an object of study that does not necessarily stem from artistic production and development per se. Rather, the aesthetic and to a large degree, the art world, are here seen as tools for investigating something other than art, for presenting ideas, research results, and project outcomes in a different discourse from other forms such as politics proper, sociology, science, journalism, etc. What is implied here, and also what is at stake in a more general and political sense, is the curatorial as a specific system of knowledge production and its relation to other forms of research and an overall research culture—and thus to the relationship between knowledge and power—and,

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100  Simon Sheikh moreover, between knowing and unknowing and what this means in relation to empowering subjects, groups, and movements.

Two notions of research However, before making such claims for curating as research-​based and capable of contributing—negatively or positively, critically or affirmatively—to a general research culture and broader issues of power and knowledge relations, it is pertinent to define what exactly is meant by curatorial research, a notion easily bandied about, particularly in the current debates, denigrations and celebrations of so-​called artistic research. Surely artistic research, whatever we might mean by that or think about that, would be the first cousin of any notion of curatorial research we can possibly think up. Would the idea of curating research have any momentum or relevance were it not for the now decade-​long discussion on the merits and methods, trials and tribulations of artistic research as an entity—whether discussed in the academy as practice-​ based PhDs or used as the main reference point for something as hegemonic as dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012, which concluded with a symposium on artistic research, in collaboration with a number of practice-​based PhD programs?3 Without becoming immersed, or even lost, in that particular discussion and its trajectories, it might be useful to recall two very different translations of the English word “research” found in the German languages. In English, research covers very different types of researching, which can then be distinguished through various prefixes such as “artistic.” But in German research translates to either Recherché or Forschung. The first term, Recherché, indicates looking into something, as when a reporter looks for sources, witnesses, and stories, but also in terms of checking these for accuracy. In this sense, research is not only about getting your facts straight but also about finding a story and an angle on this story, or a sort of framing of the real. This notion of research is obviously also found in other production processes, ranging from consumer research to location scouting. Within artistic practice, it also always has a place, as when an artist researches a topic, looks into an archive, finds and experiments with materials, and so on, in ways not fundamentally different to those of a journalist or fact checker in a news agency, and which is why this work is often not the work of the artist him or herself but rather delegated to the studio assistant. The same goes for curatorial work, in which there is always research about possible artists and artworks within a given frame. Although rarely celebrated in contemporary debates on artistic research, this is the most widespread form of curatorial research, to the point of being presupposed as an almost unquestioned tradition, which is perhaps precisely why it receives so little attention. Whereas Recherché is to be understood mainly in terms of journalistic research, Forschung implies a scientific model of research, and thus an entirely different relation to subjects and objects. If journalism understands itself as an endeavor that uncovers the truth by looking at the facts, and thus constructing a story, or what we can call a discourse, from what it finds,

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Curating and research 101 then science works, principally and traditionally, in the opposite direction— that is, from the discourse to the objects. Science implies a specific way of looking, through apparatuses of knowledge, as exemplified by the microscope and the laboratory, which also goes for ethnographic and sociological models of field research. Forschung is thus the translation of research in the scientific sense, meaning that it not only uses specific methods of investigation but, moreover, that it operates with hypotheses and propositions that—contra to journalism—can then be tested against the behavior of its objects of study. A thesis may be proven, discarded, or modified depending on the results of research. So, unlike Recherché, which treats its findings as facts, Forschung treats them as uncertainties and concepts that need to be defined and may contradict the preemptive thesis about them. If, according to the method of recherché, a certain story turns out to be untrue or, for that matter, not interesting enough to be newsworthy, this does not, in itself, lead to a modification of journalistic methods. In science, however, a thesis will have be rejected if it transpires that molecules do not act as expected under the specific experimental conditions. The procedures for research in the sciences thus constantly undergo transformations, which, in turn, transform science itself and its paradigms of truth—at least in principle. The location of research is not only a matter of hierarchy, but also indicative of its methodology. Whereas Recherché could take place in the archive or out in the field, Forschung implies the spatial production of specific sites for research—such as the laboratory and clinic—antiseptic spaces in which things can be isolated and thus studied and examined. Moreover, the formulation and execution of the thesis indicates a notion of time, or a project contained within a certain timeframe. Scientific research must not only provide a working thesis but also to do so within a given timeframe. Research funding is never provided in a continuous stream, but always limited to specific timeframes, and success in achieving formulated goals will determine whether a research team will be able to have its next project funded. The parallels with curatorial research are only too obvious—the historical similarities between the laboratory and the white cube of the gallery as spaces for isolated viewing and experimenting with objects are self-​evident. But the notion of a handpicked specialist project team is nowadays also all-​pervasive in the making of exhibitions, particularly those with clear research objectives. While it is obvious that almost any exhibition employs Recherché to a lesser or greater extent, not all exhibitions can truly be thought of as Forschung, since they can lack a thesis, proposition, or laboratory. We must, then, ask which curatorial research projects and exhibitions are built upon a thesis that is to be proven or disproven.

The exhibition as research This proposition can be radicalized further. Let us presume that a curatorial project did have a thesis, which it set out to investigate through its research

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102  Simon Sheikh and present in an exhibition, proving or disproving the thesis; could this lead to the exhibition presenting its own failure? Furthermore, would this lead to a questioning of its research method and to the transformation of curatorial processes and institutional practices? Can the exhibition be a site for research and, if so, can one, then also think of it as a type:  the research exhibition? We would then have to understand the exhibition as a proposition, rather than thesis proper. Whereas the thesis can be proven or disproven, the proposition advances its claims along a different rationale, namely positing its ideas as claims which, if followed, would then make certain things possible, not only logically and philosophically but also, in our case, aesthetically and politically. In this way, invoking the proposition allows for speculation, or for the curatorial as political imaginary. The curatorial project—including its most dominant form, the ­exhibition—should thus not only be thought of as a form of mediation of research but also as a site for carrying out this research, as a place for enacted research. Research is here not only that which comes before realization but also that which is realized throughout actualization. That which would otherwise be thought of as formal means of transmitting knowledge, such as design structures, display models, and perceptual experiments, is here an integral part of the curatorial mode of address, its content production, and its ­proposition. In a historical sense, institutions of art mediate, and as such are educational platforms, and curators can therefore not be distinguished from educators in any principal sense. The museum, and by extension curatorial processes, inscribes both subjects and objects in specific relations of power and knowledge—of the nation-​state, of Western civilization, and so on—in a transfer of knowledge and direction of desires and agencies that are educational, entertaining, narrative, and/​or informative—all traits that are as often complementary as they are conflicting. The cultural theorist Tony Bennett has aptly termed these spatial and discursive techniques of the curator “the exhibitionary complex” as a means of describing the complex assemblage of architecture, display, collections, and publicness that characterize the field of institutions, exhibition making, and curating: The exhibitionary complex was […] a response to the problem of order, but one which worked […] in seeking to transform that problem into one of culture –​a question of winning hearts as well as the disciplining and training of bodies. As such, its constituent institutions reversed the orientations of the disciplinary apparatuses in seeking to render the forces and principles of order visible to the populace  –​transformed, here, into a people, a citizenry –​rather than vice versa.4 Whereas the “strictly” disciplinary institutions (in a Foucaultian sense), such as schools, prisons, factories, and so on, tried to manage the population through direct inflictions of order onto the actual bodies and thus behavior,

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Curating and research 103 the exhibitionary complex added persuasion to coercion. Exhibitions were meant to please as well as to teach, and as such needed to involve the spectator in an economy of desire as well as in relations of power and knowledge. In a sense, the exhibitionary complex was also meant to be empowering, in that you could identify with the histories on display and act accordingly. In this way, exhibition making was directly connected to the construction of a national body, and as such it was involved in identitarian as well as territorial politics of representation. The knowledge that became available to the subject was a means of inscribing that subject within a given nation-​ state, or of cultivating the populace into exactly that:  a people, a nation. But it also always did so by positing an other: by opposing civilization to primitivism, and by contrasting not just subjecthood with the objectification of others, but with a separation between those who know, and those who believe: primitive peoples, women, and children.

Genealogy as critique Bennett of course both draws and expands upon the work of Michel Foucault, who himself had questioned the very premises of establishing the human sciences as scientific, that is, as Forschung rather than Recherché, and who instead pointed to the logical and philosophical impossibility of such a project: “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation.”5 Foucault’s genealogy is thus a form of critique, as scholar Rudi Visker has pointed out.6 However, in order to produce such a critique, we will have to look beyond Foucault’s short essay on genealogy, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” because it does not tell us much about how genealogy must be written, but rather how it must not be written, in a long series of rejections, and instead compare it to the methodology, however hesitant, found in his contemporaneous Archeology of Knowledge, published in 1969. And we must do so, fully aware that the move between genealogy and archeology is a slippery and, intellectually, quite hazardous one, because it constitutes one of the major, if not the historically central debate, in the reception history of Foucault’s work. For a commentator like Visker, genealogy is a radicalization of archeology, what he sometimes even calls (an)archaeology, in the way that it resists philosophy as a “science” at every step, but rather sees it as a politics, as not only a theory of practices, such medicine, and so on, but as theory as practice, meaning that theory must be practiced, as in the study of specific power-​knowledge relations and, if you will, institutions, such as the prison. But if all discourse is the result of power and knowledge constituting each other as objects and producers, what are the structural workings of something like a discourse? That is not its purpose or reversals, but workings, or mechanics (terms absolutely crucial in transposing this discussion to exhibition-​making). Whereas genealogical critique unfolded itself through the analysis of local centers, or case studies, archaeology provided

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104  Simon Sheikh a long methodological, and antimethodological thesis, found in the series of counter intuitive moves, known as nothing less grand than the Archaeology of Knowledge, which is a strange, drawn out discussion of statements, objects, modalities, concepts, and strategies. Terms that all sounds, amazingly, as if descriptions of the curatorial, which it arguably could be, as it relates to disciplines and history, as what is called discursive formations: Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation.7 Such formations could be natural history, political economy, psychiatry, or medicine, where statements make up a field of relations with both regularity and rarity, but where it is not the individual statement or the individual speaking subject that matters, but rather how a discourse is produced as a whole by the relations created by various statements and their repetition, establishing both the place/​context for the statements and their limitations. The statement is thus different from the sentence or the proposition, that are grammatical units, and dependent on a referent, whereas the statement is the very “fact of language,” and thus “neither visible nor hidden.”8 Lastly, statements are limited in number, and also defined by their field, and not easily transposed—they always have a specific form of additivity.9 For example, where successive statements within one particular formation, such as medical science, will not only supplement each other, but often also annihilate a previous statement—a particular discovery of the physiological connection between organs and thus their “treatment” will disprove another earlier one, and thus erase it from the discourse. Now, this is not so much the case in our context, although de-​presentations and exclusions constantly occur. But even when something has been written out of history, there is no logical reason that it cannot be rediscovered, reinstated, repeated, whether thinking of a particular exhibition, event or artist, or whether thinking about a specific technology of exhibitions that has been out of vogue or practice, but precisely for that reason is re-​presented into exhibitionary practice.

Curating differently Obviously, the curator is not the same as the scientist or doctor, and may not even be equivalent with our discursive formation—if curating, contemporary art, and art history can at all be said to constitute such a formation, whether separately or in some combination. A curator does not lay down a law: indeed, his or her decisions and authority can always be questioned, by colleagues and artists, as well as by the public. The public can refuse, directly

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Curating and research 105 or indirectly, to engage, to be persuaded, or to be involved. There is, contra Kant, no aesthetical demand to be followed by curatorial authority and the power-​knowledge machine that is the museum. In this manner, exhibitions as statements are then not dependent on individual subjects and their agency, but entangled in a web of statements, present as past, that both contradict and condition each other. And you are, principally, always allowed to disagree with the selection. Which is not to say that they do not deal in cultural hierarchies and hegemonies, but rather that these are not definite, but rather that they work with inclusion and exclusion, representation and de-​presentation as constitutive of the field, and thus with an essential instability despite the perceived solidity of tradition, nation, and the walls of the institution, or what can be established as the canon. Now, in contemporary art and from art history we know that only very little is won by trying to include the excluded in the canon, since it works and maintains itself exactly through this inclusion/​exclusion game. The inclusion of the excluded will again always be limited to only a select few individuals from whichever chosen excluded group, who will then have to suffer the indignity of representing this group forever. The canon only holds individuals, as works or subjects, and not contexts and histories. Instead of trying to expand the canon, it should be disposed of altogether, and perhaps begin to be thought of as what philosopher Stefan Nowotny has termed “Anti-​Canonization” in his reading of Foucault’s genealogy, and the notion of differentiality: […] this knowledge is differential because it does not allow itself, being resistive, to be subjected to any authorized discursive field, to any authorization by a dominant discourse, but instead recognizes the power effects found in the separation of knowledge, yet without composing itself into a new totality of knowledge. Hence as plural knowledge it also does not “organize” itself under a unified form, but rather in an open, non-​ dialectical game of concurrence. For precisely this reason, the Foucaldian genealogy can be concerned with “preparing a historical knowledge of struggles and introducing this knowledge into current tactics.”10 Nowotny goes on to list how this led to Foucault’s political commitments in the 1970s into antipsychiatry, prisoners’ rights, and sexual morals, and how these struggles were also the topic of his archaeological research and intellectual work, and he suggests that an investigation of institutional critique, as a theoretical proposition and artistic practice, should today follow the same route. There are two features here that need to be remarked upon; first, the connection of genealogy to social struggles, and second, the transposition of the genealogical critique into the field, and practice, of art. The first feature is crucial, in an understanding of not only the theoretical “radicality” of Foucault’s genealogy, but of his idea of practicing (radical) theory:  the

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106  Simon Sheikh prison was not only to be analyzed and criticized, but this critique and analysis must also take the form of activism, of politics proper, and, moreover, in a form consistent with the analytical findings and theoretical ­propositions— no straightforward task, surely. In other words, genealogy as practice meant not only writing case studies, but also activist work in the very same field of problematization. As curators we should aspire to this as well. Regarding the call for an artistic practice of differentiality, I would not only agree with this position, but also claim it as an already ongoing practice, even if marginal and occasional (and if Foucauldian, how could it be otherwise?). To this I would add exhibition-​making, and I mean truly add it in the sense of transforming its currency and an acknowledgment of something currently lacking, if not downright actually wrong: as if a practice of curating could be an anti-​canonical project, if only imaginatively, and to see if not also the exhibition can also act like “both battle and weapon, strategy and shock, struggle and trophy or wound, conjecture and vestige, strange meeting and repeatable scene” as Foucault himself hoped for his books in the beginning of the 1970s.11

Notes 1 The confederation consists of the following museums:  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands). 2 Jean-​Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff, “Preface,” in The Curatorial –​ A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-​Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ix. 3 Chaired by d13 Head of Department, Chus Martinez, the symposium, entitled simply “On Artistic Research,” had the participation of PhD programs from no less than twelve different European art schools, and brought what had been a niche debate to the center stage of contemporary art. Martinez herself describes artistic research as follows: “When I speak of artistic research, I am not speaking of the exhaustive research undertaken by artists before making a work. Nor should one confuse artistic research with contemporary art’s proximity to the social sciences and their methods.” What is implied here, is, again, the idea not that art is different from science, but it also produces its own methods of research. See, Chus Martinez, “Unexpress the Expressible,” in dOCUMENTA(13): The Book of Books, ed. Carolyn Christov-​Bakargiev (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 495. 4 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 84. 5 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.’ In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), 386. 6 Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault –​Genealogy as Critique (London: Verso, 1995). 7 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.  M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 38.

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Curating and research 107 8 Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 109. 9 Ibid., 124. 10 Stefan Nowotny, “Anti-​ Canonization,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, eds. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: Mayfly, 2009), 26–​27. 11 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), xxxviii.

Bibliography Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” In Thinking about Exhibitions. Edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. London:  Routledge, 1996, 84. Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M.  Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. —​—​—​. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, 369–​91. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press, 1998. —​—​—​. History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge, 1996. Martinez, Chus. “Unexpress the Expressible.” In dOCUMENTA(13):  The Book of Books. Edited by Carolyn Christov-​ Bakargiev, 493–​ 95. Ostfildern:  Hatje Cantz, 2012. Martinon, Jean-​ Paul, ed. The Curatorial  –​A  Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Nowotny, Stefan. “Anti-​Canonization.” In Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, 26–​27. London: Mayfly, 2009. Raunig, Gerald and Gene Ray, eds. Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. London: Mayfly, 2009. Visker, Rudi. Michel Foucault –​Genealogy as Critique. London: Verso, 1995.

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8  Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction Peter Bjerregaard

Distraction as a way of knowing The role of the curator has been much discussed within the art world for decades, as curating has turned into an independent professional and theoretical field related specifically to the conception and organization of exhibitions.1 In contrast, in museums of cultural history curating tends to refer to a more withdrawn position of a person doing research in the museum’s collections. However, the contours of a new conception of the role of exhibitions and curating are currently emerging, as theorists and practitioners start to talk about exhibitions as research, rather than the dissemination of research.2 Thus there has been a tendency to acknowledge the exhibition as a particular site for knowledge generation in itself, rather than a place to disseminate knowledge that has been produced elsewhere. The question is, however, what this means for the role of the curator. If the curator was once the one who knew about the objects and could communicate their meanings, what is the role of the curator if the exhibition is about knowing something new? The following essay argues that the modus operandi for curating exhibitions that aim for knowing something new is based in distraction. Conventionally, distraction may be seen as the opposite of knowing. Distraction is about not focusing and being led off track. But sometimes we need to be led off track to discover something new, rather than reproduce what we considered relevant. In this sense, distraction reflects an order deprived of the logics of relevance. My particular interest in distraction as a way of knowing is related to the cross-​ disciplinary potential of museum-​ based research. Whereas researchers tend to see their relevance within their own disciplinary field only, I will argue that distraction is a prerequisite for engaging researchers in collaborations that go beyond their regular disciplinary perspectives that allow for researchers to be influenced by other perspectives. The first part of this essay will consider the concept of the curator to specify not simply a particular role in the making of the exhibition, but a role in cultivating alternative ways of making knowledge within a research

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Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction 109 institution. Conceived of in this way, curating is a continuous process within an institution that has as its specific aim to break with regimes of efficiency in order to grow, instead, a culture of curiosity. I  will then focus on the making of COLLAPSE  –​ Human Being in an Unpredictable World that opened at the Museum of Cultural History (MCH), University of Oslo in May 2017. Through an account of the making of this exhibition I will point toward concrete moves of distraction that helped to turn it into a knowledge-​generating process.

Curating, research, and distraction One of my first personal experiences of curating was the opening workshop of a research project called Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo in 2011, which I  arranged together with Austrian-​based curator and anthropologist, Alexandra Schüssler. Apart from introducing the research project, this workshop was intended to mark the start of an institutional change aimed at generating a more playful and challenging approach to research.3 We gathered around forty people to contribute to the project. Inspired by Plato’s “symposion,” we did not place the participants in an ordinary seminar setting, but around a lavishly laid dinner table. On the table we had made a collection of what one may call the unconscious of the museum: archival cards, pigments, film rolls, wax heads of ethnographic “types,” and so on—that is, objects that had been stowed away, not used, and no longer meant for presentation to an audience. As such, the materiality of the museum was literally brought to the table, hopefully evoking an understanding of the role of the senses and materials in academic production in the participants. Presentations were held at the dinner table and with each presentation some kind of activity took place. Most of the participants in the workshop praised the table for its strange beauty. Others complained that the table, and the activities arranged around it, made it impossible to follow what was being said during the presentations. For one presentation, assistants circulated the table with posters accompanying the presentation (which made one of the participants compare the situation to a boxing ring circled by number girls). For another presentation, soil was passed from hand to hand among the listeners during a presentation on reburials in post–​civil war Uganda. While some participants highly appreciated the table and activities around it as memorable performances, most complained about an overload of information and impressions. In other words, the whole event was distracting, with the form obscuring information. In hindsight, I realized that rather than taking this as a critique, distraction could be very telling of what curating is about. If considering exhibitions as research means that we want exhibitions to generate new insights and not “simply” disseminate what we already know from research, then distraction

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110  Peter Bjerregaard

Figure 8.1 The symposium. Workshop participants gathered around a table laid with objects from the hidden parts of the museum. Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Lill-​Ann Chepstouw-​Lusty.

could be a strategy for turning our eyes toward the unexpected, or what we thought was not relevant. We can consider this kind of distraction akin to Walter Benjamin’s description of a child watching the work of a carpenter. Whereas the adult, looking for relevance, will focus on the emerging object, the child, Benjamin argues, tends to direct his or her attention elsewhere: The child’s attention is directed towards the wood shavings and scraps of fabric and threads that fall onto the floor, where they create a world of their own; an “underworld” having its own peculiar visual richness. This visual richness reminds us that the things belong to an order deprived of the logic of goal oriented usefulness.4 To see and acknowledge this kind of richness beyond “goal oriented usefulness” is, however, not restricted to the child. Benjamin extends this perspective to what he calls “the vertical child”: a potential we all have for seeing the world as being underway, a perspective that sees the richness and value of what would otherwise be deemed unproductive and irrelevant.5 Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has recently claimed that a kind of productive distraction emerges in the practical engagement with objects during exhibition processes. Looking for objects and asking questions about them

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Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction 111 leads the curator from one point to the next, allowing objects to “happen upon” him or her, pointing out directions that transgress established theoretical frameworks.6 Thomas describes this as a kind of antiquarianism, or a kind of research specifically related to working with collections and archives, or “a distracted meditation on larger histories of culture.”7 I take this to suggest that the tangible as well as intellectual work with collections has a capacity to distract us from what we would render meaningful in objects from an abstracted, theoretical perspective. Through the multiple roads of interrogation opened by singular objects and their possible connections, a perspective emerges that allows the antiquarian to discover parts of the past that have been deemed irrelevant in the canonical version of history. One may object that in the current academic climate, which to an increasingly greater degree focuses on results and products, it may seem futile to claim the right to retire to the secluded space of the antiquarian. It is, however, critical to note what is lost in this process of making academic institutions more efficient. What is to a large degree lost, as I see it, is the capacity for research to produce radically new perspectives on the world we live in and on human life in general. In a world where research is increasingly measured by numbers, the risk of delivering what is expected is obvious. Therefore, the curatorial challenge I want to address here considers how to open our eyes to the potentials beyond goal-​oriented usefulness.

Three distractive steps in COLLAPSE In order to demonstrate what distraction may mean in practice, I will follow three steps in the making of the exhibition COLLAPSE –​Human Being in an Unpredictable World through which distraction has worked as an underlying strategy for engaging the museum staff in new kinds of collaborations. In this sense, they are also steps for turning museum production itself into knowledge-​ in-​ the-​ making, rather than ways to communicate established knowledge. Step one: “Core exhibitions” COLLAPSE was the first of a series of four exhibitions to replace the existing permanent archaeological display in the ground floor at MCH. The former installation created a traditional linear narrative of Norwegian history, “From the Ice Age to White Christ.” Moving along in this installation the audience would go through the classical archaeological division of the past into chronologically organized periods. “From the Ice Age to White Christ” was paralleled by the ethnographic displays in the upper floors of the museum that were organized, in classical ethnographic fashion, according to regions, such as “The Arctic,” “The Americas,” and “South East Asia.” The new exhibitions were internally described as core exhibitions and took on major challenges to humanity that could be traced across time and

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112  Peter Bjerregaard space through to the contemporary world. Moreover, the core exhibitions were intended to present a more playful and challenging approach to exhibition making, crossing disciplinary divides, and turning the exhibition into a process of knowledge-​in-​the-​making. As the then director, Rane Willerslev, would frame it, we should bring ourselves to the brink of what we are able to know, into “the borderlands of science.” The development of “core exhibitions” as a new exhibition format was the first curatorial distraction at MCH, as it asked the MCH staff to look for ideas and concepts beyond the heart of their disciplinary expertise, toward framing questions they could share and explore with colleagues from other disciplines and audiences alike. Indeed, by deliberately deciding not to divide exhibitions according to disciplines, the museum’s research staff was asked to find relevance in areas they might not have thought about before. Step two: what’s in a title? In the first stages of its development, COLLAPSE went under the working title Colonization. The project was part of a larger collaboration with the six Norwegian university museums, which were all asked to develop a project about colonization. As project leader, I gathered a cross-​disciplinary group of colleagues, who had all in one way or the other worked with colonization. It turned out, however, to be rather complicated to create any movement toward “the borderlands of science” with the material. While all the project participants were very skilled in their specific subfields, we did not manage to lift the discussions beyond them. This changed when the term “collapse” was introduced by one of the archaeologists to point to an alternative approach to colonization, which could look at how cultural patterns emerged in the wake of the collapse of a given system. Our focus was not so much why or how a given system would collapse, but rather, to look at the collapse as an analytical point zero, from which radical change could emerge.8 Deciding on “Collapse” as our working title turned out to have important and unexpected effects on the making of the exhibition. In contrast to colonization, none of the project participants could claim expertise in collapses. None of us had ever published on the theme and none of us had ever mentioned collapses in our CVs. Therefore, rather than a number of distinctive chapters on colonization, we suddenly had a common challenge: what would collapse mean in the development of culture, and what did it mean for the three cases we ended up working with? In this sense, the idea of collapse worked as a distraction that forced the participants to see beyond their mastered knowledge and move into the borderlands of their expertise. By introducing collapse as title to the exhibition, moreover, we broke with the standard archaeological and anthropological approach to our collections, constantly asking ourselves to search

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Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction 113 for relevance not through established disciplinary dogmas, but in the new, imaginary world we were about to create. It was exactly this distraction that provided us with a common cause. Step three: getting on the floor As we had our theme and work group settled we started to work. But unlike former exhibitions at the museum, we wanted to base ours on an extensive degree of collaboration, rather than simply having each participant taking care of the tasks he or she was responsible for. And rather than always meeting around a table we wanted people to “get on the floor” and work together in a real and practical way. So we introduced workshops as a work format that broke with how most of the staff was used to working. The three main workshops brought the work group together for two to three days each, and we worked both with our common ambition of presenting collapse as a general dynamic in human culture and with how this dynamic was expressed in each of the included cases. The first workshop was inspired by the 1970s and 1980s British TV show “The Great Egg Race,” where a group of researchers are asked to solve a problem through a mechanical construction. Our challenge was naturally based on collapse. Our designer, Adam Bartley, developed a narrative about a society that had collapsed leaving spaghetti and marshmallows as the only raw materials left. Based on this idea, the participants were asked to build various constructions to protect the society’s biomass, an egg. Each group was thus asked to build: a construction that could hold the egg at a minimum of 40 centimeters over the ground; a device in which the egg could roll and fall off a 10 centimeter ramp without getting hurt, and a device that would allow the egg to be transported over a gap. Obviously this workshop did not aim to develop elements to be used directly in the exhibition. What it did help to do, however, was to create a focus on collapse as a general and material dynamic. In a sense we created our own collapses, watched them as they occurred, and discussed them afterward. Rather than taking departure in texts and narratives, we looked to materials and material processes, creating common experiences that we would refer back to as the processes went on. In this way, this workshop helped to create a horizon from which we wanted to direct the exhibition. It took the focus away from individual cases of collapse to concrete experiences, and it suggested how far we could go in transforming our research insights into material experiences. The second workshop was organized as a board game. Adam had prepared a board that rendered the basic spatial division of the exhibition. It was structured as a Venn diagram with three individual zones and overlapping areas between each of the three zones (see Figure 8.3). Each of the researchers were supplied with a number of colored bricks and a supplemental number of cards.9

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Figure 8.2 The egg race. Using marshmallows and spaghetti to avoid the collapse. Photo: Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Toril C. Skaaraas Hofseth.

Figure 8.3 The board game workshop. The board shows the overall organization of the space into three overarching zones. Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Kirsten Jensen Helgeland.

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Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction 115 Each brick represented an object or a body of objects. The object was drawn on the brick and a card was filled in for each brick, naming the object and explaining what the researcher wanted this object to do in the exhibition. Rather than preparing a selection of objects for each case on beforehand, the researchers were asked to place their bricks on the board game individually responding to the bricks laid by the other researchers. Laying their bricks, the researchers would start to define core areas for each case, and to find new relations between themes or concrete types of objects. The workshop provided us with a way to break the disciplinary contexts of individual cases, instead opening up the possibility for a final object selection based in an understanding of the entire exhibition as the context for all included objects. The final workshop was developed in collaboration with the Tongan artist, Filipe Tohi (b. 1959). In his art, Tohi works from traditional Polynesian pattern and motifs, translating them into new materials and formats. Tohi has a theory that the x-​patters found in all Polynesian art stems from the latching techniques used for creating stable structures, such as houses or boats. When you latch together two pieces of wood placed at a 90-​degree angle to one other, a cross pattern starts to emerge. And this pattern, Tohi suggests, has been transferred to wooden ceremonial art, adding symbolic stabilizing qualities to these objects. The workshop was focused on learning how to latch in the Polynesian tradition. Apart from Tohi and the members of the core group, we had invited a flint knapper, a student from the school of art and design, and an ethnographer working with indigenous crafts. Tohi taught the workshop participants how to latch increasingly intricate patterns. While to the observer this probably appeared as a fairly simple activity resembling what many museums do with children, and certainly not an appropriate activity for busy researchers and other museum staff. Still, the workshop turned out to have interesting effects. Taking part in the same practice opened up for rich, associative discussions on the emergence and development of patterns. Not only physical ones, but also more general cultural patterns, and the way in which cultural patterns and basic functional tasks are intricately intertwined.10 The workshops attempted to get the project members out of the office and onto the floor, helping to generate a space where the making of the exhibition was not simply a matter of how to give shape to predefined content. Instead, new content, slightly displaced from original insights, came out of the various engagements. What is more, it pointed to the ways in which deliberately distracting the project members, taking them off track, opened up a process that generated new perspectives and insights.

Audiences and research The way I have described distraction as a curatorial move so far has primarily focused on the internal institutional effects. But how did the distractions in

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116  Peter Bjerregaard COLLAPSE affect the actual exhibition, and in which ways did they generate new research? COLLAPSE ended up being both radically new and somewhat conventional. The exhibition was radically new in the way it brought widely dispersed cases in time and space together in the same space. To do that, the common theme of collapse, had to be constantly accentuated in the design. In one sense, in order to create an exhibition based on collapse we had to dare to collapse our own work practices. So, entering the space, audiences face a floor that breaks and cracks underneath them, leaving the display cases protruding at strange angles. Going further into the exhibition they find a greenhouse with various plants grown in a hydroponic system (a growing system using water only and no soil). And, to a certain extent, the audience also faces an exhibition that collapses meaning as a whole. Each of the three cases builds up rather conventionally with a representative selection of objects and quite informative texts. But the exhibition does not explain the connection between the three parts thoroughly. Instead, in the spaces connecting each of the three parts, audiences find what we have called “activity zones,” or areas where they can act themselves. This includes building towers out of blocks inspired by Polynesian patterns, creating string patterns around a globe construction, and solving basic problems on survival in a puzzle. In this sense, the exhibition invites the audience to engage and associate possible relations between the three sections.

Figure 8.4 The exhibition. Norwegian Stone Age settlement in COLLAPSE –​ Human Being in an Unpredictable World. Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​Kirsten Jensen Helgeland.

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Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction 117 This aspect of COLLAPSE has probably been the hardest for audiences to grapple with. While the activity zones are indeed actively used, many audiences find themselves at a loss trying to comprehend the overall organization of the exhibition. Somehow, many find the reasoning behind the exhibition under-​ communicated and hard to understand. But audiences have generally appreciated the fact that we have sought to go more in depth with how to turn our ideas into a spatial experience. Many have praised the boldly shifting floor, the effect created by filtered daylight that enters through filters on the windows, and the general impression of the space. But in what way, then, can this be considered research? The particular collaboration through which COLLAPSE came into being resulted in journal articles and book chapters, for instance with an article applying Polynesian cosmology to the analysis of fish hook manufacture in Stone Age Norway, a chapter in a monograph on Tonga, and the present essay.11 I am quite convinced that these overlaps would not had happened had we not engaged in the kind of process as was the case for COLLAPSE. In this sense, we can consider curatorial distractions as research in a more general sense of museum-​based research where distractions work as a method to open up new perspectives and thus influence the more conventional cycles of research in the museum.

Curation as translation In “The Task of the Translator” Walter Benjamin quotes Rudolf Pannwitz: The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. […] He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign tongue.12 Thinking of curatorial practice I suggest that we think of the exhibition as a translation in this manner. Exhibiting is not a matter of finding a direct translation of the kind of research that has been done already, but a matter of letting this research be “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue,” of the exhibition as medium. In doing so, the curatorial challenge is to distract, to point to other discarded objects, connections and ideas in what has become the authorized version of history. Curation that insists on the capacity of exhibitions to create new knowledge in the process must organize activities that open for the coincidental, for things and ideas to “happen upon us” in Thomas’s phrasing. This entails a way of curating research that basically aims at distracting; opening up attention for insights and relations that would otherwise be thought of as irrelevant in the everyday production of the museum. In this sense curating is not necessarily an activity aiming for an exhibition as end product but may be practiced by bringing people, objects, and space together in new formats.

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118  Peter Bjerregaard It is these kinds of distractions from the straight path, which promise that the museum can produce a particular kind of research that may place it at the cutting edge of academic practice.

Notes 1 See Hans-​Ulrich Obrist, Curating: A Brief History (Zürich: JRP, Ringier, 2008); Judith Rugg and Michéle Sedgwick, eds., Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Bristol:  Intellect, 2006), and Rossen Ventzislavov, “Idle Arts:  Reconsidering the Curator,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 1 (2014): 82–​93. 2 See Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald, “Introduction:  Experiments in Exhibition, Ethnography, Art and Science,” in Exhibitions Experiments, eds. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2007), 1–​ 24; Peter Bjerregaard, “Exhibitions as Research:  An Introduction,” in Exhibitions as Research:  Experimental Methods in Museums, ed. Peter Bjerregaard (London and New  York:  Routledge, 2019); Anita Herle, “Exhibitions as Research:  Displaying the Techniques That Make Bodies Visible,” Museum Worlds 5, no. 1 (2013): 113–​35; Susanne Lehman-​Brauns, Christian Sichau, and Helmuth Trischler, eds., The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (Berlin:  Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftgeschichte, 2010), www.mpiwg-​ berlin.mpg.de/​Preprints/​P399.PDF, accessed on July 3, 2017; Paul O’Neill and Mark Wilson, eds., Curating Research (London: Open Editions/​de Appel, 2016); Nikolai Ssorin-​Chaikov, “Gift/​Knowledge Relations at the Exhibition of Gifts to Soviet Leaders,” Laboratorium 5, no. 2 (2013): 166–​92, and Nicholas Thomas, “The Museum as Method,”Museum Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2010): 6–​10. 3 Alexandra Schüssler and Peter Bjerregaard, The Danish Invasion. Obstructions in the Museum. Unpublished paper, 2015. 4 Walter Benjamin in Dag T. Andersson, “The Order of Incompleteness” (2013), http://​ruinmemories.org/​2013/​07/​the-​order-​of-​incompleteness/​, accessed on January 22, 2018. 5 Dag T. Andersson, “Salvaging Images,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 37, no. 1 (2014): 61, 67. 6 Nicholas Thomas, “The Museum as Method,” Museum Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2010): 76. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 As the term is applied, for instance in Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (New York: Viking Press, 2005). 9 At this point we had not established a formal collaboration with Mads Pålsrud, who would later represent urban farming in our project. Therefore, I represented urban farming at this workshop. 10 Tim Ingold, “On Weaving a Basket,” in The Perception of the Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 339–​48. 11 Anja Mansrud, “Untangling Social, Ritual and Cosmological Aspects of Fishhook Manufacture in the Middle Mesolithic NE Skagerrak,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 46, no. 1 (2017): 31-​47. doi: 10.1111/​1095–​9270.12211, accessed on March 21, 2018. 12 Rudolf Pannwitz in Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” [1923], in Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 70–​82.

