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PARSE - On The Question of Exhibition Part 1-Protected - Redefining The Exhibition
PARSE - On The Question of Exhibition Part 1-Protected - Redefining The Exhibition
—Summer 2021
On the Question of
Exhibition Part 1
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Caroline Jones argues that there is “no plausible history of ‘exhibitions’ that
originates outside of Western capitalism”.[2] It is vitally important to begin an
investigation into the definition and redefinition of the art exhibition by locating it
within the historical, geographical and political conditions that encouraged its
formation, but I want to turn Jones’s assertion into a question to avoid the false
impression that the exhibition by definition corresponds to capitalist social relations
and is best understood as an expression of them. What exactly is the relationship
between the exhibition format and capitalism or the West? In what ways is the art
exhibition historically tied to the rise of shop window displays or the public displays
of artefacts in museums? Readers of Michel Foucault’s essay on “heterotopia” may
have an answer to these questions ready to hand—the exhibition is a device of
modern governance that, for instance, pacifies the crowd—but I want to attempt a
redefinition of the exhibition that pays more attention to art’s changing and
contested social relations of production, so that the actual and plausible history of
exhibitions is laced with potential and haunted by suppressed and buried histories.
[3]
My purpose is not to focus on the economics of the exhibition, but to explain the
persistence of the exhibition and its continued viability—and its possibilities and
limitations—by understanding the specific social relations assumed or constituted
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My argument is not that the exhibition should be thought of as an act of labour, but
that the art exhibition arises historically out of a revolution that liberated artists
from art’s social relations of production. In other words, I am calling for a
redefinition of the exhibition that is based on locating it historically not only within
the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as an example of the commodification
of art within the shift from patronage to the art market, but more importantly within
the long historical campaign to elevate art as a scholarly activity above both
handicraft and industry.[5] It must be recognised that this history is shaped by the
history of European imperial expansion, and that certain aspects of the colonial
project are fulfilled with the invention of the form of the exhibition and the Western
European invention of art as a universal category of high culture. But another strand
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An exhibition can take almost any form, and any theoretical restriction on what the
exhibition consists of will almost certainly be disproved in practice by artists and
curators expanding the possibilities of the exhibition as medium. The category of
the exhibition can be further stretched to cover practices of display prior to the
use of the word “exhibition”, which was introduced to name a specific historically
unusual form of display at the end of the eighteenth century. In retrospect, the
exhibition of works of art can be detected in practices of display prior to the
formalised organisation of the first consciously staged exhibitions. The pre-history
of the exhibition is not to be dismissed as outside the field of enquiry, as not
exhibitions in the full sense of the word, but are to be understood as indicative of a
condition for art in which various practices of display were subordinated to other
dominant modes of circulation. This is why the purpose of my inquiry is not to
describe the features of the exhibition and then track down examples that
resemble it, which therefore stand as origins or precursors of it. For most of the
history of art, exhibitions were unheard of, so when works of art are put on display
in the window of an artisan’s workshop or in the reception room of a palace or
shown to the public in a marketplace for sale, for instance, we need to be able to
see how these types of display did not immediately bring about the universalisation
of the art exhibition and to understand what prevented this from happening. The
aim of this short study, therefore, is to reconstruct an image of the structural
changes to art that were active in shifting the role of the art exhibition from being
rare, marginal, itinerant and unformed to being a principal feature of art’s mode of
operation.
If the first Salon of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris was, in
some sense, the first exhibition of works of art, then the invention of the exhibition
precedes the birth of the museum, gallery, art’s public and the art market, since it
took place in 1667, albeit nearly twenty years after the academy was established.[6]
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A history of exhibitions that pays attention only to exhibitions is not a history at all.
