Creating exhibitions today can be seen as an assembly of cultural practices that lead to certain displays. These displays are at once the presentation and performance ofobjects and structures. They place objects and subjects in a certain relationship to one another and are thus elements of communicative processes. They are founded in discourses and produce discourses, thus generating meaning.

 

DISPLAY: DEFINING A CONCEPT

Even as recently as the early 1990s, the English word display was not particularly widespread in reference to exhibitions in the German-speaking world. The concept of Inszenierung(presentation, staging) was popular from about the mid-1970s on as well as Ausstellung (exhibition). The word Inszenierung is derived from the French mise-en-scène, or ‘putting on stage’, and hence suggests the world of theater, cabaret, opera, and later film and only then, by extension, the exhibition (as medium). By contrast, the term Ausstellung is related to zur Schau stellen (putting on display) and hence with presentation and exhibitions at annual fairs.1 Walter Benjamin derived the concept from the culture of display and fairs and alluded in that context to an ancient culture of eventful displaying and enjoyment.2 The English word display has been used in German- speaking lands for exhibitions only recently, for about a decade. Its semantic context of presentation display,display and packaging, advertising and computer display points to new economies and new conceptions of (re)presentation based on a particular ‘screen’, a ‘user interface’. Displaycan be used in English to refer to a computer screen and the visual presentation of facts. The semantic horizons of the word already point to a primacy of the surface against acomplicated, difficult, and unintelligible background.3 Understood in this way, a study of ‘exhibition displays’ already transports us into certain conceptions of the manner of performingobjects and subjects within an exhibition. If we think of the complex consti-tution of exhibitions in the sense of a social and politically located and effective apparatus, then wecan view the dominance of phenomenalism as an effect of this apparatus.

 

SEEING AND PERCEIVING AS HISTORICAL CONCEPTS

When we study exhibition presentations using discourse analysis, it is necessary first, in the process of making distinctions within this sphere, to point to the fundamental historical constitution of seeing, showing, and perceiving. Behind this is the idea that this analytical process itself belongs to the practices of the production of meaning. In analyzingdiscourse, speech and material manifestations are seen as intertwined, mutually generating practices. The history of the origins of the museum and the art space was central tothe constitution of a notion of the bourgeois public sphere. The first public display of art was during the French Revolution, when the common people, the people of ‘liberty,equality, and fraternity’, were shown art taken as spoils. The paintings, furniture, and art objects taken from the defeated class, the nobility, were presented publicly in the Louvre. Already inscribed in this first spectacle wereboth appropriation and affirmation. In accordance bourgeois concepts: of the autonomy of art, of the subject conceived of as autonomous (as well as male and white), of the subject of single-point perspective and as ‘thing in itself’, and of a unassailableobject that is elevated per se; the bourgeois art museum evolved over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into a space of showing and displaying, that illustrated andpromoted these concepts. Following Foucault, it is possible to understand the technologies of displaying and commenting as a practice within which certain subjectivities are produced andcertain hierarchical relationships organized, as has been shown by, among others, Marion von Osten with reference to the work of Tony Bennett.4

Also inscribed in the bourgeois space of ‘displaying’ are concepts and effects of gender difference that since the Renaissance have centered around establishing distance and aroundthe male subject of single-point perspective. ‘Woman’ becomes an object, a thing observed, a thing available, the character of the commodity attaches itself to her image. Againstthis backdrop, we are meant to understand that the gaze is, as a rule, associated with the male, while the thing seen, presented for view, is associated with the female.