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Bibliography Andersson, Dag T. “The Order of Incompleteness.” 2013. http://​ruinmemories.org/​ 2013/​07/​the-​order-​of-​incompleteness/​. Accessed on January 22, 2018. Andersson, Dag T. “Salvaging Images.” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 37, no. 1 (2014): 61–​68. Basu, Paul and Sharon Macdonald. “Introduction:  Experiments in Exhibition, Ethnography, Art and Science.” In Exhibition Experiments. Edited by Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, 1–​24. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator” [1923]. In Illuminations, 70–​82. London: Fontana Press, 1992. Bjerregaard, Peter. “Exhibitions as Research.” In Exhibitions as Research: Experimental Methods in Museums. Edited by Peter Bjerregaard. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Press, 2005. Herle, Anita. “Exhibitions as Research: Displaying the Techniques That Make Bodies Visible.” Museum Worlds 5, no. 1 (2013): 113–​35. Ingold, Tim. “On Weaving a Basket.” In The Perception of the Environment, 339–​48. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Lehman-​ Brauns, Susanne, Christian Sichau, and Helmuth Trischler, eds. The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Berlin: Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftgeschichte, 2010. www.mpiwg-​berlin.mpg.de/​Preprints/​P399. PDF. Accessed on July 3, 2017. Mansrud, Anja. “Untangling Social, Ritual and Cosmological Aspects of Fishhook Manufacture in the Middle Mesolithic NE Skagerrak.” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 46, no. 1 (2017): 31–​47. doi: 10.1111/​1095–​9270.12211. Accessed on March 21, 2018. Obrist, Hans-​Ulrich. Curating: A Brief History. Zürich: JRP, Ringier, 2008. O’Neill, Paul and Mark Wilson, eds. Curating Research. London: Open Editions/​de Appel, 2016. Rogoff, Irit. “Was ist ein Theoretiker?” In Was ist ein Künstler:  Das Subjekt der modernen Kunst. Edited by Martin Hellmold, Sabine Kampmann, Ralp Lindner, and Katharina Sykora, 273–​83. Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003. Rugg, Judith and Michéle Sedgwick, eds. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Bristol: Intellect, 2006. Schüssler, Alexandra and Peter Bjerregaard. The Danish Invasion: Obstructions in the Museum. Unpublished paper, 2015. Ssorin-​Chaikov, Nikolai. “Gift/​Knowledge Relations at the Exhibition of Gifts to Soviet Leaders.” Laboratorium 5, no. 2 (2013): 166–​92. Thomas, Nicholas. “The Museum as Method.” Museum Anthropology, 33, no. 1 (2010): 6–​10. Ventzislavov, Rossen. “Idle Arts: Reconsidering the Curator.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 1 (2014): 82–​93.

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9  Curating a mild apocalypse Researching Anthropocene ecologies through analytical figures Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup

Welcome to the Danish Anthropocene COME ON IN. The animals are leaving, it seems. Do as Goldilocks and surrender to your curiosity. Sit on the stools, open the drawers, and explore this Danish landscape where previous extraction of brown coal has left remarkable traces. Look at the life that quietly emerges in the shadows of prior industrial activity.1 These were the words that greeted visitors in our research-​based exhibition Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark (2016), at the Moesgaard Museum outside of Aarhus, Denmark. In the exhibition, we explored forms of life and cross-​species interaction at Søby, an abandoned mining site in western Denmark where brown coal was extracted during the period 1940–​1970.2 The figure of Goldilocks, the bold little girl who surrenders to her curiosity and crosses the threshold of the bears’ house, was our initial guide to curating the exhibition.3 We were inspired by her curious conduct toward the life of the bears, as she enters a setting inhabited by a different yet familiar species. Trying out the bowls of porridge, chairs, and beds of different sizes, she is at once mystified and at home in the bears’ house. Eventually identifying with the smallest bear, she settles in, falls asleep in the little bed, but is frighteningly reminded that she is in someone else’s home when the bears return and send her running, scared to death, into the forest. This classic fairy tale proved interesting to think with in our work on the Danish mining landscape for several related reasons. To begin with, we simply wanted to invite the audience to mimic Goldilocks by enabling the same kind of tangible curiosity at the different stations in the exhibition, where objects were displayed in drawers for visitors to open at their convenience. In the drawers, audience would find unspectacular objects such as broken plastic toys, dried samples of local flora, and discarded cartridges found in the forest, along with suggestive texts that proposed other means by which to understand these trivial items. Further, the presence of Goldilocks along with the stuffed deer in the periphery of the room that looked back in

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Figure 9.1 Taxidermied deer in a field of bags with high-​tech modified starch from potatoes grown in the area. From the exhibition. Photo: Iga Kuriata.

on human visitors were meant to make it unclear who is at home and who is foreign, thus unsettling who is intruding on whom, and who is tame and wild, an ambiguity captured in the notion of feral that in biology indicates species that were once domesticated but have gone wild again. By working with Goldilocks we thus invoked curiosity about complicated multispecies entanglements, at once identifying with and decentering our human protagonist as a way of probing the abandoned Søby mining site. In framing our exhibition work in terms of a folk fairy tale we also wanted to hint at the inevitable element of popular and dynamic storytelling present in any exhibition through which the curators make a proposition—in our case about a landscape coinhabited by multiple species and created by shifting industrial projects. Even though our exhibition was research-​based in that it drew on ethnographic fieldwork, we never meant it to be a one-​to-​one representation of our field site. Instead, we wanted it to be a creative engagement with a site as seen through a series of interpretive gestures and from a particular perspective (See Figure 9.1). In this article we have a twofold ambition. Firstly, we want to reflect on how our interdisciplinary collective research project in a tiny and somewhat insignificant place became an exhibition that addressed pressing global issues by crafting a series of curious objects and displays. Secondly, and in close relation, we want to go into detail with a few examples of these objects from the exhibition and explain them as what we term “analytical

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122  Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup figures.” This concept is meant to specify a mode of curating that is explicit in showing the creative element in research and which deliberately works across the genres of ethnography, cultural history, and art, unsettling these categories along the way. By launching this idea of analytical figures we thus point to curation of ethnographic work as an uncontrollable and generative craft that invites reflection and produces complexity, rather than a representational effort of merely displaying a fieldwork site in any accurate way.

Sensationalizing an unspectacular landscape in Denmark The exhibition was part of our work with an international research group based at Aarhus University, which explored an abandoned brown coal mining site at Søby in Central Jutland.4 As anthropologists we undertook fieldwork alongside other scholars from different disciplines to research how forms of life emerge and interact in a heavily disturbed landscape that bears the distinct marks of around forty years of brown coal extraction.5 Since the two scientists P.J. Crutzen and E.F. Stoermer suggested the notion of the Anthropocene as a name for the current geological age to indicate the inescapable and enormous human impact on the ecosystems of planet earth, the concept has gained ever increasing momentum.6 In recent years, museums in neighboring countries have also launched exhibitions on this theme. In Munich, Deutches Museum showed Welcome to the Anthropocene (2014–​2016), while Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin launched The Anthropocene Project (2013–​2014). In Gothenburg, Sweden, Röda Sten Konsthall opened The Anthropocene (2016), and most recently ARoS Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, opened The Garden  –​The Anthropocene (2017). In our exhibition and research project as a whole, we took the brown coal site at Søby as an instance of this sweeping global concept of a man-​ made ecology. The concept of the Anthropocene argues that human impact on the earth is now comparable to other geological forces such as tsunamis, volcanos, and earthquakes. Thus, global in scale and monstrous in imagery, the Anthropocene is often depicted by oceans covered in plastic, melting glaciers and rising seas, nuclear bombs and omnipresent radioactive material in the atmosphere, species extinctions and radically transformed ecologies, together with graphs and curves with sudden exponential peaking figures. Compared to these apocalyptic images, our field site, the brown coal beds in Denmark, seemed rather mild, provincial, and insignificant. The area is no longer exploited by any industries. Today, it is a quiet patch of carefully managed forest, marked walking paths, picnic spots, and which is home to deer, and even an occasional wolf and overseen by the Danish Nature Agency. The Agency also hosts a brown coal museum commemorating the area’s mining history. Hunters and a few nature lovers—as well as the wildlife—enjoy the relative calmness in an area otherwise thoroughly

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Figure 9.2 View of the brown coal beds taken from Mount Søby, a huge pile of waste dumped in what was considered an already devastated landscape, 2014. Photo: Nathalia Brichet.

exploited by monocrop agro-​fields, forest plantations, high-​tech companies, and highways. At first glance, then, the place seems anything but an ecological disaster resulting from extraction practices (see Figure 9.2). It seems an inconspicuous place; is there really anything remarkable about a bit of mixed Danish forest squeezed in between agriculture and production industries in flat Central Jutland? Looking closer, however, traces of the thirst for fossils are everywhere and thoroughly configure the landscape at the former mining site. Lining the walking paths are signs stating that any traffic beyond the marked routes is prohibited and can be fatal. The reason for this is that the small beautiful lakes that are scattered around the area are in fact acidic mining craters where groundwater has seeped back in after having been pumped away during the digging. The removal and return of water have made the brinks unstable. Thus, the area is prone to landslides, which is why the police urges people to stay on the few designated roads. The hilly character of the landscape, too, is a result of the mining. The layers of brown coal—organic material compressed for millions of years—were dug up from up to twenty meters below the ground, and the sandy earth removed to uncover the fossil resource thus left piles. These have since grown over to become forested hills. The vegetation, though, is also partly a result of human activity: in order to stop sand drift in the area laid bare by mining, brown coal entrepreneurs

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124  Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup were obliged to replant the area over which they had concession.7 This resulted in quick spread of particular types of mainly imported plants.8 Upon a closer inspection, then, the peaceful recreational Søby site is made up of a series of human interventions, all fueled by the perceived need for a national energy resource, mainly during World War II, when import of coal was difficult. For all its modest and scenic charm, Søby is a man-​made landscape through and through. The point, implied by the contradictory configuration Mild Apocalypse, is that the Søby site materializes a type of unspectacular environmental disaster, which is both easy to overlook and everywhere to be found. At Anthropocene Søby, which by all accounts seems like an unpretentious place, things are not what they seem at first glance: the lakes are also mining craters, the hills are also remnants of brown coal digging, much of the vegetation is imported to cover up a fossil thirst, and all of this is entangled in the global politics of war. This fundamentally unsettles how to analyze a composite landscape like the Søby brown coal beds, as it emerges as both an all too nice, pretty, and familiar site and as one that tells a highly dramatic story. This double nature of the site provides an important opportunity for ethnographic research and exhibition work to invent new concepts and things to figure the place out and possibly give museum visitors pause. It seems irresponsible to write the environmental disturbance off as “too minor” to care about; it might be a lesser evil, but still the brown coal extraction caused unstable grounds and irreversibly changed future life conditions of the site. How then to exhibit a relatively limited and harmless disaster while also making the point that the Anthropocene is not only a problem for hard hit regions but something everyone needs to care and think about? What tools can be used to try to prevent visitors from just shrugging their shoulders and concluding that the brown coal exploitation at Søby was benign compared to many other mining operations? Our focus on Søby is an attempt to bring the Anthropocene home and also to spur new ideas for thinking about what kind of world we want, even in places where state authorities manage the disturbed landscape, and companies have had enough corporate social responsibility to replant exploited areas. In such a “hyper Anthropocene” setting—where disaster complies with all rules and has left a nice recreational area behind—we need to think hard about how to “untrivialize” the apocalypse. This brings us more directly to the curatorial efforts of the exhibition and our attempt at creating a sensational experience out of an unspectacular landscape as captured in our work with what we think of as analytical figures.

The craft of curating an Anthropocene ecology Mild Apocalypse was displayed in the experimental room at Moesgaard Museum. The room is about 80 square meters, and the backbone of the exhibition was six different thematic stations made up of old second hand writing desks with many small drawers containing different artifacts. The

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Figure 9.3 Moesgaard Museum, Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark. Panoramic view of the exhibition. Photo: Iga Kuriata.

desks were all covered in graph paper and thus had a uniform appearance. (See Figures 9.3 and 9.4.) On the back of each writing desk were screens with looping film, showing, among other things, night recordings with a wildlife camera in the area, a slow motion recording of an archaeological excavation, and a recording formatted with a biology student’s thermic camera that mapped the vegetation in the brown coal beds. All of these objects were crafted to make different aspects of the landscape and research visible. Lining the walls like windows to the outside world were photos from other industrial landscapes where members of our research group have conducted fieldwork. The exhibition also featured two installations involving taxidermied deer. One displayed a small deer completely covered in flakes of brown coal, resting on a pile of coal and surrounded by old mining equipment. The other installation was comprised of three deer separated from the audience by a wire fence. The animals seem to be leaving the room. Around their feet lay bags made to hold high tech potato starch ready for export. Potato starch is produced by a nearby facility at Søby, provided with potatoes from fields squeezed in between the formerly mined brown coal beds. The deer thus somehow pass through a field of industrial produce, which they also live off, if they are not kept out of the potato fields. The installation, we contend, is as surreal, slightly kitsch, and dystopic as it is peaceful, figuratively familiar, and simple. It points to a concrete problem in the area, which we were told about repeatedly during fieldwork: the population of deer, fed and

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Figure 9.4 Writing desk covered in graph paper and drawers with various objects from the field site. From the exhibition. Photo: Iga Kuriata.

nourished by leisure hunters who own land in the area and both enjoy and make money on the hunting rights, has grown too big in the eyes of many local inhabitants, including the potato farmers. The local deer eat potato plants much to the annoyance of the farmers who sell off their produce to the local starch factory, which supplies a global market. The installation thus engaged a set of cross-​species entanglements and highlights the complex interdependencies between farmers, deer, hunters, potatoes, and export. What the installation was not, was a one-​to-​one literal representation of the brown coal beds. It was not a documentary. Instead, we see the installation as an analytical figure that creatively and artistically performs a point in our research in that it relates and assemblages elements in new ways that are not given by the explored site itself, all while using objects that are recognizable and in a way unspectacular. To us, this analytical-​artistic approach is a way to surpass the representational ambitions—indeed, crises—that have for too long haunted ethnographic museums.9 By letting the field that the deer pass through be made of bags for potato starch, we created a piece through which to highlight both Anthropocene ecology, in which the concept of pure nature is unthinkable, and that we as curators have done stuff (cutting, gluing, assembling, thinking, writing, etc.) and worked with our material on the basis of a particular research-​based perspective and message. (See Figure 9.5.) Cultural historical museums often work with collecting objects rather than producing them, but one of our points is that this distinction may not hold. At least, the kind of anthropological research we do is always also

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Figure 9.5  The making of analytical figures. A taxidermy trophy is being coated in brown coal flakes in order to show a multilayered landscape, coinhabited by multiple species. Photo: Nathalia Brichet.

generative of material which is created as much as found—a fact that we wanted to make a virtue of by displaying these explicitly crafted analytical figures as one mode of communicating our findings. Importantly, the artistic element, then, is more than an aesthetic ambition. The familiar objects—deer, potatoes, coal, fence, and cartridges—came to life as strangely intertwined during our conversations with locals during fieldwork. A potato farmer in the area directed us to the starch factory and complained about the number of deer.10 Hunters in the afforested brown coal beds explained their practice of feeding deer to maintain a robust population. The point here is that people that we met during our fieldwork shared their practices and concerns with us and contributed to our research on the Søby landscape. But they did not function as a source community or as co-curators as has been the case in some ethnographic museums, which have invited natives to take part in exhibition, as a deliberate decolonial move to break the Western museums monopoly of display,11 or as the way to make an inclusive and participatory museum.12 The installation was our suggestion—our analytical fi ­ gure— composed on the basis of our field dialogues and processing; we were fully responsible for it, and the fact that there is a clearly defined sender is not camouflaged by alleged naturalism. While the deer installation was in a sense quite dominant in the room, the majority of the displayed artifacts were actually less conspicuous objects.

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128  Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup One was a normal household glass jar of the sort that could have contained jam or mustard, displayed on the writing desk with the theme of “the dump.” This station focused on a landfill and recycling facility in the area. Originally, because the formerly unstable mined area was off limits for industry as explained above, people used it as an improvised dump where trash of all kinds could be discarded—illegally until a proper well-​organized facility was made. This initially unregulated practice eventually created a mountain of trash, the so-​called Mount Søby. Because the trash piled up for years, the mountain now exhumes methane gas which is produced in the process of decomposition. In terms of environmental effect, methane is a highly harmful greenhouse gas. But it is also a potential energy source. For both of these reasons, the methane from the Søby dump is now tapped and securely managed for use in a local power plant. The jar on the desk contained methane gas from the dump. Although the gas is invisible and we could have displayed an empty jar off our own kitchen shelf, we actually went to great lengths to get an actual sample of the gas. In addition to being an important artifact in the specific exhibition, then, the glass was also an implicit constructive comment to museological debates about authenticity versus replicas; the point was not to debate whether the gas jar is an authentic museum object. Rather, the reason why we found it important to actually have the jar contain the gas was that our inquiry into it made some characteristics of the gas and practices of how it is handled visible, and that this occasioned interesting conversations with the dump managers about their work and about ours. The skills and labor that went in to understanding and handling the consequences of the dump, that is, the methane gas, were foregrounded and jointly brought to life in our attempt to acquire real gas. If the Anthropocene is a premise that infiltrates us all and is everywhere, even in unspectacular sites where what is produced is invisible, it is only right that more people than anthropologist curators take part in crafting things that might show this. The glass was thus another analytical figure, jointly created by the curators and professionals from the Søby dump. Getting the methane was not just a matter of making the exhibition more truthful, but an attempt to pay careful attention to good and evil of waste practices and to the endless number of human projects that engage with nature to make it into valuable objects. We quite simply think that the methane as a resource made out of trash in a wasted landscape is due all attention as part of an Anthropocene ecology. They may be invisible and trivial, but the effects of human interventions are everywhere.

Feral exhibition landscapes As researchers, most often we present our work in writings that address colleagues with similar interests. By curating an exhibition in a rather large

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Curating a mild apocalypse 129 cultural historical museum, we had the opportunity to invite a broader range of visitors to explore our collaboratively research-​based version of the Søby landscape. We hoped that Goldilocks could serve as both guide and role model, and as such, an analytical figure in her own right embodying our invitation to visitors to be both curious, at home, and unsettled, thereby possibly reconsidering what industrial landscapes are and how to inhabit them. Needless to say, the change of media from articles to exhibition did of course have an effect on the way we engaged the brown coal landscape. However, this change was not so much a matter of a changed communication strategy, that is, of simplifying difficult research into a popularized format. Curating our research did not imply a reduction of complexities. On the contrary, our analytical figures—materialized in desks, taxidermied deer covered in brown coal, bags of starch potatoes, jars with greenhouse gasses, Goldilocks, etc.—are invitations to rethink what we take environmental disasters to be, arguing that even apocalypse on a small scale is due consideration and shared articulation. Further, for all the cuteness that might pertain to a baby deer, once it is part of an assemblage that also implies brown coal, the digging of which was spurred by a world war, and shovels indicating highly risky and strenuous work on the brinks of porous dips, cross-​species life is no longer uncomplicated. This is one way of phrasing our curatorial challenge: how can we explore and expand our research on an Anthropocene ecology through physical objects by juxtaposing them in ways that invite visitors to think along. Put differently, we were looking for ways to get Goldilocks to stay in the bears’ house, show her true colors, and work it out across species and despite initial fright. It is in a sense no longer possible to run to safety in the forest, just as it is unclear what constitutes wilderness, which species are at home where, and not least who is entitled to living off the resources. As mentioned in the opening of the essay, in biology, the term “feral” characterizes a wild species descended from a domesticated one. It thus indicates something that has been tamed and then again gone out of control. With Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark we worked with this concept to play with and question ideas about things controllable and uncontrollable. The brown coal landscape of Søby emerged as a feral place, where all kinds of life, including methane gas, rise from the ruins of extraction. We took the concept of the Anthropocene as a humbling one—an invitation to think again and jointly about how to handle a feral world where ideas about human control mostly remind us of a long lost Enlightenment dream. On a more constructive note, though, the loss of control is also a curatorial virtue in that it indicates that exhibitions may be equally feral in displaying open-​ended suggestions, thereby hopefully summoning a collective—be they potato farmers, folk tale heroes, sports hunters, or museum visitors—to think along and contribute to figuring out the world.

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Notes 1 Introduction poster, Mild Apocalypse exhibition, 2016. 2 Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup, “Industrious Landscaping. The Making and Managing of Natural Resources at Søby Brown Coal Beds,” Journal of Ethnobiology 2, no. 1 (2018): 8–​23; Jan Svendsen, Det brune guld (Copenhagen: DialogForum, Ikast Bogtrykkeri, 2007), and Johannes Rolsted, Søby Klondyke –​ en sandfærdig skildring af forholdene i Søby Brunkulslejer 1940–​ 1950 (Copenhagen: Stout, 1975). 3 We were first inspired by Claude D’Anthenaise, director of Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, who mentioned Goldilocks in passing to unsettle homeliness in his museum (http://​video-​streaming.orange.fr/​autres/​les-​sorties-​ du-​jour-​claude-​d-​anthenaise-​du-​musee-​de-​la-​chasse-​paris-​est-​a-​vous-​25-​avril-​3-​ 5-​VID0000001Mhvg.html (2013), accessed February 26, 2018. 4 The research project is called Aarhus University on the Anthropocene:  http://​ anthropocene.au.dk/​, accessed June 24, 2017. 5 Anna Tsing, “The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag: Some Unexpected Weeds of the Anthropocene,” Keynote to the Finnish Anthropological Society (Helsinki, 21 October, 2015). www.youtube.com/​watch?v=pENVHOAtpk4, accessed February 26, 2018. 6 P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–​18. 7 Svendsen, Det brune guld. 8 Georg Schlätzer. “Some Experiences with Various Species in Danish Reclamation Work,” in Ecology and Reclamation of Devastated Land, eds. R.  Hutnik and G.  Davis, vol. 2, 33–​64 (New  York:  Gordon Breach,. 1973); Rolsted, Søby Klondyke, 44. 9 James Clifford and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup, ”Sensationelle trivialiteter –​Museer i vores eksotiske verden,” in Etnografi på museum. Visioner og udfordringer for etnografiske museer i Norden, eds., Ulf Dahre and Thomas Fibiger. (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2015). 10 Frida Hastrup and Nathalia Brichet, “Antropocæne monstre og vidundere: Kartofler, samarbejdsformer og globale forbindelser i et dansk ruinlandskab,” Tidsskriftet Kulturstudier 1 (2016): 19–​33. 11 Cf. Laura Peers and Alison Brown, “Introduction,” in Museums and Source Communities. A Routledge Reader, eds., Laura Peers and Alison Brown (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–​16; Saskia Vermeylen and Jeremy Pilcher, “Let the Objects Speak: Online Museums and Indigenous Cultural Heritage,” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 4 (2009):  59–​78; Mille Gabriel, “Fortiden, fremtiden og det etnografiske museum: Samtidsindsamling, videndeling og medkuratering,” in Etnografi på museum. Visioner og udfordringer for etnografiske museer i Norden, eds., Ulf Johansson Dahre and Thomas Fibiger (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2015). For a more general discussion, see Luke Eric Lassiter, “From ‘reading over the shoulders of natives’ to ‘reading alongside natives,’ Literally:  Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography,” in The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3–​14. 12 See also Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz:  Museum 2.0, 2010); Eelasaid Munro, “Doing emotion work in museums:  reconceptualising

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Curating a mild apocalypse 131 the role of community engagement practitioners,” Museum & Society 12, no 1 (2014): 44–​60; Phillipp Schorch, “Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation,” Museum & Society 11, no. 1 (2013): 68–​81. For a more elaborate discussion of these two points, see Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup, “Sensationelle trivialiteter”; Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup, “Ethnography, Exhibition Practices and Undisciplined Encounters. The Generative Work of Amulets in London,” in Exhibitions as Research, ed. Peter Bjerregaard (London: Routledge, 2019).

Bibliography Brichet, Nathalia and Frida Hastrup. “Sensationelle trivialiteter  –​Museer i vores eksotiske verden.” In Etnografi på museum:  Visioner og udfordringer for etnografiske museer i Norden. Edited by Ulf Dahre and Thomas Fibiger, 259–​77. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2015. Brichet, Nathalia and Frida Hastrup. “Industrious Landscaping. The Making and Managing of Natural Resources at Søby Brown Coal Beds.” Journal of Ethnobiology 38, no. 1 (2018): 8–​23. Brichet, Nathalia and Frida Hastrup. “Ethnography, Exhibition Practices and Undiscipined Encounters. The Generative Work of Amulets in London.” In Exhibitions as Research. Edited by Peter Bjerregaard. London:  Routledge, 2019. Clifford, James and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Crutzen, P. J. and E. F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–​18. Gabriel, Mille. “Fortiden, fremtiden og det etnografiske museum: Samtidsindsamling, videndeling og medkuratering.” In Etnografi på museum: Visioner og udfordringer for etnografiske museer i Norden. Edited by Ulf Johansson Dahre and Thomas Fibiger, 25–​54. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. 2015. Hastrup, Frida and Nathalia Brichet. “Antropocæne monstre og vidundere: Kartofler, samarbejdsformer og globale forbindelser i et dansk ruinlandskab.” Tidsskriftet Kulturstudier 1 (2016): 19–​33. Lassiter, Luke Eric. “From ‘reading over the shoulders of natives’ to ‘reading alongside natives,’ Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography.” In The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, 3–​14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Munro, Eelasaid. “Doing Emotion Work in Museums:  Reconceptualising the Role of Community Engagement Practitioners.” Museum & Society 12, no. 1 (2014): 44–​60. Peers, Laura and Alison Brown. “Introduction.” In Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. Edited by Laura Peers and Alison Brown, 1–​16. London: Routledge, 2003. Rolsted, Johannes. Søby Klondyke  –​en sandfærdig skildring af forholdene i Søby Brunkulslejer 1940–​1950. Copenhagen: Stout, 1975. Schlätzer, Georg. “Some Experiences with Various Species in Danish Reclamation Work.” In Ecology and Reclamation of Devastated Land. Edited by R. Hutnik and G. Davis, vol 2, 33–​64. New York: Gordon Breach, 1973.

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132  Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup Schorch, Phillipp. “Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation.” Museum & Society 11, no. 1 (2013): 68–​81. Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010. Svendsen, Jan. Det brune guld. Copenhagen: DialogForum, Ikast Bogtrykkeri, 2007. Vermeylen, Saskia and Jeremy Pilcher. “Let the Objects Speak: Online Museums and Indigenous Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 4 (2009): 59–​78.

Webpages Interview with Claude d’Anthenaise in “Paris est a vous” (25 April 2013). http://​ video-​streaming.orange.fr/​autres/​les-​sorties-​du-​jour-​claude-​d-​anthenaise-​du-​ musee- ​ d e- ​ l a- ​ c hasse- ​ p aris- ​ e st- ​ a - ​ v ous- ​ 2 5- ​ a vril- ​ 3 - ​ 5 - ​ V ID0000001Mhvg.html. Accessed June 24, 2017. Aarhus University on the Anthropocene (the research project that we are affiliated with): http://​anthropocene.au.dk/​. Accessed June 24, 2017. Tsing, Anna. “The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag:  Some Unexpected Weeds of the Anthropocene.” Keynote lecture at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Helsinki, October 21, 2015. www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=pENVHOAtpk4. Accessed February 8, 2018.

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10  Curating experimental entanglements Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon

Origins In the spring of 2016, eleven people sat down together around a table at Medical Museion, a university museum and interdisciplinary research group at the University of Copenhagen, with the aim of making an exhibition together.1 At the initial meeting, the group had little more than a thematic starting point:  the rapidly growing scientific research interaction between gut, brain, and bacteria, alongside the long history of investigations into our “gut feelings.” Beyond this, the team had a space to fill, a newly renovated basement in the museum, and a title: Mind the Gut. Alongside curatorial staff from the museum, the group consisted of three artists and two biomedical scientists, chosen from a pool of 155 applicants that responded to an open call for collaborators.2 The project was an experiment that aimed to find out what would happen when both artists and scientists were given access to the “total medium” of the exhibition, working with in-​house curators from the very start. The entire team was to be involved in everything from the overall approach and framing, to the selection of cases and themes, installation design, and marketing messages.3 We found gut-​brain-​bacteria interaction research to be a poignant case study for this kind of experiment, as it involves complex, unsettled science focused on a sophisticated, environmentally entangled body, where science-​society relations are easy to see and fast-​evolving. At the time of writing, Mind the Gut has only been open for a month, and the empirical research material will be analyzed in later articles. Here, however, we give will provide some theoretical arguments behind our “curatorial challenge”: to explore the possibilities and effects of using transdisciplinary cocuration with artists and scientists to exhibit complex, unsettled science in its cultural-​historical context.4 This chapter thus presents some theoretical argumentation for doing how we approached this curatorial experiment, rather than going into the details of how the experiment was done and how the transdisciplinary cocurator team worked together. Mind the Gut was driven by a curiosity as to what kind of an exhibition this cocuration process would lead to; this was also a historic strategy

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Figure 10.1 Exhibition photo from Mind the Gut, featuring an outside view of the installation Landscape Epithelia (2017) by Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt in collaboration with the curatorial team. Copyright: Morten Skovgaard.

that has driven Medical Museion in various forms for the last fifteen years. The museum has an established commitment to exhibiting the complex and uncertain—and often abstract and intangible—matters of biomedical research, and to engaging with such research as a cultural process in its cultural-​historical context.5 This commitment has been accompanied by a growing conviction that it is best honored by bringing together science, cultural-​history, and artistic, aesthetic, and material perspectives—both as content and method. In other words, the topics we were interested in with our project can best be understood at this intersection, and our methods for exhibiting these topics then drew upon the practices of the intersecting disciplines. The exhibition is a “knowledge technology” with a long history and a well-​developed set of expertise required to operate it. But it doesn’t have a settled disciplinary base, and can thus act naturally as a laboratory for inter-​ or transdisciplinary experimentation—the kind of knowledge presented and generated is always flexible and open to interpretation. The following explores two loose clusters of literature that inspired our thinking and methods. The first comes from museological and science communication literature, focusing on the changing societal role of museums and the shift in focus toward exhibiting science as a cultural, socially situated process. This directs attention toward the affective, material, and aesthetic dimensions of both science and its communication, and points toward the

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Curating experimental entanglements 135 role of art and artists in particular. The second cluster stems from arguments for collaboration between the sociological and biological sciences that value the awkwardness of transdisciplinary “experimental entanglement,” rather than aiming to extract maximum reciprocal value from an exchange-​based interdisciplinarity.6 There are overlaps between these literatures, and we address how they might fruitfully be brought together, pointing to how we aimed to do this in practice, and to some of the wider desires and normative drives that lie behind such projects.

Between gut, brain, and bacteria Despite the remnants of phrases like “gut reactions” and “gut feelings” in everyday language, the brain and gut have traditionally been categorized as separate research fields, conceptual domains, and clinical realms. However, the past decade has seen an explosion of scientific research around the so-​ called gut-​brain-​microbiome axis, showing that the brain, the gut, and the gut’s trillions of microbial inhabitants, interact to a much greater degree than previously thought. Research fields such as neurogastroenterology, enteric neuroscience, the neuroscience of hunger and satiation, intestinal microbiology and host microbial interactions, and microbial gut-​brain signaling all suggest that the gut and its microbial inhabitants do much more than passively digest the food we eat.7 Researchers have argued that the bidirectional signaling between the gut, microbiota, potentially plays an important role in health and disease and is possibly related to everything from obesity and autoimmune diseases to memory, stress, depression, and autism.8 This research, while still preliminary, provides a fundamentally different perspective on long-​held views on human development, our sense of self, and our connection to our environments.9 Microbiome research also evokes concepts from contemporary new materialism and feminist science studies such as material selves and exposed bodies and social science and humanities research projects are beginning to spring up to try and understand its conceptual, philosophical, and societal aspects.10 According to biologist Jeffrey Gordon, we might, it seems, have to integrate the gut and its microbes “into our concept of ‘self’ ” and this might provide “a refreshing and humbling departure from our anthropocentric worldview.”11 Gut-​brain-​bacteria interaction also links theoretical and artistic questions with the pathologies that characterize postindustrial societies; where metabolic and mental symptoms are often intertwined in complex syndromes and “lifestyle diseases.” It is also a field of growing public interest—the implications of gut-​brain-​bacteria research have already “escaped the lab,” being widely reported in the media and appropriated in popular culture, artistic practices, medical discourse, and do-​it-​yourself (DIY) health practices. Scientific research and patient practices are developing side by side: probiotics and fecal transplants are so accessible that DIY practices are leapfrogging clinical trials; big pharma and grassroots companies are developing bacterial

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136  Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon treatments, and open science projects sell personal microbiome sampling and clinical tests. In other words, people are experimenting with changing their microbiomes long before clinical use and ethical frameworks are settled. It is a profoundly messy, unsettled, complex, and entangled field, and one that also taps into the long history of the relationship between food, mood, and health.

Science and society in the museum and the role of artists Medical Museion’s desire to utilize aims that engage people with the processes, practices, and affects of science is part of a general trend across STEM museums. Many have followed Bruno Latour’s now classic description of a shift from a “culture of science” associated with “cold facts,” objectivity, and certainty, to a “culture of research” which is more “warm,” risky, and involving.12 With this approach science is not presented as a linear narrative of ever-​increasing knowledge, and controversies are central.13 Exhibiting science-​in-​process raises practical questions about how to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and intangibility in material form; STEM museums are having to change what they communicate in tandem with how they communicate.14 Historical medical objects readily evoke the techniques by which scientists, doctors, and people in their everyday lives make the ontologies of the body accessible and perceptible. But for abstract, complex, and intangible concepts such as those that litter contemporary biomedical science, the museum and its collections might need some help—as we explain later in this chapter, artistic and multimedia strategies have been more or less successfully employed to this end. The shift toward exhibiting science-​in-​process has taken place in tandem with increasing demands that museums play a greater social role, which arguably requires taking more of an explicit stance in relation to the inevitably political entanglements of science and society. To capture these growing expectations of the museum’s role in “transforming mentalities, social attitudes, and behaviors,” museum researcher Élise Dubuc has proposed an expansion of the four traditional functions of collection-​conservation, research, exhibition-​interpretation, and education to a set of eight “meta-​ functions”: conservation, scientific, economic, political, educational, social, cultural, and symbolic.15 In the context of Mind the Gut, we particularly engaged with the symbolic function, where the museum is charged with opening up a more philosophical and less settled perspective on the world. As a physical space apart from everyday life museums are well suited to containing this kind of rupture, that is, disturbances in standard concepts of space and time that are anchored by materiality.16 Artists are an obvious source of expertise in generating aesthetic and sensory phenomena that might facilitate visitors in a more philosophical encounter with the world. But it is important not to be too idealistic here. A  transformative social actor can be either liberatory or oppressive,

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Figure 10.2 Exhibition photo from Mind the Gut, featuring several Winogradsky columns and a table with objects and stories from artists, patients, and scientists who have manipulated their own microbiomes. Copyright: Morten Skovgaard.

depending on who gets to define the nature of transformation. And involving artists won’t necessarily fulfill Dubuc’s “symbolic function”; they can just as easily be co-​opted into an instrumentalizing, neutralizing agenda. Indeed, anthropologist Georgina Born and geographer Andrew Barry report that in the vast majority of cases artists are commissioned by scientific institutions under a “logic of accountability,” whereby they make science more interesting, concrete, or aesthetically pleasing, but also implicitly present an apparently more “complete” picture of science and thus strengthen the accountability of its institutions.17 This kind of completeness can be anathema to the kind of curious itch that we as curators are interested in. Born and Barry also describe an alternative “logic of ontology” which structures a more equal collaboration in which artists experiment together with scientists, contributing alternative perspectives and potentially discovering alternative ontologies—a better partner for the desires of the symbolic function. From both museological and science communication theory, the desire to show science as complex, uncertain, and socially embedded points toward aesthetic experience, to the honoring of affect, and to making philosophical questions about ontology concrete and material. And this then points toward artists and artistic approaches. From both quarters, we also find an

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138  Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon anxiety about art being neutralized or instrumentalized—perhaps associated with the very instability that allows it to reveal new possibilities of perception. For example, the hope that adding artworks to a STEM museum will give a more truthful, complete picture of science could be thwarted if this completeness is too complete: a neat, aesthetically pleasing image of science and of the museum’s open-​minded attitude might in fact divert from the uncertain, unstable, and controversial aspects of science-​society relations that are at stake. In Mind the Gut, we tried to explore these capacities and respond to these anxieties, by involving cocurators with artistic or design backgrounds from the start of the process. We sought to continually reconsider our goals, and reflect collectively on how our practices were being woven together.

