2 | Aerall

As I write from Chicago in December cJc, many of my fellow North Americans are busy
debating the recent censorship of David Wojnarowiczs video A Fire in My Belly (Jp8o
8). A few weeks ago, a religious group and conservative politicians roiled the waters
by claiming that a few brief seconds of Wojnarowiczs dark montage depicting ants
crawling across a crucix constitute anti-Christian hate speech. Te work was pulled
from the National Portrait Gallerys exhibition Hide /Seek, a comprehensive and
well-received exploration of queer portraiture. Tis has in turn generated intense debate
about an interlocked set of topics, including the social roles of art, artists and cultural
institutions; the health of US constitutional protections on free speech and separation
of church and state; and the degree to which queer identity has been embraced as a fact
of North American experience. And it has prompted art spaces and museums across the
country to quickly organise screenings and discussions based on the belief that this work
of art deserves to be experienced in full and discussed in depth, rather than sound-bit into
a tool for ideological polemics.
1

Now, this debate may remain a localised one that wont deeply touch the consciousness
of those Aerall readers not living in the United States. Even for readers currently
enmeshed in the conversation, it seems likely that this set of events will have faded from
collective consciousness by the time this issue of the journal is printed as distant a
memory as the snow that now falls outside my window. But the urgency generated around
these questions seems useful to hold in mind as a potential frame for this issue of Aerall,
resonating with several of the specic essays that follow, while also offering a broader
reminder of Aeralls aims as a journal.
Afterall is never organised around one specic topic; rather, each issue of the
journal offers a compendium of essays that examine carefully selected clusters of artists,
exhibitions and ideas that seem especially relevant at the time of discussion. Tese essays
are (almost always) grounded by a primary consideration of the works of art themselves
and strive (without fail) to situate art within the world, history and social contexts.
And they (ofen) foster text-to-text interplay, with broad themes recurring and amplifying
across one issue of the journal.
Several of the essays in this issue of Aerall address the range of both repressive
and emancipatory possibilities that might be articulated within pedagogically oriented
formulations of artistic and institutional practice. Tis is particularly true of Carmen
Mrschs interrogation of the challenges and potential at stake in crafing a critically
engaged role for museum/gallery education and Roger M. Buergels reassessment
of Lina Bo Bardis radically democratic approach to museum and exhibition design,
while Andrew Stefan Weiner explores political rhetoric in his meditation on recent
performance and video works that problematise considerations of evidence and event.
Herman Asselberghs considers Jean-Luc Godards changing relationship to didacticism,
as illustrated by his new work, Film Socialisme (cJc).
Tese loose thematic concerns apply to varied degrees to the three artists featured in
this issue. Group Materials generous, activist and deeply pedagogical work is especially
relevant to this line of thought. Catherine Sullivans lmic and performative projects are
produced through collaborative processes and engage with issues of labour and economics;
in these works the socially engaged strata of content emerges more through peripheral
vision than direct speech. And Isidoro Valcrcel Medina, the third artist addressed in this
issue, likewise touches on political processes and pedagogical strategies within his subtle
Foreword
Stephanie Smith
1 At my home institution, the University of Chicagos Smart Museum of Art, we have chosen to host
a month-long series of screenings and a one-night discussion.
Foreword | 3
materialist work. By sketching out some of these connections and lacks of connection
I dont want to overdetermine any readings of these artists works but simply to draw
out a few threads that were on the minds of the editorial team as we assembled this issue.
Issue 26 of Aerall is the rst that I had a hand in creating, having joined the
publication in spring cJc as a contributing editor. My participation grew out of Aerall s
evolving relationship with the University of Chicago. Tis relationship is currently in the
pragmatic form of distribution via the University of Chicago Press, but we hope that it
will continue to grow into a full research partnership. Such a partnership has the potential
to become one of the pillars of the universitys growing strengths in contemporary art,
from its faculty of extraordinary art historians and artists to the Renaissance Societys
long history of sharp-eyed excellence and the past decade of experimental projects at
the Smart Museum. Aerall s mission resonates especially strongly with the work of
the Open Practice Committee an intimate, loosely structured group of scholars, artists
and curators who are invested in creating and linking rich opportunities to experience
and discuss contemporary art. OPC is growing into a robust platform for critical debate,
experimental programming and the production of knowledge around and through
contemporary art. It could become a strongly collaborative partner for Aerall, completing
a dynamic framework for the creation, study, display and discussion of contemporary
art at Chicago.
And so to begin to link back to the beginning: I am now one of two North Americans
in the active editorial group (along with London-based Managing Editor Melissa Gronlund).
While I would never attempt to play Te Voice of America within editorial conversations,
I do seek out connections between my experience on the ground here and issues we seek
to address in the journal. And right now Im depressed by the return of the repressed in
the form of the inammatory commentary that has circled around the Wojnarowicz issue.
Te rhetoric on both sides recalls the polarising, chilling impact of the culture wars that
plagued our country and decimated public spending for the visual arts twenty years ago.
But Ive also found it inspiring to follow the current debates while working on this
foreword. In part thats because the Wojnarowicz debate reminds me of the larger context
of Group Materials participation in the vibrantly oppositional art worlds of New York in
the Jp8cs scenes worth careful re-examination now for the impact and salience of the
issues artists tackled, the aesthetic strategies they deployed and the reception they received
then and over time. As one point of entry, my old copy of Democracy: A Project by Group
Material (Jppc) includes several brief but terric texts by William Olander, the late curator
who commissioned a pivotal project by the AIDS activist group ACT UP for the New
Museums front window. Setting the project within a larger context of historical works
of art created in part to serve political aims, Olander wrote:
e point is a simple one: not all works of art are as disinterested as others,
and some of the greatest have been created in the midst, or as a result of a crisis.
Many of us believe we are in the midst of a crisis today. Let the record show that
there are many in the community of art and artists who chose not to be silent in
the s.
2


Both the reality and the perception of crisis are, of course, quite different here and now,
but its been heartening to witness and participate in the strong counter-show of support
from press and institutions and individuals who are speaking out in response to the cynical
(mis)use of art in ways that mobilise fear and bigotry.
And beyond the exigencies of the moment, it is useful to be reminded to step back,
breathe and seek a wider perspective. Tats exactly what Aerall can offer as here in
an unexpectedly timely consideration of Group Materials work. In those and the other
texts included in this issue, we hope you will nd nuanced, rigorous thinking about the
many ways that art matters, and useful assessments of the tangles that bind aesthetic
creation, dissemination and reception within specic social contexts and political realities.
2 William Olander, The Window on Broadway by ACT UP, Democracy: A Project by Group Material
(exh. cat.), New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1990, p.278.
4 | Aerall
Bro trafo.K,
So, what does
this have to do
with me, anyway?',
Transnational
Perceptions of the
History of National
Socialism and the
Holocaust, Vienna
200911, funded
by the Sparkling
Science' programme
of the Austrian
Federal Ministry for
Science and Research.
Courtesy Bro trafo.K
Contexts: Gallery Education | 5
[G]allery education, as it has developed since the mid-1p;os, has been both
a distinct and overlapping artistic strategy which is integrally connected to radical
art practices linked to values aired and explored in the liberation movements of
the 1poos and ;os, and particularly the womens movement. It is an individual
strategy among many (including, for instance, small-scale exhibition, small press
and small magazine publishing, alternative libraries and archives) to shi] art
from a monolithic and narcissistic position into a dialogic, open and pluralist
set of tendencies that renegotiate issues of representation, institutional critique
and inter-disciplinarity.
1

Tis is how Felicity Allen, head of the Learning department at Tate Britain until recently,
began an article in cc8 titled Situating Gallery Education, in which she undertook to
contextualise this eld of practice in England with regard to both history and feminism.
Tis was one of the rst attempts to theorise
and historicise gallery education in this
way. Gallery education is located also
and especially in conjunction with the
educational or pedagogical turn in
curating at the edges of the art eld and
of the attention of those writing within
it. Stating this does not necessarily mean
lamenting the situation: operating at
the edges and developing a semi-visible
practice has special potentials and
qualities.
2
Tis article contains speculations of its own about the functions of gallery
education for the institutions in which it takes place, and about the concepts of pedagogy
and learning that are inscribed in these functions.
3
It also speculates about the pedagogical
functions of the absence of educators (who are generally female) and of the gallery
education that does not take place in institutions that regard themselves as institutions
of critique in Andrea Frasers sense.
4

Alliances for Unlearning:
On the Possibility of Future
Collaborations Between Gallery
Education and Institutions
of Critique
Carmen Mrsch
Facing the omission of gallery education
from recent discussions of pedagogy,
Carmen Mrsch presents critical gallery
education as an alternative to the bind
between emancipation through the will
to educate and emancipation through the
presumptive equality of all subjects.
1 Felicity Allen, Situating Gallery Education, Tate Encounters [E]dition 2: Spectatorship,
Subjectivity and the National Collection of British Art (ed. David Dibosa), February 2008. Available
at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/tate-encounters/edition-2/
(last accessed on 18 October 2010).
2 Visibility means not only improved opportunities for agency and articulation, but also an increase
in control and regulation. See the allusion in F. Allen, Situating Gallery Education, op. cit.;
Veronica Sekules, The Edge Is Not the Margin, in Access all Areas, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern
Art, 2010, pp.23553; and Carmen Mrsch, Kunstcoop: Kunstvermittlung als kritische Praxis,
in Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried Pauleit (ed.), Kunst Museum Kontexte: Perspektiven der Kunst-
und Kulturvermittlung, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006, pp.17794.
3 I use the term function not in a determinist, functionalist sense, but rather based on the concept
of the author function as introduced by Michel Foucault: as a historically evolved, non-intentional
occurrence, which is still structured by power relations and domination, and which is involved in
producing the mechanisms of order and exclusion, by which it is itself conditioned. See M. Foucault,
What Is an Author? (1969), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F.
Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.11338. I prefer function
rather than effect, in order to leave no doubt that the use, the concrete arrangement and the dispensing
of gallery education along with the associated consequences does not necessarily involve individually
intended effects, but nevertheless those that are based on active actions guided by certain interests.
These effects can be analysed in terms of which interests are respectively dominant at a certain time
and in a certain context and which narratives are hegemonic.
4 Its not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. Its a question of what
kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalise, what forms of practice we reward,
and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalised, embodied, and
performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all,
of ourselves. Andrea Fraser, From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique, Artforum,
vol.44, no.1, September 2005, pp.27883.
6 | Aerall
Allens article was published in the second edition of the e-journal Tate Encounters
[E]ditions. Tis publication accompanies the research project Tate Encounters: Britishness
and Visual Culture that Tate Britain conducted from cc to cJc in cooperation with
the London South Bank University and Chelsea College of Art & Design. In this project
a research group composed of academics, museum staf and undergraduate students with
various ties to immigration investigated how Britishness is produced through the displays
of the museum.
5
Te data and intermediate results made available on the projects website
show that during its course the museums Cultural Diversity Policy, among other things,
was radically called into question, and this implied the need for changes in the educative
and curatorial work of Tate Britain. Tate Encounters is informed by insights from
decades of feminist and critical museology, and by attempts to develop ideas of institutional
practice accordingly.
6
In their engagement with the displays and the staf of Tate Britain,
for instance, the students developed their own visual and verbal approaches, which they
linked through the production of ethnographic videos to other contexts specically
relevant to them. Tese co-researcher productions were in turn associated with a series
of interviews with various experts on topics such as education practice within the museum;
the status of digital media in museum practice and culture; the racialisation of cultural
policy and the role of museums in social regeneration; and narratives of British visual
culture that could be accessed through curatorship.
7
Te project sought to dissolve the
hierarchies between researchers and the researched, and between teachers and students,
in favour of a transversal alliance, but without trivialising the power relations and
hierarchies of the setting. Indeed, in this attempt to conduct visitor research as research
in cooperation with visitors, the project is highly self-reective and meticulous in its
treatment. Gallery educators in the German-speaking world have conducted similar
projects as a research component of their work as a critical practice.
8
Twenty freelance
and precariously employed gallery educators worked as a team at documenta J (cc),
for example, to carry out analyses aimed at changing the practice and conditions of gallery
education into forms of militant research that is, as performance and intervention.
9

My own involvement in the documenta project consisted of leading and supervising
a team-based research process, and resulted in the thesis that gallery education, depending
on how it is organised, fulls various institutional functions:
10
an armative function,
when it conveys information about art institutions and what they produce to an initiated
and already interested audience as smoothly as possible, and a reproductive function
to the extent that it endeavours to bring in children, young people and others uninitiated
to these institutions and thus ensure the continuation of their audiences. It can also assume
a critical deconstructive function when it joins together with the participants to question,
disclose and work on what is taken for granted in art and its institutions, and to develop
knowledge that enables them to form their own judgements and become aware of
their own position and its conditions. Finally, gallery education can sometimes have a
5 There were two conditions for participating in the research project: the undergraduate students had
to come from a family that had migrated to England (from where was irrelevant) and in which they
were the first to attend a university. See http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/
tate-encounters/ (last accessed on 18 October 2010).
6 This project will be published as: Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh (ed.), Post Critical
Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
7 The extensive output of visual productions and research papers is accessible in its entirety at:
http://process.tateencounters.org/ (last accessed on 13 November 2010).
8 Current examples of this would be the project Doing Kinship with Pictures and Objects: A Laboratory
for Public and Private Practices of Art (200912) at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art,
where the research team includes the two gallery educators Andrea Hubin and Karin Schneider;
see A. Hubin and K. Schneider, Doing Research with Anthropologists, Designers, Mediators and a
Museum: A Project on, for and with Families in Vienna, Engage Magazine, issue 25 (Family Learning),
Spring 2010, pp.3140. There are also the research and education projects of trafo.K, the Viennese
agency for cultural education described in Nora Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education
Learn from Its Political Traditions?, e-flux journal, issue 14, March 2010. Available at
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/125 (last accessed on 29 October 2010).
9 For a contextualisation of this project, see Janna Graham, Spanners in the Spectacle: Radical
Research at the Front Lines, Fuse Magazine, April 2010, n.p. Also available at http://www.faqs.org/
periodicals/201004/2010214291.html (last accessed on 13 November 2010). On the concept of militant
research, see Marta Malo de Molina, Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-inquiry, Co-research,
Consciousness-raising (ed. Notas Rojas Collective Chapel Hill, trans. Maribel Casas-Corts and
Sebastian Cobarrubias), February 2006, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en
(last accessed on 29 October 2010).
10 For more detail on this and for an explanation of gallery education as critical practice, see C. Mrsch,
At a Crossroads of Four Discourses: documenta 12 Gallery Education in Between Affirmation,
Reproduction, Deconstruction and Transformation, in C. Mrsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education
#2: Between Critical Practice and Visitor Service, Berlin and Zrich: diaphanes, 2010, pp.931.
Contexts: Gallery Education | 7
transformative efect, in the sense of changing society and institutions, if it does not
content itself with critical questioning, but rather seeks to inuence what it conveys
for example, by shifing the institution in the direction of more justice and less discursive
and structural violence.
Tese four functions are not to be imagined hierarchically or as strictly chronological
in the sense of arising from sequential stages of development. In gallery education
practice there are usually several of these functions active at the same time. A deconstruc-
tive or transformative gallery education, for instance, can hardly be imagined without
some afrmative and reproductive aspects. At the same time, the friction between gallery
education and its host institution increases the more the critical functions come into play.
Te various functions are additionally afliated with diferent discourses on pedagogy and
education: implicit conceptions of what education is, how it occurs and whom it addresses.
For instance, neither the afrmative nor the reproductive function is self-reective in the
sense that their engagement in education is not queried in terms of its value codings and
normalisations. Yet these two strategies difer in the question of the how and the who of
education. Te afrmative function addresses, rst and foremost, the expert audience
players in the art eld.
11
Te methods used for this type of educational work although
it is rarely called that are developed in the academic eld, derived from methodological
canons that are generally instructive and limited to verbal expression in the form of
lectures or debates. Te reproductive function, on the other hand, is oriented (from the
perspective of the institution) towards the excluded, i.e. specically absent parts of the
public, especially children, young people and families. Tey are imagined as remote from
art and as laypeople. For this reason,methods of playful learning are ofen derived from
primary school and kindergarten educational practices and from institutionalised leisure
activities for children and young people. Tey are oriented to the constructivist turn in
learning theory,
12
according to which it is less a matter of instruction in contents than of
providing environments that stimulate manifold and complex processes of independently
constructed meaning. Along with learning specics, the point in these programmes is
also general in the sense of learning a love of art:
13
generating positive experiences within
the institution, recognising arts values and relevance and generating a desire to return.
In comparison, the deconstructive and the transformative functions are based on a
self-reective understanding of education and learning. Education itself becomes the object
of deconstruction or transformation: subject matter, addressees and methods are subjected
to a critical examination of the power relations inscribed in them, and this in turn becomes
the subject of the work with the audience. Questions are raised, such as: who determines
what is important to communicate? Who categorises target groups and to what end?
What gallery education is permitted within the institution, and what is considered
inappropriate and by whom? How do certain methods of teaching and learning implicitly
create the subjects of teaching and learning? Sometimes the positions of those teaching
and those learning change in this practice of querying: that is, the educational process
is understood as a mutual process, even though it is structured by the aforementioned
power relations.
With the deconstructive function, the primary educational objective is the develop-
ment of a critical attitude. Tis does not necessarily mean aspiring to change the conditions
of the educational framework itself.
14
In the understanding of education associated
with this function, engaging with art and its institutions is a relatively sheltered area of
experiments under complex conditions, which aim to enhance the capability for agency,
critique and creativity. Methods borrowed from artistic procedures are applied more
ofen here. For its part, the transformative function emphasises the structural progression
of the institution in the direction of more social justice and less epistemological and
11 Due to a lack of self-reflexivity in terms of educational methodology, however, this is rarely made
explicit, but is articulated instead through discursive practices: through the manner of addressing
the audience, the content of the research and the context of the discussion.
12 George E. Hein, The Constructivist Museum, in Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The Educational Role
of the Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.7379.
13 See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (1966,
trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
14 Deconstruction depends on the existence of the dominant text in order to be able to work in it.
The practitioner of deconstruction works within a system of concepts, but with the intention
of breaking it open. Jonathan Culler, Dekonstruktion. Derrida und die poststrukturalisitische
Literaturtheorie, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, p.95.
8 | Aerall
structural violence in the world at large, an objective linked with fostering critique
and self-empowerment. For this reason, the transformative methodological instruments
are also oriented towards strategies of activism and towards the epistemologies and
methods of critical pedagogy with a special reference to Paulo Freire, for whom the
transformation of language and of verbal action was a constitutive (although not the
sufcient) element for an education aiming to change the world.
In this logic there are no xed and predened addressees. Te concept of target
groups, which is common for the reproductive approach, is superseded by an interest
in forming alliances and in cooperation. Of course, however, here too there is a hidden
curriculum: what is expected and claimed is the fundamental afrmation of a critical
appropriation of art and its institutions.
Gallery education that understands itself as a critical practice focuses on elements of
the deconstructive and the transformative function. It conveys knowledge as represented
by exhibitions and institutions and examines their established functions while rendering
its own position visible. Accordingly, it attaches special importance to providing the
necessary conceptual tools for appropriating knowledge, and adopts a reective stance
towards the means of education, instead of relying on individual aptitude or a striving for
self-fullment. While it seeks to broaden the institutions audience, it does not indulge in
the illusion that learning in the exhibition space is solely connected to play and recreation.
15

Ideally, gallery education acknowledges the aforementioned constructivist concept of
learning processes, as well as the enriching potential of gaps found within language and
comprehension.
16
Tat the knowledge of both visitors and educators is considered equal
sets this practice apart from mere service work: critical gallery education opts for contro-
versy. In theoretical and methodological terms, it works along the lines of a critique of
domination, addressing issues such as the production of gender, ethnicity or class catego-
ries in the institution, and the related structural, material and symbolic devaluation of
gallery education, which I will return to later. It analyses the functions of (authorised and
unauthorised) speech and the use of diferent linguistic registers in the exhibition space.
Recipients are not regarded as subordinate to any institutional order; rather, the focus
is directed at their possibilities for agency and code-exchange in the sense of a practice
of everyday life.
17
It also favours a reading of institutional order that, far from being
conceived as static, leaves leeway for working within the gaps, interstices and contradic-
tions generated by the conguration of rooms and displays of the exhibiting institution.
18

Furthermore, critical gallery education addresses the ways in which the market
inuences the structure, presentation, perception and reception of art, and thereby
counters the middle-class illusion that art is detached from the economy to which it is
actually closely tied. It considers the cultural and symbolic capital of art and its institutions
as constituents of inclusionary and exclusionary processes in the art eld. At the same
time, it acknowledges and communicates the fact that symbolic capital gives rise to a desire,
and develops both strategic and sensuous ways to appropriate such capital. Finally, it seeks
to transform the institution into a space in which those who are explicitly not at the centre
of the art world can produce their own articulations and representations. In this sense,
it links institutions to their outside, to their local and geopolitical contexts. Te eld thus
derives its complexity from art, the core subject on which its methodological repertoire
is grounded.
Summarised so programmatically one could almost say paradigmatically the
approach of a critical gallery education practice seems to be something that must be in
15 One example of this is the activities of the group Kunstcoop in the Neue Gesellschaft fr Bildende
Kunst in Berlin, 19992001. This group worked with artistic and performative means and involved
groups that would not have visited the Kunstverein otherwise. The formats usually associated with
fun and pleasure were simultaneously serious confrontations with the contents of the exhibitions
and the art institution itself, which called for a high degree of engagement and concentration on
the part of the participants, offering a space at the same time to reflect together on the didactic means
that were used and to change them as needed.
16 See Shoshana Felman, Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable,
Yale French Studies, The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre, no.63, 1982, pp.2144;
and Jrgen Oelkers, Provokation als Bildungsprinzip, in Landesverband der Kunstschulen
Niedersachsen, Bielefeld: Bilden mit Kunst, 2004, pp.93113.
17 See Michel de Certeau, LInvention du quotidien: Les Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
18 See Irit Rogoff, Looking Away Participations in Visual Culture, in Gavin Butt (ed.), Art After
Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.11733; or the research project Tate Encounters
mentioned above.
Contexts: Gallery Education | 9
a permanent state of what Derrida called venir, in coming.
19
Just as in other elds
such as curating, for example a critical approach (in this case, gallery education as a
critical practice) is a minority position. However, as Felicity Allen describes, the historical
connections (in personnel, content, structure) of this eld of work to civil rights movements,
to feminism and to the intersection of art and political activism show that the critical
paradigm in gallery education does exist.
20
Indeed, it has been present for at least forty
years as an aspiration. One current example relevant in this context is the work by the
Youth Council of the National Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, initiated by Janna Graham
and now under the direction of Syrus Marcus Ware, which was established in ccc. In this
project adolescents and young adults developed a programme in cooperation with other
groups from the city, with contributions (exhibitions, performances, interventions in the
collection, zines, lectures, radio programmes, workshops) on topics such as the function of
the gallery in relation to national citizenship; policing and police violence in urban space;
or the link between art, activism and institutions in Toronto.
21
In Vienna the organisation
trafo.K produces gallery education projects for the Museum of Modern Art Vienna
(MUMOK), the international book fair
Buch Wien, the Vienna Mozart Year, the
Museum of the City of Linz and others that,
according to Nora Sternfeld, overcome
the function of reproducing knowledge
and become something else something
unpredictable and open to the possibility
of a knowledge production that, in tones
strident or subtle, would work to challenge
the apparatus of value-coding.
22
Adela
eleznik, Curator for Public Programmes
at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, is
part of the Radical Education Collective
(REC), which was founded in cco to nd ways of translating radical pedagogy into
the sphere of artistic production, with education being conceived not merely as a model
but also as a eld of political participation.
23
In Oldenburg, Germany, Nanna Lth and
her colleagues at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art conduct media (art) education with
the aim of encouraging its participants to better understand the strategies and codes of
a media world that is entirely commercial in character.
Te latter project is one of the few I know of that is located in a small art institution,
which at least partly sees itself as an institution of critique.
24
Perhaps surprisingly, gallery
education projects that attempt to be critical and aim for changes in the sense described
above are usually part of large, ofen national art institutions, which accordingly have a
powerful position in the art system and operate as global players in the art market. Projects
there become entangled in special contradictions. Teir critical potential is particularly
exposed to the dangers of neoliberal appropriation, becoming instrumentalised in the
19 See Jacques Derrida, Voyous, Paris: ditions Galile, 2003.
20 For historical examples, see C. Mrsch, From Oppositions to Interstices: Some Notes on the Effects
of Martin Rewcastle, The First Education Officer of the Whitechapel Gallery, 19771983, in Karen
Raney (ed.), Engage Magazine, no.15, 2004, pp.3337; and C. Mrsch, To Take All That Learning and
Put It Together with All That Art: Loraine Leesons Artistic-Educative Projects in the Context of
English Cultural Policies, in NGBK (ed.), Art for Change Loraine Leeson, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2005.
For examples from the 1990s, see the work by the group Kunstcoop at the NGBK in Berlin, in ibid.,
pp.10833; the project Strdienst at the Museum for Modern Art Vienna, in NGBK (ed.), Kunstcoop,
Berlin: Vice Versa, 2001; and E. Sturm, Zum Beispiel: StrDienst und trafo.K Praxen der
Kunstvermittlung aus Wien, in Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (AdKV ) (ed.),
Kunstvermittlung zwischen Partizipatorischen Kunstprojekten und interaktiven Kunstaktionen, Berlin:
Vice Versa, 2002, pp.2637.
21 See http://www.ago.net/youth-council-archive (last accessed on 22 October 2010). See also J. Graham
and Yasin Shadya, Reframing Participation in the Museum: A Syncopated Discussion, in Griselda
Pollock and Joyce Zemans (ed.), Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.15772.
22 N. Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks, op. cit.
23 See http://radical.temp.si/history/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010).
24 As the Edith Russ Site describes itself, The focus is on the content of the artwork and technologys
influence on shaping and defining artistic ideas. Beyond the programme of discussions and
presentations, we will also hold exhibitions intended to address subjects which are socially
relevant and future-oriented. The exhibition programme, which is largely publicly funded,
frequently takes into consideration queer, feminist and media-activist positions.
See http://www.edith-russ-haus.de/index.php/Kunstvermittlung/Kunstvermittlung?userlang=en
(last accessed on 25 October 2010).
Critical gallery educators
have to navigate manifold
ambivalences. ey are
representatives of the
institution, so they have no
opportunity to imagine an
uncompromised outside
for their work or themselves
as heroic gures.
10 | Aerall
context of an imperative positing of education in the so-called knowledge society
and the concomitant revaluation of sof skills within society.
25
In some cases they
are almost g leaf measures in conjunction with diversity and audience development
policies. Tey assist the institutions in presenting themselves as progressive and socially
responsible, while leaving the internal logics of operation, which usually function in a
strictly hierarchical and less socially aware way, unchanged. More recently, there have
been discussions about examples in England, where major art institutions like to make use
of the added value of artistic-pedagogic collectives in the sense of radical chic, but (re-)act
inconsistently when these collectives question the logic of operations and the structures
of the host institutions with the same radicality.
26
Not least of all, gallery education projects
intended to have a transformative efect frequently have, at best, only reforming efects
within the institution. Tis is evident in the case of the documenta J research and educa-
tion programme. Te documenta J programme was possible because the educational
turn in curating was taken up and continued by the artistic director Roger M. Buergel
and curator Ruth Noack. With their support, education at documenta J was able to
operate self-reectively within the framework of the exhibition and to open up space
for experiments (though adequate nancial resources were not made available by the
institution). Yet the reception of this experiment was and is limited almost exclusively
to specialists, taking place within the professional community of gallery education.
27

At the institutional level it was not possible to establish gallery education as a critical
practice, as the management of the documenta GmbH argued that the mode of gallery
education was the responsibility of the respective artistic directors. Based on the same
argument, it was not possible to extend the collaboration with a local audience that had
been initiated through the projects Local Advisory Board afer the exhibition closed.
28

What was achieved, however, was the institution of a principle of openness on the part of
documenta for future work with children and young people in the exhibition. It is possible
that this will change in the cJ iteration of the exhibition, but it is too early to tell.
29

Institutions of critique, on the other hand, rarely work together with gallery
educators, even when their resources allow them to do so. I would like to speculate on the
reasons for this and on the function of the absence of gallery educators in these spaces.
Te ne line between disrupting and stabilising dominant orders is very narrow for critical
practices in neoliberalism, where critical gallery educators have to navigate manifold
ambivalences. Tey are representatives of the institution, so they have no opportunity
to imagine an uncompromised outside for their work or themselves as heroic gures.
Due to the presumption that their position is insufciently radical, they are frequently
subjected to disregard or contempt from critically positioned actors in the art eld,
from whom they would prefer to receive interest and support. In reections on pedagogy
currently undertaken by curators and artists, gallery education does not appear as an
independent practice with its own history and controversial discourses, but is treated
instead if at all in casual asides. (Here should I be clear that I am not referring to
the work traditionally carried out by museum and state-funded gallery education and
interpretation departments), emphasises Andrea Phillips in brackets in her article about
25 See Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education, Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University
Press, 2001.
26 See, for example, the consequences of the invitation to the Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination to conduct a workshop with the title Disobedience Makes History for Tate Modern
(January 2010). The group Liberate Tate came out of the workshop, which in turn used activist
strategies learned in the workshop to denounce the employment and sponsoring practices of Tate
itself. See http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry/unhappy_birthday/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010).
Another example is the discussions that arose about the exhibition and event series C-Words by the
group Platform at the Arnolfini in Bristol, where the art institution itself became the centre of
attention as a polluting factor. See http://blog.platformlondon.org/content/c-words-ripples-continuing
(last accessed on 25 October 2010).
27 The activities and results of the project have been gathered in two volumes: Ayse Glec, Claudia
Hummel, C. Mrsch, Sonja Parzefall, Ulrich Schtker and Wanda Wieczorek (ed.), documenta 12
education 1: Engaging Audiences, Opening Institutions. Methods and Strategies in Education at documenta
12, Berlin and Zrich: diaphanes, 2009; and C. Mrsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education 2, op. cit.
28 It would be interesting to investigate whether and which long-term changes might be effected
by a project like the Youth Council on the institutional policy and the structures of the NGO by
Tate Encounters in Tate Britain, or by the Edgware Road Project of the Serpentine Gallery, which
should also be mentioned in this context. See http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/edgware_road.
html (last accessed on 25 October 2010).
29 For the deconstructive approach of Hatching Ideas, the children and young peoples programme
at documenta 12, see C. Hummel, What Does aushecken Hatching Ideas Mean?, in A. Glec et al.,
documenta 12 education 1, op. cit.
Contexts: Gallery Education | 11
Education Aesthetics in the publication Curating and the Educational Turn (cJc).
30

In the same book, Simon Sheikh reects on Andrea Frasers Jp8 performance Museum
Highlights: A Gallery Talk, taking it for granted that gallery education, which he calls
mediation, still exists in cJc solely to teach people the right way to look, from the
perspective of the institution, and the right way to understand the works.
31
Has he
not noticed the post-structuralist and power theory reections in this eld? It is hard
to imagine that a protagonist from gallery education would write an article about the
functions of curating without basic knowledge of this practice. Tat this does not seem
to be a problem the other way around indicates the hierarchies between curating and
educating: the lack of knowledge about the history and discourses of gallery education
involves a sanctioned ignorance, in Gayatri Spivaks sense, an unknowing that strengthens
ones own position of power.
32
Tis could be considered the rst pedagogical function
of the absence of gallery education in institutions of critique. For a gallery education that
sees itself as a critical practice could be also realised in this kind of institution, i.e. it could
question and work on mechanisms of exclusion, naturalisations and power relations there
as well. Tis, however, could be seen as calling the critical position on the part of curators
and artists into question. If curators did not want this to happen, then it would be a sensible
strategy of territorialisation to regard their actions as being identical with the actions of
gallery education.
33

Tis is not the case, however. Te audience attracted by events organised by curators
and artists is far more delimited than the groups accessed by gallery educators. Te many
academies, schools, seminars, workshops, sessions, encounters and lessons
initiated in the course of the educational turn are largely attended at least as far as I have
been able to observe by people who are similar in habits, lifestyle and attitudes to those
of the curators. For those who accept the invitation, being in these spaces and engaging in
social interaction and collective artistic and intellectual production signies an increase in
symbolic and cultural capital. In this way, these spaces are no diferent from the art spaces
that are regarded as hegemonic and bourgeois. Critical gallery education practice, on the
other hand, involves a tremendous capacity for embarrassment. It takes places in rooms
that sometimes smell more of sweat and squashed lunch packages than of brand new
furniture and freshly painted walls. It requires a willingness to take seriously views that
substantially deviate from ones own position and aesthetics much diferent from ones
own taste; it requires radically alternating between registers of language and aesthetics.
Pedagogical expertise means having an idea of how to react to the efects of educational
and knowledge hierarchies in the face of diferent world views, utopias and desires,
other than by feeling embarrassed, turning up ones nose, becoming defensive or being
helplessly silent.
Moreover, gallery educators cannot expect that their audience will be willing to accept
a critical stance. An audience that rejects this expectation eludes the educational intentions
inherent to the deconstructive and transformative functions of promoting a capacity for
critique and agency. Tere is a pedagogical paradox here, which is constitutive for gallery
education work: in certain situations, a participants refusal to take part in working on
deconstruction/transformation and his or her insistence on diferent, independent
interests could be a self-empowering act. Tese and other paradoxes call for a mode of
unlearning privilege on the part of critical gallery educators,
34
an active reection in
other words, one that is consequently also articulated in action in relation to the privilege
of ones own position, colliding languages and habitual constitutions. Nora Sternfeld aptly
calls this work an unglamorous task.
35
And this could be seen as the second function of
the absence of gallery educators in institutions of critique: enabling the concentration on
glamorous tasks, the collectively produced preservation of the aura and exclusivity through
the peer group.
30 Andrea Phillips, Education Aesthetics, in Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson (ed.), Curating and the
Educational Turn, London and Amsterdam: Open Editions and de Appel, 2010, pp.8396.
31 Simon Sheikh, Letter to Jane (Investigation of a Function), in ibid., pp.6175.
32 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (ed.),
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harester Wheatsheaf, 1994,
pp.66111.
33 Since the term education is now in vogue, curators and artists increasingly refer to themselves
as educators, implying that their practice is already educative, since it is already a mediating practice.
34 See G.C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (ed. Sarah Harasym), New York
and London: Routledge, 1990, p.9.
12 | Aerall
It is in this context that the current popularity of the philosopher Jacques Rancire,
and especially his book Je Ignorant Schoolmaster (Jp8),
36
in the art eld is signicant.
Tere is hardly a statement in conjunction with the educational turn that can do without
a reference to the radical democratic vision of self-learning, which Rancire discusses
using the historical example of the linguistics and literature professor Jean-Joseph Jacotot
and the method of universal learning he developed in Leuven in J8J8. According to
this conception, the pedagogical relationship has always been constitutive of inequality,
because one person presumes to have knowledge to be conveyed to others. In contrast,
an emancipatory process of learning is self-controlled. Te position of the teacher is
superuous, because every individual has in principle the same intelligence. Yet what
other preconditions did Jacotots students have? Tey most likely came from bourgeois
families and schools, because who else went to the university in Leuven in the nineteenth
century? Jacotots students, who taught themselves French on the basis of a bilingual text,
remained among themselves, just as self-learning groups in the pedagogical spaces of the
art eld usually do. Among the latter, the everyday use of Rancires theses has the function
of framing their own exclusionary actions as a radical democratic gesture and thus no
longer questioning, let alone changing them. Te reference to every subjects capability
for self-empowerment ironically leads to a belief in distinction as one does not feel
obliged or even entitled to make an efort to reach those who do not feel they belong in
emancipatory spaces, because that would be paternalistic, afer all. Ruth Sonderegger,
a philosopher who specialises in Rancires work, notes that regardless of Rancires
dislike (Abneigung) of Pierre Bourdieus analyses, it still remains necessary to pay
attention to normalisation and exclusion in the art eld:
In my view, it is quite astonishing that Rancire does not see Bourdieus research
on the art eld as a complementary endeavour. Indeed, both are interested
in the question of what art can contribute to the classication of social space
as a practically sensual physical space [] with the only dierence that one
emphasises emancipatory eects and the other normalising eects. Rancires
archival evidence for the self-emancipation of joiners, oor layers and metal smiths
with a love of literature seems just as convincing to me as Bourdieus evidence
that the discourse maintained by various institutions about the disinterestedness
of art beginning in 1;o is anything but disinterestedness, but rather a strategic
means of establishing and xing class boundaries along a new kind of capital:
namely cultural capital.
37
On J8 and Jp September cJc, there was a symposium in Vienna with the title educational
turn: Internationale Perspektiven auf Vermittlung in Museen und Ausstellungen
(International Perspectives of Education in Museums and Exhibitions).
38
In her
introductory lecture, Sternfeld, one of the organisers, called this event a re-appropriation
of the discourse taking place in the curatorial eld by gallery education with a critical
self-image. She also referred to how gallery educators and their knowledge have previously
been consistently overlooked in the attempt to propose curatorial action, in the course of
the reective turn, as a way of generating, conveying and experiencing knowledge beyond
setting up exhibitions. In her view, curatorial action comes closer in this way to gallery
education. It adapts the promises of the pedagogical, but without having to be confronted
with the tension between these promises and the impossibility of fullling them entirely
in pedagogical practice. She emphasised that this is a patriarchally structured omission,
because it is based on hierarchically placing production over reproduction and
distribution (in this specic case: generating knowledge in comparison with passing
on knowledge). Unlike the present text, which attempts to illuminate the reasons for
this omission and to raise the question of which function inheres in it (or also: who exactly
35 N. Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks, op. cit.
36 Jacques Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (trans. Kristin
Ross), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
37 Ruth Sonderegger, Institutionskritik? Zum politischen Alltag der Kunst und zur alltglichen Politik
sthetischer Praktiken. Symposium of the Deutschen Gesellschaft fr sthetik, paper given at the
conference sthetik und Alltagserfahrung at Friedrich-Schiller-Universitt in Jena, 2 October 2008.
38 The symposium was organised by schnittpunkt, an exhibition theory and practice network.
See http://www.schnitt.org (last accessed on 25 October 2010).
Contexts: Gallery Education | 13
prots from it and how), Sternfelds lecture stressed the common interests and potential
possibilities for cooperation between the two elds. Ultimately, in her view, both educative
and curatorial action with critical aspirations involve the attempt, a minoritised one,
to make the actualisation of critical, pedagogical approaches productive for a new
institutional practice, away from representation towards processual spaces of agency,
and to turn the disciplinary link (from a historical perspective) between art and education
into an emancipatory project.
Janna Graham, for her part, emphasises in her article Spanners in the Spectacle:
Radical Research at the Frontlines (cJc) the shared battle against precarious working
conditions in the art eld and against the neoliberal appropriation of creativity as an
economic factor, seeing here the urgent necessity of forming alliances between artists,
curators and gallery educators, and especially between these and activists:
If the project of an educational turn is indeed to nd new strategies for opposing,
exiting or even surviving these new regimes of arts education, it is necessary then
to move beyond professional distinctions, to include those actively engaged in the
struggle between the education of a neoliberalised creative class and the creation
of emancipatory and critical education.
39

In conclusion, I would like to emphasise another potential shared interest between
curatorial and educational action in conjunction with the educational turn: engendering
queer spaces in the sense that the desire to become free from contradictions, in one way or
another, gives way to the logic of action of open-ended work in and with the contradictions.
Te antinomy, alluded to above, between emancipation through the will to educate and
emancipation through emphasising the presumed principle equality of all subjects
(represented here by the two theoretical positions of Rancire and Bourdieu respectively),
between exclusionary action and paternalist action, is complex and not to be resolved
in practice. Critical gallery educators are just as aware of this irresolvability as critical
curators but they may sometimes draw diferent conclusions from it. In my view,
collaboration under these auspices, bringing these conicts into the artistic-educative
spaces of the educational turn, would in fact open up new possibilities for what an
institutional practice following institutional critique could be.
It would be hard work, though. A precondition for forming an alliance of this kind
if it wants to do justice to the egalitarian claims of the educational turn would be
the recognition of gallery education as an independent cultural practice of knowledge
production in the curatorial eld as well, while simultaneously questioning and processing
the aforementioned hierarchisation of production and reproduction/distribution. Another
precondition would be to make room in art spaces in the sense of unlearning privilege,
and that the occupation of space should be motivated by activist positions with all
the possibly disastrous consequences this might have for the aesthetic and intellectual
glamorousness of the peer groups previously operating in it.
It may be possible to create these conditions as one efect of productive encounters
in coming years in case the educational turn proves to be a real turn and not simply
another in a string of long-term social and political projects that are routinely discovered
(like Columbus discovered America) by the contemporary art world to satiate an
endless demand for circulation of the new.
40

39 J. Graham, Spanners in the Spectacle, op. cit.
40 Ibid.
Translated from German by Aileen Derieg.
16 | Aerall
Previous spread:
Group Material,
Inserts, 1988. Insert
into the 22 May 1988
Sunday New York
Times
Group Material,
The People's Choice
(Arroz con Mango),
1981. Installation
view, 244 East 13th
Street, New York.
Both images courtesy
the artists and Four
Corners Books
Artists: Group Material | 17
Te dismantling of the progressive
economic and cultural changes of the Jpocs
began in earnest in the Jp8cs, and Group
Materials overall project was imagined
in this period of attempted historical
erasure.
1
So opens Doug Ashfords text
in the recent publication Show and Tell:
A Chronicle of Group Material (cJc).
It is an apt beginning to remembering how
embattled the Lef was in the Jp8cs, and to
thinking retrospectively through the impact
and importance of the trenchant and timely
work of Group Material, the New York-
based collective active from Jpp to Jppo.
Like all good art practices, Group Materials
seems utterly contemporary. It can be
discussed in any number of ways: as a
collective rather than individual practice,
as activists and brand hackers, as a clever
employment of postmodernist theory and
of their innovations as artists working cura-
torially. Te groups projects foreshadowed
the social turn in recent art, as well as
relational, context or participatory
practices, and especially the production of
critically oriented installations in museum
exhibitions and biennials. But Group
Material seems curiously absent from
recent discussions about contemporary
art, perhaps occluded by its most famous
member, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Show and
Tell, edited by Julie Ault, a long-time
member of Group Material, provides a
good occasion to address many of these
issues. Te book itself is many things a
resource on the groups history, a study of
archiving and a manual for how (or how
not) to organise a collective art practice.
2

(Reading about the rst year of Group
Material tells you two things: dont try to
work with too many people, and dont get
bogged down paying rent on a gallery
space. Later entries are bracing in their
revelations of discord, disafection and
burn out.) So this is a compelling moment to
look at their particular form of productive
opposition. It is also a moment, hopefully,
to resist as I think Show and Tell does
hagiography or the conclusion that
a political-critical practice is no longer
possible. In what follows, this text proposes
that Group Materials most signicant
legacy is the processes that their work
produced, and the discursiveness that
became crucial to their projects diferent
forms and contexts.
Group Material began as a group of
artists, all interested in social issues and
in that Jp8cs concept the politics of
representation.
3
Tere were between ten
and thirteen members at rst, but during
the second year this unwieldy number fell
to three, and the groups size henceforth
uctuated between three and four.
4
Group
Material the name itself allowing for
exibility and signifying a materialist
approach organised itself around several
motivations, such as working as a collective
against individual art practices, working
against careerism and reconnecting arts
production and reception. Te groups
Citizen Artists:
Group Material
Alison Green
Alison Green discusses the contemporary
relevance of Group Materials use of
artistic and activist strategies, and how
their practice might disrupt current
narratives of the social turn.
1 Doug Ashford, An Artwork Is a Person', in Julie Ault (ed.), Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material,
London: Four Corners Books, 2010, p.220.
2 At the same time as the book was being prepared, an archive was created and deposited in the Downtown
Collection, Fales Library & Special Collections, at New York Universitys Bobst Library. See J. Ault,
Case Reopened: Group Material, in Ibid., pp.20916.
3 Jan Avgikos uses this term in her essay Group Material Timeline: Activism as a Work of Art,
in Nina Felshin (ed.), But Is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, p.87.
4 Show and Tell lists the members as they join and depart the group. In the second year, Ault, Tim Rollins
and Mundy McLaughlin were the three left from the original group. Doug Ashford joined early on,
and Felix Gonzalez-Torres joined in 1987, coincident with Rollinss departure. Karen Ramspacher was
active from 1988 until around 1991, and the German artists Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein joined
the group near its end.
18 | Aerall
origins, concurring with the late conceptual
and activist practices of Martha Rosler
and Conrad Atkinson and coinciding
with a resurgence of expressionist painting
in galleries, made them an important
foil for the commercial and conservative
mainstream of the 8cs. A number of the
early members had studied with Joseph
Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts in New
York, and Group Materials founding
overlapped with some members joining
Artists Meeting for Cultural Change,
organised by (among others) Kosuth, Lucy
Lippard, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and
Carl Andre.
5
In a mid-8cs article, Lippard
set Group Material in the context of other
artist-activist projects and alternative
spaces that had recently developed in New
York from Colab and Fashion Moda
to the Alliance for Cultural Democracy
reecting an inux of belligerently
disillusioned and/or idealistic young
artists, well-trained and ambitious,
but dissatised with the narrowness and
elitism of the art world into which they
were supposed to blend seamlessly.
6

Group Material was certainly idealistic,
and also experimental; as founding
member 1m Rollins recalled about one
of their early shows, It was full of fantasy
and surprise and joy and humor and wit
all of the things so ofen lacking in political
art.
7
What is also striking was their use of
design: ideas found visual form and were
articulated in texts, whether a press release
or exhibition announcement, or in visual
and textual interfaces developed for
exhibitions.
Te notion of an expanded practice
was not new, but Group Material employed
a remarkable range of curatorial
strategies involving working collectively,
politically and in relation to specic
cultural situations. Teir rst move was to
rent a storefront gallery. Rollins described
it as a not a space but a place, a laboratory
of our own.
8
Another article of faith, as it
were, was the post-Conceptual practice of
not producing art. Instead they solicited
contributions from other people, ranging
from their community of artists to
non-professional artists and non-artists.
Asked to show at the New Museum in Jp8,
they invited cc people to each contribute
a J-by-J-inch at object, which took
their places alongside album covers and
magazine ads in a grid spelling out the
word MASS. For a show at Washington
Project for the Arts in Washington, DC,
they invited responses from across the
United States by putting small advertise-
ments in local newspapers. Te press
release for Messages to Washington (Jp8)
states: Group Material is tired of hearing
peoples opinions as watered down by
public opinion polls, distorted by the
mass media and through their letters as
interpreted by President Reagan. We have
an idea other people feel the same way.
9

An early exhibition they organised, e
Peoples Choice (Arro con Mango) (Jp8J),
in their own Lower East Side gallery was
conceived in opposition to artists participa-
tion in the gentrication of outlying
neighbourhoods. To create a tight loop
between audience and location, they
put out a request to their mostly Latino
neighbours to loan things from their
own walls and shelves, things that
might not normally nd their way into
an art gallery.
10
In rejecting the role of the
artist-as-maker they became something else
producers, organisers, interpreters of
art and other artefacts, cultural workers,
even. Tey mobilised the exhibition as
an active site where all things were under
scrutiny: institutional power, aesthetics,
cultural value and political discourse.
As a curatorial practice, Group
Material made exhibitions both political
and aesthetically innovative. e Peoples
Choice was made up of a hundred
or so diverse objects, including class
photographs and collectibles, a mural by
local kids, posters, folk art, kitsch and
religious icons. Tey were installed oor to
ceiling as they arrived. Labels identied the
owners, some of which included a personal
story about the object. Te signicance
this democratic attitude especially
5 Rollins describes being involved with the AMCCs Anti-catalog, an alternative history of American
art put together in response to the Whitney Museum of American Arts bicentennial exhibition of
the collection of John D. Rockefeller, which included no artists of colour and only one woman. See
Tim Rollins talks to David Deitcher 80s Then Interview, Artforum, vol.41, no. 8, April 2003,
pp.7879. See also Lucy R. Lippard, Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power, in Brian Wallis (ed.),
Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York and Boston: New Museum and David Godine,
1984, pp.35152.
6 L.R. Lippard, Trojan Horses, op. cit., p.353.
7 Tim Rollins talks to David Deitcher, op. cit., p.78.
8 T. Rollins, What Was to Be Done?, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.218.
9 Messages to Washington, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.111.
10 Dear Friends and Neighbors of 13th Street, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.35.
Artists: Group Material | 19
in relation to other artists who make
installations of multitudes of things
(Tomas Hirschhorns and Jason Rhoadess
more packed ones come to mind) is not
the rejection of the programme of the white
cube, but how the display supported the set
of meanings already granted by the owners
of the objects. In a review of the show,
Tomas Lawson commented: Te value
of these artifacts lay precisely in their
sentimentality, a quality that is absent from
most artwork that strives to mean some-
thing to a general audience.
11
Accordingly,
e Peoples Choice might be distinguished
from exhibitions seeking to problematise
divisions between high and low culture but
which result in reasserting the hierarchy.
Te key to the diference is in the act of
a positive representation of a particular
community, initiated by a social process:
the community was specic, nameable and
present, even if open and internally diverse.
Nevertheless, e Peoples Choice and
its local success (as well as its recognition
within the art world) did not lead Group
Material to become a community-based art
practice. Internal group discussions over
the following year revealed there were
those who wanted to be activists, those who
wanted art careers and those the ones
who continued to work as Group Material
who were interested in activism and
art.
12
As Ashford writes in Show and Tell :
Group Materials self-assignment was
to locate the dissensual feelings associated
with activism, its emotional reverberations
and actual evocations, into a realisable
model or design.
13

Te groups main point of resistance
was the commercial art world and its
reliance on named artists and discrete,
saleable objects. e Peoples Choice
tried to open this closed circle of aesthetic
value. In a later show like Americana, their
contribution to the Jp8 Whitney Biennial,
Group Material proposed a precise and
innovative exhibition design,
14
a layered
and salon-style hanging of mass-produced
commodities (such as a clothes washer
and dryer, pop music and a TV continually
broadcasting one of the networks) along-
side historical works of social critique by
artists under-recognised by the Whitney
and works of contemporary art critical of
11 Thomas Lawson, The Peoples Choice, Group Material, Artforum, vol.19, no.8, April 1981, p.67,
reprinted in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.32.
12 See Peter Hall, Group Material: An Interview, REALLIFE Magazine, no.11/12, Winter 198384,
quoted in J. Avgikos, Group Material Timeline, op. cit., p.102. See also J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell,
op. cit., pp.4849.
13 D. Ashford, An Artwork is a Person, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, p.225.
14 Proposal for Americana, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.94.
Group Material,
Americana, 1985.
Whitney Biennial,
Whitney Museum
of American
Art, New York.
Photograph: Geoffrey
Clements. Courtesy
Whitney Museum
of American Art
20 | Aerall
North American culture.
15
Group Materials
self-stated aim was to demonstrate how
art is dependent on a social context for
its meaning.
16
Efectively, they curated
an alternative show, critiquing the way
the Whitney represented American culture
and tacitly arbitrated success in the New
York art world in their biennials.
Te other key strategy in Group
Materials practice was using channels
outside art circuits. At one point or another
in their run of projects, they used every
form of public advertisement available:
bus and subway posters (M, Jp8J8;
AIDS and Insurance, Jppc; and
Subculture, Jp8); newspaper inserts
(Inserts, Jp88 and Cash Prie, JppJ);
commercial billboards (Your Message
Here, Jppc); shopping bags (Shopping
Bag, Jp8p); and all of them in concert in
one show in Berlin that addressed German
reunication (Democracy Poll, Jppc).
Te initiation of such projects in Jp8J
roughly coincided with abandoning their
gallery space. At the time they explained:
It is impossible to create a radical and
innovative art if this work is anchored in
one special gallery location. Art can have
the most political content and right-on
form, but the stuf just hangs there silent
unless its means of distribution make
political sense as well.
17

In the case of using y posters the
series of works Group Material called DA
ZI BAOS afer the Chinese big character
posters it was not the intervention per se
but the discourse it produced that made the
interventions efective. Contrast the twelve
Group Material,
Democracy Poll, 1990,
Neue Gesellschaft
fr Bildende Kunst
(NGBK), Berlin.
Interview statement
installed at U-Bahn
station. Photograph:
Regina von Pock.
Courtesy the artists
and Four Corners
Books
15 Kim Levins review of the Biennial touches on flashpoints in the so-called culture wars of the 1980s
she accuses Group Material of being handmaidens to the Whitneys effort at inclusion
inclusiveness that year, and also of bringing the quality of the show down. K. Levin, The Whitney
Laundry, The Village Voice, 9 April 1985, reprinted in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.96.
16 Proposal for Americana, op. cit., p.94. Also on Americana, see J. Ault, Three Snapshots from the
Eighties: On Group Material, in Paul ONeill (ed.), Curating Subjects, London: Open Editions, 2007,
pp.3436.
17 Quoted in J. Avgikos, Group Material Timeline, op. cit., p.99. It has been argued elsewhere that
interventions like these are only marginally effective, especially as they are ultimately co-opted by
capitalism itself. For a recent text that addresses advertisings appropriation of avant-garde gestures,
see Friedrich von Borries and Matthias Bttger, False Freedom: The Construction of Space in Late
Capitalism, in BAVO (ed.), Urban Politics Now, Rotterdam: NAi, 2007, pp.12840.
Artists: Group Material | 21
posters, alternating red and yellow, which
they put up on a faade of a bankrupt
department store in Union Square, New
York, in Jp8, to Daniel Burens iconic
striped posters pasted on Paris billboards
in the late Jpocs. DA ZI BAOS represented
public, though not ofcial, discourse.
Texts presented diferent voices speaking
in diferent modes, from man-on-the-street
opinion to position statement. And this was
targeted toward an issue: the Democracy
Wall that accompanied Group Materials
AIDS meline exhibition at the University
of California at Berkeley in Jp8p and Jppc
represented campus opinion on AIDS.
18

Te timing and siting of these projects was
crucial. To stage an exhibition on AIDS
in Jp8p in the Bay Area and advertise it
on the outside of a museum was to deploy
this space as a site for political action.
19

Many of Group Materials projects
developed forms of discourse that tested
out issues of participation and inclusion,
as well as self-criticality.
20
When ofered
an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation
in New York, they staged a four-part show,
Democracy (Jp888p), which addressed
four topical issues: education, election
politics (the show overlapped with the
Jp88 presidential election of George H.W.
Bush), cultural participation and AIDS.
Tere were four diferent installations, and
each was accompanied by a town meeting
led by public gures, artists and members
of the group. As an example of their
discursive strategy, the town meeting,
titled Politics and Election, opened with
the statement that just because you invite
the public to a meeting doesnt mean they
become empowered. Tis was followed by
a discussion about site, in which questions
were raised about Dias being chosen as
the meetings location thus ofering
that very rare thing: dialogue, rather than
consensus.
21
And this dialogue runs right
through to the everyday aspects of Group
Materials practice: reading between the
lines in Show and
Tell, there is
evidence of how
their working
process remained
as open and
discursive as
the exhibitions,
despite the groups small size and intimate
interrelations. Teir projects had hundreds
of participants, from artists to activists
to the staf of the institutions with whom
they were working.
22

Of all their works, Group Materials
timelines might constitute their best
undoing of institutional contexts. Te
timelines, which used works of art,
artefacts and found documents, were the
most didactic of Group Materials projects,
and the ones in which the groups political
agenda was most strategically keyed into
the format of the show.
23
Chronological
structure signalled authority and evidence,
but in other ways the timelines are classic
examples of intertextuality. A lineup of
Far from the distinct, identiable and uid
communities Group Material aimed their
work at, audiences now are museum audiences,
government target groups, or most de-politicised
of all, individuals.
18 The question they asked was How does AIDS affect you, and your lifestyle? Responses ranged from
testing must remain anonymous and My whole life has changed due to AIDS [] I live with a constant
thought of death and how to prepare for it to AIDS doesnt affect me at the moment; I dont sleep
around. See J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.16061 and 25051. For the Democracy Wall
at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Group Material solicited position statements from right-wing
organisations, including the National Front. A text offered by the National Cleansing Campaign
was particularly shocking in its rant against the complete destruction that faces the Anglo-Saxon
and kindred people through drugs, brainwashing, homosexuality, rape and murder. See ibid.,
pp.10005.
19 For an important period account of art, activism and AIDS see Douglas Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/
Cultural Activism', October, vol.43,Winter 1987, pp.316.
20 Recent discussions of Jacques Rancires writings on dissensus are important here. See Janina A.
Ciezadlo, Pluralistic Conversation, Afterimage, vol.36, no.4, January/February 2009, pp.34, which
summarises the conference Disruptions: The Political in Art Now, at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago in 2008, which included both Rancire and Doug Ashford as speakers.
21 Politics and Election transcript, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University. See also
B. Wallis (ed.), Democracy: A Project of Group Material (Discussions in Contemporary Culture # 5),
New York and Seattle: Dia Art Foundation and Bay Press, 1990.
22 See Behind the Timeline: Collected Histories, in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.23853.
23 The first instance of Group Material using the format was Timeline: A Chronicle of U.S. Intervention
in Central and Latin America, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1984, in a show that was itself
part of a national campaign to protest US intervention in the region. The AIDS Timeline was installed
in three North American museums from 1989 to 1991 (UC Berkeley; the Wadsworth Atheneum,
Hartford, CT; and the 1991 Whitney Biennial). It also appeared in a print version that ran
simultaneously in a number of art magazines and journals to coincide with the 1 December 1990
Day Without Art.
22 | Aerall
magazine covers referenced the mass
medias (inammatory) discussion of AIDS
while agitprop paraphernalia from protest
groups like ACT UP and Gran Fury
demonstrated the smart, growing political
movement against the US government.
Works of art were multivalent: in some
cases they were as informative as the
timelines running text; in others they
represented a critical position; and some
eulogised death.
24
Other inclusions were
aimed to educate people (and possibly
shock them), as in Robert Bucks Safer
Sex Preview Booth (Jp8p), which screened
instructional/pornographic sex videos
made by the Gay Mens Health Crisis.
25

Te signicance of the timelines as
exhibition strategies was in their heteroge-
neous attempt to inform, politicise and
represent a particular community, while
also activating a general audience. In efect,
Group Material created other spaces,
or heterotopias, in Michel Foucaults sense
of places where real sites of culture are
simultaneously represented, contested and
inverted.
26
Te knowledge presented in
these exhibitions was complex, contentious
and ofen contradictory. Richard Meyer,
who worked on AIDS meline at UC
Berkeley as a postgraduate student and
curatorial intern, commented that it was
not documentary in its approach: it was,
rather, this really complicated notion of
a visual and lived history, where images
dont have xed representation.
27

What seems relevant in this observation
is how the show facilitates the production
(rather than the reproduction) of meaning,
and thereby reects other strategies
the group used to produce dialogue.
Tis is not the de-politicised mash-up
of contemporary postmodernism, but
something more akin to critical discourse
in its best sense.
Recent evaluations of socially
engaged practice provide some ground
for evaluating Group Materials work
in contemporary rather than historical
terms, although it is notable that they are
minimally present in the current wave
of critical writings about both innovative
curatorial practices and social engagement.
To mention only one thread in a complex
dialogue, Claire Bishops description
of aesthetics as the ability to think contra-
diction functions well as a descriptor
of Group Materials practice.
28
She points
to the critical space produced by both
institutions and aesthetic practice itself,
and argues that it functions as a brake
against the instrumentalisation of art for
(merely) social ends.
29
Strikingly similar
discussions took place on the pages of
e Village Voice about Group Materials
Dia show AIDS and Democracy: A Case
Study (Jp888p). Critic Elizabeth Hess
found the mixed she called it conceptual
use of agitprop, works of art and visual
culture created distance, and this allowed
for critical reection. Whilst Bishops
opposition is between aesthetics and what
she calls ethics, Hesss was barricade
politics, as made clear in a follow-up
review by Kim Levin, who charged Group
Material with becoming traditional
curators and merely preaching to
believers. For Levin the appropriate
response to the AIDS crisis was to get out
and protest.
30
In fact, Group Material did
both: they did a lot of marching in addition
to organising exhibitions. Despite the
similarities of these discussions, there
are signicant diferences between Group
Material and the more recent practices
being cited. Bishop argues, for example,
that Phil Collinss video installation they
shoot horses (cc), which documents the
two dance marathons he staged (separately)
for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers,
produces critical reection. Indeed it may
do so in many ways, but it is tempting to
imagine that Group Materials response
to a politicised subject like the Arab-Israeli
conict would raise the stakes of the
24 Crimp notes that early responses to AIDS both by and about the art community were limited to catharsis
and transcendence, and makes the argument for political action. D. Crimp, AIDS, op. cit., pp.36.
Nonetheless, it is important to realise now that the political was personally experienced: in the lead-up
to putting AIDS Timeline in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, Gonzalez-Torres was mourning the loss of his
partner to AIDS.
25 See the entries by Robert Buck and Larry Rinder in Behind the Timeline: Collected Histories,
in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.246, which indicate how controversial some of the material
in the AIDS Timeline was.
26 Michel Foucault, Des Espaces Autres, (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, 1984, available at: http://foucault.
info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (last accessed on 27 September 2010).
27 J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.239.
28 Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, in Margriet Schavemaker and
Mischa Rakier (ed.), Right About Now: Art & Theory Since the 1990s, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007, p.68.
29 Ibid., p.65.
30 Both articles are reprinted in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op.cit., pp.15354.
Artists: Group Material | 23
audiences engagement quite a lot higher
than Collinss work does.
Against the institutionalisation of
participatory practices, it might be useful
to revive the term activism. Lippard early
on contextualised Group Material in the
traditions of Jpocs Conceptualism and
Institutional Critique, and, crucially, as
part of a new wave resolving the division
between activism and aesthetic practice.
Jan Avgikoss informative mid-Jppcs essay
on the group positioned them as the middle
way between the market and political
correctness (which she describes as an
impossible politics); to this end she coined
the term cultural activism to describe the
hybrid nature of their practice. A decade
later, in her inuential book One Place
Aer Another: Site Specic Art and
Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon cited
Group Material as occupying a productive
role in the culture wars of the Jppcs, in
the context of how both progressives and
neoconservatives learned how to mobilise
communities.
31
Recent discussions like
Bishops shif signicantly away from
the public in public art and towards
established art-world circuits. Far from the
distinct, identiable and uid communities
Group Material aimed their work at,
audiences now are museum audiences,
government target groups or, most
de-politicised of all, individuals. One
might well ask where the commitment
to activate or empower visitors to
such exhibitions has gone. Where are the
points of diference crucial to the notion
of critique?
Also germane to this discussion are the
diferent fates of Group Material and Felix
Gonzalez-Torres, who posthumously
is an ever-present gure on the exhibition
circuit, and whose work, although made
of poor and endlessly replenishable
commodities, has been seamlessly
incorporated into the art markets and art
museums proclivities. Standing in front
of Gonzalez-Torress sculpture Untitled
(Supreme Majority) (JppJ), white and
mute, at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York this summer, I wondered if any
of the art-going audience there knew he
was a member of Group Material. How
does one see the politics of this work? In
this context, it produces very little. It turns
out the written history is (partially) to
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
on the opening day
of Group Material,
AIDS Timeline,
Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford,
CT, 30 September
1990. Courtesy the
artists and Four
Corners Books
31 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 2002, p.147 and note 31. Kwon wrote more extensively about Group Material
in a text on their final project: Three Rivers Arts Festival: Pittsburgh, PA, Documents, no.7, 1996,
reprinted in Texte zur Kunst, vol.23, August 1996, pp.14951.
24 | Aerall
blame for the erasure of Group Material
from Gonzalez-Torress biography; most
sources underplay his participation in the
group.
32
Writing for the catalogue of the last
major show before his death, Nancy Spector
asserted: Gonzalez-Torress career as
an individual artist has developed quite
separately from his ongoing collaboration
with Group Material, but reverberations
from its collective efort to generate social
awareness, without dictating specic mean-
ing, are readily detectable in his work.
33

Such divisions seem difcult to counte-
nance now, for both parties involved, since
the strategies in Gonzalez-Torress work
the candy spills, the lights, the billboards,
wall texts, paper stacks are so evident in
Group Materials repertoire of engagement.
And here is the point: Gonzalez-Torress
minimalism lends itself to the elegiac
reading it has received, the slow loosening
of the aesthetic and political conjunction it
created. One might also speculate that his
key position within Nicolas Bourriauds
Relational Aesthetics (cc) has contrib-
uted to the evacuation of political specicity
in his work, especially because of the terms
by which relational forms of art practice
have been embraced by institutions.
Bourriauds emphasis on art that replicates
already existing situations is problemati-
cally generalised against the way Gonzalez-
Torress work emphasised diference and
critique (how can there be any politics
in replication?). More recent writing on
Gonzalez-Torres is somewhat corrective,
as in the cco monograph edited by
Ault, and also Joe Scanlans provocative
Artforum article from last year.
34
Although
neither of these explicitly realigns
Gonzalez-Torres with Group Material,
both recontextualise his politics in terms
that resonate with the groups aspirations
as activists. An additional point of reference
for this discussion is provided by a recent
publication on 1m Rollins, who pursued
a practice outside Group Material that
was collaborative, socially-engaged,
Group Material,
YOUR MESSAGE
HERE, 1990,
Randolph Street
Gallery, Chicago.
Billboard by Stephen
Lapthisophon.
Courtesy the artists
and Four Corners
Books
32 To mention just a few one might consult: Wikipedias entry, accessed on 9 September 2010, doesnt
mention Group Material. Oddly, the 58-page-long biography on the website of Gonzalez-Torress
long-time dealer, Andrea Rosen lists only three of the more likely figure of seventeen projects he
did with or as part of Group Material. MoMAs website cites his early involvement with the group,
but separates it from his individual practice.
33 Nancy Spector, From Criticism to Collaboration: The 80s, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres (exh. cat.), New York:
Guggenheim Museum, 1995, p.13. As with other sources, Group Material is not present in the books
bibliography or exhibition history, even though the latter includes individual, group and collaborative
two-person exhibitions'. Ibid., pp.198217.
34 J. Ault (ed.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gttingen: Steidl, 2006; and Joe Scanlan, The Uses of Disorder,
Artforum, vol.48, no.6, February 2010, pp.16269.
Artists: Group Material | 25
discursive and fancy that! commer-
cially successful.
35
Te history drawn up
by this book eshes out the overlaps and
continuities between Rollinss relationship
to Group Material and his practice as
1m Rollins and KOS.
Its hard not to feel that Group Material
broke signicant ground but missed
the party. Te year they broke up, Jppo,
coincides with a proliferation of new
forms of social practice lately successful
in museum exhibitions and biennials,
whether in the work of Francis Als or
Jeremy Deller, or equally in that of later
artists like Paul Chan and Jeanne van
Heeswijk. Its also hard not to feel if
Gonzalez-Torress success is any measure
that the politics of social practices must
be negotiated carefully and continually.
As one might expect, Group Material
addressed this in their work: their
contribution to documenta 8 was a
self-contained, circular installation titled
e Castle (Jp8). Its point of departure
was an orphaned quotation from Kafkas
novel Das Schloss (e Castle, Jp),
in which a land surveyor, known only
by the initial K., is informed posthumously
that his application for citizenship to the
walled town has been denied. He would
nonetheless be permitted to live and work
there. Tis is as good a metaphor as any
for activist arts place in the art world its
useful to have around but it will never enter
into its commodied heart. As for Group
Materials place in history? As Fredric
Jameson wrote, History is what hurts.
36

35 See Ian Berry (ed.), Tim Rollins and KOS: A History, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2009.
Rollins left the group in 1987 because it wasnt activist enough.
36 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art, London: Methuen,
1981, p.102.
Group Material,
DA ZI BAOS, 1982,
Union Square,
New York.
Photograph: Andres
Serrano. Courtesy
the artists and Four
Corners Books
26 | Aerall
e fact is that spatial form is the
perceptual basis of our notion of time,
that we literally cannot tell time
without the mediation of space.
W.J.T. Mitchell
1
History is, in eect, a science of complex
analogies, a science of double vision []
History in this sense is a special method
of studying the present with the aid of
the facts of the past.
Boris Eikhenbaum
2
For some in the early Jp8cs, time seemed
to circle back on itself. Shadows of the
Vietnam War loomed large as the Reagan
Doctrine, at the time still emergent,
galvanised late-Cold War CIA and military
operations in South and Central America,
in particular in El Salvador against the
FDR and the FMLN, and in Nicaragua
against the Sandinista Liberation Front.
3

Images of state-sponsored atrocities
appeared regularly in e New York mes,
magnifying the long-running history of
United States military action elsewhere
south of the border. As the crisis mounted,
activists across the Americas responded
in kind. In New York, political exiles and
local sympathisers formed a network of
diverse organisations, both small and large,
including CISPES (Committee in Solidarity
with the People of El Salvador), Casa
Nicaragua, Taller Latinoamericano,
INALSE (Institute of El Salvadorian Arts
and Letters in Exile) and others, including,
in the summer of Jp8, Artists Call Against
US Intervention in Latin America.
4
Active
between Jp8 and Jp8, Artists Call
broadcast a message of solidarity through-
out the art world in a national campaign
of exhibitions and other events organised
in hundreds of alternative and established
cultural institutions across the country.
5
In
New York alone, more than seven hundred
artists participated, including many
well-known gures.
6
One of the most
remarkable contributions, meline: e
Chronicle of US Intervention in Central
Artists: Group Material | 27
Counter-me:
Group Materials
Chronicle of US
Intervention in Central
and South America
Claire Grace
In this examination of Group Material's
Timeline, Claire Grace considers the
ambivalent relationship to time and
historicisation embedded within their
use of a graphic, linear timeline with
which to represent history.
1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.),
The Language of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.274.
2 Boris Eikhenbaum, Literary Environment (Leningrad 1929), in Ladislav Matejka and Krystnya
Pomorska (ed.), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan, 1978, p.56. Cited in Leah Dickerman, The Fact and the Photograph, October, vol.118,
Fall 2006, p.152.
3 The first letter Artists Call (see below) sent out to Fellow Artists in the summer of 1983 opened:
Were starting down the Vietnam road again. After the 60s, we felt a sense of defeat, but in fact
we helped deflect the full might of this country from landing on the Vietnamese. Now we have
to hold back the fist in Central America. Letter reproduced in Doug Ashford, Aesthetic Insurgency:
Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America (19821985), in System Error:
War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (exh. cat.), Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2007, p.104. The FDR
(Revolutionary Democratic Front) formed in 1980 as a grouping of social democratic parties and
political organisations. The FMLN (The Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front) formed in 1980
as a coalition of left-wing revolutionary guerrilla organisations (and has since become one of two
major political parties in El Salvador).
4 See D. Ashford, Aesthetic Insurgency, op. cit., pp.11119. Email from Julie Ault, 20 November 2010.
5 Organised by an ad-hoc coalition of artists, activists and other cultural practitioners, Artists Call
raised tens of thousands in donations for the National University of El Salvador, the Sandinista
Association of Cultural Workers and a coalition of Salvadoran labour organisations. Exhibitions,
performances and other events took place beginning in January 1984. As Jamey Gambrell put it
at the time, fund raising was almost a secondary activity the expression of art-world opposition
to official US policy in [Central America] was, above all, intended to draw greater public attention
to the unofficial" war being fought there. Artists Call was [] about artists participating in the
formation of political consciousness [ Many] organizers had participated in artist protests against
the Vietnam War J. Gambrell, Art Against Intervention, Art in America, May 1984, pp.9 and 15.
6 Participants included Louise Bourgeois, Jimmy Durham, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke, Joyce Kozloff,
Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sol LeWitt, Ana Mendieta, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert
Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Mark di Suvero and many others.
Group Material,
Timeline: A Chronicle
of US Intervention
in Central and
Latin America,
1984. For Artists
Call Against US
Intervention in
Central America',
P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center, New
York. Photograph:
Dorothy Zeidman.
Courtesy the artists
and Four Corners
Books
28 | Aerall
and Latin America, was made by Group
Material, a collective of young New York
artists that formed in Jpp and whose
members included two key gures in
Artists Call (Doug Ashford and Julie Ault).
7

meline exemplies Group Materials
installation practice in a number of key
respects, not least in its status as a tempo-
rary, one time only project specic to both
its time (a two-month period in the winter
of Jp8) and its place (P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center in Queens, New York).
8

Consistent with the ephemeral nature
of many of Group Materials projects,
meline also exemplies the collectives
curatorial approach to installation art.
Filling a room at P.S.1, a loose, salon-style
hanging chequered all four walls with a
multitude of cultural artefacts, all presented
on equal footing: newspaper clippings;
press photographs; a scarf and banner
from the FMLN and the Sandinista
Liberation Front; and artworks made
in response to the crisis by close to forty
contemporary artists, including little-
known gures and many prominent ones.
Contributors included artists as diverse
as Ida Applebroog, Conrad Atkinson, Sue
Coe, Mike Glier, Leon Golub, Michael John
Gonzalez, Louis Laurita, Faith Ringgold,
Nancy Spero, Haim Steinbach, members
of Group Material and numerous others.
meline also displayed original works
by historical gures such as Honor
Daumier, 1na Modotti and Diego Rivera.
9

A selection of agricultural products
referenced North-South trade relations:
cofee grinds lined the edges of the room;
a small heap of fresh bananas emitted a
pungent scent; ten large tobacco leaves
clung to one wall, while on another cotton
sheeting hung in gauzy folds; and sheets
of copper were also displayed. In the
centre of the room stood a massive, bright
red sculpture in the shape of a maritime
navigation buoy, which had featured in a
recent protest in Washington, DC against
US policy in Central America.
melines archival impulse
10

operated much like other Group Material
installations: it pooled relevant artefacts
to create a chamber for reection on a
pressing matter of public concern, in this
case the impact of US military intervention
on political, cultural and economic
conditions in South and Central America.
But in its representation of chronological
time, the Jp8 project marked an important
shif in Group Materials practice. A red
band three-inches wide encircled all four
walls, hand-painted at intervals with
crisp black frets and four-digit numbers
enumerating the years of US interventions
in the region.
11
Tough the timeline itself
included no explanatory text, its dated
trajectory provided a framework in which
the multifarious collage of images and
objects assembled above and below
could come together as a richly reective,
if ultimately abstract, historiography.
Mapping a temporal axis onto a spatial
one, meline introduced the model of
factographic installation later developed
by Group Material in what has become
perhaps their most well known work, AIDS
meline (Jp8p).
12
Little has been published
on the Jp8 precursor, or on either works
ambivalent relationship to the graphic
form they inhabit, the modern timeline.
13

Tis essay explores that ambivalence
in the context of the Jp8 project, looking
closely at its implications for historical
representation and spectatorship.
Like Group Materials Jp8p chronicle
of the AIDS crisis, the Jp8 work is
anything but a straightforward timeline.
Codied in late-eighteenth-century
England, this powerfully reductive
representational device was linked
from the start with the idea of teleology.
Its linear horizontal form provided what
has recently been described as an intuitive
7 During the making of Timeline, Group Materials members were: Ashford, Ault, Mundy McLaughlin
and Tim Rollins. See J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, London: Four Corners
Books, 2010, p.59. Other key figures in Artists Calls organisation included Zoe Anglesey, Daniel Flores
Ascencio of the newly formed INALSE, Coosje van Bruggen, Josely Carvalho, Leon Golub, Kimiko Hahn,
Ted Hannon, Jon Hendricks, Thomas Lawson, Lucy Lippard, Thiago de Mello and others. Though not
the subject of this essay, the diversity of Artists Calls organising body was central to the work that
was accomplished. Email from D. Ashford, 5 November 2010.
8 Group Materials exhibition (22 January18 March 1984) took place long before P.S.1 a converted
school building in Long Island City, Queens officially became affiliated with the Museum of Modern
Art in 2000. P.S.1 was then a thriving non-traditional venue for experimental art and site-specific
installation.
9 A complete list of the artists and cultural artifacts represented in Timeline, as well as a written
description of the work and a series of installation photographs all appear in J. Ault (ed.), Show and
Tell, op. cit., pp.8390 and 258. Information on originals from an email from J. Ault, op. cit.
10 Group Material anticipates the archival impulse coined for a tendency in art production in the 1990s
in Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October, vol.110, Fall 2004, pp.322.
11 Timelines numbers were hand-painted by Tim Rollins using an overhead projector and Letraset layout
transparencies prepared in advance. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.
visual analogue for concepts of historical
progress that were [then] becoming
popular.
14
In its use by Group Material
just over two centuries later, seemingly
anachronistically within the burgeoning
postmodernism of the Jp8cs, meline
defly adapts this Enlightenment-era form,
applying it just enough to mark a path
away from the anxieties postmodernism
harbours for both history and time (the
former regarded as the pen of oppression,
and the latter seen as too fugitive to chart
or trace).
15
But even as meline moves
towards temporal and historiographic
clarity, it is far from a smooth rehabilitation
of the early-modern graphic form it
marshals. True to its historical moment,
meline is also shot through with
ambivalences of its own. Confronting the
certitudes of the timeline with postmodern
doubt, meline works these two temporali-
ties against one another, and in so doing
opens up a very diferent kind of historical
encounter.
History Lessons
Te bright red band that extended horizon-
tally across melines four walls hovered
at a common eye-level about ve feet from
the oor. Its vivid colour referenced the
palette of post-revolutionary Soviet graphic
design (an important source for Group
Materials practice generally), and alluded
to the blood lost in the struggles in South
and Central America. With these overtones,
the crimson timeline not only unied the
installations kaleidoscopic visual eld,
but also commanded attention as its red
thread its single formal constant and
most prominent feature (complimented by
the giant protest sculpture at the centre of
the room).
16
Spanning from J8 to Jp8,
the timelines scope connected current
interventions, naturalised in the US Cold
War media as necessary or even heroic,
with interventions in the distant past,
whose moral depravity was easily identi-
able in retrospect.
17
By chronicling the
patterns of a silenced history of oppression,
meline functioned as a work of counter-
memory,
18
reecting in this regard the
incredulity toward master narratives of
progress described in Franois Lyotards
generation-dening book, e Postmodern
Condition, rst published in English the
year of Group Materials installation.
19

If meline participated in critical
postmodernism by virtue of its subject
matter, its red thread cut against the
grain. Abiding by the conventions of the
Artists: Group Material | 29
12 The term factography derives from Soviet Productivist art of the 1920s and 30s, which was, along
with Constructivism, an important influence for Group Material. Factography refers to the
presentation within the sphere of art of contemporary and historical data relating to social,
economic and political issues. See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, From Faktura to Factography, October,
vol.30, Fall 1984, pp.82119. As Buchloh summarises in a later essay on Hans Haacke, factography
extends from the assumption that the new masses of industrial societies would warrant new
participatory forms of art production that directly related to their daily experiences and thus
transcended the traditional class limitations imposed by the esoteric standards of advanced
bourgeois visual culture. B.H.D. Buchloh, Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason (1988),
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 19551975, Cambridge,
MA and London: The MIT Press, 2000, pp.23940. AIDS Timeline, which traces the political roots
of the AIDS crisis and its demographic and cultural impact, was first exhibited in 1989 at the
MATRIX art gallery of the University of California, Berkeley, and was reconfigured for the Wadsworth
Atheneum in 1990 and the Whitney Biennial in 1991.
13 The subject merits volumes. My own work considers these two projects as works of counter-memory
that dtourne both modern representational devices they occupy, the timeline (as I discuss here)
and the archive. I also develop a reading of these projects as embodied spatialisations of memory
reminiscent of classical mnemonic techniques in which narrative is mapped onto imagined
architectural spaces (see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
14 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, Princeton:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, p.245. As the authors demonstrate, the art of graphically
representing chronological time has a long history of its own. Tabular formats developed in the
fourth century remained popular through the eighteenth century and beyond, and in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance chronographers experimented with an extraordinarily imaginative repertoire
of graphic forms, including elaborate systems of roots and trees and anatomical renderings of Christ
as well as of dragons and other fantastical creatures. Soon after its emergence in the 1770s, the
single-axis horizontal timeline almost completely supplanted these earlier models, catching on
precisely because it captured the historical spirit of the moment. Ibid., p.19.
15 See Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,
or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review, vol.146, 1984, pp.5392.
16 See Thomas Lawson, Group Material, Timeline, P.S.1, Artforum, vol.22, no.8, May 1984, p.83.
17 As just one example, Newsweeks 10 October 1983 cover story vaunts what it calls The CIAs Secret
Warriors, referring by this brassy description to the Special Forces (Green Berets by another name),
the elite military division dispatched in many Cold War operations during this period, the ranks of
which swelled under President Reagan.
18 The term and concept of counter-memory is drawn from Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D.F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977.
19 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, op. cit.
30 | Aerall
timelines modern form, its single-axis,
diachronic extension suggests continuity
and denition where postmodernism
insists on multiplicity and fragmentation.
However appropriate to Group Materials
enduring pedagogical investments, and
to the specic site of display in this particu-
lar case (a former classroom in P.S.ls
repurposed school building), melines
measured progression of dates afrms
precisely the genre of historical and
temporal coherence that the anxious
pressures of postmodernism had already
scattered and dissolved. Indeed, in Group
Materials immediate art historical context,
from the Jpocs at least through the mid-
8cs, artistic production in the US ofen
steered clear of historical representation.
As Mark Godfrey has argued, in the few
instances where historical subject matter
surfaces in this period, it tends to place less
emphasis on the history it addresses than
on the limits of historical representation in
a world heavily mediated by press photog-
raphy and television.
20
Tere are, of course,
a number of crucial exceptions, and it is
one of the claims of this essay that Group
Materials Jp8 meline helped chart
an emergent, countervailing trend of
historicism in post-War and contemporary
avant-garde practice. Among other artists
whose work engaged this historical turn
early on, Atkinson, Golub, Hans Haacke,
Martha Rosler and Spero informed Group
Materials development to varying degrees
as mentors or interlocutors, either for
the collective generally or for individual
members.
21

meline ran counter not only to the
historical scepticism that characterises
post-War art production in the US, but also
to its almost obsessional uneasiness with
time and its measure, a prevailing anxiety
Pamela M. Lee describes in Chronophobia
(cc).
22
In nonlinear paradigms of
seriality, recursion and endless duration,
the art of this period strips time bare of
historical meaning even while compulsive-
ly belabouring its passage.
23
Examples
abound: Jpocs Minimalist sculpture, which
quite radically emphasises time as a factor
of perceptual understanding, nonetheless
scours phenomenological experience clean
of its historical conditions.
24
Te work of
Robert Smithson fragments and refracts
time to such an extent that although
historical practice ickers insistently in a
work like Spiral Jetty (Jpc), it ultimately
drains away, spiralling vertiginously out of
our grasp.
25
Hanne Darbovens temporal
sublime,
26
from Jpo8 onwards, only
in exceptional cases acknowledges the
historical content of the days it endlessly
tabulates.
27
Likewise, in the white-on-black
date paintings of On Kawaras Today series
(Jpooongoing), the artists disciplined
registration of days methodically empties
time of historical meaning.
28

20 See Mark Godfrey, The Artist as Historian, October, vol.120, Spring 2007, pp.14142. See also B.H.D.
Buchloh, A Note on Gerhard Richters October 18, 1977, October, vol.48, Spring 1989, pp.88109.
21 Atkinson, Golub, Rosler and Spero were also frequently represented in Group Materials installations
and projects (including Timeline), along with Jenny Holzer, Juan Sanchez, Mike Glier, Hans Haacke
and many other consistent contributors. Group Material had other key mentors that should be
mentioned, among them Margaret Harrison and Lucy Lippard; five members of the original group
also studied with Joseph Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts (though, with the exception of Rollins,
these members had left the group by 1981). Ashford studied with Rosler and Haacke at Cooper Union
from 1980 to 1981, and subsequently maintained relationships with both artists. Email from J. Ault,
op. cit.; J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., pp.7, 49 and 59; and email from D. Ashford, op. cit.
22 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press,
2004, p.xii. Lees account of the centrality of time in the art of the 1960s has been enormously helpful
for this essay. Whether these temporal preoccupations took on specifically phobic dimensions, as she
insists, is largely beside the point. Certainly, however, what Lee calls the chronophobia of 1960s art
(which she attributes primarily to new developments in technology and the rise of the information
age) has roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the increasingly simultaneous
temporality afforded by new inventions such as photography, telephone and radio. The modernist
avant-garde responded by theorising time as relative and non-sequential (one thinks of Man Rays
Indestructable Object, 1923, and other works from Dada and Surrealism; Joyce and Woolf in the sphere
of literature; and Bergson, Freud and Einstein in philosophy and science). See Leesa Fanning, Dada and
Surrealist Time, in Jan Schall (ed.), Tempus Fugit, Time Flies, Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of
Art, 2000, p.88.
23 P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.xxiii.
24 Ibid., p.278. Also see H. Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, The Return of the Real, Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 1996.
25 See Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004, pp.5,138 and 139.
26 P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.288.
27 Alexander Alberro goes so far as to insist that Darbovens tables of countless sequenced dates have
nothing to do with the world at all. A. Alberro, Time and Conceptual Art, in Jan Schall (ed.), Tempus
Fugit, op. cit., p.151. Darbovens monumental Kulturgeschichte 18801983 (Cultural History 1880
1983) (198083) stands as an important exception, perhaps more archival in nature than specifically
historical. Dating from the same time frame as Group Materials 1984 project, it offers an important
point of comparison, particularly since both projects are, as I explore in my current research, poised
between the archive and the timeline. See Dan Adler, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 18801983,
London: Afterall Books, 2009.
Artists: Group Material | 31
Group Material,
AIDS Timeline
(New York City 1991),
1991. Whitney
Museum of American
Art, New York.
Photograph:
Ken Schles. Courtesy
the artists and Four
Corners Books
Lee struggles to carve a space for
historical agency within the yawning
temporal extensiveness she describes.
29

