"On Being an Exhibition" at Artists Space

As the elevator door opens , what should have been Artists Space is disrupted by a jerry-rigged replica of the elevator interior you thought you were about to leave. In this way, BGL’s Elevator (2007) makes visible the otherwise inconspicuous threshold of the gallery. Martin Heidegger has written about such inconspicuous technologies as holding themselves in, severed from our experience of them by a distancing of their significance from us.* Holding us in, Elevator opens out the threshold of the gallery space, by reeling it in from remoteness.

The space of “On being an Exhibition” has the quality of one thing being remote from another, consisting for the most part of small and quiet works that address it circumspectively from the edges. Germaine Koh’s Fair-weather forces (sun: light) (2005) is an electrical box, complete with overpainted wiring extending across the walls. Small signals register data gathered from the windowsill, and the artificial lighting of the gallery is calibrated to outdoor light. Lighting's purpose as a gallery fixture - to shed light upon a thing with idealized consistency - has been effectively withdrawn. This withdrawal makes the relations of “gallery lighting” visible and open to language.

Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Project [Artists Space] (2007) is the only object to foray into the open space of the room. But it is an everyday object on the floor as though left there in negligence, a digital projector resting on a stack of magazines. Even so, the double take that occurs when one realizes it’s hand carved of wood and painted is almost unnecessary given the significance of the space it occupies as designated for art.

Heidegger writes that we lose our glasses when they’re sitting on our nose because such proximity is not what characterizes the space of our vision. But their meaning for us is found when we’ve lost them, and Bakker’s clunky handmade replica - a misplaced and dysfunctional tool - makes visible the increasing practice of exhibition by committee with the web as its resource. Plugged into the floor and “projected’ against the wall, Untitled Project [Artists Space] exhibits the whims and convictions of a jury.

“On Being an Exhibition” does a nice enough job of opening out what curator Joseph del Pesco refers to as the “stable signifiers” of the gallery - “lighting tracks, white walls, a front desk, a gallery attendant, etc.”. The curator, however, is not such a stable signifier and an exhibition catalog is the form of the curator’s expression. The catalog here consists of a series of quotations by other writers, chosen by the artists and arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name. While Heidegger is certainly coursing through this show, there are many other voices as well - here is Laurel Woodcock's choice, Michel de Certeau:

"Quotation, then, is the ultimate weapon for making one believe. Because it plays what the other is assumed to believe, it is the means by which "reality" is instituted." *

Del Pesco is content to exhibit himself as the administrator who collates and presents a series of quotations. There is nothing to distinguish between the “stable signifiers” in Artists Space and what might be in a commercial gallery, including the curator himself. This is its own form of aesthetic withdrawal, and while I am sympathetic to this exhibition I wonder how, at a time when the word "curator" is perceived to be outdated, and at the same time (much like painting in the eighties) there seem to be more curators than ever, it will play out in the end. Does a curator merely "present," and what does it mean to do this? In revealing the curator as an administrator who presents, is "the curator" reeled in from remoteness, or being instantiated as distance? And coming from Artists Space, what is at stake in this?

* Martin Heidegger, “The Worldhood of the World,” in Being and Time, Macquarrie and Robinson, trans., NY: Harper and Row, c. 1962, pp. 63-148.
* De Certeau, "The Jabbering of Social Life," in Marshall Blonsky, On Signs, Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 1985, as cited in "On Being an Exhibition", Joseph del Pesco, editor, Artists Space, 2007.
Images: Laurel Woodcock, (Untitled) Neon Quote (2005); Conrad Bakker, Untitled Project [Artists Space] (2007) - Courtesy of Artists Space, www.artistsspace.org.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth

30/40: Benjamin Buchloh on Marian Goodman*

Stefan Stux's homepage opens with a self portrait of the gallerist and the words, “My interest lies in an engagement with art that transforms from avant garde to art history as I watch it happen.” Heavy breathing rides over a drum beat and an animated wand conjures the artists in his gallery into visibility, as though their appearance were generated from his very body. But Stux’s gallery is one of many galleries feeding in the glut. Imagine Fabian Marcaccio’s sci-fi silicone brushstrokes yawning wide at the frenzy - the urgency of there being something at stake suddenly seems lost in the din. Still, I want to imagine that galleries can have a sense of strong public art historical value, and in posing somewhere between sincerity and parody Stux reminds us that this indeed remains the ambition.