Experimental entanglements and exhibition experiments We were also influenced by critical reflections on the expansion of the neurosciences into sociocultural territory of the late 1990s–​2000s. Research on the interaction between gut, brain, and bacteria holds potentials to change ways of thinking about the complex relationships between body and mind. This resonates with the widespread cultural impact of neuroscience from the 1990s on, which seemed to promise a similar reconfiguration of our sense of the relationship between the social and the biological.18 Many scholars of neuroscience were initially either bewitched or enraged by brain-​ based explanations for anything from mental illness to love or religious belief, with both sides buying into the proposition that we would all become “neurodeterminists” or “neuroessentialists” who believed we were defined by, and had limited control over, our brain-​as-​mind.19 The initial reaction to the perceived possibilities of neuroscience thus tended to oscillate between, in sociologists Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard’s terms, a critical or ebullient mode.20 In the critical mode, the tools of historical, social, and cultural analysis were employed to reveal hidden biases within neuroscience and to locate the “nefarious social, political, economic, and epistemic agendas within them,” often emphasizing the ontological primacy of the sociocultural terrain.21 The ebullient mode, on the other hand, applied neuroscience to purportedly confirm or develop insights from cultural and social theory— usually in a manner that was methodologically unjustifiable. While these two approaches might seem to sit at different ends of a spectrum, Fitzgerald and Callard argue that they are moved by a shared view: Namely, that there are things, and ways of knowing things, that are sociocultural; and there are things, and ways of knowing things, that are not. The only difference is that the critic insists that this is how it should be, whereas the enthusiast would rather redraw where the line falls, in acquiescence to new neuroscientific knowledge about (what were previously thought of as) sociocultural preoccupations.22

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Curating experimental entanglements 139 Like these authors, we also worry that this then becomes a trivial distinction, with both sides reinforcing a “regime of the inter-​” that looks interdisciplinary but ultimately ends up reinforcing the distinction between the various fields. This delineates overlapping interests and objectives, negotiating over the methods by which they should be researched rather than investigating the history and geography of the shared space itself. In opposition to the regime of the inter-​, Fitzgerald and Callard propose instead the notion of “experimental entanglements” as a way to accept and foster a more awkward intra-​disciplinarity. Awkward because there is no set structure, and intra-​because it encourages participants to impact each other’s practices, and the object studied and produced. Having such a shared “object” helps to coalesce the (perhaps strange) fruits of breaking down boundaries. Fitzgerald and Callard focus on “the experiment,” as a space where ideas about what is to be asked, studied, and found about the mind/​ brain might be collectively reconstituted. In developing our response to these author’s ideas, we also became aware of the resonance with anthropologists Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu’s concept of the “exhibition experiment.”23 An exhibition experiment is not primarily concerned with the discovery of more effective ways of disseminating knowledge. Rather, it aims to reconfigure the way exhibitions work and “challenge the ‘sacrosanct autonomy’ of a singular curatorial vision, which typifies the hierarchical structure of much exhibitionary practice.”24 The examples discussed in Macdonald and Basu’s volume share a common theme with each other—and with our project—in engaging with complexity and creating spaces that will open up for conversation and reflection, rather than making complex realities more simple and palatable. In Mind the Gut, we combined these two perspectives: the experiment as a space for intradisciplinary entanglements, and the exhibition as a form that can be used experimentally to produce new knowledge. We attempted to treat a public exhibition space as a kind of laboratory where we would bring together not only curators and academics, but also scientists, artists, and others; to create and analyze new relations of meaning. As both perspectives recognize, this carries significant risks and difficulties. Participants risk working on a project where the advancement of their disciplinary CV is not guaranteed and the outcomes are unclear; institutions risk failure and lack of comprehension from their stakeholders. On the other hand, there is a risk of interpersonal conflict stifling the experiment, and turning open discussions into concrete decisions is always a challenge. Participants need to feel secure to contribute, but not too secure; able to explore disagreement without defensive retreat; clear about what is up for debate and what are the fixed points around which productive untidiness might turn. Communication is at the heart of holding these tensions in balance—an interesting resonance for an institution whose public work is often discussed in terms of “good communication.” These practical questions were very much on our mind, and so we looked to research on managing interdisciplinary projects and the co-​development

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140  Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon

Figure 10.3 Group photo of the curatorial team behind Mind the Gut, taken at a MRI scanning session at Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance at Hvidovre Hospital. Copyright: Louise Whiteley.

of exhibitions. We anticipated that conflict might come from differing motives, practice cultures, language barriers, and feelings that internal staff did not properly listen or relinquish control. We discussed these concerns openly, did not aim to avoid disagreement, and were able to spend a significant period of time developing elements of shared language as needed for our practical tasks. We attempted to stop each other when a term might be obscure in order to bring our disciplinary languages into a common terrain; we attempted to gather thoughts from all those gathered around our bustling table; we each attempted to share expertise from our own practices. Anthropological studies of interdisciplinary processes have highlighted the value of team tasks, presence, backstage communication, shared laughter, and self-​reflection in building “collective communication competence.”25

Perspectives In our process, we tried to avoid defining exactly who would do what for long enough to allow entanglements of bodies, epistemologies, terms, ideas,

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Curating experimental entanglements 141 and objects to congeal in a shared space. We hoped that this might produce something new in the world, an exhibition that would have less easily identifiable disciplinary moments—where different perspectives would bleed across installations, case studies, objects, texts, and artworks. And we hoped that this kind of exhibition would engage visitors in a reflective, questioning relation to the theme, and to the entanglement of their own experiences with the scientific, medical, historical, philosophical, and artistic approaches to the mind-​gut connection on display. Arguments that STEM museums should show science in process and in society reflect suggestions that museums should generate a more philosophical attitude to the world; recognizing their “symbolic function” and its capacity for generating and sharing diverse views of the world.26 These arguments are grounded in an image of science as an ever-​evolving set of complex practices, and as properly situated at the intersection of disciplinary, professional, and personal perspectives. This is true in a special way, we would argue, when it comes to understanding the relation between the human(ish) body and the experience of inhabiting one—for instance, when it comes to the mind-​gut connection. In critical neuroscience studies, we also found a commitment to opening new contours of knowledge; not a rejection of hard-​won disciplinary discovery, but a response to our contemporary bodies that invites sociologists, biologists, and philosophers to consider what they might “experiment on” together. As ever, lines between the descriptive and the normative blur: where does the descriptive impulse to exhibit science (and the world) “as it really is” end, and implicit arguments about the political and societal desirability of doing so begin? As ever, it’s hard to tell—and this is a line we had to repeatedly tread as we moved closer toward finalizing the exhibition design and text. Another aspect of the discussion of this image of science and how it ought to be communicated is the role of the material, affective, and aesthetic. An attention to what is like to be in the presence of material objects, and to feel emotional whilst engaging with knowledge; an attention to the role of the aesthetic not just in prettifying but in opening up perception of other possible ontologies, and an interest in the potential importance of un-​ pleasant feelings in generating public engagement and successful interdisciplinary collaborations. Again here, both descriptive and normative currents pull at us. Descriptively, communicative encounters inevitably involve the material and affective, and so cannot be fully described without attending to these dimensions. Yet descriptive slips into normative as we argue, somewhat conflicted, for completeness: we ought to give the whole picture, even whilst we insist that this is a picture that resists closure. More pragmatically, studies of interdisciplinary research and cocuration also point to the importance of managing affective currents in facilitating, designing, and continually evaluating collaborative methods.

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142  Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon The previous two paragraphs pair an argument for communicating science in and as process with an argument that this requires attention to the material and affective—both associated with similar desires for more philosophical, open, and even explicitly democratic engagement. These threads twist together to point toward the potential role of art and artists, accompanied by an anxiety that this might easily be co-​opted toward telling more graspable, reassuring stories about science rather than allowing for uncertainty, trouble, and openness. The specific critique of STEM museums instrumentalizing art was echoed in more abstract form across the literatures we dealt with:  a general worry that attempts to be revolutionary will be neutralized. In the literatures on museums and public engagement, the question is how to design public encounters that honor all forms of response, within institutional frameworks that often drift back toward superficial consensus. Within studies of complexity, interdisciplinarity, and experimental entanglements, this anxiety focuses on how to balance tensions between security and risk; and between openness and chaos. These anxieties are real, and often structured by institutional and financial constraints. In Mind the Gut we were lucky to have resources and institutional support to pursue our experiment, but we also worked hard to believe in it. We were wary of a subtle lack of confidence that we sometimes perceive from those attempting such encounters—a lack of confidence, perhaps, that they will be able to bear the potential wildness of the outcomes. And on the flip side, a fear that they won’t be wild enough. Both the intradisciplinary neuroscience laboratory and the co-​curatorial exhibition have moments of closure: data is collected, the ribbon is cut. Moments of closure inevitably represent loss of possibilities, but they don’t necessarily mean becoming boring or simplistic, or resorting to a kind of disciplinary collage.27 A moment of closure is also one of sharing something made together, something that can be more than the sum of its parts, even though it can never incorporate everything that was brought to the table or bench. Here again the notion of the experiment might help us: a mode of approaching the world that wants to discover and innovate—that has to not know in order to find out what might be known, but where in the end there is something pinned down. Something new about the world to share with others, however awkward and situated that thing might be. Our curatorial challenge was to investigate transdisciplinary collaboration with artists and scientists as a method for exhibiting complex, unsettled science in its cultural-​historical context, taking gut-​brain-​bacteria interaction as a case study. In other words, we mapped a complex, messy problem with a complex, messy transdisciplinary process; mirroring the conceptual and processual. We argue that this kind of mirroring can help to explore without inadvertently re-​inscribing, disciplinary boundaries, and can do so in many settings. Not just in relation to our particular curatorial experiment, but far more widely, as both science and exhibitions attempt to engage complex, entangled societal challenges.

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Curating experimental entanglements 143

Notes 1 For full list of participants and contributors, see www.museion.ku.dk/​da/​bag-​ projektet/​. 2 Successful applicants were expected to join twelve workshops over an eighteen-​ month period and contribute to the; participate in a two-​day international conference following the conclusion of the project; contribute to the exhibition content in a manner to be agreed during the process, and participate in three research interviews about the project. 3 Financially, the project was made possible after we were awarded a new Danish museum award, the inaugural Bikuben Prize Vision 2015, which awards innovative exhibition concepts with a grant of three million DKK (€403.000), to enable their realization. 4 There is a large literature on the history and definition of cross-​, inter-​, intra-​ , and transdisciplinarity, and these concepts vary depending on context. For our purposes, we refer to “interdisciplinarity” as looking for overlaps, shared interests, and reciprocal collaboration between disciplines but without disturbing their individual boundaries and practices; and “transdisciplinarity” as starting from a shared project or investigation, open to disturbances of the usual boundaries of methodology and expertise. 5 See Thomas Söderqvist, Adam Bencard, and Camilla Mordhorst, “Between Meaning Culture and Presence Effects: Contemporary Biomedical Objects as a Challenge to Museums,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40, no. 4 (2009): 431–​38; and Louise Whiteley et al., “Exhibiting Health and Medicine as Culture,” Public Health Panorama 3, no. 1 (2017): 59–​68. 6 See Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Felicity Callard, Des Fitzgerald and Angela Woods, “Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Action:  Tracking the Signal, Tracing the Noise,” Palgrave Communications 1 (2015); Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, Exhibition Experiments. New Interventions in Art History (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2007). 7 See, for example, Stephen M. Collins, Michael Surette and Premysl Bercik, “The Interplay between the Intestinal Microbiota and the Brain.” Nature Reviews Microbiology 10, no. 11 (2012), 735–​42; Emeran A Mayer, Rob Knight, Sarkis K Mazmanian, John F Cryan, and Kirsten Tillisch, “Gut Microbes and the Brain: Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience,” The Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 46 (2014), 15490–​96. 8 See for example Jane Foster and Karen-​Anne Neufeld, “Gut-​Brain Axis: How the Microbiome Influences Anxiety and Depression,” Trends in Neurosciences 36, no. 5 (2013), 305–​12; Sarah N. Dash, Gerard Clarke, Michael Berk, and Felice Jacka, “The Gut Microbiome and Diet in Psychiatry:  Focus on Depression,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 28, no. 1 (2015), 1–​6. 9 See Thomas Pradeu. “A Mixed Self:  The Role of Symbiosis in Development,” Biological Theory 6, no. 1 (2011), 80–​88; Myra J. Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life, Evolution after Science Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Margaret Mcfall-​Ngai et al., “Animals in a Bacterial World, a New Imperative for the Life Sciences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, no. 9 (2013), 3229–​36.

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144  Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon 10 Stacy Alaimo, Exposed, Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 11 Jeffrey I. Gordon, “Honor Thy Gut Symbionts Redux,” Science 336, no. 6086 (2012), 1251–​53. 12 Bruno Latour, “From the World of Science to the World of Research?” Science 280, no. 5361 (1998): 208–​09. 13 See Ken Arnold, “Presenting Science as Product or Process:  Museums and the Making of Science,” in Exploring Science in Museums, ed. S.  Pearce (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ:  Athlone, 1996); Jon Durant, “The Challenge and the Opportunity of Presenting ‘Unfinished Science’,” in Creating Connections: Museums and the Public Understanding of Current Research, eds. D. Chittenden, G. Farmelo, and B.V. Lewenstein (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press 2004); Morgan Meyer, From “Cold” Science to “Hot” Research:  The Texture of Controversy (IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc, 2009). 14 See Louise Whiteley et al., “Exhibiting Health and Medicine as Culture,” Public Health Panorama 3, no. 1 (2017): 59–​68. 15 Élise Dubuc, “Museum and University Mutations:  The Relationship between Museum Practices and Museum Studies in the Era of Interdisciplinarity, Professionalisation, Globalisation and New Technologies,” Museum Management and Curatorship 26, no.  5 (2011), 498. See also Marianne Achiam and Jan Sølberg, “Nine Meta-​ Functions for Science Museums and Science Centres,” Museum Management and Curatorship 32, no. 2 (2017): 123–​43. 16 Hilde S.  Hein, The Museum in Transition:  A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). 17 Georgina Born and Andrew Barry, “ART-​ SCIENCE,” Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 1 (2010): 103–​19. 18 Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby, Critical Neuroscience, A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Chichester, UK: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012); Martyn Pickersgill and Ira Van Keulen, Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences (Bingley, UK:  Emerald Group Pub, 2011); Louise Whiteley, “Resisting the Revelatory Scanner? Critical Engagements with FMRI in Popular Media,” BioSocieties 7, no. 3 (2012), 245–​72. 19 See, for example, Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell Johnson, The Neuroscientific Turn, Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2012). 20 Callard and Fitzgerald, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity. Dez Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard led the project Hubbub at The Hub at The Wellcome Collection in London. Hubbub was a project dedicated to exploring the dynamics of rest, noise and work in our cities bodies and brains. It was a fifty-​strong international collective of social scientists, artists, humanities researchers, scientists, broadcasters, public engagement professionals, and mental health experts. This process led to a number of reflections on interdisciplinary processes, building on the participants’ previous work. 21 Callard and Fitzgerald, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity, 9. 22 Ibid. 23 Macdonald and Basu, Exhibition Experiments. 24 Ibid., 10. 25 Jessica Leigh Thompson, “Building Collective Communication Competence in Interdisciplinary Research Teams,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 37, no. 3 (2009): 278–​97.

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Curating experimental entanglements 145 6 Dubuc, “Museum and University Mutations.” 2 27 Macdonald and Basu, Exhibition Experiments.

Bibliography Achiam, Marianne and Jan Sølberg. “Nine Meta-​Functions for Science Museums and Science Centres.” Museum Management and Curatorship 32, no. 2 (2017): 123–​43. Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed, Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Arnold, Ken. “Presenting Science as Product or Process:  Museums and the Making of Science.” In Exploring Science in Museums. Edited by S. Pearce. London: Athlone, 1996. Born, Georgina and Andrew Barry. “ART-​SCIENCE.” Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 1 (2010): 103–​19. Callard, Felicity and Des Fitzgerald. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Callard, Felicity, Des Fitzgerald, and Angela Woods. “Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Action: Tracking the Signal, Tracing the Noise.” Palgrave Communications 1 (2015). Choudhury, Suparna and Jan Slaby. Critical Neuroscience, A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience. Chichester, UK: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2012. Collins, Stephen M., Michael Surette, and Premysl Bercik. “The Interplay between the Intestinal Microbiota and the Brain.” Nature Reviews Microbiology 10, no. 11 (2012): 735–​42. Dash, Sarah N., Gerard Clarke, Michael Berk, and Felice Jacka, “The Gut Microbiome and Diet in Psychiatry: Focus on Depression.” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 28, no. 1 (2015): 1–​6. Dubuc, Élise. “Museum and University Mutations:  The Relationship between Museum Practices and Museum Studies in the Era of Interdisciplinarity, Professionalisation, Globalisation and New Technologies.” Museum Management and Curatorship 26, no. 5 (2011): 497–​508. Durant, Jon. “The Challenge and the Opportunity of Presenting ‘Unfinished Science.” In Creating Connections:  Museums and the Public Understanding of Current Research. Edited by D. Chittenden, G. Farmelo, and B. V. Lewenstein. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. Foster, Jane and Karen-​ Anne Neufeld. “Gut-​ Brain Axis:  How the Microbiome Influences Anxiety and Depression.” Trends in Neurosciences 36, no. 5 (2013): 305–​12. Gordon, Jeffrey I. “Honor Thy Gut Symbionts Redux.” Science 336, no. 6086 (2012): 1251–​53. Hein, Hilde S. The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. Hird, Myra J. The Origins of Sociable Life, Evolution after Science Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Latour, Bruno. “From the World of Science to the World of Research?” Science 280, no. 5361 (1998): 308–​9. Littlefield, Melissa M. and Jenell Johnson. The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

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146  Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley, and Caroline Heje Thon Macdonald, Sharon and Paul Basu. Exhibition Experiments: New Interventions in Art History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Mayer, Emeran A., Rob Knight, Sarkis K Mazmanian, John F. Cryan, and Kirsten Tillisch. “Gut Microbes and the Brain:  Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience.” The Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 46 (2014): 15490–​96. Mcfall-​Ngai, Margaret, et al. “Animals in a Bacterial World, a New Imperative for the Life Sciences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, no. 9 (2013): 3229–​36. Meyer, Morgan. From ‘Cold’ Science to ‘Hot’ Research: The Texture of Controversy. IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc, 2009. Pickersgill, Martyn and Ira Van Keulen. Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group, 2011. Pradeu, Thomas. “A Mixed Self: The Role of Symbiosis in Development.” Biological Theory 6, no. 1 (2011): 80–​88. Söderqvist, Thomas, Adam Bencard, and Camilla Mordhorst. “Between Meaning Culture and Presence Effects: Contemporary Biomedical Objects as a Challenge to Museums.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40, no. 4 (2009): 431–​38. Thompson, Jessica Leigh. “Building Collective Communication Competence in Interdisciplinary Research Teams.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 37, no. 3 (2009): 278–​97. Whiteley, Louise. “Resisting the Revelatory Scanner? Critical Engagements with FMRI in Popular Media.” BioSocieties 7, no. 3 (2012): 245–​72. Whiteley, Louise, et al. “Exhibiting Health and Medicine as Culture.” Public Health Panorama 3, no. 1 (2017): 59–​68.

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11  The forgotten and the forgettable The making of The World Goes Pop and other stories Flavia Frigeri

“What is forgotten is forgotten for a good reason.”1 This is how Alfred Hentzen (1903–​1985), director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in the mid-​ 1950s, reacted when offered a group of paintings by the artist Kazimir Malevich (1878–​1935), which a friend had duly hidden under his bed during the war. Hentzen’s firm rejection of what had been “forgotten,” however, proved fortuitous for the Stedelijk Museum: it seized the opportunity and acquired the left-​behind Malevich paintings, which now comprise a core component of their permanent collection. This short tale of consignment to oblivion and reclamation forms the starting point to the curator, museum director, and Professor Kaspar König’s hymn to rediscovery penned in 2014: Rediscovery should be about wanting to find something out. When I tear an article out of a magazine it tends to be a re-​evaluation. Re-​evaluating something also means adopting a critical approach to your own values and questioning the status quo. And that’s where rediscovery becomes massively important.2 Rediscovery and reevaluation go hand in hand in König’s incitement to the constructive reappraisal of that which is forgotten. Indeed, König’s reaction is symptomatic of a larger tendency. The terms rediscovery, reevaluation, and their more fraught companion revisionism have, in fact, been the source of scrutiny in relation to contemporary exhibition-​making. Tainted by both positive and negative connotations, they are the defining catchwords of most research driven exhibitions. Aimed at rethinking and revisiting alternatively a movement, a period, or a loose alliance of artists, these exhibitions premised on rediscovery bring to the fore that which has been obliterated from domineering narratives and ultimately “forgotten.” Not without its pitfalls, this process of rediscovery can, as König goes on to point out, prove “to be nothing more than a flash in the pan, it can actually be very detrimental to artists.”3 Taking the lead from König’s appreciation of the intrinsic need to recuperate the “forgotten,” this essay examines the challenges inherent to the process of rediscovery and how this in turn inflects and directs the making

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148  Flavia Frigeri of research driven exhibitions. Arguably, research is key to all exhibitions, both monographic and group shows alike, however the specific interest here lies in those large-​scale thematic projects explicitly conceived as research platforms. Driven by new areas of research, either understudied or in need of reconsideration, these exhibitions unequivocally seek to unearth that which is “forgotten.” Premised on a hybrid structure welding academic and curatorial practice, the large-​scale thematic projects are framed, on the one hand, by a historicizing drive and, on the other hand, by the arbitrary nature of curatorial agency. König recognized the generational impetus behind rediscovery. In his words: “Rediscovery is always important when standing on the edge of a cliff. Every generation has to write its own history from scratch, after all.”4 As the co-curator—along with Jessica Morgan—of Tate Modern’s exhibition The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop (2015–​2016), I have personally experienced what it means to stand on the edge of this cliff and the desire for rediscovery that it in turn fuels.5 As a result, this essay is a combination of personal first-​hand knowledge counter-​balanced by the experiences of similarly ambitious exhibitions premised on rediscovery. These exhibitions include Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-​1980s (2007–​2009) curated by Jane Farver, Luis Camnitzer, and Rachel Weiss, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution curated by Cornelia Butler in 1999–​2000.6 These exhibitions demonstrated, without forgoing their visual drive, how new research could be fostered through the curatorial lens. With an eye to reassessing the global remit of conceptualism with the former and rethinking feminist artistic practices in the latter, they provided conceptual role models for the development of The World Goes Pop. Both earlier endeavors presciently recognized the need to develop a hybrid model that encompassed the illustrative nature of an exhibition, whilst tackling the depth of research typical of academic projects, such as doctoral theses and book-​length studies. Treading the line between the two was challenging, as was the sheer vastness of the subjects under scrutiny. We were dealing with the broad and fraught fields of conceptualism, feminist art, and pop art. To establish a definitive perimeter around the vast realm of pop art seemed counterproductive to us. Our ambition (as of those who preceded us) was, in fact, to open up the discourse rather than circumscribe it to a set of key tenets. As a result, the first challenge common to all of these exhibitions came in the form of the so-​called “research question.” What was at stake in revisiting the well-​trodden spheres of conceptualism, feminist art, and pop art? And how did a global perspective inflect these novel assessments? These were just two questions that needed addressing in order to develop a valid research framework. The introduction and forewords of the catalogs for WACK! and Global Conceptualism offer a glimpse into the ambitions and trials incurred by the organizers of such mammoth reassessments. Faced with having to establish the parameters of what exactly defines feminist practice, Butler adopted a

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The forgotten and the forgettable 149 transversal strategy, and without tackling the question head on, she focused on expanding the canon first. She explained: “through a proposed dismantling of the received canon of feminist art, the exhibition and accompanying publication consciously re-​enact feminism’s legacy of inclusivity and its interrogation of cultural hierarchies of all kinds to suggest a more complicated history of simultaneous feminisms.”7 The curators of Global Conceptualism in their jointly authored foreword similarly states: An additional tension in this project has been between the impulse to revise existing histories  –​to “expand and decenter the canon”  –​and to broaden the scope of the discussion overall. While this exhibition intends to revise conventional historicizations of conceptual art, it does so through the strategic addition of multiple, poorly known histories presented as equal corollaries rather than as appendages to a central axis of activity.8 Despite the obvious diversity of the subjects under examination, both WACK! and Global Conceptualism shared a set of common traits that arguably underpin all re-​discovery driven projects. Chief amongst them is the compulsion to dismantle the conventional canon, only matched by the desire to de-​center the narrative and delve into alternative histories and peripheries. Secondly there is the recognition that an all-​encompassing system and definition is impossible to locate. The trajectory is thus to devise a fluid and open-​ended proposition, that while shifting the axis from the center to its manifold corollaries, avoids prescriptive narratives. We were repeatedly faced with similar conundrums with The World Goes Pop. The most problematic of all was how best to tackle a global reassessment of pop art, without falling into the trap of Anglo-​American primacy and rest-​of-​the-​world dependency. The question was whether to include or not the household heroes of pop art such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Could a pop art exhibition exist without those American artists who were so seminal to the movement’s existence and recognition? Early on we decided that in order to review the canon and truly uncover that which had been forgotten, we had to focus on another facet of pop, which was spearheaded by a whole new cast of characters, and meant leaving out those who had long been at its helm. The challenge we faced is revealingly expressed by two opposing reactions to the exhibition, both appearing in the British press on September 14, 2015, following the press view. Mark Brown, art critic from the national daily The Guardian, positively impressed by the inclusion of a large number of female artists, commented: “Work by female artists from the 1960s and 70s that was marginalized and ignored by a sexist art establishment is finally getting recognition in a major pop art show at Tate Modern.”9 Art critic Adrian Searle contributed a contrasting view in the same feature in The Guardian:

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150  Flavia Frigeri Filled with overlooked and overcooked, the forgotten and forgettable, The World Goes Pop is a bitty and disappointing exhibition. A corrective to the male-​dominated canon of the movement, it is filled with feminist pop; Spanish, Japanese, Eastern European, Brazilian, and Argentinian pop; late pop; remade pop –​and things that aren’t really pop at all.10 The two diverging responses are indicative of the polar positions that the exhibition engendered. To Searle, the exhibition was unsatisfying, filled with things that had nothing to do with pop at all. According to this line of thinking, the sovereignty over the movement was held by, to quote art historian Steven Henry Madoff, “the four-​headed goliath named Lichtenstein-​Oldenburg-​Rosenquist-​Warhol.”11 Such a view implies that the quintessentially male-​dominated canon, and its firm grounding in an Anglo-​ American art history, could only produce second-​rate derivatives across the rest of the globe. Searle did not buy into the broadening of pop art’s remit and the consequent redefinition of its premise, which he dismissed as a failed corrective to the canon, ultimately reinforcing the idea that that which is forgotten should remain so. The sixty artists presented in the exhibition had been up until that point, mostly absent from the official story of pop. Active in alternative geographic locations with their heterogeneous works tackling pop from a range of different angles (feminist, political, folk, to name just a few), they were best left undiscovered according to the critic. The aims of the exhibition ran counter to this patriarchal and western-​ centric stance, and sought to emphasize how pop art thrived globally, and often independently of, its more famous counterparts. Redeployed as a tool for social and political subversion, pop art in its international guise was explicitly critical, leaving no room for complicity, a trait generally associated with American pop. Mark Brown, for his part, represented the opposite viewpoint of Searle, and praised the inclusion of a large proto-​feminist constituency. Female pop practitioners, who were so often viewed as subjects and prone to male objectification, were given ample space in The World Goes Pop. From the outset we recognized women as the most forgotten figures of the forgotten, and one of the curatorial premises was to aptly restore their seminal role in the formation of the movement. Wives, mothers, and daughters, they had been relegated to marginal roles within the artistic sphere and society more broadly. Their works, we proposed, were in dire need of rediscovery. And while to a constituency of critics like Searle, feminist pop seemed a detrimental inclusion, to us it was a necessary focus in rethinking the movement. The polarized reactions provoked by The World Goes Pop were comparable to those experienced in the wake of WACK! and Global Conceptualism. Emblematic of the skepticism with which Global Conceptualism was first received is Tony Godfrey’s review in The Burlington Magazine, where he concluded:  “The final impression is of an exhibition that is correcting the old story rather than providing a new one.”12 In this line of thinking,

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The forgotten and the forgettable 151 Global Conceptualism appeared to be restorative more than original, or just the beginning of a longer process of reevaluation, a sketch of the possible ramifications of the movement and not its conclusive sanctioning. While Godfrey identified the propositional stance of the exhibition as a flaw, the curators recognized this open-​endedness as one of its strengths. They made this clear in their catalog foreword:  “Given the range and complexity of its subject Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-​1980s can never be a definitive account. We sincerely hope others will take up the task and further the understanding of this important work.”13 Global Conceptualism was inquisitive rather than affirmative, and framed more as a research effort than simply a visual endeavor. As such, it treaded the fine line between the academic, by nature inquisitive, and the curatorial, ostensibly more affirmative in scope. WACK similarly transcended the boundaries between the two, and like Global Conceptualism, fell prey to criticism. A  sore point of contention in WACK’s case was the catalog’s controversial cover image. Featuring Martha Rosler’s (b. 1943)  iconic image Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows No Pain:  Hot House or Harem (1966–​1972), it sparked a heated debate in both the general and specialized media. Rosler’s work was devised as a critique of pornographic display, and constructed around cut-​outs of naked models drawn from the spreads of Playboy and magazines of a similar kind. The original purpose of this harem-​like composition was to reject the female body as a spectacle and many saw in its redeployment as a cover image a slick commodification of its former self. Art historian Karen Kurczynski reviewed the exhibition in Woman’s Art Journal, She touched on the Rosler debate concluding that: “To choose such an overt pastiche—a notoriously elusive, deliberately imitative but satirical poetic form—for this significant role becomes a confusing statement precisely because of the sophisticated subtext of the work.”14 Seen from this angle, the embedded elusiveness of the image did not make it a suitable candidate to carry the exhibition’s weight. Arguably, the Rosler case is significant not so much for the flurry of headlines it caused, but because of the idea that the reinscribing works into new contexts could represent a perilous course of action. Butler was faced here with a double challenge, on the one hand, the review of well-​known conceptual and feminist works, and, on the other hand, the introduction of works and artists who up to that point had been gravely marginalized. Accounts of WACK! and Global Conceptualism consistently highlighted the ambivalent relationship between the local and global that the two exhibitions addressed. With The World Goes Pop we experienced a similar need to balance the two. The desire to present a cohesive international picture often clashed with the necessity to refer back to local genealogies. This became one of the biggest cruxes: how to maintain the individuality of singular figures and their contexts amidst the larger story that we were telling? Shifting the axis from the centripetal American and European hubs alone would not suffice. And similarly it would not be desirable to point the

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152  Flavia Frigeri spotlight solely onto Latin America, Africa, or Asia. A balance between these diverging dimensions had to be found, and it could only be done by weaving the local with the global. The fine-​ tuning that this exercise entailed came with its own set of challenges, the primary one being the recognition of a tension between the making of exhibitions and the making of history. It became quickly apparent that the two strands, which on the surface appear to go hand in hand, actually occupy two parallel courses with only a few points of intersection. The ambition to review history and possibly amend those narratives that have ignored the peripheral to focus exclusively on the center was of primary importance to all the exhibitions under scrutiny here. On the other hand, curatorial practice must abide to a set of visual rules and pragmatic logistics, which often run counter to the making of history. Or, in other words, how can history be rewritten through a compelling visual display? We were faced with this visual conundrum the very moment we started thinking about The World Goes Pop. Questions such as, should the exhibition be organized thematically, geographically, or chronologically, were on our minds for a long time, as was the ongoing preoccupation with the implications of the geographical flattening the idea of “world” carried with it. How could we preserve the heterogeneity of individual practices whilst presenting a cohesive narrative? And even more so, how would we define the term pop? Was it necessary to rethink it starting from scratch, or was it more constructive to expand on existing definitions? Should we use it at all or was what we were presenting so radically opposed to our traditional understanding of pop art that the term antipop would be a more suitable definition for it? These were just some of the questions, which accompanied us throughout the five years during which we researched, discussed, and designed our rediscovery of global pop. From a review of the accounts of the making of Global Conceptualism that are currently stored in a special section of the blog of the Museum of Modern Art, New York dedicated to the exhibition, it appears that the exhibition’s three lead curators were faced with similar concerns.15 And so was Butler, who early on questioned whether including work by male artists would make for a more powerful statement than simply focusing on that of female practitioners. In the end, she settled on the latter option: I have chosen to stand by the “women-​only” model. I decided and the artists overwhelmingly agreed  –​that, as a major institutional survey, the essential story of WACK! must be told in terms of the women who pioneered the movement and those who struggled to make work either within the dictates of a feminist language or in reaction and relationship to it.16 Deciding whether a “women-​only” or mixed model was most appropriate to support the case that Butler was making with WACK! is indicative of

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The forgotten and the forgettable 153 the decision-​making process and the arbitrary nature of curatorial authority all exhibitions face. While Butler clearly had in mind that the aim of the exhibition was “to make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period,” she nonetheless inflected its historicization through the assertion of a relative selection process.17 This stance is not peculiar just to WACK! but is ostensibly endemic to all surveys aimed at reviewing a canon, including The World Goes Pop. The analytic reassessment of that which is forgotten in fact goes hand in hand with a selective process on the curator’s part. We also experienced this during the research stages of The World Goes Pop. The research for this show took us to all corners of the world, from Brazil, to Slovakia, and passing through Spain and Japan, among others. In each of these places we were welcomed by local curators, national institutions, and most importantly by the artists themselves. Artists were incredibly generous with their time and memories. They showed us their works, many of which had not been seen since the sixties, and told us about the context, often politically fraught, in which they were made. Indeed, it was the possibility to uncover that which had been forgotten that lent to many of these encounters a sense of trepidation. I remember stepping into the studios of the Valencia-​based artists Ángela García (b.1944) and Isabel Oliver (b.1946) and being completely stunned by their proto-​feminist pop works. Made at the time of Francisco Franco’s repressive military dictatorship, García’s and Oliver’s paintings presciently undermined stereotypical conceptions of femininity and motherhood. Similarly revealing was the meeting with French artist Nicola L (1937– 2019), whose Red Coat (1969), is a remarkable example of early collective art making. A giant raincoat with eleven hoods, twenty-​two arm slits, and one single skirt uniting them all, the Red Coat was devised as a wearable mobile structure meant to shelter the artist and her friends during the 1970 Isle Wight Festival. From a kind of prêt-​à-​porter, the coat was soon upgraded to a nomadic artwork. The artist has since traveled the world with the coat crammed into a medium sized suitcase, inviting regular viewers to freely step into the work. Underscored by the subtitle Same Skin for Everybody, the experience emphasized the work’s attempt to break down gender and social barriers. Again, this was a work which had long been relegated to storage, but thanks to the show, we were able to give it not only new visibility, but also revive its participatory nature by taking it to the streets of London. Indeed, our many meetings (too many to list here) with artists had a great impact on the development of The World Goes Pop. Being able to retell the history of pop art through the memories of those who had lived and made it, was a great privilege that shaped and informed our own approach to the subject. The extensive information we gathered was both daunting and exciting. The floors of our offices were covered with print-​outs of each and every pop work we came across during our five-​year research period. How we were to

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154  Flavia Frigeri make sense of it all and organize it, soon became the key challenge. It appeared to be a mission impossible having to choose amongst the many artists and works that we had uncovered across the globe. In his account of the organization of Global Conceptualism, curator Luis Camnitzer poignantly reminisced, “what we did lack … was space.”18 We, too, lacked space: decisions had to be made and eventually, through a process of imperfect inclusion and exclusion, we selected our core list. Hard-​edged painting mimicking source imagery was privileged over assemblage works, art historical subject-​matter reviewed through the pop lens gave way to a section on folk pop, and so on. Choice soon became the counterpoint to information, evincing how the arbitrary nature of curatorial practice diverted from the pure writing of history. A research platform, extending beyond the remits of the exhibition itself, is what we experienced with The World Goes Pop. And the exhibition catalog was conceived to fulfill this promise. In general, developed as a complementary aide to the exhibition, the catalog arguably takes on a key role when accompanying large-​scale surveys such as WACK!, Global Conceptualism, and The World Goes Pop. No longer just a venue to illustrate and reiterate the exhibition’s argument, it becomes a platform for critical exchange. Corroborating the thesis proposed by the visual display, the exhibition catalog lends it art-​historical depth, while endowing the project with a legacy beyond the run of the show. The curatorial strategy is thus bifurcated, both privileging the aesthetic drive in response to the exhibition layout, as well as turning the accompanying catalog into the site where art history can be conceptually and literally rewritten. It was our ambition with the catalog of The World Goes Pop to encompass these two functions, while laying the ground for the reassessment of pop art as a global movement. Indeed, there is still a wealth of material to be unearthed and reassessed in this area, and it was our hope to be able to foster a new interest in the subject on academic, curatorial, and general interest levels. In essence, as the curators of The World Goes Pop, we became brokers between the global and local manifestations of pop art. We dealt with the inevitable canonization that came with it and struggled with how to connect and present unfamiliar work in the most accessible way possible while also staying true to its context. Perhaps, as Elena Filipovic has suggested in relation to exhibition-​making, “an exhibition isn’t only the sum of its artworks, but also the relationships created between them, the dramaturgy around them, and the discourse that frames them.”19 The reading of pop art offered by The World Goes Pop was one that eschewed national borders, favoring instead a host of previously unexplored dialogues and connections. In doing so, our aim was to avoid what Geraldo Mosquera has described as “curating cultures” and “curated cultures,” that is, the curating cultures that hold hegemonic power over the curated ones.20 To borrow from curator Rachel Weiss’s memories of the making of Global Conceptualism, “curating ­globally—at least the way we experienced it—meant accepting a very

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The forgotten and the forgettable 155 different kind of aggregate.”21 An aggregate, I would add, that was messy, intrinsically flawed in its ability to cover everything, and imperfect in its unfolding, and yet, through research, it provided a platform to rediscover that which ought not to be forgotten.

