Curating in the Post-Internet Age - Journal #94 6/4/23, 22:51

e -)ux Journal

Curating in the Post-Internet Age

Boris Groys

Hans Richter, Film Study, +M),. N', Black and white Plm. Source: EYE Filminstituut
Nederland. Copyright: Hans Richter Estate.

Issue #'(
October )*+,

One hears time and again that contemporary art is elitist because it is selective,
and that it should be democratized. Indeed, there is a gap between exhibition
practice and the tastes and expectations of the audience. The reason is simple:
the audiences of contemporary art exhibitions are often local, while the exhibited
art is often international. This means that contemporary art does not have a
narrow, elitist view, but, on the contrary, a broader, universalist perspective that
can irritate local audiences. It is often the same kind of irritation that migration

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provokes today in Europe. Here we are confronted with the same phenomenon:
the broader, internationalist attitude is experienced by local audiences as elitist
—even if the migrants themselves are far from belonging to any kind of elite.

Cover art for Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. Designed by David Pearson for
Penguin’s Great Ideas series, vol. \ ()**,).

Any genuine contemporary exhibition is not an exhibition of local art in the

international context, but rather an exhibition of international art in the local
context. The local context can obviously be seen as already given, already
familiar to the local audience, whereas the context of an international art
exhibition is necessarily constructed by the curator. Every exhibition is, if you
will, a montage in that it does not depict any real local context in which art
functions, but is always artiPcial through and through. There are more than
enough examples of how this artiPciality can cause irritation. In “The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin famously
equals the exhibition of an object with its reproduction, and dePnes the
“exhibition value” of the artwork as an ebect of its reproducibility.+ Both
reproduction and exhibition are operations that remove the artwork from its
historical place—from its “here and now”—and send it along a path of global
circulation. Benjamin believes that as a result of these operations, the artwork
loses its “cult value,” its place in ritual and tradition, its aura. Here, the aura is
understood as the artwork’s inscription in the historical context to which it
originally belongs, while the loss of aura results from its removal from that world
of lived experience. The copy refers to the original but does not truly present it.
The same can be said about the exhibited artwork: it refers to its original context,
but actually prevents the exhibition visitor from experiencing it. Having been
liberated, isolated from its original environment, the artwork remains materially
self-identical but loses its historical place, and thus, its truth.

Almost contemporaneously, Martin Heidegger writes in his “Origin of the Work

of Art”: “When a work is brought into a collection or placed in an exhibition we
say also that it is ‘set up.’ But this setting up dibers essentially from setting up as
,

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erecting a building, raising a statue, presenting a tragedy at a holy festival.”,

Heidegger diberentiates again between an artwork inscribed into a certain
historical and/or ritual space and time, and an artwork that is merely exhibited at
a certain place but removable, thus without context. However, in his later writing
Heidegger begins to stress the technological, artiPcial character of our relation
to the world. For Heidegger, the subject does not have an ontologically
guaranteed outside position vis-à-vis the world. Rather, this position is artiPcially
constructed by modern technology. Technology creates the framing, or Gestell
(apparatus) that allows one to position as a subject and experience the world as
an object, as an image.- This framing dePnes our relationship to our
environment, and invisibly guides our experiences of it. However, as Heidegger
describes, this apparatus remains concealed from us because it opens the world
to our gaze as something that is familiar, “natural.”

Instructions for eye yoga exercises aimed at relieving eyesight

screen stress.

I would argue that exhibitions defamiliarize local contexts and reveal their Gestell
—the way in which their framings operate. This is where the exhibition begins to
be understood not as a pure act of presenting, but as the presentation of
presenting, a revelation of its own strategy of framing. In other words, the
exhibition does not only present certain images to our gaze, but also
demonstrates the technology of presenting, the apparatus and structure of
framing, and the mode in which our gaze is determined, oriented, and
manipulated by this technology. When we visit an exhibition, we do not only look
at the exhibited images and objects, but also regect on the spatial and temporal
relationships between them—the hierarchies, curatorial choices, and strategies
that produced the exhibition, and so forth. The exhibition exhibits itself before it
exhibits anything else. It exhibits its own technology and its own ideology. In fact,
the framing is nothing but an amalgamation of technology and ideology.

