Virtuosity and Project Culture in Art Museums

27.11.2015

Virtuosity and Project Culture in Art Museums

The Art of Coordination

During the past decade art museums have accommodated new strategies of exhibiting. Developing new formats, complex events (if not project formats) that to a larger degree they connect immediately to audiences and to society.

“Relevant” and “contemporary” are two values that many museums aspire to embrace.

In this pursuit, however, one can observe how museums negotiate basic assumptions about visitors, about education, about participation and political issues of society. This negotiation can be observed at the level of curatorial procedures.

In the following I will argue that two economies of meaning structure this negotiation:

DISCIPLINARY ECONOMY – forming subjects

As Tony Bennett and others have argued the educational procedures of museums (the forming of modern subjects) are designed as powerful disciplinary mechanisms: they normalize through the logic of self-instruction. Through structures of knowledge and belief. In relation to art it means that: Artworks become the mirror of autonomous, free subjectivity. What characterise these disciplinary procedures is that they are authoritative and strategic. They embed specific naturalized assumptions of 1. who are the subjects of education and 2. what are the terms (and purposes) of educating subjects. In Foucauldian terms this amounts to the governmentality principle of museums.

LEISURE ECONOMY- immaterial consumption

On the other hand, museums are affected, in various degrees, by new cultures of consumptions. A culture of advanced consumption that has endorsed the values of participation, difference, critique into a lifestyle consumption. It is a form of consumption that addresses “life-fulfilling, higher needs”. events that offer intensification of experience (uniting affective, social and discursive encounters).

In the two following examples I will try to show how these two “economies” of meaning become coordinated through curatorial procedures in the museum. My first example is a public event in MoMA in the 2nd floor atrium, and the second is the collaborative exhibition project “Who Knows Tomorrow” in Berlin.

In order to qualify what this procedure of coordination means, I will employ the concept of virtuous action from the Italian post-marxistphilosopher, Paulo Virno. Virno defines virtuosity as a mode of coordinating various heterogeneous, and sometimes intrinsically irreconcilable, elements into a seemingly consistent whole. It is this “creativeness of curating” and its political implications that I wish to call attention to in the following.

Virno has brought up the notion of virtuosity in relation to the subject of postfordist production. Postfordism denotes a state of society in which production has moved away from the industrialised, Fordist notion of production as intimately connected to the manual production of commodities or material goods. Postfordist society is characterised by the displacement of production to the field of communication, to knowledge production and immaterial services. So in order to understand Virno’s notion of virtuosity, it is neccessary to understand also his idea of production – as an expanded field.

Production in the sense, that Virno uses it points to a production of social relations, of imaginary relations, of ethical dimensions of life. (What Virno says about production is that: “…we understand “mode of production” to mean not only one particular economic configuration, but also a composite unity of forms of life, a social, anthropological and ethical cluster: “ethical”, let us note, and not “moral”; in question here are common practices, usages and customs, not the dimension of the must-be”, p. 49 .)

In order to explain further the implications of this mode of production, Virno argues that it is symptomatic of a contemporary conflation of formerly distinct areas of experience: these are: labour, action and intellect. This tripartite division he picks up from Hannah Arendt’s work. In the postfordist society, Virno argues, labour takes on the characteristics of action (political) and intellect (thought). It is incarnated in the figure of the knowledge worker, who develops ideas, innovates production, who constantly finds new ways of enhancing production, of meeting the needs in consumers for life-fulfilling experiences.

Virtuosity in this scheme is the publico/political function which creatively structures knowledge into attractive economies of meaning. It is communicative and public, it presupposes an audience. Virno picks up this concept which is traditionally connected to artistic or skilled performance, it becomes applied in relation to musical concerts, here it denotes the unique and skilled performance. What is special for the virtuous performance, Virno says, is that its end product is the performance itself. It refines and elaborates its means of communication to the outmost thereby deeply convincing and affecting the audience. The relevance of Virno’s concept of virtuosity in relation to contemporary society is that it addresses the seminal function of linguistic and communicative performances. And it points out how this type of production is symptomatic of how value becomes shaped today. – As convincing orderings of meaning, as affective and intelligible clusters. (On the basis of this analysis, Virno concludes that today what counts as “means of production” is the technologies of the culture industry, the means are language and communication. )

As the art institution has become part of the contemporary culture of knowledge and experience – the linguiststic and communicative performances becomes increasingly important. They connect discourses, institutional structures, common knowledges, social experience and material objects into convincing structures of meaning.

