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Identity Exhibitions: From Magiciens de la terre to Documenta IIAuthor(s): Reesa GreenbergSource: Art Journal, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 90-94Published by: College Art Association

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Reesa Greenberg

IdentityExhibitions:

From Magiciens de la terre to

Documenta I I

Despite a continual morphing of the large, high-profile, temporary, group

identity exhibition, the provocative case studies published in this issue of Art

Journal argue that, in the fifteen years between Magiciens de la terre nd Documenta

11, the

genre operated

in a

closed-loop system.

The roller-coaster

image

chosen

by Norman Kleeblatt for the title of the 2004 College Art Association session

("Identity Roller Coaster: From Magiciens de la terreto Documenta n") inwhich

the essays were first presented alludes to the end-game

aspect of the ride as well as to its ups and downs, its

twists and turns, its exhilarating and terrifying speeds,

its performanceas

spectacle, and its ultimate function

as entertainment?not exactlyan

image that connotes

optimismwhen linked to identity xhibitions and their

programs of social justice and radical reform. Kleeblatt 's

second formulation of identityas a free radical operat

ing in and circulating around an exhibition nucleus in

bipolar tensions rather than binary oppositions offers morepossibilities, if the

promises of identity exhibitions are to be realized.

Kleeblatt 's shifting terminology raises questions about the rapidity with

which terms associated with identitymove in and out of currency, the impor

tance of language to the project of identity reformulation, and the degreeto

which discourse cancatalyze structural change. His use of a secular, scientific

model is also a reminder that exhibitions that interrogate identity and globalism

also interrogate models of the spiritual in relation tosociopolitical change,

raising another set of questions about contemporary interpretations of magic,

shamanism, the fetish, the avant-gardeas a spiritual quest, and exhibition mak

ing and viewing processes.

If the case studies point to the difficulties of negotiating change, they also

assess how specific exhibition practices candisrupt

orself-reflexively comment

on theloop.

Forexample,

therelationships

ofprocesses

of selection to curatorial

theses and their repercussions are raised in each essay. Johanne Lamoureux's

analysis of the inconsistency with which the two sets of selection criteria, one

forWestern artists, another for non-Western artists, wereapplied in Magiciens

introduces a set of considerations about the resulting unconscious, counter

differentiated, or further-differentiated narratives that can emerge. Even with

"blinder" selection processes, curatorial prerogative often prevails. In his review

of Documenta n ,Anthony Downey suggests that, eventhough 70 percent of

the work was commissioned, the response "to what was a clear, perhaps over

prescriptive curatorial mandate" may explain the evenness of output.1 Sylvester

Ogbechie's reminder that only20 percent of Documentas participants were non

Western serves as a caution about confusing selection and assessment criteria.

Even when curatorial theses and selection criteria runparallel, they

are not

always accepted, as Elisabeth Sussman points out in her review of the negative

criticisms of the 1993Whitney Biennial. Her analysis suggests that the strident

rhetoric against exhibitions of difference functions, as it always has, tomaintain

themarginalized status of difference, different aesthetics, and the avant-garde.

Here, Boris Groys's formulation of the avant-gardeas a

minority culture is

helpful.2 Sussman differentiates between the initial negative reactions and the

long-term positive results of altered selection criteria, citing the ongoingrecon

90 SPRING 200S

1.Anthony Downey, "The Spectacular Difference

of Documenta XI," ThirdText 17,no. I (2003): 90.

2. BorisGroys, The ArtJudgementShow, ed.

Barbara Vanderlinden (Brussels: Roomade, 2002).

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figuration of American identity in the public sphere of museum exhibitions, and,

Iwould add, especially at theWhitney, which subsequently opened the curatorial

process of the Biennial toregionally based curators, widened the selection to

residents as well as citizens of the United States, and, in 2003, with Lawrence

Rinder 'sAmerican Effect:Global Perspectiveson theUnited States, invited non-Americans

to comment on American hegemony and identity.

Sussman's inclusion of short- and long-term effects in her assessment sug

gests the need for different criteria when judging exhibitions. How the form

and the platform perform,to build on the model proposed in Lamoureux's title

(see page 65"), may be a better measure of an exhibition's importance than quick

judgments based on immediate or undifferentiated success or failure, triumph

or disaster, perfectionor

blight.

Here William Connolly's work onneuropoli tics, culture, and the transforma

tion of identity is helpfulas a structure for understanding how formal devices

mobilize ourthought processes subconsciously and lead us to dissect the organi

zation of our perceptions. Ideally, shifts at the individual and micropolitical level

lead to changes in cultural values on a mass scale.3 The inclusion of a reading

room with books on cultural theory and politicswas a brilliant component of

the 1993Whitney Biennial occupation strategy, for itmodeled the need to read and

think in relation to art, before and after looking, since itwasimpossible

to finish

the materials in the room in the course of asingle visit. The reading

room also

materialized the absence of a separation between political projects in and outside

the art world. At Documenta 11, the inclusion of discursive spaces?in the form

of four discussion platformson four continents with related materials published

as individual volumes, as well as inside the exhibition spaces with themassing of

text-work and archival material at the Fridericianum ?wasintegral

to reshaping

Documenta from an exhibition to a discursive event inwhich discussion of

sociopolitical processes was as importantas the discussion about the art exhibited.4

Thephysical reorganization

of Documenta 11with its decenteredplatforms,

enormous scale, and extended temporal demands required viewers to rethink the

relationships of their minds and bodies to the spaces and time of the exhibition,

and, by extension, to the global processes addressed in each component of the

project. Desires forwhat Irit Rogoff calls plenitudein the experience of an exhi

bition or what Kleeblatt designatesas resolution or what Lamoureux articulates

as seamlessness were frustrated by the impossibility of seeing it all, and, through

that frustration, expectations of self and of exhibitions were altered.5

The white-cube display aesthetic at Documenta also frustrated expectation.

Ogbechie takes up Massimiliano Gioni's criticism of the clinical white cube,

especially for projected works at the Binding Brauereri, as antithetical to the

chaos and conflict of their content.6 As Lamoureux points out, there were messy

rooms. The Binding Brauereri, though,was themost pristine, themost finished,

the cleanest and brightest exhibition space at Documenta. There, Iwould argue,

the critical mass of film and video and the attention given to their installation

in rooms of their own, themix of standing and seated viewing situations,

the variety of seating arrangements, room sizes, and configurations, and the clar

ity of the spaces created conditions conducive to considered viewing of media

still contested as visual art and the construction of what I call a safe space for

engaging with disturbing content.7

9 I art journal

3.William E.Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking,Culture,Speed (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2002).4. See my "The Exhibition as Discursive Event" in

Longing nd Belonging:From theFaraway Nearby

(Santa Fe: Site Santa Fe, 1995), I 18-25.

5. IritRogoff, "Hit and Run?Museums and

Cultural Difference," ArtJournal 1, no. 3 (Fall2002): 63-78.

6. Massimiliano Gioni, "Documenta I I, he

PlatformsReport: FindingtheCenter," Flash Art

225 (July-September 2002): 106-07.

7. See my "Playing It afe: The Display of

Transgressive Art in heMuseum," inMirroringEvil:Nazi Imagery/Recent rt,ed. Norman L.

Kleeblatt (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2001), 85-95.

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The white cube worked as a vehicle, first, for seducing and then confronting

viewers with the literal differences in the material conditions inwhich they

found themselves and those on screen. As such, the white-cube aesthetic, espe

ciallyat the

Binding Brauererei, rejectsamimicry of form

and contentand

works with structures of memory brought by viewers in order to disrupt them.

Even if the shifts are minimal, theyare what Connolly would deem an ethical

beginning and anexample of what Lamoureux identifies and analyzes

as the

problematizing of exhibition display as fetish.

The white-cube aesthetic at Documenta can also be interpretedas an echo

of themodernist laboratory,a

place of experimentation for displaying, viewing,

and engaging with abody of troubling work. Rather than sanitizing what is

shown and presenting it from a clinical distance, the white cube here promotes

critical distance. The risks, asOgbechie points out?and they are serious ones?

are turning the viewer into a voyeur and feeding the commodity fetishism of

large group exhibitions by transforming what is shown into product. Iwould

argue that these are lesser risks than spectacularizingart about trauma in an

entirely chaotic, disordered display that could flood or overwhelm viewers to the

point of perceptual paralytic dissociation, or creating atheme-park exhibition

experience of trauma.

Presentation strategies are linked to the performative aspects of exhibitions,

in particular their affective dimensions. Lamoureux demonstrates how the dis

avowal of difference inMagiciens through

an installation of "neighboring"or jux

taposition soothes viewers inwhat she calls, in an earlier version of her essay, an

"aesthetics of mending." Lamoureux contrasts the taming effects of presenting

the "frightening other" inwhat I call a cohabitation installation strategy with the

unsettling self-reflexivity of Documenta, where installation is predicated on a

destabilization of the expected and the known. Lamoureux's extensive examina

tionof thefunctionsof thefetish throughpsychological, anthropological, and

economic paradigms isan

important contribution to understanding exhibitionsabout identity, the relation of installation to

interpretations of the other, and the

construction of affect as an exhibition effect.

Rogoff's theorization of recent exhibitions asperformances of loss adds

another element to the affective dimensions of exhibitions about identities. Her

model of "living with and livingout loss as

opposed to compensating for it"

allows areading of Documenta 11 as a gesture toward what she describes as the

"contraction of the staunch belief system that organizes, classifies, locates, and

judges everything from the prevailing perspective of theWest."8 Ogbechie'stren

chant analysis of Documenta 11,however, questions the degree towhich this

"prevailing perspective of theWest" has contracted, asserting that "the artists'

conceptions of their worlds mocked the idea of globalization, exposing the

devastating effects of its unequal distribution of resources" (page 85).

Rogoff's formulation is based on the unspoken understanding that the

majority of practitioners, participants, and visitors to exhibitions are "of the

West," and it is to them thatmost of these gestures are oriented. During

the presentation of his paper at the College Art Association annual conference,

Ogbechies continuous, sequential, large-scale projection of single photographs

of poverty, deliberate destruction, militias, and misery in the non-Western

world, which were combined and presentedon a very much smaller scale as

92 SPRING 200S

8. Rogoff,69 and 72.

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Platform5 ocumental!ExhibitionDocumentan

News Welcome to the website of Documental 1.

Introduction

History

Program

Publications

Edition

Visitor ervice

Service

Shop

FAQSponsors

Media Partners

Help

Imprint

Documental 1_DiscussionAs a means of activating spaces for

discussion, the Documental 1 Education

Project is facilitating an on-liner" '

Here you will find information on the participating artists, the Documental 1 platforms and

the program, as well as on the artistic director Okwui Enwezor. hisco

curators, and histeam.

English home page for Documenta 11,

http://www.documenta 12.de/data/english/?ndex.html.

93 art journal

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avisual-essay frontispiece for the Documenta catalogue, grouped two, three, or

four to a page and printedwith a dull finish and visible grain,pointed to an

aspect of the performance of loss from a different subject position. Here the per

formance of loss wasplayed

out notjust through melancholy,

butthrough anger,

for the unrelenting slide accompaniment to Ogbechie's presentationwas

visually

assaultive. Anger, the emotion that has driven so many artists and identity exhibi

tions, is still relevant: first, because the project of equity remains unrealized, and

then, because visible anger is often the affective catalyst required to create a shift

in perception thatmight initiate forms of more ethical action. The anger of nega

tive critical response works inmuch the same way, but the goals of the desired

actions are often dissimilar.

Iwant to point to another strategy of presentation at Documenta with the

potential for increased access for participants and viewers, contracted geogra

phies, expanded temporal dimensions, and an evasion of the exhibition fetish

paradigm,one that is performative in the discursive realm. I am

speaking of the

Web site for Documenta 11, a presentation strategy historically unavailable to

the two other exhibitions discussed here, but one particularly important for a

worldwide exhibition addressing the forces of globalization and transdiscipli

nary change. Documenta's Web site did not function as an alternative exhibition

space or aplace for virtual projects or the publication of platform essays, all pos

sible strategies for rupturing the market economies of art, the infrastructure of

exhibitions, and the publications that support them, approaches used to a greater

extent in the still partially functioning Web site for Documenta 10.At Documenta

11, theWeb was used as a site for communication rather than parallelor alter

native display. Visitors could obtain information about the five platforms, the

artists, and the curatorial team, but most important, they could enter the discur

sive frame of the eventby joining facilitatedonline discussions.9

The mixed visual and textual modes of accessing Documenta 11were

evidentin

the design of thehome

page.On the home

page,a

relativelysmall

photograph of a long lineofmainly occidental visitorswaiting to enter the

Fridericianum functioned as a self-reflexive tease, inviting virtual visitors to join

in.Nothing happened when one clicked on thephoto, though.The only placesto go on theWeb site were devoted to information and discussion. This prob

lematization of an exhibition's home leads to the question of the degreeto

which and the ways inwhich online entities and identities function in relation

to exhibitions, their makers, their viewers, and their critics, especially in the

context of globalization.

At the riskof falling into thefetishization-of-technology trapand in full

awareness of Ogbechie's reminder that technology is controlled by theWest?

but in the spirit of Documenta 11 's chief curator, Okwui Enwezor?I would like

to suggest that the richpossibilities of the formf theWeb offera new platformfrom which identity exhibitions might perform radical reform.

Reesa Greenberg is Montreal-based art historian andmuseum consultant. She coedited (withBruceW.

Ferguson and Sandy Nairne) Thinkingbout Exhibitions (Routledge, 1996), haswritten extensively on the

use of art in xhibitions about theHolocaust, and currently rites about theWeb as an exhibition space.

94 spring 2005

9. The Documenta 10 nd Documenta I IWeb

sites are available online at http://www.documental2.de/archiv/dx/ and http://www.documental 2.de/data/english/index.html respectively.

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