Seen structurally, ‘woman’ occupies the location of the seen, the viewed. Like many contemporary art historians, Anja Zimmermann has described it as follows: “... that means the positionof the person who is ‘in’ the painting and thus ‘is’ the painting and the position of the person who looks at the painting are gender-specific positions. Not in the sense of anassignment to specific subjects but in relation to the significance of this regime of the gaze for the definition of gender difference itself.”5 Eroticizing the gaze, the desire to view,is now as much as ever the indispensable prerequisite for addressing the thing one desires to see: the fact that the thing displayed becomes sexually loaded is a consequence of this structure. This culturally anchored regime of the gaze is also the matrix on which contemporary displays unfold. They are based on displays as one of the unnamed, unconscioushierarchical arrangements. The status of an object that cannot reflect on itself but is rather merely a bearer of representations is attributed to the non-whites, who also become the other ofthe autonomous male subject.

The techniques of self-disciplines of the ‘autonomous’, bourgeois subjects form and are formed by seeing and being in the image; there is always an imagined observer; even the subject isto some degree always at risk of becoming an object.

 

THE APPARATUS OF SIGNS AND THE GRAMMARS OF DISPLAY

The exhibition space and the exhibition display are, however, only parts of a larger setting or apparatus, if you will. This idea picks up on the concept of what Louis Althusser called ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’.6 The concept of the apparatus describes the principal material or textual, that is to say, discursive, constitution of the dispositive ‘exhibition’ andpoints to its function as an ‘educational’ model. The display would thus be only the user interface of a differentiated process of production from material, the production of knowledge, and the rules of discourse and ideology inscribed therein. Borrowing Foucault’s perspective of the order of discourses, one could name external and internal mechanisms of exclusion that try to rein in the unpredictability of discourses and events by means of procedures of classification, by ordering the principles of distribution, types of speech, the commentary and function of the author and various disciplines. This also refers to the ‘will to know’ and is thus an academic, analytical approach to the object exhibition and thus ultimately to disciplining, the stemming of the ‘murmur’ of discourse in which the resistant and deviant are expressed. On the one hand, the function ‘exhibition’ is conceived as the product of a process to control, select, organize, and classify meaning, which then reveals itself to be a materialsetting. The concept ‘apparatus’ incorporates: the material location, the exhibition space, the exhibition hall, the museum and the respective architecture, concepts, budgeting, the respective concept of publics, the hierarchical organizational structure of the staff, the working conditions of the employees, education of the employees, the connections to the sites of social consensus- building such as committees for cultural policy and interest groups, the production and the deployment of the media, the concept of subject and object that the display offers, the ideological composition of reaching, the ennobling of the object, the possibility the viewer’s passivity/activity, the opportunities for subsequent action by those who have seen it, the budgeting and financing of the exhibition project, the people who commissioned it, the way the exhibition product is discussed, the narration of the display, the gaps in the display, the performance of the objects, the exhibition architecture, lighting, labels sounds, the exhibition spaces open to the public in relation to backstage, organizational and storage spaces.

The concept of the apparatus also points out that the formation ‘exhibition’, its setting and its elements, constitutes a historical setting and cannot and does not wish to claim to bea formulation of totality. Moreover, the concept can be connected to the Freudian idea of the psychological apparatus and thus opens up new possibilities for the viewer’s perspective to connect to it. The site of contemporary exhibition is a communicative space in which psychological, aesthetic, social, and political spaces interlink. It is one of the discursive spaces within which the conversion from social and culturalcapital to economic capital (and vice versa) that Bourdieu describes can take place, and, as Isabelle Graw has shown, in art exhibitions this happens with a certain reciprocal dependenceon the stock market. Nevertheless, a potential for resistance exists in this space, as a kind of surplus discourse. The axes of affirmation and resistance should thus be understoodas relationally and historically related.

Every act of exposition goes hand in hand with an ennobling of the objects; they and the way they are handled are equally always a means of distinction. The apparatus ofthe contemporary exhibition should thus be questioned along the parameters developed here. In exposing the rules of discourse, what matters is who speaks for whom, what ideology is put on view, what and who is suppressed and excluded, and what relationships of desire form the matrix of the exhibition. This can be studied, with no claim to completeness, by questioning and comparing the elements described, thesymbols and grammars of exhibitions.

 

VIEWERS: THE IMPLIED ADDRESSEES OF EXHIBITIONS

Exhibitions are communicative situations that are produced in order to convey content. Exhibition is thus based on a didactic idea whose emphasis or retraction can, however, varyconsiderably depending on the type and the historical development. The visitors remain the unknown entities of an exhibition. On their side lie the tasks of achieving a synthesis of thevisual formal impression, reading labels, perceiving material, media offerings, producing memories and associations.8 The exhibition institutions present themselves to an ideal viewer aboutwhom certain assumptions are made. It is assumed in principle, for example, that the viewers have a store of images that has been influenced by Western culture. A certain frame ofreference, certain conventions of perception, have to be brought with them in order to construct chains of associations and meaningful connections. Various authors assume that the ideal viewer is also distinguished by a certain ritual behaviour, what Eva Sturm has called the ‘gesture of viewing’: the viewers move about in expressive surroundings, observing intently, holding back, passive vis-à- vis what is shown.9 Museums and other places that store objects of special value, place them on pedestals, hang them in frames and placethem in display cases. These things are protected from ‘dust, theft, dampness and wear and tear’ and above all from the viewers’ grasp.10 If we accept Walter Grasskamp’s argument,viewers experience something astonishing, things that cannot be touched or sold. The objects shown thus obtain a quasi-religious value, that of a sacred, worshipped object. This is how Benjamin understood the shift from cult value to exhibition value.11 The basic synaesthetic equipment of humanbeings, Grasskamp argues, allows them to connect the sensations of difference sense organs. The museum (the site of exhibition) bans haptic experience; visitors must control and curb their movements. The museum conveys as experience the primacy of the distancing sense of vision, as well as the primacy over the subject of the object, which thus devalues theformer, as it were, and, as mentioned at the beginning, puts it risk, as an object that is to be observed further, of suddenly changing its status from the subject to the object ofthe gaze.

In some ways, therefore, all of the media employed in exhibitions for purposes of animation attempt to close this gap and thus seize the viewer’s attention. The situation at autoshows or other trade fairs is not fundamentally different from this matrix: although people are permitted to touch the objects, they may do so only in a very limited, controlled and ritualized form.12 Even if someone wants to purchase something, the desire most be temporarily postponed. The communication structure of exhibitions, according to Anna Schober, is thus inprinciple closer to that of mass media than of educational facilities: content is broadcast to a heterogeneous auditorium; the members of the audience are neither involved in directcommunicative exchange nor, as a rule, connected to one another by social networks.13 According to a study, visitors spend an average of eight seconds in front of an object in anexhibition, no matter whether it is an art exhibition or a boat show. From a historical perspective, a neutralizing exhibition style became increasingly common during the 1970s,one that conveyed a claim of objectivity; today, there is more of an effort to involve visitors emotionally. This may also be connected with a general tendency away from aneducated elite as audience in favor of a mass audience. As Bourdieu has shown, the understanding of culture is class- specific and functions as a means of distinction.14 Exhibitioninstitutions are fundamentally confronted with the problem that they are presenting to a heterogeneous audience but must at the same integrate all the various groups (at least whenfaced with the goal of maximising attendance figures). Institutions attempt to solve this problem in different ways.

 

IDEOLOGY AND THE WAYS IT FUNCTIONS: IS EMANCIPATORY PEDAGOGY POSSIBLE?

What does it mean for a specific visitor that an exhibition is addressed to an audience, and how are they influenced by the setting? Individual aspects of the messages that thevisitor-subjects receive as subtexts of exhibitions have already been addressed above.