This scene in MoMA, in the Marron Atrium on the second floor was part of the exhibition: “Contemporary Art from the Collection” curated by Kathy Halbreich and Christiope Cherix. Whereas the main part of the exhibition took place in the adjoining 2rd floor galleries, two art works had been installed in the open atrium, together forming a spatial organisation and setting up the frame for a public event. The atrium differs from the exhibition galleries in being a place of social ambience. Architecurally it is organised as an open public space. One can overview the floor and the life that takes place. The space thus has the potential of a stage, or a public forum. In this space a Fluxus work by the American artist Yoko Ono was installed. And as part of the display a microphone had been placed in the centre of the atrium. On the wall, one could read the following message (show image) in which the museum invited visitors to follow Ono’s instructions and scream into the microphone. On the right hand side, facing the gallery entrance, a large wall painting by Kara Walker had been placed. This assemblage constituted an interactive situation in which (following the information on the wall text) the issues of “having a voice”, of the violence of slavery, of the sexual abuse of women slaves, of the deprivement of having a voice. At the same time it, even though in an indirect way, addressed the issue of the museum as an agent of “non-intervention”. This can be seen in the wall instructions. Added to this, the installation invited people to use the microphone. And to improvise a performance in front of the audience.

As can be observed from the clips, many guests took the opportunity to do this.

So what takes place here? Several elements are coordinated. A task to present works from their permanent collection to the public. A direct engagement with ethical/poltical issues – relevant to contemporary society: the issue of the right to speak, or to express oneself in public. An engagement with the issue of creating public platforms for democratic exchange. (anyone, at least any of the accepted museums visitors, could use the mic). An explicitly stated self-expression of the museum ( the museum does not intervene – it is a free space, and it allows political, controversal, topics to be opened up (non-conformist attitude), and it prioritize art works that have a radical message.

In this way the museum/curator virtuously coordinates at least three things: 1. between the imperative of education (of informing modern free and submissive subject) 2. the free option of immaterial consumption, where you chose an activity because it is both pleasurable and offer an intensity that is life fulfilling in itself and 3. self-reassuring/branding the institution – as liberal, as dealing adequately and with ethical responsibility with acutely pressing societal issues.

However, some key questions (assumptions) do not become addressed in this event: does this event lead to a situation of non-intervention on the part of the museum? Does it create “free subjects”?

The self-assuring attitude of the institution is posed as a claim, rather than as a qualified effort. Again the museum employs an authoritative discourse to make unexamined claims. “without interventions from the museum”. Fundamentally the museum does intervene by setting up the social and discursive premises for the event. This is a basic tenet of institutional critique always to look the politics of the museum in the economic and social structures that conditions exhibitions of art.

What also seems an unresolved ambivalence here it the fact that MoMA is fundamentally a bourgeois institution. Visitors entering the museum are basically subjects who already possess the privileges of having a voice.

The reception situation of the open event becomes clearer when people do shout into the microphone. It becomes a social play, the self-awareness of the participants. Far from the existential – primal utterances stated by Yoko Ono (against the wind, wall, sky). Which set up a solitary relationship with nature, the universe. Here it becomes a social game, one performed by a privileged part of the social community. So one could say that the “free voice” is given only after the museum has determined the context of speaking/screaming.

This happens because the museum does not direct attention to the disciplinary structures of the situation. You are either seing others or being seen. In Bennett’s exhibitionary complex this division constitutes a basic feature of museum governmentality. So the museum is not addressing the conditions of acting, behaving in that space. (for which the institution is responsible). That it is ritual place for social conduct. And that is a bourgeois institution, targeted for the educated consumer. In this way the curatorial set up here succeeds in seamlessly providing an event that accords with immaterial consumption. This is why the institutional conduct here can be understood along the lines of Virnos notion of servile virtuosity. It is an act that immunisizes itself to critique, without being critical itself.

