Exhibition-Making in a Trans-national Context

Hans Ulrich Obrist

The point of departure is Elgaland-Vargaland, the artistic Kingdom of all Border Territories. Set in relief against the media attention given to discussion of the ongoing atrocities in the Middle East, North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and the probabilities of who and what policies will rule supreme in a post-Bush/Blair West, investigations into the status of these geographically ambiguous border-crossings makes for salient cultural debate. Indeed, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren’s project raises fundamental questions of ownership, access and moral right – questions, that is, of amplified interest as globalization realigns the governance and economic structures of modern nation-states, and as technological improvements shift power hierarchies pertaining to information and content flows.

Elgaland-Vargaland in its utopian aspirations and rigorous questioning of geographic parceling offers an instructive entry-point through which we may discuss some striking facets of our contemporary political economy. But rather than tackling this project in the concrete or these porous philosophies in the abstract, I’d prefer to engage them obliquely through an examination of trans-nationalism in my own curatorial practice. Hence the title of this paper: ‘Exhibition-Making in a Trans-national Context.’

Significantly, the question of trans-national exhibitions seems to be one of the key issues running from the ‘90s through present. Having been asked as a curator by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris to curate numerous of explicitly ‘national’ exhibitions – starting actually with Live/Life, an investigation of the British scene of the ‘90s, then Nuit Blanche on the Nordic art scene, and last but not least, Traverses, an exhibition on the French art scene around the beginning of the millennium – I often tried to turn the tables and investigate questions of what we might call the post- or trans-national. Or to put it even more precisely, I’ve been interested in deliberating how an exhibition focussing on the post- or trans-national notion of national exhibition could not be about borderlines, but actually become a borderline – a function akin to what might be possible with Elgaland-Vargaland as well.

A rudimentary interest in these processes was triggered years back by my desire to counter the pre-packaged, top-down model of how I felt many travelling exhibitions migrated. One might call this the ‘blockbuster effect’ and it is driven by the cost-effective distribution of static works for maximum effect: gate sales and visibility, for example. Saatchi’s ‘Sensation’ is an obvious case-in-point in the contemporary realm. But if this posed one model of globalisation, I’ve been driven to explore other more organic models.

In opposing what he called the ‘irreversible’ aspects of globalisation (uniformity, homogeneity), Etienne Balibar once described to me what he framed as the need for intellectual artists and exhibitions to become nomadic, physically and mentally travelling across the borders. Further on, he described how going beyond national boundaries would allow languages and cultures to spill in all directions, to broaden the horizon of translating capacities. ‘Exhibitions would vanish in their intervention,’ Balibar used to say, ‘they would be necessary but without monopoly, they would be borderlines themselves.’ Thus my earlier accentuation: to become a borderline.

To illustrate my ideas, I’d like to talk a little bit about these three aforementioned shows and then about my recent project, Uncertain States of America, a travelling group show curated by myself, Daniel Birnbaum and Gunnar Kvaran that examines the practices of some 40 contemporary American artists.

Live/Life, the first of these which I co-curated with Lawrence Bossé, occurred in ’96 and looked at the amazing dynamics of the British art scene of the period. It was also replete with trepidations. From the beginning, for example, we were aware of the sheer impossibility of such a project – that it was naïve to grapple with the entirety of such a vibrant arts scene – and the risks of imposing a reductive perspective from the outside. It thus became clear that we would work with curators practicing within the UK and we also felt strongly that it should not be a dogmatic exhibition demonstrating the ‘totality’ of British art in the ‘90s.

Urbanists like Cedric Price proved invaluable guides to questioning the masterplan of such an exhibition and introducing in its place alternative models of self-organisation. Robert Venturi, in his seminal book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, offered another in-road. I quote here at length:

The tradition of “either-or” has characterized orthodox modern architecture:

a sun-screen is probably nothing else; a support is seldom an enclosure; a wall

is not violated by window penetrations but is totally interrupted by glass […]

Even “flowing space” has implied being outside when inside, and inside when outside, rather than both at the same time. Such manifestations of articulation

and clarity are foreign to an architecture of complexity and contradiction, which

tends to include “both-and” rather than exclude “either-or.” […] An architecture which includes varying levels of meaning breeds ambiguity and tension. […] [Ultimately] it makes [the observer’s] perception more vivid. (Venturi, 23, 25)

Over the course of our research for Live/Life, we became attuned to the incredible importance of artist-run spaces all over the UK, in London but also elsewhere, and began thinking about how to break up and open the exhibition. The idea, and one that I continue to champion, would be to organise a show where there would be many exhibitions within the exhibition, where a show would hide other shows. So we invited a number of artist-run spaces such as City Racing and Bank in London, Transmission from Glasgow, and many others as well, to curate parts of the show. The exhibition in this sense became a polyphony of these different micro situations and our role, more than curating a masterplan, was to somehow create bridges and links between these different temporary and autonomous domes within the exhibition.