The visitor is addressed as a white member of Western middle-class society; as a viewer he or she is located in a ‘male’ position; he or she is increasingly addressed as a member ofa large crowd that (generally speaking) is not differentiated but rather infantilized. Oliver Marchart has proposed relating Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘ideological state apparatuses’, or ISAs,to exhibition institutions as a way of distinguishing their preformulated assumptions as either ‘dominating’ or ‘emancipatory’ pedagogy. If we examine Althusser’s concept more closely, itis evident that he conceived the formation of subjects in a highly complex way.15 Althusser viewed art and other institutions as apparatuses that convey ideology in materialized form.The material existence of ideologies may be thought of as rituals and practices and thus connected as spaces, architecture, structures and objects, each of which is performed or produced by the individuals anew. As it relates to the situation of an exhibition, this means that not only curators but also artists, visitors, cleaning personnel, guards and so on produce through their actions the material form of the Ideological State Apparatus. Seen in this way, all those involved are both actors and addressees of the ISA, even if they may have different opportunities for access. The complexity of the way in which, according to Althusser, the ideology of cultural institutions is conveyed in a continuous process and formsubjects as individuals as a lasting process, will be outlined only in brief here. First of all, he distinguishes between Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses; bothsystems serve to maintain the relationships of production in the interest of certain classes or groups. He defines as ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ the government, the administration, the army, the police, courts, and prisons. They are all based on a violence that can be enforced directly. By contrast, Ideological State Apparatuses get individuals to agree voluntarily to theexisting relationships of production. Althusser himself points to parallels with Gramsci’s concept of civil society.16 Althusser defines the following institutions as ISAs:

01. the religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),
02. the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private “Schools”),
03. the family ISA,
04. the legal ISA,
05. the political ISA (the political system, including the different Parties),
06 the trade union ISA,
07 the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
08 the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.).

Although, if we follow Althusser, the Repressive State Apparatus works above all on the basis of violence and the Ideological State Apparatus on the basis of ideology, each ofthese apparatuses uses both methods; this results in constant, subtle links between violence and ideology. In contrast to the relative homogeneity of the Repressive State Apparatus, thereare many different ISAs. These are often private institutions. To ensure the dominance of a group or class over the long term, it is necessary to support it with a universally recognizedideology. ISAs are thus not just, to use Althusser’s terms, objects of struggle but also sites where the ‘class struggle’ is carried out, or, as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau will later describe it, a place where a number of antagonistic relationships fight it out. It is worth noting that this disproves on a theoretical level the often-stated suspicion that critique in the cultural field is powerless or has only symbolic meaning. At the same time, it becomes clear the extent to which politics must necessarily possess symbolic (ideological) character. AlthoughAlthusser shows, in keeping with the Marxist tradition, that in the final instance consciousness (that is, all ideological relationships) is dependent on the base, on material relationships,nevertheless within a certain perimeter there is also a counter- movement that consciousness influences being.

As it relates to exhibitions projects, one interim result of this argument is that it makes sense for a leftist project to address visitors in new ways and to incorporate the production ofmeaning in different ways, even if it is the case, as is often lamented today, that technologies of project work are also employed in other branches of immaterial work to the benefit of thecorporate capital. How does the influencing of subjects by ideology function? First of all, Althusser makes it clear that what people represent in ideology is not their real livingconditions, but rather primarily their relationship to those living conditions: “what is represented in ideology is… not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals,but the imaginary relation of these individuals to the real relations in which they live.” This explanation goes beyond the production of ideology through cultural hegemony; evenalienation is not a sufficient explanation here. When Althusser wrote this essay around 1970, he saw the apparatus of the schools as the dominant ISA in the formation of capitalist society.