It does not address the problem of museum culture, the authoritative discourse of the museum. It does not address the issue of governmentality, how does museum instruct? It does not address the issue of what constitute a “free subject”

In relation to my example from MoMA, I will argue the curatorial function virtuously reconciles the disciplinary techniques of education, a technique of institutional reassurance and an economy of immaterial consumption. Another example of curating that virtuously combines these three elements is “Who Knows Tomorrow”.

Museum structures are also the topic of “Who Knows Tomorrow” a project organised jointly by 4 museums in Berlin. Here Neue Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Alte Naionalgalerie and Friedrichwerdersche Kirche together developed an exhibition project, which featured artworks by international artists of African origin. The project was also a major discursive endeavour, at the 100? Year for the signing of the colonial agreement between European countries. By installing visually spectacular art – as a kind of site specific intervention on the 18th 19th and 20th Century museum buildings in Berlin, the curators wanted to call attention to how in the 21st Century the art institution has become global. Not unlike the MoMA example, the project worked as an act of “self-critique” on the side of the institution. And it included, like the MoMA case, simultaneously an economy of education and an economy of consumption.

As has been seen before in exhibitions taking a Third World perspective, the Third World artist becomes representative of a “positively evaluated alterity”, radically different, and therefore the projection of a Western fantasy.

Paradoxically what was celebrated about the African artists was their “fresh perception of the world”, their privileged ability to acutely sense the urgencies of the contemporary world (due to their African perspective). These qualities are not entirely unknown in the art institution. They form the cardinal virtues of the romantic artist, whose originality is based on his ability to intensely perceive and respond creatively to the conditions of his time.

While recognizing the value of non-Western culture and thought, trying to include this dimension into the enlightenment premises of the German art museums, at the same time the project only imported those aspects of post-colonial experience that would be reconcilable with a restoration of the contemporary legitimity of the German museum institution.

It virtuosly coordinated the pittoresque tapestries of El Annatsui with the enlightenment pillars of Alte Nationalgalerie. Thereby suggesting that all can be accommodated by the structures of the museum institution. The national edifice is over-inscribed by the global, displacing the national – or complementing it?

The elements that were coordinated here, did not become the subject of interrogation themselves. Only in Shonibare’s installation at Friedrichwerdersche kirche did the intervention lead to a questioning of legitimacy of western modernity and enlightenment values. Here blood and violence were enacted in the midst of the elevated atmosphere around the busts of 18th century thinkers and artists.

But it did not lead to an examining of basic categories of enlightenment subjectivity, the status of western notions of art, the autoritative voice of the institution, the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (only the useful traits of African identity became translated). The legitimacy of nation state official cultural institutions.

Nor did globalisation become addressed as a system of exploitation, which in fundamental ways continues, rather than breaks with, the system of colonialism.The exhibition in this way fed into a culture of tourist/cosmopolitan consumption. Making spectacular – and calling attention to - some of the official architectural monuments in Berlin. Serving the industry of art consumption.

So what I have tried to highlight here is a coordination between a disciplinary enonomy and a leisure economy of meaning in contemporary curating of events. Thereby I have highlighted the political dimensions of curatorial procedures.

So when working virtuosly – in between knowledge production, it is really important to be aware of the political dimensions of curatorial planning. Of examining assumptions. How does this act lead to a possible interrogation of institutional structures? Is it embellishing? Or posing questions?

How can virtuos action be put to use in ways that challenge institutional assumptions – examine basic categories such as subjectivity, participation, education, community and so on?

It’s not that virtuosity is inherently a bad thing.

It is rather a political instrument and a condition of the art institution in the 21. century. It is the way in which art institutions plug on to the world. It is the means through which they can contribute to shaping the world differently.What needs to be addressed is the politics of coordination.

Coordination through virtuous action can transform the context in which it becomes enacted. It can lead to examinations of assumptions. Of the politics of participation of global art,

The problematic that I wish to call attention to and offer as an issue for further discussion, will be the issue of examining and interrogating basic assumptions behind institutional and curatorial procedures. I will point to suggestions as to how to address these ambivalences, and turn them into questions that can be answered or provoke reflection.