As Roger Buergel sets up the microphones, on the screen behind him, the still image of a painting hanging on a nondescript wall draws the audiences attention. It is an abstract painting, depicting a yellow circular shape resembling the sun or a kind of mandala with a white background in a paint-by-numbers style. The mystery is quickly solved. It is a photograph of a picture hanging on a wall in the luggage department of Sao Paulo international airport, taken by Buergel. His luggage is missing, and with it part of the material he had prepared for the talk, so he will have to improvise.
He starts by saying that the only curatorial method is indeed improvisation, and points out that one element has been missing from the previous talks and panels. There has been a debate around public spaces, politics and art, museums that are not stagnant and their staffs struggle to make them more dynamic. However, the word exhibition has been missing.
The art exhibition has a particular dynamic; it constitutes a transmission between the administrative apparatus not in its bureaucratic aspect but in its logic - something to be displayed and the audience. Here there is great emphasis on education. If you show something, it is important to work towards keeping it alive. The exhibition is a medium, and this idea must be expanded, because the exhibition often happens inside glass boxes and this is the logic of exhibitions that people are normally faced with. Art cannot be isolated; we must conceive of the exhibition as a way of articulating not only objects, but also the audience and the institutions.
Another picture comes up on the screen. It shows the fire exit of Copan, the modernist building designed by Oscar Niemeyer. An exhibition becomes important when it has a relationship with the place in which it is shown. This image captures the relationship we have with the universal idea of modernity. The Documenta must speak a universal language. Modernist artists have established a universal language through form and colour. Art is an anthropological element capable of bringing together different kinds of knowledge and places.
However, modernist artists have misinterpreted the modern Utopia, which resulted in the imposition of homogeneous standards. Today, when there is no longer a need for a set of standards, we must recover the idea of art works with a global reach. There is something quite disturbing about that, and something which can only be resolved if we create a forum encompassing local knowledge and the practices triggered by this knowledge.
Exhibitions such as Documenta are able to juxtapose people with different experiences and works from different places in a single location. Art can have local roots but it functions in a transformative way. There is too much information about each of the places from which an artwork emerges; the number of publications has increased, and too much is being mediated by this information. We have to think about arts ability to communicate with other kinds of art, with possible audiences who relate to art works without necessarily classifying them as knowledge. This way we could avoid identity rhetoric e.g., the Iranian artist and his images of women, the Australian and his photographs, the German painter. It is necessary to go beyond the domain of identities. The exhibition must animate space so the audience can experiment with the new implications of subjectivity. Modernity is over, and we now challenge the idea of a common ground for creation, though many contemporary artists have essayed a return to modernity in an archaeological way.
Other images come up on the screen: a set of photographs of Lorenzettis fresco from the 16th century in Siena called The good and the bad government, a projection of how the world at the time should be. A detail shows the allegory of justice ruling the citizens of the State from above. The images of groups of people show that power is spread through the social fabric; it is not centralised.
Another set of images depicts a group of young Moroccans standing by the entrance to Amsterdams town hall and watching an Islamic protest where an American flag has been burnt. There is a fragmented group standing between the town hall, which is closed, and the protest they do not belong to any side. Would that be the position of art? An important element here is the notion of bare life introduced by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, which shows the sovereigns (the State) power of stripping everything from an individual until there is almost nothing left but bare life, a body which is completely at ones disposal. Is there any connection between this precariousness of human life and the ability to overcome that through the way we live?
Other photographs show details of Tucumán Arde, a popular exhibition that took place in Rosário and Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1968. The group of artists who organised the show demonstrated that exhibitions can work as a medium, with a connection with the audience and a particular agenda. They sought to show life as the possibility to overcome the current situation. Tucumán is a deprived area in Argentina. It was an important producer of sugar in the 50s, and the rural area is formed by small properties. During the 60s, a modernisation project carried out by the authoritarian government of General Ongania (1966-1970) resulted in the closing down of sugar plants and the end of small properties. Artists got together with unions to effect a counter-propaganda of the governments official position.