Today, in 2006, when, for example, adults in Germany on average watch more than three hours of television a day, the mass media can be seen as the dominant Ideological StateApparatus, which also have the task of stimulating consumption. The fundamental function of all ISAs is to constitute concrete individuals as subjects. As Terry Eagleton has noted,Althusser based the constitution of the subject on the Lacanian institution of the imaginary. Like the mirror stage, this formation is based on a structure of a failure to recognize.According to Althusser, constitution by means of Ideological State Apparatuses occurs by means of four steps in mirror symmetry: the appellation of individuals as subjects (which hedescribes as pre-figuration, analogous to a family expecting an unborn child, as described by Freud and Lacan), the subjugation to the SUBJECT (which can also be called,following Lacan ‘the Great Other’), the recognition of the mirror situation between subjects and the SUBJECT and the subjects among themselves as well as the subject’s recognition ofitself, and, the fourth step, the absolute certainty that everything is indeed like that and the subjects acting accordingly. The subjects work ‘all by themselves’. This model represents a kind of ideal case, that is, a situation of a failure to recognize that is threatened by ruptures. For, if we follow Freud and Lacan, the constitution of the subject isnever possible without loss; it occurs through breaks and ruptures that survive as latent fractures. The subject as a construction thus always remains susceptible to breaking down. If we summarize Althusser’s theoretical concepts and apply them to the field ‘exhibitions’, it means that subjects of educational institutions are primarily situated as subjects of instruction and entertainment.

In the process the values of the dominant Western social system are communicated; the subject is positioned as white and male and stands in a relationship of desire relative to the objects presented for view. As a rule, one important subtext of exhibitions is that the subject is and remains a passive viewer. He or she is a passive consumer of ‘aesthetic productions’ that cultivate his or her taste into that of a refined connoisseur and consumer. Subjects are addressed individually, not as a group in which they could exchange things and articulate common interests. As a rule, the subjects of the exhibition are shown how to control and postpone their needs, or merely displaced in the direction of viewing pleasure. They ‘learn’, much as they did in school, to move their bodies in controlled ways. They learn to separate the levels ‘intellect’ and ‘action’. They also learn to separate the various social fields (art, politics, public, private, kitsch, high art, etc.). If we relate all this to the post-Fordist concept of ‘immaterial work’, all areas are subjected to the primacy of economic profitability. All of this should not be thought of as a unique situation, but rather as a continuous practice that is communicated by rituals and settings in which subjects take part and which they acknowledge. It is what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘habit’: the way in which exhibitions are appropriated, how social codes are used to speak about exhibitions and other cultural events, how exhibitions are enjoyed and formed. Bourdieu sees this ‘educational capital’ as a historically constituted and socially conditioned system of schemas of perception, expression, and thinking. Seen in this way, there is absolutely no difference between mass media and presentations in a museum or other art institution. As a matter of principle, both locate the viewers and visitors in a position of passive enjoyment and mark them as subjects of a cultural paradigm.

Oliver Marchart has outlined, on the basis of his theoretical analysis, possibilities of emancipatory pedagogy; he proposes (a) interruption and (b) anticanonisation. The interruption is thematised along with the naturalisation effects described above.

Anticanonisation would use the definitional power of exhibition institutions in order to expand the canon radically in terms of both form and content.17 Addressing the same questions, Nora Sternfeld refers to historical concepts of pedagogy that made self- empowerment a goal. She identifies four essential criteria: First, the idea of a natural talent is called into question. Second, one urgent pedagogical goal is to develop an awareness of one’s own situation. Third, this is achieved by addressing social relationships that reveal the mechanisms of exclusion and exploitation. Fourth, it is essentially about creating the preconditions for changing these social and political relationships, that is to say, the pedagogical project must go hand in hand with a political practice. Sternfeld also examines talk about the emancipatory in the communication of art and culture. In this view, the task of communication today is seen as making accessible an awareness of the criteria outlined above and to permit counter- narratives. As a result, this view of communication focuses on opening institutions to political practice and organization. This concept will necessarily bump up against institutional boundaries that distinguish, and that is precisely what separates emancipatory practice from merely participatory practice.18 The field of putting on view is a contested place; new attributions are not just discursive acts but also political and strategic projects. This is all the more true if we assume that Ideological State Apparatuses, the production and circulation of images, symbolic actions, and all forms of representation of political and social relationships have concrete effects and produce concrete subjects.

This article was written for the exhibition project Ausstellungs-Displays at the Institute of Cultural Studies in Art, Media and Design of the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zurich.