But as her account itself suggests, the
ultimate efect of these tireless enumerative
systems is to clear time of any trace of
historical narrative or incident.
30
Wan
and still, they cast their spectator adrif
in a kind of post-historical ennui, a world
in which, it seems, nothing much happens
or matters and no action seems capable
of making much diference.
31

meline forecloses on this cool
indiference. Unlike the vacuous
metronomic temporality of Conceptual
art, or the clean phenomenological time of
Minimalism, meline pumped its JoJ-year
span full of historical afect. Its resonance
as history resulted from Group Materials
decision to cross their signature approach
to three-dimensional collage with a
graphic representation of time. In this
regard, however spare the timelines
numerical typography remained
throughout (a minimalist, hand-rendered
sans serif as reminiscent of Kawaras
as of Constructivist graphic design),
contextualised by the installations
28 Kawara lines each paintings storage box with a page from that days newspaper. Not meant
for exhibition purposes, this practice redundantly corroborates each paintings time and place,
but accords little historical meaning to reported events. See P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.293.
Other examples include: Christine Kozlovs 271 Blank Sheets of Paper Corresponding to 271 Days of
Concepts Rejected (1968); Douglas Hueblers Duration Piece (1969); Eva Hesses Metronomic Irregularity
II (1966); Dennis Oppenheims Time Pocket (1968); and any number of others. Even in the work
of Hans Haacke, where history and chronology often play an important role, registering the passage
of time does not necessarily grant it historical meaning. In Haackes News (196970), five teletype
machines print reams of information transmitted live from commercial wire services. Even while
the printed scrolls disrupt the ostensible neutrality of the white cube and insist on the gallerys
inscription within politics and history, the endlessly accumulating surfeit of information remains
illegible as news. The few instances of linear, chronological progressions in the art of the period
tend not to address historical time but rather to evoke a more personal commentary: Sophie Calles
The Shadow (1981), Eleanor Antins Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) or Vito Acconcis Following
Piece (1969). Though not acknowledged by Group Material as a source for their work, it should be
mentioned that Judy Chicagos Dinner Party (197479) not only stands as an important example
of historicism in late-twentieth-century art in the US (the works monumental banquet table,
place settings, tiled floor and other elements represent 1,038 women in history), but also includes
a wall-mounted historical timeline in the form of seven Heritage Panels, photo-and-text collages
that document the lives of 999 women dating from prehistory to the twentieth century.
29 P.M. Lee, Chronophobia, op. cit., p.278.
30 See ibid., p.307.
31 At least in Smithsons case, this temporal sensibility provided a kind of cosmic endorsement for
his own aversion to activism, political or otherwise. J. Roberts, Mirror-Travels, op. cit., p.9. More
important than the careers and activist credentials of any one of these artists is the kind of
spectatorship their work presupposes.
32 | Aerall
layered accumulation of display objects,
the four-digit numbers registered not
merely as abstract symbols of time, but also
as moments of history. Likewise, however
richly associative the installations cultural
artefacts might have been on their own,
only in the context of the timelines
numbered extension do they come alive
as historically articulate objects. Consider
Richard Princes re-photograph of a
Marlboro ad, mounted in meline above
the year J8. One of many works from
Princes Cowboy series (Jp8cp), the
image shows a cowboy from behind as he
reaches towards a horses bridle, perhaps
about to mount, or else breaking the
animal to follow his commands. In the
context of the installation, the visual
metaphor for conquest suggested by
Princes work directs attention to the
mutually reinforcing roots of North
American myths of masculinity and
expansionist foreign policy. But it is Group
Materials wall-mounted timeline that
makes these connections register as
specically historical: J8 is the year the
Monroe Doctrine was rst introduced,
solidifying the USs expansionist position in
the Western hemisphere and providing the
rhetorical arsenal cited on numerous future
occasions to legitimise US interventions in
the Americas.
melines commitment to history
reects Group Materials immersion in
eforts to support the struggle for self-
determination in Central America. By Jp8,
they had formed relationships with exiled
artists and intellectuals from that region,
and had plugged into the activities of
CISPES, Casa Nicaragua, the Taller
Latinoamericano and other organisations
that together occupied the rst oor of
Jp West Jst Street, where, joining these
organisations, Group Material rented an
ofce space beginning in the autumn of
Jp8.
32
It was there at the Taller Latino-
americano that Group Material presented
Luchar! (Struggle!, Jp8) the previous
spring. An important precursor for
meline (as well as for Artists Call),
Luchar! assembled a range of works made
in response to the crisis in Central America,
including many by artists later included in
meline.
33
Not unlike meline, Luchar!
vividly addressed the realities of torture,
state violence and human rights abuses
in the region.
34
Te Jp8 project included
no timeline or chronology, however,
and remained focused on present-tense
conditions rather than their deeper
historical roots. Te year-and-a-half
transition between Luchar! and meline
opened the door to historical time, a shif
for which Group Materials involvement in
Artists Call and the organisations of West
Jst Street was perhaps central. CISPES
made the cumulative, historical depth of
current events explicit by producing a yer
chronicling the dates of US interventions
between J8o8 and Jp8 a chronology
that contributed to Group Materials
move towards the marked historicism
of meline, which included the yer
as a scaled-up Photostat mounted on
the entrance wall immediately to the right
of the title.
35

Many other points of reference
informed Group Materials turn towards
melines chronographic ethos. Too
numerous to detail fully here, it should
be stressed that the collectives historical
sensibility extended perhaps less from
precedents in the realm of visual art than
from popular culture. In this regard,
CISPESs yer joined the many graphic
charts and timelines printed regularly in
Newsweek, me magazine and other
similar publications. Te exhibition design
of Charles and Ray Eames also played a
Unlike the vacuous metronomic
temporality of Conceptual art,
or the clean phenomenological
time of Minimalism, meline
pumped its -year span full
of historical aect.
32 Or in North American English, the second floor.
33 Luchar! included projects by Bolivar Arellano, Golub, Lawson, Lippard, OSPAAL (Organisation of
Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America), Susan Meiselas, Rosler, Christy Rupp,
Anton van Dalen, members of Group Material and about forty others. J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit.,
p.258. The link between Luchar! and Artists Call is described in D. Ashford, Aesthetic Insurgency,
op. cit., pp.11416.
34 As described in Show and Tell, A work by Anne Pitrone a life-size piata that depicts a figure in
the strappado torture position generates some controversy. Its symbolically powerful presence
is disturbingly evocative of lived reality to some staff members of and visitors to the organisations
on the same floor. J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit. pp.7475.
35 Conversation with D. Ashford, 10 September 2010; and conversation with J. Ault, , 20 November 2010.
CISPESs timeline is reproduced in J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.90.
Artists: Group Material | 33
36 First mounted in 1961 at the California Museum of Science and Industry, Mathematica was
subsequently installed semi-permanently in Chicago, Boston and New York. The World of Franklin
and Jefferson was organised in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and travelled
to various venues in Europe before opening in New York in 1976. Group Material encountered these
exhibitions primarily through their published documentation. Email from J. Ault, op. cit.
37 Combining diverse cultural and historical material, Atkinsons work and the Eameses exhibitions
paralleled and contributed to the archival, anti-hierarchical inclusiveness of Group Materials
installations. T. Rollins, Art as Social Action: An Interview with Conrad Atkinson, Art in America,
vol.68, February 1980, pp.11923. Ault also names Constructivism as a point of reference for
Group Materials historicism. Email from J. Ault, op. cit. I am grateful to Dennis Tenenboym for
pointing out that post-revolutionary Soviet graphic design not infrequently incorporates temporally
arranged presentations of data, such as graphs and tables.
38 B.H.D. Buchloh, Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason, op. cit., pp.22228.
39 Yve-Alain Bois, D. Crimp, Rosalind Krauss and H. Haacke, A Conversation with Hans Haacke,
October, vol.30, Fall 1984, p.37.
40 In an unpublished portion of an interview with Group Material that appeared in Parachute magazine
in 1989, Jim Drobnik prompts Ault, Ashford and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to reflect on the relationship
between their practice and Haackes Manet-PROJEKT. Their responses convey quite different
perspectives, though on the whole their comments draw a distinction between the muckraking
specificity of Haackes work and Group Materials more interrogative and expansive approach.
Even while retaining this more inquiry-based, inclusive approach, however, the forensic historicism
of a work like AIDS Timeline nonetheless resembles the real-time analysis for which Haackes
work is known, in particular in projects such as Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,
a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971). This connection has been pointed out in David
Deicher, Polarity Rules: Looking at Whitney Annuals and Biennials, 19682000, in J. Ault (ed.),
Alternative Art New York 19651985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp.24445. See also J. Drobnik, Interview with Group Material,
21 June 1989, Group Material Archive, Box 7, Interview Transcripts 1, The Fales Library & Special
Collections, New York University; and J. Drobnick, Dialectical Group Materialism, Parachute, no.56,
OctoberDecember 1989, p.29.
41 D. Rosenberg and A. Grafton, Cartographies of Time, op. cit., pp.122 and 241.
role; Mathematica: A World of Numbers
and Beyond (JpoJ) and e World of
Franklin and Jeerson (Jp) both
included wall-mounted timelines, for
instance.
36
Te installations of British
Conceptual artist Conrad Atkinson made
a strong impression as well. Atkinsons
rst exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine
Arts in New York, MaterialSix Works
(Jpp), included wall-mounted displays
chronicling various politically-signicant
histories, including the struggle in North-
ern Ireland and the nexus of industrial
pollution and public health.
37

One further precedent should be
mentioned here, if only as a heuristic point
of comparison: Hans Haackes Manet-
PROJEKT (Jp). In this works ten
sequential panels, Haacke charts the
provenance of douard Manets J88c
painting Une Botte dasperges (A Bunch
of Asparagus), which had just entered
the permanent collection of the Wallraf-
Richartz Museum in Cologne. Conceived
for (and ultimately censored by) this
museum, Haackes work exposes the
Nazi-era career of the paintings previous
owner, Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann
Josef Abs, who had been a prominent
gure in the economic establishment of the
Tird Reich. A timeline of sorts, Manet-
PROJEKT deploys historical chronology
to expose the political contradictions of
cultural patronage.
38
As Haacke pointed
out in a Jp8 interview, inverting the art
historians custom to trace the provenance
of a work, provenance serves here not to
authenticate the object but rather to expose
its underside.
39

Te forensic historicism of Haackes
work and certainly its prehistory in Soviet
productivism share points in common
(as well as many diferences) with Group
Materials practice, including projects
such as meline and AIDS meline.
If less concretely factographic than
Manet-PROJEKT, and broader in its social
and political ramications, meline could
be said to extend in part from a similarly
historicising, chronographic impulse.
Signicantly, too, each work explodes the
expectations of the traditional historical
form it inhabits.
40

Historical Polysemy
meline subjects linear historiography
to a series of displacements that initiate
the viewer into a mode of spectatorship
quite diferent from the one the timeline
customarily invites. If expanding the
timeline at an architectural scale is now
somewhat common (in museum displays,
for instance), it is rare in the larger history
of the form, whose power as a synoptic
medium more ofen exploits the disembod-
ied, at a glance scale of the printed page.
41

Pulling this totalising view apart, meline
recasts the two-dimensional medium in a
three-dimensional volume, opening it out to
create a chronographic space. Rather than
providing a birds eye view, it implicates the
spectator as a subject embodied within
34 | Aerall
times unfolding. It presents time not only
as a linear progression accumulating from
lef to right, but also as a loop that encircles
all four walls, enfolding the past cyclically
within the present, and vice versa.
meline further dislodges the
narrative authority of its form by the
uncertain relationships it constructs
between the dates charted along the wall
and the artworks and artefacts arranged
around it. Rather than a chronological
survey of objects dating from the years the
timeline maps, the majority of visual and
cultural material dates from the Jpcs
and 8cs, while the timeline plunges back
a century and a half earlier. Tis means
that while some years (especially the more
recent ones) are paired with synchronically
complimentary objects Atkinsons
For Chile (Jp), for example, hangs just
afer Jp, the year of Chilean President
Salvador Allendes assassination temporal
dissonance largely prevails. Mike Gliers
Clubs of Virtue (Jpp) hangs below J8;
Denise Greenes Revolution # (Jp8)
hangs above Jp; a cover from the X-Men
comic book series (published since Jpo)
hangs just shy of J8, and inches behind
Francisco Goyas print ey Carried Her
O (Jppp, plate 8 of Los Caprichos).
Even when works appear near their date
of production Daumiers Le Rve dun
marguillier (e Churchwarden's Dream,
J8c), for example, hangs not far from
J8 more ofen than not the conceptual
distance between numbered events and
visual objects demands leaps in cognition
to connect the dots across culture and
geography, if not time as well. It may not
be immediately apparent, for example,
that Daumiers caricature of the Catholic
Church in nineteenth-century France also
illuminates Church politics in the very
diferent context of Central America.
42

In the relative absence of temporal
consonance, thematic correspondence
provides meline with a second organising
principle.
43
Electoral corruption in El
Salvador in Jp8 thus nds its counterpart
in a Jp photomontage by John Hearteld,
which shows voters driven by intimidation
to cast ballots for the Nazi party.
44
But as
the above description suggests, most of
melines thematic correlations stretch
Group Material,
Subculture, 1983,
project on the New
York City subways.
Work shown by
Dennis Adams.
Courtesy the artists
and Four Corners
Books
42 Group Material, proposal, Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America,
New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, January 1984, Group Material Archive, Box 1, Timeline:
The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, 1984, The Fales Library & Special
Collections, New York University.
43 See ibid. and J. Ault (ed.), Show and Tell, op. cit., p.85.
Artists: Group Material | 35
the imagination just as far, since many
objects, rather than cued to an isolated
year, resonate meaningfully at any number
of points along the timelines four-wall
extension. As apposite as Princes Marlboro
ad re-photograph is for J8, its aesthetic
of Manifest Destiny also reects the
numerous subsequent years in which
US government ofcials cited the Monroe
Doctrine as a rationale for intervention
(including several years listed on the
timeline, such as Jp, which references
the coup dtat in Guatemala that year,
organised and sponsored by the CIA).
Likewise, hanging above the year J8po,
a poster from Barbara Krugers series
You make history when you do business
(Jp8) precisely describes a much larger
historical context of economically
motivated military intervention. In 1na
Modottis photograph Hands Resting on
Tool (Jpo), which hangs between J8o
and J88, a labourers hands pack the
closely cropped frame, simultaneously
conceding to work while issuing a silent
refusal. Te photograph conveys volumes
about the exploitation of labour during
melines entire historical span.
As these examples suggest, restless at
their given location on the timeline, most
objects echo just as meaningfully across
all four walls. Teir eloquence across time
signals the continuity of oppression in
the past and present.
45
By the same token,
no single artwork or cultural artefact tells
the full story of any one year; instead each
intervention appears as an overdetermined
complex whose narrative disperses across
a heterogeneous constellation of objects.
Ultimately, then, the timelines two-
dimensional trajectory serves not as a
historical absolute but as a structuring
device that encourages viewers to diagram
a virtual, three-dimensional web of
connections across both space and time.
46

Te installation thereby rethinks the
timeline less as a representational form
than as an interrogative one, designed as
much as anything to provoke the viewers
historical imagination.
meline further disrupts the conven-
tions of linear historiography by presenting
three diferent competing timelines. Each
chronicles the same general subject matter,
without coinciding. Multiplied three ways,
the works rival timelines thus cast doubt
on the narrative authority of the work as
a whole. At P.S.l, Group Materials red and
black wall-mounted chronology vied for
attention with the timeline provided by
CISPES, which describes interventions
between J8o8 and Jp8, each with a single
line of text, and which Group Material
mounted in a scaled-up version on me-
lines entrance wall.
47
Te third chronology
consists of a series of black-and-white
posters designed by New York artist Bill
Allen. Group Material elected to display
Allens posters as part of meline afer
having featured them one year earlier in
Subculture (Jp8), an exhibition project
organised by Group Material in New York
City subways.
48
Allens posters each follow
an identical diptych format. Te right side
reproduces a grainy photograph of a
soldier confronting another man. On the
lef side, in simple typeface against a stark
white background, the name of a country in
South or Central America or the Caribbean
oats above the year of a US invasion in
that country. If Allens spare and repetitive
image-text aesthetic takes the timeline
to the brink of Conceptual arts temporal
blankness, its ultimate emphasis is, as
one contemporary reviewer put it, the
harrowing repetition of the oppression it
44 Heartfields image illustrates the cover of a 1933 edition of the German leftist magazine, AIZ
(Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, or Workers' Pictorial Newspaper). Group Material describes this
connection in its proposal for Timeline, op. cit.
45 Thus, as Thomas Lawson put it in a review at the time, Those seeking exact correspondences between
dates and display items would have been disappointed, for the evidence was put to different use.
A point-by-point demonstration would simply have been another accretion of power, another
construction of influence. T. Lawson, Group Material, Timeline, P.S.1, op. cit., p.83.
46 This point is indebted to a discussion about AIDS Timeline between Ault and Richard Meyer following
Aults presentation at A Museum of Ideas Contemporary Conversations (2), 27 March 2010,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
47 Conversation with J. Ault, op. cit. CISPESs chronology also appeared in a catalogue P.S.1 published
on all the exhibitions on view at the time. In addition to CISPESs chronology, the section dedicated
to Timeline also includes an updated version of Group Materials initial proposal for Timeline, as well
as a floor-plan sketch by Rollins. P.S.1 Museum; Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Winter:
January 22 March 18, 1984 (exh. cat.), New York: Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1984.
48 Allens posters were designed for Group Materials 1983 project Subculture, in which the collective
invited one hundred artists to exhibit in 1,400 rented advertising spaces on New York City trains.
Falling between Luchar! and Timeline, Allens chronology (along with CISPESs timeline and the
other reference points cited above) contributed to Group Materials shift toward the historicising
emphasis of the 1984 project. Allens posters also hung on the walls of Group Materials office on
West 21st Street. Conversation with D. Ashford, op. cit.; and email from D. Ashford, op. cit.
36 | Aerall
chronicles.
49
Moreover, in the context of
meline the posters formed a dotted line
near the ceiling, contributing to the larger
works historical polysemy, where three
rival chronologies coexist, highlighting by
their diferences the problem of historical
representation itself.
50

If melines three chronologies
represent history in diferent terms, they
also represent diferent historical content.
Te crimson timeline lists only a small
selection of dates enumerated in CISPESs
version. Te latter begins in J8o8, while the
former begins more than forty years
earlier. Many of the dates in Allens timeline
fail to appear in either of the other two
(which is only partly explained by Allens
inclusion of interventions in the Caribbean,
a region they exclude). On one wall, Allens
timeline lingers at the turn of the century,
counting of the years J8p8, Jpco and
Jpcp, while below it Group Materials red
line rushes ahead to Jp. On another
wall, Allens timeline roughly aligns with
the temporal frame below, with both
marking years between J8c and J8oc, but
even here the two timelines are syncopated.
Only in a handful of instances do their
dates coincide.
With three diferent temporal frames
of reference potentially visible at once
the crimson timeline at eye level, the Allen
timeline up above and the CISPES timeline
on the entrance wall Group Materials
meline ofers anything but a denitive
account of history. meline is in this
regard as much about exposing the
fallibility of historical representation and
the impossibility of narrative closure as
it is about presenting a xed and didactic
account of the past. Diachronic as a
chronicle, it is also synchronous as a
spatialised and multiple form. Denitive as
a timeline, the works juxtaposition of
conicting chronologies shows each one as,
in part, a construction.
Beyond the installations representation
of time, its existence in time is just as
elusive. If the timeline as a form lays claim
to the permanence of narrative authority,
Group Materials meline dees the model
once again. Specic to its time and place,
when the installation closed in March Jp8
the objects it had gathered dispersed
forever. From the vantage point of the
present, to experience the installation as
it once was is impossible. One has to rely
instead on the few existing installation
shots and the memories of those who
witnessed the work rsthand. Even during
the course of the exhibition, meline
emphasised its ephemeral constitution.
Bananas ripened, tobacco leaves browned
and cofee grinds lost their scent. If these
material transformations chart a temporal
trajectory, their deterioration and ultimate
disintegration suggest decay rather than
teleology or linear progress. Counter to
conventions of the timeline as a form (as
well as to conventions of the art object),
the work made itself just as elusive as the
historical representation it ofered.
As this essay has argued, meline
occupied the form its title names only by
inverting many of its conventions. In
exploding the expectations of the formal
device it inhabits, the work substitutes a
diferent kind of historical encounter for
the one the timeline might otherwise invite.
In so doing, it not only succeeds in bringing
an occluded history to light but also
encourages its viewers to think critically
and historically about the present, and
about the role of narrative form in all
historical representations. Rather than the
uid and singular voice of the conventional
timeline, here the historical record
fragments and divides, multiplying across
an intricate circuitry of temporal registers
and visual forms. Neither able to settle on
any one object, nor fully trust any narrative
voice, the viewer must rely on his or her
own historical imagination to make sense
of the past.
51
As a work of historical
representation, therefore, meline casts
doubt on the possibility of any single
authoritative account.
But if meline raises the sceptre of the
post-historical, it does so only to prove this
notion wrong. Tough the work refuses
49 J. Gambrell, Art Against Intervention, op. cit., p.15.
50 By including these three different chronologies, Group Material may not have specifically intended
for Timeline to represent such divergent accounts of the past. However, they were certainly very
familiar with both Allens and CISPESs chronologies prior to executing the wall-mounted timeline.
As mentioned above, they invited Allen to exhibit the black-and-white posters as part of Timeline
after they had been included in Group Materials project Subculture. Similarly, working in the
environment of West 21st Street they had certainly read CISPESs chronology, if not discussed it
at meetings. This suggests some degree of intentionality around the historical multi-vocality that
ultimately results.
51 The descriptions in this paragraph draw closely on Godfreys fascinating and pertinent discussion
of the work of Matthew Buckingham. M. Godfrey, The Artist as Historian, op. cit., p.149.
Artists: Group Material | 37
the authority of linear historiography, it
remains recognisable as a timeline nonethe-
less. By combining this form with strategies
of abstraction (the lack of explanatory
texts and the loose cognitively challenging
connections between dates and objects)
and multiplicity (the profusion of objects
and narrative voices), meline exhorts
its viewers (as well as its makers) to act as
historians themselves. Refusing postmod-
ernisms pessimism towards historical
labour and representation, the work insists
on the necessity of both tasks, not just
for artistic practice but also as modes of
spectatorship.
52

History is only part of melines
lesson, however, for its centre of gravity
is an object of political agency, a massive
bright red sculpture that had been bran-
dished a few weeks before the exhibition
opened at a public protest in the nations
capital. Created by Bill Allen, Ann Messner
and Barbara Westermann, the sculpture
takes the form of a giant maritime naviga-
tion buoy. At the demonstration, its bell
rang a repeated toll of warning, marking
time not metronomically but according
to the jostling movements of protestors
holding it alof by the beams at its base.
In meline, though silenced and stilled
by the exhibition context, the buoys
earlier life was referenced in a photograph
documenting the Washington demonstra-
tion, prominently mounted on the crimson
timeline as the very nal image of Jp8,
the installations culminating moment,
when history slips into the present. Te
chromatic bond between the sculpture
and Group Materials timeline establishes
a connection between historical analysis
and public dissent in the present tense.
Te red at the centre also marks time along
the walls, underscoring collective protest
as a force as constant as the chronicle
of oppression itself. In turn, the lessons
of history that unfold along the walls
ultimately converge at the focal point of
collective action, interpellating melines
viewers not only as historians but also as
potential activists.
52 See B.H.D. Buchloh, A Note on Gerhard Richters October 18, 1977, op. cit. M. Godfreys The Artist
as Historian, op. cit. makes the case that history, relatively absent from Anglo-American post-War
art, has recently become a primary concern in artistic practice. Notable examples relevant for Group
Materials work include: Roslers installation Fascination with the (game of the) exploding (historical)
hollow leg (1985); Richters series October 18, 1977 (1988); Mary Kellys Mea Culpa (1999); and,
more recently, Chto delat?s timeline projects (200810) and the Potos Principle exhibition
at the Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofa in Madrid and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin,
curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann. My current project undertakes
a more thoroughgoing comparison with works such as these.
Group Material,
Timeline: A Chronicle
of US Intervention
in Central and
Latin America,
1984. For Artists
Call Against US
Intervention in
Central America',
P.S.1 Contemporary
Art Center, New
York. Photograph:
Dorothy Zeidman.
Courtesy the artists
and Four Corners
Books
40 | Aerall
Previous spread:
Hans Eijkelboom,
Sunday 24 August
1997, US. New York,
Manhattan, alongside
Hudson River,
10.5011.20 a.m.,
1997, C-print,
50 70cm. From
the series Photo Notes,
19922007
Hans Eijkelboom,
Identiteit (Identity),
1976, photograph
and text, 42 60cm.
One of a series of ten.
Both images courtesy
the artist
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Photo Notes | 41
Repeatability is the very essence of a sign.
Richard Sennett, e Fall of Public Man
. Preliminary One
By the time this issue of Aerall hits the newsstands, the Shanghai World Expo cJc, titled
Better City, Better Life, will have been committed to memory, restoring the balance of
power among Chinas leading cities afer the cc8 Olympic extravaganza thrust Beijing
onto the world stage as a so-called alpha world city. Tis will (almost certainly) not signal
the end, however, of the steady stream of publications with titles such as China Rising:
Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (Columbia University Press, ccp); China Rising:
Will the West Be Able to Cope? (World Scientic Publishing Company, ccp); Chinas Rise:
Challenges and Opportunities (Peterson Institute for International Economics, ccp);
China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power (Random House, cc); China,
Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (Scribner,
cc); e Chinese Century: e Rising Chinese Economy and
Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and
Your Job (Wharton School Publishing, cco); e Rise of China:
How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower (W.W.
Norton & Company, Jpp); e Rise of China: Essays on the
Future Competition (Encounter Books, ccp); e Rise of China
and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (Monthly
Review Press, ccp); China Shakes the World: A tans Rise
and Troubled Future (Mariner Books, cc); and Dragon Rising:
An Inside Look at China Today (National Geographic, cc).
Te rst thing to observe here is the obvious lack of imagination
among Western authors in capturing the global phenomenon
of China rising. More important, however, is the distinct sense
of fear, if not outright panic, that informs these various analyses of China rising and
what it means for your (really our) job. Posing as sincere scholarly interest in the Chinese
economy, a relatively unrened brand of sinophobia is easily unmasked in these writings
the real subtext of the thousand-year-old history of the Wests ever-hesitant, ambivalent
relationship with the Empire of the Middle.
1

Many diferent fears come together in the aforementioned complex history, but
for now (i.e. with an eye on what will follow shortly) I want to single out one source of
anxiety in this cauldron of orientalist fantasies, namely the spectral terror of oriental
sameness of repetition on a mass (i.e. industrialised) scale which led even so sensitive
and empathic a thinker as Emmanuel Levinas, normally so attuned to the mysteries
of alterity, to regress to the xenophobic atavism of fear of the yellow peril
2
fear
of numbers.
e Mass Ornament Revisited:
Reading From Hans Eijkelbooms
Photo Notes
Dieter Roelstraete
Dieter Roelstraete looks
at Hans Eijkelbooms
momentous photographic
project of classication
and documentation,
Photo Notes, to argue for
a humanism that staves
o the fear of the same.
1 I am indebted to Monika Szewczyk for pointing out many of the titles listed above. The topic of
the Wests enduring fascination with Chinas phoenix-like rise to global prominence is one subject
that is dealt with rather extensively in her essay Negation Notes (while working on an exhibition
with Allan Sekula featuring This Aint China: A Photonovel), published in e-flux journal #13,
February 2010, also available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/110 (last accessed on
26 October 2010).
2 The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves
a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any
familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past. This passage is taken from what Slavoj
iek calls arguably [Levinass] weirdest text, The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic (1960).
Quoted in Slavoj iek, Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule, in Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice
and Contradiction, London and New York: Verso, 2007, p.3.
42 | Aerall
. Preliminary Two
On a closely related note, anyone one who has own into the gargantuan Chinese
manufacturing centres of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing, will have noticed
exhaust fumes permitting the dense patchwork of gleaming blue roofs that cover
hundreds of square miles of built-up land on these urban archipelagos fractured outskirts.
Indeed, the view from above these monochromatic mosaics of factory buildings, many
of which clog together in actual factory towns, which may in turn form dense clusters
of factory metropolises, certainly helps to remove any remaining doubt that the world as
we know it is indeed made in China from the laptop Im using to write this (and what
is its emphatic claim of having been designed in California other than a desperate attempt
to cover up its indebtedness to Chinese Vernun?) and the digital camera I used to
immortalise the view which sparked this insight, to the thermos Im pouring my cofee
from, to whatever else Im about to go out shopping for. And of course this endless list of
things made in China also includes the equipment used by Hans Eijkelboom to produce
the work we are about to discuss a signicant portion of which also has China as its
subject. So many things, in fact, are now made in China that a US journalist named Sara
Bongiorni wrote a best-seller chronicling her familys resolution to live one whole year
without buying or consuming a single thing made in China (this was in cc; one cannot
help but wonder what has happened to the family since)
3
yet more self-conscious civic
awareness, in other words, that is easily unmasked as crude consumerist sinophobia.
. Artist
Who is Hans Eijkelboom? Te short answer is: a Dutch photo-artist, born in Jpp,
who lives and works in Amsterdam and in a dozen other places around the world where
his faux-anthropological photo-expeditions may happen to take him at any given time.
Only slightly younger than his compatriots Bas Jan Ader, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk and
Wim T. Schippers, Eijkelboom was an active local member of the burgeoning Conceptual
art movement that made Holland, and Amsterdam in particular, such a crucial avant-
garde art destination in the late Jpocs and early cs. At age he was the youngest
participant, among such luminaries as Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and
Robert Smithson, in the landmark exhibition Sonsbeek J: Sonsbeek buiten de perken
(JpJ), organised in his hometown of Arnhem. Inspired by Concept arts groundbreaking
experiments with machine-like image (re-)production and a radically deskilled (anti)
photography Douglas Hueblers practice, along with that of Ed Ruscha, is perhaps the
dominant model here Eijkelboom already in the early Jpcs settled on the serial imaging
procedure that would become the hallmark of his practice, with the singular characteristic
that almost all of his early work (roughly made in the period between JpJ and Jp8c)
amounted to an extensive exercise in self-portraiture. In Jp, Eijkelboom succeeded in
appearing in one newspaper photograph each day for ten consecutive days (mostly grainy
pictures of regional non-events, relegated to the back pages); in Jpo he made a series of
portraits documenting his encounters with the leading politicians and artists of the day;
in eight pictures made in Jp8 he appears as a model appraising such consumer items as
Cockburns port, Heineken beer and Van Nelle tobacco. Equally early on, another pivotal
pictorial precept emerged in the sartorial motif that, along with the serial procedure (and
its formal expression, in exhibition formats, through the gure of the grid), continues to
dene his work to this day: in a photo series from Jp, he photographed diferent people
wearing his clothes; in De Drie Communisten (e ree Communists, Jp), the artist
posed next to portraits of Marx, Lenin and Mao, each time in matching Marxist, Leninist
and Maoist outts (the diferent hats give the story away faster than anything else); in the
extensive series Identiteit (Identity, Jpo), Eijkelboom photographed himself dressed up in
such a way as to correspond to the image some of his childhood acquaintances had formed
of the artist, as recounted to an assistant, ten years afer having last seen him; in De Ideale
Man (e Ideal Man, Jp8), one hundred women were sent questionnaires in which they
were asked to describe their ideal man, and the ten best answers were used for yet more
shape-shifing sartorial experimentation from Eijkelboom. And in Jpp came the nal
dening element of the diaristic the humdrum record of a mans daily doings and
with it the decisive turn towards the Other, in greater or lesser numbers, most easily and
furtively encountered in the street.
3 See Sara Bongiorni, A Year Without Made in China: One Familys True Life Adventure in the Global
Economy, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Photo Notes | 43
Hans Eijkelboom,
Advertising Poster
Project, 1978,
Cibachrome,
80 110cm.
Collection Museum of
Modern Art Arnhem
. Artwork
Eijkelbooms early experiments with street photography, that honourable genre that
includes such distinguished practitioners as Eugne Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert
Doisneau and Gary Winogrand the trusted purveyors of the exact type of ne arts
photography that early Conceptual art did so much to discredit still bear the marks of
his debt to Douglas Huebler et al.: for Mooi Lelijk (Beautiful Ugly, Jp8c), for example,
he asked random passersby in the city centre of 1lburg to point out someone in the crowd
whom they found beautiful and someone whom they found ugly; in each resulting series of
photographs, a portrait of the participant was shown in the middle, anked by the objects
of his or her aesthetic judgment to the lef and right. Tis, then, is also where the crowd
classes, groups, masses, multitudes begins to come into focus as the artists true subject
(around the same time he stopped taking pictures of himself); it is no coincidence that in
Jp8J, Eijkelboom embarked on his appropriately titled Hommage aan August Sander
(Homage to August Sander), a project for which he asked people he encountered in the
street When you look at the world and acknowledge that not all people are the same, what
is the rst division into groups or sorts that comes to mind?, upon which they were invited,
afer having been photographed, to take a walk through Arnhem with Eijkelboom to point
out people in the crowd who corresponded to this division. Te humorous, outlandish
crudeness of some of the resulting typologies authoritarian types, housewives,
junkies, ofce people, scum, the super-rich already points the way towards the
44 | Aerall
parodic typo-logic that would become the driving force behind Eijkelbooms magnum
opus, the so-called Photo Notes he made on a daily basis from 8 November Jpp until
8 November cc.
Encompassing thousands of photographs of what are, without a doubt, individuals
there are some exceptions to this rule in the form of pairs or couples, mothers and
daughters and the like, but these, too, are very much portraits, pictures of highly individual
faces in the crowd
4
Eijkelbooms Photo Notes efectively constitutes an amateur (visual)
anthropology of the global village at a turning point in its history, precisely at a moment
in time (the Jppcs and cccs) when globalisation as such took efect. Here, again, the
importance of scrupulous photographic attention to sartorial detail cannot be overstated,
although Eijkelboom is of course not a fashion photographer. His interest in clothing
concerns the levelling qualities of the uniform much more than the fashionistas illusory
logic of individuation, the provision of which the garment industry must by its very
denition found itself upon. It is repetition (or sameness) rather than diference, then,
that matters, in spite of how laborious or sincere the efort on the part of the wearer is to
difer or otherwise stand out from the crowd by clothing alone. By far the most amusing
pages from Eijkelbooms kaleidoscopic diary are those in which he has brought together
all the photographs made on the Dam in Amsterdam, one August afernoon in cc,
of young black men wearing Scarface T-shirts; or those depicting young women in
unnecessarily tight white tank tops licking ice creams; or fully-grown men, clearly
civilians, dressed from head to toe in camouage gear (o November Jpp, from J pm till
J.c pm, on the corner of Broadway and Jth Street in New York City). For this is Photo
Notess single governing principle, that which both invites immediate comparison
with August Sanders monumental Menschen des . Jahrhunderts (People of the th
Century, Jp), and decisively sets it apart from its legendary precedent: the artist
takes to the street not only armed with his camera, but also but with a set of rigorous,
Hans Eijkelboom,
ParisNew York
Shanghai, 2007,
C-print, 80 162cm
each. Courtesy the
artist
4 This is a reference to the following famous haiku by Ezra Pound: The apparition of these faces in
the crowd; petals on a wet, black bough the informal motto of an exhibition organized by Iwona
Blazwick and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and Castello di
Rivoli in Turin in 2004 and 2005. Pounds celebrated poem powerfully evokes the situation of the
individual in the metropolis: personalities suspended in a moment within the life of the city.
The exhibition was intended as an exploration of this condition of modernity seen in realist art,
especially art of the human face and form. [ It] traces a history of avant-garde figuration from a
new perspective. Clearly, it should have included the work of Hans Eijkelboom. See I. Blazwick
and C. Christov-Bakargiev, Faces in the Crowd: The Modern Figure and Avant-Garde Realism (exh. cat.),
London and Turin: Whitechapel Art Gallery and Castello di Rivoli, 2005.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Photo Notes | 45
non-negotiable rules. Photographing only takes place in a precisely determined spot,
for a precisely determined length of time (both facts are always included at the bottom of
the resulting arrangement of photographs as crucial bits of information), and the subject
is correspondingly narrowly dened to ensure maximum sameness. Young girls with
Spice Girl T-shirts, young men with Che Guevara T-shirts (most of them, though not all,
Rage Against the Machine merchandise) or middle-aged men with Rolling Stones T-shirts;
topless types on rollerblades; middle-aged mothers and teenage daughters schlepping
shopping bags while talking on their mobile phones; people who are not emergency
workers yet still wear yellow coats as a document of changing fashions, Photo Notes
creates the impression that what was in reality only a decade-and-a-half ago is light
years away in time.
In cc, Eijkelboom published ParisNew YorkShanghai, a selection of a staggering
J,J8 photographs taken in the titles locations during the closing years of Photo Notess
decade-and-a-half the projects epitaph so to speak, named afer the capitals of the
nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-rst centuries, as the artist himself has remarked in
a conversation with the author. (Tis is where we return, at long last, to our inaugural
discussion of sinophilia and sinophobia.
Luckily, the artist does not seem to sufer
from either: Eijkelbooms China, that
bewildering Empire of the Numbers,
is as much a site of diference as it is a site
of sameness, just like every other culture
in the globalised capitalist world.) In all
three cities, the same precarious balance
between diference and sameness, articu-
lated by the way people dress and comport
themselves in public, persists. In retrospect,
one question in particular a telling measure of the changes wrought upon the world
in the couple of decades that the artist has been snapping away, changes that perhaps
nowhere have made themselves felt more acutely than in both China and the China in
our minds cannot so easily be answered: would the Chinese chapter of this triptych
have made any sense in the communist Shanghai of the early Jp8cs, of which our image
is a rather drab and monochrome one? Would the monolithic spectacle of an army of
similarly clad Chinese men and women on identikit bicycles have made for insufciently
Seen through Eijkelbooms lens,
the rise of China that is so
oen the source of all kinds of
xenophobic anxieties becomes
a rather more colourful,
comical aair a carnival
of subtle, nearly imperceptible
dierences.
46 | Aerall
heterogeneous photographic subject material? However it be, the ancient Western fear
of oriental sameness, really a fear of numbers, here appears assuaged by the seemingly
benign diferentiating efects of global capitalism: seen through Eijkelbooms lens,
the rise of China that is so ofen the source of all kinds of xenophobic anxieties becomes
a rather more colourful, comical afair a carnival of subtle, nearly imperceptible
diferences.
. Reception, Interpretation
One thing that strikes me whenever I return to Eijkelbooms work, whether in book
form he has authored an impressive catalogue of self-published artists books or as
an amalgamation of art objects (i.e. nely framed prints), is its persistent good humour,
the lucidity of what is in essence its humanist spirit. Te photographs subject is the
comdie humaine, this time rendered surveyable thanks to the artists commitment to
a handful of tried-and-tested minimalist or serialist rules of a kind more commonly
associated, paradoxically, with the anti-humanist gaze of a sociology of structures, patterns
and numbers, reducing the dignity of diference (to paraphrase Jonathan Sacks) to the
mere spectacle of a human zoo or, worse still, cogs in a machine. Yet we never get the
impression that the subject of Eijkelbooms camera-eye is being ridiculed or literally looked
down upon (even though the persistence of either class distinction or class consciousness
of the existence of social strata certainly is one important element of the work), which
raises a number of questions involving the apparently academic issue of detachment and
distancing, and of the importance of the proximity of photographer to subject: where
exactly does the artist stand when he makes these pictures, many of them detailed enough
to register the intricate nery of his subjects facial expressions? Does the artist submerge
himself in the crowd he is immortalising? Does this tell us something about the diference
(or identity) of the people, the crowd, the multitude? Hans Eijkelboom is a tall man, making
it easy for him to command a panoramic outlook, but his is not the merciless birds-eye
view of a scientist noting the variety of exotic rituals in which his temporary hosts indulge.
Subtly satirising the objectivist optic of the social sciences, his work is animated by the
Hans Eijkelboom,
Saturday 24 January
1998, NL. Arnhem,
Ketelstraat, 11.30
12.30 p.m., 1998,
C-print, 50 70cm.
From Photo Notes,
19922007.
Courtesy the artist
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Photo Notes | 47
distinctly heart-warming glow of a humanist empathy with his subject something which
again leads us back, past apocalyptic, Foucauldian visions of the End of Man, via Douglas
Huebler, to August Sander.
5

It is perhaps inevitable that we should conclude the present discussion of Eijkelbooms
forensic view of the wisdom of crowds with a cursory glance back at Siegfried Kracauers
landmark essay Te Mass Ornament, published in Jp (predating the publication of
Sanders Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our me) by two years). In this widely read text, without
a doubt a key chapter in the long history of the occidental fear of numbers, Kracauer is
highly critical both of the so-called mass ornament his most famous example of such a
novel aesthetic phenomenon being the synchronised legwork of the 1ller Girls, a manically
eroticised echo of the modern factorys pitiless Taylorist regime as well as of intellectuals
misguided disdain for such revolutionary entertainments. Kracauers ambivalence is
emblematic here, and particularly insightful with regards to our current discussion of
Eijkelbooms work in relation to the atavistic fear of dizzying, innumerable multitudes:
Educated people who are never entirely absent have taken oense at the
emergence of the ller Girls and the stadium images. ey judge anything that
entertains the crowd to be a distraction of that crowd. But despite what they think,
the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate.
Such movements are in fact among the rare creations of the age that bestow
form upon a given material.
6

And so the masses who so spontaneously adopted these patterns are superior to their
detractors among the educated classes to the extent that they at least roughly acknowledge
the undisguised facts
7
the undisguised fact, that is, of mankinds enslavement to the
daemonic machine of mass production, and of the production of sameness (this is where
Kracauer emerges as a progenitor of Jpcs apparatus theory): that which is both manned
by and which produces the masses as such.
Sometime before that, Kracauer noted the ornaments resemblance to aerial
photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the
given conditions, but rather appears above them. Actors likewise never grasp the stage
setting in its totality, yet they consciously take part in its construction.
8
Tis casual
reference to the alienating particulars of the thespian profession leads us directly back
to Hans Eijkelbooms Photo Notes, in which it ofen appears as if all the worlds a stage
indeed. Many people who appear in Eijkelbooms pictures may perhaps not be aware that
they are being photographed and this certainly qualies as one of the seriess more potent
mysteries but quite a few of them clearly strut around in anxious, unspoken expectation
of some camera crew appearing out of nowhere. If they are not actually living in a movie,
at least when seen together their images make up a movie unfolding before our very eyes
that of the rise and fall and rise (etc.) of public man.