It was with some eagerness, then, that we visited Benjamin Buchloh’s curation of the Marian Goodman Gallery - it is the art historian’s job to situate cultural value as historical value. In the case of Marian Goodman and Buchloh, it is fait-accompli, as Buchloh has already written extensively about several of the artists that she carries. In fact, in a gesture not dissimilar from Stux’s above, this summer at MoMA there hung a painting by Gerhard Richter, where the painter and Buchloh, his critical champion, pose side by side before the heavy wooden doors of a church.

Buchloh is a master of describing an artist’s practice as at the cusp between one thing and another, andas the disproving of both. Goodman’s inaugural exhibition of Marcel Broodthaers is made to count in this way . Buchloh explains that Marian Goodman introduces Broodthaers to the American scene at the moment that Conceptual Art is reaching Modernism’s climax. At this climax, however, Conceptualism shed off Modernism's poetry, philosophy, historical narrative, and political representation. In the face of this, Broodthaers was acting against Modernism’s “blind aspiration” as well as Conceptualism’s “affirmative indifference towards an uncontested present.”

Elsewhere in Buchloh’s writing, Broodthaers’ work is described as an intervention of Conceptualism’s “aesthetic of administration” - the turning of pages of xerox books, or reading of wall texts as instructions, or self-referential description. In this context Broodthaers named himself the director of a museum and built the “Department of Eagles,” a manic and inexhaustible collection of all visual representations of the eagle throughout time as a symbol of ideal values, that migrates from context to context, manifesting differently in each. From Dusseldorf, Broodthaers’ eagle was a symbol of fascism, speaking from within the vehicle of conceptualism’s aesthetic of administration and simultaneously as a response to the neutralized idealist form of Minimalism’s cube.*

In the Goodman catalog, Buchloh explains one can’t deny that national cultural origins have generated the work that is accepted as international in the contemporary art scene. But how does the identity of a gallery play out in this scene? Further, how is an art historian so committed to dialectics going to describe the work of forty artists exhibited in one gallery over the course of thirty years as the expression of a gallerist? In post-historical form, that is, without “this happened and that happened,” Buchloh describes three separate epistemological force fields that give some consistency to Goodman’s discernment over the past three decades.

The first begins with Marcel Broodthaers as he is described above - the force field of those artists whose critical approach to history undoes the subject of that history. This would include not only Broodthaers but Giovanni Anselmo, Anri Sala, and Yang Fudong, and at first this is the most clearly legible category of all, depending as it does upon a cultural historical construct for its legibility.

The second epistemological field is that of chance in an administered world, and it is introduced by Sol Lewitt and Gerhard Richter. As different as their work appears, these artists are both interested in chance as well as “internalizing the very principles of technological rationality and serial production.” Buchloh describes this as a post-Cageian and anti-auratic aesthetics. John Cage is famous for deciding upon all aesthetic and personal choices in his life upon throwing the I’Ching, remaining bound to a model of self-determination as the man who throws the coin. Lewitt’s serial logic and Richter’s encyclopedic disidentification throw willfully capricious randomness into a more mechanized register. Rineke Dijkstra’s photography suddenly appears in this epistemolgical field.

The third epistemological field is that of a psychoanalytic subjectivity embedded in the phenomenological immersion of experience, where desire opens out the space of “the real” to its elisions and misrecognitions. Dan Graham’s mirrors are in the foreground here, but I see Steve McQueen’s “Five Easy pieces” as well.

Buchloh admits that there is a considerable degree of folly in his attempt to describe the singularity of one gallerist’s achievement in relation to three force fields. But the attempt has been made, and while one would be hard pressed to find a comfortable nexus for every single work in this large, two-part exhibition, there is a good deal of holding power in this articulation, and the descriptions Buchloh provides of individual artist’s projects are all the richer for them. A good art historian will always help you to see the work of art more clearly, and without any magic wands that has certainly happened here.

* This is a review of the catalog essays by Benjamin Buchloh, “Marian Goodman: Artists and Photographs,” and “40 Artists” in 30/40: A Selection of Forty Artists from Thirty Years at Marian Goodman Gallery, edited and written by Benjamin Buchloh, Marian Goodman Gallery, c. 2007.
* See Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” in October, V. 75 (Winter 1996) pp.60-82.

Images:Rineke Dijkstra, The Buzz Club, Liverpool, England/Mysterworld, Zaandam, Netherlands, 1996-7. Double projection, 35mm film with sound, transferred to video or DVD; Marcel Broodthaers, Tapis de Sable, 1974, Palm tree, sand, painted cloth, 88 5/8x70 7/8x27 1/2". Both courtesy of Marian Goodman.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth