Ten Fundamental

Questions of
Curating

5/10
What Is the Public?

Juan A. Gaitn

TEN FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF CURATING

Ten Fundamental Questions

of Curating
Publishing director
Edoardo Bonaspetti
Editor
Jens Hoffmann
Copy editor
Lindsey Westbrook
A project realized in partnership with

Artistic director
Milovan Farronato
Design
Studio Mousse
Issue #5
What is the Public?
by Juan A. Gaitn
with illustrations selected by
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Source: The Municipal Archive of the
City of Limassol, Cyprus
Ten Fundamental Questions
of Curating
is printed in Italy and published
five times a year by
Mousse Publishing
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Contrappunto S.R.L.
via Arena 23
20123, Milan - Italy
No parts of this publication may be
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form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher

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What Is the Public?

Text Juan A. Gaitn
Visuals Christodoulos Panayiotou
from The Municipal Archive of
the City of Limassol, Cyprus

The exhibition has become a more unformed and uncertain

phenomenon than one might infer from the passionate criticisms that are being launched against it and its makers. Who,
after all, are its makers? One could accept, as one of the most
recurrent criticisms has it, that the exhibition has become the
curators medium, but exhibitions in fact operate uneasily in an
encounter among the institutions that host them, the artworks
that are contained in them, and their public. The exhibition
is the museums medium, the biennials, and the gallerys. It is
also, even in our time, arts medium. With increasing force, in
what can be seen as a current paraphrasing of its old rhetoric,
it is diplomacys medium. If we are to follow Duchamps celebrated axiom that art is a rendezvous, it is also the publics mediumthe medium through which the public becomes public.
And it is in relation to this last encounter, the encounter of the
public with itself and with its own image, that the discourse
around the exhibition of art, contemporary or not, begins to
unravel most of its utopian formulations and justifications.
In 2004 a book called Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust appeared in bookstores and went almost unnoticed.
Edited by James Cuno with contributions by several museum
directors from around the Western world, it was, from the
point of view of institutional critique and by the standards of
the contemporary discourse on museums and exhibitions, an
inconsequential contribution. Nevertheless, the book and the
essays in it now seem symptomatic of an entrenchment of cul-

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tural institutions in traditional valuesvalues that, though

invented and reminiscent of another era, provide a recognizable foundation for the existence of the museum and of art.
In his preface Cuno writes that the book focuses on the museums contract with its public, a contract that is founded on
the publics trust. These words, of course, have one meaning
among the trustees, another among the wider public. They also
have one meaning in the United States, another in Germany or
France, yet another in China, and so on. Despite (or in spite
of ) these ideological and situational contingencies, Cuno explains that the absence of oppositional voices in his volume
has to do with the fact that he doesnt want to present a debate, nor a sampling of current opinion. Instead, he wants the
book to be focused on first principles, on the basis of the contract between art museums and their public. 2 The implication
inherent in this distinction between opinions and first principles is that the former are topical, the latter trans-historical,
if not timeless. The contract between museum and public he
summarizes thus:
In the end, this is what our visitors most want from us: to have
access to works of art in order to change them, to alter their
experience of the world, to sharpen and heighten their sensibilities to it, to make it come alive anew for them, so they can
walk away at a different angle to the world.
Despite its grammatical shiftiness, this paragraph was approvingly cited by John Walsh at the outset of his own contribution to Cunos publication. To such univocality of opinion one
might ask: If this is the museums contract with its public, then
what is the exhibitions function within it?
The history of exhibitions is not so remote that one can afford to forget that its former incarnations were all acts of Em-

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pire: For instance, the 1851 exhibition at the Crystal Palace,

which famously and infamously included displays of living
human beings; the World Fairs and Expositions, which were
often conglomerations of imperial lootings; the Princely Galleries of the 17 th and 18 th centuries one of which would later become the Louvre with their collected iconography of
empire. All were acts of self-reference through which a total
image of empire was affirmed. Nevertheless, we accept today
that exhibitions serve a different function, one that is relative
to the public sphere. In fact, exhibitions were one of the first
manifestations of the birth of the bourgeois public sphere, the
sphere to which the exhibition now belongs. But many things
have changed since the doors of the Princely Gallery were
slung open for all. Not least among these changes is what the
word all has come to represent. The ongoing aim of the notion of the public sphere, as conceived in the Westwhich is
to say, of the bourgeois public sphere, as this is the one that
the exhibition belongs tothe project since then has been to
make the universe that is signified by the word all more inclusive and real, less rhetorical and ideal, encompassing more
human beings; more cultural, political, and social interests;
more religious inclinations and beliefs.
In modern history this all and its margins have had various names: the people, the collectivity or collective, women,
black people, indigenous peoples. In more classed analyses:
the masses, the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat; the workers, the peasants. There are also newer, more abstract notions
such as the common, based on the quintessential principle of
our times, property. There is also the notion of citizens, which
is a more ideologically neutral form of the word bourgeoisie (city people). One of the recent favorites in the Englishspeaking world is the electorate, a concept that, deliberately or
otherwise, narrows democratic participation to those whom
the State recognizes, and their participation to the rule of