Exhibitions themselves, like the artworks that they contain, do not provide the
evidence of the social forces at play within them. The art exhibition is an
aggregation of different practices, legacies and struggles that have merged into
what seems to be a single slightly vague unit. My renarrativisation of the historical
formation of the exhibition as a social form calls for a painstaking investigation of
the archival evidence, which I cannot even hope to fulfil in this paper. Although the
historical terrain has been covered many times across various disciplines, the
precise question of the formation of the exhibition has not been studied
adequately. This is partly because the field has been divided into smaller fractions
determined by periodisation and specialisation. This means there are case studies
of individual artists (e.g. Whistler, Courbet, Blake, David) or of individual museums
(e.g. the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture,[9] the Louvre,[10] the Royal
Academy London,[11] the Museum of Modern Art New York[12]), and studies of
various types of group exhibition[13] or the solo exhibition specifically,[14] but no
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So, instead of amassing all the empirical data we need to provide a complete
history of the exhibition, I will formulate a definition of the exhibition as it changes
historically, redefining itself in response to catastrophes and crises that befall the
established methods and systems of organising the production and circulation of
artworks. I will attempt to understand the significance of the rise of the exhibition as
art’s dominant form of encounter, by investigating the social preconditions for the
exhibition in the changing relations of artistic production and reception. This kind of
study needs to be guided by a theory of history. In place of a linear sequence of
the invention of the exhibition and its subsequent roll out across art’s institutions, I
locate the exhibition within a contested field, which not only results in the ebb and
flow of legitimacy of the exhibition, but which also changes both the significance
and the form of the exhibition. I take this model of history from Walter Benjamin.
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His writings on history are always structured around the anticipation of a new
situation being possible at any point in time. This is not simply a revolutionary
attitude to history. It is the result of viewing historical circumstances from the
perspective of the wretched. Benjamin writes in bold strokes, not naturalistic detail,
as he lays out the floor plan of a theory of art in which its main architectural
features are indicated without filling in the gaps between them. This means he
presents us with graphic contrasts that correspond with the extremes of the
territory he is mapping. Benjamin longed for a revolution in art’s social relations that
never transpired, or at least not fully or not as promised. He plots a new course for
art along several routes, or along a single route with several interchangeable names.
The social function of art is revolutionised, Benjamin said, when instead of being
founded on ritual it is based on politics. And, the passage from ritual to politics is
also described as the substitution of cult-value with exhibition-value, or the
abolition of authenticity and the aura of the artwork with the unlimited edition and
spatial dispersal of the mechanically reproduced image. Like Jevon’s concept of
the “multiplication of utility”—which is realised, for instance, when a library
purchasing a book for all its members in comparison with the purchase of a book
by a single household—Benjamin’s concept of exhibition-value was introduced to
recognise a hidden benefit that results from a crisis in the valorisation of culture.[19]
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Gillian Rose summarises Benjamin’s theory of history in the image of the Messiah.
“This is what the Messiah means: the conception of the present not as
homogeneous, empty time but as the ‘time of the now’; the past is referred to
redemption, to a unique not an eternal image of the past, ‘a constellation’ with the
present, both ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time’.”[23] Theodor Adorno
inverts the image of Benjamin’s philosophy of history into a historically infused
conception of philosophy, stating that Benjamin’s philosophy “condenses into
experience so that it may have hope. But hope appears only in fragmented form.
Benjamin overexposes the objects for the sake of the hidden contours which one
day, in the state of reconciliation, will become evident, but in so doing he reveals
the chasm separating that day and life as it is.”[24] Theology is not merely a
vocabulary for Benjamin’s version of historical materialism. Redemption is not code
for communism, for instance. As Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen put it,
“Benjamin uses techniques evolved from the allegorical exegesis of the Bible” as a
method for recognising the contingency in everything that appears to be fixed and
to reorient history towards the dreams of the vanquished.[25]
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Three versions and two translations of the essay were published between 1935 and
1939. It consists of fifteen numbered sections or parts, plus a preface and
afterword. Read like a string of separate but related episodes, each part presents a
different line of enquiry, and the beginning of each part seems like going back to
the beginning of the whole thing again. The essay is organised around a history of
art’s modes of reception. The earliest social function for art he argues, following
Hegel, is a mode of reception in which works of art were experienced in social
practices of worship. Reception, in this mode, has a cult-value, he contends.