Notes 1 Alfred Hentzen, quoted. in Kasper König, “What was the role of the rediscovery of artists in the 1960s and what is it today?” Spike Art Magazine 42 (Winter 2014): 94. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 Ibid., 95. 5 The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London (September 17, 2015–​January 24, 2016). 6 Global Conceptualism opened at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 4–​July 16, 2007), then travelled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (September–​December 2007), PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York (February–​May 2008), and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC (October 2008–​January 2009). WACK! opened at Queens Museum, New  York (April 28–​August 29, 1999)  and then toured to the Walker Art Center (December 19–​March 5, 2000) and Miami Art Museum (September 15–​November 26, 2000). 7 Cornelia Butler, ed., WACK!:  Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles, Cambridge, MA, and London:  Museum of Contemporary Art and The MIT Press, 2007): 15–​16. 8 Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–​1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999): xi. 9 Mark Brown, “Tate Modern Highlights Pop Art by Women Ignored by Sexist Establishment,” The Guardian (September 14, 2015). www.theguardian. com/​artanddesign/​2015/​sep/​14/​tate-​modern-​pop-​art-​women-​ignored-​sexist-​ establishment, accessed May 21, 2016. 10 Adrian Searle, “The World Goes Pop Review –​A Bitty and Disappointing Tour of Minor Art,” The Guardian (September 14, 2015), www.theguardian.com/​ artanddesign/​2015/​sep/​14/​the-​world-​goes-​pop-​review-​tate-​modern, accessed May 21, 2016. 11 Steven Henry Madoff, “WHAM! BLAM! How Pop Art Stormed the High-​ Art Citadel and What the Critics Said,” in Pop Art:  A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): xiii–​xx. 12 Tony Godfrey, “Global Conceptualism: New York,” The Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1157 (August 1999): 502–​4. 13 Camnitzer, Global Conceptualism, xi. 14 Karen Kurczynski, “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” Woman’s Art Journal 29, no. 2 (Fall–​Winter 2008): 53. 15 See, Zanna Gilbert, Yu-​ Chieh Li, and Magdalena Moskalewicz, “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, http://​post.at.moma.org/​themes/​19-​global-​conceptualism-​ reconsidered, accessed May 21, 2016.

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156  Flavia Frigeri 6 Butler, WACK!, 22. 1 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Luis Camnitzer, “Luis Camnitzer Looks Back:  Thoughts on Global Conceptualism,” Post:  Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, http://​post.at.moma.org/​themes/​19-​global-​conceptualism-​reconsidered, accessed May 21, 2016. 19 Elena Filipovic, “What Is an Exhibition?,” in Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013): 75. 20 Geraldo Mosquera, “Some Problems in Transcultural Curating,” in Global Visions:  Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press and The Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994): 135. 21 Rachel Weiss, “Thinking Back on Global Conceptualism,” Post:  Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe, http://​post.at.moma.org/​content_​items/​578-​thinking-​back-​on-​global-​conceptualism, accessed May 21, 2016.

Bibliography Brown, Mark. “Tate Modern Highlights Pop Art by Women Ignored by Sexist Establishment.” The Guardian (September 14, 2015). www.theguardian. com/​artanddesign/​2015/​sep/​14/​tate-​modern-​pop-​art-​women-​ignored-​sexist-​ establishment. Accessed May 21, 2016. Butler, Cornelia ed., WACK!:  Art and the Feminist Revolution. Los Angeles, Cambridge, MA, and London:  Museum of Contemporary Art and The MIT Press, 2007. Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–​1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999. Camnitzer, Luis. “Luis Camnitzer Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism.” Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe (May 11, 2015) http://​post.at.moma.org/​themes/​19-​global-​conceptualism-​reconsidered. Accessed May 21, 2016. Filipovic, Elena. “What Is an Exhibition?” In Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating. Edited by Jens Hoffmann, 73–​81. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013. Gilbert, Zanna, Yu-​Chieh Li, and Magdalena Moskalewicz. “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered.” Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe (April 29, 2015). http://​post.at.moma.org/​themes/​19-​global-​conceptualism-​ reconsidered. Accessed May 21, 2016. Godfrey, Tony. “Global Conceptualism: New York.” The Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1157 (August 1999): 502–​4. König, Kasper. “What Was the Role of the Rediscovery of Artists in the 1960s and What Is It Today?” Spike Art Magazine 42 (Winter 2014): 92–​96. Kurczynski, Karen. “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” Woman’s Art Journal 29, no. 2 (Fall–​Winter 2008): 50–​53. Madoff, Steven Henry. “WHAM! BLAM! How Pop Art Stormed the High-​ Art Citadel and What the Critics Said.” In Pop Art:  A Critical History, xiii–​xx. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Mosquera, Geraldo. “Some Problems in Transcultural Curating.” In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. Edited by Jean Fisher, 133–​39. London: Kala Press and The Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994.

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The forgotten and the forgettable 157 Searle, Adrian. “The World Goes Pop Review  –​A  Bitty and Disappointing Tour of Minor Art.” The Guardian (September 14, 2015). www.theguardian.com/​ artanddesign/​2015/​sep/​14/​the-​world-​goes-​pop-​review-​tate-​modern. Accessed May 21, 2016. Weiss, Rachel. “Thinking Back on Global Conceptualism.” Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe (May 1, 2015). http://​post.at.moma. org/​content_​items/​578-​thinking-​back-​on-​global-​conceptualism. Accessed May 21, 2016.

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12  Looters, smugglers, and collectors Rethinking models of ownership research and how to mediate it through the form of the exhibition Tone Hansen How can research of a specific case study be communicated within the framework of an exhibition? Is the exhibition an end point for the research process, or is it possible to use the exhibition as research, or to stimulate further research for the audience to conduct? Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK) decided to confront these issues when in 2012 we were faced with a claim that a Henri Matisse (1869–​1954) painting in our collection, known as Profil bleu devant la cheminée (Woman in Profile in Front of the Fireplace), 1937, was actually a work looted by the Nazis.1 It started with a letter from the heirs of Jewish art collector Paul Rosenberg (1880–​1959) via the largest online database of stolen art, the Art Loss Register (ALR).2 The letter stated that the National Socialists had confiscated Matisse’s painting from Rosenberg’s storage facility when Germany invaded France.3 The painting had been registered in the Rosenberg archive as missing ever since. From the start, we saw the project as an opportunity for new possibilities in academic research and curatorial practice. It was crucial for us to transform questions and misinformation as well as facts found during our research into material for new experiments and ideas, turning a possible disaster into a space for reflection beyond the specific case. The project went through two distinct phases: the first involved concrete historical research, or what is traditionally described as provenance research. During this phase, a methodology emerged through intense archival research: a specific physical interaction with documents and bureaucratic structures related to the state of history. The restitution process for the Matisse painting caused us to look at our permanent collection with a more critical eye regarding provenance, ultimately spurring us to launch a parallel investigation into the provenance of nineteen other pre-​1945 paintings in the collection. The second phase of the project took the form of a search for a curatorial as well as artistic approach, which could help us to answer questions such as:  how can we communicate the range of facts, stories, rumors, and details that constitute the history of a painting through the form of the exhibition? And, how can we broaden the historical concept of provenance by opening up the process to contemporary artists’ own experimental take on the materials researched?

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Looters, smugglers, and collectors 159

Provenance: Filling gaps, searching for facts The concept of provenance is used to describe the history of ownership in relation to a given work. Provenance has been the subject of art historical research, closely linked to the work of museums and auction houses. While auction houses generally attempt to protect a buyer by keeping his or her name secret, an unbroken chain of ownership may serve to guarantee the value of a work, both in the sense of demonstrating ownership and verifying authenticity. An important moment articulating the nature of the field of provenance research occurred in December 1998, when the Washington Conference on Holocaust-​ Era Assets marked the rise of a relatively new, professionally disciplined field of provenance research that primarily focused on the period 1933–​1945.The declaration of principles was further strengthened by the Terezín Declaration of June 2009, which emphasized the responsibility of art institutions to work proactively in respect of researching their collection.4 The first step of provenance research we undertook involved the examination of the work itself. The back of a painting usually displays a series of labels from previous owners, that is, institutions that have had the work on loan, or freight companies used to transport it. This information is, however, in no way precise and cannot be taken at face value. If a painting carries no labels or markings at all, this is a warning sign. A second aspect of our provenance research required we travel to Paris to check, with the aid of images and the information gathered from our own archive and from the paintings themselves, the many Matisse paintings that ended up in Hermann Göring’s (1893–​1946) collection during the German occupation of France (1940–​1944). For these purposes the following archives were visited: Archives Matisse, Archives Musées Nationaux, Archives Nationales, Ministry of Foreign Affairs-​Les Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères, and Centre Pompidou’s Archives Unit. Les Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères was especially poignant. There we were handed a huge file wrapped in grey cardboard held together with a blue ribbon, which contained documents it had taken us months to gain access to. The file contained every bit of paper either presented at or written on during the trial of Gustav Rochlitz (1889–​ 1972), one of the main traders of Nazi seized properties during World War II. Document after document of evidence in the form of drawings of missing furniture were meticulously presented, in addition to tickets, small notes, messages, and legal protocols. An important aspect of provenance research in general, and our project specifically, was to uncover and understand the realities of the people who were the subjects of, owned, or otherwise involved with the works in question. The subject of Matisse’s Profil bleu devant la cheminée was Lydia Delectorskaya (1910–​ 1998), a Russian refugee in Paris.5 Delectorskaya had posed in Matisse’s studio many times before, in a variety of staged

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160  Tone Hansen arrangements, often in the same dress. In 1986, it was Delectorskaya herself who titled the painting in a manner that registers the mood of the model: Robe bleue, profil devant la cheminée, aux soucis (translated literally: Blue Dress, Profile in Front of the Fireplace, Worried). Matisse’s gallerist and friend, the renowned Parisian gallerist Paul Rosenberg (1881–​ 1959) exhibited and bought the painting, and thus their careers were intertwined by the work. Rosenberg and his immediate family fled the Nazis due to the occupation, arriving in September 1940 and settling in New York. There he quickly established a new gallery and resumed his business operations. Left behind, however, were more than two thousand objects. One of the storage facilities Rosenberg desginated for the remaining objects in France was a vault at the National Bank for Commerce and Industry in Libourne, near Floriac. This is where Profil bleu devant le cheminée was stored, along with 161 other works, such as Woman Seated in Armchair from 1920 (recently restituted to the heirs of Rosenberg from the disputed Gurlitt collection) and Oriental Woman Seated on Floor from 1927 (for many years in the ownership of the Seattle Art Museum as a gift from the Bloedel family, restituted to the heirs of Rosenberg in 1999 after a legal dispute and thereafter sold privately)—two paintings that would travel under differing circumstances, only to resurface again decades later.6 On September 1, 1940, Profil bleu devant le cheminée entered the repository at Jeu de Paume, where it was registered by the Nazi organization responsible for appropriating cultural property, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) as the property of Herman Göring. ERR was a special division of the German foreign ministry established in 1940 under the direction of Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg (1893–​1946). ERR’s primary function was to confiscate designated cultural treasures and so-​called “ownerless” Jewish art collections in Nazi-​ occupied territories. Profil bleu devant le cheminée was given the inventory number PR 28 and the somewhat shorter title Frau am Kamin (Woman by the Fireplace), and an estimated value of 3,000 francs. A photograph of the painting was stapled to the back of the inventory card. From Herman Göring’s collection, Frau am Kamin—now entitled Frau mit rotblonden Haar (Woman with Strawberry-​Blond Hair) and with an inventory number of 64—was exchanged for other works in the possession of Gustav Rochlitz (1889–​1972), a Paris-​based, German art dealer, on March 10, 1942. Rochlitz received four works in total from ERR in exchange for a Florentine Tondo. In addition to Profil bleu devant le cheminée, these works included another Matisse, Femme en veste rouge, as well as Amedeo Modigliani’s (1884–​1920) Portrait de femme, and August Renoir’s (1841–​ 1919) Portrait de jeune fille.7 Rochlitz had been conducting business in Paris since 1933, until he was arrested by the French authorities in 1939 because of his German citizenship. But he was freed by the German forces and quickly became one of the primary authorized negotiators whom the Nazis used as intermediaries. Göring

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Looters, smugglers, and collectors 161 even granted Rochlitz a special visa, enabling him to travel freely between the occupied zone and the free zone, in effect making him a kind of traveling salesman, and in this capacity he was quite useful to Göring. Rochlitz regularly visited the Jeu de Paume and established a barter system, exchanging “degenerate” artworks for highly valued ones. Under questioning carried out and documented by the Allied forces after the war, Rochlitz named the French art dealer, Paul Pétridès (1901–​1993), as the buyer of the contested painting.8 When Pétridès was confronted by the Allies he denied all knowledge of the painting. Like Rochlitz and many other art dealers at the time, Pétridès had ready access to works from Jewish collections and profited from this position.9 Rochlitz, for his part, fled Paris when the Allies arrived and was arrested in Germany in December 1945. At his trial in Paris on May 3, 1946, he recanted, and cited Isidor Rosner as the purchaser of the painting. Rosner, who was originally from Odessa (now part of Ukraine), vanished during the war, and thus was never made to account for these allegations. Rochlitz was found guilty of being an economic collaborator and sentenced to three years in prison and the seizure of all his property.10 After he served his time, he continued his activities as an art dealer, as many others of the time. After this information on the 1942 exchange of the painting, the trail went cold. From letter exchanges found in the archives at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, we were able to surmise that Onstad bought the painting from a lesser-​known dealer, Galerie Bénézit in Paris, most likely at the end of the 1940s or the very beginning of 1950. How or when the painting ended up in Bénézit’s possession has never been established, nor is there a verifiable date of purchase by Niels Onstad (1909–​1978). Henie Onstad Kunstsenter does not have a receipt for the purchase in its archives. The gallery owner, Henri Bénézit, died in 1999; his son Jean-​Pierre Bénézit then took over the business. Philippe Loudmer, another art dealer, aided Jean-​Pierre Bénézit in selling works from the defunct gallery. When we contacted the gallery in 2012, it was Loudmer who responded. According to him, Galerie Bénézit’s archives has been destroyed, or “burnt in a dustbin,” as stated in an email.11 We never succeeded in meeting with Loudmer in order to corroborate this, despite repeated requests and having ventured to the gallery’s last known address. In piecing together the painting’s provenance, the next document to turn up was in our own archives. It was a 1951 insurance document from the John F. Curry Agency.12 The document refers to insurance coverage for the prior year, 1950, and inventories a number of paintings owned by Niels Onstad. The inventory included one work titled Woman Sitting in Chair from 1937 by Matisse. It appears that this painting hung in Onstad’s residence in New York City. Niels Onstad met Hollywood film star and figure skating icon Sonja Henie (1912–​1969) in the United States in 1955. They married the following year and together continued to collect art. In November 1961, the couple decided to formally set up two foundations, which required that questions regarding the collection’s ownership history be researched. Onstad

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162  Tone Hansen thus contacted Galerie Bénézit on April 11, 1960, via a letter to Madame Jean-​Pierre Bénézit, requesting the history of several works that he states he purchased “some time ago.”13 Onstad wrote that the reason for his inquiry was that he and Henie planned to establish an art foundation that would lead to a museum, and that they were also working on a catalog of the collection to accompany an extensive European exhibition tour. Madame Bénézit replied on April 14, 1960, stating that she could not recall the exact paintings Onstad referred to. Onstad replied immediately, sending photos of the works in question and suggested a meeting in Paris. There is no subsequent correspondence between them in HOK’s archives. It was also at this time that Onstad wrote to Pierre Matisse, the painter’s youngest son, who had established his own gallery in New York, and whom both Onstad and Paul Rosenberg had known. In this letter, Onstad asked whether Matisse had any firsthand knowledge of the works by his father in Onstad’s collection.14 Pierre Matisse replied that he had no information about Onstad’s Matisse works, other than that one of them was probably painted in Nice.15 Despite these seemingly dead ends, Onstad certainly continued working on the case, and starting in 1961, Paul Rosenberg’s name is included as part of the provenance of Profil bleu devant le cheminée. Onstad knew the painting had belonged to Rosenberg, but he apparently never found out the painting was listed as looted. When the painting was enlisted as part of the property of the foundation, it again changed title to Blue Dress in Ochre Arm-​Chair. This information was presumably taken from the French art historian Jean Cassou’s Paintings and Drawings of Matisse, first published in 1939, of which a copy is in HOK’s library and where the painting is reproduced under this title, and with Paul Rosenberg as the owner.16 At the same time as these events, Paul Rosenberg’s son Alexander was hunting for the rest of his father’s collection. Despite their parallel aims, the two investigations never crossed paths. Henie and Onstad sent their collection on an impressively long international tour during the years 1961–​ 1963. Exhibition catalogs were prepared for each leg of the tour, in which the work’s provenance is always stated in the same way:  Rosenberg is cited as the prior owner, followed by Bénézit. Several years later in 1968, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter opened and Profil bleu devant la cheminée was one of the main attractions of the collection. Fast-​forward forty-​six years to March 2014, when HOK once again traveled the painting, this time by returning it to the Rosenberg family. While we accepted that we would never be able to fill the gap of ten years in the painting’s existence, we knew were left with the ethical responsibility of retelling the stories of those who had owned the painting. Accordingly, a group of artists were invited to do their own research into works in the collection, or to develop projects related to the issues that surfaced from the investigations. Dag Erik Elgin (b. 1962), Celine Condorelli (b. 1974), Marianne Heier (b. 1969), Matts Leiderstam (b. 1956), and Michael

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Figure 12.1 Dag Erik Elgin, Halbfigur einer rotblonden Frau die in einem Sessel (sitz) vor einem Kamin auf dem zwei Vasen mit Blumen stehen über dem ein von Matisse gemaltes Bild hängt (2015) (Half-​Figure of a Red-​Blonde Woman Sitting in an Armchair in Front of a Fireplace, On Which Two Vases With Flowers Are Standing, Above Which a Painting by Matisse Is Hanging), eleven canvases, each the same size as Matisse’s Profil bleu devant la cheminée (2015).

Rakowitz (b. 1973)  accepted our invitation and were given access to our research through workshops as the project developed. They were also given the task to find ways of talking about how ideas as well as customs and objects change when passed between people, as well as challenge the site of an exhibition as a place for learning with and through the art works. The project was presented in its entirety as an exhibition, In Search of Matisse, which opened in 2015 and was accompanied by the book Looters, Smugglers and Collectors: Provenance Research and the Market (Walther König, 2015).

Manet and Shabbat late lunch The methodology underlying our research and its presentation as an exhibition was inspired by German artist Hans Haacke’s (b.1936) provenance project Manet-​PROJEKT 74 (1974). We included Manet-​PROJEKT 74 in our exhibition as a reference point and connection between our provenance work and the more contemporary pieces.17 This is because Haacke produced works and writings that question various fundamental structural aspects of the field of art. In 1974, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary,

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164  Tone Hansen the Wallraf-​Richartz-​Museum in Cologne organized an exhibition with the title PROJEKT 74. Promoted with the slogan “Art Remains Art,” it was to present “aspect of international art at the beginning of the seventies.”18 Haacke submitted an outline for his project: “Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus of 1880, collection Wallraf-​Richartz Museum, is on a studio easel in an approximately 6 x 8 meter room of PROJEKT 74. Panels of the persons who have owned the painting over the years and the prices paid for it.”19 Manet-​PROJEKT 74 thoughtfully documented the history of the different owners and their curriculum vitae, which were prosaically posted alongside Une Botte d’Asperges, thereby presenting the social and economic position of the owners for the life of the painting and the prices paid for it. This included the chairman of the Wallraf-​Richartz Museum’s acquisition committee, the German banker Hermann J. Abs, who had played a key role in the economic design and stabilization of Nazism. To the Nazis, classification of objects as “ownerless” or “abandoned” was a way of justifying looted property. Hence the terminology was both a means and a consequence of the systematic, legal degradation of the Jewish and other persecuted populations of Germany and Europe, who were gradually deprived of civil rights and finally of their citizenship. For all of the artists involved in the In Search of Matisse exhibition, focusing further on the history of the owners, the circulation of works, objects, or ideas vis-​à-​ vis legal and moral issues, as well as the art historical registration of ownership as an indicator of authenticity became their underlying subject. An important aspect of the exhibition was a focus on the relational aspect of tradition and its connection to the use of objects. This was reflected in Michael Rakowitz’s work Enemy Kitchen (2003–​ongoing). With the aid of his Iraqi-​Jewish mother, over the course of several years Rakowitz compiled Baghdadi recipes in a compendium, and this document has been used to teach to different public audiences, including middle and high school students and bringing them together for preparation of and eating a meal together in many different cities and situations since. Enemy Kitchen takes as its starting point the preparing and consuming this food, something that opens up a new route through which Iraq can be discussed—in this case, through that most familiar of cultural staples: nourishment. In general, Iraqi culture tends to be virtually invisible beyond the negative daily news. Enemy Kitchen seizes the possibility of cultural visibility to produce an alternative discourse. For our exhibition, Rakowitz set up a temporary kitchen on the premises of the Fritt Ord Foundation (Freedom of Speech Foundation) in central Oslo. Together with chef Tore Namstad, we served a late Shabbat lunch for sixty people. Rakowitz’s other contribution to the exhibition dealt with questions of so-​called “ownerless” objects, an issue he has worked on for many years, such as with the consequences of the inability of armed forces to protect Iraqi museums during the invasion in 2003 with his project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is (2013-​ongoing), a continuously growing monument that consists of full-​sized replicas of lost cultural artifacts. All replicas

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Figure 12.2 Michael Rakowitz: Enemy Kitchen (2003–​ongoing).

display one notable feature: they are covered in wrappers from the region’s sweets and foodstuffs. Thus every object bears material from commercial products that cross national borders and become part of international trade. For the exhibition, Rakowitz developed three new objects for the series based on the looting of the National Museum of Iraq. His message with such works was that the destruction of cultural artifacts as a strategy of war is also about the destruction of the cultural identity of a population.

Researching the collection Two artists chose to work directly in relation to works that were under investigation in our collection. Matts Leiderstam developed a new work for the exhibition. Looking Through the Grid (2015), which investigated another form of the social life of painting by looking at Pierre Bonnard’s (1867–​1947) painting L’Arbre près de la rivière (Tree Near the River, 1909). The painting’s tripartite composition unfolds amid a large foreground tree, behind which a woman in a boat can partially be seen. The woman looks toward the viewer, which also implies the position of the painter himself. Leiderstam’s Looking Through the Grid consisted of a specially designed table holding painting sketches, books, and photocopies, and investigated the influence and methods of this school of modern French painting, thus commenting both on modernity, and a personal story of how an artistic practice has been formed through the modernist grid.

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Figure 12.3 Late Sabbath lunch served at The Fritt Ord Foundation together with chef Tore Namstad.

Artist Dag Erik Elgin, who followed the provenance research project from the very beginning, developed a work connected to the meticulous nature of Nazi bureaucracy, transforming the disputed Matisse painting’s formal description when it entered the collection of Göring, into eleven paintings each the same size as Matisse’s Profil bleu devant la cheminée. Entitled Halbfigur einer rotblonden Frau die in einem Sessel (sitz) vor einem Kamin auf dem zwei Vasen mit Blumen stehen über dem ein von Matisse gemaltes Bild hängt (2015) (Half-​Figure of a Red-​Blonde Woman Sitting in an Armchair in Front of a Fireplace, On Which Two Vases With Flowers Are Standing, Above Which a Painting by Matisse Is Hanging), Elgin’s work consisted of eleven canvases, each the same size as Matisse’s Profil bleu devant la cheminée. By taking the inventory card by ERR and turning it into an almost unreadable poem in the form of a series of paintings, Elgin offers an extensive iconographic exposition of the specific language of bureaucracy.

How ideas travel Celine Condorelli and Marianne Heier developed their project in relation to the sharing of ideas, time, and the movement of objects in time and space, as well as with questions of authenticity, announcements, and, of course, the question of ownership. Heier’s text, object, poster, and performance project The Guest (2015) took its cue from a meteorite she purchased on eBay.

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Looters, smugglers, and collectors 167 She correlated a meteorite shower that fell over an area in Argentina more than four thousand years ago—between Chaco Province and Santiago del Estero—with the kind of movement that is implicit in the process of inspiration. The meteorite was placed on top of a pile of posters and had to be lifted up for the audience to take a copy. The poster presented Antonello da Messina’s (1430–​1479) 1476 painting Our Lady of the Annunciation. Inspiration is a gift, Heier tells us; it is an obligation, a contract that binds giver and recipient together until it is sent on or reciprocated. The Guest questioned the originality of the idea and the development of the creative act of an artist in relation to something more artificial like its market. Condorelli also focused on the redistribution of ideas with her contribution to the exhibition, which consisted of an interior with benches and shelves she developed specifically for the show. Her installation charted the search for a furniture-​like object that appears in the only surviving photograph of Polish avant-​garde painter Władysław Strzemiński’s (1893–​1952) installation Neoplastic Room (1948), now reconstructed in Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland. Museum Sztuki was an artist-​founded museum invented for the art of the future. With it Strzemiński created a complete environment as an artwork to display other artworks, an exhibition room for sculptures by his love Katarzyna Kobro (1898–​1951). The installation was developed through objects whose reason for existing was their relationship to something else, objects that were no longer in existence in their original form and which were reconstructed through multiple interpretations.

Figure 12.4 Marianne Heier, The Guest (2015). Meteorite, posters, sound installation, and performance.

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Figure 12.5 Celine Condorelli, Average Spatial Compositions (2015), milk steel, plywood, upholstery, paint, dimensions.

Exhibiting evidence and anecdotes In Search of Matisse also displayed the museum’s nineteen remaining paintings that were made before 1945, which also underwent provenance research. We did so in a way that allowed viewers to observe them from the front as well as the back, in conjunction with the research that had been carried out and the contemporary projects positioning provenance and circulation within a broader context. While earlier provenance research was related to masterpieces or works of special value, provenance is now considered a requirement for all types of work and objects independent of market value or art historical relevance. In parallel to museum research, a whole new market for finding and claiming works has appeared, and the expensive research in many cases leads to works being reclaimed and returned, whereby they again enter auction houses. The problems of an object’s origin and ownership are tautologically embedded in the Western museum’s development:  the circulation of objects (either by force or will) is a condition for establishing a collection, but it also grants that collection an inherently problematic foundation. To return to the luncheon programmed by Rakowitz, it brought us together around the table and created one of many platforms throughout the exhibition to question the role of the exhibition as well as the much-​needed conscience.

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Conclusion Much more than simply an art exhibition or documentation project, In Search of Matisse sought to take what was initially a case of loss and missing information, and turn these potential obstacles into the starting points for rethinking the exhibition as a working research collaboration. While we started out attempting to answer certain questions, we found that coming up with our own, new questions provided as much, if not more possibilities for understanding the expanded role of provenance research and historical exhibitions today. That these seemingly traditional aspects of the museum world stimulated new curatorial approaches, which allowed for the reenvisioning of a permanent collection as well contemporary art, suggests an experimental model for future curatorial projects.

Notes 1 The painting titled Profil bleu devant la cheminée has a lead role in this essay. During the time of its existence, it changed title more than twenty times. We consistently name it by its very first title throughout the story. Titles attributed to Matisse’s Profil bleu devant la cheminée (1937) include:  Profil bleu devant la cheminée; 1939: Blue Dress in Ochre Arm-​chair, Femme au profil devant la cheminée; 1941: Femme au profil devant une cheminée, Frau am Kamin; 1942: Frau mit Rotblondem Haar, Frau in rotblondem Haar; 1945: Woman with Red Hair, Femme aux cheveux rouges, Profil bleu devant la cheminée; 1946: Femme en bleu devant la cheminée; 1947: Robe bleue dans un fauteuil ocre, Profil bleu devant la cheminée, Woman in Profile in front of a Chimney; 1951:  Woman Sitting in a Chair; 1954:  Robe bleue dans un fauteuil ocre; 1956:  Profil bleu devant la cheminée, Femme de profil devant une cheminée; 1960: Femme devant une cheminée; 1961: Robe bleue dans un fauteuil ocre, Frau mit blauem Kleid im gelben Sessel. 2 Paul Rosenberg was the son of an antiquities dealer, Alexandre Rosenberg, who immigrated to Paris from Slovakia in 1878 and who was himself a specialist in Impressionism and Post-​Impressionism. Paul and his brother Léonce took over their father’s business in 1906. The first contract between Paul Rosenberg and Henri Matisse, signed on July 16, 1936, covered the period 1936–​1939; under its terms works were priced according to their size, and Rosenberg had exclusive rights to Matisse’s entire production. 3 The painting’s Norwegian title is Blå kjole i okergul lenestol. 4 “Declarations [Terezin Declaration Final.pdf],” Holocaust Era Assets Conference, June 26–​30, 2009, Prague, Czech Republic, Government of the Czech Republic and Forum 2000, www.holocausteraassets.eu/​program/​conference-​proceedings/​ declarations/​. 5 “January 21, 1936. A canvas 92 x 60 cm. Bodice of blue taffeta (made by Lydia) with a frill and a bib front of white organza …” The original reads: “21 janvier 1936. Une toile de 30 Marine (92 cm x 60 cm). Corsage de taffetas bleu (fait par Lydia), avec collerette et jabot d’organdi blanc …” [trans. author] From Matisse’s diaries in Lydia Delectorskaya, L’apparente facilité: Henri Matisse: Peintures de 1935–​1939 (Paris: Adrien Maeght Editeur, 1986), 92.

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170  Tone Hansen 6 See, for instance, https://​plone.unige.ch/​art-​adr/​cases-​affaires/​odalisque-​painting-​ 2013-​paul-​rosenberg-​heirs-​and-​seattle-​art-​museum, accessed January 15, 2018. 7 Copies of receipts of exchange, which number fifteen, between Von Behr (ERR) and Rochlitz are archived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Les Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères, in Paris, France. There are also several pictures of the Florentine tondo from the sixteenth century entitled Holy Family, which would correspond to the description of the tondo in exchange number 15. However the archivists do not seem to agree and assign another exchange number to the tondo: 11. If the tondo belongs to another exchange, it must be to number 3.  In number 3, seven paintings were exchanged with a painting by Rafaellino del Garbo, Madonna and Child, while number 11 exchanged one Matisse for The Harbor of Antwerp by Jan Brueghel the Elder. 8 Paul Pétridès was originally from Cyprus, of British nationality, and naturalized French in 1943. Indicted for the first time by the French government in 1944, he slithered his way out by paying a fine of 3,330,000 francs in 1949. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in 1979, which he did not serve because of his age. 9 Cf. Paul Pétridès dossier at Les Archives de Paris Pérotin/​3314/​71/​1/​3, article 88. 10 Archives Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et Européennes/​ RA carton 417. Source kindly shared by Emmanuelle Polack, May 9, 2013. 11 Noted in an email to Karin Hellandsjø from Philippe Loudmer on October 2, 2012. 12 Records pertain to six documents between Niels Onstad and John F.  Curry Agency, 70 Pine Street, New York, NY, for the period January 30, 1951 through February 11, 1952, currently in the Archive of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Niels Onstad renewed the insurance policy twice for the years 1951 and 1952. 13 Letter dated April 11, 1960, in the Archive of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. 14 Letter dated January 22, 1960, in the Archive of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. 15 Letter dated January 30, 1960, in the Archive of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. 16 Jean Cassou, ed., Paintings and Drawings of Matisse (Paris: Braun & Cie, and New York: Tudor, 1939). 17 The works include Michael Rakowitz, Spoils (2011); Matts Leiderstam, Provenance (2007–​2011); Mounira Al Solh, Now Eat My Script (2014); Hito Steyerl, Journal No 1: An Artist’s Impression (2007), as well as Hans Haacke, Seurat’s Les Poseuses (Small Version) (1988–​1975). 18 Hans Haacke, Framing and Being Framed, 7 works 1970–​75 (Halifax:  The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York: New York University Press, 1976). Reproduced in Tone Hansen, ed., Looters, Smugglers and Collectors: Provenance Research and the Market (Oslo: Walther König and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 2015), 115. 19 Ibid.

Bibliography Cassou, Jean, ed. Paintings and Drawings of Matisse. Paris:  Braun & Cie, and New York: Tudor, 1939. Chechi, Alessandro, Raphael Contel, and Marc-​André Renold. “Case Odalisque Painting –​Paul Rosenberg Heirs and Seattle Art Museum.” Platform ArThemis. Geneva: Art-​Law Centre, University of Geneva, 2012. https://​plone.unige.ch/​art-​ adr/​cases-​affaires/​odalisque-​painting-​2013-​paul-​rosenberg-​heirs-​and-​seattle-​art-​ museum. Accessed January 15, 2018.

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Looters, smugglers, and collectors 171 Delectorskaya, Lydia. L’apparente facilité: Henri Matisse: Peintures de 1935–​1939. Paris: Adrien Maeght, 1986. Haacke, Hans. Framing and Being Framed, 7 Works 1970–​75. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York: New York University Press, 1976. Hansen, Tone, ed. Looters, Smugglers and Collectors: Provenance Research and the Market. Oslo: Walther König and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 2015. Holocaust Era Assets Conference. “Declarations [Terezin Declaration Final].” (Prague: Government of the Czech Republic and Forum 2000, June 26–​30, 2009. www.holocausteraassets.eu/​program/​conference-​proceedings/​declarations/​.

