Abstract
The dissertation focuses on the turn in contemporary art museums to new exhibition formats that stage art projects as communicative events. The dissertation develops a theoretical framework to engage with this transformation. It claims that the change evidences a transition to immaterial production.
Immaterial Production as a New Condition for Art Museums
It is the argument of the dissertation that in order to understand the present change in exhibition formats in art museums, it is productive to consider it as a new logic of production. I define this logic as immaterial production. Immaterial production designates a social condition, where value is produced in communicative situations and involves intellectual and creative procedures.
The Art Museum in a Biopolitical Age
In the dissertation, I connect the order of immaterial production to a larger transformation of society - one that can be defined as a biopolitical paradigm. The biopolitical is a concept that has been coined by Michel Foucault. Today it becomes widely employed by political thinkers and cultural theorists in order to explain how power works through technologies, communications, experiences. In other words, power works through the way we consume and the way we live. Power is, thus, at play as a force that captures us by providing economies of meaning and offering attractive models for becoming a subject.
A Crisis of Action
The transition to immaterial production effects a crisis of action in art museums. It is a paradox that while there is an increase in exhibitions that explicitly take on a political gesture, at the same time it becomes difficult to decide, whether a project is critical or not. In the second half of the 20th century, the criteria for judging whether an act was critical or not, were less complex. Here, the critical and political parts of the art field expressed their radicality by clearly opposing an established and sovereign museum institution. Today, however, these gestures of radicality may be recuperated by museums, where they take the form of self-critical actions. The new forms of curatorial action in museums are often characterised by being coordinated with less visible insitutional insterests. Therefore, is is necessary to develop analytical tools that deal with the nature of new communicative forms.
The Spectacular and Large-Scale Installations
Rather than judging the social dimension of installations, such as your rainbow panorama and Sunflower Seed, as inauthentic, because it takes place in a spectacular installation, I direct my analysis towards the element of visitor cooption. In your rainbow panorama, for example, people go there for a variety of reasons. It becomes a social event. This social dimension of large-scale installations, the fact that they work as frames for social encounters, I argue, should be taken seriously as a means of enacting social meaning.
Towards a New Active Role as Cultural Producer
With these new performative formats, art museums are gaining a new status as cultural producers. This means that museums are inceasingly performing in the intersection between art and culture. Museums, therefore, cannot any longer be considered as sanctuaries – closed off from the rest of the world. The solution to the problem of museums taking part in cultures of consumption, I maintain, is not to escape from it. It is rather to invent new forms of performative instituting. By turning the idea of institution into an active verb, it becomes possible to invent modes of action in museums that take into account the intricacies of working in between consumption and critical production.
The Curatorial - Towards an Expanded Understanding of Curating
The urgency in art museums to deal with the new mechanisms of immaterial production, I argue, makes it necessary for museums in the future to adopt to new ways of reflecting curatorial practice. Curating, I argue, needs to be shifted to a paradigm of “the curatorial”. In common usage today, curating designates a practice that involves shaping the relations between art, artists, exhibition spaces and audiences. The concept of the curatorial, on the other hand, marks a turn to a much more complex communicative situation. The function of the curatorial, thus, signals a communicative situation that involves: the negotiation of regimes of knowledge, spheres of collective imagination, processes of subjectivity, and public action.
Immaterial Production as a New Condition for Art Museums
It is the argument of the dissertation that in order to understand the present change in exhibition formats in art museums, it is productive to consider it as a new logic of production. I define this logic as immaterial production. Immaterial production designates a social condition, where value is produced in communicative situations and involves intellectual and creative procedures.
The Art Museum in a Biopolitical Age
In the dissertation, I connect the order of immaterial production to a larger transformation of society - one that can be defined as a biopolitical paradigm. The biopolitical is a concept that has been coined by Michel Foucault. Today it becomes widely employed by political thinkers and cultural theorists in order to explain how power works through technologies, communications, experiences. In other words, power works through the way we consume and the way we live. Power is, thus, at play as a force that captures us by providing economies of meaning and offering attractive models for becoming a subject.
A Crisis of Action
The transition to immaterial production effects a crisis of action in art museums. It is a paradox that while there is an increase in exhibitions that explicitly take on a political gesture, at the same time it becomes difficult to decide, whether a project is critical or not. In the second half of the 20th century, the criteria for judging whether an act was critical or not, were less complex. Here, the critical and political parts of the art field expressed their radicality by clearly opposing an established and sovereign museum institution. Today, however, these gestures of radicality may be recuperated by museums, where they take the form of self-critical actions. The new forms of curatorial action in museums are often characterised by being coordinated with less visible insitutional insterests. Therefore, is is necessary to develop analytical tools that deal with the nature of new communicative forms.
The Spectacular and Large-Scale Installations
Rather than judging the social dimension of installations, such as your rainbow panorama and Sunflower Seed, as inauthentic, because it takes place in a spectacular installation, I direct my analysis towards the element of visitor cooption. In your rainbow panorama, for example, people go there for a variety of reasons. It becomes a social event. This social dimension of large-scale installations, the fact that they work as frames for social encounters, I argue, should be taken seriously as a means of enacting social meaning.
Towards a New Active Role as Cultural Producer
With these new performative formats, art museums are gaining a new status as cultural producers. This means that museums are inceasingly performing in the intersection between art and culture. Museums, therefore, cannot any longer be considered as sanctuaries – closed off from the rest of the world. The solution to the problem of museums taking part in cultures of consumption, I maintain, is not to escape from it. It is rather to invent new forms of performative instituting. By turning the idea of institution into an active verb, it becomes possible to invent modes of action in museums that take into account the intricacies of working in between consumption and critical production.
The Curatorial - Towards an Expanded Understanding of Curating
The urgency in art museums to deal with the new mechanisms of immaterial production, I argue, makes it necessary for museums in the future to adopt to new ways of reflecting curatorial practice. Curating, I argue, needs to be shifted to a paradigm of “the curatorial”. In common usage today, curating designates a practice that involves shaping the relations between art, artists, exhibition spaces and audiences. The concept of the curatorial, on the other hand, marks a turn to a much more complex communicative situation. The function of the curatorial, thus, signals a communicative situation that involves: the negotiation of regimes of knowledge, spheres of collective imagination, processes of subjectivity, and public action.
| Bidragets oversatte titel | No Soul for Sale: Samtidskunstmuseet som sted for immateriel produktion |
|---|---|
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
| Status | Udgivet - 2014 |
| Udgivet eksternt | Ja |