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choice. The word publicon which the classical concept of

the republic was erected, and with it the modern notion of democracy, and which in antiquity designated a narrow segment
of society considered to be suitable for governing itself and
othershas been wholeheartedly embraced in the language
of cultural institutions. The public means the segment of
society that visits museums, libraries, galleries, concert halls,
cineplexes, circuses, and theaters; watches television; listens
to the radio; and so on. What this means in the context of my
question is that the public sphere has a number of forms, and
the public is the form through which exhibitions of contemporary art can be seen as taking part in it.
Most contemporary exhibitions assume as a premise that
works can come together and be arranged under a tentative
theme, even a category, then dispersed once again. These arrangements are provisional, and also often spontaneous, intuitive. They are therefore of the order of what Cuno catalogues
as opinions. Opinions that are contained within first principles, which are not as absolute, and which establish nonessential relationships among works of art, between those and
the theme, between the institution and its public, all the while
relying on the conviction that those provisional arrangements
are timely, that they are vital contributions to dialogues that
are taking place in the public sphere, that they potentially
counterpoise (without pretending to be entirely disentangled
from) what is being articulated in the spaces of official politics,
religion, the economy. It is this that brings exhibitions closer
to the format of the essay (an attempt, a weighing, a submitting to proof ). The exhibition thus functions within the space
of that contract that Cuno presents as the museums first principle, but as a disruption of the shake-of-hands between the
museum and its public. It is therefore a problem of opinion
which Cuno must bypass in order present the museum itself as
an entity whose function, in his formulation, runs contrary to
the critical one we ascribe to contemporary art: We have all

heard stories of people going to museums in the days following September 11, just to be there, quietly, safe in the company of things that are beautiful and impossibly fragile, yet that
have lasted through centuries of war and tumult. 3 But such
palliative reassurances in humanitys resilience are certainly
not what we should aim for when conceiving of an exhibition.
Which idea of humanity are we speaking of anyway? And what
public are we speaking to?

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In fact, if anything has characterized exhibition making in the

second half of the 20 th century, it is the ongoing endeavour
to dissociate the exhibition, as well as art itself, from the establishment of grand historical and political narratives and to
aim at realitys discontinuous character rather than at the confirmation of common sense. This we can call the exhibitions
dissociative factor. Schematically, the exhibition is the space
within which the order of this unilateral contract between two
institutions (the museum, its public) is interpolated. In this
respect exhibitions of contemporary art potentially simulate
albeit sometimes uncriticallythe way the public sphere is
structured today, as a gathering of non-parallel and exponentially individualistic identities and interests. A refusal of the
whole, which is to say, an indication that, in the context of
contemporary politics and society, the word all means that
which is not yet whole.
This structural non-integrity of the public sphere, as we live it
today in the West, was the topic of Artur Zmijewskis videobased installation Democracies (2009). The work is composed
of 16 flat-screen monitors hanging on the wall, evenly spaced
and at eye level. Each one plays a video clip of a public manifestation. There are images of the funeral of the ultra-right-wing
Austrian politician Jrg Haider next to images of anarchists in
an anti-NATO rally in Strasbourg destroying storefronts and
throwing Molotov cocktails. There is footage of a number of