In relationship to the exhibition, one can speak of two diberent types of gazes,
which we can call the frontal gaze and the gaze from within. When we look at an
image—whether a painted image, an image on a computer screen, or a page in a
book—we use the frontal gaze, which allows us to scrutinize the object in all its
aspects. If we interrupt the process of contemplation, the frontal gaze allows for
a new process to begin from the same point in space at which we stopped. But
this precision and stability of vision is achieved by disregarding the context of
our visual experience: we are in a condition of self-oblivion, detached from the

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outside world, absorbed and captivated by the object of our contemplation.

However, when we visit a new place—a new city or country, for example—we do
not just concentrate on a particular object or series of objects; instead, we look
around. In so doing, we become very aware of our speciPc position. The image
of the new place is not in front of us—rather, we are inside of it. This means that
we cannot grasp the new place in its totality and in all its nuance. The gaze from
within is always a fragmentary one. It is not panoramic, as we can see only what
is in front of us at any moment. We know we are inside a certain space, but we
cannot visualize this knowledge in its entirety. Furthermore, this gaze is also
fragmentary because it cannot be stabilized in time. If we were to visit the same
place later, we could never reproduce the same trajectory, the same history of
our own gaze. And while this applies to visiting a new place, the same can also
be said of a familiar place: it is always seen from within. It is visible and known,
though not necessarily visualizable or reproducible. The same can be said of an
exhibition that is always seen from within.

In our time, considering the Gestell—the technological framing of our view of the
world—one likely thinks of the internet before thinking of exhibitions. However,
the gaze of an ordinary internet user is a strictly frontal gaze, concentrated on
the screen. In using the internet, its hardware and software—its Gestell—remain
concealed to users. The internet frames the world for its user, but it does not
reveal its own framing. That opens a possibility for the exhibition of art, and,
more generally, for data, that circulates on the internet. Such a form of exhibition
is able to thematize the internet’s hardware and software, thus revealing its
hidden mechanisms of distribution and presentation. Making such rules of
selection explicit subjects them at the same time to questioning and
transgression. In other words, the internet comes to be investigated as medium,
as material form, not merely as a sum of “immaterial” content.

It is no accident that on the internet, artists function as the so-called content

providers. It is, however, quite a shift for the history of Western art. Traditionally,
in this context, content available to artists was limited to Jesus Christ, the Holy
Virgin, the Christian saints, in addition to the gods of the ancient Greek pantheon
and important historical Pgures. The content providers were the Church and its
historical narratives. It follows then that the goal of the artist was to give these
contents shape and form, and to illustrate these larger content-providing
practices, rather than to produce speciPc content. Today, however, what is the
content that artists provide for the internet? It partially consists of digital
representations of artworks, which are merely the artworks that already circulate
on the art market.

It is more interesting, however, when artists use the possibilities for producing
and distributing art that are speciPc to the internet. In those cases, they
document content that is not covered by mainstream media. It might be too
strange or, on the contrary, too trivial to be recorded by standard journalism, or it
might be documentation of forgotten or publicly repressed historical events. But
it can also be produced by artists themselves—actions, performances, and
processes that they initiated and then documented—or it can be total Pction, but
where the process of creating the Pction is documented. The cumulative ebect
of these strategies is not far from nineteenth-century realism, when artists
combined conventional approaches to representation with personalized content

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and subjective interpretation.

A meme joking at the botched restoration of Spanish painter

Elias Garcia Martinez's Ecce Homo (+M\*).

This is to say that artists on the internet use the means of production and
distribution prescribed by the internet to be compatible with protocols that are
usually employed to spread information. Twentieth-century formalist art
theoreticians such as Roman Jakobson believed that the artistic use of the
means of communication presupposes the suspension, or even annulment, of
information, which in the context of art means a total absorption of content by
form. However, in the context of the internet, the form remains identical for all
communication, thus immunizing content from this absorption. The internet
reestablishes, on a technical level, the conventions of presenting content
dominant in the nineteenth century. Avant-garde artists protested against these
conventions for being arbitrary and culturally determined. But a revolt against
such conventions makes no sense in the context of the internet, because the
conventions have already been inscribed into the technology of the internet
itself.