Benjamin mentions two other modes of reception for art, one which has exhibition-
value and the other in which art becomes political. The historical passage from one
mode of reception to another is not presented in a linear relationship that contrasts
an obsolete form and modern form, but brings about, Benjamin observes, an
“oscillation” between them. Exhibition-value precedes the rise of the technological
reproducibility of works of art, but it is clear that the possibility of printing large
volumes of images of works of art is incompatible with their cult-value and inflates
their exhibition-value.
Benjamin himself explained the unusual approach of the essay to a friend by saying
his study “depicts the mirage of the nineteenth century seen through a bloody fog
in a future liberated and non-magical condition.”[31] In this comment we can see that
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every age possesses its own new but uninheritable potential to interpret the
prophecies that the art of past epochs conveys to it. It is the most important task
of art history to decipher in the great artworks of the past the prophecies valid for
the epoch of its writing. […] In order for these prophecies to become
comprehensible, circumstances must have come to fruition, ahead of which the
work of art has rushed, often by centuries, often also by just a few years. These
circumstances are, for one thing, specific societal transformations, which alter the
function of art, and, for another, certain mechanical inventions.[33]
Fascism features prominently in the essay, not only because the fight against
National Socialism was an urgent task, but because it represents an expression of
modernity under the sign of myth, which “attempts to organize the newly
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Art history might be seen as the working out of a tension between two polarities
within the artwork itself, its course determined by shifts in the balance between the
two. These two are the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value. Artistic
production begins with figures in the service of magic. What is important is that
they are present, not that they are seen. The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the
walls of his cave is an instrument of magic, and is exhibited to others only
coincidentally; what matters is that the see it. Cult value as such even tends to keep
the artwork out of certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the
cella; certain images of the Madonna remain covered nearly all year round; certain
sculptures on medieval cathedrals are not visible to the viewer at ground level. With
the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the
opportunities for exhibiting their products increase.[37]
In certain parts of the argument, Benjamin stresses the transformative nature of the
forces of production, arguing that the possibility of printing large quantities of
images of works of art is incompatible with their cult-value and inflates their
exhibition-value. However, he argues that exhibition-value precedes the rise of the
technological reproducibility of works of art, and in fact the crisis that photography
represents for art was evident before the invention of photography, when the public
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“The uniqueness of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the
context of tradition.”[39] Works of art are ripped from one context and rehoused in
others, so that a statue might be installed first in a temple, then in a garden and
finally in a museum, finding new uses (worship, decoration, knowledge) but
remaining unique throughout, and, significantly, with the value of the museum
object being underpinned by the ritual function of the statue in the temple. This is
important because, “as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to
artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized.”[40] The film
industry counteracts the revolution by replicating old social relations in new
commercial terms—e.g. the Hollywood star system reviving the aura of the stage
actor. And yet film, which is the first fully reproducible technology of image
production, he says, alters the relationship of the masses to art insofar as “[a]ny
person today can lay claim to being filmed”,[41] and “[s]ome of the actors taking part
in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves—
and primarily in their own work process.”[42]
Technological reproducibility, Benjamin argues, has the potential to rid art of “aura”,
but it is also the basis of Nazi cinema’s celebration of myth. Benjamin repeats this
pattern of juxtaposing progressive and reactionary examples—Eugene Atget and
l’art pour l’art, communist and fascist film, Hollywood movies and Russian
factography, Dada and futurism—in what Leslie calls a “double reading of actual and
potential developments”.[43] Benjamin’s distinction between cult-value and
exhibition-value is a tool for thinking about these ongoing divisions. Hence,
Benjamin criticises theorists of photography and film who attempted to elevate it to
the status of art by reading cultic elements into it rather than recognising the
revolutionary potential of technological reproducibility.