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separate protests against the Gaza War, in both Israel and Palestine; celebrations after a football game between Germany
and Turkey, with German hooligans waving the German flag
at Turks on the streets of Berlin; and the yearly Orangemens
Day Parade in Belfast (at one point a woman yells at the camera fuck off back to Poland). And several clips shot in Poland, a particularly telling one showing a military reenactment
that is now held yearly in Warsaw, instituted by the Kaczyski
twins, who in 2006 and 2007 were the the countrys president
and prime minister. It is a rehearsal of national pride that is
intensely entangled with the Polish Catholic Church, commemorating Polands 1920 battle known as the Miracle at the
Vistula in which the Bolshevik assault on Warsaw was miraculously crushed.
This coup-doeil over the present conceptions and uses of the
so-called public sphere makes the sinister point that democracys pluralism has reached a point of self-effacement. And
the work itselfthat is, the deliberate gathering and serialization of heterogeneous and radically incompatible public manifestations proposes that if there is a public sphere to speak
of, it exists merely as an accumulation of inarticulate political
activity. By inarticulate I dont mean that those expressing
themselves arent individually clear about what they want or
how they say it, for they are. I mean in a more general sense
that the actual structure of political action is contained by the
ideal structure of contemporary democracy, which regards all
of these manifestations as legitimate. 4 They are legitimate because, in all their excessive expressionism, they are ultimately
expressions of democracy. They dont interfere with the democratic process, even if they threaten private propertywhich,
unless one asks the Thatcherites, is not a democratic value.
Here, for the purposes of this essay, I will only highlight two
aspects of Zmijewskis work that are critical. The first is that

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there is an almost absolute identification between democracy

and representation, and this mutual identification is consummated in the image. The second is that, because of this mutual identification, and because of this consummation in the
image, everything that happens within the image can be immediately consumed by democracy, as an expression of itself.
One could regard such a point of view as excessively dystopian, but one can also take it as a warning that the heart of the
public sphere is being transmuted by the systematic reduction
of politics to a series of minuscule, increasingly incompatible
factions that are harmonized by their inclusion in the space of
democracy, which is to say, into the liberal-democratic right of
self-representation. Thus, to put it in vulgar terms, the exhibition should not function in parallel to the liberal democratic
principle, as a harmonizing agent of discontinuous fragments;
it shouldnt be conceived, either, as speaking to the public or
for the public. If it has a function within the context of the
contemporary public sphere, it is to use its logica logic of
fragmentationin order to present, in the absence of the public, a public that is always to come.
Ostensibly the public is that for whom the exhibition is
made; that into which arts institutional, social, and historical responsibilities are projected. The values and principles
on which contemporary art is predicated arent universal.
They have historical and social specificity. Today, given the
retrenchment of geopolitical differentiations, the invention of
new traditional values, and the right-wing rhetoric that everywhere calls for breathing space for culture, the public is
also becoming more geographically specific. Thus, one must
pay heed to the exclusions that are performed by the apparent inclusiveness of the public sphere. For the public comes
together intermittently, and its rendezvous is not exactly harmonious. Often, it is just not there. Or there only in principle,
in numbers, but fundamentally fractured. One of the charac-

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teristic traits of contemporary art is that it allows and often

incorporates these fractures. Perhaps contemporary art is the
space where the fractures of the public are made most visible.
Perhaps, against the museums contract with the public, and
against Cunos notion of a first principlethat in the encounter with art the public sees itself reassured as belonging to a
humanity that, even if fragile, is also eternalthe exhibitions
role is to dispel the notion of the public and to interpolate this
unilateral contract between the institution and the public
(this first principle) and to present another principle, one
that is closer to the public spheres current methods of fragmentation and dispersal, of non-identification or disidentification.
The continuing classification of works of art under the category of Relational Aesthetics is one recent failure to recognize this factor of dissociationa factor that, incidentally, is
already contained within many of the works in question. At
least in principle, and in spite of some recalcitrant adherences
to high modernist critique, there is no whole implied in exhibitions of contemporary art. In fact, it is often the aim of an
exhibition to present each work autonomously, albeit in relation to the others. The public is thus, to conclude with a tentative axiom, a radically separated entity that is continuously
produced and harmonized so that the production of culture
if not the culture industrycan be said to belong to the public
sphere. It is the culture industrys phantom limb.

TEN FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF CURATING

Notes
1. These coften ny the [I am a bit
confused by the institutions from which
they draw... part of this. Can you give an
example, or maybe just give a little more
info about who is criticizing what aspect
of exhibitions/institutions?] This was a
thought that I moved down because it
made the opening sentences too dense, so
Ive removed it.
2. James Cuno, [introduction to?] Whose
Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust,
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2004), 78. My emphasis.
3. James Cuno, The Object of Art
Museums, in Whose Muse? Art Museums
and the Public Trust, 4977.
4. But legitimacy itself is split between
a legal and a political condition. In the
legal condition, legitimacy refers almost
exclusively to the right of recognition
by the father: Am I, by birth or right, a
legitimate offspring? Am I, by birth or
right, a legitimate citizen? In politics,
however, legitimacy is determined in
the direction of judgment: Am I, by how
I parent, a legitimate parent? Am I, by
how I rule, a legitimate ruler? Or, in the
third person: Is this or that act legitimate
under the law?

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