5 Douglas Hueblers status as perhaps the most important overlooked figure in Conceptual art has long
been closely linked to what curator Jenni Lomax called the humane and humorous vein in Hueblers
work to his humanism, so to speak. An emphatically unironic work such as Variable Piece #34
(1970), for instance, for which Huebler photographed forty random passersby in the street immediately
after telling them You have a beautiful face, remains an anomaly in the dour canon of 1960s and 70s
US Concept art: in a catalogue essay published on the occasion of Hueblers first ever retrospective
exhibition in the UK, organised at Camden Arts Centre in 2002, Mark Godfrey notes that of the four
figureheads of the movement captured in a famous photograph from 1969 (the other artists are Robert
Barry, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner), Huebler is the only one who is smiling. Would it be too
much of a stretch to call Hans Eijkelboom the Douglas Huebler of the Dutch Concept art scene?
6 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (trans. Thomas Y.
Levin), Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005, p.79. Italics in the original.
7 Ibid., p.85. Of some members of the educated classes who choose to remain oblivious to these undisguised
facts, Kracauer says that they fail to grasp capitalisms core defect: it rationalises not too much but
rather too little. See p.81.
8 Ibid., p.77.
50 | Aerall
Events, Works, Exhibitions: e Grammar of Display | 51
1 The quote stems from Bo Bardis Account Sixteenth Years Later, in Marcelo Carvalho FerrazandMarcelo
Suzuki (ed.), LImpasse del design. Lina Bo Bardi: Lesperienza nel Nordest del Brasile, Milan and So Paulo:
Edizioni Charta and Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1995, p.5 (of the English insert). In 1980 Bo Bardi
started editing material for this book, which was to become a testimony of her Northeastern period,
which will be discussed further on in this text. In 1981 Bo Bardi stopped the editing, convinced that
the whole undertaking would be of no use, all this is going to fall into a void (p.1). Fortunately, the
Instituto Bo Bardi, which fights for the preservation of Bo Bardi's legacy, continued and eventually
finished the editing. From the account the book provides, it becomes clear that the research done
from the late 1950s until 1964 was part of a larger collective effort that, like Glauber Rocha with
his aesthetics of hunger, pursued an artistic agenda with the aim of aligning the practical, mostly
raw aspects of this culture with a politics that sought to address the actual living conditions of its
people. An excellent source that covers the wider history of this period in Bahia is Roger Sansis Fetishes
and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2007). See in particular chapter 6, Modern Art and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Bahia.
2 Paulo Freire, born in 1921 in Recife, was a highly influential educational thinker whose programmes
to teach and emancipate the illiterate poor became officially implemented in Brazil in the early
1960. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), a treatise about an education that was both modern
and anti-colonial, he states that [n]o pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from
the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from
among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.
P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), New York: Continuum, 1970, p.54.
3 SESC, or Social Service for Commerce, is a private non-profit organisation that promotes cultural
and educational facilities all over Brazil.
Tere are two good reasons, at least, to lay claim to the architectural legacy of Lina Bo
Bardi, her technologies of display and her sense of spatial texture. Te rst reason is
artistic: the formal stagnation that haunts contemporary exhibition design. While curators
are willing to talk endlessly about mediation (and are taught in so many curatorial courses
to do just that) the realm of display gets shamelessly neglected. Art
is made to look as if it were tied to nothing but artistic production,
while context gets reduced to mere text. Te second reason is
political: Bo Bardi is exceptional in her formal understanding
of that equally vast and mysterious entity called the social.
Her poetics of sensual collaboration could be the antidote to
the populist inclinations of Western art institutions (including
their predilection for big exhibitions). Faced with the relative
disappearance of their traditional constituency (the educated
middle class) and simultaneously challenged by a curious mob
of aesthetic illiterates, art institutions need to learn that cultural illiteracy will only be
sustained by the business of mediation at least as long as the latter is conceived to be
primarily a service for unenlightened savages to which institutions eagerly reach out.
Bo Bardi, in contrast, took clues from Paulo Freires pedagogy of the oppressed
she based her work on the creative resources of the populace and advocated the
democratisation of knowledge.
2

Learning from Bo Bardi today entails conceiving of institutions in terms of their
self-perforation, their own undoing. Tey have to learn how to dramatise their key
dilemma namely, what counts as teachable and why. Attempting to epitomise the
gold-standard of legitimate knowledge in a world of crumbling canons is ridiculous.
Attempting to epitomise contemporary sexiness is worse. A methodology is needed that
addresses audiences as neither consumers nor infants, but as partners.
Bo Bardis most mature and extensive work hardly belongs to the sphere of art and
culture proper. SESC Fbrica da Pompia is a huge recreational complex on the outskirts
of So Paulo, built on an old factory constructed in the early twentieth century in the style
of Franois Hennebique, a pioneer of reinforced-concrete engineering.
3
With an area
of Jo,cc square metres (and a oor area of ,cc square metres), its size corresponds
to that of a small industrial village. From Jp till Jp8o, in a period of slow and painful
transition from the rigidities of military rule to the ambiguities of an inexperienced
Previous spread
and opposite:
SESC Fbrica da
Pompia, So Paulo,
window detail.
Conversion by Lina
Bo Bardi, 197786.
Photograph: Nelson
Kon. Courtesy Nelson
Kon Fotografas
is Exhibition Is an Accusation:
e Grammar of Display
According to Lina Bo Bardi
1
Roger M. Buergel
Roger M. Buergel nds in
Lina Bo Bardis exhibition
designs mediations between
audience and object that
allow arts social function
to unfold.
52 | Aerall
democracy, Bo Bardi worked on this site in many diferent capacities rst as a planner,
architect and designer, and later as its administrator, programme manager and exhibition
organiser. She shaped the site in almost every regard while allowing herself, in turn,
to be shaped and informed by this evolving sprawl of planned and spontaneous activities:
e second time I went there, a Saturday, the atmosphere was dierent no longer
the elegant and solitary Hennebiquen structure, but happy people, children,
mothers, parents and OAPs [old age persons] went from one shed to another.
Kids ran, youngsters played football in rain falling through broken roofs, laughing
as they kicked the ball through the water. Mothers barbecued and made sandwiches
at the entrance of ua Clcia; there was a puppet theatre near it, full of children.
I thought, it has to continue like this, with so much happiness. I returned many
times, Saturday and Sundays, until I really got it
4

Until she really got what? By looking through the structure, the reinforced concrete of the
derelict factory space, Bo Bardi was able to access the sites psychic resonances. And while
the particular value of these resonances emanated from a typical weekend feel of pleasure
and boredom as well as from a sense of place in a community of mostly migrant workers
from the Brazilian Northeast and Europe the actual material condition of the space
seemed to matter, too. Te social energy perceived and celebrated by Bo Bardi was a result of
the precarious condition of the once solid structure. Dysfunctionality kicked of happiness.
Given Bo Bardis biography, her embrace of the little festival of afects is easily
comprehensible, and so is her aim to sustain its energy. Afer more than a decade of
military rule in which her public engagement, like that of most Brazilian cultural gures,
was severely restricted, she might have felt ready for a new beginning. Her sense of
beginning must, however, have been tinged by another beginning a few decades earlier.
In Jpo Bo Bardi migrated to Brazil, leaving post-War Italy physically behind while
preserving the memory of the civilt mussoliniana. Educated in Milan, where she became
a co-editor of the magazine domus in Jp, she must have been equally sensitive about
modern architectures stance when it came to vitalism, planning, progress and the New
Man.
5
Also on her sceptical mind in Jp, most likely, were the heated architectural debates
that shaped the Brazil of the Jpcs and early ocs debates that were fuelled by the utopian
dream of a new country with a planners fantasy called Brasilia as its capital, which were
laid to rest with the establishment of the US-backed military dictatorship in March Jpo.
Te Pompia Factory was conceived with a capacity of up to J,ccc visitors per day.
Bo Bardi decided to keep the old complex of brick buildings, preserving the industrial
memory, but took out the partition walls to create a uid interior space. Tis open space
comprises a temporary exhibition area; a more solid, almost sculptural unit with a library
and a videotheque; and, next to it, a multi-use space around a longish, elegantly-shaped
lake an allusion to the So Francisco River, the artery of the Brazilian Northeast.
Te spatial layout not only corresponds to but actually favours the arbitrary ways in which
people circulate if they are not governed by denite destinations, aims or intents, while a
multiplicity of architectural details, like the shells in the cement oor or the line of textiles
suspended above the restaurant, disrupt the perception of a unied totality. Te second
part of the factory complex houses a grand foyer leading onto a theatre for J,cc people,
and a workshop area for making ceramics and other crafs. Tis workshop area follows
a diferent spatial grammar. Lush openness is scaled down in favour of a labyrinthine
wall-system built from raw bricks that slightly protects the respective working areas.
However, these diferences in structuring divisions of consciousness seem insubstantial.
4 The quote comes from Olivia de Oliveira, Subtle Substances: The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, Barcelona
and So Paulo: Editorial Gustavo Gili and Romano Guerra Editora, 2006, p.205. The book, which is based
on Oliveiras doctoral thesis, offers a particularly rich and careful account of Bo Bardis architectural
principles.
5 Italys finest architects, it is well known, supported the Fascist cause more or less openly. Razionalismo,
Italys most radical branch of modern architecture, was unambiguous about its Fascist leanings.
And it was Pietro Maria Bardi, later Lina Bos husband, who organised in 1931 in his gallery in Rome
the second exhibition of Architettura Razionale, a show accompanied by a manifesto in open praise
of the civilt mussoliniana. The point here is not to denounce the Italian architectural milieu of the
1930s and 40s, years in which Lina Bo finished her studies and started to work in association with
Gio Ponti in Milan. It suffices to say that Lina Bo was in a privileged position to contemplate the
sinister affair between advanced architecture and planning on the one side and an utterly perverted
res publica on the other.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: e Grammar of Display | 53
Tey are subordinated to a general rhythm a rhythm that is less a matter of architectural
composition (which is, by its very nature, static) but that originates from the imponderable
ways in which space is practised. Te rhythm therefore varies according to the intensity
of lived experience.
On the remaining plot of land, Bo Bardi erected a Brutalist, deliberately ugly complex
of two high towers and a tall fake chimney, all built in raw concrete.
6
In contrast to the
old factory space, this complex enters into open competition with the urban environment.
Quite literally, its own towers face the city, with its high-rises, eye to eye. While the compact
tower houses a swimming pool in the basement and four gyms stacked upon one another,
the smaller tower, arranged in a pattern that is a foil to the pattern on the larger tower,
contains the staircase and the facilities. Te towers are connected on each oor by Y- or
V-shaped bridges or gangways, the spatial design of which is reminiscent of the expressive
constructivism of Liubov Popova. And although Bo Bardi toyed with the idea of painting
the cement in bright colours she nally abstained from it, reserving colour for the door and
window frames, or for the ventilating tubes for elements, that is, which help to punctuate
the grey, bunkerish mass. To get to the gym or back to the showers and changing rooms,
the athletes, mostly adolescents, have to cross the open, weather-exposed gangways, thus
undergoing a kind of rite of passage that puries them and readies them for the excitement
and exuberance of play. Te architectures own playfulness becomes evident with the
correlation of each of the gyms oors to the colour code and name of a season a football
team thus meets in winter and with the spectacular details of the gaping apertures in
the walls, with their violently irregular but also somewhat organic shapes. Contrary to
most gym spaces, the outside world is not closed of. It is confronted or challenged from
within the arena. Te violent thrill that accompanies every animated game, the momentous
fantasy of annihilating ones adversary, is subtly diverted toward the megalopolis outside:
So Paulo, or, in Bo Bardis words, the world champion of self-destruction.
7
Te festivities for the inauguration of the Pompia Factory were planned by Bo Bardi
down to minutiae like the colour of food. For the opening period she conceived of an
exhibition for which people were supposed to bring all kinds of objects forgotten or
rejected by civilisation,
8
while the gym towers were celebrated with an exhibition about
the history of football in Brazil a colourful dream of documentary material, devotional
objects, players shirts and banners from all teams, even the most mediocre ones.
9
Later
exhibitions by Bo Bardi at the Factory included Mil brinquedos para a criana brasileira
(A Tousand Toys for Brazilian Kids, Jp8c) and Design no Brazil: Histria e realidade
(Design in Brazil: History and Reality, Jp8). Tere is a common tune to these proposals:
an unconcealed emphasis on radical inclusiveness (all things), on the material unconscious
(objects forgotten or rejected) and on what might be called the psychic texture of objects
(ask any football fan about his or her team scarf or any child about his or her favourite toy).
A similar tune can be already detected in Bo Bardis early Brazilian exhibition activities,
like the breathtaking installation of the Bahia no Ibirapuera exhibition during the fh
Bienal de So Paulo in Jpp, or the display she conceived for the exhibition Civilizao
do Nordeste (Civilisation of the Northeast) at the Museu de Arte Popular at the Solar do
Unho, in Salvador de Bahia in Jpo. Historically, both exhibitions belong to the window
of utopian dreaming that preceded the military dictatorship. Te Bienal de So Paulo,
from the moment of its inception in JpJ, partook in this dream and, for better or worse,
carried it along. It not only celebrated modern art in all its universalist splendour, but
also fed the generation of Tropiclia with a repertoire of forms that had to be devoured
6 The architectural language of progressive ugliness with its bunkerish masses and unfinished surfaces is
characteristic of the Paulista School (Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas and others).
Its aesthetics were heavily inspired by Oscar Niemeyers self-criticism in the late 1950s, when he
condemned his own former striving for originality and surface appearance at the cost of architectures
social functioning. Bo Bardi explicitly stated: I want SESC to be even uglier than MASP. Quoted in
O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.203. It should also be mentioned that at the time SESC Pompia
was planned, the integration of the suburbs became part of the official line in urban politics. Self-
management models based on neighbourhood groups or participatory building sites were especially
encouraged.
7 Bo Bardi also called So Paulo a pile of bones. Quoted in O. de Oliveira, ibid., p.245. Her sensitivity
for questions of cultural heritage and its preservation drew her back to Salvador de Bahia in 1986,
where she was invited by the mayor to intervene in the historic district around the Pelourinho.
See L. Bo Bardi, Obra construida/Built Work (text by O. de Oliveira), in 2G International Architecture
Review, no.23/24, 2003, p.142.
8 See O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.246.
9 Ibid., p.248.
54 | Aerall
and vomited (as Glauber Rocha put it) before being prepared for the artistic aims of
a decidedly local modernism.
Te Bahia exhibition of Jpp, conceived by Bo Bardi and Martim Gonalves, looks
retrospectively like a comment on, if not an answer to, the key question of how modern
universalism could be reconciled with a local agenda. (And without questioning Hlio
Oiticicas genius, it needs to be said that Bo Bardi pioneered her environmental aesthetics
years before Oiticica built his Penetrvels, the labyrinthine environments he began to
make in the late Jpocs.) Te show, according to its own denition, took an anthropological
rather than aesthetic view on popular artefacts created in the Brazilian Northeast
a region dened by poverty, a high rate of illiteracy and a mode of production Bo Bardi
characterised as pre-crafsmanship
10
. In the Northeast, objects of desperate survival
were basically made out of garbage. One section of the exhibition was devoted to
documentary photographs of the Afro-Brazilian religions macumba and candombl.
Te photographs (by Pierre Verger and others) were informally mounted on a fragile
wooden scafolding the material sensibility of which was closer to the consistency of
the life depicted on them than to the institutional self-assuredness of, say, Family of Man,
the exhibition Edward Steichen organised at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art in Jp.
Among the artefacts were almost life-size statuettes of Orisha spirits; musical instruments;
patchwork quilts made of reclaimed scraps of lefover cloth; fs, or oil lamps, built from
empty medicine bottles and pieces of tin plates; carrancas, or gureheads, from river
boats of the So Francisco; ceramics; mats; hammocks; earthenware pans; pots for
drinking water; and so on. I could say that this exhibition reveals above all the creative
force of a people who do not give up under the severest conditions, summarises Jorge
Amado in an account written at that time.
11
Te open exhibition space in Ibirapuera Park, next to the biennial, was primarily
structured by a system of freestanding walls, most of them elevated on pedestals in the
shape of white cubes. Te rather compact walls provided conspicuously solid support
for the hand-crafed objects which were, all in all, either rude or tiny and brittle. While
the elevated walls were coloured in diferent shades, one particular wall was covered with
gold leaf as if to mirror the spiritual radiance of the religious sculpture displayed in front
of it. Te ex-votos, on the other hand, were directly xed onto a whitewashed brick wall.
By drawing on the analogy between the bareness of the wall and the wooden rawness
Lina Bo Bardi,
Civilizao
do Nordeste
(Civilisation of the
Northeast'), 1963.
Installation view,
Museu de Arte
Popular do Unho.
Photograph: Armin
Guthmann. Courtesy
Instituto Lina Bo e
P.M. Bardi and
Armin Guthmann
10 See M. Carvalho Ferraz and M. Suzuki (ed.), LImpasse del design, op. cit., p.1.
11 Ibid., op. cit., p.5.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: e Grammar of Display | 55
of those sculptures, their stubborn dumpiness was transformed into an almost heroic
expression: it embodied resistance against the disenchantment of the world. Te white-
cube pedestals were scattered all over the space, serving larger-size objects like the
carrancas and Orishas as pedestals. A few articial trees were planted here and there,
one adorned with weather vanes, while the entire oor was covered with pitanga leaves.
In the background, before the row of Orishas, the exhibition was sealed of by a huge,
long curtain. Tis device, reminiscent of display strategies practised by Lily Reich
in the Jpcs and cs, provided the space with an air of privacy while simultaneously
underscoring its highly theatrical dcor. In short, the language of display spoke many
diferent tongues and thus appealed to a multiplicity of perceptual registers. It spoke less
about objects than out of them. Te exhibitions true subject was indeed neither artistic
form nor anthropology; it was, as its title suggests, the spirit of a place and its possible
transposition.
In her love for Bahia, Bo Bardi chose an even more emphatic term for this immaterial
entity than the spirit of a place. She called it the popular soul and this was the
exhibitions wager she tried to convey it less by the objects themselves than by their
appearance.
12
Teir appearance had to be revealed, not just their factual presence shown.
In Bo Bardis still acute memory, Italian Fascism had both vampirised and exorcised the
popular soul. Under the Fascist regime, popular production or craf became irreversibly
transformed into folklore or kitsch, while genuine popular art was dened by its perfect
reversibility. While a kitsch object was thus dened as a psychic dead end that puts
mans desire to rest, popular art kept the soul alert and ready to look for ever new and
transformative ways to shape the world.
13
Te Bahia exhibition had to ght two enemies. One was folklore. Te other was the
navet of utopian design that had become dominant in Brazil in the Jpcs and what this
represented: the ludicrous fantasy that an underdeveloped country with feudal structures
could be transformed overnight into an industrial society. Presenting the popular soul
in action or revealing the reversibility of popular art called for a particular kind of display
in which the objects essentially transitional character would be shown. Tis aim was
achieved by a double operation. On the anthropological level the objects were linked
to specic religious or labour practices. Te photographs of Pierre Verger, for example,
demonstrated their use in ritual. However, the objects were also paraded as being in
excess of themselves, or, rather, as transcending any conceptual framework that would
x and guarantee their meaning. Tis was achieved by dislocating them into a deliberately
articial environment that highlighted their utter strangeness. Tis particular quality they
had to borrow or even extract from modern arts claim to autonomy a claim that was
excessively stated, even propagated at the nearby biennial. Te popular soul was, above
all, volatile. Or, as Bo Bardi put it: To carefully search for the cultural bases of a country
(whatever they may be: poor, miserable, popular) when they are real, does not mean to
preserve the forms and materials, it means to evaluate the original creative possibilities.
14

Bo Bardis activities in Bahia in the Jpcs and early ocs opened her eyes to what she called
the real Brazil, not the one of European immigrants.
15
Te experience was profound;
it made her into another person.
16
What the real Brazil stands for is no mystery either:
a sedimentation of layers of violently disruptive colonial rule. At Bahia Bo Bardi recognised
how intricately linked the Western project of modernity was to colonialism and in
her subsequent projects it was clear that she was looking for an intelligent way to deal
with this problem. Tough she was asked in Jp to build the Museu de Arte de So
12 What I have in mind here is an operation called cathexis in Freudian discourse, by which an object
assumes a particular value or embodies beauty primarily because it comes to symbolise a much-desired
lost object. Kaja Silverman conceptualises the relation between appearance and visual affirmation
in her book World Spectators. Any theory of display would have to start from this question: how
can appearance be initiated from the side of the object rather than from that of the visitor?
See K. Silverman, World Spectators, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
13 For Bo Bardis concept of reversibility, see M. Carvalho Ferraz and M. Suzuki (ed.), LImpasse del design,
op. cit., p.4.
14 Ibid., p.3.
15 O. de Oliveira, Subtle Substances, op. cit., p.323.
16 Ibid.
56 | Aerall
Paulo (MASP), the process was temporarily suspended, and in the late Jpcs she moved
to Salvador, Brazils third largest city (and until Jo its capital, through which the slave
trade was organised well into the nineteenth century), following an invitation to teach
at the university and to build and direct a museum of modern art there.
17
Te building
ofered to her, the sixteenth-century Solar do Unho complex at the waterfront, was in
dire need of restoration and demanded an attitude towards the problematics of historical
legacy. Neither trying to conceive of the building in its original form nor treating it as a
neutral space, her project unmasked this pseudo-problem by considering the compound
in all its diferent forms: mill, slave quarters, noblemans residence, industrial complex,
meeting place for political activists, snuf factory, cocoa factory, waterfront warehouse,
warehouse for fuel, marine barracks, slum tenement, ruin, not forgetting the splendid
location, as Olivia de Oliveira puts it in her extensive monograph on the architect.
18
Bo Bardis main intervention in the complex was the building of a huge wooden
staircase, aptly called an event by Aldo van Eyck, making the people who go up and
down feel like nobility.
19
People here is not a general term but points precisely at the
poor and illiterate who were denied any social visibility by the racist bourgeoisie and its
apparatus. While the massive steps of the monumental staircase seem to hover in the air
as they rotate around a central column, with additional support provided by ve outer
beams, the wooden elements are connected by a traditional mortise and tenon system.
Besides the Museu de Arte Moderna, the building complex also housed the Museu de
Arte Popular, an institution that was inaugurated in Jpo with the exhibition Civilisation
of the Northeast. Consisting of about a thousand pieces from Bo Bardis own collection,
this display difered radically from the modernist atmosphere at Ibirapuera. Te space
was crammed like a Baroque church, and the institutional shell was almost entirely made
of local building materials. Te abundance of popular artefacts was displayed as if they
all belonged to various families of forms, with each family representing a particular order.
Te ceramic bowls, for example, were framed and arranged according to their height on
raw wooden shelves, while the oil lamps in the adjacent shelf contradicted this hierarchic
principle and suggested a purely morphological pattern. Other objects, like a millstone,
sat on the oor as if for sale on the local market. While Bo Bardis ample display afrmed
the basic function of ordering of a system as a way to render popular artefacts
signicant that were by and large considered insignicant, it also let the objects expose the
arbitrary character of any such orderly arrangement. Basically, the objects were allowed
to talk about themselves. But it would be wrong to consider this discourse merely in terms
of object-presentation: what was actually displayed was the dynamic interlocking of the
popular artefacts with visitors who were also invited to talk about themselves, this time
by taking and enjoying pride of place.
Te display at the Solar do Unho was realised by Bo Bardi at about the same time
as she conceived the building and revolutionary display for the collection of the Museu
de Arte de So Paulo, which was nally completed in Jpo8 following her design. It seems
evident that the lesson learnt from Bahia profoundly shaped the presentation of MASPs
collection of predominantly Western art. Te charmingly eclectic mix of sculptures and
paintings, ranging from the baroque to modernism, was acquired from an impoverished
post-War Europe by Assis Chateaubriand, a Brazilian entrepreneur, media mogul and art
connoisseur who also had the idea to invite Pietro Bardi, Bo Bardis husband, to become the
museums rst director. (Te popular highlight of the collection is Renoirs double portrait
Pink and Blue (or Alice et Elisabeth Cahen dAnvers, J88J), of which Blue, or Elisabeth,
died on her way to Auschwitz in Jp.) Te story of the xed tropical greenhouse, as Bo
Bardi called her extraordinary museum building at Avenida Paulista, is rather well known.
Also known is the sad fact that her ingenious display was destroyed in the Jppcs and
replaced by a conventional wall system.
20
Photographs give at least an idea of the single,
17 The planning and building of MASP is a remarkable story in itself, with Bo Bardi acting in many
different capacities. It was she who secured the site at Avenida Paulista in a backroom deal with the
local governor, after which her husband, nominally the museums director, characterised her bold plans
as a beautiful female dream. See O. de Oliveiras interview with Bo Bardi, in 2G, op. cit., p.24446.
18 Ibid., p.82.
19 Ibid., p.81.
20 The controversy about the demolition of Bo Bardis display within the museum and other narrow-
minded architectural changes at MASP are summarised by de Oliveira in 2G, op. cit., pp.820.
Unfortunately, this is no singular case and many of Bo Bardis buildings and urban proposals were
destroyed or carelessly altered in the decades following her death.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: e Grammar of Display | 57
enormous exhibition space into which the visitor was drawn as if into a jungle of paintings.
Each of the paintings, with their ofen quite prominent gilt frames, was mounted on huge
vertical glass panes that were xed on cubic concrete bases. While the artwork was thus
radically singularised and exposed, the space, with its hundred or so transparent glass
panes on which the paintings were suspended as if in the air, relativised the authority of the
single piece. Each artwork was shown to be its own site, a display mode that attested both to
the migratory destiny of the pieces, but also, and more importantly, to a lack of institutional
framing. Arts ontological status was no longer treated as a given.
21
While all the paintings
surfaces were facing one direction towards the viewer who entered the space each
work contained a short, basic description on its back. Of course, presenting classical
Western painting in such a spectacular display as a total image in and of itself an image
of artistic labour put an end to all received wisdoms of systematicity (be they chronology,
genre, style, -isms, national school). It laid any universal claim about the Western idea
of art to rest. Education self-education would have to start from another angle,
namely from the singular passage each individual viewer had to make, thus creating
a rather personal set of afliations between the artworks something one might even
want to talk about later and share. Te artworks would appear primarily as instances
of subjective memorising and not as containers of legitimate knowledge about art and
its history. It needs to be emphasised, though, that subjective memories are not merely
subjective but necessarily draw from a cultural repertoire of available forms. Consequently,
the truly engaging work of art mediation, the poetics of sensual collaboration mentioned
at the beginning of this essay, would have to address the gap between the given elements
of this repertoire and each single individuals conscious or unconscious interpretation and
transformation of them. Only here, in this interlocking of subjectivities and objecthoods,
could arts social function truly come alive.
Bo Bardis aim at MASP was again to restore art to its creative possibilities. However,
while the egalitarian space promises the individual free circulation, an open encounter
between faces and surfaces, this promise is invested with a substantial threat a threat
visibly expressed by the unmediated competition between the artworks. Like a ward with
newborns who cannot make it on their own, they all crave simultaneously for the viewers
attention. And this is the message conveyed by Bo Bardis display (and a truth regularly
suppressed by the art institution): art demands too much of our lives.
21 Theodor W. Adorno opens his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory with the famous remark that
nothing can be taken for granted anymore when it comes to art [...] not even its right of existence.
T.W. Adorno, sthetische Theorie, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970, p.11. Translation the authors.
Lina Bo Bardi,
interior installation
display, 195768,
Museum of Art of So
Paulo. Photograph:
Paolo Gasparini.
Courtesy Instituto
Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi
and Paolo Gasparini
60 | Aerall
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 61
Four years ago, when the Spanish Ministry
of Culture awarded him the National Prize
for the visual arts, those who were aware of
Isidoro Valcrcel Medinas work received
the news with a mixture of puzzlement and
delight. Te brief text in which the Ministry
justied granting the prize mentioned
the coherence and rigour of Valcrcel
Medinas work, developed over four
decades, which described in a concise
manner the tireless devotion of this artist
to his task. However, the text also referred
to a committed attitude, detached from the
dynamics of the art market,
1
words that
seemed to allude with calculating vague-
ness to the chasm that has always separated
Valcrcel Medinas creative practice from
the ways in which both cultural institutions
and the large majority of artists understand
art. Tose who valued Valcrcel Medinas
activities couldnt help wondering about
the prizes signicance. Did the highest
Spanish art institution share a view of
art that for half a century has appeared
to conict with that of museums and art
centres? Could the Ministry of Culture
aford to support the work of an artist
who time and again has stated his complete
disagreement with the notion of art that
cultural institutions uphold and promote,
an artist who has never concealed his scorn
for these institutions, which he sees as
isolating art from the life of citizens so
as to better serve their own political ends?
Te paradoxes generated in cc by
granting Valcrcel Medina the National
Prize were not new. Te last few decades
have made it clear that the institutions
charged with the task of constructing
and increasing the value of artworks
in the global market are not content with
promoting the kinds of art that adjust
themselves to their ends; these institutions
also aspire to absorb into their fold modes
of creativity opposing their aims or
happening beyond their fringes. Tis kind
of institutional voracity has prompted the
apparition of a particularly repulsive type
of pseudo-artist, convinced that resisting
institutions is just another means of
self-promotion, and this phenomenon
has encouraged the production of
large amounts of pseudo-art, as well
as complicating the reception of modes
of art that are genuinely critical.
In the context of Spanish contemporary
art, within and without what its institutions
manage to absorb or contain, Valcrcel
Medina is surely an extreme case: an artist
who has been granted a National Prize
despite the fact that no museum holds any
of his work. In this, as in so many other
aspects of his work, Valcrcel Medina
applies a particularly stringent version
of an understanding of art that spread
in the Jpocs and cs among radical artists.
Tis view of art countered the fetishisation
of the art object and the artists conversion
into myth by displacing the value of the
work from the object to the process of its
creation and from the author to the context
in which the artist operates. From this
perspective, collecting works of contempo-
rary art becomes an impossible task, as the
art object, thus understood as a byproduct
rather than as the result of the creative
process, lacks what is its most valuable
dimension: the circumstances of its
invention and development, its temporality,
its breath, its life.
With respect to the question of why,
in almost half a century of uninterrupted
creative activity, no art institution has ever
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medinas Constellations
Esteban Pujals Gesal
Esteban Pujals Gesal surveys the rich
literary history of the Spanish artist
Isidoro Valcrcel Medina, whose poetic
works deny a separation between art
and the rules that govern everyday life.
Previous spread
and opposite:
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, Algunas
maneras de hacer esto
(Some Ways of Doing
This), 1969/2007.
Installation view,
A Theatre Without
Theatre', MACBA,
Barcelona, 2007.
Photograph:
Tony Coll.
Courtesy MACBA
1 Ministerial Order CUL/3742/2007 of 5 December 2010, Boletn Oficial del Estado, 20 December 2007.
This is the publication in which all Spanish state decisions appear. All translations from Spanish by
the author
62 | Aerall
programmed a retrospective exhibition
of Valcrcel Medinas work, the answer,
once more, lies in the artists obstinate
refusal, anchored in a conviction of the
link between the contemporary artwork
and the specic timing of its execution;
once that moment is past, the work stops
being a work of art, and the only value
assignable to the materials that are lef
over from the process of its production
is documentary. Or, to employ the artists
own words: My art is not repertory art;
I am neither a ruminant nor a vulture
feeding of the old.
2

So, how has this author of ephemeral
works, this evasive artist of conciseness,
whose CV since Jpop consists of the simple
enumeration of the years he has lived since
Jp, come to be known? How did news of
his quiet, discrete activity, materially slight
and almost undistinguishable from the
everyday life of common citizens, reach the
ears of the Ministry of Culture? Te only
possible answer is that half a century is a
very long time and it carries rumour very
far. On the other hand, it is surprising to
realise how ofen commercial galleries have
exhibited his invariably unsellable works.
Which takes us back to the mechanism of
seduction and to the attraction exerted on
museums and art galleries by that which
they are programmed to exclude.
Conceptual Constructivism
I have referred to Valcrcel Medinas
creative activity as materially scant,
discrete in its manner of occurring, always
concise and measured the extreme
opposite of the grandiloquent or spectacular.
To this characterisation one has to add a
peculiar nomadism among art traditions
and media that would seem designed to
minimise the importance of the materials
that he has worked in, whether physical
(metal, photographs, writing or sound)
or conceptual (as in his pieces of legal art).
Tis characteristic feature of his work
places it in the company of modern poetry
and painting at the time of Cubism
the tradition that prompted Stphane
Mallarm to conceive the form of the most
astonishing of poems and led thereafer
to the invention of collage, and a tradition
that is as visible in Marcel Duchamps
contempt for the odour of turpentine and
the fetishisation of the painters rituals
as it is in Vladimir Tatlins and Alexander
Rodchenkos progress through techniques
and disciplines. Valcrcel Medina has
extended and broadened this tradition
by a unique display of the artistic potential
of any material. Particularly memorable
instances, because they are so extreme,
of the tendency in his work towards
an expansion of art by means of unusual
material manifestations were the drafing
of the text of the Act Regulating the
Exercise, Enjoyment and Commercialisa-
tion of Art, discussion of which was vetoed
by the Chamber of Deputies, the lower
house of the Spanish Parliament, in
October Jpp, and the conceptualising as
a work of art of the proceedings he brought
against the city council of Valladolid and
an insurance company in ccc over their
respective liability for the destruction
of one of his artworks (E pur si muove,
3

exhibited from J November to J
December Jpp8 in the Museo de la
Pasin, Valladolid), which the judge
ruled impossible to restore. Te Chamber
of Deputies, in the former case, and his
opponents at the trial (the judge who heard
the case and the witnesses), in the latter, all
became Valcrcel Medinas collaborators
in these trans-material and interpersonal
artistic processes.
In the years around Jpc Valcrcel
Medinas work was commonly regarded
as constructivist, a label that suggests
exactly the intimacy with his materials
to the exclusion of other possible consider-
ations, usually of a political kind,
in the Conceptual art produced at the time.
As a matter of fact, Valcrcel Medinas
work was exhibited in group shows
that specically invoked this term, along
with artists like Elena Asins and Eusebio
Sempere, whose later careers have been
consistent with those beginnings. And it
is true that all of Valcrcel Medinas work
that which was produced thirty or forty
years ago as well as recently shows
something closely akin to the constructivist
yearning to make the materials talk by
and about themselves, about their nature
and their potential as materials.
Let us examine one of his best known
pieces from those years, Motores (Engines,
Jp). Te work consisted of a tape
2 Valcrcel Medina in conversation with Jos Daz Cuys and Nuria Enguita Mayo, Valcrcel Medina
Speaks Out, Ir y venir de Valcrcel Medina (exh. cat.), Barcelona: Fundaci Antoni Tpies, 2002, p.235.
3 Valcrcel Medina does not title his works; however, for the purposes of clarity I have here referred
to them by the titles commonly used elsewhere.
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 63
recording of the sound of two car engines,
one with a small cylinder capacity (the
treble) and the other more powerful (the
bass), both travelling over the same route
(from Madrid to El Escorial) and recorded
on separate tracks so that they could be
listened to simultaneously. Te recording
was accompanied by a score, consisting
of a descriptive table, which at the time
the Spanish Ministry of Public Works
drew up for the development of public
highways. Each table described, at intervals
of one hundred metres, the incidence of
the incline of the terrain or of the bends
in the road, including the radius of the
curve towards the lef or right. When the
recording was played back, listeners could,
at least theoretically, follow the music
shown on the table and read, through the
gear changes, the higher or lower pitch of
the engines of the two cars and the squeal
of the tyres on the bends, the precise
mileage or the stage of the journey reached.
Te simplicity of Motores is clearly one
of the most constant features of Varcrcel
Medinas works, which generally contain
the bare minimum of material substance
or action, or the least of what is required
to embody the suggestion or revelation
proposed. Tis tendency recalls the
syntactic concerns that obsessed the
concrete poets of the Jpcs and ocs, and
which led Ian Hamilton Finlay to examine
the possibilities of the one-word poem.
We might think, for instance, of Valcrcel
Medinas appropriating of fy, one
hundred and one thousand peseta notes
bearing inscriptions like Mobile art,
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, E pur si
muove, 1998, poster
paper and steel cable;
40,000 strips of
paper; panel 6 3m,
strips 8mm each.
Installation view,
Valcrcel Medina
in the Museo de la
Pasin, Valladolid.
Courtesy the artist
64 | Aerall
Art in movement or Money as art. From
Jc April to August Jpp he put cJ,cc
of these pesetas into circulation, stopping
when one of the notes issued by him
returned to his possession. Or let us take
the example of the justness, the suitability
to its occasion, of the work Scottex, the
result of faxing a roll of paper towels in
response to the announcement of a fax art
competition by the Museo de Electrografa
in Cuenca in Jpp. In both works a
minimum manipulation of the media used
resulted in their essential properties being
brought to visibility: pure circulation in
the case of the banknotes, and, in the case
of the paper, the fundamentally rolled-up
nature of the fax medium as opposed
to its common conceptualisation in the
two-dimensional terms of the page.
Tough the constructivist trend
I mentioned earlier is still apparent
in Valcrcel Medinas recent work,
endowing it with a measure of restraint
and discipline, as well as a certain irony
linked to his choice of means and materials
less and less detachable from the interac-
tion of people, and though his radically
de-institutionalised view of art as a
phenomenon alien to market laws is
already visible in his work from the Jpocs,
his work gradually radicalised from that
period onwards, in that his procedures,
materials and intentions have become
better and better adapted to the project he
seems to have mapped out from the start.
Works such as No necesita ttulo (No tle
Required, Jppc) presented in the show
Madrid. Espacio de interferencias (Jppc)
at the Crculo de Bellas Artes, in which
meals, dishes and cutlery picked up each
day from Madrid charities were exhibited
during the two-and-a-half months the
show lasted or the show I.V.M. Ocina
de gestin (I.V.M. Management Ltd, Jpp)
when Valcrcel Medina opened an
ofce for a month, on a p am-to- pm basis,
at Madrids Galera Fcares, devoted to
the management of customers ideas
are entirely aimed at social interrelation.
Valcrcel Medina has outlined his
poetics on numerous occasions, sometimes
very clearly and explicitly, in statements
that form an integral and essential part of
his work as an artist. Like all his work, these
explanations are also an exploration of
both means and materials. A clear case
of this is the thoroughly tectonic analysis
he has conducted over the last decade of
the public lecture as a type of discourse,
a course of enquiry which once again
brings to mind the adjective constructivist.
One of the most accurate explanations
Above and right:
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, Proyecto
para una retrospectiva
(Project for a
Retrospective), 2009,
Otoo de 2009,
Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina
Sofa, Madrid.
Photograph: Romn
Lores & Joaqun
Corts. Courtesy
Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina
Sofa
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 65
of his work that Valcrcel Medina has
provided appears in the JppJ piece La
chuleta (e Students Crib Sheet). Tis
consists of a handwritten text on a narrow
strip of paper that is rolled up tightly at
its top and bottom, like the classic device
used by cheating students. Te rolled
ends are held together with an elastic band,
enabling the reader to turn them with just
one hand as he or she advances through
the text. Te text itself consists of a general
discussion of art in which, under headings
such as Te Everyday Nature of Art
or Te Historic Moment (Te Truth of
Testimony),
4
Valcrcel Medina expounds
upon the approach he has been testing out
in his practice for half a century. Of the
headings into which the text of La chuleta
is arranged, perhaps the most surprising
in a context in which every aspect of life,
and everything connected with art, could
be said to be under the sway of the markets
modes of operation is the one that
reads Art, a Moral Occupation by Its
Very Nature. Under this heading we read,
amongst other remarks, the following:
Te basic justication of works of art
is that they have been produced, and that
the act of producing them was supposedly
just. Further on, under the heading Te
Historic Moment (Te Truth of Testimony),
the text reads: A work of art must be
so faithful to its moment that it becomes
the moment itself.
5
Tese statements
are an open invitation to reconsider our
perception of Motores, since they suggest
that a key facet of the work is that the
journeys made between Madrid and El
Escorial in Jp actually took place and
that the existence of the tape-recording
registering the sound they made constitutes
evidence of this.
Tere is no doubt that, as a whole,
Valcrcel Medinas work shows the
qualities of coherence and rigour that the
4 El carcter cotidiano del arte, El momento histrico (la realidad del testimonio) and, below,
El arte, menester tico por naturaleza.
5 La razn fundamental que justifica a las obras es que se han realizado y que supuestamente esa accin
ha sido justa; La obra de arte ha de ser tan fiel a su momento que sea el momento mismo.
is view of art countered the
fetishisation of the art object
and the artists conversion into
myth by displacing the value
of the work from the object
to the process of its creation.
66 | Aerall
Ministry of Culture attributed to it when
it granted him the National Prize. Indeed,
both in his more visual work as well as in
the work consisting of verbal explanations
in lectures, public statements and written
pieces, such as the discrete La chuleta,
the artist has insistently denounced what
he sees as the dispossession of what one
could call citizens' artistic life by the
cultural and educational institutions whose
main function is to sequester art in spaces
institutionalised as art spaces so as
to remove it from citizens by separating
it from work, everyday interaction and,
more generally, the common life of society.
Valcrcel Medina shares this perception
of an art integrated into life with others
who have dared see in the tasks of art the
most ambitious and noble manner of living
a human life: John Ruskin, the rst to
imagine the social consequences of the
transformation of citizens into artists;
the poets and artists of Russian Cubo-
Futurism; Marcel Duchamp; John Cage.
And, like theirs, his work ofers an
obsidional resistance to the degradation of
art into fetish. But to refer to this resistance
in terms of coherence and rigour, with
the suggestion of hardness and rigidity
that these adjectives carry, is a very partial
and inadequate characterisation of his
activities: his work displays an intensied
kind of vitality or fertility, of that which
the Spanish Baroque masters called
wit'. And one has to add that it is the
characteristically quiet, concise and
discrete manner in which this artist
executes his projects that provides their
closeness to life, to the point of being
inseparable from it.
Verbal Constructivism
It is hardly surprising that among the
many art modes and kinds that Valcrcel
Medina has traversed, ofen submitting
them to a reduction that lies between the
scientically ruthless and the ironically
neo-pre-Socratic, that of poetry should be
foremost. Te ability to speak is surely
the most characteristic of human skills
and the condition of speaker the most
abstract denition of the human being,
which places verbal art at the centre of
this poetics focused on the most basic and
generalisable characterisation of human
experience. In the remote past Valcrcel
Medina composed poems in verse (En
tinta azul (In Blue Ink, Jp8), Pjaro
en su rbita(Bird in Its Sphere, JpoJ)),
but it was only afer composing El libro
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina,
Puntualizaciones
poticas (Poetic
Remarks), 1995,
text on paper.
Courtesy the artist
transparente (e See-rough Book,
Jpc), one of the most beautiful fruits
of Spanish concrete poetry, that his work
as a poet became visible on the Spanish
contemporary poetic horizon. Te unusual
quality of this production could be said
to result from an attempt to combine three
diverse orientations. In the rst place,
it is obvious that Valcrcel Medinas poetry
projects share with the tradition of Spanish
poetry afer Antonio Machado, who was
writing in the rst third of the twentieth
century, the aim of being rooted in
vernacular Spanish. In a completely
diferent direction, and in full agreement
with the whole of his work, his poetry
pieces explore the material limits of
verbal art, ofen weakening or erasing the
borders separating poetic form from other
artistic modes, an orientation that tends
to complicate their recognition as poetry.
Finally, and in the best modern tradition
afer Mallarm, each of Valcrcel Medinas
poetic works appears committed to an
analysis of the verbal medium itself, an
analysis focused on highlighting the
paradoxes and aporias that inhere in the
combination of various levels of linguistic
articulation that is, in his attentive care
both to the tensions between what is spoken
and written as well as to the exceptions,
oddities and open contradictions that ofen
result precisely from applying grammatical
norms in the everyday usage of speakers.
Two recent works that exemplify this
threefold orientation are Topologa
hermenutica o bien hermenutica
topolgica (Hermeneutic Topology or
Topological Hermeneutics), an artists
book screenprinted by the Spanish
press Ahora in cc, and El envs de la
ortoescritura (e Back of Orthography),
a project executed in ccp for the
Escrituras en libertad exhibition at the
Instituto Cervantes in Madrid.
In the rst of these works the twenty
handwritten even-numbered pages develop
a metadiscourse on the notion of an art
book, a discourse that continues and
broadens the reection of the concrete
poets of the Jpcs and ocs on the behaviour
of linear writing, while the twenty odd-
numbered pages would seem to constitute
a visual counterpart to this discourse,
highlighting the downward progression
of certain colour shapes. Among these can
be seen the letters of the Greek alphabet,
which regulates the book as a whole.
Te book would seem to movingly suggest
a synaesthetic dissolution, carried out
plastically, of the borderline separating
the sensible from the intelligible.
In the installation El envs de
la ortoescritura, Valcrcel Medina gives
up the book format and enquires into the
tension between linguistic conventions
and their consistent infraction in speakers
usage, sometimes due to ignorance or
carelessness, but ofen because of the
ambiguous, blurred or contradictory
nature of linguistic norms themselves.
Te space in which this installation was
presented was the strongroom of the bank
that today houses the Instituto Cervantes,
and the poet set himself the task of
composing brief poems that invoked
grammatical rules while at the same time
exemplifying languages helplessness
regarding abnormal usage. Tere were
as many poems as there were boxes in
the room (,cc), each of them placed
on the inner side of the doors of the boxes,
so the viewer had to open the boxes in order
to read the poems.
In one of his most exciting intuitions
Jacques Derrida characterised human
speech as writing: anyones utterance is
thus already a kind of inscription in air,
ephemeral as an event but grammatised
that is, subject to memory and repetition.
In a similar sense, each of Valcrcel
Medinas works would seem to consist of a
dance exercise on life, a dance that scarcely
touches the most common words, the most
common human gestures and movements,
but in which life itself is delicately scanned,
measured, scored. As Mallarm once said
in an interview: Les choses existent; nous
navons pas les crer; nous navons qu
en saisir les rapports.
6

In the end perhaps there is no better
metaphor to characterise Valcrcel
Medinas dances among people and things
than that of the constellation.

Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 67
6 Things exist; we do not have to create them we only have to grasp their relations. Stphane
Mallarm, Oeuvres compltes (ed. Bertrand Marchal), vol. II, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, p.702.
68 | Aerall
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, Hombre
anuncio (Man
Advertising), 1976,
performance,
Madrid. Courtesy
the artist
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 69
Te title of this essay a phrase taken from
his book endicin de la hora (Surrendering
of the Hour, Jppo) points to what I nd
most distinctive and fundamental in the
work of Isidoro Valcrcel Medina. A rst
reading of the phrase would probably
situate it alongside the poetics of the
everyday and the currents of art and life
that thrived in the Jpocs and the early cs.
Indeed, that is the time and context from
which his practice emerges, and it is there
that we nd the knot of problems that runs
through his subsequent trajectory as an
artist; a trajectory that in keeping with
his original stance has been characterised
by a protean will for a constant shifing of
positions. His mature work developed in
a conjuncture that would prove extremely
fertile in the artistic arena of the late Jpocs:
the fusion between a formal literalism
associated with Neo-Concretist and
Minimalist practices and what we might
call a situational literalism, referring to a
variety of intermedia practices in which the
meaning of a work was no longer contained
in the individual pieces, but had to be
sought in their function, in their ability to
activate an event that exceeded them. Tis
polarity between the extreme literal nature
of forms and an equally literal character
of the situation, between concrete gures
(from geometry to media reication) and
the traces of the event (from process to
action) generates in its tension the set of
questions that the most signicant works
of the period were grappling with. Tis
was apparent in the international scene,
just at that moment when for the rst time,
thanks to advances in communication
technologies, it had become possible to
speak of an intercontinental artistic debate.
Te globalisation of the art scene (which
signicantly coincided with the radicalisa-
tion and the subsequent undoing of the
myth of the avant-garde) generated an
increased awareness and dissemination
of the multifarious practices and styles
that vied for attention in the main artistic
centres. But beyond a canonical history
of the succession of movements in the
late avant-garde, or a schematic history
of inuences between the centre and the
periphery, what is truly remarkable about
that period of expansion of the society
of the spectacle is the fact that artists who
were so distant from each other shared the
same horizon of problems and, working
individually and from very localised
positions, managed to develop concepts
and practices that over time would reveal
a common afnity. Among these artists
was Isidoro Valcrcel Medina.
Although he is today known as one
of the main exponents of Conceptualism
in Spain, Valcrcel Medina does not belong
to the generation of artists who worked
under that banner in the early Jpcs. In
fact, as mentioned above, his career started
a decade earlier, in the early ocs, when,
moving away from a practice based on
geometric abstraction (a reaction against
Art Informel), he embarked upon an
investigation of painting by means of
formal reduction. From Jpo, when he
had a solo show at Galera Lorca in
Madrid, until the end of that decade,
Valcrcel Medina was repeatedly included
in exhibitions of constructive or objective
art, a loose movement that was never
constituted as a coherent group and
was never legitimated under a common
programme. Spanish art critics of the time
understood that movements normative
approach to art as an attempt to nd some
rationality in the context of Francisco
Francos dictatorship, set in contrast to
the expressive subjectivism of an earlier
generation. But, in fact, the same could be
said of the two idioms that were dominant
in Spain at the time: cold gurative Pop
with political content, and social realism.
e Everyday Fact
as Peripety
Jos Daz Cuys
Jos Daz Cuys considers Isidoro
Valcrcel Medinas measurements of time
and contingency as appeals to political
eectivity.
70 | Aerall
Tat is, in the general context of that
decade of ideologies, the vitiated and
contradictory political and moral climate
of life under Franco unduly encouraged
an all-too-direct and schematic political
interpretation of artistic practices. In Spain
the climax of Conceptualism took place
between Jp and Jp the dictatorships
nal years, which were characterised by
a hardened environment. As in Argentina,
some of the most active members of the
movement opted for what was already
known by then as ideological Conceptual-
ism.
1
Valcrcel Medina did not develop
his career in this arena; rather, his work
has always been able to maintain a subtle
distance from the seductive allegorical
link that the twentieth century has tried
to establish between avant-garde art and
revolutionary praxis a link that reached
a point of maximum confusion during
those years. Even at that point, the way he
understood art and politics, the public and
the common, had very little to do with
ideological doctrines or partisan militancy.
We could say that, instead, the ethical sense
manifest in his practice is precisely what
endows his work with its radical political
content. Te ethico-political link becomes
clearer if we attend to a development that
took him from that early literalism of the
form to what we have called a literalism
of the situation'.
Already in his rst series of works
made following a constructivist approach,
Pinturas secuenciales (Sequential
Paintings, Jpo), we nd the interrelation
of the themes of time and measure that
becomes a constant in his subsequent work
being, of course, aware that time, and
our way of understanding and structuring
it, is in itself no more than a measure, and
that only when it is conceived as separate
from mere calculation does it reveal itself
as that immediate and innite present
we are always already immersed in.
In fact, despite his prolic versatility,
all of Valcrcel Medinas work points to
the paradoxes produced by the encounter
between that reied, measurable and
socially ordered time, and that other
temporality of becoming as a permanent
present. Taking the measure of time
that would be a tting description of
his work.
Te development of his practice during
the Jpocs, as it moves away from Neo-
Concretist painting and towards the
construction of environments and installa-
tions, foregrounds his interest in these two
modes of temporality: the measurable one
and that of a current and immeasurable
present. During this period, marked by a
process of formal rationalisation, Valcrcel
Medina was well aware of the temporal
implications of form and place: 1me,
he insisted, is a geometrical place.
2
But
beyond a strict geometry, measure was
used as a way of adjusting and composing
the shape of things, the same way a tailor
refers to measurements when making a
suit, or a poet to measures when writing
verse. Measuring presupposes a method
of comparison based on logic and system;
its results allow for a precise and objective
description of the problem or thing at hand,
but only inasmuch as they are understood
as exteriorities. Art that is based on
systematic procedures as is the case
with Neo-Concretism and Minimalism
implies a neutralisation of the authors
self-expression; however, the fact that such
work does not deal with inner issues does
not hinder its ability to describe. Measuring
here is not just counting in the numerical
sense, but also recounting, giving an
account of things with an accurate gure
and establishing relationships of adjust-
ment between the gures of the exterior
contributing to the obsessive recourse
to seriality at the time.
Valcrcel Medinas paintings from
Jpo were made up of neutral planes
traversed by a few horizontal lines that
unfolded and extended between their
upper and lower edges. Tey referred
to a network of electric cables in the
landscape as seen from a train window,
an image that inevitably turned the
viewer into a spectator facing a screen
in a projection room. Tey were like still
frames, ordered in series and, potentially,
composing a narrative sequence based
on the model of the lmic time-image
according to Deleuze a direct image of
time.
3
Tis was painting at the limit of the
geometric, the sequential and the serial
painting with a propensity to objectify
itself through its action and in the present,
as bets a literalism of form, but also one
1 See Simn Marchn Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (1972), Madrid: Akal, 1986, p.271.
2 Isidoro Valcrcel Medina et al., Rendicin de la hora (1996), Barcelona: Fundaci Antoni Tpies, 2006, p.57.
3 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson), Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989.
that betrayed a will towards description
or narrative. Valcrcel Medina has spoken
about his work of this period as telling
a spatial story, reected in the images that
were placed one afer the other, normally
suited to the habit of reading (from lef to
right, from top to bottom).
4
In the series
Armarios (Wardrobes, Jpoo), which
earned its name because you could keep
things in them,
5
the structure of the
stretcher itself called out from the
measured surface of the wall to the
current time of the spectator. Tis series
was followed by Lugares (Places, Jpo8
c), in which monochrome panels and
geometrical structures organised and
divided the space of the gallery on the
condition that something went on in
them.
6
Another of these installactions
(as Valcrcel Medina likes to call them)
was titled Algunas maneras de hacer esto
(Some Ways of Doing is, Jpop) and
consisted of a book made for a place and
a place made for a book.
7
Te viewer had
to visit the installation with the help of
a publication titled Secuencia (Sequence)
that was made specically for the occasion.
Te space, which had been conceived to
accommodate its reading, was structured
in three diferent areas that gave place
to three diferent reading moments,
corresponding to the books chapters.
In the installation A continuacin (Next,
Jpc), that will to produce a narrative
understood as description was under-
scored by its subtitle, Un relato en doce
jornadas: lugares, sonidos, palabras
(A Tale in Twelve Days: Places, Sounds,
Words), while at the same time the work
reected the actual temporality of the
spatial and aural measures. Te installa-
tion consisted of Perspex modules shaped
like three-sided parallelepipeds that
slotted into each other to congure the
space in a diferent way each day. Everyday
a cassette tape was used to record the
successive accumulation of sounds
produced by a signal generator. What was
important for me was that only someone
who had visited the gallery on twelve
consecutive days could claim to have seen
the show. I liked the fact that only Fefa
the gallerist and I actually saw it.
8

Tis cycle of Valcrcel Medinas
work closed with Estructuras tubulares
(Tubular Structures, Jp), in which this
will to tell a story in the present, this desire
for something to happen, is taken to the
streets. Te work was installed in the
context of the Encuentros de Pamplona
Jp, an extraordinary large-scale festival,
held in an atmosphere of underlying
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 71
4 I. Valcrcel Medina, La memoria propia es la mejor fuente de documentacin: Entrevista a Valcrcel
Medina, Sin ttulo, issue 1, 1994, p.35.
5 I. Valcrcel Medina, quoted in Ir y venir de Valcrcel Medina (exh. cat.), Barcelona, Granada and Murcia:
Fundaci Antoni Tpies, p.118.
6 I. Valcrcel Medina, quoted in ibid., p.96.
7 I. Valcrcel Medina, quoted in ibid., p.124.
8 I. Valcrcel Medina, La memoria propia, op. cit., p.35. Fefa Seiquer ran the Galera Seiquer in Madrid,
where the exhibition took place.
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, La chuleta
(The Student's Crib
Sheet), 1991,
ink on paper, 5 5cm.
Courtesy the artist
72 | Aerall
hostility under Francos rule, that brought
together the Spanish and international
avant-garde.
9
Estructuras tubulares was,
as its title indicates, tubular structures
normally used in industrial scafoldings
that Valcrcel Medina used to construct
spaces in which to walk, stand, sit or lie
down along a city boulevard. Placing those
iron structures amidst the ow and transit
of the city had a profound efect on him:
I presented a work that could be called
plastic, but soon realised that it was an
exclusively social work.
10
Tis realisation
signalled a decisive shif in his career
and determined all his subsequent work.
From then on, he abandoned the attempt
to create inhabitable art by way of made-
to-measure forms however reasonably
adjusted and instead devoted himself
to an art of inhabiting. Te task was no
longer to construct spaces suitable for
something to go on inside them, but rather
to abandon himself in the city, without
recourse to conventional media or pre-
established ideas, in order to ofer a precise
description of the system of rules and
regulations that govern the city, in order to
give an account of what happens in a public
place. Afer this, he produced works such
as Relojes (Clocks, Jp), for which he
used photographic registers of the calendar
clocks placed in the streets of Madrid
to construct a story about urban time;
or ejercicios de medicin sobre la
ciudad de Crdoba ( Measuring
Exercises about the City of Crdoba,
Jp), which consisted of a series of
physical and symbolic measurements
of the environment and trafc of that city.
Tese exercises were followed by public
exams, anonymous photographs, travelling
art actions, dictionaries of common use,
telephone recordings and polls.
In this new phase of public art
understanding public in a strict sense as
that which concerns the citizen Valcrcel
Medinas artistic practice remained
consistent with his earlier forays into
painting. From the construction of carefully
measured and calibrated installations,
where his descriptive will was activated in
the present time, he moved on to measure
and calibrate the readymade places
of the city, focusing on their transit and
describing through actions the forms
of their exteriority. Tis he did not in an
attempt to reorder the spaces and ows
of the city, to impose a criterion on it or to
explain through some kind of theory the
surrounding reality. Rather, it was an active
9 See Jos Daz Cuys (ed.), Encuentros de Pamplona 1972: Fin de fiesta del arte experimental (exh. cat.),
Madrid: Museo de Arte Nacional Reina Sofa, 2009.
10 I. Valcrcel Medina, La memoria propia, op. cit., p.36.
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, Relojes
(Clocks), 1973,
365 photographs
and cardboard box.
Courtesy the artist
and present description of the maladjust-
ments and the disproportionate contradic-
tions created by the diferent logics or
systems that shape municipal life. His work
since then has continued to revolve around
such straightforward, uncomplicated and
elemental topics as time and measurement,
and has continued to exhibit that desire
to describe and produce an accurate gure
of what happens. Tis is apparent in the
artists book Surrendering of the Hour,
the work with which I began this text.
Surrendering of the Hour is divided into
two parts, with the rst a proposal for the
changing of the clocks. Te reader is invited
to modify the time on his or her clock on a
daily basis, as a conscious exercise by which
to compensate for the absurdity of gaining
or losing an hour every year. Te proposal
is an example of an art of addition, and
it goes so far as to ofer exact tables of the
fractions of time by which clocks should be
brought forwards or backwards each day.
Between one number and the next, each
day is signalled by a phrase that is tied to
the second part of the work, which consists
of an updated version of the daily proverbs
that appear on wall calendars a series of
sentences, comments and aphorisms about
light and time. Te last one number o
reads: Last will: make a sand-clock out
of my ashes. Likewise, in the introduction
to this comically cosmic book, which
Valcrcel Medina has called a premonition
of an inexcusable art of the hour, we nd
an explanation of the master plan for the
work that could well be taken for a general
comment on his particular method:
Te project that is presented here hides
no other message, no other intention than
that of adjusting social convention to
celestial reality.
11

Te idea, then, is to adapt and adjust
the clocks, counting the hours; the work
does not need anything else in order to
function as a signifying machine. It is
enough to compare social norms to the laws
of physics in order to reveal with precision
the nonsense which we incur when we try
to subject one to the legislation of the other
from the standpoint of a common experi-
ence, from our perception of duration and
light as mere corporeal beings. Much the
same could be said of such diverse works
as the series Arquitecturas prematuras
(Premature Architectures, Jp8p),
which is based on a fruitful adjustment
between the logic of construction (as
economic practice) and constructive logic
(as technical practice); of La ley promotora
y reguladora del ejercicio, disfrute y
comercializacin del arte (Law for the
Promotion and Regulation of the Practice,
Enjoyment and Commercialisation
of Art, Jpp), a literal example of legal
art; of I.V.M Ocina de Gestin (I.V.M.
Management Ltd, Jpp), in which
the public was ofered a service for the
management of ideas; and of d. de
J.C. ( A.D., Jppccc), a colossal
history of the Christian West in which
the logic of facts is confronted with that
of historical narrative. Te same could
also be said of the variety of interventions
that took place on the occasion of his
exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofa in
Madrid in the autumn of ccp.
12
When
I use the terms logics and norms, I am
not alluding to arcane structures that must
be sought in recondite places, but rather
to simple but fundamental practices that
anyone can observe. In fact, we could
say that all these projects belong to a
territory that, since the Jp8cs, Valcrcel
Medinas work has ofen visited: the land
of Perogrullo, populated by truths that are
so obvious as to be available for everyone,
but which prevailing cynicism compels
us to overlook.
13
Today, he declared in
ccc, I believe that obviousness (or even
silliness) contains the maximum degree
of creativity.
14
It is not difcult to conclude
that contemporary art itself, its protocols
and institutions, is one of the most fertile
grounds for this kind of practice.
As we have seen, it was the rigour
with which Valcrcel Medina assumed
a literalist position in formal external
matters that allowed him to move in such
a coherent but seemingly abrupt manner to
that other literalism which we have called
situational (and which is equally external).
But I would go so far as to say that it has
been the conviction with which he accepted
the consequences of artistic literalism the
resolution with which he devoted himself
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 73
11 See I. Valcrcel Medina et al., Rendicin de la hora, op. cit., p.2.
12 A complete list of his works until the year 2009 can be found in J. Daz Cuys (ed.), Ir y venir de
Valcrcel Medina, op. cit.
13 Perogrullo is a character who makes such obvious pronouncements that uttering them seems pointless
or silly. In Spanish such truisms are called verdades de Perogrullo (Perogrulloss truths) or even
perogrulladas. The adjective perogrullesco has also been coined.
14 I. Valcrcel Medina, Arquitectura prematura, Fisuras, vol.8, January 2000, n.p.
74 | Aerall
to a succinct description of exteriority
that has endowed his work with real
value and with political potency. Te term
literalism must not be understood here
as merely dealing with formal problems,
but rather as a historical will and a sign of
its time, as the result of a desire to proscribe
metaphor, to eliminate anything in art
that is ctitious, gurative or conventional
that perpetually unfullled desire to
show the immediacy of a naked truth
beyond any self-expressive ightiness.
Tis will did not stop with its application
in the Art Concret of the interwar period,
nor was it restricted to the theoretical
scuMes around the question of literalism
that certain artists associated with
Minimalism engaged in.
15
Rather, its
inuence goes beyond formal problems,
as a drive that runs through the twentieth
century with varying degrees of intensity
and whose most extreme and radical
expression can be found in the last of the
avant-gardes of the late Jpocs and early
cs. It is reminiscent of what Alain Badiou
has called the passion for the real that
was distinctive of the twentieth century,
a collective will that makes the artistic
gesture equivalent to an intrusion into
semblance exposing, in its brute state,
the gap of the real.
16
Tis desire has made
art turn towards the act and away from
the work, for the practice of the avant-
garde is only thought in the present.
Te phrase which gives this text its
title, the everyday fact as peripety, alludes
to a particular way of understanding
this potency of the actual.
17
In Spanish,
the word peripecia from the Greek
periptia, or adventure has a double
meaning. Its literary use coincides with the
English peripety, and refers to a sudden
and unforeseen change of circumstances
within tragedy. In common parlance
it preserves a sense of unpremeditated
accident, but loses its teleologic, dramatur-
gical and providential character to refer
to those simple events or vicissitudes, those
unanticipated novelties, that surprise us in
our daily lives. In this profane sense, every
day like every journey contains a series
of peripeties, small strokes of fortune that
with their capricious interruptions keep
on altering and complicating our existence.
However, although we could think of them
as things that happen to us, the chance that
determines them, far from imposing itself
on the way we plan our time, is actually
a condition of our temporality. We live,
as Deleuze would say, embroiled in the
aleatory in a permanent chaosmos, in
perpetual self-gestation. Something close
Isidoro Valcrcel
Medina, Estructuras
tubulares (Tubular
Structures), 1972.
Installation view,
Encuentros de
Pamplona 1972.
Courtesy the artist
15 See Lynn Zelevansky (ed.), Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 19401970s, Cambridge, MA and
London: The MIT Press, 2004, p.10ff.
16 Alain Badiou, The Century (trans. Alberto Toscano), Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007, p.50.
17 The potency of the actual alludes to the historical will that attempts to evade artistic mediation in
order to capture the immediate the literal, the here and now in the artwork. It is a paradoxical
will which, carried to the extreme, invokes an experience of the self as mere facticity: that of someone
who knows that one is nothing but his or her ways of being, someone who accepts being made up of
now, or whose potency cannot be restricted to his or her individual will or personal time schedules.
Artists: Isidoro Valcrcel Medina | 75
to this is what Valcrcel Medina refers to as
the permanent and obstinate perseverance
of chance as the stable substance of our
contingency.
18
Tis is why he cannot
conceive of any art that is not an art of
chance, but as the reader might have
guessed this has little to do with what
is normally understood as aleatory art.
An art of chance does not refer to an
inclination for gambling, but rather
to acting in the spirit of accepting the
result of the gamble whatever that is,
for it is not in the result that its creative
future lies, but in the way in which
measures are taken to set o in the path
that this result dictates; a path that must
be undertaken just as any other path
that could have come up would have
been undertaken.
19
Tis radical self-experience of the potency
of the actual, open to the contingent and
devoted to facticity, is expressed in his work
through the multiple and diverse peripeties
of his art of the everyday. Tis allows
us to say that Isidoro Valcrcel Medina
has intertwined his own life with his art.
As he has written, his work does not aim to
become a testimony of reality, but rather
to establish itself as the reality of the testi-
mony. As if it were a moral question and
God knows it is! the artwork has to be so
faithful to its moment so as to become the
moment itself. Afer manipulating it, the
author cannot be classed as a manipulator.
20

Te idea, then, is not to develop critical
discourses on reality, but rather to actualise
critical situations, to act in a way that
conjures up circumstances in which every
possible element, including the person who
signs the work, remain in crisis and at risk
of failing. Tis ongoing exercise of self-
exposure and adventure demands an
internal logic that avoids repetition, and
that results in works of radical diversity.
His understanding of testimony is
necessarily related to the personal
experience of the witness, of he who gives
evidence of that reality hence Valcrcel
Medinas recurrent appeal to the notion of
individual responsibility, for the rst thing
we are all witnesses to is our own way of
passing the time.
Tis is why his work, rather than being
a testimony of its time, is a testimony of
his time, of his disarmed afrmation of
the facticity of the present. It is a tale that
tells time, then, but like someone who gives
us a greeting as he or she passes by, a telling
of the time that restitutes the public domain
with the kind of nakedness and intimate
impropriety that we share and which
maintains our community. It is an art that
is thrown into life, a life that is thought of as
dispossessed, without historical narration,
without sociology or biography. Te way
Valcrcel Medina confronts the idea of
social systems or norms with this conscious
throwing of himself into contingency gives
his work a sense of both cruelty and joyful
humour. Any polite invitation from him
will always be a passive provocation.
Tis is so because the measured economy
of his work, its implicit poverty, appeals
to the viewers recognition of his or her
own naked facticity, and it afrms the
present without the concerns with which
we disguise our everyday life.
Te disobedient resistance of his work
to the concerns and values which prevail
in ordinary life and also, of course,
in the ordinary art world the will
with which his work afrms itself in
the potency of the actual, the ostensible
lack of resources with which it risks its
actualisation, endow his ethical position
with a radical common sense. It is the
common sense of someone who doesnt
have anything to lose or to gain, which
provides his practice with a tacit and
urgent political efectivity.
e inspired man writes poems about
becoming, or paints rays of ungraspable
light. But that is not his task. It is a
thousand times better to walk with time,
projecting a shadow, without more ado.
21

18 I. Valcrcel Medina, El seguro azar, in Sergio Rubira and Beatriz Herrez (ed.), Una tirada de dados:
Sobre el azar en el arte contemporneo, Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 2008, p.28.
19 Ibid., p.48.
20 I. Valcrcel Medina, La chuleta, 1991. La chuleta was a work in the form of a school crib sheet that
contained a text on the creative act.
21 I. Valcrcel Medina, Rendicin de la hora, op. cit., p.30.
Translated by Yaiza Hernndez.
78 | Aerall
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Pretexts | 79
One man is dressed in a dark suit, a second in the uniform of a high-ranking military
ofcer. Standing before unmarked lecterns, in front of an audience, they speak gravely
of impending dangers and the need for decisive action. Te situation is immediately
recognisable as a government press conference, but its generic staging and lack of any
other informational cues leave its purpose in doubt. At times the men seem to be making
a case for war, while at others they seem to be answering their critics. Although it soon
becomes clear that the two men are performers citing actual speeches given recently by
well-known international ofcials, this feeling of certainty gives way as they begin to repeat
themselves and nish each others sentences, periodically exchanging places at the lecterns.
Te mens statements are all variations on the same theme: the time for speeches has
passed, and now we must act. But what sort of actors are they? What kind of political
action do they model? And while their performance at times resembles a re-enactment,
how could they be re-enacting an event that never occurred in the rst place?

Two screens. On one, a man in US infantry fatigues wearing a headset with earphones and
wrap-around goggles. On the other, the computer-generated scene he watches as he relates
a story from a recent tour in Iraq. Te contents of this screen change with his narration,
depicting a desert highway an urban marketplace and then the explosion of a car
bomb, in an ambush that kills one of his comrades. Viewers soon realise that the soldier is
participating in a virtual-reality treatment of combat trauma, with his therapist controlling
the immersive simulation. Te soldier struggles to maintain his composure, at one point
even begging the therapist to stop, only to
have her press him to continue. Whatever
sympathies viewers might have shif afer
learning that the soldier and therapist
are actually both employees of a sofware
development rm, and that their entire
interaction was a scripted attempt to sell
the rms VR-therapy technology to the US
military. Tis startling reversal displaces
any potential assumptions about the
treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
While such therapy typically seeks a cathartic re-presentation of trauma, what changes
when this act occurs under economic, institutional and ideological pressure? If, as here,
therapeutic sofware shares the same platform as the battle-simulation programmes used
to recruit and train soldiers, what does it mean that the ostensible method of cure cant
be isolated from the technologies that helped produce the trauma?

An adolescent boy stands alone before a black background, facing a camera. He wears
a pullover, jogging pants and trainers, and slowly shifs his weight back and forth. From
of-screen instructions can be heard, possibly given by a director or casting agent. Te boy
is asked to act out an argument with an imagined girlfriend, and his demeanour quickly
shifs from polite difdence to barely restrained rage. He backs out of character afer a
time, looking of-camera as if for approval. Good, the voice tells him. Now give us another
ght, this time with your mother, youve just found her drunk. Afer this he is asked for yet
Pretexts:
e Evidence
of the Event
Andrew Stefan Weiner
Andrew Stefan Weiner examines recent
works that reect a new conception of
eventhood: one not dened by occurrence
in time but instead by the production
of unpredictable eects that contaminate
or even constitute the experience of the
event itself.
Previous spread:
Rod Dickinson in
collaboration with
Steve Rushton, Who,
What, Where, When,
Why and How, 2009,
performance, SMART
Project Space,
Amsterdam, 11 July
2009. Photograph:
Nicki Musgrave.
Courtesy the artists
opposite:
Ian Charlesworth,
John, 2005, video,
13min. Courtesy
the artist
80 | Aerall
another confrontation, and to keep drawing on his own experiences. As the audition
continues it is apparent that the boy is essentially being asked to play himself, or, rather,
to play himself as the sort of stereotype one would quickly recognise on television:
a working-class tough from the streets of Belfast. Despite the boys lack of training
as an actor, his capable, almost automatic responses make it clear that he understands
this role well. But how? Has he been cast before, or has he somehow internalised these
expectations such that he can reproduce them on demand? What does it mean for him
that his experience is efectively merged with a commodied image of authentic economic
disenfranchisement, or that this subjectication forms the condition for his potential
employment as an actor? And how do such demands change his own performance of
self once he leaves the studio?

Each of these three descriptions refers to a recent artwork: respectively, Who, What, Where,
When, Why and How (ccp), a live project staged by Rod Dickinson in collaboration with
Steve Rushton; Immersion (ccp), a two-channel video installation by Harun Farocki; and
John (cc), a single-channel video by Ian Charlesworth. Moreover, each description also
corresponds to a situation that is marked, even constituted, by an entanglement of the event
and its representations. In this capacity, they indicate an ever-intensifying set of transfor-
mations encompassing social relations, technical media, cultural production and even
temporal structures, ultimately challenging our sense of what we mean by the ostensibly
simple term event. Such changes have crucial implications for contemporary artistic and
critical practice, as well as for the relation between aesthetics and politics more broadly.
Tese shifs have already strained the vocabulary used to discuss durational art, so
that even basic terms like performance and video now seem to lack sufcient specicity.
1

In response, a number of contemporary practices ofen align themselves not so much
with art as with political activism, documentary, research and pedagogy. Tis expanded,
transversal eld of action enables forms of production that are more urgent and resist
reductive categorisation, whether as discrete artistic media or even as art altogether.
Some, like Farockis Immersion, which is shown either as a two-channel video installation
or a split-screen single-channel television programme, exist across multiple formats,
making the question of their ultimate medium irrelevant. Similarly, although works
like Who, What deploy codes of performance, they do not require them in order to be
legible. Dickinson refers to the piece as a live art project, but it could be described as an
experiment in re-enactment, or simply as an event in the generic sense. What matters
most is the basic questions that the works title invokes: how and why an event takes place;
when, where and for whom it occurs; and indeed what it means for it to happen at all.
In questioning these fundamental conditions of occurrence, such work exemplies an
increasingly widespread concern with the status of the event. Tis emergent proliferation
of event-oriented practices relates to but is not identical with performance as the term
is usually understood, inasmuch as these forms do not necessarily require staging or
re-enacting actual events for an audience. As in Farockis video, such work might not
directly intervene in the proceedings it depicts, but rather represent them as instances
when the concept of eventhood comes into question. Event-oriented practices might
concern duration without possessing an extended duration themselves, or question
eventfulness without themselves aspiring to it. Viewed collectively, such practices can
be understood as critical engagements with the event that resist or reformulate existing
matrices of recognition: the coordinates by which we map certain phenomena as art or
as politics, as eventful or uneventful, and so forth.
1 While these terms initially designated practices whose contingency, hybridity and marginality
directly opposed institutionally sanctioned art, theatre and media, this radical valence has been
eclipsed by an ongoing process of validation, which has retroactively deemed both performance
and video stable artistic genres. In the case of performance, this attenuation of its possible radical
character has been amplified by the ascendance of post-Fordist modes of production, which have
refigured labour as the performance of regulated modes of personality. See Martha Rosler, Video:
Shedding the Utopian Moment, in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (ed.), Illuminating Video: An Essential
Guide to Video Art, New York: Aperture, 1991, pp.3150; Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Against Performance
Art, Artforum, May 2010, pp.20812; and Sven Ltticken, An Arena in Which to Re-enact,
in S. Ltticken (ed.), Life, Once More: Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art, Rotterdam:
Witte de With, 2005, pp.1760.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Pretexts | 81
Tis development surely asks to be thought of together with the fact that the
theorisation of the event has been an ongoing preoccupation for Continental philosophy
since the late Jpocs, with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jacques
Derrida and more recently Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek all proposing their own distinct
conceptions of eventhood. While acknowledging the formidable complexity of this eld,
one might nevertheless argue that the most pertinent theorist for recent event-oriented
practices is in fact Jacques Rancire. Tis might seem slightly perverse, given that Rancire
ofers no coherent theory of the event as such, perhaps to mark his distance from post-
Structuralism, phenomenology or academic philosophy in general. However, diferent
types of the transformative event are in fact central to his inuential account of politics and
aesthetics. For Rancire, democratic politics consists of the intermittent actions by which
dissensus is articulated, contesting the fact that the means by which the rights to appear,
speak and act are unequally distributed within the eld of the sensible.
2
Te force of critical
art manifests itself in attempts to analyse or repartition this eld such that appearance
can happen under diferent conditions.
3
In this view, democracy and critical art arent
abstractions or ideals but phenomena that unfold in shared time.
We might thus understand the event along similar lines as a singular, contingent
encounter between aesthetics and politics in which their established coordinates are
reorganised or rearticulated so that forms and afects can circulate between them. Tis
ultimately suggests a plastic, capacious denition of the event as that which allows event-
hood to be thought or experienced diferently, or as that which doesnt register as a recog-
nisable type of occurrence. Tese tendencies are all in play in the three works described
above as they track the transformation of event-structures across multiple levels ranging
from a subjects actions to the conditions of representation, distribution and reception.
More specically, Dickinson, Farocki and Charlesworth all problematise the evidence
of the event : not only the diferent means by which an event is constituted, mediated,
2 See, for example, Jacques Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (trans. Julie Rose),
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp.2930.
3 Rancire outlines this position in Problems and Transformations of Critical Art, in J. Rancire,
Aesthetics and its Discontents (trans. Steven Corcoran), Cambridge: Polity, 2009, pp.4560.
Ian Charlesworth,
John, 2005, video,
13min. Courtesy
the artist
82 | Aerall
recorded and evaluated, but also its status as evident, existing within a shared domain of
perception. As this essay intends to demonstrate, the multiform relation between evidence
and event delineates a common horizon of many recent artistic practices, one traversing
the boundaries between art and other activities, including politics. Tis diverse eld centres
around an insistence that the event cannot be considered apart from its representations,
and that these elements irreducibly constitute and contaminate each other.
Such unstable reciprocity means that the consequences of these event-oriented
practices are necessarily unpredictable and singular, and that their impact derives
from their particularities, as with most complex art. Tis heterogeneity notwithstanding,
a brief schematisation of the work discussed above shows several common traits.
Te rst of these is a tendency to appear in the form of an event, but one in which the
typical parameters of occurrence are altered. While most people would concede that
the interpretation of evidence can retroactively determine the implications of an event,
as in courtrooms or in the psychoanalytic process, it seems counter-intuitive to claim
that evidence can precede an event, determining it before the fact. Tis, however, is the
scenario subtending Who, What, in which the appeals given by the speech-makers
presume prior knowledge of the ofcial rhetoric of state warfare, such that the legitimacy
of their assertions is, in a sense, pre-established.
A second common element is a focus on the action of performativity within the
event. As is clear in Jacques Derridas reading of J.L. Austin, the illocutionary speech-act
(an utterance such as I pronounce you husband and wife) is as much transformative
as performative, a force that efectively generates new objects while altering the conditions
under which they can be meaningfully recognised.
4
Given that any event requires
mediation in order to be intelligible, and since this mediation ofen (if not always) relies on
performativity, representations of the event are liable to change the identities of the speaker
or audience, or even constitute the realities they otherwise purport to document. In this
sense, whatever indexical verity it may claim, evidence always simultaneously refers back
to this process of constitutive mediation, whereby the representation of evidence alters the
context within which such evidence appears. At their limit, these performative properties
can deform the event such that it resists or even exceeds the logic of documentation,
if not that of representation altogether. By exposing the volatile overdetermination that
thus marks even seemingly simple occurrences, event-oriented practices contravene much
of what the term evidence usually signies: veriable facticity, epistemological certainty
and consensus. One could say they pose evidence as a question, uncovering a eld of
contesting forces that belies the ostensible neutrality of this concept.
5

While evidence usually evokes the law, many recent artworks frame their relation
with the event in terms that are not restricted to juridical institutions, instead situating
this conjunction within dispersed, heterogeneous discourses of power-knowledge. Here
evidence emerges as an efect of processes similar to those that interpellate the subject.
6

However, in addition to this institutional-discursive function, the law also operates through
the register of the symbolic. As is clear in Charlesworths video, subjectivity is never
something that we simply possess, but rather becomes sensible only when articulated
within given matrices of convention.
4 In Derridas words, the performative produces or transforms a situation, it effects. Jacques Derrida,
Signature Event Context (trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman), Limited Inc, Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p.13. Without over-hastily equating the speech-act with
other forms like technically reproduced images, one might recall Derridas insistence that all forms
of representation qua writing can exist only through their capacity of being repeated, and thus
remain open to the possibility of citation.
5 In doing so, they show an affinity to various philosophical critiques of representation, particularly
the interrogation of the sign conducted by semiotic theorists during the 1960s. If the photograph
had long been the master trope for an unproblematic account of evidence, recent event-oriented
practices engage the technically reproduced image in terms similar to those deployed by the early
Roland Barthes: as a site where meaning is not depicted but generated, altered and transferred.
In this view, photographic images enact a peculiar slippage between denotation and connotation,
such that certain values are retroactively projected onto the image, where they appear to have existed
all along. See R. Barthes, The Photographic Message, Image Music Text (trans. Stephen Heath),
New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, pp.1531, especially pp.1720.
6 One thinks in this context of the historical research undertaken by John Tagg and Allan Sekula,
who linked photographic portraiture to the ascendance of criminology and para-scientific fields
like phrenology, along with the implementation of police databases and the surveillance of
populations. Examples include J. Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and
Histories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993; and A. Sekula, The Body and the Archive,
in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1989,
pp.34388.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Pretexts | 83
Te fact that evidence must always be produced and recognised under unpredictable
conditions means that it harbours a force resisting reductive judgements that might
quantify or otherwise x its value. Evidence thus further resembles the law in that
the iterability that necessarily constitutes it also leaves it invariably subject to failure or
graf, as Judith Butler has argued.
7
Oppositional practices are themselves not immune
to this condition of exposure, but can only negotiate it. So if this immanence leaves them
open to recuperation, misinterpretation or reframing, it simultaneously enables them
to mobilise a more archaic meaning of evidence: that of a shared sensible manifestation,
where that which is evident exists to be seen by any and all.
8
What sorts of community
does this potential promise? What modes of being-together does it organise? And how
can we understand the event of its manifestation?
Given the decades-long lag that has separated early experiments in performance from
their inclusion in mainstream art institutions, it is no surprise that the most promising
responses to such questions today are coming from alternative spaces. One compelling
recent example was the ccp exhibition Performing Evidence, curated by Anke Bangma
for SMART Project Space in Amsterdam. Tough modest in size, the show presented itself
ambitiously as a speculation on the role of representation in the actualisation of certain
scenarios of reality.
9
As its title suggested, this approach positioned evidence within
an ongoing chain of mediations as a representation of its own performative production
that then inuences future actions, and so on. Tough such a recursive problematic has
a clear bearing on current conditions of media saturation, Bangma intended a more
comprehensive historicisation that could relate contemporary cultural production to
the development of the human sciences and related techniques of social management.
Te diverse materials gathered for the show, which included the works by Dickinson,
Farocki and Charlesworth mentioned above, shared a common trait: a presentation of
evidence that was at odds with its mediation, ofen subtly or surprisingly. Tese conicts
produced uncanny efects, as in e Battle of Seale Hayne (JpJ8), a lm produced as
part of an experimental therapy at a British clinic, in which traumatised World War I
veterans were asked to write, stage and record themselves participating in mock combat.
Te apparent realism of the battle
sequences prompted an unsettling
question: was this an efect of the soldiers
re-enacting their own actual experiences,
or of their somehow aligning their account
with the conventions of the war lm?
By exhibiting such documentary materials,
which were produced outside the context
of art, Performing Evidence tracked
movements between elds as seemingly distinct as art video, medical records, moving-
image installation, colonial-expedition lms and performance. Te show developed its
argument by pairing apparently incommensurable objects together, as in a gallery that
contained Guy Ben-Ners Wild Boy (cc) a home-video re-enactment of Kaspar
Hausers education starring Ben-Ner and his son alongside photographs taken in Ghent
in the Jpcs at an asylum for handicapped children. Te pictures were the work of the
institutes well-meaning director, who outtted his wards in formal dress and had them
role play various scenes from adult life. Viewed together with Wild Boy in which one rst
thinks the boy is aping his father, only to learn that the original sequence has been reversed
and that Ben-Ner is thus copying his son the Ghent pictures punctured the sentimental
romanticisation of childhood by suggesting that childrens play can be dictated by adults
intent on realising fantasies of their own lost freedoms.
Another efective juxtaposition was realised with Farockis installation, which was
placed alongside e Battle of Seale Hayne and other World War I-era lms in which
British soldiers act out the symptoms of war neuroses in before-and-afer fashion so as
As is clear in Charlesworths
video, subjectivity is never
something that we possess,
but rather becomes sensible
only when articulated within
given matrices of convention.
7 Judith Butler has provided a sustained close analysis of the relation between iterability, performativity
and agency, for example, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London and New York:
Routledge, 1993, pp.1216.
8 As per the Oxford English Dictionary, the Latinate etymology of the word evidence links the faculty of
sight to the condition of exteriority; that which is evident is literally out-seeing, plain for all to see.
9 Anke Bangma, SMART Papers: Performing Evidence (exh. cat.), Amsterdam: SMART Project Space,
2009, p.3.
84 | Aerall
to document their successful treatment. As with Immersion, these recordings, which
were made to persuade military and medical authorities to adopt methods of re-enactment
and favour certain hospitals, do not document the specic psychodynamics of therapy,
but rather its promotion or marketing. Tey further suggest how demands for evidence
can serve as forms of suggestion, producing the symptoms they purportedly reveal.
Whether intentionally or not, such materials portray military psychology as conicted
in terms of whether to treat patients as civilians or soldiers, and whether combat is simply
incommensurable with psychic health. Te currency of these questions is unmistakable,
given the recent media attention on the systemic failures in care for traumatised US
veterans, as well as on US intelligence and security agencies employment of doctors
and psychologists in detention and torture procedures.
10
Te crucial insight of Immersion comes in relating these issues to the penetration
of warfare into seemingly non-militarised spheres of activity, intimating the existence
of something like a military-cultural-industrial complex. Such a position brought together
two of Farockis long-standing interests: the function of disciplinary power within every-
day life, and the link between optical and military technics. Yet where one might have
expected totalising conclusions, the video exhibited a welcome restraint. Rather than
re-stage the scenario familiar from Paul Virilios writings, in which battleeld technologies
are repurposed for consumer use,
11
Immersion detailed an open circuit between the
military, Hollywood, video-game developers and experimental psychologists. Virtual
Iraq, the programme featured in the piece, was produced at the Institute for Creative
Technologies, a US Army-funded research lab at the University of Southern California,
and was in fact based on Full Spectrum Warrior, a game developed by the US military
in the early cccs as a recruitment tool.
12
In these circumstances the term immersion
assumed new meaning, designating a condition in which the distinctions between actual
and virtual warfare lapse, with soldiers recruited, trained, entertained and treated with
technologies similar to those used in combat. Although the installation, itself immersive,
clearly meant to implicate its own audience in this problematic, the potentially accusatory
tendencies of such a move were countered by the dual screen, which allowed viewers
a degree of interpretative freedom, a technique Farocki has termed sof montage.
13

By contrast, Dickinsons Who, What addressed this militarisation from the vantage
point of electoral politics. Tere the interchanges between the generic politician and
army ofcer their swapping lines and lecterns suggested the reversibility of Carl
von Clausewitzs famous maxim, with politics becoming the continuation of war by other
Harun Farocki,
Serious Games 3:
Immersion, 2009,
double-channel video,
20min. the artist
10 For coverage of the former issue, see, among others, Dana Priest and Anne Hull, Soldiers Face Neglect,
Frustration at Armys Top Medical Facility, The Washington Post, 18 February 2007; for the latter,
see Neil A. Lewis, Interrogators Cite Doctors Aid at Guantnamo Prison Camp, The New York Times,
24 June 2005.
11 See, for example, Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (trans. Patrick Camiller),
London and New York: Verso, 1989; and P. Virilio, Speed and Politics (trans. Mark Polizzotti),
Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2007.
12 Sue Halpern reports on the program and its development in her article Virtual Iraq, The New Yorker,
19 May 2008, pp.3237.
13 Farocki elaborates on the theory behind this technique in conversation with Kaja Silverman in
K. Silverman and H. Farocki, Speaking about Godard, New York: New York University Press, 1998,
pp.14143.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Pretexts | 85
means.
14
Te piece proceeded to map the recent metamorphoses of a classical rhetorical
scenario: the announcement of the casus belli. Tis precedent, invoked by many
of speeches cited, now seems completely outmoded in a moment when war is ofen
starkly asymmetrical, if it is even declared at all. Quotations from UN representatives,
Bill Clinton and members of the George W. Bush administration made clear that the
ubiquity of human rights rhetoric calls its credibility into question, as such appeals
ofen serve merely as pretexts for politics as usual. Tese selections, read unaltered and
straight-faced, ironically conjured an endless series of speeches on the limits of rhetoric
and the virtues of action. In shuttling between ostensibly disparate gures Clinton and
Slobodan Miloevi, or Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush the script didnt cynically
equate them, but rather examined how they all exploited the conventions of a given
speech situation. Following this argument, such speeches are themselves already essentially
a strange sort of re-enactment, claiming authority through an implicit identication
with historical precedent. It is thus almost as if the legitimacy of military action were
already taken for granted, with its rhetorical pre-texts serving as pretext, a form of
evidence that comes before the event of its presentation to the public. Here evidence
is less a contestable rationale than a mere formality, a claim that will likely be rendered
irrelevant afer new facts on the ground have been established. By incorporating its own
means of documentation, with a photographer and camera man playing members of
the news media, Who, What sceptically questioned the status of such speeches as public
events, implying that they happen not as part of a democratic process, but rather simply
to have happened, so that ofcials can either justify themselves before posterity or, if all
else fails, indemnify themselves.

Ultimately, the chief interest of Performing Evidence lay not so much in its historical
argument, which somewhat exceeded its own evidence, but rather in the transversal
perspective it adopted, linking art with numerous non-art forms and practices. Such an
approach remains regrettably rare, with non-art materials usually displayed as merely
illustrative context to the extent that they appear at all. Te shows successful pairings
directed viewers attention to a crucial intersection, intimating various analogies,
migrations, conicts and zones of indistinction between the aesthetics of politics and
the politics of aesthetics.
15
By reframing the relation between evidence and event in
these terms, the exhibition efectively demonstrated that its problematic could usefully
be applied to other materials and sites.
One key area for such investigation might be the war crimes tribunal, which in recent
decades has become a central instrument of international law. Te lm e Specialist,
14 tienne Balibar discusses this reversal in his lecture Politics as War, War as Politics: Post-
Clausewitzian Variations, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 8 May 2006, available online
at http://www.ciepfc.fr/spip.php?article37 (last accessed on 2 July 2010). Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari address similar questions in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
(trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p.467.
15 This distinction and terminology are borrowed from Rancire, who explains them in detail
in J. Rancire, Problems and Transformations of Critical Art, op. cit.
86 | Aerall
made in Jppp by Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman, is among the few eforts to engage
this history, analysing a decisive moment in its early history: the JpoJ trial in Jerusalem
of Adolf Eichmann. Assembled solely from appropriated footage of the proceedings,
culled from the hundreds of hours recorded by the ofcial camera crew, the lm forefronts
the status of the trial as an international media event, the rst ever to be broadcast
worldwide. In depicting the prosecutions use of procedurally irrelevant testimony
from Holocaust survivors, the lm argues that the performance of evidence was used
to develop forms of memory that could go towards redeeming genocide in the foundation
of a Jewish state, and would legitimate that states sovereign right to exercise violent force
in self-defence.
16
Te importance of this aesthetic dimension to human rights legislation
cannot be discounted, especially inasmuch as transitional justice increasingly takes
televisual form, with the tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia designed
expressly around the needs of the television camera.
17
Such a shif dees monolithic
criticism, especially given how the broadcast of hearings has in some cases integrated
previously disenfranchised constituencies, transforming basic assumptions about public
speech and afect.
18
However, most critical analysis of this eld has focused on questions
of jurisprudence or international relations. Only interventions that chiastically intertwine
aesthetics and politics can engage issues that might otherwise go overlooked, like the ways
in which the trial can become a transformative event in which technical mediation alters
the conditions under which collective identications are possible.
A second area of critical interest is the array of discourses and practices associated
with the war on terror initiated by Bush in ccJ, and continued with certain modica-
tions by the Obama administration. Its aesthetic and political implications are complex,
mirroring the intense heterogeneity of a war that has taken unprecedented forms:
recorded on camera telephones and uploaded to YouTube, conducted in prisons like
Guantnamo Bay, Bagram Air Base and others whose names are still unknown.
19
Given
this complex array of determinations, transdisciplinary discursive practices are best
equipped to register efective responses. Tough Farockis Immersion is exemplary in
this respect, a more intensively performative engagement with these issues was manifest
in the cc project Scripts from a Nation at War, undertaken collectively by Andrea
Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander and David Torne.
20
Te groups initial
research mobilised a diverse archive of sources, ranging from interviews with veterans
and journalists to transcripts of military tribunals, that they then collated into nine
separate scripts. It then inected these materials through various devices: compounding
multiple opinions into one anonymous voice, having speakers deliver each others
lines, combining trained and non-professional actors, and interlacing fact with ction.
By thus scrutinising and rearticulating the operation of the scripts, the project provocatively
re-presented such new types of event as the US militarys Combatant Status Review
Tribunals, sham trials in which defendants had no access to the evidence used to justify
their indenite detention.
21

Te stakes here extend well beyond the projects innovations within the eld of
contemporary art. Projects like Scripts pointedly distance themselves from the more
typical concerns of performance: authenticity, the relation between embodiment and
mediatisation or the ways that re-enactment problematises historical truth. Instead,
they situate themselves as contingent engagements with the very structural conditions
that make events intelligible, possible and actionable. Tis immanent, experimental
16 Benjamin Robinson provides legal and political analysis of these dynamics in his essay The Specialist
on the Eichmann Precedent: Morality, Law, and Military Sovereignty, Critical Inquiry, vol.30,
no.1, Autumn 2003, pp.6397.
17 Sivan discusses these developments in regards to The Specialist in the article Archive Images:
Truth or Memory?: The Case of Adolf Eichmanns Trial, in Okwui Enwezor et al., Experiments with
Truth, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp.27788.
18 For an insiders perspective on these questions, see Albie Sachs, Different Kinds of Truth:
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in O. Enwezor, Experiments with
Truth, op. cit., pp.4360. Sachs was appointed by Nelson Mandela to serve as a judge on the
Constitutional Court of South Africa, and was involved in numerous important post-apartheid
rulings.
19 For a representative analysis of one response to these developments, see Karen Beckman, Telescopes,
Transparency, and Torture: Trevor Paglen and the Politics of Exposure, Art Journal, Fall 2007, pp.6267.
20 A more detailed discussion of this project can be found in Ian White, One Script for 9 Scripts from
a Nation at War, Afterall, no.18, Summer 2008, pp.10007.
21 An early account of these tribunals can be found in Neil Lewis, Guantnamo Prisoners Getting Their
Day, but Hardly in Court, The New York Times, 8 November 2004.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Pretexts | 87
approach seeks to identify and test the sort of rules that govern cultural production and
political action. It asks how we might act within this conjuncture, how we might modify
it and how it might in turn act upon us. In this sense, they internalise a certain logic of
encounter, in which an unpredictable situation demands that we respond without the
knowledge of readily foreseeable consequences. Against the implicit voluntarism that
ofen marks interpretations of performance art, this scene is premised on a negotiation
with a radical and irreducible heteronomy. Tis condition of exposure unies such
practices despite their particularities, and makes them singularly qualied to track
the ongoing proliferation of event forms.
Although the contours of this transformation remain uid, several shifs are worth
noting. Chief among these is the fact that most anyone can now produce images on mobile
phones, inexpensive cameras or computers, vastly multiplying our access to representa-
tions of events while simultaneously making the provenance or the medium of the image
less relevant. Concurrently, the news media has increasingly adopted what Hito Steyerl
has termed a transnational documentary jargon, fusing the codes of journalism
with those of ctional narrative; this has
happened at a moment when corporate
media convergence and declining state arts
funding have made independent cultural
production increasingly precarious.
22
Te
resulting conditions are highly ambivalent,
with the increased power and proliferation
of the image renewing utopian aspirations
for democratic communication, largely
dormant since video experiments of the
Jpcs, while inspiring a backlash within
the US art world against installed video,
avowedly political content and documentary.
23
Although there is obviously no simple
formula to explain these shifs, it is nevertheless clear that oppositional interventions will
have to reckon with their consequences if they hope to prove viable.
In this vein, it is tempting to claim that future practices must continue to work through
the problem of the event and its evidence. But this would foster the illusion that the problem
is an object we can choose to study from outside, rather than a historical conjuncture
whose coordinates cant be precisely charted, and from which it is impossible to extricate
ourselves. At the risk of sounding portentous, this critical engagement is an event in its
own right, one whose outcomes and risks are inherently undecidable. It is within just
such an aporetic relation between actuality, virtuality and possibility that the event
resides, destabilising the foundationalist ontologies that continue to subtend theories
of aesthetics and politics.
24
If evidence and event are unpredictably transformative of
each other, how does this free reciprocity alter our thinking about modes of collective
manifestation, or the transitivity of the art object? How might it model the sorts of
exchange and encounter that can occur between media and forms, between the hierarchical
schemes that map the social onto the sensible, between discrete logics of critical resistance?
We might say, afer Maurizio Lazzarato, that the event insists, adamantly reiterating such
questions over and against our sense of what is given, real or obvious.
25
It insists on what
is possible and what is common. It insists on the evidence of what is manifest to all, even if
the fate of this equality is by no means self-evident. Without pretext or condition, the event
insists and continues insisting.
22 For discussion of this conjuncture see Hito Steyerl, A Language of Practice, in H. Steyerl and Maria
Lind (ed.), The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art, Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2008, pp.22531.
23 Such criticisms have come both from the centre-left (Rosalind Krauss) and centre-right (Peter
Schjeldahl), particularly around the programming at Documenta11 in 2002, curated by Okwui Enwezor.
Enwezor offers an insightful response in his essay Documentary/Verit: The Figure of Truth in
Contemporary Art, in Mark Nash (ed.), Experiments With Truth (exh. cat.), Philadelphia: The Fabric
Workshop and Museum, 2005, pp.97104.
24 Gilles Deleuze relates this ontological singularity of the event to what he terms its double structure:
its articulation of a present actualisation with a neutral, indeterminate past and future. See The Logic
of Sense (ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale), New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990, pp.15153.
25 Maurizio Lazzarato, Struggle, Event, Media (trans. Aileen Derieg), archived online at
http://eipcp.net/ transversal/1003/lazzarato/en/print (last accessed on 17 June 2010).
Anyone can now produce
images on mobile phones,
cameras or computers,
vastly multiplying our access
to representations of events
while making the provenance
or the medium of the image
less relevant.
88 | Aerall
Jean-Luc Godard,
Film Socialisme, 2010,
various formats
transferred to 35mm
film, 102min.
Courtesy Wild Bunch
and Wild Side Video
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Film Socialisme | 89
Moi je ne veux rien dire, jessaie de montrer, ou faire sentir,
ou permettre de dire autre chose aprs.
Jean-Luc Godard
1

By now I recognise that compassionate look students reserve for when they think Im
exaggerating. For instance, when I pause Psycho (Jpoc) on the brief close-up of the plate on
Marions car and segue into an expos on the obsessive-compulsive subtext of Hitchcocks
oeuvre. Or when I wax lyrical about the vertiginous depths of the opaque surface afer
a full-length screening of Andy Warhols Blow Job (Jpo) or Chantal Akermans Jeanne
Dielman, quai du Commerce, Bruxelles (Jp). And, yes, also when Ive come
to Histoire(s) du cinma (Jp88p8) in my crash course on Jean-Luc Godard. However,
the tolerant magnanimity of these youthful
lm-makers-to-be I can hear them
thinking: Herman will switch back to Mad
Men, YouPorn or Palestinian lm soon
enough doesnt last much past a showing
of Chapitre (a): Toutes les histoires,
the rst part of Godards four-and-a-half-
hour video work. Involuntary exposure
to this radial, multiple and multilayered
piece in an educational setting at times generates baMement, boredom and resentment.
In these students defence, most were only just born when the French lm-maker started
his magnum opus, a year before the Berlin Wall came down. Yet that generational distance
doesnt quite explain the vexation: Godards lms from the early Jpocs do excite almost
unanimous approval from the same target audience. Te irked reaction to his later work
Week-end from Jpo seems to be the cut of point seems to me rather due to its dogged
pedagogy, which wags a nger without ever really explaining what the lesson is.
Last July, I found myself at the Cinematek in Brussels. Its the night of the nal game
in the cJc World Cup Spain against the Netherlands broadcast to a global audience
of seven hundred million spectators. At the same time this sold-out Belgian lm museum
of Jc seats is screening Film Socialisme (cJc), Godards newest feature lm his rst
in six years and, given his advanced age, maybe his last. Te screening has all the allure
of a match hors catgorie: lm versus television, art movie versus sporting event, cinema
versus the world. Yet, afer all was said and done, the ercest showdown seemed to have
happened between lm and viewer. In my case, the result was more or less a standof
indeed, it was my third viewing. A month earlier, when the lights came on again in the
Paris Art et Essai cinema where I saw (or was subjected to) the lm for the rst time, I was
lef perplexed. Now I read a similar dazed baMement on the faces of my fellow viewers,
even though they are unlikely to be neophytes in a cinephilic locale such as this one. Is this
the state of bewilderment that sometimes strikes my students?

l.
Film Socialisme. Not a socialist lm (lm socialiste), nor lmic socialism (socialisme
lmique). Let alone lm and socialism. Simply two words paired, put together without
Late, Latest, Last:
Aerthoughts and
Footnotes on Godards
Film Socialisme
Herman Asselberghs
Herman Asselberghs looks at Jean-Luc
Godards Film Socialisme to nd a
late work a lm in and out of step with
contemporaneity and representing a move
from didacticism to enigma.
1 I dont want to say anything, I try to show, or make one feel, or allow for something else to be said
afterwards. Serge Kaganski and Jean-Marc Lalanne, Le droit dauteur? Un auteur na que des devoirs.
Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard, Les inrockuptibles, no.754, May 2010, p.xx.
90 | Aerall
much ado. Film Socialism. Its not even a composite term. A correlation perhaps. Te
suggestion of a possible association. Maybe even an alliance.
Tese two nineteenth-century inventions share a number of inherent similarities: their
appeal to the individual, their mobilisation of the masses, their projection of a potential
world and their striving for a transformation of reality. Moreover, since both were
dethroned at the end of the last century and have become a problematics or even outright
a problem to some, they also share a sense of past glory and illusions squandered. And an
uncertain future. Joined on a lm poster they make an unexpected and somewhat uneasy
pair, recalling the punch line to a by now well-rehearsed anecdote about Tony Judt. Afer
one of his last public appearances, his own twelve-year old son shot of an eloquently-
worded question, the rst of that evenings Q&A: Okay, so on a daily basis, if youre
having a conversation or even a debate about some of these issues and the word socialism"
is mentioned, sometimes it is as though a brick has fallen on the conversation and
theres no way to return to its form. What would you recommend as a way to restore
the conversation?
2

Godard loves throwing bricks. Take, for instance, the amusing serendipity to which he
owes the title of his new lm. As he recounts in an interview, a philosopher friend sent him
a twelve-page letter on the absolute astuteness of Film Socialisme as a title, and he cheekily
agreed to use it. Ce lm pourrait-il tre unmoment de socialisme? the philosopher asked
before providing his own answer: Sans aucun doute.
3
Tis enthused epistler had simply
misread an early promotional production booklet and erroneously conjoined part of
the producers name (Vega Film) with the tentative title of the new project (Socialisme).
2.
Te title ashes by too quickly, together with the rest of the opening credits. Trying to
determine who is in the lm, who is operating the camera, who is responsible for the sound
and who for the nancing is futile, as is the quest to learn which sources literary, visual,
audiovisual the lm-maker has plumbed this time. A glimpse has to sufce. It turns out
to be a sustained strategy: images, sounds, words, gures, storylines and chapters appear
and disappear before one can get a grip on them. Yet the lm doesnt have a rapid pace
or ashy editing, and though it is comprised of scraps and shards, the narrative does
not feel fragmented. On the contrary, Godards usual fusion of the heterogeneous yet
again conjures an astounding cohesion. Adjacencies ename the dense mass like a
spray of embers. Fragments from Walter Benjamin, Alfred Schnittke, Roberto Rossellini,
Jacques Derrida, Barbara, Agns Varda, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson and the
Champions League kindle splinters from John Ford, Fernand Braudel, Sergei Eisenstein,
Chet Baker, Joseph Conrad, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Andr Malraux, Joan Baez,
Curzio Malaparte, Jean Genet, Ludwig van Beethoven and Diego Velzquez (just a few
of the usual suspects).
4
Rock icon Patti Smith and star-philosopher Alain Badiou are
each allowed to glimmer on screen for a brief minute, as do the two parrots with which
the lm opens, in medias res.
3.
Why is it so much easier to narrate the impossible worlds of Avatar (ccp) and Inception
(cJc) than the many possible stories in Film Socialisme? Tere are two stories at
least: one about being adrif (more or less), the other about being domestic (in a way).
Tey are bound to two locations: a cruise ship and a petrol station. More or less in that
order. An association. Te implication of a possible relation. Maybe even a correlation.
2 Quoted in Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, London: Allen Lane, 2010,
pp.22728.
3 Could this film be a moment of socialism? Without a single doubt. Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme:
Dialogues avec visages auteurs, Paris: ditions P.O.L., 2010, p.105. Ever since For Ever Mozart (1996),
Godard has published the spoken text to his films in small booklets that look like mock poetry
collections: dialogue lines and voiceovers appear after each other, undifferentiated, unascribed and
uncredited. See www.pol-editeur.com for all seven titles.
4 The opening credits mention the many sources, cheekily ordered under the headers Logos (the names
of the crew, including four cameramen and his partner and longtime-collaborator Anne-Marie
Miville), Tekhnos (audiovisual hardware brands such as Canon, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Sonosax
and Studer), Audios (sounds), Textos (texts) and Videos (images).
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Film Socialisme | 91
Te cruise takes us along the ports of the Mediterranean. Life on-board ofers few
surprises. Tourism here has become a living clich, synonymous with mindless consumption.
Under the guise of moneyed exclusivity this oating corporation provides its customers
with the golden oldies of mass entertainment: kitchens ofering mildly exotic fare, interiors
decorated in a variety of faux-styles, would-be Vegas shows. Godard lms this spectacle
with palpable disgust. He lets the ubiquitous ugliness reign unimpeded over the image,
so much so that the vulgarity of the subject matter infects the image-making itself: a
sequence of grainy mobile phone footage of a packed dance oor, complete with polluted
sound, makes for one of the most lucid moments in his lm. Te image bears witness.
In a discussion of the particular blend of world history, lm history, personal history
and art history that characterises Histoire(s) du cinma, Jacques Rancire already pointed
to Godards increasing tendency to think of art as a form of the coming-into-truth of
events.
5
Te lm-makers belief in the transcendent power of the image seldom led him
to the transparent simplicity of the neo-realist plan squence. Rather, over the course of
his now half-century-long career, hes created ever more complex audiovisual montages
of emblematic gures and allegorical representations that relay an event only piecemeal,
always ultimately withholding complete revelation. In Film Socialisme, legible signs
are strewn about as cryptic clues. Te characters planted among the passengers of the
ship could hardly be more emblematic white, black, an old man, a young woman,
a philosopher, an American, an African yet their purpose on-board remains enigmatic.
What are their motives? How do they relate to each other? Tey wander through the lm
as they wander along decks and cabins while the other vacationers appear largely oblivious
to their embedded performances. Nobody seems to notice a singing and guitar-wielding
Patti Smith below decks. And we nd Badiou lecturing to an empty room.
Te image bears witness. But of what? Simply put: the rise and fall of our civilisation.
With an eye on its renaissance. Never shy of ambition, Godard here attempts to open up a
vast panorama of the world as we know it, as we impotently see it slip away. Te cruise ship
is a farcical ark that holds nothing worth saving. A pulp version of the Magic Mountain.
Tough all passengers remain unaware, the camera and microphones register the wind
gaining force and the waves rising ominously. A storm is coming and it seems only a
matter of time before this vessel of luxury turns into the raf of the Medusa. Te image
of this end-time professes its own confusion and decay: Film Socialisme (Godards
rst theatrical release shot entirely in a digital format) ofers a veritable sample of
the current tangle of standards and formats for lm, from crisp, clear HD to low-res
5 Jacques Ranire, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigus. Entretiens, Paris: ditions Amsterdam, 2009, p.302.
Jean-Luc Godard,
Film Socialisme, 2010,
various formats
transferred to 35mm
film, 102min.
Courtesy Wild Bunch
and Wild Side Video
92 | Aerall
camera phone shots to severely reduced online images. Superlatively rendered footage
of seascapes underscores the many contrasting technical failures laced throughout the
lm, as new media and techniques inspire Godard to a resolutely contemporary and highly
metaphorical plasticity: visible pixellation, glitches and other signs of corrupted digital
transmission, over-saturated colours, distorted sounds, stuttering sequences, unexpected
freeze frames, sudden silences. And of course there is the ubiquitous use of black, which
functions as a form of punctuation while equally suggesting the multitude of elements
not there. Is the black image the ultimate witness in Godards metaphysics of light and
dark? Of what was, is no more, can potentially be again?
4.
Te petrol station, Garage Martin, is a local mom-and-pop. Somewhere in the middle
of France more or less the middle of Western Europe, so to speak it is trying to stay
aoat amidst the economic crisis. Journalists of various ilk are scouring the premises,
busily rounding up opinions for the evening news, while mother and father Martin are
trying to explain the accomplishments of the European social-democratic model to their
young children. Te country is facing a major election, the business a takeover and the
family the challenge to assign meaning to a rapidly changing world. Out of a quixotic mix
of absurd sketches, one-liners, farces and sneers, Godard distils a string of touchingly
intimate scenes of mother and child, father and son, a solitary daughter. His camera casts
a compassionate glance at the fusion of parenthood and citizenship which in his lms,
moreover, is irrevocably tied to the craf of acting.
Godards characters have long been studies of the (faces of) actors in the act of
portraying their role. Mother Martins monologue, delivered by writer and former
tennis star Catherine Tanvier, an rst-time actress, opens onto Godards view of
humanity. Madame Martin tastes the words she speaks as if they are Tanviers or is
it the other way around? Te knotted tangle of actor and character is never undone.
On the contrary, it speaks of the impossibility of being oneself and the difculties inherent
in playing a role. Tanviers performance testies to complexity and multiplicity. She and
Mother Martin see themselves as if they were someone else; a displacement that nds
its visual correlate in Godards inimitable ability to coax from his cameramen detached
takes of whatever appears in front of the lens: a human, an animal, a car, water, the sky.
Te inescapability of the modern subject of appearing as double, triple, multiple to oneself
and others, dovetails with the design of Godards complex audiovisual system, which is
equally premised on multiplicity, simultaneity, layering and fraction.
Jean-Luc Godard,
Film Socialisme, 2010,
various formats
transferred to 35mm
film, 102min.
Courtesy Wild Bunch
and Wild Side Video
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Film Socialisme | 93
5.
Two stories, three movements. Like a musical score (a sonata?). Afer Des choses comme
a (the ship) and Quo Vadis, Europa? (the petrol station), the nal part of the triptych
reprises the idea of a sea voyage. Cast as a mental journey through European history,
it is baptised not without the necessary pomp Nos humanits, and set to Arvo
Prts In Principio (cc). I suspect the title refers to the origins of all things European;
those places and moments that make us European. Not Brussels, Paris, Rome, Schengen,
Maastricht or Lisbon, but those markers which stem from Godards idiosyncratic reading
(of gaps in) the cultural memory of Hesperia. Alexandria and Saloniki recall the birthplace
of a civilisation; Hafa the heyday of Western imperialism and European colonialism;
Barcelona the Civil War; Naples the Great War; and Odessa not situated on the coasts
of the Mediterranean completes the enumeration as a multivalent symbol for the Great
Revolution, which never reached Western Europe but did create a tension eld between
capitalism and socialism for most of the twentieth century. According to Godard, an earlier
title for Film Socialisme was Capitalism or Communism.
6

.
Film Socialisme is haunted by the past, a ag under which Godard assembles his own
versions of a core and fringe Europe. Without paying much attention to the concrete
political and institutional developments of the past fy years in Europe, he points to a
single cultural origin of this, our Europe:
World War II. And, of course, war in its
many guises is the spectre stalking his back
catalogue: World War II, Algeria, Vietnam,
the Gulf War, Yugoslavia, Iraq, the
Israeli-Palestinian conict. It is a long list
with multiple titles linked to each war zone.
Armed conict invariably inspires explicit
meditations from Godard on the nature
and function of images. On se regarde dans les guerres comme dans un miroir, the
voice-over muses, and it feels like a lament few in contemporary Europe, in the European
Union, know war face to face.
7
Still, in the streets of Athens and Paris battles are waged;
and so the news reverberates in this lm without ever being shown: a Europe that stands
against social democracy, a bankrupt Greece and capitalism in crisis carries Godards own
private Europe, limping along towards doomsday before it could even properly start.
Is Film Socialisme the testament of a crabby old man? If so, shouldnt old age rather
inspire wisdom and serene maturity? Wont even the most tempestuous artist nally,
in the last stages of his work and life, reconcile with the world by way of a nal creation?
According to Edward Said, this logic of artistic maturity as synthesis and apotheosis
presumes that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to do with the correspon-
dence to its time, the tting together of one to the other, and therefore its appropriateness
or timeliness.
8
Said casually points to the examples of Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach and
Wagner, yet the prime question he poses in the appropriately titled essay 1meliness
and Lateness proposes the exact opposite: What of artistic lateness not as harmony
and resolution but as intransigence, difculty and unresolved contradiction?
9
He locates
the best example of this notion of late style as an exercise in tense waywardness in
Beethovens third and last period, by way of a reading by Teodor Adorno, and nally
in Adornos own work. Late works of this type, according to Said, characteristically
display a constitutive fragmentation: One cannot say what connects the parts other than
by invoking the gure they create together. Neither can one minimize the diferences
among the parts, and it would appear that actually naming the unity, or giving it a specic
identity, would then reduce its catastrophic force.
10

Godards ambition with
Le Gai Savoir is no less than
to create a lm about the
possibility of meaning itself,
of generating new types
of meaning.
6 S. Kaganski and J.-M. Lalanne, Le droit d'auteur"', op. cit., p.xviii.
7 In war one sees oneself as in a mirror.
8 Edward W. Said, Timeliness and Lateness, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain,
London: Bloomsbury, 2006, p.6.
9 Ibid., p.7.
10 Ibid., p.12.
94 | Aerall
Contrary to the clich of the crowning achievement, Saids description of late style
as a memento mori to lost totality suggests the stubborn refusal to agree to a nal
reconciliation. Viewed from this perspective, Godards relentless grumbling and solitary
cultural pessimism, expressed so eloquently in his own private endgame, could be more
accurately read as what Said calls a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness
going against
11
Since this self-proclaimed dinosaur, gardener and country doctor of
cinema (sometimes also referred to as the hermit of Rolle, the town in which he lives in
Switzerland) has retreated into voluntary exile, his sporadic returns to the land of lm
and especially this, his potentially nal appearance, have caused even more consternation.
He is at once a relic from the past and a messenger from the future. Too early, too late:
Rien que lheure juste, as the sighed nal words of Film Socialismes voice-over puts it.
12

And I read lateness now as a form of unintentional and partial untimeliness. Tis lm
is ill-timed, inappropriate, yet still unquestionably a sign of the times. Tis lm-maker is
out of touch and out of tune, and at the same time contemporary as no other. Late style is
in, but oddly apart from the present, Said notes,
13
but it is Giorgio Agamben who explicitly
links this engaged distance as a characteristic for existential contemporaneity.
14
In order
to keep the nger on the pulse of an era, decidedly untimely meditations are needed.
Te end of chronology will occur when premature and late no longer contradict each
other. In Messianic time. In the time of apostles.
Of course its rather preposterous to discuss Godard in apostolic terms (the derisive
pun God-art is mostly heard from detractors), yet Agambens notional distinction between
prophet and apostle is a useful one for framing Godard as a late gure in contemporary
cinema. Te prophet stands in relation to the future: his predictions concern a time yet to
come. However, the apostle only speaks afer the prophecy has been actualised: he is the
envoy who spreads the Messianic message in the time of the now.
15
In his study of Pauls
Letter to the Romans, Agamben also points out a second diference: in contrast to the
visionary who contemplates the end of time, the apostle lives in the time of the end. He
writes: What interests the apostle is not the last day, it is not the instant in which time ends,
but the time that contracts itself and begins to end, or if you prefer, the time that remains
between time and its end.
16
When Said mentions the cataclysmic potential of late works,
I read his words as an implicit reference to this time that is neither chronological nor
eschatological in nature.
17
Said comes close to formulating his own version of Messianic
time when he discusses the endurance of the end in the form of lateness but for itself, its
own sake, not as a preparation for or obliteration of something else. Lateness is being at
the end, fully conscious, full of memory and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the
present.
18
Godard today operates in this interstitial time. In many ways his early works
embody the Jpocs. He was part of that time, which even then was never his he was ahead
of his time, as they say, and his lms packed the cinemas. Now, he represents an old world
ancient, even older than the Jpocs. Hes a remnant, the catastrophic commentator on
the contemporary who has somehow lost his audience.
.
In the mid-Jpcs Serge Daney devoted a tough piece to what he called the Godardian
pedagogy of terror. His thesis, a strange mix of admiration and reproof, sounds plausible:
Godard turns the theatre into a classroom, lm dialogue into a recitation, the voice-of
into a lecture, the shooting into a practical, the lm topic into course headings and the
lm-maker into a schoolmaster.
19
According to the author, the pedagogy of the master
11 Ibid., p.7.
12 Nothing but the right hour.
13 E.W. Said, Timeliness and Lateness, op. cit., p.24.
14 Contemporariness is a singular relationship with ones own time, which adheres to it and, at the same
time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship that adheres to it through a disjun-
ction and anachronism. Giorgio Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?, What Is an Apparatus? and
Other Essays (trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 41.
15 G. Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (trans. Patricia Dailey),
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p.61.
16 Ibid., p.62.
17 See ibid.
18 E.W. Said, Timeliness and Lateness, op. cit., p.14.
19 Serge Daney, Theorize/Terrorize (Godardian Pedagogy), in David Wilson (ed.), Cahiers du Cinma:
Volume Four, 19731978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle (trans. Annwyl Williams), London and
New York: Routledge, 2000, p.116. Originally published as: Le thrroris: pedagogie godardienne,
Cahiers du Cinma, January 1976, pp.26223.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Film Socialisme | 95
is based on a power discourse that takes its own sources extremely literally and never
questions their validity. Because Godard always replies to what the other says (asserts,
proclaims or recommends) by what another other says, hes constantly under threat of
being perceived as a mere blank, a black screen where images and sounds would co-exist,
cancel each other out, recognise and point to each other in short struggle.
20
Daney
acknowledges the inherent arrogance of this didacticism: the power discourse may change
ownership, but always speaks from above. Yet against the notion of the lm-maker as
charlatan he posits that of the schoolmaster as instructor. Godard is not the conveyor
still less the originator of these discourses which he asks us to believe in (and subject
ourselves to). Daney writes, His role is more like that of a tutor [rptiteur].
21
Tis tutor
appears as a modest and at the same time tyrannical gure: he makes the pupil learn
a lesson which doesnt arouse his own curiosity, and to which he is himself subjected.
22

Daneys thesis is especially reasonable given the context in which it was written.
During the rst half of the Jpcs, Godard doggedly pursued audiovisual essays in which
he systematically radicalised his early interest in Brechtian techniques of alienation.
He had in mind nothing less than the demolition of lm. Its the story of an announced
expiry: Made in U.S.A. (Jpoo) ends with the book cover of Marc Paillets Gauche,
anne zro (Year Zero of the Le, Jpo); Week-end with a placard declaiming FIN DE
LHISTOIRE FIN DU CINMA; and La Chinoise (Jpo) similarly with FIN DUN
DBUT. In lm afer lm he swung the wrecking ball until nearly nothing was lef;
Letter to Jane (Jp), which he made with Jean-Pierre Gorin, consists merely of a voice-
over accompanying one photograph. But perhaps or even exactly when hes reached
this degr zro is when the eternal schoolmasters voice surfaces. His deconstruction of
cinema, still held against him by many a cinephile, is inherently diferent from the sardonic
pleasures the Surrealists and Lettrists derived from unleashing the forces of the apoca-
lypse. Te end of cinema, of Europe, of this world as we know it, announces itself as a
lesson to be learned and always harbours the promise of new beginnings: the end as a
forced detour leading us to a fresh start. Its the infamous return to zero from Le Gai
Savoir (e Joy of Learning, Jpop): On va repartir zro. Non, avant de repartir, il faut y
aller. On va retourner zero.
23

8.
Le Gai Savoir was Godards TV debut, commissioned by the French National Broadcast
Service. Filming took place between December Jpo and January Jpo8; editing happened
in June, afer the events of May.
24
Te piece struck the wrong note with its commissioner
and was never broadcast. A year later it premiered at the Jpth Berlin Film Festival,
and was screened later that year also at the th New York Film Festival. And then the
lm was shelved, because while Godard was engaged in a legal battle over the rights to
his work with its main producer which he eventually won release in theatres was
blocked by French censors. Tis ban, however, didnt prevent the Commission for Film
Classication from mandating the removal of certain sequences.
25
Godard complied,
but only by enhancing rather than omitting the passages that caused ofense through
a series of ostentatious formal interventions. Its a provocation betting Le Gai Savoir,
itself an interrogation of the didactic potential of lm practice in the form of a radical
adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus treatise mile, or On Education (Jo). With all
the playacted gravitas of a scientic experiment, including excursus on methodology and
discourse, Godard formulated a sustained ideological critique of the image, aimed at the
emancipation of the viewer and of lm itself.
20 Ibid., p.118.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p.119.
23 We have to start from scratch. But before starting over, we must first go back to zero.
24 The editing of Le Gai Savoir was not delayed solely due to the events of May 68, but also because of
Godards hectic schedule. In the course of that year, he was working on no less than four other film
projects: the British shooting of One Plus One (filmed in London), the collective production of ten-odd
Cintracts (in Paris), the realisation of Un film comme tous les autres (also in Paris) and the American
shoots for One A.M. (in New York and Berkeley). For a detailed chronology of this intensely productive
period, see Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, London: BFI/MacMillan Press, 1980, p.21;
and C. MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70, London: Bloomsbury, 2003, pp.35355.
25 See David Faroult, Le livre Le Gai Savoir: La censure dfie, in Jean-Luc Godard (ed.), Documents, Paris:
ditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006, p.109.
96 | Aerall
In the work, two young activists Juliet Berto as Patricia Lumumba and Jean-Pierre
Laud as Emile Rousseau meet each other seven nights in a row in a dark, abandoned
recording studio. Tere they systematically devise a three-year plan, consisting of the
collecting of images, a critique and the creation of an alternative. Over the course of the
lm they show each other and the viewer a motley assortment of images: photographs
clipped from newspapers, extracts from texts, book covers, comic strips, posters
all labelled with commentaries in Godards recognisable handwriting and rhetorically
ordered in more or less obscure, somewhat revelatory sequences. Te stream of stills is
frequently interrupted by original lm footage of Parisian street scenes and of a young
boy and an older, homeless man involved in two associative word games. Tis joyous mass
of imagery follows the structure of an abcdaire, the alphabet providing a deviously
stable framework for what is in actuality a frontal assault on language itself. Language,
says Berto/Patricia (ventriloquising Godard, of course), is the weapon of choice of
the bourgeois enemy and needs to be turned against him. Language here appears as
a mechanism of control that seemingly seamlessly and self-evidently represents and
reproduces the world. Te audiovisual correlate is the smooth familiarity of conventional
images and sounds presented in what appear to be natural sequences, ofering us such
deceptively convincing representations of the world that viewers and makers enjoy seeing
them reproduced. With Le Gai Savoir Godard intends to efect a complete deconstruction
of current conceptions of lm, or, as he has his actors/characters word it, their dissolution:
Pour trouver la solution, soit dun problme chimique, soit dun problme poltique, il faut
dissoudre. Dissoudre lhydrogen, dissoudre le parlement. L, on va dissoudre des images
et des sons.
26

In his seminal text on avant-garde lm strategies of the Jpocs and cs, Te Two
Avant-Gardes (Jp), Peter Wollen rightfully claims that Le Gai Savoir shouldnt be
reduced to merely a lm about lm. Godards ambition with this bulldozer of a work is no
less than to create a lm about the possibility of meaning itself, of generating new types of
meaning, as Wollen put it.
27
Read between the lines, Wollens argument is that though the
lm seems to ercely pursue the upheaval of known conventions, it is, ultimately, equally
engaged in seeking out and testing new ways of creating meaning. Te of-cited nal words
of the soundtrack (read by Godard himself) conrm this carefully afrmative attitude:
Ce lm na pas voulu, ne peut pas vouloir expliquer le cinema, ni mme constituer son
objet, mais plus modestement donner quelques moyens efcaces dy parvenir. Ce lm
nest pas le lm quil faut faire, mais si on a un lm faire on passe ncessairement par
quelques-uns des chemins parcourus ii.
28
Tis is also why today Le Gai Savoir is still
arguably Godards most experimental work: it literally is a temporary result, the tentative
sediment of an research process whose results are merely provisionary and ought to lead
to further elaboration. One iconoclastic suggestion is persistently threaded throughout
Le Gai Savoir, perhaps best summarised by Patricias challenging one-liner: Si tu veux
voir le monde, ferme tes yeux.
29

.
Closing ones eyes in the cinema seems a nudge to revalue the auditory. Afer all, Godards
entire oeuvre invites a listening betting the work of a composer. Its simply impossible
to discuss his mise en scne without mentioning the soundtrack. It sufces to put on
once more Une Femme est une femme (JpoJ) or Vivre sa vie (Jpo) to realise the extent
to which Godard, from very early on, possessed an infallible sense of timing and the
uncanny ability to exploit the strong contrasts between music, voice, ambient noises
and silence. When I think Godard, I hear images. Forcefully present concrete sounds
(slamming windows, honking cars, the clangs of the factory oor, the ebb and ow of
26 In order to find the solution, whether for a problem in chemistry or in politics, one needs to boil the
problem down. In chemistry, they dissolve hydrogen. In politics, they dissolve parliament. Here, weve
got to dissolve images and sounds.
27 Peter Wollen, The Two Avant-Gardes, in Tanya Leighton (ed.), Art and the Moving Image: A Critical
Reader, London: Tate Publishing and Afterall Books, 2008, p.178. Originally published in Studio
International, vol.190, no.978, November/December 1975.
28 This film has not wished to, could not wish to explain cinema or even constitute its object, but more
modestly, to offer a few effective means for arriving there. This is not the film that must be made, but
it shows how, if one is to make a film, one must necessarily follow some of the paths travelled here.
29 If you want to see the world, close your eyes.
Jean-Luc Godard,
Le Gai Savoir
(The Joy of Learning),
1969, 35mm film,
95min. Courtesy
eOne Entertainment
Distribution
98 | Aerall
lm tape on the editing station, Godards own raspy voice). Asynchronicity (the streets
of Paris overlaid with glimmers of Michel Legrand, Beethoven and David Darling; Lake
Geneva functioning as an acoustic chamber for the voices of Alain Delon and Domiziana
Giordano). Juxtaposition (Histoire(s) du cinma in its entirety). Overlapping. Change
of tempo. Te richness of his soundtracks has only improved since Godard forged a
collaborative relationship with the German label ECM, known for the crystalline precision
of its recordings, in the late Jp8cs. He has been invited to plumb the ECM catalogue
freely, and has taken on Manfred Eicher, who runs the label, as a collaborator on sound;
so from Nouvelle Vague (Jppc) onwards, ECMs music has become a constitutive part
in all his lms.
Jc.
Blind viewing suggests moving beyond the cultivation of a visual type of hearing. I think
of Godard and see the black sequences that generate so much meaning in almost all of
his works. Black is distinct from nothingness. Black is absence, the presence of absence,
longing, lacunae, fallibility, respite, pause, punctuation, blackboard, clean slate, frame,
screen, curtain, dark mirror, hole, space, night. We must rst go from black to zero, one
could say. Just before the lights come on again, before they dawn.
30
Its a sly efect also,
then, calculated and timed to let the next image appear out of nowhere, in all its glory.
Tis is why Patricia and Emile meet in a pitch-black studio: so the free images and sounds
theyre hunting for can triumph at dawn. And this, nally, is also the reason for the spoken
warning at the start of Film Socialisme: Ce qui souvre devant nous ressemble une
histoire impossible. Nous voil en face dune sorte de zro.
31

ll.
Film Socialisme doesnt have end credits. Te era of pedagogy and the blackboard seems
to have passed. Yet the black slate is still present, though no longer etched with the lm-
makers handwriting. Its impossible to ignore captions, printed red on black, or titles
that have lost their proper place, cast adrif now and bobbing through the lm, haunting it
like conjuring spells: ABII NE VIDEREM (I turned away so as not to see); DES CHOSES
COMME A (Tings like that); and the nal one, NO COMMENT. If these are the
lm-makers famous last words, they seem not just to signal the end of this lm but also
of his entire lifes work an ultimate bow: take it or leave it. Didacticism has been replaced
by enigma.
32
Ill never know what exactly there is to all these words and voices and
sounds, or how all the lms landscapes and animals and people really relate to each other.
What I can see is that they all receive the same treatment. Is this the socialism Godard
envisions: an egalitarian republic of images and sounds? A bit like his mind. Or like
YouTube. Tats why Film Socialisme closes with a borrowed placard showing the usual
FBI warning, promising legal persecution of copyright infringement. No Godard without
pirating. Te dapper octogenarian for whom the mash-up is no new phenomenon calls for
civil disobedience in that same last movement: Quand la loi nest pas juste, la justice passe
avant la loi (Some laws are meant to be broken). Te scantily veiled battle cry of a one-man
anti-copyright movement.
l2.
Typing these commentaries with a stack of books and the internet within arms reach
but no Film Socialisme DVD Im reminded of that particular culture of attentiveness
of which Godard is the product par excellence. When he and his fellow lm critics created
30 For Agamben darkness is another characteristic of contemporaneity: The contemporary is he
who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness.
G. Agamben, The Time That Remains, op. cit., p.44.
31 That which unfolds before us seems like an impossible story. We find ourselves faced with a type
of zero.
32 Film Socialismes subtitling may well be its most adamant brain-teaser: the films wordly blend
of (mainly) French, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic is translated by Godard
himself in what he dubs Navajo English', conjuring up old-fashioned Westerns when Native Americans
still spoke in condensed and choppy phrases or, more appropriately, nowadays global penchant for
bad English.
Events, Works, Exhibitions: Film Socialisme | 99
cinephile culture in the years following World War II, their excavations of new, old,
famous, obscure, forgotten or ignored lms were performed almost entirely from memory.
Tey were able to see the entire lm in the theatre, possibly even multiple times, and then
hustled to write down thoughts on some signicant camera movement or montage that
most likely escaped less attentive viewers. Is it such a surprise that later, in their own work,
they demanded a similar interest and sustained attention from their viewers? Godard
drives this the furthest: he expects supreme concentration, and installs the regime of terror
Daney described and connected to the cinema as classroom: Te privilege of the school
is that it retains its pupils so that they retain what they are told; the master retains his
knowledge (he doesnt say everything) and punishes the bad pupils with detention.
33