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Part III

Revisiting the past and challenging canons One of the traditional potentials of the exhibition is to provide a format for representing the past and producing historical knowledge. When the first modern art museum—Musée du Louvre—opened in the late eighteenth century, it was based on the idea that the museum should present universal truths and reiterate a canon of what was considered artistic excellency. The modern museum quickly became one of the permanent Bildung institutions of Enlightenment, but its claim to factual representation and its tendency to naturalize what is essentially a position in regard to historical events and artistic production, has been challenged severely with poststructuralist thinking. Exhibition making—or curatorship—includes the use of fictional and narrative techniques to stage and produce a certain understanding of the past, and the artifice of the act itself is coming under increased critical scrutiny. As chronological progression and the idea of an objective and unchanging standard for what is of highest value no longer reigns supreme within the museums, many attempts have been made to revisit the past and reconsider the categories that have traditionally existed between different media and fields. Art, visual culture, historical documents, and cultural artifacts cross-​fertilize in exhibitions that invite visitors into more open and nuanced understandings of the past. Revisiting the past without regard to strict separations between disciplines and categories can also be a means to intervene in the canon, question authoritative voices, and offer alternative understandings of history. Constructing the representation of the past rather than presenting it as a historical given also entails the need to consider the communicative aspects of the exhibition and position the sender of the message, an area that is receiving increasing attention in recent years. The essays in this section consider the exhibition as an experimental format for examining and negotiating the past in different ways and through the lens of case studies of specific exhibitions. In his article “Multiple Modernisms. Curating the Postwar Era for the Present,” art historian Kristian Handberg examines the current focus on the years 1945–​1965 in large-​scale, research-​based exhibitions that explicitly attempt to recast this period within a global perspective. He guides us through recent theories

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174  Revisiting the past and challenging canons concerning “multiple modernities” and global modernisms and considers in particular the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 that took place at Haus der Kunst in Münich in 2016. In Postwar Handberg sees a “culmination of the curatorial reinvestigation of the postwar era” in its ambition to comprehensively represent the production of art across all continents. In her essay “Contested Paradise:  Exhibiting Images from the Former Danish West Indies,” historian of visual culture Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer examines how to re-​represent imagery from colonial history in ways that include social context and the reception of the images. The article reflects on how colonial history can be reassessed and contextualized by including images from visual culture, historical documentation, and contemporary art and presents how this was done in the exhibition Blind Spots. Images of the Danish West Indies Colony at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, which Meyer cocurated in 2017. In the context of Blind Spots, the inclusion of contemporary art was strategically combined with the traditional practice of primarily showing documentation when it concerns the representation of historical events and themes. In this way, the links between the past and the present take new forms and the past is turned into something “living” that is activated when contemporary artists work with historical material. Alternatively, the inclusion of documentation becomes the “alien element” in art historian Susanne Neubauer’s essay “Against the Grain of Neutralization:  Exhibiting the Ephemeral as a Curatorial Production of Historical Knowledge.” In the text, Neubauer considers how and to what extent documentation transforms the status of the exhibition as a privileged space for experiencing objects. She analyzes Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck at Villa Romana in Florence, an exhibition that only exhibited photographic documentation of the sculptures of artist Rainer Ruthenbeck without any of his original works. Taking Boris Groy’s critique of the “artificiality” of showing art documentation rather than artworks as her point of departure, Neubauer discusses how the restaging and reconstruction of the past through documentation can produce “subjective knowledge,” but also, in some cases, falls short of actually communicating a historical context that adds to a contemporary understanding of its subject. The communicative aspect of exhibitions is examined further in art historian Masha Chlenova’s article “Innovative, Polemical, Dogmatic:  The Case of Soviet Experimental Museum Displays in 1930–​1932.” Going back to the experimental collection displays at two major Soviet art museums in the early 1930s, Chlenova discusses how the construction of (art) history in an ideologically loaded environment such as that of 1930s Soviet Union took place. Radically innovative, and overtly based on ideological premises, the two exhibitions escaped the supposedly neutral stand many large-​ scale exhibitions to this date took, on the one hand, while at the same time instrumentalizing the artworks and explicitly charging them as expressions

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Revisiting the past and challenging canons 175 of an underlying sociohistorical development. Chlenova argues that is also highly relevant in a broader perspective when it comes to revisiting the past and engaging with canons, and that museums can aim to be openly discursive institutions that articulate viewpoints and position themselves within society rather than neutralize their voices. Like the other case studies presented in this section and the reflections around them, Chlenova uses the exhibition to provide an entry point to how this can be done.

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13  Multiple modernisms Curating the postwar era for the present Kristian Handberg

A significant and current focus of the art world centers on the postwar era, as demonstrated by a veritable wave of exhibitions such as the monumental Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 (2016) in Munich (see Figure 13.1). Until recently, the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s has typically been framed as a counterimage for the contemporary, perceived as dominated by a hegemonic high modernism, and only given critical attention for its propaganda use in the burdensome Cold War climate, when “New York stole the idea of modern art,” in the words of Serge Guilbaut.1 Such a viewpoint is aptly illustrated by Mark Tansey (b.1949) in Triumph of the New York School (1984), where modernism as a cultural imperialistic campaign is visualized (see Figure 13.2). In contrast, however, a more global art map has been reserved for the contemporary, as if any kind of cultural interaction or cross-​cultural exchange are an invention of art after modernism Nevertheless, the historiographical map is changing and the stakes of the postwar era are rising significantly as modernism is dynamically rethought as a truly global phenomenon. Curatorial explorations and art historical studies, for their part, are recasting artistic modernism, as well as the broader cultural context of the postwar world, in a global perspective.2 Such an expanded approach, with its implied self-​reflective revisiting of the past, presents a challenge to the canon of Western art, which has formed the core of collection and exhibition practices of the museum of modern art since its birth in the mid-​twentieth century. Similarly, the now burgeoning field of multiple modernisms is posing new curatorial challenges to these institutions, and inviting visitors themselves to take part in the formation of new narratives of art history. That this tendency is practiced in academic discourses as well as in curatorial and museal activities, makes the contemporary curating of postwar art an occasion to reflect on the form of curatorial research, on the knowledge production through exhibitions, and on the topic of exhibitions as significant contributions to current debates and an understanding of the past in and of themselves. In the following I will analyze and describe this development. I start by introducing the turn toward the “multiple modernities” and what global

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Figure 13.1 Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​ 1965. Exhibition poster, Haus der Kunst, 2016.

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Figure 13.2 ©Mark Tansey: Triumph of the New York School, 1984, Oil on canvas, 188 x 304.8 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

modernisms might imply for art history. This introduction is followed by a closer reading of the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 (2016) as a culmination of the curatorial reinvestigation of the postwar era and the challenges that this making the past present suggests and encompasses.

Modernism: singular, multiple, planetary? Recent decades have witnessed a shift in the rhetoric around cultural modernity and artistic modernism, or the artistic forms given to the modern experience, in a range of distinct “isms” and movements from the late nineteenth century through the postwar era. The implications of these debates are vast, comprising the subject of entire journals such as Modernism/​ Modernity, or voluminous readers like The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012). In the words of art historian Terry Smith, “the narrative of multiple modernities […] has recently become a paradigm within much art historical, curatorial, and critical thinking concerned with the art of the twentieth century (with some bleeding backward in time and forward to the present).”3 The conception of modernities and modernisms has gone from being positively and then negatively associated with the West and a certain hegemonic singularity, to that of the global, multiple, and even planetary. Particularly relevant here is sociologist Schmuel Eisenstadt’s term “multiple modernities,”which he introduced in 2000.4 Sociologist Peter Wagner

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180  Kristian Handberg explains Eisenstadt’s term this way:  “the encounter of other civilizations with western modernity did not lead to the mere diffusion of the western model but rather to the proliferation of varieties of modernity generated by the encounter of different ‘cultural programs,’ which had consolidated much earlier, with western ideas and practices.”5 The exact configuration and actual output of this macro-​perspective is widely discussed. For instance, the notion of “cultural programs” by Eisenstadt could suggest separated, parallel trajectories as the form of modernity, which would differ from the models of circulations, hybridization, and connectedness that are increasingly stressed by scholars of modern culture. The efforts to rethink modernity, without the West as governing center but as multiple and global, have started a naming trend of modernities and modernisms by adding adjectives and plural forms like alternative, multiple, different, other, minor, marginal, and peripheral, even reaching planetary, as suggested by Susan Stanford Friedman in her recent text Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (2015). For the study of art, a few titles debating a reassessed modernism are particularly relevant. An important example was set by the series Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross Cultural Perspectives in Visual Arts edited by British art historian Kobena Mercer, consisting of the volumes Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008). According to Mercer, the aim of this project is to counter-​balance the “de-​historized outlook that tends to identify cross-​cultural aspects of the visual arts with the limited shelf-​life of ‘the contemporary,’ ”6 and the way “ ‘the contemporary’ so often takes precedence over ‘the historical’ as the privileged focus for examining matters of difference and identity.”7 Here there is an ambition to correct the prevalent perception of the apparent discordance between a cosmopolitan contemporary versus a mono-​cultural modernism of the past. Throughout the series this is carried out by studies on how “modernist attitudes took shape in different national and cultural environments” in a “dynamic interplay between different cultures” breaking with the conventional center-​periphery perspective.8 Through specific cases (like Nigerian modernist painting in the 1920s or Brazilian Concrete art as a forerunner of American Minimalism) and the themes of each volume (abstraction, Pop art) Mercer’s series aims at practicing a globalized study of modernism, giving actual content to the proclaimed “mutual entanglement of western and non-​western practices” of modernity and modernism’s configuration. Such eclectically chosen worldwide examples suggest an overall image that might still appear vague, which is implied by adding the easy “-​s” to modernism. The question remains whether such case studies serve to present examples of alternative or minor modernisms, ultimately confirming rather than challenging the established modernism with a capital M. Perhaps modernism is not multiple at all. Art historian Keith Moxey has described the possible multiplicity of modernity, stating “its artistic partner,

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Multiple modernisms 181 modernism” has “always been tied to the star of temporal progress” and that they are teleological to the self-​understanding of Western superiority.9 As such, “multiple modernities” is an oxymoron and a logical contradiction. Modernism can operate only by excluding non-​Western works, which carry another temporality and should thus be thought of outside of the modernist category. As Moxey argues, this changed after modernism, where a contemporaneity more compatible with the multiple has taken over and where a more plausible “multiple contemporaneities” can “draw attention to the unequal speeds at which time unfolds in different locations.”10 As these examples indicate, the new interest in multiple modernities is distinct, but also carries different positions and evaluations with no common agenda or “school” of global modernism. As Postwar curator and Haus der Kunst director Okwui Enwezor has described it, “modernism has many streams that do not all empty into the same basin.”11 Further, if we take into consideration Mercer’s argument, it becomes apparent that there is a need to rethink postwar art history, not from a singular and predetermined story of modernism, which is all too easy to break with, but from a much more complicated, diverse, and contradictory image more in touch with the present state of the world and with contemporary art. It important to point out that geography is not the only factor here: modernism should also be seen as entangled with science, industry, popular culture, and ideas of the past as well as of the present and future. A singular focus on geography, as the multiple modernities focus has tended toward, is not necessarily productive and often ends in a listing of singular occurrences of a phenomenon, for example, Cubist painting, without the necessary contextualization or background. The challenge is therefore to create a comprehensible, yet nuanced survey of the past in the present with the appropriate questions and tensions. Academic studies and critical commentary thus should be productively understood through the curatorial as a way of selecting and making the past present through the deliberate choices of the author(s) aimed at a contemporary audience. One could even state that art history has become focused on a curatorial turn, making certain well-​known features of global contemporary art—such as the personally staged interest in certain topics and a focus on special themed shows rather than permanent collections— the primary focus of art’s institutions. Indeed, Enwezor’s Haus der Kunst is defined as “a non-​collecting museum” dedicated to temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.12 This phenomenon, moreover, is borne out by the recent interest in the postwar era that was reflected in a wave of exhibitions and studies that culminated in a show created by one of the world’s most profiled curators, or in other words, art history in the age of the curator. The following analysis of the Postwar exhibition will discuss the implications of the curatorial take on art history with its possibilities for new profiled readings of the past, as well as the more critical aspects of the auteur-​based and very contemporaneity-​defined musealization.

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182  Kristian Handberg

The postwar era in a new light: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 The extensive exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 at Haus der Kunst in Munich can be seen as an important manifestation of the contemporary curatorial interest in the postwar era on several levels. Whereas other recent exhibitions of postwar art and culture have focused on specific genres, regions, or themes (such as global Pop Art in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in 2015, or decolonialization at After Year Zero at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2015), Postwar was launched as a total reading of the global postwar era with the revisionist aim to “refigure the cartographies of postwar modernism” with its global focus.13 The exhibition covered the twenty-​year period and a vast array of different concepts of artistic modernity and local perspectives, as well as relations of connections (expressed in the title’s “between”).14 This informed the overall image of the postwar era as “a truly global condition: the increasingly interlocked and interdependent nature of the world itself as a single entity, as emphasized by new political and technological realities.”15 This statement pronounces the show’s strategic highlighting of the era’s status as the formative horizon for today’s world. Postwar was curated by Okwui Enwezor, the man behind the themed exhibition of the 2015 Venice Biennale, All the World’s Futures, and such globally concerned, agenda-​setting shows such as documenta 11 (2002) and The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements, 1945–​1994 (MoMA PS1, 2002). Enwezor worked in collaboration with Ulrich Wilmes, chief curator at Haus der Kunst, and American art historian and chief curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Katy Siegel. The setting of the Haus der Kunst, which is a public non-​collecting international art center without a permanent collection, made the focus on the postwar era appear as an independent curatorial vision not determined by a permanent collection as it could have been if the show had been realized in an institution with a collection of postwar art like the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The show was planned to serve as the first in a trilogy of exhibitions covering global art from 1945 to the present, with subsequent volumes on “Postcolonialism” and “Postcommunism,” which the museum states is to “describe the cultural, political, and historical conditions under which the world has developed since 1945.”16 Postwar’s obvious turning point of 1945 is, according to the curators, used to “understand the complex legacies that emerged globally from the devastation wrought by World War II.”17 One such legacy was “the waning dominance of Western European art capitals” and the takeover of American culture and the seemingly binary opposition of the Cold War conflict and its ideological and cultural fault lines.18 However, one of the refigured cartographies of the exhibition was to look beyond this simplified version of the postwar moment. Factors such as decolonization struggles, independence movements, and formations including pan-​Africanism and the Non-​Aligned

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Multiple modernisms 183 Movement are mentioned as alternative models for the key concerns of the era. As formulated by Enwezor, “What would global modernity look like?19” Thus the exhibition’s core question and curatorial agenda can be identified as, What would the exhibition of global modernity look like? In other words, how to use the (mega)exhibition as a critical reassessment of the First World canon as well as an artwork-​based experience accessible for a large audience. The exhibition consisted of eight thematic sections that provided specific narratives within the era. Each section could have also stood alone as a separate freestanding exhibition in its own right, thus forming a theoretical synthesis as well as comprehensive selection of works as renditions or different essences of global postwar modernity. The opening section, “Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Era” made clear that the starting point for the era was the atom bomb and its global shock waves. This was visibly represented with works such as Japanese photographer Yosuke Yamahata’s (1917–​ 1966) documentary photos of the immediate aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing in his series Nagasaki Journey (1945) to Henry Moore’s (1898–​1986) abstract sculpture Atom Piece (1964–​1965), which is the model for a sculpture commissioned by the University of Chicago, where the first controlled nuclear chain reaction was carried out in 1942. Other nuclear energies were expressed in the Movimento Arte Nucleare: Italian artists Enrico Baj (1924–​2003), Sergio Dangelo (b. 1932), and Joe C. Colombo’s (1930–​1971) attempt at creating an art for the atomic age, not just as a warning, but also with a certain postfuturist fascination of the forces:  Postwar Energy as the exhibition posters boldly states (see Figure 13.1). These works informed the first section’s fundamental thesis that the “iconography of the mushroom cloud helped to create a new awareness of the globe as a single, interconnected entity, a sense of scale emphasized by the programs of space exploration that would emerge from the military technology, affording views of the Earth that reinforced this sense of global integrity and interconnection.”20 This curatorial take-​off opens the postwar theme in an effective way, where the material and political context of the era are clearly stated in the works. It should also be noted that this is the section most closely connected to the postwar condition in a narrow sense—the immediate aftermath of World War II. The global orientation of the first section (see Figure 13.3) was repeated in sections two and three of the show, “Form Matters” and “New Images of Man,” respectively, but here with an emphasis on abstraction and aesthetic experiments. Here the well-​known Western movements of Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, and portrayers of the “new man” such as Alberto Giacometti (1901–​ 1966) and Francis Bacon (1909–​ 1992) were strikingly supplemented by contemporaneous experiments for the new age in a broader selection of sources, such as those by Turkish artist Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901–​ 1991) or Sudanese painter Ibrahim El Salahi (b. 1930).

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184  Kristian Handberg

Figure 13.3 From the section 1. Aftermath:  Zero Hour and the Atomic Era at Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​ 1965. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2016. Photo: Maximilian Geuter.

Once the impression of abstraction as the lingua franca of the postwar world has settled, the exhibition set up an effective contrast with the fourth section, “Realisms.” The new world powers of the Soviet Union and Maoist China communicated their visions with large-​scale public works in figurative styles. This was a very different modernity, and artistic modernism, even if such works depicting Mao’s long march and Stalin as The Morning of Our Motherland (the title of a monumental portrait from 1946–​1948 by Fyodor Shurpin (1904–​1972); see Figure 13.4) tended to confirm the well-​ worn Cold War binaries. In contrast, section five, “Concrete Visions,” explored the most antirealist forms represented by geometric and Concrete abstraction as a distinct feature of global postwar art. This section tended to privilege non-​Western forms, such as the Latin American Neoconcretism, which distanced itself from geometric art, whereas the importance of new Concrete art in Europe and its often international iterations of Optical and Kinetic art, was somewhat dismissed by the exhibition. Sections six and seven, “Cosmopolitan Modernisms” and “Nations Seeking Form,” explored supplemental perspectives that expressed new “cosmopolitan” hybrid identities and gave form to new national identities. In both cases, according to the curators, “Postwar artists combined international style abstraction with indigenous, traditional or local imagery, creating new aesthetics.”21 The final section.

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Figure 13.4 Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​ 1965, Installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2016. Photo: Maximilian Geuter.

“Networks, Media, and Communications” returned to the initial focus on technology as determining condition, this time through information technology and media, which both implied mechanisms of control and unification and new opportunities for free communication, obviously pointing into the following media age. Through its disparate sections, Postwar represented the era not so much as one of aftermath, but as an era characterized by new world orders, experiences, and identities to be given artistic form. As Enwezor writes, “within the remit of this project ‘postwar’ should be seen not as purely an aftermath but as a horizon into which the ideas of global emancipation and decolonization could be projected as the new world order transitioned into a multilateral system of governance.”22 It is this “world-​picturing” of the arts (a term Enwezor quotes from Terry Smith) that the exhibition projected through its multiple sections and components. Its totality of different streams ran into the basin of a synthesis of the postwar era as a starting point for the global contemporary. It did so with an emphasis on the many different locations and modernism(s) as the expression of reconciliation, as well as the dynamism, of the postwar condition. If this all-​encompassing curatorial ambition was able to enunciate the more specific—and critical—aspects of the era and profile the many artists of the era (mostly represented by just one work), then it achieved its aims.

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186  Kristian Handberg

Postwar as research-​based exhibition Postwar was clearly an academic and research-​ based enterprise. The curators repeatedly declared their aim was to match recent scholarship and embed research into the curatorial. Enwezor, for example, stated, “The emergent scholarship on postwar art has made a deep impact on the curatorial arguments that frame this exhibition; in turn it requires exhibitions like this one to foreground them.”23 Apart from the curatorial work on the exhibition itself, there were scholarly activities related to the project, such as an international academic conference and a comprehensive catalog of 850 pages. Accordingly, Postwar can be understood as an exhibition as well as a research project, or, a curatorial agenda expressed through an exhibition and the research activities that make up the emergent field of curatorial research, where the curatorial is seen as knowledge production rather than mere exhibition making.24 With regard to the multiple modernisms paradigm, the Postwar project expressed coinciding academic and curatorial reassessments, with the aim to draw the most comprehensive and global picture, while at same time accentuating the multiple and shunning the “canonical.”25 An interesting point in relation to the aforementioned curatorial turn and the (self)understanding of the curatorial as a discipline with its own historiography was the exhibition’s emphasis on the history of exhibitions and even its own position in this history. In the very first text that meets the visitor when entering the exhibition, it is stated that “Postwar sits squarely in the tradition of large, synthetic exhibitions that have looked at the social history of art across several geographic regions,” with the addition of its unprecedented multiple perspectives.26 In the press material this idea was expanded with the mention of the relatively few important exhibitions on the postwar era from before 2000 such as Westkunst. Zeitgenössiche Kunst zeit 1939 (Kölnermessehallen, Köln, 1981) and Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism (Tate, London, 1993).27 The stating of these references indicated an aim to work consciously with the (mega)exhibition form and, probably, promote the Postwar itself into the canon of important exhibitions. At the same time the field of exhibition histories has showed a renewed interest in the exhibitions of the past as a tool for opening new approaches within art history. The concern with the institutional context is further emphasized by the site-​specific historical reference in realizing the exhibition in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which was originally inaugurated in 1937 as Nazi Germany’s “temple” of German art in the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, or “Capital of the (Nazi) Movement,” as Munich was then known (see Figure 13.5). The grandiose building was miraculously spared, and after the war the Allied forces used the building partly as an officer’s club but also for art exhibitions to “reeducate” the German people. These included shows on German old

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Figure 13.5 Postwar advertised at Haus der Kunst, Munich 2016. Photo: Kristian Handberg.

masters as well as modern art, such as the Bauhaus, Der Blaue Reiter, and in 1955 a Picasso retrospective featuring the antifascist Guernica (1937). In 1962 the twenty-​ fifth anniversary of the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition was marked with the exhibition Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren. The history of the pre-​and postwar era is thus embedded in the very building, and it was, in the words of curator Enwezor, “a serendipitous bargain of history” to organize Postwar there, with the focus on global modernisms in a space that was once dedicated to nationalist anti-​modernism.28 The core thesis of this state-​ of-​ the-​ arts presentation was modernism viewed as multiple in a way that is closer to Mercer’s “dynamic interplay” of cultures, and contrary to Moxey’s skepticism. The project’s declared aim to present new understandings and reassessing perspectives on the postwar era was perceived as a moment of new global orientation of special relevance for our present world. The exhibition was curated around a narrative of the eight sections, each offering an essence of the postwar “world-​picturing,” through which it attempted a multifocal global perspective drawing on “other archives” (as Enwezor claims) as well as prestigious loans. Its aim was obviously to present itself as a well-​established and promoted exhibition for a large-​scale audience, as well as a research exhibition integrating recent scholarship for specialists and professionals.29

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188  Kristian Handberg The Postwar project thus can be seen as an attempt to merge scholarship and exhibition making:  a combination increasingly explored in the contemporary art world. In addition, as a theme, postwar becomes capable of generating its own momentum; as the catchy exhibition posters such as “Postwar Energy,” “Postwar Intensity,” and “Postwar Dynamism,” demonstrate, it has become desirable to spell out the postwar theme. This is a past the present is eager to engage with: a pretext that might motivate the investment of curatorial and academic resources in a project concerning this very era.30

Why the global postwar now? Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 is just one example of how modernism, and especially its iteration in the postwar era, is currently being reassessed as global and how the curatorial interacts with academic research. Such a new and expanded understanding of modernism is obviously informed by general discussions in cultural theory as well as more specific studies of art and its contexts. The exhibitions of the “paradigm of multiple modernities,” as described by Smith, span from experimental projects in small, self-​organized venues to large-​ scale exhibitions by established institutions, and new globally reoriented installations of permanent collections.31 It might be tempting to claim that “the peripheries” are becoming the new centers, at least symbolically, with the consequence of repeating old stereotypes in a new quest for the undiscovered exotic “other,” now not pre-​modern, but postwar modern. However, as Postwar demonstrates, the explorations of multiple modernism does not just switch the geographical stakes, but investigates the period in many areas, from technology over societal organization to identity, in an expanded understanding of the importance of the period, not least out of our concerns today, in terms of what is now and what is not. The postwar era of seventy years ago appears as an age of fundamental significance for the world today, where new global organizations, power structures, and value systems were forged, but as these conditions are continuously questioned and eroded, it is also an increasingly different age. This dual characteristic of connection and disconnection is possible incentive for the current curatorial interest in the postwar era and its artistic world picturing. The era associated with the forging of the North-​Atlantic world order and the canon-​making of modern art is now being rediscovered as much more globally embedded, and the primary medium for this rethinking is the art exhibition itself. The global concerns of the contemporary condition, including the world-​making of its global art world, have spurred curators and art historians to address modernism within this ever expanding context. And accordingly, museums of modern art will continue to be challenged to re-​envision their curatorial identity.

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Notes 1 Serge Guilbaut, How New  York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:  Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1984). 2 For instance, exhibitions in 2015 include no less than two major presentations of global pop art with The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, London, 2015/​2016) and International Pop (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015/​ 2016), while the postwar era and its modernism is confidently highlighted in titles like Radically Modern: Urban Planning in and Architecture in 1960s Berlin (Berlinische Galerie, 2015) and Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2015). In 2016 exhibitions like New Beginnings:  Between Gesture and Geometry of artists who emerged in the years following World War II, curated by Tate director Frances Morris (The George Economeu Collection, Athens, 2016/​2017), and Art in Europe 1945–​1965 (Bozart, Brussels, ZKM, Karlsruhe, and Pushkin Museum, Moscow) followed up, and in 2018 the exhibition Ex-​centric Modernism will open at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-​Westphalen based on the research project Museum Global. Numerous efforts have recently made an entrance, including the book series Refiguring Modernism (Penn State University Press, www. psupress.org/​books/​series/​book_​SeriesRM.html, accessed December 2017, theme issues like Modernism Revisited (Filozoski vestnik 2014, ed. Aleš Erjavec and Tyrus Miller, http://​filozofskivestnikonline.com/​index.php/​journal/​issue/​view/​ 17, accessed December 2017, and conferences like Reimagining Modernism, Mapping the Contemporary:  Critical Perspectives on Transnationality in Art. (CRAASH Conference, Cambridge University, UK, 2013). 3 Terry Smith, “Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now,” Filozofski vestnik 35, no. 2 (2014): 291. 4 See Schmuel Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–​29. 5 Peter Wagner:  Modernity:  Understanding the Present (Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2012), 6. 6 Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2008), 7 7 Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 2005), 8. 8 Ibid. 9 Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 11. 10 Ibid., 17. 11 Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Flux,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter, 2003): 68. 12 Haus der Kunst mission statement, https://​hausderkunst.de/​en/​mission, accessed February 2018. 13 Presentation on the Haus der Kunst webpage, http://​postwar.hausderkunst.de/​ en/​, accessed December 2017. 14 The total amount of works was 350 by 218 artists from 65 countries. 15 Haus der Kunst 2016 program published on E-​flux December 16, 2015, www.e-​ flux.com/​announcements/​2016-​program/​, accessed December 2017. 16 “Narrative,” press material, Haus der Kunst, October 2016, 1. 17 Ibid., 2.

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190  Kristian Handberg 18 Presentation text on the Haus der Kunst webpage, http://​postwar.hausderkunst. de/​en/​, accessed February 2018. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 9, and text in exhibition. 21 Ibid., 209 in Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–65, eds., Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrik Wilmes (Munich: Prestel and Haus der Kunst, 2016). 22 Okwui Enwezor, “Director’s Foreword,” in Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965, eds., Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrik Wilmes (Munich: Prestel and Haus der Kunst, 2016), 13. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 For a discussion of curatorial research in contemporary exhibitions on the postwar era, see Kristian Handberg, “The World Goes Modern: New Globalized Framings of the Postwar Era in the Contemporary Exhibitions After Year Zero and The World Goes Pop,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8 (2016), www. aestheticsandculture.net/​index.php/​jac/​article/​view/​30925. 25 Enwezor, “Director’s Foreword,” 38. 26 Wall text, Haus der Kunst, 2016. 27 “Narrative,” Press material, Haus der Kunst, 2016, 3. 28 Enwezor, “Director’s Foreword,” 21. 29 The intensive media coverage included a whole theme section dedicated to the exhibition in the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on October 14, 2016, featuring articles on the exhibition and related topics like the atom bomb, pop art, and how to make an exhibition. 30 The revival of the recent past and the postwar era is practiced intensively and at many levels in contemporary retro culture. See Kristian Handberg, “There Is No Time Like the Past: Retro between Memory and Materiality in Contemporary Culture,” PhD thesis (The University of Copenhagen, 2014). 31 Like the Centre Pompidou’s presentation of the permanent collection Modernités plurielles de 1905 à 1970 in 2014 and the new “global profile” announced by the Tate organization through acquisition committees for all parts of the world (https://​news.artnet.com/a​ rt-​world/​how-​museums-​look-​to-​peripheries-​527435, accessed December 2017.

Bibliography Eisenstadt, Schmuel. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1–​29. Enwezor, Okwui. “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Flux.” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 68. Enwezor, Okwui, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes. Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965. Munich: Prestel and Haus der Kunst, 2016. Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Handberg, Kristian. “There Is No Time Like the Past:  Retro between Memory and Materiality in Contemporary Culture.” PhD thesis, The University of Copenhagen, 2014. Handberg, Kristian. “The World Goes Modern:  New Globalized Framings of the Postwar Era in the Contemporary Exhibitions After Year Zero and The World

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Multiple modernisms 191 Goes Pop.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8 (2016), www.aestheticsandculture. net/​index.php/​jac/​article/​view/​30925. Mercer, Kobena, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Annotating Art’s Histories). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. —​—​—​. Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Annotating Art’s Histories). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Moxey, Keith. Visual Time: The Image in History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 (exhibition guide), Haus der Kunst 2016. Smith, Terry. “Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now.” Filozofski vestnik XXXV, no. 2 (2014): 271–​319. Wagner, Peter. Modernity:  Understanding the Present. Cambridge, UK:  Polity Press, 2012.

Exhibitions Postwar:  Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965, Haus der Kunst, Munich, October 14, 2016–​March 26, 2017, www.hausderkunst.de/​en/​agenda/​ detail/​postwar-​art-​between-​the-​pacific-​and-​the-​atlantic-​1945–​1965/​.

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14  Contested paradise Exhibiting images from the former Danish West Indies Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

Since the 1990s there has been a growing international scholarly interest in colonial images. Researchers have confronted romanticisms, atrocities, and racism in their analyses of the production and reception of colonial visual material. Among pioneer publications are White on Black and Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire.1 A number of comprehensive contributions have followed, including Nicholas Mirzoeff’s theoretical text The Right to Look, Krista A.  Thompson’s An Eye for the Tropics, and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, all testifying to the fact that colonial imagery remains a very active international field of research.2 Denmark-​Norway was a multilingual state from 1536 until 1814 when Norway was ceded to Sweden. In this period, Denmark-​Norway gained possession over territories across the globe. During the seventeenth century, colonies in Africa, India, and the Caribbean were established, and Denmark-​ Norway participated in the transatlantic slave trade. Despite the fact that Danish presence in the Caribbean rested on racial oppression and slavery, the former colonies are marketed as “our lost paradise” by Danish travel agents today.3 In international and national historiographies, Danish-​Norwegian colonialism has received little attention. Until recently the focus has been almost exclusively on trade and economic aspects as seen from the perspective of the Danish colonial administration. The past decades, however, have stimulated studies in cultural and social history as well as the experience of the enslaved.4 Visual culture has recently begun to be studied in closer detail; this article focuses on an exhibition that contributes to the emerging research field of Danish colonial visual culture.5 Sarah Giersing, Mathias Danbolt, and I  cocurated Blind Spots. Images of the Danish West Indies Colony, which was on view at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen from May 19, 2017 through February 3, 2018. On the occasion of the commemoration of the 100 years of the ceding of former Danish West Indies to the United States, we decided to present images depicting the former Danish West Indies, that is the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, which were under Danish(-​Norwegian) rule from 1666 to 1917.

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Contested paradise 193 When we began thinking about marking the centennial of the sale of the Danish West Indies with an exhibition, we were occupied with challenging the nostalgic interpretation of colonial images or the use of images as simple and self-​explanatory illustrations. In her essay “Rethinking Photography in the Ethnographic Museum,” Elizabeth Edwards states that “Museums of ethnography (and indeed social and cultural history) have used functional realist images as a ‘window on the world’ without problematising either photographic agendas themselves, the way in which photography operates as an institutional practice within museums, or the nature of photography itself.”6 This, according to Edwards, actually makes photography the perfect medium for changing discourses in the museum: “The photograph’s transparency and analogical insistence, through which it has almost unnoticed contributed to the dominant discourses, makes it an especially pertinent constituent part of both reflexive critiques and alternative strategies.”7 As historians of visual culture, our curatorial approach with Blind Spots was informed by a similar desire to stimulate a reflexive critique. By exhibiting and not least conveying information about images too often perceived as neutral windows to the world, we wanted the visitors to think about different levels of image making, circulation, and interpretation. The title of the exhibition Blind Spots itself alluded not only to the perspectives which the existing images exclude, ignore, or overlook, but also to the limitations in both historical and contemporary interpretations of these images—including our own as curators. In this article I first consider how the treatment of images has been at best rudimentary when it comes to seeking to understand the different layers in the production and reception of colonial images. I then give some examples of how the year 2017 has witnessed initiatives that moved beyond the scope of classical history and art history within publications as well as exhibitions. This forms the context for my discussion of Blind Spots and our approach to visual culture including the story of the creation and reception of images, how we considered what genres and tropes prevail through images, and how we interpreted the world view they were part of, while confronting the Danish perspective prevalent in most images and thus their “blind spots.” In the last part of the article I describe how we as curators worked with the exhibition architects Christina Back and Mette Ørnstrup in order to give the visitor a spatial experience and hopefully to inspire new and unique interpretations. Building on the developments since the new museology of the late 1980s, we attempted to break with the authoritative museum space of former times.8 I  explain how the exhibition drew from images in the library’s collection and other archives and museums in addition to including important works of contemporary art and participatory interventions in order to communicate and hopefully cause a multivocal and subjective bodily interpretation of the past.

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194  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

Subject matter Images of the former colonies in the Caribbean are rarely displayed and consumed as representations of particular and historically conditioned viewpoints. This has certainly been the case in classical historical presentations.9 In the eight-​volume tome on Danish colonial history, Vore gamle Tropekolonier (Our Old Tropical Colonies), engravings from Jean-​ Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles are reproduced as documentary representations of plantation life (see Figure  14.1). The sceneries are didactic, with the enslaved performing a specific aspect of the production process as a visual explanation of sugar and tobacco production, like carnal cogwheels in the large machinery.10 Similarly, engravings from Francois Froger’s A Relation d’un voyage (1699) are used to show different kinds of punishment of slaves. The fact that these illustrations are gross generalizations and biased is not mentioned.11 In Froger’s case, the illustrations are synchronous with the conditions described, but in general the images are reproduced anachronistically and merely for their subject matter. This happens for instance when Frederik von Scholten’s watercolor of Coral Bay at St. John, from the 1830s, is reproduced in the chapter entitled “The Danish West Indies until 1755. The Critical Years.” Likewise, the Danish nineteenth century painter Fritz

Figure 14.1 Sébastien Le Clerc. “Sucrerie,” Engraving. Illustration for Jean-​Baptiste du Tertre: Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 1667.

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Contested paradise 195 Melbye’s etching of St. John is used to illustrate the description of the slave insurrection of 1733. The landscape and city, although by that time fundamentally altered, is reproduced as if it were a timeless entity in order to add a visual aspect to the written source. The most recently published history of Danish colonialism, the five-​ volume study, Danmark og kolonierne, tells a story which treats many further aspects of colonialism than the history of commerce told in Vore Tropekolonier.12 When it comes to images, the newer text is far more careful with references. Captions are still very much centered on the subject matter, very often buildings or places, but several authors treat the ways images represent their subject matter, the reception, and social meaning of them. Caricatures constitute a special challenge due to their ambiguity, which is met with varying success. A 1917 drawing by Alfred Schmidt showing Uncle Sam leading three Afro-​Caribbean boys by the hand is thus accompanied by a text which speaks to the fact that the drawing can be said both to confirm and to contest European paternalism using an unquestionably racist mode of expression.13 Elsewhere caricatures are treated with less attention.14 In addition to recent publications, several historical exhibitions opened in 2017. The exhibition Dansk Vestindien (March 2017) about the sale of the islands created by The State Archive in Rigsdagsgården used caricatures to illustrate the history of the sale but held very little information about the stereotypes reinforced in the drawings.15 A different approach was found in the small exhibition, Reflektion/​Reflexion. Unges stemmer, curated by Museum Vestsjælland for an event at the Danish castle Borreby Gods (September 16, 2017). It not only related to the ridicule inherent in many drawings but also cited the reactions to the caricatures by students from Denmark and the Virgin Islands. The National Museum of Denmark opened Stemmer fra kolonierne (Voices from the Colonies) in October, a permanent exhibition on Danish colonialism. In the exhibition objects are key elements. When it comes to the prephotographic era, the exhibition has information on the role of images (miniatures being objects of exchange among the powerful), but in modern times the circulation, and the significance of for instance amateur photography postcards, or other popular images are very sparsely touched upon, if at all.