Next I want to reconsider the history of the exhibition through a form of “double
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Twenty years ago, a generation of curators sought to demonstrate the art museum’s
independence from the exhibition form and liberated the art-going public from the
constraints on their agency by the form of the exhibition.[48] Despite the
persistence of exhibitions alongside more adventurous cultural modes of
engagement, museums and galleries of the new variety were no longer organised
exclusively around the modernist focus on the art object and the principal mode in
which that specific type of object had come to be displayed: the exhibition. As a
result, even if the exhibition retained much of its power within the sector, the
proposition that the exhibition is the museums’ default mode of address was
somewhat weakened. Although the exhibition form was not immediately and fatally
condemned, curators and artists explored an exciting array of alternative forms of
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What I mean by saying that the art exhibition is not merely an arrangement of
objects, but rather a specific social configuration, is clarified by acknowledging that
painters and sculptors of the guild and the court before the eighteenth century did
not display their works in exhibitions, because the social relations of the artisan
workshop and noble patronage were more familiar than anonymous and more face-
to-face than mediated by objects. Exhibitions of works of art are introduced in a
moment of crisis, when it is clear that the feudal social relations of art have
collapsed, but the art market has not yet formed around a network of gallerists and
dealers. Hence, the exhibition arises historically during the transitional period
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For social theorists in the traditions of Louis Althusser and Foucault (and for art
historians influenced by them), the exhibitionary condition is best understood
through an analysis of its institutions, specifically the gallery and museum.[50]
However, like the academies before them, exhibitions were initially homeless events.
[51] It was not the gallery or museum that gave shape to the exhibition as a social
form, but the exhibition that provided the script for the gallery and museum. The art
exhibition comes to sit within a broader set of exhibitionary practices, institutions
and spaces. The museum, the library, the school, the public park and so on
constitute a new spatial configuration of citizenship and of being fully human, which
is at least partly anticipated by the advent of the exhibition as a social form.[52]
Exhibitions of one kind or another take place in all these spaces, but it is the
museum which has come to be associated with the exhibition in its hegemonic
form.
Among other things, studies of this kind are important because they reconnect the
legitimating discourses of civic humanism to the economic and governmental
discourses that were deliberately and conscientiously denigrated in the civic
humanist opposition of private and public virtues, and the preference for disinterest
over self-interest, and so on. However, when this critical work consists in little more
than translating one set of discourses into another, especially when the former
contains traces of possibility whereas the latter focuses primarily on actuality, the
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Wayne Modest, whose work in the museum continually returns to the legacies of
colonialism, has paid close attention to the effects of transporting a religious icon
from a cathedral or mosque to a museum of art or a gallery. Clearly, the category of
the human is redefined by the movement of works of art from a variety of
particular contexts to the singular space of the museum. And arguably, the return of
objects from museums to contexts of use amounts to a fresh redefinition of the
human. And yet, Modest is rightly sceptical of the idea that “the anthropological
museum [is] obsolete and the art museum [is] a space for criticality.”[55] Modest
argues that the normative idea that the visitor to the museum ought to feel
enriched acts as a barrier to the idea that the museum might be a place invested in
“critical discomfort”.[56] Modest has also noticed a specific relationship between
museums and exhibitions that has mostly gone unnoticed in the literature.
I struggled and struggle with people who want to think the colonial as just a moment
in time that has passed. This created a false distance between the reckoning with
colonial afterlives and the work of the museum as a cultural institution, even though
the afterlives and legacies of colonialism in the present continued to structure
relations or hierarchies which govern our lives today. The work, it was felt, was not
ours to be done: We were just there to do exhibitions.[57]
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Historically, the exhibition does not present itself as a single solution to a single
problem. Several histories have come to be plaited together in accounts of the
emergence of the art exhibition. The exhibition features in the historical
reconstruction of the founding of the public art museum, for instance, as if either
the birth of the museum is the material basis for the advent of the exhibition, or
without providing a separate account of the development of the exhibition. The
exhibition is similarly treated in histories of the birth of the public, the rise of
modernity, the onset of art’s commodification and the transformation of art by
technology. As such, several distinct difficulties are brought to a certain kind of
resolution by several functions of the exhibition. This means the exhibition is a
contradictory form and its legacies cannot be combined into a coherent condition.