Tucumán Arde had a specific strategy: first they contacted local leaders, researched and evaluated the current situation along with the people affected. Then they photographed the life in the countryside, the sugar fields and the derelict sugar plants. Finally, they set up an exhibition of the materials at the unions headquarters in Rosário and Buenos Aires. The authorities closed down the Buenos Aires show a few hours after the opening.
These artists carried out sociological research, collected documents and interviewed residents in order to provide the audience with counter-information about the governments project. They built relationships with people in the area so as to create a common ground from which these people could act, actively involving the audience. There is no dichotomy between the social sciences and art; sociology is not external to art. The exhibition showed that it is possible for art to bring people together and to spark discussions. The way in which the photographs and documents were displayed created spaces that corresponded to the everyday spaces inhabited by the sugar plant workers, with their narrow corridors and sugar sacks. The placement of a photograph in the exhibitions entrance showing a corridor built with sugar sacks is an example of what was termed the exhibitions phenomenological tension.
Buergel then showed some photographs of the first Documenta. The idea of organising the show, which opened in Kassel in 1955, was a reaction against the trauma of the war suffered by the German population as a consequence of the destruction of many cities and the revelation of the crimes committed by the State. The first picture shows the exhibitions entrance hall with portraits of renowned artists hanging from the walls, in an attempt to show them as common people and to show peoples faces something that was missing in the post-war everyday lives of the population. Some of the citys neighbourhoods, in ruins, were covered with flowers. There were approximately 130,000 visitors to the exhibition.
Other photographs show different aspects of the show. Some important avant-garde paintings were borrowed from large museums and placed on precarious walls covered with plastic and cardboard, which interfered with the viewers perception of the works. The purpose of placing art works over cheap materials and using large pieces of black plastic to separate the rooms was to suggest an idea of reconstruction. The way the works were displayed did not lead to a particular reading. The main point of the exhibition design was the relationship it established with the audience in that context. We must acknowledge this sort of involvement with the subjective in order to build something. There will always be a gap between art and its audience, but exhibitions should never impose a particular way of seeing the world.
Buergel shows another photograph of two boys sitting on a bench facing the camera; both have their faces covered with their jumpers. They are second-generation migrants living in Austria. They dont want to be seen because of the way they have always been represented in the past. The photographer avoided the trap of representing children as victims or producing a triumphant image. He merely supported the boys gesture of protest, a gesture that could be performed by any teenager in this kind of situation. As art audiences we should extend this gesture beyond this photograph.
The last image shown in the talk is a picture of two white girls in princess costumes looking at the camera. They need an affirmative gaze; they need the photograph to confirm their own existence. One of them is Buergels daughter. There is no aesthetic experience without subjectivity. Art also looks at itself. The exhibition is a medium that moves the subject.
Debate:
Audience:
- You have shown an audience affected by the war, an audience that is perhaps less sophisticated than audiences today. But I think that what still counts is the quality of the art shown there, even if its among cheap materials. I live in Argentina and I remember the Tucumán Arde. The artists wanted to have political participation and were repressed by the dictatorship. Now, people are beginning to know about that. But art historians havent realised that the dictatorship led to the idea of violent combat, which resulted in 30,000 deaths.
- You made some very pertinent remarks about exhibitions, not only those in museums. What characterises a museum-based and a non-museum-based exhibition?
- How much information should be given to the audiences? For example, should the diagram in the Tucumán Arde show, which is in Spanish, be translated to make it accessible to other audiences?
Roger Buergel
In relation to the last question, it is not necessary to show everything, but to create a space of resonance with what the public can see, taking into account the psychic aspect of the diagram you mentioned. It would be important to give information by showing how this information is formatted and to try to get something from this specific formatting. This motivates the audience to enter into this universe. Each artwork, each piece must create an impression. People will then identify themselves with this production and will look for more information independently.
Concerning museum-based exhibitions, I believe that museums should care for their collections and only promote shows that are somehow related to their own collections and heritage. This requires research and education. This is the difference an exhibition in a museum that does not relate to its collection is something very weak.
(by Beatriz Scigliano Carneiro)
Translation: hì-fen translation solutions
Proofreading: Jim Baxter
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