Image as aesthetics Danish art history has mainly focused on painters active in Denmark, with a few exceptions that include the Golden Age painters in Rome and other artist groups in Europe. A  painter such as N.  P. Holbech, for example, is praised for his landscapes and interiors from Denmark and Italy, but his portrait of his daughter Marie being held by the West Indian nanny Neky, is consistently omitted from Danish art historical surveys. That painting, contrary to Holbech’s other images, is housed in the historical National Museum of Denmark. It is now exhibited in Stemmer fra kolonierne and part of an online exhibition on the history of toys.16

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196  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer The painter Hugo Larsen, who stayed in the Danish West Indies between 1904 and 1907, is among few artists who have been considered important enough to be included in the canon, but contrary to historians, who generally show little interest in the image as an aesthetic object, most art historians have given aesthetic style primacy. Art historian Xenius Rostock, for example, characterized Larsen as an unacknowledged Impressionist in the league of painters such as Pissarro, Manet, and Sisley.17 In addition to their focus on the stylistic characteristics of the work, classical art historians are more interested in describing the psychological capabilities of the artist than the historical context he was a part of. Rostock, for example, emphasizes Larsen’s ability to express the soul of the Afro-​Caribbeans but without actually defining what this implies in a social context.18 Several exhibitions in art museums broke with this art historical tradition in 2017. The National Gallery of Denmark opened Ufortalte Historier (What Lies Unspoken), a special hanging of a number of art works from the collections which are all part of Danish colonial history but has never been interpreted as being so. The hanging was accompanied by an audioguide produced by activist Mary Consolata Namagambe. Furthermore, as part of a collaboration between the National Gallery of Denmark and the Royal Danish Library, art historian from Living Archives, Temi Odumosu, conducted workshops with participants reacting to images in the collections of both institutions, and she edited them into montages that could be heard in the exhibition in both places. The National Gallery thus not only took a critical, historical view on their collections, they also included other voices in the exhibition space.19

Paradise and plantation In contrast to traditional treatments of colonial imagery, Blind Spots presented images in a social and visual context. This included describing the conditions under which images were created, as well as exploring their political and social function and interpreting the worldviews they were shaped by. The first historical image in the exhibition was a woodcut in the first illustrated publication of Christopher Columbus’s description of his arrival at Hispaniola (present-​day Haiti), published in 1494 (see Figure 14.2).20 In the vein of Edward Saïd, who described the representation of the landscape as part of an “imaginary geography” in Orientalism, we approached the visual landscape as a mixture of dream and imagination, but also of politics and violent invasion.21 Popular legend has it that Columbus named the many small islands in the region of the Virgin Islands after the eleven thousand virgins in the Catholic story of Saint Ursula. The illustration depicts this longed for paradise as a lush ground with the indigenous Taíno people as naked and welcoming the Europeans. Even though this illustration is often understood as a factual documentation of the actual landing, we argue that it is a picture of the Europeans’ dream of a paradise, one to which they had a privileged access.

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Figure 14.2 Unknown artist. “De Insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis,” Woodcut. Illustration for Columbus’s letter “Epistola de insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis,” reproduced in Carolus Verardi. Cæsenatis Cubicularii Pontificii in historiam Bætecam ad R. P. Raphaelem Riarium S. Gerogii Diaconum Cardinalem, 1494.

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198  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer The Spaniards claimed Hispaniola after the discovery of Columbus, but during the next five hundred years, different European powers ruled not only in Hispaniola, but also territories throughout the entire region. The indigenous populations were subjected to imported diseases, genocide, slavery, and displacement as the paradise was transformed into a plantation. Denmark-​Norway purchased St. Croix from the French in 1733. The first known map of St. Croix is Johan Cronenberg and Johan Jaegersberg’s map from 1750, which shows settlement and land use in amazing detail. Not only does the map show individual fields of sugar cane and cotton, but also huts of the enslaved population. The land was parceled out into numerous plantations, and the Cartesian grid, as visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued, can be seen as a violation of the original curved landscape with its various, organically shaped biological zones.22 By the 1830s, forests had been cut and burned down. The landscape had been cultivated and agriculture with sugar and tobacco as the central crops was strong. At that moment in paintings, drawings, and photographs, the colonized landscape envisioned a new kind of paradise, a finely curated Garden of Eden, a point which has been made by Krista A. Thompson with regard to the imagery of Jamaica and the Bahamas.23 In the former Danish West Indies during the 1830s, Frederik von Scholten, brother of Governor General Peter von Scholten, made a number of drawings (see Figure 14.3).

Figure 14.3 Frederik von Scholten. Frederikssted, 1837. Colored drawing. Helsinore, M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark.

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Contested paradise 199 These images border on the naivistic with their primary colors and clumsy lines. In some of the images, von Scholten has included himself studying the landscape and sketching its curves, betraying the fact that this pleasing, indeed picturesque landscape, is manmade rather than natural. Apart from the observing painter, the watercolors of von Scholten are almost without people. This aestheticization of the landscape is characteristic of the colonial picturesque. The actual labor that went into the landscape and the people who worked and lived there are absent, or at best depicted engaged in a peaceful activity. The danger and violence that was part of everyday life for all the enslaved Africans and Afro-​Caribbeans, is left out.

Unfree bodies In the collections of the Royal Danish Library, few images exist of the enslaved. We have to go back to the travelogues of the seventeenth century to find traces. As mentioned they include the bodies of the enslaved in the context of machinery, underscoring that they were not recognized as persons or individuals but as a simple means of sugar or tobacco production. This trope of anonymous bodies rather than “somebodies” continues to represent slavery into the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most well known example of this is the chart of the cargo of the Brookes slave ship, which is still widely reproduced as an image representing the Middle Passage experience of the transatlantic slave trade. This includes publications with a critical perspective. In the exhibition we showed English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-​Trade by the British Parliament.24 The edition on view, according to a handwritten dedication, was given as a gift to Ernst Heinrich Schimmelmann, the Danish minister of Finance who personally owned many slaves in the Danish West Indies at the time. In the Danish colonies, slavery was abolished in 1848.25 Danes and Afro-​ Caribbeans were now connected as employers and employees. The abolition coincided with the arrival of photography, and so during this period a number of wealthy Danes had their portraits taken and sometimes included their Afro-​Caribbean servants in them. One of these images, which was highlighted in the exhibition and featured on its poster, portrays the young girl Louisa Bauditz and her Afro-​Caribbean wet nurse, Charlotte Hodge in 1847 (see Figure 14.4). In contrast to the watercolors and engravings etc. in the prephotographic era, which anonymized the enslaved, Charlotte Hodge (who had been bought free by 1847) appears as a person. The daguerreotype also speaks to intimacy as the wet nurse has her arms around the girl, and the girl rests her hand on Charlotte Hodge’s arm. But of course the daguerreotype also is an expression of power, as the picture is taken on the request of the employer. As historian George Tyson has recently pointed out, Charlotte was the mother of eight children, of which only one survived.

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200  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

Figure 14.4 Unknown artist. Portrait of Louisa Bauditz and Her Wet Nurse, Charlotte Hodge, ca. 1847. Daguerreotype. Copenhagen, The National Museum of Photography.

This is the first of many images of masters and servants in the Danes’ family photographs, which all give an expression of the intimacy but also of the power structures and pervasive racism in the Danish colony.26 By the 1890s, paper photography had become widespread. Prominent Danish families were staged and photographed in their lavishly decorated living rooms, and they produced thick family albums. Povl Helweg-​Larsen was a vicar in Christiansted in St. Croix from 1910 to 1919, where he lived with his wife Astrid Helweg-​Larsen and their three children. In their photo album, their cook, nurse, and farmhand are all immortalized in staged group photographs, or with caring arms around the white children of the family. In these instances we can detect a trace of the life of the Afro-​Caribbeans— although it is only as chambermaids, wetnurses, and cleaning ladies in the Danish households and families. The Helweg-​Larsen album is more of a scrapbook than a regular photo album. Apart from the photographs taken by the family or by photographers in their social circle, the album also contains numerous postcards. The postcards glued into the albums frame the Afro-​Caribbeans in different roles. A picture of a small Afro-​Caribbean child crying, taken by photographer Axel Ovesen, was sold as a supposedly funny stereotype. In the album of the Helweg-​Larsen it made a stark contrast to the images of the white children.

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Multivocality Although Blind Spots mainly contained and contextualized historical images, it also included present day material. We commissioned a filmed project in which Danish writer and satirist Anna Neye held discussions with the CEO of the Danish travel agency Bravo Tours, Peder Hornshøj, and historian Astrid Nonbo Andersen about the visual marketing of holidays to today’s US Virgin Islands. Neye also spoke with Eske Knudsen, a computer game designer, and art historian Temi Odumosu about Playing History:  Slave Trade, a computer game for children communicating the Atlantic slave trade (see Figure  14.5). The filmed discussions provided different opinions and experiences and served as a prompt to the visitor to reflect on contemporary visual culture and how it is connected to history. The wish to add other voices to the exhibition at a very early stage of its development also led us to collaborate with art historian Temi Odumosu on the aforementioned audio-​ intervention What Lies Unspoken (see Figure 14.6). As part of the project, Odumosu conducted several workshops in which participants shared their experiences of some of the historical

Figure 14.5 Art historian Temi Odumosu speaking to writer and satirist Anna Neye about the computer game Playing History: Slave Trade on film in the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer).

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202  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

Figure 14.6  What Lies Unspoken. Participatory sound intervention developed by art historian Temi Odumosu from the Living Archives Research Project, Malmö University, Sweden, in collaboration with the Royal Danish Library and the National Gallery of Denmark. Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​ February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Brian Berg).

images in Blind Spots. A montage of these could be heard in the exhibition, where they communicated actual and personal understandings of images in an intimate way to the visitor. The exhibition also included several critical contemporary art works, which reflect on and express the general conditions of the representation of the Caribbean and the collective memory—or forgetting—of Denmark’s colonial past. The exhibition opened with the video work called Black Magic at the White House from 2009, by Jeannette Ehlers,

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Contested paradise 203 a Danish artist with Afro-​Caribbean roots, who in the video performs a vodoun-​inspired dance in the halls of Marienborg, the official residence of the Danish prime minister since 1962. In Black Magic, Ehlers digitally erases her dancing body from the recording with the result that she appears as a kind of ghost or an unwanted interference in the image. With this gesture she points to how several earlier owners of the mansion made enormous fortunes from sugar trade and slave labor and that this knowledge is repressed in the imagined community of the Danish nation today.27 In another work of Ehlers, Whip it Good, from 2014, she whips a white canvas with black charcoal (see Figure 14.7). She is filmed in the West India Warehouse in Copenhagen, built in 1780–​1781 to store goods shipped in from the Caribbean colony. Today it houses the Royal Cast Collection containing classical sculptures of mostly white European males, and so Ehlers’s whipping act can be seen as a reminder of the violence done to enslaved laborers or as resistance of these and a clear imprint on a culture that has never depicted it and prefers not to think about it.

Figure 14.7 Jeannette Ehlers. Whip it Good, 2014. Video installation. Courtesy of the artist. La Vaughn Belle. Chaney (we live in the fragments 003), 2016. Digital Print. Courtesy of the artist. Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer).

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204  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer Whereas Ehlers primarily focused on the bodies of those who have been left out and used her own body to make those in the present aware of this, another artist included in the exhibition, Nanna Debois Buhl, probed the landscape as subject. As a white Danish artist she avoided directing her lens toward the Afro-​Caribbeans at the US Virgin Islands, thereby escaping the typical power relation in colonial photography. Instead, in her 2008 installation The Mapmaker, she castigated this culture of control, of mapping, naming, and photographing (see Figure  14.8). She is present as the voice who confronts this history and modern tourism. Sometimes she comments on traces of the past, as in the 2009 video work Looking for Donkeys where she followed the descendants of the work animals the Danes brought to the islands (see Figure 14.9). When Crucian artist La Vaughn Belle was a child she found and played with the small shards of fine china of wealthy families, another remnant of Danish colonialism that resurfaces after heavy rain. Chaney, as they were called, is a colloquialism in the US Virgin Islands, a hybrid word combining “china” and “money.” In Chaney (We Live in the Fragments

Figure 14.8 Nanna Debois Buhl. The Mapmaker, 2008. Installation with two rugs and a video. The rugs were produced in co-operation with Ege Tæpper for the Socle du Monde Biennial at HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the artist. Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer).

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Contested paradise 205

Figure 14.9 Various photographers. Postcards from St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St.  John. Various techniques, 1897–​ 1993. La Vaughn Belle. Photomontage Series, 2016. Photographs, digital print. Courtesy of the artist. Nanna Debois Buhl. Looking for Donkeys, 2009; video instal​lation on two screens. 16 mm film, HD transfer (audio in collaboration with Jonny Farrow and Pejk Malinovski. Voiceover:  Naja Marie Aidt). Installation photo from the exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony. May 19, 2017–​February 3, 2018. Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Library (photographer: Laura Stamer).

003) from 2016, she brought together blue patterns of ornaments, flowers, and landscapes known from shards into new wholes, thereby renegotiating the past in the present. Like Debois Buhl, Belle also took a critical look at the photographs in the archives. In her Photomontage Series she mounted images found in Danish archives, among these Axel Ovesen’s image of the crying child, alongside photos from her private album to encourage viewers to see the people they depict as real people with real stories (see Figure 14.10). These art works in many cases inspired our work as curators with their critical viewpoints, their pointing to blind spots but also with their attempts to create alternative narratives making their personal stories and viewpoints stand out. We therefore knew from the beginning that we wanted to bring the art works together with historical images: to stage Debois Buhl’s story about cartography with a selection of historical maps and her video about the haunted landscape with its donkeys and sugar mills alongside early

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206  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

Figure 14.10 La Vaughn Belle. Photomontage Series (“St. Croix Pickney”), 2016. Photographs, digital print. Courtesy of the artist.

twentieth century stereo images and postcards. We juxtaposed Ehlers’s whipping body and the white canvas with the few and all too nonviolent images of the enslaved in the collections. We brought Belle’s Chaney together with the china carefully preserved in the collections of the National Museum and depictions of the picturesque plantation landscapes that never existed, and her montage featuring the crying child together with the postcard in albums in the collection. Luckily the artists shared our vision, and they worked closely with us. Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony brought together maps, postcards, drawings, paintings, and photographs from Danish archives and examined and interpreted the way these have functioned in society and in the historical understanding of the former Danish colony. Our efforts to problematize the “window on the world” approach was inspired by new museology and poststructural theory of photography. We hoped to inspire a more layered understanding of images and their many different origins, functions, and meanings. This also implied a more critical understanding of Danish colonial history and more specifically a desire to challenge the authoritative voice of the museum institution. Multilayered-​ ness was a central curatorial principle to us. Both the written contextualization of each image and the selection of and juxtaposition of many different types of images were intended to convey complexity. Contemporary art works and the sound installation, What Lies Unspoken

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Contested paradise 207 made the exhibition multivocal. The art works were selected because they each in their way explored representations of the colonial past while at the same time reflect on the personal role of the artist. The soundscapes provided by What Lies Unspoken offered a conversation bringing together different opinions and backgrounds. Our intentions went beyond the mere presentation of multivocal expressions. Exhibitions have the unique possibility of affecting the visitor physically or spatially and intellectually, and a central point we wanted to convey is that experience is always aesthetical, personal, and bodily at the same time. Hopefully we opened a critical space. A  space in which not only photographs but also other images could be used again in Elizabeth Edwards’ words “as a tool to reveal the epistemological base of museum discourse rather than merely to make authoritative statements.”28 A  space where others will take up new research and provide new insights and openings in this emerging field of Danish colonial visual culture.

Notes 1 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black, Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992); James R.  Ryan, Picturing Empire, Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). 2 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2006), and Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 3 The notion of Denmark as a mild colonizer is founded on the fact that Denmark was the first country to forbid the trading of slaves in 1792 (in effect from 1803) is widespread. As Danish historian Astrid Nonbo Andersen has pointed out, nostalgia or even amnesia is revealed in the widespread use today of the name “Danish West Indies” Astrid Nonbo Andersen, “ ‘We Have Reconquered the Islands’:  Figurations in Public Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Denmark 1948–​2012,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26, no. 1 (2014): 58. 4 See Niklas Thode Jensen and Gunvor Simonsen, “Introduction:  The Historiography of Slavery in the Danish-​ Norwegian West Indies, c.  1950–​ 2016,” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, nos. 4–​5 (October 19, 2016): 475, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​03468755.2016.1210880. See also H.  C. Gulløv eds., et  al., Danmark og kolonierne:  Vestindien  –​St. Croix, St. Thomas og St. Jan (Copenhagen: Gad, 2017). 5 See Louise Wolthers, “Blik og begivenhed, en diskussion af fotografiets historiske potentialer med nedslag i krig, koloni og kommercialisme 1860–​1920” (PhD diss., University of Copenhagen, 2008). See also Frederikke Hansen and Tone O. Nielsen, Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (Copenhagen:  Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, 2007);

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208  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer Sophie Anna Bang Jacobsen, “De Dansk Vestindiske Børn. Et Speciale Om de Afrocaribiske Børns Betydning, Deres Muligheder Og Deres Begrænsninger for Den Danske Koloni i Vestindien” (MA Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2017). 6 Elizabeth Edwards, “Rethinking Photography in the Ethnographic Museum,” in Raw Histories, Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford:  Berg, 2001), 184. 7 Ibid., 183. 8 See Peter Vergo, ed., New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 9 Louise Wolthers cites Ludmilla Jordanova for arguing that historians have entrusted visual analysis to art historians on the basis of the fact that it requires specific skills. Wolthers, “Blik og begivenhed,” 7. 10 Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François, divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes et des figures (Paris: Chez Thomas Iolly, 1667). 11 François Froger, Relation d’un voyage fait en 1695, 1696  & 1697 aux Côtes d’Afrique, Détroit de Magellan, Brezil, Cayenné, et Isles Antilles, par une escadre des vaisseaux du roy, commandée par Monsieur de Gennes (Paris, Amsterdam, 1699). 12 See note 2. 13 Mikkel Venborg Pedersen, ed., Danmark:  En kolonimagt, Danmark og kolonierne (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2017), 434. 14 The paternalism inherent in the depiction of the Afro-​Caribbean as a craving toddler on the postcard published in connection with the vote preceding the sale in 1917 (in which the Afro-​Caribbeans did not get to vote), isn’t mentioned. Ibid., 179. 15 Erik Gøbel, Danish West Indies 1672–​1917. Exhibition marking the centennial of the sale of the islands (Copenhagen: Danish National Archives and The Danish Parliament, 2017). 16 See http://​natmus.dk/​historisk-​viden/​temaer/​boern-​1660–​2000/​leg-​og-​legetoej/​, accessed February 22, 2018. 17 Xenius Rostock, Hugo Larsen, Dansk-​ Vestindiens uovertrufne maler (Copenhagen: A/​S Dansk Nutidskunsts Forlag, 1950), 16. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Regarding acquisition the museum purchased Danish Golden Age painter Wilhelm Marstrands Portræt af Otto Marstrands to døtre og deres vestindiske barnepige, Justina, i Frederiksberg Have. It was added to Ufortalte Historier in July, and the head of the museum Mikkel Bogh acknowledged it as being of both artistic and historical value. “Sjældent Marstrand-​maleri er sikret –​bliver i Danmark,” www.dr.dk/​nyheder/​kultur/​sjaeldent-​marstrand-​maleri-​er-​sikret-​ bliver-​i-​danmark, accessed January 8, 2018. The gallery Gl. Holtegaard and Øregaard Museum also challenged classical art history with the exhibitions Kolonihistorier –​magt og afmagt and Citizen X –​Human, Nature, and Robot Rights. Ordrupgaard chose to focus on the artistic expression in Pissarro:  Et møde på Skt. Thomas. 20 Carolus Verardus, et  al., Caroli Verardi Cæsenatis Cubicularii Pontificii in Historiam Bætecam Ad R.  P. Raphaelem Riarium S.  Gerogii Diaconum Cardinalem (Basel: Johann Bergmann, 1494). 21 Edward W. Saïd, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 22 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 59.

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Contested paradise 209 3 Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics. 2 24 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-​Trade by the British Parliament (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), 110. 25 In the 2017 documentary film We Carry It Within Us, the collective memory of abolition in Denmark and USVI respectively is discussed. The film presents how in Denmark, the acts of governor general Peter von Scholten have been central to the discourse, whereas in U.S. Virgin Islands, the uprisings of the enslaved led by John “Buddhoe” Gotliff have been the center of attention and celebrations: http://wecarryitwithinus.com​. 26 On photographs of wet nurses, see Laura Wexler, “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye,” in The Familial Gaze (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1999), 248–​75. 27 In his seminal study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson demonstrated how shared memory (and forgetting) plays a significant part in building national identity. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 28 Edwards, Raw Histories, Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, 194.

Bibliography Andersen, Astrid Nonbo. “ ‘We Have Reconquered the Islands’: Figurations in Public Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Denmark 1948–​2012.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26, no. 1 (2014): 57–​76. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Brøndsted, Johannes. Vore gamle tropekolonier. Copenhagen: Fremad, 1966. Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Clarkson, Thomas. The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-​Trade by the British Parliament. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808. Du Tertre, Jean Baptiste. Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François, divisée en deux tomes, et enrichie de cartes et des figures. Paris:  Chez Thomas Iolly, 1667. Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories, Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Froger, François. Relation d’un voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 aux Côtes d’Afrique, Détroit de Magellan, Brezil, Cayenné, et Isles Antilles, par une escadre des vaisseaux du roy, commandée par Monsieur de Gennes. Paris: Amsterdam, 1699. Gulløv, H. C., Poul Erik Olsen, Niels Brimnes, Per Hernæs, Mikkel Venborg Pedersen, and Erik Gøbel, eds. Danmark og kolonierne. Copenhagen: Gad, 2017. Gøbel, Erik. Danish West Indies 1672–​1917: Exhibition Marking the Centennial of the Sale of the Islands. Copenhagen: Danish National Archives and The Danish Parliament, 2017. Hansen, Frederikke, and Tone O. Nielsen. Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts. Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, 2007. Jacobsen, Sophie Anna Bang. “De Dansk Vestindiske Børn. Et Speciale Om de Afrocaribiske Børns Betydning, Deres Muligheder Og Deres Begrænsninger for Den Danske Koloni i Vestindien.” MA Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2017.

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210  Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer Jensen, Niklas Thode and Gunvor Simonsen. “Introduction:  The Historiography of Slavery in the Danish-​Norwegian West Indies, c.  1950–​2016.” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, nos. 4–​5 (October 19, 2016):  475–​94. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​03468755.2016.1210880. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look, A  Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. White on Black, Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Rostock, Xenius. Hugo Larsen, Dansk-​Vestindiens uovertrufne maler. Copenhagen: A/​S Dansk Nutidskunsts Forlag, 1950. Ryan, James R. Picturing Empire, Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Saïd, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. “Sjældent Marstrand-​ maleri er sikret  –​bliver i Danmark.” www.dr.dk/​nyheder/​ kultur/​sjaeldent-​marstrand-​maleri-​er-​sikret-​bliver-​i-​danmark. Accessed January 8, 2018. Stenum, Helle. We Carry It Within Us. Copenhagen:  Helle Stenum, 2017. Documentary film. Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics, Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Venborg Pedersen, Mikkel, ed. Danmark: En kolonimagt. Danmark og kolonierne. Copenhagen: Gad, 2017. Verardus, Carolus, et al. Caroli Verardi Cæsenatis Cubicularii Pontificii in Historiam Bætecam Ad R. P. Raphaelem Riarium S. Gerogii Diaconum Cardinalem. Basel: Johann Bergmann, 1494. Vergo, Peter, ed. New Museology. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Wexler, Laura. “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye.” In The Familial Gaze, 248–​75. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1999. Wolthers, Louise. “Blik og begivenhed, en diskussion af fotografiets historiske potentialer med nedslag i krig, koloni og kommercialisme 1860–​1920.” PhD diss., University of Copenhagen, 2008.

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15  Against the grain of neutralization Exhibiting the documentary as a curatorial production of subjective knowledge Susanne Neubauer The German philosopher Boris Groys states that when we go to an exhibition “we usually assume that what we will see there—whether it is paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, readymades, or installations—is art. Artworks can, of course, refer in one way or another to something other than themselves—say, to objects in reality or specific political subjects—but they cannot refer to art, because they are art.”1 In his pivotal essay “Art in the Age of Biopolitics:  From Artwork to Art Documentation,” Boris Groys identifies a symptomatic shift in the art world toward an increased interest in art documentation. Apart from the traditional assumption that what is presented in exhibitions are works of art, the inclusion of art documentation in exhibitions create, according to Groys, a complex dilemma.2 In this essay I seek to address three key issues around this dilemma that emerges when it comes to exhibiting documentary material within a spatial situation that follows subjectivized curatorial decisions. By offering another interpretation of Rainer Ruthenbeck’s exhibition Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck at Villa Romana in Florence, I  hope to further contextualize the current discourse on remaking and restaging art with documentary material. Furthermore, I want to highlight the conceptually contradictive nature of curatorial subjectivity and its interplay with knowledge production often linked with the use of objectified media. In clarifying these issues, three areas of consideration come to the fore:  the absence-​presence dilemma; recalling the past via art documentation, and curatorial production of subjective knowledge. Producing and including documentary art forms in exhibitions become particularly complicated when these art forms are a reference to an action or an object of our everyday life, Boris Groys claims. A  main component of ephemeral art forms like performances, temporary installations, or happenings is that they can only be re-​experienced through art documentation. In these cases, documentation plays a rather important role in recording past actions. In the particular example of Groys’s “new” category of art documentation, where art refers to our everyday life, the borders between artistic action and documentation blur. Groys describes this art

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212  Susanne Neubauer

Figure 15.1 Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck, installation image, Villa Romana, Florence, 2011. © Villa Romana, Florence, photo:  Ela Bialkowsks, OKNOstudio.

documentation as “a result without a result,” since it is impossible to truly present the art that it documents. It is this gap between art and its documentation in the particular context of exhibitional representation that concerns me here. The commingling of ontological lines in the case of documentation as an art form is what Groys criticizes. He principally claims that art documentation is born out of a “biopolitical” process that is shaped—before anything else in this context, artificially. In biopolitics life is not natural but technologized and the borders of real and artificial are, as with cloning, indistinguishable. In the context of art, this occurs whenever art documentation uses artificial means as a way of becoming an art form in itself, of “making living things out of artificial ones.”3 Groys’s work is an addition to the broad spectrum of theories about the documentary mode in art that have been shaped by discussions mainly conducted in connection with new media, art activism, documentary film practices, and the question of art’s authenticity. One of Groys’s examples of a narrative that transforms art documentation “into documented life” in order to make “living things” is Sophie Calle’s installation Les aveugles. In this work, Calle juxtaposes blind people’s descriptions of what they consider beautiful in artworks, or other visual impressions such as nature, colors, fabric, and so on with their reproductions and adds a photograph of the particular blind person. Groys uses this example to clarify what he means

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Against the grain of neutralization 213 by “documented life” which is understood as “a merely functional process whose own duration is negated and extinguished by the creation of the end product.”4 Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, among others, describe the documentary mode as one influenced mainly by a discourse on the “construction of facticity and the politics of perception,” as well as authorial strategies and critical contemporary art practices.5 In this sense, Groys’s example of Calle’s work is a particular case of how artistic production appropriates these kinds of strategies. However, the paradox between the myth of documentary authenticity as a construction and the assumption of material fidelity in certain media such as photography is especially relevant to the discussion on the curatorial and the exhibitionary production of art history. Dieter Roelstraete claims that Groys’s assertion that that which refers to art cannot, by definition, itself be art—is fundamentally controversial.6 He has criticized Groys’s analysis due to its lack of acknowledging any form of referentiality “that characterizes so much contemporary art.”7 Importantly, Roelstraete—and Groys—refer solely to practices of contemporary art, which is a vital aspect when it comes to curatorial concepts that deal, within their framework of contemporaneity, with questions of historicization. The controversial discussion about documentary forms in art outlined here is key to my current research. These forms can mirror different concepts of knowledge, as they give shape not only to the conception of a work of art, but also to its public mediation. In order to clarify the complexity around art documentation, I would like to discuss an exhibition that raises a number of challenging questions about how curatorial models are currently exploring the limits of “traditional” exhibition making (traditional in the sense of excluding documentary material within a space dedicated to showing art). By looking at Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck, I will focus on curatorial and institution-​critical questions that arise when it comes to the presentation of documentary photography. Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck was an exhibition curated by Francesca Bertolotti and held at Villa Romana in Florence from April 1 to May 1, 2011. The press release starts with an introduction to Ruthenbeck’s work for an Italian audience. It briefly informs us about the artist’s activities in the German-​speaking world and his participation in such pivotal exhibitions as Op Losse Schroeven. Situaties en Cryptostructuren (1969) and Live in Your Head:  When Attitudes Become Form (Works  –​ Concepts –​ Processes –​ Situations –​ Information) (1969). The release goes on to question Ruthenbeck’s “absence from the ranks of putative fathers of contemporary Italian artistic practices,” despite his “influence and the prefiguring force of his manifold, ironic formal language.”8 The statement continues: […] this exhibition’s aim is to contribute a remedy to such absence. These could have been the opening lines for the press release of an

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214  Susanne Neubauer exhibition of Reiner Ruthenbeck in an Italian venue. The show would have included sculptures from all over the world, ready to be flown back to their lenders after its end; it would have attempted to be a remedy to an absence; its attempt would have failed.9 Instead of a selection of Ruthenbeck’s sculptures, the exhibition consisted of a series of slide projections showing the artist’s work from different periods. The works were photographed in exhibitions and as such, can be seen as so-​called installation documentation, or exhibition shots. The slides were presented in continuous sequences with five projectors in the Villa Romana’s two exhibition rooms. In the “garden room,” three projectors were positioned on opposite walls to the left and right of the entrance, with one casting projections onto the portal leading to the garden. In the second space, two projectors were positioned next to each other, adopting the art historical tradition of the double projection. The absence of the artist’s work was not a provocation, as the press release further claims, on the contrary, it was taken as a means to exhibit institutional and historical mechanisms that are usually not made public. In other words, according to the text’s declared aim, the exhibition was an institutional critique of the “mechanisms of circulation” and an attempt to commemorate the artist’s oeuvre. This also corresponds with the curator’s aim to “explore a radical possibility of retrospectives working within radical restrictions and constrictions of space, time and money,” as well as to study “the effect on perception, experience, understanding and memory of the image of the work as opposed to the work itself.”10 Nevertheless, the realization of such a prominent media transfer, and its consequences in interpretation, is debatable. In the accompanying publication Remedies to the Absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck author Vincenzo Latronico suspects that “philosophical discussions of ‘documentality’ and ‘absence’ are ultimately nothing but ways to mask an absence of, well, money.”11 Dieter Roelstraete states that this exhibition mirrors a so-​ called “post-​museological” situation characterized by the impossibility of institutions to buy works, or pay high insurance and transportation fees. Consequently, documents become the new objects of desire.12 While the Marxist reading of the economic relations and the realm of commodification and commercialization is beyond the scope of this paper, I want to briefly note it here, because it was a key argument of the writers of this exhibition. The interpretation of the exhibition’s dimension of not lending works of art for financial reasons that appear prominently in the accompanying book is important to quote as it is closely linked with critically questioning the exhibition concept as a “curatorial gimmick.” The question inevitably arises if one of the project’s central theme—showing mechanisms and problematics behind exhibition organization—does not exploit an artist’s oeuvre for pure curatorial test settings.

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Against the grain of neutralization 215

The absence-​presence dilemma There is a continuous need to find new types of “presence” in works of art that are absent. Works like performances, land art, installations, environments, and of course exhibition installations become absent when the original work ends and lose their possibility to be reexhibited in exhibitions because they are ephemeral. They are absent because their material reality is unstable, no longer exists, or, in the case of some artworks, may have never even been realized. Supporting devices, such as those in first generation video and film works become obsolete and present increasing problems for conservators. In reanimating these works and putting a stronger focus on the importance of the interaction between the works and the original curators, art historians and conservators tend to apply different approaches. It is important to understand the difference between an original exhibition and its so-​called “reconstruction” or “restaging.” What material connection is there between the two realizations? As art historian Claire Bishop states, the definitions are “not hard and fast, and in reality most installations exist somewhere on a continuum between prioritizing the immaterial (a total experience or concept) and foregrounding the material (often carefully diagrammed by the artist with future reconstruction in mind).”13 In the example of the Ruthenbeck’s exhibition in Florence, the project was neither about showing lost works in a refabricated materiality, nor restaging a past exhibition. There are two parameters that must be taken into consideration with the difference between the original and the restaged:  one is the ontology of the photographic slide and the other is the exhibition. The image’s aesthetic quality refers to artists’ habit of documenting their works for archival or publication purposes. The photographs show Ruthenbeck’s sculptures within their “exhibitionary complex.”14 They are “official” photographs of his work, authenticated by the artist. However, the artist as well as the photographer behind the camera remain silent, and the images are presented as “objective,” since they are left without the artist’s commentary. This also applies to the exhibition itself. In terms of media theory—one might think of Charles S. Peirce’s, Rosalind Krauss’s, André Bazin’s, and Siegfried Kracauer’s concepts of print, sign, trace, and index or, of Roland Barthes’s “this-​has-​been,” by which he means an index to a reality that “could never be repeated existentially.”15 In its changing sequence, the dispositive of the presentation recollects not only art historical double projections, but also nonlinear forms of different media in early hyperimage constellations. Vincenzo Latronico states in his catalog text that the projections were “full-​scale.”16 They were spatially arranged in order to follow the works’ intrinsic qualities working with corners, doors, and windows.17 The equalization of sizes was a curatorial decision made to establish a referentiality based on the works’ materiality, size, and original presentation in space.18 Size is a central feature characterizing a work of art. The important

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216  Susanne Neubauer question, however, is not only one of showing images of works of art that are obviously absent, but one of reception and narration. How does the exhibitionary apparatus clarify the status of the projected images? Are they considered works of art (by the public)? Can we consider them “documents” as the authors of the accompanying book claim? The way “document” and “full-​scale projection” are constantly equated with each other in the exhibition texts is striking, as both notions are used indifferently, while the quality of space inherent in any image projection is neglected.19 However, typically, the concept of the “document” is used to fill the gap when a work of art is missing or cannot be exhibited in its originality. Looking at other referential inclusions of documents that have replaced works of art may help us interpret the particular use of the Ruthenbeck projections.