The situation changes, however, when internet data is transposed into okine
exhibition spaces. Online, artists operate through combinations of pictures,
photos, videos, sound sequences, and text that build into a meta-narrative. In the
exhibition space, however, they come to be presented in the form of an
installation. Conceptual artists already organized the installation space to convey
a certain meaning analogous to the use of sentences in language. After a period
dominated by formalism, in the late +Ml*s conceptual art made artistic practice
meaningful and communicative again. Art began to make theoretical statements,
to communicate empirical experiences and theoretical knowledge, to formulate
ethical and political attitudes, and to tell stories again.

We all know the substantial role that the “linguistic turn” played in the

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emergence and development of conceptual art. The inguence of ideas from

sources such as Wittgenstein and French Structuralism was decisive. But the
new orientation towards meaning and communication did not make art
somehow immaterial or make its materiality less relevant, nor did its medium
dissolve into message. On the contrary, every artwork is material, and can only
be material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas, and political
messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the “linguistic turn”
precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. These
philosophers understood thinking as a use of language, which is wholly material
—a combination of sounds and visual signs. Thus, an equivalence, or at least a
parallelism, was demonstrated between word and image, between the order of
words and the order of things, between the grammar of language and the
grammar of visual space.But if the presentation of art on the internet became
standardized, the presentation of art in the exhibition space instead became de-
standardized. The reason for this de-standardization is clear: the space of the
exhibition is empty; it is not preformatted in the way a webpage or website is.
Today, the white cube plays the same role as a blank page performs for
modernist writing or a blank canvas for modernist painting. The empty white
cube is the zero point of exhibition practice, and thus the constant possibility of a
new beginning. This means that the curator has an opportunity to dePne a
speciPc form, a speciPc installation, a speciPc conPguration of the exhibition
space for the presentation of digital or informational material. Here the question
of form becomes central again. The form-giving directive shifts away from
individual artworks to the organization of space in which these artworks are
presented. In other words, the responsibility for form-giving is transferred from
the artists to the curators who use individual artworks as content, only this time
within the space that the curators themselves create.

Of course, artists can reclaim their traditional form-giving function, but only if
they begin to function as curators of their own work. Indeed, when we visit an
exhibition of contemporary art, the only thing that truly remains in our memory is
the organization of the spaces of this exhibition, especially if this organization is
original and unusual. However, if the individual artworks can be reproduced, the
exhibition can be easily documented. And if such documentation is put on the
internet, it then becomes content, ready again for a form-giving operation inside
the museum. In this way, the exchange between the exhibition space and the
internet becomes an exchange between content and form. The exhibition
becomes the means through which the relationship between the form and
content of art on the internet can be thematized and revealed. Additionally,
curated exhibitions of this art can reveal the hidden mechanisms of selection
governing the distribution of text and image on the internet.

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Screenshot of the twitter account @woreitbetter. This

account, previously a blog, compares in real life artworks that
are formally similar.

At Prst glance, the distribution of information on the internet is not regulated by

any rules governing its selection. Everyone can use cameras to produce images,
to write commentary on them, and to distribute the results with little censorship
or selection process. One might think, therefore, that traditional art institutions
and their rituals of selection and presentation have become obsolete. Many still
see the internet as global and universal, even while it has become increasingly
evident that the space of the internet is rather extremely fragmented. Even if all
data on the internet is globally accessible, in practice the internet leads not to
the emergence of a universal public space but to a tribalization of the public. The
reason for that is very simple. The internet reacts to the user’s questions, to the
user’s clicks. The user Pnds on the internet only what he or she wants to Pnd.

The internet is an extremely narcissistic medium—a mirror of our speciPc

interests and desires. It does not show us what we do not want to see. In the
context of social media we communicate mostly with those who share our
interests and attitudes, whether political or aesthetic. Thus, the non-selective
character of the internet is an illusion. The actual functioning of the internet is
based on non-explicit rules of selection by which users select only what they
already know or are familiar with. Of course, some search engines are able to
scrape the entire internet, but they always have particular goals, and are
controlled by large corporations and not by individual users. In this respect, the
internet is the opposite of, let’s say, an urban space in which we are consistently
forced to see what we do not necessarily want to. In many cases we try to ignore
these unwanted images and impressions, yet they often provoke our interest and
more generally serve to expand our Peld of experience.