Now that both theatre and classroom are permanently connected, wired, Wi-Fi-ed to the
outside world, this hostage scenario becomes more problematic, perhaps even impossible.
Calls and text messages keep the outside world within constant reach. And even when
no communication actually takes place, there is always the potential for proximity locked
in the dormant knowledge that soon this eeting image on the large screen will be available
on DVD or Blu-ray, shown on TV or downloadable online.
34
In the theatre itself, Godard
doesnt make concessions to short attention spans and momentary lapses of focus. Yet he
does embrace these drastic shifs in our capacity for mnemonic labour and attentiveness
on YouTube, where the ofcial trailer for Film Socialisme consists of the movie played
in its entirety, in extreme fast-forward. In Le Gai Savoir he insisted on emphasising the
materiality of lm within his lm by naming the total of its parts (,ccc image frames,
J,ccc sounds). Where better than the internet to now underscore his new lms
extreme volatility?
33 S. Daney, Theorize/Terrorize (Godardian Pedagogy), op. cit., p.119.
34 Film Socialisme premiered on 17 May 2010, in the afternoon, in the Un Certain Regard section
of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. That same night and the next one (literally the day before its
release in French theatres), the film could be seen in avant-premire on the internet via Video
On Demand.
Translated by Yasmine van Pee.
102 | Aerall
Whether the ordinary dance of Yvonne
Rainer, the ballet-derived language of
Michael Clark or the mass, participatory
actions of artists Francis Als or Katerina
ed, each time I have written about
choreography, I have considered it in fairly
specic terms: as a form with the capacity
to conjure utopian visions of social life,
and as one that might, in aesthetic ways,
reinvent relations of communality.
Drawing inspiration, in part, from Andrew
Hewitts observation of dances combined
status as depiction and performative
generator of relationships in his book
Social Choreography: Ideology as Dance
and Performance in Everyday Movement
(cc), I have thought about choreographys
evolution from medieval folk to the
Renaissance, and traced the origins
of ordinary dance in the Jpocs back
to ballets role as an extension of courtly
etiquette. All of these readings of dance
treat it as a deliberate, learned manner of
movement, whether practiced or directed,
with a sociopolitical dimension.
Te choreography at play in Catherine
Sullivans work is something else.
Appearing to privilege internal impulse
over external form, Sullivans work seems
to be about exposure rather than aspiration.
Crystallised in emblematic works such
as D-Pattern (cc) or e Chittendens
(cc), Sullivans choreography ofers,
perhaps, a register of our world rather than
a proposition for how we might live in it
diferently. Dance is inherently concerned
with moving: whether as physical passage
(to aesthetic ends) or as a conceptual
implication of progression, with utopian
ambition. Sullivans choreographic
movement is curiously static on both
counts, however. Hers appears as a kind
of involuntary dance form, one that its
performers strive to repress.
A ve-screen installation, e Chitten-
dens, is set partly within a suite of ofces
that are in various states of order and
disrepair. One might imagine an episode
of a legal drama, maybe Ally McBeal or
even Mad Men, being shot in the beige-
carpeted and curtained entrance lobby,
with glass panels and a splashy abstract
painting on the wall, in which the piece
begins. As the camera tracks through
from room to room, though, other spaces
appear that are heaped with junked ofce
furniture, broken lamps, a trashed
photocopier; another room yet is white-
washed and more derelict still with a view
onto an empty parking lot. Te spaces
in this piece are populated by a shifing
cast of sixteen actors in various kinds
of costume: contemporary ofce-wear,
a Jpcs holiday camp reps uniform,
theatrical period sailor suits, Edwardian
bodices and straw boater hats. Te actors
perform abbreviated, repeated gestures
in isolation, each one facing towards
the horizontally tracking camera, never
seeming to connect or communicate with
each other. Teir movements and sounds
(ofen screams, or deep breaths) have
a hysterical quality, like manic tics.
Occasionally an actor will visibly relax into
a charming smile, but such naturalism is
quickly truncated, and the actor stifens
again, joltingly, into an asymmetric motion
that implies anxiety or collapse.
D-Pattern (cc), a precursor to this
piece, was a stage performance captured
on lm and re-worked as a double-channel
installation piece. As in e Chittendens,
Sullivan layers the action using a translu-
cent montage technique for the lm
presentation, but here there are a larger
number of actors also in an assortment of
period costumes, mostly black-and-white,
and some with painted face makeup,
positioned across the gradient of a vast,
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 103
Fixed Explosive:
Catherine Sullivans
Choreography of Stasis
Catherine Wood
Catherine Wood locates in Catherine
Sullivans fascination with the gesture
a collision between moving image
technology and the contemporary
social subject.
Previous spread:
Catherine Sullivan
(in collaboration
with Sean Griffin),
2006, The Chittendens.
Installation view,
La Collection
Lambert, Avignon.
Courtesy Galerie
Catherine Bastide
opposite:
Catherine Sullivan
(in collaboration
with Sean Griffin),
The Chittendens,
2005, 35mm
production still
from five-channel
16mm film to
digital projection.
Performer: Karl
Francis. Courtesy
the artists
104 | Aerall
exposed and stepped stage. In both pieces,
all the narrative indicators the settings,
the costumes, the acting are presented
in a disintegrating state that takes the
performers roles and dramatic conventions
apart in a way that pushes beyond the logic
of deconstruction.
Logic is a faux ami in Sullivans work,
in fact. In discussions about how the work
is made, the artist has frequently spoken
of her use of numeric sequences working
with her collaborator, Sean Grifn
similar to those used in modernist scoring
strategies by musicians and choreographers
of the Jpocs, afer John Cage. In making
e Chittendens, she has explained that
she assigned fourteen singular attitudes
to each of the sixteen actors.
1
Te attitudes
were then interpreted according to strict
schemes that were transferred to numerical
patterns and performed rhythmically in
diferent tempos. Te attitudes could be
minimised or maximised [] reduced or
expanded in physical form [] abbreviated
or extended in terms of time, she says.
2

Sullivans professed use of these discrete
attitudes (sets of adapted, expressive
gestures) as compositional units has dual
signicance: rstly for a consideration
of her work as choreography, and secondly
as choreography that is inherently formed
by the intersection between bodies and
moving-image technology.
Te notion of the discrete gesture
has something in common with nineteenth-
century scientic studies of gesture as
universal language. In e Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (J8),
Charles Darwin explored the idea that
people made similar physical gestures in
similar social or emotional situations across
cultures. In the early twentieth century,
such ideas of physical lexicon were
transposed into more abstract theories of
eurhythmics (mile-Jacques Dalcroze) or
biomechanics (V.E. Meyerhold): gestural
forms were related specically to musical
rhythms or gymnastic or acting exercises,
reecting broader ideas of utopian
community via group choreography
and interaction. Te discrete gesture has
equal resonance with images of the body
captured in photography and lm, which
were beginning to be explored at the time.
Eadweard Muybridges choreographic
breakdown of ordinary movements
proposes an underlying quality of stillness
to the passage of the body, for example,
in movement that is segmented into a
sequence of positions, appearing as an
array of discrete gestures; gestures that
might become moving images once more
when re-animated by lm (or the ick
book). More generally, these stop-start
forms of dance point to the underlying
stillness of lm: Death times a second,
as Laura Mulvey put it.
An early work of Sullivans,
e Chirologic Remedy (Jppp), manifests
her fascination with the idea of a formal
language of gestural expression. Te lm is
composed of movements drawn from the
oratorical art of chirologia, or chironomia,
dened as the art of using gesticulations
or hand gestures to good efect in public
speaking. Efective use of the hands,
with or without the use of the voice, was
developed and systematised by the Greeks
and the Romans.
3
Various gestures had
conventionalised meanings that were
commonly understood, either within
certain class or professional groups, or
broadly among dramatic and oratorical
audiences. Despite being underwritten
by an invented gestural lexicon, however,
the sequencing of movement in Sullivans
work does not build into legibility. Her
choreography feels complexly corrosive
rather than generative. Whilst early
twentieth-century movements such as
German expressive dance sought to free
the body from oppressive social norms
and codes and re-naturalise inner rhythms
and expression, with the aim of rejuvenat-
ing both the individual body (and the social
body as a result), Sullivans choreography
depicts a body caught in a state of
possession by the mediated environment
in which it exists. For example, if Mary
Wigmans Witch Dance (JpJ) was
emblematic of the spirit of early twentieth-
century expressive dance in its attempt
to channel primal energy and allow
primordial forces
4
to take command
of her dancing body, Sullivans work
manifests a state of possession by technol-
ogy: one in which the cutting rhythms
of lm and, moreover, television editing
1 Catherine Sullivan, quoted in Annette Sdbeck (ed.), Catherine Sullivan: The Chittendens (exh. cat.),
Vienna and Berlin: Secession and Revolver, 2005, p.16.
2 Ibid.
3 Catherine Sullivan in conversation with the author, unpublished, 2010.
4 See Jack Anderson, Ballet and Modern Dance: A Concise History, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992, p.173.
have taken hold of the expressive capacities
of the body (and hence its involuntary
impression).
Te elaborate web of references that
Sullivan details as sources for the making
of her work feature lms, news reports,
musicals and theatre plays appear, also,
as something of a distraction from this
powerful formal impression. Her massed
staging of performed movement carries a
sense of that implied or associative content
in its dramatic pitch, without being explicit
about the sources or the narrative material.
But what is important is that the sources,
like the work, are primarily lmic or
televisual, and it is fundamental that her
choreography is mostly made specically
for lm and video, or even when live
performed through a deep understanding
of moving-image technology and its
capacities, as well as its pervasiveness
in contemporary life.
Sullivans choreography dramatises
a collision between the elastic capacities of
lm and video the dislocating processes
of editing such as jump cuts, crossing the
axis, shot-counter-shot or montage and
the contemporary human subject. Sullivan
extends to the post-Jp8cs video age the
tension captured in Man Rays famous
photograph Explosante Fixe (Jp),
which shows a dancer in full pleated
skirts caught in the midst of motion,
her head blurred out in the swirl. Te
xed explosive moment, a form of Andr
Bretons convulsive beauty, was dened
by its paradoxical rendering of mobility
as immobile, but remaining somehow
pregnant with motion, and the photograph
has subsequently been seen as emblematic
of the photographic condition of Surreal-
ism.
5
But whilst Rosalind Krauss wrote
about camera seeing as a prosthetic
extension of the bodys limited capacities
the camera mediates that presence, gets
between the viewer and the world, shapes
reality according to its terms Sullivans
medium is embedded in the psyche of the
subject to an extreme degree.
6
In Sullivans
work, the human subject is represented
as being drawn and quartered across the
surface of the moving image (think Sycorax
imprisoned by Prospero in a tree via Jean
Baudrillards observation that by the end
of the twentieth century the video camera
is in your head, or Dara Birnbaums
Wonder Woman and Paul Pfeifers
endlessly looped sportsmen). Each of
Sullivans attitudes is a register of the
subjects state of possession by the medium:
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 105
5 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism, The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1985, p.xx.
6 Ibid.
Catherine Sullivan
(in collaboration
with Sean Griffin
and Stacy Ellen
Rich), D-Pattern,
2005, two-channel
digital projection.
Installation view,
Richard Telles Fine
Art, Los Angeles.
Courtesy the artists
106 | Aerall
the way in which those attitudes are
rhythmically combined takes on the
imprint of television editing or viewing,
both in their buildup of fragmentary
impressions and the continuous deferral
of narrative conclusion.
7
In writing about
television audience culture, Norman M.
Klein has analysed the extent to which
the constant interruptions of commercial
breaks force television into a fragmentary
pattern that requires only a supercial
level of engagement. He writes: Gestures,
images, lighting efects repeat so ofen on
television they apparently are received
more as a rhythm than a coherent state-
ment. Flashes of information must be
highly abbreviated, so familiar to the
viewer that only an outline or a phrase is
needed.
8
Sullivan has similarly discussed
the arbitrary impressions of character
generated by the cumulative efect of
her scored and repeated gestures in terms
of an exploration of US philosophies
of self-possession or self-determination,
9

but they appear as much to be about
the possession of esh by technology,
showing the body to be not just mediated
but ridden by it.
In his Notes on Gesture, Giorgio
Agamben observes that the medical
conditions of ataxia and dystonia,
neurological disorders that cause twitching
or repetitive movements in muscles, must
have, somehow, become the norm during
the twentieth century. Tis observation
derives from his attention to the disappear-
ance of any recorded cases of Tourettes
syndrome (a condition which leads the
suferer to lose control of their gestures)
until Oliver Sacks believes that he spots
three in one day, walking the streets of
New York in JpJ. At some point every-
body had lost control of their gestures,
Agamben writes, and was walking and
gesticulating frantically.
10
Despite the
elaborate process that generates the actors
movements, Sullivan creates an aesthetic
equivalent for this impression of lost
control in her work. And yet again, within
the convulsive tableaux that she constructs,
the combined rhythms of the repeated
attitudes and of Sean Grifns musical score
bind the activity together, incorporating the
gasps and outbursts into its skilfully scored
syncopation of gesture, sound and image.
And although it is far in character from the
7 Interviewing Sullivans collaborator Sean Griffin, Pierre-Yves Fonfon asks, Are contemporary
musicians like you allowed to be influenced by soap operas? Griffin replies, I find histrionic
suspended narratives lasting twenty-five to thirty years very interesting. [] All of this massive
drama is played out with hyperbolic emotional themes, cloying melodies and manipulative mood
setting. [] I am a huge fan of Dark Shadows series. Its sole purpose was that of sustaining colourful
suspense and dramatic tension for one hour every weekday for over five years. C. Sullivan et al.,
Catherine Sullivan, op. cit., p.55.
8 Norman M. Klein, Audience Culture and the Video Screen, Illuminating Video, New York: Aperture,
1991, p.375.
9 C. Sullivan et al., Catherine Sullivan, op. cit., p.18.
10 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (trans. Vincenzo Binetti
and Cesare Casarino), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p.104.
pedestrian choreography of Simone Forti,
Yvonne Rainer or Trisha Brown work
that was ofen inserted, near invisibly, into
the scenography of everyday life in New
York City in the Jpocs and cs the
compressed gestural language of tics,
attitudes, repetitive motions and sounds
that are a fundamental feature of Sullivans
work conjures a potent and poetically
condensed aesthetic equivalent for the
experience of twentieth-century urban
modernity. Tat her work is made for
and fundamentally formed through an
engagement with lm and television
brings it right up to date. Sullivans
choreography comes closest to creating
a theatrical image equivalent for the
disjunctive co-existence of the anonymous
mass of people on a contemporary city
street a city street which, in the early
twenty-rst century, is dotted with
surveillance technology.
It is revealing to note that Sullivan
was taught by, and has since collaborated
with, Mike Kelley, whose fascination for
the surrealist undertow in contemporary
culture and writings on Sigmund Freuds
essay Te Uncanny (JpJp) are well
known. In his collected essays, Foul
Perfection (cc), Kelley discusses Freuds
identication of the repetition compulsion
in the unconscious mind: a recognition,
in the conscious mind, of this familiar
but repressed compulsion that produces
a feeling of the uncanny.
11
Freuds
discussions of the confusion between
animate and inanimate in his notion of
the uncanny ofen located in gurative
objects such as wax work gures, articial
dolls and automatons is a clear inuence
on Kelleys gurative sculpture project
by the same name.
Sullivans actors, and their movements,
have a similarly disturbing puppet-like
quality. Te truncated and repeated
movements, gestures and sounds that they
perform en masse are all severed from
any context. Teir actions do not create a
sense of forward movement, and neither
do they tell stories. Te most useful analogy
between this charged immobility and
a form of mass cultural image-making is,
I think, to be seen in the sports montage,
a particular kind of montage assembled
on television afer football matches
and the like. Te ecstatic pitch of these
sequences contains a quick-re juxtaposi-
tion of isolated gestures that draw from a
rule-based game for a group of players and
build not to tell a story but to conrm
an outcome: we won! Te sequence of
gestures runs through from the goal shot to
the crowds roar to the footballer punching
the air to the team embrace. Te gestural
moments do not give the twists and turns
that a dramatic narrative would rely
upon to hold an audiences attention,
but are piled together as repeat iterations
of the same celebratory afrmative. But in
Sullivans case, it is a repeated negation.
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 107
Catherine Sullivan
(in collaboration
with Sean Griffin,
Dylan Skybrook
and Kunle Afolyan),
Triangle of Need,
2007, film stills
from eight-channel
16mm film to
digital projection.
Courtesy the artists
11 Mike Kelley, The Uncanny, Foul Perfection, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2003, p.72.
108 | Aerall
Sullivan turns this piling of isolated
gestures to a diferent end while still
operating with a similar kind of insistent
pitch. But that pitch, or mood, is an
iteration of a void within the work:
a disturbing absence where one expects
the narrative content to be. It is as though
Sullivan takes the elements of costume,
setting, acting that might coalesce
together to form a semblance of naturalist
narrative and unmasks them, revealing
their ultimate incoherence. Sullivan
brings to the fore a degree of stasis and
incomprehension that acted naturalism
or choreographic phrasing ordinarily
masks. Her actors display the discombobu-
lated disparity of character that the notion
of personality attempts to synthesise.
Whilst early twentieth-century Surrealism
dealt with the individual psyche, using
automatic writing, objective chance
or dream images as sources for making
work, the attitudes and movements
in Sullivans videos and performances
are partly generated through the use of
improvisational acting exercises worked
out within the group. Every scene,
she has said about e Chittendens,
projected a uniquely suggestive situation
or emotive context between participants
and this was always changing depending
on the partnership. e patterns allowed
us to see this changing, but what exactly
was changing we didnt have a name for.
Sean refers to it as something like a Ouija
board a conjectural machine that
wasnt there.
12

Trough this adapted notion of
performative free association between
participants, Sullivan reinvents Surreal-
isms neuroses as a social condition,
played out through a lexicon of dramatic
forms and attitudes that are clearly
borrowed or learned from external
sources, and exchanged between members
of the group not as primary reciprocal
communication, but as an exchange
of oblique forms.
Catherine Sullivan,
2005, The Chittendens,
film still from
five-channel 16mm
film to digital
projection.
Performer: Stephanie
Hecht. Courtesy
the artist
12 Catherine Sullivan in conversation with the author, unpublished, 2010.
Concluding his Notes on Gesture,
Agamben goes on to discuss Deleuzes
argument about movement-images,
proposing that there are no images but
only gestures.
13
By this, he explains,
Every image, in fact, is animated by
an antinomic polarity: on the one hand,
images are the reication and obliteration
of a gesture (it is the imago as death
mask or symbol); on the other hand,
they preserve the dynamis intact
(as in the work of Muybridge, or any
sports photograph). [] Even the Mona
Lisa or Las Meninas could be seen
not as immovable and eternal forms,
but as fragments of a gesture or as stills
of a lost lm [] And that is so, because
a certain kind of litigation, a paralysing
power whose spell we need to break,
is continuously at work in every image:
it is as if a silent invocation calling for the
liberation of the image into gesture arose
from the entire history of art.
14

It is not a paralysing power but an
animating one whose spell possesses
Sullivans gesturing subjects: she returns
the liberated image-gesture to a sense
of stasis, despite the fact that it is set
within a moving-image tableau. Sullivans
actor-dancers never reach their destina-
tions or complete expressions that they
begin. Each gesture appears as less a
destiny than a dead end. Although she
makes group choreography, the participants
appear each to be locked in isolation, albeit
a shared experience of such. Te precise,
rhythmic staccato gesticulation of her
dancers has a look that has something in
common with the compulsive spasms of the
dancers captured in Joachim Koesters lm
Tarantism (cc). But whereas that piece
derives from a kind of hysteria, of group
ecstasy and liberation, the performers in
Sullivans group appear to loop back, again
and again, towards an imprisoned state,
their energy channeled into a dissonant,
drone-like quality. Te writings of cultural
theorist Mark Fisher in his book, Capitalist
Realism: Is ere No Alternative? (ccp)
conjure an image of the Western world
at the beginning of the twenty-rst
century that makes sense of Sullivans
contemporaneous vision. He speaks of
late capitalist society in terms of stasis,
describing a state of exhaustion, of cultural
and political sterility,
15
where it has
become impossible even to imagine any
alternative to the dominant ideology,
and any path for action. Tis condition of
reexive impotence is linked in Fishers
thinking to a constant but unproductive
expenditure of energy that takes the form
of a kind of digital dgeting: he writes,
the consequence of being hooked into the
entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated
interpassivity.
16
Te utopian aspiration of
historical artistic forms becomes fossilised
and impotent within such a pervasive
mindset: modernism is now something
that can periodically return, but only as a
frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for
living.
17
Sullivans moving images of group
choreography dramatise this condition of
interpassivity as an animated pause. Built
upon repeat patterns of stylised gestural
expression, they loop one question to the
point of negation: what can we do, and
where can we go, with this new movement
vocabulary?
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 109
13 G. Agamben, Notes on Gesture, op. cit., p.107.
14 Ibid., p.108.
15 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2009, p.7.
16 Ibid., p.18.
17 Ibid.
110 | Aerall
Catherine Sullivans work involves nothing
less than the problematic of virtuosity.
Te virtuosic as it pertains to performance
history (lm and theatre), but also, to quote
the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, the
virtuosity of post-Fordist labour practices,
practices which entail an immaterial,
living labour of the contemporary subject.
Before I come to Sullivans work, however,
let me dwell on Virnos notion of virtuosity
for a moment. To be a virtuoso, in the
traditional sense, is to be able to perform
a score in some extraordinary way. In
Virnos book A Grammar for the Multitude
(cc), he poses the question: If the entirety
of post-Fordist labor is productive (of
surplus-value) labour precisely because it
functions in a political-virtuosic manner,
then the question to ask is this: What is the
script of their linguistic-communicative
performances?
1
What, in other words,
constitutes the score which the contempo-
rary labourer qua subject performs and
how do the conditions of the contemporary
labourer qua virtuoso whose product
is immaterial difer from the conditions
of labour which preceded them, those
in which a visible product or object was
produced? How, likewise, does one judge
the value of work when what is produced
are afects or ideas, and when this produc-
tion process relies on improvisation? Virno
and his contemporaries, the Autonomists,
provide a number of concepts which I
believe can help us approach contemporary
art practices, and particularly the practices
of artists who make the connection
between labour and performance explicit
through their works. What might connect
contemporary labour and live art are
questions of virtuosic labour contempo-
rary live art being both reective and
critical of practices of virtuosity in the
global work place.
Virtuosity, according to Virno, was
a quality once accorded to the politicians
public role. Recalling Hannah Arendts
distinction between the artisan and the
politician-citizen, Virno reiterates through-
out his book that the artisan produces
objects while the politician-citizen produces
actions. To be objectless, to produce
an immaterial product from ones efort,
was once the place of the performer-cum-
politician-citizen. However, in post-Fordist
societies, this productive model involves the
common labourer, forced into a situation
in which he or she must become malleable
enough to perform whatever task or
situation presents itself in order, simply,
to survive. Te call centre worker, the
tech supporter, the person working behind
a drive-thru counter number among the
post-Fordist work force because the object
of their labour is not material, but cognitive,
communicative and afective. Te virtuosity
which the common labourer is forced to
perform is hardly glamorous, a far cry
from the concert pianist or exalted stage
actor. In fact, the position of the labourer-
virtuoso is typically one of abjection and
poverty; so Virno writes, Nobody is as poor
as those who see their own relation to
the presence of others, that is to say, their
own communicative faculty, their own
possession of a language, reduced to wage
labour.
2
How do contemporary live art
and performance practices reect both the
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 111
Virtuosity and the
Survival of the Subject:
On Catherine Sullivan
om Donovan
Building upon Paolo Virnos concept
of virtuosity, om Donovan looks at
Catherine Sullivans constraint-based
performances through their reection
of post-Fordist labour conditions
and practices.
1 Paolo Virno, A Grammar for the Multitude (2002, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea
Casson), New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, p.63.
2 Ibid.
Catherine Sullivan,
Tis Pity Shes a
Fluxus Whore, 2003,
35mm production
still from two-
channel 16mm film
to digital projection.
Performer: Andrzej
Krukowski, Filliou
Action. Courtesy
the artist
112 | Aerall
poverty and transformative potential of
these labour conditions?
Virnos dichotomy between the
virtuosic, immaterial labour of a post-
Fordist culture industry and that of the
factory worker of the Fordist assembly line
resounds with a number of performance
practices in the post-War period. Here I
am thinking of the performers, composers,
poets and visual artists internationally
who belong to the tradition of live and
what we might call task-based visual arts.
Intermedia, happenings, Fluxus and the
collaborations around Judson Memorial
Church are some of the recognised
movements; equally familiar are the names
of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, George
Maciunas and Yvonne Rainer, among
others who used instructions and proce-
dures to generate their works. Te partial
radicality of the post-War avant-garde lies
in its depersonalisation of the aesthetic
process, a process of eliminating styles that
had accrued and calcied around a high
Modernist canon, and many of these artists
of the post-War period seemed to be asking
exactly how to move beyond this Modern
style. How, even more importantly,
to quit the question of style altogether?
Tese works are also, arguably, an answer
to new labour and communications
practices that developed in the post-War
period and more broadly to labour
practices that develop from constantly
changing conditions which require the
subject to opportunistically assimilate
new technologies and skill sets.
While Sullivans work departs from
a variety of diferent performance regimes
and gestural codes, one of the regimes that
she continually refers to is such post-War,
avant-garde performance communities as
Fluxus and Judson Church. Sullivans early
play Grisly Notes and Tones (Jpp/ccJ)
makes reference to the lm-maker and
choreographer Yvonne Rainer through
a photograph on the scripts last pages.
Likewise, in numerous interviews and
presentations such as the one she gave at
the New Schools Vera List Center for Art
and Politics in September ccp, Sullivan
cites Rainer as an important touchstone for
her practice. And in works such as s Pity
Shes a Fluxus Whore (cc), Sullivan
infuses the stylistic regimes of Fluxus
performances at the Festival of New Art at
the Technical College of Aachen, Germany
in Jpo (an event during which Joseph
Beuys was famously attacked by an
audience of students) with those of
seventeenth-century Jacobean drama,
specically the milieu of John Fords play
1s Pity Shes a Whore' (Jo).
Similarly, if one reads the work of
Sullivans collaborator, the composer
Sean Grifn, beside her own, one realises
Grifns mutual debts to modes of composi-
tion based upon rigorous procedure,
constraint and instruction. Specically
in Grifns D-Pattern (made with Sullivan
in cc), a compositional procedure for
movement, gesture and speech that grew
out of Sullivans collaborative performance
works Manifestation Lyon/Dijon (cc)
and Audimax/Neustadt Manifestation
(cc), and which Sullivan and Grifn
drew upon extensively for the choreography
and music in their cc collaboration,
e Chittendens, a multichannel lm to
digital work exploring diferent attitudes
and gestures, one notices the inuence of
post-War avant-garde composition models
such as those ofered by Fluxus and Cage.
As Grifn has said of the inuence of Cage
on D-Pattern,
My system of structural rhythmic patterns
was developed with Catherine as a tool
for regimenting body movements and
expressive posturing of actors for a live,
Fluxus-based reinterpretation. e Cage
reference seemed appropriate. e most
important musical element this basic
pattern oered was on-the-spot access
to a musicians orientation through
stylistic choices.
3
In Grifns work, as in Sullivans, composi-
tion techniques are employed to discipline
the bodies of the performers, who must
assimilate a series of gestures and learn to
perform them in strict numerical patterns
accompanied by a soundtrack. One sees
the rigour of D-Pattern in Sullivans notes
for the piece, which she handwrites on
accounting logs.
4
In the columns of the logs
one nds combinations of fourteen gestures
for sixteen performers. Te gestures
designated for Carolyn Shoemaker, one
of Sullivans long-standing performers,
3 Sean Griffin in conversation with Pierre-Yves Fonfon in Annette Sdbeck (ed.), Catherine Sullivan:
The Chittendens (exh. cat.), Vienna and Berlin: Secession and Revolver, 2005, p.52.
4 Ibid., pp.2627.
Catherine Sullivan
(in collaboration
with Ron Athey,
Sean Griffin,
Mike Kelley and
Stacy Ellen Rich),
Audimax/Neustadt
Manifestation, 2004.
Neustadt' staging,
Volksbhne, Berlin.
Set by Bert Neumann
for a production
of Dostoevsky's
The Idiot. Courtesy
the artists
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 113
114 | Aerall
include catatonia, surprise chills, mean
showgirl, virtuous woman retreats and
lynching. In Grifns commentary about
this score, he emphasises the overdeter-
mined qualities of their narrative-gestural
textures:
many of the acting duets in the lms
are the result of tabulations of a series
of Sullivans scores based on the pattern.
ese scores provide a navigational tool
guiding the actor through ephemeral
materials using a xed chart. ey
propose a strange kind of internal
pule. ere is a calculated, account-like
approach to everything. Number and
patterns are used to rationally organise
something that is essentially subjective
and eeting. e actors do not embody
the narrative; it passes through them
in compositional relationships.
5
Another way to read Sullivans approach to
performance regimes is through the work
of Mike Kelley, with whom Sullivan studied
at Art Center College of Design in Los
Angeles in the late Jppcs. If one reviews
Kelleys work, and particularly his essays
and critical statements about art, one realis-
es just how many problematics Sullivan
and Kelley share. One relevant here is that
of discourse, which Michel Foucault
describes afer Nietzsche as the problem
of Who is speaking? in the essay What Is
an Author? (Jpop). Discourse, in Kelleys
work, may refer to the ways that artworks
produce sites for disciplinary procedures.
One of the primary sites of discourse in
Kelleys work is the art school itself, and
it is telling that many of his early works
are involved in a project of deconstructing
his education both at the University of
Michigan and at Art Center College of
Design, where Kelley was a student of
John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler.
In Educational Complex (Jpp), for
instance, Kelley constructs a scale model
of the various art buildings where he
was a student. Te architecture of Art
Center College of Design becomes a kind of
bachelor machine/torture device, churning
out students: In Educational Complex,
an architectural model that reformulates
every school I have ever attended into one
utopian arts complex, the sublevel is the
point furthest underground. To get to it one
must crawl under a table. [] I have made
it my project to reconstruct my missing
memories of this site. Given the large
number of rooms that I cannot clearly
5 Ibid., p.52.
6 Mike Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (ed. John C. Welchman), Cambridge,
MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004, p.104.
Catherine Sullivan
(in collaboration
with Ron Athey,
Sean Griffin,
Mike Kelley and
Stacy Ellen Rich),
Audimax/Neustadt
Manifestation,
2004. Audimax'
staging, Rheinisch-
Westflische
Technische
Hochschule, Aachen.
Tim Beamish,
Wostell Action.
Courtesy the artists
recall, this is a daunting task.
6
Educational
training results in what Kelley calls, afer
alien abduction literature, missing time
a time of screen memories masking
repressed experiences.
Kelleys work, through installations
like the one just described, evokes a meta-
discourse about art, and art education/
professionalism, in which particular
disciplinary regimes constitute the artist
and the artists audience as subjects.
Tis meta-discourse grounds a wider
critique of cultural phenomena from a
broad range of typically low sources,
marshalling the (ofen misapplied) tools
of critical theory and psychoanalysis in
order to critique and discuss such objects
of popular consumption. Here, the Land
OLakes butter icon, a kneeling Native
American woman, becomes an object for
psychoanalysis (Land OLakes/Land O
Snakes), as her breasts are noticeably
displaced onto her knees. Many other
gures from the dustbin of popular
culture receive such treatment, such
as the recurring character of the Banana
Man a local legend from Kelleys
Wayne, Michigan childhood. Incidentally,
Kelley is one of Sullivan's collaborators
for her Audimax/Neustadt Manifestation,
in which she invited Kelley and other
colleagues to perform Fluxus-inected
works. One of the purposes of Kelleys
oeuvre, like Sullivans, as we shall see,
is a broad, yet personal, analysis of how
power functions through heterogeneous
disciplinary regimes, and particularly
through (arts) education, consumption,
popular entertainment (kitsch) and
cultural phenomena ofen deemed unt
for criticism and analysis, let alone art.
Considerable work remains to be
done on the relationship between Kelley
and Sullivan. Something that interests me
in particular about the connection is how
Sullivans work extends from Kelley-esque
problems of cultural acquisition and
training to the exploration of expressions
of power across theatre, lm, visual art
and dance. In all of these realms, signs
of disciplinary acquisition and trauma
accrue through gesture, as well as through
the use of certain techniques, whether
as movement procedures, or in regards to
lighting, setting, costuming and elocution.
Unifying Sullivans works is a rigorous
yet ambivalent investigation of how power
functions through sites of performance.
Tis investigation becomes most visible
in Sullivans early performance works
e Gold Standard (ccJ) and Big Hunt
(cc), in which Sullivan re-stages scenes
from various lms in which the acting
is particularly virtuosic what Sullivan
describes as big-game hunting roles.
7

Ingmar Bergmans Persona (Jpoo), Arthur
Penns e Miracle Worker (Jpo), Robert
Aldrichs Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? (Jpo) and Adrian Mitchell and Peter
Brook's Marat/Sade (Jpo) each involve
roles that require virtuosity from their
actors in order to not only play them, but,
in Sullivans words, to survive them.
8

Te language Sullivan uses to describe
her understanding of the actors in these
roles draws from Elias Canettis analysis
of power in Crowds and Power (Jpoc),
a poetic-anthropological text devoted to
the cross-cultural comparison of crowd
behaviour in relation to communitarian
and authoritarian expressions of power.
Like the gures peppered throughout
Canettis anthropology, who must continu-
ally metamorphose into other creatures
and natural phenomena, Sullivan says of
her actors that they must also transform
themselves in order to survive.
Big and little [hunt] are meant to set
up a comparative relationship between
the two pieces in the installation, and
hunt refers to the dramatic stakes for
the performers. [] In both of the hunts
the stakes relate to assimilation or
elimination, connement or liberation,
by the actors capacity to meet the
demands of the dramatic tasks they
are asked to perform. I was interested
in how this could be animated through
a series of stylistic economies that would
limit and restrict certain actors and
meanwhile set others free. is would be
contingent on their ability to manifest the
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 115
Sullivans work extends
from problems of cultural
acquisition and training to
the exploration of expressions
of power across theatre,
lm, visual art and dance.
7 Russell Ferguson, Sort of Excessive: an Interview with Catherine Sullivan, in FIVE ECONOMIES
(big hunt/little hunt) (exh. cat.), Los Angeles: UCLA Hammer Museum, 2002, p.27.
8 Ibid.
116 | Aerall
codes of the ve economies, transforming
from one to another. [] For Canetti,
transformation is a means of survival
and resistance to power, and can
manifest itself negatively in the subject
(in pathologies like hysteria, mania,
and melancholia) or liberate the subject
to a transcendent state of divinity.
Imitation and simulation are the
empowering aspects of transformation,
and ultimately I wanted to address this
in dramatic acting.
9

Tese notions of survival and transforma-
tion, which appear early in Sullivans
career, impinge on ways we may think
about the labour of the actor/performer
in regards to the labour of contemporary
subjects in an increasingly administered
world. Te forms and techniques in
Sullivans work, not unlike her task-based
predecessors, reect contemporary
conditions of subjectivity and labour
practices as a determining factor for
inter/subjectivity. By framing conditions
of contemporary subjectivity, Sullivan
dramatises the stakes of the post-Fordist
workplace as a site where the subject is
constituted through modes of virtuosic
performativity performances which do
not produce a particular object but which
participate in both intellectual and afective
economies.
Te problem of survival dates back
to Sullivans work for her graduate thesis
at Art Center College of Design, Grisly
Notes and Tones (Jpp/ccJ), a play where
a bear attack is staged in different theatrical
modalities. To survive in this case is quite
literal, where virtuosity is a matter of
life and death. It also looks forward to
e Chittendens, which takes place in the
building of an abandoned insurance agency
and uses Torstein Veblens J8pp text,
e eory of the Leisure Class, to explore
pathologies native to the US insurance
industry. Tis video also uses Grifns
D-Pattern extensively in order to score
certain gestures specic to the work
of insurance company administrators,
employees and clients. What is immedi-
ately striking about the video is how the
actors gestures resemble involuntary
movement: through them one registers
an index of trauma and pathology, and
the insurance industry emerges as a site
of ghostly working through, not unrelated
to the claims they le. One particular actor
repeats the words and gestures appropriate
to an accident scene; another the numbers
that he has crunched for a particular claim.
We witness naked pathology arranged
like a score for post-Fordist labour, the
immaterial labour specically of the
insurance industry. e Chittendens,
more than any other of Sullivans works,
deals with the bureaucratic labour place,
the workplace as a model of other sites
of administration and government.
e Chittendens installation consists
of a suite of ve projections, the second
of which is called e Chittenden Screen
Tests. In this section of the installation one
sees actors performing a series of gestures
through the technique of D-Pattern,
as throughout the suite, but here doubled
by the superimposition of two images of
the actor. While in Big Hunt and Gold
Standard one viewed Sullivans infusions
her term for the combination of two
or more styles or regimes through the
combination of certain sets, props, lighting
designs and photographic images with
certain acting styles, the infusions of
e Chittendens are more literal, occurring
through the superimposition of images of
an actor performing the same gestures in
two diferent period costumes one from
the early twentieth century and the other
contemporary. Sullivans comments about
e Chittenden Screen Tests are striking,
and reect a view of survival, transforma-
tion and liberation in the labour of her
performers that is similar to the one
found in her statements about Canetti
and high-stakes acting:
Te Chittenden Screen Tests were lmed
in an executive boardroom. ese screen
tests present one score per actor in
dierent costumes, lmed in two takes,
one in black-and-white, the other in
colour. e takes are then dissolved over
one another, so that any inconsistency
in the performance between the takes
is revealed: e performer either unies
his action over two disparate moments
in time, or fails to self possess in the
boardrooms high-stakes ambience.
10

In the context of Sullivans essay, one could
read self-possession in terms of remaining
9 Ibid.
10 Catherine Sullivan Talks about The Chittendens, 2005, Artforum, vol.44, no.6, February 2006, p.176.
cool in a high-pressure environment.
But one could also see it in the context of
post-Fordist labour practices, as another
example of the performance of mastery
over movement or what would formerly
be termed virtuosity that has become
integral to a subjects survival . In e
Chittendens, Sullivans investigation
of various discourses is graphed onto the
insurance industry, a milieu that becomes
both historical and mythopoeic through
its treatment by Sullivan. More than in any
other of Sullivans works, virtuosic labour
and performance are conated in gesture.
Te dystopian aspects of art historical
task-based performance come to the fore
as one witnesses the connections between
the immaterial labour of the workplace
and that of the performers whom
Sullivan employs.
While the content of Sullivans most
recent works does not concern labour
practices per se, at least not in their
content, they do nevertheless concern
virtuosity and self-possession in terms
of formations of contemporary subjectivity.
In Sullivans elaborate eight-channel
lm installation Triangle of Need (cc),
one of the principal narrative arcs
involves a group of Neanderthals who
have been imprisoned in order to become
acculturated and assimilated into a
human population. In this work, tropes
of genocide, anthropocentricism and
racist, pseudoscientic epistemology blend
seamlessly. Te traces of racial pathology
are written into the works script, which
draws from a nineteenth- and twentieth-
century imagining of the primitive,
and specically the culture of Neanderthals.
Virtuosity involves performing humanity
within an anthropological-disciplinary
machine. To self-possess and survive,
in the atmosphere of a corporate board-
room or for Sullivans Neanderthals, is to
resist processes of acculturation organised
by Western scientic epistemologies,
late capitalism and colonialism. It is, in
some sense, to nd ones way out of these
historical processes by giving form to their
negative afects and overdetermining their
own myths.
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 117
Catherine Sullivan,
Big Hunt, 2002,
35mm production
still from five-
channel 16mm film
to digital projection.
Performers: Sarah
Taylor, Jenifer
Kingsley, Valentine
Miellii. Courtesy
the artist
118 | Aerall
Ronald Tavels play e Last Days of
British Honduras was produced only
once, in Jp, at the Public Teater, as part
of the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In Tavels wide-ranging body of work
he wrote some of the most iconic Warhol
movies (Vinyl', Jpo; Chelsea Girls',
Jpoo); co-founded the Playhouse of
the Ridiculous; won an Obie Award for
e Boy on the Straight-Back Chair (Jpop);
provoked an international scandal with
Indira Ghandis Daring Device (Jpo)
Last Days stood out for us as especially
eccentric: a slowly churning, highly
discursive colonial Death in Venice
scenario combined with light-comedic and
magic-realist elements and placed in the
nervy politico-ethnic context immediately
preceding the JpJ British Honduras (now
Belize) referendum on independence. Tis
bid for independence was in fact rejected,
even afer the British administration had
largely departed.
Te transposition of the colonial
drama, crash-landing it, as it were, from
subtropical jungle to wintertime North
American city made counter-intuitive sense
to us: a sharply contrasting geographic-
meteorological crossroads of cultures and
histories in which demographic tensions
have been historically, and now all too
familiarly, exacerbated. An important part
of the transposition, however, was based
on a slice of the Near West Side of Chicago,
a constellation of buildings and other urban
features put by historical circumstance
into close proximity and utilised by us
as lming locations. Tere are, within
the proverbial c acres, several lived-in
churches; the fairly monstrous United
Center sports and entertainment complex
(Michael Jordans home court); Malcolm X
College, a glass slab not so named because
of a liberationist pedagogy but because
residents took a vote on naming their local
city college; and the hulking shell of the
long-abandoned Cook County Hospital,
still standing within the ever-widening new
medical district. An extended history xed
in rock, steel and glass, cleaved by the rush
of the Eisenhower Expressway. As a place
that has drifed in and out of the orbit of its
ofcial overseers, it has, for better or worse,
borne its own identity as speculative
patchwork.
Our lm is not so much a conventional
adaptation as a variation on Tavels
enthusiastic, nearly wilful immersion
in material about which he ofen knew
something more and, on occasion,
something less. We were keen to follow
the plays curious admixture of symptoms,
and to respond to the anxious, comedic,
unresolved political milieu that Tavel
navigates with such simultaneous
reverence and unruliness.
Te rich heterogeneity inherent in
Tavels text itself suggested that we work
with it promiscuously. Some passages
in the original appear verbatim in our
version; other sections were treated to
varying degrees edited, recombined,
or reallocated to diferent scenes and
characters, both adapted and invented.
Yet other pieces of dialogue, or even turns
of phrase, prompted us to add altogether
new material.
Printed here are edited excerpts from
the screenplay for the 8-minute lm.
Te opening voice-over and the rst part
of the following scene derive from Jack
Smiths ehearsal for the Destruction
of Atlantis (Jpo), a performance with
which Tavel was involved.
Abstract Honduras
Catherine Sullivan
and Farhad Sharmini
All images:
Catherine Sullivan
and Farhad
Sharmini,
The Last Days of
British Honduras,
2010, Super 16mm
film, 48min.
Courtesy the artists
Catherine Sullivan and
Farhad Sharmini introduce
excerpts from the screen-
play to their new lm,
The Last Days of British
Honduras (eoio).
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 119
SCREENPLAY
EXCERPTS
1. Urban exteriors, day and night. Voice:
PRISONER
Imagine youre a wino. Youre feeling a little
drowsy, slumped on a stoop Your head feels like
a freeze-dried coconut. Your eyes like sore rectums.
Up rolls the wino police. Tey drag you of to a
skyscraper prison, disguised to look like a regular
skyscraper
And from your wino bin in the high-rise prison you
see wino trucks up and down the streets, hauling in
fresh supplies of winos. Just to keep the numbers up.
2. FIRST DANYON is giving a presentation
in a church basement.
DANYON
Lookit, rats on the inside nk on anyone they can,
instead of working out their own problems Tey
sneak their food. Tey hold out on the others. Tey
cant control their b-holes Tey climb straight up,
they crawl anywhere, everywhere.
Tey trade with each other and only with each
other in baboon sperm Te federales
FIRST RABBIT
(fed up)
Why you fussing?
DANYON
Te narcos, actually, wear rat disguises. Rat faces.
Tey nk on anyone they can
FIRST RABBIT
Fussed! What, there a tarantula in the room here?
Huh? Dee tarantula fall dhere?
FIRST DANYON
Tey, they cant control their b-holes
FIRST RABBIT
Man, you could be one of them
DANYON
Okay, put your mind on this, mister!
When dee cheeckon begin to cross dee road,
do you say dee cheeckon has crossed dee road?
Tricks is like life. You have to do them beginning
to end.
SECOND RABBIT
(pushing DANYON o dais)
Sky blue Jungle green Cheeckon white.
Hear me? Chicken white