In order to capture the complexity of the historical emergence of the exhibition I
want to think of it as a social form. The exhibition, in this analysis, is a technique
brought about within the changing social relations of art production, circulation and
distribution. This occurred during the passage from traditional artisanal practices to
the modern combination of market and non-market mechanisms built into galleries,
museums, art schools, magazines, academia and the public subsidy of art.
In her landmark study of public art museums as institutions of civic ritual, Carol
Duncan explained that the “transformation of the palace into a public space
accessible to everyone” gave the museum a double function in the constitution of
the public that it was meant to serve.[59] First, the museum was a place in which the
public as a social body was made visible to itself. And second, the museum gave
the public not only somewhere suitable to go, but also something suitable to do.
The exhibition gives form to the activity of the public. If the museum choreographs
the behaviour of its visitors, the exhibition is its score. But just like New
Institutionalism speculated about a future in which the museum can survive the
decline of the exhibition, the exhibition existed prior to the establishment of the
museum.
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The exhibition emerges at the same time as the category of art comes into focus as
a distinct class of objects—as distinct from craft, commerce, industry and science.
The definition of art—as distinct from the arts of painting, sculpture, music, poetry
and dance—begins to form under the pressure of colonial and racial hierarchies
that also set art off from the ethnographic, which results in different modes of
exhibition making. So, what separates art from everything else is not that it is
exhibited: everything is exhibited. However, each category of thing has its own
particular mode of exhibition that appears to be suited to its nature. Art develops a
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David does not replace the patron with the dealer or collector, in the way that the
social history of art presupposes in the history of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism as a history of the passage from patronage to the market. David’s
exhibition is significant, because the patron is replaced with the public. It is also
important, from an economic point of view, that the public do not purchase the
work, but pay an entrance fee to see the painting. Its economic significance is that
it interrupts and potentially diverts the alleged passage from patronage to the
market. So, even though there were exhibitions before David’s public display of The
Intervention of the Sabine Women, it stands out within the early history of the art
exhibition because it exemplifies a social function for the exhibition that is
independent of the guild, the court, the academy and the art market.
When painters, sculptors and others produced bespoke works of art for individuals
that were known to them, exhibitions were largely unknown apart from in the shop
windows and in “painting rooms” or waiting rooms beside studios so that the visitor
(patron, collector, sitter or potential sitter for a portrait) could see the quality of the
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Prior to the first exhibition, various informal practices of exhibiting were established
within the old regime. Prominent among these was the princely “gallery”, or
reception room, displaying works of art and other things to visiting dignitaries and
which served as a backdrop to official ceremonies. Works of art could also be seen
by the public a day or two prior to their sale at auction houses. Artisans were
additionally permitted to display works in the windows of their workshops and some
works might be placed about the workshop as examples. Also, some guild members
became dealers and sold their works and the works of others in the local market or
in a “picture shop” or print shop, in which works were on display for sale alongside
art supplies, commercial print copies of popular paintings and other merchandise.
And it also became common, especially in England, for artists to have a room
adjacent to their studios that was used as a waiting room for prospective sitters and
collectors where they displayed finished work.
The art exhibition, therefore, is the result of a process that James Clifford has
traced in which categories indexed to the colonial division between the West and
the rest splits the destination of cultural objects to the art gallery or the
ethnographic museum.[63] Art and the art exhibition emerge within the academic
system of the fine arts, which gave a new basis for art to be installed in national
public museums. These have been understood as permanent venues at the heart of
the city in contrast with the temporary fair on its outskirts, but the origin of the
exhibition also require the formation of the differential field in which the art
exhibition comes to set itself off from exhibitions of ethnographic objects, scientific
inventions, commercial products and popular entertainment.
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