The idea was also to map the situation and obviously there again we faced an impossibility. It’s the same thing as when we talk about a city, the impossibility of making a portrait of a city, something Italo Calvino talked about in his discussion of the futility of making a synthetic image of such a dense urban space.

But Live/Life did not travel and that’s probably its fundamental divergence with Nuit Blanche, the second of the exhibitions I’d like to discuss. In this show, also co-curated with Lawrence Bossé, we were again focussing on specific geographical boundaries but here they were perhaps more diverse: artistic production of the moment in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland was our point of departure.

I like to think about Nuit Blanche as a kind of a travelling laboratory. The show toured several Nordic countries and each time there was a different video programme driven by guest curators. So cinema, in addition to links with other fields of knowledge such as architecture, design and literature, drove this show—positions, the cinematic especially, which resurface prominently in more recent undertakings of mine such as Uncertain States of America.

The value of this long-term research is vital to the integrity and the vision of such shows. In fact, I think that these are ultimately research exhibitions: they are not about representation, but knowledge production. The shows emerge from hundreds of studio visits encompassing a year or more, so they are actually also very slow – the opposite, maybe, of what one might consider to be the basis of today’s exhibition practice. Globalisation is not only about speeding up, but slowing down: repeat visits, slow discussions, were absolutely key. This constant flow of dialogue gradually builds up the idea, the structure.

Transverses, another of the exhibitions I did with Lawrence Bossé, is the last of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris shows I’d like to discuss. Here we proposed a different rule of the game: each artist would invite another practitioner to do something in relation to or with his or her work to engage further collaboration. The actual mode of collaboration, however, would remain completely open. For example, Marine Hugonnier showed a film that captured a dialogue with her father, a very well known economist. The architect, Philippe Rahm, meanwhile, collaborated with the music group Air who developed a soundtrack which was played on a frequency that was almost inaudible for exhibition visitors, yet had a strong presence in this particular room. In yet another instance, Didier Fiuza Faustino worked with a young composer to create a soundtrack, a project which stemmed from the familiarity in the world of theatre. There are many other relevant examples as well. In essence, we began to view exhibition-making less as a continental thing, and more, to borrow poet and philosopher Eduard Glissant’s distillation, as an archipelago – a production of interconnected bodies of activity and knowledge.

This then leads to the latest exhibition, Uncertain States of America, which commenced at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, in 2005 and has since passed through the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Reykjavik Art Museum. What I want to stress here is the extent to which Uncertain States also functions as a multi-centred toolbox.

The polyphony of centres is something that has really come to define the art world over the last two decades. If the 1980s system was still very much dominated by competition for who is the centre – this famous idea of Paris having ceded the centre to New York – this jostling seemed to become less and less relevant over the course of the ‘90s. I realised this first in ’91 when I went to Glasgow to give a lecture on Transmission and came to understand what an incredibly dynamic position this otherwise regional city had in the art world. I began talking to Douglas Gordon about this and our conversations really alerted me to this dynamic: Europe as a polyphony of cultural centres.

When Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar Kvaran and I began research on Uncertain States of America, we thus began with the given that New York City no longer rules supreme and did some intense travelling across the country in order to identify some other burgeoning scenes. Portland, Oregon, for example, had an amazing wealth of goings-on around music, cinema and art – it proved to be a very strong local pocket. One could say the same of San Francisco and Los Angeles with artists like Trisha Donnelly, Miranda July, Mario Ybarra Jr and Rodney McMillian practicing there: in very different ways, they all have very strong connections to the local California scene and have only more recently, and in very different manners, engaged with the broader international context. Then there’s Miami: a few years ago there was nothing and now there is a completely new scene with young artists and tireless discussions about the new art school.

Because the show is very much a learning system, we’ve been able to adjust and add to this along the way. And then there’s a very strong reader that Noah Horowitz and Brian Sholis put together which, keeping with the theme of the exhibition, compiles writings around art and cultural politics in America since 2000. So it straddles two publishing economies – one closely aligned with the exhibition, the other entering the larger sphere of academic books – and it’s another great example, I believe, of this slowness I mentioned before and the research-driven aspect of these projects.

I think it’s important, at this juncture, to return to Édouard Glissant who’s been an unparalleled influence in terms of how I’ve negotiated these knowledge-production ventures and my approach to globalisation at large; understanding how to trigger and reinforce global dialogue while still enhancing differences. In the art context, the pre-packaged exhibition is a very dangerous undertaking: shipping the same show from one venue to the next is uninteresting, and at the extreme may even be opportunistic. So I think it’s essential that we continue to stress local research and open-ended dialogue. It is a process not of rejecting global dialogue, but of entering dialogues between the local and the global and of always keeping in mind that they must produce difference, what Glissant calls becoming a ‘different engine.’

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