 

 

Title of exhibition: Curating Degree Zero Archive
Place: Touring project, various venues Date: 2003 – Present day
Curators: Barnaby Drabble and Dorothee Richter
Display and interpretation: In collaboration with various designers, curators, artists, fine art and art history students.

 

Notes

1 See Anna Schober Montierte Geschichten: Programmatisch inszenierte historische Ausstellungen, Vienna: Jugend & Volk 1996, p. 9

2 Walter Benjamin “Food Fair: Epilogue to the Berlin Food Exhibition” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, andGary Smith (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1999, p. 135-139

3 See Michael Barchet et al (eds.) Ausstellen: Der Raum der Oberfläche, Weimar: VDG 2003

4 Marion von Osten “Producing Publics – Making Worlds! Zum Verhältnis von Kunstöffent- lichkeit und Gegenöffent- lichkeit”, elsewhere in thisvolume

5 Anja Zimmermann Skandalöse Bilder, Skandalöse Körper: Abject Art vom Surrealismus bis zu den Culture Wars, Berlin: Reimer 2001, p. 119

6 As Oliver Marchart shows in his essay “Die Institution spricht”, this concept can be applied to contemporary cultural institutions: “Whereas wenormally include with the ‘state’ such institutions as the government, the administration, the army, the police, courts, prisons, and so on” Althusserextends our concept of the state considerably. He defines the institutions just named ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’, because in case of emergencythey can all fall back on the state’s monopoly on violence. According to Althusser, however, Ideological State Apparatuses – abbreviated ISAs –also belong to the state. Under this category Althusser subsumes the religious ISA (the churches), the school ISA (public and private educationalinstitutions), the family ISA, the legal ISA, the political ISA (the political system including the parties), the trade-union ISA, the information ISA(the media), and finally the cultural ISA (Althusser includes here ‘literature, art, sports, and so on’); see Oliver Marchart “Die Institution spricht”in Beatrice Jaschke, Charlotte Martinez-Turek and Nora Sternfeld (eds.) Wer spricht?: Autorität und Autorschaft in Ausstellungen, Vienna: Turia +Kant, 2005, p. 34ff. Marchart’s list does not include the omnipresence of advertising, which Grasskamp has called totalitarian, or images from themass media.

7 Pierre Bourdieu The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996,and Pierre Bourdieu Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1974, [a collection of essays including (French listedwhere no English available): “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge” in Social Research 35, no. 4 ,1968, p. 681-706; “Conditionde classe et position de classe” in Archives européennes de sociologie 7, no. 2, 1966, p. 201-223; “Intellectual Field and Creative Project” in SocialScience Information 8, no. 2, 1968, p. 89-119; “Postface to Erwin Panofsky – Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism” in Bruce Holsinger ThePremodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005; “Outline of a Sociological Theory ofArt Perception” in International Social Science Journal 20, no. 4, 1968, p. 589-612, Trans.]

8 See Schober Montierte Geschichten, p. 95

9 Eva Sturm Konservierte Welt: Museum und Musealisierung, Berlin: Reimer 1991, p. 9

10 See Walter Grasskamp “Unberührbar und unverkäuflich: Der Museumsshop als Notausgang” in Konsumglück: Die Ware Erlösung, Munich:Beck 2000, p. 143ff

11 Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in HowardEiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press 1999, p. 251-270

12 See Katharina Tietze: special personnel are hired for auto shows to clean the cars of signs of having been touched. Interestingly, most ofthem are men.

13 See Schober Montierte Geschichten, p. 28ff

14 Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986

15 Louis Althusser “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books 1977

16 Althusser refers to Gramsci, who explained that the distinction between public and private goes back to law. The state, which is the state ofthe ruling class, is neither public nor private; it is rather the condition for distinguishing between public and private. For that reason, Althusser isconcerned only with how it functions. Private institutions can also function as Ideological State Apparatuses.