Recalling the past via art documentation Photographs are generally used to document works of art. A  document is generated by a process of ascription assigning the document a special status within the realm of objects.20 It is not surprising that photographs as documents can replace works of art in order to fill a curatorial narration whenever an original cannot be exhibited. Furthermore, an aura of originality is often ascribed to photographs, especially when they are first prints or archival discoveries. Groys states that in an exhibitionary context, photographs become originals, they gain “the here and now of a historical event.”21 Copied material or documentation that is produced for an exhibition context can, but do not have to provoke ambivalences. Sometimes they are overseen, sometimes not particularly shown and sewn into an exhibition narration, sometimes made explicitly visible. One further example stems from my own curatorial practice with the integration of photographs and films showing Paul Thek as a member of Robert Wilson’s theater group, shown in the exhibition Paul Thek in Process at the Kunstmuseum Lucerne. A simple spatial juxtaposition of images and film-​sequences challenged the visitor to both associate and question the connection between Wilson’s theater practice and Thek’s later means of realizing environments as group projects. In this case, no particular information on the sources of the films and its use as excerpts had been given, and as a consequence, film sequences had been turned into quasi-​fetishistic objects. Even though, ontologically speaking, they embodied the proof of a historical event, they above all filled certain gaps in the historical narrative.22 In the case of the much-​ cited exhibition When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/​Venice 2013, the use of photographs performed another function. The positioning of photographs within the exhibition was accompanied by lines that marked missing works. For example, Joseph Beuys’s pile of felts of his piece Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee (1968) were demarcated by a field of lines and a historic photograph of the Bern

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Against the grain of neutralization 217 exhibition. It must have been clear to visitors that the lines referred to a missing object. In this respect, the curatorial solution was puzzling, as it was this very detail that broke the exhibition’s narrative, which, according to curator Germano Celant, is a reason why such historical exhibitions should be restaged. Celant’s intention was to understand the archaeological remaking of the 1969 Bern exhibition as a “readymade” that “creates an estrangement,” and as a form of communicating.23 Swiss art critic Samuel Herzog acknowledged this feeling of estrangement that was provoked mainly via the presence of architectural elements of a Venetian palazzo.24 Art historian Beatrice von Bismarck criticized the Venice exhibition in an essay on the topic because, as she described it, it turned into a “prominent medium of historical research” itself.25 According to her, the curators’ voices became more prominent than the exhibition, and this is what links it to some aspects of the Ruthenbeck show. Current research on this venue, however, misses the opportunity to include the fact that original curator Harald Szeemann himself was maybe the first curator to make ample use of documentary material in his art exhibitions such as Happening & Fluxus (1970/​ 1971) and The Bachelor Machines (1975).26 It would have been instructive to counterbalance Szeemann’s own tendency to work with reconstructions and documentations in later projects such as When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/​Venice 2013. In a reading such as von Bismarck’s, restaging works of art within an exhibition display diminishes the status of the work of art and sensitizes the visitors’ perception of an exhibition and its spatial layout. This observation corresponds with Herzog’s description of his increased self-​awareness when visiting When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/​Venice 2013. His report suggests that he was particularly focused on the spatial aspects of the exhibition as well as the curatorial choices that were made visible, especially when it came to the encountering of the Palazzo architecture and some restaged elements of the Kunsthalle Bern. Yet if we are to understand that exhibitions and the history of art are greatly marked by absence and loss, the exact effect of these spatial representations is debatable, as is their impact on visitors. If we consider the claim that the restaging of works in an unusual manner as in Dokumentation Reiner Ruthenbeck is a contemporary way of understanding the works’ dimension within its historical context, it becomes clear that this approach is too simplistic. As critics such as Herzog and von Bismarck confess, their experience of the works on display in such documentary based or modified exhibitions ranges from pleasant to disappointing. What remains problematic is the impossibility of re-​experiencing the past and pointing out the gaps of historical narration in a situation where the display offers a spatially fixed situation. In addition, in the case of Dokumentation Reiner Ruthenbeck, the sequences of slides fall short of communicating a verifiable historical context. The images as they were presented in the galleries were purified of history and decontextualized from any art historical narration.

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Curatorial production of subjective knowledge Ruthenbeck’s slides, and Beuys’s missing felts in Venice show tendencies against institutional neutralization by including subjective knowledge that is based on curatorial production processes. This means that these art documents were introduced by a curatorial language that goes beyond widespread distant narratives of institutions, which, to the general public, pretend to be neutral. In Ruthenbeck’s case the absence of the artist’s as well as the curator’s explanatory voice in the exhibition itself (apart from the press text and the catalog, which have a life of their own) is striking, considering that it is usually this very voice that seems relevant when it comes to understanding the production of historical (and in this case institutional) knowledge. With the examples cited earlier in this chapter, my aim was to demonstrate that we also have to discuss information as such that which is solely transmitted via the exhibition display (and its selected and sometimes altered or produced objects), rather than through text panels and press releases. Even though art institutions run the risk of turning into historical museums when presenting more archival material than works of art, curators need to consciously explore and assess the possibilities afforded by the gap between a curatorial spatial setting and the way interpretation can be established within it. This demand is particularly challenging because it is this type of museum where the history of art mediation and white cube purification is most excluding. On the contrary, historical and ethnographic museums are traditionally obliged to explain history, provenance, and materiality of their various objects.27 “Showing is telling. Space is the medium in which ideas are visually phrased. Installation is both presentation and commentary, documentation and interpretation,” as Robert Storr put it.28 This is certainly true—and offers an interesting legitimation of every curator’s practice. Terry Smith, for his part, argues that the issue is how the exhibition “generates meaning semantically, through the relationships between its parts.”29 Apart from the curator’s task of linking “objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourse in physical space like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions,” a description that stems from Maria Lind, I would like to draw attention once more to the multifocal dimension of art works on display.30 Dokumentation Reiner Ruthenbeck illuminates that producing information always goes beyond generating pure spatial relationships. The examples given in this text demonstrate that works of art as well as documents, photographs, reproductions, or copies in an exhibition context possess strong presences—also when transferred into other medial states such as full-​size image projections by curators. In this context it may be impossible to define the limits of curatorial gestures when it comes to exhibiting art related documentation, or to find adequate ways of combining curatorial and art historical responsibilities. At least the projects presented here remind us to question the dimension of art documentation as a starting point for curatorial thinking, telling us that, inevitably, much scope for interpretation remains, and deserves our ongoing attention.

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Against the grain of neutralization 219

Figure 15.2 Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck, installation image, Villa Romana, Florence, 2011. © Villa Romana, Florence, photo:  Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio.

Notes 1 Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” in Documenta 11, Platform 5, eds. Gerti Fietzek and Greg Bond (Ostfildern-​ Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 107–​13. Reprinted in Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 53. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 57. 4 Ibid., 54. 5 Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, “Introduction:  Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art,” in The Greenroom:  Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, eds. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (Berlin: Sternberg-​ Press, 2008), 13. 6 Dieter Roelstraete, “In the Presence of Art:  Reiner Ruthenbeck and the Document,” in Remedies to the Absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck, ed. Vincenzo Latronico (Berlin: Archive Books, 2011), 21. 7 As well as art of former periods. Ibid. 8 Press release, online at www.villaromana.org/​front_​content.php?&idcat=69&ch angelang=2&idart=319 (last accessed January 10, 2018). 9 Ibid. 10 E-​mail from Francesca Bertolotti-​Bailey to the author, July 26, 2016. 11 Vincenzo Latronico, “Remedies. An introduction,” in Remedies to the Absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck, ed. Vincenzo Latronico (Berlin: Archive Books, 2011), 7.

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220  Susanne Neubauer 12 Dieter Roelstraete, “In the Presence of Art. Reiner Ruthenbeck and the Document,” in ibid., 19. 13 Claire Bishop, “Reconstruction Era:  The Anachronic Time(s) of Installation Art,” in When Attitudes Become Form. Bern 1969 –​Venice 2013, ed., Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2013), 429. 14 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in New Formations 4 (Spring 1998), 73–​102, online at http://​banmarchive.org.uk/​collections/​newformations/​ 04_​73.pdf, accessed January 10, 2018. 15 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida:  Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 79, 4. 16 Latronico, “Remedies,” 12. 17 E-​mail by Francesca Bertolotti-​Bailey to the author, July 26, 2016. 18 Ibid. 19 “An exhibition of documents (or of full-​scale projections) could in this respect be an extremely enhanced catalog (…).”Latronico, “Remedies,” 12. 20 The idea of “documentation” was born in the nineteenth century in the context of documentary evidence and authority. However, discussing the ontological characteristics of when an object becomes a document would take us too far at this point. For first references in this discussion see Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, 2010, http://​dictionary.oed.com (2.2010); Abigail Solomon-​Godeau, Photography at the Dock. Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” in Decoys and disruptions:  Selected writings 1975–​ 2001 (Cambridge, MA, London, and New  York:  The MIT Press, 2004), 151–​73; Darsie Alexander, “Reluctant Witness: Photography and the Documentation of 1960s and 1970s Art,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen Molesworth (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 2003), 52–​64. 21 Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” in Documenta 11, Platform 5, eds. Gerti Fietzek and Greg Bond (Ostfildern-​ Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 107–​13. Reprinted in Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics:  From Artwork to Art Documentation,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 64. 22 For a critical (self-​)evaluation, see Susanne Neubauer, Paul Thek in Process. Commentaries on/​of an Exhibition (Berlin: Revolver, New York: D.A.P, 2014). 23 Germano Celant, “A Readymade:  When Attitudes become form,” in When Attitudes Become Form. Bern 1969/​Venice 2013, ed. Germano Celant (Venice: Fondazione Prada, 2013), 391. 24 Samuel Herzog, “Es war einmal eine grosse Behauptung,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (July 22, 2013), online at www.nzz.ch/​feuilleton/​kunst_​architektur/​es-​ war-​einmal-​eine-​grosse-​behauptung-​1.18120531, accessed January 10, 2018). 25 Beatrice von Bismarck, “Der Teufel trägt Geschichtlichkeit oder Im Look der Provokation:  When Attitudes Become Form  –​Bern 1969/​ Venice 2013,” in Kunstgeschichtlichkeit. Historizität und Anachronie in der Gegenwartskunst, ed. Eva Kernbauer (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 240. 26 For a discussion on the use of documentary materials in these exhibitions see Susanne Neubauer, “Rekonstruktion und Display:  Documentary Curating,” in Susanne Neubauer, Paul Thek Reproduced 1969–​ 1977:  Dokumentation,

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Against the grain of neutralization 221 Publikation und Historisierung räumlicher ephemerer Kunstwerke (München: Silke Schreiber, 2011), 151–​63. 27 This has not always been the case as the history of “sensible collections” show. See Margit Berner, Anette Hoffmann, and Britta Lange, Sensible Sammlungen: Aus dem anthropologischen Depot (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts Fundus-​Bücher, 2011). 28 Robert Storr, “Show and Tell,” in What makes a great exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 23. 29 Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New  York:  Independent Curators International, 2012), 49. 30 Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum 68, no. 2 (October 2009), 103.

Bibliography Alexander, Darsie. “Reluctant Witness:  Photography and the Documentation of 1960s and 1970s Art.” In Work Ethic. Edited by Helen Molesworth, 52–​64. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press 2003. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4 (Spring 1998), 73–​ 102. Online at http://​banmarchive.org.uk/​collections/​newformations/​04_​73.pdf. Accessed January 10, 2018. Berner, Margit, Anette Hoffmann, and Britta Lange. Sensible Sammlungen. Aus dem anthropologischen Depot. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts (Fundus-​Bücher), 2011. Bishop, Claire. “Reconstruction Era:  The Anachronic Time(s) of Installation Art.” In When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 –​Venice 2013. Edited by Germano Celant, 429–​36. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2013. Celant, Germano. “A Readymade: When Attitudes Become Form.” In When Attitudes Become Form. Bern 1969/​Venice 2013. Edited by Germano Celant, 389–​92. Venice: Fondazione Prada, 2013. Groys, Boris. “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation.” In Documenta 11, Platform 5. Edited by Gerti Fietzek and Greg Bond, 107–​ 13. Ostfildern-​Ruit:  Hatje Cantz, 2002. Reprinted in Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation.” In Art Power, 53–​65. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Herzog, Samuel. “Es war einmal eine grosse Behauptung.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung (July, 22 2013). Online at www.nzz.ch/​feuilleton/​kunst_​architektur/​es-​war-​ einmal-​eine-​grosse-​behauptung-​1.18120531. Accessed January 10, 2018. Latronico, Vincenzo. “Remedies. An Introduction.” In: Remedies to the Absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck. Edited by Vincenzo Latronico, 7–​15. Berlin: Archive Books, 2011. Lind, Maria and Hito Steyerl, “Introduction:  Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art.” In The Greenroom:  Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1. Edited by Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, 10–​ 26. Berlin: Sternberg-​Press,  2008. Lind, Maria. “The Curatorial.” Artforum 68, no. 2 (October 2009): 65–​103. Neubauer, Susanne. “Rekonstruktion und Display:  Documentary Curating.” In Susanne Neubauer, Paul Thek Reproduced 1969–​ 1977:  Dokumentation, Publikation und Historisierung räumlicher ephemerer Kunstwerke, 151–​63. München: Silke Schreiber, 2011.

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222  Susanne Neubauer —​—​—​. Paul Thek in Process:  Commentaries on/​ of an Exhibition. Berlin and New York: Revolver and D.A.P, 2014. Roelstraete, Dieter. “In the Presence of Art: Reiner Ruthenbeck and the Document.” In Remedies to the Absence of Reiner Ruthenbeck. Edited by Vincenzo Latronico, 17–​23. Berlin: Archive Books, 2011. Rosler Martha. “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography).” In Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975–​2001, 151–​73. Cambridge, MA, London, and New York: The MIT Press, 2004. Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International, 2012. Solomon-​Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock. Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Storr, Robert. “Show and Tell.” In What Makes a Great Exhibition? Edited by Paula Marincola, 14–​31. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006. Von Bismarck, Beatrice. “Der Teufel trägt Geschichtlichkeit oder Im Look der Provokation: When Attitudes Become Form –​Bern 1969/​Venice 2013.” In Kunst geschichtlichkeit: Historizität und Anachronie in der Gegenwartskunst. Edited by Eva Kernbauer, 233–​48. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015.

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16  Innovative, polemical, dogmatic The case of Soviet experimental museum displays, 1930–​1933 Masha Chlenova

Today’s art museums increasingly present their collections in the form of special exhibitions—temporary and often polemical propositions, rather than what used to be known as permanent displays that unfold in a continuous and seemingly universal progression. Historical development itself is understood as fragmented and multifaceted; questioning hierarchies and ideological constructs has become a given. Do art museums still have the responsibility to create coherent historical narratives alongside discrete viewpoints? How do we find a balance between innovative displays that overtly and convincingly present their ideological premises and the seemingly neutral but sometimes tendentious expositions? To create a critical perspective on these issues, in what follows I will present a historical case study of a group of radically experimental collection displays held at two major Soviet art museums, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and the State Russian Museum in Leningrad in the early 1930s. Spurred by the Marxist understanding of artistic development as an expression of underlying socio-​historical processes, these exhibitions aimed to educate the Soviet masses about the dialectical unfolding of history and teach them to engage critically with artworks, thereby empowering them to take an active part in shaping the future of Soviet art, which was viewed as a tool for the building of a new socialist society. These displays were officially called “composite Marxist exhibitions” (kompleksnye marksistskie ekspozitsii), for instead of showcasing individual masterpieces made by great artists, they focused on the dialectical process of historical development and integrated artworks into the complex discursive structures of their didactic propositions. Unofficially they became known as “paper exhibitions,” due to the abundance of textual commentaries in them—ranging from large-​ scale slogans spanning gallery walls to a multitiered system of didactic labels that elucidated correspondences between historical, ideological, and artistic developments. Despite their aim of sharpening their viewers’ historical and aesthetic judgment, these displays effectively instrumentalized artworks and deprived visitors of critical autonomy. Nevertheless, regardless of their controversial nature, these exhibitions offer examples of innovative and compelling curatorial strategies that remain instructive and relevant today.

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224  Masha Chlenova In this essay I  will examine experimental displays of early twentieth-​ century Russian avant-​garde works, which were freshly integrated into the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in Leningrad from the Museums of Artistic Culture, which had been assembled by radical artists themselves in the early 1920s.1 For these large historical museums, new displays constituted an important shift from the synchronically oriented methodology of the Museums of Artistic Culture, which focused exclusively on formal innovations in contemporary art, to a historical presentation of artistic development as a continuous teleological progression. As radical works of the Russian avant-​garde were inscribed into the newly created account of the history of Soviet art, they were relegated to a closed chapter of the past, paving the way for their complete displacement from public view in the Soviet Union by the mid-​1930s. The new methodology of Soviet art museum display was developed by the young Marxist art historian Aleksei Fedorov-​Davydov (1900–​1969). In 1925, at the age of twenty-​five, he published a book entitled Marxist History of Fine Arts, which the well-​known art historian, critic, and champion of the Russian avant-​garde Nikolai Punin (1888–​1953) praised as “the first book to systematically present Marxist methodology in art history.”2 In 1929, Fedorov-​Davydov published his second book, Art of Industrial Capitalism in Russia, 1880–​ 1916, based on his doctoral dissertation. When in the same year he was appointed curator of New Russian Art at the Tretyakov Gallery, the leading museum of national art in the country, he was methodologically well equipped for turning the former picture gallery of bourgeois collector Sergei Tretyakov (1834–​1892) into a museum for the Soviet proletariat. Taking an active stance in socialist construction, Fedorov-​Davydov articulated his ultimate goal as follows:  “to use the understanding of the laws and mechanisms of artistic development as a basis for scientifically changing social aesthetics, and in this way take part in the general revolutionary transformation of society.”3 Fedorov-​Davydov’s approach reveals a contradiction that constituted an essential trait of Soviet cultural transformations from the late 1920s through the early 1930s: on the one hand, he was well trained in the formal analysis of artworks and sought to respect their autonomy in museum displays, while on the other, he felt compelled to “reveal the class content and the socio-​ politically conditioned nature of any artwork” and to ultimately inscribe them into a rather rigid system of ideological classification.4 Failing to do so, in the young Marxist’s view, would betray “an unprincipled and eclectic omnivorousness” (besprintsypnaia eklekticheskaia vseiadnost’).5 Thus while Fedorov-​ Davydov’s museum reforms relied on the formal inventiveness and pioneering museology of the Russian avant-​garde, they were also driven by the doctrinaire Marxist dialectical materialist understanding of history, which the young curator sincerely believed was the only true and beneficial approach. In April 1929, shortly after his appointment at the Tretyakov, Fedorov-​ Davydov published a long programmatic essay entitled “Principles of Building

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Innovative, polemical, dogmatic 225 Art Museums” in the journal Press and Revolution, in which he presented the theoretical foundation of his museum work to art professionals and the general public and outlined its principles in the format of sixty-​seven developed theses.6 These included avoiding aestheticism and fetishism of museum objects; presenting artworks as historical documents and examples of events and processes, and grouping artworks by styles understood as expressions of viewpoints of given social classes. In addition, Fedorov-​Davydov wanted exhibitions to be self-​explanatory:  they were to communicate to viewers without the mediation of museum guides or reliance on prior knowledge; their message was to be articulated through the very selection and presentation of artworks and through supplemental documentation providing historical and socio-​political context. At the same time, the curator paid close attention to artistic forms. He insisted that in order to create an effective presentation of an artwork it is necessary to “study its formal aspects, such as color, and how its reception differs depending on changes in the environment.”7 These experiments,” the curator wrote, “are necessary for the best possible choice of wall color in the galleries, an advantageous hanging of artworks; visual privileging of specific arguments made in the displays.”8 Upon starting work at the Tretyakov, Fedorov-​Davydov hired a one-​ time avant-​ garde artist, Boris Ender (1893–​ 1960), to head a special laboratory dedicated to the development of “a methodology for exhibiting paintings according to their painterly nature.”9 It studied “the interactions of unframed paintings with their surroundings, balancing the influence that exhibition props … had on the pictorial field of the work itself; the function of the frame … [and] the interaction between a painting and the wall.”10 This systematic investigation of the possibilities of display made possible the range of theoretically thought-​through innovations Fedorov-​ Davydov introduced during his five years at the Tretyakov, between 1929 and 1934. The young curator’s first task at the Tretyakov was to select works from the collection of the Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow (MZhK), which had been assembled by leading avant-​garde artists in the early 1920s, for the collection of the newly formed Department of Newest Trends at the Tretyakov, which Fedorov-​Davydov headed.11 His initial installation of the avant-​garde collection was on view between May 1929 and June 1930; it was a traditional floor to ceiling display that followed the principles of formal inventiveness and grouping by artistic styles developed at MZhK. A guidebook written by Lazar Rozental and published in three editions between 1929 and 1930, provided a detailed explanation of these formal innovations for the general public. Yet  already in August 1931, Rozental’s guidebook was taken out of circulation and was soon condemned as “idealist and ideologically nefarious” in the party’s central newspaper Pravda.12 In 1931 Fedorov-​Davydov began to rehang the collection according to the new Marxist methodology he had developed. In November 1931, the first Marxist display of early-​ twentieth-​ century art was unveiled:  entitled

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226  Masha Chlenova Art of the Capitalist Era (as the Department of Newest Trends was renamed), it was conceived as temporary and experimental (see Figure  16.1). Like all of Fedorov-​Davydov’s displays, it was not meant as a dogma to be taken for granted, but rather was a polemical proposition that critically engaged artworks and viewers into what the curator construed as a Marxist interpretation of the history of Russian art. A cornerstone of these new displays was their stated goal “to get away from the fetishism of museum objects by making the minimum unit not an individual artwork, but a museum utterance (muzeinoe predlozhenie).”13 An exhibition was thus conceived as a series of linked sentences that unfolded across museum walls. Abundant textual commentaries, in the form of wall texts, slogans, and labels of various formats but without stated authors, wove individual objects into coherent and overtly stated metanarratives. The largest stenciled comments, authorless but invariably authoritative, literally framed the artworks directing the viewers’ understanding of styles primarily as expressions of class interests, which often clashed with one another spurring dialectical development. Thus, works by

Figure 16.1 Experimental Composite Display, Art of the Capitalist Era, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1931–​ February 1932. Curator:  Aleksei Fedorov-​ Davydov. Front-​ facing wall text reads: “Earlier rationalism and realism in art are replaced by religious symbolism and sensuality.” Left wall text reads:  “Bourgeoisie, fighting against the workers’ movement, forms an alliance with the serf-​owning gentry.” Photographic Archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Innovative, polemical, dogmatic 227 members of the artistic group World of Art that celebrated aesthetic refinement and art for art’s sake, such as Valentin Serov (1865–​1911), Leon Bakst (1866–​1924), and Mikhail Vrubel (1856–​1910), were shown as expressing the views of the serf-​owning gentry, which escaped from the industrialization and urbanization of high capitalism into “religious symbolism and sensuality.”14 But above all bourgeois art was deemed guilty of individualism and subjectivity, which, according to the curator, led artistic practices to withdraw and thus become unable to connect adequately to the surrounding social reality. By the same logic, pictorial abstraction represented the extreme point of this tendency toward self-​absorption, and ultimately, self-​annihilation. It is not accidental that it is in the display of abstract paintings, which included works by Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–​1956), Vasily Kandinsky (1866–​ 1944), and Kazimir Malevich (1878–​ 1935) from the 1910s, curatorial commentary intrudes most forcefully into the space of the artworks—the fragmented curatorial verdict almost literally traps paintings in its denigrating embrace (see Figure 16.2). Fedorov-​Davydov once noted that some works “are so ideologically saturated that they require a most thorough

Figure 16.2 Experimental Composite Display, Art of the Capitalist Era, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1931–​ February 1932. Curator: Aleksei Fedorov-​Davydov. Wall text reads: “Bourgeois art in the blind alley of formalism and self-​negation.” Photographic Archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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228  Masha Chlenova ‘neutralizing explanation’ (obezvrezhivaiushchee tolkovaniie).”15 Acutely aware of the power of display strategies to alter the perceived meaning of individual artworks, Fedorov-​Davydov employed them masterfully. In order to better understand the mechanism and effectiveness of such exhibitions, it is helpful to consider them through the prism of linguist Valentin Voloshinov’s (1895–​1936) theorization of linguistic communication and especially of reported speech in his writings of the late 1920s.16 For Voloshinov, a case of reported speech in language is always an instance of an active relation of the authorial message to the message that is being reported, and thus can reveal a lot about the ways in which the other’s speech is received and manipulated. Moreover, every transmission of another’s speech always takes into account a third person to whom the reported utterances are being transmitted. I propose to see exhibitions as complex syntactic structures that constitute a framework similar to that of reported speech, where the author is the curator (or an exhibition committee) and the objects of his speech (that is reported messages) are the artworks themselves, authored by their makers. Viewers to whom a particular exhibition is either explicitly or implicitly addressed constitute the audience. Always a polyphonic structure, every exhibition represents a complex interaction between these three agents: the author, the object of presentation, and the audience. Considering Soviet experimental displays of the early 1930s in this framework, we can discern their double communicative orientation:  addressing the mass viewers and expressing a particular attitude toward the artworks on display. As a good Soviet Marxist, Fedorov-​Davydov was convinced he was acting for the good and in the name of the mass viewers (the revolutionary proletariat) whose class consciousness he sought to express. By publicly inscribing avant-​garde artworks within what he viewed as a dialectical materialist metanarrative, he sought to advance the course of Soviet art. At the same time, he provided mass viewers with an ideological apparatus to critically evaluate it. He did that assuming a common ground with his viewers, whom the curator conceived of either as already conscientious Marxists or as those aspiring to be “educated into” this, one and only, ideologically correct understanding. It is from this assumed and largely imaginary viewpoint, and not from the position of higher Soviet authorities, that Fedorov-​Davydov and his like-​minded colleagues operated throughout the cultural revolution.17 It was their ideological self-​righteousness and bold experimentation that brought forth innovative ideas, but also, somewhat paradoxically, led to the instrumentalization of artworks and to precarious ideological closures. A year after its initial opening, Fedorov-​Davydov modified his experimental display of the early avant-​garde (see Figure  16.3). He hung paintings on a wall painted black, captioned below with a running line of white stenciled text: “Bourgeois formalism and objectivism-​cubism mutates into a self-​serving game of formal-​aesthetic artistic means.” This sentence was a condensed version of similar accusations leveled against the early avant-​garde: a self-​serving and

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Innovative, polemical, dogmatic 229

Figure 16.3 Composite Marxist Display, The Art of the Great Industrial Bourgeoisie on the Eve of the Proletarian Revolution, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1932–​February 1933. Curator:  Aleksei Fedorov-​ Davydov. Wall text reads:  “Bourgeois formalism and objectivism-​ cubism mutates into a self-​ serving game of formal-​ aesthetic artistic means.” Photographic Archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

immature preoccupation with aesthetic forms that have no practical social use. A triumphant way out of this “dead end” was proposed in the following room with representational art in a brightly lit space. The slogan above the doorway (visible on the right side of the photograph) made this transition explicit and unambiguous: “Degenerating capitalism has driven art into the blind alley of formalism and non-​objectivity. The victorious October Revolution leads artists out of this blind alley into a new blossoming of art.” The following room showed figurative paintings hung without any textual commentary, with more breathing room given to individual works on view. Together the contrasting displays and the curatorial text in the hallway created a strongly pronounced turning point, which also had an effect of a temporal shift that simultaneously pushed the avant-​garde on the black wall into a closed chapter of the past, and presented representational art as embodying the future of Soviet art. This strategy of a pronounced temporal shift, as well as strikingly similar rhetorical devices, were employed at another important contemporaneous

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Figure 16.4 Introductory Gallery, Concise Experimental Exhibition of the Art from the Era of Imperialism, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, June 15, 1931–​early 1932. Curators: Nikolai Punin, Vera Anikieva, and others. Wall text above the doorway reads:  “As a Worldview Anarchism is Bourgeois Ideology Turned Inside Out.” (Lenin, underlining in original). Photographic Archive of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

exhibition of the Russian avant-​garde, organized by a team of curators headed by Nikolai Punin at the Department of the Art of Imperialism (formerly Department of Newest Trends) at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad in 1931 (see Figure 16.4). Its displays were bolder and more dramatic, but also more nuanced than those at the Tretyakov. Entitled A Concise Experimental Exhibition of the Art from the Era of Imperialism, this show also became known in shorthand as the “Isms.” Its task was spelled out in official documents as follows: “Through a critical analysis of the gentry and bourgeois trends in the art of prerevolutionary Russia to prepare the viewer for a critical understanding of the remnants of these trends in contemporary art.”18 A seemingly polyphonic structure, filled with quoted statements of various kinds, this exhibition in fact carefully orchestrated an overarching metanarrative, which mobilized the meaning of individual artworks in its service. A single quote of Vladimir Lenin that spanned the introductory gallery gave ideological direction to the exhibition as a whole:  “As a worldview, anarchism is bourgeois ideology turned inside out.” Lenin’s authoritative

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Innovative, polemical, dogmatic 231 voice penetrated the space of each individual installation with its condemnatory tone. In its light, artworks were made to speak against themselves, often in the voices of their own makers. Thus, for instance, a poetic line by Malevich was written above his painting Sportsmen (1931):  “May ‘debunking of the old world’ be engraved on your palms”—emphasizing the nihilistic aspect of the artist’s worldview. Intended as emancipatory in its original context, within the framework of this display, this phrase reads as a desire for destruction. In a similar tour de force, the avant-​garde persona of the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893–​ 1930) is caricatured as an egocentric dandy with an effigy, whose raised arm features a line from his poem:  “Hey you, heaven, take off your hat, I am coming.” The curators used Maiakovskii’s own words and mode of self-​expression in order to subvert his own artistic project. The effigy’s lorgnette and round hat (which actually belonged to another early avant-​garde dandy and provocateur David Burliuk [1882–​1967]), instead of being signs of individual expression, become symbols of snobbishness and asocial idiosyncrasy. The poet’s own lines, written clumsily on the effigy’s clothing, are made to ridicule his nonchalant egocentrism. Similarly, on the wall dedicated to their neo-​Primitivist painting, Mikhail Larionov (1881–​ 1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881–​1962) are made to speak against themselves in a framed quote from their manifesto: “we are not requiring society’s attention and are asking that it not require it from us.” The broader discursive context of the room leads the viewer to read this as nihilism and social isolation, as the reported speech of the artists is being invaded and appropriated by the re-​monologizing voice of the show’s metanarrative. While appearing to enrich the meaning of artworks, the numerous extraneous materials often curtail it. The overall effect of this introductory room is that of a chorus of voices that may at first appear to convey artists’ own words, but are really instrumentalized, along with the artworks themselves, in the service of an overarching ideological message of the show expressed in Lenin’s quote. At the end of his analysis of the use of reported speech, which was written in the late 1920s, Voloshinov expressed a worried concern about what he saw as a general shift taking place in humanities, which he described as a tendency toward the pervasiveness of the “quasi-​direct discourse.”19 In such use, reported speech of others is deliberately integrated in an indivisible manner with the authorial speech in such a way as to diffuse the responsibility for the statement and to relegate authorial agency to multiple secondary sources. An utterance, presented through a multiplicity of voices, acquires a pseudo-​democratic and a highly persuasive form, where all the voices are almost imperceptibly orchestrated to speak in unison. Voloshinov describes this tendency as “the weakening of an autonomous word” and “the transformation of the word into a thing,” or we could simply say, its instrumentalization.20 It is this phenomenon that we observe in experimental museum displays, where both individual artworks and individual viewers are barely left any space for subjective expression. This trend undoubtedly

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232  Masha Chlenova reflects a fundamental shift in the Soviet social and ideological environment:  articulating a singular authorial statement and a responsible social position increasingly required speaking on behalf of the masses on the one hand, and with the rhetorical support of higher authorities on the other. It is important to keep in mind that only the first room of the “-​Isms” show was firmly pervaded by the authority of Lenin’s pronouncement. The remainder of the displays were considerably tamer:  stage-​ like tripartite sections with a single signature work hung above and in front of each one as a kind of raised curtain (see Figure 16.5). Curatorial labels and wall text here were fairly small and individual artworks appeared to have greater autonomy. Within this framework, Malevich even managed to insert a programmatic display of his own new pictorial language. By placing his two paintings on the subject of peasant women, The Red Square from 1915 and Woman with a Rake from 1931, adjacent to each other on the right-​hand side wall, and by inscribing both canvases on the back with the name he gave to his new pictorial language, Supranaturalism, Malevich bridged the divide between abstraction and figuration in order to challenge the ontological credibility of mimetic naturalism. Yet the critical potential of Malevich’s powerful curatorial statement would have been subverted by the exhibition’s temporal framework

Figure 16.5 Gallery of Suprematism, Concise Experimental Exhibition of the Art from the Era of Imperialism, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, June 1931–​early 1932. Photographic Archive of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.​

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Innovative, polemical, dogmatic 233 and by its dominant metanarrative, which—through its chronological limits and the explicit label “imperialism” in its title—situated all of its contents, including works made as late as 1931, within the confines of the bygone prerevolutionary era. Taken as a whole, the Russian Museum’s “-​Isms” show, just like the experimental exhibitions at the Tretyakov, institutionalized the temporal displacement of the works of the Russian avant-​garde, and by implication their artistic strategies that had been integrated into the Soviet art of the early 1930s, as not simply ideologically “bourgeois” and therefore nefarious for the proletarian Soviet art, but also as outdated. The cumulative effect of these presentations was that of creating a broad basis for a more forceful critical attack on “formalism” in the arts that was to follow in 1933 most prominently in the publications of the critic Osip Beskin and with the major retrospective exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic that was staged on an unprecedented scale in Leningrad in the fall of 1932 and in Moscow in the spring of 1933, and effectively completed the displacement of the legacy of the Russian avant-​garde from the Soviet public sphere.21 As intended by the experimental and polemical nature of these exhibitions, since their inception they were accompanied by regular public debates intended to give constructive feedback to their authors. By the end of 1932, as the militant rhetoric of the cultural revolution increasingly gave way to class reconciliation, the overt ideological standpoints of Fedorov-​ Davydov’s displays made a growing number of Soviet art professionals and administrators uncomfortable. In January 1933 fifty prominent figures in the Soviet art world, including art historians, museum directors, curators, artists, and critics, were invited for a meeting in the office of the Commissar of Education Andrei Bubnov (1883–​1938), dedicated to developing strategies for “Sovietizing” the Tretyakov Gallery. This meeting was followed by three large public discussions held at the museum itself, where numerous artists and critics complained that Fedorov-​Davydov “lacked artistic tact” and “was destroying art with political labels.”22 The critic Abram Efros (1988–​1954) accused Fedorov-​Davydov of “the politics of black walls,” while another participant stated bluntly: “the Tretyakov uses paintings as a syrup to sweeten the bitter pill [of ideology] which it is trying to force-​ feed to its viewers, having turned into a kind of political university.”23 In February, Fedorov-​Davydov’s museological experiment was all but reversed with a drastic Soviet-​style directive from Bubnov: Remove all wall texts and labels … lock them up (possibly in the office of Fedorov-​Davydov) and don’t show them to anyone. Free the vitrines and the walls from cluttering materials. Display masterpieces. Group together the main artists. The best works should hang in the best places. Complete everything by the end of the day.24 Evidently, the overtly agitational and didactic displays that expressed the pathos of the Cultural Revolution had no more place in the USSR after its

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234  Masha Chlenova end. Sadly for the authors of these reforms, during the three years it took to implement them, between 1929 and 1932, these displays had already become obsolete. In 1933 Fedorov-​Davydov wrote a book that retrospectively synthesized his vision of a Soviet art museum and drew conclusions from the recent museum reforms, denouncing some of its excesses, including the introductory room of the “-​Isms” show at the Russian Museum (and especially the effigy of Maiakovskii) as excessively theatrical for a permanent museum display.25 By the mid-​1930s Soviet critics dismissed Fedorov-​Davydov’s methodology as “vulgar Marxism” and it was largely forgotten. Their negative impact on the legacy of the Russian avant-​garde is evident: between 1933 and 1936 a small number of avant-​garde works continued to hang on the walls of the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum in a seemingly impartial manner. Their “ideological charge,” as Fedorov-​Davydov called it, had been successfully “neutralized.” After further accusations of formalism in 1936 these works were to be confined to museum storage rooms until the mid-​1980s. It is essential to acknowledge how radically innovative this brief museological experiment was in foregrounding and exploring the power and rhetorical potential of the very language of display. Beneath the surface of denigrating the “individualism” of the early avant-​garde movements, the expert curatorial team at the Russian Museum headed by Nikolai Punin masterfully presented a nuanced narrative of these artistic movements through a selection of quotations, fonts, documentary materials, and design elements in a highly innovative exhibition that had no precedents in the history of museums. Likewise, Fedorov-​Davyvov’s concept of a self-​explanatory educational display that integrates artworks into broader socio-​historical processes and his complex system of educational labels were also far ahead of their time. The overtly polemical tone and agitational stance of these displays that opened up the persuasive tactics of montage rhetoric and quoted speech also have something to teach us about the possibilities of articulating bold curatorial propositions in museums that would evoke active polemical responses from the viewers rather than lull them with seemingly neutral and objective suggestions. Instead of being too easily dismissed as too dogmatic or narrow-​minded, this little known episode in Soviet museum history undoubtedly deserves to have a place in the history of twentieth-​century museums, and their educational turn.26 The overtly polemical stance of Soviet curators can also bring to bear on the contemporary idea of exhibitions as modes of social and political activism and of museums as discursive institutions with boldly articulated viewpoints rather than complacent mouthpieces of the seemingly universal truths.

