Overture

by Tara McDowell

“We have grown very poor in threshold experiences,” Walter Benjamin laments in Convolute O of The Arcades Project, his massive, labyrinthine textual montage of the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcades.1 For Benjamin these spaces—already considered out of date, decrepit, and old-fashioned from his vantage point of the 1930s—functioned as definitive experiential thresholds. They were at once private and public, interior and exterior, sites for production and consumption, voyeurs and exhibitionists alike. Such were the conditions of modernity.

This issue of The Exhibitionist enacts something like a threshold experience, concerned as it is with the issue of art’s publics, a concern that manifests itself throughout as a tension among arguments about the efficacy of the exhibition format. On the one hand, the exhibition can be a site for “a new topography of critical curatorial methodologies, a resonant site of discursive recontextualizations,” to quote Okwui Enwezor, who writes in the section attitude on the groundbreaking exhibitions of Susan Vogel, founding director of the Museum for African Art in New York. On the other hand, when constituted within the walls of a museum or gallery, the exhibition can be seen as profoundly delimiting our experience of art. “A looming paradox facing museums,” Nato Thompson writes, “is that the discursive framing of an art museum limits the capacity of its art to be effective.” “Art in Public Space” is the topic chosen for typologies, and the three authors—Thompson along with Joshua Decter and Mary Jane Jacob—offer rigorous and at times polemical thinking on this subject, reanimating it as a site of urgency, potential, and problematics.

In some respects this debate as to where art appears, and for whom, is old hat. Beginning in the 1960s certain artists took up the strictures of the art world as a central concern, and they produced work that was, as Sven Lütticken has observed, “capable of probing the structural conditions for the publicness of art.” Although museums, galleries, and art publications function to make art public, these spaces for art, Lütticken contends, are focused, concentrated, as opposed to the “diffuse nature of urban public space.”2 In some ways the current reframing of the issue of art’s publics is the result of the professionalization of the curatorial role—something to which this publication is keenly attuned, and which we aim to acknowledge but also to interrogate—and the paradoxical reskilling of art through the introduction of all manner of non-art activities and roles an artist might occupy. Because of these developments, and due to the privileged yet fraught value placed upon information and its dissemination in contemporary life, art’s publics are now constituted through other avenues: educational events, artistic and curatorial residencies, publications, talks, films, and performances. The para-curatorial shifts to the center, displacing the hallowed space of the exhibition.

And yet, several of the essays in this issue prove the degree to which the binary conception of exhibition space as focused, and public space as diffuse, can be unsettled by innovative curatorial and artistic strategies that take place within four walls. In back in the day, Constance Lewallen recovers the forward-looking impulses of The Eighties, organized by Brenda Richardson and Susan Rannells for the Berkeley Art Museum in 1970. Peter Eleey reflects on his unorthodox, process-based approach to Conceptual art in his 2009 exhibition The Quick and the Dead at the Walker Art Center. Another example examined in this issue by Matthew Drutt and nodded to in the previous issue by Chus Martínez is that of Pontus Hultén, the legendary curator and museum director who, apropos of the discussion about art’s publics undertaken in these pages, once explained, “A museum director’s first task is to create a public—not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution.”

The cover of this issue of The Exhibitionist reproduces a view of SHE—A Cathedral, the 1966 collaborative installation by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt, and Hultén himself that unapologetically hijacked the Moderna Museet, where Hultén was then director. Daniel Birnbaum (recently named director of the Moderna Museet) describes the work as “a gigantic, lurid cathedral in the form of a supine woman that viewers could walk into, the entry being between her legs. Inside, visitors found an aquarium full of goldfish, a love seat for couples, a bar, a small cinema showing a Greta Garbo movie, a playground with a slide, and many other surprises. Green and red lights controlled the traffic through the vaginal entrance.”4 As Benjamin remarked, to return to the opening gambit of this text, “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle [threshold] is a zone.”5 Not only did the visitor’s encounter with SHE—A Cathedral involve crossing a threshold and entering the sculpture (and here we might recall that Benjamin’s words appear within the context of a discussion about erotics, lovers, and prostitution), but that project also rejected the boundary between artworks and “related programming.”

Such an audacious endeavor feels light years away from our current moment, for salutary and desultory reasons alike, but the provocation to rethink and expand notions of what an exhibition might be remains productive. Such rethinking and expansion is the core of the three exhibitions addressed in curators’ favorites. Matthew Drutt writes of the impact of The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, Hultén’s landmark 1968 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Juan A. Gaitan examines the “double refusal” of narrative and the instrumentalization of culture enacted by Mirror’s Edge, organized by Okwui Enwezor for the BildMuseet in Umea, Sweden, and seen by Gaitan at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2000. And Aurélie Voltz discusses Jean-Luc Moulène’s rethinking of the Louvre’s collection in his 2005 show Le Monde, le Louvre.

Finally, in the spirit of testing boundaries, assessments considers Douglas Eklund’s efforts to prize open a calcified episode of recent art with The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Four writers—Eva Díaz, Jenelle Porter, Jane Simon, and Robert Storr—take the opportunity provided by Eklund’s curatorial undertaking to revisit, at times from unexpected angles, the Pictures moment, legacy, and mythology. The historicizing and revisionist impulses that work upon the near-contemporary (or the recently historical) show the degree to which art’s publics change over time and are rarely, if ever, unanimous.