3. Car drops oB FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL,
who both appear disoriented. Voice:
LORNETTE
(chirpily)
Did somebody say soup is on?
ANGEL
I did!
LORNETTE
And to drink?
ANGEL
Orange juice.
LORNETTE
(with trepidation)
Jaguar brand?
ANGEL
Naturally.
LORNETTE
Fucking Ah Balam! Fucking banana republic!
ANGEL
Yes... but with no bananas.
. DENNIS THE MENNONITE BAGMAN
on the prowl outside the sports complex. Voice:
SECOND RABBIT
Dee little tabby. Stalks his prey for the hell of it,
for hells sake. Unencumbered by the delusion
of justice of natural need So too the Americans
in Honduras. Stalking causelessly, the causeless.
For no good, for no ones good. For no real
thing.
11. Urban exteriors, accompanied by voices
from a distant stage play:
AH BALAM
(childlike)
Do you try to see the light, Mr Danyon Paron?
120 | Aerall
FIRST DANYON
What do you want?
CHORUS OF RABBITS AND PRISONER
Dee day, mon!
AH BALAM
A talk about our books, Mr Danyon Paron
of the University of Pennsylvania.
CHORUS OF DANYONS
Can you call me Dan? Yeah, Dan. Just Dan.
Plain Dan.
AH BALAM
My father has looked in your face. He has the will
to put me with you.
CHORUS OF DANYONS
(intrigued)
Im sorta sold Siddown
AH BALAM
My name is Ah Balam. It means the Jaguar.
12. SECOND LORNETTE and ANGEL look for
bearings on a snowy overpass.
LORNETTE
Tis looks like, what, an embassy.
Te American Consulate, or maybe
a hotel. Te Palace, or the Royale?
Oh, they can help us, cant they?
I am an American, I can say.
My country is going to reward you.
Angel, what is it?
ANGEL
Dont move. Just speak.
LORNETTE
About what?
ANGEL
Anything. Dan, how you feel being apart from him,
even for a day.
1415. THIRD RABBIT leads the way through
a diBerent chapel, addressing
the camera directly.
THIRD RABBIT
British Honduras. British? Abstract Honduras.
It seems not to exist once youve lef it and
I cant say Ive ever been in it. Dhis dee kind
of place dhis is. A mon cannot get here.
So how can he leave it?
Camera moves past him into an adjoining bedroom
where FIRST and SECOND RABBITS and
THIRD DANYON are seated on a bed, each
wearing a black hood. PRISONER tinkers with
a wooden ute before unhooding others.
PRISONER
Te devils middle nger is that ute.
FIRST RABBIT
Lucifers. Morning star, bearer of light. Superstitious?
DANYON
Please, were learned folk. And know all about utes.
PRISONER
You know, sometimes I wonder if you are
a real Belizean.
SECOND RABBIT
Many people do.
AH BALAM
(voice, o-screen)
Gentlemen, put away your solitude.
Cut to: AH BALAM and TRABANT
in pews.
AH BALAM
(cont.)
Let it sit beside you until, beside its self,
it is its own self, alone.
TRABANT
Do not be here. Not here with it, no one shall be,
can be parted from you.
DANYON
(emerging with the other captives)
I felt the journey. Te whole, but in an instant,
passage.
FIRST RABBIT
At least weve got a Jaguar watching over us.
Te jaguar below, the dragon above?
AH BALAM
Not a dragon, Rabbit. Quetzalcohuatl means
the feathered serpent.
DANYON
Perfess some more perfesser.
AH BALAM
Te god Kukulkan was rst a comet and, when he
challenged the sun, he fell back with his body on re.
Both he and the sun disappeared for four days of
darkness and death on earth.
TRABANT
Ten he rose again in the East to announce the suns
return. And became the greatest star in the sky, the
Morning Star. So Kukulkan became Quetzalcohuatl.
PRISONER
Te rst appearance of Venus! Lose your tail and
come out shining brighter than ever!
AH BALAM
Venus gives the Maya the reckoning of all our days
and nights and hours. Our time is measured from
his birth
PRISONER
My time is reckoned in the opposite direction.
It's always running out.
PRISONER convulses and collapses in a heap,
apparently dead.
AH BALAM
Where are your friends now, Dan?
CHORUS OF RABBITS
Nowhere, mon!
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 121
1718. FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL
in a cafeteria.
LORNETTE
He is a gifed man, he gifs me for my body, with
objects for my body, as clothes, rings, talismans,
or amulets, artefacts.
Cut to: moonlit vignette from the past, with
SECOND LORNETTE and SECOND DANYON,
observed by AH BALAM and TRABANT.
LORNETTE
(cont.)
Tings he loves, and wears next to his skin he gives
to me to wear next to my skin.
DANYON
Beautiful like a movie in Technicolor yet scary
like no place I been. Tats because we are close
to Da Source, the Celestial Mechanics.
LORNETTE
But its spooky. A South Seas spooky paradise.
And small.
DANYON
Te constant wind! Te iguana green!
Good! Te Madonna blue sky! Te jet night! Where
but here, at the end of the world, is the night so long
ago, and jet? It hunches over us like a long angel
of forever.
LORNETTE
I like the jet of night.
(turning to AH BALAM)
Must you play that ute now?
AH BALAM
Why not? It lends his lecture a sultry air.
Like a song that is sentimentally talked through
rather than sung.
LORNETTE
It is the devils instrument.
DANYON
Lucifers?
LORNETTE
Te Lucifer that is, or was, Venus.
DANYON
We are like Honduras Oh man, I actually
cant think here.
TRABANT
It is the illusion of natural phenomena.
20. A procession for the fallen PRISONER
in the chapel.
AH BALAM
Te early acts of each Venusian phase are dangerous
to the world of men. For lesser gods in each period
kill people and burn whole cities.
FIRST RABBIT
So destructive, your gods Positively vindictive.
TRABANT
Te ambitions of Quetzalcohuatl elude our full
understanding. Demolition is only his most manifest.
THIRD DANYON
Do you presume that Kukulkan before him
was benevolent?
AH BALAM
Yes, I believe it was a happy age, Dan.
THIRD DANYON
And a great one?
AH BALAM
Te great always
26. TOP OPERATIVE on mutiple mobile phones
in city college hallway. From a faraway place,
voices:
CHORUS OF RABBITS
Destiny takes advantage, Dan from Philadelphia.
DENNIS THE MENNONITE BAGMAN
Men are destiny.
CHORUS RABBITS
Honduran Mahogany is destiny.
SECOND RABBIT AND PRISONER
Mahogany men are destiny. Tis is a black
republic.
FOURTH DANYON
It is a banana republic without bananas.
SECOND RABBIT AND PRISONER
And without slaves.
FIRST DANYON
And without mahogany, just orange juice.
30. FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL are bound
to chairs in a city college hallway.
LORNETTE
What do they want from us?
ANGEL
Were mysterious to them. Tey dont know who
we are.
122 | Aerall
LORNETTE
Tey might ask!
ANGEL
Maybe they think it isnt time.
LORNETTE
Angel, why cant you gimme a straight answer
just once!?
ANGEL
I dont know how much of what I hear about
the phenomens around these parts youre going
to believe.
LORNETTE
Nows as good a time as any!
ANGEL
Oooo-kay. Te Amerinds from Yucatan to Peru have
written of instant travel over great distances by force
of mind alone. Or not by force of mind, since the
traveller in some stories doesnt know how he crossed
hundreds, even thousands, of miles from where
he was before
Maybe even worlds other than this one.
LORNETTE
How how do they say they do it?
ANGEL
I cant tell. Maybe nobody can. Not for sure.
Some stories say the body is broken apart and comes
together in a distant location. Or that the traveller
enters a diferent idea of time and returns to ours
in some faraway place
LORNETTE
Travelling to distant worlds, huh? You mean, like
astronauts?
ANGEL
Er yes, something like that. Sure, astronauts,
if you like.
35. TOP OPERATIVE with the hooded FIFTH
DANYON.
TOP OPERATIVE
(removing the hood)
Not from around here, are you?
DANYON
Come on, are you fer real? You know the answer.
TOP OPERATIVE
Okay, Mr Danyon Paron, are you an American
assassin? Here on assassination business from
Guatemala City?
DANYON
Great, great, great! I see youre going to be riding
roughshod over my brain!
38. A departure is in progress, with THIRD
DANYON, AH BALAM and TRABANT.
Also in attendance: FIRST RABBIT.
AH BALAM
It was always meant to be this way.
DANYON
People say it every time something is completely
avoidable.
AH BALAM
Put away your solitude. Let it sit beside you, until
it is its own self, alone. Do not be here, not here
with it.
TRABANT
If you part with it, no one shall be, can be, parted
from you.
DANYON
Youre going... where your people have gone?
TRABANT
You are going.
DANYON
I am going.
AH BALAM
Say it:
DANYON
Te eagles are the vessels of the spirit.
Tey alighted on the emblem of their home.
Venus.
AH BALAM
Yax: Venus.
DANYON
Hacia casa.
AH BALAM
Home. Venus. Home.
TRABANT
We are going to come home.
DANYON
And be home Be the home.
DANYON and AH BALAM
For I come to you!
FIRST RABBIT
(nonplussed)
Why you fussing? What? Is there a tarantula in here?
Dee tarantula fall dhere?
Artists: Catherine Sullivan | 123
40. FIRST LORNETTE and ANGEL come
face to face with AH BALAM and TRABANT,
who free the two captives.
AH BALAM
Tis way. You have travel before you.
LORNETTE
Angel! Is this a Maya?
ANGEL
Likely so, Miss Lornette.
LORNETTE
I must nd Danyon rst.
AH BALAM
You must go away without Danyon because hes
not ready. And you are for you.
LORNETTE
But I want him!
TRABANT
Wrong! Look about your own self In this place
that has now become holy, you have never been
with him.
LORNETTE
Angel!?
ANGEL
Listen your way out of bondage, Lornette.
AH BALAM
Leave here. I have to hasten to my own
direction, and cannot delay with you
anymore.
Get out!
41. Fate awaits FOUR DANYONS in a frozen
parking lot.
THIRD DANYON
I come from a top line of broken crockery!
TRABANT
It is a youthful thing to lose your life
for a lover.
SECOND DANYON
But love has brought me to the crippled blood
AH BALAM
I am the umbrella of absolute dimension for all arrow
obligates eventual guardianing of the absolute, like
the huge feathered heart heating the nests of breath!
Climb the pyramid! Sleeper, awake!
42. In the chapel, FIFTH DANYON is unravelling
as other characters pack boxes. Upstairs in the
church balcony is FIRST RABBIT, seated alone.
DANYON
Youve all got me up here, boxed-up, where you
want me to be!
Cops in cars! In topless bars! And nger-lickin
good, nger-eating birds, goin down, in the back of...
cop cars!
FIRST RABBIT
We are not alongside nature, like Christians
are alongside the Christ. We are in nature, like
Christians is not alongside the Christ. Or even
like him!
DANYON
Injin upstarts, hot number jaguars, on their way to
the stars! Me, I feel ancillary like a moon of Mars!
THIRD RABBIT
Nobody making you feel.
AH BALAM
Shed your skin, Dan. Leave it. Come out of it.
Bigger than ever.
DANYON
I I cant remember where things were before.
THIRD RABBIT
Pretty much like nowhere, mon.
DANYON
How did this happen?
AH BALAM
Do you remember when the air was a whirl
around us?
DANYON
Whirl Whirly bird Birdie bird Yes! Oh that was
quite a doozy, that hallucination Te heat
FIRST RABBIT
Good! Te iguana green. Madonna blue sky
DANYON
Te tarantulas
FIRST RABBIT
Te jet night!
DANYON
Do others usually share this shared misgiving?
You feel me dont you, Ah Balam you feeling it?
Hold on, I gots another blackout coming on
AH BALAM
Why feel shame now, Dan?
126 | Aerall
Previous spread:
A 1927 photograph
by Alexander
Rodchenko
of the former
Bakhmetevsky Bus
Garage in Moscow,
designed by
Konstantin Melnikov
in 1926, which
became the
Garage Center for
Contemporary Art
in 2008. Courtesy
Alexander Lavrentiev
and Varvara
Rodchenko
opposite:
The Garage Center
for Contemporary Art
(interior)
Contexts: Primitive Accumulation | 127
I
Genealogy of Contemporary Arts Statism
Te lack of cultural and art institutions was an urgent matter of debate and concern in
Russian artistic circles throughout the Jppcs and the beginning of the cccs. But it wasnt
until cc in connection with the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
that a sudden shif took place.
1
State institutions, such as the Ministry of Culture and
Rosiso (State Centre of Exhibiting Programmes), lef behind their traditional indiference
to contemporary art and decided to make the biennial the emblem of New Russian
progressive cultural politics. Tis coincided with the emergence of new galleries like Stella
Art Foundation and Triumph Gallery in Moscow, whose founders emerged from the new
upper classes.
2

From the mid-Jppcs to the early cccs, the relationship between progressive
intellectual and art initiatives, on the one hand, and business and state, on the other, was
efectively non-existent. Various artistic events and educational and publishing endeavours
were self-organised, and either lacked any external funding or received occasional support
from foreign foundations (the Soros Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur
Foundation). Perhaps because of this, artistic and intellectual spheres of production
operated with relative independence, and, although lacking organisational capacity, were
motivated by optimism and enthusiasm: these Moscow and St Petersburg self-organised
groups included Logos publishers (founded in JppJ) and Ad Marginem publishers
(founded in Jpp), specialising in philosophy and cultural theory; Visual Anthropology,
a two-year laboratory of philosophers and artists launched by Viktor Misiano at the
Philosophy Institute; TV gallery; Moscow
Art Magazine (founded in Jpp); groups
founded by Anatoly Osmolovsky, such as
the Radek art journal (Jpppp), Radek
community (Jpppccc), ETI (Expropria-
tion of Art Territory, JppJp) and the
Non-Governmental Control Commission
(Jpp8). Meanwhile state and business
concerns focused on privatising the
industrial and cultural heritage and resources of Soviet Russia. Culture in those years,
as understood by the state and media, was embodied either by dissident, anti-Soviet
or so-called non-conformist activities (the protagonists of Moscow Conceptualism
Andrei Monastyrsky, Pavel Pepperstein, Vadim Zakharov, Juri Albert and others
are ofen included in this context) or the countrys classical nineteenth-century cultural,
particularly literary, heritage. Anything taking place in the non-legitimate realm of
contemporary art in the absence of institutions (e.g. the actionist period of the mid-Jppcs)
was considered as quasi-hooliganism both in the media and in the highbrow circles of
Moscow Conceptualism. But, as a whole, neither business nor the state took interest in new
creative practices. Pleasure and enthusiasm from intellectual and artistic breakthroughs
were still completely separate from prot-making motives. Te Jppcs were a unique
period, when, lacking cultural institutions and with only a handful of galleries (XL,
Art aer Primitive
Accumulation:
Or, on the
Putin-Medvedev
Cultural Politics
Keti Chukhrov
In this analysis of the Moscow art scene
and, in particular, of the last Moscow
biennial, Keti Chukhrov examines the
centripetal movement among the new
cultural elite towards power and the state.
1 The First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, curated by Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum,
Iara Boubnova, Nicolas Bourriaud, Fulya Erdemci, Gunnar B. Kvaran, Rosa Martnez and Hans-Ulrich
Obrist, took place in various locations across the city from 28 January to 28 February 2005.
2 Stella Art Foundation was established by Stella Kesoeva in 2004, and Triumph Gallery by Emelian
Zakharov in 2005.
128 | Aerall
Guelman, Regina) constituting an art scene, a disparate group of young people obsessed
by art produced a tendency within a couple of years Moscow actionism (JppJpp).
Te actionists such as Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dmitry Gutov, Oleg Kulik and Alexander
Brener were mostly self-proclaimed artists who had neither academic training nor
the undergrounds recognition or initiation.
In the absence of an art system, market or art spaces, the famous actions of the time
among them e Prick (JppJ, by Anatoly Osmolovsky, in which the artists students
and collaborators laid out the word XY (Prick) on the Red Square by means of
their own bodies), Barricade (Jpp8, by Osmolovsky, Radek and a group of Moscow
artists, in which the they blocked of Moscows central streets with heaps of artworks),
e Man-Dog (Jpp, by Kulik and Brener) and Against All (Jppp, when Osmolovsky
and Radek climbed Lenins Mausoleum to unfold the banner with the motto against all
on it) were aimed at reclaiming the former symbols of socialist culture that afer JppJ
became the privatised territories of the new Russian capital. Te paradox of the period lay
in the fact that the more immature the contemporary art territory was, the more intensive
and intellectually charged were its art events and exhibitions. Te lack of art-market
mediation and of commissioning enabled these events to develop in the direction of
independent conceptualisation and experimentation, while Moscow Art Magaine
became, under Viktor Misianos editorship, the means for documenting, recording
and interpreting these events.
Around the end of Putins rst term in cc, when the economy was fuelled by oil and
other natural resources, the new nancial elite, the restructured state bureaucracy and the
upper middle class having guaranteed their welfare and having legitimated black and
grey incomes
3
started to pay attention to a social area that provided symbolic capital:
the culture of contemporary art. Glamorous show business and the traditional Russian
and post-Soviet cultural preferences theatre, literature, ballet appeared unattractive
for a generation that was well-travelled and had absorbed technocratic values of culture
and political power. Teatre and literature were identied with Soviet and post-Soviet
dissident culture, while contemporary art was associated with global contemporary
cultural event-making. It is not surprising, then, that the First Moscow Biennale in cc
3 Black was commonly used to refer to illegitimate income that was not stated or taxed, and grey to
laundered money.
The Garage Center
for Contemporary
Culture, Moscow
(exterior and caf)
Contexts: Primitive Accumulation | 129
reected a tremendous shif in cultural politics and encouraged large-scale investment
in art and its events, both from the government and independent donors.
4

At rst sight, it may seem that such proliferation of cultural venues and big projects
in the contemporary art eld implies a cultural breakthrough, the cultivation and
education of a middle class or an overall urban development. But that was not the case:
adherence to new cultural venues doesnt presuppose education or understanding. Rather,
in Russia it enabled the middle class to acquire the illusion of gentrication and cultivation;
those who voluntarily kept away from culture in the time of early post-Soviet artistic
and intellectual production and pursued business and privatisation were now the ones
moulding and controlling art and culture. As the result of the appropriation of formerly
self-organised educational, publishing and artistic institutions and ventures, the sites
acquired new interfaces. What are they like?
First and foremost, Russian contemporary art, like Russian culture, philosophy,
politics and event-making of the post-Yeltsin era, is dominated by the promotion and
self-promotion of producers and their personalities. Rather than developing certain
institutions and spaces of art and education, its sponsors use the cultural sphere in order
to establish themselves as the new progressive elite. As a result the social impact of
art resides in the names of the event-organisers (which is the case with Daria Zhukova
and her Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, and Maria Baibakova and her
Baibakov Art Projects at the Red October chocolate factory) rather than acquiring
potentialities for the new themes and opportunities. Moreover, the new capitals
legitimising of art is not reduced to just sponsoring and engineering the milieu and its
production. Very ofen its new engineers endeavour to act as artists, writers, critics
and thinkers themselves.
5

4 In addition to those mentioned in the text, examples include Art4.ru, an exhibition space founded
by refrigerator and window blinds magnate Igor Markin in the centre of Moscow; the Ekaterina
Cultural Foundation; the City Art Foundation; the Winzavod Art Centre; the Garage Center for
Contemporary Culture; the National Center of Contemporary Art, the new modern art museum planned
by the Ministry of Culture; three more premises of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Fabrika Art
Centre, which works with younger artists; as well as several new commercial galleries.
5 Tanatos Banionis is the pseudonym of one of the owners of the Moscow-based Triumph Gallery, Alexander
Dolgin; he is a businessman who sponsored a journal and a publishing house, and then began appearing
in the media as a philosopher and expert on culture. Sergey Minaev, who owns a beverage business,
is now conspicuous as a writer and member of the public chamber in State Duma. Julia Millner, wife
of the oligarch Juri Millner, exhibited work in the Russian Pavilion in the 2007 Venice Biennale.
130 | Aerall
Te artists involved in the actual as opposed to producer-driven Moscow art
scene from ccc to cc believed that the new patrons, despite their lack of familiarity
with the arts and humanities, would be gradually converted, rened and educated, and
that they would be better allies for art than intellectuals, who produce criticism but provide
no resources and facilities for development. Tis became a permanent debate among
artists, art historians and critics as the new producers of the art world started to emerge.
Many remembered the paradoxical motto of the writer, artist and former political activist
Osmolovsky, who said in cc that artists of the time should be for the masters,
6
which,
on the one hand, implied an inevitable co-option of artists by the new elite, and, on the
other, expressed a belief in the possibility of transforming their tastes and projections.
In fact, the nancial and bureaucratic elite made use of arts general intellect and creative
achievements to accomplish its own qualitative transformation from owners and
sponsors into sophisticated bourgeoisie, without any real appreciation of the work
they were funding.
In addition to that, Putins second term brought about an extreme centripetal
movement of various elites around statist and national values. Despite the initial expecta-
tion of agents of artistic and intellectual elds that contemporary arts modernist and
avant-garde background would draw the cultural milieu away from supporting the
government, Russian cultural politics as well as contemporary art and its practices
became, voluntarily or not, oriented towards power. As Michel Foucault demonstrates,
power is not localised in some governing centre, nor is it personied and embodied,
but rather nds itself dispersed and proliferating among social nuclei and institutions.
However, this is only partly true in Russia (and not only in Russia, as Giorgio Agambens
writings on the state of exception and sovereign power suggest).
7

In Russia there is a centralisation of sovereign power, although this centralisation
derives not from a single persons authority (as in a totalitarian regime) nor from some-
bodys personal charisma or repressive power; it is, rather, a more complex phenomenon,
motivated by a type and form of culture guaranteeing recognition both beyond expert
criteria or market success. Te new art institutions are quite able to function without
government or state recognition (to function in the space of cultural production it is not
compulsory for them to back up the state politically). In the eld of art neither authority
nor prot are generated by governmental or state structures.
But, in fact, Russian art institutions do not seek to operate without such recognition.
Tey are either subservient to the state or subservient to a certain donors taste, which
makes it impossible to talk about any art system functioning independently on its
own. What makes the social and cultural movement collude with authority is not just
aspiration to integrate with power.
Te reason for such complicity is the following: various institutions and the business
sector are friendly to government, since it instigates the ideology that holds that govern-
ment is enlightening and modernising the country, its economy and culture. Government
and its political image-makers claim they are subjects of progress in politics, social life,
science and art. Hence, it is a convenient illusion for many institutional and creative agents
of culture that government and its friendly businesses are inevitably representing avant-
garde strife. As Boris Groys has ofen remarked, even in the years of Soviet stagnation
and the renaissance of dissident movements in Soviet Russia from Jpocs up to late 8cs, the
rival or potential ally addressed by dissident activists had always been the power structures
and rarely the majority of citizens as if the aim had been the competition for symbolic
power rather than solidarity in favour of certain common aims. Te Russian intelligentsia
have always believed that general intellect and ideas of progress emanate from wherever
power resides. A number of the most inuential non-governmental organisations today
such as the cultural foundation and publishing house Territory of Future (founded
by Alexander Pogorelsky in cc), the Institute for Social Planning (founded by Valery
Fadeev in cc), the Foundation of Efective Policy (founded by Gleb Pavlovksy in Jpp),
all based in Moscow are pro-state; the functional format of such organisations is
6 Quoted in Art Without Justifications (exh. cat.), Moscow: Shchusev State Research Museum of
Architecture, 2004, p.58.
7 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen),
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995; and G. Agamben, State of Exception (trans. Kevin Attell),
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Contexts: Primitive Accumulation | 131
political technologies, and the main area of their activity is to guarantee public support
for the governmental programmes in various layers of society, mainly among intellectuals
and cultural workers. Although they develop virtuoso political and social nous and projects
of signicant cultural and economic scale, they are also openly subservient to the ofce
of the Presidents personal assistant, Vladislav Surkov. When all intellectual and creative
resources and potentialities are dragged up by the centre, representatives of creative
activity (if they search for any open social dimension at all) are drawn to participate
in these projects even if they do not share the centres political programme.
Te new biennial, as a state-sponsored cultural initiative, is then simply a decorative
extension of the glamorous post-Soviet modernisation and its democratic image.
Subservience to the government implies that the programmes of the above-mentioned
cultural and research organisations
(including publishing houses, journals,
festivals, exhibitions and even scholarly
ventures) try to combine the idea of the
national sovereignty with the sovereign
power of the state, which practically
coincide: it is the governmental status of a
venue that even from the point of view of
artists makes it internationally competitive.
In this case, indoctrination about the states
importance for society and culture and
its internationally recognisable achievements go hand in hand. Moreover, the notion
of democracy, which is widely debated and theoretically analysed by the countrys cultural
institutions, is interpreted rst and foremost as power (from the sufx -cracy) i.e. the
power of people who form a sovereign nation in the sovereign state. What follows from
such logic are odd oxymorons abounding in political texts and in mass media: sovereign
democracy, sovereign economy, democratic Empire or even conservative modernisa-
tion. Such phrases combine incompatible notions a call for innovation, modernisation,
quasi-lefist militant discourse of mobilisation and reactionary values and reduce them
to national interests and forged narratives of national glory. According to Vitaly Tretyakov,
for example, a political analyst and chief editor of the journal Political Class, only national
ideology can ensure the international inuence of Russia as the country.
In addition, according to this reading, it is national sovereignty that makes it
possible to gather smaller countries and peoples under Russias wing (which is already
a direct redenition of the national state as Empire in the Negri/Hardt sense). Such
neoconservative rhetoric goes together with self-criticality (therefore the presence of so
many former lefists consulting the government on combatant and critical texts), its main
drawback being that such criticality is imposed from above (Russian President Dmitry
Medvedevs text Go Russia (ccp) is one of the most incisive texts in relation to Russias
resource economy, corruption and the oligarchys social indiference).
8
Te political and
cultural elites are well aware that in a period of crisis they have to take up a self-critical
stance to weaken and disqualify all other subjects of political agency.
But instead of proliferating further into social practice, ideas of modernisation and
criticism remain central to the ideology of the elite, which claims progress as its goal and
abuses populist strategies, and at the same time rebukes the masses (that very sovereign
people) for backwardness, reactionary moods and political apathy. In the end, the apology
of modernisation and innovation serves the consolidation of capital and its protection
under the aegis of the business elite and technocratic bureaucracy, and demonstrates
the reluctance of the governing elites to share both material and theoretical potentialities
in concrete situations.
Another feature of the fully-edged statist stance is that progressiveness and
modernisation are identied in the media with conservative values, while the heritage of
all revolutions including that of October JpJ is interpreted as damaging reactionary
anarchy imported into Russia from abroad (resulting in another forged oxymoron:
First and foremost, ussian
contemporary art, like ussian
culture, philosophy, politics
and event-making of the post-
Yeltsin era, is dominated by the
promotion and self-promotion
of producers and their
personalities.
8 See Dmitry Medvedev, Go Russia', September, 2009. First appeared at http://www.kremlin.ru/
news/5413. Also available at http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/text/speeches/2009/09/10/1534_
qtype104017_221527.shtml (last accessed on 22 November 2010).
132 | Aerall
revolutionary-reactionary). As a result, the revolutionary period that started in Russia
with the social democratic struggle of the J8cs and ran up to the late Jpcs, with its
leaders Lenin and Trotsky, is considered to be a period of disgrace in Russian history;
Stalins totalitarian reaction (if one omits the gulags) becomes the embodiment of the
countrys mobilisation and modernisation in various spheres, with Stalin himself
(according to quite a number of politicians and parliament members) viewed as the
image of an efective technocrat and manager.
II
Aesthetics of Conservative Modernisation
Te Tird Moscow Biennale in ccp, with its principal project, Against Exclusion,
curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and located in the Garage Center for Contemporary
Culture, tted strangely into the post-crisis cultural politics of Russias conservative
modernisation. Apart from Martins show, there were no other curatorial projects within
the biennials main program. All other exhibitions (more than forty of them) formed a
background around the Garage project and were destined to demonstrate the abundance
of contemporary art in Russia rather than any curatorial ideas, or at least any conceptual
or thematic attitudes. Te suspicion that this was yet one more international biennial
again suggested contemporary arts being reduced to cultural production for the elites.
It is interesting that if up until recently the states aesthetic background was either
literary-centrist pseudo-realism or show-business spectacle, starting from the First
Moscow Biennale the direction of the governments aesthetics changed into a combination
of quasi-modernist formalism, ethnic ornamentalism and high-tech media innovations.
Ornament, being the chief aesthetic value of Martins Against Exclusion, almost
coincided with Putin and Medvedevs merging of the rhetoric of statist traditionalism and
modernisation, which was occurring at the same time. If the rst two biennials, although
produced by the Ministry of Culture, at least attempted to manifest the latest tendencies
in contemporary art, the third one demonstrated full complicity with neocolonial and
neoliberal rhetoric, which was neatly disguised in democratic demagogy, boasting
of the total inclusion of anything. Te principal impact of Martins show was to produce
an antithesis to contemporary arts avant-garde genealogy and to thus reconstitute
the grounds for arts returning to optical, sometimes even phantasmagoric richness
and unmediated visual experience devoid of verbal, conceptual or reexive impact.
Te focus on the ethnographic or exotic dimension of Tird World art enabled the curator
to de-intellectualise contemporary arts goals, claiming that the ancient, the modern and
the postmodern and the art and the craf difer only in style and material implementation,
having no historical, political and cognitive background.
Here are the aesthetic mottos enumerated by Martin in his catalogue article: to detach
personal creativity from the dimension of history; to end up with the abuse of conceptual
elements in art; to reclaim inherent spectacular properties of art; and to use traditionalist
and archaic heritage when reconstructing contemporary narratives.
9
It is true that Martin
and his artistic priorities are not very inuential in contemporary art today. Nevertheless
his aesthetic ideology may well correspond to the latent imperialism of the First Worlds
global economic domination, as well as to the narcissistic neo-colonial generosity of big
companies and nancial alliances. Claiming that there is no cultural inferiority, that
any work or object from indigenous cultures is just a form, similar to any other, Martin
neglects the economic and social inferiorities that exist between the First and non-First
Worlds. No matter how subconscious it may be, such a stance discloses the Wests cultural
hegemony, by which it claims the right to decide whom can be included. In this case the
ornamental relics of indigenous cultures exhibited in the biennial seem forcefully torn
from their context in rituals and everyday life, and as a result the exhibition concealed
life rather than revealed it. If the point was to show the tension between indigenous
and modern layers of life in the Tird World (in works like Cargo (cco), by Romuald
Hazoum from Benin, or Debtors Prison (cc8), by Chri Cherin from the Democratic
Republic of Congo), in the majority of quasi-tribal works from developing countries
9 See Jean-Hubert Martin, Against Exclusion, in J.-H. Martin (ed.) Third Moscow Biennale (exh. cat.),
Moscow: Artchronika, Moscow Biennale Art Foundation, 2009, p. 27.
Contexts: Primitive Accumulation | 133
(such as tribe ornaments by Agatoack Ronny Kowspi from New Guinea, bark paintings
by Djambawas Marawili from South Africa or zigzag paintings by Doreen Reid Nakamara
from Central Australia) the artists take perhaps unfair advantage of the formal and
spectacular relics of their indigenous traditions. Tey bring forward something that
has long ago lost its original sacred function and is being reproduced as a regional clich.
When such objects lose their ritual and spiritual signicance, they are no longer cult
objects, but they are not necessarily able to become artistic phenomena, and instead
remain exotic trompe loeil objects.
Martins Moscow exhibition is further conrmation of the fact that although the
West has rejected its ideological and spiritual colonial tools, its colonial aspirations are
not overcome. Emancipatory idealism and its cognitive procedures something that the
West has turned down, and something that in its distorted form used to be ofen interpreted
as colonisation are now globally reduced to technocratic and economic optimisation
that nevertheless carries out the project of Western hegemony efectively. Te result is
the domestication of art, dissecting it into diverse identities and particularities as against
the values of the general and the common.
But if contemporary art is ashamed of modernity and its revolution-based history,
why continue to export this ruined model as the one that could integrate relics from
the Tird World? Why should the Tird World correspond to that rhetoric of art that
apologises for its revolutionary history, while preserving its symbolic and economic
priorities?
It is only natural that Vladislav Surkov, the First Deputy Chief of the Presidential
Executive Ofce, would write in the biennials catalogue:
Today we can justly say that the Biennale has completed the process of creating
a fully edged infrastructure for Russian artistic culture as an integral component
of the worlds international scene. e ird Moscow Biennale will dier from
the other forums in that [] it will bring within the orbit of contemporary art
those artists whose work could otherwise have been ignored because they tried
to maintain delity to their traditions.
10
10 Vladislav Surkov, Preface', in J.-H. Martin (ed.), Third Moscow Biennale (exh. cat.), op. cit., p.19.
Ilya and Emila
Kabakov, The Red
Wagon, 1991.
Installation view,
The Garage Center
for Contemporary
Culture, Moscow,
2008. Courtesy
the artists
134 | Aerall
Such a stance perfectly corresponds to the Russian double-bind of conservative
modernisation, demonstrating once more how modernist and avant-garde aspirations
for art are reinterpreted within the Russian contemporary art scene as traditionalist
rigidity and thus abused to serve an unusual goal (that is, to become the sacral decoration
of fake sublimities) of a belief in the classical value of a masterpiece or the adoration and
worship of a work of art.
Tis anomalous twist would fail if it were not supported by a number of conspicuous
curators and artists. Lets take the show Second Dialogue, in the section of the Tird
Biennale at the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery and curated by Konstantine Bokhorov,
Osmolovsky and Joulia 1khonova (whose aesthetics resemble Martins). In the exhibition
the curators and artists called for a return to the classical notion of a work of art as
necessarily embracing the interplay and formal methods deeply rooted in a national
or ethnic formal heritage. In this case modernism is valued only for its formalist and
visual aspects; the curators claim this position as neoconservative. In such a way
modernisms formalism, with its striving towards abstraction and precision, is deprived
of its revolutionary genealogy, and is reinterpreted instead as decorative minimalism.
Moreover, the preponderance of ornamental values within contemporary visual art mixes
a formal understanding of the cult objects or ethnic artistry with the avant-gardes and
modernisms formalist achievements which cannot be reduced to form, but rather
whose form demonstrates the extreme transcendence of artistic ideas.
Te search within the exhibition Te Russian Povera which was part of the Tird
Biennale (at the Red October factory), curated by gallerist Marat Guelman for authentic
Russianness in Russian art is another conrmation of the tendency towards viewing art
as proof of locality rather than as artworks belonging to a transnational lineage. Even the
Anatoly Osmolovsky,
Totems, 200809,
painted wood,
height 350cm,
diameter 100cm
Contexts: Primitive Accumulation | 135
work by the younger generation shown in Really?, curated by Alexander Sokolov at the
ARTPLAY Design Center, and Labor Movement, curated by Arseni Jilyaev and Sergey
Khachaturov at PROEKT FABRIKA, similarly rejected contemporary arts conceptual
and cognitive genealogy (no matter how nonsensical or paradoxical it might have been)
and adhered instead to the purely visual merits of an art object that is, forms perception
and its unmediated material presence. From the point of view of the participants of both
shows (Alexandra Sukhareva, Stas Shuripa, Sergei Ogurtsov, Osmolovsky and Arseni
Zhilyaev), such nominalism could achieve the real in a Lacanian sense, understood as
the pure being of a de-contextualised aesthetic object.
11

Te representatives of a younger generation in contemporary Russian art, cherishing
such hunger for visual formalism, would hardly agree that their adherence to the relics
of the Russian avant-gardes geometry or US Minimalisms systematics has nothing to
do with an avant-garde gesture today. Except for certain exceptions (Olga Chernysheva,
the Factory of Found Clothes, Chto delat? and probably the new wave of realism in
lm-making), Russian contemporary art today keeps away from the vulnerable and
problematic zones of post-Soviet reality. Much like the governmental elite and the new
bourgeoisie, Russian contemporary art practices claim arts public openness while
indulging in the withdrawal of culture from the social. Te brands of avant-garde,
utopia or life engineering are equally fashionable and dominant among young curators
and artists as among political bureaucracy and private supporters, but these concepts
fall into the trap of associating formalism and avant-garde with the new elites rened
spaces and its sophisticated taste, aimed against the postmodernist gaudiness of populist
11 See Really? (exh. cat.), Moscow: Artplay Center of Design, 2009.
Agatoak Ronny
Kowspi, Untitled,
2007, acrylic on sago
bark, height 110cm,
diameter 43cm.
Both images from
Against Inclusion',
Third Moscow
Biennial of
Contemporary Art,
2009. Courtesy
the artists
136 | Aerall
show-business and mass-media. Much like the work of William Kentridge chosen by
Martin for the biennial (I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, cc8), in which the Russian
avant-garde and Revolution appear as casual ethnic particularities something like
a style la Russe the notions of utopia and avant-garde gradually acquire on the art
scene the made in Russia avour. Recent exceptions from this tendency were two research
projects in the form of exhibitions by Ekaterina Degot: Battle for the Banner' (cc8)
and Te Kudimkor Future Locomotive' (ccp). But the double show that opened last
March at the Garage Futurology, curated by Herve Mikaelof, and Russian Utopias,
curated by Julia Aksenova only conrmed the above-mentioned tendency: in search
for recognition on the global art scene, quite a number of Russian artists and curators
mechanically reproduce the avant-garde and turn it into the national brand. On the
contrary, it enforces the rigidity and atness of the Russian art eld and the indiference
of its abstract audiences. Te situation can only change if the production of ideas, spaces
and territories were politically, ethically and aesthetically re-appropriated by artistic
practitioners and creative thinkers.
Herman Asselberghs
Herman Asselberghs is a Belgian artist whose
work focuses on the borders between sound and
image, world and media, poetry and politics.
His video works have been shown at Witte
de With, Rotterdam; M HKA, Antwerp; Tate
Modern, London; International Film Festival
Rotterdam; and Internationale Filmfestspiele
Berlin, among others. Asselberghs teaches
at the film department of the Hogeschool
Sint-Lukas Brussel, Brussels and is a founding
member of the artists groups Auguste Orts
and Square.
Roger M. Buergel
Roger M. Buergel is a writer, curator
and university teacher. He has curated a
few exhibitions (often with Ruth Noack),
such as Things We Dont Understand
(.ooo, Generali Foundation Vienna) and
Governmentality: Art in Conflict with
the International Hyper-Bourgeoisie and
the National Petty-Bourgeoisie (.ooo,
Alte Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover and
CHA Moscow), an exhibition subsequently
extended into a theme with variations
(.oo3o, MACBA, Barcelona; Miami
Art Central; Witte de With, Rotterdam;
Secession, Vienna). In .oo3 Buergel became
the Artistic Director of documenta 1.,
which took place in .oo). Since then he
has taught art history at the Art Academy
Karlsruhe and curated Barely Something,
a retrospective of Ai Weiwei (.o1o, Museum
DKM, Duisburg).
Keti Chukhrov
Keti Chukhrov is Associate Professor at the
Russian State University for Humanities in
the Department of Art Theory and Culturology.
Since .oo3 she has been a member of the
editorial counsel for Moscow Art Magazine,
and is the author of numerous articles on
culture, philosophy and art theory for journals
such as NLO (New Literary Review), Moscow
Art Magazine, Siniy Divan, Critical Mass,
Artchronika, Chto delat?, Brumaria, the
documenta magazine project, Artforum,
Springerin, Pushkin, Open-space and e-flux
journal, as well as for catalogues in Russia,
Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain, India, the US
and Turkey. Her books include Pound & (1),
To Be To Perform: Theatre in Philosophic
Criticism of Art (.oo3) and the poetry books
War of Quantities (.oo3) and Prosto Liudi
(Just the Humans, .o1o). She is a researcher
for the Gender Check project, MUMOK, Vienna,
.oo81o.
Jos Daz Cuys
Jos Daz Cuys teaches aesthetics at
the Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife,
Canary Islands. He is the author of books
such as Encuentros de Pamplona: Fin de
fiesta del arte experimental (Madrid: Museo
Nacional de Arte Contemporneo Reina
Sofa, .oo) and Ir y venir de Valcrcel
Medina (Barcelona: Fundacin Tapis et al.,
.oo.); and the editor of Cuerpos a motor,
(published by CAAM, Las Palmas and CGAC,
Santiago de Compostela in 1)). Since the
18os he has given numerous lectures and
contributed to a variety of art magazines
and journals. He is also the editor of
ACTO: revista de pensamiento artstico
contemporneo.
om Donovan
Thom Donovan edits the Wild Horses Of
Fire blog and co-edits the ON Contemporary
Practice blog. He is a participant in the
Nonsite Collective and a curator for the
SEGUE reading series. His criticism and
poetry have been published in Art, BOMB,
PAJ: art + performance, Modern Painters,
The Brooklyn Rail, Performa, Museo,
Fanzine, EXIT and at the Poetry Foundations
Harriet blog. Currently he is working on a
collection of critical writings, Sovereignty
and Us: Critical Objects , and
on the Project for an Archive of the Future
Anterior (with Sreshta Rit Premnath).
His book The Hole is forthcoming from
Displaced Press.
Claire Grace
Claire Grace is a doctoral candidate in
art history at Harvard University and
is completing a dissertation on the work
of Group Material. She was co-curator
with Helen Molesworth of the .oo1o
exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism,
Art and the AIDS Crisis, 18)13
(Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts,
Cambridge, MA; White Columns, NY),
and is assisting Molesworth with the
forthcoming exhibition This Will Have
Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 18os,
which is scheduled to open at the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Chicago in
Winter .o1., before moving on to other
US venues.
Alison Green
Alison Green is an art historian, curator
and critic whose work focuses on photography,
criticism, the history of exhibitions and
episodes in the end of modernism. She is a
Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins
College of Art and Design, where she teaches
history and theory of art on the BA (Hons)
Criticism, Communication and Curation.
Her current book projects include a study of
interdisciplinarity in New York in the early
1oos and a book on contemporary art and
the image. Publications include essays in
the anthologies Utopias (Whitechapel Art
Gallery/The MIT Press, .oo8), Conceptual
Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge
University Press, .oo,) and numerous
monographic catalogue essays. She writes on
contemporary art for Art Monthly and Source.
Contributors | 137
Contributors
138 | Aerall
Carmen Mrsch
Carmen Mrsch is an artist, educator
and researcher. She is head of the Institute
of Art Education (IAE) at the University
of Arts, Zurich.
Esteban Pujals Gesal
Esteban Pujals Gesal teaches English
and American Poetry at Universidad
Autnoma de Madrid. He is also a
poet (Blanco nuclear, 18; Juegos
de artificio, 18o) and a translator
(John Ashbery, Galeones de abril, 18,;
T.S. Eliot, Cuatro cuartetos, 1o;
Gertrude Stein, Botones blandos, 1)).
He is the author of La lengua radical
(13), an anthology of North American
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and his
articles in literary and art magazines
and journals usually deal with
the borderline (or, more often,
its erasure) between poetry and the
visual arts.
Dieter Roelstraete
Dieter Roelstraete is a co-editor of
Afterall, a curator at M HKA, Antwerp
and a writer currently based in
Berlin.
Andrew Stefan Weiner
Andrew Stefan Weiner is a Ph.D
candidate in the Rhetoric Department
at the University of California
at Berkeley. His dissertation examines
shifts in the relation between aesthetics
and politics in West Germany and
Austria during the 1oos and )os.
He has contributed essays and criticism
to publications including Grey Room,
Parkett, Afterimage and Qui Parle.
Catherine Wood
Catherine Wood is Curator of Contemporary
Art & Performance at Tate Modern. She has
organised live and participatory projects
with many artists at Tate, including
Robert Morris, Sturtevant, Keren Cytter,
Joan Jonas, Guy de Cointet, Jiri Kovanda
and Ewa Partum. She was co-curator,
with Jessica Morgan, of The World as
a Stage (.oo)) and Pop Life: Art in a
Material World (.oo), with Alison Gingeras
and Jack Bankowsky. She is the author of
Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (.oo),
Afterall Books), has contributed regularly
to art periodicals including Artforum,
Afterall, frieze, Kaleidoscope and Parkett,
and has written catalogue essays on
Thea Djordjadze, Ian White, Gabriel Kuri,
Silke Otto-Knapp and Mark Leckey.