Overture

by Jens Hoffmann

Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, À bout de souffle (Breathless), released in March of 1960, was more than a critical and commercial success; it was the beginning of what became known as the Nouvelle Vague, a radical and unique movement in which cinema profoundly challenged its own conventions. As Godard once put it: “We stormed into cinema like a bunch of cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV.”

Among the primary characteristics of the Nouvelle Vague was a highly polemical and rhetorical style, a result of the directors’ interest in contemporary literature and film criticism. Almost all of the major protagonists of the movement, including François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Godard, served as editors of the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Beyond transforming the conventions of cinema, the Nouvelle Vague directors established film as the medium of the moment, and themselves as the most avant-garde contemporary group working in that medium.

The Exhibitionist takes Cahiers du Cinéma as a starting point, a source of inspiration. Our admiration for the Nouvelle Vague directors is not only about the films they actually made (which succeeded to varying degrees in actually breaking with tradition) but also about their commitment to talking about film in their own language, to working in their own style, to avoid succumbing to the forces of convention, and to their championing of intellectualism and criticality. Above all The Exhibitionist follows their example in embracing the theory of the author. To those (including those curators) who regard exhibition making as a somehow outdated way to present art, we insist otherwise. The exhibition, I reiterate, is the medium of today, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of its potential.

The exhibition, as a creative medium, establishes and cultivates a specific nexus between individuals and objects. The curator is the author of this nexus, selecting and installing the artworks, which as a group offer a larger argument than any one work could make by itself. In other words, the exhibition mirrors the subjectivity of the individual curator, just as each artwork mirrors the subjectivity of the artist who made it, and the Nouvelle Vague films mirrored the subjectivity of their directors.

The cover of this issue, depicting Michelangelo’s iconic sculpture of David, speaks about the struggle against a seemingly impossible challenge. Its deployment here is, I admit, deliberately a bit Duchampian and tongue-in-cheek, but its symbolism is meant seriously. Unlike so many artists who depicted David with Goliath’s head in his hand, Michelangelo chose to show him in the moment just before the fight. His face is tense, fierce, his eyebrows furrowed, yet his body seems relaxed. The artist has captured a particular and decisive moment in which strength and determination balance with sophistication and elegance—all characteristics that The Exhibitionist would like to claim for itself. In our case the struggle is to establish exhibition making as a cultural praxis with its own discourse, to claim curating as creative authorship, to overcome the suspicion and even hostility with which it is sometimes viewed, and to break through the conventions of the medium.

There are, of course, fundamental differences between filmmaking and exhibition making. The exhibition assumes an aesthetic experience that is individual, happening in the mind of the viewer, whereas cinema assumes a communal experience of reception. This premise of the individual art viewer/consumer complements the Western emphasis on the individual. As the art historian and curator Dorothea von Hantelmann recently pointed out, the reason for the success and social significance of the exhibition might not be the art it presents, but rather “the fact that it ritually establishes and enacts an important set of values that were and still are fundamental to Western societies.” The German sociologist Gerhard Schulze argues that one identifying characteristic of Western societies is that individuals make choices not out of necessity or purposefulness, but according to aesthetic preferences. The curator selecting works for an exhibition is also making individual aesthetic choices, which offers perhaps a further argument for curating being the profession of the moment. However, to reduce curating merely to the act of selection, ignoring issues of installation, for instance, or dramaturgy, is like reducing filmmaking to capturing images on celluloid and forgetting about the framing or editing.

One of the most successful exhibitions of the past year, if not the past decade, was Massimiliano Gioni’s 8th Gwangju Biennial, entitled 10000 Lives. It is discussed in depth in the Assesments section of this issue by Tobias Berger, Doryun Chong, Carol Lu, and Stéphanie Moisdon. Never before have I seen an exhibition on such a vast scale that was so precisely selected and installed, yet simultaneously so full of unexpected juxtapositions and surprising choices. It thoroughly reflected the curator’s clear and vigorous subjectivity. While Gioni has always (perhaps naively) dismissed the idea of the curator as author, his biennial, like many of his other exhibitions, clearly operated in an authorial mode.

The Exhibitionist generally focuses on the discussion of group exhibitions, although we are also interested in other formats, and in the Typologie section of this issue Jessica Morgan, Elisabeth Sussman, and the directors of the gallery Triple Candie all discuss the concept of the retrospective solo show. In Rear mirror, Kathrin Rhomberg talks about her 6th Berlin Biennial, Was draussen wartet (What Is Waiting Out There, 2010) and Jane Alison reflects on The Surreal House (2010). Curators’ favorites features three very different curators on three equally diverse exhibitions: What, How & for Whom/WHW (a Zagreb-based curatorial collective) discusses Innovations in Croatian Art in the 1970s (1982), Victoria Noorthoorn (an independent curator from Buenos Aires) talk about Chambres d’Amis (1986), and Apsara DiQuinzio (a museum curator based in San Francisco) looks at Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 (2001). Attitudes, a section reserved for an opinion piece by one of our editorial board members, features Maria Lind, former director of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, who comes to terms with the highly controversial topic of curatorial education, with rather unexpected results. Finally, Back in the day, this time authored by Lars Bang Larsen, focuses on the unusual (especially for its time) exhibition dedicated to the French singer Johnny Hallyday that took place in 1979 at the CAPC in Bordeaux, France.