How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Dorothea von Hantelmann
Издательство: Ingram
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9783037643693
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the other it presents them in a way that seeks to have maximum impact on the subjectivity of the viewer. By bringing these two dimensions together, the object that is produced and the object that is consumed (or actively and intentionally related to), the exhi­bition in an exemplary way participates in the hegemonic manner in which individual subjectivity is shaped in Western market societies.

       And, finally, the very notion of “product” is mirrored in and at the same time ennobled by the conception of the artwork. Market societies derive their wealth from the pro­duction of material objects and their circulation through commerce, and the visual art field is engaged in the exact same process. Visual art not only reiterates these basic components of Western societies but, through the museum, even constructs an entire ritual designed to dignify them by removing their objects from a sphere of practice and use, elevating them to a seemingly higher realm in which meaning and subjectivity are produced.

      According to this line of thinking, “autonomy” is a euphemism for art’s subjection to basic elements of bourgeois democratic market society, and the art exhibition is the place where these values and parameters are cultivated and performed in their respective relation to each other. This brings up two decisive questions that this book attempts to deal with: How is this governing function played out in ex­hibitions today? And, secondly, if every exhibited artwork—consciously or unconsciously, wittingly or unwittingly—becomes part of the setting outlined above and therefore participates in the political biases of the exhibition format, is there a way for artists to act upon this format?

       The four artists in this book—James Coleman, Daniel Buren, Tino Sehgal and Jeff Koons—exemplify such work on and within the exhibition ritual. Each of these artists operates upon some of the very fundamental parameters of art in modernity, which constitute art’s intrinsic connection to the socio-economic order of modern societies: the notion of evolutive time, the focus on the individual that recognizes and differentiates him or herself vis-à-vis the material object, and the status of this object as a product.

      Given that the museum—in its original conception—is a machine that produces an evolutive and linear conception of time, development and progress, how can an artwork exist in the museum without subordinating itself to this con­ception of history? How can an artwork within the museum, which already implies a specific notion of time, insert a different temporality? The works of the Irish artist James Coleman provide a highly complex answer to this question. Many of his visual-acoustic installations thematize issues and practices of cultural memory. Yet as his works are composed in a fragmentary and structurally time-based way, remembering plays an essential role in the constitution of the artwork itself. If anything, it is only in the viewer’s perception and memory that the images and the spoken words come togeth­er to form a “work.” This, one might say, is true of many multimedia installations today. But as Coleman prohibits any technical recordings of his work, one’s own necessarily fragmentary and subjective memory gains a different, constitutive status. I had to rely on my own memory in writing about the work at the center of the chapter about Coleman, Box (ahhareturnabout) from 1977. His works are marked by a particular