Notes 1 On Museums of Artistic Culture see Maria Gough, “Futurist Museology” Modernism/​Modernity 10, no.  2 (April 2003):  327–​ 48, Irina Karasik, “Petrogradskii Muzei Khudozhestvennoi Kul’tury” in Muzei v Muzee: Russkii avangard iz kollektsii Muzeia Khudozhestvennoi Kul’tury v sobranii

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Innovative, polemical, dogmatic 235 Gosudarstvennogo Russkogo Muzeia (St. Petersburg:  Russkii Muzei, 1998), 9–​ 33 and Svetlana Dzhafarova, “The Creation of the Museum of Painterly Culture,” in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-​Garde, 1915–​32 (New York: Guggenheim, 1992), 475–​81. 2 Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii’s memoirs in I.A. Vakar and T.N. Mikheenko, eds., Malevich o sebe, sovremenniki o Maleviche, vol. 2 (Moscow: RA, 2004), 295. 3 Fedorov-​Davydov, Aleksei Iskusstvo Promyshlennogo Kapitalizma (Moscow: GAKhN, 1929), 7. 4 Fedorov-​Davydov, “Nekotorye voprosy rekonstruktsii Tret’iakovskoi Galerei,” in Sovetskii Muzei Bulleten’ (Moscow: STG, 1930), 6. 5 Ibid. 6 Fedorov-​Davydov, “Printsipy stroitel’stva khudozhestvennykh muzeev,” Pechat’ i Revolutsiia (April 1929): 63–​79. 7 Fedorov-​Davydov, “Nekotorye voprosy rekonstruktsii Tret’iakovskoi Galerei,” 10, emphasis in original. 8 Ibid. 9 Student of Mikhail Matiushin and former member of the Institute of Artistic Culture, Ender worked at the Tretyakov from January 1929 until July 1930. 10 “Working plan of the laboratory for developing a methodology of display of paintings in a contemporary museum according to their painterly nature.” Manuscript Division, State Tretyakov Gallery [MD STG], F. 8.II d.316 l.19–​20. 11 The Museum of Painterly Culture existed from 1920 until 1928, when it was first made a branch of the Tretyakov and closed in early 1929, with 112 works from its collection integrated into it and the rest dispersed. 12 A. Agranovskiy, “Putevka v muzei,” Pravda (April 18, 1932). 13 Fedorov-​Davydov, “Ekspozitsiia khudozhestvennykh muzeev,” in Trudy Pervogo Vserossiiskogo Muzeinogo S’ezda, ed. I. Luppol (Moscow: UChGIZ, 1931), 123, emphasis in original. 14 Curatorial text on the wall in Figure 16.2. 15 Fedorov-​Davydov, Presentation (January 1933), MD STG, F 8.II, d. 489. 16 Voloshinov was a linguist and cultural theorist, and a student of Mikhail Bakhtin. On the reported speech, see his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1929], Transl. L.  Matejka and R.  Titunik (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard, 1973). On communicative structures see his “Slovo v zhizni i slovo v poezii: k voprosam sotsiologicheskoi poetiki” Zvezda 6 (1926): 244–​67. 17 The term “cultural revolution” was first applied to the period of the late 1920s–​ early 1930s in the USSR, referring to its intensified class war and major “communist offensive” by the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–​31 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 18 Press release. Manuscript Division, The State Russian Museum, F.II, op.6, d.834, l.84. 19 Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 137 20 Ibid., 159. 21 See Masha Chlenova, “Staging Soviet Art:  15 Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, 1932–​33,” October 147 (Winter 2014): 38–​55. 22 Transcripts of these debates. RGALI f. 990 op.3 d.7. 23 Ibid. 24 “Materialy po reekspozitsii GTG,” MD STG, F. 8, оp. II, d. 504, l. 3.

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236  Masha Chlenova 25 Fedorov-​Davydov, Sovetskii Khudozhestvennyi Muzei (Moscow:  OGIZ, 1933), 62. 26 For a comparison of Fedorov-​ Davydov’s educational mission to western curatorial strategies in such landmark exhibitions as Alfred Barr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, see Masha Chlenova, “Soviet Museology During the Cultural Revolution: An Educational Turn,” in Histoire@Politique 33 (September–​December 2017): www.histoire-​ politique.fr.

Bibliography Chlenova, Masha. “Staging Soviet Art:  15 Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, 1932–​33.” October 147 (Winter 2014): 38–​55. —​—​—​. “Soviet Museology During the Cultural Revolution: An Educational Turn.” In Histoire@Politique 33 (September–​December 2017): www.histoire-​politique.fr. Dzhafarova, Svetlana. “The Creation of the Museum of Painterly Culture.” In The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-​Garde, 1915–​32. New York: Guggenheim, 1992, 475–81. Fedorov-​Davydov, Aleksei. Iskusstvo Promyshlennogo Kapitalizma [Art of Industrial Capitalism]. Moscow: GAKhN, 1929. —​ —​ —​ . “Printsipy stroitel’stva khudozhestvennykh muzeev” [The principles of building art museums]. Pechat’ i Revolutsiia (April 1929): 63–79. —​—​—​. “Ekspozitsiia khudozhestvennykh muzeev” [Displays in art museums]. In Trudy Pervogo Vserossiiskogo Muzeinogo S’ezda. Edited by I. Luppol. Moscow: UChGIZ, 1931, 75–82. —​—​—​. “Nekotorye voprosy rekonstruktsii Tret’iakovskoi Galerei” [Some issues in the reorganization of the Tretyakov Gallery]. In Sovetskii Muzei Bulleten’ (Moscow: STG, 1930), 6–11. —​—​—​. Sovetskii Khudozhestvennyi Muzey [Soviet Art Museum] (Moscow: OGIZ, 1933). Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed. Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–​31. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Gough, Maria. “Futurist Museology.” Modernism/​Modernity 10, no. 2 (April 2003): 327–​48. Karasik, Irina. “Petrogradskii Muzei Khudozhestvennoi Kul’tury” [Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd]. In Muzei v Muzee: Russkii avangard iz kollektsii Muzeia Khudozhestvennoi Kul’tury v sobranii Gosudarstvennogo Russkogo Muzeia. St. Petersburg: Russkii Muzei, 1998, 9–33. Lebedeva, Irina. “Iskusstvo avangarda v ekspozitsiiakh Tretiakovskoi galerei 1920–​ 30kh godov” [Art of the Avant-​Garde on Display at the Tretyakov Gallery in the 1920s–​30s]. Russkiy avangard: Problemy reprezentatsii i interpretatsii. Edited by Irina Karasik. St. Petersburg: Russkii Muzei, 2001, 139–49. Voloshinov, Valentin. “Slovo v zhizni i slovo v poezii: k voprosam sotsiologicheskoi poetiki” [Word in Life and Word in Poetry: Issues in Sociological Poetics]. Zvezda 6 (1926): 244–​67. —​—​—​. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1929]. Translated by L. Matejka and R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1973.

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 Concluding remarks Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, and Anne Gregersen

At the University of Copenhagen, we have been invested in both art history and ethnology in our interdisciplinary course in museum studies and museology. It has been a deeply fruitful experience for students and faculty alike. The current volume is the result of these initial experiments in interdisciplinary collaboration. The particular constellation of essays presented here were chosen to bring new interdisciplinary perspectives on curating by mixing theoretical and praxis-​based analyses with specific case studies that attend to the historic gap between theory and practice through a variety of scholarly reflections on curatorial practices in various contexts. As part of the general postmodern condition, the exhibition nor the museum is ever neutral with their collections, framings, and discourse. Exhibitions can make us feel, think, and perceive the world in new ways when they start thinking with things—as experiments in process, as modes of critique, as public spaces for dialogue and knowledge exchange, and sites for the interchange of curiosity and reflection. It is this thinking with that calls for new research on what curating can mean when, how, and why. Curatorial Challenges is the last outcome in a series of knowledge-​ exchanges of the two-​year Research Network for Studies in the Curatorial funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. We are deeply grateful for the generous funding and support to further develop curatorial thinking in this interdisciplinary forum. At times like these, with serious cutbacks in public universities, museums, research, and cultural institutions, it is a privilege to have the opportunity to undertake innovative research and critical thinking—a privilege that is both important and necessary in order to define values differently than in numbers and money. We believe in the importance of museums as contemporary public spaces, where exhibitions address and question vital issues and “social truths,” where historical canons are contested, and where curatorial authority is challenged. We hope this anthology will cultivate further interdisciplinary dialogue on curating, and widen and deepen questions, reflections, and insights into contemporary curatorial challenges.

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Index

Abs, Hermann J. 164 accountability 67, 69, 71–​2, 75–​6, 137 After Year Zero 182 Aksel, Malik 25 Alder Hey 35, 38 All the World’s Futures 182 analytical figure 94 anatomical collection 40–​1 Anatomical Museum, Leiden 40 Andersen, Astrid Nonbo 201 Anli, Hakki 30 Anthropocene Project, The 122 anthropocene 94, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128–​9, 135 anthropological: approach 112; collections 35; research 126; specimens 40; studies 140 Antmen, Ahu 8, 22 “Anti-​Canonization”  105 archive 15, 59, 65, 100–​01, 111, 158–​9, 161–​2, 187, 193, 195–​6, 205–​06 Archives Matisse 159; see also Matisse Archives Nationales 159 Arnold, Ken 47 ARoS Art Museum, Aarhus 122 Arslan, Yuksel 30 art documentation 174, 211–​13, 216, 218 “art history” 23 Art of the Capitalist Era 225 Art, Culture and Politics in the “Postmigrant Condition” 90 Artists of the Russian Federation over 15 Years 233 Asmussen, Benjamin 74 avant-​garde 56, 167, 224–​5, 228–​31, 233–​4; see also fashion; Russian Bachelor Machines, The 217 Bacon, Francis 184

Baj, Enrico 183 Bakst, Leon 227 Bal, Mieke 22 Baltimore Museum of Art 182 Bare, Naked, Nude -​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting 8, 22, 24; see also Üryan, Çıplak, Nü Barrett, Jennifer 66 Barry, Andrew 137 Barthes, Roland 215 Bartley, Adam 113 Basu, Paul 139 Bauditz, Louisa 199 Bauhaus 187 Bazin, André 215 Beaton, Cecil 52, 58 Beauvoir, Simone de 26 Belle, La Vaughn 203, 205–​06 Bencard, Adam 94, 133 Bénézit, Henri 161 Bénézit, Jean-​Pierre  161 Bénézit, Madame Jean-​Pierre 162 Benjamin, Walter 110, 117 Bennett, Tony 102 Berktay, Fatmagul 26 Berlin Museum of History of Medicine at Charité 40 Bertolotti, Francesca 213 Beskin, Osip 233 Beuys, Joseph 216, 218 Biemann, Ursula 87 Bildung 2, 4, 6–​7, 60, 173 Bildungsroman 7–​8, 11–​18 biological 42, 135, 138, 198 biomedical 133–​4, 136 Bishop, Claire 215 Bismarck, Beatrice von 217 Bitzer, Lloyd 22, 30–​1 Bjerregaard, Peter 94, 108

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Index 239 Blaue Reiter, Der 187 blind spots 18, 193, 205 Blind Spots. Images of the Danish West Indies Colony 174, 192–​3, 196, 201–​02, 206 body: dead 8, 35–​47; donation 42; female 24, 28; human 8, 25, 39; naked 23, 27–​30 Body Collected, The 8, 36, 41, 43–​5 Body Worlds 35, 39 Bonnard, Pierre 165 Born, Georgina 137 Brand, Peggy Z. 28, 30 Breward, Christopher 51, 55, 61 Brichet, Nathalia 94, 120 Brown, Mark 149–​50 Buhl, Nanna Debois 204 Burke, Edmund 30 Burliuk, David 231 Butler, Cornelia 148 Büscher, Monika 90 Callard, Felicity 138 Calle, Sophie 212–​13 Camnitzer, Luis 148, 154 Campbell, Orlando 53 Campt, Tina 192 Caribbean 69, 73, 192, 194–​6, 199–​01, 203–​04 Cassou, Jean 162 Castells, Manuel 82 Celant, Germano 217 Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University 51; see also fashion Centre Pompidou’s Archives Unit 159 Certeau, Michel de 14 Chlenova, Masha 174, 223 Clark, Judith 52, 55–​9 Clark, Kenneth 28 Clarkson, Thomas 199 cocuration 127, 133, 138, 148; see also curating Coleman, Simon 86 collaboration 94, 134, 135, 137, 141–​2, 169; see also interdisciplinary collapse 112–​13, 116 COLLAPSE –​Human Being in an Unpredictable World 94, 109, 111–​12, 116–​17 collection-​conservation  136 “collective communication competence” 140 Colombo, Joe C. 183

colonial: administration 192; history 7, 9, 65, 74–​6, 174, 194, 196, 206; images 192–​3, 196; legacies 9, 65; past 203, 207; photography 204; representations 76; trade 73, 76; visual culture 192, 207 colonialism 9, 37, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74–​5, 192, 195, 204 Columbus, Christopher 196 complexity 122, 136, 139, 142, 151, 206, 213 conceptual: art 149; aspects 135; domanes 135; role models 148; works 151 conceptualism 148; see also Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–​1980s Concise Experimental Exhibition of the Art from the Era of Imperialism 230 Condorelli, Céline 162, 166–​7 contemporary: art 1–​3, 55, 65, 80, 98, 104–​05, 169, 174, 181, 193, 203, 206, 213, 224, 230; art practices 213; art world 188; artists 9, 158, 174; institutional practices 94; media 2; migration 7; public spaces 237; society 1, 9, 14, 55; theory 14, 17; transit nodes 89; Turkey 8; video 26, 29, 69; see also curating; exhibition; fashion “contemporary, the” 180 Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 52, 56 Cresswell, Tim 82 Cronenberg, Johan 198 cross-​disciplinary 108, 112; see also interdisciplinary Crutzen, P. J. 122 cultural hierarchies 105, 149 cultural-​historical 133–​4, 142 “culture of research” 136 curating: anthropocene ecology 124; as artistic practice 12; contemporary 98, 177; collections 43; cultural heritage 62; as creative performance 4, 11; as critique 8, 12; culture 154; the dead body 8, 35–​4; as distraction 108–​118; Mild Apocalypse 94, 120–​29; multi-​ sited 9, 79–​90; the nude 5, 8, 22–​32; “off-​site” 79; postwar era 173, 177–​88; practice of 11, 98–​9, 106; and research 87, 93–​4, 97–​106; as rhetorical practice 12; as translation 117; utopia 62; see also exhibition; fashion

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240 Index curator: anthropologist 128; as auteur 58; as distraction 94, 108–​18; independent 3, 58; individual 90; international 3–​4; in-​house 133; local 153; 108; Soviet 234; see also fashion “curator, the” 3 curatorial: activities 177; agency 148, 183, 186; approach 52–​3, 80, 169, 193; authority 105 153; concepts 213; decisions 211, 215; education 98; experiment 133, 142; explorations 177; intentions 67, 76; interest 4, 182, 188; labels 232; language 218; models 213; modes 9, 65, 97, 102; move 115; narration 216; practices 2, 47, 52, 55, 80, 87, 93–​4, 117, 148, 154, 158, 216; process 59, 102; production 211, 213, 218; projects 79, 86–​7, 99–​101, 169; research 79–​80, 83, 93, 98; as research 99; 177, 186; responsibility 39, 43, 218; as “rhetorical situation” 30; statement 232; strategies 4, 9, 36, 41, 44–​5, 86, 154, 223; studies 2, 4, 97; subjectivity 211; team 51, 234; theorist 22, 87; thinking 179, 218; turn 181, 186; vision 139, 182; work 43, 57, 93–​4, 100, 186 curatorship v, 7, 11–​18, 173 “curatorial, the” 22, 31, 87, 98–​99 Dangelo, Sergio 183 Danish West Indies 73–​4, 174, 192–​4, 196, 198–​9, 206 De Appel, Amsterdam 97 Delectorskaya, Lydia 159–​60 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 17–​18, 82 Denmark 4, 9, 12–​13, 42, 65, 72, 76, 80, 84, 94, 120, 122, 129, 192, 195, 198–​9, 203, 237 Denner, Balthasar 72 Derrida, Jacques 13, 16, 18 design strategies 65, 67 Deutches Museum, Munich 122 differentiality 105–​06 discursive formations 104 display: archaeological 111; of bodily material 35; didactic 233; of dresses 58; ethnographic 111; experimental 223–​4, 228, 231; of historical collections 36; of human material 35, 37; programmatic 232; strategies 228; thematic 68–​69; see also educational; fashion

documenta 11 182 dOCUMENTA(13) 100 Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck 174, 211, 213; see also Ruthenbeck Du Tertre, Jean-​Baptiste  194 Dubuc, Élise 136–​7 educational: display 234; entertaining 102; function 136; idea 234; intentions 39; labels 234; mission 236; narrative 102; program 97–​8; purpose 39, 57; thinking 9; workshops 75 Efros, Abram 233 Ehlers, Jeanette 203–​4, 206 Eisenstadt, Schmuel 180 El Salahi, Ibrahim 184 Elgin, Dag Erik 162, 166 Ender, Boris 225 Enlightenment 2, 7, 129, 173 enslavement 68–​9, 75–​6 entanglement 62, 93, 94, 121, 126, 133–​142, 180 Entartete Kunst 187 Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren 187 Enwezor, Okwui 181–​3, 185–​7 ephemeral 174, 211, 215 epistemological technologies 12 Equiano, Olaudah 69, 71 Every Day People Follow Signs Pointing to Some Place Which Is Not Their Home 88 exchange-​based interdisciplinarity 135; see also interdisciplinarity exhibition: addresses 9, 44, 65–​76, 151; “benchmark exhibition” 51, 55, 162; contemporary 147; context 218; as cultural exchange 1, 2, 177; design 51–​54, 62, 141; ethnographic 37; experience 8, 67, 138–​9, 173; format 65, 86; as historically situated space 7; labels 55; language 44; maker 3, 52, 55, 58, 62, 87, 93–​4, 97, 99, 101–​03, 106, 112, 147, 154, 173, 186, 188, 213; Marxist 223; multi-​sited 9, 80; multivocal 207; narrative 53, 217; of the nude 22, 25–​26; practices 60, 177; process 94, 110; rhetorics 65–​7; as research 94, 99, 101, 108–​118, 158; as/​and research 4, 93–​106; research-​based 94, 120–​1, 173, 186; space 14, 139, 196; strategies 40, 47, 181

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Index 241 “exhibition maker” 3 “exhibition rhetoric” 4, 22 exhibitionary: apparatus 216; context 216; strategies 7 “experimental entanglements” 94, 133–​42 Farver, Jane 148 fashion: avantgarde 56; contemporary 51, 58, 62; curation 51–​62; curators 9, 54–​5, 58, 60; designers 55, 57, 60; display 51–​52, 55, 57–​8, 60, 62; exhibition 8, 52, 55–​6, 60–​1; film 52; MA in Fashion Curation 58; museum 56; objects 52–​3, 55–​6, 62; studies 51; utopia of 55, 62 Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton 52 Fedorov-​Davydov, Aleksei 224–​8, 233–​4 female: body 24, 29, 151; artists 25, 149; models 25; nude 26; pop practioners 150; practitioners 152 feminisms 149, 153 feminist: art 30, 148–​9; artistic practices 148; language 152; pop 150; practice 148; revolution 148; science studies 135; stance 30; works 151 Ferguson, Bruce W. 1, 7, 22, 65–​6 Filipovic, Elena 154 Fine Arts Academy, Istanbul 27–​8 Fine Arts Academy, Vienna 88–​9 Fine Arts Academy for Girls, Istanbul 25 Fitzgerald, Des 138–​9 Forschung 100–​01, 103 Foucault, Michel 1, 103, 105–​06 Friedman, Susan Stanford 180 Frigeri, Flavia 94, 147 Froger, François 194 Galerie Bénézit; see Bénézit García, Ángela 153 Garden –​The Anthropocene, The 122 gender 17, 51, 69, 83, 153 gendered: bodies 23; female 25–​6; subject 23 genealogy 103, 105–​06 Giacometti, Alberto 183 Giersing, Sarah 192 Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–​1980s 148–​52, 154 global: art 182, 188; art map 177; Anthropocene 122; emancipation

185; flow of capital 87; focus 182; integrity and interconnection 183; market 126; movement 154; orientation 183, 187; perspective 148, 173, 177, 187; pop 152; pop art 149, 154, 182; postwar art 184; postwar era 182, 188; see also modernism globalization 1, 80, 82–​4, 89–​90 Godfrey, Tony 150–​1 Goldilocks 120–​1, 129 Goldsmiths, London 97 Goncharova, Natalia 231 Gordon Museum 38 Gordon, Jeffrey I. 135 Greenberg, Reesa 1 Gregersen, Anne 1, 237 Groys, Boris 211–​13, 216 Guilbaut, Serge 177 Gurlitt collection 160 Göring, Hermann 159 Haacke, Hans 163–​4 Hagens, Gunther von 39 Hall, Stuart 26, 30 Hamburger Kunsthalle 147 Hamlet 7, 11–​14, 18 Handberg, Kristian 173–​4, 177 Hansen, Malene Vest 1, 237 Hansen, Tone 94, 158 Happening & Fluxus 217 Hastrup, Frida 94, 120 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 122, 182 Haus der Kunst, Münich 174, 181–​2, 186 Haye, Amy de la 55, 58 Hedman, Sofia 51 Hegel 14 Heier, Marianne 162, 166–​7 Hellermann, Pauline von 86–​7 Helweg-​Larsen, Povl  200 Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo 94, 158, 161–​2 Henie, Sonja, 161 Henningsen, Anne Folke 1, 237 Hentzen, Alfred 147 Herzog, Samuel 217 historicization 149, 153, 213 historiography 14, 186 Hjelmslev, Louis Troll 7, 11, 17–​18 Hjemdahl, Anne-​Sofie  57 Hodge, Charlotte 199 HOK; see Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

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242 Index Holbech, N. P. 195 Hooper-​Greenhill, Eilean  61 Hornshøj, Peder 201 human: material 8, 35–​9, 41–​2, 44, 47; remains 35–​7, 39, 47; specimens 35, 47 Human Tissue Act of 2004 38 Hume, David 28, 30 Hunterian Museum, London 40 ICOM Costume; see International Committee for Museums and Collections of Costumes identity 1, 15, 51, 59–​60, 66, 75, 83, 97, 103, 165, 180, 188 In Search of Matisse 94, 163–​4, 168–​9; see also Matisse in-​house curator; see curator İnas Sanayi-​i Nefise Mektebi; see Fine Arts Academy for Girls, Istanbul industrial: activity 120–​1; landscapes 125, 129; capitalism 224 infotainment 64, 72, 74 “institutional utterances” 65 interdisciplinarity 135, 142 interdisciplinary: approach 4; background 94; collaborations 141, 237; collective research 121; dialogue 2, 4, 237; fields of study 60; perspectives 237; processes 140; projects 139; research 133, 141; strategy 93 International Committee for Museums and Collections of Costumes 57 intra-​disciplinarity 139, 142 Istanbul State Museum of Painting and Sculpture 23 Jaegersberg, Johan 198 Jenkins, Tiffany 37 Jensen, Ole B. 82 Jeu de Paume 160–​1 Johnson, Barbara 17 Kandinsky, Vassily 227 Kant, Immanuel 30, 105 Kaufmann, Vincent 82 Kierkegaard, Søren 17 knowledge: disruption 22; exchange 2–​3, 237; historial 174, 218; -​making 43; neuroscientific 138; production 1, 3–​4, 9, 38, 44, 73, 79, 87, 90, 97, 99, 177, 186, 211; situational 31; subjective 174, 211, 213, 218

“knowledge technology” 134 knowledge-​in-​the-​making  111–​2 Knudsen, Eske 201 Kobro, Katarzyna 167 Kracauer, Siegfried 215 Krauss, Rosalind 215 Kubler, George 14 Kunsthalle Bern 217 Kunsthallen 3 Kunstmuseum Lucerne 216 Kurczynski, Karen 151 Kwon, Miwon 83 Kölnermessehallen, Köln 186 König, Kaspar 147–​8 KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces 9, 80 Lacks, Henrietta 45 L, Nicola 153 Lagomarsino, Runo 88 landscape 23, 52, 62, 94, 120–​5, 127–​9, 195–​6, 198–​9, 204–​06 Larionov, Mikahail 231 Larsen, Hugo 196 Lash, Scott 82 Latour, Bruno 136 Latronico, Vincenzo 214–​15 Le Magasin, Grenoble 97 Leiderstam, Matts 162, 165 Lenin, Vladimir 230–​2 Lichtenstein, Roy 149 Lind, Maria 213, 218 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works –​Concepts –​ Processes –​Situations –​ Information) 213 London College of Fashion 55, 58 London, Sugar and Slavery 9, 65, 67–​8, 71, 75–​6 Looking Through the Grid 165 looting 165 Loudmer, Philippe 161 M/​S Maritime Museum of Denmark 65, 72 MA in Fashion Curation; see fashion Macdonald, Sharon 139 Madoff, Steven Henry 150 Maiakovskii, Vladimir 231, 234 male objectification 26 Malevich, Kazimir 147, 227, 231–​2 Malign Muses 56 Malinovski, Pejk 84–​5 “management of meanings” 65

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Index 243 Manet-​PROJEKT 74 163–​4 Manet 163–​4, 196 Marcus, George 84–​7 market 126, 163, 167–​8 Martinon, Jean-​Paul 22, 99 Martynov, Serge 51 Marxist 214, 223–​6, 228 materiality 15–​17, 109, 136, 215, 218 Matisse, Henri 158–​62, 166 Matisse, Pierre 162 medical: approaches 40; collections 37, 39–​42; history 43, 47, 93; knowledge 37, 41; museum 35, 38; object 8, 36, 47, 136; practices 8, 37–​8, 41; purposes 8, 36; research 37–​39, 42, 44; responsibility 38; science 41, 44–​5, 47, 104; scientific specimens 35; specimens 40; see also display; museum Medical Museion, Copenhagen 8, 35, 36, 41, 43, 94, 133–​4, 136 Melbye, Fritz 194 Melchior, Marie Riegels 8, 51 Mercer, Kobena 180–​1, 187 Messina, Antonella da 167 Meyer, Mette Kia Krabbe 174, 192 microbiome 135–​6 migration 7, 9, 79–​80, 87–​90 Mild Apocalypse. Feral Landscapes in Denmark 94, 120, 129 Mind the Gut 94, 133, 136, 138–​9, 142 mind/​brain  139 mind-​gut  141 mining 120–​5 Ministry of Foreign Affairs-​Les Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères 159 Mirzoeff, Nicolas 192, 198 mobile methods 89–​90 mobility 9, 79–​80, 82–​4, 86–​90 MoMu (ModeMuseum, Antwerp) 56 modernism: anti-​ 187; artistic 23, 30, 177, 179, 184; cosmopolitan 180, 185; global 173–​4, 177–​9, 181, 187; mono-​cultural 180; multiple 173, 177–​88; postwar 182; Turkish 29 Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus 94, 120, 124 Moore, Henry 183 Morgan, Jessica 148 Mosquera, Geraldo 154 Mouchot, Augustin 53 Moxey, Keith 181, 187 “multi-​sited curating”  9

multi-​sited curating 9, 79–​90; see also “off-​site curating” multi-​sited research 79–​80, 83–​8, 90 MUSEEA 51 Musées Nationaux 159 museological: changes 55; communication 134; debates 58, 128; implications 61; experiment 94, 233–​4; theory 137; museology 18, 52, 58, 60, 224, 237; see also new museology museum: contemporary 2, 14, 66; display 223–​4, 231, 234; ethnographic 193, 218; historical 218, 224; medical 35, 38; reforms 224, 234; see also research Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo 94, 109; Museum of London 37, 40; Museum of London Docklands 9, 65, 67 Museum of Modern Art, New York 152 Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw 182 Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow (MZhK) 225 Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland 167 Museum Vestsjælland, Denmark 195 Nairne, Sandy 1 Namagambe, Mary Consolata 196 National Museum of Denmark 195 National Museum of Iraq 165 Nead, Lynda 23 “negotiation in motion” 82 “neurodeterminists” 138 Neubauer, Susanne 174, 211 “neuroessentialists” 138 neuroscience 94, 135, 138, 141–​2 “new museology” 1 new museology 2, 60, 66, 193, 206 Neye, Anna 201 Nielsen, Sabine Dahl 9, 79 nomadology 82 Nowotny, Stefan 105 nude 8, 22–​31 Odumosu, Temi 196, 201–​2 “off-​site curating” 79; see also curating Oliver, Isabel 153 Onstad, Niels 161–​2 Op Losse Schroeven. Situaties en Cryptostructuren see Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form

244

244 Index (Works –​Concepts –​Processes –​ Situations –​Information Ovesen, Axel 201, 205 Pannwitz, Rudolf 117 “paper exhibitions” 223 Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 186 participatory interventions 193 Paul Thek in Process 216 Peirce, Charles S. 215 Pera Museum, Istanbul 22–​4 Pétridès, Paul 161 photography 192–​3, 195, 199, 204, 206, 213 Picasso 187 Pissarro 196 Plato 11, 13, 18 pop art 148–​50, 152–​4, 180, 182 “post-​museological”  214 “postcolonial turn” 66; see also colonial postcolonial 98, 182; see also colonial postindustrial societies 135; see also industrial postwar art 177, 181–​2, 184, 186 Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 174, 177, 179, 182, 188 power relations 79, 82, 84–​6, 88 power-​knowledge 103, 105 practical curatorial work 93; see also curatorial Preziosi, Donald 1, 7–​8, 11 provenance 38, 95, 158–​9, 161–​3, 166, 168–​9, 218 psychoanalysis 14–​15 public: discussion 7, 24, 233; engagement 98, 141–​2; transit nodes 80–​1, 85 publics 9, 65–​8, 75–​6, 85, 87 Punin, Nikolai 224, 230, 234 Rakowitz, Michael 163–​5, 168 Recherché 100–​01, 103 Reflektion/​Reflexion. Unges stemmer 195 Renoir, Auguste 160 representation: art 229; colonial 76; cultural 8, 12; of fashion 57; historical 75, 174; of landscape 196; of the naked body 29; of the nude 25; of the past 173; of plantation life 194; politics of 103

research: academic 3, 97, 158, 188; activities 186; archaeological 105; archival 158; artistic 93, 100; biological 42; biomedical 134; collaboration 169; culture 98, 100; cultural 99; ethnographic 124; fields 2, 135, 192; findings 58; framework 148; group 122, 125, 133; gut-​brain-​bacteria 135; focus 2; institution 109; methods 58, 97, 99, 102; microbiome 135; multi-​ sited 79–​80, 83–​88, 90; museum 168; museum-​based 108, 117; platforms 148, 154; project 79, 109, 121, 122, 135, 186; processes 3, 93, 158; scientific 101, 135; team 101; see also curatorial; interdisciplinary; medical Research Network for Studies in the Curatorial 4 “research question” 148 research-​based exhibition; see exhibition Richardsons, Ruth 37 Rimini Protokoll 88 Rochlitz, Gustav 159–​61 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 227 Roelstraete, Dieter 213–​4 Rogoff, Irit 99 Rosenberg, Alfred 160 Rosenberg, Paul 158, 160, 162 Rosler, Martha 151 Rosner, Isodor 161 Rostock, Xenius 196 Royal College of Art, London 97 Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen 174, 192, 196, 199 Rozental, Lazar 225 Russian art 224, 226 Russian avant-​garde 224, 230, 233–​4 Ruthenbeck, Rainer 174, 211, 213–​218; see also Dokumentation Rainer Ruthenbeck Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, 122 Saïd, Edward 196 Saussure, Ferdinand de 17 Schimmelmann, Ernst Heinrich 199 Schmidt, Alfred 195 Scholten, Frederik von 194, 198 Scholten, Peter von 198–​9 Schüssler, Alexandra 109 science-​in-​process  136 science-​society 133, 138

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Index 245 Searle, Adrian 149–​50 Seattle Art Museum 160; semiotic production 67 Serov, Valentin 227 Shakespeare, William 12–​14 Sheikh, Simon 87, 97 Sheller, Mimi 83 Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements, 1945–​1994 182 Shurpin, Fyodor 184 Siegel, Katy 182 Simsek, Ozlem 26 Sisley 196 slide projection 214 Smith, Terry 179, 185, 218 social: activism 234; actors 79, 136; aesthetics 224; agendas 138; classes 225; conflict 9, 82; context 174, 196; history 38, 41, 45, 60, 186, 192–​3; interaction 98; media 82; media platforms 60; networks 84; positions 164, 232; problem 79, 84; realities 12, 227; sciences 83, 135; struggles 79, 84–​85, 88, 105; subversion 150; truths 7–​8, 11–​12, 237 sociocultural 138 Soviet: art 223–​4, 228–​9, 233; art museums 174, 223–​4, 234; proletariat 224; Union 174, 184, 224 Spectre: When Fashion Turns Back 56 State Archive, Rigsdagsgården, Copenhagen 195 State Russian Museum, Leningrad 230, 232 STEM museums 135–​6, 138, 141–​2 Stemmer fra kolonierne; see Voices from the Colonies Steyerl, Hito 213 Stoermer, E. F. 122 Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition 87 Storr, Robert 218 “strategic systems of representations” 65 strategies for managing time 14 strategy of reading 18 Strzemiński, Wladyslaw 167 Superflex 89 symbolic function 136–​7, 141 Szeemann, Harald 3, 217 Søby 120–​5, 127–​9 Tansey, Mark 177 Tate Modern 94, 148–​9, 182

Taylor, Lou 56, 62 Tea Time: The First Globalization 9, 65, 67, 72 Terezín Declaration of June 2009 159 Thek, Paul 216 Thomas, Nicholas 110 Thompson, Krista A. 192, 198 Thon, Caroline Hejn 94, 133 Tohi, Filipe 115 transdisciplinary: cocuration 133; collaboration 142; “experimental entanglement” 135; experimentation 134; process 142; see also interdisciplinarity Transit project 80, 84, 86, 89–​90 Transit: Mobility and Migration in the Age of Globalisation 9, 79–​80 Tretyakov Gallery 223–​4, 233–​4 Turkish: art 8, 25; art history 24; artist 25, 27–​8, 184; modernity 23–​4, 27, 29–​30; painting 22, 24 Tyson, George 199 Ufortalte Historier; see What Lies Unspoken United Kingdom 98 Universal Exhibition, Paris 1878 53 urban transit nodes 82, 90 Urry, John 82, 90 Üryan, Çıplak, Nü; see Bare, Naked, Nude –​A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting Utopian Bodies: Fashion Looks Forward 51, 58, 62 Venice Biennale 182 Vergo, Peter 66 Victoria & Albert Museum, London 51–​2, 56, 58 Villa Romana, Florence 174, 211, 213–​4 Visker, Rudi 103 visual: appeal 51; approach 57; chronicle 22; contextualization 52; culture 55, 57, 60, 173–​4, 192–​3, 201, 206–​07; explanation 194; language 62; marketing 201; rhetoric 8, 24; theorist 198 Voices from the Colonies 195 Voloshinov, Valentin 228, 231 Vreeland, Diana 52, 56 Vrolik Museum, Amsterdam 39–​40

246

246 Index WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 148 Wagner, Peter 180 Wallraf-​Richartz Museum  164 Warhol, Andy 149–​50 Warner, Michael 66 Washington Conference on Holocaust-​ Era Assets 159 Weiss, Rachel 148, 154 Welcome to the Anthropocene 122 Wellcome Collection, London 47 Westkunst. Zeitgenössiche Kunst zeit 1939 186 What Lies Unspoken 196

When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/​Venice 2013 216–​7 Whitney, New York 97 Wilde, Oscar 51 Willerslev, Rane 112 Wilmes, Ulrich 182 Witchger, Katian 90 World Goes Pop, The 94, 147–​54 Yamahata, Yosuke 183 Yeats, William Butler 17 Zeid, Princess Fahrelnissa 183