To perform a similar role, we can say that curatorial selection should be a kind of
anti-selection, a transgressive selection even. The act becomes relevant when it
crosses the dividing lines that fragment the internet and, more generally, our
culture. It reinstates the universalist project of modern and contemporary art.
Rather than fragmenting the public space, such selection works against it by
creating a uniPed space of representation where the diberent fragments of the

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internet come to be equally represented. The creation of such universal spaces

was the traditional occupation of the modern art system.

The history of modern world exhibitions began in the nineteenth century,

famously with the +,N+ Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. In the art context, the
great museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, or
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as exhibitions like
Documenta in Kassel or numerous biennials, made and still make the claim of
presenting the art of the world. Here, individual items are removed from their
original contexts and placed in a new artiPcial context in which images and
objects meet historically or “in real life” with each other that otherwise could
never have encountered one other. For example, Egyptian gods sit beside
Mexican or Inca gods in their respective universes, and in further combination
with the unrealized utopian dreams of the avant-garde. These removals and new
arrangements call forth uses of violence—such as those in economic and direct
military intervention—by demonstrating the forms of order, law, and trade that
regulate our world, as well as the ruptures, wars, revolutions, and crimes to
which such orders are subjected.

These orders cannot be “seen,” but they can be and are manifested in the
organization of the exhibition and in the way it frames art. As visitors, we are not
outside this frame, but rather inside it. Through the exhibition, we are exhibited
to ourselves and to others. For this reason, the exhibition is not an object, but an
event. The aura is not lost when an artwork is uncoupled from its original, local
context, but is rather re-contextualized and given a new “here and now” in the
event of an exhibition—and thus, in the history of exhibitions. This is why an
exhibition cannot be reproduced. One can only reproduce an image or an object
placed in front of the viewing subject. However, an exhibition can be reenacted
or restaged. In this respect, the exhibition is similar to theatrical mise-en-scène,
but with one important diberence: exhibition visitors do not remain in front of the
stage, but enter the stage to participate in the event.

We live within a system of nation states. However, inside every national culture
there are institutions that embody universalist, transnational projects. Among
them are universities and large museums. Indeed, European museums were
from their inception universalist institutions that attempted to present universal
art history rather than speciPc national art histories. Of course, one can argue
that this universalist project regected the imperial policies of nineteenth-century
European states, and to some extent this is true. The European museum system
has its origin in the transformation during the French Revolution of objects used
by the Church and aristocracy into artworks—objects to be looked at only, rather
than used. The French Revolution abolished the contemplation of God as the
highest goal of life, and substituted this act with the secular contemplation of
“beauty” in material objects. In other words, art as we know it today was
produced by revolutionary violence, and was from its beginning a modern form
of iconoclasm. This is to say that European museums attempted to aesthetically
suspend their own cultural traditions before aestheticizing and suspending non-
European cultural traditions.

The goal of the Enlightenment was the creation of the universal and rational
world order: a universal state in which every particular culture would be
recognized. We are still far from reaching this goal. Our moment is characterized

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by an imbalance between political and economic powers, between public

institutions and commercial practices. Our economy operates on a global level,
whereas our politics tend to operate on a local level. However, today’s art system
plays a role in symbolically substituting such a universal state for the
organization of biennials, Documentas, and other exhibitions claiming to present
universal, global art and culture of a non-existent utopian global state. Under
current conditions, an exhibition can only be relevant if it constructs such a
utopian and universalist context that does not yet exist.

Notes
+ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in Illuminations
(New York: Schoken Books, +MlM), )Nr.
, Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins, )**,),
+lM.
- Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins,
)**,), \)t–N.

Category Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media

Contemporary Art, theorist, and an internationally renowned expert on
Museums, Data & Soviet-era art and literature, especially the Russian
Information, Internet avant-garde.

Subject
Curating,
Internationalism,
Post-Internet

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© )*+, e-gux and the author

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